bible – Page 3 – By Another Road

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.

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.