Tag: Episcopal Church

Lock: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, June 9 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are 1 Samuel 8:4-20 and Mark 3:20-35.

Last week, while Matt and I were on vacation in Boston, we did a lot of walking. And of course we visited all of the famous sites in the city: the Old North Church, and Paul Revere’s house, and Bunker Hill, and all the rest. But we also ended up in some lesser known corners. I won’t say we were lost, but at the end of one day, we were trying to find our way back across the Charles River to the central part of the city. We came across a narrow little walking path that cut through a park and then over a series of concrete structures in the river. 

As we crossed over, I saw that it was a dam used to control the inflow of saltwater from the ocean and that it had a series of locks built into it to make the water navigable for boats traveling up and down the river. So we stopped for a moment to look. 

I’ve always found locks interesting—the kind for boats, not for doors—maybe because I grew up in proximity to the famous Soo Locks up in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, where large cargo ships must pass through to get from Lake Superior to the rest of the Great Lakes. 

The basic concept of a lock, if you have never seen one, is that a boat, when it is passing from one elevation of water to another, enters into an enclosed chamber, and then water either flows in or out of the chamber so that the boat can rise or fall and then emerge safely on the other side at the proper elevation. They are elegant and ingenious in their simplicity, and you can find them all over the world, in all sorts of settings.

But as we looked down into these locks in Boston, I was surprised to see one little boat, just floating there in the chamber, in the still water, with nobody on board. Now, I am sure there was a perfectly mundane reason for this boat to be left there, but it struck me as a rather forlorn sight, almost as if the boat had been abandoned, mid-journey, trapped between the river and the sea, left to sit alone in this chamber of somber, motionless water, surrounded by gray cement walls, waiting for someone to claim it and release it. 

And, as it happens, that image of the boat trapped in the lock came to my mind this week as I was reflecting on our Scripture lessons—probably because I was thinking about the price we are sometimes asked to pay for safety and for belonging.

Just as that boat was suspended in motion, confined to a safe place that it was not meant to stay in forever, so, too, I think, we can find ourselves trapped in proverbial locks—ones that we have constructed for ourselves or that we’ve drifted into unwittingly—and in those moments we need to be reminded that we were meant for something more.

Consider: in our first passage from the Book of Samuel, Israel wants a king. They want a king because they are a bedraggled and storm-tossed people; they are weary of being vulnerable, weary of having to trust in the guidance of a God whom they cannot see. They want to be like other nations, they want to be ruled by the sort of king they can comprehend, the kind who will put them on the same level as their adversaries. And so they enter the lock. 

But Samuel warns them—and warns us still: beware of hiding yourselves within the stone walls of an earthly king’s protection, because you might get stuck there, stifled and crushed by the very safety you once craved. That’s why Samuel says, in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day. Personally and politically,God will let us build up all the walls we think we need, but it will also be up to us to dismantle them when we realize we’re trapped inside. All of history seems to be us learning this lesson over and over again. 

Because now, as then, God wants us to remember that the human heart and our common destiny was not meant for small spaces, intellectually, socially, or spiritually—we were created for for expansiveness, for mutuality, for the practice of a love that is broad and deep, the kind that ultimately cannot be contained by fear. 

If our life is something like that little boat in the lock, then God is not found in the walls around us, hemming us in. God is instead the living water rising up beneath us, the bracing current flowing from the depths of time, the One saying, come out, be brave, sail upon the ocean of light, see where the wind of the Spirit carries you, and fear not, for I am with you in every cresting wave.

And, speaking of the Spirit, we must also deal with this morning’s Gospel, which can, again, read as one of those passages that locks us in, with all of this talk about blasphemy and unforgivable sins, and Jesus rejecting his mother and siblings. What does all this have to do with the good news of God’s broad and deep love?

Quite a lot, actually. And here, again, the image of the boat and the lock helped me think about this. 

I think the Church has too often read Scripture as if Jesus himself was the keeper of the lock rather than what he actually is: the ocean that lies beyond it. We have too often imagined Jesus as if he was the heir of King Saul rather than the Son of God. We have entrapped him within the limited nature of our cultural and political imagination, as if he wants to rule over us like any other king. But he does not.

He is, as God was with Israel, as God has always been, the One who warned us against the seductive promises of tyrants. He is the God who wants us to leave behind the locks we have built up, who wants us to open the gates and break down the walls and break open our hearts and unfurl our spirits and cross the sea with him toward a farther, more promising shore.

And that is why, in today’s reading, he rebukes the religious authorities who condemn his healing and his casting out demons all because such things challenge their narrow understandings and harden them against the infinite compassion that is the true power of God. And this is why Jesus rebukes his family’s efforts to restrain his ministry, too. They want to keep his mission quiet and still and respectable like the water pent up in a cement chamber, rather than let it be the raging torrent of mighty waters that it actually is!

Jesus wants them—and us, now—to see: all of the systems and structures and institutions in the world, even the most cherished and fundamental ones, can turn into stifling dead ends if we hide within them, if we resist the outpouring of love and justice and mercy that is the true purpose of being alive.

And until we realize this, until we claim this as God’s true purpose for us—to leave the lock, to brave the waters, to give our lives over to the blowing wind of the Spirit—then we are indeed at risk of blasphemy against that Spirit, which has nothing to do with taking the Lord’s name in vain, but is the serious risk of living our lives in vain—of never letting God transform our hearts and our world. That’s why Jesus came among us. That is why we must set out; that is why our hearts must be set free.

Can you accept that you are loved so deeply and unconditionally that you are indeed free? Are we out there telling others in our community that they are loved that deeply and unconditionally, too?

They need to hear it. Because a lot of people are hurting, and they need to know that the Gospel is, in fact, good news for everyone and everything, without condition or exception. No cement walls. No tyrant kings. Just a river flowing toward the open water, and a wind that will carry us home. 

If we do nothing else in The Episcopal Church and here at St. Anne, I hope that we will realize this and help others do the same. I hope, in this moment in our world when there are so many big questions and deep hurts, that we will understand: the time for waiting behind the walls is over. It’s time to get out there, and show the world who Jesus actually is, and see where his love takes us.

The gates of the lock are open. 

Let’s go. 

Wake Up: A Sermon for Pentecost

I preached this sermon on Pentecost, May 19, 2024, at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH.

I actually don’t remember my dreams that often, but every so often I have a really strange or stressful one. You know, the sort where you are caught in some embarrassing situation and you can’t get out of it, or everything starts crumbling apart and you fall through an opening in the floor, or some scary monster is chasing you and you can’t quite get away. I once had a dream where I opened my mouth to speak and marbles kept pouring out of it. Hopefully not a subconscious commentary on my preaching prospects today.

But if you have ever had a stressful dream or a nightmare, then you also know that strangely pleasurable pang of relief when you wake up with a start and realize, blessedly, that everything is ok. You are safe. The walls are not falling down around you. The monster wasn’t real. You can speak the words you need to speak. 

And so you catch your breath in the soft pre-dawn gloom, and it’s true, the world to which you’ve awakened may not be perfect, it may carry its own tangible shadows and fears, but it is solid and real, and the sun is rising, and it will somehow be ok. This is the relief of waking up. 

And this is why, I think, that in many of the great spiritual traditions of the world, coming into the proximity of divine truth is also often described as “waking up.” We employ the metaphors of sleep and dreams and wakefulness in talking about our experiences of God because we know, instinctively, what it feels like to be jolted into an awareness of what is real, to find safety and purpose in the things that we can actually hold onto, the things that endure, versus those things that are confusing and illusory and which fade like dreams, like the moon at daybreak. 

It might even be said that the entire spiritual journey of humanity is one made in the direction of “waking up” and comprehending, as much as our mortal minds can, what is True with a capital T and to cultivate within ourselves the place where that truth can take root and flourish and bear fruit and not be crowded out by nightmares and delusions. I think that this is the case no matter who you meet, no matter who you are, no matter how you understand God. 

Notice that I am deliberately speaking in very broad strokes here about human spirituality, and not specifically about a Christian spirituality—not yet. That is intentional, even if it’s maybe a bit daring to do so on Pentecost, one of the major Christian feast days of the entire year.

But Pentecost is a very unusual feast day, and if we take it seriously, it demands more from us than a passive acknowledgment of one moment in the life of Jesus’ disciples recorded in the book of Acts. It would be easy to gather and to sing some hymns about the Holy Spirit and wonder what the tongues of fire looked like and then go on about our business til next year. 

But what if we were meant to do more than that today? What if Pentecost was meant to wake us up to something entirely new, something very real and enduring and transformative about the God whom Jesus embodied?  

Because here’s the thing about Pentecost: it is, perhaps more than any other feast day, a categorical statement that the gospel does not belong to us. Let me say that again: the gospel does not belong to us. At least, not only to us.

Because the true gospel of love that Jesus initiated cannot be contained or controlled or wielded by anyone, including the churches that bear his name. It is universal, for all people, not in an imperialistic sense where we will compel others to be like us, but simply because the movement of love, the movement of the Holy Spirit, is everywhere, in everything and everyone. This was the radical revelation and invitation of God in Christ, fulfilled at Pentecost: to wake up to the good news that God’s love is free to all people. And then to act like people who are awake.

Nontheless, we have spent over 2,000 years, in various places and times and cultures, fitting the message and the mission and the death and the resurrection and the ascension of Jesus into a sectarian or institutional framework. And of course we would. We’re only human. For all we know, the apostles were drafting an organizational chart in the days leading up to Pentecost. 

But then something happened. Something so strange and wild and free and destabilizing that even the account of it in Acts doesn’t make a lot of sense. All we get are metaphors: a sound like a rush of violent wind. Divided tongues, as of fire. People speaking in languages they don’t even know. It honestly sounds more like a strange dream, except in this case it wasn’t. They were not asleep, and they were not drunk on new wine. They were awake. Maybe for the first time in their entire lives. And in the speaking and the praying and the blowing of the wind and the burning of the flame something became apparent that had not been before:

That whatever Jesus had been doing, whatever he had been trying to teach them and pass on to them and invite them into in his risen life, it did not belong to them, or to any one group. This gospel was not a secret teaching for the elect, it was not an exclusive invitation for the chosen, it was not a blueprint for the power of one nation above all others. It was the Spirit saying to all of creation:

Wake up! Wake up and see that I love all of you, that I love everything, that everything is nothing but love! Wake up, children of every nation and creed and language and color and class. Wake up and see that the good news is you were made for blessedness, you were made for communion with your Creator, you were made to stand at the threshold of heaven and earth and to let these things rush through you like a fire, like a gale, like the light of the rising sun! 

The Gospel of this love does not belong to you, and that is what makes it good news. It is for Israel, but not only for Israel. It is for the Gentiles, but not only for the Gentiles. It is for the rich, the poor, the healthy, the weak, the lost, the found, the mighty, the marginal, but it does not belong to any one of them alone. It is for the gay, the straight, the trans*, the young, the old, the urban, the rural, the liberal and the conservative, the partisan and the cynic, but not for any one of them alone. It is for the human, the beast, the soil, the stars, the rivers, the wood, the stone, the deep ocean and the immeasurable depths of the cosmos. It is for all of them, this gospel. It is for all of us.

And on this day, on this strange and beautiful day, we have a choice: we can either wake up all over again and rediscover our calling to a universal, boundless, borderless, indiscriminate care and concern and fellowship with everything and everyone. Or we can keep dreaming our restless dreams about a God who is more concerned with perpetuating cultural warfare and the histories of violence and loss to which we have become accustomed. 

But I will tell you, I am weary of those terrible dreams. I am ready to wake up and see what is real, to speak clearly, to seek what is possible if we let the gospel be what it is, as dynamic and fluid and liberated as the Holy Spirit, belonging to no one and thus belonging to everyone, everywhere, always, revealing how we all belong, how are all beloved, how everything is possible if we dare to act like it is.

This morning we are baptizing baby Oliver and baby Thea into all of this. And as we witness their incorporation into this life, into this story, into this community, what I hope you will remember is that, on a fundamental level, what we are talking about in baptism, and what we are talking about on Pentecost, and really on every Sunday we gather, is not only being part of a church, but also about being part of everything. 

It is about recognizing our kinship with every face we encounter, and with the night sky, and the vast earth, and the creatures that dwell therein. It is about giving something of ourselves over to everything else, just as Jesus did—something of our life, and labor, and heart—so that we might wake up, with a start, and yet with a strange pang of relief, to realize that life is neither a strange dream nor a private nightmare to endure, but something solid and real and interconnected and whole, and that the sun is rising, and that somehow, in the end, everything will be ok. 

For there is a God who is bigger than everything, who burns with love for you; there is a Spirit who is closer than your own breath, and this Spirit has come, in wind and fire and gentleness to say one, necessary thing as you toss and turn in that gloom just before the dawn:

Wake up, dear one. Wake up.

Books: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, May 5, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is John 15:9-17.

If you didn’t already know this about me, now you will—and I’m not ashamed to admit it, because I am surely in good company with others in this room–but…I buy too many books. I can’t seem to help myself. 

My partner, Matt, will attest to this, as will my mom, who I am pretty sure passed this problem on to me. New, used, it doesn’t matter—if I am out and about and I pass by a bookshop, I have to go in. I have to peruse. And more often than I should, I find yet another book that I absolutely need to buy it right now. *Right now.*

Never mind that I have a teetering stack of books on my bedside table most of the time, all in various stages of consumption. Never mind that I have a wall of books behind me in my office. Never mind that I have donated so many books to local libraries, every time I have moved, that I could have probably started a library of my own. It’s not my fault they keep publishing so many good ones!

Books are just so interesting. So many good ideas, so many stories, so many important histories and lessons to digest. I think my all-time record purchase, one time when my mom and I took a trip to Florida and stayed near a used book store—was 22 books in one visit. They probably only cost me $10 or $20 in total, but still. A little embarrassing. As to whether I read all 22 of them cover to cover…no comment. 

These days Matt just gives me a knowing look when a small Amazon package shows up at the apartment door or when I make a sabbath day visit to the local book shop. He knows what he’s in for in the future, God love him. 

Now, despite my insatiable appetite for books, I will admit that it can get a bit overwhelming when it comes time to actually pick one to read and stick with. Hence the big stack by the bedside.

But every so often…you come across a book that just draws you in. If you are an avid reader, you know what this feeling is like. The plot or the writing style just envelops you, and suddenly you are not interested in scrolling on your phone or watching Netflix or anything else—you just want to devour this book and see what happens next. It is truly one of the most pleasurable experiences in life. And not only because you are being entertained or educated, but because you are focused. All the little annoyances and worries and wonderings that clutter our minds fall away for a bit and you are part of a new and different world with each turning of the page. 

If it’s been a while since you found a book like that (or a film, or a piece of music, or whatever it is that captivates you), I hope that you do so soon. I hope you remember what it feels like to surrender yourself to the ideas and possibilities of another world. 

Because, although there are always more books to collect, there is a certain rest, and peace, and, paradoxically, a freedom, in committing fully to just one: one story, one thing, over all the other ones beckoning from the proverbial shelf.

And speaking of stories worth committing to, this morning Jesus arrives at the central theme of his own story. “This is my commandment,” he says to his disciples, “that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” 

This is my commandment. This is it. This, right here, is the purpose of the Gospel stories. This the purpose of the entirety of Scripture. This is the purpose of everything; the beginning and the endpoint of creation. Love one another as I have loved you. 

And I know we spend a lot of time wondering about and debating the meaning of existence, but here’s a spoiler alert: your life is about loving one another. Just as God, incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, has demonstrated that love in the flesh. 

Your life is about proclaiming this love and practicing this love. That’s it! That’s the one story, above all others, that we were meant to read and internalize. And we can spend our lives reading a thousand other books or exploring esoteric philosophies, looking for countless other hints about what it means to be alive and to live well, but I guarantee you, we will always come back to this: love one another.

“I have called you friends,” Jesus continues, “because I have made known to you everything I have heard from my Father.” All the secrets of the universe, all the origins of creation, all the big questions about why and what and how and when—it’s all just summed up in this: love one another.

I think, in some ways, we are convinced it must be more complicated than that. We imagine there is some secret library, locked away, waiting to be discovered, that will reveal a more complex, surprising answer to why we are alive on this earth. We construct a bunch of ideological theories and political dividing lines to explain things. But our faith reveals to us that there isn’t some big secret. There’s just this. Love one another. It’s almost embarrassingly simple.

Now I understand, of course, that this does not mean that the actual living out of our lives is always simple. How we choose to love one another, how we wrestle with the challenges of love and the sacrifices and the losses it occasions and how we navigate the many temptations to choose something other than love—thes are all stories that are still being lived, still being told and written down and passed on. 

But to be a Christian, to be a disciple of Jesus, is to say: no matter what my own story is, no matter how hard or complicated it gets, and no matter what other stories I encounter in this big, diverse, sometimes scary world, there is ONE story that is the key to understanding all the rest: love one another. 

And it is to say: this is the one story that I will choose over all the others on the shelf, and I will find rest and clarity in choosing to believe that loving one another is all that will be left when the last word has been written at the end of time. 

And this is the story that we will keep on telling and living out here at St. Anne, as best we can, week after week, year after year, because you know as well as I do that the world is still, always, desperately in need of such a story. 

For all the cultural impact of Christianity in our history and society, it seems too often that a lot of people who claim to follow Jesus have lost the plot of what he was actually talking about. They decided somewhere along the way that his story was about purity or power, not love.

But while we may not know everything, this much we do know and this much we proclaim: God is love and love is God and no one has greater love than this: to lay down one’s life like an open book; to become engrossed in the story of the love we share; to forsake all the side plots and distractions, because we know that love for one another is the only story worth telling. It is the only one that makes sense in the end.

If it’s been a while since you felt a love like that, I hope that you do so soon. I hope you remember what it feels like to surrender yourself to the ideas and possibilities of love.

Now, I will probably never read all of the books on my shelf in their entirety. I will probably keep buying more books. Matt, I pray, will be patient with me.

But what I take comfort in is that, even if I never get to read every story written, I already know the resolution to all of them. We catch glimpses of it here every week, in the bread that we eat, in the reconciliation we pursue, in the songs we sing. All beautiful fragments of the one true story. 

And not to give away the ending entirely, but I promise you this: it’s good news. 

Stranger: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, April 28, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Acts 8:26-40.

This may sound odd, but every so often, it’s good to feel like a stranger. 

Most of us tend to build our lives in pursuit of familiarity and predictability. We establish relationships and routines and structures that allow us to feel safe and known wherever we go.

But especially if we have been in a place for a long while, and we have become very comfortable and familiar with the people around us, every so often it’s good to feel like a stranger—to remember what a humbling experience it can be, how vulnerable it is, standing at the edge of a room and hoping that someone will be kind enough to take notice of us. 

I experienced this one afternoon last August shortly after I came to Ohio. Not at Saint Anne, mind you—my role here meant that I felt known and seen here from day one. But  a few weeks after I started, I decided to go down into Cincinnati to attend an open house event for a nonprofit organization that has no connection to the church. 

I was interested in learning more about their work and thought it would be good to go and check it out. I went by myself, and as soon as I showed up, a feeling hit me that I hadn’t felt in a very long time: that feeling I used to have on the first day of school after moving to a new town. The slightly awkward feeling when you walk into a place where everyone else seems to know each other and you are just sort of standing there looking for a way in, feeling like you have a big blinking sign around your neck that says “stranger.”

Now, maybe some of you are life-of the-party types who can easily walk into a room and make 5 friends immediately. If so, I am in awe of you, because while I love people, and I love learning about people and connecting with people, I am also, somewhere buried underneath all of these vestments, still carrying with me a bit of that quiet kid on the first day of school. I used to think this was a bad thing, a weakness on my part, but I don’t anymore. 

Because every so often, it’s good to feel like a stranger. It’s good because it reminds me to look for and have compassion for those people brave enough to show up in a new space, to try a new thing, to go it alone when they must. 

And my own moments of feeling this way have, I pray, helped me stay mindful of the people who stand at the edges of those rooms in which I am very comfortable and confident. This is, I think, a spiritual practice we should all work at: looking for the strangers in our midst, and welcoming them, and even, sometimes, daring to go out and be a stranger ourselves. 

Especially because in so many of our Scriptural stories, we discover that God loves a stranger, and that often God shows up as a stranger, too. 

Consider this morning’s reading from Acts. Consider this man who is a eunuch—one who lives his entire life in an ambiguous posture. On one hand, he is a man who cannot have children or engage in traditional male gender norms, and so he is deemed a non-threatening and useful servant for a royal household, which affords him some privilege and comfort. 

On the other hand, he is a person who stands at the periphery of every room he enters—a stranger in his own culture, and a stranger, too, in Jerusalem, where he has just traveled to worship at the Temple. The Israelites, you see, had long excluded eunuchs from their assembly, as recorded in the book of Deuteronomy.

So I was thinking this week about this man who was a eunuch.

I imagined him arriving in Jerusalem in his royal chariot alone, and for all his finery, feeling like a kid on the first day of school: looking for a kind face somewhere in the crowd, wondering if this God who had called him to a new place would place a welcoming figure in his path. 

I imagined him standing in the firelight of a courtyard in the cool night, watching families eat and laugh and pray and gather–families he would never be part of, families who did not see him standing there waiting, hoping for an invitation to pull up a seat, to join in, to be known. 

And then I thought of him traveling back to Ethiopia on the wilderness road, reading the scroll of Isaiah, maybe with tears in his eyes, seeing his own life staring back at him on the page: “like a lamb silent before its shearer, he does not open his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him.”

And as he read, asking himself—How did Isaiah know? How did this prophet know exactly how I have felt every day of my life, quiet and humiliated and unsure? And what is on the other side of this, this feeling perpetually like a stranger in my own life, standing at the edge of my own existence? 

But God loves a stranger. So wouldn’t you know, there is Philip by the side of the road. 

God suddenly shows up, in the form of another stranger, with good news of the Son of God who was, himself, a stranger to his own people; and who ventured into the gates of death as a solitary stranger bearing his cross, pierced with nails; and who emerged back from death as a stranger pierced with light, offering a new type of belonging for anyone and everyone who has ever felt alone in this world. 

So yes, it is good, once in a while, to be a stranger–to feel your heart tremble with the longing to be a part of something, to stand awkwardly, looking for kindness in the eyes of those whom you do not know. 

It is good to do this because, what we must realize is that God is doing this every day in our midst—God is showing up at the margins, in those who feel excluded and uncertain, in the guests brave enough to enter through the doors of our church for the first time or after a very long time. God is standing just outside the firelight in the cool night, watching us eat and laugh and pray and hoping that we will welcome him in every form he takes. That we will invite God to pull up a seat, to join in, to be known. 

God is in the eunuchs and in all the people of our own time and place who do not know where they fit in—the people who love differently, who express their gender identity differently, the ones who come from different backgrounds, the ones who have done things they regret, the ones who aren’t sure what they believe, the ones who don’t believe in themselves, and the ones who have lost everything and yet still long to be part of something. 

And if we do nothing else here, I hope we will look for them. I hope we will not just say hello to them when they come to worship, but that we will then ask them to pull up a seat at coffee hour, or take them to lunch. That we will go out into the community and look for them and find ways to remind them that they are not alone, that we are all in this together. 

And, once in a while, I hope that we will become them, too—that we will venture into those new places where we are the stranger, to let our hearts be pierced by vulnerability, knowing that when we do so, we might be the face of God for the ones kind enough to notice us. 

…

After his impromptu baptism, all we know about the man who was a eunuch is that he went on his way rejoicing. Rejoicing because he knew, now, that God saw and loved him. Rejoicing because, perhaps for the first time in his whole life, he was seen as something more than a stranger. 

Rejoicing because now he knew that the very things that had made him feel different and excluded and less-than were now, precisely, the things that God would use in him to help others. Rejoicing because now it was his turn to go and find those at the periphery, to build his own fires in the cool night, and to say, I know what it feels like to be alone. Come closer. You are welcome here. You belong here. 

For the great mystery of God’s love is this: sometimes it is good to feel like a stranger, if only to look into each other’s eyes and realize that, in truth, none of us actually are.

What Is Loved, Is Resurrected

I preached this sermon on Easter Day, March 31, 2024, at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. A version was also featured this day as part of The Episcopal Church’s Sermons that Work.

“While it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed.”

—

What is loved, is resurrected. 

This is the proclamation of this singular, eternally true day. This is what we discover on this morning, as the dawn caresses the darkness and wipes away its tears. Just as sunlight reveals itself in the morning sky, so has the Son of God revealed his fullness, so that in the light of this impossible, wondrous moment, we, like Mary Magdalene, might finally behold God’s answer to our broken hearts:

That what is loved, is resurrected.

Because Jesus, who was so deeply loved, who is Love, has been resurrected. Or, more accurately, he IS the resurrection, just as he once told Martha as she grieved over Lazarus. He is Love and he is Resurrection, and now, at last, we see what had previously been hidden: that these two, love and resurrection, are the same thing. We see that love is not a temporary condition, not something that we must live in fear of losing; it is the fundamental premise of existence, it is the Alpha and the Omega. When we love, when we are loved, we are given a taste of eternity. 

And so Jesus, this Love enfleshed, stands before us, bathed in the dew of the garden, his voice as soft as flower petals, his heart as radiant as fire, and he has arrived, not at the end of his journey, but at the new beginning of our journey. At the new beginning of the world—again, as before, in a garden. A beginning that is again, as before, signified by the tenderness of a God who walks among the trees and seeks his children and calls out to them by name. 

But on this day, on the other side of night and on the other side of death, God has a new message to add: not simply that we are loved, for that has always been true…but that what is loved is resurrected. That love is resurrection, and that death is no longer a closed door. It is an empty tomb. 

It was not always evident that this would be so. 

Humanity has traveled a long way to get to this morning. Outward from the original, creative tension between chaos and genesis; outward from the garden of Eden; outward across a thousand wildernesses of yearning and temptation; traveling through the turbulent seas and across the river to the precarious, uncertain peace of our earthly promised lands.

And as we have traveled, humanity, in good times and hard, has always sought the one thing it could never have: a solution to the conflict between our affections and our mortality. In other words, that what we love, dies.

This has been the curse, this has been the bitten, bitter fruit of an inescapable insight: that even if our deep love—for God, for family, for spouse, for neighbor, for earth—somehow manages to endure over time, our bodies and the work of our hands do not. We are burdened with the degeneration of even our noblest efforts, the severing of our most precious bonds. The inescapable presence of death has driven the world mad with grief, desperate with the longing for something other than goodbye.

But today, in the strange dim light of Easter morning, a wondrous thing takes place. And not just the one you are thinking of. 

No, in fact, the first thing is this: that a disciple, Mary Magdalene, who has watched Jesus suffer and die, and who now carries the vast pain and loneliness of all creation in her heart, on a morning in which God is dead and Love is dead…she comes to the tomb. She comes to the grave of all human hope, knowing what has been lost, and she looks into the void where Love used to be…and yet she refuses to yield her love to that void.

Mary refuses, there, despite the literal death of Love itself, to give up the love she carries in her. She keeps that love alive in her broken heart. And so, on behalf of all of us, she comes to bear witness and to tend to God’s body when no one else is able or willing to do so, because she knows that bearing witness and tending to what is broken is what love looks like, both in life and in death. 

And in this moment of miraculous tenderness and strength, she, the stubborn bearer of a Love that was supposed to have been killed, is given to behold a new miracle:

That what is loved, is resurrected. 

Mary Magdalene did not resurrect Jesus, of course—the upwelling, earth-sustaining, heaven-rending power of the living God did that—but it is also true that, even as Jesus lay dead, this very same divine, undying love coursed through her veins and animated her soul and carried her to the tomb that day. 

It was God’s love, it was God’s own heart, in and with and through the heart of Mary Magdalene, who also wept beside the empty tomb, God weeping in her and with her and with us for the senselessness of separation, weeping for that long journey out of Eden, across the wilderness, through the seas, searching for something other than goodbye—a journey that God made, too, right beside us, step by weary step.

And so while Mary did not resurrect Jesus, we can say that she carried that same resurrecting love within herself, that she was an agent of and a participant in its surprising, vivifying force, and that she partook, in that moment, of the very same powerful, stubborn love that will ultimately restore all life back to life. 

And if she does, then so can we. 

What you need to know is this: the Resurrection of Jesus is not just a remote story of a bygone moment when something amazing happened; it is a statement about what is still true for you and for me and for everyone who is still navigating that long and often wearisome journey in search of something other than goodbye. For everyone who struggles to love; for everyone who has loved and lost; for everyone who feels confused about what love even is: Easter Day is the answer. 

What is loved, however imperfectly, for however long, is resurrected. 

This is what the risen body of Christ signifies and enacts: that what is loved is not lost to you, and it will live forever, not only as a memory, but in its fullness, in the flesh, on that day when God becomes all in all, and the whole earth is loved back to life. 

And, as Mary discovered, what you choose to love in this world is imbued with the promise of resurrection simply by the act of loving it. Every time you have gently kissed a soft cheek or held a calloused hand. Every time you have refused to break a bruised reed or trample a fragile spirit. Every time you have preserved the hope of the poor, or sought beauty, or made peace. Every time you have stopped to love something, you have taken part in the ultimate resurrection of the world, for what is loved—by you, by God, and by God working through you—is resurrected. 

Why and how is this so? How can Easter be what it is? 

We cannot explain it. We need not explain it. Because neither can we really explain our compulsion to love, even in the face of loss and uncertainty, and yet we simply do. Love is its own answer to the questions we ask. And resurrection is the same. 

Jesus emerges from the fading night, calling Mary by name, calling you by name, to confirm what you already knew in your bones but dared not trust: that love is worth the cost, it is worth having to say goodbye, because there is indeed, something other than goodbye at the end of the story, there is a place where beginnings and endings meet, where, forever, the dawn will caress the darkness and wipe away its tears and all that has been loved will be alive, and we will call each other by name. 

And in this strange new Easter light, perhaps we will realize that there was, in fact, always something deeper than mere human longing that propelled us across the wilderness and through the sea—that our long history of choosing to seek, to hope, to endure, to dream of something other than goodbye, was never a futile endeavor—it was a fertile one. It was the resurrecting love of God already at work in our mortal bodies, now completed in God’s body.

And like Mary in the garden, beholding the Risen Lord of flesh and flower and flame, perhaps we will discover that we, too, are bearers of that force which is stronger than death; that our choice to love is to take part in the very same mysterious, power that compels life to rise up from the earth.

For what is loved, is resurrected. 

Just like Jesus. 

And, one day, just like us. 

I’m Here: A Sermon for Good friday

I preached this sermon on Good Friday, March 29th, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH.

Here we are. 

Here we are, at the Cross. At the place that is an ending, even if we pray that it’s not the end. It’s the day in the story that no one wants to think much about and yet that must be faced, eventually. The day that is full of dread and sorrow and pain and yet compels us in ways that are hard to explain. We are pulled in close on this day, challenged to listen and to look, challenged to stay, even if we would rather run far away, rather be anywhere else than here, in proximity to the tears and the sweat and the blood, holding vigil with a broken man as he weeps and dies. With a broken God as he weeps and dies. 

We do not enjoy this observance, and yet we come, on Good Friday, because somehow we know that we must come. Not out of a sense of religious obligation or detached piety. No, we leave all of that posturing far behind us if we are actually paying attention to the story, if we are actually open to it. Out here on Golgotha, where things are brutally spare and honest, where only the wind and the rock and the bones take note of our presence, out where even temples and empires have neither sense nor safety to offer, it is something deeper than duty that draws us.

We come here because we know, in a way deeper than knowing, that this is what love requires of us. We know, somehow, that showing up, that being present, that being able to look into someone’s frightened, tired eyes–into Jesus’ frightened, tired eyes–and to simply say, “I’m here,” is the most important thing that we can do when there is nothing else left to do. 

We know this because we know death all too well. We have lived it. If you have ever received that call or text that comes late in the night and you have rushed to be with someone who is gravely ill or dying, you know what I mean. You know how, as their eyes grow dim and their energy fades and their breathing changes, and then they are sleeping, and then they are slipping, and you aren’t even sure if they can hear you anymore…you know that you cannot do much of anything except say, “I’m here. I’m here. I’m here. I love you. And I’m here.” 

We feel helpless, then. And we are. And yet this is exactly what we need to do at such times. No big gestures, no eloquent words are necessary. Just, “I’m here.”

And so it is fitting, now, as Jesus dies, that we stop what we’re doing, that we come here from wherever we are in our lives and in our hearts. Not to fix anything or figure anything out. But simply to say to him: I’m here.

I’m here, Lord, even if we weren’t always as close as I’d hoped. 

I’m here even if I never fully understood you, even if I never felt fully understood.

I’m here, even though there are a thousand questions you never answered, and a thousand more I never asked. 

I’m here, even though I have doubted you, and I have doubted myself, I have doubted whether the type of love you talked about is even possible in a world as broken as this one. 

I’m here, even though I cannot bear to see you like this. 

I’m here, because I cannot imagine never seeing you again. 

I’m here, and somehow, I pray that it is enough that I am here, to hold your hand, to look into your eyes, to show you that you are not forsaken. 

I love you, and I’m here.

The strangeness of it all, is that, on this day, we are here consoling God as God dies, whereas for all the rest of our days, God has been the one drawing close to console us. Since the moment we were born, and as we grew up, and as we grew older and began to learn the cost of growing old, God has always been waiting, listening, watching, staying near. God has been ready, when we cry out in pain or fear, ready to drop everything, to come, to say, “I’m here. I’m here. I love you. I’m here. I know you don’t understand. And I can’t always fix it for you, but I’m here.”

Yet now, in the mysterious circularity of love, like children who must one day cradle their parents, it is our turn. Our turn to comfort our Creator, our Lord, our God, as he cries out and enters the darkness, enters death—the one and only place where he, being eternal, being God, has never been before. Our turn to help him feel a bit less afraid, just this once. 

Our turn, now, to be the one who is strong, the one who must endure, who must bear witness, who must show up, as God has always done for us. Good Friday is our turn to offer back the gift of presence, saying, yes, God, I know. It hurts to live. And it’s scary to die. I know. But I’m here. I’m here. I’m here. 

In other words, today is the day, spiritually, that we grow up, that we become the ones that he always longed for us to be. The ones who choose, in coming here, to no longer hide from death nor from pain nor from ourselves, because love compels us, above all, to show up, to stay present, no matter what. And because today, on the Cross, God, who never needed anything, who didn’t know what need felt like, now needs us. 

For he has traveled from farther than forever, and the trip has taken its toll. He has been wearied and winnowed down to the bone. He has spent all he had, and he has nothing left to give over except his body, and he is willing to risk be misunderstood and despised and mocked, all for the chance to come and find you and say those words from his own lips that God has been trying to tell us for all time: I’m here, I’m here, I’m here. I love you. I’m here.

As it turns out, all he ever needed was to hear us say it back.

What If?: A Sermon for Palm Sunday

I preached this sermon on Palm Sunday, 2024, at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The text cited is the Passion narrative in the Gospel according to Mark.

One thing that strikes me, every year, as Holy Week envelops us in the stark power of its narrative, is how inevitable it all feels, this story about Jesus’ betrayal and death. How fixed the trajectory, after lifetimes, after centuries, after millennia of retracing it. It is easy to forget that the story we tell today began so differently.

Just a few months ago, we beheld a baby born in Bethlehem under the chill of starlight, and we heard angel choirs singing of peace, and then we watched that child grow and mature through the soft gloom of the season, and in the slow lengthening of our days through Epiphany, we beheld his light and his life and his love gathering their own brightness, and we have looked for signs of the unfurling promise of his Kingdom, like springtime emerging from the muddy, fertile ground of Lent. 

And yet, once more, here we stand on Palm Sunday, only to witness this particular story of God’s goodness cut short again, this particular promise deferred again, the tender green growing palms trampled, again, under the force of misguided adulation; the gently stirring earth soaked, again, not with gentle spring rain, but with blood.

And yet, despite the grave horrors, the enduring shock of what we see and experience in this Passion story, still, I think, we tend to see it as inevitable. As if this brutal end to Jesus’ earthly ministry was somehow the necessary price of his message, as if it were normal for for mothers to mourn their children, as if it were normal for springtime to give way to winter instead of summer. As if this sacrifice was as natural as the turning of the seasons. As if there was no other way the story could have ended. 

What if there was?

It’s odd, we rarely seem to ask that question about Holy Week. And it’s especially odd because, for most of us, in our own lives, we spend a lot of time and energy asking “what if?” 

What if I had made a different choice? What if I had chosen a different path? What if I had learned from my mistakes sooner? What if we, as a nation or as a community or as a church had chosen another course of action? 

Asking these sorts of questions is, most of the time, as natural as breathing. 

We are accustomed to “what ifs” because we are faced with a dizzying number of choices every day, and so of course we wonder how else things might have turned out if we had gone a different way. 

And yet, when it comes to Holy Week, when it comes to Jesus stumbling on the rocky road to Golgotha, we surrender him to his fate. We surrender our “what ifs”  to the violence we know and expect, and we behold the drama as if it were fixed and preordained, the way that it had to be for Jesus to be who he was and accomplish what he did. 

Without the suffering of Christ, without the brutality of the Cross (we have often been taught) there would be no salvation, no redemption, no liberation from the brokenness and sin that formed and fashioned the Cross in the first place. And so we have accepted, on some level, that all of this was necessary.

It’s a strange sort of logic that a God of Love would require torture to prove that love. At best, it leaves us to simply shake our heads and shrug at God’s inscrutable will. But at worst, it gives rise to the idea of redemptive violence—a God who inflicts harm upon himself and creation to achieve the ends of peace. Which sounds suspiciously like the tyrants we know, not like the God for whom we long. 

And so I wonder if, perhaps, as we move through Holy Week together, we are meant not to accept the inevitability of the Passion as passive observers of Jesus’ pain, but to trouble the narrative, just as our spirits are troubled by it. I wonder if we are meant to ask “what if?”

What if Jesus did not have to die in the way that he did? What if his own predictions of the Passion reflected his deep, grief-stricken understanding of our brokenness rather than some necessary violence inflicted by his Father? 

What if none of this had to happen?

What if the crowd chose to listen to his actual teachings? What if they understood, as he entered the city, the subversive symbolism of his ride on the colt for what it was—a challenge to the pageantry of imperial power—rather than projecting their own political agendas onto his actions?

What if his disciples had not forsaken him? What if the temple authorities had kept an open mind, had been humble in the face of things they did not understand? What if Pilate had chosen to be something more than a functionary of the deadly inertia of empire? 

What if there had, in fact, been another way for the story to end, another way for Jesus’ undying love to be made manifest and to bless the earth? 

We cannot know the answer to these questions, anymore than we ever know the answer to the “what ifs” of our own lives. The story is the story. And we must tell it. 

But that is not the point. The point is that we still need to ask the question. We need to ask “what if” during Holy Week, just as we must ask “what if” every time we are faced with violence and pain and prejudice, so that we do not accept these things as somehow normative, somehow determinative, because without “what if,” we will have made an uneasy peace with the crucifying impulses of the world. We will have surrendered our imaginations to the sense of their inevitability.

But what if we didn’t? 

What if the God who has repeatedly said “I desire mercy, not sacrifice,” actually meant it, and meant us to expect this from ourselves and our world? What if the brutality of this Passion story is no more part of God’s plan than any of the rest of the suffering we inflict upon one another? 

Because when you start asking “what if,” you realize that everything in the Passion narrative is the result of choices, choices made made by people not so different from you and me, choices made, too often, in service to the prevailing order, choices made by people who were as agitated and lost and polarized as we are, people caught up in faltering hopes and flourishing suspicions, people distracted and weighed down by a history of loss, people who also forgot to ask, “what if this was not the way it has to be?”

I tried it this week, asking “what if” as I was reading and wrestling with the story. And there are signs of possibility, thank God, if we look closely. Especially if we look closely at the women.

There’s the unnamed woman with the alabaster jar, who pours out her rare, costly, sweet ointment with the same mixture of wild abandon and care by which God pours his love upon creation. They say it is wasteful, this love and care, and yet she seems to be asking, “what if it’s not?”

And there’s the servant girl who, like a prophet, calls Peter to account for abandoning his true identity, all of his no, no, no, I do not know him. And she seems to be asking, “what if you said yes? What if you did finally, fully, know him and claim him as your own?”

And the women who gather near the Cross to hold vigil with Jesus as he dies, refusing to abandon him to his shame and loneliness. The crowds call it a lost cause, a failed revolution, a big disappointment, but the women seem to be asking, “what if none of that was the point?”

All of these women are the ones who refuse to accept the unfolding trajectory of the story—the ones who see another way, the true Way. They are the ones brave enough to name presence and fidelity, not violence and power, as the strongest force at work in this narrative. They are the ones who are asking, what if this story is not about the myth of redemptive violence that forms its center, but about the quiet, determined insistence of love that flourishes on the margins?

What if the point of Holy Week is not to valorize the story of Jesus’ suffering, but to build a world in which it is the last such story that ever need be told? 

What if we realized that the Cross is not the necessary means to an end, that God would have saved us in a thousand different ways if we would have let him, and that he still will?

What if we realized that the only inevitable narrative is not the Passion, but this: that Jesus—and all of us— are loved passionately from the day of our birth, all of us adored by angels under the chill of starlight, loved through the soft gloom of the turning seasons, loved through the lengthening of our days, and loved when we rejoice and loved when we despair and loved even when we die—however we die—and loved, ultimately, back to life.

What if that was the one, true, enduring, necessary story we needed to hear? What if all the rest was up to us? 

What if?

Breakwater: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, March 17, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is John 12:20-33.

If you have spent any time traveling up around the Great Lakes, you might have observed the structures called breakwaters, which are a feature of many cities with harbors and bays along the lakeshore. Their construction varies, but essentially they are a thin wall or barrier that juts out into the lake in order to do exactly what the name implies—to break the waves that move in toward the shore, creating calm, navigable water on the inner side of the wall for ships and other small craft, while the swells and breakers roll and rage in the great expanse beyond. 

Growing up, every summer we would spend time in Marquette, Michigan, which sits right at the edge of Lake Superior, the largest and wildest of the Great Lakes. There is a breakwater that extends out from the shore there, and when I was young, my family and I would walk out onto it, taking in the views of the water and the city. 

The breakwater in Marquette has been there since the 1800s, reconstructed a few times due to storms, and the first half of it is a sturdy concrete structure, flat easy to walk on in good weather. You can stroll out in this narrow path, the calm harbor to your right, the endless waves to your left, and as a kid it was a thrill to be there on the breakwater, bathed in summer breezes, dancing and skipping out, out, out along the thin line between home and the world beyond, between familiarity and the eternity of blue water stretching toward an unseen shore.

But then there was a point on our walk where we would always stop. About halfway, the breakwater turns at an angle and keeps going farther out into the lake, but this second portion is only comprised of large boulders; the concrete wall ends and from there the going gets slick and treacherous as the waves collide with the bare stone. The only way forward is to scramble and leap and crawl along the rocks. 

My cousins and I always wanted to go onto the rocks all the way out to the end, the very end, where a light tower marked the edge of the breakwater. But the adults wisely said no, it wasn’t safe. So we would turn back. 

And what I could not have perceived then, but that I do now—more and more so with every passing year—is that life is much like that walk along breakwater. When we are younger, setting out into the wide expanse of the world is deliriously exciting, and, if we are blessed with a kind and caring childhood, we take for granted, perhaps, the solid structures beneath our feet. Stay on the straight and solid path, we are told, and all shall be well, and if you are careful, the waves will not break over you, and you will go as far as you need to go. 

But then, somewhere along the way, we get to the place in our lives where the solid footing ends, and we realize, with some surprise and trepidation, that we are no longer children, and that now we are expected to keep going. 

We discover that growing up and growing wise means that the journey does not, in fact, end at the bend in the path, but that life keeps going, going out where there are only rocks to traverse, where the water licks at our heels and sometimes threatens to sweep us away, out where we must indeed scramble and leap and crawl on our knees, and the walls we relied upon for safety suddenly seem much more permeable than they once did. 

One of the times I realized this was when my father had his first major heart attack in late spring, several months before he died. As it happens, I flew into Marquette, where he was in the ICU, and I remember seeing the lake as we drove through town in between hospital visits, and I remember seeing the breakwater, too, curling like a question mark out into the blue expanse, a reminder of simpler springs. 

And I remember feeling, in that moment, like my own solid path had ended, but that I was now required to keep moving forward out where there were only rocks ahead, with no one there to call me back.  I suspect most of us have had experiences like that.

And, in our passage from John’s Gospel today, this is also such a moment for Jesus, where the solid path he has been traveling since the day he was born comes to a precarious place , and when he, too, accepts that he must still keep going, out, out, onward, to where the footing is uncertain and where there is no guarantee of safety. 

“Now my soul is troubled,” he says. “And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.”

Just as the other Gospel authors record his struggle in the Garden of Gethsemane, here John depicts Jesus at the edge of his own understanding, wrestling to reconcile the deep love he shares with his Father with the dawning sense that this love is no guarantee of preservation. Quite the opposite, in fact—this love for the Father is now clearly an invitation, a call, out onto the rocks where certainties end and faith alone must guide him. 

This love that has been growing in Jesus, that has been manifesting in his deeds and his teachings, this love that has bathed him in clear, calm living water, is now rolling in like a wave, rolling in from the unseen shore, and he knows, now, that to be all that he must be, to do all that he must do—for himself, for us—the wave must break over him, come what may, and the rock must be the place where he plants his feet and carries his cross and builds his church, the rocks where the walls of safety, the walls between heaven and earth, the walls between familiarity and eternity, seem much more permeable than they once did. 

It’s interesting, too, that this moment occurs alongside Andrew and Philip, who have been asked by some Greek believers to come and “see” Jesus, echoing Andrew and Philip’s own encounter with Jesus at the beginning of John’s text. Because inasmuch as this passage is Jesus reckoning with the nature of his own journey, it is also a moment for his disciples—including us—to reckon with ours. For “where I am, there will my servant be also.” If we are to follow Christ, then the rocks and the waves beckon us all. 

And our reaction to this realization might depend on where we stand. If we have become too comfortable in our faith, if we have become accustomed to solid ground beneath our feet, if we have not dared to venture out to the places where love requires us to risk something, then we, too, might feel our souls troubled by Jesus’ call. 

If so, then today we are being asked to take one small step outward onto the rocks—one small step towards admitting that we don’t have all the answers, ones step towards being vulnerable, towards embracing new ideas, new relationships, new ways of opening our hearts, new ways of standing with the poor and the forgotten and the storm-tossed—so that we might follow the path that Jesus has already traversed.

But if you are already out there on the rocks, somewhere between scrambling and leaping and crawling on your knees; if you already know all to well what it feels like to have left your certainties and safety behind, then perhaps Jesus’ call will be a consolation, because you will come to understand that even when the path crumbles under your feet, you are not lost. For this, too, is part of the path. 

And this is, in fact, the part of the path that we must travel if we ever want to grow up, if we ever want to grow, to reach that place where familiarity and eternity meet, where home and heaven lap up against one another: out, out at the outermost edge where Jesus abides, where he burns like a light at the end of the breakwater, at the end of every journey, drawing all people to himself, blessing every rocky path you have walked, every crashing wave that has washed over you, and every weary heart, including yours.

I have not been out on that breakwater in Marquette for many years, now, but I hope to go back someday. I still have a little bit of my father’s ashes, and if I can, I’d like to sprinkle a few into the lake there. But I am no longer a child, now, so I think that when I go, I’ll venture out a bit farther out onto the rocks to do so, to let his ashes mix with the water and the wind. It feels right, somehow, that this is how it must be, and where it must be, on that thinnest of lines between home and the world beyond. 

And though my feet might be a little unsteady, and my eyes might sting, I think my heart will still dance and skip like it once did.

It will not be entirely safe. Life never is. Love never is.

But it is still part of the path. And God will be there. 

Foraging: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, March 1oth, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Numbers 21:4-9 and John 3:14-21.

A few years back, while I was finishing up my seminary studies in Berkeley, I did a very northern California sort of thing—I enrolled in a weekend seminar to learn how to forage for wild mushrooms. 

Now, I like eating mushrooms as much as the next person, but I had never really thought much about going out and picking my own. I am by no means a wilderness expert, but I did grow up watching the 1980’s cartoon David the Gnome, which is set in the woods, and from that I had a vague sense that going out into the forest and eating the things you find there is a risky thing to do.

Nonetheless, the idea of hiking through the redwoods and learning more about mushrooms sounded intriguing, (and honestly when I was a kid, I kind of always wanted to be David the Gnome with his little red cap) so I went for it. 

A group of us gathered on a Friday evening in this little lodge in the forest, the foggy ocean air hovering in the trees outside, and we sipped peppermint tea and listened to a lecture about mushrooms—how all those random little growths you see springing up out of the dirt are not standalone entities, but really just one piece of a vast underground organism called a mycorrhizal network—hidden filaments of fungi intertwined with tree roots, all nourishing one another in the soil. 

So when you encounter a mushroom in the woods, what you are seeing is the visible manifestation of a vast, deep, mysterious life force, and it’s true, some are dangerous and some are not, but all of them are connected.

And, as I learned the next day when we went out, field guides in hand, it is quite difficult to tell the difference between the dangerous and the merely delicious. For example, there is a plain white mushroom called the field mushroom—perfectly fine to eat, looks like the kind you see in the grocery store. However, there is another white mushroom, very similar in appearance, and it is called the Destroying Angel, and as the name indicates, you probably don’t want to take it home and put it in your pasta sauce.

Now, I did pick a few mushrooms, and I even went so far as to cook a few of them and eat them—tentatively, prayerfully—but I will tell you upfront, that despite the increasing amount of gray in my beard and my penchant for wearing little hats, I am not David the Gnome, and mushroom foraging has not become a regular hobby. Even with that field guide, I would not trust myself to judge between a good mushroom and a bad one. 

Instead, what I took away from that weekend is that it is better, perhaps, to simply enjoy walking through the forest, to behold all the mysterious fruits of the dark earth without trying to consume them. Not everything is meant to be easily digestible. 

And you know, it’s funny, but that memory came to mind this week because I was thinking about how Christianity has, at times, misunderstood its purpose—that we decided somewhere along the line, mistakenly, that our mission was to make the world easily digestible. That we decided our vocation was something like foraging for mushrooms—arming ourselves with the Bible as if it were a field guide, going out into the wild with our little notes to judge what is “good” and what is “bad”, and harvesting whatever is deemed useful to us. And to the extent we have done so, then I think we have missed the point of church. 

Case in point: consider our reading today from John’s Gospel. John’s is the most poetic and mysterious of all the Gospel texts—and yet this one piece of it, John 3:16, has been, in our culture, reduced down to a slogan, a bumper sticker version of the good news, a smiling little phrase employed by those who think of Christianity as a binary system designed to differentiate between the saved and the condemned, the insiders and the outsiders.  

With John 3:16 (and a few other passages) people go out into the world and declare those who conform to their interpretation of it as useful and good, and those that don’t as something dangerous, something poisonous, something definitely unworthy of being brought to the table. 

But I will confess to you, I don’t think John 3:16 is about insiders and outsiders and I don’t think our faith is like foraging for mushrooms. I don’t think Scripture is a field guide, a rule book for knowing what is dangerous and what is not. I don’t think anything that we are up to here is as simple and safe as all that, because encountering God is not simple or safe. 

And if you need a reminder of this, then look at the line that comes just before John 3:16:

Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

The idea that Jesus is somehow taking the place of that bronze serpent in the Book of Numbers should startle us, unnerve us a bit. 

Because that story from Numbers is itself a strange and unnerving story, one in which the wounding and healing powers of God collide, forcing the Israelites to realize that there is nothing simple or tidy about their salvation—it is not, as they might have assumed, about choosing between the poison of Pharaoh and the benign, edible pleasures of God—it is about surrendering to a path, a promise, a future that defies easy categorization because it is real, it is true, it is of God. 

And God will be who God will be, both mighty and gentle, both tender and wild, and God expects that his people will walk in that fullness of truth, as ones who are wise and brave, not those who settle for simplistic answers and well-ordered oppression. 

God wants Israel—and all creation—to share in his wholeness, to be complete, to be overflowing with all that life has to offer, and, then as now, one does not achieve that by dividing the world into overly simplistic binaries of good and bad, useful and worthless. One has to throw out the notes, so to speak, and face life—all of life—as it is, and love it anyway.

And so Jesus, in comparing himself to the serpent, has come to remind us of the same thing. He has come to embody in himself that same collision of wounding and healing that is real life. He has come to crucify our binaries. He has come to invite us to take part in an existence that is mighty and gentle and tender and wild—an existence that approaches wholeness. 

He is the One who calls us to go out into unfamiliar places, to walk through the forest, to behold the mysterious fruits of the dark earth without trying to consume them. He is the One lifted up so that we will understand—at last, or for the first time—that love is not the absence of danger, it is the thing that survives danger. It is the thing stronger than fear. Love is like the mycorrhizal network that underlies everything—and the purpose of our faith is not to outsmart it, to escape it, but to participate in it. 

And no bumper sticker, no cherry-picked verse of Scripture, will ever suffice to convey this. Only a life lived in the wholeness of the love of Christ will convey this.

God so loved the world that he sent his only Son—his own life, his own self—to show us that everyone and everything belongs, and that all of it is worth saving—the good and the bad, the poisoned and the beautiful, the sinful and the sublime. And not by reciting a formulaic prayer, but by enmeshing our lives into the vast mystery of creation. 

So woe to anyone, to any church, to any Christian, who takes it upon themselves to consult their little notes and declare who and what is worthy, as if the world were ever that simple, as if  the truth about any of us could ever fit such neat categories, as if anyone could ever be sure what is in and what is out.

No, far better for us to toss out the field guide. Far better to go out into the world each day to simply marvel at what we find there, even if we do not understand it. Better to love all of it without discrimination. And better to trust that in doing so, we will live into the one simple piece of guidance that God has ever given for navigating the wild: to see and to proclaim that everything belongs. Nothing is forsaken. And we are all part of of that vast, deep, mysterious life force welling up from beneath the surface of things.

That’s what Christianity is about. 

It may not fit on a bumper sticker, but it sounds like pretty good news to me. 

Notes on a Dance: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, March 3, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Exodus 20:1-17 and John 2:13-22.

I am a big fan of the ballet—some of you know that I worked for the Nevada Ballet for a number of years before seminary. Behind the scenes, though—I was never a graceful dancer!

Working there, I saw a lot of ballets over the years. And one of those, in 2013, was a touring centennial performance of The Rite of Spring, an infamous ballet first performed in Paris in 1913. 

Now if the thought of ballet makes you feel bored or sleepy, stay with me—because The Rite of Spring was not (and still is not) what anyone thinks of when they think of ballet. There is no dancing on pointe, no tutus. The music is not pretty. The whole work—the score by Stravinsky and the choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky, is harsh and unsettling. The ballet portrays a fictional ritual dance done by pre-Christian Russian peasants, where a Spring Maiden is selected and ultimately dances herself to death as a sort of sacrificial offering. Cinderella it is not. 

When I saw in on tour, I felt a little overwhelmed and disturbed by the whole thing. But back in 1913, when it premiered, the audience lost it. It touched some strange nerve deep within them. People started screaming at the stage and throwing things at the orchestra, and then they started shouting at one another and starting fights, and the police had to be called in, even as the dancers and the music kept going. 

Critics called the performance “barbaric” and “in complete opposition to the traditions of classical ballet,” without realizing that this was, in fact, the entire point. The Rite of Spring was meant to be challenging, to point to something wild and uncontrollable that lay pulsating beneath the benignly oppressive surface of our social and political structures. It was an artistic premonition of sorts for a society that was, in 1913, already on the precipice of its own tumble into war-torn barbarity. 

The Rite of Spring was only performed a few times, and after World War I, the music survived but the ballet was considered lost. The choreographer had suffered a mental breakdown, and nobody else seemed to have preserved the dance notations. Perhaps some felt it was best left forgotten anyway. Too raw, this dance, too zealous, too much a reminder of things that people would rather forget.

It wasn’t until the 1980s, when a copy of the those dance notes was found tucked away in the cupboard, that the ballet was brought back to life, to shock and unsettle and invigorate new audiences, including me. 

We rely so much on the notes we take down. Notes of information, notes of music, notes on a dance—they are what help us perpetuate ephemeral, fleeting encounters with truth, including the unsettling truth, so that future generations can know what it felt like to see what we have seen, to feel what we have felt, and in so doing, to rediscover something about themselves.

It’s the same reason, here, that we sing the old hymns, pray the old prayers, and, above all, hear the old readings, year after year, even the ones that challenge us—for they, too, are something like notes on a dance—a very old dance, indeed, one even more elemental and uncontrolled than The Rite of Spring. A dance that, in today’s readings, begins like this: 

Then God spoke all these words: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. 

I know, we don’t tend to think of the Ten Commandments as a series of dance steps. Maybe that sounds a bit absurd. The Ten Commandments are weighty things in our cultural imagination—words carved into stone tablets, all the “thou shalt nots,” words of stony solemnity, words thrown like stones at the unworthy: immovable, fixed, and cold. 

But what if the Ten Commandments were not meant to be rigid and heavy at all? What if these notes, given to Moses from amidst the wild, dancing, fire-lit darkness atop Mt. Sinai, are in fact something quite different, quite dynamic?

Because we must remember that God gives the Ten Commandments to Israel while they are in the middle of their wilderness journey—out where there are no courts or palaces or temples. They are notes given to a group of lean, hungry dreamers, the salt of the Red Sea still clinging to their skin, the impassive judgments of Pharaoh weighing on their memories. 

But God speaks to them and says, I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt. I am not Pharaoh. I have brought you out not so that you might be crushed under the heaviness of another oppressive system, but so that you might LIVE with me. So that you might DANCE with me.

I, the Lord your God, I am the artist and you are my beloved work! Understand: I have guided you through the raging, dancing waters of the sea, under the pirouetting pillars of cloud and fire and now, my children, I am giving you notes on this dance. I am teaching you, in ten steps, how to keep dancing. 

These commandments I give you are not a stone around your neck, they are the choreography of your liberation, so that you and your descendants might never again be bound by the forces that oppress and constrain. I give you these commandments, these notes, so that the dance will never be lost, so that it will keep going, so that you will teach it to the rest of the world. 

It’s funny, though. Even with the best notes, the interpretation can get a bit muddled after a while. And maybe the the power of those ten commandments, the wilderness intimacy upon which they were founded, became dulled by the passage of the years, such that people began to forget it was ever a dance at all.

Which makes Jesus’ entry into the Temple, his big show of flipping of tables and driving out the livestock so very interesting. What was his purpose in doing this? Was he staging a protest against the system? Was he simply angry in the moment? 

We could interpret it in many ways, and people do, of course, but to me there has always been something of the artist about Jesus in this moment—something visionary and deliberate and creative in his action, his all-consuming zeal. It is performative, not in the hollow sense, but in the sense that he is showing those around him how to perform—how move in a way that is expressive of a deep and fundamental truth. Sort of like…a dance.

And I imagine that some of Jesus’ critics said that he was being barbaric, that he was in complete opposition to the traditions of classical temple procedure—and they were right. But that was, perhaps, the point. Perhaps it was was meant to be challenging, meant to point to something wild and uncontrollable that lay pulsating beneath the benign surface of the Temple’s social and political structures. Perhaps it was the rite of a new spring about to blossom, and a new sacrifice, too. 

The Son has returned to his Father’s house, and in the turning of the tables and the whip of cords he is saying: I, the Lord your God, I am the artist and you are my beloved work! Have you forgotten the steps? Have you forgotten that I long to be close to you, close as two partners dancing under the stars, close like we were in the wilderness, when I first taught you the choreography of liberation? 

And now I am here, in the flesh, for a revival, to turn these tables over like I once made chariots somersault into the sea, and I do this to save you from forgetfulness, because ultimately this is what you were made for: Not to be the bearers of oppressive regulations as cold and heavy as stone, but to be dancers of a dance as alive and free as the God who made you.

What would our faith look like, what would our church look like, what would our world look like, if we realized that this is what God desired of us? That all of the Commandments and the codes and the practices and the liturgies we follow were designed to help us respond to the deep, elemental music of the earth, and to move in harmony with it? What does it look like for us to respond to that music here at St. Anne? 

What steps would we make together? What small gods would we relinquish? What tables might we overturn? 

Because here’s the thing: just as it was on Sinai, just as it was in the Temple, just as it was when the audience came undone during The Rite of Spring: there is something deep and fierce and strange and beautiful pulsating just under the surface of things, and it is true, and it is alive, and it is God, and he will never be content to let us forget. He is always emerging, the artist with his notes, to remind us who he is, and who we are, and what we are supposed to do.

Our decision is simply this:

Shall we dance?