episcopalian – Page 11 – By Another Road

What He Saw: A Sermon for Good Friday

I preached this sermon on Good Friday, April 7, 2023, at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary text cited is the Passion Narrative according to John, in which Jesus, as he dies, says, “It is finished.“

I was not there to witness it, but I was told that shortly before my great-grandma died, many years ago, she began speaking to her own mother, long since dead—speaking to her as though she was right there in the room with her. Not mumbling in her sleep, not in a delusional state, but clearly, directly, as you might talk to anyone who has come to visit your bedside. She saw her mother’s face, and then, not too long afterwards, she died, and it was finished.

I’ve heard many similar stories about other people since then, and while I don’t really know how to explain them, they seem to suggest that as our lives ebb, like a wave pulling away from the shore, a returning wave of something makes its presence known to us—something very real and very deep. Maybe we call it a memory…or maybe we call it divine presence…or maybe, like my great-grandma, we simply call out, mother. Whatever it is, whoever it is, there is a shared sense across many cultures and generations that in our final moments, we catch a glimpse of the people and the places we have known and loved.

As they say, our life flashes before our eyes.

Just last year a medical paper was published documenting, for the very first time, how this is in fact true—how life does flash before your eyes in the end. Somewhat by chance, the brain waves of a dying man were captured by an advanced medical scanning device. The doctors noticed that in the moments both immediately before and after this person died, the portion of the brain that processes memory was activated. As his other brain waves ebbed, the gamma waves—the waves of memory and meaning—flowed. He was remembering—processing a vision, somehow—of someone or something familiar. Something lost that had come back to him in the end.

And I wonder what he saw, that unnamed man. Was it his mother’s face? Maybe the time he got lost as a child? Was it the way the sun sets over the water on a summer evening? The fragment of a half-forgotten song? The smell of baking bread or the taste of good wine? How his father used to smile at him? And I wonder, were they just memories, just impulses in the brain, or were they a response to something real, something, like my great-grandma’s mother, that was somehow truly present again in a way that no medical scanner could ever detect? Those are questions that science cannot answer, but that the heart ponders nonetheless.

Because I like to think that, whatever it was that the dying man experienced, or whatever it was that my great-grandma saw as her life slipped away, that they were not just alone with their thoughts. I want to believe that their lives and their love came back to them at the very end, like a returning wave upon the shore, a presence, a promise that even though it is finished, it still all mattered. And that nothing was lost. Not really.

And if that is true, then I also can’t help but wonder what Jesus saw in his final moments on the Cross before he said, it is finished. He who felt so alone, he who was so abandoned, so undeserving of the ending he received. My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?

But if it’s true that our life flashes before our eyes, that love returns to us in the end to companion us into the darkness, I wonder what he saw as his breath ebbed away.

We know, of course, he saw his mother’s face, still alive, but deadened by grief.

And maybe, as he closed his eyes, maybe he saw the time he got lost as a child, when they found him in the Temple, when everything was new and possible. Or perhaps he saw the way the sun sets on the Sea of Galilee. Or maybe he remembered the fragment of a half-forgotten song heard long ago: my soul magnifies the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my savior. Maybe he remembered the smell of bread in the Upper Room.The taste of good wine at that wedding in Cana. Or how his Father smiled at him in secret, in his heart, and from beyond the cold and distant stars.

Maybe it was all of this, the sum of a life, the fragmented pieces of himself gathering back in, returning on a wave, bearing witness to the ending, bearing the memory and the presence of love, bearing the unbearable weight of loneliness until…it was finished.

And although that would be beautiful and meaningful all on its own, and although I believe that Jesus’ own life and love came back to him in the end, I don’t think that’s all there was. I don’t think that’s all he saw as he hung there, his breath crushed under the weight of the world’s brokenness.

I think we would miss something essential about who he is and what this day is about if Good Friday were the story of just another, single life flashing before someone’s dying eyes.

For the life of Jesus is the life of God, and the mind of Jesus is the mind of God, and the memory of Jesus is the memory of God, deeper and broader than any one returning wave. He holds the whole ocean of time and experience within himself. His life, his mind, his memory encompass everything, everyone, everywhere.

And so it was not just his own private memories, his own personal life that flashed before his eyes in the end, but ALL of life. All that ever was, all that ever will be. He saw all of it as he died on the Cross. He saw all of you. He saw every part of you. And through eyes blurred with tears and blood and love, he saw, as he always had, in the very beginning, that it was good. Not perfect, but very, very good.

He saw the time you got lost as a child and your parents found you.

He saw the time you got lost and nobody came looking.

He saw the way the sun sets over the lake you sat beside on a summer’s evening.

He saw the way the sun rose on the first day of the world.

He saw how your mother sang to you when you were afraid.

He saw the times you were too afraid to sing out loud. The poems you never wrote. The letters you never sent.

He saw every meal on every table. He saw every hungry belly.

He saw the consequential fruit trembling on the tree in Eden; and he saw the unnoticed wildflowers and weeds that grow on the side of the road. He saw the bouquets at every graveside, the names inscribed in stone.

He saw every creature, its life and its death, its peace and its agony, he saw every crack in the earth, every polluted river, every verdant forest, every wave of the infinite sea.

He saw every battlefield, every bomb and bullet, every needless slaughter, and he saw how our brother’s blood cries out from the ground, seeking justice.

He saw every broken heart, every tearstained face, every lash of the whip, every dream deferred, every march for peace, every backroom deal, every sacrifice and every betrayal, every sleepless night, every tick of the clock.

He saw all the times we failed, all the times we tried, all the times we made something beautiful, all the times we broke something beautiful.

He saw all the times we broke.

He saw the worst of what we have done, and the best.

He saw all of it.

All of life—all of life flashed before his eyes.

And then he said:

It is finished.

He said, it is finished, now, my beloved child, bone of my aching bone, and flesh of my wounded flesh. Finished because now I see it all, with my own living, dying eyes, everything done and left undone. Now I comprehend your finitude, your fear, how alone you feel in the vastness of creation. I see, with my own eyes, the returning wave of memory and grief, all that was lost, all that was forgotten, all that was loved; all of it is returning to me now, and it is your face I see, your face I call out to, your face I will not forget as I enter into the darkness and whatever lies beyond it.

It is finished, and I do not know where I am going, but now I see the pain and the beauty and the promise of this entire world and I hold it in my broken heart, in my fading breath, and so wherever I go now, I will carry you all with me. Nothing is lost. Not really.

So let us rest, now. It is finished. For I see, in the end, what was always the only important thing to see: that I love you, all that you are, all that you are not, with the ferocity and the depth and the power and the mystery of the endless ocean, and if I can, I will return it all to you, I will bring it all back to you, I will make it whole again, somehow, someday.

For all of life—mine, and yours, and ours—has flashed before my eyes, and thus I have drawn all things to myself.

It is finished.

…

And then the wave breaks on the shore.

And he is gone.

And, for today, there is nothing else that can be said.

The Best Meal I Ever Had: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, March 19, 2023 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary text cited is John 9:1-41, in which Jesus opens the eyes of a man blind from birth.

So, I want to tell you about the best meal I ever had.

It was in Assisi, Italy, back when I was in college and my mom and I were doing some travels through Europe. We had gone to Assisi to visit the holy sites associated with St. Francis, but we were, of course, also very happy to enjoy some good Italian food and wine.

The meal in question was at a simple little restaurant, nothing fussy or expensive. It incuded a bottle of red wine, a plate of ravioli in a light cream sauce flavored with poppyseeds and citrus, and a thick steak so tender that I would put it up against the best you could find at Ruth’s Chris down the street or anywhere else, really.

We sat at a table near the window, the golden evening light pouring in across the table, and both the servers and the other diners seemed genuinely happy to be there–at peace, in no rush to be anyplace else. Now, maybe I was delirious from the beauty and the sanctity of Assisi, or maybe I was just really hungry, but the food was so lovingly prepared and the setting so homey and warm that as I ate, tears of joy welled up in my eyes. Outside of cherished family gatherings, it was definitely one of the best meals I ever ate.

I wonder if you can recall a meal or a particular dish that evokes warm memories for you. Maybe it was on a vacation, too, or maybe it is something much closer to home—a family recipe or food from your favorite local spot.

Now, I am going to do something quite shocking and unconventional in the midst of a sermon. I’m going to ask you to turn to someone next to you or near you (don’t be shy) and very briefly tell them about that food. Doesn’t have to be anything fancy or exotic. Just something you have loved. Take just a moment and tell your neighbor about it.

…

Feeling hungry yet? Good!

Food can and should be one of the elemental pleasures of life, and our memories of it are often vivid, tied to beloved people and places. I always find it interesting how easily we can call to mind a favorite dish or restaurant and talk about it to connect with other peope. I think that’s because we speak about food from our lived experience of it, our deeply felt sense of nourishment and identity and belonging.

And even if we are not expert chefs, even if we don’t know how to cook at all, we can still probably speak with some energy and insight about our experience of food, of being fed, of what that one magical dish tasted like back when we were a kid, or when we cooked it for our family, or, yes, when the evening light spilled across the dining table in Assisi—in all the little moments and morsels when we encountered a little taste of heaven. We may not know the recipe or the reason why, but we can simply say with confidence, this much I know: I was hungry, and I tasted something beautiful.

In his own way, this is the testimony of the man in today’s Gospel story, the man who once was blind but who now can see, the man who has had a little taste of heaven. He is healed by Jesus through a rather earthy recipe: dirt and saliva kneaded together into a paste and then dipped into the sacred water of Siloam. Not a meal, per se, but rather the satisfaction of a deeper sort of hunger, one the man might have given up on: the hunger to belong, the hunger to be something other than “other.” And so this is what Jesus gives him, and to those around him who witness the healing: a sign, a reminder that in God’s Kingdom, there will be no outsiders, there will be no people forgotten at the roadside, there will be no one who hungers from lack of bread or compassion.

And this man, his eyes having been opened, although he knows not the recipe nor the reason why, speaks with captivating simplicity about what he has experienced. “He put mud on my eyes. Then I washed, and now I see…I was blind, now I see.” I was hungry, and I now I have tasted something beautiful.

And everyone around him, the neighbors and the Pharisees, they kind of lose it over this miracle served up in their midst . First they refuse to believe this is the same man who was blind. Then, after its clear that he is, they refuse to believe that Jesus is up to any good, and they certainly refuse to believe that this is a sign from God. They want to know how, and why, and to what end all of this has taken place. They want the ingredient list, they want the recipe, they want to speak to the chef, they want to send it back, this exquisite, strange gift, this feast of possibility.

But the man can’t speak to any of that. He is not a priest or a scribe, he is not a person of any influence. He doesn’t know yet exactly who Jesus is or where he comes from or why he did what he did. And so he just keeps saying what he knows, what he has experienced: I was blind, now I see. I was forgotten, now I am remembered. I was invisible now I am seen. I was lost now I am found. I was nothing now I am part of everything. I was hungry, and now I have tasted something beautiful. That is my testimony. It is entirely up to you whether you partake of it or not. But it has nourished me. It has saved me.

And I wonder, dear friends—I wonder whether we can speak about our faith like the man whose eyes were opened by Jesus. I wonder whether we can speak with simplicity and confidence about the experience of Jesus in our lives. I wonder whether we can describe how we have been encouraged, how we have been sustained, how we have been healed, how we have been fed by our encounters with the Son of God.

I wonder, really, since we can speak so easily and joyfully about the best meal we ever had, why we can’t always, just as easily, just as joyfully, speak about the One who is the Living Bread, the One who has prepared for us an eternal banquet? I wonder why I hesitate to do this sometimes.

I have a couple of theories about this, at least for us Episcopal types.

First, I think somewhere we got the idea that talking about Jesus means that we need to fully understand everything there is to know about Jesus. (As if we ever could!) Maybe we’re afraid we don’t fully understand every line in the Nicene Creed or that we can’t coherently explain the relationship between the persons of the Trinity (pro tip: nobody can!). Maybe we don’t feel up to the task of defending the history of the church to the skeptical or the confused. Maybe we are even a little skeptical or confused ourselves some days.

But here’s the thing: we do not need to know everything about who Jesus is in order to speak about who Jesus is to us. We do not need to have a degree in theology or church history to describe how we have been changed by an encounter with a loving, welcoming, merciful, dynamic, ever-present God.

As the man says, Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. If we, too, can name the impact that following Jesus has had on our lives, then maybe that’s exactly enough.

The second reason I think we hesitate, sometimes, is that talking a lot about a personal encounter with Jesus sounds like something other types of Christians do—including those whose values and understandings of the gospel differ significantly from our own. We are afraid, perhaps, of coming across as preachy or exclusionary.

But again, here’s the thing: if we take seriously that we are part of God’s life in Christ, then we have to be able to talk simply, humbly about who we are, who we love, what we have experienced of God, without it automatically becoming an exercise in recruitment or conversion. I don’t think I need to tell you that the world desperately needs Christians who can do this.

So my challenge to you, to myself, to all of us in these final weeks of Lent, is this: think of how you described that favorite meal. Think of how it felt to share about it with your neighbor, not trying to convince them that it needed to be their favorite meal too, or even that they have to learn to cook it themselves. Think about how it was simply you sharing the joy of what you have experienced, what you have tasted, what you have known and loved.

And then, I want you think about how you would evoke that same feeling when you talk about what Jesus has done in your life. Commit, if you will, to 15 or 20 minutes this week of writing down or thinking about how you would describe the impact upon your life of following Jesus, of being loved by him, of whatever your relationship is with him right now.

Give yourself the gift of putting that into words, and then, perhaps, God will show you when and how to share it with someone else who needs to hear it. Someone who is hungry for something deeper than food. Someone who is lost, or who cannot see their own belovedness. Maybe you will tell them what you have experienced. Maybe it will save them from despair. Maybe it will save you, too.

Maybe you will simply say, I was blind, but now I see.

Maybe you will say, I was hungry, and I tasted something beautiful.

Spectacle: A Sermon on The Transfiguration

I preached this sermon on Sunday, February 19, 2023 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, Indiana. The lectionary texts cited are Exodus 24:12-18 and Matthew 17:1-9, an account of the Transfiguration of Jesus.

I wonder if this has ever happened to you: you come to church on a Sunday for Mass, and the service moves you deeply—the music is transcendent, and the prayers are full of meaning, and maybe (we pray!) the sermon is even inspiring or thought provoking. And then you receive communion and you emerge out into the world, basking in the radiance of love and light and liturgy…

…and then someone cuts you off in traffic. Or you get home and your dog has eaten your favorite pillow. Or you have an email waiting from that frustrating coworker. Or you see the news and some dire, troubling thing has taken place somewhere. And suddenly all those warm feelings, those lingering memories of song and silence and candlelight collide with the less-than lovely-realities of life as it is.

If you know what I’m talking about, rest assured that you are not alone. It is, I think, a challenge shared by all worshipping Christians to experience the disjuncture between the glimpse of heaven at the altar—that ordered vision of life and eternity grasped in our prayers and rituals and hymns—and the decidedly messier truth of days spent navigating a fractured world.

This has been true for members of the Church for a very long time. The elaborate beauty and deep feeling we cultivate in worship is intentional. It reminds us of the beauty of God for which we long and the beauty of one another, too, which is often harder to sense amid the traffic and the emails and the gloomy headlines.

But the contrast between liturgy and life, between the transcendent and the prosaic, is not entirely by accident. It also has its roots in a rather pragmatic need identified by the early leaders of the Church.

A brief liturgical history lesson: In the 4th century, when the decidedly countercultural followers of Jesus suddenly found their traditions absorbed by the ruling elites into the power structures of the Roman Empire, a curious thing happened. What had been a grassroots, underground movement, subject to persecution and shaped by fervent commitment to an alternative way of being in the world, gradually became an institution for the powerful and the fashionable.

Whereas once baptism was more akin to the Mark of Cain—a seal of divine promise in the face of peril—it now became more like a badge of honor and access and status. People showed up to be baptized not because they necessarily understood how Christ had transformed their existence, but simply because it was the thing to do.

And as a result, the bishops and other church leaders decided that they needed a new way to make an impression upon these slightly passive, comfortable new members of the body of Christ. If they couldn’t compel them with the bracing possibilities of martyrdom or a new, radical communitarian ethic, then they would dazzle them into awe and reverence with liturgy. Spectacle would stand in where, perhaps, substantive conversion of life fell short. And so liturgy, over the years, become ever more elaborate, ever more majestic, to remind people that Church was not just a social club, but a sign of eternity.

Now I admit this all sounds a bit cynical, as if liturgy were a tool to play with people’s emotions. I don’t think that’s quite it. It’s just that we, as human beings, especially when we are enmeshed in myriad concerns, need potent reminders that another world, another way of being in this world is possible.

And the more our daily lives are entrenched in the predictable patterns of consumption and competition and zero-sum thinking, the harder it is to perceive the alternative. We, like those Roman converts, are deep in the valley of Empire, stooped over, scrabbling for our daily bread, and it takes the power of something bold and wondrous, a mountaintop experience, to draw our gazes heavenward, to remind us to dream again. And so we come here.

God knows this about us. God knows we need to be dazzled sometimes in order to believe. Perhaps that’s why mountaintops figure so prominently in the two theophanies—Godly manifestations—in our readings this morning.

Moses is called up the cloud-draped mountain where the glory of the Lord has come to meet him, “like a devouring fire…in the sight of the people of Israel.” It’s that last phrase that matters here—in the sight of the people of Israel. Remember, Moses himself had been in communication with God ever since the burning bush; he did not need to go up a mountain in dramatic fashion to trust in the word given to him.

But the people, newly released from the land of their bondage, uncertain about what was true and what was possible for them—it was for their benefit that God gathered like a cloud and burned like a fire. The spectacle reassured them that whatever Moses found there at the top of Mt. Sinai was Real with a capital R. It was God. It was the answer to their deepest fears and longings.

And then we have Jesus with James and Peter and John, on another mountain sojourn. Immediately before this, Peter has already confessed Jesus to be the Messiah, the Son of the Living God—and so his head already knows what is true, but Jesus, in his wisdom, knows that seeing is believing, and that the road ahead will be hard, and so now the disciples’ own eyes behold the Transfiguration of Christ’s body into the glory of the Lord, another spectacle, his face blazing like fire, like sunlight, like certainty.

Two mountaintops, two dazzling visions to imprint themselves on the memory and on the heart. Maybe we need these transcendent visions, just like we need our transcendent liturgies. We are creatures of sensation and feeling contending with a world that sometimes drains us of both, and so perhaps it is part of the strange mercy of God to to slay us with beauty so that we might survive for another day.

But here’s the thing we cannot forget, whether in our own experience of liturgy or in our reflections on these two texts: spectacle alone cannot save us. To be moved by beauty is not, by itself, to be transformed. Those church leaders of the 4th century knew this—they just hoped to make a big enough impression in worship to keep people engaged in deeper formation the rest of the time.

And Moses knew this, too, for he came down from the fiery mountain not with more bedazzlements for the people but with Commandments and instructions for how to build a real life, a real society worthy of the glorious vision.

And Jesus knew this, too, he knew that his transfiguration would soon be followed by his crucifixion, and that his disciples would need to build a living community based on an ethic of sacrificial, self-giving love, not just a pretty piece of performance art and some pious recollections. Because whether on the mountaintop or in the sanctuary, we were not made children of God and we were not given the glimpse of heaven’s perfect beauty simply for the enjoyment of a private holiness, but for the exercise of a public wholeness.

And these two things—beauty and responsibility, spectacle and sacrifice— must work together if we actually want to BE a transfigured people rather than people who simply admire the Transfiguration. We can love our worship, as all Christians in all traditions should, and we can give our hearts over to it on Sunday and give the best of ourselves to its enactment, but we will not be changed into bearers of the beatific vision until that day when our liturgy spills out into the streets and its fire and its light are no longer reserved for the mountaintop but instead become the flame we carry within us in the hard, dim, disordered, necessary work of everyday life, the work of loving the world into the newness life that God has ordained for it. Yes, even when we get cut off in traffic or get a troubling email. Even when the news is dire. Especially then.

Because although God can indeed be glimpsed in the mountaintop moments, and God is in the bread and the wine and is dancing in the flame upon the altar, and although God will continue to show us how wondrous, how beautiful, how spectacular is the glory of his presence in this place, it is in the unspectacular moments, the ones after the formal liturgy ends, the moments that make up most our lives, when we will see not just who God is, but who God has formed us into and what, we pray, his glory has wrought in us.

Are we radiating with his light? Are we helping build his just and peaceful Kingdom? Can all who see us feel both the power and the gentleness of our love, like a devouring fire, like a cool mantle of cloud?

When we do these things, and when the world can see these things, then on that day the true spectacle will not be the beauty of God alone, but of God alive in us. On that day, God’s glory will no longer be reserved for the liturgy, for the mountaintop, but will be everywhere. And on that day, the Transfiguration will be complete.

Fisherman: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on January 22, 2023 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 14:12-23.

And Jesus said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.”

My grandpa, like any person born and raised in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, loved to go fishing. And in particular he loved to go ice-fishing.

If you are not among the hardy (foolhardy?) souls who have tried this pastime, maybe you can still picture it: a frozen lake in the dead of winter, all sentient life wisely hibernating or hunkered down in a warm place. Except for the intrepid ice-fishers, who drag their shacks and their camp chairs out onto the quiet snow-blown expanse to drill holes in the ice and to sit—in bitter cold and in pensive expectation—waiting for a bite.

I confess, the few times I went out ice-fishing with my family as a kid, I didn’t get it. I was bored and restless—and cold! I didn’t understand why anyone would willingly do this for fun, especially when you could just get fish at the grocery store. But then, I was a kid who grew up mostly in cities and in California sunshine, and the lake water didn’t run in my veins like it did for my grandpa. The stoic beauty of the ice-fisherman’s reverie was lost on me.

He would sit out on the ice, munching on a sandwich, sipping coffee from a thermos, contemplating the tree line, the sky, maybe his place in the universe; I was never quite sure. Sometimes he’d catch something, often he wouldn’t. He never seemed to mind. And truth be told, I think he liked the ritual of the trip to the lake—its sensations and its silences—just as much, if not more so, than bringing home a catch.

Now you still aren’t likely to find me out on a frozen lake these days, but as I look back, I have come to appreciate not only the spare beauty my grandpa found in ice-fishing, but also how his going out onto the ice was, in many ways, an encapsulation of who he was in the rest of his life. The quiet and the deliberative spaciousness of ice fishing were the same qualities he evoked most other days, with his family and with his neighbors and friends.

He had his hot-tempered moments, but for the most part he moved through the world with a gentle attentiveness to things and to people: content to be who he was, where he was, patient, not obsessed with the elusive big catch of one sort or another that many of us chase after. Maybe he had always been that way. Or maybe all those years of ice-fishing helped make him that way. I’m not sure, but I do know that it was a part of him.

My grandpa and his ice-fishing have been on my mind this week, of course, because Jesus, in calling the first disciples, finds a handful of fishermen by the Sea of Galilee and invites them, in a clever turn of phrase, to “fish for people” instead. It’s a beloved scene in the Gospels, but oftentimes I think we focus so much on the abruptness of the disciples’ response—how they seem to drop everything and follow Jesus on the spot—that we don’t spend a lot of time pondering what they were doing beforehand: namely, their original vocation as fishermen. I wonder, though, why Jesus singles them out, these men on the shore, among all the other people he might have invited into his circle.

Was Jesus calling them just because they happened to be there, without regard for their previous life experience? Was he, in effect, asking them to become someone entirely new, or did he see some particular potential in these men with their nets and their boats and their weather-beaten faces?

Given who Jesus is, I like to think he saw something already formed in them after a lifetime of traversing open waters and mending things that are frayed and waiting, day after day, with persistent hope for an unseen harvest from the deep. I like to think he saw something that made these fishermen exactly the right people for the journey that was about to unfold.

Because I believe that who we are and what we have done with our lives, no matter how simple or quiet or humble, matters to God. It matters in the Kingdom of God.

In the same way that my grandpa’s ice fishing and the rest of his life seemed to mutually inform one another, perhaps these Galilean fishermen already had what Jesus needed them to have as future apostles. Maybe their decision to follow him, as dramatic and abrupt as it seems, was not, in fact, a clean break from their past. It was not a rejection of who they had been, a rinsing off of the smell of fish and mud, but an embrace of what these things had taught them—it was the decision to trust that their lives, their skills, and their gifts might be brought forth in a new way for the purposes of God.

Maybe Jesus did not call them away from themselves and their original vocation, but deeper into those things. For he did not say follow me and I will make you something other, something better than a fisherman, but follow me, and I will make you fishers of people. In other words, I will make you the fullness of who you already are.

And so those fisherman had the courage to follow him away from the shore because they knew that they had what they needed within them; they were already enough. And if that is so, then perhaps we have what we need, too, perhaps we are already enough for wherever God is calling us to go. Not running away from ourselves but going deeper into ourselves so that we might embody what God created us to be.

And I know all of us, myself included, have parts of ourselves, parts of our story, parts of our personality, parts of our past, that feel worthless, parts we would just as soon leave behind. The embarrassments that enmesh us in a net of shame. The regrets that linger on us like the scent of lake water. The things that prevent us from believing we have anything of value to offer.

But Jesus is standing there, seeing all of it, knowing all of it, and he is saying, yes, you. I’ve been looking for someone just like you. Follow me. Follow me as you are. Follow me with what you have, no matter how great or small. Fishermen, follow me. Tax collectors, follow me. Saints and sinners, follow me. The mighty and the lowly; the famous and the forgotten; everyone, follow me— for everyone is needed where we’re going. And all that you have been and known and done will be gathered in and it will be made purposeful, it will be made beautiful by my love. It will be more than enough.

That, in the end, is what I learned from my grandpa and how his quiet, patient days fishing on the ice spilled over into his quiet, patient life: to trust in the sufficiency of who you are; of what you love; of what you know. Trust it to guide you, with God’s help, into what you do not yet know. Trust that God is already at work in the small things of daily life, shaping you for the vast and timeless purposes that only God can truly understand.

And regardless of whether it is ice-fishing or mending nets on the shore of Galilee or raising your kids or caring for your neighbor or striving for your daily bread, whatever it is that has formed you into who you are today, trust that you are ready to respond when Jesus calls you. You are ready and able, not in spite of your life but because of it, because every life has potential, every one of us shimmers with the possibility of God’s glory, like ice glittering in the sun.

Follow me, Jesus says, and I will make you fish for people.

So follow him. And let him show you the blessedness of who you can still be. The blessedness of who you already are.

The Road Taken: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord, January 8, 2023 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 3:13-17.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Even if you are not a fan of poetry, I suspect you’ve probably heard this verse, from Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” It has been passed down by generations of readers, and that last line about the road less traveled is often used as a sort of poetic motto by those who are eager to pursue meaningful, purposeful, adventurous lives.

Now, I don’t want to be a total downer this soon into a promising new year, but if you’ve ever been inspired by this verse’s invitation to take the road less traveled and chart a singular, unconventional course through life, I am about to ruin it for you.

Because if you read the entire poem very closely and look into the backstory of its composition, it becomes clear that Frost was being ironic. His point, in fact, is not that there is one blessed byway for the adventurous and a boring one for the rest of us, but that both of the roads diverging in the wood are, in fact, comparable. The narrator of the poem, no matter how they choose to recall it later, is probably not fundamentally changed by the particular road chosen. Frost, with his typically wry sensibility, is subtly poking fun at our anguish and indecision over the choices we make and the illusion that there is one perfect course to take through life—he does this so subtly in fact that it’s easy to miss! But now you know. Sorry.

But Frost wanted to challenge us with this not because he was a nihilist, not to suggest that the paths we take in life are meaningless, but to suggest the opposite, something hopeful—that meaning is found on every path. Frost, like many poets, saw that true significance is found in the actuality, the givenness of the world around us—that what is good and true is available everywhere, no matter which road we have chosen.

And I, for one, am actually relieved that this is what the poem is getting at, because there have been many times in my life when I grieved the roads not taken—the sense that I had missed some big opportunity or make some irreversible blunder into the weeds. As one moves farther and farther through life, down whatever path we’re on, it’s all too easy to be consumed by what-ifs: what if I had gone there instead? What if I had stayed there just a bit longer? What if I had said yes to that? What if I had said no to that?

It’s natural to wonder such things, but what-ifs can also stop us in our tracks, prevent us from embracing the reality of whatever is in front of us right now. And, as Frost might want to remind us, whatever is in front of us is itself sufficiently meaningful. The journey we are actually on is a good one, because it is real, it is what we have chosen.

I’ve been thinking about all of this—of roads diverging and life’s purposes—because today we celebrate the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord, and however else we might interpret or understand Jesus’ baptism, it was indeed a pivotal decision in his own journey through the world. Just a couple of weeks ago we honored his birth, and now we observe him as a grown man, setting out with the song of the road on his lips and the fire of heaven in his eyes. “Let it be so now,” he insists to John the Baptist as he prepares to enter the River Jordan. “It is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” He is eager to begin, eager to go wherever the Spirit-wind of God is blowing.

And I wonder, in this moment, sensing in himself the need to fulfill some deep and all-consuming purpose, did Jesus ever ask himself, “what if?” Did he ever consider taking another path? To stay in Nazareth, perhaps, and live a quiet life? Go to Jerusalem straight away and try to make it big there? Or did he worry, at the age of 30 or so (not considered all that young in his time and place) that maybe he had already missed his chance to do his Father’s work? Perhaps.

But in this moment, in his baptism, no matter what else has come before, we see him make a commitment to the path that he is on. As he goes into those waters, he is saying, whatever this life is, whatever this journey is, whatever this road is, I choose it. I will love it. I will follow it to the end. No more what-ifs. Here I am, Lord. And here I am—the Lord.

And then he emerges from the river, and heaven rejoices that he has said yes, that he has chosen. For this is what heaven always does—rejoice—when we choose to love what is in front of us.

And this is what Jesus’ baptism—and our own baptism—invite us into: a life that always chooses love for whatever, whoever comes into our path. A life that isn’t haunted by the roads not taken, but a life that says, instead, this place where I stand is good. And even if it’s not what I imagined, this place where I stand is still full of possibility, it is a place where I might yet “fulfill all righteousness.” For this place is beloved of God, and therefore I will make this place, this life, this path my own beloved, too. I will no longer be distracted by roads never traveled, I will no longer be consumed by what-ifs and whys but I will instead throw my arms open, still bathed in those baptismal waters, still drenched in God’s love, and I will say, “what now? What next? What might I do here, on this road, in order to truly live?”

For what Frost implied, and what God knows, and what Jesus demonstrates is clear: there is no road you can take, no road you have taken before, that will ever remove you from the landscape of God’s Kingdom or the realm of God’s Spirit. Wherever you go–and even if you have stumbled along the way, as we all do–if you move through this world with love and compassion and a thirst for righteousness, you are not lost. For in the end it is not the road we travel that matters most, but the heart of the one who travels upon it.

So wherever you find yourself today, in this new year—whatever has come before, whatever might lie ahead—know that God, through your baptism, invites you into the fullness of life right here, right now; the fullness of life that Jesus embraced.

And when you do come to a fork in the road, make your choice, but remember that God will travel with you wherever you go. God’s mercy will surround your path like falling leaves, God’s peace will be the ground under your feet, and God’s Son—the song of the road on his lips, the fire of heaven in his eyes—will greet you at the end of your journey.

And on that day, “ages and ages hence,” when there is no more sighing, may we add our own words to that famous verse, saying, instead:

Two roads diverged in a wood

And I—

I saw my Lord would never leave my side

—and that has made all the difference.

The Mother of All: A Homily for Our Lady of Guadalupe

I preached this homily at a Choral Evensong observing the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne.

She appeared in 1531, near a small village at the outskirts of Mexico City.

She appeared in the winter, when roses do not bloom. She appeared in the wild, where the powerful do not venture. She appeared to an indigenous man, a person at the margins who saw what others did not, could not see. She appeared just as she had lived and loved and labored in her earthly life—in the hidden, borderless, bracing landscapes where heaven and earth intertwine, where the wind rushes over the hillside and the angels cry ave and the dream of God is revealed, not to calculating kings, but to the wakeful wanderer.

It is not sufficient to describe Our Lady of Guadalupe as a pious legend or a miraculous tale, for no matter what you believe about the veracity of Juan Diego’s vision of Mary in 1531, it is indisputable that she is real in the hearts and souls and prayers of millions across our continent and beyond. She is everywhere, her image burned into our consciousness, into our culture, as surely as it was onto that peasant’s cloak over 450 years ago.

As the Psalmist says of God, so might we say of the Virgin of Guadalupe: where can I flee from your presence? We cannot, for she appears everywhere. She looks back at us from prayer cards and bumper stickers and paintings, from the pages of books, from the pages of our collective memory—even if we know nothing about her or the details of her original apparition, even if we doubt or dismiss the story, somehow we instinctively recognize her, this woman draped in stars, this woman carrying a child in her womb, this woman with dark hair and downcast eyes.

Unlike many other Marian apparitions, there has always been something visceral about Guadalupe, something that almost transcends the structures of faith and doctrine and resonates, instead, with a more elemental and universally human need: the need to know that we have a mother who loves us. The need to know that we were born into a world that wants us. And to have somewhere to turn, someone who remembers us, someone who calls us their beloved child, even when we are no longer children. Especially when we are no longer children.

For generations of people, Our Lady of Guadalupe has been an embodiment of that longing for the profound gentleness of heaven, particularly for those who felt estranged from the patriarchal images of God mediated through the historic colonial church.

For the indigenous people of north and central America, who understandably might have associated images of Jesus and God the Father with the conquerers and clerics who upended their ancient ways of life, Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared as something altogether different—a divine message of love and care directed to them, a messenger of grace who stood with them and for them, who could subdue the high and mighty not with a sword, but with her peaceful word, with her fecundity, with the possibility of roses blooming in the snow.

She appeared, not just as the mother of a foreign God, but as the mother of all people, and especially the mother of the impoverished and forgotten, those original inhabitants of an old land called the New World. She imprinted herself, not on the robe of a bishop, but on the flimsy tilma of a poor man.

And though centuries have passed, there she remains, a mother for any and all of us who find ourselves feeling poor and forgotten, those of us who still navigate the uncertain landscape of this New World that is not yet a new heaven and earth, this land with its collision of promise and deprivation, wealth and uncertainty, privilege and peril. Amid the rubble of colonialism, astride the divisions of nations and ethnicities and languages, still she stands, hands clasped, waiting, seeing, saying to us the things we do not know how to say to each other:

This land can hold all of you, God can hold all of you, you who have been harmed, you who have done harm. You who came from afar, you who were always here. You of every color, you of every path, you of every loss, you of every dream—I can love you if you will let me, if you will give your heart into my care.

Come to me, and let me show you the true nature of God, the God who is like a child, who is like a dove, who is like a rose climbing up from the cold, dark earth. Come to me, you who know a mother’s love, you who have lost it, you who never felt it before. Come to me, for I have come to you, and I will not leave you.

No, we cannot flee from her presence, this Lady of Guadalupe. And thanks be to God that we cannot. Thanks be to God that she has not forsaken us, that her image endures, that she remains, still, everywhere we wander, a sign of God’s relentless desire to care for each of us, for all of us. For it is your life, too, that she carries in her womb, it is your name she remembers in her prayer, and it is your homeland that lies beneath her mantle of stars. She is God’s mother, and your mother, and ours, forever.

Take Me Back: A Sermon for Christ the King

I preached this sermon on Sunday, November 20, 2022, the Feast of Christ the King. The lectionary texts cited are Jeremiah 23:1-6 and Luke 23:33-43.

Maybe it’s the holidays, or the winter setting in, or maybe it’s the fact that we have arrived at the final Sunday of the Church’s liturgical year, but around this time each November I get a little bit nostalgic. The smell of familiar foods and the melody of old songs and the sight of candles glowing in the darkness behind icy windows—it takes me back.

Maybe it takes you back, too. Back to memories of childhood, or to when you were first in love, or maybe even just a few years ago; nostalgia connects us to those periods of our lives that contained some measure of simplicity, a special sweetness. And while we know that “the good old days” were never actually as simple or perfect as we might recall them to be, it remains true that the pull of the past is powerful, and the longing we experience for it is real: longing for the faces and the places we once knew and even the versions of our selves that we used to be.

Every so often a certain memory wells up in us and we feel the gap between then and now and we cry out “Take me back!” Though we always say with a bit of irony, for we know that it’s not possible: we can’t go back, because time unfolds in only one direction, and our memories are windows into a land we can’t reenter.

If I ever get a bit self-conscious, though, about my tendency towards this November nostalgia, I remind myself that it’s simply part of the human condition. People have been haunted by their memories in every age. In Scripture we encounter generations of people caught between the past and the future, strugglng to make sense of both. Think of Israel in exile, longing for Jerusalem. Think of Jesus’ contemporaries, agitating to overthow the Empire and restore the political glory of their nation. Think of how such impulses both console and plague us, even now.

Going back in time—or at least wanting to—has been written upon the human heart since Adam and Eve stumbled out of Eden and the gates were closed to them. From that day, it seems, we have been looking over our shoulders, longing for the time “before”, longing for the people we were back then. You might even say that nostalgia is one of the most prevalent themes throughout the Bible, and while it doesn’t always serve people especially well in those stories (I am reminded of Lot’s wife), I find some reassurance in the fact that it is not just our generation that feels like it’s a long way from where it started.

But what struck me for the very first time, as I was reflecting on the passages for this Christ the King Sunday, is that we humans aren’t the only ones who feel nostalgia, why cry out “take me back.” God, too, seems to long for the time before. The time before kings and conquests. The time before we and God lost sight of one another on the long road through the centuries.

Now it’s true that the words of the Lord spoken through the prophet Jeremiah, which we heard this morning, like most prophetic writings, are all future tense—I will do this, and this will happen, and the days are surely coming, but implicit in them is God’s desire that things should return back to the way they were supposed to be—namely, to when God was the shepherd, the provider, the one who would not abandon his people or exploit them or lead them astray. God wants to go back to when there were no mortal kings of Israel, back to when God was their only sovereign, when God’s heart spoke directly to theirs.

God longs for unmediated intimacy with his people. He remembers how he walked alongside them, leading them in a pillar of flame through the deep night of the desert wilderness. God remembers how he made his dwelling place in their midst, how they sang hymns of liberation to him on the other side of the Red sea, how he fed them from his own hands with manna. And God remembers even farther back still, back to Paradise, when he walked among the trees in the cool of the evening and his creation knew the sound of his voice and the fruit still trembled, unpicked, upon the branch. Yes, God remembers it all: the smell of the familiar foods and the old songs and the fire glowing in the darkness. And he longs for it as much as we do.

Take me back, he says, without any irony. Take me back. Take me back.

How humbling that the King of Glory, the Creator of the Cosmos, would ask such a thing. That he would ask us such a thing.

Of course, we could not go back—neither back in time, nor back to him, for it seems that we are made only to tumble forward into the future. Gone, the food and song and fire. We could not recover it. We could not undo what had been done. We could not pry open the gates to Paradise. At least, not by ourselves. Not without help.

But we are here this morning, on Christ the King Sunday, because help did arrive. God determined, in the end, how to move beyond nostalgia, his own and ours, how to finally reclaim the past. He did the only thing, perhaps, that was left to do: he brought all that we had lost directly to us, in the flesh. In Jesus.

He showed up with the food in his own hands and the song on his own lips and the fire in his own eyes. He came as a different sort of king—a king who would not engage any power except the powers of love and mercy and justice. A king who would die rather than compromise his commitment to those things. One who would rise again to show us that these are the only things that are truly powerful.

And so he was born into the margins and stood at the margins, and he broke down the thin margin between heaven and earth with the force of his love, and he died, this image of the Invisible God, with a name affixed above him: The King of the Jews.

And whatever the authorities intended for him, there was no irony in that title.

For this is what he was and is: the one true King—the last king of his people, and the first king of all people. The Alpha and the Omega. The one who, from his throne on the cross, forgives us for all that has been lost, and who promises that nothing, and no one, ever need be lost. The king reopening the gates into Paradise, which is really just the gate into his heart.

Take me back, says Christ, our King.

Take me back, we reply.

And for once, maybe for the first time, it is possible.

Real: A Sermon for All Saints’ Day

I preached this sermon on November 6, 2022, All Saints Sunday, at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary text cited is Luke 6:20-31.

One of my favorite books when I was little was The Velveteen Rabbit, and I will admit that even now, many years later, it still brings a tear to my eye when I read it. If you’re not familiar with the book, by Margery Williams, it tells the story of a toy rabbit who is given to a young boy as a Christmas present. The toys talk to each other when people aren’t around, and the little rabbit befriends a threadbare old hobby horse, learning from him the secrets of what is called “nursery magic,” including the mysterious concept of becoming “real.”

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day. ”Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. …Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

And thus begins the Velveteen Rabbit’s own journey toward becoming “real,” which, as you might imagine, is not just about becoming more realistic, like the other rabbits who can jump and run and play, but about becoming more true: it’s about discovering the luminousness that radiates from within a person when they have given themselves over to a life of deep and faithful love.

For the little toy rabbit, this process of becoming real proves surprising, and costly, and beautiful, and I will leave it to you to revisit the story to find out exactly what happens to him. You can find the full text of the story online.

I was moved to do so myself this past week because the Velveteen Rabbit’s journey feels especially appropriate for the feast we are observing today. In the world of nursery magic it might be called becoming “real,” but in the Christian tradition we have another, very particular name for following the long and twisting road towards love: we call it sainthood.

Sainthood, to be honest, has an unhelpful reputation. We too often associate it with the opposite of “real”: plaster statues of seemingly perfect people, with their halos and their dreamlike gaze directed towards heaven. We might feel inspired by such figures, but we might also struggle to see how their seemingly exemplary lives bear any resemblance to our own imperfect ones.

But if you have ever felt that way, I have good news for you: the saints, even the most famous and revered ones, are far messier and more real than you might expect. If you have never done so, find a biography about one of them and read it. They struggled with doubts, with despair, with health conditions, with war and economic instability. They fought with their colleagues. They ended up in prison and in exile. Some of them were beloved in their own time, many were not. And really, in the end, the only thing that is consistently true about them is that they were somehow dedicated to the vision of blessedness that Jesus elucidates in the Beatitudes from today’s Gospel: that God stands on the side of those who are vulnerable and trampled upon, that God enlivens those who give their lives away for love’s sake, that God does not forget those who pay the cost of caring deeply in a callous world.

God’s mission in Christ is to make these things real, to make them tangible, indeed, to make them inescapably present even as the forces of death and despair surround us—this is what we mean when we talk about the kingdom of God. And sainthood, far from being a sort of self-satsified, holier-than-thou lifestyle choice, is simply what it looks like to participate as best we can in that kingdom, in the redemptive work of love in our lives, for as long as we can, until most of our hair has been loved off, and our eyes drop out and we get loose in the joints and very shabby, until our carefully cultivated defensiveness and artifice have been worn down so thin that we burn, burn, burn brightly with the fearlessness, with the joy, with the reality of love. That is what a saint looks like. And, however imperfect our lives and our circumstances, that is what we have been invited into, from the day of our baptism until this very moment.

This morning, baby Natalie will be baptized into the Body of Christ, taking her own place within the Church’s long journey toward becoming real, becoming saints, becoming all that God made each of us and all of us to be. We will bathe her in water and in prayers, passing on that which we have been given in our own baptisms: a glimpse of what is real, and the One who is real, and the wondrous hope that we will come to know that reality in our very flesh…that over the course of our lives, we will become as part of it. Natalie’s share of this story is just beginning, and we rejoice for her and her family.

And yet, as it is said, “in the midst of life we are in death,” and so this morning, on All Saints, we also summon the memory of those whose stories have ended—those whom we love and see no longer and yet who are no less real simply because they are absent. In fact, we might say that that they are even more real now, blessed and at peace in the nearer presence of the Living God.

Our beloved dead are so real, now, that our limited senses cannot quite perceive them, except in our hearts, in those moments when we still feel the weight of our love for them, how it endures beyond death, how it cannot be destroyed, how we are bound together for all time, beyond all time. We say their names out loud, each one a life now infused with eternity, and in the silences between, we listen for the music of heaven.

And so here we find ourselves, beloved ones, saints-in-progress, weary hearts still daring to believe in nursery magic—here we are, suspended on this November morning between life and death, between warmth and winter, between the promise of the future and the tenderness of the past. Here we are, asking what is true and what is real and what is worth living and dying for, and knowing, in the end that the answer can only be love, that it can only be the name of love, which is Jesus.

Here we are, rich and poor, hungry and full, laughing and weeping, longing for him, for the Savior who will gather up our worn out bodies and call us blessed, who will make us whole, who will make us truly alive. Not perfect, plaster saints, but real ones: threadbare, wise, and full of grace.

Just Finish: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, October 23, 2022, at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary text cited is 2 Timothy 4:6-18, 16-18.

When I was probably about 10 or 11 years old, my mom took up a new hobby — rollerblading. It was the 90s, so rollerblades were all the rage. And for those of you who know my mom, who is quite the adventurous person, you can imagine that she took on this new pastime with great enthusiasm. So much so that before long, she had signed up to compete in a local rollerblade race where you go in laps around an empty office park on a Saturday afternoon—yes, this was actually a thing back in the day (at least out in California in the 90s.)

Now, I will admit that I had little to no interest in rollerblades. I had a pair, and I would sort of wobble along in them around the neighborhood after school, but I was not then–nor am I now–the most athletic or graceful person. I wasn’t fast or agile or daring. Most weekends I would’ve rather been reading a book or singing along to the soundtracks of my favorite Broadway musicals. You know, we just are who we are.

But my mom was so excited about this rollerblade race that she was bound and determined that I would also sign up and be in the kid’s competition, making it a sort of family activity. And for some reason I will never understand, I agreed to do so.

We showed up that morning and I was in my little skates with my baggy jeans and knobby knees and thick glasses and a helmet askew on my head, and the other kids…I mean, they looked like they’d been training their whole short lives for this race. They were in lycra shorts and fancy rollerblades and they skated more gracefully than I could even walk. It was one of those moments when you realize you’ve made a very bad decision, but now it’s too late and you just have to roll with it. Literally, in this case.

We all gathered in a cluster at the starting line and they blew the horn and we took off, and the crowd was cheering, and….you can probably imagine exactly what happened next. Those other kids took off on their skates like they were sprinting, and they went so fast around the course that they lapped me at least once, if not more, and meanwhile I was stumbling along on my skates, breathing heavily, trying to stay upright, telling myself “you just have to finish. Just finish.”

And I did. It wasn’t pretty, but I made it.

Eventually, long after the other kids were done, here I came, stumbling across the finish line by myself.

But you know what? It was ok. Now, would I ever do it again? Not a chance. But it was ok. Because when I got to that finish line, some of the people were still there, my mom included, waiting to cheer for me. I was so relieved to be done that it felt like arriving in heaven, and people gave me hugs, and the sound of their encouragement was, in that moment, like the sound of angels rejoicing.

I think of that rollerblade race once in a while, because it reminds me that on the other side of embarrassment, on the other side of disappointment, there is a strange sort of grace that you sometimes find in simply finishing what you set out to do. Especially when the road is long and challenging, just finishing can be its own sort of victory.

I think many of us spend our lives feeling like we need to jockey for a place at the front of the pack of whatever we’re doing—to win the contest, to be the best at whatever it is, or at least to feel like we’re not the worst. We’re afraid of falling behind, of stumbling and skinning our knees—of becoming an object of derision or pity as the race of life wears on.

And it’s all too easy to approach our faith like this, too, somehow imagining Jesus as the leader at the front of the race, the one who runs fastest and hardest, the one we’re chasing, just out of the reach of us mere mortals with our aching joints and our eyes burning with sweat and tears. We know we can’t overtake him, but somehow we think we’re supposed to try.

I wonder, sometimes, if this is how Paul first understood Jesus after his conversion on the Damascus Road. Paul, after all, was a Roman citizen who was well acquainted with the competitive spirit of the Empire and who loved using athletic metaphors in his writing. In his early letter to the Galatians, he expresses anxiety about his mission to the Gentiles, wanting “to make sure that I was not running, or had not run, in vain.” He uses similar language in his letter to the Philippians, and, though its authorship is uncertain, there is that famous line in the letter to the Hebrews which encourages believers to “run with perseverance the race that is set before us.”

So one can imagine a younger Paul, bursting with energy and determination, ready to win the race for the sake of the gospel—to be the best, to go the farthest, to conquer his opponents, to be right up in front, ahead of all the other apostles, trailing just behind Christ.

But then in today’s reading we meet Paul at the end of his life: an old and infirm man, sitting in prison, awaiting execution, writing to his companion Timothy, trying to make peace with the way his life has actually turned out:

“I am already being poured out as a libation, and the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. From now on there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness.”

Not, “I have won the race,” but simply “I have finished.” Not “the crown of victory”–the laurel wreath of the athletic champion–but “the crown of righteousness,” the crown of blessedness, the crown worn by those who finish last in this world—the crown worn by his savior, and ours. The crown of thorns.

Paul came to understand, as each of us must when we are inevitably humbled by life–when we finally see things as they are, not as we expected them to be–that winning was never the point. Coming in first was never God’s expectation for us. And Jesus, whom we try so hard to follow, to be like, to catch up to, was never, in truth, at the front of the pack, showing off his divine athleticism and daring us to match it.

On the contrary, Jesus was (and remains) at the back of the pack, watching over those of us who are moving slowly, those of us who are just struggling to keep up. He’s back alongside the ones who were never graceful or impressive or strong. And he’ll stay there, bringing up the rear of the race until every last one of us has made it over the finish line, aching joints and skinned knees and all.

And when we do, I imagine that he will say to us,

“It is enough that you finished. It is enough that you fought the good fight and kept the faith. It is enough. You were enough, just as you were, even if it took you a long time to get here. Even if you were in last place, I loved you from the first.”

And perhaps this is what Paul wanted to remind us at the end of his own race, in his final message to Timothy and to those of us who would one day come along, stumbling on our skates, breathing heavily, trying to stay upright. Maybe he just wanted us to know:

You might not end up in first place. You might look like a total failure at times. It doesn’t matter. If you have stayed the course with gentleness in your heart, if you have cared for your neighbor along the way, if you have loved this broken world as you have travailed across it, you have already won.

So just finish the race. Just finish.

And when you do, when you stumble across that finish line, there will be arms outstretched to welcome you, and the angels will rejoice.

Small Things: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, October 9, 2022 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary text cited is 2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15 and Luke 17:11-19.

I don’t know why, exactly, but fall is a season when I start to reflect on the past — something about the approach of holiday traditions and the winding down of the year and the brilliance of the autumn leaves lends itself to the sharpening of particular memories. These recollections waft on the air like woodsmoke, sweet and sharp, occasionally stinging the eyes.

And it’s interesting—I don’t know if this is true for you, but I have noticed that when I am looking back on life and remembering things and people and places that are long gone, long past, my most vivid memories are of very small things, very particular little details, rather than one big grand narrative playing out in my mind.

I might suddenly recall the sound of my dad’s laughter one afternoon in late September when I was 15, or the particular way my grandmother carved a chicken on Sunday afternoons, or the scent of the gardenias my mom used to buy on the way home from work when I was a little boy.

All ordinary things, unremarkable, perhaps, to an outside observer, but nonetheless these are the little things that stick, that signify meaning, long after the worries and speculations and fantasies of the past have faded away. I don’t remember most of the conflicts and longings and unsatisfied desires that seemed so important when I was 12 or 22, but I can recall with crystalline specificity the small moments of beauty and kindness and care that have been strewn along the path of my life.

This suggests to me that it is, in the end, these small things that imbue our lives with significance, with holiness, with hope. And it is these small things that are vessels of God’s grace, far more than the big concerns and bold plans that so often preoccupy our imaginations.

We may have great expectations, but it is the small things that sustain us. It is the small things that save us.

But this isn’t always easy to see. Naaman, the mighty general seeking a cure for his leprosy in today’s reading from 2 Kings, doesn’t quite understand the value of small, ordinary things, or perhaps he has simply forgotten it in all of his conquering and striving to be important. He is a man burdened by disease, but he is also burdened by the sense of his own significance, and so he presumes that any healing he might receive from the prophet Elisha will come at great cost and will arrive with great dramatic impact. No humble, commonplace treatments for this man. And so he loads up his treasures and his servants and his other accumulated defenses and brings them to Elisha’s door, ready for anything.

For anything, that is, except for the rather anticlimatic thing that actually happens. Elisha, in his wisdom, doesn’t even come outside, and instead simply sends out a message Naaman: go take a bath in the river.

Imagine having come all that way, with so much build-up, with your whole entourage looking on expectantly, and then being asked to take a dip in an unremarkable, muddy body of water. Naaman, who expects so much more of himself and of the world, is offended by the simplicity of it all. Surely that can’t be it? Surely this God of Israel, if he is so powerful, would reveal his works in a more impressive way? Surely healing requires something more than this? Surely, after I have suffered so much and traveled so far, salvation cannot come from such a small thing?

We might laugh a bit at Naaman’s pride and his self-importance, but I also have to say I relate to his disappointment a little bit. I look back at my life, and I look around at the problems facing our world today, and I know what it feels like to be overwhelmed by the magnitude of longing for a big and decisive answer. I know what it feels like to want a dramatic solution, to yearn for God to appear in glory and make it all better, make it all clear, to lift us up from the mud and the misery.

So maybe I, too, would be frustrated by the instructions to go bathe down in that mud instead. Maybe I, too, would just want to pack it in and go home. Because I confess that some days I get tired of meager solutions to big problems. I get tired of relying on small things when the grief of the world is so big.

Maybe somedays you get tired, too. Naaman would certainly understand if you do.

But then, at the moment when all hope seems to be lost, another small thing: this time it is the voice of one of Naaman’s servants, the voice of practical wisdom—

“if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when all he said to you was, `Wash, and be clean’?

In other words, yes, the journey has been long, and the outcome may be uncertain. But it can’t hurt to do the small thing that is asked of you in this moment. And, in fact, it may be that finding hope in such small things, believing in the power of small things, is more reflective of God’s purposes than any dramatic solution. Why that might be, I cannot say for sure. I only know that I remember my father’s laughter, and my grandmother’s hands, and the scent of my mother’s gardenias in the cool of the evening, and that these things matter more than I can say.

They matter in the same way that it matters that God offers us himself in the frail body of a man, and in a morsel of bread and in a sip of wine. It seems that he longs for us to love the small things, to submit ourselves to their humble grace. He asks us, like Naaman, and like the grateful Samaritan healed by Jesus, to remember that when we encounter love and beauty, no matter how simple or small, we are seeing God.

He is in the muddy waters and in mended bodies. He is in the gifts we share with one another. He is in the moments when we remember to say thank you. He is in everything, every small thing, holding the universe together with love.

Naaman does, of course, eventually take Elisha’s advice. He strips off his many layers of armor and submerges himself in that muddy water and emerges, the text tells us, with flesh appearing as it did long ago, skin gleaming like when he was a young boy. When he himself was a small thing: bright, laughing, free.

And perhaps that is the mystery of love: not only that it flourishes in small things, but that it distills us back down to smallness ourselves, like children, sloughing off our grief and our delusions of grandeur, leaving only our essence, our innoncence, our intense and enduring joy.

Can you remember what that felt like, back when you were small, too? Can you remember that version of yourself, back through the turning of the seasons? Can you remember when you believed in simple things, when love was not a memory, but an ever-present gift, as numerous as the autumn leaves?

God, help us to remember.