Sermons from Saint John’s

Lectionary Readings

In March of 1522 in the Swiss city of Zurich, a priest named Ulrich Zwingli participated in an event that led to outrage and condemnation. Personally, I think there was a missed opportunity for a great Hollywood film to be made on the 500th anniversary, because the name alone is made for the silver screen. The events of that Lent, 503 years ago, became known to history as The Affair of the Sausages.

It was just five years after Martin Luther had nailed his 95 Theses to a church door. The Protestant Reformation was in its earliest days. But one thing was clear: more and more Christians, clergy and laypeople alike, were beginning to question the commandments of the church. And this was particularly true for the Church’s teachings on things like fasting during Lent. The Church had developed an intricate system of rules for which foods could be eaten when, and which could not. But this seemed to have little to do with the good news. Jesus and his disciples were accused of not fasting enough, in fact, and the Apostle Paul made compelling arguments that Christians had been freed from these kinds of legalistic practices by God: “by grace [they had] been saved through faith, and not by works of the law.” (Eph. 2:8)

And so one night in 1522, Zwingli was invited to the home of a local printer whose workers had been laboring day and night to publish a new edition of the Epistles of Saint Paul, and they shared a meal during which, despite the Lenten ban on the consumption of meat, they ate a few slices of smoked sausage.

The public was outraged. The printer who hosted the meal was arrested. But Zwingli took a public stand. Fasting or not fasting, he argued, was a matter of individual conscience, not something that the Church could demand. Fasting could not save a Christian’s soul; by grace they had been saved, through faith. The Bishop was furious. But Zwingli’s view convinced his fellow-citizens, and he went on to lead the Reformation in Switzerland, at least until his death.

Now, the Episcopal Church is a Protestant church. But we’ve also always occupied a kind of middle way between the most outspoken Protestants and the Catholic tradition. And so at Coffee Hour this week, you might hear people chat about whether they’re “giving something up” during Lent or “taking something on” or simply going about their lives as usual. So I thought it might be interesting today, as we begin this season of Lent, to try to draw this all together; to ask whether there’s a way to understand the spiritual benefits of adopting a Lenten discipline while still embracing the freedom Zwingli found, five hundred years ago, in the good news that he was saved by the grace of God, and not by his own hard work; the freedom to eat a sausage, even during Lent.

The whole practice of a Lenten fast starts with our Gospel story today, in which Jesus fasts for a season of forty days. No ordinary person can go without food for so long, of course, but the Catholic and Orthodox traditions have always had certain regulations around eating and fasting during these forty days. And many people choose to fast from a particular thing for the duration of the season. So, for example, I’ve heard of people here fasting from chocolate, coffee, alcohol, Amazon.com, and the reading of novels, among other things.

There’s an important subtlety here. There’s a difference between giving up something you think is bad, and something you think is good. You can give up something that’s bad, a habit or a vice, any time, and Lent offers a great structure to start. But to fast is to give up something good, temporarily, and plan to take it up again at Easter. So the medieval practice of giving up meat during Lent wasn’t about ethical vegetarianism; they didn’t give up meat because they thought it was bad, but because it was good, and hard to give up. And the same is true if you fast from chocolate, or coffee today.

So why would you do that? Here’s the thing: The goal is to give something up where the stakes are low; where it doesn’t matter if you cheat, because the thing you’ve given up is fine on its own; but that’s enticing enough that it can teach you something about how you respond to the cycle of temptation, failure, and grace. So I want to say a few words about temptation, and failure, and grace.

Jesus has been fasting for forty days and he’s “famished.” (Luke 4:2) And now, the temptations begin to come. The devil entices him—You’re the Son of God… Why don’t you just turn this hard stone into nice, soft bread? The devil shows him the kingdoms of the world: I’m a pretty well-connected guy; just, worship me, and I’ll give you however much political power you please. (Hm.) And the devil takes him up to the top of the Temple—Aren’t you always going on about being the Beloved Son of God? Jump off! God won’t let anything bad happen  to you.

Jesus easily resists. But temptation is harder for us. It doesn’t appear with a pitchfork and horns. It doesn’t all come at the end of forty days. Temptation appears in different times and in different ways. And one of the purposes of fasting during Lent is to understand how the dynamics of temptation work out for you. When does that little voice appear that says “Oh, surely it’s not that big of a deal…” Is it when you’re hungry? Angry? Lonely? Tired? With a certain group of friends, or a certain family member? When you experience the temptation to break your Lenten fast, you can ask the usual questions—the who/what/where/when/why of its appearance, and then the how, as in, How do you resist it? Jesus quotes repeatedly from the Psalms, and that works for him. What’s going to work for you?

And what is it like when it doesn’t work? Failure isn’t a part of the story of the temptation of Christ, but none of us is Christ. We fail. So what’s that feel like for you? What’s it like to try to abstain from Amazon for six weeks and finding your finger inexorably drawn to the orange button tempting you to “Buy Now.” Do you feel the heat of shame when you fail? Do you immediately start to rationalize it to yourself? If you find that you succeed easily in a forty-day fast—if you never give in, if you never fail—then maybe you should try something harder next time, because failing at Lent is a really important part.

Failure is important because it unlocks the third and most important step: grace. What do you do after things go off the rails? How do you get back on the horse? How do you admit that you’ve failed, and start again—not by rationalizing it or by hiding it in shame, but by accepting that you’ve messed up, and you are loved, and you can go on, nevertheless? Jesus raises the bar of perfection. Jesus makes resisting temptation look easy. But Paul lowers the bar completely to the floor. Salvation doesn’t  depend on your perfect Lenten fast. Salvation doesn’t depend on your good deeds. It’s simple, for Paul: “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9)

This is the kind of good news that led to the Affair of the Sausages. Those Swiss workers, after all, had just finished printing an edition of the Epistles of Paul. And what they had found in those letters, again and again, was the message of God’s grace. They discovered that they didn’t need the Church’s whole system of penance and indulgence, fasting and good works. Paul had set the bar so low that all they needed was to put their trust in what God had already done for them, because “Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” (Romans 10:13)

Even as imperfect, limited human beings, they would be forgiven and loved and saved by God, free of charge. And so are you. And so that’s the third thing about which Lent invites you to reflect: What does it feel like to be forgiven, and accepted, even when you fail?

Life is full of temptations, small and large, but they exist on a sliding scale. If you fast from social media during Lent, and find yourself logging in to scroll—that’s okay! The point is to learn how to face the bigger temptations in your life, the ones that really do matter. The temptation to gossip about the secret of a friend. The temptation to violate the trust of someone we love. The temptation to let ourselves be overwhelmed with apathy in the face of a suffering world. Temptation is a fact of human life. But Lent is a chance to play, a chance to train, a chance to experiment, to learn about how temptation works for us. To learn how failure feels for us. To practice accepting the grace that comes, inevitably, even after our worst mistakes, freeing us from the fear and the shame of being imperfect people, for as “the scripture says, ‘No one who believes in [God] will be put to shame.’” (Romans 10:11)

Lectionary Readings

Last week, I went on a short trip to London, and after getting four hours of airplane-seat sleep on the way over, spending the day with my one- and three-year old nieces, going to a conference with a few hundred people, flying back on a plane full of British teenagers on a school trip, then making it through church and confirmation class, on Monday I somehow strangely found that I was coming down with a cold. Who could’ve imagined?

It wasn’t a bad cold, not at all. But it gave me that feeling that a head cold or allergies often do, of a kind of fuzzy barrier between my brain and the world. Do you know what I mean? As if there was a layer of gauze in front of my face, and I just didn’t feel myself. So although I wasn’t particularly tired, and I didn’t have a particularly sore throat, or much of a cough, I just didn’t quite feel like myself.

And then over the course of the week, I finally felt a little better each day, until finally, on Saturday, I woke up feeling like myself again, and it was as if a veil had lifted from before my face.

There’s a question that I have sometimes when I read these two stories about Moses and Jesus, in which they are transfigured and a divine light shines from their faces: Is this a process of addition or subtraction? In other words—In these moments, is God adding to their faces something new, some holy light that wasn’t there before; or is God taking something away, removing some outer layer that had obscured the divine spark within? Is the Transfiguration like putting on a layer of makeup and looking extra good—or is it like recovering from a cold, and suddenly finding that you are yourself again?

The answer may be different, of course, in the two stories. Moses has been up on Mount Sinai with God, receiving the Law, basking in the divine presence. And you can almost imagine him as an iron left in the fire, heating up. He’s been immersed in holiness for 40 days, and when he returns, he glows—like the iron pulled from the fire, he is himself a source of heat and light. And the people are afraid. He has to veil his face; he has to hide that light. He needs something to obscure his holiness so that the people are not burned. But whenever he goes into the Tabernacle to be with God, he lowers the face again, and it’s as if his holiness is continually renewed by returning once again to the presence of God.

For Jesus, it seems to be the other way around. Jesus goes up a mountain, too, but in this case, he’s the source of light. As he’s praying, it seems that an invisible veil has fallen away. His face is changed, and even his clothes become “dazzling white” (Luke 9:29). In this moment on the mountain, Jesus’ true nature is revealed. A voice comes from the cloud that overshadows the disciples, and says, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” (9:35) And they are stunned.

When Moses comes down from the mountain, it seems like addition: the Spirit of God has added something to Moses to infuse him with a holiness that is visible and palpable. When Jesus goes up on the mountain, it seems more like subtraction: the Spirit seems to take away something that otherwise hides the divine reality of who Jesus is.

But we didn’t only hear two stories of change, today. There was a third, this strange story of a boy who’s been possessed by an “unclean spirit.” Now, we could speculate about the medical details of his condition, but that would miss the point. There is some spirit, Luke tells us, some outside force, that’s in control. It oppresses him, it makes him act unlike himself. And Jesus frees the boy from the thing that is controlling him. He heals him, he restores him to wholeness, and the boy’s true self, no longer weighed down by the power of this spirit, is revealed. It is the miraculous version of recovering from a cold: The greatest miracle Jesus does is to allow this boy to be himself, as he really is. The boy is revealed just as Jesus was: he is himself, exactly as he is.

This is the beauty and the promise of the Transfiguration for us. We are not Jesus. But sometimes in our spiritual lives, we are like Moses, and what we need is to spend some time in the presence of God, and be filled with God’s holy warmth and light, so we can bring those back down to the world. And sometimes, we’re like the boy; sometimes we need to be freed from the things that are weighing us down, so that we can be revealed as ourselves, as we truly are.

It’s occasionally been observed that churches are full of quirky people. And it’s true. I’m sure I’ve said it before, but if you’re sitting in a church on a Sunday morning in Boston in 2025, you must be at least a bit unusual. (In a good way!) In a statistical sense, just by virtue of being among the small fraction of the population who regularly go to church, you’ve proven that you’re kind of strange, but that actually misses the point. Here’s my thesis: Every human being is kind of strange; faithful Christians are just more willing to admit it. In a healthy church community you should expect more quirkiness than in the world outside, because the nature of the Gospel is that it frees us to be ourselves.

We come here into the presence of God, and we hear that God is love. We hear that God loves us, as we are in our inmost selves, and not as we pretend to be. And at our best, we can lower the veil for a moment that hides our faces, and see one another as we really are. For a moment, together, we can see the glory of God “as though reflected in a mirror,” and we can be transformed, growing from glory into glory. (2 Cor. 3:18) We can absorb a little bit of the radiance of God, and more importantly, we can be freed from the unclean spirits of judgment and criticism that afflict us in the world. We can be ourselves, and we can be a little weird, thank God. Because God wants us to recover from our life-long spiritual cold. God wants to set us free from the things that keep us from being our true selves. God wants us to lower the veil, and to let our faces shine with the radiance of God’s own love and light.

And this may sound like a frivolous thing, like a whole sermon built around the slogan “Keep Austin Weird.” But I think it’s the most serious thing in the world. I genuinely believe that the message of God’s unconditional love is good news, and I genuinely think that is has the power to change the world: not by giving us a new burden, a new commandment to love one another as God has loved us; but by releasing us from the burdens the world puts on us to be anything other than the people we truly are.

There is a weight of expectation that seizes many of us and dashes us to the ground. There is a veil we use to hide ourselves in shame, praying that nobody really find us out. There is an epidemic of anxiety driven by the brutal judgment of social media and dating apps. There is a real crisis of masculinity driven by our failure to say that to be kind and compassionate and vulnerable is, in fact, to be a man, and a better man than the one who’s brash and arrogant and rude. There are a thousand small ways in which we veil our faces so that the world cannot see us as we are, and every one of them is a lost opportunity for light to shine in the world. And while I don’t want to go through a whole list, I really do think that there are dozens of social and political effects of our basic inability to believe that God loves us, and that God’s grading us with a rubric that’s nothing like what we would call success.

So Lent begins this week. And Lent is a good time to make an honest reckoning of who we are. Lent is a good time to let go of some of the ways in which we hide our true selves in shame, and to let the veil disappear. Lent is a good time to act with great boldness, as Paul says; to be who we really are, as God has made us and as God loves us. To turn toward the Spirit of the Lord, knowing that “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom,” (2 Cor. 3:16) and to let ourselves be freed from the burdens that hold our spirits down, so that we stand before God and be transformed from one degree of glory to another.

Lectionary Readings

One thing you all may have gleaned about me after a year and a half together is that I am quite artsy and craftsy. I partly get this love of arts and crafts from camp–where one can spend long languid days making friendship bracelets and tie-dyeing. The other parts of camp are appealing too: swimming in the lake, doing the climb tower, archery. Though there is one part of camp that I am wary of–both as a child and as an adult.

That would be any kind of competitive team sport–dodgeball, capture the flag, basketball, you name it. A few things are almost guaranteed to occur: you get a bunch of 9-15 year old boys who sign up, and then almost inevitably you will have a lot of 9-15 year old boys who are extremely angry and sad and disappointed. Cabinmates who were once friends are deeply at odds over accusations of cheating, younger campers feel betrayed by older campers who greatly outmatch their physical skill. Many of these animosities dissolve quite quickly, others fade with some time, and yet others become deep seated for the remainder of these children’s time at camp. 

To me, the core problem seems to be that, in each of these games, there must be a winner. With every other activity, there is a built in sense of togetherness and camaraderie–archery gets people to cheer each other on; you often find campers helping each other figure out how to make friendship bracelets; campers regularly encourage each other at the climb tower. There is no winner at friendship bracelets, nor does any one person “win” at the climb tower at another’s expense. 

I feel a brief digression may be in order. I am not, on principle, opposed to team sports. I know I am preaching to a congregation that is upwards of 50% hockey lovers? or parents of hockey lovers, or just likely has a team sport they enjoy rooting for. I think team sports are incredibly important for childhood development, it is particularly important to learn how to lose with grace. However, at camp, unlike with regular team sports, a camper now has to live alongside the group of people who just beat them at dodgeball–which can get, as I’ve said, oddly personal at times.

I think the issue with these scenarios at camp points to bigger tendency in our society: we love winning. I am taking a broad view of “winning” here. I would say the feeling of “winning” can take many forms in our day to day lives–revenge, one-up-man-ship, smugness, generally getting to feel superior to someone else–are all different kinds of winning. I might point to feeling smug in class when someone else asks a question that was clearly in the reading they did not do-feels like winning; overhearing a couple fighting on the subway and thinking I am sure glad that is not me-seems like winning; or even when Carrie Underwood destroyed her cheating boyfriend’s car in her hit song “Before He Cheats”–she definitely “won” that interaction. Or better yet, and maybe more locally, the feeling of shoveling out a parking space, and then keying someone’s car when they park in it–feels good to win (though I am sure nobody in this room knows about that instance of winning). 

These things might be justifiable, but that isn’t really the point. Sure, it is a natural drive in our culture to want to be the best, or have the best for ourselves and loved ones. We enjoy when we are not the butt of the joke, or when we did the work someone else didn’t do, and other examples abound of moments where we feel justifiably smug or correctly righteous. However, our Gospel has another thing to say about this prevailing attitude.

Our Gospel story today is actually a continuation of what we read last week. In our reading last week, we got a new vision for the world through Luke’s version of the beatitudes–blessings for those who are poor, hungry, sad and hated and woes to those who are rich, full, well-liked, and laughing. We get a new vision for how the world might be, and this vision continues into this week’s reading. In this week’s gospel we get some words about how we might begin to live that out in our lives right now. 

However, it is tempting, but would be a misreading to think that these instructions we get in today’s gospel lesson can be treated as some kind of to-do list. It would be a mistake to think that we can complete this list of nice things and then sit back, content at a moral life well-lived. Sure, these are good things to strive for–but to treat them as a checklist misses the wider point of the teaching. The message that this is a deeper change to our disposition in the world, a disposition that calls us away from this attitude of “winning”, judgement, and condemnation. 

Just as it would be a misreading to think that this is a to-do list. It would be a further misreading to read it as a to-do list by which God will measure us. The clue is right there in the text. We are not merciful, forgiving, and generous because it will make us great people. We are inspired to try and live out these ideals because that is the nature of God, and we are called to emulate that attitude in our own lives. We are called to be merciful because Our Father in heaven is merciful. 

Even so, these are not easy actions to take. It is incredibly difficult to forgive. It is hard to be incredibly generous with whatever wealth we may or may not have. It is difficult to not return violence for violence; or get passive-aggressive for perceived slights. It is difficult to feel okay with not “winning”. More than a series of difficult actions, it can feel like an overwhelming task to do these things in a world that feels, day by day, increasingly unkind, aggressive, and unforgiving. It is hard to have mercy in a world that, oftentimes, seems to mock mercy. 

Back in 1948, C.S. Lewis had a helpful response when asked about a different daunting and gigantic facet of life–the newly invented atomic bomb. When asked by someone what they should do, now that society was permanently at risk of destruction from this new and terrible weapon. He says, 

“This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb–when it comes–find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.”

Obviously, in today’s gospel lesson, we are not talking atomic bombs–we are talking about showing generosity and being merciful. But I think the advice can still apply. Instead of a world newly beset by the anxieties of the atomic bomb, we must wrestle with how we are supposed to–essentially–continue to be kind in a world where it is easier, encouraged, and sometimes applauded to be unkind. We must struggle not with the atomic bomb, but with the fact that we are encouraged, to use my earlier illustration, in many small and big ways to “win” in life through so many different means. 

I think the advice of C.S. Lewis applies in two ways. The first way: we must not gather together to think about the unkindness of the world, until such unkindness comes knocking on our door (again). The second, applies to how we are meant to go about living: I think the answer might be quite normal–do sensible and human things: forgive the person who cut you off in traffic, remember to bring in clothes for the community clothes closet, chat to your friends over a pint and a game of darts, do not judge the people on the subway, pray, teach, listen to music.

The key to living out our gospel from this week that C.S. Lewis illuminates is that in the face of the big harshness of the world, we often can do only the sensible human things within our own reach. Just as most of us do not have the time and skill to contend with the atomic bomb, we also do not have the time and skill to deconstruct the hostility and meanness of our society. However, each of us has the time and power within our lives to do “sensible and human things”. I ask you this week to find a “sensible and human” way to pull back from the desire to condemn. I ask you to find a “sensible and human” way to forgive those who may need forgiving. I ask you to find a sensible and human way in which you can refrain from judgement. 

We do this not because we strive for perfection, we do this because we seek to be merciful like our Father in heaven is merciful. We do this because we know our Father in heaven is merciful, and full of love, and I preach to you all in the name of that One who loves us first. 

Lectionary Readings

I often wish that I were a magician. Not a magician like my Grandpa was, when he would entertain us at birthday parties with a black cape and top hat and a wand. But a real magician, the kind that don’t exist. I often wish that I were a magician because I often wish that I could wave a magic wand and fix something. I wish that I could cast a simple spell to repair a broken relationship. I wish that I could whip up a quick healing potion for a chronic illness. I wish that I could create a protective shield around the people I love that would make sure that no harm could ever touch them.

I’m not the first person in the world to have this wish. The allure of wizardry has always been that if you could only learn the secret method, if you could only find the magic words, you could make things right. Magic, at its heart, is a kind of technology: once you learn the spell, once you’ve got the ingredients for the potion, you can reproduce it again and again. And amid the uncertainty and fear that human beings have always faced—this has always had a certain appeal.

Now, most people know that magic isn’t real. They don’t go in for pointed hats and wands. But there’s a kind of magical thinking that’s very common, nevertheless. Sometimes it comes with religious belief: If I believe the right things, many people hope, if I go to the right church, if I take part in the right rituals in the right way, then God will bless me, God will make things good, for me, now. If I pray, earnestly, for the people I love, then surely God will help. And even when religious belief falls away, this magical thinking is often what remains: and so you’ll hear otherwise-secular people talk about “manifesting things” in their lives or “speaking things into existence.”

And there’s nothing really wrong with this. What do we do when someone is sick, or mourning, or recovering from a surgery? We pray for them, of course! It’s a natural response. It’s a good and comforting thing. But like all good things, it can go bad. And this impulse to prayer, this desire to take comfort in the idea that good things happen to good people, becomes a problem when we begin to extrapolate—when we begin to think that if good things happen to good people, and bad things are happening to me, or bad things are happening to someone else, it must be my fault, or their fault.

You can see a bit of this in our first reading and the psalm today. “Blessed are those who trust in the Lord,” Jeremiah says, “[their] leaves shall stay green… and [they do] not cease to bear fruit.” (17:7–8) “Happy are they who have not walked in the counsel of the wicked,” the psalmist sings, “everything they do shall prosper.” (Psalm 1:1, 3) But “cursed are those who trust in mere mortals… whose heart turns away from the Lord… [they] shall not see when relief comes.” (Jer. 5:5–6) “They are like chaff which the wind blows away.” (Ps. 1:4) And it’s so tempting for us human beings to read these words and think, “Great! I have a choice! I have some control. Choose goodness and I will prosper like a tree bearing good fruit; choose wickedness, and life will be hard; my leaves will dry away.” It sounds like a kind of magic: a tried-and-true recipe for making good things happen in this world.

But it doesn’t really work. We all know good people whose lives have been much harder than they deserve. You may know people for whom it’s the other way around. And these Biblical texts recognize exactly that. They don’t quite promise that these blessings and curses will arrive in this life. Divine justice extends beyond this world. So the Psalmist doesn’t say that people who do evil will be punished in this life—it says that they won’t stand upright “when judgment comes.” It’s not as simple as “good things happen to good people.”

But there is still a very clear sense of division: good and evil, blessed and cursed, us and them.

Jesus picks up that theme… But he changes it in a very specific way. For one thing, he doesn’t buy the magical thinking at all. Riches and fullness and laughter, for Jesus, are not the signs of God’s blessing, bestowed as a reward for a life of faith or for saying your prayers. It’s the other way around. Those are the woes. And the outward signs of poverty and hunger and weeping are not signs of God’s disdain—no, people who are poor and hungry and weeping are the ones Jesus says are blessed.

But there’s another difference here, as well. In these Beatitudes in this Gospel of Luke, there is no “us” and “them”: there is only “you.” There is no “happy are they” or “cursed are those”—there are only “blessed are you,” and “woe to you.”

There are no good people and bad people, neatly divided into groups. There’s only you, sometimes blessed, and sometimes… Woe! Jesus is talking to his disciples, face to face. And the geometry of the scene is important. Last week, I mentioned Jesus standing on a boat to preach. You’ve probably heard of the “Sermon on the Mount.” On a mountain or in a pulpit or on a boat, you are lifted above the crowd. Sound travels further. And the physical distance creates some conversational distance, too. A preacher is often looking out into the congregation, but it’s a kind of only-halfway look—I’m looking at you, but I’m only very rarely looking at you. You can’t have a real one-on-one conversation with an altitude difference—that’s why my posture is so bad.

So Jesus comes down from the mountain, to a level place. And he looks up at his disciples. He looks at this group of faithful people who have chosen to follow him, and he says, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” “But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.” “Blessed are you who are hungry, for you will be filled.” “But woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.” “Blessed are you who weep now…blessed are you when people hate you… for your reward is great in heaven.” “Woe to you who are laughing now… woe to you when all speak well of you,” for you will mourn and weep.

And he’s speaking to the disciples. To you. He’s speaking to us. He’s not making promises, he’s not making threats. He’s not saying what will happen if we’re good or if we’re bad, if we pray or if we don’t. He’s acknowledging the truth that a prayer is not a magic spell that brings prosperity. A life of faith is not a surefire way to become healthy, wealthy, and wise. Our lives will be full of many blessings, many real moments of joy. And they will also be full of woe. We won’t live them without tears.

And in fact, it’s more than that. The Christian life is a life in which we will sometimes choose what Jesus calls the more blessed path. We will sometimes choose to make ourselves a little poorer to help the other citizens of the kingdom of God. We will sometimes choose to go hungry, so someone else can be fed. We will sometimes see someone else weeping, and not turn away, but turn toward them, and listen to them, and find that we are weeping too. If we are faithful to the good news of a loving and merciful God, we will sometimes be reviled and mocked. And yet it’s in these very moments that Jesus say that we are blessed.

We celebrate a baptism this morning. This child’s parents and godparents will make promises on her behalf, promises that she may one day take as her own, promises that all of us this morning will renew. Promises to “continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, and in the breaking of the bread.” Promises to “persevere in resisting evil.” Promises to “seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving [our] neighbor[s] as [ourselves],” and to “respect the dignity of every human being.”

These promises don’t lead to the easiest possible life. They lead to a life that requires some self-sacrifice, some willingness to give up some of our own comfort and prosperity when times are good to support others for whom times are hard. They lead to a life of compassion, a life in which we will sometimes weep.

The life of the baptized Christian is not an easy life, but it’s a blessed life. Not because, if we do these things, we will be rewarded with God’s blessing. Not because the promises we make and the prayers we say give us a magic wand that we can wave to make the world right. But because the measure of the good life is not how comfortable we are, or how easy life is—but how deeply we love one another.

Lectionary Readings

From time to time, when I’m just walking down the street, or halfway through getting a haircut; when I bump into a postal worker on the street, or someone calls to ask about a wedding, I’m asked a certain: “What are you again?” As in, “What do I call you?” Are you a priest? A pastor? A minister? Father? Reverend? Greg? And I often give the useless answer, “Yes!” Yes, I’m a priest, albeit not a Roman Catholic priest. Yes, I’m the pastor of this church. And yes, of course, I’m a minister. To most people that’s what “minister” means: an ordained clergy person in some kind of Protestant church.

But in its most basic sense, “ministry” means “service.” And the Episcopal Church believes that all of us, ordained clergy or not, are called to serve. And so if you turn in the Book of Common Prayer to our Catechism, as I’m sure you often do—You’ll find that when it asks, “Who are the ministers of the Church?” the answer is, “The ministers of the Church are lay persons, bishops, priests, and deacons.” (Nice order, right?) Clergy aren’t the only ones who serve the Church and the world. Laypeople have their own essential ministry: to bear witness to Christ wherever they may be; to carry on Christ’s work of reconciliation in the world; and to take their part in the life, worship, and governance of the Church.

You’re doing it right now! This is “life and worship.” In fact, if you stay for Annual Meeting, that’s “governance” checked off, too. And while I’ll do more than my fair share of talking, the Annual Report is full of shorter reports that reflect our ministry, not my ministry. And there are also many ways in which each one of us serves the world that will never be captured in an Annual Report—ways that we may never have thought of as “ministries” before.

And so I want you to think. How is it that you try to love people in this world? How is it that you participate in God’s work of reconciliation? And what rings true for you, in what I’m about to say about the Gospel, about what your ministry is like?

I see three miniature moments of what ministry is like, inside the church and outside it, in the Gospel today.

First, we see Jesus navigating the dynamic of distance and closeness in his work. Jesus stands on the beach, trying to teach to a crowd. He’s down, on their level, and he can only see maybe ten or fifteen faces in front of him. He can only talk to a few at a time. The physics of sound mean that those who are closer in will block his voice from those who are further away. “The crowd is pressing in,” Luke says, (5:1) and I almost get the sense of Jesus being pushed closer and closer to the water’s edge, as the hubbub of those trying to get closer to hear completely drowns out anything that he’s trying to say.

Have you ever felt this way? Is the urgent noise of the world ever so loud that you can’t hear yourself think? Does the crowd of urgent tasks ever press in so close that you cannot see the big picture? Even if your calendar is more empty than full, even if what’s crowding in on you are your own thoughts, it’s just the same. Our ability to love and serve other people well can be drowned out by a thousand small demands.

So Jesus steps back. He boards a boat. And from up there on the deck, he can see the crowd in a new way. He can speak and be heard. But he needs to take that step back, to give himself a little from the people he’s trying to serve, in order to be heard by them at all. And I think that this is an important skill, for any of us who try to serve: sometimes we need to step back, in order to really engage.

The second scene captures a very different feeling: the sudden lurch from unfortunate scarcity to dangerous abundance. Jesus finishes teaching, and tells Simon to head out from the shore to deeper waters, and to cast his nets. They’ve been fishing all night, and they haven’t caught a thing. That’s not good. But it’s not the end of the world. If you spend one night on the boat and catch no fish, you’re not going to starve. A month, or a year with no fish, that’s trouble. But one night? That’s just annoying.

A day with too many fish is actually a bigger problem. Simon starts to catch so much that the nets are going to break. If you break your nets, you have no fish, and no nets; you’ve only got what you managed to salvage from the catch, and some serious capital expenditures ahead. So the other boat comes to help them out. But now the problem’s even worse. Now there are so many fish that the boats begin to sink—and they’ve gone out to the deep water and there’s a pretty good chance that none of these guys can swim. The miracle seems worse than the problem to me.

I think this has a lesson for us, too. We often work for a long time, with relatively little in return. And then there comes a time when everything happens all at once, and it can almost be too much. Our lives are organized for the everyday and not for great success, and sometimes, if we can’t handle the sudden opportunity, we just don’t miss out on something good—we sink the boat.

This is true for churches that are growing, as they try to make sure that newer members feel welcomed, and no one slips through the cracks. It’s true for nonprofits, like the Clothes Closet, trying to navigate the huge volume of donations people want to make. It’s true, I think, for many parents, who spend so much of their time bouncing from good thing to good thing that, even though each individual activity or event is wonderful on its own, it’s hard to keep your head above the water. When our nets are so full of fish that our boats begin to sink, it can begin to feel like too much of a good thing.

And so we come to my final, favorite scene. Peter—dear, dear Peter—is amazed. And he throws himself down at Jesus’ knees, and says, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (5:8) Now, the main benefit of having a Rector who is learned in Greek is that you get to hear the funny parts of the Bible more clearly than you do in translation, and this is an important one: strictly speaking, Peter doesn’t “fall down at” Jesus’ knees, he “falls toward” them. It reminds me of an ancient posture of distress, that you find in Homer’s epic poems, among other places, in which a person would throw himself down and clasp the knees of someone else in supplication. I like to picture the scene that way: “Go away from me, Lord! I am a sinful man!” Peter says, falling toward Jesus’ knees. “If I went away from you, Peter, I would fall down,” I imagine Jesus thinking. “You’re holding onto my legs.” But what does Jesus say instead? “Be not afraid. From now on you will be fishers of men.”

Peter feels, as many of us have, a sense of inadequacy when confronted with the task at hand, and the abundance of God’s grace. How could I be enough for this situation, in which God has placed me? How could I be enough to do this work, to which God has called me? How could I be enough to deserve the amazing gifts that God has given me? Or, in the inmost thought of every parent ever sent home from the hospital with their first-born child, “Are you really going to send us alone home with this?” Get away from me! I’m not enough for this!

And yet God draws us in with the great paradox of grace. God’s goodness and perfection draw us closer, however inadequate and imperfect we may feel. And God doesn’t punish us for loving and serving one another imperfectly. God gives us even greater gifts: “From now on, you will be fishers of men.”

So maybe you wrote one of those Annual Reports. Maybe not. Maybe you’re just passing through today. But whoever you are, you are as much a minister as I am—God has some way for you to love and to serve, some way for you to bear witness to Christ, wherever you may be.

And when you find yourself serving, when you find yourself doing your best to love the people you find around you, I pray that you may have the space to step back from the shore onto the boat and take a breath; that when your nets begin to overflow, you do not sink; and that, no matter how much you may feel that you are not enough, you fall not away from but toward the God who trusts you and who is inviting you into even greater things. Amen.

Lectionary Readings

“This child is destined… to be a sign that will be opposed
so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—
and a sword will pierce your own soul too.” (Luke 2:34–35)

The next two weeks on the calendar are full of excitement. Next Sunday, the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles will duke it out for the title of Super Bowl Champions, just hours after we conclude our—hopefully less-hotly-contested—Annual Meeting. Later that week, on Friday the 14th, we’ll celebrate the most popular day in the Church’s calendar of saints, when the Episcopal Church, always eager to remain in touch with the culture, observes the Feast Day of Saints Cyril and Methodius, known of course for their invention of the Glagolitic alphabet used to transcribe Old Church Slavonic. I guess some of us will be celebrating Saint Valentine’s Day, too. Then, a few days later, it’s Presidents’ Day. And of course, we kick it all off this morning with a holiday that’s not as well-known as the rest: the Presentation of Jesus Christ in the Temple, sometimes known as the Purification of Mary, and popularly as Candlemas—the day when, forty days after Jesus’ birth, Mary and Joseph bring him to the Temple.

The Church and the world rank the importance of these days in different ways. So, for example, polls show that in a typical year, more Americans are interested in the Super Bowl than in Valentine’s Day, or even than Saints Cyril and Methodius. Church annual meetings are relatively low in the cultural order of priorities, and in this country, at least, Candlemas isn’t very well known.

For the Church, things are the other way around. The Presentation is a major feast. The Annual Meeting is a canonical requirement. Saints Cyril and Methodius don’t have the most devoted followings, but we don’t even list Saint Valentine on our official calendar of saints. While we always pray for the President and the leaders of the world, we don’t observe Presidents’ Day as a holy day; and of course, Super Bowl Sunday isn’t really a religious event, although many prayers will be offered, I’m sure.

But  there’s something that unites this wildly disparate sets of religious and secular occasions, something that draws them all together, nevertheless: each one of these days provides us with an example of the vulnerability that comes from love.

This year, there will be many people whose Valentines are sick or gone, or someone whom they haven’t yet found, but wish they had. This year, there will be Annual Meetings all around the country where congregations will grapple with the reality that the community of worship that they love can no longer be sustained—not ours, this year, thank God. There will be grown adults who cry on Super Bowl Sunday—in joy, but also in despair. Presidents’ Day can be hard, in its own way, for those who love this country and its traditions of government. These days express our love, in many different ways, and anything that we love has the potential to cause us pain.

That’s what speaks to me this morning about our Gospel reading. It’s not the ritual of purification that Mary is there to carry out. It’s not the prophecy of Jesus’ destiny. It’s what Simeon has to say to Mary, as she celebrates the healthy arrival of her firstborn child, once they’ve all made it through forty days of life: “a sword will pierce your own soul too.” (Luke 2:35)

“A sword will pierce your soul.”

That’s certainly been my experience so far of parenthood. Even with a child who isn’t the Messiah. To love a child is to have a sword pierce your soul, again and again. Not because they’re mean to you, or rude—although they sometimes are, especially as they grow. But because it is a heartbreaking thing to love someone who is soft, and innocent, and small in a world that is hard, and cruel, and big. To see your child insulted, and rejected, and mocked by the most powerful people in the land—as Mary did when Jesus was on the Cross—is to have a sword pierce your soul. It’s true of all the struggles of life, small or large. To see a child whom you love left out by other kids, or benched by a coach; to see them neglected by a teacher or addicted to a drug, is to feel that soul-piercing pain.

This isn’t limited to parent-child love. Everyone in this room, I’m pretty sure, has felt the pain of seeing a person whom you love suffer, and not being able to fix it. Maybe for you, it’s been a sibling stuck in an unhealthy relationship. Maybe a friend with an eating disorder. Whatever it’s been, if you have loved another person, I’m pretty sure you’ve known what it is to have a sword pierce your own soul too.

We often talk about “vulnerability.” In Latin, vulnus is a “wound.” So vulnerability is the ability to be wounded. And this wound-ability comes inevitably with love. When we open our hearts to one another, we leave them exposed, and the very words we use to express the best of love reveal the possibility of pain: “compassion” and “empathy” mean, “suffering with” or “being in the suffering of” another person. To allow ourselves to love is to allow the possibility that our souls will be pierced.

I don’t want to be too frivolous, but as a kid, I loved watching sports. This may come as a surprise to some of you who know me now, and who have seen how little attention I pay to sports; last week at Coffee Hour, I somehow managed to segue a conversation about football into one about grammar with only the single line, “You know what I think about when I hear ‘buffalo’?” But as a kid, I used to stretch the Globe Sports section out and read the whole thing. I could spend an hour reading the standings for every high-school football league in the state. The first thing I did every day was to look at the final score from the Sox game, since I usually fell asleep before the end. I spent the years up to 2004 experiencing the agony of the Red Sox fan, and the next few years in the ecstasy of the Red Sox fan, but at some point, I realized that it just wasn’t working for me to start my day happy or sad depending on the fate of the Sox, or the Pats. I also no longer owned a TV, which helped.

And it works, for sports, to cut yourself off. If you find, like me, that you have become overly attached to the ups and downs of your favorite team, you can just stop, so that the New York Yankees cannot pierce your heart, no matter how much money they may spend.

This works for sports. But we can’t let it become true in general for love. The things that make us vulnerable in life are the things that make our lives most worth living: they are the bonds of love that unite us with one another. And in the end, we have to choose, in this life, whether we’re going to act like Peter or like Mary. We can protect ourselves like Peter does when Jesus is arrested, and he denies ever having met him. We can look away, we can isolate ourselves, from the pain of other human beings. Or we can be like Mary. We can follow Jesus to the Cross, and we can stand there, bearing witness to the suffering of this world, and letting our souls be pierced by love.

Christianity is a frustrating religion, because God is frustrating sometimes. Life in this world is hard. There are many things that simply are not right. And we would rather live in a world in which God simply didn’t allow them. A world in which nobody got sick, or died before their time; a world in which no evil deed was done. But we don’t live in that world. And I don’t know what’s true for you, but for me, because I live in this world, as it is, the Christian story is good news.

Because it’s a story that begins, not with our love, not with our wounded hearts, but with God’s love for us—a love so strong that God’s own soul was pierced, a love so strong that in Jesus, “Love came down at Christmas,” as my favorite carol goes. God became one of us, like us in every way, as Hebrews says. Jesus enjoyed the best of human life, and he endured the worst of it—and “because he himself was tested by what he suffered,” Hebrews goes on, “he is able to help those who are being tested.” (Heb. 2:18) When our hearts are broken, God’s heart is broken too. And it’s because God knows what it’s like to be human and to suffer, that God can comfort and help us in our suffering.

But the Christian story doesn’t end there. Jesus suffers and dies, but he dies “so that through death he might destroy…the power of death.” (Heb. 2:14) Jesus’ own death somehow transforms death—Jesus’ own suffering somehow transforms suffering—in a way that we cannot yet fully see. Jesus rises from the grave, with that tantalizing sign: he rises from the grave, still bearing his wounds, still shaped by the things that he’s been through, but no longer subject to their pain.

This promise isn’t enough to soften the blow. We will still feel that ache. But we can also hold fast to the hope that God is drawing us forward into a world in which death will be no more, mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” (Rev. 21:4) And we can hold on to our love for one another, knowing that in the end, God’s love will reign supreme.

Lectionary Readings

What are we doing here?

That’s a rhetorical question, to be clear. But it’s one that’s worth asking from time to time. In a world that’s full of urgent needs and pressing demands, what are we doing when we pause for an hour and gather here on Sunday mornings for worship? Our Scripture readings this morning happen to tell two stories of worship. They happened hundreds of years apart from one another, and thousands of years ago, but they have something urgent to say to us about why we do what we do, and what it can mean for us in the coming months years.

And so I want to invite you to come with me on a little journey through time today: to read these two stories as the pattern for our story as we try to understand God’s vision for this world.

We begin with the Book of Nehemiah, which describes events that took place about 2500 years ago. It comes at the beginning of what’s called the Second Temple period. The First Temple, built by the great King Solomon, had been destroyed about seventy years before. The Babylonians had besieged the city of Jerusalem, and demolished the Temple, and kidnapped the leaders and many of the people and brought them into exile for many years. After the Babylonian Empire fell, the people were finally allowed to go home. They began to rebuild the city. They began to rebuild the Temple. And as they tried to rebuild their life together, they gathered to hear the scribe Ezra read from the scroll of the Law.

There are echoes of what we still do here today. Ezra opens a book in the sight of the people. They stand. He says a blessing, and they offer a response. He reads. And this is a lot like what we just did. (Although we’re all glad that the Gospel reading didn’t last “from early morning until midday.”)

The people read from the book of the Law “with interpretation,” the Bible says.  And we do the same thing. We’re doing it right now. We listen to readings, and we hear them explained. And we do it within a context of community, and ritual, and prayer.

The “Law” here is the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. Christians often think of Biblical law as being mostly concerned with ritual and purity, food laws and obscure commandments. And it does have all of those. But throughout the Law that they heard read that day, you also find a clear concern for people at the margins of society: most especially for people who are poor, and for the gerim, “strangers,” people who are not citizens, not members of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, but residents in the land.

And there’s an unusual characteristic of this law. Over the next few thousand years, the Jewish people rarely had an independent state. But the Law that Ezra read wasn’t something that needed to be enforced from above. It was something that the people could follow for themselves, even as the political authorities changed. It didn’t matter whether the ruler was Persian or Macedonian, Seleucid or Ptolemaic or Roman. Because the Law didn’t lay out an immigration policy that those authorities needed to enforce: it said, “You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Deut. 10:19) You or your ancestors have known what it is to be new to a place; so love the people who are new, as you would love your own family.

It didn’t matter who was king, because the social safety net the Law described didn’t rely on an official bureaucracy: it told the people, “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest; you shall leave them for the poor and for the alien: I am the LORD your God.” (Lev. 23:22) The edges of your property, God said, really belong to the poor and to the strangers in the land. And whatever decisions whoever’s in charge may make, there cannot be a law against generosity and mutual aid. That commandment’s from Leviticus, by the way, a book we sometimes dismiss, but you know what else comes from that book? Jesus’ second-favorite law of all: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Lev. 19:18) When Ezra reads from the Law, it isn’t for the Persian emperor to hear, it’s for the people gathered there: This is who we are, and in this society we are trying to rebuild, this is how we’ll live, whoever sits on the throne. 

Ezra’s reading of the Law happened once. But that same kind of holy reading would go on, in synagogues and study houses around the Holy Land and around the world.

Jesus did it all the time. He does it in our Gospel reading today. He goes to the synagogue to worship on the Sabbath day. And when he stands to read, they give him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” he reads, “because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18-19)

And they wait. Is there a sermon? Is he going to explain?

And Jesus simply says: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled.” (Luke 4:21)

He’s announced the agenda for the rest of his short life. God has sent me, Jesus says, to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, sent me to let the oppressed go free. He has announced the year of the Lord’s favor, the year of the jubilee, when debts are forgiven and injustices are made right. “He has anointed me,” Jesus says. He makes his claim to be the Messiah, the Anointed One of God, and he does it by recalling people’s attention to the Biblical values of equity, and justice, and liberation.

This is sometimes called Jesus’ “Nazareth Manifesto,” but he’s not making a speech. His comments on the text are brief. He doesn’t lay out policy ideas. He reads from a holy text, and he reminds the people of God’s vision for the world, a vision of good news for the poor, release for the captives; sight for the blind, and freedom for the oppressed.

You might ask what the point is. Does Jesus really think that word will spread from his little synagogue in Galilee down to Pontius Pilate’s palace, that news will travel across the sea to Rome; that suddenly Herod Antipas will say, “Maybe we’d better do something to help the poor,” that the Emperor Tiberius will let his oppressed subjects go free?

News will spread all right, not of Jesus’ values but of his claim to be the Messiah. Will they accept his claim to rule? Will they accept his word as law? No. He’s gonna be crucified for that.

But Jesus’ words aren’t really for them.

Jesus’ words aren’t for the powerful people, the rulers of his day and age. They’re for us. For all of us who hear his words and are reminded that there is another way to look at the world: through the eyes of a Messiah who spent his life among the people at the margins of society, the Word of God made flesh, the Law of Love in human form.

These words are good news for us who hear them, rich and poor alike, in any day and age, because they remind us that God’s vision of generosity and love does not depend on human politics; that we can live according to that heavenly law whatever our earthly laws may be.

Laws change. Leaders come and go. The Episcopal Church as a whole Office of Government Relations that advocates for our values, whoever the government may be. But whether their words are heard or not, we can live our values now. We can treat our gay and lesbian and transgender neighbors with dignity and respect, love them and protect them as ourselves, as God has commanded us. We can welcome people who are strangers in our land, not because of our opinions on how they arrived, but because we’re all human beings, and it’s really freaking cold, and the only way that we can survive in this land is to welcome one another, and help each other out, as locals have been helping newcomers out for four hundred years and more. We can choose to leave the edges of our fields unreaped to share with people who don’t have enough—even if these days, that takes the less-romantic form of writing a check. We can glean things from our closets that we’d forgotten were ever them, and drop them off at the Clothes Closet to be harvested with joy. There’s a bonus perk for church members: you can even drop them off on a Sunday morning. I won’t tell you came outside the scheduled time.

We can live, in other words, as people of faith have always lived, with our feet in two worlds: governed, yes, by the laws of the land in which we live—but guided by God’s holy law of grace, and mercy, and love.

Lectionary Readings

There are three questions that always come up when we get to this particular Gospel reading, as we celebrate the Baptism of Jesus on this Sunday after the Epiphany. First: Why does Jesus, of all people, need to be baptized? Second: What on earth is John talking about with this baptism of fire, and why does it sound so scary? And third, for the particularly regular worshipers: Didn’t we just read this? (Like, a month ago?)

And indeed we did! There is a Venn diagram in which the Gospel reading for the Third Sunday of Advent overlaps with the Gospel reading for this morning. In December, we read a few extra verses at the beginning, where John calls people a “brood of vipers” and tells them that “the ax is lying at the root of the trees.” This morning, we read the verses at the end, in which Jesus is baptized. And in the middle, the two Sundays overlap with the winnowing fork and the threshing floor, with the Holy Spirit and the unquenchable fire.

And Michael preached a great sermon on that overlapping part back then. (He’s away for a few weeks at seminary, by the way; I didn’t fire him.) He pointed out that this winnowing process isn’t about dividing between people, saying you are wheat but you are chaff—you will be gathered in, but you will burn in unquenchable fire. It’s about something within each person.

You can compare the image to some others that we get. Jesus talks about a fishnet catching all kinds of fish, and the good fish being picked out, and the rotten thrown away. (Matthew 14:47-51) And he talks about dividing the sheep from the goats, on the basis of how they treated people who were hungry, or foreign, or sick. (Matt. 25:31-46)

You can be a good fish, or a bad one. You can be a sheep or a goat. These are separate categories, and you can sort one from the other. But there’s no such thing as a grain of wheat, without chaff. The chaff is just the husk, the protective outer layer around the kernel inside. And the wheat and the chaff are always both there at first. Even the heartiest whole-wheat flour throws away the chaff; but without the chaff, that grain of wheat could never survive. And so you need to thresh the harvested wheat, to loosen the grain from the straw. And you need to winnow it, tossing it up into the air with the fork, letting the heavier grains of wheat fall back to the ground while the lighter husk, the chaff, floats off.

Wheat and chaff aren’t like good fish and bad, sheep and goats, two separate categories into which you, as a person, might fall. We all have both wheat and chaff. They are two parts of each one of us, one that has served its purpose and can be released, and the other that needs to emerge for you to become who you were meant to be.

This makes some sense, I think. I wouldn’t be the first to observe that many of our worst tendencies—or at least the medium-bad ones that matter for most of us day to day—originate as defense mechanisms. Our annoying or difficult or toxic personality traits start out as the ways we protect ourselves against one another, or our parents, or the world—they are our chaff, our own protective husks. But eventually, they’re no longer helping us, they’re hurting, and it’s time to let them go.

So much for John, for now. We’ll come back to him. But what’s up with Jesus? Why is he being baptized today? (Well, Ethan’s being baptized today. Why was Jesus being baptized back then?) Christian give lots of theological explanations of what baptism is and what it means. And for most of those explanations, the Baptism of Jesus is a confusing event. Is baptism about the washing away of our inherited original sin? The who are most adamant that that’s what baptism does would also tell you that Jesus doesn’t inherit original sin. Is baptism way that we symbolize and embody coming to believe in Jesus and accepting him as our Savior? Jesus’ own baptism seems redundant, then. (It’s a sign that he believes in himself?) Is baptism a way of bringing someone new into the Church, making them a part of the Body of Christ in some mystical but also real way? Again, it seems odd—surely Jesus’ baptism in the river Jordan isn’t what makes him part of the Body of Christ; his body, when it goes down into the water, is by definition, the Body of Christ.

These are all reasons that we might be baptized, now. But why was Jesus baptized, then?

I don’t know “why,” of course, but I do know “what.” In other words—I don’t know why it is that God chose to act this way, but I do know what happens, according to Luke: the heavens open, and the Holy Spirit descends, and a voice says, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” (3:22)

Have you ever needed to hear that voice? Have you ever needed God to say, “You are my Beloved Child; with you I am well pleased?” Have you ever just needed to hear someone say that, for someone to tell you that you are worthy, and you are loved, and they are pleased with you?

Everyone who has ever been baptized, or ever will be, is baptized into the Body of Christ. In some mysterious way, we join with him in that one baptism. We go down into the water with Jesus, and with him, we stand back up. And indeed, God says to each one of us, on that day, and every day, “You are my Beloved Child; with you I am well pleased.”

That doesn’t mean there isn’t any chaff in your life, if you want to bring it back to John. It doesn’t mean God likes everything you do or say. It means that God loves you, like the best parent you can imagine would love you. It means that God wants you to be the best and most true version of yourself. It means that God wants you to try to be faithful to God’s promises of love, and to be faithful to God’s commandment to love as you have been loved. And sometimes a life lived in love feels a lot like being threshed—at least how I imagine being threshed would feel, if I were wheat. Sometimes life turns you inside out, and upside down. It whacks you with a big old flail and it picks you up with a winnowing fork and throws you in the air. Sometimes you find yourself on the floor, thinking, “What on earth was that?” And sometimes, on the other side of all of that, you come out looking a little more like wheat, with a few bits of that chaff in your life blown away.

But God isn’t only waiting for you on the other side of all that tumult, ready to love you once you’re perfect. God is already here, now, loving you where you are, and as you are. And the message that Isaiah delivered to the ancient Israelites is the same message that God has for you: “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name. You are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you…You are precious in my sight,” God says to you today, “and honored, and I love you.” (Isaiah 43:1–2, 4)

And everything else—every article of faith, every choice we make in life, every hymn that we sing, each of our baptismal vows—is nothing but our attempt to respond to God in love; to be the beloved children God already knows we are, in the sure and certain hope that we will one day stand before God, and God will wipe off that remaining bit of chaff, and God will say again to each one of us, more clearly than ever before, “You are my Beloved Child; with you I am well pleased.”

Lectionary Readings

“How can we thank God enough for you?” (1 Thess. 3:9)

Advent is a season of contrasts. The sense of quiet anticipation in the Advent liturgy of the church contrasts with the frenzy and exhaustion of the Christmas Season on our calendars and advertisements. The beauty and joy that we associate with the coming of the Christ child at Christmas contrasts with the chaos and confusion of “the Son of Man coming in a cloud” on some frightful future day. The words of Paul this morning, offering his heartfelt gratitude and prayers for the Christian disciples in Thessalonica contrasts with Jesus’ words of warning and vigilance delivered to the disciples when they are in Jerusalem.

We can talk about this contrast in a number of different ways. So for example, you might describe Advent as a season in which we prepare both for the first coming of Christ, in the birth of that sweet little child on Christmas Day, and for the second coming of Christ, on some future day, when we will finally stand before the Son of Man. Or, you might think of Advent as a time when our readings and our prayers tend to emphasize the fact that Christian life is always both “now” and “not yet”; when the promises God gives us in Christ have already begun to be realized and have not yet been fulfilled. God has already now established a kingdom of peace and love on the earth, but it has not yet fully taken hold. God has already now invited each one of us to begin a new life of faith and hope and love, but we are not yet perfect practitioners of faith, or hope, or love.

It can sometimes feel strange to live suspended between these two extremes. It can be alarming to come back to church after a Thanksgiving break, or maybe longer, ready to get into the Christmas spirit, ready to remind yourself of “the reason for the season,” and to be told instead that “there will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves!” (Luke 21:25) It can be discouraging, year after year, to hear prophecies of “justice and righteousness in the land,” to hear that “the days are surely coming” when “Jerusalem will live in safety,” and then to look around at our world, wondering where that justice and righteousness may be, wondering when Jerusalem, or Beirut, or Khartoum, or Kyiv will live in safety. It’s hard to be told, again and again, that we have been given the gift of eternal life, and then to say goodbye to people we have loved and be left with only the hope that we will see them again some day.

Advent is a season of contrasts, but here’s the thing: Our ordinary lives right run down the middle. Advent is the First Coming and the Second, the Now and the Not Yet, the Promise and the Fulfillment, and “Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.”

In just a few minutes, I’ll baptize Hugo Watson. And baptism fits, in a strange way, with this “now and not yet” truth of Advent.

In the Episcopal Church we practice both adult and infant baptism. In other words, baptism is available, of course, to adults or older children who haven’t been baptized before and are beginning a life of faith. But it’s also available to infants, and to young children, who may not even be able to speak for themselves, let alone articulate their own beliefs. And that’s actually the norm, across the church, right now and for, oh… 16 centuries or so.

Of course, I could explain this to you historically. If you’d like the detailed historical account, come ask me at coffee hour. But I think that there’s a deeper spiritual truth at play. We don’t require people to come to a full understanding of faith before they can be baptized because we know that in this life, our faith, like all God’s work, is always both “now and not yet.” We are, already now, journeying along the long road toward God. And we have not yet any of us, however old or young, arrived in the place where we will see God face to face.

But we do not journey alone. In baptism, each one of us is brought into the community of the Church. And I hope you can hear the capital “C” in that. We are not only baptized into the community of St. John’s Episcopal Church, Charlestown, but into the one, holy, catholic—which just means “universal”—and apostolic Church with a capital C, the one Body of Christ of which all Christians are members. But we are also members of this particular church, because while the united life of the Church universal is not yet been revealed, we have the life of this church now.

In our baptismal prayers, we turn away from all the spiritual forces of evil in this world. We turn toward Christ. And then soon enough, we turn to Coffee Hour. And that’s no less a holy thing. Because while God’s work in us has already begun, it is not yet complete, and here we are—stuck in the middle with each other.

            So like I said at the beginning—well, like Paul said, at the beginning— “How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy that we feel before our God because of you?” (1 Thess. 3:9) He writes these words to a group of Christians in Thessalonica, a church that he himself had founded during his travels spreading the good news. He’d been run out of town when he was there—as was often the case for Paul—but the people he’d gotten to know there are still in his prayers.

And I find myself feeling the same way, on this post-Thanksgiving Sunday, this baptism Sunday, this first Advent Sunday, and I find myself asking, “How can I thank God enough for you in return for all the joy I feel before our God because of you?” Not because of who you will one day be, in some heavenly reality where all our imperfections fade away. But because of you, who you are now, each one of you. Some of you I know very well. Some of you don’t really want to be known. Some of you have only stepped foot in this place for the first time. But I thank God for each one of you, for walking together for at least a little part of this journey.

Because every one of us is still a work in project. Every one of us is still waiting for God to fulfill the promises God has made. Every one of us is still praying for the strength to face the things we face right now, let alone in days to come. But we have God to accompany us along the way. And we have one another, too; to share those burdens and to celebrate those joys, to live life together as the beloved community of God.

So “may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you. And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.” Amen. (1 Thess. 3:12-13)

Lectionary Readings

Did you notice anything cool about the lectionary today? Something I didn’t think actually happened; or rather, something I had never noticed happened, happened today. We get not one, but two different apocalypses in the lectionary readings for today. What a rare and wonderful treat to preach on. 

The apocalypse genre itself gets a bit of a bad rap; I would say first because of the modern connotations of the term apocalypse. And second, because we don’t get a lot of exposure to the genre. Although it was a relatively popular in the ancient world, we really only get two proper apocalyptic books in the Bible: Revelation and Daniel. 

Although the modern connotation is different, what an apocalypse does at its core is reveal something about God’s intention for the world, for humanity, and history. It often uses elaborate codes and imagery to convey its message. For Daniel, he was writing about a past period of captivity in the Babylonian exile, but the author likely actually lived under a different empire entirely. In any case, Daniel’s wider point that he makes; and the point that he makes in our reading today, is that the people holding him and his people captive are not God’s vision for the people.
In Revelation, the author is struggling under the regime of the Roman Empire. The author is given to us in the text as John of Patmos; he was likely on the island of Patmos after having been exiled on account of his faith and prophetic works. Even so, the vision that got him exiled far from his homeland was one that Caesar is not Lord, and that God has a vision for humanity that does not include the oppression of the Roman Empire. 

In both of these apocalypses, we can see a vague gesture towards the life and ministry of Jesus. For Daniel, we as Christians might read into how Jesus seems to fit the bill of the one who is “like a human being coming with the clouds of heaven…[and] given dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him” it sounds a lot like how we talk about Jesus. In Revelation, we see not only a repetition and interpretation of Jesus’ ministry, but the hope and expectation that Jesus will come back, and rule the kings of the earth. 

What we hear from Jesus himself today echoes this sentiment, while also turning the idea on its head. If Jesus is supposed to be this great king who rules over the nations, he does not necessarily do a great job [by the standards of the time]: he doesn’t take down any leaders, not even the local ones, much less the emperor. Instead, Jesus responds to Pilate with the basic fact of matter that the kingdom Jesus will rule over is not of this world.  The kingdom of God is, by this Gospel’s account, incompatible with the world Jesus lives in; and the one we live in now. 

As followers of Christ, of a king whose kingdom is not of this world, we belong to a kingdom we do not get to see. We belong to a kingdom where the powers that are important in our world are not the powers that will prevail in God’s ultimate plan: no empire, no government, no nation. None of these powers are God’s ultimate plan, and to none of these powers do we truly belong as Christians. 

As reassuring as this may or may not be, it does not really make the practice of faith that much easier. 

To return to Revelation. The aforementioned author, John of Patmos, naturally brings up what I have come to know as the “John problem” here. There are a number of Johns in the Bible, and it is unclear which one we are named after, and it is unclear exactly how many distinct Johns there are. The general consensus is that our John of Patmos, of Revelation fame, is a different John than the one who wrote the Gospel. If this is true, then it likely puts John of Patmos into a category of people whom I admire greatly: the “second generation” of Christians. People like Phoebe, Silas, and Timothy. A group of people who neither got the chance to meet Jesus, nor got the benefit of having multiple generations of Christian witness to guide them. 

Phoebe appears in the New Testament as the deliverer, and likely first interpreter, of Paul’s letter to the Romans. Silas and Timothy appear as travelling companions, coworkers,  and occasional co-authors of some of Paul’s letters. For these people, and John of Patmos, they followed a ‘king’ they had never met, and travelled far from their homes to witness that to others. With seemingly only the stories they had heard about him, and their experience of faith. This is to say, John of Patmos lives into belonging to a kingdom that is not of this world in a profound way; his vision of a world beyond our own is from a fellow follower for whom faith was likely a very hard thing to have and live into.

One of the silly hobbies I have in graduate school is that I still read for fun in the small amounts of free time I am able to steal away. I was recently enamored with a book called The Bright Sword. It takes place just after the main events of the legend of King Arthur. That is, King Arthur is dead, as are all the other noteworthy heroes from the stories. All those left when our protagonist shows up to audition for a place at King Arthur’s court are the unfortunate dregs and leftovers: knights who nobody remembers, and Nimue: Merlin’s apprentice. 

Similar to John of Patmos, Phoebe, and the rest of the “second generation”, I admire these non-heroes as they grieve the loss of almost everyone they knew, while trying to repair a broken realm, and figure out what it is they should do in the absence of their leader and his magical sword. In about the middle of the book, they attempt to perform a quest that they believe will get Arthur back; or at the very least another magical king to replace him, and get therefore them off the hook for trying to save the realm. The quest, unsurprisingly, does not work. In the end, they end up doing nothing more than fading into myth and legend, left largely forgotten. However, their labor for a king who is no longer there, and for a vision of a brighter world, remains admirable nonetheless. 

Although I find John of Patmos, Phoebe, and my beloved characters from The Bright Sword inspiring. It does not necessarily make the fact of belonging to a kingdom, and to a king, I never get to physically see that much easier. In a theological sense, I have not found a great answer for this aside from pointing to the various others who have lived and also belonged to this kingdom that is not of this world. It is difficult, as we go about our daily lives with our economies, our careers, our nation, to live into the fact that as Chrisitans we are called into a kingdom that moves towards love and community, and away from economy, careers, and nations with human kings. It was likely difficult for those Christians who lived through the Plague; or who lived through colonization; or who lived through any number of strange and tragic historical events. That is to say, if it is hard, we are in good company, historically speaking and today. 

To that end, I will leave you with a story and a poem. In 1820, a sperm whale attacked and sank a Nantucket whaler, The Essex, in the middle of the southern Pacific Ocean. Its twenty-man crew were stranded at sea in open row boats for 95 days; eventually they managed to come ashore on the west coast of South America; five of the twenty survived. In 1847, a poem was written in their memory by the captain of another Nantucket whaler, The Three Brothers. The poem is “row on”

Clouds are upon the summer sky;
There’s thunder in the wind
Row on, row on, and homeward high
Nor take one look behind

Row on, row on, another day
May shine with brighter light.
Ply, ply the oars and pull away
There’s dawn beyond the night

Bear where thou goest the words of love
Say all that words can say
Changeless affection and strength to prove
And speed upon the way

Like yonder river would I fly
To where my heart would be
My barque would soon outsail the tide
That hurries to the sea

Row on, row on another day
May shine with brighter light
Ply, ply the oars, and pull away
There’s dawn beyond the night

But yet a star shines constant, still
Through yonder cloudy skies
And hope, as bright, my bosom fills
From faith that cannot die

In the name of the one who loved us first.