Facing It: A Sermon

About seven weeks ago, as most of you know, I found myself in a place I didn’t want or expect to be. There are so many other things that Matt and I thought this summer would be about, but we had to accept that my surgery and its aftereffects were, in fact, was what was happening instead.

Every so often, you come face to face with life as it actually is, and you can’t hide. You can’t escape into your plans or your platitudes or all the comforting narratives in your head. There comes a moment—and it is a hard, holy moment—when all you can do is surrender to the truth that’s right in front of you. 

This doesn’t always come as bad news. Yes, for some of us, this sort of moment shows up in crisis. But the immediacy of life comes through in wonderful ways, too: when you fall in love, or see the sun dip into the sea, or hear your children laughing, or taste the perfection of sweet summer corn on the cob. 

As followers of Jesus and as sacramental people, any and all of this is an opportunity. Our faith tradition teaches that whenever you surrender to the truth of things, whenever you can drink of the cup that is right now, whether bitter or sweet, you will taste God. Because God is found precisely in those places where there is nothing to hide from anymore—where you are, at last, here, actually partaking in life. This is what Jesus modeled for us every single day. 

For me, several weeks ago, that moment of surrender was when they were wheeling me in for surgery. I’d said all the goodbyes and I love you’s, we’d prayed, and I had to go. And as they rolled me down those cold dim hallways towards the operating room, I found myself some mixture of terrified and very, very present, thinking, here I am. This is my life. I don’t know what comes next, but there is nothing left to hide from now.

I am grateful for what came next. I am grateful for the love and prayers that sustained us. It is so good to be back—back with you, back with Matt and with our families, and back into this life with its sunsets and its summer corn and the thousand other small tastes of God. 

But I’ve been watching the news of the word, of course, and I know it is also a life that remains full of the complexities we all face: complicated, risky and uncertain, populated by all those proverbial wolves. 

I have been reflecting, lately, on how challenging it is to actually face the fullness of the world we live in—how much easier it is to stand safely behind the shelter of our opinions and our ideologies and our internet comments and our brittle certainties, like children playing hide and seek with truth. Meanwhile the world burns. It burns with pain, with longing for a humanity that will no longer hide from its collective responsibilities. 

Speaking for myself, I am hoping to do less hiding and more facing.

Because that’s what Jesus wants for us. It is, in many ways, God’s fundamental expectation of us: to face the world, to love it for what it is, to name what is broken in it, and to surrender ourselves fully to its healing, holding nothing back. If we are not willing to try that, however imperfectly, we are not practicing Christianity, not really. 

To that end: in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus commissions a large group. He rounds up 70 or so people—a meaningful number in the Bible, by the way, which evokes the idea of wholeness, fullness, completion— and he sends them out into the villages of the surrounding countryside to bear witness to the nearness of the kingdom of God. And they must do so without money, possessions, or even shoes. Not my favorite method of weekend travel. 

This list of instructions might sound arbitrary, but it is not. Jesus has very good reason for the 70 to go forth in this way—because he wants them to know what it feels like to stop hiding behind anything—he needs them to face and to receive life just as it is. 

He wants them—and us—to be able to answer these questions, honestly:

How will you carry yourself out in the wilderness places, where you can rely on none of the usual comforts? 

How will you stop thinking you can do all of this on your own strength?

How will you stare down your demons, so that you might bravely face the demonic and destructive forces at work in the world?

How will you surrender to the nearness of the Kingdom of God within you, so that others might find it, too?

Despite what some current perversions of the Christian faith claim, the answer to these questions has nothing to do with money, or force, or power. We are the sheep, not the wolves.

So yes, first, lay down your purse, Jesus says. You cannot buy the substance of your life. It will come to you freely, on its own terms, as a strange and unexpected gift, as a seat at the unexpected table where nothing can be bought or sold. Wisdom is understanding that we are all beggars at the feast of creation. Receive what is given to you.

And then lay down your bags, too. Your possessions, yes, but also your “baggage”—your assumptions and your gripes, your enmities and your cravings and your uncritical allegiances and your worn out old stories that serve no one anymore. Because if you don’t, you won’t ever see what’s actually in front of you, and we won’t ever do the work that needs doing right now. Do the work that is given to you. 

And finally, take off your shoes. Discover reverence for this moment, the place you are in—it is holy ground. It may not be the place you wanted to go. But “Here I am, Lord.” Here I am, in the hallway to the operating room. Here I am on Sunday morning with my doubts and my desires and my scars. Here I am in the United States in 2025, with my gratitude and my tears and my determination that we do not squander the dream of our forebears.

Here we are, with all these questions and hopes and fears, without anything but ourselves to give, trusting that, like Jesus, ourself is exactly what we are meant to give, for that is what the Lord loves most of all. Give back what has been given to you. 

So here’s what I am wondering today:

What will it take for us to step out like the 70? What do you need—from me, from this community—to do the thing you’ve been hesitating to do, to face the thing you must face? What will nourish us for the road ahead, with its wolves and its sunsets and its sorrows and its summer corn? 

Whatever that thing this, you need to name it, and I want to know about it, and we need to figure out how to help each other face it. It may begin with laying a few heavy things down—our assumptions and our resentments and our complacencies and our “we’ve always done it this ways.”

But if we’re not working on that here, as a community that carries on the legacy of those 70 liberated wanderers— whose names are written in heaven and whose lives blessedly became something other than a game of hide and seek—if we’re not doing that, then I don’t really know what we’re doing. And as I’ve been reminded recently, our time together is precious. I don’t to waste a moment of it.

I don’t know about you but I’m feeling a call toward all those wild, thin, courageous places where Jesus sends us—no purse, no bag, no shoes. Just a new heart. Those places where you can taste God.

They’re in the dim cool hospital corridors where all you have is a prayer under your breath and a sense of surrender to right now. In the invisible currents of mercy and sacrifice that undergird our worship and our service and our public witness. In all the moments when you can really, truly look at yourself and your life and your neighbor and, yes, our country—all that we are and all that we are not—and still say: yes, I choose to face this. I choose to not give up on this. I choose to keep trying for the good of all this. I choose to love this.

When we do that, wherever we are, then the proclamation once spread throughout the villages is still alive: the kingdom of God has come near. 

Indeed, it was always there, just waiting for us to face it.