Christianity – By Another Road

The Opposite of Despair: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, February 1, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Micah 6:1-8 and Matthew 5:1-12.

We are living through difficult times. You don’t need me to tell you that.

There is division, yes, but beneath the division, I sense something even more concerning: despair. Despair that we are losing ourselves, losing each other, losing our way, and despair that there’s nothing we can do about it.

Maybe I’m just stubborn and naive but I refuse to believe that’s true. And so I’ve been thinking: what is the counter to despair? How do we resist it? Secular culture might suggest that the opposite of despair is happiness or positivity, but I think our faith teaches us something else, and it’s vital that we understand it.

So, in order to to describe what this ‘something else’ is which can save us from despair, I am going to tell you briefly about two things which may seem, at first, to be completely unrelated.

The first ‘something’ is my grandpa’s candy dish. For the entirety of my life, there it was: a small stainless steel bowl covered by an old pink melamine saucer. It looked like something that’d been improvised on the fly one day and then just remained on the kitchen table forever.

No matter what else changed in the world, I knew that if you went into that kitchen, there that dish would be, and you could lift up the pink saucer and find grandpa’s perennial favorite, bridge mix, an odd mixture of chocolate covered things: raisins and nuts and malted milk balls. I didn’t love bridge mix, but I did love that it was always there for anyone who wanted it. That dish became a sort of sacramental presence, like the basin of holy water you dip into in church to remind yourself of something good and lasting. It was its constancy that made it sacred, that candy dish.

The second ‘something’ is one I hope you’ve already heard about. On August 20, 1965, an Episcopal seminarian named Jonathan Myrick Daniels was murdered by a white supremacist in Alabama. He had been volunteering in the state throughout that spring and summer, supporting the civil rights movement. On the day he died, he and his fellow activists had just been released from jail for taking part in a nonviolent protest.

While waiting for a ride, Daniels and a few of his companions walked over to a store to buy a soft drink, but a man with a gun was blocking the entrance. The man aimed his gun at Ruby Sales, a young Black woman, and Jonathan Daniels instinctively pushed her out of the way; he was shot instead and died instantly. Daniels is honored as a martyr on the calendar of The Episcopal Church and Ruby Sales, who is still living, went on to a long ministry of faith-based activism for racial justice.

Something that always strikes me about Daniels’ story is how simple his actions really were. He was just trying to buy a soda, and then suddenly the stakes were impossibly high. Daniels did not set out to be a martyr or a hero that day. He just followed the same habits of care and kindness that he’d been practicing for a long time. It just so happened that this time, in the face of an active evil, his kindness became sacrificial.

I think this is an important distinction to make: we remember Christian martyrs not just because they are killed, but because they refuse to stop living according to God’s values when it matters the most. In other words, it was Jonathan Myrick Daniels’ constancy that made his life sacred, not the violence which ended it.

Constancy. That is the ‘something else,’ the true alternative to despair, conveyed to me by both a candy dish and a martyr. Not happiness or positivity, but constancy. Above all else, God is interested in our constancy. Our commitment to doing the things—often the very simple things—that God has always asked people to do, and our refusal to give up on them when the years grow long or times get tough.

And what is it that God wants people to do?

He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you

but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?

The prophet Micah needed people to hear: you are making this God thing too complicated. You are attempting overwrought gestures and grandiose conquests when all God actually desires is your constancy of love. Sometimes these actions will cost you not very much at all. Some day they may cost you your own life. But the fundamental question is: will you keep offering them regardless?

I have been struck in recent weeks by the constant, faithful actions of our siblings in The Episcopal Church in Minnesota and the networks of other neighbors in that region who are supporting each other in the face of great hardship.

Put aside policy debates for a moment and just look at the human scale of what these people are doing for each other. Outside observers have taken note, with some surprise, at how effectively all these scrappy Lutherans and Episcopalians and Catholics and people of other faiths are doing the very basic, yet suddenly prophetic actions of delivering groceries, making casseroles, offering rides, praying, sharing information, and showing up to bear witness.

I don’t know, maybe some of these observers have never been part of a church community, especially in the midwest, but the fact of the matter is: this is the stuff we always do. Casseroles and car rides and mutual care are the bread and butter of our life together. That’s true in tranquil times, in times of personal grief, and now, it seems, in times of national, moral crisis.

What is miraculous is not so much the nature of the actions themselves, but people’s constancy in offering these things to their neighbors even now that the wolf is at the door. The constancy of their willingness to show up, to pray, to act, to give, even when the stakes are much higher than they used to be. It is their constancy in doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly, as best they know how, that makes all of this sacred.

I have said this before in various ways but I am going to say it again, because I need you to hear this; I really need you to take this in as a counter to the temptation of despair: the way through the challenges of our time, and through the personal challenges we face, too, is not about some new innovative, impressive action we haven’t thought of yet.

Look at Minnesota. Look at Jonathan Myrick Daniels. Look at my grandpa’s candy dish, for heaven’s sake: you already know exactly what love looks like! We already know how to do what love requires of us! The question is will we remain constant in doing it, regardless of the circumstances around us?

We practice this here with each other every week so that it becomes like second nature. Did you think we were just gathering at church to pass the time til Jesus comes back? No, friends. We are practicing constancy.

Here’s the sacred logic of church life: we make soup for the annual Soup Supper and then, if loss or strife comes to our community, we’ll know how to make soup for those who grieve or for our vulnerable neighbors. And then, by God, if the apocalypse comes we will keep making soup even as the world falls down, just to spite the devil.

You see, those forces of evil—the ones that tempt us to despair—would love for us to think that the real solution to our collective problem is something big and dramatic and remarkable, something far sexier than soup or car rides or common kindness. Because then we would do nothing and content ourselves with waiting for someone else to come in and fix it all.

But there isn’t anyone else. Blessed are you, Jesus says. Blessed are you, just as you are, poor and mournful and meek. Empowered are you for this work. There is only us and what we have and what we know how to do, with God’s help and with constancy. And Jesus says that it is enough. We just have to keep at it.

Blessed are the ones who keep at it.

So, whatever you do, do not read the news and sit back and throw up your hands and say, “oh what am I to do, what are any of us to do?”

He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you

but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?

There’s only one question: will we do it?!

If you need help figuring out what that looks like in practice, open your church bulletin, go to the back, and pick something. And do it. And keep doing it. Keep praying, keep serving, keep showing up, no matter what happens next.

Like my grandpa, or Jonathan Myrick Daniels, or our friends in Minnesota, we will keep offering our small, necessary, transformative acts of love, together.

And in our constancy, our lives will be made sacred, too. In our constancy, the world may still struggle, and divisions may persist, and we may weep.

But there will be no room for despair.

Cat Pageant: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, January 18, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is John 1:29-42.

Matt and I don’t have any pets at present, and if we do expand our family someday it will likely be with a dog.

But it so happens that I grew up in a household of cats. Lots of cats. At any given time in my childhood, my mom had about six, mostly rescues and most of them Siamese. So all of my earliest memories (and chores) were cat-adjacent, and we had what I’d call a lovingly complex relationship. Meaning that we loved them and they made life complex.

I was an only child, given to playing lots of games by myself and making up all kinds of imaginary scenarios and scenes which I would then try to stage in our living room like a sort of pageant. Which was generally fine, except on those occasions when I had the bright idea to incorporate the cats into my efforts, to make them characters in my story of the day.

You know, I loved Shakespeare, so maybe I was recreating a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the cats could be the fairies. Or I was imagining myself as a medieval king and the cats were my court attendants, dressed up in my mom’s scarves.

Have you ever tried to put a costume on a cat? I don’t recommend it. Lets just say this medieval king suffered an uprising among the nobility.

The point is that, in short order, I learned that the cats were their own creatures, with their own purpose and dignity, and they were not props to be subjected to my fanciful whims. It took a few bites and scratches for me to internalize this, but I did eventually. And we settled into a more peaceful coexistence where the true order of cat-human relationships was confirmed: they were in charge, and I was just there to serve their whims. If you have ever loved a cat, you know this is how it goes.

Animals are good teachers; I am so glad I learned all of that at an early age—a little dose of humility in a world that is always encouraging us to center our own needs and narratives. It is important though, as we grow and evolve, to remember that we are not the center of things, and that others do not exist to serve our personal agenda.

And that is especially important when we consider the most fundamental relationship in our lives: our relationship with God.

Like me and the cats, I think it is safe to say that, much of the time, we are tempted to cast God in the role most useful to us at the time. If we are angry at someone, we want the vengeful God. If we are frightened, we want soothing God. If we are lost, we want the God who gives us a clear sign. If we are happy and content then, Lord forgive us, often we just want the God who is quiet and stays out of our way. And so we will pray, or not, to this version of God whom we need and then hope we are accommodated by him.

But have you ever tried to put a costume on God? In my experience, it doesn’t usually work. So many times I wanted, demanded God to do one thing, and God had quite another thing in mind.

Which leads me into this morning’s Gospel passage from John, when John the Baptist has his epiphany that Jesus is, indeed, the Messiah, and when others, like Andrew and Simon Peter begin to have this same intuition.

“Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” John enthuses. He sounds very confident.

But I wonder….I wonder, really, if he knows what that means, even as he says it. Clearly he senses, in some deep, Spirit-inspired way, that Jesus is the One he’s been looking for all his life.

But then he names Jesus—he casts him, if you will—as “the Lamb of God,” a sacrificial offering that will somehow make all things right. I wonder if John really understands at this point, though, what this means. Remember that in another account, from prison, John will doubt whether Jesus is who John thought he was because things don’t seem to be going the way he planned.

So when John calls Jesus the Lamb of God here, he is speaking from his expectations of what Jesus will do for them, not realizing that Jesus will end up expecting much, much more from John and these disciples than they ever imagined.

Jesus, you see, is not just a medieval king who drops in to smite our enemies. He is not a magician with a wand. And to follow him is not simply to behold a Lamb who will be sacrificed for all of our failings while we stand idly by.

No, what John does not yet understand is that following Jesus means becoming the sacrificial Lamb ourselves. To follow this Messiah is to give away our own egos, pride, safety, expectations, and fanciful whims for the sake of an unselfish love. Jesus changes the world in and through us, not just through himself. Theologians call this cooperative grace. I call it putting our money where our mouth is.

But John and the disciples don’t know that yet. I think they’re still hoping somehow this Lamb of God will accomplish it all on his own—both the salvation and its aftereffects—and that they can content themselves with beholding him rather than becoming him.

I wonder, friends, if we get stuck in that same posture sometimes. Jesus save me, but don’t change me!

I hate to break it you (and to myself) but Christianity is a becoming, not a beholding. It is a surrender to God’s story, not the manipulation of God to fit our own stories. We will only be saved when we stop trying to put costumes on Jesus and let him do what he actually came to do: to make us like him.

I am dismayed by the extent to which Christianity has failed in this regard. In every age and culture where the Gospel is proclaimed, people—especially powerful people—have a propensity to turn it into a cat pageant—an self-indulgent enactment of their own agenda. We dress Jesus up in crowns and flags, we make him a general in an army or a judge on the bench. Or, sometimes, we make him a sweet little kitten, curled up by the fire, disturbing no one. Our enemies are his enemies. Our priorities are his priorities. Our failings are just the sort of thing he doesn’t mind too much. How convenient.

But what I find encouraging in all of this is that, like those cranky felines I grew up with, Jesus does not submit to any of our games. Not for long, anyway. The truth keeps coming out, generation after generation. It keeps bubbling up—in protests and in psalms, in the sacrifices of the martyrs who refuse to worship empires, in this pesky proclamation that God loves all people, and in the fact that those who twist the words of God to suit their own ends will, ultimately, come to nothing. It can take time but it is always so—the truth of love wins out.

I find great hope in that long record of God dismissing our various ideologies and indignations and inviting us, again and again, to come and see what Jesus is actually about, where he is staying, as the Gospel passage says. And it’s always the same, familiar place: charity, gentleness, mercy, peace, service, patience, trust, joy. And maybe a few scratch marks for those who try to distort the truth.

So yes, I know that, as they say, God is dog spelled backwards, but today when I think of God, I am thankful that he’s a bit more like the insubordinate cats I grew up with. Especially in these times of great cruelty and fear, of widespread confusion, and the creeping sense of despair felt by so many people. God is not a willing participant in any of this debased pageantry. God has his own purpose and dignity and his own way of evading our best efforts to make him what he is not.

And what he asks of us is to be exactly like him—catlike in our dismissiveness towards whatever nonsense is being sold to us. I am so glad. I find encouragement in his utter disobedience of our schemes. That’s the God whom I am grateful to obey.

So behold this Lamb of God who is far more than you ever imagined. Behold this Lamb of God who will ask more of us than we ever imagined. Behold this Lamb of God who will accomplish more through us than we ever imagined.

Just don’t try to put a costume on him.

Comedy/Tragedy: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, January 4, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 2:13-15, 19-23, the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt.

I was really into theater as a kid, so one of the best Christmas gifts I ever received was a big kit of stage makeup when I was 10 or 11 years old. I was blessed with parents who supported my love for all of this, even if it made me a little bit different from other boys my age.

But my mom was all in, and so she got this big blue plastic case and filled it with the various things actors wear on stage, and on the top of it she glued a comedy mask and a tragedy mask to symbolize the theater. I loved it so much that I burst into tears when I opened it.

Funny, how that goes—how smiles and tears get all mixed up at certain moments. I guess that’s why the two masks always show up together.

Those comedy and tragedy masks, by the way, one laughing and one frowning, are from ancient Greece, but they still signify our two dominant modes of storytelling.

The ancient Greeks understood, as we do, that life is a many-layered thing: that we must make an accounting of both sorrow and joy, both victory and futility, if we are ever going to navigate life this world. We might prefer one over the other in our entertainments, but in our lives we will have to put on both masks eventually.

I’ve been thinking a lot about comedy and tragedy this week—maybe because every time I feel some sense of joy in my own life, some new tragedy unfolds in the world and I find myself all mixed up again with smiles and tears.

One definition of comedy and tragedy that has helped me with all this: rather than simply focusing on whether something is “funny” and thus a comedy, or “sad” and therefore a tragedy, instead we might think of tragedies as those stories that end in disintegration and loss; and comedies as those that end in integration or wholeness. Tragedy: things come apart. Comedy: things come together.

And so, with this framework in mind, I wonder how you would answer this question: are the Gospels a comedy or are they a tragedy?

This is not just an intellectual exercise, because the answer, as Christian people, will shape how we respond to all of life.

At first glance, a passage like the one we heard today is decidedly tragic. Matthew tells us of a traumatic event in the early life of Jesus when he is no older than two: that desperate journey into Egypt made in order to evade King Herod, who will not put up with any rumored threats to his own power.

Our lectionary text unfortunately skips over a few key verses. Perhaps the editors feared that we wouldn’t want to hear hard things in the afterglow of Christmas. But we ought to hear them, we ought to bear witness, because this is when Herod commands what is known as “the slaughter of the innocents”—the murder of all the baby boys in Bethlehem, intended to include Jesus. The Holy Family is saved from catastrophe, but this is no happy ending. Countless other families are destroyed in the process. A tragedy, surely.

And only years later, once Herod has died, do Mary and Joseph dare return back to their homeland to begin again.

Matthew frames this as a grand prophetic fulfillment, but that would be cold comfort to all those mourning parents in Bethlehem. Cold comfort, even, to Mary and Joseph up in Nazareth, who have become poor and desperate migrants through their acceptance of God’s various invitations.

We might imagine them gazing upon this young Christ child, raised in the shadow of great sacrifices and constant dangers, and wondering: what have you brought upon us, child? What have you wrought in your coming? Do you offer disintegration or wholeness? Are you our destroyer or our salvation? Are we, who love you and follow you, bound up in a tragedy or a comedy in this unfolding story?

The rest of us who follow Jesus might ask the same thing at times.

Because, of course, it doesn’t get much easier as the story goes on.

Which would support the notion, perhaps, that the gospels are largely a tragic epic: a record of Jesus’ struggle against disintegration—ours and his own, too. Taken chapter by chapter, there is a lot of heartbreak in there. The Greeks knew that sort of noble tragedy well.

There’s just one catch—one small, crucial catch. And it’s one that, oddly, I think we can forget to hold in mind as we read the Gospel passages week by week. Something that we forget, too, when the bad news of the world inundates us.

And it is simply this: at the end of the story, Jesus will rise again.

No, I haven’t just decided to skip over Epiphany and Lent and go straight to Easter. But frankly it is pointless, even misleading, to read or ponder any part of the gospel texts without holding the resurrection in mind. Because the resurrection is the only reason why any of these texts were written down in the first place. The world already has its share of tragedies. It didn’t need to record one more.

No, this Jesus story is something else, because Jesus rose again. And when he did, everything that came before—the birth in the manger, all the long journeys into Egypt and back, all the sacrifices, all the strange dreams and guiding stars—all of it, tragic as it was, was finally redeemed into something good.

Because of the resurrection, the gospels are not a tragedy. They are not just a record of our woes and of God’s sacrifice. That’s part of it, sure. But it’s not the heart of it. The heart of the gospels, the heart of the good news is wholeness, fullness. The heart of it is survival, flourishing even. The heart of it, if you can believe it, is comedy. A great, divine comedy (a term which I think some guy named Dante thought of long before I did).

The Gospels say: I know the headlines are dire, but don’t let them destroy your hope. We are NOT on an inevitable path towards disintegration. We are NOT always going to live under the subjection of Herod and his successors, with their war games and their slaughter of innocents for political ends. We are NOT meant to be content with the sad acceptance of such a world.

We are not even meant to die, not forever, and in the story of Jesus, we see that we will not. While we may put on both comic and tragic masks in our lifetimes, while we will smile and cry sometimes all at once, at the last we will all be called out of Egypt, out of despair, out of death itself, to stand, unmasked and unafraid, face to face with the One who calls us back to himself.

So it’s a comedy, this Christian story. Not always the laugh out loud kind, God knows, but a comedy nonetheless in that classical sense, because it is the kind of story where we will end up ok in the end. All of us. We are going to be ok.

And what this means for us, at the threshold of a new and already complex year, is that faith communities like ours have a particular part to play in the world, especially as tragic news persists; as new innocents are slaughtered; as new communities live in the shadow of sacrifice and danger.

Because we are the ones who will bear witness to these challenges, but we are also the ones who will offer a counter-narrative in how we speak and act and live.

When some preach division and fear, we preach love. When some enact oppression and petty grievance, we pursue justice and relationship. When some say life is loneliness, we say, you belong here. When some try to sell us empty, vain promises, we say, no, I have found wisdom in older, simpler, humbler things like prayer and friendship and kindness and service.

And when we feel the pain of life, we will admit, yes, there are many tragedies in this world. But there is also that light which shines in the darkness. There is that light which darkness has not and shall not overcome. And so the story, the whole story, isn’t over just yet. We are coming out of Egypt. And Jesus will rise again.

Tragedy will never take the final bow.

I lost track of that old stage makeup kit long ago, but those two faces glued to the top, laughing and frowning…I still see them everywhere I look. The comedy and the tragedy of life are all around, and there are days—oh there are days—when I do wonder which will win out, and I look at Jesus and ask,

What have you brought upon us, Child of Bethlehem? What have you wrought in your coming?

But then I remember. And call it resurrection, call it unyielding love, call it undying joy, call it just the tiniest sliver of hope.

Whatever name you give it, this much I know:

That in the end, after the curtain falls on everything else, there will be laughter.

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.