We have all had our time in the wilderness. Perhaps over and over again. Sometimes our wilderness seems silent. Other times there’s a voice crying out. Or several. Sometimes the voice in the wilderness is ours. Sometimes the voice should be ours. 

In the Kingdom, wealth is not to be stored but used to care for the poor and to spread about as much as possible, as a sign of God’s extravagant grace. When we worship Christ the King, we worship a God who dies a miserable death while forgiving and welcoming sinners. 

To be part of the resistance movement that is Christianity is to protect victims of hatred with love. This protection has nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with how we vote or what news outlets we choose to follow, but everything to do with what it means to be a follower of Jesus. 

None of us will ever be perfect Christians. We just keep doing those things that we feel God calls us to do as followers of Jesus. To be a saint is not to be a perfect or a super-Christian but to let the love of God move through us so that we make some small difference in the lives of the people around us and so that we might, like the big Saints-with-a-capital S, point to God. 

The shadow side of being a Pharisee was a tendency to be too scrupulous, to get fussy about things related to religion that are peripheral to God’s love and God’s call to us. I don’t think it’s possible to be Episcopalian without a bit of pharisee in each of us. But I think it’s always important to ask ourselves: are we intentional Christians or habitual Christians? Our habits tend to attach to the forms of worship, the trappings, rather than to God who is the object of our worship. 

Persistence means remembering our baptismal promise to strive for justice and peace and respect the dignity of every human being every day. We live in a time when our capacity to keep this promise is constantly under threat. But living in the kind of persistence and hope we see in Jacob and in the widow means keeping these promises. 

When our nation was founded (not all that long ago) it would never have occurred to the writers of the declaration of independence or the constitution that anyone would ever have to choose between God and country. But if we choose the Jesus who came for the last, the least, and the lost, following Jesus may be interpreted by some as unpatriotic. 

What if the gospel contains an invitation to be surprised, rather than expectant, of grace? Because when we expect it, it ceases to be grace. When we think about our deserving, it ceases to be grace. And it is in the grace of doing the work God gives us to do, without expectation, that we can let go of all that stands between us and God’s purpose for us.

In coming among us, Jesus gives us a different way to respond, with love and with hope. Often, responding with love and hope is about as countercultural as one can get. There are ways that church is outside of culture, and there are ways that the church is created by God to transform culture. In either case, we cannot be church if we cannot stay together.