Tag: illness

Facing It: A Sermon

About seven weeks ago, as most of you know, I found myself in a place I didn’t want or expect to be. There are so many other things that Matt and I thought this summer would be about, but we had to accept that my surgery and its aftereffects were, in fact, was what was happening instead.

Every so often, you come face to face with life as it actually is, and you can’t hide. You can’t escape into your plans or your platitudes or all the comforting narratives in your head. There comes a moment—and it is a hard, holy moment—when all you can do is surrender to the truth that’s right in front of you. 

This doesn’t always come as bad news. Yes, for some of us, this sort of moment shows up in crisis. But the immediacy of life comes through in wonderful ways, too: when you fall in love, or see the sun dip into the sea, or hear your children laughing, or taste the perfection of sweet summer corn on the cob. 

As followers of Jesus and as sacramental people, any and all of this is an opportunity. Our faith tradition teaches that whenever you surrender to the truth of things, whenever you can drink of the cup that is right now, whether bitter or sweet, you will taste God. Because God is found precisely in those places where there is nothing to hide from anymore—where you are, at last, here, actually partaking in life. This is what Jesus modeled for us every single day. 

For me, several weeks ago, that moment of surrender was when they were wheeling me in for surgery. I’d said all the goodbyes and I love you’s, we’d prayed, and I had to go. And as they rolled me down those cold dim hallways towards the operating room, I found myself some mixture of terrified and very, very present, thinking, here I am. This is my life. I don’t know what comes next, but there is nothing left to hide from now.

I am grateful for what came next. I am grateful for the love and prayers that sustained us. It is so good to be back—back with you, back with Matt and with our families, and back into this life with its sunsets and its summer corn and the thousand other small tastes of God. 

But I’ve been watching the news of the word, of course, and I know it is also a life that remains full of the complexities we all face: complicated, risky and uncertain, populated by all those proverbial wolves. 

I have been reflecting, lately, on how challenging it is to actually face the fullness of the world we live in—how much easier it is to stand safely behind the shelter of our opinions and our ideologies and our internet comments and our brittle certainties, like children playing hide and seek with truth. Meanwhile the world burns. It burns with pain, with longing for a humanity that will no longer hide from its collective responsibilities. 

Speaking for myself, I am hoping to do less hiding and more facing.

Because that’s what Jesus wants for us. It is, in many ways, God’s fundamental expectation of us: to face the world, to love it for what it is, to name what is broken in it, and to surrender ourselves fully to its healing, holding nothing back. If we are not willing to try that, however imperfectly, we are not practicing Christianity, not really. 

To that end: in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus commissions a large group. He rounds up 70 or so people—a meaningful number in the Bible, by the way, which evokes the idea of wholeness, fullness, completion— and he sends them out into the villages of the surrounding countryside to bear witness to the nearness of the kingdom of God. And they must do so without money, possessions, or even shoes. Not my favorite method of weekend travel. 

This list of instructions might sound arbitrary, but it is not. Jesus has very good reason for the 70 to go forth in this way—because he wants them to know what it feels like to stop hiding behind anything—he needs them to face and to receive life just as it is. 

He wants them—and us—to be able to answer these questions, honestly:

How will you carry yourself out in the wilderness places, where you can rely on none of the usual comforts? 

How will you stop thinking you can do all of this on your own strength?

How will you stare down your demons, so that you might bravely face the demonic and destructive forces at work in the world?

How will you surrender to the nearness of the Kingdom of God within you, so that others might find it, too?

Despite what some current perversions of the Christian faith claim, the answer to these questions has nothing to do with money, or force, or power. We are the sheep, not the wolves.

So yes, first, lay down your purse, Jesus says. You cannot buy the substance of your life. It will come to you freely, on its own terms, as a strange and unexpected gift, as a seat at the unexpected table where nothing can be bought or sold. Wisdom is understanding that we are all beggars at the feast of creation. Receive what is given to you.

And then lay down your bags, too. Your possessions, yes, but also your “baggage”—your assumptions and your gripes, your enmities and your cravings and your uncritical allegiances and your worn out old stories that serve no one anymore. Because if you don’t, you won’t ever see what’s actually in front of you, and we won’t ever do the work that needs doing right now. Do the work that is given to you. 

And finally, take off your shoes. Discover reverence for this moment, the place you are in—it is holy ground. It may not be the place you wanted to go. But “Here I am, Lord.” Here I am, in the hallway to the operating room. Here I am on Sunday morning with my doubts and my desires and my scars. Here I am in the United States in 2025, with my gratitude and my tears and my determination that we do not squander the dream of our forebears.

Here we are, with all these questions and hopes and fears, without anything but ourselves to give, trusting that, like Jesus, ourself is exactly what we are meant to give, for that is what the Lord loves most of all. Give back what has been given to you. 

So here’s what I am wondering today:

What will it take for us to step out like the 70? What do you need—from me, from this community—to do the thing you’ve been hesitating to do, to face the thing you must face? What will nourish us for the road ahead, with its wolves and its sunsets and its sorrows and its summer corn? 

Whatever that thing this, you need to name it, and I want to know about it, and we need to figure out how to help each other face it. It may begin with laying a few heavy things down—our assumptions and our resentments and our complacencies and our “we’ve always done it this ways.”

But if we’re not working on that here, as a community that carries on the legacy of those 70 liberated wanderers— whose names are written in heaven and whose lives blessedly became something other than a game of hide and seek—if we’re not doing that, then I don’t really know what we’re doing. And as I’ve been reminded recently, our time together is precious. I don’t to waste a moment of it.

I don’t know about you but I’m feeling a call toward all those wild, thin, courageous places where Jesus sends us—no purse, no bag, no shoes. Just a new heart. Those places where you can taste God.

They’re in the dim cool hospital corridors where all you have is a prayer under your breath and a sense of surrender to right now. In the invisible currents of mercy and sacrifice that undergird our worship and our service and our public witness. In all the moments when you can really, truly look at yourself and your life and your neighbor and, yes, our country—all that we are and all that we are not—and still say: yes, I choose to face this. I choose to not give up on this. I choose to keep trying for the good of all this. I choose to love this.

When we do that, wherever we are, then the proclamation once spread throughout the villages is still alive: the kingdom of God has come near. 

Indeed, it was always there, just waiting for us to face it. 

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.