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.

January 10, 2026 0

And Then There Were Nine

Image courtesy of Redeeminggod.com

Today is the launch of our public stewardship renewal campaign for 2026. It will run until November 9^th. Letters with educative documentation, along with an estimate of giving card, allowing for the vagaries of the US postal service, should land in your mailboxes by the end of this coming week or hopefully sooner. Now, no one wants to hear – even on the Stewardship launch Sunday, a sermon distorted into a harangue for more money. So you can rest easy, I’m not interested in doing that either.

I want you to picture the scene Luke depicts in today’s gospel.

And Luke pauses here to let us feel the implication of the story – one not lost on Jesus’ immediate 1st-century audience. Because the one who returns is a hated foreigner, a Samaritan who falls at Jesus’ feet, giving thanks. His gratitude becomes an act of recognition, an awakening of something within him, as he becomes overwhelmed by hope. For gratitude is never just backward-looking; it is the soil in which the future grows.

Five centuries before this moment, the prophet Jeremiah wrote to another group of people living outside the fold of inclusion—a people rendered strangers in a foreign land -Israel’s exiles in Babylon. They were displaced, disheartened, and desperate to go home to rebuild what had been lost. So Jeremiah’s letter would have shocked them. He didn’t say, Hold on, you’ll be back next year. He said: Build houses and live in them. Plant gardens and eat their produce. Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you. (Jer. 29:5–7)

In other words: Hope is not waiting for escape—it is beginning again where you are. Jeremiah’s hope was not naïve optimism. It was a fierce, grounded trust that God is still at work, even in exile. Like gratitude, hope starts by paying attention to what is already possible. For gratitude is never just backward-looking; it is the soil in which the future grows.

The healed Samaritan and Jeremiah’s exiles are kin in spirit. Both live outside the center of inclusion. Both find hope in despair. Both embody what we might call resilient gratitude—the capacity to thank God even before everything is fixed.

The Samaritan’s turning back is his equivalent to planting a garden in exile. He does not rush back into a normal life, the life he must have longed to return to during his years of being shunned. He turns toward the source of his gratitude. And in that turning, he is not only cured but discovers a new kind of wholeness.

Jesus’ final words to him—Your faith has made you well—echo Jeremiah’s promise: For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.

Stewardship is about the fostering of our sense of gratitude for what God has already given. From gratitude, hope emerges, trusting that the same God will bring future abundance to life.

Stewardship, then, is nothing less than the practice of hope in action. It requires attentive care. St Benedict loved to tell his monks that stewardship is the exercise of tender competence in ordinary things. Jeremiah said, Build houses… plant gardens… seek the welfare of the city. Stewardship does precisely that—it tends, builds, and plants for the future even when the present feels uncertain.

Every pledge of financial generosity, every act of service, every hour given in ministry is an act of trust that God’s future – already coming to fruition through us is worth investing in. It says, With our time and our treasure, we believe our story isn’t over.

In the Samaritan’s turning back, we glimpse the same truth: gratitude is never passive. It propels us forward into participation—into giving, healing, reconciling, and most importantly investing in the future in a community where our commitment to one another becomes more important than our prized self-sufficient individuality. The key to recognizing gratitude is to never resist for too long, an opportunity to express generosity towards another.

To give thanks in the midst of uncertainty is to refuse to be ruled by fear. To give generously, even when anxious about the future, is to declare that God’s promise of abundance is greater than our fear of scarcity.

When we live this way, we become what Jeremiah envisioned—a community that plants gardens in exile, a people who embody hope through gratitude expressed in generous living. People who make possible a future we cannot yet see.

As I often remind us, it’s only together that we can achieve so much more than any one of us alone. As we enter our own season of stewardship, the fostering in us of our tender competence and love for one another in community, we need to remind ourselves that it is to God we must continually give thanks for the enjoyment of our abundance amidst the experience of change, challenge, and uncertainty.

Like Jeremiah’s exiles, we are called not to wait for the perfect moment— but to build now, plant now, give now, hope now. You and I may not be here tomorrow, yet through what we tend today, the community we build will remain.

Every pledge, every gift, every offering of time and skill says that we believe that God still has plans for us. We believe that love will have the last word. That is when we turn back, as the healed Samaritan did—when we give thanks and offer ourselves anew—we open the way for God to create a new future together. Gratitude is not the end of faith. It is the beginning of renewal. Jeremiah calls us to build despite our present experience of alienation and exile from an America we still cherish in our hearts.

Gratitude is the seed of hope, and hope is the architecture of the future God is already building through us.

Ten men stand at a distance. Ten voices cry out—not for justice, not even for understanding, but simply: Jesus, Master, have mercy on us. And Jesus—without touch, without spectacle—says, Go, show yourselves to the priests. Ten go but only one turns back in gratitude. Nine are cleansed, but only one is made whole. And just to rub it in for his xenophobic Jewish audience harboring an aversion and hostility towards Samaritans, Jesus asks: Were not ten made clean? Was none of them found to return and give thanks to God except this foreigner?

For gratitude is never just backward-looking; it is the soil in which the future grows.

October 11, 2025 0

Refracted Hope

It’s Friday morning and after a hectic week I finally turn my thoughts to today’s readings for the second Sunday in Lent. Bereft of helpful insights – I scratch my heard as I read that Jesus tells us – his modern-day disciples – to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow him – that the cost of saving our lives lies in our willingness to risk losing them?

Nightly images numb me further into acquiescence and resignation as I watch in real time as the civilian population of Gaza is bombed into a stone age wasteland of wretchedness beyond belief.

News from Oklahoma of a young trans person’s death as a result of a bathroom incident between fellow students in a school – further evidences the unleashing of politically sanctioned persecution of trans and nonbinary persons in large parts of this country.

In States governed by legislatures no longer committed to the basic principles of representative democracy – where power is maintained through gerrymandered electorates – legislatures pursue their anti-liberal agendas – and the courts continue to hand down insane rulings that impose increasingly cruel and unusual punishments that further restrict the basic civic freedoms to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness enshrined in the Constitution. We’ve reached the ludicrous situation where the courts defend freedom of speech protections that allow the right to incite hatred but strictly policing student hairstyles.

I hear a voice in my head cautioning me to stop it! Stop what? Well stop funneling down the rabbit hole of rage and despair. Forty years of experience reminds me that this is no good way to begin a sermon reflection.

At the root of my despair is my rage that the world is not fair, that wrongs seem seldom righted. Everywhere I look the appearance of things leads me to conclude that despite my frequent protests to the contrary, might is often right and wealth is the primary influence on power. It’s into this slough of despond I hear Jesus speaking to Simon Peter: Get thee behind me Satan. The words of the King James Authorized Version – a translation I hardly ever read – remain indelibly imprinted on my mind as is probably true for most English-speaking Christians.

To fully appreciate the searing impact of Mark’s account of the encounter between Jesus and Simon Peter we need to go back to verse 27 of chapter 8 where Mark reports Jesus on his way to Caesarea Philippi. Along the way he asks his disciples what are people were saying about him? Reporting the general gossip – the disciples tell him: Well Rabbi, some say this, and some say that. To which Jesus asks: But you – who do you say I am? His question provokes Simon Peter to declare: We know who you are, you are the Messiah! But giving the correct answer doesn’t necessarily mean understanding what that answer means.

Today’s text picks up at verse 31 with: Then he began to teach them —. But what Jesus teaches them is not what they want to hear. Simon Peter – with his Jewish conditioned misunderstanding of messiahship confronts Jesus. Taking him aside he rebukes Jesus with what I imagine probably went like this:

What on earth are you talking about, Jesus. What nonsense are you spouting about suffering and death. You are the Messiah – the great king sent by God to get us out of this mess of Roman occupation and restore us to our status of a chosen nation. So, let’s hear no more of this defeatist nonsense about suffering and death. Can’t you see the undermining effect on our morale when you speak like this?

Jesus fixes Simon with a steely gaze and with a heart stopping authority commands: Get behind me Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.

This is a hard saying. Trapped within our human perspective we look out at the appearance of things – unable to see beyond our limited perceptions to the larger picture. So much of the divine action remains hidden from our view.

Can we with any honesty speak in a community like ours about Jesus’ prediction of suffering and death? Like Simon Peter, suffering and death as the cost of discipleship are not on our agenda – no matter how darkly at times we may view events in the world around us. Unlike Peter we don’t even have the courage to protest the point. We just tune out – preferring to think the choice is ours whether to follow Jesus or not. We may choose to follow Jesus, but always on our own terms – at little cost to ourselves.

Like Simon Peter and the Disciples we want to filter Jesus’ messiahship through the prism of our own desires and fears – the things of our human priorities.

Prisms. Now here’s an interesting fact. The thing about prisms is that they don’t filter light – they refract it. White light enters as a beam to become refracted into the seven-color constituents of the spectrum. Our desires and fears – our human priorities enter the prism of Jesus’ messiahship as a tight beam of white light and emerge refracted to reveal the divine priorities in a multi-stranded, Kodachrome cone of ever-widening dispersion.

An event of ultimate significance occurred this week – shedding some light on this incident in Mark. I refer to the death in suspicious circumstances of Alexei Navalny -the courageous Russian dissident and now martyr for the democratic cause. Many of us still find it incomprehensible that he chose to return to Russia knowing the fate that awaited him. It seems that in this action, with his mind no longer focused on his own concerns – Navalny understood the cost of discipleship as inseparable from fidelity to the path of discipleship – which for him was the cause of democratic freedoms.

I am not in any way conflating Alexei Navalny with Jesus. I don’t know whether Navalny was a Christian believer or not. My point is – Navalny emulates Jesus in action. They both knew that being faithful to their cause would cost them nothing less than their life. They both wielded the most powerful weapon in the confrontation with evil – that of nonviolent resistance.

Like Pontius Pilate before him, as the representative of empire, Vladimir Putin understands well the necessity of killing the leader of a movement for nonviolent resistance. Like Pilate and countless other brutes of history before him – Putin fails to understand that non-violence is an idea that only strengthened in killing its leading proponents. As with Jesus, the concentrated white light of Alexei Navalny’s life has now been refracted through the prism of his death into a broad Kodachrome spectrum of ever widening hope. But hope comes at a cost and when the cost is paid – hope strengthens.

What will it take for us to discover what the disciples eventually came to understand – that the fruit of discipleship is inseparable from its cost?

The cost of discipleship is paid in the currency of hope’s confrontation with evil. What will discipleship cost us? This is Jesus’ 21^st century discipleship question to which the life and death of Alexei Navalny reveals one possible answer.

Discipleship is unlikely to cost us our lives. But it does require our death to self – a death to our self-preoccupation – a dying to our exclusive focus on merely human things that lead us to despair and acquiescence to helplessness.

As we enter upon the journey of another Lent – a season in which we are called to face-down the temptation to acquiesce in the face of the evil that holds such sway in the world around us. Lent is a season when the white light of despair is refracted through the prism of discipleship into the broad color spectrum of faith, courage, and love – to name but three stands in the spectrum of hope. But be under no illusion – the path of discipleship is a costly one – as Navalny’s death confirms. And the encounter between Peter and Jesus in Mark 8 is where for us the journey of discipleship begins. It’s from here we reset our compass needle towards the resurrection.

February 24, 2024 0

It’s all in the waiting

In East Coker, the second in T.S Eliot’s Four Quartets the following lines attract and repel me in equal measure.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope,
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith,
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Try as I might, the conundrum of these words registers deep in my gut – where I intuit them sounding a warning. I dislike waiting. The unpalatable truth seems to be that some things are only made possible when we have the patience to wait for them.

The experience of waiting is for many of us today a kind of agony because we are now shaped by a culture in which waiting has been abolished. From download speeds to the endless deluge of things arriving same day- or at most, next day from Amazon our new Godfather in the sky – instantaneous getting gratifies us as our capacity for enjoyment vanishes along with our ability to give attention to anything for more than a few seconds – minutes at most. We become more impatient as our tolerance for waiting erodes. What use have we for the enigma posed by Eliot’s words in a culture where fewer and fewer things are considered worth the inconvenience of having to wait for them?

Yet, Advent is the season of waiting. We curtail its waiting as much as possible. Advent no sooner begins when Christmas overwhelms us. Every year, with Advent Sunday barely in the rear-view mirror, I’m asked by the staff – is it all right to put the Christmas trees up now? Because I’m thinking about the pressure to get things done in time for Christmas I say yes, but don’t switch on the lights until Advent 4. Of-course I realize my desire to preserve the prominence of the visuals of Advent is out of step with the culture – I mean I’ve had the Christmas tree up at home for weeks now.

Eliot used to famously – and to my mind somewhat disingenuously – deny any particular meaning to his words over and beyond the immediacy of their impact on the reader in the moment of reading. Who knows what Eliot intended with these words from East Coker – which incidentally is the name of a picturesque Somerset village? If he is to be believed, then he didn’t intend any particular meaning to be read into these lines – beyond what one critic referred to as his narcissistic gloom.

In a way Eliot has achieved his intention. Left to puzzle over the meaning – his words are still immediately impactful. I receive them deep in my gut as some kind of profound warning about the choices and the inevitable disappointments which usually accompany improbable hope; the folly of misplaced affection for things, causes, and people I love; faith misdirected as a defense against my need for unending denial.

At this point in the 21^st century, what is the state of our capacity for hope? We have become increasingly fearful of the future as we see the world unraveling around us. A consequence of the erosion of our capacity for waiting is we no longer think ahead. You see the point of waiting is preparation. Increasingly addicted to short-term thinking – as a society we satisfy the needs of today with short-term patches – seemingly without concern for tomorrow. We become increasingly uneasy at any prospect of a future – preferring to live in a state of self-sustaining denial of a future that becomes more and more a source of fear.

Our capacity to imagine and to dream now seems to be limited to the preservation of the status quo – as with fingers crossed our whistling in the dark becomes deafening. As evidenced by the recent message from COP23 and our general malaise concerning the realities of climate change – our hope is reduced to staving off the eventual reckoning for at least a little bit longer. The majority in the House crows loudly about border security but shows little interest in long term immigration reform. It dilly-dallies over funding for Ukraine oblivious to the future cost of facing down a Russian juggernaut should the defense of Ukraine fail. Politics is now the game of empty posture – of impeachment enquiries without the evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors. That old line about Nero fiddling while Rome burned comes to mind.

Our aversion to waiting focuses our attention exclusively on today so that in crucial areas of our public life we are failing to invest in the future. The future is tomorrow’s problem and we thank God we won’t live to see it. Our generation of decision makers – of world shapers – has become so self-preoccupied that they – and we because we put them there – no longer care about the world our children and their children are likely to inherit.

Proverbs 29:18 is a reminder that Where the vision fails, the people perish.

For us, hope remains a word out of place. It’s a word that conjures risk in a risk averse culture. Whatever hope might be – we console ourselves it’s certainly not practical. In our society hope is a word out of place because it beckons us to dream dreams and see visions of a better tomorrow. It summons us to the audacity of shattering the projections of impoverished imagination limited by utilitarian practicality.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope,
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith,
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Whatever Eliot intended or didn’t – his words are impactful – and therefore we are justified in finding our own meaning in them. I hear them as a warning that without the patience to wait – without a tolerance for surviving a delay between wanting and getting – without a capacity to await the objects of our hopes, to with patience nurture our loves, our faith will always be misplaced. When we no longer know how to wait, we deprive ourselves of time to reflect and to prepare. We seem to have forgotten the old adage that all good things come only to those who wait for them.

In the vision of Isaiah chapter 61 we hear God inviting us to dream moving beyond the poverty of only what can be imagined within imaginations limited by a lack of courage to have faith. God is inviting us to bind-up one another’s wounds and cease from wounding one another further. God is longing for us to liberate ourselves from being captive to the short-termism of our current addiction to self-interest and self-protection. God is calling us to rebuild the ruins of our civilization, to inhabit the spaces long forsaken; reminding us that no good end can be achieved through evil action; that no peace can be ensured without its foundation in justice.

Isaiah 61 comes from the prophet – the third of that name – who is addressing the returning exiles now freed by the emancipation edict of Cyrus the Great in 539 BC. The hope embodied in Trito-Isaiah’s words is of a new society in which healing, freedom, compassion, joyful celebration, repentance, and justice will mark the end of exile.

Of course, there is always a discrepancy between hope and reality. The difficulty of the task, the scarcity of resources, the animosity of the surrounding peoples towards the returning exiles engendered a society where the rich diverted the scarce resources away from the reconstruction of the Temple and the repair of the city wall in order to build fine houses for themselves. A culture of oppression of the poor and powerless by the rich and powerful quickly reestablished itself. We read of this painful situation described by the prophet Zechariah, Nehemiah, the governor entrusted with the rebuilding project, and Ezra, the scribe responsible for implementing the religious reforms that were the fruit of the pain of exile.

The hope to which Trito-Isaiah speaks is the hope of a future of expanded inclusion for all of humanity within the promises God had hitherto only made to Israel. The purpose of this vision of future hope was not that it be realized immediately, but that it would reset the compass settings in the direction of its ultimate fulfillment in the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus. It was a vision of hope that would come only through the process of waiting.

Hope is not only a dream for a future better than the past. It is that of course. But through the experience of waiting – we prepare – allowing for a future directed hope to resets our direction of travel in the present. Waiting is not a passive state of just hanging around. Waiting is a state in which we are actively engaged in a process of preparing for the future by action in the present. Our present-time action is guided and directed by the vision of that for which we hope.

Future hope comes through waiting – which is a state of actively preparing the conditions for hope’s fulfilment. But the important point here is to note that future hope guides by changing the compass settings - altering the direction of travel in the here and now. Therefore, the quality of the vision of that for which we hope matters. Misdirected hope – Eliot’s hope for the wrong thing – only sets us in a wrong direction of travel through decisions made or not made; opportunities grasped or missed in real time.

Between the realization of future hope and the present time lies the experience of waiting. Waiting is a process of preparing, reflecting and acting in the present – guided by future hope. In waiting we are already being changed by the hope we are still waiting for.

To paraphrase Eliot – true hope, real love, and effective faith come together only in the experience of waiting.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope,
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith,
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

December 16, 2023 0

For whom do we wait?

Advent is a time that refocuses us spiritually on the thorny experience of hope. While hope is a universal trait of the human spirit, its thorniness lies in the way hope raises both expectation and fear of disappointment.

I cannot reflect on hope and the nature of expectation without hearing the voice of my fatalistic grandmother saying don’t hope- never be disappointed. I think we all instinctively know what she means. To hope is to risk wanting – and wanting raises the possibility of disappointment. But my grandmother’s expression, while it captures our fear of risk, nonetheless misses the essential point about hope. Hope is not primarily – a picture of a longed-for future – realizable or not. Hope is the compass setting that establishes a direction of travel in the present.

Hope is the compass setting that establishes a direction of travel in the present.

You see, hope is not a future dream – although we often think of hope in this way. Hope is a vision for a desired future but the purpose of hoping is to reorient ourselves in the present through future expectation. Don’t hope -never be disappointed is not simply a protection against future disappointment. It’s a severe limitation on present time action and future possibility.

We are the ones we have been waiting for is a saying the origin of which has multiple attributions. We are the ones we have been waiting for is however the title of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize winning book in which she comments that:

We are the ones we have been waiting for because we live in an age in which we are able to see and understand our own predicament. With so much greater awareness than our ancestors – and with such capacity for insight, knowledge, and empathy – we are uniquely prepared to create positive change within ourselves and our world.

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for was a phrase that Barack Obama borrowed – not to indicate that he or his administration were necessarily the ones desperately awaited – but that present generations of our society have the potential to really change American society’s direction of travel towards an – as yet – unrealized future. At the everyday level of experience we know the truth of this as we live through the chaos and upheaval of a period of momentous change – the kind of change that beckons us towards a future that will be so much more than a repetition of our past.

The shape of our future hope is important but too much dreaming or foreboding about the the future is a distraction. The purpose of hope is not to inhabit the future before it emerges but to focus our attention on the quality of our present time actions – both those we boldly embrace and those we fail to take.

Don’t hope -never be disappointed is not simply a protection against future disappointment it’s a severe limitation on present time possibility. Hope is a lifetime’s work. Advent reminds us that hope also requires courage in a world that often – like my grandmother’s saying – plays up the risk of hope’s disappointment.

The book of Isaiah begins around 740 BCE with the figure known as 1st Isaiah (chapters 1-40). The book concludes with the prophecies of the 3rd Isaiah (chapters 56-66) over two centuries later after the ending of the Babylonian Exile in 515. The combined prophecies of 1st, 2nd (chapters 40-56), and 3rd Isaiah form the mainstay of Advent’s O.T. lessons. In chapter 25, appointed for the 3rd Sunday in Advent we hear 1st Isaiah’s words: Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God.

Where is our God? Our God is here! How do we know God is here? We know because the eyes of the blind shall be opened, the ears of the deaf unstopped; the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy. Isaiah’s hope is ambiguous with regard to time. His use of –shall– is suggestive of future events – but events determined by actions in present time.

If our Advent hope causes us to raise our eyes heavenwards waiting for future divine rescue from the mess we are making of the world – we will miss Advent hope as a present time statement that God is already here – among us – journeying alongside us through the turbulence of the present time.

The Gospels ascribe a prophetic quality of premonition to John the Baptist because we prefer to view prophets as visionaries of future time. But the prophet speaks first and foremost into present time – no matter how future oriented his words. As we all know, the present time fear of disappointment plays havoc with our expectations. And so we see in Matthew 11 that even the legendary John the Baptist is subject to the fear of disappointed expectation. John – languishing in Herod’s prison – has become anxious because Jesus seems not to be fulfilling his expectations. The doubt arises in his mind – maybe he’d got it wrong and Jesus is not the promised one – afterall. So he sends his disciples to enquire of Jesus – are you the one or are we to wait for another?

Jesus quotes Isaiah 25 back to John telling John’s disciples to go tell him what you hear and see! The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear – and just to up the ante he adds – the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. Here the point not to be missed is that Jesus takes Isaiah’s words – couched as future hope – and renders them a description of present time reality.

The point of future hope lies in the beginning of its realization in the present.

We are the ones we have been waiting for focuses our attention firmly on the present time in which hope is not a future dream but a present-time activity. Of course, there is a hidden irony here. Our usual Advent question: what are we waiting for and why are we still waiting? – is not perhaps the question after all.

The great 20^th-century theologian Paul Tillich wrote:

The power of that for which we wait is already effective within us. Those who wait in an ultimate sense are not that far from that for which they wait.

On the 3rd Sunday in Advent – what are we waiting for becomes who are we waiting for? Allowing for an appropriate sense of humility, if we are not to be the ones we have been waiting for – then who will be?

December 10, 2022 0

Faith is a ‘doing word’, silly

London Bridge is down – the code that acknowledges to the British Nation, the Commonwealth, and the world the death of Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand and her other realms and territories; head of the British Commonwealth of Nations, an organization of 56 sovereign states with a population of 2.4 billion people, among which 16 continue to acknowledge her as head of state.

The Queen is dead, long live the king! Elizabeth of gracious memory – her death sets in motion the constitutional processes ensuring the peaceful transition to her successor, now King Charles III. His is destined to be a significant reign – during which the style and appearance of the Monarchy will continue to evolve. The emotionally charged late Queen’s legacy must now be carried forward. We pray for King Charles III and Camilla, his Queen Consort, as they assume the burden of the monarchy at a point of significant uncertainty for the United Kingdom in an increasingly unstable world.

I have the good fortune to hold three passports – two of which request and require in the name of Her Majesty all whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary. I have been surprised by a sense of deep sadness following the death of the late Queen. Surprised in that sense of awakening to a loss akin to the loss of a grandparent – someone I may not have paid that much personal attention to while alive, somehow taking for granted they would always be there.

The death of Elizabeth II is an event of global significance because for so many around the world she embodied the values that have passed from most people’s experience of public life. The global coverage of her death and the colorful rituals of the accession of Charles III, remind us of our longing for stability and continuity, color and dignity. The medieval rituals proclaiming the new king by Garter Knights dressed in costumes that could have jumped from a deck of playing cards has not been seen for 70 years and now is for the first time seen by millions around the world. Yet, behind all the pomp the new king’s commitment to diligent service in public life commends itself to us all.

Today is also Homecoming Sunday at St Martin’s. When I first arrived in the parish Homecoming was marked by the production of a ministry prospectus and the excitement of a new cycle in the parish’s life. It’s interesting to reflect on how much has changed in 7 years. Yet, although clearly different now, Homecoming in 2022, marks what I hope will signify a full return to in person interactional parish life – though as a learning from the pandemic period I will continue to plug for as many Vestry meetings as possible to continue via Zoom (joke).

It’s always surprising to me how the three-year lectionary cycle uncannily reflects the themes and needs of the day. This year on Homecoming we read from Luke 15:1-10 with its linked parables of finding the lost. Fortunately, the gospel passage ends at v 15 thus excluding the parable of the prodigal son. This is a parable that deserves a separate occasion of its own.

Seeking the lost is for me a significant theme in contemporary church life. It reminds me that so much of our efforts now focus on preventing what remains from being further lost that we have little energy for searching out and restoring the lost. But having said that – there arises a question: what exactly do we think of as being lost? As we face a general demographic decline of institutional church going – no less so here at St Martin’s than more generally across the board, it’s tempting to envisage the loss of a remembered golden age of post war church going. The thing about memory however is the past is always selectively recalled –skewed and filtered through the anxieties of the present moment.

In this past week’s E-News, I endeavored, limited by space and reader’s attention span to articulate what can seem a rather complex connection between faith – as a present time action, and hope – as future expectation. Both impact upon each other, but what is often missed is the impact of the expectations of our future hope upon our current practice of faith – faith defined not as assent to propositions of belief, but as present time action. Alice Miller, the 20^th-century psychoanalyst, and pioneer in the area of child abuse commented that we already are who we have been waiting for. Future hope is already here, present and embedded in our practice of faith as present time action.

Is our St Martin’s community growing or declining in numbers? I personally see evidence that St Martin’s numbers are holding steady. We evoke increasing curiosity among those whose first contact with church is now online. For many we may for the time being remain an online presence in their lives, yet new people are now showing up on Sunday mornings. Worship – once the barometer for a sense of numbers is no longer a reliable reflection due to changing social patterns of Sunday attendance among the membership. For me its less a matter of actual numbers and more one of inconsistent participation that remains an issue – but this is an issue better left to next week on Ministry Sunday.

On Homecoming I would like to suggest to us all that what has been lost is our confidence in faith as present time action. We’ve come to misperceive faith as about assent to statements about God. Thus faith becomes something we possess or don’t, something we accept of reject. By contrast faith is actually action, its what compels us to act. What we’ve lost is the confidence of faith as present time action – capable of actually making a difference in the world. This is faith as lived commitment as collaborators in the coming of the kingdom into a world so sorely in need of a reordering of priorities. The gospel message of seeking the lost is for me in this instance about the confidence to embody our faith at the everyday level of life – through the power of present time action.

As Episcopalians we often rebuke ourselves for our comfortable complacency. We are very happy with God, and we don’t expect God to make too many demands of us. This is an attitude that dilutes the energy of faith in us. The energy of faith lies in the belief that what we do here and now can and is building a future world for our children and their children that will be better than the one we inherited. The expectation of hope empowers our present practice of faith, while our crisis of confidence or lack of courage to hope weakens our belief in ourselves as the instruments of the change we long to see.

Faith as present time action involves cultivating a much-overlooked human quality – diligence. The parable of the lost coin is a story about the diligence of the woman who turns her house upside down in what amounts to the spring-clean of spring-cleans in search for her lost coin. She never doubted she would find it and on finding it shares the joy of its recovery with all her family and neighbors. The practice of faith may be personal but it is never private. The practice of faith is always social.

Diligence is the quality of focus on the task at hand. It requires of us confidence and consistency of effort. Diligence requires a persistent attention of body, mind, and heart – and in my experience, is a key quality often most displayed by women. In the masculine sphere of heroic action, diligence is easily eclipsed. Diligence has a quiet quality – its practice goes largely unnoticed. Diligence involves an attention to the details of relationship. It is a taking care in ordinary everyday circumstances. Diligence is a gentle competence in ordinary things. It’s an unsung characteristic of discipleship.

None of us needs reminding that in our media-driven world where news is now entertainment, diligence is not sexy, it is not sound bite-friendly. It mostly goes unappreciated in the clashing and discordant cacophony of the politics of bread and circuses. Diligence in public service and private life is no longer a quality our politicians aspire to – preferring instead the peacock display of self-serving egotism. Success is no longer measured by what is achieved but on the size of one’s twitter following.

I think so many of us mourn the late Queen’s death because although we may not have been able to put a name on it -for 70 years she has consistently embodied the quality of diligence. For her diligence was an essential attribute of her Christian discipleship – expressed through an unstinting devotion in the service of her people. Over 70 years of service it’s been estimated that The late Queen met and shook hands with the equivalent of a third of the UK population.

Through faith as present time action we set the direction of travel towards the future. The expectations of hope in turn strengthen our confidence in faith as present time action. The energy of longing expressed in our hope as future expectation flows backwards through the channel of faith -shifting and reshaping our perspectives and actions in the present. The future is still to come and yet the future does not wait. If we already are who we have been waiting for then the future is already here in the confidence of our faith and the quality of our diligence. Whatever we long for the future to bring, the future always begins now!

On this Homecoming Sunday we give heartfelt thanks for our St Martin’s community, reminding ourselves that we are a community renewing our confidence in faith as something that can move mountains – but perhaps only one stone at a time – which requires the quiet ways of unsung diligence – the gentle competence in ordinary things. Nevertheless our task at hand is to continue to work tirelessly to build up our common life. To proclaim the causes of peace and universal justice – which in our present state of climate crisis begins with championing environmental justice at home and abroad. On Homecoming we remember that it is only together that we can achieve more than anyone of us alone . We rededicate to God anew, our time, our talents, and our treasure. God of renewal – Hear us.

September 10, 2022 1

Dreaming Good News is Hoping and Loving in the Waiting

Measuring time

The birth of Christ is for us, the pivotal point of history. Western Civilization calibrates time according to whether events happen before or after the birth of Christ. The centuries before Christ count forward or actually backward as it were, to the year 0. The centuries following Christ’s birth count forward from 0 onward.

The designations BC -before Christ and AD anno domini – after Christ have been replaced by the neutral designations BCE and CE referring to either before or during the common era. Yet, despite the attempt to decrease the prominence of a Christo-centric view of time, the neutral designations, nevertheless still paradoxically, affirm the significance of the birth of Christ. In ways most of us are hardly aware of anymore, the birth of Christ remains the defining moment that continues to shape our sense of the flow of history.

Last week I introduced a concept I’ve named the trans-generational vision. This is the central vision that punctuates the passage of time. The trans-generational vision weaves in and out of the flow of history, surfacing before submerging only to resurface again centuries later. The Holy Scriptures are the textual record of this process – a process of tracking the movements of the Spirit of God weaving in and out of human history.

The book of the prophet Isaiah

The Book of the Prophet Isaiah operates like a fractal for the trans-generational vision. Wikipedia defines a fractal as a natural phenomenon or a mathematical set that exhibits a repeating pattern that displays at every scale. Snowflakes are a common example of fractals with every part of the crystal being a complete mirror image of the whole.

The Book of Isaiah falls into three distinct historical epochs spanning around 350 years. The voice of the prophet we call Isaiah is, therefore, three distinct voices. We divide the book into that of First Isaiah – chapters 1 to 39, Second Isaiah – chapters 40 to 55, and Third Isaiah comprising chapters 56 to 66. Each of these three voices is the articulation of the trans-generational vision surfacing in the midst of three distinct periods of crisis in history of Israel, namely:

The invasion of the Northern Kingdom and destruction of its capital Samaria with the permanent deportation of the king, nobles and priesthood in 722-21 by Assyrian King, Sennacherib. In this period the First Isaiah foretells of the birth of the messiah in the person of a child, born to a maiden, a child who will usher in a reign of unparalleled peace and prosperity for Israel.
The destruction of the Southern Kingdom of Judah and Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon in 586 with the deportation of King, priests and nobles into a 50 year exile in Babylon. Second Isaiah gives voice to this calamity in a messianic figure of the Suffering Servant, who announces the coming of the Kingdom of God through his taking upon himself the sin and suffering of the people.
The freeing of the exiles by Cyrus, King of Persia in 515 and their return to rebuild Jerusalem in the period following 515 forms the period focus for chapter 61 appointed for Advent III. Here the figure of the messiah – promised one, announces himself as the one upon whom the Spirit of God rests in order to announce good news to the people.

The return of the exiles began as a period of hope and rejoicing after the 50 years in exile. The exhilaration of the returning exiles for whom God was forging a road through the desert, leveling the high places low and the terra-forming of the rough places into a plain, was an exhilaration at the prospect of rebuilding the Solomon’s Temple. Yet, the difficulty of the task, the scarcity of resources, the animosity of the surrounding peoples towards the returning exiles engendered a society where the rich diverted the scarce resources away from the reconstruction of the Temple in order to build fine houses for themselves. A culture of oppression of the poor and powerless by the rich and powerful quickly reestablished itself. We read of this situation painfully described by the prophets Zechariah, Nehemiah, and Esra. It is in judgment of this situation against which the Third Isaiah raises his prophetic voice.

The first Christians, in the years that followed the death of Jesus and his resurrection as the Christ, looked back and perceived the trans-generational vision of Isaiah resurfacing again in the person of Jesus. For generations of Christians who followed the figures of the child Eman-uel, the Suffering Servant whose visage is so disfigured by his having taken our transgressions upon himself, and the figure of the anointed one who brings good news to the poor are consequently, very familiar. For most of us, we know them so well because they were so powerfully memorialized by Handel in his great oratorio: The Messiah.

In the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke, Jesus is the child Eman-uel born to the maiden Mary. In his Passion and Crucifixion, Jesus becomes the embodiment of Isaiah’s Suffering Servant who dies as a sacrificial expression of God’s great love for the world. Jesus’ offers his first public self-definition when in the synagogue at Nazareth he proclaims his identification with the figure of the anointed one who brings good news to those oppressed, healing to those of us with broken hearts, liberty to we who are held captive, and the arrival for all of the year of the Lord’s favor – the year of Jubilee.

A word out of place

Another way of thinking about the trans-generational vision is to be reminded that it is the intrusion into temporal time of a word out of place. By this I mean that a word out of place is a dream not simply of the improbable, but of the seemingly impossible. This for me is the chief characteristic of the trans-generational vision. It is always a vision that seems to be fantastical within the context of its emergence.

As we move into the second decade of the 21^st century, what do we as a culture dream about? We have become increasingly fearful of the future as we see the culture unraveling in the present. A trend I find disturbing is our addiction to short-term thinking and grasping at short-term solutions that satisfy needs today and simply reinforce that the future us something to be afraid of. Our capacity to dream seems now to be limited to the preservation of self-interest, both individual and community self-interest, in the present. In nearly every area of our public life, we are failing to invest today in a future that we won’t live to see. Have we become so self-preoccupied that we no longer care about the world our children and their children are likely to inherit?

Blame obfuscating shame

Republicans blame Democrats and vice versa. Independents blame both parties. Yet all of us keep returning politicians to office on the most spurious, fear mongering, and short term of visions. Surely, the aspirations behind our political allegiances stand for more than this? Is not our location on the political continuum an indication that we yearn for a deeper vision for the future than the one we see being fulfilled in our present? We now prefer the blame game when acknowledging our shame might be a more healthy response.

At the moment, we seem to be capable only of dreaming of a future that is worse than the present. Yet, the message of the trans-generational spiritual vision reminds us that solutions to the problems of today lie in our courage to dream of a better tomorrow. Such dreaming defies our sense of the limitation that pervades our collective mood. Such dreaming should startle us by the extent to which it is a word out of place.

We recognize a faith-driven trans-generational vision by its fantastical nature. What seems fantastical is only the audacity to break away from the projections of a future limited by the present consideration of the sensible, probable or possible.

Proclaiming good news

In the vision in Isaiah 61 of the good news God is offering us more than a political manifesto for social action, although such is badly needed. God is inviting us to dream of moving beyond the poverty of only what can be imagined within imaginations limited by a lack of courage to dream. God is inviting us to bind-up one another’s wounds and cease from wounding one another further. God is longing for us to liberate ourselves from being captive to the short-termism of our current addiction to self-interest and self-protection.

The trans-generational vision resurfaces in times of deep despair and fear. We are living through such a time! Advent is the time to renew our commitment to furthering in the present the dream of the future. Advent is a time of waiting. Over the last two weeks, I have been reminding my hearers and readers that we become that which we long and hope for. We are already those for whom we wait.

To paraphrase T.S. Eliot’s words from his poem East Coker:

to hope is invariably to hope for the wrong thing; to love is to want to love the wrong thing, but there is faith, and faith is the hoping and the longing in the waiting!

December 13, 2014 0