LGBT Christian – Page 4 – By Another Road

Stranger: A Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

Foraging: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, March 1oth, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Numbers 21:4-9 and John 3:14-21.

A few years back, while I was finishing up my seminary studies in Berkeley, I did a very northern California sort of thing—I enrolled in a weekend seminar to learn how to forage for wild mushrooms.

Now, I like eating mushrooms as much as the next person, but I had never really thought much about going out and picking my own. I am by no means a wilderness expert, but I did grow up watching the 1980’s cartoon David the Gnome, which is set in the woods, and from that I had a vague sense that going out into the forest and eating the things you find there is a risky thing to do.

Nonetheless, the idea of hiking through the redwoods and learning more about mushrooms sounded intriguing, (and honestly when I was a kid, I kind of always wanted to be David the Gnome with his little red cap) so I went for it.

A group of us gathered on a Friday evening in this little lodge in the forest, the foggy ocean air hovering in the trees outside, and we sipped peppermint tea and listened to a lecture about mushrooms—how all those random little growths you see springing up out of the dirt are not standalone entities, but really just one piece of a vast underground organism called a mycorrhizal network—hidden filaments of fungi intertwined with tree roots, all nourishing one another in the soil.

So when you encounter a mushroom in the woods, what you are seeing is the visible manifestation of a vast, deep, mysterious life force, and it’s true, some are dangerous and some are not, but all of them are connected.

And, as I learned the next day when we went out, field guides in hand, it is quite difficult to tell the difference between the dangerous and the merely delicious. For example, there is a plain white mushroom called the field mushroom—perfectly fine to eat, looks like the kind you see in the grocery store. However, there is another white mushroom, very similar in appearance, and it is called the Destroying Angel, and as the name indicates, you probably don’t want to take it home and put it in your pasta sauce.

Now, I did pick a few mushrooms, and I even went so far as to cook a few of them and eat them—tentatively, prayerfully—but I will tell you upfront, that despite the increasing amount of gray in my beard and my penchant for wearing little hats, I am not David the Gnome, and mushroom foraging has not become a regular hobby. Even with that field guide, I would not trust myself to judge between a good mushroom and a bad one.

Instead, what I took away from that weekend is that it is better, perhaps, to simply enjoy walking through the forest, to behold all the mysterious fruits of the dark earth without trying to consume them. Not everything is meant to be easily digestible.

And you know, it’s funny, but that memory came to mind this week because I was thinking about how Christianity has, at times, misunderstood its purpose—that we decided somewhere along the line, mistakenly, that our mission was to make the world easily digestible. That we decided our vocation was something like foraging for mushrooms—arming ourselves with the Bible as if it were a field guide, going out into the wild with our little notes to judge what is “good” and what is “bad”, and harvesting whatever is deemed useful to us. And to the extent we have done so, then I think we have missed the point of church.

Case in point: consider our reading today from John’s Gospel. John’s is the most poetic and mysterious of all the Gospel texts—and yet this one piece of it, John 3:16, has been, in our culture, reduced down to a slogan, a bumper sticker version of the good news, a smiling little phrase employed by those who think of Christianity as a binary system designed to differentiate between the saved and the condemned, the insiders and the outsiders.

With John 3:16 (and a few other passages) people go out into the world and declare those who conform to their interpretation of it as useful and good, and those that don’t as something dangerous, something poisonous, something definitely unworthy of being brought to the table.

But I will confess to you, I don’t think John 3:16 is about insiders and outsiders and I don’t think our faith is like foraging for mushrooms. I don’t think Scripture is a field guide, a rule book for knowing what is dangerous and what is not. I don’t think anything that we are up to here is as simple and safe as all that, because encountering God is not simple or safe.

And if you need a reminder of this, then look at the line that comes just before John 3:16:

Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

The idea that Jesus is somehow taking the place of that bronze serpent in the Book of Numbers should startle us, unnerve us a bit.

Because that story from Numbers is itself a strange and unnerving story, one in which the wounding and healing powers of God collide, forcing the Israelites to realize that there is nothing simple or tidy about their salvation—it is not, as they might have assumed, about choosing between the poison of Pharaoh and the benign, edible pleasures of God—it is about surrendering to a path, a promise, a future that defies easy categorization because it is real, it is true, it is of God.

And God will be who God will be, both mighty and gentle, both tender and wild, and God expects that his people will walk in that fullness of truth, as ones who are wise and brave, not those who settle for simplistic answers and well-ordered oppression.

God wants Israel—and all creation—to share in his wholeness, to be complete, to be overflowing with all that life has to offer, and, then as now, one does not achieve that by dividing the world into overly simplistic binaries of good and bad, useful and worthless. One has to throw out the notes, so to speak, and face life—all of life—as it is, and love it anyway.

And so Jesus, in comparing himself to the serpent, has come to remind us of the same thing. He has come to embody in himself that same collision of wounding and healing that is real life. He has come to crucify our binaries. He has come to invite us to take part in an existence that is mighty and gentle and tender and wild—an existence that approaches wholeness.

He is the One who calls us to go out into unfamiliar places, to walk through the forest, to behold the mysterious fruits of the dark earth without trying to consume them. He is the One lifted up so that we will understand—at last, or for the first time—that love is not the absence of danger, it is the thing that survives danger. It is the thing stronger than fear. Love is like the mycorrhizal network that underlies everything—and the purpose of our faith is not to outsmart it, to escape it, but to participate in it.

And no bumper sticker, no cherry-picked verse of Scripture, will ever suffice to convey this. Only a life lived in the wholeness of the love of Christ will convey this.

God so loved the world that he sent his only Son—his own life, his own self—to show us that everyone and everything belongs, and that all of it is worth saving—the good and the bad, the poisoned and the beautiful, the sinful and the sublime. And not by reciting a formulaic prayer, but by enmeshing our lives into the vast mystery of creation.

So woe to anyone, to any church, to any Christian, who takes it upon themselves to consult their little notes and declare who and what is worthy, as if the world were ever that simple, as if the truth about any of us could ever fit such neat categories, as if anyone could ever be sure what is in and what is out.

No, far better for us to toss out the field guide. Far better to go out into the world each day to simply marvel at what we find there, even if we do not understand it. Better to love all of it without discrimination. And better to trust that in doing so, we will live into the one simple piece of guidance that God has ever given for navigating the wild: to see and to proclaim that everything belongs. Nothing is forsaken. And we are all part of of that vast, deep, mysterious life force welling up from beneath the surface of things.

That’s what Christianity is about.

It may not fit on a bumper sticker, but it sounds like pretty good news to me.

God Loves Dust: An Ash Wednesday Sermon

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

God loves dust.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And God loves dust.

Screen Door: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, February 11, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Mark 9:2-9, an account of Jesus’ transfiguration.

It has been many years, but I can still remember the sound of the screen door opening and slamming shut in the back porch of my grandparent’s house. The door was old and worn and yet amazingly resilient given the infinite number of times that people had passed through it on their way in and out. You see, in that house, nobody ever came in the front door, through the living room—it was always, always through the old screen door out back, and then a few steps through the porch, and on into the kitchen, the room where, as with most Midwestern families, all the truly important stuff took place.

Maybe you remember a home or a place or a time like this—a season in your own life when the doors were always open. And so it was for us—that loud screen door was never locked, it was always at work, announcing the in-breaking of the world that lay out beyond the warm cloister of the dim and fragrant kitchen.

If we happened to glimpse anyone approaching the door from far off, they would emerge first as a glimmer of color and moving light out beyond the wire mesh of the screen and then—creak, rattle, slam!—there they would be, standing in our midst, in the flesh, stomping their boots, commenting on the weather. Friends and family members often showed up like this unannounced, a stream of visitors seeking to share a meal or a moment’s company, bearing news and stories.

And I am sure someone, at some point, must have knocked, but I don’t remember it. I don’t recall the sound of knocking at all—only the familiar opening and closing of that screen door and how normal it was that people would come right in—how natural it felt for there to be a permeable boundary between what is already known and what comes to make itself known.

There is an odd sort of paradox in a screen door, when you think about it. It is a barrier, but it’s one that is flimsy by design. It may have the shape of something absolute but it is rather ambiguous in its purpose, used to shield what is within it, but also to receive what is beyond it—the cooling breezes and the beams of light and the birdsong that travel through the screen to mingle with the inside smells of dinner and dish soap.

It is not much of a safety measure, the screen door, but rather a way for two unique worlds to coexist alongside one another and to reveal themselves to one another. The screen door teaches us that the practice of passing back and forth between privacy and welcome; between domesticity and wildness; between the familiar and the unknown; is a good and necessary thing to do.

And it seems to me that we have arrived at our own sort of screen door moment today, on the Sunday in the year when we see the Transfiguration, when the familiar and the unknowable commingle on the top of a mountain, when the human and the divine aspects of Jesus reveal themselves in a collision of time and light and cloud, of terror and belovedness.

We, alongside Peter and James and John, are drawn into the strange paradox of looking at two realities at once—God’s and humanity’s—and realizing that, in Jesus, the boundaries between them are shockingly permeable.

Today we conclude the seasons of Incarnation and Epiphany, where we have seen how the Son of God has been born and made his way into the world, approaching us, a glimmer of color and light beyond the mesh of our familiar understanding, and yet now—creak, rattle, slam!—here he stands, in his fullness, the eternal God come to pass through our door, to share a meal or a moment’s company, bearing good news and stories.

And this, I think, is one of the most important things to understand about the Transfiguration—it’s not simply that Jesus revealed himself in a particularly magnificent way in this one moment to a handful of disciples, but that in all of our life with God, in worship and discipleship and service, transfiguration is always ready to reveal itself—the boundaries between our lives and the life of God are as permeable as a screen door through which the breeze of heaven blows.

I have seen and heard and felt him in so many different places. In moments of prayer and song. Beside a deathbed. Last week at the laundromat with the Outreach team. In conversations shared with many of you. Gathered around this table, week by week. And certainly, gathered around a kitchen table.

As we prepare for a long and thoughtful journey through Lent, to the Cross and beyond it, we are reminded today, right before we set out, that there is no aspect of human experience—even the most difficult and despairing ones—where Jesus is not able to come and be with us, to enter through the back door to sit a while, to remind us that he is separated from us by only the thinnest, most pliable boundary, if we are willing to look and listen and receive him.

Which begs the question—if the Kingdom of God is approaching us from the other side of the screen, then what must we do on our side to be ready, to greet this new world when it reveals itself? What does a screen door faith look like for us who desire a glimpse of the transfigured world beyond?

And in that, I think my grandparents were on to something simple, but essential: their door was always open. Part of what we practice here, week after week, in liturgy and in hospitality and in service and in formation, is a permeable, open-door way of life, a blurring of the demarcations between personal and communal, finite and eternal.

First, we engage in the pattern of the Eucharist so that we will go out into the world beyond our red doors and replicate that same pattern elsewhere, giving away our own selves for the sake of love, just as Jesus has done for us.

We practice welcoming visitors and strangers into the doors here at St. Anne because being open to new faces, new stories is how we cultivate openness to the presence of God whenever and however God comes into our lives—which is quite often in the form of visitors and strangers.

We serve our neighbors, approaching the threshold of their experiences and getting to know them so that we begin to see how little separates us from anyone else; how their well-being is bound up in our own; and how the differences we perceive, while real, are not a barrier to meaningful relationship.

And we pray and learn and study and challenge our assumptions and expand our perspectives, so that we can be attuned to the infinite number of ways that God passes into our world and abides with us, because Jesus, in that transfigured collision of flesh and light, of time and eternity, has broken down the division between heaven and earth, or at the very least he has made it like a door that will never be locked, a door to eternity that is flimsy by design, a door that is, in fact, like a screen door, where the commingling of two realities finally meet—God’s heart and our heart, God’s life and our life, the beams of light and the birdsong, the dish soap and the dinner, and all of it is God’s and all of it is ours and all of it is sacred.

And so as we approach Lent, and whatever you decide to do or not do in that season, most of all I want you to consider this: how you will stay present to the thin and permeable boundary between you and God? How will you stay open to the life that lies on the other side of the screen? Will you glimpse heaven at the laundromat, in the food pantry? Will you look for the glimmer of color and light that dance behind the words of Scripture? Will you bring good news to your neighbor, share your story with them, proclaim a word of peace to a hurting world? Will you set the table? Will you unlock the door?

Because what we do know is that God will indeed come to see us. We may not know when or how, but in every moment, on every mountain and in every valley, God is always there, ready to be with you , ready to enter in, so eager that he might not even knock, so wondrous that even if you hear his approach—creak, rattle, slam!—you may never be the same once you look up and see him: glorious, stomping his boots and commenting on the weather, seeking to share a meal, a moment; seeking, ultimately, to stay forever in you, in your heart, where, at last, he is transfigured into your flesh, your life.

And then, everything will be both familiar and new; safe and free; and you will be in heaven and you will be at home, all at once.

On Facebook: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, February 4, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Isaiah 40:21-31 and Mark 1:29-39.

Today, February 4, 2024, is a somewhat significant anniversary. Do you know what it is?

It’s the 20th anniversary of Facebook.

On February 4, 2004, Facebook, or “The Facebook” as it was originally known, was launched by a team of students at Harvard as a sort of high-tech student directory and then began its long, seemingly unstoppable march towards changing the way we interact with one another and the world around us. Two months after launching, in 2004, it had 70,000 active monthly users. Now it has over 3 billion, or 37% of the world’s population. As with many types of anniversary dates, reflecting on who we were then, before Facebook, and who we are now might bring up some mixed feelings.

I was a senior in college when Facebook started, and I still remember hearing about it from some friends and signing up for the website in my dorm room in early 2005, uploading a grainy picture of myself and hunting for my real-life friends on there, when there were no links to news articles, no “like” buttons, no videos or vindictive comment sections.

It was, back then, a novel and gently thrilling thing to be able to connect (or reconnect) with so many people at once, almost as if everyone you had ever known had moved back into your neighborhood, their lives and their stories no longer obscured by time and distance. Maybe you, too, if you ever signed up for Facebook, felt that same sense of promise, of an infinite horizon somehow drawn close enough to touch.

But 20 years on, even if we continue to be active users of Facebook or other social media platforms, I think it’s safe to say that we have come to experience the shadow side of such a vast network of connections. And I am not just referring to the casual vitriol that seems to infect so much online discourse or the amount of time we spend staring at screens, though those are major challenges of their own.

But even more fundamental than these, I think, and something that we might overlook, is that the vastness of information and awareness that is available via digital social networks is more than any one person is equipped to process and integrate. It might be wonderful to reconnect with lost friends, but it is also true that we only have so much bandwidth to invest in deeply meaningful, mutual relationships.

And it is indeed valuable to have access to information about other people’s experiences, especially those whose lives are very different from our own, but the unceasing avalanche of content of all kinds, means that we also run the risk of becoming numb from overexposure, or that we end up spend a great deal of energy arguing and posturing around areas of social concern without actually engaging them in our off-screen realities.

But it makes sense that this would happen. It is not simply a failure of the will, but the reality of our limited capacity as mortal beings who, despite our deep hunger for knowledge and our inherent sense of empathy, cannot know everything, cannot respond to everything in the world with the depth and nuance it requires.

And running up against our limitations in the face of the seemingly infinite need and infinite possibility of the world–transmitted to us online–can lead us to rage, or despair, or cynicism, or some strange mixture of the three. Thinking of this through a scriptural lens, every day we bite the bitter fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and the truth is as it always has been: it was not meant for us; we cannot digest it.

And here we are, 20 years on.

But lest we get too down on ourselves and the ills of a digital age, we must acknowledge that this wrestling with our capacity for knowledge and compassion is as ancient as existence itself. It is a tension that is woven into all of Scripture, including our readings this morning.

The prophet Isaiah, in a passage of both comfort and gentle reproach for Israel, asks the people whether they have forgotten the incomparable scale of God–not only that God is acting on their behalf, to care for and deliver them, but that God alone has the capacity to do so. They, by themselves, cannot conceive of or effect their own salvation. Only God can do that. God alone is able to hear and understand the many cries of the people, to bear the pain and the longing of all creation and discern a path toward healing and reconciliation. God alone can do that, because God alone has a heart large enough to break open and hold all things, and to beat and to burn with determination for the rescue and restoration of all things.

Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? It is he who sits above the circle of the earth…his understanding is unsearchable…he does not grow faint or weary.

In other words, only God can digest the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Only he can bear the fullness of knowing and loving all of us and each of us. And God does not give in to rage or despair or cynicism in the face of our infinite need. Our hope is found in the One who can do what we ourselves cannot: to be the agent of infinite compassion, of unyielding justice, of uncompromising charity. This is who God is for us.

And yet this truth about God sets up a deep and striking irony in the Gospel passage from Mark, where Jesus, picking up from last week, continues his ministry of healing and exorcism and in so doing, draws out the desperation and the hope and the curiosity of everyone in his vicinity, such that “the whole city was gathered around the door.” The whole city was gathered around the door. Much like reading the news online, when it can feel like the whole world is at our door, it was surely more than any one person could keep up with or even comprehend. Even Jesus.

Because unlike the infinitely expansive capacities of God spoken of in Isaiah, Jesus is–like us–just one man. Despite his eternal power, he is as finite as we are, and he can only take in so much need, so much information. And this is perhaps why, whether out of exhaustion or frustration, or both, he decides to evade the clamoring crowds, trying to stay focused on his mission to proclaim the Kingdom.

It is as though God, in the flesh, had his own epiphany: the needs of the world are too numerous for any of us to comprehend, much less to solve on our own. We children of the dust cannot bear the fullness of what it means to be alive, to suffer, to dream. And we need something more than help. We need some measure of God’s mind, God’s heart, God’s body to mingle with our own if we ever hope to digest the bitter fruit of the tree and know what to do with it.

And that, of course, is what Jesus ultimately gives us—not just help, but transformation into his likeness. This is my body, given for you. My peace I give to you.

So I think of Jesus, sometimes, when I struggle on Facebook and elsewhere with the enormity of the world’s grief and anxiety and the endless profusion of the world’s ideas. I think about how he, too, struggled to take it all in, and had to figure out what to do. I think about how his decision, in that moment, was not to try and understand everything or solve everything, nor to reject everything, but to love everything.

I think about how he showed up as one of us and how he blessed our finitude; how he demonstrated that true wisdom is less about an infinite capacity for knowledge or strength and more about getting in touch with the deep well of compassion that forms and sustains the cosmos.

And I think about how we are invited—when we are overwhelmed by waves of information and endlessly expanding networks of connectivity—to neither ignore them nor to be subsumed by them, but, like Jesus, to find the still, small center of love that abides at the core of our immensely complex world and to hold fast to it no matter what. To observe and bless the ground beneath our feet; to pray; to heal whom we can heal; to love whom we can love; to proclaim what we have been sent to proclaim–the Kingdom of incarnate love; to trust that this will be sufficient.

And to realize that, as we do so, even in our limited capacity, we are taking part in the infinite; that we are part of the broken, beating, burning heart of the One who will gather us all in and hold us; the One does not grow faint or weary, the One who will someday carry us up on eagle’s wings into the vast interconnectedness of heaven and creation, of time and eternity. Into something far better than a social network–into the very fabric of life itself, where we will be truly known and understood, where our infinite stories and endless longings will finally make sense, and where the fruit of the tree of knowledge, at long last, will be for us, and we will eat of it, and it will be sweet.

River Towns: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, January 28, 2024, the date of the annual parish meeting at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Mark 1:21-28.

It’s somewhat customary, when preaching on the Sunday of a parish’s annual meeting, to focus on the state of things in our faith community and to explore what it looks like to follow Jesus in this place. And I will get to that, but first, of course: a little story.

Last September, on my 40th birthday, Matt and I took a drive out from Cincinnati and along the Ohio River, first down the Kentucky side and then crossing the river by boat on one of the region’s last remaining car ferries, and then down the Ohio side of the river and eventually back up again. Surely many of you have made this trip. And if you have, you know it’s a meandering journey through a number of river towns, some of decent size, some no more than a cluster of quietly deteriorating houses.

But what you notice in all of these places, no matter their size or condition, is that the river always looms large, just at the edge of vision and consciousness. Even if the broad water is hidden by trees or the swell of a hill, you know it is there, flowing swiftly, quietly, with determination, and the towns along its edge have conformed to the river’s temperament; they have been indelibly formed by its moods and its movement.

I later read a book by a local author reflecting on the history of these river towns, the ones large and small, and he noted that, because there is both great opportunity and great risk in choosing to dwell at the river’s edge, people must learn to coexist with its power rather than trying to control it.

Because when you live alongside a mighty force like the Ohio, it provides both sustenance and danger; it offers both a point of connection with the rest of the world and an ever-present possibility of inundating you. To build alongside the river, and to stay there, season after season, requires a particular blend of pragmatism, irrational hope, and surrender.

And in that sense, those river towns are a perfect metaphor for a life of faith, for a community of faith like the one that has been built here at St. Anne. To build up a church is an act of vision and of great trust in something much larger and more powerful than ourselves. We do not sit at the edge of a literal river here, of course, but we have planted ourselves alongside the living waters that comprise God’s movement through our individual lives and through the course of human history, and here at our particular bend in the stream, we must continuously live in that same precarious, energizing balance between preparedness and vulnerability, never knowing exactly what God will do next.

And while this sense of unpredictability might feel especially disorienting because of contemporary politics or technology or culture, in truth it is not a new thing—it is as old as the church itself, older even than that. It is, in fact, bound up in the very reality of God in our midst, who is always both sustaining us and overwhelming us all at once. We cannot domesticate this God any more than we can tame the power of the river, even as we are drawn to build our community upon his holy banks.

Did you know, St. Anne, that simply by building this place, and by tending to it, and welcoming others into it, you have bravely staked a claim in close proximity to the infinite, outpouring majesty of heaven? And the whole purpose of what we do here is to learn how to live faithfully in the presence of such a force, to arrive at a knowledge of God that is born of a direct encounter with his immense and dynamic vitality. How incredible that you have done this. How wondrous that we get to continue doing this together!

And this wondrous proximity is exactly what our Gospel passage today speaks of. Consider this: Jesus, when he goes to the synagogue in Capernaum and begins to teach, impresses those present because he has what is termed “authority,” somehow unlike the wisdom of the scribes. The scribes, remember, were very learned interpreters of the law—they knew a lot of stuff—but Jesus spoke and acted as one with direct, unmediated understanding of the living force that pulsed beneath the letter of the law.

Whatever he offered in that synagogue, however he conveyed God’s activity in the now-imminent Kingdom of Heaven, it was not just a lecture or a study guide; it was like a familiar riverbed of understanding suddenly swelling up with a previously unseen fullness—recognizable in its shape, but newly enthralling in its force, and perhaps a bit scary, too. If you have ever stood near a river that threatens to crest its banks, you might imagine what it felt like to be in the presence of Jesus. And that image might be a useful one for us to think about how God shows up to transform us and the world around us.

If you have ever witnessed a piece of art or oratory that made you well up with tears because it is so urgently true, God was there. And if you have ever stood amidst an undulating sea of protestors crying out for justice, God was there. And if you have been overcome by the beauty of a song or a thunderstorm or the silence between two kindred hearts, you might know what this looks and feels like, this torrent of God’s presence. Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream, says the prophet, and so we come down to the river and pray for it to roll and flow through us.

And so it does in the synagogue at Capernaum, because Jesus does not simply teach via dry explanation or interpretation. He is the lesson. He washes away the clinging roots of demonic forces, he floods the space with holiness, he saturates the crowd with divine possibility and this is a new teaching indeed, this is authority indeed, for like a river that will not be contained, the Son of God is on a course not fixed by human machinations or timelines but is One who flows freely, with a wild, unruly peacefulness, towards the vast and hidden depths of the Father’s will.

And the invitation—and the challenge—both for those in Capernaum back then and those of us sitting here today—is to dive in after him. To decide how we will bear witness and bear within ourselves this unmediated current of divine love and justice. How we will let our lives become the riverbeds that hold God’s life, how we will coexist, in humility and hope, with the Kingdom of God that rolls down through our cities and through our lives like those mighty waters, sustaining us and sweeping us away all at once. How will we, as the church, be like those who dwell alongside the river, building our common life with that same blend of pragmatism, irrational hope, and surrender?

Practically speaking, those are questions we will have to answer together in this new season of life at St. Anne, but they are questions we are well equipped to answer because this community knows how to build wisely and well, and this community knows how to love courageously in the face of challenge, and this community knows how to welcome the surprising in-breaking of the Spirit.

And I am so grateful that God’s providence has led us all to be here, on the proverbial riverbank, at the outset of a new year, in that precarious, energizing balance between preparedness and vulnerability, figuring it out together.

And so we will, this year and in the years to come, continue to construct a community that looks outward, that understands how deeply our well-being and our liberation is bound up in the well-being and the liberation of our neighbor. We are going to go deep into the riches of our spiritual life, in prayer and worship and study. We are going to welcome, with intentionality and care, every single person brought to our doors by the currents of the Spirit, so that no one here ever feels like a stranger. We are going to proclaim to all who will listen that God’s love is the most unstoppable force in the world, and that the way of love, though it can make life challenging, is the only way to truly be alive.

On some level, we cannot know exactly how this will play out or what the future will bring. But what I do know is that all of this—what we do here, how we adapt, how we flourish, how we navigate the rise and fall of the years—is the most beautiful and courageous and necessary thing we will ever do.

I am so excited to walk with you as we do so, because this way of life draws us into the presence and the power and the authority of the living God, whose sole purpose is to inundate the world with grace and mercy and truth. May we build faithfully at the water’s edge; may we be swept away; and may we, like all who dwell beside the mighty river, choose each day–with determination and love–to do it all over again.

Pinky Promise: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, January 7, 2024, the Baptism of Our Lord, at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Mark 1:4-11.

This may not be a very popular opinion, but I actually love new year’s resolutions. Every December, in that odd lull between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, I find myself pondering what I might want do more or less of in the coming year. And I know for some this is a tiresome custom, but it honestly never gets old for me. When we are able to spend the holidays together, my mom and I have a tradition of writing down our resolutions on a scrap of paper on December 31st, reading them aloud, signing our names at the bottom, and then doing that most sacred gesture of commitment, a pinky promise, and then we tuck the piece of paper away into a wallet or bag for future reference.

Now, truth be told, I usually find the scrap of paper sometime around June and have a look and a good laugh at my own expense, because undoubtedly my record at that point is mixed at best. I think I’ve been resolving to take up jogging for the past 20 years, and so far I’ve managed a fast walk. But I like to think of this less as a disappointment and more as persistent optimism. And 2024 is a new year—I did jog for about a minute on the treadmill the other day. Anything is possible!

But the thing that helps me—the thing that I have to remind myself, sometimes, in order to stay optimistic—is that while the goals and resolutions we have might indeed be worthwhile, and even drastically improve our lives, they do not impact our fundamental worthiness or value.

What I have come to realize is that my mom and I are able to relax and enjoy making our lists and our pinky promises together, even if we know we will likely stumble along the way, because we know that even if we have fallen short of every single resolution by next December, it will still be ok, because it is the dreaming together and the trying that matter.

The pinky promise that we make, I think, is more about saying—we promise we’re in this together, for good or ill, come hell or high water, no matter what happens through the turning of the seasons. It’s the sort of promise that is stronger and more enduring than any failure, because it is rooted in love.

I think we sometimes have a complicated relationship with resolutions because it can start to feel like they are a checklist that must be accomplished IN ORDER for us to be good enough, to become, somehow, worthy of love, rather than the other way around—knowing that we are already loved, and then figuring out what to do with that knowledge. Love comes first, always.

And what shocks me, sometimes, is that even after two millennia of Christian practice and storytelling and worship and prayer, there are so many people who refuse to recognize that this is also the whole message of the Gospel: that love comes first, always.

People so easily forget that the entire story of our existence is rooted in an unshakeable love. That, as we heard this morning in Genesis, God ventured into the chaos of primordial darkness and created the world precisely so that he could love it all—and not just the easy stuff, but the light and the darkness together. All of it. Always.

People forget that God’s promise to love us—and everyone, and everything—is itself stronger and more enduring than any failure, and that there is nothing that we can do to alter or diminish this. Some folks like to say hate the sin, love the sinner, forgetting, first, that this statement is not actually in the Bible, and second, that our greatest commandment is to not hate anything, but to love foolishly, indiscriminately, without calculation or agenda or expectation or condition. And to let ourselves be loved in that same way.

In a world that is so shaped by contracts and conditional promises and careful measurements and demarcations, maybe this unreserved, unabashed, unbounded sort of love is inconceivable. Maybe it is a scandal. And maybe it always has been.

It would seem so if we consider the Baptism of Jesus, which is itself, when you ponder it, a rather scandalous act, at least for our good friend John the Baptist. We don’t get as many details in Mark’s version that we just heard a few minutes ago, but in other accounts John is actually quite dismayed that Jesus—the one he was waiting for his whole life, the one coming after who is so much more powerful, so much greater—that this Holy One submits himself to a ritual cleansing from sin and failure. Where was the fire and the winnowing fork and the judgment and the display of great strength?

Whatever John was expecting, this, apparently, was not it. He had proclaimed a Messiah who would shake the foundations of the earth, and yet this promised One comes forward like a simple man, not so different in appearance from the countless others baptized in the River Jordan, with their unmet resolutions and their faltering hopes. Jesus comes forward like one eager to love, eager to be among us, eager to confound us with his humility.

He comes from within us, content to step down and be submerged in the current of our human frailty, content to love us precisely as we are, not as he is. Jesus’ baptism is God saying to us, we’re in this together, for good or ill, come hell or high water.

And that, essentially, is what Jesus hears, too, when he emerges from the river: this is my Son, whom I love. With him I am well pleased. Since the day the world began, God has desired for us to know and claim our belovedness, and now he has come to show us in the flesh what it looks like.

This belovedness, we begin to see, is not conditional on Jesus’ failure or success. It is woven into the very core of his being. It is this belovedness that will propel forward into everything that will follow—the temptations and the miracles and the everyday moments. It is this belovedness that will sustain him even when things get hard, when things fall apart, when he falls apart. And it is this belovedness that he has come to declare as both the birthright and the purpose of all people—of all creation.

Judgment and punishment are easy to understand. But this is the incomprehensible scandal of the Gospel that no one—maybe not even John—expected: that God is love, and that God loves you and everything and everyone, and that, try as you might, nothing will change this. And once we realize this essential truth—this epiphany–we must begin to live in a new way, with the mercy and tenderness of someone who no longer needs to prove themselves worthy, and who understands the inherent worthiness of everyone else.

But still we struggle to understand or accept this, even 2,000 years on. Still we think that somehow we must earn our place in the cosmos. But we do not. We need not. We cannot. Because love came first.

And even if we crawl over the finish line of a particular year, and even if we crawl over the finish line of our lives, God will still say, you are my child, the beloved, with you I am well pleased. And even if we have failed and made a mess of everything, somehow, even then, I think he will be there saying we’re in this together, for good or ill, come hell or high water.

Because God is not out there somewhere waiting for us to measure up, waiting for us to figure it all out before he loves us fully and comes alongside us. He already does. And he already has.

He has stepped down into the water with us. He has taken note of everything we’ve tried and the things we were afraid to try. The ways we have succeeded and the ways we have fallen short. The resolutions kept and the ones we still keep writing with foolish optimism on a scrap of paper. And through it all, I think he simply delights in our willingness to dream together, to try—our willingness to keep showing up, year after year, to share in a hope that is stronger and more enduring than any failure. The kind that only comes when you know that you are truly, eternally beloved.

Because you are. And that’s a pinky promise.

Emperor: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, October 22, 2023 at St. Anne Episcopal Church in West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 22:15-22. This sermon was offered as part of the parish’s annual pledge/fundraising campaign.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve gotten together with many of you at a series of meet-and-greet events. I’ve loved the opportunity for us to learn more about one another and to hear from you about your hopes and dreams for St. Anne. There are still a couple more of these on the calendar, so I hope to see you soon if you haven’t made it to one yet.

At a few of these, I have been able to share a bit of my own story—how I came to be in The Episcopal Church and how that eventually led me into the priesthood. I am not going to retell that whole story this morning, but a piece of it has been on my mind this week as I’ve been reflecting on both our Gospel for today and our annual pledge campaign to fund St. Anne’s mission and ministry in the coming year, because one common thread in all of these things—my own story, the Gospel story, and in St. Anne’s ongoing story—is that sometimes we discover that God is not at all who we thought God was, or that God does not in any way resemble our longstanding assumptions…and that this can be very good news.

When I was in college, I drifted away from church; or it might be more accurate to say I ran away. My reasons were personal, but not entirely unique; I think many of us, at one juncture or another, begin to question our foundational understandings of who we are and how the world works and what is ultimately true. And that is exactly what happened to me.

And so, in my mid-twenties, I found myself in an awkward position: I had spent a number of years feeling very unsure about everything I had been taught about faith and religion, and yet the hunger for meaning, for purpose, for belonging to something greater than myself, would not leave me alone. I longed to be part of a community that was committed to something deeper than just a hobby or a political opinion or a worldview; I wanted to engage the big questions of life and death and love and eternity, but I didn’t want to be given an ultimatum as to how best to answer those questions, and I had always understood religion as a place of ultimatums—believe this, think this, be like this, or else you are not part of this.

And yet, despite my trepidation, God still haunted me, like the lingering memory of a lost love, and so one day I found myself slipping into the back pew of an Episcopal church near my house, tentative, uncertain, hopeful. I followed along as best I could; I stood and sat and kneeled like Episcopalians do. When it came time to recite the Creed, I only said parts of it, because I didn’t know what I believed anymore, and I didn’t want to lie.

And yet, when the time came, I nonetheless went up to the rail for communion, praying that if there was a God who still loved me, that he would forgive my confusion and my reticence and still meet me there in the bread and the cup. I prayed that I would not be punished for having so many doubts, for being wayward and unsure of my commitments. And I reached out my hands, almost breathless, waiting to see what would happen.

I think that the stakes of that moment, at least as I perceived them, were similar to the stakes of the question posed by the Pharisees and the Herodians to Jesus in this morning’s gospel passage. They have ulterior motives, of course, but they are asking, fundamentally, where Jesus’ loyalties lie, and whether he is all in for God or for Caesar, as if the two are comparable forces competing for the same spiritual and material resources.

Although they don’t say so explicitly, there is, woven into their question, the idea that God, like Caesar, is an emperor of sorts—a figure or a force demanding fealty and submission. And to be fair to them, this is an image of God that is embedded in much of our Scripture, since these are texts that were shaped and recorded by a society accustomed to rulers with absolute authority.

This is the same understanding of God that I had when I approached the communion rail: a God who literally sat on a throne, ready to suss out whether I had been loyal, whether I was willing to pay the price of my authenticity in order to receive his beneficence.

But what Jesus knew, and what he came to proclaim to the world, is that God is not comparable to Caesar. God is not like an emperor at all; God’s power is from the ground up, not from the top down. And though we still try to put a crown on God’s head and though there are still those who try to fashion God’s Word into a sword rather than a healing balm, Jesus continues to dismiss such posturing. And he continues to console those among us who fear that we are too doubtful, too wayward, too lost to be part of this.

He says, render unto Caesar your questions of punishment and debt and power.

But render unto God what is God’s—the deepest longing of your heart to be welcomed unconditionally, to be loved without reservation, to be invited into building and sustaining something kind, something beautiful, something true.

And so you know what happened when I reached out my hands to receive communion on that Sunday so many years ago? Nothing. In the best possible way, nothing. God did not send down a thunderbolt and smite me for having run away. God did not send an angry Episcopalian to berate me for not reciting the whole Creed. God did not punish me for having doubts and questions.

God simply fed me, and that was its own sort of answer.

Because, as I realized, perhaps for the first time that day, God is not Caesar, demanding conformity and unthinking allegiance, asking “are you worthy, are you certain, are you pure?” No, the God revealed in Christ is more like a person standing on the front porch to welcome you home, saying, “I’ve missed you. Come on in; you look like you need something to eat.”

And I did eat, and I am still eating, responding to that hunger that could not be satisfied anywhere else. And from that first Sunday onward, I knew that if this was what church could be, then it was worth everything I had to give.

I know, from hearing so many of your stories already, that some of what I am talking about overlaps with your experience of the Episcopal Church and of St. Anne in particular. I know that in this place, many of you have come to the realization that God is not that which we were once taught to fear, and that the point of all this is not to arrive at some untroubled belief in God, but to discover that God believes in us, and that God always will, no matter how far we run or how long we wander.

And I want you to consider what a rare and precious treasure this is—that there is a place in this world, as polarized and fractured as it is, where people are welcomed to come as they are, to be held in community, to be invited to grow in faith while still leaving space for tough questions, for doubt, for mystery, and for a certain acceptance that we don’t have all the answers.

I know that, because of what I discovered about God that first Sunday in an Episcopal church, I decided to pledge my life to this vision and embodiment of Christianity. And because of the ways that St. Anne so joyfully and passionately pursues that same vision, both within our walls and beyond them, I will be pledging a substantial amount to help fund the mission of this parish in the coming year.

I want to do that not just because of all the good things already taking place here, but because I know that somewhere out there, maybe just down the road, there are people just like I was on that Sunday so long ago—no longer able to endure the notion of the God of empire, yet still longing to find a place of welcome, longing to belong to and to help build something kind and beautiful and true. Longing to hear a voice saying, I’ve missed you. Come on in. You look like you need something to eat.

This is that place. Let’s make sure they find it. Let’s be ready for them when they do.

The Law: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, September 10, 2023 at Saint Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Romans 13:8-14.

One night when I was in my early 20s, I was out with a couple of people at a pub. One of them was the man whom I was dating at the time, and at some point in the evening we must have held hands or in some other way indicated that we were together. I got up to use the restroom, and as I was washing my hands, I suddenly heard a group of people who had assembled outside the bathroom door; it was clear that they were talking about me and that they were unhappy with my presence in their midst. As I opened the door, a group of about 8 people, men and women, surrounded me and started yelling at me. They called me names and said a number of things that were very hard to hear, but the thing I heard that has stuck with me in the years since is when one of the women yelled, “you’re breaking God’s law! You’re breaking God’s law!”

I was able to make my way through them somehow and I made a beeline for the front door. The people I was with followed me out and we quickly put some distance between ourselves and that place. Thankfully no one followed us.

Later that night after walking around and calming our nerves a bit, we paused by the river. The city we were in was near the coast, the air was warm and still, and as we rested and watched the moon reflecting upon the water, suddenly out of nowhere we saw a dolphin leaping out of the water, glistening in the dim light.

It was so perfect, so surreal, that it felt like a dream, and we fell silent with awe. And what struck me was how strange it was that a vision of such perfect beauty and an experience of such shame and fear could all exist in the span of one evening. And I knew, in a way that I couldn’t quite explain, that whatever God’s law was, whatever it meant to follow that law, it had more to do with this moment of silent wonder and unexpected beauty than it did with whatever those people had been screaming at me about inside.

I share that story with you not out of a sense of self-pity nor to vilify anyone. We all have our harms and our hurts to account for, and so I’ve tried my best to let that experience in the pub be an instructive one. And what it has taught me, what I fiercely believe because of it and because of other stories I’ve heard from people who are different in one way or another, is that we must continue to wrestle with the meaning and the purpose of the law recorded in Scripture as it has been received in Christian tradition. We must continue to ask ourselves what the Judeo-Christian law is meant to look like and sound like and the fruits that it is meant to bear in our own lives and in our world.

Because although it might be tempting sometimes, when confronted with the violence or prejudice perpetuated in its name, we cannot ignore the law or dismiss it as irrelevant to modern life. Because we are followers of Jesus, and earlier in Matthew’s gospel he says quite clearly: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.”

Such a conundrum: how do we honor what the Law represents—God’s eternal, unchanging desires for how we are to live—while also recognizing that the original writers of the Law were speaking to the needs and concerns of a highly particular culture and geography and context?

How do we arrive at a place where the Law by which we pattern our lives is both substantive and kind, both a defense against harm and yet also a gateway to liberation? How do we conceive of the Law in a way that guards against our most dehumanizing tendencies and yet is as beautiful and elemental and free as that dolphin cresting the shimmering water? Can such a Law be found and followed?

Yes.

Owe no one anything, Paul says this morning, owe no one anything except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet”; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.

Love is the fulfilling of the Law. If you take nothing else away from this sermon, I hope you will take that. Love is the fulfilling of the Law.

Or another way of saying it: the only true measure of the Law is love. The only true measure of whether we are obeying God’s Law is how well, how deeply, how broadly we are embodying love.

And so if you have, in your life, ever been told that you are unworthy, or if you have ever felt lost or forgotten, or if you have ever struggled to figure out how to be good enough, how to to be strong enough, how to simply be enough in a world that too often fixates on how we fall short, I want you to remember: love is the fulfilling of the Law.

And if you have witnessed the endless debates about what makes a person truly Christian, what makes a church truly Christian, what it means to follow God’s Law, then I want you to remember, love is the fulfilling of the Law.

And, yes, we can study the history and the context of Scripture to understand how and why the Law took the form it did in that time and place where it was first recorded. But we can also honor the truth that love takes on new contours, new understandings to meet the realities and the revelations of our present moment. And this is not weak or permissive-on the contrary, to love unreservedly is the bravest thing we can do.

Because if love is the true fulfillment of the law, well, love is scary. Love is risky and strange and it doesn’t always go the way you planned, it doesn’t always look the way you expected. And love demands things of you, it demands you to bend and grow and weep and dance. It requires you to sit beneath the moon and hold pain and beauty alongside one another and still say yes, yes, I will still believe in love, even when the world is ugly and cruel. I will still believe in Love Incarnate, even though he was crucified. And I will still believe that love endures, that it persists beneath the surface of life, cresting unexpectedly to dazzle us, to save us, to remind us of what is true.

How will love show up for us this year at Saint Anne? How will we discover it amidst the pain and promise of our own lives? How will be give ourselves over to its invitation as we begin a new season of ministry and worship and community? I urge you to listen to how God is stirring your heart into action.

Whether it is offering a word of support to someone who is struggling with grief, or a word of hope to a society struggling with injustice; whether it is tending the lawn or tending to the shattered fragments of someone’s spirit; whether it is learning to sing or helping others find their own voice; studying Scripture or simply sitting in awe beneath the moon—no matter what you do, if it is offered in love, then it is one more indication of the coming Kingdom, and it is one more revelation of the unchanging truth that will guide us and sustain us in any age:

Love is the fulfilling of the law. And love is the one thing that can never truly be broken.

Do-Over: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, August 20, 2023 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 15:21-28, Jesus’ interaction with a Canaanite woman.

Have you ever looked back at some moment in your life and wished you could have a do-over? I know that it’s popular to say things like “no regrets” and “everything happens for a reason,” but if I’m perfectly honest, there are plenty of things I would change if I could. Some of them are a bit trivial, like my questionable fashion choices in high school (though some of these, as I approach 40, already seem to be coming back around).

But some of the regrettable things are a bit harder and heavier: the things in my life done and left undone, the things said and left unsaid. They jangle around in my memory like a set of keys—keys for doorways that can no longer be opened—tarnished and jagged and yet hard to throw away.

Truth be told, though, I am mostly ok with that. While I don’t think it’s helpful to myself or anyone else to wallow in regret, I do think there is value in remembering what has not gone well, what has been broken within us and broken by us, because it informs how we can make different choices in the present and on into the future.

This is true not just for individuals, but for communities and nations, too, all of whom must reckon with the more painful aspects of their histories if they ever hope to unlock the shackles that bind their greatest ideals, to liberate their deepest and most beautiful dreams.

We don’t get a do-over, exactly, but we get an infinite number of opportunities, as long as we live, to do better, to discern and to grow in wisdom, informed by our past but never imprisoned by it.

And this not just a sort of humanistic self-improvement philosophy, but the fundamental arc of Scripture, a story of promise and regret and repentance and redemption, a story which is itself filled with the messy choices of people and of nations wrestling with a Divine presence and power only partially understood, and yet who are drawn, always, always, into a new revelation of the breadth and the depth of God’s infinite power and unfailing ability to redeem our complicated histories.

I’ve been pondering all of this about do overs and doing better because, I think, it will help us wrestle with our challenging Gospel text this morning. Not solve it, but wrestle with it.

Let’s just name the hard thing up front: Jesus is, to say the least, not kind to the Canaanite woman; he associates her and her people with dogs, and seems uninterested, at first, in healing her daughter. And we could, as many have, spend a lot of time wondering whether he was having his own regrettable moment or whether he was, in some opaque Divine way, testing the woman’s faith. Given who Jesus is, neither of these two choices is particularly easy or comfortable.

But it is also good for us to step back and consider that for the disciples, and even for the original hearers of Matthew’s gospel, the truly remarkable thing in the narrative is not Jesus’ commitment to the children of Israel, nor his verbal sparring with the woman, but the fact that, ultimately, she is a Canaanite who receives God’s blessing.

For if Israel’s troubled collective memory is a set of old keys, their relationship with the Canaanites is a particularly heavy and sharp one—the Canaanites are the people who originally inhabited the Promised Land, they were the ones displaced and slaughtered by Joshua’s armies, they were among the ones subjugated by the Kingdom of Israel and even now, in Jesus’ time, under Roman rule, the Canaanites are still a people whose name evokes that strange mixture of pride and fear when we encounter those whom we have othered past the point of recognition.

And all of this, all of this spilled blood and rage and this faded ghost of empire is heaped upon the Canaanite woman—this woman who has surely knelt at her child’s bedside, eyes brimming with tears, praying for her to make it; this woman who shouts in the street; who cries out for help; who boldly kneels before Jesus and seeks her daughters survival. She is a woman of unquestionable courage, but as a Canaanite she is also a symbol of all that Israel has wrought, and all that they have lost. No wonder they want to silence here and send her away. We often try to ignore those who remind us of our own wounds.

But there’s something we have to understand about Jesus, something which both explains and underscores the significance of what happens next, the fact that he doesn’t send her away.

From the very beginning, when he was born as the Son of David in Bethlehem, Jesus has carried both the burden and the promise of Israel within his flesh—their chosenness and their chastening. We might even say that throughout his life, Jesus has embodied and recapitulated the original story of Israel.

And thus, Jesus, like Israel, is exiled into Egypt and then brought back; and like Israel he is sent into the desert to be tested and formed; and like Israel he bears out the weighty tradition of the prophets in his teaching and his miracles. And in all of these instances, he gathers up the glory and the pain and the belovedness of his people to bring it into an ever deepening level of Divine intimacy, knitting Israel’s story of liberation into the very fabric of creation, that it might become everyone’s story, in every time, in every nation.

Which makes his encounter, today, with the Canaanite woman, all the more significant, because we cannot forget that Israel’s history, its journey, is political and territorial, not just theological. And so now Jesus stands here, as Israel once did when they crossed with their armies to the other side of the Jordan, he stands here once again holding the life of a Canaanite in his hands, bearing the ancient grudges and the ancient fears of his people on his shoulders, and….he lays them down.

He lets this mother’s love, and her faith, and her fierce determination change the story. O Woman, he says, great is your faith, and while the past cannot be erased, somewhere a new has opened, and suddenly the Kingdom of Heaven is bigger than Israel alone, bigger than any one nation. And while the children of the ones who spilled each other’s blood cannot get a do-over, they can do better. They can tell a new story, a story in which the daughter of a Canaanite is as beloved and valued as anyone else, and in which the only conquering power is mercy, and where the only Promised Land is the one big enough for everyone.

Can we tell that story, too? Can we show the world what it looks like to do better, even if we can’t get a do-over on the most painful parts of our own history? Can we lay down our own ancient enmities and fears and misplaced nostalgia so that the best of who we have been might inform who we yet might become? These are deeply personal questions as well as collective ones for our church and for our world.

But the good news of the gospel is that the answer is always YES. Yes, there is something on the other side of regret. Yes, there is something on the other side of failure and fear. Yes, there is a place where we won’t need all those old keys jangling in our pockets after all, because in that place all the doors will be flung wide open, and no one will be shut out, and everything that has been lost will be found and made whole.

Call that place what you will: call it the Kingdom, call it the new Creation, or call it Canaan; by any name and by God’s grace we’re heading to that land of promise together, and when we arrive, I suspect it will feel like this: waking up to a mother’s face, brimming with joyful tears, saying, my child, all is well. I am here. You made it.