The words of judgement in Matthew are quite striking. I can see it so clearly, the feet of the judge firmly planted on the ground, the axe in their hand sharp and glinting in the sun, ready to swing the moment they notice the lack of good fruit. And when I hear of the fire I think of the Epiphany bonfires my grad school would throw, where people would bring their Christmas trees to Golden Gardens and burn them in the fire rings. Those trees would burn, the flames reaching fifteen feet high. It was a fearsome thing, Lord knows I wasn’t going to be the one to start those fires. And to imagine a fire like that but unquenchable? I couldn’t tell you if I start sweating from the anxiety or the imagined heat.

“Repent,” John the Baptist cries, “for the Kingdom of heaven has come near.” Repent, turn around, change your life, turn your back on what you were once doing and start on a new path. That is hard work. C.S. Lewis has this bit in The Great Divorce where he writes, “A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on.” Using the metaphor again, but in Mere Christianity, he states, “When I have started a sum the wrong way, the sooner I admit this and go back and start over again, the faster I shall get on.”

As a person who is terrible at math, I can tell you with a great deal of experience that it does not feel good to find the mistake and begin again. It’s frustrating and embarrassing and often fills me with despair. Sometimes there’s part of me who wants to carry on, knowing that there has been a mistake, because it costs too much to admit it. Perhaps if I carry on and act like everything is fine, people won’t notice my mistake. Maybe I can find a way to argue that my wrong answer is actually the right answer.

Today, we enter the holy season of Advent. For many of us, this season is a time to hear once again the stories of our faith that announce the promise of God’s salvation and anticipate the fulfillment of that promise in the birth of Jesus. Culturally, Advent is the long season that leads finally to Christmas day. But this season is not just about looking back. This season also bids us to look forward, to a final day of judgment, to the culmination of God’s day of salvation when the fullness of God’s reign will be established.

We’ve made it! It’s the last Sunday of ordinary time! The interminable green season has found its terminus. The liturgical new year, Advent 1, happens just next week! All of which means, in some corners of the Church, that today is the feast of Christ the King.

Karl Barth, a prominent 20th-century theologian who wrote at the height of Nazi nationalism and counted himself part of the “confessing church” alongside others like Deitrich Boenhoffer, is often credited with saying that the people of God ought not consider themselves a religious society concerned only with certain themes, but should remember that they are in the world and therefore need both the Bible and the Newspaper.

Christians have always been story tellers. Of course we have, we have an incredible story to tell! God became human. What a premise. And this God lived a fully human life, bringing God-sanctioned dignity to all that we experience. Then this God died. What grief and sorrow. What despair. But then! In the denouement to end them all, through dying this God has defeated death and been resurrected, opening the door to new life and the fullness of love and justice and liberation.

The days are surely coming, says the Lord.

We hear these words repeated throughout our reading from Jeremiah, this morning. For many of us, I suspect that the promised coming days and new covenant bring to mind a particularly Christian reading of this passage. We think about Jesus, about the Christian scriptures, about the Church. In doing so, we tend to lose the connection between the promises proclaimed in this passage and the experience of those to whom these promises were first uttered. In order to understand the “days that are coming,” we need to first understand the days in which these promises were made.

The days are surely coming, says the Lord.

We hear these words repeated throughout our reading from Jeremiah, this morning. For many of us, I suspect that the promised coming days and new covenant bring to mind a particularly Christian reading of this passage. We think about Jesus, about the Christian scriptures, about the Church. In doing so, we tend to lose the connection between the promises proclaimed in this passage and the experience of those to whom these promises were first uttered. In order to understand the “days that are coming,” we need to first understand the days in which these promises were made.

The days are surely coming, says the Lord.

We hear these words repeated throughout our reading from Jeremiah, this morning. For many of us, I suspect that the promised coming days and new covenant bring to mind a particularly Christian reading of this passage. We think about Jesus, about the Christian scriptures, about the Church. In doing so, we tend to lose the connection between the promises proclaimed in this passage and the experience of those to whom these promises were first uttered. In order to understand the “days that are coming,” we need to first understand the days in which these promises were made.

I regularly wish I could have a conversation with the framers of the revised common lectionary. I am so curious why they made the choices they did about what texts we read any given Sunday morning. Sometimes I want to know why they skipped certain passages, sometimes I begrudgingly acknowledge their wisdom in avoiding challenging texts that need far more than ten to twelve minutes to unpack, sometimes I lament that preachers have to talk about bread for seven weeks in a row.

In the way our lectionary is presented to us, the Gospel reading seems a bit strange. It begins with the disciples’ request to increase their faith, which leads to a bizarre response from Jesus about a mulberry bush, and then ends with an analogy of obedience. To keep these verses in isolation, without reference to the larger narrative, we risk a great deal of misunderstanding – with regard to both the disciples’ request and to Jesus’ response.

Luke speaks a great deal about wealth and possessions in his account of the Gospel. The categories of rich and poor are employed regularly in Luke’s vision of the Great Reversal inaugurated by the coming of God’s reign. Mary’s Song sings of God filling the hungry with good things while sending the rich away empty.

God weeps. Statements like this make many bible scholars and theologians very uncomfortable. It’s almost funny how much ink scholars have spent attempting to convince each other that clearly this is Jeremiah speaking and not God. But at the end of the day, the text is ambiguous. It could be Jeremiah’s voice we hear, but it could just as easily be God continuing to speak from earlier, or it could be a mingling of the voices of both Jeremiah and God, distraught over the path their people are taking.

This last week, I was in Portland with students and faculty from Church Divinity School of the Pacific. We were there for an intensive gathered session with three and a half hours of class time in the morning, two and half hours of class time in the afternoon, interspersed with prayer and worship and meals. On Wednesday, as we left our morning classes, many of us opened our phones to the news that had begun to spread of another high school shooting and of the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Today marks our first Sunday observing the session of creation. This is a short liturgical season meant to draw us into reflecting on God's relationship with creation as well as our own relationship with the more than human world.

But before we begin to explore those themes, we need to take a minute to unpack this gospel reading. This is no tender image of Jesus, no “let the little children come to me” moment. Jesus sounds downright harsh.

“Be appalled, O heavens, at this, be shocked, be utterly desolate, says the Lord, for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water.”

The prophet Jeremiah has not been given a gentle word to prophesy.

We don’t really know much about the woman in our Gospel reading today. We don’t know her name, or where she comes from. We don’t even know why she appeared, “just then,” in the synagogue on the Sabbath day that Jesus was there teaching. All we know is that for 18 years, she had been crippled by a spirit, “bent over and quite unable to stand up.” I wonder if you can imagine the scene …