Sermons

Most of us come to Genesis assuming these stories were written in order to teach some moral and to provide guidance for how we ought to live our lives. But I think so much of Genesis simply isn’t that.

So today we are haunted by two children: a Syrian boy who died and a Syrian girl who was saved.  Do these two Syrian children echo one another?

And how shall we answer supremacists, white supremacists and otherwise? Perhaps something like this: Where were you when God laid the foundations of the earth?

In the time of Jesus, the Jewish people were scattered all over the known world, they were divided by vast distances and by vastly different languages, and they were sorely oppressed in their own homeland. That is the story that this list of place-names tells us. It’s a story of a people who have lost nearly everything that defined them as a people.

And it is really that dialogue that we enact today and in all the weird things we do during the Holy Week liturgies between now and next Sunday. We, like those crowds, are quoting scripture with our bodies.

I wonder if the ashes I wear are actually yours, and the ashes you wear are actually mine — that what we bear on our heads this day are not just a reminder of our own mortalities, but a piece of that common, dusty creation we all share.

Like a crier ringing his bell to gather the townsfolk to the square, Jesus roams the streets calling us out of the safety of our homes to assemble with our neighbors for a greater purpose than the pursuit of our own narrow desires.

I thank you, Father, because you have revealed these things to the children and the fools, to the dreamers and the astrologers.

Christmas gets complicated because it is itself like a ghost story, a story of murkiness, of mystery, of the nighttime — a time for strange visitations from unearthly beings bearing life-altering messages. It’s a story of the contours of reality being inverted, like hills being made low and plains being exalted.