God – Page 8 – By Another Road

Promised Land: A Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emperor: A Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bittersweet: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, October 15, 2023 at Saint Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, Ohio. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 22:1-14, one of Jesus’ particularly challenging parables about a wedding banquet and a violent king.

I remember, when I was much younger, how great I thought it would be to drink coffee. You know, my mom would have it at home in the morning, or I would smell it brewing in a coffee shop, and I thought it surely had to be the most delicious thing ever. The fact that I was not allowed to drink it because it was “for grown-ups” probably made it all the more tantalizing. And so I wondered, when would I get to taste this magical drink with its secret power that apparently only adults could handle? My cousins and I would play with a plastic tea party set sometimes, setting out the cups and saucers and sipping on air, and I always imagined that it was coffee in the cup, and I would pretend to drink it in carefully, as if I were imbibing the mysteries of the universe, rich and delicious and sweet.

Then, the day came when I actually tried coffee for the first time. I think it was out of the pump pot in my grandparents kitchen. Nobody was looking, so I got out a cup and watched the steaming dark liquid cascade down and then held it up to my lips, ready to see what the mysteries of the universe actually tasted like.

I promptly spit it out. Whatever I was expecting coffee to be, that weird, bitter brew was not it. I thought, why on earth would anyone willingly drink this?! Grown-ups must be out of their minds! Those empty tea cups with their imaginary sweetness were far preferable to whatever this nastiness was.

Now, of course, that was a long time ago, and some of you know that I am now mildly obsessed with coffee. Like many grown ups, for whatever reason I have come to appreciate its oddly compelling mixture of bitterness and sweetness, the way its flavors can be both bright and deep all at once. Those were not things I was prepared for the first time I tried coffee, but over time, cup by cup, its complexities and paradoxes have become deeply satisfying.

And with apologies to the tea and hot chocolate drinkers out there, I think faith might be a little bit like coffee, for faith, too, necessitates a willingness to embrace complexity and paradox, to savor robust and impenetrable flavors, and to be jolted awake from time to time.

Case in point: our Gospel text this week, where we have quite a bit to wrestle with. As one commentator says, it is a parable that will make anyone trying to interpret it go weak in the knees. We might need a good cup of coffee to tackle this one.

So let’s just acknowledge this up front: if the Kingdom of God is anything like this wedding banquet and this king, I don’t know who on earth would want to be a part of it. The imagery that Jesus uses here seems to fly directly in the face of our understanding of an inclusive, expansive, forgiving, welcoming God. We are troubled by this retaliatory king, his excess and his violence; we are discomfited by the idea of someone thrown into the outer darkness for wearing the wrong garment to a party. That sort of callousness sounds too much like the world we already know, not the one we long for. It’s a bitter cup to swallow.

But one of the things that we must remember when we approach the parables of Jesus is that they are not simple, allegorical fables. They don’t describe heaven, nor do they describe the precise nature of God. They are not a rule book for how to live well. No, the parables are intentionally disturbing, they are acrid on the tongue, because they are meant to wake us up, to make us a bit jittery, to question our assumptions, and, most importantly, to realize that the inbreaking of the good news of God will not be anything like the existing conventions and power structures of this world. Let me say that again: the good news of God will not be anything like the existing conventions and power structures of this world.

And that is indeed good news, because you only need to glance at recent headlines to see that the existing conventions and power structures of this world are incapable of bringing out the peace for which we long. And so, in its own, strange and paradoxical way, there is hope in this disturbing parable, hope in the notion that the Kingdom of God has nothing to do with the worn out systems of patronage and privilege where all the usual faces are invited to the banquet.

On the contrary, in this parable, the Kingdom is a feast that nobody really wants to attend, because it is as dangerous as it is desirable, as costly as it is dazzling. The stakes are uncomfortably high, and the risks are just as great as the rewards.

And then you look again at those news headlines, and you think about what it means to actually live in this world and be present to it—its pleasures and its pain, its beauty and its terror—and you begin to realize: the Kingdom of which Jesus speaks, the feast in which we tremble to take part—is simply the real world, the world where we stop playing pretend, where God abides and calls us to risk everything for the sake of love. It is the world we discover when we grow up and stop sipping on air and begin to taste the deep, dark, bittersweet mystery of life as it actually is, not as we imagined it to be.

Later this morning, we will baptize baby Lydia, and of the many ways that we can speak about baptism, one of the ways that I often think about it is this: it is to be initiated into reality. It is so easy to spend our lives under a cloud of delusion and daydreams, hiding from the truth about ourselves and our world.

But God says, no, I desire that you would truly live, that you would truly look upon this world and learn how to love it, even in its brokenness, and so by water and the indwelling of my Spirit, I awaken you. I enmesh you in my love. I incorporate you into my accountability for the well-being of all things. I give you the bitter cup of which I myself have drunk, the cup of life, by which all illusion dies and by which your soul will burn with the fire of the eternal stars. This is my gift, God says: to make you as real and as alive as I am, marked as Christ’s own forever.

It is terrifying, wondrous, beautiful thing, to be baptized. It is a terrifying, wondrous, beautiful thing to be truly alive. To be guided and shaped by the requirements of love. To be drawn out into the complexities and paradoxes where God is at work, to do what we can, while we can, as best we can.

It is like a banquet that, if one were to truly count the cost, nobody would want to attend.

But it is also the only choice we have, if we wish to be truly part of this world. For the cities still burn, and the kings still rage, and the feast is still costly, but the Kingdom of Heaven is like the one who says: I will put on a garment of compassion and I will attend anyway.

So fill up my cup. I am ready to live.

Mountaintop: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, September 24, 2023 at Saint Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Philippians 1:21-30.

Sometimes it feels like you have to possess superhuman capacities to face the enormity of the world’s challenges. In times of social strife or of personal distress, we might look at inspirational figures from the past, looking for some guidance about how to live bravely and well through times such as these.

But it can also feel, for me at least, like those inspiring saints of ages past must have possessed some otherworldly insight or giftedness to do what they did, to face what they faced. And I find myself wondering how on earth they found the strength, what secret wisdom must have guided them.

On April 3, 1968, one day before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his final public address in Memphis, Tennessee in support of a sanitation workers’ strike. It’s referred to as his “Mountaintop” speech, and in case you’ve never heard it, or if it’s been a while, here is the final, unforgettable piece of it, where King said,

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

What is striking for many people about King’s final message, of course, is the sense that he knew, on some level, what was about to happen, that he somehow foresaw the end of his own journey.

But it’s not King’s seeming anticipation of his own death that I find the most compelling thing about this speech. It’s that he seemed to be at peace with it. It’s the way he stood in that perilous moment speaking something that sounds a lot like joy, a lot like hope. And not a naive sort of hopefulness that assumes everything will turn out fine. No, it sounds like the deep sort of hope, deeper than fear, the hope that knows how, even if everything goes wrong, even if the worst possible thing happens, that even then, there is a well of goodness underlying everything that will never run dry. The kind of hope that says even though my life may end, and my eyes may close, the vision endures, for

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming Lord. And I’m happy.

But then I think about the small anxieties that sometimes clutter my own life, and I look around at the big anxieties of our age, and I hear that opening prayer we offered, the one that says not to be anxious about earthly things, and I think—I’d sure like to know what that feels like. I’d sure like to know how Dr. King got to where he was on that April night. And although, God willing, none of us will ever face the danger he faced, I wonder what it would take for the rest of us to experience that deep kind of hope, that peace, that tenacious belief in the well of goodness, even in the face of our own hardships.

Is such a thing only for the saints and the heroes? Or is there some way that we, too, might travel up to the Mountaintop?

I think there is, and St. Paul helped me see it this week in his letter to the Philippians.

It’s interesting, in this passage we heard today, Paul sounds a lot like Dr. King; he, too, seems to possess a peace and a hope even as he is suspended between the possibility of life or death. He says,

I do not know which I prefer. I am hard pressed between the two: my desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better; but to remain in the flesh is more necessary for you.

Whatever else we might say about Paul, we know that he was a passionate person, deeply engaged in the life of the world. But death was on his mind, because he likely wrote this letter from prison in the final years of his life. He was put there by the Roman authorities, and while it was his ardent desire to be reunited with the various faith communities he had founded, there was surely a part of him that knew his chances of doing so were slim.

Like Dr. King, he was a man hunted. But also like Dr. King, he was a man haunted by possibility, who had glimpsed something on the proverbial mountaintop. He had glimpsed something and he insisted that what he had seen, what drove his entire mission, was not for a select group of wise or superhuman people, but for everyone, everywhere. It was the key to his hope, his peace, and his courage.

What was it?

Well, it was Jesus, of course, but more specifically, it was the revelation that in Jesus and through Jesus, God’s wants us to know that we are in this together. You and me and God and everyone else, we are in this together. We don’t have to face this alone. We are one people. We are one creation, redeemed by the one Living God. We are part of one story, and it is a good story, a story that begins in love and ends in love.

And though we are diverse, and though we each face our own choices and challenges and fears in each generation, it is this essential unity that holds us, that sustains us, and that places upon us the responsibility of caring for one another, loving our neighbor as ourselves, because fundamentally they are.

And although they don’t state it explicitly, what you will notice beneath the words of Dr. King and beneath the words of St. Paul is that they are able to face those big, frightening things, those questions of life and death and loss and hope, simply because they knew, deep down, that whatever happened, God would not abandon them nor would God abandon the story that has begun.

And when you know you aren’t alone, then you can face anything. That’s why we come here week after week. That’s why we keep challenging ourselves to build more fully the Beloved Community. That’s why we pray for each other and lean on each other through good times and bad, all the way to the end.

You, and me, and everyone we’ve ever loved, and everyone we’ve ever hated, and everyone we’ve ever lost, and everything that has ever been and the God who made it all—we’re in this together. And that’s it. That’s the Mountaintop. That’s the simple, world-changing, heart-transforming truth that sustains the saints but is also available to every single one of us, even in our anxieties. And even when we face death.

Catching a glimpse of the promised land is not a private revelation for the few—it’s everywhere. It’s as close as looking in your neighbors face and realizing: we belong to one another. It’s as close as looking down at the earth and realizing: we belong to one another. It’s as close as listening to God in the still moments and in the frightening moments and hearing God say to you: we belong to one another. In life, and in death, and beyond, we belong to one another.

Let’s keep building up a community here at Saint Anne where that is what it means to be the church. Let’s keep discovering what it means to belong to one another, and then to go out into the world and discover that ultimately we belong to everything. Maybe, if we do, we too will say, even at the end of our days:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. And I’m happy.

Free: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on September 17, 2023 at Saint Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, Ohio. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 18:21-35.

As I have shared with many of you, when I was a kid, I would spend the summers in Michigan with my dad and my grandparents. There were a number of things about those vacations that I looked forward to all year long, and a lot of them had to do with food. First there was my grandma’s cooking and baking, which filled the house with mouth-watering fragrances throughout the day. Her fresh strawberry pie was the stuff dreams are made of. But another thing was the little general store that was just down the block, an old-fashioned kind of place that sold a few groceries and sundries, but in which the main attraction, at least for an eight year old, was the selection of ice cream and penny candies and trading cards.

My cousin, Mike, and I were particularly interested in that selection of trading card packets, and it was our singular mission each year to get our hands on enough money to buy them. Now, of course, we could have just asked our family for spare change, but at some point we decided to get a bit entrepreneurial.

So, for several summers we would take over the enclosed, rarely used front porch of my grandparents’ house and we turned it into a couple of “shops” of our own, cobbled together with odds and ends from some spare room of the house, and offering what was, in retrospect, a rather underwhelming selection of goods and services. One iteration was a restaurant that served plastic play food and real glasses of water, 10 cents a piece. Another, perhaps my most efficient business model, was simply setting up a desk in the porch and declaring that the house was now a hotel, and that our family members now had the privilege of paying 25 cents a night to sleep in their own beds.

But our parents and our grandparents were dutiful customers, and so we collected up our coins day by day and ran down to the general store, and spent them all on cards and candy, quite pleased with ourselves.

This is a very happy memory, of course, but I was thinking about it this week because it occurred to me that for all those summers, while my cousin and I were focused on the nickels and dimes and quarters that would buy us all of those treats we daydreamed about, we were less aware of the most wondrous thing of all: that when we got tired of playing and scheming and striving for coins, we could just go down the hall to our grandma’s kitchen, and there would be more food and more love than we knew what to do with. And in the end, that was the truly priceless treasure. I don’t have much use for those trading cards anymore, I don’t even know what happened to them, but I would give just about anything for another bite of my grandma’s strawberry pie at that kitchen table, surrounded by loved ones who are now long gone.

We spend so much of our lives, I think, in a similar posture—so focused on the measurement and acquisition of the things we want (or think we want) while failing to sit up and recognize the immense—but less quantifiable—blessings in our lives: the relationships that shape us and sustain us and guide us forward, the simple gifts of time and care freely given by the ones who love us. And if we’re not careful, we might spend our whole existence scrounging for penny candies while the true feast sits, beckoning yet unappreciated, just down the hall.

For me, at least, this image has helped me think about the parable that Jesus offers us in today’s Gospel, which is also, at its heart, about a person who doesn’t really understand what he is being given.

A king forgives the debt of a slave, or a servant, as some translations put it, but then this servant refuses to do the same for someone in debt to him, and is thrust back into the fear and scarcity with which he started.

We are told that this is a parable about forgiveness, and that somehow it should model for us what the Kingdom of Heaven is like. The tricky part is that this King, who many of us interpret to represent God, ultimately rescinds the forgiveness originally offered. So is this a “be good or else” type of story, such that we should be forgiving others out of fear of eternal punishment?

I don’t think so. I don’t think God’s mercy has conditions like that, and I don’t think forgiveness under duress is a healthy or life-giving way of understanding human relationships. No, I think this parable is suggesting that the heart of forgiveness—and the heart of really every virtue we try to embody—is rooted in a proper understanding and appreciation of what is truly important in life. And it is not the things that can be counted.

We are not hearing this parable in Jesus’ own time and place, so we might miss the key point that the amount of debt forgiven by the king, 10,000 talents, is not just a big amount, it is an absurd amount—it is more money than any empire had, more money than someone could conceive of. And so the king in this parable is not just telling the servant he can walk away from his debts. He is essentially saying to the servant, walk away from the entire notion of indebtedness. I am uninterested in measuring it anymore. You are free now. Everything is free now. Live as if this is true.

This is good news, but it is also strange news, for we are all too accustomed to counting the cost of everything, both literally and figuratively. And so the real mistake that the servant makes is that he does not comprehend the gift that has been given. The servant doesn’t understand that he is living in a kingdom where there is no longer any need for calculation, where there is no grasping and groveling, where there is no currency at all. Just the current of goodwill that encompasses all things, all people.

He doesn’t see it, or he refuses to see it, and so he keeps on counting the cost, he keeps on demanding payment from others, because that is what he knows how to do, and his inability to understand that another way is possible, his refusal to trust that another way has been given to him, sends him right back to the dead end where he started, back to the world that is easier to believe in, where Kings torture and no payment is ever enough. And to the extent that we have treated love and forgiveness and grace as commodities to be bought and sold and bartered, the same will be true for us. We will have missed the point. We will have squandered the true gift. That other realm, where everything is possible, will be lost to us.

So no, Jesus is not just saying be kind and forgiving or else. Jesus is saying, if you would enter into the Kingdom of God, if you would understand mercy, if you would know what it truly feels like to love and be loved, to forgive and be forgiven, then look up from your games, beloved children, stop playing shopkeeper. You have to realize that the important stuff is all free. You don’t have to spend your life scrounging for coins to purchase paradise. 10,000 talents are worthless in my sight; your heart is the true treasure.

Because this Kingdom is not, in fact, a hotel with a 25 cent nightly rate; it’s just the house we get to call home, if we choose it, and the light is always on in the front porch, and there’s a feast at the end of the hallway, luscious as strawberry pie, a slice for everyone, free of charge.

That’s what forgiveness is, when you get down to it: love without a price tag. And when we realize it is all free, then we will be free, too. Forever.

The Law: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, September 10, 2023 at Saint Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Romans 13:8-14.

One night when I was in my early 20s, I was out with a couple of people at a pub. One of them was the man whom I was dating at the time, and at some point in the evening we must have held hands or in some other way indicated that we were together. I got up to use the restroom, and as I was washing my hands, I suddenly heard a group of people who had assembled outside the bathroom door; it was clear that they were talking about me and that they were unhappy with my presence in their midst. As I opened the door, a group of about 8 people, men and women, surrounded me and started yelling at me. They called me names and said a number of things that were very hard to hear, but the thing I heard that has stuck with me in the years since is when one of the women yelled, “you’re breaking God’s law! You’re breaking God’s law!”

I was able to make my way through them somehow and I made a beeline for the front door. The people I was with followed me out and we quickly put some distance between ourselves and that place. Thankfully no one followed us.

Later that night after walking around and calming our nerves a bit, we paused by the river. The city we were in was near the coast, the air was warm and still, and as we rested and watched the moon reflecting upon the water, suddenly out of nowhere we saw a dolphin leaping out of the water, glistening in the dim light.

It was so perfect, so surreal, that it felt like a dream, and we fell silent with awe. And what struck me was how strange it was that a vision of such perfect beauty and an experience of such shame and fear could all exist in the span of one evening. And I knew, in a way that I couldn’t quite explain, that whatever God’s law was, whatever it meant to follow that law, it had more to do with this moment of silent wonder and unexpected beauty than it did with whatever those people had been screaming at me about inside.

I share that story with you not out of a sense of self-pity nor to vilify anyone. We all have our harms and our hurts to account for, and so I’ve tried my best to let that experience in the pub be an instructive one. And what it has taught me, what I fiercely believe because of it and because of other stories I’ve heard from people who are different in one way or another, is that we must continue to wrestle with the meaning and the purpose of the law recorded in Scripture as it has been received in Christian tradition. We must continue to ask ourselves what the Judeo-Christian law is meant to look like and sound like and the fruits that it is meant to bear in our own lives and in our world.

Because although it might be tempting sometimes, when confronted with the violence or prejudice perpetuated in its name, we cannot ignore the law or dismiss it as irrelevant to modern life. Because we are followers of Jesus, and earlier in Matthew’s gospel he says quite clearly: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.”

Such a conundrum: how do we honor what the Law represents—God’s eternal, unchanging desires for how we are to live—while also recognizing that the original writers of the Law were speaking to the needs and concerns of a highly particular culture and geography and context?

How do we arrive at a place where the Law by which we pattern our lives is both substantive and kind, both a defense against harm and yet also a gateway to liberation? How do we conceive of the Law in a way that guards against our most dehumanizing tendencies and yet is as beautiful and elemental and free as that dolphin cresting the shimmering water? Can such a Law be found and followed?

Yes.

Owe no one anything, Paul says this morning, owe no one anything except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet”; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.

Love is the fulfilling of the Law. If you take nothing else away from this sermon, I hope you will take that. Love is the fulfilling of the Law.

Or another way of saying it: the only true measure of the Law is love. The only true measure of whether we are obeying God’s Law is how well, how deeply, how broadly we are embodying love.

And so if you have, in your life, ever been told that you are unworthy, or if you have ever felt lost or forgotten, or if you have ever struggled to figure out how to be good enough, how to to be strong enough, how to simply be enough in a world that too often fixates on how we fall short, I want you to remember: love is the fulfilling of the Law.

And if you have witnessed the endless debates about what makes a person truly Christian, what makes a church truly Christian, what it means to follow God’s Law, then I want you to remember, love is the fulfilling of the Law.

And, yes, we can study the history and the context of Scripture to understand how and why the Law took the form it did in that time and place where it was first recorded. But we can also honor the truth that love takes on new contours, new understandings to meet the realities and the revelations of our present moment. And this is not weak or permissive-on the contrary, to love unreservedly is the bravest thing we can do.

Because if love is the true fulfillment of the law, well, love is scary. Love is risky and strange and it doesn’t always go the way you planned, it doesn’t always look the way you expected. And love demands things of you, it demands you to bend and grow and weep and dance. It requires you to sit beneath the moon and hold pain and beauty alongside one another and still say yes, yes, I will still believe in love, even when the world is ugly and cruel. I will still believe in Love Incarnate, even though he was crucified. And I will still believe that love endures, that it persists beneath the surface of life, cresting unexpectedly to dazzle us, to save us, to remind us of what is true.

How will love show up for us this year at Saint Anne? How will we discover it amidst the pain and promise of our own lives? How will be give ourselves over to its invitation as we begin a new season of ministry and worship and community? I urge you to listen to how God is stirring your heart into action.

Whether it is offering a word of support to someone who is struggling with grief, or a word of hope to a society struggling with injustice; whether it is tending the lawn or tending to the shattered fragments of someone’s spirit; whether it is learning to sing or helping others find their own voice; studying Scripture or simply sitting in awe beneath the moon—no matter what you do, if it is offered in love, then it is one more indication of the coming Kingdom, and it is one more revelation of the unchanging truth that will guide us and sustain us in any age:

Love is the fulfilling of the law. And love is the one thing that can never truly be broken.

Two Fires: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, September 3, 2023 at Saint Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Exodus 3:1-15 and Matthew 16:21-28.

Throughout the wider church, this month begins what is called the Season of Creation. It’s a time when we consider our interrelatedness with all created things and how our connection to the natural elements might shape the elements of our faith. So today, in that spirit, I want to tell you two stories about fire.

The first will probably sound familiar: when I was a kid, I spent summers up in the north woods of Michigan, and one of my favorite memories is of the campfires that my dad and my grandpa would build out by the lake. There were s’mores, of course, and ghost stories, and as the evening wore on, a companionable silence settled in as the wood snapped and the flames danced in the darkness. And what I love about that memory of fire is not that it was something unique to me or my family, but that it felt like something that people have been doing forever. I suspect most of us have, at some point, experienced a similar quiet pleasure around a fire pit, where, as the night enfolds us, busyness gives way to simply being, and the amber glow creates a sense of closeness and belonging for all those who are bathed in its light.

The second story is less comforting. When I was in seminary in northern California, having returned to the state after many years away, one of the things that was hard to ignore was the pervasive and intense threat of wildfire, far more so than when I grew up there as a child. Due to the corrosive effects of climate change, the fires across our continent are bigger and more widespread than ever before, and each year one must live under their shadow, both literally and figuratively.

There was one fall where the smoke from nearby fires poured into Berkeley and the sky was gray like fog and the sun was red and we had to wear N95 masks to go outside long before COVID made them necessary for other reasons. And I remember how my friends and I discussed whether we should pack a bag with essentials ready to grab should the wildfire jump to the nearby hillsides. We wondered where we would escape to if they did. I thought of that again, recently, when smoke enveloped the midwest from Canadian wildfires and while watching videos of people flee the town of Lahaina as Maui burned.

This is the duality of fire: it warms and sustains, but it also consumes and destroys. We need it, and we fear it. We rejoice in its beauty, but we ignore its power at our peril.

And so perhaps it is no surprise that fire often appears in key moments of Scripture where God is revealed to humanity, for that same duality characterizes our relationship with the Holy. God is the source of our life and yet also of our trembling. God is the light of belonging and is also the burning heat that lays bare our pretenses of safety. And, as Scripture attests, the challenge of life with God is to learn how to hold both of these understandings at the same time.

When Moses sees the burning bush, he is not immediately afraid, but attracted. This fire in the wilderness that burns but does not consume is not exactly a campfire, but it is a sign of God’s desire to gather in the people of Israel and tell them a new story. Moses and the burning bush form an image of humanity drawing together in communion with its Creator; and Moses’ experience suggests that when we gather in close to listen to God, we too will hear a promise of deliverance; we too, in the companionable silence, might hear the name of the One who abides with us.

This story reminds us that part of our calling is to form communities where everyone and anyone can come hear the story of how God will liberate and heal all of creation. And even if we, like Moses, feel unworthy or unprepared to take part in that story, we are part of it, because the place we are standing is already holy ground.

But gentle warmth is only half the story. Because this morning we also hear Jesus telling his disciples—in fiery, unsparing language—about the true nature of discipleship: the necessity of death and relinquishment and the searing pain of the cross that he will soon experience. We do not need to indulge in theologies that glorify suffering nor should we promote the idea that people’s pain is itself holy. But we do have to acknowledge that God’s activity in the world is not always cozy; it’s not limited to upholding that which comforts us.

Through the Cross of Christ, God is like a wildfire, laying waste to the structures and the systems and the sins that confine and subjugate and placate; God’s intention is to incinerate them with justice; God means to engulf them in peace, so that something new might spring up. And this type of divine fire is dangerous—dangerous to the powerful, dangerous to the complacent, dangerous to anything within us our around us that stands in the way of the Kingdom’s coming. Get behind me, Satan, Jesus says to Peter, not because he hates Peter but because he rejects Peter’s assumptions of comfortable messiahship, of self-satisfied discipleship, and he intends to burn away those parts of ourselves that resist God’s mission in the world. As John the Baptist once said, “the one who is coming after me …will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” Now we begin to see what he meant.

So, two stories about fire, and two stories about God’s presence in the world. Two stories that are part of our own story, which must be held in tension and told and lived into, again and again, in every generation.

How are we, at Saint Anne, gathering others in toward the burning bush? How are we creating a community with space enough for everyone to share their story, to delight in fellowship, to sing and study and pray and learn together? And how are we making sure others know that this fire burns as a sign for all people? Because it’s important to remember that Moses’s encounter with God in the desert was not a private revelation. It was the initiation of a public mission, one that radiated outward with light and heat and hope. There is a story about the world that does not end in division or oppression or fear. Are we telling that story beyond these walls? Are we inviting people to gather ‘round, to come and rest in its light? This is the call of the burning bush.

At the same time, how are we, at Saint Anne, taking up the Cross as the sign of God’s categorical rejection of all that would harm and oppress and stifle the flourishing of life on this planet? Because it’s not enough for us to gather around the campfire while the world burns. Jesus could have stayed in Galilee telling stories with his friends if that’s all that was needed to save creation.

But he didn’t. He took on the Cross—the ultimate symbol of degradation and cruelty—in order to consume it with the power of his love. And we who would follow him, we, too, have to look for the crosses of our own time—the failings, the fault lines, the dehumanizing tendencies of our hearts and our culture—and we have to take them up and take them on, speaking the word of love that is like fire, so that the crucifying forces of this world will be revealed for what they are: a lie. A delusion. A pile of ashes. This is the call of the Cross.

The good news that I have already witnessed at Saint Anne is that we are engaged in both of these things—the gathering in around the fire, and the setting the world aflame with love. But as we prepare for another program year, as we prepare for a new season of ministry together, I encourage you to consider how you are taking part in these two stories yourself, whether through education, through prayer, through advocacy and justice-seeking, through service, through pastoral care, or through the many ways that we build up and enrich life in this community. I hope you will make that commitment, knowing that you will never be walking alone as you do so.

Because here’s the thing: God is already doing what God will do in the world: beckoning and illuminating, dismantling and renewing. Our choice, our vocation, our glorious gift and responsibility is whether we will join in, whether we will rest in the light, and whether we will become like holy fire ourselves, fierce, fluid, and free.

In the end, it’s not two stories about fire, but one. Just one story, reconciled in the burning heart of Christ, one story that holds all of life, that holds all of creation, and it is God’s story and, if we so choose, of we so dare, it is also ours.

Seen: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on August 27, 2023 at Saint Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Exodus 1:8-2:10, Romans 12:1-8, and Matthew 16:13-20.

Some years ago, there was an essay published in the New York Times and it was tantalizingly titled, “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This.” Now, I admit that I was rather skeptical when I saw that title; it sounded like one of those ads you see on the internet, offering “one weird trick” to make you look ten years younger or to regain your lost hair. As you can see, I have not generally taken advantage of those ads.

But being single at the time, I was intrigued by the idea of a surefire method for finding love, so I read on. The author, Mandy Len Catron, described a study done in the 90s by psychologist Dr. Arthur Aron, which suggested that significant levels of connection between two people could be achieved very quickly by asking one another a series of 36 vulnerable questions over a 90 minute period. After asking all of the questions, according to the Times essay, you were then supposed to gaze into the eyes of the other person for *exactly* four minutes and…voila. Love.

If this sounds a bit far-fetched to you, I get it, though for the record, in both the original study and in the essay, some marriages did emerge from this initial moment of connection. So, hey, you never know. Dating is tough, you have to get creative.

But romance aside, it does make sense to me that there would be a unique sort of potency in the combination of knowing and seeing someone with great intentionality. So often, we only casually consider the people in proximity to us, even the ones we are around a great deal. We know their names, maybe some of their hobbies or associations, and their general appearance, but how often do we look, really look at them? How often do we seek to know, really know, something substantive about their inner life or their memories or their dreams? For that matter, how often do we strive to see and to know ourselves in that way?

It can be a little scary, if we’re honest, to know and to be known on that level. Maybe we fear that if someone actually sees us as we are, all of us, every mistake, every quirk, every wrinkle, we will become less lovable in their eyes. And maybe we fear if we see others in their fullness, we won’t know what to do with it, we won’t be up to the task of loving them in the way they need.

I’ve been on both sides of that equation. I think of the times when I have been hesitant to share my story and my identity with others for fear of rejection. And I think of the times, whether in my hurry or my hard-heartedness, that I haven’t looked into the eyes of that person seeking assistance on the street, my gaze downcast, hiding from them, hiding from our shared humanity. Maybe you’ve experienced these things as well: opportunities missed to be seen, to see, to experience the connection that only comes from open eyes and open hearts.

But we learn in Scripture time and time again that the flourishing, the healing, and the salvation that we seek can only be found when we dare to look and to be looked upon, in that space of mutual recognition, both with our neighbor and with God.

In our Exodus story, it is the willingness of the midwives to see the beauty and the humanity of the Hebrew children that gives them the courage to defy Pharaoh’s edict.

And St. Paul is encouraging a certain type of self-disclosure in the letter to the Romans when he invites the faithful to ‘present [their] bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God” offering up not just the parts of themselves that seem impressive or strong or unmarred, but the totality of themselves, their creaking bones and their broken hearts and their unanswered questions, to let all of it be placed upon the altar of life, where God in Christ will see it all, and hold it all, and render it all into something beautiful.

But part of the strange and lovely mystery of the gospel is that the work of seeing and being seen is not humanity’s alone. Because in Jesus, God’s own life is laid out for us to see, it is placed on the altar, too, that we might know him and render something beautiful from divine self-disclosure.

And so God stands before us with his own list of vulnerable questions, his own desire to look us in the eye for four minutes, or maybe forever, to give us a glimpse of his eternal longing for us.

This is what we encounter in today’s Gospel passage, in that all important question on Jesus’ lips, perhaps the most vulnerable question that God has ever asked of humanity: Who do you say that I am?

Who do you say that I am, my friends, my children, my infuriating and precious creation? Who do you say that I am, now that we are face to face? Am I another prophet? Am I another king? Am I a projection of your own desires? Am I an instrument of your political agendas? A benefactor to meet your needs? Or do you see, do you know, do you feel the way that it is much more than that, do you sense how heaven erupts in the space between us, the way that an undying love weaves in and out of every question I ask you and every story I share? Do you understand who I am and how far I have come in order that you might understand?

And if you understand, can you love me? Can you love me back, as I love you?

Who do you say that I am?

And Peter, on behalf of the other disciples, on behalf of all of us who would follow, says,

You are the Messiah. You are the Son of the Living God.

You are the One we’ve waited for. You are the Love of our Lives, you are the Love of Life itself. Yes, we understand.

And I like to think that Jesus smiles in that moment because at last God knows what it feels like to be seen.

If we want to know what heaven on earth can look like, how we might participate in it day by day, this moment is instructive. For if the God of the Universe came to be with us in the flesh, that we might see and know and name him as our own truest love, then perhaps our interactions with one another should reflect this.

Perhaps, on the most basic level, our discipleship begins simply by looking, really looking, into the eyes of the people we encounter—the familiar ones and the strangers, the friends and yes, even the enemies—especially the enemies—and saying, yes, I see you. I see you. At the very least I want to see you. And while I’m at it, let me show you something of myself, too, and maybe in that brief moment of vulnerability, when we behold each other, something new will begin to take root in each of us, something that feels a little bit like falling in love, even if only for a moment. It’s like one weird trick to change the world.

You might be wondering if I ever tried the experiment in that essay. Sort of. Matt and I have asked each other some of the questions, and they’re really good. The four minutes of eye contact still feels a little daunting to me.

But it has reminded me that one of the most fundamentally important things we can do, and one of the bravest, is simply to see what is, and to love what is, and to believe that we, too, are worthy of being seen and loved. Because if you look closely enough, no matter whom you meet, you will always be looking into the face of the Holy One, if you choose to recognize him.

Just like the essay said, to fall in love with anyone—or really, to fall in love with everyone—do this.

Do-Over: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, August 20, 2023 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 15:21-28, Jesus’ interaction with a Canaanite woman.

Have you ever looked back at some moment in your life and wished you could have a do-over? I know that it’s popular to say things like “no regrets” and “everything happens for a reason,” but if I’m perfectly honest, there are plenty of things I would change if I could. Some of them are a bit trivial, like my questionable fashion choices in high school (though some of these, as I approach 40, already seem to be coming back around).

But some of the regrettable things are a bit harder and heavier: the things in my life done and left undone, the things said and left unsaid. They jangle around in my memory like a set of keys—keys for doorways that can no longer be opened—tarnished and jagged and yet hard to throw away.

Truth be told, though, I am mostly ok with that. While I don’t think it’s helpful to myself or anyone else to wallow in regret, I do think there is value in remembering what has not gone well, what has been broken within us and broken by us, because it informs how we can make different choices in the present and on into the future.

This is true not just for individuals, but for communities and nations, too, all of whom must reckon with the more painful aspects of their histories if they ever hope to unlock the shackles that bind their greatest ideals, to liberate their deepest and most beautiful dreams.

We don’t get a do-over, exactly, but we get an infinite number of opportunities, as long as we live, to do better, to discern and to grow in wisdom, informed by our past but never imprisoned by it.

And this not just a sort of humanistic self-improvement philosophy, but the fundamental arc of Scripture, a story of promise and regret and repentance and redemption, a story which is itself filled with the messy choices of people and of nations wrestling with a Divine presence and power only partially understood, and yet who are drawn, always, always, into a new revelation of the breadth and the depth of God’s infinite power and unfailing ability to redeem our complicated histories.

I’ve been pondering all of this about do overs and doing better because, I think, it will help us wrestle with our challenging Gospel text this morning. Not solve it, but wrestle with it.

Let’s just name the hard thing up front: Jesus is, to say the least, not kind to the Canaanite woman; he associates her and her people with dogs, and seems uninterested, at first, in healing her daughter. And we could, as many have, spend a lot of time wondering whether he was having his own regrettable moment or whether he was, in some opaque Divine way, testing the woman’s faith. Given who Jesus is, neither of these two choices is particularly easy or comfortable.

But it is also good for us to step back and consider that for the disciples, and even for the original hearers of Matthew’s gospel, the truly remarkable thing in the narrative is not Jesus’ commitment to the children of Israel, nor his verbal sparring with the woman, but the fact that, ultimately, she is a Canaanite who receives God’s blessing.

For if Israel’s troubled collective memory is a set of old keys, their relationship with the Canaanites is a particularly heavy and sharp one—the Canaanites are the people who originally inhabited the Promised Land, they were the ones displaced and slaughtered by Joshua’s armies, they were among the ones subjugated by the Kingdom of Israel and even now, in Jesus’ time, under Roman rule, the Canaanites are still a people whose name evokes that strange mixture of pride and fear when we encounter those whom we have othered past the point of recognition.

And all of this, all of this spilled blood and rage and this faded ghost of empire is heaped upon the Canaanite woman—this woman who has surely knelt at her child’s bedside, eyes brimming with tears, praying for her to make it; this woman who shouts in the street; who cries out for help; who boldly kneels before Jesus and seeks her daughters survival. She is a woman of unquestionable courage, but as a Canaanite she is also a symbol of all that Israel has wrought, and all that they have lost. No wonder they want to silence here and send her away. We often try to ignore those who remind us of our own wounds.

But there’s something we have to understand about Jesus, something which both explains and underscores the significance of what happens next, the fact that he doesn’t send her away.

From the very beginning, when he was born as the Son of David in Bethlehem, Jesus has carried both the burden and the promise of Israel within his flesh—their chosenness and their chastening. We might even say that throughout his life, Jesus has embodied and recapitulated the original story of Israel.

And thus, Jesus, like Israel, is exiled into Egypt and then brought back; and like Israel he is sent into the desert to be tested and formed; and like Israel he bears out the weighty tradition of the prophets in his teaching and his miracles. And in all of these instances, he gathers up the glory and the pain and the belovedness of his people to bring it into an ever deepening level of Divine intimacy, knitting Israel’s story of liberation into the very fabric of creation, that it might become everyone’s story, in every time, in every nation.

Which makes his encounter, today, with the Canaanite woman, all the more significant, because we cannot forget that Israel’s history, its journey, is political and territorial, not just theological. And so now Jesus stands here, as Israel once did when they crossed with their armies to the other side of the Jordan, he stands here once again holding the life of a Canaanite in his hands, bearing the ancient grudges and the ancient fears of his people on his shoulders, and….he lays them down.

He lets this mother’s love, and her faith, and her fierce determination change the story. O Woman, he says, great is your faith, and while the past cannot be erased, somewhere a new has opened, and suddenly the Kingdom of Heaven is bigger than Israel alone, bigger than any one nation. And while the children of the ones who spilled each other’s blood cannot get a do-over, they can do better. They can tell a new story, a story in which the daughter of a Canaanite is as beloved and valued as anyone else, and in which the only conquering power is mercy, and where the only Promised Land is the one big enough for everyone.

Can we tell that story, too? Can we show the world what it looks like to do better, even if we can’t get a do-over on the most painful parts of our own history? Can we lay down our own ancient enmities and fears and misplaced nostalgia so that the best of who we have been might inform who we yet might become? These are deeply personal questions as well as collective ones for our church and for our world.

But the good news of the gospel is that the answer is always YES. Yes, there is something on the other side of regret. Yes, there is something on the other side of failure and fear. Yes, there is a place where we won’t need all those old keys jangling in our pockets after all, because in that place all the doors will be flung wide open, and no one will be shut out, and everything that has been lost will be found and made whole.

Call that place what you will: call it the Kingdom, call it the new Creation, or call it Canaan; by any name and by God’s grace we’re heading to that land of promise together, and when we arrive, I suspect it will feel like this: waking up to a mother’s face, brimming with joyful tears, saying, my child, all is well. I am here. You made it.

Love > Chaos: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on August 13, 2023 at St. Anne Episcopal Church in West Chester, OH, on the occasion of my first service as Rector. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 14:22-33, when Jesus walks to the disciples across a stormy sea.

Anyone who has ever moved, whether across the country or the globe, or even just across town, knows that it can be an experience of utter chaos. And although I was determined, back when my call to St. Anne was finalized, that for once I would have an incredibly organized and orderly moving process, and that I would have all my boxes packed weeks in advance, life had other ideas. A confluence of events, both planned and unplanned, conspired to find me, just several days before the moving truck arrived, drowning in piles of books and papers and boxes and yet more books, questioning why on earth I ever felt it necessary to acquire three separate copies of Shakespeare’s complete works and a cardigan sweater collection large enough to rival Mr. Rogers (you’ll see those in the fall).

One evening, as I sifted through the clutter and felt a rising anxiety that it all might rise up and swallow me whole, like Jonah in the belly of the fish, I opened a box of old papers and came across a collection of cards and letters, mostly from college days, some even older than that, and I started reading them. There were birthday cards from my late father; letters my mom sent me when she was living in Africa; postcards from old friends I haven’t seen in years. And as I sat there, reading through them, reminded of all the places I been and the people who have loved and cared for me so well along the way, I looked around at the disorder of my apartment and my life and I had a feeling of clarity, of reassurance, that yes, even here, even in the midst of change, in the midst of upheaval, love would sustain me, just as it always has.

Those moments of chaos, both large and small, are no stranger to any of us, I’m sure. No matter who we are or where we come from, there are turbulent seasons of life, when the safe and familiar fall away and we are left out in the open, unsure of how to navigate, or even just how to keep our head above water. And it is perhaps quite natural for us, in such moments, to assume that the resolution to chaos is its opposite: order. safety. calm. Once I get everything in my life in order, then it’ll all be ok. Once I get all my books and cardigans stacked and sorted, it will all be ok. Somewhere, over the rainbow, just on the other side of the chaotic present, there will be a moment where life makes perfect sense and nothing is complicated.

There’s just one little problem—that perfect order which we seek never quite comes to pass. Someone gets sick, or an unexpected bill comes along, or the person we expected to stick around says goodbye, or we simply have too much to do and not enough time. And the waters rise, and we feel, once again, like the forces of chaos are stronger than our best laid plans.

Surely the disciples felt a bit like this when they were out in that boat, battered by the storm on the sea. In the passage just before this, Jesus has just miraculously fed over five thousand people, so they’re all feeling pretty good about themselves, and then he says, take that boat and go over to the other side, and that seems straightforward enough for a group that includes some fishermen. But then the storm comes, and Jesus is nowhere to be found, and they are tired, and afraid, and the forces of chaos, both literal and proverbial, the dark and restless deep, the cresting wave, the rising anxiety, seems ready to overtake them, and any pretense of control, of order, of safety, is carried away on the howling wind.

And then, suddenly, in the midst of the chaos, there is Jesus, walking towards them on the water, saying do not be afraid, saying, take heart, saying, do not be afraid, saying come.

And I think it is crucial–if we are to understand what this gospel might be telling us about navigating the chaotic storms of our own time and of our own lives–it is absolutely crucial to note that Jesus does not make this invitation to step out of the boat after he has calmed the wind, but before. He speaks from out of the whirlwind, as God did to Job. He is, in effect, saying to Peter (and thereby to us) come out and walk with me on the troubled waters; come and stand out here, where there is more beauty than there is safety; out here where there is more meaning than there is order; and know that I have come to you, across the sea, across the waters of eternity, not always to make things simple, but to make them true.

For it is here, in that space where nothing is familiar and yet where everything is possible, where a hand reaches out to guide us into the unknown, it is here that Jesus reveals good news for anyone frustrated by the inescapable complexities of life: that the true opposite of chaos is not order. The true opposite of chaos is not safety, nor simplicity. It is love. The opposite of chaos is love.

For when things fall apart, as they sometimes do, and when things get messy, as they often will, whether in our personal lives or in our families or communities or in the world around us, when the piles of problems and to-dos loom up and threaten to swallow us whole, it is love that will reveal itself, even in the midst of the chaos, like an old letter in a moving box, like a hand clasping yours in the darkness, like the Son of God holding us close within the roar of the sea. It is only love that is more powerful than chaos, not because love eliminates chaos, but because chaos, no matter how hard it tries, cannot eliminate love. Chaos can wreck our best laid plans, but it cannot drown out love.

And you know this already, each of you and all of you together, surely. Because the divine spirit of love is alive and strong at St. Anne, and I have already heard from so many of you how that love has sustained you through occasional seasons of change and challenge in your lives, just as it has through many seasons of joy.

And I know in my heart that we are embarking, this day, on a new season of joy together, but I am also comforted by the reminder that even when we must face and solve challenges together, even when things get a little complicated or confusing or messy, as they sometimes do, it is that love—love of God and neighbor and of one another—that will carry us through any storm.

And it is that kind of love—the wild and free kind that is undaunted by chaos; that doesn’t hesitate to get its feet wet; that doesn’t mind troubling the waters for the sake of justice or navigating the unknown for the sake of spiritual depth—it is that Jesus-type of love that this world needs so desperately right now. And that’s the kind of love we’re going to continue cultivating here and sharing with everyone who comes through these doors and those beyond this place who need to hear about what happens here. Believe me, they need to hear about it.

Because how marvelous it is that the God of the universe, the Lord of all creation, the One who breathed over the swirling waters at the morning of the world, is coming to find us, still, on this very morning, undeterred by any storm, unstoppable, unimaginably determined to love us, saying, sighing, singing, roaring that invitation into the wind:

Take heart.

Do not be afraid.

Come.