The Cost of Authenticity

Providence is experiencing a deep winter storm of snow and ice, and the resulting parking ban has simply confirmed the wisdom of cancelling church services. This sermon is by way of a reflection on the gospel for Epiphany 3 from Matthew chapter 4 on one of the key characteristics of discipleship – the cost of authenticity. The tone of the audio is more fireside chat than proclamation.

Sometimes discipleship is not hearing a new call
so much as realizing that a familiar and faithful way of life
is being gently loosened from our grasp.

Most of us live with the quiet assumption that if God is going to call us,
it will be obvious. Clear. Undeniable.

We imagine a clarion call.

And so, when we sense even the faintest possibility
that something might be shifting, we mutter—often without realizing it—
not yet.

Most of the time our antennae are finely tuned
to filter that possibility out. Familiarity comforts us.
Routine reassures us. They insulate us from disturbances
that might decenter us.

We are often listening for a call, but we are listening for it
to arrive on our terms.

And of course, it rarely does.

When a familiar and faithful life begins to leave us less satisfied,
when we sense—sometimes reluctantly— that something needs to change,
what often happens first is not clarity, but loosening.

Our accustomed ways of thinking about ourselves,
our settled sense of who we are,
begin—almost imperceptibly—
to slip from our grip.

Even when the light ahead feels real,
we often become alarmed
as the ground beneath us begins to shift.

We say to God:
If the light ahead is real,
then surely you can explain it to us.

We ask for a blueprint.
Presented for our pre-approval.

But even as the way forward remains unclear,
the ground beneath us continues to move—
heedless of our need for certainty.

Discipleship often asks us
to step away from what has been faithful,
fruitful, and trustworthy, before we can yet see
what will take its place.

Not all calls offer clarity at the outset.

For many of us,
facing a call only dimly perceived
fills us with anxiety.
With restlessness.
With agitation.

And that restlessness—
that refusal to let us remain where we are—
has a long spiritual pedigree.

St Augustine gave it words centuries ago:
“O Lord, our hearts are restless
until they find their rest in thee.”

That restlessness is not the enemy of faith.
It is often the sign that faith is being invited
to grow into a new form.

When we turn to Matthew’s Gospel,
this is not always easy to see.

I have often struggled with Matthew’s lofty, elevated portrayal of Jesus.
Matthew’s Jesus can feel remote—hovering above the human fray,
secure in his identity, untroubled by uncertainty.

Matthew gives us a Jesus shaped deliberately in the image of Moses:
authoritative, commanding, decisive.

And because of that, we can read Matthew’s account
of the call of the first disciples as a story from a different world—
a time when people were apparently capable of instant, unquestioning obedience
in a way that seems unavailable to us now.

But sometimes a familiar text changes because we have changed.

Sometimes scripture becomes newly audible
not because the words are different,
but because our lives are.

When Jesus hears that John the Baptist has been arrested,
Matthew tells us, he withdraws to Galilee,
leaving Nazareth, and making his home in Capernaum,
by the Sea of Galilee.

Matthew offers no commentary.
No emotional description.
No interior reflection.

And yet, for the first time, that single sentence stops me short.

Jesus leaves Nazareth.

He leaves his family networks.
He leaves the rhythms of village life.
He leaves behind the identity of the carpenter’s son—
a life that had made sense up until now.

And suddenly, I see this moment for what it is:
a threshold.

A quiet one.
But a costly one.

Before Jesus calls anyone else to leave their nets,
he himself leaves what has been home.

Matthew may not tell us how Jesus felt,
but he shows us the price that must be paid
before discipleship can even begin.

I find myself imagining the scene.

The packing of a few possessions.
The unspoken grief of departure.
The vulnerability of beginning again
in an unfamiliar place.

Capernaum was not a retreat.
It was a border town.
An ethnic and cultural crossroads.
An economic hub marked by opportunity
and deep precarity.

Matthew underscores this by reaching back to Isaiah:
“Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali…
Galilee of the Gentiles… the people who sat in darkness
have seen a great light.”

Yes, this is mission geography.
But it is also inner geography.

Capernaum is the kind of place you go
when you are no longer who you were,
but are not yet who you will be.

Jesus’ move is not only strategic.
It is formative.

It is there—in that unsettled, liminal space—
that his authority takes shape.

And then, walking by the sea, Jesus sees two brothers fishing
and says simply: “Follow me.”

Matthew tells us they follow him immediately.

No deliberation.
No negotiation.
No farewell speeches.

For generations, this has sounded almost magical.

But perhaps it is not magic at all.

These fishermen already lived with risk.
They already knew instability.
They already sensed the limits
of their current lives.

They were poised.

And the power of Jesus’ invitation lies not only in his words,
but in the life he is already living.

Jesus does not appear as a settled authority figure
asking others to risk what he himself will not.

He appears as someone who has already crossed a line.

Discipleship recognizes authenticity instinctively.

Simon and Andrew follow him not because he is powerful,
but because he is already living the question they have not yet dared to ask.

In our Episcopal Church culture, discipleship is a word we use often
and understand poorly.

We tend to imagine discipleship as familiarity without transformation.
As membership.
As volunteerism.
As being good people doing what good people do.

But Matthew will not let us rest there.

The call to discipleship involves decentering.
Disruption.
Relocation—if not always geographic,
then interior.

It asks us to risk uncertainty in order to discover
a deeper, truer form of life.

And so we come back
to where we began.

Sometimes discipleship is not hearing a new call
so much as realizing that a familiar and faithful way of life—
the habitual way we think about ourselves
and experience the world— is being gently loosened from our grasp.

Discipleship is not adding Jesus to an otherwise stable life.

It is allowing our encounter with Jesus to unsettle us just enough
that the possibility of a new kind of life might begin to take shape within us.

The dawning of the light is a principal theme of Epiphany. Discipleship is how the light breaks through.

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A Challenging Invitation

There is much that is confusing in John’s Gospel. In his opening chapter, John the Evangelist focuses on John, elsewhere known as the Baptist, as a witness to the messiah. But there’s also another John lurking in the background – John the Beloved Disciple of Jesus, whom Tradition has associated with John the Evangelist. Despite the Tradition, it’s clear that John the Evangelist is not John the Beloved Disciple. The Evangelist is writing in the 120’s, a period beyond the normal lifespan of the Beloved Disciple. So, John the Evangelist is someone who stands in the tradition of the Beloved Disciple, who, as a young man, probably knew him personally.

John’s gospel opens on the majestic panorama painted in the Prologue before plunging us into the opening moments in Jesus’ earthly ministry. The evangelist known as John fills this opening chapter and the whole of his gospel with word allusions and metaphors indicating the mysterious connections between Jesus and the fulfilment of Old Testament expectations of the Messiah.

We can tie ourselves in knots trying to decipher what these allusions and metaphors meant to the Evangelist John and his community. But so much of John remains mysterious.

For instance, John uses the metaphor of the Lamb of God. Taken in the context and period in which he is writing, this is a peculiar metaphor for Jesus. The practice of Temple animal sacrifice is, by this time, but a distant memory. Yet John’s metaphors are arresting, and in chapter one we have two on display – Lamb of God and God the Son – titles for Jesus that deeply resonated as they eventually entered the mainstream of orthodox Christology, i.e., the branch of theology that relates to the identity and nature of Jesus. Seeing as believing is the major theme in John’s gospel. First-hand seeing is not necessary, believing through hearsay, i.e., the words of another, is enough.

Chapter one is a story set over three days. On day one, the Jewish elders come to interrogate John (the Baptist), during which he identifies Jesus as the messiah because of what he has seen and can bear witness to. Day two, John’s out and about with two of his disciples – one of whom is Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter. When Jesus walks by, and John points him out as the Lamb of God, curiosity gets the better of Andrew and his unnamed companion, who follow Jesus, asking him where he is staying. Jesus replies come and see. 

Andrew then recruits his brother, Simon. In the section following this passage on the next day, day three, Jesus journeys to Galilee, where he encounters Philip, who then recruits his friend, Nathaniel (Bartholomew), and tells him he has seen the messiah.

John is showing his readers how discipleship happens and how it works. One person’s curiosity discovers Jesus. This discovery is then shared with a friend and they both begin to follow Jesus.

Jesus and his new disciples are now in position on day three for the first of John’s great signs – the wedding at Cana of Galilee, opening chapter two. John is not telling his readers about the call of the first disciples as much as he is showing them how discipleship works. First – we notice, then – we become curious, leading us to ask – then we have the opportunity to respond or not, to Jesus’ invitation to come and see. We then tell our friends what we’ve found and invite them to join us.

John’s Gospel is a gospel for our own age precisely because John the Evangelist addresses a mixed community in tension, a ragbag of different constituencies.

  1. There are the former disciples of John the Baptist, hence the Evangelist’s emphasis on the initial role of John (the Baptist) in the first chapter.
  2. There is a strong contingent of Samaritans, as evidenced by the story in chapter four, where the Samaritan woman he encounters at the well is the first to recognize Jesus’ true identity.
  3. There are gentile spiritual seekers. Later, in 12:21, we read that some Greeks come and ask Philip: please sir, we want to see Jesus.
  4. There are Jews who have openly split with the synagogue.
  5. There are Jews who still faithfully attend the synagogue but also secretly hang out with John’s ragbag Christian community on Sundays.

John’s task is to speak to the inner tensions in a community composed of factions, each with its own slightly different history and take on Jesus, all seeking to hold together amid the backdrop of unremitting hostility from the Jewish authorities, as represented by the emergence of rabbinic Judaism. This unremitting hostility from the newly emerging rabbinic movement is why John appears to us to project hostility back to those he continually refers to as the Jews.

John’s ragbag community manages to hold together during his lifetime. But after his death, another John, John of Patmos, writer of the epistles of John, bears witness to the internal tensions and eventual breakup of the Johannine Community in the middle decades of the 2nd century. Members of the Johannine community, known to us as the Gnostics, easily challenged the cohesion of a community with no recognized leader.  

The Johannie community had a flat hierarchy. It seems to have no recognized leaders apart from the guidance of the Evangelist, who lived on in his gospel. For instance, John never mentions the teaching authority of the apostles as the community leaders so evident elsewhere in the New Testament. Everyone is simply a disciple. All disciples are equal, sitting under the tutelage of the Holy Spirit. There are no sacraments, no doctrine, only the willingness to be led by the Holy Spirit on the way of love.

Jesus’ invitation is to come and see. But see what? Come and see a community characterized by the love its members have for one another. Now there’s a rare and seemingly unworkable thing!

A community known as the Beloved Community was a radical experiment based on Jesus’ Golden Rule in chapter 13:35, love one another, for by this the world will know them as his disciples. A radical and noble experiment in community, yet one predictably destined to fail.

Can we hear an echo of John’s beloved community in our Anglican, tolerant, and inclusive understanding of Christian community? Surely this is a difficult yet precious witness. Something unique to offer amidst the civic strife of 2026 in a nation torn asunder by so many bitterly held divisions.

The former Presiding Bishop, The Most Rev. Michael Curry, exhorted us with  John’s message to invite a renewal that flows from reframing ourselves as the contemporary Jesus Movement, a modern-day Johannine community embarked on the Way of Love involving seven practices that require us to turn, pause, listen, and make a choice to follow or not to follow Jesus.

  1. Learn – through reflecting on Scripture each day, esp. on Jesus life and teachings.
  2. Pray – dwell intentionally with God daily.
  3. Worship – gather in community weekly to thank, praise and dwell with God.
  4. Bless- share our faith unselfishly – one might suggest unselfconsciously- in order to give and serve.
  5. Go- cross boundaries, listen deeply and live like Jesus.
  6. Rest -receive the gift of God’s grace, peace, and restoration.

The Way of Love is a contemporary Johannine project that flows naturally from our Anglican love for John’s Gospel. For like John’s Beloved Community, we have some experience of holding together internal tensions within a framework that cherishes right relationship over right belief. Communities that stress the right belief are vulnerable to becoming oppressive. Communities where right relationship is stressed require no agreement, only tolerant acceptance of one another’s differences negotiated by love.

Our only obligation is to come and see! The question is, are we open and willing to see what the Spirit of Jesus longs to show us?

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A Story Big Enough To Belong To

Our lives unfold inside stories.

Whether we are conscious of it or not, our experience of living in time and space is structured by the stories we tell—about ourselves, about one another, about the world, and about God. It is through story that the world takes on shape and meaning, that chaos becomes intelligible, that suffering is given context, and hope a horizon.

So the most important question we can ask about the stories we tell is not whether they are true or false, but whether they are big enough.

Are they thick stories—or thin ones?

Thin stories are easy to tell. They reduce complexity. They trade nuance for certainty. They divide the world neatly into winners and losers, insiders and outsiders, saved and lost. They are efficient. They are emotionally gripping. And for a while, they feel powerful.

But sooner or later, the threadbare nature of thin stories becomes increasingly difficult to hide. When reality refuses to fit their narrow frame, thin stories resort to fear, coercion, and eventually, violence to hold themselves together. Thin stories always need enemies.

Thick stories, by contrast, are harder to tell and slower to hear. They are woven from many strands—memory and hope, failure and grace, belonging and struggle. They leave room for contradiction and growth. They make space for human flourishing because they are large enough to hold real lives.

It is the thickness of our stories—their depth, complexity, and generosity—that determines whether we thrive.

And today, we stand inside one of the thickest stories the Christian faith knows: the baptism of Jesus. And in 2026, we inhabit this rich story surrounded by the fraying of the thinnest of national thin stories.

All four Gospels tell a story about Jesus’ origins—but they do so in strikingly different ways.

Matthew and Luke begin with birth stories. Mark begins abruptly, with no mention of an infancy at all, Jesus emerges from the long silence of childhood and adolescence and steps onto the public stage as a grown man, ready to begin the work God has given him. John reaches back even further, telling a cosmic story of pre-existence: the Word who was with God and was God from the beginning has taken flesh and blood.

Each Gospel tells the same truth—but not in the same way. Each shapes a recognizable yet distinctive identity through story. This is the variety offered by a thick story – the truth -approached from a number of different angles.

And that matters, because identity is always a moving target. We discover and rediscover who we are through the stories that are told about us—and as these stories become our own, edited and reedited to become the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and the world we inhabit.

Some identities are rooted primarily in birth. For a few—royalty, dynasties, elites—birth alone bestows belonging and meaning. But for most of us, identity is shaped less by birth than by adoption.

We become ourselves through a series of adoptions: into families, friendships, communities, vocations, causes, and commitments. Each adoption draws us more deeply into the persons we are becoming.

That is why baptism matters.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke recount Jesus’ baptism differently—and their differences reveal something essential. In Matthew’s and Luke’s birth narratives, the divine nature is conceived in human gestation. Matthew’s account is typically shorn of the human warmth of Luke, an event reserved only for the select few, whereas in Luke, Jesus’ baptism is witnessed by the crowds – a solidly communal experience. But it’s in Mark’s account that Jesus’ baptism becomes intensely personal. In Matthew and Luke, the heavens majestically part, but in Mark, they are violently torn open. In all three accounts, the Spirit descends, and the divine voice proclaims, but in Mark alone it is a voice heard only by Jesus. It’s personal, it’s particular, it’s the voice of divine adoption – still a secret only to be shared between Jesus and God.

These are not contradictions. They are complementary truths held together within a thick story. Within the complexity of this thick story, a key question remains unanswered. Is baptism a personal or a communal event? Is baptism the certificate of individual salvation —or is it the recognition of entry into the life of a community that is already saved?

The Christian tradition has never settled this question neatly, because it refuses thin answers to complex questions. What baptism does is tell us where and to whom we belong.

Jesus’ baptism echoes the first story of creation, when the Spirit of God swept over the waters and breathed life into the world. At the Jordan River, that same breath rests upon Jesus. God claims him. Names him. Delights in him.

And why the adoption strand in Mark’s account is crucial is that it shows that what God does for Jesus, God does for us.

As Jesus is baptized into a relationship of adoption, so are we.

In baptism, God adopts us—not because we have earned it, not because we understand it, but because God delights in us. Before we believe, before we choose, before we behave correctly, we are named and claimed.

Belonging precedes believing!

This is where the Christian story confronts the thin stories of our time.

Our nation is struggling—violently at times—to tell a story about who belongs. Immigration, race, power, identity, and fear have all been reduced to brittle slogans and hardened boundaries. Thin stories dominate because they promise certainty in an anxious world.

But many of us no longer recognize ourselves in these stories. We sense—often without knowing how to articulate it—that they are too small, too cruel, too narrow to hold the truth of our lives together.

What we are witnessing is not merely political conflict. It is a struggle over belonging.

Which story will tell us who we are and where we belong?

The Christian story is very thick, yet this does not mean the Church is immune to thin interpretations.

Different Christian communities tell very different stories about baptism, salvation, and belonging. Some see baptism as a personal declaration of faith—a transaction securing one’s place in heaven. Others see it as entry into a tightly bounded institution where salvation is carefully guarded.

The Anglican tradition tells yet a different story—an awkward, sometimes frustrating, but profoundly generous one.

William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, once said, “The Church is the only society that exists for those who are not its members.”

That sentence unsettles us because it resists thin boundaries. In the Episcopal Church, belonging often precedes believing. People find themselves woven into the life of the community—sometimes long before they know what they believe.

Our boundaries are intentionally fuzzy. Worship is open to all. The invitation to Communion is offered to the baptized—yet no one is turned away at the rail. To some, this seems inconsistent. But it reflects a thick story: the Church as a sign of God’s salvation already at work in the world.

Unlike other traditions, ours does not confine grace. We are content only to witness to it.

Baptism, then, is not a private spiritual insurance policy. It is entry into a community that lives for the sake of the world.

That is why the Episcopal Church places such weight on the Baptismal Covenant. Baptism is not something that happened once. It is something we relive every day.

We promise to persevere in the life of community.
To resist evil and return when we fall and to proclaim—not create but proclaim—the good news that God has already acted.
We promise to love and serve our neighbors. And to strive for justice, peace, and to fight to defend the dignity of every human being.

These promises are not abstract ideals. They are the practices of belonging.

They form us into people who can live inside thick stories—stories that do not require enemies, that do not depend on fear, that make room for difference and growth.

At Jesus’ baptism, God does not give him a task list. God gives him a name.

“You are my Son. With you I am well pleased.”

Before Jesus teaches. Before he heals. Before he suffers. Before he dies. He comes to belong.

Belonging comes first.

And that is the story we are called to live and tell—not only in church, but in a world desperate for stories big enough to hold the hope. And remember Advent’s key message about hope. That for which we hope is already present to us simply by virtue of our hoping. We are already those for whom we have been waiting. So let us stop waiting and proceed with the tasks at hand.

Amen.

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It’s the Beginning that Matters

How you begin a story matters. For example, in a time long ago, in a galaxy far, far away– but such a beginning takes us into the wrong story. Let me try again. Now, what is it? Ah – here it is – to boldly go where no one has gone before – still the wrong story. What about – once upon a time there was – no, no, no, this won’t do either.

Let’s try again.

In the beginning was the Word… and the Word was with God, the Word was God. Through the Word all things came into being …
What has come into being was life… and this life was the light of the world.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

Now that feels right.

We are fortunate that the New Testament provides more than one doorway into the mysterious story of the Incarnation, the term we use for the event in which God wishes to become recognizable in the world as a human being acting through human agency.

On Christmas Eve, we come to hear the good news of our Savior’s birth. In some churches, it will be enough to bathe worshippers in a warm bath of a manger scene nostalgia, of shepherds, angels, and, eventually, wise men. In others, however, something edgier will be offered – capable of speaking the good news of our Savior’s birth into the pain and chaos of the world in these times.

Yet, John begins: “In the beginning was the Word.”

Using the phrase “In the beginning,” John echoes the opening verses of Genesis, which, like a cinerama, opens onto a wide screen filled with a deep darkness, with the only sound – the ghostly haunting sound of the divine wind sweeping across the face of the dark.

Then, suddenly, a pinpoint of light appears.

A flicker at the heart of the darkness of the deep.
A pinpoint of light expanding at phenomenal speed -piercing the darkness—bringing order out of chaos, life out of light.

In the phrase: In the beginning… John takes us back to before Bethlehem, before shepherds, angels, and mangers; before wise men, before an infanticidal king; before flight into refugee exile.
John takes us back to the moment of the Big Bang, when all that exists emerged from within the self-contained life force we know as the Creator or the Prime Mover.

Genesis pictures the emergence of a single point of light breaking open the deep darkness. John has a word for that light. He calls it the Logos, which literally means “that which speaks forth God.”

In English, we translate logos as the Word. The Word is the communicative life of God.
The Word is God speaking into the void—speaking order, organizing structure, creating meaning. The Word is the light of divine life, shining out from the heart of the darkness.

And here John makes his crucial point: he identifies Jesus as the very Word of God, speaking forth into the darkness of the primeval void as light shining in the darkness. Of this light, John tells us the darkness is powerless to overcome.

Listen again to his opening lines:

In the beginning was the Word… and the Word was with God, the Word was God. Through the Word all things came into being …
What has come into being was life… and this life was the light of the world. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

At Creation, the Word spoke forth the light of life into a formless universe. In the Incarnation, that same Word spoke forth the divine self into a human life.
The Word became flesh and now dwells among us, full of grace and truth.

Let’s pause.
Let this settle in you.

On this Christmas Eve, we come seeking comfort and solace—a brief respite from the world’s tribulations. We find comfort in familiar memories of Christmas past. 

In 1849, the Reverend Edmund Sears, a New England Unitarian minister, wrote the poem It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.

What’s striking is that Sears doesn’t situate Christ’s birth in its ancient context of the stable scene.
He situates the birth of Jesus in the turmoil of his own day, turmoil weighing on his heart.

He pictures a moment of solemn stillness amid the world’s cacophony, as humanity strains to hear the angels’ song of peace, always at risk of being drowned out by the noise of human strife.

Speaking of the angels’ voice, Sears delivers his prophetic line:

Yet with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long;
And man, at war with man, hears not the love-song which they bring;
O hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing.

How contemporary that sounds to us.

We celebrate Christmas this year amidst rancor and bitterness here at home. All around us, the fabric of the Republic – its laws, its Constitution, its government frays under the assault of authoritarian forces.

And abroad against the backdrop of heart-rending violence in Ukraine, in the Holy Land, we behold that Bethlehem itself—once a symbol of holy joy—stands darkened in protest and grief amidst the unspeakable settler violence being unleashed against Palestinian farms and villages in the West Bank. Bethlehem is darkened in mourning for the destruction of Gaza and the dreadful plight of its people.

Sami Awad of Nonviolence International put it succinctly:

What Bethlehem offers today is not reassurance, but clarity. People here are celebrating not because the “war in Gaza” is over or we are ignoring our reality but because it is what we have left in our resilience. 

To meet the challenges and seize the opportunities in our world, we must first find the right story – with the right beginning. We must situate the birth of our Savior in the context of our present lives, as the story of the light of life penetrating the deepest reaches of the darkness that enshrouds us. So that, like the people of Bethlehem, our celebration, rather than ignoring reality, flows from the source of our resilience.

The French saying captures the irony: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
The more things change, the more they remain the same, or as ordinary Frenchmen and women today say, no matter who you vote for, the government still gets in.

So many of us feel pulled toward despair by the course of world events. And into that despair, John’s Prologue speaks the word we most need to hear.

Here is the most startling truth of Christmas that in the human life of Jesus, the divine Word, the divine light, takes flesh and blood to dwell among us, full of grace and truth.

And here is the challenge:
John tells us not whether this light is real, but whether we choose to recognize it or not.

Forget belief for a moment and focus on the exercise of choice. Do we choose to allow the light of life to shape our lives? Coming back to belief, it’s not whether this happened as described, but whether we give this story the power to remake us.

And this is what requires courage.
Courage to believe in the face of everything that whispers despair.

Many of us feel as though we’ve fallen into the primordial deep—
where the darkness is thick and the sound of hope feels faint.
In such moments, how easily we forget the central truth:

Darkness is not the enemy of the light. Darkness is the fuel the light consumes to shine even brighter.

This is the defiance of Christian hope.
No matter how dark things become…
no matter how relentless the headlines…
darkness cannot extinguish the light.
 For:

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness will never overcome it.

Renewed by that hope, we have work to do.
The work of aligning ourselves with God’s ongoing restoration of creation.
The work of preparing the world to receive Christ’s eventual return in glory – the Advent metaphor for the completion of God’s dream in the full restoration of creation.

How do we begin?

We begin with cherishing the light that burns within each of us.
By sharing that light.
By pooling our individual lights until they become a radiance strong enough to push back the encroaching shadows around us.

Given the state of the world, perhaps “merry” isn’t the word that fits this Christmas.
But resilient, hope-filled might be.
Hope-filled, because the light still shines.
Hope-filled, because the Word has taken flesh.
Hope-filled, because the darkness will never overcome us.

Amen.

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Dreaming Joseph

Image: The dream of St Joseph. Bernardino (Bernardino de Scapis) Luini (c.1480-1532)

This year, we return to Matthew as the gospel of choice in the three-year Lectionary cycle. Thus, Advent IV’s gospel opens with Matthew’s account of the events leading to the birth of Jesus. Matthew structures his birth narrative around themes specific to him. I want to offer a very personal take on Matthew’s understanding of the significance of Jesus’ birth.

For most of us, our sense of the nativity narrative emerges from an often unconscious compilation of Luke and Matthew, giving us the typical manger scene depicted in countless churches and nativity plays. In doing so, we miss the significance of each Evangelist’s distinctive portrayal of the events surrounding Jesus’ birth.

Luke’s focus is on Mary. His birth narrative is Mary’s story, depicting a birth in farmyard conditions surrounded by sheep and cattle and witnessed by ordinary shepherds – representative of those on the margins of society – and of course, let’s not forget the angels.

Matthew’s version of events gives us Joseph’s story – the story of Jesus’ birth told from Joseph’s perspective. Matthew does not mention the setting. Here, there are no shepherds, no cattle or sheep. This is a birth witnessed not by ordinary people but by foreign emissaries – the Magi – representatives of the wider world’s homage to the infant king of the Jews. Matthew also has an angel, but Matthew’s angel appears not to Mary, as in Luke’s account, but to a dreaming Joseph.

The first point to notice in the Matthew chronicle is the importance of establishing Jesus’ identity within the long genealogy that extends back through Jewish mythological time to Abraham. Matthew spends 17 verses of his 25-verse first chapter to do this. So we notice from the outset how intensely a Jewish story this is.

The second point to note is that Matthew’s story is highly political, situating the birth of Jesus within the turbulent political context of 1st-century Palestine. Here we have all the ingredients for a tense political drama – a brutal ruler in Herod the Great, the puppet of Roman occupation, whose murderous intent drives the Holy Family into exile as political asylum seekers. The Holy Family escapes, but every other-year-old male child born in the region of Bethlehem is slaughtered as Herod, alerted by the indiscretion of the Magi, endeavors to neutralize Isaiah’s prophecy of the birth of a rival king.

Matthew’s is a rich narrative, one that sets the birth of Jesus within a political context entirely familiar to us today in a world where literally millions of fathers and mothers with young children are daily forced to undertake the perils and dangers as refugees escaping in fear for their lives. And, Matthew’s birth narrative provides a contemporary flavor of the political and humanitarian themes embedded in his account. Matthew sets Jesus’ birth within the context of political oppression and of a ruler’s desire to seek out and punish anyone who poses a threat.

Matthew’s birth narrative also hints at the societal complexities of Joseph and Mary’s predicament. Matthew will go on to describe the holy family’s displacement and flight from political violence, but he must first skillfully navigate 1st-century Jewish societal reactions to surprise pregnancies out of wedlock.

Matthew’s approach to the Jesus story is told from within the Jewish patriarchal worldview of the men in charge. I have an intense personal unease with this feature of his approach. As a gay man, I learned early to fear the power of the patriarchy and to be deeply suspicious of the presentation of scripture through the exclusive lens of the men-in-change, in whose worldview there was no place for someone like me.

Richard Swanson is – at least to my way of thinking – a delightfully provocative biblical commentator who never misses an opportunity to take the patriarchal voice – that is, the traditional interpretation of scripture from the restrictive perspective of the men-in-charge – down a peg or two. Swanson coined the delicious phrase Holy Baritones to describe scripture’s patriarchal voice. My not infrequent uneasiness with Matthew’s voice is that, at times, he seems to me to epitomize the role of section leader in the Holy Baritone chorus.

It’s only in verse 18 that Matthew turns to the birth of Jesus. Having, as I’ve already noted, spent the first 17 verses of his 25-verse first chapter establishing Jesus’ identity at the heart of Jewish patriarchal transmission. Matthew writes:

When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child.

In a society with a strict prohibition against sex before marriage, which by the way is a central convention in all patriarchal societies, including our own until relatively recently, Matthew chooses to introduce the birth of Jesus by telling us that Mary was found to be with child.

Was found to be is a grammatical structure known as the divine passive. It’s a way of telling us that so and so happened while obscuring causality. For the Hebrew writers, it was a way of indicating that something had occurred by the hand of God without invoking the name that could not be spoken. Matthew makes clear that Mary’s pregnancy is the result of God’s hidden hand. Still, unlike Luke’s portrayal of a direct encounter between Mary and the Archangel Gabriel, in which God addresses Mary directly and respects her primary decision-making agency, the thrust of Matthew’s narrative suggests that, once Mary’s pregnancy is discovered, she no longer has any agency, with all decision-making reserved to Joseph.

Matthew presents Joseph in a predicament. His reputation, through no fault of his own, is endangered by this turn of events. A kindly middle-aged widower with a teenage betrothed, he is resolved to end the engagement quietly. What a mensch! But here’s my problem with Matthew’s Joseph-focused version of events. In a religious society with draconian laws against sex before marriage, Joseph’s risk is one of public disgrace. Still, Mary risks honor killing by being stoned to death – in the first instance by her father – and if he could not bring himself to do the deed, then by another male relative – an uncle, or brother, or male cousin conveniently waiting in the wings. The reality of honor killing is a nasty detail that the Holy Baritone voice skips over in silence.

So how is Joseph to be extricated from his predicament of being betrothed to a girl who has now been found with child. Matthew rescues Joseph through the tried and trusted literary device of an angel appearing to him in a dream, telling him not to be afraid. Afraid of what we might ask? – if not a reputational disgrace. The angel instructs Joseph to proceed with the marriage because it is God who has caused Mary’s pregnancy. On waking, Joseph dares to do as the angel had commanded him. After all, what’s social opprobrium when compared with divine displeasure?

We might expect Matthew to end his chapter here. Joseph the mensch rescues his betrothed by marrying her. But as a cheerleader for the Holy Baritone voice, Matthew is not done yet. He rather tellingly – to my mind at least – mentions that while Joseph married Mary, he declined to consummate the marriage until after the child was born.

Why does Matthew feel the need to tell us this? Well, one of the pervading themes of the Holy Baritone voice is a preoccupation with genital penetration and sexual purity. As today’s conservative obsession with the restriction of women’s reproductive, queer, and transgender rights continues to demonstrate, this preoccupation continues a story older than time.

Let’s listen again to Matthew’s voice:

When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son, and named him Jesus.

Although Joseph did as he was commanded, we will never know how he actually felt; however, we have a hint of how Matthew thought he might.

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Hope is in the Waiting

On Advent Sunday, I explored the conundrum of time usually pictured as moving in a straight line, flowing only in one direction – from past to future. Drawing from a few lines of T.S.Eliot in his poem Little Gidding, I contended that our usual way of thinking about time, rather than describing reality, is simply a construction around which to organize our lives. What Eliot hints at is a notion of timelessness interrupting the linear flow of predictability: timelessness in which time bends back on itself—where memory and imagination meet, where, under the influence of the future, the past unsettles the present, and God’s future leans toward us with urgency.

Today on the 3rd Sunday in Advent I want to explore another conundrum – that of hope and hoping, with reference once again to a few lines of T.S. Eliot in his poem East Coker:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope – for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.

Eliot is pointing us toward a distinction we rarely pause to notice between the action of hoping … and the object of our hope. That distinction lies at the heart of Advent, where, between the act of hoping and the object of our hope, we encounter the experience of waiting.

When hope disappoints us, is it because, as Eliot warns, we’ve placed our hope in the wrong thing?

So the question quietly pulsing beneath the themes in Advent is this:
How do we know whether our hope is rightly placed?

Act One and Act Two

Jesus’ fellow Jews in the first century lived with a deep, transgenerational expectation of the coming one—the messiah. A small group came to believe that this long-awaited hope had finally arrived in Jesus and that the messianic age had dawned.

But there was a problem. An enormous problem. How do you proclaim a messiah … who is dead? A dead messiah was not part of anyone’s expectations, prompting the first Christians to understand the dawning of the messianic age as a two-act process.

Act One: In Jesus—through death and resurrection—God had begun the messianic age. Act Two: What had begun would be completed when the Lord returned. Only then would God bring the long hope of Israel—and the hope of all creation—to its promised fulfillment. But it’s difficult to find ourselves living in the tension between the beginning of Act one and the still distant fulfilment of Act two. And so somewhere along the way, we Christians, especially in the Western mainline, quietly jettisoned a real expectation of a second act in the fulfillment of the messianic age.

We still say the words:

He will come again to judge the living and the dead. And Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again.

But is this still our actual expectation? Not so much.

We no longer live with any urgency around Christ’s return. Advent has become almost entirely about Act One—the Incarnation. A sweet baby. A quiet Bethlehem. A familiar story.

So when we jettison Act Two—what do we put in its place? We replace the early Christian hope of God renewing heaven and earth with a far more comfortable expectation: that when we die, we will be transported into eternal bliss. Instead of Christ coming to us, we will go to him.
Heaven is the end. Mission accomplished.

But note the subtle shift: Hope has moved from the renewal of creation to the escape from creation. A small shift with enormous consequences.

Competing Expectations—Then and Now

When John the Baptist began preaching his fiery message of repentance, many flocked to him because they thought he might be the coming one. Every Jew lived with urgent expectation. Yet, as with all expectations, there was a wide divergence about what the messiah was actually supposed to do.

Some clung to Isaiah’s great vision of cosmic renewal, which we listened to in the first reading from Isaiah 35. This is a vision of the desert blooming, the blind seeing, the lame leaping, the whole creation singing. A kind of divine re-terraforming of the earth.

Others, humiliated under Roman occupation, longed for a more political messiah.  A military leader. A racial champion. One who would restore the fortunes of Israel and make Israel great again.

Two expectations. Two hopes. Both fervent. Both biblical. Both alive in the hearts of first-century Jews.

And into this tangle of hope comes the moment in Matthew’s Gospel—with John the Baptist, now in prison, becoming afraid, unsure, increasingly doubting.

He sends messengers to ask Jesus:
Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect another?

We can imagine the roots of his doubt. John was a firebrand. He expected a messiah with a bit more muscle. A bit more judgment. A lot more nationalistic fervor.

And Jesus—wily as ever—refuses a direct answer.
He doesn’t debate. He doesn’t reassure. He doesn’t explain away the paradox. He simply says:

Go tell John what you see and hear. The blind see. The lame walk. The lepers are cleansed. The deaf hear. The poor receive good news.

In other words: remind John of Isaiah’s messianic expectation. The object of John’s hope is misplaced – his hope is hoping for the wrong thing.

Jesus aligns himself not with tribal ambition but with prophetic transformation. Not with national restoration but with justice, mercy, and renewal.

That same clash of expectations is alive today—very much alive—in the American church. Among large swaths of white evangelical Christianity, the hope is for a more muscular Jesus. A more tribal – a racially pure Jesus. A more nationalistic Jesus. A Jesus who will restore the fortunes of a particular nation, through political power at home and military strength abroad.

It is, as in the first century, hope for the wrong thing. And Jesus refuses to endorse it.

The Advent Question for Us

We who call ourselves mainstream Christians face the same choice John faced. The same choice the early Church faced. And the stakes today feel just as high.

Do we continue to ignore the New Testament’s two-act expectation, living with our eyes fixed solely on the reward of heavenly bliss? A single-act Christianity of personal salvation? A spirituality that floats above the world rather than being incarnated within it? Or do we recover Act Two—the expectation that Christ will return to this world, bringing justice to this society, healing to this creation?

Because the expectations we choose shape the lives we live.

If we believe the earth is simply the disposable staging ground before we depart for heaven, then why bother with justice? Why bother with creation? Why bother with anything beyond my personal ticket to ride the heaven-bound express?

But if we believe that God intends to redeem this material reality, then we understand our present responsibilities very differently – to become collaborators with God, agitators for peace with justice, stewards of the earth, and repairers of the breach. People who embody this hope – now—in real time.

So How Do We Know Whether Our Hope Is Right?

Let me return to the question that has been quietly humming underneath everything:

How do we know whether our hope is for the right or wrong thing?

Is our hope placed in some future escape from this world into heavenly bliss—while the world around us burns, and injustice deepens, and creation groans under the weight of greed and neglect?

Or is our hope placed in the renewal of all things— the healing of creation, the raising of what has fallen, the setting right of what has gone wrong?

Is our hope aligned with John’s early instinct for a tribal, forceful messiah? Or with Jesus’ prophetic vision of the messiah as the herald for the inbreaking of God’s justice, healing, and ecological restoration?

Enormous consequences flow from the hope we choose. Because hope is realized in the waiting, and in the spaciousness of waiting, future expectation folds back into present-time action.

Into the spaciousness of waiting time bends to flow back on itself — here memory and imagination meet, here under the influence of the future, the past unsettles the present, and God’s future leans toward us with urgency as we discover that the power of that for which we wait is already – I repeat, already effective within us.

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Advent Stillness in the Eye of the Hurricane

Picture: St John’s Church, Little Gidding

Advent begins with a strange invitation. It’s an invitation not to hurry, to pause, to savor the stillness of the moment at the point where time feels different – where the past and future seem to lean in on us at the same moment.

We have the prevailing idea that time flows in a linear, one-way direction – from the past into the future. This idea of time normally serves us well in everyday functioning, yet it’s nothing more than a convention of thought that enables us to organize our lives.

At points of crisis, however, we often find ourselves in moments of stillness akin to the eye of a hurricane. Here we have an uncanny sense of timelessness – not of the unidirectional linear flow of time, but of something more akin to convergence. We sense the past and future converging into the stillness of the present moment.

On a bleak, grey, winter’s afternoon, the poet T.S. Eliot arrived in the out-of-the-way hamlet of Little Gidding, deep in rural Huntingdonshire, northwest of Cambridge. That quiet visit became the seedbed for the fourth and final section of his Four Quartets, which he completed as London burned under the steady rain of German bombs.

The village of Little Gidding resonates in the English High Church imagination. In 1625, after the loss of much of their fortune with the collapse of the Virginia Company, the Ferrar family retreated to their estate at Little Gidding. In 1626, Nicholas Ferrar was ordained deacon by Archbishop Laud. As Archbishop of Canterbury, Laud led the extrajudicial suppression of the Puritans, and it was only by the skin of his teeth that one Roger Williams managed to embark for Massachusetts with Laud’s commissioners hot on his heels.

On Monday, we will commemorate Nicholas Ferrar. Under his leadership, the extended family forged a brave experiment in spiritual community centered on the disciplined life of prayer, work, and pastoral care grounded in the Daily Offices of the Book of Common Prayer.

Although Nicholas died in 1637, the community continued under the leadership of his brother, John, and their sister, Susana Collet, until their deaths in 1657.  

King Charles 1st visited the community three times. The king made his final visit to the community where he sought refuge following the defeat of the Royalist Army by the Parliamentary forces at the Battle of Naseby in 1645.

Chilled to the bone by that miserable dampness that is the unique characteristic of the English winter, after his long and taxing wartime journey from London, Eliot, stood in the little church dedicated to St John the Evangelist, and sensed a timeless moment.  Eliot opened the second stanza of his final quartet, aptly named Little Gidding, capturing his memory of that moment when wave met wave, past touched present, and present opened towards the future. He wrote:

If you came this way, taking any route, starting from anywhere, at any time or in any season, it would always be the same: you would have to put off sense and notion. You are not here to verify, instruct yourself, or inform curiosity or carry report. You are here to kneel where prayer has been valid – here, the intersection of the timeless moment is England and nowhere. Never and always.

Eliot here is speaking of the experience of a moment in timelessness – when the past and future converge in the real-time of the present moment.

Timelessness, interrupting the linear flow of predictability – past touching future in the present, is precisely the spiritual landscape to be explored in Advent.

Advent is where time bends to flow back on itself —
where memory and imagination meet,
where under the influence of the future, the past unsettles the present,
and God’s future leans toward us with urgency.

The voice of the prophet Isaiah conveys a sense of this divine urgency leaning into temporal time. In a vision of a future where swords will be beaten into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks, and where nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.

Isaiah is not describing a dream to admire. He is describing a future that demands our present-time participation!

He beckons us with: “Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord.”

He does not say, let’s wait while we dream of a future better than the present. He commands us to walk now, conveying the divine urgency, leaning in to transform the future dream into something already shaping us in the present.

And here we are in 2025, a year when Isaiah’s vision feels both desperately needed and painfully elusive.

Wars continue to erupt and smolder. Political rhetoric grows sharper, more fearful, more chaotic. We face unprecedented technological acceleration with insufficient moral wisdom and the lack of a protective legislative and legal framework. We feel the low hum of climate anxiety amidst the quiet ache of rising social isolation and loneliness.

In such a world, Isaiah’s invitation is no abstraction. It’s invitation and instruction – it’s hope with boots on.

Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord.

Walk now before the world feels ready – before we have our act together – before we see the way ahead clearly enough to wrest its direction from God’s control.

Advent is a season of preparation. Yet, this is paradoxical. Jesus reminds us that there is nothing we can do to prepare ourselves to be ready. He invites us to simply remain awake, for we cannot know on what day the Lord is coming.

We wake up and stay awake, aware of the dangers of hardening our hearts against hope and allowing despair to shrink our imagination.

To be awake is to be alert to God’s urgency, leaning into the present time – in the moment we live in between Jesus’ birth and his return as the cosmic Christ in end-of-time glory. Here, past and future enfold in real-time punctuated repeatedly by acts of mercy and moments of courage, as the steady persistence of love is realized in the small actions of everyday life.

Traveling back to a drab and battered London, Eliot had felt the echo of Nicholas Farrar’s brave spiritual experiment. For him, the past leaned forward as the future leaned back. Right there, in that moment, something timeless broke through.

He wrote:

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

This is what it feels like when God’s future leans in upon the present and makes the ordinary shimmer with possibility.

At St. Martin’s, we catch glimpses of what it means to walk in hope before we fully see the way ahead. We are learning — slowly, steadily, faithfully — that hope is made real through service rooted in worship and prayer. Hope is something we make real, together.

We know what it is to rebuild community, deepening in worship and the renewal of ministries; to welcome newcomers with warmth, and to carry the flame of faith forward even when cultural winds blow cold.

Here, week after week, between font and altar, we open to the experience of that still place where the richness of tradition reconfigures to meet the challenges of the future. As we listen for God’s whisper we embrace hope as the antidote to the poison of despair.

Because even now, even here, in this community, with these people, in this moment, God’s dream, long promised, is already leaning in to take shape in us!

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A King, But What Kind of King?

Image: 9th-century Christ figure, Esglesia de Sant Cristofol de Beget, Catalonia.

Note the sermon recording is a version of the text below streamlined for oral delivery.

This Sunday, the last in the season after Pentecost, brings us again to the Feast of Christ the King. It’s worth remembering that this is a relative newcomer to our Anglican–Episcopal calendar. Traditionally, the Sunday before Advent was known as Stir-Up Sunday—from that marvelous opening of the old Collect for Advent Sunday. We now find his Collect moved to Advent II.

“Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people…”

In England, of course, this also served as the annual cue for the vigorous stirring of the Christmas pudding. A lighthearted association, yes—but there is a deeper, more unsettling story beneath the surface of this day.

100 years ago in 1925, Pope Pius XI instituted the Feast of Christ the King as an explicit protest against the rise of fascism and the growing threat of communism. His instinct was to reassert the old Constantinian notion of the Church as the supreme earthly authority—the singular center of allegiance for Roman Catholics. At tremendous cost to freedom of thought and conscience within the Church, he marshaled his legions against those he perceived as rival authoritarian powers.

It is, as you’ve heard me say before, an old and familiar story: one form of authoritarian power confronting another. And for us, for our Anglican sensibilities and ecclesiology, this is problematic. We do not imagine ourselves as an authoritarian church, nor do we look to the state to wield sacred authority on our behalf. And so we are forced to ask:

What kind of king, and what kind of kingship, are we actually celebrating today?

The first chapter of Genesis tells us that humanity—male and female—is made in the image and likeness of God. But if God is unseen, then the only way we can learn anything about God is by taking a long, honest look at ourselves.

And this is where things immediately become complicated.

For which image of humanity is God reflected in?
The compassionate one?
The jealous one?
The collaborative one?
The violent one?
Perhaps, in some mysterious sense, all of them?

This double-edged mirroring cuts both ways. We deduce that God is loving, relational, and faithful because we find traces of these aspects within ourselves. But we also project onto God our fear, our rage, our desire for power and control—because these too are embedded so deeply within us.

This is why the Bible’s shifting, sometimes contradictory portraits of God may have more to do with the conflicting, constantly changing images of ourselves than with any actual change in God. And so today’s great question arises again:

Which of our many competing self-images do we want Christ the King to reflect?

The Church has never lacked for imagery.

Pantocrator—the omnipotent ruler of the universe—gazes down from Orthodox domes and even from our own great West Window at St. Martin’s, itself a war memorial. In this rendering, Christ is robed with imperial grandeur, presiding over the world with absolute command.

Christus Rex, the risen high priest, appears in the reredos of the St. Martin Chapel—Christ triumphant, the cross firmly behind him now, is decked in priestly attire; new life springing forth from resurrection’s victory.

But then there is that other image—stubborn, uncomfortable, and impossible to romanticize:
the one who reigns not from a throne but from a cross.
Not robed in splendor but stripped of all earthly power.
Not lifted above humanity but nailed into its deepest suffering.

This third image refuses the familiar pairing of strength over against vulnerability. It insists instead on a revolutionary pairing:

strength through vulnerability,
continuity reshaped by disruption,
life emerging from death.

This is the image Luke gives us today in Jesus’ Passion. Here, Christ’s kingship shines through the very moment when Rome, the Temple, and a frightened populace converge to crush him. He refuses to play the power game. He refuses to mount a defense that mirrors their tactics. His vulnerability becomes the very thing that reveals divine strength.

We are living, once again, in an interesting moment—interesting in that biblical sense where the tectonic plates shift beneath our feet. Authoritarian voices rise across the world; fear becomes a political currency; purity narratives—racial, religious, cultural—gain traction among anxious populations. Meanwhile, many feel that continuity is slipping away, that the old certainties no longer hold.

Newton’s Third Law quietly reminds us: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. And so the pendulum of history swings between order and chaos, continuity and disruption, stability and fracture.

Like Pope Pius XI a century ago, we, too, are tempted to imagine that the only adequate response to coercive power is counter-coercive power. Strength for strength. Force for force. A sort of theological arms race.

The danger here is subtle but real:
when God is remade in our image, it is only a matter of time before violence, domination, and exclusion become divinely sanctioned.

And so Christ the King asks us to choose carefully which image of ourselves we are willing to project onto God.

Left to our own devices, our imaginations merely recycle the familiar. We recognize only what we have already trained ourselves to see.

But the Gospel calls us into a more permeable imagination—one in which the rigid boundaries of our conventional selves give way, and something new breaks through. Jesus’ parables work in this way – as disruptive stories—stories that jump the track like a needle skipping on a vinyl record, suddenly placing us in an unanticipated part of the song.

Christ the King, as Luke gives him, is such a disruption.

Not Pantocrator high above us.
Not Christus Rex safely beyond us.
But Christ who stoops, who descends, who reigns from the cross itself.

This is not the familiar polarity of strength or vulnerability.
It is the holy paradox of strength through vulnerability.

Not disruption as the enemy of continuity,
but disruption as a necessity in the long-term reshaping and renewal of continuity.

Beneath the cross—Luke implies it, and the tradition expands it—are three great stones wedged into the earth:

divine love,
divine mercy,
divine justice.

From this place of what looks like utter defeat, Jesus exercises a kingship the world is not conditioned to recognize. A kingship that unsettles our desire for easy answers, half-truths, and superficial allegiances. A kingship that pushes us to live from hearts less governed by fear.

Christ’s kingship blesses us with righteous anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of the helpless. It calls us not to passive acceptance but to active labor for freedom, peace, and justice.

And Christ’s kingship blesses us with just enough holy foolishness to believe that we truly can make a difference—that the world’s wounds are not beyond healing, and that we are called to participate in that healing.

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in another moment of deep historical crisis:

“We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; we have been drenched by many storms; we have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretence; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical. Are we still of any use?

He continues:

What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, and straightforward men. Will our inward power of resistance be strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves remorseless enough, for us to find our way back to simplicity and straightforwardness?” we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, straightforward men and women … with enough inward strength to find our way back to simplicity and straightforwardness.”

So today—this last Sunday of the Christian year—we stand again before the three competing images of Christ the King:

Pantocrator, the omnipotent ruler;
Christus Rex, the triumphant high priest;
and Jesus of Nazareth, reigning from the cross.

The first two are familiar.
The third is revolutionary.

For in that crucified face, we find not a projection of our own lust for control, but a revelation of God’s true nature:

a kingship that reconciles by resisting,
that resists by refusing to imitate violence,
that transforms by entering the world’s suffering rather than escaping it.

Perhaps this is the image of Christ the King we need now:
the one who reigns by setting aside every pretense of worldly strength,
and who invites us to do the same—so that God may enter our picture
and remake us in the divine image of love, justice, and mercy.

Amen.

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Confrontation

Sermon on Luke 20:27–38 — “The God of the Living”

This story from Luke’s Gospel gives us one of Jesus’ clearest windows into what resurrection really means.

He isn’t just talking about life after death.
He’s talking about a whole new kind of life.

Resurrection doesn’t just keep the story going —
it transforms existence.
It isn’t the old life resumed,
it’s a new creation breaking in.

The Setting

To feel the power of what Jesus says, we have to picture the scene.

He’s standing in the Temple courtyard —
surrounded by religious authorities,
priests in their robes,
men who run the system.

The Sadducees.

They were the religious aristocrats —
a small priestly class who controlled the Temple in Jerusalem.
Wealthy, well-connected, aligned with Rome.
Religion and politics —
for them, it was all one system.
And it worked pretty well for them.

They only accepted the written Torah —
the first five books of Moses —
and since those books don’t mention resurrection or angels,
they didn’t believe in either.

For them, what you see is what you get.
God’s justice is whatever happens — if it happens — in this life.
So when Jesus preaches resurrection,
they hear danger.


Political danger.
Theological danger.
Because resurrection means
God still has surprises they can’t control.

So they come with their clever little riddle —
about a woman who marries seven brothers.
“In the resurrection,” they ask,
“whose wife will she be?”

It’s meant to make hope sound ridiculous.

But Jesus doesn’t take the bait.
He says, “as usual you’re asking the wrong kind of question.”

The resurrection, he says,
isn’t about rearranging the old furniture.
It’s not a continuation of this world’s arrangements —
it’s a transformation of life itself.

And then he quotes their own Torah —
the story of Moses at the burning bush.
God says, ‘I am the God of Abraham’ — not ‘I was.’

If God is their God,
then they are alive to God.
Because to belong to God
is to share God’s life.
And God’s life never ends.

A Theological Debate with Real Consequences

Jesus isn’t just winning an argument here.
He’s taking a stand in one of the great theological battles of his time.

The Pharisees — unlike the Sadducees —
believed that God’s justice must extend beyond the grave, – that wrongs in this life will be eventually put to rights –
that God’s faithfulness doesn’t stop at the cemetery gate.

And here, for once, there is no daylight between Jesus and the Pharisees.
He shares their conviction
that the covenant promise of God cannot be broken by death.

As Bishop Tom Wright says,
resurrection is not simply “life after death,”
but life after life after death —
the full flowering of creation made new.

So this moment in the Temple
is not just a debate about heaven.
It’s a declaration that God’s future is already reaching into the present.
Resurrection is not something we wait for —
it’s something we can live into right now.

Then and Now

It’s easy to leave the Sadducees in the first century,
but their voice still echoes.

You can hear it today whenever people say:

  • “Be realistic — nothing ever really changes.”
  • “Power is power — take what you can.”
  • “Hope is naïve — better to be transactional.”

That voice fills our politics.
It shapes our economy.
It even creeps into our churches.

It whispers:
“The only world that matters is the one you can control.”
“The future belongs to the powerful.”
“Resurrection is just wishful thinking.”

But the God Jesus reveals
won’t fit inside that logic.
The God of Jesus
is the living God —
the One who keeps breaking in,
bringing life where death thought it had the last word.

The God of the Living

When Jesus calls God
“the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,”
he’s saying something profound about who God is.

If God is their God,
then they are alive to God.
Because God’s faithfulness can’t be interrupted by death.

Resurrection isn’t just about what happens after we die.
It’s what happens whenever God’s life breaks into our dead places:

— when forgiveness replaces bitterness,
— when courage rises to face down fear,
— when love crosses a boundary we thought was final.

That’s resurrection.
That’s the God of the living at work.

Resurrection as Resistance

To believe in resurrection
is to resist despair.
It’s to say that cruelty, injustice, and death
do not get the last word.

It’s to live as if God’s future
is already pressing in on this moment.

And yes —
it’s a dangerous belief.
Because resurrection threatens every order built on fear and violence used as a means of control.
That’s why the Sadducees — then and now —
want to silence it.

Fast Forward to 2025

You don’t have to look far to hear the same old logic being used today:

“People are bad and must be controlled.”
“The poor have only themselves to blame.”
“Immigrants are a threat and so must be expelled.”
“We’re not responsible for climate change, so drill, baby drill.”
“The Church is dying — why bother trying, it’s yesterday’s news?”

And into that weary chorus of constant outrage as distraction, Jesus still speaks:

“God is not God of the dead, but of the living.”

He calls us to live as citizens of that kingdom —
not someday, but today.

To practice resurrection
by daring to hope,
by forgiving, by standing with those the world forgets.

Conclusion — The God of the Living

So what does it mean to say
that God is not the God of the dead, but of the living?

It means that every time we meet despair with courage,
every time bitterness gives way to forgiveness,
every time indifference is replaced with compassion —
resurrection is already happening.

It means faith is not about survival.
Church is not about maintenance.
Resurrection is not escape — resurrection is transformation.
And that transformation begins with us.

That old Sadducean spirit still lingers —
in every system that defends the status quo,
in every voice that says nothing really changes,
in every theology that locks God in the past.

But the living God —
the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob —
the God who raised Jesus from the dead —
will not be managed by fear or cynicism.

To proclaim resurrection
is not to deny death —
it’s to deny its finality.

It’s to trust that love is stronger.
That mercy endures.
That creation still pulses with divine possibility.

It’s to stand in the middle of an anxious, fractured world
and say with quiet defiance:

“The future belongs not to those who manipulate our fear of death,
but to the God who brings life out of death.”

So when you look around at our world —
its exhaustion, its cruelty, its despair —
do not lose heart.

Live as witnesses to the living God.
Practice resurrection
in the small, stubborn acts of love
that make God’s future visible in the present.

For the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
is still the God of the living.

And my friends —this means that however we may be feeling,
God is not done with us yet.

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The Scarcity-Abundance Paradox

Image: The Pharisee and the Tax Collector, James Tissot, 1886-1894

Any attempt to speak about money in the church runs the risk of provoking a cynical or defensive response. We’ve all heard it before — “the church just wants my money.” But this reaction misses the point.

Money, in the life of faith, is only ever a metaphor for values. When we commit to financially supporting an organization — especially the Church — our hope is not only to contribute value but also to derive a sense of value. Both are essential to living meaningfully with purpose.

One of the great paradoxes at the heart of Christian life is that spiritual renewal is so much more than money, and yet financial generosity is a key expression of our deepening awareness of our need for God. But money and religion often make for a volatile mix.

Putting religion aside for a moment, our attitudes and feelings about money evoke in many of us a deep-seated anxiety — the scarcity–abundance paradox.

I can trace my own anxiety about money back to my parents arguing about it. As the eldest child, I witnessed the early days of their marriage when money was the powerful metaphor for their fears of scarcity as they struggled to build a stable life.

What about you? What are your earliest memories of family conversations around money? Was money, in your home, a metaphor for enoughness or for scarcity?

We internalize — without being conscious of doing so — the anxieties transmitted to us during infancy and childhood. In my case, an expectation of scarcity was implanted in me, even though enoughness — even abundance — has been a much stronger feature of my adult life.

This tension between expectation and experience is exactly where God begins to work.

The Old Testament reading from Joel speaks into this space. After years of drought, famine, and devastation, Joel delivers a word of hope:

The threshing floors shall be full of grain,
the vats shall overflow with wine and oil.

That would have been miracle enough — but Joel goes further:

Then afterward, I will pour out my spirit on all flesh;
your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
your old men shall dream dreams,
and your young men shall see visions.

God’s promise is not only enough to survive, but enough to dream again.

We often associate “abundance” with endless surplus. That’s why I prefer the word enoughness. Abundance means sustained enoughness — a way of living rooted in trust rather than fear.

Trusting this promise is risky. It requires relinquishing the illusion of being in control — the illusion that we are the authors of our own security. For those of us shaped by scarcity fears, God’s promise of abundance is not easily believed.

So we must ask: Which is more real — our fear of scarcity, or the evidence of our own experience?

Scarcity says: there won’t be enough.
Enoughness says: there is always enough.

Fear blocks generosity. Trust makes generosity possible. When we look honestly at our lives, we discover how often fear has misled us. Most of us live every day with enough — and more than enough. The critical question becomes: Which story do we choose to inhabit?

America may well be the most prosperous society in human history — and yet, paradoxically, we experience the highest levels of scarcity anxiety fueled by the myth of self-sufficiency. In the land of plenty, we too easily condone poverty and inequality, justifying these conditions as the consequences of personal and moral inadequacy.

To abundance understood as enoughness, God calls us to add the practice of justice. Generosity is not just an act of kindness — it is a protest against the myth of scarcity and the injustice that flows from it.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells of two men who go up to the Temple to pray: a Pharisee and a tax collector.

The Pharisee believes himself the author of his own salvation. He stands tall, proud of his accomplishments, loudly proclaiming them before God.

We know we are supposed to side with the tax collector, and yet — if we are honest — many of us live more like the Pharisee, designing our lives so we will never need anything from anyone.

But the tax collector — standing apart, unable even to lift his eyes — knows his need of God. In that posture of honest dependence, he discovers a truth the Pharisee cannot: everything — even the good we do — flows from God’s grace, not our control.

The source of all our loves in life flows from God’s love for us. Only when we acknowledge this can we begin to understand our need for God.

Generosity is not a financial transaction — it is a spiritual practice, a way of saying:
I trust in God’s unstinting generosity.

This stewardship season invites us to remember that none of us is an island — our lives are bound together in God’s shared abundance. Through mutual generosity we accomplish far more than any one of us can do alone. Through giving, time, participation, and compassion, we remind each other that abundance is not personal achievement but the fruit of life in community.

Between now and November 24th, I invite each of us to cultivate practices of generosity — for our spiritual, emotional, and societal flourishing. Generosity is not simply about sustaining a budget — it is about extending ourselves to realize God’s promise of enoughness.

Every act of generosity participates in God’s dream for justice.

And so we return to Joel’s vision:

I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh;
our sons and our daughters shall prophesy;
our old men shall dream dreams;
our young men shall see visions.

So this Stewardship season, let’s dream of unleashing our generosity to achieve yet-to-be-imagined possibilities.

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