Tag: Christianity

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.

Greeting Cards: A Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jackrabbit: A Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

That’s all the sign says. Here it is.

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

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

A gift shop. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And really, we do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here it is. 

The Other Part: A Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So be it. 

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

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

By Another Road: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, January 5 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 2:1-12, the journey of the Magi to see the baby Jesus.

Some of you know that I post the text of my sermons each week on a little blog site I created several years ago. I’ve always loved writing, and it started out as a helpful way for me to share some of my early sermons and reflections with a few family members and friends. It has transitioned into, I hope, a convenient way for anyone to go back, if they want to, to see what exactly I was attempting to say on any given Sunday—whether because you found it interesting, or perhaps because it made no sense at all. I make no promises! 

It is the humbling labor of a preacher each week to launch out our words as an offering to the community we serve and out into the universe as an offering to God. We hope, at best, to leave behind a small impression—which can feel like trying to skip a stone on the surface of the sea.

But I digress. The blog where I post my sermons and skip my stones is titled By Another Road, and folks have asked me on occasion why it’s called that. Well, in this morning’s Gospel reading, you have your answer. I took it from Matthew’s account of the Magi (or Wise Men) who, after visiting the baby Jesus and having been warned of King Herod’s nefarious intentions, decide to travel home “by another road.” 

On its face, this little phrase is just part of the plot—the Magi literally have to go home a different way in order to avoid an awkward or dangerous conversation with Herod. They’ve accomplished what they came to do, paying homage to this newborn king, and now they slip down a back road to their own homelands.  

But for me, at least, this phrase, by another road, always meant something more. Maybe it’s because, for various reasons, I have known what it feels like to be “other” myself. When a person feels different somehow from those around them, you come to know what it means and what it costs to walk a road through life that some people cannot—or choose not—to understand.

This can be many things. For some, this “other road” is tied to an identity we carry with us; for others perhaps it is shaped by our personal or family history, or our physical limitations, or the unexpected responsibilities and challenges that life has visited upon us. The more I live and serve as a priest and hear people’s stories, the better I understand that we are all traveling “by another road” of one sort or another.

And what I became convinced of at a particular point in my walk with God, and which I fervently believe is the basis of our faith, is that the story of following Jesus is less about conforming ourselves to one straight and narrow, conventionally acceptable path, and instead is about opening our hearts and our eyes and our minds to recognize how God is present on every road we must travel. And that God is present, too, on the roads we do not recognize—the ones walked by people very different from us. 

The point of being Christian is found not so much in which road we take, but how we travel. Are we going gently and justly? Are we helping others along the way? Are we stopping to notice the beauty of the world around us and giving thanks for it? Are we treating those whom we meet as adversaries, or as fellow pilgrims? 

To travel by another road, ultimately, means seeing the world as the Wise Men did after their encounter with the Christ child—once they decided to opt out of whatever political intrigue they’d been drawn into. It is to see the world no longer as place of transactional relationships and personal ambitions, but as a network of winding paths—all our pasts and futures and sorrows and dreams, all converging, ultimately, beneath the star of Bethlehem, in the flesh of God, and in the humble gifts we offer to one another…all of us skipping our stones on the surface of the sea. 

And to be a follower of Jesus is to commit to walking whatever road we’re on as if all of this is true and worthwhile. Because in every worship service and in every act of service to our neighbor we affirm that it is—that God was born into this world to bless every pathway we have stumbled upon, and even to journey by another road of his own, to the Cross and beyond. 

Now, I’ll admit that the idea that there isn’t just one road, one perfect way to “do” this Christian life, and that—heaven help us—there might even be holy pathways for people who look or love or live differently than us— might be a bit disorienting, even offensive to some. So be it.

But I’ll tell you—it’s this realization–that God was with me on my own road, that Jesus wanted to walk with me just as I am–that saved me, and continues to save me every day of my life. And I suspect, because you have found a sense of home at St. Anne, that might be true for you, too.

Because the other thing I love about the story of the Magi is that they, themselves, discovered in their encounter with Jesus that it was ok to be different. They were not Israelites. They weren’t part of the in-crowd in this story. And yet God, as a child, welcomed them as any child would—full of love and trust and wonder. These Magi were enough, just as they are; they were loved and blessed not because of the particular road they have traveled, but simply because they have come. And so it is for you.

I hope we learn something from all of this. And so, if I could ask you to do two things, my dear friends, at the outset of this new calendar year, it would be this:

First—take some time to look at the road you’re on, whether in this past year or maybe for your whole life. Maybe it’s not perfect. Maybe it’s been hard. But I want you to kneel down and bless that road, and bless the body and soul that has carried you on it. 

I want you to trace a cross in the dust of this road you’ve been walking, trace a cross over the story you’ve been carrying in your heart, over the questions you’ve been asking, over the fears you’ve been fearing, and I want you to say to yourself, God is on this road with me. Jesus is on this road with me. And so I will travel it with my head held high, with a sense of love and purpose and care, because like any other road, it is made sacred by the journey.

And second—take some time to learn about the road someone else is walking. Maybe someone close to you whose life just doesn’t make a lot of sense to you. Or maybe someone you’ve lost touch with. Or maybe a community of people whose life experiences differ greatly from yours. 

In whatever way you can, whether through conversation or study, try to understand the road that they are walking. Maybe you can ask them those questions I suggested last November:  What do you love? What do you fear? What do you hope for? And another important question one of you added to that list: What can I do to help? 

Because the Epiphany that we speak of this time of year—the Epiphany of God’s revelation in our midst—is not just about the news of Jesus born in Bethlehem all those years ago, visited by wise men and feared by kings. 

No, the Epiphany is also that God is still here with every one of us, no matter which road we’re on—the winding roads and the dangerous ones; the placid pathways and the ones cut short; the long hauls and the dead ends. 

And we are now the ones who must be Wise Men and Wise Women and Wise People, putting one foot in front of the other, following that star, bearing our own particular gifts, so that kings and tyrants might yet tremble in the face of love and peace and mercy, both in the form of a child and in the ones who seek him—the ones, like us, who dare to travel by another road. 

A road which, no matter where it goes, always leads us home.