hope – By Another Road

No More Waiting: An Advent Sermon

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

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

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

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

So I hit the refresh button. How about now?

And I hit refresh again. How about now?!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So maybe we need to rethink this whole waiting thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Division: A Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Visitor: An Advent Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, December 1, 2024, the First Sunday of Advent. The lectionary text cited is Luke 21:25-36.

If you are relatively new to the Episcopal Church, one thing you will learn very quickly at this time of year is that Episcopalians really want you to know that Advent is not the same as Christmas. And once you begin to profess, in hushed, knowing tones, your particular love for Advent…I guarantee you are well on your way to becoming a bonafide Episcopalian!

The world around us might be playing Christmas carols at full volume and decking the halls with boughs of holly, but we, by God, we are the select few who know that Advent is not all fun and games. It’s serious business. It has apocalyptic Scripture readings for us to enjoy(!) and hymns about the Second Coming of Christ(!) and a decided lack of frivolity.

And for all that, I do love it. Advent is the slow, thoughtful descent into winter darkness, as candle flames tremble in the night and our souls reach out towards the cold, silent stars, looking for a sign of hope.

But let’s be honest with ourselves—a lot of us sort of do Advent and Christmas at the same time. We alternate between cozy cheer and prayerful pondering depending on when and where we find ourselves. Matt and I put up our Christmas tree this past weekend and we did some Black Friday shopping with the best of them.

And yet he is engaged to an Episcopal priest, the poor guy. As we were driving, Matt put on some cheerful Christmas tunes and then it was my turn to pick a song and I put on that absolute Advent banger, “Lo! He Comes with Clouds Descending.” I wildly waved my arms around in the car, conducting the unseen choir of King’s College, Cambridge while Matt patiently drove and listened. And…that really sums up our relationship, now that I think about it.

But I do find it restful and gratifying that here, in church, we embrace a bit of reflective, anticipatory energy in these weeks. We let Advent be what it is- we let it be its intense, quiet self. We allow it to make us squirm a bit with wonder and and longing and even a little fearfulness, if only so that when Christmas does arrive, we are fully prepared to be undone by the simple, gentle loveliness of a baby in a manger.

I think the pairing of these two seasons right alongside each other is helpful in developing our spiritual palates, because, to be honest, life is an acquired taste…most often bitter and sweet on the tongue at the same time. And we are learning, as we grow in faith, to appreciate the more complex flavors.

As I was thinking the other day about the bitter and the sweet, and the peculiar blessings of Advent, all of the sudden I thought of my great uncle Dick—my grandma’s brother. Now, Dick was a unique character. I think I would describe him as Advent in the flesh—pale and slim and serious; a man of very few, yet very deliberate words. And when Dick came to visit, it always made me a little nervous because, although a kind man, he was not like other people. You would come into my grandma’s kitchen and suddenly there he’d be, sitting in the lamplight at the kitchen table with a cup of weak coffee, surveying the room, saying nothing. If I’m honest, Uncle Dick was a complete mystery and as a kid he scared me a little— I just didn’t know what to make of him.

Then one day, without any explanation, when I was about 8 or 9, he told me to come with him, and we walked down the street to a little restaurant and he bought me a strawberry shortcake and we ate it in silence. And on the way home, we stopped at the dime store and he bought me a package of those old fashioned Ticonderoga pencils, the kind you have to sharpen. The whole time he said almost nothing at all.

I can’t tell you why, but of the many gifts I’ve received in my life, for some reason that outing with the shortcake and the pencils sticks with me. It haunts me with its quiet sweetness to this very day.

I think Advent is sort of like that—kind, stern, a bit hidden from view, and very precious as the years go by, especially once you realize that life is more than just bright lights and loud noise. Because it is the quiet moments and the quiet people and the quiet revelations of love that often make everything else make sense.

We need those Advent people, the Uncle Dicks of this world, to tether us to the value of that which is unadorned and profound. For it is their arrival which prepares our hearts for the winter seasons of life, when we cannot see clearly and when we need to rely on that something which is deep and dim and cool, long buried in our souls beneath the striving and the haste.

And this is exactly what Jesus is trying to convey to his disciples in this morning’s Gospel and what he wants us to realize, too. We might hear all of the imagery he speaks of—the roaring sea and the shaken heavens—and think that the apocalypse is the part of the story that matters most to Jesus. We might think that war and ruin are his chosen manner of appearing. But that is a misreading of his words.

Jesus is not apocalyptic noise; he is the quiet revelation who comes afterwards. That’s why Jesus tells his disciples over and over again to stay alert, aware, attentive, suggesting that, just like when he came the first time as a baby in a manger, perhaps his second coming will also be easy to miss. Like a thief in the night or a light in the darkness or…like a quiet visitor who slips in unannounced, gazing at you across the kitchen table over a cup of weak coffee. We must be ready to recognize him when he comes.

Because here’s the thing—apocalypse and noise are always around us. They’re nothing special. No, it is the cool, clear, quiet of grace and peace and the advent of those who bear these things which is transformative. It is ones such as these who reveal to us something worth knowing: that God will conquer the world and will conquer our hearts not through sword and terror but through strawberry shortcakes. And Ticonderoga pencils.

Jesus is many things, and he asks us to be many things, but above all he wishes for us to be unprovoked by fear and satisfied by the simplicity of love. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away, he says to us. My authority will not crumble like a temple, my hope will not decay like a body in the tomb, because true authority and true hope is here, in the advent of another sort of kingdom. The kind we are baptized into. The kind that indeed comes descending upon the clouds and lo, it is quiet, and it is gracious, and it is love.

Which is exactly what I hope each of us will seek, in our own way, during the next few weeks. It’s ok—do Advent and Christmas all at once if you need to. Go ahead and listen to all the songs and trim your trees and attend your parties and engage in whatever deeds of goodwill you can.

But also stop, every once in a while, and be quiet, and tend to that hidden corner of yourself where festiveness gives way to something deeper, something more substantive and kind than anything that can be written on a greeting card. Learn to savor that bittersweetness at the bottom of your heart, that mixture of weak coffee and shortcake, where God abides in us.

My Uncle Dick died years ago, but every time I happen to a sharpen a pencil, I am reminded of him, and I feel a twinge of gratitude for his grave, lonely gentleness. Thanks to him, I know what Advent looks and feels like. And thanks to him and his visits, I think that, should God come again in my own life, my heart will be attentive and ready and a little less afraid of an unexpected visitor.

And we’ll stare at one another across the table, God and I, as the winter shadows lengthen, and the lamplight burns and the world at last comes home to itself. And we’ll pour another cup of coffee. And no words will be necessary.

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.

The Stories We Tell in the Dark: An Advent Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, December 3, 2023, Advent I, at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Isaiah 64:1-9 and Mark 13:24-37.

When I was in elementary school, I auditioned to be in a community theater production of A Christmas Carol. I was so nervous during the audition that I totally flubbed my rendition of Silver Bells, but apparently they needed lots of children in the production, so somehow I was cast as some nameless older brother of the real star, Tiny Tim. I had no solos, which was fine, and I think my only real speaking part was to exclaim something about the Christmas goose. A Tony-award winning role it was not.

But I loved every minute of it. And since then, I’ve always had a soft spot for A Christmas Carol, which, when you step back and think about it, is really a strange and gloomy bit of entertainment during the holiday season. There are ghosts and nightmares and strange visions in the dark, and the story is, at its core, an exploration of mortality and regret and redemption as Ebenezer Scrooge enters the twilight of his life. A far cry from the doggedly bright and cheerful tone of most things we watch and read and hear this time of year.

But you might be surprised to learn that Charles Dickens, the author of A Christmas Carol, was not trying to be countercultural by injecting some dark themes into the festive season. In fact, at the time he published the story, in 1843, the winter holidays were actually the preeminent time of year for ghost stories and tales of the macabre. People expected to be frightened a bit at Christmastime. We might associate those things now with Halloween, but in pre-Victorian England, it was wintertime, when the nights were cold and families gathered in close for warmth, that chilling stories were shared and the mysteries of the dark corners of life were explored.

A Christmas Carol is one of the only remnants we have of this tradition, along with that one line in the Andy Williams song, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” when he references people telling ‘scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago.’ Otherwise, the culture around us seems to favor a cozier, less threatening tone as the winter settles in.

Except for one place. There is still somewhere you can go if you want to be a bit frightened during the holiday season. Right here, when you step into a liturgical church and listen to the readings during Advent.

Someone unfamiliar with the church seasons, stumbling into the midst of our Advent observances, might be forgiven for being shocked by the dim and haunting atmosphere of our readings and prayers this time of year. For this, the first Sunday of Advent, we have a yearning, wistful lament from the prophet Isaiah and an unsettling apocalyptic vision from Jesus and a Collect about casting away the works of darkness. One might expect the ghosts of Christmas past and future to show up at any moment, rattling their chains.

But for those of us who stick around to hear the stories, those who don’t run away, who try to make space for the odd collision of gloom and light that is Advent, I think we discover a strange respite in this season, perhaps the same sort that was provided by Christmas ghost stories in earlier times.

And the respite I am taking about is not the typical, self-soothing, therapeutic language that gets bandied about in some conversations about Advent being a slow and quiet time, an invitation to rest and relax and take part in self-care. Those are very good and healthy things, especially in a manic consumerist culture, but they are not the themes of Advent. Advent is not about a classical music and a bubble bath in between shopping trips.

Advent is about the stories that we tell in the dark—the stories that send a chill down our spine because they ask us to look into the shadows, the unknowability, the loss and the dissatisfaction and the brevity of things. That’s why you won’t find many light and happy Scripture passages this month; we must pass through the valley of shadows first, so that we can begin to understand the true radiance of what is promised in the first and second comings of Christ.

In the same way that we tell ghost stories around the fire in order to feel more alive, and in the same way that Scrooge, in A Christmas Carol, has to face his demons before his spirit can soar with the angels, so too does Advent invite us—require us, really—to acknowledge the pain of life so that we might better understand what Jesus is actually coming for in the first place. That is why our readings are not warm and bright and cheerful— because they attempt to be honest about, as Shakespeare put it, “the winter of our discontent” so that we might also be honest about what true contentment looks like when it arrives.

And what does contentment look like? We begin to collect some images for ourselves this week. Contentment looks like intimacy with our Creator, his hands like a potter molding the clay of our bodies into something beautiful and useful and strong. And contentment looks like intimacy with creation, that we might be as attentive and awake as a fig tree, our souls unfurled to receive the Son of God in due season.

In Isaiah and in the Gospel, and in all the stories we will tell in the dark over the next few weeks, we are asked to abide in the creative tension of living as a people who are both aware of life’s shortcomings and yet are haunted by the Kingdom of Heaven—knowing that both are real, the deep lamentation and the emerging promise, knowing that God will indeed reshape us, knowing that we do not hope in vain, and yet not knowing when the consummation of that hope will arrive in its fullness to descend upon our war-torn cities and upon our war-torn hearts.

And so, in Advent, we wait for the peace that the world proves time and again that it cannot give. And we tell the truth: the waiting is hard.

But may we also discover that in the waiting, even waiting in the dark where ghosts linger, there is still joy and loveliness and courage to be found when we gather in close to one another and do what we have been asked to do: to keep telling the stories of God’s goodness. To keep telling the good news. And to do this, all of this, in remembrance of the One who has promised that the end of the story will be a beautiful one.

And on that day, when past and present and future all come together, when the long delayed advent of God gives way to arrival, when we are awakened from something deeper than sleep, then, well, what a happy morning that will be. Happier, even than when Scrooge woke up to find himself alive, truly alive, on Christmas Day. I think it will be worth the wait.

Speaking of Scrooge, I suppose I have accepted the fact that I will probably not feature in any other productions of A Christmas Carol. But that’s ok. I am perfectly content. And you know why? Because I may not have had any good lines on stage back then, but now, every Sunday, I basically get to say the most important line of all, the one Tiny Tim says at the end of the story, the one that really sums everything up, the one that underlies everything we do. I get to say, God bless us, every one.

God bless us, every one. Everyone. It’s the best ending to a story anyone could hope for. Especially because it happens to be true. God will.

The Edge of Knowing: An Advent Reflection

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

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

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

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

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

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

And why has this happened to me? asks Elizabeth.

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

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

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

But at the very least, they are willing.

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

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

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

How do I prepare for whatever comes next?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is God calling forth from within you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Porches: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, January 30, 2022 at Trinity Episcopal Church in Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary text cited is 1 Corinthians 13:1-13.

Since moving to Fort Wayne a few years ago, I have discovered one of the simple, perfect pleasures of life in the Midwest (during the warmer months, at least): strolling through the neighborhood at dusk, fireflies blinking in the humid air, as people sit out on their front porches watching the encroaching twilight.

Growing up largely out west where the houses look very different, I have to say that there is nothing like a good front porch. They are a thing of beauty, especially in the older neighborhoods where they sit broad and benevolent, ensconced amidst leafy green trees, the warm glow of a lamp spilling out into the gathering night. And always a rocking chair or a swing, inhabited in the cool of the evening by some friendly neighbors.

I walk past and we wave to one another, remark on the weather; just a moment of encounter, a little reminder of the permeability of the barrier between our lives and the lives of the people around us—between our homes and the larger home that is our community. Front porches facilitate that somehow.

One evening last spring I was walking through the neighborhood as the blossoms fell and gathered on the streets, and the silhouette of a man on his porch greeted me. “It’s a beautiful night,” he said. “It feels like hope.”

It feels like hope. What an unexpected yet wonderful thing to say to a passing stranger. But he was right, that moment did feel like hope—both the beautiful evening and his poetic greeting.

Early on in the most isolating phase of the pandemic, those porch greetings were sometimes the only real face-to-face interaction I might have in a day, and it was a balm for the loneliness of uncertain times. You might recall that there were stories in early 202 from around the world of people going out on their front porches or their balconies to wave to one another, to dance and to sing, as if to say: yes, we’re all still here. We’re still together, even if we don’t always realize it.

When we’re out on the front porch, the world is a bit kinder, a bit gentler—we suddenly realize that we live amidst a thousand open thresholds rather than row upon row of closed doors. A thousand open hearts; a thousand possibilities to stop and say hello, maybe even pause together in the night and smell the blooming flowers, to watch the stars come out.

I know, of course, that not all of us live in neighborhoods with front porches, but I hope that at some point in your life you’ve experienced what I am describing—and if you haven’t, then some evening in late spring or summer, park at the church and come take a walk through my neighborhood, and let yourself experience what it is like to see your neighbors again. I promise they’ll be out there on those stately old porches, and you will be greeted, and you will go home feeling a bit more like you belong to this world.

So why all this talk of porches? Because actually I think that they’re a great way of thinking about our life of faith.

Here’s what I mean: It can be tempting to think of our faith as something very private, something that is done behind closed doors, in the seclusion of our church sanctuaries or during our bedside prayers.

Perhaps we’ve just always done it that way, or perhaps we are suspicious of certain folks who practically chase you down the street with their religious views. Either way, we might start to act as though our Christianity is like eating alone or singing only in the shower—just something between us and God. And while there is indeed a deeply personal dimension to our relationship with Jesus, there is also something else that he asks of us—a willingness to step outside of our domesticity, to seek his face in one another and among the rest of our neighbors–especially the ones we don’t know very well.

We don’t have to parade ourselves through the streets every day—but we can’t keep the joy of our salvation sequestered either. Our faith needs to exist in that liminal space between indoors and out, neither zealously private nor zealously overbearing.

And so, it occurs to me that we need a front porch kind of faith.

Deeply personal, yes, deeply grounded, but also open, inviting, hospitable, and a bit vulnerable—a faith that breathes out in the open air, a faith that is ready to meet whoever comes along and to bless them. A faith that is ready to love our neighbors in Christ’s name.

The struggle to find this balance is as old as the church itself. Paul, in today’s famous passage from the first letter to the Corinthians, has a lot to say about love, and it is beautiful to hear, but we are well-served to remember why he was writing this letter in the first place. You see, the church in Corinth had some wealthy and worldly members in it—people who tended to think rather highly of themselves. As such, they had a tendency towards insularity—the wealthier members kept to themselves and didn’t share table fellowship with their poorer brothers and sisters. And some of them saw Christianity as, essentially, another Greek mystery religion—a pathway to further wealth and health and wisdom for themselves, rather than a dramatic reordering of their value system and their conduct in the broader community.

And so when Paul speaks of the preeminence of love over and above all other virtues and achievements, he is telling the Corinthians—and us—that far more than cultivating eloquence or wisdom or impressive piety, we are called to simply take care of one another, and to especially take care of those who need us the most. We are called to recognize our interdependence upon one another. We are, in other words, called to have a front porch faith—a faith that is outward facing, open, and neighborly.

Someone once said, after all, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Neighbors. That’s who we are in this whole thing. To be a neighbor is our primary vocation as Christians. Not heroes on our own personal quest, not would-be saviors, not judges, nor rulers—just neighbors. Neighbors sitting on the front porch, in joyful proximity to one another, calling out blessings into the summer night, watching the fireflies, waiting for the stars.

Each of us will live out this vocation differently—whether we have an actual front porch or not. For some of us, it might look like getting to know our broader community and its needs a bit better. For others it might be delving more deeply into the ministries and the offerings of this parish. For some it might be writing a letter of encouragement or making a long overdue phone call. There is no bad place to begin. There is only the invitation to do so—to step out, to greet the world and discover that Paul was right–yes, indeed, love does abide, everywhere, in everyone, and the bravest, most impressive thing we can ever do is to live as if this is true.

And when we do so, may we discover the deep satisfaction of being a neighbor and of having one.

May we encounter the joy of remembering that each of us is an integral part of all things.

And at the end of all our journeys, may we find the front porch that waits for us, a lamp glowing in the darkness, and a voice to welcome us home. A voice that says,

It’s a beautiful night. It feels like hope.

Prize: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on January 23, 2022 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne. The lectionary text cited is Luke 4:14-21, where Jesus speaks to the community at Nazareth.

I don’t know if they’re still on, but when I was a kid watching television, I would always see those commercials for Publishers Clearing House…you know, the ones where it would show people answering the doorbell and being greeted by an entourage carrying one of those huge checks for a huge amount of money. They showed the people crying and jumping up and down with joy, all of their problems having been seemingly solved by this incredible prize appearing out of nowhere.

Now, we didn’t live in poverty when I was young, but there were lean times for a whole host of reasons, and I came largely from a working class family, so the idea of never having to worry about money, to not have to live paycheck-to-paycheck, was a tantalizing idea that seemed reserved for other families. So I would daydream a bit about what it would feel like if one of those prize committees showed up at our front door—what it would be like to see that check with OUR name on it, to suddenly live without that pervasive, gnawing fear that there won’t be enough.

And one day, when I was probably 12 or so, we actually got one of those envelopes in the mail from Publishers Clearing House—we had been “selected” to enter to win a prize. Now of course this was no more likely than winning the lottery, but I wanted it so badly to be true—I wanted to believe that we had a chance. So we filled out the entry form and I put it in the mailbox and we waited…and waited….and waited.

I’m still waiting, by the way. I have to believe that because I’ve moved so many times they’ve just not found my current address, and that surely that prize check will find me one of these days.

I tell you about all of this because I wonder if it was a little like that for the people in Nazareth in today’s gospel passage. Struggling to get by under Roman occupation, struggling to get by as a people for as long as they can remember, really. And they’d submitted their supplications to God over the centuries, they’d cried out for some help, and they were waiting, waiting, waiting for that prize to finally show up—the One who would make it possible to live confidently, the One who would fix things, the One who would make the waiting worth it.

And then, here is Jesus, one of their own, and he tells them something wonderful: he quotes from the prophet Isaiah, speaking of good news and abundant healing and the year of the Lord’s favor—the jackpot, really, the big prize check from God saying “it’s all going to be all right now,” and then Jesus says: today, this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Well, Hallelujah! Break out the balloons! It’s as though Jesus has come to the door, and he’s heaven’s prize committee, and he’s got the solution—in fact, he IS the solution. I bet a few people in that synagogue, shocked as they were, wanted to cry and jump for joy.

Have you ever wanted something so badly that you can almost see it, almost feel what it would be like to have it? Have you ever wanted something so badly that it haunts you? I imagine that is what it was like for those people in the synagogue at Nazareth, and here, for one brief moment, they begin to hope that their time has come. That happy days are here again.

But you and I know that’s not exactly how the story ends. It’s a little more complicated than that. Because Jesus goes on to tell them, essentially, that God’s favor, God’s imminent redemption, God’s big victory prize, is not at all what they expected. In fact, it’s not even necessarily for them. He reminds them that when God responded to famine and disease in the past, God sometimes bypassed Israel entirely and bestowed gifts on other nations.

That would sting. It’d be like opening the door to that prize committee and realizing after a few minutes that they got the wrong address—the check is actually for that neighbor down the street that you can’t stand. So close, yet so far.

So I feel for the people of Nazareth a little bit, even if they do try to throw Jesus off of a cliff. They didn’t really understand yet. They were waiting desperately for a prize, but instead they got a gift—a Savior, entirely unlike the one they expected—the Savior, of all people, everywhere. A gift so big, so incomprehensible, that it didn’t even register as valuable to them right away, or maybe ever. And so we see them there in the narrative of the Gospel, forever locked in that moment at the edge of the cliff, still waiting, waiting, waiting for the prize they expected, not recognizing the gift that showed up.

We are liable to do the same thing. It is so easy to look back and measure our lives by whether we got what we wanted–what we expected should be ours. The problem with that, of course, is that we never get everything we want, and even when we do, it’s usually not quite what we’d imagined. So we, too, might find ourselves waiting at the edge of that cliff for our whole lives, shaking our fist at heaven, cursing our dashed hopes.

Or…we can turn around, and look what what is right in front of us: Jesus. And one another. The true gift. Better than any prize we could win. He has already arrived at our doorstep, sometimes dramatically, sometimes quietly, but he is coming, he is there, I promise he hasn’t lost your address.

And while he’s not carrying a big check, he is offering himself to you—all that he is, all that he has, all that he signifies. The question is, will we accept him, will we recognize that he is what we have been waiting for, or will we spend the rest of our days waiting for something that we imagine to be better?

I assure you, that thing is not coming.

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

Today–and every day– that you encounter Jesus, and every day that you love one another in the name of Jesus, this Scripture, this longing, this promise, has been fulfilled in your hearing. It won’t take away all our worries, but it will show us what actually matters. It will guide us—all of us—into that peace which passes all understanding—a peace that no amount of money can buy.

You’re here. You’re loved beyond measure. You’re free.

So congratulations. You’ve won.