October 2023 – By Another Road

Promised Land: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on October 29, 2023 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Deuteronomy 34:1-12 and Matthew 22:34-46.

When you live in Las Vegas, as I did for many years, the temperatures in the summertime, reaching 115 degrees or more, can become unbearable after a while. Air conditioning makes it survivable of course, but some days you get sick of that frigid, metallic breeze and you start to long for something cool and gentle and real, a soft wind filtered through trees and birdsong, perhaps, the kind that dances across your brow rather than blasting it with an artificial chill.

And luckily, even in the midst of the Mojave Desert where Las Vegas sits, there is a solution to this dilemma, a place known as Mt. Charleston. Drive north from the city, surrounded by endless jagged rock formations and scrub brush and shaggy Joshua trees, and then turn left, and go down a long two lane road through a desert expanse, and suddenly, the highway begins to climb, up, up, up, and the landscape changes before your eyes, and as the elevation increases, suddenly, miraculously, there are mountainsides covered in green pine trees and wildflowers grow along the ditches, and the thermometer on your car drops 5, 10, 15, 20 degrees in a matter of minutes.

You arrive at one of the many trailheads or parking lots and breathe in the cool, verdant air and it seems absolutely impossible that you were roasting amid the harsh glare of the Las Vegas Strip just 40 minutes ago. Up on Mt. Charleston, the world is suddenly new and fragrant and full of different possibilities and the stifling desert is a distant memory.

There was one time up there, though, when I decided to hike a particular trail that led even higher, up through the alpine forest, to an outcropping called Cathedral Rock. I had read that the views from the top were spectacular in every direction. It was a long, moderately strenuous hike, but it was indeed breathtaking at the summit. In one direction, you could look further into the expanse of green mountainside and imagine that you were in Colorado or northern California.

But what struck me the most was that in the other direction you could see all the way back down the mountainside, back down the road that led there, all the way back to the brown valley and the hot desert and the unsparing sunlight of another climate, another reality.

It was jarring and fascinating, from that vantage point, to comprehend the totality of the landscape, how I had not really “escaped” the desert but had simply been lifted up a bit to see how its edges gave way to something else, how the brown and the green, the fiery sun and the cool breeze, were all part of one another. From Cathedral Rock, one could see in a sweeping glance the coherence of things that felt so different, the interplay of opposites, and the ways that the place from which we came and the place where we now stand are always lapping up against one another, borderless.

Now, I make no claim to have reenacted Moses’ journey up to the top of Pisgah, as we heard described in today’s reading from Deuteronomy, but in thinking about that view from Mt. Charleston, I do find myself wondering about his own mountaintop moment, looking into the Promised Land.

I think we usually hear this story and figure that Moses must have been awfully disappointed, never getting to go to the place he’d been working so hard to arrive in. But I wonder if, befitting one who has somehow seen God face to face, perhaps he was given something even better than arrival, something more profound than a simple journey’s end.

We spend a great deal of energy in our own lives, and in the communities and societies we have constructed, assuming that there will be, one magic day, the point when we arrive. Arrive at stability, arrive at safety, arrive at certainty, arrive at the untroubled future long sought but always just around the next bend. Arrive, so to speak, in our own sort of Promised Land.

And when we do, we tell ourselves, then life will really begin, then it will be the way it is supposed to be, and we can forget about all this hardship and heartache that has accompanied us. We will leave the stifling desert wilderness behind, we can forget it ever existed, and the world will be new and fragrant and full of different possibilities.

But the thing is, we never quite escape what has come before. We make strides, we see the possibility of progress and peace, and then—another war erupts and drags innocent victims back into a maelstrom of violence and ancient enmity. Or another pandemic comes along and disrupts our patterns of life and work and worship. Or we lose someone dear to us, or we just make the same old tiresome mistake yet again, or the bottom drops out of our best laid plans, and the hot despair of the desert threatens to engulf us once more.

And maybe we wonder—what’s the point of all this if we can’t ever seem to get where we’re going? What the use of seeing the Promised Land if it keeps evading our grasp?

But as I imagine Moses standing there with tears in his eyes on the top of Pisgah, weeping for a land he will never quite reach, I also imagine him looking back in the other direction, back down into the long road toward the desert, back into the wilderness from whence they had come, back into the memory of Egypt, of heat and sweat and tears.

And I wonder if, from that high vantage point, Moses realized that there was less distinction than one might assume between where they’d been and where they were going. For, despite all the great expectations of the Promised Land, we can’t forget that the desert was also a place where God spoke to them and fed them and guided them day and night and refused to forsake them, even in their faithlessness and desolation and despair.

And so perhaps the wisdom Moses was given, one final gift in the dying light on the mountain, as he cast his eyes back and forth between the road traveled and the road ahead, was to see that, in the end, the desert and the land beyond the Jordan might look different, but they are actually the same landscape. They are just the past and the present lapping up against one another, and while only one might be called the Promised Land, they are both lands that revealed a promise kept—a promise by God to never abandon his people, to never to let them walk alone.

The deserts of our lives and the lands of plenty—they are both places where God abides and where God provides, and the truth is that to cross the proverbial river; to escape; to forget what came before–none of this is the ultimate prize or even the point of the journey. The point is to know that God stands with us wherever we are. It is to know that God loves us wherever we are and, as Jesus says, God commands us to love one another wherever we are. It is to discover that when we do this, then the Kingdom of Heaven, which is dependent on no particular landscape, can spring up anywhere—in the desert heat, in a green and fragrant valley, and the spaces in between.

So no, we cannot spend our lives waiting for arrival at some perfect place in order to begin the work of love. Like Moses, like Jesus, we can only love the rock upon which we stand. We can only love here, love now, love the people that God has placed in front of us, love the world we know, despite its seemingly endless propensity to break our hearts and to backslide into the barren wilderness.

And so we must hold onto the view from Pisgah; we must hold onto the greatest commandment to love, in which all of our perceived divisions are revealed to be an illusion, and in which we discover that there is just one land, there is just one body, one story, one home where all deserve to live in peace and safety.

We must begin to see in a way that comprehends the totality of the landscape, realizing that God’s love is borderless—and that wherever we cast our gaze, and wherever we go from here, and wherever we end up, God will be there. Even on the near side of the Jordan. Because where we ultimately arrive someday is less important than the fact that God has already arrived here, today.

If we are able to see this, and if we choose to live as if this is so, then the Promised Land is no elusive dream of a summer breeze in another place; it’s the ground right under our feet.

Emperor: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, October 22, 2023 at St. Anne Episcopal Church in West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 22:15-22. This sermon was offered as part of the parish’s annual pledge/fundraising campaign.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve gotten together with many of you at a series of meet-and-greet events. I’ve loved the opportunity for us to learn more about one another and to hear from you about your hopes and dreams for St. Anne. There are still a couple more of these on the calendar, so I hope to see you soon if you haven’t made it to one yet.

At a few of these, I have been able to share a bit of my own story—how I came to be in The Episcopal Church and how that eventually led me into the priesthood. I am not going to retell that whole story this morning, but a piece of it has been on my mind this week as I’ve been reflecting on both our Gospel for today and our annual pledge campaign to fund St. Anne’s mission and ministry in the coming year, because one common thread in all of these things—my own story, the Gospel story, and in St. Anne’s ongoing story—is that sometimes we discover that God is not at all who we thought God was, or that God does not in any way resemble our longstanding assumptions…and that this can be very good news.

When I was in college, I drifted away from church; or it might be more accurate to say I ran away. My reasons were personal, but not entirely unique; I think many of us, at one juncture or another, begin to question our foundational understandings of who we are and how the world works and what is ultimately true. And that is exactly what happened to me.

And so, in my mid-twenties, I found myself in an awkward position: I had spent a number of years feeling very unsure about everything I had been taught about faith and religion, and yet the hunger for meaning, for purpose, for belonging to something greater than myself, would not leave me alone. I longed to be part of a community that was committed to something deeper than just a hobby or a political opinion or a worldview; I wanted to engage the big questions of life and death and love and eternity, but I didn’t want to be given an ultimatum as to how best to answer those questions, and I had always understood religion as a place of ultimatums—believe this, think this, be like this, or else you are not part of this.

And yet, despite my trepidation, God still haunted me, like the lingering memory of a lost love, and so one day I found myself slipping into the back pew of an Episcopal church near my house, tentative, uncertain, hopeful. I followed along as best I could; I stood and sat and kneeled like Episcopalians do. When it came time to recite the Creed, I only said parts of it, because I didn’t know what I believed anymore, and I didn’t want to lie.

And yet, when the time came, I nonetheless went up to the rail for communion, praying that if there was a God who still loved me, that he would forgive my confusion and my reticence and still meet me there in the bread and the cup. I prayed that I would not be punished for having so many doubts, for being wayward and unsure of my commitments. And I reached out my hands, almost breathless, waiting to see what would happen.

I think that the stakes of that moment, at least as I perceived them, were similar to the stakes of the question posed by the Pharisees and the Herodians to Jesus in this morning’s gospel passage. They have ulterior motives, of course, but they are asking, fundamentally, where Jesus’ loyalties lie, and whether he is all in for God or for Caesar, as if the two are comparable forces competing for the same spiritual and material resources.

Although they don’t say so explicitly, there is, woven into their question, the idea that God, like Caesar, is an emperor of sorts—a figure or a force demanding fealty and submission. And to be fair to them, this is an image of God that is embedded in much of our Scripture, since these are texts that were shaped and recorded by a society accustomed to rulers with absolute authority.

This is the same understanding of God that I had when I approached the communion rail: a God who literally sat on a throne, ready to suss out whether I had been loyal, whether I was willing to pay the price of my authenticity in order to receive his beneficence.

But what Jesus knew, and what he came to proclaim to the world, is that God is not comparable to Caesar. God is not like an emperor at all; God’s power is from the ground up, not from the top down. And though we still try to put a crown on God’s head and though there are still those who try to fashion God’s Word into a sword rather than a healing balm, Jesus continues to dismiss such posturing. And he continues to console those among us who fear that we are too doubtful, too wayward, too lost to be part of this.

He says, render unto Caesar your questions of punishment and debt and power.

But render unto God what is God’s—the deepest longing of your heart to be welcomed unconditionally, to be loved without reservation, to be invited into building and sustaining something kind, something beautiful, something true.

And so you know what happened when I reached out my hands to receive communion on that Sunday so many years ago? Nothing. In the best possible way, nothing. God did not send down a thunderbolt and smite me for having run away. God did not send an angry Episcopalian to berate me for not reciting the whole Creed. God did not punish me for having doubts and questions.

God simply fed me, and that was its own sort of answer.

Because, as I realized, perhaps for the first time that day, God is not Caesar, demanding conformity and unthinking allegiance, asking “are you worthy, are you certain, are you pure?” No, the God revealed in Christ is more like a person standing on the front porch to welcome you home, saying, “I’ve missed you. Come on in; you look like you need something to eat.”

And I did eat, and I am still eating, responding to that hunger that could not be satisfied anywhere else. And from that first Sunday onward, I knew that if this was what church could be, then it was worth everything I had to give.

I know, from hearing so many of your stories already, that some of what I am talking about overlaps with your experience of the Episcopal Church and of St. Anne in particular. I know that in this place, many of you have come to the realization that God is not that which we were once taught to fear, and that the point of all this is not to arrive at some untroubled belief in God, but to discover that God believes in us, and that God always will, no matter how far we run or how long we wander.

And I want you to consider what a rare and precious treasure this is—that there is a place in this world, as polarized and fractured as it is, where people are welcomed to come as they are, to be held in community, to be invited to grow in faith while still leaving space for tough questions, for doubt, for mystery, and for a certain acceptance that we don’t have all the answers.

I know that, because of what I discovered about God that first Sunday in an Episcopal church, I decided to pledge my life to this vision and embodiment of Christianity. And because of the ways that St. Anne so joyfully and passionately pursues that same vision, both within our walls and beyond them, I will be pledging a substantial amount to help fund the mission of this parish in the coming year.

I want to do that not just because of all the good things already taking place here, but because I know that somewhere out there, maybe just down the road, there are people just like I was on that Sunday so long ago—no longer able to endure the notion of the God of empire, yet still longing to find a place of welcome, longing to belong to and to help build something kind and beautiful and true. Longing to hear a voice saying, I’ve missed you. Come on in. You look like you need something to eat.

This is that place. Let’s make sure they find it. Let’s be ready for them when they do.

Bittersweet: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, October 15, 2023 at Saint Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, Ohio. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 22:1-14, one of Jesus’ particularly challenging parables about a wedding banquet and a violent king.

I remember, when I was much younger, how great I thought it would be to drink coffee. You know, my mom would have it at home in the morning, or I would smell it brewing in a coffee shop, and I thought it surely had to be the most delicious thing ever. The fact that I was not allowed to drink it because it was “for grown-ups” probably made it all the more tantalizing. And so I wondered, when would I get to taste this magical drink with its secret power that apparently only adults could handle? My cousins and I would play with a plastic tea party set sometimes, setting out the cups and saucers and sipping on air, and I always imagined that it was coffee in the cup, and I would pretend to drink it in carefully, as if I were imbibing the mysteries of the universe, rich and delicious and sweet.

Then, the day came when I actually tried coffee for the first time. I think it was out of the pump pot in my grandparents kitchen. Nobody was looking, so I got out a cup and watched the steaming dark liquid cascade down and then held it up to my lips, ready to see what the mysteries of the universe actually tasted like.

I promptly spit it out. Whatever I was expecting coffee to be, that weird, bitter brew was not it. I thought, why on earth would anyone willingly drink this?! Grown-ups must be out of their minds! Those empty tea cups with their imaginary sweetness were far preferable to whatever this nastiness was.

Now, of course, that was a long time ago, and some of you know that I am now mildly obsessed with coffee. Like many grown ups, for whatever reason I have come to appreciate its oddly compelling mixture of bitterness and sweetness, the way its flavors can be both bright and deep all at once. Those were not things I was prepared for the first time I tried coffee, but over time, cup by cup, its complexities and paradoxes have become deeply satisfying.

And with apologies to the tea and hot chocolate drinkers out there, I think faith might be a little bit like coffee, for faith, too, necessitates a willingness to embrace complexity and paradox, to savor robust and impenetrable flavors, and to be jolted awake from time to time.

Case in point: our Gospel text this week, where we have quite a bit to wrestle with. As one commentator says, it is a parable that will make anyone trying to interpret it go weak in the knees. We might need a good cup of coffee to tackle this one.

So let’s just acknowledge this up front: if the Kingdom of God is anything like this wedding banquet and this king, I don’t know who on earth would want to be a part of it. The imagery that Jesus uses here seems to fly directly in the face of our understanding of an inclusive, expansive, forgiving, welcoming God. We are troubled by this retaliatory king, his excess and his violence; we are discomfited by the idea of someone thrown into the outer darkness for wearing the wrong garment to a party. That sort of callousness sounds too much like the world we already know, not the one we long for. It’s a bitter cup to swallow.

But one of the things that we must remember when we approach the parables of Jesus is that they are not simple, allegorical fables. They don’t describe heaven, nor do they describe the precise nature of God. They are not a rule book for how to live well. No, the parables are intentionally disturbing, they are acrid on the tongue, because they are meant to wake us up, to make us a bit jittery, to question our assumptions, and, most importantly, to realize that the inbreaking of the good news of God will not be anything like the existing conventions and power structures of this world. Let me say that again: the good news of God will not be anything like the existing conventions and power structures of this world.

And that is indeed good news, because you only need to glance at recent headlines to see that the existing conventions and power structures of this world are incapable of bringing out the peace for which we long. And so, in its own, strange and paradoxical way, there is hope in this disturbing parable, hope in the notion that the Kingdom of God has nothing to do with the worn out systems of patronage and privilege where all the usual faces are invited to the banquet.

On the contrary, in this parable, the Kingdom is a feast that nobody really wants to attend, because it is as dangerous as it is desirable, as costly as it is dazzling. The stakes are uncomfortably high, and the risks are just as great as the rewards.

And then you look again at those news headlines, and you think about what it means to actually live in this world and be present to it—its pleasures and its pain, its beauty and its terror—and you begin to realize: the Kingdom of which Jesus speaks, the feast in which we tremble to take part—is simply the real world, the world where we stop playing pretend, where God abides and calls us to risk everything for the sake of love. It is the world we discover when we grow up and stop sipping on air and begin to taste the deep, dark, bittersweet mystery of life as it actually is, not as we imagined it to be.

Later this morning, we will baptize baby Lydia, and of the many ways that we can speak about baptism, one of the ways that I often think about it is this: it is to be initiated into reality. It is so easy to spend our lives under a cloud of delusion and daydreams, hiding from the truth about ourselves and our world.

But God says, no, I desire that you would truly live, that you would truly look upon this world and learn how to love it, even in its brokenness, and so by water and the indwelling of my Spirit, I awaken you. I enmesh you in my love. I incorporate you into my accountability for the well-being of all things. I give you the bitter cup of which I myself have drunk, the cup of life, by which all illusion dies and by which your soul will burn with the fire of the eternal stars. This is my gift, God says: to make you as real and as alive as I am, marked as Christ’s own forever.

It is terrifying, wondrous, beautiful thing, to be baptized. It is a terrifying, wondrous, beautiful thing to be truly alive. To be guided and shaped by the requirements of love. To be drawn out into the complexities and paradoxes where God is at work, to do what we can, while we can, as best we can.

It is like a banquet that, if one were to truly count the cost, nobody would want to attend.

But it is also the only choice we have, if we wish to be truly part of this world. For the cities still burn, and the kings still rage, and the feast is still costly, but the Kingdom of Heaven is like the one who says: I will put on a garment of compassion and I will attend anyway.

So fill up my cup. I am ready to live.

Pig: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, October 1, 2023 at Saint Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 21:23-32.

Later this afternoon we are going to do a blessing of the animals in honor of the upcoming feast of St. Francis and as an unofficial conclusion to the Church’s Season of Creation. So, in honor of all God’s beloved creatures, here’s a story for you:

When I was in 3rd grade, my mom decided that we should get a potbellied pig as a pet. Now, most of you haven’t yet met my mom, but when you do, you will discover that she is a person full of surprising ideas and unexpected inspirations. Never a dull moment with her.

And I don’t recall exactly how or why she decided we should get a potbellied pig, and in retrospect, I think it was probably something we should have thought through a bit more. First of all, we didn’t live out in the country, but in a house right downtown, and this pig would have to cohabitate with several Siamese cats who were, shall we say, selective about who or what they would tolerate. Second of all, we had never had a pig, and if you hadn’t already guessed, pigs are a little different than house cats.

But nevertheless, the day arrived and we brought home a tiny little black pig and set up a bed for him in the mudroom. We named him Boris. Boris was truly the cutest thing you ever saw. He was also one of the naughtiest creatures that God ever made. Stubborn, unruly, and loud, Boris took over the house and horrified the cats and was completely and utterly pleased with himself.

Boris would not do anything you wanted him to do. We would put him on a little leash and try to take him for a walk. He refused to budge, and he would squeal as though you were trying to kill him.

But if you left the back door open for a split second, he would run out as fast as he could into the nearby parking lot and begin gobbling up wads of dried gum. If you tried to stop him, he would squeal as though you were trying to kill him.

In the evenings, it was my job to feed him his dinner of bran cereal and mashed bananas. I had to try to do it as silently as humanly possible, though, because the moment he heard that cereal hit the bowl, he would squeal, as though you were trying to kill him, until dinner was served and he was finally placated.

It became clear to us, after a very brief time, that that the idea of a pig was something far different from the reality of caring for THIS pig. It was not for the faint of heart. He would not be contained, nor tamed, nor would he adapt to the settled rhythms of our life. He was simply Boris. And that was that.

But as maddening as he was, Boris was also delightful, because you always knew where you stood with him. He was unapologetically himself. There was no artifice, no secret agendas. Would that more of us were as authentic and transparent about our needs as he was.

And so while we will offer that blessing of the animals later this afternoon the truth is that, quite often, animals bless us because they show us what it looks like to live with complete integrity of being. No masks, no posturing, just unaffected authenticity. What you see is what you get, wads of gum and squealing and all.

And there is something of Jesus reflected in that. Something of what it means to know who God really is.

When the chief priests and the elders challenge Jesus in today’s Gospel passage, asking him by whose authority he is doing what he does and teaching what he teaches, they are, of course, not asking out of genuine curiosity. They are not interested in who he truly is; they just want to trip him up and get him to say something that they can use against him. But Jesus knows what they are up to, and he beats them at their own game, entrapping them in their own questions with a bit of cleverness.

But the most important thing that we need to know about Jesus and take away from this exchange is not just that he is clever or quick—it is that he is authentic. The underlying truth, the thing his questioners miss, is the inconceivably good news that he is authentically who he says he is. Our whole faith hinges on this, in fact. Because at the end of the day, the true source of Jesus’ authority is his authenticity. His authenticity as the true Son of God, as the Incarnate Word, as the love of God revealed in the flesh. It is his authenticity that is so powerful: it is the fact that he is not here to play games, or to posture, or to only tell us what we want to hear. It is his authenticity that allows us to say, yes, Jesus, I trust you, yes, I will call you Lord, yes, I will follow you anywhere because I see, I know, I feel in my bones that you are the real deal.

And to give our lives over to the authenticity of God, to let it shape us into our own most authentic selves—well, there is no greater adventure that we can make in this life. Though I guarantee you, it’s not for the faint of heart.

Because while the authentic God is not exactly like a potbellied pig, there are some parallels. When we say yes to all of God, not just our idea of God, when we say yes to following Jesus, not just the idea of Jesus, we might get more than we bargained for, and it may not fit into the settled rhythms of our life.

Indeed, we might assume somehow that, in our life of faith, we are going to adopt Jesus and take him home with us and set up a little comfy space for him in the back room, but the fact of the matter is that God is always going to demand freedom, and attention, and God is going to slip out the door and make you chase after, and God is going to keep making a lot of noise lest you forget that there are hungry bellies out there, and God will absolutely not be walked on a leash.

But in all of the madness and all of the unpredictability of this life with God, the beauty, the gift is this: God will always be themself. You will always know where you stand with God. You will always know that you are loved. And we will come to discover that our own deep authenticity, messy as it might be, is where the power and promises of God will find us and save us and carry us onward. Even if there’s a little bit of squealing along the way.

Eventually we had to give Boris away; a woman that we knew fell in love with him and took him to live out at her place in the country. The last story I heard about him, which I really hope is true, was that he escaped from her yard one day and that, after a while, a neighbor spotted him along the road, running back towards the house as fast as his little legs could carry him, with an orange in his mouth.

I don’t know where he had been and I don’t know the end of the story, exactly, but as funny as it might sound, I think that’s one of the best images of authentic discipleship that I can conjure up: running forward in sheer delight, unapologetically yourself, brave and free, sustained by the taste of something sweet, heading towards home.

So thanks for being authentically you, Boris. It was fun chasing after you for a little while.

And more importantly, thanks for being authentically you, Jesus. We’ll keep chasing after you forever.