Author: J. Barrett Lee

Turning the Lights On

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Sermon for the 3rd Sunday of Epiphany.

The biblical text is Isaiah 9:1-4.

Back when I was a little kid, I would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, maybe after a nightmare, and I would look around my room in the dark.

And this place that felt so comfortable and so familiar to me in the daytime suddenly felt very foreign and strange in the nighttime. I was certain that there was danger in the darkness. And some of it, to be fair, was real. I never did a good job of keeping my room clean—either then or now—so it was entirely possible that I might trip and fall over something without the lights on. But some of that danger, I now know, was imaginary—like the monster under the bed or the boogeyman hiding in my closet.

But either way, whether I was thinking about real danger or imaginary danger, the feeling of fear was real.

I think we’ve all felt that way at some point or another in our lives—whether it was back when we were kids or maybe even now that we’re grown-ups. The things we’re afraid of might be different, and they too might be real or imaginary. But the fear itself stays the same.

The people of the kingdom of Judah in the 8th century BCE felt that fear too—the terror of a kid waking up in the middle of the night and not recognizing their own bedroom—Except that the people of Judah were feeling it about their country.

They didn’t recognize it anymore. There was trouble brewing at home and abroad. Their leaders had become self-absorbed and inhumane. And the prophet Isaiah—the one person in the capital city who was making any sense at all—wasn’t being listened to by anyone.

The Assyrian Empire was lurking on their borders, threatening invasion, and meanwhile Ahaz, the king of Judah, was busy flirting with their king and trying to impress him in any way that he could. It was as if a deep darkness had settled over their country, and the familiar landscape had suddenly become unrecognizable.

These were scary times for the people of Judah. And that’s where our first reading, from the book of Isaiah, picks up today.

And the prophet Isaiah doesn’t beat around the bush: He gets straight to the point, saying, “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them light has shined.”

Light is a funny thing. It doesn’t change much, but it makes all the difference.

For that kid who wakes up in the middle of the night, turning on the light is the one thing that can assuage that overwhelming fear. When the light is on, you can see a path through the messy room to the door. When the light is on, you can see that there are no monsters under the bed or in the closet. When the lights are on, you can remember that the place where you are now is the same place where you felt so at home before—you were just temporarily blinded by the darkness.

Turning on the lights doesn’t bring the night to an end any quicker, and it certainly doesn’t cause the room to be any less messy than it was before, but it makes it possible for you to see a way through the mess to the other side, and it gives you the comfort and strength you need to make it through the night until a new day dawns.

That’s the hope that the prophet Isaiah was giving to the people of Judah during their time living “in a land of deep darkness.”

The candle in the night was a sign of better days to come.

The word Isaiah uses to describe this new day—the word he repeats over and over again—is joy. He says, “You have multiplied the nation; you have increased its joy… They rejoice before you, as with joy at the harvest.”

It’s joy, joy, joy.

Isaiah says to his people, “I know things are tough right now, and in the darkness, you don’t recognize the country that once felt so familiar to you. But I promise you that a new day will dawn—a day of joy. And it will come when you least expect it, and in a way that you didn’t see coming.”

He said to the people that, “the yoke of their burden… the bar across their shoulders… and the rod of their oppressor,” would be broken “as on the day of Midian.”

And that’s a very interesting phrase.

When Isaiah talks about “the day of Midian,” he’s talking about a very specific scene from the book of Judges.

In Judges, chapter 7, the hero Gideon defeats a vast army in battle with an impossibly small force of underdogs. By the numbers, it should not have worked. But God was with them, and they stood up for what was right anyway, in spite of the overwhelming odds. And in the end, they were victorious.

So when Isaiah says that “the rod of the oppressor will be broken as on the day of Midian,” he’s saying to the people of Judah, “Just as God was with our ancestors in their struggle for what was right, so God will be with us too in ours.”

And I believe that message applies not just to the people of Isaiah’s day in the 8th century BCE, but to us too in our own day.

It’s easy to look around at the way things are today and see the darkness.

It’s easy to feel the fear and want to lash out in anger.

But what God asks of us instead is to be the light and let that light shine for all to see.

As we already talked about, light doesn’t change much—but it brings clarity. It allows the truth of our present moment to be seen for what it is. Light beats back the darkness of fear with the brightness of perspective. When we look around the room with the lights on, we see what’s really going on, and we are not afraid.

With the lights on, we can say to the monster under our bed, “You’re not really there. You have no power over me.” With the lights on, we can say to the mess on the floor, “I’m going to clean you up tomorrow, and you will not cause me to stumble and fall during this temporary time of darkness.” With the lights on, we can say to our fears—both real and imaginary—“You don’t scare me anymore.”

So, kindred in Christ, my message to you today is this:

Let your light shine. Now more than ever.

When the darkness of this world threatens to overwhelm you with fear, answer with light—light that brings truth and clarity, light that refuses to let you deny the evidence of your eyes, light that exposes monsters for the illusions that they are, light that dispels the darkness of fear for the brightness and warmth of home.

Because that is where we are.

Scripture tells us, in the Gospel according to John, chapter 1, verse 5, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

My dear, beloved kindred in Christ, I proclaim to you today, in this season of Epiphany, that the scripture is true: The darkness has not overcome the light.

In fact, darkness is simply the absence of light. So, wherever the light shines, the darkness flees in terror.

You need not fear the monster under your bed, because the truth is that the monster is afraid of you.

So, let your light shine, my friends. Say to yourself, “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.”

Let it shine through the cameras of your cell phones.
Let it shine in your posts on social media.
Let it shine in your conversations with friends and family.
Let it shine in the acts of mercy and justice that you share in solidarity with your neighbors.

Let it shine.
Let it shine.
Let it shine.

Because, “the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them light has shined.”

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

Amen?

The God’s Eye View

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon1 Comment

Sermon for the second Sunday after the Epiphany

The biblical text is John 1:29-42.

Most of us have experienced what it feels like to be misjudged or misunderstood.

The pain of that memory can sometimes cause us to seethe with anger at the injustice, even years after the fact.

Less common and less visceral are memories of times when we have discovered ourselves to be the ones misjudging others.

Psychologists have discovered a reason for this: they call it “the fundamental attribution error.”

What it means is that people tend to name external circumstances as the cause of their own faults, while simultaneously blaming other peoples’ faults on defects of character.

Here’s an example: You are at a stoplight and rush in front of another driver.

You think to yourself, “Sorry about that, but I can’t be late for work!”

Now, if you’re the driver in the other car, and you see this happen in front of you, you think, “What a jerk! They don’t know how to drive!”

That’s the fundamental attribution error in action. The first driver chalks the mistake up to circumstances, while the second driver chalks it up to the other person’s character.

People do this. In the story of our own lives, we tend to cast ourselves in the role of either the hero or the victim, but never as the bad guy. The role of villain is given to someone else.

But here’s the funny thing: the “bad guys” in each of our stories are the “good guys” in their own story, while we ourselves are the “bad guys” in their stories.

The world loves to divide people into categories: us and them, good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains.

We pass judgment on one another and react, rather than respond, when circumstances turn inconvenient.

It’s as though each of us is in the process of writing our own superhero comic book, fighting like mad to ensure that the “good guys” win in the end.

The problem is that, when we do this, we aren’t relating to each other as whole people, each with their own complex challenges of circumstance and character.

Life is complicated. People are complicated. And at the end of the day, there are no good guys or bad guys, just people.

In today’s gospel, we get to see an example of a time when one person was able to look at another and see the truth beneath the surface of that person.

When St. John the Baptist looked at Jesus, he saw past the categories that other people put on him. John saw Jesus for who he truly is.

Jesus was no stranger to being misjudged by other people. Time and again in the gospels, people can’t get past the categories in which they had placed him:

Son of Joseph, carpenter, heretic, radical. Even his own family came to believe that Jesus was crazy.

All of these people made up their minds about Jesus and dismissed him.

But John the Baptist doesn’t do that. John sees Jesus with a different set of eyes.

The gospel calls John a “prophet”, one who was “sent from God” as “a witness to the light.” Whatever else this may mean, we can at least say that it means this:

John the Baptist saw Jesus for who he was, from a spiritually-centered point-of-view.

We know that John lived simply, out in the desert. He had few possessions and sustained himself, as the text of the Bible tells us, on “locusts and wild honey.” As far as we can tell, he was unmarried. He was given to prayer and the preaching of spiritual renewal in baptism.

When Jesus arrives on the scene, John is ready to see him differently too.

Where some saw just another crazy person or heretic, John saw Jesus’ true self, beyond the categories imposed on him by the world.

This ability is not unique to John.

We get a glimpse, in John’s vision, of the way God sees each and every one of us. When we feel misunderstood or misjudged, God looks at us and seeing past the shell of worldly categories to the treasure beneath the surface of our lives.

That treasure is there in your life because it was placed there by God.

Even better, God wants us to see that treasure too, so that we can share it with others. Whenever our dignity is maligned by our neighbors (or even ourselves), God is working quietly behind the scenes to bring prophets like John into our lives who will see and draw out that divine treasure.

I believe that John’s gift of spiritual insight is available to all of us, if we choose to make use of it.

Our spiritual practices sharpen and focus the way we look at the world and our understanding of the people around us. The Scriptures and the Sacraments keep us connected to the core beliefs and values that tell us there is inherent dignity in every human life, no matter what categories people may try to impose on it.

We read in the Bible that our neighbors are reflections of God’s image, members of the Body of Christ, and living stones in the temple of the Holy Spirit. In the Sacraments, we all pass through the waters of Baptism and partake of the bread and cup of the Eucharist as members of the one Body of Christ. We are part of each other, precisely because we are part of Christ. This is how St. Paul is able to say, “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’” (1 Cor. 12:21)

In prayer and meditation, we connect the joys and concerns of daily living to our divine life in God. Even secular psychologists have come to admit in recent years that the practice of meditation is good for human relationships. It lowers stress levels and raises empathy, so that we can respond to crises from a place of peace, rather than react out of anger.

Spiritually centered people don’t see “good guys” and “bad guys,” but “people.” They don’t think in terms of “us” and “them,” but “We.”

God sees each of us as beloved children. People who see the world from God’s point-of-view see their neighbors in that same way.

That’s how John saw Jesus. That’s how God sees us.

My prayer this morning is that we too will continue, day by day, through Word and Sacrament, through prayer and meditation, to look at each other in this same way. When we do, we will be seeing one another with the eyes of God.

To Fulfill All Righteousness

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Sermon for the first Sunday after the Epiphany: The Baptism of the Lord.

The biblical text is Matthew 3:13-17.

Two cows are standing in a field. One of them says to the other, “Have you heard about this mad cow disease that’s going around?”
The other says, “No, I haven’t. What is it?”
The first one says, “Well, it’s this sickness that makes cows go insane.”
And the other one says, “Gosh, that sounds awful. It’s a good thing I’m a chicken!”

It’s funny how we can be so invested in our perspective—so convinced that we are right—that we don’t even notice how that commitment to being right is disconnecting us from things that matter, like reality or relationships.

When my kids were younger, I had a more authoritarian style of parenting. When they would act up, as kids do, I would try to think up a punishment that was appropriate to the offense and uncomfortable enough to dissuade the child from committing that same offense again.

But I’m not proud of that.

Because here’s what I’ve learned about that style of parenting: it suffers from the law of diminishing returns. Each time the kid would repeat the offense, I would repeat the punishment. But eventually, the kid would get used to it, so I would have to increase the severity in order to achieve the same result. And then the process would just repeat itself.

Until I eventually backed off.

Because I was not actually trying to harm my kids—I was trying to help them. And I could ground them for a week or a month, but there’s no way I could ground them until they’re 30, as much as I might want to.

So the system of crime and punishment seems great on paper, but it falls apart in reality because it can’t deliver on the results it promises. Eventually, the authority figure becomes the bad guy, because the punishment surpasses the severity of the crime. And it’s in that moment that character-building becomes cruelty, and discipline becomes demeaning rather than defining.

God understands that law of diminishing returns, which is why we have this story of the baptism of Jesus in today’s reading from the Gospel according to Matthew.

In this story, which takes place at the outset of Jesus’ ministry, Jesus approaches John and asks to be baptized. John looks at him and says, “Wait a minute—that’s not right! You should be baptizing me, not the other way around!”

And Jesus answers, “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.”

That phrase—fulfill all righteousness—is very interesting.

In Greek, the word translated here as righteousness is a sailing term. It refers to the state of affairs when the mast of a ship is perpendicular to the line of the water. In that situation, one can say that the ship is sailing upright. So the definition of righteousness—or being “righted,” as sailors still say in modern terms—is about the relationship between the mast and the water. They are in right relationship with each other.

And that’s the definition of righteousness we see in today’s Gospel.

It’s not about following the rules. It’s about being in right relationship with each other.

What happens next is a concrete illustration of what this looks like in practice. Jesus enters the water and is baptized by John. Jesus does this not because he has any sins of which he needs to repent, but as a callback to the story of Israel, when they passed through the waters of the Red Sea in the book of Exodus.

Jesus, in this moment, is entering into Israel’s story in order to bring that story to the next stage of its development.

In other words, Jesus meets them where they are in order to bring them to where they ought to be.

And the same thing is true of the relationship between us and Jesus today. In Jesus, God enters into our story in order to bring us deeper into God’s story. That’s the meaning of the mystery of the Incarnation.

St. Athanasius of Alexandria, one of the early Church Fathers, said this beautifully. He said, “God became human so that humanity might become divine.”

Contemporary singer-songwriter Derek Webb said it like this: “You must become what you want to save.”

It’s not about being right. It’s about being in relationship. It’s about meeting people where they are in order to bring them to where they ought to be.

This is a very different vision of righteousness than the one we see most often in the world today. Most often, the kind of righteousness we hear about is compliance with laws laid down by powerful people. Those who comply are left alone, while those who don’t are punished.

But that definition of righteousness suffers from the law of diminishing returns I described a moment ago. It lacks the ability to bring us to that deep transformation of character and relationships that Jesus intended when he used the word righteousness in today’s Gospel.

Christ-like righteousness happens when we attend to the quality of our relationships rather than simply force compliance with an established law. It happens when we enter into each other’s stories so that we can help one another enter more deeply into God’s story—which is the reconciliation of all things in heaven and on earth, as it says in the letter to the Colossians.

It’s not about being right. It’s about being in relationship—with ourselves, with each other, and with God. That’s the kind of righteousness God is interested in, and that’s the kind of righteousness Jesus fulfills in today’s Gospel.

What it requires of us is empathy, imagination, and a willingness to listen—to apologize, to make things right, and ultimately to forgive.

We can’t get to that kind of relational righteousness by punishing people until they comply. We have to listen and try to understand if we want to make things right.

As Christians—particularly as Episcopalians—what this requires of us is that we consider carefully the words of our own Baptismal Covenant. In it, we vow to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves. Furthermore, we vow to strive for justice and peace among all people and to respect the dignity of every human being.

These vows are not just about rules we follow. They are about relationships.

We make these vows as part of the covenant of baptism, just as we make marriage vows as part of the covenant of Holy Matrimony. It’s not about rules we follow individually; it’s about the relationship we are building together.

In baptism—the sacrament of solidarity—we are made one with Christ and one another. Those who have passed through the waters of the font—whether Venezuelan, Chinese, Russian, or American; whatever their skin color or native language; gender identity or sexual orientation; political affiliation or preference in pizza toppings—whatever distinctions we make between ourselves, they cannot erase the fact that we are one in Christ Jesus.

We are in relationship with one another, and therefore, we ought to act like it.

That’s what the fulfillment of righteousness means in the eyes of Jesus. It’s not about who deserves to be punished. It’s about who is my family.

And for Jesus, the answer is everyone.

Several years ago, a friend of mine went through a test of his faith in this Baptismal Covenant. His name is the Very Reverend Dr. Peter Elliott, and he was the dean of the Anglican Cathedral in Vancouver, Canada.

[On a personal note, Peter was one of my strongest friends and supporters in my journey to the Episcopal Church. So if you appreciate my standing here before you today, you have, in part, Peter Elliott to thank for it.]

The Very Rev. Dr. Peter Elliott, Dean of Christ Church Cathedral (retired)

During his tenure as cathedral dean, Peter lived through the Stanley Cup riots in Vancouver in 2011. These riots happened not as an outcry against social injustice, but because their favorite team lost a hockey game. And these Canadians—who are normally so polite—absolutely trashed the downtown corridor of their own city.

Windows were broken, cars were burned, and people were hurt. And my friend, along with the rest of the city, was left stunned in the aftermath.

News reporters called them hoodlums and hooligans. The mayor declared that he was going to deal with these troublemakers. Some Canadians even declared that this would be a good time for Canada to bring back the death penalty.

And Peter sat back watching, and he noticed how the worst behavior of those who took part in the riot was bringing out the worst in everyone else.

When asked about it by a reporter, he said that the city’s response to the rioters could be more creative than simply throwing them in jail. He said that justice, in this scenario, was more about healing the community than punishing the offenders.

So Peter joined with others to lead a restorative justice initiative in Vancouver after the Stanley Cup riots. Through this process, victims and offenders willingly sat down together. Victims were heard, and offenders were held accountable—not just through punishment, but through working with others to restore the community they had damaged by their actions.

Peter led this movement as a priest in Christ’s Church. He stepped up because he believed—and still believes—that the gospel of Christ and the way of Jesus have the power to change lives and save sinners like you and me.

Kindred in Christ, we will eventually come to the fulfillment of all righteousness that Christ talks about in today’s Gospel. But we’re not going to get there by simply punishing the right people or making those punishments severe enough that they learn their lesson.

We’re going to get there by deepening our relationships with one another—by taking time to listen and understand those who are different from us.

We’re going to get there by remembering that justice doesn’t come from a loaded gun, but from an empty tomb.

That is the gospel that Jesus Christ demonstrated in his time on this earth and continues to demonstrate in his Church today.

May we ever be faithful to this gospel, as we have received it.

Amen.

Home By Another Way

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Sermon for the Feast of the Epiphany

The text is Matthew 2:1-12.

When I was younger, I used to believe that there was one specific right way, and a whole lot of wrong ways, to practice spirituality. I thought I had to believe all the right doctrines and follow all the rules perfectly, or else God would get mad at me and punish me accordingly.

Now, to be fair to my younger self, there were a few upsides to this way of thinking. For one, it gave me a very strong moral compass, which is a good thing for a young person to have. And number two, it gave me a strong sense of community with others who were trying to practice their spirituality in the same way. And that’s also a good thing.

The downside, however, was that I lived with a constant sense of dread—that if I asked too many tough questions, or failed to live up to my moral code, I would be in deep yogurt with God, who watched everything I did, listened to every word I said, and knew every thought I thunk, and was keeping a meticulous record of all of it, for which I would one day have to answer.

I knew very well just how much I failed to live up to the high standard I set for myself, and I figured that God was looking at me in just the same way—only more so, because God could never forget.

I’ll be honest. Living with that kind of fear, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, was crazy-making. I was told that I needed to trust in God, but the God I believed in—the all-seeing and all-knowing micromanager—wasn’t trustworthy. That kind of God was less like the lover of our souls and more like an abusive ex-boyfriend. No matter how hard I tried, nothing I did would ever be good enough.

I believed these things about God because I thought that’s what it said in the Bible. But then I made one fatal mistake: I actually read the Bible. And what I found there was something more complex, more nuanced, and more loving than the abusive ex-boyfriend I had been in a relationship with up to that moment.

It’s funny, isn’t it, how the Bible is a central source of our theology, but actually reading it can completely wreck that theology?

The gospel for the Feast of the Epiphany is one of those biblical passages that absolutely wrecked my theology. But it didn’t just break me down—it broke me open. This story opened my eyes to the reality that God is both bigger and more loving than all my narrow ideas about God.

This story—the visit of the magi, or wise men from the East, as our translation renders it—is one of the best-known and least-understood stories in the New Testament. The magi themselves were not Jewish. In all likelihood, they were Persian, from somewhere around the modern-day city of Baghdad in Iraq. The dominant religion in that area at that time was not Judaism, but Zoroastrianism. And these magi were astrologers.

And that’s the first place where the Bible starts to mess with my theology. Because I had always been told that astrology was fake and bad, and that I should stay away from it. But here was this famous story in the Bible, no less, where spiritual seekers are using astrology to find their way to the presence of Jesus. That made me go, wait, what?

And it didn’t stop there. It gets weirder—so hold on to your seats.

These Persian astrologers determined, by practicing their craft, that a great king was being born in the land of Judea, so they figured they should go and pay their respects. And if you’re looking for a newborn king, where else would you go except to the king’s palace in the capital city, right?

So they ring the doorbell and say, “Hey, congratulations.” And King Herod is just standing there like, “What? There’s no newborn king here. What are you talking about?” So he goes and consults with the bishops and the theology professors, and they tell him, “Yeah, it’s not happening here. It’s supposed to happen in Bethlehem, according to the ancient prophecies.”

So Herod sends the magi back out to find this new king—not because he wants to pay his respects, but because he wants to eliminate any possible threat to his power. But the magi don’t know that. So they set out again.

And another really interesting thing happens. The text of Matthew’s Gospel specifically says that the magi didn’t follow the directions the clergy had given them from the Bible. It says that they set out, and they saw the star again, and they followed that instead—and lo and behold, it led them to the exact same place the clergy had told them to go.

They weren’t following the “right” way that was prescribed by the Bible. They were following the light they knew, and it led them to the same place.

It’s hard to be a fundamentalist when you actually read the Bible.

So they get there, to the presence of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. They pay their respects. They offer their gifts. And just as they’re getting ready to go home, they have a dream. And in this dream, God warns them not to return to Herod, but to return to their own country by another road.

Other translations render this sentence as “they went home by another way.” And I really like that turn of phrase.

The magi were going home by another way—not just at the end of the story, but the whole way through. They were not members of the God Squad in the traditional sense. And they didn’t follow the guidance of the Bible. They walked by the light of their own star and ended up exactly where they needed to be anyway.

That says something to me about the God we believe in today—not the abusive ex-boyfriend god, not the all-knowing micromanager, but one who is not afraid of people who ask questions, make mistakes, and travel by their own light. God was with the magi in ways that broke the rules. And that same God is still with us today and has been all along.

One of the many things that I love about the Episcopal Church is that we have a theological tradition where diversity is baked in. Our theology is not about obedience to a single infallible authority. It’s an ongoing dialogue between scripture, tradition, and reason. There is room in our theology for differing viewpoints, and the God we believe in is bigger than all of it.

No book or person or institution is capable of having the last word, because we believe that word hasn’t been spoken yet.

Like the magi, God is still guiding us closer to the presence of Jesus by many and various paths. So none of us has the right to pass judgment on another, or say with absolute certainty, “You’re wrong, and I am right.”

We might think we’re right, but God is usually standing off to the side with a little smirk, going, “Are you sure about that?”

If God could lead the magi to where they needed to be by the light of a star, then surely it’s no big problem for God to lead you wherever you need to be by means of whatever light you follow—no matter the size of your questions, the severity of your mistakes, or the strangeness of your personal beliefs.

Kindred in Christ, that’s the good news of Epiphany for us. What that good news asks of us is the courage to ask the big questions, the humility to make mistakes, and the confidence to trust that we are still loved, even when we don’t get it right.

That is the light that will lead us home by another way.

Amen?

Hope First

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Sermon for the second Sunday of Christmas

The biblical text is Jeremiah 31:7-14.

Sermon recording:

In September 1940, at the height of World War II, the German Luftwaffe began a sustained bombing assault on the British capital that eventually became known as the London Blitz.

As the city burned above them, the people of London gathered and slept in the underground subway tunnels for safety.

And yet, even as the city was being bombed night after night, something remarkable happened: Concerts continued, drama troupes put on plays, teachers taught classes, and an inter-shelter darts league formed. One pianist, Myra Hess, organized daily concerts at the National Gallery. People would come on their lunch breaks, not because the war was over, not because things were safe again, but because something in them knew this mattered.

They didn’t sing because the bombing had stopped.
They sang because without beauty, without meaning, without joy, they wouldn’t survive the bombing at all.

And that human instinct — to cling to hope before everything is fixed — is exactly what we hear in today’s reading from the prophet Jeremiah.

This passage comes from one of the bleakest books in the Bible. Jeremiah is not an easy prophet. He doesn’t offer quick comfort. He doesn’t soften his message. He spends much of the book warning his people — the people of Judah — that a crisis is coming.

For the first large section of the book, Jeremiah is doing one hard thing over and over again. He is speaking the truth about his nation’s injustice, exploitation, and unfaithfulness to God’s covenant, even though he knows the king won’t listen. He keeps telling the truth anyway, even though it gets him ignored, mocked, threatened, and eventually imprisoned.

And the truth he speaks is this:
“If we have lost faith in the core principles that make us who we are as a nation, then no amount of wealth, power, or political strategy will be able to shelter us from the consequences of our own actions.”

Jeremiah is not speaking as an outsider. He is speaking as a concerned citizen. He loves his people. That’s why he tells the truth.

Later in the book, the tone shifts again. By that point, his warnings have gone unheeded. The moment of truth has come and gone. The disaster Jeremiah spoke about has arrived. Jerusalem has fallen to the Babylonians. The people have been carried off into exile.

So, for Jeremiah and the people of Judah, the question is no longer, “How do we avoid this?”
The question is, “How do we live now that it’s here?”

That final section of Jeremiah is about acceptance — not resignation, but the sober recognition that what’s done is done, and all that remains is to make the best of it.

But right in the middle of those two sections, between the warnings and the acceptance, we get a third section that scholars call the Book of Consolation. Chapters 30 through 33. This is the section where today’s first reading comes from.

What’s striking about the Book of Consolation is that Jeremiah offers hope before the exile is resolved. Consolation comes before acceptance. Not because everything is okay, but because Jeremiah knows that, without hope, the people will not be able to survive what lies ahead.

Listen again to the imagery Jeremiah uses. This is not quiet, private reassurance. This is public celebration. Singing. Shouting. Gathering. Grain, wine, and oil. A watered garden.

And notice who’s invited:
The visually impaired.
The mobility impaired.
Those who are pregnant.
Those in labor.
The people who cannot move quickly. The people who cannot carry much. The people who are exhausted, vulnerable, and easily left behind.

If you step back and picture it, what Jeremiah is describing looks less like a church service and more like a street party.

This is not a party for the strong. This is not a celebration of victory or success. This is a gathering that moves at the pace of the most vulnerable. No one is told to wait until they’re healed. No one is told to come back later when they’re stronger.

Everyone belongs.

Jeremiah even says, “I will give the priests their fill of fatness” — as a priest myself, I’m trying not to take that one personally.

But the most important thing to notice is this: the party happens before anything is fixed.

The exile is still real. The losses are still fresh. The future is still uncertain. And yet — the singing continues.

Just like the music during the Blitz, this isn’t a celebration because the danger is gone. It’s a celebration because without joy, without meaning, people won’t make it through what’s coming.

What’s fascinating is that psychology tells us something very similar.

Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi concentration camps, noticed that people didn’t endure suffering because it stopped. They endured because they found a reason to keep going. Meaning came first. Relief came later — if it came at all.

Or as Frankl famously put it, those who have a “why” to live can bear almost any “how.”

In other words, hope comes before acceptance. Without it, people collapse.

Developmental psychology tells us something similar from the very beginning of life. Erik Erikson wrote that hope is the first human virtue, formed not through explanation or reasoning, but through trust.

You don’t argue a baby into trust.

You don’t sit down with a newborn and say, “Now listen here, if you’ll just consider the evidence, you’ll see that you have been fed and changed, that your parents love you very much, and that it’s in everyone’s best interest that you lay down and go to sleep…”

Obviously, you don’t do that. You hold them.

Trust comes before understanding. Hope comes before explanation.

That explains why Jeremiah doesn’t wait until the exile is over to offer hope. He offers it first — because without it, the people won’t survive the truth they’re about to face.

The kind of hope Jeremiah is talking about is not mere optimism or denial, but something tougher.

I read a Tweet online that illustrates this kind of hope perfectly. It was written by someone named Matthew @Crowsfault and says:

“People speak of hope as if it is this delicate, ephemeral thing made of whispers and spider’s webs. It’s not. Hope has dirt on her face, blood on her knuckles, the grit of the cobblestones in her hair, and just spat out a tooth as she rises for another go.”

I absolutely love that. That’s the kind of hope you need when you’re living in exile.

And that kind of hope matters not just for us as individuals, but for us as communities.

When communities come under strain, they tend to split into two instincts. Some respond by saying the only faithful thing to do is expose every failure, until there’s nothing left but despair. Others respond by saying the only faithful thing to do is protect what’s good, even if it means refusing to see what’s broken.

Jeremiah refuses both extremes.

He loves his people too much to flatter them — and too much to abandon them.

That’s why hope comes first. Accountability without hope turns into cynicism. Hope without accountability turns into denial. Jeremiah offers hope not to erase the truth, but to make it possible for the people to face it.

And this isn’t just about nations or communities. It’s about individual lives, too.

I once read about a mother whose child was born with a severe and terminal disease. There were no long-term plans. No grand ambitions. None of the milestones people usually imagine for their children.

From the outside, many would have called that situation hopeless.

But the mother wrote about discovering a different kind of hope — not hope that things would be different, but hope rooted in love, presence, and fierce attention to the life in front of her. She described learning to delight in small moments, celebrate what was real, even though the future looked nothing like what she had imagined.

That’s the hope Jeremiah is pointing toward.

Not hope that skips over suffering.
Not hope that waits for everything to be resolved.
But hope that shows up anyway — and holds us together while the story is still unfinished.

The music during the Blitz didn’t stop the bombs. But it reminded people who they were.

Jeremiah’s street party didn’t end the exile. But it reminded the people that their story wasn’t over, that God wasn’t done with them, that life itself still carried the possibility of renewal.

So the invitation in this passage is not to pretend that everything is fine. It’s to accept the fact that things are pretty messed up and practice hope anyway. To create moments of joy. To notice what is good and celebrate what is being born, even though the ending is still unclear.

Kindred in Christ, as you look around at our troubled world today, gape in horror at the latest news reports, and wonder what it’s all coming to, I dare you to practice hope as a spiritual discipline.

Not a vague optimism that everything will work out fine, not a distraction from the real problems that we are facing, but a defiant commitment to keep hoping in the face of despair. An unshakable faith that God is not done with us yet, so we owe it to ourselves and each other to keep holding on and keep looking for opportunities to do what good we can, where we can, with whomever we can, and for as long as we can.

Like the people who lived through the London Blitz, we too have a need to sing before the war is over.
We too have a need to gather before the exile ends.
We too have a need to hold tightly onto one another, not because everything is okay, but precisely because it isn’t!

Because hope isn’t what comes after we heal the world.
Hope is what makes healing the world possible.

Amen?

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.

Staying Awake

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

Sermon for Advent 1, Year A

Click here for the biblical readings.

We were supposed to gather at church today. Plans were made. Schedules were set. And now a storm has rearranged all of it. The roads aren’t safe. The building is closed. And here we are instead—in living rooms, kitchens, basements—still together, but not in the same place.

It’s not the end of the world. But it is the breaking open of the illusion that everything is under our control. We make our plans. We set our calendars. We line up our routines. And underneath it all is the unspoken hope that if we stay organized enough, life will stay predictable. But life rarely cooperates with our plans.

When Jesus says in today’s gospel, “No one knows the day or the hour,” that planning part of ourselves feels the tension right away. Not knowing feels dangerous. Change feels risky. We want a roadmap. We want signs. We want time to prepare.

But underneath that need for predictability is something even more tender: the fear of what might be revealed if the surface of things were ever to crack. Many of us carry the quiet suspicion that the order we see every day is fragile—that if it gives way, what’s underneath will be dark and dangerous. So we work hard to keep everything looking normal. And when the sense of normal is threatened, fear rises fast.

Most of us know that feeling. A weird sound coming from the car. The boss asking, “Can I see you in my office?” A phone call that begins with, “Your child has been in an accident…” A moment ago everything felt stable, and now suddenly it doesn’t.

That’s what Jesus points to when he talks about the days of Noah. People were eating and drinking, marrying and building their lives. Ordinary life. But ordinary life wasn’t able to hold together. It eventually fell apart, as all things do.

Was it the end of the world? In some ways, yes. It was the end of the world, as they knew it. But Jesus hints at a deeper truth. Not about the end of the world, but about what comes after it.

We often fear that if the surface of life ever falls apart, what comes next will be a nightmare. When our carefully constructed order gives way, what we meet first often feels like chaos. But after that first rush of chaos, there is something else.

Today’s gospel reading only hints at what that might be, but our first reading, from the book of Isaiah, dares to name it:

Isaiah sees the nations of the world gathering together instead of marching against each other. He sees people laying down their weapons because they have learned a better way to live.

Swords become plowshares. Spears become pruning hooks.
What once took life now gives life. What once drew blood now grows bread.

That is the apocalypse beyond the apocalypse. Not just the exposing of what happens when things fall apart—but the unveiling of what is trying to be born. A world no longer organized by fear, but by learning. By shared life. By the slow conversion of violence into nourishment.

We see the same pattern in the natural world all the time. In the hollow of a fallen log, an animal makes her home. From the remnants of a supernova come the building blocks of life itself.

We might wish for a world where everything is under control and nothing is chaotic. We might be afraid that, in reality, nothing is under control and everything is chaos. But the fact of the matter is that neither of those things is ultimately true. Life isn’t completely chaotic, but neither is it completely under control. Life grows in the creative tension between chaos and order. And over time, it keeps leaning toward connection. Toward relationship. Toward more belonging, not less. Faith dares to say that this same love is what’s holding the whole universe together.

That’s why Jesus can say, “Stay awake,” without meaning, “Be afraid.” Staying awake doesn’t mean scanning the horizon for disaster. It doesn’t mean planning for every possible contingency. Staying awake means paying attention to what really matters.

And that kind of waking up doesn’t just happen in dramatic moments. It happens in the small ones. It’s the pause before snapping back at someone. It’s the choice to listen instead of trying to win. It’s the moment when we decide whether we’re going to lead with fear—or with love.

Staying awake isn’t about knowing what’s coming. It’s about choosing how to live in alignment with what really matters.

So—here we are. Not in the same room. Not in the way we expected to be. The storm has interrupted “the best-laid plans of mice and men.” Our illusion of control has already cracked.

And still, beneath it all, we are being held.

Even here, in separate homes. Even on an altered Sunday. Even in uncertainty. Beneath the inconvenience, there is care. Beneath the disruption, there is still connection. Beneath what unsettles us, there is love doing its quiet, steady work.

So our invitation this season is simple. Don’t cling in fear. Don’t shut down in despair. Stay awake to what matters. Choose what grows life. Trust what is deeper than the storm.

Amen?