Month: July 2026

On Judgment, And Strawberries: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, July 19, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43.

This morning I am going to offer you a disclaimer right up front: this is a sermon about God’s judgment.

Judgment is not a word we enjoy hearing very much, and many of us, perhaps, came to a church like St. Anne because we were exhausted by hearing about it too much in other faith communities. Believe me, I get that. But before you run for the exits, stick with me for a minute. Because today I am hoping we can reengage the idea of judgment rather than run from it. 

And in order to do that, first I need to tell you about picking strawberries. 

Just like the 4th of July rituals I described a couple weeks ago, another certainty of summer in rural Michigan is strawberry picking. Every year, on some particular July morning, my grandpa would announce it was time to go out to get our annual haul of berries for the many pies and jams and strawberry shortcakes that would soon fill the kitchen.

And so a bunch of us, young and old, would load into the pickup truck with visions of strawberry pie in our heads and travel way out past town, down an old country road to Kudwa’s strawberry farm. It was an old family farm with thousands of ripe berries beckoning from the low-growing plants just waiting to be plucked up into our buckets.

Now I was a city kid and didn’t really know much about how things grow, but I find you don’t have to be an expert to recognize a good strawberry. The big, fat red ones—into the bucket! The small, green ones, or the mushy overripe ones, you leave behind for some future berry picker or for the deer. And did a few especially perfect looking strawberries get popped in my mouth on the sly? Absolutely!

The point is that, when you’re strawberry picking, you must judge between which ones are worth it and which are not. And that type of judgement is a useful, necessary thing. It’s how we sort through all kinds of matters in this life. 

And so, when it comes to talk of God’s judgment in Scripture, rather than avoid it, I want you to hold onto that image of the strawberry patch, where “judgment” is not indiscriminate condemnation but careful discernment. Judgment is God saying, this over here is good and necessary and life-giving. And this other thing over here is not. 

I think we make a great error in the church if we forego any discussion of God’s judgment in our well-meant attempt to be welcoming and loving people. I think we miss out on the particular type of ethical clarity that God is asking us to speak and to practice as followers of Jesus. We say love God and love our neighbor, always, yes, and we push back against the ways judgment is misused to demonize whole groups of people, but it remains that there are things in this world that are good and sweet and nourishing, and those that are best left behind. And in following Jesus we are expected to get clear about which is which. 

So which is which? That is the question. Unlike strawberry picking, it gets tricky.

I bring all of this to your attention this morning because of our Gospel passage from Matthew, where Jesus regales us with yet another agricultural parable. This time it’s about wheat and weeds and how they spring up together in the same field. Somewhat surprisingly, the owner of the wheat fields says, just let the weeds grow and someday it will all be sorted out at the harvest. 

Now there is a lot that can be taken from this, but in its simplest terms, this parable is about God’s capacity for judgment. Because at any given time there is both good and evil in the world and a judgment—a choice—between them must be made. In nearly every situation we’ll ever experience, if we wish to live fully and well, we have to discern between what is life-giving and what is not. 

The problem is that often we mere mortals can get confused by these choices, and overwhelmed by having to constantly navigate the thicket of wheat and weeds growing up all around us.

People get all mixed up and think that we should judge according to our biases and cultural norms or our personal points of view or our political allegiances.  That type of judgment rarely ends well. We end up standing lost amid the fields, amid the ruins of our former certainties, crying out for clarity.

But thankfully God is not lost. God does not get confused. And God is not overwhelmed. God has always been crystal clear about what leads to abundant life and what does not. 

God has been clear about this since that first fruit was picked from the tree in Eden, and God is clear about it in the words of the prophets, and God is clear about it, above all, in Jesus, the “first fruits” of the resurrection, as Paul calls him. 

And this is why we need God—we have always needed God—to come and help us see, and to follow, and to persist in the truth of his capacity for judgment, not ours. In the “Te Deum,” one of the most ancient Christian hymns, we sing to Christ:

We believe that you will come and be our judge.
    Come then, Lord, and help your people.
   

And yet you might still be wondering, how do we tell which is which? What is the ultimate criteria of Jesus’ judgment—that ancient and eternal clarity of God which can tell the good from the bad, the right from the wrong, the sweet fruit from the bitter? What does he see as the one true measure of things that we struggle to see?

Friends, I suspect you actually already know the answer. It is love. Love is the fundamental criteria of God’s judgment—of his sorting between what will last and what is best let go.

And no matter the choice you must make in any particular situation in your life, if you claim to follow Jesus, if you claim Jesus as your judge, then love is the side you must be on. 

Love—by which I mean a self-giving, goodwill-seeking, justice-building, peace-making, reconciliation-building, fault-admitting, circle-widening, inclusion-orienting, humility-accepting, mercy-sharing, good-humor-celebrating, creation-honoring, reverence-offering, sweet-summer-berry-picking kind of love—this love, God says, time and again, is the only choice worth making. 

And if that’s what we’re talking about when we talk about God’s judgment—and make no mistake, in this place we are—then I am going against the Episcopal grain, I suppose, friends, because I WELCOME God’s judgment. I welcome God’s enduring ability to tell me what is worthwhile in those moments when I am afraid or have forgotten. 

In this world where the weeds are grown so high, I cry out for that good judgment, because I believe in the goodness of God, the love of God, the generosity and the beauty of God, and I WANT the world to be held accountable to generosity and beauty and love and goodness. 

In fact I refuse to settle for a world in which nobody can separate what is life-giving from life-degrading and where anything is ok simply because someone can get away with it. That’s not any kind of good news at all, and I am hungry for Good News. Hungrier for it, even, than strawberry pie, and that’s saying something!

So if we are anything at all, let us be a community where we are not afraid to speak of God’s judgment—God’s clear judgment between love and its many impostors, God’s wise judgment between those who build up and those who tear down, God’s saving judgment between the sweet and the bitter fruits of this life. 

Let us be an Episcopal church who is unafraid to say that anything less than a spacious and generous and inclusive love is, in fact, unacceptable in the kingdom of God. Let us be a people who, in word and action, demonstrate that we do indeed know the difference between truth and a lie, and we are choosing, Lord help us, we are choosing love’s truth.

Because, as former Presiding Bishop Michael Curry often says, “if it’s not about love it’s not about God.” And that’s the sort of judgment call I am glad to hear proclaimed. 

As far as I know, that strawberry farm in Michigan is long gone. But oh, that summer harvest taught me some lasting things, and on a July morning like this I think we who gather here are still picking berries in our own sort of way —all of us down on our knees, working as one, reaching out for those sweet, perfect gifts. No confusion or fear, just clarity…and a hunger for the feast to come. 

And while I don’t claim to know the mind of God, as best I can judge…if that’s what we’re up to, it sounds pretty much like heaven. 

On Love of Country: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, July 5, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH on the weekend of the sesquicentennial of the United States. The lectionary texts cited are Zechariah 9:9-12 and Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30.

We talk a lot about love here on Sundays. But this weekend, for obvious reasons, I’m thinking about love of country and how we might honestly, faithfully talk about it.

When I was young, the 4th of July was my favorite holiday. I spent the summers in upper Michigan, and for the 4th we’d always go up to Marquette, on Lake Superior, where my aunt & cousin lived. We’d scramble for candy at the parade and then go to the annual international food festival right on the lakeshore, and we’d eat Ojibwe Fry Bread and spaghetti and Chinese food and snow cones and everything else you can think of as the fireworks bathed us in their star-spangled light. 

I loved the 4th back then because it was easy, and joyful, and, as a kid who hadn’t learned much of our country’s layered history, it was supremely uncomplicated. Just sparklers and warm July sunshine and the sense that this home of ours is a good and generous place.

That was many years ago now, and a lot has happened since then. These days, I know that the 4th of July lands a bit differently for some people. Not just because of contemporary politics, but because many of us have spent time wrestling with that complex history of ours. 

We’ve been listening more closely, in recent years, to all of the American stories: those of women, and of our indigenous neighbors, and our Black and Latino and Asian neighbors, and our LGBTQ+ neighbors, and our disabled neighbors, and our non-Christian neighbors, and all the other perspectives that didn’t always make the first round of the history books. 

That diversity was, of course, already part of the story–as hinted at by that international food festival on an American holiday–but now we are attempting to give those stories their full due. And we do this not in order to betray or dilute the American dream, as some might think, but as a fulfillment of that dream’s original intent: to be a nation, not of uniformity or self-congratulation, but one that is constantly in the process of becoming more fully itself. Constantly striving to live up to its own best hopes.

This is not easy work. And it’s not what I grasped as a naive little boy watching fireworks explode in the night sky. But, a quarter of a millennia on as a country, it is indeed still the work we have been given to do.

And, to make matters even more complex, you and I, of course, do this work not only as citizens or residents of the U.S., but as followers of Jesus. So we are constantly navigating the ways that these two identities—citizen and disciple—both overlap and are in tension with each other. 

To this end, in The Episcopal Church, we have an odd relationship with the 4th of July. You may notice, if you look through the Prayer Book, that Independence Day is noted as a major feast on our liturgical calendar—a legacy of our historical roots in the Church of England where faith and government were more closely intertwined. 

And yet most of us have been formed as citizens who value a clear separation between church and state. So this is a tricky path to navigate. We are asked to pray for our country, and to engage actively in the pursuit of its welfare, even as we are taught that our ultimate allegiance is to the God whose love and blessing and concern are not constrained by any national border.

There’s a lesson here. We are being invited to love our country without worshipping it. We are being called to love our country not because it is perfect, or singularly chosen by God, or unassailable in its history, but simply because it is the place where we have found ourselves knit together as one beautiful, messy, diverse assembly, forging a path toward our shared horizon. That alone makes it worthy of love.

But we are reminded in Scripture, time and again, that love and idolatry are not the same thing, and that true love—including for our country— embraces complexity, and prophetic criticism, and grief, and beauty, and lament. We are, like the prophet Zechariah says today, “prisoners of hope” for this land of ours—we struggle, and yet we dream.

I did not know this as a kid eating a snow cone. But now I know that, unless we can look up at those 4th of July fireworks with both joy in our hearts and tears in our eyes…with some peculiar and potent mixture of gratitude and longing in our hearts…until then, perhaps we have not fully learned how to engage this particular holiday as people of faith. 

I would also offfer, though, that while some of us may feel deep discomfort with contemporary trends to conflate Christian identity and civic identity, it would be a mistake for us to totally separate them either. If you ask me, we should not remove the 4th of July from our Prayer Book just because it makes some folks uncomfortable. We should not pretend that our faith has no bearing on public life and how we engage as citizens. It does.

God has always had a perspective on the social and political challenges of our times. Listen to those prophets. Listen to the Psalms. Listen to Jesus. 

Come to me, Jesus says in today’s Gospel. Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

We’ve heard these words many times before, but often we might receive them as a personal invitation to be consoled by God. I was struck this week, though, with the 4th of July approaching, by how similar Jesus’ words are to those from the verse by the poet Emma Lazarus which is affixed to the Statue of Liberty: Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Emma Lazarus was a Jewish poet, and I don’t know that she was drawing from the Gospels in her writing, but nonetheless the resemblance suggests something: that Jesus’ own words of rest and refuge are a social vision, not just a personal consolation. And so, if we are pondering how to navigate the narrow way between faith and patriotism, perhaps we should begin by trying to build a society that reflects the true values of our Lord: hospitality, charity, mercy, humility, concern for the least and the lost. 

Perhaps we should remember that Jesus invitation was especially for the burdened and beleaguered of his own time—people longing for liberation and safety and peace. And he was not just giving them a pat on the head and promising things will be ok once they die and go to heaven. He was saying, let’s start to live now like heaven is here on earth. Let’s create a new sort of home where everyone—everyone—has space to heal, to live, to thrive, to be, and to become. 

That vision, that notion of a true home, which we call the Kingdom of God, is not exclusive to the United States of America, but it should take root here, too. And so those who claim to follow Jesus in this country of ours, if they do anything, should be doing all they can to make that vision a reality, through peacemaking, and trust-building, and justice-seeking for all of our neighbors. All of them. 

In essence, if we could spend a little less time arguing over whether this is a “Christian nation” and just go about the work of actually being like Christ to one another in this nation—then, perhaps, we would finally see what Jesus was getting at. Maybe we would all find our rest, together.

It has been many years since I sat on that Lake Superior shore and felt like the world around me was uncomplicated. I miss those days. But now that I am grown, I still love the 4th of July. Matt and I went to see the Cincinnati Pops last night and we sang along to all the good old songs and I looked up in wonder at those fireworks. I still love this country.

It’s just that now I try to love it in the way that Jesus taught me to love things: not as an idol, but as a work in progress. With space for its complexity, and forgiveness for its failures, and hope in its promises. 

We are still prisoners of hope for this homeland of ours. We struggle and yet we dream. But I refuse to give up on it, even if we still have a long way to go to reach that horizon line.

And one day, with God’s help, and with true love for this land and for one another in our hearts…maybe we will get there.