coming out – By Another Road

No Words: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, March 15, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is John 9:1-41.

There are some things in this life that cannot be explained simply, and they usually have to do with love.

We talk a lot about love here in this pulpit—God’s love and our own—and that’s really because we could talk about it forever yet still not fully capture what love is with words alone. Talking about love is like trying to paint a picture of the wind. We can capture the effects of the wind well enough—the ripples in the grass, the curtain billowing in the window, the way it makes your eyes burn—but the wind itself remains beyond our grasp. Mostly we just feel it. We live and move and have our being in it.

So it is with love. So it is with God.

To that end: I was thinking this week about my dad, and in particular about the night I came out to him. He’d driven out to Virginia in his old rundown blue Cadillac to pick me up from college for Christmas break during my freshman year. And when he got to town on a windy, rainy December night, we went to grab some food together at a diner.

Now, I’d already shared this information about myself with a few college friends, but this was the first big moment of telling a loved one about who I am. And so we ordered our hamburgers and caught up about how school was going while I worked up the nerve to tell him what was really on my heart.

And honestly, I don’t even remember what I said or quite how I got the words out, I was so scared. But I did and, although I shouldn’t have been at all surprised, given the type of person he was, it was still astonishing in the best way when he simply smiled at me and said, “oh, I knew that. And I love you.”

And that was it. No more words had to be said. No more words could be said. We just ate our hamburgers and watched the rain streak against the window and the moment was both comfortable and brand new all at once. That’s love as best I can tell of it: something that is familiar and frightening and safe and strange all at once, asserting itself, making itself known and yet never really explaining itself.

And, because the Bible tells me so, I have to come think that God is much the same way, since God is love. God, too, is familiar and frightening and safe and strange, and we begin to lose the plot a bit when we try too hard to explain God with exact precision. We just know his effects: the way it fees when the Spirit blows by, and and the way that the words of Jesus billow through an open window, and the the way he can make your eyes burn.

The wordlessness of love can make us uncomfortable, because many of us have been formed to be precise people—we want to know exactly what’s going on before we trust it; to have our ducks in a row before we act; to be sure that the odds are in our favor before we take any sort of risk. And in many aspects of life and work, these are good and reasonable strategies.

But love and the God who is love are not reasonable propositions; they are bone-deep, soul-deep experiences. And so in our relationship with Jesus, we are invited—no, commanded—to invert the equation.

Jesus says: love first, ask questions later.

Love first, then seek understanding.

Love first, then form a plan.

Love first, then believe.

That’s what my dad did that night in the diner. I don’t think he’d necessarily worked out all the theological arguments one might make about whether his gay son deserved love and support or not. I don’t think, if he’d been challenged by someone in church about why he “condoned” my existence, that he would’ve had some long rational or theological argument to convince them. I think he would have just said, “he is my son, and I love him.”

I think for him, love was its own reason. Its own proof. Its own rationale.

And that is what God would like us to see. That is exactly how Jesus asks us to speak when we are speaking of the things of God. Love first, then figure out what it is you believe. Our Gospel story today shows us this.

Think about this man who is born blind and is then made to see. Much like last week, this long story is deeply instructive to us disciples if we spend time with it—as though Jesus is inviting us to see something for the first time, too.

You might notice that the whole thing feels a bit like a trial or a test. The Pharisees are outraged and offended, as they often are, because Jesus is going around healing on the sabbath and showing signs of power that make them uncomfortable. He is loving first, asking questions about propriety later.

But they have lots of questions, lots of demands for an explanation—of who is who and what is what and how any of this could be possible or permissible or acceptable.

But here’s the simple beauty of this particular story: both the man born blind and Jesus, too, politely yet firmly refuse to engage in the Pharisee’s frenetic search for explanations.

“One thing I do know,” the man says. “That though I was blind, now I see.”

You know, that line alone tells us everything we need to know about being a follower of Jesus and a proclaimer of the good news.

It is to stand in the midst of the raucous, anxious, cynical crowd and say, “One thing I know: that somehow love has changed me. And I don’t have all the answers, but this I do know: that love—for God, for my neighbor, for my enemy, for myself— is the starting point of any true answer.”

Because the love of God that Jesus heals with is an experiential reality, a way of life, not a theory or a formula. And unless you start with that experience—of love, of mercy, of grace—you can talk about God all the days of your life and still you will speak nothing true of God. And you can make a thousand sacrifices and walk a thousand miles and give a thousand alms, but until you have brushed up against the sort of love that makes you fumble for words, the love that renders explanations unnecessary, you will not really know who God is.

The Pharisees, of course, cannot accept this. They have made an idol of their desire to understand, and so true knowledge eludes them here. The same can be said for far too many Christians, so desperate for clear answers that they don’t mind who they have to hurt to hold onto them.

As for me, and maybe as for you, too, I am ok with the God of fewer answers and greater presence. I am still looking for that God at diner tables and on rainy nights and in stories of those who have learned to see the world in a new way. The ones who aren’t afraid to look a little foolish, a little unprepared, because they have chosen to love first, and ask questions later.

I think its only then, in fact, that we can begin to ask the truly important questions anyway. It is only then that we can bear witness to the reality of a God who is hard to understand but very easy to see when you know how to look. And if your eyes begin to burn a bit, that might be a good hint he’s close by.

And that’s my hope for us in these final weeks of Lent: to practice naming those moments when God feels close by. I tell you these stories from the pulpit week by week because they are such moments for me. And I know each of you probably have hundreds of your own.

So part of our practice of discipleship can be noticing them and then writing them down in a journal or telling someone else about them, however briefly. It doesn’t have to be a mountaintop moment or a miraculous healing. But the more you look for God, the more you name God, the more you will see God, everywhere, in everyone. Hard to put into words, hard to explain, but impossible to miss.

If we do this, perhaps then we will all be able to say, “one thing I do know—that though I was blind, now I see.”

And there will be nothing else that needs to be said.

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.