Our congregation is taking some bold steps during Letn this year, we're on the path to become a Reconciling in Christ congregation, meaning that we're becoming a congregation who intentionally and actively seeks out and welcomes LGBTQIA+ folks and persons of color.

The ACT of loving folks who have been traditionally eschewed by the Church isn't something new to St. James. We've welcomed LGBTQIA+ persons for a long time now. What's new is that we haven't enshrined it in writing as a core part of our identity as a congregation.

At its heart, while this is very much about learning to be more welcoming of people who society marginalizes, it's also more closely related to our identity as a congregation – one that's much like so many congregations right now. We've been here for over seventy-five years, but we look around our neighborhood and don't see our physical neighbors in worship like we used to.

Part of what it means to reconcile ourselves to Christ and his welcome is learning to reconcile ourselves to our neighbors and meet them again for the first time.

This is holy, hopeful work. Here's to a Lenten discipline that we hope will change us all for the better.

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Ash Wednesday is a singular moment, not only in the Church year, but in our culture as well. Very seldom do we feel comfortable engaging our mortality, and there are entire industries devoted to helping us forget that all of us are mortal and time comes for us all.

As challenging as it is to confront this reality, reckoning with our own mortality also brings an air of release. We aren't meant to be eternal in this life, but what we offer is something of the eternal mystery – love. We worship God, who doesn't need us for existence, sustenance, or power; yet God does desire relationship.

What can we offer but a broken heart to the one who knows how to fix it?

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A prophet, a lawgiver, and the Messiah are transfigured on a mountain. Sounds like the beginning of a joke, but it's more about the identity of the Jewish people in Jesus' construction of the faith. It's about the discples' response and not knowing how to respond.

Faith isn't about morality or being a good person, but the lifelong pursuit of seeking the eternal in order to better understand ourselves. Faith is an exercise in identity. The transfiguration is about the identity of people who follow Jesus or seek faith two thousand years later in a moment when so many of us are wondering whether there's any way that we can share a national identity again.

And in a world that declares the best use of religion is to produce good people and good citizens, what Jesus brings is just as surprising as it was in the First Century – it's not about being good, but through learning to love faithfully, we learn to become human.

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