Tag: stories

Books: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, May 5, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is John 15:9-17.

If you didn’t already know this about me, now you will—and I’m not ashamed to admit it, because I am surely in good company with others in this room–but…I buy too many books. I can’t seem to help myself. 

My partner, Matt, will attest to this, as will my mom, who I am pretty sure passed this problem on to me. New, used, it doesn’t matter—if I am out and about and I pass by a bookshop, I have to go in. I have to peruse. And more often than I should, I find yet another book that I absolutely need to buy it right now. *Right now.*

Never mind that I have a teetering stack of books on my bedside table most of the time, all in various stages of consumption. Never mind that I have a wall of books behind me in my office. Never mind that I have donated so many books to local libraries, every time I have moved, that I could have probably started a library of my own. It’s not my fault they keep publishing so many good ones!

Books are just so interesting. So many good ideas, so many stories, so many important histories and lessons to digest. I think my all-time record purchase, one time when my mom and I took a trip to Florida and stayed near a used book store—was 22 books in one visit. They probably only cost me $10 or $20 in total, but still. A little embarrassing. As to whether I read all 22 of them cover to cover…no comment. 

These days Matt just gives me a knowing look when a small Amazon package shows up at the apartment door or when I make a sabbath day visit to the local book shop. He knows what he’s in for in the future, God love him. 

Now, despite my insatiable appetite for books, I will admit that it can get a bit overwhelming when it comes time to actually pick one to read and stick with. Hence the big stack by the bedside.

But every so often…you come across a book that just draws you in. If you are an avid reader, you know what this feeling is like. The plot or the writing style just envelops you, and suddenly you are not interested in scrolling on your phone or watching Netflix or anything else—you just want to devour this book and see what happens next. It is truly one of the most pleasurable experiences in life. And not only because you are being entertained or educated, but because you are focused. All the little annoyances and worries and wonderings that clutter our minds fall away for a bit and you are part of a new and different world with each turning of the page. 

If it’s been a while since you found a book like that (or a film, or a piece of music, or whatever it is that captivates you), I hope that you do so soon. I hope you remember what it feels like to surrender yourself to the ideas and possibilities of another world. 

Because, although there are always more books to collect, there is a certain rest, and peace, and, paradoxically, a freedom, in committing fully to just one: one story, one thing, over all the other ones beckoning from the proverbial shelf.

And speaking of stories worth committing to, this morning Jesus arrives at the central theme of his own story. “This is my commandment,” he says to his disciples, “that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” 

This is my commandment. This is it. This, right here, is the purpose of the Gospel stories. This the purpose of the entirety of Scripture. This is the purpose of everything; the beginning and the endpoint of creation. Love one another as I have loved you. 

And I know we spend a lot of time wondering about and debating the meaning of existence, but here’s a spoiler alert: your life is about loving one another. Just as God, incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, has demonstrated that love in the flesh. 

Your life is about proclaiming this love and practicing this love. That’s it! That’s the one story, above all others, that we were meant to read and internalize. And we can spend our lives reading a thousand other books or exploring esoteric philosophies, looking for countless other hints about what it means to be alive and to live well, but I guarantee you, we will always come back to this: love one another.

“I have called you friends,” Jesus continues, “because I have made known to you everything I have heard from my Father.” All the secrets of the universe, all the origins of creation, all the big questions about why and what and how and when—it’s all just summed up in this: love one another.

I think, in some ways, we are convinced it must be more complicated than that. We imagine there is some secret library, locked away, waiting to be discovered, that will reveal a more complex, surprising answer to why we are alive on this earth. We construct a bunch of ideological theories and political dividing lines to explain things. But our faith reveals to us that there isn’t some big secret. There’s just this. Love one another. It’s almost embarrassingly simple.

Now I understand, of course, that this does not mean that the actual living out of our lives is always simple. How we choose to love one another, how we wrestle with the challenges of love and the sacrifices and the losses it occasions and how we navigate the many temptations to choose something other than love—thes are all stories that are still being lived, still being told and written down and passed on. 

But to be a Christian, to be a disciple of Jesus, is to say: no matter what my own story is, no matter how hard or complicated it gets, and no matter what other stories I encounter in this big, diverse, sometimes scary world, there is ONE story that is the key to understanding all the rest: love one another. 

And it is to say: this is the one story that I will choose over all the others on the shelf, and I will find rest and clarity in choosing to believe that loving one another is all that will be left when the last word has been written at the end of time. 

And this is the story that we will keep on telling and living out here at St. Anne, as best we can, week after week, year after year, because you know as well as I do that the world is still, always, desperately in need of such a story. 

For all the cultural impact of Christianity in our history and society, it seems too often that a lot of people who claim to follow Jesus have lost the plot of what he was actually talking about. They decided somewhere along the way that his story was about purity or power, not love.

But while we may not know everything, this much we do know and this much we proclaim: God is love and love is God and no one has greater love than this: to lay down one’s life like an open book; to become engrossed in the story of the love we share; to forsake all the side plots and distractions, because we know that love for one another is the only story worth telling. It is the only one that makes sense in the end.

If it’s been a while since you felt a love like that, I hope that you do so soon. I hope you remember what it feels like to surrender yourself to the ideas and possibilities of love.

Now, I will probably never read all of the books on my shelf in their entirety. I will probably keep buying more books. Matt, I pray, will be patient with me.

But what I take comfort in is that, even if I never get to read every story written, I already know the resolution to all of them. We catch glimpses of it here every week, in the bread that we eat, in the reconciliation we pursue, in the songs we sing. All beautiful fragments of the one true story. 

And not to give away the ending entirely, but I promise you this: it’s good news. 

Stories: A Goodbye Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, July 16, 2023, my final service as Associate Rector at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23, Jesus’ parable of the sower.

I still remember quite clearly the first time I saw Trinity. It was late evening in early April of 2019, just over four years ago. I had flown into Fort Wayne from California that day for my interview weekend, and Fr. T.J. picked me up at the airport and dropped me off at my hotel after a welcome cocktail. But I was still wide awake, restless, a bit nervous, my body on west coast time. 

So I took a walk down Main Street in the dark, past the stately Courthouse, past the workers closing up shop at the Coney Island, past Henry’s, then left on Fulton Street, and suddenly there it was in front of me, lit up, its gold-hued stone walls illuminated by flood lights, a beacon in the still spring night. And I stood there on the corner, looking up at the steeple, and I felt a strange, thrilling sense of knowing, like when you fall in love, and I thought, maybe, just maybe, the long and winding road of my life has led me all the way here. 

And so it did. And the courthouse and the Coney Island and Henry’s and especially these old stone walls have come to hold all sorts of memories and meanings that I could not have imagined back then on that April night, back before I was a priest, before COVID, before I came to know and treasure your names and your faces and your stories, before we navigated the ups and the downs of these four years alongside one another, praising God and praying for each other and engaging, week by week, the graceful rhythm of the liturgy. I could not have imagined all the blessings and the lessons of these years, and how they would leave such an indelible mark on my heart. 

But here we are. And although four years go by so quickly, I know that the story that began on that April night and which ends, for me, on this July morning, will be one of the most cherished and enduring stories of my life. 

But one of the interesting and oddly comforting things that I have learned during my ministry at Trinity, and something that I think is true for all of us who spend time in this place, is that within these walls, our beginnings and our endings are all layered on top of one another, interlocking like those golden stones—time is a bit slippery, and what is seemingly lost to us lives on. 

Just as it is in the liturgy itself, where Alpha and Omega come together, where righteousness and peace kiss, I find that the past and the present commingle in these hallways. Priests and parishioners long gone, long dead, even, are still part of the living memory of this place. One can sit here in the nave on a quiet afternoon, the sunlight bathing the walls in color, and sense the presence of those who came before, the ones who are themselves carried, now, on the light, a thousand fragments of faith, hope, and love, still abiding here. 

And so when things change, when stories end, when people leave, or move away, or even die, these endings are gently incorporated into that which does not end. They are held in trust, like a precious volume added to the shelf, an entry into our one shared story. It is a story that began long before any one of us, and that will continue long after all of us. Each of us comes and contributes what we can while we can, and then we hand it off to God and to the future. 

And as hard as it is to leave, I find peace in the knowledge that my offering is just one of many; for there is something good and necessary and holy to feel, in this life, like you have been part of something far larger than yourself alone. Trinity is a place where each of us can be part of something large, something magnificent, something eternal, even, if we give ourselves over to it. 

And that is so, of course, not simply because of some magic within these stone walls, but because this is the house of God; it is the place where our individual stories collide not only with one another’s and those of our forebears but with the one timeless story of God’s passionate and undying love for us and for all of creation. 

And in a world and a culture that so often tells us that it is up to us alone to determine what is real and true, to wrest some scrap of meaning from the happenstance of our lives, to navigate our way between the lonely waystations of existence and find solace only in ourselves, in this place we learn that this is not so. We learn that we were not made to be alone and that we will not be alone, in the end. We learn that God has knit himself into our stories and has knit us into his own, all-encompassing story. 

I think this is part of the reason that Jesus, the incarnate God, loves to teach his followers in stories and parables. Not just to be obscure or confusing, but to remind us that the whole of salvation is the imaginative exercise of a Creator who longs to re-enchant the world. 

God longs for us to feel a sense of wonder, like the child we used to be, and so he tells us stories of sowers and seeds and soil and sunshine so that we might begin to realize that the Kingdom of God is as close to us as the ground upon which we stand, that this Kingdom grows, somehow, when we recognize that we are a part of everything and that everything is a part of us.

In parables like the one we heard this morning, the parable of the sower, Jesus is not telling us about various types of earth so that we can determine which soil sample fits our own individual story and circumstance—whether we by ourselves are rocky or thorny or rich and fertile.  Instead, he is asking us whether we can dream of and bring into existence a world where all might flourish of fertile ground; where all might be fed by the harvest of a righteousness deep and vibrant as the Indiana cornfields; where all might know the abundance that is possible when we love and care and tend to one another, as we have here. That’s the story God wants us to be a part of. That’s the story I have found here with you.

For God knows that too many of us, myself included, have felt what it is to be trampled down like the dust; to be caught among the thorns and stones. God knows how we have walked endlessly through the night, down unfamiliar streets, down long and winding roads, seeking our place in this world, and that sometimes we need a new promise, a new vision to illuminate the darkness, to dazzle us with its golden possibilities, to give us that strange, thrilling sense of knowing, like when you fall in love. Because God wants you to fall in love again–or for the first time–with him, with who he has made you to be, with this world and all who are in it, with the unique story that has brought you safe thus far, and with the new, shared story that is still being written. 

How good it is, my beloved friends, that our paths have converged in this place. How good it is that the story of God’s love, the one that brought us together, will never truly end. And if you ever find yourself feeling lost, or alone, or unsure about your place in this world, may I commend to you the simple reassurance of these old stone walls, softly glowing in the darkness, and the Spirit that abides herein, which will never forget you, nor me, nor any moment of what we have found and cherished in this place, even long after we are gone. 

So thank you. Thank you for letting me be part of your stories. Thank you, God, for letting me be part of Trinity’s story. And so, until we meet again, in that place and time where all our stories become one, world without end: my gratitude and my love.