Hello/Goodbye: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, May 21, 2023 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary texts cited are Acts 1:6-14 (an account of the Ascension of Jesus) and John 17:1-11.

I find it a fascinating feature of certain languages that the same word can be used for both hello and goodbye. In Italian, whether coming or going, people often simply say “ciao.” In Hawaiian, it is “aloha.” In the Czech Republic, where I did a study abroad year in college, they say “ahoj,” which honestly always made me feel a little bit like a pirate. When a word like this contains within itself more than one meaning, it is called polysemy. 

We have many polysemous words in English, too, of course, but we typically use different words to greet one another and then to take our leave. Although even for us, we might choose to say “good day” or “good evening” on both arrival and departure. 

In all of the instances when one word serves as both hello and a goodbye, our languages reveal something deeper than their simple function. When both meanings are held in the same word, there is an acknowledgment of the fluidity of time and space and our place within them; when hello and goodbye are the same, then every coming together acknowledges an inevitable parting of ways, and yet every parting of ways holds within it the hope of inevitable reunion. 

I like this very much, not only because it is linguistically nuanced, but because it feels true, it feels like a little reminder that whether, in this moment, we are moving closer or farther from one another, we are still connected. 

And if that is true, then it suggests that the narratives we so often tell of encounters and departures—of definitive hellos and devastating goodbyes—are all, in reality, held within a larger, more gentle and generous story wherein all the roads we travel are interconnected, where all of our hellos and goodbyes lead back to one another in the end. Which is, itself, a polysemous, complex realization. 

Because if hello and goodbye are never truly final, it’s a consolation when we feel the sting of loneliness and yet it’s also a caution when we would rather escape our histories or shrug off our responsibilities to right relationship, because the intertwining of all our hellos and goodbyes signifies that we are inextricably tied to one another and to the whole of the earth. It suggests that, as the poet Tennyson says, we are a part of all that we have met, and, thus, it is part of us. Hello, you are part of me. Goodbye, I am part of you. No matter where we go, we will never not be part of each other. And knowing this, we must decide how best to live.

I am thinking about hellos and goodbyes and polysemy this week because we have just celebrated the Feast of the Ascension this past Thursday and you can tell that its story is echoing into our lectionary readings this morning, and to tell the truth, this story has always felt like kind of a bummer to me in the midst of our Easter joy. 

Because viewed from one angle, the Ascension is a goodbye narrative. The risen Jesus, only recently reunited with his beloved friends and family, is carried up in a cloud, into the great Mystery where it is beyond our capacity to see him, and his disciples are left staring at the sky, yearning for one last glimpse of him. 

And from this perspective, especially for all of us who have grieved the loss of a beloved face, who have felt the hollowness of being the one left behind, the Ascension might feel a bit like a flat note in the jubilant melody of the season. 

We might say, You loved us enough to come back from death, Lord, so why must you go, now, to a place where we cannot see you? Why must we continue to let go of you? Why is it still the case, even after the Resurrection, that everyone and everything we love still says goodbye to us in the end? Why must we wait here alone, waiting for the unresolved promise of your peaceable kingdom?

And yes, Lord, I know you have promised us the Spirit as our Comforter and guide, but if I am brutally honest, Lord, there are days I would trade that unseen Spirit for just one glimpse of your face, for one moment of your actual hands holding mine, reassuring me that I am not alone on this journey, some proof that your leaving was not forever, that there will come a day when we can say hello and it will not also mean goodbye. I would give anything to know that there will be, one day, an end to endings. 

But depart he does, and wait we must. And so for now, like the disciples on the mountain, we must stand in this polysemous moment of the goodbye that searches for a hello, containing within itself both joy and grief, reunion and relinquishment, and we must continue to wonder why and how and when we will understand the necessity of loss. 

But then this week, as I was reflecting on all of this, something occurred to me: that the Ascension, like so many other stories in Scripture, is itself polysemous—it, too, means multiple things at once. And while it is indeed a farewell narrative from the perspective of us and the disciples on the mountain, I realized that from the vantage point of God the Father, from the vantage point of the Spirit aloft on the high wind, from vantage point of the innermost heart of the Trinity, the Ascension is a hello, a celebration, a homecoming. It is Jesus, the Son, in the fullness of his risen, reclaimed, redeemed human flesh, crossing back over the threshold of heaven saying to the Father, here I am, I have returned to you, and much have I seen, and long have I loved you, and how good it is to be in your embrace again. 

And if we truly love him, how could we not want our Lord to finally be at home? How could we not feel some joy that even though we must say goodbye, it is because he needed to see his Father’s face once more? I can’t begrudge him that. I know I want to see my father’s face again someday, too.

And there’s also this: in the Ascension, when Jesus says goodbye to us and hello to eternity, he is, in truth, doing something entirely new, something that only he could do, fully human, fully divine, his polysemous body drawn up and out beyond the limits of the flesh, blurring the boundaries between heaven and earth, reigning as the Lord of both. 

He is not simply saying both hello and goodbye at the same time; he is breaking down the barriers between hello and goodbye; the barriers that separate us from God and one another. He is effecting his prayer that we might all be one, never parted. He is transfiguring all our beginnings and our endings, all of our greetings and our grief, all of our hope and our fear, into something bigger, something timeless, something that we cannot even imagine because we have not yet known a story that didn’t have an ending. 

By journeying to a realm where human flesh could never have otherwise gone, he is making a place for us, a place where we will be greeted and welcomed, and somehow, where we will never have to say goodbye.

And when he returns, bringing back the glory of heaven for our eyes to behold at last, it will be a new word that he speaks, neither hello nor goodbye, but some word no mind has yet conceived, that no lip has dared to speak, a word that contains all things within itself, a polysemous Word that resolves every question, dries every tear, mends every broken heart, a word that will make the earth tremble with its beauty and its power, a word that will hold more than we could ever say but that will say it all. A word that will initiate our own Ascension.

What will that word be? I do not know. But in essence, I think it will say, here I am, I have returned to you, and much have I seen, and long have I loved you, and how good it is to be in your embrace again. 

And now, no more hellos, no more goodbyes. Only this. Only us. All of us together. Always. 

Tunnel: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, April 16, 2023 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne. The lectionary text cited is John 20:19-31, when the risen Jesus appears to the disciples, including Thomas.

Many of you know that I was born in Northern California, and for the most part we lived just north of San Francisco. Now, a curious quirk in that part of the world: when you grow up in any proximity to the Bay Area, you don’t refer to San Francisco by name, you just call it the city, and everyone else knows implicitly what you mean. Within a several hour radius, you can simply say “we’re going to the city,” and they will assume that you don’t mean Oakland or Berkeley, or San Jose, or Sacramento.

For northern Californians, for better or worse, there is only one city that is the city, and it’s the one you leave your heart in, as the old song goes—the one that glows like a beacon at the end of the world; the one that is draped in fog and flowers; the one that is complex, and layered, and broken, and is yet still beautiful; the one that looms large in the imagination of everyone who has been there and many who have not—it is only this one that needs no other name but is simply the city. 

And if you have never been to San Francisco before, let me tell you the absolute best way to see the city for the first time. You have to come by car, from the north, down through the towns and the vertiginous hillsides of Marin County, your view obscured by the terrain: steep, cypress-clad hills and winding roads. 

And as you go along, any notion of what lies ahead is completely hidden from sight, until suddenly you come upon an arched tunnel in the rock, long known as the Rainbow Tunnel. Drive through the dim passage, ever so briefly, and as you emerge on the other side, suddenly, all at once, everything is there before you: the blue of the bay; the shadowy mountains rising up from the sea, reaching toward heaven; the Golden Gate; and beyond it, the city—the luminous city, indeed glowing like a beacon at the end of the world. You’re never quite prepared for it. Every time as a kid that we drove through the tunnel, the shocking beauty of that view took my breath away. 

Now there are all sorts of unexpected views revealed to us as we journey through the world—both the literal ones waiting just over the next hillside, and the more figurative ones, too—those new insights and understandings that come upon us at certain points in our life and change us in profound ways. 

Sometimes we can go looking for such revelations, but just as often they come to us when we do not expect them, when we are deep in a tunnel of one sort or another, rushing ahead, our vision narrowed, and then suddenly, the world opens up and the the landscape is entirely new to us. It can be wonderful, and it can be terrifying; sometimes it can be both.

The season of Easter is just such a moment, when a new and astounding vision unfolds before us. Easter is when everything that seemed impossible, everything that seemed dead and gone, sealed away behind our certainties and our sorrow, is suddenly standing before us, more vivid and alive than we ever imagined, inviting us to reconsider how the world actually works.

Easter is when our tunnel vision falls away and suddenly we see things previously undreamt of: that death is not definitive, that love is more enduring than we ever dared to hope, and that God’s purpose is not simply to make our burdens bearable but to bear our burdens himself; not simply to preserve our lives but to give us his own life. It’s enough to take your breath away.

And it is understandable that, emerging from the long tunnel of our painful histories, we might not know what to do with such a vision. It is only natural that we would feel unprepared for its implications, its possibilities, its endless horizons. As Fr. T.J. said in  last week’s homily, resurrection is messy, because we are messy, and resurrection has come to find us here and now, just as we are: fearful, unsure, full of questions.

But don’t worry, we’re in good company, because you know who else was fearful and unsure, and full of questions? All of the first disciples! All of them—not just Thomas—needed some help in processing what it meant to see the risen Jesus standing in their midst. All of them had their breath taken away by the shock of it. 

And it was only in Jesus ministering to them—giving them his own Spirit-infused breath, showing them his wounds, offering them peace and blessing, commissioning them to go forth in his name—that they were able to begin to comprehend the landscape that awaited them on the other side of the dark, narrow tunnel of grief and fear in which they had found themselves. 

And Thomas, our dear friend Thomas, should actually be called “Believing Thomas,” not “Doubting Thomas,” for it is he who truly emerges first onto the other side of understanding; it is he who comprehends the fullness of the vision before him; it is he who realizes the significance of the risen body of Jesus that, though wounded, persists in life and love; it is Thomas who names what he sees, and who thereby gives voice to the Church’s dawning understanding of what the Resurrection is meant to show all of us: My Lord and my God! 

My Lord and my God, it is you! It is you, wounded like me! Wounded for me! It is you, complex, and layered and broken and yet still beautiful, and loving me, loving all of us, loving this whole earth for being the same! It is you, glowing like a beacon at the end of the world! It was always you. It will always be you, forgiving, peace-bearing, redeeming, blessing, waiting to reveal yourself, through the dark tunnel, just around the bend, a vision to take my breath away. Now I see. 

And it is this movement from not seeing to seeing that is, in truth, the heart of the message of this Gospel passage, rather than any dichotomy of doubt versus belief. Because the good news of the Resurrection is not about whether we can conquer doubt through the power of our faith; it is about the God who conquers death through the power of his love. It is about the God who comes to show us what that love looks like in this world and in the world to come. It is about the gift, the incomprehensible gift, of seeing something beautiful, hopeful, and true, even when we least expected it. Especially when we least expected it.

You might wonder, though, with all this talk of seeing, what to make of Jesus’ final statement here:

Blessed are the ones who have not seen and yet have come to believe,

It is tempting to read this as a sort of challenge, either to Thomas or to ourselves—as if we might be deemed more faithful, more favored, somehow, by God if we believe in the Resurrection without hard evidence. But I think this misses the point. 

Because this statement, like those in the Sermon on the Mount, is structured as a beatitude (blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn, and so on…) And beatitudes are not challenges, but are God’s promises of comfort and sustenance to those who are struggling in the world as it is. The ones who have forgotten to hope for any glorious new visions.

Thus, blessed are the ones who have not seen is not a gold star for the especially committed believers, the ones who are blithely certain of their faith…

No, it is a word of comfort for the rest of us. It is a word of blessing to those who have not yet seen the fulfillment of God’s Kingdom and yet long for it. It is a word of promise to those who look at the world around them and see only death and injustice and callousness but refuse to give up on the practice of love and the search for truth. It is a word of encouragement to those who are deep in the tunnel, who are deep in the tomb, who are in the dark, but are searching for the light, who are persisting on the path, who are pursuing the vision, who are trusting that somewhere, someday, the City, the heavenly City, the City of God, the City of a Redeemed and Resurrection Creation, the City long promised and long sought, will be just around the bend, glowing like a beacon at the end of the world, and all of us, complex and layered and broken and beautiful will get there, and the gates will be open and the risen, wounded Christ will greet us and say Peace be with you and we will cry out in one voice:

My Lord and My God!

…and it’ll be enough to take your breath away.

What He Saw: A Sermon for Good Friday

I preached this sermon on Good Friday, April 7, 2023, at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary text cited is the Passion Narrative according to John, in which Jesus, as he dies, says, “It is finished.“

I was not there to witness it, but I was told that shortly before my great-grandma died, many years ago, she began speaking to her own mother, long since dead—speaking to her as though she was right there in the room with her. Not mumbling in her sleep, not in a delusional state, but clearly,  directly, as you might talk to anyone who has come to visit your bedside. She saw her mother’s face, and then, not too long afterwards, she died, and it was finished. 

I’ve heard many similar stories about other people since then, and while I don’t really know how to explain them, they seem to suggest that as our lives ebb, like a wave pulling away from the shore, a returning wave of something makes its presence known to us—something very real and very deep. Maybe we call it a memory…or maybe we call it divine presence…or maybe, like my great-grandma, we simply call out, mother. Whatever it is, whoever it is, there is a shared sense across many cultures and generations that in our final moments, we catch a glimpse of the people and the places we have known and loved. 

As they say, our life flashes before our eyes.

Just last year a medical paper was published documenting, for the very first time, how this is in fact true—how life does flash before your eyes in the end. Somewhat by chance, the brain waves of a dying man were captured by an advanced medical scanning device. The doctors noticed that in the moments both immediately before and after this person died, the portion of the brain that processes memory was activated. As his other brain waves ebbed, the gamma waves—the waves of memory and meaning—flowed. He was remembering—processing a vision, somehow—of someone or something familiar. Something lost that had come back to him in the end.

And I wonder what he saw, that unnamed man. Was it his mother’s face? Maybe the time he got lost as a child? Was it the way the sun sets over the water on a summer evening? The fragment of a half-forgotten song? The smell of baking bread or the taste of good wine? How his father used to smile at him? And I wonder, were they just memories, just impulses in the brain, or were they a response to something real, something, like my great-grandma’s mother, that was somehow truly present again in a way that no medical scanner could ever detect? Those are questions that science cannot answer, but that the heart ponders nonetheless. 

Because I like to think that, whatever it was that the dying man experienced, or whatever it was that my great-grandma saw as her life slipped away, that they were not just alone with their thoughts. I want to believe that their lives and their love came back to them at the very end, like a returning wave upon the shore, a presence, a promise that even though it is finished, it still all mattered. And that nothing was lost. Not really.

And if that is true, then I also can’t help but wonder what Jesus saw in his final moments on the Cross before he said, it is finished. He who felt so alone, he who was so abandoned, so undeserving of the ending he received. My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? 

But if it’s true that our life flashes before our eyes, that love returns to us in the end to companion us into the darkness, I wonder what he saw as his breath ebbed away.

We know, of course, he saw his mother’s face, still alive, but deadened by grief.

And maybe, as he closed his eyes, maybe he saw the time he got lost as a child, when they found him in the Temple, when everything was new and possible. Or perhaps he saw the way the sun sets on the Sea of Galilee. Or maybe he remembered the fragment of a half-forgotten song heard long ago: my soul magnifies the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my savior. Maybe he remembered the smell of bread in the Upper Room.The taste of good wine at that wedding in Cana. Or how his Father smiled at him in secret, in his heart, and from beyond the cold and distant stars.

Maybe it was all of this, the sum of a life, the fragmented pieces of himself gathering back in, returning on a wave, bearing witness to the ending, bearing the memory and the presence of love, bearing the unbearable weight of loneliness until…it was finished.

And although that would be beautiful and meaningful all on its own, and although I believe that Jesus’ own life and love came back to him in the end, I don’t think that’s all there was. I don’t think that’s all he saw as he hung there, his breath crushed under the weight of the world’s brokenness. 

I think we would miss something essential about who he is and what this day is about if Good Friday were the story of just another, single life flashing before someone’s dying eyes.

For the life of Jesus is the life of God, and the mind of Jesus is the mind of God, and the memory of Jesus is the memory of God, deeper and broader than any one returning wave. He holds the whole ocean of time and experience within himself. His life, his mind, his memory encompass everything, everyone, everywhere. 

And so it was not just his own private memories, his own personal life that flashed before his eyes in the end, but ALL of life. All that ever was, all that ever will be. He saw all of it as he died on the Cross. He saw all of you. He saw every part of you. And through eyes blurred with tears and blood and love, he saw, as he always had, in the very beginning, that it was good. Not perfect, but very, very good. 

He saw the time you got lost as a child and your parents found you. 

He saw the time you got lost and nobody came looking. 

He saw the way the sun sets over the lake you sat beside on a summer’s evening.

He saw the way the sun rose on the first day of the world. 

He saw how your mother sang to you when you were afraid. 

He saw the times you were too afraid to sing out loud. The poems you never wrote. The letters you never sent.

He saw every meal on every table. He saw every hungry belly.

He saw the consequential fruit trembling on the tree in Eden; and he saw the unnoticed wildflowers and weeds that grow on the side of the road. He saw the bouquets at every graveside, the names inscribed in stone.

He saw every creature, its life and its death, its peace and its agony, he saw every crack in the earth, every polluted river, every verdant forest, every wave of the infinite sea. 

He saw every battlefield, every bomb and bullet, every needless slaughter, and he saw how our brother’s blood cries out from the ground, seeking justice.

He saw every broken heart, every tearstained face, every lash of the whip, every dream deferred, every march for peace, every backroom deal, every sacrifice and every betrayal, every sleepless night, every tick of the clock. 

He saw all the times we failed, all the times we tried, all the times we made something beautiful, all the times we broke something beautiful. 

He saw all the times we broke.

He saw the worst of what we have done, and the best.

He saw all of it. 

All of life—all of life flashed before his eyes.

And then he said:

It is finished. 

He said, it is finished, now, my beloved child, bone of my aching bone, and flesh of my wounded flesh. Finished because now I see it all, with my own living, dying eyes, everything done and left undone. Now I comprehend your finitude, your fear, how alone you feel in the vastness of creation. I see, with my own eyes, the returning wave of memory and grief, all that was lost, all that was forgotten, all that was loved; all of it is returning to me now, and it is your face I see, your face I call out to, your face I will not forget as I enter into the darkness and whatever lies beyond it. 

It is finished, and I do not know where I am going, but now I see the pain and the beauty and the promise of this entire world and I hold it in my broken heart, in my fading breath, and so wherever I go now, I will carry you all with me. Nothing is lost. Not really.

So let us rest, now. It is finished. For I see, in the end, what was always the only important thing to see: that I love you, all that you are, all that you are not, with the ferocity and the depth and the power and the mystery of the endless ocean, and if I can, I will return it all to you, I will bring it all back to you, I will make it whole again, somehow, someday. 

For all of life—mine, and yours, and ours—has flashed before my eyes, and thus I have drawn all things to myself. 

It is finished.

…

And then the wave breaks on the shore.

And he is gone. 

And, for today, there is nothing else that can be said. 

The Best Meal I Ever Had: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, March 19, 2023 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary text cited is John 9:1-41, in which Jesus opens the eyes of a man blind from birth.

So, I want to tell you about the best meal I ever had.

It was in Assisi, Italy, back when I was in college and my mom and I were doing some travels through Europe. We had gone to Assisi to visit the holy sites associated with St. Francis, but we were, of course, also very happy to enjoy some good Italian food and wine. 

The meal in question was at a simple little restaurant, nothing fussy or expensive. It incuded a bottle of red wine, a plate of ravioli in a light cream sauce flavored with poppyseeds and citrus, and a thick steak so tender that I would put it up against the best you could find at Ruth’s Chris down the street or anywhere else, really. 

We sat at a table near the window, the golden evening light pouring in across the table, and both the servers and the other diners seemed genuinely happy to be there–at peace, in no rush to be anyplace else. Now, maybe I was delirious from the beauty and the sanctity of Assisi, or maybe I was just really hungry, but the food was so lovingly prepared and the setting so homey and warm that as I ate, tears of joy welled up in my eyes. Outside of cherished family gatherings, it was definitely one of the best meals I ever ate. 

I wonder if you can recall a meal or a particular dish that evokes warm memories for you. Maybe it was on a vacation, too, or maybe it is something much closer to home—a family recipe or food from your favorite local spot. 

Now, I am going to do something quite shocking and unconventional in the midst of a sermon. I’m going to ask you to turn to someone next to you or near you (don’t be shy) and very briefly tell them about that food. Doesn’t have to be anything fancy or exotic. Just something you have loved. Take just a moment and tell your neighbor about it.

…

Feeling hungry yet? Good! 

Food can and should be one of the elemental pleasures of life, and our memories of it are often vivid, tied to beloved people and places. I always find it interesting how easily we can call to mind a favorite dish or restaurant and talk about it to connect with other peope. I think that’s because we speak about food from our lived experience of it, our deeply felt sense of nourishment and identity and belonging. 

And even if we are not expert chefs, even if we don’t know how to cook at all, we can still probably speak with some energy and insight about our experience of food, of being fed, of what that one magical dish tasted like back when we were a kid, or when we cooked it for our family, or, yes, when the evening light spilled across the dining table in Assisi—in all the little moments and morsels when we encountered a little taste of heaven. We may not know the recipe or the reason why, but we can simply say with confidence, this much I know: I was hungry, and I tasted something beautiful.

In his own way, this is the testimony of the man in today’s Gospel story, the man who once was blind but who now can see, the man who has had a little taste of heaven. He is healed by Jesus through a rather earthy recipe: dirt and saliva kneaded together into a paste and then dipped into the sacred water of Siloam. Not a meal, per se, but rather the satisfaction of a deeper sort of hunger, one the man might have given up on: the hunger to belong, the hunger to be something other than “other.” And so this is what Jesus gives him, and to those around him who witness the healing: a sign, a reminder that in God’s Kingdom, there will be no outsiders, there will be no people forgotten at the roadside, there will be no one who hungers from lack of bread or compassion. 

And this man, his eyes having been opened, although he knows not the recipe nor the reason why, speaks with captivating simplicity about what he has experienced. “He put mud on my eyes. Then I washed, and now I see…I was blind, now I see.” I was hungry, and I now I have tasted something beautiful. 

And everyone around him, the neighbors and the Pharisees, they kind of lose it over this miracle served up in their midst . First they refuse to believe this is the same man who was blind. Then, after its clear that he is, they refuse to believe that Jesus is up to any good, and they certainly refuse to believe that this is a sign from God. They want to know how, and why, and to what end all of this has taken place. They want the ingredient list, they want the recipe, they want to speak to the chef, they want to send it back, this exquisite, strange gift, this feast of possibility. 

But the man can’t speak to any of that. He is not a priest or a scribe, he is not a person of any influence. He doesn’t know yet exactly who Jesus is or where he comes from or why he did what he did. And so he just keeps saying what he knows, what he has experienced: I was blind, now I see. I was forgotten, now I am remembered. I was invisible now I am seen. I was lost now I am found. I was nothing now I am part of everything. I was hungry, and now I have tasted something beautiful. That is my testimony. It is entirely up to you whether you partake of it or not. But it has nourished me. It has saved me.

And I wonder, dear friends—I wonder whether we can speak about our faith like the man whose eyes were opened by Jesus. I wonder whether we can speak with simplicity and confidence about the experience of Jesus in our lives. I wonder whether we can describe how we have been encouraged, how we have been sustained, how we have been healed, how we have been fed by our encounters with the Son of God. 

I wonder, really, since we can speak so easily and joyfully about the best meal we ever had, why we can’t always, just as easily, just as joyfully, speak about the One who is the Living Bread, the One who has prepared for us an eternal banquet? I wonder why I hesitate to do this sometimes. 

I have a couple of theories about this, at least for us Episcopal types. 

First, I think somewhere we got the idea that talking about Jesus means that we need to fully understand everything there is to know about Jesus. (As if we ever could!) Maybe we’re afraid we don’t fully understand every line in the Nicene Creed or that we can’t coherently explain the relationship between the persons of the Trinity (pro tip: nobody can!). Maybe we don’t feel up to the task of defending the history of the church to the skeptical or the confused. Maybe we are even a little skeptical or confused ourselves some days. 

But here’s the thing: we do not need to know everything about who Jesus is in order to speak about who Jesus is to us. We do not need to have a degree in theology or church history to describe how we have been changed by an encounter with a loving, welcoming, merciful, dynamic, ever-present God. 

As the man says, Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. If we, too, can name the impact that following Jesus has had on our lives, then maybe that’s exactly enough.

The second reason I think we hesitate, sometimes, is that talking a lot about a personal encounter with Jesus sounds like something other types of Christians do—including those whose values and understandings of the gospel differ significantly from our own. We are afraid, perhaps, of coming across as preachy or exclusionary.

But again, here’s the thing: if we take seriously that we are part of God’s life in Christ, then we have to be able to talk simply, humbly about who we are, who we love, what we have experienced of God, without it automatically becoming an exercise in recruitment or conversion. I don’t  think I need to tell you that the world desperately needs Christians who can do this.

So my challenge to you, to myself, to all of us in these final weeks of Lent, is this: think of how you described that favorite meal. Think of how it felt to share about it with your neighbor, not trying to convince them that it needed to be their favorite meal too, or even that they have to learn to cook it themselves. Think about how it was simply you sharing the joy of what you have experienced, what you have tasted, what you have known and loved. 

And then, I want you think about how you would evoke that same feeling when you talk about what Jesus has done in your life. Commit, if you will, to 15 or 20 minutes this week of writing down or thinking about how you would describe the impact upon your life of following Jesus, of being loved by him, of whatever your relationship is with him right now. 

Give yourself the gift of putting that into words, and then, perhaps, God will show you when and how to share it with someone else who needs to hear it. Someone who is hungry for something deeper than food. Someone who is lost, or who cannot see their own belovedness. Maybe you will tell them what you have experienced. Maybe it will save them from despair. Maybe it will save you, too.

Maybe you will simply say, I was blind, but now I see. 

Maybe you will say, I was hungry, and I tasted something beautiful. 

Born Again: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, March 5, 2023, at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary text cited is John 3:1-17, wherein Nicodemus visits Jesus at night.

When I was born, my parents were living in a log cabin on the California coast. I went back to see it many years later, and it was nothing fancy, but it was nestled among tall trees, eucalyptus and cypress and and Monterey pine; and the breeze off the ocean would stir the leaves beyond my nursery window, like a lullaby. 

Now, I was an infant so I don’t actually remember that, but I would like to remember. I would like to be able to remember how the first sounds I heard in this world were my parent’s soft voices and the wind in those trees, both speaking gently, assuring me that the world was a good and green and generous place, and that being born, being part of all this, meant being held, being found, being loved from the very first breath.

Of course, I don’t know for sure, but I want to imagine it like that. I believe that it was like that. 

The memory of being born and being nurtured (assuming we were fortunate enough to be nurtured) is something, it seems, our minds can’t hold onto. Some researchers call this “infantile amnesia,” and they suggest that we don’t remember our earliest days because we are still becoming, our sense of self is not fully developed at birth; there isn’t quite yet a “me” to do the remembering. 

And spiritually, I think this makes sense. When we are born, we emerge from the deep darkness of the womb in which we were first formed and nourished and known—we come by night, as it were, our infant body a bearer of the hidden, unspoken, unbounded mystery from which all life springs forth, a fragment of the fabric of creation that only gradually learns how to recognize its own unique shape. 

And so as we grow, we learn how to exist, and thus how to remember. But there is always that inaccessible part of us, the hidden origin point, the life before remembering, when we were indeed born, and held, and (God-willing), loved from the very first breath, and even before. It’s there, but we can’t quite recall how it felt. 

I sometimes wonder if our long search for the fullness of love in our life is rooted in that hidden memory, lost to time, retained only as a shadow, an impulse in our yearning hearts: yearning to know what it actually feels like for the world to be a good and green and generous place. Yearning to be born again, if only to reclaim the experience of being that seen and safe.

And Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” 

So often Nicodemus, in this story, is regarded as someone who doesn’t get it. A Pharisee coming by night, still learning how to remember good things, drawn toward the life he perceives in Jesus, but missing the full truth of his teachings whether because of fear or suspicion or simple confusion.

But I don’t hear suspicion in Nicodemus’ question. And I don’t hear confusion. I hear longing. I hear a bit of sadness, maybe a flicker of hope. 

What if his question is in earnest: How can anyone be born after having grown old? Tell me.How can I get back to that place and time when the wind sang in the trees and a face smiled at me simply for being here, for breathing? How can I get back to when love was free and true, when it was unconditioned by the bitten fruit, by snakes in the garden, by mistakes and ulterior motives? How can I get back to that, the time I long for, but can’t quite remember? I want it to be possible, but how?

How can anyone be born after having grown old?

Because Nicodemus, like most of us, is a man who has lived through many seasons. He knows his own pain and the pain of his people and the long pain of the earth. He sees the passing of time looking back at him in the mirror, he sees how the years escape and don’t come back, how death looms, how it waits to greet everything that lives. While birth, with all is hopefulness, is a stranger to us, a face long forgotten, unfamiliar, inaccessible behind the veil of memory and time. 

Or is it?

Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above,’ Jesus tells Nicodemus. ‘The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.’

It is lost on us in the English translation of the text, but Jesus is speaking in layers, here, not in riddles. And so I would argue that he is not trying to confuse Nicodemus or chastise him, but rather he is trying to reveal something deep and multi-faceted about his purpose. Because the Greek word for ‘wind’ used here, pneuma, is also the word for ‘Spirit’, and this word is connected to the Hebrew word ‘ruach’, which also means ‘breath.’ Wind. Spirit. Breath. The animating forces of God and the breaths we take and the breeze off the ocean: they are all connected, all bound together in Christ. 

And so Jesus is saying, do not be astonished that I am talking about being born again, about finding a way back to the unreachable memory of where you began, for I have come so that your breath, your life, will be caught up in the eternal Spirit of God, in the windstorm of heaven, which is not bound by time or space.

And you do not know where your breath, your life, comes from or where it goes. So who’s to say that you can’t go back, that you can’t experience the unconditional love by which and into which you were born? Who’s to say the trees can’t sing a lullaby to you once more? Who’s to say you can’t be held and found and loved by your mother, by your Father, breath by breath? Who’s to say that you can’t remember, for the first time, what it is to be born, what it is to know that you are part of the fabric of creation?

Jesus says, you can. Jesus says, this is why I was born. Jesus says, you may have grown old, but you need not perish. Jesus says, follow me, abide in me, and you will know a love so real and pure that it will indeed feel like being born again.

For the Son of God has come to make all things new, including you. He has come as midwife, as cradle, as sustenance, as song, to birth you into a new creation. He has come to remind us what we could never quite remember: that we are born, and born, and born again each day into the loving arms of a Divine parent who sees past our mistakes, who has no ulterior motives, who is good and green and generous and who will never let us go. 

And when we fall, he will help us be born again. And when we grow old, he will help us born again. And when we die and return back to the deep, dark mystery from whence we came, he will help us be born again, this time everlastingly, to stand among the rustling trees alongside an ocean of undying light, the Spirit and the wind and our breath moving as one.

For God so loved the world. For God so loves you. 

Of course, I don’t know for sure, but I want to imagine it like that. 

I believe that it will be like that.

Garden at the End of the World: A Reflection

I offered this reflection during a parish Lenten retreat at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, which explored the various gardens of Scripture, including Eden, Gethsemane, and, here, the garden of the New Creation in the Book of Revelation.

I want to tell you a story about a garden at the end of the world.

Last summer, I was on a trip to the United Kingdom, and after a very long set of flights from Fort Wayne to London, and a train from London to the northern city of Newcastle, and a car from Newcastle to the Northumbrian coast near the border of England and Scotland, I found myself standing on the seashore, looking out towards my final destination: an island just off the mainland, separated by a tidal causeway that is only passable at certain times of day when the seawater does not inundate it. It was the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, an ancient seat of Christian monasticism and a pilgrimage site for centuries. 

I was still wearing the same clothes I’d put on, many, many hours ago in Indiana, and it was a surreal experience to stand there, bleary eyed, carrying the dust and the baggage of all I’d left behind, and yet to be in the midst of something so luminously, shockingly new. 

We crossed the causeway as the sun sank into the North Sea and the skies were every pastel shade imaginable, like ice cream flavors melting together. Rasberry, peach, grape, blueberry, cream. And once we’d arrive to the other side, my companion and I made our way up a grassy embankment, to the top of a ridge overlooking the sea. We had arrived, and we were bathed in color and salt air, and I confess that it felt like the landscapes of heaven one dreams of as a child, before heaven seems a bit harder to imagine. 

As we stood among the waving grasses of Lindisfarne, we looked out towards the far side of the island, straining our eyes in the falling dusk. Isn’t it interesting how, whenever we get to the edge of something we still want to see what is even further out? Curiousity, or longing, keeps our eyes on the horizon. 

And as we looked, we noticed something that was hard to make out, a low structure of some kind, dark and earthen, out beyond any other buildings or roads. It wasn’t on our map. It was a mystery, and we decided to go out the next day to see what it was, sitting in solitude at the far end of an island at the far end of the earth. 

So we set out the next morning, making our way along a path that followed the sea, curving out around the old castle that sits like a sentinel atop a rocky hill on the otherwise gentle landscape of Lindisfarne. And that low, dark thing, whatever it was, was still hard to make out, until we curved around the eastern edge of the island and followed a narrow road that led us closer. 

It was not a building at all, in fact, but a set of low stone walls, made of rocks piled on top of one another, moss growing in the cracks between them, delicate sea grasses growing out of the top. And in the center of one wall was a gate. And when we opened the gate…we stepped into a garden.

A garden, sitting in silent, abundant repose, at the end of the earth. And in that garden, on this July afternoon, every color flower imaginable was blooming—red poppies and white daisies and flowers I did not recognize—fuschia and pink and gold and amethyst. And there were bees buzzing around, gathering their pollen, and the sea breeze stirred the plants gently and the air smelled like earth and salt and sweetness and greenness. Like viriditas. 

And we just stood there, in awe, marveling that such a beautiful thing could actually exist anywhere, but especially here, out at the end of the world. 

In the Revelation to John, we are given a vision of another garden, in another place and time, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that it is a vision of a garden that is in every place and beyond time. For it is the garden of the New Creation, the garden that is the fulfillment of God’s promise to redeem creation and to make it whole. To make it holy.

John writes: Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. 

This vision, the very last one given in the Book of Revelation, and thus the final one in Holy Scripture, is the consummation of God’s promises: that in the end, beyond death, beyond time itself, there will be a garden, there will be life, there will be food and healing and abundance in every season. There will be a garden at the end of the world, and there will be a place for everyone and everything.

It is worth noting that this new garden, this new and eternal revelation of Divine viriditas, is not just a reentry into Eden. We don’t simply end up where our forebears started, as if nothing had happened, as if the millennia of life and death and growth and decay we’ve survived all just folded back on itself into some sort of primordial, unknowing, unremembering dream. Because God cherishes the beauty of all the seasons we have endured. God knows the seeds we have planted, the dreams and the tears and the blood spilled into the soil. God sees all of it, God sees all of you, all of us, and God does not desire to erase but to redeem it, to heal it, to imbue it with an everlasting radiance. To imbue it with viriditas.

So no, we are never going back to Eden. But neither are we stuck forever in Gethsemane, where life and death struggle in their tortured dance. No, in the Garden of the New Creation, we enter into something far better than a new and improved version of the world we know. We enter into the very life of God. We enter into God’s own heart, God’s own home, God’s own viriditas, a place that is not simply a lost paradise reclaimed, but is the very love and life that underlies every notion of paradise. 

In the new heave and new earth, we enter into God, who is waiting for us at the end of the world. And according to Scripture, it seems that God looks very much like a garden. 

I confess that as we look around the world today, it is hard to hold onto this vision. Our planet is in crisis, and all of us—humanity and plants and animals, rocks, rivers, and seas—all of us are bound together in uncertainty and in pain. So some days it’s hard to imagine a place where there is ever-ripening fruit and balm for every ailment. A place where all creation exists in harmony with itself and its Creator. It is a lovely thought, beyond lovely, but it can feel like a fanciful wish rather than a grounded hope, because we have known so much of hardship for so long.

Loss and death and finitude are so intimately part of our lives; they are big and burdensome yet also familiar, and if I am honest with myself, I can’t imagine life without death, as much as I want to. Sometimes the idea of eternity, even in a beautiful garden, scares me a little. I can’t really understand its unending joy. It’s hard to imagine a world that is not Eden or Gethsemane, a world where the serpent won’t show up again with his temptations, it’s hard to imagine a world where the Cup that we receive will be full of life, with not even a trace of bitterness or loss.

But the Revelation, of course, doesn’t really explain how it all will work. We are given a dream, a promise to trust in. We are given a garden, and the rest is left to our sense of wonder. This vision of the New Creation is not a precise roadmap to eternity, but more of a song, or a poem, or an intuition. A reminder that as we wait, if we seek a foretaste of heaven, we might tend to the earth and help in flourish.

All we can do, here and now, is love the gardens in which we find ourselves, the gardens of the earth as it is: broken yet insistently hopeful; the gardens of our lives as they are: broken yet insistently hopeful. The gardens that remind us of what has been given, what has been lost, what has been promised. All I can do is walk through this earth and notice it, and care for it, and I can walk alongside my neighbor (my human neighbor and all the rest of creation too) and notice them and care for them, and I can trust that my Lord, the unseen gardener and caretaker of us all, is just on the other side of the dense greenery, smiling through the leaves, and that whatever he is planting for that future day, that final harvest, that eternal garden, it will be more beautiful, more whole, more full of connection and love than anything I’ve yet known or imagined. 

More so, even, than the gift I found hidden behind those stone walls on the Holy Island, where for one brief summer afternoon, heaven whispered among the poppies and the seagrass, and God was in the green and in the wind and said,

I want to tell you a story about a garden at the end of the world. 

Spectacle: A Sermon on The Transfiguration

I preached this sermon on Sunday, February 19, 2023 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, Indiana. The lectionary texts cited are Exodus 24:12-18 and Matthew 17:1-9, an account of the Transfiguration of Jesus.

I wonder if this has ever happened to you: you come to church on a Sunday for Mass, and the service moves you deeply—the music is transcendent, and the prayers are full of meaning, and maybe (we pray!) the sermon is even inspiring or thought provoking. And then you receive communion and you emerge out into the world, basking in the radiance of love and light and liturgy… 

…and then someone cuts you off in traffic. Or you get home and your dog has eaten your favorite pillow. Or you have an email waiting from that frustrating coworker. Or you see the news and some dire, troubling thing has taken place somewhere. And suddenly all those warm feelings, those lingering memories of song and silence and candlelight collide with the less-than lovely-realities of life as it is. 

If you know what I’m talking about, rest assured that you are not alone. It is, I think, a challenge shared by all worshipping Christians to experience the disjuncture between the glimpse of heaven at the altar—that ordered vision of life and eternity grasped in our prayers and rituals and hymns—and the decidedly messier truth of days spent navigating a fractured world.

This has been true for members of the Church for a very long time. The elaborate beauty and deep feeling we cultivate in worship is intentional. It reminds us of the beauty of God for which we long and the beauty of one another, too, which is often harder to sense amid the traffic and the emails and the gloomy headlines. 

But the contrast between liturgy and life, between the transcendent and the prosaic, is not entirely by accident. It also has its roots in a rather pragmatic need identified by the early leaders of the Church. 

A brief liturgical history lesson: In the 4th century, when the decidedly countercultural followers of Jesus suddenly found their traditions absorbed by the ruling elites into the power structures of the Roman Empire, a curious thing happened. What had been a grassroots, underground movement, subject to persecution and shaped by fervent commitment to an alternative way of being in the world, gradually became an institution for the powerful and the fashionable. 

Whereas once baptism was more akin to the Mark of Cain—a seal of divine promise in the face of peril—it now became more like a badge of honor and access and status. People showed up to be baptized not because they necessarily understood how Christ had transformed their existence, but simply because it was the thing to do.

And as a result, the bishops and other church leaders decided that they needed a new way to make an impression upon these slightly passive, comfortable new members of the body of Christ. If they couldn’t compel them with the bracing possibilities of martyrdom or a new, radical communitarian ethic, then they would dazzle them into awe and reverence with liturgy. Spectacle would stand in where, perhaps, substantive conversion of life fell short. And so liturgy, over the years, become ever more elaborate, ever more majestic, to remind people that Church was not just a social club, but a sign of eternity. 

Now I admit this all sounds a bit cynical, as if liturgy were a tool to play with people’s emotions. I don’t think that’s quite it. It’s just that we, as human beings, especially when we are enmeshed in myriad concerns, need potent reminders that another world, another way of being in this world is possible. 

And the more our daily lives are entrenched in the predictable patterns of consumption and competition and zero-sum thinking, the harder it is to perceive the alternative. We, like those Roman converts, are deep in the valley of Empire, stooped over, scrabbling for our daily bread, and it takes the power of something bold and wondrous, a mountaintop experience, to draw our gazes heavenward, to remind us to dream again. And so we come here.

God knows this about us. God knows we need to be dazzled sometimes in order to believe. Perhaps that’s why mountaintops figure so prominently in the two theophanies—Godly manifestations—in our readings this morning. 

Moses is called up the cloud-draped mountain where the glory of the Lord has come to meet him, “like a devouring fire…in the sight of the people of Israel.” It’s that last phrase that matters here—in the sight of the people of Israel. Remember, Moses himself had been in communication with God ever since the burning bush; he did not need to go up a mountain in dramatic fashion to trust in the word given to him. 

But the people, newly released from the land of their bondage, uncertain about what was true and what was possible for them—it was for their benefit that God gathered like a cloud and burned like a fire. The spectacle reassured them that whatever Moses found there at the top of Mt. Sinai was Real with a capital R. It was God. It was the answer to their deepest fears and longings. 

And then we have Jesus with James and Peter and John, on another mountain sojourn. Immediately before this, Peter has already confessed Jesus to be the Messiah, the Son of the Living God—and so his head already knows what is true, but Jesus, in his wisdom, knows that seeing is believing, and that the road ahead will be hard, and so now the disciples’ own eyes behold the Transfiguration of Christ’s body into the glory of the Lord, another spectacle, his face blazing like fire, like sunlight, like certainty.

Two mountaintops, two dazzling visions to imprint themselves on the memory and on the heart. Maybe we need these transcendent visions, just like we need our transcendent liturgies. We are creatures of sensation and feeling contending with a world that sometimes drains us of both, and so perhaps it is part of the strange mercy of God to to slay us with beauty so that we might survive for another day. 

But here’s the thing we cannot forget, whether in our own experience of liturgy or in our reflections on these two texts: spectacle alone cannot save us. To be moved by beauty is not, by itself, to be transformed. Those church leaders of the 4th century knew this—they just hoped to make a big enough impression in worship to keep people engaged in deeper formation the rest of the time. 

And Moses knew this, too, for he came down from the fiery mountain not with more bedazzlements for the people but with Commandments and instructions for how to build a real life, a real society worthy of the glorious vision. 

And Jesus knew this, too, he knew that his transfiguration would soon be followed by his crucifixion, and that his disciples would need to build a living community based on an ethic of sacrificial, self-giving love, not just a pretty piece of performance art and some pious recollections. Because whether on the mountaintop or in the sanctuary, we were not made children of God and we were not given the glimpse of heaven’s perfect beauty simply for the enjoyment of a private holiness, but for the exercise of a public wholeness.

And these two things—beauty and responsibility, spectacle and sacrifice— must work together if we actually want to BE a transfigured people rather than people who simply admire the Transfiguration. We can love our worship, as all Christians in all traditions should, and we can give our hearts over to it on Sunday and give the best of ourselves to its enactment, but we will not be changed into bearers of the beatific vision until that day when our liturgy spills out into the streets and its fire and its light are no longer reserved for the mountaintop but instead become the flame we carry within us in the hard, dim, disordered, necessary work of everyday life, the work of loving the world into the newness life that God has ordained for it. Yes, even when we get cut off in traffic or get a troubling email. Even when the news is dire. Especially then. 

Because although God can indeed be glimpsed in the mountaintop moments, and God is in the bread and the wine and is dancing in the flame upon the altar, and although God will continue to show us how wondrous, how beautiful, how spectacular is the glory of his presence in this place, it is in the unspectacular moments, the ones after the formal liturgy ends, the moments that make up most our lives, when we will see not just who God is, but who God has formed us into and what, we pray, his glory has wrought in us. 

Are we radiating with his light? Are we helping build his just and peaceful Kingdom? Can all who see us feel both the power and the gentleness of our love, like a devouring fire, like a cool mantle of cloud?

When we do these things, and when the world can see these things, then on that day the true spectacle will not be the beauty of God alone, but of God alive in us. On that day, God’s glory will no longer be reserved for the liturgy, for the mountaintop, but will be everywhere. And on that day, the Transfiguration will be complete.

Salt & Fire: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, February 5, 2023 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 5:13-20, when Jesus says, “You are the salt of the earth.”

Last year as we were preparing for the Easter Vigil (the nighttime service that is the culmination of both Holy Week and, really, the entire liturgical year), Father T.J. let me know that I would be responsible for building and lighting the outdoor Paschal fire, the flames of which signify resurrection and which are used to light the Paschal candle for the first time. 

And I thought, great. I love the Paschal fire; it evokes something so deep and elemental about our faith and worship tradition; it is such a powerful liturgical moment. This was going to be amazing!

But there was just one problem. And if you recall my sermon from a couple weeks ago about my reticence towards going ice fishing, you might be able to put the pieces together: I am not the most outdoorsy person. As a Cub Scout I was more likely to get a badge for indoor activities like cooking or arts & crafts than I was for anything out in the woods. So building fires? Not exactly my strong suit.  Members of the Young Adults group have seen my rather suspect attempts at building a “camp fire” in the church garth by simply lighting a Duraflame log…so they’ve known this for some time. 

But anyway, back to the Paschal fire. Fr. T.J. said, don’t worry, there’s a really simple way to do this. Watch this Youtube video and you will see how to make the fire with just two things: rubbing alcohol and coarse salt. And it’s true! Those two ingredients, when ignited, create a beautiful, bright fire. My struggle to actually get the thing lit is a story for another time, but if you were at the Easter Vigil this past year, you saw the fire blazing out on the labyrinth, and you saw how it sparked the Paschal candle and how it sparked our Easter joy. Just some fuel and some salt for the flames to dance upon.

That’s the amazing thing about salt: sort of like the burning bush that Moses encounters, or the three young men who survive the fire in the Book of Daniel, salt can burn and burn and not be consumed. It is a catalytic agent, which, chemically speaking, means that it affects the rate at which the fuel is consumed. The salt is stable and strong, and so it allows the flame to burn long and hot and steady rather than just flaring up and disappearing in a moment. 

This is very useful for Paschal fires, but also for other things. You see, in 1st century Middle Eastern cultures, among other places, this same principle was employed in the earthen ovens used to make bread: salt would be placed on the bottom, topped by fuel (which in that time was usually dried animal dung) and then lit to produce an intense, consistent heat for baking. 

And it’s true that salt was also used for preserving food, but in a society that had very little access to meat, it was actually this use as a catlytic agent in the earthen oven that was the most prevalent in the daily lives of common people. Over time, if the salt became mixed with dirt or other materials that decreased its ability to help the fire burn, it would be discarded for a fresh supply. 

And so now, I invite you to listen again to that moment when Jesus says, You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.

The first time I learned about the connection between salt and the earthen oven, it was like hearing that famous passage from the Gospel for the first time. Especially when you realize that the Greek word for “earth” that Matthew uses here is drawn from a Hebrew word that elsewhere in the Bible means not just the earth, the ground, the land but literally the earthen oven, the furnace.

And so some Biblical scholars who have made this connection argue that a more accurate rendering of the passage could be:

You are the salt of the earthen oven; but if salt has lost its saltiness, (that is, its ability to catalyze), how can it be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.

In other words: in your place and time, here and now, you, the disciples of Jesus, are the catalysts of the flame of God’s Spirit. This is what you are. This is what God made you to be: salt to bear the heat, salt to sustain the fire of love, to allow it to burn in you and through you with the Divine promise that it will not consume you and it will not destroy you, for to bear this flame of love is your God-given purpose on this earth.

You are the salt of the earthen oven. And the world will be warmed and fed and illuminated by the holy fire you carry, by the brightness of God’s light that encircles you.

And I know that there are other symbolic layers to the image of salt, too, but if we take this interpretation to heart, then it suggests that being salt, being light, being disciples of Jesus, is not so much about preservation—which is, in essence, the slowing down of transformation—but about sustaining the transformative process: giving ourselves over to that ever-emerging fire, that blazing brightness we refer to as God’s Kingdom. 

We are salt when we let our selves and souls and bodies nourish the flame of love and help it to burn long and slow and steady down through the ages. We are salt when we turn our insitutions and our societies, like that earthen oven, into places where there is food and warmth and safety for everyone; where the lonely and the lost and the hungry gather in around the hearth; where our daily bread is found until that day when the true feast that God is preparing for us–the bread of heaven, the bread of life–is ready at last. 

And so if we strive to follow our Lord’s counsel, if we long to be the salt and light he tells us that we are, then we must ask ourselves: when and where do I feel on fire with purpose and joy? What thing have I been given to do, big or small, that stirs up a sense of warmth and light within me and around me? 

Or, if we’re not quite sure of that yet, then ask, what inspires me in the lives of others, those in my life or in the history of our faith, who have clearly been set ablaze with God’s love? Whatever it is—a creative pursuit, an act of service, a cause for justice and peace, a conversation with a neighbor, a small gift offered in love, a dedication to prayer—focus on these things, make note of them, and consider deepening your practice of them as we begin to approach our season of Lenten reflection and devotion.

Even now, in the deep chill of winter, long before the salt and fuel are mixed and the Paschal flame is lit anew, we can still light up the world. We can still be the source of brightness and the providers of nourishment. 

For if we are the salt of the oven, scattered gently down upon the earth by our Creator, baptized with fire and the Holy Spirit, then we have but one mission: to keep the flame burning for as long as we can; to nourish the world with our love; and to let our Alleluias and our Amens rise up like ember and smoke and the scent of baking bread: the spark of eternity, the scent of heaven, the taste of home. 

For more on the scholarship behind this sermon, visit: https://www.ajol.info/index.php/hts/article/view/70848/59805

Fisherman: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on January 22, 2023 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 14:12-23.

And Jesus said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.”

My grandpa, like any person born and raised in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, loved to go fishing. And in particular he loved to go ice-fishing.

If you are not among the hardy (foolhardy?) souls who have tried this pastime, maybe you can still picture it: a frozen lake in the dead of winter, all sentient life wisely hibernating or hunkered down in a warm place. Except for the intrepid ice-fishers, who drag their shacks and their camp chairs out onto the quiet snow-blown expanse to drill holes in the ice and to sit—in bitter cold and in pensive expectation—waiting for a bite. 

I confess, the few times I went out ice-fishing with my family as a kid, I didn’t get it. I was bored and restless—and cold! I didn’t understand why anyone would willingly do this for fun, especially when you could just get fish at the grocery store. But then, I was a kid who grew up mostly in cities and in California sunshine, and the lake water didn’t run in my veins like it did for my grandpa. The stoic beauty of the ice-fisherman’s reverie was lost on me.

He would sit out on the ice, munching on a sandwich, sipping coffee from a thermos, contemplating the tree line, the sky, maybe his place in the universe; I was never quite sure. Sometimes he’d catch something, often he wouldn’t. He never seemed to mind. And truth be told, I think he liked the ritual of the trip to the lake—its sensations and its silences—just as much, if not more so, than bringing home a catch. 

Now you still aren’t likely to find me out on a frozen lake these days, but as I look back, I have come to appreciate not only the spare beauty my grandpa found in ice-fishing, but also how his going out onto the ice was, in many ways, an encapsulation of who he was in the rest of his life. The quiet and the deliberative spaciousness of ice fishing were the same qualities he evoked most other days, with his family and with his neighbors and friends. 

He had his hot-tempered moments, but for the most part he moved through the world with a gentle attentiveness to things and to people: content to be who he was, where he was, patient, not obsessed with the elusive big catch of one sort or another that many of us chase after. Maybe he had always been that way. Or maybe all those years of ice-fishing helped make him that way. I’m not sure, but I do know that it was a part of him.

My grandpa and his ice-fishing have been on my mind this week, of course, because Jesus, in calling the first disciples, finds a handful of fishermen by the Sea of Galilee and invites them, in a clever turn of phrase, to “fish for people” instead. It’s a beloved scene in the Gospels, but oftentimes I think we focus so much on the abruptness of the disciples’ response—how they seem to drop everything and follow Jesus on the spot—that we don’t spend a lot of time pondering what they were doing beforehand: namely, their original vocation as fishermen. I wonder, though, why Jesus singles them out, these men on the shore, among all the other people he might have invited into his circle. 

Was Jesus calling them just because they happened to be there, without regard for their previous life experience? Was he, in effect, asking them to become someone entirely new, or did he see some particular potential in these men with their nets and their boats and their weather-beaten faces?

Given who Jesus is, I like to think he saw something already formed in them after a lifetime of traversing open waters and mending things that are frayed and waiting, day after day, with persistent hope for an unseen harvest from the deep. I like to think he saw something that made these fishermen exactly the right people for the journey that was about to unfold.

Because I believe that who we are and what we have done with our lives, no matter how simple or quiet or humble, matters to God. It matters in the Kingdom of God. 

In the same way that my grandpa’s ice fishing and the rest of his life seemed to mutually inform one another, perhaps these Galilean fishermen already had what Jesus needed them to have as future apostles. Maybe their decision to follow him, as dramatic and abrupt as it seems, was not, in fact, a clean break from their past. It was not a rejection of who they had been, a rinsing off of the smell of fish and mud, but an embrace of what these things had taught them—it was the decision to trust that their lives, their skills, and their gifts might be brought forth in a new way for the purposes of God. 

Maybe Jesus did not call them away from themselves and their original vocation, but deeper into those things. For he did not say follow me and I will make you something other, something better than a fisherman, but follow me, and I will make you fishers of people. In other words, I will make you the fullness of who you already are.

And so those fisherman had the courage to follow him away from the shore because they knew that they had what they needed within them; they were already enough. And if that is so, then perhaps we have what we need, too, perhaps we are already enough for wherever God is calling us to go. Not running away from ourselves but going deeper into ourselves so that we might embody what God created us to be.

And I know all of us, myself included, have parts of ourselves, parts of our story, parts of our personality, parts of our past, that feel worthless, parts we would just as soon leave behind. The embarrassments that enmesh us in a net of shame. The regrets that linger on us like the scent of lake water. The things that prevent us from believing we have anything of value to offer. 

But Jesus is standing there, seeing all of it, knowing all of it, and he is saying, yes, you. I’ve been looking for someone just like you. Follow me. Follow me as you are. Follow me with what you have, no matter how great or small. Fishermen, follow me. Tax collectors, follow me. Saints and sinners, follow me. The mighty and the lowly; the famous and the forgotten; everyone, follow me— for everyone is needed where we’re going. And all that you have been and known and done will be gathered in and it will be made purposeful, it will be made beautiful by my love. It will be more than enough. 

That, in the end, is what I learned from my grandpa and how his quiet, patient days fishing on the ice spilled over into his quiet, patient life: to trust in the sufficiency of who you are; of what you love; of what you know. Trust it to guide you, with God’s help, into what you do not yet know. Trust that God is already at work in the small things of daily life, shaping you for the vast and timeless purposes that only God can truly understand. 

And regardless of whether it is ice-fishing or mending nets on the shore of Galilee or raising your kids or caring for your neighbor or striving for your daily bread, whatever it is that has formed you into who you are today, trust that you are ready to respond when Jesus calls you. You are ready and able, not in spite of your life but because of it, because every life has potential, every one of us shimmers with the possibility of God’s glory, like ice glittering in the sun. 

Follow me, Jesus says, and I will make you fish for people.

So follow him. And let him show you the blessedness of who you can still be. The blessedness of who you already are.

The Road Taken: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord, January 8, 2023 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 3:13-17.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Even if you are not a fan of poetry, I suspect you’ve probably heard this verse, from Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” It has been passed down by generations of readers, and that last line about the road less traveled is often used as a sort of poetic motto by those who are eager to pursue meaningful, purposeful, adventurous lives. 

Now, I don’t want to be a total downer this soon into a promising new year, but if you’ve ever been inspired by this verse’s invitation to take the road less traveled and chart a singular, unconventional course through life, I am about to ruin it for you. 

Because if you read the entire poem very closely and look into the backstory of its composition, it becomes clear that Frost was being ironic. His point, in fact, is not that there is one blessed byway for the adventurous and a boring one for the rest of us, but that both of the roads diverging in the wood are, in fact, comparable. The narrator of the poem, no matter how they choose to recall it later, is probably not fundamentally changed by the particular road chosen. Frost, with his typically wry sensibility, is subtly poking fun at our anguish and indecision over the choices we make and the illusion that there is one perfect course to take through life—he does this so subtly in fact that it’s easy to miss! But now you know. Sorry.

But Frost wanted to challenge us with this not because he was a nihilist, not to suggest that the paths we take in life are meaningless, but to suggest the opposite, something hopeful—that meaning is found on every path.  Frost, like many poets, saw that true significance is found in the actuality, the givenness of the world around us—that what is good and true is available everywhere, no matter which road we have chosen.

And I, for one, am actually relieved that this is what the poem is getting at, because there have been many times in my life when I grieved the roads not taken—the sense that I had missed some big opportunity or make some irreversible blunder into the weeds. As one moves farther and farther through life, down whatever path we’re on, it’s all too easy to be consumed by what-ifs: what if I had gone there instead? What if I had stayed there just a bit longer? What if I had said yes to that? What if I had said no to that?

It’s natural to wonder such things, but what-ifs can also stop us in our tracks, prevent us from embracing the reality of whatever is in front of us right now. And, as Frost might want to remind us, whatever is in front of us is itself sufficiently meaningful. The journey we are actually on is a good one, because it is real, it is what we have chosen. 

I’ve been thinking about all of this—of roads diverging and life’s purposes—because today we celebrate the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord, and however else we might interpret or understand Jesus’ baptism, it was indeed a pivotal decision in his own journey through the world. Just a couple of weeks ago we honored his birth, and now we observe him as a grown man, setting out with the song of the road on his lips and the fire of heaven in his eyes. “Let it be so now,” he insists to John the Baptist as he prepares to enter the River Jordan. “It is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” He is eager to begin, eager to go wherever the Spirit-wind of God is blowing. 

And I wonder, in this moment, sensing in himself the need to fulfill some deep and all-consuming purpose, did Jesus ever ask himself, “what if?” Did he ever consider taking another path? To stay in Nazareth, perhaps, and live a quiet life? Go to Jerusalem straight away and try to make it big there? Or did he worry, at the age of 30 or so (not considered all that young in his time and place) that maybe he had already missed his chance to do his Father’s work? Perhaps. 

But in this moment, in his baptism, no matter what else has come before, we see him make a commitment to the path that he is on. As he goes into those waters, he is saying, whatever this life is, whatever this journey is, whatever this road is, I choose it. I will love it. I will follow it to the end. No more what-ifs. Here I am, Lord. And here I am—the Lord. 

And then he emerges from the river, and heaven rejoices that he has said yes, that he has chosen. For this is what heaven always does—rejoice—when we choose to love what is in front of us. 

And this is what Jesus’ baptism—and our own baptism—invite us into: a life that always chooses love for whatever, whoever comes into our path. A life that isn’t haunted by the roads not taken, but a life that says, instead, this place where I stand is good. And even if it’s not what I imagined, this place where I stand is still full of possibility, it is a place where I might yet “fulfill all righteousness.” For this place is beloved of God, and therefore I will make this place, this life, this path my own beloved, too. I will no longer be distracted by roads never traveled, I will no longer be consumed by what-ifs and whys but I will instead throw my arms open, still bathed in those baptismal waters, still drenched in God’s love, and I will say, “what now? What next? What might I do here, on this road, in order to truly live?”

For what Frost implied, and what God knows, and what Jesus demonstrates is clear: there is no road you can take, no road you have taken before, that will ever remove you from the landscape of God’s Kingdom or the realm of God’s Spirit. Wherever you go–and even if you have stumbled along the way, as we all do–if you move through this world with love and compassion and a thirst for righteousness, you are not lost. For in the end it is not the road we travel that matters most, but the heart of the one who travels upon it.

So wherever you find yourself today, in this new year—whatever has come before, whatever might lie ahead—know that God, through your baptism, invites you into the fullness of life right here, right now; the fullness of life that Jesus embraced.

And when you do come to a fork in the road, make your choice, but remember that God will travel with you wherever you go. God’s mercy will surround your path like falling leaves, God’s peace will be the ground under your feet, and God’s Son—the song of the road on his lips, the fire of heaven in his eyes—will greet you at the end of your journey.

And on that day, “ages and ages hence,” when there is no more sighing, may we add our own words to that famous verse, saying, instead:

Two roads diverged in a wood

And I—

I saw my Lord would never leave my side

—and that has made all the difference.