Tag: sermon

Home By Another Way

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon, UncategorizedLeave a comment

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

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

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?

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.

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.

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.