episcopal – Page 4 – By Another Road

Get Up: A Sermon

So, a confession—and one that for some reason always feels a little bit awkward for a priest to make: I am NOT a morning person. Not even in the slightest. I admire and honor the morning people out there among you; I think it’s probably a beautiful thing to have those extra, slightly quieter hours at the outset of the day. I understand this intellectually. But my body does not agree.

I get up when I must, but I’m not happy about it, and it’s a slow process of reanimation. Eventually, at some point after my morning coffee, I am ready to rejoin the land of the living.

People sometimes seem surprised by this; maybe they have an idea that priests are up every day with the rising sun chanting the Psalms. And maybe some of my fellow priests do indeed do that, but not me. I am a night owl, and it’s usually late at night that I am especially inclined to talk to God and reflect and pray. The prayer office of Compline, the one said just before bed, is my absolute favorite.

I make this confession to you because, on one hand, it’s always good to remember that we are all simply human beings trying to make it through the day in whatever way we can, whatever clock our bodies are on.

But also because I realized, pondering the readings for this All Saints Day, that I have a kindred spirit—a new patron saint for those like me who are not always ready to greet the dawn. It is poor Lazarus, who was, by John’s account in the Gospel, not prepared to get up when and how he did.

Think about it. You have died and, presumably, are resting peacefully in the arms of God. And then all of the sudden someone rolls back that stone and lets all the light in and starts calling, “Lazarus, come out!”

My mom used to do this when I was a kid—she’d come into the bedroom and pull open the blinds and say, Phillip, get up, we’ve got things to do!! And I would grumble and groan.

And yes, I know the raising of Lazarus is a miracle of the highest order, a sign that Jesus is indeed the Son of God, but still, the not-morning people like me might empathize a little with Lazarus stumbling out into the daylight, a bit confused and rough-looking, not quite ready to face whatever this is. This new day. This new, changed life. Maybe he just wanted five more minutes of rest, first, before embarking on existence as a saint raised from the dead.

Lazarus, in his sleepy disarray, with the smell of the burial shroud and the bandages all askew, is a comfort to me, because he reminds me that sainthood, ultimately, is not about having it all together. It’s not like those senior superlatives that show up in the high school yearbook—most likely to succeed, best dressed, best personality. Lazarus, coming out of the tomb, would not have won any prizes.

No, sainthood ultimately is about Jesus, about what Jesus does in our very ordinary, imperfect, complicated, exhausting lives, even when we hit the snooze button a few too many times or burn our tongues on the coffee or run a few minutes behind our best intentions.

Lazarus doesn’t get mentioned much more in the Gospels—as far as we know, he didn’t lead a revolution or work any miracles of his own. He just…got up when Jesus called him and returned to his family and did his best to get on with life. And that was sainthood. That’s a low bar that I feel like I can get over, even on my worst days.

All Saints’ Day is one of the glorious feasts in our church year, but we should not be overly confused about or intimidated by saints, or feel like they are these remote, pious figures with their hands perpetually clasped in prayer.

They were and are human beings, with all their idiosyncrasies, living through eras just as complicated and challenging as our own, if not more so. Really, what distinguishes them is simply that God called out to each of them and said, “it’s time to get up. We’ve got things to do. Come on out, wounds and bandages and all, and let’s face the world together.”

And the plot twist is that God is doing the exact same thing to you and to me every day of our lives. Maybe you don’t have actual trouble getting out of bed, like me, but we are all, at times, a little hesitant to open our eyes, to step out into the bright light and the crowd and the fray, with all of the world’s questions and uncertainties and dangers and demands. We might think it would be easier to turn over and go back to sleep, to let someone else handle it, whatever it is. To trust that God will call on someone else.

And maybe God will, or maybe God won’t. But the question is—what will we never see, what life will we miss out on, what new glory might never be revealed in us, if we just stay curled up in the dark?

You don’t have to be full of undaunted courage and untroubled certainty. Lazarus was literally still half-dead, couldn’t even speak. But he pulled himself up on those aching bones and even though he didn’t say a word, his heart said yes, Lord, ok, Lord, I am a mess, and I haven’t had my coffee yet, but yes, I’ll come out. I’ll take part in whatever this new thing is that you are doing.

And with just that, he was a saint.

My friends, the world needs more saints like Lazarus. We need more imperfect people willing to stand up and step out, just as they are, to bear witness to the all-powerful love that is God’s message for all people. We need more people willing to stand up and say, death and division and enmity and cynicism and hatred and exclusion are NOT the last word of the story, and we will not roll over and we will not pull the covers up over our heads while the world weeps. No. Jesus says come out, we’ve got things to do, and so we’re gonna come out, at every hour of the day, to be the messengers and agents of his undying love.

And because we are Episcopalians, yes, we will say our prayers and drink our morning coffee to help us along the way. And woe to anyone who stands in the way of a bunch of Episcopalians hyped up on caffeine and God’s love—death and tyranny themselves are going to run in the other direction!

I know that there is a lot that weighs heavily right now. I know we’re all stressed out, and maybe like Mary and Martha we’re wondering why Jesus isn’t showing up when and how we want him to. Maybe we are afraid of what a new morning will bring.

But listen. Listen closely. Jesus is calling out. He is saying, open your eyes. He is saying, I am here, and I am asking you—yes, you—now, to get up, to come out, to brush off the dust and wipe away the tears and the sleep from your eyes and LIVE. For your own sake, for the sake of the ones who came before us, and for the ones who will follow long after we are gone, LIVE fully, and generously and openly, and lovingly. Live in pursuit of justice. Live in the practice of peace. Live as if God is real and death is a lie, because it is so. Live as though the opportunity to love is the best reason for getting out of bed in the morning, because it is so. And then you will be counted among the saints.

Because that’s all sainthood is, in the end. An accumulation of choices to get up every day and love something or someone fiercely.

And it is God saying, when all is said and done, at that dawn of a new and eternal day—yes, my child, yes, you understood. Love is all there was to it.

Get up. Open your eyes. Good morning.

Trick or Treat: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, October 27, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Job 42:1-6, 10-17 and Mark 10:46-52.

Every year about this time, I come up against two things that are both true and yet are hard to reconcile with one another. The first is that Halloween was my absolute favorite holiday growing up and is still something I find great joy in. And the second is that 12 years ago, my father died on Halloween.

For a long time I didn’t really know what to do with that.

Even many years on, now, when this season comes around, that intersection of nostalgic pleasure on one hand and lingering sadness on the other strikes me as a very strange thing. But it also strikes me as a very true thing about life. It is the time of year when I’m reminded that the very good and the inexpressibly hard always brush up against one another–fairy princesses and ghosts both knocking at the door.

Halloween is when I realize that grief and joy are not a binary choice I can pick between, but two companions who have different things to teach me. We navigate the autumn, the three of us–grief and joy and I–and so I have found a new way of being in this season.

Because as much as I used to love it, I am well past the age of going trick or treat; instead I’ve come to that point when one learns that both treats and tricks arrive in our tentatively outstretched hands as the years go by. The key is to keep our hands and our hearts open anyhow; to trust that, with God’s help and with each other, we can sift through whatever is given.

That’s easier said than done, though.

We live at time in which the general tendency is to see grief and joy as enemies of one another, as a sort of zero sum struggle, and this false binary has all sorts of dangerous implications.

For example, we get caught up in partisan divisions which suggest our grief and grievance must be satisfied by destroying the joy of those who are different from us.

At times our public discourse cannot bear subtlety or compromise, as one group seeks to maximize its pleasure and discount its perceived enemy’s pain.

Or we find ourselves caught up a brittle, toxically positive culture that frames joy as the absence of sadness or weakness, suggesting that something is wrong with anyone who dares to weep or crack or mess up or show fear.

And when this happens, we become a shallower, meaner, more haunted society.

We have been here before, though. Just read the story of Israel. Read the Psalms, including the hard parts our Sunday lectionary leaves out. Read the Gospels. The wisdom of our spiritual forebears, the wisdom of Scripture, has always understood that fullness of life–this thing that Jesus speaks about and wants to invite us into–is a space which gives voice to every human condition, and that the only way to approach God is to move toward that strange crossroads where joy and grief coexist.

Consider, for example, the culmination of the Book of Job, which we heard today. At first glance, it might sound almost like a fairy tale, a sweet treat for frightened children—a tidy, happy resolution where this poor man gets back even more than what was taken from him.

Except when we stop to consider the fact that his questions to God never did get answered, and that his new wealth and his new children will never erase the pain of what he has been through, not really.

Anyone who has suffered loss will recognize this: that Job must learn to live out his days somehow with both grief and with joy, and it is only in the holy tension of these two that a new sort of blessedness is visited upon him, one that is deeper and wiser and more alive than that of earlier, simpler days.

We come to realize that Job’s story is the journey of the soul’s movement toward God through the ambiguities and complexities of life.

And something similar is revealed in the story of Bartimeus, the blind beggar, healed by Jesus just before his own final entry into Jerusalem. Unlike the rich young man and the ambitious disciples we’ve heard about in recent weeks, Bartimeus has no illusions about life. His experience at the margins of society and his close intimacy with sorrow have shown him what seeing eyes could not see—that the true disciple of Christ is no prosperity gospel status seeker but the one who is unafraid of darkness.

Like Bartimeus, the true disciple, though they cannot see God, calls out anyway, saying walk with me, God of grief and of joy, let me follow you wherever you might go, let me see everything, for the first time, as it really is, not just what I am accustomed to seeing.

Show me who you are, God, and reveal who I am, too, and though we are long past a transactional trick or treat sort of faith, let us see what good might yet be done as we go wandering together in this night strewn with tears and candy wrappers.

Because let’s be honest with ourselves—that is the world we live in. That is life, in all its bittersweet complexity.

I know, especially in this election season, a lot of us are struggling to manage a lot of feelings at once these days—fear, anger, anxiety, uncertainty, hope, gratitude, determination. We have many good reasons for this, personal and political and cultural. But one thing that we cannot lose sight of as we navigate the next few weeks or months or years is that no single one of these emotions is the whole story.

Beware of anyone who wants you to tap into only your anger, only your fear, or only your craving for the sweet things in life. The only way that we can be faithful, purposeful, authentic disciples of Jesus is to carry all of it with us: the sadness, the delight, the gratitude, the humility, the resilience.

Being Christian, following Jesus, means we aren’t trick or treating anymore—we don’t get to choose just one thing or the other—strength or compassion, patriotism or prophetic witness, righteousness or relationship. Resisting idolatry, whether of nation or party or religious institution or even of our own identities means standing in that crossroads of understanding with Job and Bartimeus and Jesus, guided into a deeper sense of empathy and connection with one another above all else.

If you haven’t realized this already, I hope you will understand that one point of a parish like ours is that it’s a place where we practice this together. Church is like a workshop for the heart and soul, where we try out this honest relationship with grief and joy, with each other and with God, so that we can go out and do that same thing in the rest of our lives, in this world that so badly needs it.

I am grateful that the church, that this church, can be such a place. I am grateful that Jesus in the fullness of his gospel makes space for everything that we are, and everything that we have lost, and that he does this for everyone.

It helps make the strange collision of all my Halloweens—and any other haunted seasons of our life in this world–a bit easier to bear. A bit easier to keep going, to keep hoping, to keep believing, no matter what comes next, whether trick…or treat.

On The List: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, October 13, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Mark 10:17-31.

Most of you know that my last job before I went to seminary was as a fundraiser with a regional ballet company in Nevada. It was great—I planned events and wrote grants and worked with donors from all walks of life. But as you might imagine, ballet is an art form that has a somewhat rarified sensibility, so many of the environments I found myself working in were quite wealthy—spaces that a kid from a fairly humble background had never imagined being part of. So I’d put on my clearance rack suits and smile and do the best I could. People were generally lovely and kind, so it was fine.

But there was one part of my job that always made me feel a little awkward, maybe because of my own background. You see, whenever the ballet company was putting something on at our regional performing arts center, it was my job to stand at a little desk outside of this place called the Founders Room; it was the VIP area reserved for top tier donors and their guests. The Founders Room was a luxurious lounge with elegant furniture and art and little trays of sweets and finger sandwiches set out for whoever got to come in.

I was meant to stand there to greet our top donors as they arrived, but also to make sure that other people did NOT come in. The privacy and the exclusivity of the space was the point, of course, not just the finger sandwiches.

But at nearly every performance, someone would come up to the door, or at the very least walk slowly past, peering in at the room and at the small group of wealthy people mingling inside…and a certain look would come across their face. It was some combination of curiosity and wistfulness, almost as if they knew it was not for them, but they couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to come inside. A few would ask me what it was, and I would tell them as graciously and apologetically as I could that, no, it was not open to them. You had to be on the list.

So there I was in my cheap suit, like St. Peter at the pearly gates, casting the unworthy back down into the bowels of the lobby where they’d have to stand in line and buy their own finger sandwiches.

And I have to admit, it just made me a little sad to stand guard in that way–to be the keeper of a party not everyone was invited to. I got tired of VIP lists and inner circles. Who knows, maybe that’s partly why I felt drawn to the priesthood in that season of my life.

Because the thing about church (at its best), and the thing about the Kingdom of God, is that everyone is invited to the party. With all due respect to St. Peter, at least this side of eternity there are no gates and guest lists—just one open door, one table, one host. And that’s the only way I want to live. That’s the only way I think we are truly meant to live.

But for whatever reason, we struggle with this. Generation after generation, outside the church and sadly sometimes inside it too, we still find people standing at the threshold wanting to determine who’s in and who’s out. Maybe we even find ourselves buying into such notions from time to time.

The rich young man in today’s Gospel is certainly one such person. Before we get too hung up on Jesus’ words about wealth, first we have to understand the mistake that this earnest man has made in his question about inheriting eternal life. And it is essentially his mistake is this: he has misunderstood the Kingdom of God to be something like the Founders Room.

He has learned, somewhere along the way, that God’s domain must be a private and exclusive place, reserved only for the virtuous and the successful, where there is milk and honey and trays of finger sandwiches as far as the eye can see. You just have to be good enough or holy enough or know the right people or pray the right prayer.

And we might shake our heads at the young man for his folly, but we also might want to be careful. Because while we might not be keepers of the law in the same way he was, most of us have bought in to certain standards and expectations and identities that we are convinced will help us solve the problem of ourselves. If we just try a little harder, if we just work at it a bit more, if we just buy that one thing or get that one particular ideology to win out over the others, then, then all will be well and our God and our neighbor will smile on us and we will have mattered. We will be on the list.

And so we might imagine that rich young man approaching Jesus as if he were standing at that little desk in the lobby, looking in at the room beyond and asking, “Good Teacher, what must I do to get in?”

But here’s the thing, my friends. Here’s the thing that will save the world in the end. Jesus looks at him and loves him and says, in so many words, “my beloved child, that’s not the Kingdom of Heaven.” That’s not the thing you are seeking. Heaven is not a private reserve for the privileged few names on a list. And anyone who tells you that it is has fundamentally misunderstood the nature of God.

God is in the hubbub of the crowded lobby, where people are standing in line for overpriced drinks and make new friends. God is out where little ones in ballerina dresses tug at their parent’s coats and dream big dreams and where people bump into each other say they’re sorry and where it’s all a little messy but there’s room enough for everyone. That’s where God is. That’s where heaven will emerge.

And if you have spent your whole life storing up treasure and accomplishments and status symbols to try to wheedle your way into that little room, I’m telling you right now—you don’t have to do that anymore. Get rid of all that. Let it go. Come and follow Jesus out into the crowd as we all wait together for the dance to begin.

But at least on this day, in this instance, well…I guess the young man really wanted to taste those finger sandwiches. So he goes away, shocked and disappointed, curious and wistful. We might hope and imagine that eventually he comes back.

It’s funny…throughout the gospels, Jesus is actually somewhat ambivalent about money—he dines with and calls people from all sorts of backgrounds, he is noncommittal about those coins with Caesar on them and he is unbothered by costly jars of ointment poured on his feet. And he loves a good feast.

What bothers Jesus is when people decide that money is God, when we all know that love is God. He has pity on those who have forgotten this, and he has anger for those who knowingly exploit this lie to their own advantage, or to keep others down. But mostly, Jesus is patient, and he waits for us to realize our mistake and to follow him…and to discover where the true party is at.

And you know what, St. Anne, I am grateful every day of my life that now I get to stand at that door each morning and say, unequivocally to every single person who passes through—you belong here. You are on the list, because everybody is. You are worthy, because there is nothing you can do to make God love you any less. All we have to do is step in and join the celebration and let the love and the hospitality that pervades this space make us more loving and hospitable, too.

And that’s one difference about gathering pledges and donations for a community like this instead of what I used to do. Like the ballet, we, too, are committed to building something beautiful and lasting and inspiring and dynamic, but here we are not just audience members with varied levels of access. We are the art itself.

We are the practitioners of a love without gatekeeping, of a belonging without list-making, and a truth without exclusivity. That’s worth everything and anything that we can afford to give to it—our resources, yes, but most importantly, our hearts.

So I’ve let go of most of my cheap suits in favor of this priestly outfit that I don’t even own—an outfit that is pure gift. And I don’t stand at a little desk in a lobby these days, checking my list.

Instead, I get to stand up here, by God’s grace, looking out at all of you. And it’s true, we might look up at this altar with our own mixture of curiosity and wistfulness sometimes, but it is my distinct pleasure to tell you: this is for you. It has always been for you. We don’t have finger sandwiches, but we do have the bread of life. And we have each other.

Come on in.

Questions: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, October 6, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Job 1:1, 2:1-10 and Mark 10:2-16, where Jesus is asked about the lawfulness of divorce.

I still remember vividly the day that my parents separated. It was Christmas Eve of 1989. I was six.

I have to say, there are some stories that just don’t need to be told in detail from the pulpit. What I can tell you, though, is that it was a story about two good, complex people who had tried really hard, who had faced a number of big obstacles, and who just couldn’t make it work.

Such stories, when you live through them, leave you wondering: why do good and beautiful things break sometimes in this life? Why, despite all our good intentions, do things sometimes fall apart?

These are big questions. Difficult, honest questions.

One thing that is often said about The Episcopal Church, and something I love about it, is that we strive to be a place where we’re committed to asking good questions, and it’s a place where we admit that we don’t have all the answers.

For so many of us who have found our way into this faith tradition, especially from backgrounds and communities where over-confident certainties were wielded like weapons, being able to ask and to wonder and even to doubt sometimes…well, it feels like coming up for air.

I’ve shared with you before that I found my way back to Jesus after years of wandering because I realized, finally, in this Church, that I didn’t have to have it all figured out in order for Jesus to love me. He just did. And with that realization, I could breathe. I could ask my hard questions without fear.

As we study it, we notice that Scripture itself is full of all sorts of questions, too, though we have to admit that not all of them are created equal. Some are honest, and profound, and very brave, like the entire book of Job, which we heard the beginning of this morning. If you have ever read Job, is basically just one long-form, fundamental question: why is there suffering this world, and why doesn’t God do anything about it?

We’ll be traveling with Job for the next few weeks in our lectionary readings, but I will give you a heads up: the power of this ancient book is not that it has some simple, easily digestible answer to that big question. Its power is that the book is brave enough to ask the question in the first place. It does not hold back. Job demonstrates that for all of us, wrestling with the inevitability of pain and loss is not anti-faith. It is a necessary part of faith.

Because our salvation is not just a smiley face and a slogan that fits on a bumper sticker. No, true salvation comes to us through the deep questions we are willing to ask of God, of ourselves, and one another. It is born in those moments at 3AM when we have been stripped bare and are left on our knees without pretense–when we are finally willing to ask what we were too complacent or too afraid to ask before. This, as we will see, is exactly the sort of question that Job will ask, and it is the questioning that will transform him completely and save him.

But in the meantime, today, we are faced with another sort of question—the one that is posed by the Pharisees to Jesus in todays Gospel reading. Yes, it’s the dreaded “divorce reading” that can make a preacher squirm when they realize it’s their turn in the pulpit.

But here’s the thing about this reading—we can only approach it in a fruitful, truly Christian way when we acknowledge that the question that the Pharisees are asking is not like Job’s—it is not a thoughtful, bold, or honest one. They are just playing games. They are trying to lay traps for Jesus, guided by their own definitions of power and wisdom.

The Pharisees already know the law about divorce. One of the only reasons they’re asking this question is because they hope Jesus will say something to offend the King or the Emperor and get himself in trouble.

And with that it mind, it’s incredibly sad to me, infuriating even, that there are some corners of Christianity where this whole passage has been interpreted through the very same Pharisaical lens of power and control, as if purity were the point of the Gospel rather than what the Gospel actually is: solace for the vulnerable and the lost.

So we have to keep this in mind when we listen to Jesus’ response—we have to understand that he is turning their manipulative question back on them. He knows what they are up to, and so he responds with something they cannot argue against. It’s not a legal argument or a political claim, but a statement about something much more fundamental: a reminder about creation and its heartbreaking complexity.

Jesus knows the reality is that in marriage, as in the rest of life, love can bind us together and it can also cause us to break and make mistakes. And when it does, it is a very sad and difficult thing, because God has always desired for us to find wholeness in our relationships with each other. But God also knows all too well the risks that love requires and, yes, when things go wrong, the damage it can do. But he seeks to console us in the wreckage, not pile on.

So Jesus, by undercutting their ploy, is, in effect, dismissing the Pharisees’ question and asking a far better one: you, who are so concerned with getting everything right, and with everyone else getting it right—when did you stop being honest about life? When did you forget that life is full of inexplicable pain and unkept commandments and unanswerable questions? When did you forget that the only true answer is to love each other as best we can, for as long as we can, until we can’t anymore?

Jesus acknowledges to his disciples something we know well: when there is divorce, there is pain and there is brokenness, as any of us who have lived through a divorce or who’ve grown up as children of divorce can attest. We don’t need church authorities to tell us that. We’ve already experienced the flesh of our hearts being pulled apart. We already know what it feels like to not be able to breathe.

But God’s posture in all of this, always, is to meet us in the middle of the mess and to say to us, my love for you is stronger than your broken heart and my dream for you is bigger than your shattered expectations. And if you have been divorced; if you have failed to keep your promises; if you did what you had to in order to survive; if you walked away to save your own body or soul; or even if you just made a mess of it all…so be it. Because Jesus loves a sinner. He invited them to his table. He said, come to me like a child, tear streaked and exhausted and hungry, and don’t ever let anyone tell you, ever, that you don’t deserve love. Even when you couldn’t quite make it all work on your own strength. Especially then.

And so I would say to those churches who use this passage against those who have been divorced, or who use any Scripture passage to condemn or exclude—I would say, God calls us to be saints, not Pharisees. God call us to be honest, imperfect people transfigured by grace. God calls us to stop playing games, to stop thinking faith is about knowing everything, and to ask real, heartfelt questions instead, like,

How do I leave this world better than I found it?

What does being a disciple look like in this time and place?

When will I let go of all things that have burdened my heart for so long?

Who is Jesus to me, now, at this point in my life?

Where do I see God’s Spirit at work, every single day, and how do I tell others about that?

God, help us to be a community where questions like this are what guide us more than any simplistic answers. God, lead us into a way of life where, instead, we become the answers to the good questions we ask.

When we do–even when good and beautiful things break–we will realize once more that we can breathe.

Runaway: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, September 15, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Mark 8:27-38 and Proverbs 1:20-33.

I want to tell you a story—a true story—about a young man who ran away from home. And, first things first, this is NOT a story about me, though it might ultimately be a story about all of us.

So there was a young man. At a fairly young age, about 18 or so, his parents died, and he found himself alone in the world, except for a younger sister for whom he was now responsible. But this young man, who was full of idealism, had a struggle within him. He knew that he should settle down and grow up, especially now that tragedy had struck and responsibilities had fallen into his lap. But he was deeply troubled by the world around him. He was not sure he could bear the life he was expected to live.

You see, he lived in a particular time when society was going through a period of decline. There was political intrigue, and widespread poverty, and rumors of war. Conspiracies and coarseness dominated much of public discourse. And this young man did not want to be part of it, of any of it.

He had been raised a Christian and he had a sense, nurtured from a very early age, that he was destined for a holier sort of life, something purer, something unstained by tears or bloodshed, something uncorrupted by the accepted order of things. He believed that God wanted him to leave it all behind.

And so he dropped off his sister with some caretakers and he wandered out into the wilderness, convinced that the pristine solitude of an empty space would fill the void in his spirit, that it would mend the cracks in his heart.

He knew, he just knew, that if he could purge himself of disappointment and attachment, if he could just find a way to make the pain go away, if he could shed the calamity of human flesh, he would finally be worthy of the peace for which he hungered. By leaving the world behind, he would become worthy of seeing God.

But a funny thing happened on the way to enlightenment. Somehow, people found out about this young man—brave, holy, or simply out of his mind, no one was quite sure—and certain people came to find him. They would not leave him be.

They camped near the places he had sequestered himself, waiting to catch a glimpse, waiting for a word from his lips, wondering what he had discovered in his solitude. And as they waited, they made for themselves impromptu communities out in the wilderness, communities, ironically, born of the young man’s initial rejection of communal life. Communities that were formed in the desert at the edge of loneliness, at the border of emptiness, made intimate and strangely alive by the search for another way of being.

The young man, by the way, was named Antony, and he lived in Egypt in the 3rd and 4th century CE, and those travelers who followed him into the wilderness were the first monastic communities in the Christian tradition. Antony is now known as St. Antony the Great, the father of all those called into religious life as monks or nuns.

But I am not telling you his story as a lecture on Church history. I am telling you Antony’s story because there remains, in each of us, I think, a bit of the impulse to run away from home—to look at the disappointments and the pain and the callousness of whatever is around us, our broken relationships or our broken politics and to say, “no thanks.” I am done with all of that. I am seeking something else, I am seeking something better, something unstained. I am walking away from the world as it is. Peace out.

In our own age of fractured social bonds and conspiracy theories and coarseness, this is a daily temptation. A cave in the desert might sound pretty good to some of us right about now. And of course there are circumstances and seasons, in our own lives, when we do need to walk away and free ourselves from unhealthy situations.

But what Antony discovered, in his accidental creation of monastic communities—when all he thought he needed was to be alone—what he discovered is that the sacred path, the way of Jesus, might be liberating, but it is never an escape. Choosing God is not the same as opting out of the world. Because God’s love will always, in one way or another, lead us DEEPER into the heart of the world, not further from it.

The plot twist for Antony was that, after many years of battling his demons in the dark and silent chambers of his soul, he emerged, not as a detached saint who had transcended human flesh, but as someone finally comfortable in his skin—and as someone deeply, deeply committed to the flourishing of others. He traveled back into those cities he once hated to debate theologians and take on emperors, challenging their corruption and their rejection of the truth, insisting, always, that the God of Love was more powerful than any partisan agenda, and that this God will hold all of us to account for the ways we form or deform our common life.

And that is what we must discover, or rediscover, if we are to live faithfully now. We have to remember that a life of faith is not about running away from home, but about realizing that everywhere is home, and that our task is to ensure that everyone experiences a sense of home in this life, no matter how they differ from us or where they have come from.

In this same vein, much has been debated and preached about Jesus’ invitation for his followers to take up their cross and follow him. What are we taking on? What are we leaving behind? There is one certain perspective, promoted by some, that Jesus wants us to reject our own humanity, to discount our own needs, to leave behind all that is familiar, and brazenly follow him out into some barren place of suffering for its own sake. To grovel and winnow ourselves down into a thin sort of holiness.

But that would only be the case if Jesus’ story ended with his death on the cross. And, spoiler alert, it does not. The story of Jesus is the story of resurrection—it is the story of what lies on the other side of rejection and despondency.

It is the story of a man and a God and a people who say, no, I am not running away. I am not running away from myself. I am not running away from what disappoints me or scares me or makes me feel small. I am going to face it, by God, and I am going to live a life shaped by something other than fear. I am going to let love make me courageous and alive in ways nobody dreamed possible. This is the story.

This our story: to charge headlong, with singing and tears and laughter and clarity, into the courageousness of a love that cannot be killed; into the public square where Wisdom still yearns for someone, anyone, to speak a word of truth. It is to venture into the places we once feared to go and the places we feared to return, until we discover, as Antony did, that God makes everywhere home.

We are at the beginning of a new season in this community—this fall we are resuming and expanding the ways that we connect with one another and with Christ in this place. We are welcoming new friends into our midst as they seek a home in this parish. And we are navigating, as best we can, a fractious and tense time in the life of our country.

My invitation to you, and to myself, and to all of us, is this: in all that we do this year, let us be a people who are running towards something, not running away. Running towards each other, even in our differences, not retreating into a corner. Running towards the needs of our neighbors. Running towards a joyful and clear and public witness to the Gospel of Love that is Jesus’ true message. Running towards that sense of community that God invites us to build together, we who are still dwelling at the edge of loneliness, at the border of emptiness, and yet who are made intimate and strangely alive in our continued search for another way of being.

And in all these things, running towards God–who has been running towards us across the wilderness of time since before time began. Running to say, beloved, you don’t have to keep running. You are here. I am here. We are already home.

Tomato: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, September 1, 2024, the first Sunday in the ecumenical Season of Creation, at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Song of Solomon 2:8-13; James 1:17-27; and Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23.

When I moved back to the midwest several years ago and started serving in parishes in this part of the world, I got to experience all over again the distinct pleasures of the turning of the seasons.

Living out in California, where summer and fall are pretty much the same, you have to rely on manmade, manufactured reminders—back to school sales and ads for pumpkin spice lattes. But here, in the midwest, we get real, tangible, earthy signs of the changing year as we make our way through it.

For example, right now is not just Labor Day weekend or the precipice of football season, as wonderful as those things are. It is also…tomato season. Oh dear God, is it ever tomato season. Ask me how I know this.

You see, every year right about this time, a curious thing happens in the life of a midwestern priest. Tomatoes start appearing in odd places. They show up on your desk when you come back from lunch….and they appear randomly on Bible study tables and at breakfast meetings. They manifest, almost miraculously, in little bags pushed into your hands by unseen gift-givers as you make your way through a Sunday crowd.

Indeed, had Jesus wanted to perform a feeding miracle in our own time, he would have done well to pick August in the midwest, and the crowds would have feasted on bread and tomatoes, and there would have been far more than twelve baskets left over!

I am grateful for the generosity of the gardeners among us, truly, especially since I don’t have much of a green thumb. For those who enjoy them, as I do, there are few things that approach pure, balanced perfection more than a late summer tomato, barely able to contain within its fragile skin the deep, bittersweet, vegetal tang of green stem and sunlight. Tomatoes are, if you will forgive my tendency towards poetics, almost saintly in their abundant, delirious, self-giving, delicious brightness.

Oh yes, you can look for reminders of God even in a tomato.

And I was thinking about tomatoes this week not just because Matt and I have a stack of them on our counter and because we’ve been eating salads and BLTs and tomato sandwiches for dinner, but because these tomatoes revealed something to me about our Scripture passages this week.

Yes, really.

What all of our passages this morning are all talking about, to some extent, is what I would describe as an ancient struggle experienced by humanity in its search for meaning and healing and hope: the perceived struggle between our inner life and our outer life.

Think about it. Almost without realizing, we constantly talk in our faith lives about the tension between inner reality, inner spirituality, inner knowing, and what happens on the so-called outside: our actions in the world or those of others. This dichotomy is always with us. And usually we understand this interplay between inner and outer as one of conflict.

Maybe our inner thoughts and feelings strive to be kind and loving, but then our outward actions betray us. This is what James is warning against in his letter, when he encourages the church to be doers of the word and not just hearers of it—to put their money where their mouth is and match their actions with their interior commitments.

But then at other times, we might actually be doing good things, helpful and righteous things in public view, yet there is war and bitterness in our hearts. We are consumed with pettiness or jealousy or some other self-defeating emotion. This is what Jesus is warning against in the Gospel as he reproaches the scribes and Pharisees for committing grand public acts of virtue while their inner life and their theological imagination are shriveled and small and hard. To Jesus, the Pharisees are like the most beautiful tomato you have ever seen, only to bite into it and realize it is made of wax.

But God wants neither of these outcomes for us—God doesn’t want us to be houses divided against ourselves, or to live divided lives. God wants our insides and our outsides to match.

That’s the invitation that Jesus is making to his disciples. It’s really quite simple. And really quite hard!

If we want to know what this looks like in practice, of course, we can look at Jesus who was, in a way no one else ever could be, someone who cultivated within himself and lived visibly with an undivided love for God, self, and neighbor.

When he tells the Pharisees that what comes out of a person is what defiles them, he is not saying that the interior life matters more; he is upending their assumptions about how the world works so that they might finally perceive that their judgment is not just harmful, it is irrelevant, because everyone and everything is part of a whole.

One of the most distinctive and important aspects of Jesus is that in him, the ancient dichotomy of struggle between the inner and outer life does not exist. There is simply—life. Life flowing through, life taking shape, life abundant, rising up as urgently as a summer garden. Nothing to hide, everything to offer.

And I don’t know about you, but my God, as I look around our world, full of real crises and manufactured divisions and illusory promises…my God how I long for something with integrity, for something true, for something that is what it says it is, someone who is what they appear to be. And how I long to be the version of myself that is also all of these things, even when things get tough.

Like the voice crying out in the Song of Solomon, looking for her lover through the latticework, we are all desperately seeking something true, something whole, something that won’t betray us or turn on us or trick us, and it can often seem rather impossible to find…

…until you meet Jesus and realize that he is–my Lord and my God–the real deal. That he is the ripe summer fruit that is just as delicious as it looks. He is the fruit that bears no curse. The simple, abundant gift of life rising up from the earth and coming down from heaven. Stem and sunlight.

And if we, as the church, as the followers of this simple, bittersweet, abundant God, if we hope to show the world who he is, then by God we’d better get out there and act like it, whether in the pews or in the laundromat or in the office or in the public square. And we’d better get in here, too, into our hearts, and nourish ourselves with the prayer and silence and study that seed and nourish our work.

Because the Gospel, ultimately, is about leaving behind the notion of inner and outer lives. We don’t get to choose between them. The world needs us to do love and to be love at the same time. The world needs us to be disciples who are as uncontrived, as self evident, as whole as Jesus. And yes….as uncontrived and self evident and whole as those tomatoes that keep appearing everywhere I look.

So I guess that’s what the tomatoes showed me this week—those saintly summer tomatoes. They aren’t the most impressive or exotic thing. But, they are, blessedly, exactly what they appear to be. They are a promise kept, for once in this world. And they offer themselves, without reservation, without calculation, and with completeness, for the sustenance of all.

And just when you think there’s nothing left….they keep showing up, in unexpected places, to remind you what sunlight tastes like. Sort of like Jesus. And, at our best, like us, too.

So yes, if anyone asks you this week, you can say, well…he preached about tomatoes.

But if I have learned anything thus far, it is that you can look for reminders of God everywhere, even in a tomato.

And imagine—if God can be revealed in a tomato, then, maybe, just maybe, he can be revealed in us, too.

Montana: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, August 25, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is John 6:56-69.

As most of you know, my dad’s side of the family lived in a small town in the woods of upper Michigan. I talk about that place a lot, in sermons and in stories, and I think about it a lot too, because it inhabits that place in my heart where one finds something true and good to hold onto as the years go by.

Because as a kid in California who moved around a lot, Iron River, MI, (population 2,000) was an unconventional promised land of sorts: a place where the doors always stood open and porches creaked hospitably when you stepped on them and streets were paved in golden sunlight. It was (and to some extent remains for me) a sort of dream. Maybe you have your own such place, somewhere within your own heart and history. A particular golden landscape. A door that always stood open for you.

But for my family who actually lived full time in Iron River—and especially my grandpa, Russ, who lived there his entire life—it was not a dream. It was simply where he lived, and where his family had always lived, for generations. He loved it in his own practical way, but I think it’s safe to say it did not dazzle or tantalize him like it did me. No, for my grandpa, the promised land was another place entirely. It was…Montana.

If you’ve been you know that Montana is a stunning place, especially in the western half where the mountains are like green teeth chewing the sky, with lakes as still as glass mirrors reflecting the faces of the big thunderhead clouds. And while I was busy dreaming of Michigan, it was Montana that had long fueled the daydreams of my grandpa. So much so that at one point, when my dad and his siblings were young, he attempted to move the family out there.

It didn’t work out, and they soon returned back to Michigan, but for as long as I can remember, he would get a sort of dreamy, wistful sound in his voice whenever he talked about the big sky and the small western towns and that one particular diner in eastern Montana that had the best tomato soup known to God or humankind.

But ultimately, while my grandpa loved the idea of Montana, the freedom and adventure it represented to him, it was Michigan that was home for his entire life, until he died at the age of 89. It was that one small Michigan town where he swept hallways as a janitor and drove buses and went fishing and paid bills and fixed broken things down in the basement while puffing on his little cigars.

And while he might have dreamt of the wind singing in the pines on some far off Montana peak, it was in Michigan where he sang songs to his grandchildren and watched us grow up to dream our own dreams.

I was thinking about all of this—Michigan and Montana and the places that tantalize us and the regular places where we make a life—because I have realized that it parallels and illuminates something really important about our lives of faith. In particular, I’ve been thinking about that very word, faith.

When I say the word faith–when I ask you to talk about your faith–what would you say in reply?

Typically, we would start to talk about what we believe—what we think—about who God is and how God acts in the world. Faith is the word people often use to describe their attitude towards the Bible and Jesus and whether they think he is who he says he is. And so, if I say I have found my faith, it means I think one thing about Jesus. And if I have lost my faith, it means I think something else.

Faith, understood in this way, is very conceptual; it’s an idea that we wrestle with. It is sort of like Montana was for my grandpa—this lovely but not quite solid thing that rattles around in our head, a vision that remains always just out of reach.

But what I have realized is that Jesus is not all that interested in this sort of faith. I don’t think he came just to tantalize us with concepts or give us more fuel to endlessly debate ideas about God. He came to give us something real, something tangible. He came to give our actual lives back to us.

Because Jesus teaches, time and again, that the Kingdom of Heaven is not a place hidden beyond the horizon. It is the ground beneath our feet, made holy by our daily choices. It is the temple of the present moment, open to all who recognize here, now as the place where we meet God.

At the risk of sounding overly provocative, I am suggesting that Christian life is less about faith and more about fidelity—the commitments we make and the promises we keep, where love looks less like a map to a far off place and more like an object mended in the basement. In this Christian way of life, we commit not so much to an idea as we do to a set of choices made and acted upon. Choices that build a sense of home and hope for ourselves and the people around us.

That’s why Jesus is so insistent about bread and flesh and blood in this discourse we’ve been hearing for the past few weeks. He is telling his disciples, and us: stop treating all of this—what I am doing, what I am saying, what I am teaching—like it’s an idea that you can take or leave. God is not an idea. Love is not a theory or a concept or an ideology. It is the fundamental substance of existence.

And until we realize this–until we realize that God is not an idea and heaven is not a dream destination, but the enactment of our daily fidelity to love–until we claim this, we do not have life in us. Not truly, not fully, not yet.

And so if you are ever looking to check in with God about your discipleship, about how things are going between the two of you, I would encourage you to spend less time agonizing over your doubts or relishing your certainties and spend more time asking: to what or to whom have I given my fidelity? What choices am I making? What relationships am I building? What simple, practical work am I doing to love the ground beneath my feet in the name of Jesus?

I daresay that the Gospel of Christ has endured for over 2000 years less because of the triumph of an idea and more because certain people in each generation decided, as Jesus did, to put some flesh on their love—they decided to stop talking and actually live the gospel out. To give their own bodies and selves as living bread for the life of the world. Even if it just looks, most of the time, like fixing broken things, paying the bills, sweeping the hallway, and singing to your grandchildren.

You know, I have sometimes wondered, when my grandpa died and went to be with God, what it looked like for him when he got there. I wondered if it looked like Montana..that maybe he got there at last and finally found himself at home in the high peaks, bathed in wind and cloud and Spirit.

But if I am honest, I bet his homecoming looked more familiar than that—that heaven is more like being enfolded back into the love we spend our life on.

And so maybe, just maybe, in some quiet, woodsy corner of heaven, he is still tinkering in the basement, still singing in the night, or driving down a quiet highway, headed not towards Montana or any ineffable dream, but to the place where God actually abides—the place that looks like flesh and blood and fidelity. The place that looks like home.

Purpose, Passion, Practice: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, August 11, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, on the occasion of my one-year anniversary as Rector. The lectionary text cited is John 6:35, 41-51.

In a revelation that will surprise exactly no one, I was a theater kid growing up. My first big role was as an ice cream cone in the 2nd grade Christmas pageant at school. In 3rd grade, I was promoted to a Russian Baker in the Nutcracker; I rocked the chef hat but the dance moves eluded me. Then in 4th grade my big break came: I starred as the Nutcracker himself.

This was a low budget production in a rural California elementary school, so my costume was made out of a long old white silk shirt of my mom’s that she fashioned into a sort of tunic with red tights, and God help me, somewhere there are photos of this. You wouldn’t ever catch me in such an over the top getup these days, but….well…*looks down at vestments* Nevermind!

Anyway, growing up, I loved theater so much—not just being on stage, but the immersive process and culture that surrounded it. The lore and the lingo and all the little traditions of theater people that go on behind the scenes. The bond that you form with the other people working on a production. The sense that, no matter what else is going on in your life—no matter how strange or scary or lonely things might be elsewhere—in this place, doing this thing, you know where you fit. In this place you have a part to play, both literally and figuratively, and other people have your back as your strive together towards a common vision.

What a healing, even saving experience it was, as a nerdy, closeted kid, to be enfolded into a community and a way of life like that.

If you were ever a theater person, you know what I mean. But if not, then still, I hope, somewhere along the way, that you have experienced your own version of a tight knit community of purpose and passion and practice.

Maybe it was a team sport. Or music. Or another hobby or fellowship group that brings you deep joy. I’ve met devotees of bird watching and of stamp collecting and of long distance running and there’s always something so beautiful about the way their faces light up when they talk about this thing, whatever it is, that guides and sustains and challenges them.

And then, of course, there’s church. And church can be complicated.

Now, I will tell you, that one of the primary things that led me to begin serving as your rector exactly one year ago was that, when I got to meet folks from the Vestry and the Search Committee, their eyes also lit up when they talked about St. Anne. I thought—YES, this type of joy and enthusiasm is what we SHOULD experience when we walk into the doors of a church on Sunday morning.

But you and I both know that the church, more broadly, is not always this way. And in some corners of our society, it’s quite the opposite. It is a place where too many people, for a whole host of reasons, experience their faith not as a community of purpose and passion and practice but as some combination of duty, and fear, and anxiety. For them, church can feel like that bad dream people have where you’re on stage and the big spotlight is shining down on you and you forgot all your lines and you just know there’s a trapdoor that going to swallow you up.

But here’s the thing (and it needs to be said out loud): the true purpose of church is not, and should not ever be like that. Church should not be a place that plays into our fears and anxieties. It can be a place where we acknowledge our fears and anxieties, of course, but it should not play into them. It should not exacerbate fear or foster suspicion in our conduct with others.

When you’re a theater kid, you learn to overcome your worst fears and your stage fright because you know that you are part of something bigger than just you, that there is something beautiful worth putting yourself out there for…and church should be the same. At its best and truest, it always has been.

There’s a bit of this in today’s Gospel reading today. Jesus is under the spotlight, he’s been pursued by a group of folks who want to know how he’s going to perform for them, how closely he is going to follow the script of what they are expecting in a Messiah. And they’re not fully convinced. They say, “is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?” He is not nearly mighty or impressive or well-connected enough to topple empires and lead us to victory over our enemies.

And I get it. These people are afraid. They are hungry and tired and afraid. They want someone strong who is going to help them be less afraid of all the big forces in the world they cannot control. God forgive us, we still want that. A sort of typecast strongman messiah.

But here’s the thing about Jesus—maybe one of the most important things about Jesus. He refuses to play that part, because Jesus refuses to let fear be the defining feature of the human experience.

Just as God has been saying throughout all of Scripture (more so than anything else God says in Scripture): Do not fear. Be not afraid. Not because fear isn’t normal or natural—it is—but because fear is not the pathway to the answers we seek. The fearful, vindictive, vengeful warrior is not who God ultimately reveals himself to be, and it is not the role any of us were meant to play either.

If God—and Jesus as God’s Son—wanted to traffic in fear, he would have said to this crowd: I am the Warrior you have been waiting for. I am the one who will get rid of your enemies. I am the one who scorns the people you scorn and hates the people you hate. And they probably would have been thrilled!

But that’s not what he says is it? He says, instead, I am the bread of life. I am the bread of life. I am not a warrior, I am just bread. I am a warm meal at the end of a long day. I am a table with enough seats for everyone. I am nourishment and kindness and a lively, earthy, sacred love. I am the one who is inviting you in to a way of life, not an imperial religion, not an endless series of wars both military and cultural. I am inviting you into a community of purpose and passion and practice. I am not going to play upon your fears. I want to see your eyes light up.

Somewhere along the way, friends, much of the church lost that script, or decided to toss it out. They decided to stage a different sort of production, one that is more about power and control and influence than it is about love and justice and mercy.

But what I love to see, and what gives me undaunted hope—both here in our parish—and elsewhere in the Episcopal Church—and in other parts of the so-called “declining” church—which, by the way, is really just the church getting back to its roots—is that we are reconnecting with that spark of fearless creativity. We are trying new things. We are laying down old prejudices and assumptions. We are asking good questions and admitting that we don’t have all the answers. We are doing it together.

To me that sounds like Jesus, and it is as delightful and delicious as the scent of warm baking bread. And, for me, it is as thrilling as those old theater days when I was a little bit afraid but I realized I was part of something bigger and lovelier and livelier than just me—that I didn’t have to go it alone anymore, that I belonged.

We belong, here. We belong to each other, here. All of us, in this community of purpose, passion and practice that is the church. That is what we are building together here at St. Anne. That is what we are going to welcome people into when they come through our red doors; and when we are out in the community; and when we are talking about our faith with our friends. We are going to say: this is what brings me joy and hope and peace and determination and compassion, and that is enough. That is what the Bread of Life, the Lord of Love, the great I AM came to help us do.

You know it’s funny, the very last play I was ever in, as a senior in college—and I am NOT making this up—included a scene where I had to play a priest. God has a sense of humor sometimes.

But God knows, better than we do, the many roles we will be called to take on, and this, right here, is where we work to discover them. Not as theater people, but just as people. People made for the single greatest role ever written: ourselves, transfigured by God’s love, with light in our eyes.

Mercy: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, August 4, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is 2 Samuel 11:26-12:13a.

People sometimes ask the question, if you could have dinner with any one person, living or dead, who would it be, and why? And usually the answer we give is a celebrity or some other interesting figure from history—somebody fun or fascinating. Mine would probably be either Rowan Williams, the theologian and former Archbishop of Canterbury…or Dolly Parton. And that probably tells you all you need to know about me!

But this morning I have a different question for you…and it’s maybe a little bit of a harder one: If you could make amends with any one person in your life, living or dead, who would it be? If you could sit down across from just one person and know that somehow, the breach between you could be repaired, the fence mended, the hostility put to rest…who would you pick? Imagine, for just a moment, what that would feel like.

Imagining such a thing can be a tender, even painful sort of moment…especially if we feel that this is not a realistic possibility. I can think of a few people who were once in my life that I wish, somehow, I could get another chance to say the thing I never said, or to take back the thing I did say.

But that pang in the stomach, that sense of longing for reconnection…it’s good to be reminded of it from time to time. I would say it’s necessary, even, in our life as Christian disciples. Because that pang, that longing, is indicative of a fundamental part of our faith. It’s a part that we don’t talk about a lot, because it can get overlooked in our conversations about love or justice or wisdom or truth. And that fundamental thing is mercy.

Mercy is an somewhat misunderstood concept. It is not just what a judge offers to a criminal, or some sort of favor bestowed the unworthy. It is far humbler, and gentler and more mutual than that. Mercy is the softening of the heart that takes place when we truly, fully see each other. It is the thing that makes reconciliation possible.

For me, mercy is like that feeling when your aching bones and tired mind sink into a warm bath at the end of the day, when there is nothing left to give or to prove or to hide. Mercy is like slipping under cool sheets and falling asleep beneath the untroubled, drifting stars. It is the remembrance of the fundamental kindness that holds all things and all people together.

And the desire to take part in mercy is what prompted you to think of that one, seemingly inaccessible person. It’s that part of ourselves that longs to say to the ones we’ve lost and the ones who’ve hurt us, I see now, I see YOU now, and I feel seen by you now, and so now let us rest in the silence of what we have seen, of the price that was paid, of what is forgiven, and of whatever it is that waits for us on the other side of regret.

This sort of mercy is important. And it’s essential, actually, if we hope to begin to understand the Gospels and the many complicated stories that are given to us in Scripture. Without mercy, they can seem more like a series of vivid, sometimes frightening dreams. But with mercy—it all begins to make a bit more sense.

For example, consider the reading from 2 Samuel. I promised you last week that we would get the rest of the story—David’s comeuppance after his seduction of Bathsheba and his plot to kill her husband. And today we see it. The Lord sends a prophet to David and, by way of a parable that contrasts mercy and hard-heartedness, he gets David to unwittingly pronounce judgment on himself.

You are the man, the prophet Nathan says—you are the man without mercy. You are the one who has tramped on the vulnerable! You are the one who has forgotten who you are! Where is the old David, the one with the gentle light in his eyes? Where is the young shepherd who would not hurt even the smallest lamb? Where is the brave young man who stood up to terrible giants? When did you, David, decide that you were now a terrible giant yourself?

And, even though he has done horrific things, and even though he will eventually pay a dear price for them, David understands. He sees his failure. And he seeks God’s mercy. “I have sinned against the Lord,” he says, and this one sentence is the key to the story—the softening of his heart, the crack in his defensiveness, the one thing that makes healing and reconciliation possible again.

Without mercy, this would just be a story of a violent king and an angry God. But with mercy, it is a reminder that even in our worst moments, God refuses to forsake us. God will always call us back to the most innocent and compassionate and tender version of ourselves.

Because sometimes that one person we wish we could sit across from and make amends with is simply an earlier version of ourselves. And in such moments, mercy begins with recognizing how far we have strayed from the person we thought we were, or the person we once hoped to be.

Mercy, for David, is being able to look at himself and to say, I see now, God. I see YOU, now, God, and am seen by you, God. Every part of me: the terrible king I’ve become and the gentle child I once was. Come what may, let me not forget this seeing, God. Let me sing Psalms about this seeing. Let me not forget how you called me back to myself, how you reminded me that the best parts of myself are not lost entirely.

My friends, if we hope to make any sense of the Bible, and of what it means to follow Jesus, and what it must look like to navigate the troubled times in which we live, I will tell you this: mercy is the key. Not being right all the time. Not being the strongest or the most impressive. Not winning the game or the prize, whatever that is. It’s just mercy.

Mercy is the only thing that will lead not just to change in our world, but transformation of our world. And it begins, as most things do, within each of us.

If you are wondering how on earth to begin, or how to engage in the practice of mercy, here and now, I have a very practical exercise for you—one I read about in a book many years ago. It’s simple but powerful, and it goes like this:

This afternoon, or this evening, or whenever you have a few quiet minutes to yourself, I want you to call to mind that person you thought of a few minutes ago. The one that is distant from you. Imagine them, as vividly as you can, at their happiest or healthiest. Imagine them as God might see them, before the hurt, beneath the pain and fear. Imagine yourself the same, the two of you sitting across the table, both of you at your best.

And then, just for a few minutes, imagine what you would say to them.

Maybe it’s, I forgive you.

Maybe it’s, please forgive me.

Maybe it’s, I don’t know how to forgive you just yet, but I’d like to someday.

Maybe it’s, I know you tried your best.

Maybe it’s just, I don’t understand why it turned out the way it did between us but I wish it were different.

And I see you, now.

And I wish you peace.

Maybe you can imagine them saying something back. Or maybe not. It’s ok either way.

And then rest in the silence. And know that, somewhere, somehow, in this imagined conversation which is a sort of prayer, that a small seed of mercy has taken root in your heart and has been released into the world.

Try it sometime. I’d love to hear how it goes if you do. And with practice, maybe it will even empower you to have a real-life conversation like that with someone when the time comes. And God will be glad.

Because what I believe, fundamentally, is that if you asked God who he’d like to sit across the table from and make amends, it’s you, and me, and all of us. God is hoping for some version of this conversation each week at this Eucharistic table, so that he can say to us, yes, I see now, I see you, now, I long to be seen BY you, that you might slip into my love like a warm bath and slide under the cool sheets to sleep an untroubled sleep.

And then you will understand that this was always the key to every story, this was always the dream written in those silent, drifting stars, this was alway the word written upon your soul to call you back to yourself and to one another:

Mercy.

Speak it, and practice it, and it will tell you all you need to know.

Annoying: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, July 28, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are 2 Samuel 11:1-15 and John 6:1-21.

Now, I tend to think that I was a pretty nice, friendly kid growing up—I liked being around people, including my mom and dad and my other relatives. But there’s a funny thing that happens to most of us, somewhere around the age of 14 or so—we suddenly want our parents and the rest of our family members to leave us alone.

I was not a very rebellious teenager, but still, somewhere around that age, I became totally uninterested in what the rest of my family was up to. I couldn’t drive yet, and this was long before the age of smartphones, but I would still check out and close myself up in my room, reading books or talking to my friends on the phone or surfing the internet (the kind that you had to connect to on a landline).

And yet, for some reason, my family would keep pestering me! My dad would knock on the door to tell me dinner was ready, or my mom would call and want to know how school was going. One time my grandma got mad at me because I had been on the dialup internet for so long that no one could make calls in or out of the house.

I was just convinced that their whole mission in life was to cramp my style. The nerve of these people. Didn’t they understand that I was my own person, that I needed space to do exactly what I wanted to do, when and how I wanted to do it?!

If you happen to be going through that right now as a teenager, I want to say, you’re not entirely wrong. There is something really important about figuring out who you are as a person and how that might be different from the expectations of all the people around you. Figuring ourselves out takes time and trial and error and you need a little space to do that.

It’s also true, though, many years on from 14, that now I would give just about anything to have my dad knock on the door to call me to dinner or to hear my grandma fussing at me about the busy signal on the phone. Maybe it’s just a function of getting older—the prospect of being on one’s own loses a bit of its luster.

Nonetheless, it strikes me that our relationship with God is a bit like the push-pull of growing up and feeling both grateful for and claustrophobic around the ones we love.

I know it’s very pious to talk about how much we love to spend time with God, and we say a lot in church about how wonderful it is that God came to be with us in the flesh in Jesus, how he will never leave us, how he is always there when we call on him.

But in the midst of all of that, I think we need to be honest with ourselves: there is a part of us that might prefer for our Lord to leave us alone once in a while. There is a part of us that finds it awfully exhausting and burdensome to have the Way, the Truth, and the Life constantly knocking on the door, reminding us we are spending too much time closed up in our rooms, asking us to get off our phones and come out and be part of the human family.

The nerve of this Divine Person! Doesn’t he know that I need space to do exactly what want to do, when and how I want to do it? It would be so much easier if we could just stay in our own little world rather than contend with the real world.

In this week’s reading from the Old Testament, David is caught up in this tendency towards self-isolation, and unfortunately for him it comes at great cost. The implication of the text we heard today is that, as King, he should have been out there in solidarity with the troops who are fighting his battles, but instead he chooses to stay home and take advantage of his newfound royal power, using it to exploit and manipulate others for no reason other than his own idle satisfaction.

If that reading made you uncomfortable, good—that’s the point. David and those like him are not our savior; God is. We will return to this story next week and we will learn the grave cost of his actions, but for now we simply see in David the terrible danger of cutting ourselves off from a sense of responsibility to the people around us—of assuming that God doesn’t care what we do with our time. David will soon learn that, like any annoyingly persistent parent, God does indeed care, and God is not inclined to leave us to our own devices forever, even when we would rather he did.

And, at the risk of sounding really impious, there is no greater evidence of God’s annoying, parental persistence than the incarnation of Jesus. He just had to come down and get up in our business. He just had to come knock on our door to tell us to get off the internet for a minute and open our eyes and look at each other and listen to one another.

Yes, God becoming flesh and walking among us and revealing to us the urgent necessity of embodying the Father’s love—let’s get real for a minute here—it’s beautiful and revelatory, but it’s also quite inconvenient.

Because, Lord, I don’t want to love my enemies! Lord, I don’t want to relinquish my own ambitions and self-interest for the greater good! Lord, I don’t want to face the suffering of the world and realize that I am expected to actually do something about it. I just want to be left alone! Stop knocking on my door, please. Stop calling me up and telling me that I was made for something more. Just let me put on my headphones and talk to the people I like and leave the rest for someone else to figure out!

Thankfully God doesn’t listen to me when I say that, anymore than my parents or grandparents ever did. Because Jesus is, as God always has been, the one who says, no, it’s time you come and have something to eat. It’s time you rejoined the land of the living. It’s time you remembered that you are, indeed, part of a family—the family of all of creation—and while we all need a bit of solitude and self-exploration from time to time, you were not made to be alone.

Jesus showing up here in our midst, week after week, in the form of bread and wine, showing up to knock on the door of your heart, is not just a pretty idea—it’s a reminder of that frustratingly persistent tendency of God to never leave us be, to never give up on us, to wait for us, all of us, however long it takes, until we realize that this—this love, this way of life, this relationship with God and with each other—is what we needed most all along, at age 4, and at 14, and at 104.

Because there will be a moment that comes for each of us, at a certain age, when we look up and realize that, like those disciples on the Sea of Galilee, we have been rowing our boat alone on the waves for a bit too long, and the waters around us are stormy, and we are far from home, and now we would give anything to hear our father or our mother or our grandmother’s voices instead of the howling wind. And then, quite suddenly, there is Jesus, coming across the water, saying It is I, do not be afraid.

Annoyingly, stubbornly, blessedly, miraculously, he has followed us the whole way, out past our pride, out past our loneliness and bewilderment. He has refused to leave us to our own devices, even when we thought we wanted him to.

I hope that, following in Jesus’ footsteps, I can be just as annoyingly persistent in my own commitment to caring for others and the world around me. I’d like to think that this is what are about here at St. Anne, that this is what we are celebrating today on St. Anne Day.

I pray that, as we do this more and more and more, there are folks out there in our community who might start to say, oh gosh, there go those St. Anne people again, always inviting everyone to come to the table, always advocating for justice and mercy, always going on about how much God loves everyone, always trying to call us back into relationship with one another. When will they let up with all of that? When will they leave me to my own devices? When will they give up on that annoying, persistent hope in something better for this world?

Never, my friends.

I pray the answer is never.