bible – Page 3 – By Another Road

Everything Happens: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, March 23, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Exodus 3:1-15 and Luke 13:1-9.

So there’s a particular phrase that gets used a lot, one that most of us have heard or maybe used at one point or another. I’m sure that I have used it in the past. But it’s a phrase that, as I live longer and especially as I do ministry longer, I have become more and more troubled by. It’s this one: “everything happens for a reason.”

I’ll be honest, I really don’t like this phrase very much anymore. And if you use it in your own discussions of the big questions of life, I hope you’ll at least hear me out. Because as I have spent these years as a priest and have been invited into the vulnerable, sometimes painful and complex stories of people’s lives, the more I see how empty this phrase can be.

Imagine if you will: a person comes to you and says they have been harmed in every imaginable way by their family, and now they deal with mental illness and addiction, and they struggle to keep a roof above their heads, and lately they’ve been sleeping in a tent in the park. But they come to you and want to know more about what God’s love could possibly mean for them.

Or imagine this: you are visiting with someone who has lost their spouse of over 60 years, gone in the blink of an eye, and they tell you the stories of how they met, and show you old, beautiful photos of when they were both young and laughing and strong and unafraid of love’s deep costliness. And today, this person gazes at the photos with an unanswerable longing and wonders what the rest of life will look like.

Would you, could you ever bring yourself to say to such a person, “well, everything happens for a reason”? Having sat with them, many times over, I can assure you with every fiber of my being: I could not. I would not. I will never.

Because even if we rightly acknowledge that we do not understand why things happen the way they do, this phrase, everything happens for a reason, is still just a flimsy band-aid over the deep wounds of life. It is attempt at naming something when a gentle silence would suffice. Better, I’ve learned, to just be present with that which we cannot understand. Better to offer quiet love than easy answers. Like that unspeakable name of the Living God who speaks to Moses from the burning bush, sometimes it is good for words to fail us.

I was thinking about this because wrestling with “everything happens for a reason” is also, I think, a helpful way of wrestling with our Gospel reading this morning. It’s a reading which at first hearing sounds very severe. Someone at Bible study this week said this is a very “Lenten” reading, full of suffering and judgment. And that’s true, but I would offer that suffering and judgment are not the deeper message that Jesus is trying to convey to us here. His call to repentance is a call to a new understanding of God and the world we live in.

When these unnamed individuals come and let Jesus know about some Galileans—in other words, people who could have been Jesus’ neighbors—who have been killed by the imperial authorities and had their bodies desecrated, we can imagine that they want some answer from Jesus about why such a thing could happen. And although we don’t actually hear them say it out loud, we can imagine them wondering: did these Galileans do something to deserve this fate? Or is there some greater plan God has in mind by making these people suffer? Did all of this happen for a reason?

But Jesus’ answer to them is bracing and provocative, especially for those of us who need everything to fit together neatly. No, he says. Do not ascribe the suffering of the Galileans to God. And do not console yourself by secretly assuming it couldn’t happen to you. “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners?” In other words, are you, when confronted with the horrors of cruelty and injustice in this world, trying to convince yourself that everything happens according to God’s plan? That God instrumentalizes our suffering? If so, you are not yet understanding the nature of God.

And, he goes on, those eighteen killed with the tower of Siloam fell…and those who were in the Twin Towers when they collapsed…and the generation of people lost to AIDS…and the children who are dying in Gaza and the hostages who haven’t come home…and our neighbors in West Chester who go to bed hungry at night…and the ones next to us in the pews who have suffered illness or deep loss—are they somehow “worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem?” If anyone says yes, they, too, are not yet understanding the nature of God.

Because the awakened and transfigured heart can’t look at such things and hold onto “everything happens for a reason” or “they had it coming” or “at least it wasn’t me and mine.” The awakened and transfigured heart, the one that is grafted onto the heart of God, does not put band-aids on deep wounds; it does not offer platitudes that primarily serve to comfort the one who speaks them. No, the awakened and transfigured heart—the heart of Christ, the heart that beats in our own chest, too, if we will let it–chooses to offer love rather than easy answers.

Jesus wants his disciples to understand, both in that age of Roman oppression and now in our own time of social and political disarray, that the Christian path is not paved with empty words and good intentions—that road leads…elsewhere. The Christian path is not characterized by shrugging our shoulders at the universe and saying “everything happens for a reason” and then going back to whatever it was we were doing.

No, the Christian path is the one gentle and courageous enough to look into the face of suffering and to simply say, yes, everything happens. Everything happens. Families hurt us sometimes, and loved ones leave us, and towers fall, and democracies struggle and times get tough, and it’s hard to know what to say. But what we can do is choose compassionate action. What we can do is plant the seeds of love and mercy and hope, defiant in the face of death and despair. And in fact we must do that if we hope to experience true salvation, to live as God lives, both in this life and beyond it.

That’s why, after his challenging teaching and his call to a new way of life, Jesus gives us, today, a parting image—one that clarifies the alternative to empty words and flimsy band-aids. He shows us a gardener who refuses to give up on a fig tree. A gardener who refuses to shrug his shoulders at the fruitless branch, who refuses to say “everything happens for a reason,” and leave the quaking tree to its lonely fate. He shows us a gardener who bends down close, who chooses to stay, who chooses to care, who chooses to try, no matter what the next year brings.

Because that turning around and leaning down into love, that’s repentance. And that’s the beginning of understanding the true nature of God.

And to the extent we are doing that here at St. Anne—in our ministries, in our hearts, in our community—thank God, because that is the journey along the true Christian path, which indeed always leads back to a garden, back to what might yet grow—so that this hungry world might be fed something more than platitudes.

After all, we ourselves are fed, week by week, by the God who does not often speak out loud with easy answers, but who prefers to simply show up in bread and wine and song and silence. Quiet, eternal, impossibly near. Thi is the God who asks us to do anything but give up on each other, and who refuses to give up on us, no matter how little we understand.

The God in Christ who, even when everything happens, as it too often does, prefers to give us the one thing better than a reason: himself.

The Feast of All Hungers: An Ash Wednesday Sermon

Offered on Ash Wednesday, March 5, 2025, at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH.

Ash Wednesday has an unusual quality to it. It’s a bit hard to describe. It’s not exactly mournful like Good Friday, but it’s not joyful, either. It’s quiet and sharp and dim and bright all at once. But to me, more than anything else, Ash Wednesday is a hungry day.

I remember back in seminary, when I studied and lived for a bit of time at a theological college in England next to a community of monks, they took their Lenten observances quite seriously. On the morning of Ash Wednesday I went into the dining hall and discovered that we were being given the sparest of meals to last us for most of the day. Talk about wailing and gnashing of teeth; I felt the fear of God deep in my stomach that day!

So yes, sometimes Ash Wednesday is literally a hungry day if you participate in the tradition of fasting, but that’s not all I mean. It’s about other types of hunger, too.

You know how we celebrate a Feast of All Angels in September and a feast of All Saints in November?

I have come to the conclusion that Ash Wednesday is the feast of all hungers. It is the day when we acknowledge that, simply by virtue of being alive, we are hungry people—hungry for many things. There is a rumble in our stomachs and a yearning in our souls, and we are driven by the pursuit of them across the long, lean years of life.

In Psalm 51, a version of which we will recite in a little while, the Psalmist declares, “I have been wicked from my birth, a sinner from my mother’s womb.” And while that sounds a little dire, we might relate to the Psalmist, who is frustrated by the many gnawing hungers, bodily and spiritual, that never seem to go away—the hungers that assert themselves afresh each day. The Psalmist senses, as we do, the desperate sense that enough is an elusive concept, and that we will be starving for something for all our days. Call it wickedness, call it sin, but whatever it is that plagues us, its origin is that we are so very hungry.

And so Ash Wednesday is when we name, without too much fanfare, that this is where we begin in Lent. This is the human condition. That we come into the world this way: from our first gasp and cry outside of the womb, we are hungry for air and for food, and also for love, for protection, for shelter, for community.

And as we grow, these basic hungers endure; they are our companions for as long as we live, joined in time by other, subtler pangs—a hunger for purpose, for meaning, for wholeness, for righteousness, for beauty. And every once in a while, by some grace or tribulation, we tap into the deepest hunger of all—the hunger for the One we call God.

Despite its reputation as a very pious sort of observance, I would argue that Ash Wednesday is actually a visceral feast day, not an ethereal, spiritual one. You feel Ash Wednesday in the gut, sort of like I did sitting at that monastic breakfast table. And, as odd as it might sound, that means it is an ideal time to come to church even if you don’t know what you believe about God, because no matter what we believe, what we all know is this: that we are hungry. That we are very hungry.

And we also know that we are tired—tired of seeing the world go hungry, whether for bread or justice or love or simple human kindness. We are tired, ourselves, of going to bed with an emptiness in our stomachs and in our souls. We long for that which satisfies, wherever or whatever (or Whoever) it is.

And today all of these hungers and longings collide, both the temporal and the transcendent. We stand at the raw edge of springtime, the earth hungry for sunlight and our mouths watering for a fulfillment we can’t quite name. A fulfillment that, our readings and our worship suggest, might be found in the places we don’t tend to look.

And if Lent is the journey toward an answer to that fulfillment–an answer that will come, in time, with the scent of lilies and the song of resurrection–then today, Ash Wednesday, is simply when we dare to make the admission that yes, despite our desire to seem satiated and wise and successful and strong….we are really just hungry. So truly, honestly hungry that we are willing, even, to follow this Lenten road all the way to the Last Supper and the Passion and the Cross, because something that groans deep within us suggests that we will be fed, here, in a way that nothing and no one else can offer.

In that spirit of hunger, then ,the mark that we are about to receive on our foreheads—the mark of dust and ashes—takes on a slightly different meaning.

If you heard Jesus’ words about not being ostentatious in our piety and if you are wondering how that squares with wearing a cross on your forehead the rest of the day, I would simply offer this: the ashes on your brow are not a sign of membership in a club. They are not a status symbol. They are not proof of our collective and elevated holiness. Those are the self-important, self-deluding impulses Jesus advises against.

Instead, consider this: that the mark that you are about to receive simply indicates: I am hungry. I am hungry for God. I am hungry for a glimpse of my truest, most beloved self. And like all who have come before me, like all the children of the dust that ever lived and died, I came into this world hungry, and I walk through my days hungry, and I admit it openly here and now on this feast of all hungers. Because I trust, somehow, that if I can name my hunger, then God will fill the depth of it with himself.

And that on the other side of this hungry season, this hungry life, there will be something waiting for us. There will be an answer. There will be a feast. And there will be One who welcomes us, and who bids us rest, and who says, again, and at last, and always,

Blessed are you who are hungry, for you shall be satisfied.

Greeting Cards: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, February 23, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Genesis 45:3-11, 15 and Luke 6:27-38.

I was heartened during last week’s sermon when our preacher, Baker, confessed that he, too, has a penchant for accumulating books. It helped me feel a little bit better about my own endless accumulation! Though I like to say that am a collector of books, because that sounds so much more elegant than “hoarder of books” or “person who is constructing the leaning Tower of Pisa with books.” No, no, I’m a collector. So it’s fine.

Well, with that in mind, I’ll tell you there is something else I am a collector of—and I have stacks of them, too, squirreled away here and there—and that is old greeting cards. I have a tough time letting go of the cards that I’ve received. Whether it’s those I’ve been given as a priest, or for birthdays, or even the occasional thank you note…every so often I’ll open a drawer or a folder and there they’ll be, little bundles of time and relationship and memory.

And just when I think, oh, I probably don’t need to hold onto these anymore, I’ll open one up and suddenly I am reading about how proud my dad was at my high school graduation, or some half-forgotten in-joke from a long lost college friend, or a Christmas greeting from a beloved parishioner who has since died. And I just slide them all back into the drawer. Really, I suppose I am a collector of heartfelt sentiments, but I am not ashamed of that.

Because we need reminders sometimes, don’t we, of all the things that we have been to other people, and of all that they have been to us. And really, when you think about it, those greeting cards and other such notes are one of the few tangible signs we ever receive that this is indeed the case. They are evidence that we’re not, in fact, just isolated figures navigating the surface of the earth, but that we are of something, that our hearts and our bodies have been tethered to something, to someone. And in a lonely age, any such reminder is a precious, even sacred thing.

Think about it: when we die, if a stranger were to go through our house and clear out most of our belongings—the clothes and the pots & pans and yes, even the books—it is only a few items, maybe just the greeting cards and the letters and the photos—that would actually tell the story of the love that has shaped our lives. Sobering thought, maybe, but clarifying, too, about what actually matters in this life. What is worth holding onto and what is worth saying to one another in the bit of time we are given.

And for me, few scenes in Scripture capture the preciousness and power of what is said to one another more so than this morning’s Old Testament reading. To set the scene, we are with a handful of isolated figures navigating the face of the earth—the elder brothers of Joseph, who have come to Egypt in the midst of a famine searching for food. Instead, they end up finding Joseph himself, whom they secretly sold into slavery many years before. Joseph is now a powerful figure in Pharaoh’s household, and at first the brothers don’t recognize him.

But as we hear today, Joseph reveals his identity to them and, instead of exacting righteous revenge or punishment, he does something quite astounding. He pours out words of love. He forgives them and welcomes them and weeps upon them, and what he says is tender and generous and full of unexpected grace.

I’ll admit, sentimental as I am, Joseph’s decision here can still sound a bit unrealistic, the stuff of greeting card verses rather than real life. And that’s fair enough. Accountability for harm done is a real and important facet of healthy relationships, and there are plenty of examples of it in Scripture, too.

But what we might want to take away from this story is not simply that Joseph was a very nice person who did a very nice thing by letting his brothers off the hook, but that this narrative represents something deeper and more profound for the people who wrote it down. It captures something of Israel’s own fundamental, fragile hopes.

They, too, often felt like people isolated on the face of the earth, and like those elder brothers consumed by hunger and regret, Israel prayed that they might one day hear God again saying to them: “come down to me, do not delay…you shall settle in the land…and you shall be near me, you and your children and your children’s children.”

And so what Joseph offers his brothers is what Israel itself longed to receive, and maybe what we all long to receive at our core—a word, an assurance, direct from God’s own heart, that says, “you are not an isolated figure, because you are mine, and I am yours and I, the one who Created you, weep for the love of you. And so no matter what has happened before, no matter what is broken, I your God will make it all fit together somehow. No matter how you have failed, no matter how far you’ve wandered, we are not lost to one another.”

This is not just sentimentality, but the reality of grace. And I think we wait our whole lives hoping to hear some version of it. It is why Jesus came as God Incarnate, to deliver the same message in person through his life, death, and resurrection.

But there’s a twist with Jesus, of course (there always is)—because he invites us not just to receive the word of grace, but to live it. Jesus asks us to become the very word we long for.

And that’s important to keep in mind when we hear Jesus’ seemingly impossible instruction on forgiveness and loving our enemies. Just as we might be incredulous at Joseph, so we might find ourselves skeptical of this teaching. Doesn’t Christ, of all people, know that the world is not so simple? How can we turn the other cheek and resist judgment, when there is so much hate and harm?

And Jesus looks at us and says, because that is what God does. And I, your Lord, have come for one thing: to invite you to participate in the life of God.

And in that Life, God weeps for the love of you. God forgives you. God turns the other cheek to you. God refuses to give up on relationship with you, with anyone. And so if you would dare surrender to the fullness of the life of God…then so it will be for you. For all of us. For at last, in Christ, we will see as God sees and we will love as God loves.

You might even say we will become the people that our stacks of greeting cards say we are–that all of those thank you notes and letters of apology and kind greetings are what will endure of us, once everything else is stripped away.

To become the words we long to hear: this is, at its heart, what discipleship is. Like Joseph and Jesus before us, this is our participation in the life of God. It is God’s sentimental, foolish, stubborn, unabashed, greeting-card-worthy love, now pouring out of us. We who are so used to being strategic in our affections, careful in our compassion….Jesus says, no, the Christian life is something else. It is becoming an unashamed collector of heartfelt sentiments. It is stumbling over teetering stacks of forgiveness. It is letting grace accumulate in your desk drawers. It is to die with nothing but little bundles of faithfulness left behind as our legacy. It is the opposite of the way the world works, and that is the entire point.

So with this in mind, I have a proposal for you. It’s rather simple, maybe even silly, but so be it. This week, I propose that you go out and buy a greeting card and send it to someone. Maybe someone in this community you want to acknowledge. Maybe a friend or a family member whom you haven’t talked to in a while. Maybe even to someone you need to forgive,

Whoever it is, send them a card with a little note, saying whatever it is that you need to say. I wonder what would happen if you did.

It might be that years from now, when most of our other things have fallen apart or been given away, that this part of you will endure. It might be that your notes will still be tucked away somewhere, precious and sacred, a reminder that you were tethered to something, to someone for this brief moment while we navigated the face of the earth together. And that somehow, even with all that is broken all around us, we still fit together, and wept upon each other for love, and at last became the words we longed to hear.

Because God knows: that’s the one thing worth holding onto.

Jackrabbit: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, February 9, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Isaiah 6:1-13 and Luke 5:1-11.

Fun fact about me: at least three or four times, I’ve traveled the remnants of Route 66, that famous old highway which once stretched from Chicago to Los Angeles. A lot of the roadside attractions and cafes and motels from its heyday in the 40s and 50s have been lost to time, but even now it’s a beautiful and worthwhile trip, a sort of pilgrimage road across America, where odd wonders abound.

For example, as you drive across northeastern Arizona, just a bit south of Navajoland, you might notice these signs along the desert highway. They’re ambiguous, just old wooden billboards painted bright yellow, no words, just the silhouette of a big black rabbit and a number of miles counting down.

150 miles, one sign says…and then 100….and 50….and 10…and as you drive across the empty landscape with not much else to look at, you find yourself overly invested in these mysterious signs, wondering, what exactly are we counting down to? What is that big rabbit all about? What or who is waiting out there across the desert, across the hours and the miles and long, winding road?

So you can imagine that, by the time you get to the end of the countdown, you have to pull off the highway to see whatever this thing is that has been tantalizing, taunting, beckoning you. And as you arrive at the exit, there’s one last sign, bigger than all the rest, still bright yellow like the noonday sun with that big black rabbit and big red letters that spell out, at last, three words: HERE. IT. IS.

That’s all the sign says. Here it is.

And you better believe, like countless travelers before us, we turned off the highway to see what IT is. Nothing would have stopped me.

And do you know what’s there, shimmering in the desert sun, under the gaze of the big black rabbit?

A gift shop.

Yes, it’s just a gift shop. Mildly disappointing, perhaps. It’s the Jackrabbit Trading Post and it’s been there since 1949 offering t-shirts and cold drinks and restrooms for all those wide-eyed pilgrims.

But if that sounds underwhelming, fear not. Because there’s also a big statue of a jackrabbit in the parking lot, with a saddle attached to it, that you can mount for a completely absurd photo of yourself. And did I get up on that jackrabbit every single time I’ve stopped there, including when I was 35 years old? You bet your life I did!

Because, well, why not? Maybe the sign is right after all. Here it is, five miles outside of Joseph City, Arizona…as good a place as any to find whatever it is we’ve been looking for in this life.

As the years go by, I’ve found a sort of contemplative wisdom in that phrase, here it is. Especially when things don’t go quite the way I thought they would.

Bad diagnosis? Bad breakup? Tough election outcome? Before I can act purposefully, I have to start by saying, well, here it is. And, since it has always been true before, I also have to trust that God is not done with me just yet. In the meantime, the best I can do is to just get up on the jackrabbit so to speak, and accept the invitation of the present moment.

Because here it is, this moment we’ve been given. And there’s still abundant life to be found here. Besides, what I notice so often in Scripture is that that the mildly disappointing and the foolish and the transcendent often converge in surprising ways.

As it happens, we have two such stories in our readings this morning—two call stories where somebody gets less than what they bargained for. Here’s what I mean.

First there’s Isaiah. Forget the billboards, he’s just had a vision of the throne of God, a glimpse of the heavenly court singing the same song we do during the Eucharist, Holy, Holy, Holy Lord. And he’s been touched by the burning coal of truth and he feels ready. HERE I AM he cries out. HERE IT IS! Here is my time to shine, my opportunity to tell the world exactly how powerful God is!

But God says, no. That’s not quite how this works. In fact, the people will not hear you. They will not understand. No, as they tend to do, the people will look for other, smaller, more alluring salvations, the ones promised by the forces of this world with better marketing. No, God says, you, my prophet, you will be left alone in the dry desert, sitting up there on your jackrabbit, the cars whizzing past you. But even though you won’t understand it, I am asking you to get up on there anyway. Here it is.

And then there’s Simon Peter, who sees Jesus perform the miraculous sign of abundant fish at Lake Gennesaret. Peter, like Isaiah, is both impressed and overwhelmed by this show of power, and he tells Jesus, “go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man,” but we can also imagine he’s pretty excited to be in proximity to the One who can do such things. He may feel unworthy, but he wants to be among the inner circle of such a Lord.

But as we will come to see, Jesus does not end up saving the world through abundant displays of power. The fish thing is a bit of a head fake. Not because God can’t do impressive things, but because Jesus chooses not to, and it’s in the self-limiting, foolish weakness of God that true salvation becomes possible for us all. A Messiah who rides on the back of a donkey, which is not a jackrabbit, but pretty close.

And those, like Peter, who have been counting down the miles til their glimpse of the Messiah, are destined to be mildly disappointed, at least for a little while. But here it is.

God says to all of us still clamoring for an impressive sort of divinity who is nothing more than the satisfaction of our desires—God says, no. That’s not quite how this works.

I am the God of forgotten things…of forgotten trading posts and forgotten people on the side of the road. I am not in the halls of power and privilege and plenty. I am waiting for you out on the wilderness road, waiting to share a drink and a meal with you, out under the ramshackle sign that says, HERE IT IS. Here is what salvation is, at the intersection of the sublime and the absurd. Waiting for those brave, holy fools who understand that sometimes in this life, you just have to get up on the jackrabbit and go with it.

And really, we do.

In such a time as we are living through now, friends—a time of political crisis and climate crisis and cultural crisis, when Neo-Nazis are trying to set up their own signs above our highways and when it can feel like we are many miles from home—in such a time as this, we run a great risk as disciples of Jesus.

We run the risk of being so burdened by fear that we lose our ability to respond to the present moment with what it requires: defiant, purposeful joy. We run the risk of letting despair make us small and hard and cynical and incurious, terrified of the future and longing for the past, unable to get on with the somewhat absurd work of hope and love here, now, where it is needed. We cannot let that happen. We will not let that happen here.

At the risk of exhausting the metaphor, we need to get up on the jackrabbit—to clamber up onto the unapologetic foolishness of our proclamation, which is that Christ’s mercy and peace and kindness are more substantive than the evil we see. And even if it’s not as impressive or mighty as some of the other narratives out there, we have to go with it. Because that proclamation is the only thing that will save us.

And as for the ones who try to put up the billboards of hate and fear and petty grievance to lure people in—to them we point to our own unambiguous signs—to the Cross of Christ crucified for love’s sake and to the Risen Christ who defeated hatred for love’s sake, and we say, HERE IT IS. Here is the truth about about this world: foolish and transcendent and sometimes mildly disappointing, yes, but also lovely and good and worth not giving up on. Worth following. Worth looking a bit foolish for.

So, like those who have been called before us, here we are, too, Lord. Here we are, only beginning to understand what You are all about. Here we are, praying and serving and speaking truth and caring for our weary neighbors. Here we are, counting down the miles, trusting your promise, the one that waits for us at the end of the many lonely roads we have traveled.

Here we are, ready to just go with it, ready to speak your name and get up on that jackrabbit and tell the world, tell anyone who will listen—

Here it is. You who have been longing for whatever is on the other side of fear and disappointment.

Here it is.

The Other Part: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, January 26, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Luke 4:14-21, Jesus’ teaching in the synagogue at Nazareth.

It was the 5th grade, and I was about 10 years old, and I was enraged. When I tell you the reason, it will sound so trivial, but the stakes of things can feel big when you’re young.

Here’s the situation: I was in an after-school drama program where we picked a scene from any play to perform for parents and friends. I was really into theater as a kid, and so I took this very seriously. At 10, I was obsessed with Greek mythology (and yes, I know how nerdy that makes me sound, but so it was). And so I’d picked a scene from the ancient Greek tragedy Prometheus Bound for my partner and I, mainly because I wanted to play the role of the Greek god Hermes. It was my 10-year old dream in life to play the part of the Greek god Hermes. Did I mention I was not a particularly popular kid?

No matter. I’d picked out the scene and it was so good—Hermes, the messenger of the gods, comes to visit the mortal Prometheus, who is punished for stealing sacred fire from Mt. Olympus and giving it to humanity for those mundane things like staying warm and cooking food. And as Hermes, I would get to show up and make a solemn speech about all the ways Prometheus had violated the sacred order of the universe. It was going to be my shining moment as a Greek god!

And then, a nightmare situation: the teacher watched us rehearse and decided that, in fact, I should play Prometheus and the other kid would get to be Hermes. My dreams were dashed. He got to wear the cape and the fancy helmet and I had to be some sad, angry man tied to a chair, ranting and raving about justice. The indignity!

I won’t bore you with all the details, but the short version is that I did indeed end up playing Prometheus in that little scene, and among all the parts I ever played, I think it was the one that stuck with me most. Because what I couldn’t see at the time-what that wise teacher recognized-was that there was something deep within my own heart that needed to be set free by playing the other part. I am grateful, now, that that teacher dared challenge the part in which I had cast myself.

I wonder, though, friends—I wonder how often we are willing to let ourselves be challenged in the parts we have cast ourselves. I wonder what we do when the truth comes knocking insistently, telling us that we were meant for something more, something different than that to which we have become accustomed? Do we admit willingly, yes, oh, yes, of course, you’re right, my whole life has been built upon a pile of half-understood desires and misinterpreted signs. Or do we, perhaps, become a little bit enraged that someone dares challenge our carefully constructed sense of ourselves?

Jesus learned something about this in Nazareth after his teaching in the synagogue. Lamentably, our lectionary skips over a big part of this story. Because after saying “this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” Jesus tells his hometown crowd, in so many words, that their understanding of themselves as the only victims, as the only ones who will receive God’s mercy, is completely misguided—because God’s scope of concern includes not just the poor, the captives, and the oppressed on their side of the cultural and political divide, but also the ones they fear and resent.

Well, after hearing that, they don’t want to just tie him to a rock, they try to throw him off the top of a cliff. Tough crowd.

But we can’t be too hard on the crowd in Nazareth. Because every single one of us, in one way or another, would benefit from some reflection on the scope of God’s mercy, and how it includes those vastly different from us—and how Jesus’ message requires us to play a part in this world perhaps different from the one we would prefer.

A lot of ink has been spilled this week about the part that the church ought to play in political discourse in our country. The sermon offered by Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde this past Tuesday has generated, shall we say, keen interest among those both in support of what was preached and those outraged by it.

And it’s true, the mercy of God is outrageous. But what I found interesting in the debate is that there wasn’t much critique of the sermon’s content—which was, after all, taken directly from that useful preaching resource called the Bible. No, the complaint is mostly that it was an inappropriate time or place to say what was said. That it’s not the church’s role to speak into our civic life. That a direct plea for mercy towards the vulnerable, and especially towards those perceived by some as enemies, was a disturbance to the civility of the occasion. And yes, I suppose it was a disturbance of sorts.

But I hate to have to remind us all, 2000 years on from the death and resurrection of Jesus, but placid civility in support of the current social order is not the primary goal of coming into a church, as much as we have become accustomed to the church taking on that role.

Really, this whole uproar has helped me realize that the real problem is that too many folks think the church is just there as a sort of spiritual backdrop to their own headlining role in the world. That it’s just The Universe, starring Me and My Opinions. But then there’s that pesky gospel of Jesus Christ, always getting in the way of my good time.

No matter our outside affiliations, we would all do well to remember the part we are called to play when we step through these doors and into the liturgy–into an encounter with the sacramental and Scriptural presence of the Living God.

We would do well to remember that none of us is the main character in this play, that this is an ensemble piece, and that, whether we are a president or a pauper or Prometheus himself, we dare to come here to consider a power greater than any one of us and to which all of us will be held accountable in the end: the power of love, and truth, and justice, and yes, unfailing mercy, which Scripture teaches is the yardstick by which our lives will be measured.

And so today, as we consider with some urgency the role we and our church are to play in the present moment—on this day I would ask us to consider: do we understand what we are supposed to be about in this place? Do we understand that Jesus doesn’t just draw us here, week after week, to give us a snack and a pat on the head? Do we hear Jesus’ call upon our lives–his disturbing, surprising, humbling, but ultimately transformative invitation–to be like him, to take on his part in the world, to live as he actually lived, to die and rise again with him—liberating the oppressed, healing the sick, bearing good news to the poor, repairing the breach, trusting that love is more powerful than death and more important than mere civility?

Because the curtain is up now, friends, and the world is waiting for us to act, and the old bit parts we’ve been playing at aren’t going to cut it anymore. If you want untroubled civility….and an unexamined conscience…and an easy peace with the world as it is…then I’d say be careful coming into an Episcopal Church, because you might get more than you bargained for. You might get the whole story about how God loves you and how God loves everything and how God expects us to love each other unconditionally. We’re a whole lot of fun, I promise, but when it comes to speaking truth and living in love, we’re not playing around. Kind of like Jesus.

And it can feel scary sometimes to take on that part, I know. When I am tired and fearful, sometimes, I still say, gosh, God, couldn’t I just go back and play the part of Hermes—couldn’t I just stay aloof, untouched by sorrow, detached from the risks and the mess that love requires? And God sees me, and loves me, and says…no.

So be it.

St. Anne, we were meant for a life big enough, bright enough, brave enough to make those old gods on Mt. Olympus shudder. We were meant for the life of Jesus: uncivil and gentle and beautiful and true. And that life is now ours to live out, ours to share, ours to bring to bear upon the public square and in the deepest chambers of our hearts. It is the life we were created for.

It is the role, however surprising, that we and the whole church were born to play.

The Fire That Never Came: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, January 12, 2025, the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord, at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Luke 3:15-17, 21-22.

I’ve shared with you in the past how, when you live in California, you become acquainted with the risk of wildfire. You make an uneasy peace with it. Much of the year it’s in the back of your mind and then, when the risk level is high, you look nervously towards the hills, wondering if and when something might spark.

But because you never really know, most days you go about your business and go to work and do the dishes and pay the bills, carving out a sense of normalcy and telling yourself that, if it does happen, if the fire does come, somehow you will manage. Or maybe, in your less noble moments, you just figure it will happen to somebody else.

But the fires do come, in their own cruel time and manner, and it is hard to be prepared when they do. As we’ve seen this week in Los Angeles—as some of you know intimately well through the impact on friends and family members—the fires come without much warning, and they blaze and they creep up upon the homes and lives of people without much regard for their wealth or background or virtues or vulnerabilities.

They come, these fires, and they do what fires do—they consume. We know already this week of Episcopal churches and whole communities consumed by this most recent set of wildfires. We also know that we are living in a time when human-impacted climate conditions will only continue to increase the likelihood and intensity of such events. The unquenchable fires have come.

And maybe it’s just me, maybe when you grow up with this threat of flame and smoke, it has a formative effect..but I have to say that, as evocative as it is, I find little that’s romantic or alluring about most of the fire imagery in Scripture. I’m circumspect about declarations, like the one that John the Baptist makes in this morning’s text, about how God will come and burn and consume things for some divine purpose. There is nothing pretty or transcendent about that. Not when you have seen or known what fire can actually do, what it can take.

And yet that imagery is there for us to contend with. John, admonishing the crowds before Jesus’ appearance, warns of a Messiah who will come bearing unquenchable fire to burn up all that is wicked and unworthy. And I get it, he is angered by injustice and wants the people to look a bit nervously toward the hillsides, wondering when their reckoning will come. As prophets often do, he wants them to experience an uneasy peace with the world as they know it. He assumes that God will save the world through a display of vengeance and power, in billows of smoke and flame.

He is not alone in that, even today. I found a number of news articles this week in which people described the Los Angeles wildfires as “biblical” and “apocalyptic” and as being like a scene from “the battle of Armageddon.” Still, still, even if we don’t want to, we imagine and speak of God working through destructive forces, raining down judgment upon us like ashes, threatening at any moment to take away all that we know, or, in our less noble moments, to come and take from somebody else.

I wish we could loosen our grip on that fiery imagery somehow. Because I will tell you that so much of why I am Christian, why I was able to give my life over to the way of Jesus, is because of what actually happens in today’s Gospel after John’s dire predictions.

And it is this: that Jesus, the Son of God, appears in Galilee, the Incarnate Deity appears at last, coming over the hills…but the fire never comes. Not in the way that anyone expected anyway (and Pentecost is a story for another day).

No, on this day Jesus appears and it is not as a vengeful blaze cresting the ridge, but as a man ready to get down into the water like everyone else. A man ready to come alongside all of us in the uneasy peace we have negotiated with this life. A man who wants us hope for something more than mere escape and to believe in something more than just survival.

And truly, thank God for that. Because I will tell you, my friends, I am tired of fires, and of people who blithely traffic in the language of fire when talking about God and our common life. I am sick of “burn it down” and “let it burn” and of fire & brimstone theologies that devour human dignity in the name of purgation. I am sick of destruction—of bodies and landscapes and souls—and how they are cast as part of God’s saving mission.

I don’t want to settle for an uneasy peace anymore. I want the peace that the world cannot give, the peace born of water and Spirit. And today we see where it comes from—from the God who stands in solidarity with us in the River Jordan, whose only fire is the one burning in his heart with love.

Because John, for all his Spirit-inspired wisdom, got this part wrong, and it’s important that we don’t just read past his mistake. There’s a reason, in other versions of the story, that he is actually somewhat dismayed Jesus wants to be baptized with water. There is a reason, later from prison, John asks, are you the one we have been waiting for?

Because John himself is also discovering, as we must, that the true Messiah, the Christ, is not an inferno coming to gobble up everything we’ve tried to build; God is the one strengthening us and helping us to carry those buckets of water– all that blessed baptismal water–to put out all the fires we ourselves have started on this earth.

And yes, God will help us separate the wheat from the chaff within ourselves and in our world, but God will do so not through devastation but by the devastating power of his mercy and kindness.

And the thing is, we already know this. We already know, if we stop to reflect on it, where and how God shows up in the world. We know that God is not the one burning the hillsides of Los Angeles or blessing the gunfire in war zones. We know that God is instead with the firefighters and the first responders and the widows and the orphans and the volunteers and the communities of people who are sheltering each other and guiding each other into safety.

We know that Christ asks us to do the same for each other no matter what landscape we live in or what disasters befall us. We know this, because it is what Jesus demonstrated and proved the value of in his life, death, and resurrection. And we can’t let anyone distort this truth.

No matter what we must navigate in our time and in times to come, no matter how many times the fire looms at the edge of the horizon, we are still, and will always be, the people who proclaim the good news of the one fire that never came—that so-called fiery, angry God who instead appeared in the water, like a falling dove, like a gentle Word, stooping down from the misty heavens to scoop up our fears in his hands and bless them and say,

Peace. I am here. You don’t have to be afraid anymore, you who have been uneasy for so long. Step down into the water with me, where the flames cannot reach.

Drench yourself in love, and let us begin again.

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.