Righteousness

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Sermon for January 11, 2026

I want to rewind Matthew’s gospel for a few minutes this morning, back to the beginning. I want to go back to the very beginning of the story, before Jesus is born. One of the things that we are told in the very beginning of the gospel is that Joseph, Jesus’s adoptive father, was a righteous man. He was a righteous man, and when he discovered that Mary was pregnant (and not by him) he decided that rather than publicly shaming her he would put her away quietly. He wouldn’t make a big deal out of it. He wasn’t going to go through with the marriage, but he would find some way to handle it discreetly. 

Now you need to understand that this is NOT what the law commanded. He didn’t HAVE to do that. Under the law, Joseph would have been completely justified in having Mary publicly shamed and even stoned. That was the penalty for adultery. And yes, we know that Mary was not an adulteress, but there was no way that an unmarried pregnant woman could have proven that to anyone’s satisfaction. Nobody other than Mary knows the real truth yet, not even Joseph. So, under a strict reading of the law, Joseph could have had Mary put to death, and he would have been justified under the law. The law was on his side. But Joseph didn’t do that. Even before Joseph had a revelation of the truth about Mary’s condition, he had already decided that he would be merciful to Mary and deal with the whole situation as quietly as he could. He didn’t HAVE to do that, but that is what he did. And that is why Matthew calls him righteous. He did something that he didn’t have to do. He sacrificed some of his own pride. The law gave Joseph the right to just walk away, but Joseph decided to do more than the law requires. And Matthew calls him a righteous man. 

So being righteous, according to Matthew, is NOT just about being on the right side of the law. It isn’t just about fulfilling the letter of the law. It is about doing MORE than the law requires. It is about doing more than you have to do. It is about putting mercy before justice. It is about being more concerned with what is right, than you are with what your rights are. It is about being more concerned with the needs of others than your own needs. That is righteousness. I wanted to go back to that moment earlier in Matthew’s gospel, because we encounter that righteous word again in today’s passage and it is helpful to understand what the author means when he uses that word. Righteousness is about more than just being right. It is a self-sacrificial way of relating to others. When we understand that, I think we will better understand what is happening when Jesus is baptized in today’s gospel.

Jesus meets John the Baptist in the river Jordan. John is baptizing people for the repentance of sins. People are asking to be washed clean and to start a new life in God. Well, if Jesus truly is the sinless Son of God, then this makes no sense. Why would someone who is without sin need to be baptized. It doesn’t make sense. Jesus is sinless, why does he need baptism? It doesn’t make sense to John the Baptist either, because when Jesus approaches him he says “I need to be baptized by you…why are you coming to me?” 

And Jesus’s response is: Let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness. There is that righteous word again. That is our clue that this is about a holiness that goes beyond the letter of the law. This act or ritual that Jesus is participating in, it isn’t about just doing what the law requires for himself. This is about doing more than the law requires for others. This is about compassion and mercy. Jesus doesn’t enter into the waters of baptism for himself; he does it for us. We just sang the hymn “Christ when for US you were baptized.” The law doesn’t require it for him. He does it for us. He does it to set us free. You may know that the gospel writer Matthew loves to draw parallels between Jesus and Moses. Well Moses was free, but he went back to Egypt to save his people. Jesus was free from sin, but he enters into it to pull us out, to save his people. He does it to be united with us in our sinfulness, ultimately so that he can redeem our sinful human nature. He unites himself with us so that we may be united with him. That is baptism. It is the place where divine love and forgiveness meet human sinfulness.

There is a prayer that I say to myself during the mass that happens when we are setting up for communion. As I bless the water that is about to be mixed with the wine I say “through the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share in our humanity.” We are blessed to share in the divine life, because God was humble enough to share in our humanity. That is what baptism is about. That is what communion is about. That is what the whole Incarnation is about. Jesus was humble enough to be baptized, even though he didn’t need to be. Joseph was humble enough to care about Mary’s life and future, even when he technically didn’t HAVE to. That is Matthew’s understanding of righteousness. Sacrificing your own needs for the needs of others. Doing more than the law commands. Putting mercy ahead of justice. Jesus in his preaching and teaching, and in the example of his life, doesn’t negate or dismiss the law; he encourages us to go beyond it. Jesus isn’t baptized for his sake, he is baptized for our sake. And Matthew makes it clear that that type of sacrificial love is something with which God is well pleased.

You are not the first outsider to kneel before the manger

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Sermon for January 4, 2026

Readings:

The church of the nativity in Bethlehem is one of the oldest churches in the world. It was commissioned by the emperor Constantine, who basically was told to build it by his mother Helena, around the year 326. It sits on top of a cave that is the traditional birthplace of our lord Jesus Christ. People were already worshipping Jesus in that spot long before Constantine built a church there. That is why it was built there. So, it is probably the oldest site of almost continuous Christian worship that exists. Christ has been worshipped and adored on that spot from the first Christmas to this Christmas with very few interruptions. Constantine’s church would burn down at one point, but it was immediately rebuilt by another emperor, Justinian.  That building still exists to this day, but it almost didn’t. 

In the year 614 the Persian army invaded the Holy Land, destroying much in its path, but not the church of the nativity. Legend has it that the commander of the army, a man named Sharbaraz, noticed near the entrance to the church three figures in beautiful mosaic on the wall. And these figures were dressed like Zoroastrian or Persian priests. They were the Magi, or the wise men coming to pay homage to the baby Jesus. Well, the commander was moved, and a bit perplexed, and he thought that surely there must be something holy about this place. This was not just some foreign shrine to a foreign god. On the wall, there were people that looked like him worshipping the God that this church was dedicated to. The commander could see that this story, this shrine, this temple, and this God involved his own people. So, he spared the church and it more or less stands to this day. Or at least that is how the story goes. What is certainly true is that the Persians decided not to destroy that church even though they did destroy so much else.

What I love about that legend of the Persian army commander though, is that it reflects a truth that we find in the scripture story itself. People from distant lands, different races, different religions, different stations of life and different customs all manage to find in the child in the manger, a life that touches their own. This baby that has been born as King of the Jews, is noticed by people from outside the Jewish world from the very beginning. He is even noticed by the very stars in the sky.

Matthew tells us in his gospel that wise men, magi (magicians or astronomers) came from the East. They were not Jewish. They did not know the Jewish prophets. They were outsiders. They had been led there by another sign, a star, that spoke to them (as astronomers) in a way that the Jewish prophecies might not have. God sent them their own sign to lead them to Jesus. Now Jesus was still the promised Jewish messiah, so the wise men still needed some help and direction from the Jewish prophets and scriptures to actually find him and know him, but their journey to him began long before they ever hear a word of the Prophet Micah. God had been leading them to Jesus long before they ever got to Bethlehem. 

Now, the church has always held that the story of the wise men was an early sign that Jesus’s mission would be to the gentiles as well as the Jews. He came to save the whole world. His birth affects everyone. One of the things that I love about this story in Matthew’s gospel though is how few details we actually have about these mysterious characters. We are told they came from the East, but that doesn’t tell us much. We are told they were Magi (and you can translate that as magicians, astronomers, scientists). They weren’t Jewish. They travel following a star. They find Jesus and offer him gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Then they slip out of town, having been warned by God not to offer Herod any assistance. We don’t really know where they came from. We don’t really know their religion or their race. We don’t even really know that there were three of them. The bible says there were three gifts, it doesn’t actually say there were three wise men. And sadly, it doesn’t say anything about camels either, but in my mind there will always be camels. The wise men are something of a blank slate or an uncolored page in a story book and I kind of have to wonder if God didn’t do that on purpose. We don’t know much about these outsiders that worshipped Jesus so we can fill in the details as we see fit. We can make them look and dress like us. Or we can make them look completely unlike us. You can make them look African or Asian or European. You can make them look tame or exotic. Yesterday, our youth went to an exhibit of Medieval illuminated psalms at the Morgan library in the city, and there in one of them was a depiction of the wise men looking an awful lot like European kings. These mysterious Magi who walk on and walk off the stage, they give us all another chance to see ourselves as a part of Jesus’s story. Their image is a sign to us today, as much as it was a sign to the Persian commander in 614, that it doesn’t matter how much of an outsider you are, you will not be the first outsider to kneel before the manger. Someone who looks just like you has worshipped this God before.

Let Jesus do his job.

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Sermon for December 14, 2025

Readings:

This morning’s gospel passage records a very peculiar moment in the life of John the Baptist. I won’t call it a moment of doubt, though it could be that, but I think I would prefer to call it a moment of wonder. Wonder in the sense of being perplexed. Hopeful, but slightly unsure. Wonder in the sense of not having complete certainty. John is wondering about who Jesus really is. 

Now you may recall that John and Jesus are cousins. And you may also recall that John is well aware that Jesus is special. When Jesus comes to be baptized by John in the Jordan river, it is John who says to Jesus “I ought to be baptized by you!” John saw the spirit descend upon Jesus like a dove at his baptism. John said that Jesus was “the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” John knows that Jesus is special. John knows that Jesus is greater than himself. But in the gospel this morning we get a very different image of John the Baptist. Now John is in prison. His own ministry is about to come to an end, but he knows that Jesus is still out in the world doing work. So John who is in this very dark place and who has reached the limits of his own abilities, wonders. Is Jesus really the messiah or is he another prophet? John’s ministry has been about pointing people to Jesus, but now he is sitting in prison, powerless. Maybe he is wondering what kind of power Jesus really has. Is Jesus really the messiah? John knows that he is probably going to die very soon at the hands of Herod, what then? Is Jesus really the messiah? Or is the coming of the messiah still a distant dream? Is Jesus going to save us, or is the saviour someone else?

That is the message that John, through some of his followers, sends to Jesus: Is it you? He doesn’t ask him for any specific assistance; he doesn’t ask his cousin to come and bail him out of jail; he just asks, is it you? Are you the messiah, or are we still waiting for another? John, in his distress, is wondering.

Jesus responds in a way that he often does, not with a direct answer, but with an illustration. He tells John’s followers to go and tell John what they hear and see. The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. Jesus’s response to the question “are you the messiah?” is a list of miracles. The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. It is as if Jesus knows that that question needs more than a yes or no answer. It needs proof, but it needs more than proof. It needs illustration, illumination. Jesus isn’t just affirming his status as the messiah, but he is also coloring in the picture of who and what the messiah is. The messiah isn’t about one miracle. The messiah is about all miracles. The messiah brings good news and encouragement to the poor and the hopeless. The messiah heals the sick and mends the broken. The messiah opens eyes and opens ears. The messiah raises the dead. Jesus doesn’t just point to one proof, he points to all of them. The messiah isn’t about one miracle. The messiah is about all miracles. The messiah isn’t just the greatest prophet; the messiah is the power of God.

The prophets, they do amazing things. The prophets can work miracles. Jesus honors John as a prophet this morning, but even the greatest prophet is nothing compared to the power of God. John, as a prophet, is a messenger of the kingdom. His job was to announce and prepare the way for the kingdom. But Jesus is the kingdom. Jesus is God’s kingdom on two feet. He isn’t just someone who can perform A miracle, he is the power and the force behind ALL miracles. Jesus is the grand miracle. The miracle of God becoming a human to break the power of sin and death and to restore all creation to glory. That is the grand miracle that gives all other miracles meaning and force. He isn’t one miracle. He is all miracles. That is frankly more than some people are hoping for; more than they are expecting.

That might be more of a messiah than even John was expecting, and John knew that we needed to be saved. Many of us don’t really know that, or we are prone to forget it. We may pray for miracles now and then, but then how much time do we spend trying to fix the world and everyone in it on our own? I know that as Christmas approaches, some of you are out there trying to make miracles happen on your own. You are trying to turn a dime into a dollar. You are trying to get through meals with relatives that don’t like each other. You are trying to find the perfect gift. You are trying to juggle too many obligations with too few resources, all while trying to imagine peace on earth and good will towards men. I’m guilty of all that I know. So Jesus’s message to John comes at just the right time for us. God does not expect us to do this on our own. The salvation of the world, and all the necessary miracles that that entails, that is the messiah’s job. This messiah, whose birth we are about to celebrate, HE is the miracle worker. So let Jesus do his job. Let Jesus do his job. 

It is ok to prepare. It is ok to work for the kingdom, to point to it and hope for it. And it is ok to wonder what God is up to. John the Baptist did all of that. But at a certain point, like John, you are going to come to the end of your abilities and what you can do, and that is when you just have to step back and let Jesus do his job. He is the messiah. Miracles, all miracles, are his department.

A balanced view of the Second Coming

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Sermon for November 30, 2025

Readings:

The Reformation leader Martin Luther is reported to have once said that “the world is like a drunken peasant. If you lift him into the saddle on one side, he will fall off the other side.” 

That image of a man who just cannot stay upright in the saddle but is just inclined to fall off his horse on one side or another was an inspiration to C. S. Lewis who saw it as the perfect symbol of humanity out of balance. We make an error by going too far in one direction, but then we respond or react to that by going too far in the other direction. Sometimes we fall off the horse on the left, sometimes we fall off on the right, but regardless of which side of the horse you fall off, you are still a drunken fool laying on the ground. Balance is the key to staying on top. Balance is the ability to correct without over-correcting. It requires you to be aware of the forces that are pulling on you from both sides and not to give in to one or the other. 

This, Lewis says, is a problem not just with religion, but with everything. He said he distrusts reactions in everything and I have to say I am there with him. Humans don’t react to things, we overreact to them. We watch people make a mistake in one direction, and then we head off and make a mistake in the opposite direction. Lewis makes this observation in one of his essays about religion called “the World’s Last Night.” As an aside, if anything I say this morning interests or inspires you, then I would encourage you to read his essay yourself. I am stealing from him liberally and shamelessly this morning. Anyways, in this essay Lewis talks about the doctrine of the second coming of Christ, which is of course what Advent is really about, not just preparing for Christmas. “and he shall come again, with glory, to judge both the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end.” It is right there in our creed. It is in our scriptures. You heard it just now. Jesus says that he will come again. How are we supposed to react to those words? That is a question Christians have grappled with over the centuries.

The problem, Lewis says, is that we humans are inclined to make one of two mistakes or overreactions. We either take Jesus at his word, and then start trying to figure out the precise moment in time he will come, becoming utterly consumed by expectation that then leads to crushing disappointment. Or, we dismiss Jesus’s words, and the idea that he will come again altogether. We write them off as ancient superstition and go on living our lives as if we and the world we live in will go on forever. We pay no attention to him. But these are both mistakes. 

The first mistake of trying to figure out exactly when Jesus is coming has been done so many times at this point that it just boggles the mind that people keep doing it, but people keep doing it. We just can’t help ourselves. Some of you may remember a few years back that guy Harold Camping who had decided that it was going to be May 21st, 2011 when the world would end. When it didn’t happen, he said, ok, maybe October 21st. It is easy to make fun of him but Camping stands in a very long line of religious folks that have tried to figure out precisely the day and time of Christ’s return and failed. And they were destined to fail, because Jesus said they would fail. The same people who want to take seriously Jesus’s promise of his second coming, somehow fail to take seriously his admonition that no one can or will know when it will happen. If God says you’re not gonna know, you’re not gonna know, but for some reason people keep trying. 

And these failed predictions and the people who make them, actually lead people into making the second mistake. So many times, people have been told that the end is nigh and Jesus is coming, and so many times he hasn’t shown up. It is no wonder then that so many people, even many Christians dismiss all this talk about a Second Coming as being antiquated and embarrassing. To put it simply, they don’t believe it is going to happen. But this is, of course, to fall off the other side of the horse. 

The problem with both of those mistakes is that neither one of them takes all of Jesus’s words very seriously. They both want to conveniently omit something, and in doing so they miss the whole point of why Jesus told us that he would come again. Keep awake! Be ready! Jesus is talking in the present tense here, not the future. The Second Coming isn’t just about some future event. It is about the here and now. If we take Jesus’s words seriously, all of them, what I think we will find is a balanced view of the end of the world that has real power to affect the life we are living today. I think that is the point of all of this.

Jesus tells us that the world will someday certainly come to an end, AND then he tells us that we cannot and will not know when that time will be. It will be unexpected. Therefore, and this is the important part, THEREFORE we must always live our lives with a constant awareness that the future is in God’s hands, not our own. We never know how much time we have. We never know what the future holds. A wise and prudent person will make plans and provisions for the future, but a faithful person will remember in doing so that tomorrow is a gift, not a promise. Those big plans you have for the future, they might never happen. That thing that you are sitting here worrying about, it might never happen. This life that you have is a gift from God and at any moment you may be asked “what have you done with it?” That is what the Second Coming is about…not taking this life for granted. Being prepared for the end, not by living in fear of it, but by living with the knowledge that each day, each day is a gift from God. The end will come, someday, somehow, for each and every one of us. It may be a bus, it may be an embolism, or it may be our Lord descending from on high, but one way or another the end will come. To stay awake and to be prepared, is not to spend endless hours obsessing about the end itself and how and when it may come about. To stay awake and to be prepared is really about making sure that you are making the most of the time you have been given. It seems paradoxical, but the doctrine of the Second Coming really is more about what you are doing today, than it is about what God may be doing tomorrow. 

The world as it is

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Sermon for Remembrance Sunday, November 9, 2025

Readings:

Job 19:23-27a
Psalm 17:1-9
2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
Luke 20:27-38

Things in this world are not as they should be. Things in this world have been messed up for a very long time. The evidence of this is in this service today. Today, the second Sunday of November, Anglicans throughout the world will remember their war dead. Soldiers, men and woman, who sacrificed their lives in the two world wars of the last century and in so many other battles since then. It is right that we should remember them, and pray for their souls and pray for their families. It is right that we should honor sacrifice. That is as it should be. What is not as it should be, what is obviously messed up, is that we live in a world where war is sometimes a necessity. We live in a world where freedoms have to be fought for, and protected. We live in a world where basic human dignity cannot be taken for granted. So it is right that we should honor bravery and self-sacrifice, but it is not right that human beings have created a world where such sacrifices are necessary. 

But that is a part of the story of our faith. I’m not saying anything new or controversial here this morning. A fundamental Christian belief is that human beings were designed in the image of God and made to live in peace and harmony with God, the earth, and each other, but from the very beginning we chose to turn away from that and to treat each other as objects or possessions and not as equal children of God. That is the very beginning of the Bible, but it is a theme that runs through the whole book and all of history. Think about our gospel reading this morning. The Sadducees ask Jesus a ridiculous question because they want to make fun of his belief in the resurrection of the dead. They ask Jesus if a woman marries seven times and all of her husbands die, and then she dies, in the resurrection whose wife will she be? Think about what is implied in what they are asking there. What is their real question? Who will she belong to? That is what they want to know. That is their understanding of marriage. That woman is a possession to them, not an equal child of God. Even in our most intimate relationships we objectify people and treat them as possessions. Is it any wonder that there is war between nations? We are broken human beings.

Scripture is so spot on about human nature, and if you need evidence of its truth, look around. Read the paper. The reason that we need to honor and remember the war dead today is because we live in a world of broken human beings, that can and will do terrible things to other human beings. We live in a fallen world and we have to deal with fallen humanity. Wars have to be fought. Maybe not every war, but some of them. Some conflicts we can avoid, but some we cannot walk away from, not if we value and respect our own lives or the lives of others. What would the world look like today if our fathers and grandfathers just walked away from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan? Sure, our country is a long way from perfect, but it is still here. And you may or may not like some of the people who won elections this week, but you still got to vote. We cannot take that for granted. We owe a lot to those who fought. And one thing we owe them is to remember that humans are what they are. Humans are still not as they should be, as they were created to be, and that means that it is entirely possible that we will someday have to fight again. Things in this world are not as they should be. We are a long way from what God created us to be.

But God has not abandoned us to ourselves. We are believers in the resurrection. Unlike the Sadducees in our gospel story today, we believe that there will be a future day when God sets the world right again, and fixes all of us broken humans who cannot fix or save ourselves. No many how many wars we fight, we are never going to fix this world on our own. We cannot fix human nature, but God can. God can transform us and he can transform how we relate to each other. Think about Jesus’s answer to the Sadducees this morning. They ask who will the woman belong to? And Jesus’s answer is: she will belong to God. The Sadducees weren’t asking about love or marriage as we know it; they were asking about possession. And Jesus sets them right. In the resurrection, the only person she will belong to is God. This broken world and our twisted ways of relating to each other will be washed away and finally we will be able to see and relate to each other as God originally intended: as equal children of God. 

But that is a hoped for and devoutly believed in future day. We have been given a glimpse of that resurrection and our future glory in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but until the day we all live in that glory, we will have to deal with living in a world that is not as it should be. The world as it is. We need to honor those who help us live in the world as it is. We need to honor those who fight the wars that have to be fought, and honor those who sacrificed everything to try and make the world a little better and a little safer. 

Blessings are worth fighting for

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Sermon for October 19, 2025

Readings:

Genesis 32:22-31
Psalm 121
2 Timothy 3:14-4:5
Luke 18:1-8

I think that it is only fitting that our first scripture reading this morning should be about wrestling, as I am sure that I am not the only one here that woke up feeling like I had just been body-slammed by Macho-Man Randy Savage. Everything hurts. I have sympathy for our biblical patriarch Jacob this morning as he limps away at the end of that Old Testament story. He’s victorious, he has been blessed, but it is a victory and a blessing that comes with tremendous effort and some pain. Some of us know what that feels like right now. If you are a visitor today and weren’t around this weekend, or are watching from home, we have had a big church fair for the past two days and a lot of us are pretty tired. So, we know how Jacob feels.

But I’m not letting you go home today without a sermon, and the passage that you heard from the Book of Genesis a moment ago is a mysterious one that needs some exploration. Jacob and his family are on the move for reasons that I can’t fully get into this morning because nobody wants to hear a long sermon, I will at least spare you that, but I will just say it is a lot of family drama. Jacob has a brother that hates him, a father-in-law that tricks him, not to mention two wives and eleven children, so drama is to be expected. And Jacob is not a faultless character either. He is not simply some great example of primitive virtue. He is as complicated and as crooked as any of us. But that is something that should give us hope, because even as a person who is kind-of messed up, he still has encounters with God. And that is what that first scripture reading really is all about. It’s what all of our scripture readings this morning are about. An ordinary person has an encounter with God. God interacts with people that aren’t always good; God still cares loves people who are complicated. God does not remain distant from the mess of everyday human lives, but gets right down into the midst of it and grapples with us. God is in the midst of the drama with us. If you get nothing else from the scriptures or my sermon this morning, please remember that. God has encounters with ordinary, sinful human beings in the midst of real life. Jacob doesn’t just wrestle with God, God wrestles with him.

One night when Jacob sends his wives and children on ahead of him, he is left alone and has an encounter with a mysterious man. Our tradition sometimes identifies this man as an angel, but the text doesn’t say that. It just calls him a man. Eventually we learn that he is not just a man. We are not told why Jacob is wrestling with him though; we are just told that this mysterious man could not, or would not, subdue and overpower Jacob. He says “let me go” and Jacob replies “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” Jacob is stubborn and bold, which I like to think of as qualities, though I personally probably exhibit more of one than the other. Anyways, in this moment the mysterious man confers upon Jacob a new name. He calls him Israel, a name which we means wrestled or striven with God, for as the man says, “you have striven with God and with humans and have prevailed.” Jacob then asks the mysterious man his name, because obviously he wasn’t wearing his name tag, and the man makes no reply. He just blessed Jacob, renamed him Israel, and disappears. But Jacob knows that something miraculous has happened. He knew that this was not just any man. This was God. He knows that his encounter with this man was actually an encounter with God, because he names the place Peniel, which means face of God. 

There is much that can, and has, been said about that mysterious Genesis passage, but in the end Jacob has an encounter with God and realizes it, because he is stubborn. He doesn’t give up easily. Jacob gets his blessing because he knows that a blessing is worth fighting for. Encounters with God are precious and they are worth a little pain and suffering. God is worth holding on to, even if it involves a bit of wrestling.

Now I must admit that everything I know about actual wrestling comes from watching professional wrestling as a child with my grandfather and uncle. Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair, Dusty Rhodes, Junkyard Dog, Ravishing Rick Rude, and Jake the snake Roberts…these were all names that I knew well as a child, so everything I know about wrestling comes from watching their crazy antics. If you don’t know who those guys are…well you have missed out on some high-class American culture. You can look them up. But the one thing I learned from watching all that is that wrestlers are constantly having to adjust and change their grips. Your opponent moves one way, you move another. You try this, you try that. Sometimes you are up, sometimes you are down. There are some predictable, standard moves, but then there are wild cards. It isn’t always the same exact thing. You have to be willing to adjust and change your grip. 

Now I am probably one of the most traditional people you are likely to meet, in the sense that I love tradition and traditions and I think that they are worth fighting for. Traditions are a blessing and blessings are worth a good struggle. Traditions are worth stubbornly holding on to, but how you hold on to them…THAT is what has to constantly change. You have to be willing to adjust your grip, move and change your position and even try something new now and then if you hope to prevail. The tradition of the Friendship Fair, for all of the pain that it is, is a tradition that I think is worth holding on to, because I think in many ways divine encounters happen because of it, not just in the two days of the fair, but in so much of the work that happens leading up to it. There are elements of the fair that really do produce joy and build relationships. These are the parts of the fair that we need to stubbornly hold on to; but then there are aspects of the fair that can and must change over time. We need to be mindful of that. We can maintain the tradition of the fair, but also change our grip here and there. Trying new things and sometimes letting go of old things that we just can’t do anymore. I’m not the sort of person who loves change, but it can be very good now and then. It was only a couple fairs ago that we started taking credit cards, and what a change that has made. We haven’t always had a beer tent or apple cider donuts, but those have both proved to be popular additions as well. Incidentally, in the beer tent on Friday, Michael Coyne challenged me that if I mentioned apple cider donuts in my sermon on Sunday that he would double his weekly pledge. Michael, you may consider that challenge accepted. Now, if all of you would do the same, we wouldn’t have to worry about the financial side of the fair at all; we could simply focus on the things that bring us joy. But we can talk about that more another day.

To our younger parishioners that are here and helping to lead this service today I would say this: the future of this fair is really going to be in your hands, not ours. I hope that some of the things we are doing now will be things that you see value in and will want to maintain, but I also know you won’t always do everything the way we do it and that’s OK. I hope that you will hold on to many things that you experience here in church: prayer, scripture, mystery, joy, encounters with God, and meaningful relationships. I hope that you hold on to the tradition of the friendship Fair, but how you hold on to it, may be a little different than how we have held on to it. And that is as it should be. I can tell you that it won’t always be easy, but there are blessings that come from all these mysterious divine encounters that happen in church, even in church fairs, and blessings are worth fighting for.

Saint Lois and Saint Eunice

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Sermon for October 5, 2025

Readings:

Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4
Psalm 37:1-10
2 Timothy 1:1-14
Luke 17:5-10

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, for the sake of the promise of life that is in Christ Jesus, To Timothy, my beloved child:
Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord. 

I am grateful to God—whom I worship with a clear conscience, as my ancestors did—when I remember you constantly in my prayers night and day. Recalling your tears, I long to see you so that I may be filled with joy. I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you. 

I wanted you to hear those words from Saint Paul’s epistle to Timothy again this morning, because sometimes I think we are so fixated on the big picture or the major names or themes in a scripture passage that we often miss smaller details and characters that have a story all their own to tell. So, let’s talk for a moment this morning about Lois and Eunice. They are mentioned in passing in Paul’s letter. “I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you.” Who are Lois and Eunice? They don’t get much press in church history. Their names are not widely known or celebrated. Churches aren’t dedicated to them. I have been to plenty of churches named after Saint Paul, and I have heard of plenty of churches named after Saint Timothy. But I have never seen a church called Saint Lois. I have never seen a church dedicated to Saint Eunice. And it’s a shame really. Someone needs to go and start a church and call it Saint Lois or Saint Eunice. We don’t really know who Lois and Eunice are. All we know is that Lois was a woman of faith who passed her faith on to her daughter Eunice. And Eunice herself would become a woman of faith who would pass her faith on to her son Timothy. It’s a boring little detail and hardly worth mentioning, right? Insignificant?

Except, maybe it isn’t an insignificant detail. Because if it weren’t for Lois and Eunice, there would be no Saint Timothy. This faith that Timothy has, this faith that Paul praises and celebrates, it didn’t just materialize out of the air. It has a genealogy. It was handed down to him. Timothy’s faith came from his mother Eunice. And Eunice’s faith came from her mother Lois. This is a faith that Paul is willing to die for. He describes it as a treasure that needs to be guarded. But it is also a treasure that gets handed down from one generation to the next. It is a gift that we receive and it is a gift that we give. Sometimes, like with Timothy, we get it from our parents or grandparents. Sometimes we get it from other people in our lives: distant relatives, friends, neighbors, or even strangers, but none of us, not one of us, came to faith entirely on our own. We all had someone who shared the gospel with us, or shared their faith in God, in some way. Maybe it wasn’t some great sermon. Maybe it was through their actions or their prayers or their hope or their perseverance, but somehow, someway, if you are here today then someone has planted a seed of faith within you. Someone shared their faith with you. Who was it? Maybe there are multiple people in your life that you can think of that shared their faith with you. If so, then you are blest. You are blest because you have been given a treasure. Don’t forget that. You have been given a treasure. The treasure is this living hope inside of you that keeps reminding you that the struggles of this world are not all that there is. The treasure is the conviction that there is a God that is worth trusting in, more than we trust in anything else in this world. The treasure is the belief that love is worth fighting for. The treasure is the promise that death is not the end for us. That treasure is a powerful thing that even in the tiniest amount can transform our lives and change the way we look at the world. Think about how the belief in the Resurrection must have given Lois and Eunice strength. Think about the troubles that those women must have seen in their lives. They would have known Psalm 37 very well. They would have know of God’s promise to deal with evildoers and set the world right, but in the Resurrection that would have seen God in action. They would have seen God keeping his promises to his children and that was a treasure to them that they had to pass on. You have been given a treasure too, and the treasure is not this building, it’s not a place or an inanimate object. It is a living thing inside of you. I think it is important to note that Paul says the faith lived within Timothy, and lived within Eunice, and lived within Lois. The faith is a living thing. Living things grow when you feed them and nurture them; they wilt and dwindle and may eventually die when you neglect them. That is why Paul challenged Timothy to rekindle that gift, that treasure that was withing him. We have been given a precious and powerful thing, but it needs guarding, it needs regular rekindling and it needs to be handed on. 

Today is not Mother’s Day or Father’s Day. It isn’t All Souls’ day or All Saints’ day. It isn’t even Grandparent’s day. But a couple names in a single verse of one of Paul’s letters is a good enough reminder that we need to take time now and then to give thanks to God for the Loises and Eunices in our own life. Without them and their witness and their sacrifices we wouldn’t have the faith that we have. They have surely given us a treasure. 

They only get a passing mention this morning and we know nothing else about them, but if it wasn’t for Lois and Eunice, Timothy would not have had the faith and Paul wouldn’t have had anyone to write to. 

A Good Steward

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Sermon for September 21, 2025

Readings:

Amos 8:4-7
Psalm 113
1 Timothy 2:1-7
Luke 16:1-13

Our family has been rewatching Downton Abbey lately in preparation for the new and final film which is about to come out. Not that we need to rewatch it; we’ve seen the series several times at this point, but it is a nice diversion and even little Lord Robert seems to be enjoying it. One of the central themes that comes up over and over again in that show is the idea of stewardship or being stewards. The Crawleys don’t see themselves so much as owners of the great estate, but as stewards of it. Episode after episode there is discussion after discussion about how they have a duty to hand something on to the next generation. They inherited the estate, but they had to do everything in their power to manage it wisely and carefully in order to pass it on. It was never just theirs. To be a steward of something, means that you are a caretake for a time, but not forever. It doesn’t really belong to you. 

I was reminded of that this week when I was signing for a permit to replace the roof over the parish hall. Incidentally we have to replace the roof over the parish hall to stop all those leaks you may have noticed. Anyways I had to sign the form under “owner.” Well I have had to do this many times before and it always feels odd. I am the rector, I am the executive of the organization and the legal representative with the power to sign for things, but I would never call myself the owner. I’m not the owner. None of us is. We are stewards that are entrusted with the responsibility of this place for a while, but not forever. 

We have less of that kind of talk now, of being stewards. Churches are one of the few places where we still talk about stewardship, but even when we do that, we are more often than not just talking about paying today’s bills. We aren’t usually thinking beyond next year’s budget. We live in a world of buying and selling and living in the moment. We aren’t trained to think long-term anymore. I think part of what makes Downton Abbey feel quaint is all that talk of duty and stewardship and responsibility and tradition. Everyone lives in a world of generations and eras. There is as much talk of history as there is the headlines in the papers. It’s quaint, but this understanding of stewardship, of being a generational care-taker, isn’t completely foreign to us. We know what it means. We just don’t think about it as much. We think that right now is all that really matters.

But to be a good steward, one has to be aware that one’s position is time-limited. The thing that you are the steward over will not always be yours. And what then? Will you leave something behind that is better and stronger than you found it? What future are you helping to create? And what of your time in power? Will you be remembered for using the power and influence you were afforded to help others, or will people think of you as self-centered and greedy? As a steward, the actions you take now will have future consequences, and will be judged by future generations, and you have to always be aware of that. 

This morning’s gospel reading is a difficult one, and I think it is made more difficult by our modern translation which calls the dishonest main character a “manager.” The King James Version uses the word “steward” which I think is more to the point and has a little less corporate baggage than the word “manager.” A rich man has a steward; someone who does not own the property outright, but nonetheless has the authority to run things and make decisions. Now we are told from the very beginning that the man is being fired for squandering the owner’s property. That is an important point to remember. The manager is already being fired for what he has done before his actions in the gospel story. We aren’t really given many details though. We are told that he was squandering property. Well judging by what happens next, we must assume that the steward or manager was not squandering property by lavishing gifts or preferment on his friends and acquaintances. He wasn’t storing money away in a secret retirement fund. He had to have been living purely for the moment. He must have been spending the money on momentary pleasures for himself, because this steward doesn’t start thinking about the future and about others UNITL he finds out he is about to be fired. The termination of his position seems to come as quite a shock to him. Like he wasn’t expecting it, or just thought his power and position would go on and on. It hits him like a ton of bricks when he finds out he is being let-go. Then all of his past decisions start coming out to haunt him. He has no money saved, and he doesn’t want to work and doesn’t want to beg. And it is clear from what happens next that he doesn’t have any friends either. This steward has been a terrible steward because he has been living only for himself and not thinking about the future. It comes as a shock to him when he realizes that his position is time-limited. To be a good steward one has to realize that one’s position is time-limited and he doesn’t. 

So he does something that is both shady, and forward thinking. It’s the first time this steward really starts to think about the future. He goes to everyone that owes the master money and he reduces their debt. He cooks the books, but probably for the first time he cooks the books not in his own favor but in someone else’s. He knows now that he needs other people. He knows that his future is in jeopardy because all this time he has been only thinking of himself, and taking, and using his position for his own pleasure and enjoyment. Now that he knows that power and wealth is fleeting, he realizes that it is relationships that really endure, so he goes around trying to repair those in his last few moments. It’s shady, its’s dishonest, but at least the steward has learned a valuable lesson. And the rich owner commends him. And that is a part of the gospel story that people really struggle with. Why does the rich man commend this dishonest steward for giving his money away?

Well we know that the master of the estate does not appreciate or condone dishonesty; that is why the steward is being fired in the first place. But finally the steward has learned what stewardship is really about: the future. The steward finally woke up to realize that living for the moment, and living for himself, was not enough. That is what the owner was commending. He had finally gotten enough wisdom to realize that it wasn’t all about him. He had been a slave to his own greed and self-interest and now at least, he was free of that. 

I have often said that inside of every pulpit should be inscribed the words “it’s not about you!” Perhaps those words should also be written on the vestry minutes or financial reports. Perhaps they should be written on the bulletins, in the prayer books, and on our website. Maybe we should paint them on the wall over the altar. Because all of us, on some level, are stewards of something. Whether it is the planet we live on, the country we live in, or the church we pray in, we have all been given responsibility, for a time to manage and make use of something that doesn’t really belong to us. What will we do with it? Will we be enslaved to our own interests and the needs of the moment? Or will we think about the generations to come? I will be interested to see how the Downton Abbey saga concludes, and please don’t anyone spoil it for me. But I would be willing to bet that the creators of the show will spend as much time thinking ahead to the family’s future as they do revisiting moments from the family’s past. I guess we shall see. 

It’s me, hi, I’m the problem. It’s me.

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Sermon for September 14, 2025

Readings:

Exodus 32:7-14
Psalm 51:1-11
1 Timothy 1:12-17
Luke 15:1-10

I became an Episcopalian in college and the parish that sponsored me for the priesthood was actually a college chapel at the University of Miami. That chapel had a very interesting set of stations of the cross hanging on the wall in the nave. Now if you aren’t familiar with the stations of the cross, they are a very old devotional practice of remembering Jesus’s final moments through fourteen different reflections or stations that are often depicted in some artistic form. We have stations of the cross here. That is what those little pictures are hanging on the beams all around you. 

Well, at the chapel in Miami, it will come as no surprise that our stations had a very Caribbean flavor to them. They were actually all carved panels of wood that were done by an artist in Haiti. There were sometimes a topic of discussion though, because occasionally someone would make the observation that all of the Roman soldiers depicted, including those nailing Jesus to the cross, had distinctly African features. Now, the knee-jerk reaction that some folks would have to seeing this would be to proclaim that this artwork was racist in some way, because the “bad guys” were depicted as African. There is no question that racism finds its way into all aspects of human society because it is a product of human sinfulness and always has been. But the mistake some people made in their rush to pronounce a judgement on those stations of the cross is that they overlooked one crucial detail: the artist was Haitian. The artist was Haitian and he knew exactly what he was doing in depicting those Roman soldiers with African features. He wanted them to look like himself. He was putting himself into the story. The Romans, the crucifiers, the sinners, the “bad guys,” they needed to look like the person he saw when he looked in the mirror. The artist knew what he was doing. As someone who could have justifiably depicted the Romans as the French or the English, or any other nationality that had participated in the slave trade (and there are many), he chose instead to cast himself in that role. The oppressor in this artist’s depiction of Jesus’s journey to the cross, was himself.

Now I know that there are people who would want to analyze this on many different levels and make all sorts of pronouncements based on culture, history, or Psychology, and some of that may be perfectly true. But a fundamental part of the Christian journey of faith is the ability to recognize one’s own sinfulness. The ritual of baptism, where we actually become Christian, necessarily involves a recognition of one’s own sinful nature. It is not enough to point to the sins of others; we must take responsibility for our own sins. That is repentance and the Christian faith begins with an act of repentance. As September the 14th is the Feast of the Holy Cross in the church’s calendar, I have been thinking specifically about the cross of Christ this week, and my mind was drawn to those stations of the cross in Miami carved lovingly and carefully by that Haitian artist. And I can’t help but marvel at the spiritual maturity that it takes to recognize sinfulness and evil within your own self. That is what that artist was doing. He was saying that I, am not merely a passive bystander in the story of Jesus, but I am a sinner, and I am precisely the sort of person that Jesus died on the cross to save. I am a sinner, not because of my race, my gender, or my circumstances, but because of my humanity. Despite all of our therapy, and don’t get me wrong I am a huge proponent of therapy, it is a wonderful and life-saving thing, but despite therapy being more common, the ability to publicly and honestly acknowledge our own sinfulness and broken human nature seems to be less common. It is becoming a lost art. And I’m sorry, but I have to think that part of the reason we are living in this age of vicious division and political violence and online hatred, is that we are losing the ability to own and claim our own sinfulness. It is so much easier to always be a victim. It is so much easier to always look for the fault in someone else. The situation we are in is because of the radical left or the reactionary right. It is the fault of the mentally ill, the gun lobby, the internet, politicians. In times of great upheaval and uncertainty we want someone to blame. It has become increasingly unpopular and uncommon to own our own faults. Everyone else is the problem. I don’t often reference or refer to Taylor Swift, I’m not a devotee, but I am quite fond of her song anti-hero because I think it does just this: it shows someone taking responsibility for the troubles in their own life.

It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me
At tea time, everybody agrees
I’ll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror
It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero

Such a great lyric. We don’t want to look in the mirror. We don’t want to examine our own words or our own actions. We don’t want to acknowledge that we all share some responsibility for the pain and suffering in the world. Taylor’s song was very popular, but sadly the kind of honest introspection that she is singing about isn’t. We want to blame everyone else for our problems. The temptation to blame others for all your problems is so pervasive that it goes all the way back to the beginning when Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent. We don’t want to take responsibility. And if all the problems in our lives are the fault of someone else, or some other group, then the solution is very easy: just eliminate them. Eliminate those people. This is what humans have done throughout history. This is what the Romans were doing nailing Jesus to the cross: eliminating a problem. This is what Paul was doing when he was having Jesus’s followers stoned to death. He was simply eliminating a problem. Until one day he realized that HE was the problem. 

In Paul’s letter to Timothy, he writes: “The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners– of whom I am the foremost.” Of whom I am the foremost…do not forget that Paul added that little bit at the end. Paul isn’t just saying that YOU need Jesus. Paul is saying that I need Jesus. Paul is testifying to his own sinfulness and brokenness. He isn’t just saying y’all are messed up. Y’all are a problem. He is saying we are a problem. He is saying I am a problem. I am a sinner. We sinners, and that means all of us, we are the problem. We are the ones Christ came to save. We are the lost sheep. 

That is why the grace of the Lord is such an amazing gift for Paul, because he knows that is has nothing to do with merit or righteousness. Paul did not deserve the love of God. He says himself that he was a man of violence. But he says, he received mercy anyways. Paul did not deserve God’s mercy, but he received it. Paul did not deserve God’s love, but he received it. Paul did not deserve God’s grace, but he received it, because that is what grace is. Grace is a gift you don’t earn and don’t deserve. It is pure gift. Friends, our world needs more grace right now. Our world needs more people who know that they are sinners, who understand that they are not righteous, who can acknowledge that they have received grace and mercy from God and therefore must MUST show grace and mercy to others. Even if they don’t deserve it. Especially if they don’t deserve it. Because that is what grace is.

I am a big fan of the Wall Street Journal columnist and former Regan speech writer Peggy Noonan. Her columns the last couple weeks in particular have really been on point. Two weeks ago she shared an exchange that she had had with a veteran political consultant who was talking about young political operatives, and something she said really struck me. She said to this political consultant: “I write for those 33-year-old operatives you speak of who have actually never seen grace.” If they don’t know what it looks like they can’t emulate it, they can’t adopt it and give it new life because they don’t know what it was.”

We need to wake up and realize that there are young people in our world right now who do not know or understand grace, so it is up to us to tell them, but more importantly show them, what it is and how it works. We have been taught, and shown, grace by the master. Our Lord didn’t just come to save the persecuted, he came to save the persecutors as well. He came to save sinners of all sorts. He came even to save those Romans that were nailing him to the cross. He asked God to forgive them with one of his last breaths. That is how grace works. It is given to those who don’t deserve it. Those of us who worship beneath the foot of the cross week after week, need to remember that. We need to remind the world what grace looks like.

The paradox of God’s Grace

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Sermon for September 7, 2025

Readings:

Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Psalm 1
Philemon 1-21
Luke 14:25-33

The religious life is filled with paradoxes, or seemingly contradictory ideas that are nonetheless, both true. It can be frustrating sometimes, when you go looking for an easy answer. One of those paradoxes is that sometimes the more you know, the less you understand. This is especially true with scripture. Today’s gospel is a good example. 

Now on the surface, today’s gospel is about the cost of discipleship. What does it really take to be a follower of Jesus Christ? Can we just call ourselves Christians and leave it at that, or is Jesus looking for more substantial proof? And Jesus is shockingly blunt. He says, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” What a thing to say! Welcome back families! Here I am trying to make this a very family friendly church, and Jesus goes and pulls the rug right out from under me on the day Sunday school starts back up. Hate your families. Thanks a lot Jesus that’s very helpful. So to try and make some sense out of what Jesus is saying and to give some context, naturally I went back and looked at the whole passage of scripture and everything that came before this. That’s when things got more confusing. The more I read, the less I understood.

You see immediately before Jesus makes this statement to the large crowd, he had been at dinner with some Pharisees. It was at that dinner that he taught about being humble and not taking the high place at the table. That was the passage that I preached on last week. But then at that same dinner, Jesus goes on to tell a story that compares the kingdom of God to a great dinner. The host invited many people to come, but they all found some excuse not to go. Everyone was busy. Someone just purchased some land, someone just purchased some new cows, someone just got married. Everyone had some good reason to turn down their invitation to this free banquet. So the host sends out his messengers to invite the poor, and the crippled, and the blind and the lame, and when he discovers he still has room for more, he sends out his messengers again and says bring in anyone so that my house may be filled. Jesus tells this wonderful story about the Kingdom of God and he compares it to a free banquet, that some people refuse their invitation to, and then, in the very next line, we get today’s gospel passage. The very next line is Jesus telling the crowd the true cost of discipleship.

So which is it? Is God’s kingdom a free gift or is it something that costs us dearly? The bible can’t seem to decide. You see my confusion? Is the Christian life, about receiving God’s blessings, or is it about serving God? Are we supposed to celebrate the feast or carry the cross? Which is it? These two stories seem to give contradictory images of a relationship with God: the first image emphasizes God’s grace as a free and undeserved gift; the second image emphasizes what God’s grace can cost us. And yet, we are obviously meant to hear these two stories together. They are side by side in the scripture, and I am convinced that that is not by accident. This is another paradox, a truth about God that is not simple. We need to hold these two contradictory images together. This is the paradox of God’s grace: it is completely free, and it can cost you everything. It is celebration and it is sacrifice. It is rest and it is work. God’s grace, God’s Kingdom, the invitation to the banquet, the forgiveness of sins and the promise of eternal life, this is a free gift. We don’t earn it. We don’t deserve it. It is God’s love being poured out on us. That is a truth that is revealed to us in scripture time and time again. But, choosing to accept that invitation, does mean that some of the cares and pressing concerns of this world will have to come second. We will have choices to make. And sometimes choosing to put God and his invitation first, can be a really tough choice. It can and will involve hard decisions. It can and will involve sacrificing some of the things of this world. Maybe even our own lives. That was the problem with everyone that was invited to the banquet in Jesus’s story: they all had some other worldly concern that kept them from showing up. They didn’t hate the host, they were polite and sent their apologies, but they all had excuses that seemed more important. And those excuses kept them from receiving the great gift that God wanted to give them. This is the truth that Jesus and scripture is pointing us to: God’s love is a free and underserved gift, but how often do we choose to put lesser things first, before God? Is God always our number 1 priority?

You see, people get really worked up when they hear Jesus say “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” We don’t like to hear Jesus use the word hate, especially not when it comes to those we love, but we need to remember where that love we share with our families ultimately comes from. It comes from God. It is a gift from God. Your father, your mother, your wife, your children, brothers and sisters, even your own life…that all comes to you from God. If we put anything else before God, we are getting things out of order. We aren’t paying attention to the true source. Jesus doesn’t want you to actually hate your mother and father, because honoring your mother and father is a commandment of God. But the first commandment of God is I am your God, you shall have no other God’s before me, so everything else, no matter how important, has to come second. Without the first commandment to worship only God, none of the other commandments like honoring your parents have any power or authority. The first commandment is the foundation of all the commandments. God has to come first.

I think Jesus is trying to shake people up a bit and make them think about their lives. I think Jesus wants his followers to understand that following him means accepting God’s invitation to the banquet, and that means a radical shift in priorities that is necessarily going to change how you live in this world. It can mean making some tough choices, because the world we live in does not want you to put God first. The world wants to keep you busy with good excuses, so it’s tough. Despite the message that many people are sold about what it means to be a Christian, the Christian life is not a simple thing. In many ways it is a paradox that many struggle to understand and many oversimplify. God does want us to have life and have it in abundance; God does want to bless us with good things. But God also warns us that truly following him is not easy and involves real sacrifice and real work. This is one of those occasions where both things are true. God’s grace is free, but it will cost you something. It may cost you everything.