Christianity – By Another Road

Answer: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, December 14, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 11:2-11. A version of this sermon was also published by The Episcopal Church for its Sermons that Work project.

Yesterday as I watched the snow billowing down, interrupting more than a few well-laid plans we’d had for this weekend, I was reminded that as much as we try to prepare and plan ahead, uncertainty and ambiguity still find us sometimes. They descend upon us, soft and muted like winter, blurring the sharp edges of our assumptions. And we tend not to like this very much.

Because we want answers, most days. We crave them; we seek them; sometimes we demand them. We peer at stars and read between lines and survey the vast, muddied landscape of our experiences hoping to catch sight of something clear and telling.

Often they are quite matter-of-fact, the questions we ask and the answers we seek: is church go to happen tomorrow or not? what should I make for dinner? Where should I go next weekend? How long til Christmas?

And yet at other times they are more subtle and lingering: is the church going to endure? what should I make of my life? Where should I go to feel like I am not alone? How long til Christ makes all things new?

But whether our questions are practical or existential, it is still the case that decisive answers are usually what we’re after. And especially because we are formed and guided by words, we often imagine an answer as a thing that coheres nicely into a single phrase or insight. Surely, we think, whatever it is that we want to know is waiting out there just beyond the tip of our own tongues.

Unfortunately, though—perhaps more often than we’d care to admit—answers are not so easily translated into simple turns of phrase. The more important the question, the more likely that this is so. Despite our human fascination with fortunes told and secrets disclosed, the truth is that answers to our most profound questions are more often discerned slowly, in broad shapes and patterns of meaning, than they are discovered in revelatory, obvious flashes.

This is important for those of us who follow Jesus on the Christian path, and it is especially important in this Advent season as we engage the sense of heightened anticipation that God will, somehow, come and make an answer to all of our enduring sorrows and longings. What is the Word we await? What sort of answer are we expecting to receive from on high? A crisp, clear phrase with which to flatten our enemies; to unlock the mysteries of the ages; to solve the conundrums of ourselves?

What if that is not what’s coming?

In today’s Gospel, John the Baptist has a question, too, and it’s quite clear that he wants a “yes or no” sort of answer. Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?

So much—everything, really—depends on the answer, and we can’t blame John for wanting to know plainly. He has given his whole life over to this question. He has been made wild and holy by the yearning of this question. He has become stricken by the weight of this question. And ultimately he will die for the implications of this question.

Because to ask whether Jesus is “the one who is to come” is to assert that nothing and no one else in this world can be. No emperor or king, no treasure, no philosopher or fortune-teller can contend with the one who is to come, because this One will be the answer to every question and the remedy to every wrong. And so of course, as his own days dwindle down in captivity, John desperately wishes to know if his waiting has been in vain.

He, too, maybe like you and I, he is blanketed in the soft white drifts of uncertainty and he is asking, what have I made of my life? Am I alone? How long til God makes all things new?

And yet Jesus, as is so often the case, does not answer the question directly.

Just as when he teaches in parables, in this moment Jesus replies to John with images and with an invitation to look closely at them. Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.

In other words, John, the answer is all around you. It is in the shapes and patterns of healing and life and justice that come forth wherever love reigns. It is not found in simplistic assertions of identity or authority.

Anyone can claim to be a messiah or a king—and goodness knows many have done so. But only God can bring forth the fruits of the Kingdom within us and among us. Only God can transform our wildernesses into a sanctuary. Only God can show us, as I said a couple weeks ago, how to be the answer rather than just wait for one.

This is the essential paradox of the Messiah we are given in Jesus—he is the Expected One who will not conform to our expectations. He is the One who has come, and yet he points away from himself the moment he arrives.

He does not respond directly because he refuses to succumb to the idolatry of easy answers. And it is perhaps in this, in Jesus’ rejection of the deceptive simplicities of our lesser gods, certainty and control, that we begin to know that he is the Son of God. For only Truth would be content to let the results speaks for themselves.

So what does this mean for us—we, like John, who are still captive to the world’s many ambiguities and are still hungering for a clear and piercing response to our questions?

It means, quite simply, that we must reorient our search for answers. The things we are seeking to understand as followers of Jesus are not insights locked away somewhere, reserved for the especially wise or powerful or pious.

The answers, instead, will always be found in the living enactment of the good news—the practice of love and righteousness in our churches and communities and homes. The real answers are to be found in doing the same things that Jesus did: listening, healing, reconciling, liberating, giving thanks, and letting go. And if we do these things, then we will look back one day and say, oh, yes, I see: there it was. There was my answer. There were all of the answers to every question.

It means, too, that we should be wary of any institution or figure, political, religious, or otherwise, who claims that they alone have the answer or, even worse, that they are the answer.

In the face of such assertions, we must resist and remember that even Christ himself was loathe to claim his Messiahship. He was most concerned with helping others find their own inherent dignity, not with worshipping his. Let that be a benchmark for the ones whom we entrust with authority.

And finally, hopefully, joyfully, it means that perhaps we can rest a bit in the midst of all our Advent anticipation. Instead of waiting with bated breath like John, with our whole lives dependent upon a single word of response from God, perhaps we can look around at how the answers to our deepest questions are already springing up around us—how they are already being given.

This is the gift and the power of a sacramental life: how you will catch a glimpse of God in the gleam of a candle or in the phrase of a protest song; in a bag of groceries left on a doorstep or a hand reached out to you in forgiveness. It may come to you in liturgy on a Sunday, or in the broader liturgy of your life.

The point is: God’s answers are here, in the words you already knew how to speak. They have come, John, oh yes, they have already come. But they have come softly, like falling snow, like promises kept, like all those small mercies piling up around us—the ones we overlook while searching the skies for grander resolutions. They have come to us, John, these answers that contain the Answer, in a way that must be lived to be believed, not just seen or heard.

The question that Jesus asks of us is this: will you live it? Will you dare the joy of living it?

Maybe, just maybe, in this Advent, God is waiting for our answer, too.

Let it be yes.

Bricks: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, November 16, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Luke 21:5-19.

Early in our relationship, as Matt and I got to know each other, we discovered an odd coincidence. Among our respective collections of personal mementos, we each have a single brick. Not a brick of gold, mind you, just an old, slightly crumbly, dusty brick. Kind of a strange thing for each of us to be carrying around through life, but so it is.

What’s more, these bricks we each have are both from old school buildings. Matt’s is from his elementary school, north of Dayton, which was torn down some years back. And mine is from a dilapidated portion of this massive old Victorian school building that was just out behind my grandparents’ house in Michigan—the Central School. I wasn’t a student there, but generations of Hoopers were.

Now the Central School was not a one-room schoolhouse, but more like a palace, or at least that’s how it looked to me when I was young. It occupied a whole city block and was made up of a bunch of wings and turrets and gables. I know Cincinnati still has some schools like that.

But eventually, in this increasingly small Michigan town, they closed it up for lack of money and students. By the time I was skulking around its perimeter as a kid, it was already boarded up and coming apart gently at the seams. And for whatever reason, this made me very sad.

I remember as an 8 or 9 year old going to sit up against the old brick walls of the Central School in summer, feeling the heat of those brick walls radiate into my back, and I remember wishing, praying, even, that somehow it could all be saved, that it could be brought back to life. And I suppose, in that moment, that I was being given an inkling of mortality—how things and people can crumble, how certainties falter, and how not even brick walls can always withstand the onslaught of the years.

Years later, when a portion of the building was pulled down, a family member saved me a single brick, and though I am no longer a child, and I have seen many things fall apart in life, I confess I still can’t quite let that brick go. For me, it’s a holy relic.

You might have already guessed why I am talking about old buildings today, because in our Gospel passage, Jesus and those with him are also considering a building, though one that is far grander, even, than the Central School. They are walking near the Temple in Jerusalem, a structure whose importance would be hard to overstate for the Israelites in Jesus’ time.

The Temple was not just a place of worship or a focal point of national identity; it was, for those who worshipped there, the beating heart at the center of the world. It was the place which held God’s very presence, where they could lean their backs against the stone walls and sense that divine warmth radiating into their souls. It was one true and reliable thing to count on in a world that often takes so much away.

So if we want to understand and relate to the pathos of what Jesus says in this text, his dire prediction of falling stones and uncertain times and great sacrifices, you don’t have to be a 1st century Israelite.

You can simply imagine whatever or whomever or wherever is most precious to you—and how quickly, how shockingly the impermanence of what we love can be revealed to us. We know it is so, we know that nothing is permanent, and yet we cannot bear the thought of it any more than Jesus’ companions could. So we press our backs up against the proverbial bricks of whatever we love and feel their warmth and we pray for these things to never go away. We pray for something good to last forever, just this once.

Now, I know that this particular passage is usually interpreted in apocalyptic terms—a sort of “bad times are coming, so you better get right with God” type of message. And that’s ok, I guess.

But I can’t help but think that there is also a deeply human and pastoral dimension to Jesus’ observation here. I hear grief and empathy in his words.

Because remember two things: first, Jesus loved the Temple. He had his own childhood memories there in his Father’s house. And second, everything he is predicting about the Temple and the hardship of the disciples is about to happen in his own life first—accusation and punishment, defenselessness and destruction. Jesus’ own life, his body, is also the temple of God that will fall down and fall apart, long before this Temple of stone does.

And so I think that his observation is not so much a threat of divine wrath or apocalyptic comeuppance as it is an acknowledgment of our struggle in every age: we who have been laboring forever to hold up and hold onto everything we love, everything we have built, everything we fear to lose.

Jesus is telling us that he gets it, that he is right here with us as we press our backs against the crumbling bricks—of our homes, our health, our relationships, our country, our world. He sees us begging them not to fall down. He hears us praying for something good to last forever, just this once.

But here’s the thing, my friends—and this is perhaps the most important thing that Jesus can teach us in hard times: even if it does fall apart—whatever it is you love the most—even you fall apart—and even if we find ourselves, in shock, standing amidst the rubble of our own personal promised lands, even then, Jesus says, do not be terrified. Endure. I am with you. For I am not a God who requires a pristine temple to meet you. I am not a God who demands perfect composure in order to love you. I never was that. For I will be with you in the wreckage, too.

Even if all you have left is a single brick to remind you of what is good and loving and true in this life, that will be enough. Hold onto it. Hold onto me.

Some days, friends, some days I look around at the state of things, or I feel the pain of certain challenges in my own life, and indeed it feels like just a brick’s worth of hopefulness is all I’ve got to hold onto.

But here’s the real miracle of us doing this life of faith together: if I just show up holding my single brick, and if you show up holding yours, and if all of us show up with our own small fragments of love and truth and mercy, maybe we can put them together and build something altogether new. Maybe that’s exactly what Jesus was praying for his disciples to understand and to do.

Because that’s what I see you doing here at St. Anne, week by week and year by year. Things in life do change. Things in our world do fall apart. But that’s never the end of the story.

Because every prayer, every ministry idea, every leaky faucet fixed, every bit of food or friendship offered to a neighbor, every pledge made and every heart opened in unconditional welcome is one of us holding up a brick that still remains—a small, stubborn piece of hope we refuse to let go of, and it’s us saying, it’s not much by itself, but by God if we add them all up together, all these fragments, we could build something beautiful. Brick by brick by brick.

So let’s keep building.

As it happens, much of the Central School did not get torn down; by some miracle, part of it was converted into affordable rental housing and it has a whole new purpose now. I guess my childhood prayer was answered.

But I still hold onto that brick anyway—partially as a memento of the odd and sentimental kid I used to be, but also as a reminder that even among the ruins, there is still something good that remains. Something worth preserving. Something that can be rebuilt.

And if I could go back and find my 8 or 9 year old self, his back pressed up against the bricks, fearful of all the things that can fall apart, I think I’d tell him, don’t be terrified. You will learn how to endure, even if the walls come tumbling down all around you. Because that’s not the end of the story. It never is.

And it’s funny, but…I think God might want us, now, to hear the exact same thing.

The Ones Who Walk Away: A Sermon for All Saints

I preached this sermon on Sunday, November 2, All Saints’ Sunday, at St. Anne Episcopal Church in West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Luke 6:20-31.

I read a lot of stuff, such that much of it kind of blurs together. Matt and I donated a few books the other week, and as I was sifting through the stack of titles I thought a few times, “now what was that one about again?”

But sometimes there are particular stories or texts that stick with you and rattle around in your heart and mind. I was looking through some old boxes recently, and I came across one of these on an old photocopied set of pages I’ve been holding onto since middle school. It is the text of a famous short story by Ursula K. Le Guin. Are any of you familiar with her? She was a forerunner of many writers these days who combine elements of sci-fi, fantasy, and pointed social commentary. If you know of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, or the Hunger Games series, or Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Ursula K. Le Guin writes in that sort of imaginative, prophetic space.

Anyway, when I was in middle school, our teacher had us read one of her best known short stories, and it has haunted me ever since. It is called, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” If you can get your hands on a copy, I encourage you to read it—it’s not too long, but it packs a punch. I can’t do full justice to Le Guin’s writing here, but the essence is this: there is a fictional, wondrous, joyous city called Omelas, where all the citizens are happy and healthy and blessed. They live simple, lovely, celebratory lives. But there’s a catch (of course). For mysterious reasons that no one quite understands but which everyone tacitly agrees to, the blessedness and the perfection of Omelas depends upon the misery of a single child, who is hidden away at the edge of the city, living in squalor, unconsoled by any human kindness. How the child came to be there, no one in Omelas knows, but they do know that if they were to set the child free, all their perfect happiness would come to an end.

And so they turn back to their festivals and their feasts and learn to live, somehow, with the knowledge of the child’s suffering.

But there are a few people—the ones alluded to in the title—who look upon the suffering child and do not turn back to the bright and beautiful city. Instead, driven by some ineffable word deep within, they keep walking, walking out alone, away from all that they have known and seen. As Le Guin writes, “the place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”

I am thinking of Omelas, today, friends, because I fear we are living in it.

I am thinking of Omelas today because children and other vulnerable people go hungry and have their rights bandied about as the collateral of partisan gamesmanship.

I am thinking of Omelas because we live in a society that does a poor job of distinguishing between true blessedness and mere privilege.

And I am thinking about Omelas because it is the feast of All Saints, and I wonder if this story has something to tell us, in a different sort of way, about what saintliness actually is.

I think for a long time, we have been taught to think of saints as the teacher’s pets in the Kingdom of Heaven—those people somehow born reciting the Lord’s Prayer or the Nicene Creed and easily believing every word of it, while the rest of us cross our fingers behind our backs and count down the seconds til recess. Top of the class Christians, those saints. Easy to admire, and easy to dismiss, too.

Because really, who has the time or the inclination to be a cow-eyed innocent, gazing blithely into the sky, when there are too many bills to pay and too many storms to quell and too many hearts being broken all around us?

And if that’s all the saints were, just the untroubled prayerful sort, then our eye-rolling would make sense.

But what if that’s not what sainthood is all about? What if it had nothing to do with being especially well-behaved or pious? What if, in fact, it was something wildly different ? Something far more subversive?

For we have all, I fear, been raised to be good citizens of Omelas, to climb the ladders of towers built on quicksand. We have all been formed by its false pageantry and asked to ignore its real price. Day by day, we are lulled and soothed and distracted, and asked to fix our gaze upon the pleasanter things our systems can offer us.

But following Jesus—which is all that sainthood could ever be about—is not, I am sorry, it is not about blithe piety nor about making an uneasy peace with the costly beauty of Omelas, or America, or wherever we happen to find ourselves.

No, following Jesus is about encountering that point in time when you are standing there, daring to look upon the face of suffering even as the festival flags beckon you back to forgetfulness.

And the saints? The saints are simply the ones among us who walk away. Driven by that ineffable Word, they walk in the other direction. And what we can say of them is this: they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

And if this is what saintliness is all about—not getting a gold star, but a refusal to accept the world’s usual means and ends—then today in our gospel Jesus gives us some perspective on that blessed path which beckons those who dare to walk away.

Blessed are the poor, blessed are the hungry and the sad and the hated, Jesus tells his disciples today in Luke’s more blunt version of the Sermon on the Mount. He calls these things blessed, not because being poor or hungry or sad are inherently good things, but blessed because God refuses to look away from them. God will not forsake them. Jesus declares that he will call them blessed even if we will not.

So, blessed are the ones we’d rather forget. Blessed are the food stamp recipients and the queer couples applying for a marriage license. Blessed are the Black and brown neighbors and those who speak a different language or worship in a different way. And blessed, too, are all the ones who are your so-called enemies, political or religious or otherwise. Even if we choose not to see that that they are blessed—especially if we choose not to see it.

Because God is not seduced by our necessary evils or our expedient sacrifices. God is not deceived by Omelas–neither by its kings nor its festivals nor its monuments of triumph over its victims. God says either we are all blessed, or we are all lost, together.

And so the ones who walk away, the ones we call saints, head towards this other Beatitude-place instead: this land of unrestrained, unwitheld blessedness, where love does not extract a price, where satisfaction does not depend upon the misery of others and safety does not demand a scapegoat. We may not see it fully in this lifetime, but what a place it must be, that Kingdom of Heaven far beyond the horizon of Omelas.

St. Anne, today the Church remembers those saints who glimpsed that someplace else worth walking towards, often at great personal cost but also with the deep peace and joy of knowing what is true and then acting upon it. I pray that we follow them.

Today, too, we recall our own departed loved ones who have, in the mystery of Christ’s risen life, already been carried ahead of us towards that same true and joyful place. I pray that we will find them there.

And finally, today, we will place our pledges upon the altar of God—our pledges to this place and to one another that, for one more year at least, we will keep walking together, driven by that ineffable Word—that something which we have glimpsed in Jesus and in one another as we go. I pray its beauty and its promise will be revealed somehow, in the very act of walking.

Because they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

And wouldn’t you know—if we do, too, then I guess that makes us all saints.

Worth It: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, September 7, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH, which was observing its “Faith in Action” ministry celebration. The lectionary text cited is Luke 14:25-33.

I mentioned “Scary Jesus” a couple weeks ago, and it seems he’s back with us today using very strong language to tell us something fairly self-evident: often in life you have to count the cost of something and decide if it’s worth it, whatever “it” is. But sometimes…sometimes you just can’t know in advance if it will be worth it, or how, but you know you have to do it anyway. And that’s when things get interesting. That’s when faith begins.

So, for this Faith in Action Day we are observing, here’s a story, in three parts, about determining the worth of things.

Part 1:

It was love at first sight.

My father saw it sitting there in the parking lot with a bunch of other used vehicles, bathed in the promise of a perfect spring morning: a gleaming, goldenrod, vintage VW van—the kind that, when you see it, you feel lighthearted and adventurous, and you swear you can hear Hotel California playing on some distant radio, and you feel that open road unfurling from some point of origin within your deepest self. Oh yes, it was love, and he was all in.

Never mind that he didn’t have much money. Never mind that the old man selling it was vague on its maintenance history. My dad saw that van and he knew he had to get it, he knew that it could carry us long and wondrous distances: California to Michigan and back again, or even farther, maybe, all the way to the promised land.

And so he plunked down some cash and, a few weeks later, once I was done with school, we threw what we had in the back and headed east, ready for anything. Well, maybe not anything.

Because the first time we made a quick stop, a few hours from home, the van wouldn’t start. And we were stuck in a rest area outside of Willows, California, on a 90-something degree day in June, unsure how to keep going.

I don’t remember exactly how he figured it out—this was before cell phones and internet access—but somehow he determined that we had to manually spark the ignition to start the van again—I had to sit in the driver’s seat and turn the key, and he was out there, cussing in the heat, pressing some fuses together or something. Essentially we had to hotwire our own vehicle every time we started it. And so we did, all the way across the country, until we got to Michigan and he could afford to fix it.

Was the van worth it? Depends on how you count the cost. It never really did work that well, and years later I think he sold it for next to nothing.

But on the other hand, I can tell you that when I think of what it means to be free, and safe, and alive in this world, when I think of what hope feels like…what I remember is riding in that old VW van with the windows down somewhere in the Great Plains, eating a ham sandwich, singing an old song on the radio with my dad and I think: oh, maybe we did get to the promised land after all.

Part II:

It was love at first sight.

Those disciples had met Jesus in any number of ways, caught up in the various worries and occupations that constitute a normal life, but when they saw him, they saw Life with a capital L. They saw a different sort of road unfurling in front of them, one that carried with it all the promise of a spring morning. And how could they not follow, to see where they might go together? Wouldn’t that be worth just about anything?

And it’s true, that most of them didn’t have much to lose—no money or status. Maybe they thought that following Jesus would give them the dignity and the peace and the protection that are scarce resources in this life.

But then, we come to today’s Gospel passage, and somewhere at a rest stop along the way to Jerusalem, maybe in the 90 degree summer heat, Jesus has some difficult news for them: this journey is going to cost a whole lot more than they imagined.

The language of hating what is dearest to us and of giving up what is most precious—it lands hard on the ears, it makes a person sweat and second guess their choices. It suggests that whatever this love is, it is not the comfortable, cruising along smooth highways kind.

And its worth cannot be measured in the same way as those kings who wage war and build towers. Jesus, I think, talks about those things not to equate them with discipleship, but to contrast them. He is being ironic. He is saying, the book of True Life is not a ledger. The way of True Peace is not a negotiated settlement.

Therefore, none of you can be my disciples unless you let go of all that. You have to follow me by faith and when they ask, on the other side of the cross, was it worth it, you will have discovered a new way to speak of worth.

And only then will you be free, and safe, and alive in this world. Only then will you reach the promised land.

Part III:

I imagine, for many of us, it was love at first sight, or close to it—the first time we came through those red doors of St. Anne, or another door like it. The first time we heard the Spirit reverberate through an old hymn or felt Jesus press against our lips in the shape of bread. The first time we understood that we were welcomed just as we are, and felt the possibility of something new unfurling within us.

And what a journey it is, to be in a church like this, to build a community like this, to see it grow and change and stumble and get back up again. To show up in the light of spring mornings, and on winter nights, too, and to know that something, that Someone, waits for us here, waits to huddle in close, to hotwire our hearts, to ignite something long dormant within our souls, to make us feel alive again. That is the gift of church at its best. That is the gift of a place like St. Anne. Its worth is hard to measure.

And yet, it doesn’t always go the way we think it might, or should. We’ve had our moments when we felt stranded on the side of the road, the world rushing past, and I imagine there have been times when it feels like we are getting by on a lick and a prayer, because, well, frankly, sometimes that’s the best anyone can do.

Which is why Faith in Action day is so much more than just a ministry fair or a sign-up event. It is an acknowledgment of the cost—the deep and continued and holy cost—of following Jesus, and of figuring out how we are going to bear it, and share it, and even rejoice in that costliness together. It is a moment to say thank you to one another for all of the ways, large and small, that we’ve shared in the cost of keeping this place going, mile by by mile.

I hope, as we travel around the tables at coffee hour today, we will take time to say thank you to each other—for being here. For trying. For sweating in the summer sun and shoveling the snow and planning the programs and assembling the ham sandwiches. I hope we will taste the goodness of all of it, and recommit ourselves to the love that drew us in, that draws us out, that keeps us here and keeps us going.

Because it’s funny, when you consider the value of our life together here: it is not “useful” in any traditional sense of the word. We are not building towers and waging culture wars. We are not “winning” anything. We are just loving everything, and everyone.

What a miracle that this is enough—more than enough. What a miracle that this is everything.

What a miracle that we persist in the foolish, extravagant experiment of a life founded on chasing after Jesus, wherever he goes, for no other reason than this: that it was love at first sight.

And, as with all great love stories, perhaps, when all is said and done here at St. Anne, if someone were to ask us if all of this was worth it—all the false starts and the broken engines, all the hard questions and the hellos and the goodbyes—I hope that we will be able to look up and say: depends on how you count the cost.

But we can tell you this much: here, we were free. Here, we were safe. Here, maybe for the time, we were alive in this world.

And yes, oh yes, every now and then, I think we even saw the promised land.

Division: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, August 17, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Luke 12:49-56, which includes the following:

Jesus said, “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!

Jesus has something to say today, doesn’t he? All this fiery language and talk of division. If you were looking for a feel-good Gospel passage today, my apologies, but I want us to really look at this notion of division rather than scuttle past it. Because I’ll tell you something, I love Scary Jesus. Really, I do!

Not because I take what he says lightly, but because Scary Jesus—or perhaps more accurately, Prophetic Jesus, No-Nonsense Jesus—is willing to say and do the hard things that love and truth require. He is willing to take a stand for what is good and willing to name what is not.

This is the sort of division that he brings—it’s not about enmity, but clarity. The clarity of telling the sheep from the goats and the wheat from the chaff in our hearts and in our world. Jesus is here to give us clarity about what is worth holding onto through the long onslaught of the years. And what must be let go of.

When I think of this sort of division, I am reminded of a certain legendary incident in my family.

My grandparents, you see, had very different philosophies about how many old items in the house should be held onto. My grandma believed strongly that she might need to look at that stack of TV guides from the 1970s and, as you know from prior sermons, she had an epic collection of empty Cool Whip containers just in case. My grandpa, on the other hand, was a fitful organizer. He was occasionally seized with passionate zeal for empty countertops and cleared-out corners. And on one such occasion, he went nuclear.

Their attic was a place where no person dared tread; the detritus of decades was accumulated there—old photo albums, broken toys, enough boxes of papers to rival the Library of Congress. And one day, my grandpa must have been seized by a vision of cleanliness, and he just snapped. He had that baptism of fire burning him up inside. So he stole up the ladder to that attic and before we knew it, he had pried open the little window and was tossing bags of old clothes and God knows what else down onto the front lawn for all the neighbors to see!

You want to talk about households divided. Hell hath no fury like Verna Hooper on that day; she was up that ladder fast as a squirrel and a whole lot louder than one. Even Scary Jesus would have been scared. I won’t bore you with the gory details, but let’s just say every single item went back up into the attic and my grandfather learned afresh the meaning of marital penitence.

I would venture to say, though, that neither of them was fully in the right. I get my grandpa’s point: when we are frustrated by the weight and mess of the world, it is indeed tempting to think we should just toss it all out and start over. Send in the cleansing flood, or break down the walls of the spoiled vineyard, as Isaiah puts it today. Just let it all go.

But my grandma had a point too—there are things worth saving, even in the messiness. There are things that should be preserved, and there has to be someone willing to stand up for their value.

As is usually the case, the path of wisdom falls somewhere in the middle of these two postures. We have to figure out what to hold onto and what to let go of, and how to tell the difference. That’s the kind of division that Jesus is talking about. He is not interesting in starting fights among families for no good reason. But he does need the human family—all of us, together—to really get clear about what matters and what doesn’t. Have we figured it out yet? Maybe we’re still working on that. I hope we are.

Because that work of division, friends, that laborious and slow discernment between heirloom and junk, that is what the church is asked to do in each age. Informed by study, shaped by community, emboldened by love, empowered by the Spirit, we have to decide as best we can what stays and what goes. What is the substance of God’s mission and what is just clutter. And we do that, hopefully, for ourselves and one another here, and then we step out into the public square and declare the truth there, too.

And it’s funny, you know—I think The Episcopal Church is accused sometimes of being like my grandpa; that we, seized by some vision of inclusivity and love and social justice, have tossed out all of the fundamentals of the faith. This is absurd to me. As if, somehow, love and inclusivity and justice were not themselves the exact fundamentals that God is always interested in. I’ve read the Bible, thank you very much, and God does indeed care about those things deeply. Come to think of it, maybe we are the fundamentalists after all!

In truth we have not been seized by misguided zeal; but nor are we like my grandma that day, digging in our heels, holding onto the past. Instead we have been doing the long, careful, imperfect labor of figuring out what stays and what goes in the unfolding emergence of God’s kingdom. We are still doing it. We will always be doing it. Debating Scripture and structure. Cherishing our hymns and collects like Cool whip containers that are enduringly useful. And letting go of some of those old prejudices and fears, like TV guides that have nothing helpful to show us.

We do all of this, by the way, not because we are “getting political” but because we are faithful to the God who is still speaking into the present moment. We hear the message of the Lord and we take it seriously. We hear Jesus, who says I have not come to bring mere peace—I have not come to bring a passive acceptance of the deadening forces of this world. No, I have come to bring an ever-renewed capacity for division between right and wrong, I have come to bring clarity and awareness. I have come to empower a choice between what is true and what is a lie. So follow me, he says, follow me with love as our guide, and find out which is which, and let’s learn to speak it out loud.

How urgently we need to follow him now, this truth-telling, fundamentally loving and unafraid Jesus. How urgently we need to tell the world who he actually is, and not what he has been made out to be by the transactional exigencies of partisanship, culture, and power.

Because Scary Jesus, Prophetic Jesus, No Nonsense Jesus, the Jesus that I fear and love and follow, has never changed his message. He has never submitted to the lies of any age. And he never will.

Today we hear his rejection of a cheap comfort at the expense of truth. We hear his dedication to separating out what is worthy and good from what is destructive to the human spirit, and we see his willingness to die and rise again for the sake of this gentle and hospitable Kingdom. A Kingdom where all are welcomed at the table. That is what Jesus is about. That is who Jesus is.

And if that is somehow offensive to the prevailing and popular order of things—GOOD. If that is divisive—GOOD. I would rather stand in the divisiveness of an unequivocal love for all people; I would rather pay the price for that divisiveness; I would rather pursue its invitation to the edge of comfort and respectability, just like Jesus did, than live in uneasy peace with the world as it is.

I would rather the institutional church die singing songs of love than live for something other than the real Jesus. I would rather be mocked and misunderstood for doing the long, hard, foolish, communal work of sifting through the brokenness and the beauty of life and crafting a future out of it, together. Us and God, together. It’s not easy or efficient, but that’s the only kind of church I want to be.

So what kind of church are we going to be, my friends?

Maybe, with God’s help, the kind that is able to do some division.

And wouldn’t you know, as it happens, that is also exactly what occurred eventually with my grandparent’s house, long after the attic incident.

Once they were both gone, my family members carefully went through every room determining what to let go and what to hold onto. It was hard, and it was grief, and it was love, and it was the resurgence of a million precious memories. I think the clothes and the TV guides did go away; sorry Grandma. But not everything. Some things, like that old organ in my office, and like the Cool Whip containers that show up in my sermons, some things endure, undaunted by the years.

And that was, in the end, the necessary division—the healthy, holy division—which made what really matters so very clear to us.

That is the work we must all do eventually. And it is the work of the church, too.

So, if we are feeling brave, let’s go up to the attic, and sit down amid all the boxes of memory, and regret, and fear, and hope. Let’s speak of what is true, and admit what never was.

Let’s hold it all up to the light—and sort through—and do the work the Lord has given us to do.

What Else?: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, August 3, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The congregation celebrated a baptism and the lectionary texts cited are Hosea 11:1-11 and Luke 12:13-21.

I love a baptismal Sunday. I may be biased, but there’s nothing like a baptism to remind us what life truly is—they get us in touch with the fundamentals of what life is actually about.

We start with water—that most fundamental of elements. And then there are families gathered, in all their joyful complexity—also fundamental. And there’s hope, and maybe a little bit of nervousness and distraction, all fundamentally normal things to feel. And there can be some tears, too, and that’s perfectly ok. Tears accompany us through all of life’s fundamental moments, after all.

Because most of all, there’s love. The love of community. The love of the ones who share life with us. And the love of God in Christ, that fundamental love which holds all the rest of it together.

Now, you may be surprised to learn this, but no classes or studies are explicitly required in The Episcopal Church before a person gets baptized. Not because we don’t care about learning, but because it’s really quite difficult to put into words the fullness of what baptism is—how it renders within us a new creation; how it ends us; how it begins us again each day; and how it ties us inextricably to Jesus, he who is the kite on the wind of God, and all of us the slightly terrified tail of the kite pulled heavenward into storms and rainbows and other untold wonders.

See, we fall into metaphors with baptism, always. It’s hard to put into words. So we just sort of dive into it and then spend our lives trying to figure it out.

And one of our best efforts at this, I think, is something we will recite in a few minutes. It’s called the Baptismal Covenant, which sounds a bit officious, but is really just our attempt to put words to what baptism has wrought upon us after the water is put away and the tears are dried and all we are left with is the strange sense that a threshold in our heart has been crossed.

And what the Baptismal Covenant says, in so many words, is this: baptism is the point of entry into real life, the way God intended it to be. It describes those things that help us be truly alive, things like prayer and fellowship and learning, and also a particular posture toward the world: one of humility and service and justice-seeking. The Covenant suggests that, as Jesus showed us, these things are the way into an encounter with unending life, right here, right now. You might call it Big Life, capital B, capital L.

We get baptized so that we can put this Big Life on for size, sort of like when we were kids, slipping into our parents winter coats. The idea is that we might, with God’s help, grow up to wear it fully ourselves.

See, always with the metaphors.

But it’s good, it’s very good that we would try to put all of this into words on happy days like this, and maybe especially on harder days, when the world or our own lives seem to look nothing like the Big Life we dreamt of—when we find that, after all these years, we are still children crying in our parent’s winter coats, waiting to feel like a grown up. On those hard days, we need some words to call us back to ourselves and help us begin again.

And if kites and winter coats are all just a bit too much of a stretch for you, never fear, I’ve got one more metaphor inspired by this week’s Scriptures, so stick with me. It’s this:

Baptism is a question. It’s a question planted in our hearts. A simple, two-word question we are invited to carry through the rest of our life. And the question is, “what else?”

Here’s what I mean.

In today’s Scripture readings, we first have this astounding passage from Hosea.

Like any good prophet, Hosea is giving voice to God’s inner dialogue, God who is so upset with ancient Israel, so angry and disappointed at the way they’ve turned out—how selfish, how wayward, how lost as a people. God’s wants to know: when will you grow up? When will you understand what life is about? Do I have to keep punishing you to make you see?

And then, God has a revelation of His own. He says to himself:

When Israel was a child, I loved him.

It was I who taught Ephraim to walk.

I took them up in my arms.

I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks.

How can I give you up, O Ephraim?

How can I hand you over, O Israel?

In other words, God says, no, no, no more heartbreak. No more floods that destroy and wars that avenge. No more winter coats that never quite fit. My children, my people, my beloved, my own—what else? What else can we be to each other, you and your God? What else can I do to help you grow? What else can heal the cracks of this broken earth and make it flow with streams of righteousness rather than rivers of blood? What else? What else?

For I am God and no mortal. I will not come in wrath.

I am so tired of telling you to follow me, to love me or else. So instead I ask, with hope and tenderness: what else?

And for those of us who follow Jesus and perceive the truth of him and make him our own Lord, that “what else” is our baptism into his life. He who comes in something other than wrath. He who came to the River Jordan to be baptized himself, to show us what real life—God’s life—actually is. Tears and storms and rainbows and untold wonders.

Which is why this parable that Jesus shares with his disciples—it’s not just some moralistic rant about storing up material wealth. Most of the people originally hearing this had few material resources anyway. No, this is Jesus, God, staring deep into us, we terrified souls attached to his heaven-bound kite, unsure whether we are ready to be carried away by him on the wind of the Spirit. We who think we can make ourselves safe and sound so as to hide from real life, and it is God saying,

You fool! You blessed, silly, beautiful, scared, foolish children of mine, stumbling in your winter coats. This very night, this very moment, right now, with every breath, your life is being demanded of you. And I will help you live it! Trust in me! Trust in this! Let me bathe you in my love!

And I know that you are scared, and I know that the world is disappointing and cruel sometimes, and it might seem easier to look away, but to be baptized into this life is to ask what else is possible for us? What else might we do together, you and I? What else might we be to each other, God and neighbor, heaven and earth, forever and now, bound up together in this one glorious kingdom that wells up in our midst like water in a font?

What else might be waiting for us if we shared in life together, you and I? What words might we speak to one another then?

Baby Noelle, today we will splash a bit of water on you, and it will be cleansing and it will be tears and it will be aliveness and danger and it will be more than we can ever express.

And we will cradle you close and gently tie you to the tail of that luminous kite, the One who will carry you across the landscape of your life, forever. And it will be grace, and it will be mystery, and it will be good and hard and more than we can ever understand.

But we will stand with you, and for you, and we will speak that Covenant made for us and by us and in us since time immemorial, in the best way that we can, with the imperfect words of our hearts. We will grow up into it together.

And then all of us, Noelle, you and I, and everyone who has ever been baptized into life as it really is—we will dry our tears, and we will hold our loved ones, and we will go to the threshold and look out into the complicated world that waits there, and we will begin again each day with God’s simple question:

What else?

And the answer, whatever we make it, will be our life.

Failed: A Good Friday Sermon

Preached on Good Friday, April 18, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH.

It is important that we speak plainly and honestly today. We owe that much to ourselves, and to him. There is no hiding, here. No pretty turns of phrase to evade the truth.

No, the truth of Good Friday is simply this: We failed, God.

We failed today, fully and completely. We failed to see you. We failed to understand who you are and why you created us and why you came among us and what you asked of us.

It was so simple, what you asked, but so impossible for us to accept: to love one another and to love you.

But for so many reasons, and sometimes for no reason at all, we can’t do it. We don’t do it. And instead we crucify. And instead we are crucified. We fail.

And oh, how we hate to admit it. We are so afraid of failure and shame. But somehow that fear of our own failure, that recoiling at our own limitations, is precisely what we lay upon others. We make them bleed the blood we are terrified of spilling. We make them die the death we are terrified of dying.

And so we have ended up here again, like clockwork, on another Golgotha, on that dusty hill which arises in every age, soaked with sorrow and strewn with cynicism. And we are bathed, today, in a grim, unflattering light, the sort of light that doesn’t illuminate so much as it lays bare. In the deathly light of Good Friday, every blemish and crack and wound in the body of creation is made plain in your body, Lord; your precious body, as it, too, fails.

And we see here, in Jesus, upon this hill of sorrows, that, despite all our best efforts and biggest dreams, we don’t know how avoid failure in the end, not in the world as it is, because here death consumes even our greatest successes and highest ideals. It even consumes our God.

So even if we give everything we have, like Jesus did, even if we practice peace and stay patient and never speak a hateful word, even if we do everything asked of us, still, it seems, the crucifier comes. The crucifier who is time and death and fear and fury.

Still he comes, with crosses freshly assembled to dole out. Still he comes, in his heavy boots, stomping on the harvest of our years.

And still he comes, too, this crucifier, as a strange unwelcome traveler within us, welling up as the apathy and anger and resentment of our own hearts. We are the crucifier, too, somedays, even if we wish we weren’t. We must say that plainly, too.

Because so often, on any given Friday, good or otherwise, we choose to shrug or gawk or look away as the crucified ones continue to struggle through the streets of our own Jerusalems: draped in the flags of other nations or other identities, crowned with the thorns of prejudice, bearers of the burdens we’ve been taught to sneer at or dismiss.

And if we are honest, really honest with ourselves, we’re often just relieved that it isn’t us.

And so on it goes, this passion play.

So yes, we have failed, God, and we can’t fully explain it.

But it is necessary to say it, now, because really, what else can be said at the foot of your cross? There is no worldly victory here. No positive spin. There is no sly wink or nudge you give us that this is all just for show. This is simply what it appears to be. It is the opposite of love. And you, the One who is Love, you are gone.

And that is that.

But here’s the thing about today, God (and I am afraid, almost, to say it out loud, but I must, if we are speaking plainly.) Today is your encounter with failure, too, Lord. Your acceptance of your own failure.

I’ve struggled to understand this or even put it into words, since you are eternal and unfailingly good, but I am realizing that Good Friday is nonetheless your own surrender to failure.

Because you chose not just any death, but a shameful, embarrassing, degrading death. On the Cross, we see the fullness of your failure on the world’s terms. We see how creation could not bear the weight of you, how even your blessed flesh could not bear the weight of us. How you could not draw us back from our worst impulses.

You who–ever since your hungry children stumbled out of Eden with tearful eyes–you who have been trying to teach us how to undo the curse, how to find our way home. You who have parted seas and toppled tyrants and rained bread from heaven and crossed deserts and appeared in smoke and fire, all in the hopes of helping us find you again and find ourselves again…today is the shocking day when you say, my children, I have failed, too.

Because you have come to us in every way possible. You have come as light and as fire and as word and now as a man. You have come as bread and as silence and as liberation, to show us, to show us, to show us, and still, still, still we are here again, on this dusty hill, unable to truly find each other.

No matter what you have done til now, still, the crucifer comes.

And I am sorry, Jesus seems to say with his own parched lips, out of his own deep wounds. I am sorry that this has never quite worked. I am sorry that we always seem to end up here, on these many Golgothas. Because I promise you, you were created for so much more than a world full of crosses. I have wanted to give you so much more than this.

But now, it is finished. It is finished.

On Good Friday, the saga of our long journey out of Eden is finished. It ends here, with us casting God from our garden, sending him away, weeping and hungry. It ends here.

And I realize that saying this might make us uncomfortable. Surely this is not the end of the story? We know there is more.

But it is very important, actually, that we let Good Friday be Good Friday, and nothing else. That we let it be the ending that it is.

It is necessary, I think, after our long history of death and despair, to say that this particular story, this particular mode of endless disappointment—ours and Gods—ends today.

Because perhaps we need to say goodbye here, us and God, here upon the dusty hill, upon the rubble of our failed dreams. Perhaps Jesus’ words are the most honest thing that we can say to one another today: it is finished. We tried, and it failed, but whatever this is, this world that crucifies truth, it must be finished.

Because somewhere, out beyond time and terror and the Cross, somewhere within the mysterious alchemy of love and death and failure, only there and only then is something else possible, some truly good news that is not just a new chapter in this same, sad old story, but that’s a new story altogether. A new creation altogether.

A different garden that is neither Eden nor our own, but a new world, a new life in which no one will ever be cast out.

But whatever that looks like, whatever that new thing is that might yet be revealed from the depths of the tomb, we have to come here, first. We have to look into the face of our broken Lord, who tried so hard, who came so far, who loved so deeply. And we have to let him look at us, too: we who try so hard, who have come so far, who love so deeply, and yet are as broken as we’ve always been.

And today, for now, we have to let each other go.

I am sorry, Lord. I am sorry for all that we could not be to each other in the world as it is. I am sorry this is the ending of your time with us.

But please, please let it not be the end.

Let there be some new word spoken, some gentler, more kindly light revealed. Let there be something on the other side of all this failure. Let there be something plain and honest and good that does not always get crucified.

For whatever it is, we wait.

For you, we wait.

More than Welcome: A Sermon

I offered this sermon at the Diocese of Southern Ohio’s inaugural LGBTQ+ Ministry Summit on Saturday, March 29, 2025 at the Procter Camp & Conference Center . The text cited is John 4:5-26, Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well.

One of the indelible images of The Episcopal Church is that little sign posted here and there outside some of our church buildings: “The Episcopal Church welcomes you.” Maybe you’ve noticed them before. Maybe it even encouraged you to go inside an Episcopal Church. They are pleasant signs; I have no particular issue with them, other than that they are often so small that the welcome reads like a whisper. Pssst, yeah, you, come in here. Let’s all be quietly welcoming together. Very demure. Very mindful. We’ll be mindfully, quietly welcoming together.

I’m an introvert, so on some level, I can get into that. I love a sweet, reverent silence.

But then I look up and I look around at the world today…and I look back at the history of violence and rejection inflicted upon LGBTQ+ people, and upon so many other groups, all supposedly in the name of Christ. And I look at how cheap, how rescindable are some of the promises of equity and inclusion in political and corporate spaces, and I begin to wonder: maybe we as the Church need to make those signs a little bit bigger. Maybe we need to speak a little louder. A little prouder.

And maybe, too—and I realize I am going to verge on some Episcopal heresy here—maybe, after all this time, we also need to talk about something more than just welcome.

Because here’s the thing, Church. Here’s the thing many of us in this room already know: welcome is lovely, welcome is important, but welcome is only step one towards building up the kingdom of God in our midst. A community can graciously, warmly welcome all sorts of people. It can slide over and create some space for them in the pews and show them how the liturgy works, and that’s good.

But after a while, a person does not live on welcome alone. Eventually, we all want something more, something deeper than welcome—we want belonging. We want to feel like we belong among others, and that others want to belong with us. We want to feel that belonging in our bones. We want to know that all of us together belong to each other and to God.

The hunger for belonging is deeper than a greeting and a handshake at the door. It is the acknowledgement that you need me, you need my gifts and my story and my insights, just as much as I need yours. The acknowledgement that loving our neighbor as ourself means something other than casual friendliness—that it means the risk of vulnerability, the risk of permeability, the risk of being changed. That is what I am seeking when I walk into a church. And to the extent that any of us have been settling for less than that, or giving less than that, well—we still have work to do, with God’s help. We need a church that doesn’t simply welcome quietly, but actively, vibrantly, fearlessly creates communities of belonging.

The Samaritan woman in our Gospel passage experiences her own insight into welcome and belonging, too. This is a familiar scene for many of us, but let’s reimagine it together. This woman has come to draw water from the well in her own city. She is not the stranger here. Jesus is. And we can imagine that they are not necessarily hanging out the welcome sign for him and his followers. Despite their shared ancestry, the Samaritans and the Jews understand themselves as being at a religious and cultural impasse. Maybe they’ve used a few clobber passages against each other, who knows.

But nonetheless there is Jesus, sitting by himself at the well, asking for water. Asking this woman, in effect, am I welcome here? Will you welcome me? Will you give me something from the deep well?

And the woman is astounded by this. So astounded, you might notice, that we never hear whether she gives Jesus any actual water.

But what she does give him is something even better than welcome, something that is indeed from the deepest well of all—she gives him back her own deep thirst for connection and truth. Because she, too, knows what it is to feel like a stranger. To be labeled as an enemy, a villain, a lonely figure making her way through the world. And she, too, like Jesus, wants to know what that thing beyond mere welcome feels like, what belonging feels like. She, too, wants to be more than the labels applied to her, more than the constraints of her history and identity. And she senses, perhaps, that this man sitting with her understands this better than anyone.

Because God does. That’s the big reveal: that God, too, wants something more than just welcome and a little bit of space in our pews on Sunday morning. God wants to belong with us, God wants to belong within us, in the deepest well of our hearts. God wants to be the living water that is absorbed into our souls—not just a guest, but a part of the whole. That is why God came in the flesh, to satisfy the Divine thirst for communion with us.

And some of us here who, like the Samaritan woman, know something of feeling like a stranger, an enemy, a villain, or who have felt like a lonely figure making our way through the world—we who are queer, we who have thirsted and wept, well, we have something to teach the Church about the necessity of true communion.

Because we already know the insufficiency of a simple welcome when it doesn’t lead to something deeper. We know what it means to long for human kindness, and to risk our safety, even our lives, for the possibility of connection. And we have been drawing from the deep wells of inner knowing and vulnerability for our whole lives. To the extent that the rest of the church can see this and hear this and internalize this for itself, it will bless all of us together. Maybe it will help us all become something more than demurely welcoming. Maybe it will help us be brave. Brave for love’s sake. Brave in the way people can only be when they know they truly belong.

This is what it means to worship God in Spirit and in Truth—to experience an intimacy and a trust that cannot be taken away by anyone or anything. No law, no leader, no single passage of Scripture. And that deep connection to God and each other is (if we will embrace it) the unfolding mission that Christ offers to the church. The Episcopal Church, and the whole church. And it begins by getting to the other side of welcome and beginning the good, scary, holy work of actually belonging to each other.

That’s what we’ve been doing here this weekend. And that, I pray, is what all of us will bring back to our churches, and to our communities, and to the whole lonely, thirsty world. To unapologetically, joyfully, truthfully show them not just what it means to be LGBTQ+, but what it means to drink from the deep well of Spirit and Truth, where everyone—EVERYONE—Jew or Greek, enslaved or free, male or female or nonbinary, gay or straight or questioning, trans or Two-Spirit, of any color or heritage, of any orientation or ability, the one who knows God on the Mountain or in the city or only in the silence of their heart and the tears on their pillow—EVERYONE is part of the whole. For God says my house shall be called a house of prayer for ALL peoples. All peoples. All peoples who are are not just welcomed tentatively but BELONG in the household of the Living Word. It was already our home, because in God everyone is home. Thanks be to God, if we would only hear it and live it! Let’s hear it. And live it.

Ironically enough, outside my own current parish, I don’t think we ever actually had a sign that says, “The Episcopal Church welcomes you.” In our setting, nobody would have seen it driving by. But last year, instead, we put up a big banner by the side of the road. And it simply says, You Belong Here. I confess that I personally wanted to put it there because for so long in my past I needed that to be true. And so we pray–through the work of our hands and the openness of our hearts–that it may truly be so, for us and for all who come to the well seeking something deeper than mere welcome.

You are not just welcome here in the church, beloved, you belong here. You always did. And you always will. No matter who you are or who you are becoming. So drink deeply from the well of God’s love. It belongs to you. It belong to all of us.

And then let’s all of us show the world–not quietly–how beautiful belonging can be.

Everything Happens: A Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coming Out: A Sermon on the Transfiguration

I preached this sermon on Sunday, March 2, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Luke 9:28-43, an account of Jesus’ transfiguration on the mountaintop.

I came out when I was eighteen. And although I came from a pretty open-minded family, it was still a struggle, as it often is for people. But there came a point about halfway through my first year of college when I was just weary of hiding—hiding from others, hiding from myself, hiding from that fundamental desire to be loved and to love someone back. I was willing to do anything, to give up anything, if it meant that I could stop being half-invisible. To live authentically and experience fullness of life. Or at least have the chance to try, and mess up, and keep trying like anybody else.

And so, I came out. And it’s been mostly wonderful, and sometimes difficult, but it was never really optional, because it was simply the truth of me. Ultimately life requires us to acknowledge what is true, even if folks don’t get it or don’t want to get it.

Because what is true is that most of us fundamentally want very similar things: to understand and to be understood; to be able to feel things; to experience life without fear or scarcity; to know and share love; and to leave behind something meaningful when we’re gone. These desires are pretty much universal, whether we are gay or straight; black or white; whether we are in Cincinnati or Kiev; whether we are rich or poor; or any of the other myriad ways people inhabit this world.

It’s just that for some such people, because of their characteristics or their location or their status, they find themselves having to convince other, more powerful people they actually deserve those fundamental things, too. That they aren’t half-invisible.

And while the powerful don’t usually like it very much, many such people, in their own ways, eventually have to muster the courage to come out—not specifically as I did, but to come out into the world in the fullness of their own humanity and say, this is who I am, and I dare to be seen. I dare to inhabit the dignity of myself. And I offer myself—all of myself—for I am no longer constrained by the fear of being misunderstood or maligned. Because I would rather perish in the light than wither in the shadows.

Every liberating impulse of the human heart, guided by the Spirit and made manifest in everything from the crossing of the Red Sea to the Stonewall riots to the sit-ins of the Civil Rights movement to the demands of peacemaking of our own time—all of it is a form of coming out. Coming out of Egypt, coming out of Jim Crow, coming out of the closet, coming out from behind the structures of prejudice and fear and choosing to see each other as we are, as the beautifully diverse children of God.

Churches could learn a lot from all of this coming out, I think. Especially, God love us, those polite, well-meaning churches that have, for too long perhaps, been hiding our own light within our walls, wondering why the world is looking elsewhere. I wonder what such a church might learn from the people who’ve had to come out in their own lives.

And I wonder, too, what we might learn from today’s Gospel account of the Transfiguration, when Jesus came out as…God.

Make no mistake, that’s what this story is: a coming out story. Not as any of the categories of identity we usually associate with that term, but a coming out nonetheless. A bold revelation of selfhood to a world not quite ready for it.

On this particular mountaintop, just before his journey to Jerusalem and the suffering that awaits him there, Jesus decides he is tired of being half-invisible, too. He is, perhaps, weary of hiding the truth of himself: that he is the Son of God; the indwelling of the divine light; the Creator aching with love for creation—and he cannot hide it anymore. And for this moment, at least, in the company of his most trusted friends, before he surrenders himself to the culmination of his difficult work, he decides to come out.

And so he does. And so we behold him.

This is Jesus, in blazing brilliance, in that white light which is formed by every color of the rainbow. This is Jesus, at last inhabiting the dignity of himself. This is Jesus, God, who also fundamentally wants the same things: to understand and be understood by us, to know and share love with us, and to leave us something meaningful of himself when he’s gone. This is Jesus, willing to pay the price for being himself, willing even to be rejected, because he knows that the truth is not optional, because the truth of him is love in its many forms, and it always has been and it always will be.

This is Jesus, the God who has always called his children to come out from whatever harmed them or held them back from fullness of life, now doing it himself.

The point of this, my friends, is that if Jesus can come out as God in a world that did not welcome him….and if our vulnerable siblings can come out as human beings seeking dignity in a world that does not welcome them…then perhaps we as the church should realize that our own future also depends on our willingness to come out of the shadows and into the light. To come out and say, we are Christians, and this is what we stand for. And that we will no longer let others hijack the narrative of our faith or the nature of the Gospel for craven, fear-based, or politically expedient ends.

We who seek to do good and proclaim love as the Way, perhaps we need to come out and say that we do so not simply because we are well-educated or well-mannered people, but because we are passionate followers of Jesus, and that is what followers of Jesus actually do: they love without exclusion, they surrender their lives to compassion, and they are not cowed by the forces of evil and mistruth.

Perhaps we who often find it easier to practice a private, respectable faith need to align ourselves more closely with those of our neighbors whose very humanity is a matter of public debate. Our neighbors of other ethnicities and creeds and identities whose very decision to step outside the house and exist each day is an act of courage. Perhaps by seeking them out and knowing them better, we could find some of the courage we need ourselves as Christians. The courage to name Jesus as Lord. The courage to reject, in the name of Jesus, those forces which diminish or demonize any category of people. The courage to not be half-invisible ourselves any longer. To wear God’s heart on our sleeve.

Because we are living in a time that demands an accounting of our values, of our commitments to one another, and of the depth of our souls. We are not the first to live in such a time, nor will we be the last.

And for those of us who have already had to come out and be ourselves in one way or another…well, some of us are rather accustomed to this sense of high stakes in the basic activities of living. We’ve got some tips to share. There is much that we can learn from one another to navigate the road head. To encourage each other. To stand with each other.

I hope and pray we will continue to do that work here. Whether through the building up of people participating in outreach services, or in the expansion of our advocacy and justice ministries, or in deepening our study of Scripture or in the practice of prayer and contemplation, I hope our parish will find and reveal the fullness of itself in this time. I hope that, right here in West Chester, we will help guide the broader church out into the possibilities of the present moment, despite the perils of stepping into the light. We have too much good news to share here to let it hide behind the doors or wither in the shadows.

If that sounds a little daunting, I get it. But as God likes to say, don’t be afraid. Pretty much anyone who’s had to risk simply being themselves in one way or another can tell you: it’s mostly wonderful. Sometimes difficult, yes: even Jesus, after the transfiguration, still had to keep on casting out demons and dealing with people who couldn’t or didn’t want to understand him.

But mostly, the peace of being wholly oneself with other people, without fear, is a wondrous gift. A gift from God. It is the thing that has saved some of us. Maybe it will help save all of us, together.

All we have to do, beloved church, is hold fast to the love that is the truth of us.

And then…come out.