Between noon and three

Preached at St. Mark’s, Berkeley, on July 27, 2025, the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 12).

Collect: O God, the protector of all who trust in you, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: Increase and multiply upon us your mercy; that, with you as our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we lose not the things eternal; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Readings: Genesis 18:20-32, Colossians 2:6-19, Luke 11:1-13

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen:

“Yes, No, or Not Yet.” I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid we learned that God always answers every prayer that we make with Yes, No, or Not Yet. We might not like the answer, but God is faithful, and never just leaves us hanging. So if we don’t get the Yes we want, we have to start considering that the other two might be what’s on offer instead, and then try to consider what each might mean for us. Yes, No, Not Yet. In any case, once we receive our answer, we give thanks to God in return. In this way we grow in prayer and in faithfulness.

Today’s passage from the Gospel of Luke contains some extended reflection on prayer, and the passage from Genesis shows us Abraham bargaining with God. All these tactics are pretty familiar, aren’t they — bargaining with God, pleading our case as a child to a parent, repeated asking, insisting, banging on the door in the middle of the night, the quiet contemplation and trust commended in the Lord’s Prayer.

I’m sure I’ve tried every one of these tactics with God, and a lot more besides. If nothing else, seeing them here in the text of Holy Scripture gives us assurance that God is pleased to hear our requests, even though he already knows what we need, far better than we do ourselves. Or, put another way, our lessons assure us that God desires to hear and receive our own desires. In prayer, the desire I share with God is met by God’s desire for me, and this encounter, the church teaches, works both to heal and to elevate my own desiring, so that more and more I want what God wants, and I am satisfied with nothing less than God himself. This is the door that is opened to all who knock, that which is found by all who seek, the gift received by all who ask.

Do you ever stop to recall: what are some of the principal things you have prayed for in your life, and how did God respond? Speaking for myself, I’m often so caught up in the answers I want right at this minute that it’s easy to forget the fervent prayers I offered in the past. But at least once in a while it’s worth pausing to remember them, and to reflect on whether the answer was Yes, No, or Not Yet.

If you’re like me, the No answers, and maybe some of the Not Yets loom particularly large. Some of them still sting, either because I do not yet understand why the answer was No, or because I am now so relieved not to have gotten what I thought I wanted that today I am embarrassed to recall how fervently I prayed for it. Perhaps you fell in love with someone who didn’t love you back. Perhaps you were hoping for a loved one’s illness to be healed. Perhaps you went to great lengths pursuing a vocation or other pathway that never finally opened its door to you. 

There is nothing wrong with any of these desires or pursuits, and some of them no doubt reflect very noble personal qualities, deeply held convictions, and sincere loves, as well as overwhelming desires. When God says No to requests like these, it can feel like we ourselves are being rejected, or that God’s goodness has somehow failed or reached its limit. If we can muster the presence of mind, we want to know why; more often we simply suffer the loss and grieve. Parents of children lost in the Texas floods a few weeks ago know something of the grief of God’s No. But if you find God has said No to one of your most fervent prayers, I urge you not to consider it a personal rejection, or a failure of God’s goodness. I can’t pretend to open the mind of God to you. And I will not tell you that pain and suffering ever serves some larger, inscrutable, divine plan, because it doesn’t. But I will say that God does make good from ill, life from death, and that some day our eyes will be opened to see what he has made to grow from all the injuries and deaths we have suffered. In God nothing and no one is ever truly lost, and his power to restore is far greater than any power to destroy.

Of course it’s also true that in addition to noble virtues and deep pathos, our most fervent prayers also frequently spring from a poor and incomplete knowledge of what is good for us in the first place. As a child, if I asked my mother for ice cream for dinner every night, she would tell me no every night. Not because I didn’t ask nicely or frequently enough, but because ice cream wasn’t a meal, and no matter how much I wanted it to, it could not provide the nutrition I needed for dinner. God made me, God knows what I need better than I know it myself, and sometimes what I pray for simply isn’t good for me, and God’s No is a way of saving me from myself.

But if No is sometimes painful, at least the answer is definite. The Not Yet answer can be much worse, because it never seems to come with a clear timeline. Those with a heart for particular causes are frequently answered Not Yet: just treatment for immigrants and refugees, racial healing, renewed growth of social trust, a swift and effective response to the climate crisis, to name just a few. Not yet. We do see improvements here and there, but plenty of backsliding too, and sometimes it gets a lot worse before it gets better. So we wonder, why “Not Yet”? 

Again, there’s nothing wrong with any of these desires, they are all of them seriously good. It’s the same in our own lives. God, help me make the most out of the gifts you’ve given me. God, let my brother see his addiction for what it is. God, heal the relationship between my two neighbors. Not yet. Why not?

Remember, Not Yet isn’t a No — and, critically, it isn’t a Maybe, either. God doesn’t do conditions, “Yes if you do this, no if you don’t, maybe, we’ll see if you behave.” Grace is not conditional, if it were it wouldn’t be grace. No, a “Not Yet” from God is always really a Yes, but it’s a Yes with an unknown and perhaps unknowable horizon. Before we can properly receive some of the things we pray for, we need first to be ready, and Not Yet helps us to see where we might need to do some work ourselves, within ourselves and within our own communities. 

God wills to give us everything that is good. But if we were to possess it all now, it would tempt us, like Adam and Eve, to forget that it was given in the first place, and instead we would grasp at it, consume it, like the apple on the tree, and thereby corrupt it utterly. Not Yet teaches us to hold some prayers, some desires, taut perpetually, tight, like a bowstring, or like the great rope threads which ancient shipwrights used to tie boats together, in order to give shape and form the rest of our lives and to all our other desiring; or like the string of a violin, to be the means by which the Holy Spirit makes music upon our souls. As Bianca of Siena put it in her famous hymn, “And so the yearning strong / With which the soul will long / Shall far outpass the power of human telling; /  For none can guess its grace / Till love create a place / Wherein the Holy Spirit makes his dwelling.”

Prayer helps us see, the Nos, the Not Yets, and the Yeses all take place in God. There is nowhere we can go, no answer God can give, that sends us out from his presence, that closes our eyes to his love, though we can choose to turn our backs and stop our ears. Whether we understand the reasons or not, whether we are bowed down with grief or ecstatic with joy at God’s response to our prayers, we have not left his presence — in prayer we remain right in his very heart. 

So, when we go to pray, having sought and found, having asked and been answered, having knocked and the door opened, perhaps to the place we wanted to go, perhaps to somewhere else entirely, we can truly say, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

To conclude this morning, I simply repeat my invitation, to stop occasionally and take stock of your life’s most fervent prayers. Lay down for a time the overwhelming concern of the present, and consider the prayers that shaped your way here to this moment, whose ups and downs have created the landscape of your own spiritual life. Recall how God answered you in each of them, whether Yes, No, or Not Yet, and consider if your sense of that answer has changed over time. Then, give thanks: not for clarity, or even for satisfaction, because both are in short supply, even in prayer. Rather give thanks that your prayers offered to God are always met by God’s steadfast faithfulness to you, by God’s desire for your good and the healing of the world. 

His love makes a way through death itself to return to its source, prospering in that for which he sent it. So, in this Great Thanksgiving, this Eucharist, we find that the Nos and even the Yeses are all Not Yets: what has been affirmed or denied has been affirmed or denied only in part, and in the Eucharist of our Thanksgiving, both Yes and No find their restoration and their fulfillment in an endless communion of love, in God’s new and everlasting day.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Amen.

Preached on Sunday, July 13, 2025, the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, at St. Mark’s, Berkeley.

Collect: O Lord, mercifully receive the prayers of your people who call upon you, and grant that they may know and understand what things they ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

Readings: Deuteronomy 30:9-14, Colossians 1:1-14, Luke 10:25-37

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen:

Today’s Gospel brings us the parable of the Good Samaritan. So famous is this parable, so loudly does it echo through the ages, that the other readings almost disappear into the background. And rightly so: this is one of those passages that even hardened atheists seem to know by heart, and they treasure it at least as much as believing Christians do.

Most sermons on this parable preach the same message Jesus did: “You, go and do likewise: be a neighbor to those in need, in the way the Good Samaritan was to the man robbed and beaten.” In this reading, we might see Christ himself as the great Good Samaritan. St. Paul seems to take this approach when he says, “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” That is, while we ourselves were incapable of helping ourselves, Christ came to the rescue.

In some of my own sermons on this parable, I’ve suggested we might find another layer of meaning in reading Christ not as the Good Samaritan, but as the man beaten by the side of the road, while all of us, who start out as Samaritans, foreigners, are made neighbors, members of the household of God, by our taking him in.

Either way, the Priest and the Levite usually get short shrift. They are the picture of what NOT to do, as they hurry about their busy, important lives. This makes it an especially tough passage for us to hear, because, in Berkeley, in the Bay, how many such helpless people in need do we literally walk past on a daily basis? The experience of simply walking down the street becomes an exercise in bitter moral failure. 

I don’t know about you, but “precisely zero” is the number of times I have walked or carried a homeless person to the Hotel Shattuck, gotten them a room, and then given my card to the front desk to open a tab for room service. And, to make matters worse, “more than I can count” is the number of times I have walked past them on my way to St. Mark’s for some appointment or a service in the chapel.

There are other ways I personally and St. Mark’s as a parish have engaged and helped the struggling on our streets, and you ought to proud of that: everything from impromptu conversation, occasional direct aid, and genuine welcome and inclusion in this worshiping community, to our feeding ministry and the weekly clinic we host, to the money we send to the diocese and the many housing and social ministries that funds. So it’s not nothing. But it’s still hard to hear this parable, knowing that the Lord’s demand of direct, one on one, personal engagement is mostly absent for us — and, worse, feels genuinely impossible most of the time.

So this morning I want to spend a little time considering that poor priest and Levite, whom we normally paint as the villains in the story. The fact is, they are not the villains, they didn’t rob and beat up the traveler — that distinction belongs to the bandits. And, far from being merely heartless to the poor man’s sufferings, they both happened to be members of an occupation governed by strict conditions and prerequisites, especially around contact with the dead. 

Jesus notes this poor man had been beaten and left for dead, and from a distance it might looked like he was indeed dead — so of course the priest and the Levite crossed to the other side of the road. Their job was an important one, one they understood to accomplish real social and spiritual good for the people in their care and the nation as a whole. It’s not that they didn’t care about this poor man. It’s that their job was important enough to have to rank the needs of the community over the needs of an individual, who in this case might have been beyond help anyway.

If you say, “Yes but this is the logic of Caiaphas,” you would be right. Remember, the night of Jesus’s betrayal and arrest, Caiaphas tells the council, “Better that one man should die than the whole nation perish.”The Church reads a deeper logic in Christ’s crucifixion, such that Caiaphas’s Machiavellian compromise turns out to be a true prophecy: this one man does die, so that all humanity might not perish but have eternal life. Still, any diplomat of any skill would have a hard time disagreeing, either with Caiaphas in the early hours of Good Friday, or with the priest or the Levite in today’s parable. They are not, in fact, wrong in their calculation of their duty. Yet Jesus lifts up the Samaritan as the example to emulate.

What’s going on here? If the priest and the Levite aren’t actually wrong, if instead they are the perfect image of obedience and dedication, what is the teaching? One way of reading it is to observe that this is the sort of thing that’s behind the charge of subversion so often leveled at Jesus, in his own lifetime and long after. If the priest or the Levite had followed Jesus’s teaching in the parable and helped the man, they would have neglected the temple and their religious duties, duties sanctioned by generations of historical development and by Holy Scripture itself. 

Is Jesus really suggesting we do away with all these structures and institutions for the sake of helping a single suffering person? And if we do, if they’re all swept away, what would be left to motivate the next good deed? Jesus tells the parable in the first place in response to a question about obeying the law. But if the law itself is swept away in the act of obeying it, then again the question remains, what’s left to motivate the next act of love? What’s left to hold power to account? The most Jesus himself says about this question is that he does not come to abolish the law, but rather to fulfill it; that the law in fact does not pass away.

So maybe Jesus is not as subversive as this reading suggests. But we’re still no clearer to understanding the logic at the heart of the parable, why it’s the Samaritan who gets lionized while the priest and Levite are not.

Many commentators note that the Samaritan is a foreigner. Remember, Samaria was the successor to the northern kingdom of Israel after its people were exiled and scattered by the Assyrians. By Jesus’s day, some of its people were descended from the Israelites who had remained in the land, but on the whole they were a mix of other tribes and nationalities. Even before the exile, the people of the northern kingdom had been rivals to the people of Judah from the days of Solomon’s son Rehoboam. That a Good Samaritan is the one who helps this poor man on the road from Jericho to Jerusalem — one of the quintessential Judean roads — makes for a much greater impact on Jesus’s hearers. This foreigner has compassion on a suffering man. And, most commentators note, this compassion fulfills a deeper law than the one motivating the priest and the Levite.

I want to maintain, however,  that the priest and the Levite are not without hope. They are being faithful in the way they know how. Indeed, they are maintaining the religious structures in which Jesus’s parable inheres and makes sense in the first place. And yet its the Samaritan who fulfills the law.

There’s no way around it, there is a real tension running through the parable. But then Christian life is full of the same tension: the tension between the world as it is and the world as it is meant to be, the world God is working steadily to build. One of the consequences of humanity’s fall from grace is a departure from a former intimacy with God. This present lack of intimacy is overcome in the rites and ceremonies of religion, in which we see as in a glass darkly what in the end we shall see face to face. 

The priest and the Levite work faithfully to keep this intimacy possible in the here and now, for all the people of God. The Samaritan, on the other hand, breaks in as a representative of the life of the world to come, in which every tear is wiped from every eye, and disease and pain and death shall be no more. The Samaritan puts aside every division, every social more, in order to heal and restore. 

When Jesus suggest that this is what fulfills the law, he is pointing to the life of the world to come, and suggesting that the fulfillment of the law, as a whole, does not finally occur until we enter the kingdom of God in full. And, by corollary, he is suggesting that whenever we go and do likewise, we ourselves initiate a momentary breakthrough of heaven on earth. The law which priest and Levite obey is not abolished or superseded, but it is transcended, in every instance of care and compassion.

I think this is really lovely, but it still presents us with a problem, because while we are in this life we still need the structures and institutions by which we can make sense of the acts which transcend them. And insiders, like ordained people and active, engaged members of churches, almost always err on the side of those structures and institutions. It can’t really be otherwise, these institutions are themselves signposts that a different, a greater life is possible, that the estrangement of the world from God is a sad thing, a temporary thing, which God is in the business of healing.

We’re left simply to thank God, that outsiders are not bound by the same law as insiders. They are free in a way we are not. And their freedom from the very laws and rites which, we believe, open our eyes and fill our hearts, by God’s grace shows us just how blind we are and reveals how stony our hearts can be. 

So, until trumpet shall sound, and the clouds be rolled back as a scroll, let insiders everywhere, and especially in the church, be glad for the presence and witness of outsiders, who, like the Good Samaritan, so often unwittingly inaugurate and even embody the very thing we long and pray for — till we ourselves wake up in the Innkeeper’s care, healed and restored by their quick thinking and selfless ministration. So we shall be made outsiders ourselves to our former lives, and as outsiders, finally free to enter the inheritance of the children of God.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Amen.

I preached this sermon on Sunday, June 29, 2025, the third Sunday after Pentecost, at St. Mark’s, Berkeley.

Collect: Almighty God, you have built your Church upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone: Grant us so to be joined together in unity of spirit by their teaching, that we may be made a holy temple acceptable to you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Readings: 1 Kings 19:15-16,19-21, Galatians 5:1,13-25, Luke 9:51-62

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen:

“For freedom, therefore, Christ has set us free.” This, from the beginning of today’s Epistle, is one of those glorious verses that comes as very good news indeed — because if you’re like most people, you’re deeply aware of those things that keep you unfree.

What are those things? You might reply with things like, fear of the future, or perhaps an abiding worry about your loved ones, or the institutions you care about. Maybe you’d reply with something about your health, like creaky joints or a heart condition or a cancer diagnosis. Some of you might reply by naming your particular addiction, maybe a substance or maybe a codependency. Maybe for you it’s none of these things but rather a need to be liked, to be needed, to be respected, or to please your parents, your spouse, your boss. 

Would you like to be free of these things? “For freedom Christ has set us free.” What would it even mean to be free? Many of us cozy up to our various captivities because we think they reflect well of us: “Of course I am captive to my kids, they’re my responsibility after all, and I love them. Of course I’m captive to my boss, I care about my career and I feel that my work is a real vocation. Of course I’m captive to the news, I care about the world, and even if it makes me depressed I’d still rather know than not know. Why should I want to be free of any of these things? It sounds like you’re suggesting free myself of the people and things I care about, but I can’t let them go, they’re too important to me.”

But for freedom Christ has set us free. Paul’s invitation is not to cut all ties with our loved ones, but to be free of all that holds us captive. The challenge, the opportunity, is to learn how to love them without being captive to them. Because true love actually doesn’t take prisoners, and if you find yourself captive to something you love, it’s usually a good sign that there’s something more at play than love.

Of course the two big things that Christ comes to free us from are sin and death. The church has always interpreted sin to be, first and foremost, a matter of love: either not enough love, or too much love, or else love misdirected, but love in any case. 

Too much love is easy: I love ice cream, I love spending time with my son, I love a good vacation, but too much of any of those things and suddenly I find I’ve neglected my health, my other household duties, my job. 

Not enough love is easy too: the driver of that minivan at nursery school drop off, who almost ran me over, is still someone for whom Christ died, and deserves my compassion and forgiveness, not my ire or wrath.

Love misdirected is harder, but still common enough: I love my country, and the values I understand are at the core of our our national identity. This love leads me to vote in certain ways, and to take a certain satisfaction when the other party faces difficulty. But love, real love, cannot take any satisfaction in anyone’s difficulty and still remain love. If I find myself caught in this trap, it means my supposed love for my country has been misdirected into something less – mere tribalism – and it doesn’t make it better if I’m in the right (because of course I always am!).

Love excessive, love deficient, love misdirected is how we turn the strongest, most life giving and creative force in the universe, the very Name of God, into a servant and vector of death. But for freedom Christ has set us free.

I say all this by way of set up to suggest a means of understanding why Paul follows his glorious statement about freedom with a laundry list of vices and an extended reflection on the war between the flesh and the spirit. The point of Gospel freedom is not to be free of the loves that make us who we are, but to be free in order to love them properly, fully, unalloyed by any misdirection, insufficiency, or excess; free to love, in other words, as God loves, who does not require anything from us except that we should exist, and give him glory by our being ourselves, free of captivating and controlling interests, free of sin and death.

Paul did not believe that the flesh was evil. Like most good ancient thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to Augustine and Gregory Nyssa, he simply thought that it should defer to the higher faculties, and not usurp their powers for its own ends. At the top was the spirit, the soul, which was the human person’s window and connection to God himself. Next came the mind, the rational powers, which operated according to reason, order, and laws. Then came the flesh, which operated according to desire, appetite, and need. 

For all these thinkers, the human person was a unity of body, mind, and soul, not one to the exclusion of the others, and the challenge was for all to operate harmoniously, with the lower in service to the higher, and not the other way around. This is because the higher had greater perspective, greater power, and greater potential for good. 

Back to ice cream again: when I allow my appetite to rule, I eat too much ice cream and not only does my mind enter a sugar-induced fog, but I’m also bloated for days. Maybe that’s too much information, but you get the point: when the appetite is allowed to rule, the mind is impeded, and even the flesh suffers. But when the spirit is given its rightful place, my mind is able to listen, even to people I think are dead wrong, and my passions are exercised in empathy rather than exasperation.

But this is MUCH more difficult than it sounds. So Paul, ever the pragmatist, gives us a series of exercises to practice. These are the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These are not personality traits we can either have or not have; these are all of them acts of the will, by which we exercise our freedom from captivity, freedom especially from captivity to ourselves.

Thank God we have help, because otherwise it would be too hard for us. In Baptism we have put on Christ himself, and we enter into his own freedom, by which he freely entered death and hell to break all its captives free. In the confession we’re about to make and the absolution which follows, we lay aside the many shackles we put on ourselves, and receive grace to walk upright again. In the Eucharist we’re about to celebrate, we are nourished with the very bread of heaven, and our own flesh and blood receive the Spirit of the living God. With help like this there is hope for all of us, no matter how deeply into captivity we might have fallen. 

For freedom Christ has set us free, and the doors of hell are wrenched open now forever. Please, walk out with me, and step into the light of God’s eternal life.

Amen.

This sermon was preached on Sunday, June 22, 2025, at St. Mark’s Berkeley. We kept the day as the feast of Corpus Christi.

Collect: God our Father, whose Son our Lord Jesus Christ in a wonderful Sacrament has left us a memorial of his passion: Grant us so to venerate the sacred mysteries of his Body and Blood, that we may ever perceive within ourselves the fruit of his redemption; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Readings: Genesis 14:18-20, 1 Cor 11:23-26, Luke 9:11b-17

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen:

This Sunday we keep the feast of Corpus Christi. Some of you know this feast as a particularly exotic relic of medieval religion, something not seen north of the Alps since 1539. And you might wonder, what on earth is it doing in Berkeley, California, in 2025? Others might note, it’s only two months since Easter, didn’t we just commemorate this on Maundy Thursday? Still others might be wondering, what on earth is it anyway, and, whatever it is, why are we keeping a feast not in our prayer book? 

I’m happy to say, in response to this last point, it is in our prayer book, or a version of it at least, under the heading “Various occasions” and described as “Of the Holy Eucharist.” There are plenty of churches in our tradition in this country and around the world who still keep it. So what is it? In Latin, the name simply means, “Body of Christ,” and the feast was meant to be an occasion at the very tail end of Eastertide to give thanks for the gift of Christ’s ongoing presence with his church in the Sacrament of his Body and Blood. 

Anglicans have affirmed the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist for so long now, it’s easy to forget how stupendous this really is. What we’re saying is, that the Lord of all heaven and earth is present in these consecrated wafers, in this consecrated wine; that this is not just an amazing ongoing miracle, but that this is the fulfillment of his promise to be with his disciples, to be with us, till the end of the age.

There’s a lot to say about the Eucharist, about what happens when we offer it, and what happens when we make our communions. Perhaps this is why we have a separate feast for it. On Maundy Thursday, when we celebrated its institution, we were also at the outset of the Triduum, the Great Three Days celebrating the Lord’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection, and that rightly tends to take all our focus. A separate feast of Corpus Christi gives us a chance to pause, to dwell, on the mystery of the Eucharist.

All that notwithstanding, it’s worth noting that at present we live in an age where, when we look out at the world around us and encounter mystery, we take it as an opportunity to figure it out; to learn new things about how the world works, to grow in knowledge and in skill and in mastery. We’re convinced that in order to grow in wisdom and maturity as human beings in our relationship to the world, we must understand the systems according to which the world operates, find our place within them, and then wield them successfully to our purposes.

This is a good thing, mostly. It’s how we get everything from quantum physics to airplane travel and vaccines. But it is also fundamentally impersonal. Mystery, in a world like this, is anything I simply do not know yet — the implication being, that once I know it, the mystery is gone, that the proper end of all inquiry is the elimination of all mystery.

But as anyone who has loved another person knows, no amount of knowledge can finally plumb the depths of a human person. A person is always just beyond the reach of our powers of perception, analysis, prediction. We can get to know them very well, but even couples married sixty years can still surprise one another regularly. There is always a further, deeper layer of mystery to a human person, which we cannot ever fully understand, which compels us to stop trying to figure them out and merely to step back and love them. And it’s in this sense that the church talks about the Eucharist as “The Sacred Mysteries.” 

The Mystery of the Eucharist is one we have learned a lot about over the last twenty centuries. The church has prayed about it, sung about it, written, debated about it, been torn apart over it, been brought back together for it — and all this has left an enormous body of writing, devotion, and hymnody for us to read and celebrate today. But there is finally no plumbing these depths, no mastery over what it commends to us, no point at which we become an expert in this field. Because The Sacred Mysteries are for each of us an encounter with the living God, day by day, week by week, and year by year: an encounter we have in community, but which still comes to each of us individually, too. The Host is placed into your hands, after all, and you consume it yourself. Our first and proper response is always to love. Not to stop thinking, but to love first and last.

All this suggests another way of interacting with the world, an older way than the one that invites us merely to mastery over impersonal systems. And that older way encounters mystery not as a problem to be solved but as a presence to be loved; not as a problem to be solved but as a presence to be loved.  

There’s much to be gained in problem-solving, I’m not suggesting we set aside 500 years of Enlightenment and modern living to turn back the clocks. But I do think there is some real wisdom in this approach, and in any case it does seem to be what the feast of Corpus Christi suggests is the primary posture of the Church.

As Christians we are people who go through the world, first and foremost, learning to recognize and respond with love to the presence of God, in the Sacraments, in Scripture, in Christian community, in the beauties of creation, and especially in the sick, the suffering, the dying, the condemned, and those who wish us harm. There are plenty of things to learn here, plenty of processes and systems and doctrines to grow accustomed with. But the work is to love first, and only second to do anything else; to love first, and only second to do anything else.

Because: presence is everything. Christ came to earth not to make us masters of the universe, or enlightened beings who can command all truth, but so that heaven might touch the earth, and that earth might be dragged up to heaven, while both enjoy the full presence of God forever; so that even death itself might play host to the Son of God and his deathless love. It’s a family affair, a household drama, with the intention that all the members of the family leave their wanderings, put down their weapons,  and come home again.

Presence is everything: this is the whole thrust of the Gospel, for all the creatures of God, and creation itself, to be restored to one another, in one family, one household, where sins and injuries are forgiven, death is done away, and there are no further impediments to our communion with one another and with God.

Then what? Then we live, we grow up, we enter the lives we were made for, full of freedom, and vigor, and joy.

This is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It’s a beautiful vision, and full of grace. But it’s not easy. It’s hard enough to be present to the people in our lives we love, let alone to those whom we really don’t. How wonderful, then, that we are strengthened at this altar with the presence, the Body, of Christ himself. How wonderful that when we leave here, we carry him within ourselves — so if we find it hard to be present in whatever situation may come, we can trust that the Incarnate Lord is present in us, for us.

The challenge is to get ourselves out of the way so he can do in us what he comes to do: to lift up our poor distracted lives, our imperfect loves and our cloudy judgements, our incomplete knowledge and our many sins, to lift them all up and to offer them to his Father, in us, so that we might be as present to God as in this Sacrament God is to us; so we in turn might respond with love to the presence all around us. So may our communion grow, till God be all in all.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Amen.

This sermon was preached on Sunday, June 1, 2025, the Seventh Sunday of Easter, at St. Mark’s, Berkeley.

Collect: O God, the King of glory, you have exalted your only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph to your kingdom in heaven: Do not leave us comfortless, but send us your Holy Spirit to strengthen us, and exalt us to that place where our Savior Christ has gone before; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

Readings: Acts 16:16-34, Rev 22:12-14, 16-27, 20-21; John 17:20-26

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen:

Our readings for the last few weeks of Eastertide move with such breathless anticipation towards Pentecost that it’s easy to lose sight of the major feast we just celebrated on Thursday: the Ascension. Properly speaking, the Ascension itself is the end of Eastertide, and for the nine days between then and Pentecost, the church lingers in a kind of suspended animation, full of anticipation, full of eagerness to get started on our mission in the world, but still waiting for the promised Holy Ghost. Maybe you know, the classic devotion of the Novena, nine days of prayer, takes its origin from these nine days when the disciples waited and prayed between the Lord’s ascension and the promised coming of the Holy Spirit.

But since we’re waiting anyway, it’s worth pausing for a moment to reflect on the magnitude of what’s just happened in the Ascension. This is the sort of feast that makes skeptics like to jeer. “Oh yes,” they say, “Jesus rose from the dead, never more to die again. Then why don’t I see him today, why isn’t he on the news, what have you done with him Oh, he ascended into heaven you say? Well, isn’t that convenient.” It won’t surprise you to hear me counter, that the Ascension is much more than a convenient way to dispose of Jesus’s body. It’s essential to complete the work he began when he took on human flesh in the first place. 

And what work was that? This is really important, I can’t say this enough, Jesus did not come just to tell us important things, though he did do that. He did not come just to be a good example, though he is that too. He did not come just to comfort and to heal, though thank God that was a big part of his mission. He didn’t even come just to forgive sins, though of course he is the only one who can, and he does, gladly, as many times as it takes. No, more than all these things on their own, he came to change something fundamental about human nature and about creation itself.

One of the old Christmas antiphons puts it succinctly: speaking of God, the antiphon says, “What he was, he remained; what he was not, he assumed.” In other words, though God had made human beings in his image, he was not himself one of them. In the Incarnation, however, the second person of the Trinity assumed, put on, fully inhabited for himself, human nature. His name, Emmanuel, famously “God with us,” means that now, no matter where we human beings may find ourselves, there God has gone ahead of us, as one of us. Wonderful – alleluia! – this is the Christmas Gospel, and it’s the reason the whole heavenly host split the heavens singing, “Glory to God in the highest.”

But that’s not all. At the other end of the journey is the Ascension. The first pope Leo, the one we call The Great, wrote in a sermon in the 5th century, that Christ, “in descending to earth, had never been absent from his father; and, in ascending up to heaven, had never withdrawn himself from his disciples.” What he’s saying is, if heaven came to earth at the Incarnation, then at the Ascension, Earth is raised up into heaven. At Christmas, God became a human person. At the Ascension, that human person sits down at the right hand of God; and with him, there in heaven, there is all of human nature, indeed all of creation itself. Heaven has come to earth, and earth has come to heaven. What before was separated is now joined forever.

Wait just a minute, you will say, are you saying I am now already in heaven with Jesus? How is that possible? I don’t feel very much in heaven most of the time. My life still feels very earthly. My mother still has dementia, the world is still a mess, people are still dying of overdoses, bombs are still falling, there are still families who can’t afford a place to live, hurricanes and wildfires still ruin whole regions. I still screw up all the time, I still put my own needs ahead of others. There is too much hurt and crying and pain and wrongdoing for this to be anything like heaven. How can you possibly say I am now in heaven with Jesus?

I’m afraid in this case the good news and the bad news are both the same piece of news. While we are in this life, we only have one foot in heaven with the Lord, while the other foot is firmly planted on earth. But think: this is exactly why the sin, death, and suffering bother us so much, because we do have one foot in heaven, and we know deep in the fiber of our being, that we are meant for more than all this. If we were wholly of earth, none of it would bother us very much, it would be just the way things are. Our very feeling of discomfort, of being off balance here, points us to see that we do indeed have one foot in heaven. The first and last prayer of every Christian is the first petition that Christ himself taught us, that on earth it may be as it is in heaven. And we have confidence in so praying, because the whole work and ministry of Christ is to stitch heaven and earth together. What before was severed, he has now joined, ad by his grace, his power, it grows together more and more.

This has lots of implications for our lives and how we understand the experience of being in the world. For one thing, it suggests that the deeper we go in prayer, in self-examination, in contemplation; the further we penetrate the mysteries of the cosmos in mathematics, physics, string theory, and whatever comes after that; whatever our chosen pursuit, whatever our charism, the higher we climb, the more we find we are not alone, that somewhere along the way we have passed through a door, that there is Another who has arrived there ahead of us. There is an Encounter deep within the heart of our being. If we shrink from it, then something vital in ourselves shrivels and dies, but if we embrace it, then that Encounter grows to encompass us and the whole world we occupy, filling us with love and beauty and grace.

Second, it suggests that a big part of our work as Christians is to make plain for all the world to see the marriage of heaven and earth: to treat every person with the same dignity as the Son of God, to love creation as the reflection of his glory, to grow in faith, hope, and love. It means much of our worship and mission consists in an Ascension-style lifting up, holding up before the presence of God everything in our lives, everything in creation, that does not yet reflect the truth, beauty, or goodness that we know it was made for, starting with our own hearts and extending to everything we encounter.

We do this in a special way at the altar, when we offer bread and wine to become for us the Body and Blood of Christ. But we do much the same whenever we pray, whenever we give thanks, whenever we exult, whenever we work to feed, clothe, visit — both those who love us and those who are otherwise unlovable. This is the Ascension at work, and it accomplishes, in our own small ways, the work God has been about from the beginning: to stitch heaven and earth ever more closely together, till God be all in all.

Third, it is strong medicine against despair. One of the things the presence of heaven does is to heal our memories: it reveals the good God has made of all the ruin we have wrought. It would have been better, of course, had the ruin never happened. But God is in the business of making good what we have spoiled, and when we begin to have eyes to see, even the worst and lowest and darkest moments of human existence, of our own lives, will start to shine with a higher light, as the door which Christ’s Ascension opens in our hearts floods even the grave  with God’s own life and love, and we find restored to us more than we thought we had lost.

Heaven has come to earth, and earth has been raised to heaven. This Ascensiontide, as we wait afresh for Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit, let us take courage, and with joy enter the work that knits heaven and earth ever more tightly together. So our senses and our wits, our bodies and our souls will be healed, and with all creation we will come to know and breathe the many splendors of God’s love.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Amen.

This sermon was preached on the third Sunday of Easter, May 4, 2025, at St. Mark’s, Berkeley.

Collect: O God, whose blessed Son made himself known to his disciples in the breaking of bread: Open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him in all his redeeming work; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Readings: Acts 9:1-20, Rev 5:11-14, John 21:1-19

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen:

Having a three-year old means reading a lot of children’s stories. One of Oliver’s favorites at the moment is one of Beatrix Potter’s, about the Tailor of Gloucester. Maybe you know it: the tailor is making an embroidered waistcoat for the mayor of Gloucester, who is getting married on Christmas Day. But the tailor gets sick at just the wrong time, and can’t work on the waistcoat. His cat, Simpkin, helps with a number of errands, and then a lot of mice show up to do most of the sewing. So the waistcoat does get finished in time, and it’s of such high quality that the tailor is rich and famous thereafter.

Why this is currently Oliver’s favorite I have no idea — I think it could use a few more pictures given the number of words; and most of the language — about silks, taffeta, ruffles, twist, and late medieval city life — must be a total mystery to a toddler. If nothing else, I think Oliver must like the cat and mice and the games they play, but maybe he understands more than I think.

One of the strangest parts of the story is a long interlude on Christmas night. According to Beatrix Potter, on Christmas night, all animals speak in human language, though not every person can understand them. We, her readers, are the privileged few,  and we are treated to a whole series of animal Christmas carols, with general animal merriment, before the matins bells chime and the happy creatures return to their usual birdsong, barks, and meows.

While the story is set at Christmastime, this bit about the animals talking gives it an echo of Eastertide. Throughout the resurrection appearances of Jesus in the gospels, there is an ongoing play on whether the disciples recognize him or not — and if not, why not, and when they do, when exactly their eyes are opened, and whose first. Today the play, on sight vs blindness, recognition vs hiddenness, builds to an almost fever pitch, spilling into the other readings as well. Even the collect gets in on the act, praying that God may open the eyes of our faith to behold his Son in all his redeeming work. 

In our first reading, Saul goes breathing threats and murder to persecute Christians in Damascus, but on the road he sees the Lord and is blinded by the sight. He goes to Damascus and visits the believer Ananias as instructed, when something like scales fall from his eyes, and his sight is restored. Ananias has his own experience with recognition and sight: he thought he knew what this Saul was about, but the Paul whose eyes he heals is a changed man, and Ananias has to rethink his prejudice and fear.

Meanwhile in the Gospel, once again the disciples do not recognize the risen Lord, and only at the miraculous catch of fish does John realize who it is. Around the cooking fire on shore, Jesus finally reconciles with Peter, with his threefold “Do you love me?” matching poignantly Peter’s threefold denial.

And in the passage from Revelation, the author sees in a vision the whole heavenly multitude praising God. Soon the vision turns to the earth as well, and he sees, “Every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, singing, to the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!” Every creature: suddenly the tailor of Gloucester doesn’t seem so far off. Every creature singing: from humans and angels, to cats and mice, to trees and flowers and rocks, to water itself and the elements and minerals that make up the building blocks of the material world. Every creature means every created thing, and the author of Revelation sees them all singing.

This is wonderful stuff, fantastical even. It makes for captivating children’s stories, beautiful poetry, and richly symbolic works of art, no doubt. But is it real? What can it all mean? Lovely as it is, it’s hard for sophisticated, educated, modern people to take any of it very seriously. Birds speaking? Stones singing? The dead coming back to life? “Come on, this is the real world,” someone will say, “It’s all very nice but surely you can’t take it literally, it must be symbolic.” 

I suggest, though, that if we’re quick to dismiss it all as hyperbole, as mere religious imagery, then perhaps we need to ask if we are not more blind than we like to think. There are so many things we cannot see. There are so many ways we cope with our blindness by methods that limit our sight yet further, rather than opening it up.

One of the most popular of these is probably thanks to our culture, to this particular moment in the progression of western civilization, where we’ve been thoroughly conditioned to work very hard at earning our place in the groups, professions, and positions that we enjoy.

We work so hard, so conscientiously, to get into a good school, to get good grades, find a good profession, get the right promotion, meet the right partner, live in the best neighborhood, have meaningful hobbies, make the most of our time, produce respectable kids, die an admirable death. Who do we think is watching? What do we think we have to prove? 

We work so hard, so much of the time, to feel we deserve our identities, that we are totally blind to the abject beauty of what is given. I don’t just mean we ought to “count our blessings,” like we do at Thanksgiving, though that’s always worth doing. I’m suggesting something deeper, and hopefully more liberating — that we don’t actually have to create who we are from scratch all the time.

For example, if a teacher hadn’t shown me how to love Bach, I certainly would not have figured it out by myself. Does that mean my own love for Bach isn’t authentic? No, it’s very much a part of me, just one that was, blessedly, totally given by someone else.

Or for another example, I did not choose to grow up as and where I did. There were many joys to be sure, but there were also many frustrating things about growing up in my community, plenty of personal failures, embarrassments, and pain points too. But my own history is now a given — one I can grow from, recover from, reinterpret, to be sure, but ultimately my history is inescapable, and therefore it is redeemable. It is not just an archive of past events, it is a place of present encounter with the love of God.

When we rush forward headlong, as if every day we have to create our whole lives from scratch, in order to win best in show and therefore prove our worthiness to be here, we ignore, miscount, or are otherwise blind to the many givens that cry out for our time, our wonder, and our delight. If only our eyes were opened, we might see what glories there are to be seen, in what is already true of us.

Or another popular one: we absolutely love to turn things into instruments, to make means of things that are actually ends in themselves. Mindfulness is a perfect example: Christian meditation is a very ancient practice of prayer with many schools of thought and avenues of approach, with a robust and well-documented body of wisdom to govern its healthy practice. The point of the whole thing is to love God, in a unique and special way, less mediated by the things and images which normally define our thinking and constitute our language. Yet now, adapted for the modern wellness market, corporations sponsor meditation workshops for their employees in order for them to be happier and more productive at work. One of the highest-grossing apps in Apple’s App Store is the “Calm” app, ostensibly designed to foster inner peace in its users, but in any case wildly successful at lining the pockets of its creators.

There is something obviously sick about this “instrumentalizing” of meditation. But how often do we justify our own religious practice, or other parts of our lives for that matter, in terms of some other end? We pray because it helps us focus. We come to church because it inspires us for the week ahead. We read the Bible because it offers some insight or meaning for our lives. We feed the hungry because social justice demands it. We help our kids with their homework so they can get good grades, get the good job, get along in life. 

All these things are good, but they are not good because they enable some other end. They are good because they are already good ends in themselves. Prayer, feeding the hungry, spending time with your kids, caring for your mom — this is it, these are the ends of a good, virtuous, happy, beautiful, holy life, not the means. And when we make them means, we lose everything that is wondrous about them. So, again, we are blind to the glories right in front of us.

These are just two examples. No doubt there are countless more. But if we are so blind as this to so much of real significance in our lives, can we really say so confidently that cats cannot sing carols on Christmas Eve when we’re not looking, that an enemy cannot become a friend, that a betrayal cannot be forgiven, that the dead do not come back to life?

Perhaps the worst way we are habitually blind is to be convinced we know the narrative that’s being told about us and the world we inhabit, that we know our role, our place in it, that we have some sense of how it’s turning out, that we have some control over what it might do for us.

But the big story here, at Easter, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, on the road to Damascus, and in my own life, is, to quote theologian Andrew McGowan, that, “the story [we] are a part of is not the one [we] had assumed.” God is telling a different story: a different story in our life, in creation, than the one we have been telling ourselves — a story of freedom, of life; of interruption, of reversal. 

For us to hear and understand the story God is telling will require that our eyes be opened to see in ways we did not imagine before. This is what the Easter, resurrection appearances of Jesus begin to do for the disciples, and for us. 

And in a sense, this is what the Church, the whole of Christian life, is all about: to be a place where we can celebrate God’s many surprises and interruptions for what they are, where can even make a certain kind of sense of them. Here, baptized into Christ’s Body, nourished by the Sacrament of his own flesh and blood, the scales fall and we begin to catch glimpses of what finally will be revealed in full: what yesterday was a sealed tomb, today is the open door of heaven. What yesterday was my deepest shame, today is my greatest joy. What yesterday was only mute stone, today is a voice crying, “Glory in the highest heaven.”

In the Name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Amen.

This sermon was preached on Palm Sunday, April 13, 2025, at. St. Mark’s, Berkeley. Our Holy Week preacher this year, the Rev. Canon Justin White, will arrive on Monday of Holy Week and preach Maundy Thursday through Easter Day. He was originally scheduled to preach Palm Sunday as well, but in the meantime was appointed chaplain of Merton College, Oxford, which has a major Passiontide Festival on the weekend of Palm Sunday. I’m delighted the task falls to me instead, and I’m looking forward to his arrival tomorrow!

Collect (Palms): Assist us mercifully with your help, O Lord God of our salvation, that we may enter with joy upon the contemplation of those mighty acts, whereby you have given us life and immortality; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Collect (Mass): Almighty and everliving God, in your tender love for the human race you sent your Son our Savior Jesus Christ to take upon him our nature, and to suffer death upon the cross, giving us the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his suffering, and also share in his resurrection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Readings (Palms): Luke 19:28-40, Ps 118:19-29 

Readings (Mass): Isaiah 50:4-9a, Ps 31:9-16, Phil 2:5-11, Luke 22:14-23:56

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen:

You probably know the old Christmas carol, Good King Wenceslas, or at least the first verse — something about snow, and the feast of Stephen, and a poor man gathering winter fuel. You may not know the rest, though, or the origin of the carol. The legend is medieval, and 10th century at that. But the carol is actually wholly Victorian: freshly written by the prolific translator John Mason Neale, he wanted his carol to have the air of antiquity, so he made it sound as medieval as possible, with his chosen rhyme scheme and the way he told the story.

The story goes: Wenceslaus looks out of his castle on a cold, snowy feast of St. Stephen, notes a poor man gathering wood, and decides to bring him some Christmas cheer. The king orders his page to get supplies for a feast: “Bring me flesh and bring me wine / Bring me pine logs hither / You and I will see him dine / when we bear them thither.” So we bounce along. But it’s a long, cold walk, and the page starts to lose heart. Wenceslaus tells him to place his steps into his own footprints, whereupon he finds himself miraculously warmed.

It’s exactly the sort of happy, implausible story we expect at Christmastime, so we don’t generally dwell on it too much. But if you set aside the obvious difficulties for a moment, the story is actually a wonderful meditation on the Incarnation: for Wenceslaus it’s Christmastime and good to be the king, until he notices one of his subjects struggling. Then he leaves his warm castle and, carrying supplies, walks a very long way to the man’s hovel, in order to shower him with royal attention and fellowship. Is this not what Jesus does for us when he becomes flesh?

If this carol is a meditation on the Incarnation, it’s also a meditation on Christian life. What are we to do, but follow where our Lord leads? Where he leads was obvious for the good king’s page: the poor man’s hut was under the mountain, we’re told, at the edge of the wood near St. Agnes’s fountain; Wenceslas himself goes in front as they walk. Today it’s often harder for us to know where Christ leads, but still he goes in front, and following him is still our task, trusting that he brings warmth and fellowship to all he visits.

Today is not Christmas, however, today is Palm Sunday. And as our collects have both expressed, today we “enter with joy upon the contemplation of those mighty acts whereby Christ has won for us life and immortality;” we pray for the grace to “walk in the way of his suffering,” and also to “share in his resurrection.” Our liturgy today begins a week-long series of dramatic, sacramental “re-enactments” whereby we relive the principal events of Jesus’s passion and death: his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, his last supper, betrayal, and arrest, his trial, his crucifixion, and culminating finally in his resurrection.

It’s worth asking, why do we do all this? Dramatic re-enactment may be a beautiful thing, but it also takes a lot of work, along with the blood, sweat, and tears of a lot of people. The liturgies of Holy Week are more arcane than what we usually offer (if that’s possible), and much more difficult for visitors and newcomers to understand let alone to participate in. Meanwhile attendance is never what we’d wish. So it really is fair to ask, why go through all the effort, year after year? Who is it all for, what difference does it make?

Well, for one thing, when Jesus said to his disciples at his Last Supper, “Do this in memory of me,” the church took that command seriously. We do still today. Why did they want to keep his memory alive? Because they loved him, because they believed him when he said he was the Son of God, and because they saw in his resurrection not just his own vindication but a revolution in the cosmic order of things. And they felt that staying near Jesus, even if only in memory, helped them live in his new kingdom rather than the old.

So, if all this re-enactment helps to bring the past forward into the present, helps us keep in touch with the Lord we love, then our living memory also helps us to cast our present lives forward, into the new kingdom whose doors he opened, and on whose throne he now sits. Our living memory, our sacramental re-enactments, help us to locate our lives in Christ’s Easter victory. His suffering and death are not without purpose: they are the tools of our enemy the devil; Christ takes them up himself in order to defeat the devil at his own game.

Why is this important? Because, to return to Good King Wenceslas, it really is winter out there! I don’t need to tell you how great is the number and variety of forces arrayed against us: not just tariffs and political chaos, not just so many cruelties and depredations on the vulnerable, but the loneliness epidemic as well, the monetization of the internet and especially social media, reducing relationships to “likes” and truth to memes, not to mention the affordability crisis, and the ongoing loss of confidence in many pillars we once took for granted, plus countless private griefs and challenges.

In such a maelstrom, it’s clear life has a hard time taking hold, and if we don’t gather what fuel we can, we’re liable to freeze to death. So you and I are like the peasant in the carol, which by the way ends before Wenceslas and the page actually arrive at his dwelling. I’m not sure they arrive at Christmas at all, I think they arrive now, in Holy Week: Here in the Lord’s passion and death, our king arrives with his own flesh and wine, to make a feast with us in the midst of winter’s icy howl.

Or perhaps we are the page, dragged out of a perfectly warm castle by a boss whose whimsy we’re sure is going to get us killed one of these days. Really, bring flesh and wine and pine logs halfway across the kingdom in the middle of a winter storm? And on foot? For one single peasant? Even if we love our king, surely it’s more important to take care of ourselves, to address more pressing needs, in any case to turn back from obvious folly, else we perish. No, keep following, he says, just put your feet in my footprints.

So, against our better judgement, we do, and, lo and behold, there is warmth in the king’s footprints: He steps in snow and ice, the surface is still frozen, the wind whips as badly as ever. But when we place our feet where his have been, we find the very earth has warmed, and life returns to our numbed limbs. Do you hear what I’m saying? When we walk the way of his suffering, winter may still be raging all around, but where our feet touch earth, there is life, and health, and peace, while death and fear flee away.

Of course Wenceslas and the page must eventually arrive at the peasant’s cottage; however long it takes, they must finally have their pine log fire, finally have their feast of flesh and wine. But remember where he lives: under the mountain. When Jesus is sealed in the tomb, he enters the realm of the dead, to bind its tyrant and lead all its captives free. There under the mountain he celebrates communion: the king has brought his feast, all share his bounty and his fellowship, and where he has stepped flowers grow over tombstones, and dry bones put on flesh.

Are you and I the peasant? Are you and I the page? Are we the dying and the dead? This Holy Week, I invite you to put your feet where Christ has stepped, to walk with the Church the way of his suffering, to enter upon the contemplation of those mighty acts, whereby he has won for us life and immortality. There is warmth in this earth: it received his body for burial, but found itself delivering him up again to a new life that shall not die. So may our winter turn to spring, and our darkness to light.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Amen.

This sermon was preached on the fourth Sunday of Lent, “Laetare” Sunday, March 30, 2025, at St. Mark’s, Berkeley.

Collect: Gracious Father, whose blessed Son Jesus Christ came down from heaven to be the true bread which giveth life to the world: Evermore give us this bread, that he may live in us, and we in him; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Readings: Joshua 5:9-12, 2 Corinthians 5:16-21, Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen:

The parable of the prodigal son is easily one of the most well-known, most beloved of all the parables, perhaps one of the best-loved passages in all of Scripture, and for good reason. There are few episodes with a greater range of emotion, greater depth of pathos, greater height of celebration, than this one, especially packed into so small a number of verses. For me, I’m always moved by the father’s response to his son, but maybe even more than that, I find myself moved by all that’s contained in the short phrase, “But when he came to himself.”

How long had the prodigal been out at this point, sowing wild oats? Months? Years? A decade or more? We don’t know, but it sounds like it was probably longer rather than shorter. Before that, what must this son have been like when he was at home? Insufferable, no doubt. No father, not even a generous or foolhardy one, would have sold half the farm and given the cash to one of his sons on the first request. How many years must that father have listened to this kid’s whining, his insistence that he knew better, that he could do better, that he deserved better, than so much farming? I’m sure by the time the father sends off his son he’s tried every other option, used every trick in the book, to get him to grow up. But then there came a point when he’d simply had enough, and he thought, fine, let him have what he wants, and off he went.

Really, it was an insulting thing to ask: the farm is the inheritance, after all. The prodigal son is essentially telling his father, “You’re only good to me dead, and even then only as so many dollar signs. Why should I care about you, your life’s work, what you’ve labored to build and create and care for? Why should I stay here, stuck with a crazy family and nothing to look forward to but livestock?”

In a sense, the prodigal son disowns himself: he has reduced his father to mere money, and leaves his family, his life behind. He is now a “free agent,” as they say, with not a care in the world, but a heavy purse in his pocket. Does he at least work diligently with it? Does he do something with it worthwhile? No. He’s so taken with the freedom he’s gained for himself that he spends every last penny in “dissolute living.”

It’s unclear what exactly Jesus means by this, but we can guess, we’ve all known prodigals in our own life; perhaps we’ve been one ourselves. However he employs himself, it’s no surprise to hear, the money eventually runs out, and he finds he has to work for a living. Without any marketable skills, however, he’s limited to the meanest possible labor, feeding pigs: an unclean animal, one Jews do not eat and would not have raised. The prodigal is far from home indeed.

Finally, we’re told, “he came to himself.” And this realization is what turns the whole parable: he remembers he is a son, that he has a father, that his own actions have removed him from that relationship. He remembers that his father has hired hands, all of whom have enough to eat and to spare. So he decides to go back and beg to be treated as one of those hired hands.

You know the rest: his father welcomes him with open arms; the older brother is resentful, the father tries to snap him out of it, and we’re left to wonder whether it isn’t the prodigal who’s more grown up than his brother after all.

There’s a reason we’re reading this parable in Lent, and it’s because we’re meant to see it as an image, a type, an icon, of what the church means when we talk about sin, repentance, forgiveness, even resurrection: it’s all inescapably personal, it’s all a matter of relationship. If the law is involved at all, it’s to indicate what’s right and wrong and to measure the degree of offense. But the substance is personal, the whole point is that the father welcomes home his son despite what the law says he deserves. The son demanded what was legally his, spent it all, and now has no legal recourse. Still his father embraces him. So it is with you and me. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that God treats each one of us with the same degree of compassion and tenderness with which the father treats the prodigal son, but nevertheless this is indeed what the church teaches.

Holy Week is not far now, only two weeks away. This lesson is perfect preparation because it reminds us that, if we read the prodigal son’s story more broadly, as the history of the entire human race, the point at which the Incarnation takes place is when the prodigal is in the pig pen trying to snatch a bite out of their slop. The incarnation, especially the Lord’s passion and death, is how the human race “comes to itself,” how we are suddenly able to remember that God loves us, and that there is a way back from the mess we’ve made of our life, from the wreckage of the inheritance we’ve squandered.

Consider what that little phrase, “he came to himself,” implies. He was not himself, and now he is. This is right at the heart of what the church teaches about sin: sin makes us a stranger to ourselves. What was the prodigal’s sin? Sure, it was whatever “dissolute living” means. But before that, at the root of the whole thing, was his decision to render his father into nothing but money, and to divorce himself from all family ties. We can only guess at the story he told himself, what delusions he must have entertained. But what’s painfully clear is that he did not appreciate, and perhaps did not even know, who he himself actually was. Among the lies he had bought into was that freedom meant creating his own identity afresh, by raw consumption of goods and services, without reference to anything  beyond his own ego.

Does this suddenly sound familiar? There are some people who call it “The American Dream.” But for all that it promises of freedom, empowerment, and personal agency, the prodigal’s choice is a trap that keeps people estranged from themselves, from their histories, from their neighbors, and from their world. It is not freedom at all, but a prison. 

There in the pig sty, the prodigal finally “came to himself;” and when he came home, this father ran to him on the road, embraced him, put a robe around him, put his own signet ring on his finger, and announced that his son, who was dead, was alive again. The prodigal’s life has been returned to him, and, having come to himself, perhaps he can finally see and recognize it for what it is: the freedom to be rendered not according to money or pleasure or deserving, but according only to love — with all its limitations, yes, but with all its possibility and promise, too.

This is freedom indeed, the freedom to make something, not just to consume; the freedom to be made, forged by the love of others, and to forge by love in return, not just to feed our appetites.

It’s also worth noting that, even while we are strangers to ourselves, the prodigal son is not a stranger to his father, not a stranger to the one he has despoiled and abandoned, whose love he has injured most. Whether his father considers him alive or dead, he never questions whether he is his son. The father refuses to sever the family ties his prodigal son had rejected.

Just so, you and I are not strangers to God. Everything that was true about us before, that we couldn’t or refused to see, remains true, even in the midst of whatever self-imposed exile or pigsty we currently inhabit. No matter how thoroughly we have refused the peace of God or the promise of life, no matter how often we have treated as disposable the people and creatures of God, there is something deeper that remains true of us: that we are made in the image of God, and for such as you and I, Christ came into the world: to make it possible for us to come to ourselves.

And here is an even deeper mystery: the moment we come to ourselves, the moment we recall the bonds we have broken, the love we have scorned, the moment we notice the wasteland we now inhabit; the moment our conscience quickens and we feel the first stirrings of repentance, then God opens our eyes: to see what till now we couldn’t, what we lacked the strength to perceive: that we never actually left the Father’s bosom in the first place. Whatever we have been doing, whatever enormities we have committed, whatever destruction we have caused, whatever departures we have made  whatever wanderings we have went, whatever rage we have indulged, we have done right there, in plain sight, in his lap, the whole time; and all that’s left is to make a tearful embrace of the One who has seen it all and holds us anyway.

Our culture teaches us that responsibility, that the prudent exercise of power, that a certain amount of well-earned affluence, and other such grown-up things are the marks of maturity and wisdom, of a life well-lived. We are taught to put away childish things, to stop depending on the love and care of others, especially of our parents, and ideally to not need anything from anyone. 

I suppose that’s a good way to make sure we fill up our 401k. But oh if we had eyes to see, as the prodigal’s are finally opened: the Love that made us will not let us go, does not let us go, and we are only finally fully grown in that we remain a child at home.

I don’t know what that looks like for you. Chances are the details are different than what it looks like for me, but I’m sure the overall shape is the same: Your task this Lent, O soul, as always, is to learn to let God love you. Whatever else you do or give up this Lent, whatever other good work you attempt, whatever virtue you try to cultivate, whatever grief or shame you hold, whatever sin your conscience carries, you must learn to let God love you. Like the prodigal’s father, that is all he wishes to do; it is God’s whole will and intent. 

The moment you come to yourself, in that moment, a name, a history, a family, a life, will be restored to you, which perhaps you did not realize was yours in the first place. And when Christ rises from the tomb, it will be for us as the sun rising for the very first time, on the world’s very first day.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Amen.

This sermon was preached on the third Sunday of Lent, March 23, 2025, at St. Mark’s, Berkeley.

Collect: Almighty God, who seest that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Readings: Exodus 3:1-15, 1 Corinthians 10:1-13, Luke 13:1-9

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen:

Our first reading today continues the lectionary’s Lenten romp through some of the most pivotal moments in the Old Testament. This Lent, all of them in one way or another reflect on God’s promises to Israel, especially as relating to their Exodus out of slavery in Egypt and their passage through the Red Sea. 

Today’s reading is particularly resonant: God appearing in the burning bush to Moses is almost cinematic in its drama. I’m sure the first time I encountered this story as a kid was watching Cecil B DeMille’s  “The Ten Commandments.” But long before 1950s epic biblical film-making, God appearing to Moses in the burning bush has been understood to be one of the most important and multi-layered passages in the Bible, read and interpreted in many ways. This morning I’ll some time exploring just three of them.

In the Christian tradition, one of the oldest ways of understanding this episode is as a type, an icon, of the spiritual encounter: Moses goes to the deserts of Sinai to escape himself, his history; but what he finds instead, or rather who finds him instead, is the God of his ancestors, who recognizes him and commissions him to return to the land, the people, he had fled, and lead them to freedom.

One of the most frequent reasons people give up on church or faith or prayer is because they come to it with expectations that are totally and utterly disappointed. Faith is not an escape from our problems, going to church does not magically make us better or even different from who we were before, prayer does not introduce us to a higher state of being. 

The episode of the burning bush teaches us that the moment we begin to approach God, we find ourselves stopped in our tracks, disoriented, turned around. Moses saw the bush that did not burn, and when he began to approach it, God called out to him by name, saying, “Moses, stop.” “Come no closer.” Then, “take off your shoes, for this wilderness, this mountainside, this waste scrub, is holy ground.” 

Already we are somewhere very different from the serene peace and joy that so many modern spiritual gurus promise about prayer. For Moses, at first glance in any case,  his encounter with God seemed to bring him everything but. So it is with the rest of us. The closer we get to God, or the closer God gets to us, the more we are thrown back to the very things we had worked so hard to escape. 

I don’t know what that is for you, but if you’re like most, it’s some combination of your history, the shame you carry, your griefs; your most besetting sins, your most unhealthy habits of mind, your disappointments, your distractions, your temptations. Why is it that the minute we show up at church, or the minute we begin to pray, or the minute we resolve to do some good work, suddenly there they all are again, like some monstrous internet comments section trolling our good intentions? 

Well, for the simple reason that God made us who we are, and his purpose is not to make us into something else, but rather to perfect what he began. The bush does not actually burn after all, it only appears to be burning, and approaching it Moses discovers the true end of every created thing, to be bright as flame with the presence of God. 

For us lowly humans, this project always means making something with our histories, our griefs; with the basket of unruly thoughts and deeds we’d rather just ignore. It means facing them, owning them, and letting God tell another story in them than the one we’ve been telling ourselves. But that’s hard, and painful, and very difficult, and it really doesn’t feel like peace or joy or nirvana most of the time.

Moses has to go back to the Egypt he had fled, to the people he had abandoned, and, ironically, be for them the icon of God’s faithfulness and the agent of God’s liberation: be the icon of what he had explicitly escaped. You and I won’t be let off the hook any more easily than Moses. What are you being called to face? The distractions that assault your prayers might be a good place to start asking that question.

Another important element in today’s passage is the introduction of the divine Name. To this day, Jews and even some Christians have such profound respect for the divine Name that they refuse to print it completely, let alone say it out loud. Moses asks God, “If I go to your people and say, the God of your ancestors has sent me to you, and they ask, what is his name, what should I say?” God replies with a name that is famously impossible to translate, but rendered in English is, loosely, “I am that I am,” or, “I am he who is,” or simply, “I am.” 

If you’re Moses in that moment, I can’t imagine it’s a very satisfying response. Wouldn’t a name like Baal, or Anubis, or Ishtar have been more in-genre? But it’s a remarkable name all the same, and for both Jews and Christians it has been understood to mean simply that the God we worship is being in himself. His essence is to be; he is not a creature among other creatures, there was never a time before he came into being because he always has been. 

This is an insight many of the great religions share, that there is something divine about being. But the Judeo-Christian tradition goes quite a bit further by asserting that this divine being who is the God of Abraham is personal, is capable not only of recognizing Moses, but of seeing the suffering of his people Israel, of having compassion on them, and of appointing an agent who will rescue them and bring them to the land he had long ago promised to Abraham and his descendants. 

For Judaism and Christianity, Divine being is not just a principle, it is a person, a person who is not only capable of speech, relationship, empathy, but also a person who desires such things in the first place and acts in history in order to bring them about. This is incredibly important, because suddenly it places the ultimate truth about God not in the hands of scholars or emperors or bureaucrats but into the hearts of any who are capable of replying in kind, whose longing to know God meets God’s longing to be known to them. If divine being is fundamentally personal, then the ultimate truth about God is something that can be known only by love, not by training, position, expertise, or certification.

Maybe you know the atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and his famous, terrifying quote, “If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” Frankly, he’s not far off: except, for the Christian, the abyss we stare into when we go deep into ourselves and contemplate our life, our being, is not a void, not the annihilation of all distinction, not a principle or an abstraction; but rather the abyss at the heart of our being is nothing less than the whole love of God — and what stares back at us is God’s own face, in whose image you and I were made. There, at the deepest point of our souls, of all that is, is an encounter, whose name is only and all Love.

The last thing I’ll observe this morning about this episode of the Burning Bush is that it reminds us that there is a point to all this faith stuff, there is an end to our religion that we’re eagerly anticipating, aiming at; this is all really going somewhere, it’s not just an endless repetition of readings and rites so we can have some meaning on this earth during the time we’re alive. For Moses, he was to go liberate the people of Israel so that they could leave Egypt and worship there on that very mountain where God was visiting Moses in the burning bush — Mt. Horeb, Mt. Sinai. So that, when they got to that mountain, the whole people could receive the law and ratify a covenant with God, that he would be their God and they would be his people. So that they could embark on the joyful project of living together with him in love.

In the Christian faith, the end we’re aiming at is just what we’ll say in the creed in a few moments: “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come,” when Christ’s “kingdom shall have no end.” In this life, we do not have being in ourselves, we are creatures, God is creator; we have being insofar as God continually wills it. The promise is, that because he created us to love and delight in, that God’s purpose is finally to assume all created, contingent creatures into himself. We will participate by grace in what God is by nature, and so we will join the eternal dance.

In this life we pray, we worship, we undertake works of charity and repentance so that we might be ready for the life of the world to come when it does finally arrive. This work always entails a retelling of our own stories, a reconciliation with former, younger, lesser versions of ourselves, forgiveness for the evil we have done and the good we have failed to do; and love for the God who makes these reunions possible, love for the God in whom these reunions take place.

So, when we enter the kingdom of God, we will recognize the face of the One who greets us, and find our whole selves, our souls and bodies, restored to us, and full, finally, of every peace and joy.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Amen.

This sermon was preached on the second Sunday of Lent, March 16, 2025, at St. Mark’s, Berkeley.

Collect: O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from thy ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of thy Word, Jesus Christ thy Son; who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Readings: Gen 15:1-12, 17-18, Phil 3:17-4:1, Luke 13:31-35

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen:

Our readings today are all about covenants and faithfulness, even tenderness. They are so comforting that it feels almost odd to be reading such reassuring words in Lent. Aren’t we supposed to be getting stiff doses of our own sinfulness, and if the assurance of pardon, then not before a reminder of the necessity of penitence?

Perhaps. But this Sunday anyway the lectionary suggests a different path. I for one am grateful: sometimes we get so inundated with questions of ultimate meaning, with wondering what to make of our lives, our world; sometimes we get so overwhelmed with the tasks ahead of us, that words of comfort land like rain in the desert, unlooked-for and refreshing. So it is today. If you hear nothing else, then hear me say that God is faithful to the promises he has made, at least as much today as centuries and millennia ago: promises to keep, preserve, forgive, heal, redeem, fulfill.

Our reading from the Gospel is especially tender, all the more so for the feminine imagery Jesus freely employs regarding himself: “How I have longed to gather your children as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings.” As tender as it is, it’s also bittersweet, as he reflects on the sad end many of the prophets faced, and the persecution they received in their lifetimes.

This is a fair place to stop and say, wait a minute. This is a really lovely image. Why were the prophets so poorly received, if this was the tradition they stood within? Well, to put it simply, divine comfort is a harder sell than you might think, and unearthing why also reveals why it’s actually a deeply Lenten message after all.

We can start by asking, what was it, exactly, that the prophets counseled? The critique they offered is probably more familiar than their actual counsel: we know they spoke up against economic policies that disenfranchised the poor and the stranger, against kings who had abused their power, against greed, hypocrisy, and propaganda. But what were they for? What was the alternative they suggested? At the end of the day, that’s probably even more subversive than their critique. Because what they counseled instead was simple trust in the provision of God.

Why is that subversive? Because it meant not putting trust in the things kings normally put trust in: things like the royal maintenance of chariots and standing armies; like entangling alliances with foreign powers; like wars of conquest and campaigns of international subterfuge. Famously, the prophet Samuel was even against the institution of monarchy altogether, and against the centralization of the state that a monarchy implied. For him it was much preferable that the people remain a loose network of tribes, bound by family obligations rather than by any kind of civic code.

Nathan the prophet confronted king David over his affair with Bathsheba, we know that well enough, and we have the glorious Psalm 51 as a result. But less well-known is that David was punished much more severely for presuming to do something so unthinkably wicked as to take a census of the people. A census? That sounds pretty innocuous to our ears, but the problem was that a census always means taxes and conscription, and with those things come exploitation and war.

In our first reading today, God promises Abraham that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars of heaven. He believed God, and his faith in the promise was reckoned to him as righteousness. Later on, the kings of the people, instead of simply trusting God to be faithful, preferred to take matters into their own hands, and tried to bring about the fulfillment in their own time, in their own way, by whatever means they could muster. This was the opposite of faithful trust. The prophets said as much. And as a result they were run out of town on a rail.

In all those kings’ defense, it’s hard to imagine how it could have played out otherwise. What, they were supposed to just trust that everything would be okay, without making any provision for the kind of resources, security, and organization that a stable, prosperous society would need? If they built no fortresses, if they kept no chariots, how would they defend themselves when the Assyrians came marching? Or forget the Assyrians, what about when their neighbors came marching? And if they made no alliances, if they did not engage in international trade, how could they get the cedar logs or acquire the stone blocks or accomplish the fine metal work to make the Lord’s temple beautiful? 

I can’t blame them for trying to make the best of their situation. But it does seem that ‘just trusting that everything would be okay’ is exactly what the prophets would have preferred, what God would have preferred, despite how insane it sounds to the more practical and pragmatic among us.

It’s a fair question to ask ourselves, especially in Lent. How often do we try to short-circuit God’s promises of peace, or justice, or ‘life and that abundantly’ by making them come true for us on our own terms, at a time of our own choosing? I don’t know what that looks like for you, though I’d venture a guess it doesn’t look much different than for myself. Basically we try to mitigate risk by heaping up whatever resources come naturally to us. Maybe that’s money or security, or maybe it’s things like affection, or influence, or position;  or degrees, or certifications; perhaps it’s our own indispensability, or maybe it’s our zeal — for the Lord’s house, or the Lord’s people, or the vulnerable we care about.

Don’t misunderstand me, none of these things are bad on their own, and most are quite good. When we pursue them because they are good and for no other reason, then we haven’t short-circuited anything at all. But all too frequently we pursue them in order to feed some existential need or lack of our own, and then we twist them to serve another purpose, to serve ourselves instead, and we begin to look less like those simply trusting God to be faithful, and more like Lucifer claiming God’s prerogative for his own.

The truth is, though we can and do trust God to be faithful, the final and complete fulfillment of his promises will not occur in our lifetimes. We cannot have all the answers now. Our life, our work, is oriented towards a future we are not likely to see, towards beneficiaries we are not likely to meet this side of heaven. This should grant us both humility and good cheer, as we suffer whatever slings and arrows come in the meantime. Building ourselves a fortress to mitigate all possible risk is actually counterproductive: it draws, it attracts the very threats we wanted to ward off. Worse than counterproductive, it walls us off from any possibility of being surprised by God’s faithfulness, goodness, or mercy.

As people of faith there is no security we can claim, no impregnable fortress we can flee to, no army of chariots to fight our battles for us. There is only the shadow of God’s wings; there is only the cleft in the wounded side of Christ. Everything else is as so much grass, here today and gone tomorrow.

This is why Scripture uses such tender imagery so much of the time: “All we like sheep have gone astray;” “I am the good shepherd, I know my own and my own know me;” “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he leadeth me beside still waters;” “I do not call you servants but friends; you are my friends.” “Taste and see that the Lord is good, happy are they who trust in him.” We are sent out as sheep into the midst of wolves, and our whole purpose is to be just as trusting, just as dependent as sheep, trusting that God will be faithful to keep us until he calls us home.  Taking refuge in divine comfort means not taking comfort in anything less, else our comfort of choice be revealed as so many fig leaves, as it was so painfully for so many biblical kings.

There’s no way around it, this is a deeply uncomfortable position to be in: especially for reasonably well-educated, reasonably well-resourced people in Berkeley, California, in 2025. We want to do something, we want to use our power, exercise our agency, to make positive change in a world that desperately needs positive change. 

Yes, please let’s do. But at least insofar as we are Christians, a big part of our work is to put ourselves in positions where we can be misunderstood, dismissed, rejected, removed from the board, for our earnestness, innocence, or integrity — in short where we are vulnerable enough to be wounded by those savvier and more cunning than we, by those more willing to take up  the weapons they find lying about the world. Such a dismissal, such a wound will, in the grand scheme of things, serve far greater and more lasting positive change than we could ever accomplish by taking up the tools of our enemy in order to force our ‘better way’ earlier.

“Them that live by the sword die by the sword.” Our life, our task, as Christians, is to trust that God is faithful: to trust that the meek shall indeed inherit the earth, to live now as if this is already the case, and to make our boast in nothing but the God who went to the cross that death may die. So in simple trust we shall be gathered under the shelter of Christ’s wings. So, safe from all disquietude, we shall feed on the bread of heaven. So on that final day we shall wake up after his likeness and find our faithfulness vindicated by God’s own, and all the world at peace.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Amen.