October 25, 2026

You have what it takes

Let’s talk about our guts. We’re told often enough to trust our guts, to follow our guts. We do gut checks. We get gut aches. Sometimes we suffer a gut punch.

What’s a gut check? It's when you stop and consider your instinctive feelings or notions about something.

A gut ache? Well, there’s the literal kind, how you feel if you overindulge on pizza, but there’s also the gut ache of agitation, a persistent worry, a burning emotional sensation.

A gut punch? That’s when you’re knocked over by bad news, or sharp conflict, or overwhelming fear. “I was gutted,” people sometimes say, after hearing terrible news.

What does your gut tell you? How does your gut feel? You probably know a few things about your physical gut, to set all metaphors aside for a moment. Your physical gut is filled with helpful bacteria, numbering in the uncountable billions, responsible for much of your health and well-being. And your gut is the path to the exit for waste, toxins, all the yucky stuff that your body no longer needs, all the disgusting stuff that could poison your body if it can’t find a way out.

We don’t think or talk about our guts very much, here in church. We seem to stand on ceremony here, in polite company, and we instinctively know that guts are… gross. So instead we talk about love, and we talk about remorse, passion, and compassion: strong feelings, these! We talk about anger and fear, frustration and longing, anxiety and despair. It is far less common for us to explore the messy parts of our bodies where many of these feelings lurk, and churn, and sometimes rush up to our hearts and out of our mouths, for good and for ill.

First-century Christians may have been more attuned than we are to matters of the gut. When we hear him today, Jesus, in today’s Good News according to Matthew, doesn’t seem to mention the gut. He quotes the greatest commandment in the Torah in this way: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” But in the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy, the source text that Jesus is using, the commandment is worded differently: instead of loving the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, and mind, we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, and might, or strength.

But the original Hebrew word in Deuteronomy for “might” or “strength” doesn’t exactly mean “might” or “strength.” The Hebrew modeka is closer to other English words like “very,” or “exceedingly,” or “much.” So it’s more precise to translate the greatest commandment this way:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your much-ness, all your very-ness, all your exceeding-ness, all your everything.” Your whole being should love the Lord your God. Your beliefs and attitudes, your desires and deepest longings, your everything-ness should love the Lord your God.

Now, consider this: in the ancient world, the gut was considered the seat of emotion, the location not only of our deepest feelings but our deepest identity. The gut, from belly to bowels, was where a person lived. It was not just where they felt things but where they found wisdom, it was where they wrestled with tough decisions. I have a gut, therefore I am.

Earlier in Matthew, Jesus is moved in his guts with compassion when he encounters people suffering from hunger or illness, or people who were lost and leaderless. Matthew’s Greek is more clearly mentioning the gut in those passages. We translate it as Jesus “feeling compassion” for the people, but it’s more accurate to say his “guts were wrenched” for them. His compassion was a gut punch.

So it’s a small leap for us, then, to conclude that Jesus and his companions understood the greatest commandment this way: “You shall love the Lord your God with your seat of feelings and wisdom, with your most essential identity, with everything that constitutes you. You shall love the Lord your God with all your gut.

But… do you? Do you love the Lord your God with your much-ness, your everything-ness, your very self, your gut? I expect that if you do, this love is not perfectly consistent. And I expect that if you do, this love will often be painful, sometimes even agonizing.

I love my husband Andrew with my gut. He is never far from my mind. When we argue, I can feel heartburn. When I haven’t heard from him and he seems to have been out walking the dogs way too long, my gut startles me with terrible ideas.

I am not a parent, but I know well how my sister feels about her boys, how all of my siblings feel about their children. You know the old saying, that having a child is like tearing your heart out of your body and letting it walk around on the earth.

Maybe you feel this way about your career. If so, that is not shallow! Vocation is vitally important not only to the person living it, but all the people whose lives are improved by her vocation. Vocation: a word that shares a linguistic root with “voice” and “advocate.” Your vocation should wrench your gut with passion and compassion, with a heart-burning anxiety for the welfare of your neighbor; with a heartbreaking commitment to those who have no advocate but you; with a heartwarming affection for those who live without love, if not for you; with heart-opening challenges and crises that draw on every strength you have for a righteous cause.

And, ultimately, in your closest relationships, in your vocation, in all that you are and all that you do, you shall love the Lord your God: you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your gut. Love for God always makes itself manifest in love for neighbor, so it is our neighbors who punch our guts with compassion; it is our neighbors who wrench our guts with outrage on their behalf; it is our neighbors who break open our hearts with the tender love of the Lord our God, who burned with love for the Israelites in bondage, the Lord God who seared the people with fiery love in the wilderness, the Lord God whose guts broke open in love for all people on the cross.

Our faith is not staid. Our faith is not meekly dutiful. Our faith is not reticent. Our faith takes guts.

Every so often, when I am out on a long run, I suffer acid reflux. It happens if I am a little dehydrated, or if I’ve slurped one of those awful energy gels with caffeine and electrolytes. But there might be another cause. I don’t talk about this too much, because I typically just want to post fitness brags about the distance I covered, or how close I am to my goals, but running, for me, is an activity that surfaces harder feelings, sadder feelings, worry thoughts. Everything is connected, so the acid reflux isn’t just the energy gel. It’s my yucky gut punches and gut wrenches that make themselves felt as I pound the asphalt.

Sometimes I play songs by Enya when I run. Friends have teased me about this: “Enya?!” they say. “Don’t you just fall asleep?!” No, Enya’s soothing harmonies and synth instruments cool me out, settle my stomach, calm my fevered imagination.

So maybe that’s why we sing so much soothing music around this place. Simple plainchant psalm refrains, gorgeous harmonies, lyrical hymns, poignant motets. Even our spoken words are soothing and musical. Even at the 8:00am mass, we are soothed and regulated by Thomas Cranmer’s masterful prayers. For St. Paul’s, these pieces of music and spoken word — they are our Enya playlist. They calm us down. They coat the acid in our guts with the soothing Word of God.

But that’s not the end of the story, for us. As we pray in one of our Eucharistic prayers, we come here not only for solace but for strength, not only for pardon but for renewal. Enya helps me calm down, but she also helps me keep running.

So: check your gut, good friends. Listen to it, and let it tell you what you care about. Let your gut show you what it means for you to love the Lord your God. Receive the Eucharist as, well, probiotics for your gut, to help you absorb the gut punches we all inevitably suffer in our life of faith — gut punches of compassion, gripping sorrow, and sharp outrage; gut punches of longing for justice. Chew a few tablets of antacid, in the form of gorgeous antiphons and soaring descants. And then: back at it. Loving the Lord our God — it takes guts.

And you have what it takes.

***

Preached on the 22nd Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 25A), October 25, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.

Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18
Psalm 1
1 Thessalonians 2:1-8
Matthew 22:34-46

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You have what it takes

Let’s talk about our guts. We’re told often enough to trust our guts, to follow our guts. We do gut checks. We get gut aches. Sometimes we suffer a gut punch.

What’s a gut check? It's when you stop and consider your instinctive feelings or notions about something.

A gut ache? Well, there’s the literal kind, how you feel if you overindulge on pizza, but there’s also the gut ache of agitation, a persistent worry, a burning emotional sensation.

A gut punch? That’s when you’re knocked over by bad news, or sharp conflict, or overwhelming fear. “I was gutted,” people sometimes say, after hearing terrible news.

Christ is our clothing

I'm just this kid from Worthington

“I’m just this kid from Worthington.” That’s something I like to say in text messages with a certain friend of mine, signaling real (if playful) modesty after I say something highfalutin or pompous. I’m not uppity. I don’t have a big ego. I’m just this kid from Worthington.

My friend was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and for a time lived in Rock Island, Illinois. He’s married to someone who grew up in Davenport, Iowa. I’m married to someone born in San Jose who lived in Tucson. I know very few native New Yorkers, and even fewer – nearly zero – native Parisians or Londoners or Tokyoites.

Maybe you come from somewhere famous, a top-tier city. Or you hail from a blue-blood family line. Are you the scion of a dynastic clan? My father was interested in genealogy and discovered a thin but durable connection between our family and a passenger on the Mayflower in 1620. But that is now a dubious distinction, given what we’ve learned, all too recently, about the impact of English colonists on this continent.

I am not the son of a royal house. I am not a Windsor or a Kennedy or a Bush or a Kardashian or a Hilton. I did not attend an Ivy League school.

I’m just this kid from Worthington.

You just have to understand this!!

“Bless us with anger,” Bishop Gene Robinson prayed, on Sunday, January 18, 2009, in Washington, D.C. The setting was a “kick-off” concert celebrating the inauguration, two days later, of a new president.

“Bless us with anger.”

The bishop asked God for the blessing of anger in response to discrimination against “refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.” When we witness this discrimination, may God bless us with anger.

But how can anger be a blessing? Anger so often is destructive. Anger motivates acts of violence. Anger in even small amounts can be corrosive. Someone cuts you off in traffic and you flip them the bird: This is corrosive. It damages, however slightly, our social fabric.

Often enough I feel angry. Often enough I understand the function and value, if not the “blessing,” of anger: we humans evolved this sharp emotion. Anger urges us to fight, to make ourselves bigger, to assert, to overcome. Anger has been described simply as the feeling you have when something is in your way. There’s a barrier in front of you, and anger helps you remove that barrier.

Why aren't we talking about fascism?!

“Why aren’t we talking about fascism?”

That’s what someone was asking, over the past few days. I was working near Columbus, Ohio, as one of the trainers for the College for Congregational Development in the Diocese of Southern Ohio.

We covered lots of topics: congregational identity, Episcopal identity, how to map the neighborhood around your church to discern where God is sending you next on your mission, how to look at your congregation through different lenses to see different things — things like where you are on the organizational life cycle. If you’re wondering, St. Paul’s Seattle is currently in the “healthy stability” stage of our organizational life.

We learned a tool to discover who is coming to our congregations to develop their faith, and how best to nurture and lead them; and another tool to discern how the faithful enter their worlds of family, work, neighborhood, and civic life, and what (if anything) they do in those worlds that’s different or better because they said their prayers with us.

“Why aren’t we talking about fascism?” the participant said again. He mentioned this concern in his small group, in our main plenary sessions, and in his written evaluation of the week, which he filled out at the end of our time together. He seemed frustrated because, he reasoned, if we aren’t talking about the crisis of fascism currently threatening not just livelihoods but lives in our nation, a crisis trapping and killing people along the Strait of Hormuz, along our southern border, inside our urban centers and neighborhoods, just outside these doors, everywhere – if we aren’t talking about this global calamity, then, this participant said, we are blessing the status quo. We are going along with all the outrageous things that are happening. We are part of the problem.

"Bless us with anger..."

Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.

Our parents bless us. That is to say, our parents hand things down to us. Some of their gifts are conscious: they deliberately try to raise us a certain way, to instill certain values. They teach us how to treat our friends. They teach us what’s important, and what’s not. They teach us who is kin and who is an outsider. Sometimes they teach us how to vote, how to think, how to behave at dinner, even how to feel.

Other things parents give us are unintentional, unconscious… and they’re not all blessings. Sometimes parents let their children down in ways that give them deep-seated anxiety, and make it hard for their children to form strong emotional bonds with people. My parents formed secure emotional attachments with me, but I think they unintentionally taught me to suppress emotions, midwestern-style. I had to learn from somebody else that big feelings are useful, and good; that if I learn to work with them, they help me make better choices about my life.

Today we celebrate — we call “blessed,” we bless — a human being who is many things, as all of us are, but whose identity as a parent perhaps looms largest in our imagination. Saint Mary the Virgin has many titles, but perhaps her chief title, her primary claim to fame, is Mary the mother of Jesus, or Mary the mother of our Lord, or (we Christians came up with this title a bit later on) Mary the Mother of God.

The sound of silence

I will begin with three little scenes, and one song verse, about silence. Silence in its many forms.

After the fire, [there was] a sound of sheer silence. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.

From the works of Simon and Garfunkel:
Hello darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence

From the novel “Franny and Zooey,” by J.D. Salinger:
You’ve even both been up here on many a weekend [since Seymour killed himself], and though we’ve talked and talked and talked, we’ve all agreed not to say a word.

After Jesus had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone.

Congregant number 14

Last week, during the early mass, someone came into our church for a few moments, took one of the snack packs from the table near the baptismal font, and left. I saw this because I was up here, behind the table, getting our breakfast ready.

My immediate response was to add one to my headcount for that mass. “It’s fourteen now,” I told myself. And so that goes for a working priest who’s developing a Christian congregation in a mostly secularized urban setting: attendance is one of our lagging indicators, a metric that helps us assess the health and vitality of this congregation. I focus on attendance enough that I’ve been rightly teased about it.

But I like counting people, especially people I love. (And that definitely includes you, beloveds!) I’m from a big family, so I count my nieces and nephews, a daunting twenty-three people. I always try to count people and other creatures who matter. When I had a big aquarium in the kitchen during the pandemic years, I loved counting tropical fish. When I see videos of dog litters on the internet, I count the puppies. “That looks like seven,” I say to myself. One-two-three-four-five-six-seven. Yep. Oh wait, they’re squashing another one — it’s eight!”

We need help

Watch this sermon on video here.

I recall several experiences across my life, especially in the early years, when I had most of my needs met, but I really just needed a little more help. That’s all — I needed more help. Can you relate?

When I was a small child, I needed significantly more attention than my overwhelmed parents could give me. When I was a confused and scared junior in college, I had one strong helper when I came out as gay, but I needed much more guidance than that one person could possibly give.

Across the decades of early adulthood and early midlife, I needed help with career discernment, several times. Without that help, every step was slower, every transition more difficult. I finally found my true vocation, but not until a couple of months before my fiftieth birthday.

Now, please be assured that I am well aware that I am just fine. Much more than fine. By any reasonable human or historical standard, I luxuriate in embarrassing opulence with physical health, housing, and income in my fifties that would have been unimaginable for my prairie-farmer ancestors. When I was in seminary, my favorite priest and theologian lived in a small house just off campus, and she remarked that her little two-bedroom rambler was a vast palace.

Breakfast with Jesus

Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.”

Perhaps you are frightened right now. There is plenty to be frightened about. Climate change is causing heat waves in Europe, and hurricane season is coming: terrifying. But it isn’t just natural ecosystems that are changing or getting worse. Our political world roils in chaos, making Pride weekend all the more relevant and urgent, particularly for our trans companions. War ravages the land in West Asia, Africa, Europe, and along our borders. There was another mass shooting the other day, in Chico, California. A double earthquake has killed at least 1,400 people in Venezuela.

As we struggle through these crises, and (at our best) advocate for others in more extreme need, our chronic and intense anxiety could damage our health. Your fears about the world could finally generate a fear of their own: that your health and well-being will finally begin to break down under the relentless emotional strain.

Or perhaps your fear is closer to home. Maybe you are in a phase of life that daunts you: you are on the brink of adulthood, or you are a parent with a thousand fears about your child, or you are drawing close to the end of your life. Maybe you’re in one of the generations that can’t afford the basics, and you fear you’ll never pay your student loans; or you’re worried that your careful, reasonable plan for a comfortable and safe retirement is unraveling. Or you’re in midlife, and you’re wondering with nagging worry about the meaning of your life, worry about the health of your relationships, worry about the purpose of your career. Maybe you’re coping with addiction: no matter whether you or someone you love is the actual substance user, addiction is a social disease that damages the health of everyone involved, and locks whole families in excruciating fear.

Are you frightened right now? Jesus said to them — Jesus says to you — “Come and have breakfast.”