Month: December 2025

The Light by Which We See

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

Sermon for Christmas Eve, Year A.

The text is John 1:1-14

I have a small confession to make:

I am not very good at returning text messages.
Or emails.
Or remembering meetings I genuinely meant to remember.

I see a message come in, I think, I’ll get back to that, and then life happens—another email, another conversation, another thing that needs attention—and suddenly it’s two days later and I’m apologizing.

It’s not because I don’t care.
It’s usually because I’m trying to care about too many things at once.

Some days my mind feels like an internet browser—nineteen tabs open, three of them frozen, and I have no idea where the music is coming from.

And living like that can feel exhausting—like I’m always moving, always trying to keep things from dropping.

When life feels like that, God can start to feel like just one more thing to manage—one more idea to keep track of—rather than a presence we actually encounter.

And I don’t think it’s just me that feels that way.

Most of us know what that scattered feeling is like—not because we don’t care, but because we’re trying to care about too many things at once.

We live in a world that keeps asking for our attention, and it doesn’t often slow down enough for us to catch our breath.

So we miss things, forget things, and drop balls without meaning to.

And over time, that constant commotion can start to wear us down.

We arrive at nights like this—Christmas Eve—exhausted. Looking for something meaningful and hopeful, but not always sure where to look anymore.

And when life feels fragmented like that, God can begin to feel distant—
not absent, exactly, but more like an abstract idea.

Something we talk about, or remember from another season of life, rather than something alive and near.

Underneath the candles and the carols, there’s a quiet question many of us carry:

Is there anything that truly holds all of this together?
And does it still have room for me?

Tonight’s Gospel has an answer for those questions.

John doesn’t begin his Christmas story with a baby in a manger. He begins with a claim about reality itself.

“In the beginning,” he says, “was the Word.”

Before anything existed—before stars or stories or people—there was a deep coherence to the universe.
A living wisdom.
A pattern that held everything together.
John calls it the Word.
The Greek term is Logos.

And what’s striking is that John doesn’t describe this Word as something we can point to or look at directly. Instead, he talks about it the way we talk about light.

We don’t actually see light itself.
We see by it.

Light makes everything else visible. Without it, the world dissolves into darkness—not because things stop existing, but because we can no longer perceive them.

John says God is like that.

Not one more object in the universe, not a thing alongside other things, but the light by which everything else becomes visible.

The same is true of the deep order of the cosmos.
We don’t see it directly either.
But we see its effects everywhere—
in galaxies and nebulae, in atoms and molecules, in the astonishing emergence of life itself.

Reality is not random noise.
It has structure.
It has pattern.

And John dares to say that this coherence, this life-giving order, this light—is not distant from God.

It is God’s own life at work in the world.

Which makes what John says next so startling:

“The Word became flesh and lived among us.”

Every religious tradition has its own way of speaking about how the sacred meets the world. Some find God through sacred texts. Some through law, or wisdom, or prayer, or practice.

What is distinctive about Christianity is not that we claim more of God—but that we claim God met us in a person.

Not finally as an idea to master, but as a life to encounter.

The light that makes all things visible did not stay abstract. The wisdom that shaped the universe did not remain distant.

It took on flesh.
It moved into our neighborhood.
It became a human life.

And because of that, Jesus is not where we stop looking for God—it’s where we start.

Jesus becomes the lens, not the limit.

In him, we see what divine life looks like when it is lived in human form—in compassion and courage, in mercy and truth, in love given freely.

And once we have seen that light in Jesus, we begin to recognize it everywhere else.

The world itself becomes sacramental—charged with presence, thick with meaning, alive with grace.

Which is why the miracle of Christmas is not that God once came to visit us.

It’s that God, in Christ, showed the world what it always had the capacity to be.

As we learn to look at the world through the lens of Jesus, the clutter and commotion of life’s busyness begin to fade into the background, and what truly matters becomes clearer.

I saw that kind of shift happen in real time just this past week.

Debi Wright—who has graciously given me permission to share this—stopped by the church on a Friday afternoon to take care of something quick in the kitchen.

At least, that was the plan.

We met in the hallway, exchanged a few words, and she asked me to pray for her father-in-law, who was nearing the end of his life.

And so we sat down.
And we talked for a while.

I won’t share any details about that conversation—that’s private. What I will say is that it was an honor to sit with her as she paused, paid attention to what she was carrying, and noticed where God was meeting her in the middle of it.

There was nothing to fix.
No answers to offer.
Just presence.

When the conversation ended, Debi said how meaningful it had been. And I joked that sometimes God makes my schedule for me.

But afterward, I realized something:
That moment wasn’t a disruption of my day. It was the whole point of my day.

That’s what John is pointing to in tonight’s Gospel.

God doesn’t come to us as one more thing to manage, or another responsibility to juggle.

God comes to us in flesh—in human lives, in moments of attention, in presence we didn’t plan for.

And what that is slowly teaching me is that faith may not be about doing more or holding everything together, but about learning how to notice where—and when—the light is already shining.

So this is where Christmas leaves us.

Not with another task to complete, or one more thing to add to already full lives, but with an invitation to see things in a new way.

Because God came to us in flesh, we come to expect God in the flesh of this world—in one another, in ordinary moments, in lives that are fragile, complicated, and real.

Christmas trains our eyes.

It teaches us not simply to look for the light, but to look through it—not only in carols and candles, but in conversations we didn’t plan for, in moments of deep presence, in love that shows up quietly and refuses to leave—even when it interrupts our plans.

So as we leave this place tonight—as we step back into busy lives and open calendars—we go trusting that the light John speaks of is still shining in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

The light of Christ shines not just in heaven, but here.
Within us.
Among us.
And even through us.

May we learn to notice that light this Christmas, and follow where it leads us in the coming year.

Amen?

Showing Up When You Can’t Take Control

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon1 Comment

Sermon for the fourth Sunday of Advent, Year A.

The text is Matthew 1:18-25.

When my wife and I were in seminary, there was this Chinese restaurant that we liked to eat at. And at this restaurant, there was this spicy peanut noodle soup that I absolutely adored. But of course, we couldn’t eat there all the time because we were a couple of broke seminary students. So I decided, I’m going to try to figure out how to make this at home.

So I looked up some recipes, bought some ingredients, and decided I was just going to try and wing it. We had the noodles and the vegetables, of course. But the real kicker was chili oil, milk, and peanut butter. That’s how you got that nice sauce.

So, I was putting it all together and I thought to myself, “The peanut flavor in that soup was pretty strong, and this doesn’t seem like a lot of peanut butter. I better add some more to be safe.” So I did.

But what I ended up with was not so much soup as soggy clumps of peanut butter laced with noodles. And of course, it was completely inedible.

I got myself in over my head. And I learned that day that enthusiasm cannot make up for the fact that I have no idea what I’m doing.

It’s funny when the stakes are low.
It’s harder when they’re not.

Sometimes in life, we get in over our heads with something that really matters, and still, we have no idea what we’re doing. We care, but we’re clueless.

Most painful of all are those times when we get in over our heads with something that’s happening to someone we love, and we have no control over the outcome. We want to step in, help out, take charge, and fix it. We figure if we’re smart enough, committed enough—if we just love them enough—we can manage the outcome and stop the situation from getting messy.

But real life doesn’t work that way. Other people’s lives are not problems to be solved, no matter how much we love them. We can’t control who they are, what they go through, or how their story ends. It’s their life. They have to live it—even if we’re pretty sure we could do a better job living it for them.

All we can really do is show up and stand with them while they go through it. And that gap—that gaping chasm between love and control—is one of the most uncomfortable places a human being can stand.

And it’s exactly where St. Joseph is standing in today’s Gospel.

The story begins with our buddy Joe finding out that his fiancée, Mary, is pregnant. And for reasons that were probably explained to you in biology class, Joe is pretty sure that he is not the father. So, what’s a guy supposed to do in a situation like that?

The text of Scripture tells us that Joseph was a righteous man. And that’s important. He’s not reckless, cruel, or indifferent. He’s just a guy trying to do the right thing in a situation that he didn’t choose and doesn’t understand.

He’s caught between the competing goods of compassion and law, love and responsibility, mercy and obligation. He’s hit the limit of what he can manage. And it’s there, in the stunned silence of that moment, that God finally gives him the answer he’s looking for.

It’s not a full explanation or a long-term strategy, or even a promise that everything’s going to work out okay. What it is is something much quieter and more grounding.

The first thing Joe hears is his name: “Joseph, son of David.” Before he’s told what to do, he’s reminded who he is. Identity before instruction.

Joe is reminded that he’s not just some working-class bumpkin. He’s the descendant of kings. In modern language, we might render “Joseph, son of David” as “Joe Davidson.” And we can imagine his dad saying to him, “Hey, Joe. Buck up there, kiddo. I know you’ll figure this out, because you’re no chump. You’re a Davidson. And I believe in you.”

We all need to hear that sometimes.

The second thing the angel does for Joe is name what he’s feeling. The angel says, “Do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife.” And that’s important too.

So often, in the midst of a crisis, it’s easy to get caught up in what’s happening on the outside and forget to pay attention to what’s happening on the inside. The problem is, when we do that, we’re still being controlled by our emotions—it’s just happening unconsciously. So we’re just reacting.

The better way is to pause, take a breath, and pay attention to what’s happening inside, so we can choose to respond from our deepest morals and values rather than just reacting emotionally. We have to be aware of our emotions before we can do that.

And that’s what the angel does for Joseph. He’s not shaming it. He’s just naming it. “Joe, you’re afraid. Anybody would be in your shoes. But now that you know that, you don’t have to let it control you.”

Fear is not failure. It’s just a part of life. But if you can stay aware of it, Joe, you can stay awake and stay present with yourself and with Mary, because she needs you right now. She doesn’t need you to fix it. She needs you to show up and listen and stay engaged with her while this important thing that God is doing is still working itself out in her life.

Joe, that’s your job. That’s your role in all this. Don’t try to manage the mystery. Just stay present to it. Because what’s coming to birth through her is nothing less than Emmanuel, which is Hebrew for “God is with us.”

And that’s true. God is with us—here and now. Not after everything makes sense. Not after the crisis has passed. Not after the fear goes away, but right here and right now. In the mess. In the uncertainty.

Later on, when Joe woke up from the dream where all this happened, he woke up to a world where nothing had changed—and yet, everything had changed. The future was still unclear. The risk was still real. And poor old Joe still didn’t have the answer to the big questions.

But what he did have was the next step. The choice to relinquish control over the story and just show up in it instead.

And that kind of faithfulness is not the kind of thing you can learn overnight. It takes a lifetime.

For me personally, the place where I’ve had to learn that lesson over and over again is with my family, and especially my kids. They say that parenting doesn’t come with an instruction manual, and boy, they’re right.

Just when I think I’ve got one stage of my kids’ lives figured out, they go ahead and move on to the next one, where once again I find out that I have no idea what I’m doing.

The first time it hit me, I was standing in a hospital parking lot the day after my first child was born, and my task was to install a car seat for the first time. It hit me that I was now responsible for the life of another human being, and I was in way over my head.

I understand when people say they don’t feel ready to have kids, because the truth is, you’re never ready. You just take it as it comes and do the best you can. So I wedged my knee into that hard plastic, yanked the seatbelt through the loops, and did what I guess was an okay job—because we made it home from the hospital in one piece.

It was the first time, but certainly not the last time, that I felt that sense of panic.

As time went on and the kids grew up, we dealt with new challenges as they came to us—homework, friendships, drama, dating, breakups. Each stage of life offered something new that my wife and I were not prepared for. Our responsibility kept increasing, and our certainty never quite caught up.

This week, that same child for whom I installed the car seat told us that what he wants to do over his Christmas break is take a day trip to Chicago by himself. He showed us his plan of where he wants to go and what he wants to do. He’s got all the train schedules and the phone numbers. He’s ready, but his mother and I are not. And yet, we are taking that leap of faith anyway.

What faithfulness often looks like in real time is not confidence or control, but the choice to stand alongside a life that is unfolding at its own pace and in its own way. It takes courage. And I’ll let you know how it goes, because I don’t know yet.

Earlier this week, many of us read about another act of courage and faithfulness that took place during the massacre at Bondi Beach, Australia, where several of our Jewish neighbors had gathered to celebrate the first night of Hanukkah. In the midst of the carnage, a Muslim man named Ahmed al-Ahmed, “in the name of conscience and humanity,” ran toward the shooter and wrestled the gun away from him, taking five bullets in the process.

He did it to protect people of a different faith and culture from his own—people he didn’t even know. And in so doing, Ahmed al-Ahmed demonstrated to the rest of us that the faith of Joseph is still alive in the world today: the courage not of control, but of presence; the courage to step toward life even when the outcome is unclear.

That kind of courage is real, and it is still available to us today.

Kindred in Christ, there are moments in life when all of us are asked to stand alongside people we love in situations we cannot control.

Where is that happening for you today?

How are you being asked to protect without possessing, to care without controlling?

Where might faithfulness look less like fixing and more like staying?

Joseph shows us how faithfulness sometimes means showing up when walking away would be much easier and much safer. Joseph shows us how courage sometimes means staying engaged when we cannot manage the outcome of events.

That is the courage and the faith that St. Joseph holds before us in today’s Gospel.

May we also have the grace to recognize that courage when it is asked of us, trusting that God is with us even when the way forward is not yet clear.

Amen?

Tripping over Jesus

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

Sermon Advent 3 A 2025
Advent 3, Year A

Text: Matthew 11:2–11

People sometimes ask me, “What’s a typical day for a priest?”
And I usually say, “As soon as I have one, I’ll tell you.”

It gets a laugh—but underneath it is something more honest than funny. Most of us assume that if we plan carefully enough, if we follow the right steps, life will eventually settle into something predictable that we can wrap our minds around.

And then it doesn’t.

Occasionally, things fall apart all at once, but more often they just stop lining up the way we thought they would. The plan works—until it doesn’t. The explanation helps—until it doesn’t.

It seems that by now things should be clearer, that faith would feel steadier, that doing the right things would eventually lead to a sense of arrival.

Instead, it feels slower. More complicated. Less certain. And sometimes the hardest part isn’t the pain itself. It’s the disorientation—the sense that the maps we were given no longer match the terrain beneath our feet.

That’s not a failure of faith. That’s simply what happens when life refuses to fit our expectations.

Which is exactly where today’s Gospel begins.

John the Baptist sends word to Jesus from prison. And that detail matters. John is not asking this question from a place of comfort or curiosity. He is asking it from confinement, from danger, from a situation that has already gone very wrong.

“Are you the one who is to come,” he asks, “or are we to wait for another?”

This is not the question of a weak believer. This is the question of a faithful prophet whose expectations have been stretched to their breaking point. John has done everything right. He has prepared the way. He has spoken truth to power. He has named injustice. And now he is sitting in a cell, waiting.

John expected the Messiah to bring urgency. Fire. Judgment. A turning of the tables. What he gets instead is something much gentler.

Jesus doesn’t say yes. He doesn’t say no. He doesn’t explain why John is still in prison. He simply says, “Go and tell John what you hear and see.”

Look.
Pay attention.
Notice what is happening.

And then Jesus adds a blessing:
“Blessed is anyone who does not stumble because of me.”

The word translated stumble means to be tripped up—to lose your footing. And in this story, what trips people up is that Jesus does not match what they were expecting.

That’s not an explanation.
It’s not a justification.
It’s not a promise that things will turn out differently.

It’s simply an acknowledgment that what Jesus is doing will unsettle people—that his way of being Messiah will not line up with their categories—and that some will walk away because of it.

And yet, Jesus names blessing here—not for those who understand, not for those who can make sense of it all, but for those who do not turn away.

Notice what Jesus does not do. He does not rescue John. He does not clarify the timeline. He does not explain the suffering. John remains in prison. The empire does not fall. The story does not resolve.

What Jesus offers instead is a larger horizon. A deeper reality. A God who is present—but not in the ways John expected.

That’s the promise buried inside this strange exchange. The mismatch is not a failure. It’s a revelation. It reveals that reality is larger than the boxes we build for it. That God is larger than the categories we carry. That faith sometimes matures not through clarity, but through disorientation.

And if I’m honest, this is where the text presses closest to home.

I’m learning—slowly, and not without resistance—that some of the most important moments of faith are the ones where the old frameworks stop working. Where the explanations that once brought comfort start to feel thin. Where the answers I memorized don’t quite reach the questions I’m living now.

My faith hasn’t gone away,
but it no longer fits into the box where I used to keep it.

What I’m losing is the version of faith that promises things will go right if I get things right. And that loss matters.

I’ve realized over time that I’m much more familiar with Advent than with Christmas—with waiting in the cold and the dark, trusting that God is present, even though that presence doesn’t look the way I expect.

That’s been unsettling.
But it’s also been honest.

And I suspect I’m not alone in that.

So this is the courage Advent asks of us.

Advent becomes the courage to let our boxes break open, to let our faith deepen, mature, awaken—not toward easy answers, but toward deeper participation in reality, even when that reality unsettles us.

Staying awake looks like resisting the urge to label uncertainty as failure.

It looks like refusing to rush past questions that don’t yet have answers. Like remaining present to lives and stories that are still unfinished.

Advent doesn’t ask us to stop hoping. It asks us to hope without insisting that reality conform to our expectations.

John never gets an answer that explains his suffering. He gets a blessing—and a larger horizon.

He remains in prison.
The empire does not fall.
The story does not resolve.

And still, Jesus says,
“Blessed are those who do not stumble because of me.”

Not blessed are those who understand.
Not blessed are those who are certain.
But blessed are those who stay awake to a reality larger than their expectations.

That may be all the blessing Advent gives us.
And it may be enough.

Amen.

The Winnowing Wind

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

Sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent, Year A

Click here to read the biblical passages.

So, we are now into that time of year when everybody hunkers down to watch their favorite holiday movies. Some people like It’s a Wonderful Life. Some people like the Hallmark Channel, but I only count that one as one movie because they all have the same plot. (No offense, I’m just preaching the truth.) Some people like Die Hard with Bruce Willis. Instead of deck the halls, he likes to deck the terrorists. But for me personally, there can be only one. And it’s The Muppet Christmas Carol. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. Because not only is it absolutely hilarious because of the Muppets, but Michael Caine, as Ebenezer or Scrooge, is just (*) chef’s kiss perfection. And finally, it’s actually one of the more faithful renditions of the classic novel by Charles Dickens. Most of us know the story already. Ebenezer Scrooge is a grouchy old miser, who gets visited by three spirits on Christmas Eve. The ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future. And through these visits, Ebenezer comes to a greater understanding of himself in order to make some necessary changes in his life. It’s a story about personal transformation, and that’s the exact same theme we find in today’s gospel.

The passage focuses on the ministry of St. John the Baptist, and as you may know, John could be more than a little intense, like camping. He walks in screaming,

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near,”

calling people names, and talking about pitchforks and unquenchable fire. That’s why he’s called John the Baptist (because if he was John the Episcopalian, he would have been much more polite about the whole thing). But he wasn’t polite. He was a prophet. And the message that God spoke through this prophet was a pretty direct one.

I think it might help if we were to unpack that message just a little bit. So, first of all, we hear that word repent, which makes a lot of us think about those angry preachers we see screaming and waving a Bible around on TV. We think that to repent means to feel guilty or ashamed, but that’s not actually what it means. In Greek, the word is metanoia, coming from meta, meaning “change,” and noia, meaning “mind.”

So in the language in which the New Testament was written, the word repent actually means, “to change your mind.” Anybody here ever change your mind about something? It happens.

It makes sense to change your mind when you get new information. The poet Maya Angelo said it beautifully,

“Do the best you can until you know better. And then, when you know better, do better.”

That’s what repent means. It’s not easy, but it also has nothing to do with guilt or shame. And that’s the core of John the Baptist’s prophetic message.

He tells people to

“bear fruit worthy of repentance.”

This has to do with how they live their lives. This is what Maya Angelou was talking about: “When you know better, do better.” No need to wallow and shame. Just learn from your mistakes.

After that, John starts to get really deep, but we miss what he’s saying if we get stuck on that idea of punishment and shame. John says,

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

Okay. I want you to remember those words: “Holy Spirit and fire.” They’re important. Specifically, I want you to remember that the Greek word for spirit is the same word they use for wind. So what John just said to the people is that the one coming after him (that’s Jesus) will baptize them with sacred wind and fire. I know that sounds weird, but stay with me because it’s about to become important.

John says,

“his winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

Couple of unfamiliar terms in that sentence. They are agricultural terms, and I’ll deal with them in reverse order. First for us, and second for John, is the term chaff.

Chaff is a part of the wheat plant. It’s a kind of husk that protects the grain while it’s still growing on the stalk. It’s very important, because without it, the grain would be vulnerable to predators and the elements. So the chaff isn’t bad, it’s necessary.

The only problem is that it’s not very tasty or nutritious. So, if you want to harvest that wheat and bake bread, you have to get rid of the chaff first. That’s where winnowing comes in.

Winnowing is another agricultural term. After the farmers would harvest the wheat, they would heat it up over a fire, which would crack open the husks that surrounded and protected the grain. And then the farmers would take their winnowing forks and sift the wheat by tossing it up into the air, letting the wind blow the tough husks away and allowing the delicious and nutritious grain to fall back to the earth, where it could then be collected into baskets, and later baked into bread.

So, the thing to remember about chaff is that it’s the part of the plant that protects the grain while it’s still growing, but no longer serves the purpose of what the grain is meant to become. That’s the winnowing process, if we’re talking about wheat, and it’s also the repentance process if we’re talking about us, and using the word repent in the way that it was originally intended.

That’s what I see happening in Ebenezer Scrooge, throughout the story of A Christmas Carol. Our friend Ebenezer was taken on a journey through his childhood and youth where he saw how he had used study, work, and money as a shield to protect himself from the rejection that he experienced from his family and friends.

His skills made him very successful as a financial manager, but they left him empty when it came to the really important and valuable things in life. Miserliness for Ebenezer was like the chaff that protected the grain while it was still growing, but it was also the very thing that kept him from becoming the person he was meant to be. The work of the Holy Spirit in his life, the wind and the fire, was to help him let go of his old protective shell and embrace the truth of who he really was in God’s eyes, and I think the same thing is true for each and every one of us.

We all have old habits or beliefs that hold us back from living authentically as our truest and best selves. We might think that staying thin and beautiful is the key to a long and happy marriage. We might believe that next drink might make us the life of the party. We might wonder whether we will finally feel acceptable in God’s eyes if we could just pray the gay away. But none of these things are true. They are all chaff, and the work of the Holy Spirit in your life is the work of God, helping you to like yourself just the way you are and living that truth boldly and bravely in the world, just as God intended for you.

That’s what winnowing means. That’s what repentance means. And that is the message of St. John the Baptist for us in today’s gospel and in this season of Advent.

Kindred in Christ, I pray that you will come to know this message more fully for yourself during this holiday season, and that you will bear fruit worthy of changed minds by loving yourself, your neighbors, and God more authentically. When we finally come to that blessed celebration of Christmas, I pray that you will see the light of Christ being born in you in a new way, so that you can be that light for others and let your light shine for all to see.