Easter 3A-26

Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago

They recognized him in the breaking of the bread. The Emmaus story is a eucharist story. Jesus “took bread, gave thanks, broke it, and gave it to them” (Luke 24:30). All three synoptic gospels say the same thing (Matthew 26:26 = Mark 14:23 = Luke 22:19). When Jesus “broke the bread, their eyes were opened” (24:31). Luke repeats this detail a second time: ‘when the disciples return to tell what had happened on the way, and how they recognized Jesus was when he broke the bread” (24:35).

They could have believed what the women had told them. Yet, despite their astounding testimony of that morning, the disciples had tallied it up and concluded the wonderful story amounted to nothing. Cleopas and the unnamed disciple decided to head home. For them, the dream had ended in violence and shame. They had given up when Jesus came along and walked beside them.

On the way to Emmaus, they were walking off their post-traumatic stress. Jesus, under guise of a stranger, joins their walk and patiently listens to them vent about their frustrations and express their pain. Jesus responded with some expert biblical exegesis, yet his testimony is, at least initially, beside the point. Only in “the breaking of the bread” (Luke 24:35), do they recognize his presence, and everything fell into place. Their hearts burning, they rush back to Jerusalem “that same hour” to share their discovery with those they love most.

Notice, none of it would have happened had they not invited a stranger to join them for dinner. Despite their dismissal, doubt, and disappointment, enough Jesus had rubbed off on them. Something prompted them to ask him to stay with them, although he was walking ahead as if he intended to be going on (vs. 28). Alleluia! Christ is risen!  (He is risen indeed. Alleluia!)  For Christ to be raised from the dead Christ must live in our hearts, minds, and deeds –not merely in our words and beliefs.

In the Eucharist, Jesus showed the disciples how to find him, and how to partake in him, how, quite literally, to be him. We do this not merely with our words, but when we enact the gospel by using our body.  We get up. We follow. We take and eat. We become the body of Christ. We do God’s work with our hands.  Even the expert teaching of Jesus was not enough to reach them. Words must be paired with deeds. The old saying still holds true: ‘Don’t tell me what a friend I have in Jesus until I see what a friend I have in you.’

Communion means “one with.”  It is of Latin origin, a combination of the word cum, meaning “with,” and unus, meaning “one.” But for a Latin speaker there would have been a rich image associated with it. Unus, meaning “one,” sounds like unio, meaning “a great pearl.” When we enter communion with one another, we enter a precious unity. It is like the “pearl of great price” that Jesus uses to speak of the treasure of God (Matthew 13:46). (John Philip Newell, A New Harmony, p. 114)

In communion Jesus teaches that we find ourselves only by giving ourselves away in love. Finding the oneness of God is like finding treasure hidden in a field.  Upon finding it, we want to sell everything we possess to buy the field. “Is this happening in our lives? If not, is it because we have yet to discover the treasure? Or is it because we are unwilling to pay the price? Have we glimpsed the hidden gold of oneness in our relationships yet been dissuaded by our individual ego, or by the ego of our nation or species, from truly giving ourselves?” (Newell p. 117). The Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology, Carl Jung, wrote that the “ego seizes the reins of power to its own destruction.” (Mysterium Coniunctionis, p. 369)

Communion with Christ does not represent a loss of our individuality.  Quite the opposite. Union with Christ is based on a deep cherishing of our distinctness as individuals. The French, Jesuit, paleontologist and theologian, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote, that this is the great gift of Christianity, “to be united while remaining oneself” (The Divine Milieu, p. 116).  Gathered at this Table, in communion with the risen Christ, we do not lose the unique qualities that make each of us one of a kind. We find our true selves in one another.

This is another way to describe what happens when we begin to live the reality of Easter.  In our resurrection we must die to our old, small ego-driven self, and be raised by the grace of God to our higher self. Jesus showed us we truly find ourselves by losing our egocentricity. He showed us that true strength is to be found by loving the other as one’s self.

“To love God, to love oneself, and to love one’s neighbor, as Jesus teaches, is impossible unless and until we realize with the Spirit’s prompting that each of these amount to the same thing. To truly love one’s family is to love the essence of every family. To truly love one’s nation is to enter “genuine dialogue” with the heart of every nation.  To truly love God is to look for the sacred in everything that has being” (Newell p. 123). Easter is not just a holiday on our calendar, nor is it a day to celebrate the events of two thousand years ago, rather it is the occasion of our own daily dying and rising to new life in Christ in communion with one another and all living things.

Celtic teacher and author, John Philip Newell, writes about an American rabbi who was once asked what he thought of Jesus’ statement, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). Surprisingly, the rabbi replied, “Oh, I agree with these words.” The questioner persisted, “But how can you as a rabbi believe that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life? “Because,” answered the rabbi, “I believe that Jesus’ way is the way of love, that Jesus’ truth is the truth of love, and that Jesus’ life is the life of love. No one comes to the Father but through love.” (Newell p. 119)

How often have we heard these words to imply that “We are the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but through us?” No one comes to God except through our beliefs, our sacraments, ourchurch? (Newell)

“We miss the rabbi’s point…Instead of seeing Jesus as embodying the way of love that we are to follow, and the truth of love we are to live, we have turned his teachings into a set of propositional truths about Jesus. We have pretended that the most important thing is to give assent to a set of beliefs rather than to follow the way of love, the truth of love, and the life of love.” (Newell)

The disillusioned disciples encountered Jesus in the breaking of bread after welcoming a stranger to dinner. It doesn’t matter how many times you may have let Jesus walk past without acknowledging him, or how many times you may have pretended you didn’t even know him.  Jesus is ready to walk with you now. We pray this Easter for the gift of new eyes and new ears.  We show hospitality to strangers, for in doing so we may entertain angels unawares. (Hebrews 13:2).

Only love has the capacity to transform the individual parts of our lives and world into a living communion.  All the mightiest weapons of the world put together do not have the power to change a single human heart. (Newell) We do more than meet Jesus here at this Table. We partake of him—we become his very body, walking with those trying to walk off their trauma, patiently listening, mediating Jesus in meals shared, and recognizing Jesus now offered to us at a stranger’s table. “Be my hands and feet, said Jesus, live as ones I died to save” (ACS #939).

Easter Sunday A-26

Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago

Alleluia! Christ is risen. (Christ is risen indeed. Alleluia!) But that first Easter morning, the disciple’s minds remain shrouded in grief.  We follow Mary Magdalene and the other Mary through the pre-dawn air, rushing along the quiet streets as they head out the Ganneth Gate of the great walled city of Jerusalem. Outside this gate is the countryside, except for a large stone quarry, looking like a huge gravel pit, off to our left.  From this quarry many slaves have hewn great stone blocks for building the city. It is to this quarry the two Mary’s go through the morning darkness.

 It is important that we note these women were leaders within Jesus’ small band of followers. They and other women, like Joanna and Susanna, traveled throughout Israel with Jesus. Scripture says they provided financial support out of their own means (Lk. 8:3). In fact, recent scholarship based on examination of the earliest known copy of the gospel of John, suggests Mary Magdeline rivaled Cephas, aka Peter, the Rock. The name, ‘Magdeline,’ refers, not to Mary’s hometown, but is an honorific title. Mary Magedeline translates to ‘Mary the Tower.’

These independent women of means, are going to the place where their hopes were dashed, where their dreams had died, where their worst fears were realized. Where Empire had, once again, quashed human dignity and love. They will be met there with great good news of seismic proportions. Matthew’s gospel tells us stars swooned at Jesus’ birth; and rocks split at his crucifixion. Now the earth will quake as angels announce Jesus’ resurrection.

We tend to get the cart before the horse.  We put emphasis on the wrong syl-LABle. We miss the meaning of Easter when we tell this story by emphasizing Christ’s divinity and neglect the fact of Jesus’ humanity. The way to heaven is the way of Jesus who shows us that suffering through love unto a higher love is the path toward the fullness of life. “The humanity of Jesus reveals the openness of the soul to the infinite love of God. His humanity is our humanity; his divinity is our divinity as well.” (Ilia Delio, “Truly Human in a Partially Human World,” Center for Christogenesis, April 1, 2026)

The resurrection is deep calling unto deep.  Easter is the love which calls us home. It is the call to embrace and inhabit the indelible dignity God plants within you. It is to become fully human in a partially human world. The life of Jesus is not only a way to live in the present moment; it is a way into future life: “I have come,” Jesus said, “that you may have life, and have it to the full.” (Delio)

We all want the fullness of life but often it eludes us. We are constantly distracted by the false self, to use Thomas Merton’s term, the self that I think I need to be to be successful. The cross of Jesus reveals to us the difficult path of becoming truly human: facing the death of the false self, willing to forgive our enemies, and to ask forgiveness of those we have wronged, and finally, to love unto death because the God with a human face can only be realized in love. Love is only an idea, a possibility, until it is chosen and brought into a new reality. (Delio)

The early twentieth century Catholic artist and writer Caryll Houselander (1901-1954) wrote that as “Christ was in the tomb; the whole world was sown with the seed of Christ’s life…the seed of his life was hidden in darkness in order that his life should quicken in countless hearts, over and over again for all time.  His burial, which seemed to be the end, was the beginning.  It was the beginning of Christ-life in multitudes of souls.”  It was the death of death.

Jesus went to the cross to teach us how to be human in a partially human world.  In a world where a U.S. president threatens his enemies with war crimes; in a world where our neighbors are ‘disappeared;’ in a world where the routine of daily life threatens planetary life with extinction, Jesus shows us that it is precisely our fragile, human limits that define our humanity. “We fail, we do bad things, we make wrong decisions — and the tech industry promises to relieve us of these burdens. Yet it is precisely in failure that we begin anew. In the world of capitalism, we are products for consumption and algorithms for manipulation. But the core of our human identity is not appearance, usefulness, or success. It is the true self before God. This is the earth-shaking great good news. Being human is what Jesus was about, and it is what we are called to embrace.

The gospels say Jesus was not the first incarnation of divine love but the second one. The other Mary, Jesus’ mother, whom Orthodox Christians call theotokos, the God-bearer, is a symbol of the cosmos itself. She first said yes to accepting divinity into the chaos of humanity. “Divine love must be received, and receptivity requires space within. Nature does this without complaint, bending its roots toward the life of God. But humans are conflicted, tortured by an ongoing conflict between ego and freedom. To be human does not come naturally; it is a choice for love beyond measure, and such love requires absolute freedom” (Delio).

Ultimately, it was this divinely-inspired love that got Jesus into trouble. He lived into the freedom of the resurrection before he died. He refused the limits of the law that excluded people, stretched the law to include people left out, and showed us that the spirit of love is the highest law to follow. To live, authentically, according to Jesus, is to follow the compass of the heart, even when the direction goes against cultural, ecclesial, institutional, economic, or political demands.

If Mary was the first incarnation of divine love, and Jesus the second, then today we are called to be the third. When we walk the path Jesus walked — choosing love over power, vulnerability over control, forgiveness over vengeance — we do not merely imitate Christ; we become the body of Christ in the world. The divine love that was received by Mary and embodied by Jesus seeks a third dwelling place: the human person who says yes to the fullness of life, even when that yes leads through suffering.

The cross of Jesus is the symbol of this becoming. But the cross is also where God is most fully revealed — not only in the form of love but in the entropy of death itself. Creativity thrives on entropy; only when things break down does life find a way to break through. Evolution is a via dolorosa, suffering through the tragedies of existence into something higher and more wondrous. And we, by taking up this path, become part of that cosmic unfolding — the third incarnation of a love that will not stop until it fills all things.” (Delio)

Lent 5A-26
Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago

Lazarus was dead. There was no sugar coating it. The scene Jesus and the disciples encounter at the home of Mary, Martha and the dead man is familiar to most of us. The regular routines of life and commerce had stopped. Family, friends, and neighbors are gathered. They sit together in clumps, engaged in quiet conversation marked with tears, probably eating abundant simple food others have prepared.

It should be clear by now today’s gospel isn’t about our happy bright, everything’s going right days. This gospel is for all our horrible bad days. Today’s readings are for those who feel half dead, for people afraid to even to hope. Our scripture invites us who are in mourning now to come worship, to receive the breath of the Spirit, to hear the voice of Christ, to be fed at the table, and to celebrate the life God gives even as we acknowledge we do not always understand it.

Anne Lamott writes in her beautiful book called Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair, “The miracle is that we are here, that no matter how undone we’ve been the night before, we wake up every morning and are still here.” (p. 81)
Jesus said, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24). Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead to wake us from our own tomb-like existence. Jesus and the disciples walked back to Bethany in Judea. Jesus walked into the midst of murderous enemies and to a dead man’s grave bearing the power –not of wrath or retribution—but of life.

Lazarus’ name means, “God helps.” Lazarus lives in a town named Bethany, meaning “House of Affliction.” Lazarus of Bethany means, ‘God helps those in affliction’. This means ‘Lazarus’ is us. Lazarus is you. Lazarus is me. Lazarus is our church, our neighborhood, our nation, the world around us. This is a story about the ubiquitous reality, opportunity, and pain of resurrection. In the tomb of Lazarus, we confront the painful truth that not everything that lives in us is worthy of our life.
Most of us must learn life’s lessons the hard way. Here is wisdom born of pain, born of loss, born of struggle, born of mortality, and fear of death. When we let the walls go up, the air goes out. It’s all too easy to shut our self in and cut off from one another. While we keep all the doors and windows shut tight so no light or air can get in. It shouldn’t surprise us that our lives begin to stink a little.

Our readings are like a survival kit, packed for us by our ancestors in faith for when we find ourselves shut in our tombs or stuck in the ditch. Scholar and preacher, Walter Wink, has said the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel, whom we read today, may be the first in all of scripture to proclaim the promise and power of the resurrected life God offers through the always present power of grace.

Ezekiel’s joyful discovery was born of long suffering. The desolation of war and forced exile into slavery in a foreign land led the prophet Ezekiel to envision the nation of Israel as a wasteland of bones scattered across a desert valley (Ezekiel 37). Bones that spoke of what was but is no more. No more Promised Land. No more Chosen People. Now their bodies were wrapped in chains. Their freedom swallowed in a living death. The prophet Ezekiel testifies to the power of God to rekindle hope even after we have become utterly hopeless.

Helpless and hopeless is exactly how Mary and Martha felt upon the death of their brother (John 11). Our bible does not offer an antidote to the very real painful realities of life. When Jesus saw Mary weeping, the King James says simply, “Jesus wept” (v.35). With his tears, Jesus assured Mary and Martha, not only that their beloved brother is worth crying for, but also that they are worth crying with. He acknowledges the grief that must inevitably accompany love. He acknowledges his own mortality. By raising Lazarus, he will seal his fate in Jerusalem. With his tears Jesus kindles the fire of hope in believing this old world that so grieved Israel, that provoked the psalmist, that still vexes us, can yet be changed for the better.

He calls us out from our tombs. Anne Lamott writes, Saint “Augustine’s insight that to search for God is to have found God is deeply profound, because the belief we hold in the existence of another world opens space within us, and around us, which creates a more radiant reality. A radiance is inside us, just as it is visible outside us, and to seek it is maybe to catch a glimpse from time to time of a light within, of a candle at the window of our heart, of a home somewhere inside.” (Anne Lamott. “Stitches.”)

In this light we glimpse the truth, all people are one. Stumbling from the tomb we breathe in a fresh outpouring of the Spirit. We find within ourselves a new mind, a new heart, a new consciousness of life’s interrelatedness. We are living once again in a new age of Lazarus. There is new Pentecost stirring in the human soul bolstered by new science and the ancient witness of our ancestors. All things are one.

Such resurrection implies transformation and transformation begets both hope and fear. Fear begets fundamentalisms that pop up like dandelions in times of in profound change. Unquestioning, incurious, rigid, and violent fundamentalisms of religion, of culture, of racial hierarchies, of gender, sexual orientation, and you name it, are attempts to return to the relative peace and predictability of our tombs. Tragically, they do not, they cannot yield peace but lead to further fragmentation and strife. We are right now fighting a new war started by fundamentalist Jews against fundamentalist Muslims alongside fundamentalist Christians who all claim God is on their side.

“The word ‘revelation’ is from the Latin ‘revelare’ which means ‘to lift the veil.’ Jesus is our greatest gift of revelation.” We step from the tomb into the light of day. Jesus rolls away the stone. He lifts the veil, not to show us an exclusive truth [belonging only to Christians], but to show us the most inclusive of truths, that we and all things are made of God. We can humbly share Jesus with the world. We can offer our treasure in love. (John Philip Newell, “A New Harmony,” p. xxv).

Jesus reminds us of what we have forgotten. Jesus, our epiphany, discloses to us what is deepest in the life of all things, the sacredness of everything that has being. (J. S. Eriugena, “Periphyseon,” p. 692). Jesus reveals the hidden ground of our buried in the depths of our consciousness (C. G. Jung, Psychology and Religion, p. 89). The gift of resurrection and new life is not opposed to the wisdom of other traditions. It is given to serve the wisdom of other traditions. We do not have to compete with one another. We complete one another.

Thomas Berry called this a “moment of grace.” (T. Berry, “The Great Work,” p. 198). It is a decisive moment in which we are being offered a new-ancient way of seeing with which to transform the fragmentation of our lives and world back into relationship. (Newell, p. xxvi). It is the way of Lazarus. It is the way of love. It is the way of peace. It is the way.

Lent 2A-26
Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago

Sometimes change comes when we, like Nicodemus, start to ask questions. Sometimes change simply knocks us off our horse like Paul on the road to Damascus. Less often change comes when we, like Abraham and Sarah, have a radical new vision of what’s possible. More often we resist change with a combination of recrimination and denial.

It took nearly 250 years after the invention of the microscope, from 1590 to 1850, to convince doctors to wash their hands and their surgical instruments to prevent infection. It took nearly as long after the invention of the telescope, from 1608 to 1835 for the Church to admit Copernicus and Galileo were right. The earth is not at the center of the universe.

Civil war, Jim Crow, civil rights, mass incarceration, health disparities parsed by zip code, and cell phone videos have repeatedly exposed the ugly original sin of America that we refuse to fully reckon with. Add to this the violent history of gender equality and sexual orientation. Christian nationalism has brought us face to face with the fact that our religion is more concerned with protecting patriarchy, privilege, and wealth than with the gospel teaching of Jesus. We are all of us, bound up in a culture and economic system of extraction, exploitation, and extinction.

We don’t know what we don’t know, so can hardly be blamed for our ignorance. But once we have seen the truth, how do we unsee it? Willful ignorance is but another name for our sin. But God does not live us in our brokenness. Nicodemus, Abraham, Sarah, and Paul are hunted and haunted by the Holy Spirit to reach for something new they struggled to name that called for change, promised liberation and demanded sacrifice.

Jesus said to Nicodemus, “…no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above” (John 3:3). “Teacher, we know,” Nicodemus replied. People who want answers to fit in with what they already know are operating within what psychologists call confirmation bias: they only want to hear what conforms to and confirms their current thinking. Like many people today, he is focused on protecting the superiority of his in-group. (Brian McLaren, “Seeing the Word in Radically New Ways,” Sunday Musings, 2/28/26).

Nicodemus is operating on what we might call a conventional and literalistic level, unaware of his biases and the limitations of his current perspective, so he asks questions that demonstrate his cluelessness. Jesus keeps challenging him to break out of his childish thinking and to join him, not in working for himself alone, or even for his own little group or clique, but to work toward everyone’s welfare, everywhere, no exceptions.
We still struggle just like Nicodemus today. Jesus said, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16). Jesus includes everyone. Yet many people have used Jesus’ words to exclude most of humanity, shunting them away among those who don’t believe, or don’t believe properly. This, according to British theologian, Lesslie Newbegin, has become the greatest heresy in the history of monotheism. You can’t claim God’s blessings for yourself, your race, your culture, or your religion, Newbegin says, and leave out and “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” God’s blessings are not exclusive, but rather instrumental.

The profound image of being born again is not about getting a free “get out of hell” card. Jesus wasn’t teaching Nicodemus how to be saved in order get to heaven,’ but to liberate or set people free from the current corrupt kingdoms of this world. The people are ‘perishing’ not by ‘going to hell’ but quite literally by dying through war and oppression. Jesus pointed Nicodemus toward ‘eternal life’ not in heaven’ but to “life of the ages,” in sharp contrast to “life in this present age or regime.” Life “from above,” is life lived on a higher level than life within the current economic, political, and social systems of our human civilization. ‘Eternal life’ becomes a synonym for what Jesus later calls “abundant life.” The “kingdom of God” is not the afterlife where souls go after death, but “what the world would be like if God were sitting on the throne instead of Caesar and Herod.” Imagine a world in which Jesus gave the State of the Union Address. What would the applause lines be? Who would stand and who would remain seated if equality, justice, and restorative love animated public policy?

When we are born from above, we are re-born to the perspective of the oneness of God and humanity. “Being born again,” suggests to us the image of the mother. Historically, the church as faith community, described itself as this mother and the font as the womb from which birth in God arises. What God is bringing to life in us is a new mind and new heart, new eyes, new ears, new hands, and voices. See all has become new. Anyone in Christ is born a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17).

We see but do not see. We hear but do not listen. The way to abundant life comes by way of seeing and living according to the mind of God in Christ. The story of Nicodemus is the first of four intimate portraits of followers of Jesus that we will read from John’s Gospel in coming Sundays this Lent. They are the stories which the ancient church chose for those preparing for baptism at the Vigil of Easter. (With joy, we prepare with three of our siblings here at Immanuel who are On the Way and will affirm their baptism at the Easter Vigil—Saturday April 4th, at 7:30 PM.)
Martin Luther once wrote, “faith is a free surrender and a joyous wager on the unseen, untried and unknown goodness of God.” Jesus, the incarnate Word, enters the dark and fearful world with grace like a mighty wind, or a stirring breeze, or a calming breath of fresh air.

The Spirit of Christ confronts the rejecting, unjust world with an invitation and a decision, to believe or not to believe, to see or not to see, to wager or not to wager, to love or not to love. Today Jesus bids us enter the goodness, the otherness, the awesomeness and the mystery of God that surrounds and moves among and within us. The Spirit takes us beyond our words, our understanding. Leave behind what you know or think you know. Like the turbulent winds of March, the winds of the spirit signal that change is coming. See, a new church, a new humanity is being born. Let us be carried by Christ ‘to a new land that God will show you’ (Genesis 12:1)—a land flowing with milk and honey—where “justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” (Amos 5:24)

Transfiguration A-26
Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago

Jesus and the disciples have walked six days, nearly a week. They are moving south from Galilee, through soft, shallow hills that mark the beginning of the slow, steady climb to Jerusalem and the cross. One morning before breakfast, Jesus took with him Peter, and the two brothers, James, and John, and led them up a nearby mountain. Tradition says it was Mt. Tabor in lower Galilee. There, on the summit, Jesus lit up like the sun and became midwife to the birth of a new humanity.

500 years before Christ, Rabbis called Mount Tabor “the navel of the world.” The peak rises from the plain like the belly of a pregnant woman. It is modest, covered in pine, about 11 miles west of the Sea of Galilee. It rises almost 2,000 feet above the plain. Today, a modest hiking trail winds its way three miles to the top—about an hour’s walk. It would have been an obvious and inviting choice for an early-morning climb.

There, on top of the world’s navel, Jesus revealed the radical immanence of the Divine which God has hidden deep within everyone. He showed them what they were made of. The life within all life, the soul within all souls, shown forth from him. To be made of God is to be made of a wildness which cannot be domesticated or tamed. He showed us that we are children of light and called us carry this light with him into the world of shadow and death.

But somehow, Peter didn’t get the memo. Rather than transcendence, Peter was thinking more mundane thoughts. Perhaps Peter speaks for all of us when he suggested they build someplace nice to linger in comfort. Wouldn’t that be the perfect end to the Jesus story? Popular religious imagination dictates that the faith journey leads us upwards. We strive toward the mountaintop of glory to sit around and shoot the breeze with Moses, Elijah, and all the other saints in light. Peter’s instinct was to hoard their spiritual high. He is mid-sentence when a terrifying cloud overshadowed them. They are seized with fear and knocked to the ground. A heavenly interrupts him saying, “This is my Son, my chosen; listen to him!” (Luke 9: 28-30; 34-35)

In other words, God says, ‘shut up Peter,’ your pious sounding words completely miss the point. You WILL make temples but not here. They will be built with living stones and made with human hands. You will build circles of solidarity and communities of welcome and hospitality. I desire cathedrals of compassion and justice any place that the light in all people is being crushed and dominated by the power of death and darkness. In Christ Jesus, you will be my living sanctuary.

The way of Jesus leads down the mountain of transfiguration and to the cross. For reasons only love can explain, though he was in the form of God, Jesus did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped but came down, was born of human flesh, and lived among us, full of grace and truth. (Philippians 2:6 & John 1:14).

St. Paul quotes the words of an ancient Christian hymn and urges us to “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 2:5). This is the living sanctuary in which we live and move and have our being. This is the only kind of sanctuary that can enable us to do the work Jesus calls us to do that doesn’t burn us and our little light out. From within the sanctuary of peace and shalom that travels in us, with us, and among us—we follow Jesus to the cross to confront the powers and principalities of death and shadow. With Jesus we throw our bodies like a wrench into the gears of empire, colonization, and exploitation grinding human and non-human life for profit.

We stand on the threshold of Lent, the season of death, a time of resisting temptation, fasting, prayer, and repentance. “Lent fosters an awareness of mortality that brings with it something more than self-denial…For death reminds us that we are vulnerable, thus calling us to discover the beauty of humility. Death insists that human power and greed are folly and so directs our efforts toward compassion and generosity. …Ultimately, death can unite us with our truest selves. Lent is for realists” (Diana Butler Bass, A Beautiful Year, p. 113).

One of the most important theologians of the 20th century, Reinhold Niebuhr, coined the political philosophy he called, ‘Christian Realism.’ Christian Realism, is a theological and political perspective that emphasizes human sinfulness, the inevitability of conflict, and the need for a balance of power. In the shadow of WWII Niebuhr wrote a book in 1944 called, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness.

The “children of light,” he said, were the naive idealists—liberals, progressives, and democrats who believed that the conflict between self-interest and the general interest can be resolved through reason, education, or good-faith dialogue. Niebuhr called them “stupid” or “foolish,” not because they lacked intelligence, but because they chronically underestimated the power of self-interest and collective egotism. They could not see that human groups never willingly give up their interests to the general good.

The “children of darkness,” by contrast, were the moral cynics who knew no law beyond their own will or the will of their community. Niebuhr called them “wise in their generation” because they understood the reality of self-interest and the operations of power. But they were “evil” because they recognized no moral law beyond themselves which ultimately becomes the seed of their downfall.
Jesus taught us to get real about the God-light within us. Niebuhr gets real about what is at stake in walking Jesus’ way of the cross. The struggle for justice is obligatory precisely because it is never complete. Democracy is worth defending not because it is destined to triumph but because it is good—the form of political organization most consistent with human dignity and most capable of checking human sin. One fights without guarantee of victory, hopes without certainty of fulfillment, and perseveres because the alternative is capitulation to evil.

To do this, Jesus said, the children of light must be wise as serpents and innocent as doves (Matthew 10:16). The children of light must become wise without becoming evil. They must get real and see clearly without losing hope. They must fight without surrendering their souls. You are light and salt, Jesus said. The children of darkness have no taste, no flavor but cruelty.
Niebuhr did not counsel despair. He counseled realism. ‘The human…capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but the human inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary,’ he said. Democracy is necessary—not because humans are good, but because they are not.

The children of darkness thrive when the children of light fail to deliver justice. Democracy without economic democracy generates its own gravediggers. When large portions of the population experience economic vulnerability, social dislocation, and cultural humiliation—while elites prosper and preach about diversity—the ground is prepared for demagogues.

This means that defeating the powers and principalities requires more than winning elections. “It requires addressing the material conditions that make people susceptible to the appeal of the children of darkness. It requires economic policies that deliver tangible benefits to working people. It requires rebuilding the civic institutions—unions, churches, community organizations—that once provided meaning and solidarity outside the marketplace.” (Tripp Fuller, “Steve Bannon is Not an Idiot,” Process This, 2/11/26)

“For contemporary politics, this teaching has concrete implications. Labor organizing, which builds the countervailing power of workers against capital. Coalition politics, which assembles diverse groups into alliances capable of winning elections. Institutional fortification, which strengthens the agencies and procedures that check executive overreach. Voter mobilization, which translates demographic potential into electoral power.”

On the mountain of Jesus’ transfiguration, the barrier between the visible and invisible was broken. Now we see the two are woven of the same fabric. Standing on the threshold of Lent, it is time once again to get real. Get real about the depth of human dignity planted in you by grace. Get real about the challenges we face as a people and as a nation. Get real and know that God is in you, with you, and among you. Get real and know the loving mercy of God.