grief – By Another Road

Shepherd/Lamb: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, April 21, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, Ohio. The lectionary text cited is John 10:11-18, Jesus speaking about the Good Shepherd.

I don’t remember the first time I saw an illustration of the Good Shepherd, but it’s one of those images that, even if you grow up with only a marginal relationship with Christianity, you just sort of know about. It’s been depicted in so many formats, in visual art, in music, more so than almost any other image of Jesus, other than perhaps the Nativity or the Cross.

In the little Lutheran church in Michigan where my grandparents belonged and where I’d venture as a boy on summer mornings, there was a massive, colorful stained glass window above the choir with an image of the Good Shepherd, and if you close your eyes you can probably imagine it: the green trees and billowing clouds; the smiling shepherd and the snowy flock of lambs.

As a young child, looking up at this image, bathed in the dappled sunlight that streamed through the window, I assumed that this is who God must be: a protector and guide; he of the watchful eye and gentle heart, the one who will not leave us, the one who is soft light and green grass and a warm, safe place to fall asleep when night falls.

But it’s difficult, because as time goes by, we are faced with reminders that life is not a stained glass window. Wolves still prowl the landscape, just out of the frame of those gauzy, glowing images of the Shepherd and his lambs, and sometimes they pounce.

And when this happens, when the ones we love are snatched away, when we are scattered, and when we feel lost, suddenly the whole proposition of a shepherding God who hovers protectively behind us, ensuring our safety, preserving us from barren places, might feel like a cruel joke.

If you have ever asked or been asked by someone, “where was God when ____ happened?” you know what I am talking about. In such moments, those stained glass images can lose their luster, and feel more like a fantasy than a promise kept. We would be lying to ourselves and to God if we did not admit that this is sometimes the case. And it’s ok to ask those questions, because God knows we have all had our share of dark nights and howling wolves at the door.

This week, St. Anne lost a beloved member of our own flock far too soon. This is not the first time our community has faced such a loss, but it is also true that when someone like our dear friend Spencer Pugh is taken away so suddenly, without any opportunity to say goodbye, it can feel disorienting, and all of our words about the God who protects and watches over us can feel a bit hollow. How could such a thing happen? Where was God when we needed him?

But all of us must grapple with these questions eventually, because these questions are what emerges when we get honest about faith, when stained glass windows can’t tell the whole story, when platitudes are no longer adequate to address the complex mixture of grief and joy that deep love and deep relationship require of us.

We ask these hard questions when we grow up and realize that anodyne images of the Good Shepherd tending a flock of placid sheep do not tell the whole story of God’s presence and activity in our midst, nor do they fully capture the way of life that Jesus has offered us.

Here’s what I mean. Think of that image of the Good Shepherd again. Call it to your mind. Ask yourself: where is God in that picture?

Who is God in that picture?

Who are you, in that picture?

When we start out, as I did as a kid in that Lutheran church, this seems pretty obvious. God is the Shepherd, we are the sheep. And this is partly true.

Because long before Jesus even came into the world, God was a shepherding God. When Jesus says, I am the Good Shepherd, as he does twice in this passage from John, notice that he is using the same name for God that was uttered to Moses, the unspeakable name usually translated as I AM WHO I AM. I AM the Good Shepherd.

I AM, the ancient and eternal God, is the Good Shepherd, because God, from time immemorial, has always been the one hovering over creation, tending and watching and calling us by name, seeking to guide us through wilderness places and call us back even when we are stubborn or foolish or lost like sheep, stumbling under the weight of our waywardness and loneliness and our unanswerable questions.

But that’s not the whole story. That’s not all there is to this image. Because there’s something different about God in Jesus. Something surprising.

What I have come to realize is that in the image of the Good Shepherd, Jesus is actually, ultimately, the lamb in the picture. He is the lamb who was slain. He is the lamb who lays down his life. The lamb who bears the wound of our waywardness and our loneliness and our questions. The lamb who gives himself over to the wolf. The lamb who takes away the sin of the world. The lamb who dies and yet lives again, so that all of the rest of us might do the same.

So where does that leave us in this picture?

I could not have understood such a thing as a child, when I simply needed a God who would always lead me beside still waters. But now, with every twist and turn in the stream, with every loss and hard question that comes along, I have come to see what I did not, what I could not back then:

That there is something far more serious and yet also more hopeful in this image of the Good Shepherd than platitudes about a God who will always keep us safe, when we know all too well that life and love are not always safe or certain.

Instead, we discover that in Christ, in our baptism, in our particular living participation in the aliveness of Jesus, God has done a new thing: he has traded places with us. He has made us the Shepherds, now.

And he, God, has entered into the small and the weak and the vulnerable parts of creation, he has become one with the lambs and the lost and he has now said to us, my children, my own precious heart, you will be saved, but not by means of a stained-glass window sort of faith. Not by easy answers and ever-gentle paths.

You will be saved by the love of the least of these. You will be saved, day by day, by the care YOU give, by the protection YOU provide as a shepherd, as a guardian, as a companion and a friend. You will be saved by the number of small things you learn to call by name. You will be saved by taking your share, now, in the shepherding that God has always offered.

You will be the one who says, now in Christ, I AM the Good Shepherd. And I will stand up to the wolf at the door, and I will help tend to this fragile earth and its fragile creatures, and I will lay down my life for you, my sibling, my neighbor, my friend, because salvation is not a pursuit free from danger, but is the unfolding of a love stronger than death. And now we have been given a Shepherd’s heart, and the Lamb who is God is the one we carry with us on the road, and together, we pray, we will all get where we are going, and no one will be lost because we won’t abandon them.

People like Spencer lived their lives as shepherds like this. And even when they’re gone from our midst, they serve to remind us all of our shared calling, our responsibility to be part of the answers to those hard questions we ask, and to labor in the hope of that world first glimpsed in stained glass: the one with the green trees and the billowing clouds and the dappled sunlight, where the promise of life everlasting is not a cruel joke, where justice is realized, where love reigns, and where the wolf no longer prowls.

Are you ready for that work? Are you ready for that world?

As God once said, and as we are now invited to say back: I am.

I’m Here: A Sermon for Good friday

I preached this sermon on Good Friday, March 29th, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH.

Here we are.

Here we are, at the Cross. At the place that is an ending, even if we pray that it’s not the end. It’s the day in the story that no one wants to think much about and yet that must be faced, eventually. The day that is full of dread and sorrow and pain and yet compels us in ways that are hard to explain. We are pulled in close on this day, challenged to listen and to look, challenged to stay, even if we would rather run far away, rather be anywhere else than here, in proximity to the tears and the sweat and the blood, holding vigil with a broken man as he weeps and dies. With a broken God as he weeps and dies.

We do not enjoy this observance, and yet we come, on Good Friday, because somehow we know that we must come. Not out of a sense of religious obligation or detached piety. No, we leave all of that posturing far behind us if we are actually paying attention to the story, if we are actually open to it. Out here on Golgotha, where things are brutally spare and honest, where only the wind and the rock and the bones take note of our presence, out where even temples and empires have neither sense nor safety to offer, it is something deeper than duty that draws us.

We come here because we know, in a way deeper than knowing, that this is what love requires of us. We know, somehow, that showing up, that being present, that being able to look into someone’s frightened, tired eyes–into Jesus’ frightened, tired eyes–and to simply say, “I’m here,” is the most important thing that we can do when there is nothing else left to do.

We know this because we know death all too well. We have lived it. If you have ever received that call or text that comes late in the night and you have rushed to be with someone who is gravely ill or dying, you know what I mean. You know how, as their eyes grow dim and their energy fades and their breathing changes, and then they are sleeping, and then they are slipping, and you aren’t even sure if they can hear you anymore…you know that you cannot do much of anything except say, “I’m here. I’m here. I’m here. I love you. And I’m here.”

We feel helpless, then. And we are. And yet this is exactly what we need to do at such times. No big gestures, no eloquent words are necessary. Just, “I’m here.”

And so it is fitting, now, as Jesus dies, that we stop what we’re doing, that we come here from wherever we are in our lives and in our hearts. Not to fix anything or figure anything out. But simply to say to him: I’m here.

I’m here, Lord, even if we weren’t always as close as I’d hoped.

I’m here even if I never fully understood you, even if I never felt fully understood.

I’m here, even though there are a thousand questions you never answered, and a thousand more I never asked.

I’m here, even though I have doubted you, and I have doubted myself, I have doubted whether the type of love you talked about is even possible in a world as broken as this one.

I’m here, even though I cannot bear to see you like this.

I’m here, because I cannot imagine never seeing you again.

I’m here, and somehow, I pray that it is enough that I am here, to hold your hand, to look into your eyes, to show you that you are not forsaken.

I love you, and I’m here.

The strangeness of it all, is that, on this day, we are here consoling God as God dies, whereas for all the rest of our days, God has been the one drawing close to console us. Since the moment we were born, and as we grew up, and as we grew older and began to learn the cost of growing old, God has always been waiting, listening, watching, staying near. God has been ready, when we cry out in pain or fear, ready to drop everything, to come, to say, “I’m here. I’m here. I love you. I’m here. I know you don’t understand. And I can’t always fix it for you, but I’m here.”

Yet now, in the mysterious circularity of love, like children who must one day cradle their parents, it is our turn. Our turn to comfort our Creator, our Lord, our God, as he cries out and enters the darkness, enters death—the one and only place where he, being eternal, being God, has never been before. Our turn to help him feel a bit less afraid, just this once.

Our turn, now, to be the one who is strong, the one who must endure, who must bear witness, who must show up, as God has always done for us. Good Friday is our turn to offer back the gift of presence, saying, yes, God, I know. It hurts to live. And it’s scary to die. I know. But I’m here. I’m here. I’m here.

In other words, today is the day, spiritually, that we grow up, that we become the ones that he always longed for us to be. The ones who choose, in coming here, to no longer hide from death nor from pain nor from ourselves, because love compels us, above all, to show up, to stay present, no matter what. And because today, on the Cross, God, who never needed anything, who didn’t know what need felt like, now needs us.

For he has traveled from farther than forever, and the trip has taken its toll. He has been wearied and winnowed down to the bone. He has spent all he had, and he has nothing left to give over except his body, and he is willing to risk be misunderstood and despised and mocked, all for the chance to come and find you and say those words from his own lips that God has been trying to tell us for all time: I’m here, I’m here, I’m here. I love you. I’m here.

As it turns out, all he ever needed was to hear us say it back.

Breakwater: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, March 17, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is John 12:20-33.

If you have spent any time traveling up around the Great Lakes, you might have observed the structures called breakwaters, which are a feature of many cities with harbors and bays along the lakeshore. Their construction varies, but essentially they are a thin wall or barrier that juts out into the lake in order to do exactly what the name implies—to break the waves that move in toward the shore, creating calm, navigable water on the inner side of the wall for ships and other small craft, while the swells and breakers roll and rage in the great expanse beyond.

Growing up, every summer we would spend time in Marquette, Michigan, which sits right at the edge of Lake Superior, the largest and wildest of the Great Lakes. There is a breakwater that extends out from the shore there, and when I was young, my family and I would walk out onto it, taking in the views of the water and the city.

The breakwater in Marquette has been there since the 1800s, reconstructed a few times due to storms, and the first half of it is a sturdy concrete structure, flat easy to walk on in good weather. You can stroll out in this narrow path, the calm harbor to your right, the endless waves to your left, and as a kid it was a thrill to be there on the breakwater, bathed in summer breezes, dancing and skipping out, out, out along the thin line between home and the world beyond, between familiarity and the eternity of blue water stretching toward an unseen shore.

But then there was a point on our walk where we would always stop. About halfway, the breakwater turns at an angle and keeps going farther out into the lake, but this second portion is only comprised of large boulders; the concrete wall ends and from there the going gets slick and treacherous as the waves collide with the bare stone. The only way forward is to scramble and leap and crawl along the rocks.

My cousins and I always wanted to go onto the rocks all the way out to the end, the very end, where a light tower marked the edge of the breakwater. But the adults wisely said no, it wasn’t safe. So we would turn back.

And what I could not have perceived then, but that I do now—more and more so with every passing year—is that life is much like that walk along breakwater. When we are younger, setting out into the wide expanse of the world is deliriously exciting, and, if we are blessed with a kind and caring childhood, we take for granted, perhaps, the solid structures beneath our feet. Stay on the straight and solid path, we are told, and all shall be well, and if you are careful, the waves will not break over you, and you will go as far as you need to go.

But then, somewhere along the way, we get to the place in our lives where the solid footing ends, and we realize, with some surprise and trepidation, that we are no longer children, and that now we are expected to keep going.

We discover that growing up and growing wise means that the journey does not, in fact, end at the bend in the path, but that life keeps going, going out where there are only rocks to traverse, where the water licks at our heels and sometimes threatens to sweep us away, out where we must indeed scramble and leap and crawl on our knees, and the walls we relied upon for safety suddenly seem much more permeable than they once did.

One of the times I realized this was when my father had his first major heart attack in late spring, several months before he died. As it happens, I flew into Marquette, where he was in the ICU, and I remember seeing the lake as we drove through town in between hospital visits, and I remember seeing the breakwater, too, curling like a question mark out into the blue expanse, a reminder of simpler springs.

And I remember feeling, in that moment, like my own solid path had ended, but that I was now required to keep moving forward out where there were only rocks ahead, with no one there to call me back. I suspect most of us have had experiences like that.

And, in our passage from John’s Gospel today, this is also such a moment for Jesus, where the solid path he has been traveling since the day he was born comes to a precarious place , and when he, too, accepts that he must still keep going, out, out, onward, to where the footing is uncertain and where there is no guarantee of safety.

“Now my soul is troubled,” he says. “And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.”

Just as the other Gospel authors record his struggle in the Garden of Gethsemane, here John depicts Jesus at the edge of his own understanding, wrestling to reconcile the deep love he shares with his Father with the dawning sense that this love is no guarantee of preservation. Quite the opposite, in fact—this love for the Father is now clearly an invitation, a call, out onto the rocks where certainties end and faith alone must guide him.

This love that has been growing in Jesus, that has been manifesting in his deeds and his teachings, this love that has bathed him in clear, calm living water, is now rolling in like a wave, rolling in from the unseen shore, and he knows, now, that to be all that he must be, to do all that he must do—for himself, for us—the wave must break over him, come what may, and the rock must be the place where he plants his feet and carries his cross and builds his church, the rocks where the walls of safety, the walls between heaven and earth, the walls between familiarity and eternity, seem much more permeable than they once did.

It’s interesting, too, that this moment occurs alongside Andrew and Philip, who have been asked by some Greek believers to come and “see” Jesus, echoing Andrew and Philip’s own encounter with Jesus at the beginning of John’s text. Because inasmuch as this passage is Jesus reckoning with the nature of his own journey, it is also a moment for his disciples—including us—to reckon with ours. For “where I am, there will my servant be also.” If we are to follow Christ, then the rocks and the waves beckon us all.

And our reaction to this realization might depend on where we stand. If we have become too comfortable in our faith, if we have become accustomed to solid ground beneath our feet, if we have not dared to venture out to the places where love requires us to risk something, then we, too, might feel our souls troubled by Jesus’ call.

If so, then today we are being asked to take one small step outward onto the rocks—one small step towards admitting that we don’t have all the answers, ones step towards being vulnerable, towards embracing new ideas, new relationships, new ways of opening our hearts, new ways of standing with the poor and the forgotten and the storm-tossed—so that we might follow the path that Jesus has already traversed.

But if you are already out there on the rocks, somewhere between scrambling and leaping and crawling on your knees; if you already know all to well what it feels like to have left your certainties and safety behind, then perhaps Jesus’ call will be a consolation, because you will come to understand that even when the path crumbles under your feet, you are not lost. For this, too, is part of the path.

And this is, in fact, the part of the path that we must travel if we ever want to grow up, if we ever want to grow, to reach that place where familiarity and eternity meet, where home and heaven lap up against one another: out, out at the outermost edge where Jesus abides, where he burns like a light at the end of the breakwater, at the end of every journey, drawing all people to himself, blessing every rocky path you have walked, every crashing wave that has washed over you, and every weary heart, including yours.

I have not been out on that breakwater in Marquette for many years, now, but I hope to go back someday. I still have a little bit of my father’s ashes, and if I can, I’d like to sprinkle a few into the lake there. But I am no longer a child, now, so I think that when I go, I’ll venture out a bit farther out onto the rocks to do so, to let his ashes mix with the water and the wind. It feels right, somehow, that this is how it must be, and where it must be, on that thinnest of lines between home and the world beyond.

And though my feet might be a little unsteady, and my eyes might sting, I think my heart will still dance and skip like it once did.

It will not be entirely safe. Life never is. Love never is.

But it is still part of the path. And God will be there.

On Facebook: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, February 4, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Isaiah 40:21-31 and Mark 1:29-39.

Today, February 4, 2024, is a somewhat significant anniversary. Do you know what it is?

It’s the 20th anniversary of Facebook.

On February 4, 2004, Facebook, or “The Facebook” as it was originally known, was launched by a team of students at Harvard as a sort of high-tech student directory and then began its long, seemingly unstoppable march towards changing the way we interact with one another and the world around us. Two months after launching, in 2004, it had 70,000 active monthly users. Now it has over 3 billion, or 37% of the world’s population. As with many types of anniversary dates, reflecting on who we were then, before Facebook, and who we are now might bring up some mixed feelings.

I was a senior in college when Facebook started, and I still remember hearing about it from some friends and signing up for the website in my dorm room in early 2005, uploading a grainy picture of myself and hunting for my real-life friends on there, when there were no links to news articles, no “like” buttons, no videos or vindictive comment sections.

It was, back then, a novel and gently thrilling thing to be able to connect (or reconnect) with so many people at once, almost as if everyone you had ever known had moved back into your neighborhood, their lives and their stories no longer obscured by time and distance. Maybe you, too, if you ever signed up for Facebook, felt that same sense of promise, of an infinite horizon somehow drawn close enough to touch.

But 20 years on, even if we continue to be active users of Facebook or other social media platforms, I think it’s safe to say that we have come to experience the shadow side of such a vast network of connections. And I am not just referring to the casual vitriol that seems to infect so much online discourse or the amount of time we spend staring at screens, though those are major challenges of their own.

But even more fundamental than these, I think, and something that we might overlook, is that the vastness of information and awareness that is available via digital social networks is more than any one person is equipped to process and integrate. It might be wonderful to reconnect with lost friends, but it is also true that we only have so much bandwidth to invest in deeply meaningful, mutual relationships.

And it is indeed valuable to have access to information about other people’s experiences, especially those whose lives are very different from our own, but the unceasing avalanche of content of all kinds, means that we also run the risk of becoming numb from overexposure, or that we end up spend a great deal of energy arguing and posturing around areas of social concern without actually engaging them in our off-screen realities.

But it makes sense that this would happen. It is not simply a failure of the will, but the reality of our limited capacity as mortal beings who, despite our deep hunger for knowledge and our inherent sense of empathy, cannot know everything, cannot respond to everything in the world with the depth and nuance it requires.

And running up against our limitations in the face of the seemingly infinite need and infinite possibility of the world–transmitted to us online–can lead us to rage, or despair, or cynicism, or some strange mixture of the three. Thinking of this through a scriptural lens, every day we bite the bitter fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and the truth is as it always has been: it was not meant for us; we cannot digest it.

And here we are, 20 years on.

But lest we get too down on ourselves and the ills of a digital age, we must acknowledge that this wrestling with our capacity for knowledge and compassion is as ancient as existence itself. It is a tension that is woven into all of Scripture, including our readings this morning.

The prophet Isaiah, in a passage of both comfort and gentle reproach for Israel, asks the people whether they have forgotten the incomparable scale of God–not only that God is acting on their behalf, to care for and deliver them, but that God alone has the capacity to do so. They, by themselves, cannot conceive of or effect their own salvation. Only God can do that. God alone is able to hear and understand the many cries of the people, to bear the pain and the longing of all creation and discern a path toward healing and reconciliation. God alone can do that, because God alone has a heart large enough to break open and hold all things, and to beat and to burn with determination for the rescue and restoration of all things.

Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? It is he who sits above the circle of the earth…his understanding is unsearchable…he does not grow faint or weary.

In other words, only God can digest the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Only he can bear the fullness of knowing and loving all of us and each of us. And God does not give in to rage or despair or cynicism in the face of our infinite need. Our hope is found in the One who can do what we ourselves cannot: to be the agent of infinite compassion, of unyielding justice, of uncompromising charity. This is who God is for us.

And yet this truth about God sets up a deep and striking irony in the Gospel passage from Mark, where Jesus, picking up from last week, continues his ministry of healing and exorcism and in so doing, draws out the desperation and the hope and the curiosity of everyone in his vicinity, such that “the whole city was gathered around the door.” The whole city was gathered around the door. Much like reading the news online, when it can feel like the whole world is at our door, it was surely more than any one person could keep up with or even comprehend. Even Jesus.

Because unlike the infinitely expansive capacities of God spoken of in Isaiah, Jesus is–like us–just one man. Despite his eternal power, he is as finite as we are, and he can only take in so much need, so much information. And this is perhaps why, whether out of exhaustion or frustration, or both, he decides to evade the clamoring crowds, trying to stay focused on his mission to proclaim the Kingdom.

It is as though God, in the flesh, had his own epiphany: the needs of the world are too numerous for any of us to comprehend, much less to solve on our own. We children of the dust cannot bear the fullness of what it means to be alive, to suffer, to dream. And we need something more than help. We need some measure of God’s mind, God’s heart, God’s body to mingle with our own if we ever hope to digest the bitter fruit of the tree and know what to do with it.

And that, of course, is what Jesus ultimately gives us—not just help, but transformation into his likeness. This is my body, given for you. My peace I give to you.

So I think of Jesus, sometimes, when I struggle on Facebook and elsewhere with the enormity of the world’s grief and anxiety and the endless profusion of the world’s ideas. I think about how he, too, struggled to take it all in, and had to figure out what to do. I think about how his decision, in that moment, was not to try and understand everything or solve everything, nor to reject everything, but to love everything.

I think about how he showed up as one of us and how he blessed our finitude; how he demonstrated that true wisdom is less about an infinite capacity for knowledge or strength and more about getting in touch with the deep well of compassion that forms and sustains the cosmos.

And I think about how we are invited—when we are overwhelmed by waves of information and endlessly expanding networks of connectivity—to neither ignore them nor to be subsumed by them, but, like Jesus, to find the still, small center of love that abides at the core of our immensely complex world and to hold fast to it no matter what. To observe and bless the ground beneath our feet; to pray; to heal whom we can heal; to love whom we can love; to proclaim what we have been sent to proclaim–the Kingdom of incarnate love; to trust that this will be sufficient.

And to realize that, as we do so, even in our limited capacity, we are taking part in the infinite; that we are part of the broken, beating, burning heart of the One who will gather us all in and hold us; the One does not grow faint or weary, the One who will someday carry us up on eagle’s wings into the vast interconnectedness of heaven and creation, of time and eternity. Into something far better than a social network–into the very fabric of life itself, where we will be truly known and understood, where our infinite stories and endless longings will finally make sense, and where the fruit of the tree of knowledge, at long last, will be for us, and we will eat of it, and it will be sweet.

God Comes to Us in the Dark: A Meditation

I offered this meditation at a service for The Longest Night at St. Anne Episcopal Church in West Chester, OH on December 20, 2023. It is a time of prayer, music, and stillness for those who are struggling in the holiday season.

God comes to us in the dark. This has always been true.

In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep. So says Genesis. So say our ancestors in faith, grasping back through time, back through the shadowy recesses of human memory, back to an original stillness, an original peace, an original fullness, back to when God, alone, was—and it was dark, and it was already good.

And all that follows—let there be light, and let there be all of this, and let there be you and me—all of it emanated from the darkness of love, where God dreamed and saw visions, where God composed the constellations, where God traced out the edges of the universe and imagined all that could be if there were such a thing as being. In the dark, God already knew both the price and the promise of being—what it would require—of God, and of us—and so God made a promise, from the very start, when our being came to be:

And that promise is: I am here. I am here. And again and again, when you lose sight of me, I will come to you. In every season, in every hour. When the light is bright, I am here. When it fades, I am here. And when it is night—on the face of the earth, or in the depths of your soul—then I am still here. You will not lose me in the dark. No, in the dark you will encounter me as I was from before the beginning: hidden but present, dreaming but awake, tracing, now, the edges of your face, your flesh now holding a universe of meaning. I am here, gazing at the constellations in your eyes, reminding you that being, simply being, here and now, together, is enough. It is all I ever wanted. It always has been. Even in the dark. Especially in the dark

For God comes to us in the dark. And this has always been true.

…

Despite this truth, we have a complicated history with the darkness, for reasons both pragmatic and imaginative. Job calls down the darkness as a curse; the Psalmist yearns for light like the watchmen waiting for morning. We understand this in our bones.

Because, until recently, the night was, for most people, an inevitable and somewhat threatening feature of daily life. Before electric lights and heaters, it was a cold and dim and dangerous time when one had to gather in close to others for safety and warmth. For our siblings who have no home to go to on this night, for those who are alone, this is still true—the night is not always our friend.

And yet there are other reasons we fear the dark, ways we have been formed to fear it in our mind’s eye. We have been taught, too often, that night metaphors are literal—that the light itself is somehow truer, purer, stronger, more moral, and that the darkness is a time of indolence, of deceit, of confusion and waywardness. And so when we find ourselves in a seemingly dark place—a place in our lives where we cannot see the path ahead, where we cannot understand what has happened to us and why—we might assume that we have been forsaken, that we have been forgotten, that we are at fault, or that God has left us to fend for ourselves.

We call this the dark night of the soul and think that we are talking about God’s absence. But we are wrong.

For we must remember, again: God comes to us in the dark.

Not just in the beginning, but always. The darkness is when God chooses to appear.

Consider how the Passover and the Exodus and God’s liberating work all began at night.

Consider God speaking to Moses on a mountain covered in thick, dark cloud, amid thunder and lightning.

Consider Jacob wrestling with an angel all through the night, claiming a blessing upon his wounded body before sunrise.

Consider the promise spoken by the prophet Isaiah: I will give you the treasures of darkness and riches hidden in secret places.

Consider the child, soon to be born in Bethlehem, in the silent, holy, starlit night.

Consider the Risen Christ, emerging from the darkness of the tomb into the predawn shadows of a garden.

And consider how the Lord promises his return when “the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light,” how he will reveal himself, in the end, as he was in the beginning, emanating from that deep original mystery, that unseen, unspoken, ageless night of dreaming, older than the stars.

Yes, God always comes to us in the dark.

And if we consider this, then perhaps we will begin to realize that, indeed, darkness and light to God are both alike, because God’s presence and power and mercy are not dependent upon whether we walk confidently, whether we understand, whether we see clearly, whether we know exactly what to do next or how. God arrives in the night because God is at peace with hiddenness, with the unfolding mystery that God is to us, with the unfolding mystery that we are to God, and so we are invited, also, to make peace with that which is hidden—the reasons and the justifications and the certainties that elude us, and the ways that love endures regardless of what we know or do not know.

And God arrives in the night because, in truth, the darkness has its own particular knowing—its own intimacies and surrenders and quietude that come precisely when we cannot see everything, when we let go, when we cannot strive or plan or rely on ourselves as much as we do in the light of day.

The night engenders a deeper trust, if we will let it. If we will rest in it.

So whatever you carry with you on this night—a weariness, a fear, a grief, a bitterness, a question, a regret, a secret dream—what you must know is that God is still present to you in this place, God sees you and knows you, even if you cannot see God’s face, even if you don’t recognize who you have become.

Like a mother cradling her child, or like a lover in the darkness, God sees you, God gazes upon you tenderly, whispering gentle reminders of promises made and kept and renewed, of a covenant, of a bond deeper than eternity—one that will not break, even when we do. And we do sometimes.

But God comes to us in the dark, saying: do not be afraid, and saying, blessed are you who mourn, for I will make my home in the cracks of your shattered heart, and saying your pain will turn into joy—not because pain is holy but because I AM, and I am the one who offers you a joy that is deeper than fear — the joy that is my own self, that same self from before the beginning, a divine darkness bathed in the stillness of eternity and traveling, traveling, across the constellations and the cosmos to be here, right here, to hold you when your eyes are blurred with tears and shadows on this long, long, longest night.

And to tell you that even when it’s not ok, even when you are not ok, you are loved.

…

In a few days, we will celebrate a birth, and we will speak of the Light of the World, and on that day we will be talking, of course, about God. But remember, as we do, and as you go from this place tonight, that the Light of the World is not all that can be said of God. For before the light, God was.

And here, in the night of the earth and, perhaps, in the night of your soul, God has not left you. God is still doing what God always has been doing, in that original, timeless, holy darkness: dreaming, creating, forming, loving. Remembering all the prices you have paid. Remembering the promises God has made. And reminding us of the one thing that is always true, the one thing God will never stop telling us, even in the dark:

I am here. I am here. I am here.

The Table: A Sermon For All Saints

I preached this sermon on Sunday, November 5, 2023, the observance of All Saints’ Day at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Revelation 7:9-17 and Matthew 5:1-12.

It’s in storage at the moment, but I am in possession of a rather unusual coffee table that my mom bought years ago. At the time, she was a young woman living in northern California, and one day as she was driving along, she saw a random man just sitting there on the side of the road selling furniture made out of oddly shaped pieces of reclaimed redwood. Apparently this was *totally normal* in the 70s in California, so she stopped to take a look and ended up going home with this particular coffee table, and it’s been handed on and passed down ever since.

Now I will admit, it is not the most useful piece of furniture. Because it is made from an irregularly shaped slab of wood, you can’t really put much on top of it, and the base is a little bit wobbly, and I’ve lost a few cups of coffee off of it and I’ve banged my shins on its jagged edges more than once in the dark, evoking some colorful language on my part.

But as impractical as it might be, I will never give up that table. Part of that is sentimentality of course; but also because the wood itself is so beautiful. The man who made it put a protective polish on it, but you can still see the deep, natural, rich hue of the redwood, the undulating grain, the nicks and the scars, the dark glow of its inner luminosity. In all my life, I have never seen another table quite like it. And so someday, when Matt and I have a house, I’ll hopefully find some corner where we can set it up with minimal risk to our shins.

What I love most about that table is that when you look at it, you can see its source. You can see the tree that formed it, the very shape of its origin, the textures and the imperfections acquired by its life in some long forgotten, cloud draped forest. You can see all the things that, when we craft something, are typically glossed over, shaved away, painted and and stained and hidden in the pursuit of a uniform perfection.

And it might sound strange, but I pulled out that table and looked at it this week as I was reflecting on the Feast of All Saints, which we are observing today. All Saints is, itself, a bit of a quirky object with a few jagged edges. One one hand, it’s, of course, a day when we call to mind the saints—people in the distant and recent past who, by some measure, experienced a particular closeness with God and God’s mission in the world. On the other hand, we also incorporate into our observance bits and pieces of All Souls Day, recalling the beloved dead, saintly and otherwise, who have populated our own past and whose memory lingers, sometimes a comfort, sometimes a painful thing we stumble up against in the dark.

And so in this one day we have a whole range of themes, references, and feelings to try and make sense of: a bit of joy; a pang of grief; a sense of calling toward something profound and eternal; and yet a lingering doubt about how to do so when life feels so temporary and fragile.

Our scriptures appointed for the day are similarly confounding. We are given a startling depiction in Revelation of martyrs in blood-white robes before the throne of God, an image that feels both vivid and yet impossibly remote from our day-to-day reality, where blood tends to stain a different color. And we are also given the deceptively simple Beatitudes of Jesus—equally vivid, yet equally remote once we try to figure out how to practically live them out. I have not yet figured out how to determine whether I am sufficiently poor in spirit or pure in heart.

But that confounding quality, that ambiguous, jagged beauty, is, I would argue, the point of this feast, because All Saints, in requiring us to grapple with grief and gratitude and hope all at once, is about reclaiming purpose from those things in our lives that are raw and unstructured and unvarnished, those irregularly shaped experiences we carry with us.

And at its core, All Saints’ wants to teach us that these things are not an obstacle but an answer; that sainthood is not something neat and tidy and peaceful; it is about the courage to reconnect with the deep, untidy, God-given authenticity within us, whether in this life or the next.

Because death and sainthood have something in common: they are both a sort of returning back to God, a stripping away of the cheap veneer, the paint and the pretense. The dead and the saints both experience a reconnection with that mysterious divine power which created all things.

The saints remind us that we can make this return even while we live, that by prayer and service, we can scrub ourselves down to the essential substance of which we were made, revealing the undulating grain, the dark glow of God’s inner luminosity in our very flesh.

But the dead remind us that even if we fail to return to God fully in this life, we will nonetheless, by God’s grace, do so in death, our souls restored to their original character, abiding in God like a stand of redwoods in a clouded forest. Everyone we have ever loved and lost is there now, standing tall and graceful, embedded back into the fabric of life itself, awaiting the day of a new creation when we will be fashioned into something even more honest, more complete.

And so if we read the Scriptures from this vantage point—that sainthood is not about wearing a golden halo but about the reclamation of our raw, inner radiance—then the texts reveal something important, something that my quirky old coffee table also seems to tell me whenever I look at it: our life of faith is not about acquiring layers of lacquer and gilding; it is not about being whittled down into something that barely resembles us; it is not about the straight line or the perfect edge. It is about the surrender to an organic, unbridled sort of beauty; it is about showing forth something of our eternal origins; it is about reminding all who gaze upon us, even with our nicks and our scars and our unsteady legs and our jagged edges, that we bear the image of the One who made us.

Which means that the Beatitudes are not, in fact, a checklist for achieving sainthood: they are the promise that even when bad things happen, even when all else is stripped away from us, our intrinsic blessedness will shine through.

And that image from Revelation is not just a remote tableaux of lofty, saintly figures in white; it is the promise that even when we bleed, even when we die, in Christ we will be revealed as what we always were: vessels of pure, divine light.

So my advice, for all of us, is to let All Saints be what it is. Let it be a little rough around the edges. Let it be delightful and let it be sad. Let it inspire a glance towards heaven and another down towards the dark earth where our loved ones rest. We will say their names and we will sing our songs, and maybe it will all be a little bit wobbly, a bit of a stumbling hazard, but it will be so very honest, so very meaningful, as all real, unvarnished things are.

I know I will never meet that mysterious man on the side of the road who was selling that redwood furniture, but if I could, I think would ask him, what inspired you to try and make something useful out of such rough, unruly, imperfect materials? Didn’t you know it wouldn’t quite work? Didn’t you know we would stumble in the dark and hit our shins and that it would hurt, that we would curse the ground we walk on?

But, at least in my imagination, I wonder if he might look back at me with a dark, gentle glow in his eyes and say,

Blessed are the ones who see the beauty in what is unruly and imperfect.

Blessed are the ones who love such things anyway.

Blessed are the ones who stumble and hurt and keep going.

Blessed are the ones who live.

Blessed are the ones who die.

Blessed are the jagged-edged and the real and the saintly.

And blessed, too, are the ones who simply try.

Wounds: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on April 24, 2022 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne. The lectionary text cited is John 20:19-31, when the risen Jesus appears to his disciples and shows them his wounds.

I was 18 years old when my body betrayed me.

At least, that is how it felt at the time. It was the spring of my first year of college, and I was full of expectations and grand plans about what my life was going to be like. I was going to travel the world, or maybe join the Peace Corps, or maybe write a book, or maybe be an actor on the stage—who knows, anything felt possible, and at that juncture in life you have more hope than clarity.

But as the blossoms came out on the trees that spring, I felt my body wilting—I lost a ton of weight, I was weak and listless, insatiably thirsty, unable to concentrate on anything. And a visit to the campus health clinic completely upended my life: the nurse listened to my symptoms, took a quick blood sample, and then said to me, with devastating simplicity: Phil, it looks like you have Type I diabetes.

I didn’t even know what that meant, at first, but I would soon learn. I would learn how to give myself insulin shots, how to count carbohydrates, how to triage a blood sugar crash. But throughout the management of my new, incurable disease, the one thing I struggled with the most was a feeling of resentment against my body. Suddenly, without any warning or obvious cause, it just stopped working, and all of my youthful daydreams about far-flung adventures were replaced by a grim pragmatism—health insurance, co-pays, the spectre of long-term complications. Everything I had hoped for seemed impossible, lost, pointless, all because my body was now broken.

Each of us must, at some point, contend with the frailty of our mortal flesh. Some of us face it very early in life, others much later, but eventually, at one time or another, our bodies stop cooperating fully with us. And whether it is sudden and tragic or more of a slow onset of accumulating challenges, the loss of health can be devastating, infuritating, or simply exhausting, such that we would rather just hide away in a locked room, foregoing the demands of being out in the world.

We might, at some point, quite understandbly, direct our frustration to God: God, why would you give me so many dreams and desires and then give me a body that can’t live them out? Why did you make us so vulnerable, so susceptible to fracture? What is the good of these wounds and scars and broken parts?

I certainly asked such questions when I was diagnosed with diabetes, and there are rough days when I still ask it. But of course, God tends not to answer such queries directly. He just shows up in the midst of them.

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side.

I was struck, in reading this passage again this week, that Jesus does not save the display of his wounds for Thomas alone—they are, in fact, the first thing he shows the initial group of disciples when he appears among them. It is as though his greeting of peace and the revelation of his pierced flesh are two inseparable parts of the same message. It is the wounds, the marks that bear the story of his suffering, that give the peacefulness he offers both authenticity and authority.

His injuries demonstrate that he is indeed who he said he is. There was no fake-out on the cross, no magic trick in the tomb, no secret plot to bypass the suffering that was bestowed upon him. There is only this strange new body, still very much like ours in its capacity for injury, but that now drips sweet peace from its wounds, like sap running out of the hole in a tree during the winter thaw. He is risen, yes, but still bleeding; the Resurrection has not erased his injuries, but has instead transfigured them, made them part of the wholeness of the cosmos, a part of the emerging Kingdom of God in which nothing, not even our gravest injury, is unreconcilable.

I need that reminder, to be honest, when I rail against my own physical limitations or when I grieve the illnesses and challenges of the people I care about. I need to remember that Jesus held onto his wounds, incorporated them into his peace, that he appeared on the other side of death with scars, as one changed by life, as one marked by life’s indifferent cruelty, and that it did not keep him from being, in the end, exactly what he needed to be. It gives me hope that there might yet be peace for us, too, who tend to our own wounds, who struggle with feeling betrayed by life’s fragility.

Because if we’re honest, we are all, in one way or another, just like Thomas and the other disciples. We know what it is to suffer and so we doubt—not because we are obstinate but because we are heartbroken. We doubt because we know the sting of disappointment and grief, we doubt because hope, at times, feels like the purview of the young, the strong, and the unmarred.

But Jesus shows up and shows us his hands and his side because he needs us to know that this, is, in fact, what hope actually looks like: not an unblemished daydream, but a body that both bleeds and loves profusely, because in the end, real life requires us to do both.

Do not doubt, but believe, he says to us–to encourage us.

Do not doubt that there is peace and promise on the other side of brokenness. Do not doubt that your own wounds and hurting parts are as precious to God as any other piece of you. Do not doubt that, even though some days you might feel like you are falling apart or that you are useless, you are, in truth, growing ever closer to God, ever more precious to God, ever more caught up in the healing mystery of grace. Even in your fragmented condition, you are loved wholly, as one who is complete.

Our journey is to trust that this is true about ourselves, and to tell others that it is true about them, too, no matter what they are going through, no matter what they have lost.

This month will be exactly 20 years since I was diagnosed with diabetes. I no longer feel betrayed by my body—I have found some measure of acceptance about it all—but I can’t stand here and tell you that it was a blessing or that I wouldn’t change it if I could. I would. It can be hard some days. But I think it’s ok to be honest about the hard stuff we face.

What I can tell you, though, is that Jesus’ wounds mean more to me now than they might have when I was perfectly healthy. I can see now how they are their own kind of answer to all of our questions about suffering and loss. Not an explanation, but still an answer. One that says:

I am here. You are not alone. This brokenness is part of you, but it is not all of you. And there is life to be found, even now, just as you are. Touch these wounds and see how well God understands your own. Touch these wounds and see that peace is still possible.

And in that moment, I get it. In that moment, I no longer doubt. I believe.

Parting Words: A Sermon for Good Friday

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

And then, it is finished.

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

Love Made Strange: A Sermon

This sermon was preached on August 9, 2020 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 14:22-33, wherein Jesus walks upon the sea.

One of the most frightening things in life is when the familiar, the comforting, becomes strange to us.

10 years ago, I remember the horrific shock of seeing my father intubated in a hospital bed after his first major heart attack. Here was a person I knew better than almost anyone else—the man who had held my hand on the sidewalk as a child, the man whose voice was the very sound of warmth and safety—here he was draped in shadow and blinking lights, in dreamless slumber, his skin slick with sweat, his features empty.

He was not yet gone, but he was far from me, and seeing him there as a figure unreachable, uncomprehensible, was a formative moment of terror—the last gasp of my childhood, the unraveling of certainties, the perilous thinness of the boundary between what is given and what is taken away.

If in our gospel passage we are speaking of voyages across stormy seas, then in that moment for me there was no shoreline in sight—only the roiling waves, the wind, the deep, and the realization that as much as I loved him and as much as I needed him, my father’s fragile life did not belong to me and never had; he did not exist solely to provide me with security—his soul had its own wild freedom, and I could only stand there and behold it, suspended in the wind, at the outset of its own new journey.

We all have to reckon with this realization at some point in our lives—that the things we cherish are always slightly beyond our grasp, like a sunset we cannot make stay.

Perhaps you, too, have felt that same mixture of suprise and fear at some point, when you realize that the person or the thing you love most is not entirely your own—standing beside a hospital bed, as I did, or waving goodbye as the car pulls out of the driveway, or in the evasive eyes of a lover whose love has left, or even in the daily news headlines that suggest the world is far more complex, unpredictable, and frightening than you thought it was.

These are the destabilizing revelations, the mini-apocalypses of our lives—the inbreaking of awareness that everything we thought we knew, everything that felt within our grasp, was never actually within the parameters of our control.

And this is what terrifies the disciples on the boat in the middle of the Sea of Galilee—not the storm itself, but the vision of Jesus approaching them through the storm, his feet suspended above the raging depths, an enigma and an impossibility.

How beyond understanding he has become, their humble teacher: the one they love and trust and rely upon, the one they thought they knew. How very strange he seems now, a ghostly image striding across the waters, no longer the benevolent offerer of bread and fish and a healing touch, but the embodied and eternal voice speakign out of the whirlwind, the untamed majesty of the transcendent I AM who parted the Red Sea and called from the flaming bush, as free as the wind and as inscrutable as the depth of night.

This is the very same Jesus, yes, but it is an overflowing manifestation of his fullness that defies the disciples’ comfortable assumptions, despite the miracles they have already witnessed. And he has a lesson for them, and for us.

One of the greatest temptations we will ever face is to feel threatened by that which we cannot understand. When we are afraid, we can reject the unfamiliar becasue it undermines our sense of an ordered and safe world. And in this singular impulse we can trace a myriad of tragedies throughout human history—the othering of minorities, the persecution of the innocent, the viciousness of groups, both religious and cultural, who insist upon the purity of their own moral vision. The institutional church is not exempt from this, as we are all painfully aware.

In ways large and small, each of us has likely participated in this tendency, every time we try to fashion another person into our image, every time we assume that our own social location, our own priorities, are the universal standard of judgment. In our fearfulness, you might say that we are all in the same boat, and, scared of what we glimpse in the tempest, we close our eyes, rowing desperately toward the familiar shoreline of our understanding.

But Jesus would not have us look away from him so easily. He is not simply the God of the comfortable shoreline, but also the one who emerges de profundis, from the deep places of our lives, who beckons with an authority that calls us, like Peter clambering out of the boat, to move toward that which frightens us. He shows up as God In the Storm, reaching to us across the waves, so that we will know he is there, so that we will not hide from the storms in our own lives.

Jesus is the one who asks us to let go of our fear, not because the world is a paticularly safe place—it isn’t— or because our lives will always be comfortable—they won’t—but because he is the one who sustains us despite our fear; he is, as 1 John describes, the perfect Love who casts out our fear. He is the silent stillness beneath the waves, the ground of certainty who persists in his pursuit of us, in all conditions.

We need a God who startles us a bit, if only to remember that we don’t have God all figured out. We need to let Jesus surprise us from time to time; we need to let him be just a bit more than we are comfortable with him being, so that we can learn to trust in a goodness that transcends mere pleasantness.

He remains the familiar, gentle Savior who calms the winds, yes, but he is also the wild Holy One who dances upon the storm and invites us to dance with him. When we allow Jesus to be all of this, to be both friend and stranger, both familar and new, then we begin to perceive how everything and everyone we love is also both of these things—forever ours…and forever free.

Because that was the thing about seeing my father that day in the hospital—beyond the shock, beyond the fear, beyond the strangeness, there was still love. Changed, perhaps, nuanced by grief and impending loss, but love nonetheless, spacious enough and strong enough to withstand circumstances beyond my understanding.

A love enduring, unkillable, and true. A love all-encompassing, as deep as the raging sea.

In the Marketplace: A Sermon

This sermon was preached online for Sunday, July 5, 2020 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30.

Jesus said to the crowd, “To what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another,

‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
we wailed, and you did not mourn.’ (Matthew 11:16-17)

Outdoor markets are vibrant, wonderful places. If you have ever had the chance to visit one, especially a market in another country, I am sure you know what I mean. Whether you are wandering the mountain-town markets of Guatemala or the urban night markets of Hong Kong, or even spending a Saturday morning at the Fort Wayne Farmer’s Market, to visit one is to be surrounded by the smell of ripe fruit and spices and grilled meat; the sounds of haggling customers and music; a profusion of colors and textures spilling out into your field of vision, each stall offering an invitation to trail your fingers along the contours of the earth’s abundance and of human creativity.

And, at the very same time, marketplaces are confusing, intimdating places, as well. The rules of negotiation are sometimes cryptic, the languages spoken might not be your own, the crowds can close in, and there is always the chance that you might take a wrong turn and end up lost amid a maze of counterfeit goods and beckoning strangers.

In their jumbled offering of both the delightful and the dangerous, markets are a microcosm of our common life—their sights and sounds represent the enticement of the ideas and experiences people exchange with one other, but they also signify the inherent risk of venturing beyond home, the vulnerability of relying on the trustworthiness of strangers, the calculated risk of enmeshing ourselves into a deep system of interdependence–one that extends far beyond simply finding a fair price for honey and housewares.

In the commerce and connections we foster in the marketplace, we belong to one another; we take our place in the unpredictability and fluidity of life, and who we are and how we are in that space conveys–and ultimately shapes–the kind of world we wish to see prosper. Are we people of curiousity and fairness? Or of suspicion and exploitative self-interest? Do we engage in just and sustainable practices, or is the cheap bargain more alluring to us?

The marketplace reveals every option and allows us the freedom to choose. We might also say it places upon us the responsibilty of choosing, because our conduct in the public square is never just about ourselves; it has broad impact.

And so we hear Jesus, this morning, comparing his generation to children, “sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another,” children who say “we played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed and you did not mourn.”

These children in Jesus’ analogy are disappointed because their companions have not engaged in the interplay of mutuality that a vibrant communal life requires; the signals of both celebration and grief, of flute and funeral dirge, have gone unheeded by those too busy, too distracted, or perhaps too self-conscious to respond to the opportunities that beckon in the public square. Their chiding reminds us that it is not enough to simply be present in the world—we must also choose how we are going to respond to it. Will we be attentive to the signs around us and shape our actions accordingly, or will we scurry through the market with our heads down, lost in our own impulses and hesitations?

In its immediate context, Jesus is using his market imagery to critique the crowd’s inability (or unwillingness) to discern the prophetic and proclamatory missions of John the Baptist and himself—like unresponsive children, Jesus sees them as a people who refuse to hear or respond to the signals given that the Kingdom of God is at hand, and that they should therefore listen and follow him, adopting the radically compassionate values of the new, Divine economy which he teaches and embodies.

But I would also say that Jesus’ critique continues to resonate for us today. Right now, in an historical moment when the marketplaces we inhabit are both physical and digital, we must continue to ask ourselves how we are showing up in those spaces—in every space wherein we take part in our expressions of common life. Our social media feeds. Our grocery stores and other businesses. Our political forums. Our parishes and our civic organizations. Although our physical presence has been limited in some of these places lately, we might take this as an opportunity to ponder the values which we will carry with us as we return.

And principal among those values, according to today’s Gospel? A willingness to listen, and look, and learn, and respond. We are asked to be brave, responsive participants in the marketplaces of the world—people who dance with the joyous and grieve with the injured. People who look for the signs of the Kingdom and take action to support its emergence. We are asked, in short, to be people who are all in for the world, who are so attuned to the colors and the sounds and the smells surrounding them that their love for God’s creation is, ultimately, the currency by which they trade.

We just celebrated Independence Day in the United States, and given the strained fabric of our national life, you might feel a poignant mixture of gratitude and discomfort this year. In the current environment, celebration is tinged with grief and concern. Many of us in this country have been blessed with abundance and freedom, and others among us have been prevented from receiving their share of that same vision.

But imperfect as our union might be, this is nonetheless the marketplace in which we find ourselves. This is the world that requires our loving response. This is the moment we are given, both to dance and to mourn. Let us do both, and tomorrow, and the day after that, let us begin again.