Tag: Episcopal Church

Pinky Promise: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, January 7, 2024, the Baptism of Our Lord, at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Mark 1:4-11.

This may not be a very popular opinion, but I actually love new year’s resolutions. Every December, in that odd lull between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, I find myself pondering what I might want do more or less of in the coming year. And I know for some this is a tiresome custom, but it honestly never gets old for me. When we are able to spend the holidays together, my mom and I have a tradition of writing down our resolutions on a scrap of paper on December 31st, reading them aloud, signing our names at the bottom, and then doing that most sacred gesture of commitment, a pinky promise, and then we tuck the piece of paper away into a wallet or bag for future reference. 

Now, truth be told, I usually find the scrap of paper sometime around June and have a look and a good laugh at my own expense, because undoubtedly my record at that point is mixed at best. I think I’ve been resolving to take up jogging for the past 20 years, and so far I’ve managed a fast walk. But I like to think of this less as a disappointment and more as persistent optimism. And 2024 is a new year—I did jog for about a minute on the treadmill the other day. Anything is possible!

But the thing that helps me—the thing that I have to remind myself, sometimes, in order to stay optimistic—is that while the goals and resolutions we have might indeed be worthwhile, and even drastically improve our lives, they do not impact our fundamental worthiness or value. 

What I have come to realize is that my mom and I are able to relax and enjoy making our lists and our pinky promises together, even if we know we will likely stumble along the way, because we know that even if we have fallen short of every single resolution by next December, it will still be ok, because it is the dreaming together and the trying that matter. 

The pinky promise that we make, I think, is more about saying—we promise we’re in this together, for good or ill, come hell or high water, no matter what happens through the turning of the seasons. It’s the sort of promise that is stronger and more enduring than any failure, because it is rooted in love. 

I think we sometimes have a complicated relationship with resolutions because it can start to feel like they are a checklist that must be accomplished IN ORDER for us to be good enough, to become, somehow, worthy of love, rather than the other way around—knowing that we are already loved, and then figuring out what to do with that knowledge. Love comes first, always.

And what shocks me, sometimes, is that even after two millennia of Christian practice and storytelling and worship and prayer, there are so many people who refuse to recognize that this is also the whole message of the Gospel: that love comes first, always. 

People so easily forget that the entire story of our existence is rooted in an unshakeable love. That, as we heard this morning in Genesis, God ventured into the chaos of primordial darkness and created the world precisely so that he could love it all—and not just the easy stuff, but the light and the darkness together. All of it. Always.

People forget that God’s promise to love us—and everyone, and everything—is itself stronger and more enduring than any failure, and that there is nothing that we can do to alter or diminish this. Some folks like to say hate the sin, love the sinner, forgetting, first, that this statement is not actually in the Bible, and second, that our greatest commandment is to not hate anything, but to love foolishly, indiscriminately, without calculation or agenda or expectation or condition. And to let ourselves be loved in that same way. 

In a world that is so shaped by contracts and conditional promises and careful measurements and demarcations, maybe this unreserved, unabashed, unbounded sort of love is inconceivable. Maybe it is a scandal. And maybe it always has been. 

It would seem so if we consider the Baptism of Jesus, which is itself, when you ponder it, a rather scandalous act, at least for our good friend John the Baptist. We don’t get as many details in Mark’s version that we just heard a few minutes ago, but in other accounts John is actually quite dismayed that Jesus—the one he was waiting for his whole life, the one coming after who is so much more powerful, so much greater—that this Holy One submits himself to a ritual cleansing from sin and failure. Where was the fire and the winnowing fork and the judgment and the display of great strength? 

Whatever John was expecting, this, apparently, was not it. He had proclaimed a Messiah who would shake the foundations of the earth, and yet this promised One comes forward like a simple man, not so different in appearance from the countless others baptized in the River Jordan, with their unmet resolutions and their faltering hopes. Jesus comes forward like one eager to love, eager to be among us, eager to confound us with his humility. 

He comes from within us, content to step down and be submerged in the current of our human frailty, content to love us precisely as we are, not as he is. Jesus’ baptism is God saying to us, we’re in this together, for good or ill, come hell or high water.

And that, essentially, is what Jesus hears, too, when he emerges from the river: this is my Son, whom I love. With him I am well pleased. Since the day the world began, God has desired for us to know and claim our belovedness, and now he has come to show us in the flesh what it looks like.

This belovedness, we begin to see, is not conditional on Jesus’ failure or success. It is woven into the very core of his being. It is this belovedness that will propel  forward into everything that will follow—the temptations and the miracles and the everyday moments.  It is this belovedness that will sustain him even when things get hard, when things fall apart, when he falls apart. And it is this belovedness that he has come to declare as both the birthright and the purpose of all people—of all creation. 

Judgment and punishment are easy to understand. But this is the incomprehensible scandal of the Gospel that no one—maybe not even John—expected: that God is love, and that God loves you and everything and everyone, and that, try as you might, nothing will change this. And once we realize this essential truth—this epiphany–we must begin to live in a new way, with the mercy and tenderness of someone who no longer needs to prove themselves worthy, and who understands the inherent worthiness of everyone else. 

But still we struggle to understand or accept this, even 2,000 years on. Still we think that somehow we must earn our place in the cosmos. But we do not. We need not. We cannot. Because love came first. 

And even if we crawl over the finish line of a particular year, and even if we crawl over the finish line of our lives, God will still say, you are my child, the beloved, with you I am well pleased. And even if we have failed and made a mess of everything, somehow, even then, I think he will be there saying we’re in this together, for good or ill, come hell or high water. 

Because God is not out there somewhere waiting for us to measure up, waiting for us to figure it all out before he loves us fully and comes alongside us. He already does. And he already has.

He has stepped down into the water with us. He has taken note of everything we’ve tried and the things we were afraid to try. The ways we have succeeded and the ways we have fallen short. The resolutions kept and the ones we still keep writing with foolish optimism on a scrap of paper. And through it all, I think he simply delights in our willingness to dream together, to try—our willingness to keep showing up, year after year, to share in a hope that is stronger and more enduring than any failure. The kind that only comes when you know that you are truly, eternally beloved.

Because you are. And that’s a pinky promise. 

Unimpressive: A Christmas Eve Sermon

I preached this sermon at the 2023 Christmas Eve services at St. Anne Episcopal Church in West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Luke 2:1-20.

All of us probably have a story or two about a Christmas gift that we received that wasn’t quite what we were hoping for. Something in the wrong size or style, maybe, or some odd item that we don’t know quite what to do with. It’s bound to happen at some point, of course, because we are all just people doing our best to know and to provide for one another, and sometimes we miss the mark a bit. That’s life. It’s ok.

But 4-year old me did not understand this quite as well. 4 year old me, I must confess, had a very particular expectation of what a Christmas present should look like. And so it came to pass that, when I was in pre-school, I had to learn a tough lesson during our classroom gift exchange.

I was only 4, but I remember it vividly. Every student brought in one gift to give, and they were all placed in a circle around the Christmas tree. And then, sort of like musical chairs, we all got in a circle around the tree, too, and when the music started, we started marching around it, and when the music stopped, whichever present was in front of us was ours to open.

Well, the music started, and off we went, and I was eyeing all the various packages and boxes under the tree, getting more excited by the moment. And then the music stopped, and there in front of me was a big box, beautifully wrapped, big enough to be a board game or a whole set of toys. I thought, this is looking good for me! 

And then, all of the sudden—immediately to my left, the kid next to me swooped forward and grabbed that big present and ran off with it. I can still feel the indignity of it! And all the other kids grabbed their presents and ran off, too, and before I knew what to say or do, there I was, alone at the tree with the gift that the little thief next to me didn’t want. 

It was a very small little box, wrapped in some crumpled paper. 

And I stood there and opened it up and it was a tiny little plastic bear, the kind you could stick onto the end of a pencil. 

I was FURIOUS. I will admit to you now that I stood there in my Christmas sweater and I cried sad, angry tears, and I refused to be consoled. Whatever had been in that big box was supposed to be MINE and now all I had was this stupid little plastic bear.  My parents tried to tell me something about gratitude, but I wasn’t having any of that! I didn’t get it. Not then. Not yet. All I knew is that I thought I was going to get something big and shiny and instead I had this tiny, unimpressive little thing in my hands.

…

I think a lot of life is like that little plastic bear. We carry with us so many big hopes and expectations of what will be, what ought to be, what WE ought to be, and then the music stops and we look in front of us and instead we are only given what is, and we are who we are, and things might look a little dimmer and dingier and smaller than we imagined. Even Christmas, bright and lovely though it is, can feel like that, sometimes, depending on what we’re going through, what the year has brought (or taken) from us. 

And when that happens—when plans fall apart, when we lose what is precious, when the world turns out to be a messy and complicated place where joy is sometimes snatched out from under us—well, maybe we all shed a few sad, angry tears in those moments, too. And that’s life. It’s ok.

But here’s the thing about Christmas, about the Christmas story, in particular—the one that we just heard retold a few minutes ago about the birth of a baby in Bethlehem, and the frightened shepherds in the field and the new mother pondering this strange, small gift she now cradles in her arms—here’s the thing about all of it: 

It is good news for us precisely because it is unimpressive. Surprising, unexpected, even miraculous, yes, but on the surface, by all outward appearances, the nativity of Jesus is entirely unimpressive. 

We forget this, too easily perhaps, because our traditions and our music and our associations with the holiday are all so beautiful and rich with meaning, as they should be, given that we know who Jesus turned out to be. But if we pay close attention to what is actually told in the narrative itself, the bare facts underneath the wrapping paper and ribbons,  it’s a rather simple little story, that can be summed up like this:

A young, unwed mother gives birth in a tiny town of no great wealth or prominence. She is in crowded quarters because her fiance’s family is of modest means and so she has to place her newborn into a makeshift crib. A few ragtag men show up in the night telling a story about a strange vision they just had out in the fields. The family members, or whoever happens to be around, are surprised by this odd visit. Maybe they believe them; maybe they think the shepherds are off their rocker. We don’t really know. Then the shepherds leave. And that’s it.

The night is quiet, and the baby slumbers, and the world spins on. 

No palaces, no proclamations from the king, no processions or parades or parties in the street, no big board games wrapped under the tree. From the perspective of any passerby in Bethlehem, the birth of Jesus is completely unimpressive. God is born and heaven unites itself with mortal flesh and the One who is mightier than any emperor is in our midst…and yet still the animals must be brought in from the cold and hungry mouths must be fed and everyone still goes to bed with backaches and unfinished to-do lists.

The coming of the Messiah is small: small like a child sleeping in the night, small like a little gift wrapped in crumpled paper, small like real life can be, all the average moments that are too easily overlooked in the quest for bigger brighter, more impressive things. And although the years go by with their ups and downs, and although sometimes we cry sad, angry tears and it’s hard to feel grateful for what we are left holding, still he comes in the night, still he waits for us look down and behold him. Still he invites us to appreciate the difference between grandeur and grace, and how those two things rarely resemble one another in this life. 

This is the good news of Christmas: that God came into our midst in an unimpressive way because God works primarily through unimpressive, normal, struggling, imperfect people and places and things. Which means that, no matter who you are, no matter what you have done or not done, no matter who you love or how you have failed to love or how love has eluded you, no matter the doubts and the fears and the wounds you carry, no matter whether you are famous or forgotten, God still seeks to be born in you. God seeks to live and move and have his being in your ordinary, unimpressive, perfectly normal life. 

And he is small enough, humble enough to fit wherever there is space. Wherever you can make a bit of room in your heart, he is content there—content to be the small, unexpected gift that will transform our understanding of everything if we will let him. 

And if we do, then what we will see, as I could not on that Christmas long ago—clutching that tiny plastic bear—is that the things which will endure in our memories and in our hearts when all is said and done, the things that will teach us how God desires for us to live, how to be grateful and joyful no matter what, are the small, unimpressive things—the things that come wrapped in crumpled paper, the gifts we did not expect or perhaps even want, but through which God comes to us and abides with us and reveals the simplicity of his message: that love, though it be small and vulnerable, is the most powerful force on earth. 

May tonight, and the humble story that we tell, and the humble lives that we have been given, come together as a sign to help us understand this love. 

Because Christ is born on this holy night, unimpressively, with unimaginable grace, for you and for all. He has come to be with us, just as we are, whether you are laughing or crying, whether life has been a delight or a disappointment. He has come as the tiniest, most surprising and precious gift, waiting for you when the music stops, waiting for you to pick him up and behold the truth: that God is in the small things. That we will be saved by small things. That whenever you hold even the smallest bit of love in your hands and in your heart, you are holding him. 

God Comes to Us in the Dark: A Meditation

I offered this meditation at a service for The Longest Night at St. Anne Episcopal Church in West Chester, OH on December 20, 2023. It is a time of prayer, music, and stillness for those who are struggling in the holiday season.

God comes to us in the dark. This has always been true.

In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep. So says Genesis. So say our ancestors in faith, grasping back through time, back through the shadowy recesses of human memory, back to an original stillness, an original peace, an original fullness, back to when God, alone, was—and it was dark, and it was already good.

And all that follows—let there be light, and let there be all of this, and let there be you and me—all of it emanated from the darkness of love, where God dreamed and saw visions, where God composed the constellations, where God traced out the edges of the universe and imagined all that could be if there were such a thing as being. In the dark, God already knew both the price and the promise of being—what it would require—of God, and of us—and so God made a promise, from the very start, when our being came to be: 

And that promise is: I am here. I am here. And again and again, when you lose sight of me, I will come to you. In every season, in every hour. When the light is bright, I am here. When it fades, I am here. And when it is night—on the face of the earth, or in the depths of your soul—then I am still here. You will not lose me in the dark. No, in the dark you will encounter me as I was from before the beginning: hidden but present, dreaming but awake, tracing, now, the edges of your face, your flesh now holding a universe of meaning. I am here, gazing at the constellations in your eyes, reminding you that being, simply being, here and now, together, is enough. It is all I ever wanted. It always has been. Even in the dark. Especially in the dark

For God comes to us in the dark. And this has always been true.

…

Despite this truth, we have a complicated history with the darkness, for reasons both pragmatic and imaginative. Job calls down the darkness as a curse; the Psalmist yearns for light like the watchmen waiting for morning.  We understand this in our bones. 

Because, until recently, the night was, for most people, an inevitable and somewhat threatening feature of daily life. Before electric lights and heaters, it was a cold and dim and dangerous time when one had to gather in close to others for safety and warmth. For our siblings who have no home to go to on this night, for those who are alone, this is still true—the night is not always our friend. 

And yet there are other reasons we fear the dark, ways we have been formed to fear it in our mind’s eye. We have been taught, too often, that night metaphors are literal—that the light itself is somehow truer, purer, stronger, more moral, and that the darkness is a time of indolence, of deceit, of confusion and waywardness. And so when we find ourselves in a seemingly dark place—a place in our lives where we cannot see the path ahead, where we cannot understand what has happened to us and why—we might assume that we have been forsaken, that we have been forgotten, that we are at fault, or that God has left us to fend for ourselves.

We call this the dark night of the soul and think that we are talking about God’s absence. But we are wrong.

For we must remember, again: God comes to us in the dark. 

Not just in the beginning, but always. The darkness is when God chooses to appear. 

Consider how the Passover and the Exodus and God’s liberating work all began at night. 

Consider God speaking to Moses on a mountain covered in thick, dark cloud, amid thunder and lightning. 

Consider Jacob wrestling with an angel all through the night, claiming a blessing upon his wounded body before sunrise.

Consider the promise spoken by the prophet Isaiah: I will give you the treasures of darkness and riches hidden in secret places.

Consider the child, soon to be born in Bethlehem, in the silent, holy, starlit night.

Consider the Risen Christ, emerging from the darkness of the tomb into the predawn shadows of a garden.

And consider how the Lord promises his return when “the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light,” how he will reveal himself, in the end, as he was in the beginning, emanating from that deep original mystery, that unseen, unspoken, ageless night of dreaming, older than the stars. 

Yes, God always comes to us in the dark.

And if we consider this, then perhaps we will begin to realize that, indeed, darkness and light to God are both alike, because God’s presence and power and mercy are not dependent upon whether we walk confidently, whether we understand, whether we see clearly, whether we know exactly what to do next or how. God arrives in the night because God is at peace with hiddenness, with the unfolding mystery that God is to us, with the unfolding mystery that we are to God, and so we are invited, also, to make peace with that which is hidden—the reasons and the justifications and the certainties that elude us, and the ways that love endures regardless of what we know or do not know. 

And God arrives in the night because, in truth, the darkness has its own particular knowing—its own intimacies and surrenders and quietude that come precisely when we cannot see everything, when we let go, when we cannot strive or plan or rely on ourselves as much as we do in the light of day. 

The night engenders a deeper trust, if we will let it. If we will rest in it.

So whatever you carry with you on this night—a weariness, a fear, a grief, a bitterness, a question, a regret, a secret dream—what you must know is that God is still present to you in this place, God sees you and knows you, even if you cannot see God’s face, even if you don’t recognize who you have become.

Like a mother cradling her child, or like a lover in the darkness, God sees you, God gazes upon you tenderly, whispering gentle reminders of promises made and kept and renewed, of a covenant, of a bond deeper than eternity—one that will not break, even when we do. And we do sometimes.

But God comes to us in the dark, saying: do not be afraid, and saying, blessed are you who mourn, for I will make my home in the cracks of your shattered heart, and saying your pain will turn into joy—not because pain is holy but because I AM, and I am the one who offers you a joy that is deeper than fear — the joy that is my own self, that same self from before the beginning, a divine darkness bathed in the stillness of eternity and traveling, traveling, across the constellations and the cosmos to be here, right here, to hold you when your eyes are blurred with tears and shadows on this long, long, longest night.

And to tell you that even when it’s not ok, even when you are not ok, you are loved.

…

In a few days, we will celebrate a birth, and we will speak of the Light of the World, and on that day we will be talking, of course, about God. But remember, as we do, and as you go from this place tonight, that the Light of the World is not all that can be said of God. For before the light, God was. 

And here, in the night of the earth and, perhaps, in the night of your soul, God has not left you. God is still doing what God always has been doing, in that original, timeless, holy darkness: dreaming, creating, forming, loving. Remembering all the prices you have paid. Remembering the promises God has made. And reminding us of the one thing that is always true, the one thing God will never stop telling us, even in the dark: 

I am here. I am here. I am here.

The Stories We Tell in the Dark: An Advent Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, December 3, 2023, Advent I, at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Isaiah 64:1-9 and Mark 13:24-37.

When I was in elementary school, I auditioned to be in a community theater production of A Christmas Carol. I was so nervous during the audition that I totally flubbed my rendition of Silver Bells, but apparently they needed lots of children in the production, so somehow I was cast as some nameless older brother of the real star, Tiny Tim. I had no solos, which was fine, and I think my only real speaking part was to exclaim something about the Christmas goose. A Tony-award winning role it was not. 

But I loved every minute of it. And since then, I’ve always had a soft spot for A Christmas Carol, which, when you step back and think about it, is really a strange and gloomy bit of entertainment during the holiday season. There are ghosts and nightmares and strange visions in the dark, and the story is, at its core, an exploration of mortality and regret and redemption as Ebenezer Scrooge enters the twilight of his life. A far cry from the doggedly bright and cheerful tone of most things we watch and read and hear this time of year. 

But you might be surprised to learn that Charles Dickens, the author of A Christmas Carol, was not trying to be countercultural by injecting some dark themes into the festive season. In fact, at the time he published the story, in 1843, the winter holidays were actually the preeminent time of year for ghost stories and tales of the macabre. People expected to be frightened a bit at Christmastime. We might associate those things now with Halloween, but in pre-Victorian England, it was wintertime, when the nights were cold and families gathered in close for warmth, that chilling stories were shared and the mysteries of the dark corners of life were explored. 

A Christmas Carol is one of the only remnants we have of this tradition, along with that one line in the Andy Williams song, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” when he references people telling ‘scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago.’ Otherwise, the culture around us seems to favor a cozier, less threatening tone as the winter settles in. 

Except for one place. There is still somewhere you can go if you want to be a bit frightened during the holiday season. Right here, when you step into a liturgical church and listen to the readings during Advent. 

Someone unfamiliar with the church seasons, stumbling into the midst of our Advent observances, might be forgiven for being shocked by the dim and haunting atmosphere of our readings and prayers this time of year. For this, the first Sunday of Advent, we have a yearning, wistful lament from the prophet Isaiah and an unsettling apocalyptic vision from Jesus and a Collect about casting away the works of darkness. One might expect the ghosts of Christmas past and future to show up at any moment, rattling their chains.

But for those of us who stick around to hear the stories, those who don’t run away, who try to make space for the odd collision of gloom and light that is Advent, I think we discover a strange respite in this season, perhaps the same sort that was provided by Christmas ghost stories in earlier times. 

And the respite I am taking about is not the typical, self-soothing, therapeutic language that gets bandied about in some conversations about Advent being a slow and quiet time, an invitation to rest and relax and take part in self-care. Those are very good and healthy things, especially in a manic consumerist culture, but they are not the themes of Advent. Advent is not about a classical music and a bubble bath in between shopping trips. 

Advent is about the stories that we tell in the dark—the stories that send a chill down our spine because they ask us to look into the shadows, the unknowability, the loss and the dissatisfaction and the brevity of things. That’s why you won’t find many light and happy Scripture passages this month; we must pass through the valley of shadows first, so that we can begin to understand the true radiance of what is promised in the first and second comings of Christ. 

In the same way that we tell ghost stories around the fire in order to feel more alive, and in the same way that Scrooge, in A Christmas Carol, has to face his demons before his spirit can soar with the angels, so too does Advent invite us—require us, really—to acknowledge the pain of life so that we might better understand what Jesus is actually coming for in the first place. That is why our readings are not warm and bright and cheerful— because they attempt to be honest about, as Shakespeare put it, “the winter of our discontent” so that we might also be honest about what true contentment looks like when it arrives. 

And what does contentment look like? We begin to collect some images for ourselves this week. Contentment looks like intimacy with our Creator, his hands like a potter molding the clay of our bodies into something beautiful and useful and strong. And contentment looks like intimacy with creation, that we might be as attentive and awake as a fig tree, our souls unfurled to receive the Son of God in due season. 

In Isaiah and in the Gospel, and in all the stories we will tell in the dark over the next few weeks, we are asked to abide in the creative tension of living as a people who are both aware of life’s shortcomings and yet are haunted by the Kingdom of Heaven—knowing that both are real, the deep lamentation and the emerging promise, knowing that God will indeed reshape us, knowing that we do not hope in vain, and yet not knowing when the consummation of that hope will arrive in its fullness to descend upon our war-torn cities and upon our war-torn hearts. 

And so, in Advent, we wait for the peace that the world proves time and again that it cannot give. And we tell the truth: the waiting is hard. 

But may we also discover that in the waiting, even waiting in the dark where ghosts linger, there is still joy and loveliness and courage to be found when we gather in close to one another and do what we have been asked to do: to keep telling the stories of God’s goodness. To keep telling the good news. And to do this, all of this, in remembrance of the One who has promised that the end of the story will be a beautiful one. 

And on that day, when past and present and future all come together, when the long delayed advent of God gives way to arrival, when we are awakened from something deeper than sleep, then, well, what a happy morning that will be. Happier, even than when Scrooge woke up to find himself alive, truly alive, on Christmas Day. I think it will be worth the wait. 

Speaking of Scrooge, I suppose I have accepted the fact that I will probably not feature in any other productions of A Christmas Carol. But that’s ok. I am perfectly content. And you know why? Because I may not have had any good lines on stage back then, but now, every Sunday, I basically get to say the most important line of all, the one Tiny Tim says at the end of the story, the one that really sums everything up, the one that underlies everything we do. I get to say, God bless us, every one. 

God bless us, every one. Everyone. It’s the best ending to a story anyone could hope for. Especially because it happens to be true. God will. 

Trailer Park: A Sermon for Christ the King

I preached this sermon on Sunday, November 26, 2023 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 25:31-46.

I think the holiday season, more so than any time of year, inspires within us the desire to catch a glimpse of a kinder and more compassionate world. There is so much harshness, so much sorrow, and yet right about now we bring out the lights and the wreaths and the inflatable lawn decorations as though to remind ourselves and others—or maybe, to insist to ourselves and others—that suspicion and gloom are not the whole story. That there is still beauty. There is still hope. And there is still a general posture of friendliness that we can assume towards our neighbor, despite everything else. 

But I have to say, the friendliest neighborhood I ever lived in—both in the holidays and throughout the whole year—was a trailer park in Santa Rosa, California. Yes, for about two or three years, when I was an adolescent, I lived in a small travel trailer on the outskirts of town, due to a complex set of family circumstances that are a whole other story. But the thing that’s on my mind this week is not so much about my reasons for ending up in the trailer park, but instead the extraordinary hospitality and kindness that I witnessed there among people who were, for various reasons, going through seasons of challenge and transition in their lives.

This was not a vacation-destination sort of place, but the kind of community you go to when money is tight and you don’t have any other options. Most of our neighbors were either paycheck-to-paycheck or getting by on even less than a paycheck.

But the remarkable thing—the thing that I have carried with me ever since—was that the people there were friendlier, more approachable, and more open to the stranger in their midst than any other place I’ve lived. These were folks who couldn’t even afford to put up Christmas decorations in their yard, but a mysterious light illuminated the place nonetheless. 

People would, without hesitation, invite you over to share some food, or would stop to have a chat while passing by your trailer, or check in on someone when they were sick or hadn’t been seen in a couple of days. The kind of attentiveness and care that feels almost quaint in this day and age.

Our neighbor, an older woman named Pearl, would peer out of her screen window, chain smoking cigarettes and eating Burger King, observing the neighborhood and dispensing her thoughtful insights about life in between puffs of cigarette smoke. Her eyes looked like they had seen more than their fair share of hardship, but they were gentle eyes. 

“I’m tiiiiired, man, I’m tiiiiired,” she would say in her Oklahoma drawl, but she was never so tired as to not invite me in for a visit, to ask how I was doing, to really listen to me, which meant a lot to an awkward 13 year old who had a lot of emotional baggage and who felt unseen much of the time.

I can’t say that I loved living in the trailer park, or that everything was easy there. And I don’t want to romanticize the desperate circumstances faced by so many of the folks who were living there. But I can’t deny that overall, my memory is one of kindness, of welcome, and of compassion. 

And it’s that final quality, compassion, that I think was the key distinction between that neighborhood and the other, more typical places that I have lived. Whether they thought about it in this way or not, the people in the trailer park lived with an almost instinctive sense of compassion towards their neighbors, because they knew that, no matter the reason someone found themselves there, they probably needed a little understanding, a little care. 

And they knew this because they, too, needed the same thing. There was a sense that, though we might be living in cramped quarters, making a home on cracked pavement, we were all in this together. And though yes, we were tiiiired, we were not alone. 

You know, it’s funny, this is Christ the King Sunday, and we expend a lot of energy in the Church pondering the mysteries of the Kingdom and what it’s like and who is part of it and how to get in, but I think in the end, it’s not as complicated as some make it out to be. 

To put it simply, I think the Kingdom of God is like that trailer park I lived in. Because the Kingdom of God, more than anything else, is a place shaped by compassion. And it glows with a light that is not dependent upon any season.

It has nothing to do with your material resources, this Kingdom of God. It has nothing to do with your nationality or your sexuality or your gender or your political party. It has nothing to do with the mistakes you’ve made or the wrong turns you’ve taken. If we are to take this morning’s gospel passage seriously, truly seriously, then the only criteria of the Kingdom prepared before the foundation of the world is that it is a place of compassion. 

Compassion for everyone we meet, including those whom the world tends to forget. Compassion for our enemies. Compassion for creation. Compassion for ourselves.

And the thing about compassion is that it is not the same as benign goodwill or charity. It is not someone sitting in a lofty place dispensing a favor to someone less fortunate. Compassion, the Latin root of which means “to suffer with,” is about experiencing the solidarity of human existence, of realizing that we all need each other, that we are all blessed by one another, and that perhaps those who have struggled, those who have experienced life’s challenges the most, will be the ones to bless us with a particular depth of wisdom. I have often found that to be true.

Compassion, in other words, is not saying “there but for the grace of God go I,” it is saying “by God’s grace, we are in this together. Let’s care for each other.” It is what Jesus embodied in his ministry and in his own passion, and it’s what he asks us to embody as well, if we would know what life is truly about, if we would enter the Kingdom where true life is found. 

So when we ponder the Kingship of Christ, and the Kingdom over which he reigns, and how we might seek it here and now so that we might be its inheritors in the age to come, then I will tell you this: it’s right in front of us. It is not reserved for the morally perfect or the privileged. To take part in God’s reign, simply look to cultivate a life of compassion. 

And the simplest way to do this? Look for the places in your own story, in your own heart, where there is a wound, a vulnerability, a hard lesson learned, that moment when you were hungry, or sick, or felt imprisoned by circumstance. In other words, recall a time when you needed compassion, and let that memory guide your actions. 

Find those who are doing their best to get by, who are tired, or who are struggling in a particular way that you understand, because you’ve been there yourself. And go be with them. Literally, go be with them at least once this holiday season. See how your own life is blessed and illuminated by doing so. 

And if you are the one struggling to get by this morning, if you are feeling unseen or lost, then simply imagine the God of the universe looking at you the same way Pearl looked at me all those years ago: with gentle, infinitely compassionate eyes, asking nothing of you other than to do your best, to not give up, to keep that beautiful light burning within you.

The giving and receiving of compassion. That’s it. That’s the Kingdom. Poor or rich, virtuous or broken, sheep or goat, in the end, compassion is the only thing that will show us what heaven looks like, what salvation feels like. 

And compassion is the only thing that will endure and live on when our selfishness and indifference and judgment—the stubborn goat that lives inside all of us—has been separated out from our long and complicated history and is burned up in the regenerating fire of God’s justice and love. And even then, yes, even then, on the other side of judgment, I believe that compassion will win out, and that something new will grow from the ashes of our failures, up from the cramped quarters and the cracks in the pavement where we’ve been trying to make a home. 

So, I don’t know what it looks like when you close your eyes and imagine the Kingdom of Heaven. Maybe it is a beautiful place, a perfect place, a place of twinkling lights and evergreen and streets gleaming like freshly fallen snow. 

But I will confess, for me, it looks a little bit like that trailer park, a place of open doors and broken hearts still beating, a place of no illusions and of deep strength. A place where everyone is welcomed, where every wayward soul has a place to call home. 

Like Pearl said, some days I’m tiiiired, man, I’m tiiiiired, and maybe you are too, but I think we’ll get there someday, and when we do, to be part of God’s reign forever, to meet Christ our King, to meet Jesus our friend, compassion will be the crown upon his head, and the whole earth will glow with its radiance. And so will we. 

The Master: Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, November 19, 2023 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 25:14-30, Jesus’ parable of the talents.

The other day a very exciting thing happened to me: I received in the mail a copy of the Vermont Country Store Christmas catalog. Now, if you are not familiar with this company or its catalog, it is a family-owned business in Vermont that primarily sells home goods and clothing and other items for anyone who is enticed by things like flannel sheets and wool sweaters and maple syrup. 

And the Christmas catalog, especially, is something I look forward to all year, even though I rarely buy anything from it. Just to flip through it is a treasure trove of nostalgia—vintage holiday decorations and cakes made from “old world” recipes and cozy slippers like the ones my dad used to wear on cold nights in northern Michigan. To read the Vermont Country Store catalog is, for me at least, to be drawn into that landscape of memory that feels especially potent as the holidays approach, as the past reaches out to embrace us.

And although our memories of the past can be both pleasant and painful, there is something about this time of year that seemingly compels us not just to remember it but to re-engage it, to make it live again through recipes and traditions and songs. 

For me it might be the Vermont Country Store catalog, for you it might be something else, but I am willing to bet that there will be something in the next several weeks—a scent, a taste, a melody—that will suddenly collapse the boundaries between past and present such that your life will suddenly feel both very spacious and very small all at once—spacious enough to hold so many memories, small enough to still feel like they were only yesterday. Time is strange like that. 

I’ve been thinking about time this week. It is precious, isn’t it? Perhaps the most precious thing we are given. It seems so abundant when we start out. It can feel interminable when we are waiting for something to happen. 

And then, suddenly, it slips away, and we think, oh, wait, not quite yet. I thought I had a bit more, I need a little bit more. There were still things I wanted to do, there were still words I needed to say. I don’t know why I didn’t. Maybe I was distracted. Maybe I was afraid. Please, just a bit more time. 

But the dying light and the winnowing down of the year reminds us that time is a relentless master; we are given what we are given, and it is up to us to make the most of it. It is up to us to imbue it with light and love and care while we can. I think we try to remind ourselves of this during the holidays.

If you wonder why on earth I’m going on about Christmas catalogs and time and memory, it’s not just because Thanksgiving is coming up in a few days, although I am excited about that. I have my Cool Whip ready!

No, it’s because I have been wrestling all week with the parable we have been given this morning, seeking a life-giving word from what can feel like an impenetrable text. Jesus, yet again, gives us an image of the Kingdom that seems, on its face, short on mercy and full of dire threats from a cruel master demanding a return on his investments. Is this supposed to be God? I cannot believe it. And so, yet again, I found myself seeking good news in an unexpected place.

And as I was flipping through that Christmas catalog and reflecting on the past, I found it. Not in the catalog itself, but in that tender sense of longing for times past that it evoked in me. It made me realize, in a new way, that the thing in this life that is of greatest value—the closest thing we might equate with both  the “talents” given in this parable and the Master who dispenses them—is not God. It is time. 

Time is our greatest resource. Time is our most precious gift. Time is the thing we must decide how to use while it is entrusted to us. And time, in the end, is the unyielding master of our mortal bodies, for it will run out, and it will call us to account. Time will ask us, in the dying light, in the winnowing down of our own years: what did you do while you could? What dividends of love and justice and peace do you have to show for it all?

And yes, I know that for generations, the Church has interpreted the Master in this parable as Christ and the talents as our material or spiritual resources that we should not bury out of idleness or fear. But I will be honest, I don’t believe that God punishes us simply because we are afraid, because we didn’t know quite what to do, because we didn’t yield a certain rate of return. I think such notions of God have been used to exploit people or at the very least, to make them feel like they are never enough, that they had better produce results or else, usually for the cruel masters of this world. 

Because here’s the thing about God—here’s the good news for those of us wearied and tearstained by the passage of the years—God is bigger than time. God is not bound by time. God is not sitting out there somewhere, watching the clock, waiting to see what you and I will accomplish. God is not making a list and checking it twice. 

God already knows. God has always known all that you would be, and all that you wouldn’t, or couldn’t be. And God has loved you anyway. Whether time has been kind or cruel to you, God has been with you every moment of your life, and will continue to be there, even when time runs out. And on that day, God will guide you out beyond time itself, beyond longing and regret and fear to that place where nothing is wasted, where nothing is lost, where everything is given. 

And if this is so, then perhaps the true invitation of this parable, the way into a Kingdom that arises in the midst of the cruelty and finitude of time, is simply this: cherish what you have been given. Savor the collection of fleeting moments that are your life. Use your days to make a world that is more peaceful, more beautiful and gentle and loving. 

Not to try and impress that master, Time, who will take all we have back for himself, but to get in touch with something even more powerful—to awaken to the reality that no matter what is taken from us by time, the love that we experience and share in this life is timeless, it is eternal, for it belongs to God. And one day Christ will come and give back everything and everyone that time has taken, and it will be a gift more precious than anything you can order in a catalog. 

It will be the life that is beyond time, which we cannot yet even imagine, and yet which is deeper, even, than our most cherished memories. Because even more so than our own lives, God is both very spacious and very small, all at once—spacious enough to hold forever, small enough to hold you. 

Cool Whip: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, November 12, 2023 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 25:1-13, the parable of the 10 bridesmaids.

Have you ever experienced something in your life that you only understood a little bit later, when you were looking back at it, maybe with a few more years under your belt, a little bit more wisdom or humility? 

One little thing that always amused me a bit, growing up, was my grandma’s excessively large collection of empty Cool Whip containers. You know the kind I’m talking about, those blue and white plastic tubs? Now, I love Cool Whip, it’s sweet and soft, like a cloud melting on your tongue. And we ate a lot of desserts at my grandparents’s house, so there was almost always some Cool Whip in the refrigerator. 

But while most of the other bottles and cartons we used were tossed out or recycled, for reasons I could not decipher my grandma seemed determined to save every single Cool Whip tub the family had ever consumed. They were used as containers for Thanksgiving leftovers, for all sorts of leftovers, actually, and they were repurposed to hold all sorts of random odds and ends on cupboards and shelves. 

And somewhere, deep in some drawer, I am sure there was a back stock of them, all nested together, ready to be drawn out at a moment’s notice should some unexpected object need to be sealed up and stored away. 

When I was young, the notion of why anyone would need so many Cool Whip containers was beyond me. I figured it was just some quirk, an odd little habit in a family with a zealous attachment to whipped dessert topping. 

And it was only much later, as I reflected both on my grandma’s life and the circumstances that shaped it, that I realized there was more to it than just a quirky habit.

You see, my grandma grew up with very little money. She was born in the midst of the Great Depression, one of four children, the daughter of a Lutheran pastor who died when she was a teenager, leaving her family’s budget even tighter than it had already been. 

And once she was married, my grandma raised six children as a stay-at-home mother, tending to her family on my grandpa’s modest, blue-collar wages. For my grandma, love looked like providing enough food for her kids, making a dollar stretch, getting to the end of the month, and if that meant reusing a Cool Whip container to save some money, to preserve food and to make sure there was always something stashed away in the fridge, then that is what she would do. 

And it’s only once I got a bit older and had to pay my own bills and navigate some of my own lean financial seasons that I came to appreciate exactly what my grandma and others in her position had to overcome—they had to survive in the face of scarcity, with very little in the way of a safety net. And so even if it just looked like a collection of Cool Whip containers stashed away in a drawer, I feel like she was storing up all her hopes and her unspoken dreams in that drawer, too, all nested together, a stack of prayers that someday her children and her grandchildren would have a better, easier life. 

What a gift, when we can look back with empathy and and finally see in a new way all the ways, big and small, that we have been cared for. And when we do so, it can also help us think about other things in a new way, too.

Take, for example, this morning’s parable from Jesus about the foolish and the wise bridesmaids. This is, by all accounts, a parable about the promised return of Christ, and about the ways in which we are encouraged, as partakers of the Kingdom, to be prepared for this return.

The challenge, of course, in the long, long wait for this return, is that we may grow confused or unsure about what wisdom and preparation should actually look like in our day-to-day lives. And Christian tradition, at various stages in its history (and its present), has unfortunately used such parables as instruments of fear, of enforcing moral purity, saying, be prepared, be obedient, be well-behaved, good Christian, or else! The door will be locked to you and you will suffer forever in the darkness. 

Nevermind the fact that the whole thrust of Jesus’ message is that the morally lost, the wayward, and the broken will be the first ones invited to the feast of God. Nevermind his radical inclusivity. 

No, we are so conditioned by our own notions of insiders and outsiders, of the worthy and the outcast, that we cannot help but imagine that this parable reinforces the predictable judgments and punishments of our own world, where grace is meager and perfection is mandatory, despite its being impossible.

But what if that wasn’t the point of this parable at all? What if this depiction of the Kingdom was getting at something else entirely? 

And that brings me back to the Cool Whip containers, and my grandma—back to the scrimpers and the savers of this world, and Jesus’ particular affection and solidarity with the ones who have little—in short, it brings me back to the poor and the marginal. If we want to find the good news, we must alway read the Gospel from the margins. The margins will show us the way to the center of God’s heart.

What I realize, now, is that the bridesmaids who bring extra oil are not stand-ins for the morally perfect and pure…they represent the ones who know about scarcity. Their wisdom is the type that comes from having very little, of needing to make your resources stretch through a long, cold night. It’s the sort of thing that Jesus’ followers, most of them people of low social and economic circumstance, would identify simply as “common sense.” The same thing that my grandma told me, as a child prone to flights of fancy, that I needed a bit more of. 

In contrast, the bridesmaids who do not bring enough oil are the type who have never had to make a dollar stretch; they don’t plan ahead because they have never imagined a resource that would run out, and even if it did, they are the type who assumes that someone else will bear the cost and fix the problem. They are probably not the kind who have ever had to worry about the light bill or whether there will be enough food at the feast. They are the type who don’t quite get the value of a Cool Whip container. 

Jesus is offering this parable to his ragtag band of followers as they express some concern and fear about when he will come back to them, when he will make things finally and truly right and whole and just for all people. They are maybe even a bit scared that they don’t have what it takes to get by until that unknown day. So maybe he is giving them the type of encouragement that they will understand. Maybe he is saying to them,

You who have had to get by with little, you who know what it means to save up your oil for the lamp, you who know what it is to pray for your daily bread, you who have stored up your tears in your jar and your dreams stacked up in a drawer, you who know what it means to be wise in this world, to survive in this world—you already have what it takes to endure, you already know how to be ready for that day, for you are already living with integrity and care. 

And so until then, just keep doing what you are doing. Stay humble, stay aware of the preciousness of every resource, stay grateful for every simple gift, steward the earth and those entrusted to you with wisdom and care and gentleness, and then dream. Dream of what can be. Dream of what will be. Stash those dreams away, all nested together, pull them out when you need them, and one day, I promise, the world will be sweet and soft, like a cloud melting on the tongue, and it will all have been worth it. It will all make sense. 

My grandma is gone, and I don’t know what happened to all of her Cool Whip containers. But every time I am in the grocery store and walk past them in the case, I smile and think of her. And I think about all the people in the world who are getting by as best they can, saving back a bit of oil for the lamp, saving back whatever they can for their families until a better day arrives, and I am grateful that now I understand a bit better now than I used to: they are the true face of wisdom. They are the true face of love. 

And until the day when the Bridegroom returns at last, they are the closest glimpse we will have of the face of God. 

The Table: A Sermon For All Saints

I preached this sermon on Sunday, November 5, 2023, the observance of All Saints’ Day at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Revelation 7:9-17 and Matthew 5:1-12.

It’s in storage at the moment, but I am in possession of a rather unusual coffee table that my mom bought years ago. At the time, she was a young woman living in northern California, and one day as she was driving along, she saw a random man just sitting there on the side of the road selling furniture made out of oddly shaped pieces of reclaimed redwood. Apparently this was *totally normal* in the 70s in California, so she stopped to take a look and ended up going home with this particular coffee table, and it’s been handed on and passed down ever since. 

Now I will admit, it is not the most useful piece of furniture. Because it is made from an irregularly shaped slab of wood, you can’t really put much on top of it, and the base is a little bit wobbly, and I’ve lost a few cups of coffee off of it and I’ve banged my shins on its jagged edges more than once in the dark, evoking some colorful language on my part. 

But as impractical as it might be, I will never give up that table. Part of that is sentimentality of course; but also because the wood itself is so beautiful. The man who made it put a protective polish on it, but you can still see the deep, natural, rich hue of the redwood, the undulating grain, the nicks and the scars, the dark glow of its inner luminosity. In all my life, I have never seen another table quite like it. And so someday, when Matt and I have a house, I’ll hopefully find some corner where we can set it up with minimal risk to our shins. 

What I love most about that table is that when you look at it, you can see its source. You can see the tree that formed it, the very shape of its origin, the textures and the imperfections acquired by its life in some long forgotten, cloud draped forest. You can see all the things that, when we craft something, are typically glossed over, shaved away, painted and and stained and hidden in the pursuit of a uniform perfection. 

And it might sound strange, but I pulled out that table and looked at it this week as I was reflecting on the Feast of All Saints, which we are observing today. All Saints is, itself, a bit of a quirky object with a few jagged edges. One one hand, it’s, of course, a day when we call to mind the saints—people in the distant and recent past who, by some measure, experienced a particular closeness with God and God’s mission in the world. On the other hand, we also incorporate into our observance bits and pieces of All Souls Day, recalling the beloved dead, saintly and otherwise, who have populated our own past and whose memory lingers, sometimes a comfort, sometimes a painful thing we stumble up against in the dark. 

And so in this one day we have a whole range of themes, references, and feelings to try and make sense of: a bit of joy; a pang of grief; a sense of calling toward something profound and eternal; and yet a lingering doubt about how to do so when life feels so temporary and fragile.

Our scriptures appointed for the day are similarly confounding. We are given a startling depiction in Revelation of martyrs in blood-white robes before the throne of God, an image that feels both vivid and yet impossibly remote from our day-to-day reality, where blood tends to stain a different color. And we are also given the deceptively simple Beatitudes of Jesus—equally vivid, yet equally remote once we try to figure out how to practically live them out. I have not yet figured out how to determine whether I am sufficiently poor in spirit or pure in heart.

But that confounding quality, that ambiguous, jagged beauty, is, I would argue, the point of this feast, because All Saints, in requiring us to grapple with grief and gratitude and hope all at once, is about reclaiming purpose from those things in our lives that are raw and unstructured and unvarnished, those irregularly shaped experiences we carry with us. 

And at its core, All Saints’ wants to teach us that these things are not an obstacle but an answer; that sainthood is not something neat and tidy and peaceful; it is about the courage to reconnect with the deep, untidy, God-given authenticity within us, whether in this life or the next.

Because death and sainthood have something in common: they are both a sort of returning back to God, a stripping away of the cheap veneer, the paint and the pretense. The dead and the saints both experience a reconnection with that mysterious divine power which created all things. 

The saints remind us that we can make this return even while we live, that by prayer and service, we can scrub ourselves down to the essential substance of which we were made, revealing the undulating grain, the dark glow of God’s inner luminosity in our very flesh. 

But the dead remind us that even if we fail to return to God fully in this life, we will nonetheless, by God’s grace, do so in death, our souls restored to their original character, abiding in God like a stand of redwoods in a clouded forest. Everyone we have ever loved and lost is there now, standing tall and graceful, embedded back into the fabric of life itself, awaiting the day of a new creation when we will be fashioned into something even more honest, more complete.

And so if we read the Scriptures from this vantage point—that sainthood is not about wearing a  golden halo but about the reclamation of our raw, inner radiance—then the texts reveal something important, something that my quirky old coffee table also seems to tell me whenever I look at it: our life of faith is not about acquiring layers of lacquer and gilding; it is not about being whittled down into something that barely resembles us; it is not about the straight line or the perfect edge. It is about the surrender to an organic, unbridled sort of beauty; it is about showing forth something of our eternal origins; it is about reminding all who gaze upon us, even with our nicks and our scars and our unsteady legs and our jagged edges, that we bear the image of the One who made us.

Which means that the Beatitudes are not, in fact, a checklist for achieving sainthood: they are the promise that even when bad things happen, even when all else is stripped away from us, our intrinsic blessedness will shine through. 

And that image from Revelation is not just a remote tableaux of lofty, saintly figures in white; it is the promise that even when we bleed, even when we die, in Christ we will be revealed as what we always were: vessels of pure, divine light. 

So my advice, for all of us, is to let All Saints be what it is. Let it be a little rough around the edges. Let it be delightful and let it be sad. Let it inspire a glance towards heaven and another down towards the dark earth where our loved ones rest. We will say their names and we will sing our songs, and maybe it will all be a little bit wobbly, a bit of a stumbling hazard, but it will be so very honest, so very meaningful, as all real, unvarnished things are. 

I know I will never meet that mysterious man on the side of the road who was selling that redwood furniture, but if I could, I think would ask him, what inspired you to try and make something useful out of such rough, unruly, imperfect materials? Didn’t you know it wouldn’t quite work? Didn’t you know we would stumble in the dark and hit our shins and that it would hurt, that we would curse the ground we walk on? 

But, at least in my imagination, I wonder if he might look back at me with a dark, gentle glow in his eyes and say, 

Blessed are the ones who see the beauty in what is unruly and imperfect. 

Blessed are the ones who love such things anyway. 

Blessed are the ones who stumble and hurt and keep going. 

Blessed are the ones who live. 

Blessed are the ones who die.  

Blessed are the jagged-edged and the real and the saintly. 

And blessed, too, are the ones who simply try.

Promised Land: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on October 29, 2023 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Deuteronomy 34:1-12 and Matthew 22:34-46.

When you live in Las Vegas, as I did for many years, the temperatures in the summertime, reaching 115 degrees or more, can become unbearable after a while. Air conditioning makes it survivable of course, but some days you get sick of that frigid, metallic breeze and you start to long for something cool and gentle and real, a soft wind filtered through trees and birdsong, perhaps, the kind that dances across your brow rather than blasting it with an artificial chill. 

And luckily, even in the midst of the Mojave Desert where Las Vegas sits, there is a solution to this dilemma, a place known as Mt. Charleston. Drive north from the city, surrounded by endless jagged rock formations and scrub brush and shaggy Joshua trees, and then turn left, and go down a long two lane road through a desert expanse, and suddenly, the highway begins to climb, up, up, up, and the landscape changes before your eyes, and as the elevation increases, suddenly, miraculously, there are mountainsides covered in green pine trees and wildflowers grow along the ditches, and the thermometer on your car drops 5, 10, 15, 20 degrees in a matter of minutes. 

You arrive at one of the many trailheads or parking lots and breathe in the cool, verdant air and it seems absolutely impossible that you were roasting amid the harsh glare of the Las Vegas Strip just 40 minutes ago. Up on Mt. Charleston, the world is suddenly new and fragrant and full of different possibilities and the stifling desert is a distant memory. 

There was one time up there, though, when I decided to hike a particular trail that led even higher, up through the alpine forest, to an outcropping called Cathedral Rock. I had read that the views from the top were spectacular in every direction. It was a long, moderately strenuous hike, but it was indeed breathtaking at the summit. In one direction, you could look further into the expanse of green mountainside and imagine that you were in Colorado or northern California. 

But what struck me the most was that in the other direction you could see all the way back down the mountainside, back down the road that led there, all the way back to the brown valley and the hot desert and the unsparing sunlight of another climate, another reality. 

It was jarring and fascinating, from that vantage point, to comprehend the totality of the landscape, how I had not really “escaped” the desert but had simply been lifted up a bit to see how its edges gave way to something else, how the brown and the green, the fiery sun and the cool breeze, were all part of one another. From Cathedral Rock, one could see in a sweeping glance the coherence of things that felt so different, the interplay of opposites, and the ways that the place from which we came and the place where we now stand are always lapping up against one another, borderless. 

Now, I make no claim to have reenacted Moses’ journey up to the top of Pisgah, as we heard described in today’s reading from Deuteronomy, but in thinking about that view from Mt. Charleston, I do find myself wondering about his own mountaintop moment, looking into the Promised Land.

I think we usually hear this story and figure that Moses must have been awfully disappointed, never getting to go to the place he’d been working so hard to arrive in. But I wonder if, befitting one who has somehow seen God face to face, perhaps he was given something even better than arrival, something more profound than a simple journey’s end. 

We spend a great deal of energy in our own lives, and in the communities and societies we have constructed, assuming that there will be, one magic day, the point when we arrive. Arrive at stability, arrive at safety, arrive at certainty, arrive at the untroubled future long sought but always just around the next bend. Arrive, so to speak, in our own sort of Promised Land. 

And when we do, we tell ourselves, then life will really begin, then it will be the way it is supposed to be, and we can forget about all this hardship and heartache that has accompanied us. We will leave the stifling desert wilderness behind, we can forget it ever existed, and the world will be new and fragrant and full of different possibilities. 

But the thing is, we never quite escape what has come before. We make strides, we see the possibility of progress and peace, and then—another war erupts and drags innocent victims back into a maelstrom of violence and ancient enmity. Or another pandemic comes along and disrupts our patterns of life and work and worship. Or we lose someone dear to us, or we just make the same old tiresome mistake yet again, or the bottom drops out of our best laid plans, and the hot despair of the desert threatens to engulf us once more. 

And maybe we wonder—what’s the point of all this if we can’t ever seem to get where we’re going? What the use of seeing the Promised Land if it keeps evading our grasp?

But as I imagine Moses standing there with tears in his eyes on the top of Pisgah, weeping for a land he will never quite reach, I also imagine him looking back in the other direction, back down into the long road toward the desert, back into the wilderness from whence they had come, back into the memory of Egypt, of heat and sweat and tears. 

And I wonder if, from that high vantage point, Moses realized that there was less distinction than one might assume between where they’d been and where they were going. For, despite all the great expectations of the Promised Land, we can’t forget that the desert was also a place where God spoke to them and fed them and guided them day and night and refused to forsake them, even in their faithlessness and desolation and despair. 

And so perhaps the wisdom Moses was given, one final gift in the dying light on the mountain, as he cast his eyes back and forth between the road traveled and the road ahead, was to see that, in the end, the desert and the land beyond the Jordan might look different, but they are actually the same landscape. They are just the past and the present lapping up against one another, and while only one might be called the Promised Land, they are both lands that revealed a promise kept—a promise by God to never abandon his people, to never to let them walk alone. 

The deserts of our lives and the lands of plenty—they are both places where God abides and where God provides, and the truth is that to cross the proverbial river; to escape; to forget what came before–none of this is the ultimate prize or even the point of the journey. The point is to know that God stands with us wherever we are. It is to know that God loves us wherever we are and, as Jesus says, God commands us to love one another wherever we are. It is to discover that when we do this, then the Kingdom of Heaven, which is dependent on no particular landscape, can spring up anywhere—in the desert heat, in a green and fragrant valley, and the spaces in between. 

So no, we cannot spend our lives waiting for arrival at some perfect place in order to begin the work of love. Like Moses, like Jesus, we can only love the rock upon which we stand. We can only love here, love now, love the people that God has placed in front of us, love the world we know, despite its seemingly endless propensity to break our hearts and to backslide into the barren wilderness. 

And so we must hold onto the view from Pisgah; we must hold onto the greatest commandment to love, in which all of our perceived divisions are revealed to be an illusion, and in which we discover that there is just one land, there is just one body, one story, one home where all deserve to live in peace and safety. 

We must begin to see in a way that comprehends the totality of the landscape, realizing that God’s love is borderless—and that wherever we cast our gaze, and wherever we go from here, and wherever we end up, God will be there. Even on the near side of the Jordan. Because where we ultimately arrive someday is less important than the fact that God has already arrived here, today.

If we are able to see this, and if we choose to live as if this is so, then the Promised Land is no elusive dream of a summer breeze in another place; it’s the ground right under our feet. 

Emperor: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, October 22, 2023 at St. Anne Episcopal Church in West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 22:15-22. This sermon was offered as part of the parish’s annual pledge/fundraising campaign.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve gotten together with many of you at a series of meet-and-greet events. I’ve loved the opportunity for us to learn more about one another and to hear from you about your hopes and dreams for St. Anne. There are still a couple more of these on the calendar, so I hope to see you soon if you haven’t made it to one yet. 

At a few of these, I have been able to share a bit of my own story—how I came to be in The Episcopal Church and how that eventually led me into the priesthood. I am not going to retell that whole story this morning, but a piece of it has been on my mind this week as I’ve been reflecting on both our Gospel for today and our annual pledge campaign to fund St. Anne’s mission and ministry in the coming year, because one common thread in all of these things—my own story, the Gospel story, and in St. Anne’s ongoing story—is that sometimes we discover that God is not at all who we thought God was, or that God does not in any way resemble our longstanding assumptions…and that this can be very good news. 

When I was in college, I drifted away from church; or it might be more accurate to say I ran away. My reasons were personal, but not entirely unique; I think many of us, at one juncture or another, begin to question our foundational understandings of who we are and how the world works and what is ultimately true. And that is exactly what happened to me. 

And so, in my mid-twenties, I found myself in an awkward position: I had spent a number of years feeling very unsure about everything I had been taught about faith and religion, and yet the hunger for meaning, for purpose, for belonging to something greater than myself, would not leave me alone. I longed to be part of a community that was committed to something deeper than just a hobby or a political opinion or a worldview; I wanted to engage the big questions of life and death and love and eternity, but I didn’t want to be given an ultimatum as to how best to answer those questions, and I had always understood religion as a place of ultimatums—believe this, think this, be like this, or else you are not part of this. 

And yet, despite my trepidation, God still haunted me, like the lingering memory of a lost love, and so one day I found myself slipping into the back pew of an Episcopal church near my house, tentative, uncertain, hopeful. I followed along as best I could; I stood and sat and kneeled like Episcopalians do. When it came time to recite the Creed, I only said parts of it, because I didn’t know what I believed anymore, and I didn’t want to lie. 

And yet, when the time came, I nonetheless went up to the rail for communion, praying that if there was a God who still loved me, that he would forgive my confusion and my reticence and still meet me there in the bread and the cup. I prayed that I would not be punished for having so many doubts, for being wayward and unsure of my commitments. And I reached out my hands, almost breathless, waiting to see what would happen.

I think that the stakes of that moment, at least as I perceived them, were similar to the stakes of the question posed by the Pharisees and the Herodians to Jesus in this morning’s gospel passage. They have ulterior motives, of course, but they are asking, fundamentally, where Jesus’ loyalties lie, and whether he is all in for God or for Caesar, as if the two are comparable forces competing for the same spiritual and material resources. 

Although they don’t say so explicitly, there is, woven into their question, the idea that God, like Caesar, is an emperor of sorts—a figure or a force demanding fealty and submission. And to be fair to them, this is an image of God that is embedded in much of our Scripture, since these are texts that were shaped and recorded by a society accustomed to rulers with absolute authority. 

This is the same understanding of God that I had when I approached the communion rail: a God who literally sat on a throne, ready to suss out whether I had been loyal, whether I was willing to pay the price of my authenticity in order to receive his beneficence. 

But what Jesus knew, and what he came to proclaim to the world, is that God is not comparable to Caesar. God is not like an emperor at all; God’s power is from the ground up, not from the top down. And though we still try to put a crown on God’s head and though there are still those who try to fashion God’s Word into a sword rather than a healing balm, Jesus continues to dismiss such posturing. And he continues to console those among us who fear that we are too doubtful, too wayward, too lost to be part of this. 

He says, render unto Caesar your questions of punishment and debt and power.

But render unto God what is God’s—the deepest longing of your heart to be welcomed unconditionally, to be loved without reservation, to be invited into building and sustaining something kind, something beautiful, something true. 

And so you know what happened when I reached out my hands to receive communion on that Sunday so many years ago? Nothing. In the best possible way, nothing. God did not send down a thunderbolt and smite me for having run away. God did not send an angry Episcopalian to berate me for not reciting the whole Creed. God did not punish me for having doubts and questions.

God simply fed me, and that was its own sort of answer. 

Because, as I realized, perhaps for the first time that day, God is not Caesar, demanding conformity and unthinking allegiance, asking “are you worthy, are you certain, are you pure?” No, the God revealed in Christ is more like a person standing on the front porch to welcome you home, saying, “I’ve missed you. Come on in; you look like you need something to eat.”

And I did eat, and I am still eating, responding to that hunger that could not be satisfied anywhere else. And from that first Sunday onward, I knew that if this was what church could be, then it was worth everything I had to give. 

I know, from hearing so many of your stories already, that some of what I am talking about overlaps with your experience of the Episcopal Church and of St. Anne in particular. I know that in this place, many of you have come to the realization that God is not that which we were once taught to fear, and that the point of all this is not to arrive at some untroubled belief in God, but to discover that God believes in us, and that God always will, no matter how far we run or how long we wander.

And I want you to consider what a rare and precious treasure this is—that there is a place in this world, as polarized and fractured as it is, where people are welcomed to come as they are, to be held in community, to be invited to grow in faith while still leaving space for tough questions, for doubt, for mystery, and for a certain acceptance that we don’t have all the answers. 

I know that, because of what I discovered about God that first Sunday in an Episcopal church, I decided to pledge my life to this vision and embodiment of Christianity. And because of the ways that St. Anne so joyfully and passionately pursues that same vision, both within our walls and beyond them, I will be pledging a substantial amount to help fund the mission of this parish in the coming year. 

I want to do that not just because of all the good things already taking place here, but because I know that somewhere out there, maybe just down the road, there are people just like I was on that Sunday so long ago—no longer able to endure the notion of the God of empire, yet still longing to find a place of welcome, longing to belong to and to help build something kind and beautiful and true. Longing to hear a voice saying, I’ve missed you. Come on in. You look like you need something to eat.

This is that place. Let’s make sure they find it. Let’s be ready for them when they do.