June 2024 – By Another Road

Weeds: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, July 30, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Mark 5:21-43.

I am not an adept gardener, but I can always tell when we have reached peak growing season—it’s when those pesky weeds spring up through the cracks in the sidewalk. I plucked out several this morning on the walkway into church, likely nourished by this weekend’s rain. It’s the eternal struggle—we weed, God laughs. But I also admire the tenacity of those weeds! They seem to defy our best efforts to subdue them. Their impulse to grow is strong.

Maybe they have something to teach us. Have you ever noticed that, throughout human history, our impulse towards growth and freedom also emerges most often in the summer?

There’s the Fourth of July, of course, when we Americans were the proverbial weeds in the garden of King George III, but there was also the singing of the Magna Carta (which happened in June); and the storming of the Bastille in France (in July); and the March on Washington (in August); and the summer Freedom Rides of the civil rights movement; and the Stonewall riots and the Pride marches inspired by them; and the racial justice protests of 2020; and many, many other such moments when people had finally had enough and demanded something new… and they all unfolded in the long, hot, hopeful days of summer.

I’ve been wondering this week why that is. It’s almost as though the human spirit comes alive, too, in this warm growing season with our own renewed, fierce determination to flourish, almost as if our souls were like stalks of summer corn, reaching up towards the infinite blue sky, determined to reach the clouds, to brush against the hem of eternity, to thrive unencumbered.

And you might notice that, in the seasons of the Church, we acknowledge this impulse too, adorning the altars and the ministers with green, the color of an insistent, stubborn vitality. After Easter and Pentecost, in the long green season of Ordinary Time, we are reminded that the Church, at is best, is indeed like a weed growing up through the cracks of empire, or like wildflowers growing in a forgotten ditch—it is the embodiment of the beautiful, humble, pesky aliveness of Christ that challenges anything and everything that would try to pave it over.

And so, we, too, in the church, have our own summer revolutions. One of them is coming up in just a few weeks, on July 29th. Do you know what it is?

It’s the 50th anniversary of the Philadelphia Eleven, the first eleven women ordained to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church on July 29, 1974. These women were indeed possessed of a fierce determination to flourish. They were not willing to wait for the church hierarchy of the time to drag its feet any longer, and so they found a few retired bishops willing to ordain them and they simply…did it. They went up to the altar and put on those green vestments, for they knew that they, too, were called to brush against the hem of eternity, and they said, now is our time to thrive, unencumbered. Call us a weed in the garden if you want, but we know what we are: fully alive.

And thank God for them. I would not be able to be the out and proud priest I am today if it were not for their courage to be the priests God made them to be. And thank God for all those saints and heroes of summers past who decided to grab hold of their chance to flourish. We need their witness now more than ever.

In an age where it is especially easy to be cynical, or even despairing about our politics and our culture and our collective future, the examples of the Philadelphia Eleven and all the summer revolutionaries remind me that true change, true justice, true peace, are gifts of God, but gifts that must be claimed and grown and harvested if we want them in our own time.

And more often than not, these revolutions are initiated by those at the bottom of the power structure, those at the margins, those weeds in the garden who finally say: we have languished for too long. Now is our time to thrive. All of Scripture and much of human history is a testament to this.

A perfect example is our Gospel reading today. Jesus has been traveling around the countryside, criss-crossing the Sea of Galilee, calming storms and casting out demons and offering all sorts of signs of his power. And there is a particular woman who hears about all of this—a woman who, because of illness and poverty has been consigned to a meager, desperate existence. She is a woman who is tired of waiting for relief, tired of grieving, tired of bleeding and calling out for help while people look the other way. She is not dead, like Jairus’ daughter, but she is a ghost among her people.

But when she hears about Jesus, something shifts within her. Who knows, maybe it was summertime, maybe she was hot and tired and fed up with the way things were.

But whatever it was, something deeper than despair, something stronger than cynicism or despondency arises within her and she says, “if I but touch is clothes, I will be made well.” If I reach out and brush against the hem of eternity and say, I too, deserve to thrive unencumbered, then it will be so.

And so she did. And so it was.

And I imagine her standing there, this unnamed woman, this patron saint of nothing left to lose, and what I realize is that, when Jesus says, “daughter, your faith has made you well,” he is not just talking about a cure to her illness—he is saying, you, my child, have tapped into the stubborn vitality that is at the heart of God.

And by claiming the blessing long denied you, by asserting your inherent dignity, you have discovered the one thing that cannot be taken away, the one thing that rises up again and again like a weed, or like a stalk of summer corn—God’s life, God’s love, God’s wholeness, God’s humble, pesky aliveness, which is now my gift to you and all who have been told for too long that they do not deserve it. Receive it today, this love and this life freely given to you and for you, for this is the revolutionary truth at the center of creation.

So I wonder, are we willing to be revolutionaries, too, St. Anne? Revolutionaries for the sake of love? It’s a good question to ask on the 4th of July or in any season, really.

God knows we need to be, for our own sakes and for the sake of our neighbors. Like the woman with the hemorrhage, we may be bleeding and tired, but we do not have the luxury of languishing in despondency, no matter how gloomy it looks out there. Just like all those generations before us, we are called to be people with summer hearts, with souls on fire for justice, with bodies and spirits ready for the necessary work of liberation that arises in every age. And how we will engage that work is a conversation we must continue to have.

We’ve made some strides already in our parish. But there is more we can do together, more we must do given the challenges of our time and the demands of our faith.

Conversations are rising up among us about social justice ministries and creation care work and more proactive outreach to people who have been hurt by other churches, and more formation to equip us for ministry, and I am thrilled by all of this, and I encourage you to seek out these conversations and take part in them and then take part in making them a reality. Let’s brush up against the hem of eternity, and let’s pursue the vitality that is God’s gift to us, and let’s see what happens.

Because we and the whole Church, when we’re at our bravest and our best, we are still that weed, growing up through the cracks; we are still that wildflower in the ditch, reminding people of what’s beautiful about this world, what is not easily killed, what it looks like to reach up towards the infinite blue sky, and to be fully, truly, stubbornly, miraculously alive.

And wouldn’t you know, it’s summertime. Signs of life are all around us. Sounds like a good time to grow.

Photographs

A sermon preached on the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, June 23, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Mark 4:35-41.

My fiancé, Matt, and I have been in the process of moving into our new apartment over the past few weeks, and combining all of our belongings and finding space for all of our stuff is an adventure. As with any time you move, we are realizing how much stuff we all carry around with us as we go through life. And some of that stuff can be pared down or donated or sold, but there are always those things that you hold onto, no matter what. And among these, probably for almost all of us, are boxes of old photos.

I have a big plastic tub of family photos that I keep swearing I’m going to sort through and organize…and I’ve been saying this for the past 15 years. Every so often, usually when I move, I will drag out that tub and open the lid and gasp in horror at the mixed up stacks and envelopes. Then I close it up and slowly back away.

But I could never give them up, of course, because our photos are valuable in a different sort of way than other belongings. They are like a pathway through the forest of memory that thickens as we grow older… a pathway that guides us back to other homes, other times, other faces, other versions of ourselves that would otherwise be lost from view in the shadow of the passing years. We pull them out to show others—and ourselves—all that we have known, all that we have been.

In my own collection, I see many things. Here is my mother, sitting on the back of a pony when she was two years old..land here is my father as a young man, laughing in his college dorm room…and here is my great-grandmother, her smiling face obscured by a wide brimmed hat in the summer heat, and here—oh goodness—here is a child that was once me, dancing on the sand on some forgotten beach, yelling something into the wind.

Memories and mysteries, all of these photos. Perhaps we carry them with us, wherever we go, both to remind ourselves of where we’ve come from and to reassure ourselves that whatever we have become, we were also, this. And this, and this. And that life is, somehow, holding together all these layers, finding the truth not in any one picture, but somewhere in the sum of them, in the shape of what they reveal.

It might sound odd, but I think it’s helpful to think of Scripture the same way, almost like a box of jumbled snapshots. Because our sacred texts, too, are repositories of memory and mystery, and just like a single photograph, no single Scripture passage can ever reveal the whole truth about the life of God. Remember that when someone tries to cherry-pick a verse to use against…whomever. No, we must gather all of these verses together, all these little glimpses of God’s face, and ponder the bigger story they tell.

With this in mind, then, I think the most striking image of God’s face we are handed this week is Jesus asleep in the storm-tossed boat, his disciples as panicked and furious as the sea itself. You can practically close your eyes and see it. So let’s pull that one out of the box and ponder it together, shall we?

It is dark. Bands of rain and wind are lashing against a small boat on a stormy sea. The disciples are looking at their teacher, sleeping in the tumult, and they are bewildered—they can’t begin to imagine why Jesus isn’t awake, why he isn’t helping them fix the situation, giving them direction, something, anything. And so they wake him up and, at a word, he uses his mighty power to still the storm.

Is it easy to see what’s going on here? Just a scary storm and a God who will make it stop? Look a bit closer.

As is often the case, there is much more to this image than what immediately meets the eye. Because it’s interesting—Jesus, after calming the wind and the waves, doesn’t look at them and offer soothing reassurance. He doesn’t say what we might expect God would say, “there, there, I fixed it for you, don’t worry, you’re fine.”

No. Instead, a better Greek translation of his words to them might be, “why are you so timid? Do you not trust?” And the Gospel says then, and only then, after the storm, that the disciples “ephobethesan phobon megan” — they feared with a great fear — not because of the storm, but because of the One who stilled it.

You see, in that moment, the disciples have a brief encounter with enlightenment—they realize, right then, that Jesus is more than just a sleeping teacher who can fix their problems—more, even, than the prophetic miracle worker they’d been following around.

You might say that it was as though a collection of old photos suddenly appeared before them, and for the first time they could really see Jesus—all of him—and there he was, sitting on the back of a donkey, escaping to Egypt with his mother. And there he was, laughing as a young man in the Temple, astounding the scribes in his Father’s house. And there he was, dancing on the sand of some forgotten wilderness, rebuking the temptations of Satan, yelling something into the wind. And there he was, too, even farther back, before time and image and memory itself, the Eternal Son, like light looking up from the brim of deep darkness–the original Creator of the water and the wind now riding with them on the waves.

And for them, in this moment, to see Jesus—to see all the images that make up who he is and what he is—is to realize that loving him and following him is not about fixing their problems..it is about re-creating the entire world in the image of Love.

We are the inheritors of that same encounter, you and I, that same collection of images. We, too, are reminded that Jesus will not remain the flat, convenient, utilitarian image that might suit us best.

If we want him to appear as a mere teacher, we must also discover that he is Lord. And if we want him to appear as the victorious one, we must also see that he is the crucified one. And if we want him to bless our health and our wealth, we will also find that he makes his home among the poor and the sick and the forgotten.

And he is all of these things–this whole jumbled stack of images, this whole collection of memories and mysteries–not to make our faith an impossible task, but to make impossible our tendency to render God in our own image–our propensity to make God as small as our own fears and misgivings. He asks, ‘why are you so timid?’ because he wants the disciples, and us, to see that God’s love is so much bigger than we can envision, so much bigger than our fear.

And so, even now, this Jesus asks us— today, here, in The Episcopal Church; here, in the United States; here, on a planet on fire; here among all of us who have tried to be diligent, polite, welcoming people of faith—he asks us, as we fear that the church is shrinking and the world is raging and the ship is sinking, he asks again, Why are you so timid?

Do we not trust that love is the strongest force on earth? Because it is.

Do we not believe that the world needs this good news more than anything else? Because it does.

Do we not feel that love raging in us like a storm of life giving water? Because it’s there, waiting to be set free.

And all of this—the storm of love and the memory and the mystery, and the countless revelations of eternity—if it is part of Jesus, we must let it become part of who we are, too. We must let this undaunted, unfaltering, fearless type of love become the shape of us, the sum of all the images we are, the precious treasure that we can never give away, no matter how many years go by.

And maybe, if we were to look for this in ourselves, and in others, we would brush up against enlightenment, too. Maybe we would see that every person we meet also carries with them a box of old photos. That they were once two years old on the back of a pony, or laughing with their friends or dancing on the sand or shouting into the wind or smiling in the light of the sun.

Maybe if we saw all of one another, we would be less timid, less overwhelmed by the storms we are navigating, because we would realize that Jesus isn’t asleep while the world falls apart. He is dreaming a new world into being and inviting us to dream with him. A world in which, instead of fearing with a great fear, we will love with a great love

It’s a beautiful image, isn’t it? I think I’ll hold onto it.

Troubled Water: A Sermon For Pride Month

I preached this sermon on Wednesday, June 12 at Lord of Life Lutheran Church, West Chester, OH for the Butler County Affirming Churches service of Healing & Affirmation. The Scripture cited is Mark 12:28-34.

When I was in the sixth grade, I had a friend…we’ll call him Chris. And in a particular way that maybe some of you can relate to, I had confusing feelings about Chris. All I wanted to do was spend time with him. I went over to his house to play video games even though I didn’t care one bit about video games. And I hung on every word he said, even though he wasn’t much of a conversationalist. I got nervously excited whenever he was around.

In my young mind, back in a time and place where “liking” other boys was not acceptable or even acknowledged, I interpreted these feelings as simply wanting to be “best friends” with Chris, and so I told myself that this ardor, this devotion, was probably what any two friends were supposed to share with each other. But I had to know…did he want to be my “best friend” too? So I decided that, clearly, the thing to do was to tell Chris exactly how much he meant to me…as a “friend.”

Back in those days (and I’m dating myself here) we had typing classes in a special computer lab in our elementary school. This was pre-smartphone, pre-internet, pre-everything. But on these computers, you could send little messages to someone at another workstation, like a very early version of email. And I decided that I was going to send Chris a really special message so that he knew what a good friend I wanted to be.

And so (remember, I was in sixth grade, but I still cringe recalling this)…I decided to type out the full lyrics of the Simon and Garfunkel song “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and send them to him as an expression of my friendship.

Yes, really.

If you don’t know that song, look up the lyrics later, and I promise you, no matter what your sexual orientation is, you will be embarrassed on my behalf.

So I hit send on this message and I was eager to see what he would write back. But…of course he didn’t write back. He didn’t say a word to me after that. And although, to his credit, he was never cruel, there were definitely no more invitations to come over and play video games.

I realized then, as much as I could at the time, that I had gotten things mixed up somehow. The feelings I had were real, and true, and earnest, but all the cues around me said that they were something I should be embarrassed about, something that was unwelcome, and perhaps for the first time, at 12 years old, I understood what it was to feel like a stranger in one’s own skin.

Now, I know that unrequited affection and feelings of shame are not experiences restricted to LGBTQ+ folks alone, but I do think that, more than most, we are intimately acquainted with the great gap that can exist between the love we have to give and the desire of others to accept it. To express queer love and queer identity is to live with an ever-present sense of risk.

So many of us, whether in 6th grade or much later in our lives, have stood at the edge of our own troubled waters, looking for a bridge, looking across toward our childhood crushes, or our family members, or our churches, or our communities. And many of them are standing on the other side of the gap, too often refusing to extend a hand back toward us, turning away in confusion or embarrassment or worse.

And so we queer folks learn something important as we navigate this reality: we learn that love, true love, is never a guarantee in this life. It is something that must be fought for and claimed and created and protected, from within the deepest parts of yourself.

We learn that love is not the prize for successfully assimilating to the dominant culture. We learn that love is not passive compliance with the accepted order of things. It is not medal you win when you meet everyone else’s expectations of how you are to live or be.

No, we queer folks know, firsthand, that love—love for ourselves, love for the ones our hearts and our bones and our flesh cry out to hold—this love can be costly. We know this because that is what you learn when it is a political act every single day to take your partner’s hand in public. You know this when it becomes a profound act of courage to put on the outfit that best expresses your identity or dare to name the pronoun that resonates most with your spirit.

When that is your life, you realize that love is not just a nice feeling among pleasant people; it is something tangible and active that requires strength and vulnerability and the willingness to be misunderstood. The willingness to put yourself out there and sometimes to pay the price for what is deeply, wholly, inescapably true, even if it’s not popular or acceptable to those around you.

It can be bewildering, sometimes, all of this. It can feel like you’re the only one who gets it.

But it’s interesting. You know who else had something to say about that real, hardscrabble, costly, risky sort of love? That true, inclusive, expansive, all-encompassing sort of love? Jesus.

Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus, the Son of God. Jesus, the One who embodies divine mystery in his flesh. Jesus, who came as a teacher, as a Savior, as the champion of all who have been trampled upon and left behind. Jesus who was himself rejected and misunderstood and deemed a threat to the accepted order.

The Church has tended to forget this throughout its history, but Jesus, in the deepest, most essential heart of the Christian story, is the embodiment of a truth that any LGBTQ+ person could already tell you: that love is scary and it is beautiful and it is necessary and it is all-powerful, and that this love cannot be prayed away by those who don’t understand it. This love cannot be killed or stamped out by judgment or greed or patriarchy or empire or any of the other maladies that afflict us.

Jesus lived and died and rose again to demonstrate that this type of unending, unyielding love of God queers the narrative about life—it troubles the conventional wisdom about the way things are, and who is included, and it reveals the extent to which God will go to rescue us from the binaries and the judgments that bind us. And God will go as far as it takes to save us from this, all the way to the grave and back again.

And if any Church, or anyone tries tell you that Jesus is anything other than this, then they have conveniently ignored this evening’s Scripture reading.

In this passage, when Jesus is asked about the greatest commandment, he says it is this: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself. That’s it. Everything else we might do is secondary to this, and just as important, everything else we think about Christian faith must be interpreted in light of this commandment. As Michael Curry, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church likes to say, if it’s not about love, it’s not about God. Period.

And if that is so, then what I would like the broader Church—our allies and all the rest—to understand is this: if you want to know about God’s love, if you want to understand what is meant when Jesus talks about love, I suggest that one of the first things you do is talk to your LGBTQ+ neighbors and friends and family members.

Ask them what it has cost to simply be themselves. Ask them why they were willing to pay that cost. Ask them how they navigate the daily razors edge between love and danger. And perhaps when you do this, you will realize that what they are describing to you is, in fact, a reflection of Jesus’ own story—his own cost, his own love, his own danger.

You see, for far too long LGBTQ+ people have been thought of as the outsiders who ought to be welcomed inside the Church in the name of Christian love, when the truth is that the LGBTQ+ folks are the ones who have something to teach the Church and the world about what the love of Jesus actually looks like.

Because believe me, we know all about crucifixion—we have watched our siblings be vilified and victimized, we have watched them bleed in the streets because they dared to exist openly, we have watched them die forsaken in hospital beds.

And we know all about God’s abundant forgiveness and grace, because we have so often been the ones who seek reconciliation with those people and institutions who refuse to extend any charity back to us.

And we know a bit about resurrection, because although so many of us have tasted the despair of loneliness and rejection, we have been brought back to life by the power of music, of laughter, of solidarity, of chosen families, of mentors and drag mothers and allies and friends.

And we know about building the Kingdom of Heaven, too, because alongside our allies, we are the builders and champions of inclusive, affirming spaces where all are seen and known and enough, whether in a church or in a protest march or on a dance floor.

Yes, if anyone wants to know more about Christian love actually is, talk to a queer person. And then you will begin to see how, as Jesus always teaches us, you will see how the Reign of God indeed springs up in queer places, at the margins of power and privilege, not at its center. You will begin to see where the Spirit resides, how she emerges out of those troubled waters like a rainbow, like a promise, like a sign from heaven that says: even if no one else understands it, your love is enough. However mischaracterized, however rejected or rebuked or unrequited, your love is more than enough.

Because, my LGBTQ+ siblings, God is that very same love that wells up in your own heart and seeks to express itself through your deepest authenticity, come what may. Even if it is costly. Even if some people never accept it. And yes, even if your email full of sappy song lyrics never gets a response. God sings with you. God understands. And God is proud of you. So very proud of you for showing the world what love can be. Be proud of yourself, too.

Because the Pride we speak of, the pride that we have fought for and died for and chosen to live for, is not, as some might say, the rejection of humility. Pride is the dismantling of shame. Pride is the construction of dignity. And when you finally get what this Pride actually means, what it actually represents, what it actually signifies, it is a beautiful thing to behold.

Sort of like what Jesus talked about. Sort of like love.

Thank God for all the LGBTQ+ people, marvelously and perfectly made, who continue to show us what love is.

May your Pride be happy. And may it be blessed.

Lock: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, June 9 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are 1 Samuel 8:4-20 and Mark 3:20-35.

Last week, while Matt and I were on vacation in Boston, we did a lot of walking. And of course we visited all of the famous sites in the city: the Old North Church, and Paul Revere’s house, and Bunker Hill, and all the rest. But we also ended up in some lesser known corners. I won’t say we were lost, but at the end of one day, we were trying to find our way back across the Charles River to the central part of the city. We came across a narrow little walking path that cut through a park and then over a series of concrete structures in the river.

As we crossed over, I saw that it was a dam used to control the inflow of saltwater from the ocean and that it had a series of locks built into it to make the water navigable for boats traveling up and down the river. So we stopped for a moment to look.

I’ve always found locks interesting—the kind for boats, not for doors—maybe because I grew up in proximity to the famous Soo Locks up in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, where large cargo ships must pass through to get from Lake Superior to the rest of the Great Lakes.

The basic concept of a lock, if you have never seen one, is that a boat, when it is passing from one elevation of water to another, enters into an enclosed chamber, and then water either flows in or out of the chamber so that the boat can rise or fall and then emerge safely on the other side at the proper elevation. They are elegant and ingenious in their simplicity, and you can find them all over the world, in all sorts of settings.

But as we looked down into these locks in Boston, I was surprised to see one little boat, just floating there in the chamber, in the still water, with nobody on board. Now, I am sure there was a perfectly mundane reason for this boat to be left there, but it struck me as a rather forlorn sight, almost as if the boat had been abandoned, mid-journey, trapped between the river and the sea, left to sit alone in this chamber of somber, motionless water, surrounded by gray cement walls, waiting for someone to claim it and release it.

And, as it happens, that image of the boat trapped in the lock came to my mind this week as I was reflecting on our Scripture lessons—probably because I was thinking about the price we are sometimes asked to pay for safety and for belonging.

Just as that boat was suspended in motion, confined to a safe place that it was not meant to stay in forever, so, too, I think, we can find ourselves trapped in proverbial locks—ones that we have constructed for ourselves or that we’ve drifted into unwittingly—and in those moments we need to be reminded that we were meant for something more.

Consider: in our first passage from the Book of Samuel, Israel wants a king. They want a king because they are a bedraggled and storm-tossed people; they are weary of being vulnerable, weary of having to trust in the guidance of a God whom they cannot see. They want to be like other nations, they want to be ruled by the sort of king they can comprehend, the kind who will put them on the same level as their adversaries. And so they enter the lock.

But Samuel warns them—and warns us still: beware of hiding yourselves within the stone walls of an earthly king’s protection, because you might get stuck there, stifled and crushed by the very safety you once craved. That’s why Samuel says, in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day. Personally and politically,God will let us build up all the walls we think we need, but it will also be up to us to dismantle them when we realize we’re trapped inside. All of history seems to be us learning this lesson over and over again.

Because now, as then, God wants us to remember that the human heart and our common destiny was not meant for small spaces, intellectually, socially, or spiritually—we were created for for expansiveness, for mutuality, for the practice of a love that is broad and deep, the kind that ultimately cannot be contained by fear.

If our life is something like that little boat in the lock, then God is not found in the walls around us, hemming us in. God is instead the living water rising up beneath us, the bracing current flowing from the depths of time, the One saying, come out, be brave, sail upon the ocean of light, see where the wind of the Spirit carries you, and fear not, for I am with you in every cresting wave.

And, speaking of the Spirit, we must also deal with this morning’s Gospel, which can, again, read as one of those passages that locks us in, with all of this talk about blasphemy and unforgivable sins, and Jesus rejecting his mother and siblings. What does all this have to do with the good news of God’s broad and deep love?

Quite a lot, actually. And here, again, the image of the boat and the lock helped me think about this.

I think the Church has too often read Scripture as if Jesus himself was the keeper of the lock rather than what he actually is: the ocean that lies beyond it. We have too often imagined Jesus as if he was the heir of King Saul rather than the Son of God. We have entrapped him within the limited nature of our cultural and political imagination, as if he wants to rule over us like any other king. But he does not.

He is, as God was with Israel, as God has always been, the One who warned us against the seductive promises of tyrants. He is the God who wants us to leave behind the locks we have built up, who wants us to open the gates and break down the walls and break open our hearts and unfurl our spirits and cross the sea with him toward a farther, more promising shore.

And that is why, in today’s reading, he rebukes the religious authorities who condemn his healing and his casting out demons all because such things challenge their narrow understandings and harden them against the infinite compassion that is the true power of God. And this is why Jesus rebukes his family’s efforts to restrain his ministry, too. They want to keep his mission quiet and still and respectable like the water pent up in a cement chamber, rather than let it be the raging torrent of mighty waters that it actually is!

Jesus wants them—and us, now—to see: all of the systems and structures and institutions in the world, even the most cherished and fundamental ones, can turn into stifling dead ends if we hide within them, if we resist the outpouring of love and justice and mercy that is the true purpose of being alive.

And until we realize this, until we claim this as God’s true purpose for us—to leave the lock, to brave the waters, to give our lives over to the blowing wind of the Spirit—then we are indeed at risk of blasphemy against that Spirit, which has nothing to do with taking the Lord’s name in vain, but is the serious risk of living our lives in vain—of never letting God transform our hearts and our world. That’s why Jesus came among us. That is why we must set out; that is why our hearts must be set free.

Can you accept that you are loved so deeply and unconditionally that you are indeed free? Are we out there telling others in our community that they are loved that deeply and unconditionally, too?

They need to hear it. Because a lot of people are hurting, and they need to know that the Gospel is, in fact, good news for everyone and everything, without condition or exception. No cement walls. No tyrant kings. Just a river flowing toward the open water, and a wind that will carry us home.

If we do nothing else in The Episcopal Church and here at St. Anne, I hope that we will realize this and help others do the same. I hope, in this moment in our world when there are so many big questions and deep hurts, that we will understand: the time for waiting behind the walls is over. It’s time to get out there, and show the world who Jesus actually is, and see where his love takes us.

The gates of the lock are open.

Let’s go.