Tag: Matthew

Never Too Late: A Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courage: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on December 22, 2019, the fourth Sunday of Advent, at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary texts cited are Isaiah 7:10-16 and Matthew 1:18-25.

I have discovered in recent months that one of the great privileges of a life in ordained ministry is the invitation to be present with people in those deep, delicate moments when life’s urgent mysteries present themselves:

In the act of placing our Lord’s body, hidden in bread, into an outstretched hand;

In the silence between a question asked and an answer given during a vulnerable conversation;

In the prayers offered beside hospital beds or when gathered around tables for meetings and meals;

In the tears and the jokes, the handshakes and the hugs.

There is, for me, no greater joy than to see the infinite iterations of love that flow in and through this parish—in and through each of us who gather here. 

And throughout this Advent, as I reflect on the many ways that love shows up here at Trinity, the word that keeps coming up in my mind is courage.  

Now, courage is perhaps not a word that we might typically associate with the quiet, expectant season of Advent, but courage is something that I see demonstrated in the lives of every person seated here today. As we learn one another’s stories and better understand each others lives, we often find out how much courage is contained in the people around us, in ways we couldn’t have begun to imagine beforehand. 

Courage is something of a misunderstood word. We tend to equate it with showy displays of bravery or strength, as if it is a quality reserved for the fearless and the bold. But the ancient root of the word courage, “cor” simply means “heart”—and so to be courageous is to be full of heart; to let whatever resides in our heart to overflow into our lives and into the world around us. 

And that is what you and I do in our lives as disciples of Jesus—we seek the heart of Christ and cultivate our own hearts to mirror his. We engage in a thousand small, daily acts of courage—of heart-centered action. Most of these acts the world will never notice, but they are, in fact, the very things upon which the flourishing of the world depends. The quiet gestures of attentiveness that sustain our common life.

So if you do not tend to think of yourself as courageous, I have news for you: you are. By getting up each morning and doing the thing that you must do—to offer the care that you must offer, to send up the prayer that you must send, to grieve what you must grieve—you are full of heart. You are full of courage. And, as our texts this morning reveal, God is with you in all of it. 

God with us. Emmanuel. This is the name we hear in Isaiah and in Matthew; and it is not just a name, it is a promise.

It is, in fact, the definitive promise of the entire Biblical narrative: that God is with God’s people, through everything. Through creation, through estrangement, through exile and restoration, through waiting, through weeping, through victory and vanquishment, through the thrill of love and the void of loneliness—God is with us. God is the one who gives us the courage—the hopeful, faithful heart— to face all of it, and God is the one who makes meaning out of all of it. 

For King Ahaz, who was ruling over the kingdom of Judah in a time of political instability, the name and the promise of Emmanuel was the sign he didn’t ask for. For whatever reason, he refused the prophet Isaiah’s offer of an assurance from God.  But God offered the sign anyway, in the form of a baby about to be born whose name-Emmanuel–literally bore the promise of God’s presence. And for the time being, anyway, the people of Judah were safe. God was with them.

Centuries later, as Matthew recorded the story of Christ’s birth, the moment that God appeared to us in human flesh, he drew on this ancient narrative of a baby carrying God’s eternal promise—God’s eternal “en-couragement,” if you will—and connected the name Emmanuel with the name of Jesus.  So it is a name we sing out to this day, especially at this time of year, with fervent hope and gratitude, offering it as the answer to every question that this troubled word might offer.

O come, O Come, Emmanuel. O, Come, O Come, God, to be with us.

This is the heart of our faith: that even when it seems otherwise, we believe that God is with us. That God will always be with us. The prophecy of Isaiah has been and continues to be fulfilled, especially and ultimately through Christ.

God’s name and God’s promise of presence is written on our hearts, and that name and that promise gives us the strength to do what we must do, those everyday acts of courage. Those small, unglamorous, but vital offerings:

the feeding of a hungry mouth,

the wiping of a tear,

the holding of a trembling hand,

the speaking of truth to power. 

In each of these, we find the presence of God.  In their accumulation, we find the significance of our entire lives. 

So yes, in Advent, we are reminded of the big, beautiful things: of God’s promises to us, and how the coming of Jesus Christ fulfills those promises for all time; how the birth of a child who we call Emmanuel will make the mountains sing and the stars dance in the night sky.

But we are also reminded, in Advent, of the humble things, the earthy things, the tender, powerful things that comprise our lives, that fill our periods of longing and waiting, and we are assured that these things are courageous enough, beautiful enough, just as they are. As the offerings of our hearts to God, as the demonstration of our courage, they tell the same story, they bear the same name: Emmanuel.

Because the God who will be with us as an infant in a bed of straw is also the God who is with us as we wait beside the hospital bed; 

the God who is with us as a thundering voice from on high is also the God who is with us when we cry silent tears into our pillow at night; 

the God who is with us as the sovereign of all creation is also with us as we stand in the lamplight of a familiar doorway, being welcomed home. 

So no matter where you find yourself in this season, and in the seasons to come, take courage. God is with you, and within you, working through you. In your waiting, in your wondering. In your pain and in your joy. In every act of love that you give or receive. 

In each of your names, I hear a whisper of his name, Emmanuel. In each of your faces, I see the face of Christ. What a gift we are given, to find God in one another. To be courageous for one another. To love one another. 

This–simply this–is enough.

This–simply this–is everything there is.