Christian – Page 8 – By Another Road

Free: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on September 17, 2023 at Saint Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, Ohio. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 18:21-35.

As I have shared with many of you, when I was a kid, I would spend the summers in Michigan with my dad and my grandparents. There were a number of things about those vacations that I looked forward to all year long, and a lot of them had to do with food. First there was my grandma’s cooking and baking, which filled the house with mouth-watering fragrances throughout the day. Her fresh strawberry pie was the stuff dreams are made of. But another thing was the little general store that was just down the block, an old-fashioned kind of place that sold a few groceries and sundries, but in which the main attraction, at least for an eight year old, was the selection of ice cream and penny candies and trading cards.

My cousin, Mike, and I were particularly interested in that selection of trading card packets, and it was our singular mission each year to get our hands on enough money to buy them. Now, of course, we could have just asked our family for spare change, but at some point we decided to get a bit entrepreneurial.

So, for several summers we would take over the enclosed, rarely used front porch of my grandparents’ house and we turned it into a couple of “shops” of our own, cobbled together with odds and ends from some spare room of the house, and offering what was, in retrospect, a rather underwhelming selection of goods and services. One iteration was a restaurant that served plastic play food and real glasses of water, 10 cents a piece. Another, perhaps my most efficient business model, was simply setting up a desk in the porch and declaring that the house was now a hotel, and that our family members now had the privilege of paying 25 cents a night to sleep in their own beds.

But our parents and our grandparents were dutiful customers, and so we collected up our coins day by day and ran down to the general store, and spent them all on cards and candy, quite pleased with ourselves.

This is a very happy memory, of course, but I was thinking about it this week because it occurred to me that for all those summers, while my cousin and I were focused on the nickels and dimes and quarters that would buy us all of those treats we daydreamed about, we were less aware of the most wondrous thing of all: that when we got tired of playing and scheming and striving for coins, we could just go down the hall to our grandma’s kitchen, and there would be more food and more love than we knew what to do with. And in the end, that was the truly priceless treasure. I don’t have much use for those trading cards anymore, I don’t even know what happened to them, but I would give just about anything for another bite of my grandma’s strawberry pie at that kitchen table, surrounded by loved ones who are now long gone.

We spend so much of our lives, I think, in a similar posture—so focused on the measurement and acquisition of the things we want (or think we want) while failing to sit up and recognize the immense—but less quantifiable—blessings in our lives: the relationships that shape us and sustain us and guide us forward, the simple gifts of time and care freely given by the ones who love us. And if we’re not careful, we might spend our whole existence scrounging for penny candies while the true feast sits, beckoning yet unappreciated, just down the hall.

For me, at least, this image has helped me think about the parable that Jesus offers us in today’s Gospel, which is also, at its heart, about a person who doesn’t really understand what he is being given.

A king forgives the debt of a slave, or a servant, as some translations put it, but then this servant refuses to do the same for someone in debt to him, and is thrust back into the fear and scarcity with which he started.

We are told that this is a parable about forgiveness, and that somehow it should model for us what the Kingdom of Heaven is like. The tricky part is that this King, who many of us interpret to represent God, ultimately rescinds the forgiveness originally offered. So is this a “be good or else” type of story, such that we should be forgiving others out of fear of eternal punishment?

I don’t think so. I don’t think God’s mercy has conditions like that, and I don’t think forgiveness under duress is a healthy or life-giving way of understanding human relationships. No, I think this parable is suggesting that the heart of forgiveness—and the heart of really every virtue we try to embody—is rooted in a proper understanding and appreciation of what is truly important in life. And it is not the things that can be counted.

We are not hearing this parable in Jesus’ own time and place, so we might miss the key point that the amount of debt forgiven by the king, 10,000 talents, is not just a big amount, it is an absurd amount—it is more money than any empire had, more money than someone could conceive of. And so the king in this parable is not just telling the servant he can walk away from his debts. He is essentially saying to the servant, walk away from the entire notion of indebtedness. I am uninterested in measuring it anymore. You are free now. Everything is free now. Live as if this is true.

This is good news, but it is also strange news, for we are all too accustomed to counting the cost of everything, both literally and figuratively. And so the real mistake that the servant makes is that he does not comprehend the gift that has been given. The servant doesn’t understand that he is living in a kingdom where there is no longer any need for calculation, where there is no grasping and groveling, where there is no currency at all. Just the current of goodwill that encompasses all things, all people.

He doesn’t see it, or he refuses to see it, and so he keeps on counting the cost, he keeps on demanding payment from others, because that is what he knows how to do, and his inability to understand that another way is possible, his refusal to trust that another way has been given to him, sends him right back to the dead end where he started, back to the world that is easier to believe in, where Kings torture and no payment is ever enough. And to the extent that we have treated love and forgiveness and grace as commodities to be bought and sold and bartered, the same will be true for us. We will have missed the point. We will have squandered the true gift. That other realm, where everything is possible, will be lost to us.

So no, Jesus is not just saying be kind and forgiving or else. Jesus is saying, if you would enter into the Kingdom of God, if you would understand mercy, if you would know what it truly feels like to love and be loved, to forgive and be forgiven, then look up from your games, beloved children, stop playing shopkeeper. You have to realize that the important stuff is all free. You don’t have to spend your life scrounging for coins to purchase paradise. 10,000 talents are worthless in my sight; your heart is the true treasure.

Because this Kingdom is not, in fact, a hotel with a 25 cent nightly rate; it’s just the house we get to call home, if we choose it, and the light is always on in the front porch, and there’s a feast at the end of the hallway, luscious as strawberry pie, a slice for everyone, free of charge.

That’s what forgiveness is, when you get down to it: love without a price tag. And when we realize it is all free, then we will be free, too. Forever.

The Law: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, September 10, 2023 at Saint Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Romans 13:8-14.

One night when I was in my early 20s, I was out with a couple of people at a pub. One of them was the man whom I was dating at the time, and at some point in the evening we must have held hands or in some other way indicated that we were together. I got up to use the restroom, and as I was washing my hands, I suddenly heard a group of people who had assembled outside the bathroom door; it was clear that they were talking about me and that they were unhappy with my presence in their midst. As I opened the door, a group of about 8 people, men and women, surrounded me and started yelling at me. They called me names and said a number of things that were very hard to hear, but the thing I heard that has stuck with me in the years since is when one of the women yelled, “you’re breaking God’s law! You’re breaking God’s law!”

I was able to make my way through them somehow and I made a beeline for the front door. The people I was with followed me out and we quickly put some distance between ourselves and that place. Thankfully no one followed us.

Later that night after walking around and calming our nerves a bit, we paused by the river. The city we were in was near the coast, the air was warm and still, and as we rested and watched the moon reflecting upon the water, suddenly out of nowhere we saw a dolphin leaping out of the water, glistening in the dim light.

It was so perfect, so surreal, that it felt like a dream, and we fell silent with awe. And what struck me was how strange it was that a vision of such perfect beauty and an experience of such shame and fear could all exist in the span of one evening. And I knew, in a way that I couldn’t quite explain, that whatever God’s law was, whatever it meant to follow that law, it had more to do with this moment of silent wonder and unexpected beauty than it did with whatever those people had been screaming at me about inside.

I share that story with you not out of a sense of self-pity nor to vilify anyone. We all have our harms and our hurts to account for, and so I’ve tried my best to let that experience in the pub be an instructive one. And what it has taught me, what I fiercely believe because of it and because of other stories I’ve heard from people who are different in one way or another, is that we must continue to wrestle with the meaning and the purpose of the law recorded in Scripture as it has been received in Christian tradition. We must continue to ask ourselves what the Judeo-Christian law is meant to look like and sound like and the fruits that it is meant to bear in our own lives and in our world.

Because although it might be tempting sometimes, when confronted with the violence or prejudice perpetuated in its name, we cannot ignore the law or dismiss it as irrelevant to modern life. Because we are followers of Jesus, and earlier in Matthew’s gospel he says quite clearly: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.”

Such a conundrum: how do we honor what the Law represents—God’s eternal, unchanging desires for how we are to live—while also recognizing that the original writers of the Law were speaking to the needs and concerns of a highly particular culture and geography and context?

How do we arrive at a place where the Law by which we pattern our lives is both substantive and kind, both a defense against harm and yet also a gateway to liberation? How do we conceive of the Law in a way that guards against our most dehumanizing tendencies and yet is as beautiful and elemental and free as that dolphin cresting the shimmering water? Can such a Law be found and followed?

Yes.

Owe no one anything, Paul says this morning, owe no one anything except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet”; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.

Love is the fulfilling of the Law. If you take nothing else away from this sermon, I hope you will take that. Love is the fulfilling of the Law.

Or another way of saying it: the only true measure of the Law is love. The only true measure of whether we are obeying God’s Law is how well, how deeply, how broadly we are embodying love.

And so if you have, in your life, ever been told that you are unworthy, or if you have ever felt lost or forgotten, or if you have ever struggled to figure out how to be good enough, how to to be strong enough, how to simply be enough in a world that too often fixates on how we fall short, I want you to remember: love is the fulfilling of the Law.

And if you have witnessed the endless debates about what makes a person truly Christian, what makes a church truly Christian, what it means to follow God’s Law, then I want you to remember, love is the fulfilling of the Law.

And, yes, we can study the history and the context of Scripture to understand how and why the Law took the form it did in that time and place where it was first recorded. But we can also honor the truth that love takes on new contours, new understandings to meet the realities and the revelations of our present moment. And this is not weak or permissive-on the contrary, to love unreservedly is the bravest thing we can do.

Because if love is the true fulfillment of the law, well, love is scary. Love is risky and strange and it doesn’t always go the way you planned, it doesn’t always look the way you expected. And love demands things of you, it demands you to bend and grow and weep and dance. It requires you to sit beneath the moon and hold pain and beauty alongside one another and still say yes, yes, I will still believe in love, even when the world is ugly and cruel. I will still believe in Love Incarnate, even though he was crucified. And I will still believe that love endures, that it persists beneath the surface of life, cresting unexpectedly to dazzle us, to save us, to remind us of what is true.

How will love show up for us this year at Saint Anne? How will we discover it amidst the pain and promise of our own lives? How will be give ourselves over to its invitation as we begin a new season of ministry and worship and community? I urge you to listen to how God is stirring your heart into action.

Whether it is offering a word of support to someone who is struggling with grief, or a word of hope to a society struggling with injustice; whether it is tending the lawn or tending to the shattered fragments of someone’s spirit; whether it is learning to sing or helping others find their own voice; studying Scripture or simply sitting in awe beneath the moon—no matter what you do, if it is offered in love, then it is one more indication of the coming Kingdom, and it is one more revelation of the unchanging truth that will guide us and sustain us in any age:

Love is the fulfilling of the law. And love is the one thing that can never truly be broken.

Two Fires: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, September 3, 2023 at Saint Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Exodus 3:1-15 and Matthew 16:21-28.

Throughout the wider church, this month begins what is called the Season of Creation. It’s a time when we consider our interrelatedness with all created things and how our connection to the natural elements might shape the elements of our faith. So today, in that spirit, I want to tell you two stories about fire.

The first will probably sound familiar: when I was a kid, I spent summers up in the north woods of Michigan, and one of my favorite memories is of the campfires that my dad and my grandpa would build out by the lake. There were s’mores, of course, and ghost stories, and as the evening wore on, a companionable silence settled in as the wood snapped and the flames danced in the darkness. And what I love about that memory of fire is not that it was something unique to me or my family, but that it felt like something that people have been doing forever. I suspect most of us have, at some point, experienced a similar quiet pleasure around a fire pit, where, as the night enfolds us, busyness gives way to simply being, and the amber glow creates a sense of closeness and belonging for all those who are bathed in its light.

The second story is less comforting. When I was in seminary in northern California, having returned to the state after many years away, one of the things that was hard to ignore was the pervasive and intense threat of wildfire, far more so than when I grew up there as a child. Due to the corrosive effects of climate change, the fires across our continent are bigger and more widespread than ever before, and each year one must live under their shadow, both literally and figuratively.

There was one fall where the smoke from nearby fires poured into Berkeley and the sky was gray like fog and the sun was red and we had to wear N95 masks to go outside long before COVID made them necessary for other reasons. And I remember how my friends and I discussed whether we should pack a bag with essentials ready to grab should the wildfire jump to the nearby hillsides. We wondered where we would escape to if they did. I thought of that again, recently, when smoke enveloped the midwest from Canadian wildfires and while watching videos of people flee the town of Lahaina as Maui burned.

This is the duality of fire: it warms and sustains, but it also consumes and destroys. We need it, and we fear it. We rejoice in its beauty, but we ignore its power at our peril.

And so perhaps it is no surprise that fire often appears in key moments of Scripture where God is revealed to humanity, for that same duality characterizes our relationship with the Holy. God is the source of our life and yet also of our trembling. God is the light of belonging and is also the burning heat that lays bare our pretenses of safety. And, as Scripture attests, the challenge of life with God is to learn how to hold both of these understandings at the same time.

When Moses sees the burning bush, he is not immediately afraid, but attracted. This fire in the wilderness that burns but does not consume is not exactly a campfire, but it is a sign of God’s desire to gather in the people of Israel and tell them a new story. Moses and the burning bush form an image of humanity drawing together in communion with its Creator; and Moses’ experience suggests that when we gather in close to listen to God, we too will hear a promise of deliverance; we too, in the companionable silence, might hear the name of the One who abides with us.

This story reminds us that part of our calling is to form communities where everyone and anyone can come hear the story of how God will liberate and heal all of creation. And even if we, like Moses, feel unworthy or unprepared to take part in that story, we are part of it, because the place we are standing is already holy ground.

But gentle warmth is only half the story. Because this morning we also hear Jesus telling his disciples—in fiery, unsparing language—about the true nature of discipleship: the necessity of death and relinquishment and the searing pain of the cross that he will soon experience. We do not need to indulge in theologies that glorify suffering nor should we promote the idea that people’s pain is itself holy. But we do have to acknowledge that God’s activity in the world is not always cozy; it’s not limited to upholding that which comforts us.

Through the Cross of Christ, God is like a wildfire, laying waste to the structures and the systems and the sins that confine and subjugate and placate; God’s intention is to incinerate them with justice; God means to engulf them in peace, so that something new might spring up. And this type of divine fire is dangerous—dangerous to the powerful, dangerous to the complacent, dangerous to anything within us our around us that stands in the way of the Kingdom’s coming. Get behind me, Satan, Jesus says to Peter, not because he hates Peter but because he rejects Peter’s assumptions of comfortable messiahship, of self-satisfied discipleship, and he intends to burn away those parts of ourselves that resist God’s mission in the world. As John the Baptist once said, “the one who is coming after me …will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” Now we begin to see what he meant.

So, two stories about fire, and two stories about God’s presence in the world. Two stories that are part of our own story, which must be held in tension and told and lived into, again and again, in every generation.

How are we, at Saint Anne, gathering others in toward the burning bush? How are we creating a community with space enough for everyone to share their story, to delight in fellowship, to sing and study and pray and learn together? And how are we making sure others know that this fire burns as a sign for all people? Because it’s important to remember that Moses’s encounter with God in the desert was not a private revelation. It was the initiation of a public mission, one that radiated outward with light and heat and hope. There is a story about the world that does not end in division or oppression or fear. Are we telling that story beyond these walls? Are we inviting people to gather ‘round, to come and rest in its light? This is the call of the burning bush.

At the same time, how are we, at Saint Anne, taking up the Cross as the sign of God’s categorical rejection of all that would harm and oppress and stifle the flourishing of life on this planet? Because it’s not enough for us to gather around the campfire while the world burns. Jesus could have stayed in Galilee telling stories with his friends if that’s all that was needed to save creation.

But he didn’t. He took on the Cross—the ultimate symbol of degradation and cruelty—in order to consume it with the power of his love. And we who would follow him, we, too, have to look for the crosses of our own time—the failings, the fault lines, the dehumanizing tendencies of our hearts and our culture—and we have to take them up and take them on, speaking the word of love that is like fire, so that the crucifying forces of this world will be revealed for what they are: a lie. A delusion. A pile of ashes. This is the call of the Cross.

The good news that I have already witnessed at Saint Anne is that we are engaged in both of these things—the gathering in around the fire, and the setting the world aflame with love. But as we prepare for another program year, as we prepare for a new season of ministry together, I encourage you to consider how you are taking part in these two stories yourself, whether through education, through prayer, through advocacy and justice-seeking, through service, through pastoral care, or through the many ways that we build up and enrich life in this community. I hope you will make that commitment, knowing that you will never be walking alone as you do so.

Because here’s the thing: God is already doing what God will do in the world: beckoning and illuminating, dismantling and renewing. Our choice, our vocation, our glorious gift and responsibility is whether we will join in, whether we will rest in the light, and whether we will become like holy fire ourselves, fierce, fluid, and free.

In the end, it’s not two stories about fire, but one. Just one story, reconciled in the burning heart of Christ, one story that holds all of life, that holds all of creation, and it is God’s story and, if we so choose, of we so dare, it is also ours.

Seen: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on August 27, 2023 at Saint Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Exodus 1:8-2:10, Romans 12:1-8, and Matthew 16:13-20.

Some years ago, there was an essay published in the New York Times and it was tantalizingly titled, “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This.” Now, I admit that I was rather skeptical when I saw that title; it sounded like one of those ads you see on the internet, offering “one weird trick” to make you look ten years younger or to regain your lost hair. As you can see, I have not generally taken advantage of those ads.

But being single at the time, I was intrigued by the idea of a surefire method for finding love, so I read on. The author, Mandy Len Catron, described a study done in the 90s by psychologist Dr. Arthur Aron, which suggested that significant levels of connection between two people could be achieved very quickly by asking one another a series of 36 vulnerable questions over a 90 minute period. After asking all of the questions, according to the Times essay, you were then supposed to gaze into the eyes of the other person for *exactly* four minutes and…voila. Love.

If this sounds a bit far-fetched to you, I get it, though for the record, in both the original study and in the essay, some marriages did emerge from this initial moment of connection. So, hey, you never know. Dating is tough, you have to get creative.

But romance aside, it does make sense to me that there would be a unique sort of potency in the combination of knowing and seeing someone with great intentionality. So often, we only casually consider the people in proximity to us, even the ones we are around a great deal. We know their names, maybe some of their hobbies or associations, and their general appearance, but how often do we look, really look at them? How often do we seek to know, really know, something substantive about their inner life or their memories or their dreams? For that matter, how often do we strive to see and to know ourselves in that way?

It can be a little scary, if we’re honest, to know and to be known on that level. Maybe we fear that if someone actually sees us as we are, all of us, every mistake, every quirk, every wrinkle, we will become less lovable in their eyes. And maybe we fear if we see others in their fullness, we won’t know what to do with it, we won’t be up to the task of loving them in the way they need.

I’ve been on both sides of that equation. I think of the times when I have been hesitant to share my story and my identity with others for fear of rejection. And I think of the times, whether in my hurry or my hard-heartedness, that I haven’t looked into the eyes of that person seeking assistance on the street, my gaze downcast, hiding from them, hiding from our shared humanity. Maybe you’ve experienced these things as well: opportunities missed to be seen, to see, to experience the connection that only comes from open eyes and open hearts.

But we learn in Scripture time and time again that the flourishing, the healing, and the salvation that we seek can only be found when we dare to look and to be looked upon, in that space of mutual recognition, both with our neighbor and with God.

In our Exodus story, it is the willingness of the midwives to see the beauty and the humanity of the Hebrew children that gives them the courage to defy Pharaoh’s edict.

And St. Paul is encouraging a certain type of self-disclosure in the letter to the Romans when he invites the faithful to ‘present [their] bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God” offering up not just the parts of themselves that seem impressive or strong or unmarred, but the totality of themselves, their creaking bones and their broken hearts and their unanswered questions, to let all of it be placed upon the altar of life, where God in Christ will see it all, and hold it all, and render it all into something beautiful.

But part of the strange and lovely mystery of the gospel is that the work of seeing and being seen is not humanity’s alone. Because in Jesus, God’s own life is laid out for us to see, it is placed on the altar, too, that we might know him and render something beautiful from divine self-disclosure.

And so God stands before us with his own list of vulnerable questions, his own desire to look us in the eye for four minutes, or maybe forever, to give us a glimpse of his eternal longing for us.

This is what we encounter in today’s Gospel passage, in that all important question on Jesus’ lips, perhaps the most vulnerable question that God has ever asked of humanity: Who do you say that I am?

Who do you say that I am, my friends, my children, my infuriating and precious creation? Who do you say that I am, now that we are face to face? Am I another prophet? Am I another king? Am I a projection of your own desires? Am I an instrument of your political agendas? A benefactor to meet your needs? Or do you see, do you know, do you feel the way that it is much more than that, do you sense how heaven erupts in the space between us, the way that an undying love weaves in and out of every question I ask you and every story I share? Do you understand who I am and how far I have come in order that you might understand?

And if you understand, can you love me? Can you love me back, as I love you?

Who do you say that I am?

And Peter, on behalf of the other disciples, on behalf of all of us who would follow, says,

You are the Messiah. You are the Son of the Living God.

You are the One we’ve waited for. You are the Love of our Lives, you are the Love of Life itself. Yes, we understand.

And I like to think that Jesus smiles in that moment because at last God knows what it feels like to be seen.

If we want to know what heaven on earth can look like, how we might participate in it day by day, this moment is instructive. For if the God of the Universe came to be with us in the flesh, that we might see and know and name him as our own truest love, then perhaps our interactions with one another should reflect this.

Perhaps, on the most basic level, our discipleship begins simply by looking, really looking, into the eyes of the people we encounter—the familiar ones and the strangers, the friends and yes, even the enemies—especially the enemies—and saying, yes, I see you. I see you. At the very least I want to see you. And while I’m at it, let me show you something of myself, too, and maybe in that brief moment of vulnerability, when we behold each other, something new will begin to take root in each of us, something that feels a little bit like falling in love, even if only for a moment. It’s like one weird trick to change the world.

You might be wondering if I ever tried the experiment in that essay. Sort of. Matt and I have asked each other some of the questions, and they’re really good. The four minutes of eye contact still feels a little daunting to me.

But it has reminded me that one of the most fundamentally important things we can do, and one of the bravest, is simply to see what is, and to love what is, and to believe that we, too, are worthy of being seen and loved. Because if you look closely enough, no matter whom you meet, you will always be looking into the face of the Holy One, if you choose to recognize him.

Just like the essay said, to fall in love with anyone—or really, to fall in love with everyone—do this.

Do-Over: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, August 20, 2023 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 15:21-28, Jesus’ interaction with a Canaanite woman.

Have you ever looked back at some moment in your life and wished you could have a do-over? I know that it’s popular to say things like “no regrets” and “everything happens for a reason,” but if I’m perfectly honest, there are plenty of things I would change if I could. Some of them are a bit trivial, like my questionable fashion choices in high school (though some of these, as I approach 40, already seem to be coming back around).

But some of the regrettable things are a bit harder and heavier: the things in my life done and left undone, the things said and left unsaid. They jangle around in my memory like a set of keys—keys for doorways that can no longer be opened—tarnished and jagged and yet hard to throw away.

Truth be told, though, I am mostly ok with that. While I don’t think it’s helpful to myself or anyone else to wallow in regret, I do think there is value in remembering what has not gone well, what has been broken within us and broken by us, because it informs how we can make different choices in the present and on into the future.

This is true not just for individuals, but for communities and nations, too, all of whom must reckon with the more painful aspects of their histories if they ever hope to unlock the shackles that bind their greatest ideals, to liberate their deepest and most beautiful dreams.

We don’t get a do-over, exactly, but we get an infinite number of opportunities, as long as we live, to do better, to discern and to grow in wisdom, informed by our past but never imprisoned by it.

And this not just a sort of humanistic self-improvement philosophy, but the fundamental arc of Scripture, a story of promise and regret and repentance and redemption, a story which is itself filled with the messy choices of people and of nations wrestling with a Divine presence and power only partially understood, and yet who are drawn, always, always, into a new revelation of the breadth and the depth of God’s infinite power and unfailing ability to redeem our complicated histories.

I’ve been pondering all of this about do overs and doing better because, I think, it will help us wrestle with our challenging Gospel text this morning. Not solve it, but wrestle with it.

Let’s just name the hard thing up front: Jesus is, to say the least, not kind to the Canaanite woman; he associates her and her people with dogs, and seems uninterested, at first, in healing her daughter. And we could, as many have, spend a lot of time wondering whether he was having his own regrettable moment or whether he was, in some opaque Divine way, testing the woman’s faith. Given who Jesus is, neither of these two choices is particularly easy or comfortable.

But it is also good for us to step back and consider that for the disciples, and even for the original hearers of Matthew’s gospel, the truly remarkable thing in the narrative is not Jesus’ commitment to the children of Israel, nor his verbal sparring with the woman, but the fact that, ultimately, she is a Canaanite who receives God’s blessing.

For if Israel’s troubled collective memory is a set of old keys, their relationship with the Canaanites is a particularly heavy and sharp one—the Canaanites are the people who originally inhabited the Promised Land, they were the ones displaced and slaughtered by Joshua’s armies, they were among the ones subjugated by the Kingdom of Israel and even now, in Jesus’ time, under Roman rule, the Canaanites are still a people whose name evokes that strange mixture of pride and fear when we encounter those whom we have othered past the point of recognition.

And all of this, all of this spilled blood and rage and this faded ghost of empire is heaped upon the Canaanite woman—this woman who has surely knelt at her child’s bedside, eyes brimming with tears, praying for her to make it; this woman who shouts in the street; who cries out for help; who boldly kneels before Jesus and seeks her daughters survival. She is a woman of unquestionable courage, but as a Canaanite she is also a symbol of all that Israel has wrought, and all that they have lost. No wonder they want to silence here and send her away. We often try to ignore those who remind us of our own wounds.

But there’s something we have to understand about Jesus, something which both explains and underscores the significance of what happens next, the fact that he doesn’t send her away.

From the very beginning, when he was born as the Son of David in Bethlehem, Jesus has carried both the burden and the promise of Israel within his flesh—their chosenness and their chastening. We might even say that throughout his life, Jesus has embodied and recapitulated the original story of Israel.

And thus, Jesus, like Israel, is exiled into Egypt and then brought back; and like Israel he is sent into the desert to be tested and formed; and like Israel he bears out the weighty tradition of the prophets in his teaching and his miracles. And in all of these instances, he gathers up the glory and the pain and the belovedness of his people to bring it into an ever deepening level of Divine intimacy, knitting Israel’s story of liberation into the very fabric of creation, that it might become everyone’s story, in every time, in every nation.

Which makes his encounter, today, with the Canaanite woman, all the more significant, because we cannot forget that Israel’s history, its journey, is political and territorial, not just theological. And so now Jesus stands here, as Israel once did when they crossed with their armies to the other side of the Jordan, he stands here once again holding the life of a Canaanite in his hands, bearing the ancient grudges and the ancient fears of his people on his shoulders, and….he lays them down.

He lets this mother’s love, and her faith, and her fierce determination change the story. O Woman, he says, great is your faith, and while the past cannot be erased, somewhere a new has opened, and suddenly the Kingdom of Heaven is bigger than Israel alone, bigger than any one nation. And while the children of the ones who spilled each other’s blood cannot get a do-over, they can do better. They can tell a new story, a story in which the daughter of a Canaanite is as beloved and valued as anyone else, and in which the only conquering power is mercy, and where the only Promised Land is the one big enough for everyone.

Can we tell that story, too? Can we show the world what it looks like to do better, even if we can’t get a do-over on the most painful parts of our own history? Can we lay down our own ancient enmities and fears and misplaced nostalgia so that the best of who we have been might inform who we yet might become? These are deeply personal questions as well as collective ones for our church and for our world.

But the good news of the gospel is that the answer is always YES. Yes, there is something on the other side of regret. Yes, there is something on the other side of failure and fear. Yes, there is a place where we won’t need all those old keys jangling in our pockets after all, because in that place all the doors will be flung wide open, and no one will be shut out, and everything that has been lost will be found and made whole.

Call that place what you will: call it the Kingdom, call it the new Creation, or call it Canaan; by any name and by God’s grace we’re heading to that land of promise together, and when we arrive, I suspect it will feel like this: waking up to a mother’s face, brimming with joyful tears, saying, my child, all is well. I am here. You made it.

Love > Chaos: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on August 13, 2023 at St. Anne Episcopal Church in West Chester, OH, on the occasion of my first service as Rector. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 14:22-33, when Jesus walks to the disciples across a stormy sea.

Anyone who has ever moved, whether across the country or the globe, or even just across town, knows that it can be an experience of utter chaos. And although I was determined, back when my call to St. Anne was finalized, that for once I would have an incredibly organized and orderly moving process, and that I would have all my boxes packed weeks in advance, life had other ideas. A confluence of events, both planned and unplanned, conspired to find me, just several days before the moving truck arrived, drowning in piles of books and papers and boxes and yet more books, questioning why on earth I ever felt it necessary to acquire three separate copies of Shakespeare’s complete works and a cardigan sweater collection large enough to rival Mr. Rogers (you’ll see those in the fall).

One evening, as I sifted through the clutter and felt a rising anxiety that it all might rise up and swallow me whole, like Jonah in the belly of the fish, I opened a box of old papers and came across a collection of cards and letters, mostly from college days, some even older than that, and I started reading them. There were birthday cards from my late father; letters my mom sent me when she was living in Africa; postcards from old friends I haven’t seen in years. And as I sat there, reading through them, reminded of all the places I been and the people who have loved and cared for me so well along the way, I looked around at the disorder of my apartment and my life and I had a feeling of clarity, of reassurance, that yes, even here, even in the midst of change, in the midst of upheaval, love would sustain me, just as it always has.

Those moments of chaos, both large and small, are no stranger to any of us, I’m sure. No matter who we are or where we come from, there are turbulent seasons of life, when the safe and familiar fall away and we are left out in the open, unsure of how to navigate, or even just how to keep our head above water. And it is perhaps quite natural for us, in such moments, to assume that the resolution to chaos is its opposite: order. safety. calm. Once I get everything in my life in order, then it’ll all be ok. Once I get all my books and cardigans stacked and sorted, it will all be ok. Somewhere, over the rainbow, just on the other side of the chaotic present, there will be a moment where life makes perfect sense and nothing is complicated.

There’s just one little problem—that perfect order which we seek never quite comes to pass. Someone gets sick, or an unexpected bill comes along, or the person we expected to stick around says goodbye, or we simply have too much to do and not enough time. And the waters rise, and we feel, once again, like the forces of chaos are stronger than our best laid plans.

Surely the disciples felt a bit like this when they were out in that boat, battered by the storm on the sea. In the passage just before this, Jesus has just miraculously fed over five thousand people, so they’re all feeling pretty good about themselves, and then he says, take that boat and go over to the other side, and that seems straightforward enough for a group that includes some fishermen. But then the storm comes, and Jesus is nowhere to be found, and they are tired, and afraid, and the forces of chaos, both literal and proverbial, the dark and restless deep, the cresting wave, the rising anxiety, seems ready to overtake them, and any pretense of control, of order, of safety, is carried away on the howling wind.

And then, suddenly, in the midst of the chaos, there is Jesus, walking towards them on the water, saying do not be afraid, saying, take heart, saying, do not be afraid, saying come.

And I think it is crucial–if we are to understand what this gospel might be telling us about navigating the chaotic storms of our own time and of our own lives–it is absolutely crucial to note that Jesus does not make this invitation to step out of the boat after he has calmed the wind, but before. He speaks from out of the whirlwind, as God did to Job. He is, in effect, saying to Peter (and thereby to us) come out and walk with me on the troubled waters; come and stand out here, where there is more beauty than there is safety; out here where there is more meaning than there is order; and know that I have come to you, across the sea, across the waters of eternity, not always to make things simple, but to make them true.

For it is here, in that space where nothing is familiar and yet where everything is possible, where a hand reaches out to guide us into the unknown, it is here that Jesus reveals good news for anyone frustrated by the inescapable complexities of life: that the true opposite of chaos is not order. The true opposite of chaos is not safety, nor simplicity. It is love. The opposite of chaos is love.

For when things fall apart, as they sometimes do, and when things get messy, as they often will, whether in our personal lives or in our families or communities or in the world around us, when the piles of problems and to-dos loom up and threaten to swallow us whole, it is love that will reveal itself, even in the midst of the chaos, like an old letter in a moving box, like a hand clasping yours in the darkness, like the Son of God holding us close within the roar of the sea. It is only love that is more powerful than chaos, not because love eliminates chaos, but because chaos, no matter how hard it tries, cannot eliminate love. Chaos can wreck our best laid plans, but it cannot drown out love.

And you know this already, each of you and all of you together, surely. Because the divine spirit of love is alive and strong at St. Anne, and I have already heard from so many of you how that love has sustained you through occasional seasons of change and challenge in your lives, just as it has through many seasons of joy.

And I know in my heart that we are embarking, this day, on a new season of joy together, but I am also comforted by the reminder that even when we must face and solve challenges together, even when things get a little complicated or confusing or messy, as they sometimes do, it is that love—love of God and neighbor and of one another—that will carry us through any storm.

And it is that kind of love—the wild and free kind that is undaunted by chaos; that doesn’t hesitate to get its feet wet; that doesn’t mind troubling the waters for the sake of justice or navigating the unknown for the sake of spiritual depth—it is that Jesus-type of love that this world needs so desperately right now. And that’s the kind of love we’re going to continue cultivating here and sharing with everyone who comes through these doors and those beyond this place who need to hear about what happens here. Believe me, they need to hear about it.

Because how marvelous it is that the God of the universe, the Lord of all creation, the One who breathed over the swirling waters at the morning of the world, is coming to find us, still, on this very morning, undeterred by any storm, unstoppable, unimaginably determined to love us, saying, sighing, singing, roaring that invitation into the wind:

Take heart.

Do not be afraid.

Come.

Stories: A Goodbye Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, July 16, 2023, my final service as Associate Rector at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23, Jesus’ parable of the sower.

I still remember quite clearly the first time I saw Trinity. It was late evening in early April of 2019, just over four years ago. I had flown into Fort Wayne from California that day for my interview weekend, and Fr. T.J. picked me up at the airport and dropped me off at my hotel after a welcome cocktail. But I was still wide awake, restless, a bit nervous, my body on west coast time.

So I took a walk down Main Street in the dark, past the stately Courthouse, past the workers closing up shop at the Coney Island, past Henry’s, then left on Fulton Street, and suddenly there it was in front of me, lit up, its gold-hued stone walls illuminated by flood lights, a beacon in the still spring night. And I stood there on the corner, looking up at the steeple, and I felt a strange, thrilling sense of knowing, like when you fall in love, and I thought, maybe, just maybe, the long and winding road of my life has led me all the way here.

And so it did. And the courthouse and the Coney Island and Henry’s and especially these old stone walls have come to hold all sorts of memories and meanings that I could not have imagined back then on that April night, back before I was a priest, before COVID, before I came to know and treasure your names and your faces and your stories, before we navigated the ups and the downs of these four years alongside one another, praising God and praying for each other and engaging, week by week, the graceful rhythm of the liturgy. I could not have imagined all the blessings and the lessons of these years, and how they would leave such an indelible mark on my heart.

But here we are. And although four years go by so quickly, I know that the story that began on that April night and which ends, for me, on this July morning, will be one of the most cherished and enduring stories of my life.

But one of the interesting and oddly comforting things that I have learned during my ministry at Trinity, and something that I think is true for all of us who spend time in this place, is that within these walls, our beginnings and our endings are all layered on top of one another, interlocking like those golden stones—time is a bit slippery, and what is seemingly lost to us lives on.

Just as it is in the liturgy itself, where Alpha and Omega come together, where righteousness and peace kiss, I find that the past and the present commingle in these hallways. Priests and parishioners long gone, long dead, even, are still part of the living memory of this place. One can sit here in the nave on a quiet afternoon, the sunlight bathing the walls in color, and sense the presence of those who came before, the ones who are themselves carried, now, on the light, a thousand fragments of faith, hope, and love, still abiding here.

And so when things change, when stories end, when people leave, or move away, or even die, these endings are gently incorporated into that which does not end. They are held in trust, like a precious volume added to the shelf, an entry into our one shared story. It is a story that began long before any one of us, and that will continue long after all of us. Each of us comes and contributes what we can while we can, and then we hand it off to God and to the future.

And as hard as it is to leave, I find peace in the knowledge that my offering is just one of many; for there is something good and necessary and holy to feel, in this life, like you have been part of something far larger than yourself alone. Trinity is a place where each of us can be part of something large, something magnificent, something eternal, even, if we give ourselves over to it.

And that is so, of course, not simply because of some magic within these stone walls, but because this is the house of God; it is the place where our individual stories collide not only with one another’s and those of our forebears but with the one timeless story of God’s passionate and undying love for us and for all of creation.

And in a world and a culture that so often tells us that it is up to us alone to determine what is real and true, to wrest some scrap of meaning from the happenstance of our lives, to navigate our way between the lonely waystations of existence and find solace only in ourselves, in this place we learn that this is not so. We learn that we were not made to be alone and that we will not be alone, in the end. We learn that God has knit himself into our stories and has knit us into his own, all-encompassing story.

I think this is part of the reason that Jesus, the incarnate God, loves to teach his followers in stories and parables. Not just to be obscure or confusing, but to remind us that the whole of salvation is the imaginative exercise of a Creator who longs to re-enchant the world.

God longs for us to feel a sense of wonder, like the child we used to be, and so he tells us stories of sowers and seeds and soil and sunshine so that we might begin to realize that the Kingdom of God is as close to us as the ground upon which we stand, that this Kingdom grows, somehow, when we recognize that we are a part of everything and that everything is a part of us.

In parables like the one we heard this morning, the parable of the sower, Jesus is not telling us about various types of earth so that we can determine which soil sample fits our own individual story and circumstance—whether we by ourselves are rocky or thorny or rich and fertile. Instead, he is asking us whether we can dream of and bring into existence a world where all might flourish of fertile ground; where all might be fed by the harvest of a righteousness deep and vibrant as the Indiana cornfields; where all might know the abundance that is possible when we love and care and tend to one another, as we have here. That’s the story God wants us to be a part of. That’s the story I have found here with you.

For God knows that too many of us, myself included, have felt what it is to be trampled down like the dust; to be caught among the thorns and stones. God knows how we have walked endlessly through the night, down unfamiliar streets, down long and winding roads, seeking our place in this world, and that sometimes we need a new promise, a new vision to illuminate the darkness, to dazzle us with its golden possibilities, to give us that strange, thrilling sense of knowing, like when you fall in love. Because God wants you to fall in love again–or for the first time–with him, with who he has made you to be, with this world and all who are in it, with the unique story that has brought you safe thus far, and with the new, shared story that is still being written.

How good it is, my beloved friends, that our paths have converged in this place. How good it is that the story of God’s love, the one that brought us together, will never truly end. And if you ever find yourself feeling lost, or alone, or unsure about your place in this world, may I commend to you the simple reassurance of these old stone walls, softly glowing in the darkness, and the Spirit that abides herein, which will never forget you, nor me, nor any moment of what we have found and cherished in this place, even long after we are gone.

So thank you. Thank you for letting me be part of your stories. Thank you, God, for letting me be part of Trinity’s story. And so, until we meet again, in that place and time where all our stories become one, world without end: my gratitude and my love.

Sleep: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, June 11, 2023 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary texts cited are Genesis 12:1-9, Romans 4:13-25, and Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26.

The other night, I couldn’t sleep.

Maybe you’ve had one of those nights, too, where you go to bed and turn off the lights and as you lie there, suddenly all of the questions and the challenges you are facing loom up in the shadows and take on newer, larger dimensions. Maybe you start to think up problems you didn’t even know you had. And you toss and turn and flip and flop and look at the clock and tell yourself “I have to get to sleep,” but then that just makes you more anxious and so now you can’t sleep because you are stressed that you can’t sleep.

I am grateful that this is not a nightly occurrence for me; it happens just once in a while. And I know that for some folks, sleep is persistently hard to come by for a whole host of reasons. But as I was lying there the other night, trying to calm my mind, listening to the fan blowing, I was reminded of other June nights: the ones from my childhood, when I would fall into bed, tired from the day’s activities, and the fan would be blowing in the window…but back then I would just drift off, unfazed by any existential angst or unfinished to-do lists.

And it occurred to me that, by and large, many of us probably slept a lot better when we were children. Back when our loved ones were just down the hall and we didn’t feel so alone. When it was easier to release the cares of the day, easier to trust that tomorrow would be just fine, and that maybe, when we wake up, it would be even better than we dreamed it to be.

But somehow, along the way, things change, and by the time we are grown, a great number of questions and worries and memories hold vigil at our bedside, and it becomes hard to fall asleep in their company. What was once an easy rest, a trusting openness to tomorrow, is now a tense, restless waiting, our minds spinning in the darkness as we try to solve all of the problems of the world before the morning comes. And so while I was lying there in bed, I thought, how precious it would be to sleep like a child once again.

As I was recovering from my sleeplessness this week and reflecting on this Sunday’s readings, something else occurred to me that hadn’t before: that sleep is actually a powerful metaphor for faith. Because the sleep for which we long, that wistfully-remembered sleep of the June nights our childhoods—deep, peaceful, trusting—is quite similar in nature to what St. Paul is talking about when he refers to this thing called “faith” in the letter to the Romans.

When Paul speaks of faith, he is not just talking about an intellectual assent to a set of doctrines, nor is he speaking of a blithe certainty about how and why the world is the way that it is. He is talking about that intimate sort of bond you feel when you know that you are safe, that you are loved, that you are not alone in the dark, and that tomorrow will be ok.

And to this end, Paul uses as an exemplar of such faith the figure of Abraham–someone who had the benefit of neither doctrines nor certainties, but who did (a few passages later in Genesis) fall into a deep sleep and had a dream of what would be–that he would be the “father of many nations.”

Abraham could not have imagined on his own how God was going to do the things God promised to do, but he gave himself over to the promise anyway. And this giving over of the self to something large and mysterious; this surrender to the dream that God unfurls for us in the darkness—this is what we mean when we talk about faith.

As best we can tell, Abraham did not lie awake making checklists, trying to figure out exactly what he had to do in order to make this happen on his own; instead, he said, God is with me, and I suppose that will be enough to face whatever tomorrow brings. And so it was.

The faith of Abraham was an abiding trust that the God who called him by name would hold him and carry him and nurture him, like a parent cradling a sleeping child. And so we laud him as the progenitor of our faith not because of his perfect understanding, but because he was the first among us, the first in this long unfolding story, who simply rested in the arms of God. He was the first to trust that tomorrow would be just fine, and that maybe, when he woke up, it would be even better than he dreamed it to be.

A question that remains, though, is how? How do I arrive at such a tranquil faith, such a restful surrender? How do I trust in God so deeply, so fully, that I can drift off in his loving arms, despite the real dangers of this life, despite the despair and the unanswered questions that keep me awake at night? How can any of us, once we are no longer children, once we feel so alone?

Of course the answer, as always, has something to do with Jesus. And our Gospel passage points toward it.

There’s a lot going on in this Gospel reading, actually. It’s kind of like those dreams you have where one scene suddenly transitions into another, layer upon layer. But after the calling of the reviled tax collector Matthew and the healing of the woman with the hemmhorage (both people, by the way, who have surely suffered their own share of sleepless nights) the story culminates with…what?

Jesus visiting a child, lying in her bed. A young girl who, he says, is not dead, but sleeping.

Now of course we can interpret this passage several ways, and most of us might assume that he was speaking metaphorically–that the girl was indeed dead and that Jesus brought her back to life, like Lazarus. Or that she was sick or comatose, and he revived her.

But there is another possibility, too, one that is a bit more evocative and mysterious, one that we might dismiss as easily as the observers in the story itself: the possibility that Jesus meant what he said.

What if Jesus was right, and the young girl was indeed asleep, in another state of consciousness, resting in the tantalizing, hidden promises of God? She wouldn’t be the first person in the Bible to have done so. As it is said:

your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,

and your young men shall see visions,

and your old men shall dream dreams.

What if she was a mystic deep in a vision, deep in the hidden, luminous darkness of God? What if she was asleep like Jesus was asleep in that boat on the stormy sea; asleep like Joseph when the angels spoke to him; asleep like Abraham dreaming of his children; asleep like one who is held in the arms of the Almighty; asleep in order to remind the clamoring, sleepless world—including us— of what true faith looks like—

Not like a restless, anxious night, not like a to-do list, but like….rest. Perhaps faith, in the end, is nothing more than rest. Resting in God.

If so, then this young girl is, for us, another Abraham. Another reminder that faith, more than anything, looks like curling up in the arms of a loving parent and falling asleep.

And thankfully, we have a God who desires but one thing: to hold us and rock us through the night.

Come to me, all you who are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

Will we still have some sleepless nights? Probably. Anyone who loves this world and the people in it is bound to worry a bit. But I hope that when I am lying there in the dark, lamenting my inability to figure life out once and for all, to know what’s coming, to know exactly what to do, that I’ll remember dreaming Abraham and the sleeping girl, and I hope I’ll remember how faith feels less like having all the answers and more like slipping into cool sheets on a warm June night and drifting off, knowing that tomorrow will be just fine. That maybe it will be even better than I dreamed it to be. And that no matter what happens, God will still be there, waiting to take my hand when I wake up.

For he has come through the clamor and the noise, through the vast night of eternity to be at our bedside, to cradle us like a sleeping child, to promise, “you are not alone. I am here.”

And in that promise, I rest.

Hello/Goodbye: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, May 21, 2023 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary texts cited are Acts 1:6-14 (an account of the Ascension of Jesus) and John 17:1-11.

I find it a fascinating feature of certain languages that the same word can be used for both hello and goodbye. In Italian, whether coming or going, people often simply say “ciao.” In Hawaiian, it is “aloha.” In the Czech Republic, where I did a study abroad year in college, they say “ahoj,” which honestly always made me feel a little bit like a pirate. When a word like this contains within itself more than one meaning, it is called polysemy.

We have many polysemous words in English, too, of course, but we typically use different words to greet one another and then to take our leave. Although even for us, we might choose to say “good day” or “good evening” on both arrival and departure.

In all of the instances when one word serves as both hello and a goodbye, our languages reveal something deeper than their simple function. When both meanings are held in the same word, there is an acknowledgment of the fluidity of time and space and our place within them; when hello and goodbye are the same, then every coming together acknowledges an inevitable parting of ways, and yet every parting of ways holds within it the hope of inevitable reunion.

I like this very much, not only because it is linguistically nuanced, but because it feels true, it feels like a little reminder that whether, in this moment, we are moving closer or farther from one another, we are still connected.

And if that is true, then it suggests that the narratives we so often tell of encounters and departures—of definitive hellos and devastating goodbyes—are all, in reality, held within a larger, more gentle and generous story wherein all the roads we travel are interconnected, where all of our hellos and goodbyes lead back to one another in the end. Which is, itself, a polysemous, complex realization.

Because if hello and goodbye are never truly final, it’s a consolation when we feel the sting of loneliness and yet it’s also a caution when we would rather escape our histories or shrug off our responsibilities to right relationship, because the intertwining of all our hellos and goodbyes signifies that we are inextricably tied to one another and to the whole of the earth. It suggests that, as the poet Tennyson says, we are a part of all that we have met, and, thus, it is part of us. Hello, you are part of me. Goodbye, I am part of you. No matter where we go, we will never not be part of each other. And knowing this, we must decide how best to live.

I am thinking about hellos and goodbyes and polysemy this week because we have just celebrated the Feast of the Ascension this past Thursday and you can tell that its story is echoing into our lectionary readings this morning, and to tell the truth, this story has always felt like kind of a bummer to me in the midst of our Easter joy.

Because viewed from one angle, the Ascension is a goodbye narrative. The risen Jesus, only recently reunited with his beloved friends and family, is carried up in a cloud, into the great Mystery where it is beyond our capacity to see him, and his disciples are left staring at the sky, yearning for one last glimpse of him.

And from this perspective, especially for all of us who have grieved the loss of a beloved face, who have felt the hollowness of being the one left behind, the Ascension might feel a bit like a flat note in the jubilant melody of the season.

We might say, You loved us enough to come back from death, Lord, so why must you go, now, to a place where we cannot see you? Why must we continue to let go of you? Why is it still the case, even after the Resurrection, that everyone and everything we love still says goodbye to us in the end? Why must we wait here alone, waiting for the unresolved promise of your peaceable kingdom?

And yes, Lord, I know you have promised us the Spirit as our Comforter and guide, but if I am brutally honest, Lord, there are days I would trade that unseen Spirit for just one glimpse of your face, for one moment of your actual hands holding mine, reassuring me that I am not alone on this journey, some proof that your leaving was not forever, that there will come a day when we can say hello and it will not also mean goodbye. I would give anything to know that there will be, one day, an end to endings.

But depart he does, and wait we must. And so for now, like the disciples on the mountain, we must stand in this polysemous moment of the goodbye that searches for a hello, containing within itself both joy and grief, reunion and relinquishment, and we must continue to wonder why and how and when we will understand the necessity of loss.

But then this week, as I was reflecting on all of this, something occurred to me: that the Ascension, like so many other stories in Scripture, is itself polysemous—it, too, means multiple things at once. And while it is indeed a farewell narrative from the perspective of us and the disciples on the mountain, I realized that from the vantage point of God the Father, from the vantage point of the Spirit aloft on the high wind, from vantage point of the innermost heart of the Trinity, the Ascension is a hello, a celebration, a homecoming. It is Jesus, the Son, in the fullness of his risen, reclaimed, redeemed human flesh, crossing back over the threshold of heaven saying to the Father, here I am, I have returned to you, and much have I seen, and long have I loved you, and how good it is to be in your embrace again.

And if we truly love him, how could we not want our Lord to finally be at home? How could we not feel some joy that even though we must say goodbye, it is because he needed to see his Father’s face once more? I can’t begrudge him that. I know I want to see my father’s face again someday, too.

And there’s also this: in the Ascension, when Jesus says goodbye to us and hello to eternity, he is, in truth, doing something entirely new, something that only he could do, fully human, fully divine, his polysemous body drawn up and out beyond the limits of the flesh, blurring the boundaries between heaven and earth, reigning as the Lord of both.

He is not simply saying both hello and goodbye at the same time; he is breaking down the barriers between hello and goodbye; the barriers that separate us from God and one another. He is effecting his prayer that we might all be one, never parted. He is transfiguring all our beginnings and our endings, all of our greetings and our grief, all of our hope and our fear, into something bigger, something timeless, something that we cannot even imagine because we have not yet known a story that didn’t have an ending.

By journeying to a realm where human flesh could never have otherwise gone, he is making a place for us, a place where we will be greeted and welcomed, and somehow, where we will never have to say goodbye.

And when he returns, bringing back the glory of heaven for our eyes to behold at last, it will be a new word that he speaks, neither hello nor goodbye, but some word no mind has yet conceived, that no lip has dared to speak, a word that contains all things within itself, a polysemous Word that resolves every question, dries every tear, mends every broken heart, a word that will make the earth tremble with its beauty and its power, a word that will hold more than we could ever say but that will say it all. A word that will initiate our own Ascension.

What will that word be? I do not know. But in essence, I think it will say, here I am, I have returned to you, and much have I seen, and long have I loved you, and how good it is to be in your embrace again.

And now, no more hellos, no more goodbyes. Only this. Only us. All of us together. Always.

Tunnel: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, April 16, 2023 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne. The lectionary text cited is John 20:19-31, when the risen Jesus appears to the disciples, including Thomas.

Many of you know that I was born in Northern California, and for the most part we lived just north of San Francisco. Now, a curious quirk in that part of the world: when you grow up in any proximity to the Bay Area, you don’t refer to San Francisco by name, you just call it the city, and everyone else knows implicitly what you mean. Within a several hour radius, you can simply say “we’re going to the city,” and they will assume that you don’t mean Oakland or Berkeley, or San Jose, or Sacramento.

For northern Californians, for better or worse, there is only one city that is the city, and it’s the one you leave your heart in, as the old song goes—the one that glows like a beacon at the end of the world; the one that is draped in fog and flowers; the one that is complex, and layered, and broken, and is yet still beautiful; the one that looms large in the imagination of everyone who has been there and many who have not—it is only this one that needs no other name but is simply the city.

And if you have never been to San Francisco before, let me tell you the absolute best way to see the city for the first time. You have to come by car, from the north, down through the towns and the vertiginous hillsides of Marin County, your view obscured by the terrain: steep, cypress-clad hills and winding roads.

And as you go along, any notion of what lies ahead is completely hidden from sight, until suddenly you come upon an arched tunnel in the rock, long known as the Rainbow Tunnel. Drive through the dim passage, ever so briefly, and as you emerge on the other side, suddenly, all at once, everything is there before you: the blue of the bay; the shadowy mountains rising up from the sea, reaching toward heaven; the Golden Gate; and beyond it, the city—the luminous city, indeed glowing like a beacon at the end of the world. You’re never quite prepared for it. Every time as a kid that we drove through the tunnel, the shocking beauty of that view took my breath away.

Now there are all sorts of unexpected views revealed to us as we journey through the world—both the literal ones waiting just over the next hillside, and the more figurative ones, too—those new insights and understandings that come upon us at certain points in our life and change us in profound ways.

Sometimes we can go looking for such revelations, but just as often they come to us when we do not expect them, when we are deep in a tunnel of one sort or another, rushing ahead, our vision narrowed, and then suddenly, the world opens up and the the landscape is entirely new to us. It can be wonderful, and it can be terrifying; sometimes it can be both.

The season of Easter is just such a moment, when a new and astounding vision unfolds before us. Easter is when everything that seemed impossible, everything that seemed dead and gone, sealed away behind our certainties and our sorrow, is suddenly standing before us, more vivid and alive than we ever imagined, inviting us to reconsider how the world actually works.

Easter is when our tunnel vision falls away and suddenly we see things previously undreamt of: that death is not definitive, that love is more enduring than we ever dared to hope, and that God’s purpose is not simply to make our burdens bearable but to bear our burdens himself; not simply to preserve our lives but to give us his own life. It’s enough to take your breath away.

And it is understandable that, emerging from the long tunnel of our painful histories, we might not know what to do with such a vision. It is only natural that we would feel unprepared for its implications, its possibilities, its endless horizons. As Fr. T.J. said in last week’s homily, resurrection is messy, because we are messy, and resurrection has come to find us here and now, just as we are: fearful, unsure, full of questions.

But don’t worry, we’re in good company, because you know who else was fearful and unsure, and full of questions? All of the first disciples! All of them—not just Thomas—needed some help in processing what it meant to see the risen Jesus standing in their midst. All of them had their breath taken away by the shock of it.

And it was only in Jesus ministering to them—giving them his own Spirit-infused breath, showing them his wounds, offering them peace and blessing, commissioning them to go forth in his name—that they were able to begin to comprehend the landscape that awaited them on the other side of the dark, narrow tunnel of grief and fear in which they had found themselves.

And Thomas, our dear friend Thomas, should actually be called “Believing Thomas,” not “Doubting Thomas,” for it is he who truly emerges first onto the other side of understanding; it is he who comprehends the fullness of the vision before him; it is he who realizes the significance of the risen body of Jesus that, though wounded, persists in life and love; it is Thomas who names what he sees, and who thereby gives voice to the Church’s dawning understanding of what the Resurrection is meant to show all of us: My Lord and my God!

My Lord and my God, it is you! It is you, wounded like me! Wounded for me! It is you, complex, and layered and broken and yet still beautiful, and loving me, loving all of us, loving this whole earth for being the same! It is you, glowing like a beacon at the end of the world! It was always you. It will always be you, forgiving, peace-bearing, redeeming, blessing, waiting to reveal yourself, through the dark tunnel, just around the bend, a vision to take my breath away. Now I see.

And it is this movement from not seeing to seeing that is, in truth, the heart of the message of this Gospel passage, rather than any dichotomy of doubt versus belief. Because the good news of the Resurrection is not about whether we can conquer doubt through the power of our faith; it is about the God who conquers death through the power of his love. It is about the God who comes to show us what that love looks like in this world and in the world to come. It is about the gift, the incomprehensible gift, of seeing something beautiful, hopeful, and true, even when we least expected it. Especially when we least expected it.

You might wonder, though, with all this talk of seeing, what to make of Jesus’ final statement here:

Blessed are the ones who have not seen and yet have come to believe,

It is tempting to read this as a sort of challenge, either to Thomas or to ourselves—as if we might be deemed more faithful, more favored, somehow, by God if we believe in the Resurrection without hard evidence. But I think this misses the point.

Because this statement, like those in the Sermon on the Mount, is structured as a beatitude (blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn, and so on…) And beatitudes are not challenges, but are God’s promises of comfort and sustenance to those who are struggling in the world as it is. The ones who have forgotten to hope for any glorious new visions.

Thus, blessed are the ones who have not seen is not a gold star for the especially committed believers, the ones who are blithely certain of their faith…

No, it is a word of comfort for the rest of us. It is a word of blessing to those who have not yet seen the fulfillment of God’s Kingdom and yet long for it. It is a word of promise to those who look at the world around them and see only death and injustice and callousness but refuse to give up on the practice of love and the search for truth. It is a word of encouragement to those who are deep in the tunnel, who are deep in the tomb, who are in the dark, but are searching for the light, who are persisting on the path, who are pursuing the vision, who are trusting that somewhere, someday, the City, the heavenly City, the City of God, the City of a Redeemed and Resurrection Creation, the City long promised and long sought, will be just around the bend, glowing like a beacon at the end of the world, and all of us, complex and layered and broken and beautiful will get there, and the gates will be open and the risen, wounded Christ will greet us and say Peace be with you and we will cry out in one voice:

My Lord and My God!

…and it’ll be enough to take your breath away.