Your King is with you. Not far above, but right beside you. Not condemning, but companioning. Not turning away, but turning toward you.

We just keep showing up together in the present with the lives we actually have. And maybe find that the risen Christ does keep showing up among us, not in the ways we planned for. But with a new word, a new wisdom for a new day that we were never meant to anticipate.

Because this life is where we are now, and wouldn’t it be extraordinary if we could flip the script around, so that instead of projecting qualities of this broken world onto the next, we could instead take the hints we get about the wholeness that awaits us and get about the business of living that way now and here?

Maybe All Saints’ Day is the day we’re reminded that the Church isn’t the place where we get free of enemies Jesus asks us to love. It’s where he traps us with some of the most obnoxious ones and says, “Here we are, folks. Shall we get on with it?”

If you’ve been told you’re too much or not enough, if you’ve been carrying fear, shame, exhaustion, or rage, hear this good news. The Lord stands beside you.

And yet a door to another world still stands open to every moment. A door to a better way. Which is to see your life, not as an achievement of your savvy and your will, but as a gift. A gift from a loving God who doesn’t trick us into faithfulness or force us into submission, because that’s not love. A gift from the God who woos us with blessings that are given in spite of our selfish shrewdness, not as rewards. Blessings given simply because it is the nature of love to bless. A door stands open. But you won’t be tricked or shoved through it. Because it’s open to life in the realm of gift and love. It will still cost you everything you’ve tricked this world out of thus far. But could you send all of that to the far side of the river, and limp through the door into another way of being alive?

And so this little moment of counsel from twenty-five-some-odd centuries ago helps me learn how to do that. What to do when I find myself waking up in a strange place that I don’t recognize and can only mutter: I don’t understand this world, I don’t want this, I don’t know what to do with all this. “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce… Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”

"What would it take for you to give up, at least a little, the credit-taking game and step a little more fully into a deeper faith in your belovedness by God?"

"What is real life? It’s not one thing. It’s not just suffering. It’s not just joy. It’s not just fulfillment. It’s all of it, held together by love."

Especially when we can’t find it, when we insist that it is still true, that there is a balm in Gilead, we are making a bold and audacious proclamation: Proclaiming that all the while there is still beauty and kindness, that repair is just as real as destruction.

Imagine her thankfulness when she sees that there’s someone who loves her enough to sacrifice everything to go find her and bring her home.

One thing a little time away has made clear to this sinner is that I need you if the old patterns are to be broken in me. I need a community of people trying to listen to Jesus and to live by the light of his love.

What if we admitted we're all afraid? It takes real courage to do this. It's a radical move, which is why fear and not hate is the opposite of love.

“Get it straight, before the voice comes to your house and says, ‘you fool, tonight.’”

We pray in order to be, to be in the presence of God, being transformed into the likeness of Christ, and that the miracle we get from prayer is God’s presence and God’s hearing us, not a particular outcome. And though that understanding lives somewhere in my heart and in my soul and a big place in my mind, the truth is that prayer remains a mystery for me.

The kingdom of God is real. What if we choose this story? What if we tell this story to ourselves and to everyone we meet on the way, and to every house we enter, and at every meal we eat? What could it look like to live inside that story, to imagine a world where the harvest is plentiful, where we all get to be there, where the wolves and the lambs lie down together?

Real freedom will cost you your illusions. But it will give you your name, your story, your voice, your joy. Your freedom. And it will be loud, and bright, and contagious.

My prayer for us and for the church is that we will fight with all our might and with as little fear as possible any effort, message, or policy that attempts to restrict or confine the love of God. The hope of the world may depend upon it.

The challenge of believing in the Trinity is not figuring out the formula; the challenge of believing in the Trinity is living a life that reflects our beautiful understanding of God as more than we can grasp or imagine.

Pentecost doesn’t reverse the effects of Babel so much as it breaks open our imagination. Opens us to the possibility of connection and reconciliation even in a world of difference and diversity.