God – By Another Road

Empathy: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, December 21, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 1:18-25.

Most of us, while growing up, have certain moments when we realize something difficult about the way the world works. Perhaps that things are not as safe or pleasant as we had thought them to be; that people are often lonelier and more lost than we had imagined, and that we ourselves might someday feel that way, too. These are not happy discoveries, but they are important ones.

When I was in the fifth grade, I had a group of friends, and every day at recess we played foursquare. If you’re not familiar with that game, it’s essentially a group of four people bouncing a large rubber ball back and forth among, you guessed it, four squares, and trying to get each other out. We loved it.

But one of my friends at the time had a little bit of a schoolyard bully streak in him, and one day at recess he started taunting another boy who was not in our group. The particulars of his taunt don’t really matter—they were made up and casually cruel. But they stuck, and soon some of the other kids joined in. I did not, but I also didn’t say or do anything about it.

This went on for a few days, and I just remember that it started to bother me more and more. Until one day, I told my friend in the middle of the foursquare game that he should stop saying those things, that he was being mean, and that I was not going to be “one of his followers” who went along with this. Oh, this enraged him. He turned on me in a fury and starting aiming that rubber foursquare ball at my face. The other kids didn’t join in, per se, but they didn’t say or do anything, and I soon found myself exiled from that particular group. This is how the world works sometimes.

Now this is not an after-school special on tv—there was no happy ending where I befriended the bullied boy and started a new group of misfit friends. I wish I had. I did realize though, that there are choices to be made, and a price bound up in them, when we encounter those ways the world works which we simply cannot abide.

But I think the most important thing that I learned in that situation was the power of empathy—of placing yourself in the shoes of someone else and letting your own heart break for them a bit. It is a wondrous thing, empathy—a small, simple choice made in a million different instances that can transform everything within us and among us.

Now there are some in popular culture and other circles these days who are claiming that empathy is toxic. That it’s dangerous to morality and social order to care too much about others’ feelings or experiences. And for such people….I try to have empathy. We are all afraid or resentful of what we don’t understand, sometimes. But we must decide what to do in response to that fear.

Which brings us to our gospel today. Another fearful, confused person who has to make a decision about circumstances he does not understand is Joseph. At least that is how I imagine him when I try to empathize with his situation: shocked, bewildered, conditioned by the strict codes of honor and shame within his own culture.

Before any divine dreams or angelic messages come to explain the circumstances to Joseph, there is simply a regular man, alone, with more questions than answers. Presumably through family or friends, Joseph has been given the news of Mary’s mysterious pregnancy. And, according to the standards of his time, no one would have questioned it if he reacted with rage or rejection. The taunts of schoolyard bullies would pale in comparison to what Mary was up against.

But instead, we have the first Christmas miracle before Christmas even arrives, and it is simply this: the choice of empathy. So quick you might overlook it: Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose [Mary] to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.

It is good to dwell on this sentence. We may not fully understand the patriarchal culture of 1st century Galilee, but we can understand this much: Joseph, in this moment, is not going along with the way that his world works. He is choosing, as best he knows how, to be empathetic with whatever Mary’s situation is.

This is a risky choice for him. Some people already knew that Mary was with child, so Joseph’s decision to protect her practically ensures the whispers of his neighbors or even their outright derision of him. He is refusing, after all, to punish her and to thereby protect his own honor, as his culture would expect.

But he is a righteous man, as Mathew tells us, righteous in the ways of God, not of culture wars, and somehow that means he is willing to pay the price of empathy.

Imagine that—empathy as the hallmark of righteousness. A concept that I wish the whole of the Christian church would embrace.

Because we should not overlook this in the narrative: Joseph’s empathy comes BEFORE his angelic dream, which then reveals God’s plan. Joseph’s empathy is the precondition of his participation in the Kingdom of Heaven.

I am going to say that one more time for the ones who need to hear it: his empathy is the precondition of his participation in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Not his knowledge or his power or his strength. Not his social standing or his wealth. Not his capacity for censure or his commitment to cultural purity.

His empathy is the precondition of his participation in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Miracle of miracles! At the end of Advent we finally see it clearly: Empathy is “the way of the Lord” we have been commanded to prepare. Empathy is the means of fulfillment of the ancient promises of God. Empathy is the nature of the One who is coming. Who knew?

Well, actually, all of the prophets knew this; all of the patriarchs and matriarchs; all of the saints of every age knew this and continue to say it. But somehow, in 2025, we need to keep saying it, and so we will:

Empathy is the precondition of our participation in the Kingdom of Heaven. We let our hearts break a little bit for someone else, and God rushes in.

This will come as less than good news to some—the schoolyard bullies we encounter at any age and in every age. The self-righteous and the judgmental. The condemnatory and the incurious. The ones who have confused discipleship with the hard, glossy veneer of social acceptability. They are not yet on board with empathy, but just you wait.

Because Jesus is coming and has already come to assemble his own group of misfit friends, and nobody is excluded from this group except the ones who lack empathy. They’ll be welcome too, once the veneer cracks. It usually does. Eventually we all discover that things are not as safe or pleasant as we hoped them to be. That we are all a bit lonelier or more lost that we thought we’d end up.

And that is when empathy is born in us, and when God’s advent can truly begin.

So here is my invitation to you, friends, in the spirit of St. Joseph: between now and Christmas Eve, think of one person you don’t understand, or whom you resent. It could be anyone, but ideally someone close to your daily life. And as challenging as it might be, I want you to take just five minutes alone and do your prayerful best to empathize with them. Imagine what struggles or fears might be shaping their decisions. Consider what hidden wounds might still plague them. Try to remember even one thing that you probably both share in common.

And that’s it. You don’t have to write a letter or tell anyone at all. Just give your own heart the brief gift of empathy—the tiniest crack of compassion—so that God can achieve his advent into you. Who knows what dreams or visions might follow.

I have no idea whatever happened to the boy I defended or the bully I enraged. All I do know is that the empathy I chose that day is something I would never take back. And if I accomplish nothing else in life, I hope that by the end my heart is broken all the way open by love, I hope it is broken into a thousand glimmering pieces of grace given and received, and that God alone will know what do with all of it.

I know that this is not always how the world works, but how beautiful it will be when it does.

When at last, in perfect empathy, He comes.

Answer: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, December 14, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 11:2-11. A version of this sermon was also published by The Episcopal Church for its Sermons that Work project.

Yesterday as I watched the snow billowing down, interrupting more than a few well-laid plans we’d had for this weekend, I was reminded that as much as we try to prepare and plan ahead, uncertainty and ambiguity still find us sometimes. They descend upon us, soft and muted like winter, blurring the sharp edges of our assumptions. And we tend not to like this very much.

Because we want answers, most days. We crave them; we seek them; sometimes we demand them. We peer at stars and read between lines and survey the vast, muddied landscape of our experiences hoping to catch sight of something clear and telling.

Often they are quite matter-of-fact, the questions we ask and the answers we seek: is church go to happen tomorrow or not? what should I make for dinner? Where should I go next weekend? How long til Christmas?

And yet at other times they are more subtle and lingering: is the church going to endure? what should I make of my life? Where should I go to feel like I am not alone? How long til Christ makes all things new?

But whether our questions are practical or existential, it is still the case that decisive answers are usually what we’re after. And especially because we are formed and guided by words, we often imagine an answer as a thing that coheres nicely into a single phrase or insight. Surely, we think, whatever it is that we want to know is waiting out there just beyond the tip of our own tongues.

Unfortunately, though—perhaps more often than we’d care to admit—answers are not so easily translated into simple turns of phrase. The more important the question, the more likely that this is so. Despite our human fascination with fortunes told and secrets disclosed, the truth is that answers to our most profound questions are more often discerned slowly, in broad shapes and patterns of meaning, than they are discovered in revelatory, obvious flashes.

This is important for those of us who follow Jesus on the Christian path, and it is especially important in this Advent season as we engage the sense of heightened anticipation that God will, somehow, come and make an answer to all of our enduring sorrows and longings. What is the Word we await? What sort of answer are we expecting to receive from on high? A crisp, clear phrase with which to flatten our enemies; to unlock the mysteries of the ages; to solve the conundrums of ourselves?

What if that is not what’s coming?

In today’s Gospel, John the Baptist has a question, too, and it’s quite clear that he wants a “yes or no” sort of answer. Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?

So much—everything, really—depends on the answer, and we can’t blame John for wanting to know plainly. He has given his whole life over to this question. He has been made wild and holy by the yearning of this question. He has become stricken by the weight of this question. And ultimately he will die for the implications of this question.

Because to ask whether Jesus is “the one who is to come” is to assert that nothing and no one else in this world can be. No emperor or king, no treasure, no philosopher or fortune-teller can contend with the one who is to come, because this One will be the answer to every question and the remedy to every wrong. And so of course, as his own days dwindle down in captivity, John desperately wishes to know if his waiting has been in vain.

He, too, maybe like you and I, he is blanketed in the soft white drifts of uncertainty and he is asking, what have I made of my life? Am I alone? How long til God makes all things new?

And yet Jesus, as is so often the case, does not answer the question directly.

Just as when he teaches in parables, in this moment Jesus replies to John with images and with an invitation to look closely at them. Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.

In other words, John, the answer is all around you. It is in the shapes and patterns of healing and life and justice that come forth wherever love reigns. It is not found in simplistic assertions of identity or authority.

Anyone can claim to be a messiah or a king—and goodness knows many have done so. But only God can bring forth the fruits of the Kingdom within us and among us. Only God can transform our wildernesses into a sanctuary. Only God can show us, as I said a couple weeks ago, how to be the answer rather than just wait for one.

This is the essential paradox of the Messiah we are given in Jesus—he is the Expected One who will not conform to our expectations. He is the One who has come, and yet he points away from himself the moment he arrives.

He does not respond directly because he refuses to succumb to the idolatry of easy answers. And it is perhaps in this, in Jesus’ rejection of the deceptive simplicities of our lesser gods, certainty and control, that we begin to know that he is the Son of God. For only Truth would be content to let the results speaks for themselves.

So what does this mean for us—we, like John, who are still captive to the world’s many ambiguities and are still hungering for a clear and piercing response to our questions?

It means, quite simply, that we must reorient our search for answers. The things we are seeking to understand as followers of Jesus are not insights locked away somewhere, reserved for the especially wise or powerful or pious.

The answers, instead, will always be found in the living enactment of the good news—the practice of love and righteousness in our churches and communities and homes. The real answers are to be found in doing the same things that Jesus did: listening, healing, reconciling, liberating, giving thanks, and letting go. And if we do these things, then we will look back one day and say, oh, yes, I see: there it was. There was my answer. There were all of the answers to every question.

It means, too, that we should be wary of any institution or figure, political, religious, or otherwise, who claims that they alone have the answer or, even worse, that they are the answer.

In the face of such assertions, we must resist and remember that even Christ himself was loathe to claim his Messiahship. He was most concerned with helping others find their own inherent dignity, not with worshipping his. Let that be a benchmark for the ones whom we entrust with authority.

And finally, hopefully, joyfully, it means that perhaps we can rest a bit in the midst of all our Advent anticipation. Instead of waiting with bated breath like John, with our whole lives dependent upon a single word of response from God, perhaps we can look around at how the answers to our deepest questions are already springing up around us—how they are already being given.

This is the gift and the power of a sacramental life: how you will catch a glimpse of God in the gleam of a candle or in the phrase of a protest song; in a bag of groceries left on a doorstep or a hand reached out to you in forgiveness. It may come to you in liturgy on a Sunday, or in the broader liturgy of your life.

The point is: God’s answers are here, in the words you already knew how to speak. They have come, John, oh yes, they have already come. But they have come softly, like falling snow, like promises kept, like all those small mercies piling up around us—the ones we overlook while searching the skies for grander resolutions. They have come to us, John, these answers that contain the Answer, in a way that must be lived to be believed, not just seen or heard.

The question that Jesus asks of us is this: will you live it? Will you dare the joy of living it?

Maybe, just maybe, in this Advent, God is waiting for our answer, too.

Let it be yes.

No More Waiting: An Advent Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, November 30, 2025, the first Sunday of Advent, at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 24:36-44.

You know how they say that the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result? Well, call me what you will, but I am guilty of this in at least one way.

Every morning, as I get up and get going, I open the various news apps on my phone, and I think to myself as the headlines are loading, “well, maybe today there will be some good news about the state of the world.”

And then I look at the headlines. Oof. Nope. It’s pretty rough out there.

So I hit the refresh button. How about now?

And I hit refresh again. How about now?!

I keep waiting. I keep waiting for that morning when I’ll wake up and there is nothing but good news in the headlines; good news on the radio as I drive to the church; good news in the streets…

Good news that somebody, somewhere has turned all our swords into ploughshares. That somebody, somewhere has discovered the cure for cancer and stopped war and found the surefire fix for loneliness and broken hearts. The good news that–at last–love has come like a thief in the night to abscond with all of our complacency; to make off with all our regrets.

I keep waiting for those headlines. Refresh, refresh, refresh.

And I will tell you, friends, I am pretty darn tired of waiting. Maybe you are, too. Not just because I am impatient (though I can be), or because I am, more than ever, aware that life is too short for nonsense (which it is).

No, I am tired of waiting because I cannot be satisfied with a world where people must wait for love, for peace, for dignity, for safety, for daily bread. And I am not impressed or convinced by those who argue that some people don’t deserve these things right now.

I don’t think anyone should have to wait for those things. Too many people, across too many generations and in too many places have waited far too long for crumbs from the table. And so I keep hitting that refresh button waiting for someone more powerful or popular than I am to figure that out, but they’re not, and it’s getting old.

I am over the waiting game. There is no virtue in the delay of the common good, of common decency, of common care for all God’s children.

So maybe we need to rethink this whole waiting thing.

It’s funny: the season of Advent is often characterized as a time of waiting, too—we recollect the long history of our waiting for God to show up, to act, to save. It’s what Isaiah and all the other prophets dreamt of for Israel. It’s what Jesus will soon make manifest to us in his birth under the star of Bethlehem: that our waiting will have somehow been worth it.

And yet I think we miss something urgently important if we satisfy ourselves with waiting—if we merely frame it as something pretty and pious and noble.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Advent candles and the songs and the old stories. I will always love them. But what I would love even more is to live in a world, here and now, that looks more like the realized promises which those songs and stories contain. I don’t just want candles and hymns about God’s love and justice. I want God’s love and God’s justice. The real thing. No more waiting. Frankly I think God wants that, too.

And hitting the refresh button on my phone isn’t going to cut it anymore.

What I am coming to realize is this: Advent is not about celebrating the wait for God’s good things. Because the wait for those things…is bad. Love delayed is love denied. That is not holy. The wait for those good and fundamental things like peace and safety and sustenance should make us ablaze with impatience.

Advent should be a shout; a refusal of the dull and stultifying darkness in which we languish.

Advent is about saying, come, Lord Jesus, and meaning it. Saying, come, Lord Jesus, and if I must be the vessel of your arrival, then let it be so. Let your light blaze in me, in us. For we have grown weary of waiting for someone else to make the good news happen. With God’s help, we reclaim that power for ourselves.

I find this urgency woven into today’s Gospel passage, too, when Jesus warns his disciples against passivity. It is true, he says, that no one knows the day and the hour when God will bring us all to our knees—a truth that most of us have already experienced in our own lives—but, he says, that is no excuse for dozing our way through history, waiting for someone else to fix things.

No, Jesus tells his disciples. No—you do not get to sit idly by, hitting the refresh button on your phone, waiting for someone else to make that good news happen, waiting for heaven to come and call you in some day. No, the Kingdom of God has come NEAR to you. It is alive in you.

So wake up! You do not have an appointment with God on some far off day; you have been appointed BY GOD here and now to be the good news that you are waiting for.

Stop waiting! This Advent, this arrival of our salvation in Christ Jesus, is OUR advent, too—it is OUR arrival as the dreamers of the dream of God, it is OUR coming into the world as the Body of the risen Lord, it is OUR raging against the darkness as the bearers of the light of love; it is OUR time to be the ones who bring a word of peace and justice and compassion to a world grown sick and dull and bitter with waiting.

So with all due reverence to the waiting language of this holy season of Advent, my friends, let it be said of us in this time and place and parish: they were the ones who refused to wait. They were the ones who decided that the Kingdom of God is not a coming attraction. It’s here, it’s now, in the words we choose to speak and the lives we choose to live. In the forgiveness we can offer and in the truth we can tell. In the service we can render and in the stories we can pass on.

Because I, for one, am tired of waiting for a world shaped by love, and I imagine our Lord is tired of us waiting for somebody, somewhere to make it visible. So come, Lord Jesus, and let your Kingdom arrive in me.

I promise, Lord, I’ll stop hitting the refresh button on my phone. I’ll try.

And maybe I’ll try refreshing my neighbor’s spirit instead. Refreshing my prayer life. Refreshing my commitment to speaking out for the vulnerable. Maybe you will join me in that.

And if you do, I have a challenge for you. I’d love for you to join me in this. If you do or experience something this Advent season that is a small sign of God’s love—an act of charity given or received, an act of truth-telling spoken or heard, a moment of grace offered or found…I want you to write it down on a post-it note, and when you come into to the church, I want you to stick it on the wall right in the hallway out here. Just a sentence or two about whatever it was that made God’s love real to you. Put up as many as you like.

I wonder, come Christmas, how many pieces of good news we could collect right here. I wonder, come Christmas, when visitors join us at St. Anne, if they might read our collection and say, oh, I see, yes, this is what it’s all about, isn’t it? This is what church can be.

And I wonder, come Christmas, if we might read them ourselves and look back at this season of waiting in which we refused to wait, and I wonder if we might realize: God has already come. Jesus is here, and we have seen his advent, and we have been his advent. We have become the good news we longed to hear. And we have been refreshed.

I’ll tell you, that’s the kind of headline I’d like to read.

Bricks: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, November 16, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Luke 21:5-19.

Early in our relationship, as Matt and I got to know each other, we discovered an odd coincidence. Among our respective collections of personal mementos, we each have a single brick. Not a brick of gold, mind you, just an old, slightly crumbly, dusty brick. Kind of a strange thing for each of us to be carrying around through life, but so it is.

What’s more, these bricks we each have are both from old school buildings. Matt’s is from his elementary school, north of Dayton, which was torn down some years back. And mine is from a dilapidated portion of this massive old Victorian school building that was just out behind my grandparents’ house in Michigan—the Central School. I wasn’t a student there, but generations of Hoopers were.

Now the Central School was not a one-room schoolhouse, but more like a palace, or at least that’s how it looked to me when I was young. It occupied a whole city block and was made up of a bunch of wings and turrets and gables. I know Cincinnati still has some schools like that.

But eventually, in this increasingly small Michigan town, they closed it up for lack of money and students. By the time I was skulking around its perimeter as a kid, it was already boarded up and coming apart gently at the seams. And for whatever reason, this made me very sad.

I remember as an 8 or 9 year old going to sit up against the old brick walls of the Central School in summer, feeling the heat of those brick walls radiate into my back, and I remember wishing, praying, even, that somehow it could all be saved, that it could be brought back to life. And I suppose, in that moment, that I was being given an inkling of mortality—how things and people can crumble, how certainties falter, and how not even brick walls can always withstand the onslaught of the years.

Years later, when a portion of the building was pulled down, a family member saved me a single brick, and though I am no longer a child, and I have seen many things fall apart in life, I confess I still can’t quite let that brick go. For me, it’s a holy relic.

You might have already guessed why I am talking about old buildings today, because in our Gospel passage, Jesus and those with him are also considering a building, though one that is far grander, even, than the Central School. They are walking near the Temple in Jerusalem, a structure whose importance would be hard to overstate for the Israelites in Jesus’ time.

The Temple was not just a place of worship or a focal point of national identity; it was, for those who worshipped there, the beating heart at the center of the world. It was the place which held God’s very presence, where they could lean their backs against the stone walls and sense that divine warmth radiating into their souls. It was one true and reliable thing to count on in a world that often takes so much away.

So if we want to understand and relate to the pathos of what Jesus says in this text, his dire prediction of falling stones and uncertain times and great sacrifices, you don’t have to be a 1st century Israelite.

You can simply imagine whatever or whomever or wherever is most precious to you—and how quickly, how shockingly the impermanence of what we love can be revealed to us. We know it is so, we know that nothing is permanent, and yet we cannot bear the thought of it any more than Jesus’ companions could. So we press our backs up against the proverbial bricks of whatever we love and feel their warmth and we pray for these things to never go away. We pray for something good to last forever, just this once.

Now, I know that this particular passage is usually interpreted in apocalyptic terms—a sort of “bad times are coming, so you better get right with God” type of message. And that’s ok, I guess.

But I can’t help but think that there is also a deeply human and pastoral dimension to Jesus’ observation here. I hear grief and empathy in his words.

Because remember two things: first, Jesus loved the Temple. He had his own childhood memories there in his Father’s house. And second, everything he is predicting about the Temple and the hardship of the disciples is about to happen in his own life first—accusation and punishment, defenselessness and destruction. Jesus’ own life, his body, is also the temple of God that will fall down and fall apart, long before this Temple of stone does.

And so I think that his observation is not so much a threat of divine wrath or apocalyptic comeuppance as it is an acknowledgment of our struggle in every age: we who have been laboring forever to hold up and hold onto everything we love, everything we have built, everything we fear to lose.

Jesus is telling us that he gets it, that he is right here with us as we press our backs against the crumbling bricks—of our homes, our health, our relationships, our country, our world. He sees us begging them not to fall down. He hears us praying for something good to last forever, just this once.

But here’s the thing, my friends—and this is perhaps the most important thing that Jesus can teach us in hard times: even if it does fall apart—whatever it is you love the most—even you fall apart—and even if we find ourselves, in shock, standing amidst the rubble of our own personal promised lands, even then, Jesus says, do not be terrified. Endure. I am with you. For I am not a God who requires a pristine temple to meet you. I am not a God who demands perfect composure in order to love you. I never was that. For I will be with you in the wreckage, too.

Even if all you have left is a single brick to remind you of what is good and loving and true in this life, that will be enough. Hold onto it. Hold onto me.

Some days, friends, some days I look around at the state of things, or I feel the pain of certain challenges in my own life, and indeed it feels like just a brick’s worth of hopefulness is all I’ve got to hold onto.

But here’s the real miracle of us doing this life of faith together: if I just show up holding my single brick, and if you show up holding yours, and if all of us show up with our own small fragments of love and truth and mercy, maybe we can put them together and build something altogether new. Maybe that’s exactly what Jesus was praying for his disciples to understand and to do.

Because that’s what I see you doing here at St. Anne, week by week and year by year. Things in life do change. Things in our world do fall apart. But that’s never the end of the story.

Because every prayer, every ministry idea, every leaky faucet fixed, every bit of food or friendship offered to a neighbor, every pledge made and every heart opened in unconditional welcome is one of us holding up a brick that still remains—a small, stubborn piece of hope we refuse to let go of, and it’s us saying, it’s not much by itself, but by God if we add them all up together, all these fragments, we could build something beautiful. Brick by brick by brick.

So let’s keep building.

As it happens, much of the Central School did not get torn down; by some miracle, part of it was converted into affordable rental housing and it has a whole new purpose now. I guess my childhood prayer was answered.

But I still hold onto that brick anyway—partially as a memento of the odd and sentimental kid I used to be, but also as a reminder that even among the ruins, there is still something good that remains. Something worth preserving. Something that can be rebuilt.

And if I could go back and find my 8 or 9 year old self, his back pressed up against the bricks, fearful of all the things that can fall apart, I think I’d tell him, don’t be terrified. You will learn how to endure, even if the walls come tumbling down all around you. Because that’s not the end of the story. It never is.

And it’s funny, but…I think God might want us, now, to hear the exact same thing.

The Ones Who Walk Away: A Sermon for All Saints

I preached this sermon on Sunday, November 2, All Saints’ Sunday, at St. Anne Episcopal Church in West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Luke 6:20-31.

I read a lot of stuff, such that much of it kind of blurs together. Matt and I donated a few books the other week, and as I was sifting through the stack of titles I thought a few times, “now what was that one about again?”

But sometimes there are particular stories or texts that stick with you and rattle around in your heart and mind. I was looking through some old boxes recently, and I came across one of these on an old photocopied set of pages I’ve been holding onto since middle school. It is the text of a famous short story by Ursula K. Le Guin. Are any of you familiar with her? She was a forerunner of many writers these days who combine elements of sci-fi, fantasy, and pointed social commentary. If you know of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, or the Hunger Games series, or Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Ursula K. Le Guin writes in that sort of imaginative, prophetic space.

Anyway, when I was in middle school, our teacher had us read one of her best known short stories, and it has haunted me ever since. It is called, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” If you can get your hands on a copy, I encourage you to read it—it’s not too long, but it packs a punch. I can’t do full justice to Le Guin’s writing here, but the essence is this: there is a fictional, wondrous, joyous city called Omelas, where all the citizens are happy and healthy and blessed. They live simple, lovely, celebratory lives. But there’s a catch (of course). For mysterious reasons that no one quite understands but which everyone tacitly agrees to, the blessedness and the perfection of Omelas depends upon the misery of a single child, who is hidden away at the edge of the city, living in squalor, unconsoled by any human kindness. How the child came to be there, no one in Omelas knows, but they do know that if they were to set the child free, all their perfect happiness would come to an end.

And so they turn back to their festivals and their feasts and learn to live, somehow, with the knowledge of the child’s suffering.

But there are a few people—the ones alluded to in the title—who look upon the suffering child and do not turn back to the bright and beautiful city. Instead, driven by some ineffable word deep within, they keep walking, walking out alone, away from all that they have known and seen. As Le Guin writes, “the place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”

I am thinking of Omelas, today, friends, because I fear we are living in it.

I am thinking of Omelas today because children and other vulnerable people go hungry and have their rights bandied about as the collateral of partisan gamesmanship.

I am thinking of Omelas because we live in a society that does a poor job of distinguishing between true blessedness and mere privilege.

And I am thinking about Omelas because it is the feast of All Saints, and I wonder if this story has something to tell us, in a different sort of way, about what saintliness actually is.

I think for a long time, we have been taught to think of saints as the teacher’s pets in the Kingdom of Heaven—those people somehow born reciting the Lord’s Prayer or the Nicene Creed and easily believing every word of it, while the rest of us cross our fingers behind our backs and count down the seconds til recess. Top of the class Christians, those saints. Easy to admire, and easy to dismiss, too.

Because really, who has the time or the inclination to be a cow-eyed innocent, gazing blithely into the sky, when there are too many bills to pay and too many storms to quell and too many hearts being broken all around us?

And if that’s all the saints were, just the untroubled prayerful sort, then our eye-rolling would make sense.

But what if that’s not what sainthood is all about? What if it had nothing to do with being especially well-behaved or pious? What if, in fact, it was something wildly different ? Something far more subversive?

For we have all, I fear, been raised to be good citizens of Omelas, to climb the ladders of towers built on quicksand. We have all been formed by its false pageantry and asked to ignore its real price. Day by day, we are lulled and soothed and distracted, and asked to fix our gaze upon the pleasanter things our systems can offer us.

But following Jesus—which is all that sainthood could ever be about—is not, I am sorry, it is not about blithe piety nor about making an uneasy peace with the costly beauty of Omelas, or America, or wherever we happen to find ourselves.

No, following Jesus is about encountering that point in time when you are standing there, daring to look upon the face of suffering even as the festival flags beckon you back to forgetfulness.

And the saints? The saints are simply the ones among us who walk away. Driven by that ineffable Word, they walk in the other direction. And what we can say of them is this: they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

And if this is what saintliness is all about—not getting a gold star, but a refusal to accept the world’s usual means and ends—then today in our gospel Jesus gives us some perspective on that blessed path which beckons those who dare to walk away.

Blessed are the poor, blessed are the hungry and the sad and the hated, Jesus tells his disciples today in Luke’s more blunt version of the Sermon on the Mount. He calls these things blessed, not because being poor or hungry or sad are inherently good things, but blessed because God refuses to look away from them. God will not forsake them. Jesus declares that he will call them blessed even if we will not.

So, blessed are the ones we’d rather forget. Blessed are the food stamp recipients and the queer couples applying for a marriage license. Blessed are the Black and brown neighbors and those who speak a different language or worship in a different way. And blessed, too, are all the ones who are your so-called enemies, political or religious or otherwise. Even if we choose not to see that that they are blessed—especially if we choose not to see it.

Because God is not seduced by our necessary evils or our expedient sacrifices. God is not deceived by Omelas–neither by its kings nor its festivals nor its monuments of triumph over its victims. God says either we are all blessed, or we are all lost, together.

And so the ones who walk away, the ones we call saints, head towards this other Beatitude-place instead: this land of unrestrained, unwitheld blessedness, where love does not extract a price, where satisfaction does not depend upon the misery of others and safety does not demand a scapegoat. We may not see it fully in this lifetime, but what a place it must be, that Kingdom of Heaven far beyond the horizon of Omelas.

St. Anne, today the Church remembers those saints who glimpsed that someplace else worth walking towards, often at great personal cost but also with the deep peace and joy of knowing what is true and then acting upon it. I pray that we follow them.

Today, too, we recall our own departed loved ones who have, in the mystery of Christ’s risen life, already been carried ahead of us towards that same true and joyful place. I pray that we will find them there.

And finally, today, we will place our pledges upon the altar of God—our pledges to this place and to one another that, for one more year at least, we will keep walking together, driven by that ineffable Word—that something which we have glimpsed in Jesus and in one another as we go. I pray its beauty and its promise will be revealed somehow, in the very act of walking.

Because they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

And wouldn’t you know—if we do, too, then I guess that makes us all saints.

Homecoming: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, October 5, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Luke 17:5-10.

What’s Jesus up to in these Gospel texts lately?! The last few times it’s been my turn to preach, I take a look at the prescribed passage and I think, ok, Lord, ok…you’re not going easy on me here. Time to tangle again with this weird, hard, good news you’ve got for us.

So you also, Jesus instructs the apostles today—so you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, `We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!’

Now maybe it’s because we live in a society still burdened by the legacy of slavery. Or maybe it’s because I’m just little sassy and don’t always like to be told what to do…but this seeming glorification of servility gives me pause. It makes me a little twitchy.

Is this not the same Jesus who, in John’s Gospel, says, I call you no longer servants, but friends, and who invites everyone to the table? So what do we make of today’s instruction and the parable that comes along with it? What does he want us to get from this? Ok, Jesus, let’s tangle.

But first, a story.

A different sort of weird, good thing happened to me in my senior year of high school. I was, to the surprise of everyone, I think, elected to the homecoming court in my small high school in rural Michigan. What I suspect is that some people thought they were casting a sympathy vote for me, and then (surprise!) they just all had the same idea. I can’t account for it any other way! I was not “homecoming court material,” but they called me up and said, guess what, congratulations—you actually are!

So on one October night during halftime at the homecoming game it was me in my little thrift store blazer and then the usual lineup of the football players and cheerleaders and other kids who I’d always been a little bit jealous of. Finally I got to stand up next to them under the bright lights. I even got to ride in a little parade with all of 50 people in Iron River, Michigan waving back at me. My big moment!

Now, I did not win homecoming king—the universe asserted its usual order and one of the football guys got the crown. But that’s ok. I am so glad that weird thing happened, because it let me look behind the curtain for a moment, to stand among the popular kids and to realize…none of it actually mattered that much.

Maybe you can relate—when you are unpopular, or when you’re on the outside in any sort of way—you think, gosh, my life would be so much better if ______.

If I had more friends. If I had more money. If I got to ride in the homecoming parade. Or, maybe like the apostles in today’s reading, if I had more faith. Oh yes, if I just had more faith, better faith, purer faith…then I’d really be something. Then I could really do something. I could be the homecoming queen of heaven.

What I discovered in that brief stint as a member of the homecoming court, though, is that my ascension in the social hierarchy didn’t actually change anything substantive about my life or what was actually important. I was still just me, and I finally realized that those other kids, the popular ones—well, they weren’t really living in some hallowed state. They had the same insecurities I did, just with less acne and nicer clothes. Oh well.

Privilege is not a panacea, that’s what I learned. Privilege is not a panacea, a cure-all. Having more this or more that will not solve the true question of our heart’s deep ache and it won’t add to our heart’s deepest delight. It will not give us what we actually need, because true salvation–the kind Jesus talks about–resists commodification. Salvation resists commodification. It cannot be bought, sold, or bartered. Because true salvation is a way of seeing, a way of being, not a having.

So back to this text today: the apostles are struggling with the call of following Jesus, all that this asks of a person, and so they say, as so many of us do—give me more faith, Lord! I am lacking the stuff required to be a truly good and whole person! I want to get my crown!

And Jesus says, oh, you beloved idiots. You still don’t get it, do you. You don’t need more faith. You need to understand what faith actually IS in the first place! You need to understand that faith is a communion, not an acquisition. It is the knitting of your soul into the life of God, it is the relinquishment of your own interests out of compassion for your neighbor, it is the abandonment of your quest to win a crown or ride in a parade. None of that stuff matters!

And if you could just experience that sort of faith for the tiniest moment, for the briefest, mustard-seed moment, you would experience a power and a grace that would reorient your entire life.

Don’t ask for “more” faith, beloved. Ask to know and to feel and to do what faith actually is. The kind that shows up in the patterns of Eucharist. The kind that shows up when we welcome our Muslim neighbors into relationship and conversation like we did at St. Anne the other night. The kind that enlivens and gentles us all at once.

And if we know that kind if faith, then perhaps we’ll find a new insight into this weird, hard parable about masters and slaves that Jesus gives us today.

Because if my faith has set me free from grasping, from a fear of loss—if my encounter with the living God has awakened me to the infinite love that’s already mine, and has alerted me to the divine presence in everyone I see, including me—then suddenly the whole system of honor and status and who is served first and who is served last….none of it matters so much anymore.

And suddenly those slaves in the parable are not groveling, they are laughing. Slaves they may be but their hearts are free! They are saying, I don’t care if I am invited to the masters table, because I have a place reserved for me at the heavenly banquet. I don’t care about getting a thank you because I am not dependent on the validation of the ones who cannot see me clearly.

I don’t care if I win homecoming king or become the most popular kid in school because I know the real truth: that God has loved me and you and all of us fiercely from the very start, and I am part of the parade of the faithful, the forgotten, and the blessed whom God refuses to forsake even though they wear no crowns of honor.

And so my tangling with Jesus’ parable this week suggests to me that the slaves who say, “we are worthless, we are doing what we ought,” are not being servile, they are being subversive.

They are saying to their masters: your withheld invitation to the tables of privilege has no sway over me. I am not hungry for your crumbs, because I have the Living Bread. I am not craving your familiarity because I am a beloved child of the Living God and by his grace I have been initiated into the heavenly court. I await not the approval of an oppressor but the homecoming of the one true King.

In other words, take your dinner and your hierarchies and your crowns and your parades…and stuff it.

Friends, we are called to be servants of God. But we are called to be liberated servants—the kind who are not secretly wishing to be kings or queens ourselves. We are to be set free from the grasping for honor, set free from the feeling that we never have enough or will ever be enough. You are already enough. You are a vessel of the living Christ! You are an inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven! What more could we do together here at St. Anne, and in West Chester, and all across this sore and hungry earth if we would actually wake up and realize that.

Now, this is our pledge campaign season, and so we are praying and thinking and talking a lot about why our faith community matters to us. Well, one big reason is that St. Anne is the sort of place where we actually try to learn what faith is—not just a gold star or a reassurance that we’re in the in-crowd—but a transformed and fearless life lived in the image of Jesus Christ. A life, like his, that is liberated from all the old games and the posturing that the powers that be want us to keep playing.

We’re not here to play games, friends. We’re here to become free.

That’s what this place can offer us if we let it, if we show up for it, if we find that mustard seed already lodged in our hearts and let it bloom and take over our lives. If we take up the holy task of tangling with Jesus and his weird, hard good news, week after week, because that is exactly the sort of people he expects us to be.

What else could we experience, what could we learn, what could we transform, if that is who we were?

Well, guess what? Congratulations. Because actually, we are.

Bus: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, September 21, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Luke 16:1-13, the parable of the dishonest manager.

My dad didn’t always have that VW van I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. Before that, when summertime came around, we had to get back to the family home in Michigan some other way. And once, when I was probably in the second grade, we took a Greyhound bus all the way from northern California to the Upper Peninsula.

Now, have you ever ridden on a Greyhound bus? Have you ever ridden 2,300 miles cross-country on a Greyhound bus? Let me tell you, that trip is not for the faint of heart. Hard seats, barely any air conditioning, and back then people still smoked cigarettes on board. We only stopped for a few minutes at a time at run down bus stops and gas stations and other places at the frayed edge of human comfort.

When you make such a trip, though, you discover a kinship with the folks riding next to you, because all of you are united by the one fervent desire of anyone who is on a long-distance bus: to get home. At every stop, people were speaking of home, remembering home, wondering how much longer it would be to get there.

Those of us on the Greyhound were not out for a pleasure ride or a sightseeing trip. Most all of us had been somewhere else, far away from where we wanted to be, and now we were doing whatever it took to get back.

And sometimes you face desperate circumstances. One night on that trip, in the middle of Des Moines, Iowa, our bus was hit by a drunk driver. Thankfully nobody was seriously injured, but the bus was, and so my dad and I found ourselves in a downtown station, bleary eyed and stranded at 4 in the morning with no money. It’s been over 30 years, but I still remember that pit in my stomach, the rising tide of panic.

We are all just trying to get home in this life, friends. In one way or another, we are all just trying to get home. Some of us have a fairly comfortable time of it. And some of us do not. But beneath and beyond the material circumstances of our lives, that desire to get home, to find a home, to build or reclaim a sense of home—this is what unites us.

I wish we could see that more clearly, especially in divided times like these. I wish we could understand that while our opinions and our ideologies may vary, our basic desires usually do not. We’re all just people on the bus, driven by the memory of a particular porch light, hoping it’s been left on for us if we can ever get back to it.

As it so happens, Jesus came to help us get back home, in every sense of the word. But first—and I think this is a core goal of his teaching ministry—Jesus wants us to see that we are all on the trip together—this long, surprising trip, with its many perils and compromises. And so we arrive at today’s parable.

Now, I will fully admit, this Gospel passage is a tough one. The story, the motivations of the characters in it, and Jesus’ message for us all feel a bit confusing, even contradictory. We are told that one cannot serve God and wealth as two masters, which is easy enough to understand, even if it’s difficult in practice.

But then we are also told to make friends by means of “dishonest wealth.” Why would the Son of God tell us such a thing, sounding more like a rascal than a Redeemer? This is not “Scary” Jesus, but it is Crafty Jesus, speaking to us with an irreverent wink.

Whenever I come up against a perplexing passage of Scripture, I try to remember my two guiding principles for how these texts should be read: first, through the lens of love. And second, as I have said before, is to read Scripture from the margins—through the eyes of those people and places which exist out at that frayed edge of human comfort.

And when I do so with this parable, what I notice is how the manager—crafty though he may be—is really just a man with a desperate need to find a home.

“I have decided what to do,” he says to himself, probably because he has no one else to turn to. I have decided what to do. I will figure out how to get someone, anyone, to care whether I live or die. I will figure out how to find a home that won’t be taken from me.

How lonely he must be! And this dialogue with himself—this broken man trying to survive—this, for me, is the heart of the parable.

Because note, first, that we don’t know if he actually squandered any property—just that he was accused of doing so by someone with more power than him. And we can’t quite tell whether his subsequent choices were immoral, or resourceful, or subversive, or some combination of these.

But what we do know about this manager, much like the character of the Prodigal Son, (which is, by the way, the story just before this one in Luke), and what we might even begin to empathize with is that, when faced with the breakdown of everything he thought he could count on, the manager discovers, in a flash, the only thing that actually matters in this life. He discovers the one thing we all seek, in the end: to find that one porch light that might be left on for us. To get home, however far we might have to go to get there.

And so he tries, however imperfectly, to do just that. I don’t know if I admire him, but I see him. I understand him.

Because I think it’s safe to say that every single person on that old Greyhound bus had a lot in common with this manager. We were all people without much money, all having to face down our frightening sense of need. We were all people who felt the urgency of getting to a place where someone would finally open the door and welcome us in.

And guess what: that hungry urgency of homegoing—the kind that leads you down lonely highways, the kind that keeps you going through peril and fatigue, the kind that makes you do surprising things—that, that is part of discipleship. That is part of following Jesus, who called tax collectors and dined with sinners and who, I am fairly certain, would also be quite comfortable with bus stops and the people who rely on them.

Because it’s not a pleasure ride or a sightseeing trip, this Christian path through life. It is the long, necessary journey through our failure and sinfulness and on towards home, back to God. It is late nights and lonely gas stations; it is grace and compassion and cigarette smoke; it is extravagant hope and deep hunger. That is the truth of this Christian journey. Every story Jesus tells us reveals that this is so.

And if we don’t pick up on that in his stories, well, it’s time to read them again, with love and from the margins.

So here’s what I’ll ask of you today, whether you have ever ridden the Greyhound or not: don’t judge the manager too harshly, or throw up your hands at the complexity of his story. We are all a tangled mess of crafty and caring, after all.

Just see him for who he is: a fellow traveler on the bus with you, with his own mistakes and missteps, his own private failures and desperate choices, just like yours or mine, just sitting in Des Moines at 4AM with his head in his hands, wondering what he’s going to do next and when or if he will ever be home again. Some times, that’s all of us.

And if that inspires a bit of tenderness in you, a bit of compassion for the many imperfect ways people have to survive in this world and the ways that God loves us and welcomes us regardless…well, then perhaps the parable has done its job after all. Perhaps Jesus has met us, again, as he tends to, at the frayed edge of human comfort.

On that bus trip, we did finally make it to Michigan, by the way. But in a bit of a twist, we didn’t get there on the Greyhound. After the accident, we were stranded. So my grandpa got in his old truck and drove over 500 miles to Des Moines and brought us home with him. The porch light was indeed on when we got back.

And you know, I’m fairly confident that’s what heaven would feel like for me if I ever get there: the light on and the door opening, and the One who just looks and me and says, long trip, huh?

And I’ll say, Lord, you have no idea.

And he’ll say, maybe with an irreverent wink, actually, I do.

Worth It: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, September 7, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH, which was observing its “Faith in Action” ministry celebration. The lectionary text cited is Luke 14:25-33.

I mentioned “Scary Jesus” a couple weeks ago, and it seems he’s back with us today using very strong language to tell us something fairly self-evident: often in life you have to count the cost of something and decide if it’s worth it, whatever “it” is. But sometimes…sometimes you just can’t know in advance if it will be worth it, or how, but you know you have to do it anyway. And that’s when things get interesting. That’s when faith begins.

So, for this Faith in Action Day we are observing, here’s a story, in three parts, about determining the worth of things.

Part 1:

It was love at first sight.

My father saw it sitting there in the parking lot with a bunch of other used vehicles, bathed in the promise of a perfect spring morning: a gleaming, goldenrod, vintage VW van—the kind that, when you see it, you feel lighthearted and adventurous, and you swear you can hear Hotel California playing on some distant radio, and you feel that open road unfurling from some point of origin within your deepest self. Oh yes, it was love, and he was all in.

Never mind that he didn’t have much money. Never mind that the old man selling it was vague on its maintenance history. My dad saw that van and he knew he had to get it, he knew that it could carry us long and wondrous distances: California to Michigan and back again, or even farther, maybe, all the way to the promised land.

And so he plunked down some cash and, a few weeks later, once I was done with school, we threw what we had in the back and headed east, ready for anything. Well, maybe not anything.

Because the first time we made a quick stop, a few hours from home, the van wouldn’t start. And we were stuck in a rest area outside of Willows, California, on a 90-something degree day in June, unsure how to keep going.

I don’t remember exactly how he figured it out—this was before cell phones and internet access—but somehow he determined that we had to manually spark the ignition to start the van again—I had to sit in the driver’s seat and turn the key, and he was out there, cussing in the heat, pressing some fuses together or something. Essentially we had to hotwire our own vehicle every time we started it. And so we did, all the way across the country, until we got to Michigan and he could afford to fix it.

Was the van worth it? Depends on how you count the cost. It never really did work that well, and years later I think he sold it for next to nothing.

But on the other hand, I can tell you that when I think of what it means to be free, and safe, and alive in this world, when I think of what hope feels like…what I remember is riding in that old VW van with the windows down somewhere in the Great Plains, eating a ham sandwich, singing an old song on the radio with my dad and I think: oh, maybe we did get to the promised land after all.

Part II:

It was love at first sight.

Those disciples had met Jesus in any number of ways, caught up in the various worries and occupations that constitute a normal life, but when they saw him, they saw Life with a capital L. They saw a different sort of road unfurling in front of them, one that carried with it all the promise of a spring morning. And how could they not follow, to see where they might go together? Wouldn’t that be worth just about anything?

And it’s true, that most of them didn’t have much to lose—no money or status. Maybe they thought that following Jesus would give them the dignity and the peace and the protection that are scarce resources in this life.

But then, we come to today’s Gospel passage, and somewhere at a rest stop along the way to Jerusalem, maybe in the 90 degree summer heat, Jesus has some difficult news for them: this journey is going to cost a whole lot more than they imagined.

The language of hating what is dearest to us and of giving up what is most precious—it lands hard on the ears, it makes a person sweat and second guess their choices. It suggests that whatever this love is, it is not the comfortable, cruising along smooth highways kind.

And its worth cannot be measured in the same way as those kings who wage war and build towers. Jesus, I think, talks about those things not to equate them with discipleship, but to contrast them. He is being ironic. He is saying, the book of True Life is not a ledger. The way of True Peace is not a negotiated settlement.

Therefore, none of you can be my disciples unless you let go of all that. You have to follow me by faith and when they ask, on the other side of the cross, was it worth it, you will have discovered a new way to speak of worth.

And only then will you be free, and safe, and alive in this world. Only then will you reach the promised land.

Part III:

I imagine, for many of us, it was love at first sight, or close to it—the first time we came through those red doors of St. Anne, or another door like it. The first time we heard the Spirit reverberate through an old hymn or felt Jesus press against our lips in the shape of bread. The first time we understood that we were welcomed just as we are, and felt the possibility of something new unfurling within us.

And what a journey it is, to be in a church like this, to build a community like this, to see it grow and change and stumble and get back up again. To show up in the light of spring mornings, and on winter nights, too, and to know that something, that Someone, waits for us here, waits to huddle in close, to hotwire our hearts, to ignite something long dormant within our souls, to make us feel alive again. That is the gift of church at its best. That is the gift of a place like St. Anne. Its worth is hard to measure.

And yet, it doesn’t always go the way we think it might, or should. We’ve had our moments when we felt stranded on the side of the road, the world rushing past, and I imagine there have been times when it feels like we are getting by on a lick and a prayer, because, well, frankly, sometimes that’s the best anyone can do.

Which is why Faith in Action day is so much more than just a ministry fair or a sign-up event. It is an acknowledgment of the cost—the deep and continued and holy cost—of following Jesus, and of figuring out how we are going to bear it, and share it, and even rejoice in that costliness together. It is a moment to say thank you to one another for all of the ways, large and small, that we’ve shared in the cost of keeping this place going, mile by by mile.

I hope, as we travel around the tables at coffee hour today, we will take time to say thank you to each other—for being here. For trying. For sweating in the summer sun and shoveling the snow and planning the programs and assembling the ham sandwiches. I hope we will taste the goodness of all of it, and recommit ourselves to the love that drew us in, that draws us out, that keeps us here and keeps us going.

Because it’s funny, when you consider the value of our life together here: it is not “useful” in any traditional sense of the word. We are not building towers and waging culture wars. We are not “winning” anything. We are just loving everything, and everyone.

What a miracle that this is enough—more than enough. What a miracle that this is everything.

What a miracle that we persist in the foolish, extravagant experiment of a life founded on chasing after Jesus, wherever he goes, for no other reason than this: that it was love at first sight.

And, as with all great love stories, perhaps, when all is said and done here at St. Anne, if someone were to ask us if all of this was worth it—all the false starts and the broken engines, all the hard questions and the hellos and the goodbyes—I hope that we will be able to look up and say: depends on how you count the cost.

But we can tell you this much: here, we were free. Here, we were safe. Here, maybe for the time, we were alive in this world.

And yes, oh yes, every now and then, I think we even saw the promised land.

Division: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, August 17, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Luke 12:49-56, which includes the following:

Jesus said, “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!

Jesus has something to say today, doesn’t he? All this fiery language and talk of division. If you were looking for a feel-good Gospel passage today, my apologies, but I want us to really look at this notion of division rather than scuttle past it. Because I’ll tell you something, I love Scary Jesus. Really, I do!

Not because I take what he says lightly, but because Scary Jesus—or perhaps more accurately, Prophetic Jesus, No-Nonsense Jesus—is willing to say and do the hard things that love and truth require. He is willing to take a stand for what is good and willing to name what is not.

This is the sort of division that he brings—it’s not about enmity, but clarity. The clarity of telling the sheep from the goats and the wheat from the chaff in our hearts and in our world. Jesus is here to give us clarity about what is worth holding onto through the long onslaught of the years. And what must be let go of.

When I think of this sort of division, I am reminded of a certain legendary incident in my family.

My grandparents, you see, had very different philosophies about how many old items in the house should be held onto. My grandma believed strongly that she might need to look at that stack of TV guides from the 1970s and, as you know from prior sermons, she had an epic collection of empty Cool Whip containers just in case. My grandpa, on the other hand, was a fitful organizer. He was occasionally seized with passionate zeal for empty countertops and cleared-out corners. And on one such occasion, he went nuclear.

Their attic was a place where no person dared tread; the detritus of decades was accumulated there—old photo albums, broken toys, enough boxes of papers to rival the Library of Congress. And one day, my grandpa must have been seized by a vision of cleanliness, and he just snapped. He had that baptism of fire burning him up inside. So he stole up the ladder to that attic and before we knew it, he had pried open the little window and was tossing bags of old clothes and God knows what else down onto the front lawn for all the neighbors to see!

You want to talk about households divided. Hell hath no fury like Verna Hooper on that day; she was up that ladder fast as a squirrel and a whole lot louder than one. Even Scary Jesus would have been scared. I won’t bore you with the gory details, but let’s just say every single item went back up into the attic and my grandfather learned afresh the meaning of marital penitence.

I would venture to say, though, that neither of them was fully in the right. I get my grandpa’s point: when we are frustrated by the weight and mess of the world, it is indeed tempting to think we should just toss it all out and start over. Send in the cleansing flood, or break down the walls of the spoiled vineyard, as Isaiah puts it today. Just let it all go.

But my grandma had a point too—there are things worth saving, even in the messiness. There are things that should be preserved, and there has to be someone willing to stand up for their value.

As is usually the case, the path of wisdom falls somewhere in the middle of these two postures. We have to figure out what to hold onto and what to let go of, and how to tell the difference. That’s the kind of division that Jesus is talking about. He is not interesting in starting fights among families for no good reason. But he does need the human family—all of us, together—to really get clear about what matters and what doesn’t. Have we figured it out yet? Maybe we’re still working on that. I hope we are.

Because that work of division, friends, that laborious and slow discernment between heirloom and junk, that is what the church is asked to do in each age. Informed by study, shaped by community, emboldened by love, empowered by the Spirit, we have to decide as best we can what stays and what goes. What is the substance of God’s mission and what is just clutter. And we do that, hopefully, for ourselves and one another here, and then we step out into the public square and declare the truth there, too.

And it’s funny, you know—I think The Episcopal Church is accused sometimes of being like my grandpa; that we, seized by some vision of inclusivity and love and social justice, have tossed out all of the fundamentals of the faith. This is absurd to me. As if, somehow, love and inclusivity and justice were not themselves the exact fundamentals that God is always interested in. I’ve read the Bible, thank you very much, and God does indeed care about those things deeply. Come to think of it, maybe we are the fundamentalists after all!

In truth we have not been seized by misguided zeal; but nor are we like my grandma that day, digging in our heels, holding onto the past. Instead we have been doing the long, careful, imperfect labor of figuring out what stays and what goes in the unfolding emergence of God’s kingdom. We are still doing it. We will always be doing it. Debating Scripture and structure. Cherishing our hymns and collects like Cool whip containers that are enduringly useful. And letting go of some of those old prejudices and fears, like TV guides that have nothing helpful to show us.

We do all of this, by the way, not because we are “getting political” but because we are faithful to the God who is still speaking into the present moment. We hear the message of the Lord and we take it seriously. We hear Jesus, who says I have not come to bring mere peace—I have not come to bring a passive acceptance of the deadening forces of this world. No, I have come to bring an ever-renewed capacity for division between right and wrong, I have come to bring clarity and awareness. I have come to empower a choice between what is true and what is a lie. So follow me, he says, follow me with love as our guide, and find out which is which, and let’s learn to speak it out loud.

How urgently we need to follow him now, this truth-telling, fundamentally loving and unafraid Jesus. How urgently we need to tell the world who he actually is, and not what he has been made out to be by the transactional exigencies of partisanship, culture, and power.

Because Scary Jesus, Prophetic Jesus, No Nonsense Jesus, the Jesus that I fear and love and follow, has never changed his message. He has never submitted to the lies of any age. And he never will.

Today we hear his rejection of a cheap comfort at the expense of truth. We hear his dedication to separating out what is worthy and good from what is destructive to the human spirit, and we see his willingness to die and rise again for the sake of this gentle and hospitable Kingdom. A Kingdom where all are welcomed at the table. That is what Jesus is about. That is who Jesus is.

And if that is somehow offensive to the prevailing and popular order of things—GOOD. If that is divisive—GOOD. I would rather stand in the divisiveness of an unequivocal love for all people; I would rather pay the price for that divisiveness; I would rather pursue its invitation to the edge of comfort and respectability, just like Jesus did, than live in uneasy peace with the world as it is.

I would rather the institutional church die singing songs of love than live for something other than the real Jesus. I would rather be mocked and misunderstood for doing the long, hard, foolish, communal work of sifting through the brokenness and the beauty of life and crafting a future out of it, together. Us and God, together. It’s not easy or efficient, but that’s the only kind of church I want to be.

So what kind of church are we going to be, my friends?

Maybe, with God’s help, the kind that is able to do some division.

And wouldn’t you know, as it happens, that is also exactly what occurred eventually with my grandparent’s house, long after the attic incident.

Once they were both gone, my family members carefully went through every room determining what to let go and what to hold onto. It was hard, and it was grief, and it was love, and it was the resurgence of a million precious memories. I think the clothes and the TV guides did go away; sorry Grandma. But not everything. Some things, like that old organ in my office, and like the Cool Whip containers that show up in my sermons, some things endure, undaunted by the years.

And that was, in the end, the necessary division—the healthy, holy division—which made what really matters so very clear to us.

That is the work we must all do eventually. And it is the work of the church, too.

So, if we are feeling brave, let’s go up to the attic, and sit down amid all the boxes of memory, and regret, and fear, and hope. Let’s speak of what is true, and admit what never was.

Let’s hold it all up to the light—and sort through—and do the work the Lord has given us to do.

What Else?: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, August 3, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The congregation celebrated a baptism and the lectionary texts cited are Hosea 11:1-11 and Luke 12:13-21.

I love a baptismal Sunday. I may be biased, but there’s nothing like a baptism to remind us what life truly is—they get us in touch with the fundamentals of what life is actually about.

We start with water—that most fundamental of elements. And then there are families gathered, in all their joyful complexity—also fundamental. And there’s hope, and maybe a little bit of nervousness and distraction, all fundamentally normal things to feel. And there can be some tears, too, and that’s perfectly ok. Tears accompany us through all of life’s fundamental moments, after all.

Because most of all, there’s love. The love of community. The love of the ones who share life with us. And the love of God in Christ, that fundamental love which holds all the rest of it together.

Now, you may be surprised to learn this, but no classes or studies are explicitly required in The Episcopal Church before a person gets baptized. Not because we don’t care about learning, but because it’s really quite difficult to put into words the fullness of what baptism is—how it renders within us a new creation; how it ends us; how it begins us again each day; and how it ties us inextricably to Jesus, he who is the kite on the wind of God, and all of us the slightly terrified tail of the kite pulled heavenward into storms and rainbows and other untold wonders.

See, we fall into metaphors with baptism, always. It’s hard to put into words. So we just sort of dive into it and then spend our lives trying to figure it out.

And one of our best efforts at this, I think, is something we will recite in a few minutes. It’s called the Baptismal Covenant, which sounds a bit officious, but is really just our attempt to put words to what baptism has wrought upon us after the water is put away and the tears are dried and all we are left with is the strange sense that a threshold in our heart has been crossed.

And what the Baptismal Covenant says, in so many words, is this: baptism is the point of entry into real life, the way God intended it to be. It describes those things that help us be truly alive, things like prayer and fellowship and learning, and also a particular posture toward the world: one of humility and service and justice-seeking. The Covenant suggests that, as Jesus showed us, these things are the way into an encounter with unending life, right here, right now. You might call it Big Life, capital B, capital L.

We get baptized so that we can put this Big Life on for size, sort of like when we were kids, slipping into our parents winter coats. The idea is that we might, with God’s help, grow up to wear it fully ourselves.

See, always with the metaphors.

But it’s good, it’s very good that we would try to put all of this into words on happy days like this, and maybe especially on harder days, when the world or our own lives seem to look nothing like the Big Life we dreamt of—when we find that, after all these years, we are still children crying in our parent’s winter coats, waiting to feel like a grown up. On those hard days, we need some words to call us back to ourselves and help us begin again.

And if kites and winter coats are all just a bit too much of a stretch for you, never fear, I’ve got one more metaphor inspired by this week’s Scriptures, so stick with me. It’s this:

Baptism is a question. It’s a question planted in our hearts. A simple, two-word question we are invited to carry through the rest of our life. And the question is, “what else?”

Here’s what I mean.

In today’s Scripture readings, we first have this astounding passage from Hosea.

Like any good prophet, Hosea is giving voice to God’s inner dialogue, God who is so upset with ancient Israel, so angry and disappointed at the way they’ve turned out—how selfish, how wayward, how lost as a people. God’s wants to know: when will you grow up? When will you understand what life is about? Do I have to keep punishing you to make you see?

And then, God has a revelation of His own. He says to himself:

When Israel was a child, I loved him.

It was I who taught Ephraim to walk.

I took them up in my arms.

I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks.

How can I give you up, O Ephraim?

How can I hand you over, O Israel?

In other words, God says, no, no, no more heartbreak. No more floods that destroy and wars that avenge. No more winter coats that never quite fit. My children, my people, my beloved, my own—what else? What else can we be to each other, you and your God? What else can I do to help you grow? What else can heal the cracks of this broken earth and make it flow with streams of righteousness rather than rivers of blood? What else? What else?

For I am God and no mortal. I will not come in wrath.

I am so tired of telling you to follow me, to love me or else. So instead I ask, with hope and tenderness: what else?

And for those of us who follow Jesus and perceive the truth of him and make him our own Lord, that “what else” is our baptism into his life. He who comes in something other than wrath. He who came to the River Jordan to be baptized himself, to show us what real life—God’s life—actually is. Tears and storms and rainbows and untold wonders.

Which is why this parable that Jesus shares with his disciples—it’s not just some moralistic rant about storing up material wealth. Most of the people originally hearing this had few material resources anyway. No, this is Jesus, God, staring deep into us, we terrified souls attached to his heaven-bound kite, unsure whether we are ready to be carried away by him on the wind of the Spirit. We who think we can make ourselves safe and sound so as to hide from real life, and it is God saying,

You fool! You blessed, silly, beautiful, scared, foolish children of mine, stumbling in your winter coats. This very night, this very moment, right now, with every breath, your life is being demanded of you. And I will help you live it! Trust in me! Trust in this! Let me bathe you in my love!

And I know that you are scared, and I know that the world is disappointing and cruel sometimes, and it might seem easier to look away, but to be baptized into this life is to ask what else is possible for us? What else might we do together, you and I? What else might we be to each other, God and neighbor, heaven and earth, forever and now, bound up together in this one glorious kingdom that wells up in our midst like water in a font?

What else might be waiting for us if we shared in life together, you and I? What words might we speak to one another then?

Baby Noelle, today we will splash a bit of water on you, and it will be cleansing and it will be tears and it will be aliveness and danger and it will be more than we can ever express.

And we will cradle you close and gently tie you to the tail of that luminous kite, the One who will carry you across the landscape of your life, forever. And it will be grace, and it will be mystery, and it will be good and hard and more than we can ever understand.

But we will stand with you, and for you, and we will speak that Covenant made for us and by us and in us since time immemorial, in the best way that we can, with the imperfect words of our hearts. We will grow up into it together.

And then all of us, Noelle, you and I, and everyone who has ever been baptized into life as it really is—we will dry our tears, and we will hold our loved ones, and we will go to the threshold and look out into the complicated world that waits there, and we will begin again each day with God’s simple question:

What else?

And the answer, whatever we make it, will be our life.