Several hundred, some may say several thousand, years worth of anticipation hung in the air. Like summer humidity that sticks to your shirt the second you step outside, you couldn’t avoid it. Not today. Not on Passover week.

A guy claiming to be the Messiah or at least someone who people said was the Messiah was nothing new. There had been tons of guys going around saying that they were the One; saying that they were going to show Rome what’s what. So a messiah making his way to Jerusalem was about as common as a singer-songwriter making their way to Nashville.

But this guy was different. There was a good deal of discussion over whether he was the right kind of different. It wasn’t so much that he talked like he was the Messiah. Word had it that he had tried to keep a lot of that talk and even tales of his miracles under wraps. But the stories still got out: dead men walking, the blind seeing, demon-possessed pigs plunging over a cliff, and thousands fed with a lunch meant for a kid. It is hard to keep those type of things hush-hush.

His name certainly carried great weight. Yeshua, which translates to Joshua or—as the Greeks put it—Jesus. It means “the Lord saves.” It’s true that tons of people gave their boys this name. What parent doesn’t want their child to be the redemption of his people? You have to name the kid to fit the bill. Poindexter isn’t going to quarterback the state championship team and Biff isn’t going to find the cure for cancer. Joshua, like Messiah talk, was nothing special. But it seemed special. At least with him.

All of this—the miracles, the name, the hope that he was the Messiah—mixed with Passover week like a molotov cocktail. Jerusalem seemed like it could explode at any moment. Roman officials were squeamish enough with all of these people that they had underfoot flooding into the city. The last thing they wanted was for another revolution-driven Messiah to take the religious devotion of the masses and turn it into a riot.

“Death itself would start working backwards.”

From the moment when I read that line in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, it has taken root in my imagination. There comes this point when you realize that a great deal of this world is in the throes of entropy. Everything that lives on this planet dies. Relationships drift and then fall apart. As a sensitive child, all fo this decay frightened me. I wanted something to help us escape all this gravity. And so C.S. Lewis’ regal God-lion reminded me of a concept that is essential to all of scripture: resurrection.

What fascinates me is not so much the idea of the resurrection of the dead. I believe that is part of this grand narrative; at least I do on most days. That is the concept to which a lot of the Christian faith pays attention. Rather it is the idea that God is in the art of taking the things that are falling apart, broken, dying, and decaying and throwing it into reverse. Death does not have the final word. There is always the chance for life.

That is the image that we see in Ezekiel. It starts with a valley full of bones and God asks the prophets whether they live can live again. Ezekiel wisely answers that only God knows whether resurrection is possible. Thus God orders Ezekiel to prophesy over the bones. To go out where there is seeming hopelessness and dead ends and to preach the word of the Lord. And what is that word?

When your job revolves around questions of God, faith, and the mysteries of the universe, you need to become comfortable with an important three word phrase: I don’t know. That is not to say that there are some things that you do not know or at least about which you have an informed, educated opinion. Every person of faith should spend their lifetimes learning and seeking to know all they can about God.

There are simply times that our finitude crashes into the infinity and you realize that you don’t know that much. Like I do not know why God allows bad things to happen. I don’t believe God causes things like the Covid-19 virus or tornadoes or starving children. But I don’t know why God allows it. I hope that there is a good reason behind it. But I don’t know. When you get right down to it, there is much both good and bad about which we just don’t know.

All of which sets up what I love about this passage in John. Jesus heals a man born blind and the story veers into an episode of Law & Order: Strict Pharisee Unit. The healed man and his parents are interrogated about what happened. The second time this particular group of Pharisees are talking to the formerly blind man—who has to be confused as to why people are so upset that he has been miraculously healed—they demand that he give glory to God because Jesus has to be a sinner. You can almost hear the one playing bad cop slamming on the interrogation room table as he yells it.

What if we named places the same way that they did during biblical times? Moses named a location in this week’s passage Massah and Meribah—which respectively mean “test” and “quarrel”—because that is exactly what his people were doing in that place. They threw verbal hands and they tested God.

So what if we did that? Like if Moses ventured out to Chicago’s Navy Pier with our family this morning and saw St. Patrick’s Day revelers stumbling out to various booze cruises, might he have dubbed that place Poor Drunken Decisions? Granted, he might have looked at our family exploring pandemic-era Windy City and dubbed wherever we went Poor Sober Decisions by our actions (we changed flights last night to head home tomorrow rather than several days later as originally planned).

But it seems incredibly harsh to name a place by the terrible thing that happened there. It is true that sometimes the place was named for something wonderful that happened. Jacob gave the name Bethel or “House of God” to a place in which he had an incredible encounter with the Divine. Yet I am stuck thinking about Moses making some future Geography Bee contestant answer “Test and Quarrel.” It forces me to ponder on the places in my life that might have been dubbed Apathy or Cowardice. I don’t like to dwell in those cities, but I do need to remember that they could exist. Moses heavy-handed naming was meant to be a reminder. We need to remember that we’re fallible.

It’s a bit of insufferable cliche, but the most diehard fans of a musical act will cite the most obscure songs as their favorites. Sure, they like the hits, but they prefer Track 9 from their underrated sophomore album or the unreleased track that the band only plays during sound checks. Anyone can know an artist by the hits, but you really don’t know them until you love the deep cuts (Sometimes this is true. Have you heard U2’s “Acrobat”? It’s an unbelievable song. My absolute favorite Coldplay song is “Till Kingdom Come,” which is a hidden track on X&Y. Okay, I’m going to stop).

The Bible is a bit of a different beast than an artist’s discography. It’s the work of many different artists over thousands of years so it is not a one to one comparison. Yet it’s true that too many people know the hits, but not the deep cuts. And the Apocrypha is deeper than the deep cuts. It’s not in the Protestant biblical canon. Still it is someone’s response to an encounter with God. It’s connected, but Protestant churches don’t hold it at the same level. It’s like when Bono and The Edge composed that Broadway Spider-Man musical. That may not be a fair comparison, because Turn off the Dark was apparently crazy (but I guess you could say the same about Bel and the Dragon).

Yet you should still pay attention to the Apocrypha, because like with an artist’s b-sides, outtakes, or side projects, you might find a gem. Each week the Revised Common Lectionary often includes a reading from the Apocrypha as an alternative reading. I don’t normally pay attention to those apocryphal readings and have never considered one for Weekly Lectionary.

The lamp in my childhood bedroom looked like balloons. I cannot remember if someone was holding the balloons; whether it was a clown or a child or if the balloons were hanging by themselves. My memory of what the lamp looked like is fading. But I can close my eyes and see the light that it gave off. A warm reddish-orange glow.

When one is a small child, those bedside lamps are like a security blanket. It pushes away the mysterious and foreboding darkness. The light chases monsters. It is a reminder that your room is still your room no matter how many shadows make it look otherwise. And in a way, the light can be a beacon left there by the grownups in your life. Mom and Dad turned the lamp on and the light was like their lingering presence through the night.

As I got older, I didn’t need the lamp as much. It eventually became a light by which to read books before I went to bed. Eventually the dark did not scare me that much anymore and I would turn off the light to sleep. The lamp had done what it needed to do. It had shown me that the world was not as scary as I had thought and in a way that light had turned from something in a balloon lamp by my bed to something inside of me.

Psalm 40 is a passage of the Bible that I and many others cannot read without hearing Bono singing in our head. In a way, we probably should hear more psalms in our head like that. Not necessarily with U2’s frontman belting it out, but with music that amplifies the anguish and joy that make up this brutally honest book of common prayers. Yet—because of U2—the words that I most commonly associate with the 40th Psalm do not appear in the passage at all:

How long to sing this song?

And it creates a tension within the psalm itself. “I waited patiently for the Lord” and yet how long to sing that song. Patience is not wearing thin, but it feels like there are centuries, even millennia worth of waiting building up behind it. God pulls us out of the pit, yet “How long?” has this element of wondering how many times we are going to fall down into that pit. A new song will be sung, but how long will we sing it?

I don’t remember this happening. But I hear the story every time our family is at the beach, so I can almost see it in my head. When I was not much older than a baby, Dad was playing with me out in the ocean. An enormous wave swelled out of the water. My dad saw it and braced for it; holding me as tightly as he could. It wasn’t enough. The wave wrenched me from my father’s arms. Acting quickly, Dad dove forward in hopes of finding me somewhere. And he found me; very likely saving my life.

There was this time that both sides of my family were over at my grandparents’ house for a party. I could not have been more than five or six years old. Everyone was playing in the pool. Somehow, I got into my little mind that I was going to push Pop, my dad’s uncle, into the water. It took all the strength I had in my tiny body, but I got my great uncle over the edge. And I went with him. I don’t know if I couldn’t swim at that point or if I was just as surprised as Pop was. All I remember is the blue. Everywhere. And a pair of arms reaching down and pulling me out.

I remember that my socks were completely wet. And that felt really weird. I remember seeing my mom out in the sanctuary. I remember my dad talking about the commitment I had made. There was lots of white; white robes on me and Dad, white baptismal, white washcloth that went over my nose and mouth when I went under water, and those wet, white socks. I was around seven and I had a seven year old’s understanding of what was going on, which is perfectly fine. I think God honors that; probably prefers it sometimes to the way we muck up our relationship with Him. I remember the red carpet of the sanctuary and people saying they were proud of me afterwards. I think that struck me as kind of funny since it was what God wanted me to do anyway. I think I was a practical seven year old.

He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. - John 1:10-11

I know that the gospel writer is talking about a time and a place. And as beautifully written as the Prologue is, there is a bit of unnecessary shade-throwing to that statement: the world did not know, his own people did not accept him. There seems to be this suggestion that, reader, you and I would have known better.

I don’t know if we would. I am actually fairly sure that we would not have known him either.

It’s one of those essential questions of pop theology: What if Jesus came back today? What would he look like? What would he do? Would Christians follow him or revile him? Granted, when you are talking about “Christians” you are talking about a wide swath of individuals who hold vastly different beliefs. So it is hard to say what his theoretical followers would do if Immanuel showed up in 2020. Those of us in the United States probably wouldn’t notice for awhile because I get the sense that he wouldn’t show up here.

I’m presently working on a sermon for tomorrow (using a non-Lectionary text), but I wanted to do something to remember this week’s gospel passage about Mary, Joseph, and Jesus escaping to Egypt as refugees. I am not a good artist by any stretch of the imagination, but I was inspired to sketch the drawing above from a photograph that I saw of Central American refugees. We shouldn’t ever forget that Christ too was a refugee and whatever we do to those who are seeking shelter, it is as if we were doing it to him.