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.

13 Pentecost, 2025-C: On the wings of God's mercy

Lectionary: Jeremiah 18:1-11; Psalm 139:1-5,13-17; Philemon 1-21; Luke 14:25-33 

En el nombre de Dios: creador, redentor, y santificador. In the name of God: creator, redeemer, and sanctifier. Amen.

C. S. Lewis, renowned theologian and author, once said, “It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.”

Change happens. It’s part of being alive, and for us believers, it’s a goal: continual transformation in the Spirit of God toward the likeness of God in Christ. Change is also part of being God, as our lesson from Jeremiah reminds us.

But certainty, familiarity, and predictability are comfortable and can tempt us to resist change. Now it’s true that some changes are better than others, and it can be hard to know which changes to make – but that’s where faith comes in.

For God’s people, there is nothing to fear in change. We’re in good hands. The LORD says to Jeremiah: “…go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.” So, Jeremiah goes where God directs him, and as he watches the potter reforming a pot that has spoiled on the wheel, Jeremiah hears the voice of God say: “Can I not do with you…just as this potter has done? Just like clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.”

Telling the people through the prophet Jeremiah (twice, to be sure we hear it) that the course of God’s plan is not fixed, God says, “I will change my mind.” When God’s mind changes, it is in response to our faithful or our faithless choices.

On the downside, this means that we can never fully ‘figure out’ God’s plan - it’s a moving target. So, we can never be absolutely sure we know what to do to get it all right. But we aren’t called to be right. We’re called to be faithful. As we prayed in our Collect: “Grant us O Lord, to trust in you with all our hearts…”

On the plus side, this opens us to an amazing truth: that what we do and how we live matter and affect the course of God’s plan… or is that a downside? Not if we are like clay in the hands of our Potter - clay that is malleable on the wheel where it is formed and re-formed into a vessel of the Potter’s design.

Have you ever worked with clay? You have to keep drizzling water over it on the wheel because clay that gets too dry becomes rigid and unusable. If we choose to be rigid, we must realize that we have also chosen to be unworkable by the Master Potter, who honors our choices, even when they are regrettable.

The basic message in all of the prophets in our Scripture is this: God has promised to be faithful to us, and IS faithful to us, even when we aren’t faithful to God. And we aren’t faithful when we become so rigidly attached to something that we refuse to change or to allow God to change us.

When we find ourselves attached to anything, we need to remember what Jesus said in today’s Gospel: “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.” You can almost hear the hearts of his listeners drop with a thud. I heard that here today!

But wait – there’s more! Jesus goes on to say: “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple… and none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.”

When we read this, we justify our knee-jerk detachment from it by saying we just don’t believe that. Surely Jesus isn’t saying we should give up all of our possessions. And you’d be right. Rabbi Jesus is using hyperbole to make a point.

And the point is this: those things we attach to - our possessions – include things like houses, cars, and retirement plans; but they also include things like our reputation or status, our independence, or our need to be dependent. We can be attached to our secrets, our self-image, our opinions about others… even to our ideas about God.

Jesus says that to be a disciple we must trust only in God’s love and mercy, despite how it may look around us. We must take up our cross, symbolic of our death and our defeat by the systems of corrupt and evil power in the world, just as Jesus took up his.

While it may seem that those corrupt power-mongers who hoard money and exploit earth’s resources, who destroy social and medical safety nets and heap hardship on the poor, the sick, and the helpless - while it may seem that they are winning the day, we are called to hold fast to our faith, to trust that God’s love and mercy will have the final victory, that the new life brought by the resurrection of Jesus in his time continues in our time by the hands of our attentive, responsive God.

For our part, we must choose to shift our priority of loyalty (which is how the word ‘hate’ translates) from earthly power to the power of love, which is God, and live that reality into our world. As one Bible Studier asked: how can we do that?

To begin with, we must remember that we are not called to solve the problems of poverty, hunger, war, famine, violence, and oppression. We are called to be in relationship with God and one another – including everyone God draws into our orbits.

A very practical example here in St. Louis is: beggars at the street corners. When you come to a traffic light, do you look at them or look away? Do you hope for a green light so they don’t come to your window? Are you afraid of them? Grossed out by them?

If so, welcome to the human race. So, what do we do? How do we respond?

Last week I sat next to a very talkative man on my airplane trip to FL. When he asked and found out that I was a priest, he was very excited to talk about religious things. Our conversation led to a discussion about giving to street beggars, and the man shared with me about an experience he’d had a while back. When the beggar approached his car window, the man realized he only had a $10 bill – too much, he thought, wishing he had some $1’s, but he gave the $10 bill, feeling very generous in a Christian way. The beggar looked at the woman begging alongside him and said, “Look, we can buy a 6-pack now.” The man was incensed and said he hasn’t given to a beggar since.

That’s very sad, I said, because your $10 wouldn’t have solved his poverty, but the moment you looked into his eyes and connected with him, you showed him that he mattered enough for you to give him what you had.

That’s what we are called to do – to be in relationship, to let everyone God leads to us know that they matter. When we do that, we are bringing down barriers, opening a path of love, and living as the body of Christ in the world, because everywhere we go, we present the spirit of God in Christ who dwells in us to everyone we meet.

We give because we have it to give – whether it’s money, time, prayer, or simply presence. What they do with our gift is not our concern. That’s between them and God. We don’t know their story, and Jesus was very clear that we shouldn’t judge.

I should finish the story. The man on the airplane said he realized that he had been judging and would begin giving to street beggars again, looking them in the eye and trusting God’s love and mercy to make use of his meager gift for the benefit of the one begging.

We are continually being formed and re-formed by God into disciples. As we grow and change according to God’s plan for us, I pray that God will help us maintain our malleability, so that we can be molded and fashioned into the kind of disciples who can create moments where oneness with God and another human being can be known and experienced through us, where we can inspire others with the hope that is the truth of the Gospel.

Grant us, O Lord, to trust in you with all our hearts… that we may be hatched and learn to fly on the wings of your mercy. Amen.

10 Pentecost, 2025-C: In the name of Love

Lectionary: Isaiah 5:1-7; Psalm 80:1-2, 8-18; Hebrews 11:29-12:2; Luke 12:49-56

En el nombre de Dios, nuestra luz, nuestro amor, y nuestra vida… 

In the name of God, our light, our love, and our life. Amen. 

So… that’s a tough set of readings we have today. Good news, eh? Actually, it is… if we have eyes to see and ears to hear it.

I want to begin by pointing out my favorite phrase in our Collect today, because it is a VERY important part of what we believe. “Give us grace to receive thankfully the fruits of his redeeming work” …the fruits of HIS redeeming work.

Somehow, we moved from receiving the fruits of his redemption to working to achieve our own or someone else’s redemption, even though we believe and profess that redemption is a gift from God and not something we can achieve for ourselves.

Christians are not called to worry about our own or anyone else’s salvation. Our faith assures us that Jesus has already accomplished that once for all, for all time. Our life here on earth isn’t about getting to heaven after we die, but about bringing heaven to earth while we live.

Currently, we are living in a time of alarming hypocrisy by people who call themselves followers of Christ. There are prophets among us speaking out right now, and they’re being treated now as prophets always have been - with avoidance and contempt.

But we must listen to these prophets who are telling us honestly where and how we got off the path of love and onto a path of destruction. It’s easy to see - we know the signs and we hear the cries - all over the news and social media.

A couple of people complained to me this week that they hate when we read the prophets because they’re so dark and full of threats and punishment. To which I replied, I love the prophets - they are such a source of hope and some of the most truthful storytellers in our Scripture.

Prophets are only called by God to speak when things are going way wrong, when the path God’s people are on will lead to destruction or death. Through the prophets, God reminds the people how to get back on the path that leads to life.

Prophets don’t hold back when speaking the truth. We also have to remember that the prophets in our Scripture were from a culture of storytellers, whose readers weren’t listening literally as most modern Christians do.

The story being told in Isaiah is a love song about God’s care of and devotion to the people, represented as the vineyard. God provides the people with everything they need to thrive out of pure love for them. “What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it?” God asks.

But, as Isaiah explains, “…the vineyard… is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting; he expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry!”

This is about as honest as our Scripture gets. God gave us everything we needed to bring about justice, but we created war. We were given all we needed to be in right relationship, but we created suffering.

Whenever and wherever we see bloodshed in our world today or hear cries for help, cries of hunger, or cries of suffering, we know we, God’s people, have not used the gifts God has given us faithfully. The prophets are the ones who remind us to open our eyes and see the reality of the world we have created.

The prophets don’t hold this truth up just to leave us wallowing in misery and hopelessness. They always show us the hope, which is God’s faithfulness to us, despite our faithlessness to God and one another.

When we see and hear the reality in our world, we return to God with something like the prayer in our Psalm: “Turn now, O God of hosts, look down from heaven; behold and tend this vine; preserve what your right hand has planted… Restore us, O LORD God of hosts; show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved.”

And God does - every single time. If you read the prophets to the end of their stories, they always end with God responding in tender love for us, protecting and restoring us even when we are caught in a mess of our own making.

This has happened over and over throughout our history as God’s people, which is what the letter to the Hebrews is reminding us. Too many to recount, the author says.

The genius of this letter, however, is how the author connects these stories to faith. It is through faith that, for example, David conquered Goliath. In this storytelling culture, David represents the tiny community of the people of God in Israel who fended off Goliath, who represents the huge, military-supported machine of the Philistines, who were driven by territorial ambition to attack Israel.

If we were to tell this story today, we might say that David represents Ukraine and Goliath represents Russia. Same story, different time.

Our collective narrative is replete with these stories, and that gives us hope. As we see this playing out in our world today, we have a great cloud of witnesses who will testify to us about the faithfulness of God who makes us all Davids, able by God’s grace, to defeat whatever Goliaths we face.

Will people suffer in the meantime? Yes, but by faith we lay aside every weight, every fear, every thought of abandonment, and we run our race with perseverance looking to Jesus, “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.”

Which brings us to our gospel story and one of Jesus’ most challenging teachings. He begins with: “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!”

Many of our fire-and-brimstone siblings in Christianity would have us believe that Jesus came to purify the world by burning and destroying the enemies of God. Then, of course, they decide who those enemies are. In our world today, this list would include LGBTQIA2S+, anyone who is “woke,” immigrants, refugees, the poor… you know the list.

But they have failed to hear the story being told by Jesus. What does fire mean every time we hear it in our Scripture? We’ve done this enough times that most of you know… fire means the presence of God.

Jesus is prophesying the redemption he is bringing as the Incarnate Word of God, the Second Person of the Trinity who took on human form. Jesus IS the fire, the presence of God on earth.

Then Jesus says, “I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Baptism is the ritual, the outward sign of the inauguration of a spiritual transformation, and Jesus is going all out (a better translation than stress) and give everything, even his life, for it to be completed!

Then the really hard part of this teaching - Jesus says, “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!” This spiritual transformation, Jesus warns us, will divide households.

Some will follow Jesus’ way, letting go of their own power and privilege in order to raise up those who don’t have either, while others will demand they lift themselves up by their own bootstraps. Some will share from the abundance they have, while others will be indignant that the have-nots don’t deserve any rewards they haven’t worked for. Some will recognize all others as siblings in the family of God, while others will hate, denigrate, and oppress those whose skin color, religious practice, gender identity, or language is different from their own.

Many of us already experience this happening among our friends and families. Jesus’ way, the way of Love, will divide families and communities.

The world has always had Goliaths who vociferously defend their destructive path. And Christian Nationalists among us today are even calling their way Jesus’ way. To them, Jesus says, “You hypocrites!”

The way of Jesus is a way of love, generosity, selflessness, kindness, forgiveness, and the sharing of resources with all who need. It does not need or seek earthly political power. Anyway, God’s family includes all nations, peoples, and languages as Isaiah says.

Following Jesus’ way invites us to give all we have as we trust God to redeem. We must also open our eyes, ears, hearts, and hands to the reality around us.

Wherever heaven isn’t happening on earth, there is where we need to be, bearing the light and love of Christ, serving our neighbor, lifting them out of pain, poverty, hunger, oppression, judgment, cruelty, and loneliness, and into peace and harmony in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. We do this as a faith community, and as members of our local, regional, and global communities – all of us working together in the name of Love. Amen.