Once you’ve experienced who you really are, it’s so, so hard to go back to being what you were. You realize how much energy went into pretending to be something that you’re not, and you just don’t have that energy to give anymore. I can’t squeeze myself back into femininity. I can’t mold myself back into one-dimensional sisterhood. I can’t wedge myself into an oversized white ball gown with thick straps, a sweetheart neckline, and cathedral veil and be paraded down the aisle. I can no more switch back to she/her pronouns than a rehabilitated bird can be put back in a cage. And that’s dramatic, I know, but so is this change. I like myself in a way that I never have before. When someone uses they/them pronouns for me, it’s like hearing someone say my name for the first time. It’s like belonging in my body for the first time, ever.

This passage comes in a section of Mark I like to call, “Exasperated Jesus.” Seriously. First the disciples are arguing about who’s the greatest, then a rich man chases him around asking him what he has to do, then James and John want to “sit beside Jesus in glory,” and the whole while, Jesus cannot believe the stuff he’s dealing with. Jesus spends like three chapters walking around Judea, bouncing between Jerusalem and Jericho, like a mother with three kids under five. One says he’s hungry even though he’s got a snack catcher of Cheerios IN HIS HAND, another has just fallen and is wailing over the lightest of skinned knees, the other one has somehow inserted most of a toy car in their left nostril, and here’s Jesus, raising his eyes to the heavens, asking what could possibly happen next.

When we follow the path of this building up to the ceiling of the nave, up to this boat we’re all in together, we must deal with the knowledge that we are not alone. God is not away up there. God has declared that God is with us, each and every time we gather together here. God has declared that a church may meet here in this place, and in this place, no one stands alone.

Because while sacred means set apart, holy shares an origin with the word “whole.”

My keyring holds the weight of the places I’ve loved. It hangs, awkwardly, from the lock of a new and temporary home, swaying slightly with remembered motion, and as it swings, I see flashes of who I used to be.

If you look in the bulletin, you’ll see that our sermon this week is titled, “Abide.” This is one of those moments that happens to preachers sometimes, where the idea they had for the sermon on Tuesday when the bulletin was due doesn’t exactly line up with where the sermon wanted to go on Wednesday... or Thursday... or Friday... or 11:30 at night on Saturday. Sometimes sermons have a mind of their own. So I promise that we will talk about abiding during this sermon, but I don’t think I want to start there. What’s been on my heart this week is change. Change and volcanoes. 

Let me explain. 

Thankfulness has been a challenge for me all of my life. It may not surprise you to hear that I was a serious little kid, one of the old souls you sometimes find amongst children. I was thoughtful and responsible to a fault. So when I was given a small plastic coin as a child at a Thanksgiving service, with a smiley face and the words, “Rejoice always! Again, I say rejoice!” printed on it, I took it and put it in my pocket, and began a lifelong journey of trying to figure out how to follow this new rule I had learned.

One of my basic theological beliefs is that there is an undying love at the center of the universe. When you strip away everything else, all our rituals and practice, all our questions and doubts, our understanding of good and bad and what to do with that information, when nothing else is left, there will still be an unending, undying love that will not let you go.

My senior year of high school, circa 2007, I remember receiving a gift made of olive wood from the holy land. I remember turning it over, feeling the stirrings of longing, or loneliness, maybe, that feeling of wanting to go home to a place you’ve never been. But this was real. This wood was from a real place, a place I could maybe go one day. This was the place in the Bible, the place that all those little towns of Bethlehem in the US were named after. Israel. 

A woman and her beloved child are sent out into the desert with nothing but some bread and a skin of water, which means they were sent out into the wilderness to die. Even if we weren’t caught up in the extraordinary story of Sarah and Abraham, this is anything but an ordinary bible story. It’s not every day that we see paragons of our faith like this patriarch and matriarch choose to be so cruel. 

Living Resistance did a gospel work on my soul: it called me into a better way of being, where the yoke is easy and the burden is light, while, at the same time, renewing my commitment to justice. As a United Methodist, I have committed myself to resisting evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves, but it took reading this book for me to understand that resistance must be life-giving. 

A sermon based on John 5:1-9. Acts 16:9-15, and Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5.

I was at home when the news alert came across my phone. There had been—

No. I have to start earlier.

I want to be profound. Aren’t chronic pain sufferers profound? Doesn’t the daily presence of the thing we’re all trying to avoid every moment of our lives cause them to see the world differently?

Jesus has proclaimed the year of the Lord’s favor, a jubilee. In a jubilee year, everyone is set free. The land is given a rest from constant tilling and the people are released from all debts. It’s a reset, an equalization, a loosening of what binds us. Just as Lazarus is freed from his graveclothes after Jesus calls for him to come out, in a year of jubilee, we are freed from all that has held us in death.

On the day my friends were commissioned, I roasted pumpkin seeds.

A letter.

Through all the fog of this moment, and through all the storms of emotion that may lay ahead, I know I’ll hold onto that thought: she is home.

What do you do when someone is taken from you mid-conversation? What do you do when there is still work to do, when there was still a role for her to play, when you were waiting on a visit that will never happen, for a meal you’ll never share, for conversations that will never happen, for love with nowhere to go?

I’m not sure that I’ve let myself fell the full impact of that moment even now, more than sixteen Sundays down the road.

We believe that the God who calls us God’s own people is the same God who cast a spiderweb of galaxies out into space and taught spiders how to weave here on earth, and somehow, we believe that God loves us.

This is how God works. God works in the lowly. God doesn’t seek out kings. God seeks out people who are willing to share God’s dreams.

I don't mean to portray Mary as naive. I think Mary is exactly right. These cries for justice are fundamental parts of the biblical story and we can't ignore them. We can't just shake our head and say, “Oh, those kids. They'll learn one day.”

When I think about people who prepared the way for me, I think about my first grade Sunday School teacher, Mrs. Johnson, may she rest in peace.

Light is what I think about the most as I approach Advent. I think about how out four Advent candles build up light each week, even as the nights stretch out around us. That’s what we do as Christians: we hold on and we trust and we testify to others that even the darkness night will end and the sun will rise.