Tag: Gospel

What Do We Do with John 3:16?

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

This is likely the most quoted verse in the New Testament. For we Christians, it is probably the most quoted verse in the whole Bible. We see it held up on signs by fans at sporting events, printed on billboards, worn on t-shirts.

My brother-in-law and I, decades ago, once made a John 3:16 sign with markers and poster board and floated it across a narrow channel on the bay side of Ocean City in the middle of the night and took pictures of ourselves standing on a small island ironically holding our John 3:16 sign to show that we had claimed and conquered the island.

Which is to say: so what? This quote encapsulates something key and wonderful about our faith. What do we do with it, or about it? What do we do with it in terms of our lifestyle? How does it change the way we live our lives?

For too many people, I don’t think it translates, by itself, into a transformed life or consciousness.

It makes me think sometimes, what if the most quoted lines in the New Testament or the Bible for Christians were:

Or Matthew 5:9, which says: “Blessed are the Peacemakers”

Or John 13:35: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

Or Matthew 25:40, “Just As You Did to One of the Least of These You Did to Me”

How much different would our view of ourselves or our impact on the world be, if what we quoted talked about grace embodied, not simply grace received?

Or what if we included John 3:17 as part of our marketing message to complete the “God so loved the world” thought, and we read, “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

Jesus came to do something wonderful, something transformational, something life-changing for the people of the world. John 3:16, by itself, hasn’t seemed to have that effect on those who read it or hear it.

But Jesus gives us something to work with in his conversation with Nicodemus. He asks us to think, and to change, if necessary, rather than just shouting out Scripture.

We know this story a bit, don’t we? Nicodemus, who is a Pharisee, a leader of the Jews, comes to Jesus at night. He comes at night so no one sees him talking to Jesus. Going to Jesus for teaching could ruin Nicodemus’s reputation. Jesus is not an “insider,” he challenges the Pharisees. But there is something in Nicodemus that needs to meet with Jesus, to know what he’s all about.

Nicodemus begins his conversation with incredible vulnerability:

“Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.”

Can you imagine, going up to someone who challenges the way you think, the way you act, the way you live your life, and leading with that kind of admission? Wanting to learn from them? Would I have the guts to do that? Would you?

And Jesus answers in a way that sends Nicodemus reeling:

“Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”

Oh, wow. I guess I should have warned you about this. There are two parts of today’s reading that can be sticky for those outside the faith, those who are looking in at Christianity. This is where we get the term and idea of “born again Christian.”

Born-again Christians have their own reputations as being the people you don’t want to run into at the grocery store or a concert. They are thought of as pushier, over-zealous. And overly interested in whether YOU have been born again or saved.

That’s another aspect of this reading that has gotten a bad rap. What does Jesus mean when he says born from above? That’s what Nicodemus is trying to wrap his head around.

Jesus, this is crazy talk. Once we are born from our mothers, we can’t be born again. We’re already here.

And Jesus says, that’s not the kind of birth I’m talking about. We’re all born of the flesh. I’m talking about the Spirit.

“No one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit.”

This is a spiritual birth, or re-birth. In Nicodemus’s defense, this is a hard concept to get our heads around, especially if you’ve never experienced or heard about something like this. I recently came across something that strikes me as a helpful way to think about being reborn.

In his book, “The Healing Path,” author James Finley talks about becoming a clinical psychologist, this is after having lived for years as a monk and then becoming a spiritual retreat leader. During his doctoral studies, he had a year-long internship at a Veterans Administration Hospital and Finley was assigned to an inpatient alcohol treatment unit.


Many of the men there for treatment were Vietnam vets. You can imagine that alcohol abuse was only a part of what they were dealing with.

Finley learned that some years earlier the men on the unit developed an initiation rite for those who wanted to be admitted to the program. He watched it as a new person came in for the first time.

He said that all the men sat in chairs lined around the walls of the room, except for two empty chairs in the center of the room, left facing each other. The man seeking to be admitted sat in one chair, and one of the men in the unit who was conducting the initiation sat in the other.

And he asked the newcomer, “What do you love the most?” The guy was confused, caught off-guard, and said, “My wife.” And all the guys along the walls got loud, gave him a hard time, shouted some things.

He was asked again, “What do you love the most?” The newcomer thought and said, “My children.” Same response from the men, raucous, not having it.

The same question, “What do you love most?” And finally the newcomer answered, “Alcohol.”

And the moment he said it, all the men stood, gave him a standing ovation, the newcomer was asked to stand and one by one, every man there lined up to hug him and welcome him into their midst, as one of them. And everyone in the room, Finley included, had tears running down their faces.

Finley writes about the newcomer, “In his moment of awakening, he was vulnerable… As the man stood there with tears streaming down his face, he was childlike, meaning he was guileless and open-faced, free of posing and posturing. And in his child-like transparency, true spiritual maturity was being manifested in the world…

“He knew nothing. In this unknowing, all his foggy assumptions, conclusions, and answers that were formed and sustained in his addiction were eclipsed by a luminous, empty-handed understanding that lit up his mind and heart in ways that he had not as yet even begun to comprehend.”

“He was dying before our very eyes. For in this moment the alcoholic in him that, for so many years claimed to have the final say in who he was, was dying. And in this death he was being born before our very eyes as someone newly emerging out of the darkness into the light.”

This was a man, who was being born again. His old life, his old self, was dying. And a new life was beginning. He had to surrender his old way of seeing and being, everything about that life, in order for a new life, a new birth to start.

That’s a powerful metaphor for us, who are being given a chance to let go of the life the powers of the world have us living and opening ourselves to being born anew in the Spirit, with how Jesus calls us to live.

This is not the kind of birth we can see with our eyes, like the birth of a newborn baby. Jesus says, you can’t see the wind, you don’t know where it comes from or goes, but we know it from the sound.

We know the new life in someone born of the spirit by their life. By who they are and what they show us.

At the time when this Gospel was written, it was unthinkable that someone could declare “I believe” and not have it show in their life. If you had received and accepted this amazing grace of God so loving the world that he gave his only Son—you would embody that grace—you would live it out in the world.

I love this quote by writer Debie Thomas who says:

“When the writers of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament wrote of faithfulness, they were not advocating for intellectual assent. They were making a case for trust, fidelity, dependence, and love. To believe in God was to place their loving confidence in God. To entrust their hearts, minds, and bodies into God’s hands… What does it mean to believe in Jesus? It means becoming a newborn: vulnerable, hungry, and ready to receive reality in a fresh way. It means coming out of the shadows and risking the light… Why is belief important to God? Because love is important to God. To believe is to BE LOVE.”

This may all sound crazy. It certainly did to Nicodemus. Nicodemus came to Jesus at night, in secret, hoping to understand what he was all about. And he leaves that night perplexed and confused.

But that’s not the end of the story for Nicodemus. He is one of the few characters we encounter in the Gospels who we get to see again two more times in the story.

In John chapter 7, the temple police ask the Pharisees why they don’t arrest Jesus and it is Nicodemus who steps in to defend Jesus saying, “Our law doesn’t judge people without first giving them a hearing does it?”

And then again, in John chapter 19, after Jesus has been crucified, it is Nicodemus, “who first came to Jesus at night” who brings a mixture of myrrh and aloes, weighing 100 pounds; who with Joseph of Arimathea takes Jesus’s body, prepares it and wraps it in linens, and lays Jesus in the tomb.

This was at huge personal risk to Nicodemus—being associated with the man who had just been publicly executed.

Nicodemus leaves his first meeting with Jesus confused, humbled, and probably heartbroken, not understanding what it means to be born of the Spirit.

And then, as he lives, as he prays, as he thinks, Nicodemus, risking his reputation and his life, shows us what it looks like to be born again, of the Spirit.

Maybe this reading is not about the waving a sign in the stands.

It’s not simply about receiving the grace of John 3:16.

Maybe it’s about embodying that grace once we’ve received it. Maybe it looks like risking our reputation, risking ourselves, risking the light—being vulnerable and open to Jesus so that we can give up our old way of living to be born again of the Spirit.

Caravaggio, “The Entombment of Christ”

Being Salt and Light

Background: last weekend I preached at Christ Church Easton on our lectionary reading, Matthew 5:13-20, where Jesus tells those listening to his Sermon on the Mount that they are the salt of the earth and the light of the world. This is the text of my sermon, bouncing off of Bishop Jake Owensby’s book “A Full-Hearted Life” and commentary from the SALT Project blog.

“Being Salt and Light”

This is our second week sorting through parts of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, as it’s come to be known in Matthew’s Gospel. The full sermon goes from chapter 5 through chapter 7.

Jesus sees crowds of people gathering and he goes up a mountain, sits down and teaches.

It begins with the Beatitudes: the “blessed are” statements, where those considered “blessed” are not people many would consider fortunate or lucky. Last Sunday on Zoom, Rev. Anne Wright walked us through the Beatitudes, pointing out that being blessed isn’t about having good things happen to us; part of the blessing is that when we go through difficult times, God is with us. We are blessed in being close to God and not being alone in our dark nights of the soul.

This week’s reading picks up right where last week left off. Continuing to teach, Jesus tells his disciples, his listeners, that they are the salt of the earth and the light of the world. Those things are great, but they come with a warning: if salt has lost its taste, you have to throw it out, and don’t hide your light, let it shine so that others can see.

What does it mean to be salt and light? Let’s take a look at a few things here.

First, Jesus isn’t asking his listeners to become something new; he doesn’t tell them to “become” salt and light. He says, you ARE these things already. In the book we’ve been reading in small groups, “A Full-Hearted Life” by Episcopal Bishop Jake Owensby, he reminds us that we are all God’s beloved. God made us with and out of love. We don’t have to do anything, we are loved.

We are salt and light. Jesus is telling his listeners, and us, to act like it; to be who we were created to be.

Another aspect to this, salt losing its flavor or light being covered up: our faith is not supposed to be a hollow faith. It’s not a matter of doing things because we are supposed to do them. Even things like going to church, helping the poor, praying—all things that are good for us to do, but not if we are going through the motions; doing them because we are told to do them.

Bishop Owensby in talking about the world and the church today says that we see a lot of “functional atheism.” He says:

“a longing for the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Moses—a longing for a relationship with the risen Christ—no longer animates the lives of many people, even church-going, creed-professing people. Our life-shaping desire is no longer focused on the Transcendent God. Many lives—including the lives of self-identified Christians—are centered on things of this world.”

One of the things Owensby points out is that many lives are centered around work, instead of our relationship with Christ. He says “workism,” is “the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose.”

Workism is a spirituality that measures human value as a function of productivity and efficiency. Workism “distorts worship, prayer, feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, and all spiritual practices into transactions.”

If you are coming to church, or you consider yourself a Christian, just because you want to go to heaven, or so you will be well thought of in the community, those are transactions.


Owensby says that spiritual practices are supposed to be “responses to the infinite love that God has always already given us, not pleas to receive what we do not have.”

We are already God’s beloved. All of us. We are already salt and light.

Faith is not performative. It’s meant to be heart-centered. It’s meant to be a response to, and a part of, our relationship with God.  

As Jesus continues teaching to the crowds, he says:

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.”

Okay, Jesus, that’s a bit of a head-scratcher. What does it mean to “fulfill” the law? Here is what our friends over at the SALT Project website have to say:

“the underlying notion is that when something is “fulfilled,” it’s truly embodied, incarnated, filled out, brought to life. When we “fulfill a responsibility,” for example, we perform it — we give it form… To “fulfill the law,” then, is to embody its essential features, to “fill out” and exemplify its meaning, spirit, and substance.”

Jesus has come to embody, fill out, bring the law to life. If we want to see what it looks like to live out the law—look at Jesus. If we want to see what it looks like to be salt and light: look at Jesus.

As he continues his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is going to spell out in greater detail how we are to live, some of the things we are to do in fulfilling the law the way that he does.

The difference between “following the law” and “fulfilling the law” can be the difference between salt that’s lost its flavor and light that’s being hidden, and the salt and light we were created to be.

The laws say: don’t murder anyone, don’t steal, don’t commit adultery, don’t covet, don’t worship false idols.

Are we being salt and light if all we are doing is following these laws, these “don’ts?”

What’s the difference between following and fulfilling these laws? Later on in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is pressed on which law or commandment is the greatest and he replies:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

It’s not a statement on our actions, it starts with our hearts. It isn’t just don’t do these things that are harmful; we are meant to love God and love each other. 

If we love God, we won’t worship work and put works as idols where we are meant to put God. If we love each other, we are not going to murder, steal, or covet.

Being salt and light happens when we soften our hearts in love and turn away from making the things that the world seems to hold dear—money, power, status—the center of our lives.

This is counter-cultural today and it was counter-cultural in Jesus’s time. It’s not a message we hear from CEOs to stockholders, but it’s the message Jesus tries to get through to his followers in order to change the world; to bring about the kingdom of heaven. We are made by God to love and be loved.

If from our hearts we love God with everything we have and we love our neighbors, we don’t argue with each other whether it’s okay to kill someone, or not pay them a living wage, or to treat them as less than human. If we act with and from love, we know what to do. We know how to be salt and light.

The order of the Sermon on the Mount matters here. Jesus starts with talking about blessings and then says you are salt and light.

He doesn’t say: go be salt and light and then you will be blessed. He says even when you don’t think you are blessed, you are. You are salt and light. Being so, go do what salt and light do.

It’s not a matter of performing our duties. It’s a matter of sharing the love we receive from God to be a blessing to others.

We aren’t required to do this; we get to do this.

We are loved and made to love others. We are blessed and made to bless others.

This is not something we can force or yell at or argue into someone. These are inherent gifts, given to us, that we get to share in gratitude with joy and love.

And if that feels like pressure, to be salt and light in a world that desperately needs both, what do we know about salt:

It takes just a little salt to add flavor to whatever you are making. You are enough.

What do we know about light? If you are in a dark room, a match, a candle, a flashlight, or even the light from your phone, all of a sudden illuminates the whole room.

You are enough to make a difference. It’s who you were created to be.

We have Jesus as our model. We have the Holy Spirit as our guide and helper. And we have each other to both encourage and be encouraged by. 

We can start by sharing God’s love with those around us. We can do our small part. And be a part of where things go from there.

We can do this, following Jesus, with God’s help.

Second Sunday of Advent: Change Your Life

Background: Last weekend was a preaching weekend for me at Christ Church Easton, on the Second Sunday of Advent. The Gospel reading was Matthew 3:1-12, where John the Baptist is telling people to “Repent!” and baptizing them in the River Jordan. Below is the text of the sermon I gave at our four weekend services.

“Change Your Heart, Change Your Mind, Change Your Life”

We started Advent last weekend with Jesus telling his disciples to BE READY! Or KEEP AWAKE. We don’t know when God is going to break into the world, or break into our lives, so we’ve got to be ready.

This week, we encounter John the Baptist, who is Advent personified. He might be the perfect Advent spokesperson, or the best possible hype man for Christmas, for the incarnation. That’s what John came to do.

Two words that stand out for me in today’s reading are REPENT and PREPARE.

John says, “REPENT! The kingdom of heaven has come near.” Repent is one of those church words that we like to stay away from. It’s got some baggage. What we might hear instead as John calls us to repent is: change your heart, change your mind, change your life.

Our normal way of doing things, the same-old, same-old isn’t going to cut it. Turn around. Stop doing what you are doing. And change your heart, your mind, and your life.

Why do we get John the Baptist in our second reading of the church new year? John isn’t Jesus, do we really have to listen to him? What makes John the Advent spokesperson?

First, you can’t miss him. He stands out. Aside from Jesus, he is the most memorable character in the Gospels. We don’t often get much in the way of descriptions of people from our Gospel writers, but we do with John. When we hear his name, we probably all think about his camel hair clothing, his leather belt, and his go-to diet of locusts and wild honey.

John the Baptizer takes his job seriously and people take him seriously. For someone who cuts such a strange figure, people listen to him. Matthew tells us:

“the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan, and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.”

People from all over were going out into the wilderness to John. This isn’t going to coffee hour; they were being baptized in a river and confessing their sins. And John was so charismatic and influential in doing this work that we hear about him and his followers through the Gospels and all the way into the Book of Acts.

John walks the walk. He was not a hypocrite. What he told people to do, he himself was doing. He gave his life to God and to the mission God called him to.

John’s message: change your heart, change your mind, change your life, was not and is not an easy sell.

We have this sense of church sometimes that we want to enjoy ourselves, hear good music, catch up with our friends, hear a sermon that inspires us, and to walk out of church with a nice feeling.

For some people, going to church is entertainment. If I don’t like the music, if I don’t like the pastor, or if someone says something that makes me mad, I’ll just find another church.

That’s not what John was about. John called people out. He made them uncomfortable. If John was preaching REPENT in the same way today, you wouldn’t invite him to your holiday party.

And we certainly wouldn’t want John as a greeter at the front door:

“Welcome, you brood of vipers! You think going to church is going to save you? God could raise up the slate from your front steps and put them into the church pews. You better bear fruit worthy of repentance.”

I’ve always appreciated the analogy for repentance of taking a trip in your car. It doesn’t matter how fast you are going if you are going in the wrong direction. We might think, well, we’re going at a good speed, the car is nice, the radio station is coming in clear, all distracting us from the fact that we are actively moving away from the place we are trying to get to.

When that’s the case, the only sensible thing to do is to stop. And turn around. That’s what John is trying to get across. The companies who sell gas, service your car, and put shopping malls up on your way, none of them care where you are going or what direction you are going in.

John cares. Because God cares.

If we want to get to the place that God wants us to go—which by the way, isn’t a place, it’s a way of being, a way of seeing, a way of treating each other—then we need to change our hearts, change our minds, and change our lives. Both individually, but also as a church, as a community, as a country, as a world. The way the world is heading does not lead to the kingdom or kingship of God.

There was a poignant line in the Advent study we are doing this month, where Randall Curtis, who is a youth and family minister at an Episcopal Church in Florida, talks about the distractions and busy-ness that bombard us this month and he says:

“These distractions are the new ‘drunkenness and worries of this life,’ which means that as we prepare for Christmas and God breaking into the world, we will have to make sure we look up from our phones to see it.”

Ouch. But isn’t that the truth.

Maybe John’s message still applies to us today.

Talking about all these qualities of John—his influence, his popularity, his dedication—the thing that makes him the hype man for the coming Incarnation is: John doesn’t need things to be all about him. In fact, he points to someone else coming, who is a way bigger deal than John is:

“I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

John points to Jesus. The season of Advent points to the Incarnation of Jesus. This is a season not only of being ready, of staying awake, but of making sure our hearts, our minds, and our lives, are in fact preparing the way, and if they aren’t, then we need to repent, to change so that we are going in the same direction that Jesus is.

When people heard John, and when they heard Jesus, the ones with the ears to hear, listened to them and changed. I wonder if the church still holds that place, that authority, that someone might hear a critical, difficult message, go home, think about it, pray about it, and make a change in their lives if it is warranted.

Or is church just something we do, something we are, to feel good and to confirm and encourage us in the ways that we already are?

We’ve touched on repentance. What about preparation? John the Baptizer was preparing the way for Jesus, the same way Advent prepares the way for Christmas. If our lives are going in the wrong direction, the first thing we need to do to prepare the way for Jesus is to change our hearts, our minds, our lives.

John is doing his work so that we are ready for Jesus. Prepare the way, prepare our hearts. Jesus looks and acts differently than what the world wants us to focus on right now.

At a time when power and status are grand-standing, Jesus is going to come into the world as a defenseless child born to non-descript parents. At a time when we’re told vulnerability and empathy are weaknesses, the coming Incarnation meets us in our human-ness. Jesus says let me show you what vulnerability and empathy are.

Preparing our hearts and our lives for Jesus means letting go of the things that harden our hearts and blind us to the struggles of others. Our hard hearts and our lack of compassion are the chaff that will burn in unquenchable fire. It’s the love of God that wins out.

Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren writes that:

“It is the love of God, in the end, that wins the day. The love of God is the blazing fire that purifies us, remakes us, and sets right all that is broken in us and in the world. The love of God brings us to repentance. The love of God sets the oppressed free and makes all things new. The love of God insists on truth and justice. The love of God reveals every hidden thing. And it is this love that is coming for us.”

The love of God IS the kingdom of heaven, which is drawing near. The love of God, the kingdom of heaven is coming to us in the person of Jesus Christ. Let us change our hearts, our minds, and our lives to prepare the way.

Forgiveness

Context: At our Wednesday healing service at Christ Church Easton this week, the Gospel reading was Matthew 18:21-35, the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant. At the end of the parable, the unforgiven servant (who had been forgiven by his master, but wouldn’t forgive his fellow slave, was being tortured for his unforgiveness. The following is a brief homily and discussion question we had on forgiveness.

Forgiveness

Remember, parables are stories that are meant to make a point. They aren’t to be taken 100 percent literally. To say that you are going to be tortured until you learn forgiveness sounds a little ridiculous.

But I am going to say to you that in this case, that’s actually true. Every one of us is tortured until we learn how to forgive.

When we hold resentment and unforgiveness in our hearts against someone, that feeling takes control over us. Kessler Bickford, who sometimes joins us at the healing service has given programs on forgiveness and she used the analogy of not forgiving someone being like having a huge fish on a fishing line, that we can’t pull in, and it’s digging into your hands and pulling the boat, and the fish is determining the direction you go and becomes the only thing you can focus on. And the only way forward is to cut the line, to forgive, so you can get back to living your own life.

Another famous analogy is that not forgiving someone and holding onto hate and resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.

Not only does it not work, it kills you in the process.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in “The Book of Forgiving” put it as eloquently and effectively as you can:

“Until we can forgive, we remain locked in our pain and locked out of experiencing healing and freedom, locked out of the possibility of being at peace.

“Without forgiveness, we remain tethered to the person who harmed us. We are bound with chains of bitterness, tied together, trapped. Until we can forgive the person who harmed us, that person holds the keys to our happiness; that person is our jailor. When we forgive, we take back control of our own fate and our feelings. We become our own liberators.”


It’s in that sense that the parable hits home: we are tortured when and while we don’t forgive. And that torture is self-inflicted.

Forgiveness is the way forward for Jesus and our way forward with Jesus.

The Lord’s Prayer is the prayer Jesus taught his disciples. Every time we pray it, we say:

“And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.“

And though we prefer the language that we know, the more accurate translation of those lines is:

“Forgive us our sins
as we forgive those who sin against us.“

If we ourselves ask for and know we need forgiveness when we slip up, what sense does it make to deny forgiveness to someone else? That’s what this parable tries to make clear—the hypocrisy of that kind of stance.

We’ve got not forgiving as being tortured. We have forgiveness as the way forward that Jesus asks us to take.

I also maintain that forgiveness is the only, or at least the main thing that will change the world. It’s hard to disprove the saying, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”

On a national and global scale, unforgiveness, resentment, anger lead to wars, crimes against humanity, you name it. And the only direction it goes when unchecked is to get worse. Give someone more resources or more weapons, conflict continues and elevates.

In Luke’s Gospel, as Jesus is being tortured and killed on the cross, he says, “Father forgive them for they don’t know what they’re doing.”


Often when people react or act in violence and hatred, they don’t know what they are doing. They are seeing only through those limited lenses.

If you want to know if we have a forgiving God: in the Resurrection, when Jesus overcomes the death that humans gave him, we don’t see God looking for vengeance or retribution, instead we see Jesus doubling down on everything he had been saying, showing, modeling—love God and love your neighbor; if you are my disciples, they will know you by your love.

If we are going to get ourselves from the kingdom of the world to the kingdom of heaven, it’s going to be on the road of love and forgiveness.

How do we get there from here? What does it take in our lives, in your life, to more fully embrace forgiveness?

In some cases, it can be seeing the person or people who we need to forgive as human beings who make mistakes. It is realizing that it is often hurt people who hurt people.

Archbishop Tutu, in his book, explains a fourfold path of:

Telling the story
Naming the hurt
Granting forgiveness
Renewing or releasing the relationship

It’s an important thing to remember that forgiving someone doesn’t mean becoming best friends with them or even having them in your life.

Of course for some of us, the person we most need to forgive is ourselves, and that is a process as well.

Since Desmond Tutu has literally written the book on forgiveness, let’s give him the last word:

“When I cultivate forgiveness in my small everyday encounters, I am preparing for the time when a much larger act of forgiveness will be asked of me, as it almost certainly will. It seems none of us journeys through life unscathed by tragedy, disappointment, betrayal, or heartbreak, but each of us has at his or her disposal a most powerful skill that lessens and can even transmute the pain. This skill can, when given the chance, win over an enemy, heal a marriage, stop a fight, and—on a global scale—even end a war. When you set out to change the world, the job seems insurmountable. But each of us can do his or her small part to effect change. We can change the world when we choose to create a world of forgiveness in our own hearts and minds.”

Live Now What Matters Forever

Background: My August preaching weekend at Christ Church Easton gave me Luke 12:13-21, where Jesus tells the Parable of the Rich Fool, who wants to build bigger barns to store all his stuff. Following is the text of my sermon.

“Live Now What Matters Forever”

There is a lot going on in today’s Gospel reading that gets my mind and my heart churning.

Someone in the crowd says to Jesus, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.”

 And Jesus’s answer may seem for our day and time like one of the most un-Jesus responses we can imagine:

“Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?”

Some followers of Jesus today like to lift absolutely everything up for Jesus to help us to make our decisions, to settle our disputes.

But Jesus may say to us sometimes, “That sounds like ‘your problem.’ That sounds like something you guys are going to have to figure out for yourselves.”

Certainly, this nameless person from the crowd has his own self-interest in mind and wants to get the teacher he looks up to, to weigh in on his side, to tell his brother to give him some money and some land.

It may astonish us that in dealing with family matters, Jesus’s answer to us might be, “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?”

Not the answer we were hoping for.

One of the reasons Jesus doesn’t have an interest in answering this question or settling this dispute is that he sees it is leading the person, his brother, and the crowd in a bad direction. If this is the kind of question you really want to spend your time with Jesus going through, you’ve got a bigger problem.

Greed and hoarding possessions are not going to help you. And then Jesus does one of the most Jesus things he does when asked questions.

He says, “Let me tell you a story…”

I love that Jesus’s answer to some of the most vexing questions and profound problems when the crowds press him for answers is… “Let me tell you a story.”

Franciscan and author Richard Rohr says:

“The way Jesus usually answers questions is by telling a story. There is creative and healing power in a story. It doesn’t avoid the question, it goes to the root of the question… That’s the way the great masters of religion always taught—by simply telling stories and giving the soul room to grow and understand.”

If Jesus gives them an answer, they are done thinking about the matter. It doesn’t help them grow; it doesn’t help them understand the deeper currents that are underneath the question.

Jesus’s parables work on us. They stick with us. And their meanings move around for us.

Teacher of preachers Tom Long wrote a book on Jesus’s parables and the word he uses for parable is “riddle.” Long says:

“One of the best definitions of parable is: riddle. A parable is a riddle, there is some puzzle to be solved, some enigma to be plumbed. And the thing about Jesus’s parables, just when you think you’ve got it… a trap door opens and you fall down into a deeper level of mystery. By the way, I think insufficient attention is given to the fact that we serve a Jesus whose favorite method of teaching was not rule, law, spiritual truth, principle, but riddle…  All this is to say, that parables, and particularly Jesus’s parables aren’t clear, cut and dry, and don’t lend themselves to a quick and easy interpretation, or they wouldn’t be doing their job.”

Jesus told them this story, this riddle:

The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, `What should I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ Then he said, `I’ve got an idea: I will pull down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, `Soul, you have plenty of goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ 

But God said to him, `You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’

If our most pressing question of Jesus is to solve our inheritance problems, to solve our financial problems, Jesus says, I’ve got a warning for you—you might be focusing on the wrong things. It’s not that money isn’t important, but it can cause us to lose focus on the biggest things in life… which includes the fact that we don’t know how much time we have in this life.

I absolutely love how Richard Rohr brings this parable and this reading to a point. He says:

“‘Live now what matters in eternity’ is Jesus’s message. Live on earth what’s happening in heaven… That’s the kingdom: live now what matters forever.”

LIVE NOW WHAT MATTERS FOREVER. There’s your bumper sticker or your t-shirt from today’s Gospel. There is something to tape to your mirror or above your coffeemaker, or somewhere you’ll see it every morning when you wake up.

There is a poet named Maggie Smith whose work I am a big fan of. She always seems to bring big issues and questions into the here-and-now in ways that stick with me. When she posts on social media, she’ll often use the heading “Life lately” and include a bunch of pictures and captions of what’s been going on with her.

“Life lately” for me has been Clinical and Pastoral Education—Rev. Kelsey and I have three weeks left out of our 16-week programthat is our last requirement to be ordained as priests. In my experience, seminary helps train your brain, CPE helps mold your heart.

Sitting with and opening myself up to strangers, and sometimes friends, who are in the hospital, softens my heart in ways that I couldn’t have predicted.

Last week at the Easton Hospital, I checked in on an older gentleman who was eating his lunch. I introduced myself as the chaplain for the day, and he said, “What denomination are you?” I said, “Episcopal.” He said, “Good, that’s the only good one!”

Over the next hour he told me his entire life story: father died when he was nine, military school, jobs he had, marriages, divorces, kids dying, mistakes he made, luck he has had, good times, bad times, and when he was wrapping things up he said, “Now you’ve heard my confession.”

Sometimes visits go that way. I get a sense of someone who is in the hospital, in some cases they are lonely, they are stuck in bed in a place they would rather not be and their main interaction is with medical staff who are responsible for a whole lot of people and don’t have time to address things like loneliness, anxiety, fear; they don’t have time to hear someone’s story; to come alongside them and be present with them for a few minutes, for an hour.

The time we spend together matters. A personsitting in the hospital can feel seen and heard and human, even if just for a little while.

LIVE NOW WHAT MATTERS FOREVER.

During the announcements, my friend Jack Anthony is going to tell you a story about Stephen Ministry. Stephen Ministry is a program that became a part of Christ Church in 2005 and that trains people to walk beside someone going through a difficult time in their lives. There are more than 100 people in our congregation over these last 20 years who have responded to a call in their hearts to learn to be more loving, more empathetic, more compassionate; to be better listeners, and to make themselves available for people who are hurting. Last year, my wife Holly went through the training and became a Stephen Minister. And the whole experience has blessed her in amazing ways. They are offering the next training this fall. Maybe it is something that speaks to you.

What I am learning in CPE and what you learn through becoming a Stephen Minister is very similar. How to listen. How to be present. What love looks like when the conditions aren’t perfect.

These are not skills or experience that apply only to visiting a hospital or spending time with a care receiver.

“Life lately.” I helped with a celebration of life on Friday for a man and family I have known since I was in elementary school. The man’s name was Ed Bishop, one of the kindest human beings I have ever met. People got up and told stories. A neighbor pointed out that even after almost 60 years married, Ed and his wife Wendy wouldn’t feed the birds without each other because they loved doing it together. The number of people there Friday who were in their late 50’s and showed up with their families who said that they learned what unconditional love and kindness were from being friends with the Bishops’ two sons and seeing these qualitieson full display from their parents. Ed Bishop lived now what matters forever and showed people what that looks like.

At the service, I got to catch up with a number of long-time friends who I hadn’t seen in quite a while. My daughters are 23 and 20 years old. Some of my friends have younger kids and I’ve heard a few times lately, “it must be nice to have your kids out from under, working, not needing you all the time.”

I look back at the years when the girls were under foot, and it takes a lot of time and energy to get through all of that. But I found that most of the problems that they had then, I could fix. I could do something about. Tie a shoe. Clean a cut and put a Band-Aid on it. Drive them to school. Decide who got to pick the movie they would watch.

The problems the girls have now, I can’t fix. I can’t solve for them. Heartbreak, relationships,loneliness, anxiety. Epilepsy. Seizures. These things above my pay grade.

You know what I have found that I can offer? Time. Presence. Love. I can be there. I can listen. I can come alongside them. We can do life together.

We can live now what matters forever.

Each of us has that chance every day. If Jesus had continued his parable, his story, and given us an alternative to building bigger barns, I’d bet it would be a story of showing love and care to people who need it. That’s the kingdom Jesus wants to help us build.

Living the Gospel: vulnerable, dependent, together

Background: Last weekend was a preaching weekend for me at Christ Church Easton. The Gospel reading for the lectionary was Luke 10:1-11, 16-20, where Jesus sends 70 followers out ahead of him to towns and place he will go, with specific instructions as to how they are to interact with people. Following is the transcript of my sermon.

“Living the Gospel: vulnerable, dependent, together”

In last week’s reading, we saw Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem and send people ahead to get things ready for him. The disciples were not well received when they got to a village of Samaritans. This made John and James furious and they wanted to send fire from heaven to consume the Samaritans. Not a very neighborly thing to do.

Jesus rebuked them; he told James and John, this is not how we do things and he gave a series of teachings about how the disciples needed to set their priorities if they were going to follow him.

Last week’s reading was a bit of precursor to this reading, as now Jesus gets 70 people together, he’s not just talking to the 12. And now he’s giving specific instructions to this larger group as he sends them out ahead of him to the towns and places he is going.

No more of this raining down fire from heaven, here’s what I want you all to do:

First of all, “the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.” So we need laborers. What a great place to start. It’s out there, there is abundance—this work you are doing is needed. Given the reception in the last village, that might not be a foregone conclusion to some of Jesus’s disciples, but he sees abundance where others might see scarcity.

“Go on your way. See, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves. Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; and greet no one on the road.”

Whenever I hear “sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves,” I am waiting for that qualifying line, “so be as wise as serpents, but as innocent as doves.” But that’s from Matthew’s Gospel, we don’t get that spelled out in Luke. The disciples just go out like lambs.

Jesus is sending these 70 followers out into a hostile world that may not receive them well, and instead of arming them for battle, he points out their vulnerability. Not only will we not call down fire from heaven, you all are going out like lambs. No purse, or bag, or sandals.

Sending them out as lambs, he is sending them intentionally vulnerable, vulnerable by design. Why would he do that?

If you Google vulnerability today, it’s a guarantee that you will find a slew of quotes from social worker and storyteller Brene Brown. And here is a quote of hers from a book study we did that speaks to what Jesus may have had in mind:

“Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.” (Brene Brown, “Daring Greatly”)

Alright, Jesus. We’re getting vulnerable. Now what?

Go to their homes. Offer them peace. If they share in the peace you offer, it will rest on that person, if not it comes back to you. You are going to depend on the people in that house, eating and drinking whatever they give you.

Whenever you enter a town and they welcome you, eat what they give you, cure the sick and tell them the kingdom of God has come near to you.

If a town doesn’t welcome you, it’s the same message, the kingdom of God has come near.

One of the things that strikes me about this reading, Jesus isn’t teaching them theology, he isn’t giving them Scripture 101, he is instructing them in how to interact with people. How to go about their work, dependent on those in the towns and places the disciples are sent to.

In thinking about this, Franciscan Richard Rohr writes:

“All of Jesus’ rules of ministry here, his ‘tips for the road,’ are very interpersonal. They are based on putting people in touch with people. Person-to-person is the way the gospel was originally communicated. Person-in-love-with-person, person-respecting-person, person-forgiving-person, person-touching-person, person-crying-with-person, person-hugging-person: that’s where the Spirit is so beautifully present.” (Richard Rohr, “The Good News According to Luke”)

In fact, Rohr goes so far as to say, “The gospel happens between two or more people.”

Fr. Richard Rohr and Brene Brown

Now, this is something to kick around a bit. Say I am sitting at home in the morning, having my coffee and prayer time, reading my Bible or doing a devotional, and I have a Holy Spirit moment. I feel touched by God; my heart is on fire; I see the interconnectedness of all people; I see how God’s love flows back and forth between us all; I am sure in my heart that I am a child of God.

Then I cut the grass. And I go to the grocery store. And I go about my business. And that realization I had in the morning has no apparent impact on my life. It doesn’t translate into how I love, how I treat other people, how I live.

Have I been true to the realization? If all I do is go to church services and read my Bible, and listen to sermons and music: has love, has grace transformed my life?

Here is one of Rohr’s most impactful thoughts for me. He says:

“The most a preacher does is entice you, attract you, and call you out of yourself to live a new kind of life. But the gospel cannot happen in your head alone. You never think yourself into a new way of living. You invariably “live” yourself into a new way of thinking.”

You don’t THINK yourself into a new way of LIVING. You LIVE yourself into a new way of THINKING.

I wonder if that’s what Jesus has in mind sending his disciples out: that you are going to learn and experience things on the road that I can’t simply teach you here, no matter how brilliant and deep the parable is.

You’ve got to get out there and take this peace, this good news, to others. That’s where the gospel is, that’s where love is, in our interactions with people. That’s where Jesus, that’s where Scripture, and that’s where the Holy Spirit sends us. Out.

When we open ourselves to this interpersonal gospel, this gospel that happens between two or more people, that’s where lasting transformation can happen. I know we are in an era of self-love, and self-love is hugely important—we get ourselves into trouble if we try to love our neighbor as ourselves, but we loathe ourselves, rather than love ourselves. Love yourself for sure.

But love ultimately calls us outside ourselves. Love is bigger than us. And if love is the most powerful force in the world… if God is love and we belong to God… it’s living out this love and experiencing what happens when it is shared and multiplied, that then changes our lives, and the world, in meaningful ways.

Jesus gives his 70 disciples his “tips for the road” and sends them out. And they come back filled with joy saying, Jesus! You were right! In your name even the demons submit to us!”

And Jesus says, “Right??” I’ve seen all this happen and I’ve given you this authority and it will keep you safe.

“Nevertheless, do not rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”

How do we make sense of that? David Lose, writing in “Feasting on the Word” says:

“Jesus declares there is something even more significant than the triumph of the 70… what matters more than the earthly and spiritual successes of Jesus’ followers is the eternal relationship with God they enjoy through him. This relationship is theirs by grace, for they are simultaneously recipients of, and heralds to, the grace and mercy of God embodied in Jesus.”

Jesus knew they were going to have success in the towns and places he sent them. He wanted them to experience that and that was exactly what they needed. And it’s exactly what we need from time to time.

But not all days are going to be like that and not all our encounters with people are going to be infused with love and leave us feeling love. What’s more important than the success of our ministries or our evangelism, is our relationship with God, which we experience through Jesus.

This relationship is theirs, and ours, by grace. And I love this: we are simultaneously RECIPIENTS OF, and HERALDS TO the grace and mercy of God embodied in Jesus.

Let’s go back to our morning coffee revelation, the one we experience by ourselves. There we have the realization: we are the recipients of God’s grace and love. Let’s think of it as light in a frequently dark world.

If we keep that light to ourselves, it doesn’t do much to spread the light that the world needs to get out of the darkness. So we take that light and we become heralds TO it, this grace and love that we are shown in Jesus.

Jesus sends the 70 disciples, and us, out with this light. He sends us out to others, in humility and vulnerability, asking us to be dependent on him and on those who we encounter.

But don’t lose focus. There will be great days. There will be crappy days. There will be in-between days. And sometimes all three in one day.

We can’t control those things. What we can do is rejoice and be grateful for our relationship with God. That we get to do this work, that we get to experience and share this light, this grace; that God is with us, and that this good news, this gospel of love that we share, is exactly what the world needs right now.

The 2025 Christ Church Easton/Diocese of Easton Mission Team in Wilmington, NC.

Let’s pray: Lord, you give us stories in Scripture for our learning, so that we can find you and find ourselves in them. Help us hear what your story is saying to each of our hearts. Let us locate where you are calling us, and how to amend our lives by your love and grace, so we can get there. And help us receive, experience, and share your gospel, your good news, in the world, with each other.

Amen.

Why Ascend? And then what?

Context: The first Sunday in June was a preaching weekend for me at Christ Church Easton. We celebrated and talked about Jesus’s Ascension into heaven, marking the end of the Easter season, moving the church calendar to Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit. This is the text of the sermon I gave.

Why Ascend? And then what?

A couple years ago, I saw a comic strip about Jesus’s Ascension that sticks with me.

It’s Jesus and three disciples standing around. Jesus says, “Gotta go guys. Don’t forget what I taught you.” And then it shows Jesus’s feet as he ascends out off the page and the disciples say, “Bye, boss.”

They are standing around together and one asks, “So what have we learned?”

“Pretty much it’s love God and love your neighbor.”

“Well, that seems pretty simple, I don’t see how we can mess this…”

It shows a group is coming over the hill in their vestments and robes, with their hats and staffs, books, and scrolls. And the disciple says, “Uh-oh… Here come the theologians.”

And it sticks with me both because it strikes me as funny and that it’s on to something.

Jesus didn’t come to confuse us or complicate us. He came to set things right, so that we could get off the hamster wheel of sin and that instead we might have life in all its abundance.

We don’t have these stories and teachings in Scripture to vex us, but to help us.

In today’s reading, as he is about to leave the disciples, Jesus says:

“These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you– that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled… Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.”

Jesus has done what he came to do. The Word became flesh, lived among us, taught us, performed signs, died for us, conquered death, came back and showed us and told us all about it. As he is leaving, he is connecting all the dots and making sure the disciples get it.

He’s not giving them new information or teaching, he’s just recapping, reminding them. This is all part of the plan.

Jesus has to go so that he can send the Holy Spirit to do things that he couldn’t do in his bodily form. He could only be in one place at a time. There is more to do.

Jesus becoming incarnate: good news.
Jesus dying for us: tragic and horrible, but still part of the good news.
Jesus overcoming death: good news.
Jesus ascending and sending the Holy Spirit: all part of the same good news.

We talked a bit last week on Zoom and at the Healing Service about how things are going in the world with the Holy Spirit and the church and whether we might not prefer to have Jesus back in the flesh. Sometimes it might be nice to be able to ask Jesus something directly and have him settle the debate right then and there.

Two things come to mind with that: Jesus has already given us everything we need, to know what he would do, how he would answer questions, what we are supposed to do. Those answers aren’t going to change.

The fact that we, as people, aren’t loving God and loving our neighbor, the fact that we aren’t loving each other as Jesus loved us, isn’t because we don’t understand or we don’t know how.

It’s because we don’t want to.

It’s because it’s hard. It’s because it costs us—we have to sacrifice in order to do it. It’s because while we are living in the ways of the world, it’s not popular—people might think we’re weird or soft or whatever word you want to use.

There are stories that have been written that suppose that Jesus comes back just as he was before, preaching the same love, doing the same good works, and what ends up happening is that either the church or the government kills him because his message is a threat to their power.

Does that sound familiar? We just read that story a month or so ago.

Our world hasn’t changed so much since then. But it’s supposed to. And that’s up to us.

Jesus ascended into heaven because his work was done, and he was giving the ball back to his followers to move things forward.

I’ve shown you everything. Now it’s your turn.

The Ascension of Jesus Christ, gold mosaic; in Neamt Monastery, Rom.

If we look at the disciples during the two or three years Jesus was with them, Jesus did all the work. He was teaching them and showing them what to do, but they depended on him to do everything.

Here is what the SALT Project says about Jesus having to go away in their commentary:

“The fact that Jesus departs at all is worthy of reflection. Many founders of movements — or companies or political parties — stay around as long as they can (often staying too long!), and according to the Gospels, the risen Jesus is presumably impervious to death, and so could have remained indefinitely. From this angle, the fact that he leaves reveals what sort of movement he has in mind: a community not standing around admiring him (“Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?—as we heard in Acts), but rather active and present in the world, carrying on his work of kindness, justice, humility, and proclaiming the dawn of God’s joyous Jubilee. In the end, the Ascension itself is meant to invite and empower the church to be all the more down-to-earth. Into the world, for the love of the world!

For Jesus, it wasn’t about his ego, his pride, or any accolades. He leaves so that even more amazing things can happen with the Holy Spirit dwelling with and within us.

This is what spiritual maturity asks of us and looks like. Peter and the other apostles do not look and sound the same in the Book of Acts as they sound in the gospels. They carry on. They put in the work. They wait for the Holy Spirit, just as Jesus told them to. And after Pentecost, they are lit on fire with the Spirit and the early church is born.

The apostles accept that they are Jesus’s “witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

There are no “thoughts and prayers” in the apostles action plan, their response to Jesus, as ours is in our Baptismal Covenant, was:

“We will, with God’s help.”

As we remember and celebrate Jesus’s Ascension; as we look to Pentecost next week and the coming of the Holy Spirit; and as we move into Ordinary Time, the Season After Pentecost—it’s the same Holy Spirit with and within us now as came to Peter and the apostles. It’s the same Holy Spirit that has inspired and guided the community of saints over the ages. It’s the same Holy Spirit that has used ordinary people and their ordinary lives to do extraordinary things for God’s kingdom.

The church has moved in fits and starts and stalls and sputters over the last couple thousand years. There have been miracles and signs and there have been tragedies and disgrace. When the church falls away from the Holy Spirit and from Jesus, it loses its way.

It’s during those times that we need to regroup, refocus, remember who we are and WHOSE we are and allow the Spirit to move through us to be the body of Christ, the church, Jesus’s hands and feet and love in the world.

This is our time. We can’t look around and expect someone else to do it. WE are why Jesus came. WE are why Jesus died. WE are why Jesus overcame death. And WE are why Jesus ascended and gave the world the gift of the Holy Spirit.

What will we do with it? What does it look like to have the Spirit in us?

Here is the SALT Project:

(changed to present tense)

“It looks like Jesus, and at the same time, it looks like us — that is, it looks like us being true to ourselves, the people God made us to be. In a word, it looks like love: incarnate, tangible, down-to-earth love. And from another angle, it looks like peace: not just any peace, but what Jesus calls “my peace,” the shalom of God, a buzzing, blooming, fruitful community, coming and going, alive with the Spirit, healthy and whole.”

We look to the characters in the Bible for our answers, as if their lives were more spiritually significant than ours. Here’s the thing:

When they were living out all these experiences, their stories hadn’t been written down. They were figuring it out, reading the stories they had, just like we are.

We have Scripture for our learning, so that we can continue these stories, live spiritually significant lives, be a part of God’s love story in its unfolding.

We have a chance to write the next chapters—to inspire, connect, and allow God to use us just as he used the first apostles. That’s what “apostolic” is all about—being sent out.

Jesus wants our stories and our time to matter just as much as the apostles in Acts. We have same Holy Spirit and we are proclaiming the same good news.

WE can be that community. That’s who we are called to be. It’s who we were made to be.

Will we? Our best answer:

We will, with God’s help.

Coming Down the Mountain

Background: March 1-2 was a preaching weekend for me and the lectionary reading was Luke 9:28-43a, Jesus’s Transfiguration on the mountaintop. The following is the text of my sermon given at Christ Church Easton.

“Coming Down the Mountain (We’re Not Finished Yet)”

This is our last reading before Lent; our last reading for the Season After Epiphany, and it really bookends how we started the season, with the magi searching for and acknowledging Jesus. The transfiguration on the mountaintop is the vision, the revelation to Jesus’s closest friends as to his true identity as the Messiah.

Let’s get ourselves into the scene a bit. Since our last couple readings out of Luke’s Gospel, Jesus has healed people, cast out demons, taught and told parables, calmed a storm, and brought back a girl thought to be dead.

He has called the Twelve together, given them power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases and sent them out to proclaim the Kingdom of God and to heal the sick. And they have gone out and done just as Jesus commanded. They came back to together and were excitedly telling Jesus about all they had done. As they were telling these stories, crowds gathered around Jesus and he welcomed them, taught them, healed them, and then working with the disciples and just a little bit of food, Jesus feeds 5,000 people.

Jesus then goes off by himself to pray, with only the disciples nearby and he asked them, “Who do the crowds say that I am?” And then he asks the disciples straight up, “Who do you say that I am?” And Peter says, “The Messiah of God.”

Hearing Peter’s answer, Jesus says don’t tell anyone. “The Son of Man must undergo great suffering and be rejected and killed and on the third day be raised.” He gives them some more mind-blowing, scandalous sounding teaching, which they can’t possibly make sense of, and then eight days later, Luke tells us, Jesus takes his closest friends, Peter, James, and John, and they go up the mountain to pray.

While Jesus is praying, his three friends have the ultimate epiphany. This isn’t just Peter saying “You are the Messiah,”—this is Jesus with his face changing and his clothes becoming as bright as lightning; Moses and Elijah appearing and talking to Jesus. There is a big difference between saying something and seeing it in miraculous form in front of you.

Peter, James, and John are weighed down with sleep, not sure if this is a dream or really happening. And Peter gives the line that we can all relate to, “Master, it’s good for us to be here; let’s set up three tents.”

A cloud overcomes them and out of the cloud they hear God’s voice saying, “This is my Son, my Chosen, listen to him!”

I feel Peter here. Let’s stay in this moment. What else do we need. We’ve got the law, the prophets, and the Messiah, everything has been revealed, what else can there be? This is the ultimate!

Mountaintop moments. Have you ever had moments like that, where everything makes sense, everything is lined up, all the most amazing feelings—awe and wonder so much that you can barely contain it.

We’ve seen Holy Spirit moments at Alpha Retreats we’ve taken into the hills of the Claggett Center outside DC. Joy, laughter, the good kind of tears overflowing, a sense of community and connection to where no one wants to leave and go back home. We all wanted to stop time and stay in those mountaintop moments.


Wow, do we need those moments. We need those moments, those epiphanies, where we feel connected to God, where our doubts are erased, where darkness and pain are left behind and God’s love in the person of Jesus is as bright as lightning.

But we can’t stay there yet. Just as Jesus had been talking to Moses and Elijah, he had work to do—his exodus, which would be achieved in Jerusalem—was still ahead of him.

It’s back down the mountain. We’re not finished yet.

And no time is wasted, the very next day, a big crowd meets Jesus. A man shouts, “Teacher, I beg you to look at my son. Suddenly a spirit seizes him and all at once he shrieks. It convulses him until he foams at the mouth. It mauls him and will scarcely leave him.”

In all the synoptic accounts of the Transfiguration—in Matthew, Mark, and Luke—coming down the mountain is each time followed by the encounter with the father and his child who is seized by demons. In Matthew’s account, the father says instead, “Lord, have mercy on my son, for he has epilepsy and suffers terribly.”

As the father of a daughter with epilepsy, who has seizures, I can tell you exactly what that looks like and how helpless you feel. Something happens to her and it’s not her there in front of me for a while. I don’t mind calling it seized by a demon, though we have a better understanding of it now.

The father tells Jesus that he brought his son to the disciples and they couldn’t cure him. Jesus gets miffed and says, “Bring him here to me,” and he casts the demon out, cures the boy, and gives him back to his father.

It’s interesting to think about: the disciples, who had been sent out to proclaim the kingdom and heal the sick, but couldn’t help the boy—they didn’t go up the mountain with Jesus. They weren’t there for his transfiguration and to hear God confirm his identity. They weren’t there for the mountaintop experience.

Something happened up there that came back down the mountain with Jesus and his three friends. This is how former Episcopal Bishop of Alaska, Steven Charleston puts it:

“The Spirit’s vision always takes us down from the mountaintop and out into the world. Our personal relationship with the Spirit opens us up to engage with others. In doing that, we begin with the one thing we all share in common: HOPE. Hope is the catalyst, the tipping point where what we believe becomes what we do.”


They came down the mountain with hope. And when we have our mountaintop experiences, our moments of certainty, our epiphanies—they give us hope that we can hold onto. Hope that lasts through the valleys, through the dark stretches we go through.

Jesus comes back down the mountain because he isn’t finished—there is work to be done. He gives us hope and the Holy Spirit because we are PART of that work. The hope we feel in our hearts is part of the way that His hope gets spread out into the world.

I wish with everything that life were all mountaintop moments. That we could dwell in them, build our tents with Peter and stretch them out. But the Kingdom isn’t the Kingdom until everyone is in it, until it fills the hearts of the poor, the sick, the confused, the outcast. All of us.

Jesus isn’t finished. And so neither are we. We come back down the mountain because the world needs that hope, that epiphany, that encouragement.

We can make the hope of the mountaintop our home on the ground.

Steven Charleston continues:

“When we claim hope for our home—when we make it the guiding energy of our faith—we transition from being scattered individuals who wish things would get better into being active partners with the Spirit, reshaping the balance of life toward mercy, justice, and peace. Hope becomes our goal. Once that hope has been released in the human heart, it cannot be forced back into the darkness. It is spiritually incandescent. The faith which we see penetrates the shadows around us like a searchlight seeking the future. Hope becomes a force that will not be denied.”

Incandescent. Like a searchlight. In the Old Testament reading, Moses came down the mountain with his skin shining because he had been talking to God. With Jesus it was more than that: Jesus’s face BECAME light. He was and is the light.

When we open ourselves to the Spirit, we allow that same light to shine in us. We can take that light into the world. What a privilege, what an opportunity, and what a challenge when life feels dark.

How do we keep in touch with the light? How can we find it when it seems distant?

We remember. Remember those mountaintop moments. Keep them in your heart.

We pray. We get vulnerable with God and open ourselves so that we can be filled with God’s love and light.

We share our stories, we share our hope, we come together in community.

My story as a father doesn’t have the healing in it that the father in today’s reading has. Yet. The demon of epilepsy is still in my daughter, and it breaks my heart at times.

But I’ve been on the mountaintop. I’ve seen and known that light, that incandescence, bright as lightning. I have hope and the Spirit.

And Jesus is coming down the mountain. He’s not finished yet. And neither are we.

08/06/15 was the date of Ava’s first seizure and the beginning of our lives with epilepsy. She hopes to get a second tattoo of the date where she knows it is behind her.

Living with Mercy and Grace

Background: The lectionary readings for Sunday, February 23 include Genesis 45:3-11, 15, where Joseph is merciful to his brothers who threw him into a pit and sold him into slavery, and Luke 6:27-38, where Jesus tells his disciples to love your enemies, as part of his Sermon on the Plain. This is a quick homily I gave at the Wednesday Healing Service at Christ Church Easton, as these are both readings I think we need to discuss more.

“Living with Mercy and Grace“

Jesus’s teaching today is a continuation of the “Blessings and Woes” or Beatitudes that Patrick talked about last week. Let’s remember that Luke’s version of the Beatitudes is different than the one we find in Matthew’s Gospel, both in nuanced ways and in that Matthew shows Jesus going up a mountain to teach, whereas Luke has Jesus going down to a level place. Matthew’s version is often referred to as the Sermon on the Mount; this speech in Luke is often called the Sermon on the Plain. That’s an intentional setting for Luke, who shows Jesus among the people, not above them, lifting up the poor, and being visited by shepherds, not wise men.

After Jesus has bowled the disciples over by calling the poor, the hungry, and those who weep “blessed,” now he’s gone totally off his rocker telling them to love their enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who abuse you.

If we think Jesus is just speaking theoretically, no, he gives examples: if someone hits you on the cheek, give them the other one too; if someone takes your coat, give them your shirt as well; give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes your stuff, don’t ask for it back.

Then Jesus drops a version of what we call the Golden Rule: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.”

How do you want to be treated? With love? With kindness? Then treat people that way. That’s a teaching we can get behind. We get something out of that, we think about how we want to be treated, which of course is to be treated well.

What about mercy? Hhhmmm… there is something to that. If only we had a case study, an example, something from the Old Testament maybe, to refer to…

Oh wait, we’ve got Joseph and his brothers from our Genesis reading. Joseph’s story is well known, even turned into a musical. Joseph was a dreamer and favored by his father; his brothers were jealous, decided to kill him, thought better of it, threw him into a pit; then got the bright idea to sell him into slavery; they took his robe or coat and put blood all over it and took it to their father, who assumed Joseph had been killed by wild animals.

From being a slave, Joseph works his way up to becoming the Pharoah’s top advisor in Egypt. He is able to see the tough times coming, store up food in times of famine; and in our reading today, his brothers come before him, in need. Joseph has all the power and can do with them whatever he wants. How many Hollywood movies would have this scene being sweet revenge, just retribution. But it’s not.

Joseph is merciful. And then some. The brothers don’t ask for forgiveness, they don’t fall down at his feet. It’s Joseph who initiates it:

“I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And now do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life… God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors”… And he kissed all his brothers and wept upon them.”

It’s okay. You didn’t know what you were doing. But God did. This is where I was supposed to end up, so I could save us. It had nothing to do with how his brothers acted; it had everything to do with who Joseph was and how he acted.

Joseph was merciful. Even when he had every right to get back at them. And he showed mercy in a way that let his brothers save face.

Fr. Richard Rohr from the Center for Action and Contemplation website.

Franciscan and best-selling author Richard Rohr in talking about today’s Gospel reading gives us a thought that connects both readings. He says that Jesus doesn’t forgive in a way that makes him look good and sinners look bad. Jesus doesn’t say look how great I am and how sinful you are.

Rohr writes:

“Forgiveness is loyalty to the truth of who you are. To forgive someone is to recognize who they are, to admit and affirm who they are, and to know that their best selves will be brought out only in the presence of an accepting and believing person. Forgiveness is basically the act of believing in another person and not allowing that person to be destroyed by self-hatred. Forgiveness involves helping people uncover their self-worth, which is usually crusted over by their own self-hatred.

“This is a way of forgiving people that does not make you look goodbut makes them look good. That’s the way God forgives us. In the act of forgiveness, God gives us back our dignity and self-worth. God is loyal to the truth of who we are. God affirms that we are good persons who have sinned. God asserts that we aren’t bad.”

Joseph doesn’t wait for his brothers to grovel and plead. He jumps right out and says, don’t be angry with yourselves. This isn’t your fault. God needed me here to help.

Let’s move back to the Gospel. Jesus says, loving people that already love you? You want credit for that? Doing good to those who do good to you? Giving to those who you expect to get something back from? That’s not love, it’s business. We’ve got plenty of that going around.

“But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”

Jesus is a teacher whose actions back up his words. If the disciples, or if we think, yeah Jesus, that sounds great and all, but mercy isn’t how the world works. Jesus’s response, with his life, is to show mercy and to love those he encounters, to walk himself straight to Jerusalem, into the hands of those who will persecute and execute him and as he is dying on the cross, being mocked by the thieves on either side of him, as Luke tells it, one thief wises up and says, “Jesus remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

And Jesus replies, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

Mercy. Forgiveness. Right up to his death. And in his Resurrection, does Jesus ask for retribution? Does God want justice? No. Again, and again, and again, God shows mercy. Jesus forgives.

And it’s love that wins.

This is from The SALT Project’s weekly commentary, which brings it together beautifully:

“And what do we call this kind of love, this completely free, above-and-beyond, gratuitous giving? We call it “grace.” We may think of grace primarily as the unmerited, saving love of God — and well we should, Jesus says, for God “is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.” But at the same time, this is exactly the love Jesus calls us to live out, not as gods or angels but as “children of the Most High,” human beings created in God’s image: “Be merciful, just as God is merciful” When we love this way, we embody the imago Dei (the image of God). This is the love we were made for.”

Helped Are the Lonely

Background: This month at Christ Church Easton, we are offering Blue December services on Wednesday evenings leading up to Christmas. These services recognize that people have a difficult time leading up to Christmas for any number of reasons–loneliness, grief, depression, anxiety, or just feeling out of step and out of place in a commercially-consumed culture. These services include lighting of candles, prayers, quiet music and singing, Scripture readings and reflections, some silence, Communion with previously sanctified elements (often called a Deacon’s Mass), and they are for are for anyone going through something this time of year who might want to come together for a quiet worship service in the evening in the middle of the week, and have some fellowship and discussion after. Our hope is that people will feel God’s presence and love and experience the company, care, and fellowship of other people.

The Gospel reading for the service on December 4 was Matthew 5:1-12, often called the Beatitudes from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount.

“Helped Are the Lonely”

The cards are stacked against us if we are going through a hard time in December. It’s getting colder, it’s basically dark after lunch, Christmas movies and music are streaming 24-7, and we feel like we are supposed to act like we are happy, even when we are the farthest thing from it.

States of being that include loneliness, grief, depression, and anxiety are all connected, we can move back and forth between them. And I say states of being because these aren’t things we can just change our mind about and decide, “I am not going to be lonely or sad,” “I am not going to grieve anymore,” or “I am tired of being depressed.”

But we can reach out. We can show up. We can give ourselves permission, allow ourselves to be low or hurting, or questioning. It may be counter to what we see when we look around this time of year, but it’s honest. Let’s start where we actually are.

How’s it going? Fine. How are you doing? Good. Granted, when someone asks us that when we run into them at the grocery store, that may not be the time and place to bare our souls. But we need to have some place we can do that.

Different people have different ways of coping with life. I don’t know where I would be without distance running and reading, two things that have helped me keep going through some of my darkest times. Reading, in part, because I find people who are describing the same thing I am feeling—someone who helps me give words to something I feel but can’t describe.

There is a poet named David Whyte. In his book “Consolations,” he talks about loneliness.

“Loneliness can be a prison, a place from which we look out at a world we cannot inhabit; loneliness can be a bodily ache and a penance, but loneliness fully inhabited also becomes a voice that asks and calls for that great unknown someone or something we want to call our own.”

One of the questions that led me to searching and to the journey I am on now was wondering in my bones and in my soul, “am I really and ultimately alone—are we only ever truly alone in the Universe?” It’s a question I came back to often enough, and one of the times that it had legs and kicked me in the gut was when my marriage was ending. I knew that even together, I felt alone, I knew that even among friends, I felt alone, like no one was out there, or really understood who I was.

But I wanted there to be. The fact that I didn’t want to be and feel alone, sent me both inside myself and out into the world.

This is David Whyte again:

“Loneliness is the very state that births the courage to continue calling, and when fully lived can undergo its own beautiful reversal.

“Loneliness is the place from which we pay real attention to voices other than our own; being alone allows us to find the healing power.”


Lonely human beings are lonely because we are made to belong. Feeling alone is hard because we aren’t made to be alone. As many times as I feel like living as a hermit would be a lifestyle-change I would embrace—even for an introvert, there are times I need connection.

In one of the most counter-intuitive sermons in the Bible, Jesus says that these low times we experience have a purpose. We call this section of Matthew’s Gospel, the Beatitudes, for its use of the word “blessed.” This is one of the key parts of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. He tells us:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit,
“Blessed are those who mourn,
“Blessed are the meek,
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness…”

Ummm… Jesus, what are you talking about? I’ve felt those things, and no offense, but I’d like to be done with all that.

In her book, “Into the Mess & Other Jesus Stories,” Debie Thomas writes:

“What Jesus bears witness to in the Beatitudes is God’s unwavering proximity to pain, suffering, sorrow, and loss. God is nearest to those who are lowly, oppressed, unwanted, and broken. God isn’t obsessed with the shiny and the impressive. God is too busy sticking close to what’s messy, chaotic, and unruly.”

What our faith tells us, what Jesus showed again and again with his teaching, his healing, his life, is that it was the outcast, the low, the hurting, the people no one wanted to think about or deal with, who were his people.

Self-reliance and independence are very American values. I can take care of myself, I got this, I don’t need anyone’s help. Those ideas are NOT Christian values. They are not love-centered values.

One of the biggest Christian values we hold is surrendering. Realizing that we don’t control the Universe; that there are so many things in our own lives that we don’t have control of and that we are helped when we surrender our need to be in control to a higher power, to God.

It often happens that we don’t experience a need for God, a need to accept that we aren’t always in control, until things start to fall apart.

And it’s those times that God is closest to us. It’s those times when what we’ve been fed by society—that if we have the right house, the right family, the right job, the right car—then we ‘ll be happy. When that turns out not to give us what we are looking for, or pursuing those things stops making sense, and we are looking for something more substantial, then we are open to another way of thinking about life.

One of the most useful things I’ve run into in thinking about the Beatitudes is the novelist Alice Walker, who wrote “The Color Purple,” in coming up with a similar list for a character of hers, changed the word “blessed” to “helped.” Listen to Jesus’s teaching like this:

“Helped are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Helped are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
“Helped are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
“Helped are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
“Helped are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
“Helped are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
“Helped are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”

The world wants us to be hard, tough, to put our heads down and be productive. To be good, to be fine, to be surface level.

Jesus wants us to have soft hearts. To go deep. To care for one another, to help one another, to love one another. Our ability to do these things is part of what constitutes the Kingdom of Heaven.

We are not meant to go through life alone. We need each other. We need to be there for each other.

To have soft hearts, to be able to be there for someone, we are helped by knowing what they are going through.

Brene Brown describes herself as a storyteller and social worker. This is how she talks about empathy:

“Empathy is feeling WITH people. I always think of empathy as this kind of sacred space. When someone’s in a deep hole and they shout from the bottom and they say “I’m stuck. It’s dark. I’m overwhelmed.” and we look and we say “Hey” and climb down and say “I know what it’s like down here, and you’re not alone… Empathy is a choice and it’s a vulnerable choice. In order to connect with you, I have to connect with something in myself that knows that feeling.”

Helped are the lonely.

Helped are those who struggle.

Helped are those who feel lost.

Because they are closer to God. And God can help.

And we can help each other.