Tag: Jesus

The Way of Peace: A Sermon for Troubled Times

I preached this sermon on Sunday, July 14, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Mark 6:14-29, the beheading of John the Baptist.

I sometimes wonder what John the Baptist thought about, just before the end of his life.

They say that sometimes the past comes back to us in our final moments, in visions and in fragments–that we can see people long dead, and that we can hear the music of songs long finished. And so I wonder what faces and melodies danced in the darkness of John’s prison cell.

Maybe it was the face of his mother, Elizabeth, who in her old age thought she’d never be a mother, looking upon him once more with a gaze of tenderness and wonder. Maybe he heard the song of his father, Zechariah, the song sung the day of John’s birth, the one even we might remember: and you, my child, will be called the prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways.

And so he did, all the way up to this moment in our Gospel text.And while I imagine he might have wept for that all that seemed lost, all that felt like it had been wasted, my hope is that all of God’s promises came back to John in the end, carried on a wind that smelled of wilderness and wild honey. A glimpse of heaven, even as he commended himself to the unseeing darkness. 

I hope so. I hope he knew that his efforts were not in vain, that he had done his part, that his voice had indeed cried out and been carried on the wind where it needed to go. That the paths had been made straight. 

I hope so because his actual death, and the circumstances that led up to it, are, like all political violence, so unbearably shortsighted and pointless and small. John, the prophet of the Most High, the one who bathed Jesus in the waters of baptism, the one who, his whole life, burned with the fire of the Holy Spirit, is here, today, snuffed out over a bit of palace intrigue, by the machinations of another petty empire. 

No dignified sacrifice, no farewell discourse—just a debauched party and an idle grudge and a series of terrible decisions and a swift, pitiful ending. Even the writer of Mark’s Gospel seems at a loss for words, unwilling or unable to describe anyone’s reaction to the senselessness of what has taken place. 

Because, as is always the case, what can you really say when rage and violence emerge, yet again, into our midst? Thoughts and prayers for your family, John. This is not who we are, John. We promise we’ll be nicer to each other in the future, John, so that your death meant something. 

And we keep on saying it, hoping next time it will be true.

Yesterday, another act of political violence struck at the heart of our civic life in what should be a peaceful political process in this country. The shooting at former President Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania, which resulted in the death of one bystander and which will likely have historic repercussions we cannot yet understand, is a stark and frightening reminder that we are all still subject to the same destructive tendencies that plagued our forebears. 

We pray for all victims of political violence, including those harmed yesterday. And we are reminded, yet again, how cultures and rhetorics of violence are self-perpetuating—that all the words and wounds we choose to inflict upon one another play out in predictable, terrible ways. I hate to say it, but this is who we are. At least, it’s who we choose to be, too much of the time. 

These forces of division, enmity, and the desire to eradicate those we deem as other are active and at work in our politics, in the broader world and, as hard as it is to admit, to some extent within each of us. We resist them, and build around them, and sometimes even seem to rise above them, but they are there. 

And from time to time, in seasons like the one we are living through now in this country, we are called to account for the persistence of violence. We are called to reckon with the warring impulses of the human heart, called to ask if another way is possible, if indeed our feet might actually be guided somehow into the way of peace. John certainly believed it could be so, but his life demonstrated that calling people prophetically into the way of peace is rarely a safe endeavor.

And so I wonder, as John sat in the darkness, waiting for the end, I wonder whether he finally understood that we need something more than just thoughts and prayers and the invitation to do better next time. That for whatever reason, at least on our own strength, we cannot be much better than we already are. 

I wonder, in those flashes of memory and music, in the fragmentary sum of his long and mysterious journey, if John could sense that Jesus, the One for whom he had waited and prepared the way, was not simply a new political leader strong enough or charismatic enough to enforce peace, but was, in fact, the Holy One who came to show us a truth both very new and eternal: that strength and force and violence will never achieve a redemptive end or guide us to a place of rest. That only love and peace and an embarrassing level of gentleness will do that. 

Because that is what Jesus is. He is the one who embarrasses the Herods of the world by his gentleness; the one who stops the dance of death in its tracks; the one who reveals not just violence’s depravity, but its futility, its weakness. He does this because although he was also killed senselessly, for pointless political ends, he comes to us as the Risen One, the Wounded One who stands in the midst of our fear and our cynicism and our despair and says, peace. 

He says, peace.

He does not say revenge or rage or retribution, but peace. And this is something altogether different from what we have been given to expect of this life or this world, or even of ourselves. Something different, even, than John expected–John who had once spoken of the Lord’s winnowing fork and fire.

And so I hope, somehow, before the end, he saw the truth in the darkness and smiled and said, yes, this, yes, peace, yes, we have warred and wept and wandered in the wilderness, and we may continue to do so for many more generations, but yes, another way is possible and it is here, now, insistently alive even in the face of all this senseless death, and its name is love, and its name is God and its name is Jesus. 

I hope we see this, too, every day, but especially on days like today, when those forces of violence and fear seem so strong, so palpable, and when forcefulness seems to be the only way forward. I hope we will see that there is something deeper and stronger than anger that animates our common life and our work and our faith, even after all that has been done and left undone.

Long before our own endings, long before we must gaze into the darkness, I hope we will glimpse that vision, fragmented though it might be…the one that is revealed in the faces of the ones we have loved and in the songs of peace we have sung and in the ways we have tried to practice tenderness and gentleness with each other in this place.

And then I hope we will go out and proclaim that vision in the world, costly as its might be to do so. Not to win a political or cultural battle, not to earn a spot in heaven, but simply because it is true. It is the only true thing there is to hold onto—that love and justice and peace and forgiveness are the only things which will endure in the end, long after our seemingly endless capacity for violence has consumed itself. 

Because this is the Gospel: that on that day, when everything is finished, when every game is played and ever last war is waged, God will still be there standing on the wreckage of our best intentions and worst impulses and God will still be saying, Peace, peace I give to you. My love I give to you. My life I give to you. Let the dawn from on high break upon you, my children. Let us begin again. 

We don’t have to wait til the end to begin, though. We can start right now. Because no matter what happens in the next several months in this country, or the next several years of our lives, or in the next several generations on this planet, I can tell you this: the things worth doing, the things that will survive and flourish long after we are gone, are the same things that John glimpsed in the dark: the face of love and the song of peace, and the courage to trust in something other than the hurt we’ve known.

God be with our country as we try to remember this.

God be with us as we try to live it. 

Weeds: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, July 30, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Mark 5:21-43.

I am not an adept gardener, but I can always tell when we have reached peak growing season—it’s when those pesky weeds spring up through the cracks in the sidewalk. I plucked out several this morning on the walkway into church, likely nourished by this weekend’s rain. It’s the eternal struggle—we weed, God laughs. But I also admire the tenacity of those weeds! They seem to defy our best efforts to subdue them. Their impulse to grow is strong. 

Maybe they have something to teach us. Have you ever noticed that, throughout human history, our impulse towards growth and freedom also emerges most often in the summer? 

There’s the Fourth of July, of course, when we Americans were the proverbial weeds in the garden of King George III, but there was also the singing of the Magna Carta (which happened in June); and the storming of the Bastille in France (in July); and the March on Washington (in August); and the summer Freedom Rides of the civil rights movement; and the Stonewall riots and the Pride marches inspired by them; and the racial justice protests of 2020; and many, many other such moments when people had finally had enough and demanded something new… and they all unfolded in the long, hot, hopeful days of summer. 

I’ve been wondering this week why that is. It’s almost as though the human spirit comes alive, too, in this warm growing season with our own renewed, fierce determination to flourish, almost as if our souls were like stalks of summer corn, reaching up towards the infinite blue sky, determined to reach the clouds, to brush against the hem of eternity, to thrive unencumbered.

And you might notice that, in the seasons of the Church, we acknowledge this impulse too, adorning the altars and the ministers with green, the color of an insistent, stubborn vitality. After Easter and Pentecost, in the long green season of Ordinary Time, we are reminded that the Church, at is best, is indeed like a weed growing up through the cracks of empire, or like wildflowers growing in a forgotten ditch—it is the embodiment of the beautiful, humble, pesky aliveness of Christ that challenges anything and everything that would try to pave it over. 

And so, we, too, in the church, have our own summer revolutions. One of them is coming up in just a few weeks, on July 29th. Do you know what it is?

It’s the 50th anniversary of the Philadelphia Eleven, the first eleven women ordained to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church on July 29, 1974. These women were indeed possessed of a fierce determination to flourish. They were not willing to wait for the church hierarchy of the time to drag its feet any longer, and so they found a few retired bishops willing to ordain them and they simply…did it. They went up to the altar and put on those green vestments, for they knew that they, too, were called to brush against the hem of eternity, and they said, now is our time to thrive, unencumbered. Call us a weed in the garden if you want, but we know what we are: fully alive.

And thank God for them. I would not be able to be the out and proud priest I am today if it were not for their courage to be the priests God made them to be. And thank God for all those saints and heroes of summers past who decided to grab hold of their chance to flourish. We need their witness now more than ever. 

In an age where it is especially easy to be cynical, or even despairing about our politics and our culture and our collective future, the examples of the Philadelphia Eleven and all the summer revolutionaries remind me that true change, true justice, true peace, are gifts of God, but gifts that must be claimed and grown and harvested if we want them in our own time.

And more often than not, these revolutions are initiated by those at the bottom of the power structure, those at the margins, those weeds in the garden who finally say: we have languished for too long. Now is our time to thrive. All of Scripture and much of human history is a testament to this.

A perfect example is our Gospel reading today. Jesus has been traveling around the countryside, criss-crossing the Sea of Galilee, calming storms and casting out demons and offering all sorts of signs of his power. And there is a particular woman who hears about all of this—a woman who, because of illness and poverty has been consigned to a meager, desperate existence. She is a woman who is tired of waiting for relief, tired of grieving, tired of bleeding and calling out for help while people look the other way. She is not dead, like Jairus’ daughter, but she is a ghost among her people.

But when she hears about Jesus, something shifts within her. Who knows, maybe it was summertime, maybe she was hot and tired and fed up with the way things were. 

But whatever it was, something deeper than despair, something stronger than cynicism or despondency arises within her and she says, “if I but touch is clothes, I will be made well.” If I reach out and brush against the hem of eternity and say, I too, deserve to thrive unencumbered, then it will be so.

And so she did. And so it was.

And I imagine her standing there, this unnamed woman, this patron saint of nothing left to lose, and what I realize is that, when Jesus says, “daughter, your faith has made you well,” he is not just talking about a cure to her illness—he is saying, you, my child, have tapped into the stubborn vitality that is at the heart of God. 

And by claiming the blessing long denied you, by asserting your inherent dignity, you have discovered the one thing that cannot be taken away, the one thing that rises up again and again like a weed, or like a stalk of summer corn—God’s life, God’s love, God’s wholeness, God’s humble, pesky aliveness, which is now my gift to you and all who have been told for too long that they do not deserve it. Receive it today, this love and this life freely given to you and for you, for this is the revolutionary truth at the center of creation. 

So I wonder, are we willing to be revolutionaries, too, St. Anne? Revolutionaries for the sake of love? It’s a good question to ask on the 4th of July or in any season, really. 

God knows we need to be, for our own sakes and for the sake of our neighbors. Like the woman with the hemorrhage, we may be bleeding and tired, but we do not have the luxury of languishing in despondency, no matter how gloomy it looks out there. Just like all those generations before us, we are called to be people with summer hearts, with souls on fire for justice, with bodies and spirits ready for the necessary work of liberation that arises in every age. And how we will engage that work is a conversation we must continue to have. 

We’ve made some strides already in our parish. But there is more we can do together, more we must do given the challenges of our time and the demands of our faith. 

Conversations are rising up among us about social justice ministries and creation care work and more proactive outreach to people who have been hurt by other churches, and more formation to equip us for ministry, and I am thrilled by all of this, and I encourage you to seek out these conversations and take part in them and then take part in making them a reality. Let’s brush up against the hem of eternity, and let’s pursue the vitality that is God’s gift to us, and let’s see what happens. 

Because we and the whole Church, when we’re at our bravest and our best, we are still that weed, growing up through the cracks; we are still that wildflower in the ditch, reminding people of what’s beautiful about this world, what is not easily killed, what it looks like to reach up towards the infinite blue sky, and to be fully, truly, stubbornly, miraculously alive.

And wouldn’t you know, it’s summertime. Signs of life are all around us. Sounds like a good time to grow.

Photographs

A sermon preached on the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, June 23, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Mark 4:35-41.

My fiancé, Matt, and I have been in the process of moving into our new apartment over the past few weeks, and combining all of our belongings and finding space for all of our stuff is an adventure. As with any time you move, we are realizing how much stuff we all carry around with us as we go through life. And some of that stuff can be pared down or donated or sold, but there are always those things that you hold onto, no matter what. And among these, probably for almost all of us, are boxes of old photos. 

I have a big plastic tub of family photos that I keep swearing I’m going to sort through and organize…and I’ve been saying this for the past 15 years. Every so often, usually when I move, I will drag out that tub and open the lid and gasp in horror at the mixed up stacks and envelopes. Then I close it up and slowly back away. 

But I could never give them up, of course, because our photos are valuable in a different sort of way than other belongings. They are like a pathway through the forest of memory that thickens as we grow older… a pathway that guides us back to other homes, other times, other faces, other versions of ourselves that would otherwise be lost from view in the shadow of the passing years. We pull them out to show others—and ourselves—all that we have known, all that we have been.

In my own collection, I see many things. Here is my mother, sitting on the back of a pony when she was two years old..land here is my father as a young man, laughing in his college dorm room…and here is my great-grandmother, her smiling face obscured by a wide brimmed hat in the summer heat, and here—oh goodness—here is a child that was once me, dancing on the sand on some forgotten beach, yelling something into the wind. 

Memories and mysteries, all of these photos. Perhaps we carry them with us, wherever we go, both to remind ourselves of where we’ve come from and to reassure ourselves that whatever we have become, we were also, this. And this, and this. And that life is, somehow, holding together all these layers, finding the truth not in any one picture, but somewhere in the sum of them, in the shape of what they reveal.

It might sound odd, but I think it’s helpful to think of Scripture the same way, almost like a box of jumbled snapshots. Because our sacred texts, too, are repositories of memory and mystery, and just like a single photograph, no single Scripture passage can ever reveal the whole truth about the life of God. Remember that when someone tries to cherry-pick a verse to use against…whomever. No, we must gather all of these verses together, all these little glimpses of God’s face, and ponder the bigger story they tell. 

With this in mind, then, I think the most striking image of God’s face we are handed this week is Jesus asleep in the storm-tossed boat, his disciples as panicked and furious as the sea itself. You can practically close your eyes and see it. So let’s pull that one out of the box and ponder it together, shall we?

It is dark. Bands of rain and wind are lashing against a small boat on a stormy sea. The disciples are looking at their teacher, sleeping in the tumult, and they are bewildered—they can’t begin to imagine why Jesus isn’t awake, why he isn’t helping them fix the situation, giving them direction, something, anything. And so they wake him up and, at a word, he uses his mighty power to still the storm.

Is it easy to see what’s going on here? Just a scary storm and a God who will make it stop? Look a bit closer.

As is often the case, there is much more to this image than what immediately meets the eye. Because it’s interesting—Jesus, after calming the wind and the waves, doesn’t look at them and offer soothing reassurance. He doesn’t say what we might expect God would say, “there, there, I fixed it for you, don’t worry, you’re fine.” 

No. Instead, a better Greek translation of his words to them might be, “why are you so timid? Do you not trust?”  And the Gospel says then, and only then, after the storm, that the disciples “ephobethesan phobon megan” — they feared with a great fear — not because of the storm, but because of the One who stilled it.

You see, in that moment, the disciples have a brief encounter with enlightenment—they realize, right then, that Jesus is more than just a sleeping teacher who can fix their problems—more, even, than the prophetic miracle worker they’d been following around.

You might say that it was as though a collection of old photos suddenly appeared before them, and for the first time they could really see Jesus—all of him—and there he was, sitting on the back of a donkey, escaping to Egypt with his mother. And there he was, laughing as a young man in the Temple, astounding the scribes in his Father’s house. And there he was, dancing on the sand of some forgotten wilderness, rebuking the temptations of Satan, yelling something into the wind. And there he was, too, even farther back, before time and image and memory itself, the Eternal Son, like light looking up from the brim of deep darkness–the original Creator of the water and the wind now riding with them on the waves.

And for them, in this moment, to see Jesus—to see all the images that make up who he is and what he is—is to realize that loving him and following him is not about fixing their problems..it is about re-creating the entire world in the image of Love.

We are the inheritors of that same encounter, you and I, that same collection of images. We, too, are reminded that Jesus will not remain the flat, convenient, utilitarian image that might suit us best. 

If we want him to appear as a mere teacher, we must also discover that he is Lord. And if we want him to appear as the victorious one, we must also see that he is the crucified one. And if we want him to bless our health and our wealth, we will also find that he makes his home among the poor and the sick and the forgotten.

And he is all of these things–this whole jumbled stack of images, this whole collection of memories and mysteries–not to make our faith an impossible task, but to make impossible our tendency to render God in our own image–our propensity to make God as small as our own fears and misgivings. He asks, ‘why are you so timid?’ because he wants the disciples, and us, to see that God’s love is so much bigger than we can envision, so much bigger than our fear.

And so, even now, this Jesus asks us— today, here, in The Episcopal Church; here, in the United States; here, on a planet on fire; here among all of us who have tried to be diligent, polite, welcoming people of faith—he asks us, as we fear that the church is shrinking and the world is raging and the ship is sinking, he asks again, Why are you so timid? 

Do we not trust that love is the strongest force on earth? Because it is.

Do we not believe that the world needs this good news more than anything else? Because it does.

Do we not feel that love raging in us like a storm of life giving water? Because it’s there, waiting to be set free. 

And all of this—the storm of love and the memory and the mystery, and the countless revelations of eternity—if it is part of Jesus, we must let it become part of who we are, too. We must let this undaunted, unfaltering, fearless type of love become the shape of us, the sum of all the images we are, the precious treasure that we can never give away, no matter how many years go by.

And maybe, if we were to look for this in ourselves, and in others, we would brush up against enlightenment, too. Maybe we would see that every person we meet also carries with them a box of old photos. That they were once two years old on the back of a pony, or laughing with their friends or dancing on the sand or shouting into the wind or smiling in the light of the sun.

Maybe if we saw all of one another, we would be less timid, less overwhelmed by the storms we are navigating, because we would realize that Jesus isn’t asleep while the world falls apart. He is dreaming a new world into being and inviting us to dream with him. A world in which, instead of fearing with a great fear, we will love with a great love

It’s a beautiful image, isn’t it? I think I’ll hold onto it. 

Troubled Water: A Sermon For Pride Month

I preached this sermon on Wednesday, June 12 at Lord of Life Lutheran Church, West Chester, OH for the Butler County Affirming Churches service of Healing & Affirmation. The Scripture cited is Mark 12:28-34.

When I was in the sixth grade, I had a friend…we’ll call him Chris. And in a particular way that maybe some of you can relate to, I had confusing feelings about Chris. All I wanted to do was spend time with him. I went over to his house to play video games even though I didn’t care one bit about video games. And I hung on every word he said, even though he wasn’t much of a conversationalist. I got nervously excited whenever he was around.

In my young mind, back in a time and place where “liking” other boys was not acceptable or even acknowledged, I interpreted these feelings as simply wanting to be “best friends” with Chris, and so I told myself that this ardor, this devotion, was probably what any two friends were supposed to share with each other. But I had to know…did he want to be my “best friend” too? So I decided that, clearly, the thing to do was to tell Chris exactly how much he meant to me…as a “friend.”

Back in those days (and I’m dating myself here) we had typing classes in a special computer lab in our elementary school. This was pre-smartphone, pre-internet, pre-everything. But on these computers, you could send little messages to someone at another workstation, like a very early version of email. And I decided that I was going to send Chris a really special message so that he knew what a good friend I wanted to be. 

And so (remember, I was in sixth grade, but I still cringe recalling this)…I decided to type out the full lyrics of the Simon and Garfunkel song “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and send them to him as an expression of my friendship.

Yes, really.

If you don’t know that song, look up the lyrics later, and I promise you, no matter what your sexual orientation is, you will be embarrassed on my behalf. 

So I hit send on this message and I was eager to see what he would write back. But…of course he didn’t write back. He didn’t say a word to me after that. And although, to his credit, he was never cruel, there were definitely no more invitations to come over and play video games. 

I realized then, as much as I could at the time, that I had gotten things mixed up somehow. The feelings I had were real, and true, and earnest, but all the cues around me said that they were something I should be embarrassed about, something that was unwelcome, and perhaps for the first time, at 12 years old, I understood what it was to feel like a stranger in one’s own skin.

Now, I know that unrequited affection and feelings of shame are not experiences restricted to LGBTQ+ folks alone, but I do think that, more than most, we are intimately acquainted with the great gap that can exist between the love we have to give and the desire of others to accept it. To express queer love and queer identity is to live with an ever-present sense of risk.

So many of us, whether in 6th grade or much later in our lives, have stood at the edge of our own troubled waters, looking for a bridge, looking across toward our childhood crushes, or our family members, or our churches, or our communities. And many of them are standing on the other side of the gap, too often refusing to extend a hand back toward us, turning away in confusion or embarrassment or worse.

And so we queer folks learn something important as we navigate this reality: we learn that love, true love, is never a guarantee in this life. It is something that must be fought for and claimed and created and protected, from within the deepest parts of yourself. 

We learn that love is not the prize for successfully assimilating to the dominant culture. We learn that love is not passive compliance with the accepted order of things. It is not medal you win when you meet everyone else’s expectations of how you are to live or be.

No, we queer folks know, firsthand, that love—love for ourselves, love for the ones our hearts and our bones and our flesh cry out to hold—this love can be costly. We know this because that is what you learn when it is a political act every single day to take your partner’s hand in public. You know this when it becomes a profound act of courage to put on the outfit that best expresses your identity or dare to name the pronoun that resonates most with your spirit. 

When that is your life, you realize that love is not just a nice feeling among pleasant people; it is something tangible and active that requires strength and vulnerability and the willingness to be misunderstood. The willingness to put yourself out there and sometimes to pay the price for what is deeply, wholly, inescapably true, even if it’s not popular or acceptable to those around you. 

It can be bewildering, sometimes, all of this. It can feel like you’re the only one who gets it.

But it’s interesting. You know who else had something to say about that real, hardscrabble, costly, risky sort of love? That true, inclusive, expansive, all-encompassing sort of love? Jesus.

Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus, the Son of God. Jesus, the One who embodies divine mystery in his flesh. Jesus, who came as a teacher, as a Savior, as the champion of all who have been trampled upon and left behind. Jesus who was himself rejected and misunderstood and deemed a threat to the accepted order.

The Church has tended to forget this throughout its history, but Jesus, in the deepest, most essential heart of the Christian story, is the embodiment of a truth that any LGBTQ+ person could already tell you: that love is scary and it is beautiful and it is necessary and it is all-powerful, and that this love cannot be prayed away by those who don’t understand it. This love cannot be killed or stamped out by judgment or greed or patriarchy or empire or any of the other maladies that afflict us. 

Jesus lived and died and rose again to demonstrate that this type of unending, unyielding love of God queers the narrative about life—it troubles the conventional wisdom about the way things are, and who is included, and it reveals the extent to which God will go to rescue us from the binaries and the judgments that bind us. And God will go as far as it takes to save us from this, all the way to the grave and back again.

And if any Church, or anyone tries tell you that Jesus is anything other than this, then they have conveniently ignored this evening’s Scripture reading. 

In this passage, when Jesus is asked about the greatest commandment, he says it is this: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself. That’s it. Everything else we might do is secondary to this, and just as important, everything else we think about Christian faith must be interpreted in light of this commandment. As Michael Curry, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church likes to say, if it’s not about love, it’s not about God. Period. 

And if that is so, then what I would like the broader Church—our allies and all the rest—to understand is this: if you want to know about God’s love, if you want to understand what is meant when Jesus talks about love, I suggest that one of the first things you do is talk to your LGBTQ+ neighbors and friends and family members. 

Ask them what it has cost to simply be themselves. Ask them why they were willing to pay that cost. Ask them how they navigate the daily razors edge between love and danger. And perhaps when you do this, you will realize that what they are describing to you is, in fact, a reflection of Jesus’ own story—his own cost, his own love, his own danger.

You see, for far too long LGBTQ+ people have been thought of as the outsiders who ought to be welcomed inside the Church in the name of Christian love, when the truth is that the LGBTQ+ folks are the ones who have something to teach the Church and the world about what the love of Jesus actually looks like. 

Because believe me, we know all about crucifixion—we have watched our siblings be vilified and victimized, we have watched them bleed in the streets because they dared to exist openly,  we have watched them die forsaken in hospital beds. 

And we know all about God’s abundant forgiveness and grace, because we have so often been the ones who seek reconciliation with those people and institutions who refuse to extend any charity back to us. 

And we know a bit about resurrection, because although so many of us have tasted the despair of loneliness and rejection, we have been brought back to life by the power of music, of laughter, of solidarity, of chosen families, of mentors and drag mothers and allies and friends. 

And we know about building the Kingdom of Heaven, too, because alongside our allies, we are the builders and champions of inclusive, affirming spaces where all are seen and known and enough, whether in a church or in a protest march or on a dance floor. 

Yes, if anyone wants to know more about Christian love actually is, talk to a queer person. And then you will begin to see how, as Jesus always teaches us, you will see how the Reign of God indeed springs up in queer places, at the margins of power and privilege, not at its center. You will begin to see where the Spirit resides, how she emerges out of those troubled waters like a rainbow, like a promise, like a sign from heaven that says: even if no one else understands it, your love is enough. However mischaracterized, however rejected or rebuked or unrequited, your love is more than enough.

Because, my LGBTQ+ siblings, God is that very same love that wells up in your own heart and seeks to express itself through your deepest authenticity, come what may. Even if it is costly. Even if some people never accept it. And yes, even if your email full of sappy song lyrics never gets a response. God sings with you. God understands. And God is proud of you. So very proud of you for showing the world what love can be. Be proud of yourself, too.

Because the Pride we speak of, the pride that we have fought for and died for and chosen to live for, is not, as some might say, the rejection of humility. Pride is the dismantling of shame. Pride is the construction of dignity. And when you finally get what this Pride actually means, what it actually represents, what it actually signifies, it is a beautiful thing to behold.

Sort of like what Jesus talked about. Sort of like love.

Thank God for all the LGBTQ+ people, marvelously and perfectly made, who continue to show us what love is.

May your Pride be happy. And may it be blessed.

Lock: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, June 9 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are 1 Samuel 8:4-20 and Mark 3:20-35.

Last week, while Matt and I were on vacation in Boston, we did a lot of walking. And of course we visited all of the famous sites in the city: the Old North Church, and Paul Revere’s house, and Bunker Hill, and all the rest. But we also ended up in some lesser known corners. I won’t say we were lost, but at the end of one day, we were trying to find our way back across the Charles River to the central part of the city. We came across a narrow little walking path that cut through a park and then over a series of concrete structures in the river. 

As we crossed over, I saw that it was a dam used to control the inflow of saltwater from the ocean and that it had a series of locks built into it to make the water navigable for boats traveling up and down the river. So we stopped for a moment to look. 

I’ve always found locks interesting—the kind for boats, not for doors—maybe because I grew up in proximity to the famous Soo Locks up in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, where large cargo ships must pass through to get from Lake Superior to the rest of the Great Lakes. 

The basic concept of a lock, if you have never seen one, is that a boat, when it is passing from one elevation of water to another, enters into an enclosed chamber, and then water either flows in or out of the chamber so that the boat can rise or fall and then emerge safely on the other side at the proper elevation. They are elegant and ingenious in their simplicity, and you can find them all over the world, in all sorts of settings.

But as we looked down into these locks in Boston, I was surprised to see one little boat, just floating there in the chamber, in the still water, with nobody on board. Now, I am sure there was a perfectly mundane reason for this boat to be left there, but it struck me as a rather forlorn sight, almost as if the boat had been abandoned, mid-journey, trapped between the river and the sea, left to sit alone in this chamber of somber, motionless water, surrounded by gray cement walls, waiting for someone to claim it and release it. 

And, as it happens, that image of the boat trapped in the lock came to my mind this week as I was reflecting on our Scripture lessons—probably because I was thinking about the price we are sometimes asked to pay for safety and for belonging.

Just as that boat was suspended in motion, confined to a safe place that it was not meant to stay in forever, so, too, I think, we can find ourselves trapped in proverbial locks—ones that we have constructed for ourselves or that we’ve drifted into unwittingly—and in those moments we need to be reminded that we were meant for something more.

Consider: in our first passage from the Book of Samuel, Israel wants a king. They want a king because they are a bedraggled and storm-tossed people; they are weary of being vulnerable, weary of having to trust in the guidance of a God whom they cannot see. They want to be like other nations, they want to be ruled by the sort of king they can comprehend, the kind who will put them on the same level as their adversaries. And so they enter the lock. 

But Samuel warns them—and warns us still: beware of hiding yourselves within the stone walls of an earthly king’s protection, because you might get stuck there, stifled and crushed by the very safety you once craved. That’s why Samuel says, in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day. Personally and politically,God will let us build up all the walls we think we need, but it will also be up to us to dismantle them when we realize we’re trapped inside. All of history seems to be us learning this lesson over and over again. 

Because now, as then, God wants us to remember that the human heart and our common destiny was not meant for small spaces, intellectually, socially, or spiritually—we were created for for expansiveness, for mutuality, for the practice of a love that is broad and deep, the kind that ultimately cannot be contained by fear. 

If our life is something like that little boat in the lock, then God is not found in the walls around us, hemming us in. God is instead the living water rising up beneath us, the bracing current flowing from the depths of time, the One saying, come out, be brave, sail upon the ocean of light, see where the wind of the Spirit carries you, and fear not, for I am with you in every cresting wave.

And, speaking of the Spirit, we must also deal with this morning’s Gospel, which can, again, read as one of those passages that locks us in, with all of this talk about blasphemy and unforgivable sins, and Jesus rejecting his mother and siblings. What does all this have to do with the good news of God’s broad and deep love?

Quite a lot, actually. And here, again, the image of the boat and the lock helped me think about this. 

I think the Church has too often read Scripture as if Jesus himself was the keeper of the lock rather than what he actually is: the ocean that lies beyond it. We have too often imagined Jesus as if he was the heir of King Saul rather than the Son of God. We have entrapped him within the limited nature of our cultural and political imagination, as if he wants to rule over us like any other king. But he does not.

He is, as God was with Israel, as God has always been, the One who warned us against the seductive promises of tyrants. He is the God who wants us to leave behind the locks we have built up, who wants us to open the gates and break down the walls and break open our hearts and unfurl our spirits and cross the sea with him toward a farther, more promising shore.

And that is why, in today’s reading, he rebukes the religious authorities who condemn his healing and his casting out demons all because such things challenge their narrow understandings and harden them against the infinite compassion that is the true power of God. And this is why Jesus rebukes his family’s efforts to restrain his ministry, too. They want to keep his mission quiet and still and respectable like the water pent up in a cement chamber, rather than let it be the raging torrent of mighty waters that it actually is!

Jesus wants them—and us, now—to see: all of the systems and structures and institutions in the world, even the most cherished and fundamental ones, can turn into stifling dead ends if we hide within them, if we resist the outpouring of love and justice and mercy that is the true purpose of being alive.

And until we realize this, until we claim this as God’s true purpose for us—to leave the lock, to brave the waters, to give our lives over to the blowing wind of the Spirit—then we are indeed at risk of blasphemy against that Spirit, which has nothing to do with taking the Lord’s name in vain, but is the serious risk of living our lives in vain—of never letting God transform our hearts and our world. That’s why Jesus came among us. That is why we must set out; that is why our hearts must be set free.

Can you accept that you are loved so deeply and unconditionally that you are indeed free? Are we out there telling others in our community that they are loved that deeply and unconditionally, too?

They need to hear it. Because a lot of people are hurting, and they need to know that the Gospel is, in fact, good news for everyone and everything, without condition or exception. No cement walls. No tyrant kings. Just a river flowing toward the open water, and a wind that will carry us home. 

If we do nothing else in The Episcopal Church and here at St. Anne, I hope that we will realize this and help others do the same. I hope, in this moment in our world when there are so many big questions and deep hurts, that we will understand: the time for waiting behind the walls is over. It’s time to get out there, and show the world who Jesus actually is, and see where his love takes us.

The gates of the lock are open. 

Let’s go. 

Wake Up: A Sermon for Pentecost

I preached this sermon on Pentecost, May 19, 2024, at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH.

I actually don’t remember my dreams that often, but every so often I have a really strange or stressful one. You know, the sort where you are caught in some embarrassing situation and you can’t get out of it, or everything starts crumbling apart and you fall through an opening in the floor, or some scary monster is chasing you and you can’t quite get away. I once had a dream where I opened my mouth to speak and marbles kept pouring out of it. Hopefully not a subconscious commentary on my preaching prospects today.

But if you have ever had a stressful dream or a nightmare, then you also know that strangely pleasurable pang of relief when you wake up with a start and realize, blessedly, that everything is ok. You are safe. The walls are not falling down around you. The monster wasn’t real. You can speak the words you need to speak. 

And so you catch your breath in the soft pre-dawn gloom, and it’s true, the world to which you’ve awakened may not be perfect, it may carry its own tangible shadows and fears, but it is solid and real, and the sun is rising, and it will somehow be ok. This is the relief of waking up. 

And this is why, I think, that in many of the great spiritual traditions of the world, coming into the proximity of divine truth is also often described as “waking up.” We employ the metaphors of sleep and dreams and wakefulness in talking about our experiences of God because we know, instinctively, what it feels like to be jolted into an awareness of what is real, to find safety and purpose in the things that we can actually hold onto, the things that endure, versus those things that are confusing and illusory and which fade like dreams, like the moon at daybreak. 

It might even be said that the entire spiritual journey of humanity is one made in the direction of “waking up” and comprehending, as much as our mortal minds can, what is True with a capital T and to cultivate within ourselves the place where that truth can take root and flourish and bear fruit and not be crowded out by nightmares and delusions. I think that this is the case no matter who you meet, no matter who you are, no matter how you understand God. 

Notice that I am deliberately speaking in very broad strokes here about human spirituality, and not specifically about a Christian spirituality—not yet. That is intentional, even if it’s maybe a bit daring to do so on Pentecost, one of the major Christian feast days of the entire year.

But Pentecost is a very unusual feast day, and if we take it seriously, it demands more from us than a passive acknowledgment of one moment in the life of Jesus’ disciples recorded in the book of Acts. It would be easy to gather and to sing some hymns about the Holy Spirit and wonder what the tongues of fire looked like and then go on about our business til next year. 

But what if we were meant to do more than that today? What if Pentecost was meant to wake us up to something entirely new, something very real and enduring and transformative about the God whom Jesus embodied?  

Because here’s the thing about Pentecost: it is, perhaps more than any other feast day, a categorical statement that the gospel does not belong to us. Let me say that again: the gospel does not belong to us. At least, not only to us.

Because the true gospel of love that Jesus initiated cannot be contained or controlled or wielded by anyone, including the churches that bear his name. It is universal, for all people, not in an imperialistic sense where we will compel others to be like us, but simply because the movement of love, the movement of the Holy Spirit, is everywhere, in everything and everyone. This was the radical revelation and invitation of God in Christ, fulfilled at Pentecost: to wake up to the good news that God’s love is free to all people. And then to act like people who are awake.

Nontheless, we have spent over 2,000 years, in various places and times and cultures, fitting the message and the mission and the death and the resurrection and the ascension of Jesus into a sectarian or institutional framework. And of course we would. We’re only human. For all we know, the apostles were drafting an organizational chart in the days leading up to Pentecost. 

But then something happened. Something so strange and wild and free and destabilizing that even the account of it in Acts doesn’t make a lot of sense. All we get are metaphors: a sound like a rush of violent wind. Divided tongues, as of fire. People speaking in languages they don’t even know. It honestly sounds more like a strange dream, except in this case it wasn’t. They were not asleep, and they were not drunk on new wine. They were awake. Maybe for the first time in their entire lives. And in the speaking and the praying and the blowing of the wind and the burning of the flame something became apparent that had not been before:

That whatever Jesus had been doing, whatever he had been trying to teach them and pass on to them and invite them into in his risen life, it did not belong to them, or to any one group. This gospel was not a secret teaching for the elect, it was not an exclusive invitation for the chosen, it was not a blueprint for the power of one nation above all others. It was the Spirit saying to all of creation:

Wake up! Wake up and see that I love all of you, that I love everything, that everything is nothing but love! Wake up, children of every nation and creed and language and color and class. Wake up and see that the good news is you were made for blessedness, you were made for communion with your Creator, you were made to stand at the threshold of heaven and earth and to let these things rush through you like a fire, like a gale, like the light of the rising sun! 

The Gospel of this love does not belong to you, and that is what makes it good news. It is for Israel, but not only for Israel. It is for the Gentiles, but not only for the Gentiles. It is for the rich, the poor, the healthy, the weak, the lost, the found, the mighty, the marginal, but it does not belong to any one of them alone. It is for the gay, the straight, the trans*, the young, the old, the urban, the rural, the liberal and the conservative, the partisan and the cynic, but not for any one of them alone. It is for the human, the beast, the soil, the stars, the rivers, the wood, the stone, the deep ocean and the immeasurable depths of the cosmos. It is for all of them, this gospel. It is for all of us.

And on this day, on this strange and beautiful day, we have a choice: we can either wake up all over again and rediscover our calling to a universal, boundless, borderless, indiscriminate care and concern and fellowship with everything and everyone. Or we can keep dreaming our restless dreams about a God who is more concerned with perpetuating cultural warfare and the histories of violence and loss to which we have become accustomed. 

But I will tell you, I am weary of those terrible dreams. I am ready to wake up and see what is real, to speak clearly, to seek what is possible if we let the gospel be what it is, as dynamic and fluid and liberated as the Holy Spirit, belonging to no one and thus belonging to everyone, everywhere, always, revealing how we all belong, how are all beloved, how everything is possible if we dare to act like it is.

This morning we are baptizing baby Oliver and baby Thea into all of this. And as we witness their incorporation into this life, into this story, into this community, what I hope you will remember is that, on a fundamental level, what we are talking about in baptism, and what we are talking about on Pentecost, and really on every Sunday we gather, is not only being part of a church, but also about being part of everything. 

It is about recognizing our kinship with every face we encounter, and with the night sky, and the vast earth, and the creatures that dwell therein. It is about giving something of ourselves over to everything else, just as Jesus did—something of our life, and labor, and heart—so that we might wake up, with a start, and yet with a strange pang of relief, to realize that life is neither a strange dream nor a private nightmare to endure, but something solid and real and interconnected and whole, and that the sun is rising, and that somehow, in the end, everything will be ok. 

For there is a God who is bigger than everything, who burns with love for you; there is a Spirit who is closer than your own breath, and this Spirit has come, in wind and fire and gentleness to say one, necessary thing as you toss and turn in that gloom just before the dawn:

Wake up, dear one. Wake up.

Books: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, May 5, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is John 15:9-17.

If you didn’t already know this about me, now you will—and I’m not ashamed to admit it, because I am surely in good company with others in this room–but…I buy too many books. I can’t seem to help myself. 

My partner, Matt, will attest to this, as will my mom, who I am pretty sure passed this problem on to me. New, used, it doesn’t matter—if I am out and about and I pass by a bookshop, I have to go in. I have to peruse. And more often than I should, I find yet another book that I absolutely need to buy it right now. *Right now.*

Never mind that I have a teetering stack of books on my bedside table most of the time, all in various stages of consumption. Never mind that I have a wall of books behind me in my office. Never mind that I have donated so many books to local libraries, every time I have moved, that I could have probably started a library of my own. It’s not my fault they keep publishing so many good ones!

Books are just so interesting. So many good ideas, so many stories, so many important histories and lessons to digest. I think my all-time record purchase, one time when my mom and I took a trip to Florida and stayed near a used book store—was 22 books in one visit. They probably only cost me $10 or $20 in total, but still. A little embarrassing. As to whether I read all 22 of them cover to cover…no comment. 

These days Matt just gives me a knowing look when a small Amazon package shows up at the apartment door or when I make a sabbath day visit to the local book shop. He knows what he’s in for in the future, God love him. 

Now, despite my insatiable appetite for books, I will admit that it can get a bit overwhelming when it comes time to actually pick one to read and stick with. Hence the big stack by the bedside.

But every so often…you come across a book that just draws you in. If you are an avid reader, you know what this feeling is like. The plot or the writing style just envelops you, and suddenly you are not interested in scrolling on your phone or watching Netflix or anything else—you just want to devour this book and see what happens next. It is truly one of the most pleasurable experiences in life. And not only because you are being entertained or educated, but because you are focused. All the little annoyances and worries and wonderings that clutter our minds fall away for a bit and you are part of a new and different world with each turning of the page. 

If it’s been a while since you found a book like that (or a film, or a piece of music, or whatever it is that captivates you), I hope that you do so soon. I hope you remember what it feels like to surrender yourself to the ideas and possibilities of another world. 

Because, although there are always more books to collect, there is a certain rest, and peace, and, paradoxically, a freedom, in committing fully to just one: one story, one thing, over all the other ones beckoning from the proverbial shelf.

And speaking of stories worth committing to, this morning Jesus arrives at the central theme of his own story. “This is my commandment,” he says to his disciples, “that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” 

This is my commandment. This is it. This, right here, is the purpose of the Gospel stories. This the purpose of the entirety of Scripture. This is the purpose of everything; the beginning and the endpoint of creation. Love one another as I have loved you. 

And I know we spend a lot of time wondering about and debating the meaning of existence, but here’s a spoiler alert: your life is about loving one another. Just as God, incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, has demonstrated that love in the flesh. 

Your life is about proclaiming this love and practicing this love. That’s it! That’s the one story, above all others, that we were meant to read and internalize. And we can spend our lives reading a thousand other books or exploring esoteric philosophies, looking for countless other hints about what it means to be alive and to live well, but I guarantee you, we will always come back to this: love one another.

“I have called you friends,” Jesus continues, “because I have made known to you everything I have heard from my Father.” All the secrets of the universe, all the origins of creation, all the big questions about why and what and how and when—it’s all just summed up in this: love one another.

I think, in some ways, we are convinced it must be more complicated than that. We imagine there is some secret library, locked away, waiting to be discovered, that will reveal a more complex, surprising answer to why we are alive on this earth. We construct a bunch of ideological theories and political dividing lines to explain things. But our faith reveals to us that there isn’t some big secret. There’s just this. Love one another. It’s almost embarrassingly simple.

Now I understand, of course, that this does not mean that the actual living out of our lives is always simple. How we choose to love one another, how we wrestle with the challenges of love and the sacrifices and the losses it occasions and how we navigate the many temptations to choose something other than love—thes are all stories that are still being lived, still being told and written down and passed on. 

But to be a Christian, to be a disciple of Jesus, is to say: no matter what my own story is, no matter how hard or complicated it gets, and no matter what other stories I encounter in this big, diverse, sometimes scary world, there is ONE story that is the key to understanding all the rest: love one another. 

And it is to say: this is the one story that I will choose over all the others on the shelf, and I will find rest and clarity in choosing to believe that loving one another is all that will be left when the last word has been written at the end of time. 

And this is the story that we will keep on telling and living out here at St. Anne, as best we can, week after week, year after year, because you know as well as I do that the world is still, always, desperately in need of such a story. 

For all the cultural impact of Christianity in our history and society, it seems too often that a lot of people who claim to follow Jesus have lost the plot of what he was actually talking about. They decided somewhere along the way that his story was about purity or power, not love.

But while we may not know everything, this much we do know and this much we proclaim: God is love and love is God and no one has greater love than this: to lay down one’s life like an open book; to become engrossed in the story of the love we share; to forsake all the side plots and distractions, because we know that love for one another is the only story worth telling. It is the only one that makes sense in the end.

If it’s been a while since you felt a love like that, I hope that you do so soon. I hope you remember what it feels like to surrender yourself to the ideas and possibilities of love.

Now, I will probably never read all of the books on my shelf in their entirety. I will probably keep buying more books. Matt, I pray, will be patient with me.

But what I take comfort in is that, even if I never get to read every story written, I already know the resolution to all of them. We catch glimpses of it here every week, in the bread that we eat, in the reconciliation we pursue, in the songs we sing. All beautiful fragments of the one true story. 

And not to give away the ending entirely, but I promise you this: it’s good news. 

Stranger: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, April 28, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Acts 8:26-40.

This may sound odd, but every so often, it’s good to feel like a stranger. 

Most of us tend to build our lives in pursuit of familiarity and predictability. We establish relationships and routines and structures that allow us to feel safe and known wherever we go.

But especially if we have been in a place for a long while, and we have become very comfortable and familiar with the people around us, every so often it’s good to feel like a stranger—to remember what a humbling experience it can be, how vulnerable it is, standing at the edge of a room and hoping that someone will be kind enough to take notice of us. 

I experienced this one afternoon last August shortly after I came to Ohio. Not at Saint Anne, mind you—my role here meant that I felt known and seen here from day one. But  a few weeks after I started, I decided to go down into Cincinnati to attend an open house event for a nonprofit organization that has no connection to the church. 

I was interested in learning more about their work and thought it would be good to go and check it out. I went by myself, and as soon as I showed up, a feeling hit me that I hadn’t felt in a very long time: that feeling I used to have on the first day of school after moving to a new town. The slightly awkward feeling when you walk into a place where everyone else seems to know each other and you are just sort of standing there looking for a way in, feeling like you have a big blinking sign around your neck that says “stranger.”

Now, maybe some of you are life-of the-party types who can easily walk into a room and make 5 friends immediately. If so, I am in awe of you, because while I love people, and I love learning about people and connecting with people, I am also, somewhere buried underneath all of these vestments, still carrying with me a bit of that quiet kid on the first day of school. I used to think this was a bad thing, a weakness on my part, but I don’t anymore. 

Because every so often, it’s good to feel like a stranger. It’s good because it reminds me to look for and have compassion for those people brave enough to show up in a new space, to try a new thing, to go it alone when they must. 

And my own moments of feeling this way have, I pray, helped me stay mindful of the people who stand at the edges of those rooms in which I am very comfortable and confident. This is, I think, a spiritual practice we should all work at: looking for the strangers in our midst, and welcoming them, and even, sometimes, daring to go out and be a stranger ourselves. 

Especially because in so many of our Scriptural stories, we discover that God loves a stranger, and that often God shows up as a stranger, too. 

Consider this morning’s reading from Acts. Consider this man who is a eunuch—one who lives his entire life in an ambiguous posture. On one hand, he is a man who cannot have children or engage in traditional male gender norms, and so he is deemed a non-threatening and useful servant for a royal household, which affords him some privilege and comfort. 

On the other hand, he is a person who stands at the periphery of every room he enters—a stranger in his own culture, and a stranger, too, in Jerusalem, where he has just traveled to worship at the Temple. The Israelites, you see, had long excluded eunuchs from their assembly, as recorded in the book of Deuteronomy.

So I was thinking this week about this man who was a eunuch.

I imagined him arriving in Jerusalem in his royal chariot alone, and for all his finery, feeling like a kid on the first day of school: looking for a kind face somewhere in the crowd, wondering if this God who had called him to a new place would place a welcoming figure in his path. 

I imagined him standing in the firelight of a courtyard in the cool night, watching families eat and laugh and pray and gather–families he would never be part of, families who did not see him standing there waiting, hoping for an invitation to pull up a seat, to join in, to be known. 

And then I thought of him traveling back to Ethiopia on the wilderness road, reading the scroll of Isaiah, maybe with tears in his eyes, seeing his own life staring back at him on the page: “like a lamb silent before its shearer, he does not open his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him.”

And as he read, asking himself—How did Isaiah know? How did this prophet know exactly how I have felt every day of my life, quiet and humiliated and unsure? And what is on the other side of this, this feeling perpetually like a stranger in my own life, standing at the edge of my own existence? 

But God loves a stranger. So wouldn’t you know, there is Philip by the side of the road. 

God suddenly shows up, in the form of another stranger, with good news of the Son of God who was, himself, a stranger to his own people; and who ventured into the gates of death as a solitary stranger bearing his cross, pierced with nails; and who emerged back from death as a stranger pierced with light, offering a new type of belonging for anyone and everyone who has ever felt alone in this world. 

So yes, it is good, once in a while, to be a stranger–to feel your heart tremble with the longing to be a part of something, to stand awkwardly, looking for kindness in the eyes of those whom you do not know. 

It is good to do this because, what we must realize is that God is doing this every day in our midst—God is showing up at the margins, in those who feel excluded and uncertain, in the guests brave enough to enter through the doors of our church for the first time or after a very long time. God is standing just outside the firelight in the cool night, watching us eat and laugh and pray and hoping that we will welcome him in every form he takes. That we will invite God to pull up a seat, to join in, to be known. 

God is in the eunuchs and in all the people of our own time and place who do not know where they fit in—the people who love differently, who express their gender identity differently, the ones who come from different backgrounds, the ones who have done things they regret, the ones who aren’t sure what they believe, the ones who don’t believe in themselves, and the ones who have lost everything and yet still long to be part of something. 

And if we do nothing else here, I hope we will look for them. I hope we will not just say hello to them when they come to worship, but that we will then ask them to pull up a seat at coffee hour, or take them to lunch. That we will go out into the community and look for them and find ways to remind them that they are not alone, that we are all in this together. 

And, once in a while, I hope that we will become them, too—that we will venture into those new places where we are the stranger, to let our hearts be pierced by vulnerability, knowing that when we do so, we might be the face of God for the ones kind enough to notice us. 

…

After his impromptu baptism, all we know about the man who was a eunuch is that he went on his way rejoicing. Rejoicing because he knew, now, that God saw and loved him. Rejoicing because, perhaps for the first time in his whole life, he was seen as something more than a stranger. 

Rejoicing because now he knew that the very things that had made him feel different and excluded and less-than were now, precisely, the things that God would use in him to help others. Rejoicing because now it was his turn to go and find those at the periphery, to build his own fires in the cool night, and to say, I know what it feels like to be alone. Come closer. You are welcome here. You belong here. 

For the great mystery of God’s love is this: sometimes it is good to feel like a stranger, if only to look into each other’s eyes and realize that, in truth, none of us actually are.

Shepherd/Lamb: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, April 21, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, Ohio. The lectionary text cited is John 10:11-18, Jesus speaking about the Good Shepherd.

I don’t remember the first time I saw an illustration of the Good Shepherd, but it’s one of those images that, even if you grow up with only a marginal relationship with Christianity, you just sort of know about. It’s been depicted in so many formats, in visual art, in music, more so than almost any other image of Jesus, other than perhaps the Nativity or the Cross. 

In the little Lutheran church in Michigan where my grandparents belonged and where I’d venture as a boy on summer mornings, there was a massive, colorful stained glass window above the choir with an image of the Good Shepherd, and if you close your eyes you can probably imagine it: the green trees and billowing clouds; the smiling shepherd and the snowy flock of lambs. 

As a young child, looking up at this image, bathed in the dappled sunlight that streamed through the window, I assumed that this is who God must be: a protector and guide; he of the watchful eye and gentle heart, the one who will not leave us, the one who is soft light and green grass and a warm, safe place to fall asleep when night falls.

But it’s difficult, because as time goes by, we are faced with reminders that life is not a stained glass window. Wolves still prowl the landscape, just out of the frame of those gauzy, glowing images of the Shepherd and his lambs, and sometimes they pounce. 

And when this happens, when the ones we love are snatched away, when we are scattered, and when we feel lost, suddenly the whole proposition of a shepherding God who hovers protectively behind us, ensuring our safety, preserving us from barren places, might feel like a cruel joke. 

If you have ever asked or been asked by someone, “where was God when ____ happened?” you know what I am talking about. In such moments, those stained glass images can lose their luster, and feel more like a fantasy than a promise kept. We would be lying to ourselves and to God if we did not admit that this is sometimes the case. And it’s ok to ask those questions, because God knows we have all had our share of dark nights and howling wolves at the door.

This week, St. Anne lost a beloved member of our own flock far too soon. This is not the first time our community has faced such a loss, but it is also true that when someone like our dear friend Spencer Pugh is taken away so suddenly, without any opportunity to say goodbye, it can feel disorienting, and all of our words about the God who protects and watches over us can feel a bit hollow. How could such a thing happen? Where was God when we needed him?

But all of us must grapple with these questions eventually, because these questions are what emerges when we get honest about faith, when stained glass windows can’t tell the whole story, when platitudes are no longer adequate to address the complex mixture of grief and joy that deep love and deep relationship require of us. 

We ask these hard questions when we grow up and realize that anodyne images of the Good Shepherd tending a flock of placid sheep do not tell the whole story of God’s presence and activity in our midst, nor do they fully capture the way of life that Jesus has offered us. 

Here’s what I mean. Think of that image of the Good Shepherd again. Call it to your mind. Ask yourself: where is God in that picture? 

Who is God in that picture? 

Who are you, in that picture? 

When we start out, as I did as a kid in that Lutheran church, this seems pretty obvious. God is the Shepherd, we are the sheep. And this is partly true. 

Because long before Jesus even came into the world, God was a shepherding God. When Jesus says, I am the Good Shepherd, as he does twice in this passage from John, notice that he is using the same name for God that was uttered to Moses, the unspeakable name usually translated as I AM WHO I AM. I AM the Good Shepherd. 

I AM, the ancient and eternal God, is the Good Shepherd, because God, from time immemorial, has always been the one hovering over creation, tending and watching and calling us by name, seeking to guide us through wilderness places and call us back even when we are stubborn or foolish or lost like sheep, stumbling under the weight of our waywardness and loneliness and our unanswerable questions.

But that’s not the whole story. That’s not all there is to this image. Because there’s something different about God in Jesus. Something surprising. 

What I have come to realize is that in the image of the Good Shepherd, Jesus is actually, ultimately, the lamb in the picture. He is the lamb who was slain. He is the lamb who lays down his life. The lamb who bears the wound of our waywardness and our loneliness and our questions. The lamb who gives himself over to the wolf. The lamb who takes away the sin of the world. The lamb who dies and yet lives again, so that all of the rest of us might do the same.

So where does that leave us in this picture?

I could not have understood such a thing as a child, when I simply needed a God who would always lead me beside still waters. But now, with every twist and turn in the stream, with every loss and hard question that comes along, I have come to see what I did not, what I could not back then:

That there is something far more serious and yet also more hopeful in this image of the Good Shepherd than platitudes about a God who will always keep us safe, when we know all too well that life and love are not always safe or certain.

Instead, we discover that in Christ, in our baptism, in our particular living participation in the aliveness of Jesus, God has done a new thing: he has traded places with us. He has made us the Shepherds, now.

And he, God, has entered into the small and the weak and the vulnerable parts of creation, he has become one with the lambs and the lost and he has now said to us, my children, my own precious heart, you will be saved, but not by means of a stained-glass window sort of faith. Not by easy answers and ever-gentle paths. 

You will be saved by the love of the least of these. You will be saved, day by day, by the care YOU give, by the protection YOU provide as a shepherd, as a guardian, as a companion and a friend. You will be saved by the number of small things you learn to call by name. You will be saved by taking your share, now, in the shepherding that God has always offered. 

You will be the one who says, now in Christ,  I AM the Good Shepherd. And I will stand up to the wolf at the door, and I will help tend to this fragile earth and its fragile creatures, and I will lay down my life for you, my sibling, my neighbor, my friend, because salvation is not a pursuit free from danger, but is the unfolding of a love stronger than death. And now we have been given a Shepherd’s heart, and the Lamb who is God is the one we carry with us on the road, and together, we pray, we will all get where we are going, and no one will be lost because we won’t abandon them.

People like Spencer lived their lives as shepherds like this. And even when they’re gone from our midst, they serve to remind us all of our shared calling, our responsibility to be part of the answers to those hard questions we ask, and to labor in the hope of that world first glimpsed in stained glass: the one with the green trees and the billowing clouds and the dappled sunlight, where the promise of life everlasting is not a cruel joke, where justice is realized, where love reigns, and where the wolf no longer prowls.

Are you ready for that work? Are you ready for that world?

As God once said, and as we are now invited to say back: I am.

What Is Loved, Is Resurrected

I preached this sermon on Easter Day, March 31, 2024, at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. A version was also featured this day as part of The Episcopal Church’s Sermons that Work.

“While it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed.”

—

What is loved, is resurrected. 

This is the proclamation of this singular, eternally true day. This is what we discover on this morning, as the dawn caresses the darkness and wipes away its tears. Just as sunlight reveals itself in the morning sky, so has the Son of God revealed his fullness, so that in the light of this impossible, wondrous moment, we, like Mary Magdalene, might finally behold God’s answer to our broken hearts:

That what is loved, is resurrected.

Because Jesus, who was so deeply loved, who is Love, has been resurrected. Or, more accurately, he IS the resurrection, just as he once told Martha as she grieved over Lazarus. He is Love and he is Resurrection, and now, at last, we see what had previously been hidden: that these two, love and resurrection, are the same thing. We see that love is not a temporary condition, not something that we must live in fear of losing; it is the fundamental premise of existence, it is the Alpha and the Omega. When we love, when we are loved, we are given a taste of eternity. 

And so Jesus, this Love enfleshed, stands before us, bathed in the dew of the garden, his voice as soft as flower petals, his heart as radiant as fire, and he has arrived, not at the end of his journey, but at the new beginning of our journey. At the new beginning of the world—again, as before, in a garden. A beginning that is again, as before, signified by the tenderness of a God who walks among the trees and seeks his children and calls out to them by name. 

But on this day, on the other side of night and on the other side of death, God has a new message to add: not simply that we are loved, for that has always been true…but that what is loved is resurrected. That love is resurrection, and that death is no longer a closed door. It is an empty tomb. 

It was not always evident that this would be so. 

Humanity has traveled a long way to get to this morning. Outward from the original, creative tension between chaos and genesis; outward from the garden of Eden; outward across a thousand wildernesses of yearning and temptation; traveling through the turbulent seas and across the river to the precarious, uncertain peace of our earthly promised lands.

And as we have traveled, humanity, in good times and hard, has always sought the one thing it could never have: a solution to the conflict between our affections and our mortality. In other words, that what we love, dies.

This has been the curse, this has been the bitten, bitter fruit of an inescapable insight: that even if our deep love—for God, for family, for spouse, for neighbor, for earth—somehow manages to endure over time, our bodies and the work of our hands do not. We are burdened with the degeneration of even our noblest efforts, the severing of our most precious bonds. The inescapable presence of death has driven the world mad with grief, desperate with the longing for something other than goodbye.

But today, in the strange dim light of Easter morning, a wondrous thing takes place. And not just the one you are thinking of. 

No, in fact, the first thing is this: that a disciple, Mary Magdalene, who has watched Jesus suffer and die, and who now carries the vast pain and loneliness of all creation in her heart, on a morning in which God is dead and Love is dead…she comes to the tomb. She comes to the grave of all human hope, knowing what has been lost, and she looks into the void where Love used to be…and yet she refuses to yield her love to that void.

Mary refuses, there, despite the literal death of Love itself, to give up the love she carries in her. She keeps that love alive in her broken heart. And so, on behalf of all of us, she comes to bear witness and to tend to God’s body when no one else is able or willing to do so, because she knows that bearing witness and tending to what is broken is what love looks like, both in life and in death. 

And in this moment of miraculous tenderness and strength, she, the stubborn bearer of a Love that was supposed to have been killed, is given to behold a new miracle:

That what is loved, is resurrected. 

Mary Magdalene did not resurrect Jesus, of course—the upwelling, earth-sustaining, heaven-rending power of the living God did that—but it is also true that, even as Jesus lay dead, this very same divine, undying love coursed through her veins and animated her soul and carried her to the tomb that day. 

It was God’s love, it was God’s own heart, in and with and through the heart of Mary Magdalene, who also wept beside the empty tomb, God weeping in her and with her and with us for the senselessness of separation, weeping for that long journey out of Eden, across the wilderness, through the seas, searching for something other than goodbye—a journey that God made, too, right beside us, step by weary step.

And so while Mary did not resurrect Jesus, we can say that she carried that same resurrecting love within herself, that she was an agent of and a participant in its surprising, vivifying force, and that she partook, in that moment, of the very same powerful, stubborn love that will ultimately restore all life back to life. 

And if she does, then so can we. 

What you need to know is this: the Resurrection of Jesus is not just a remote story of a bygone moment when something amazing happened; it is a statement about what is still true for you and for me and for everyone who is still navigating that long and often wearisome journey in search of something other than goodbye. For everyone who struggles to love; for everyone who has loved and lost; for everyone who feels confused about what love even is: Easter Day is the answer. 

What is loved, however imperfectly, for however long, is resurrected. 

This is what the risen body of Christ signifies and enacts: that what is loved is not lost to you, and it will live forever, not only as a memory, but in its fullness, in the flesh, on that day when God becomes all in all, and the whole earth is loved back to life. 

And, as Mary discovered, what you choose to love in this world is imbued with the promise of resurrection simply by the act of loving it. Every time you have gently kissed a soft cheek or held a calloused hand. Every time you have refused to break a bruised reed or trample a fragile spirit. Every time you have preserved the hope of the poor, or sought beauty, or made peace. Every time you have stopped to love something, you have taken part in the ultimate resurrection of the world, for what is loved—by you, by God, and by God working through you—is resurrected. 

Why and how is this so? How can Easter be what it is? 

We cannot explain it. We need not explain it. Because neither can we really explain our compulsion to love, even in the face of loss and uncertainty, and yet we simply do. Love is its own answer to the questions we ask. And resurrection is the same. 

Jesus emerges from the fading night, calling Mary by name, calling you by name, to confirm what you already knew in your bones but dared not trust: that love is worth the cost, it is worth having to say goodbye, because there is indeed, something other than goodbye at the end of the story, there is a place where beginnings and endings meet, where, forever, the dawn will caress the darkness and wipe away its tears and all that has been loved will be alive, and we will call each other by name. 

And in this strange new Easter light, perhaps we will realize that there was, in fact, always something deeper than mere human longing that propelled us across the wilderness and through the sea—that our long history of choosing to seek, to hope, to endure, to dream of something other than goodbye, was never a futile endeavor—it was a fertile one. It was the resurrecting love of God already at work in our mortal bodies, now completed in God’s body.

And like Mary in the garden, beholding the Risen Lord of flesh and flower and flame, perhaps we will discover that we, too, are bearers of that force which is stronger than death; that our choice to love is to take part in the very same mysterious, power that compels life to rise up from the earth.

For what is loved, is resurrected. 

Just like Jesus. 

And, one day, just like us.