Sedimentary: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, August 23, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 16:13-20, the confession of St. Peter.

My best friend, Laura, whom I met at college, was a double major in two very disparate fields: theater and geology. That’s a combination that I have never encountered in someone neither before nor since. 

We met through the theater side of things, and I’ll admit, whenever geology would come up in conversation my brain would just sort of power down. I am sure it’s a fascinating discipline, but the sciences were never my strength. As Paul says in Romans today, we are each given different gifts and callings in this world, and geology was definitely not mine.

Nevertheless, one thing that I do happen to recall about geology is that there are three different types of rock on this planet—each one shaped by different natural forces and with different characteristics. There are metamorphic rocks like marble and there are igneous rocks like lava rock and then, finally, there is sedimentary rock, which is the type of rock that’s on my mind this week. This is the only time I can recall rock types having been on my mind, but God is full of surprises. So stick with me on this.

Sedimentary rock, as best I can summarize, is the type of rock that’s made up of various pieces of things—smaller bits of other rocks and sand and minerals and even bones—that, over time, get pressurized and cemented into one big slab. Limestone is like this, as is sandstone. You’ll find fossils in this type of rock, and sometimes those stratified bands of color that tell the story of the accumulation of the aeons, like in the Grand Canyon.

And there is this sort of fascinating paradox about sedimentary rock. It can be the stuff of mountains and show up in these incredibly large and strong formations, but among the three types of rock, it is the most easily broken. It erodes and it wears down and it can be carved and formed by the elements or, sometimes, by human hands.

If you have ever seem images of the ancient stone city of Petra in Jordan, you can see how a whole world was delicately carved into sedimentary sandstone cliff faces. Beautiful and strong and yet breakable. Hold onto that for a minute. 

Because in today’s Gospel passage, we also hear about a rock—the rock that is Simon, Son of Jonah. He confesses his understanding of Jesus as the Messiah and the Son of God. And in so doing, Simon is renamed by Jesus to be known at Peter, Petros in Greek, which means ‘rock.’ Upon this rock, Jesus says, upon you and the faith you embody, Jesus says, I will build my ekklesia, my community, my church. 

But what sort of rock is Peter? What sort of foundation is Jesus building upon here? Is it the cold and immovable force of metamorphic marble? Is it the the igneous crust of jagged, hardened lava rock? Some branches of Christianity might have you believe that it is—that our church is built to be something forceful and unblemished and immovable and unchanging. I suppose that can feel comforting in an uncertain world. 

But Peter—and we know this from the arc of his whole story—is not that kind of rock. Under pressure, he crumbles, he doubts and denies Jesus, he sinks in the raging waters, he is worn down by uncertainty and fear. 

Does his heart reach toward the heavens like a mountain peak striving toward the sun? Absolutely. But he is a complicated man, with layers of motivations and questions and cares comprising the sum total of his discipleship. His rock, if anything, is sedimentary. Beautiful and strong…and yet breakable. 

It just so happens, too, that in the scene we witness today, Jesus and the disciples are walking near Caesarea Philippi, an area characterized by high limestone cliffs, into which are carved ancient grottoes and niches once used for cultic worship. And so when Jesus says to Peter, you are Petros, you are rock, and upon this rock I will build my new movement of love and flesh and spirit and death and life—he is literally saying this in the shadow of sedimentary rock, a breakable rock, a beautiful and eternal and yet distinctly changeable rock. 

And yes, all of us who follow Jesus, all of us, too, will change and break; we too will be hollowed out by time and loss. We, too, will feel the sun break upon our brow and we, too, will know the deep darkness of the canyonlands. And all of this—all that we are and all that we will be and all that we can never be—all of this is exactly the type of rock that God chooses to build upon. 

I do not share any of this with you, friends, just to explore Jesus’ metaphors. I tell you this because I think it’s deeply reassuring good news that ours is a church, a community, a way of life built upon this type of rock. 

Because how many times have you and I broken apart? How many times, like Peter, have we crumbled, despite our best intentions? How many times have we set out to get truly right with God and neighbor only to fall back into the same old traps of complacency or resentment or fear? How many times have I been reminded that no matter how hard I try, we are all bound to erode and wear down and become something other than what we imagined we’d become?

And whenever that happens, I usually lament that I am not carved from marble, that I am not unblemished and cool and collected and unbreakable. I lament that little pebbles of regret fall from my broken edges. I am embarrassed that tears and time have carved gullies on my face. 

But then, in this gospel story, I see Jesus looking at poor, hapless Peter and at poor, hapless you and me, with all our layers and deep cracks, and I hear Jesus say:

On you I will build my church. I choose no other. I choose you precisely because you can break and change. I choose you because I am going to take all those broken pieces and create a different thing. I do not desire cold perfection, I desire the ongoing process of your creation. I desire the kind of faith that can fall apart and find a way to reshape itself. I desire to carve into you with my Spirit and create a whole new world within you. 

So stop wishing that you were perfect. Let go of perfect. Stop thinking that you have to have God all figured out. Let go of figuring it all out. Peter certainly didn’t have it figured out. He confessed his faith on fumbling lips and he tried and he failed and he just kept going, with love in his heart and Jesus in his sights. And that was more than enough. That was enough to build a church upon. It still is.

I am so glad that, in a place like St. Anne, following Jesus looks more like that and less like stone-cold-certainty. I am grateful for the sort of church into which we can carve out space enough for all sorts of people, all sorts of questions and discoveries, all sorts of mistakes and reconciliations. I can’t speak for other folks, but that is the sort of rock I want to help Jesus build upon. That is the sort of church I want to live in.

I suspect that none of this was on Laura’s geology exams. But knowledge has a funny way of coming back around and helping us out. So thanks, Laura, if you hear this. 

And thank you, Jesus, for choosing imperfect Peter as your type of rock, and for choosing all of us who have come after him. Thank you for choosing to love this whole, beautiful, strong, breakable world. 

Lord, we are still becoming whatever comes from the melding of time and broken pieces and bones and tears and love and loss and memory and hope and grace. We are still becoming that. 

And our confession, and our prayer, through the accumulation of the aeons is ever the same: 

You are the Messiah. The Son of the Living God. 

Make of us what you will. 

The God of Holy Interruptions: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, August 17, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 15:21-28, Jesus’ encounter with the Canaanite woman.

You know that saying, “life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans”? I’ve also found it to be true that encountering God is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. 

One day in Fort Wayne, Indiana, not long after I was ordained as a priest, it was lunchtime and I wanted one thing and one thing only: Arby’s. Now, I don’t really go to Arby’s very often, but on this particular day I was seized with a powerful craving for curly fries and one of those huge roast beef sandwiches with horsey sauce. I am not ashamed to admit this!

Now, Arby’s wasn’t too far from that church, so I decided I’d just walk over there. I remember, though, that I was in a bit of a hurry—I had some meetings that afternoon. But in any event, as I walked into the parking lot, heading toward the front door, dreaming of that roast beef sandwich, I ran into a man who we’ll call “Jim.” Jim was standing there in the middle of the  Arby’s parking lot, rail thin and his clothing worn and dirty, with a big grin on his face. 

“Hello Father!” he said. “Boy, am I glad to see you!” Now, I had never met Jim before, but he seemed to know me—maybe the collar made me a familiar figure in his eyes. In any event, I stopped to talk to him, though I will confess to you that I had to force myself to slow down and pivot from my single-minded pursuit of lunch. Because Jim clearly wanted to talk.

And boy did he talk. In the span of more than a few minutes, I learned more than I could have ever imagined about Jim’s life and his background and what had led him to sleep in a tent in a park not too far from downtown, as he was doing in those days. 

He was not in a good way—his health was poor and he couldn’t find regular shelter and he said there were mean people out on the streets sometimes—but he was nonetheless an enthusiastic and smiling sort of guy. He asked me to pray with him, which I did, and he asked if I could help him buy some lunch, which I did, and then he went on his way. And it’s funny, I’m sure I eventually ate that roast beef sandwich, but I don’t really remember it clearly. Jim was the reason I had walked to Arby’s that day.

This was not the last time that I saw him—not by a long shot. Over the course of my four years in Fort Wayne, I got to know him very, very well. He came to Sunday services pretty regularly, both to ask for a little help and to receive Communion at the altar rail. We cheered him on when he got a job and a place to stay and I listened and prayed with him when he lost that job because of various personal struggles. 

One Sunday we baptized Jim, and I was one of his sponsors. Oh, how he smiled that day. He was a complicated person: simultaneously happy, frustrating, determined, sweet-natured, unpredictable, and always, always showing up at church right when I was trying to work on something else. But I am so glad he found me that day in the Arby’s parking lot and kept showing up.

Because the thing is—and this is as true for those of us who wear collars as anyone else—we can too easily miss God when God shows up. Because so many of us are taught what sacred things are supposed to look and feel like: beautiful, grand, whole, full, safe, pleasant. The Kingdom we dream of is one populated by healthy people and uncomplicated pleasures. 

And yet, the utter strangeness of the way of Jesus is that God comes to us very differently. God comes to us, yes, God is all around us, but more often than not it is in an Arby’s parking lot on a Tuesday afternoon when we were not looking for him. Our God is a God of holy interruptions more than of best laid plans. And the sooner we realize this, the sooner we become attentive to this, the more our lives will be changed. 

Today’s story from Matthew, which builds on the ones we’ve heard over the past couple of weeks, is a perfect example. Because this God of Holy Interruptions even comes to Jesus, who is already God, who already knows a lot about interrupting the assumptions of others. 

Jesus did so when he fed the 5,000 with just a little bit of food and he did so when he met the disciples, walking in the middle of the stormy lake. And yet, today, it is Jesus who is interrupted. It is Jesus to whom the surprising nature of Divine truth is revealed. And this time, this God of Holy Interruptions show up in the form of a Canaanite woman. 

I don’t mean she is an angel in disguise, exactly. I just mean God showed up in her. We don’t hear much about her backstory, but somehow I imagine her a bit like Jim—standing in the middle of the city, thin and threadbare, desperate for help, and yet strangely bright and ebullient. Hello Lord! Boy, am I glad to see you!

Now, presumably Jesus had his mind on something more important than Arby’s, but nonetheless, he seems reluctant to slow down for this interruption. He has a clear vision of what his mission is—to first help Israel; to call his people back to the heart of God. It’s a good mission.

But this Canaanite woman, outside the fold of Israel, has other ideas in mind. She needs help now, not on some far off day. And she is willing to go toe to toe with Jesus, willing to risk ridicule or rejection for the sake of her daughter, willing to risk it because when you love that deeply you become bold. You become brave. 

And Jesus—who has already been preaching and teaching about the boldness and the bravery of a life made urgent by the hunger for love and mercy—well, he suddenly sees his own teaching staring back at him. Just not, perhaps, in the way he expected. 

When I think of this Canaanite woman, I can’t help but think of a different passage we didn’t hear today—that of Lady Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs. She is another embodiment of God, crying out in the marketplace of the city. She says,

To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all who live…Hear, for I will speak noble things, and from my lips will come what is right, for my mouth will utter truth. 

I may be going out on a limb, but I think that Jesus met Lady Wisdom in the city that day. I think he saw divine truth shining from the face of a determined mother willing to savor even just the crumbs of heaven. I think she reminded him that Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

And I think she comes to all of us, this Lady Wisdom, often as a holy interruption, to rouse us from our daily sleepwalking, to attune us to the opportunities right in front of us to step within the gates of the real kingdom of God. It is not just far off somewhere else, somewhere pretty. It is very near—as near as an Arby’s parking lot, or wherever someone calls you back to the task of loving whoever or whatever is in front of you. 

Have you ever been interrupted, friends? Have you ever found your carefully laid plans thrown off course? It can be hard, and even heartbreaking. But if it happens, when it happens, still try and look for the God of Holy Interruptions. Look for her crying out in the marketplace. Look for him grinning at you with a strange light in his eyes. And if the plans you made were not to be, then so be it. Perhaps the interruption will be your new beginning instead.

Since moving away a few years ago, I don’t know what has become of Jim. I pray that, wherever he is, he remembers that he is loved, that he was baptized as a beloved child of God, and that Jesus walks with him always. 

And although I can’t necessarily tell him face to face, I hope he knows that his holy interruptions were, for me, an encounter with grace. That they fed me in a way that no roast beef sandwich ever could. And that he taught me to open my eyes a bit wider, to walk a bit slower, and to be ready for Wisdom when she appears, even while I am busy making other plans. 

And when she does appear, now I’ll know exactly what to say:

Hello, God! Boy, am I glad to see you.

Here, Here: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, August 9 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 14:22-33.

About halfway across the lake, I knew we should never have gotten into the boat. 

It was late December, and my mom and I were traveling through the mountain highlands of Guatemala, where she was living at the time, teaching in an international school in the capital city. Just after Christmas, we’d made the popular trip up to Lake Atitlán, one of the most beautiful lakes in the world. Its deep waters are flanked by precipitously high volcanic mountainsides, and there are small villages sprinkled along the shore, and one afternoon we found ourselves needing to cross over to the other side. 

And so we got into the boat. 

It was a lancha, a small motorboat used regularly as a water taxi across the lake since the mountain roads are narrow and dangerous in that area. And at first, the trip was lovely—the broad blue water, the high clouds and the breeze and the green slopes arcing upward into the vault of the sky.

But somewhere about halfway across, far too late to turn back, the choppy waves started to turn into swells, and the boat was tossed around and water started coming over the low sides, and I realized three things at once. 

First, we were the only two passengers on this boat, when usually they should be packed with people. Second, I saw no lifejackets. And third, as I looked around us across the wide, turbulent waters, there were no other boats making the crossing. We were alone. And the landscape that had looked beautiful and exciting just a few minutes prior was suddenly wild and terrible and we were very, very small upon it. 

If you’ve ever had a moment where you had to stare your own mortality in the face, perhaps you can imagine the hollow-in-your-belly, eyes-wide-open feeling that hits you when there is no illusion of safety left to hide behind, and there is only you and this moment and the terrible, fearsome power of being alive and wanting to stay that way.

And if you can imagine this, then you can also imagine what the disciples are going through this morning in our Gospel reading. 

Because they are in their own little lancha, crossing to the other side of a stormy lake. We focus a lot on Peter’s part, but we shouldn’t skip past that initial, understandable feeling of terror as the waves tossed them around in the boat. We might even wonder whether they felt a little betrayed—didn’t Jesus tell them to make this crossing? Why would he send them out and leave them alone in this dangerous place?

It is the perplexity that comes when we realize a godly life is no guarantee of a comfortable life. 

Because ultimately, friends—and you probably don’t need me to tell you this—we can all be very good little boys and girls, we can follow all the Lord’s commandments, and yet we will all end up in the lancha at some point in our lives—we all find ourselves in a moment when the waves are high and the sides of the boat are low and we forgot our lifejacket somewhere and it is far too late to turn back. 

It may come in the form of a death or a divorce or a diagnosis or simply a sense of lostness, loneliness or regret. But we all end up there eventually. As do communities and countries, in their own cycles of flourishing and floundering. We cannot evade the storm forever. We pray to God, lead us not into temptation, but oh, the tempests still come of their own accord. 

And when they do come…this is where a lot of popular takes on Christian theology sort of fall apart for me. 

Have you ever been in the middle of a really hard moment or season of your life and heard it said: don’t worry! Just have more faith! Just pray a little harder! God won’t give you more than you can take! And they might even cite Gospel stories like today’s. You of little faith, why did you doubt?

It’s the spiritual equivalent of someone giving you a pat on the head and saying “there, there.” There, there, you’re overreacting. There, there, everything works out for the best. There, there, don’t rock the boat. Don’t disturb the peace for the rest of us, those of us who are trying really hard to pretend the storms only come for somebody else. There, there. 

I don’t have much use for that type of Christian comfort. 

Because our story today indicates something far more profound than a pat on the head. In stories like this, God does not say, there, there. No, to the disciples, Jesus says, here, here. He says I am here, here with you, in the midst of the worst. I am here, here, precisely where you didn’t want to end up. I am here, when the waves are too high and your heart is breaking and you have nothing left to hide behind. I am here, here, right here, and I am asking you to be here with me, too. 

As we mature, we come to see that entering the storm is not an impediment to following Jesus. It is a requirement of following Jesus.

Because faith is about looking hard at life and choosing to revere its often frightening beauty. It’s about holding onto each other through the rise and fall of the times. Faith is about facing the darkness and speaking peace into it. It is about standing in the storms we prayed would never come and still whispering words of trust on our trembling lips. 

And when we do…here, here, God says. Life and death and heaven and earth are here, here, now. Come out and stand here with me.

Why? What does it do for us?

Well, for one, it makes us vividly grateful. Some of the times I have felt closest to God and neighbor were not the good times, but the tough ones. Facing the storm also makes us, hopefully, less petty and critical of one another, a bit gentler with them and with ourselves, too, because we realize that we are all just in this little lancha together, making our way through the waves. 

And hopefully that helps us get clear on the things that matter most and choosing them, day by day. The things that Jesus constantly shows us: Mercy. Compassion. Ethical clarity. Charity of heart and generosity of spirit. Careful discernment and bold conviction that love is the only truly saving power there is. These are virtues born of the storms of life, not the avoidance of them. Here, here, where it is indeed possible to sink beneath the waves, is the only place you can learn them. 

You might wonder why I haven’t dwelt much on the fact that Jesus walks on water. That’s usually the headline of this story. But it can be a stumbling block, too, because I think we tend to equate walking on water with somehow transcending the problems and the limitations of this life and thinking that’s what Christian life is about—that having “enough” faith will allow us to escape the waves, to never sink.

But if you hear nothing else today, I need you to hear this. I need you to remember something important about Jesus. Something radical and transformational in my understanding of him. Something that is the opposite of a pat on the head and a “there, there” and a blithe dismissal of the storm.

It is this: Jesus does sink beneath the waves. Not here, but soon, he sinks. On the Cross, amid the tempest of our brokenness and rage, he willingly sinks. 

He surrenders to the storm. He gives himself over to the chaos and descends down, down, into the deepest places of fear and sorrow. He goes down, down, down…all so that he can say to you, here, here. 

Oh yes, even here, I am here. There is nowhere I will not go for you, to be with you, to find you, to bring you back, even from the very bottom. 

Walking on water is a wonder. But you of little faith, why did you doubt that even if you do sink, I will be there. Wherever you go, I am already with you.

As for my Guatemala story, you can guess the ending—we made it to the other side. The lancha managed to ride the swells and we got off, seasick and teary-eyed, weak-kneed and deliriously grateful. The meal we ate that night was, perhaps, the most joyful meal I ever experienced, because it tasted like life. 

And that, when you think on it, is the journey for us on this Jesus-shaped path. 

We face death, and we taste life. 

We huddle together among the waves and we stumble, wide-eyed, onto the shore. 

We are passengers on the ship of grace, you and I, and some days we have enough faith and many days we have not nearly enough, but somehow, somehow, God keeps showing up anyway. 

And he says, always, the same thing. The one true thing that can always be said of God and by God, no matter how high the waves get:

Here, here. I am here. 

On Judgment, And Strawberries: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, July 19, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43.

This morning I am going to offer you a disclaimer right up front: this is a sermon about God’s judgment.

Judgment is not a word we enjoy hearing very much, and many of us, perhaps, came to a church like St. Anne because we were exhausted by hearing about it too much in other faith communities. Believe me, I get that. But before you run for the exits, stick with me for a minute. Because today I am hoping we can reengage the idea of judgment rather than run from it. 

And in order to do that, first I need to tell you about picking strawberries. 

Just like the 4th of July rituals I described a couple weeks ago, another certainty of summer in rural Michigan is strawberry picking. Every year, on some particular July morning, my grandpa would announce it was time to go out to get our annual haul of berries for the many pies and jams and strawberry shortcakes that would soon fill the kitchen.

And so a bunch of us, young and old, would load into the pickup truck with visions of strawberry pie in our heads and travel way out past town, down an old country road to Kudwa’s strawberry farm. It was an old family farm with thousands of ripe berries beckoning from the low-growing plants just waiting to be plucked up into our buckets.

Now I was a city kid and didn’t really know much about how things grow, but I find you don’t have to be an expert to recognize a good strawberry. The big, fat red ones—into the bucket! The small, green ones, or the mushy overripe ones, you leave behind for some future berry picker or for the deer. And did a few especially perfect looking strawberries get popped in my mouth on the sly? Absolutely!

The point is that, when you’re strawberry picking, you must judge between which ones are worth it and which are not. And that type of judgement is a useful, necessary thing. It’s how we sort through all kinds of matters in this life. 

And so, when it comes to talk of God’s judgment in Scripture, rather than avoid it, I want you to hold onto that image of the strawberry patch, where “judgment” is not indiscriminate condemnation but careful discernment. Judgment is God saying, this over here is good and necessary and life-giving. And this other thing over here is not. 

I think we make a great error in the church if we forego any discussion of God’s judgment in our well-meant attempt to be welcoming and loving people. I think we miss out on the particular type of ethical clarity that God is asking us to speak and to practice as followers of Jesus. We say love God and love our neighbor, always, yes, and we push back against the ways judgment is misused to demonize whole groups of people, but it remains that there are things in this world that are good and sweet and nourishing, and those that are best left behind. And in following Jesus we are expected to get clear about which is which. 

So which is which? That is the question. Unlike strawberry picking, it gets tricky.

I bring all of this to your attention this morning because of our Gospel passage from Matthew, where Jesus regales us with yet another agricultural parable. This time it’s about wheat and weeds and how they spring up together in the same field. Somewhat surprisingly, the owner of the wheat fields says, just let the weeds grow and someday it will all be sorted out at the harvest. 

Now there is a lot that can be taken from this, but in its simplest terms, this parable is about God’s capacity for judgment. Because at any given time there is both good and evil in the world and a judgment—a choice—between them must be made. In nearly every situation we’ll ever experience, if we wish to live fully and well, we have to discern between what is life-giving and what is not. 

The problem is that often we mere mortals can get confused by these choices, and overwhelmed by having to constantly navigate the thicket of wheat and weeds growing up all around us.

People get all mixed up and think that we should judge according to our biases and cultural norms or our personal points of view or our political allegiances.  That type of judgment rarely ends well. We end up standing lost amid the fields, amid the ruins of our former certainties, crying out for clarity.

But thankfully God is not lost. God does not get confused. And God is not overwhelmed. God has always been crystal clear about what leads to abundant life and what does not. 

God has been clear about this since that first fruit was picked from the tree in Eden, and God is clear about it in the words of the prophets, and God is clear about it, above all, in Jesus, the “first fruits” of the resurrection, as Paul calls him. 

And this is why we need God—we have always needed God—to come and help us see, and to follow, and to persist in the truth of his capacity for judgment, not ours. In the “Te Deum,” one of the most ancient Christian hymns, we sing to Christ:

We believe that you will come and be our judge.
    Come then, Lord, and help your people.
   

And yet you might still be wondering, how do we tell which is which? What is the ultimate criteria of Jesus’ judgment—that ancient and eternal clarity of God which can tell the good from the bad, the right from the wrong, the sweet fruit from the bitter? What does he see as the one true measure of things that we struggle to see?

Friends, I suspect you actually already know the answer. It is love. Love is the fundamental criteria of God’s judgment—of his sorting between what will last and what is best let go.

And no matter the choice you must make in any particular situation in your life, if you claim to follow Jesus, if you claim Jesus as your judge, then love is the side you must be on. 

Love—by which I mean a self-giving, goodwill-seeking, justice-building, peace-making, reconciliation-building, fault-admitting, circle-widening, inclusion-orienting, humility-accepting, mercy-sharing, good-humor-celebrating, creation-honoring, reverence-offering, sweet-summer-berry-picking kind of love—this love, God says, time and again, is the only choice worth making. 

And if that’s what we’re talking about when we talk about God’s judgment—and make no mistake, in this place we are—then I am going against the Episcopal grain, I suppose, friends, because I WELCOME God’s judgment. I welcome God’s enduring ability to tell me what is worthwhile in those moments when I am afraid or have forgotten. 

In this world where the weeds are grown so high, I cry out for that good judgment, because I believe in the goodness of God, the love of God, the generosity and the beauty of God, and I WANT the world to be held accountable to generosity and beauty and love and goodness. 

In fact I refuse to settle for a world in which nobody can separate what is life-giving from life-degrading and where anything is ok simply because someone can get away with it. That’s not any kind of good news at all, and I am hungry for Good News. Hungrier for it, even, than strawberry pie, and that’s saying something!

So if we are anything at all, let us be a community where we are not afraid to speak of God’s judgment—God’s clear judgment between love and its many impostors, God’s wise judgment between those who build up and those who tear down, God’s saving judgment between the sweet and the bitter fruits of this life. 

Let us be an Episcopal church who is unafraid to say that anything less than a spacious and generous and inclusive love is, in fact, unacceptable in the kingdom of God. Let us be a people who, in word and action, demonstrate that we do indeed know the difference between truth and a lie, and we are choosing, Lord help us, we are choosing love’s truth.

Because, as former Presiding Bishop Michael Curry often says, “if it’s not about love it’s not about God.” And that’s the sort of judgment call I am glad to hear proclaimed. 

As far as I know, that strawberry farm in Michigan is long gone. But oh, that summer harvest taught me some lasting things, and on a July morning like this I think we who gather here are still picking berries in our own sort of way —all of us down on our knees, working as one, reaching out for those sweet, perfect gifts. No confusion or fear, just clarity…and a hunger for the feast to come. 

And while I don’t claim to know the mind of God, as best I can judge…if that’s what we’re up to, it sounds pretty much like heaven. 

On Love of Country: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, July 5, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH on the weekend of the sesquicentennial of the United States. The lectionary texts cited are Zechariah 9:9-12 and Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30.

We talk a lot about love here on Sundays. But this weekend, for obvious reasons, I’m thinking about love of country and how we might honestly, faithfully talk about it.

When I was young, the 4th of July was my favorite holiday. I spent the summers in upper Michigan, and for the 4th we’d always go up to Marquette, on Lake Superior, where my aunt & cousin lived. We’d scramble for candy at the parade and then go to the annual international food festival right on the lakeshore, and we’d eat Ojibwe Fry Bread and spaghetti and Chinese food and snow cones and everything else you can think of as the fireworks bathed us in their star-spangled light. 

I loved the 4th back then because it was easy, and joyful, and, as a kid who hadn’t learned much of our country’s layered history, it was supremely uncomplicated. Just sparklers and warm July sunshine and the sense that this home of ours is a good and generous place.

That was many years ago now, and a lot has happened since then. These days, I know that the 4th of July lands a bit differently for some people. Not just because of contemporary politics, but because many of us have spent time wrestling with that complex history of ours. 

We’ve been listening more closely, in recent years, to all of the American stories: those of women, and of our indigenous neighbors, and our Black and Latino and Asian neighbors, and our LGBTQ+ neighbors, and our disabled neighbors, and our non-Christian neighbors, and all the other perspectives that didn’t always make the first round of the history books. 

That diversity was, of course, already part of the story–as hinted at by that international food festival on an American holiday–but now we are attempting to give those stories their full due. And we do this not in order to betray or dilute the American dream, as some might think, but as a fulfillment of that dream’s original intent: to be a nation, not of uniformity or self-congratulation, but one that is constantly in the process of becoming more fully itself. Constantly striving to live up to its own best hopes.

This is not easy work. And it’s not what I grasped as a naive little boy watching fireworks explode in the night sky. But, a quarter of a millennia on as a country, it is indeed still the work we have been given to do.

And, to make matters even more complex, you and I, of course, do this work not only as citizens or residents of the U.S., but as followers of Jesus. So we are constantly navigating the ways that these two identities—citizen and disciple—both overlap and are in tension with each other. 

To this end, in The Episcopal Church, we have an odd relationship with the 4th of July. You may notice, if you look through the Prayer Book, that Independence Day is noted as a major feast on our liturgical calendar—a legacy of our historical roots in the Church of England where faith and government were more closely intertwined. 

And yet most of us have been formed as citizens who value a clear separation between church and state. So this is a tricky path to navigate. We are asked to pray for our country, and to engage actively in the pursuit of its welfare, even as we are taught that our ultimate allegiance is to the God whose love and blessing and concern are not constrained by any national border.

There’s a lesson here. We are being invited to love our country without worshipping it. We are being called to love our country not because it is perfect, or singularly chosen by God, or unassailable in its history, but simply because it is the place where we have found ourselves knit together as one beautiful, messy, diverse assembly, forging a path toward our shared horizon. That alone makes it worthy of love.

But we are reminded in Scripture, time and again, that love and idolatry are not the same thing, and that true love—including for our country— embraces complexity, and prophetic criticism, and grief, and beauty, and lament. We are, like the prophet Zechariah says today, “prisoners of hope” for this land of ours—we struggle, and yet we dream.

I did not know this as a kid eating a snow cone. But now I know that, unless we can look up at those 4th of July fireworks with both joy in our hearts and tears in our eyes…with some peculiar and potent mixture of gratitude and longing in our hearts…until then, perhaps we have not fully learned how to engage this particular holiday as people of faith. 

I would also offfer, though, that while some of us may feel deep discomfort with contemporary trends to conflate Christian identity and civic identity, it would be a mistake for us to totally separate them either. If you ask me, we should not remove the 4th of July from our Prayer Book just because it makes some folks uncomfortable. We should not pretend that our faith has no bearing on public life and how we engage as citizens. It does.

God has always had a perspective on the social and political challenges of our times. Listen to those prophets. Listen to the Psalms. Listen to Jesus. 

Come to me, Jesus says in today’s Gospel. Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

We’ve heard these words many times before, but often we might receive them as a personal invitation to be consoled by God. I was struck this week, though, with the 4th of July approaching, by how similar Jesus’ words are to those from the verse by the poet Emma Lazarus which is affixed to the Statue of Liberty: Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Emma Lazarus was a Jewish poet, and I don’t know that she was drawing from the Gospels in her writing, but nonetheless the resemblance suggests something: that Jesus’ own words of rest and refuge are a social vision, not just a personal consolation. And so, if we are pondering how to navigate the narrow way between faith and patriotism, perhaps we should begin by trying to build a society that reflects the true values of our Lord: hospitality, charity, mercy, humility, concern for the least and the lost. 

Perhaps we should remember that Jesus invitation was especially for the burdened and beleaguered of his own time—people longing for liberation and safety and peace. And he was not just giving them a pat on the head and promising things will be ok once they die and go to heaven. He was saying, let’s start to live now like heaven is here on earth. Let’s create a new sort of home where everyone—everyone—has space to heal, to live, to thrive, to be, and to become. 

That vision, that notion of a true home, which we call the Kingdom of God, is not exclusive to the United States of America, but it should take root here, too. And so those who claim to follow Jesus in this country of ours, if they do anything, should be doing all they can to make that vision a reality, through peacemaking, and trust-building, and justice-seeking for all of our neighbors. All of them. 

In essence, if we could spend a little less time arguing over whether this is a “Christian nation” and just go about the work of actually being like Christ to one another in this nation—then, perhaps, we would finally see what Jesus was getting at. Maybe we would all find our rest, together.

It has been many years since I sat on that Lake Superior shore and felt like the world around me was uncomplicated. I miss those days. But now that I am grown, I still love the 4th of July. Matt and I went to see the Cincinnati Pops last night and we sang along to all the good old songs and I looked up in wonder at those fireworks. I still love this country.

It’s just that now I try to love it in the way that Jesus taught me to love things: not as an idol, but as a work in progress. With space for its complexity, and forgiveness for its failures, and hope in its promises. 

We are still prisoners of hope for this homeland of ours. We struggle and yet we dream. But I refuse to give up on it, even if we still have a long way to go to reach that horizon line.

And one day, with God’s help, and with true love for this land and for one another in our hearts…maybe we will get there.

Connection: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, June 28, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Romans 6:12-23 and Matthew 10:40-42.

There are certain moments in your life when you feel a profound sense of connection—with the people around you, or with God, or even with some deep part of yourself. These moments are precious when they appear. 

And I have to say, I’ve experienced a lot of them lately. 

The past few weeks have, for me and Matt, been so full of care and kindness and beauty and connection that I am still trying to process all of it. We got back to town on Monday afternoon and have been catching up on all of life’s practicalities. 

But I can’t shake the sense that, although there is still trash to be taken out and laundry to fold and groceries to put away, all of these familiar everyday things have been transfigured by the sense of connection and the love we have shared with all of you and all those dear to us over the course of our wedding celebrations. 

The cynics might call this sort of thing a honeymoon phase, I suppose. But although it is certainly true that life is not all cake and flowers, I’m not just talking about an emotional high or a glossing over of conflict. 

No, in all these recent experiences of connection, I feel like I was given the opportunity to glimpse behind the veil, so to speak— to see what life is really and truly about when all our distractions and fears and frustrations are swept away.

I don’t think I am in honeymoon-mode or that I have stars in my eyes when I tell you that connection is what it’s all about. Connection is the fundamental purpose for which we were made. Connection to the goodness within ourselves; and connection to the goodness within each other; and, ultimately, connection to the Goodness of God. The search for that connection is not without its challenges and pitfalls, and it requires great risk and vulnerability, and sometimes it costs us a great deal, but it is, in the end, the only thing that makes life meaningful.

That is certainly what we felt when we celebrated at St. Anne on June 7 and when we saw many of your faces at the Cathedral a couple Saturdays ago. It is also what I saw in images of people at the Pride parade yesterday, and what I observed in witnessing a friend’s ordination to priesthood this weekend.

And that sense of connection is what I cherish every time we gather on Sunday, or when we get together one-on-one talk about life or to pray or grieve, or when we come together in groups for Bible study or service. So many connections being revealed and strengthened and repaired. 

And I suspect, if you think back on the most meaningful moments in your life—both the happy ones and the hard ones, too—they, too, were meaningful precisely because they had something to do with connection. A hand held, a confidence shared, a hello or a goodbye, a kindness offered, a bridge built across some chasm of loneliness. These moments can be as monumental as a wedding or as small as a conversation at coffee hour. Scale doesn’t matter as much as quality. The more connected we are, the more alive we become.

So it stands to reason that God, who gave us life and who wants nothing more for us than to be connected to him and to each other—would have something to say to us about this through Scripture. And so it is this week in our lessons.

Consider Jesus’ words in today’s gospel. If you’ve read the passages leading up to this one, where he’s been describing in fiery detail all the hardships and dangers of discipleship, one might be left wondering why on earth anyone would want to follow the Christian path. And to the casual observer, that would make sense. This life of discipleship, with its loving of enemies and its relinquishment of easy assumptions and its embrace of the deep and wild mystery of God, is no honeymoon. So why would we take this risk? 

Jesus tells us plainly today: it is about connection. Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. In other words, this life, this path, this crazy, scandalous way of love—it will guarantee you the one thing the soul seeks above all else: to be part of something larger than ourselves. 

Welcome the good news of God’s love into your life and not only will you get a glimpse behind the curtain, but you will be invited to abide there in that transfigured reality where even grocery shopping and laundry folding can become sacred reminders of the love we share. And yes, the cynics may call it a honeymoon phase, but we call it the Kingdom. And it endures not for one season, but forever. 

The problem is that we keep trying to make other things last forever—things like power or money or material achievements. These are the more obvious pursuits in life, the seemingly less risky prospects. 

Precisely because connection with God and with other people is messy and unpredictable, we would, instead, rather find our fulfillment in the things we can tailor to our liking. There’s just one catch—these things always fade away. 

The cake goes stale. The flowers wither. The vacation ends and the stacks of laundry await. It’s not a great evil that these things happen—it’s just the way things are. But if we have invested all of ourselves into the permanence of such things, we will be in for great disappointment when they do not endure. And they never do. Only connection can last.

That’s what Paul is getting at in his words to the Romans today. Although this passage has usually been interpreted as a sort of finger wagging at bad behavior, it’s deeper than that. When Paul says “the wages of sin is death” this is not fire and brimstone so much as it is a plain truth: if we fix our hearts only on things that ultimately wither and die, our hearts will die with them. 

This is not just a moral failing…it is the great tragedy of life. Far better, then, far more hopeful and joyful, Paul says, to give our heart to the one thing that does not die: the connections—to God and to each other—which we forge through love. Which is, it so happens, exactly what Jesus came and showed us how to do. 

So if the past few weeks have showed me anything about life, it’s this: the best place I can invest my time and my care is in maintaining and strengthening those connections that are founded on love. And, at any given moment, a good benchmark for my life is the extent to which I am doing this or not. 

Our politics and our society are not big on meaningful and authentic connection these days—quite the opposite, in fact. Which makes this truth as countercultural and urgent as it was in Paul’s time. 

So I wonder, for you: to what have you given over your heart? What connections are you making or retreating from? Where could you build a bridge across a chasm of loneliness? With whom do you need to repair the breach? 

And if you’re feeling isloated, or angry, or cut off—how can we help you, here at St. Anne, to do the work of reconnecting with yourself, with God, with other people? That is, in fact, what we are here to do. That is why we do faith in community, to practice the messy, sacred art of connection.

And I know it can be hard, sometimes. Relationships with people are tricky, and even a relationship with Jesus can be overwhelming and perplexing sometimes. 

But I am here to tell you, that, thanks to your love, and thanks to God’s love, I have recently seen behind the veil, and all of this—our relationships, our time together, the ways we try to care for each other and let God care for us—all of this is good. It is so very good. It is, honestly, the only thing that matters in this life. And it is the only thing that will last.

Because it’s the love that we share, the connection that we have built, all of us, together, with God’s help. There is no greater gift.

And cynics may say that’s just the honeymoon talking, but I say: it will last forever. 

Never Too Late: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, June 7, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Hosea 5:15-6:6, Romans 4:13-25, and Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26. This Sunday was also the occasion of a large parish celebration for the upcoming wedding of myself and my partner, Matt.

This day has been a long time coming. But you know, I think that the extra-long wait has taught me something really important. Something I hope you will take away, too: it’s never too late. 

It is never too late for love. It is never too late to give love and it is never too late to live a life shaped by love. 

And yes, I suppose that applies to me as a now 42 year old groom-to-be with more than a few grays in his beard who took a little longer than some to find his partner in life. But that’s not all I am getting at when I say it’s never too late.

Because I think many of us, in all states of life, have at some time grappled with the sense that it is too late for us in one way or another. That we have waited too long to chase our dreams. Or we’ve let a broken relationship remain broken for too many years to fix it. Or we’ve made too many mistakes to be forgiven, or too many bad decisions to start fresh. That life is like a big party that we somehow missed by a couple of hours. 

But you know what? It’s never too late. It is never too late for love to find us, and change us, and help us begin again. And it is never too late to try and repair what is broken. Things may not always go the way we expect—they usually don’t—but it is never too late to try. 

And I think we need that reminder, maybe more often than we receive it, because the world around us seems to have a vested interest in making us always feel behind, feel a bit lost, feel not quite enough. 

But as I said last week at the Pride Service we offered at St. Anne, God has a different message for us. God says you, whoever you are, are already enough. You are already beloved and you already belong. There is no such thing as being too late when you realize that love is, indeed, patient, and kind, and all of those other things that love is. From God’s perspective, whenever you choose love, you are right on time.

We might even say that the Good News of Jesus is predicated on this premise of it never being too late. Because you can imagine, when Jesus came into the world (a lot like now, actually) that people were on the brink of despair. They’d been beaten down and battered, subjugated and subsumed into violence. They had made their own fair share of mistakes, too, over the years—all those things the prophets talk about. 

And so I suspect that, on a very large scale, some of the anxiety and agitation of Jesus’ time was due to a pervasive sense that it was too late to fix things. Too late to find the good again. Too long since people had walked with God in the wilderness and lived closely and gently with one another. 

But Jesus came and said: not only is it not too late, friends, but we are just getting started. I, your God, I am just getting started. Creation is beginning again. Follow me, and see how the sun can still rise on your biggest dreams and your deepest hopes. Whatever has gone before is gone. Let it be. Open your arms again like a child and receive the good news of this new day. 

I tell you all of this not just because I am feeling particularly grateful for new beginnings this week, but because I think this idea of “never too late” is what holds together our Scripture readings today. 

Although Hosea sounds rather dire, as he often does, he is not telling Israel that it is too late for them. He simply needs them to understand that true hope is found in a love of constancy, of  care, and not in fickle, performative gestures. You have been very good at those, he says to Israel. You have been very good at making grand gestures of sacrifice for God. But God just wants your heart—your simple, steadfast heart. And God wants you to know that its never too late to give it. Even when you’ve lost the plot and lost your way, it’s never too late to make your way back home to real love. 

And Paul, writing to the church at Rome, has a similar message. It’s not too late to become part of the family of God, he is saying. You Gentiles who did not grow up under the Law—guess what, neither did Abraham! He just ran into the desert with stars in his eyes and trust in his heart. And any of us can do the same thing. Any of us, right where we are, can start being exactly who God made us to be, and not just the lowest common denominator of ourselves.

And then, finally, there’s Matthew. Poor Matthew, sitting at his tax collector table. I think he must have been a rather sad figure there—estranged from his neighbors due to his profession, estranged from himself, wondering how on earth he got here with only coins for companions.

But here comes Jesus, Son of Love itself, patient and kind, his voice piercing the veil of a thousand regrets. Follow me, he says. That’s it. Follow me.

But what he’s really saying to Matthew is this: It’s not too late, my brother. It’s not too late, my child. I know you think it is. I know you think the sun has set on you; that the world is nothing but ledgers and uncounted costs; but hear me when I say: It’s never too late for love. It’s never too late to give love. It’s never too late to live a life shaped by love. So follow me, and see what else your life can be. 

St. Anne, as happy as today is, I know many folks are going through a lot these days—some of us have lost loved ones, or maybe gotten a scary test result, or are facing big transitions in the near future. Maybe we’re not feeling so sure how to handle whatever comes next in our life, in our society. Maybe we’re afraid we’re long past some point of no return. 

But look around you. Look at the people sitting next to you who love you, or who would love to love you if you get to know them better. Look at the party prepared in the other room—not just for a wedding, but as a sign of the deep and abiding love that this community is founded upon. Look at the way we raise the Pride flag and open doors to the marginalized and the doubtful and go out from those doors and serve. Look at the beauty of the songs we sing and the music we make. Look at the God who, in all of this, gives himself to us without reservation. 

And if these things tell you nothing else about yourself or life or God, let them tell you this: it is never too late for love. Because love is here. It is here for you, for me, for everyone. And as long as there is love to be found and built upon, like there is at St. Anne….then your story is not over yet. And the story of this world is not over either. Not by a long shot.

Just ask that old tax collector Matthew who jumped up from that table, all his coins and compromises scattering to the ground, as he ran headlong into the light of that new day. He never looked back.

I don’t know about you, but I’m done with feeling like it’s too late. I’m ready to follow Jesus and see where it goes. I am ready to leave behind regret and simply rejoice in the love that is all around us.

If you’re ready too, I have very good news for you: there’s a big party waiting for us in the other room. And far from being too late, I’d say that we are right on time. 

(Asc)ending: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, May 17, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Acts 1:6-14, an account of the Ascension of Jesus.

I don’t think that this is a particularly unique or exceptional thing, but I don’t like endings all that much. When I come across something good, I don’t ever want it to end. As a kid I used to stay up late into the night covertly reading books long past bedtime—just one more chapter!—and then I’d get to the end of the book and feel that distinct pang of sadness when the page goes blank. 

I didn’t ever want to finish the story. I just wanted it to go on and on and on. 

But stories are good training for us, I suppose, because life is the same way. All of us, on one level or another, have had some endings that leave us a bit achy inside—the end of a relationship; or of a season in one place; or, of course, the big endings that death brings into our lives.

We learn to live, somehow, with these finalities, but we never really get over them. There tends to be an empty space within us where that thing or place or person used to be. And the question, as we go, is not so much how to prevent having any of that empty space. No, the necessary question is: how to keep growing around this emptiness? How do we bless the blank page at the end of the story? How do we carry on, carrying all these endings in the hollow spaces carved out within us?

You would think that, in Christian life, we would be really good at talking about this sort of thing. That maybe we would’ve come up with a way to make it all easier, less painful. No such luck. We struggle with endings in church just like all people do. 

Think about it: our favorite church celebrations and feasts all tend to emphasize hellos, not goodbyes. We love to celebrate arrivals and appearances and manifestations—Advent and Christmas and Easter Day and, next week, Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit will rush in with all her fiery gifts.

Departures and farewells—not so much. Those are mostly for funerals, for Good Friday, and for one more feast…one that doesn’t get much traction in the Church these days. Do you know what that feast might be? It just happened this past Thursday: the Feast of the Ascension. 

This is, in our time, probably among the most overlooked of the Church’s principal feast days. Now, the fact that it’s always on a Thursday, exactly 40 days after Easter, is probably part of that. But I also think it’s because of what the Ascension commemorates: the ending of Jesus’ physical presence in this world. It’s not Good Friday-tragic, but it’s still an ending. It is a feast dedicated to saying goodbye.  And we don’t much care for goodbyes.

And maybe our lectionary editors knew we’d try to skip over it on Thursday, so they snuck the story back into our first reading this morning, too. All right, then—we’ll take it on. Let’s see what this particular goodbye has to teach us. 

…

According to Acts, Jesus appears this last time among his disciples, and he gives them some parting instructions and promises, and then just like that, as the author describes, “he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.” 

These disciples will not see Jesus in the flesh ever again. Imagine the very last time you saw the person you loved most in the world. Perhaps that is something of what they felt this Ascension day and why they remembered it.

Jesus leaves a space behind that they are not yet sure what to do with. And as they stand there, staring up at the clouds, perhaps feeling like they have arrived at the end of the very best story they’ve ever known, with that blank-page pang and that hollowness in the pit of their stomachs. The question is, now what? How will they carry on with this Jesus-shaped empty space in their lives? Who are they now that he is gone from their sight?

But what is so beautiful, so worthy of celebration in this story is what the disciples do NOT do next. Unlike after the crucifixion, they do not scatter. They do not each retreat into their own private, bitter grief. And they do not try to fill up that empty space with distractions or anger or denial or dissipation. They don’t even splinter off into factions competing with each other for influence—which, knowing some of the other stories of these guys, you might have thought they would! 

But no—they go back to Jerusalem, and they gather with the women, and they pray. They pray into this ending. They pray into the blank page of this new, unwritten part of the story. They stick together in community and they begin to form a new life around the shape of Jesus’ absence. They somehow accept the goodbye and the empty space, and they trust that God will provide whatever they need to carry on. 

And next week, at Pentecost, we will discover exactly what God does provide to them. And it will be something!

The point for today, though, my friends, is that we—the ones who continue to gather in the wake of Jesus’ departure—are still in the process of forming that new life. We are still learning how to pray into our endings, how to build a community that can bless what we cannot hold onto and love the things that leave. We are still learning how to tend to the empty spaces within ourselves wrought by all our goodbyes, rather than trying to fill them up with easy answers and petty idols. 

This is not happy-go-lucky spiritual platitude stuff. This is sacred soul work. This is the feast-days-we’d-rather-skip-over stuff. It is also, I would offer, the difference between a faith that merely placates and a faith that liberates.

Because as much as we are afraid of endings, it’s also true that sometimes we need them. Sometimes we need to let go. And it’s definitely the case that the wider world needs some endings, and it needs a people—a Church—that is unafraid of letting things go. A people who can speak of all that ought to pass from our midst so that God can do something new in us and in this world. The Church, in every age, is called to pray into those endings with clarity and courage. 

For example, maybe we need to pray into an ending for the poisonous nostalgia for some imagined past that was never as pure or perfect as some people think it was.

And maybe we need to pray into an ending for tired old structures that prop up all those powers antithetical to God’s kingdom. 

And maybe we need pray into an ending for small imaginations and big egos and conditional compassion and hesitant mercy.

Maybe we need to pray into an ending for judgment masquerading as moral clarity and into an ending for violence masquerading as justice and into an ending for hard-heartedness masquerading as tough love. 

Maybe we need to pray into the ending of all those things.

Because THAT is what the disciples did after the Ascension—they learned how to embrace the power and the necessity of goodbye. They took the absence of Jesus’ body as the call to BE his body now—to stand where he stood—to face down the powers of death and despair as he once did, and to say: he may be up there, but we are still here! And we are just getting started!

This is the lesson of the Ascension: blessed, blessed are the ones who can pray into life’s endings and say to the blank page and the hollow heart and the uncertain future: Thy Kingdom Come, Lord, Thy Spirit Come, Thy Truth and Goodness Come and goodbye to everything else!!

Easier said than done, perhaps. That’s why we need one other here, in community, just like those first disciples did.

But I think—I know—I believe–that if we can keep at it together; if we can pray into all our endings together; if we can keep up what began on that first Ascension Day rather than skip past it; we will continue to discover all that we were meant to become once Jesus disappeared from view: loss-carriers, hope-seekers, truth-tellers, care-givers, prayer-offerers, peace-makers, song-singers, dance-dancers, Lord-proclaimers, Son-followers, Spirit-bearers, ever beloved children of our Father in heaven. 

In other words, the Church.

In other words, a people who no longer stare up at the clouds but who get to work, here and now, to be the visible presence of our invisible God. To take up the blank page at the end of Jesus’ earthly story and continue the next chapter ourselves. Just one more chapter!

For that is what the Ascension calls to be: the ones who can see beyond the last page. The ones who will see the story through all the way to our ultimate end: abiding forever in God. 

And although I tend to hate an ending, I have to say: I love the sound of that one. 

Snapshots: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, May 10, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Acts 17:22-31.

Have you ever wished you could go back and tell an old version of yourself something that they might need to know?

This weekend I’ve seen lots of old versions of myself—I started pulling out boxes of old photos and sifting through them in preparation for the wedding in June—Matt and I are putting together a little table with pictures and  mementos for the reception. 

So I’ve been looking at some way-back-when pictures from childhood, and high school, and young adulthood. And frankly I’d like to have a word with those earlier versions of myself. 

I’d like to tell that little boy with an awkward smile on his face: don’t worry. There is indeed a place for you in this world. 

I’d like to tell my high school self: Phil, that look was not fashionable even then. What were you thinking?!

And I’d like to tell my younger adult self: cherish your loved ones; you don’t know how long you will have them. 

But, of course, we cannot access our old selves in that way. Each snapshot simply captures the best we knew at the time. So perhaps the best we can do now with those images of our old selves is to bless them, love them, and to forgive ourselves for all that we were, and all that we were not. Same goes for the photos of our mothers…and our fathers and friends and lost loves. Bless, love, forgive.

We have to do that, I think, if we ever hope to make peace with this life. 

I also think that God looks upon us in the same way, from the wide perspective of time and with the deepest sense of peace. Because God knows our past and our future all at once; God can see where our lives fit together, and God can see where they’re broken, too. And whether we ever figure it all out for ourselves or not, God loves our lives anyway. 

So I like to imagine God sitting somewhere in heaven, thumbing through the infinite snapshots of us, patiently and with great compassion, wanting to say, “just wait! It will often be better than you fear. And sometimes it will be harder than you think. But you can do it. You’ll see.”

I’m thinking about this not only because of my photo box, but because of our reading from Acts today, a passage I really love. Paul’s interaction with the Athenians gets to the heart of all our knowing and not knowing in this life, and it reveals what God wants to do about it. 

The Athenians, you see, were very adept at knowing things. Though Athens was part of the Roman Empire in the apostles’ time, this ancient Greek city was the cradle of western art, philosophy, and politics. The Athenians KNEW many, many things and were proud of that knowledge.

And yet even they suspected that there were things that had escaped them along the way. They didn’t have embarrassing old photographs to remind them this was the case, but perhaps it was just a sneaking suspicion that for all their philosophical wisdom, they were still just barely brushing up against the great mystery of existence.

So Paul sees an altar in the city inscribed with the dedication “to an unknown God.” 

Some scholars think this was a “blanket insurance policy” altar; that the people were ensuring no Roman deity was accidentally overlooked and therefore dishonored—sort of like our understanding of the “tomb of the unknown soldier” today.

Others think it was more abstract: an altar dedicated to that divine truth that is simply beyond all knowledge. But in either case, the Athenians knew that there was something that they did not know, and they wanted to honor it.

And then here comes Paul. We can think of his remarkable speech to them in a variety of ways—an early Christian sermon; a challenge to the Roman social order; a pastoral message—but I think it’s also something even more remarkable than any of that. I think it is like a message from some future version of ourselves. Let me explain what I mean.

Paul, when he had that Damascus road experience, did not just have a nice cozy little chat with the Risen Christ. They didn’t just sit down to tea. No, Paul was drawn into a direct encounter with Resurrection life—he saw, he felt, he was immersed in, the destiny of all of us—the very thing Jesus promises in today’s Gospel: how someday there will be no space between us anymore, no space between us and God, and all creation will be able to love and feel itself new and whole and fully alive. 

That’s what Paul saw, and it blinded him for a bit, and it saved him, too, and he was driven and haunted by the vision of this great glory til his dying day. Understand that, and you will understand his whole ministry better.

And so he has come back from this encounter—as a sort of time traveler into God’s ultimate plan for us—to tell anyone and everyone what he has seen. In the same way that we wish we could go back and tell an older version of ourselves what to hope for, what to cherish, what to let go of—well, that’s what Paul is doing in all his speeches and letters—telling us what will ultimately come to pass, so that we might know what to bless, what to love, and what to forgive in the meantime. 

What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.

Let me tell you about the bigger picture of yourself, Paul says. Let me tell you of the God who made you and loved you from the start. The God who came to be with you, and die for you, and who destroyed death for you. The God who, even now, holds your entire life in loving hands, all those snapshots that make up who you are becoming. 

Let me introduce this God to you, Paul says. His name is Jesus.

I tell you all of this, friends, because every day I hear big, important questions being asked. I ask them, too. What will happen to the economy? What will the next election hold? How will we bridge our divides and care for our parents and raise our children and heal the earth and survive our grief? And how can we possibly do these things when the future looms like a great specter over us? 

These are important questions that require us to work toward faithful answers. 

But here’s the funny thing about Christian life: we work towards those answers while already knowing the ultimate Answer. We live our lives already having received the Truth about life. We pray for our daily bread having been fed with Living Bread. We know where it’s heading. We do not worship an unknown God anymore. 

And if you forgot that, as it is so easy to do, let me introduce him to you. His name is Jesus. And he wants to share his Spirit of love and life and peace with you.

It’s true, we cannot reach those past versions of ourselves, but God can reach us here and now to tell us what will become of us. And in Jesus, that is exactly what God does.

In Jesus, we are given a message from that glorious future God has prepared for all the world, where justice rules and where love is the last word and where all those sweet, sad, awkward, partial snapshots of our lives have been gathered together into one big story, one Big Life, one diverse Kingdom. 

So whenever you are feeling overwhelmed by the future; when you don’t quite know what to do next; when there are questions which seem to have no answers—first, lean on the people around you in this place. That is what we’re here for. 

And second, think back to all those previous versions of yourself. Pull out a few old photos if it helps. And remember that you—that all of us—are still becoming all that God would have us be. 

So try to bless this present version of yourself, and love it, and forgive it, just as God has always done.

(Except for some of those fashion choices of mine. Maybe some of those were unforgivable.) But all the rest of it, absolutely. 

So I think the Athenians were half-right. We are always brushing up against the great mystery of existence.

But the good news is this: ours is not an altar to an unknown God. Because God is known. He has come, and lived, and died, and risen, so that we can finally know him. 

And in case it’s been a while, let me introduce him to you.

His name is Jesus. 

Way, Truth, Life: A Sermon

I preached this sermono on Sunday, May 3, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is John 14:1-14, which includes the following: “Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.'”

I am of two minds with this Gospel passage—I find it both comforting and troubling at the same time. Comforting because I think of all the times I have preached on it at the funerals of people I love, with that beautiful image of God’s house with many dwelling places, the doors flung open wide, welcoming us home after the long journey through this life. 

But then…there’s that line that so often sounds like a closed door, not an open one: no one comes to the Father except through me. This part lands hard on the ears, especially for those of us who have known rejection, or who have come from other church backgrounds where exclusivity was emphasized and sharp lines were drawn between the saved and the condemned. 

We supposedly proclaim a God of unconditional love for all creation, and yet this verse can read like Jesus is a bouncer at a nightclub, and some folks’ names just aren’t going to be on the list. 

But I confess that I struggle to imagine the Jesus I know, the Jesus I love, shaking his head and putting up the velvet rope to keep anyone out of God’s enduring celebration. Something just doesn’t sit well with my soul there.

And I suppose I could just shrug my shoulders and say “who knows, I guess God will figure it all out later on,” but that feels like an easy out of a very fundamental question. I think we can try a little harder than that. And in a complex and diverse and often judgmental world, I think we owe it to ourselves and our neighbors to try a little harder than that. So that’s what we’re going to do today. 

You know, last fall we welcomed a large group of our neighbors from the Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati here to St. Anne and we broke bread with them and learned from one other and even invited them to observe a service of Holy Eucharist. I’ve mentioned before that it was one of the most powerful nights I’ve ever experienced in ministry—that the Spirit of God was truly alive and present in these walls. 

And it was not because of some secret agenda to show our neighbors the “right” way to live and believe. No, it was because it was communion in the truest and simplest sense—people coming together from different backgrounds, with integrity and humility, to share their stories, to speak of what they know to be true, and to be bound together by a love that is ultimately hard to quantify or categorize. 

And you know what, in that space without agendas, where everyone was a little bit uncomfortable and a little bit open to the things we do not understand…in that space I felt the love of Jesus more powerfully than ever. I felt like he was saying to us here, “see, now you’re starting to get it! Now you’re on your way! Loving me doesn’t mean fearing everyone else!”

So when it comes to passages like the one we have today, I wonder if maybe we can try on a new pair of glasses, as Mtr. Alane suggested last week. Maybe we as the Church have been reading this passage the wrong way for a very long time, assuming it was about who gets into the nightclub when instead it was trying to show us the vastness of the night sky.

It wouldn’t be surprising if that were so. We’ve been formed within the long, long shadow of history to think of faith in institutional terms: insiders and outsiders; winners and losers in some vast cultural and cosmic landscape. As if following Jesus were like joining one team pitted against all the others. 

But what if I told you—or reminded you, really—that this is not at all what Jesus wanted us to understand about God? What if I reminded you that Jesus’ whole mission was about making us aware of the boundlessness of God’s love and mercy, and of the truth that there is only one team—all of us, together, the whole creation—and that being Christian is fundamentally about recognizing this and living like this? How might that help us hear this passage (and maybe every passage) with new ears?

“I am the way and the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me.”

Let’s work through this carefully. Stick with me.

If we accept that Jesus is the human face of God—which is one of the foundational premises of our Christian life—then the first part of this statement (I am the way the truth and the life) is not that difficult to accept. 

Because Jesus does indeed show us what ‘the way, the truth, and the life’ are. He shows us in word, in action, and in his very being—in his “I AM”ness, if you will. And it is love. The way, the truth, and the life are a fully embodied love like his. A persistent, humble, purposeful love for God and for every one of our neighbors. We know this. We have seen the Lord, and we know this.

And if we know that love is what Jesus is all about, that love is his very being, then the second part of his statement follows from the first. No one comes to the Father except through me. 

‘The Father’ is, of course, Jesus’ name for this God who is love, and Jesus is the embodiment of this God who is love, so this second line could just as easily and faithfully be read: 

No one comes to this Love except through…love.

I hear that, and it feels like an open door. So let’s step out from behind the velvet ropes and stare up at the stars and hear that line one more time, anew: 

Love is the way and the truth and the life. And no one comes to this great Love except through love itself.

I don’t know about you, but that does sit well with my soul. That message is truly good news. And it tracks with the Jesus I know, the one who died and rose again for love’s sake. It tracks with the Jesus who never gave up on me even after all the times I have given up on him. It tracks with the Jesus who keeps giving himself to us, over and over again, in bread and wine and Spirit, embracing sinners and saints and everyone in between, with no exceptions. It tracks.

And it speaks somehow, too, into all that love I hold for people of every background and creed—our friends who have lost their faith and the ones who never found it; and for our Jewish siblings and our Hindu friends and our Islamic neighbors, and everyone else. Just like that night last fall, the very real love of Jesus should draw us closer to one other, not further apart.

Because although I don’t claim to understand exactly how or why, I know, God, I know that somehow there is room enough for all of us in this life and in this world…and even in the vast eternity beyond the stars, in that house of many dwelling places. Love makes room for everyone. And if I’m wrong, I’m wrong; but I’d rather be a fool for love than a sage for certainty. 

And so, I don’t know about you, but that foolish love is the thing I am going to believe in, and live by, and die trusting in, because, as best I can tell, that is what Jesus came to show us and to give us. 

I hope you’ll hold onto that, especially for those days when things feel heavy and faith feels narrow and you need to remember what this is all about. 

Though I warn you, it remains a passage both comforting and troubling. Because even if it’s all about love, God knows I am still figuring out how to love like Jesus does, day by day, and that’s not always easy. I just happen to believe that such a love is the one thing in this life worth figuring out. 

You might even say that it is the way, the truth, and the life. 

You might even say that this love is the only way. 

I tend to think that Jesus would agree.