As we have moved through our first week in Lent, I have cherished the conversations I have had with many of you about this season.  Some of you have decades of memories that form the foundation of your Lenten journey, and others are experiencing the liturgical season of Lent for the first time.

Last night as I drove home from our evening Ash Wednesday service, I was listening to an interview on NPR's “Well Woman” show featuring three black women who had achieved remarkable success as entrepreneurs, even as they recognized the challenges they have faced in achieving balanced self-care. Anxiety, burnout, insecurity…all those things were hidden behind the veneer of being a “resilient, powerful leader.”

Like many of you, my heart is breaking for those who have lost their lives to the earthquake in Turkey and those who now struggle to survive in the rubble that remains. I grieve also for those who have lost their lives to war, gun violence, opioid addiction, and for those who suffer from hunger, economic insecurity, or any form of life-denying oppression. 

This week, as I spend a week away in California to be with my family, I have found a few quiet moments in the early morning to reflect on the meditations I receive in my inbox before everyone rises for the day – one of the benefits of the time difference.  I have been struck by two pieces written by poet/pastor Steve Garnass-Holmes,* who ponders the images of salt and light from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount that we will be hearing in church this Sunday.  

At our Annual Meeting last week, we celebrated all that we accomplished together this past year; and included among the highlights were the baptisms and weddings that brought families and friends in communion with one another after two years of pandemic. Preparing couples and young families for these sacred rites has been among the greatest honors of my ministry.

As I anticipate our Annual Meeting this morning and all that we have been called to be and do this past year, I have reflected upon the timeliness of the gospel story we are given for the day. It is Matthew’s version of the calling of Jesus’ first disciples, in which he tells them to “come, follow me.”

This morning we hear from the Gospel of John how Jesus launches his public ministry and calls his first disciples. And it begins with John the Baptist, who points Jesus out to the crowd at the Jordan River as the “Lamb of God.” Interestingly, even though John has just baptized Jesus and grew up knowing him as the son of his mother’s cousin, he continues, “I myself did not know him.”

Every year, on the first Sunday in Epiphany, we are given the story of Jesus’ baptism in the River Jordan. This year, we read from the gospel of Matthew that as soon as Jesus was baptized by his cousin John, the skies open, the Spirit descends like a dove, and a voice from heaven says, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

As I write, I am still basking in the afterglow of our Christmas services at St. John’s, and the joy that was shared by members of our congregation and choir, our family and friends, and the many visitors from our neighborhood and beyond who gathered to celebrate the birth of Christ. One of the advantages of officiating at a church service is that I have the best seat in the house when it comes to observing the faces of those who are seated in the pews, and there is nothing like the joy, love, and peace that radiates from them at Christmas. There are tears, too…expressing the full range of emotions that accompany this season.

Each year, on Christmas Eve, we read from the prophet Isaiah: 

The people who walked in darkness

have seen a great light;

those who lived in a land of deep darkness—

on them light has shined.

—from Isaiah 9:2–7

This past week during our Wednesday evening Advent program, the participants were invited to reflect upon some of the paradoxical blessings we’ve received in the most unexpected or unwelcome phases of our life journeys. As we looked back on the big stories of our lives, we came to realize that the disruptive and disturbing parts are quite often what make the stories memorable and even valuable to us.

As with many of you, the Christmas letters from friends and relatives are beginning to arrive in my mailbox (or inbox, since some are electronic). I always admire people who take the time to write these letters; I am not one of them and wish I were. 

Last Sunday we began the Season of Advent, a time of preparation in the church’s liturgical year for the Christ who has come and is coming, not just in some far away time in the future, but in the everyday reality of right now. And as it is every year, our gospel reading for the Second Sunday in Advent tells of the wild figure of John the Baptist in the desert crying out, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!”

This week, we make the transition from the Season of Pentecost to the Season of Advent, a word that means “coming” or “arrival.” It is a season of preparation and waiting, a time to ready ourselves for the arrival of God into our lives, in ways we may have missed before.

This Sunday we will celebrate the Christ the King Sunday. This Feast day is a relative newcomer to our liturgical calendar, established in 1920 by Pope Pius X out of a concern for the growing secularism and the rise of fascism in Europe.

In our gospel reading for this Sunday, Jesus offers words of wisdom to his disciples while they admire the grandeur of the Jerusalem temple. See these beautiful stones?

This week the church calendar included the ancient Feasts of All Saint’s and All Souls, a time of remembering those who have gone before. These days have roots in an ancient Celtic festival, during which it was believed that the veil between worlds became permeable.

Last week, I came across an article that studied the relationship between happiness and aging. The results were surprising -- evidently, measures of happiness, well-being, and contentment all tend to increase as we age, not decrease as one might expect.

In this week’s gospel passage we are given the story of a woman who, driven by her passion for justice, keeps going before a judge. The judge does not care much for her or her cause, but to get rid of her agrees to rule in her favor, “so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.”