Be honest: If you were one of Joseph’s brothers, you’d hate him, too. He’s the youngest (technically the second-youngest) of twelve boys. But he’s the baby. The baby who – as almost every older sibling will tell you – gets away with murder. Who gets whatever he wants. He’s got Dad wrapped around his finger. Which is reason enough for his big brothers to do all the things big brothers do to put little brothers in their place. Like: Tell him he’s actually not really their brother – that they found him in a trash can when he was a baby. Or hold him down and beat on him with his own hands while shouting, “Stop hitting yourself!” (A classic.) Joseph may be the first known tattletale in recorded history. He “brings a bad report” of his brothers – he rats them out to their dad. Which no doubt only brings on more torment. We can probably all agree that this kid is about as obnoxious as they come. This kid with his dreams. He has a dream about working in the fields with his brothers. Each of them is binding wheat into sheaves when suddenly, Joseph’s sheaf stands itself upright and starts floating above all the other sheaves. And his brothers’ wheat sheaves then bow down prostrate before his. When Joseph awakens, he goes to them and tells them about his dream – which doesn’t exactly take the likes of Sigmund Freud to interpret. They understand its meaning full well, and they hate Joseph even more for it. The morning’s reading ends in a much darker place, but Joseph’s grandiosity is the genesis of all the cruelty which is to come. His grating favorite-son status and egotism give rise to resentment and to jealousy, to just common dislike. It’s all so ordinary. It’s all so understandable. Joseph’s brothers are not evil men. They’re regular guys whose run-of-the-mill grievances get away from them. There’s a chilling realism here. Cruelty can seem – can so often seem – to be deserved. There can seem to be some genuine warrant behind it.

The brothers – all of them together with the baby left behind – they are off in the hills herding their father’s sheep. And one day, they see Joseph at the far horizon, coming toward them, still tagging infuriatingly along, still following them wherever they go (and go to get away from him). They conspire to kill him. Now, how did they get from hating him to plotting his murder? How did unthinkable evil become thinkable? What happened? They didn’t go into the wild country with the intent of luring him out, away from their father and away from watching eyes. This wasn’t a premediated act. The scriptures show it coming together in real time, and coming together rather clumsily. An opportunity presents itself, and their long-simmering disdain has primed them to take it. But, again, most people who hate other people could never imagine killing them. You might wish that they would rot in hell – but then it would be God’s fingerprints on the murder weapon, so to speak. Did this all start of as a joke? Like: Did the brothers see Joseph coming and start kidding amongst themselves, “Guys, I had a dream that we were working in the fields and all of our sheaves rose up and started beating up his sheaf.” And, “No, no, I had a dream that we strangled him with that stupid coat of many colors.” And then silence. And then, “But… but, what if we really did find a way to ditch him for good?” Reuben, one of the older brothers, is uneasy with this. He says, “Let us not take his life.” None of the other brothers say anything in reply. It’s going to take some persuading. So Reuben plays it out for them: They can throw Joseph in a pit and let him die for lack of food and water. They’ll have plausible deniability about his death. They could pass a polygraph test. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to them, Reuben plans to sneak back and rescue him. Again, this is chilling: They are contemplating an act of horrific cruelty and are in their right minds. They can be reasoned with. They can stand back and weigh the pros and cons of different acts of cruelty logically and dispassionately. Cruelty isn’t always (or maybe even often) the work of some crazed thug in an alleyway; cruelty can be the work of otherwise decent men deliberating calmly amongst themselves.

The brothers agree that Reuben’s plan is a sensible one. They seize Joseph and strip him of his coat of many colors. Maybe they take turns strutting around wearing it, doing their best little-brother voice, and exclaiming, “I’m telling Dad!” Then they throw Joseph into a pit. What comes next is – to me – the most chilling detail of all in a story that has no small number of chilling details. They throw Joseph into a pit and then, the scriptures say, “they sit down to eat.” (Almost murdering your brother is one way to work up an appetite, I guess.) What did they talk about over their meal? Could they hear Joseph crying out for help? Did they laugh? These brothers do the evilest thing they have ever done. And then they have a snack. How can cruelty be compartmentalized in this way? How can they put the suffering they have caused out of their minds? Is it really so easy to place the pain of others just outside the circle of our immediate concern? What is Reuben thinking, sitting there? That everything is going to plan? Is he satisfied with himself? Pleased to think that he has done his part? That – bad as things may be in the moment – he has done what he could? Has he done what he could? He doesn’t speak up for Joseph. He doesn’t remind them all that Joseph is their brother and that what they are doing is wrong. He doesn’t threaten to return to their father and tell him the truth. He doesn’t say that, if they want to kill Joseph, they’ll have to kill him first. What are we to make of Reuben, who shows only so much courage? Who shows only so much compassion? Surely, there is something chilling in this: in the willingness of a man who would do right to settle for half-measures while the men doing wrong are determined to go the whole way. And then, what about Judah? Where does his question come from – “What profit is it if we kill our brother?” And what an interesting way to put it. “What profit is it?” Is this question born of mercy or of calculation? Is he trying to turn them from their evil? Or is he trying to make money off it? And does it matter if his real motive is making money as long as Joseph is spared in the process? Might Judah and his brothers even feel something like moral satisfaction? After all, what he proposes and what they all settle on is less evil than their original plan. This, too, is chilling: That “this isn’t as bad as it might have been” is enough to quiet a troubled conscience. That we can so easily and so genuinely come to believe that accepting cruelty which is marginally less cruel than the alternative is actually compassion.

Stories like this, scriptures like this exist to shine a light into the depths of the human heart. I’d be surprised if any of us would describe ourselves as cruel. But, then, wouldn’t Joseph’s brothers also deny that their cruelty is cruelty? Cruelty is so common, so ordinary. Cruelty is funny. Cruelty is so easy to rationalize. Cruelty is relative. Cruelty is debatable and defensible. Cruelty is something you can make a case for. Cruelty is something you can make money from. Cruelty is profitable. Cruelty is so many things that don’t seem to be cruelty. Joseph’s brothers sell him into slavery. A caravan of traders is passing by, and they barter their brother away. They return home twenty pieces of silver richer, and Joseph is bound and carried off to Egypt. Where is God in this story? Maybe in the pit with Joseph. Maybe in the whisper in the conscience that Reuben almost, almost heeds. Maybe calling to them from the future, calling them toward a mercy that will take many, many years to work its healing. When cruelty cuts so deep as to hit bone, the wounds do not quickly heal. The wounds of some kinds of cruelty open again and again, generation by generation. Joseph’s brothers will have grown old by the time they all meet again. A lifetime will have passed before these ones who have done such terrible wrong can say, can finally say: “We saw his anguish when he pleaded with us, but we would not listen.” In time, they will recognize their cruelty as cruelty. They will finally be able to acknowledge Joseph’s anguish as anguish. And there is a mercy in this. God is in this. God is in the hard moment – the hard moment in which they no longer let themselves lie or try to explain what they’d done or why they’d done it, or minimize it, or try to go on forgetting about it. God is in the breaking of heart that happens when they let themselves feel their brother’s pain. God is in the clarity that comes when they let the truth of right and wrong be simple again.

There are moments when you know God is with you. You feel it in the air. You feel it in your bones. They’re not the moments you’d maybe expect them to be – the big moments, like weddings or births or baptisms or funerals. At least, they’re not for me, anyway. I barely remember my wedding day. I know at some point, the dog (who was wearing a bow tie for the occasion) got loose and went running up and down the aisle, tail wagging, just delighted to finally be given the attention he deserves. It was definitely the happiest day of his life. It might have been the happiest day of mine, but, as I said, I don’t really remember. The day was a blur. I don’t remember a word of whatever it was the minister said. And, so, if God was there, I missed it. Linus’s birth… it happened. I guess. I mean, he’s here. So it must have happened. But that’s a haze, too. Obviously, God showed up for his baptism; that’s the whole point of a baptism. But, again, there was a lot to coordinate – family and logistical stuff – and all of that was more front-of-mind for me. My funeral might be the first major life event I actually get to be present for. I won’t be officiating it. I won’t be responsible for making sure the food is all taken care of. In whatever way it can be said that I’ll be there, I’ll be there. I look at the pictures: we’re cutting the cake and holding the baby, but, if I’m honest, I don’t see God in the pictures. I see myself looking back from the photographs: either so present to what was happening that God was the last thing I was thinking about, or else so distracted that God was the last thing I was thinking about.

I’ve felt God’s presence in our church. Sometimes when we sing, I have this sense that something is being given to us in the music that is more than the music. Things I don’t fully understand and struggle to accept take the shape of truths. For me, a lot of things are only true when you hear them sung in four-part harmony. When we sing, I feel the truth of things that I otherwise am not so sure about. It’s possible – when we sing “Nearer, my God, to Thee” – to trust that God is with me in a way it isn’t always possible to trust that God is with me. Some Sundays, the way John plays a line of a hymn on the organ will open a locked door in me. And all week, just because of that sound, light will have a way to get inside of me. God’s healing love and God’s peace will have a way to get inside of me. But it’s not only the music. A number of you have told me that when your family has faced a hard time or a loss, it’s been important to be able to tell your kids that you will come to church and share what’s happened and ask for prayer and let the community hold the sadness. And I know, I also know that some of you – you want to share, but you can’t. It would be too hard to say what you need to say. The words would break you. I think the space between – the silence between – the joys and the concerns that are shared: there is a kind of sharing that happens in that silence, too. Something is being given to us in the silence, too. We are giving ourselves to one another in that silence. God is giving God’s own self to us in that silence. In some churches, the measure of God’s presence in worship is the intensity of the praise; it’s when the people sing out and clap and raise their hands that they sense God there with them. In our church, the measure of God’s presence in worship is the depth of the silence. It’s the quality of the stillness in the silence.

I’ll be honest: I don’t know if I feel God’s presence in church every Sunday. I’m the minister, so I guess I have no one to blame for that but myself. I say this maybe to normalize it. My whole heart is in this, and even still, some weeks leave me cold. If God was here, God must have snuck in and out the back doors without my noticing. God isn’t always present – not even in the times and in the place when God is really supposed to be present. That’s how it feels, anyway. And not only in church when the sermon is boring, or on your wedding day when the whole thing is a whirlwind. But when you pray and your prayers aren’t answered. When the hurt doesn’t stop hurting. In ordinary, day-to-day life – when the blessings you know are blessings feel more like burdens. A lot of people describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious,” by which they mean that they have an awareness of Something bigger than themselves, they feel a part of It and feel It to be a part of them. They encounter It while experimenting with psychedelics or even just hiking through the woods. I envy them. When I hike through the woods, the only awareness I really ever have is of the bug bites I’ll be returning home with. And of how much my feet hurt. I am friends with a few other ministers who really want me to try psychedelics. I should say that I have no moral objections to this or anything like that. I’m just not interested. They keep telling me that I will experience God like I’ve never experienced God before. And they tell me this with the enthusiasm of a Jehovah’s Witness. But I’ve never cared much for proselytizing.

I suspect that I – and probably a lot of people who show up in church – might more accurately be described as “religious but not spiritual.” I’m not chasing an awareness of God’s presence like a high. I’m here because I like the sense of community. I like the traditions and the rituals and the old words. I like being confronted by certain ideals and moral aspirations when, even in my job, they’re often the last thing I think of Monday through Friday. I like being challenged to do more to honor my own values. I like being pushed to be of service to my neighbors in need. Sometimes, as I said, in certain rare moments, it does feel like God pulls back the veil here, and gives something of God’s own self to us. But God visits us and vanishes. God is as elusive as God is generous. I guess I believe that that’s how we know it’s God and not something else, something lesser, something not bigger than us but smaller than us – something we can manipulate or conjure or control. Many of the mystics, the women and men who “wrote the book” on feeling God’s presence – they actually talk about it in this very way. God becomes more real to them as God becomes less present to them. Because what they experience is not their own feelings of God’s presence, but the presence itself, which, being God’s, is ultimately beyond human feeling. God is not absent. God is present more truly and more purely, in absolute, transcendent holiness. Most of the mystics don’t like this very much. It’s not fun or comforting. It’s painful and confusing. But they come to describe their faith as stronger and their lives as full of contentment and peace.

They come to understand what Jacob came to understand when he exclaimed: “Surely the Lord is in this place — and I did not know it!” He awoke to this realization having literally awoken, from a dream. But this doesn’t have to happen while you’re sleeping. Jacob’s words are words I live my whole life by. They – almost more perfectly than anything else in all of scripture – capture what faith means to me. How faith works for me. What faith feels like for me. Which is: A lot of the time, nothing. Nothing much. Nothing rapturous. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing I notice or appreciate in the moment. Later – sometimes it’s at night as I’m reflecting back on the events of the day, and other times it’s years afterwards – but later, only later, I’ll awaken to it. Although “awaken” is too strong a word. I’ll sense after the fact what I didn’t – what I couldn’t – sense before. Because I was too busy, too stressed, too shocked, too blind, too in it, too heartbroken, too whatever. I’ll sense God. I’ll sense that God was with me. Not is with me now. But was with me then. God is most real to me in my memories. I can live any given moment without any awareness whatsoever of God’s presence. But I can’t relive those moments that way. It’s like an image from the negative of an old photograph is slowly, slowly crystallizing, coming into focus. And a figure is appearing in the picture that wasn’t there before. Translucent at first, so you aren’t sure what you’re seeing. But then with more and more solidness, there at the altar and in the hospital room and beside the font, so it’s unmistakable. You see what was always there to see – God, with you, with you when you didn’t know it. Guiding. Strengthening. Providing. Healing. One way to experience God’s presence is to not know you are experiencing God’s presence.

In Jerusalem, in Jesus’s day, when soldiers stopped you on your way to the market, told you they needed your donkey and your cart and the crop you had been carrying to the city to sell to feed your family, when they told you that it was the law, that, in the name of Caesar, “What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is mine,” when they told you this – they told you in Greek. When you begged, pleaded with them to leave you something; it’d been a bad harvest and, please, your children would starve, when you begged them – you begged them in Greek. And when they refused you and snickered and struck you, beat you, for being so impertinent, when they refused you – they refused you in Greek. When the tax-collector read out what he said you owed (a number much higher than it should have been), when he read it out – he read it out in Greek. And when he said, with a smile, that if you couldn’t pay cash, you could always sell yourself into indentured servitude to settle the bill, when he said it – he said it in Greek. The grain merchant who held that, no, there was nothing wrong with his scale, that, no, he had certainly not weighed it falsely to short his buyers, the governor who had your brother crucified as a bandit for stealing a loaf of bread – these men of means and might conducted their business in Greek.

Greek was the language in which the Empire made its pronouncements. Greek was the language in which its power was wielded. Greek was the language of the marketplace. Greek was the lingua franca of the day. Greek was spoken far and wide. To survive in Caesar’s world, sooner or later, you would have to speak Greek. So it would not have taken a Pentecost miracle for those Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Mesopotamians, Judeans, Romans, Cappadocians, Cretans, and Cyrenians, Phrygians, Pamphylians, Egyptians, and Arabs, together with Jesus’s Galilean followers – it would not have taken a Pentecost miracle for them to be able to carry on a conversation. The people were from all over the place, but, all over the place, people spoke Greek. No one needed the Holy Spirit to make themselves understood. The point of this story is not that those who couldn’t speak to one another before could speak to one another now.

One way a lingua franca can become a lingua franca is by being the tongue of the one holding the lash. The Judeans and Cappadocians and Phrygians and Egyptians spoke Greek because they had to. To claim the protections of the legal system, to fight even just for partial justice, to barter, to beg for mercy, to hail Caesar, they had to speak Greek. But – and this is the point of the story – when God speaks to the people, God doesn’t speak Greek. God doesn’t speak the language of the Empire. God doesn’t speak the language of the marketplace. God speaks to the Phrygians in Phrygian, to the Parthians in Parthian, to the Egyptians in Egyptian, to the Arabs in Arabic, and even to the Greeks (but only the Greeks) in Greek. God speaks whatever language you were first loved in. God speaks the language of a mother’s lullaby and of a father’s blessing. God speaks the language of hearth and home. God speaks the language of the wedding feast. God speaks the language we dream in and jest in and rejoice in, the language we remember in and mourn in. Caesar makes you speak his language. God learns yours.

We are all bilingual. We are all fluent in the language of the Empire – the language of the performance review, the credit score, the insurance claim, the college degree. We all speak the language of LinkedIn. We speak the language of prove it, earn it, deserve it. We speak the language of you are what you have. We speak the language of you are what you accomplish. We speak the language we have to speak to survive in a culture that doesn’t force us to our knees at the end of a sword, but that has its ways of making us fall in line all the same. There’s less stick, but more carrot. The promise of a certain lifestyle – and the threat of that certain lifestyle slipping out of reach – makes obedient subjects of us all. People – people in this town, people like me – sell themselves into indentured servitude every day for what we’ve been told our kids need. We speak Greek. Maybe we have a choice in the matter. But for most of us it doesn’t feel that way. We do what we truly believe we have to do. And we teach our children alpha, beta, gamma, delta; we teach them to do what they have to do, too. At least I do, anyway. Don’t think I’m not down on the floor, doing my best baby-voice: “Linus, can you say Princeton?”

But God doesn’t speak to us in Greek. God doesn’t speak to us in the language of where did you go to school? God doesn’t speak to us in the language of what do you do for work? God doesn’t speak to us in the language of audits, demands, and account-settling. God speaks your mother tongue. God speaks the language of the kitchen table and of Christmas morning. And know: If you grew up in a home where, when Mom or Dad spoke to you, it was Caesar’s voice you heard – know that Pentecost is the day you get to start over with God and learn the language of unconditional love. God speaks the language of the songs that were sung when you couldn’t sleep. God speaks the language of Goodnight Moon. God speaks the language of the hand on the forehead when you felt sick. God speaks the language of the way your grandfather hugged you. God speaks the language of the treehouse. God speaks the language of the voice on the phone that says, “Just come home.” God speaks the language of “I forgive you.” God speaks the language of “I’m just glad you’re okay.” God speaks the language of “I got it. Let me…”

“I got it. Let me…” Against all the voices that demand and accuse, all the voices that say you should… and you must…, God’s is the voice that says, “Don’t worry about it,” that says, “Leave the dishes in the sink,” that says, “Here, let me help you,” that says, “You’re off the hook.” God’s is the voice that says to the tax-collector: “I’ve already taken care of it.” God’s is the voice that says to the soldier, “Put away your sword.” God’s is the voice that says to the governor, “Take me instead.” In the streets of Jerusalem, beneath the loud jostling of the crowds, in the marketplace, beneath the din of the buying and selling and bartering, in a whisper, in your heart of hearts, there is a lullaby being sung in a language you may have forgotten you know. It will sing itself into your fears, into your inadequacies and your failings. It will sing itself into your hopes. It will sing itself into the fiber of your being – until you can truly rest your weary soul in the “I love you anyway,” in the great “just because” of God’s grace. Beneath the taking, there is this giving. Beneath the striving, there is this steadying.

Mary Magdalene wasn’t the first to stand among the gravestones weeping. Not long before, Jesus himself had stood in that same place, where the willows hung their heads and the old stones heaved up crooked from the ground – and Jesus felt something within him heave up crooked, too. Someone he loved had died. And he stood, undone, where his dear friend lay buried. And he wept. Jesus wept. This is the shortest verse in all of scripture. So little is said. And so much is said. Jesus wept. It’s as if more is said in these two words than thought can bear; anything else would break our language. Or maybe it’s just that these two words say everything there is to say – everything there is to say about Jesus, about God. God cries. There is sadness in God that can’t be kept in. Jesus wept. But you want to ask why: Why did he weep? Why did he weep only to then go on and do what he did – and call that dead man forth from his grave? That’s what happened in that story. Jesus grieved the man and then turned right around and resurrected him. Maybe that’s why – on the other side of his own death and resurrection, on that dark Easter morning – when Jesus came upon Mary crying at his own tomb he didn’t say, “Stop crying.” And doesn’t that mean something? That he stood, shining with life before someone mourning his death, and let her cry? Jesus didn’t tell Mary to stop crying. He asked her a question: “Why are you weeping?”

Whatever else it does – and who can say quite what – resurrection doesn’t make death less heartbreaking. For every Easter morning, there is still a stone with someone’s name on it. And the lilies that grow up around each of them have been watered with tears. Even if you believe that the man whose wife died too young will share eternity with her, and that they’ll celebrate their ten-thousandth anniversary together vacationing someplace beyond the stars, they won’t have celebrated their fiftieth here, where having to be patient and to forgive and to put up with all the annoying things the other person does makes every year of marriage a miracle all its own. Or – however lovely it is for your father to be sitting out on a park bench in the sun in heaven, he’ll never sit beside his grandchildren here, sharing ice cream cones in the last week of summer break, and feel what it feels like when time stands still in August. If hope for a life beyond this life made death not hurt, hope would only make us less than human, and make love for those we’ve lost less than love. And so, of course Jesus – the resurrected Jesus – doesn’t tell Mary to stop crying for him. We hope through our tears. That’s the only way to hope. That’s what makes hope hope. Hope and grief go together: Hope without grief is denial. Grief without hope is despair. We need both, even on Easter. Especially on Easter.

Even when Mary recognizes the one she’s been mourning as the man standing before her, even when she realizes that Jesus is Jesus – there is another recognition, there is another realization: that something has changed. “Do not touch me,” he says to her. Those are not the words you want to hear on Easter Sunday. No one is putting those words on a greeting card! “Do not touch me,” he says. Why? In death, in God, we will be given back to ourselves. And we will be given back to one another. But what this means is beyond our grasp. This truth is just beyond what our words and our thoughts can reach. We can, in our hearts, in our hoping, almost almost touch it. Touch them. But not quite. At least, not yet. Hope – it sort of – shimmers. Easter hope doesn’t form itself into something hard and solid like a gravestone. Easter hope moves in the wind and lives in the light of the morning. And in the quiet moment when we are alone but know that we are not alone. Easter hope is gentle with us at first. It doesn’t force itself against our hearts. It is careful with the sadness – and with the love that lives in the sadness.

Isn’t this the subtlest, loveliest detail in the Easter story – that the question, “Why are you weeping?” is posed to Mary more than once? First by the angels. And then again by Jesus. It’s the question all of heaven asks earth. The angels ask Mary this question and then actually let her answer it. She is confused. Of course she is. But the angels don’t stop her, don’t correct her. They don’t say anything. Not even angels know what to say sometimes. When a person is crying. When a person is in pain. They’re just there. With no words. Because there are no words. I wonder how often, in our lives, there are angels hovering around, in the silence. Their breathing sounds like those gentlest of words: “Why are you weeping?” We can’t hear them, but we can feel them in the air. And then Jesus asks Mary this question. He, too, lets her answer it. He, too, lets her answer it, without interrupting her, without interrupting her to reveal himself to her, even though this would no doubt be a comfort to her. Jesus lets her make her own way through her grief, which is, of course, the only way any of us can make our way through our grief. Jesus lets her grieve longer than, strictly speaking, her grieving “should” take. Grief takes the time it takes. Which is why, I think, the question is posed to her again.

What grief asks of us changes over time. There is the grief – and many of us know this grief – of the long letting go. The grief that sits beside you in the waiting room of Memorial Sloan Kettering month after month. There is the grief that feels like fear. There is the grief that burns slowly. And there is the grief that shocks. The grief that comes suddenly and overwhelmingly all at once. There is the grief of the last kiss and of the last goodbye. There is the grief that disguises itself as frantic doing – doing this and doing that and doing everything that needs to be done and that doesn’t need to done. There is the grief that you walk through in a trance. And: there is the grief that comes with laughter. There is the grief that tells itself as old stories. There is the grief that feels comfortable and familiar. There is the grief that comes and goes and yet never goes. Some people think every single day of their husband or their mother or their best friend who died twenty years before. The grief carries on like a conversation. For some of us, it is a conversation. I don’t think I’m the only one who talks to people who aren’t there, but who are there. And if, even years later, there are tears, again the question will come down to us from above, will come to us as a kind of grace: “Why are you weeping?” Again and again, through all the days of sadness, and as the seasons turn, as what grief is changes like the leaves, on and on, if need be, our whole lives long, the question will be posed to us: “Why are you weeping?”

Because there are so many ways to answer this question which is always whispering itself over our world. It’s like when a small child asks, “Why is Mommy crying?” They haven’t yet learned how to talk about what’s so hard for any of us to talk about: Not only, “Because she’s sad.” “Because she’s sad, but also because she’s okay.” “Because she’s sad, but also because she’s thankful.” “Because she’s sad, but also because she’s happy thinking about Grandpa.” “Because she’s sad, but also because she feels him here with us.” Easter hope shimmers itself into our hearts and our minds and our memories. So that slowly, over time, loss shines with life. There are still those words – “Do not touch me.” A miracle is still a miracle. A mystery is still a mystery. We can never hold as tightly to Easter hope as we might wish we could. But those words come to mean something different. They honor the experience that so many of us have had: of finding that it’s actually the Easter hope which holds us. Whatever else it does – and who can say quite what – the resurrection touches us. It reaches out to us from farther away than the farthest star and from the empty place at the kitchen table. As gentle as the brush of an angel’s wing. As the dawn. As the question, “Why are you weeping?” Which in heaven, of course, is how they say, “I love you.” Is how they say, “I’m here.” Easter morning breaks slowly but beautifully.

If you read the Christmas story, what you will read is a story with far less of Christ in it than you might expect. There is one line in it about the birth of Christ, really. The rest of the Christmas story is a story about other people – about other people, who, while doing all sorts of things with no obvious religious significance, found themselves drawn to Christ and to Christ’s service even so, and even spite of themselves. No one woke up in the morning thinking they were about to be immortalized in a nativity scene. Mary wasn’t shining her halo when an angel appeared to her. How many nights had Joseph awoken from a dream in which he’d stood up in front of everyone in the synagogue only to look down and realize he was in his underpants before he dreamed the one dream that would change his life forever? The shepherds weren’t saying their prayers when the sky started singing to them; there was only the stars and the silence until there wasn’t. Caesar Augustus’s schemes were not God’s plans, except then they were. And the poor innkeeper. How could he ever have known that he would go down in history as a heartless Grinch for doing nothing more and nothing less than his job? How could he ever have known that the teenage girl with the fingernails bitten down to the quick was pregnant with God?

In the Christmas story, the whole world is pregnant with God. A holiness that was always there, hidden but moving beneath things – it strained against the routine ordinariness of life until it broke through and caught everyone unaware. People were surprised and undone by angels and miracles, guided and thwarted by an unbidden grace, and changed by a mysterious, magnetic Presence which made itself felt in a time and in a place and in a way that no one seemed ever to have thought to expect. Christmas “happened” for these people, Christ “happened” for these people, in the ordinary course of their ordinary lives. How much had any of them ever really thought about God before? How regularly did they attend church? Were they the types to stop and smell the roses, or did they hurry along through their days like everyone else? Why them? Why then? There is no reason to believe that they were especially pious or pure, that they were religious or reflective or ready or worthy. There is no reason to believe that they understood what was going on any more than the sheep or the oxen or the camels understood what was going on when they sensed God as they might sense wolves prowling in the woods, when they felt God in the air and in their animal bodies and bowed down in praise.

I can only imagine that there was, among the shepherds, at least one who did not stand before the mystery of the manger with his heart broken open as wonder washed over him. At least one who was thinking only of how much work it was going to be to find all the sheep that had wandered off into the hills, spooked by the angels. Or one who was not an especially sentimental man, who thought, “You’ve seen one baby, you’ve seen them all.” Or the village rationalist, maybe, who thought, “I don’t feel what I think I’m supposed to feel. I don’t feel what everyone else feels.” Who worried: “Is what I feel… enough?” For that one who didn’t feel God in the air, but only the chill – still it’s true: Christmas happened for him. Christ happened for him. The quiet hum of holiness within everything and within everyone was – as it still is – so constant and so gentle that he heard it without hearing it and felt it without feeling it. And even when it strained against the ordinary reality of his life and erupted, even when he experienced the surprise that God is and the surprise that grace is, which, by all accounts, should have left him changed, so that nothing – not work, not love, not worry, not sorrow – so that nothing for him would ever be merely ordinary again, even then he didn’t know the extent of what he knew. But so what?

Isn’t this how Christmas always happens? Isn’t this how Christ always happens? We never actually see it coming. We never know the full measure of the grace we are being given. At best, maybe, while we are caught up in other things, and rarely in response to anything religious – there are moments when we feel more than we knew we could feel. When we feel ourselves drawn to Something huge and good and generous. When we sense that, somehow, we are a part of it, and that it is a part of us. And there is nothing to say and nothing to know and nothing to do but kneel. But kneel before it. The carol we sing as “O Holy Night” originated as a French aria entitled “Midnight, Christians.” The French lyrics, translated into English more literally, call worshipers to “jump for joy” and “stand to sing.” Which, of course, is all wrong. The only thing to do is “fall on your knees.” This line is sung as a command. As a command which addresses itself to us without threat or argument or explanation, but with a majesty that compels surrender and compels obedience – though it doesn’t feel quite like obedience, because it is from deep in our own hearts, from beneath any understanding or not understanding, that the urge and the longing to kneel arises. “Fall on your knees.” Not stoop down, gently, carefully lowering yourself. Fall. Feel the release of being moved by the gravitational pull that is God into a posture of reverent abandon and humility. If only on this one night, on this holy night, fall on your knees. Before the mystery of mysteries. Before the One whose grace, poured out in our world and in our lives, works as triumphantly as an angel choir and as quietly as a silent night.

The apostles ask Jesus for more faith. The faith they have doesn’t feel like it’s all the faith they need. And I wonder why. Why do they feel this way? Why doesn’t their faith feel like it’s enough faith? Maybe they don’t believe something that they’ve gotten it into their heads they are “supposed” to believe. There are all kinds of things that people – that some people – don’t believe: say, in the virgin birth or in miracles, in original sin, or in the rapture, that the bible is the Word of God, that Jesus was the Son of God, that he was anything more than a good teacher, that his death on a cross saves us in some way – like, how? how does it save us, exactly? Some people don’t believe that he rose from the dead. Some people don’t believe in hell or in heaven, in any afterlife at all. Some people don’t even believe in God. Is it something like this that they don’t believe in but think they should believe in? Is it something like this that they feel they need more faith to be able to believe in? Maybe. Although, Jesus didn’t go around telling people to believe this or to believe that – or else. He didn’t try to pressure people into believing things they found impossible to believe. He didn’t police people’s beliefs. He went around telling stories. He went around asking questions. He went around, often enough, answering people’s questions with questions. I don’t know how someone could read the gospels and come away thinking that Jesus would care much whether you can recite the creeds of the church with your hand over your heart or only with your fingers crossed behind your back. It seems to me that Jesus cared less about what people believed than how they lived. So maybe that’s it? Maybe the apostles worry that they can’t live the lives Jesus called them to live. Maybe they don’t know whether or know how they can go from being who they are to being who Jesus wants them to be, and who they, they themselves, want to be. If they are going to be more empathetic, more humble, more helpful, more hopeful, more forgiving, more patient, more grateful, more content, more generous, more encouraging, more prayerful, more awake to the quiet wondrousness of the world, more attentive to the needs of the poor – if they are going to lead more faithful lives, they are going to need more faith, if not in God then at least in themselves. Maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s why they say to Jesus, “Lord, increase our faith.”

Whatever their reason, Jesus does not respond to them by saying, “Okay.” Jesus does not say, “When most people pray, they ask God for selfish things like more money, but you have asked for more faith. What a good and pious prayer! You got it!” Jesus does not answer their prayer. Jesus does not grant their request. Jesus does not give them more faith. Instead, he says, “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you can say to a mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea!’” Some people read Jesus’s words here as a kind of indictment: He’s faulting the apostles for having such little faith – for having less, less even than a mustard-seed-sized faith. For, if they had even a speck of faith, they could move mountains; they could work miracles. They can’t, and so, clearly, their pitiful, infinitesimal faith is indeed the problem. The apostles tell Jesus that they need more faith, and he replies by saying, in essence, “Yeah you do!” Some people read Jesus’s words here like this, in a way that leaves them feeling more despairing, more guilty, and more spiritual inadequate than they were beforehand. And I think those readings are wrong. Jesus isn’t trying to make the apostles feel hopeless and bad – which is certainly how I would feel were someone to tell me to do the very thing that I’ve just told them I want to do but can’t. “Have faith!” is about as unhelpful and pointless a thing to tell someone as “Cheer up!” Don’t you think they would if they could? You can’t believe what you can’t believe. No, when Jesus responds to those who ask him, “Lord, increase our faith,” by saying, “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed…” he is saying, I think – he is saying, in effect: “The faith you’ve got is just fine. You’re good. You don’t need more faith. You don’t need a lot of faith. A little faith goes a long way.” He is reassuring them: Sometimes, things happen the way they happen, and there truly, sadly, is nothing to be done. In so many tragedies, life-or-death struggles, losses, and heartbreaks, there’s just nothing that anyone can do. There is nothing you can do. There is nothing that anyone could have done. There is nothing you could have done. Praying harder or believing harder would not have prevented it or changed it. Some mulberry trees stay rooted and some mountains remain unmoved because they just do. And, even so, you will have the faith you need for what you need it for.

I heard an interview with Adam Gopnik from the New Yorker in which he spoke, about his experience, as a secular Jew and an atheist, of going to church on Christmas Eve: about the sort of deep human truths that we can only ever be in touch with in the hush and the dark of a church at midnight, as carols are sung by candlelight; he spoke about being drawn to that. He said something about the back pews being filled with nonbelievers just like him who open their hearts to the Mystery for that one night only; you know them, he said, by the tears in their eyes. That really got me, because, look, obviously you all who are here week in and week out are my favorites, but – I have a real soft spot for those once-a-year churchgoers who come and don’t entirely know why they’ve come. A lot of them apologize to me, sort of jokingly, for not being regular attenders, but I always want to thank them for reminding me how beautiful faith is when there is just a flicker of it, or when there are only embers of it. I’m not naïve: I know more often than not, people come to please mom or for the music or because it’s a tradition. But I can see the tears in their eyes, too. And it’s clear that they feel the same tug toward Something transcendent and unknown and good that I feel, even if they feel it more gently or feel it only every now and then or feel it and let it take them someplace else. In that same interview, Gopnik remarked that our ancestors practiced a faith that made room for doubts, but that, today, as modern people, most of us practice doubt and struggle to make room for faith. On any given Sunday, my guess is that half of us are here practicing faith and the other half of us are practicing doubt; some of us are probably practicing both at once. And I don’t think that Jesus or that God would have it any other way. I certainly wouldn’t. There is something that is almost unspeakably beautiful to me about the honesty of our worship: We come together with whatever faith we have – faith the size of the Himalayas, faith the size of a mustard seed, of a grain of sand, faith too small even to see under a microscope; we come with whatever faith we have, and more Sundays than not, the honest expression of that faith leaves me feeling like we’ve touched the Benevolence, touched the Kindness at the heart of all that is.

Often, when a person’s faith is praised, it is described as being strong. A strong faith is what we’re all supposed to be shooting for; that’s the ideal. But I don’t know why strength – or size – should be the only measure we use. Faith can be many things. Instead of a strong faith, how about a supple faith – a faith that is flexible and bows and bends with gracefulness when put under pressure? How about – in the spirit of this morning’s scripture reading – having a humble faith, a modest faith, a quiet faith, an unassuming faith, a faith that is treasured as a secret is treasured? Faith can be deep. Faith can also be broad. Faith can be brave. There is a place for brave faith, but isn’t there also a place for a meek faith, for a tentative faith, for a faith that is unsure in the way a scientist testing a hypothesis is unsure? Faith can be simple and faith can be complicated. Faith can be childlike and faith can be wise. Part of what I, as your pastor, want for you and pray for you is that you will come to understand and appreciate your faith for the faith it is – whatever the longing or curiosity or ache or intimation or need it is born from, whatever the quality of it or quantity of it. Of course, especially in church, we talk about growing in faith, but your faith can grow to be more truly what it is; it doesn’t need to grow to become something it isn’t, something different and supposedly better. However much faith you have, it’s enough. It’s enough to get you through whatever you will need it to get you through. Whatever all this is about for you, it’s okay for it to be that. God can work with that. God can do a lot with a little.

In the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells three stories, three parables about lost things that are found, and that, when they are found, are rejoiced over. In the first, a shepherd with one hundred sheep leaves ninety-nine of them behind to go out and find the one that wandered off, lost. In the second, a woman with ten silver coins loses one of them and looks high and low until she finds it. And in the third – and in an emotional and spiritual more so than a physical sense – a father loses his son; a father looks on in sad helplessness as his son leaves home and runs his life into the ground, as he himself loses everything: his inheritance, his innocence, his dignity, his good name, his sense of who he truly is. This father waits and hopes and prays (and waits and hopes and prays) for his prodigal son to find his way home, until, one day, seeing but the speck of him on the far horizon, he sets off racing, falling over himself racing, to embrace him. When the shepherd finds his sheep, the woman her coin, and the father his son, they celebrate. They give thanks, and they invite others to share with them in their gladness and in their relief and to give thanks, too.

These stories, which, Jesus says, are illustrations of the nature of God’s loving concern for us – they are moving, especially when read in sequence; they are a great, glowing triptych of grace. Even so, it’s hard to read them, and, especially, it’s hard for those of us who have made sound choices and worked dutifully and aspired to live decent, moral lives, as has the prodigal’s older brother – it’s hard to read them without having certain ungenerous questions pose themselves in our hearts. They are ungenerous questions, but they are also obvious and commonsensical questions, questions which, again, to those of us who have always played by the rules, it will feel, in fact, irresponsible not to ask. Like: Isn’t it unwise of the shepherd to leave ninety-nine of his sheep – and leave them not safely gathered into the sheepfold, but in the wilderness! – isn’t in unwise of the shepherd to leave ninety-nine of his sheep exposed and vulnerable in the wilderness to go deeper into the wilderness to find the one that has gone missing? He risks ninety-nine sheep for the sake of the one. Cut your losses, man! This is not only a bad but a potentially ruinous business decision! A pack of wolves could come along and if not eat all ninety-nine sheep, at least scatter them or send them stampeding off a cliff or into a river to drown. The shepherd’s devotion to the one lost sheep is foolish, no? As is the exuberance of his celebration – calling friends and neighbors together to rejoice because he has avoided a loss which, in our time, would be considered rather ordinary: something either to be insured against or written off.

The same goes for the woman with the lost coin. Unlike the men in the stories Jesus tells before and after, unlike the men who are men of means, one with a princely herd of one hundred sheep and the other with a landholding large enough to be reduced by half and still produce handsome yields, unlike these men of means, the woman is poor. She has only ten silver coins to her name, has only ten silver coin – each one, each drachma, worth a day’s wage. She lives, probably she lives, alone and, given she needs a lamp to see by, probably she lives in a small windowless hut made of mud. The friends and neighbors she calls together are, in the original Greek, they are identified as being all women; so we are probably not far off in imagining the woman with the lost coin to be widow, a poor widow, whose social world consists entirely of other poor widows. The loss of one tenth of her life savings is quite a loss indeed. So she searches desperately for the silver coin, only when she finds it, she celebrates by spending more than the coin is worth on wine and on providing hospitality to her guests! Is this not also foolish? Is this not wasteful? Rejoicing in this way is a luxury that a poor widow who so keenly feels the loss of a single silver coin simply cannot afford.

And when the father tells his slaves to welcome his prodigal son by bringing out a robe — and not just any robe, the best robe, the finest robe – and by putting a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet, when father tells them to butcher the fatted calf and call the village together for a homecoming feast, is this not yet more foolishness, more wasteful extravagance? (Like: When you hear “get the fatted calf,” don’t think of something on the order of running to Costco to get hamburger patties in bulk for a backyard barbecue. Think: Sparing no expense, spending a small fortune, a five-figure sum at least, paying for your son or daughter’s wedding.) Now, the younger son has already been given his half of the family property and has squandered it in what scripture describes as “dissolute living.” He has sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll-ed his way through what his father and his father’s father had spent their lives quietly, faithfully laying up. So when he returns home and is feted in almost royal style, his older brother is not wrong to be outraged – because this lavish celebration is paid for out of his half of the inheritance! He is not wrong to be resentful. He is not wrong to worry that this good-for-nothing black sheep of a brother has returned only to milk his poor, gullible father for the rest of what he’s worth. The father acts unwisely and unfairly. Beguiled by love for his son, his father makes himself a fool.

Jesus tells three stories, three parables about lost things that are found, and that, when they are found, are rejoiced over – rejoiced over with foolish abandon, rejoiced over with an uncalculating and wasteful, careless, reckless, joy. And these stories, Jesus says, are illustrations of the nature of God’s loving concern for us. God – Jesus’s God – God is evidently not Someone you would want to go into business with. God is not Someone you would want as a financial advisor. God is not Someone you would want to parent a child with. God is not Someone you would want serving as a judge or as a traffic cop or as umpire of a Little League game. Because God cannot be trusted to act prudently, to act rationally, to act objectively, to act cautiously and conservatively, to act justly. God will only ever act with love – with a foolish love that responds always and only to the absolute, inviolable, unconditional worthiness of love of every, and of even the most unworthy, human being. Foolish love: This is a quite good definition for mercy. And God, as scripture says, is rich in mercy – poor in common sense, perhaps, but rich in mercy. Speaking of scripture, here are some things scripture never says God is or names God as: God is not Rationality. God is not Justice. God is not Fairness. God is not Impartiality. God is none of these things in any ultimate, transcendent sense. God is love. Love is what God is. Love is who God is. God is love, and as we see not only in these three parables but over and over again in the gospels and across both testaments, God’s love has the quality of foolishness. God’s love is always heedless and unrestrained and baffling. God’s love is always excessive. God’s love is always undeserved. God’s love is always “wasted” on the unworthy. God’s love is always given “even though” and “in spite of” and “just because.”

If God is a fool, it should be said (and these are the words of the Apostle Paul in his first letter to the Christians in Corinth) that “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom.” We are human beings living among other human beings; human wisdom is what we have to build a world with. In our courts of law, human wisdom is what we have. In our government, human wisdom is what we have. In our workplaces, in our families, in our relationships, human wisdom in what we have. We have to strive to be rational and to be fair. Justice requires us to imprison violent and dangerous men. Prudence requires us to practice a measured, careful generosity. A need to balance budgets requires us to reevaluate costly social welfare programs. Realities such as addiction and abuse require us to hold boundaries, to draw red lines, to say no, to show tough love, and to end relationships. As human beings, I just don’t see how we can do any other than, at times, leave lost sheep unfound and tell prodigal sons (or prodigal daughters or prodigal fathers or prodigal husbands or wives) that they cannot come home. Our human love, guided by human wisdom, is all the love and the wisdom we have. But it is not all the wisdom – or all the love – that God has.

This side of Eternity, the best we may be able to do is love with as wise a love we can, taking thought of justice, of the rules, of what is safe, of what is responsible and what is rational and what is right. The best we may be able to do is think carefully when someone outside the train station asks us for money and we know very well what they’ll do with it, or when someone who has wounded us asks for forgiveness and we have every reason to believe that they will wound us again – think carefully and come to as discerning a judgement we can – but, but: also pray. Pray, and not, not necessarily, that we would break out of our small, wise, boundaried love, but that God would break in and break through; that, even if we cannot afford to be rich in mercy, that a greater mercy will still, somehow, mysteriously, make itself felt; that God’s Love will be the love our love cannot be; that this Love, God’s Love, a Love beyond any love we have ever known, a Love beyond what we could ever be capable of, a pure and crazy and holy Love will be at work in us and through us and in spite of us in ways that shock us and confound us and enrage us and free us for the foolishness and the wastefulness and the unfairness of the Lord’s mercy.

You know the story about the three blind men who come upon an elephant? The first blind man takes its trunk into his hands and says, “This is a snake!” The second blind man wraps his arms around one of the elephant’s legs and says, “No, it’s a tree!” The third blind man brushes up against its large, flat side and says, “You’re both wrong! It’s a wall!” Each of them is wrong. But, also, each of them is right. Each of them perceives something about the elephant that is right and real. Each of them sees without seeing, and what they see is, if not the whole elephant as it truly is, then at least a part of it. That’s how it is with God. God is pretty big. God is too big to stand back from and to take in all at once. Before God, we are all those blind men, seeing without seeing, holding our hand out to the mystery, holding our hand out to touch it. We are all those blind men, wrong about God, but also right. Mistaken, confused, in error, yes, but also sensing things, feeling things, that are right and real. Alone, we will never know God as God truly is; we will see (as scripture teaches) “only in part,” but if we talk to one another, if we let our hands find one another’s as we feel our way along, side by side, together, we can help each other come to a truer understanding of what this huge and holy Presence is, and what it wants from us, and what it wants for us.

In this morning’s scripture reading, we meet this big, big God. King Solomon has built a temple in which to worship God. And so great was this temple – so grand –that there wasn’t wood enough in Israel to build it; timber was imported from Lebanon; ancient cypress trees and cedars were felled and carted from the hills and floated down the Mediterranean shore and hauled through the plains and up the winding pathways into the gate of the holy city. There weren’t workers enough in Israel to build it, either. Foreigners came and labored alongside Israelites: seventy-thousand of them in Jerusalem and another eighty-thousand out in the quarries cutting stone. And this is the first glimpse we get of the hugeness that is God: God would not dwell in a house built by God’s people, by God’s chosen people alone. Such a house would be too small for our big, big God; for all people were God’s people. And so, God’s house was to be built by native-born Israelite craftsmen and by wood-workers and masons and artisans from faraway lands, by Jews and Gentiles, by faithful worshippers of God and foreign idolators – who would toil and sweat and bleed as brothers, who would tear down the old dividing walls as they built up the walls of God’s temple together. The offerings, the offerings which these foreign idolators made of themselves were pleasing to God. They gave themselves – as they were – to God’s work. They served God by building up God’s house by day, and then they returned to their tents and prayed to the gods of their ancestors by night. And God was honored even so. The Hebrew prophets spoke of the temple, and Jesus with them spoke of the temple, as a “house of prayer for all peoples.” And that is truly what it was, even when it was just a “hard-hat-only zone for all peoples.”

King Solomon has built a temple in which to worship God. And at the ribbon-cutting, as the enormous doors creak open, and the priests in their robes process in solemnly, and emissaries from all the nations of the earth bring tribute, and the people sing, and Solomon himself rises to speak – God appears. The God whom they all have gathered to worship appears, appears to be worshipped, but it’s as if, in appearing, what God has done is crash the party. God descends, comes to dwell, to be at home in God’s own house, but God is so…. big that God’s glory, just God’s glory, which is God’s aura, the energy of holiness that God gives off, that emanates outward from God, just God’s glory fills the whole of the temple to overflowing. The priests and the people run fleeing; they run from temple. The worship ceases. No prayers are spoken and no sacrifices are made. All anyone can do is stand at a distance and look on in amazement as the entirety of this enormous and magnificent edifice which ten thousand upon ten thousand have labored to erect, to look on as it is completely engulfed in God. Again, this is a big, big God. God is too big for even God’s own big, big house. God is too big to be worshipped in this house of worship. God is too big for any one people to worship in any one place. God is bigger than our ways of worshipping God. God is bigger than our rituals and traditions and rites. God is bigger than how we do things: opening hymn (preferably something reasonably familiar), the Lord’s prayer with “debts” and “debtors” and no mercy shown, no slowing down to allow those who didn’t know not to say “trespasses” time to catch up, fourteen-minute sermon, doxology with “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost” even though the minister continually lectures us about how God is both Father and Mother, and out on time, if not with a few minutes to spare.

There’s nothing wrong with how we do things here. But even with the things I think we don’t just do well here, but do right here, even with the things that I will never be convinced we aren’t right about and which I preach hard and will always preach hard, still, I don’t think that just because we’re right, other churches with other traditions are necessarily wrong. Like: When we celebrate communion, we welcome everyone to share with us. You don’t need to be a member of this church or of any church, you don’t need to be a Congregationalist, you don’t need to be a Protestant, you don’t need to be a Christian even to share with us in what we believe to be a feast of grace. If Jesus would break bread with Thomas, who would doubt him, Peter, who would deny him, Judas who would deliver him to his enemies, and nine other disciples, all of whom would desert him in his darkest hour – surely, we say, he would eat with us. All Christ’s table, we say, all you have to be is hungry. All are welcome. All are worthy. Now, I believe that we’re right about this. I know we’re right about this. I know it my bones. And yet… well, in Chile, in the 1970s and 80s, during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, when thousands of men, women, and children were being murdered, tortured, or simply disappeared – awoken in the middle of the night, marched onto helicopters, and thrown, very much alive, thrown screaming, into the waters of the Pacific far below: some Roman Catholic nuns, priests, and bishops, working with a very different theology of the sacrament, they agitated to bar the General and to bar all those serving in his junta, from receiving communion. An enormous amount of moral pressure was generated by Catholics on the ground, which paved the way for a meeting between Pope John Paul II and Pinochet, which in turn, paved the way for something approaching elections – and all because (what I think of as) a rigid and exclusivistic and restrictive understanding of the Lord’s Supper, according to which any person can be judged unworthy to commune and refused, because this was put in the service of the liberation of an oppressed people. And there is a rightness to that. There is. There is rightness and a real power in that belief they held and acted upon which we don’t hold or act upon and never will. They were holding their hands out to the mystery of God, and touching it, far, far from where we are touching it. But they, too, felt the pulse of something huge and something holy and something true.

King Solomon has built a temple in which to worship God. And God appears. And God is so much bigger than anyone ever thought of God as being. Solomon can but pray: “O God, you are big. You are too big to fit in this house of worship. You are too big to fit in this world. You are too big even to fit in heaven, in the highest, highest heaven.” The temple is again declared to be a sanctuary, a haven and a spiritual home, not only for the Israelites, but for every nation on earth, not only for God’s people, for God’s chosen people, but for all people, for faithful Jews and for foreigners and Gentile idolators alike. The doors of God’s house are opened to those who serve other gods. The doors of God’s house are opened as wide as God’s own arms. For the only true temple is a big, big tent. A big, big tent for our big, big God with his big, big heart. And that’s no less the case in our time than in King Solomon’s. A Christian church is not truly Christian unless it counts among its worshippers some who are not Christian. We can’t be the Congregationalist, Protestant, Christian “we” we are called to be without some number of agnostic, atheist, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or spiritual-but-not-religious friends, neighbors, and family sitting beside us in these pews, seeking God with us, sharing life with us, working for good with us, holding out their hands to the mystery with us, even if to some part of that holy hugeness, that huge holiness, which is beyond the grasp of our own small minds.