The disciples have a problem. These guys who have been following this other guy all around Israel and Judea, who have seen him heal and seen him be run out of villages on a rail, who have heard the Word of God coming from his lips and see him bid the lame to walk and the blind to see and all the wonders that came from traveling with the holy child of God are starting to be held in the light of all that they have left behind them in their pursuits of “normal lives.” And it would seem that the reality of everything that they have given up in following this Jesus guy has started to set in on them. Perhaps it was the long walks, going town to town not knowing where they would stay or what they would eat when they got there. For many of them it was leaving behind friends and family, maybe significant others and children, it was a a minimum leaving behind parents while “letting the dead bury the dead.”

I find mass shootings to be both exhausting and triggering. Triggering because of my own experience with them and being taken back to that place in my mind every time another one of them is big enough that it makes the evening news. But, more than that, exhausting. Exhausting that we cannot seem to figure out a way to make it so that folks can safely go bowling on a Wednesday night. Exhausting that we cannot seem to figure out a way to make it so that folks can enjoy a night out with friends. Exhausting that we cannot seem to figure out a way to make it do that folks can send their kids to school every day and not have that feeling in the backs of their minds that they need to make sure that the last thing their children here before walking into the building is, “I love you.” This is the world that we have created. You, me, us, every American. This is the world that we have made for our children. This is the world that we are slowly but surely bequeathing to our children.

For this is our true call, while we may wish that things are different in the current moment, our call is always to work for the next one. To embody and strive for peace in our own minds, our own souls, that we might encounter the world, exactly as it is, broken and beautiful, sinful and saved, reckless and redeemed, and return to no one evil for evil. That we might, in our own place and own time, create ripples of peace and love that will intersect with one another and make a web of care, concern, compassion that intercepts cycles of violence and strife and turns them back with interlocked circles of hope and light.

It was a formless void. Waters and wind and darkness covering everything. We are told that this was the condition when the spirit of God began to pass over creation. A formless void. And then God declared, “Light!” and there was light. And God saw the light was good. And soon the light was separated from darkness and the one was called day and the other night and that was the very first day of creation. Others would follow.

In every time and place, in response to this conundrum, a question that rests at the heart of all other questions, “How are we to live?” In our own tradition, we see this question arise time and time again though it takes on many different guises. There is the story of the rich, young, ruler who comes to Jesus decrying the fact that he has lived within the tenets of his religious community since birth and still finds his life incomplete. Jesus’s response? “Follow me.” We see the teacher, Nicodemus, come to Jesus in the dark of night, plagued in his heart by the questions of the universe, not understanding how things have come to be as they are and yet still desiring to find peace in the midst of all the brokenness. Jesus’s response? “Follow me.” We see the tax collector and Zaccheus, and Saul and Peter, each incredibly broken people, struggling in the depths of their souls with the question, “How are we to live?” Jesus’s response? “Follow me.”

Each time we gather at this table we are given the opportunity to both dwell with Christ in body and essence but also to dwell with Christ as the body of Christ united from all over the world. And as we all unify at this table, we are given the opportunity to find rest when we are weary, sustenance when we need to be fed, but more importantly, to find hearts on fire beating at the center of each of our souls. Hearts that reach beyond all the stuff we put in between one another. Hearts that overcome the brokenness of our lives and the world. Hearts that fill in the deathly dark hole that resides in our souls that nothing but the love of God can ever fully fill. Each time we gather at this table we are given a center, a balance, a mission, a love, to go out into the streets and bring in the lost and the lame, to bring in the blind and the hungry, to bring in those who seek to hear the still quiet voice of the one on whom all creation rests, to bring in that tired and the confused, the hurting and the crying, the one who thinks that nobody cares, and the one who looks nothing like you. Here at this table we are all brought together to be one people, one body, one creation, one image of God, replicated a billion times over in each person we meet. Each time we gather in at this table we find ourselves, we find Christ, and we find that they are one in the same.

In a moment in the story of humankind when the gathering threats can feel daunting and scary, my kids all are still driven beyond themselves and into what that famous theologian Tom Petty called the “Great Wide Open.” In a world, in a time, in a moment in our own history in which the threat of demise feels uncomfortably close, I am always reminded and amazed at the degree to which children, my children, your children, children are able to continue to set their course out into the wilderness of thought, of space, of exploration and go.

The reality is that in a state like Kentucky the vast majority of our elected leaders would claim to be followers of Jesus—the one who just a couple of months ago we with one voice declared to be the Prince of Peace. The problem is they just aren’t all that interested in the peaceful version of the faith. They want no part of the faith to which the earliest followers gave their lives rather than take up arms against another, nor the peaceful version of the faith wherein the savior warned his disciples that those who live by the sword will die by the sword as he chided his disciples that there would be “No more of this” when they wished to respond to Jesus’s arrest with violence.

Friends, siblings in Christ, this is the most important thing that you can take from today. The hope found in the next moment is not ever reliant on the success of this one. All we have in this life, in this existence, in this cosmos, is this moment with all the opportunity for newness and to cast aside the brokenness of the previous moment and start a new movement that will bring a whole new world, a whole new creation, a whole new thing, none of which can ever truly be contained just as what happened that moment in the tomb can never be wholly contained in that moment.

Friends, it is rare that the world in which we inhabit so perfectly coincides with the story of our faith and yet, as we begin this Holy Week together, it is not hard to imagine the difficulties that faced the savior, that faced all who followed him. It is not hard to feel as if all the powers and principalities of the world are set against the movement of the spirit. It is not hard to imagine of a people walking in darkness desperate to see a light. Nor, however, is it hard to imagine an empty tomb, the peace and light that seemingly permeates every space in creation at that moment, the love that seems to be flowing freely between creator and created. That’s where we know we are headed and its just a few more agonizing steps before we can celebrate it together in this space once again.

At my church, United Presbyterian, we are mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, siblings of school children and we are sick and tired of this being our normal existence. We take seriously our call to follow the Prince of Peace and to work to spread that peace wherever we go in the world.

This Sunday, this year is a real conundrum for me that I didn’t predict particularly well. We commenced our Lenten journey together we me telling you, promising you that we weren’t going to dwell in the darkness of the season, in demands that we give something up, in the call for us all to die to ourselves that we might live in Christ because it all felt like too much to ask of a time in our world when death, dying, lack, and darkness seemingly threatens to subsume everything. And yet, had I thought a bit more about it, I would have remembered that these two stories were sitting where they always were in the journey. Stories in which Ezekiel finds himself cast into a large boneyard with death and decaying all around him. Stories in which one of Jesus’s closest friends dies and Jesus is so swept up in the emotion of it all that he breaks down and weeps.

Can we even begin to imagine the experience of the man who since birth had been unable to see, calling out day after day for people to drop whatever pennies they had in his little wooden bowl, left in the care of his friends, because he couldn’t care for himself, unable to see his parent’s faces, unable to see the road before him or behind him, can you imagine the brilliance of opening his eyes for the first time. How beautiful must this dusty road in the Judaean countryside must have been. How beautiful the face of the one who had given him sight. How much he must have taken in every single moment because you have to imagine that he must have been clinging to this new reality like it was his salvation. Because it was.

This church stands and has stood as a beacon for all those who feel like the water is just a little too high, like the waves are about to crest over the bough, that the squalls are about to sweep them away and we have made ourselves a shelter from the storm. We have thrown our doors wide open and said all those who are weary and heavy laden come into our midst and find rest. Stay for a minute, an hour, a day, a lifetime and let us love you and let you love us in return. Let us walk with you and you walk with us in return. Let us give you a space to figure what, if anything, you actually believe and we will share our questions, our struggles, our journey with you.

During this Lenten season, I want to invite all of us to leave that sort of thinking behind—to relieve ourselves of any remnant of that kind of faith. To leave behind any notion of belief that conceives of a God whose love is only doled out in limited amounts to a small number of persons. Whose care and concern is relegated to just the folks who are in the club and everyone else can remain on the outside looking in. Because the minute, the second, the moment that you do that, the whole of the world begins to look infinitely brighter, blazingly bright, blisteringly bright. The whole of humanity begins to glow with the light of Christ which is in all of us. The whole of the cosmos is teeming with energy and spirit and love and goodness and peace and unity.

So, I’m not going to ask you to die to anything this year. I’m going to ask you to consider how you can best live a life of true abundance. And I’m not going to ask you to consider what needs to be left behind within our little church. I’m going to ask you to dream with me of what is possible. I’m not going to ask you to give anything up. I’m going to ask you to take time each day, just five minutes, to figure out someway, in prayer, in meditation, in reading, in being, to see the light that is all around you. And when we arrive together on Easter morning rather than coming in from the darkness into the light we can come together to celebrate the light that is always and forever all around us, borne witness to by an empty tomb, a risen savior, and a love that never, ever dies. And let that be our Lenten journey together.