family – By Another Road

Division: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, August 17, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Luke 12:49-56, which includes the following:

Jesus said, “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!

Jesus has something to say today, doesn’t he? All this fiery language and talk of division. If you were looking for a feel-good Gospel passage today, my apologies, but I want us to really look at this notion of division rather than scuttle past it. Because I’ll tell you something, I love Scary Jesus. Really, I do!

Not because I take what he says lightly, but because Scary Jesus—or perhaps more accurately, Prophetic Jesus, No-Nonsense Jesus—is willing to say and do the hard things that love and truth require. He is willing to take a stand for what is good and willing to name what is not.

This is the sort of division that he brings—it’s not about enmity, but clarity. The clarity of telling the sheep from the goats and the wheat from the chaff in our hearts and in our world. Jesus is here to give us clarity about what is worth holding onto through the long onslaught of the years. And what must be let go of.

When I think of this sort of division, I am reminded of a certain legendary incident in my family.

My grandparents, you see, had very different philosophies about how many old items in the house should be held onto. My grandma believed strongly that she might need to look at that stack of TV guides from the 1970s and, as you know from prior sermons, she had an epic collection of empty Cool Whip containers just in case. My grandpa, on the other hand, was a fitful organizer. He was occasionally seized with passionate zeal for empty countertops and cleared-out corners. And on one such occasion, he went nuclear.

Their attic was a place where no person dared tread; the detritus of decades was accumulated there—old photo albums, broken toys, enough boxes of papers to rival the Library of Congress. And one day, my grandpa must have been seized by a vision of cleanliness, and he just snapped. He had that baptism of fire burning him up inside. So he stole up the ladder to that attic and before we knew it, he had pried open the little window and was tossing bags of old clothes and God knows what else down onto the front lawn for all the neighbors to see!

You want to talk about households divided. Hell hath no fury like Verna Hooper on that day; she was up that ladder fast as a squirrel and a whole lot louder than one. Even Scary Jesus would have been scared. I won’t bore you with the gory details, but let’s just say every single item went back up into the attic and my grandfather learned afresh the meaning of marital penitence.

I would venture to say, though, that neither of them was fully in the right. I get my grandpa’s point: when we are frustrated by the weight and mess of the world, it is indeed tempting to think we should just toss it all out and start over. Send in the cleansing flood, or break down the walls of the spoiled vineyard, as Isaiah puts it today. Just let it all go.

But my grandma had a point too—there are things worth saving, even in the messiness. There are things that should be preserved, and there has to be someone willing to stand up for their value.

As is usually the case, the path of wisdom falls somewhere in the middle of these two postures. We have to figure out what to hold onto and what to let go of, and how to tell the difference. That’s the kind of division that Jesus is talking about. He is not interesting in starting fights among families for no good reason. But he does need the human family—all of us, together—to really get clear about what matters and what doesn’t. Have we figured it out yet? Maybe we’re still working on that. I hope we are.

Because that work of division, friends, that laborious and slow discernment between heirloom and junk, that is what the church is asked to do in each age. Informed by study, shaped by community, emboldened by love, empowered by the Spirit, we have to decide as best we can what stays and what goes. What is the substance of God’s mission and what is just clutter. And we do that, hopefully, for ourselves and one another here, and then we step out into the public square and declare the truth there, too.

And it’s funny, you know—I think The Episcopal Church is accused sometimes of being like my grandpa; that we, seized by some vision of inclusivity and love and social justice, have tossed out all of the fundamentals of the faith. This is absurd to me. As if, somehow, love and inclusivity and justice were not themselves the exact fundamentals that God is always interested in. I’ve read the Bible, thank you very much, and God does indeed care about those things deeply. Come to think of it, maybe we are the fundamentalists after all!

In truth we have not been seized by misguided zeal; but nor are we like my grandma that day, digging in our heels, holding onto the past. Instead we have been doing the long, careful, imperfect labor of figuring out what stays and what goes in the unfolding emergence of God’s kingdom. We are still doing it. We will always be doing it. Debating Scripture and structure. Cherishing our hymns and collects like Cool whip containers that are enduringly useful. And letting go of some of those old prejudices and fears, like TV guides that have nothing helpful to show us.

We do all of this, by the way, not because we are “getting political” but because we are faithful to the God who is still speaking into the present moment. We hear the message of the Lord and we take it seriously. We hear Jesus, who says I have not come to bring mere peace—I have not come to bring a passive acceptance of the deadening forces of this world. No, I have come to bring an ever-renewed capacity for division between right and wrong, I have come to bring clarity and awareness. I have come to empower a choice between what is true and what is a lie. So follow me, he says, follow me with love as our guide, and find out which is which, and let’s learn to speak it out loud.

How urgently we need to follow him now, this truth-telling, fundamentally loving and unafraid Jesus. How urgently we need to tell the world who he actually is, and not what he has been made out to be by the transactional exigencies of partisanship, culture, and power.

Because Scary Jesus, Prophetic Jesus, No Nonsense Jesus, the Jesus that I fear and love and follow, has never changed his message. He has never submitted to the lies of any age. And he never will.

Today we hear his rejection of a cheap comfort at the expense of truth. We hear his dedication to separating out what is worthy and good from what is destructive to the human spirit, and we see his willingness to die and rise again for the sake of this gentle and hospitable Kingdom. A Kingdom where all are welcomed at the table. That is what Jesus is about. That is who Jesus is.

And if that is somehow offensive to the prevailing and popular order of things—GOOD. If that is divisive—GOOD. I would rather stand in the divisiveness of an unequivocal love for all people; I would rather pay the price for that divisiveness; I would rather pursue its invitation to the edge of comfort and respectability, just like Jesus did, than live in uneasy peace with the world as it is.

I would rather the institutional church die singing songs of love than live for something other than the real Jesus. I would rather be mocked and misunderstood for doing the long, hard, foolish, communal work of sifting through the brokenness and the beauty of life and crafting a future out of it, together. Us and God, together. It’s not easy or efficient, but that’s the only kind of church I want to be.

So what kind of church are we going to be, my friends?

Maybe, with God’s help, the kind that is able to do some division.

And wouldn’t you know, as it happens, that is also exactly what occurred eventually with my grandparent’s house, long after the attic incident.

Once they were both gone, my family members carefully went through every room determining what to let go and what to hold onto. It was hard, and it was grief, and it was love, and it was the resurgence of a million precious memories. I think the clothes and the TV guides did go away; sorry Grandma. But not everything. Some things, like that old organ in my office, and like the Cool Whip containers that show up in my sermons, some things endure, undaunted by the years.

And that was, in the end, the necessary division—the healthy, holy division—which made what really matters so very clear to us.

That is the work we must all do eventually. And it is the work of the church, too.

So, if we are feeling brave, let’s go up to the attic, and sit down amid all the boxes of memory, and regret, and fear, and hope. Let’s speak of what is true, and admit what never was.

Let’s hold it all up to the light—and sort through—and do the work the Lord has given us to do.

Visitor: An Advent Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, December 1, 2024, the First Sunday of Advent. The lectionary text cited is Luke 21:25-36.

If you are relatively new to the Episcopal Church, one thing you will learn very quickly at this time of year is that Episcopalians really want you to know that Advent is not the same as Christmas. And once you begin to profess, in hushed, knowing tones, your particular love for Advent…I guarantee you are well on your way to becoming a bonafide Episcopalian!

The world around us might be playing Christmas carols at full volume and decking the halls with boughs of holly, but we, by God, we are the select few who know that Advent is not all fun and games. It’s serious business. It has apocalyptic Scripture readings for us to enjoy(!) and hymns about the Second Coming of Christ(!) and a decided lack of frivolity.

And for all that, I do love it. Advent is the slow, thoughtful descent into winter darkness, as candle flames tremble in the night and our souls reach out towards the cold, silent stars, looking for a sign of hope.

But let’s be honest with ourselves—a lot of us sort of do Advent and Christmas at the same time. We alternate between cozy cheer and prayerful pondering depending on when and where we find ourselves. Matt and I put up our Christmas tree this past weekend and we did some Black Friday shopping with the best of them.

And yet he is engaged to an Episcopal priest, the poor guy. As we were driving, Matt put on some cheerful Christmas tunes and then it was my turn to pick a song and I put on that absolute Advent banger, “Lo! He Comes with Clouds Descending.” I wildly waved my arms around in the car, conducting the unseen choir of King’s College, Cambridge while Matt patiently drove and listened. And…that really sums up our relationship, now that I think about it.

But I do find it restful and gratifying that here, in church, we embrace a bit of reflective, anticipatory energy in these weeks. We let Advent be what it is- we let it be its intense, quiet self. We allow it to make us squirm a bit with wonder and and longing and even a little fearfulness, if only so that when Christmas does arrive, we are fully prepared to be undone by the simple, gentle loveliness of a baby in a manger.

I think the pairing of these two seasons right alongside each other is helpful in developing our spiritual palates, because, to be honest, life is an acquired taste…most often bitter and sweet on the tongue at the same time. And we are learning, as we grow in faith, to appreciate the more complex flavors.

As I was thinking the other day about the bitter and the sweet, and the peculiar blessings of Advent, all of the sudden I thought of my great uncle Dick—my grandma’s brother. Now, Dick was a unique character. I think I would describe him as Advent in the flesh—pale and slim and serious; a man of very few, yet very deliberate words. And when Dick came to visit, it always made me a little nervous because, although a kind man, he was not like other people. You would come into my grandma’s kitchen and suddenly there he’d be, sitting in the lamplight at the kitchen table with a cup of weak coffee, surveying the room, saying nothing. If I’m honest, Uncle Dick was a complete mystery and as a kid he scared me a little— I just didn’t know what to make of him.

Then one day, without any explanation, when I was about 8 or 9, he told me to come with him, and we walked down the street to a little restaurant and he bought me a strawberry shortcake and we ate it in silence. And on the way home, we stopped at the dime store and he bought me a package of those old fashioned Ticonderoga pencils, the kind you have to sharpen. The whole time he said almost nothing at all.

I can’t tell you why, but of the many gifts I’ve received in my life, for some reason that outing with the shortcake and the pencils sticks with me. It haunts me with its quiet sweetness to this very day.

I think Advent is sort of like that—kind, stern, a bit hidden from view, and very precious as the years go by, especially once you realize that life is more than just bright lights and loud noise. Because it is the quiet moments and the quiet people and the quiet revelations of love that often make everything else make sense.

We need those Advent people, the Uncle Dicks of this world, to tether us to the value of that which is unadorned and profound. For it is their arrival which prepares our hearts for the winter seasons of life, when we cannot see clearly and when we need to rely on that something which is deep and dim and cool, long buried in our souls beneath the striving and the haste.

And this is exactly what Jesus is trying to convey to his disciples in this morning’s Gospel and what he wants us to realize, too. We might hear all of the imagery he speaks of—the roaring sea and the shaken heavens—and think that the apocalypse is the part of the story that matters most to Jesus. We might think that war and ruin are his chosen manner of appearing. But that is a misreading of his words.

Jesus is not apocalyptic noise; he is the quiet revelation who comes afterwards. That’s why Jesus tells his disciples over and over again to stay alert, aware, attentive, suggesting that, just like when he came the first time as a baby in a manger, perhaps his second coming will also be easy to miss. Like a thief in the night or a light in the darkness or…like a quiet visitor who slips in unannounced, gazing at you across the kitchen table over a cup of weak coffee. We must be ready to recognize him when he comes.

Because here’s the thing—apocalypse and noise are always around us. They’re nothing special. No, it is the cool, clear, quiet of grace and peace and the advent of those who bear these things which is transformative. It is ones such as these who reveal to us something worth knowing: that God will conquer the world and will conquer our hearts not through sword and terror but through strawberry shortcakes. And Ticonderoga pencils.

Jesus is many things, and he asks us to be many things, but above all he wishes for us to be unprovoked by fear and satisfied by the simplicity of love. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away, he says to us. My authority will not crumble like a temple, my hope will not decay like a body in the tomb, because true authority and true hope is here, in the advent of another sort of kingdom. The kind we are baptized into. The kind that indeed comes descending upon the clouds and lo, it is quiet, and it is gracious, and it is love.

Which is exactly what I hope each of us will seek, in our own way, during the next few weeks. It’s ok—do Advent and Christmas all at once if you need to. Go ahead and listen to all the songs and trim your trees and attend your parties and engage in whatever deeds of goodwill you can.

But also stop, every once in a while, and be quiet, and tend to that hidden corner of yourself where festiveness gives way to something deeper, something more substantive and kind than anything that can be written on a greeting card. Learn to savor that bittersweetness at the bottom of your heart, that mixture of weak coffee and shortcake, where God abides in us.

My Uncle Dick died years ago, but every time I happen to a sharpen a pencil, I am reminded of him, and I feel a twinge of gratitude for his grave, lonely gentleness. Thanks to him, I know what Advent looks and feels like. And thanks to him and his visits, I think that, should God come again in my own life, my heart will be attentive and ready and a little less afraid of an unexpected visitor.

And we’ll stare at one another across the table, God and I, as the winter shadows lengthen, and the lamplight burns and the world at last comes home to itself. And we’ll pour another cup of coffee. And no words will be necessary.

Annoying: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, July 28, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are 2 Samuel 11:1-15 and John 6:1-21.

Now, I tend to think that I was a pretty nice, friendly kid growing up—I liked being around people, including my mom and dad and my other relatives. But there’s a funny thing that happens to most of us, somewhere around the age of 14 or so—we suddenly want our parents and the rest of our family members to leave us alone.

I was not a very rebellious teenager, but still, somewhere around that age, I became totally uninterested in what the rest of my family was up to. I couldn’t drive yet, and this was long before the age of smartphones, but I would still check out and close myself up in my room, reading books or talking to my friends on the phone or surfing the internet (the kind that you had to connect to on a landline).

And yet, for some reason, my family would keep pestering me! My dad would knock on the door to tell me dinner was ready, or my mom would call and want to know how school was going. One time my grandma got mad at me because I had been on the dialup internet for so long that no one could make calls in or out of the house.

I was just convinced that their whole mission in life was to cramp my style. The nerve of these people. Didn’t they understand that I was my own person, that I needed space to do exactly what I wanted to do, when and how I wanted to do it?!

If you happen to be going through that right now as a teenager, I want to say, you’re not entirely wrong. There is something really important about figuring out who you are as a person and how that might be different from the expectations of all the people around you. Figuring ourselves out takes time and trial and error and you need a little space to do that.

It’s also true, though, many years on from 14, that now I would give just about anything to have my dad knock on the door to call me to dinner or to hear my grandma fussing at me about the busy signal on the phone. Maybe it’s just a function of getting older—the prospect of being on one’s own loses a bit of its luster.

Nonetheless, it strikes me that our relationship with God is a bit like the push-pull of growing up and feeling both grateful for and claustrophobic around the ones we love.

I know it’s very pious to talk about how much we love to spend time with God, and we say a lot in church about how wonderful it is that God came to be with us in the flesh in Jesus, how he will never leave us, how he is always there when we call on him.

But in the midst of all of that, I think we need to be honest with ourselves: there is a part of us that might prefer for our Lord to leave us alone once in a while. There is a part of us that finds it awfully exhausting and burdensome to have the Way, the Truth, and the Life constantly knocking on the door, reminding us we are spending too much time closed up in our rooms, asking us to get off our phones and come out and be part of the human family.

The nerve of this Divine Person! Doesn’t he know that I need space to do exactly what want to do, when and how I want to do it? It would be so much easier if we could just stay in our own little world rather than contend with the real world.

In this week’s reading from the Old Testament, David is caught up in this tendency towards self-isolation, and unfortunately for him it comes at great cost. The implication of the text we heard today is that, as King, he should have been out there in solidarity with the troops who are fighting his battles, but instead he chooses to stay home and take advantage of his newfound royal power, using it to exploit and manipulate others for no reason other than his own idle satisfaction.

If that reading made you uncomfortable, good—that’s the point. David and those like him are not our savior; God is. We will return to this story next week and we will learn the grave cost of his actions, but for now we simply see in David the terrible danger of cutting ourselves off from a sense of responsibility to the people around us—of assuming that God doesn’t care what we do with our time. David will soon learn that, like any annoyingly persistent parent, God does indeed care, and God is not inclined to leave us to our own devices forever, even when we would rather he did.

And, at the risk of sounding really impious, there is no greater evidence of God’s annoying, parental persistence than the incarnation of Jesus. He just had to come down and get up in our business. He just had to come knock on our door to tell us to get off the internet for a minute and open our eyes and look at each other and listen to one another.

Yes, God becoming flesh and walking among us and revealing to us the urgent necessity of embodying the Father’s love—let’s get real for a minute here—it’s beautiful and revelatory, but it’s also quite inconvenient.

Because, Lord, I don’t want to love my enemies! Lord, I don’t want to relinquish my own ambitions and self-interest for the greater good! Lord, I don’t want to face the suffering of the world and realize that I am expected to actually do something about it. I just want to be left alone! Stop knocking on my door, please. Stop calling me up and telling me that I was made for something more. Just let me put on my headphones and talk to the people I like and leave the rest for someone else to figure out!

Thankfully God doesn’t listen to me when I say that, anymore than my parents or grandparents ever did. Because Jesus is, as God always has been, the one who says, no, it’s time you come and have something to eat. It’s time you rejoined the land of the living. It’s time you remembered that you are, indeed, part of a family—the family of all of creation—and while we all need a bit of solitude and self-exploration from time to time, you were not made to be alone.

Jesus showing up here in our midst, week after week, in the form of bread and wine, showing up to knock on the door of your heart, is not just a pretty idea—it’s a reminder of that frustratingly persistent tendency of God to never leave us be, to never give up on us, to wait for us, all of us, however long it takes, until we realize that this—this love, this way of life, this relationship with God and with each other—is what we needed most all along, at age 4, and at 14, and at 104.

Because there will be a moment that comes for each of us, at a certain age, when we look up and realize that, like those disciples on the Sea of Galilee, we have been rowing our boat alone on the waves for a bit too long, and the waters around us are stormy, and we are far from home, and now we would give anything to hear our father or our mother or our grandmother’s voices instead of the howling wind. And then, quite suddenly, there is Jesus, coming across the water, saying It is I, do not be afraid.

Annoyingly, stubbornly, blessedly, miraculously, he has followed us the whole way, out past our pride, out past our loneliness and bewilderment. He has refused to leave us to our own devices, even when we thought we wanted him to.

I hope that, following in Jesus’ footsteps, I can be just as annoyingly persistent in my own commitment to caring for others and the world around me. I’d like to think that this is what are about here at St. Anne, that this is what we are celebrating today on St. Anne Day.

I pray that, as we do this more and more and more, there are folks out there in our community who might start to say, oh gosh, there go those St. Anne people again, always inviting everyone to come to the table, always advocating for justice and mercy, always going on about how much God loves everyone, always trying to call us back into relationship with one another. When will they let up with all of that? When will they leave me to my own devices? When will they give up on that annoying, persistent hope in something better for this world?

Never, my friends.

I pray the answer is never.

Photographs

A sermon preached on the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, June 23, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Mark 4:35-41.

My fiancé, Matt, and I have been in the process of moving into our new apartment over the past few weeks, and combining all of our belongings and finding space for all of our stuff is an adventure. As with any time you move, we are realizing how much stuff we all carry around with us as we go through life. And some of that stuff can be pared down or donated or sold, but there are always those things that you hold onto, no matter what. And among these, probably for almost all of us, are boxes of old photos.

I have a big plastic tub of family photos that I keep swearing I’m going to sort through and organize…and I’ve been saying this for the past 15 years. Every so often, usually when I move, I will drag out that tub and open the lid and gasp in horror at the mixed up stacks and envelopes. Then I close it up and slowly back away.

But I could never give them up, of course, because our photos are valuable in a different sort of way than other belongings. They are like a pathway through the forest of memory that thickens as we grow older… a pathway that guides us back to other homes, other times, other faces, other versions of ourselves that would otherwise be lost from view in the shadow of the passing years. We pull them out to show others—and ourselves—all that we have known, all that we have been.

In my own collection, I see many things. Here is my mother, sitting on the back of a pony when she was two years old..land here is my father as a young man, laughing in his college dorm room…and here is my great-grandmother, her smiling face obscured by a wide brimmed hat in the summer heat, and here—oh goodness—here is a child that was once me, dancing on the sand on some forgotten beach, yelling something into the wind.

Memories and mysteries, all of these photos. Perhaps we carry them with us, wherever we go, both to remind ourselves of where we’ve come from and to reassure ourselves that whatever we have become, we were also, this. And this, and this. And that life is, somehow, holding together all these layers, finding the truth not in any one picture, but somewhere in the sum of them, in the shape of what they reveal.

It might sound odd, but I think it’s helpful to think of Scripture the same way, almost like a box of jumbled snapshots. Because our sacred texts, too, are repositories of memory and mystery, and just like a single photograph, no single Scripture passage can ever reveal the whole truth about the life of God. Remember that when someone tries to cherry-pick a verse to use against…whomever. No, we must gather all of these verses together, all these little glimpses of God’s face, and ponder the bigger story they tell.

With this in mind, then, I think the most striking image of God’s face we are handed this week is Jesus asleep in the storm-tossed boat, his disciples as panicked and furious as the sea itself. You can practically close your eyes and see it. So let’s pull that one out of the box and ponder it together, shall we?

It is dark. Bands of rain and wind are lashing against a small boat on a stormy sea. The disciples are looking at their teacher, sleeping in the tumult, and they are bewildered—they can’t begin to imagine why Jesus isn’t awake, why he isn’t helping them fix the situation, giving them direction, something, anything. And so they wake him up and, at a word, he uses his mighty power to still the storm.

Is it easy to see what’s going on here? Just a scary storm and a God who will make it stop? Look a bit closer.

As is often the case, there is much more to this image than what immediately meets the eye. Because it’s interesting—Jesus, after calming the wind and the waves, doesn’t look at them and offer soothing reassurance. He doesn’t say what we might expect God would say, “there, there, I fixed it for you, don’t worry, you’re fine.”

No. Instead, a better Greek translation of his words to them might be, “why are you so timid? Do you not trust?” And the Gospel says then, and only then, after the storm, that the disciples “ephobethesan phobon megan” — they feared with a great fear — not because of the storm, but because of the One who stilled it.

You see, in that moment, the disciples have a brief encounter with enlightenment—they realize, right then, that Jesus is more than just a sleeping teacher who can fix their problems—more, even, than the prophetic miracle worker they’d been following around.

You might say that it was as though a collection of old photos suddenly appeared before them, and for the first time they could really see Jesus—all of him—and there he was, sitting on the back of a donkey, escaping to Egypt with his mother. And there he was, laughing as a young man in the Temple, astounding the scribes in his Father’s house. And there he was, dancing on the sand of some forgotten wilderness, rebuking the temptations of Satan, yelling something into the wind. And there he was, too, even farther back, before time and image and memory itself, the Eternal Son, like light looking up from the brim of deep darkness–the original Creator of the water and the wind now riding with them on the waves.

And for them, in this moment, to see Jesus—to see all the images that make up who he is and what he is—is to realize that loving him and following him is not about fixing their problems..it is about re-creating the entire world in the image of Love.

We are the inheritors of that same encounter, you and I, that same collection of images. We, too, are reminded that Jesus will not remain the flat, convenient, utilitarian image that might suit us best.

If we want him to appear as a mere teacher, we must also discover that he is Lord. And if we want him to appear as the victorious one, we must also see that he is the crucified one. And if we want him to bless our health and our wealth, we will also find that he makes his home among the poor and the sick and the forgotten.

And he is all of these things–this whole jumbled stack of images, this whole collection of memories and mysteries–not to make our faith an impossible task, but to make impossible our tendency to render God in our own image–our propensity to make God as small as our own fears and misgivings. He asks, ‘why are you so timid?’ because he wants the disciples, and us, to see that God’s love is so much bigger than we can envision, so much bigger than our fear.

And so, even now, this Jesus asks us— today, here, in The Episcopal Church; here, in the United States; here, on a planet on fire; here among all of us who have tried to be diligent, polite, welcoming people of faith—he asks us, as we fear that the church is shrinking and the world is raging and the ship is sinking, he asks again, Why are you so timid?

Do we not trust that love is the strongest force on earth? Because it is.

Do we not believe that the world needs this good news more than anything else? Because it does.

Do we not feel that love raging in us like a storm of life giving water? Because it’s there, waiting to be set free.

And all of this—the storm of love and the memory and the mystery, and the countless revelations of eternity—if it is part of Jesus, we must let it become part of who we are, too. We must let this undaunted, unfaltering, fearless type of love become the shape of us, the sum of all the images we are, the precious treasure that we can never give away, no matter how many years go by.

And maybe, if we were to look for this in ourselves, and in others, we would brush up against enlightenment, too. Maybe we would see that every person we meet also carries with them a box of old photos. That they were once two years old on the back of a pony, or laughing with their friends or dancing on the sand or shouting into the wind or smiling in the light of the sun.

Maybe if we saw all of one another, we would be less timid, less overwhelmed by the storms we are navigating, because we would realize that Jesus isn’t asleep while the world falls apart. He is dreaming a new world into being and inviting us to dream with him. A world in which, instead of fearing with a great fear, we will love with a great love

It’s a beautiful image, isn’t it? I think I’ll hold onto it.