Tag: God

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?

The Merciful King

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon1 Comment

Sermon for Christ the King Sunday (Proper 29), Year C.

Click here for the biblical readings.

Back when I was newly ordained in my previous denomination and serving my first congregation, the time came for me to request a Sunday off in order to attend a friend’s wedding. Not wanting to be too forceful, I intentionally phrased my request very gently. And one of the board members commented, “Gosh, you sound like a kid asking for candy.” I was a bit taken aback by this comment because the board member had obviously mistaken my kindness for weakness. Looking back, what I wish I’d said was, “Ma’am, if you think this is me asking for candy, then you have seriously underestimated just how much I love candy!”

It’s funny how often people mistake kindness for weakness. In this world we live in, it’s the blustering, strong-man style of leadership that tends to get the most attention: leaders who are loud, decisive, never apologize or admit when they’re wrong, who rule by force, fear, and the power of sheer will. Such leaders are not confined to any particular political party, country, or era of history; even going back to biblical times, they’re everywhere — even inside our own heads. Who among us doesn’t sometimes hear that harsh voice in the back of our minds, yelling at us when we struggle?

“Suck it up, Buttercup. Quit your crying, loser. Forget about your feelings. You don’t need a break. You need to push harder.”

If we listen to that voice in our heads day in and day out, we become our own tyrants. And society rewards us for it. The message we hear again and again is: “That’s just how you get things done. You may not like it, but reality doesn’t care about your feelings.”

But let me share something with you that I have learned from reading up on leadership science. Strong-man and fear-based leadership styles are useful in the midst of a sudden crisis because they’re very good at achieving fast results in the short term. But in the long term, they’re subject to the law of diminishing returns. Over time, fear-based environments become less and less effective because they lose talent by stifling creativity and causing burnout among their best performers. Mercy-based environments, on the other hand, foster resilience, creativity, and loyalty. They have lower turnover and higher productivity.

So if we’re going by the numbers, it’s not about feelings at all. It’s about results. Compassionate leadership is more effective than fear-based leadership. Mercy isn’t a feeling. It’s a method — a strategy for transforming the world from the inside out.

Which brings us to our Gospel reading for today. Today we celebrate the Feast of Christ the King, which was added to our liturgical calendar exactly 100 years ago, in 1925, by Pope Pius XI. The Pope created this new festival in direct response to the rising tide of fascism in Italy at that time. By establishing this new liturgical feast, Pope Pius was declaring that Jesus Christ is Lord and Benito Mussolini is not. It was a direct challenge to the authoritarian strong-man style of leadership that was so prevalent in the culture at that time.

In today’s Gospel for Christ the King, we get to see firsthand what Jesus’ merciful style of leadership looks like. His throne is not a majestic chair of gold, but an old rugged cross. His crown is not made of jewels, but of thorns. Beside him are not trusted advisers, but criminals.

Traditionally, one of them has been labeled as “the good thief.” But here’s the thing: he was neither good nor a thief. The Romans didn’t crucify pickpockets. Crucifixion was too slow and too expensive for such petty crimes as that. Crucifixion was reserved for the most severe crime of sedition against the authority of the empire.

So the man commonly known as the “good thief” was not like Jean Valjean, who was thrown into prison for stealing a loaf of bread. He was most likely a religious zealot who believed that God had called him to overthrow the Roman Empire by violent force. He was probably a killer, an extremist. In modern-day terms, we might even call him a terrorist. So you can imagine the kind of person to which that term might apply today.

That’s the person to whom Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” That one line exposes every lie that we have ever been told about what true power looks like. Jesus doesn’t say this line to someone who has proved his worth through good deeds or correct theology. He says it to the least likely and most despicable person imaginable. By speaking words of forgiveness to the terrorist on the cross next to him, Jesus demonstrates that his only method is mercy. It is the entire basis of his kingship and authority.

William Shakespeare said it well in The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene 1:

“The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath.
It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
’Tis mightiest in the mightiest;
It becomes the throned monarch better than his crown…
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice.”

Mercy is the foundational principle of Christ’s kingdom, just as equality of all persons is foundational to the American system. Mercy is a direct challenge to the strong-man style of leadership in any age, because there is always another strong man waiting in the wings somewhere who promises salvation, saying, “Fear me, follow me. I will protect you, and I will punish your enemies.”

But Christ doesn’t promise those things.
Jesus Christ says, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”
Jesus says, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God.”
Jesus says, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

If God wanted the world to be saved by force, Jesus would have come with an army of angels. But instead he broke bread with outcasts and forgave sinners like you and me. He led with mercy — not because he is soft or weak, but because mercy is the strongest force in the universe.

Some people imagine that when Christ comes again in glory, he will drop the mercy act and behave like the conquering king we all expected. That apocalyptic idea suggests that mercy was just a temporary mask, and violence is the true nature of God. But I wholeheartedly disagree with that sentiment.

The Christ who will come again is the same Christ who came before, who broke bread with outcasts and sinners, and forgave the unforgivable. Mercy isn’t the exception — it is the essence of who Jesus Christ is as the King of kings and Lord of lords.

During World War II, a Dutch woman named Corrie ten Boom hid some of her Jewish neighbors in her attic from the raiding parties of the Nazis. Eventually, she was discovered, arrested, and sent to a concentration camp, where her sister, Betsy, eventually died. Several years later, she was preaching in a church on the subject of forgiveness when a man approached her whom she recognized. He confessed to her that he had been a guard at the concentration camp to which she and her sister had been sent.

“Since that time,” he said, “I have become a Christian. I know that God has forgiven me for the cruel things I did there, but I would like to hear it from your lips as well. Fräulein, will you forgive me?” And he extended his hand.

Corrie ten Boom said,

“It could not have been many seconds that he stood there, hand held out, but to me it seemed like hours as I wrestled with the most difficult thing I had ever had to do. For I had to do it — I knew that. I knew it not only as a commandment of God, but as a daily experience. Those who were able to forgive their former enemies were able also to return to the outside world and rebuild their lives, no matter what the physical scars. Those who nursed their bitterness remained invalids. It was as simple and as horrible as that.

“And still I stood there, with the coldness clutching my heart. But forgiveness is not an emotion; forgiveness is an act of the will — and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart. ‘Jesus, help me!’ I prayed silently. ‘I can lift my hand. I can do that much. You supply the feeling.’

“And so, woodenly, mechanically, I thrust my hand into the one stretched out to me. And as I did, an incredible thing took place. The current started in my shoulder, raced down my arm, sprang into our joined hands. And then this healing warmth seemed to flood my whole being, bringing tears to my eyes.
“I forgive you, brother,” I cried, “with all my heart!”

For a long moment we grasped each other’s hands — the former guard and the former prisoner.

“I had never known God’s love so intensely as I did then.”

Kindred in Christ, what does this mean for us? It means that sometimes our kindness will be mistaken for weakness. But each time we choose to lead with mercy instead of fear, the kingdom of Christ comes a little bit more on earth as it is in heaven.

Leadership is not about getting people to do what you want — it is about helping them grow into the kind of people they were always meant to be. And that applies just as much to our leadership of ourselves as it does to the way we relate to other people. Many of us know the voice of the inner tyrant, who expects perfection and punishes us when we fall short. But that voice is not the voice of Christ.

Christ did not come to replace one tyrant with another — including the tyrant that lives in your own head. Let Christ’s mercy reign in you. Be patient with your own healing. Forgive yourself for the mistakes you keep making. Speak to yourself as Christ spoke to the terrorist on the cross next to him: “Truly, I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

Today. Not someday. Not when you’ve cleaned up your act. Not when you’ve fixed everything that’s wrong with you. Not when you’ve come up with airtight answers to the doubts and the questions that plague your mind.

Today — because mercy begins here and now.

This is where the kingdom of Christ begins: in you. But it doesn’t stay there. It flows out. It changes how you speak to your spouse, how you raise your kids, how you treat your neighbors and your coworkers, how you handle difficult people — and the people who find you difficult.

This is how the kingdom comes on earth as it is in heaven: not by brute force or fear, but by mercy, dropping like the gentle rain from heaven, as Shakespeare said.

So today, on the centennial anniversary of the Feast of Christ the King, you and I stand together beneath the old rugged cross — the throne of grace — and we hear Christ saying to us, as he did to the penitent terrorist:
“Truly, I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

Not someday, but today.
Here and now — let mercy reign in you.
Let it flow out from you.
And let it change the world through you.
One little bit at a time.

The Next Evolutionary Step

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

Sermon for All Saints Sunday, Year C

Click here for the biblical readings.

Biological instincts are a funny thing. Our cravings for safety, sustenance, and status evolved as tools for survival, but often they are the very things that hold us back from living our best life.

Let’s take Grog the caveman, for example. Grog was born with an inherent craving for sugars, fats, and salts because he was born into an environment where those things were rare. So it behooved him to eat as much of those things as possible, because he never knew if or when he would come across them again.

Fast forward to 2025, where you and I have inherited Grog’s cravings for sugars, fats, and salts, but live in a very different kind of environment where those things are not rare. So we look at a TV commercial and go, “French fries!” and proceed to eat as much of them as possible, even if we know it’s going to eventually kill us. It’s a mismatched instinct.

So we’re out here living with Flintstone brains in a world of Jetson technology, and we wonder why we struggle. This is true of other instincts too.

Let’s go back to our friend Grog the caveman. He is walking along through the jungle and goes, “Hear sound in bush! Might be saber-toothed tiger! Must fight!” because he developed his fight-or-flight instinct as a means of protection against predators.

But here we are in 2025 with the same brain that Grog had, and we’re like, “Notification on phone! Man on Facebook has bad politics! Must fight!” And we proceed to react as if we ourselves were being attacked by a saber-toothed tiger. It’s not the same thing, and our mismatched instincts are leading us farther away from life rather than toward the preservation of it.

We’re living with Flintstone brains in a Jetson’s world. What we need is a way to take that next evolutionary step so that we can get back to the work of preserving life instead of working against it. Thankfully, that’s exactly what Jesus gives us in today’s gospel.

When we practical-minded people read Jesus’s teachings on the Beatitudes and the principle of nonviolence, it sounds at first like a bunch of impractical, high-minded nonsense. Our natural, God-given instincts for safety, sustenance, and status lead us to want to be rich, full, joyful, and well spoken of. But Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor, the hungry, the weeping, and the hated.”

So it sounds like nonsense, as does all this talk about loving our enemies, turning the other cheek, and giving to everyone who begs from us. Our inner caveman hears these things and goes, “No! Bad!”

And yet Jesus teaches them, which raises the question: Does Jesus just want us to fail? It certainly seems that way on the surface, and that’s a disturbing thought.

It might seem a bit obvious and self-serving for me, as a Christian priest, to say this, but I don’t think that Jesus is saying these things because he just wants us to fail at life. I think that what Jesus is doing is pointing us toward the next step in human evolution. Unlike our previous evolutionary steps, which were driven by biology and survival instincts, this next step that Jesus represents is driven by morality and conscious decision-making.

In other words, the next step of human evolution is not biological but spiritual.

Jesus’s earthly ministry was characterized by compassion. The movement he initiated was characterized not by who it excluded but by who it included. Jesus shared his family table with the most despised and outcast members of society.

He used nature imagery to direct his followers’ attention to the divine abundance that exists all around them. He directed their attention to the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, who neither farm nor sow but are still fed and clothed by the God who loves them.

He invited his listeners to consider the sun and the rain, which shine and fall without discrimination, bringing life to the earth—both sinners and saints alike.

Jesus was convinced that this is the way the world truly works, in spite of the walls of human self-preservation that we have constructed around it and through it. Jesus said that, in spite of our egotistical selves, compassion reigns supreme because God wills it.

The question that he puts to us is: What would our lives look like if we lived as if we believed this is true—as indeed it is?

If you are a person of a certain generation, the name Robert McNamara will probably mean something to you. For those who do not know this name, he served as the Secretary of Defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. His legacy is controversial, and it’s not my job to either endorse or denounce that legacy. But I heard him say something very interesting about his involvement in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

For those who are too young to remember, the Cuban Missile Crisis was a 13-day confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union about the Soviet Union’s placement of nuclear missiles in Cuba—well within striking distance of American soil. The tension escalated to the point where President Kennedy was considering an invasion of Cuba in order to stop the deployment of these missiles, a move which almost certainly would have resulted in a launch of said missiles, triggering a counterstrike of nuclear missiles on the American side, resulting in the mutually assured destruction of both countries and possibly ending human civilization as we know it.

At the height of the tension, the world was mere minutes away from nuclear annihilation. But Secretary McNamara reported that it was saved at the last possible moment by a cabinet member who used his empathy and imagination to understand what it was that the Soviets really wanted. As a result, they were able to negotiate a diplomatic solution that avoided a nuclear holocaust and allowed humanity to continue to exist as it does to this day.

It is not too much of a stretch to say that empathy, or love of one’s enemies as Jesus commanded, saved the world that day. That’s just one example of a time when Jesus’s teachings proved to be more practical than high-minded.

If President Kennedy had listened only to his basic survival instincts, the game of survival would have been over. But by listening to the voice of empathy, he was able to transcend those basic impulses in a way that preserved life—not only for Americans but also for his Soviet enemies, and for the rest of the world as well. It was the moral principles of Jesus, and not the instincts of Grog the caveman, that saved the world that day.

That’s why I say that Jesus’s teaching is not just spiritual wisdom or high-minded idealism, but the next step in human evolution. We won’t get there by playing games like survival of the fittest, but we will get there by loving our enemies and doing unto others as we would have them do unto us.

Of course, it’s likely true that most of us will never find ourselves in a position where our personal decisions could affect the nuclear annihilation of millions. But it’s a near certainty that we will find ourselves in a position where we will have to choose between the way of self-preservation and the empathic way of Jesus. The repercussions of that decision may not affect millions, but they will affect individual lives—not least of which is our own.

Which impulse will we choose to follow on that day? The broad and well-trodden path of self-preservation or the narrow way of Jesus? Will we stay locked into familiar patterns of the status quo, or take the next step in human evolution? The choice is up to us.

Today, we celebrate the Feast of All Saints—a holy day when we give thanks for those who have come before us in the faith. Those whose lives have been remembered not because they were successful in amassing copious amounts of money, sex, and power, but because they were faithful in choosing the more difficult way of Jesus when it would have been easier to default to familiar patterns of self-preservation.

They are the vanguard who show us the way to embody the teachings of Jesus and take that next step in human evolution in our own day, just as they did in theirs. The Church honors the saints because they remind us that the work of Jesus is not yet done, and the loving power of Jesus is still at work in our lives today.

I have already seen this power at work in you, the people of this congregation. Your creativity, courage, and compassion are obvious to all who walk through our doors, and even to those who have never attended a service but have borne witness to your good works in our wider community.

At no time has this been more obvious to me than it was last Sunday afternoon, when this church was packed to standing room only with people who gathered to give thanks for a recent member of the communion of saints, our own dearly departed sister, Mary Dally.

She touched so many lives in her decades of teaching in this town, and so many of them showed up to pay their respects that I could scarcely walk from my office to the sacristy. As far as I know, Mary never commanded a nuclear arsenal, but I do know for a fact that her empathy and her commitment touched the lives of hundreds—and I know this because I saw them here in this room.

Someone once told me that I should live my life in such a way that there would be standing room only at my funeral. As far as Mary Dally is concerned, I would say: mission accomplished.

The rest of us are still engaged in that mission, and I watched each of you show up and put in the extra work to honor the dead, care for the bereaved, and support the whole community. This is the next step in human evolution, and you are taking it.

Even as we said farewell to one of our members last week and celebrated one saint’s entry into the Church Triumphant, so in a few moments will we be adding two new members to that fellowship on earth, as we baptize Barak and Cyrus into the Body of Christ.

As Mary’s journey on earth is ending, so theirs is just beginning. Our continuing task is to nurture their growth in the faith, support them with our prayers, and be to them an example of what the next step in human evolution looks like—just as we learned it from Jesus.

Continue to be strong in this faith, and keep up the good work. Amen.

Laughing at Ourselves

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Sermon for Proper 25, Year C

Click here for the biblical readings

As I was coming up with an opening illustration for this week’s sermon, it occurred to me that the one thing you’re probably learning about your new rector this year is that he watches way too much TV. But then again, maybe that’s just something I’m learning about myself. Anyway, what came to my mind this week was a scene from an episode of the famous sitcom The Office.

And in this scene, the boss was on his way to a very important meeting when he slipped and fell into a koi pond. When he got back to the office, soaking wet, he tried making up all kinds of stories to hide his embarrassment about what really happened. But the thing is that all his rationalizations and excuses just made people laugh at him more.

Later on, when he finally admitted the truth about what happened and started poking fun at himself, people’s laughter started turning into compassion. Instead of making up jokes at his expense, they said, “You know, Michael, that’s really the kind of thing that could have happened to anybody.”

I find that moment in the scene very fascinating. It’s like the situation itself was calling for laughter, no matter where it came from. If Michael couldn’t laugh at himself, then the universe was going to make sure that somebody was laughing about it. But when Michael finally did learn how to laugh at himself, the laughter became a gateway to mercy and understanding. It’s as if laughter had this secret power to unlock the doors of compassion in our hearts.

How like life! When we as human beings stand on the firm bedrock of safe and supportive relationships, we gain the ability to laugh at ourselves. And that kind of laughter, rather than tearing us down or pushing us farther apart, has the ability to build us up and pull us closer together — provided that our relationships do, in fact, stand on that solid ground of safe and supportive love.

As a Christian, I do believe that the entire universe stands on just such a solid ground. When we say each week in the Nicene Creed that we believe that Christ will return in glory to judge the living and the dead, I imagine that judgment not as a verdict in a courtroom, but more like a funny story told around the Thanksgiving table. The embarrassment is there, but so is the love. And that love gives us the power to laugh at ourselves.

That’s how I imagine the final judgment of the living and the dead — not as a sentence to hellfire and damnation, but as a side-splitting laugh at ourselves. Because we learn from Scripture that God is both just and merciful. The one who judges us is also the one who knows and loves us best.

In today’s gospel, we get a glimpse of that justice and mercy in action. Jesus tells a parable about a Pharisee and a tax collector. Pharisees, as we know, were very educated and religious people — upstanding citizens and pillars of their community. Tax collectors, on the other hand, were the scum of the earth: bottom feeders, liars, and traitors to their own people.

The Pharisee in this story is doing exactly what we would expect an upstanding citizen to do — holding his head up high in church, listing his accomplishments, and thanking God that he is not like other people, especially this tax collector here. The tax collector, meanwhile, is standing at the back of the church, looking down at his shoes, and the only prayer he can manage to get out is, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”

It’s the tax collector, according to Jesus, who went down to his home justified that day, despite his lack of religious or moral qualifications.

Now, what I find interesting about this passage is that at no point does Jesus say that the Pharisee is not justified. Our English translation says that the tax collector went down to his home justified instead of the Pharisee. But the Greek word translated as instead of in our English Bibles is actually the word para, which literally means alongside. So another way that we might translate this verse from the Greek is to say that the tax collector went down to his home justified alongside the Pharisee, not instead of.

And I really like that. Because if I’m really honest with myself, then I have to admit that there is both a Pharisee and a tax collector within me. Like the Pharisee, I too have the capacity to act like a self-righteous windbag. And like the tax collector, I too have the ability to act like a selfish dirtbag. And if I’m being really, really honest, I’m often doing both at the exact same time.

So it’s very comforting for me to be able to read this story as one where both the Pharisee and the tax collector go down to their home justified alongside each other — because most days, both of those guys are coming home with me.

Several years ago, I had a job interview at the hospice agency where I ended up working for several years before I came here. The interview went really well. I came home all excited and ready to talk about it. But then I walked through the door, and my wife Sarah had just had a disaster of a day. Things were stressful at her job, the kids were acting out, and she needed to unload about all of it.

At the end of the night, we went to bed, and she had forgotten to ask me how my interview went. One part of me was seething — this is the Pharisee part of my brain. Except I was imagining him as more like a tough guy from New Jersey. And he said, “Here’s what you’re gonna do. You’re gonna get that job, and you’re gonna work there for like six months, until one day she asks you, ‘Hi, honey, how was the hospital today?’ And you’re going to be like, ‘Lady, I ain’t worked there in six months! But what do you care?’ And then she’s gonna feel real bad about it. Forget about it.”

So that was one voice in my head — the Pharisee from New Jersey. I decided I should name him Carl. So that’s Carl.

The other part of me was not from New Jersey, but rather from the Midwest. So obviously, he was a nice guy, because we Midwesterners are nice people. And this part of me was saying, “Oh, don’t you know, Sarah’s really busy, and she’s worried about a lot of really important things. You’re not that important, so you should just keep your yapper shut. Remember that you love each other and just get back to your darn life.”

I didn’t give that voice a name, but it was more like the tax collector side of me. That’s the part that just wants to stand in the back, look down at my shoes, and make myself small and invisible.

But let’s be honest: if I was to listen to either of these voices by itself and do what it says, would either one lead me toward having a more honest and loving relationship with my wife? No, it wouldn’t.

So instead, I took a deep breath and imagined myself sitting at a table with both of these guys. I let each one have their say, and even wrote out what they said in a journal. Because the thing is, each part of me was actually trying to help me — they just weren’t being very helpful in the way that I needed at that moment.

So I heard them out, listened with compassion, and tried to understand where each one was coming from. And what I ended up doing was sitting down with Sarah the next day and saying, “Hey, I’m sorry you had such a rough day yesterday, but I had that really big job interview with hospice, and it hurt my feelings when you didn’t ask me about it.”

And Sarah, my wonderful wife, said, “Oh my gosh, you’re right. I’m sorry. Please tell me — how did it go?” And I did tell her about it, against the advice of the Midwest nice guy, because I am important to her, even though she does have a lot of other really important things to worry about.

And I also went against the advice of Carl from New Jersey and his elaborate ruse about working a job for six months without telling my wife, because obviously that plan would not have worked — but mostly because I didn’t actually want her to feel bad. I just wanted my wife to take an interest in my life and the things that are important to me and to our family. Which, of course, she does. We all just have bad days sometimes.

I tell this story as a personal illustration of the Pharisee and the tax collector that exist within each of us — because they both do. That’s why I’m glad that the text of Jesus’ parable can be translated as, “The tax collector went down to his home justified alongside the Pharisee.”

At the end of the day, it was neither the religious and moral observance of the Pharisee nor the humility of the tax collector that justified each of them in the eyes of God. It was God’s own mercy that supported them both. The only difference between them is that one of them recognized that truth and the other did not. But they both needed it, and they both got it — whether they realized it or not, whether they deserved it or not.

Kindred in Christ, the same thing is true for each and every one of us today. We stand in right relationship with God not because we deserve it by virtue of our righteous deeds or our honest confession, but simply because we need it, and it is there. We stand in right relationship with God because God loves us, whether we realize it or not, whether we believe in God or not.

We receive love because God is love. And that is the central truth not only of our faith but of our entire existence. And that love is what gives us the ability to laugh at ourselves — when we trip over our own shoelaces, or when we strut around like a bunch of pompous and self-righteous Pharisees, or when we betray our moral values and closest relationships like the tax collector did. Beneath all of that, the central truth holds firm: you are loved, whether or not you realize it, whether or not you deserve it, whether or not you believe in it. It’s still true — for you and for everyone else in this hurting world.

My prayer for you today is that you would come to know this truth more fully for yourself, and that knowing it will make it easier for you to reflect that same love onto the faces and into the lives of the people around you.

Your Faith Has Made You Whole

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Sermon for Proper 23, Year C

Click here for the biblical readings.

Navigating the diverse world of religious beliefs can be an enlightening, if tricky, experience, even when one is already an active participant in a particular faith community. Visiting another community for the first time can feel disorienting. Up until last week, I had been to Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox church services. I had visited a synagogue and even served as a guest preacher in Unitarian Universalist services, but until recently, I had never been to a mosque.

That changed a little over a week ago when I attended Friday prayer services at the American Muslim Society of Coldwater with my friend, Pastor Scott Marsh, of the Coldwater United Methodist Church. Pastor Scott and I meet regularly for mutual support and to discuss joint ministry opportunities in service to the wider Coldwater community.

One concern that we share is for our Muslim neighbors in our beautiful city, most of whom are also Yemeni immigrants. In spite of the fact that there are differences of skin color, religion, and language between these, our neighbors, and the predominantly light-skinned, Christian, and English-speaking population of Coldwater, Pastor Scott and I wanted to send a message of friendship and support from the Christian clergy of this town.

We were concerned that the negative and hostile rhetoric against immigrants and Muslims that seems to predominate in present-day news media was causing our neighbors to feel unsafe and unwelcome in our community. What we discovered instead surprised us greatly, but I will return to that in a moment.

What I want to emphasize right now is the sense of awkwardness that Pastor Scott and I felt as newcomers in a religious space, even though both he and I are trained professionals in the sphere of religion. For once, we did not stride into the room with the confidence of leaders, but with the tentativeness of visitors. We were unaccustomed to the practice of taking off our shoes at the door. We didn’t understand a word of the sermon or the liturgy, which was entirely in Arabic. We were vulnerable outsiders, cut off from the usual trappings of familiarity that make us feel comfortable in the religious spaces where we lead.

This experience of isolation and fragmentation is common in modern society. We, the people of the digital age, for whom the traditional structures of faith and family seem to be eroding away in the relentless stream of data that comes through the internet, are frequently left feeling like strangers in a strange land. We feel cut off from the sources of meaning that sustained our ancestors for generations. In the wake of constant change, this sense of alienation is understandable—and it relates directly to today’s gospel.

In the story that we read this morning, Jesus encounters a group of similarly alienated people. The text tells us that they were lepers, although that term is a bit of a misnomer. Leprosy, in the modern sense, refers to a condition known as Hansen’s disease, but in the ancient world it could refer to one of any number of infectious skin diseases that required those who suffered from them to be quarantined from the general population. Their isolation from the rest of society was not a matter of moral purity but of public health.

The Torah required that people suffering from skin disease keep their distance from everyone else and loudly announce their condition whenever an uninfected person drew near. This was the isolated state of the ten people whom Jesus encountered in today’s reading. Moreover, the reading particularly focuses on one person who was even more isolated than the rest because he was a Samaritan—and thus regarded as a heretic and a half-breed by his Jewish neighbors.

So this person, like many of us in the modern age, was cut off from all the familiar sources that gave life meaning in the ancient world. These ten people, and this one Samaritan in particular, cried out to Jesus for mercy from the depths of their isolation and despair.

Jesus, in turn, reconnected them to the roots of their tradition, where they might find meaning. He said, “Go, show yourselves to the priest.” And the text says that as they went, they were made clean. This was all well and good for most of them, but not for the Samaritan. For him, there was no option of showing himself to the priest because he was not Jewish but a Samaritan, and thus unable to enter the temple and complete the ritual of purification prescribed by the Torah.

So what was he to do? He did the only thing he could think of—he turned around, returned to the presence of Jesus, fell at his feet, and thanked him. Upon seeing this, Jesus asked a very interesting series of questions. He said, “Were not ten made clean? But the other nine—where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?”

I find those to be very interesting questions. Upon hearing them, many of us consider them to be rhetorical questions. The answer, we think, is obviously no. No, no one but this foreigner returned to give praise to God. But that doesn’t sit well with a careful reading of the text.

After all, Jesus had told the ten to go show themselves to the priests, hadn’t he? Presumably, they were doing exactly what Jesus had asked them to do—visiting the priests in the temple and giving thanks to God for their healing, as prescribed in the Torah that their ancestors had followed for generations. The only reason one of them came back to thank Jesus personally was because that person was legally unable to enter the temple under the traditional laws of the Torah.

What I wonder is whether Jesus’s question was not rhetorical but authentic. What if he actually wanted us to consider where the other nine had gone? What if Jesus wanted to show us that there is more than one way to give thanks to God when we are grateful for the good things that God has done for us? What if the diversity of praise is the very thing that Jesus wants to highlight for us in today’s gospel?

Kindred in Christ, I believe that is exactly what is happening in today’s reading. After asking these three poignant questions, Jesus turns to the Samaritan ex-leper and says, “Get up and go on your way. Your faith has made you well.”

The first thing I notice about this sentence is the part where Jesus says, “Go on your way.” It reminds me of the Fleetwood Mac song from the 1970s: You Can Go Your Own Way. He doesn’t tell the Samaritan to convert to Judaism or to start following the laws of the Torah. He says, “You can go your own way.”

And immediately after this, I find it most fascinating that he refuses to take credit for his own miracle. He doesn’t say, “I have made you well.” He says, “Your faith has made you well.” He gives credit not to the giver of the gift but to the receiver. Isn’t that interesting?

To me, that says that Jesus isn’t interested in building a name for himself because Jesus doesn’t have an ego to bruise. I mean, come on—the guy works a miracle and then refuses to take credit for it. Who does that? Only the kind of person who is more interested in helping people than getting credit for it.

Jesus said to the man, “Your faith has made you well.” And there’s something else that’s interesting to me about that. Our translation, the New Revised Standard Version, renders that last phrase as “Your faith has made you well,” but other translations have rendered it differently. Some say, “Your faith has saved you,” or “Your faith has healed you.” But this is one of the very rare instances where I think the 17th-century King James Version actually renders it best. The King James Version says, “Thy faith hath made thee whole.”

And I really like that, because that’s what faith actually does for us. Whether or not faith can cure people of physical ailments or preserve their immortal souls for bliss in the afterlife, faith, we know, has the power to make us whole.

Humans are meaning-making machines. Evolution has hardwired us to look for patterns and connections in the world around us. When we see two unrelated events that seem to be related to one another, we instinctively look for some kind of causal connection between them. We can’t help it—it’s just the way we were made.

Our faith is not a system of beliefs that we cannot prove scientifically, but the means through which we are able to put together the fragmented pieces of our lives into one coherent whole. Like Jesus said to the man in today’s gospel, our faith makes us whole.

Kindred in Christ, that is the good news coming to us through today’s gospel. That is how we can take the fragmented parts of our life and the alienated people in our society and weave them together into one coherent unit—not because we look alike or talk alike or pray alike, but because we have been brought together into one family by the God who loves us all, regardless of our skin color, or ethnic background, or language, or even our religious beliefs. Our faith has made us whole.

When Pastor Scott and I went to the mosque on the Friday before last, we entered that building as strangers and outsiders. We didn’t speak the language. We didn’t share their specific beliefs. And these two white guys didn’t even look like anyone else in that room. But I want to tell you how we received a welcome of radical hospitality and joy and love. We got a tour of the beautiful new facility that they are building for the worship of God and for service to our community.

They spoke to us about members of their faith community who have been in Coldwater longer than either Pastor Scott or I have been on this earth. Kindred in Christ, I want to tell you today, with both embarrassment and joy, that Pastor Scott and I went to that mosque to extend hospitality, but instead we received it. We went there to offer welcome, but instead we were welcomed.

They surrounded us with the loving arms of Allah, which is simply the Arabic word for God. Friends, Pastor Scott and I learned something that day. We discovered, like the Samaritan in today’s gospel, that our faith has made us whole—not an Episcopal faith, or a Methodist faith, or a Muslim faith, but faith in that mystery which transcends all names and categories, including the categories of existence and nonexistence. Faith in God, or Allah, or love, or any other name that you may choose to give this mystery.

It was faith that brought us together. It was faith that united us across the boundaries of our many differences. It was our faith that made us whole.

Amen.

Fr. Barrett, Pastor Scott, Dr. Ali, and a longtime member of AMS Coldwater (also named Ali)

Crossing the Impassible Chasm

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

Sermon for Proper 21, Year C

Click here for the biblical readings

Several years ago, I was working at a job for which I was particularly unsuited. I believed in the mission of the organization I was working for, but it became clear, as time went on, that my skills were not a good match for the skillset that was actually needed in the position I was filling.

The ever-increasing tension led to a concurrent increase in my depression. I would come home from work every night, drained and exhausted and hopeless. It felt to me like there was this huge chasm opening up between me and my coworkers and my family and my friends. Eventually, it got so bad that I felt like I just couldn’t carry on anymore.

Suffering, unfortunately, is an inescapable fact of life in this world, or so the Buddha taught in the first of his great noble truths. One of the hardest parts of suffering is not the pain itself, but the isolation that it creates between we who suffer and those around us. The paradoxical truth is that pain is a human universal, but it makes us feel like we are alone in the universe.

Maybe your pain is like mine was at that time, coming from dissatisfaction with a job or a relationship. Then again, maybe for you, that pain comes from grief at the loss of a loved one. Or maybe it’s the hopelessness you feel when you look at the world through the screen of an iPhone, doom-scrolling through social media as people respond to the nastiness of the world by getting nastier and nastier with each other.

The causes are manifold, but the result is the same. We feel the chasm opening up between ourselves and our neighbors and widening to the point where it feels impassable. That chasm, that feeling of emptiness between us and our neighbors, is where I want to start as we look at our gospel for today.

The impassable chasm between one person and another factors highly in the parable that Jesus tells in today’s gospel. This is a parable about a wealthy man whose name we do not know and a poor man named Lazarus. On the surface, this looks like a story about the afterlife, but the main thing to understand is that it’s not.

Here’s how I know: This is a parable, and parables are never about the surface-level imagery in the story itself. Think about it: The parable of the lost sheep is not about animal husbandry. It’s about the joy that God experiences in each of us. Likewise, the parable of the Good Samaritan is not about highway safety; it’s about the care that each of us is called to give to one another. So, in the same way, the parable of the rich man and Lazarus is not about the afterlife. That’s just the surface-level image. So what, then, is it about? That’s what we’re here to talk about today.

I already talked about the isolation that I felt when I was going through my experience of suffering at my job. That experience of isolation, that depression, felt like an impassable chasm between myself and the people around me. In the same way, an impassable chasm appears in this parable between the rich man and Lazarus.

This chasm exists in the afterlife, where the fortunes of the rich man and Lazarus have been reversed: The rich man is suffering in Hades, while Lazarus is resting comfortably in the presence of Abraham, or, as some older translations have rendered it, in Abraham’s bosom. The rich man cries out for help, but Father Abraham tells him that there is an impassable chasm between them that no one can cross.

I think this chasm between them had always existed. It’s just that it couldn’t be seen before, when they were alive. The missed opportunity for the rich man was the opportunity to cross that chasm while it could still be crossed in this life. That, I think, is the point of this parable.

To drive the point home, let’s look at the name of the poor man: Lazarus. Lazarus is a Latinization of the Hebrew name Eleazar, and the name Eleazar translates into English as “God helps.”

God helps. That’s the true message of this parable. That’s the fundamental truth that Jesus was trying to communicate to his listeners through the symbols of heaven and hell, or Abraham’s bosom and Hades, as the parable presents them.

Where is God in the midst of suffering in this world? God is helping. That’s what God does because that’s who God is.

In the wake of the terrible events of September 11th, 2001, one of my spiritual heroes, Mr. Rogers, spoke to the families of America and gave them some solid guidance about what to do when terrible things happened. He said, “When I was a boy and would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”

That is the wisdom of Jesus that we find in today’s parable. The name Lazarus literally means “God helps,” and that’s exactly what God does in the midst of suffering that separates us from one another. It’s the opportunity that the rich man missed in this parable, and it’s also the very thing that God did for us in the mystery of the Incarnation.

Christian theology tells us that in the Incarnation, God “took on flesh and dwelled among us.” When humanity was suffering in the isolation of sin and death, God in Christ became one of us — “just a slob like one of us, just a stranger on the bus, trying to make his way home,” as songwriter Joan Osborne told us in the 1990s.

In Christ, God crossed the impassable chasm between heaven and earth, between time and eternity, between sin and righteousness, between death and life. God crossed the impassable chasm. Therefore, according to Jesus in this parable, we are called to do the same with our neighbors.

Returning to my initial story about the job for which I was so ill-suited: My depression got so bad that my mental and physical health were in jeopardy, so I reached out to my priest, Father Randall Warren of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Kalamazoo, and Father Randall listened while I told him what was going on. He validated my feelings and gave me some unsolicited advice, which was rare for him.

He said, “You need to get out of there now.”

Thankfully, I listened to what he said. I quit my job and spent the next year at home with my kids. It transformed our relationship and helped me to become the kind of father that I had always wanted to be. After that, I entered a chaplain training program and spent the next six years as a healthcare chaplain.

During that time, I was able to get back the confidence I had lost while working in my previous job. At the end of that time, I was able to come back and resume my work in parish ministry as the rector here at St. Mark’s, Coldwater, where I am proud to serve you today and hope to do so for a very long time.

When I was younger, I used to say that I wanted to become a priest in order to be the kind of priest that I needed. But now, thanks to Father Randall, I can say that I want to be the kind of priest that I had — a priest who reaches across the impassable chasm of sadness and suffering with the arms of love. I can never pay back the gift that was given to me by my priest, so I will do my level best to pay it forward to others.

Kindred in Christ, that is what this parable is about. God reaches across the chasm of suffering to reach us with the arms of love and calls us to do the same for one another. This is not a calling only for priests, rabbis, imams, and pastors. It is a job for each and every one of us.

When you show up for a friend or a neighbor who is struggling, who is grieving the loss of a loved one or a job, who is going through a divorce, who is in the early stages of recovery from an addiction or a mental illness, who is suffering from the effects of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or any other kind of social injustice, you are crossing the impassable chasm that exists between the rich man and Lazarus while there is still time.

Friends, I don’t believe this parable is about the afterlife. It is about the way we care for each other in this life. It is about reaching across the chasm of suffering with the arms of love. It is about being the hands and feet of Jesus in the world today. That is what God has done for us in Christ, and that is what we are called to do for each other today.

Amen.

A Very Particular Set of Skills

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

Sermon for Sunday, Proper 20, Year C

Click here for the biblical readings

If you are of a certain age, you may remember a movie from a few years ago called Taken. It stars Liam Neeson as a retired CIA operative whose daughter is kidnapped. When the kidnappers contact him on the phone, he replies in his gravelly Irish voice, “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. If you’re looking for ransom, I can tell you that I don’t have money. What I do have is a very particular set of skills.”

The rest of the movie involves Liam Neeson tracking down his daughter’s kidnappers in an attempt to rescue her. If you want to know how it ends, you’ll have to watch it for yourself. I don’t give out spoilers, and this sermon isn’t about Liam Neeson anyway. It’s about Jesus. But I want you to keep Liam Neeson’s line in your head — the one about having “a very particular set of skills” — since we’re going to circle back to it and see how it relates to the parable that Jesus told in today’s gospel.

This parable is notorious as one of the most difficult to understand among Jesus’s parables. Even PhD-level biblical scholars are left scratching their heads about it. What makes this parable so difficult to understand is the fact that there is no moral to the story, nor are there any clear-cut heroes and villains in the story for us to either imitate or avoid. And that’s actually part of the point that Jesus was trying to make in telling it.

It might help us to unpack the meaning of this parable if we were to look at it again and add some of the cultural context that would have been obvious to Jesus and his listeners but may not be so obvious to us who are reading it 2,000 years later.

To begin with, Jesus is telling this parable on the same night and at the same dinner party where he told the two parables that we heard last week: the lost sheep and the lost coin. This is also the same dinner party where he told the parable of the prodigal son, which we read back in Lent. So the scene around this dinner party is Jesus sitting at table and eating with tax collectors and sinners — the most outcast and despised members of his society. Meanwhile, the scribes and Pharisees — the most well-respected, well-educated, and religiously observant members of society — were looking on in disgust at the company that Jesus chose to keep.

The act of eating with someone in that culture was a powerful symbolic statement that you accepted this person or these people as members of your family and thereby approved of their conduct and lifestyle. So it makes sense, then, that the most respectable members of society would be offended at Jesus’ decision to eat at table with the most unsavory and despised members of society. They would be understandably suspicious of the example that Jesus was setting by associating with such people. Nevertheless, Jesus welcomed them and accepted them anyway.

He told the parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the prodigal son for God’s radically inclusive love that extends to everyone — even the last, the lost, and the least. So that’s the immediate setting for this parable. It’s part of the same scene in the movie, if you will, as the parables we heard last week. So it makes sense to look for a thematic connection between this parable and those parables.

Let’s keep going. Jesus begins by saying, “There was a rich man.” This is a significant detail. Regular people had a somewhat complicated relationship with rich people in Jesus’ day. On the one hand, people saw peace and prosperity as signs of God’s blessing upon the righteous. On the other hand, the everyday experience of lower-class people, like many of Jesus’s followers, was that rich people had become rich by exploiting the misfortune of their neighbors.

In the years when the harvest was bad, farmers would stay afloat by borrowing money from their neighbors. If the harvests continued to be bad and they couldn’t pay off the debt, the creditors would eventually seize the farmers’ property and lease it back to them for a price. This then created a kind of economic feedback loop in which the farmers would get poorer and poorer, and the landlords would get richer and richer by absorbing more and more properties of the farmers around them.

This, as you might imagine, did not exactly ingratiate the wealthy landowners to the farmers who had probably worked that land for generations. That’s the first detail to notice about this parable.

As we keep reading, we learn that our concerns about this particular rich man are well-founded. He is indeed a wealthy moneylender. He’s been so successful at it, in fact, that he has had to hire a manager to help him sort through the mountains of debt that his neighbors owed him.

Just how much debt is quite interesting. Let’s take a look. A hundred jugs of olive oil, as Jesus describes in the parable, was worth about three years’ wages for a day laborer. One hundred containers of wheat was worth up to ten years’ wages for a day laborer. So if you were to think of your current annual income — whatever that is — and multiply it by three, that’s how much the first debtor owed to the rich creditor. And if you take your annual income and multiply it by ten, that’s how much the second debtor owed to the rich creditor in this parable.

It doesn’t take much, then, to imagine just how heavy this burden of debt was for the characters in this parable. By forgiving such a large share of these debts, the dishonest manager was literally giving them years of their life back. It was huge, and the people would have certainly been most grateful to the manager for what he had done.

The thing is, however, that this manager wasn’t just acting out of altruistic motives. He was desperately trying to save his own skin. This guy had just learned that he was about to be fired for mismanaging the creditor’s accounts. So he went ahead and cooked the books in order to garner favor with the people he had been exploiting, who would now be above him on the social ladder when he finally faced the consequences of his own actions.

So, yeah, this guy isn’t exactly a Robin Hood kind of character — stealing from the rich in order to give to the poor. He’s more of a conniving opportunist looking for an advantage in an unfavorable situation, which also happens to be a situation of his own making.

The part that sounds funny to us is when the creditor actually praises the manager for his shrewdness. What the manager has done by illegally forgiving debts in his master’s name is to create a win-win situation for everyone involved in the story.

The debtors win because their debts have been dramatically reduced. The manager wins by ensuring goodwill for himself among his former debtors. The landowner wins by improving his social standing in the eyes of the community, which now sees him as a generous lender. This kind of social capital was worth even more than money in the ancient world.

So, the manager is not exactly a “good guy” in the moral sense, but he is a “wise guy” in the strategic sense.

This, according to most scholars, is the reason why Jesus told this parable. It’s not about being good. It’s about being smart and creative and forward-thinking.

Now, let me be clear before we move on: Jesus is not advocating for fiscal misconduct or any other kind of immorality. But he is talking about the kind of thinking that helps us to make the best of a bad situation. Our neighbors who practice in the Buddhist tradition might refer to this as the use of skillful means.

The shrewd manager in Jesus’s story is not a particularly moral person, but he’s smart. He has a very particular set of skills, as Liam Neeson said, and he used that to make the best of a bad situation.

I look around at the world we live in today, and I worry sometimes that we, too, are in the midst of a bad situation. Like the shrewd manager, our situation, too, is of our own making. Also, like the shrewd manager, our situation is no longer sustainable. Things seem to be coming apart at the seams, on the societal and global levels.

Our lust for money, sex, and power, and our faith in violence and greed to give us the world we want, are proving to be false idols that cannot deliver on what they promise. As things continue to unravel, Jesus calls us once again to be shrewd, like the manager in today’s parable: to be smart, creative, and forward-thinking. But this time, it’s not just to save our own skins, but to work together to build the kind of world that God intended.

Here’s a real-life modern-day example:

I read recently about an Episcopal church in Mountain Brook, Alabama. Several years ago, the members of this parish became very concerned about their neighbors who were being overwhelmed by medical debt. People were losing their jobs and their homes for no other reason than that they got sick.

Here in 21st-century America, the members of this church decided that’s not okay anymore. So they did a little research, and what they found out was that collection companies, after trying and failing to collect on the debt that was owed them, would often sell that debt for pennies on the dollar in order to recoup at least part of the sum. And this church decided to take them up on that offer.

They raised $78,000 and purchased $8.1 million of outstanding medical debt, and then, rather than collecting on it, they forgave it all. Now, that’s the kind of thinking that Jesus was talking about in today’s parable. It’s smart, it’s creative, it’s forward-thinking. And, unlike the shrewd manager in the parable, its purpose is to bless others, not just to save our own skins.

Kindred in Christ, I put it to you today that we, too, are called to be smart, creative, and forward-thinking — not in order to save our own skins, but to bless the world around us. There can be no doubt that things are falling apart. As the rock band REM said, “It’s the end of the world as we know it,” but the gospel tells us that it’s also the beginning of a new world, so we have a choice to make:

We can either shake our fists at the sky, point our fingers at one another, hang our heads in despair — or, alternatively, we can be smart, creative, and forward-thinking, like Jesus invited us to be in today’s parable.

When you look at your life, what is the very particular set of skills that you can use to bless those around you? How can you use your time, talent, and treasure to help build the kind of world that God intends for us?

You might not be able to forgive six-figure debts, but perhaps you can take it easy on someone who has offended you in some way. You might not be able to heal the sick with the Laying on of Hands, but perhaps you can give someone a ride to a medical appointment. You might not be able to end world hunger, but perhaps you can volunteer your time at a local soup kitchen.

Each and every one of us has a gift to give, so let us work together and offer those gifts in the hope that God will be able to use them to replace this failing world with the kind of world God intends for us to live in.

Lost & Found

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Sermon for Proper 19, Year C

Click here for the biblical readings

I don’t usually like to toot my own horn, but I’m going to make an exception in this case, because when it comes to the subject of getting lost, I am something of an expert. According to my extensive personal experience, there are at least three ways in which I tend to get lost.

First, I know where I am and where I want to be, but I don’t know how to get there. Physically speaking, this is a pretty common experience for a lot of people. This is why we have GPS—or in the old days, these funny little pieces of paper called maps. Of course, the hardest thing about maps was that you could never quite figure out how to fold them right. So by the end of it, you would need a map for figuring out how to fold a map.

Spiritually speaking, this is why we have our spiritual practices: prayer, meditation, the reading of Scripture, and, of course, the seven sacraments. These things are like a map for the spiritual journey that we are all on—a journey from self-centeredness to reality-centeredness, as philosopher John Hick calls it.

The second way of getting lost is when we know where we want to go and how to get there, but we don’t have a clear idea of where we actually are. Physically speaking, this reminds me of a photo I saw this week of a sign in the Salzburg airport that says, “Sorry, this is Austria, not Australia. Need help? Press the button.”

Spiritually speaking, this is like the scribes and Pharisees in today’s Gospel reading. They saw themselves as good, righteous, decent citizens, offended that Jesus was hanging out with tax collectors and sinners. In their inflated sense of self-righteousness, these religious leaders mistakenly believed that they were morally and spiritually superior to the people Jesus was choosing to spend time with. They forgot that they, too, were sinners who needed grace just as much as everybody else.

The third way of getting lost is when we know where we are and how we want to travel, but we have no idea—or the wrong idea—of where we’re going. This would be like somebody who sets out from Coldwater to travel to Rochester, New York, but ends up in Rochester, Minnesota.

Spiritually speaking, this reminds me of people who think that their religious lives are only about getting their ticket stamped for the afterlife instead of trying to make this world a better place. It also reminds me of people who think that the spiritual life is about gaining some kind of mystical knowledge that makes them superior to others. Finally, it reminds me of those so-called Christian nationalists who see their religion as a means through which they can gain power and thereby force their will or beliefs on others. These people might have a clear sense of who they are and how they are living, but their final goal is very different from what Jesus Christ envisioned as the ultimate purpose of the spiritual path he taught.

So then, these are just a few examples of the many ways in which I tend to get lost in life, both physically and spiritually.

The theme of getting lost figures rather prominently in today’s Gospel reading. Here we listen to Jesus tell two stories about things that got lost: a sheep and a coin. Both are stories Jesus told in response to the religious leaders of his day getting upset about the kind of people he was hanging out with.

The scribes and Pharisees were educated and observant people who cared deeply about their faith and about how they thought it ought to be practiced. In contemporary terms, they would be like clergy or seminary professors. The tax collectors and sinners, on the other hand, were somewhat less respectable in the eyes of polite society. They were the riff-raff, the outcasts—the freaks and the geeks, if you will. But even more than that, they were people who, in the eyes of their neighbors, were not just sketchy but actually scary.

If we were to search for modern equivalents that would have the same emotional impact tax collectors had on Jesus’ audience, we might have to replace tax collector with sex offender or meth cook or gang member. Tax collectors and sinners were a rough crowd not just because of how they looked, but because of how they lived. These were genuinely scary people to Jesus’ audience. So it makes sense that polite, upstanding citizens would be disturbed by Jesus’ choice to spend time with them.

The shocking part of the good news Jesus proclaimed is that God’s love extends even to these most despicable human beings. And Jesus doesn’t flinch from saying it.

What I would like us to notice is the emotional tone of the words. The text says that the Pharisees and scribes were grumbling, but the emotional term Jesus uses—no fewer than five times—is some variation of the word joy or rejoice. The shepherd rejoices when he finds the lost sheep. The phrase rejoice with me is repeated twice. Jesus says there is joy in heaven and among the angels at the finding of what was lost.

Modern psychologists tell us people need about 5.6 positive compliments to balance out each negative criticism in order to be emotionally healthy. In this passage, Jesus actually comes close to that, with five repetitions of joy compared to one mention of grumbling. That’s kind of cool.

What this tells us about how Jesus sees the world is that unconditional love is the foundational fact of all reality. And that fact can be a source of joy when we learn to embrace it for ourselves and for others.

But this is easier said than done. Many of us find it hard to accept the gift of unconditional love, because there’s nothing we did to earn or deserve it. That makes it harder to extend love to others, because we can hardly believe it for ourselves.

Jaye Brix, a trans woman and former pastor, points out:

Many of us were taught a theology that prioritizes retribution over transformation. It’s not about making things right; it’s about who deserves to be punished. Someone needs to pay. So, when someone who holds a theology of retribution hears the words, “You hurt me,” they don’t hear, “Let’s fix it.” They hear, “You are a bad person.”

The fear that accompanies this theology causes people to look for any way to avoid guilt, because in their world guilt doesn’t mean growth; it means punishment. And who among us hasn’t felt the fear that being wrong might lead to being unloved?

According to Jesus, this is not a fear we need to carry any longer, because the good news he proclaims is that love is the foundational fact of all reality—and it applies equally to each of us. Believing this good news, trusting in the foundational fact of love, frees us from the power of fear that turns guilt into shame.

I like to tell my kids when they mess up that regret is a wonderful teacher. It means you’ve grown as a human being. It means you care about what is right. If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t feel guilty. Guilt, then, is not a sign that you are a bad person, but actually a sign that you are a good person. The only kind of person who truly lives with no regrets is a psychopath.

Kindred in Christ, I want to encourage you this morning with the good news that all of us get lost—at some time or another, in one way or another. Therefore, none of us can claim moral superiority over anyone else. What we can do, because unconditional love is the foundational fact of our existence, is learn to practice the art of radical self-acceptance and then extend that acceptance to those around us—even people we don’t like, people we disagree with, and people who scare us.

If God is love, as Scripture says, then the single greatest act of worship we can offer is to find joy in accepting that love for ourselves and extending it to everyone else. This is the heart of the Gospel. It is who we are, and it is what we are called to do as Christians on this earth.

Amen.

Touching Grass

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

Sermon for Proper 17, Year C

Click here for the biblical readings

When I was a kid, growing up in the 80s and 90s, Nintendo was a big part of my life. I spent a lot of time perfecting my fine motor skills with games like Super Mario Brothers and Street Fighter II. The only problem was that I developed a bad habit of losing my temper at the TV screen whenever things weren’t going my way in the game. When my poor mother would hear me screaming from the next room, she knew it was time to come in and tell me to turn off the game and go play outside.

Now that I have teenagers of my own, I’ve noticed that their generation has coined a new phrase to deal with this exact situation. When someone is showing signs of having become too wrapped up in drama on the internet, their friends will say to them, “Go touch grass.”

In previous generations, parents might have worried that the mention of “grass” indicated that their kids were engaging in, shall we say, a bit of “recreational chemistry.” But, in present day terms, “touch grass” means temporarily unplugging from the virtual world in order to get back in touch with actual reality. If you’ve been online too long, you need to go touch grass. It’s the same thing that my mother was trying to tell me, back in 1992.

In a way, “touch grass” is also the same point that Jesus is trying to make in today’s gospel. When people are getting too wrapped up in “playing the game” of social hierarchies, they sometimes need to turn it off, reengage with reality, and maybe even go outside and literally “touch grass.”

Whether or not we happen to be of the online generation, we all have a tendency to get wrapped up in silly games that sometimes stress us out. The technology is new, but human nature remains just the same as it ever was. At school, there is a pecking order that dictates who gets to sit at the “cool kids’ table.” At work, certain voices are more likely to be listened to in a meeting. In our neighborhoods, people scramble to “keep up with the Joneses,” while forgetting that everyone is a “Jones” to someone else. The game of social hierarchies is crazy-making. That’s why all of us need to periodically turn it off, go outside, and touch grass.

That’s how we remember that the essence of the good life is not about competition, but communion. It’s not about beating each other, but being together.

In today’s gospel, Jesus is enjoying a meal at someone’s house on the Sabbath day. This is an important detail. In the gospel according to St. Luke, the Jewish concept of Sabbath, the day of rest, comes up repeatedly. For Jesus, the day of rest was not a day of religion, rules, and rituals, but a weekly reminder of the way life is meant to be. Many of Jesus’ healing miracles took place on the Sabbath. People were restored on this day, not only to physical health, but also to their rightful place as equal partners in their community.

A significant part of the Sabbath, for our Jewish neighbors today as well as back then, is the common meal. In Jesus’ time, the seating chart at these meals was very important. The right kind of people had to have the right seat at the right supper in the right house. The whole thing was a game about reinforcing social hierarchies (much like the “cool kids’ table” in every school cafeteria).

At first glance, it seems like Jesus is teaching strategic etiquette for getting the right place at the right table, but what he’s actually doing is subverting the social order by encouraging people not to play the game of social hierarchies. For Jesus, the big Sabbath meal is a symbol of reality, as seen from a spiritual point of view. The most honorable guests, in God’s eyes, are those who willingly take a lower position in order to make space for others at the table.

From the point of view of the Christian spiritual tradition, this parallels nicely with the mystery of the Incarnation, where the Divine Source of all Being “became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14) in the person of Jesus the Christ.

In Christ, according to the Christian tradition, God’s own self took the lowest place by being born to an impoverished refugee couple, in an occupied country, in the feeding trough of a stable outside of an overfull inn. In today’s terms, it would happen in the parking lot of a run-down motel, somewhere in the West Bank of Palestine.

From the point-of-view of the powers-that-be, such a baby would be nothing more than another mouth to feed, a nameless statistic in the latest news about the latest airstrikes, and a drain on national resources. But, from the Divine point of view, such a birth marks the coming of salvation and liberation into the world. This is the truth that Christians proclaim every time we celebrate Christmas.

Kindred in Christ, this is what it means to “take the lowest place.” It means becoming vulnerable and standing with the most disenfranchised people on earth. In Christian terms, this is what it means to save the world. Jesus the Christ didn’t do it by climbing the social ladder, but by intentionally taking the “lowest place” among humanity. We who claim to be the people of Jesus must follow suit, as the Scriptures say in 1 John 2:6, “whoever says, ‘I abide in him,’ ought to walk just as he walked.”

Dear kindred in Christ, our Lord invites us to “touch grass” because that is exactly what God did in the mystery of the Incarnation. Jesus the Christ took the lowest place among humanity in order to exalt humanity to the “right hand” of God, “in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come” (Ephesians 1:20-21).

Friends, our Lord asks this of us because he knows that real life is not about beating each other, but being together.

When I think about this way of being together, what comes to mind is Crescent Comics and Games, which sits just a few yards from our church’s front door, on Chicago Street. This establishment is a prime example of a “third place,” as described by Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book, The Great Good Place.

A “third place,” according to Oldenburg, is different from a “first place” (the home), and a “second place” (the workplace), because it is a place where people can come and be human, without the expectation of monetary participation. Third places are important because they provide space for people to hang out, converse, and figure out who they are, without having to make a purchase or prove their monetary worth.

Other examples of third places include places of worship, public libraries, community centers, and internet chat rooms. They are absolutely essential for functional democracies, but they are becoming increasingly rare in our consumer-oriented society.

Crescent Comics and Games is a for-profit business, but it also functions as a third place because people come there to play games, even if they don’t buy anything from the shop. Logan and Colleen, the owners of this shop, have intentionally made their business a place of welcome for everyone in Coldwater. Those who play games in their store are welcome to make a purchase, but it is not required for participation in the games that take place there. That is why I ultimately consider their shop to be a third place in our beautiful town.

The kinds of games that people play there are manifold. Most significant to me are the role-playing games, one of which is run by our own parishioner and cameraman, Chris Russell.

Here’s the thing to understand about role-playing games: They aren’t about winning or losing. In role-playing games, the players work together to overcome a common challenge and tell a story that is greater than any one of the individual players present. The story is the thing that matters most, and the players either succeed or fail together. I can think of no greater parallel to the Church than this. We, the people of faith, are called together by Christ, not to compete with one another, but to work together in service to a Grand Story that is greater than any one of us.

Kindred in Christ, I believe that the Church is called to be a third place, like Crescent Games and Comics, in our community today. We ought to be a place where people from every walk of life can come and know that they will find a friendly face and a safe shelter from the storms of life.

This is what Jesus the Christ meant when he encouraged his followers to “take the lowest place” in the social hierarchy of Sabbath suppers in his day.

I pray that our church might be a “third place” where every person in our city can come to touch grass, find safety, hospitality, and love in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, who taught his followers that real life is not about beating each other, but being together.

Amen.