Tag: love

On Anger, & What To Do With It: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, April 6 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The text cited is John 12:1-8, Jesus’ anointing for burial by Mary of Bethany.

There’s an aspect of life—of faith, even—that we don’t talk much about on Sundays. Maybe it’s because we’ve been raised to be polite. Maybe it’s because, for very good reason, we hold fast to the proclamation of a loving and gracious God. But nonetheless, there’s something that we all contend with in our lives that’s probably worth talking about, and that’s anger. 

Are you feeling angry these days?

If not, at some point you surely have felt it, whether about the state of the world; the decisions of others; or the frustrations that tend to show up each day. Maybe you’ve felt anger at yourself for the things you wish you’d done differently but can’t take back. I know I have felt all this and more, though as a person who tries to remain centered and peaceful, I may not like to admit it. 

But anger is hard to avoid when our hopes are dashed or our deep fears encountered or our wounds touched. And some days we might wonder, if anger is so bad for us, why, Lord, do people keep giving me so many good opportunities to practice it??

It’s tough, though, because sometimes a bit of righteous anger feels appropriate. I get angry, for example, when folks demonize vulnerable groups of people who aren’t hurting them, people who are just trying to live their lives as best they can.

And I get angry, too, when I see how working-class communities like the one my family came from in rural Michigan have been dismissed and left behind by 21st century economics and culture.

And this is sillier, but I was even a bit angry last week when Cincinnati got passed over for the Sundance Film Festival because, essentially, some folks out west still consider the entire middle of the country a big blank space. I’m from California, but I consider myself a proud midwesterner now, so that riled me up a bit!

I cite these because anger, it seems, cuts across ideologies, politics, cultures, and identities. It is an equal-opportunity companion in this life. And there are plenty of late nights when I reflect on my own personal failures and I’m just angry at my own foolish self.

The question is, what do we do about it? 

In a cultural moment that seems so saturated by anger and its consorts—fear, anxiety, uncertainty, cynicism—the question of what to do with our anger, individual and collective, is both an ethical and an existential one. Ethical, because somehow we have to figure out how to live meaningfully in this world despite its frustrations. Existential, because Jesus calls us to be something more than the sum of our many angers. 

Lent is almost over, and we are in the foothills of Holy Week. Soon, through the Passion of Christ, we will bear witness to the the cost of humanity’s capacity for self-defeating anger. So it’s a good time to figure out what to do about the rage within us and amongst us, lest we keep on murdering the promise of the kingdom that still stands in our midst. 

In today’s Gospel reading, I think we are given two insights–two pathways–in our response to anger, though I don’t think that this story is usually viewed that way. 

Consider first Mary of Bethany—she who previously sat at Jesus’ feet while her sister Martha cooked and cleaned. Mary is not usually viewed as an angry person, but for the first time this week I found myself wondering if here, in this moment in the narrative, she actually is. 

Because I remember how angry I was when my father was dying—not angry at him, but angry that it had to happen at all. Angry that I had to watch his vitality slowly ebb away. And I know, too, how somethings the things we love the most also wound us the deepest. And so I wondered, maybe, if Mary’s anointing, her shattering of the precious jar, her wasteful smearing of fragrant oils, was not, as I have often assumed, some sort of calm, smiling ritual. 

Maybe there were angry tears streaming down her face as she did so. Maybe she was furious with grief that Jesus–her teacher, her Lord, the one who raised her brother from the dead, the one who could potentially make this mess of a world beautiful again—maybe she was furious that he was giving himself over, that he was surrendering himself to death at the hands of those same old persecutors who kill everything good. Maybe Mary was anointing him with holy anger as much as holy love. Because I find those two are often strange companions in the tangle of this life, where good things break and sure things falter and we must both rage and bless at the same time.

However (and this is essential) anoint him she does, even through her angry tears, because despite how disappointed Mary must be that Jesus will die, and that life does not conform to our expectations, she realizes in the way that only Wisdom can reveal that we must anoint our fierce anger at the world with an even fiercer love, rather than try to manipulate or abandon or destroy what disappoints us. 

Because to give into that temptation is to choose the other path in the story today—that of Judas, the betrayer, who is likely also disappointed that Jesus is not the sort of savior he imagined. But for Judas, it seems, the world is just a series of disputes to be bargained and negotiated and won, rather than a network of relationships to honor.

It may be tempting to navigate the world that way, with our understandable anger at the way things are (even Judas surely raged against the empire) but it is not the way of Jesus. It is not the way that will lead to the flourishing or health or peace that Jesus offers. Only the pouring out of our hearts, only the giving away of our costly love will ever lead us to the kingdom of Christ. 

So what do we do, friends, with the angers of our own life and times? How do we acknowledge all that we carry within ourselves but then, like Mary of Bethany, surrender it to our Lord? 

First, we have to name it—really name it. Maybe part of the problem in all our conditioning to be polite is that we tend to remain strangers with our anger. Maybe it would help to begin by writing down for ourselves the things that anger us. Not on social media, please, but just for ourselves. An accounting of our frustrations, our sorrows, our disappointments, and our fears. And then, as this Lent winds down, give them over to Jesus in prayer. 

Maybe it would help, like Mary, to undo your hair, and bend low, and smear the bittersweet fragrance of your rage and blessing on his feet. If you are disappointed that nothing seems like an easy fix, tell him. If you had hope for so much more from this life and from your fellow humans, tell him. If you don’t understand why crucifixion must be the path, and why we can’t have nice things, and why so many people suffer for no good reason at all, tell him. 

But I pray we will tell him, too, that in our anger, we will refuse to be apathetic or craven or cynical. That we’ll tell him we’re willing to love with our shattered jar and our shattered hearts. I promise you, he will understand.

And then, together, we will continue to go about the work of building a community and a world in which, even as we acknowledge our anger, we become a people who are not ultimately formed by it. A people who will not sell our hope for thirty pieces of silver or justify our anger on the backs of the poor, but who will anoint the present moment with our furious compassion. Even with tears in our eyes. 

Because every week, as we come to the table to feast on the shattered pieces of Christ’s body, we glimpse the truth: anger is persistent, yes, but love is eternal. And he will transform it all: our anger, our grief, our disappointment, our fear. He will transform it. 

Just ask Mary. Because in a couple of weeks’ time, we will see her again, but it will be in a garden, in the cool morning light, with the perfume of burial washed away by the scent of living, resurrected things. And she will cry very different tears. And maybe so will we.

And for once in the history of broken jars and broken hearts and all the things we do not understand, our anger, at last, will be forgotten.

More than Welcome: A Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything Happens: A Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sandwich: A Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Feast of All Hungers: An Ash Wednesday Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coming Out: A Sermon on the Transfiguration

I preached this sermon on Sunday, March 2, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Luke 9:28-43, an account of Jesus’ transfiguration on the mountaintop.

I came out when I was eighteen. And although I came from a pretty open-minded family, it was still a struggle, as it often is for people. But there came a point about halfway through my first year of college when I was just weary of hiding—hiding from others, hiding from myself, hiding from that fundamental desire to be loved and to love someone back. I was willing to do anything, to give up anything, if it meant that I could stop being half-invisible. To live authentically and experience fullness of life. Or at least have the chance to try, and mess up, and keep trying like anybody else. 

And so, I came out. And it’s been mostly wonderful, and sometimes difficult, but it was never really optional, because it was simply the truth of me. Ultimately life requires us to acknowledge what is true, even if folks don’t get it or don’t want to get it. 

Because what is true is that most of us fundamentally want very similar things: to understand and to be understood; to be able to feel things; to experience life without fear or scarcity; to know and share love; and to leave behind something meaningful when we’re gone. These desires are pretty much universal, whether we are gay or straight; black or white; whether we are in Cincinnati or Kiev; whether we are rich or poor; or any of the other myriad ways people inhabit this world. 

It’s just that for some such people, because of their characteristics or their location or their status, they find themselves having to convince other, more powerful people they actually deserve those fundamental things, too. That they aren’t half-invisible. 

And while the powerful don’t usually like it very much, many such people, in their own ways, eventually have to muster the courage to come out—not specifically as I did, but to come out into the world in the fullness of their own humanity and say, this is who I am, and I dare to be seen. I dare to inhabit the dignity of myself. And I offer myself—all of myself—for I am no longer constrained by the fear of being misunderstood or maligned. Because I would rather perish in the light than wither in the shadows.

Every liberating impulse of the human heart, guided by the Spirit and made manifest in everything from the crossing of the Red Sea to the Stonewall riots to the sit-ins of the Civil Rights movement to the demands of peacemaking of our own time—all of it is a form of coming out. Coming out of Egypt, coming out of Jim Crow, coming out of the closet, coming out from behind the structures of prejudice and fear and choosing to see each other as we are, as the beautifully diverse children of God. 

Churches could learn a lot from all of this coming out, I think. Especially, God love us, those polite, well-meaning churches that have, for too long perhaps, been hiding our own light within our walls, wondering why the world is looking elsewhere. I wonder what such a church might learn from the people who’ve had to come out in their own lives. 

And I wonder, too, what we might learn from today’s Gospel account of the Transfiguration, when Jesus came out as…God. 

Make no mistake, that’s what this story is: a coming out story. Not as any of the categories of identity we usually associate with that term, but a coming out nonetheless. A bold revelation of selfhood to a world not quite ready for it.

On this particular mountaintop, just before his journey to Jerusalem and the suffering that awaits him there, Jesus decides he is tired of being half-invisible, too. He is, perhaps, weary of hiding the truth of himself: that he is the Son of God; the indwelling of the divine light; the Creator aching with love for creation—and he cannot hide it anymore. And for this moment, at least, in the company of his most trusted friends, before he surrenders himself to the culmination of his difficult work, he decides to come out. 

And so he does. And so we behold him.

This is Jesus, in blazing brilliance, in that white light which is formed by every color of the rainbow. This is Jesus, at last inhabiting the dignity of himself. This is Jesus, God, who also fundamentally wants the same things: to understand and be understood by us, to know and share love with us, and to leave us something meaningful of himself when he’s gone. This is Jesus, willing to pay the price for being himself, willing even to be rejected, because he knows that the truth is not optional, because the truth of him is love in its many forms, and it always has been and it always will be. 

This is Jesus, the God who has always called his children to come out from whatever harmed them or held them back from fullness of life, now doing it himself. 

The point of this, my friends, is that if Jesus can come out as God in a world that did not welcome him….and if our vulnerable siblings can come out as human beings seeking dignity  in a world that does not welcome them…then perhaps we as the church should realize that our own future also depends on our willingness to come out of the shadows and into the light. To come out and say, we are Christians, and this is what we stand for. And that we will no longer let others hijack the narrative of our faith or the nature of the Gospel for craven, fear-based, or politically expedient ends. 

We who seek to do good and proclaim love as the Way, perhaps we need to come out and say that we do so not simply because we are well-educated or well-mannered people, but because we are passionate followers of Jesus, and that is what followers of Jesus actually do: they love without exclusion, they surrender their lives to compassion, and they are not cowed by the forces of evil and mistruth. 

Perhaps we who often find it easier to practice a private, respectable faith need to align ourselves more closely with those of our neighbors whose very humanity is a matter of public debate. Our neighbors of other ethnicities and creeds and identities whose very decision to step outside the house and exist each day is an act of courage. Perhaps by seeking them out and knowing them better, we could find some of the courage we need ourselves as Christians. The courage to name Jesus as Lord. The courage to reject, in the name of Jesus, those forces which diminish or demonize any category of people. The courage to not be half-invisible ourselves any longer. To wear God’s heart on our sleeve. 

Because we are living in a time that demands an accounting of our values, of our commitments to one another, and of the depth of our souls. We are not the first to live in such a time, nor will we be the last.

And for those of us who have already had to come out and be ourselves in one way or another…well, some of us are rather accustomed to this sense of high stakes in the basic activities of living. We’ve got some tips to share. There is much that we can learn from one another to navigate the road head. To encourage each other. To stand with each other.

I hope and pray we will continue to do that work here. Whether through the building up of people participating in outreach services, or in the expansion of our advocacy and justice ministries, or in deepening our study of Scripture or in the practice of prayer and contemplation, I hope our parish will find and reveal the fullness of itself in this time. I hope that, right here in West Chester, we will help guide the broader church out into the possibilities of the present moment, despite the perils of stepping into the light. We have too much good news to share here to let it hide behind the doors or wither in the shadows.

If that sounds a little daunting, I get it. But as God likes to say, don’t be afraid. Pretty much anyone who’s had to risk simply being themselves in one way or another can tell you: it’s mostly wonderful. Sometimes difficult, yes: even Jesus, after the transfiguration, still had to keep on casting out demons and dealing with people who couldn’t or didn’t want to understand him.

But mostly, the peace of being wholly oneself with other people, without fear, is a wondrous gift. A gift from God. It is the thing that has saved some of us. Maybe it will help save all of us, together.

All we have to do, beloved church, is hold fast to the love that is the truth of us.

And then…come out.

Greeting Cards: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, February 23, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Genesis 45:3-11, 15 and Luke 6:27-38.

I was heartened during last week’s sermon when our preacher, Baker, confessed that he, too, has a penchant for accumulating books. It helped me feel a little bit better about my own endless accumulation! Though I like to say that am a collector of books, because that sounds so much more elegant than “hoarder of books” or “person who is constructing the leaning Tower of Pisa with books.” No, no, I’m a collector. So it’s fine.

Well, with that in mind, I’ll tell you there is something else I am a collector of—and I have stacks of them, too, squirreled away here and there—and that is old greeting cards. I have a tough time letting go of the cards that I’ve received. Whether it’s those I’ve been given as a priest, or for birthdays, or even the occasional thank you note…every so often I’ll open a drawer or a folder and there they’ll be, little bundles of time and relationship and memory. 

And just when I think, oh, I probably don’t need to hold onto these anymore, I’ll open one up and suddenly I am reading about how proud my dad was at my high school graduation, or some half-forgotten in-joke from a long lost college friend, or a Christmas greeting from a beloved parishioner who has since died. And I just slide them all back into the drawer. Really, I suppose I am a collector of heartfelt sentiments, but I am not ashamed of that. 

Because we need reminders sometimes, don’t we, of all the things that we have been to other people, and of all that they have been to us. And really, when you think about it, those greeting cards and other such notes are one of the few tangible signs we ever receive that this is indeed the case. They are evidence that we’re not, in fact, just isolated figures navigating the surface of the earth, but that we are of something, that our hearts and our bodies have been tethered to something, to someone. And in a lonely age, any such reminder is a precious, even sacred thing. 

Think about it: when we die, if a stranger were to go through our house and clear out most of our belongings—the clothes and the pots & pans and yes, even the books—it is only a few items, maybe just the greeting cards and the letters and the photos—that would actually tell the story of the love that has shaped our lives. Sobering thought, maybe, but clarifying, too, about what actually matters in this life. What is worth holding onto and what is worth saying to one another in the bit of time we are given.

And for me, few scenes in Scripture capture the preciousness and power of what is said to one another more so than this morning’s Old Testament reading. To set the scene, we are with a handful of isolated figures navigating the face of the earth—the elder brothers of Joseph, who have come to Egypt in the midst of a famine searching for food. Instead, they end up finding Joseph himself, whom they secretly sold into slavery many years before. Joseph is now a powerful figure in Pharaoh’s household, and at first the brothers don’t recognize him. 

But as we hear today, Joseph reveals his identity to them and, instead of exacting righteous revenge or punishment, he does something quite astounding. He pours out words of love. He forgives them and welcomes them and weeps upon them, and what he says is tender and generous and full of unexpected grace.

I’ll admit, sentimental as I am, Joseph’s decision here can still sound a bit unrealistic, the stuff of greeting card verses rather than real life. And that’s fair enough. Accountability for harm done is a real and important facet of healthy relationships, and there are plenty of examples of it in Scripture, too.

But what we might want to take away from this story is not simply that Joseph was a very nice person who did a very nice thing by letting his brothers off the hook, but that this narrative represents something deeper and more profound for the people who wrote it down. It captures something of Israel’s own fundamental, fragile hopes. 

They, too, often felt like people isolated on the face of the earth, and like those elder brothers consumed by hunger and regret, Israel prayed that they might one day hear God again saying to them: “come down to me, do not delay…you shall settle in the land…and you shall be near me, you and your children and your children’s children.”

And so what Joseph offers his brothers is what Israel itself longed to receive, and maybe what we all long to receive at our core—a word, an assurance, direct from God’s own heart, that says, “you are not an isolated figure, because you are mine, and I am yours and I, the one who Created you, weep for the love of you. And so no matter what has happened before, no matter what is broken, I your God will make it all fit together somehow. No matter how you have failed, no matter how far you’ve wandered, we are not lost to one another.”

This is not just sentimentality, but the reality of grace. And I think we wait our whole lives hoping to hear some version of it. It is why Jesus came as God Incarnate, to deliver the same message in person through his life, death, and resurrection. 

But there’s a twist with Jesus, of course (there always is)—because he invites us not just to receive the word of grace, but to live it. Jesus asks us to become the very word we long for. 

And that’s important to keep in mind when we hear Jesus’ seemingly impossible instruction on forgiveness and loving our enemies. Just as we might be incredulous at Joseph, so we might find ourselves skeptical of this teaching. Doesn’t Christ, of all people, know that the world is not so simple? How can we turn the other cheek and resist judgment, when there is so much hate and harm?

And Jesus looks at us and says, because that is what God does. And I, your Lord, have come for one thing: to invite you to participate in the life of God. 

And in that Life, God weeps for the love of you. God forgives you. God turns the other cheek to you. God refuses to give up on relationship with you, with anyone. And so if you would dare surrender to the fullness of the life of God…then so it will be for you. For all of us. For at last, in Christ, we will see as God sees and we will love as God loves.

You might even say we will become the people that our stacks of greeting cards say we are–that all of those thank you notes and letters of apology and kind greetings are what will endure of us, once everything else is stripped away.

To become the words we long to hear: this is, at its heart, what discipleship is. Like Joseph and Jesus before us, this is our participation in the life of God. It is God’s sentimental, foolish, stubborn, unabashed, greeting-card-worthy love, now pouring out of us. We who are so used to being strategic in our affections, careful in our compassion….Jesus says, no, the Christian life is something else. It is becoming an unashamed collector of heartfelt sentiments. It is stumbling over teetering stacks of forgiveness. It is letting grace accumulate in your desk drawers. It is to die with nothing but little bundles of faithfulness left behind as our legacy. It is the opposite of the way the world works, and that is the entire point.

So with this in mind, I have a proposal for you. It’s rather simple, maybe even silly, but so be it. This week, I propose that you go out and buy a greeting card and send it to someone. Maybe someone in this community you want to acknowledge. Maybe a friend or a family member whom you haven’t talked to in a while. Maybe even to someone you need to forgive,

Whoever it is, send them a card with a little note, saying whatever it is that you need to say. I wonder what would happen if you did. 

It might be that years from now, when most of our other things have fallen apart or been given away, that this part of you will endure. It might be that your notes will still be tucked away somewhere, precious and sacred, a reminder that you were tethered to something, to someone for this brief moment while we navigated the face of the earth together. And that somehow, even with all that is broken all around us, we still fit together, and wept upon each other for love, and at last became the words we longed to hear.

Because God knows: that’s the one thing worth holding onto.

Jackrabbit: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, February 9, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Isaiah 6:1-13 and Luke 5:1-11.

Fun fact about me: at least three or four times, I’ve traveled the remnants of Route 66, that famous old highway which once stretched from Chicago to Los Angeles. A lot of the roadside attractions and cafes and motels from its heyday in the 40s and 50s have been lost to time, but even now it’s a beautiful and worthwhile trip, a sort of pilgrimage road across America, where odd wonders abound.

For example, as you drive across northeastern Arizona, just a bit south of Navajoland, you might notice these signs along the desert highway. They’re ambiguous, just old wooden billboards painted bright yellow, no words, just the silhouette of a big black rabbit and a number of miles counting down. 

150 miles, one sign says…and then 100….and 50….and 10…and as you drive across the empty landscape with not much else to look at, you find yourself overly invested in these mysterious signs, wondering, what exactly are we counting down to? What is that big rabbit all about? What or who is waiting out there across the desert, across the hours and the miles and long, winding road?

So you can imagine that, by the time you get to the end of the countdown, you have to pull off the highway to see whatever this thing is that has been tantalizing, taunting, beckoning you. And as you arrive at the exit, there’s one last sign, bigger than all the rest, still bright yellow like the noonday sun with that big black rabbit and big red letters that spell out, at last, three words: HERE. IT. IS.

That’s all the sign says. Here it is.

And you better believe, like countless travelers before us, we turned off the highway to see what IT is. Nothing would have stopped me. 

And do you know what’s there, shimmering in the desert sun, under the gaze of the big black rabbit?

A gift shop. 

Yes, it’s just a gift shop. Mildly disappointing, perhaps. It’s the Jackrabbit Trading Post and it’s been there since 1949 offering t-shirts and cold drinks and restrooms for all those wide-eyed pilgrims.

But if that sounds underwhelming, fear not. Because there’s also a big statue of a jackrabbit in the parking lot, with a saddle attached to it, that you can mount for a completely absurd photo of yourself. And did I get up on that jackrabbit every single time I’ve stopped there, including when I was 35 years old? You bet your life I did!

Because, well, why not? Maybe the sign is right after all. Here it is, five miles outside of Joseph City, Arizona…as good a place as any to find whatever it is we’ve been looking for in this life. 

As the years go by, I’ve found a sort of contemplative wisdom in that phrase, here it is. Especially when things don’t go quite the way I thought they would.

Bad diagnosis? Bad breakup? Tough election outcome? Before I can act purposefully, I have to start by saying, well, here it is. And, since it has always been true before, I also have to trust that God is not done with me just yet. In the meantime, the best I can do is to just get up on the jackrabbit so to speak, and accept the invitation of the present moment. 

Because here it is, this moment we’ve been given. And there’s still abundant life to be found here. Besides, what I notice so often in Scripture is that that the mildly disappointing and the foolish and the transcendent often converge in surprising ways.

As it happens, we have two such stories in our readings this morning—two call stories where somebody gets less than what they bargained for. Here’s what I mean.

First there’s Isaiah. Forget the billboards, he’s just had a vision of the throne of God, a glimpse of the heavenly court singing the same song we do during the Eucharist, Holy, Holy, Holy Lord. And he’s been touched by the burning coal of truth and he feels ready. HERE I AM he cries out. HERE IT IS! Here is my time to shine, my opportunity to tell the world exactly how powerful God is!

But God says, no. That’s not quite how this works. In fact, the people will not hear you. They will not understand. No, as they tend to do, the people will look for other, smaller, more alluring salvations, the ones promised by the forces of this world with better marketing. No, God says, you, my prophet, you will be left alone in the dry desert, sitting up there on your jackrabbit, the cars whizzing past you. But even though you won’t understand it, I am asking you to get up on there anyway. Here it is.

And then there’s Simon Peter, who sees Jesus perform the miraculous sign of abundant fish at Lake Gennesaret. Peter, like Isaiah, is both impressed and overwhelmed by this show of power, and he tells Jesus, “go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man,” but we can also imagine he’s pretty excited to be in proximity to the One who can do such things. He may feel unworthy, but he wants to be among the inner circle of such a Lord. 

But as we will come to see, Jesus does not end up saving the world through abundant displays of power. The fish thing is a bit of a head fake. Not because God can’t do impressive things, but because Jesus chooses not to, and it’s in the self-limiting, foolish weakness of God that true salvation becomes possible for us all. A Messiah who rides on the back of a donkey, which is not a jackrabbit, but pretty close.

And those, like Peter, who have been counting down the miles til their glimpse of the Messiah, are destined to be mildly disappointed, at least for a little while. But here it is.

God says to all of us still clamoring for an impressive sort of divinity who is nothing more than the satisfaction of our desires—God says, no. That’s not quite how this works. 

I am the God of forgotten things…of forgotten trading posts and forgotten people on the side of the road. I am not in the halls of power and privilege and plenty. I am waiting for you out on the wilderness road, waiting to share a drink and a meal with you, out under the ramshackle sign that says, HERE IT IS. Here is what salvation is, at the intersection of the sublime and the absurd. Waiting for those brave, holy fools who understand that sometimes in this life, you just have to get up on the jackrabbit and go with it. 

And really, we do.

In such a time as we are living through now, friends—a time of political crisis and climate crisis and cultural crisis, when Neo-Nazis are trying to set up their own signs above our highways and when it can feel like we are many miles from home—in such a time as this, we run a great risk as disciples of Jesus.

We run the risk of being so burdened by fear that we lose our ability to respond to the present moment with what it requires: defiant, purposeful joy. We run the risk of letting despair make us small and hard and cynical and incurious, terrified of the future and longing for the past, unable to get on with the somewhat absurd work of hope and love here, now, where it is needed. We cannot let that happen. We will not let that happen here.

At the risk of exhausting the metaphor, we need to get up on the jackrabbit—to clamber up onto the unapologetic foolishness of our proclamation, which is that Christ’s mercy and peace and kindness are more substantive than the evil we see. And even if it’s not as impressive or mighty as some of the other narratives out there, we have to go with it. Because that proclamation is the only thing that will save us.

And as for the ones who try to put up the billboards of hate and fear and petty grievance to lure people in—to them we point to our own unambiguous signs—to the Cross of Christ crucified for love’s sake and to the Risen Christ who defeated hatred for love’s sake, and we say, HERE IT IS. Here is the truth about about this world: foolish and transcendent and sometimes mildly disappointing, yes, but also lovely and good and worth not giving up on. Worth following. Worth looking a bit foolish for.

So, like those who have been called before us, here we are, too, Lord. Here we are, only beginning to understand what You are all about. Here we are, praying and serving and speaking truth and caring for our weary neighbors. Here we are, counting down the miles, trusting your promise, the one that waits for us at the end of the many lonely roads we have traveled.

Here we are, ready to just go with it, ready to speak your name and get up on that jackrabbit and tell the world, tell anyone who will listen—

Here it is. You who have been longing for whatever is on the other side of fear and disappointment. 

Here it is. 

The Other Part: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, January 26, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Luke 4:14-21, Jesus’ teaching in the synagogue at Nazareth.

It was the 5th grade, and I was about 10 years old, and I was enraged. When I tell you the reason, it will sound so trivial, but the stakes of things can feel big when you’re young. 

Here’s the situation: I was in an after-school drama program where we picked a scene from any play to perform for parents and friends. I was really into theater as a kid, and so I took this very seriously. At 10, I was obsessed with Greek mythology (and yes, I know how nerdy that makes me sound, but so it was). And so I’d picked a scene from the ancient Greek tragedy Prometheus Bound for my partner and I, mainly because I wanted to play the role of the Greek god Hermes. It was my 10-year old dream in life to play the part of the Greek god Hermes. Did I mention I was not a particularly popular kid? 

No matter. I’d picked out the scene and it was so good—Hermes, the messenger of the gods, comes to visit the mortal Prometheus, who is punished for stealing sacred fire from Mt. Olympus and giving it to humanity for those mundane things like staying warm and cooking food. And as Hermes, I would get to show up and make a solemn speech about all the ways Prometheus had violated the sacred order of the universe. It was going to be my shining moment as a Greek god!

And then, a nightmare situation: the teacher watched us rehearse and decided that, in fact, I should play Prometheus and the other kid would get to be Hermes. My dreams were dashed. He got to wear the cape and the fancy helmet and I had to be some sad, angry man tied to a chair, ranting and raving about justice. The indignity!

I won’t bore you with all the details, but the short version is that I did indeed end up playing Prometheus in that little scene, and among all the parts I ever played, I think it was the one that stuck with me most. Because what I couldn’t see at the time-what that wise teacher recognized-was that there was something deep within my own heart that needed to be set free by playing the other part. I am grateful, now, that that teacher dared challenge the part in which I had cast myself. 

I wonder, though, friends—I wonder how often we are willing to let ourselves be challenged in the parts we have cast ourselves. I wonder what we do when the truth comes knocking insistently, telling us that we were meant for something more, something different than that to which we have become accustomed? Do we admit willingly, yes, oh, yes, of course, you’re right, my whole life has been built upon a pile of half-understood desires and misinterpreted signs. Or do we, perhaps, become a little bit enraged that someone dares challenge our carefully constructed sense of ourselves? 

Jesus learned something about this in Nazareth after his teaching in the synagogue. Lamentably, our lectionary skips over a big part of this story. Because after saying “this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” Jesus tells his hometown crowd, in so many words, that their understanding of themselves as the only victims, as the only ones who will receive God’s mercy, is completely misguided—because God’s scope of concern includes not just the poor, the captives, and the oppressed on their side of the cultural and political divide, but also the ones they fear and resent. 

Well, after hearing that, they don’t want to just tie him to a rock, they try to throw him off the top of a cliff. Tough crowd. 

But we can’t be too hard on the crowd in Nazareth. Because every single one of us, in one way or another, would benefit from some reflection on the scope of God’s mercy, and how it includes those vastly different from us—and how Jesus’ message requires us to play a part in this world perhaps different from the one we would prefer.

A lot of ink has been spilled this week about the part that the church ought to play in political discourse in our country. The sermon offered by Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde this past Tuesday has generated, shall we say, keen interest among those both in support of what was preached and those outraged by it. 

And it’s true, the mercy of God is outrageous. But what I found interesting in the debate is that there wasn’t much critique of the sermon’s content—which was, after all, taken directly from that useful preaching resource called the Bible. No, the complaint is mostly that it was an inappropriate time or place to say what was said. That it’s not the church’s role to speak into our civic life. That a direct plea for mercy towards the vulnerable, and especially towards those perceived by some as enemies, was a disturbance to the civility of the occasion. And yes, I suppose it was a disturbance of sorts. 

But I hate to have to remind us all, 2000 years on from the death and resurrection of Jesus, but placid civility in support of the current social order is not the primary goal of coming into a church, as much as we have become accustomed to the church taking on that role. 

Really, this whole uproar has helped me realize that the real problem is that too many folks think the church is just there as a sort of spiritual backdrop to their own headlining role in the world. That it’s just The Universe, starring Me and My Opinions. But then there’s that pesky gospel of Jesus Christ, always getting in the way of my good time. 

No matter our outside affiliations, we would all do well to remember the part we are called to play when we step through these doors and into the liturgy–into an encounter with the sacramental and Scriptural presence of the Living God.

We would do well to remember that none of us is the main character in this play, that this is an ensemble piece, and that, whether we are a president or a pauper or Prometheus himself, we dare to come here to consider a power greater than any one of us and to which all of us will be held accountable in the end: the power of love, and truth, and justice, and yes, unfailing mercy, which Scripture teaches is the yardstick by which our lives will be measured.

And so today, as we consider with some urgency the role we and our church are to play in the present moment—on this day I would ask us to consider: do we understand what we are supposed to be about in this place? Do we understand that Jesus doesn’t just draw us here, week after week, to give us a snack and a pat on the head? Do we hear Jesus’ call upon our lives–his disturbing, surprising, humbling, but ultimately transformative invitation–to be like him, to take on his part in the world, to live as he actually lived, to die and rise again with him—liberating the oppressed, healing the sick, bearing good news to the poor, repairing the breach, trusting that love is more powerful than death and more important than mere civility? 

Because the curtain is up now, friends, and the world is waiting for us to act, and the old bit parts we’ve been playing at aren’t going to cut it anymore. If you want untroubled civility….and an unexamined conscience…and an easy peace with the world as it is…then I’d say be careful coming into an Episcopal Church, because you might get more than you bargained for. You might get the whole story about how God loves you and how God loves everything and how God expects us to love each other unconditionally. We’re a whole lot of fun, I promise, but when it comes to speaking truth and living in love, we’re not playing around. Kind of like Jesus.

And it can feel scary sometimes to take on that part, I know. When I am tired and fearful, sometimes, I still say, gosh, God, couldn’t I just go back and play the part of Hermes—couldn’t I just stay aloof, untouched by sorrow, detached from the risks and the mess that love requires? And God sees me, and loves me, and says…no. 

So be it. 

St. Anne, we were meant for a life big enough, bright enough, brave enough to make those old gods on Mt. Olympus shudder. We were meant for the life of Jesus: uncivil and gentle and beautiful and true. And that life is now ours to live out, ours to share, ours to bring to bear upon the public square and in the deepest chambers of our hearts. It is the life we were created for.

It is the role, however surprising, that we and the whole church were born to play. 

The Fire That Never Came: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, January 12, 2025, the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord, at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Luke 3:15-17, 21-22.

I’ve shared with you in the past how, when you live in California, you become acquainted with the risk of wildfire. You make an uneasy peace with it. Much of the year it’s in the back of your mind and then, when the risk level is high, you look nervously towards the hills, wondering if and when something might spark. 

But because you never really know, most days you go about your business and go to work and do the dishes and pay the bills, carving out a sense of normalcy and telling yourself that, if it does happen, if the fire does come, somehow you will manage. Or maybe, in your less noble moments, you just figure it will happen to somebody else.

But the fires do come, in their own cruel time and manner, and it is hard to be prepared when they do. As we’ve seen this week in Los Angeles—as some of you know intimately well through the impact on friends and family members—the fires come without much warning, and they blaze and they creep up upon the homes and lives of people without much regard for their wealth or background or virtues or vulnerabilities. 

They come, these fires, and they do what fires do—they consume. We know already this week of Episcopal churches and whole communities consumed by this most recent set of wildfires. We also know that we are living in a time when human-impacted climate conditions will only continue to increase the likelihood and intensity of such events. The unquenchable fires have come. 

And maybe it’s just me, maybe when you grow up with this threat of flame and smoke, it has a formative effect..but I have to say that, as evocative as it is, I find little that’s romantic or alluring about most of the fire imagery in Scripture. I’m circumspect about declarations, like the one that John the Baptist makes in this morning’s text, about how God will come and burn and consume things for some divine purpose. There is nothing pretty or transcendent about that. Not when you have seen or known what fire can actually do, what it can take.

And yet that imagery is there for us to contend with. John, admonishing the crowds before Jesus’ appearance, warns of a Messiah who will come bearing unquenchable fire to burn up all that is wicked and unworthy. And I get it, he is angered by injustice and wants the people to look a bit nervously toward the hillsides, wondering when their reckoning will come. As prophets often do, he wants them to experience an uneasy peace with the world as they know it. He assumes that God will save the world through a display of vengeance and power, in billows of smoke and flame. 

He is not alone in that, even today. I found a number of news articles this week in which people described the Los Angeles wildfires as “biblical” and “apocalyptic” and as being like a scene from “the battle of Armageddon.” Still, still, even if we don’t want to, we imagine and speak of God working through destructive forces, raining down judgment upon us like ashes, threatening at any moment to take away all that we know, or, in our less noble moments, to come and take from somebody else. 

I wish we could loosen our grip on that fiery imagery somehow. Because I will tell you that so much of why I am Christian, why I was able to give my life over to the way of Jesus, is because of what actually happens in today’s Gospel after John’s dire predictions. 

And it is this: that Jesus, the Son of God, appears in Galilee, the Incarnate Deity appears at last, coming over the hills…but the fire never comes. Not in the way that anyone expected anyway (and Pentecost is a story for another day). 

No, on this day Jesus appears and it is not as a vengeful blaze cresting the ridge, but as a man ready to get down into the water like everyone else. A man ready to come alongside all of us in the uneasy peace we have negotiated with this life. A man who wants us hope for something more than mere escape and to believe in something more than just survival.

And truly, thank God for that. Because I will tell you, my friends, I am tired of fires, and of people who blithely traffic in the language of fire when talking about God and our common life. I am sick of “burn it down” and “let it burn” and of fire & brimstone theologies that devour human dignity in the name of purgation. I am sick of destruction—of bodies and landscapes and souls—and how they are cast as part of God’s saving mission. 

I don’t want to settle for an uneasy peace anymore. I want the peace that the world cannot give, the peace born of water and Spirit. And today we see where it comes from—from the God who stands in solidarity with us in the River Jordan, whose only fire is the one burning in his heart with love. 

Because John, for all his Spirit-inspired wisdom, got this part wrong, and it’s important that we don’t just read past his mistake. There’s a reason, in other versions of the story, that he is actually somewhat dismayed Jesus wants to be baptized with water. There is a reason, later from prison, John asks, are you the one we have been waiting for? 

Because John himself is also discovering, as we must, that the true Messiah, the Christ, is not an inferno coming to gobble up everything we’ve tried to build; God is the one strengthening us and helping us to carry those buckets of water– all that blessed baptismal water–to put out all the fires we ourselves have started on this earth. 

And yes, God will help us separate the wheat from the chaff within ourselves and in our world, but God will do so not through devastation but by the devastating power of his mercy and kindness.

And the thing is, we already know this. We already know, if we stop to reflect on it, where and how God shows up in the world. We know that God is not the one burning the hillsides of Los Angeles or blessing the gunfire in war zones. We know that God is instead with the firefighters and the first responders and the widows and the orphans and the volunteers and the communities of people who are sheltering each other and guiding each other into safety. 

We know that Christ asks us to do the same for each other no matter what landscape we live in or what disasters befall us. We know this, because it is what Jesus demonstrated and proved the value of in his life, death, and resurrection. And we can’t let anyone distort this truth.

No matter what we must navigate in our time and in times to come, no matter how many times the fire looms at the edge of the horizon, we are still, and will always be, the people who proclaim the good news of the one fire that never came—that so-called fiery, angry God who instead appeared in the water, like a falling dove, like a gentle Word, stooping down from the misty heavens to scoop up our fears in his hands and bless them and say,

Peace. I am here. You don’t have to be afraid anymore, you who have been uneasy for so long. Step down into the water with me, where the flames cannot reach.

Drench yourself in love, and let us begin again.