God – Page 9 – By Another Road

Stories: A Goodbye Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, July 16, 2023, my final service as Associate Rector at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23, Jesus’ parable of the sower.

I still remember quite clearly the first time I saw Trinity. It was late evening in early April of 2019, just over four years ago. I had flown into Fort Wayne from California that day for my interview weekend, and Fr. T.J. picked me up at the airport and dropped me off at my hotel after a welcome cocktail. But I was still wide awake, restless, a bit nervous, my body on west coast time.

So I took a walk down Main Street in the dark, past the stately Courthouse, past the workers closing up shop at the Coney Island, past Henry’s, then left on Fulton Street, and suddenly there it was in front of me, lit up, its gold-hued stone walls illuminated by flood lights, a beacon in the still spring night. And I stood there on the corner, looking up at the steeple, and I felt a strange, thrilling sense of knowing, like when you fall in love, and I thought, maybe, just maybe, the long and winding road of my life has led me all the way here.

And so it did. And the courthouse and the Coney Island and Henry’s and especially these old stone walls have come to hold all sorts of memories and meanings that I could not have imagined back then on that April night, back before I was a priest, before COVID, before I came to know and treasure your names and your faces and your stories, before we navigated the ups and the downs of these four years alongside one another, praising God and praying for each other and engaging, week by week, the graceful rhythm of the liturgy. I could not have imagined all the blessings and the lessons of these years, and how they would leave such an indelible mark on my heart.

But here we are. And although four years go by so quickly, I know that the story that began on that April night and which ends, for me, on this July morning, will be one of the most cherished and enduring stories of my life.

But one of the interesting and oddly comforting things that I have learned during my ministry at Trinity, and something that I think is true for all of us who spend time in this place, is that within these walls, our beginnings and our endings are all layered on top of one another, interlocking like those golden stones—time is a bit slippery, and what is seemingly lost to us lives on.

Just as it is in the liturgy itself, where Alpha and Omega come together, where righteousness and peace kiss, I find that the past and the present commingle in these hallways. Priests and parishioners long gone, long dead, even, are still part of the living memory of this place. One can sit here in the nave on a quiet afternoon, the sunlight bathing the walls in color, and sense the presence of those who came before, the ones who are themselves carried, now, on the light, a thousand fragments of faith, hope, and love, still abiding here.

And so when things change, when stories end, when people leave, or move away, or even die, these endings are gently incorporated into that which does not end. They are held in trust, like a precious volume added to the shelf, an entry into our one shared story. It is a story that began long before any one of us, and that will continue long after all of us. Each of us comes and contributes what we can while we can, and then we hand it off to God and to the future.

And as hard as it is to leave, I find peace in the knowledge that my offering is just one of many; for there is something good and necessary and holy to feel, in this life, like you have been part of something far larger than yourself alone. Trinity is a place where each of us can be part of something large, something magnificent, something eternal, even, if we give ourselves over to it.

And that is so, of course, not simply because of some magic within these stone walls, but because this is the house of God; it is the place where our individual stories collide not only with one another’s and those of our forebears but with the one timeless story of God’s passionate and undying love for us and for all of creation.

And in a world and a culture that so often tells us that it is up to us alone to determine what is real and true, to wrest some scrap of meaning from the happenstance of our lives, to navigate our way between the lonely waystations of existence and find solace only in ourselves, in this place we learn that this is not so. We learn that we were not made to be alone and that we will not be alone, in the end. We learn that God has knit himself into our stories and has knit us into his own, all-encompassing story.

I think this is part of the reason that Jesus, the incarnate God, loves to teach his followers in stories and parables. Not just to be obscure or confusing, but to remind us that the whole of salvation is the imaginative exercise of a Creator who longs to re-enchant the world.

God longs for us to feel a sense of wonder, like the child we used to be, and so he tells us stories of sowers and seeds and soil and sunshine so that we might begin to realize that the Kingdom of God is as close to us as the ground upon which we stand, that this Kingdom grows, somehow, when we recognize that we are a part of everything and that everything is a part of us.

In parables like the one we heard this morning, the parable of the sower, Jesus is not telling us about various types of earth so that we can determine which soil sample fits our own individual story and circumstance—whether we by ourselves are rocky or thorny or rich and fertile. Instead, he is asking us whether we can dream of and bring into existence a world where all might flourish of fertile ground; where all might be fed by the harvest of a righteousness deep and vibrant as the Indiana cornfields; where all might know the abundance that is possible when we love and care and tend to one another, as we have here. That’s the story God wants us to be a part of. That’s the story I have found here with you.

For God knows that too many of us, myself included, have felt what it is to be trampled down like the dust; to be caught among the thorns and stones. God knows how we have walked endlessly through the night, down unfamiliar streets, down long and winding roads, seeking our place in this world, and that sometimes we need a new promise, a new vision to illuminate the darkness, to dazzle us with its golden possibilities, to give us that strange, thrilling sense of knowing, like when you fall in love. Because God wants you to fall in love again–or for the first time–with him, with who he has made you to be, with this world and all who are in it, with the unique story that has brought you safe thus far, and with the new, shared story that is still being written.

How good it is, my beloved friends, that our paths have converged in this place. How good it is that the story of God’s love, the one that brought us together, will never truly end. And if you ever find yourself feeling lost, or alone, or unsure about your place in this world, may I commend to you the simple reassurance of these old stone walls, softly glowing in the darkness, and the Spirit that abides herein, which will never forget you, nor me, nor any moment of what we have found and cherished in this place, even long after we are gone.

So thank you. Thank you for letting me be part of your stories. Thank you, God, for letting me be part of Trinity’s story. And so, until we meet again, in that place and time where all our stories become one, world without end: my gratitude and my love.

Sleep: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, June 11, 2023 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary texts cited are Genesis 12:1-9, Romans 4:13-25, and Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26.

The other night, I couldn’t sleep.

Maybe you’ve had one of those nights, too, where you go to bed and turn off the lights and as you lie there, suddenly all of the questions and the challenges you are facing loom up in the shadows and take on newer, larger dimensions. Maybe you start to think up problems you didn’t even know you had. And you toss and turn and flip and flop and look at the clock and tell yourself “I have to get to sleep,” but then that just makes you more anxious and so now you can’t sleep because you are stressed that you can’t sleep.

I am grateful that this is not a nightly occurrence for me; it happens just once in a while. And I know that for some folks, sleep is persistently hard to come by for a whole host of reasons. But as I was lying there the other night, trying to calm my mind, listening to the fan blowing, I was reminded of other June nights: the ones from my childhood, when I would fall into bed, tired from the day’s activities, and the fan would be blowing in the window…but back then I would just drift off, unfazed by any existential angst or unfinished to-do lists.

And it occurred to me that, by and large, many of us probably slept a lot better when we were children. Back when our loved ones were just down the hall and we didn’t feel so alone. When it was easier to release the cares of the day, easier to trust that tomorrow would be just fine, and that maybe, when we wake up, it would be even better than we dreamed it to be.

But somehow, along the way, things change, and by the time we are grown, a great number of questions and worries and memories hold vigil at our bedside, and it becomes hard to fall asleep in their company. What was once an easy rest, a trusting openness to tomorrow, is now a tense, restless waiting, our minds spinning in the darkness as we try to solve all of the problems of the world before the morning comes. And so while I was lying there in bed, I thought, how precious it would be to sleep like a child once again.

As I was recovering from my sleeplessness this week and reflecting on this Sunday’s readings, something else occurred to me that hadn’t before: that sleep is actually a powerful metaphor for faith. Because the sleep for which we long, that wistfully-remembered sleep of the June nights our childhoods—deep, peaceful, trusting—is quite similar in nature to what St. Paul is talking about when he refers to this thing called “faith” in the letter to the Romans.

When Paul speaks of faith, he is not just talking about an intellectual assent to a set of doctrines, nor is he speaking of a blithe certainty about how and why the world is the way that it is. He is talking about that intimate sort of bond you feel when you know that you are safe, that you are loved, that you are not alone in the dark, and that tomorrow will be ok.

And to this end, Paul uses as an exemplar of such faith the figure of Abraham–someone who had the benefit of neither doctrines nor certainties, but who did (a few passages later in Genesis) fall into a deep sleep and had a dream of what would be–that he would be the “father of many nations.”

Abraham could not have imagined on his own how God was going to do the things God promised to do, but he gave himself over to the promise anyway. And this giving over of the self to something large and mysterious; this surrender to the dream that God unfurls for us in the darkness—this is what we mean when we talk about faith.

As best we can tell, Abraham did not lie awake making checklists, trying to figure out exactly what he had to do in order to make this happen on his own; instead, he said, God is with me, and I suppose that will be enough to face whatever tomorrow brings. And so it was.

The faith of Abraham was an abiding trust that the God who called him by name would hold him and carry him and nurture him, like a parent cradling a sleeping child. And so we laud him as the progenitor of our faith not because of his perfect understanding, but because he was the first among us, the first in this long unfolding story, who simply rested in the arms of God. He was the first to trust that tomorrow would be just fine, and that maybe, when he woke up, it would be even better than he dreamed it to be.

A question that remains, though, is how? How do I arrive at such a tranquil faith, such a restful surrender? How do I trust in God so deeply, so fully, that I can drift off in his loving arms, despite the real dangers of this life, despite the despair and the unanswered questions that keep me awake at night? How can any of us, once we are no longer children, once we feel so alone?

Of course the answer, as always, has something to do with Jesus. And our Gospel passage points toward it.

There’s a lot going on in this Gospel reading, actually. It’s kind of like those dreams you have where one scene suddenly transitions into another, layer upon layer. But after the calling of the reviled tax collector Matthew and the healing of the woman with the hemmhorage (both people, by the way, who have surely suffered their own share of sleepless nights) the story culminates with…what?

Jesus visiting a child, lying in her bed. A young girl who, he says, is not dead, but sleeping.

Now of course we can interpret this passage several ways, and most of us might assume that he was speaking metaphorically–that the girl was indeed dead and that Jesus brought her back to life, like Lazarus. Or that she was sick or comatose, and he revived her.

But there is another possibility, too, one that is a bit more evocative and mysterious, one that we might dismiss as easily as the observers in the story itself: the possibility that Jesus meant what he said.

What if Jesus was right, and the young girl was indeed asleep, in another state of consciousness, resting in the tantalizing, hidden promises of God? She wouldn’t be the first person in the Bible to have done so. As it is said:

your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,

and your young men shall see visions,

and your old men shall dream dreams.

What if she was a mystic deep in a vision, deep in the hidden, luminous darkness of God? What if she was asleep like Jesus was asleep in that boat on the stormy sea; asleep like Joseph when the angels spoke to him; asleep like Abraham dreaming of his children; asleep like one who is held in the arms of the Almighty; asleep in order to remind the clamoring, sleepless world—including us— of what true faith looks like—

Not like a restless, anxious night, not like a to-do list, but like….rest. Perhaps faith, in the end, is nothing more than rest. Resting in God.

If so, then this young girl is, for us, another Abraham. Another reminder that faith, more than anything, looks like curling up in the arms of a loving parent and falling asleep.

And thankfully, we have a God who desires but one thing: to hold us and rock us through the night.

Come to me, all you who are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

Will we still have some sleepless nights? Probably. Anyone who loves this world and the people in it is bound to worry a bit. But I hope that when I am lying there in the dark, lamenting my inability to figure life out once and for all, to know what’s coming, to know exactly what to do, that I’ll remember dreaming Abraham and the sleeping girl, and I hope I’ll remember how faith feels less like having all the answers and more like slipping into cool sheets on a warm June night and drifting off, knowing that tomorrow will be just fine. That maybe it will be even better than I dreamed it to be. And that no matter what happens, God will still be there, waiting to take my hand when I wake up.

For he has come through the clamor and the noise, through the vast night of eternity to be at our bedside, to cradle us like a sleeping child, to promise, “you are not alone. I am here.”

And in that promise, I rest.

Hello/Goodbye: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, May 21, 2023 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary texts cited are Acts 1:6-14 (an account of the Ascension of Jesus) and John 17:1-11.

I find it a fascinating feature of certain languages that the same word can be used for both hello and goodbye. In Italian, whether coming or going, people often simply say “ciao.” In Hawaiian, it is “aloha.” In the Czech Republic, where I did a study abroad year in college, they say “ahoj,” which honestly always made me feel a little bit like a pirate. When a word like this contains within itself more than one meaning, it is called polysemy.

We have many polysemous words in English, too, of course, but we typically use different words to greet one another and then to take our leave. Although even for us, we might choose to say “good day” or “good evening” on both arrival and departure.

In all of the instances when one word serves as both hello and a goodbye, our languages reveal something deeper than their simple function. When both meanings are held in the same word, there is an acknowledgment of the fluidity of time and space and our place within them; when hello and goodbye are the same, then every coming together acknowledges an inevitable parting of ways, and yet every parting of ways holds within it the hope of inevitable reunion.

I like this very much, not only because it is linguistically nuanced, but because it feels true, it feels like a little reminder that whether, in this moment, we are moving closer or farther from one another, we are still connected.

And if that is true, then it suggests that the narratives we so often tell of encounters and departures—of definitive hellos and devastating goodbyes—are all, in reality, held within a larger, more gentle and generous story wherein all the roads we travel are interconnected, where all of our hellos and goodbyes lead back to one another in the end. Which is, itself, a polysemous, complex realization.

Because if hello and goodbye are never truly final, it’s a consolation when we feel the sting of loneliness and yet it’s also a caution when we would rather escape our histories or shrug off our responsibilities to right relationship, because the intertwining of all our hellos and goodbyes signifies that we are inextricably tied to one another and to the whole of the earth. It suggests that, as the poet Tennyson says, we are a part of all that we have met, and, thus, it is part of us. Hello, you are part of me. Goodbye, I am part of you. No matter where we go, we will never not be part of each other. And knowing this, we must decide how best to live.

I am thinking about hellos and goodbyes and polysemy this week because we have just celebrated the Feast of the Ascension this past Thursday and you can tell that its story is echoing into our lectionary readings this morning, and to tell the truth, this story has always felt like kind of a bummer to me in the midst of our Easter joy.

Because viewed from one angle, the Ascension is a goodbye narrative. The risen Jesus, only recently reunited with his beloved friends and family, is carried up in a cloud, into the great Mystery where it is beyond our capacity to see him, and his disciples are left staring at the sky, yearning for one last glimpse of him.

And from this perspective, especially for all of us who have grieved the loss of a beloved face, who have felt the hollowness of being the one left behind, the Ascension might feel a bit like a flat note in the jubilant melody of the season.

We might say, You loved us enough to come back from death, Lord, so why must you go, now, to a place where we cannot see you? Why must we continue to let go of you? Why is it still the case, even after the Resurrection, that everyone and everything we love still says goodbye to us in the end? Why must we wait here alone, waiting for the unresolved promise of your peaceable kingdom?

And yes, Lord, I know you have promised us the Spirit as our Comforter and guide, but if I am brutally honest, Lord, there are days I would trade that unseen Spirit for just one glimpse of your face, for one moment of your actual hands holding mine, reassuring me that I am not alone on this journey, some proof that your leaving was not forever, that there will come a day when we can say hello and it will not also mean goodbye. I would give anything to know that there will be, one day, an end to endings.

But depart he does, and wait we must. And so for now, like the disciples on the mountain, we must stand in this polysemous moment of the goodbye that searches for a hello, containing within itself both joy and grief, reunion and relinquishment, and we must continue to wonder why and how and when we will understand the necessity of loss.

But then this week, as I was reflecting on all of this, something occurred to me: that the Ascension, like so many other stories in Scripture, is itself polysemous—it, too, means multiple things at once. And while it is indeed a farewell narrative from the perspective of us and the disciples on the mountain, I realized that from the vantage point of God the Father, from the vantage point of the Spirit aloft on the high wind, from vantage point of the innermost heart of the Trinity, the Ascension is a hello, a celebration, a homecoming. It is Jesus, the Son, in the fullness of his risen, reclaimed, redeemed human flesh, crossing back over the threshold of heaven saying to the Father, here I am, I have returned to you, and much have I seen, and long have I loved you, and how good it is to be in your embrace again.

And if we truly love him, how could we not want our Lord to finally be at home? How could we not feel some joy that even though we must say goodbye, it is because he needed to see his Father’s face once more? I can’t begrudge him that. I know I want to see my father’s face again someday, too.

And there’s also this: in the Ascension, when Jesus says goodbye to us and hello to eternity, he is, in truth, doing something entirely new, something that only he could do, fully human, fully divine, his polysemous body drawn up and out beyond the limits of the flesh, blurring the boundaries between heaven and earth, reigning as the Lord of both.

He is not simply saying both hello and goodbye at the same time; he is breaking down the barriers between hello and goodbye; the barriers that separate us from God and one another. He is effecting his prayer that we might all be one, never parted. He is transfiguring all our beginnings and our endings, all of our greetings and our grief, all of our hope and our fear, into something bigger, something timeless, something that we cannot even imagine because we have not yet known a story that didn’t have an ending.

By journeying to a realm where human flesh could never have otherwise gone, he is making a place for us, a place where we will be greeted and welcomed, and somehow, where we will never have to say goodbye.

And when he returns, bringing back the glory of heaven for our eyes to behold at last, it will be a new word that he speaks, neither hello nor goodbye, but some word no mind has yet conceived, that no lip has dared to speak, a word that contains all things within itself, a polysemous Word that resolves every question, dries every tear, mends every broken heart, a word that will make the earth tremble with its beauty and its power, a word that will hold more than we could ever say but that will say it all. A word that will initiate our own Ascension.

What will that word be? I do not know. But in essence, I think it will say, here I am, I have returned to you, and much have I seen, and long have I loved you, and how good it is to be in your embrace again.

And now, no more hellos, no more goodbyes. Only this. Only us. All of us together. Always.

Tunnel: A Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Lord and My God!

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

The Best Meal I Ever Had: A Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

Feeling hungry yet? Good!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Word: A Sermon for Christmas Day

I preached this sermon on Christmas Day, 2022, at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne. The lectionary text cited is John 1:1-14.

One of the gifts that we are given each year on Christmas Day is a poem of sorts:

In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God. And the Word was God.

Today’s Gospel reminds us—lest we forget in the immediacy and the intimacy of our holiday celebrations, with the lights and the songs and the smiling baby in the manger—that Christmas also has vast, cosmic dimensions. The poetic language of John’s prologue tells us that the significance of this day begins out beyond the stars, beyond time itself, back to the hidden and infinite source of all things.

It’s an intuition, a hunch, a golden thread tugging at the human heart from some unknown depth, when we say that in the beginning, before the beginning, God simply was, in timeless communion with himself, beyond conception, boundless, complete.

We were not there to see such a thing, of course, and the mind cannot really understand this, as hard as we might try, and so, with St. John, we do what we always do when our usual way of communicating falls short: we resort to poetry, to language that strains against its limits, language that reaches past itself, trying to speak of that which is ultimately greater than our words. We say,

In the beginning was the Word,

And yet even in this evocative statement, we fail—albeit gloriously, with great beauty,—to capture the fullness of whatever it means. When we speak of timeless beginnings, of eternity, our souls lean toward that which our mind cannot grasp, like flowers turning toward the distant sun, seeking the source of life, hungering to know where, and how, and why all things are.

From where did all things come into being, God?

How did all things coming into being, God?

Why did all things come into being, God?

These are big and timeless questions, carried on the lips of humanity from time immemorial. And while we may not always associate them with Christmas, still, the birthing of God into our midst lends itself to considerations of origin and purpose—both his, and our own.

In the beginning was the Word.

The Scriptures are full of figures asking for an explanation, a solution, or at least an assurance that there is some shape and purpose to life on this earth, especially when it can seem so obscure and aimless at times.

“Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his dwelling,” Job cries out at one point in his long tribulation. “Why are times not kept by the Almighty, and why do those who know him never see his days?”

This is, in essence, the question we have been asking during the long Advent that preceded this glorious morning. We have been searching for the day and the dwelling place of God for a very long time, trying to locate him, trying to see him, trying to learn from him why it is that we find ourselves here, enfleshed, imperfect, haunted by beauty, hungering for truth, wanderers on the earth, struggling to remember our true home, saying,

In the beginning was the Word,

And hoping that we will discover, in the end, a fuller sense of what this means for us. Hoping that this Word, one day, might speak a word back to us, to reveal both our origin and our future.

And today, quite suddenly, he does. Today, as an infant, the Word gives his answer.

For, the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

Christmas is the feast of holy materiality. It is the day when what was poetic becomes incarnate. What was eternal and unreachable becomes finite and present. God reveals that his days and his dwelling place and his origin and his purposes are not solely in some distant realm, but right here, in our midst, no longer hidden or inscrutable, but fully accessible, as vulnerable and open to us as a newborn child.

And this is a new thing.

For when Job cried out to God, and when God replied, God did so only with more questions. God said, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” He said. “Who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?” And Job had to be satisfied with not knowing the answer.

But on this day, God says, instead, “come to Bethlehem and behold the foundation of the earth in the flesh, for I have come that you might reach out and hold it. Come and see the cornerstone of the universe, lying right here in a manger. Come and see with your own eyes the Morning star rising in your sight, that you, too, might shout for joy like the angels. For though I come from an eternally distant place, I am no longer hidden from you, my purposes and my plans are here for all to see, and though they are deeper and older than time itself, they are quite humble, quite real.

God says, You have asked a question of me across the ages—where? And how? And why? And the answer, the long awaited answer I give to you, the answer– you who are now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh–the answer is simply this:

Cherish what is given; be at peace with what is taken; believe in what endures.

For yes, in the beginning was the Word, shrouded in the silence of eternity, but today you shall hear the Word with your own ears, you shall see it with your own eyes. The Word is love. And this Love was with God. And this Love is God. Today, and forever.

And now, let your life become the incarnate poetry of God’s love. Let your life be the thing that strains against the limits of language, that reaches past itself. Let your life become an answer to your own questions. And let the child in the manger who is God teach you that such an answer—where, and how, and why we are—can only be enacted and embodied, not fully comprehended. Because love is a verb, and Christmas is an origin story, and the world still yearns to see where it will lead through all of us.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.

And today, at last, we are with God, too.

The Edge of Knowing: An Advent Reflection

I offered this reflection as part of a contemplative retreat on Saturday, December 3rd at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The theme of the retreat was Be Born in Us: Preparing for the Advent of Christ.

In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leapt in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leapt for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.’ -Luke 1:39-45

Imagine: two women stand, side by side, at the edge of the world.

Behind them, receding from view, the conventional lives that they expected—lives of predictable joy and predictable sorrow, all held safely within the boundaries of what they already understood. Behind them, now, the future that they had been preparing for—the one that the world had prepared them for from their earliest days.

Here they stand, bearers of good news carried on the lips of angels. Here they stand, backs turned on all of those old certainties, facing instead toward a great unknown.

True, the villagers in this unnamed Judean hill town might just see two women like any other, shoulder to shoulder, staring out at nothing in particular. Hands instinctively resting upon their bellies. Two regular women, pausing to catch their breath, perhaps, caught up in a memory, or a daydream, or a question.

And why has this happened to me? asks Elizabeth.

They might still look the same as before, but inside, it feels as though they are standing at the edge of the earth, at the edge of a wide and restless sea, knowing that whatever must come next is out there beyond the solidity of the ground beneath their feet. But how does one step out into the unknown? How does one learn to walk on water?

The sun is coming out. The light is bright in their eyes.

Are they weeping? Are they laughing? Maybe both? Who can say?

But at the very least, they are willing.

Yes, let it be done according to your word. Blessed are we among women.

For Mary and Elizabeth, one just beginning her life and one late in her years, there is a new type of kinship on this day. Not just one of blood, and not just because they both find themselves unexpectedly bearing a child in their womb.

No, they are kindred spirits in this moment because they, like so many others before and after them, have come to the edge of what they know, of who they thought they were, and now must ask themselves:

How do I prepare for whatever comes next?

How do I prepare for the things nobody told me about? The things I could not have seen coming? How do I prepare for the bottom dropping out, for the unimaginable news at the door?

And how do I prepare for God, who comes like a thief in the night, making off with my comforts and my complacency, leaving me instead with strange, shadowy miracles and a song on my lips, only half-understood?

How do I prepare when I could not have ever prepared for this?

These, ultimately, are questions for all of us. And at their heart, they are Advent questions.

Because Advent, far from simply being a cozy, quiet season ahead of Christmas, is actually a season of learning how to live with that which is unknown and unresolved in our hearts and in our world.

It is the season of waiting and of preparation for Christ, but it is also the season that reminds us that preparation only brings us so far, because what lies ahead—the fullness of who God will be for us, who God will ask us to be for Him—is inevitably surprising and more expansive and more wondrous than we can imagine. It demands all, even as it redeems all.

What will be revealed to us, Lord, when you arrive? What will be revealed about us when you arrive? How can we ever prepare ourselves for you, when you are so much more than we understand?

And yet, even as we ask such unanswerable questions, even as we stand facing the unknown, there is new life stirring within us, leaping with joy at the promise of His appearing.

So we come here today to ask such questions, to notice this joy, to find kinship with Mary and Elizabeth: to dare to believe that God can indeed be born in each of us, even if we feel utterly unprepared for that to be possible. Even if it scares us a little bit.

It should scare us a little bit, if we’re honest. The truly important things always do.

I invite you to consider what you need this year during Advent—if there is a prayer or a question on your heart in this season of your life. I invite you, right now, to take a moment and close your eyes and call it to mind.

Feel the significance of that need or prayer or question within you, how your body holds it. Is it light? Is it heavy? Is it comforting? Is it unsettling?

What is God calling forth from within you?

My hope is that you will carry that intention with you in this season, that you will spend some time being very honest with God and with yourself—that you will consider what it is that you need, and who you are becoming, and that you will name these things—whether in conversation with others or in the silence of prayer with God.

Because the strange thing is that even if we cannot perfectly prepare for the unknown future, it is in knowing God and ourselves more deeply, and in knowing one another more deeply, that we will be able to bear it, whatever comes, whenever it comes.

Even if, sometimes, it feels like you are standing at the edge of the world, remember that you are not standing there alone. You are in solidarity with Mary and Elizabeth and with every person who has ever longed to let the powerful love of God be born in them, to transform them, to take them out beyond certainty, beyond complacency, into the wide and eternal mystery of grace.

Today we step out upon those waters, trusting that they will hold. Trusting the spirit of God who lives and moves within us. Trusting that the life of God which we carry will ultimately carry us.

For this is, in the end, how we truly prepare: by being bearers of love. By letting God’s love be born in us each day, no matter what happens. Standing side by side in the light of sun, facing forward, saying yes, saying come, saying even though I will never be ready, I am willing. Blessed are we. Blessed are we.

Are we weeping? Are we laughing? Maybe both? Who can say?

But we are willing. Yes, whatever comes, let us be willing.

Take Me Back: A Sermon for Christ the King

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take me back, says Christ, our King.

Take me back, we reply.

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

Just Finish: A Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So just finish the race. Just finish.

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

Homesick: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, August 7, 2022 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary texts cited are Genesis 15:1-6 and Luke 12:32-40.

A funny thing happened while I was in England for a conference a couple of weeks ago. It was near the end of the trip, my very last night in the country, and I was staying overnight next to Heathrow airport. I decided on a whim to take the Tube, London’s subway system, into the center of the city to walk around for a couple of hours. But as I was sitting there on the subway, figuring out which stop I should get off to catch a glimpse of Buckingham Palace, I suddenly developed an urgent and intense craving for a Fort Wayne Coney dog. I don’t even get over to the Coney Island that often, but right then and there in the middle of London I wanted one so bad I could taste it—with extra mustard and extra coney sauce. I found Buckingham Palace, but needless to say no Coney dogs were in sight.

That moment really made me smile, though, because after three years of living and serving alongside you here in Fort Wayne, I was blessed with the sense of feeling a little bit homesick for Northern Indiana. I had the most incredible time in the UK, but it was time to come home—to come back to the dense and verdant cornfields along the highway, back to the fireflies and fireworks in the late summer darkness, back to coffee and doughnuts in the Common Room and the familiar smiles of the people who don’t forget you when you’re gone.

It is good to be home. I missed you.

Homesickness is, in a strange way, a gift. Whether we experience it as kids on a hard day at summer camp, or as our families drive away on that first exhilarating and terrifying day of college, or perhaps later, in more subtle ways, when life’s chances and changes have led us far from all that we once knew, it’s that familiar pang in the stomach, that tremble of longing in the chest, which is in fact encouraging evidence that we belong somewhere, to someone—homesickness is the tightening of the tether of memory and feeling, calling us back to the people and places that have shaped us and held us.

And the longer we stay in any once place, the more it does its work upon us, imparting something of itself into our hearts, such that you might be lying awake some night in a far distant city, remembering the way the thunder rolls into town on an August evening, or the scent of your grandmother’s roses in the garden, or the way the organ music swells at the end of Mass, or yes, perhaps even the taste of a Coney dog. To be homesick for such things is a reminder that somewhere, at some point, you were given the gift of knowing what home is.

When you look for it, the question of home—where and what it is, how to get there, how to get back when you’ve drifted away—is a theme that shows up time and again in our faith tradition. It stretches all the way back to the beginning, really, when Adam and Eve stumbled out of Eden and knew for the first time what homesickness felt like. And in today’s reading from a bit later in Genesis, we encounter Abram, soon to be Abraham, the one who received God’s promise of a homeland that might endure through his descendants, even when he could barely hope to dream that such a thing was possible.

Because although he’s already in Canaan, Abram is homesick, too—longing for the reassurance that God will be faithful, that he, Abram, will not simply die a stranger in a strange place, but that somehow he and his children might belong to the earth upon which he stands. That is what homesickness is, in the end, no matter where we are: our soul’s deep hunger to belong somewhere. To know and be known, to remember and to be remembered.

In Abram’s case, of course, we know that God does indeed make a home for him and his descendants in Canaan. And even when they end up in slavery in Egypt, God hears their cries and leads them back. And even when they are sent into exile in Babylon, and the homesickness threatens to overwhelm them, he leads them back again. God, it seems, is very invested in leading us back home, no matter how many times we get lost. And just like the children of Israel, we get lost a lot, both literally and figuratively.

I don’t know about you, but I think the moments of truest homesickness I’ve felt in my life were not just during a long trip, but in those moments when the person who I used to be, and the people that I used to know, and the certainties that I used to hold feel very far away from me. When I look up from the path and see my life and wonder: where am I? How on earth did I get here? That’s when I really miss home. Have you ever felt that way? I hope not too often, but I suspect each of us does at some point.

Because that’s the tricky thing about homesickness—it finds us even when we are stationary. Even if you live in one place your whole life, surrounded by the same people, things still change, and loved ones leave, and there is loss, and still we end up longing for peace and rest and the scent of our grandmother’s roses; and yet we know deep in our bones that Eden is no more, that the gates of the garden are barred to us, that going back is not really an option, and neither is clinging tightly to that which is passing away.

But there is an answer to our homesickness, in the end. A very simple one, elegant in its simplicity, yet earth-shattering in its implications. Something more enduring, even, than a homeland promised for a thousand generations.

It is our true home. The one that does not change. The one that we can always find. It is Jesus.

God, with infinite mercy, perhaps, knew how easily we get lost—how our fear and our selfishness and our broken hearts leave us in a perpetual state of homesickness. And it seems God was not satisfied with just telling us how to get home. So instead, he simply came and made his home among us. As one of us. To live and die and live again in us so that our true home—the heart of God—is as close as our own breath. Never far away. Never inaccessible. Neither a faded memory nor a squandered hope. Simply home, here. And all we must do is be ready to welcome him. The only gate that is barred and must be opened now is the gate of our own heart, to let him in where he longs to reside.

“Be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet,” Jesus says, “so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks…truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them.”

I know we are a frustrating and stubborn human family, and we make a mess of things quite often. But I have to hope that, perhaps, seated up at the right hand of the Father, our Lord—who himself has known the sound of thunder and the scent of roses—is maybe a little bit homesick for us, too. And that when he comes again to find us, to redeem all things, and when the banquet is prepared—whether it is Coney dogs or whatever else heaven tastes like—that we might look into the face of God and God might look into ours and we might say to each other, with simple joy, in one voice: It is good to be home. I missed you.