LGBT Christian – By Another Road

Empathy: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, December 21, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 1:18-25.

Most of us, while growing up, have certain moments when we realize something difficult about the way the world works. Perhaps that things are not as safe or pleasant as we had thought them to be; that people are often lonelier and more lost than we had imagined, and that we ourselves might someday feel that way, too. These are not happy discoveries, but they are important ones.

When I was in the fifth grade, I had a group of friends, and every day at recess we played foursquare. If you’re not familiar with that game, it’s essentially a group of four people bouncing a large rubber ball back and forth among, you guessed it, four squares, and trying to get each other out. We loved it.

But one of my friends at the time had a little bit of a schoolyard bully streak in him, and one day at recess he started taunting another boy who was not in our group. The particulars of his taunt don’t really matter—they were made up and casually cruel. But they stuck, and soon some of the other kids joined in. I did not, but I also didn’t say or do anything about it.

This went on for a few days, and I just remember that it started to bother me more and more. Until one day, I told my friend in the middle of the foursquare game that he should stop saying those things, that he was being mean, and that I was not going to be “one of his followers” who went along with this. Oh, this enraged him. He turned on me in a fury and starting aiming that rubber foursquare ball at my face. The other kids didn’t join in, per se, but they didn’t say or do anything, and I soon found myself exiled from that particular group. This is how the world works sometimes.

Now this is not an after-school special on tv—there was no happy ending where I befriended the bullied boy and started a new group of misfit friends. I wish I had. I did realize though, that there are choices to be made, and a price bound up in them, when we encounter those ways the world works which we simply cannot abide.

But I think the most important thing that I learned in that situation was the power of empathy—of placing yourself in the shoes of someone else and letting your own heart break for them a bit. It is a wondrous thing, empathy—a small, simple choice made in a million different instances that can transform everything within us and among us.

Now there are some in popular culture and other circles these days who are claiming that empathy is toxic. That it’s dangerous to morality and social order to care too much about others’ feelings or experiences. And for such people….I try to have empathy. We are all afraid or resentful of what we don’t understand, sometimes. But we must decide what to do in response to that fear.

Which brings us to our gospel today. Another fearful, confused person who has to make a decision about circumstances he does not understand is Joseph. At least that is how I imagine him when I try to empathize with his situation: shocked, bewildered, conditioned by the strict codes of honor and shame within his own culture.

Before any divine dreams or angelic messages come to explain the circumstances to Joseph, there is simply a regular man, alone, with more questions than answers. Presumably through family or friends, Joseph has been given the news of Mary’s mysterious pregnancy. And, according to the standards of his time, no one would have questioned it if he reacted with rage or rejection. The taunts of schoolyard bullies would pale in comparison to what Mary was up against.

But instead, we have the first Christmas miracle before Christmas even arrives, and it is simply this: the choice of empathy. So quick you might overlook it: Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose [Mary] to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.

It is good to dwell on this sentence. We may not fully understand the patriarchal culture of 1st century Galilee, but we can understand this much: Joseph, in this moment, is not going along with the way that his world works. He is choosing, as best he knows how, to be empathetic with whatever Mary’s situation is.

This is a risky choice for him. Some people already knew that Mary was with child, so Joseph’s decision to protect her practically ensures the whispers of his neighbors or even their outright derision of him. He is refusing, after all, to punish her and to thereby protect his own honor, as his culture would expect.

But he is a righteous man, as Mathew tells us, righteous in the ways of God, not of culture wars, and somehow that means he is willing to pay the price of empathy.

Imagine that—empathy as the hallmark of righteousness. A concept that I wish the whole of the Christian church would embrace.

Because we should not overlook this in the narrative: Joseph’s empathy comes BEFORE his angelic dream, which then reveals God’s plan. Joseph’s empathy is the precondition of his participation in the Kingdom of Heaven.

I am going to say that one more time for the ones who need to hear it: his empathy is the precondition of his participation in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Not his knowledge or his power or his strength. Not his social standing or his wealth. Not his capacity for censure or his commitment to cultural purity.

His empathy is the precondition of his participation in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Miracle of miracles! At the end of Advent we finally see it clearly: Empathy is “the way of the Lord” we have been commanded to prepare. Empathy is the means of fulfillment of the ancient promises of God. Empathy is the nature of the One who is coming. Who knew?

Well, actually, all of the prophets knew this; all of the patriarchs and matriarchs; all of the saints of every age knew this and continue to say it. But somehow, in 2025, we need to keep saying it, and so we will:

Empathy is the precondition of our participation in the Kingdom of Heaven. We let our hearts break a little bit for someone else, and God rushes in.

This will come as less than good news to some—the schoolyard bullies we encounter at any age and in every age. The self-righteous and the judgmental. The condemnatory and the incurious. The ones who have confused discipleship with the hard, glossy veneer of social acceptability. They are not yet on board with empathy, but just you wait.

Because Jesus is coming and has already come to assemble his own group of misfit friends, and nobody is excluded from this group except the ones who lack empathy. They’ll be welcome too, once the veneer cracks. It usually does. Eventually we all discover that things are not as safe or pleasant as we hoped them to be. That we are all a bit lonelier or more lost that we thought we’d end up.

And that is when empathy is born in us, and when God’s advent can truly begin.

So here is my invitation to you, friends, in the spirit of St. Joseph: between now and Christmas Eve, think of one person you don’t understand, or whom you resent. It could be anyone, but ideally someone close to your daily life. And as challenging as it might be, I want you to take just five minutes alone and do your prayerful best to empathize with them. Imagine what struggles or fears might be shaping their decisions. Consider what hidden wounds might still plague them. Try to remember even one thing that you probably both share in common.

And that’s it. You don’t have to write a letter or tell anyone at all. Just give your own heart the brief gift of empathy—the tiniest crack of compassion—so that God can achieve his advent into you. Who knows what dreams or visions might follow.

I have no idea whatever happened to the boy I defended or the bully I enraged. All I do know is that the empathy I chose that day is something I would never take back. And if I accomplish nothing else in life, I hope that by the end my heart is broken all the way open by love, I hope it is broken into a thousand glimmering pieces of grace given and received, and that God alone will know what do with all of it.

I know that this is not always how the world works, but how beautiful it will be when it does.

When at last, in perfect empathy, He comes.

No More Waiting: An Advent Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, November 30, 2025, the first Sunday of Advent, at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 24:36-44.

You know how they say that the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result? Well, call me what you will, but I am guilty of this in at least one way.

Every morning, as I get up and get going, I open the various news apps on my phone, and I think to myself as the headlines are loading, “well, maybe today there will be some good news about the state of the world.”

And then I look at the headlines. Oof. Nope. It’s pretty rough out there.

So I hit the refresh button. How about now?

And I hit refresh again. How about now?!

I keep waiting. I keep waiting for that morning when I’ll wake up and there is nothing but good news in the headlines; good news on the radio as I drive to the church; good news in the streets…

Good news that somebody, somewhere has turned all our swords into ploughshares. That somebody, somewhere has discovered the cure for cancer and stopped war and found the surefire fix for loneliness and broken hearts. The good news that–at last–love has come like a thief in the night to abscond with all of our complacency; to make off with all our regrets.

I keep waiting for those headlines. Refresh, refresh, refresh.

And I will tell you, friends, I am pretty darn tired of waiting. Maybe you are, too. Not just because I am impatient (though I can be), or because I am, more than ever, aware that life is too short for nonsense (which it is).

No, I am tired of waiting because I cannot be satisfied with a world where people must wait for love, for peace, for dignity, for safety, for daily bread. And I am not impressed or convinced by those who argue that some people don’t deserve these things right now.

I don’t think anyone should have to wait for those things. Too many people, across too many generations and in too many places have waited far too long for crumbs from the table. And so I keep hitting that refresh button waiting for someone more powerful or popular than I am to figure that out, but they’re not, and it’s getting old.

I am over the waiting game. There is no virtue in the delay of the common good, of common decency, of common care for all God’s children.

So maybe we need to rethink this whole waiting thing.

It’s funny: the season of Advent is often characterized as a time of waiting, too—we recollect the long history of our waiting for God to show up, to act, to save. It’s what Isaiah and all the other prophets dreamt of for Israel. It’s what Jesus will soon make manifest to us in his birth under the star of Bethlehem: that our waiting will have somehow been worth it.

And yet I think we miss something urgently important if we satisfy ourselves with waiting—if we merely frame it as something pretty and pious and noble.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Advent candles and the songs and the old stories. I will always love them. But what I would love even more is to live in a world, here and now, that looks more like the realized promises which those songs and stories contain. I don’t just want candles and hymns about God’s love and justice. I want God’s love and God’s justice. The real thing. No more waiting. Frankly I think God wants that, too.

And hitting the refresh button on my phone isn’t going to cut it anymore.

What I am coming to realize is this: Advent is not about celebrating the wait for God’s good things. Because the wait for those things…is bad. Love delayed is love denied. That is not holy. The wait for those good and fundamental things like peace and safety and sustenance should make us ablaze with impatience.

Advent should be a shout; a refusal of the dull and stultifying darkness in which we languish.

Advent is about saying, come, Lord Jesus, and meaning it. Saying, come, Lord Jesus, and if I must be the vessel of your arrival, then let it be so. Let your light blaze in me, in us. For we have grown weary of waiting for someone else to make the good news happen. With God’s help, we reclaim that power for ourselves.

I find this urgency woven into today’s Gospel passage, too, when Jesus warns his disciples against passivity. It is true, he says, that no one knows the day and the hour when God will bring us all to our knees—a truth that most of us have already experienced in our own lives—but, he says, that is no excuse for dozing our way through history, waiting for someone else to fix things.

No, Jesus tells his disciples. No—you do not get to sit idly by, hitting the refresh button on your phone, waiting for someone else to make that good news happen, waiting for heaven to come and call you in some day. No, the Kingdom of God has come NEAR to you. It is alive in you.

So wake up! You do not have an appointment with God on some far off day; you have been appointed BY GOD here and now to be the good news that you are waiting for.

Stop waiting! This Advent, this arrival of our salvation in Christ Jesus, is OUR advent, too—it is OUR arrival as the dreamers of the dream of God, it is OUR coming into the world as the Body of the risen Lord, it is OUR raging against the darkness as the bearers of the light of love; it is OUR time to be the ones who bring a word of peace and justice and compassion to a world grown sick and dull and bitter with waiting.

So with all due reverence to the waiting language of this holy season of Advent, my friends, let it be said of us in this time and place and parish: they were the ones who refused to wait. They were the ones who decided that the Kingdom of God is not a coming attraction. It’s here, it’s now, in the words we choose to speak and the lives we choose to live. In the forgiveness we can offer and in the truth we can tell. In the service we can render and in the stories we can pass on.

Because I, for one, am tired of waiting for a world shaped by love, and I imagine our Lord is tired of us waiting for somebody, somewhere to make it visible. So come, Lord Jesus, and let your Kingdom arrive in me.

I promise, Lord, I’ll stop hitting the refresh button on my phone. I’ll try.

And maybe I’ll try refreshing my neighbor’s spirit instead. Refreshing my prayer life. Refreshing my commitment to speaking out for the vulnerable. Maybe you will join me in that.

And if you do, I have a challenge for you. I’d love for you to join me in this. If you do or experience something this Advent season that is a small sign of God’s love—an act of charity given or received, an act of truth-telling spoken or heard, a moment of grace offered or found…I want you to write it down on a post-it note, and when you come into to the church, I want you to stick it on the wall right in the hallway out here. Just a sentence or two about whatever it was that made God’s love real to you. Put up as many as you like.

I wonder, come Christmas, how many pieces of good news we could collect right here. I wonder, come Christmas, when visitors join us at St. Anne, if they might read our collection and say, oh, I see, yes, this is what it’s all about, isn’t it? This is what church can be.

And I wonder, come Christmas, if we might read them ourselves and look back at this season of waiting in which we refused to wait, and I wonder if we might realize: God has already come. Jesus is here, and we have seen his advent, and we have been his advent. We have become the good news we longed to hear. And we have been refreshed.

I’ll tell you, that’s the kind of headline I’d like to read.

The Ones Who Walk Away: A Sermon for All Saints

I preached this sermon on Sunday, November 2, All Saints’ Sunday, at St. Anne Episcopal Church in West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Luke 6:20-31.

I read a lot of stuff, such that much of it kind of blurs together. Matt and I donated a few books the other week, and as I was sifting through the stack of titles I thought a few times, “now what was that one about again?”

But sometimes there are particular stories or texts that stick with you and rattle around in your heart and mind. I was looking through some old boxes recently, and I came across one of these on an old photocopied set of pages I’ve been holding onto since middle school. It is the text of a famous short story by Ursula K. Le Guin. Are any of you familiar with her? She was a forerunner of many writers these days who combine elements of sci-fi, fantasy, and pointed social commentary. If you know of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, or the Hunger Games series, or Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Ursula K. Le Guin writes in that sort of imaginative, prophetic space.

Anyway, when I was in middle school, our teacher had us read one of her best known short stories, and it has haunted me ever since. It is called, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” If you can get your hands on a copy, I encourage you to read it—it’s not too long, but it packs a punch. I can’t do full justice to Le Guin’s writing here, but the essence is this: there is a fictional, wondrous, joyous city called Omelas, where all the citizens are happy and healthy and blessed. They live simple, lovely, celebratory lives. But there’s a catch (of course). For mysterious reasons that no one quite understands but which everyone tacitly agrees to, the blessedness and the perfection of Omelas depends upon the misery of a single child, who is hidden away at the edge of the city, living in squalor, unconsoled by any human kindness. How the child came to be there, no one in Omelas knows, but they do know that if they were to set the child free, all their perfect happiness would come to an end.

And so they turn back to their festivals and their feasts and learn to live, somehow, with the knowledge of the child’s suffering.

But there are a few people—the ones alluded to in the title—who look upon the suffering child and do not turn back to the bright and beautiful city. Instead, driven by some ineffable word deep within, they keep walking, walking out alone, away from all that they have known and seen. As Le Guin writes, “the place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”

I am thinking of Omelas, today, friends, because I fear we are living in it.

I am thinking of Omelas today because children and other vulnerable people go hungry and have their rights bandied about as the collateral of partisan gamesmanship.

I am thinking of Omelas because we live in a society that does a poor job of distinguishing between true blessedness and mere privilege.

And I am thinking about Omelas because it is the feast of All Saints, and I wonder if this story has something to tell us, in a different sort of way, about what saintliness actually is.

I think for a long time, we have been taught to think of saints as the teacher’s pets in the Kingdom of Heaven—those people somehow born reciting the Lord’s Prayer or the Nicene Creed and easily believing every word of it, while the rest of us cross our fingers behind our backs and count down the seconds til recess. Top of the class Christians, those saints. Easy to admire, and easy to dismiss, too.

Because really, who has the time or the inclination to be a cow-eyed innocent, gazing blithely into the sky, when there are too many bills to pay and too many storms to quell and too many hearts being broken all around us?

And if that’s all the saints were, just the untroubled prayerful sort, then our eye-rolling would make sense.

But what if that’s not what sainthood is all about? What if it had nothing to do with being especially well-behaved or pious? What if, in fact, it was something wildly different ? Something far more subversive?

For we have all, I fear, been raised to be good citizens of Omelas, to climb the ladders of towers built on quicksand. We have all been formed by its false pageantry and asked to ignore its real price. Day by day, we are lulled and soothed and distracted, and asked to fix our gaze upon the pleasanter things our systems can offer us.

But following Jesus—which is all that sainthood could ever be about—is not, I am sorry, it is not about blithe piety nor about making an uneasy peace with the costly beauty of Omelas, or America, or wherever we happen to find ourselves.

No, following Jesus is about encountering that point in time when you are standing there, daring to look upon the face of suffering even as the festival flags beckon you back to forgetfulness.

And the saints? The saints are simply the ones among us who walk away. Driven by that ineffable Word, they walk in the other direction. And what we can say of them is this: they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

And if this is what saintliness is all about—not getting a gold star, but a refusal to accept the world’s usual means and ends—then today in our gospel Jesus gives us some perspective on that blessed path which beckons those who dare to walk away.

Blessed are the poor, blessed are the hungry and the sad and the hated, Jesus tells his disciples today in Luke’s more blunt version of the Sermon on the Mount. He calls these things blessed, not because being poor or hungry or sad are inherently good things, but blessed because God refuses to look away from them. God will not forsake them. Jesus declares that he will call them blessed even if we will not.

So, blessed are the ones we’d rather forget. Blessed are the food stamp recipients and the queer couples applying for a marriage license. Blessed are the Black and brown neighbors and those who speak a different language or worship in a different way. And blessed, too, are all the ones who are your so-called enemies, political or religious or otherwise. Even if we choose not to see that that they are blessed—especially if we choose not to see it.

Because God is not seduced by our necessary evils or our expedient sacrifices. God is not deceived by Omelas–neither by its kings nor its festivals nor its monuments of triumph over its victims. God says either we are all blessed, or we are all lost, together.

And so the ones who walk away, the ones we call saints, head towards this other Beatitude-place instead: this land of unrestrained, unwitheld blessedness, where love does not extract a price, where satisfaction does not depend upon the misery of others and safety does not demand a scapegoat. We may not see it fully in this lifetime, but what a place it must be, that Kingdom of Heaven far beyond the horizon of Omelas.

St. Anne, today the Church remembers those saints who glimpsed that someplace else worth walking towards, often at great personal cost but also with the deep peace and joy of knowing what is true and then acting upon it. I pray that we follow them.

Today, too, we recall our own departed loved ones who have, in the mystery of Christ’s risen life, already been carried ahead of us towards that same true and joyful place. I pray that we will find them there.

And finally, today, we will place our pledges upon the altar of God—our pledges to this place and to one another that, for one more year at least, we will keep walking together, driven by that ineffable Word—that something which we have glimpsed in Jesus and in one another as we go. I pray its beauty and its promise will be revealed somehow, in the very act of walking.

Because they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

And wouldn’t you know—if we do, too, then I guess that makes us all saints.

Homecoming: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, October 5, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Luke 17:5-10.

What’s Jesus up to in these Gospel texts lately?! The last few times it’s been my turn to preach, I take a look at the prescribed passage and I think, ok, Lord, ok…you’re not going easy on me here. Time to tangle again with this weird, hard, good news you’ve got for us.

So you also, Jesus instructs the apostles today—so you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, `We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!’

Now maybe it’s because we live in a society still burdened by the legacy of slavery. Or maybe it’s because I’m just little sassy and don’t always like to be told what to do…but this seeming glorification of servility gives me pause. It makes me a little twitchy.

Is this not the same Jesus who, in John’s Gospel, says, I call you no longer servants, but friends, and who invites everyone to the table? So what do we make of today’s instruction and the parable that comes along with it? What does he want us to get from this? Ok, Jesus, let’s tangle.

But first, a story.

A different sort of weird, good thing happened to me in my senior year of high school. I was, to the surprise of everyone, I think, elected to the homecoming court in my small high school in rural Michigan. What I suspect is that some people thought they were casting a sympathy vote for me, and then (surprise!) they just all had the same idea. I can’t account for it any other way! I was not “homecoming court material,” but they called me up and said, guess what, congratulations—you actually are!

So on one October night during halftime at the homecoming game it was me in my little thrift store blazer and then the usual lineup of the football players and cheerleaders and other kids who I’d always been a little bit jealous of. Finally I got to stand up next to them under the bright lights. I even got to ride in a little parade with all of 50 people in Iron River, Michigan waving back at me. My big moment!

Now, I did not win homecoming king—the universe asserted its usual order and one of the football guys got the crown. But that’s ok. I am so glad that weird thing happened, because it let me look behind the curtain for a moment, to stand among the popular kids and to realize…none of it actually mattered that much.

Maybe you can relate—when you are unpopular, or when you’re on the outside in any sort of way—you think, gosh, my life would be so much better if ______.

If I had more friends. If I had more money. If I got to ride in the homecoming parade. Or, maybe like the apostles in today’s reading, if I had more faith. Oh yes, if I just had more faith, better faith, purer faith…then I’d really be something. Then I could really do something. I could be the homecoming queen of heaven.

What I discovered in that brief stint as a member of the homecoming court, though, is that my ascension in the social hierarchy didn’t actually change anything substantive about my life or what was actually important. I was still just me, and I finally realized that those other kids, the popular ones—well, they weren’t really living in some hallowed state. They had the same insecurities I did, just with less acne and nicer clothes. Oh well.

Privilege is not a panacea, that’s what I learned. Privilege is not a panacea, a cure-all. Having more this or more that will not solve the true question of our heart’s deep ache and it won’t add to our heart’s deepest delight. It will not give us what we actually need, because true salvation–the kind Jesus talks about–resists commodification. Salvation resists commodification. It cannot be bought, sold, or bartered. Because true salvation is a way of seeing, a way of being, not a having.

So back to this text today: the apostles are struggling with the call of following Jesus, all that this asks of a person, and so they say, as so many of us do—give me more faith, Lord! I am lacking the stuff required to be a truly good and whole person! I want to get my crown!

And Jesus says, oh, you beloved idiots. You still don’t get it, do you. You don’t need more faith. You need to understand what faith actually IS in the first place! You need to understand that faith is a communion, not an acquisition. It is the knitting of your soul into the life of God, it is the relinquishment of your own interests out of compassion for your neighbor, it is the abandonment of your quest to win a crown or ride in a parade. None of that stuff matters!

And if you could just experience that sort of faith for the tiniest moment, for the briefest, mustard-seed moment, you would experience a power and a grace that would reorient your entire life.

Don’t ask for “more” faith, beloved. Ask to know and to feel and to do what faith actually is. The kind that shows up in the patterns of Eucharist. The kind that shows up when we welcome our Muslim neighbors into relationship and conversation like we did at St. Anne the other night. The kind that enlivens and gentles us all at once.

And if we know that kind if faith, then perhaps we’ll find a new insight into this weird, hard parable about masters and slaves that Jesus gives us today.

Because if my faith has set me free from grasping, from a fear of loss—if my encounter with the living God has awakened me to the infinite love that’s already mine, and has alerted me to the divine presence in everyone I see, including me—then suddenly the whole system of honor and status and who is served first and who is served last….none of it matters so much anymore.

And suddenly those slaves in the parable are not groveling, they are laughing. Slaves they may be but their hearts are free! They are saying, I don’t care if I am invited to the masters table, because I have a place reserved for me at the heavenly banquet. I don’t care about getting a thank you because I am not dependent on the validation of the ones who cannot see me clearly.

I don’t care if I win homecoming king or become the most popular kid in school because I know the real truth: that God has loved me and you and all of us fiercely from the very start, and I am part of the parade of the faithful, the forgotten, and the blessed whom God refuses to forsake even though they wear no crowns of honor.

And so my tangling with Jesus’ parable this week suggests to me that the slaves who say, “we are worthless, we are doing what we ought,” are not being servile, they are being subversive.

They are saying to their masters: your withheld invitation to the tables of privilege has no sway over me. I am not hungry for your crumbs, because I have the Living Bread. I am not craving your familiarity because I am a beloved child of the Living God and by his grace I have been initiated into the heavenly court. I await not the approval of an oppressor but the homecoming of the one true King.

In other words, take your dinner and your hierarchies and your crowns and your parades…and stuff it.

Friends, we are called to be servants of God. But we are called to be liberated servants—the kind who are not secretly wishing to be kings or queens ourselves. We are to be set free from the grasping for honor, set free from the feeling that we never have enough or will ever be enough. You are already enough. You are a vessel of the living Christ! You are an inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven! What more could we do together here at St. Anne, and in West Chester, and all across this sore and hungry earth if we would actually wake up and realize that.

Now, this is our pledge campaign season, and so we are praying and thinking and talking a lot about why our faith community matters to us. Well, one big reason is that St. Anne is the sort of place where we actually try to learn what faith is—not just a gold star or a reassurance that we’re in the in-crowd—but a transformed and fearless life lived in the image of Jesus Christ. A life, like his, that is liberated from all the old games and the posturing that the powers that be want us to keep playing.

We’re not here to play games, friends. We’re here to become free.

That’s what this place can offer us if we let it, if we show up for it, if we find that mustard seed already lodged in our hearts and let it bloom and take over our lives. If we take up the holy task of tangling with Jesus and his weird, hard good news, week after week, because that is exactly the sort of people he expects us to be.

What else could we experience, what could we learn, what could we transform, if that is who we were?

Well, guess what? Congratulations. Because actually, we are.

Worth It: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, September 7, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH, which was observing its “Faith in Action” ministry celebration. The lectionary text cited is Luke 14:25-33.

I mentioned “Scary Jesus” a couple weeks ago, and it seems he’s back with us today using very strong language to tell us something fairly self-evident: often in life you have to count the cost of something and decide if it’s worth it, whatever “it” is. But sometimes…sometimes you just can’t know in advance if it will be worth it, or how, but you know you have to do it anyway. And that’s when things get interesting. That’s when faith begins.

So, for this Faith in Action Day we are observing, here’s a story, in three parts, about determining the worth of things.

Part 1:

It was love at first sight.

My father saw it sitting there in the parking lot with a bunch of other used vehicles, bathed in the promise of a perfect spring morning: a gleaming, goldenrod, vintage VW van—the kind that, when you see it, you feel lighthearted and adventurous, and you swear you can hear Hotel California playing on some distant radio, and you feel that open road unfurling from some point of origin within your deepest self. Oh yes, it was love, and he was all in.

Never mind that he didn’t have much money. Never mind that the old man selling it was vague on its maintenance history. My dad saw that van and he knew he had to get it, he knew that it could carry us long and wondrous distances: California to Michigan and back again, or even farther, maybe, all the way to the promised land.

And so he plunked down some cash and, a few weeks later, once I was done with school, we threw what we had in the back and headed east, ready for anything. Well, maybe not anything.

Because the first time we made a quick stop, a few hours from home, the van wouldn’t start. And we were stuck in a rest area outside of Willows, California, on a 90-something degree day in June, unsure how to keep going.

I don’t remember exactly how he figured it out—this was before cell phones and internet access—but somehow he determined that we had to manually spark the ignition to start the van again—I had to sit in the driver’s seat and turn the key, and he was out there, cussing in the heat, pressing some fuses together or something. Essentially we had to hotwire our own vehicle every time we started it. And so we did, all the way across the country, until we got to Michigan and he could afford to fix it.

Was the van worth it? Depends on how you count the cost. It never really did work that well, and years later I think he sold it for next to nothing.

But on the other hand, I can tell you that when I think of what it means to be free, and safe, and alive in this world, when I think of what hope feels like…what I remember is riding in that old VW van with the windows down somewhere in the Great Plains, eating a ham sandwich, singing an old song on the radio with my dad and I think: oh, maybe we did get to the promised land after all.

Part II:

It was love at first sight.

Those disciples had met Jesus in any number of ways, caught up in the various worries and occupations that constitute a normal life, but when they saw him, they saw Life with a capital L. They saw a different sort of road unfurling in front of them, one that carried with it all the promise of a spring morning. And how could they not follow, to see where they might go together? Wouldn’t that be worth just about anything?

And it’s true, that most of them didn’t have much to lose—no money or status. Maybe they thought that following Jesus would give them the dignity and the peace and the protection that are scarce resources in this life.

But then, we come to today’s Gospel passage, and somewhere at a rest stop along the way to Jerusalem, maybe in the 90 degree summer heat, Jesus has some difficult news for them: this journey is going to cost a whole lot more than they imagined.

The language of hating what is dearest to us and of giving up what is most precious—it lands hard on the ears, it makes a person sweat and second guess their choices. It suggests that whatever this love is, it is not the comfortable, cruising along smooth highways kind.

And its worth cannot be measured in the same way as those kings who wage war and build towers. Jesus, I think, talks about those things not to equate them with discipleship, but to contrast them. He is being ironic. He is saying, the book of True Life is not a ledger. The way of True Peace is not a negotiated settlement.

Therefore, none of you can be my disciples unless you let go of all that. You have to follow me by faith and when they ask, on the other side of the cross, was it worth it, you will have discovered a new way to speak of worth.

And only then will you be free, and safe, and alive in this world. Only then will you reach the promised land.

Part III:

I imagine, for many of us, it was love at first sight, or close to it—the first time we came through those red doors of St. Anne, or another door like it. The first time we heard the Spirit reverberate through an old hymn or felt Jesus press against our lips in the shape of bread. The first time we understood that we were welcomed just as we are, and felt the possibility of something new unfurling within us.

And what a journey it is, to be in a church like this, to build a community like this, to see it grow and change and stumble and get back up again. To show up in the light of spring mornings, and on winter nights, too, and to know that something, that Someone, waits for us here, waits to huddle in close, to hotwire our hearts, to ignite something long dormant within our souls, to make us feel alive again. That is the gift of church at its best. That is the gift of a place like St. Anne. Its worth is hard to measure.

And yet, it doesn’t always go the way we think it might, or should. We’ve had our moments when we felt stranded on the side of the road, the world rushing past, and I imagine there have been times when it feels like we are getting by on a lick and a prayer, because, well, frankly, sometimes that’s the best anyone can do.

Which is why Faith in Action day is so much more than just a ministry fair or a sign-up event. It is an acknowledgment of the cost—the deep and continued and holy cost—of following Jesus, and of figuring out how we are going to bear it, and share it, and even rejoice in that costliness together. It is a moment to say thank you to one another for all of the ways, large and small, that we’ve shared in the cost of keeping this place going, mile by by mile.

I hope, as we travel around the tables at coffee hour today, we will take time to say thank you to each other—for being here. For trying. For sweating in the summer sun and shoveling the snow and planning the programs and assembling the ham sandwiches. I hope we will taste the goodness of all of it, and recommit ourselves to the love that drew us in, that draws us out, that keeps us here and keeps us going.

Because it’s funny, when you consider the value of our life together here: it is not “useful” in any traditional sense of the word. We are not building towers and waging culture wars. We are not “winning” anything. We are just loving everything, and everyone.

What a miracle that this is enough—more than enough. What a miracle that this is everything.

What a miracle that we persist in the foolish, extravagant experiment of a life founded on chasing after Jesus, wherever he goes, for no other reason than this: that it was love at first sight.

And, as with all great love stories, perhaps, when all is said and done here at St. Anne, if someone were to ask us if all of this was worth it—all the false starts and the broken engines, all the hard questions and the hellos and the goodbyes—I hope that we will be able to look up and say: depends on how you count the cost.

But we can tell you this much: here, we were free. Here, we were safe. Here, maybe for the time, we were alive in this world.

And yes, oh yes, every now and then, I think we even saw the promised land.

Division: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, August 17, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Luke 12:49-56, which includes the following:

Jesus said, “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!

Jesus has something to say today, doesn’t he? All this fiery language and talk of division. If you were looking for a feel-good Gospel passage today, my apologies, but I want us to really look at this notion of division rather than scuttle past it. Because I’ll tell you something, I love Scary Jesus. Really, I do!

Not because I take what he says lightly, but because Scary Jesus—or perhaps more accurately, Prophetic Jesus, No-Nonsense Jesus—is willing to say and do the hard things that love and truth require. He is willing to take a stand for what is good and willing to name what is not.

This is the sort of division that he brings—it’s not about enmity, but clarity. The clarity of telling the sheep from the goats and the wheat from the chaff in our hearts and in our world. Jesus is here to give us clarity about what is worth holding onto through the long onslaught of the years. And what must be let go of.

When I think of this sort of division, I am reminded of a certain legendary incident in my family.

My grandparents, you see, had very different philosophies about how many old items in the house should be held onto. My grandma believed strongly that she might need to look at that stack of TV guides from the 1970s and, as you know from prior sermons, she had an epic collection of empty Cool Whip containers just in case. My grandpa, on the other hand, was a fitful organizer. He was occasionally seized with passionate zeal for empty countertops and cleared-out corners. And on one such occasion, he went nuclear.

Their attic was a place where no person dared tread; the detritus of decades was accumulated there—old photo albums, broken toys, enough boxes of papers to rival the Library of Congress. And one day, my grandpa must have been seized by a vision of cleanliness, and he just snapped. He had that baptism of fire burning him up inside. So he stole up the ladder to that attic and before we knew it, he had pried open the little window and was tossing bags of old clothes and God knows what else down onto the front lawn for all the neighbors to see!

You want to talk about households divided. Hell hath no fury like Verna Hooper on that day; she was up that ladder fast as a squirrel and a whole lot louder than one. Even Scary Jesus would have been scared. I won’t bore you with the gory details, but let’s just say every single item went back up into the attic and my grandfather learned afresh the meaning of marital penitence.

I would venture to say, though, that neither of them was fully in the right. I get my grandpa’s point: when we are frustrated by the weight and mess of the world, it is indeed tempting to think we should just toss it all out and start over. Send in the cleansing flood, or break down the walls of the spoiled vineyard, as Isaiah puts it today. Just let it all go.

But my grandma had a point too—there are things worth saving, even in the messiness. There are things that should be preserved, and there has to be someone willing to stand up for their value.

As is usually the case, the path of wisdom falls somewhere in the middle of these two postures. We have to figure out what to hold onto and what to let go of, and how to tell the difference. That’s the kind of division that Jesus is talking about. He is not interesting in starting fights among families for no good reason. But he does need the human family—all of us, together—to really get clear about what matters and what doesn’t. Have we figured it out yet? Maybe we’re still working on that. I hope we are.

Because that work of division, friends, that laborious and slow discernment between heirloom and junk, that is what the church is asked to do in each age. Informed by study, shaped by community, emboldened by love, empowered by the Spirit, we have to decide as best we can what stays and what goes. What is the substance of God’s mission and what is just clutter. And we do that, hopefully, for ourselves and one another here, and then we step out into the public square and declare the truth there, too.

And it’s funny, you know—I think The Episcopal Church is accused sometimes of being like my grandpa; that we, seized by some vision of inclusivity and love and social justice, have tossed out all of the fundamentals of the faith. This is absurd to me. As if, somehow, love and inclusivity and justice were not themselves the exact fundamentals that God is always interested in. I’ve read the Bible, thank you very much, and God does indeed care about those things deeply. Come to think of it, maybe we are the fundamentalists after all!

In truth we have not been seized by misguided zeal; but nor are we like my grandma that day, digging in our heels, holding onto the past. Instead we have been doing the long, careful, imperfect labor of figuring out what stays and what goes in the unfolding emergence of God’s kingdom. We are still doing it. We will always be doing it. Debating Scripture and structure. Cherishing our hymns and collects like Cool whip containers that are enduringly useful. And letting go of some of those old prejudices and fears, like TV guides that have nothing helpful to show us.

We do all of this, by the way, not because we are “getting political” but because we are faithful to the God who is still speaking into the present moment. We hear the message of the Lord and we take it seriously. We hear Jesus, who says I have not come to bring mere peace—I have not come to bring a passive acceptance of the deadening forces of this world. No, I have come to bring an ever-renewed capacity for division between right and wrong, I have come to bring clarity and awareness. I have come to empower a choice between what is true and what is a lie. So follow me, he says, follow me with love as our guide, and find out which is which, and let’s learn to speak it out loud.

How urgently we need to follow him now, this truth-telling, fundamentally loving and unafraid Jesus. How urgently we need to tell the world who he actually is, and not what he has been made out to be by the transactional exigencies of partisanship, culture, and power.

Because Scary Jesus, Prophetic Jesus, No Nonsense Jesus, the Jesus that I fear and love and follow, has never changed his message. He has never submitted to the lies of any age. And he never will.

Today we hear his rejection of a cheap comfort at the expense of truth. We hear his dedication to separating out what is worthy and good from what is destructive to the human spirit, and we see his willingness to die and rise again for the sake of this gentle and hospitable Kingdom. A Kingdom where all are welcomed at the table. That is what Jesus is about. That is who Jesus is.

And if that is somehow offensive to the prevailing and popular order of things—GOOD. If that is divisive—GOOD. I would rather stand in the divisiveness of an unequivocal love for all people; I would rather pay the price for that divisiveness; I would rather pursue its invitation to the edge of comfort and respectability, just like Jesus did, than live in uneasy peace with the world as it is.

I would rather the institutional church die singing songs of love than live for something other than the real Jesus. I would rather be mocked and misunderstood for doing the long, hard, foolish, communal work of sifting through the brokenness and the beauty of life and crafting a future out of it, together. Us and God, together. It’s not easy or efficient, but that’s the only kind of church I want to be.

So what kind of church are we going to be, my friends?

Maybe, with God’s help, the kind that is able to do some division.

And wouldn’t you know, as it happens, that is also exactly what occurred eventually with my grandparent’s house, long after the attic incident.

Once they were both gone, my family members carefully went through every room determining what to let go and what to hold onto. It was hard, and it was grief, and it was love, and it was the resurgence of a million precious memories. I think the clothes and the TV guides did go away; sorry Grandma. But not everything. Some things, like that old organ in my office, and like the Cool Whip containers that show up in my sermons, some things endure, undaunted by the years.

And that was, in the end, the necessary division—the healthy, holy division—which made what really matters so very clear to us.

That is the work we must all do eventually. And it is the work of the church, too.

So, if we are feeling brave, let’s go up to the attic, and sit down amid all the boxes of memory, and regret, and fear, and hope. Let’s speak of what is true, and admit what never was.

Let’s hold it all up to the light—and sort through—and do the work the Lord has given us to do.

Urgency: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on May 11, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is John 10:22-30.

I have been told many times throughout my life (as I am sure you have been, too) that patience is a virtue. My track record with that is mixed at best.

Especially in springtime. Most years when I was growing up, right about this time, when the May afternoons become warm and breezy and filled with the scent of mown grass and flowers, I felt anything but patient—because the promise of summer felt so close, so tantalizing! Everything felt possible. Patience? Who needs it? That was something for boring old grown ups—I wanted freedom and sunshine and ice cream cones that dripped on the sidewalk and those long, campfire-scented nights when we listened to the old stories and sang the old songs. I was impatient, impatient for all of it.

And then a bit later, like some of our graduating teens whom we are celebrating today, you start to feel a new form of impatience for “real life” in the world beyond childhood, when you get to make your own decisions and mistakes and discoveries. The May of senior year of high school is sort of an icon of impatience, though usually a joyful one.

But frankly, as I have become more and more like those boring old grown ups, I’ve discovered that the whole patience thing never magically materialized with age. There are still so many things that I want–eagerly and anxiously–things I do not want to wait around for forever. Because as you go along through life, you realize the preciousness of time, the preciousness of experiencing everything you can, while you can.

And you also notice the deep needs and challenges and pain of the world around you, too, and you start wonder whether “patience is a virtue” might’ve been something coined by those who simply want the rest of us to be quiet and give up our dreams and our collective agency. In our own lives and in our common life in this world, more often than not what I really find myself wondering is not how to be more patient, but what, on earth, we are waiting for? Let’s go!

I love life too much, I love the world and the people in it too much to wait on truly being alive in it. So I think today, I think now, I think in all truth I am interested in the virtue of urgency. The virtue of loving, compassionate urgency.

Some of the personal circumstances of my life are surely shaping that feeling, but to be honest, I think I am still and always have been that kid who is eager for freedom and sunshine and sweetness, and I think most all of us are, deep down, in our own ways. The problem, the fundamental problem, is not that we are impatient—it is that we are too willing to wait. We are too willing to forestall what is truly important. We put off waking up and seeing the beauty and the goodness that we were created to be and called to build in the name of God.

So yes, I want to seek the virtue of urgency. Urgency to do something real that contributes to God’s kingdom. Urgency to love without discrimination. Urgency to listen and respond to the people around me, like Jesus did. Urgency to stand up to what is wrong and dishonest and harmful. Urgency to be the sort of person who is unashamed of the Cross of Christ and who is unabashedly confident in the promise of his Resurrected Life.

And I think that is what Jesus wants from all of us, really. Now, I know that patience is named as a fruit of the Holy Spirit in Scripture, and there are indeed times when we must slow down and seek the capacity to endure, to persist, to trust in God when we can’t see the road ahead.

But more often than not, I think Jesus wants us to get a little more urgent in our discipleship: in our living and our loving. A little wilder, a little bit more free. A little bit less like a boring old grown up and more like what we once were and still are—an open heart, running down summer sidewalks, licking ice cream cones and chasing stars.

Note this morning’s Gospel passage. Jesus is walking in the temple, a very serious grown up sort of place. He is approached by some Jewish leaders, and they have an urgent, rather insolent question for him. “How long will you keep us in suspense,” they ask. A better translation of the Greek is, how long will you keep wasting our time? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.

And you can’t really blame them. They have good reason to be impatient. They are not just longing for summer freedom, they are longing for true freedom—from oppression and suffering and exploitation. They are impatient for hope. And I think we all know what that feels like, we who have had too much of disappointment.

But as is so often the case, it’s Jesus’ reply that I find so compelling. You might think he’d say, now, now, my brothers, wait and see. Patience is a virtue. You’re just gonna have to be quiet and hold tight and buckle down til your salvation comes.

But that’s not what Jesus says. He is, instead, equally insolent, equally blunt. I have told you. You want a Messiah? You want salvation and liberation? I have told you all about it, and you do not believe. I’m waiting on you, my brothers and sisters!

I am standing here, I am standing here, Jesus says. I am God, standing here asking you to do something, anything other than sit around waiting for God’s Kingdom. I am asking you to live the Kingdom with me now, to build it with me now! I am God standing here, just as impatient as you are for the healing of the world. That’s why I came and why I am willing to die and to rise again. I am God standing here with my love and my life and my Spirit poured out for you like an ice cream cone melting in the summer heat, asking you to taste of its sweetness. Asking you to urgently live a life shaped by love and justice rather than patiently waiting for someone else to do it for you.

Thanks be to our urgently loving God.

And with all due respect to patience is a virtue, I do not want to be patient for the things of Jesus—the things of truth and beauty and goodness in this world—and I don’t think you should be either. If someone comes through our red doors, let them come away saying, wow, those people are not waiting around on the Good News. They’re running with it! They’re doing it! They are living with compassionate urgency and my God, what if all of us did that? How different things could look.

And if we are going to be the sheep of the Good Shepherd, then let us be the wild unruly sort, the kind who are utterly impatient to run through summer fields and to bless the earth as we stumble along through the flowers. Let us cause a stir for love’s sake. Let us make a bit of a mess for righteousness’ sake. And when people tell us to be quiet and shut up about love and to just be patient for the Kingdom, let’s do what all good sheep do—let’s not listen. Let’s chase it, right now. Let’s help it spring up, right now. Let’s never stop.

And sure, maybe we all start to look like boring old grown ups after a while. And I definitely can’t eat ice cream like I once did. But oh, oh, in here, in my heart, I am still trembling at the promise of springtime. I am still wanting to huddle in close to the firelight and hear the old stories and sing the old songs. I am still wanting to chase the stars and make my own discoveries and for all of us to be free. All of us, together, with Jesus, our Shepherd, leading the way.

So if patience is a virtue, I am still looking for it. Maybe I’ll find it some day.

But in the meantime, you’ll find me out there somewhere, running towards summertime. Running towards love. Running towards the God who is always, always running back towards us.

It is May. Everything is possible. And we’ve all had enough of waiting. So let’s go.

The Lord’s Own Prayer: A Palm Sunday Sermon

I preached this sermon on Palm Sunday, April 13, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Luke’s narrative of the Last Supper, Passion and Crucifixion of Jesus.

When you encounter hard things, sometimes it can be difficult to know exactly what to say. In such moments, our eloquence can crumble, leaving us wide eyed and silent like children.

Palm Sunday is always sort of like that for me. It’s hard to vocalize what it all means, this jumble of praise and fury. I imagine it was even more so for the disciples who watched from afar as their Lord, the Lord, succumbed to the senselessness of his death. I wonder what they said. I wonder what prayer was on their lips as they stood there watching, as he gave himself away, as the sun covered its face and the earth was darkened, its Creator flickering and faltering like a dying star.

I wonder if, in such an impossible moment, those disciples simply grasped at whatever prayer they knew best, as most of us do in desperate times. And for the majority of us, I would suspect the prayer that we know best and turn to is the Lord’s Prayer.

How many times have we prayed it? Impossible to number, like those flickering stars. I couldn’t even tell you exactly when I first learned the Lord’s Prayer. It’s just always sort of been there, rattling around in between my breath and my bones.

I’d suspect though, as reliable as it can be, for many of us, the Lord’s Prayer is almost too familiar We remember the words but forget the meaning. We become dulled to the boldness and intimacy of what it says about God and about being alive to God in this world that births and crucifies us. It is only in moments like this, like today, when all other words fail us, that the Lord’s Prayer returns to mind, like a life raft.

I’ve been thinking about the Lord’s Prayer lately for two reasons. The first is because, with the ups and downs of the world as it is, I sometimes need a life raft as I struggle to express whatever tempest of feelings fills my heart. In such instances, sometimes the old, familiar words are all I have to offer up. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.

The second reason, though, is because, as I was spending time this week with Luke’s narrative of the Last Supper and the Passion and the Crucifixion that we just heard, I realized something that I hadn’t before: woven into this narrative, like a hidden scaffolding that holds together Jesus’ final days, are all the elements of the Lord’s Prayer. In fact, if you look closely, you realize that Jesus quotes or enacts the prayer directly throughout the Passion narrative.

So let’s refresh our memory. Earlier in Luke, Jesus has taught his disciples to pray in this way:

Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven. Give us each day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. And do not bring us to the time of trial.

And then, in today’s story, as we just heard, he does and says again all the things in this prayer. He gathers with his disciples and gives them bread. And he prays near the Mount of Olives, crying out to his Father who is in heaven and says, your will be done. And he asks his disciples, multiple times, to pray that they would not come into the time of trial. And then, finally, with his dying breath, he seeks forgiveness, for everyone. It is the Lord’s Prayer, every single piece of it.

In this Palm Sunday story—in the culmination of his earthly ministry—we see Jesus living the very same prayer he has been teaching. He is walking the walk. When he is experiencing his own pain, and fear, and doubts about why it all has be like this, and why people do what they do, and whether the ones he loves can carry on when he is gone, when in effect he has run out of anything else to say or know, he, too, falls back into the familiar words:

Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.

And although it is a painful story; and although we are living through painful times, I find a sort of hopeful symmetry in the realization that God is praying the same prayer that God wants us to pray.

I find it rich with possibility and power, even, that when we call to mind those familiar old words, we are not just reciting something memorized as a child, but that we are somehow part of God’s own eternal prayer.

And that God, from the time before all our senseless crucifixions, from the very beginning, God has been offering himself to Creation in prayer, calling us by our names, seeking for earth and heaven to be one, desiring to give us bread and love and forgiveness.

I believe that God is still praying that prayer, today and every day, because God’s heart breaks not just for the Passion of Jesus, but for the passion and pain of every one of us who have trod the path of crumpled palms and broken dreams, hosannas caught in our throats, unsure of the words to speak.

Yes, with us and for us, Jesus is praying this prayer in Holy Week, and in the many hard, holy weeks that comprise our lives. The Lord’s Prayer is the Lord’s own prayer, you see. God is alongside us in the praying this week, and has been forever. And when we call to mind those familiar words, God is reflecting them back to us, saying,

My Child, who art of the dust,

Blessed is your name to which I call.

My kingdom is coming, so that our wills can be one

On earth as it is in heaven.

So eat the bread I give. It is more than enough for all your days.

And forgiveness is already yours if you receive it

And share it freely.

We have been through many trials and temptations together,

You and I,

But I have never left you.

And those things that are past will never define you,

because your deliverance is already at hand.

So take my hand.

In the same way that the Lord’s Prayer shapes and guides Jesus’ path to the Cross, I pray that this Holy Week will shape and guide your path through whatever you are facing in life. This week will reveal everything that Christianity is actually about, beyond the noise and the politics and the culture wars. It is the week when we learn what walking the walk really looks like.

Come and wade deep into these waters as much as you possibly can. We will watch, and listen, and grieve, and celebrate and yes, we will pray the Lord’s Prayer many times over, and all of this—all that Jesus is and all that he gives and all that he loses and all that he transforms—will become the hidden scaffolding of our souls, strengthening us for whatever might flicker or falter.

Because beneath and beyond the clamor and the confusion and the crumpled palms and the wide-eyed silences, only one thing abides, only one thing really can, in the end, be true:

The Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory are God’s. Now and for ever.

And to that I can only say, Amen.

More than Welcome: A Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.