Month: April 2024

Stranger: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, April 28, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Acts 8:26-40.

This may sound odd, but every so often, it’s good to feel like a stranger. 

Most of us tend to build our lives in pursuit of familiarity and predictability. We establish relationships and routines and structures that allow us to feel safe and known wherever we go.

But especially if we have been in a place for a long while, and we have become very comfortable and familiar with the people around us, every so often it’s good to feel like a stranger—to remember what a humbling experience it can be, how vulnerable it is, standing at the edge of a room and hoping that someone will be kind enough to take notice of us. 

I experienced this one afternoon last August shortly after I came to Ohio. Not at Saint Anne, mind you—my role here meant that I felt known and seen here from day one. But  a few weeks after I started, I decided to go down into Cincinnati to attend an open house event for a nonprofit organization that has no connection to the church. 

I was interested in learning more about their work and thought it would be good to go and check it out. I went by myself, and as soon as I showed up, a feeling hit me that I hadn’t felt in a very long time: that feeling I used to have on the first day of school after moving to a new town. The slightly awkward feeling when you walk into a place where everyone else seems to know each other and you are just sort of standing there looking for a way in, feeling like you have a big blinking sign around your neck that says “stranger.”

Now, maybe some of you are life-of the-party types who can easily walk into a room and make 5 friends immediately. If so, I am in awe of you, because while I love people, and I love learning about people and connecting with people, I am also, somewhere buried underneath all of these vestments, still carrying with me a bit of that quiet kid on the first day of school. I used to think this was a bad thing, a weakness on my part, but I don’t anymore. 

Because every so often, it’s good to feel like a stranger. It’s good because it reminds me to look for and have compassion for those people brave enough to show up in a new space, to try a new thing, to go it alone when they must. 

And my own moments of feeling this way have, I pray, helped me stay mindful of the people who stand at the edges of those rooms in which I am very comfortable and confident. This is, I think, a spiritual practice we should all work at: looking for the strangers in our midst, and welcoming them, and even, sometimes, daring to go out and be a stranger ourselves. 

Especially because in so many of our Scriptural stories, we discover that God loves a stranger, and that often God shows up as a stranger, too. 

Consider this morning’s reading from Acts. Consider this man who is a eunuch—one who lives his entire life in an ambiguous posture. On one hand, he is a man who cannot have children or engage in traditional male gender norms, and so he is deemed a non-threatening and useful servant for a royal household, which affords him some privilege and comfort. 

On the other hand, he is a person who stands at the periphery of every room he enters—a stranger in his own culture, and a stranger, too, in Jerusalem, where he has just traveled to worship at the Temple. The Israelites, you see, had long excluded eunuchs from their assembly, as recorded in the book of Deuteronomy.

So I was thinking this week about this man who was a eunuch.

I imagined him arriving in Jerusalem in his royal chariot alone, and for all his finery, feeling like a kid on the first day of school: looking for a kind face somewhere in the crowd, wondering if this God who had called him to a new place would place a welcoming figure in his path. 

I imagined him standing in the firelight of a courtyard in the cool night, watching families eat and laugh and pray and gather–families he would never be part of, families who did not see him standing there waiting, hoping for an invitation to pull up a seat, to join in, to be known. 

And then I thought of him traveling back to Ethiopia on the wilderness road, reading the scroll of Isaiah, maybe with tears in his eyes, seeing his own life staring back at him on the page: “like a lamb silent before its shearer, he does not open his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him.”

And as he read, asking himself—How did Isaiah know? How did this prophet know exactly how I have felt every day of my life, quiet and humiliated and unsure? And what is on the other side of this, this feeling perpetually like a stranger in my own life, standing at the edge of my own existence? 

But God loves a stranger. So wouldn’t you know, there is Philip by the side of the road. 

God suddenly shows up, in the form of another stranger, with good news of the Son of God who was, himself, a stranger to his own people; and who ventured into the gates of death as a solitary stranger bearing his cross, pierced with nails; and who emerged back from death as a stranger pierced with light, offering a new type of belonging for anyone and everyone who has ever felt alone in this world. 

So yes, it is good, once in a while, to be a stranger–to feel your heart tremble with the longing to be a part of something, to stand awkwardly, looking for kindness in the eyes of those whom you do not know. 

It is good to do this because, what we must realize is that God is doing this every day in our midst—God is showing up at the margins, in those who feel excluded and uncertain, in the guests brave enough to enter through the doors of our church for the first time or after a very long time. God is standing just outside the firelight in the cool night, watching us eat and laugh and pray and hoping that we will welcome him in every form he takes. That we will invite God to pull up a seat, to join in, to be known. 

God is in the eunuchs and in all the people of our own time and place who do not know where they fit in—the people who love differently, who express their gender identity differently, the ones who come from different backgrounds, the ones who have done things they regret, the ones who aren’t sure what they believe, the ones who don’t believe in themselves, and the ones who have lost everything and yet still long to be part of something. 

And if we do nothing else here, I hope we will look for them. I hope we will not just say hello to them when they come to worship, but that we will then ask them to pull up a seat at coffee hour, or take them to lunch. That we will go out into the community and look for them and find ways to remind them that they are not alone, that we are all in this together. 

And, once in a while, I hope that we will become them, too—that we will venture into those new places where we are the stranger, to let our hearts be pierced by vulnerability, knowing that when we do so, we might be the face of God for the ones kind enough to notice us. 

…

After his impromptu baptism, all we know about the man who was a eunuch is that he went on his way rejoicing. Rejoicing because he knew, now, that God saw and loved him. Rejoicing because, perhaps for the first time in his whole life, he was seen as something more than a stranger. 

Rejoicing because now he knew that the very things that had made him feel different and excluded and less-than were now, precisely, the things that God would use in him to help others. Rejoicing because now it was his turn to go and find those at the periphery, to build his own fires in the cool night, and to say, I know what it feels like to be alone. Come closer. You are welcome here. You belong here. 

For the great mystery of God’s love is this: sometimes it is good to feel like a stranger, if only to look into each other’s eyes and realize that, in truth, none of us actually are.

Shepherd/Lamb: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, April 21, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, Ohio. The lectionary text cited is John 10:11-18, Jesus speaking about the Good Shepherd.

I don’t remember the first time I saw an illustration of the Good Shepherd, but it’s one of those images that, even if you grow up with only a marginal relationship with Christianity, you just sort of know about. It’s been depicted in so many formats, in visual art, in music, more so than almost any other image of Jesus, other than perhaps the Nativity or the Cross. 

In the little Lutheran church in Michigan where my grandparents belonged and where I’d venture as a boy on summer mornings, there was a massive, colorful stained glass window above the choir with an image of the Good Shepherd, and if you close your eyes you can probably imagine it: the green trees and billowing clouds; the smiling shepherd and the snowy flock of lambs. 

As a young child, looking up at this image, bathed in the dappled sunlight that streamed through the window, I assumed that this is who God must be: a protector and guide; he of the watchful eye and gentle heart, the one who will not leave us, the one who is soft light and green grass and a warm, safe place to fall asleep when night falls.

But it’s difficult, because as time goes by, we are faced with reminders that life is not a stained glass window. Wolves still prowl the landscape, just out of the frame of those gauzy, glowing images of the Shepherd and his lambs, and sometimes they pounce. 

And when this happens, when the ones we love are snatched away, when we are scattered, and when we feel lost, suddenly the whole proposition of a shepherding God who hovers protectively behind us, ensuring our safety, preserving us from barren places, might feel like a cruel joke. 

If you have ever asked or been asked by someone, “where was God when ____ happened?” you know what I am talking about. In such moments, those stained glass images can lose their luster, and feel more like a fantasy than a promise kept. We would be lying to ourselves and to God if we did not admit that this is sometimes the case. And it’s ok to ask those questions, because God knows we have all had our share of dark nights and howling wolves at the door.

This week, St. Anne lost a beloved member of our own flock far too soon. This is not the first time our community has faced such a loss, but it is also true that when someone like our dear friend Spencer Pugh is taken away so suddenly, without any opportunity to say goodbye, it can feel disorienting, and all of our words about the God who protects and watches over us can feel a bit hollow. How could such a thing happen? Where was God when we needed him?

But all of us must grapple with these questions eventually, because these questions are what emerges when we get honest about faith, when stained glass windows can’t tell the whole story, when platitudes are no longer adequate to address the complex mixture of grief and joy that deep love and deep relationship require of us. 

We ask these hard questions when we grow up and realize that anodyne images of the Good Shepherd tending a flock of placid sheep do not tell the whole story of God’s presence and activity in our midst, nor do they fully capture the way of life that Jesus has offered us. 

Here’s what I mean. Think of that image of the Good Shepherd again. Call it to your mind. Ask yourself: where is God in that picture? 

Who is God in that picture? 

Who are you, in that picture? 

When we start out, as I did as a kid in that Lutheran church, this seems pretty obvious. God is the Shepherd, we are the sheep. And this is partly true. 

Because long before Jesus even came into the world, God was a shepherding God. When Jesus says, I am the Good Shepherd, as he does twice in this passage from John, notice that he is using the same name for God that was uttered to Moses, the unspeakable name usually translated as I AM WHO I AM. I AM the Good Shepherd. 

I AM, the ancient and eternal God, is the Good Shepherd, because God, from time immemorial, has always been the one hovering over creation, tending and watching and calling us by name, seeking to guide us through wilderness places and call us back even when we are stubborn or foolish or lost like sheep, stumbling under the weight of our waywardness and loneliness and our unanswerable questions.

But that’s not the whole story. That’s not all there is to this image. Because there’s something different about God in Jesus. Something surprising. 

What I have come to realize is that in the image of the Good Shepherd, Jesus is actually, ultimately, the lamb in the picture. He is the lamb who was slain. He is the lamb who lays down his life. The lamb who bears the wound of our waywardness and our loneliness and our questions. The lamb who gives himself over to the wolf. The lamb who takes away the sin of the world. The lamb who dies and yet lives again, so that all of the rest of us might do the same.

So where does that leave us in this picture?

I could not have understood such a thing as a child, when I simply needed a God who would always lead me beside still waters. But now, with every twist and turn in the stream, with every loss and hard question that comes along, I have come to see what I did not, what I could not back then:

That there is something far more serious and yet also more hopeful in this image of the Good Shepherd than platitudes about a God who will always keep us safe, when we know all too well that life and love are not always safe or certain.

Instead, we discover that in Christ, in our baptism, in our particular living participation in the aliveness of Jesus, God has done a new thing: he has traded places with us. He has made us the Shepherds, now.

And he, God, has entered into the small and the weak and the vulnerable parts of creation, he has become one with the lambs and the lost and he has now said to us, my children, my own precious heart, you will be saved, but not by means of a stained-glass window sort of faith. Not by easy answers and ever-gentle paths. 

You will be saved by the love of the least of these. You will be saved, day by day, by the care YOU give, by the protection YOU provide as a shepherd, as a guardian, as a companion and a friend. You will be saved by the number of small things you learn to call by name. You will be saved by taking your share, now, in the shepherding that God has always offered. 

You will be the one who says, now in Christ,  I AM the Good Shepherd. And I will stand up to the wolf at the door, and I will help tend to this fragile earth and its fragile creatures, and I will lay down my life for you, my sibling, my neighbor, my friend, because salvation is not a pursuit free from danger, but is the unfolding of a love stronger than death. And now we have been given a Shepherd’s heart, and the Lamb who is God is the one we carry with us on the road, and together, we pray, we will all get where we are going, and no one will be lost because we won’t abandon them.

People like Spencer lived their lives as shepherds like this. And even when they’re gone from our midst, they serve to remind us all of our shared calling, our responsibility to be part of the answers to those hard questions we ask, and to labor in the hope of that world first glimpsed in stained glass: the one with the green trees and the billowing clouds and the dappled sunlight, where the promise of life everlasting is not a cruel joke, where justice is realized, where love reigns, and where the wolf no longer prowls.

Are you ready for that work? Are you ready for that world?

As God once said, and as we are now invited to say back: I am.