faith – By Another Road

Tunnel: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, April 16, 2023 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne. The lectionary text cited is John 20:19-31, when the risen Jesus appears to the disciples, including Thomas.

Many of you know that I was born in Northern California, and for the most part we lived just north of San Francisco. Now, a curious quirk in that part of the world: when you grow up in any proximity to the Bay Area, you don’t refer to San Francisco by name, you just call it the city, and everyone else knows implicitly what you mean. Within a several hour radius, you can simply say “we’re going to the city,” and they will assume that you don’t mean Oakland or Berkeley, or San Jose, or Sacramento.

For northern Californians, for better or worse, there is only one city that is the city, and it’s the one you leave your heart in, as the old song goes—the one that glows like a beacon at the end of the world; the one that is draped in fog and flowers; the one that is complex, and layered, and broken, and is yet still beautiful; the one that looms large in the imagination of everyone who has been there and many who have not—it is only this one that needs no other name but is simply the city.

And if you have never been to San Francisco before, let me tell you the absolute best way to see the city for the first time. You have to come by car, from the north, down through the towns and the vertiginous hillsides of Marin County, your view obscured by the terrain: steep, cypress-clad hills and winding roads.

And as you go along, any notion of what lies ahead is completely hidden from sight, until suddenly you come upon an arched tunnel in the rock, long known as the Rainbow Tunnel. Drive through the dim passage, ever so briefly, and as you emerge on the other side, suddenly, all at once, everything is there before you: the blue of the bay; the shadowy mountains rising up from the sea, reaching toward heaven; the Golden Gate; and beyond it, the city—the luminous city, indeed glowing like a beacon at the end of the world. You’re never quite prepared for it. Every time as a kid that we drove through the tunnel, the shocking beauty of that view took my breath away.

Now there are all sorts of unexpected views revealed to us as we journey through the world—both the literal ones waiting just over the next hillside, and the more figurative ones, too—those new insights and understandings that come upon us at certain points in our life and change us in profound ways.

Sometimes we can go looking for such revelations, but just as often they come to us when we do not expect them, when we are deep in a tunnel of one sort or another, rushing ahead, our vision narrowed, and then suddenly, the world opens up and the the landscape is entirely new to us. It can be wonderful, and it can be terrifying; sometimes it can be both.

The season of Easter is just such a moment, when a new and astounding vision unfolds before us. Easter is when everything that seemed impossible, everything that seemed dead and gone, sealed away behind our certainties and our sorrow, is suddenly standing before us, more vivid and alive than we ever imagined, inviting us to reconsider how the world actually works.

Easter is when our tunnel vision falls away and suddenly we see things previously undreamt of: that death is not definitive, that love is more enduring than we ever dared to hope, and that God’s purpose is not simply to make our burdens bearable but to bear our burdens himself; not simply to preserve our lives but to give us his own life. It’s enough to take your breath away.

And it is understandable that, emerging from the long tunnel of our painful histories, we might not know what to do with such a vision. It is only natural that we would feel unprepared for its implications, its possibilities, its endless horizons. As Fr. T.J. said in last week’s homily, resurrection is messy, because we are messy, and resurrection has come to find us here and now, just as we are: fearful, unsure, full of questions.

But don’t worry, we’re in good company, because you know who else was fearful and unsure, and full of questions? All of the first disciples! All of them—not just Thomas—needed some help in processing what it meant to see the risen Jesus standing in their midst. All of them had their breath taken away by the shock of it.

And it was only in Jesus ministering to them—giving them his own Spirit-infused breath, showing them his wounds, offering them peace and blessing, commissioning them to go forth in his name—that they were able to begin to comprehend the landscape that awaited them on the other side of the dark, narrow tunnel of grief and fear in which they had found themselves.

And Thomas, our dear friend Thomas, should actually be called “Believing Thomas,” not “Doubting Thomas,” for it is he who truly emerges first onto the other side of understanding; it is he who comprehends the fullness of the vision before him; it is he who realizes the significance of the risen body of Jesus that, though wounded, persists in life and love; it is Thomas who names what he sees, and who thereby gives voice to the Church’s dawning understanding of what the Resurrection is meant to show all of us: My Lord and my God!

My Lord and my God, it is you! It is you, wounded like me! Wounded for me! It is you, complex, and layered and broken and yet still beautiful, and loving me, loving all of us, loving this whole earth for being the same! It is you, glowing like a beacon at the end of the world! It was always you. It will always be you, forgiving, peace-bearing, redeeming, blessing, waiting to reveal yourself, through the dark tunnel, just around the bend, a vision to take my breath away. Now I see.

And it is this movement from not seeing to seeing that is, in truth, the heart of the message of this Gospel passage, rather than any dichotomy of doubt versus belief. Because the good news of the Resurrection is not about whether we can conquer doubt through the power of our faith; it is about the God who conquers death through the power of his love. It is about the God who comes to show us what that love looks like in this world and in the world to come. It is about the gift, the incomprehensible gift, of seeing something beautiful, hopeful, and true, even when we least expected it. Especially when we least expected it.

You might wonder, though, with all this talk of seeing, what to make of Jesus’ final statement here:

Blessed are the ones who have not seen and yet have come to believe,

It is tempting to read this as a sort of challenge, either to Thomas or to ourselves—as if we might be deemed more faithful, more favored, somehow, by God if we believe in the Resurrection without hard evidence. But I think this misses the point.

Because this statement, like those in the Sermon on the Mount, is structured as a beatitude (blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn, and so on…) And beatitudes are not challenges, but are God’s promises of comfort and sustenance to those who are struggling in the world as it is. The ones who have forgotten to hope for any glorious new visions.

Thus, blessed are the ones who have not seen is not a gold star for the especially committed believers, the ones who are blithely certain of their faith…

No, it is a word of comfort for the rest of us. It is a word of blessing to those who have not yet seen the fulfillment of God’s Kingdom and yet long for it. It is a word of promise to those who look at the world around them and see only death and injustice and callousness but refuse to give up on the practice of love and the search for truth. It is a word of encouragement to those who are deep in the tunnel, who are deep in the tomb, who are in the dark, but are searching for the light, who are persisting on the path, who are pursuing the vision, who are trusting that somewhere, someday, the City, the heavenly City, the City of God, the City of a Redeemed and Resurrection Creation, the City long promised and long sought, will be just around the bend, glowing like a beacon at the end of the world, and all of us, complex and layered and broken and beautiful will get there, and the gates will be open and the risen, wounded Christ will greet us and say Peace be with you and we will cry out in one voice:

My Lord and My God!

…and it’ll be enough to take your breath away.

Porches: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, January 30, 2022 at Trinity Episcopal Church in Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary text cited is 1 Corinthians 13:1-13.

Since moving to Fort Wayne a few years ago, I have discovered one of the simple, perfect pleasures of life in the Midwest (during the warmer months, at least): strolling through the neighborhood at dusk, fireflies blinking in the humid air, as people sit out on their front porches watching the encroaching twilight.

Growing up largely out west where the houses look very different, I have to say that there is nothing like a good front porch. They are a thing of beauty, especially in the older neighborhoods where they sit broad and benevolent, ensconced amidst leafy green trees, the warm glow of a lamp spilling out into the gathering night. And always a rocking chair or a swing, inhabited in the cool of the evening by some friendly neighbors.

I walk past and we wave to one another, remark on the weather; just a moment of encounter, a little reminder of the permeability of the barrier between our lives and the lives of the people around us—between our homes and the larger home that is our community. Front porches facilitate that somehow.

One evening last spring I was walking through the neighborhood as the blossoms fell and gathered on the streets, and the silhouette of a man on his porch greeted me. “It’s a beautiful night,” he said. “It feels like hope.”

It feels like hope. What an unexpected yet wonderful thing to say to a passing stranger. But he was right, that moment did feel like hope—both the beautiful evening and his poetic greeting.

Early on in the most isolating phase of the pandemic, those porch greetings were sometimes the only real face-to-face interaction I might have in a day, and it was a balm for the loneliness of uncertain times. You might recall that there were stories in early 202 from around the world of people going out on their front porches or their balconies to wave to one another, to dance and to sing, as if to say: yes, we’re all still here. We’re still together, even if we don’t always realize it.

When we’re out on the front porch, the world is a bit kinder, a bit gentler—we suddenly realize that we live amidst a thousand open thresholds rather than row upon row of closed doors. A thousand open hearts; a thousand possibilities to stop and say hello, maybe even pause together in the night and smell the blooming flowers, to watch the stars come out.

I know, of course, that not all of us live in neighborhoods with front porches, but I hope that at some point in your life you’ve experienced what I am describing—and if you haven’t, then some evening in late spring or summer, park at the church and come take a walk through my neighborhood, and let yourself experience what it is like to see your neighbors again. I promise they’ll be out there on those stately old porches, and you will be greeted, and you will go home feeling a bit more like you belong to this world.

So why all this talk of porches? Because actually I think that they’re a great way of thinking about our life of faith.

Here’s what I mean: It can be tempting to think of our faith as something very private, something that is done behind closed doors, in the seclusion of our church sanctuaries or during our bedside prayers.

Perhaps we’ve just always done it that way, or perhaps we are suspicious of certain folks who practically chase you down the street with their religious views. Either way, we might start to act as though our Christianity is like eating alone or singing only in the shower—just something between us and God. And while there is indeed a deeply personal dimension to our relationship with Jesus, there is also something else that he asks of us—a willingness to step outside of our domesticity, to seek his face in one another and among the rest of our neighbors–especially the ones we don’t know very well.

We don’t have to parade ourselves through the streets every day—but we can’t keep the joy of our salvation sequestered either. Our faith needs to exist in that liminal space between indoors and out, neither zealously private nor zealously overbearing.

And so, it occurs to me that we need a front porch kind of faith.

Deeply personal, yes, deeply grounded, but also open, inviting, hospitable, and a bit vulnerable—a faith that breathes out in the open air, a faith that is ready to meet whoever comes along and to bless them. A faith that is ready to love our neighbors in Christ’s name.

The struggle to find this balance is as old as the church itself. Paul, in today’s famous passage from the first letter to the Corinthians, has a lot to say about love, and it is beautiful to hear, but we are well-served to remember why he was writing this letter in the first place. You see, the church in Corinth had some wealthy and worldly members in it—people who tended to think rather highly of themselves. As such, they had a tendency towards insularity—the wealthier members kept to themselves and didn’t share table fellowship with their poorer brothers and sisters. And some of them saw Christianity as, essentially, another Greek mystery religion—a pathway to further wealth and health and wisdom for themselves, rather than a dramatic reordering of their value system and their conduct in the broader community.

And so when Paul speaks of the preeminence of love over and above all other virtues and achievements, he is telling the Corinthians—and us—that far more than cultivating eloquence or wisdom or impressive piety, we are called to simply take care of one another, and to especially take care of those who need us the most. We are called to recognize our interdependence upon one another. We are, in other words, called to have a front porch faith—a faith that is outward facing, open, and neighborly.

Someone once said, after all, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Neighbors. That’s who we are in this whole thing. To be a neighbor is our primary vocation as Christians. Not heroes on our own personal quest, not would-be saviors, not judges, nor rulers—just neighbors. Neighbors sitting on the front porch, in joyful proximity to one another, calling out blessings into the summer night, watching the fireflies, waiting for the stars.

Each of us will live out this vocation differently—whether we have an actual front porch or not. For some of us, it might look like getting to know our broader community and its needs a bit better. For others it might be delving more deeply into the ministries and the offerings of this parish. For some it might be writing a letter of encouragement or making a long overdue phone call. There is no bad place to begin. There is only the invitation to do so—to step out, to greet the world and discover that Paul was right–yes, indeed, love does abide, everywhere, in everyone, and the bravest, most impressive thing we can ever do is to live as if this is true.

And when we do so, may we discover the deep satisfaction of being a neighbor and of having one.

May we encounter the joy of remembering that each of us is an integral part of all things.

And at the end of all our journeys, may we find the front porch that waits for us, a lamp glowing in the darkness, and a voice to welcome us home. A voice that says,

It’s a beautiful night. It feels like hope.

No Paradise: HBO’s “The White Lotus” and the Limits of Natural Theology

This reflection does not contain specific plot spoilers for the HBO series “The White Lotus” but it does refer to the overall trajectory of the storyline.

If you are looking for the key question that underlies HBO’s limited series The White Lotus, you will find it in episode 4, during a dinner conversation among the wealthy white Mossbacher family and their daughter’s BIPOC friend, Paula. In the midst of a terse intergenerational argument over race, class, and social change, the normally quiet teenage son Quinn erupts in frustration:

“What does it matter what we think? If we think the right things or the wrong things, we all do the same shit. We’re all still parasites on the earth. There’s no virtuous person when we’re all eating less fish and throwing all our plastic crap in the ocean. Like a billion animals died in Australia during the fire. A billion. Where does all the pain go?”

Where does all the pain go, indeed? Who pays the price for widespread abuse and destruction, be it climate change, systemic social injustices or otherwise?

Although it looks and sounds like a straightforward TV series centering intertwined human dramas, it is the tension between ethics and ecology that is, in truth, the force propelling the stories of the indolent guests at The White Lotus resort. Certain questions linger and prod at us throughout the series: can we (especially we white, economically-privileged westerners) insulate ourselves from the raw forces of nature, including the self-destructiveness of our own predatory instincts? Will nature eventually humble us into a greater sense of mutuality and interconnectedness with our neighbor and our planet?

For The White Lotus, at least, the answer is yes to the first question and no to the second. Without giving away any specific plot points, it is safe to say that there is no dramatic comeuppance for the hotel guests. They emerge from their vacations largely unscathed, still ensconced in their entitlement, while those who serve them or tread in their wake are left to bear the brunt of the tragedy that ensues.

This can feel a bit disappointing, especially if you were hoping for the emotional gratification of seeing some problematic people get their just deserts. The sinister, sickly-golden artifice of the resort, which at the outset of the series hints at the possibility of some moral reckoning lurking among the hibiscus flowers (like a modern-day Fantasy Island) gives way to an even more sinister truth at the end: there is no reckoning, at least not for those at the top of the food chain. The world, the show seems to admit, continues to reward the dominant and chew up the vulnerable. There is no moral arc intrinsic to the natural order of creation.

A bleak takeaway for an intelligent and entertaining TV series, perhaps. However, there is much here to consider through the lens of Christian faith—especially for those of us who operate in generally progressive Christian circles or who frequently emphasize the inherent goodness of creation. Here’s why.

If you or anyone you know has ever said something like, “I sense God’s presence most clearly in nature,” you have participated to some degree in what is called natural theology, which explores “what can be known of God through the natural world without any divine guidance or revelation” (McGrath, Christian Theology, 141.) When we behold the beauty of a sunset or marvel at the intricacy of an ecological system and then consider how those things might reveal something of their Creator, we are, in that moment, natural theologians. In our wonder we echo the words of the Psalmist who cries out that “the heavens declare the glory of God; the heavens proclaim the work of God’s hands” (Psalm 19:1).

This can be a sacred and life-giving pursuit. Natural theology is a deeply important approach, especially because in an age of overly-spiritualized Christianity it emphasizes the goodness and the preciousness of the created world and our responsibility to it. For if nature bears some imprint of God’s own majesty, then presumably we are called to honor it and care for it, just as we do for our neighbor whose own face reveals to us the face of Christ. In the era of destructive climate change, this perspective is more urgent than ever.

But natural theology has its limits, and we must be mindful of acknowledging them. For as much as we celebrate in the Christian faith that God created the earth and called it good (see:Genesis) this ought not send us into a mawkish romanticism that sees nature simply as a benign object of admiration. For example, it is unarguably lovely to imagine God revealed in a sunset or a rainbow, but far more troubling to consider God as exercising Divine prerogative in an earthquake or a hurricane. And although the record of Scriputure does both, it is far too easy to reject the latter while blithely retaining the former. God becomes the object of our pleasure rather than our awe, and God then suspiciously begins to look a lot like us, as malleable as the landscape we exploit.

And while they do not seem to profess any particular faith, this is, in fact, what the characters of The White Lotus are prone to do in their Hawaiian pseudo-paradise. They are natural theologians in extremis. They admire the waves and the flowers and the hula dancers as scenery while carefully ignoring their own complicity in the subjugation of the land and the people in whose midst they are traveling. Nature is beautiful and largely banal to them because, as those residing at the top of the ecosystem, they can afford to ignore the ugly, brutal stuff. But others (the hotel workers and those in more precarious social circumstances) cannot help but notice that stuff because they are the ones left to clean it up, both literally and figuratively.

Natural theology, unmitigated, can result in a subtle sort of idolatry in which the world as it is is interpreted as an end in itself. Our reverence for creation risks turning into reverence for ourselves with creation as a soothing backdrop, which might sound like a harmless form of self-empowerment until you see it at work among those who hold all of the power and who claim that this is both natural and divinely sanctioned (see: white supremacy.) At the risk of gross understatement, we’ve seen too much of this, and there must be a corrective.

Thankfully, there is. A central aspect of our faith, which can get lost in our contemporary enthusiasm for natural theologies, is that Christianity is revealed—that is, God’s activity and self-disclosure in Christ are outside of the natural order. This activity is characterized by intervention, by miraculousness, and what might be called a loving antagonism against the established natural and social order of the world.

Because if we, like the creators of The White Lotus, observe that nature is inherently amoral in its ordering, such that “there are righteous people who are treated according to the conduct of the wicked, and there are wicked people who are treated according to the conduct of the righteous.” (Ecclesiastes 8:14), then God has provided a revolutionary new thing (Isaiah 43:19) in the Incarnation, Passion and Resurrection of Jesus. This new thing is categorically unnatural, because it overturns the tendencies of death and domination that pervade nature as we know it.

And in its unnatural character, God’s work in Christ liberates us from the expected outcomes. It is a promise that those who feast and laugh (and, ahem, take expensive and exploitative beach vacations) at the expense of others must eventually be accountable for their share of the world’s suffering.

Divine judgment, which tends to make us progressive Christians squirm, is actually a promise that the brutality of nature is not the end of the story. Hence Mary’s jubilant song: “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” (Luke 1:52-53).

This is the moral outcome which is utterly lacking in The White Lotus, but our dismay about that absence is actually a sign of encouragement. For if nature itself (and the society we have built upon its back) is largely indifferent to our basest impulses, then from whence comes our longing for justice and our capacity for selflessness? How can we imagine pure benevolence when we have no direct experience of it in the world around us? That these questions are inherently “unnatural” and unsupported by prevailing evidence suggests that there is more going on in God’s universe than what we can readily perceive.

This is our hope: that the answers to these questions transcend the limits of natural theology and invite us into something more vast than the largest ocean and more beautiful than the most perfect sunset—something made known to us not by human wisdom or striving, but only in the revelation we receive as followers of Christ. While Jesus does not deny that domination and death will still shape our experience of life and discipleship (see: Calvary), he also promises through his conquering of death that yes, there is place where all the pain goes. It goes to a place where it is held and transformed and redeemed by Love itself. We usually call it the Kingdom of God. It is a realm where we are are not just on vacation, but where we—and all of creation—can finally experience what the hapless travelers at The White Lotus never actually find: true peace.

Home: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on August 15, 2021 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary texts cited are Proverbs 9:1-6 and John 6:51-58.

This past Wednesday the parish gathered outside in the garden (or the garth, as we call it) for a party to celebrate the beginning of a new program year here at Trinity—and, I think, to simply revel in the joy of being together after a very long and challenging year and a half.

I saw and heard so many beautiful things as I wandered around—friends visiting and reconnecting; some of our downtown neighbors who showed up and appreciated the opportunity to receive a hot meal from the food truck; the sound of music and laughter bouncing off of those old stone walls. It felt so good, like the love that we speak of and cultivate here in the nave of the church had spilled out into the streets.

If you were there, I think you have a sense of what I am talking about. And if you couldn’t be there, please know that you were thought of, that you were in a sense still part of things, because no matter the day or the week or the year, this place belongs to all of us who have loved it, to all whose lives have crossed this threshold, to all whose hands have tended to its care, whose feet have trod the well-worn path to the altar rail. And so, as we begin another season of worship, study, and service at Trinity, I say again to you what will always be true, every time you come through these doors, whether for the first time or the last: welcome home.

Now for some, the language of “church home” and a “church family” can come off as overly sentimental or disingenuous, an attempt to gloss over the broken parts of a complex institution, claiming a spirit of welcome and mutuality when what is actually expected is compliance and conformity. I know that many have been harmed in the past by those types of environments, and thus it is so very important here, in this place, that we mean what we say. That we come together in our diversity and difference and live as though there is space enough for everyone at this table, in this house of prayer, because God has told us that, indeed, there is. The door is open to every willing heart.

In today’s reading from Proverbs, the personification of Wisdom calls out to passersby, “you that are simple, turn in here! To those without sense…come eat of my bread.” In other words, no matter how foolish or stupid you are, you are welcome here!

And while I don’t know that that exact wording will show up on any of our parish event invitations, the point is this: we are all, in one way or another, lost, stumbling around, distracted and confused by both the complexity and the banality of our days, and we are all seeking the place that is home. The place where we don’t have to earn our sense of worth. The place where we are loved simply for being there, AND the place where we are invited to lay down our burdens and grow into the fullness of life.

This is that place. This community, this altar, this moment where our life encounters God’s life is that place. Or at least, it can be, if we will let it be. If we will show up and receive what is offered.

“Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you,” Jesus tells us today, and as much as we sometimes like to equivocate and dance around the bold claims of Christian truth, there is, in these words, a stark choice. Take part in the life of Christ, feast at his table, follow where he leads, or do not. But know that if you do not, you may very well spend the rest of your life searching for home in the wrong places.

Because your true home is not the house you live in. Your true home is not your political identity. Your true home is not your nationality. It is not found in the private realm made up of your hobbies and tastes and preferences. It is not even found within your “self” as we tend to use that word, the amalgam of your memories and thoughts and experiences.

All of those things are part of who you are, they all matter, but they are not your home. Your home is here, in the presence of the living, beating heart of God. Your home is beneath the loving, penetrating gaze of Jesus, who knows you better than you will ever know yourself. Your home is here, in the Sacraments and in the service of Christ’s body, the church—in the place where our individual stories are enmeshed with the stories of our forebears, the generations of those who came before us, who sat right where you are sitting, who knelt and stretched out their hands and received the bread on a thousand Sundays, just as you are about to do.

Here, among the great cloud of witnesses, at the Eucharistic center of creation, this is where you truly belong. So yes, you that are simple, turn in here. You that are lost, turn in here. Come home, no matter what you have done, no matter how long it has been. Come home!

And I don’t say all of this merely as a sneaky way to convince you to attend Mass more often or to join in all of our fall programming, though I certainly hope that you will, because I continue to be amazed by the transformation of the heart that I witness among those who engage deeply with prayer and study and fellowship in this place.

I want you to hear and know that this is our true home because we are living through a time when so many people do indeed feel lost—a time when the very idea of home and belonging are unraveling concepts—when it is easy to feel disconnected and divided and estranged from any sense of community, any sense of being a part of something greater than ourselves. People are desperate to find somewhere that feels like home, but they don’t know where it is.

Because maybe at times, you have felt that way, too, wondering: is there a place for me in the world? Does anything I do actually matter? In the face of so much uncertainty and loss and suffering, is there any sense to be made of this life? After all of my wandering, when will I arrive? When will I know that I am truly known?

These are hard questions to answer with mere words. There is no simple phrase or formula that makes everything in this life easy or clear. But there is this place, where we wrestle with the questions and we strive to live into the enfleshed, incarnate answer that we find in Jesus.

Because I guarantee you, if you stood where I stood on Wednesday and watched the little ones laughing and running in circles, like fish swirling through a pond; if you stood there and saw friends and families of every age and circumstance sitting together sharing a meal on the grass; if you sensed the solid and reassuring presence of this church building huddled there in the twilight, inviting you to rest against its warm stones; and if you can perceive the life that radiates outward, every moment of every day from the Body of God resting in this tabernacle, the Body that will soon be placed in your hands…if you have experienced these things, or if you can simply see how important they are, then you have already glimpsed the answer. The answer to everything. It is here. It has always been here, where God offers himself to you freely.

“Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed,” says Wisdom.

“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them,” says Jesus.

In other words, God is saying to you: Come, take all I have, take my very life, so that you can truly live.

Come, and eat, and know that you will never be a stranger here. Just come.

Welcome home.

Parting Words: A Sermon for Good Friday

I preached this sermon on Good Friday, April 2, 2021 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary text cited is the Passion Narrative from John’s Gospel. A recording of the service can be found here.

—

What can we say, now that we have arrived here?

This is the moment in the Christian year when words fail us, when our platitudes turn to dust. What meager phrase is adequate to express what we see, what we feel, what we fear in this place: the first and only time in the history of creation when we face the prospect of being truly, utterly alone in the cosmos? What could we say that would ever be a sufficient offering, a word of consolation to our God as he hangs on the cross?

For that is what we are doing today, on Good Friday: we are keeping vigil at the side of our Lord as he dies for us. We plant ourselves here, amid the skulls, at the foot of his cross, and we wait, and we watch, not because we can change anything or solve anything, but because somehow we know that to love him is to be present in this moment. Nobody should have to die alone.

But in our waiting and watching, still, perhaps, we wonder how to express to him what we feel—all the things that we always wanted to say, but never quite could.

My Lord and my God, how quickly the time went; how much more I wish I had told you while we were together. But now we are here in this valley of shadows, and you are slipping away, and there is so little time left. Please don’t leave us. But if you must leave us, what would you have me say?

—

If you have ever lost someone close to you, you know that this is not just a Good Friday conundrum; when death is imminent, when it is time for that last conversation, we often struggle with what to say. We are often not very good with endings.

And in those moments, beside the hospital bed, in the moment before we must finally turn away, memory and regret and fear can leave us as inarticulate as Mary and the Beloved Disciple, gazing upon the face of the one who is leaving us, but saying not a word, our tongues parched by grief.

For what can we say, now that we have arrived here?

I recently read, though, that, in the end, there are, in truth, just four things that are most important to say to someone you care about before they die. Four statements that we can offer: Forgive me. I forgive you. Thank you. I love you.

So perhaps that is what we can offer today; perhaps that is the best we can do, to give our dying God the same, humble tenderness we might offer each other. To say to him: Forgive me. I forgive you. Thank you. I love you.

—

Lord Jesus, forgive me. Forgive me for all the times I forgot you, while you patiently waited for me to remember. Forgive my stubbornness and my smallness, and all the times that I got in the way of the joy that you yearned to nurture within me. Forgive me for all the ways that I have passively accepted a world that still crucifies the vulnerable and disregards the poor and the meek and the hungry, whom you have blessed. Forgive me for my silence when I ought to have spoken; and for my careless words when I ought to have been still. Forgive me for holding you at a distance, for trying to preserve myself from the transformational intensity of your love. Lord Jesus, forgive me.

Lord Jesus, it may sound strange to say it, but I forgive you, too. I forgive you for not being present in the ways that I needed you to be when I felt so alone. I forgive you for inaugurating a church that at times, in your name, has harmed so many people. I forgive you for creating a world that allows for sin to break people apart, for this mortal life where we seem to lose everyone we love. I forgive you for being so hard to understand at times, and so hard to follow. I forgive you for not being the type of strong and mighty savior that I expected, the kind that would keep me safe. I forgive you for all these things, mostly because I need to let them go, in order to see you properly, in your fullness, and not the incomplete version of you that has been distorted by my own pain and confusion and resentment. I forgive you because I want to know you as you are, not as I wish you were. Lord Jesus, I forgive you.

Lord Jesus, thank you. Thank you for loving me beyond comprehension. I know that your love is why you hang upon the cross, why you choose to lay down your life for your friends, and although I cannot fully understand it, I feel it—its saving, healing power—deep in my soul. Thank you for showing us what it means to live as a human being fully alive, fully in communion with our Father in heaven, fully in partnership with our neighbors and with the web of all creation. Thank you for the outpouring gift of your grace in water and bread and wine and oil; for giving your flesh and your Spirit to us, unworthy as we may be. Thank you for your church, which, at its best, has saved my life and taught me the meaning of community. Thank you for the invitation to live a life caught up in the joy your life, and to love with a heart enraptured by your undying love. Lord Jesus, thank you.

Lord Jesus, I love you. Not perfectly. Not as consistently as I might hope to. But I love you. I love you for challenging me to be better; for believing in us, in our potential, these wayward children that you have fashioned out of the dust of the earth. I love you for your tenacity and your gentleness; your courage and your peace. I love you because you have taught me how to be myself, the way you created and intended for me to be. I love you because you were yourself, purely and utterly yourself. And as your life slips away on this day, know that I will carry you with me now, for all the days to come, until death is but a memory, until I see your face again. But for now, Lord Jesus, just know that I love you. And it’s ok to go, if you must. I know you must.

—

What can we say, now that we have arrived here?

Forgive me. I forgive you. Thank you. I love you.

And then, it is finished.

But is enough. It is, perhaps, all he ever wanted us to say.

The Church that is Willing to Die: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on June 21, 2020 for the online services at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 10:24-39.

What does it mean to be the church in a time such as this? At this turning point in our national life, when old values, old practices, old ways of being are called into question, when the mythic landscape of American history is being challenged and reordered by pandemics, protests, and political turmoil, when certainties are few and far between, here and now we are urgently led to revisit this question: what does it mean to be the church? Who are we Christians in this fraught moment: this moment of lament, this moment of reckoning with the unjust systems we have built and sustained, this moment of questioning the bedtime stories with which we have comforted ourselves about blessing and destiny and progress?

What is the church now when the wind comes howling in through the open window, when the doors to the building are locked and the bottom drops out and we are falling, falling down into the gloom of an unknown tomorrow? What are we then? Who are we then?

For so much of our nation’s history, to be part of the church has been a designation of institutional membership, a cultural practice encoded in spiritual language handed down from generation to generation; an elegant packaging of some laudable core values, and a safe, enclosed space in which to work out the meaning of life according to those values. In this understanding of church as institution, which patterns itself according to the societal contexts in which it operates—the world outside the walls—there are usually a number of factions, organized along political, liturgical, or ideological spectrums, and whoever dominates in numbers or funding tends to dictate what we stand for and the ways in which we do so. It’s not that we ignore the gospel in this mode of church; it’s simply that the “good news” we share often sounds like the good news we want to hear, or more specifically, the good news that the powerful want to hear.

For many, being church in this way feels very navigable—it maps rather neatly onto the rest of our lives, it absorbs the language of the zeitgeist like a sponge, such that the progressive and the conservative, whatever those labels happen to mean in a given moment, have equal opportunity to bedeck themselves in Scripture and silk vestments, to continue their eternal struggle via the proxy wars of theology and church politics.

This is not a new thing, and perhaps, for much of our history, this mode of being the church felt sufficient for the majority of people. Since the peace of Constantine in the 4th century, when Christianity became legalized in the Roman Empire and later adopted as the religion of that Empire, there has been little distinction between the idealized values of citizenship and the core teachings of the sacred in dominant Western culture—especially for those of us who enjoyed the privileges and powers that such citizenship affords. The easy mix of civic and ecclesial agendas was simply a given. Church was, in effect, where you learned how to be a good and loyal participant in the realm, to support its structures, to promote the peace of the established order.

But established orders tend to fall apart eventually. Structures give way under their own weight. And what is the church, then? Who are we, then?

Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel:

Do not think that I have come

to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace,

but a sword. (Matthew 10:34)

Jesus’ words today remind us that there is another choice when it comes to understanding the meaning of the church—a choice that is unsettling, a bit scary even—one that looks nothing like the established order in which we are tempted to become comfortably numb. He describes the cost of following him in the starkest of terms—it is to give up family bonds, it is to give up one’s safety, to give up one’s own life, even, in order to find and participate in whatever strange, magnetic sweetness he seems to carry within himself. This is not a metaphorical invitation. It is quite serious.

To be church in this way—to relinquish, to descend, to die—has little to do with the striving and the strategies that characterize so much of public life in the West. It is, instead, an intentional upending, a deconstruction of those values, especially whenver they deny life and dignity to the least among us. For, as Mary proclaims, He has lifted up the lowly and the rich he has sent away empty.

To be the church that responds to Jesus’ invitation is to search for the cracks in the veneer of decadence, to find them and to tear them open, to name what is rotten underneath and, crucially, inescapably, not simply to name and to criticize, but to cast ourselves, with equal measure of grief and hope, down into the rottenness, down to the places where we do not want to go, down to where we will finally see what is true, what endures, what refuses to die, even there. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Here and now, in our present turmoil, some of that work has been done for us. The veneer is already cracked. Some of the rottenness is already exposed. But we still have to choose whether we will get down there and look at it. We still have to choose whether we will do something about it. Nobody will force us to, not even God; and the urge to look away, to go back to the old mode of being, will continue to be powerful. But what we decide will determine what sort of church we are part of. Are we an insitution of the present order, subject to the whims of history, or are we a community of disciples, of learners, of passionate lovers of God, seeking Holy Wisdom into the uncomfortable places she calls us?

Most days, I doubt that I have the strength and the courage to choose this latter vision. Most days, I just want to roll over and go back to sleep. It would be so much nicer to stay on the surface of my Christian identity, to let church function as an ornament, as a daydream where we talk about forgiveness and love in hazy terms without ever submitting to the fierce demands that such things actually require.

But then, always, there is Jesus, with his unsettling words and his compelling gaze that cuts through me like a sword. I see him looking back at me from the cross, forgiving my weakness, unimaginably patient with my fear. I see him in the faces of my homeless neighbors, my black and brown neighbors, my lgbtq neighbors, my conservative neighbors, my liberal neighbors, my neighbors of every background and belief, and I hear his voice:

Follow me. Follow me wherever it might take you. Follow me out past the church you thought you knew, out beyond a brittle, compromised peace, follow me out past certainty and cynicism, follow me into the heart of the world’s sorrows and see what lies on the other side of fear and lamentation. I promise you, everything real, everything joyful, everything good, is there. I am there.

If we listen to Jesus, if we really listen to him, what other choice can we make?