This is my sermon for August 31, 2025, the Twelfth Sunday after Penetecost, Proper 17, Year C. We are using Wilda Gafneys’ A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church, and the readings were Obadiah 1:1-4, 10-15; Psalm 7:8-11; James 4:5-11; and Luke 17:1-4.

This week, as I read and listened to the news, including the most recent attack on a hospital in Gaza and the school shooting at the church in Minnesota, I was once again struck by how violent we can be when we believe we have been wronged.  Perhaps I should say how “indiscriminately violent” we can become because more and more it seems that we have no qualms about brutalizing and killing people who had absolutely nothing to do with the ways in which we feel wrong or have been harmed. It is as if our anger, our sense of betrayal, gives us free reign to enter into a seemingly endless cycle of violence and retribution that will do little, if anything, to heal our hurt, to cure the brokenness. Often, this seems to be done without compunction, with no sense that we could one day be on the receiving end of this kind of violence.  But Scripture tells us otherwise.

The first lesson today, in which this message is pretty clearly stated, is one that we likely have never heard preached in church before.  The prophesy of Obadiah, the shortest book in the Hebrew Scriptures, is not included in the Revised Common Lectionary, which is the custom in the Episcopal Church. We get it today because we are using Dr. Gafney’s A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church. And that is both a little bit of a preacher’s curse, but it is also a gift, because one of the gifts of reading, hearing, and reflecting on the lessons using Gafney’s lectionary the past few years is that it opens our hearts and minds to read, hear, and understand Scripture a bit differently than the customary lectionary.  The different combinations of readings, even without the differences in her translation, point to themes and to messages, it makes connections that are only possible when you read this group of lessons together. This helps us to better understand the story of God’s work in the world, God’s presence with us, and our part in that story.

To set a bit of context: The name Obadiah means slave or servant of the Lord and the entire book – all 21 verses of it – is a vision.  We don’t know much about the book or the person who wrote it, but it is thought to have been written in the period of time at the end of the Babylonian exile and the return of the Israelites to Jerusalem, so perhaps about 2500 years ago. It references generational conflict between the descendants of Jacob and Esau.  The problem is a rupture in the family that gives rise to horrific behavior. It happens in a family, all descendants of Jacob and Esau, though they don’t necessarily remember their family ties because geographical distance and also because it’s generation after generation, so the ties are less obvious. It ends with a fairly ominous reminder that what goes around comes around, to use a familiar phrase. It is a timely lesson. And one for which Dr. Gafney says, “There is no happy ending for this passage and it should not be given one.”  That raises the question, “So where’s the hope?”

The obvious answer for a person of faith is that our hope is in God.   And we believe that, don’t we?  We claim Christian identity because we believe in Jesus. We pray together every Sunday that we believe in God, the Trinity. We pray, as it says in today’s psalm, for the end of the “wickedness of the wicked” but do we really believe that the end of the wickedness of the world will come about simply through our prayer? Or do we know, as has been popping up all over the place on social media, that prayer in these times is not enough, and we must act differently if we want to live in a world in which people are treated differently?  Some of the good news is that our faith invites us to pray and to act. Perhaps it is more accurate to say to pray for the wisdom and courage to act.  Is there hope to be found in living faith as a verb, not a noun?

Today’s readings, no matter how troublesome they start out, point to the answer to that question as being a resounding,” Yes!”  There is hope in living faith as a verb and not as a noun. There is a lot of action described in these readings, even when the action is in the form of a “you should not have” as we read in Obadiah.  When we look at the psalm,  when we look at James, and when we look at the Gospel, there is the overtly physical action of flapping lips; of entering the gate; of cleansing hands; of lamenting and weeping, which is as fully  an embodied expression of grief as I have ever seen; of laughing, although in this case it is about not letting it be at someone else’s expense. And then there are of the less overtly physical acts of praying, opposing the devil, of forgiving those who cause us harm, and of trusting that God will see that all things our made right. Faithful living is not something that just happens to us, it happens because we choose to live our lives in ways that are consistent with God’s will and God’s dream for the world.  And that includes knowing and living the knowledge that, whether the wrong done to us is real or imagined, more objectively factual or seen through a particular political or cultural lens, wrong done to us does not justify wrongful behavior on our part.  It doesn’t.

A few times in the past couple of months I’ve come across this quote: “Now is not the time to accept the things we cannot change but to change the things we cannot accept.”  Now I’ve seen this mostly in response to actions of the current administration but it certainly applies to more than that, doesn’t it?  If we cannot accept as people of Christ that the way others are treated, the way things are happening or are structured in this world, then by our faith we should be acting in ways that change that. This statement about changing the things we cannot accept is a hopeful statement. It’s a reminder that that we are disciples of the Incarnate God and that we are called, and we are supported and nudged – and in my case, as you may have heard me say, we are victim to the holy 2×4.  We are nudged and guided by the Holy Spirit to live our faith out in the world each and every day.

We follow Jesus, the one who showed us how to love as we are loved and who promised us that his Spirit would remain with us to guide, nudge, and otherwise convince us to live our faith. Jesus also told us and showed us that God’s family is not just those we know or who look like us or act like us or talk like us or worship like us or love like us or whose actions have an immediate and direct impact on our lives. God’s family is all people for all time and, even though we can’t know when and we may not understand how, we will be held accountable for the things we have done, as well as the things we have left undone. 

Now, that might not sound like a hopeful statement, but I’d argue that it is.  Each of us has the freedom to make the kinds of choices that will make a positive difference in the world now and for the future.  We get to choose the right path, even if not always the easy path, knowing that with God’s help we can do it, we can be a part of the change. And we also know that we don’t have to be perfect.  God will forgive us. God will forgive our missteps and even our deliberate misbehaviors, if we trust enough to repent and seek forgiveness.  As I said over and over during the many months of Covid, God has us.  God has our backs.  We just need to believe that God is with us.  We need to believe Jesus’ promise that his Spirit will be with us, to guide us, to nudge, to lead us.  In that way, we get to be a part of ending the cycle of violence that, for some reason, we have such trouble stepping away from.  We get to be beacons of hope for ourselves and for the world.  And we get to say, as we say in our baptism and in other sacred rites in the church, “we will, with God’s help.”

This is my sermon for August 6, 2025, the Eight Sunday after Pentecost , Proper 13 in Year C. We use the Gafney lectionary, A Woman’s Lectionary for the Whole Church, and the readings were Habakkuh 1:1-13; Psalm 62:8-12; 2 Peter 3:1-11; and Luke 17:20-25. The cento is composed of lines from each of the readings.

Some of you know that I tend to dabble a little bit in poetry. And when I say, “a little bit,” that is quite an exaggeration, but it is what I do from time to time. There is a form of poetry called cento. Basically, that’s creation of a poem from lines from other writings. As I was reading today’s lectionary, praying with it and reflecting on it, with all the news that was swirling around, including the detention of a young Korean woman, a sophomore in college, the daughter of a Korean priest – so a colleague – in the Diocese of New York, a cento practically jumped off the pages.  And I want to say now that this reflection – this answer to a prayer – is one of those that raises many more questions than answers.

Holy One,
how long shall I cry for help,
and you do not save.
So the law becomes powerless
and justice has been aborted.
The wicked surround the righteous,
therefore judgment comes forth perverted.
Trust not in oppression,
and set not your heart on robbery;
if force bears fruit, 
do not set your heart upon it.
Trust in God at all times, O people
pour our your heart before her.
But this one thing
do not ignore, beloved
that with the Most High
one day is like a thousand years
and a thousand years are like one day.
Be astonished! Be astounded!
For a work is being worked in your days
that you would not believe if you were told.
Therefore, beloved, 
while for these things you are waiting,
strive so that without spot 
and being blameless
is how you all are to be found by God in peace.
For, see here, the majesty of God is among you all.
For, see here, the majesty of God is among you all.

I don’t know about you, but I sometimes wonder if my prayers, – my cries to God to heal the injustices of the world – are falling on deaf ears. How am I to understand, to preach the Gospel, when all around us there is so much that is not at all about love, and completely and totally about greed and the wrong kind of power.

How are we to have faith in anything when the world seems to be falling apart, in a bizarre kind of whack-a-mole, where previously unimaginable and remarkably creative – albeit horrific and terrifying – injustices pop up more quickly and in more places  than it seems possible to address?

How are we to remain true to our commitment to live our faith in ways that make a positive difference?

How do we keep from sliding into the abyss and losing hope that it is possible to be a part of changing the world from the nightmare it is for so many, into the dream God has for it? (to paraphrase former Presiding Bishop Michael Curry)

One of the ways to remain hopeful is to remember that our understanding of things, including time and permanence is not the same as God’s.  Granted that seems like a bit of an Escher-type conundrum because how can we understand these things differently outside the bounds of our experience and our brokenness? When we can’t even begin to figure out what we are to do before the next urgent, life-altering need is pressing down on us, because that’s all there seems to be some days?  It’s a seemingly impossible call to be hopeful, to be patient with God, while also acknowledging and responding to what’s happening around us, locally, nationally, and globally.

And, yet, that is our call as followers of Jesus. Being found by God in peace is not something that just happens, it happens because we do our part – all of us -to bring about that peace. It is to look around us, to take it in – take everything in – all the while we trust that God is present with us, and that we can grab a bit of the divine majesty and use it to ease the pain that we see and experience in the world.

It is to remember, as our sister, Terese of Avila, wrote so beautifully,

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.
Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

My prayer for all of us is that we embrace astonishment, welcome being astounded, and be open to being used by God to change the world in ways that seem more and more hard to believe are possible every single day.  And that means we trust in God.  We believe the promises God has made to all people.  We have faith that each of us doing our part will add up to the kind of change we know the world needs.  In short, it means we live our faith each and every moment of each and every day, with each and every decision we make, with everyone we encounter -whether we know them or not, whether we like them or not, whether we’ll ever meet them or not (which means we won’t encounter them in quite the same way as we would with a face-to-face.  It means that we just get out there and do it.  We do it because we know who and whose we are.

This is my sermon from Easter Sunday, April 20, 2025. The lessons for the day were Isaiah 49:1-13, Psalm 18:2-11, 16-19. The translation was Wilda Gafney’s from A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church: Year C.

“Now faith is the essence of things hoped for, the conviction of that which is not seen. By faith, indeed, were our ancestors approved.”

That idea: that we can be faithful enough in our understanding of who God is and how God is in the world, that we can trust and hope and believe that good things will happen in the midst of all else, the things that we haven’t yet seen, that they can be the promises fulfilled, is a message for the ages, obviously.  And, over the arch of the world in the past several years, it is a message we craze perhaps more desperately than we even have before.

On this Easter day, when we are reminded, when we celebrate the fact that the unheard of, the completely-unexpected-because-it-had-never-been-done-before thing happened, where the man whom many recognized as the Messiah of God, the one who came to fulfill the promises of God’s love for God’s people, was raised from the dead.  Wow!  Talk about affirming your faith in him if you were on the ground with him.

Now think about all the people who had been.  They were the apostles, who traveled the countryside with him during the three or so years of his earthly ministry.  They followed this man who was soon to be executed because he was basically saying, “The leaders have got it wrong.  We need to live differently.”  Their faith in who Jesus was and is and will always be inspired them to walk with him, to learn to live a new way, to learn to live God’s way: learning to honor the dignity and worth of all God’s people, learning to love your neighbor as yourself because God loves love.  These were the lessons that Jesus taught.  It took a great deal of faith to be up close and personal with Jesus in those times.

We see that in some of the past week, Holy Week, in which we see Judas betray him with a kiss. Judas, who was in the inner circle (if Jesus had such a thing), who at the last minute when it counted more than it had at any other time, betrays him with a kiss.  He did this in a pretty cowardly way by walking up to him as if in friendship to give him a kiss, which most people would have seen as a good thing before learning it was a betrayal.

There’s Peter, who became the rock of the Church, St. Peter, betrays Jesus three times in one day, after Jesus lets him know that he knows he’s going to slip and not be able to stand up for Jesus.  Even after Jesus gives him this warning,  which Peter could’ve taken as hint to stay a little more focused, a little more mindful, Peter betrays him three times. And, yet, Jesus’ love for Peter never changed and Peter’s love for Jesus grew exponentially and became an inspiration for the world.

We have Mary Magdalene and one of the other Marys in todays Gospel. They, too, have traveled with Jesus, even though their parts in the story of Jesus’ life isn’t as well documented as Judas’ and Peter’s, probably because they were women.  Their faithful enough to Jesus that they show up at his tomb.  I’m not sure what they were expecting to see.  Maybe that hoped that when Jesus said he would rise in three days after his death, he meant it literally.  My guess is they also just went to be near the person they loved so much and whom they knew loved them even more.  They walked in faith.

Walking in faith is not something that can only be 2025 years ago.  Walking in faith is the call we are given from God.  I don’t think it matters if we are Christian or Jew or Muslim or atheist or agnostic or any other thing because walking in faith is a response to God’s invitation to love.  This is an invitation to a love that we cannot begin to comprehend no matter how hard we try.  It is the kind of love that says, “Sure! I’ll be born in the form of a vulnerable child in one of the harshest places in the world in one of the most challenging times in its history.  That makes sense to me because I love you enough to give you a chance to know me differently.” 

It’s the love of a God who says, “I will live with you.  I will try to teach you.  I will love you in the ways that you and all people deserve to be loved.  And I will take that a step further: I will love you in the day and forever after the day that you execute me.” 

That’s the love we’re celebrating today.  It’s not a love that any one of us can wrap our heads around, which is why it’s a love we have to accept on faith and respond to by living faithfully.  When we can accept that invitation, and when we can respond in that way, we get to experience glimpses of that love, over and over and over again.  It’s what we celebrate every Sunday when we come to the Table.  We celebrate the love that was born for us, the love that was willing to die for us, the love that promised to never leave us and has fulfilled that promise, even when we have let go of that faith, even when we’ve been unsure it exists, even when we’ve wondered how such horrible things can happen to people across time and across the world, even when we wonder, “How can I be good enough.”

Easter is the Resurrection of the Incarnate God, the man who was born to show us in real time, up close and personal, what it means to be loved by the God who breathed life into us, the God who has never let us go, the God who will never ever let us go.

That love is the source of all hope, and we need hope.  We need hope that tomorrow the news will not be filled mostly with the horrors that some of us inflict upon others of us.  We need hope that we will learn to take care of our planet in ways that do not destroy it.  That we will live our lives in ways that whenever we meet anybody, wherever we meet anybody, under whatever circumstances we meet anybody, that we will recognize the image of God within them and we will learn to relate to them in God’s love to God’s love, as God’s beloved to God’s beloved.

Easter is the celebration of God’s love, the love that defies all expectation, the love that hopes to save us from ourselves, the love that even death cannot conquer.  I pray that we celebrate this day in the big and fun and glorious ways that we do.  I pray, too, that each and every day, each and every moment of our lives.

This is the sermon I preached on March 2, 2025, which was the Feast of the Transfiguration. The lectionary was Judges 4:5-10, Psalm 46, 2 Peter 1:16-21, and Luke 9:28-36.

In today’s Gospel we have a story about liminality. Liminality is the term for when the veil between heaven and earth is lifted, so that what you experience in that moment transcends your typical experience here on earth. We have this when we have Peter, James, and Jesus are on the mountain and suddenly Jesus’ appearance is transfigured, his glory is made visually obvious to them. And then they see Elijah and Moses. I think if I were to ask you who Moses is, you could tell me a few stories from the Hebrew Scriptures about burning bushes and Ten Commandments, the parting of the Red Sea, and Moses looking across the river after 40 years of wandering in the wilderness but not getting there because it’s his brother Aaron who takes up the mantle when the people actually cross the river into freedom and liberation.

If I were to ask you about Elijah, my guess is it’s not as familiar a story. Elijah, like Moses, brought an understanding of God to the people. He lived nine centuries or so before Christ. He is the man who, among other things, goes to a widow who has next to nothing to eat and says, I want some food. I want some wine.” and she says, “Yeah, well this is all I’ve got.” and he says, “Don’t worry about it. It will be fine.” and, of course, it is. He heals people. He rains down fire on people. In some ways he is as significant as Moses in bringing an understanding of who God is and how God is in the world, even though we don’t know as much about him.

So, we have this liminal time when the veil between heaven and earth opens and Peter and James see Jesus standing with these two great figures in Jesus’ history, these faithful men, and Jesus is talking to them. This is a reminder to us that time as we know it, that space as we know it, is not God’s time or God’s space. God can make things happen. What I think is kind of fun about this story is that Peter, the same Peter who denies Jesus not one or two, but three times, and who later falls asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane at a critical time in Jesus’ ministry, is awake and he gets to experience this.

I was reminded of some times that may or may not have been truly liminal experiences in my life, but I know were times when I have been with people and the presence of God has felt different to me, when presence of God was almost palpable to me.  I felt as if only I dared to reach out, I could grab onto something and feel in my hands. Those times happened when I was a hospice and a hospital chaplain. It happened only the day before my mother died when she was clearly starting her journey. There was something that said, “Pay attention to the moment.”  There was nothing in the moment before that I was aware that made the next moment different, but the next moment was different. She was able to say that she felt as if she were drifting towards God. It was a moment I didn’t anticipate, and it was beautiful.

I was thinking about that moment as I was reading about Peter and James seeing Elijah and Moses alive with Jesus on the mountain. And I wondered what made the moment for me the same as the moment for Peter, who missed so many other critical moments later in the story. What made that moment different, and what I think makes all liminal moments possible, is that Peter was awake, which meant that he was paying attention.

And I’ve been thinking about that in the context of all that the world is showing us today and throwing at us, when our tendency is to want to go huddle up under the covers and not pay attention, to kind of will ourselves to not be awake in the presence of everything that we’re experiencing.  A little bit of confession here: I have come to terms this week with the reality that when I choose not to pay attention to what’s happening in the world, two other things are also happening:

The first thing is that I am in a place of privilege that I can do that, and I’m not sure it’s a place of privilege that I want to proudly occupy. When I can turn my back on the news that people are being rounded up, whether they’re citizens or not, whether they are documented or not – when I can turn my back on that, boy am I in a place of privilege. And again, it’s not a place I want to be, so I am trying to read the news a little bit more, although, quite frankly, it is painful, because privilege doesn’t preclude pain. It does mean that we have options about how, when, and how often we want to experience it.

The other thing that happens is that I don’t get to see, as Mr. Rogers advised, “the heroes.”  You don’t get to see God at work, fighting against the things that terrify you, that horrify you, that make your body and your soul so heavy you wonder why you’re getting up in the morning. When you’re not awake to things, you’re not awake to all things.

One of the things this Gospel reminds us is that those liminal times, those experiences of God that are different, those experiences that evoke hope and optimism, that ground us in the reality of God’s love for God’s people, those things happen when we least expect them. But even though we are not expecting them, we are awake to the possibility that they can happen, whether we know it or not. We’re awake to the possibility that God will make God’s presence known to us in a way that we need.

So, whatever it is that we need to get through, whether it’s illness or a political situation, we know that we need God, which means we must be awake.  We need to be “woke,” as the Black Lives Matter movement taught us and is now a term that has become such a rallying cry for the right at this point, or Christian Nationalists to say, “But we don’t want you to pay attention.”  What Christian Nationalists say woke is a bad thing, what they’re really saying is, “Close your eyes, because if you close your eyes, you can’t see good, either.  You can’t see the positive things that are happening around you. You can’t see your own potential to be a part of positive things happening.” It shuts us down and, I’ve said it often from this very place, that God always invites us into relationship, but God doesn’t ever insist that we accept the invitation.

If we want to be able to see that we are invited into deeper relationship with God, which does mean taking care of other people whether we know them or not, whether we like them or not, whether we agree with them or not – because that loving your neighbor thing is out there.  If we are to be able to accept the invitation, we have to be able to see it in the midst of everything that is happening, the good, the bad, the horrifying, and just the good old, mundane and ordinary stuff, because God is in it with us.  God is not making it happen, but God is saying, “If you let me lead you, I will bring you to me. You will see that there is hope for a future that is not some far off, after-you’re-dead future, but a future in the next moment, in the next week, in the next month, in the next decade.”

We get to do that. We get to have that, but we must be aware of what’s going on around us. In our second lesson today, from Peter, we had this idea that, “We didn’t get to this place by complicated mythologies.” It isn’t complicated. It’s not magic.  It’s the opposite of magic. It’s a fundamental truth about who we are and who we were created to be.  We make it complicated when we think we must close our eyes to what’s happening around us, when we think we can only see God and experience in this one little place, in this one little box. God is never in a box.

We make it complicated when we think that God is only present in this kind of thing, or that, because God is always present with us, all the time. It is as uncomplicated as it can be. It requires only that we accept the truth of our belovedness, that we see and accept the invitation into deeper relationship with God, and that we trust the God who has never, ever lied to us or let us down, to be with us and to show us the way forward, even if we don’t understand a single thing about what’s going on around us.

Our faith is about how we respond to the God we cannot define, that we cannot put in a box, that we cannot describe in the ways that we need certainty. Our faith requires that we trust in what we know to be true in those liminal moments. You may not realize that you’ve had a liminal moment. You may not be able to describe it in the way that I describe what I call liminal moments. I ask you all to search your hearts – and maybe you have to search back quite a while, or maybe it will come to you immediately – but search your hearts to remember a time when you thought you could not take another breath, you could not take another step, you could not see a way out of whatever it was you were in, and then remember that moment when you took another breath, when you took another step, and you realized you were no longer in that place you had been.  That, my friends, is a God experience. And, if we can all be awake and aware, and maybe looking , although actively looking for God doesn’t always get you to God, for some reason I haven’t figure out, but sometimes it does – if we can be aware of the possibility, if we can try to see our sisters and our brothers as heroes in this, to try to know that there will be some people who are heroes in this, and they may even be us, if we can be aware of that we will get through this.  It will be okay, though perhaps not in a way we can predict or describe, but we will be okay because we are never without God. And that’s a hard truth to remember at times when all we want to do is turn off the news, curl up under a blanket, and chant Kumbaya (something I’ve found myself doing).

Be aware. Take care of yourselves in the being aware. We don’t have to subject ourselves to everything all at once or all the time. Be awake. Pay attention. Allow God to give you what God knows you need and more will come.

This is my sermon for Trinity Sunday, May 26, 2024. We are using Wilda Gafney’s Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church, Year B. The lectionary was Hosea 11:1-4; Psalm 130:5-8; 131:1-3; 2 Peter 1:16-18; and Matthew 28:16-20

As a people, we’ve been seeking the Divine -God – since the beginning of time.  Our earliest stories, including those we hear in the Hebrew Scriptures, are all about our search for that deeper understanding.  Some of the stories are troubling.  Others don’t make much sense to us today. Some are reassuring and offer glimmers – sometimes magnificent beams – of hope.  There are confusing and sometimes seemingly contradictory messages about our relationship to God and God’s relationship to humankind and all of creation.  There are even those stories that seem to be troubling, nonsensical, reassuring, hopeful, confusing, and contradictory all at once!

What all of these stories and messages have in common is an understanding that there is a presence  beyond our immediate comprehension.  The stories we hear and the stories we tell are our best efforts to capture or document our experience of that divine presence.  And we can only experience, capture, and document at a particular moment in time, from where we find ourselves and how we find ourselves in that particular moment in time.  Because God is largely unknowable – at least in the ways we usually come to know what we know- we ascribe all manner of traits and temperaments, all kinds of motivations and reactions to God.  All of this is to help us better understand that which we desire beyond all else – deeper relationship with the God who breathed life into us and all creation.

Today is Trinity Sunday, a day on which we can’t help but acknowledge that the nature of God defies not only the comprehension of human reason but challenges the capacity of human language.  And yet try to explain or define or illuminate we do, year after year after year, even as we acknowledge that God is undefinable, immeasurable, beyond comprehension, beyond comparison. 

We seem to forget sometimes that the Bible never explicitly defines or describes God.  Trinitarian theology, including the language “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” language that so many of us have grabbed onto and have been adamant that we do not want to let loose, grew from the early days of Christianity when people were trying to understand life with Christ in the post-resurrection world.  The traditional language of the Trinity and the underlying theology was not a neat and tidy gift that suddenly appeared from heaven, but rather a long – and I’m talking hundreds of years long – human process of study, reflection, conversation, debate, and, ultimately, compromise, one that was often ugly and violent.  There were power plays and schisms, exiles and executions. 

Trinitarian theology did grow from the well-intentioned efforts of people like us who wanted to be better followers of Christ and understood the need for some common understanding, though they perhaps couldn’t have understood or foreseen that their best efforts, the conclusions of that time, would limit that same desire for people many centuries later.

The question of how to explain who God is and how God works in and through creation is not a question that should ever be considered answered once and for all.  One of the greatest gifts of faith is that, in response to God’s call to us, we do what we can do in our particular time and place to broaden our understanding and deepen our relationship with God. And then, because we possess this annoyingly human combination of traits: the need to be certain and the need to be right, we find ourselves in all kinds of situations in which our focus shifts from seeking God to trying to define once and for all who God is and how God is present in the world.  We forget that religion and all that we do within it should be an active seeking of relationship with God, a means to an end.  Sadly, too often, we equate religion and religious institutions with God.  The icon- which should point us to God, becomes the idol – that which we worship.  And that is true of our theology, as well. We find ourselves stuck or tied to the past or others’ experiences in ways that are not helpful or life-giving or God-like. 

You see, as interesting as it may be, as important as it is, for most of us the question isn’t whether or not we can explain the Trinity.  The questions that matter most as we live our lives are:

• Do we believe (or at least hold open the possibility) that God is present with us in and through all things? and
• How does our faith in God always present prepare us and shape us each and every day so that we live into the image of God in ourselves and each other?

The theologian, Paul Tillich, writing his systematic theologyover 50 years ago, said it well: “Theology moves back and forth between two poles, the eternal truth of its foundations and the temporal situation in which the eternal truth must be received.”

My prayer for all of us on this Trinity Sunday, is that we open our hearts and minds to new and varied ways of experiencing the presence of God, who was and is and is to come. Let us not be limited by particular language or by the experiences of others before us who so faithfully did the same.  Let us invite the Holy Spirit to continually guide us along the paths that will help us live our lives as our brother, Jesus, taught us, so that all people ultimately come to know the fullness of God’s love. Amen.

This is my sermon from The Day of Pentecost 2024, a day that included a very special baptism. I offer it with the usual disclaimer that I don’t use notes when I preach so it is “more or less” what the congregation heard. We are using Dr. Wilda Gafney’s, A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church. The lectionary was Isaiah 44:1-8; Psalm 104:1-4, 10-15, 27-30; Romans 8:14-27; and John 14:8-17.

Today, in addition to being the day of Clara’s baptism, is the Day of Pentecost, the day we sometimes refer to as the birthday of the Church because it’s the day when God’s Holy Spirit descended upon the disciples as they were cowering in an upper room (or so we’re told in other parts of Scripture) not quite understanding how they were going to go on living life in the ways they had felt compelled to when they were sitting with Jesus, breaking bread with Jesus, healing with Jesus, and doing all the things they had been doing with Jesus for the three years of his public ministry, at least as far as we know it.

The Day of Pentecost is the day when the Spirit enlivens them to live their lives as Jesus would have them live, without needing the physical Jesus with them, living their lives with the understanding that to follow God’s commandments – to love one another as we are loved, to free the imprisoned, to give food to the hungry, clothing to the poor, shelter to the unsheltered, sight to the blind – to do all of those things that Jesus told us are part of how we love God because we show our love for God in the ways we show our love for God’s people.  That’s the day -today, Pentecost – when the disciples accepted the Spirit in their lives in a way they hadn’t before and the Church as we know it today, for better or for worse, was born.

What is also remarkable about this is that, in the reading from Acts we’ve heard in other years, we’re told that there are throngs of people outside, people from all nations and all languages, people who didn’t know each other and didn’t understand each other and would’ve thought they had very little in common, and suddenly they could understand each other.  This was possible because what the Spirit does for us is enliven our very core.  She enlivens the very essence of who we are as children of God.  When we live our lives with that essence as the wellspring, then the things we think divide us don’t because we’re not looking for obstacles, we’re looking for life, we’re looking for love.

Paul says to us that we don’t necessarily even need to know what we need or what we want or what we desire, because God’s spirit already does.  When we don’t know how to pray -whether it’s for ourselves or the problems of the world or for our friend or whatever it is- when we don’t know how to pray, when we open ourselves to the Spirit, the Spirit does it with us, and for us, and in us. 

And that really is how we should live as the Church, as the Body of Christ.  Not so much focused on what we think or what we want or any of that, but rather on what we discern God would have us do or how God would have us be in any circumstance or any moment in time.

Today, in just a few minutes, we’ll be baptizing Clara, who, at the ripe old age of seven, wants to be baptized.  Now, she was about five and a half when she said to her mother, “we need to start going to church.” I’m not sure she even understood what church was, but, lo and behold, we now have two new families in this parish because a five-and-a-half-year-old listened to what I can only imagine was the voice of God, even though at five and a half, she probably wouldn’t have thought it was the voice of God.  But she knew that she wanted to come here and be a part of a church community.

Today we are baptizing her and as we do this we will be invoking the Holy Spirit, not to come and to be a part of her for the first time, or a part of us for the first time, but to welcome her, to welcome her in the spirit of adoption we just heard about, to welcome her into the household of God in ways that we believe will shape her life, will inform the ways she lives her faith, will help us be a better church than we could have been yesterday.

The Spirit is with us. Today the Spirit, who is capable of doing things and doing new things at the same time, will be doing the same things she always does: being present in our midst, nudging us to invite her into our lives and our hearts, and she’ll be doing a new thing.  She’ll be making us different than we were yesterday because, in addition to Clara being welcomed, we will remember our call to be welcoming.   

You will have a spoken part.  I’m going to ask you a question and I expect a faith-filled, resounding, “We will!” in answer to that question.  In that moment, I invite you to open your hearts, maybe to more than where they are in this moment, to where the Spirit is calling you. I invite you to listen to how the Spirit is nudging you to live your faith in ways that are as bold and as forthright as a five-and-a-half-year-old making the decision that coming to this church, to being part of a community of faith, was something she just needed to do.

We have two services on Good Friday and I preach two different sermons, in part because there are a number of people who are present at both, but mostly because there is too much to say in just one. These are the manuscripts from Good Friday, March 29, 2024, which are more or less what I preached. (I don’t preach with my notes, so there is always some variation.) This is from the noon service.

We are using Wilda C. Gafney’s A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church: Year B. The readings for Good Friday are Judges 11:29-40, Psalm 22, Hebrews 12:1-4; Luke 22:14-23:56.

Some of you have probably heard this story from me before that when Kathleen was about 10, she was searching for a gift for me.  She was checking out the jewelry stores in our local mall because she wanted to buy me a cross.  She was having a really hard time finding what she was looking for: a plain simple cross, lacking the crucified Christ.  At one point she encountered a friend’s mother, working at one of the stores.  This family was Roman Catholic and the woman showed her a crucifix, saying, “this is beautiful.”  And Katie said, “I don’t mean to be rude but we’re Episcopalians.  Jesus didn’t get stuck on the Cross.”

I share this story because we are focused on the Cross right now, as we should be, but we also need to take a wider view and wonder how anyone could come to call the day the Son of Woman, the Incarnate God, could be hung on a cross like a common criminal, and still have this day be “good.”  How can it be good?

I know that there are a lot of different understandings and that there are a lot of people who believe that by his death on a cross Jesus invited us to suffer along with him and that he atoned for our sins.  While I don’t think that God ever wants us to suffer, the atonement of sins – the fact that Jesus sacrificed himself for us is good news. There is the Good News that his sacrifice points to: the love of God for all of God’s people, the love of God for each and every one of us. The love of God who can be broken in body, hanging from a cross, and still reassure the person on the cross next to his that all would be well, that he would enter Paradise and be with Jesus.

There is something about that moment because we are reminded that even as Jesus sacrificed himself, as he was willing to suffer with us and for us, Jesus never stopped being the incarnation of perfect love.  It’s a reminder that throughout all our life, even the most horrific moments of our lives, Jesus is with us because God’s love is ever present.  God’s love is unconditional. 

When we think about this particular story, we think about Judas.  Jesus knows he is about to be betrayed.  Did he know that it was Judas in particular? I don’t know.  But he knew that in order for this story to play out – the story being the particular events that lead to his trial and execution – it would not be good.  Jesus knew where he was, he knew who he was with, and he knew how the system worked.  In order for the system to work as so many people needed it to or thought they needed it to work, he would have to be betrayed.  Peter denies him, which is a kind of betrayal.  Judas betrays him with a kiss.  Jesus doesn’t rant and rave, and say “how could you do this to me?”  Jesus remains right there with Judas, and it plays out like Judas needed it to, or thought he needed it to in that moment.

This merciful, compassionate, forgiving God let us show the worst of who we could be and continued to love us to the end of his time on earth.

Jesus wasn’t stuck at the moment of the Cross.  Jesus could look beyond the moment of the Cross at all the potential, all the promise, all the hope that God has for us all of the time.  He made the sacrifice for us.  He made that sacrifice not so that we would feel guilty or feel like we had to suffer to understand Jesus’ suffering -because in reality, which one of us could?

Jesus made the sacrifice, he made this Friday “Good” for no other reason than God’s love.

We have two services on Good Friday and I preach two different sermons, in part because there are a number of people who are present at both, but mostly because there is too much to say in just one. These are the manuscripts from Good Friday, March 29, 2024, which are more or less what I preached. (I don’t preach with my notes, so there is always some variation.) This is from the evening service.

We are using Wilda C. Gafney’s A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church: Year B. The readings for Good Friday are Judges 11:29-40, Psalm 22, Hebrews 12:1-4; Luke 22:14-23:56.

One of the questions – one of the age-old questions – is why is this day called “Good” Friday? The day that the Son of Woman is hung on a cross like a common criminal, taunted by the likes of us, and eventually dies – how can it be a good day? And yet, I think it is fair to say that when we take this day, fast forward a couple of days and look at the whole picture, it is part of the best days.

Part of our questioning about it is because when we look at the cross and we see suffering, we see humiliation, we death. I’m not convinced that Jesus every saw the cross in and of itself because  he saw everything beyond the cross.  Jesus saw the fullness of God’s love for God’s people, and the promise he had come to fulfill some 33 years before he was executed.

He was executed because he was so radical and was standing up to the authorities.  He wasn’t standing up for no reason or because he never outgrew his teenage tendency to defy authority just because he could. It was about showing us, telling us, inviting us to understand that the way we live together, the way we treat each other, is essential to our wellbeing.  It was about showing us the Way of Love. 

It was about showing us the kind of love in which and from which it made sense to be born a human in a horribly violent and conflicted time, where there were people who never stood a chance and a few people who had all of the privilege and all of the resource, as well as the people in-between.  It was a time not unlike the times we find ourselves in today.

Jesus came to show us that there are different ways for all of us to feel richly blessed, for all of us to feel that we have authority in our own lives, and the power and agency to make the world a better place.  Jesus was born from love, lived only in love, died in that love, all so that we could understand that love, which is, quite frankly, beyond our comprehension.

That is the good news of Good Friday. The good news isn’t in our horrifically bad behavior. It isn’t in our ability to justify the horrible things we do to each other and to God’s creation, and to eventually feel vindicated because some authority figure somewhere says, “Sure.  You must be right so we’ll punish this person.”  It is about helping us to live our best selves, showing us that there is a love that knows no bounds, a love that will tolerate immense pain to sacrifice themselves for us.

It is not about the suffering.  Yes, Jesus had to have suffered.  The fully human person suffered on that cross just like any one of us would have.  The fully divine welcomed that in some way as further proof that the divine love will conquer everything, including death.  That’s good news.

When we look at that cross, a question for all of us is what do we see?  What does it mean for us? I’m reminded of a 10-year-old Kathleen telling a friend’s mother that “We’re Episcopalians.  Jesus didn’t get stuck on the Cross.”

That’s the good news.  Jesus died on the cross.  The human person died on that cross, but the divine Christ lived beyond it and continues to live still. It’s that perception that God has of who we are and what we and the world can that God was willing to sacrifice God’s self. That is the good news.

I think we observe Good Friday solemnly in part because I’m not sure that if Jesus came back today, that we would do any of it any differently.  The good news is that the God who loved us into being and loves us still, would still think it worth doing.

The Cross, though a place of suffering, is not a symbol of suffering.  The Cross is a symbol of a magnificent, unbelievably generous love that is perfect and is everything we need.

This is my sermon for September 3rd, the first Sunday of the Season of Creation, which fell on the Fourteenth Sunday after the Pentecost. We are using Wilda Gafney’s A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church. The readings for today were 1 Samuel 25:14-19, 23-25, 32-34, 42-43; Psalm 25:4-12; 1 Corinthians 7:1-9; and Matthew 5:38-42.

There is a theme in today’s readings.  It is justice, specifically how we as flawed and broken people live our lives in ways that embody and enact justice.  There is a focus in today’s readings.  It is about relationships, specifically about how we as flawed and broken people treat each other, especially when we are inclined to treat each other poorly.  And, because this is Scripture, the story of God at work in the world in and throughout all time, we know that these readings are also about relationship with God, specifically how we embody and enact justice for and with all of God’s beloved children, always trusting God that God’s dream for the world is the way it should be, even if that way is not always easy to see or understand.

Today is the first Sunday of The Season of Creation, the approximately five weeks the Episcopal Church and others designate as a period to focus intentionally on the earth and its resources.  The theme for this year is “Let Justice and Peace Flow.”   Episopalchurch.org says this about this season:

The Season of Creation, September 1st through October 4th, is celebrated by Christians around the world as a time for renewing, repairing and restoring our relationship to God, one another, and all of creation. The Episcopal Church joins this international effort for prayer and action for climate justice and an end to environmental racism and ecological destruction. The 2023 theme is Let Justice and Peace Flow. In celebrating the Season, we are invited to consider anew our ecological, economic, and political ways of living.  (www.episcopalchurch.org/season-of-creation-and-st-francis-day-resources)

It seems one of those coincidences that Squire Rushnell called “God winks” that today we welcome our siblings from Christ Church in Short Hills to celebrate our recovery from the Hurricane Ida flooding and their loving hospitality when they invited us to join them in worship and fellowship for the five weeks we were displaced when we couldn’t worship here in this beautiful space.  I know I am not alone when I say that the invitation we received from Rev. Bowie on behalf of the Christ Church community was a much needed reminder that we were not alone then, nor are we alone now, no matter how it might have felt in the moment.  And I believe those moments, when we show up for each other in the ways that are needed, are part of how God sees and dreams we would be in the world.

I know there is debate in some circles about the impact of climate change on the extreme weather events that seem to be happening more and more frequently and intensely, though the question is pretty well settled in the relevant scientific communities.  As we enter this Season of Creation, wildfires are raging on each and every continent, displacing hundreds of thousands of people, destroying their homes and livelihoods, disrupting food, water, and health care supply lines, and injuring, sometimes fatally, thousands.  No one is immune from either the destruction or its aftermath.  Every day we continue to get updates about the ongoing struggles in Maui as people mourn the more than 100 dead and continue to hope for word that the just as many missing have been found.  And they are doing this in a tourism-dependent economy that has been decimated and knowing that it will take literal years to recover.

Now, you may be thinking that the connection between climate change and today’s lectionary is pretty tenuous, though I submit to you that it is not.  How we treat God’s Creation – the earth and each other – is inextricably linked to matters of justice and relationship.  As bad as things were in Millburn two years ago, they could have been worse on so many levels.  We are a wealthy community in a well-resourced part of the world and, though not enough to prevent the damage we sustained, attention had been paid to flood mitigation in the years before Hurricane Ida.  The community came together to clean up the mess and to support each other in our recovery efforts.  The majority of us had the resources through insurance, savings, income, or family to rebuild or, in some cases, to relocate, either temporarily or permanently.  Walking through town only two years later, you only know there was a flood if you lived through it or someone told you about it.  In contrast, here are still parts of New Orleans, almost exclusively poor and non-White neighborhoods, that are essentially uninhabited since Hurricane Katrina almost 20 years ago.

Being good stewards of the earth and its resources is one of the most critical ways we demonstrate our love for one another and our commitment to Jesus’ mission of mercy, justice, compassion, and hope.  It is directly related to how we understand who God is and how we express our gratitude for all that we have and all that we are, especially when we are inclined to try to go it alone.  It is about living fully into relationship with God and trusting the promises that God has made to, well, be God.

I leave you with these words of wisdom from Br. Geoffry at the Society of St. John the Evangelist:

Jesus was intimately involved with the natural world. When he spoke of God and God’s Kingdom, he almost always pointed to the natural world:  seeds, the harvest, the clouds, vines, weeds, sheep, fire, water, lilies, bread, wine. Walk out into God’s wonderful creation – and be touched by the very hand of God.

This is my sermon from the Eleventh Sunday after the Pentecost, preached on August 13, 2023. We use Wilda Gafney’s A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church, Year A. The lectionary was 1 Samuel 17:1-7, 12-16, 24-27; Psalm 108:1-6, 11-13; Ephesians 6:10-17; and Matthew 5:43-48.

Perfection is a funny thing.  It seems like something we should strive for if we are to be all that we can be. Yet one who does, a perfectionist, often is treated with suspicion, perhaps even with disdain.  We seem to know that setting the bar that high is not always all it is meant to be.  So much of what makes us human – a diversity of gifts and perspectives, a need for sabbath (or at least less pressure all the time) – gets lost when we are held accountable to standards  that are unachievable for most of us, regardless of our gifts or resources or education.  It sets up a kind of competition between us as we continually grade ourselves and others against some standard that may or may not be completely subjective and is certainly unattainable. And in the quest to be something other than we truly are, we set each other apart, which is contrary to who we were created to be.  In the process, we give each other and ourselves false ideas of who we are and who we are not.   

Being perfect is hard work.  Being perfect can be lonely.  Being perfect distracts us from enjoying so much of life.  And the kicker?  Being perfect isn’t possible.  

Today’s Gospel – at least as translated in the English – doesn’t do a whole lot to help us understand how to be our best selves when it comes to perfection.  It also equates who we are and what we can do with God and who God is and what God can do.  

I’d venture a guess that the directive to “be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Sovereign is perfect” has contributed to lots of doubts about God’s unconditional love for all of God’s people and set so many of us up to feel like we have failed.  If it says it in Scripture – our holy text – then it must be the bar we are to reach, right?  But what if I were to tell you that in the original Greek it does not mean “perfect” as we have come to understand the word?  

The word in the original Greek is telos, which means, essentially, to be or become who it is God created you to be, whether you are a puppy, a piece of fruit (remember the parable about the fig tree?), or a person.  Puppies are perfect in that they become dogs.  A fig tree is perfect when it bears fruit.  People are perfect when they are who they are with authenticity and integrity, nurturing the gifts God has given them in ways that are honest, true, and build up the beloved community.  It’s interesting because I think so many of us know that, even as we sometimes struggle to live it.   

How many times have you heard – or maybe you’ve even said – something along the lines of “My parents wanted me to be [fill in the blank]. And I tried but it just wasn’t for me. I am a good [fill in this blank]. I know this is the path I was meant to take.”  And if you’re really lucky, you also can say, “I know the work I do makes a difference in my community [or to someone else].”  

We put so much pressure on ourselves and each other when we seek a perfection that is defined by some human standard of success or worth.  It is hard, sometimes devastatingly hard, to live that way.  We doubt ourselves or we punish ourselves, when we can’t achieve what it is we think we are supposed to achieve. We worry that we can’t keep up with our neighbors or colleagues, even as we try harder and harder to do so.  We look down on or distance ourselves from other people when they don’t meet similar standards.   

And, worst of all, we start to doubt God – “If God wants me to be perfect, why isn’t God helping me more? If it’s really true that we are created in the image of God and God is perfection, how do I reconcile that with the reality that I am far from perfect, no matter how hard I try?  And what does that say about God’s love? Surely God must love those people more than me because look how blessed they are.”  

The unconditional love of God should never be a question for anyone.  It’s the kind of love we strive to give our children, that love that says, “no matter what, I love you and believe in you.”  It’s the kind of love I know I hoped to convey when I would tell the each of the kids, “You are the perfect one for me.”  Admittedly, that became something of a joke as they figured out I was saying it to each of them, so I tweaked it a bit.  “You are the perfect 9-year-old (or middle child or…)”  We even got Christmas ornaments that said, “Favorite first born,” “Favorite middle child,” and “Favorite youngest child.”  The point is that this was one way of letting the kids know that they are loved unconditionally, no matter what.   

The perfection in today’s Gospel is about living into the fullness of who God created us to be, trusting in God’s truly perfect love – and I mean that in both the sense of “perfection” as we have come to understand it and in the telos way, in that God cannot be or do anything other than love us unconditionally because that is precisely what it means for God to be God.  God’s love for us is an invitation into more than we could ever ask or imagine on our own.  It is a love that challenges us in only the best, most inspiring ways, to live to grow into our best selves, that image of God in us.   

I will leave you with a quote, something I read this week, which helps to understand the importance of some of the things Jesus tells us to do, like loving our neighbor and praying for those who persecute us because they, too, were created in the image of God:  

“Jesus’ words are less command than promise. God sees more in you than you do. God has plans and a purpose for you. God intends to use you to achieve something spectacular. And that something spectacular is precisely to be who you were created to be and, in so doing, to help create a different kind of world. Jesus calls this new world the kingdom of God – where violence doesn’t always breed more violence and hate doesn’t always kindle more hate. Martin Luther King, Jr. captured the logic of Jesus’ kingdom well when he stated, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”   (davidlose.net/2017/02/epiphany-7-a-telos) 

And when we see God’s perfect love as being all that we need or ever will need, and we trust that God will help us to be who it is that God intended us to be, perfect in that telos kind of way, we get to be a part of making the kingdom what God intended it to be in its perfection.