grief – By Another Road

Bricks: A Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So let’s keep building.

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

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

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

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

On Anger, & What To Do With It: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, April 6 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The text cited is John 12:1-8, Jesus’ anointing for burial by Mary of Bethany.

There’s an aspect of life—of faith, even—that we don’t talk much about on Sundays. Maybe it’s because we’ve been raised to be polite. Maybe it’s because, for very good reason, we hold fast to the proclamation of a loving and gracious God. But nonetheless, there’s something that we all contend with in our lives that’s probably worth talking about, and that’s anger.

Are you feeling angry these days?

If not, at some point you surely have felt it, whether about the state of the world; the decisions of others; or the frustrations that tend to show up each day. Maybe you’ve felt anger at yourself for the things you wish you’d done differently but can’t take back. I know I have felt all this and more, though as a person who tries to remain centered and peaceful, I may not like to admit it.

But anger is hard to avoid when our hopes are dashed or our deep fears encountered or our wounds touched. And some days we might wonder, if anger is so bad for us, why, Lord, do people keep giving me so many good opportunities to practice it??

It’s tough, though, because sometimes a bit of righteous anger feels appropriate. I get angry, for example, when folks demonize vulnerable groups of people who aren’t hurting them, people who are just trying to live their lives as best they can.

And I get angry, too, when I see how working-class communities like the one my family came from in rural Michigan have been dismissed and left behind by 21st century economics and culture.

And this is sillier, but I was even a bit angry last week when Cincinnati got passed over for the Sundance Film Festival because, essentially, some folks out west still consider the entire middle of the country a big blank space. I’m from California, but I consider myself a proud midwesterner now, so that riled me up a bit!

I cite these because anger, it seems, cuts across ideologies, politics, cultures, and identities. It is an equal-opportunity companion in this life. And there are plenty of late nights when I reflect on my own personal failures and I’m just angry at my own foolish self.

The question is, what do we do about it?

In a cultural moment that seems so saturated by anger and its consorts—fear, anxiety, uncertainty, cynicism—the question of what to do with our anger, individual and collective, is both an ethical and an existential one. Ethical, because somehow we have to figure out how to live meaningfully in this world despite its frustrations. Existential, because Jesus calls us to be something more than the sum of our many angers.

Lent is almost over, and we are in the foothills of Holy Week. Soon, through the Passion of Christ, we will bear witness to the the cost of humanity’s capacity for self-defeating anger. So it’s a good time to figure out what to do about the rage within us and amongst us, lest we keep on murdering the promise of the kingdom that still stands in our midst.

In today’s Gospel reading, I think we are given two insights–two pathways–in our response to anger, though I don’t think that this story is usually viewed that way.

Consider first Mary of Bethany—she who previously sat at Jesus’ feet while her sister Martha cooked and cleaned. Mary is not usually viewed as an angry person, but for the first time this week I found myself wondering if here, in this moment in the narrative, she actually is.

Because I remember how angry I was when my father was dying—not angry at him, but angry that it had to happen at all. Angry that I had to watch his vitality slowly ebb away. And I know, too, how somethings the things we love the most also wound us the deepest. And so I wondered, maybe, if Mary’s anointing, her shattering of the precious jar, her wasteful smearing of fragrant oils, was not, as I have often assumed, some sort of calm, smiling ritual.

Maybe there were angry tears streaming down her face as she did so. Maybe she was furious with grief that Jesus–her teacher, her Lord, the one who raised her brother from the dead, the one who could potentially make this mess of a world beautiful again—maybe she was furious that he was giving himself over, that he was surrendering himself to death at the hands of those same old persecutors who kill everything good. Maybe Mary was anointing him with holy anger as much as holy love. Because I find those two are often strange companions in the tangle of this life, where good things break and sure things falter and we must both rage and bless at the same time.

However (and this is essential) anoint him she does, even through her angry tears, because despite how disappointed Mary must be that Jesus will die, and that life does not conform to our expectations, she realizes in the way that only Wisdom can reveal that we must anoint our fierce anger at the world with an even fiercer love, rather than try to manipulate or abandon or destroy what disappoints us.

Because to give into that temptation is to choose the other path in the story today—that of Judas, the betrayer, who is likely also disappointed that Jesus is not the sort of savior he imagined. But for Judas, it seems, the world is just a series of disputes to be bargained and negotiated and won, rather than a network of relationships to honor.

It may be tempting to navigate the world that way, with our understandable anger at the way things are (even Judas surely raged against the empire) but it is not the way of Jesus. It is not the way that will lead to the flourishing or health or peace that Jesus offers. Only the pouring out of our hearts, only the giving away of our costly love will ever lead us to the kingdom of Christ.

So what do we do, friends, with the angers of our own life and times? How do we acknowledge all that we carry within ourselves but then, like Mary of Bethany, surrender it to our Lord?

First, we have to name it—really name it. Maybe part of the problem in all our conditioning to be polite is that we tend to remain strangers with our anger. Maybe it would help to begin by writing down for ourselves the things that anger us. Not on social media, please, but just for ourselves. An accounting of our frustrations, our sorrows, our disappointments, and our fears. And then, as this Lent winds down, give them over to Jesus in prayer.

Maybe it would help, like Mary, to undo your hair, and bend low, and smear the bittersweet fragrance of your rage and blessing on his feet. If you are disappointed that nothing seems like an easy fix, tell him. If you had hope for so much more from this life and from your fellow humans, tell him. If you don’t understand why crucifixion must be the path, and why we can’t have nice things, and why so many people suffer for no good reason at all, tell him.

But I pray we will tell him, too, that in our anger, we will refuse to be apathetic or craven or cynical. That we’ll tell him we’re willing to love with our shattered jar and our shattered hearts. I promise you, he will understand.

And then, together, we will continue to go about the work of building a community and a world in which, even as we acknowledge our anger, we become a people who are not ultimately formed by it. A people who will not sell our hope for thirty pieces of silver or justify our anger on the backs of the poor, but who will anoint the present moment with our furious compassion. Even with tears in our eyes.

Because every week, as we come to the table to feast on the shattered pieces of Christ’s body, we glimpse the truth: anger is persistent, yes, but love is eternal. And he will transform it all: our anger, our grief, our disappointment, our fear. He will transform it.

Just ask Mary. Because in a couple of weeks’ time, we will see her again, but it will be in a garden, in the cool morning light, with the perfume of burial washed away by the scent of living, resurrected things. And she will cry very different tears. And maybe so will we.

And for once in the history of broken jars and broken hearts and all the things we do not understand, our anger, at last, will be forgotten.

Everything Happens: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, March 23, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Exodus 3:1-15 and Luke 13:1-9.

So there’s a particular phrase that gets used a lot, one that most of us have heard or maybe used at one point or another. I’m sure that I have used it in the past. But it’s a phrase that, as I live longer and especially as I do ministry longer, I have become more and more troubled by. It’s this one: “everything happens for a reason.”

I’ll be honest, I really don’t like this phrase very much anymore. And if you use it in your own discussions of the big questions of life, I hope you’ll at least hear me out. Because as I have spent these years as a priest and have been invited into the vulnerable, sometimes painful and complex stories of people’s lives, the more I see how empty this phrase can be.

Imagine if you will: a person comes to you and says they have been harmed in every imaginable way by their family, and now they deal with mental illness and addiction, and they struggle to keep a roof above their heads, and lately they’ve been sleeping in a tent in the park. But they come to you and want to know more about what God’s love could possibly mean for them.

Or imagine this: you are visiting with someone who has lost their spouse of over 60 years, gone in the blink of an eye, and they tell you the stories of how they met, and show you old, beautiful photos of when they were both young and laughing and strong and unafraid of love’s deep costliness. And today, this person gazes at the photos with an unanswerable longing and wonders what the rest of life will look like.

Would you, could you ever bring yourself to say to such a person, “well, everything happens for a reason”? Having sat with them, many times over, I can assure you with every fiber of my being: I could not. I would not. I will never.

Because even if we rightly acknowledge that we do not understand why things happen the way they do, this phrase, everything happens for a reason, is still just a flimsy band-aid over the deep wounds of life. It is attempt at naming something when a gentle silence would suffice. Better, I’ve learned, to just be present with that which we cannot understand. Better to offer quiet love than easy answers. Like that unspeakable name of the Living God who speaks to Moses from the burning bush, sometimes it is good for words to fail us.

I was thinking about this because wrestling with “everything happens for a reason” is also, I think, a helpful way of wrestling with our Gospel reading this morning. It’s a reading which at first hearing sounds very severe. Someone at Bible study this week said this is a very “Lenten” reading, full of suffering and judgment. And that’s true, but I would offer that suffering and judgment are not the deeper message that Jesus is trying to convey to us here. His call to repentance is a call to a new understanding of God and the world we live in.

When these unnamed individuals come and let Jesus know about some Galileans—in other words, people who could have been Jesus’ neighbors—who have been killed by the imperial authorities and had their bodies desecrated, we can imagine that they want some answer from Jesus about why such a thing could happen. And although we don’t actually hear them say it out loud, we can imagine them wondering: did these Galileans do something to deserve this fate? Or is there some greater plan God has in mind by making these people suffer? Did all of this happen for a reason?

But Jesus’ answer to them is bracing and provocative, especially for those of us who need everything to fit together neatly. No, he says. Do not ascribe the suffering of the Galileans to God. And do not console yourself by secretly assuming it couldn’t happen to you. “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners?” In other words, are you, when confronted with the horrors of cruelty and injustice in this world, trying to convince yourself that everything happens according to God’s plan? That God instrumentalizes our suffering? If so, you are not yet understanding the nature of God.

And, he goes on, those eighteen killed with the tower of Siloam fell…and those who were in the Twin Towers when they collapsed…and the generation of people lost to AIDS…and the children who are dying in Gaza and the hostages who haven’t come home…and our neighbors in West Chester who go to bed hungry at night…and the ones next to us in the pews who have suffered illness or deep loss—are they somehow “worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem?” If anyone says yes, they, too, are not yet understanding the nature of God.

Because the awakened and transfigured heart can’t look at such things and hold onto “everything happens for a reason” or “they had it coming” or “at least it wasn’t me and mine.” The awakened and transfigured heart, the one that is grafted onto the heart of God, does not put band-aids on deep wounds; it does not offer platitudes that primarily serve to comfort the one who speaks them. No, the awakened and transfigured heart—the heart of Christ, the heart that beats in our own chest, too, if we will let it–chooses to offer love rather than easy answers.

Jesus wants his disciples to understand, both in that age of Roman oppression and now in our own time of social and political disarray, that the Christian path is not paved with empty words and good intentions—that road leads…elsewhere. The Christian path is not characterized by shrugging our shoulders at the universe and saying “everything happens for a reason” and then going back to whatever it was we were doing.

No, the Christian path is the one gentle and courageous enough to look into the face of suffering and to simply say, yes, everything happens. Everything happens. Families hurt us sometimes, and loved ones leave us, and towers fall, and democracies struggle and times get tough, and it’s hard to know what to say. But what we can do is choose compassionate action. What we can do is plant the seeds of love and mercy and hope, defiant in the face of death and despair. And in fact we must do that if we hope to experience true salvation, to live as God lives, both in this life and beyond it.

That’s why, after his challenging teaching and his call to a new way of life, Jesus gives us, today, a parting image—one that clarifies the alternative to empty words and flimsy band-aids. He shows us a gardener who refuses to give up on a fig tree. A gardener who refuses to shrug his shoulders at the fruitless branch, who refuses to say “everything happens for a reason,” and leave the quaking tree to its lonely fate. He shows us a gardener who bends down close, who chooses to stay, who chooses to care, who chooses to try, no matter what the next year brings.

Because that turning around and leaning down into love, that’s repentance. And that’s the beginning of understanding the true nature of God.

And to the extent we are doing that here at St. Anne—in our ministries, in our hearts, in our community—thank God, because that is the journey along the true Christian path, which indeed always leads back to a garden, back to what might yet grow—so that this hungry world might be fed something more than platitudes.

After all, we ourselves are fed, week by week, by the God who does not often speak out loud with easy answers, but who prefers to simply show up in bread and wine and song and silence. Quiet, eternal, impossibly near. Thi is the God who asks us to do anything but give up on each other, and who refuses to give up on us, no matter how little we understand.

The God in Christ who, even when everything happens, as it too often does, prefers to give us the one thing better than a reason: himself.

Trick or Treat: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, October 27, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Job 42:1-6, 10-17 and Mark 10:46-52.

Every year about this time, I come up against two things that are both true and yet are hard to reconcile with one another. The first is that Halloween was my absolute favorite holiday growing up and is still something I find great joy in. And the second is that 12 years ago, my father died on Halloween.

For a long time I didn’t really know what to do with that.

Even many years on, now, when this season comes around, that intersection of nostalgic pleasure on one hand and lingering sadness on the other strikes me as a very strange thing. But it also strikes me as a very true thing about life. It is the time of year when I’m reminded that the very good and the inexpressibly hard always brush up against one another–fairy princesses and ghosts both knocking at the door.

Halloween is when I realize that grief and joy are not a binary choice I can pick between, but two companions who have different things to teach me. We navigate the autumn, the three of us–grief and joy and I–and so I have found a new way of being in this season.

Because as much as I used to love it, I am well past the age of going trick or treat; instead I’ve come to that point when one learns that both treats and tricks arrive in our tentatively outstretched hands as the years go by. The key is to keep our hands and our hearts open anyhow; to trust that, with God’s help and with each other, we can sift through whatever is given.

That’s easier said than done, though.

We live at time in which the general tendency is to see grief and joy as enemies of one another, as a sort of zero sum struggle, and this false binary has all sorts of dangerous implications.

For example, we get caught up in partisan divisions which suggest our grief and grievance must be satisfied by destroying the joy of those who are different from us.

At times our public discourse cannot bear subtlety or compromise, as one group seeks to maximize its pleasure and discount its perceived enemy’s pain.

Or we find ourselves caught up a brittle, toxically positive culture that frames joy as the absence of sadness or weakness, suggesting that something is wrong with anyone who dares to weep or crack or mess up or show fear.

And when this happens, we become a shallower, meaner, more haunted society.

We have been here before, though. Just read the story of Israel. Read the Psalms, including the hard parts our Sunday lectionary leaves out. Read the Gospels. The wisdom of our spiritual forebears, the wisdom of Scripture, has always understood that fullness of life–this thing that Jesus speaks about and wants to invite us into–is a space which gives voice to every human condition, and that the only way to approach God is to move toward that strange crossroads where joy and grief coexist.

Consider, for example, the culmination of the Book of Job, which we heard today. At first glance, it might sound almost like a fairy tale, a sweet treat for frightened children—a tidy, happy resolution where this poor man gets back even more than what was taken from him.

Except when we stop to consider the fact that his questions to God never did get answered, and that his new wealth and his new children will never erase the pain of what he has been through, not really.

Anyone who has suffered loss will recognize this: that Job must learn to live out his days somehow with both grief and with joy, and it is only in the holy tension of these two that a new sort of blessedness is visited upon him, one that is deeper and wiser and more alive than that of earlier, simpler days.

We come to realize that Job’s story is the journey of the soul’s movement toward God through the ambiguities and complexities of life.

And something similar is revealed in the story of Bartimeus, the blind beggar, healed by Jesus just before his own final entry into Jerusalem. Unlike the rich young man and the ambitious disciples we’ve heard about in recent weeks, Bartimeus has no illusions about life. His experience at the margins of society and his close intimacy with sorrow have shown him what seeing eyes could not see—that the true disciple of Christ is no prosperity gospel status seeker but the one who is unafraid of darkness.

Like Bartimeus, the true disciple, though they cannot see God, calls out anyway, saying walk with me, God of grief and of joy, let me follow you wherever you might go, let me see everything, for the first time, as it really is, not just what I am accustomed to seeing.

Show me who you are, God, and reveal who I am, too, and though we are long past a transactional trick or treat sort of faith, let us see what good might yet be done as we go wandering together in this night strewn with tears and candy wrappers.

Because let’s be honest with ourselves—that is the world we live in. That is life, in all its bittersweet complexity.

I know, especially in this election season, a lot of us are struggling to manage a lot of feelings at once these days—fear, anger, anxiety, uncertainty, hope, gratitude, determination. We have many good reasons for this, personal and political and cultural. But one thing that we cannot lose sight of as we navigate the next few weeks or months or years is that no single one of these emotions is the whole story.

Beware of anyone who wants you to tap into only your anger, only your fear, or only your craving for the sweet things in life. The only way that we can be faithful, purposeful, authentic disciples of Jesus is to carry all of it with us: the sadness, the delight, the gratitude, the humility, the resilience.

Being Christian, following Jesus, means we aren’t trick or treating anymore—we don’t get to choose just one thing or the other—strength or compassion, patriotism or prophetic witness, righteousness or relationship. Resisting idolatry, whether of nation or party or religious institution or even of our own identities means standing in that crossroads of understanding with Job and Bartimeus and Jesus, guided into a deeper sense of empathy and connection with one another above all else.

If you haven’t realized this already, I hope you will understand that one point of a parish like ours is that it’s a place where we practice this together. Church is like a workshop for the heart and soul, where we try out this honest relationship with grief and joy, with each other and with God, so that we can go out and do that same thing in the rest of our lives, in this world that so badly needs it.

I am grateful that the church, that this church, can be such a place. I am grateful that Jesus in the fullness of his gospel makes space for everything that we are, and everything that we have lost, and that he does this for everyone.

It helps make the strange collision of all my Halloweens—and any other haunted seasons of our life in this world–a bit easier to bear. A bit easier to keep going, to keep hoping, to keep believing, no matter what comes next, whether trick…or treat.

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.