Praying and singing hymns to God is its own subversive practice. Christian history is full of stories of people who pray and sing at times when most of us would be enraged or despondent. On Sunday mornings we pray and sing hymns to God, and we do it despite what is happening in the rest of the world. Worship is often our best answer to despair.

Jesus might have been hanging out where people who were ill hung out because in his day illness was considered punishment from God. For him to gravitate toward, rather than avoid places like that was in itself a way to restore people to themselves, to God, and to their community.

I recently came across the mathematical concept of Bounded Set vs. Centered Set, applied to churches. In a bounded set, people are either inside or outside of some boundary. Maybe the boundary is practices of faith, maybe it’s respectability, maybe it’s familiarity. Maybe it is simply a building. In a centered set, there is not border separating who is in or who is out; God is in the center, and everyone connects freely with one another, informed by the center.

Imagine that this morning’s gospel began: Jesus was walking around the Gettysburg memorial... The Civil War is about the same distance away from us in history as the bloody oppression of the Jews by Antiochus was. We would know something was up. The conflict between Empire and the Kingdom of God is a constant tension throughout all of history.

The important part of Christian faith and practice is not how we found Jesus or how Jesus found us, but what we do with that awareness of God in our lives. The world needs hearts transformed by Jesus.

The Roman Province of Judaea, which included Jerusalem and the region of Galilee, was experiencing a national emergency….The principalities and powers tried to squash Jesus’ revolution of love, and they could not. They could not, because the Jesus movement of revolutionary love cannot be squashed.

The people who were there in person were expecting victory. The scene that day in Jerusalem represents the dual reality of the first followers of Jesus as well as our dual reality: we live in the Kingdom of Empire while we work to unveil the Kingdom of God.

As we move closer to Holy Week, we are moving closer to the place of death and resurrection, our Jerusalem. The stories are the same year after year but because we are always changing, always evolving as children of God, our experience this year will be different.

I like to think if the father in this parable were at one of those meetings, he’d say to these good people: You are provided for. I love you. You have enough. These others have nothing. They cannot pull themselves up by their bootstraps the way you have, because their feet have been cut off. Can we not all be in this together?

Gardeners love the story of the fig tree. Everyone needs second and third chances, and the lives of plants provide a wonderful metaphor for that.