Indiana – By Another Road

Jesus & Johnny Appleseed: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on the First Sunday in Lent, February 18, 2024, at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Mark 1:9-15.

I love quirky historical sites and stories and figures. So you won’t be too surprised to learn that back in 2019, when I was getting ready to move to Fort Wayne, Indiana to serve at my former parish, I was deeply excited to learn that the city is the final resting place of John Chapman, better known to the world as Johnny Appleseed.

Many of you know probably know who Johnny Appleseed is, but just in case you don’t recall, he was a real person in American history who has taken on a somewhat legendary status. He roamed the countryside in the early 1800s, starting in his native New England and moving westward, introducing and cultivating apple orchards in regions where apples were previously unknown, including much of the Midwest.

And after a lifetime spent wandering about with his bag of seeds, in 1845, while visiting Fort Wayne, he died unexpectedly. So you can visit his gravesite there, and there is also a Johnny Appleseed Park & campground and a Johnny Appleseed Festival and the local baseball team is the Tincaps, in honor of the tin pot that Johnny supposedly wore as a hat.

And I recently discovered that there are a number of towns in Ohio, too, associated with Johnny: the Johnny Appleseed Museum is up in Urbana, and the last surviving tree planted by him still grows on a farm in northern Ohio. So there are a couple more road trips my partner, Matt, doesn’t know he’s signed up for yet!

But hopefully he’ll be fine with it, because the very first picture that Matt and I ever took together, the first documentation of our relationship, right after we met, is a selfie of us sitting on a bench with a statue of Johnny Appleseed. So he has a very special place in our personal history, too!

And if you’re wondering why on earth I am going on about Johnny Appleseed on the First Sunday in Lent, well, one of the reasons I find him such fascinating figure–one worthy of our consideration here today–is that John Chapman, while unusual, was not just an eccentric driven purely by some strange obsession with apples.

No, it so happens that he was a missionary, too, and by most accounts a kind and gentle one. He was a member of the Swedenborgian Church, a small Christian denomination that still exists, and as he traveled, planting and raising up small nurseries of apple seedlings, Johnny also distributed information about his Church, which was, especially for his time, a remarkably progressive and inclusive expression of Christianity.

And these two things—his love of the land, his desire to carpet it with fruitful plantings; and his love of humanity, his desire to offer people a fruitful and life-giving message: these were all bound up together in his years of roaming the hills and valleys we now call home, and the sweet fragrance of his mission lingers even today.

But you know, long, long before John Chapman ever set out with his pamphlets and his seed bag, there was another man who set out on a similar sort of mission, out beyond his familiar homeland, out into the world, out into the wilderness, for purposes deemed strange by some at the time and yet which have left their own lingering sweetness.

Of course, I am talking about Jesus of Nazareth, whom we encounter in today’s Gospel, driven by the Spirit, driven by the mysterious designs of God, out from the river’s edge an into an unknown, untamed place. He did not wear a tin cap, but we can be assured that people still didn’t know what to make of this man on a mission, propelled by his unconventional, radical form of love, his vision of a harvest that nobody else could quite imagine.

But we might wonder—if Jesus was the Son of God, if he was already God in the flesh, why did he first go on this journey into temptation we hear about today? What was the point of these 40 days in the wild?

We could interpret it a number of ways, but it has not been lost on some observers that, especially in Mark’s version of Jesus’ trip into the wilderness, where he is tempted by Satan and is in the company of both wild beasts and ministering angels, that Jesus is, in some sense, not going somewhere new but going back somewhere that God knows very well. He is returning back to the Garden of Eden, where humanity first met the beasts and the angels and Satan, the one who tempts us away from our God-given place in creation.

Let’s do a little imagining together. In this unnamed wilderness we hear about today, a tangle of wild plants and harsh sunlight, we might imagine Jesus stepping back through the rusted, broken gate of that original garden, now long abandoned. We might imagine the cherubim guarding the lost portals of Eden, lowering their flaming swords in deference to the Son of God passing through.

We might imagine him walking amongst the derelict seed beds and the withered trees, meeting the wild beasts who no longer remember the names once given them by Adam.

And perhaps we might imagine, too, Jesus encountering that ripe fruit of the tree of knowledge on an old gnarled branch—the fruit once bitten by the children of God, when they did not know the price of their hunger.

And if this is so, if Jesus is, somehow, in the wilderness, also standing in the ruins of Eden and holding the fruit, bright and beguiling as a ripe apple, considering what to do with temptation,

perhaps this is the purpose of his journey: to discover what Adam and Eve did not—that the fruit of the sacred tree, the fruit of the mind of God, wasn’t meant to be consumed for ourselves—it was meant to be shared. It was meant to be broken open and given away. It was meant to be spread throughout the world. Its seeds were meant to be planted far and wide.

And so:

Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming (we might say sowing) the good news of God… “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

Jesus is what John Chapman would become and what we are invited to be as well: planters of the seeds of God’s Kingdom. Our journey through Lent, our journey through life, isn’t meant to be one where we stay indoors and gorge ourselves on private spiritual insights, as if heaven were an apple pie baked for us to eat all by ourselves.

No, we, too, are participants in the planting of a future harvest. Following in Jesus’ footsteps, we are the propagators of the seeds of Eden, the seeds of a paradise that is no longer lost to us. We, too, are a people called to carpet the land with the fruitful plantings of love and truth and mercy and knowledge and care—day by day, step by step, seed by seed.

Now, I don’t imagine that most of us will take this Lent as an opportunity to put a tin cap on our heads and head out to roam the world as missionaries and seed-planters—though maybe the world would look a whole lot different if more of us did so in our own community.

But what Jesus and Johnny Appleseed can teach us today is that small, faithful choices have transformative impacts. So maybe this Lent you will volunteer at our burgeoning neighborhood Laundry Ministry. Or maybe you will attend a Thursday Eucharist or a Bible study.

Maybe you will write to your representatives and tell them to advocate for the poor, the hungry, the war-torn, the forgotten. Maybe you will call someone who is lonely or invite someone to church with you. Maybe you will simply tell someone that you love them, that you forgive them, that you see how hard they are trying, how far they have come. Maybe you will tell yourself these things.

Maybe you will prune the overgrown bushes of paradise.

Maybe you will teach the wild beasts their long-forgotten names.

Maybe you will remember your own long-forgotten name: beloved Child, disciple, seed-bearer of the Kingdom of God.

And maybe, come Easter, we will already see the green shoots of something new growing up from the earth, from our hearts and our souls. If so, it will have been a good and holy Lent.

…

You know, there is one more memorial to Johnny Appleseed, just down the road in Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati. There is a statue of him, holding an apple sprig up to the sky, as if seeking a blessing upon it from heaven. And carved into the stone, there is a fitting summary of all that he was. It says:

SAINTLY IN HIS DAILY LIFE. HE LOVED LIFE IN ALL ITS FORMS AND HAD A JOYOUS WILL TO HELP THE EARTH YIELD ITS FRUITS.

The same could be said about the seed-planter from Nazareth.

And someday, we pray, it might be said of us, too.

Homesick: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, August 7, 2022 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary texts cited are Genesis 15:1-6 and Luke 12:32-40.

A funny thing happened while I was in England for a conference a couple of weeks ago. It was near the end of the trip, my very last night in the country, and I was staying overnight next to Heathrow airport. I decided on a whim to take the Tube, London’s subway system, into the center of the city to walk around for a couple of hours. But as I was sitting there on the subway, figuring out which stop I should get off to catch a glimpse of Buckingham Palace, I suddenly developed an urgent and intense craving for a Fort Wayne Coney dog. I don’t even get over to the Coney Island that often, but right then and there in the middle of London I wanted one so bad I could taste it—with extra mustard and extra coney sauce. I found Buckingham Palace, but needless to say no Coney dogs were in sight.

That moment really made me smile, though, because after three years of living and serving alongside you here in Fort Wayne, I was blessed with the sense of feeling a little bit homesick for Northern Indiana. I had the most incredible time in the UK, but it was time to come home—to come back to the dense and verdant cornfields along the highway, back to the fireflies and fireworks in the late summer darkness, back to coffee and doughnuts in the Common Room and the familiar smiles of the people who don’t forget you when you’re gone.

It is good to be home. I missed you.

Homesickness is, in a strange way, a gift. Whether we experience it as kids on a hard day at summer camp, or as our families drive away on that first exhilarating and terrifying day of college, or perhaps later, in more subtle ways, when life’s chances and changes have led us far from all that we once knew, it’s that familiar pang in the stomach, that tremble of longing in the chest, which is in fact encouraging evidence that we belong somewhere, to someone—homesickness is the tightening of the tether of memory and feeling, calling us back to the people and places that have shaped us and held us.

And the longer we stay in any once place, the more it does its work upon us, imparting something of itself into our hearts, such that you might be lying awake some night in a far distant city, remembering the way the thunder rolls into town on an August evening, or the scent of your grandmother’s roses in the garden, or the way the organ music swells at the end of Mass, or yes, perhaps even the taste of a Coney dog. To be homesick for such things is a reminder that somewhere, at some point, you were given the gift of knowing what home is.

When you look for it, the question of home—where and what it is, how to get there, how to get back when you’ve drifted away—is a theme that shows up time and again in our faith tradition. It stretches all the way back to the beginning, really, when Adam and Eve stumbled out of Eden and knew for the first time what homesickness felt like. And in today’s reading from a bit later in Genesis, we encounter Abram, soon to be Abraham, the one who received God’s promise of a homeland that might endure through his descendants, even when he could barely hope to dream that such a thing was possible.

Because although he’s already in Canaan, Abram is homesick, too—longing for the reassurance that God will be faithful, that he, Abram, will not simply die a stranger in a strange place, but that somehow he and his children might belong to the earth upon which he stands. That is what homesickness is, in the end, no matter where we are: our soul’s deep hunger to belong somewhere. To know and be known, to remember and to be remembered.

In Abram’s case, of course, we know that God does indeed make a home for him and his descendants in Canaan. And even when they end up in slavery in Egypt, God hears their cries and leads them back. And even when they are sent into exile in Babylon, and the homesickness threatens to overwhelm them, he leads them back again. God, it seems, is very invested in leading us back home, no matter how many times we get lost. And just like the children of Israel, we get lost a lot, both literally and figuratively.

I don’t know about you, but I think the moments of truest homesickness I’ve felt in my life were not just during a long trip, but in those moments when the person who I used to be, and the people that I used to know, and the certainties that I used to hold feel very far away from me. When I look up from the path and see my life and wonder: where am I? How on earth did I get here? That’s when I really miss home. Have you ever felt that way? I hope not too often, but I suspect each of us does at some point.

Because that’s the tricky thing about homesickness—it finds us even when we are stationary. Even if you live in one place your whole life, surrounded by the same people, things still change, and loved ones leave, and there is loss, and still we end up longing for peace and rest and the scent of our grandmother’s roses; and yet we know deep in our bones that Eden is no more, that the gates of the garden are barred to us, that going back is not really an option, and neither is clinging tightly to that which is passing away.

But there is an answer to our homesickness, in the end. A very simple one, elegant in its simplicity, yet earth-shattering in its implications. Something more enduring, even, than a homeland promised for a thousand generations.

It is our true home. The one that does not change. The one that we can always find. It is Jesus.

God, with infinite mercy, perhaps, knew how easily we get lost—how our fear and our selfishness and our broken hearts leave us in a perpetual state of homesickness. And it seems God was not satisfied with just telling us how to get home. So instead, he simply came and made his home among us. As one of us. To live and die and live again in us so that our true home—the heart of God—is as close as our own breath. Never far away. Never inaccessible. Neither a faded memory nor a squandered hope. Simply home, here. And all we must do is be ready to welcome him. The only gate that is barred and must be opened now is the gate of our own heart, to let him in where he longs to reside.

“Be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet,” Jesus says, “so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks…truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them.”

I know we are a frustrating and stubborn human family, and we make a mess of things quite often. But I have to hope that, perhaps, seated up at the right hand of the Father, our Lord—who himself has known the sound of thunder and the scent of roses—is maybe a little bit homesick for us, too. And that when he comes again to find us, to redeem all things, and when the banquet is prepared—whether it is Coney dogs or whatever else heaven tastes like—that we might look into the face of God and God might look into ours and we might say to each other, with simple joy, in one voice: It is good to be home. I missed you.

The Island: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, February 13, 2022 at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Mishawaka, IN. The lectionary text cited is 1 Corinthians 15:12-20.

I spent most of the summers of my childhood in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where my dad’s side of the family lived for generations. Now here in Mishawaka, you all live relatively close to Lake Michigan, so you have a good sense of the beauty of the Great Lakes, and if you have ever gone way up north, you know how rugged and beautiful it is on the shoreline of Lake Superior—rock formations and dense forests colliding with the open expanse of the water in its many shades and moods.

And although there are any number of places along the shore of Lake Superior where one might be struck by its wild beauty, there is one particular spot we would visit as a kid that always stayed with me—the type of place that impresses itself upon your psyche, such that you might recall it out of nowhere while absentmindedly washing the dishes or just before drifting off to sleep at night—a pleasurably haunting memory, a dream, a landscape pregnant with unspoken meaning.

It is a rocky, forested point of land, stretching out into the lake, with a small sandy beach at its tip and then, across a churning channel of water, an island—so close that you can see it clearly, and, when the waters are calm, even dare to wade across to its shore. I have a distinct memory of doing so, by myself, as a child—scrambling through the water and ending up on the other side, giddy with freedom—just a couple hundred feet from the mainland but a world apart.

The point of land, the channel of water, the island—the image of that place stayed with me through many long and parched seasons of my life—chronic illness, the uncertainties of young adulthood, the sudden death of my father and, then, later, my grandparents. And although I had not been back to visit Michigan for nearly a decade and hadn’t been back to the lake for even longer than that, when I moved to Indiana nearly three years ago to serve at Trinity Fort Wayne, one of the first things I did was make the long drive north through the landscape of my past, through the mining towns and the forests. Eventually I ended up at Lake Superior, and I found the point of land again, and I walked out to the edge of it.

What struck me, though, was how deep the waters were this time—choppy waves and wind blowing in off the lake, no rocks visible to scramble on, no chance of crossing over. All I could do was stand and stare at the island, that childhood dreamscape, so close, but just beyond my reach.

As we grow up and grow older, we tend to experience life as a sort of expanding distance from the solidities of the past. Sometimes we are grateful for that increased distance, and other times we mourn it, but either way, I think that there comes a time in each of our lives when we stand at the edge of what we know and glimpse the islands of youth and memory as beloved, yet inaccessible kingdoms. And we might despair how death consumes what was once so present to us—the places, the faces and the voices of another time. And perhaps we start to believe that this is simply our portion in a fragile and fleeting world.

But there is another choice. There is another way to see this.

“How can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead?” Paul asks the church at Corinth. “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain.”

Apparently there were some among the Corinthians who accepted that Christ indeed had risen from the dead, and that this was a miraculous act of God, but they could not accept the idea that all of the rest of us were destined for the same undying life. In a world where it is self-evident that everything and everyone dies and decays, perhaps it felt foolish to them, naive, even, to claim such a possibility. They were content, it seems, for Jesus to be the inaccessible island, beautiful to behold but not part of their actual lived reality—not a place they themselves could ever dare to venture.

But Paul will have none of this. For he understands that we are not just people who have beheld the resurrection of someone else, of Jesus, but we are, ourselves, resurrection people. Where Jesus goes, we go too. And if the chasm between where we stand and where he has risen seems impassable, that is because we have still bought into the lie that death wins. It does not. Not any more. With Jesus, death is not the last word of any story. “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied,” because then we have missed the actual endpoint, the actual telos of following Jesus. Follow me, he says, not just through this world but onward, onward, “further up and further in” as C.S. Lewis wrote, to the undying life of God that makes everything possible.

I think sometimes as good, reasonable Episcopalians, we are hesitant to really lean into this paradigm of resurrection, of life eternal. We don’t want to think so much about heaven that we discount the beauty and the urgent need of this world. But the danger is that we go too far the other way—that we become so focused on our present reality that we forget that we are inheritors of the resurrection—that another world is not only possible, it is promised, and it is already making itself known in our midst.

And when we see that, it changes EVERYTHING, because death is no longer the precipice over which our love inevitably vanishes. Death is no longer an impassable, stormy channel separating us from God’s life. For God’s Son has calmed the waters, he has made it passable. And so the island beckons once more; its golden shores are a place we were meant to stand; the kingdom beyond death where Jesus stands, welcoming us back into life.

What does this mean for us, here and now, to be Resurrection people? It means that we can be people of joyful courage. We don’t have to stand wistfully on the shore, mourning what once was. Because to believe in Resurrection is to believe that nothing is truly lost; that every good thing is still possible. Even when we are poor, hungry, grieving, or lonely, even when the world is changing, even when the church is changing—every good thing is possible. This is our proclamation and our practice.

And here at St. Paul’s, and down at Trinity Fort Wayne, and in every parish and faith community that comes together in the name of Jesus, we have an opportunity to practice at this together—to practice being Resurrection people. Everything we do in our faith communities—serving, donating, tending to one another, worshipping, studying, feeding, mending, advocating—all of it is a way of saying yes to God’s aliveness, it is a step out into the water, confident that we can reach the other side, that that Divine life awaits us, as long as we hold onto each other and keep our eyes on Jesus.

I know it has been a long hard couple of years, but don’t turn back. Don’t give up. We can get there.

I haven’t been back up to to Lake Superior since that day, and I don’t know if or when I will make it there again. But I think that the island will remain in my mind’s eye forever—a reminder that I have a choice—that life can be viewed either as a wistfully inaccessible, passing dream or it can be viewed as a promise that lies on the other side of death. Every day, with God’s help, I mean to choose the latter. I mean to choose the promise.

And perhaps, one distant day, when the waters have been stilled forever, I will cross that channel and stand on the other side once more, and life will feel new, and nothing will be lost, ever again. Perhaps that’s where we’re all headed in time. I pray that we are.

And on that day, Resurrection will be not just a promise glimpsed far off, but the ground upon which we stand.