inclusion – By Another Road

More than Welcome: A Sermon

I offered this sermon at the Diocese of Southern Ohio’s inaugural LGBTQ+ Ministry Summit on Saturday, March 29, 2025 at the Procter Camp & Conference Center . The text cited is John 4:5-26, Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well.

One of the indelible images of The Episcopal Church is that little sign posted here and there outside some of our church buildings: “The Episcopal Church welcomes you.” Maybe you’ve noticed them before. Maybe it even encouraged you to go inside an Episcopal Church. They are pleasant signs; I have no particular issue with them, other than that they are often so small that the welcome reads like a whisper. Pssst, yeah, you, come in here. Let’s all be quietly welcoming together. Very demure. Very mindful. We’ll be mindfully, quietly welcoming together.

I’m an introvert, so on some level, I can get into that. I love a sweet, reverent silence.

But then I look up and I look around at the world today…and I look back at the history of violence and rejection inflicted upon LGBTQ+ people, and upon so many other groups, all supposedly in the name of Christ. And I look at how cheap, how rescindable are some of the promises of equity and inclusion in political and corporate spaces, and I begin to wonder: maybe we as the Church need to make those signs a little bit bigger. Maybe we need to speak a little louder. A little prouder.

And maybe, too—and I realize I am going to verge on some Episcopal heresy here—maybe, after all this time, we also need to talk about something more than just welcome.

Because here’s the thing, Church. Here’s the thing many of us in this room already know: welcome is lovely, welcome is important, but welcome is only step one towards building up the kingdom of God in our midst. A community can graciously, warmly welcome all sorts of people. It can slide over and create some space for them in the pews and show them how the liturgy works, and that’s good.

But after a while, a person does not live on welcome alone. Eventually, we all want something more, something deeper than welcome—we want belonging. We want to feel like we belong among others, and that others want to belong with us. We want to feel that belonging in our bones. We want to know that all of us together belong to each other and to God.

The hunger for belonging is deeper than a greeting and a handshake at the door. It is the acknowledgement that you need me, you need my gifts and my story and my insights, just as much as I need yours. The acknowledgement that loving our neighbor as ourself means something other than casual friendliness—that it means the risk of vulnerability, the risk of permeability, the risk of being changed. That is what I am seeking when I walk into a church. And to the extent that any of us have been settling for less than that, or giving less than that, well—we still have work to do, with God’s help. We need a church that doesn’t simply welcome quietly, but actively, vibrantly, fearlessly creates communities of belonging.

The Samaritan woman in our Gospel passage experiences her own insight into welcome and belonging, too. This is a familiar scene for many of us, but let’s reimagine it together. This woman has come to draw water from the well in her own city. She is not the stranger here. Jesus is. And we can imagine that they are not necessarily hanging out the welcome sign for him and his followers. Despite their shared ancestry, the Samaritans and the Jews understand themselves as being at a religious and cultural impasse. Maybe they’ve used a few clobber passages against each other, who knows.

But nonetheless there is Jesus, sitting by himself at the well, asking for water. Asking this woman, in effect, am I welcome here? Will you welcome me? Will you give me something from the deep well?

And the woman is astounded by this. So astounded, you might notice, that we never hear whether she gives Jesus any actual water.

But what she does give him is something even better than welcome, something that is indeed from the deepest well of all—she gives him back her own deep thirst for connection and truth. Because she, too, knows what it is to feel like a stranger. To be labeled as an enemy, a villain, a lonely figure making her way through the world. And she, too, like Jesus, wants to know what that thing beyond mere welcome feels like, what belonging feels like. She, too, wants to be more than the labels applied to her, more than the constraints of her history and identity. And she senses, perhaps, that this man sitting with her understands this better than anyone.

Because God does. That’s the big reveal: that God, too, wants something more than just welcome and a little bit of space in our pews on Sunday morning. God wants to belong with us, God wants to belong within us, in the deepest well of our hearts. God wants to be the living water that is absorbed into our souls—not just a guest, but a part of the whole. That is why God came in the flesh, to satisfy the Divine thirst for communion with us.

And some of us here who, like the Samaritan woman, know something of feeling like a stranger, an enemy, a villain, or who have felt like a lonely figure making our way through the world—we who are queer, we who have thirsted and wept, well, we have something to teach the Church about the necessity of true communion.

Because we already know the insufficiency of a simple welcome when it doesn’t lead to something deeper. We know what it means to long for human kindness, and to risk our safety, even our lives, for the possibility of connection. And we have been drawing from the deep wells of inner knowing and vulnerability for our whole lives. To the extent that the rest of the church can see this and hear this and internalize this for itself, it will bless all of us together. Maybe it will help us all become something more than demurely welcoming. Maybe it will help us be brave. Brave for love’s sake. Brave in the way people can only be when they know they truly belong.

This is what it means to worship God in Spirit and in Truth—to experience an intimacy and a trust that cannot be taken away by anyone or anything. No law, no leader, no single passage of Scripture. And that deep connection to God and each other is (if we will embrace it) the unfolding mission that Christ offers to the church. The Episcopal Church, and the whole church. And it begins by getting to the other side of welcome and beginning the good, scary, holy work of actually belonging to each other.

That’s what we’ve been doing here this weekend. And that, I pray, is what all of us will bring back to our churches, and to our communities, and to the whole lonely, thirsty world. To unapologetically, joyfully, truthfully show them not just what it means to be LGBTQ+, but what it means to drink from the deep well of Spirit and Truth, where everyone—EVERYONE—Jew or Greek, enslaved or free, male or female or nonbinary, gay or straight or questioning, trans or Two-Spirit, of any color or heritage, of any orientation or ability, the one who knows God on the Mountain or in the city or only in the silence of their heart and the tears on their pillow—EVERYONE is part of the whole. For God says my house shall be called a house of prayer for ALL peoples. All peoples. All peoples who are are not just welcomed tentatively but BELONG in the household of the Living Word. It was already our home, because in God everyone is home. Thanks be to God, if we would only hear it and live it! Let’s hear it. And live it.

Ironically enough, outside my own current parish, I don’t think we ever actually had a sign that says, “The Episcopal Church welcomes you.” In our setting, nobody would have seen it driving by. But last year, instead, we put up a big banner by the side of the road. And it simply says, You Belong Here. I confess that I personally wanted to put it there because for so long in my past I needed that to be true. And so we pray–through the work of our hands and the openness of our hearts–that it may truly be so, for us and for all who come to the well seeking something deeper than mere welcome.

You are not just welcome here in the church, beloved, you belong here. You always did. And you always will. No matter who you are or who you are becoming. So drink deeply from the well of God’s love. It belongs to you. It belong to all of us.

And then let’s all of us show the world–not quietly–how beautiful belonging can be.

On The List: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, October 13, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Mark 10:17-31.

Most of you know that my last job before I went to seminary was as a fundraiser with a regional ballet company in Nevada. It was great—I planned events and wrote grants and worked with donors from all walks of life. But as you might imagine, ballet is an art form that has a somewhat rarified sensibility, so many of the environments I found myself working in were quite wealthy—spaces that a kid from a fairly humble background had never imagined being part of. So I’d put on my clearance rack suits and smile and do the best I could. People were generally lovely and kind, so it was fine.

But there was one part of my job that always made me feel a little awkward, maybe because of my own background. You see, whenever the ballet company was putting something on at our regional performing arts center, it was my job to stand at a little desk outside of this place called the Founders Room; it was the VIP area reserved for top tier donors and their guests. The Founders Room was a luxurious lounge with elegant furniture and art and little trays of sweets and finger sandwiches set out for whoever got to come in.

I was meant to stand there to greet our top donors as they arrived, but also to make sure that other people did NOT come in. The privacy and the exclusivity of the space was the point, of course, not just the finger sandwiches.

But at nearly every performance, someone would come up to the door, or at the very least walk slowly past, peering in at the room and at the small group of wealthy people mingling inside…and a certain look would come across their face. It was some combination of curiosity and wistfulness, almost as if they knew it was not for them, but they couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to come inside. A few would ask me what it was, and I would tell them as graciously and apologetically as I could that, no, it was not open to them. You had to be on the list.

So there I was in my cheap suit, like St. Peter at the pearly gates, casting the unworthy back down into the bowels of the lobby where they’d have to stand in line and buy their own finger sandwiches.

And I have to admit, it just made me a little sad to stand guard in that way–to be the keeper of a party not everyone was invited to. I got tired of VIP lists and inner circles. Who knows, maybe that’s partly why I felt drawn to the priesthood in that season of my life.

Because the thing about church (at its best), and the thing about the Kingdom of God, is that everyone is invited to the party. With all due respect to St. Peter, at least this side of eternity there are no gates and guest lists—just one open door, one table, one host. And that’s the only way I want to live. That’s the only way I think we are truly meant to live.

But for whatever reason, we struggle with this. Generation after generation, outside the church and sadly sometimes inside it too, we still find people standing at the threshold wanting to determine who’s in and who’s out. Maybe we even find ourselves buying into such notions from time to time.

The rich young man in today’s Gospel is certainly one such person. Before we get too hung up on Jesus’ words about wealth, first we have to understand the mistake that this earnest man has made in his question about inheriting eternal life. And it is essentially his mistake is this: he has misunderstood the Kingdom of God to be something like the Founders Room.

He has learned, somewhere along the way, that God’s domain must be a private and exclusive place, reserved only for the virtuous and the successful, where there is milk and honey and trays of finger sandwiches as far as the eye can see. You just have to be good enough or holy enough or know the right people or pray the right prayer.

And we might shake our heads at the young man for his folly, but we also might want to be careful. Because while we might not be keepers of the law in the same way he was, most of us have bought in to certain standards and expectations and identities that we are convinced will help us solve the problem of ourselves. If we just try a little harder, if we just work at it a bit more, if we just buy that one thing or get that one particular ideology to win out over the others, then, then all will be well and our God and our neighbor will smile on us and we will have mattered. We will be on the list.

And so we might imagine that rich young man approaching Jesus as if he were standing at that little desk in the lobby, looking in at the room beyond and asking, “Good Teacher, what must I do to get in?”

But here’s the thing, my friends. Here’s the thing that will save the world in the end. Jesus looks at him and loves him and says, in so many words, “my beloved child, that’s not the Kingdom of Heaven.” That’s not the thing you are seeking. Heaven is not a private reserve for the privileged few names on a list. And anyone who tells you that it is has fundamentally misunderstood the nature of God.

God is in the hubbub of the crowded lobby, where people are standing in line for overpriced drinks and make new friends. God is out where little ones in ballerina dresses tug at their parent’s coats and dream big dreams and where people bump into each other say they’re sorry and where it’s all a little messy but there’s room enough for everyone. That’s where God is. That’s where heaven will emerge.

And if you have spent your whole life storing up treasure and accomplishments and status symbols to try to wheedle your way into that little room, I’m telling you right now—you don’t have to do that anymore. Get rid of all that. Let it go. Come and follow Jesus out into the crowd as we all wait together for the dance to begin.

But at least on this day, in this instance, well…I guess the young man really wanted to taste those finger sandwiches. So he goes away, shocked and disappointed, curious and wistful. We might hope and imagine that eventually he comes back.

It’s funny…throughout the gospels, Jesus is actually somewhat ambivalent about money—he dines with and calls people from all sorts of backgrounds, he is noncommittal about those coins with Caesar on them and he is unbothered by costly jars of ointment poured on his feet. And he loves a good feast.

What bothers Jesus is when people decide that money is God, when we all know that love is God. He has pity on those who have forgotten this, and he has anger for those who knowingly exploit this lie to their own advantage, or to keep others down. But mostly, Jesus is patient, and he waits for us to realize our mistake and to follow him…and to discover where the true party is at.

And you know what, St. Anne, I am grateful every day of my life that now I get to stand at that door each morning and say, unequivocally to every single person who passes through—you belong here. You are on the list, because everybody is. You are worthy, because there is nothing you can do to make God love you any less. All we have to do is step in and join the celebration and let the love and the hospitality that pervades this space make us more loving and hospitable, too.

And that’s one difference about gathering pledges and donations for a community like this instead of what I used to do. Like the ballet, we, too, are committed to building something beautiful and lasting and inspiring and dynamic, but here we are not just audience members with varied levels of access. We are the art itself.

We are the practitioners of a love without gatekeeping, of a belonging without list-making, and a truth without exclusivity. That’s worth everything and anything that we can afford to give to it—our resources, yes, but most importantly, our hearts.

So I’ve let go of most of my cheap suits in favor of this priestly outfit that I don’t even own—an outfit that is pure gift. And I don’t stand at a little desk in a lobby these days, checking my list.

Instead, I get to stand up here, by God’s grace, looking out at all of you. And it’s true, we might look up at this altar with our own mixture of curiosity and wistfulness sometimes, but it is my distinct pleasure to tell you: this is for you. It has always been for you. We don’t have finger sandwiches, but we do have the bread of life. And we have each other.

Come on in.