The Second Sunday after the Epiphany

"Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." We hear that word — repent — and most of us flinch.  We hear threat. Guilt. Punishment coming. Get your act together or else.

But the Greek word is metanoia, and it means something different.

Meta — beyond, after, change. Noia — mind, perception. Metanoia is a turning of perception. An invitation to see differently. To let your whole way of seeing be transformed.

And notice what follows: "the kingdom of heaven has come near." Not someday. Not if you're good enough. The kingdom is pressing in — right here, right now. Metanoia is the capacity to perceive what's already happening.

But let's be honest about where we hear these words today. Isaiah didn't write from comfort. This part of Isaiah was written during the Babylonian exile. Jerusalem in ruins after a long and brutal siege, the people were dragged from their homeland, and everything they knew was destroyed. The exile lasted generations. Nearly fifty years before some could return — and many never did. Children were born, grew old, and died in Babylon. This was not a trial to be endured until things got back to normal. This was normal. And still, Isaiah spoke of light.

The gap between that harsh reality and the world God had promised must have felt like abyss. And yet. It is from those abyssal depths that Isaiah's words emerge: "The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light."

Walter Brueggemann called this "an utterance from elsewhere" — a word of deliverance for a disheartened people. Not denial of the darkness. Not empty optimism.  A word that comes through the ruins, from beyond what they could see. 

We are living through disquieting days. You don't need me to name them — you've been watching, reading, feeling it in your bones. The gap between what is and what God promises can feel like an abyss.

Isaiah invites us to listen for the utterance from elsewhere. To trust that the darkness is not the final word. To attend — even here, especially here — with faith.

Centuries later, Matthew remembers. He reaches back to Isaiah's exile words: 'the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light' and tells us this is where Jesus begins. And so Jesus begins. Not in Jerusalem — the center, the place of power. But Galilee. Borderlands. A region of mixed peoples, mixed languages, and suspicion from the center. "Galilee of the Gentiles," Matthew calls it, quoting Isaiah.  A place of crossing and complexity.

Why there? Why would Jesus announce the kingdom's nearness from the margins? Perhaps because thin places are often edges. The shore where land meets sea. The mountaintop where earth touches sky. The borderlands where cultures meet and something new becomes possible.

We live in borderlands. This land was Tohono O'odham land, and still is. It was Mexico, and in many ways still is. The line we call a border is a recent invention, imposed on a landscape and a people that have never fully accepted it.

The Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa gave us a word for this: nepantla.  It's Na-hua-tl — the language of the Aztecs — and it means "the in-between place." She used it to describe what happens in borderlands, at thresholds, in liminal space. Nepantla is where transformation happens.

Anzaldúa wrote that living in nepantla means "seeing double — first from the perspective of one culture, then from the perspective of another. Seeing from two or more perspectives simultaneously renders those cultures transparent. You start to see what others miss. The assumptions that looked solid become visible as assumptions. The walls reveal themselves as constructions This is metanoia. This is what borderlands do to you.

And Anzaldúa named the people who learn to live in these threshold spaces: nepantleras. Threshold people. Bridge people. Those who, as she wrote, "facilitate passages between worlds... serve as agents of awakening."

Tucson knows something about this. The Sanctuary movement was born here in the 1980s — churches seeing clearly and acting while much of the country looked away. That's what nepantla does. The edges see first. The borderlands perceive what the center cannot yet imagine.

The veil has been thin here for a long time.

Four hundred years ago, a young Spanish nun named María de Jesús de Ágreda began experiencing something she could barely explain. While deep in prayer in her convent in Spain, she found herself here —in the Sonoran Desert, among the Jumano people. She appeared to them dressed in blue, the color of her order's cloak. They called her La Dama Azul — the Lady in Blue. She reported over five hundred of these visits. The Jumano confirmed them. They said she came to them "like light at sunset... a kind and gentle person who spoke sweet words to them that they could understand." She spoke Spanish; they heard their own language. They spoke Jumano; she understood perfectly.

Whether you take this as literal miracle or sacred legend, it tells us something: this ground has been recognized as threshold for centuries. The veil has always been thin here. We sit in a place where worlds meet.

Back in the 1980s, it took me a hot minute to discover the thinness of this place. I arrived in Tucson in the summer of 1988. Record heat. No air conditioning. Everything looked dead -the plants shrunken and brown, the ground cracked, the sky white with heat

I couldn't imagine why anyone would live here voluntarily. I started counting the months until I'd have enough time in my position to compete for another job. Somewhere green. Somewhere that rained.

The drought persisted through the winter of 1988-89. It was bleak and frankly frightening. Then in 1990 it rained. Really rained.

I don't know how to describe what happened next except to say the desert erupted. First the delicious smell of creosote bush.  Then the brittlebush, green against the brown hills. Then the poppies — whole mountainsides of orange. The prickly pear bloomed yellow and fruits ripened red. The saguaros, which had looked shriveled and desperate, drank up the rain and filled out, their pleated skin expanding, arms lifting almost imperceptibly toward the sky.

And I knew. This is my home. Not despite the dry time. Because of it.

The months of heat had sharpened my senses. The parched landscape had taught me to notice what I'd never noticed before — the desert shrubs holding their silvery gray leaves at just the angle to reflect the sun, the saguaro's shallow roots spread wide to catch every drop. And when the blessing came, when water fell from the sky,

I could not take it for granted. I had been prepared to see. That's what the desert does. That's what the dry time is for.

We are in a dry time now.

A year into it, and some of you are tired to the bone. The heat of fear and despair has been relentless.  It feels like nothing is going well, like the life has gone out of things. Like whatever you hoped might bloom has shriveled before it could flower.

I'm not here to tell you the feeling isn't real. It is. The dry time is hard. It's supposed to be hard. But the desert teaches: what looks dead may be dormant. The saguaros look shrunken before the rain. The ocotillo drops every leaf and stands like a bundle of dead sticks — but it isn't dead. It's waiting. The life is pulled deep inside, conserving, preparing.

And remember where you are. This is borderlands. Nepantla. The edges see first.

The Sanctuary movement was born here before the rest of the country understood what was at stake. Emergence happens here. It always has.

What if metanoia is being asked of us not as a threat but as an invitation? What if this dry time — this hard time — is sharpening our capacity to perceive? What if the kingdom is pressing in, right now, and our work is simply to see it?

The practice I want to offer you is simple, and it is for the long haul: attend with faith.

Not fix. Not flee. Not fight everything everywhere all at once — but choose how and where to resist. Not manufacture hope as a feeling you're supposed to produce.

Attend. Show up. Stay present. Keep watching. Notice what's actually happening at the edges, in the cracks.

With faith. Trusting that what looks dead may be dormant. That emergence is already underway even when you can't see it yet. That the dry time is sharpening your senses for the recognition that is coming.

Know where your thin places are — the geographic ones, the temporal ones, the relational ones. The wash at dawn. The mountain at dusk. The threshold of this sanctuary.The face of the stranger who becomes neighbor. Know where you can go to drink, to be restored, to remember what you've seen.

You are nepantleras -  threshold people, bridge people. You have been prepared by this place to see what others cannot yet see.

Isaiah promised: "The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness — on them light has shined."Not will shine. Has shined. Already. The light has already dawned.

Matthew tells us Jesus came proclaiming: "The kingdom of heaven has come near."Not will come. Has come near. It is pressing in. Right now. Right here.

The work isn't to create the light. The work isn't to build the kingdom.

The work is to perceive what is already happening. To attend with faith. To trust the life hidden in the dry sticks. To wait for rain.

You know how to do this. You live in the desert. You've seen the saguaros drink and fill. You've watched dead-looking ocotillo burst into red flame after a single storm. You know that dormant is not dead.

Attend with faith.

The emergence is already underway.

Amen.