The whole point of the Christian narrative is that it isn’t over yet. The first shall be last

and vice versa means that all the evidence isn’t in to justify a rational conclusion yet. Just

wait until the end of the story.

It has been waiting
long ages for you.

Look close
and you can see
the layers of it,

how it has been fashioned
by those who walked
this road before you,

…

…you are part
of the path
it is preparing

… all four Gospels begin with John the Baptist and start out with a quote of this passage, clearly suggesting that Jesus is belatedly a leader on the road home.

There is the heart of one high above me who stooped to become my rival.
[I assume this is commentary on Genesis 32:22-32]

He lifts from the water. Water beads on his shoulders. I see the water in balls as heavy as planets, a billion beads of water as weighty as worlds, and he lifts them up on his back as he rises. He stands wet in the water. Each one bead is transparent and each has a world, or the same world, light and alive and apparent inside the drop: it is all there ever could be moving at once, past and future and all people.

Next, if you will immerse yourself in the Gospels, they will cure you of the “stiff-upper-lip” religion that is so foreign to the one who was a “man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” Jesus knew the Prayer of Tears and he will show you how to follow “in his steps” (I Peter 2:21). Follow the counsel of Saint Theodore the Studite: “Let us go in the Spirit to the Jordan … and let us receive baptism with him, I mean the baptism of tears.”

It was said of one of the elders that he persevered in a fast of seventy weeks, eating only once a week. The elder asked God to reveal the meaning of a certain Scripture text and God would not reveal it to him. So he said to himself: Look at all the work I have done without getting anywhere! I will go to one of the brothers and ask him. When he had gone out and closed the door and was starting on his way an angel of the Lord was sent to him saying: The seventy weeks you have fasted did not bring you any closer to God but now that you have humbled yourself and set out to ask your brother, I am sent to reveal the meaning of that text. And opening to him the meaning which he sought, he went away.

We know nothing about Jesus’ enlightenment experience, which changed him from carpenter to Master, from “son of a whore” to a son of God. … The Gospel of Mark implies that it happened while he was being baptized by John the Baptist, and that may be the historical reality.

     “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”  These are the exact words Jewish fathers say over a newborn son, confirming paternity and declaring sonship in unambiguous terms.

     Standing drenched in the Jordan River, Jesus learned about his First Father and his heavenly origin.

The silent sky suddenly spoke love to Jesus in the waters of sin

“Since the death of the prophets Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi the holy Spirit ceased from Israel” (tSotah 13:2) is a famous rabbinic saying, signifying that Israelite prophecy came to an end in the late sixth century B.C., shortly after the rebuilding of the Temple of Jerusalem by the Jews who had returned from Babylonian captivity. From then on divine revelation was conveyed according to the belief of the rabbis by the bat qol, or heavenly “daughter of a voice” like the one introduced by the evangelists at the moment of the baptism of Jesus. … Nevertheless, intertestamental literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Josephus in a roundabout way, and the New Testament all seem tacitly to contradict this view and attest that up to the time of the first Jewish war against Rome (A.D. 66-70), prophetic activity among Palestinian Jews continued and further prophets were still awaited.

     Jesus did not begin to be loved at the moment of his baptism, nor did he cease to be loved when his baptism became a memory. Baptism simply named the reality of his existing and unending belovedness. As my friend Nadia [Bolz-Weber] puts it, “Identity. It’s always God’s first move.”

If you would enter
into the wilderness,
do not begin
without a blessing.

Do not leave
without hearing
who you are:
Beloved,
…

… if you find
it is hard
to let it into your heart,
do not despair.
That is what
this journey is for.

…

…
the strange graces
that come to our aid
only on a road
such as this,

What all wilderness metaphors have in common are the notions of solitude, vulnerability, and an emotional, spiritual or physical quest.

Again, holding before our awareness the meaning of the word “adversary,” the one toward whom we may turn, the one who stands beside us, the one without whom we are not whole.
[spirit, paraclete, adversary, satan]

Here, near Lent’s empty center,
the loneliness goes to your bones.

Even Jesus in the desert
must have wondered why
he’d abandoned his life
to live on nothing but visions
and ominous animal visitations.

It all began with such promise—the thrill
of turning thirty,
when reality pivoted for him
and gained a clarity so forceful
it didn’t matter who thought he was crazy.
He dropped to his knees in a rush of earthen water,
and a wild man doused his head.

The severed sky, a dove diving,
a voice immense with love overtook him,
and wind decisive as a hand
drove him up the slick riverbank,
past repentant, dripping believers,
out beyond the village’s edges,
straight into the bloodless, unpeopled heart
of wilderness,
like no heart at all.

Loneliness is a gentle word for this
solitude Jesus endured,
for which you, in strange, singular courage,
now search.

The temptation to flee
before a fiercer word than loneliness emerges, a silence
deeper than prayer descends,
gnaws and taunts you from within, like hunger,

here, where breezes go nearly unheard
because there’s no one for them to disturb

but you,
who have relinquished all
you thought you couldn’t live without,
for what? To search
for all you really need.

I am learning to pray again, not in the way I was taught as a child, but in all the ways the desert has taught me to listen.

If you would enter
into the wilderness,
do not begin
without a blessing.

Do not leave
without hearing
who you are:
Beloved,
…

… if you find
it is hard
to let it into your heart,
do not despair.
That is what
this journey is for.

…

…
the strange graces
that come to our aid
only on a road
such as this,

… that sureness
of foot you know
in animal and
angel

Its emphatically Markan theology presumes, as Werner Kelber has shown so well, that the Kingdom is here and now present but in a mode of hiddenness and humility that demands repentance before acceptance is even possible.

“Political” in its best sense does not mean “government,” in contrast to other spheres of life, like business, education, entertainment, religion. Every ordering of possibilities and structures and powers which makes up the sphere in which life can be lived is political. …

So Jesus in announcing a kingdom has to be heard as announcing an alternative. In the midst of all the people and organizations which seek, hold, and wield power and authority, he announces, not just advocates, announces another power structure—in the presence of board chairmen, representatives, labor leaders, bishops, and presbytery. …

That is the seriousness of his proclamation—unless you think the words are empty, and the sovereignty is not really a sovereignty, not actually a structure of power and policy capable of forming a sphere within which men can live. Unless you think the Kingdom of God is a shadow government, a polite monarchy like Great Britain’s which can adapt to any kind of real government which takes shape within it, a rule that does not actually offer a concrete alternative to the defining and ordering by which you live.

If one thinks of the Christian gospel primarily as communication between a newsbearer and a hearer of news one realizes that the news is often not heeded because it is not delivered soberly. … it is spoken either in a sonorous pulpit voice or at a pitch calculated to stimulate the emotions. But emotional stimuli are not news. The emotions can be stimulated on any island at any time.

The church must suffer for speaking the truth
for pointing out sin
for uprooting sin.
No one wants to have a sore spot touched
and therefore a society with so many sores twitches
when someone has the courage to touch it
and say: “You have to treat that.
You have to get rid of that.
Believe in Christ.
Be converted.

Believe in the message of joy.

In Mark 1:15 he announced the coming of the kingdom. But surely implicit in the announcement is the counterpart that present kingdoms will end and be displaced.

The one who plans, projects, and programs a future, even and especially if one covers the denial of finitude by calling it God’s future disclosed or disclosable to oneself, is in idolatry against the sovereign freedom of God’s advent to create one’s time and establish one’s historicity. This is the central challenge of Jesus. The geographers tell us we do not live on firm earth but on giant moving plates whose grinding passage and tortured depths give us earthquake and volcano. Jesus tells us that we do not live in firm time but on giant shifting epochs whose transitions and changes are the eschatological advent of God. It is the view of time as man’s future that Jesus opposed in the name of time as God’s present, not as eternity beyond us but as advent within us. Jesus simply took the third commandment seriously: keep time holy!

     The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more.  The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet.

   Benedictines pledge to an outwardly paradoxical life of simultaneous conversion and stability—a constant evolution of mind an spirit within the rootedness of a particular community. … adsum. I am here.

Here’s another thing faith and writing have in common. Like writing, faith is a way of dealing with things that baffle us until we look at them through new eyes.

[Me:  Writing is the “way,” the process. Faith (πιστευετε) gives us the courage to look at what baffles us and the patience to hang in there until we receive the new eyes (μετανοειτε).]

On this night [Christmas] as every year for twenty centuries we recall that God’s reign is now in this world and that Christ has inaugurated the fullness of time. His birth attests that God is now with us in history, that we do not go alone.

Gaps don’t
just happen.
There is a
generative element
inside them,
a welling motion
as when cold
waters shoulder
up through
warmer oceans.
And where gaps
choose to widen
coordinates warp,
even in places
constant since
the oldest maps.

It is something that has arrived in innumerable ways, small and large and often incremental, but not in that way that was widely described and expected.

Come for me now World
whatever is near come close.
I have been over the water
and lived there all alone.

From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,
A snow flake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed. That’s all
There was to it. No more than a solemn waking
To brevity, to the lifting and falling away of attention, swiftly,
A time between times, a flowerless funeral. No more than that
Except for the feeling that this piece of the storm,
Which turned into nothing before your eyes, would come back,
That someone years hence, sitting as you are now, might say,
“It’s time. The air is ready. The sky has an opening.”

For once we admit following this line of argument, the existence of a critical point of species-formation at the end of the evolution of technical developments and civilizations, we realize that what finally opens out at the peak of time (maintaining to the end the priority of tension over rest in biogenesis) is an issue: an issue not merely for our hopes of escape but also for our awaiting of some revelation.

We are prisoners of an ideology that prevents us from seeing the world as it is.
We are captives of a view of things that gives them a false appearance of self-evidence.
Our task is to change the world—no—our task is to change our view of the world.

And everything that once was
infinitely far
and unsayable is now
unsayable
and right here in the room.

The other commuter … feels quite lost to himself. He knows that something is dreadfully wrong. More than that, he is in anxiety, he suffers acutely, yet he does not know why. …The second commuter might very well heed the stranger’s “Come!” At least he will take it seriously. Indeed it may well be that he has been waiting all his life to hear this, “Come!”

O Lord, give us grace, we beseech Thee, to hear and obey Thy voice which saith to every one of us, “This is the way, walk ye in it.” Nevertheless, let us not hear it behind us saying, “This is the way;” but rather before us saying, “Follow me.” When Thou puttest us forth, go before us; when the way is too great for us, carry us; in the darkness of death, comfort us; in the day of resurrection, satisfy us.

Unless a definite step is demanded, the call vanishes into thin air, and if people imagine that they can follow Jesus without taking this step, they are deluding themselves like fanatics … Although Peter cannot achieve his own conversion, he can leave his nets.

Your own growth cannot take place without growth in others. …

Through all of this, it is important for you to stay united with the larger body and know that your journey is made not just for yourself but for all who belong to the body.

… The journey you are choosing is Jesus’ journey, and whether or not you are fully aware of it, you are also asking your brothers and sisters to follow you. … Your choices also call your friends to make new choices.

The image of Jesus as exorcist is someone who has experienced his own demons (Mark 1:12-13). The temptation stories point to the image of the wounded healer, to an image of one who by his own experience understands vulnerability and internalized oppression. In having recovered their own hearts, healers have some understanding of the suffering of others.

Naming the demons means knowing the demons. … The Gospels imply that anyone who exorcises cannot be a stranger to demons. … To have faced our demons is never to forget their power to hurt and never to forget the power to heal that lies in touching brokenheartedness. … Jesus hears, below the demon noises, an anguished cry for deliverance.

Luke 4:43 spoils that last sentence by rephrasing it as “for I was sent for this purpose.” But Peter, if Mark had granted him a reply, would have said that it makes much more sense to stay right here at Capernaum, let the word go forth along the peasant grapevine, and await the crowds that would come to his door. … It was, after all, what John the Baptist had done. But all Jesus says it that he “came out” from Peter’s house. … I take from it only its opposition of itinerancy and brokerage. … The egalitarian sharing of spiritual and material gifts, of miracle and table, must be atopic else it will inevitably become another hierarchical operation.

In Mark, Jesus prays in Capernaum at the start and in Gethsemane at the end of his public life. He prays when his will is tempted to deviate from the divine will, either in life or in death. And to settle down at Capernaum and let all come to him is against the geography of the Kingdom of God. That is why Jesus “came out” from Peter’s (wife’s) house. It could not be his “home base” as if the Kingdom of God could, like the kingdoms of Caesar Augustus at Rome, of Herod the Great at Caesarea, or Herod Antipas at Sepphoris and then Tiberias, have a dominant center, a controlling place, a local habitation and a name.

Neither Matthew nor Luke knows what to make of Mark’s phrase about “coming out” and each solves it in a different way. Matthew copies all the other incidents from Mark’s inaugural day at Capernaum, but he omits completely any mention of a dawn prayer and a “coming out.” Luke accepts the unit from Mark, but changes its final phrase from Mark’s “for that is what I came out to do” into his own alternative “for I was sent for this purpose” (4:43).

I think [William Stafford’s] work as a whole will go on surprising us, growing as we recognize it, bearing witness in plain language to the holiness of the heart’s affections which he seemed never to doubt.

It could be that Jesus’ love was so strong, and entered the leper’s body so deeply, that he felt completely accepted by it, and this allowed him to let go of all the manifestations of feeling unaccepted and unloved.