Month: September 2026

The Leap: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, September 27, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 21:23-32.

When Matt and I were on our honeymoon in Curaçao this past June, we took one day to drive up the coast, stopping at various beautiful beaches along the way. They were all slightly different from each other, but all of them were backed by these rugged cliffs, hugging small crescents of sand and deep blue coves of water. 

At one of our first stops, we observed what is, I think, a popular pastime in Curaçao: cliff jumping into the ocean. High above the beach, a group of people had clambered up the rocky slope and stood at the edge peering down into the shimmering water. And then, sometimes hesitantly, sometimes confidently, one by one they would leap, and fly through the air, and disappear beneath the still surface of the sea, only to emerge a moment later, laughing and (I imagined) trembling with adrenaline and joy. 

Now, mind you, I observed all of this from the safe distance of my beach chair with my novel and my sun hat and my layers and layers of sunscreen. I was not about to jump off a cliff! What were those people thinking?! Why hurl yourself through the air and potentially break a limb when you can just relax in the shade?

But then something occurred to me. Not a thought, but an image, a memory. A different tall rock cliff, long ago, perched above a turbid river, with thick autumn foliage and the air cool and wet and luminous. And, in this memory, there I was, standing on the edge of that cliff some 30 feet above the river, looking down, and then closing my eyes, and leaping, and flying through the air, and plunging into the water below. 

And so I remembered something long forgotten: once, I was a cliff jumper, too. When I was 18, I had jumped off that cliff into the Gauley River in West Virginia on a whitewater rafting trip in college. And I, too, had come up from the deep, trembling with adrenaline and joy. As I remembered all of this, for just a moment I wondered: where had he gone, that young man who was willing to step off the edge, step out into the open air, and fly?

I tell you this story on this particular morning because I think, as the birthdays accumulate, I have some empathy for the chief priests and the elders in today’s Gospel reading. I know they are Jesus’ enemies in the story, so I’m probably not supposed to feel much empathy for them, but I do. 

Because in them, in their stubborn resistance to Jesus’ wild and fearless relationship with the God of Israel, in the priests and elders’ fearful cautiousness which has atrophied into bitterness, I see the toll that life can take upon any of us. How we go from cliff jumping to throwing stones without even realizing it. 

When the priests and the elders demand to know by whose authority Jesus is teaching and healing and feeding and flipping tables, I know they are trying to trap him, to get him to say something incriminating so that they can get rid of him. 

But I also suspect that deep down they are envious of him—envious of the way he emerges into each day, blazing with fire, glistening with living water, making people tremble with adrenaline and joy at the thought of a God who loves them like a parent. I suspect the priests and elders long for the freedom and the boldness Jesus carries within himself, even as they sneer at it.

Because I know that the priests and the elders surely felt free and bold once, too—maybe when they were younger, and the world felt bigger and kinder. Back before they had been hardened by time and grief and political maneuvering and the many small compromises each of us makes to endure another year. 

Jesus criticizes them for rejecting the baptism of John, but I suspect there was a time, long ago, when they would have stripped off all their heavy garments and leapt into the River Jordan, wailing and laughing like a child. But somewhere along the way, as can happen to people, they’d lost that sense of daring intimacy with God.

They’d forgotten what it feels like to jump, to fall into another’s waiting arms. They had only dim, ghostly memories of what it is to be held, to rest and to trust. 

And rather than remember, rather than daring, in this moment, to begin again, they dig in to what is familiar. They will not make the leap into the new life that Jesus offers.

But friends, Christian life is, indeed, a leap. It is an exuberant cliff jump into the sea. If, like me, you are accustomed to safety and sunscreen and sensible goals, that may be startling news. 

But I am reminded, time and again, that there is nothing sensible about following Jesus. The values he espouses and the transformation he asks of us—loving all people indiscriminately; practicing radical humility and hospitality; surrendering our will to the will of God; refusing to look away from the death-dealing forces of this world; and resolving, despite those forces, to stay gentle and trusting and simple—these are not get-ahead strategies. 

This is not a carefully constructed self-improvement plan. It is not a social development platform. Those sorts of things are fine, but following Jesus is not that. Following Jesus is a great leap into the mysteries of life and love and loss. 

And I suspect you are worshipping in a church like ours because, deep down, you know this. I hear it in the deep questions asked at Bible study, and in the deep wrestling with God you express in one-to-one conversations. I observe it in your desire to stand up against that which harms our neighbors in this day and age. I sense it in your curiosity about something more than the faith you inherited. 

In all of this, I see you at the cliff’s edge, staring down into the deep blue sea, and I hear in you the longing to leap and to fly. And so I would remind you, as your priest and pastor, that if you do, every time you do embrace and embody the wild, tender fearlessness of Jesus, you will be caught by the waiting arms of the kingdom of God. So do it. 

Your task is simply to decide what that leap looks like in your own life. It varies for each of us. It’s not always an obviously daring act like cliff jumping. For some, it will be diving into prayer on a retreat. For some it will be working on a broken relationship, or finding the courage to leave one that is harmful. For others, it will be marching in the streets, and for others it will be the vulnerability of sitting in silence to listen to God. 

For you, the leap is likely that thing God has put in your heart that scares you just a little bit. Listen to that. And if you need help figuring out what that thing might be, I’ve got good news for you—this parish and the people in it provide endless opportunities to help you to figure it out. 

But eventually you have to leap. In your heart of hearts, you have to do what the priests and the elders could not do that day, and reclaim something of the freshness that the world has taken from your soul. You have to stop lying there in the shade wondering what happened to your life. You have to follow Jesus and remember what it feels like to tremble with adrenaline and joy. God, help us to remember what that feels like. 

Because what Jesus wanted for the priests and the elders and the tax collectors and the prostitutes and for you and for me and for everyone on the face of this good earth is not a careful faith, a careful life, but a life that is full of faithfulness and caring. Ridiculously, daringly, jump-off-the-cliff full of it. 

In God’s good kingdom, Jesus wants all of us to come out from hiding, to jump into the water, to go down deep, and to come up into the light, wailing and laughing like a child. He will not cease from seeking us until we get there, together, all of us. 

And maybe you’re wondering—did I, in Curaçao, have a flash of inspiration and get up and jump off the cliff and reclaim my lost courage? No. No I did not. 

But that’s ok, because nonetheless I’m wondering: what is it now that will make me tremble with adrenaline and joy? What is it now that will wash away the accumulation of the years? What is it now that will let Jesus back into my heart of hearts? 

What is it for you?

Whatever it is, beloved friends, whatever it is for each of us, the deep waters of God shimmer and wait. 

Let’s join hands, and look down, and close our eyes, and leap. 

On Forgiveness: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, September 13 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, Ohio. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 18:21-35.

I’ve been thinking, lately, about forgiveness. I’ve been wondering what makes it so difficult—more difficult, even, than other tough things we have to cultivate in this life like courage, or patience, or sacrifice. Forgiveness, I think, is hardest of all.

Because when I consider the heaviest burdens in my heart—the ones I have carried for a long time, that weigh me down and trouble those lean, restless hours before falling asleep—they almost all have to do with something I struggle to forgive, even if its only myself that needs the forgiving. I wonder if you have ever wrestled in the darkness with those feelings, too: replaying old conversations, voices of indignation and regret whispering to you from the shadowy corners of the room.

In such moments I’m tempted to say to God, why must I forgive? It’s an honest question, even if it’s not nice to ask it. But why must we lay down our anger against the harms done, the neglect shown, the manifold cruelties which leave their scars upon us and our neighbors and our earth? Where is the justice in that?

Oddly enough, we don’t spend much time talking about this. We are just told to forgive—by our parents, by our teachers, by Jesus in today’s Gospel reading—but nobody really says much about why or how. Even Jesus resorts to a parable to make his point, and it’s a rather unsettling, strangely unforgiving parable at that. A slave is tortured for his lack of forgiveness by a king who previously forgave him but now rescinds his forgiveness until the first guy repays the thing that is now no longer forgiven. 

Ok, Jesus. Help me out here! This is why I am tossing and turning at night. Are we supposed to forgive from a place of fear and self-preservation? That can’t be it. 

We’ll come back to that parable in a minute, but I’m beginning to suspect that part of the reason forgiveness is so hard, so perplexing, is that we have the wrong idea about what it actually is and where it comes from. 

I think when we hear the word “forgiveness” we often imagine it as a transaction—as one person saying “I’m sorry” and another person saying “I accept your apology” and that’s that. Sort of like Joseph, today, forgiving his brothers after they’d sold him into slavery in Egypt. 

Those moments are beautiful and satisfying when they happen, but of course so often in life they don’t happen, or can’t happen, and we remain unconsoled. And yet I don’t believe we are meant to wrestle in the darkness with indignation and regret for all our days. 

So I have to think that the forgiveness Jesus speaks of is something more than just accepting apologies when we happen to get them. This is the man, after all, who will soon say from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” And nobody said “sorry” on Good Friday.

So I am starting to think that forgiveness is something deeper, and bigger, and more fundamental. Something we can participate in no matter what, even if we can never speak or hear an apology. I am beginning to think that forgiveness is a posture, an attribute of the liberated soul, a way of being and seeing formed by grace.

And a couple of people have been on my mind lately who have helped me think about forgiveness in this way.

The first is Dolly Parton. When Dolly died a couple of weeks ago, a flood of thoughts and songs went through my mind. I’ve always been amazed by the way she brought together people from all sorts of different backgrounds, perhaps more so than any other public figure in our time. How did she do this? I think part of the reason, odd as it might sound, was that she had a deep well of forgiveness within her. 

Dolly grew up very poor and worked very hard and overcame a lot, but you get the sense, especially in her songwriting, that she didn’t begrudge those things. She wasn’t hard or bitter , because she could always see a bigger picture. 

For example, in the song “Coat of Many Colors,” she writes of being teased by other children for the patchwork coat made by her mother, not unlike Joseph’s in the Bible, but she is unashamed. She is proud of that coat because she sees in it the love that stitches all things together and the richness that comes from compassion, not from wealth. And with that beautiful vision in mind, she can sing a blessing. She can forgive them, for they know not what they do. 

If you listen to her music and look at her life, you will notice that forgiving perspective throughout—the laying down of anger, the taking up of joy, the freedom that comes from knowing, deep in your bones, that you are held fast by love no matter what, and so is everyone else.

My second helpful person, the author & environmental advocate Wendell Berry, also possessed a deep knowledge of being held by love.

When Wendell died, just a week after Dolly, I immediately fell back into reading his poems, which I cannot recommend highly enough. Mtr. Alane shared one at the end of her sermon last week. In another poem, written for his mother, he speaks specifically about forgiveness, saying about her (and weaving in God as well),

So complete has your forgiveness been 

I wonder sometimes if it did not

precede my wrong, and I erred,

safe found, within your love,

prepared ahead of me,

the way home,

or my bed at night

No lean, restless hours tossing and turning before sleep. Just forgiveness as rest. Just the kind of love that you can climb into under cool sheets. In all his works, Wendell, like Dolly, gives glimpses of this earthy, divine grace that stitches everything together. 

And because he has seen and known this goodness, he remains hopeful about the earth and its people and its many creatures, and he himself can live from a posture of forgiveness, even while there is so much to grieve. 

What Dolly and Wendell and, ultimately, Jesus have helped me to see is that real forgiveness, the kind that God offers, is not a favor dispensed to the appropriately remorseful. It is a way of seeing everything and everyone with gentleness and generosity. It is a hand of blessing laid upon the broken edges of life. In brief, forgiveness is God’s posture toward everything. 

Forgiveness is the benediction of our incompleteness. 

It is the unceasing praise of half-worthy things. 

And maybe that’s why I have struggled for so long with forgiveness—because I thought you had to be fully worthy in order to receive it. But the good news of Jesus is that none of us are there yet, and yet forgiveness is still ours. Because it is a gift. 

And through that lens, today’s parable makes a little more sense to me. The real mistake of the unforgiving slave is not so much that he failed to forgive a transactional debt—it is that he failed to understand the gift of mercy and peace he’d been given, and he failed to see that it was a gift meant to be shared. He was still thinking of life in terms of ledgers and receipts when, in truth, everything fundamentally important, like forgiveness, is utterly free. 

And Jesus’ warning here is that until we can internalize this—until we can engage in our own unceasing praise of half-worthy things—our souls will be impoverished and we will remain enslaved, tortured in a hell of our own making, with indignation and regret always whispering and tempting us from the shadows. We will have missed the point of everything. 

And of that sort of life, Jesus says, we should indeed be very much afraid. 

So, as a form of resistance to that life, I would invite you to try to answer these questions for yourself:

Who or what do you think you can never forgive? Is it person, a circumstance, a memory? Is it yourself?

Whatever it is, how long have you carried that burden in your heart?

How do you think God sees that person or that situation? Can you find a way to take a step back and see it all through that bigger, deeper perspective in which all things are stitched together? 

And even if there are wrongs that ought to be made right, will you, this very day, still choose to lay your hand in blessing upon the broken edges? Will you dare to praise the half-worthy things of this world?

Because the strange, holy teaching of Jesus is that, until we can do this, we will never be complete. 

And perhaps what I have learned most of all in this wrestling with forgiveness is that I long to be complete. I long to see you and others feel complete. 

And maybe forgiveness, if it is anything, is believing that someday we can be completed. That the patchwork will all add up to something perfect, and that the stitches will hold, and that God will take us beyond the lean, restless hours to that place where we are, as Wendell says, “safe found, within your love.”

If that is forgiveness, God help us to get there.