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A sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 9
July 7, 2024 at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Hot Springs

Readings: Ezekiel 2:1-5; II Corinthians 12:2-10; Mark 6:1-3

We began today with a passage from Ezekiel. The prophet is speaking in a time of exile, as he and his people are far from their homeland. They’ve been gone awhile, and they wonder if that will ever change. And here we have this startup prophet who has been given a word of hope. It’s a difficult word with mysterious visions; it’s a word about how God is restoring the nation, bringing them home. It’s a word that seems so out of realm of the possible that God warns Ezekiel that the people won’t listen. 

A sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 16
Education Sunday
August 27, 2023

Every Wednesday, one of my duties is to send a sermon title to Sallie Culbreth. If you don’t know Sallie, you should. She’s an angel among us. I send her my sermon title, and she sends it on to the Sentinel Record. She often even makes graphics advertising what to expect, like this week. Well, today I’m going rogue. If you came expecting me to preach on “Presenting our Sacrifice,” I am sorry to disappoint. 

Continue reading “Confession’s Response”

A sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 15
August 20, 2023

Just who do you think you are? Has anyone ever asked you that, perhaps with a tone revealing that they certainly don’t think of you in the same way? 

The question is central in today’s gospel–who do you think you are? I’ll be honest: this passage has always been a challenge for me. Maybe it has for you, too. Let’s dive in and take a close look. 

Continue reading “Just Who Do You Think You Are?”

A sermon for the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 14
August 13, 2023
First Sunday at St. Luke’s

Do you remember learning to swim? I learned at a summer daycare program. The day I learned, I went up to the edge of the pool. Johnny, the swim teacher, was in the water waiting for me to jump in. “Hey, Mr. Johnny! Should I jump in?” “I dare ya!” Johnny replied. Even as a child, I had my pride. I couldn’t turn down a dare. So without any other options, in I went. Splash–right into the arms of Johnny. 

Continue reading “I Dare Ya”

A sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 10
July 16, 2023

“Listen! A sower went out to sow.” Of all of Jesus’s parables, this may have the most memorable start. We know what comes next–the sower throws seed indiscriminately on all kinds of ground. Sometimes the seed sprouts; sometimes it doesn’t. When it does sprout, sometimes it thrives; sometimes it doesn’t. 

Continue reading “Sower at Work”

A sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 8
July 2, 2023

I have a vivid memory from my childhood. I was probably around 8 years old. It’s dark, and we are on our way to the hospital for me to have yet another surgery. That was the year I had one surgery every two to three months. The recovery was painful, and just as I felt I was about healed I had to go back. In the darkness, in the backseat, I remember feeling as if no one around me really understood what I felt. I did not feel like anyone could really see me–that is, I didn’t feel like anyone could understand what I was dealing with. I felt alone, and my questions to God went unanswered. As I’ve grown, I have wondered what my mother, alone in the front seat, was thinking about on that dark drive. Knowing what her son would go through in a couple of short hours must have been painful for her, too. How helpless she must have felt. 

Have you been in that kind of dark place before? Alone, afraid, unsure of what comes next but knowing you would rather go another way? Perhaps we can understand a little bit of what Abraham and Isaac are going through today. 

Our reading from Genesis takes us to the binding of Isaac. Abraham and Sarah have waited for God’s promise to be fulfilled their whole lifetimes. Sarah is soon to die. And God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Child sacrifice was not unheard of at that time and in that part of the world. For all of human history, people have sacrificed children to their gods, usually in the face of unprecedented hardship, when they feel backed into a corner. They think they can satisfy their gods if they can give them what is most precious: their children. And today, Yahweh tells Abraham that such a sacrifice will be required of him. 

It feels barbaric. It feels cruel and terrible and unnecessary. It feels wrong. It’s supposed to, in a sense. I think we, along with Abraham, are meant to be horrified by this request. If we’re not horrified, we are ignoring our humanity and our God-given sense of justice.  

I wonder what the experience is like for Isaac. Perhaps he was a little like me in that backseat, along for the ride, wondering why, trying to figure things out in the dark. “We have the wood and the fire, father. But where is the sacrifice?” Maybe he was asking hoping his father would put him at ease. He may have known whom the butcher’s cleaver was for. 

I wonder what that experience was like for Abraham? Perhaps a little like my mother’s on that drive to the hospital. This is something he must do, but the pain he feels is overwhelming. He wishes he could step into Isaac’s place, but he cannot. 

I have often imagined Abraham bargaining with God when God tells him to sacrifice Isaac. I have imagined Abraham refusing God at first, negotiating, counter offering, then reluctantly going along with it. But the text doesn’t say that. There’s no indication that Abraham does that. Instead he goes along with what God requires, trusting, as he says over and over today, God will provide. Why? 

I think it’s because Abraham knows God. Abraham knows that God is not some capricious, unaccountable, thunderbolt-hurling deity. Abraham knows that God is faithful. Abraham knows that God has promised Isaac, and Abraham knows that Isaac can be trusted in God’s hands of love and mercy. So Abraham goes forward in trust and faith: God will provide, God will provide, God will provide. 

In Hebrew, that phrase, “God will provide,” is actually “The Lord sees.” The Lord sees a way even when we cannot see a way. The Lord sees even when we find ourselves going up a mountain with all we hold dear under threat of losing it all. The Lord sees even when we find ourselves in the darkness wondering why, grappling with suffering, helplessly hoping for the light. The Lord sees, even when our sight is limited. The Lord sees our future, and we are held in his hand from here to there. Abraham knows that, and Isaac will know it, too. My mother knew that, and I learned it in time. The Lord sees; the Lord is faithful and trustworthy; we can withstand whatever test is in front of us, for we are held in God’s hands. 

But beyond that, there is a greater promise embedded in this story of the binding of Isaac–a greater vision that Abraham cannot see yet, that will not be seen until the coming of the Messiah centuries after Abraham and Isaac. In the binding of Isaac, we see a promise of the atoning and sacrificial death of Christ, the Son of God, for our sins and the sins of the world. 

The Lord sees. The Lord sees how we are held hostage by sin and death. The Lord sees the dominion wrought over us by forces that seeks to corrupt and destroy the creatures of God. The Lord sees how we are wracked with grief, sorrow, tears, pain, suffering, hardship, despair, and hopelessness. The Lord sees those painstaking journeys up mountains, those car rides through incomprehensible darkness. 

The Lord sees and the Lord provides. The Lord does not forever send some stop-gap measure, a ram in the thicket. The Lord does not require the most precious blood of our children from us like those capricious and unaccountable false gods. The Lord sees that we cannot help ourselves, so the Lord provides himself. The Lord sees our need for redemption, for hope, for peace with God, for the love of God, so the Lord sends his Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but so that the world through him might be saved. 

The Lord sees and gives his only begotten Son–God’s very Self for our sin, to cover us, to heal us, to make us whole and to draw us up into the life and love of God. And by this and this alone, the domineering cycle of death is stopped. The vicious circle that leads parents, even today, to sacrifice their children to the gods of this world is stopped and put on notice. For God has seen, and God has provided us his very self–on offer, on the cross, on the altar of God as Body and Blood. 

Like Abraham and Isaac, Mother and I still had that dark road to travel. We all have those roads, those paths of pain, that helplessness. But we are not alone, and it’s not all up to us. For God has gone ahead of us to the cross, and walks with us now to help us carry our crosses from death to resurrection. Like Abraham, may we have the grace and the faith to confess, even in despair: the Lord sees, and the Lord will provide. 

A sermon for the Third Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 6
June 18, 2023

The angel said to me: “Why are you laughing?”
“Laughing! Not me. Who was laughing? I did not laugh. It was
A cough. I was coughing. Only hyenas laugh.
It was the cold I caught nine minutes after
Abraham married me: when I saw
How I was slender and beautiful, more and more
Slender and beautiful.
            I was also
Clearing my throat; something inside of me
is continually telling me something
I do not wish to hear: A joke: A big joke:
But the joke is always just on me.
He said: you will have more children than the sky’s stars
And the seashore’s sands, if you just wait patiently.
Wait: patiently: ninety years? You see
The joke’s on me!”

This poem, called “Sarah,” by the 20th century American poet Delmore Schwartz is a creative reimagining of today’s reading from Genesis and the exchange between Sarah and the heavenly visitors. Sarah, the wife of Abraham, is told at the age of 90 that she will not be barren forever, but that she will, indeed, bear a child. She laughs. Who wouldn’t? Abraham himself laughs at this promise in another place. I would probably laugh, too. Today, it is Sarah who laughs, because she has heard this before. God has promised an heir already. God has doubled down on that promise, more than once already. And yet there is so much that makes this promise seem ridiculous on its face. So Sarah laughs–skeptically, mockingly, dismissively, ironically, perhaps a little like a hyena. “So numerous shall your descendants be, Sarah.” “Yeah, sure God, whatever you say.” 

Have you ever laughed like Sarah? “Of course this would have to happen to me,” we might say with a little chuckle. “That’s just how things go in my life: another day, another problem,” we comment with a laugh. Maybe we are at a place where we have given up hope, where we can’t see a way forward, where we are so used to the way things have been that we cannot see how things could be any different, and all we can do is laugh–mockingly, dismissively, ironically. 

But here’s the thing about God’s promises. They are not just hearty efforts, or a promise to see what God might be able to do under the right conditions, or good intentions. They are promises that can be accounted for, written into the ledger, taken to the bank. They are sure. And just as God says, Isaac is born. And Sarah laughs again. Not like before–not a skeptical, mocking, dismissive, or ironic laughter. But an Isaac laughter that comes from a deep well of joy, from wonder at the goodness of God. Sarah has been surprised by hope, so she laughs. 

The truth is life is full of sufferings and things we cannot control. Sometimes it takes us a long while to be surprised by hope, so we give up. Just ask Sarah. The desire of her heart has not come to pass; the thing she hoped for most seems a fantasy, even too much for the promises of God. She is despondent and sorrowful. No doubt she has spent nights weeping, nights angry, nights bargaining with God, nights wondering why her. And day by day, month by month, year by year, decade by decade, it seems that her worst fears will become her destiny. Sometimes, in the face of that, all we can muster is an ironic chuckle, a dismissive laugh, to keep us from going over into the abyss.

The author of that poem I quoted at the beginning, Delmore Schwartz, knew something about despair. He knew something about how Sarah feels today before the promise is fulfilled. His family lost most everything when the depression hit in 1929. His father died in 1930. A corrupt executor embezzled most of the money away. Delmore went to college, started writing. Early on he was heralded as a big success story, the up-and-coming one to keep your eye on. People like T.S. Eliot praised his work. But then that faded away. His later work was dismissed. His life, once so full of promise, slipped into despair and alcoholism and mental illness. Delmore would die alone, anonymous and penniless, at the age of 52 from a heart attack. It would take two days for his body to be discovered. 

His poem reveals that he understands Sarah’s laugh at a deep level, at a despairing level. Her ironic guffaw was his also. I can hear him say with a dismissive chuckle, “the joke’s on me!” For him in this life, there was no Isaac, no vindication, no joyful laugh that turned mourning into dancing. If we are honest, for many people, that’s the case in this life. 

Here’s what I wish someone could have said to Delmore, what I hope someone tells me when I’m in that low place: The source of real joy, the source of that Isaac laughter, is present, even in our sufferings, even when we cannot feel anything but despair. Our peace with God, our connection to God, does not come through us, but through what God has done for us in Christ Jesus. God’s promises do not depend on us, but on God’s faithfulness, and are always yes and amen. So even in suffering, we can hope. Even in despair, we can hope. Even in fear, we can hope. We can hope, expecting that Isaac laughter to break out at any moment; expecting God to show up in a wonderful way that surprises us; expecting the great reversal from despair to joy, from doubt to faith, and even from death to life. And this hope–hope in God’s power to reverse and bring victory from defeat, life from death–this hope, St. Paul says today, will never disappoint us, for it’s a hope beyond the horizon of this life alone. 

The good news, today and every day, is that God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through Jesus. Poured out in his life, death, and resurrection. Poured out into us moment by moment. And this love of God is always faithful. 

We are not immune from suffering. We are not immune from despair. Like Sarah, the only defense we sometimes have in the face of things we cannot control is an ironic chuckle. “The joke’s on me,” Delmore says. But suffering, despair, and that ironic chuckle do not get the last word over our lives. God gets the final word, and God has promised us love and life. And even if that ultimate Isaac-laugh does not come in this life, it will come just over the horizon. Faith is trusting that–trusting that we are children and beloved heirs of God who will never be separated from God’s love for us. Faith is laughter–Isaac laughter–in the face of suffering, because we know the end of the story: God’s victory over all. 

Was it not Jesus himself who said, “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.” And with us all of heaven. 

A sermon for the Second Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 5
June 11, 2023

“As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’” Today’s gospel takes us to the calling of St. Matthew. Jesus sees an unlikely disciple in an unlikely place. Matthew, a tax collector, sitting in a tax booth, would not have expected a call from Jesus. Despised, called a collaborator with the Romans, Matthew was not the most obvious candidate for discipleship. But Jesus calls him anyway. 

Today we begin a new season of the church year. It’s called the season after Pentecost, or Ordinary Time. Last week, Trinity Sunday, was actually our first Sunday in Ordinary Time, but Trinity Sunday feels different from today and the Sundays to come. From now until Advent, with only a couple of exceptions, we will be in the green season, focusing on Jesus’s life and teaching. We will hear Jesus calling us, like he called St. Matthew, through the words he speaks. And like St. Matthew, we are not the most likely of candidates in the most likely of places to be called by Jesus. But here we are, and Jesus is calling us: “Follow me.” 

As with St. Matthew, Jesus does not give us any details. He does not say, “follow me to this place,” or “follow me for this long.” No, he just says, “follow me.” The invitation is to follow indefinitely, with no details, with no guarantees, without any warranties, without any conditions–but to follow wherever, putting our complete trust in his grace and love. 

Nor does the call to follow Jesus come easily. There is always a cost–a cost to our will, a cost to our egos. We pick up our cross and follow. But in order to pick up that cross, we must lay down some things: pride, vanity, hatefulness, old grudges, anger, envy, festering wounds. We must lay down our insistence to be in control, to always be right, to get the final word. We lay it down so that we might pick up our cross–and the crown of life. 

There is a painting by the Italian Renaissance painter Caravaggio called “The Calling of St. Matthew.” In it, we see a group of men sitting at a table counting money. We suppose this is a tax booth. Off to the side, we see Jesus and another man. Jesus is pointing, calling, inviting, beckoning. The reactions at the table are mixed. One man looks as if he is about to fall out of his chair, and he is reaching for his sword, perhaps in an automatic defensive posture. Another man is looking with interest; he looks young and naive. One man’s head is buried in the table, counting money. This is his favorite part of that day–counting what goes in his pockets. Another man, looking at Jesus, is pointing to himself, as if to say, “who? Me?” 

Art scholars have pointed out that Caravaggio never told us who St. Matthew was. It could be any of the people at that table. To some degree, St. Matthew is in each of them. And so are we. After all, the name “Matthew” literally means disciple. That’s all of us. 

Jesus shows up at the tax booth of my life. He points, calls, “follow me,” he says. Like one of the fellas in the painting, sometimes I nearly fall out of my chair, startled and surprised; and maybe I reach for my sword, put up my defenses, make my excuses. There have been times when I stare with amazement, naively–and that’s all the reaction I seem to be able to muster. There have been times when I’ve asked, “who, Lord? Me? Are you sure?” There are other times yet when I haven’t heard the call because I’ve been buried in other things, things I think are more important, like that dragon in the Lord of the Rings, obsessing over things that are passing away. I have been in each one of those places, and I bet you have, too. 

But the point is not where we are when Jesus comes calling; the point is where we end up. “I have not come to call the righteous,” Jesus says, “but sinners.” Jesus has come to call all of us, no matter where we find ourselves sitting in that tax booth: you, me, and every person on this planet. Jesus calls all of us to him, to his grace, to his love, to his life. He comes and calls–over and over and over again–pulling us forward, in stages, on the journey to the heart of God.