The Transfiguration story that rolls around every year before Lent is a strange and wonderful one. But so is the very disturbing story that follows it, the story of Jesus, in the grit and the grime of real life, healing a child from possession. What are we to make of these tales? Maybe they're about mystery...maybe they're about Divine presence...maybe they're about the work of the Church, passed down from generation to generation. Maybe. Listen, and see what you think of Force Ghosts and Spiritual Warfare.

That's what this particular section of Jesus' Sermon on the Plain is all about...resisting the values of the dominant culture, resisting the urge to lash out, resisting oppression and evil. But we can only do it through training, through practice, through the difficult and often painful work of making the movements of grace again, and again, and again. And at the heart of it all...love, muscular, tangible, active love. Let's live into it!

Both the lectionary passages given to us this week, found in Luke's Sermon on the Plain, and Paul's words about the reality of the resurrection, are at heart about God's great yes...to the poor, the hungry, the grief-stricken, the struggling, those looking death in the eye. God is about life, abundant and bountiful, and both Jesus and Paul affirm that reality in our texts for Sunday. Differently, of course, but beautifully and strongly. Jump in to hear what they have to say.