November 2023 – By Another Road

Trailer Park: A Sermon for Christ the King

I preached this sermon on Sunday, November 26, 2023 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 25:31-46.

I think the holiday season, more so than any time of year, inspires within us the desire to catch a glimpse of a kinder and more compassionate world. There is so much harshness, so much sorrow, and yet right about now we bring out the lights and the wreaths and the inflatable lawn decorations as though to remind ourselves and others—or maybe, to insist to ourselves and others—that suspicion and gloom are not the whole story. That there is still beauty. There is still hope. And there is still a general posture of friendliness that we can assume towards our neighbor, despite everything else.

But I have to say, the friendliest neighborhood I ever lived in—both in the holidays and throughout the whole year—was a trailer park in Santa Rosa, California. Yes, for about two or three years, when I was an adolescent, I lived in a small travel trailer on the outskirts of town, due to a complex set of family circumstances that are a whole other story. But the thing that’s on my mind this week is not so much about my reasons for ending up in the trailer park, but instead the extraordinary hospitality and kindness that I witnessed there among people who were, for various reasons, going through seasons of challenge and transition in their lives.

This was not a vacation-destination sort of place, but the kind of community you go to when money is tight and you don’t have any other options. Most of our neighbors were either paycheck-to-paycheck or getting by on even less than a paycheck.

But the remarkable thing—the thing that I have carried with me ever since—was that the people there were friendlier, more approachable, and more open to the stranger in their midst than any other place I’ve lived. These were folks who couldn’t even afford to put up Christmas decorations in their yard, but a mysterious light illuminated the place nonetheless.

People would, without hesitation, invite you over to share some food, or would stop to have a chat while passing by your trailer, or check in on someone when they were sick or hadn’t been seen in a couple of days. The kind of attentiveness and care that feels almost quaint in this day and age.

Our neighbor, an older woman named Pearl, would peer out of her screen window, chain smoking cigarettes and eating Burger King, observing the neighborhood and dispensing her thoughtful insights about life in between puffs of cigarette smoke. Her eyes looked like they had seen more than their fair share of hardship, but they were gentle eyes.

“I’m tiiiiired, man, I’m tiiiiired,” she would say in her Oklahoma drawl, but she was never so tired as to not invite me in for a visit, to ask how I was doing, to really listen to me, which meant a lot to an awkward 13 year old who had a lot of emotional baggage and who felt unseen much of the time.

I can’t say that I loved living in the trailer park, or that everything was easy there. And I don’t want to romanticize the desperate circumstances faced by so many of the folks who were living there. But I can’t deny that overall, my memory is one of kindness, of welcome, and of compassion.

And it’s that final quality, compassion, that I think was the key distinction between that neighborhood and the other, more typical places that I have lived. Whether they thought about it in this way or not, the people in the trailer park lived with an almost instinctive sense of compassion towards their neighbors, because they knew that, no matter the reason someone found themselves there, they probably needed a little understanding, a little care.

And they knew this because they, too, needed the same thing. There was a sense that, though we might be living in cramped quarters, making a home on cracked pavement, we were all in this together. And though yes, we were tiiiired, we were not alone.

You know, it’s funny, this is Christ the King Sunday, and we expend a lot of energy in the Church pondering the mysteries of the Kingdom and what it’s like and who is part of it and how to get in, but I think in the end, it’s not as complicated as some make it out to be.

To put it simply, I think the Kingdom of God is like that trailer park I lived in. Because the Kingdom of God, more than anything else, is a place shaped by compassion. And it glows with a light that is not dependent upon any season.

It has nothing to do with your material resources, this Kingdom of God. It has nothing to do with your nationality or your sexuality or your gender or your political party. It has nothing to do with the mistakes you’ve made or the wrong turns you’ve taken. If we are to take this morning’s gospel passage seriously, truly seriously, then the only criteria of the Kingdom prepared before the foundation of the world is that it is a place of compassion.

Compassion for everyone we meet, including those whom the world tends to forget. Compassion for our enemies. Compassion for creation. Compassion for ourselves.

And the thing about compassion is that it is not the same as benign goodwill or charity. It is not someone sitting in a lofty place dispensing a favor to someone less fortunate. Compassion, the Latin root of which means “to suffer with,” is about experiencing the solidarity of human existence, of realizing that we all need each other, that we are all blessed by one another, and that perhaps those who have struggled, those who have experienced life’s challenges the most, will be the ones to bless us with a particular depth of wisdom. I have often found that to be true.

Compassion, in other words, is not saying “there but for the grace of God go I,” it is saying “by God’s grace, we are in this together. Let’s care for each other.” It is what Jesus embodied in his ministry and in his own passion, and it’s what he asks us to embody as well, if we would know what life is truly about, if we would enter the Kingdom where true life is found.

So when we ponder the Kingship of Christ, and the Kingdom over which he reigns, and how we might seek it here and now so that we might be its inheritors in the age to come, then I will tell you this: it’s right in front of us. It is not reserved for the morally perfect or the privileged. To take part in God’s reign, simply look to cultivate a life of compassion.

And the simplest way to do this? Look for the places in your own story, in your own heart, where there is a wound, a vulnerability, a hard lesson learned, that moment when you were hungry, or sick, or felt imprisoned by circumstance. In other words, recall a time when you needed compassion, and let that memory guide your actions.

Find those who are doing their best to get by, who are tired, or who are struggling in a particular way that you understand, because you’ve been there yourself. And go be with them. Literally, go be with them at least once this holiday season. See how your own life is blessed and illuminated by doing so.

And if you are the one struggling to get by this morning, if you are feeling unseen or lost, then simply imagine the God of the universe looking at you the same way Pearl looked at me all those years ago: with gentle, infinitely compassionate eyes, asking nothing of you other than to do your best, to not give up, to keep that beautiful light burning within you.

The giving and receiving of compassion. That’s it. That’s the Kingdom. Poor or rich, virtuous or broken, sheep or goat, in the end, compassion is the only thing that will show us what heaven looks like, what salvation feels like.

And compassion is the only thing that will endure and live on when our selfishness and indifference and judgment—the stubborn goat that lives inside all of us—has been separated out from our long and complicated history and is burned up in the regenerating fire of God’s justice and love. And even then, yes, even then, on the other side of judgment, I believe that compassion will win out, and that something new will grow from the ashes of our failures, up from the cramped quarters and the cracks in the pavement where we’ve been trying to make a home.

So, I don’t know what it looks like when you close your eyes and imagine the Kingdom of Heaven. Maybe it is a beautiful place, a perfect place, a place of twinkling lights and evergreen and streets gleaming like freshly fallen snow.

But I will confess, for me, it looks a little bit like that trailer park, a place of open doors and broken hearts still beating, a place of no illusions and of deep strength. A place where everyone is welcomed, where every wayward soul has a place to call home.

Like Pearl said, some days I’m tiiiired, man, I’m tiiiiired, and maybe you are too, but I think we’ll get there someday, and when we do, to be part of God’s reign forever, to meet Christ our King, to meet Jesus our friend, compassion will be the crown upon his head, and the whole earth will glow with its radiance. And so will we.

The Master: Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, November 19, 2023 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 25:14-30, Jesus’ parable of the talents.

The other day a very exciting thing happened to me: I received in the mail a copy of the Vermont Country Store Christmas catalog. Now, if you are not familiar with this company or its catalog, it is a family-owned business in Vermont that primarily sells home goods and clothing and other items for anyone who is enticed by things like flannel sheets and wool sweaters and maple syrup.

And the Christmas catalog, especially, is something I look forward to all year, even though I rarely buy anything from it. Just to flip through it is a treasure trove of nostalgia—vintage holiday decorations and cakes made from “old world” recipes and cozy slippers like the ones my dad used to wear on cold nights in northern Michigan. To read the Vermont Country Store catalog is, for me at least, to be drawn into that landscape of memory that feels especially potent as the holidays approach, as the past reaches out to embrace us.

And although our memories of the past can be both pleasant and painful, there is something about this time of year that seemingly compels us not just to remember it but to re-engage it, to make it live again through recipes and traditions and songs.

For me it might be the Vermont Country Store catalog, for you it might be something else, but I am willing to bet that there will be something in the next several weeks—a scent, a taste, a melody—that will suddenly collapse the boundaries between past and present such that your life will suddenly feel both very spacious and very small all at once—spacious enough to hold so many memories, small enough to still feel like they were only yesterday. Time is strange like that.

I’ve been thinking about time this week. It is precious, isn’t it? Perhaps the most precious thing we are given. It seems so abundant when we start out. It can feel interminable when we are waiting for something to happen.

And then, suddenly, it slips away, and we think, oh, wait, not quite yet. I thought I had a bit more, I need a little bit more. There were still things I wanted to do, there were still words I needed to say. I don’t know why I didn’t. Maybe I was distracted. Maybe I was afraid. Please, just a bit more time.

But the dying light and the winnowing down of the year reminds us that time is a relentless master; we are given what we are given, and it is up to us to make the most of it. It is up to us to imbue it with light and love and care while we can. I think we try to remind ourselves of this during the holidays.

If you wonder why on earth I’m going on about Christmas catalogs and time and memory, it’s not just because Thanksgiving is coming up in a few days, although I am excited about that. I have my Cool Whip ready!

No, it’s because I have been wrestling all week with the parable we have been given this morning, seeking a life-giving word from what can feel like an impenetrable text. Jesus, yet again, gives us an image of the Kingdom that seems, on its face, short on mercy and full of dire threats from a cruel master demanding a return on his investments. Is this supposed to be God? I cannot believe it. And so, yet again, I found myself seeking good news in an unexpected place.

And as I was flipping through that Christmas catalog and reflecting on the past, I found it. Not in the catalog itself, but in that tender sense of longing for times past that it evoked in me. It made me realize, in a new way, that the thing in this life that is of greatest value—the closest thing we might equate with both the “talents” given in this parable and the Master who dispenses them—is not God. It is time.

Time is our greatest resource. Time is our most precious gift. Time is the thing we must decide how to use while it is entrusted to us. And time, in the end, is the unyielding master of our mortal bodies, for it will run out, and it will call us to account. Time will ask us, in the dying light, in the winnowing down of our own years: what did you do while you could? What dividends of love and justice and peace do you have to show for it all?

And yes, I know that for generations, the Church has interpreted the Master in this parable as Christ and the talents as our material or spiritual resources that we should not bury out of idleness or fear. But I will be honest, I don’t believe that God punishes us simply because we are afraid, because we didn’t know quite what to do, because we didn’t yield a certain rate of return. I think such notions of God have been used to exploit people or at the very least, to make them feel like they are never enough, that they had better produce results or else, usually for the cruel masters of this world.

Because here’s the thing about God—here’s the good news for those of us wearied and tearstained by the passage of the years—God is bigger than time. God is not bound by time. God is not sitting out there somewhere, watching the clock, waiting to see what you and I will accomplish. God is not making a list and checking it twice.

God already knows. God has always known all that you would be, and all that you wouldn’t, or couldn’t be. And God has loved you anyway. Whether time has been kind or cruel to you, God has been with you every moment of your life, and will continue to be there, even when time runs out. And on that day, God will guide you out beyond time itself, beyond longing and regret and fear to that place where nothing is wasted, where nothing is lost, where everything is given.

And if this is so, then perhaps the true invitation of this parable, the way into a Kingdom that arises in the midst of the cruelty and finitude of time, is simply this: cherish what you have been given. Savor the collection of fleeting moments that are your life. Use your days to make a world that is more peaceful, more beautiful and gentle and loving.

Not to try and impress that master, Time, who will take all we have back for himself, but to get in touch with something even more powerful—to awaken to the reality that no matter what is taken from us by time, the love that we experience and share in this life is timeless, it is eternal, for it belongs to God. And one day Christ will come and give back everything and everyone that time has taken, and it will be a gift more precious than anything you can order in a catalog.

It will be the life that is beyond time, which we cannot yet even imagine, and yet which is deeper, even, than our most cherished memories. Because even more so than our own lives, God is both very spacious and very small, all at once—spacious enough to hold forever, small enough to hold you.

Cool Whip: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, November 12, 2023 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 25:1-13, the parable of the 10 bridesmaids.

Have you ever experienced something in your life that you only understood a little bit later, when you were looking back at it, maybe with a few more years under your belt, a little bit more wisdom or humility?

One little thing that always amused me a bit, growing up, was my grandma’s excessively large collection of empty Cool Whip containers. You know the kind I’m talking about, those blue and white plastic tubs? Now, I love Cool Whip, it’s sweet and soft, like a cloud melting on your tongue. And we ate a lot of desserts at my grandparents’s house, so there was almost always some Cool Whip in the refrigerator.

But while most of the other bottles and cartons we used were tossed out or recycled, for reasons I could not decipher my grandma seemed determined to save every single Cool Whip tub the family had ever consumed. They were used as containers for Thanksgiving leftovers, for all sorts of leftovers, actually, and they were repurposed to hold all sorts of random odds and ends on cupboards and shelves.

And somewhere, deep in some drawer, I am sure there was a back stock of them, all nested together, ready to be drawn out at a moment’s notice should some unexpected object need to be sealed up and stored away.

When I was young, the notion of why anyone would need so many Cool Whip containers was beyond me. I figured it was just some quirk, an odd little habit in a family with a zealous attachment to whipped dessert topping.

And it was only much later, as I reflected both on my grandma’s life and the circumstances that shaped it, that I realized there was more to it than just a quirky habit.

You see, my grandma grew up with very little money. She was born in the midst of the Great Depression, one of four children, the daughter of a Lutheran pastor who died when she was a teenager, leaving her family’s budget even tighter than it had already been.

And once she was married, my grandma raised six children as a stay-at-home mother, tending to her family on my grandpa’s modest, blue-collar wages. For my grandma, love looked like providing enough food for her kids, making a dollar stretch, getting to the end of the month, and if that meant reusing a Cool Whip container to save some money, to preserve food and to make sure there was always something stashed away in the fridge, then that is what she would do.

And it’s only once I got a bit older and had to pay my own bills and navigate some of my own lean financial seasons that I came to appreciate exactly what my grandma and others in her position had to overcome—they had to survive in the face of scarcity, with very little in the way of a safety net. And so even if it just looked like a collection of Cool Whip containers stashed away in a drawer, I feel like she was storing up all her hopes and her unspoken dreams in that drawer, too, all nested together, a stack of prayers that someday her children and her grandchildren would have a better, easier life.

What a gift, when we can look back with empathy and and finally see in a new way all the ways, big and small, that we have been cared for. And when we do so, it can also help us think about other things in a new way, too.

Take, for example, this morning’s parable from Jesus about the foolish and the wise bridesmaids. This is, by all accounts, a parable about the promised return of Christ, and about the ways in which we are encouraged, as partakers of the Kingdom, to be prepared for this return.

The challenge, of course, in the long, long wait for this return, is that we may grow confused or unsure about what wisdom and preparation should actually look like in our day-to-day lives. And Christian tradition, at various stages in its history (and its present), has unfortunately used such parables as instruments of fear, of enforcing moral purity, saying, be prepared, be obedient, be well-behaved, good Christian, or else! The door will be locked to you and you will suffer forever in the darkness.

Nevermind the fact that the whole thrust of Jesus’ message is that the morally lost, the wayward, and the broken will be the first ones invited to the feast of God. Nevermind his radical inclusivity.

No, we are so conditioned by our own notions of insiders and outsiders, of the worthy and the outcast, that we cannot help but imagine that this parable reinforces the predictable judgments and punishments of our own world, where grace is meager and perfection is mandatory, despite its being impossible.

But what if that wasn’t the point of this parable at all? What if this depiction of the Kingdom was getting at something else entirely?

And that brings me back to the Cool Whip containers, and my grandma—back to the scrimpers and the savers of this world, and Jesus’ particular affection and solidarity with the ones who have little—in short, it brings me back to the poor and the marginal. If we want to find the good news, we must alway read the Gospel from the margins. The margins will show us the way to the center of God’s heart.

What I realize, now, is that the bridesmaids who bring extra oil are not stand-ins for the morally perfect and pure…they represent the ones who know about scarcity. Their wisdom is the type that comes from having very little, of needing to make your resources stretch through a long, cold night. It’s the sort of thing that Jesus’ followers, most of them people of low social and economic circumstance, would identify simply as “common sense.” The same thing that my grandma told me, as a child prone to flights of fancy, that I needed a bit more of.

In contrast, the bridesmaids who do not bring enough oil are the type who have never had to make a dollar stretch; they don’t plan ahead because they have never imagined a resource that would run out, and even if it did, they are the type who assumes that someone else will bear the cost and fix the problem. They are probably not the kind who have ever had to worry about the light bill or whether there will be enough food at the feast. They are the type who don’t quite get the value of a Cool Whip container.

Jesus is offering this parable to his ragtag band of followers as they express some concern and fear about when he will come back to them, when he will make things finally and truly right and whole and just for all people. They are maybe even a bit scared that they don’t have what it takes to get by until that unknown day. So maybe he is giving them the type of encouragement that they will understand. Maybe he is saying to them,

You who have had to get by with little, you who know what it means to save up your oil for the lamp, you who know what it is to pray for your daily bread, you who have stored up your tears in your jar and your dreams stacked up in a drawer, you who know what it means to be wise in this world, to survive in this world—you already have what it takes to endure, you already know how to be ready for that day, for you are already living with integrity and care.

And so until then, just keep doing what you are doing. Stay humble, stay aware of the preciousness of every resource, stay grateful for every simple gift, steward the earth and those entrusted to you with wisdom and care and gentleness, and then dream. Dream of what can be. Dream of what will be. Stash those dreams away, all nested together, pull them out when you need them, and one day, I promise, the world will be sweet and soft, like a cloud melting on the tongue, and it will all have been worth it. It will all make sense.

My grandma is gone, and I don’t know what happened to all of her Cool Whip containers. But every time I am in the grocery store and walk past them in the case, I smile and think of her. And I think about all the people in the world who are getting by as best they can, saving back a bit of oil for the lamp, saving back whatever they can for their families until a better day arrives, and I am grateful that now I understand a bit better now than I used to: they are the true face of wisdom. They are the true face of love.

And until the day when the Bridegroom returns at last, they are the closest glimpse we will have of the face of God.

The Table: A Sermon For All Saints

I preached this sermon on Sunday, November 5, 2023, the observance of All Saints’ Day at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Revelation 7:9-17 and Matthew 5:1-12.

It’s in storage at the moment, but I am in possession of a rather unusual coffee table that my mom bought years ago. At the time, she was a young woman living in northern California, and one day as she was driving along, she saw a random man just sitting there on the side of the road selling furniture made out of oddly shaped pieces of reclaimed redwood. Apparently this was *totally normal* in the 70s in California, so she stopped to take a look and ended up going home with this particular coffee table, and it’s been handed on and passed down ever since.

Now I will admit, it is not the most useful piece of furniture. Because it is made from an irregularly shaped slab of wood, you can’t really put much on top of it, and the base is a little bit wobbly, and I’ve lost a few cups of coffee off of it and I’ve banged my shins on its jagged edges more than once in the dark, evoking some colorful language on my part.

But as impractical as it might be, I will never give up that table. Part of that is sentimentality of course; but also because the wood itself is so beautiful. The man who made it put a protective polish on it, but you can still see the deep, natural, rich hue of the redwood, the undulating grain, the nicks and the scars, the dark glow of its inner luminosity. In all my life, I have never seen another table quite like it. And so someday, when Matt and I have a house, I’ll hopefully find some corner where we can set it up with minimal risk to our shins.

What I love most about that table is that when you look at it, you can see its source. You can see the tree that formed it, the very shape of its origin, the textures and the imperfections acquired by its life in some long forgotten, cloud draped forest. You can see all the things that, when we craft something, are typically glossed over, shaved away, painted and and stained and hidden in the pursuit of a uniform perfection.

And it might sound strange, but I pulled out that table and looked at it this week as I was reflecting on the Feast of All Saints, which we are observing today. All Saints is, itself, a bit of a quirky object with a few jagged edges. One one hand, it’s, of course, a day when we call to mind the saints—people in the distant and recent past who, by some measure, experienced a particular closeness with God and God’s mission in the world. On the other hand, we also incorporate into our observance bits and pieces of All Souls Day, recalling the beloved dead, saintly and otherwise, who have populated our own past and whose memory lingers, sometimes a comfort, sometimes a painful thing we stumble up against in the dark.

And so in this one day we have a whole range of themes, references, and feelings to try and make sense of: a bit of joy; a pang of grief; a sense of calling toward something profound and eternal; and yet a lingering doubt about how to do so when life feels so temporary and fragile.

Our scriptures appointed for the day are similarly confounding. We are given a startling depiction in Revelation of martyrs in blood-white robes before the throne of God, an image that feels both vivid and yet impossibly remote from our day-to-day reality, where blood tends to stain a different color. And we are also given the deceptively simple Beatitudes of Jesus—equally vivid, yet equally remote once we try to figure out how to practically live them out. I have not yet figured out how to determine whether I am sufficiently poor in spirit or pure in heart.

But that confounding quality, that ambiguous, jagged beauty, is, I would argue, the point of this feast, because All Saints, in requiring us to grapple with grief and gratitude and hope all at once, is about reclaiming purpose from those things in our lives that are raw and unstructured and unvarnished, those irregularly shaped experiences we carry with us.

And at its core, All Saints’ wants to teach us that these things are not an obstacle but an answer; that sainthood is not something neat and tidy and peaceful; it is about the courage to reconnect with the deep, untidy, God-given authenticity within us, whether in this life or the next.

Because death and sainthood have something in common: they are both a sort of returning back to God, a stripping away of the cheap veneer, the paint and the pretense. The dead and the saints both experience a reconnection with that mysterious divine power which created all things.

The saints remind us that we can make this return even while we live, that by prayer and service, we can scrub ourselves down to the essential substance of which we were made, revealing the undulating grain, the dark glow of God’s inner luminosity in our very flesh.

But the dead remind us that even if we fail to return to God fully in this life, we will nonetheless, by God’s grace, do so in death, our souls restored to their original character, abiding in God like a stand of redwoods in a clouded forest. Everyone we have ever loved and lost is there now, standing tall and graceful, embedded back into the fabric of life itself, awaiting the day of a new creation when we will be fashioned into something even more honest, more complete.

And so if we read the Scriptures from this vantage point—that sainthood is not about wearing a golden halo but about the reclamation of our raw, inner radiance—then the texts reveal something important, something that my quirky old coffee table also seems to tell me whenever I look at it: our life of faith is not about acquiring layers of lacquer and gilding; it is not about being whittled down into something that barely resembles us; it is not about the straight line or the perfect edge. It is about the surrender to an organic, unbridled sort of beauty; it is about showing forth something of our eternal origins; it is about reminding all who gaze upon us, even with our nicks and our scars and our unsteady legs and our jagged edges, that we bear the image of the One who made us.

Which means that the Beatitudes are not, in fact, a checklist for achieving sainthood: they are the promise that even when bad things happen, even when all else is stripped away from us, our intrinsic blessedness will shine through.

And that image from Revelation is not just a remote tableaux of lofty, saintly figures in white; it is the promise that even when we bleed, even when we die, in Christ we will be revealed as what we always were: vessels of pure, divine light.

So my advice, for all of us, is to let All Saints be what it is. Let it be a little rough around the edges. Let it be delightful and let it be sad. Let it inspire a glance towards heaven and another down towards the dark earth where our loved ones rest. We will say their names and we will sing our songs, and maybe it will all be a little bit wobbly, a bit of a stumbling hazard, but it will be so very honest, so very meaningful, as all real, unvarnished things are.

I know I will never meet that mysterious man on the side of the road who was selling that redwood furniture, but if I could, I think would ask him, what inspired you to try and make something useful out of such rough, unruly, imperfect materials? Didn’t you know it wouldn’t quite work? Didn’t you know we would stumble in the dark and hit our shins and that it would hurt, that we would curse the ground we walk on?

But, at least in my imagination, I wonder if he might look back at me with a dark, gentle glow in his eyes and say,

Blessed are the ones who see the beauty in what is unruly and imperfect.

Blessed are the ones who love such things anyway.

Blessed are the ones who stumble and hurt and keep going.

Blessed are the ones who live.

Blessed are the ones who die.

Blessed are the jagged-edged and the real and the saintly.

And blessed, too, are the ones who simply try.