prayer – By Another Road

The Lord’s Own Prayer: A Palm Sunday Sermon

I preached this sermon on Palm Sunday, April 13, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Luke’s narrative of the Last Supper, Passion and Crucifixion of Jesus.

When you encounter hard things, sometimes it can be difficult to know exactly what to say. In such moments, our eloquence can crumble, leaving us wide eyed and silent like children.

Palm Sunday is always sort of like that for me. It’s hard to vocalize what it all means, this jumble of praise and fury. I imagine it was even more so for the disciples who watched from afar as their Lord, the Lord, succumbed to the senselessness of his death. I wonder what they said. I wonder what prayer was on their lips as they stood there watching, as he gave himself away, as the sun covered its face and the earth was darkened, its Creator flickering and faltering like a dying star.

I wonder if, in such an impossible moment, those disciples simply grasped at whatever prayer they knew best, as most of us do in desperate times. And for the majority of us, I would suspect the prayer that we know best and turn to is the Lord’s Prayer.

How many times have we prayed it? Impossible to number, like those flickering stars. I couldn’t even tell you exactly when I first learned the Lord’s Prayer. It’s just always sort of been there, rattling around in between my breath and my bones.

I’d suspect though, as reliable as it can be, for many of us, the Lord’s Prayer is almost too familiar We remember the words but forget the meaning. We become dulled to the boldness and intimacy of what it says about God and about being alive to God in this world that births and crucifies us. It is only in moments like this, like today, when all other words fail us, that the Lord’s Prayer returns to mind, like a life raft.

I’ve been thinking about the Lord’s Prayer lately for two reasons. The first is because, with the ups and downs of the world as it is, I sometimes need a life raft as I struggle to express whatever tempest of feelings fills my heart. In such instances, sometimes the old, familiar words are all I have to offer up. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.

The second reason, though, is because, as I was spending time this week with Luke’s narrative of the Last Supper and the Passion and the Crucifixion that we just heard, I realized something that I hadn’t before: woven into this narrative, like a hidden scaffolding that holds together Jesus’ final days, are all the elements of the Lord’s Prayer. In fact, if you look closely, you realize that Jesus quotes or enacts the prayer directly throughout the Passion narrative.

So let’s refresh our memory. Earlier in Luke, Jesus has taught his disciples to pray in this way:

Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven. Give us each day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. And do not bring us to the time of trial.

And then, in today’s story, as we just heard, he does and says again all the things in this prayer. He gathers with his disciples and gives them bread. And he prays near the Mount of Olives, crying out to his Father who is in heaven and says, your will be done. And he asks his disciples, multiple times, to pray that they would not come into the time of trial. And then, finally, with his dying breath, he seeks forgiveness, for everyone. It is the Lord’s Prayer, every single piece of it.

In this Palm Sunday story—in the culmination of his earthly ministry—we see Jesus living the very same prayer he has been teaching. He is walking the walk. When he is experiencing his own pain, and fear, and doubts about why it all has be like this, and why people do what they do, and whether the ones he loves can carry on when he is gone, when in effect he has run out of anything else to say or know, he, too, falls back into the familiar words:

Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.

And although it is a painful story; and although we are living through painful times, I find a sort of hopeful symmetry in the realization that God is praying the same prayer that God wants us to pray.

I find it rich with possibility and power, even, that when we call to mind those familiar old words, we are not just reciting something memorized as a child, but that we are somehow part of God’s own eternal prayer.

And that God, from the time before all our senseless crucifixions, from the very beginning, God has been offering himself to Creation in prayer, calling us by our names, seeking for earth and heaven to be one, desiring to give us bread and love and forgiveness.

I believe that God is still praying that prayer, today and every day, because God’s heart breaks not just for the Passion of Jesus, but for the passion and pain of every one of us who have trod the path of crumpled palms and broken dreams, hosannas caught in our throats, unsure of the words to speak.

Yes, with us and for us, Jesus is praying this prayer in Holy Week, and in the many hard, holy weeks that comprise our lives. The Lord’s Prayer is the Lord’s own prayer, you see. God is alongside us in the praying this week, and has been forever. And when we call to mind those familiar words, God is reflecting them back to us, saying,

My Child, who art of the dust,

Blessed is your name to which I call.

My kingdom is coming, so that our wills can be one

On earth as it is in heaven.

So eat the bread I give. It is more than enough for all your days.

And forgiveness is already yours if you receive it

And share it freely.

We have been through many trials and temptations together,

You and I,

But I have never left you.

And those things that are past will never define you,

because your deliverance is already at hand.

So take my hand.

In the same way that the Lord’s Prayer shapes and guides Jesus’ path to the Cross, I pray that this Holy Week will shape and guide your path through whatever you are facing in life. This week will reveal everything that Christianity is actually about, beyond the noise and the politics and the culture wars. It is the week when we learn what walking the walk really looks like.

Come and wade deep into these waters as much as you possibly can. We will watch, and listen, and grieve, and celebrate and yes, we will pray the Lord’s Prayer many times over, and all of this—all that Jesus is and all that he gives and all that he loses and all that he transforms—will become the hidden scaffolding of our souls, strengthening us for whatever might flicker or falter.

Because beneath and beyond the clamor and the confusion and the crumpled palms and the wide-eyed silences, only one thing abides, only one thing really can, in the end, be true:

The Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory are God’s. Now and for ever.

And to that I can only say, Amen.

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.

Get Up: A Sermon

So, a confession—and one that for some reason always feels a little bit awkward for a priest to make: I am NOT a morning person. Not even in the slightest. I admire and honor the morning people out there among you; I think it’s probably a beautiful thing to have those extra, slightly quieter hours at the outset of the day. I understand this intellectually. But my body does not agree.

I get up when I must, but I’m not happy about it, and it’s a slow process of reanimation. Eventually, at some point after my morning coffee, I am ready to rejoin the land of the living.

People sometimes seem surprised by this; maybe they have an idea that priests are up every day with the rising sun chanting the Psalms. And maybe some of my fellow priests do indeed do that, but not me. I am a night owl, and it’s usually late at night that I am especially inclined to talk to God and reflect and pray. The prayer office of Compline, the one said just before bed, is my absolute favorite.

I make this confession to you because, on one hand, it’s always good to remember that we are all simply human beings trying to make it through the day in whatever way we can, whatever clock our bodies are on.

But also because I realized, pondering the readings for this All Saints Day, that I have a kindred spirit—a new patron saint for those like me who are not always ready to greet the dawn. It is poor Lazarus, who was, by John’s account in the Gospel, not prepared to get up when and how he did.

Think about it. You have died and, presumably, are resting peacefully in the arms of God. And then all of the sudden someone rolls back that stone and lets all the light in and starts calling, “Lazarus, come out!”

My mom used to do this when I was a kid—she’d come into the bedroom and pull open the blinds and say, Phillip, get up, we’ve got things to do!! And I would grumble and groan.

And yes, I know the raising of Lazarus is a miracle of the highest order, a sign that Jesus is indeed the Son of God, but still, the not-morning people like me might empathize a little with Lazarus stumbling out into the daylight, a bit confused and rough-looking, not quite ready to face whatever this is. This new day. This new, changed life. Maybe he just wanted five more minutes of rest, first, before embarking on existence as a saint raised from the dead.

Lazarus, in his sleepy disarray, with the smell of the burial shroud and the bandages all askew, is a comfort to me, because he reminds me that sainthood, ultimately, is not about having it all together. It’s not like those senior superlatives that show up in the high school yearbook—most likely to succeed, best dressed, best personality. Lazarus, coming out of the tomb, would not have won any prizes.

No, sainthood ultimately is about Jesus, about what Jesus does in our very ordinary, imperfect, complicated, exhausting lives, even when we hit the snooze button a few too many times or burn our tongues on the coffee or run a few minutes behind our best intentions.

Lazarus doesn’t get mentioned much more in the Gospels—as far as we know, he didn’t lead a revolution or work any miracles of his own. He just…got up when Jesus called him and returned to his family and did his best to get on with life. And that was sainthood. That’s a low bar that I feel like I can get over, even on my worst days.

All Saints’ Day is one of the glorious feasts in our church year, but we should not be overly confused about or intimidated by saints, or feel like they are these remote, pious figures with their hands perpetually clasped in prayer.

They were and are human beings, with all their idiosyncrasies, living through eras just as complicated and challenging as our own, if not more so. Really, what distinguishes them is simply that God called out to each of them and said, “it’s time to get up. We’ve got things to do. Come on out, wounds and bandages and all, and let’s face the world together.”

And the plot twist is that God is doing the exact same thing to you and to me every day of our lives. Maybe you don’t have actual trouble getting out of bed, like me, but we are all, at times, a little hesitant to open our eyes, to step out into the bright light and the crowd and the fray, with all of the world’s questions and uncertainties and dangers and demands. We might think it would be easier to turn over and go back to sleep, to let someone else handle it, whatever it is. To trust that God will call on someone else.

And maybe God will, or maybe God won’t. But the question is—what will we never see, what life will we miss out on, what new glory might never be revealed in us, if we just stay curled up in the dark?

You don’t have to be full of undaunted courage and untroubled certainty. Lazarus was literally still half-dead, couldn’t even speak. But he pulled himself up on those aching bones and even though he didn’t say a word, his heart said yes, Lord, ok, Lord, I am a mess, and I haven’t had my coffee yet, but yes, I’ll come out. I’ll take part in whatever this new thing is that you are doing.

And with just that, he was a saint.

My friends, the world needs more saints like Lazarus. We need more imperfect people willing to stand up and step out, just as they are, to bear witness to the all-powerful love that is God’s message for all people. We need more people willing to stand up and say, death and division and enmity and cynicism and hatred and exclusion are NOT the last word of the story, and we will not roll over and we will not pull the covers up over our heads while the world weeps. No. Jesus says come out, we’ve got things to do, and so we’re gonna come out, at every hour of the day, to be the messengers and agents of his undying love.

And because we are Episcopalians, yes, we will say our prayers and drink our morning coffee to help us along the way. And woe to anyone who stands in the way of a bunch of Episcopalians hyped up on caffeine and God’s love—death and tyranny themselves are going to run in the other direction!

I know that there is a lot that weighs heavily right now. I know we’re all stressed out, and maybe like Mary and Martha we’re wondering why Jesus isn’t showing up when and how we want him to. Maybe we are afraid of what a new morning will bring.

But listen. Listen closely. Jesus is calling out. He is saying, open your eyes. He is saying, I am here, and I am asking you—yes, you—now, to get up, to come out, to brush off the dust and wipe away the tears and the sleep from your eyes and LIVE. For your own sake, for the sake of the ones who came before us, and for the ones who will follow long after we are gone, LIVE fully, and generously and openly, and lovingly. Live in pursuit of justice. Live in the practice of peace. Live as if God is real and death is a lie, because it is so. Live as though the opportunity to love is the best reason for getting out of bed in the morning, because it is so. And then you will be counted among the saints.

Because that’s all sainthood is, in the end. An accumulation of choices to get up every day and love something or someone fiercely.

And it is God saying, when all is said and done, at that dawn of a new and eternal day—yes, my child, yes, you understood. Love is all there was to it.

Get up. Open your eyes. Good morning.

Mercy: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, August 4, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is 2 Samuel 11:26-12:13a.

People sometimes ask the question, if you could have dinner with any one person, living or dead, who would it be, and why? And usually the answer we give is a celebrity or some other interesting figure from history—somebody fun or fascinating. Mine would probably be either Rowan Williams, the theologian and former Archbishop of Canterbury…or Dolly Parton. And that probably tells you all you need to know about me!

But this morning I have a different question for you…and it’s maybe a little bit of a harder one: If you could make amends with any one person in your life, living or dead, who would it be? If you could sit down across from just one person and know that somehow, the breach between you could be repaired, the fence mended, the hostility put to rest…who would you pick? Imagine, for just a moment, what that would feel like.

Imagining such a thing can be a tender, even painful sort of moment…especially if we feel that this is not a realistic possibility. I can think of a few people who were once in my life that I wish, somehow, I could get another chance to say the thing I never said, or to take back the thing I did say.

But that pang in the stomach, that sense of longing for reconnection…it’s good to be reminded of it from time to time. I would say it’s necessary, even, in our life as Christian disciples. Because that pang, that longing, is indicative of a fundamental part of our faith. It’s a part that we don’t talk about a lot, because it can get overlooked in our conversations about love or justice or wisdom or truth. And that fundamental thing is mercy.

Mercy is an somewhat misunderstood concept. It is not just what a judge offers to a criminal, or some sort of favor bestowed the unworthy. It is far humbler, and gentler and more mutual than that. Mercy is the softening of the heart that takes place when we truly, fully see each other. It is the thing that makes reconciliation possible.

For me, mercy is like that feeling when your aching bones and tired mind sink into a warm bath at the end of the day, when there is nothing left to give or to prove or to hide. Mercy is like slipping under cool sheets and falling asleep beneath the untroubled, drifting stars. It is the remembrance of the fundamental kindness that holds all things and all people together.

And the desire to take part in mercy is what prompted you to think of that one, seemingly inaccessible person. It’s that part of ourselves that longs to say to the ones we’ve lost and the ones who’ve hurt us, I see now, I see YOU now, and I feel seen by you now, and so now let us rest in the silence of what we have seen, of the price that was paid, of what is forgiven, and of whatever it is that waits for us on the other side of regret.

This sort of mercy is important. And it’s essential, actually, if we hope to begin to understand the Gospels and the many complicated stories that are given to us in Scripture. Without mercy, they can seem more like a series of vivid, sometimes frightening dreams. But with mercy—it all begins to make a bit more sense.

For example, consider the reading from 2 Samuel. I promised you last week that we would get the rest of the story—David’s comeuppance after his seduction of Bathsheba and his plot to kill her husband. And today we see it. The Lord sends a prophet to David and, by way of a parable that contrasts mercy and hard-heartedness, he gets David to unwittingly pronounce judgment on himself.

You are the man, the prophet Nathan says—you are the man without mercy. You are the one who has tramped on the vulnerable! You are the one who has forgotten who you are! Where is the old David, the one with the gentle light in his eyes? Where is the young shepherd who would not hurt even the smallest lamb? Where is the brave young man who stood up to terrible giants? When did you, David, decide that you were now a terrible giant yourself?

And, even though he has done horrific things, and even though he will eventually pay a dear price for them, David understands. He sees his failure. And he seeks God’s mercy. “I have sinned against the Lord,” he says, and this one sentence is the key to the story—the softening of his heart, the crack in his defensiveness, the one thing that makes healing and reconciliation possible again.

Without mercy, this would just be a story of a violent king and an angry God. But with mercy, it is a reminder that even in our worst moments, God refuses to forsake us. God will always call us back to the most innocent and compassionate and tender version of ourselves.

Because sometimes that one person we wish we could sit across from and make amends with is simply an earlier version of ourselves. And in such moments, mercy begins with recognizing how far we have strayed from the person we thought we were, or the person we once hoped to be.

Mercy, for David, is being able to look at himself and to say, I see now, God. I see YOU, now, God, and am seen by you, God. Every part of me: the terrible king I’ve become and the gentle child I once was. Come what may, let me not forget this seeing, God. Let me sing Psalms about this seeing. Let me not forget how you called me back to myself, how you reminded me that the best parts of myself are not lost entirely.

My friends, if we hope to make any sense of the Bible, and of what it means to follow Jesus, and what it must look like to navigate the troubled times in which we live, I will tell you this: mercy is the key. Not being right all the time. Not being the strongest or the most impressive. Not winning the game or the prize, whatever that is. It’s just mercy.

Mercy is the only thing that will lead not just to change in our world, but transformation of our world. And it begins, as most things do, within each of us.

If you are wondering how on earth to begin, or how to engage in the practice of mercy, here and now, I have a very practical exercise for you—one I read about in a book many years ago. It’s simple but powerful, and it goes like this:

This afternoon, or this evening, or whenever you have a few quiet minutes to yourself, I want you to call to mind that person you thought of a few minutes ago. The one that is distant from you. Imagine them, as vividly as you can, at their happiest or healthiest. Imagine them as God might see them, before the hurt, beneath the pain and fear. Imagine yourself the same, the two of you sitting across the table, both of you at your best.

And then, just for a few minutes, imagine what you would say to them.

Maybe it’s, I forgive you.

Maybe it’s, please forgive me.

Maybe it’s, I don’t know how to forgive you just yet, but I’d like to someday.

Maybe it’s, I know you tried your best.

Maybe it’s just, I don’t understand why it turned out the way it did between us but I wish it were different.

And I see you, now.

And I wish you peace.

Maybe you can imagine them saying something back. Or maybe not. It’s ok either way.

And then rest in the silence. And know that, somewhere, somehow, in this imagined conversation which is a sort of prayer, that a small seed of mercy has taken root in your heart and has been released into the world.

Try it sometime. I’d love to hear how it goes if you do. And with practice, maybe it will even empower you to have a real-life conversation like that with someone when the time comes. And God will be glad.

Because what I believe, fundamentally, is that if you asked God who he’d like to sit across the table from and make amends, it’s you, and me, and all of us. God is hoping for some version of this conversation each week at this Eucharistic table, so that he can say to us, yes, I see now, I see you, now, I long to be seen BY you, that you might slip into my love like a warm bath and slide under the cool sheets to sleep an untroubled sleep.

And then you will understand that this was always the key to every story, this was always the dream written in those silent, drifting stars, this was alway the word written upon your soul to call you back to yourself and to one another:

Mercy.

Speak it, and practice it, and it will tell you all you need to know.

The Edge of Knowing: An Advent Reflection

I offered this reflection as part of a contemplative retreat on Saturday, December 3rd at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The theme of the retreat was Be Born in Us: Preparing for the Advent of Christ.

In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leapt in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leapt for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.’ -Luke 1:39-45

Imagine: two women stand, side by side, at the edge of the world.

Behind them, receding from view, the conventional lives that they expected—lives of predictable joy and predictable sorrow, all held safely within the boundaries of what they already understood. Behind them, now, the future that they had been preparing for—the one that the world had prepared them for from their earliest days.

Here they stand, bearers of good news carried on the lips of angels. Here they stand, backs turned on all of those old certainties, facing instead toward a great unknown.

True, the villagers in this unnamed Judean hill town might just see two women like any other, shoulder to shoulder, staring out at nothing in particular. Hands instinctively resting upon their bellies. Two regular women, pausing to catch their breath, perhaps, caught up in a memory, or a daydream, or a question.

And why has this happened to me? asks Elizabeth.

They might still look the same as before, but inside, it feels as though they are standing at the edge of the earth, at the edge of a wide and restless sea, knowing that whatever must come next is out there beyond the solidity of the ground beneath their feet. But how does one step out into the unknown? How does one learn to walk on water?

The sun is coming out. The light is bright in their eyes.

Are they weeping? Are they laughing? Maybe both? Who can say?

But at the very least, they are willing.

Yes, let it be done according to your word. Blessed are we among women.

For Mary and Elizabeth, one just beginning her life and one late in her years, there is a new type of kinship on this day. Not just one of blood, and not just because they both find themselves unexpectedly bearing a child in their womb.

No, they are kindred spirits in this moment because they, like so many others before and after them, have come to the edge of what they know, of who they thought they were, and now must ask themselves:

How do I prepare for whatever comes next?

How do I prepare for the things nobody told me about? The things I could not have seen coming? How do I prepare for the bottom dropping out, for the unimaginable news at the door?

And how do I prepare for God, who comes like a thief in the night, making off with my comforts and my complacency, leaving me instead with strange, shadowy miracles and a song on my lips, only half-understood?

How do I prepare when I could not have ever prepared for this?

These, ultimately, are questions for all of us. And at their heart, they are Advent questions.

Because Advent, far from simply being a cozy, quiet season ahead of Christmas, is actually a season of learning how to live with that which is unknown and unresolved in our hearts and in our world.

It is the season of waiting and of preparation for Christ, but it is also the season that reminds us that preparation only brings us so far, because what lies ahead—the fullness of who God will be for us, who God will ask us to be for Him—is inevitably surprising and more expansive and more wondrous than we can imagine. It demands all, even as it redeems all.

What will be revealed to us, Lord, when you arrive? What will be revealed about us when you arrive? How can we ever prepare ourselves for you, when you are so much more than we understand?

And yet, even as we ask such unanswerable questions, even as we stand facing the unknown, there is new life stirring within us, leaping with joy at the promise of His appearing.

So we come here today to ask such questions, to notice this joy, to find kinship with Mary and Elizabeth: to dare to believe that God can indeed be born in each of us, even if we feel utterly unprepared for that to be possible. Even if it scares us a little bit.

It should scare us a little bit, if we’re honest. The truly important things always do.

I invite you to consider what you need this year during Advent—if there is a prayer or a question on your heart in this season of your life. I invite you, right now, to take a moment and close your eyes and call it to mind.

Feel the significance of that need or prayer or question within you, how your body holds it. Is it light? Is it heavy? Is it comforting? Is it unsettling?

What is God calling forth from within you?

My hope is that you will carry that intention with you in this season, that you will spend some time being very honest with God and with yourself—that you will consider what it is that you need, and who you are becoming, and that you will name these things—whether in conversation with others or in the silence of prayer with God.

Because the strange thing is that even if we cannot perfectly prepare for the unknown future, it is in knowing God and ourselves more deeply, and in knowing one another more deeply, that we will be able to bear it, whatever comes, whenever it comes.

Even if, sometimes, it feels like you are standing at the edge of the world, remember that you are not standing there alone. You are in solidarity with Mary and Elizabeth and with every person who has ever longed to let the powerful love of God be born in them, to transform them, to take them out beyond certainty, beyond complacency, into the wide and eternal mystery of grace.

Today we step out upon those waters, trusting that they will hold. Trusting the spirit of God who lives and moves within us. Trusting that the life of God which we carry will ultimately carry us.

For this is, in the end, how we truly prepare: by being bearers of love. By letting God’s love be born in us each day, no matter what happens. Standing side by side in the light of sun, facing forward, saying yes, saying come, saying even though I will never be ready, I am willing. Blessed are we. Blessed are we.

Are we weeping? Are we laughing? Maybe both? Who can say?

But we are willing. Yes, whatever comes, let us be willing.

Small Things: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, October 9, 2022 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary text cited is 2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15 and Luke 17:11-19.

I don’t know why, exactly, but fall is a season when I start to reflect on the past — something about the approach of holiday traditions and the winding down of the year and the brilliance of the autumn leaves lends itself to the sharpening of particular memories. These recollections waft on the air like woodsmoke, sweet and sharp, occasionally stinging the eyes.

And it’s interesting—I don’t know if this is true for you, but I have noticed that when I am looking back on life and remembering things and people and places that are long gone, long past, my most vivid memories are of very small things, very particular little details, rather than one big grand narrative playing out in my mind.

I might suddenly recall the sound of my dad’s laughter one afternoon in late September when I was 15, or the particular way my grandmother carved a chicken on Sunday afternoons, or the scent of the gardenias my mom used to buy on the way home from work when I was a little boy.

All ordinary things, unremarkable, perhaps, to an outside observer, but nonetheless these are the little things that stick, that signify meaning, long after the worries and speculations and fantasies of the past have faded away. I don’t remember most of the conflicts and longings and unsatisfied desires that seemed so important when I was 12 or 22, but I can recall with crystalline specificity the small moments of beauty and kindness and care that have been strewn along the path of my life.

This suggests to me that it is, in the end, these small things that imbue our lives with significance, with holiness, with hope. And it is these small things that are vessels of God’s grace, far more than the big concerns and bold plans that so often preoccupy our imaginations.

We may have great expectations, but it is the small things that sustain us. It is the small things that save us.

But this isn’t always easy to see. Naaman, the mighty general seeking a cure for his leprosy in today’s reading from 2 Kings, doesn’t quite understand the value of small, ordinary things, or perhaps he has simply forgotten it in all of his conquering and striving to be important. He is a man burdened by disease, but he is also burdened by the sense of his own significance, and so he presumes that any healing he might receive from the prophet Elisha will come at great cost and will arrive with great dramatic impact. No humble, commonplace treatments for this man. And so he loads up his treasures and his servants and his other accumulated defenses and brings them to Elisha’s door, ready for anything.

For anything, that is, except for the rather anticlimatic thing that actually happens. Elisha, in his wisdom, doesn’t even come outside, and instead simply sends out a message Naaman: go take a bath in the river.

Imagine having come all that way, with so much build-up, with your whole entourage looking on expectantly, and then being asked to take a dip in an unremarkable, muddy body of water. Naaman, who expects so much more of himself and of the world, is offended by the simplicity of it all. Surely that can’t be it? Surely this God of Israel, if he is so powerful, would reveal his works in a more impressive way? Surely healing requires something more than this? Surely, after I have suffered so much and traveled so far, salvation cannot come from such a small thing?

We might laugh a bit at Naaman’s pride and his self-importance, but I also have to say I relate to his disappointment a little bit. I look back at my life, and I look around at the problems facing our world today, and I know what it feels like to be overwhelmed by the magnitude of longing for a big and decisive answer. I know what it feels like to want a dramatic solution, to yearn for God to appear in glory and make it all better, make it all clear, to lift us up from the mud and the misery.

So maybe I, too, would be frustrated by the instructions to go bathe down in that mud instead. Maybe I, too, would just want to pack it in and go home. Because I confess that some days I get tired of meager solutions to big problems. I get tired of relying on small things when the grief of the world is so big.

Maybe somedays you get tired, too. Naaman would certainly understand if you do.

But then, at the moment when all hope seems to be lost, another small thing: this time it is the voice of one of Naaman’s servants, the voice of practical wisdom—

“if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when all he said to you was, `Wash, and be clean’?

In other words, yes, the journey has been long, and the outcome may be uncertain. But it can’t hurt to do the small thing that is asked of you in this moment. And, in fact, it may be that finding hope in such small things, believing in the power of small things, is more reflective of God’s purposes than any dramatic solution. Why that might be, I cannot say for sure. I only know that I remember my father’s laughter, and my grandmother’s hands, and the scent of my mother’s gardenias in the cool of the evening, and that these things matter more than I can say.

They matter in the same way that it matters that God offers us himself in the frail body of a man, and in a morsel of bread and in a sip of wine. It seems that he longs for us to love the small things, to submit ourselves to their humble grace. He asks us, like Naaman, and like the grateful Samaritan healed by Jesus, to remember that when we encounter love and beauty, no matter how simple or small, we are seeing God.

He is in the muddy waters and in mended bodies. He is in the gifts we share with one another. He is in the moments when we remember to say thank you. He is in everything, every small thing, holding the universe together with love.

Naaman does, of course, eventually take Elisha’s advice. He strips off his many layers of armor and submerges himself in that muddy water and emerges, the text tells us, with flesh appearing as it did long ago, skin gleaming like when he was a young boy. When he himself was a small thing: bright, laughing, free.

And perhaps that is the mystery of love: not only that it flourishes in small things, but that it distills us back down to smallness ourselves, like children, sloughing off our grief and our delusions of grandeur, leaving only our essence, our innoncence, our intense and enduring joy.

Can you remember what that felt like, back when you were small, too? Can you remember that version of yourself, back through the turning of the seasons? Can you remember when you believed in simple things, when love was not a memory, but an ever-present gift, as numerous as the autumn leaves?

God, help us to remember.

No Regrets: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, March 6, 2022, the First Sunday in Lent. The lectionary text cited is Luke 4:1-13, Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness.

We inhabit an unsettled moment. That statement is true on many different levels, but in this instance I am referring to something deeper and more elemental than the news headlines. I am thinking instead about the changing of the seasons that accompanies our entry into Lent in the northern hemisphere. Amid the turbulent moods of early spring, when we are caught up in the vacillating space between ice and dewdrops, between dirt and blossom, between the cradle and the Cross, there is a keener sense perhaps, of the fertile mix of decay and growth that characterizes our lives on this earth. On Ash Wednesday, the cold mud of winter was imprinted on our brows, and eventually on Easter Day we will convulse with joy among the fields of lilies, but for now we are held in the tension of the time-being, suspended in the middle of frost and flower, mortality and miracle.

Lent is the pungent season when life and death speak to one another. Too often we keep these two realities isolated in separate corners of our minds, so it is good for us to listen to their conversation over the next several weeks, to notice how life and death layer upon and fertilize the other, both in the Liturgy and in the world around us. Lent is when this life—the delicate, earthy existence we have been given—is brought into clarity and focus by accepting its brevity and, indeed, sometimes its cruelty and brokenness. But it is also a season for celebrating that life, for rediscovering the urgency of living deeply and well while we have the chance, before it is too late, and we go down to the dust once more.

There was an article that became popular online several years ago, written by a hospice nurse. In it, she reflected on the conversations she’d had with the countless people she’d cared for in the final weeks and days of their lives, and she shared the top five regrets that people expressed as they prepared to die. They were as follows:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

And while these five regrets might not be true for every person in every time and place, I think they are striking, because they point to the heart of the things that matter when everything else falls away, when there are no illusions left to hide behind, when the wind blows cold across the bare fields and we remember the trace of that muddy cross on our brow. We might say they are the insights of a Lenten spirit, from the passage between life and death, the unadorned space between the seasons of the soul.

And they reveal that when we die, the thing we might grieve the most is simply that we never allowed ourselves to truly live. That we didn’t connect with others. That we didn’t connect with our deepest selves. And that, having been tempted by other distractions, we might face the great mystery of eternity without having deeply savored the great mystery of now.

God knows this is our struggle. God has always known this. And that is why, I suspect, we see the same struggle woven through God’s own life among us in Jesus. Consider today’s gospel passage from Luke, when Jesus is compelled by the Holy Spirit to enter the wilderness and submit to the temptations that humanity has always faced—the temptation to control our own destiny rather than trust in God’s providence, to adorn ourselves with the false security of power and prestige and material comfort; to laud safety and strength rather than vulnerability and humility.

These were the same temptations that Israel faced in the wilderness and again when they reached the Promised Land. They are the same temptations that each of us must contend with in our own particular way. And if and when we succumb to them, the result is the same—disconnection, distrust, inauthenticity, the cultivation of a brittle and strident spirit, and then, at the end, a litany of sorrows that might sound something like:

I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard. I wish I’d expressed my feelings. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

But Lent is an opportunity to pull back from this trajectory in our own lives. And Jesus, in a Lenten moment of his own in this Gospel, shows us how to do so. He faces the temptations of the devil—those temptations to pattern his life in self-serving ways, to become something that he is not, and he chooses, instead, to be exactly who he is, exactly who his Father wills him to be. Which is to say, he chooses relationship, he chooses simplicity, he chooses depth, he chooses trust, he chooses love. And the words he speaks are a ray of light burning away the frost, a budding promise to us, even now, as we wait for the spring:

One does not live by bread alone.

Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.

Do not put the Lord your God to the test.

Simple, ancient words, drawn from the Hebrew Scriptures. True words. Words that are almost like a death, in that they remind us of the fleeting nature of most of the things we fixate upon and obsess over, and instead call us back to what is eternal. These are the words that allowed Jesus to stay focused on who he was, and they can do the same for us whatever our journey looks like. They are the words that invite us to a life—and a death—that is the opposite of regret.

How do we get there? How do we live as Jesus chose to live? How do we die as Jesus chose to die?

1. Have the courage to be yourself. Abide deeply in the love that is inside of you, the love that God gave you to share with others.

2. Don’t work so hard, at least not for the things we usually give away our lives for. Work for God’s kingdom, and rest in knowing that you don’t have to do it all by yourself. You were created for wonder and praise more than you were for achievement.

3. Express your feelings. Jesus certainly did. Don’t be afraid to be vulnerable, to be wrong, to show your weaknesses, because they are part of what will save you. We worship a God who was crucified before he was glorified.

4. Stay in touch with your friends, and with all of the important people in your life. They are the most likely place where you will experience the love of God firsthand, and are thus the true treasures of this world.

5. Let yourself be happy. Let yourself love this imperfect world, whether it’s deep winter or glorious spring or the messy middle with all of its unanswered questions. Let yourself be dazzled by the mystery of existence, by the mystery of God’s love, embrace it while you live, and then you will regret nothing, because you will experience everything.

This is the life Jesus chose in the wilderness. This is the life he invites to choose. And this is the strange, holy, in-between season where we must make our choice. This is Lent.

And so here we stand, with a trace of mud on our brow, leaning into the light; children of the broken earth, children of God. Tempted, yes. Stumbling, sometimes. Seeking, always.

But loved, always loved, in death and in life, in winter, and in spring, and in the glorious mystery that is beneath and beyond all seasons.

And with a love that powerful, that eternal, that true, there is nothing to regret.

Transfixed: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, February 27, 2022 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary text cited is Luke 9:28-36, an account of the Transfiguration.

Like many of you, I have been transfixed by the images coming out of Ukraine the past several days. I was transfixed by the video clips of parents kissing their children goodbye. I was transfixed by the story of a young couple who got married one day and signed up to defend their city the next. I was transfixed by the images of people sheltering in subway stations last night, the thought of lives upended and ended, and of the incomprehensibility of yet another needless war blighting the face of God’s beloved creation. I have been transfixed by the question: what now? What next?

I use that word, transfix, intentionally. It means “to make motionless with amazement, awe, or terror,” and in the face of the brutalities that too often characterize life in this world, I do sometimes find myself shocked into motionlessness. I find myself without words or insights or any idea how to meaningfully respond. My prayer this week has been little more than silence and variations of, “Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy.” Even the beautiful language of the Prayer Book has felt dry and heavy on my tongue.

It is easy to feel this way when we are inundated with challenging news. Ukraine is the latest iteration of the world’s grief, but in this interconnected planet, I think we are more keenly aware than ever of the collective heartbreak of the human family. We’ve faced our share of it together in the past few years. And it can feel, some days, like too much to process. Like my heart and my mind can’t hold it all. And so I am simply transfixed.

But our generation is not alone in this experience. As I reflect on all of this, I feel some connection to Peter and John and James in today’s gospel—up on the mountain to pray, they see something incomprehensible—the figures of Moses and Elijah appearing in glory, speaking with Jesus, who is himself visibly changed in some mysterious way. And while we might tend to think of this as an exciting and beautiful vision, in truth it was terrifying and overwhelming for the disciples. It was too big for them, not something they were prepared to process.

I have an icon in my office of this scene, and in it, the disciples are not gazing placidly, reverently up at Jesus and Moses and Elijah. They are falling back in shock, tumbling down the mountainside, as if they are in the process of being struck dead.

Luke describes their state of being while all of this was going on by saying “Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep.” They were tired. They were frightened. We might say that they were transfixed. And so I have to wonder whether their prayer as the cloud enveloped them on the mountaintop was also some version of “Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy.”

In the face of what is new, and strange, and frightening, it is natural for us to not know what to do, and therefore to end up doing very little. We cannot comprehend the mind of God. We cannot save the world. We cannot explain the persistence of evil. And so we get stuck. We tell ourselves that we are just bystanders, poor pilgrims caught up in the storm on the mountain, waiting for the clouds to break, waiting for things to go back to normal. Waiting, transfixed, until someone else figures out what to do, what the next step should be.

But I fear we might be waiting a long time if that is all we do. Because here’s the thing, both about this gospel passage in particular and about our lives as followers of Jesus more generally: it’s not about being transfixed. It’s a different “t” word.

The word of the day today, the key word in this story, and the key word for our discipleship in moments such as this is not transfixion but transfiguration. That is what is happening up on the mountaintop. Transfiguration—the transformation of one thing into another, better thing.

Let me say that again: the transformation of one thing into another, better thing. Now you might think, wait a second—Jesus is already fully God and fully human, long before he went up this mountain—he doesn’t need to be transformed into something better. And you would be correct.

Because in truth, although we usually focus on his changed appearance, Jesus is not the one being transfigured in this encounter. It is the disciples. It is the disciples who are changed—it is the disciples who are given eyes to see and ears to hear. It is the disciples who in this moment perceive the fullness of God’s truth, who feel what it is to bear the glorious weight of God’s love. It is the disciples who are being stretched and shaped and re-formed by this experience into who God intends them to become. And that invitation, that challenge, extends to us as well, we who are the disciples of the present, perilous moment.

Jesus, in revealing his eternal inner radiance, is actually inviting the disciples, and us, to let go of that sleep-heavy paralysis, that transfixed state of limited imagination, and to step out into a transfigured life, a life in which we are awake. A life in which we may not have all the answers, a life in which pain and suffering and war still persist, but also a life in which we are ready to face whatever lies ahead because we have seen, we have held, we have tasted–if only for a moment–the fullness of the glory of God.

And if you wonder, how can I live that way? Where will I find the courage? What if I am not good enough or strong enough or centered enough? Well, yes, I ask myself those things every day, too.

And then I look again at those parents kissing their children goodbye, willing to die to protect them–parents who just a week ago were not very different from you and me. I think of that couple whose marriage is being consecrated as we speak in the laying down of their lives for their friends. And I think of all the saints and the martyrs, the advocates and the prophets, the justice-seekers and the wound-healers, the citizens of God’s kingdom, the famous and the unsung, the ones who gave their lives over to God’s dream of peace even in world that mocks peace, and I don’t know why it must be this way, or how it all works, but I see that it does, indeed, work—that in the mystery of grace, transfiguration is possible. That we can face the moment when it comes. That we won’t be transfixed forever.

So yes, let us pray for peace. In Ukraine, and around the world. And let us also pray for peace to transfigure our hearts, that we might become makers of peace.

And until then,

Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy.

Can’t Go Home Again: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on March 7, 2021 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary text cited is John 2:13-22, an account of Jesus clearing out the Temple in Jerusalem.

Just before I started serving at Trinity, Fort Wayne, nearly two years ago now, I took a drive up north, to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where my grandparents and my father lived before they died, where I spent much of my youth. The old family home, a place that had been an anchor throughout my entire life, was no longer occupied, and my aunt and uncles were planning on selling it, so I wanted to see it at least one more time before that happened.

And you know that old saying, “you can’t go home again”? Well, sometimes you can, technically, but the problem is that either the home has changed so much—or you have—that you feel disoriented, like a stranger wandering into the story that used to be your own, but that doesn’t quite fit anymore.

The house was quiet, too quiet, cleared of most of its familiar clutter, though some of the furniture remained—the kitchen table right where it had always been, the same curtains in the window, the old parlor organ in its usual spot, the armchair where my grandmother read her books before bed. The outlines of a thousand memories, still rich and resonant, but hollow, too, a monument to an era of our family history that had passed away.

And as strange as it might sound, I kept thinking about that empty house in Michigan as I was sitting with this week’s gospel passage from John, where Jesus clears out the Temple in that dramatic scene.

Because although we often focus on the intensely prophetic nature of his actions—turning over the tables, critiquing the economics of the sacrificial system—I think there is a also a deep poignancy to be found here. This is a personal moment as much as it is a public one, because we must remember that, for Jesus, this is not just a religious power center, a building filled with strangers whom he wants to knock down a peg or two. It is, as he plainly says, his Father’s house. He has, after much time away, come back home.

Remember the story early in Luke’s gospel, when Mary and Joseph lose track of Jesus in Jerusalem when he is a young boy? And they search for him for three days…and then they finally find him…where? In the Temple, yes, still himself but also unfamiliar—a bearer of wisdom, engaging in dialogue with the teachers assembled there. And what does twelve year-old Jesus say to Mary and Joseph?

“Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”

It is a homecoming scene. A memory deeper than memory, a familial instinct has drawn him there, to the dwelling place of his Father, to the place where his own story, just beginning to take shape, finds its larger context.

And so now, as he arrives again in today’s reading as an adult–a bit older, a bit more knowing–what is Jesus thinking, as he enters the Temple for this very different homecoming? Does he remember how he once sat, just over there, as a young prodigy, amazing the onlookers with his insight? Does he remember, perhaps, that certain slant of light across the stones on that long ago day, or the sound of his mother’s voice calling out to him in relief from across the courtyard, when life was newer, when there was still so much to be discovered? Does he now feel that disconcerting pang of regret when you return to a place after you’ve grown a bit too much to be comfortable there, that swirl of familiarity and estrangement when a Father’s house no longer feels like home?

You can’t go home again, no. Not even Jesus. Not in the exact same way as before. Too much has changed. But also, there is too much that must still be done. No time to wallow in what is lost. Life persists. And so our histories must be reckoned with, not recaptured.

In his own way, that is exactly what Jesus is doing, as he braids the whip, as he releases the doves into the sky: he is clearing out the past, because he knows that this story—his family’s story, his nation’s story, creation’s ancient and unfolding story—must now go in a new direction. So out go the sacrificial animals, and the money-changers—out go the old systems, the old patterns, the old and familiar ways of interacting with God, of satisfying our never-ending longing for heaven.

For a new thing is about to be done: a definitive sacrifice is about to be made, in the confines of a drastically different Temple—the Temple of God’s own body, on the altar of Calvary. Jesus, in clearing out the Jerusalem Temple, is clearing the path towards the new Jerusalem, the heavenly city; he is taking upon himself all the memories, all the hopes, all the sorrows that have been held and offered here through the millennia, in the halls and holy places of his Father’s house, and he is carrying them with him, into the next chapter, into his own life and death–and beyond.

What has been is not always what can continue to be. This is as true for us now as it was then. This is true for you and for me in our own lives, and it is true for us as a community, as a society, as a planet.

We cannot go back to what was, even if we have loved it more than anything, because things have changed, and we have changed, and the world needs something different from us now.

And if Jesus fashioning a whip of cords and turning over tables seems drastic, that’s because surrendering to change always is—it requires a certain lack of sentimentality on our parts, a certain fury and fire in the heart, a startled emergence from slumber, to get up, to live, to look forward, to do what must be done now, to say goodbye to what no longer serves us and what no longer serves emerging God’s purpose.

So the question for us today, here, at the edge of whatever awaits us next, is this: What is it that we need to clear out of our lives? What is it that we need to let go of, in order to make space for what will be? What is holding us back from the next chapter in our story, in Trinity’s story, in America’s story, in the human story–what is holding us back from the chapter of the story where we go out once more and meet the world in its pain and its promise and rediscover the beauty and the healing and the freedom that Jesus can offer? What must be put to rest in order to do that? What are we waiting for?

Nostalgia will not save us. It will not save us in the church, it will not save us in this country; it will not save your life or mine. Try as we might (and God knows I often try) we cannot live on memories or longings for what used to be, for the ways things were, even the way things were a year ago. The pre-pandemic world is gone. The “before” time—the time when we did not know all that we know now—that time is gone. We have seen too much now. We can’t go home again.

And yes, we can and we should honor the past for all that it has done for us, for its beautiful gifts, for its lessons, and we can preserve the wisdom of our ancestors and the life-giving pieces of the traditions we have been given, and then….we have to let the rest go.

The old mindsets. The old assumptions. The old prejudices. The old fears. The old lies. They don’t serve anymore. We have to be strong enough, together, to figure out how to be the Christians that the world needs now. That’s what we’re here for. That’s what Jesus has driven us out into this present moment to do.

So let’s do it. With some trepdiation, perhaps, maybe even a tear or two, but also with hope, and determination, and curiosity, and above all, a trust in the Lord, our Lord, who knows what he is doing, even when that thing seems dramatic and strange and hard to us.

You know, when I left my family’s house for the last time, I cried as I pulled out of the driveway. And I knew as I drove out of town that the love that I experienced there, in that place, would be lodged deep in my soul for the rest of my life.

But it was time to go, whether I was ready or not. It was time.

And so I did. And I kept going, down through the forests, through the sleepy old towns, down past the shimmering city lights, and across the wide open fields, back down here. Back to you. To this place and time, the one that I had to live into now.

And I thought: it’s true, you can’t go home again.

But you can make a new home, wherever it is you have to go. Wherever it is that Jesus leads. You can make a new life there, with gratitude for what came before, and with hope for what is coming next.

Not in your Father’s house, perhaps, but on holy ground, nonetheless. The ground upon which we are standing.

My family’s old home in Iron River, Michigan

Lamentations of the People

I wrote these liturgical “Prayers of the People” a few weeks before the national protests in response to George Floyd’s killing, but they have taken on a new resonance for me now, and so I share them with you here.

Lamentations of the People

In grief and in undaunted hope, let us cry out to God, the undivided Trinity, saying:
Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy Immortal One, Have mercy upon us.

God, your Church is splintered and sorrowful. We are undone by the virulence of the age into which you have called us. We hunger for the bread only you can give; we long for the solace of an absent embrace. Gather us close, hide us under the shadow of your wings, and strengthen us to be your ministers amidst the uncertainties that lie ahead.