September 2025 – By Another Road

Bus: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, September 21, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Luke 16:1-13, the parable of the dishonest manager.

My dad didn’t always have that VW van I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. Before that, when summertime came around, we had to get back to the family home in Michigan some other way. And once, when I was probably in the second grade, we took a Greyhound bus all the way from northern California to the Upper Peninsula.

Now, have you ever ridden on a Greyhound bus? Have you ever ridden 2,300 miles cross-country on a Greyhound bus? Let me tell you, that trip is not for the faint of heart. Hard seats, barely any air conditioning, and back then people still smoked cigarettes on board. We only stopped for a few minutes at a time at run down bus stops and gas stations and other places at the frayed edge of human comfort.

When you make such a trip, though, you discover a kinship with the folks riding next to you, because all of you are united by the one fervent desire of anyone who is on a long-distance bus: to get home. At every stop, people were speaking of home, remembering home, wondering how much longer it would be to get there.

Those of us on the Greyhound were not out for a pleasure ride or a sightseeing trip. Most all of us had been somewhere else, far away from where we wanted to be, and now we were doing whatever it took to get back.

And sometimes you face desperate circumstances. One night on that trip, in the middle of Des Moines, Iowa, our bus was hit by a drunk driver. Thankfully nobody was seriously injured, but the bus was, and so my dad and I found ourselves in a downtown station, bleary eyed and stranded at 4 in the morning with no money. It’s been over 30 years, but I still remember that pit in my stomach, the rising tide of panic.

We are all just trying to get home in this life, friends. In one way or another, we are all just trying to get home. Some of us have a fairly comfortable time of it. And some of us do not. But beneath and beyond the material circumstances of our lives, that desire to get home, to find a home, to build or reclaim a sense of home—this is what unites us.

I wish we could see that more clearly, especially in divided times like these. I wish we could understand that while our opinions and our ideologies may vary, our basic desires usually do not. We’re all just people on the bus, driven by the memory of a particular porch light, hoping it’s been left on for us if we can ever get back to it.

As it so happens, Jesus came to help us get back home, in every sense of the word. But first—and I think this is a core goal of his teaching ministry—Jesus wants us to see that we are all on the trip together—this long, surprising trip, with its many perils and compromises. And so we arrive at today’s parable.

Now, I will fully admit, this Gospel passage is a tough one. The story, the motivations of the characters in it, and Jesus’ message for us all feel a bit confusing, even contradictory. We are told that one cannot serve God and wealth as two masters, which is easy enough to understand, even if it’s difficult in practice.

But then we are also told to make friends by means of “dishonest wealth.” Why would the Son of God tell us such a thing, sounding more like a rascal than a Redeemer? This is not “Scary” Jesus, but it is Crafty Jesus, speaking to us with an irreverent wink.

Whenever I come up against a perplexing passage of Scripture, I try to remember my two guiding principles for how these texts should be read: first, through the lens of love. And second, as I have said before, is to read Scripture from the margins—through the eyes of those people and places which exist out at that frayed edge of human comfort.

And when I do so with this parable, what I notice is how the manager—crafty though he may be—is really just a man with a desperate need to find a home.

“I have decided what to do,” he says to himself, probably because he has no one else to turn to. I have decided what to do. I will figure out how to get someone, anyone, to care whether I live or die. I will figure out how to find a home that won’t be taken from me.

How lonely he must be! And this dialogue with himself—this broken man trying to survive—this, for me, is the heart of the parable.

Because note, first, that we don’t know if he actually squandered any property—just that he was accused of doing so by someone with more power than him. And we can’t quite tell whether his subsequent choices were immoral, or resourceful, or subversive, or some combination of these.

But what we do know about this manager, much like the character of the Prodigal Son, (which is, by the way, the story just before this one in Luke), and what we might even begin to empathize with is that, when faced with the breakdown of everything he thought he could count on, the manager discovers, in a flash, the only thing that actually matters in this life. He discovers the one thing we all seek, in the end: to find that one porch light that might be left on for us. To get home, however far we might have to go to get there.

And so he tries, however imperfectly, to do just that. I don’t know if I admire him, but I see him. I understand him.

Because I think it’s safe to say that every single person on that old Greyhound bus had a lot in common with this manager. We were all people without much money, all having to face down our frightening sense of need. We were all people who felt the urgency of getting to a place where someone would finally open the door and welcome us in.

And guess what: that hungry urgency of homegoing—the kind that leads you down lonely highways, the kind that keeps you going through peril and fatigue, the kind that makes you do surprising things—that, that is part of discipleship. That is part of following Jesus, who called tax collectors and dined with sinners and who, I am fairly certain, would also be quite comfortable with bus stops and the people who rely on them.

Because it’s not a pleasure ride or a sightseeing trip, this Christian path through life. It is the long, necessary journey through our failure and sinfulness and on towards home, back to God. It is late nights and lonely gas stations; it is grace and compassion and cigarette smoke; it is extravagant hope and deep hunger. That is the truth of this Christian journey. Every story Jesus tells us reveals that this is so.

And if we don’t pick up on that in his stories, well, it’s time to read them again, with love and from the margins.

So here’s what I’ll ask of you today, whether you have ever ridden the Greyhound or not: don’t judge the manager too harshly, or throw up your hands at the complexity of his story. We are all a tangled mess of crafty and caring, after all.

Just see him for who he is: a fellow traveler on the bus with you, with his own mistakes and missteps, his own private failures and desperate choices, just like yours or mine, just sitting in Des Moines at 4AM with his head in his hands, wondering what he’s going to do next and when or if he will ever be home again. Some times, that’s all of us.

And if that inspires a bit of tenderness in you, a bit of compassion for the many imperfect ways people have to survive in this world and the ways that God loves us and welcomes us regardless…well, then perhaps the parable has done its job after all. Perhaps Jesus has met us, again, as he tends to, at the frayed edge of human comfort.

On that bus trip, we did finally make it to Michigan, by the way. But in a bit of a twist, we didn’t get there on the Greyhound. After the accident, we were stranded. So my grandpa got in his old truck and drove over 500 miles to Des Moines and brought us home with him. The porch light was indeed on when we got back.

And you know, I’m fairly confident that’s what heaven would feel like for me if I ever get there: the light on and the door opening, and the One who just looks and me and says, long trip, huh?

And I’ll say, Lord, you have no idea.

And he’ll say, maybe with an irreverent wink, actually, I do.

Worth It: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, September 7, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH, which was observing its “Faith in Action” ministry celebration. The lectionary text cited is Luke 14:25-33.

I mentioned “Scary Jesus” a couple weeks ago, and it seems he’s back with us today using very strong language to tell us something fairly self-evident: often in life you have to count the cost of something and decide if it’s worth it, whatever “it” is. But sometimes…sometimes you just can’t know in advance if it will be worth it, or how, but you know you have to do it anyway. And that’s when things get interesting. That’s when faith begins.

So, for this Faith in Action Day we are observing, here’s a story, in three parts, about determining the worth of things.

Part 1:

It was love at first sight.

My father saw it sitting there in the parking lot with a bunch of other used vehicles, bathed in the promise of a perfect spring morning: a gleaming, goldenrod, vintage VW van—the kind that, when you see it, you feel lighthearted and adventurous, and you swear you can hear Hotel California playing on some distant radio, and you feel that open road unfurling from some point of origin within your deepest self. Oh yes, it was love, and he was all in.

Never mind that he didn’t have much money. Never mind that the old man selling it was vague on its maintenance history. My dad saw that van and he knew he had to get it, he knew that it could carry us long and wondrous distances: California to Michigan and back again, or even farther, maybe, all the way to the promised land.

And so he plunked down some cash and, a few weeks later, once I was done with school, we threw what we had in the back and headed east, ready for anything. Well, maybe not anything.

Because the first time we made a quick stop, a few hours from home, the van wouldn’t start. And we were stuck in a rest area outside of Willows, California, on a 90-something degree day in June, unsure how to keep going.

I don’t remember exactly how he figured it out—this was before cell phones and internet access—but somehow he determined that we had to manually spark the ignition to start the van again—I had to sit in the driver’s seat and turn the key, and he was out there, cussing in the heat, pressing some fuses together or something. Essentially we had to hotwire our own vehicle every time we started it. And so we did, all the way across the country, until we got to Michigan and he could afford to fix it.

Was the van worth it? Depends on how you count the cost. It never really did work that well, and years later I think he sold it for next to nothing.

But on the other hand, I can tell you that when I think of what it means to be free, and safe, and alive in this world, when I think of what hope feels like…what I remember is riding in that old VW van with the windows down somewhere in the Great Plains, eating a ham sandwich, singing an old song on the radio with my dad and I think: oh, maybe we did get to the promised land after all.

Part II:

It was love at first sight.

Those disciples had met Jesus in any number of ways, caught up in the various worries and occupations that constitute a normal life, but when they saw him, they saw Life with a capital L. They saw a different sort of road unfurling in front of them, one that carried with it all the promise of a spring morning. And how could they not follow, to see where they might go together? Wouldn’t that be worth just about anything?

And it’s true, that most of them didn’t have much to lose—no money or status. Maybe they thought that following Jesus would give them the dignity and the peace and the protection that are scarce resources in this life.

But then, we come to today’s Gospel passage, and somewhere at a rest stop along the way to Jerusalem, maybe in the 90 degree summer heat, Jesus has some difficult news for them: this journey is going to cost a whole lot more than they imagined.

The language of hating what is dearest to us and of giving up what is most precious—it lands hard on the ears, it makes a person sweat and second guess their choices. It suggests that whatever this love is, it is not the comfortable, cruising along smooth highways kind.

And its worth cannot be measured in the same way as those kings who wage war and build towers. Jesus, I think, talks about those things not to equate them with discipleship, but to contrast them. He is being ironic. He is saying, the book of True Life is not a ledger. The way of True Peace is not a negotiated settlement.

Therefore, none of you can be my disciples unless you let go of all that. You have to follow me by faith and when they ask, on the other side of the cross, was it worth it, you will have discovered a new way to speak of worth.

And only then will you be free, and safe, and alive in this world. Only then will you reach the promised land.

Part III:

I imagine, for many of us, it was love at first sight, or close to it—the first time we came through those red doors of St. Anne, or another door like it. The first time we heard the Spirit reverberate through an old hymn or felt Jesus press against our lips in the shape of bread. The first time we understood that we were welcomed just as we are, and felt the possibility of something new unfurling within us.

And what a journey it is, to be in a church like this, to build a community like this, to see it grow and change and stumble and get back up again. To show up in the light of spring mornings, and on winter nights, too, and to know that something, that Someone, waits for us here, waits to huddle in close, to hotwire our hearts, to ignite something long dormant within our souls, to make us feel alive again. That is the gift of church at its best. That is the gift of a place like St. Anne. Its worth is hard to measure.

And yet, it doesn’t always go the way we think it might, or should. We’ve had our moments when we felt stranded on the side of the road, the world rushing past, and I imagine there have been times when it feels like we are getting by on a lick and a prayer, because, well, frankly, sometimes that’s the best anyone can do.

Which is why Faith in Action day is so much more than just a ministry fair or a sign-up event. It is an acknowledgment of the cost—the deep and continued and holy cost—of following Jesus, and of figuring out how we are going to bear it, and share it, and even rejoice in that costliness together. It is a moment to say thank you to one another for all of the ways, large and small, that we’ve shared in the cost of keeping this place going, mile by by mile.

I hope, as we travel around the tables at coffee hour today, we will take time to say thank you to each other—for being here. For trying. For sweating in the summer sun and shoveling the snow and planning the programs and assembling the ham sandwiches. I hope we will taste the goodness of all of it, and recommit ourselves to the love that drew us in, that draws us out, that keeps us here and keeps us going.

Because it’s funny, when you consider the value of our life together here: it is not “useful” in any traditional sense of the word. We are not building towers and waging culture wars. We are not “winning” anything. We are just loving everything, and everyone.

What a miracle that this is enough—more than enough. What a miracle that this is everything.

What a miracle that we persist in the foolish, extravagant experiment of a life founded on chasing after Jesus, wherever he goes, for no other reason than this: that it was love at first sight.

And, as with all great love stories, perhaps, when all is said and done here at St. Anne, if someone were to ask us if all of this was worth it—all the false starts and the broken engines, all the hard questions and the hellos and the goodbyes—I hope that we will be able to look up and say: depends on how you count the cost.

But we can tell you this much: here, we were free. Here, we were safe. Here, maybe for the time, we were alive in this world.

And yes, oh yes, every now and then, I think we even saw the promised land.