If there is no room for pure emptiness, if we leave no space for this void [Simone] Weil speaks of, then there is no room for God. And the world we live in today leaves little to no room for that kind of mystery, for this acceptance of what we can never really know. We have a void to fill yes—but very few are willing to wait or work for that void to be filled with the grace and love of God…

And so…how do we “live our lives” in a manner worthy of the gospel? How do we live as American citizens in a manner worthy of the gospel? How do we engage in politics in a manner worthy of the gospel?

…think about how good we are within these walls at not judging one another. We don’t think anything of it if someone chooses not to take communion; we don’t get offended if someone decides not to sing the hymns. We don’t hold it against people who don’t come to coffee hour. We don’t think that someone who expresses their faith in a different way than we do, inside these walls is weak or wrong. How can we take that nonjudgemental way of being that we’re so good at in this building and translated to outside these sacred walls?

Joe Jackson’s story isn’t just a cautionary tale of greed or gambling. It’s not just a cautionary tale of literacy and general wherewithal. Rather, it’s one of confidence and of faith—humble confidence in each of our own abilities, gifts, and talents—because we all have them—and faith that our God knows our hearts, and we must therefore be always honest with ourselves before our all-loving and forgiving God…

As a frustrated Red Sox fan, I guess I don’t have much advice for keeping the faith during these times… but as a Christian, I always do. No matter how dark things may seem, we know how to keep the light alive within our hearts…

…let me tell you— if Boston Red Sox fans can take the massive logs out of their eyes and understand what really went down in that 1986 World Series, and can see the person, the whole person, Bill Bucker was—the incredible athlete, the perfectionist, the fighter who would play through injuries, who would hustle, who came from humble beginnings to about as high as you can get in professional sports—if Boston Red Sox fans can take the logs out of their eyes and see the truth of a heartbreaking loss, and see the man for the human he was, anything is possible…

[Baseball] remains a sport that cannot be constrained by our concept of time. It remains an example of the push and pull of God’s time and our own. The time spent in a baseball stadium during a game remains, if only we allow it, a time to let God-time wash over us…

And that is still our call today: to welcome the stranger, the oppressed, the discouraged, and to love them, to love one another unconditionally. We are not meant to be beholden to algorithms or screens, or autonomous weapons of war. We are meant to be in relationship with each other, freely and joyfully…

“Now they know that everything you have given me is from you,” says, “[so] protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.” In understanding that God, Jesus, and the Spirit are one, the disciples are, in turn, one with one another and one with the Spirit. And this deep understanding allows them to spread the good news in the right way—in a compassionate and loving way, full of great works of justice and healing…

Just as God cannot be shoved into small, binary ideas of male or female, God, and therefore Christ, cannot be forced into binary notions of seeing vs. blindness. Just because we no longer see him, does not mean he’s not there. And just because we are able to physically see in the world, does not mean we can truly see and know the truth, if we are not following the commandment to love one another. To really see, we need to practice the sacrificial love of Jesus by giving up, in our case, not our lives, but our ego, our selfishness; by not giving into fears of the unknown, by not letting our anxieties take over. And we will then be guided by the Advocate—our comforter, our supporter, the truth…

Soon, [the disciples] will have to carry on the healing work of justice and love that Jesus began. Soon they will have to spread the Good News and make sure the world knows that death can be defeated. They cannot linger in the past, they cannot mourn for too long because they will have to carry on the works…

Sheep has been used as a derogatory term for centuries, and its derogatory nature has certainly gained traction in the past decade or two. But our faith tells us that we need Jesus to lead us to greener pastures. Our faith tells us that we need to let go of the silly notion of power that we are always grasping at, and follow the commands of Christ. And those commands are not to prove yourself to be the best, the smartest, the strongest by any means necessary. Those commands are to love God, and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves…

The bread that Jesus broke was not magic. His appearance did not change when he sat at the Emmaus table. And yet, it was in this simple action of breaking bread that that he was suddenly known. It was in the revelatory act of hospitality that his friends snapped out of their despair and their confusion and realized who they had been talking to this whole time, realized who was truly with them, miraculously, in the flesh…

They tried to bury him. But they didn’t know he was a seed. They didn’t know he would rise again and his message would propagate, proliferate, and spread, and spread, and spread, until it could be silenced no longer…

He’s ready because, as it’s written in verse 17 and 18, “I shall not die, but I shall live… [and God] did not give me other to death.”

I shall not die, but I shall live. As Jesus marches through the city he knows that he will be given over to death… and yet he will not die, but he will live…

It’s connection that will make us whole again. Ezekiel and his people longed for the day when they would be back together as one people, in one place, and God provided Ezekiel with a wild vision showing him it would happen, showing him that anything in possible when we keep our faith, and when we recognize our wrongs; and so, despite the deplorable ways they had been acting, despite what brought them into exile in the first place, Ezekiel saw a vision of his people rising from the depths of despair…

In our journeying through our crooked paths to this new future, we are creating it. We don’t know what is ahead, because it hasn’t happened yet. We can’t see the future. But we’re doing our best to make sure whatever ends up being ahead is a better world than the one we have now…

Because God is not a secret. God is present for all of us. God blesses all of us. Even when we doubt, even when we curse and challenge God—God keeps their promise—the promise of blessing over punishment, the promise of life over death…

It seems like God was trying a new parenting strategy— instead of threats of punishment, God chooses to bless Abram, seemingly out of nowhere. Abram trusts this new blessing God, and goes to Canaan. The result of this trust in God turning a new leaf, the result of these blessings, is that Abram would become the patriarch of an entire religion—he would help to usher in a new era and would help to vindicate God’s decision after the flood, to never, ever destroy us again…

But— we who accept the frailty are the strong ones. We who find the blessings in the so-called curse are the strong ones. We who understand that our mortality means we have to support and uplift one another are the ones living authentic, and in our case, good Christian lives…