bible – Page 3 – By Another Road

By Another Road: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, January 5 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 2:1-12, the journey of the Magi to see the baby Jesus.

Some of you know that I post the text of my sermons each week on a little blog site I created several years ago. I’ve always loved writing, and it started out as a helpful way for me to share some of my early sermons and reflections with a few family members and friends. It has transitioned into, I hope, a convenient way for anyone to go back, if they want to, to see what exactly I was attempting to say on any given Sunday—whether because you found it interesting, or perhaps because it made no sense at all. I make no promises!

It is the humbling labor of a preacher each week to launch out our words as an offering to the community we serve and out into the universe as an offering to God. We hope, at best, to leave behind a small impression—which can feel like trying to skip a stone on the surface of the sea.

But I digress. The blog where I post my sermons and skip my stones is titled By Another Road, and folks have asked me on occasion why it’s called that. Well, in this morning’s Gospel reading, you have your answer. I took it from Matthew’s account of the Magi (or Wise Men) who, after visiting the baby Jesus and having been warned of King Herod’s nefarious intentions, decide to travel home “by another road.”

On its face, this little phrase is just part of the plot—the Magi literally have to go home a different way in order to avoid an awkward or dangerous conversation with Herod. They’ve accomplished what they came to do, paying homage to this newborn king, and now they slip down a back road to their own homelands.

But for me, at least, this phrase, by another road, always meant something more. Maybe it’s because, for various reasons, I have known what it feels like to be “other” myself. When a person feels different somehow from those around them, you come to know what it means and what it costs to walk a road through life that some people cannot—or choose not—to understand.

This can be many things. For some, this “other road” is tied to an identity we carry with us; for others perhaps it is shaped by our personal or family history, or our physical limitations, or the unexpected responsibilities and challenges that life has visited upon us. The more I live and serve as a priest and hear people’s stories, the better I understand that we are all traveling “by another road” of one sort or another.

And what I became convinced of at a particular point in my walk with God, and which I fervently believe is the basis of our faith, is that the story of following Jesus is less about conforming ourselves to one straight and narrow, conventionally acceptable path, and instead is about opening our hearts and our eyes and our minds to recognize how God is present on every road we must travel. And that God is present, too, on the roads we do not recognize—the ones walked by people very different from us.

The point of being Christian is found not so much in which road we take, but how we travel. Are we going gently and justly? Are we helping others along the way? Are we stopping to notice the beauty of the world around us and giving thanks for it? Are we treating those whom we meet as adversaries, or as fellow pilgrims?

To travel by another road, ultimately, means seeing the world as the Wise Men did after their encounter with the Christ child—once they decided to opt out of whatever political intrigue they’d been drawn into. It is to see the world no longer as place of transactional relationships and personal ambitions, but as a network of winding paths—all our pasts and futures and sorrows and dreams, all converging, ultimately, beneath the star of Bethlehem, in the flesh of God, and in the humble gifts we offer to one another…all of us skipping our stones on the surface of the sea.

And to be a follower of Jesus is to commit to walking whatever road we’re on as if all of this is true and worthwhile. Because in every worship service and in every act of service to our neighbor we affirm that it is—that God was born into this world to bless every pathway we have stumbled upon, and even to journey by another road of his own, to the Cross and beyond.

Now, I’ll admit that the idea that there isn’t just one road, one perfect way to “do” this Christian life, and that—heaven help us—there might even be holy pathways for people who look or love or live differently than us— might be a bit disorienting, even offensive to some. So be it.

But I’ll tell you—it’s this realization–that God was with me on my own road, that Jesus wanted to walk with me just as I am–that saved me, and continues to save me every day of my life. And I suspect, because you have found a sense of home at St. Anne, that might be true for you, too.

Because the other thing I love about the story of the Magi is that they, themselves, discovered in their encounter with Jesus that it was ok to be different. They were not Israelites. They weren’t part of the in-crowd in this story. And yet God, as a child, welcomed them as any child would—full of love and trust and wonder. These Magi were enough, just as they are; they were loved and blessed not because of the particular road they have traveled, but simply because they have come. And so it is for you.

I hope we learn something from all of this. And so, if I could ask you to do two things, my dear friends, at the outset of this new calendar year, it would be this:

First—take some time to look at the road you’re on, whether in this past year or maybe for your whole life. Maybe it’s not perfect. Maybe it’s been hard. But I want you to kneel down and bless that road, and bless the body and soul that has carried you on it.

I want you to trace a cross in the dust of this road you’ve been walking, trace a cross over the story you’ve been carrying in your heart, over the questions you’ve been asking, over the fears you’ve been fearing, and I want you to say to yourself, God is on this road with me. Jesus is on this road with me. And so I will travel it with my head held high, with a sense of love and purpose and care, because like any other road, it is made sacred by the journey.

And second—take some time to learn about the road someone else is walking. Maybe someone close to you whose life just doesn’t make a lot of sense to you. Or maybe someone you’ve lost touch with. Or maybe a community of people whose life experiences differ greatly from yours.

In whatever way you can, whether through conversation or study, try to understand the road that they are walking. Maybe you can ask them those questions I suggested last November: What do you love? What do you fear? What do you hope for? And another important question one of you added to that list: What can I do to help?

Because the Epiphany that we speak of this time of year—the Epiphany of God’s revelation in our midst—is not just about the news of Jesus born in Bethlehem all those years ago, visited by wise men and feared by kings.

No, the Epiphany is also that God is still here with every one of us, no matter which road we’re on—the winding roads and the dangerous ones; the placid pathways and the ones cut short; the long hauls and the dead ends.

And we are now the ones who must be Wise Men and Wise Women and Wise People, putting one foot in front of the other, following that star, bearing our own particular gifts, so that kings and tyrants might yet tremble in the face of love and peace and mercy, both in the form of a child and in the ones who seek him—the ones, like us, who dare to travel by another road.

A road which, no matter where it goes, always leads us home.

Uncountable: A Christmas Sermon

I preached this sermon on Christmas Eve, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. A version of this sermon was also featured as the 2024 Christmas offering in The Episcopal Church’s Sermons that Work project.

They came to be counted.

This is where our story begins tonight: Joseph and Mary, just two of many in the teeming, trembling, transcendent history of their people, just two, traveling the well-worn roads of their ancestors and coming, at last, to Bethlehem, the city of that singular king, David.

They came, these two, to be registered in a census decreed by distant ruler on a foreign throne—one who knew few of their number and cared even less; a ruler who had likely never stood where they stood or stopped to consider the centuries of sacrifice and prayer and supplication that cried out from the stones of this particular wilderness.

But nonetheless they obeyed, Joseph and Mary, and they came to be counted. Counted among the multitude of faces, both familiar and strange, in a place that barely felt like home. Counted as two, though a third was on the way. Counted as fixed commodities of an empire that did not suspect and could not comprehend the infinite possibility carried in this flesh of theirs—a child, yes, but even before that new miracle, an older one: a long history of survival, an ancient promise of human dignity yet to be delivered in its fullness. A fullness that will not and cannot be commodified or controlled. A fullness that is a story, not a sum.

And although that story has shaped us and brought us here today, it is safe to say that most of us are still caught up in the process of counting. We are a people encircled by an empire of metrics and measures, whether for economies or households or faith communities or even our own bodies. This is understandable to a certain extent. We pursue the stability and the clarity that numbers offer. We want an objective proclamation of what is real, even if we can’t decide what to do about it.

But it is also true, especially evident in recent times, that numbers alone cannot save or solve our most urgent and fundamental questions. We can count, and count, and count some more, and order census after census and survey after survey to track our shared challenges, but in the face of deep spiritual hunger and anger and grief and change, the power of these numbers is limited. They can be idolized or distorted or ignored. At their worst, they become weapons rather than tools, used to shape arguments rather than reveal truth. Like the empires that wield them, numbers can be useful in the project of uniformity, they are insufficient for the pursuit of salvation.

No, as we travel the well-worn roads of our own ancestors, bearing our own miracles of survival, something else must be revealed to us, something else must arrive. Something—or someone—else must come, not just to be counted, but to make our lives count.

And today, that something does arrive. He arrives. The surprise addition to the census; the child whom no one was counting on.

If we wish to begin to understand the significance of Jesus’ birth and how this Christmas gospel begins to counter our empires of counting, we should pay close attention to how his arrival is heralded. Not by an agent of the orderly government, but by an angel of light, by one who emanates from the expanse of a heavenly host more numerous than the stars. “A multitude,” Luke’s narrative tells us, and the Greek word is plethos, which connotes a number so large it is impossible to quantify.

And then we are told that this divine plethora delivers its message, not to the statisticians or the bureaucrats of Caesar, but to the shepherds in the fields. And they are figures who are themselves barely considered countable, roaming elusively among fields and pastures at the edge of respectability or safety. These nameless, numberless shepherds are given a message that would likely have been ignored by larger, more august bodies: that the long sought answer, the long awaited promise kept, is to be found in the most unlikely of places—in a manger, in a child, in the smallest fraction of possibility, nearly obscured by the margin of our errors.

The angels no one can count and the shepherds nobody bothers to count—these are God’s chosen messengers. These are the means of revelation. No census could ever account for it.

And yet this baby, this Jesus—he is perhaps the greatest surprise of all. For he is not just one of many, he is the One with a capital O—the One who made many. He is the One who, as the Psalmist says, determines the number of the stars and gives to all of them their names. He is the Uncountable One who has, for the sake of love, come himself to be counted, to submit himself to the census of our despair, to the sum of our fears, to stare all our empires in the eye and forgive them, knowing that they know not what they do.

And on this night of his birth the ways in which this baby in the manger will do all of this have not yet revealed to us, but the story is set into motion, and the countdown to our transformation has begun anew in his newborn flesh.

This transformation is still at work in us, never more visible than in this season. Because the joy of Christmas is and always has been this: that despite all our attempts to categorize and commodify ourselves and the world around us, God always manages to introduce an element of the immeasurable into our midst.

Just like the child whom we celebrate, Christmas itself refuses to yield itself entirely to our lists and our ledgers. Just when we become overburdened by the weight of expectations or regrets or the other ways we fear we don’t quite measure up—the number on the scale or the number in our bank account or the number of empty seats at the table this year—suddenly there is a song in the night, and a burning star, and the old story retold, and although we, too, may feel like just one of many in the teeming, trembling, transcendent history of the world, we remember that there is a fullness meant for us, too, and it is still seeking us, even now. It has a name and a face that we can call upon even when nothing else makes sense.

It is Jesus, and he, too, has come to be counted. Counted as one of us. And even more importantly, he has come to be counted upon by you and by me and by all who seek a life that is more than the sum of its parts.

And like the shepherds who first received this good news, Christmas is also an invitation for us to stand up, to go forth, and to be counted upon as well. To be counted upon as those who keep telling the story, who keep seeking the signs of a new Kingdom being born, and who will keep working to make this new Kingdom something more than a fleeting dream in the night.

Because the paradox of the Uncountable One becoming one of the counted actually suggests the opposite for us: that even in the finite number of moments that make up our individual lives, there is an element of numberless eternity that abides and yearns to be born through our prayers and our actions.

We are called not only to behold a birth but to give birth ourselves, through the labor of our hearts, to the tangible realities of glory and peace and justice and hope for the entirety of the plethos, the multitudes, who live on the face of the earth and who are still searching the heavens for something more than that which can be quantified.

Christmas is the enduring moment when that search was—and continues to be—answered. And the answer, for all creation, is the same as it was for Mary and Joseph:

You, who have traveled so very far, who have perhaps arrived in a place that barely feels like home, and who fear that you will be counted among the lost and the forgotten and the used up of this world—on this day, eternity has been born unto you; infinite love has condensed itself down to be as one for you, to be one with you, and to show you the way into a life that cannot be commodified or conquered. All we must do is seek him, and hold him, and stand with him.

And when we do, the story will reach its fullness all over again in our lives, just as it did on that night in Bethlehem: the ancient promise fulfilled, and the innumerable host of heaven singing its song, and something measureless welling up within us to be revealed.

And what is that something?

It is love. It is the love we were born to bear into the world. The One True Love that holds all things together.

And tonight, and forever, it is yours.

Widow: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, November 10, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Mark 12:38-44, Jesus observing a widow giving her last coins to the temple.

I don’t have any stories of my own to tell this morning. I must begin by speaking plainly and naming something we all know: it’s been a complex week. And for many people (many of you, I know) a very difficult week. A lot of people are feeling a lot of intense things. That said, I know that we are not all feeling the same things, and that’s ok. That’s a normal part of human life in community. It’s complicated…and it’s ok.

But before I reflect on the story found in our Scriptures, I want to invite us to abide, together as a parish, for a moment, in that distinctive space where we have always been called to dwell as the Church–the place where humility and hope coexist. A place where each of us acknowledges the limits of our own understanding; where we affirm our desire to love one another as best we can; and where we commit to a generosity of spirit towards those who are experiencing this time differently from us. I want to encourage you to care for and look out for each other now and in the days to come. As I said at our prayer service on Wednesday evening, in times of anxiety and division, we must not lose sight of each other, or of ourselves, or of God.

The challenge, with God, is that sometimes we aren’t sure where to look for him, or even exactly what we are looking for. In stressful times, especially, his exact location and nature can feel elusive. We might look to the sky and say, where are you, God, where have you gone? Why don’t you come down here and do what we want you to do? Why have you left us to our own devices?

But perhaps part of the problem is that we are looking in the wrong places for signs of God’s presence and action. We think he’s in one place but really he’s in another place entirely. Those who were expecting Jesus to be a purely political messiah when he turned out to be a cosmic one is an example of this.

So it can be good, sometimes, to practice reframing the stories we tell.

I find it helpful, sometimes, in a retreat setting or a Bible study, to look at a particular passage in Scripture and to wonder where people might fit into the narrative. Where am I in this story, and where is my neighbor, and where is God? Sometimes it’s surprising what this exercise can reveal to us.

Take, for example, this morning’s Gospel, where Jesus is observing and commenting on the wealthy scribes and the poor widow and their respective gifts to the temple treasury. He wants his disciples to see something important, and he wants us to see something too—the question is, what exactly are we supposed to be looking at? Who are we meant to be in this story, and where is God at work in this story?

A cursory reading, and an interpretation I’ve heard many times, might suggest that we, the followers of Jesus, are meant to be like the widow. We are meant to give all we have to God, in whatever way we must. Dig deep and hand it over– your coins, your heart, your body and soul. You have nothing left to offer? That’s ok, give your very life itself.

And if the powers that be want to exploit you? Well, we all have our cross to bear. You’ll get rewarded in heaven.

That’s one version of the story.

And I don’t know, maybe its just because I am a little run down this week, but that story just sounds like a bunch of junk. That is not Good News. It does not sound like love or hope or fullness of life to be bled dry by an insatiable God who is counting up our coins on his throne, untroubled by our scarcity, unmoved by our poverty of spirit. That image has nothing to do with the Jesus we know in Scripture: the one who promises rest for the weary and freedom for the oppressed.

And that’s the problem with this interpretation—this assumption that we are to be the widow in this story. It mislocates God. It suggests that God is somehow bound up in those corrupted temple authorities. That God is an ally of those scribes who devour widow’s houses and drape themselves in the profits. It suggests that God is found in the gleam of gold and marble and the imperviousness of unjust systems. It suggests that holiness just means paying the current price of admission to privileged spaces, scrounging for whatever we have to hand over and prove our worth.

But the problem, which some of us know all too well, is that we can pay and pay and pay and yet those earthly authorities will still tell us we are not *quite* deserving of entering their holy of holies.

St. Anne, that is not a story I am interested in retelling. Too many of us have spent too much of our lives wondering whether we are worthy of love, figuring out how to give just a little more of ourselves to get into the club. The Jesus I know says we’re done playing that game. We’re done groveling for grace. It is free.

So what do we do instead, my friends? Where is God today, here, in this story and in this world where wealth and power still seem to dazzle and deceive at every turn? How do we find hope and strength when it’s hard to know where to look?

The answer to that question is the same today as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow: God is found in the small and simple places, usually the ones where we didn’t think to look. God tends to show up in the ways that nobody expects from the Creator of the universe.

So if you are wondering where God is in this particular story that Jesus is showing us today…I would tell you that God is the widow.

God is the widow.

Because God has come into our midst with all he has—his love, his heart, his hope, and he has said to us: here, take it. Have it all. I am not holding anything back from you. I have never held anything back from you. My very life is yours, now. My Spirit is yours, always. It is all I can give you. It is the one thing I must give you, because it is the one thing that can’t be taken away.

Like that widow, God, in the flesh of Christ, is all in with us. He has cast his lot in with ours and he is standing here at the threshold of the temple of our hearts, waiting, hoping, wondering when we will look down and look within and see who he really is and find him where he actually tends to show up.

Which is in the faces of our neighbors. In the acts of kindness and care and generosity we can offer each other. And in the voices and the stories of those who are different from us, who are overlooked, or easily dismissed by the prevailing order.

Those are the places where we need to be looking for God right now. Because I think many people are living through a moment where certain narratives or expectations no longer seem to fit or make sense. And in such moments, one of the most important things we can do is to stay open to the new things that God might be trying to show us rather than retreating or hardening our hearts or turning our faces away from one another because the story didn’t go the way we thought it would.

If you are struggling to make sense of the world right now, that’s ok. It may take some time. And some things in this life never make much sense. But this much I know: God is still present in all of it, and we still have a part to play, too. We just have to decide what that part will be.

For us at St. Anne, I believe that part will look something like this:

We will be a community that continues to foster inclusivity and welcome for all people, no matter who they are, what they look like, who they love, how they vote, how much money they have, what language they speak, or where they were born.

We will be a community that speaks the truth in love–to one another and to those in power, whether in the church or in the public square.

We will be a community that takes seriously Jesus’ call to serve the least of these, because it is in such figures—the widows and the orphans and the neglected and the forgotten—where God will reveal himself to us most consistently.

We will be a community that is undaunted by the changes and chances of this world because we have each other, and we proclaim the victory of a love which favors no nationality or race or tongue or party.

We will be, in this Gospel story today, we ourselves will be the temple of God’s Spirit, doors ever open to receive him. He who comes not as a conquering king, but as a widow with two coins. And when she comes, this God of infinite generosity and care, we will say, oh, of course—there you are. We see you now. This is who you are. Come in. Come in. Come into your dwelling place, Holy One. Help us receive all that you want to give us.

And when we do…on that day the story we tell will be very good news.

Get Up: A Sermon

So, a confession—and one that for some reason always feels a little bit awkward for a priest to make: I am NOT a morning person. Not even in the slightest. I admire and honor the morning people out there among you; I think it’s probably a beautiful thing to have those extra, slightly quieter hours at the outset of the day. I understand this intellectually. But my body does not agree.

I get up when I must, but I’m not happy about it, and it’s a slow process of reanimation. Eventually, at some point after my morning coffee, I am ready to rejoin the land of the living.

People sometimes seem surprised by this; maybe they have an idea that priests are up every day with the rising sun chanting the Psalms. And maybe some of my fellow priests do indeed do that, but not me. I am a night owl, and it’s usually late at night that I am especially inclined to talk to God and reflect and pray. The prayer office of Compline, the one said just before bed, is my absolute favorite.

I make this confession to you because, on one hand, it’s always good to remember that we are all simply human beings trying to make it through the day in whatever way we can, whatever clock our bodies are on.

But also because I realized, pondering the readings for this All Saints Day, that I have a kindred spirit—a new patron saint for those like me who are not always ready to greet the dawn. It is poor Lazarus, who was, by John’s account in the Gospel, not prepared to get up when and how he did.

Think about it. You have died and, presumably, are resting peacefully in the arms of God. And then all of the sudden someone rolls back that stone and lets all the light in and starts calling, “Lazarus, come out!”

My mom used to do this when I was a kid—she’d come into the bedroom and pull open the blinds and say, Phillip, get up, we’ve got things to do!! And I would grumble and groan.

And yes, I know the raising of Lazarus is a miracle of the highest order, a sign that Jesus is indeed the Son of God, but still, the not-morning people like me might empathize a little with Lazarus stumbling out into the daylight, a bit confused and rough-looking, not quite ready to face whatever this is. This new day. This new, changed life. Maybe he just wanted five more minutes of rest, first, before embarking on existence as a saint raised from the dead.

Lazarus, in his sleepy disarray, with the smell of the burial shroud and the bandages all askew, is a comfort to me, because he reminds me that sainthood, ultimately, is not about having it all together. It’s not like those senior superlatives that show up in the high school yearbook—most likely to succeed, best dressed, best personality. Lazarus, coming out of the tomb, would not have won any prizes.

No, sainthood ultimately is about Jesus, about what Jesus does in our very ordinary, imperfect, complicated, exhausting lives, even when we hit the snooze button a few too many times or burn our tongues on the coffee or run a few minutes behind our best intentions.

Lazarus doesn’t get mentioned much more in the Gospels—as far as we know, he didn’t lead a revolution or work any miracles of his own. He just…got up when Jesus called him and returned to his family and did his best to get on with life. And that was sainthood. That’s a low bar that I feel like I can get over, even on my worst days.

All Saints’ Day is one of the glorious feasts in our church year, but we should not be overly confused about or intimidated by saints, or feel like they are these remote, pious figures with their hands perpetually clasped in prayer.

They were and are human beings, with all their idiosyncrasies, living through eras just as complicated and challenging as our own, if not more so. Really, what distinguishes them is simply that God called out to each of them and said, “it’s time to get up. We’ve got things to do. Come on out, wounds and bandages and all, and let’s face the world together.”

And the plot twist is that God is doing the exact same thing to you and to me every day of our lives. Maybe you don’t have actual trouble getting out of bed, like me, but we are all, at times, a little hesitant to open our eyes, to step out into the bright light and the crowd and the fray, with all of the world’s questions and uncertainties and dangers and demands. We might think it would be easier to turn over and go back to sleep, to let someone else handle it, whatever it is. To trust that God will call on someone else.

And maybe God will, or maybe God won’t. But the question is—what will we never see, what life will we miss out on, what new glory might never be revealed in us, if we just stay curled up in the dark?

You don’t have to be full of undaunted courage and untroubled certainty. Lazarus was literally still half-dead, couldn’t even speak. But he pulled himself up on those aching bones and even though he didn’t say a word, his heart said yes, Lord, ok, Lord, I am a mess, and I haven’t had my coffee yet, but yes, I’ll come out. I’ll take part in whatever this new thing is that you are doing.

And with just that, he was a saint.

My friends, the world needs more saints like Lazarus. We need more imperfect people willing to stand up and step out, just as they are, to bear witness to the all-powerful love that is God’s message for all people. We need more people willing to stand up and say, death and division and enmity and cynicism and hatred and exclusion are NOT the last word of the story, and we will not roll over and we will not pull the covers up over our heads while the world weeps. No. Jesus says come out, we’ve got things to do, and so we’re gonna come out, at every hour of the day, to be the messengers and agents of his undying love.

And because we are Episcopalians, yes, we will say our prayers and drink our morning coffee to help us along the way. And woe to anyone who stands in the way of a bunch of Episcopalians hyped up on caffeine and God’s love—death and tyranny themselves are going to run in the other direction!

I know that there is a lot that weighs heavily right now. I know we’re all stressed out, and maybe like Mary and Martha we’re wondering why Jesus isn’t showing up when and how we want him to. Maybe we are afraid of what a new morning will bring.

But listen. Listen closely. Jesus is calling out. He is saying, open your eyes. He is saying, I am here, and I am asking you—yes, you—now, to get up, to come out, to brush off the dust and wipe away the tears and the sleep from your eyes and LIVE. For your own sake, for the sake of the ones who came before us, and for the ones who will follow long after we are gone, LIVE fully, and generously and openly, and lovingly. Live in pursuit of justice. Live in the practice of peace. Live as if God is real and death is a lie, because it is so. Live as though the opportunity to love is the best reason for getting out of bed in the morning, because it is so. And then you will be counted among the saints.

Because that’s all sainthood is, in the end. An accumulation of choices to get up every day and love something or someone fiercely.

And it is God saying, when all is said and done, at that dawn of a new and eternal day—yes, my child, yes, you understood. Love is all there was to it.

Get up. Open your eyes. Good morning.

Trick or Treat: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, October 27, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Job 42:1-6, 10-17 and Mark 10:46-52.

Every year about this time, I come up against two things that are both true and yet are hard to reconcile with one another. The first is that Halloween was my absolute favorite holiday growing up and is still something I find great joy in. And the second is that 12 years ago, my father died on Halloween.

For a long time I didn’t really know what to do with that.

Even many years on, now, when this season comes around, that intersection of nostalgic pleasure on one hand and lingering sadness on the other strikes me as a very strange thing. But it also strikes me as a very true thing about life. It is the time of year when I’m reminded that the very good and the inexpressibly hard always brush up against one another–fairy princesses and ghosts both knocking at the door.

Halloween is when I realize that grief and joy are not a binary choice I can pick between, but two companions who have different things to teach me. We navigate the autumn, the three of us–grief and joy and I–and so I have found a new way of being in this season.

Because as much as I used to love it, I am well past the age of going trick or treat; instead I’ve come to that point when one learns that both treats and tricks arrive in our tentatively outstretched hands as the years go by. The key is to keep our hands and our hearts open anyhow; to trust that, with God’s help and with each other, we can sift through whatever is given.

That’s easier said than done, though.

We live at time in which the general tendency is to see grief and joy as enemies of one another, as a sort of zero sum struggle, and this false binary has all sorts of dangerous implications.

For example, we get caught up in partisan divisions which suggest our grief and grievance must be satisfied by destroying the joy of those who are different from us.

At times our public discourse cannot bear subtlety or compromise, as one group seeks to maximize its pleasure and discount its perceived enemy’s pain.

Or we find ourselves caught up a brittle, toxically positive culture that frames joy as the absence of sadness or weakness, suggesting that something is wrong with anyone who dares to weep or crack or mess up or show fear.

And when this happens, we become a shallower, meaner, more haunted society.

We have been here before, though. Just read the story of Israel. Read the Psalms, including the hard parts our Sunday lectionary leaves out. Read the Gospels. The wisdom of our spiritual forebears, the wisdom of Scripture, has always understood that fullness of life–this thing that Jesus speaks about and wants to invite us into–is a space which gives voice to every human condition, and that the only way to approach God is to move toward that strange crossroads where joy and grief coexist.

Consider, for example, the culmination of the Book of Job, which we heard today. At first glance, it might sound almost like a fairy tale, a sweet treat for frightened children—a tidy, happy resolution where this poor man gets back even more than what was taken from him.

Except when we stop to consider the fact that his questions to God never did get answered, and that his new wealth and his new children will never erase the pain of what he has been through, not really.

Anyone who has suffered loss will recognize this: that Job must learn to live out his days somehow with both grief and with joy, and it is only in the holy tension of these two that a new sort of blessedness is visited upon him, one that is deeper and wiser and more alive than that of earlier, simpler days.

We come to realize that Job’s story is the journey of the soul’s movement toward God through the ambiguities and complexities of life.

And something similar is revealed in the story of Bartimeus, the blind beggar, healed by Jesus just before his own final entry into Jerusalem. Unlike the rich young man and the ambitious disciples we’ve heard about in recent weeks, Bartimeus has no illusions about life. His experience at the margins of society and his close intimacy with sorrow have shown him what seeing eyes could not see—that the true disciple of Christ is no prosperity gospel status seeker but the one who is unafraid of darkness.

Like Bartimeus, the true disciple, though they cannot see God, calls out anyway, saying walk with me, God of grief and of joy, let me follow you wherever you might go, let me see everything, for the first time, as it really is, not just what I am accustomed to seeing.

Show me who you are, God, and reveal who I am, too, and though we are long past a transactional trick or treat sort of faith, let us see what good might yet be done as we go wandering together in this night strewn with tears and candy wrappers.

Because let’s be honest with ourselves—that is the world we live in. That is life, in all its bittersweet complexity.

I know, especially in this election season, a lot of us are struggling to manage a lot of feelings at once these days—fear, anger, anxiety, uncertainty, hope, gratitude, determination. We have many good reasons for this, personal and political and cultural. But one thing that we cannot lose sight of as we navigate the next few weeks or months or years is that no single one of these emotions is the whole story.

Beware of anyone who wants you to tap into only your anger, only your fear, or only your craving for the sweet things in life. The only way that we can be faithful, purposeful, authentic disciples of Jesus is to carry all of it with us: the sadness, the delight, the gratitude, the humility, the resilience.

Being Christian, following Jesus, means we aren’t trick or treating anymore—we don’t get to choose just one thing or the other—strength or compassion, patriotism or prophetic witness, righteousness or relationship. Resisting idolatry, whether of nation or party or religious institution or even of our own identities means standing in that crossroads of understanding with Job and Bartimeus and Jesus, guided into a deeper sense of empathy and connection with one another above all else.

If you haven’t realized this already, I hope you will understand that one point of a parish like ours is that it’s a place where we practice this together. Church is like a workshop for the heart and soul, where we try out this honest relationship with grief and joy, with each other and with God, so that we can go out and do that same thing in the rest of our lives, in this world that so badly needs it.

I am grateful that the church, that this church, can be such a place. I am grateful that Jesus in the fullness of his gospel makes space for everything that we are, and everything that we have lost, and that he does this for everyone.

It helps make the strange collision of all my Halloweens—and any other haunted seasons of our life in this world–a bit easier to bear. A bit easier to keep going, to keep hoping, to keep believing, no matter what comes next, whether trick…or treat.

On The List: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, October 13, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Mark 10:17-31.

Most of you know that my last job before I went to seminary was as a fundraiser with a regional ballet company in Nevada. It was great—I planned events and wrote grants and worked with donors from all walks of life. But as you might imagine, ballet is an art form that has a somewhat rarified sensibility, so many of the environments I found myself working in were quite wealthy—spaces that a kid from a fairly humble background had never imagined being part of. So I’d put on my clearance rack suits and smile and do the best I could. People were generally lovely and kind, so it was fine.

But there was one part of my job that always made me feel a little awkward, maybe because of my own background. You see, whenever the ballet company was putting something on at our regional performing arts center, it was my job to stand at a little desk outside of this place called the Founders Room; it was the VIP area reserved for top tier donors and their guests. The Founders Room was a luxurious lounge with elegant furniture and art and little trays of sweets and finger sandwiches set out for whoever got to come in.

I was meant to stand there to greet our top donors as they arrived, but also to make sure that other people did NOT come in. The privacy and the exclusivity of the space was the point, of course, not just the finger sandwiches.

But at nearly every performance, someone would come up to the door, or at the very least walk slowly past, peering in at the room and at the small group of wealthy people mingling inside…and a certain look would come across their face. It was some combination of curiosity and wistfulness, almost as if they knew it was not for them, but they couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to come inside. A few would ask me what it was, and I would tell them as graciously and apologetically as I could that, no, it was not open to them. You had to be on the list.

So there I was in my cheap suit, like St. Peter at the pearly gates, casting the unworthy back down into the bowels of the lobby where they’d have to stand in line and buy their own finger sandwiches.

And I have to admit, it just made me a little sad to stand guard in that way–to be the keeper of a party not everyone was invited to. I got tired of VIP lists and inner circles. Who knows, maybe that’s partly why I felt drawn to the priesthood in that season of my life.

Because the thing about church (at its best), and the thing about the Kingdom of God, is that everyone is invited to the party. With all due respect to St. Peter, at least this side of eternity there are no gates and guest lists—just one open door, one table, one host. And that’s the only way I want to live. That’s the only way I think we are truly meant to live.

But for whatever reason, we struggle with this. Generation after generation, outside the church and sadly sometimes inside it too, we still find people standing at the threshold wanting to determine who’s in and who’s out. Maybe we even find ourselves buying into such notions from time to time.

The rich young man in today’s Gospel is certainly one such person. Before we get too hung up on Jesus’ words about wealth, first we have to understand the mistake that this earnest man has made in his question about inheriting eternal life. And it is essentially his mistake is this: he has misunderstood the Kingdom of God to be something like the Founders Room.

He has learned, somewhere along the way, that God’s domain must be a private and exclusive place, reserved only for the virtuous and the successful, where there is milk and honey and trays of finger sandwiches as far as the eye can see. You just have to be good enough or holy enough or know the right people or pray the right prayer.

And we might shake our heads at the young man for his folly, but we also might want to be careful. Because while we might not be keepers of the law in the same way he was, most of us have bought in to certain standards and expectations and identities that we are convinced will help us solve the problem of ourselves. If we just try a little harder, if we just work at it a bit more, if we just buy that one thing or get that one particular ideology to win out over the others, then, then all will be well and our God and our neighbor will smile on us and we will have mattered. We will be on the list.

And so we might imagine that rich young man approaching Jesus as if he were standing at that little desk in the lobby, looking in at the room beyond and asking, “Good Teacher, what must I do to get in?”

But here’s the thing, my friends. Here’s the thing that will save the world in the end. Jesus looks at him and loves him and says, in so many words, “my beloved child, that’s not the Kingdom of Heaven.” That’s not the thing you are seeking. Heaven is not a private reserve for the privileged few names on a list. And anyone who tells you that it is has fundamentally misunderstood the nature of God.

God is in the hubbub of the crowded lobby, where people are standing in line for overpriced drinks and make new friends. God is out where little ones in ballerina dresses tug at their parent’s coats and dream big dreams and where people bump into each other say they’re sorry and where it’s all a little messy but there’s room enough for everyone. That’s where God is. That’s where heaven will emerge.

And if you have spent your whole life storing up treasure and accomplishments and status symbols to try to wheedle your way into that little room, I’m telling you right now—you don’t have to do that anymore. Get rid of all that. Let it go. Come and follow Jesus out into the crowd as we all wait together for the dance to begin.

But at least on this day, in this instance, well…I guess the young man really wanted to taste those finger sandwiches. So he goes away, shocked and disappointed, curious and wistful. We might hope and imagine that eventually he comes back.

It’s funny…throughout the gospels, Jesus is actually somewhat ambivalent about money—he dines with and calls people from all sorts of backgrounds, he is noncommittal about those coins with Caesar on them and he is unbothered by costly jars of ointment poured on his feet. And he loves a good feast.

What bothers Jesus is when people decide that money is God, when we all know that love is God. He has pity on those who have forgotten this, and he has anger for those who knowingly exploit this lie to their own advantage, or to keep others down. But mostly, Jesus is patient, and he waits for us to realize our mistake and to follow him…and to discover where the true party is at.

And you know what, St. Anne, I am grateful every day of my life that now I get to stand at that door each morning and say, unequivocally to every single person who passes through—you belong here. You are on the list, because everybody is. You are worthy, because there is nothing you can do to make God love you any less. All we have to do is step in and join the celebration and let the love and the hospitality that pervades this space make us more loving and hospitable, too.

And that’s one difference about gathering pledges and donations for a community like this instead of what I used to do. Like the ballet, we, too, are committed to building something beautiful and lasting and inspiring and dynamic, but here we are not just audience members with varied levels of access. We are the art itself.

We are the practitioners of a love without gatekeeping, of a belonging without list-making, and a truth without exclusivity. That’s worth everything and anything that we can afford to give to it—our resources, yes, but most importantly, our hearts.

So I’ve let go of most of my cheap suits in favor of this priestly outfit that I don’t even own—an outfit that is pure gift. And I don’t stand at a little desk in a lobby these days, checking my list.

Instead, I get to stand up here, by God’s grace, looking out at all of you. And it’s true, we might look up at this altar with our own mixture of curiosity and wistfulness sometimes, but it is my distinct pleasure to tell you: this is for you. It has always been for you. We don’t have finger sandwiches, but we do have the bread of life. And we have each other.

Come on in.

Questions: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, October 6, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Job 1:1, 2:1-10 and Mark 10:2-16, where Jesus is asked about the lawfulness of divorce.

I still remember vividly the day that my parents separated. It was Christmas Eve of 1989. I was six.

I have to say, there are some stories that just don’t need to be told in detail from the pulpit. What I can tell you, though, is that it was a story about two good, complex people who had tried really hard, who had faced a number of big obstacles, and who just couldn’t make it work.

Such stories, when you live through them, leave you wondering: why do good and beautiful things break sometimes in this life? Why, despite all our good intentions, do things sometimes fall apart?

These are big questions. Difficult, honest questions.

One thing that is often said about The Episcopal Church, and something I love about it, is that we strive to be a place where we’re committed to asking good questions, and it’s a place where we admit that we don’t have all the answers.

For so many of us who have found our way into this faith tradition, especially from backgrounds and communities where over-confident certainties were wielded like weapons, being able to ask and to wonder and even to doubt sometimes…well, it feels like coming up for air.

I’ve shared with you before that I found my way back to Jesus after years of wandering because I realized, finally, in this Church, that I didn’t have to have it all figured out in order for Jesus to love me. He just did. And with that realization, I could breathe. I could ask my hard questions without fear.

As we study it, we notice that Scripture itself is full of all sorts of questions, too, though we have to admit that not all of them are created equal. Some are honest, and profound, and very brave, like the entire book of Job, which we heard the beginning of this morning. If you have ever read Job, is basically just one long-form, fundamental question: why is there suffering this world, and why doesn’t God do anything about it?

We’ll be traveling with Job for the next few weeks in our lectionary readings, but I will give you a heads up: the power of this ancient book is not that it has some simple, easily digestible answer to that big question. Its power is that the book is brave enough to ask the question in the first place. It does not hold back. Job demonstrates that for all of us, wrestling with the inevitability of pain and loss is not anti-faith. It is a necessary part of faith.

Because our salvation is not just a smiley face and a slogan that fits on a bumper sticker. No, true salvation comes to us through the deep questions we are willing to ask of God, of ourselves, and one another. It is born in those moments at 3AM when we have been stripped bare and are left on our knees without pretense–when we are finally willing to ask what we were too complacent or too afraid to ask before. This, as we will see, is exactly the sort of question that Job will ask, and it is the questioning that will transform him completely and save him.

But in the meantime, today, we are faced with another sort of question—the one that is posed by the Pharisees to Jesus in todays Gospel reading. Yes, it’s the dreaded “divorce reading” that can make a preacher squirm when they realize it’s their turn in the pulpit.

But here’s the thing about this reading—we can only approach it in a fruitful, truly Christian way when we acknowledge that the question that the Pharisees are asking is not like Job’s—it is not a thoughtful, bold, or honest one. They are just playing games. They are trying to lay traps for Jesus, guided by their own definitions of power and wisdom.

The Pharisees already know the law about divorce. One of the only reasons they’re asking this question is because they hope Jesus will say something to offend the King or the Emperor and get himself in trouble.

And with that it mind, it’s incredibly sad to me, infuriating even, that there are some corners of Christianity where this whole passage has been interpreted through the very same Pharisaical lens of power and control, as if purity were the point of the Gospel rather than what the Gospel actually is: solace for the vulnerable and the lost.

So we have to keep this in mind when we listen to Jesus’ response—we have to understand that he is turning their manipulative question back on them. He knows what they are up to, and so he responds with something they cannot argue against. It’s not a legal argument or a political claim, but a statement about something much more fundamental: a reminder about creation and its heartbreaking complexity.

Jesus knows the reality is that in marriage, as in the rest of life, love can bind us together and it can also cause us to break and make mistakes. And when it does, it is a very sad and difficult thing, because God has always desired for us to find wholeness in our relationships with each other. But God also knows all too well the risks that love requires and, yes, when things go wrong, the damage it can do. But he seeks to console us in the wreckage, not pile on.

So Jesus, by undercutting their ploy, is, in effect, dismissing the Pharisees’ question and asking a far better one: you, who are so concerned with getting everything right, and with everyone else getting it right—when did you stop being honest about life? When did you forget that life is full of inexplicable pain and unkept commandments and unanswerable questions? When did you forget that the only true answer is to love each other as best we can, for as long as we can, until we can’t anymore?

Jesus acknowledges to his disciples something we know well: when there is divorce, there is pain and there is brokenness, as any of us who have lived through a divorce or who’ve grown up as children of divorce can attest. We don’t need church authorities to tell us that. We’ve already experienced the flesh of our hearts being pulled apart. We already know what it feels like to not be able to breathe.

But God’s posture in all of this, always, is to meet us in the middle of the mess and to say to us, my love for you is stronger than your broken heart and my dream for you is bigger than your shattered expectations. And if you have been divorced; if you have failed to keep your promises; if you did what you had to in order to survive; if you walked away to save your own body or soul; or even if you just made a mess of it all…so be it. Because Jesus loves a sinner. He invited them to his table. He said, come to me like a child, tear streaked and exhausted and hungry, and don’t ever let anyone tell you, ever, that you don’t deserve love. Even when you couldn’t quite make it all work on your own strength. Especially then.

And so I would say to those churches who use this passage against those who have been divorced, or who use any Scripture passage to condemn or exclude—I would say, God calls us to be saints, not Pharisees. God call us to be honest, imperfect people transfigured by grace. God calls us to stop playing games, to stop thinking faith is about knowing everything, and to ask real, heartfelt questions instead, like,

How do I leave this world better than I found it?

What does being a disciple look like in this time and place?

When will I let go of all things that have burdened my heart for so long?

Who is Jesus to me, now, at this point in my life?

Where do I see God’s Spirit at work, every single day, and how do I tell others about that?

God, help us to be a community where questions like this are what guide us more than any simplistic answers. God, lead us into a way of life where, instead, we become the answers to the good questions we ask.

When we do–even when good and beautiful things break–we will realize once more that we can breathe.

Runaway: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, September 15, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Mark 8:27-38 and Proverbs 1:20-33.

I want to tell you a story—a true story—about a young man who ran away from home. And, first things first, this is NOT a story about me, though it might ultimately be a story about all of us.

So there was a young man. At a fairly young age, about 18 or so, his parents died, and he found himself alone in the world, except for a younger sister for whom he was now responsible. But this young man, who was full of idealism, had a struggle within him. He knew that he should settle down and grow up, especially now that tragedy had struck and responsibilities had fallen into his lap. But he was deeply troubled by the world around him. He was not sure he could bear the life he was expected to live.

You see, he lived in a particular time when society was going through a period of decline. There was political intrigue, and widespread poverty, and rumors of war. Conspiracies and coarseness dominated much of public discourse. And this young man did not want to be part of it, of any of it.

He had been raised a Christian and he had a sense, nurtured from a very early age, that he was destined for a holier sort of life, something purer, something unstained by tears or bloodshed, something uncorrupted by the accepted order of things. He believed that God wanted him to leave it all behind.

And so he dropped off his sister with some caretakers and he wandered out into the wilderness, convinced that the pristine solitude of an empty space would fill the void in his spirit, that it would mend the cracks in his heart.

He knew, he just knew, that if he could purge himself of disappointment and attachment, if he could just find a way to make the pain go away, if he could shed the calamity of human flesh, he would finally be worthy of the peace for which he hungered. By leaving the world behind, he would become worthy of seeing God.

But a funny thing happened on the way to enlightenment. Somehow, people found out about this young man—brave, holy, or simply out of his mind, no one was quite sure—and certain people came to find him. They would not leave him be.

They camped near the places he had sequestered himself, waiting to catch a glimpse, waiting for a word from his lips, wondering what he had discovered in his solitude. And as they waited, they made for themselves impromptu communities out in the wilderness, communities, ironically, born of the young man’s initial rejection of communal life. Communities that were formed in the desert at the edge of loneliness, at the border of emptiness, made intimate and strangely alive by the search for another way of being.

The young man, by the way, was named Antony, and he lived in Egypt in the 3rd and 4th century CE, and those travelers who followed him into the wilderness were the first monastic communities in the Christian tradition. Antony is now known as St. Antony the Great, the father of all those called into religious life as monks or nuns.

But I am not telling you his story as a lecture on Church history. I am telling you Antony’s story because there remains, in each of us, I think, a bit of the impulse to run away from home—to look at the disappointments and the pain and the callousness of whatever is around us, our broken relationships or our broken politics and to say, “no thanks.” I am done with all of that. I am seeking something else, I am seeking something better, something unstained. I am walking away from the world as it is. Peace out.

In our own age of fractured social bonds and conspiracy theories and coarseness, this is a daily temptation. A cave in the desert might sound pretty good to some of us right about now. And of course there are circumstances and seasons, in our own lives, when we do need to walk away and free ourselves from unhealthy situations.

But what Antony discovered, in his accidental creation of monastic communities—when all he thought he needed was to be alone—what he discovered is that the sacred path, the way of Jesus, might be liberating, but it is never an escape. Choosing God is not the same as opting out of the world. Because God’s love will always, in one way or another, lead us DEEPER into the heart of the world, not further from it.

The plot twist for Antony was that, after many years of battling his demons in the dark and silent chambers of his soul, he emerged, not as a detached saint who had transcended human flesh, but as someone finally comfortable in his skin—and as someone deeply, deeply committed to the flourishing of others. He traveled back into those cities he once hated to debate theologians and take on emperors, challenging their corruption and their rejection of the truth, insisting, always, that the God of Love was more powerful than any partisan agenda, and that this God will hold all of us to account for the ways we form or deform our common life.

And that is what we must discover, or rediscover, if we are to live faithfully now. We have to remember that a life of faith is not about running away from home, but about realizing that everywhere is home, and that our task is to ensure that everyone experiences a sense of home in this life, no matter how they differ from us or where they have come from.

In this same vein, much has been debated and preached about Jesus’ invitation for his followers to take up their cross and follow him. What are we taking on? What are we leaving behind? There is one certain perspective, promoted by some, that Jesus wants us to reject our own humanity, to discount our own needs, to leave behind all that is familiar, and brazenly follow him out into some barren place of suffering for its own sake. To grovel and winnow ourselves down into a thin sort of holiness.

But that would only be the case if Jesus’ story ended with his death on the cross. And, spoiler alert, it does not. The story of Jesus is the story of resurrection—it is the story of what lies on the other side of rejection and despondency.

It is the story of a man and a God and a people who say, no, I am not running away. I am not running away from myself. I am not running away from what disappoints me or scares me or makes me feel small. I am going to face it, by God, and I am going to live a life shaped by something other than fear. I am going to let love make me courageous and alive in ways nobody dreamed possible. This is the story.

This our story: to charge headlong, with singing and tears and laughter and clarity, into the courageousness of a love that cannot be killed; into the public square where Wisdom still yearns for someone, anyone, to speak a word of truth. It is to venture into the places we once feared to go and the places we feared to return, until we discover, as Antony did, that God makes everywhere home.

We are at the beginning of a new season in this community—this fall we are resuming and expanding the ways that we connect with one another and with Christ in this place. We are welcoming new friends into our midst as they seek a home in this parish. And we are navigating, as best we can, a fractious and tense time in the life of our country.

My invitation to you, and to myself, and to all of us, is this: in all that we do this year, let us be a people who are running towards something, not running away. Running towards each other, even in our differences, not retreating into a corner. Running towards the needs of our neighbors. Running towards a joyful and clear and public witness to the Gospel of Love that is Jesus’ true message. Running towards that sense of community that God invites us to build together, we who are still dwelling at the edge of loneliness, at the border of emptiness, and yet who are made intimate and strangely alive in our continued search for another way of being.

And in all these things, running towards God–who has been running towards us across the wilderness of time since before time began. Running to say, beloved, you don’t have to keep running. You are here. I am here. We are already home.

Annoying: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, July 28, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are 2 Samuel 11:1-15 and John 6:1-21.

Now, I tend to think that I was a pretty nice, friendly kid growing up—I liked being around people, including my mom and dad and my other relatives. But there’s a funny thing that happens to most of us, somewhere around the age of 14 or so—we suddenly want our parents and the rest of our family members to leave us alone.

I was not a very rebellious teenager, but still, somewhere around that age, I became totally uninterested in what the rest of my family was up to. I couldn’t drive yet, and this was long before the age of smartphones, but I would still check out and close myself up in my room, reading books or talking to my friends on the phone or surfing the internet (the kind that you had to connect to on a landline).

And yet, for some reason, my family would keep pestering me! My dad would knock on the door to tell me dinner was ready, or my mom would call and want to know how school was going. One time my grandma got mad at me because I had been on the dialup internet for so long that no one could make calls in or out of the house.

I was just convinced that their whole mission in life was to cramp my style. The nerve of these people. Didn’t they understand that I was my own person, that I needed space to do exactly what I wanted to do, when and how I wanted to do it?!

If you happen to be going through that right now as a teenager, I want to say, you’re not entirely wrong. There is something really important about figuring out who you are as a person and how that might be different from the expectations of all the people around you. Figuring ourselves out takes time and trial and error and you need a little space to do that.

It’s also true, though, many years on from 14, that now I would give just about anything to have my dad knock on the door to call me to dinner or to hear my grandma fussing at me about the busy signal on the phone. Maybe it’s just a function of getting older—the prospect of being on one’s own loses a bit of its luster.

Nonetheless, it strikes me that our relationship with God is a bit like the push-pull of growing up and feeling both grateful for and claustrophobic around the ones we love.

I know it’s very pious to talk about how much we love to spend time with God, and we say a lot in church about how wonderful it is that God came to be with us in the flesh in Jesus, how he will never leave us, how he is always there when we call on him.

But in the midst of all of that, I think we need to be honest with ourselves: there is a part of us that might prefer for our Lord to leave us alone once in a while. There is a part of us that finds it awfully exhausting and burdensome to have the Way, the Truth, and the Life constantly knocking on the door, reminding us we are spending too much time closed up in our rooms, asking us to get off our phones and come out and be part of the human family.

The nerve of this Divine Person! Doesn’t he know that I need space to do exactly what want to do, when and how I want to do it? It would be so much easier if we could just stay in our own little world rather than contend with the real world.

In this week’s reading from the Old Testament, David is caught up in this tendency towards self-isolation, and unfortunately for him it comes at great cost. The implication of the text we heard today is that, as King, he should have been out there in solidarity with the troops who are fighting his battles, but instead he chooses to stay home and take advantage of his newfound royal power, using it to exploit and manipulate others for no reason other than his own idle satisfaction.

If that reading made you uncomfortable, good—that’s the point. David and those like him are not our savior; God is. We will return to this story next week and we will learn the grave cost of his actions, but for now we simply see in David the terrible danger of cutting ourselves off from a sense of responsibility to the people around us—of assuming that God doesn’t care what we do with our time. David will soon learn that, like any annoyingly persistent parent, God does indeed care, and God is not inclined to leave us to our own devices forever, even when we would rather he did.

And, at the risk of sounding really impious, there is no greater evidence of God’s annoying, parental persistence than the incarnation of Jesus. He just had to come down and get up in our business. He just had to come knock on our door to tell us to get off the internet for a minute and open our eyes and look at each other and listen to one another.

Yes, God becoming flesh and walking among us and revealing to us the urgent necessity of embodying the Father’s love—let’s get real for a minute here—it’s beautiful and revelatory, but it’s also quite inconvenient.

Because, Lord, I don’t want to love my enemies! Lord, I don’t want to relinquish my own ambitions and self-interest for the greater good! Lord, I don’t want to face the suffering of the world and realize that I am expected to actually do something about it. I just want to be left alone! Stop knocking on my door, please. Stop calling me up and telling me that I was made for something more. Just let me put on my headphones and talk to the people I like and leave the rest for someone else to figure out!

Thankfully God doesn’t listen to me when I say that, anymore than my parents or grandparents ever did. Because Jesus is, as God always has been, the one who says, no, it’s time you come and have something to eat. It’s time you rejoined the land of the living. It’s time you remembered that you are, indeed, part of a family—the family of all of creation—and while we all need a bit of solitude and self-exploration from time to time, you were not made to be alone.

Jesus showing up here in our midst, week after week, in the form of bread and wine, showing up to knock on the door of your heart, is not just a pretty idea—it’s a reminder of that frustratingly persistent tendency of God to never leave us be, to never give up on us, to wait for us, all of us, however long it takes, until we realize that this—this love, this way of life, this relationship with God and with each other—is what we needed most all along, at age 4, and at 14, and at 104.

Because there will be a moment that comes for each of us, at a certain age, when we look up and realize that, like those disciples on the Sea of Galilee, we have been rowing our boat alone on the waves for a bit too long, and the waters around us are stormy, and we are far from home, and now we would give anything to hear our father or our mother or our grandmother’s voices instead of the howling wind. And then, quite suddenly, there is Jesus, coming across the water, saying It is I, do not be afraid.

Annoyingly, stubbornly, blessedly, miraculously, he has followed us the whole way, out past our pride, out past our loneliness and bewilderment. He has refused to leave us to our own devices, even when we thought we wanted him to.

I hope that, following in Jesus’ footsteps, I can be just as annoyingly persistent in my own commitment to caring for others and the world around me. I’d like to think that this is what are about here at St. Anne, that this is what we are celebrating today on St. Anne Day.

I pray that, as we do this more and more and more, there are folks out there in our community who might start to say, oh gosh, there go those St. Anne people again, always inviting everyone to come to the table, always advocating for justice and mercy, always going on about how much God loves everyone, always trying to call us back into relationship with one another. When will they let up with all of that? When will they leave me to my own devices? When will they give up on that annoying, persistent hope in something better for this world?

Never, my friends.

I pray the answer is never.

The Way of Peace: A Sermon for Troubled Times

I preached this sermon on Sunday, July 14, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Mark 6:14-29, the beheading of John the Baptist.

I sometimes wonder what John the Baptist thought about, just before the end of his life.

They say that sometimes the past comes back to us in our final moments, in visions and in fragments–that we can see people long dead, and that we can hear the music of songs long finished. And so I wonder what faces and melodies danced in the darkness of John’s prison cell.

Maybe it was the face of his mother, Elizabeth, who in her old age thought she’d never be a mother, looking upon him once more with a gaze of tenderness and wonder. Maybe he heard the song of his father, Zechariah, the song sung the day of John’s birth, the one even we might remember: and you, my child, will be called the prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways.

And so he did, all the way up to this moment in our Gospel text.And while I imagine he might have wept for that all that seemed lost, all that felt like it had been wasted, my hope is that all of God’s promises came back to John in the end, carried on a wind that smelled of wilderness and wild honey. A glimpse of heaven, even as he commended himself to the unseeing darkness.

I hope so. I hope he knew that his efforts were not in vain, that he had done his part, that his voice had indeed cried out and been carried on the wind where it needed to go. That the paths had been made straight.

I hope so because his actual death, and the circumstances that led up to it, are, like all political violence, so unbearably shortsighted and pointless and small. John, the prophet of the Most High, the one who bathed Jesus in the waters of baptism, the one who, his whole life, burned with the fire of the Holy Spirit, is here, today, snuffed out over a bit of palace intrigue, by the machinations of another petty empire.

No dignified sacrifice, no farewell discourse—just a debauched party and an idle grudge and a series of terrible decisions and a swift, pitiful ending. Even the writer of Mark’s Gospel seems at a loss for words, unwilling or unable to describe anyone’s reaction to the senselessness of what has taken place.

Because, as is always the case, what can you really say when rage and violence emerge, yet again, into our midst? Thoughts and prayers for your family, John. This is not who we are, John. We promise we’ll be nicer to each other in the future, John, so that your death meant something.

And we keep on saying it, hoping next time it will be true.

Yesterday, another act of political violence struck at the heart of our civic life in what should be a peaceful political process in this country. The shooting at former President Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania, which resulted in the death of one bystander and which will likely have historic repercussions we cannot yet understand, is a stark and frightening reminder that we are all still subject to the same destructive tendencies that plagued our forebears.

We pray for all victims of political violence, including those harmed yesterday. And we are reminded, yet again, how cultures and rhetorics of violence are self-perpetuating—that all the words and wounds we choose to inflict upon one another play out in predictable, terrible ways. I hate to say it, but this is who we are. At least, it’s who we choose to be, too much of the time.

These forces of division, enmity, and the desire to eradicate those we deem as other are active and at work in our politics, in the broader world and, as hard as it is to admit, to some extent within each of us. We resist them, and build around them, and sometimes even seem to rise above them, but they are there.

And from time to time, in seasons like the one we are living through now in this country, we are called to account for the persistence of violence. We are called to reckon with the warring impulses of the human heart, called to ask if another way is possible, if indeed our feet might actually be guided somehow into the way of peace. John certainly believed it could be so, but his life demonstrated that calling people prophetically into the way of peace is rarely a safe endeavor.

And so I wonder, as John sat in the darkness, waiting for the end, I wonder whether he finally understood that we need something more than just thoughts and prayers and the invitation to do better next time. That for whatever reason, at least on our own strength, we cannot be much better than we already are.

I wonder, in those flashes of memory and music, in the fragmentary sum of his long and mysterious journey, if John could sense that Jesus, the One for whom he had waited and prepared the way, was not simply a new political leader strong enough or charismatic enough to enforce peace, but was, in fact, the Holy One who came to show us a truth both very new and eternal: that strength and force and violence will never achieve a redemptive end or guide us to a place of rest. That only love and peace and an embarrassing level of gentleness will do that.

Because that is what Jesus is. He is the one who embarrasses the Herods of the world by his gentleness; the one who stops the dance of death in its tracks; the one who reveals not just violence’s depravity, but its futility, its weakness. He does this because although he was also killed senselessly, for pointless political ends, he comes to us as the Risen One, the Wounded One who stands in the midst of our fear and our cynicism and our despair and says, peace.

He says, peace.

He does not say revenge or rage or retribution, but peace. And this is something altogether different from what we have been given to expect of this life or this world, or even of ourselves. Something different, even, than John expected–John who had once spoken of the Lord’s winnowing fork and fire.

And so I hope, somehow, before the end, he saw the truth in the darkness and smiled and said, yes, this, yes, peace, yes, we have warred and wept and wandered in the wilderness, and we may continue to do so for many more generations, but yes, another way is possible and it is here, now, insistently alive even in the face of all this senseless death, and its name is love, and its name is God and its name is Jesus.

I hope we see this, too, every day, but especially on days like today, when those forces of violence and fear seem so strong, so palpable, and when forcefulness seems to be the only way forward. I hope we will see that there is something deeper and stronger than anger that animates our common life and our work and our faith, even after all that has been done and left undone.

Long before our own endings, long before we must gaze into the darkness, I hope we will glimpse that vision, fragmented though it might be…the one that is revealed in the faces of the ones we have loved and in the songs of peace we have sung and in the ways we have tried to practice tenderness and gentleness with each other in this place.

And then I hope we will go out and proclaim that vision in the world, costly as its might be to do so. Not to win a political or cultural battle, not to earn a spot in heaven, but simply because it is true. It is the only true thing there is to hold onto—that love and justice and peace and forgiveness are the only things which will endure in the end, long after our seemingly endless capacity for violence has consumed itself.

Because this is the Gospel: that on that day, when everything is finished, when every game is played and ever last war is waged, God will still be there standing on the wreckage of our best intentions and worst impulses and God will still be saying, Peace, peace I give to you. My love I give to you. My life I give to you. Let the dawn from on high break upon you, my children. Let us begin again.

We don’t have to wait til the end to begin, though. We can start right now. Because no matter what happens in the next several months in this country, or the next several years of our lives, or in the next several generations on this planet, I can tell you this: the things worth doing, the things that will survive and flourish long after we are gone, are the same things that John glimpsed in the dark: the face of love and the song of peace, and the courage to trust in something other than the hurt we’ve known.

God be with our country as we try to remember this.

God be with us as we try to live it.