Sisters and brothers, grace to you and peace from God our source, Christ our salvation, and the Spirit our sustainer. Amen.

I know I’ve told you this before, but every once in a while, I am tickled by one particular street sign which punctuates our boulevards and avenues in this community. Here and there, every so-many blocks, you will come across it somewhere between a restricted parking and a speed limit sign, and unexpectedly and mysteriously out of the blue there will come the message which simply reads, “SHARE THE ROAD.”

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Let us pray.

At your birth, Lord Jesus, bless us as we come to Bethlehem,
where animals and angels, shepherds and seekers,
together behold your face.
Here snow becomes straw and frost becomes flowers,
as winter melts into everlasting spring.
In our holy Christmas, in this festival of Christ,
give us the riches of your poverty.
Show us the power of your weakness,
as we join with the angels in proclaiming your praise:
Glory in heaven and peace on earth, now and forever.  Amen.

Sisters and brothers, grace to you and peace from God the Word, from Jesus Christ the Word made flesh, and from the holy & life-giving Spirit who sets the Word to music in us.  Amen.

An admission on this holy night: I’ve become quite fascinated by the internet phenomenon known as Facebook this year. (& my husband Christopher would say that’s just a bit of an understatement.) Go figure: that this grown-up kid who, in elementary school in the late 1960s and 70s would consistently get checks on his report card for being unable to avoid unnecessary talking in the classroom, would now — 40 years later — be so thoroughly mesmerized, completely intrigued, and totally distracted, by this self-described “social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study, and live around them.”

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Mark 1: 14-20

Sisters & brothers, grace to you & peace from the God of hope, the Christ who calls, and the holy, life-giving & life-disrupting Spirit. Amen.

My grandfather occasionally enjoyed fishing and every now-and-then would take me down to the Vermillion River with his old bamboo fishing pole on hot and humid mid-summer South Dakota afternoons.  Once we got down to the river, he would find us a nice cool place under a shade tree, unfold the tattered lawn chair he always used, turn a bucket upside down for his footstool, pull his floppy straw hat down over his eyes and say, “I sure hope they don’t bite.”

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John 1:1-14

Sisters & brothers, grace to you and peace from God the Word, from Christ the Word Made Flesh, and from the Spirit, whose sets the Word to music.  Amen.

“Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. When you read you begin with A-B-C. When you sing you begin with Do-Re-Mi.”

We start at the very beginning this morning.

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Mark 1: 21-28

Sisters and brothers, grace, light, & peace be yours from God our creator, Christ our redeemer, and the Spirit our sustainer. Amen.

It was a moment of demonic epiphany.

And the Gospel of Mark wastes no time getting there. It’s the prime characteristic of St. Mark’s entire gospel narrative, after all. Mark, you see, is all about epiphanies: about Jesus’ being revealed/manifest to his world. Mark’s is almost a breathless account of the life of our Lord. With no story of the birth in the opening verses of the Gospel, Mark starts instead with Jesus’ baptism, and then immediately into his temptation, and then after that the calling of Simon, Andrew, James & John to drop everything and becomes fishers of people, and then: just half-way into the first chapter: this.

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Mark 1: 29-39

Sisters & brothers, grace to you and peace from God our Creator, Christ our Redeemer, and the Spirit our Comforter.  Amen.

We don’t even know her name.

St. Mark only refers to her as “Simon’s mother-in-law.”

Because, like everything else in his gospel narrative, Mark hurries through the details to get to the main point.  The first words of this morning’s Gospel are toned down a little in the translation.  “As soon as” maybe sounds less frenetic than “immediately” but “immediately” is what Mark means to say.  And remember: we’re still only in chapter 1 of Mark’s Gospel which skips Jesus’ birth altogether and goes “immediately” to his baptism, and then “immediately” to his temptation in the wilderness, and then “immediately” to the calling of the same 4 gentlemen who are named in today’s gospel, fishermen called to follow Jesus, and then “immediately” from their boatworks and their networks they go with Jesus to Capernaum where in the synagogue he teaches as one with authority, rebuking and finally exorcising a demon.

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Mark 9: 2-9

Sisters & brothers, grace to you & peace from the God of pulsing radiance, from Christ the blazing light, and from the Spirit of transcendence and imminence.  Amen.

Think of how many times you have prayed the Lord’s Prayer over the years, and how many times the words “thy kingdom come” have rolled off your tongue, over your lips, and out into your close, personal airspace.

If you’re like me, you might have occasionally imagined what that kingdom might look like:  “peace on earth and mercy mild, God and sinners reconciled,” a lion laying down with the lamb, somewhere over the rainbow, a glorious and everlasting kingdom in the clouds awaiting us.  But truth be told, too often we find it hard to imagine a new world coming to transform our ordinary, mostly mundane existence.

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Mark 1: 40-45

Sisters & brothers, grace to you and peace from the God of all, from the Christ of compassion, and from the Spirit of comfort. Amen.

One of the singularly-most-popular words these days in the vocabulary of modern psychology is the word “boundaries.”

Everyone, it seems, is aware of observing appropriate boundaries.

Workshops are offered in the workplace to assist people to understand and respect the need for professional boundaries.

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Matthew 6: 1-6 16-21

Sisters & brothers, grace to you & peace from the God of all mercy, the Christ of consolation and cleansing, and the Spirit who renews our hearts. Amen.

This morning as I sat down to prepare this Ash Wednesday’s message, my doorbell rang. It was Stephanie, our un-official “neighborhood watch” lady from one block over.  Stephanie walks her dog a number of times daily around the blocks of our neighborhood, but believe me it’s not just dog-walking she’s doing when she’s out and about. Hers are the eyes and ears of the neighborhood, and also the mouthpiece. She was stopping by to let us know that there had been a break-in just down the street from us, on our block, yesterday afternoon around 3:00. Thieves had broken in to our neighbor’s home while no one was there, and stolen some valuables. Next-door neighbors who were at home at the time had no idea.

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John 2: 13-22

Sisters & brothers, grace to you & peace from our jealous God, the zealous Christ, and the disruptive Spirit of grace.  Amen.

For those of you who were here last week, you will recall that we were quite physically disturbed and re-arranged in order to better hear the disturbing and disruptive call of Jesus to “deny our selves, take up the cross, and follow.”  In an exercise of communal disruption, the preacher asked the congregation (or was it ordered the congregation?!) to pack up and move to the polar opposite side of the congregation from where they were presently seated. The homily was preached from the back of the sanctuary just to disorient everyone involved a little bit more. It was all a bit of Lenten fun (if there is such a thing) done in the spirit of Jesus’ disruptive call to self-denial, to cross-centering, and to Christ-following.   Perhaps the topsy-turviness of it all helped us to hear and to discern that call with new ears.

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