"Embodied Faith"

Luke 24:36b-48

Sunday, April 19, 2015

First Congregational United Church of Christ – Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

Go back with me in time a couple of weeks.....back on Palm Sunday, we gathered here and celebrated the triumphal entry of Jesus and his followers into Jerusalem. Then we heard the stories of Jesus’s final days on Earth and stood as witnesses at the cross when he was crucified.

Most of us have heard the stories of Jesus’s death and resurrection so many times, we could practically recite them in our sleep. But one of the things that’s interesting about all these stories is how they subtly (and sometimes not-so-subtly) differ from each other. Every once in a while, I’ll be reading one of these stories and I’ll think, “Wow. I’ve never noticed THAT before!”

And so it was earlier this week when I was flipping through the Gospel of Matthew. We didn’t read that particular account during Holy Week this year, so it had been a little while since I’d read it. But what I found was this…after Jesus died, around 3 o’clock in the afternoon, the temple curtain was torn in two and there was an earthquake…you probably remember that part. But what comes right after that was surprising to me: the Gospel of Matthew says that as the Earth shook, there were many graves that were opened and lots of people (dead people) got up and walked into Jerusalem and were seen by many.

Woah. Say, what? I thought Jesus was the only one being resurrected. Turns out there were a bunch of people resurrected? What on earth?

For thousands of years now, humans have struggled to understand what the story of Jesus’s resurrection might mean for the rest of us. Those of us who grew up saying the Nicene or Apostle’s Creeds in worship probably remember that line about “the resurrection of the dead.” That part’s not about Jesus’s resurrection…it’s about the particular belief that our own fate as humans is intimately tied up with Jesus’s. The concept of the “the resurrection of the dead” is a way of saying that, someday, bodies will be raised up from their tombs and the same bodies we once had here on Earth will live again. Kind of like what happened in Matthew right after Jesus died.

I don’t know about you. Maybe you dig this idea. It sounds pretty far fetched to me.

But I think it gets an important theme that runs throughout the gospels, in particular, the narratives about Jesus’s death and resurrection and that’s this: bodies matter.

In today’s story from Luke we have one of many post-resurrection accounts of an encounter with Jesus. They sort of all start to get jumbled in your head after a while, right? Mary at the tomb with Peter and the beloved disciple, Mary and Mary at the tomb when the earthquake comes, the disciples locked in the upper room and Thomas sticking his hand in Jesus’s side, the story of the two people on their way to Emmaus when Jesus approached them on the road.

The passage from Luke that we just heard comes right after that Emmaus encounter. The disciples are gathered together in Jerusalem and these two friends come back to tell them about their encounter with Jesus as they broke bread together. Suddenly, Jesus appears among them and says, “Peace be with you.”

But they don’t feel peaceful at all! I guess it’s kind of like when the angel appeared to Mary and told her not to be afraid. Angels and resurrected people only tell you not to worry when they know you’re going to be worried.

Who wouldn’t be worried? It’s a dead dude standing there in their midst! They assume he is a ghost. That’s the only logical explanation. But….the author of Luke is very careful to assert that he is no ghost. That seems to be the whole point of this story. Jesus says, “Look! Touch and see! I have flesh and bones!” And he even asks to eat some food…further proof that he is a real, corporeal human being – not a ghost.

Now, I know we’ve ventured into some pretty bizarre territory here. You may be sitting there saying, “Does she really expect me to believe this nonsense?” The answer is, “No. I don’t.” I mean, it’s fine with me if you do believe it. It’s fine with me if you don’t. It’s fine with me if you change your mind from time to time, too. I personally don’t ultimately think that what we believe about the exact nature of the Resurrection matters too much in the whole great scheme of things. But…BUT! I’d be an irresponsible preacher if I didn’t point out to you that it seems to matter to the early followers of Jesus quite a lot. They were convinced they had seen the literal flesh-and-blood Jesus and they wanted to make sure that we knew that he wasn’t a ghost.

Once again: bodies matter.

Bodies mattered to the early followers of Jesus. Bodies mattered to Jesus himself – why else would he have spent so much time around those who had such conflicted and painful relationships with their own bodies? He could have just been a great teacher who stood up on a mountain and waxed eloquent about the nature of God and other existential truths. He could have spent all of his time reading and writing.

But he didn’t. Instead, he spent his time placing his body squarely in the middle of the messy humanity he encountered. He spit in a blind man’s eyes and healed him. He touched those with leprosy and who were hemorrhaging that others refused to touch. He broke bread and passed around fish and fed those who were hungry. He sat down at the well with the woman and asked her for a drink of water – a basic need we all have because we are all living in bodies. When he encountered another woman who was about to be stoned by an angry mob, he didn’t preach a long sermon. Instead, he simply put his body right in between the woman and the crowd and said very little.

Jesus ate and drank and slept and ran and laughed and danced and sang and cried and turned over tables…and felt the warm oil caressing his face when a friend anointed his head…and shook the dust off of his feet when things weren’t going well…and gently bathed the feet of his followers…and rode a smelly beast into Jerusalem for his final victory lap.

The book we’ve been reading in confirmation class tells this lovely story about the bodily reality of Jesus.[1] One of the authors recalls talking to his daughter about God when she was very young. She was scared of the dark and he reminded her that she didn’t need to be afraid because God was with her – even though she couldn’t see God, she could be assured God was there. And the little girl said, “I need God with a skin-face on, daddy.”

God with a skin-face on. Regardless of whether you believe Jesus was God exactly or perhaps just another one of us messy human beings infused with the Divine, it does seem to me that Jesus was God with a skin-face on in many ways. One of the most mysterious and amazing blessings of being a human is that we are all God with a skin-face on. We are all the embodiment of the Holy, created in the image of the Divine, called to love and care for one another just as God has loved and cared for us.

I think sometimes we have a tendency to want to compartmentalize our faith. To pretend like it’s only about words on a page, or prayers that we say aloud, or the great intellectual calisthenics we like to do when we’re debating some cool theological concept or an intriguing passage of scripture. Faith is something we think about, ponder….but only with our heads and hearts.

Our faith ancestors, though, call to us to do more. They call us to a faith that is fully embodied. Totally corporeal. Fleshy. Carnal. A faith that encompasses our entire bodies, not just our brains and hearts.

Our faith is not separate from what we do. The two are completely intertwined. And the way our bodies experience the world and act in the world is all tied up with who we are as people of faith.

God is not absent from the room where the new mother labors to bring new life into the world. There is blood and a few stray curse words and some fear…and God is right there, laboring alongside the woman as co-creator of the new life that is emerging.

God is not absent from the playground where the children run and jump and wave sticks at each other. There are skinned knees and nursery rhymes and new games invented…and God is right there, gleefully laughing with the children as they experience the goodness of living and breathing.

God is not absent from the kitchen where the man prepares a meal for his grown children who are home for a visit. Can you see now the hands, creased with wrinkles and slowly moving as they dice the onions and stir the pot? God is right there, enjoying the goodness of offering hospitality and care.

God is not absent from the bed that the two lovers share. The connection, the care, the vulnerability, the trust, the pleasure…all are wrapped up in God’s good gift of sexuality and the connections that are forged there are the ones that sustain humanity.

We are not spirits floating around without bodies. We are not bodies devoid of spirit. Instead, we are holy messes of skin, bone, flesh, and the divine. We are infused with the very breath of God. Our faith is meant to be embodied because our bodies matter to God.

All let me be very clear: all of our bodies matter to God. The person who is transgender whose body is threatened daily by those who are fearful? That person’s body matters to God.

The woman who walks out of the abortion clinic with her head down because she cannot bear to see the angry faces screaming at her? Her body matters to God.

The fast-food worker who punches the time clock and walks off the job to stand in solidarity with her co-workers to demand fair compensation? Her body matters to God.

And I can’t help but think of the bodies of Walter Scott and Eric Harris. Scott, who was shot in the back while running from Officer Michael Slager. And Harris, who spent his last few moments in his earthly body, pinned to the ground fighting to breathe and hearing the officers above him callously and cruelly hurling expletives his way, telling him they didn’t care if he could breathe or not.

But God cared. God was there watching all of those bodies struggle with each other and God cared that Harris couldn’t breathe. Just as God cared that Eric Garner couldn’t breathe. Just like God sat vigil with the body of Michael Brown as it lay in the street for hours in the hot August sun.  

Our bodies are known fully and loved fully by the God who is the very source of our being. We are – all of us – created in God’s image….and our bodies, of every structure, size, age, and ability; bodies of every gender and ethnicity….our bodies are holy.

We are called to live an embodied faith. One that cares for bodies, cares about bodies.

A faith that calls us to steward our bodies as best we can. A faith that calls us to remember that God is present in each and every body and that we called to treat all of humanity with dignity and respect. We do all of this in the name of the one who came and embodied faith to its fullest, so that we might have life and have it abundantly. Amen. 

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[1] Words for the Journy. Martin Copenhaver and Anthony Robinson.

“Easter is a Time for Dreaming ”

John 20:19-31 (with a smattering of Acts 4)

Sunday, April 12, 2015

First Congregational United Church of Christ – Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

I’ve always been a sucker for utopian communities…or at least the idea of them. When I was a little girl, my mom would often take me to the mall with her and I’d sit on this big leather couch in Banana Republic and look at this amazing coffee-table book that was all about the Shakers. I loved the idea of a group of people so fervent in their beliefs, so dedicated, so completely bonkers that they were willing to live in this odd, utopian community together.

When we lived in Indiana, we were a couple of hours away from New Harmony, which was home to a failed utopian experiment. David and I had the chance to visit there a few years ago. We walked the grounds, heard the stories, saw the places where the Owenites had lived and worked. We spent some time at dusk in the Roofless Church and as I sat there looking out over a big green field, the very presence of God was palpable in the breeze and the clouds overhead and the sounds of the birds around me.

I bring all of this up not just as a way of self-disclosing myself as an impassioned dreamer, but because I think we sometimes forget that we, as the Church, are actually a failed utopian experiment, too.

Listen again to the text from Acts 4:

“Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.”

Sounds like a hippie commune, right? Whenever I start to wonder, “What REALLY happened at Easter? Did Jesus really get up and walk around after he died?” I think about this chapter from Acts. I am somehow convinced that something really unusual, surprising, incredible, and unbelievable must have happened after Jesus’s death…because only something really major and life-altering and earth-shattering would convince a bunch of rational, everyday people to pool all of their possessions and live in a commune together.

You don’t just give up everything you own and join a commune if you’re a reasonable person. You don’t move across the country to Indiana to a utopian community if you’re a reasonable person. You don’t join a religious sect that is counter-cultural and frowned-upon if you’re a reasonable person.

Which is part of what fascinates me about Christianity. Because I look around the room today and I think, “Well, this looks like a pretty reasonable group of folks.”

But I know that if you’re here, there has to be at least one small part of you that isn’t reasonable at all. Because there’s nothing reasonable about the Resurrection; nothing reasonable about following a guy who tells us that we have to lose our own lives to find them; nothing reasonable about continuing to read a book that’s thousands of years old every Sunday and claim that our lives have been utterly transformed by a person we’ve never heard or seen. There’s nothing reasonable about that at all.

Thomas – dear old Thomas. John tells us he’s known as “the Twin” which is what the name Thomas means. But we know him better as what? Doubting Thomas, that’s right.

Thomas has been held up as a cautionary tale (“Don’t be like this guy!”) or lauded as a hero (“Thank God there was at least ONE reasonable person there to ask the sensible questions!)…but, as usual, I think it’s more complicated, right?

First of all, let’s give Thomas the benefit of a little bit of context. This is the third time in John’s gospel that Thomas speaks. He first comes on the scene in chapter 11. Jesus has just learned that his dear friend Lazarus has died. He wants to leave immediately for Judea so he can help his friend. The other disciples urge him to use caution – they worry that if they go back to Judea he will get hurt or killed. When it becomes apparent that Jesus is going, whether or not his friends decide to tag along, Thomas speaks up and says to the others, “Let’s go, too, so that we can die with Jesus.”

Wow. “Let’s go, too, so that we can die with Jesus.” Kinda makes you feel bad for thinking Thomas didn’t have enough faith, right? When was the last time YOU volunteered to die with a friend?

And then in chapter 14 Jesus is waxing eloquent about how, “In my father’s house there are many rooms and I am going there to prepare a place for you.” This is a beautiful text – I read it at almost every funeral. Jesus is trying to comfort his friends, telling them “do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God. Believe also in me.” Thomas speaks up, saying, “Jesus, we don’t know where you’re going. How can we know the way?” And Jesus says, “I am the way and the truth and the life.”

Thomas. Faithful, strong, passionate, struggling, beloved Thomas. He is always following Jesus. He’s willing to follow him to death in Judea. He’s willing to follow him to this big house with many rooms, wherever-the-heck-it-is. He loves his friend and he’s willing to follow him wherever he leads.

So it’s actually somewhat surprising that Thomas reacts the way he does when his friends come to tell him that they’ve seen the Risen Christ. He scoffs, “Yeah, right. You saw Jesus. Dead Jesus. Sure you did. I’ll believe that when I see it with my own eyes.”

I wonder if Thomas felt a little hurt and left out. Here he is, the one who has been so willing to follow Jesus wherever he leads and he missed the big show. Why did Jesus come to the others when Thomas wasn’t there? It hardly seems fair.

And then there is, of course, the elephant in the room: these are perfectly reasonable questions to ask, right? I mean, dead things don’t get up and walk around. “You saw Jesus? Sure you did. Suuuuure you did.” It’s a perfectly reasonable response.

David Lose says that Thomas wasn’t a doubter as much as he was a realist.[1] When Thomas demands to see Christ’s bloody hands and put his own hand in Christ’s side, he’s not so much making a request, says Lose, as he is mocking his friends. He doesn’t actually expect these things to ever HAPPEN, mind, he’s just trying to point out how ridiculous their story is.

So when Christ shows up and turns his own words back on him and actually invites him to do the impossible….well, it’s one of those moments where the whole world just kind of falls away. Here we see it: two dear friends reunited in this strange and unbelievable way. Jesus could have scolded Thomas for his disbelief, but he does nothing of the sort. Instead, he simply invites Thomas to do the incredible – to see the wounds, to step into a new world where the impossible is the new normal.

And Thomas, upon seeing Christ with his own eyes, says, quite simply, “My Lord and my God.”

Of all of the statements of faith that various people say when confronted with Jesus, there’s none more faithful than these astonished words breathed from Thomas’s lips. Thomas, the one we’ve labeled as a doubter, confesses that Christ is his Lord and his God. If that ain’t faithful, I don’t know what is.

David Lose writes that what really happens in this moment is that Thomas’s very understanding of reality is shifted. His world is expanded and what he believes might be possible grows and grows. Lose says, “And this issue of having too small a vision of reality is what I find interesting. Because I also fall into a worldview governed by limitations and am tempted to call that ‘realism.’ Which is when I need to have the community remind me of a grander vision. A vision not defined by failure but possibility, not governed by scarcity but by abundance, not ruled by remembered offenses but set free by forgiveness and reconciliation.”[2]

Hoo boy. I am right there with him. Because I, too, am confronted by the reality that my vision is often too small. Limited. Finite. I find myself saying things like, “Well, the best we can hope for is probably…” or “I’m not expecting much here…” or “You know, things aren’t likely to change much. We’ve kind of just got to deal with what we’ve been given.”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how our faith can sustain us as we continue to work for justice in our world. I don’t have to give you the whole laundry list of things we wish we could change in this world – to make things more equitable, more just, more kind – you have your own laundry list, I’m sure. And I know that many of you, like me, often turn on the news and wonder, “Well, how on earth will it ever get any better? Just when we take one step forward then it’s two steps back. And the corporations own the politicians. And the lobbyists control Washington. And the voters seem to be downright stupid. And it seems that we’ll have racism and sexism and bigotry with us always. And the problems are so big and so complex and so scary and so overwhelming….”

Wait. Just me?

Earlier this week I had a chance to watch the two-hour PBS special on The Abolitionists. It was a balm for my soul. One of the things that struck me about it was just how futile abolition seemed when they began dreaming of it.

When William Lloyd Garrison began to publish The Liberator in 1831, he wasn’t part of a movement. He was just one crazy twenty-something with some paper and a printing press who was spouting off his own wild ideas – hoping against hope that if he continued to shout his dream of a nation without slavery someone might listen to him. It was 32 long years before the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. 32 years. That is a long time to stay the course. But people like Garrison, and Angelina and Sarah Grimke, and Frederick Douglass, and Sojourner Truth dedicated their entire lives to this dream. They believed it was possible and they were undeterred by the voices of reason. As Lose said, they were governed by a vision “not defined by failure but possibility, not governed by scarcity but by abundance.”

And if they were able to live into those unrealistic dreams, then so are we.

Because Easter is a time for dreaming. It is a time for putting away reason and flow-charts and models and statistical analysis and projections and data….not forever, but just for a time.

Easter is a time to say to those reasonable voices inside our head, “Shhh. Quiet down for just a minute.” Easter is a time for dreaming.

Easter is a time for opening ourselves to the possibility that things may go better than we had hoped, love may finally triumph over evil, wrongs may be made right, justice may finally roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

And Easter is a time for each of us to hear Christ’s invitation to be a part of the impossible. To reach out and touch his hands, his side. To know that the Spirit of the Living Christ is alive among us – even here – even now – and that we are still called to dream along with God.

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[1] http://www.davidlose.net/2015/04/easter-2-b/

[2] http://www.davidlose.net/2015/04/easter-2-b/

"Gospel of Uncertainty"

John 20:1-18

Sunday, April 5, 2015 – Easter Sunday

First Congregational United Church of Christ – Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

Earlier this week, I was taking our two boys to preschool and we started talking about Easter. I said something about how it was the biggest, most important day of the church year and they wanted to know why. I reminded them of the highlights from the story we just heard, “Remember, guys? How Jesus died and his friends were really sad. So sad. And then something totally surprising and unexpected happened.” “What?” “His friends tell us that they saw him again. They looked for him in his grave, but it was empty. And then they saw him…at first they didn’t necessarily recognize him, but later they realized it was him. It was all very mysterious. No one really understands it.”

Our five year old carefully inquired, “But…that doesn’t happen to REAL people, right, mama? Real people don’t come back from the dead?”

I sighed. “Well, sweetie, Jesus WAS real and that’s part of what makes this story so confusing and special….because, you’re right. I’ve been alive a good long while now and I’ve never known anyone who has come back from the dead.”

I felt my eyes begin to water and I said, “You know, there are sure a lot of people I’ve known that I wish could come back from the dead. People I miss. People I wish I could see again.”

We talked for a few minutes about some of the people and animals we have known and loved that we miss. And how unfair it is that some of them are gone. We talked about doctors and the amazing medical advances in our world and how, someday, scientists might be able to help people live longer in the face of scary diseases. But, ultimately, that death is something we will always have with us. And that sometimes death just makes us really mad and sad.

They say that only two things in life are certain, right? Death and taxes. It was the same for Jesus and his friends. They lived perhaps even more intensely and intimately with death and taxes than most of us do these days.

Babies and young children often didn’t live to see adulthood. Adults were frequently struck down in what could have been the prime of their lives. We know that Jesus was surrounded by the sick, the destitute, the cast-aways, the nobodies. Death was always at Jesus’s door and he was keenly aware of its proximity. At times, he seemed to wear it like a cloak, wrapping it around himself. That he would die – and that the hands of the powers and principalities of his day – was something he knew for certain. And so he wrapped the cloak of death tightly around himself and carried it everywhere he went.

I have to think, this probably made Jesus a real drag to have as a friend, right? I mean, here he is, this young and healthy guy, always going on and on about his impending doom. Not exactly a day-brightener, you know?

Except. Except! Jesus was also a great guy to have around. He lived fully and he loved a good party. Remember when he turned the water into wine at that wedding in Cana? He just couldn’t bear to see a good party come to an end simply because the wine had run out, so he stuck another record or two on the turntable and kept the beats flowing on into the wee hours of the night.

When I imagine Jesus, I always think of his eyes. I have to imagine that they carried within them the depth of all humanity. I imagine that they must have been the kind of eyes that trapped you….the kind where you couldn’t bear to look away. And, yet, the kind of eyes that were also so intense that you could hardly stand to maintain eye contact for more than a few seconds.

I think about Jesus’s eyes weeping, just as my human eyes often do. He cried, you know….when his good friend Lazarus died.

He traveled to Lazarus’s hometown of Bethany and stood outside his tomb with Lazarus’s sisters, Mary and Martha, and although the text just says that Jesus wept, I have to think all three of them were probably crying together. Or maybe Mary and Martha were already all cried out because their brother had been dead for four days already and they knew Jesus had missed his chance to say goodbye and they knew they’d never see him again.

So when Jesus told them to roll the stone away, I imagine that they must have laughed a bit through their tears. Or perhaps there was an incredulous snort. “Jesus,” they might have chided, “Don’t you know that the only two things that are certain in life are death and taxes? He’s dead, Jesus. Dead. It’s too late.”

But Jesus didn’t know. Or he didn’t believe. Because they did roll the stone away and we are told that Lazarus – Lazarus who had been dead for four long days – walked out of that tomb still wrapped up tightly in his own cloak of death, those cloths that were used to prepare his body for burial– and Jesus, his friend, said through his tears, “Unbind him, and let him go.” And they loosed the cloths that bound him and he lived again.

“But, mama, that’s not a real story right? Real people don’t come back from the dead, right?”

Honestly, friends, sometimes I’m not even sure how to answer that question. Because, no, I’ve never seen anyone come back from the dead. But I’m equally convinced that these stories – these stories that are at the very core of our faith – are true in some deep and profound ways.

One of my all-time favorite preachers, Anna Carter Florence, says one of my all-time favorite things when she tells the Easter story. She says this, “If the dead won’t even stay dead, then what can you count on?”

I mean, that pretty much sums up the ridiculous nature of the Easter story, right? “If the dead won’t even stay dead, then what on Earth can we count on?”

Death and taxes, I tell ya. Death and taxes are supposed to be for certain.

Except when they aren’t.

You know, the longer I follow this Jesus of Nazareth, the less and less certain I am about a lot of things. I know, you might think that seems backwards. I often think that we’ve told ourselves a grand fib when we’ve pretended that having “faith” is about becoming more and more certain. Because the more I live into this wild and crazy faith called Christianity, the more I realize just how much I don’t know.

“If the dead won’t even stay dead, what can you count on?”

I am struck by how often, in John’s Gospel, at least, we are told that Jesus’s disciples did not know what was going on that morning…early on the first day of the week when they went to the tomb. Mary must have approached the grave 100% certain that the heavy stone would still be in place….except it wasn’t. And she ran to find backup, telling her friends, “Someone has taken Jesus, and I do not know where they’ve laid him!” When the nameless disciple bends down and looks in the tomb, we are told that he “believes” (in what, exactly, we’re not told) but even though he “believes” he still “does not understand” the full gravity of what is taking place. And again, when Mary is standing there crying and the two angels ask her why she s weeping, she responds “They’ve taken Jesus away, and I do not know where they’ve laid him!”  And then she sees Jesus but, of course, she does not know it’s Jesus. 

There’s a lot of not knowing this in passage. A lot of confusion. A lot of things that seem to be, quite literally, in-credible, un-believable.

At first glance, a story like this one….a story that upends everything we believe to be true; a story that leaves us snickering a little or nervously looking around to see how others react;

A story like this doesn’t seem to be good news at all. What could be so good about having the ground pulled out from under you? What could be so good about a story that takes all we know to be true about life and just….crumples it up and tosses it aside?

Except, this: when things aren’t going well.

When the phone call comes from the doctor’s office with bad news – and they are sure – SURE there’s hardly anything that can be done….

When the one that you love more than life itself is gone and there’s no way they’re coming back…

When you’ve screwed up so very badly that you’re sure, you’re just SURE, there’s nothing you can do to fix it and you’re feeling as unlovable as you’ve ever felt…

When you look up from the empty bottle, the all-you-can-eat-buffet, the computer, the gambling table, the credit card….and you realize that your life is empty. As empty as can be and you can’t see your way back.

When that happens, my friends, then it turns out that there is a little jewel within the Christian faith that I like to call The Gospel of Uncertainty. There is Good News to be found in the incredible, because it means that maybe the experts aren’t always right, that death isn’t the end of love, that there actually are do-overs forever and even the most unlovable of offenders will be loved again, and that even in our moments of deepest despair and brokenness, we are never truly empty.

The Gospel of Uncertainty means that there is always More. That’s More with a capital “M.” More growth, more hope, more love, more light and truth yet to break into our midst. Death does not have the final word. Love does.

“When the dead won’t even stay dead, what CAN we count on?” I have a feeling the answer is different for each of us. And that one of the most sacred of our tasks as humans is to live ever more fully into the answers that find us.

Thanks be to God for the journey, the stories, and our companions on the Way. May we continue to live into the More with every passing day.