December 2024 – By Another Road

Uncountable: A Christmas Sermon

I preached this sermon on Christmas Eve, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. A version of this sermon was also featured as the 2024 Christmas offering in The Episcopal Church’s Sermons that Work project.

They came to be counted.

This is where our story begins tonight: Joseph and Mary, just two of many in the teeming, trembling, transcendent history of their people, just two, traveling the well-worn roads of their ancestors and coming, at last, to Bethlehem, the city of that singular king, David.

They came, these two, to be registered in a census decreed by distant ruler on a foreign throne—one who knew few of their number and cared even less; a ruler who had likely never stood where they stood or stopped to consider the centuries of sacrifice and prayer and supplication that cried out from the stones of this particular wilderness.

But nonetheless they obeyed, Joseph and Mary, and they came to be counted. Counted among the multitude of faces, both familiar and strange, in a place that barely felt like home. Counted as two, though a third was on the way. Counted as fixed commodities of an empire that did not suspect and could not comprehend the infinite possibility carried in this flesh of theirs—a child, yes, but even before that new miracle, an older one: a long history of survival, an ancient promise of human dignity yet to be delivered in its fullness. A fullness that will not and cannot be commodified or controlled. A fullness that is a story, not a sum.

And although that story has shaped us and brought us here today, it is safe to say that most of us are still caught up in the process of counting. We are a people encircled by an empire of metrics and measures, whether for economies or households or faith communities or even our own bodies. This is understandable to a certain extent. We pursue the stability and the clarity that numbers offer. We want an objective proclamation of what is real, even if we can’t decide what to do about it.

But it is also true, especially evident in recent times, that numbers alone cannot save or solve our most urgent and fundamental questions. We can count, and count, and count some more, and order census after census and survey after survey to track our shared challenges, but in the face of deep spiritual hunger and anger and grief and change, the power of these numbers is limited. They can be idolized or distorted or ignored. At their worst, they become weapons rather than tools, used to shape arguments rather than reveal truth. Like the empires that wield them, numbers can be useful in the project of uniformity, they are insufficient for the pursuit of salvation.

No, as we travel the well-worn roads of our own ancestors, bearing our own miracles of survival, something else must be revealed to us, something else must arrive. Something—or someone—else must come, not just to be counted, but to make our lives count.

And today, that something does arrive. He arrives. The surprise addition to the census; the child whom no one was counting on.

If we wish to begin to understand the significance of Jesus’ birth and how this Christmas gospel begins to counter our empires of counting, we should pay close attention to how his arrival is heralded. Not by an agent of the orderly government, but by an angel of light, by one who emanates from the expanse of a heavenly host more numerous than the stars. “A multitude,” Luke’s narrative tells us, and the Greek word is plethos, which connotes a number so large it is impossible to quantify.

And then we are told that this divine plethora delivers its message, not to the statisticians or the bureaucrats of Caesar, but to the shepherds in the fields. And they are figures who are themselves barely considered countable, roaming elusively among fields and pastures at the edge of respectability or safety. These nameless, numberless shepherds are given a message that would likely have been ignored by larger, more august bodies: that the long sought answer, the long awaited promise kept, is to be found in the most unlikely of places—in a manger, in a child, in the smallest fraction of possibility, nearly obscured by the margin of our errors.

The angels no one can count and the shepherds nobody bothers to count—these are God’s chosen messengers. These are the means of revelation. No census could ever account for it.

And yet this baby, this Jesus—he is perhaps the greatest surprise of all. For he is not just one of many, he is the One with a capital O—the One who made many. He is the One who, as the Psalmist says, determines the number of the stars and gives to all of them their names. He is the Uncountable One who has, for the sake of love, come himself to be counted, to submit himself to the census of our despair, to the sum of our fears, to stare all our empires in the eye and forgive them, knowing that they know not what they do.

And on this night of his birth the ways in which this baby in the manger will do all of this have not yet revealed to us, but the story is set into motion, and the countdown to our transformation has begun anew in his newborn flesh.

This transformation is still at work in us, never more visible than in this season. Because the joy of Christmas is and always has been this: that despite all our attempts to categorize and commodify ourselves and the world around us, God always manages to introduce an element of the immeasurable into our midst.

Just like the child whom we celebrate, Christmas itself refuses to yield itself entirely to our lists and our ledgers. Just when we become overburdened by the weight of expectations or regrets or the other ways we fear we don’t quite measure up—the number on the scale or the number in our bank account or the number of empty seats at the table this year—suddenly there is a song in the night, and a burning star, and the old story retold, and although we, too, may feel like just one of many in the teeming, trembling, transcendent history of the world, we remember that there is a fullness meant for us, too, and it is still seeking us, even now. It has a name and a face that we can call upon even when nothing else makes sense.

It is Jesus, and he, too, has come to be counted. Counted as one of us. And even more importantly, he has come to be counted upon by you and by me and by all who seek a life that is more than the sum of its parts.

And like the shepherds who first received this good news, Christmas is also an invitation for us to stand up, to go forth, and to be counted upon as well. To be counted upon as those who keep telling the story, who keep seeking the signs of a new Kingdom being born, and who will keep working to make this new Kingdom something more than a fleeting dream in the night.

Because the paradox of the Uncountable One becoming one of the counted actually suggests the opposite for us: that even in the finite number of moments that make up our individual lives, there is an element of numberless eternity that abides and yearns to be born through our prayers and our actions.

We are called not only to behold a birth but to give birth ourselves, through the labor of our hearts, to the tangible realities of glory and peace and justice and hope for the entirety of the plethos, the multitudes, who live on the face of the earth and who are still searching the heavens for something more than that which can be quantified.

Christmas is the enduring moment when that search was—and continues to be—answered. And the answer, for all creation, is the same as it was for Mary and Joseph:

You, who have traveled so very far, who have perhaps arrived in a place that barely feels like home, and who fear that you will be counted among the lost and the forgotten and the used up of this world—on this day, eternity has been born unto you; infinite love has condensed itself down to be as one for you, to be one with you, and to show you the way into a life that cannot be commodified or conquered. All we must do is seek him, and hold him, and stand with him.

And when we do, the story will reach its fullness all over again in our lives, just as it did on that night in Bethlehem: the ancient promise fulfilled, and the innumerable host of heaven singing its song, and something measureless welling up within us to be revealed.

And what is that something?

It is love. It is the love we were born to bear into the world. The One True Love that holds all things together.

And tonight, and forever, it is yours.

Poetry: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, December 22, 2024, the Fourth Sunday of Advent, at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Luke 1:39-55, the Visitation of Mary to Elizabeth.

Holy Sacred Spirit/Vanishes noiselessly/Shining Rivers, Dying Trees/Quietly Grass Whispers

This little verse is in a magnetic frame on our refrigerator, and I’m somewhat self-conscious to admit that it’s a poem I wrote in 3rd grade, while sitting with my class in a field in rural northern California. I think the class assignment was to write a haiku, and I didn’t meet the sentence structure or standards of that venerable art form at all, but hey, I was 8.

I share those few lines with you not because they’re anything remarkable, but because they remind me, whenever I see them, that from a very early age, as kids we are already aware of the sacredness of the world, no matter what words we might attach to this awareness.

When we are young, wonder and love and fidelity and that vivid, almost-tangible presence we call God are all as natural as breathing. I was not raised going to church, but I could write a poem about the Spirit whispering to me in the brown field grass because, well, I was young, and the whole world felt alive. That’s childhood. We find it easier to accept that God is at work wherever we look.

And then we grow up a bit, and our capacity for poetry falters. The grass is just the grass. It wasn’t until much, much later, after many faith-uncertain years, that I began to wonder what had ever happened to that holy, sacred Spirit who used to whisper and hover and suggest herself to me on the wind.

She hadn’t gone anywhere. One day, years later, I was back again in rural northern California, driving down a winding road with some friends and I looked up into the forested hillside and I saw a mantle of fog unfurling down among the green boughs of the trees and those words came back to me again….holy sacred spirit…and I thought, oh, there you are, old friend. I had almost forgotten. I need to remember to name you when I see you.

Calling God by name, and naming God’s presence. That is, in many ways, the primary vocation and the mission of the Church. We have inherited the story of how God named things—how God made the world and named it good, named it beloved, named us as the bearers of God’s image.

And in a way, all of Scripture is one long record of us trying to give a name back to to God—to pronounce that unspeakable holy word disclosed to Moses, I AM THAT I AM—a word in Hebrew, sometimes translated as Yahweh, which isn’t really a word at all, but the sound of breath, of dynamic silence. The sound of the wind stirring the grass.

And the names we have given this nameless One are many—Elohim. Adonai. Shaddai. And later, in our own language, God. Lord. Creator. Holy, Sacred Spirit.

But here’s the thing: we aren’t called or tasked with simply coming up with new names to address God.

No, more importantly we as the people of God are asked to name those moments and movements and things in our world that are revelations of God. We are asked to look for God at work and to point him out when we see him, so that others might understand what God is all about—

We are to say, look! There! Yes! That is what God is like. That is the One we speak of! There he is, filling the hungry with good things. And there is God, leaning against the bus stop in a shabby coat, smiling in the rain. And there she is, doing her children’s laundry with just a few dollars left in her purse. And there, too, there is God, in the grasp of my beloved’s hand when I am frightened, and in the laughter between old friends, and in the candlelight, and in the taste of bread and wine. There is God, and there, and there, and there…This naming is one of our primary jobs as disciples.

But we forget about it as we grow up. We forget how self-evident is the sacred dimension of all things. We don’t hear God in the grass anymore. The world is a bit more matter of fact, a bit less poetic. Growing up, growing older, can do that.

Elizabeth, who we meet in todays Gospel, would have known something about that.

Now, we don’t know much about Elizabeth, other than that she is Mary’s much older relative and Zechariah’s wife and that she has been, til now, unable to have a child. In her time and place and culture, this would have been an especially great source of sorrow and shame.

And we might imagine that Elizabeth had long given up on trying to figure out where to look for God at work in her life, or how to name his presence. She has not lived a life with much poetry in it.

But then, a miracle. Despite being advanced in age, Elizabeth has been blessed by that holy, sacred Spirit, and in the great Biblical tradition of barrenness transformed into promise, she, like Mary, now carries a child in her womb, a child who will be named John, who will grow up to be sort of wilderness poet himself.

But before John, and before Jesus, and even before Mary sings her own Magnificat, that powerful song of hope and redemption we heard today, Elizabeth does something quite remarkable. It’s easy to overlook. Let’s revisit the text, so that we don’t miss it:

Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?

Do you see what Elizabeth does there? She names the baby in Mary’s womb as Lord. She is the first one—the very first person—to call Jesus Lord.

She, Elizabeth, she the forsaken, she the unfruitful, she who had capitulated to an unpoetic life, she is now speaking the first verse of a new creation—the first human person in the Gospel narrative to speak of God and flesh as one—the first person to say that this child is God and that God could be a child and that a new poetry is emerging, being birthed from the deep mystery of life.

Elizabeth names what thus far only angels have dared to say—that the shining rivers and the dying trees and the whispering grass and the whole laboring creation are about to become ONE with the substance of heaven.

And in seeing this, and saying this, Elizabeth is, we might say, the very first Christian disciple. The very first to name God where she sees God at work in the world, in the most unexpected of places.

So what does that mean for us, we who are doing our best to make Christ known, here, in another time and place?

It’s means we must do what Elizabeth did. Look for God at work in the world, and take part in God’s labor in the world—the work of peacemaking, of compassion, of justice, of service, of loving our neighbors, of loving the earth—and—this is very important—call it what it is. Call it the work of God.

Not just a nice deed or an act of human kindness. No, not just that. Give God back his name. Give the world back its divine poetry. Name the work of love as the true work of God, the true nature of God—the God who is love—the God who saves and sings and comes to us in frailty and gentleness.

Because the problem of our own time is that the Christian message has been de-poeticized. It has been stripped of its creativity and robbed of its lush beauty. It has been turned into a cultural weapon or a social club or a benign pastime we fit in between brunch and grocery shopping when what the Kingdom of Heaven really is, is the insistent, upwelling, powerful transcendence of the living God that saturates and spills out of every cell of creation and asserts its advent into every moment of our day. If only we would look for it and name it and take part in it.

The world needs us to take part in it. The world needs to hear the true name of God, which is love, which is undying, reconciling, proactive, poetic love, which is what we are waiting for in Advent, which is what we are naming when we speak the name of Christ, and when we speak the name of that holy, sacred Spirit who still sings, in wind and grass and in the Magnificats that well up in our hearts. Let them well up, my friends. Let yourself see the world as poetry again.

And when we do, then we, much like Elizabeth, will be able to say,

Blessed are we, and blessed is the fruit we bear. And blessed are those who know that God has a name we are finally able to speak, and that it is Jesus, and that it is love.

And blessed are those who speak it.

Visitor: An Advent Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, December 1, 2024, the First Sunday of Advent. The lectionary text cited is Luke 21:25-36.

If you are relatively new to the Episcopal Church, one thing you will learn very quickly at this time of year is that Episcopalians really want you to know that Advent is not the same as Christmas. And once you begin to profess, in hushed, knowing tones, your particular love for Advent…I guarantee you are well on your way to becoming a bonafide Episcopalian!

The world around us might be playing Christmas carols at full volume and decking the halls with boughs of holly, but we, by God, we are the select few who know that Advent is not all fun and games. It’s serious business. It has apocalyptic Scripture readings for us to enjoy(!) and hymns about the Second Coming of Christ(!) and a decided lack of frivolity.

And for all that, I do love it. Advent is the slow, thoughtful descent into winter darkness, as candle flames tremble in the night and our souls reach out towards the cold, silent stars, looking for a sign of hope.

But let’s be honest with ourselves—a lot of us sort of do Advent and Christmas at the same time. We alternate between cozy cheer and prayerful pondering depending on when and where we find ourselves. Matt and I put up our Christmas tree this past weekend and we did some Black Friday shopping with the best of them.

And yet he is engaged to an Episcopal priest, the poor guy. As we were driving, Matt put on some cheerful Christmas tunes and then it was my turn to pick a song and I put on that absolute Advent banger, “Lo! He Comes with Clouds Descending.” I wildly waved my arms around in the car, conducting the unseen choir of King’s College, Cambridge while Matt patiently drove and listened. And…that really sums up our relationship, now that I think about it.

But I do find it restful and gratifying that here, in church, we embrace a bit of reflective, anticipatory energy in these weeks. We let Advent be what it is- we let it be its intense, quiet self. We allow it to make us squirm a bit with wonder and and longing and even a little fearfulness, if only so that when Christmas does arrive, we are fully prepared to be undone by the simple, gentle loveliness of a baby in a manger.

I think the pairing of these two seasons right alongside each other is helpful in developing our spiritual palates, because, to be honest, life is an acquired taste…most often bitter and sweet on the tongue at the same time. And we are learning, as we grow in faith, to appreciate the more complex flavors.

As I was thinking the other day about the bitter and the sweet, and the peculiar blessings of Advent, all of the sudden I thought of my great uncle Dick—my grandma’s brother. Now, Dick was a unique character. I think I would describe him as Advent in the flesh—pale and slim and serious; a man of very few, yet very deliberate words. And when Dick came to visit, it always made me a little nervous because, although a kind man, he was not like other people. You would come into my grandma’s kitchen and suddenly there he’d be, sitting in the lamplight at the kitchen table with a cup of weak coffee, surveying the room, saying nothing. If I’m honest, Uncle Dick was a complete mystery and as a kid he scared me a little— I just didn’t know what to make of him.

Then one day, without any explanation, when I was about 8 or 9, he told me to come with him, and we walked down the street to a little restaurant and he bought me a strawberry shortcake and we ate it in silence. And on the way home, we stopped at the dime store and he bought me a package of those old fashioned Ticonderoga pencils, the kind you have to sharpen. The whole time he said almost nothing at all.

I can’t tell you why, but of the many gifts I’ve received in my life, for some reason that outing with the shortcake and the pencils sticks with me. It haunts me with its quiet sweetness to this very day.

I think Advent is sort of like that—kind, stern, a bit hidden from view, and very precious as the years go by, especially once you realize that life is more than just bright lights and loud noise. Because it is the quiet moments and the quiet people and the quiet revelations of love that often make everything else make sense.

We need those Advent people, the Uncle Dicks of this world, to tether us to the value of that which is unadorned and profound. For it is their arrival which prepares our hearts for the winter seasons of life, when we cannot see clearly and when we need to rely on that something which is deep and dim and cool, long buried in our souls beneath the striving and the haste.

And this is exactly what Jesus is trying to convey to his disciples in this morning’s Gospel and what he wants us to realize, too. We might hear all of the imagery he speaks of—the roaring sea and the shaken heavens—and think that the apocalypse is the part of the story that matters most to Jesus. We might think that war and ruin are his chosen manner of appearing. But that is a misreading of his words.

Jesus is not apocalyptic noise; he is the quiet revelation who comes afterwards. That’s why Jesus tells his disciples over and over again to stay alert, aware, attentive, suggesting that, just like when he came the first time as a baby in a manger, perhaps his second coming will also be easy to miss. Like a thief in the night or a light in the darkness or…like a quiet visitor who slips in unannounced, gazing at you across the kitchen table over a cup of weak coffee. We must be ready to recognize him when he comes.

Because here’s the thing—apocalypse and noise are always around us. They’re nothing special. No, it is the cool, clear, quiet of grace and peace and the advent of those who bear these things which is transformative. It is ones such as these who reveal to us something worth knowing: that God will conquer the world and will conquer our hearts not through sword and terror but through strawberry shortcakes. And Ticonderoga pencils.

Jesus is many things, and he asks us to be many things, but above all he wishes for us to be unprovoked by fear and satisfied by the simplicity of love. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away, he says to us. My authority will not crumble like a temple, my hope will not decay like a body in the tomb, because true authority and true hope is here, in the advent of another sort of kingdom. The kind we are baptized into. The kind that indeed comes descending upon the clouds and lo, it is quiet, and it is gracious, and it is love.

Which is exactly what I hope each of us will seek, in our own way, during the next few weeks. It’s ok—do Advent and Christmas all at once if you need to. Go ahead and listen to all the songs and trim your trees and attend your parties and engage in whatever deeds of goodwill you can.

But also stop, every once in a while, and be quiet, and tend to that hidden corner of yourself where festiveness gives way to something deeper, something more substantive and kind than anything that can be written on a greeting card. Learn to savor that bittersweetness at the bottom of your heart, that mixture of weak coffee and shortcake, where God abides in us.

My Uncle Dick died years ago, but every time I happen to a sharpen a pencil, I am reminded of him, and I feel a twinge of gratitude for his grave, lonely gentleness. Thanks to him, I know what Advent looks and feels like. And thanks to him and his visits, I think that, should God come again in my own life, my heart will be attentive and ready and a little less afraid of an unexpected visitor.

And we’ll stare at one another across the table, God and I, as the winter shadows lengthen, and the lamplight burns and the world at last comes home to itself. And we’ll pour another cup of coffee. And no words will be necessary.