LGBT Christian – By Another Road

Connection: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, June 28, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Romans 6:12-23 and Matthew 10:40-42.

There are certain moments in your life when you feel a profound sense of connection—with the people around you, or with God, or even with some deep part of yourself. These moments are precious when they appear.

And I have to say, I’ve experienced a lot of them lately.

The past few weeks have, for me and Matt, been so full of care and kindness and beauty and connection that I am still trying to process all of it. We got back to town on Monday afternoon and have been catching up on all of life’s practicalities.

But I can’t shake the sense that, although there is still trash to be taken out and laundry to fold and groceries to put away, all of these familiar everyday things have been transfigured by the sense of connection and the love we have shared with all of you and all those dear to us over the course of our wedding celebrations.

The cynics might call this sort of thing a honeymoon phase, I suppose. But although it is certainly true that life is not all cake and flowers, I’m not just talking about an emotional high or a glossing over of conflict.

No, in all these recent experiences of connection, I feel like I was given the opportunity to glimpse behind the veil, so to speak— to see what life is really and truly about when all our distractions and fears and frustrations are swept away.

I don’t think I am in honeymoon-mode or that I have stars in my eyes when I tell you that connection is what it’s all about. Connection is the fundamental purpose for which we were made. Connection to the goodness within ourselves; and connection to the goodness within each other; and, ultimately, connection to the Goodness of God. The search for that connection is not without its challenges and pitfalls, and it requires great risk and vulnerability, and sometimes it costs us a great deal, but it is, in the end, the only thing that makes life meaningful.

That is certainly what we felt when we celebrated at St. Anne on June 7 and when we saw many of your faces at the Cathedral a couple Saturdays ago. It is also what I saw in images of people at the Pride parade yesterday, and what I observed in witnessing a friend’s ordination to priesthood this weekend.

And that sense of connection is what I cherish every time we gather on Sunday, or when we get together one-on-one talk about life or to pray or grieve, or when we come together in groups for Bible study or service. So many connections being revealed and strengthened and repaired.

And I suspect, if you think back on the most meaningful moments in your life—both the happy ones and the hard ones, too—they, too, were meaningful precisely because they had something to do with connection. A hand held, a confidence shared, a hello or a goodbye, a kindness offered, a bridge built across some chasm of loneliness. These moments can be as monumental as a wedding or as small as a conversation at coffee hour. Scale doesn’t matter as much as quality. The more connected we are, the more alive we become.

So it stands to reason that God, who gave us life and who wants nothing more for us than to be connected to him and to each other—would have something to say to us about this through Scripture. And so it is this week in our lessons.

Consider Jesus’ words in today’s gospel. If you’ve read the passages leading up to this one, where he’s been describing in fiery detail all the hardships and dangers of discipleship, one might be left wondering why on earth anyone would want to follow the Christian path. And to the casual observer, that would make sense. This life of discipleship, with its loving of enemies and its relinquishment of easy assumptions and its embrace of the deep and wild mystery of God, is no honeymoon. So why would we take this risk?

Jesus tells us plainly today: it is about connection. Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. In other words, this life, this path, this crazy, scandalous way of love—it will guarantee you the one thing the soul seeks above all else: to be part of something larger than ourselves.

Welcome the good news of God’s love into your life and not only will you get a glimpse behind the curtain, but you will be invited to abide there in that transfigured reality where even grocery shopping and laundry folding can become sacred reminders of the love we share. And yes, the cynics may call it a honeymoon phase, but we call it the Kingdom. And it endures not for one season, but forever.

The problem is that we keep trying to make other things last forever—things like power or money or material achievements. These are the more obvious pursuits in life, the seemingly less risky prospects.

Precisely because connection with God and with other people is messy and unpredictable, we would, instead, rather find our fulfillment in the things we can tailor to our liking. There’s just one catch—these things always fade away.

The cake goes stale. The flowers wither. The vacation ends and the stacks of laundry await. It’s not a great evil that these things happen—it’s just the way things are. But if we have invested all of ourselves into the permanence of such things, we will be in for great disappointment when they do not endure. And they never do. Only connection can last.

That’s what Paul is getting at in his words to the Romans today. Although this passage has usually been interpreted as a sort of finger wagging at bad behavior, it’s deeper than that. When Paul says “the wages of sin is death” this is not fire and brimstone so much as it is a plain truth: if we fix our hearts only on things that ultimately wither and die, our hearts will die with them.

This is not just a moral failing…it is the great tragedy of life. Far better, then, far more hopeful and joyful, Paul says, to give our heart to the one thing that does not die: the connections—to God and to each other—which we forge through love. Which is, it so happens, exactly what Jesus came and showed us how to do.

So if the past few weeks have showed me anything about life, it’s this: the best place I can invest my time and my care is in maintaining and strengthening those connections that are founded on love. And, at any given moment, a good benchmark for my life is the extent to which I am doing this or not.

Our politics and our society are not big on meaningful and authentic connection these days—quite the opposite, in fact. Which makes this truth as countercultural and urgent as it was in Paul’s time.

So I wonder, for you: to what have you given over your heart? What connections are you making or retreating from? Where could you build a bridge across a chasm of loneliness? With whom do you need to repair the breach?

And if you’re feeling isloated, or angry, or cut off—how can we help you, here at St. Anne, to do the work of reconnecting with yourself, with God, with other people? That is, in fact, what we are here to do. That is why we do faith in community, to practice the messy, sacred art of connection.

And I know it can be hard, sometimes. Relationships with people are tricky, and even a relationship with Jesus can be overwhelming and perplexing sometimes.

But I am here to tell you, that, thanks to your love, and thanks to God’s love, I have recently seen behind the veil, and all of this—our relationships, our time together, the ways we try to care for each other and let God care for us—all of this is good. It is so very good. It is, honestly, the only thing that matters in this life. And it is the only thing that will last.

Because it’s the love that we share, the connection that we have built, all of us, together, with God’s help. There is no greater gift.

And cynics may say that’s just the honeymoon talking, but I say: it will last forever.

Never Too Late: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, June 7, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Hosea 5:15-6:6 , Romans 4:13-25 , and Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26. This Sunday was also the occasion of a large parish celebration for the upcoming wedding of myself and my partner, Matt.

This day has been a long time coming. But you know, I think that the extra-long wait has taught me something really important. Something I hope you will take away, too: it’s never too late.

It is never too late for love. It is never too late to give love and it is never too late to live a life shaped by love.

And yes, I suppose that applies to me as a now 42 year old groom-to-be with more than a few grays in his beard who took a little longer than some to find his partner in life. But that’s not all I am getting at when I say it’s never too late.

Because I think many of us, in all states of life, have at some time grappled with the sense that it is too late for us in one way or another. That we have waited too long to chase our dreams. Or we’ve let a broken relationship remain broken for too many years to fix it. Or we’ve made too many mistakes to be forgiven, or too many bad decisions to start fresh. That life is like a big party that we somehow missed by a couple of hours.

But you know what? It’s never too late. It is never too late for love to find us, and change us, and help us begin again. And it is never too late to try and repair what is broken. Things may not always go the way we expect—they usually don’t—but it is never too late to try.

And I think we need that reminder, maybe more often than we receive it, because the world around us seems to have a vested interest in making us always feel behind, feel a bit lost, feel not quite enough.

But as I said last week at the Pride Service we offered at St. Anne, God has a different message for us. God says you, whoever you are, are already enough. You are already beloved and you already belong. There is no such thing as being too late when you realize that love is, indeed, patient, and kind, and all of those other things that love is. From God’s perspective, whenever you choose love, you are right on time.

We might even say that the Good News of Jesus is predicated on this premise of it never being too late. Because you can imagine, when Jesus came into the world (a lot like now, actually) that people were on the brink of despair. They’d been beaten down and battered, subjugated and subsumed into violence. They had made their own fair share of mistakes, too, over the years—all those things the prophets talk about.

And so I suspect that, on a very large scale, some of the anxiety and agitation of Jesus’ time was due to a pervasive sense that it was too late to fix things. Too late to find the good again. Too long since people had walked with God in the wilderness and lived closely and gently with one another.

But Jesus came and said: not only is it not too late, friends, but we are just getting started. I, your God, I am just getting started. Creation is beginning again. Follow me, and see how the sun can still rise on your biggest dreams and your deepest hopes. Whatever has gone before is gone. Let it be. Open your arms again like a child and receive the good news of this new day.

I tell you all of this not just because I am feeling particularly grateful for new beginnings this week, but because I think this idea of “never too late” is what holds together our Scripture readings today.

Although Hosea sounds rather dire, as he often does, he is not telling Israel that it is too late for them. He simply needs them to understand that true hope is found in a love of constancy, of care, and not in fickle, performative gestures. You have been very good at those, he says to Israel. You have been very good at making grand gestures of sacrifice for God. But God just wants your heart—your simple, steadfast heart. And God wants you to know that its never too late to give it. Even when you’ve lost the plot and lost your way, it’s never too late to make your way back home to real love.

And Paul, writing to the church at Rome, has a similar message. It’s not too late to become part of the family of God, he is saying. You Gentiles who did not grow up under the Law—guess what, neither did Abraham! He just ran into the desert with stars in his eyes and trust in his heart. And any of us can do the same thing. Any of us, right where we are, can start being exactly who God made us to be, and not just the lowest common denominator of ourselves.

And then, finally, there’s Matthew. Poor Matthew, sitting at his tax collector table. I think he must have been a rather sad figure there—estranged from his neighbors due to his profession, estranged from himself, wondering how on earth he got here with only coins for companions.

But here comes Jesus, Son of Love itself, patient and kind, his voice piercing the veil of a thousand regrets. Follow me, he says. That’s it. Follow me.

But what he’s really saying to Matthew is this: It’s not too late, my brother. It’s not too late, my child. I know you think it is. I know you think the sun has set on you; that the world is nothing but ledgers and uncounted costs; but hear me when I say: It’s never too late for love. It’s never too late to give love. It’s never too late to live a life shaped by love. So follow me, and see what else your life can be.

St. Anne, as happy as today is, I know many folks are going through a lot these days—some of us have lost loved ones, or maybe gotten a scary test result, or are facing big transitions in the near future. Maybe we’re not feeling so sure how to handle whatever comes next in our life, in our society. Maybe we’re afraid we’re long past some point of no return.

But look around you. Look at the people sitting next to you who love you, or who would love to love you if you get to know them better. Look at the party prepared in the other room—not just for a wedding, but as a sign of the deep and abiding love that this community is founded upon. Look at the way we raise the Pride flag and open doors to the marginalized and the doubtful and go out from those doors and serve. Look at the beauty of the songs we sing and the music we make. Look at the God who, in all of this, gives himself to us without reservation.

And if these things tell you nothing else about yourself or life or God, let them tell you this: it is never too late for love. Because love is here. It is here for you, for me, for everyone. And as long as there is love to be found and built upon, like there is at St. Anne….then your story is not over yet. And the story of this world is not over either. Not by a long shot.

Just ask that old tax collector Matthew who jumped up from that table, all his coins and compromises scattering to the ground, as he ran headlong into the light of that new day. He never looked back.

I don’t know about you, but I’m done with feeling like it’s too late. I’m ready to follow Jesus and see where it goes. I am ready to leave behind regret and simply rejoice in the love that is all around us.

If you’re ready too, I have very good news for you: there’s a big party waiting for us in the other room. And far from being too late, I’d say that we are right on time.

(Asc)ending: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, May 17, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Acts 1:6-14, an account of the Ascension of Jesus.

I don’t think that this is a particularly unique or exceptional thing, but I don’t like endings all that much. When I come across something good, I don’t ever want it to end. As a kid I used to stay up late into the night covertly reading books long past bedtime—just one more chapter!—and then I’d get to the end of the book and feel that distinct pang of sadness when the page goes blank.

I didn’t ever want to finish the story. I just wanted it to go on and on and on.

But stories are good training for us, I suppose, because life is the same way. All of us, on one level or another, have had some endings that leave us a bit achy inside—the end of a relationship; or of a season in one place; or, of course, the big endings that death brings into our lives.

We learn to live, somehow, with these finalities, but we never really get over them. There tends to be an empty space within us where that thing or place or person used to be. And the question, as we go, is not so much how to prevent having any of that empty space. No, the necessary question is: how to keep growing around this emptiness? How do we bless the blank page at the end of the story? How do we carry on, carrying all these endings in the hollow spaces carved out within us?

You would think that, in Christian life, we would be really good at talking about this sort of thing. That maybe we would’ve come up with a way to make it all easier, less painful. No such luck. We struggle with endings in church just like all people do.

Think about it: our favorite church celebrations and feasts all tend to emphasize hellos, not goodbyes. We love to celebrate arrivals and appearances and manifestations—Advent and Christmas and Easter Day and, next week, Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit will rush in with all her fiery gifts.

Departures and farewells—not so much. Those are mostly for funerals, for Good Friday, and for one more feast…one that doesn’t get much traction in the Church these days. Do you know what that feast might be? It just happened this past Thursday: the Feast of the Ascension.

This is, in our time, probably among the most overlooked of the Church’s principal feast days. Now, the fact that it’s always on a Thursday, exactly 40 days after Easter, is probably part of that. But I also think it’s because of what the Ascension commemorates: the ending of Jesus’ physical presence in this world. It’s not Good Friday-tragic, but it’s still an ending. It is a feast dedicated to saying goodbye. And we don’t much care for goodbyes.

And maybe our lectionary editors knew we’d try to skip over it on Thursday, so they snuck the story back into our first reading this morning, too. All right, then—we’ll take it on. Let’s see what this particular goodbye has to teach us.

…

According to Acts, Jesus appears this last time among his disciples, and he gives them some parting instructions and promises, and then just like that, as the author describes, “he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.”

These disciples will not see Jesus in the flesh ever again. Imagine the very last time you saw the person you loved most in the world. Perhaps that is something of what they felt this Ascension day and why they remembered it.

Jesus leaves a space behind that they are not yet sure what to do with. And as they stand there, staring up at the clouds, perhaps feeling like they have arrived at the end of the very best story they’ve ever known, with that blank-page pang and that hollowness in the pit of their stomachs. The question is, now what? How will they carry on with this Jesus-shaped empty space in their lives? Who are they now that he is gone from their sight?

But what is so beautiful, so worthy of celebration in this story is what the disciples do NOT do next. Unlike after the crucifixion, they do not scatter. They do not each retreat into their own private, bitter grief. And they do not try to fill up that empty space with distractions or anger or denial or dissipation. They don’t even splinter off into factions competing with each other for influence—which, knowing some of the other stories of these guys, you might have thought they would!

But no—they go back to Jerusalem, and they gather with the women, and they pray. They pray into this ending. They pray into the blank page of this new, unwritten part of the story. They stick together in community and they begin to form a new life around the shape of Jesus’ absence. They somehow accept the goodbye and the empty space, and they trust that God will provide whatever they need to carry on.

And next week, at Pentecost, we will discover exactly what God does provide to them. And it will be something!

The point for today, though, my friends, is that we—the ones who continue to gather in the wake of Jesus’ departure—are still in the process of forming that new life. We are still learning how to pray into our endings, how to build a community that can bless what we cannot hold onto and love the things that leave. We are still learning how to tend to the empty spaces within ourselves wrought by all our goodbyes, rather than trying to fill them up with easy answers and petty idols.

This is not happy-go-lucky spiritual platitude stuff. This is sacred soul work. This is the feast-days-we’d-rather-skip-over stuff. It is also, I would offer, the difference between a faith that merely placates and a faith that liberates.

Because as much as we are afraid of endings, it’s also true that sometimes we need them. Sometimes we need to let go. And it’s definitely the case that the wider world needs some endings, and it needs a people—a Church—that is unafraid of letting things go. A people who can speak of all that ought to pass from our midst so that God can do something new in us and in this world. The Church, in every age, is called to pray into those endings with clarity and courage.

For example, maybe we need to pray into an ending for the poisonous nostalgia for some imagined past that was never as pure or perfect as some people think it was.

And maybe we need to pray into an ending for tired old structures that prop up all those powers antithetical to God’s kingdom.

And maybe we need pray into an ending for small imaginations and big egos and conditional compassion and hesitant mercy.

Maybe we need to pray into an ending for judgment masquerading as moral clarity and into an ending for violence masquerading as justice and into an ending for hard-heartedness masquerading as tough love.

Maybe we need to pray into the ending of all those things.

Because THAT is what the disciples did after the Ascension—they learned how to embrace the power and the necessity of goodbye. They took the absence of Jesus’ body as the call to BE his body now—to stand where he stood—to face down the powers of death and despair as he once did, and to say: he may be up there, but we are still here! And we are just getting started!

This is the lesson of the Ascension: blessed, blessed are the ones who can pray into life’s endings and say to the blank page and the hollow heart and the uncertain future: Thy Kingdom Come, Lord, Thy Spirit Come, Thy Truth and Goodness Come and goodbye to everything else!!

Easier said than done, perhaps. That’s why we need one other here, in community, just like those first disciples did.

But I think—I know—I believe–that if we can keep at it together; if we can pray into all our endings together; if we can keep up what began on that first Ascension Day rather than skip past it; we will continue to discover all that we were meant to become once Jesus disappeared from view: loss-carriers, hope-seekers, truth-tellers, care-givers, prayer-offerers, peace-makers, song-singers, dance-dancers, Lord-proclaimers, Son-followers, Spirit-bearers, ever beloved children of our Father in heaven.

In other words, the Church.

In other words, a people who no longer stare up at the clouds but who get to work, here and now, to be the visible presence of our invisible God. To take up the blank page at the end of Jesus’ earthly story and continue the next chapter ourselves. Just one more chapter!

For that is what the Ascension calls to be: the ones who can see beyond the last page. The ones who will see the story through all the way to our ultimate end: abiding forever in God.

And although I tend to hate an ending, I have to say: I love the sound of that one.

Snapshots: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, May 10, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Acts 17:22-31.

Have you ever wished you could go back and tell an old version of yourself something that they might need to know?

This weekend I’ve seen lots of old versions of myself—I started pulling out boxes of old photos and sifting through them in preparation for the wedding in June—Matt and I are putting together a little table with pictures and mementos for the reception.

So I’ve been looking at some way-back-when pictures from childhood, and high school, and young adulthood. And frankly I’d like to have a word with those earlier versions of myself.

I’d like to tell that little boy with an awkward smile on his face: don’t worry. There is indeed a place for you in this world.

I’d like to tell my high school self: Phil, that look was not fashionable even then. What were you thinking?!

And I’d like to tell my younger adult self: cherish your loved ones; you don’t know how long you will have them.

But, of course, we cannot access our old selves in that way. Each snapshot simply captures the best we knew at the time. So perhaps the best we can do now with those images of our old selves is to bless them, love them, and to forgive ourselves for all that we were, and all that we were not. Same goes for the photos of our mothers…and our fathers and friends and lost loves. Bless, love, forgive.

We have to do that, I think, if we ever hope to make peace with this life.

I also think that God looks upon us in the same way, from the wide perspective of time and with the deepest sense of peace. Because God knows our past and our future all at once; God can see where our lives fit together, and God can see where they’re broken, too. And whether we ever figure it all out for ourselves or not, God loves our lives anyway.

So I like to imagine God sitting somewhere in heaven, thumbing through the infinite snapshots of us, patiently and with great compassion, wanting to say, “just wait! It will often be better than you fear. And sometimes it will be harder than you think. But you can do it. You’ll see.”

I’m thinking about this not only because of my photo box, but because of our reading from Acts today, a passage I really love. Paul’s interaction with the Athenians gets to the heart of all our knowing and not knowing in this life, and it reveals what God wants to do about it.

The Athenians, you see, were very adept at knowing things. Though Athens was part of the Roman Empire in the apostles’ time, this ancient Greek city was the cradle of western art, philosophy, and politics. The Athenians KNEW many, many things and were proud of that knowledge.

And yet even they suspected that there were things that had escaped them along the way. They didn’t have embarrassing old photographs to remind them this was the case, but perhaps it was just a sneaking suspicion that for all their philosophical wisdom, they were still just barely brushing up against the great mystery of existence.

So Paul sees an altar in the city inscribed with the dedication “to an unknown God.”

Some scholars think this was a “blanket insurance policy” altar; that the people were ensuring no Roman deity was accidentally overlooked and therefore dishonored—sort of like our understanding of the “tomb of the unknown soldier” today.

Others think it was more abstract: an altar dedicated to that divine truth that is simply beyond all knowledge. But in either case, the Athenians knew that there was something that they did not know, and they wanted to honor it.

And then here comes Paul. We can think of his remarkable speech to them in a variety of ways—an early Christian sermon; a challenge to the Roman social order; a pastoral message—but I think it’s also something even more remarkable than any of that. I think it is like a message from some future version of ourselves. Let me explain what I mean.

Paul, when he had that Damascus road experience, did not just have a nice cozy little chat with the Risen Christ. They didn’t just sit down to tea. No, Paul was drawn into a direct encounter with Resurrection life—he saw, he felt, he was immersed in, the destiny of all of us—the very thing Jesus promises in today’s Gospel: how someday there will be no space between us anymore, no space between us and God, and all creation will be able to love and feel itself new and whole and fully alive.

That’s what Paul saw, and it blinded him for a bit, and it saved him, too, and he was driven and haunted by the vision of this great glory til his dying day. Understand that, and you will understand his whole ministry better.

And so he has come back from this encounter—as a sort of time traveler into God’s ultimate plan for us—to tell anyone and everyone what he has seen. In the same way that we wish we could go back and tell an older version of ourselves what to hope for, what to cherish, what to let go of—well, that’s what Paul is doing in all his speeches and letters—telling us what will ultimately come to pass, so that we might know what to bless, what to love, and what to forgive in the meantime.

What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.

Let me tell you about the bigger picture of yourself, Paul says. Let me tell you of the God who made you and loved you from the start. The God who came to be with you, and die for you, and who destroyed death for you. The God who, even now, holds your entire life in loving hands, all those snapshots that make up who you are becoming.

Let me introduce this God to you, Paul says. His name is Jesus.

I tell you all of this, friends, because every day I hear big, important questions being asked. I ask them, too. What will happen to the economy? What will the next election hold? How will we bridge our divides and care for our parents and raise our children and heal the earth and survive our grief? And how can we possibly do these things when the future looms like a great specter over us?

These are important questions that require us to work toward faithful answers.

But here’s the funny thing about Christian life: we work towards those answers while already knowing the ultimate Answer. We live our lives already having received the Truth about life. We pray for our daily bread having been fed with Living Bread. We know where it’s heading. We do not worship an unknown God anymore.

And if you forgot that, as it is so easy to do, let me introduce him to you. His name is Jesus. And he wants to share his Spirit of love and life and peace with you.

It’s true, we cannot reach those past versions of ourselves, but God can reach us here and now to tell us what will become of us. And in Jesus, that is exactly what God does.

In Jesus, we are given a message from that glorious future God has prepared for all the world, where justice rules and where love is the last word and where all those sweet, sad, awkward, partial snapshots of our lives have been gathered together into one big story, one Big Life, one diverse Kingdom.

So whenever you are feeling overwhelmed by the future; when you don’t quite know what to do next; when there are questions which seem to have no answers—first, lean on the people around you in this place. That is what we’re here for.

And second, think back to all those previous versions of yourself. Pull out a few old photos if it helps. And remember that you—that all of us—are still becoming all that God would have us be.

So try to bless this present version of yourself, and love it, and forgive it, just as God has always done.

(Except for some of those fashion choices of mine. Maybe some of those were unforgivable.) But all the rest of it, absolutely.

So I think the Athenians were half-right. We are always brushing up against the great mystery of existence.

But the good news is this: ours is not an altar to an unknown God. Because God is known. He has come, and lived, and died, and risen, so that we can finally know him.

And in case it’s been a while, let me introduce him to you.

His name is Jesus.

Way, Truth, Life: A Sermon

I preached this sermono on Sunday, May 3, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is John 14:1-14, which includes the following: “Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.'”

I am of two minds with this Gospel passage—I find it both comforting and troubling at the same time. Comforting because I think of all the times I have preached on it at the funerals of people I love, with that beautiful image of God’s house with many dwelling places, the doors flung open wide, welcoming us home after the long journey through this life.

But then…there’s that line that so often sounds like a closed door, not an open one: no one comes to the Father except through me. This part lands hard on the ears, especially for those of us who have known rejection, or who have come from other church backgrounds where exclusivity was emphasized and sharp lines were drawn between the saved and the condemned.

We supposedly proclaim a God of unconditional love for all creation, and yet this verse can read like Jesus is a bouncer at a nightclub, and some folks’ names just aren’t going to be on the list.

But I confess that I struggle to imagine the Jesus I know, the Jesus I love, shaking his head and putting up the velvet rope to keep anyone out of God’s enduring celebration. Something just doesn’t sit well with my soul there.

And I suppose I could just shrug my shoulders and say “who knows, I guess God will figure it all out later on,” but that feels like an easy out of a very fundamental question. I think we can try a little harder than that. And in a complex and diverse and often judgmental world, I think we owe it to ourselves and our neighbors to try a little harder than that. So that’s what we’re going to do today.

You know, last fall we welcomed a large group of our neighbors from the Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati here to St. Anne and we broke bread with them and learned from one other and even invited them to observe a service of Holy Eucharist. I’ve mentioned before that it was one of the most powerful nights I’ve ever experienced in ministry—that the Spirit of God was truly alive and present in these walls.

And it was not because of some secret agenda to show our neighbors the “right” way to live and believe. No, it was because it was communion in the truest and simplest sense—people coming together from different backgrounds, with integrity and humility, to share their stories, to speak of what they know to be true, and to be bound together by a love that is ultimately hard to quantify or categorize.

And you know what, in that space without agendas, where everyone was a little bit uncomfortable and a little bit open to the things we do not understand…in that space I felt the love of Jesus more powerfully than ever. I felt like he was saying to us here, “see, now you’re starting to get it! Now you’re on your way! Loving me doesn’t mean fearing everyone else!”

So when it comes to passages like the one we have today, I wonder if maybe we can try on a new pair of glasses, as Mtr. Alane suggested last week. Maybe we as the Church have been reading this passage the wrong way for a very long time, assuming it was about who gets into the nightclub when instead it was trying to show us the vastness of the night sky.

It wouldn’t be surprising if that were so. We’ve been formed within the long, long shadow of history to think of faith in institutional terms: insiders and outsiders; winners and losers in some vast cultural and cosmic landscape. As if following Jesus were like joining one team pitted against all the others.

But what if I told you—or reminded you, really—that this is not at all what Jesus wanted us to understand about God? What if I reminded you that Jesus’ whole mission was about making us aware of the boundlessness of God’s love and mercy, and of the truth that there is only one team—all of us, together, the whole creation—and that being Christian is fundamentally about recognizing this and living like this? How might that help us hear this passage (and maybe every passage) with new ears?

“I am the way and the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me.”

Let’s work through this carefully. Stick with me.

If we accept that Jesus is the human face of God—which is one of the foundational premises of our Christian life—then the first part of this statement (I am the way the truth and the life) is not that difficult to accept.

Because Jesus does indeed show us what ‘the way, the truth, and the life’ are. He shows us in word, in action, and in his very being—in his “I AM”ness, if you will. And it is love. The way, the truth, and the life are a fully embodied love like his. A persistent, humble, purposeful love for God and for every one of our neighbors. We know this. We have seen the Lord, and we know this.

And if we know that love is what Jesus is all about, that love is his very being, then the second part of his statement follows from the first. No one comes to the Father except through me.

‘The Father’ is, of course, Jesus’ name for this God who is love, and Jesus is the embodiment of this God who is love, so this second line could just as easily and faithfully be read:

No one comes to this Love except through…love.

I hear that, and it feels like an open door. So let’s step out from behind the velvet ropes and stare up at the stars and hear that line one more time, anew:

Love is the way and the truth and the life. And no one comes to this great Love except through love itself.

I don’t know about you, but that does sit well with my soul. That message is truly good news. And it tracks with the Jesus I know, the one who died and rose again for love’s sake. It tracks with the Jesus who never gave up on me even after all the times I have given up on him. It tracks with the Jesus who keeps giving himself to us, over and over again, in bread and wine and Spirit, embracing sinners and saints and everyone in between, with no exceptions. It tracks.

And it speaks somehow, too, into all that love I hold for people of every background and creed—our friends who have lost their faith and the ones who never found it; and for our Jewish siblings and our Hindu friends and our Islamic neighbors, and everyone else. Just like that night last fall, the very real love of Jesus should draw us closer to one other, not further apart.

Because although I don’t claim to understand exactly how or why, I know, God, I know that somehow there is room enough for all of us in this life and in this world…and even in the vast eternity beyond the stars, in that house of many dwelling places. Love makes room for everyone. And if I’m wrong, I’m wrong; but I’d rather be a fool for love than a sage for certainty.

And so, I don’t know about you, but that foolish love is the thing I am going to believe in, and live by, and die trusting in, because, as best I can tell, that is what Jesus came to show us and to give us.

I hope you’ll hold onto that, especially for those days when things feel heavy and faith feels narrow and you need to remember what this is all about.

Though I warn you, it remains a passage both comforting and troubling. Because even if it’s all about love, God knows I am still figuring out how to love like Jesus does, day by day, and that’s not always easy. I just happen to believe that such a love is the one thing in this life worth figuring out.

You might even say that it is the way, the truth, and the life.

You might even say that this love is the only way.

I tend to think that Jesus would agree.

Hello, Lord: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, April 19, 2026, at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Luke 24:13-35.

Many of you know that, after Easter, I took a few retreat days back down at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. It’s the Trappist monastery where the monk and writer Thomas Merton lived, prayed, and authored some of the most important pieces of spiritual writing of the 20th century. I highly, highly recommend going there if you’re in need of the deep solace of silence in a beautiful place.

You may also recall that last year I went there and got violently ill! Thankfully this year I had a much more healthful experience.

But just up the road an hour or so from the Abbey, in a very different sort of place, right in downtown Louisville, is another Thomas Merton-related sight that’s also worth seeking out. It’s a state historical marker in his honor, right on the corner of 4th Street and Muhammad Ali Blvd, just a stone’s throw from the Roman Catholic cathedral.

On one side of this marker it has the standard sort of language for a plaque: “Thomas Merton, 1915-1968. Trappist monk, poet, social critic, and spiritual writer,” etc. etc.

But it’s the other side of this marker that really captures my interest. Because inscribed there, on this sign right amid the bustle of downtown Louisville, is what I’d wager to be the only state historical marker anywhere to commemorate a mystical vision. Really. Here’s what it says:

A Revelation.

Merton had a sudden insight at this corner, March 18, 1958, that led him to redefine his monastic identity with greater involvement in social justice issues. He was “suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people….” He found them “walking around shining like the sun.”

What a remarkable thing to read on a street sign. I’ve seen a lot of roadside markers in my travels, but I can’t think of any others that say, in effect, here, a man saw God in the faces of his neighbors. Here, a man glimpsed the beautiful truth that trembles beneath the surface of everything.

But that’s exactly what happened. Right there, next to the garbage cans and the bicycle racks and the people asking for spare change and the office workers and all the rest of our disjointed, everyday clamor, there Thomas Merton saw the love and the light that is God. Which suggests that God can be revealed anywhere, in anyone. And that, in fact, God might be everywhere, in everyone. If that is so, it changes everything.

And, as Christians, we proclaim that it is so.

We do this not just out of some vague sense of the generic blessedness of all things. No, it’s something far more unusual and amazing: we make the claim that God is, through Jesus, truly, materially present in creation: tangible and alive, beckoning us with winks and whispers and half-hidden angels. When you hear us speak about a “sacramental” world, that is the sort of thing we’re getting at.

And our particular understanding of this tangible, sacramental presence is shaped especially by these strange, beautiful passages that we hear in Eastertide: Jesus in the garden outside the empty tomb and Jesus in the locked room and now, Jesus on the Emmaus Road. In all of them, there is the risen Lord appearing and and disappearing, hidden and visible all at once like a beam of light dancing momentarily upon the dust.

Our whole faith is predicated on these stories and their central claim—the claim not just that “we like the Lord” or “we remember the Lord” or “we think the Lord was a really swell guy” but that “we have seen the Lord.” Though he was crucified and died, we have seen the Lord. We have seen the Lord, and still he lives, and still he waits to be seen again…and again…and again…for he is the beautiful truth trembling beneath the surface of everything, shining like the sun.

And if we have seen the Lord still alive in this world, it changes everything.

Speaking of today’s story of Emmaus, Luke’s gospel actually offers this as the first appearance of Jesus after the resurrection. The other Gospels vary, but there is a similar pattern across all of them: Jesus is at first hard to recognize, and then suddenly plainly visible. We might wonder why this is so.

Is Jesus just feeling sort of sneaky? Is he having a bit of fun with his resurrected body and just scaring the disciples, like Casper the friendly ghost?

I think not. As strange as these passages are, it’d be a mistake to treat the resurrection accounts like ghost stories…to assume that the authors want to emphasize Jesus’ elusiveness or his otherworldliness.

No, I think that they are actually meant to emphasize the exact opposite: that, far from being elusive and inaccessible, the resurrection means that Jesus is now part of everything. That he is right here in front of us. That he is everywhere, and in everyone. “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

So these are not ghost stories and maybe not even “mistaken identity” stories at all. Maybe we are meant to understand: Jesus is the stranger we meet on the road, and he is the one we invite to our table. He is the gardener and he is the one who prepares our breakfast and he is every other person who might cross our path when we look at them through the eyes of love.

And so the invitation to his disciples—including us—is simply to look. To look for him always, always, so that at the close of each day and at the close of our lives, we might be able to say: I have seen the Lord. Everywhere, I have seen the Lord.

Now, this sounds quite lovely in theory, that Jesus is everywhere we look, but it’s actually a rather challenging idea. Because if we love Jesus, and if Jesus is everywhere, in everyone and everything, then we might have to change our attitude a bit.

Because Jesus, if I’m honest I don’t want to see you in a few folks I have in mind. Are you SURE you’re hiding in there? Are you sure you didn’t vacate a few of these premises? No? Lord, help me see you, then. Even in the ones I can’t stand. Even on the days I can’t stand myself. Help me to see you. Becasuse I know it will change everything.

And it does. As it says on that Thomas Merton sign, his vision in Louisville altered him. His monastery became not just one location but the whole wide world. He became passionate about social justice and antiwar movements and interfaith dialogue precisely because he saw that there was nowhere and no one beyond the scope of God’s presence.

And so I wonder, how would we live differently if we saw what Merton did that day? How would we relate to others if we actually saw the light of God, the face of God in all those other faces? It’s a question worth pursuing.

So here’s my Eastertide challenge to you: imagine if you will (and try, if you dare) going about for one whole day and, every single person you see, say to yourself, “Hello, Lord.” (I do recommend saying it just to yourself so as not to freak people out.) But you get the idea:

The barista at the coffee shop—hello, Lord. The person in the car next to you on the road—hello, Lord. The person you recently argued with—hello, Lord. And yes, even the angry talking head on your TV screen—hello, Lord (help me to see you).

Let it be like a quiet prayer you carry. And see what you begin to see. I wonder if our hearts might start burning within us.

Because I don’t think that the story of Emmaus was recorded by those first disciples simply because Jesus did some ghostly tricks. No, I think it lingered in their memory because glimpsing his face in the dying light brought them to life. It changed them. It changed everything. And from then on, wherever they went, on every lonely road and city street corner, at every full table and in every quiet place, and in the face of every stranger, and lover, and enemy, and friend, on some level they kept asking themselves: is it you, Lord? Is it you?

Is it you, trembling beneath the surface of things, shining like the sun?

And the resurrection teaches us quite simply: the answer is always yes.

No Words: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, March 15, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is John 9:1-41.

There are some things in this life that cannot be explained simply, and they usually have to do with love.

We talk a lot about love here in this pulpit—God’s love and our own—and that’s really because we could talk about it forever yet still not fully capture what love is with words alone. Talking about love is like trying to paint a picture of the wind. We can capture the effects of the wind well enough—the ripples in the grass, the curtain billowing in the window, the way it makes your eyes burn—but the wind itself remains beyond our grasp. Mostly we just feel it. We live and move and have our being in it.

So it is with love. So it is with God.

To that end: I was thinking this week about my dad, and in particular about the night I came out to him. He’d driven out to Virginia in his old rundown blue Cadillac to pick me up from college for Christmas break during my freshman year. And when he got to town on a windy, rainy December night, we went to grab some food together at a diner.

Now, I’d already shared this information about myself with a few college friends, but this was the first big moment of telling a loved one about who I am. And so we ordered our hamburgers and caught up about how school was going while I worked up the nerve to tell him what was really on my heart.

And honestly, I don’t even remember what I said or quite how I got the words out, I was so scared. But I did and, although I shouldn’t have been at all surprised, given the type of person he was, it was still astonishing in the best way when he simply smiled at me and said, “oh, I knew that. And I love you.”

And that was it. No more words had to be said. No more words could be said. We just ate our hamburgers and watched the rain streak against the window and the moment was both comfortable and brand new all at once. That’s love as best I can tell of it: something that is familiar and frightening and safe and strange all at once, asserting itself, making itself known and yet never really explaining itself.

And, because the Bible tells me so, I have to come think that God is much the same way, since God is love. God, too, is familiar and frightening and safe and strange, and we begin to lose the plot a bit when we try too hard to explain God with exact precision. We just know his effects: the way it fees when the Spirit blows by, and and the way that the words of Jesus billow through an open window, and the the way he can make your eyes burn.

The wordlessness of love can make us uncomfortable, because many of us have been formed to be precise people—we want to know exactly what’s going on before we trust it; to have our ducks in a row before we act; to be sure that the odds are in our favor before we take any sort of risk. And in many aspects of life and work, these are good and reasonable strategies.

But love and the God who is love are not reasonable propositions; they are bone-deep, soul-deep experiences. And so in our relationship with Jesus, we are invited—no, commanded—to invert the equation.

Jesus says: love first, ask questions later.

Love first, then seek understanding.

Love first, then form a plan.

Love first, then believe.

That’s what my dad did that night in the diner. I don’t think he’d necessarily worked out all the theological arguments one might make about whether his gay son deserved love and support or not. I don’t think, if he’d been challenged by someone in church about why he “condoned” my existence, that he would’ve had some long rational or theological argument to convince them. I think he would have just said, “he is my son, and I love him.”

I think for him, love was its own reason. Its own proof. Its own rationale.

And that is what God would like us to see. That is exactly how Jesus asks us to speak when we are speaking of the things of God. Love first, then figure out what it is you believe. Our Gospel story today shows us this.

Think about this man who is born blind and is then made to see. Much like last week, this long story is deeply instructive to us disciples if we spend time with it—as though Jesus is inviting us to see something for the first time, too.

You might notice that the whole thing feels a bit like a trial or a test. The Pharisees are outraged and offended, as they often are, because Jesus is going around healing on the sabbath and showing signs of power that make them uncomfortable. He is loving first, asking questions about propriety later.

But they have lots of questions, lots of demands for an explanation—of who is who and what is what and how any of this could be possible or permissible or acceptable.

But here’s the simple beauty of this particular story: both the man born blind and Jesus, too, politely yet firmly refuse to engage in the Pharisee’s frenetic search for explanations.

“One thing I do know,” the man says. “That though I was blind, now I see.”

You know, that line alone tells us everything we need to know about being a follower of Jesus and a proclaimer of the good news.

It is to stand in the midst of the raucous, anxious, cynical crowd and say, “One thing I know: that somehow love has changed me. And I don’t have all the answers, but this I do know: that love—for God, for my neighbor, for my enemy, for myself— is the starting point of any true answer.”

Because the love of God that Jesus heals with is an experiential reality, a way of life, not a theory or a formula. And unless you start with that experience—of love, of mercy, of grace—you can talk about God all the days of your life and still you will speak nothing true of God. And you can make a thousand sacrifices and walk a thousand miles and give a thousand alms, but until you have brushed up against the sort of love that makes you fumble for words, the love that renders explanations unnecessary, you will not really know who God is.

The Pharisees, of course, cannot accept this. They have made an idol of their desire to understand, and so true knowledge eludes them here. The same can be said for far too many Christians, so desperate for clear answers that they don’t mind who they have to hurt to hold onto them.

As for me, and maybe as for you, too, I am ok with the God of fewer answers and greater presence. I am still looking for that God at diner tables and on rainy nights and in stories of those who have learned to see the world in a new way. The ones who aren’t afraid to look a little foolish, a little unprepared, because they have chosen to love first, and ask questions later.

I think its only then, in fact, that we can begin to ask the truly important questions anyway. It is only then that we can bear witness to the reality of a God who is hard to understand but very easy to see when you know how to look. And if your eyes begin to burn a bit, that might be a good hint he’s close by.

And that’s my hope for us in these final weeks of Lent: to practice naming those moments when God feels close by. I tell you these stories from the pulpit week by week because they are such moments for me. And I know each of you probably have hundreds of your own.

So part of our practice of discipleship can be noticing them and then writing them down in a journal or telling someone else about them, however briefly. It doesn’t have to be a mountaintop moment or a miraculous healing. But the more you look for God, the more you name God, the more you will see God, everywhere, in everyone. Hard to put into words, hard to explain, but impossible to miss.

If we do this, perhaps then we will all be able to say, “one thing I do know—that though I was blind, now I see.”

And there will be nothing else that needs to be said.

Cat Pageant: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, January 18, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is John 1:29-42.

Matt and I don’t have any pets at present, and if we do expand our family someday it will likely be with a dog.

But it so happens that I grew up in a household of cats. Lots of cats. At any given time in my childhood, my mom had about six, mostly rescues and most of them Siamese. So all of my earliest memories (and chores) were cat-adjacent, and we had what I’d call a lovingly complex relationship. Meaning that we loved them and they made life complex.

I was an only child, given to playing lots of games by myself and making up all kinds of imaginary scenarios and scenes which I would then try to stage in our living room like a sort of pageant. Which was generally fine, except on those occasions when I had the bright idea to incorporate the cats into my efforts, to make them characters in my story of the day.

You know, I loved Shakespeare, so maybe I was recreating a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the cats could be the fairies. Or I was imagining myself as a medieval king and the cats were my court attendants, dressed up in my mom’s scarves.

Have you ever tried to put a costume on a cat? I don’t recommend it. Lets just say this medieval king suffered an uprising among the nobility.

The point is that, in short order, I learned that the cats were their own creatures, with their own purpose and dignity, and they were not props to be subjected to my fanciful whims. It took a few bites and scratches for me to internalize this, but I did eventually. And we settled into a more peaceful coexistence where the true order of cat-human relationships was confirmed: they were in charge, and I was just there to serve their whims. If you have ever loved a cat, you know this is how it goes.

Animals are good teachers; I am so glad I learned all of that at an early age—a little dose of humility in a world that is always encouraging us to center our own needs and narratives. It is important though, as we grow and evolve, to remember that we are not the center of things, and that others do not exist to serve our personal agenda.

And that is especially important when we consider the most fundamental relationship in our lives: our relationship with God.

Like me and the cats, I think it is safe to say that, much of the time, we are tempted to cast God in the role most useful to us at the time. If we are angry at someone, we want the vengeful God. If we are frightened, we want soothing God. If we are lost, we want the God who gives us a clear sign. If we are happy and content then, Lord forgive us, often we just want the God who is quiet and stays out of our way. And so we will pray, or not, to this version of God whom we need and then hope we are accommodated by him.

But have you ever tried to put a costume on God? In my experience, it doesn’t usually work. So many times I wanted, demanded God to do one thing, and God had quite another thing in mind.

Which leads me into this morning’s Gospel passage from John, when John the Baptist has his epiphany that Jesus is, indeed, the Messiah, and when others, like Andrew and Simon Peter begin to have this same intuition.

“Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” John enthuses. He sounds very confident.

But I wonder….I wonder, really, if he knows what that means, even as he says it. Clearly he senses, in some deep, Spirit-inspired way, that Jesus is the One he’s been looking for all his life.

But then he names Jesus—he casts him, if you will—as “the Lamb of God,” a sacrificial offering that will somehow make all things right. I wonder if John really understands at this point, though, what this means. Remember that in another account, from prison, John will doubt whether Jesus is who John thought he was because things don’t seem to be going the way he planned.

So when John calls Jesus the Lamb of God here, he is speaking from his expectations of what Jesus will do for them, not realizing that Jesus will end up expecting much, much more from John and these disciples than they ever imagined.

Jesus, you see, is not just a medieval king who drops in to smite our enemies. He is not a magician with a wand. And to follow him is not simply to behold a Lamb who will be sacrificed for all of our failings while we stand idly by.

No, what John does not yet understand is that following Jesus means becoming the sacrificial Lamb ourselves. To follow this Messiah is to give away our own egos, pride, safety, expectations, and fanciful whims for the sake of an unselfish love. Jesus changes the world in and through us, not just through himself. Theologians call this cooperative grace. I call it putting our money where our mouth is.

But John and the disciples don’t know that yet. I think they’re still hoping somehow this Lamb of God will accomplish it all on his own—both the salvation and its aftereffects—and that they can content themselves with beholding him rather than becoming him.

I wonder, friends, if we get stuck in that same posture sometimes. Jesus save me, but don’t change me!

I hate to break it you (and to myself) but Christianity is a becoming, not a beholding. It is a surrender to God’s story, not the manipulation of God to fit our own stories. We will only be saved when we stop trying to put costumes on Jesus and let him do what he actually came to do: to make us like him.

I am dismayed by the extent to which Christianity has failed in this regard. In every age and culture where the Gospel is proclaimed, people—especially powerful people—have a propensity to turn it into a cat pageant—an self-indulgent enactment of their own agenda. We dress Jesus up in crowns and flags, we make him a general in an army or a judge on the bench. Or, sometimes, we make him a sweet little kitten, curled up by the fire, disturbing no one. Our enemies are his enemies. Our priorities are his priorities. Our failings are just the sort of thing he doesn’t mind too much. How convenient.

But what I find encouraging in all of this is that, like those cranky felines I grew up with, Jesus does not submit to any of our games. Not for long, anyway. The truth keeps coming out, generation after generation. It keeps bubbling up—in protests and in psalms, in the sacrifices of the martyrs who refuse to worship empires, in this pesky proclamation that God loves all people, and in the fact that those who twist the words of God to suit their own ends will, ultimately, come to nothing. It can take time but it is always so—the truth of love wins out.

I find great hope in that long record of God dismissing our various ideologies and indignations and inviting us, again and again, to come and see what Jesus is actually about, where he is staying, as the Gospel passage says. And it’s always the same, familiar place: charity, gentleness, mercy, peace, service, patience, trust, joy. And maybe a few scratch marks for those who try to distort the truth.

So yes, I know that, as they say, God is dog spelled backwards, but today when I think of God, I am thankful that he’s a bit more like the insubordinate cats I grew up with. Especially in these times of great cruelty and fear, of widespread confusion, and the creeping sense of despair felt by so many people. God is not a willing participant in any of this debased pageantry. God has his own purpose and dignity and his own way of evading our best efforts to make him what he is not.

And what he asks of us is to be exactly like him—catlike in our dismissiveness towards whatever nonsense is being sold to us. I am so glad. I find encouragement in his utter disobedience of our schemes. That’s the God whom I am grateful to obey.

So behold this Lamb of God who is far more than you ever imagined. Behold this Lamb of God who will ask more of us than we ever imagined. Behold this Lamb of God who will accomplish more through us than we ever imagined.

Just don’t try to put a costume on him.

Lo, He Comes Anyway: A Christmas Sermon

I preached this sermon at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH on Christmas Eve, 2025.

Here’s the thing about the circumstances of that first Christmas: it was the best they could do.

We’ve heard the story so many times, and maybe we’ve imagined it as something quaint and simple, but it was not. Consider: there’s a young woman soon to give birth, and man who is not quite yet her husband, both suddenly compelled into a long, challenging journey to Bethlehem. It’s place that is not their home and where no familiar faces wait to welcome them.

And so they did the best they could do, these two, but by the time they got to their destination, there was no space left. And no time left, either. No choice for Mary and Joseph but to do their best—to make way for the baby now, to prepare the way of the Lord now, in this wilderness of happenstance, for he is coming, here, right now, this mysterious, urgent, holy child. He will not wait for the peaceful or convenient moment to appear; God rarely does.

No, the birth pangs of a new creation have come, as they so often do, in the midst of displacement and discomfort, and Jesus emerges, ready or not, into the messiness of life, just as it is.

As that old Anglican hymn tries to put it politely, with classic British understatement: lo, he comes.

Replace “lo” with whatever word slips out of your mouth when things go wrong, and you probably have a more accurate sense of the scene.

Lo, he comes, as all babies do, with tears and cries. Lo, he comes into a world not quite ready to greet him. Lo, he comes, from up beyond the drifting clouds and the blazing stars, to see how our tense and divided world might yet learn to love again.

No space? No time? So be it, for lo, he comes anyway—God emerging from outside of space, outside of time itself to make a home with us, just as we are.

And yet, we might think, surely, surely, despite all the challenges in their journey leading up to this, surely when this moment comes, Mary and Joseph will at least be able to welcome him properly. Surely this birth-of-God moment, despite our long and imperfect history, will itself be perfect.

But, lo, there is just that one little problem: no space. No time. And no cradle, either. And so poor Mary and Joseph have to plop the precious little Creator of the universe into a manger, which is, let’s not sugar coat it, a feeding trough for livestock, and, we can imagine, not a very clean one.

Given the circumstances, it was the best they could do.

Blessedly for us, though, I think Mary and Joseph set a precedent for Christmases to come, because saying “just put the baby in the trough” is somehow representative of all those moments when our plans fall apart. Those moments when, due to circumstance or desperation, we have to make a hard pivot towards “good enough.”

Maybe I wanted to wrap all my presents perfectly, but end up stuffing them into gift bags sometime late on Christmas Eve. Or I planned the perfect dish, and it burned (and I definitely said some word other than “lo”), so my potluck contribution will just have to be some extra napkins and my winning personality.

Or, more significantly, perhaps I thought this would be the year that I finally mended a few fences, patched up a few broken relationships, helped to make a more just and compassionate society take shape, but it didn’t quite go that way. So I come and sing Silent Night one more time hoping it’ll stick this year, that such peace will exist someday for me, for my neighbor, for this world.

It’s the best I can do.

And the baby in the feeding trough gets it. He has understood from the very beginning.

If you take some time with the story of Jesus’ nativity, and if we can look past, for a moment, all of the beautiful art and poetry and pageantry that accompanies our observance of this night, you will find that it’s actually the story of a big old mess. I think that’s what helps it feel so true.

We have the manger, yes, and the rushed journey to Bethlehem, and there are also the shepherds—not considered respectable company in those days—and then there’s just the fact that there are all these people running around in the dark of night, shouting strange news at each other by starlight. Dirt and sweat and stumbling and confusion. There is absolutely nothing perfectly composed about this moment. Nothing clear or easy about the arrival of the answer to our deepest questions. Just a bunch of imperfect people doing the best they could do and finding themselves bathed in grace anyway.

Lo, he comes, just as we are.

And that is the most hopeful thing I can imagine. Because I don’t know about you, but I am more intimately acquainted with messiness than I am with perfection. I know quite well what it feels like to have no space, no time. I am less familiar with transcendent and abiding peacefulness.

I look around, most days, and that is what I see: people doing the best they can do. Trying to understand themselves, trying to endure. Trying to love their neighbors. Trying to provide for their families. Trying to know who God is. Trying to cultivate some small moments of joy and contentment and right relationship in cultural, economic, and political landscapes that are not always hospitable to those things.

I see people, against all odds, still looking up at the drifting clouds and blazing stars, seeking a reassurance that it will all be ok—that we might sing Silent Night this yearand actually feel it. That it is not all just a pipe dream, this Kingdom of heaven bending down to kiss us and dry our tears.

And so how wondrous and how wonderful that, on this night, God is precisely what he is: a baby born of displaced, stressed parents, resting in a resting in feeding trough, making his home amidst our foibles and fears and tremblings. How glorious that God looks at all of our various “best that they could dos” and says to all of them: Yes.

Yes, I am here for that. Yes, I am here to love you in the middle of that.

You may think that this is the God of perfectly wrapped gifts and finely seasoned dishes, but I am here to tell you this is also the God of unmade beds and messed up schedules and burnt tongues. You may fear that this is the God who demands fine garments and unstained reputations, but in truth this is the God of shepherds; of dark places; of those who sorrow and those who survive.

And this God has come to you this night. Yes, you—you who may be questioning yourself or questioning all of this or wondering how we can sing any song at all while the world is heaving with grief and this God is here to tell you: you have to sing and you have to pray and you have to just “put the baby in the trough,” because we have to start with the best we know how to do, and then we just keep going.

And that will somehow be enough.

So says the God who has been working, working, working since the world began to help us see that we are enough, that perfection was never his purpose for us, but connection. Connection with each other and connection with the infinite divine Love by which we were made. Connection with the beauty of the earth and the beauty hidden within our hearts, broken and burdened though they might be.

And though our long history with God has been full of ups and downs, of misunderstandings and missed opportunities, tonight God is trying something new.

Perhaps he realized, in the end, that this was the only way to truly connect with us: to be with us completely, to experience the same failures that we do, to gather them into himself and guide us toward another type of world, one where there is plenty of space and all the time in the world.

And if it all has to begin in a manger, so be it.

For lo, he comes anyway, ready to give his whole life to us.

Ready to risk everything to see us, at last, face to face.

When you think about it, I think it was, perhaps, the best that he could do.

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.