Christmas, 25-A: We are the manger

Lectionary: Isaiah 9:2-7; Psalm 96, Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-14(15-20) 

En el nombre de Dios: creador, redentor, y santificador… 

In the name of God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. Amen. 

For whatever reason, when we think about the birth of our Savior, we picture it happening in the dark of night. I think of the hymn Silent Night, which we will sing later in this service.

I don’t know if art gave that to us, or if we reasoned that the natal star signifying Jesus’ birth would be seen at night or if it actually did happen at night. However we got there, it seems a perfect picture.

Darkness is such a powerful spiritual symbol. It’s a place of quiet in which God creates. In the deep, dark soil of the earth, God transforms a seed into a fruitful harvest. In the dark quietness of a woman's womb, God creates new life.

Darkness is attractive to us. We sleep in the dark, restoring our bodies and minds. In darkness, the world is at rest (unless they are at war). 

We love a candlelit dinner or prayer service, like our weekly Taizé service. The quiet calms us. The peace enters us. God enters us.

Darkness can also seem frightening. Unable to see our surroundings can put us off balance and make us afraid to move.

That’s the beauty of darkness, though. When we’re off balance or can’t move, we have the opportunity to walk by faith, not by sight. In the darkness, we can rest in the faith that God loves us, protects us, and is always waiting to be known to us in a new way, which is what Christmas is all about.

Culture tends to judge darkness as bad and light as good. Even church culture often does that. But there can’t be one without the other, so instead of holding them as opposing, we can appreciate them as symbiotic, mutually beneficial.

Without darkness, the light would overwhelm us. Without light, the darkness would swallow us. Both are of God and both give us life.

One of my favorite modern-day theologians, Episcopal priest and author Barbara Brown Taylor, gave a lecture in 2013 at the Rothko Chapel in TX. Seeing the paintings in that chapel in person, Barbara+ noted that what stood out for her were the deep royal blues, violets, and the gold she saw. She said, “The darkness of these panels is the luminous kind, and not the bossy kind. They don’t tell me what to see. They make room for me to see whatever I see, even if that is gold in the dark.” (Source) (Image: Philip Jonson)

Christmas is this luminous kind of darkness that opens us to see the gold.

The world teaches us to be afraid of the dark. God demonstrates to us that darkness is sacred, fertile, and life-giving. The world teaches us to fear and sometimes scorn our humanness, but by becoming one of us, Jesus revealed to us our own sacredness and the sacredness of all humanity. This was the reconciling work Jesus started and asked us to continue in his name.

How are we doing with that? Have you seen the news lately? Do we respect, protect, and honor the dignity of every human being as we vow to do in our Baptism?

I’m a real fan of British and Russian literature: Bronte, Austin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. Part of what I like, apart from the brilliant writing, is the cultural mirror it provides. Humanity may not be where we should be yet, but we’ve come a long way from the entrenched classism of the19th century Golden Age… or have we?

Whenever we hear rhetoric that dehumanizes or denigrates anyone or any nation, language that elevates one group above another, we have turned away from our faith in the reconciling work of Jesus, the Incarnate Word of God, whose birth into the human race, we celebrate today. Whenever we glorify earthly or military power or coerce of people through threats of destruction or starvation, we have turned away from the way of love established by the Prince of Peace who is born in us again at Christmas.

Christ was born in a manger more than two millennia ago. He is born again today in us.

We, individually and a a church community, are the manager where Christ is born today because we are the dwelling place of God in the world. The reason God is born again in us this day is so that we might live into our divine purpose, which is to bear the love of God into the world until all people, all nations know that God’s love is real, present, more powerful than anything or any way devised by humans, and already working to redeem all things, all people, all the time.

Our Bishop, Deon Johnson, said this about Christmas: 

“As we walk once more to the manger, we do so in a world marked by division, fear, and deep uncertainty. This is nothing new. Jesus was born into a time much like our own, a world shaped by anxiety and unrest, where the powers of authority were firmly in control, where fear was weaponized to still and to silence. And yet, God chose not spectacle or force, but vulnerability. God came among us as Emmanuel, God-with-us, disarming the powerful through the ordinariness of love made flesh, redeeming the world not from above, but from within.”

We are partners with Christ in this continuing work of redemption. In the ordinariness of our flesh dwells the powerful, transforming love of God. I think Marianne Williamson was right when she said, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” We are powerful beyond measure, not because of us, but because of God’s spirit in us.

Tonight (today), I invite us all to bask in the Christmas experience as we worship. After sharing the holy food of Communion, we will pause, dim the lights, kneel before the Lord (in our bodies or our spirits), and sing Silent Night. As we sing (or listen), we have the opportunity to open ourselves to enter the luminous darkness where we find that the love of God in Christ has entered us, making us all holy, sacred, reconciled, and powerful through him.

Christ is born in us this day. Alleluia! 

Merry Christmas! Amen.

Advent 4, 2025-C: Extraordinary faithfulness

Lectionary: Isaiah 7:10-16; Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18; Romans 1:1-7; Matthew 1:18-25

 

En el nombre de Dios, creador, redentor, y santificador… In the name of God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. Amen. 

Extraordinary faithfulness. This was a term used by one of our Bible studiers this week as we engaged our readings for today. Mary and Joseph both showed extraordinary faithfulness in recent gospel stories - last week with the angel’s in-person (so to speak) visitation to Mary, and this week with the angel’s visitation to Joseph in a dream. 

The question came up: Will we do now what Mary and Joseph did then? It’s a good question, which we’ll get to shortly.

First, let’s take a look at our Collect because it speaks to how Mary and Joseph lived extraordinarily faithful lives. The Collect begins: “Purify our conscience, Almighty God, with your daily visitation…”

What do we hear when we hear the word “purify?” If we look at how Jesus used this word during his ministry (think about the Beatitudes we read recently), we learn that to be pure is to be completely aligned with the will of God.

Our readings today give us a clue about what God’s will is. God is ready to do a new thing, to be known in a new way, and God needs us to stop thwarting that plan, as Ahaz did, and get on board with it, as Joseph did.

In the reading from Isaiah, the Jewish people have been besieged by war, but their King, Ahaz, who is visited by God, can’t or won’t respond faithfully because he has put his obedience to the human-made rule of not putting God to the test ahead of God’s current call to him.

Seeing this, Isaiah issues a prophecy: “Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.” This isn’t a prophecy about Jesus. It’s about a boy born then whose identity we don't know, but we do know the outcome of the prophecy: God acted through the boy, and by his adulthood, the city and the nation were saved.

In our gospel story, this prophecy is referenced and connected, but taken even further. The angel tells Joseph that he is to name the son born of Mary, Jesus, Jehosua, which means YHWH (God) is salvation, for he will save his people from their sins.

Jesus isn’t the first person in our Scripture with this name. The first Jehosua, Joshua, who succeeded Moses as the leader of the Israelites, led his people to military victory, saving them from their enemies.

This Jehosua, Jesus, will save the people from their sins. This matters because that’s something only God can do. This Jehosua, Jesus, is not just a man in whom God is acting. This Jehosua is God.

In the gospel story, Joseph is presented as a faithful Jewish man. His betrothed, Mary, has turned up pregnant and he knows it isn’t his. In his day, the law required Joseph to divorce Mary, that is, to nullify their contract to marry. The law also required that Mary be stoned to death as an adulterer.

Joseph, being a decent man, considers disassociating from Mary quietly, ostensibly, not outing her as pregnant, in order to spare Mary’s life and her family the shame. Anyone who’s ever lived in a small town, however, knows it won’t be long before the whole town knows the whole story.

An angel, speaking to Joseph in a dream, tells him that Mary has not been unfaithful to him or their contract. The angel then quotes Isaiah to him, assuring him of God’s presence in this moment.

If he consents to participate in what is being asked of him, Joseph will pay a heavy social, religious, amd interior price. His consent will require him to let go of his expectations and all of the religious guardrails that gave him security. He will have to trust, and launch into something new and unknown - with Mary and Mary’s baby - as protector and usher of this new thing God is doing in the world. 

Extraordinary faithfulness.

Looking back at last week, the same is true for Mary. The angel is asking her to become pregnant before she marries, putting her very life at risk. Mary asks the obvious, ‘How would that work?,’ then accepts the angel’s explanation that it is God at work in her. Mary consents, surrendering her whole life to God’s care. Mary had to let go her own expectations for how her life would be and the religious and social guardrails that safeguarded her. She would have to deal with the shame-filled rumors that would follow her and head off with Joseph into something new and unknown. And she did!

Extraordinary faithfulness.

When Steve and I were newly married and trying to start a family - it wasn’t easy. I suffered multiple miscarriages and was feeling desolate and afraid.

I had quit working full-time in marketing to reduce my stress, hoping that would help my body hold on to a pregnancy. We finally did have two babies, 13 months apart! God’s abundance (ha!).

It was a LOT, so we made the decision for me to say at home. This was a huge emotional risk for me: becoming financially dependent on a man again (even though this one was good and worthy of my trust).

Living without my salary meant we couldn’t keep up with our country-club lifestyle. When Christmas came around, we couldn’t load the living room with gifts as we’d done before.

It became clear to us that we had been trapped in the societal commercialization of Christmas: the decorations and parties, presents for everyone, ensuring our kids had the “it” gift for the year… It was exhausting and expensive.

So, we made a decision. We stepped out of the rat race of commercialized Christmas and refocused on what Christmas means: the love of God being born in us in a new way. How could we experience and share that?

We decided to connect with loved ones and make memories, rather than buying gifts. We informed our extended families and friends that we were no longer buying them presents. Instead, we would spend time doing something fun - making memories to last a lifetime. We wondered if our friends would abandon us and our strange new way, but they didn’t.

This new way gave us a sense of freedom we still enjoy. It also has given us so many cherished memories, something we value far more than any trendy new gadget or toy.

Moving outside of accepted expectations and established societal and religious structures can be scary and lonely. We need support. We need each other, and God makes those connections for us.

Last week I led a retreat at a church in VA where I met a woman of extraordinary faithfulness. Two of their members, young immigrant women with proper documentation, had been illegally arrested by ICE, and sent to detention in FL. (News article) The church was (and is) reeling from the injustice and terrified for the girls’ safety.

The rector found herself fighting against an unjust system outside of her knowledge, experience, and expectations as a rector. She gave her ‘yes’ to God and suddenly had a whole new job, on top of leading her church.

On the edge of burnout, she texted me: “I’m jaggy and cranky, over-tired and worried. I’m usually good but somehow the potential deportation to certain death of women I love has taken my normal self care off the table.“

My reply to her was: “Give all you have without fear. God’s abundance is enough and will carry you through. Please listen to your body and trust the moments of rest God sends you. All shall be well. You have been chosen.”

“The Holy Spirit did a good thing when she connected us. [the rector said]. I was expecting something amazing for our Vestry and congregation …but I wasn’t expecting a soul-friend at the same time.”

Society looks out for itself. God looks out for us. 

 Knowing which expectations and societal or religious structures to walk away from or fight against requires discernment: time in prayer with God, listening for the voice that tells us when, how, and where to go. As we prayed for in our Collect: Purify our conscience, Almighty God….

Inviting God to purify our conscience is a daily practice, not just an Advent thing. We must intentionally, prayerfully, and daily enter God’s presence so that God can guide us just as God guided Mary, Joseph, and so many others in the stories of our faith.

So… back to the question: Will we do now what Mary and Joseph did then? Will we a) listen for the voice of God, b) ponder the request God makes of us with open hearts, c) let go of our expectations and guardrails, and, d) respond with our yes?

I pray, for the sake of the world Jesus loved and gave his life for, that we will. Amen.

Feast of Christ the King & Baptism, 2025-C: Transformed by forgiveness

Lectionary: Jeremiah 23:1-6; Canticle 16; Colossians 1:11-20; Luke 23:33-43 

En el nombre de Dios, por cuya compasión tenemos redención mediante el perdón de los pecados… 

In the name of God, by whose compassion we have redemption through the forgiveness of sin. Amen.

Today we celebrate the feast of Christ the King as we prepare to baptize Leo Sanford.

As people who have the freedom of a democratic republic in our DNA, the term “King” can be a bit of a disconnect for us, but remember that for the ancient Jewish people, the King was a Shepherd… like David, whose role is to love, protect, and guide the people of God.

As Jeremiah notes, some human kings weren’t loving or protective, but the redeeming love of God is greater than all of that and is a certainty. When Zechariah set out John the Baptist’s divine purpose in Canticle 9, he proclaimed ours too. We, too, my children, are prophets of the Most High. We are to give people knowledge of salvation by the forgiveness of sin. That’s the key.

Sin separates us and leads to violence, hatred, and harm. Jesus, who is the Christ, reunites us, making us one again. So it might make a little more sense now that our gospel for this day comes from the passion – the crucifixion - because that is where the very notion of kingship is transformed.

Great kings in our salvation history, like David, brought peace and harmony, but none has brought eternal redemption except for Jesus, and he did it in a way that no one saw coming. It wasn’t by being a great ruler or a great warrior, but by the forgiveness of sin.

I want to pause for a moment to reflect on what “sin” is. Most of us talk about sin as those things we do that are wrong or harmful. That’s partly right.

Theologian Karl Barth talks about sin as a state of separation from God. In that state of separation, we choose to do things that are wrong and harmful. So, it’s kind of like the disease versus the symptoms. We know there is a disease by the presence of its symptoms. We can treat the symptoms, but unless we cure the disease, we aren’t healed.

Jesus brought us redemption by the forgiveness of sin by bringing down all that separated us from God and one another. Jesus didn’t just treat the symptoms; he cured the disease. This is our King.

In his most miserable, painful, humiliating moment as a human, Jesus prayed, and his prayer takes our breath away: “Father, forgive them…” At our most miserable moments, when we are being unfairly treated, when those with power over us are acting corruptly, is this our prayer?

When I was working on my doctorate, I went to England to study. I visited a place called the Cathedral at Coventry. During WWII, this cathedral was bombed by the Nazis because under it was a hidden arsenal. When you go to the cathedral now, you see that they didn’t clear away the rubble of the original cathedral; they simply built the new cathedral and attached them with a walkway. So it’s one cathedral: the bombed-out shell and the new place of worship; and every day at noon they hold a prayer service in the bombed-out shell. It’s a very powerful experience. Photo credit: Valori Mulvey Sherer

When you walk into the new cathedral, the very first thing you see, built into the tile on the floor, are these words: “Father forgive.” I can still feel in my body the power of the first moment I saw that.

Anyone who’s been awake or watching the news lately might notice that our beloved human family is sorely “divided and enslaved by sin.” In our effort to address this discomfort, we often react like the soldiers and the criminal who call upon Jesus to save himself. Make this pain go away. Take a pill. Kill an enemy. Eat chocolate. Do whatever it takes – just make it stop… And sometimes we can… for a while, but we’ve only addressed the symptom. The disease remains.

As Jesus was dying on that cross, he certainly had the power to make it stop, to make it go away, but as the soldiers mocked him, and the religious leaders scoffed at him, and one of the criminals crucified with him derided him, Jesus forgave. This is what Christ our King does.

Jesus forgives, and by doing so, he has “set us on a course that will bring all of us together again under God’s gracious rule.” Baptism marks the beginning of our journey on that course.

In Christ, we are made family through Baptism, which calls us to continue the reconciling work of Jesus until the whole world recognizes its citizenship in the kingdom of God and lives as one body, one spirit in Christ.

It’s the kind of work that will take a village – or as we call it, a church. We need one another, and we need to share the nourishment of Word and Sacrament regularly together because that is what strengthens us and unites us. Church is where we learn and practice forgiveness so that we can take it out into the world, which remains divided and enslaved by sin.

To do that, we must be willing to notice sin – to notice when we are not one, where, how, and why we are separated. Then we must be willing to remember that we are imperfect vessels made perfect by God alone. We are imperfect communities enlightened by Christ the King who dwells in us, setting us free from all that separates us, guiding our feet into the way of peace.

In our church family, we learn and practice how to love, how to keep hope, and how to serve. We remember the stories handed to us from our forebears and teach them to our children.

Today, we will baptize Leo Sanford, initiating him fully into Christ’s body, the church, making him the newest Christian in our Episcopal branch of the family tree. As his faith community, we promise to support Leo, accompany and guide him, as he grows in the Spirit toward the full stature of Christ. It’s a beautiful journey that we are blessed to take together. Amen.

Note: Following the sermon, Leo, his parents, godparents, and family, along with the children of Emmanuel, are invited to come forward to the font for the Baptism.

23 Pentecost (Proper 28), 2025-C: Jesus' Way of Love

Lectionary: Isaiah 65:17-25; Canticle 9; 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13; Luke 21:5-19 

En el nombre de Dios, cuyo camino de amor es nuestro camino de vida… 

In the name of God whose Way of Love is our way of life. Amen.

Today’s readings offer us one of Jesus’ most important teachings covering so much of our basic belief – who he is, who we are because of who he is, and how we live because of the presence of his spirit in us.

Here’s the background…

The temple Jesus and his disciples are standing near in our gospel story is the 3rd temple built in Jerusalem. The first, built by Solomon, was destroyed by the Babylonians who sent the Jewish people into exile. When they returned from exile, they built a second temple, inferior in quality and aesthetic to Solomon’s temple, but it’s what they could manage with their post-exilic resources.

This second temple was destroyed by Herod who built a bigger, better, more lavish temple in its place. It was massive - 15 stories high, with huge gold plating on the outside, so when the sun shone it was too bright to even look at it! The inside was furnished lavishly as well. This third temple represented the epitome of earthly wealth, power, and splendor. 

This is the temple Jesus predicts will be thrown down in the days to come, not one stone being left upon another. The question is: is Jesus talking about the actual building or what it represents? Knowing Jesus, it’s both.

But there’s another temple being referenced here. The temple of God is the dwelling place of God, so this third temple is Jesus himself, the Incarnate Word. And if we believe in what Jesus did at Pentecost, breathing his spirit into us, there’s yet another temple: us. This is one more instance of Jesus talking about a single, tangible, earthly reality while at the same time, deepening and broadening it to include comprehensive, cosmic, and eternal truth.

On this, his final journey to Jerusalem, Jesus is continuing to teach his disciples how to live in the world as followers of his Way of Love.

The destruction of their beloved, historic building, even with the promise of a bigger and better one, is disconcerting. Many of us had a similar experience recently when bulldozers tore down the east wing of our White House. (Photo credit: Jacquelin Martin/AP)

Like us, the Jewish people hadn’t been informed or consulted about it. A single powerful figure, in this case, Herod, made the decision, made plans for rebuilding, and chose the timing on his own, so part of the discomfort was the surprise of it, and seeing the walls come down felt like a cultural ravaging. In addition, some voices complained that while the building was aesthetically beautiful, it was spiritually bankrupt, intended to cover up Herod’s hypocrisy and growing oppression of the Jewish people over whom he was tetrarch.

Upon hearing Jesus’ prediction of the destruction of the temple, the disciples asked if this would be the start of the “end time.” What would be the sign? How would they know?

End-time teaching, also called apocalyptic teaching, was common, and we need to remember that Jesus’ followers started as followers of John the Baptist, who was an apocalypticist.

Apocalypticism was originally meant to provide hope and comfort in the midst of hopelessness and suffering, but fear, mostly stoked by religious leaders, distorted it into a threat that has been wielded against the very people it was designed to comfort - then and now.

Repent, John would exhort the people. Change the way you are living for this is an age where good and evil are in a battle. We could say the same about now, couldn’t we?

But we don’t repent in order to be rewarded with the other good people or to avoid punishment with the other bad people. We change the way we live so that we can live more fully in the Way of Love, as a people reconciled by Jesus to God and one another.

My proclamation of the Good News is this: God always acts with love, out of love, and toward love. When there is suffering, whether due to natural or human-made disasters, God is present, aware, and already acting to redeem.

Has there ever been a time in history when there was no suffering, or plagues or famines? …No natural disasters or wars? No. Neither, it seems, has there ever been a time in history when people weren’t trying to figure out how to survive an apocalypse.

Jesus says, when you see dreadful events happening, “Do not be terrified... the end will not follow immediately.” The epistle writer urges the church in Thessalonica (not very well, lacking wisdom, but his point is good), who had been waiting for the apocalyptic second coming of Jesus that never happened, not to be idle – not to sit back and just wait for the end to come. Do your work, the writer says, “do not weary in doing what is right.”

Jesus says, prepare to be betrayed, even by family and friends because of your association with me and my way. When that happens, use it as an opportunity to witness.

An example of how transforming witnessing can be is found in an old Indian story about Maskepetoon, a Cree Indian chief, whose father was murdered by a Blackfoot Indian during an ongoing war. When the two tribes gathered to forge a peace treaty, one of the warriors present was the man who had killed the Chief’s father. Maskepetoon, who had only recently been converted to Christianity, went up to the man who murdered his father and said, ‘You killed my father…now you must become a father to me... wear my clothes, ride my horse [and] tell your people that this is the way Maskepetoon takes revenge.’ (Photo credit)

That’s a far cry from how the world generally responds. One of the best examples of how the world usually responds is Inigo Montoya from the movie "The Princess Bride" who repeatedly said, “Hello! My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die!”

As followers of Jesus’ Way of Love, we are called to be steadfast in our faith, aware that along this Way we will meet up with inhospitable neighbors, friends and family who betray us, enemies, and injustice at the hands of earthy authorities.

Our faith assures us, however, that God is always with us, in us, redeeming all things. That assurance enables us to live our lives in peace – the kind of peace that isn’t attached to circumstances, which may be good or bad at any moment in time.

We live with the peace that our salvation, the final judgment of God, has already happened in Jesus, and it is a judgment of forgiveness, reconciliation, and abundant love. Therefore, freed from the need to earn our place in eternal bliss, freed from the need to judge and fix other people, we can be kind and generous toward everyone. We can be gentle with ourselves as we grow in our faith and gentle with others who are growing too.

As we grow in faith, we also grow in wisdom, so we can hold our tongues when we want to lash out - especially on social media.

The keynote speaker at our convention yesterday, Dr. Catherine Meeks, said, “Think about someone who gets on your nerves. Then think about how much they are like you;” reflecting something about you to you, like a mirror.

That is wisdom.

Jesus’ Way of Love is a path of agape love - love that reflects God’s love for us, love that puts the needs of the other first. It’s the kind of love Jesus demonstrated for us on the cross.

As followers of Jesus’ Way of Love, we are already in the life eternal, because we are bearers of the
eternal presence of God here, now, and forevermore. Jesus has come again - into us - at Pentecost.

So, we don’t live in order to get to heaven one day. We live to bring heaven to earth right now.

Like the church in Thessalonica, we just need to get on with our work loving one another, feeding the hungry, sheltering the unhoused, clothing the poor, protecting the exposed and oppressed, and visiting the lonely.

We must grow together until we can love even the ones we don’t want to love – because we know that everyone is God’s child, and therefore, our kin in the family of God. As Dr. Meeks said, we made up all the categories that divide us, so we can unmake them.

Let’s get to it. Amen.

All Saints Day, 2025: Committed to shine

Lectionary: Daniel 7:1-3,15-18; Psalm 149; Ephesians 1:11-23; Luke 6:20-31

En el nombre de Dios: creador, redentor, y santificador… 

In the name of God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. Amen.

On this, one of my favorite feast days in the liturgical year, our lectionary features the Beatitudes. This teaching from Jesus is rich with history, symbolism, and current application, but it helps to study it deeply. First, a little context…

Our reading begins at verse 20. In verse 12, Jesus went out to pray on a mountain. ‘Going up a mountain,’ as you may remember, is Bible-talk for ‘going to be with God.’

Luke says Jesus prayed on the mountain all through the night. Night and darkness symbolize the state of unknowing from which we are enlightened by God.

When it was day, that is, when divine inspiration had come, Jesus called his 12 disciples to himself and led them down the mountain to a flat land, symbolizing the movement from divine to earthly experience.

There they encountered a great multitude of people from the surrounding Jewish and Gentile areas. These people came with spiritual torments and physical wounds. They came to hear Jesus and seek healing from him.

And Jesus healed them – all of them: Jews, Gentiles, maybe even some Romans. Jesus healed them all. This is Jesus showing the disciples whom to serve: anyone and everyone; and how to serve them – by going where they are, entering into relationship by talking with them, and being a conduit of God’s healing love to them.

This is where our Gospel story picks up. Having healed the multitude of people from all that ailed or tormented them, Jesus looks at his disciples and, in the beautiful words of the Beatitudes, teaches them how to understand what they just saw - how to be his disciple - and this lesson applies just as much to us today as it did to them back then.

The saints, whom we honor and remember today, are exemplars of faithful discipleship for us. 

Jesus begins with: “Blessed are you who are poor.” The word blessed does mean happy, but it also means exalted. You will be lifted up into the glory of God.

‘Poor’ refers to those who cower or hide themselves out of fear, like Adam did in the creation story in Genesis. The poor may hide from God out of guilt or fear, or they may hide from their earthly oppressor. Jesus teaches that what blesses the poor is that they know they need what they don’t have, whether that is a spiritual or a physical need. Blessed are you who know you need what you don’t have… 

…for yours is the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is where and when God’s presence, power, and glory are – which is everywhere, something we know when the eyes of our hearts are enlightened. Being exalted into the kingdom of God provides us with the power and protection of God, so we don’t need to cower or fear any longer.

Blessed are you who are hungry now, who long for relief from suffering or isolation, who desire closeness to God or another. God promises that, in the kingdom of God, you will be satisfied.

Blessed are you who grieve and shed tears. God promises that, in the kingdom of God, you will triumph in joy.

We often think of joy as happiness, but it isn’t. Theologian Frederick Buechner offers a clarifying teaching on the distinction between the two. Buechner says, “Happiness is man-made—a happy home, a happy marriage, [etc.]… We work for these things, and if we are careful and wise and lucky, we can usually achieve them. … moments of joy…[are] not man-made and we… [can] never take credit for … them. They come when they come. They are always sudden and quick and unrepeatable… Joy is always all-encompassing; there is nothing of us left over to hate with or to be afraid with, to feel guilty with or to be selfish about… joy is a mystery because it can happen anywhere, anytime, even under the most unpromising circumstances, even in the midst of suffering, with tears in its eyes. Even nailed to a tree.” Source: originally published in The Hungering Dark

This is the joy Jesus promises. What we need is joy, but what we work to achieve is happiness, and it’s never enough.

Blessed are you, Jesus says, when you are hated, separated, excluded, or defamed on account of the Son of Man (referring to himself and his way of being in the world). Rejoice that day and frolic in joy because your reward is great and rests in the dwelling place of God (which is what heaven means).

This is not a promise of a future reward. Jesus is talking about a present reward, right now, while we are here on earth. Our joy is a result of living as the dwelling place of God. That is how heaven happens on earth. It’s us! We are the means by which “on earth as it is in heaven” happens.

Then come the woes… Jesus says, Woe to you who are rich. This isn’t a condemnation of people who have money. Jesus is grieving for those who don’t know what they don’t have – or don’t care. He’s grieving for those who aren’t humble or hungry because they don’t realize they’re trading divine joy for earthly happiness.

Then comes the really challenging part of Jesus’ teaching: “Love your enemies.” 

Let’s pause here and remember that Jesus is a Jewish rabbi who lived 2 millennia ago. In that time and in his religious context, “love” referred to loyalty, loyalty to relationship, as I mentioned in my sermon last week. This kind of love protects, respects, and cares for the other, even an enemy who seeks to harm us.

The disciples don’t know it yet, but just as Jesus was showing them whom to serve, he is now preparing them to understand the non-violent humility they will see Jesus model for them at his arrest and crucifixion, described 12 chapters hence.

Jesus sums up his teaching with what has come to be called The Golden Rule: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” The Greek word translated as “do” also means “commit.” Rabbi Jesus is reminding us to commit to the other as a human being, created of God in the image of God, deserving of respect and dignity, just as we would want them to commit to us in the same way.

If we were suffering or hungry or broken, we’d be desperate for hope and healing. Jesus has given that to us by giving us himself. Now it’s our turn to do likewise.

The many saints we remembered today in our Litany are examples to us of how Jesus’ teaching can be lived in the world. The best part is that they too are committed to relationship with us. They remain just a prayer away, always ready to share the gift that shone so brightly in their lives, to light our way in our lives.

We are not alone. The saints are with us. God is with us.

God, who made us, loves us, and redeemed us, dwells with in us now. As we grow in our faith, we come to learn our shortcomings and failings, and we confess them together in our weekly worship.

Then, knowing ever more clearly what we don’t have, we humbly ask God to give it to us, so our lights can shine as brightly as the saints we remember today: “Almighty God… give us grace so to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those ineffable joys that you have prepared for those who truly commit to you.  Amen.

(All Saints icon purchased for use from Kelly Latimore Icons.)

20 Pentecost (Proper 25) 2025-C: Pure and humble of heart

Lectionary: Lectionary: Joel 2:23-32; Psalm 65; 2 Timothy 4:6-8,16-18; Luke 18:9-14

En el nombre de Dios: creador, redentor, y santificador… In the name of God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. Amen.

I share with you today from Mechthild of Magdeburg, a medieval mystic known for her poems, songs, and writings on spiritual matters. She was a remarkable Christian whose wisdom continues to us today. One of Mechthild’s poems speaks directly to Jesus’ parable in our Gospel story: 

In pride I so easily lost Thee -- 

But now the more deeply I sink 

The more sweetly I drink 

Of Thee! 

It’s a concept that is counter-intuitive. We don’t like to sink because it means letting go of our own efforts. It’s more natural for us to fight against sinking, kick against the current, and struggle to keep our heads above water. But Mechthild presents such a beautiful image of the truth of our lives as Christians. Drowning, as in the waters of Baptism, means letting go of self and relying totally on God for our life, our breath, our very survival.

In today’s Gospel story, the Pharisee assumes that God will be pleased by his good behavior, so he reminds God that he fasts, prays, and tithes, that he doesn’t steal, cheat on his wife, or exploit his own kind for profit. He’s not like those other people, including that tax collector over there, and for that, he’s thankful.

There is nothing wrong with being thankful in prayer, but where the Pharisee goes wrong is in his self-centered arrogance. His prayer reveals to us that he is not in right relationship with God because his attention is focused on himself, his own efforts, and that has led him astray.

As Mechthild once said: “When I … cherish some sourness in my heart… my soul becomes so dark… that I must… humbly make confession… Then only does grace come again to my soul…” The Pharisee’s prayer shows that arrogance has darkened his heart and soured the purity of his soul.

The tax collector, on the other hand, knows that his life isn’t anything to brag about, so he makes a humble confession instead, praying simply: God, be merciful to me a sinner. And this is the prayer that pleases God because this is the heart that presents itself humbly and is therefore justified – restored to a new and right relationship with God.

To be pure of heart is to be completely in the will of God, or as Jesus often said it, dead to self. The pure of heart will long for unity and work for reconciliation. The pure of heart will not stand alone in their churches reveling in their closeness to God, as the Pharisee does. They will be out there among the sinners, the suffering, and the scorned, embodying God’s love and giving generously from their gifts so that all they meet will know that they matter, and that they are beloved of God.

But we don’t want to be too hard on the Pharisee. He was faithful, and he was praying. And if we’re not careful, we might find ourselves silently giving thanks to God that we are not like the Pharisee… but we are. Everyone is …at least sometimes. Like the Pharisee, we often get distracted by our scorekeeping - measuring our value by the good things we do, the success of our efforts - rather than by the purity of our hearts, by our willingness to trust that God has a loving plan for us, and for the whole world.

Notice that in this gospel, Jesus doesn’t tell us whether or not the tax collector ever repented. That’s because a) God’s love isn’t dependent upon our behavior, and b) that isn’t the point of this story. The point is that we don’t earn God’s grace by doing good things. It comes as a gift from God.

Jesus is teaching us to love even when the one who sins, seems to have no remorse, no repentance. Anyone who has ever loved an addict knows what this is like.

Love has nothing to do with behavior, especially if we approach the word “love” in the ancient Jewish way: love as loyalty to relationship. The prophets show us a God who stands by us even when we sin. In the reading from the prophet Joel, the people of Israel have broken the covenant so habitually that they don’t even know how to be in relationship with God anymore.

The prophet calls upon them to look around and see the love of God manifested in real ways: abundant rain, threshing floors overflowing with grain, vats overflowing with wine. Joel gives voice to God’s promise of presence and power within us saying, “I will pour out my spirit on all flesh,” sons and daughters, old and young, the greatest and the least in society. God will pour out God’s spirit on ALL people.

Be forewarned… being in right relationship with God, one another, and creation often puts us at odds with the world, as Paul’s letter to Timothy shows us. Being a voice for right relationship can be lonely, even punishing. Living in right relationship with God and God’s creation may place us in a contentious relationship with those who, by their worldly power and self-centered perspective, have a different plan, one outside of God’s plan of redeeming love.

In his life, Jesus showed us the path of the pure and humble of heart. We remember that we are made acceptable through him… not by our right behavior, or even by right belief. We are made acceptable through Jesus Christ, the Savior and Redeemer of the world.

Jesus made clear that those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted. To be exalted is to be lifted up - as Jesus was on the cross. We are called to do with our lives as Jesus did with his: to humble ourselves, and trust God with all we are, all we need, and all we should do.

That’s why each Sunday, as we gather for Holy Eucharist, we confess our sins against God and our neighbor. We intentionally remind ourselves that we sin, that we disrupt our relationships with God, one another, and even ourselves. Our confession is corporate, said together, because we sin not just as individuals, but also as a people.

But we also remember how God deals with us – wondrously - bringing us out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, and out of death into life… We hear over and over again the amazing truth that we have been sanctified by the Holy Spirit of God, freed from the power of sin, and set apart for a holy purpose.

That holy purpose may not be what we think because it isn’t anything that we do by our own efforts. Paul describes this holy purpose in his second letter to Timothy. In that letter, Paul is dying. He has been deserted by his friends, whom he has forgiven, and he says: …the Lord stood by me and gave me strength, so that through me the message might be fully proclaimed and all… might hear it.

And there it is. Like Paul, our purpose is to be instruments God can use to proclaim the message through our words and our actions so that all might hear it. We can only do this by humbling ourselves in prayer and opening our hearts to let God strengthen us, then send us, showing us when, with whom , and how to serve in Jesus’ name.

Right now, I am asking all of us, in the name of Jesus, to let go of anything that has soured the purity of our hearts and disrupted our right relationships with God and one another. I’m asking us to surrender our hearts to God, by sinking deeply into this Eucharist, into the waters of our Baptism; sweetly drinking from the cup of salvation we share. Let us release our judgments, our fears, and our pride, and rely totally on God for everything – as individuals and as a people.

Finally, let us offer pure and humble hearts to God in our prayers today, so that we can receive God’s grace and become the ones through whom the Good News is faithfully proclaimed by our words and our lives. Amen.

15 Pentecost & Homecoming, 2025-C: We must choose

Lectionary: Jeremiah 8:18-9:1; Psalm 79:1-9; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13 

En el nombre de Dios, creador, redentor, y santificador… In the name of God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. Amen.

I begin with one of my favorite prayers from Mother Theresa: “Dear Lord, the Great Healer, I kneel before You, Since every perfect gift must come from You. I pray, give skill to my hands, clear vision to my mind, kindness and meekness to my heart. Give me singleness of purpose, strength to lift up part of the burden of my suffering [siblings], and a true realization of the privilege that is mine. Take from my heart all guile and worldliness, That with the simple faith of a child, I may rely on you.” Amen.

Mother Theresa’s prayer pleads for the will and wisdom to be faithful stewards of all of the gifts given by God, and to answer God’s call for justice. It’s a call for an inward change - meekness of heart and a true realization of our privilege - that has an outward effect - strength to act to relieve the burden suffered by others.

Privilege is a special advantage granted to a specific group. That by itself is neutral. Believing we have the right to be privileged…and the right to have immunity from guilt for being privileged, is sin because it distorts our relationships with God and one another.

The sin of privilege creates a blindness in us. Over time, we can become focused primarily on ourselves and those who can help us maintain our privilege because we have come to believe that we deserve all of the good things we have.

The sin of privilege, and the disruption it wreaks, is all over our current news in quantities I haven’t seen before. The most surprising part for me is how acceptable and normalized this kind of selfishness and its concomitant cruelty have become.

Jesus speaks directly to this in today’s gospel. Known as the parable of the dishonest manager, this is considered a particularly tough teaching, and it is, but not because the parable is hard to understand. I think what’s hard about this parable is the fundamental truth it communicates.

A little background: In those days, managers earned their salary by adding fees to the debt they were collecting – a practice called usury, which was strictly prohibited by Jewish law (Deut 23:19-20). FYI… it’s exactly what banks and lenders do today.

The manager in the parable would have been hated because his wealth resulted from how successfully he could squeeze these fees out of the debtors from whom he was collecting. The rich man, the manager’s boss, says that some folks have told him the manager is being reckless and wasteful with his property, so the rich man demands an accounting, then fires him.

The manager begins to panic. I’m not strong enough to work, and I’m too proud to beg. So, he cooks up a plan to save himself. He visits each of the debtors and does a surprising thing – he reduces their debt.

Scholars say the actions of the manager can be interpreted a few ways. First, the manager is cheating the rich man in order to ingratiate himself to the debtors. He is, after all, dishonest. Establishing a good relationship with the debtors he’s been fleecing will create a community of people who trust and will support him when he needs it.

Second, maybe the manager is simply cutting out his own commission. While this would have a short-term financial impact on him, there would have been no impact on the rich man who wouldn’t even know about it unless the manager told him.

The third possibility is that the dishonest manager was actually repenting. Given his other actions and statements, that’s doubtful.

Jesus presses on with some very surprising and challenging statements such as, the “… master (supposedly God) commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly.” Wait - what?

Hang on - it gets worse. Jesus also says: “… I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.” Again, seriously?

By now, the disciples’ brains – and ours - are nearly exploding, but Jesus isn’t finished. “If then you have not been faithful with dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you true riches?”

Then comes the big finale - the difficult truth being communicated by Jesus: “No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”

This parable teaches us that the wealth offered by the world is dishonest. It lies to us. It makes us believe that we have control of our lives and the right to decide how things should work for others. It fools us into thinking that we deserve what we have. It also makes us think it will last forever… but it won’t.

Wealth comes and goes, and as the saying goes, you can’t take it with you. As disciples, however, we know that the gifts we’ve been given were meant to be shared with others as generously as God has shared them with us.

Jesus says we cannot serve God and wealth. We will either be disloyal (which is how the word "hate" translates from the Greek) to God and loyal to money; or we will devote ourselves to God and find that obsessive devotion to money is incompatible with that.

Please let me be clear – having money or power or influence is not the problem. Devoting ourselves completely to having more and more money, so much that we can’t spend it in our lifetime, while others are dying from famine, poverty, unemployment, or as casualties of war meant to feed even more power to the power hungry – that is a problem. In fact, it’s sin.

Threatening someone’s safety or solvency, denigrating persons or groups, and telling outright lies that twist and pervert the truth, and even worse connecting God’s name to that, in order to garner more influence, more money, or more power is sin because it a) violates about 8 of the 10 commandments and, b) distorts our relationships with God, others, and even ourselves.

This is what brought the prophet Jeremiah to joyless grief. His heart broke as the people of Judah looked away from God and toward promises made by earthly powers for their safety and sustenance. He watched as those earthly powers turned God into a tool they could use to coerce the people into cooperating with their dishonest schemes.

To be honest, I’ve shared Jeremiah’s exasperation and sadness a lot lately as I watch the news. This is clearly not a new problem.

That’s why Jesus offered this teaching and it’s why, I think, this parable is so tough. Jesus offers us a rare “either-or” choice: God or wealth. It can’t be both. This is hard for Episcopalians who much prefer “both-and” options.

We must choose: will we be devoted to God or wealth? 

Like the people of Judah in the OT story, we live in a world where greed is good, and empathy is bad. We witness continual acquiescence to the ‘me-first,’ mob-boss style ethics of this world.

But we are called to co-create a new world where the mercy, community, and the interconnectedness of Jesus reigns. We act faithfully with the dishonest wealth of the world by building relationships here on earth that lead us all into the eternal presence of God, because, in the end, it isn’t us vs. them. It’s just us.

As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson once said, “We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically.” [As for] “…me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday and lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.”

Maybe we wouldn’t be surprised. We are, after all, Episcopal Christians, part of the world-wide Anglican communion, and that is our tradition. Those of you who are or have been in our Episcopal 101 class will recognize this, my favorite quote from Episcopal theologian Terry Holmes: “[Episcopalians] see ourselves as interconnected …To love God is to relieve the burden of all who suffer. The rest is a question of tactics.” (Holmes, What is Anglicanism?, 95)

Jesus confronted the dishonest systems of his time. He modeled how to welcome the stranger and how to treat those society labeled as sinners, outcasts, or in today’s parlance: vermin.

We do the same now through the ministries of the church, which will be on display in the parish hall after the 9:30 service. Ministry leadership will be available to explain the ministries and you can sign up on the spot if you like.

We will share a meal – one of Jesus’ favorite activities, then get to work… together, doing our part to relieve the burden of all who suffer.  Amen.