Month: January 2026

Cat Pageant: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, January 18, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is John 1:29-42.

Matt and I don’t have any pets at present, and if we do expand our family someday it will likely be with a dog.

But it so happens that I grew up in a household of cats. Lots of cats. At any given time in my childhood, my mom had about six, mostly rescues and most of them Siamese. So all of my earliest memories (and chores) were cat-adjacent, and we had what I’d call a lovingly complex relationship. Meaning that we loved them and they made life complex. 

I was an only child, given to playing lots of games by myself and making up all kinds of imaginary scenarios and scenes which I would then try to stage in our living room like a sort of pageant. Which was generally fine, except on those occasions when I had the bright idea to incorporate the cats into my efforts, to make them characters in my story of the day. 

You know, I loved Shakespeare, so maybe I was recreating a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the cats could be the fairies. Or I was imagining myself as a medieval king and the cats were my court attendants, dressed up in my mom’s scarves. 

Have you ever tried to put a costume on a cat? I don’t recommend it. Lets just say this medieval king suffered an uprising among the nobility. 

The point is that, in short order, I learned that the cats were their own creatures, with their own purpose and dignity, and they were not props to be subjected to my fanciful whims. It took a few bites and scratches for me to internalize this, but I did eventually. And we settled into a more peaceful coexistence where the true order of cat-human relationships was confirmed: they were in charge, and I was just there to serve their whims. If you have ever loved a cat, you know this is how it goes. 

Animals are good teachers; I am so glad I learned all of that at an early age—a little dose of humility in a world that is always encouraging us to center our own needs and narratives. It is important though, as we grow and evolve, to remember that we are not the center of things, and that others do not exist to serve our personal agenda. 

And that is especially important when we consider the most fundamental relationship in our lives: our relationship with God. 

Like me and the cats, I think it is safe to say that, much of the time, we are tempted to cast God in the role most useful to us at the time. If we are angry at someone, we want the vengeful God. If we are frightened, we want soothing God. If we are lost, we want the God who gives us a clear sign. If we are happy and content then, Lord forgive us, often we just want the God who is quiet and stays out of our way. And so we will pray, or not, to this version of God whom we need and then hope we are accommodated by him.

But have you ever tried to put a costume on God? In my experience, it doesn’t usually work. So many times I wanted, demanded God to do one thing, and God had quite another thing in mind.

Which leads me into this morning’s Gospel passage from John, when John the Baptist has his epiphany that Jesus is, indeed, the Messiah, and when others, like Andrew and Simon Peter begin to have this same intuition. 

“Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” John enthuses. He sounds very confident. 

But I wonder….I wonder, really, if he knows what that means, even as he says it. Clearly he senses, in some deep, Spirit-inspired way, that Jesus is the One he’s been looking for all his life. 

But then he names Jesus—he casts him, if you will—as “the Lamb of God,” a sacrificial offering that will somehow make all things right. I wonder if John really understands at this point, though, what this means. Remember that in another account, from prison, John will doubt whether Jesus is who John thought he was because things don’t seem to be going the way he planned. 

So when John calls Jesus the Lamb of God here, he is speaking from his expectations of what Jesus will do for them, not realizing that Jesus will end up expecting much, much more from John and these disciples than they ever imagined. 

Jesus, you see, is not just a medieval king who drops in to smite our enemies. He is not a magician with a wand. And to follow him is not simply to behold a Lamb who will be sacrificed for all of our failings while we stand idly by. 

No, what John does not yet understand is that following Jesus means becoming the sacrificial Lamb ourselves. To follow this Messiah is to give away our own egos, pride, safety, expectations, and fanciful whims for the sake of an unselfish love. Jesus changes the world in and through us, not just through himself. Theologians call this cooperative grace. I call it putting our money where our mouth is. 

But John and the disciples don’t know that yet. I think they’re still hoping somehow this Lamb of God will accomplish it all on his own—both the salvation and its aftereffects—and that they can content themselves with beholding him rather than becoming him.

I wonder, friends, if we get stuck in that same posture sometimes. Jesus save me, but don’t change me!

I hate to break it you (and to myself) but Christianity is a becoming, not a beholding. It is a surrender to God’s story, not the manipulation of God to fit our own stories. We will only be saved when we stop trying to put costumes on Jesus and let him do what he actually came to do: to make us like him. 

I am dismayed by the extent to which Christianity has failed in this regard. In every age and culture where the Gospel is proclaimed, people—especially powerful people—have a propensity to turn it into a cat pageant—an self-indulgent enactment of their own agenda. We dress Jesus up in crowns and flags, we make him a general in an army or a judge on the bench. Or, sometimes, we make him a sweet little kitten, curled up by the fire, disturbing no one. Our enemies are his enemies. Our priorities are his priorities. Our failings are just the sort of thing he doesn’t mind too much. How convenient. 

But what I find encouraging in all of this is that, like those cranky felines I grew up with, Jesus does not submit to any of our games. Not for long, anyway. The truth keeps coming out, generation after generation. It keeps bubbling up—in protests and in psalms, in the sacrifices of the martyrs who refuse to worship empires, in this pesky proclamation that God loves all people, and in the fact that those who twist the words of God to suit their own ends will, ultimately, come to nothing. It can take time but it is always so—the truth of love wins out.

 I find great hope in that long record of God dismissing our various ideologies and indignations and inviting us, again and again, to come and see what Jesus is actually about, where he is staying, as the Gospel passage says. And it’s always the same, familiar place: charity, gentleness, mercy, peace, service, patience, trust, joy. And maybe a few scratch marks for those who try to distort the truth. 

So yes, I know that, as they say, God is dog spelled backwards, but today when I think of God, I am thankful that he’s a bit more like the insubordinate cats I grew up with. Especially in these times of great cruelty and fear, of widespread confusion, and the creeping sense of despair felt by so many people. God is not a willing participant in any of this debased pageantry. God has his own purpose and dignity and his own way of evading our best efforts to make him what he is not. 

And what he asks of us is to be exactly like him—catlike in our dismissiveness towards whatever nonsense is being sold to us. I am so glad. I find encouragement in his utter disobedience of our schemes. That’s the God whom I am grateful to obey. 

So behold this Lamb of God who is far more than you ever imagined. Behold this Lamb of God who will ask more of us than we ever imagined. Behold this Lamb of God who will accomplish more through us than we ever imagined. 

Just don’t try to put a costume on him. 

Comedy/Tragedy: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, January 4, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 2:13-15, 19-23, the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt.

I was really into theater as a kid, so one of the best Christmas gifts I ever received was a big kit of stage makeup when I was 10 or 11 years old. I was blessed with parents who supported my love for all of this, even if it made me a little bit different from other boys my age. 

But my mom was all in, and so she got this big blue plastic case and filled it with the various things actors wear on stage, and on the top of it she glued a comedy mask and a tragedy mask to symbolize the theater. I loved it so much that I burst into tears when I opened it. 

Funny, how that goes—how smiles and tears get all mixed up at certain moments. I guess that’s why the two masks always show up together.

Those comedy and tragedy masks, by the way, one laughing and one frowning, are from ancient Greece, but they still signify our two dominant modes of storytelling. 

The ancient Greeks understood, as we do, that life is a many-layered thing: that we must make an accounting of both sorrow and joy, both victory and futility, if we are ever going to navigate life this world. We might prefer one over the other in our entertainments, but in our lives we will have to put on both masks eventually. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about comedy and tragedy this week—maybe because every time I feel some sense of joy in my own life, some new tragedy unfolds in the world and I find myself all mixed up again with smiles and tears. 

One definition of comedy and tragedy that has helped me with all this: rather than simply focusing on whether something is “funny” and thus a comedy, or “sad” and therefore a tragedy, instead we might think of tragedies as those stories that end in disintegration and loss; and comedies as those that end in integration or wholeness. Tragedy: things come apart. Comedy: things come together.

And so, with this framework in mind,  I wonder how you would answer this question: are the Gospels a comedy or are they a tragedy?

This is not just an intellectual exercise, because the answer, as Christian people, will shape how we respond to all of life. 

At first glance, a passage like the one we heard today is decidedly tragic. Matthew tells us of a traumatic event in the early life of Jesus when he is no older than two: that desperate journey into Egypt made in order to evade King Herod, who will not put up with any rumored threats to his own power. 

Our lectionary text unfortunately skips over a few key verses. Perhaps the editors feared that we wouldn’t want to hear hard things in the afterglow of Christmas. But we ought to hear them, we ought to bear witness, because this is when Herod commands what is known as “the slaughter of the innocents”—the murder of all the baby boys in Bethlehem, intended to include Jesus. The Holy Family is saved from catastrophe, but this is no happy ending. Countless other families are destroyed in the process. A tragedy, surely.

And only years later, once Herod has died, do Mary and Joseph dare return back to their homeland to begin again. 

Matthew frames this as a grand prophetic fulfillment, but that would be cold comfort to all those mourning parents in Bethlehem. Cold comfort, even, to Mary and Joseph up in Nazareth, who have become poor and desperate migrants through their acceptance of God’s various invitations. 

We might imagine them gazing upon this young Christ child, raised in the shadow of great sacrifices and constant dangers, and wondering: what have you brought upon us, child? What have you wrought in your coming? Do you offer disintegration or wholeness? Are you our destroyer or our salvation? Are we, who love you and follow you, bound up in a tragedy or a comedy in this unfolding story? 

The rest of us who follow Jesus might ask the same thing at times.

Because, of course, it doesn’t get much easier as the story goes on.

Which would support the notion, perhaps, that the gospels are largely a tragic epic: a record of Jesus’ struggle against disintegration—ours and his own, too. Taken chapter by chapter, there is a lot of heartbreak in there. The Greeks knew that sort of noble tragedy well. 

There’s just one catch—one small, crucial catch. And it’s one that, oddly, I think we can forget to hold in mind as we read the Gospel passages week by week. Something that we forget, too, when the bad news of the world inundates us. 

And it is simply this: at the end of the story, Jesus will rise again.

No, I haven’t just decided to skip over Epiphany and Lent and go straight to Easter. But frankly it is pointless, even misleading, to read or ponder any part of the gospel texts without holding the resurrection in mind. Because the resurrection is the only reason why any of these texts were written down in the first place. The world already has its share of tragedies. It didn’t need to record one more. 

No, this Jesus story is something else, because Jesus rose again. And when he did, everything that came before—the birth in the manger, all the long journeys into Egypt and back, all the sacrifices, all the strange dreams and guiding stars—all of it, tragic as it was, was finally redeemed into something good.

Because of the resurrection, the gospels are not a tragedy. They are not just a record of our woes and of God’s sacrifice. That’s part of it, sure. But it’s not the heart of it. The heart of the gospels, the heart of the good news is wholeness, fullness. The heart of it is survival, flourishing even. The heart of it, if you can believe it, is comedy. A great, divine comedy (a term which I think some guy named Dante thought of long before I did). 

The Gospels say: I know the headlines are dire, but don’t let them destroy your hope. We are NOT on an inevitable path towards disintegration. We are NOT always going to live under the subjection of Herod and his successors, with their war games and their slaughter of innocents for political ends. We are NOT meant to be content with the sad acceptance of such a world. 

We are not even meant to die, not forever, and in the story of Jesus, we see that we will not. While we may put on both comic and tragic masks in our lifetimes, while we will smile and cry sometimes all at once, at the last we will all be called out of Egypt, out of despair, out of death itself, to stand, unmasked and unafraid, face to face with the One who calls us back to himself. 

So it’s a comedy, this Christian story. Not always the laugh out loud kind, God knows, but a comedy nonetheless in that classical sense, because it is the kind of story where we will end up ok in the end. All of us. We are going to be ok.

And what this means for us, at the threshold of a new and already complex year, is that faith communities like ours have a particular part to play in the world, especially as tragic news persists; as new innocents are slaughtered; as new communities live in the shadow of sacrifice and danger.

Because we are the ones who will bear witness to these challenges, but we are also the ones who will offer a counter-narrative in how we speak and act and live. 

When some preach division and fear, we preach love. When some enact oppression and petty grievance, we pursue justice and relationship. When some say life is loneliness, we say, you belong here. When some try to sell us empty, vain promises, we say, no, I have found wisdom in older, simpler, humbler things like prayer and friendship and kindness and service. 

And when we feel the pain of life, we will admit, yes, there are many tragedies in this world. But there is also that light which shines in the darkness. There is that light which darkness has not and shall not overcome. And so the story, the whole story, isn’t over just yet. We are coming out of Egypt. And Jesus will rise again.

Tragedy will never take the final bow. 

I lost track of that old stage makeup kit long ago, but those two faces glued to the top, laughing and frowning…I still see them everywhere I look. The comedy and the tragedy of life are all around, and there are days—oh there are days—when I do wonder which will win out, and I look at Jesus and ask,

What have you brought upon us, Child of Bethlehem? What have you wrought in your coming?

But then I remember. And call it resurrection, call it unyielding love, call it undying joy, call it just the tiniest sliver of hope. 

Whatever name you give it, this much I know:

That in the end, after the curtain falls on everything else, there will be laughter.