Passion – By Another Road

Purpose, Passion, Practice: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, August 11, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, on the occasion of my one-year anniversary as Rector. The lectionary text cited is John 6:35, 41-51.

In a revelation that will surprise exactly no one, I was a theater kid growing up. My first big role was as an ice cream cone in the 2nd grade Christmas pageant at school. In 3rd grade, I was promoted to a Russian Baker in the Nutcracker; I rocked the chef hat but the dance moves eluded me. Then in 4th grade my big break came: I starred as the Nutcracker himself.

This was a low budget production in a rural California elementary school, so my costume was made out of a long old white silk shirt of my mom’s that she fashioned into a sort of tunic with red tights, and God help me, somewhere there are photos of this. You wouldn’t ever catch me in such an over the top getup these days, but….well…*looks down at vestments* Nevermind!

Anyway, growing up, I loved theater so much—not just being on stage, but the immersive process and culture that surrounded it. The lore and the lingo and all the little traditions of theater people that go on behind the scenes. The bond that you form with the other people working on a production. The sense that, no matter what else is going on in your life—no matter how strange or scary or lonely things might be elsewhere—in this place, doing this thing, you know where you fit. In this place you have a part to play, both literally and figuratively, and other people have your back as your strive together towards a common vision.

What a healing, even saving experience it was, as a nerdy, closeted kid, to be enfolded into a community and a way of life like that.

If you were ever a theater person, you know what I mean. But if not, then still, I hope, somewhere along the way, that you have experienced your own version of a tight knit community of purpose and passion and practice.

Maybe it was a team sport. Or music. Or another hobby or fellowship group that brings you deep joy. I’ve met devotees of bird watching and of stamp collecting and of long distance running and there’s always something so beautiful about the way their faces light up when they talk about this thing, whatever it is, that guides and sustains and challenges them.

And then, of course, there’s church. And church can be complicated.

Now, I will tell you, that one of the primary things that led me to begin serving as your rector exactly one year ago was that, when I got to meet folks from the Vestry and the Search Committee, their eyes also lit up when they talked about St. Anne. I thought—YES, this type of joy and enthusiasm is what we SHOULD experience when we walk into the doors of a church on Sunday morning.

But you and I both know that the church, more broadly, is not always this way. And in some corners of our society, it’s quite the opposite. It is a place where too many people, for a whole host of reasons, experience their faith not as a community of purpose and passion and practice but as some combination of duty, and fear, and anxiety. For them, church can feel like that bad dream people have where you’re on stage and the big spotlight is shining down on you and you forgot all your lines and you just know there’s a trapdoor that going to swallow you up.

But here’s the thing (and it needs to be said out loud): the true purpose of church is not, and should not ever be like that. Church should not be a place that plays into our fears and anxieties. It can be a place where we acknowledge our fears and anxieties, of course, but it should not play into them. It should not exacerbate fear or foster suspicion in our conduct with others.

When you’re a theater kid, you learn to overcome your worst fears and your stage fright because you know that you are part of something bigger than just you, that there is something beautiful worth putting yourself out there for…and church should be the same. At its best and truest, it always has been.

There’s a bit of this in today’s Gospel reading today. Jesus is under the spotlight, he’s been pursued by a group of folks who want to know how he’s going to perform for them, how closely he is going to follow the script of what they are expecting in a Messiah. And they’re not fully convinced. They say, “is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?” He is not nearly mighty or impressive or well-connected enough to topple empires and lead us to victory over our enemies.

And I get it. These people are afraid. They are hungry and tired and afraid. They want someone strong who is going to help them be less afraid of all the big forces in the world they cannot control. God forgive us, we still want that. A sort of typecast strongman messiah.

But here’s the thing about Jesus—maybe one of the most important things about Jesus. He refuses to play that part, because Jesus refuses to let fear be the defining feature of the human experience.

Just as God has been saying throughout all of Scripture (more so than anything else God says in Scripture): Do not fear. Be not afraid. Not because fear isn’t normal or natural—it is—but because fear is not the pathway to the answers we seek. The fearful, vindictive, vengeful warrior is not who God ultimately reveals himself to be, and it is not the role any of us were meant to play either.

If God—and Jesus as God’s Son—wanted to traffic in fear, he would have said to this crowd: I am the Warrior you have been waiting for. I am the one who will get rid of your enemies. I am the one who scorns the people you scorn and hates the people you hate. And they probably would have been thrilled!

But that’s not what he says is it? He says, instead, I am the bread of life. I am the bread of life. I am not a warrior, I am just bread. I am a warm meal at the end of a long day. I am a table with enough seats for everyone. I am nourishment and kindness and a lively, earthy, sacred love. I am the one who is inviting you in to a way of life, not an imperial religion, not an endless series of wars both military and cultural. I am inviting you into a community of purpose and passion and practice. I am not going to play upon your fears. I want to see your eyes light up.

Somewhere along the way, friends, much of the church lost that script, or decided to toss it out. They decided to stage a different sort of production, one that is more about power and control and influence than it is about love and justice and mercy.

But what I love to see, and what gives me undaunted hope—both here in our parish—and elsewhere in the Episcopal Church—and in other parts of the so-called “declining” church—which, by the way, is really just the church getting back to its roots—is that we are reconnecting with that spark of fearless creativity. We are trying new things. We are laying down old prejudices and assumptions. We are asking good questions and admitting that we don’t have all the answers. We are doing it together.

To me that sounds like Jesus, and it is as delightful and delicious as the scent of warm baking bread. And, for me, it is as thrilling as those old theater days when I was a little bit afraid but I realized I was part of something bigger and lovelier and livelier than just me—that I didn’t have to go it alone anymore, that I belonged.

We belong, here. We belong to each other, here. All of us, in this community of purpose, passion and practice that is the church. That is what we are building together here at St. Anne. That is what we are going to welcome people into when they come through our red doors; and when we are out in the community; and when we are talking about our faith with our friends. We are going to say: this is what brings me joy and hope and peace and determination and compassion, and that is enough. That is what the Bread of Life, the Lord of Love, the great I AM came to help us do.

You know it’s funny, the very last play I was ever in, as a senior in college—and I am NOT making this up—included a scene where I had to play a priest. God has a sense of humor sometimes.

But God knows, better than we do, the many roles we will be called to take on, and this, right here, is where we work to discover them. Not as theater people, but just as people. People made for the single greatest role ever written: ourselves, transfigured by God’s love, with light in our eyes.

What If?: A Sermon for Palm Sunday

I preached this sermon on Palm Sunday, 2024, at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The text cited is the Passion narrative in the Gospel according to Mark.

One thing that strikes me, every year, as Holy Week envelops us in the stark power of its narrative, is how inevitable it all feels, this story about Jesus’ betrayal and death. How fixed the trajectory, after lifetimes, after centuries, after millennia of retracing it. It is easy to forget that the story we tell today began so differently.

Just a few months ago, we beheld a baby born in Bethlehem under the chill of starlight, and we heard angel choirs singing of peace, and then we watched that child grow and mature through the soft gloom of the season, and in the slow lengthening of our days through Epiphany, we beheld his light and his life and his love gathering their own brightness, and we have looked for signs of the unfurling promise of his Kingdom, like springtime emerging from the muddy, fertile ground of Lent.

And yet, once more, here we stand on Palm Sunday, only to witness this particular story of God’s goodness cut short again, this particular promise deferred again, the tender green growing palms trampled, again, under the force of misguided adulation; the gently stirring earth soaked, again, not with gentle spring rain, but with blood.

And yet, despite the grave horrors, the enduring shock of what we see and experience in this Passion story, still, I think, we tend to see it as inevitable. As if this brutal end to Jesus’ earthly ministry was somehow the necessary price of his message, as if it were normal for for mothers to mourn their children, as if it were normal for springtime to give way to winter instead of summer. As if this sacrifice was as natural as the turning of the seasons. As if there was no other way the story could have ended.

What if there was?

It’s odd, we rarely seem to ask that question about Holy Week. And it’s especially odd because, for most of us, in our own lives, we spend a lot of time and energy asking “what if?”

What if I had made a different choice? What if I had chosen a different path? What if I had learned from my mistakes sooner? What if we, as a nation or as a community or as a church had chosen another course of action?

Asking these sorts of questions is, most of the time, as natural as breathing.

We are accustomed to “what ifs” because we are faced with a dizzying number of choices every day, and so of course we wonder how else things might have turned out if we had gone a different way.

And yet, when it comes to Holy Week, when it comes to Jesus stumbling on the rocky road to Golgotha, we surrender him to his fate. We surrender our “what ifs” to the violence we know and expect, and we behold the drama as if it were fixed and preordained, the way that it had to be for Jesus to be who he was and accomplish what he did.

Without the suffering of Christ, without the brutality of the Cross (we have often been taught) there would be no salvation, no redemption, no liberation from the brokenness and sin that formed and fashioned the Cross in the first place. And so we have accepted, on some level, that all of this was necessary.

It’s a strange sort of logic that a God of Love would require torture to prove that love. At best, it leaves us to simply shake our heads and shrug at God’s inscrutable will. But at worst, it gives rise to the idea of redemptive violence—a God who inflicts harm upon himself and creation to achieve the ends of peace. Which sounds suspiciously like the tyrants we know, not like the God for whom we long.

And so I wonder if, perhaps, as we move through Holy Week together, we are meant not to accept the inevitability of the Passion as passive observers of Jesus’ pain, but to trouble the narrative, just as our spirits are troubled by it. I wonder if we are meant to ask “what if?”

What if Jesus did not have to die in the way that he did? What if his own predictions of the Passion reflected his deep, grief-stricken understanding of our brokenness rather than some necessary violence inflicted by his Father?

What if none of this had to happen?

What if the crowd chose to listen to his actual teachings? What if they understood, as he entered the city, the subversive symbolism of his ride on the colt for what it was—a challenge to the pageantry of imperial power—rather than projecting their own political agendas onto his actions?

What if his disciples had not forsaken him? What if the temple authorities had kept an open mind, had been humble in the face of things they did not understand? What if Pilate had chosen to be something more than a functionary of the deadly inertia of empire?

What if there had, in fact, been another way for the story to end, another way for Jesus’ undying love to be made manifest and to bless the earth?

We cannot know the answer to these questions, anymore than we ever know the answer to the “what ifs” of our own lives. The story is the story. And we must tell it.

But that is not the point. The point is that we still need to ask the question. We need to ask “what if” during Holy Week, just as we must ask “what if” every time we are faced with violence and pain and prejudice, so that we do not accept these things as somehow normative, somehow determinative, because without “what if,” we will have made an uneasy peace with the crucifying impulses of the world. We will have surrendered our imaginations to the sense of their inevitability.

But what if we didn’t?

What if the God who has repeatedly said “I desire mercy, not sacrifice,” actually meant it, and meant us to expect this from ourselves and our world? What if the brutality of this Passion story is no more part of God’s plan than any of the rest of the suffering we inflict upon one another?

Because when you start asking “what if,” you realize that everything in the Passion narrative is the result of choices, choices made made by people not so different from you and me, choices made, too often, in service to the prevailing order, choices made by people who were as agitated and lost and polarized as we are, people caught up in faltering hopes and flourishing suspicions, people distracted and weighed down by a history of loss, people who also forgot to ask, “what if this was not the way it has to be?”

I tried it this week, asking “what if” as I was reading and wrestling with the story. And there are signs of possibility, thank God, if we look closely. Especially if we look closely at the women.

There’s the unnamed woman with the alabaster jar, who pours out her rare, costly, sweet ointment with the same mixture of wild abandon and care by which God pours his love upon creation. They say it is wasteful, this love and care, and yet she seems to be asking, “what if it’s not?”

And there’s the servant girl who, like a prophet, calls Peter to account for abandoning his true identity, all of his no, no, no, I do not know him. And she seems to be asking, “what if you said yes? What if you did finally, fully, know him and claim him as your own?”

And the women who gather near the Cross to hold vigil with Jesus as he dies, refusing to abandon him to his shame and loneliness. The crowds call it a lost cause, a failed revolution, a big disappointment, but the women seem to be asking, “what if none of that was the point?”

All of these women are the ones who refuse to accept the unfolding trajectory of the story—the ones who see another way, the true Way. They are the ones brave enough to name presence and fidelity, not violence and power, as the strongest force at work in this narrative. They are the ones who are asking, what if this story is not about the myth of redemptive violence that forms its center, but about the quiet, determined insistence of love that flourishes on the margins?

What if the point of Holy Week is not to valorize the story of Jesus’ suffering, but to build a world in which it is the last such story that ever need be told?

What if we realized that the Cross is not the necessary means to an end, that God would have saved us in a thousand different ways if we would have let him, and that he still will?

What if we realized that the only inevitable narrative is not the Passion, but this: that Jesus—and all of us— are loved passionately from the day of our birth, all of us adored by angels under the chill of starlight, loved through the soft gloom of the turning seasons, loved through the lengthening of our days, and loved when we rejoice and loved when we despair and loved even when we die—however we die—and loved, ultimately, back to life.

What if that was the one, true, enduring, necessary story we needed to hear? What if all the rest was up to us?

What if?