All of the people I really, truly care about could fit into this room.

Maybe that sounds like a dreadful thing to say. Among billions of people around the globe, I care about one or two hundred, that’s it?! But — it’s true, and no offense, I suspect it’s true about all of us. The people each of us really, truly cares about could probably fit into this room.

Of course I care about the people of Ukraine and Russia, Gaza and Israel, Sudan and South Sudan, Taiwan and China. I care about our unsheltered neighbors, and people in peril across our nation. I care about countless refugees, so many of them children, who groan under the heel of massive injustice and inequity. I care about animals incarcerated in factory farms, too. I care about ocean creatures plagued by toxins and plastics. I do care.

But who do I really, truly care about? Can any of us honestly answer this question? If you look up “Dunbar’s Number,” an anthropologist will tell you that we typically only care about a couple hundred people because evolution selected for humans who built village-sized kinship networks to survive. Robin Dunbar says the number of manageable primary relationships for most of us is about 150… roughly the seating capacity of this room.

When I was a grade-schooler, I took a standardized test of some kind. I can’t remember the name. I do remember that I did poorly, because my mother was upset by the result, and approached my teacher. She suggested that I take the test again, but this time in a study carrel, free of the distractions that (my mother assumed) had brought down my original test score.

She was right. I got a good score, and peace was restored in my achievement-oriented family of origin. I was the first child in the family to present problems like this. It’s not that I wasn’t capable. It’s that I was distracted.

If I had been born in Generation Z, I would likely have been diagnosed with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Code 314.00, Predominantly Inattentive Presentation. As a 1970s kid, I never took the ADHD test. The tests I did take reassured my parents that I was a smart kid, but mostly they mystified me, because I did not know how to integrate their encouraging results with my own lived experience. 

On January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy was sworn in as the 35th president of the United States. It was a bright cold day in Washington, D.C., with a promising blue sky stretching to eternity. My uncle Ray was there. He was thirty years old, a newspaper reporter from southwest Minnesota who made his way to the nation’s Capital to report the story. He wore overshoes and stood in the snow and cold.

Uncle Ray wrote about the experience, years later. “Golly, it was good,” he recalled. He was thrilled to be there to see the young president, but he also appreciated the old poet: Robert Frost was there, and had composed a new poem for the occasion. My uncle sensed among the excited crowd the feeling that all was well, that the bright future beckoned. Young President Kennedy represented so much. He wore no hat on his head, and his vigorous youth shone bright. He was eleven years younger than I am now.

I love my uncle, and I would love to have been there myself. I admit I am fond of mountaintop civic moments. Maybe in this cynical age you would say I’m a sucker for them. In the mountaintop story we hear today, Saint Peter comes in for criticism as a sucker like me, and once again I can relate to that flawed but enthusiastic disciple. Let’s build booths, Peter says, or tents, to house and contain this mountaintop moment. But as we heard, he did not know what he was saying.

Then Joseph said to his brothers, "Come closer to me."

In that sentence can be found all the wisdom of God.

Let’s begin with the brothers. Joseph’s brothers aren’t just scared. They are terrified. They are in a life-and-death crisis. Their aging father is anguished, and may die in despair because of something they did. Their people are enduring a famine. They have just found out that someone who holds their lives in his hands is the same person they sold into slavery, and nearly murdered. He could easily have them executed. But —

Joseph said to his brothers, "Come closer to me."

In that sentence can be found all the wisdom of God.

Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

Just once in my life, I would like to leap for joy. Even when I can no longer physically leap; even if the “leap” I am talking about is in my mind or my heart, I would love to leap for joy.

Have you ever done this? Really: have you ever, for any reason, literally or figuratively, leapt for joy? Well, maybe I did leap literally for joy when I was a small child. Maybe jumping on a trampoline, or jumping on the bed, counts as leaping for joy. That was great fun, but the last time I had access to a trampoline, I declined the invitation to jump. Two kids were preparing for baptism and I was over at their house, chatting with their mother in the kitchen. The kids were jumping impossibly on that trampoline, terrifying me with astonishing, gravity-defying moves. I thought they would surely crack open their heads if they put one foot even a little bit wrong. But I didn’t begrudge them their joyful leaping, even as I cowered in the kitchen. We need all the joy we can get, we humans. We collectively seem determined to destroy all the joy that erupts on the face of this old earth. Let the kids leap.

“Put your sword back into its sheath.”

Jesus delivers this sharp reprimand in the Good News according to John, just after his arrest. He is in trouble — big trouble. Peter, in his anxiety, in his panic, had drawn his sword and cut off the ear of a slave. John the evangelist goes to the trouble of telling us the slave’s name: Malchus. The word ‘malchus’ finds its origin in the Hebrew root melech, which means ‘king’ or ‘ruler’. Put it all together: we are meant to understand that Peter, acting in desperation, is trying to slay the powers of this world. He is trying to win a human political battle. He is returning violence for violence.

No. “Put your sword back into its sheath,” Jesus says. We do not win that way. We do not even fight that way. We do not carry weapons on our mission.

This is a hard teaching. Who among us does not want to rise up and overcome the powers of this world? Isn’t that what resistance inherently is? These powers destroy human beings, they separate human families, they foment division and war, and they seem almost intentionally to be rendering the planet uninhabitable for the human race, and countless other living species. They seem to be un-creating the world. If we could only draw a sword and cut off the ear, as it were, of the ruler of this world! If only we could score a strong win, and do that for the good side.

How do you know when you’ve had enough?

This is a good question for both good things and bad things. Let’s start with some day-to-day good things: How do you know when you’ve had enough ginger-molasses cookies? This seems like a light, easy example to begin a discussion of what it means to have “enough.”

But of course even ginger cookies are fraught with complications and controversy. Thousands of people out there think they know how much food is enough – for us, for you, for me. Marketers tell us our bodies need their products. Body-shamers tell us to avoid so-called “guilty pleasures” entirely. Most everyone suffers from harmful messages driven into our consciousness by our food-fixated, divisive, image-conscious popular culture. 

One of my nieces has bravely pushed against all the disordered messaging about the food she likes. She simply listens to her body about the nourishment she needs – nourishment in all its forms. Nutrition? Sure, of course. But we have evolved as a species to enjoy the pleasures of food, the delights of an abundant family dinner, the bliss of a sugar cookie with our morning coffee. And these are nourishments too. These are among the things we truly need. My niece teaches me to decide for myself whether I have had enough of these good and life-giving things.

Ten and a half years ago, on a warm evening in Seattle, late in the evening — I know it was late because it was already dark, in June — I walked around Queen Anne Hill. This had been a sad and traumatic day for our city. This was the day when Seattle Pacific University suffered a mass shooting. 

The neighborhood was quiet, but before long I noticed the smell of fire in the air. I turned onto West Fulton Street between 8th and 9th Avenues West, and saw leaping flames. Someone’s house was on fire. But maybe it wasn’t their house — I couldn’t be sure. It might have been a shed out back. But if so, it was a big enough shed to cause an impressive, unnerving fire, with large bright flames and billowing black smoke. (I can’t even begin to imagine the size and heat of the fires in southern California that have destroyed thousands of houses, businesses, schools, and churches.)

“Oh, Seattle,” I remember thinking, I remember feeling, on that warm, weary June night. “Oh, Seattle,” I said to myself, “Oh, Seattle — rest now. You have had a terrible day.” I breathed quiet prayers for our beleaguered city, torn badly by a violent shooting, vulnerable to devastating fires, heading into another anxious summer in this era of climate catastrophe. I’m sure I was projecting, at least a little, but Seattle felt feverish, even somehow sweaty, that night, the way you feel when you just can’t rest. Your bed sheets are wrinkled and clammy, the fitted sheet keeps slipping off the corner of your mattress, the air in your room is stagnant and ten degrees too warm, you have a dull headache and you just can’t rest. (Have you been there?) “Oh, Seattle, rest now,” I chanted again.

“Omit needless words.”

This is the greatest commandment in “The Elements of Style,” a little guidebook for writers by William Strunk and E.B. White.

If you want to be a powerful, effective writer, then heed Strunk and White’s instruction: Omit needless words.

The rule elegantly obeys itself. It requires only three words to teach writers the power of brevity. 

I first read Strunk and White as a creative-writing student at Sibley Senior High School in Mendota Heights, Minnesota. Our teacher was David Coleman, an Irish scholar of mythology and drama. Mr. Coleman nurtured my first attempts at writing things worth writing. His assignments were deceptively simple: “Write a paper about an interesting person,” he would assign us. And: “Write a paper about an interesting experience.”

It’s dark. It’s glam. It’s sad.

It’s Christmas.

I have remembered this line from a television sitcom for twenty-three years. It was spoken by the actor Parker Posey, guest starring on “Will and Grace,” a show about a gay guy living with his straight woman friend. Back then, it was a major step forward for gay characters simply to appear on prime-time television, so progressive fans of the show put up with the fact that the queer characters never so much as held hands. They were the most chaste gay New Yorkers imaginable. And of course transgender identity – even the existence of transgender persons – was barely mentioned, let alone explored. 

But “Will and Grace” had this terrific line, and they gave it to the dry, droll Parker Posey. She played a tough, uncompromising manager at Barney’s department store, and she was reviewing a store window that Grace had decorated for the holiday season. Grace’s window featured crimson trees, sad people in festive masks, and images of haunting characters from some of the darker Christmas stories and films. And this was the hard manager’s take on Grace’s work: “It’s dark. It’s glam. It’s sad. It’s Christmas.”

To watch this sermon on video, click here.

Today’s Good News includes a happy reunion of two of our matriarchs in the faith. But this delighted meeting of two pregnant women got me thinking about two more matriarchs, Sarah and Hagar.

Sarah is the savvy wife of Abraham, famous for being startled and then amused by the ludicrous promise that she could have a child in old age. Sarah found that idea so ridiculous that when it finally happened, she named her child Isaac, a name that means “Laughter.”

Soon after she gave birth to Laughter, Sarah wasted no time expelling the household slave Hagar and her illegitimate son from the family compound. Abraham had slept with Hagar (at Sarah’s suggestion!) to hedge his bets on God’s promise of a son by Sarah. (It’s highly doubtful that Hagar had much of a choice in this matter.) Hagar had duly given Abraham a son, who was named Ishmael, a name that means “God will hear”. But with Isaac’s arrival, the clock was ticking loudly for Hagar. She and Ishmael had to go.

“Let your gentleness be known to everyone.”

I vividly remember something said in a class at Seattle University, back in about 2010. The professor was Dr. Jeanette Rodriguez, a member of the religion faculty who specializes in U.S. Hispanic theology, liberation theology, and women’s spirituality. Dr. Rodriguez said that persons of color in this country are angry, they have every right to be, and people with white privilege just need to understand that fact, and accept it. 

I am about to offer a reflection on the spiritual practice of gentleness, but I want to begin here, with Dr. Rodriguez, and her good words. “Gentleness” as we understand it — “gentleness” as healthy Christian communities understand it — “gentleness” is not about protecting white fragility, or what people from my home state call “Minnesota Nice.” It’s not about everyone being sweet, brushing off disagreement, and delaying justice so that we all just get along. It’s most definitely not about oppressed persons grinning and bearing it. “Gentleness” is not passive; it is not reticent. Gentleness makes no peace with evil.

To watch this sermon on video, click here.

Recently I’ve been taking little mental-health breaks from the traumatic news around the world by watching YouTube videos about the solar system, about stars, about the natural universe. Guided by a soothing narrator and expert astronomers, I take serene trips through outer space to, say, Phobos, one of the moons of Mars, which has only thirty to fifty million years of life left, before the tidal forces it shares with its parent planet tear it into countless pieces. Mars will one day be adorned with a new planetary ring. 

I also watched a video illustrating the formation sixty-six million years ago of the Chicxulub [CHICK-shoo-loob] Crater, when an asteroid slammed into what we now call the Yucatán Peninsula, ending the era of the dinosaurs. I marvel at the speed of death and destruction that circled the globe in the minutes and hours after that catastrophe.

But maybe that’s a little on the nose, that particular video. I don’t necessarily want to imagine the world as we know it coming to a violent end. And yet even that video offers a strange sort of consolation: after all, the biosphere recovered quite well in the following eons, and here we are. Our home planet has seen a lot of ecological “reboots,” if you can call them that, over millions of years. We humans ironically may not survive the Anthropocene Era, the age of the planet we’ve named after ourselves, Earth’s most ingenious and most destructive species. But whether or not we survive our own dubious adventures, the planet itself will be fine.

“Do not fear, O soil; be glad and rejoice, for the Lord has done great things!” —Joel 2:21

Our forebears in faith are not above a little healthy anthropomorphism. They ascribe human qualities to rivers and trees, who clap their hands to praise God. They ascribe human qualities — or at least animal qualities — to mountains and hills, who skip like rams and lambs. The sea roars its praises to the Lord, and the desert lifts up its voice.

And so it should not surprise us that the prophet Joel is heard talking to the soil, to the earth, to the mud beneath our feet. Joel sings consolation to the people of God in the wake of a devastating plague of locusts that ravaged the land, causing terrible starvation and despair. The people had assumed that this was God’s punishment for their wrongdoing, and so, when the land was restored, they assumed it meant that they finally had been reconciled to God.

But again, the people were not alone in their rejoicing: the prophet bids the soil to rejoice, too. “Do not fear, O soil; be glad and rejoice!” Then Joel sings to the animals: “Do not fear, you animals of the field!” he cries, “for the pastures of the wilderness are green; the tree bears its fruit, the fig tree and vine give their full yield.” Only then does Joel encourage the human population to rejoice, to sing in the rain, oh, the luscious, life-saving rain!

Mary of Teck, the wife of King George the Fifth, was the Queen of the United Kingdom from 1910 to 1936. She lived just long enough to see her granddaughter accede to the throne in February 1952. Mary is portrayed by the actor Eileen Atkins in the popular Netflix drama, “The Crown.” Reclining in her bedroom, ailing from lung disease, Queen Mary teaches Queen Elizabeth the fundamentals of monarchy: what it is, what it is not, and what the young queen must do as she begins her long reign.

Elizabeth is concerned about her new role and her duties (or lack thereof) as the nation responds to a major crisis — a toxic smog that paralyzed London in December of 1952, leading to thousands of deaths. She wonders if, as sovereign, she is entitled to interfere politically to direct or contradict the elected government, which initially appears to be woefully unresponsive to the challenge. If the crisis is mishandled, isn’t she answerable to the public, just like her ministers? Shouldn’t she do something? And if she fails to act, shouldn’t she have to answer to her subjects for that failure? Queen Mary’s advice is to remain quiet, to do nothing, to simply stand stoically as an icon of divinely-ordained monarchy. Here is what this dramatic television show imagines that Queen Mary said to her granddaughter:

To watch this sermon on video, click here.

“This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.”

Since 2018, I have sustained a daily text string with three seminary friends — Sam, Claire, and Chip. Our foursome came together when we were summer chaplains commuting to Mary Washington Hospital in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Our bond deepened when we stopped for chocolate shakes at Arby’s on our way back to Alexandria, and then listened to “My Favorite Murder,” a true-crime comedy podcast. We are now, I think, friends for life.

Sam and Claire now have two children each: Sam is the father of Mac and Rixey; Claire is the mother of Ruth and Sophia. Chip and I are, well, “childless cat ladies,” I suppose.

This past week, the four of us texted about the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, whose episcopate was brought down by a child-abuse scandal. We are all Episcopal priests now, so naturally we have all followed this story, more or less, and have formed opinions about it. 

You can watch this on video by clicking here.

Dear friends,

My heart is heavy with grief and exhaustion. But my job is to preach the Good News, the Gospel, God’s glad tidings of justice and peace. 

I'll get to that, I promise. But we can’t just jump to the cheerful things. This is a profoundly frightening time. Many, many people are in danger as a result of our national election. And of course it’s not just the election. We are facing so many overlapping crises right now. We are worried for the safety of women, persons of color, and transgender persons. We watch with outrage as warfare kills innocent people. We can’t even trust that our kids are safe from deadly violence in the classroom. And of course, through all of this, we feel traumatic anxiety about climate change and extreme weather.

I sometimes feel like I’m suffocating under heavy blankets of fear, anger, and aching sadness. And not just today, not just last evening: I’ve awakened in the wee hours quite often, for many years now, worried about all that’s happening, all that could happen.

To watch this sermon on video, click here.

“Any [fool]1 can burn down a barn.”

This is a line from a movie, a quarter century ago. “Any fool can burn down a barn,” says a presidential candidate in the film, “Primary Colors,” a fictional take on a national election, nineteen-nineties-style. (Elections were different back then… but also not all that different.)

I have often recalled this movie line in the past few weeks and months. We’re on the brink of another critically important national election, another civic event with countless innocent lives hanging in the balance. In this time of polarization and catastrophic warfare, it’s easy to conclude that there are two kinds of people, two ways of being, two basic human natures. You can either be a wise person who builds barns, or you can be a fool who burns the barn down.

Now, of course, I want us all to be barn builders. But it’s much more complicated than a good/bad, wise/foolish, angel/devil binary: Each of us has the capacity for both: We all know how to build things up; we all know how to burn things down. Our behaviors and choices are usually a confusing, confounding mix. There is a battle raging inside each one of us: our essential human nature, made in God’s image, wants to build things up, but our broken, self-centered, ‘shadow’ self wants to burn things down. And our spiritual lives often determine who prevails.

To watch this sermon on video, click here.

I speak to you as any foolish woman would speak.

That’s right. I’m standing next to the wife of Job, right at this particular moment. I stand next to her in defiance of her suffering husband’s dismissive remark. He snaps at her, saying, “You speak as any foolish woman would speak,” and I’m on her side. She seems to find the problem of innocent suffering intolerable, and if God doesn’t answer for it, then she is not about to just shrug her shoulders and say, “Thy will be done.”

Girl, same.

It’s all too easy for Christians, it’s easy for all people of all faiths, or no faith, to minimize the problem of suffering. But our tradition offers authentic empathy, too. C.S. Lewis, the Anglican scholar and theologian, reflected memorably on the awful pain of human grief, and how that pain deepens when it appears that God is absent, or uncaring. "Meanwhile, where is God?” Lewis wonders. “...Go to [God] when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.”

Jesus said to her, “I AM the Resurrection and the Life.”

I want five more minutes with my father. I just need five more minutes. Now, I am relieved to say that we really are at peace, me and my dad, following his death last November. My wish for five more minutes is not debilitating, not terrible. But I just want one more chance to say a few good things to my father. And while we’re on the topic of personal grief, I would need many more minutes to catch up with my mother, to meet her now, now that half of my own lifetime (and counting) has unfolded after her death. My mother never met Andrew. In certain important ways, she never met me.

Jesus does not directly speak comfort to me in these reflections of mine about my departed parents. Jesus doesn’t speak simple comfort to any of us who are grieving today for our departed brother in Christ, Tracy. Jesus simply but complicatedly says this to us: “I AM the Resurrection and the Life.” He does not say, “Oh, you’ll get your five minutes, and more, with your beloved dead.” And he certainly does not say, “Oh, there is no death; death is an illusion.” We Episcopalians say — and will say this very afternoon — that in death “life is changed, not ended,” but that’s as far as we’ll go on minimizing the sting of death.

It’s understandably not far enough for many people.