I’m very much a latecomer to this business of taking the things we used to do in church and trying to make them work somehow online, though I have been consuming these offerings for the past 11 months and so have done some thinking about it.

I’m one of those who actually finds it painful to sit through “Eucharist” on the screen, because to me it just isn’t that. I’ve learned that there are some folks who find it life-giving just to hear those words even if they can’t receive the Eucharist, and others for whom it just hurts too much, and I’m definitely in the second group.

And sure you can do “spiritual communion,” but I struggle with that, too. I trust that God is always coming to me, with or without that wafer, with or without some special prayer that only emphasizes the full experience I’m missing. All of that said, I’m glad to be leading online worship in a community where the decision has already been made to do Morning Prayer, not Eucharist, online.

Last night we did Ash Wednesday online only without ashes. I’ll say here that another thing that’s really been confirmed for me over this past year is that different individuals and different communities have different needs. Good on you if you and your people needed ashes and you made sure they got them, somehow or other. But from my perspective, all the convoluted ways of sending physical ashes out to be placed on the physical foreheads of people who are sitting in front of their computers at home amounted to a huge distraction.

I know we Anglicans put great emphasis on using physical things in ritual, but if in the end the “stuff” ends up distracting from the true meaning rather than bringing it alive, I think we’re going in the wrong direction.

I didn’t preach for our short Ash Wednesday service last night, but I did offer these comments before we began:

So today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. Our second Lent since the covid pandemic began.

We’ve had to let go of so many of the things we usually do in church over this past year, and coming to church on this day to have a cross marked on our foreheads in ashes is one more of those things. And I know you might be wondering: What’s the point of doing Ash Wednesday without ashes?

And I think that to answer that question, we have to first ask ourselves another question: What do those ashes actually mean?

They aren’t something that’s required, but they’re meant to remind us of our own mortality: “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

We’re fragile. Eventually our bodies will return to the earth. In other words, as much as we don’t usually like to think about it, eventually we all die. And in the meantime, we’re completely dependent on God. We’re not in control. We might like to think we are, but the truth is we are not in control – even of our own lives.

And this year, of all years, that’s something we don’t particularly need any reminders to be aware of, because if’s right there in front of us. We’ve lost more than 450,000 lives to covid so far, in the United States alone. I got word yesterday that a friend of mine had just died of covid, and he’s not the first friend I’ve lost. Maybe that’s true for you as well.

So perhaps this year, as we come to Ash Wednesday and we’re reminded once again that sooner or later we all die, we might want focus our reflections on another question, which is:

How do we want to live in the meantime?

What’s really important, and what is there in our lives that we want to do better in the time that we have?

The cross marked in ashes on our foreheads traces the cross that was made there in holy oil on the day we were baptized, when we were “marked as Christ’s own forever.” That cross is still there – it’s always there – invisible though it might be to others.

We know it’s there. We wear it to remind ourselves who we are, and what really matters in our lives. May this Lent be for us a rich time of reconnecting with those things that matter.

Photo from yesterday’s walk up Mechanic Street. I love the late afternoon sun on the old stonework, and the windows. So many opportunities to see out, but despite all the windows the opportunity to see in is quite limited. I haven’t decided if the way the trees obscure the building adds to the image or detracts. I think I like the idea of the trees, but I wish I could rearrange these particular trees.

When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” 
 ~ Luke 24:30-35 

And so today we come to the final chapter of Luke’s Gospel, where Jesus rises and his followers reclaim the joy of believing even as they struggle to understand. In reflecting on the previous 23 chapters I’ve tried to bring a fresh eye to the text. This has been an opportunity to ponder passages that aren’t usually read in church, or to dig deeper into the meaning of stories we churchgoers have heard preached again and again. Today I find my heart drawn as it always is to the story of the Walk to Emmaus, which is the centerpiece of this chapter. It’s one of my favorites, always has been, and there’s so much going on here that I don’t think we’ll ever get to the bottom of it no matter how hard we dig. As N.T. Wright, New Testament scholar and retired Anglican bishop of Durham, says, “If Luke is an artist, this is one of his most sublime paintings.”

The whole story runs from verse 13 through verse 32 so it’s relatively long, but I think it’s worth getting out your Bible and reading through it again a few times. Cleopas and his unnamed companion are on their way to a village outside of Jerusalem. They’re discouraged, weary and heartbroken. They had put so much faith in Jesus, and his death seems to have destroyed all their hopes. It’s late in the day on the first Easter, and they’ve heard that some in their group visited Jesus’ tomb that morning and came back with the news that he was alive, but most of them have dismissed this report as unbelievable. Jesus joins these two travelers on the road, but they aren’t able to recognize him. They confide their disappointment, and this stranger proceeds to interpret the scriptures that should make everything clear, but still they don’t get it.

As they led him away, they seized a man, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming from the country, and they laid the cross on him, and made him carry it behind Jesus.
 ~ Luke 23:26

I grew up thinking Simon of Cyrene was a white man. Why wouldn’t I, considering that it is only the very rare artistic representation of this scene that portrays him otherwise. And anyway, I thought Jesus was white, too. He’s got blue eyes and blond or light brown hair, right? At least that’s how he looked in the pictures they showed me. Now I know better. Jesus was a Middle Eastern Jew, and Simon came from a city in the North African country we now call Libya. Neither was a European white man. 

If you’re white, you might wonder why this matters. I would say that if in your mind’s eye you picture the Gospels populated by men who look like the figures in the religious art that’s most familiar to us, you might easily misunderstand. Christianity isn’t a white religion that generously invites others to come in and join us. We’re part of something much bigger than that. Esau McCaulley, author of a book titled Reading While Black, says the idea “that Christianity is fundamentally a white religion … is simply historically false. The center of early Christianity was in the Middle East and North Africa. But deeper than the historical question is the biblical one. Who owns the Christian story as it is recorded in the texts that make up the canon?”

Jesus took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” 
 ~ Luke 22:19

These past weeks have been filled with rich memories as images of my parents, my childhood, and the house where I grew up have been popping into my waking thoughts and filling my dreams. No doubt this flood of scenes from the past has been provoked to some extent by having our little granddaughters with us this month as we prepare for Christmas. Looming as it does as a reminder of my own mortality, Covid-19 has also surfaced thoughts of relatives now gone. So many of them lived through the flu pandemic of 1918, though they never spoke of it to me.

Our memories make us who we are, both in church and in the world. Memory forms our identify. Recalling the stories about where we came from provides a matrix for making sense of who we are now. These stories remind us that we’re connected to something greater than ourselves, that we’re part of a bigger story. There’s a difference between honoring past memories and living in the past, because our remembering brings the past alive in the present. My parents will be with me when I fill the stockings and place the presents under the tree on Christmas Eve. In my mind I’ll always hear Luke’s Nativity story in the voice (and New York accent) of my childhood pastor.

“Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day does not catch you unexpectedly, like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.” Every day he was teaching in the temple, and at night he would go out and spend the night on the Mount of Olives, as it was called. And all the people would get up early in the morning to listen to him in the temple.
 ~ Luke 21:34-38

I don’t spend a lot of time in dissipation and drunkenness, but across the centuries I know Jesus is still talking to me. Be on guard. Be alert at all times. What he’s saying here is to pay attention to the things that really matter in life. Don’t let yourself be distracted by unimportant things. For “dissipation and drunkenness” I could substitute my own list of distractions: email, social media, playing games on my phone. Your list will no doubt be different from mine.

Don’t let life pass you by while you’re not paying attention, or not paying attention to the things that count. These words take on particular meaning in this time of pandemic. Everything seems different now, and sometimes it’s easy to forget that life hasn’t come to a halt. Good things are still happening. People are still finding joy in ordinary pleasures. We’re still preparing to celebrate Christmas. It won’t be like last year, but we’ll manage.

The legal experts and chief priests were watching Jesus closely and sent spies who pretended to be sincere. They wanted to trap him in his words so they could hand him over to the jurisdiction and authority of the governor. They asked him, ‘Teacher, we know that you are correct in what you say and teach. You don’t show favoritism but teach God’s way as it really is. Does the Law allow people to pay taxes to Caesar or not?’ Since Jesus recognized their deception, he said to them, ‘Show me a coin. Whose image and inscription does it have on it?’ ‘Caesar’s’ they replied. He said to them, ‘Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.’ They couldn’t trap him in his words in front of the people. Astonished by his answer, they were speechless.
 ~ Luke 20:19-26

Jesus is days away from his death. The religious authorities have ramped up the plot against him. They’re desperately  looking for some way to trip him up in public so can arrest him without provoking an uprising among the crowds who follow him everywhere. They ask him this question about taxes, thinking he’ll be wrong no matter how he answers, but he comes back with a question of his own. Show me a coin, he says; whose image does it bear?

The coin he’s handed is believed to have looked much like the one in the picture, which shows the emperor Tiberius and bears the inscription “Caesar Augustus Tiberius, son of the Divine Augustus.” His challengers respond with the obvious answer – the emperor’s. Then give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, Jesus says. In other words, pay your taxes. Do what the civil government requires. 

As he came near and saw the city, Jesus wept over it, saying, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. Indeed, the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you, and hem you in on every side. They will crush you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave within you one stone upon another; because you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God.       
 ~ Luke 19:41-44

Way back in early spring, hunkered down in isolation and still hoping it might all end by Easter, we started looking for new places to go walking in our area and found this overlook. This view was both familiar and brand new; I’d never before seen my town from 400 feet up. We could see so much from up there, looking down on familiar landmarks laid out side by side for miles. But what we couldn’t see was the people. I couldn’t see if the virus had arrived among us yet. I couldn’t see the divisions that bring people to talk about each other so cruelly on the community Facebook pages, as if they were enemies at war rather than small-town neighbors. I couldn’t see the poverty that I know is there, too. All of this filled me with a kind of sadness. Life is so beautiful, and sometimes it’s so hard – and some of what hurts the most doesn’t have to be.

Jesus also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”
 ~ Luke 18:9-14

I think of grace and mercy as closely related in the life of the spirit. I’m writing now not as a practitioner of the formal discipline of theology, mind you, but simply as someone’s who’s trying to live that life. Grace to me is the lived experience of God’s love. It falls on me like the warmth of sunlight and gives me strength to go on when I think I can’t; it illuminates the path ahead when I’m having trouble finding my way. Mercy is the divine patience that keeps that love alive for me even when I forget to care about it. Touched by grace, eventually I’ll remember.

Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed;  nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.”
 ~ Luke 17:20-21

The challenge that launched this series of reflections was the suggestion to spend the run-up to Christmas reading Luke’s Gospel a chapter a day, starting on Dec. 1. Since there are 24 chapters in the book, that would bring you right to Christmas Eve. We’re just over halfway through now, and this passage seems a good place to stop and look back at the big picture in what we’ve read so far, which means today’s entry will be a little longer than usual.

So who is this Jesus you get to know in reading straight through the text? Born under unusual circumstances to a religious family, he takes his time emerging into the public eye. He’s baptized by John at the age of 30, gathers a small band of followers, and begins a career of itinerant teaching and healing. There’s a promise of reversal of social hierarchy that runs through his preaching, foreshadowed at the very beginning by his mother’s song of praise: 

    He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
        and lifted up the lowly;
    He has filled the hungry with good things,
        and sent the rich away empty. (1:52-53)