lent – By Another Road

Everything Happens: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, March 23, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Exodus 3:1-15 and Luke 13:1-9.

So there’s a particular phrase that gets used a lot, one that most of us have heard or maybe used at one point or another. I’m sure that I have used it in the past. But it’s a phrase that, as I live longer and especially as I do ministry longer, I have become more and more troubled by. It’s this one: “everything happens for a reason.”

I’ll be honest, I really don’t like this phrase very much anymore. And if you use it in your own discussions of the big questions of life, I hope you’ll at least hear me out. Because as I have spent these years as a priest and have been invited into the vulnerable, sometimes painful and complex stories of people’s lives, the more I see how empty this phrase can be.

Imagine if you will: a person comes to you and says they have been harmed in every imaginable way by their family, and now they deal with mental illness and addiction, and they struggle to keep a roof above their heads, and lately they’ve been sleeping in a tent in the park. But they come to you and want to know more about what God’s love could possibly mean for them.

Or imagine this: you are visiting with someone who has lost their spouse of over 60 years, gone in the blink of an eye, and they tell you the stories of how they met, and show you old, beautiful photos of when they were both young and laughing and strong and unafraid of love’s deep costliness. And today, this person gazes at the photos with an unanswerable longing and wonders what the rest of life will look like.

Would you, could you ever bring yourself to say to such a person, “well, everything happens for a reason”? Having sat with them, many times over, I can assure you with every fiber of my being: I could not. I would not. I will never.

Because even if we rightly acknowledge that we do not understand why things happen the way they do, this phrase, everything happens for a reason, is still just a flimsy band-aid over the deep wounds of life. It is attempt at naming something when a gentle silence would suffice. Better, I’ve learned, to just be present with that which we cannot understand. Better to offer quiet love than easy answers. Like that unspeakable name of the Living God who speaks to Moses from the burning bush, sometimes it is good for words to fail us.

I was thinking about this because wrestling with “everything happens for a reason” is also, I think, a helpful way of wrestling with our Gospel reading this morning. It’s a reading which at first hearing sounds very severe. Someone at Bible study this week said this is a very “Lenten” reading, full of suffering and judgment. And that’s true, but I would offer that suffering and judgment are not the deeper message that Jesus is trying to convey to us here. His call to repentance is a call to a new understanding of God and the world we live in.

When these unnamed individuals come and let Jesus know about some Galileans—in other words, people who could have been Jesus’ neighbors—who have been killed by the imperial authorities and had their bodies desecrated, we can imagine that they want some answer from Jesus about why such a thing could happen. And although we don’t actually hear them say it out loud, we can imagine them wondering: did these Galileans do something to deserve this fate? Or is there some greater plan God has in mind by making these people suffer? Did all of this happen for a reason?

But Jesus’ answer to them is bracing and provocative, especially for those of us who need everything to fit together neatly. No, he says. Do not ascribe the suffering of the Galileans to God. And do not console yourself by secretly assuming it couldn’t happen to you. “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners?” In other words, are you, when confronted with the horrors of cruelty and injustice in this world, trying to convince yourself that everything happens according to God’s plan? That God instrumentalizes our suffering? If so, you are not yet understanding the nature of God.

And, he goes on, those eighteen killed with the tower of Siloam fell…and those who were in the Twin Towers when they collapsed…and the generation of people lost to AIDS…and the children who are dying in Gaza and the hostages who haven’t come home…and our neighbors in West Chester who go to bed hungry at night…and the ones next to us in the pews who have suffered illness or deep loss—are they somehow “worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem?” If anyone says yes, they, too, are not yet understanding the nature of God.

Because the awakened and transfigured heart can’t look at such things and hold onto “everything happens for a reason” or “they had it coming” or “at least it wasn’t me and mine.” The awakened and transfigured heart, the one that is grafted onto the heart of God, does not put band-aids on deep wounds; it does not offer platitudes that primarily serve to comfort the one who speaks them. No, the awakened and transfigured heart—the heart of Christ, the heart that beats in our own chest, too, if we will let it–chooses to offer love rather than easy answers.

Jesus wants his disciples to understand, both in that age of Roman oppression and now in our own time of social and political disarray, that the Christian path is not paved with empty words and good intentions—that road leads…elsewhere. The Christian path is not characterized by shrugging our shoulders at the universe and saying “everything happens for a reason” and then going back to whatever it was we were doing.

No, the Christian path is the one gentle and courageous enough to look into the face of suffering and to simply say, yes, everything happens. Everything happens. Families hurt us sometimes, and loved ones leave us, and towers fall, and democracies struggle and times get tough, and it’s hard to know what to say. But what we can do is choose compassionate action. What we can do is plant the seeds of love and mercy and hope, defiant in the face of death and despair. And in fact we must do that if we hope to experience true salvation, to live as God lives, both in this life and beyond it.

That’s why, after his challenging teaching and his call to a new way of life, Jesus gives us, today, a parting image—one that clarifies the alternative to empty words and flimsy band-aids. He shows us a gardener who refuses to give up on a fig tree. A gardener who refuses to shrug his shoulders at the fruitless branch, who refuses to say “everything happens for a reason,” and leave the quaking tree to its lonely fate. He shows us a gardener who bends down close, who chooses to stay, who chooses to care, who chooses to try, no matter what the next year brings.

Because that turning around and leaning down into love, that’s repentance. And that’s the beginning of understanding the true nature of God.

And to the extent we are doing that here at St. Anne—in our ministries, in our hearts, in our community—thank God, because that is the journey along the true Christian path, which indeed always leads back to a garden, back to what might yet grow—so that this hungry world might be fed something more than platitudes.

After all, we ourselves are fed, week by week, by the God who does not often speak out loud with easy answers, but who prefers to simply show up in bread and wine and song and silence. Quiet, eternal, impossibly near. Thi is the God who asks us to do anything but give up on each other, and who refuses to give up on us, no matter how little we understand.

The God in Christ who, even when everything happens, as it too often does, prefers to give us the one thing better than a reason: himself.

Sandwich: A Sermon

Preached on the First Sunday in Lent, March 9, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH.

Matt and I started new diet and fitness routines this past week. Our wedding is coming up in just a few months, and we decided we’d both like to be looking and feeling our best as the big day approaches. So we’ve committed to a plan and we’ve mostly got our groceries stocked up for it and our exercises mapped out. And it’s Lent, no less, so the perfect time for a little healthy self-discipline, right?

Yes, it’s all lovely in theory. That is, until I have to measure out my little bowl of oats for breakfast and then put together my grim little sandwich for lunch—no cheese, no mayo, no meaning in life. And let me tell you, by about 3PM I start to get a wild look in my eyes. Right about now I’d give just about anything for a big sandwich with all the fixings.

Maybe you can relate; self-discipline of any sort is hard work. My only consolation in this instance is that it’s something we are doing together and we’re encouraging each other as we go. And maybe we won’t be perfect in our efforts, but we’ll give it our best. And at the end of the process, it will be a beautiful wedding day no matter what.

But in the meantime, in the spirit of what I preached on Ash Wednesday, I am hungry. And so, maybe unsurprisingly, I was particularly struck this week by the story of Jesus and his fasting and testing in the wilderness, a version of which shows up every year on the first Sunday in Lent. There were absolutely a few rocks I spied here and there this week that I was wishing would turn into bread. And maybe because I was feeling rather “hangry,” as they say, I will confess to you that this time around with the text I found myself a little bit annoyed by Jesus’ stoic forbearance.

One does not live by bread alone. Oh really, Jesus? Sure. I love that for you.

But, my own selfish appetite issues aside, I did also wonder: what of all the people who literally don’t have enough bread to eat each day? And the people who could use a little more human comfort and safety? Aside from the sense that Jesus is really good at fasting, what sort of good news is this story supposed to convey to the rest of us?

Because what occurred to me in my caloric deficit, maybe for the first time, really, is that on their most basic level the things that Jesus is tempted by—food, authority, and safety—are not inherently evil things. They are the things that all of us need to survive and operate in this world. We need our daily bread. We need some ability to exercise agency and authority in order to keep things working and to pursue necessary change. And every single one of us, when we’re in danger, want to be protected and preserved. These are not intrinsically bad things. They are just human things.

So what, then, is the purpose of Jesus being tested by the devil in this way? Is it a reminder that our basic human desires are easily corruptible? Or is it simply that we are supposed to be impressed by Jesus’ holy restraint and realize that we ourselves are not as strong as he is? That we need to pray for superhuman levels of detachment and determination in order to follow him to the Cross?

Maybe. There are probably good lessons to be found in some of that.

But I have seen and heard some of the fruit of that kind of theology, the kind that denigrates human needs and bodily realities, and too often it ends up diminishing people or telling them to deny their basic worthiness. And maybe it’s because I am tired of heavy-handed, hypocritical moralizing in the world…or maybe it’s because I haven’t had a carb in seven days…but I am really not up for any theologies of shame this Lent.

So I was thinking there must be something more tangible and human and humane for us here, right? Love must have been at work in the wilderness, right?

I think so, yes, and again it comes back to a sandwich—though not the sandwiches of my recent obsession.

You see, this story of Jesus’ time in the wilderness—which, if you only read today’s lectionary, comes across like the solitary, noble quest in the archetypal hero’s journey—is actually part of a broader whole. It is sandwiched—get it?—between two really important pieces of the gospel narrative. We miss this when all we hear is today’s reading. As is often true in Scripture, we have to step back and look at the bigger picture.

On one side of this story sandwich in Luke, there’s the account of Jesus’ baptism and then his family tree. Then, on the other side of the temptation story, we see Jesus preaching in his hometown of Nazareth and calling his first disciples. And this sandwich structure is nearly identical in the other Synoptic gospels. It’s a literary structure that’s actually used many times, especially in Mark, called the Markan Sandwich (really), lest you think this whole sermon is just some hunger-induced rabbit hole.

So in today’s case, on both sides of Jesus’ experience in the wilderness, we find him embedded in stories of community—the community of the baptized; the community of Jesus’ ancestors; the faith community he grew up in; and this new Kingdom-oriented community he sets about to build with his disciples.

This pattern is not accidental. The gospel writers are trying to tell us something with this sandwich, something that our individualistic culture could easily miss: Jesus’ time in the wilderness only makes sense in the context of community. It is not about going it alone and conquering ourselves through force of will in order to be perfect and pure. It’s about remembering who we are and where we come from and the vision of community that sustains us when we come up against the inevitable deprivations and challenges and urgent questions of life.

The true test of the devil here is not actually about food or authority or safety—it is whether Jesus will succumb to the temptation to pursue these things by himself or for himself alone.

And Jesus could resist this temptation because he already carried within himself the one thing that the devil doesn’t understand and cannot defeat—that deepest and most communitarian sort of love which is the love of God. Jesus was full of the Spirit of the communal, Three-in-One God, which means he knew he never truly alone in the wilderness, but knit into everyone and everything else, and responsible to everyone and everything else, always.

Community is what strengthened him. Community is what kept him focused. Because Jesus knew:

Bread is good; but it is meant to be shared in community so that none go hungry. Power and authority can be good to get things done; but they are meant be balanced and guided by the wisdom of diverse voices in community. Safety and protection are good; but everyone should be included in the circle of care that is community, because everyone deserves to live without fear. That’s what the Kingdom of God looks like.

And by the way, don’t talk to me about the notion of a “Christian nation” unless that’s the sort of thing you have in mind. I’m a man who *hasn’t had creamer in his coffee for a week* and my patience for nonsense is stretched thin.

Now, we are not Jesus, of course. So how do we stay true to all of this, especially when things get scarce or scary like they might feel right now? Well, as it happens, that’s what church is for. It is this community that both reminds us we are not alone, and that we cannot and should not trust only in ourselves. It is this place where we are sandwiched in by grace, communing with our ancestors in faith through the liturgy, and building the future together with God’s help. And how deeply nourishing it all is.

So if we would renounce anything this Lent, let us renounce the lie of a rugged individualist Jesus. And let us renounce the lie of a go-it-alone salvation. God came to be in community with us. And God came to help us build a new community of hope with bread for all who need it.

And yes, God knows and loves and calls to us each, intimately and closely, and God walks with us through our own private wildernesses, but the Christian story is not a “me, myself, and I” story, and it is not an “us vs. them” story. It is an “all of us” story.

And right now, what all of us are being called to do in perilous, exhausting times is to build this community and make it stronger and more vibrant than ever. To baptize and confirm and study and pray. To show up and speak out and make calls and advocate and supply basic needs. To dream and wonder and connect and listen. To receive Sacrament and to become sacramental people, together. For each other. For the world that God so loves.

And if we do that? Well, then even in our present wilderness, it might just be enough to send the devil packing.

And for those of us who are feeling a bit hungry for hope and purpose and possibility—well, I suspect it will be…like a big, glorious sandwich. With all the fixings.

The Feast of All Hungers: An Ash Wednesday Sermon

Offered on Ash Wednesday, March 5, 2025, at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH.

Ash Wednesday has an unusual quality to it. It’s a bit hard to describe. It’s not exactly mournful like Good Friday, but it’s not joyful, either. It’s quiet and sharp and dim and bright all at once. But to me, more than anything else, Ash Wednesday is a hungry day.

I remember back in seminary, when I studied and lived for a bit of time at a theological college in England next to a community of monks, they took their Lenten observances quite seriously. On the morning of Ash Wednesday I went into the dining hall and discovered that we were being given the sparest of meals to last us for most of the day. Talk about wailing and gnashing of teeth; I felt the fear of God deep in my stomach that day!

So yes, sometimes Ash Wednesday is literally a hungry day if you participate in the tradition of fasting, but that’s not all I mean. It’s about other types of hunger, too.

You know how we celebrate a Feast of All Angels in September and a feast of All Saints in November?

I have come to the conclusion that Ash Wednesday is the feast of all hungers. It is the day when we acknowledge that, simply by virtue of being alive, we are hungry people—hungry for many things. There is a rumble in our stomachs and a yearning in our souls, and we are driven by the pursuit of them across the long, lean years of life.

In Psalm 51, a version of which we will recite in a little while, the Psalmist declares, “I have been wicked from my birth, a sinner from my mother’s womb.” And while that sounds a little dire, we might relate to the Psalmist, who is frustrated by the many gnawing hungers, bodily and spiritual, that never seem to go away—the hungers that assert themselves afresh each day. The Psalmist senses, as we do, the desperate sense that enough is an elusive concept, and that we will be starving for something for all our days. Call it wickedness, call it sin, but whatever it is that plagues us, its origin is that we are so very hungry.

And so Ash Wednesday is when we name, without too much fanfare, that this is where we begin in Lent. This is the human condition. That we come into the world this way: from our first gasp and cry outside of the womb, we are hungry for air and for food, and also for love, for protection, for shelter, for community.

And as we grow, these basic hungers endure; they are our companions for as long as we live, joined in time by other, subtler pangs—a hunger for purpose, for meaning, for wholeness, for righteousness, for beauty. And every once in a while, by some grace or tribulation, we tap into the deepest hunger of all—the hunger for the One we call God.

Despite its reputation as a very pious sort of observance, I would argue that Ash Wednesday is actually a visceral feast day, not an ethereal, spiritual one. You feel Ash Wednesday in the gut, sort of like I did sitting at that monastic breakfast table. And, as odd as it might sound, that means it is an ideal time to come to church even if you don’t know what you believe about God, because no matter what we believe, what we all know is this: that we are hungry. That we are very hungry.

And we also know that we are tired—tired of seeing the world go hungry, whether for bread or justice or love or simple human kindness. We are tired, ourselves, of going to bed with an emptiness in our stomachs and in our souls. We long for that which satisfies, wherever or whatever (or Whoever) it is.

And today all of these hungers and longings collide, both the temporal and the transcendent. We stand at the raw edge of springtime, the earth hungry for sunlight and our mouths watering for a fulfillment we can’t quite name. A fulfillment that, our readings and our worship suggest, might be found in the places we don’t tend to look.

And if Lent is the journey toward an answer to that fulfillment–an answer that will come, in time, with the scent of lilies and the song of resurrection–then today, Ash Wednesday, is simply when we dare to make the admission that yes, despite our desire to seem satiated and wise and successful and strong….we are really just hungry. So truly, honestly hungry that we are willing, even, to follow this Lenten road all the way to the Last Supper and the Passion and the Cross, because something that groans deep within us suggests that we will be fed, here, in a way that nothing and no one else can offer.

In that spirit of hunger, then ,the mark that we are about to receive on our foreheads—the mark of dust and ashes—takes on a slightly different meaning.

If you heard Jesus’ words about not being ostentatious in our piety and if you are wondering how that squares with wearing a cross on your forehead the rest of the day, I would simply offer this: the ashes on your brow are not a sign of membership in a club. They are not a status symbol. They are not proof of our collective and elevated holiness. Those are the self-important, self-deluding impulses Jesus advises against.

Instead, consider this: that the mark that you are about to receive simply indicates: I am hungry. I am hungry for God. I am hungry for a glimpse of my truest, most beloved self. And like all who have come before me, like all the children of the dust that ever lived and died, I came into this world hungry, and I walk through my days hungry, and I admit it openly here and now on this feast of all hungers. Because I trust, somehow, that if I can name my hunger, then God will fill the depth of it with himself.

And that on the other side of this hungry season, this hungry life, there will be something waiting for us. There will be an answer. There will be a feast. And there will be One who welcomes us, and who bids us rest, and who says, again, and at last, and always,

Blessed are you who are hungry, for you shall be satisfied.

Breakwater: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, March 17, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is John 12:20-33.

If you have spent any time traveling up around the Great Lakes, you might have observed the structures called breakwaters, which are a feature of many cities with harbors and bays along the lakeshore. Their construction varies, but essentially they are a thin wall or barrier that juts out into the lake in order to do exactly what the name implies—to break the waves that move in toward the shore, creating calm, navigable water on the inner side of the wall for ships and other small craft, while the swells and breakers roll and rage in the great expanse beyond.

Growing up, every summer we would spend time in Marquette, Michigan, which sits right at the edge of Lake Superior, the largest and wildest of the Great Lakes. There is a breakwater that extends out from the shore there, and when I was young, my family and I would walk out onto it, taking in the views of the water and the city.

The breakwater in Marquette has been there since the 1800s, reconstructed a few times due to storms, and the first half of it is a sturdy concrete structure, flat easy to walk on in good weather. You can stroll out in this narrow path, the calm harbor to your right, the endless waves to your left, and as a kid it was a thrill to be there on the breakwater, bathed in summer breezes, dancing and skipping out, out, out along the thin line between home and the world beyond, between familiarity and the eternity of blue water stretching toward an unseen shore.

But then there was a point on our walk where we would always stop. About halfway, the breakwater turns at an angle and keeps going farther out into the lake, but this second portion is only comprised of large boulders; the concrete wall ends and from there the going gets slick and treacherous as the waves collide with the bare stone. The only way forward is to scramble and leap and crawl along the rocks.

My cousins and I always wanted to go onto the rocks all the way out to the end, the very end, where a light tower marked the edge of the breakwater. But the adults wisely said no, it wasn’t safe. So we would turn back.

And what I could not have perceived then, but that I do now—more and more so with every passing year—is that life is much like that walk along breakwater. When we are younger, setting out into the wide expanse of the world is deliriously exciting, and, if we are blessed with a kind and caring childhood, we take for granted, perhaps, the solid structures beneath our feet. Stay on the straight and solid path, we are told, and all shall be well, and if you are careful, the waves will not break over you, and you will go as far as you need to go.

But then, somewhere along the way, we get to the place in our lives where the solid footing ends, and we realize, with some surprise and trepidation, that we are no longer children, and that now we are expected to keep going.

We discover that growing up and growing wise means that the journey does not, in fact, end at the bend in the path, but that life keeps going, going out where there are only rocks to traverse, where the water licks at our heels and sometimes threatens to sweep us away, out where we must indeed scramble and leap and crawl on our knees, and the walls we relied upon for safety suddenly seem much more permeable than they once did.

One of the times I realized this was when my father had his first major heart attack in late spring, several months before he died. As it happens, I flew into Marquette, where he was in the ICU, and I remember seeing the lake as we drove through town in between hospital visits, and I remember seeing the breakwater, too, curling like a question mark out into the blue expanse, a reminder of simpler springs.

And I remember feeling, in that moment, like my own solid path had ended, but that I was now required to keep moving forward out where there were only rocks ahead, with no one there to call me back. I suspect most of us have had experiences like that.

And, in our passage from John’s Gospel today, this is also such a moment for Jesus, where the solid path he has been traveling since the day he was born comes to a precarious place , and when he, too, accepts that he must still keep going, out, out, onward, to where the footing is uncertain and where there is no guarantee of safety.

“Now my soul is troubled,” he says. “And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.”

Just as the other Gospel authors record his struggle in the Garden of Gethsemane, here John depicts Jesus at the edge of his own understanding, wrestling to reconcile the deep love he shares with his Father with the dawning sense that this love is no guarantee of preservation. Quite the opposite, in fact—this love for the Father is now clearly an invitation, a call, out onto the rocks where certainties end and faith alone must guide him.

This love that has been growing in Jesus, that has been manifesting in his deeds and his teachings, this love that has bathed him in clear, calm living water, is now rolling in like a wave, rolling in from the unseen shore, and he knows, now, that to be all that he must be, to do all that he must do—for himself, for us—the wave must break over him, come what may, and the rock must be the place where he plants his feet and carries his cross and builds his church, the rocks where the walls of safety, the walls between heaven and earth, the walls between familiarity and eternity, seem much more permeable than they once did.

It’s interesting, too, that this moment occurs alongside Andrew and Philip, who have been asked by some Greek believers to come and “see” Jesus, echoing Andrew and Philip’s own encounter with Jesus at the beginning of John’s text. Because inasmuch as this passage is Jesus reckoning with the nature of his own journey, it is also a moment for his disciples—including us—to reckon with ours. For “where I am, there will my servant be also.” If we are to follow Christ, then the rocks and the waves beckon us all.

And our reaction to this realization might depend on where we stand. If we have become too comfortable in our faith, if we have become accustomed to solid ground beneath our feet, if we have not dared to venture out to the places where love requires us to risk something, then we, too, might feel our souls troubled by Jesus’ call.

If so, then today we are being asked to take one small step outward onto the rocks—one small step towards admitting that we don’t have all the answers, ones step towards being vulnerable, towards embracing new ideas, new relationships, new ways of opening our hearts, new ways of standing with the poor and the forgotten and the storm-tossed—so that we might follow the path that Jesus has already traversed.

But if you are already out there on the rocks, somewhere between scrambling and leaping and crawling on your knees; if you already know all to well what it feels like to have left your certainties and safety behind, then perhaps Jesus’ call will be a consolation, because you will come to understand that even when the path crumbles under your feet, you are not lost. For this, too, is part of the path.

And this is, in fact, the part of the path that we must travel if we ever want to grow up, if we ever want to grow, to reach that place where familiarity and eternity meet, where home and heaven lap up against one another: out, out at the outermost edge where Jesus abides, where he burns like a light at the end of the breakwater, at the end of every journey, drawing all people to himself, blessing every rocky path you have walked, every crashing wave that has washed over you, and every weary heart, including yours.

I have not been out on that breakwater in Marquette for many years, now, but I hope to go back someday. I still have a little bit of my father’s ashes, and if I can, I’d like to sprinkle a few into the lake there. But I am no longer a child, now, so I think that when I go, I’ll venture out a bit farther out onto the rocks to do so, to let his ashes mix with the water and the wind. It feels right, somehow, that this is how it must be, and where it must be, on that thinnest of lines between home and the world beyond.

And though my feet might be a little unsteady, and my eyes might sting, I think my heart will still dance and skip like it once did.

It will not be entirely safe. Life never is. Love never is.

But it is still part of the path. And God will be there.

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.

God Loves Dust: An Ash Wednesday Sermon

I preached this sermon on Ash Wednesday, 2024, at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH.

God loves dust.

God has always loved the dust: the particles of stars; the tiny fragments of creation borne aloft on a dark wind from heaven. He has loved the dust since the moment he brought it into being, each mote like the note of a song still being written, carried on the light of a thousand suns.

And when the dust had at last gathered and settled upon our small corner of creation, then–like one who makes a wish on a delicate head of dandelion seeds, closes their eyes, and blows–God blew upon the dust of earth to make it dance; to mix within every speck of it his own particular hopes and dreams; to animate it with love and life; to name it and trace his own image in it.

God made a companion out of the dust and called it you and me and us, and that same wish-making, dream-shaping breath first blown, that same impulse to love what has been made and called good…is what still holds us together. It is what drives our bodies of dust onward through time and space, guiding our feet across the dusty trails of the earth, looking up to the shimmering, dusty stars and feeling, somehow, like they are looking back us–all of us children of the dust, bearers of an ancient light, long lost siblings from the same source.

And so, if all is dust, and all is loved, then Ash Wednesday is less about bemoaning our mortality and more about marveling at the fact that we were made in the first place, that everything was made in the first place. Made of tiny pieces of one divine dream, knit together in an infinite number of shapes and places and faces, changing in form, this holy dust, but never in its belovedness.

For God loves dust, and God’s love does not change or die, even when we do.

And we come here today to inspect this dust and this love up close, to remember the times we have made a mess of it, and to be reminded that God has not given up on us regardless.

It is often said that our Gospel passage on this day, where Jesus cautions against showy acts of piety, is an awkward one for this occasion when we come to receive a smudge on our brow and go out & about wearing it for all to see.

But it is worth noting that Jesus is not opposed to public piety in and of itself—he was himself a man of deep and serious prayer, one who grew up formed by the piety of his own time and place and who embodied openly his own awareness of divine truth.

And the reading from Isaiah, too, while raging against empty, self-serving piety, still speaks of a very public devotion, a communal spirituality of care and justice–the type that is formed and sustained by knowing how sacred, how precious, is everything and everyone that God has made…from dust.

The reminder, here, then, is that piety is worthless and empty if and when we use it to try and prove—to ourselves or to others—that God loves us. And it is dangerous when we use it to try and prove that God loves only us, and not “them.”

Piety should not, cannot, need not prove any such thing, because love is already a given for all things. It is freely offered; it is the mandate that underlies creation; it is the rationale for everyone and everything that was ever made. God’s love is as inevitable, as pervasive as the dust that gathers on still surfaces; the dust that clings to our skin; that dances on beams of light; the dust that swirls in the wind. It is a love that is seeking, always seeking, like dust, to rest upon us, to be where we are, to remind us who and what we are—that we are dust, and that God loves dust. And so should we.

So to pray in secret and to fast in secret, as Jesus instructs us to do, is about resting quietly in that love, resting in the knowledge that you do not have to prove your worthiness. You do not have to win the affections of God as if he were a fickle Valentine waiting to be romanced by your words and your grand gestures. You are worthy of love already. And so is everyone else.

God loves our life even when we have little to show for it in the end. God loves the times we tried and failed and tried again. God loves you even with a streak of dirt across your brow and tears on your cheek. God loves you even when you have no good words left to offer, when you have stumbled and fallen and are covered in dust, and maybe, just maybe, God loves you most of all in those moments when you are fully yourself, without pretense, without affectation or pride.

And maybe that’s the point of our practices of simplicity and prayer and relinquishment in this season. Maybe when we are down close to the earth, when we are down close to the simplest form of ourselves, we might begin to feel that original love for the dust of which we are made, the force that orchestrated the stars, the breath that still stirs the primordial soil in our flesh—maybe we will feel that love reverberating up through us, and out through us, out to wherever the Spirit is leading.

And maybe, as we will discover in this season of Lent, that is also why Jesus came to live among the dust and move upon the dust and cry tears over the dust and trace his finger in the dust and stumble and fall and bleed into the dust and to die as dust and to live again in a body made of dust–and eternity. Because God loves dust, and he could not rest until he became that which he had loved.

In a moment you will receive a mark on your forehead, and you will hear those ancient words—remember that you are dust—and perhaps, as we often do, you will feel the challenges that this reality poses: the brevity of our composition and the inevitability of its being carried away on the wind. And that’s ok. It’s human to wonder, to weep, to carry with us the anticipation of all that comes to an end.

But remember this: wherever it goes, the dust that you are, the dust that we all are—whenever and however it finds its repose: every particle of it is still imbued with the undying love by which it was formed.

And so this smudge on your brow is not a mark of shame or lament, it is a promise—a promise that even when we return to the dust, we will not be forgotten nor forsaken, and that one day God will use it to reconstitute a new creation. One in which all of us, at long last, will feel that belovedness coursing through every particle of our being; and at long last we will see that same belovedness in the face of our neighbor and in the face and shape of everything; and at long last there will nothing left to prove, nothing left to fear, and our piety will simply be looking at the stars and the soil and seeing that they are indeed our siblings, that they always were, and that the whole cosmos is but one beautiful dance of dust. Carried on the breath of the Spirit. Swirling in the eternal light.

And when we see this, and live this, then the wish that was made when God closed his eyes and blew his breath at the dawn of time…that wish will have, at last, come true:

To know that you are dust. And to dust all things shall return.

And God loves dust.

No Regrets: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, March 6, 2022, the First Sunday in Lent. The lectionary text cited is Luke 4:1-13, Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness.

We inhabit an unsettled moment. That statement is true on many different levels, but in this instance I am referring to something deeper and more elemental than the news headlines. I am thinking instead about the changing of the seasons that accompanies our entry into Lent in the northern hemisphere. Amid the turbulent moods of early spring, when we are caught up in the vacillating space between ice and dewdrops, between dirt and blossom, between the cradle and the Cross, there is a keener sense perhaps, of the fertile mix of decay and growth that characterizes our lives on this earth. On Ash Wednesday, the cold mud of winter was imprinted on our brows, and eventually on Easter Day we will convulse with joy among the fields of lilies, but for now we are held in the tension of the time-being, suspended in the middle of frost and flower, mortality and miracle.

Lent is the pungent season when life and death speak to one another. Too often we keep these two realities isolated in separate corners of our minds, so it is good for us to listen to their conversation over the next several weeks, to notice how life and death layer upon and fertilize the other, both in the Liturgy and in the world around us. Lent is when this life—the delicate, earthy existence we have been given—is brought into clarity and focus by accepting its brevity and, indeed, sometimes its cruelty and brokenness. But it is also a season for celebrating that life, for rediscovering the urgency of living deeply and well while we have the chance, before it is too late, and we go down to the dust once more.

There was an article that became popular online several years ago, written by a hospice nurse. In it, she reflected on the conversations she’d had with the countless people she’d cared for in the final weeks and days of their lives, and she shared the top five regrets that people expressed as they prepared to die. They were as follows:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

And while these five regrets might not be true for every person in every time and place, I think they are striking, because they point to the heart of the things that matter when everything else falls away, when there are no illusions left to hide behind, when the wind blows cold across the bare fields and we remember the trace of that muddy cross on our brow. We might say they are the insights of a Lenten spirit, from the passage between life and death, the unadorned space between the seasons of the soul.

And they reveal that when we die, the thing we might grieve the most is simply that we never allowed ourselves to truly live. That we didn’t connect with others. That we didn’t connect with our deepest selves. And that, having been tempted by other distractions, we might face the great mystery of eternity without having deeply savored the great mystery of now.

God knows this is our struggle. God has always known this. And that is why, I suspect, we see the same struggle woven through God’s own life among us in Jesus. Consider today’s gospel passage from Luke, when Jesus is compelled by the Holy Spirit to enter the wilderness and submit to the temptations that humanity has always faced—the temptation to control our own destiny rather than trust in God’s providence, to adorn ourselves with the false security of power and prestige and material comfort; to laud safety and strength rather than vulnerability and humility.

These were the same temptations that Israel faced in the wilderness and again when they reached the Promised Land. They are the same temptations that each of us must contend with in our own particular way. And if and when we succumb to them, the result is the same—disconnection, distrust, inauthenticity, the cultivation of a brittle and strident spirit, and then, at the end, a litany of sorrows that might sound something like:

I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard. I wish I’d expressed my feelings. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

But Lent is an opportunity to pull back from this trajectory in our own lives. And Jesus, in a Lenten moment of his own in this Gospel, shows us how to do so. He faces the temptations of the devil—those temptations to pattern his life in self-serving ways, to become something that he is not, and he chooses, instead, to be exactly who he is, exactly who his Father wills him to be. Which is to say, he chooses relationship, he chooses simplicity, he chooses depth, he chooses trust, he chooses love. And the words he speaks are a ray of light burning away the frost, a budding promise to us, even now, as we wait for the spring:

One does not live by bread alone.

Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.

Do not put the Lord your God to the test.

Simple, ancient words, drawn from the Hebrew Scriptures. True words. Words that are almost like a death, in that they remind us of the fleeting nature of most of the things we fixate upon and obsess over, and instead call us back to what is eternal. These are the words that allowed Jesus to stay focused on who he was, and they can do the same for us whatever our journey looks like. They are the words that invite us to a life—and a death—that is the opposite of regret.

How do we get there? How do we live as Jesus chose to live? How do we die as Jesus chose to die?

1. Have the courage to be yourself. Abide deeply in the love that is inside of you, the love that God gave you to share with others.

2. Don’t work so hard, at least not for the things we usually give away our lives for. Work for God’s kingdom, and rest in knowing that you don’t have to do it all by yourself. You were created for wonder and praise more than you were for achievement.

3. Express your feelings. Jesus certainly did. Don’t be afraid to be vulnerable, to be wrong, to show your weaknesses, because they are part of what will save you. We worship a God who was crucified before he was glorified.

4. Stay in touch with your friends, and with all of the important people in your life. They are the most likely place where you will experience the love of God firsthand, and are thus the true treasures of this world.

5. Let yourself be happy. Let yourself love this imperfect world, whether it’s deep winter or glorious spring or the messy middle with all of its unanswered questions. Let yourself be dazzled by the mystery of existence, by the mystery of God’s love, embrace it while you live, and then you will regret nothing, because you will experience everything.

This is the life Jesus chose in the wilderness. This is the life he invites to choose. And this is the strange, holy, in-between season where we must make our choice. This is Lent.

And so here we stand, with a trace of mud on our brow, leaning into the light; children of the broken earth, children of God. Tempted, yes. Stumbling, sometimes. Seeking, always.

But loved, always loved, in death and in life, in winter, and in spring, and in the glorious mystery that is beneath and beyond all seasons.

And with a love that powerful, that eternal, that true, there is nothing to regret.

The Dust Matters: A Sermon

I preached this sermon today, Ash Wednesday 2019, at Christ Church, Alameda, CA. The lectionary texts are Isaiah 58:1-12, 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:10 and Matthew 6:1-6,16-21.

It’s been almost seven years since my father died, quite unexpectedly, and one of the clearest things that I remember about flying home for his funeral was the shock of seeing the little black box that held his ashes, and looking in at them, and realizing that, physically speaking, this was all that was left of a man who had been so full of life and humor and compassion. And how surreal it was that the man who cradled me in his arms when I was a baby, I was now cradling in my arms as a box of dust. It defies my comprehension, even to this day.

And I was, then (and often still am), tempted to say—as I think we often do when someone dies—no, he’s not in there. This box of ashes is not actually him. This little box can’t contain the man whom I loved and admired, a person who lived so deeply, so fully, and so well. I am tempted to say these ashes are nothing but a shell, that they have nothing to do with that person. And yet…I took those ashes home with me, and for the longest time I would take them out and look at them, and I couldn’t let them go.

Why is that?

I ponder the same thing when I walk by columbariums like the one here in Christ Church, which holds a lifetime’s worth of love and memories in each quiet chamber, with a name engraved on the front. We stand before these rows of names and ashes, and we ask, “where are you? are you here in these chambers? Are you in my heart? Are you in a place beyond this place, somewhere I can’t even begin to imagine?”

The dust of our loved ones gives no answer to these questions. They rest, silently, like those ancient ruins mentioned in Isaiah, the foundations of many generations, placed lovingly in columbariums and cemeteries, scattered across land and sea. But while the dust does not answer us, it does bears witness, both to our own impermanent bodies and to our enduring bewilderment about what becomes of us, when we are no longer *this*. The Psalmist says, “God remembers that we are but dust,” and on days like today we try to remember that too, even as it remains inconceivable that all of our vitality and memory and longing could be so shockingly reducible, so small and earthbound.

But as inconceivable as it might be, we can’t seem to escape the dust. As much as we might like to, we can’t shake it off. We are drawn back to it, over and over again, because we know, intuitively, that whatever happens after death, this dust that was once our flesh somehow still matters. It is not easily forgotten or discarded.

I bring up this meditation on flesh and dust so that we might deeply consider the meaning of these ashes we are about to receive, and the fullness of what they symbolize. Too often in our tradition they are treated only as a sign of death or penitence, and we wash them off later in the day and move on until next year. If we leave it at that, I think we miss something beautiful. And this is especially important because our scripture readings warn us against practices of empty, unexamined piety.

Isaiah, for example, tells the people that true humility and repentance is found in loving each other, not just putting on sackcloth and ashes. And in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says that fasting and praying should be about an intimate connection with God, not a big gesture to show off to our neighbors. These texts starkly reject showy displays of piety…on the very day that we receive big dark smudged crosses on our foreheads and wear them out into the world.

So we must reckon with the significance of what we are doing here today, Ash Wednesday, to articulate why these ashes–and those ashes in the columbarium–matter, and what all this talk of ash and dust conveys, not just about the tradition of the church, but about our lives.

Our faith, as we often say, is Incarnational. That word, incarnate, literally means “into the flesh”. We affirm that God came into the flesh, human flesh, and lived among us as Jesus of Nazareth, himself a mortal man of dust, and somehow in our union with Jesus, God seeps into our dusty flesh, too. Through Jesus, the love of God has not just redeemed a “spirit” or “soul” within us, but has permeated our very bodies; we are like that watered garden of which Isaiah speaks, drenched in God, nourished by the spring whose waters never fail.

And this incarnational movement of God into our unremarkable flesh reveals something crucial about the language and symbol of Ash Wednesday: that this dust of which we are made—it MATTERS to God. The dusty remains of our loved ones, which seem so far removed from who they once were—they MATTER to God, too. Our bodies, mortal as they are, all matter to God, because they are caught up in the divine story of God, the divine story that is revealed and enacted in our bodies, in relationship with one another.

We might be made of dust, but it is beloved, holy dust.

This dust makes up the fingers that we use to caress the face of our beloved;

This dust makes up the eyes that behold our children and grandchildren for the very first time;

This dust makes up the ears that we use to listen deeply to one another.

These small perishable parts of us MATTER to God, they are part of God’s indwelling in the substance of creation, and they tell a story of the goodness of being alive, of being human, of being part of one another.

From this perspective, the ashes we wear today are certainly not an empty act of piety, and they are far more, even, than a mark of penitence. They are a reminder–an affirmation–of what it means to be that which we are: a body that is at once dying and yet imbued with eternity, at once broken and yet redeemed by love. A body, as Paul says, which appears as having nothing, and yet possesses everything.

When I receive the mark on my forehead today, I will remember my father, whose ashes I finally let go and scattered into the ocean about a year ago, so that the dusty remnants of his kind eyes and his quiet smile might be carried on the waves, to dwell with God in the uttermost parts of the sea. With this smudge of ash, I am anointing myself with the dust of his memory, and with the conviction that his mortal life, his mortal body—and mine, and yours, and all the people who have come before us—will always matter to God. We are beloved, we are not forgotten, even when we become the silent dust, even as we wait, in hope, through the quiet season to come.

Pausing in the Ruins

Holy Week began tonight with the first evensong of Palm Sunday, and Mirfield is a buzz of activity as visitors arrive to participate in the Community’s extensive schedule of observances. Over the next seven days we will have upwards of 50(!) worship services, plus communal meals and public lectures. It is, according to everyone who has experienced it before, a singularly transformative experience.

I will admit, though, that the excitement of Easter’s impending arrival (and the two-week break that follows!) also feels bittersweet, like a valedictory. This time of Lent, now entering its final stretch, has been rich with challenge and insight, and I’ve taken much time and space throughout these 40 days for an unflinching look at my life. Some of it has been consoling, and some of it has been jarring. This penitential season has a way of stripping you down to the skin, revealing your fears and flaws, leaving you shivering and raw and somehow even more alive as a result.

That’s how it felt last week when I took a trip by myself to the seaside to visit the ruins of Whitby Abbey. The site stands on a headland overlooking the North Sea, and on the day of my visit the weather was so inclement that there wasn’t a single other person around. The wind blew so forcefully that it almost knocked me over as I traversed the wide grassy field, and when I sought shelter beneath the crumbling Gothic arches, the rain whipped through the intricately carved stone window openings that once held stained glass, stinging my eyes with tears. It was miserable and beautiful all at the same time and I thought: this is Lent, in all its luminous, wondrous fury. We spend a season alone, praying and crying amid the majestic ruins of our regret, as the cold wind of God blasts through, shocking us back into reverence and life.

Now, though, back in the community at Mirfield, it’s time to come in from the cold and embark on a different type of journey: into Jerusalem with Christ for a final week of tribulation and revelation. On Palm Sunday we join the throng and enter the holy city, waving our palms as an assemblage of lost souls who still seek salvation on our own terms: power, success, admiration. And as we move through the days and the liturgies, there is still so much yet to be faced and relinquished—our false hopes, our jealousies and our idleness, our tendency to betray the love that is offered to us, bargained away for a few coins and an empty kiss.

But just like my rain-soaked excursion to Whitby, it’s a journey we can’t help but make, because it is often from the depths of pain and isolation that we begin to recognize the miracle of new life that comes on Easter day. I have been wrestling with so much these past few months, and I feel ready to step into the redemptive light of whatever lies ahead. For just a few days more, though, I will sit and be attentive to the yearning and the questioning that have been my gentle companions for this season.

Wherever you are this Holy Week, and whatever you might be going through, I pray that you will find courage in facing what you must face, and solace in knowing that everything good awaits us on the other side of the Cross.

Peace, my friends.

The Ancient and the New

It’s been one month since I arrived in Mirfield; as such, one quarter of my time here is already done. I can already sense little shifts in the landscape. The dawn is brighter as I walk up the hill to morning prayer; dusk lingers a bit longer in the church as we chant the psalms at evensong. There are changes inside of me, too. A bit less disoriented, a bit more confident of how I fit into this place.

So much has gone on since my last post. There was the somber and beautiful Ash Wednesday liturgy, when the priest drew a cross on my forehead with cool, damp ashes that had been sprinkled with holy water. A day of silent contemplation at the College to usher in Lent, during which I alternated between stillness and dizzying anxiety. A weekend trip to the ancient city of York, where I wandered alone through the medieval streets looking for a glimpse of a ghost or two. At the massive and magnificent York Minster I was stunned into silence, not simply because of its visual grandeur, but in recognition of the centuries and centuries of prayers that have been offered up into its lofty heights. I felt alone, and yet deeply connected to that never-ending litany.

This journey thus far, with its ample opportunities for reflection, have made it very clear to me how I am still learning to be a disciple of Christ on the most basic levels: to look kindly upon myself and my flaws, and those of others; to trust that God actually loves me, personally, and not just as an abstraction; to recognize that grace is imbued into everything, whether I see it or not, because God is far more than I can see, or feel, or guess at. These are simple, incomprehensible truths. I know how much I still have to grow, and yet I am also seeing more clearly how becoming a priest is less about growth and more about fully inhabiting myself as God made me. We are not asked to be perfect as priests, but we are asked to be deeply, authentically ourselves, and that is the hardest thing of all sometimes. That goes for non-priests, too, of course.

Lest you think my entire month has been pensive introspection, there have been tons of joyful moments, too. Case in point: on Sunday afternoon I went to lunch with a classmate; we drove out into the countryside and the hills were so green and vast I wanted to cry. Afterwards we drove up to the Victoria Tower, an old observation structure perched far above the town of Huddersfield, and the wind was blowing and the clouds were scudding across the sky and I thought, yes, to be alive is a very good thing. To be here, breathing and breathless and crying from the wind and the wonder is exactly as it must be. Come, Lord. Come, spring. I am broken open, and I am ready.