​And he began to teach them that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. And he said this plainly.

In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

As those who know how the story of the Gospel ends -- who know that the tomb is empty -- the season of Lent could seem unnecessary, perhaps even like a distraction from the grand finale. So, it’s worth asking why we have to rewind the tape and go through Lent every year?

For Christ also died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit….

In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

On this First Sunday of Lent, I want to do some teaching on the Sacrament of Reconciliation -- otherwise known as confession or penance. In my experience, confession is not something that tends to get a lot of attention among Episcopalians, even though it’s right there in the middle of our Prayer Book. And even when it does come up, it’s often explained by the well-known cliché that some of you perhaps have heard before: that confession is an “all may, some should, and none must” sort of affair. It’s catchy, for sure, and it’s true enough on its own. The point is that while confession is “available for all who desire it” [1], there are also probably some whose sins are of such a serious nature that making an explicit confession to a priest would at least be highly recommended. But in practice, I’ve found that it’s the “none must” part that actually determines our popular opinion on the matter, effectively crowding out the other two. As a result, the unspoken assumption is often that the most important thing to know about confession is that you don’t have to do it. So it’s hardly a surprise that the Sacrament of Reconciliation is often neglected by Episcopalians. Because things that are thought to be unnecessary are soon considered superfluous, and things that are superfluous are ultimately dispensable.

And Simon and those who were with him pursued him, and they found him and said to him, “Every one is searching for you.” And he said to them, “Let us go on to the next towns, that I may preach there also; for that is why I came out.”

In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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In our readings from the Gospel of Mark for both last week and this week, we have found Jesus performing two particular kinds of ministry, two different actions. Last Sunday, “he entered the synagogue and taught” and while he was at it, “there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit,” whom Jesus promptly healed by casting out the unclean spirit. Jesus both taught the people and cast out a demon: his two kinds of ministry can thus be categorized as preaching and healing. And, considered along with our Gospel reading today, these texts give us the opportunity to consider how these two acts of Christ’s ministry relate to each other. Are both preaching and healing of equal importance or is one of them a higher priority than the other? And once we answer that question, how should the answer affect our own understanding of the Christian life?

Almighty and everliving God, we humbly beseech thee that, as thy only-begotten Son was this day presented in the temple, so we may be presented unto thee with pure and clean hearts by the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord….

In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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The Feast of the Presentation is a major feast of our Lord which occurs forty days after Christmas, which is the number of days after his birth that he was taken to the Temple with his parents to be presented to God as their firstborn son. This was done “according to the law of Moses” that governed the lives of faithful Jews like Mary and Joseph throughout the Old Testament. And in this sense, there was little to nothing that was especially remarkable about this event in Christ’s life. It’s just what you did, and no doubt that there were probably lots of other babies being presented in the temple alongside Jesus. But this is just the kind of inconspicuous event that defined every other part of Christ’s life. And more importantly, no matter how ordinary his presentation was, it was “fitting” for him to be presented in order that Jesus would “fulfil all righteousness” (Matthew 3:15), as he said himself to John the Baptist at his baptism later on in his life. As our Epistle from the Letter to the Hebrews puts it, Christ “had to be made like his brethren in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God.” His presentation in the temple, which dedicated him to the service of God as a firstborn son, was just one such respect in which he joined his brethren and experienced the full measure of a human life.

And they were all amazed, so that they questioned among themselves, saying, “What is this? A new teaching! With authority he commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.”

In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Compared with the other seasons of the church year, the season of Epiphany is concerned particularly with what is new about the New Covenant. It’s a time for meditating not only upon the Christ that has been revealed to the world, but also upon the world that receives that revelation. In the Epiphany of our Lord, we are granted a vision of the glory of Christ -- the “Light to lighten the Gentiles” -- but the illumination of this vision reveals something to us in hindsight about our lives and our world that we did not know beforehand.