Authentic and Compelling Voices

Diana Butler Bass was the preacher at the worship portion of yesterday's meeting of National Capital Presbytery (the local governing body made up of pastors and elder representatives from congregations in DC and the surrounding areas). Prior to our meeting and worship, she also did an extended presentation entitled "Where Is God?: Spirituality, Theology, and Awakening," followed by a time of discussion.

During the discussion time, she made a comment on how the "priesthood of all believers" is morphing into something else. This "priesthood" was an outgrowth of the Protestant Reformation and its ideas that all believers had direct access to God via Scripture, a move away from notions of a church hierarchy controlling this access. But thanks to social media, we're now seeing a "priesthood of everybody." I suspect this notion is as frightening to Protestant institutions as the ideas of Luther and Calvin were to the church institutions of their day.

If you've spend much time on social media, you know that the quality of the priests there varies wildly. Of course that's true of all priests, the formally ordained sort and the "all believers" sort. There are a lot of different versions of God and Jesus floating around on the internet, not to mention all other manner of spiritual "helps." The same has long been true in churches and temples. Social media has simply given every single person who wants one a pulpit.

This cacophony of voices must surely be confusing to people hoping to hear a genuine word from God. How is one not firmly grounded in a particular tradition to make sense of the competing and sometimes totally antithetical voices? At that meeting yesterday, our presbytery voted "Yes" on changes to our denomination's constitution allowing for same sex marriage, a somewhat anticlimactic event because the required majority of presbyteries have already voted in favor. Meanwhile Franklin Graham, the somewhat less kind and gentle version of his famous father, has said my denomination should no longer be able to call itself a church because of our willful sin.

Meanwhile the internet priests weigh in. Many of the voices, both left and right, are more notable for their shrillness than anything else. How is God/Jesus ever to be heard through such mouthpieces? How is an authentic and authoritative word to be found amidst all these words?

These are difficult and troubling times for religious institutions, for denominations and congregations and seminaries and more. Sometimes it seems everything we've developed and counted on is coming apart. Not that this is a novel experience. Imagine what it must have felt like to be a church leader 500 years ago in the aftermath of Luther nailing his list on the church door. The Church was splintering into countless churches, often in connection with political and nationalistic movements. The whole things got so nasty and bloody that it also spawned the Deist movement that gave rise to modern Unitarianism. You might say they got so disgusted by all the competing and arguing voices that they became their day's "spiritual but not religious."

But Christian faith not only survived. It changed and grew and thrived. Cherished ways of doing church did disappear, but faith in Jesus and the Church, his body on earth, did not. I do not know just how Christian faith will change and grow and thrive this time, but I have no doubt that it will. Cherished ways of doing church will disappear, but the living body of Christ will persist.

And so the question for me is how those of us who love Christ and his living body on earth are to offer an authentic and compelling voice amidst all those other voices. The gospels may offer a hint. They tell us that Jesus taught "as one with authority, and not as their scribes," a line that might get updated in our day to "and not as their learned clergy."

The gospels don't really describe how folks recognized this authority. It apparently was an intangible thing that's hard to describe but that people know when they see it. I suspect the appeal of Pope Francis is a little like this. There is something authentic and compelling in his voice, so much so that even non-religious people have taken notice.

I think there's a lesson there. Speaking in a manner that is authentic and compelling won't come from getting all the facts or doctrines just right. It won't come from winning all the arguments or votes. And it won't come from demonizing the other, even when that other is indeed an enemy. But it may just come if we are known more for embodying Jesus than for other things that often define us. Perhaps we're known for our shrill voice on social and political issues; perhaps we are so hidden behind church walls that we're known mostly for our buildings; perhaps we're so identified by our slick worship that we look like little more than a show. But what if we were known for acting like Jesus?

On that note, a quick mea culpa is in order. No one would be likely to confuse me with Pope Francis. So how do I need to let God work in me in order that I might better model Jesus? It starts there, I suppose.

Post Event Letdown

I assume this happens to people in other vocations and not just to pastors. You go to a conference, hear all sorts of exciting and wonderful ideas, and dream of all the ways you will use them upon your return home. But then you get back, the excitement recedes, and gradually things go back to "normal." In my case, last week's Next Church conference also included inspiring worship (I assume this would not be typical for other vocations.), and we pastors often don't get to do much actual worshiping. But as things get back to "normal," this, too, can seem a long way off and and a long time ago.

The Next Church conference planners took this into account and are planning local followup sessions. I'll be interested to see how this may help us to put into practice some things we learned at the conference. I hope it works. If so it may help with a similar problem that seems to have become pattern in many local congregations.

Very often, Sunday worship can work a bit like the conferences I attend. It can be inspiring and stimulating, but the energy doesn't really carry over into life outside the church. Interestingly enough, I heard David Lose speak at a regional Next Church gathering about how church as "concert hall" didn't seem to be working very well. Even when the worship is top notch, inspiring, creative, and more, it often doesn't impact daily life much. In that sense it becomes like going to a play, or a concert, or a movie. It may be wonderful and enriching, but it doesn't necessarily do anything to shape people to live as God's people in the world.

I worry a little about trying to make worship into something utilitarian, but still, if worship moves us yet doesn't inspire us to take any actions, to live differently in the world, is it what it should be?

Worship, of course, is something we offer to God, and in that sense it is not primarily about us getting something from it. That said, any genuine encounter with God is surely transformational. Meeting and hearing God as we worship should direct us in some way. It should call us to more faithful lives. It should  help form us as disciples of Jesus. But does it?

I worry that as the church has struggled in recent decades, we've tried harder and harder to do great worship. Often we've succeeded, but church attendance continues to plummet. Have we turned church into an event that is moving, entertaining, inspiring, thought provoking, and any number of perfectly good things, but somehow stopped helping people live out their faith beyond the church? If so, what sort of followup sessions do we need? Or do we need to think about worship differently altogether?

Sermon video: Part of Something That Matters

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Part of Something That Matters

Matthew 7:13-29

Part of Something that Matters

James Sledge                                                                                      March 22, 2015

Last month I was at a Saturday gathering of something called Next Church. The featured speaker was David Lose, president of Luther Seminary in Philadelphia, and he told a story about an extremely extroverted colleague who took his seat for a 14 hour long flight, introduced himself to the passenger next to him, and asked, “Do you go to church?”

His fellow passenger apparently wasn’t put off by this because he not only responded, he told how he had attended church for most of his life, but that he and his family were thinking about dropping church. He went on to explain that like many families, his was overcommitted and needed to drop some things. At a family meeting they had listed all the things they were involved in, then prioritized them by whether they really seemed to matter, really made a difference in their lives. Girl Scouts for his daughter did, but church did not for any of them.

The father was troubled by this. He had always gone to church. But he agreed that church wasn’t really important in their lives. It made little difference in how they lived away from church, so it just didn’t make sense to commit the time and energy it asked of them.

Dr. Lose what quick to tell those of us listening, pastors and elders, that this wasn’t our fault. We had not messed up church so badly that this family, and many others like it, had decided to leave. There’s been more energy and innovation in church and worship in the last couple of decades than any time in history, yet across the board – conservative or liberal, traditional or contemporary – people are leaving and attendance is dropping. And even committed members are attending less frequently.

The Church lives in a very different world from the one of my childhood. A generation or two ago, people raised in the Church tended to stay in it. People went to church because they were supposed to. But as our world has become filled with more and more choices, more and more options, going to church became one choice among many. “Supposed to” no longer cuts it, and church now gets weighed among other possibilities.

This situation poses some real challenges for churches who grew accustomed to the culture sending us people on Sunday. But it also poses some interesting opportunities to examine what it means to be the Church, followers of Jesus, the body of Christ in the world. Surely there is something very important about it, something about it that really matters. Why else would we toss around terms like salvation, new creations, abundant and eternal life?

As Jesus concludes his Sermon on the Mount, he clearly thinks he has just shared something important, something that really matters. He speaks of a narrow way that leads to life, of the need not to be misled, of how essential it is to do God’s will and act on his words. But just what is this narrow way? What is the will of God for you and me?

If someone asked you how your life is different because you follow Jesus, what would you say?  How is your way directed, your path narrowed from that of the world? How is your relationship to money different? How is God’s new day being born in you?

Hope, Birth Pangs, and What Comes Next

I'm having a bit of trouble concentrating today. Too much is swirling around in my head. I've just returned from the Next Church conference in Chicago where we heard and talked about the church's decline, but much more, heard and talked with great hope also about new things that are emerging. These new things are still forming, still hard to describe precisely, but that is the way of things that are coming next.

In the midst of this Next Church conference, another new thing was announced. My denomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA), has been voting on whether or not to ratify changes in our official language on marriage, changing words saying, "between a woman and a man " to ones reading "between two people." Voting by the 171 local presbyteries that make up our denomination will continue for a while, but Tuesday we reached the majority needed for ratification.  This is the first time we have voted to change our constitution so that it embraces, or at least makes room for, same sex marriage. This is indeed a new thing, and like many other such things, one that will no doubt unfold in ways that are impossible to predict precisely.

Like it or not, the church and the world are changing. Actually, Christians are supposed to be happy about that. That's not to say we must be happy with every change that occurs, but we follow a Messiah who proclaims a new day and calls us to pray for that new day and work for it. Considering there is general agreement that the kingdom, God's new community of peace and love, has not yet come on earth, then we must continue to hope and pray and work for the change that moves us toward that day. Followers of Jesus can never be about going back to some day of old. We are called to go forward toward a day that is glimpsed but is not yet. People of deep and sincere faith can disagree about whether the changes my denomination embraced this week are a part of moving toward God's new day, but we can't be caught up in nostalgia. Our destination is a hard to discern future, not any remembered past.

Such thoughts whirled about as I read both the daily lectionary and the daily devotion from Richard Rohr. In the former, the Apostle Paul writes, "We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies." In deservedly famous lines, Paul insists that creation itself experiences birth pangs as it waits for something new, something seen only by faith.

In his devotion for today, Father Rohr paraphrases Teilhard de Chardin. "We are not human beings trying to become spiritual; we are already spiritual beings, and we are just trying and needing to become human for one another!" That sounds very different from Paul and yet similar. There is something coming, a next, a rebirth yet to be that we hope for, long for, work for.

One of the great failings of Christianity over the last 100 plus years was to personalize the message of Jesus and Paul that hoped for and prayed for and worked for a new day, turning it into an individual hope for heaven. But the creation isn't groaning for me to be admitted to heaven. It is groaning for the birth of something truly new.

I hope the new thing that received ratification on Tuesday is a part of that. I believe that it is. But regardless, I know that God's new thing is not dependent on my seeing it with absolute clarity or my denomination's getting everything right. God's future is safely in God's hands, and so in hope we move and stumble toward that future as best we can. "For in hope," Paul writes, "we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience."

I'll admit I not always patient, but I am hopeful, and excited, and longing to see what comes next.

Click to learn more about the lectionary.

On Determining God's Address

In the last week I've seen a handful of Facebook posts that have a picture of the White House with this caption. "Time to put God back in this house. Do you agree?" I'm sure you can guess the political views of those posting the picture, but I wonder just what they mean by putting God back in the White House.

I've not asked and don't plan to. Such Facebook discussions rarely lead anywhere that is good or helpful. Still, I wonder how those reposting this measure whether or not God is there. The current resident professes to be a Christian and quotes Scripture on occasion, so apparently that is not it. So just how are we to know whether or not God has been evicted?

I thought of such things when reading today's lectionary passage from Jeremiah. It also talks about whether or not God is in a certain house. This house is the Jerusalem temple, also referred to by God as "the house that is called by my name." But in this case God has not been evicted. God has decided to move.

God has moved out of God's own house but will consider returning "if you truly act justly one with another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt." I wonder if aliens, orphans, widows, justice, and such have anything to do with God current residency, or lack thereof, at the White House.

One of the constant temptations for people of faith is trying to enlist God in our causes. This isn't a problem restricted to any particular sort. Conservatives and liberals can be equally guilty. That said, people who tend to wear their religion on their sleeve often can be incredibly arrogant and certain when engaging in this temptation.

We religious sorts can be quite adept at critiquing others who aren't sufficiently religious in the manner we deem correct. However, the biblical prophets don't critique those who aren't religious. Their critique is an internal one aimed at the way religious practice has gone astray. Jeremiah is fussing at people who come to the Temple and claim God's blessings. In the same way, the prophet Jesus reserved his most scathing critiques for the dedicated, never-miss-a-Sunday, religious folks.

If religious folks want to worry about whether or not God is in particular houses and buildings, Jeremiah and Jesus suggest that we had best start by looking at the one we call our religious home.

Click to learn more about the lectionary.

An Overly Talkative Religion

I'm re-reading a wonderful little book by Barbara Brown Taylor entitled When God Is Silent. At one point she writes about how God becomes progressively more quiet and remote in the Hebrew Scriptures, but in the Incarnation, "the silent God found a voice." God's Word becomes flesh and our relationship to this Word requires we proclaim it using words. According to Taylor "...this has had the effect of making Christianity an overly talkative religion, but the truth is that silence plays as central a role in Christian scripture as in Hebrew." (p. 74)

Taylor is talking especially to pastors like me, people whose vocations require them to traffic in words. There is a terrible temptation for us to make those words bear more freight than they were ever intended to. We want to speak with more certainty than is possible. We want to provide answers where there really are none. We want to put together carefully crafted homiletical packages, neatly tied up with a nice bow. We want to so engagingly retell what Jesus said that people will go, "Oh, of course. Now I get it." How unlike Jesus we are.

Today's gospel reading shows the same Word that spoke Creation into being at work in Jesus. "Go, your son will live," he says to a royal official, and it is so. Yet this same Jesus can be remarkably hesitant to give neat answers that clear everything up. He's as likely to answer a question with another question. And he is forever responding to questions with stories that don't quite answer those questions but leave you wondering. And when he does speak clearly, it's often something we don't want to hear. "Love your enemies," or "You cannot serve God and wealth."

I wonder what church might look like if we were a bit less talkative, a bit less convinced of our ability to explain Jesus, faith, God. I wonder if some of the current interest in spirituality, along with a greater emphasis on the sacraments, doesn't reflect a hunger for a less talkative church. And I wonder if we'd be a lot better off if we spent less time mining Scripture for answers and more time letting it raise questions for us to sit and quietly ponder.

Of course that might be a little risky for us professional clergy sorts. We get, in a sense, paid by the word. We are also able to control things with words. The worship services I lead are often tightly scripted from beginning to end. The congregation may say some of its own words, but they have been provided by me, either with prayers I have written or hymns I've selected. And we dare not let the service get quiet for very long. Lord knows what might happen if people were left to ponder in silence, if God were listened for rather than spoken about using just the right words.

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I was at an event the other day where David Lose, president of Luther Seminary in Philadelphia, spoke of thinking about intelligence as the awareness of all you don't know. He said this in service to his call to "Reclaim the power of 3 overlooked words: I don't know!" For wordy people like pastors, that's surely an invitation to silence, at least on our parts.

Living and working inside the Washington, DC beltway as I do, talkativeness and wordiness are part and parcel of everyday life. So too is the awareness that much of this talk says very little, much of it is manipulative, and much of it is not true. It is too often about gaining the upper hand for our side and diminishing other points of view. Given this, I wonder if we might not offer a much more powerful witness of Christ, the Incarnate Word, if we learned to be a lot less talkative.

I'm going to ponder that quietly for a while.

Click to learn more about the lectionary.

Sermon video: Fully Alive Imaginations

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Fully Alive Imaginations

Matthew 5:17-48

Fully Alive Imaginations

James Sledge                                                                                       March 1, 2015

As a general rule, I’ve learned not to engage Facebook “friends” who post provocative items, but every now and then I can’t help myself. It happened the other day when someone shared a colorful, poster-like picture that read, “You know you have gone blind when you can ‘see nothing wrong’ with something that God has called sin.”

I took the bait and commented, “Such as?” My “friend” responded, “Look at this world , sin is everywhere and people think it’s normal!”

I’d started this so I thought I would see it through. I responded, “Again, such as? Are you referring to lending money at interest or failing to care for the poor or welcome the immigrant? Or do you speak of things such as eating shrimp?”

This time my “friend” got more specific. “Homosexuality is one, killing is another, no fear of God, drugs, child abuse, animal abuse and I could go on. but don’t get me wrong I care for the people just not the sin. I don’t look down on anyone.”

At this point my better judgment started to kick in, and I decided to disengage, but not before leaving what seemed an appropriate quote from Father Richard Rohr. “Either you allow Holy Scriptures to change you, or you will normally try to use it to change--and clobber--other people. It is the height of idolatry to use the supposed Word of God so that my small self can be in control and be right. But I am afraid this has been more the norm than the exception in the use of the Bible."[1]

I suspect that most everyone who takes the Bible seriously occasionally falls into the idolatry that  Father Rohr mentions. All of us can read the Bible selectively, using it to support what we already think. That’s true of both conservative and liberal Christians, though I fear that progressive Christians are sometimes more prone simply to dismiss the Bible whenever we don’t like what it says.

It’s not a perfect fit, but I wonder if the differences between conservative and liberal Christians don’t have something in common with those between the “traditionalists” and “nontraditionalists,” the “compliant” and “defiant” that Brian McLaren suggests make up the audience when Jesus gives his Sermon on the Mount. But, “According to Jesus,” writes McLaren, “neither group was on the road to true aliveness.”[2]

Giuliani, Obama, and What Love Looks Like

President Obama doesn't love America. So said former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani in a speech I assume most everyone has heard about by now. It stirred up something of a political firestorm, and so Mayor Giuliani has further explicated his comments in a number of interviews, explaining why it is he thinks Obama does not love the USA.

People make judgments about whether or not someone loves something or someone all the time. It's not uncommon to hear young children accuse their parents of not loving them. The accusation is rarely true, but no doubt is is believed by many a child who has been punished or denied something she wants.

One of the reasons Giuliani gave for his judgment about the president had to do with Obama not being enough of a cheerleader. The president doesn't say how great America is frequently enough, criticizes the country too often, and even seems to think that other countries are exceptional, too.

What does love say and do? Where is the correct balance between cheerleading and criticizing, between defending and correcting? Look at parents and how they raise their children, and you'll see a lot of different answers.

I thought about such questions as I read the day's lectionary passages, verses filled with criticism, much of it scathing, for the people of God, the chosen people whom God loves. They are a stubborn people with hardened hearts who always go astray, at least according to God. When Jesus cleanses the Temple, accusing its leaders of making it a marketplace, his words are no harsher than those God has used with Israel on numerous occasions. And if you want more, read the gospel of Mark and look at how harshly Jesus speaks to the 12 disciples.

But in our highly partisan culture, harsh criticism is sometimes reserved for the other side. And if WE are good and THEY are bad, then we need to praise us and criticize them. In church congregations, this sort of thinking may contribute to a queasiness about prayers of confession. "They seem so negative," someone said to me. Yet how does one talk about a Savior if THEY need saving?

I've seen church members make much the same judgment as Giuliani, announcing that their pastor doesn't love them because he or she isn't enough a cheerleader and doesn't tell them how great they are. I wonder if this isn't related to partisan styled US and THEM thinking.

I suspect that a lot of pastors struggle with finding the right balance in loving their congregations, much as parents struggle. No doubt we often get it wrong. And I imagine that a lot of congregations struggle with finding the right balance in loving their pastors, much as parents struggle. No doubt they often get it wrong.

That said, all of us probably need to be careful in making judgments about others' love. Mayor Giuliani ended up looking petty and foolish, a bit like an upset toddler in his evaluation of Obama. We'd probably all do better to focus on getting our loving right.

Click to learn more about the lectionary.

Preaching Thoughts on a Non-Preaching Sunday

The lectionary gospel passage for today is Mark's extremely brief account of Jesus' baptism, temptations, and the opening of his ministry, all in the span of seven verses. There is no content to the temptations reported, just that it happened. But as bare-boned as it is, it does give us a quick look at who this Jesus is and why he is here.

Our congregation is not following the lectionary at the moment. We are instead using Brian McLaren's We Make the Road by Walking for our Sunday readings. Today we heard the opening of the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew's gospel, including the Beatitudes and the call to be salt and light for the world.

If the lectionary passage is about Jesus' identity, the one from Matthew is about our identity as the people of God. And I think we often have problems with both identities. Especially in modern America, Jesus and his work has been understood very individualistically, in terms of personal salvation, healing, fulfillment, etc. But Jesus' identity is the one who proclaims God's new community, the Kingdom, and the teachings in the Sermon on the Mount are about what it looks like for the Church to model this community.

Yesterday I was at the (snow shortened) Next Church regional gathering where David Lose was the featured speaker. He talked about how church and worship needed to be places where we practice things that really matter, things that are connected to our lives in the world. We need to move away from church as a concert hall or event center where we go to hear and see uplifting, maybe even inspiring things, but then leave to live lives little connected to that worship. We need to become places where people learn and practice ways of being God's people in the world. To put it in the identity terms from above, church needs to be the place where we learn and practice those ways that mark us as God's alternative community, ways that we take into the world and our lives.

What is church? Clearly it is many things to many people, but what is it at its very core? Why does Jesus/God need the Church? And are our congregations being whatever that is?

Click to learn more about the lectionary.

A Lenten Test Drive

Here we are on the eve of another Lent. Tomorrow evening people will come to our sanctuary for a rather somber service where ashes are used to mark a cross on people's foreheads. At the same time they will hear, "Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return." Some of these people will "give up something" or engage in other "lenten disciplines" for this season that carries us toward the events of Holy Week, and finally to the empty tomb on Easter.

Growing up in 1960s South Carolina, I was only vaguely aware of Lent. Few southern Protestants did much with Lent. It was too "Catholic." Of course I didn't really know any Catholics so I wasn't quite sure what that meant.

My how things have changed. Even conservative, southern Protestants have adopted "Catholic" practices they would never have gone near 50 years ago. All manner of Christians will have Ash  Wednesday services to kick off this season. I assume that almost all view Lent as some sort of preparation, some way of deepening faith as Easter draws near. But to be honest, I've never quite figured this Lent thing out. Maybe that's just because I was almost 40 years old before it became a part of my church life. I'm not certain.

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In today's gospel reading, John the Baptist answers questions about his identity by saying that he is the voice crying in the wilderness, "Make straight the way of the Lord." The origins of these words from the prophet Isaiah likely go back to actual preparations for religious parades of some sort. But clearly the phrase had become a symbol about getting ready. But for what?

I think that may be one of my issues with Lent. I'm all for a time of cultivating spiritual practices, of trying to be more focused on God and what God wants from my life. But to what end? What happens when Lent is over and another Easter is celebrated? Did anything change, or do we just start playing the song over again. (The same sort of questions seem equally appropriate for Advent and perhaps other seasons.)

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There is a great deal of looking backward in Christianity these days. (This could be something peculiar to American Christianity.) There are many versions of this. Not all Christians long to put prayer back in school, but even the most liberal may long for days when they had more political influence or when it was easy to fill a sanctuary on Sunday. But if our gaze is not primarily on that future that God is bringing, the new day Jesus says is drawing near, what are our Lents or Advents getting ready for?

One thing I do really appreciate about Lent is its association with giving up things. This can get trivialized into little more than a spiritual diet plan, but on a deeper level, the practice invites us into something very much at odds with the world we live in. Our world, our society, is convinced that a fuller and more abundant life is an exercise in addition. Our lives would be better if we just got enough of whatever it is we are lacking. (Often spirituality gets understood as just one more consumer item to add to all our other things, hoping that this will get us to enough.) But the Jesus-way is more about subtraction, about letting go of things and of self.  It is about losing one's life in order to find it. Lent, at least, seems to get that.

Lent got its start all those centuries ago as a time of intense preparation for new Christians, people who would be baptized during the night just before Easter and join in their first Lord's Supper on Easter morn. So maybe it would be good to think of Lent as a Jesus-way test drive. But of course that hopes that Easter will be the start of something and not the end. Understood that way, doing Lent again each year still make sense. It may be another test drive because the previous one didn't lead to a new way of life. Or it may be a test drive for a fuller and deeper walk with Jesus. But either way, it gets ready for something that is about to begin, something that looks forward and not backward.

Click to learn more about the daily lectionary.