Homily: The Third Sunday after Epiphany [January 25, 2026] All Saints, Beverly Hills

            Two Sundays ago, we celebrated the baptism of Jesus. In today’s gospel, we learn that immediately following his baptism in the Jordan in the south, Jesus has gone to Galilee, his home area in the far north of Israel. The area Matthew in the Gospel and Isaiah in the Old Testament calls “the territory of Zebulon and Naphtali” had long been occupied by invading forces, first the Assyrians in Old Testament times, and now the Romans in Jesus’s day. Jesus’s decision to start his work in a place identified with foreign occupation signifies his sense of himself as one who forwards God’s plan to liberate us from everything that holds us down.

 

            In today’s gospel [Matthew 4: 12-23] we also hear a lot about fish. When I was a boy I once asked my father, a lapsed Catholic, why Roman Catholics always eat fish on Fridays. Without missing a beat, he replied: “That’s because the apostles were fishermen.” 

 As we just heard in the gospel,

As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea—for they were fishermen. And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him.

 

            Leave it to a member of the Hall family to suggest a cynical marketing strategy behind a dietary law. 

            The Vatican decided to end the fish-on-Friday policy in 1984, suggesting alternate forms of penance. But fish have always had an important place in Christian tradition. The first disciples were fishermen, and the early Christians often used the fish symbol as a covert way of identifying themselves in a time of persecution. The Greek word for fish, ἰχθύς (ichthus), is an anagram for the words Jesus Christ, Son of God and Savior. 

And even before the time of Jesus, the book of Jeremiah (16:16) talks about fishing neither as breadwinning nor as a peaceful piscatorial pastime but as a method of rooting out evildoers:

I will bring them back to their own land that I gave to their ancestors. I am now sending for many fishermen, says the Lord, and they shall catch them; and afterwards I will send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain and every hill, and out of the clefts of the rocks.

 

So part of what this gospel tells us is that God wants us to fish for people. And part of what it tells us is that it’s always a good time to throw the rascals out. What I find most interesting today, though, is the way Jesus engages with these fisherfolk: Andrew, Simon, James and John, the sons of Zebedee. He talks with them as if he knows them, as if he is keyed in to their innermost thoughts and desires. I know they’re fishermen, he seems to say, and (to mix a metaphor) I will help them cast their nets for bigger game.

One of the problems with talking about Jesus’s most famous statements (as in the phrase “fishers of people”) is that we tend to set stained glass around them and treat them as if they only have one possible meaning. To be sure, most Christians over time have seen this as a call towards evangelism, as a way of bringing new people into the life and work of the church. But it seems to me that there is an additional layer of meaning to this encounter that we don’t often explore.

Simon, Andrew, James, and John were fishermen. Jesus addresses them in the language of their own life work, not about serving the church. He says, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” He doesn’t say, “Follow me, I will enroll you in a newcomers’ class, and soon after that we’ll put you on the vestry. Oh, and here’s a pledge card.” Jesus asks not that they serve the church but that they follow him and serve the world. He asks them to do so in the terms of who they actually are. These fishermen follow Jesus not by dropping their nets and changing careers or volunteering. They follow Jesus by doing what they do and being who they are as they are, where they are in the world.

Too often we have equated Christian discipleship with serving the church. But if we attend to what Jesus is doing and saying in today’s gospel, Jesus himself equates discipleship as following him by being faithful, generous, and loving in the terms of your own life. Whatever your profession or life’s work, God wants you not to drop it so that you can set up chairs in the parish hall. God wants you to do your work in the world as a Christian person, to see all your activity through the lens of following Jesus. Of course, it is important to get involved in church and do what you can to serve and support it. But the principal way to follow  Jesus is to be fully present to your workplace, your household, your community as the arenas where you bring God’s love, forgiveness, healing, and justice into your relations with those with whom you spend the other six days of the week.

Today’s encounter at the Sea of Galilee is the time when Jesus begins his real ministry by saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” From here on in, Jesus and his companions will proclaim a new reign of love and justice which will replace the old world of occupation and oppression. Jesus means to free us in all aspects of our lives and to enlist us as his agents of good news, healing, and wholeness. Coming to church is vital, but you can’t do God’s liberating work only or even primarily in this building. You do it in the places you regularly engage other people. 

How we treat each other (both outside and inside these walls) matters. In today’s epistle [1 Corinthians 1: 10-18] Paul calls for church unity:

Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose. 

 

Having worked in the church far longer than Paul ever did, I’m not sure I have ever known a church where everyone was in agreement about everything. Churches have always been places where we regularly bump into each other with conflicting ideas about how best to follow Jesus. Just as we represent God to the world out there, so we represent God to each other in here. 

Too much of our religious thinking focuses on our role in the church rather than our role in the world. The church exists to forward God’s mission of bringing the kingdom of heaven near. We’ll never be of one mind on how best to do it. But, to the extent that we see ourselves not as church mice but as fishers of people, as we give ourselves to Jesus’s call to bring that kingdom near in all the venues of our lives, then we’ll be following Jesus faithfully and we can trust that God will use us to God’s purposes in the blessing and liberation of those around us.

God calls you as who you are where you are. Let God use you there and leave it to trust that God will sort it all out. You are God’s agent here, at home, and in the world. And that is not a fish story. Amen.

 

 

 Hoom

Homily: The Second Sunday after Epiphany [January 18, 2026] All Saints, Beverly

            I went to seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to a divinity school affiliated with Harvard. In my second year I took a course at Harvard taught by G.H. Williams, the Hollis Professor of Divinity. Williams was an eminent church historian, and with his flowing white hair was the perfect image of a distinguished Ivy League professor. I remember once going to meet him in his office in the bowels of Widener Library to read him my term paper and doing so under the terrifying gaze of a stuffed owl.

            Professor Williams amazed the class one day when he got to talking about the historical Jesus and his family. Jesus had a younger brother, James, who became the leader of the Jerusalem church in its early days. “You know,” he said, “one of the reasons I’m a Christian is because Jesus’s own brother believed it. I have a brother, and it would take an awful lot to make me believe him to be the Son of God.”

            Something like that—the idea of brothers and credibility—is going on in today’s gospel [John 1: 29-42. Two of John the Baptist’s followers see Jesus, and one of them (Andrew) goes to tell his brother, Simon, “We have found the Messiah.” Simon, who will become Peter, goes to see Jesus and ends up being one of his principal followers, and all because his brother told him to.

            I’m an only child, so I have no sibling memories to compare, but something about this story rings true to me. We end up following God because people we trust believe. In this ongoing season of Epiphany, God’s glory is made manifest through the people we know, love, and trust.

            The other thing going on in today’s gospel is John the Baptist pointing to Jesus and saying, “Look, here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”  In those days, Jews used lambs for sacrifice, and so John points toward Jesus as the one who, through his life, death, and resurrection will take away the sin of the world. It’s important to note that John uses the singular word sin, not the plural sins, here. In our individualistic culture we tend to think of sins as particular personal acts like breaking one of the Ten Commandments. When John calls Jesus the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, he is speaking of sin in its more general sense. Jesus has come to challenge the chaos and evil at work in the world. His life and death will upend the order of things and free us from the cosmic and social forces that oppress and confuse us.

            If this season is about the manifesting of God’s glory throughout all creation, then this morning’s gospel asks us to focus on the good news that spreads through the world as God continues to set things right. God is doing something big and good, and you and I are being called into it. In this regard, our Old Testament reading helps us understand what God is up to in all of this. In the words of Isaiah [Isaiah 49: 1-7] God declares:

“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and to restore the survivors of Israel;

I will give you as a light to the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

 

            God is not only Israel’s God. God is the world’s God.

Jesus continues the God’s onslaught on sin that Israel’s prophets announced earlier in the Bible. The role of Israel (and then the church) will be not only to save itself, but to be “a light to the nations” so that God’s salvation “may reach to the end of the earth.”

Over the course of human history we have seen countless examples of women and men who have been God’s agents in the conflict with sin, people who stood for love and justice in a time when the chaos of sin ran rampant. Tomorrow, you know, is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and the point of this holiday (at least to me) is to hold up and remember one who stood for God’s liberating justice in a time and culture of racial chaos and oppression. We remember King not only because he had a dream but because he organized his life and witness around the idea of human freedom. All of us dream. Only a few of us live our lives in such a way that we, too, become a light to the nations, instruments in God’s ongoing work to bless and change the world. As followers of Jesus, we too seek to be a light to the nations so that God’s salvation may reach to the end of the earth.

Which brings us back to the Lamb of God. In Christianity’s earliest days, the lamb was the visual symbol of Christ and the church. If you look at the remains of very early Christian churches, you see far more lambs than crosses. Christians adopted the lamb symbol because of John’s words in today’s gospel. They saw Jesus not only as the sacrificial victim who takes away the sin of the world. They saw him as the one who leads God’s onslaught against sin in the struggle for healing and justice here and now. And he does it as a lamb would do it: peaceably, lovingly, and gently.

            Every time I read today’s gospel and hear John describe Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, I wonder about posing an alternative. What if for the past two thousand years Jesus’s followers had been wearing lambs rather than crosses around their necks? What if we had projected an image of gentleness and peace as we go about our loving, reconciling business? Would we have engaged each other and the world differently? Would our visual declaration of standing with those who suffer made us more credible as we sought to bring peace and wholeness to the world? I wonder: how can you and I be agents of God’s quest to take away the sin of the world, to end the personal, social, and moral chaos that are loose even now around us? Seeing Jesus and ourselves as lambs not led to the slaughter but leading the charge against it may be the best way forward for all of us in a time of chaos and rage.

            Tomorrow as a nation we celebrate the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., a man who challenged the reign of sin in Jesus’s name and pushed the chaos and hatred back for a little while. God’s glory is being made manifest in the many ways faithful people take their place in the work begun in the life and ministry of Jesus. We are all here lovingly to help God in challenging sin in all its forms, even and especially as we see its evidence in ourselves. As John the Baptist said, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” As Andrew said, “We have found the Messiah.” This messianic lamb is also our shepherd, and he will lead and accompany us as we join the fellowship of all those who seek simply to make the world, our community, our household a better place. Jesus’s own brother believed it. That’s good enough for me. Amen.

Homily: The First Sunday after Epiphany [January 11, 2026] All Saints, Beverly Hills

 

            Most of you probably do not remember your baptism. I remember mine very well—not because I was a prescient newborn but because I was baptized in my sophomore year of college. My parents were both in show business, and when they moved to L.A. they fled from the religious upbringings they had separately received back east. When I was born they decided to let me decide my religion for myself.  (I guess I showed them!) I never even entered the doors of a church until my freshman year of college. I was baptized a year later on a Sunday morning, standing in full view of the congregation next to a nice young family holding a screaming infant. Had I known what I was in for, I might have cried, too.

            There don’t seem to be any children surrounding Jesus in today’s gospel account of his baptism [Matthew 3: 13-17]. All four gospels describe this event, and each in its own way tries to explain why Jesus submitted to a baptism by John. In Matthew’s words, “John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’” One possible explanation is that Jesus wanted to begin his public ministry in solidarity with the others who are flocking to John. Another has to do with the curious phrase that Jesus uses in response to John’s question: “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.”

            An interesting phrase, “fulfill all righteousness”. What can Jesus mean?      

In the Judaism which both John and Jesus practiced, righteousness was connected to obeying the Jewish law and its commandments—not only ritual requirements and food  laws but also doing acts of justice and mercy. The rules for living that way were clearly spelled out in the Torah. Moral living consisted in understanding the law and applying it faithfully to the circumstances you were in.

            Matthew’s gospel (which we will be reading together this liturgical year) often emphasizes the imperative for Jesus’s followers to live by a “higher righteousness”. As Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount, “I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” [Matthew 5: 20]. Who said Christianity was going to be easy?

            When Jesus comes to John and joins the crowd in baptism, he is both submitting himself to the traditional claims of righteousness and also staking his claim to a life based on a new kind of accountability to each other and to God. Living righteously, to Jesus, means living in a style which exemplifies the spirit of the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount. It’s not just a matter of getting things right. It’s a matter of doing things “righteously”: going the extra mile, loving your enemy, forgiving your adversaries, turning the other cheek, treating others as subjects, not objects. That’s human righteousness. There’s also divine righteousness.

            The Hebrew word we translate as “righteousness” says something about God—God’s greatest attribute is the “saving mercy” offered to all. A righteous person knows themselves to be recipients of God’s continual care. To think of oneself as accountable to a “higher righteousness” means to ground your life in a sense of ongoing gratitude for God’s saving mercy. We usually translate the familiar first Beatitude as “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” The New English Bible puts it this way: “Happy are they who know their need of God.” When I start from an acknowledgment of my dependence on God’s saving mercy, I know myself to be one who needs God and who strives in both gratitude and humility to find a way to live in the higher righteousness toward others that Jesus in his life and ministry exemplifies.

            All this brings us back to the question posed by John the Baptist: , “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” Why did Jesus himself get baptized? John’s baptism was for the forgiveness of sins. Jesus clearly did not need absolution. Why did he step into the Jordan’s waters to be cleansed?

            My attempt to answer this question comes only after having spent a lifetime in the life and work of the church. In the course of these many years I have come to know and love countless people across generations and races and various ways of identifying themselves who have given themselves over—sometimes in fits and starts—to the “higher righteousness” that Jesus proposes. In various ways they have dedicated their lives to the work of justice,  mercy, and compassion. They have done so from a posture of humility and gratitude. They know their need of God and they realize that God has responded to that need with an abundant love that compels them to share it with others.

            I believe that Jesus was baptized by John so that he could show us how to live as he did, to show us what the baptized life is like. From this moment on in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus will go on to do things that characterize the life and commitments of a baptized person: feeding the hungry, healing the sick, consorting with the less respectable people in the neighborhood. Living the life of a baptized person means standing with and for others, and it ultimately brought Jesus to the cross. And what happened there and on the Easter that followed had life-giving and life-changing implications not only for the world, but  for you and me too.

            Living the baptized life does not necessarily involve going to the cross, though for some people it will. Living the baptized life does mean reorienting one’s life and priorities in such a way that we can make common cause with others for the common good. Baptism is an entry into the community that gathers around Jesus, who himself was baptized in the community gathered around John. Living the baptized life means that we find our fulfillment not alone but with others. The hard news of Jesus’s teaching us “higher righteousness” is that the moral demands on us now will be high.  The good news of this teaching is that it will not be solely on us to live up to them. The Christian life is a life lived in community, in solidarity not only with the poor and sick and bereaved, but also a solidarity of companionship with others who also seek faithfully to live it out. None of us is on our own. We are all in this together. That’s why we come to church for service and support.

            On this First Sunday after the Epiphany, we celebrate the baptism of Jesus as one of the ways in which God’s glory is made manifest in the world. Jesus has shown us a way to live our lives in alignment with his, by seeing ourselves as recipients of God’s saving mercy and by extending that mercy to others. God’s glory is made real and visible in you and in the myriad ways you love and serve the world. And if that isn’t wonderful news in hard days like these, I don’t know what is. Amen.

Homily: The Second Sunday after Christmas/The Epiphany [January 4, 2026] All Saints, Beverly Hills

As much as I enjoyed my first Sunday with you, the majority of appreciative comments I received on my sermon last week had less to do with its content than its brevity. So relax: however awful today’s sermon may be, it’ll be over before you know it.

 

            This has been quite a week for news: yesterday’s capture of Venezuelan president Maduro, the horrific New Year’s Eve fire in Switzerland, the Rose Bowl annihilation of Alabama by Indiana to name a few. But the story that has touched many of us the most was of the untimely death of Tatiana Schlossberg, the environmental journalist and daughter of Caroline Kennedy. Just before Thanksgiving The New Yorker published her moving and brilliant essay, “A Battle with my Blood” [https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/a-battle-with-my-blood]. In her piece, Ms. Schlossberg recounted her experience of the sudden onslaught of terminal leukemia, the lengths to which she and her family had gone to treat the disease, and her sadness at the prospect of dying before she really got to know her new daughter. I have rarely read a piece that affected me so. How could someone so sick write so powerful an essay? How could someone so vital be cut down so early in life? 

            When we think of the Kennedys, we think of tragedy. Part of what moved me so much in Tatiana Schlossberg’s essay was the empathy she felt, even in her own suffering, for her family:

For my whole life, I have tried to be good, to be a good student and a good sister and a good daughter, and to protect my mother and never make her upset or angry. Now I have added a new tragedy to her life, to our family’s life, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.

 

            You’re probably thinking that this is a bummer way to open an Epiphany sermon, but remember that the holiday’s name, epiphany, actually means manifestation. When we observe Jesus’s epiphany we celebrate the manifestation of his glory to the entire world. For me, Tatiana Schlossberg’s New Yorker article was an epiphany, a manifestation of a grace and power in the human spirit that we encounter only rarely.

Matthew’s gospel story of the “wise men from the east” following the star to Bethlehem makes real this manifestation of divine glory in what J.A.T. Robinson called “the human face of God”. Whenever I hear this story, my mind immediately goes to one of my favorite artworks, Fra Angelico’s large tondo painting of “The Adoration of the Magi” in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. where I used to live and work. [https://www.nga.gov/artworks/41581-adoration-magi] If you’ve been to that museum you’ve certainly seen it. It’s both beautiful and startling at once.

In Fra Angelico’s picture we see the traditional tableau of the wise men kneeling before Jesus and the holy family. But there are some additional touches that always surprise me. One is that there is also a large crowd who have followed the Magi to the manger. Another is that a group of emaciated men—probably lepers—raise their arms in praise as they joyously join the throng in adoring the baby Jesus. A third shows one viewer who appears to be shielding his vision from the sight of so much glory. The birth of this baby will transform both the world and individual human lives.

I don’t know if Fra Angelico ever read the letter to the Ephesians, but if he did he must have been struck by a passage from the reading we heard this morning:

In former generations [the mystery of Christ] was not made known to humankind, as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit: that is, the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel. [Ephesians 3]

 

For the author of Ephesians the whole Jesus experience is an indescribable miracle, and its proof lies in the very existence of the church, a community which includes in one body what we had previously thought to be irreconcilable opposites. Jews and Gentiles now live together in the company gathered around Jesus. Wise men from the east worship the child in the manger. Lepers rejoice at the one who will heal, touch, and include them. Jews and Gentiles go to church together. Human divisions have been healed. We are all of us members of a body which transcends definitions and categories..

It is easy to become sentimental about things like this and to pretend that the tensions between us are not real. Our nation is divided over its purpose and meaning. Families, relationships, households become torn. Even churches have been known to have conflict over their leadership. These problems are real. MAGA and Woke are not getting together anytime soon.

And yet: when God’s glory is made manifest—at the Bethlehem manger, in a New York City hospital room, in what Robert Frost called “the countless ties of love and thought” that invisibly connect us one to another—when we glimpse even for a moment the depth and grandeur of God and God’s hope for us—we realize that the hard categories we had put so much trust in are not fixed but fluid. Jew, Gentile, Black, White, Gay Straight, Blue, Red—all of these identities, while important markers, do not tell the true story about us, our destiny, or our world. We are all in the words of Ephesians, “fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise of Christ Jesus through the gospel”. It’s not that we have no differences; it’s that all our differences go together to make up the fullness of the divine and human community of which we are a part. All this diversity adds up to something ultimately beautiful, glorious, and good.

As we gather on this Second Sunday after Christmas to celebrate the Epiphany, there are no words that will erase the pain of the suffering we have seen this week and to which all of us are liable as vulnerable, mortal creatures. Christianity will always stand in the paradox which embraces both the cross and resurrection. Something big and deep and good is going on in the universe which puts all our experience, sorrow and joy, into perspective. As our passage from Ephesians puts it, even in our sorrow we proclaim “the news of the boundless riches of Christ” as “the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God” begins to unfold. 

God and God’s purposes are working themselves out even now in God’s world, in the human community, and in you. The Epiphany of God in Jesus begins at the manger, continues over centuries, and is alive even and especially in your life, experiences, and relationships. As this unfolding season will demonstrate, the epiphany of Jesus is only the beginning of God’s manifestation in the world. Everywhere we turn we now see what was hidden being revealed. 

In a world racked with conflict and pain, let us rejoice in the unfolding of the mystery which begins in this visit to the manger, continues in the church and world, and finds its culmination in each and every human life and relationship. You too are an epiphany of God. This is the kind of news that can turn tragedy into triumph, estrangement into reconciliation, death into life. So, together with Jesus, let us bring this long-hidden secret out into the open and make it manifest to ourselves and to each other as we serve our broken yet beloved world. Amen.

Homily: The First Sunday after Christmas [December 28, 2025] All Saints, Beverly Hills

I’m Gary Hall, your new priest in charge, here to see you through the last bit of your rector transition. I don’t really start until New Year’s Day, but I thought I’d give you a sneak preview now so you could begin thinking about alternative ways to spend your Sunday mornings for the next six months.          Call it advance warning of what you’re likely to be in for.

You should have received a letter listing some of my credentials. If not, I’ll happily recite them to you at the door. I’m not going to spend a lot of time introducing myself. But I do want to begin by saying what a pleasure it is to be with you this morning as my brief interim here begins. I’ve known many lay and clergy folks at All Saints over the years, and I have long admired your traditions of great music and expansive welcome. I look forward to a stable yet engaging six months with you.

            My wife Kathy and I are just back from a month in New York City where I have served for the past seven Decembers as priest-in-residence at the House of the Redeemer, an Episcopal retreat house on the upper east side. Advent in New York City is an intense experience:  the lights, the crowds, the store, and yes, the tree. There is so much sensual stimulation there this month that the holiday itself is almost (but not quite) overwhelmed. Speaking as one who grew up partly in Beverly Hills, I’m sure that the scene on Rodeo Drive each December is pretty much the same.

            In a way, our shared experience of observing Christmas surrounded by overpowering sights and sounds exactly parallels that of the earliest Christians. Jesus and his followers lived in Roman-occupied Judea (as they called it then), and Rome was very much like 21^st century America in the way it projected its power through attention-grabbing spectacles. Every time I go into an Apple Store and see the beautiful hi-resolution images on the screens there, I think to myself: so THIS is what we’re competing with.

            Just last Sunday, the New York Times ran an opinion piece in which the columnist Nicholas Kristof interviewed New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman. In it they discuss the world-changing power of Christmas. [“What Would Surprise Jesus about Christmas 2025?” December 20, 2025 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/20/opinion/jesus-christmas-religion.html]  It’s always been about something more than Santa.

            There are many ways in which we Christians have always pushed against the values of the prevailing culture which we inhabit. This was true in Jesus’s day, as Ehrman explains:

The heart of Jesus’ message is that loving “others” means caring not only for family and friends but even for strangers — whoever is in need, whether we know them or whether they are like us. This kind of altruism was not promoted — or even accepted — in the Greek and Roman worlds that Jesus came out of. But it is a view that completely transformed the thinking and ethical priorities of the Western world down till today.

            In other words, the Romans persecuted Christians partly because we wouldn’t worship the emperor, but mostly because we persisted in treating the sick, the widowed, the orphaned, the poor, the stranger with compassion and dignity. Our willingness to love and honor everyone regardless of origin or status has always set us apart.

            On Christmas Eve we retell the familiar story of Jesus’s birth in a Bethlehem stable. If we listened to it every year with fresh ears, it would shock us. It tells how the One at the center of the universe entered our human life and experience by being born in the poorest and least powerful of surroundings. God does not come as an emperor in a marble palace trimmed with gold. God is wrapped in swaddling clothes and lain in a manger, surrounded by the poorest of the poor, the local shepherds.

            As Bart Ehrman reminds us, the Christmas story is not a fairy tale. It relates a powerful truth about our life and its meaning.  The story has “power to shape how we think and behave towards others”. 

 

            Today, on the First Sunday after Christmas, we heard a different gospel reading: the beautiful prologue to John’s Gospel [John 1: 11-18]:

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth. . . . No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known.

 

            In his own more philosophical way, John is saying what Luke is telling us in his Bethlehem story. The Word has become flesh and lived among us, making God known to us in a manner full of grace and truth. The One born in Bethlehem will grow up to heal the sick, forgive us when we sin, feed the hungry, go to the cross rather than deny God’s universal love and goodness, and ultimately come back to us when raised at Easter. This is a story about God and us. God wants to be connected with us and will not be stopped until we and all creation are at one with each other.

            In the 18^th century, the English poet Christopher Smart gave voice to the mysterious paradox we celebrate at Christmas. In his hymn, “The Nativity of Our Lord and Saviour”, he gives voice to the power and vulnerability we see joined in the stable and later at the cross and empty tomb:

 

O Most Mighty! O MOST HOLY!

Far beyond the seraph's thought,

Art thou then so mean and lowly

As unheeded prophets taught?

            

O the magnitude of meekness!

Worth from worth immortal sprung;

O the strength of infant weakness,

If eternal is so young!

--Christopher Smart, “The Nativity of Our Lord and Saviour, A Hymn”

            

            Christmas is about so many things, and this Sunday gives us the chance to reclaim for a moment the mystery central to our faith.

            O the magnitude of meekness!

            O the strength of infant weakness

 

God is alive and at work in our world and in you and me in hidden and surprising ways. The creator of the universe is born in a barn. The Word is made flesh and dwells among us.

            We miss the point of Christmas if we fail to see ourselves at the center of it. This is a story about God and us. We are the reason God has taken all this on. Here is the deep truth of the gospel: we matter to the One at the center of creation. We matter to each other. We should take ourselves as seriously as God takes us.

            On this First Sunday after Christmas, now that the season’s intensity begins to wane, we can see again what the shepherds saw. Mary, Joseph, and the baby show our human experience at the center of God’s heart. You are as precious to God as the baby Jesus was to Mary and Joseph. The beauty of the season can sometimes distract us from its central truth. Your life has meaning and significance not always apparent even to you. Your life, your struggles, your joys, your sorrows—all those things are important to the One who made and loves us all. Christmas is about God coming to be with and in and for us. This is why Christians have always served others. Every human being reflects the depth and beauty of God—even and especially you. That is the deep truth behind this beautiful season, and it is why we now proceed together to give thanks. Amen.

Homily: St. James [July 21, 2024] St. James, Newport Beach

            Today’s Gospel [Matthew 20: 20-28] and its tale of how the mother of James and John went to Jesus on their behalf, reminds me of the many times, during my years as a school teacher and principal, when a parent would come to me asking a special favor for their child. True, no one ever came to me demanding that their kid sit next to Jesus in his kingdom, but some of those special requests came close: a different, more popular science teacher; looking the other way after an outrageous offence; changing a grade for a better chance at a college admission. Being a parent myself I understood the impulse driving the desire for special treatment. But like all administrators everywhere, I always fell back on the tired bureaucrat’s response: “If I do it for you, I’ll have to do it for everybody.” They never found that any more convincing than I did.

            Luckily for us, Jesus in today’s Gospel is more creative than I was. When the mother of James, the first martyr among the twelve apostles and the patron saint of this parish, makes her exceptionalistic request, Jesus does not fall back on school administrator excuses. Instead, he asks James and his brother John, “Are you able to drink the cup that I am about to drink?” They say they are. But with his surprising reply, Jesus stops them in their tracks:

“You will indeed drink my cup, but to sit at my right hand and at my left, this is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared by my Father.”

            We need a little context here. Our gospel reading lopped off some introductory verses about Jesus deciding now to leave his home up north in Galilee and head straight south for Jerusalem. James, John, and his mother apparently think that the trip to the capital city will be a triumphant procession to glory, and they want to sit at the right and the left of Jesus so they can bask in all the applause. Jesus, however, knows that this journey is about something else: he is bringing his healing work and his message of love and justice to the heart of Israel’s life in what will become a direct confrontation with imperial power. This is not going to look or feel like the Tournament of Roses.

            If you remember last week’s Gospel, we heard the story of Herod’s brutal execution of John the Baptist. In today’s reading from Acts, we hear the account of that same Herod ordering the murder of the apostle James by the sword. It turns out that Jesus was right: James did drink from the same cup as Jesus. When love comes up against power, power’s first response is always to murder love. It happened to Jesus. It happened to James. It has happened to saints and martyrs around the world and down through time. James learned the hard way that following Jesus is not dressing for success. It is standing for something that our power structures will always find threatening and will seek to destroy.

            And that is why Jesus concludes today’s teaching with these words to James and John and their companions:

You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave.

 

Caesar and Herod operate on the power principle, but it won’t be that way in the community gathered around Jesus. The Son of Man “came not to be served but to serve”. It turns out that our special treatment isn’t special privilege. Our surprising reward is a call to service.

I have thought a lot about this Gospel and the story of James this week. Kathy and I are just returned from two weeks in the Midwest, spending time with family and friends. Because we were busy doing basic vacation things we didn’t have time to follow any of the political news stories that have rolled out over the summer. As I thought a lot about this Gospel and very little about social media or cable news, I began better to understand James, his mother, and myself. As this election year shows, we can all be caught up in the world’s constant struggle for power and prestige. But when we turn from the struggle and toward Jesus, we are drawn to a vision of something real and true. Life is not about the things we usually chase and value. Life is about the kind of love, justice, and compassion which Jesus both preaches and embodies.

It is easy upon hearing this Gospel to beat up on James, John, and their mother. What is harder is to look at them and see ourselves. We often value the reward more than the work that earns it. I remember hearing an interview with the late actress Carrie Fisher. She was talking about going to the gym. The reporter asked her if she liked exercise. “No,” she replied. “I like the feeling of having worked out.” That answer could serve as the motto for much of contemporary life. We want to get the result without having to pay the price of it.

Let’s remember, though, that the story of James the Great did not stop here. We wouldn’t be celebrating this apostle, and you wouldn’t have named your church after him, if he had just been a guy on an ego trip. Though we do not know a lot about his life after this and in the earliest Christian community, we do know that he died as Jesus did at the hands of state violence. He clearly took in the message that we hear Jesus giving to all the twelve:

You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.

 

As Jesus has it, we his followers account to a higher set of standards. One of the things you learn studying church history is the way in which Christianity at its best has managed to be what we call today “countercultural”. Often we bless the culture we inhabit uncritically. But sometimes we rise above that. When he describes the common run of humanity, Jesus here uses the word ἐθνῶν which is variously translated “gentiles”, “nations”, “pagans”.  Our culture values ego and rewards performance. Those gathered with and around Jesus nurture more interior virtues and bask not in his fame but in his presence. And we show that we value those things by living lives of service and, sometimes, real costly sacrifice. Just ask James.

When I look closely at James, John, and their mother I am looking in a mirror. As in Carrie Fisher’s example, I want the reputation of having done the thing rather than the doing of the thing itself. I want to be seen as loving, just, generous, and compassionate and am less interested in doing the actual work that earns the reputation. This doesn’t mean I’m a bad person. It just means that I’m human. 

But, luckily for me and I trust also for you, the story doesn’t stop there. God does not simply leave us to the mercy of the problems of human selfishness. For some mysterious reason that I cannot always understand, God has brought you and me into this community that we share with Jesus, with James and John, with all the saints and sinners who have shared this table with us over time, and today, here and now, with each other. Perhaps God’s greatest gift to us is that we are not left to face the dilemmas of being human on our own. We have been placed in and given a community in which to work it all out—a thing called the church which can be as frail and damaged as any human institution, but can also be the vehicle that brings us into deeper self-awareness and compassion. 

Today is the Sunday on which St. James parish celebrates the life and witness of St. James the apostle and martyr. He is your patron saint for a good reason. James followed Jesus faithfully, but it took him a while to get what Jesus was really about. I’ve been doing this priestly church work for almost fifty years, and I’m still trying to get it. All of us, together, have been brought into this gracious space and have been given each other as companions to help us become the people God made us to be. It’s not always easy following Jesus. It’s often a bumpy road, and learning hard truths about yourself in community doesn’t always feel good. But over a lifetime walking this road with Jesus and each other leads us to a new and gracious place we wouldn’t have gotten to simply on our own. Over time—and sometimes against our wishes--God makes over us in the image of Jesus. We too become ones who came not to be served but to serve. 

So come to the table now with Jesus, with James, with each other and give thanks for the God who sees us, knows us, loves us. God’s love calls us into new and blessed life in service of a world which still has things mostly upside down and usually backwards. It is only by following Jesus together that we discover, finally, who we really are. Amen.

 

Homily: The Fourth Sunday in Lent [March 10, 2024] St. James, Newport Beach

            When I retired eight years ago, the only thing I promised myself was that I would never again preach on the Sunday we spring forward to Daylight Saving Time. I didn’t know Cindy then, and I didn’t reckon with her persuasiveness.     

Two of today’s scripture readings feature snakes: Moses lifting up a serpent in the wilderness as a divine cure for snakebite, and Jesus’s comparing his own lifting up on the cross to that earlier exaltation of a snake. Every time I come across a snake in scripture, I’m drawn back to the day, in 1982, when I began my job as vicar of St. Aidan’s Church in Malibu. The church is situated on a hillside, across the PCH from Paradise Cove. As I got out of my car I was greeted by the Junior Warden, who was carrying a shovel. He greeted me with a hearty, “Good morning, father!” and then proceeded to decapitate a gigantic rattlesnake that I was just about to step on. 

            I am a snakeophobe. (The Latin term is ophidiophobia.) But over the course of my years in Malibu I made a kind of peace with them. It turned out we had a huge den of rattlers on the hillside above us, but they did a really good job of keeping the rodent population down. And every so often I would see king snakes gliding around, and they were very good at controlling the rattlers. I learned to make my way among them, if not with ease, then at least with confidence and some real gratitude.

We’re gathered this morning on the Fourth Sunday in Lent, a day also called “Refreshment Sunday” in the U.S. and “Mothering Sunday” in the UK. This Sunday marks a kind of pause in the Lenten action. We often read the story of Jesus’s feeding of the five thousand today, and our collect refers to Jesus as the bread which “came down from heaven to be the true bread which gives life to the world”. But instead of bread today, our readings give us a couple of snakes. Go figure.

Let’s look at each of our three readings briefly.

The Old Testament reading, from the Book of Numbers [Numbers 21: 4-9], recounts a moment part way in the Israelites’ exodus journey from Egypt toward the promised land. The people are tired and hungry, and they constantly complain. The always unpredictable Old Testament God gets so annoyed that he sends poisonous snakes to bite the people. When they repent, God tells Moses to put a bronze serpent on a pole so that those bitten by a snake may look on the bronze one and live.

There’s not a lot to say about this, except to note that the ancient symbol of medicine—the caduceus or staff of Asclepius--still in use today: two snakes coiled around a staff or pole. What it seems to suggest is that the malady we suffer contains within it the cure. The cure for snakebite lies within the bite itself. The remedy for the thing we fear is to look directly into the thing we are afraid of. It sounds a bit New-Agey, but there it is.

But Jesus clearly has something like that in mind when he compares himself, in the Gospel [John 3:14-21] to Moses’s bronze snake in the sky: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” The lifting up that Jesus foretells is a crucifixion, not an excursion up into the heavens to bring back divine advice. My friend Andrew McGowan, dean of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, describes the notion, current in biblical times, of a sage “as a sort of pedagogue who will share interesting theological tidbits and diverting signs from the upper realm.” 

As McGowan points out, what Jesus says in today’s Gospel differs radically from the conventional pieties about divine figures:

Yet his version of being lifted up also amounts to a critique of the conventional ideas about heavenly beings or revealers ascending and descending calmly and benignly with their stores of divine knowledge.  [“Jesus Lifted Up”, abmgc@substack.com, March 5, 2024]

            And that is why, a few verses later, Jesus can say the oft-quoted saying, familiar to old time Episcopalians from the “comfortable words” of the old prayer book to those of us baseball fans who have to endure it written on signs held up behind home plate. John, 3:15: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” This is the kind of exaltation Jesus is talking about, an exaltation in service of divine love and forgiveness. Christianity is not about tidbits of divine wisdom. It is about this life-giving encounter between God and us. God lifts up Jesus as an act of love for us. Our response, in that same spirit of love and forgiveness, is to extend compassion, mercy, and grace to others.

            And this brings us to what is, for me, the most important reading in our service this morning: the passage [Ephesians 2: 1-10] from the Letter to the Ephesians. Now I have to admit that Ephesians is perhaps my favorite book in the Bible. It was probably written not by Paul but by a next generation follower. And it wrestles with the reality of what it means for the early church to be made up of two groups who were absolutely anathema to each other: gentiles and Jews. In today’s passage he engages the implications of living together in radical difference for a real, flesh and blood, human community:

 

You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. . . But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. . .  For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God-- not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.

            Now it’s always a bit hard to follow these New Testament arguments; their style can be a bit confusing. But what the writer says here is supremely important for us individuals, as citizens, as church. None of us is here by right. We were brought here by the same divine action that lifted up the serpent in the wilderness and Jesus on the cross. As Jesus says, : “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” It is only because of God’s generosity that you and I have any status here at all. Our claim to importance rests not on our own doing but on our being recipients of God’s forgiving, empowering, and liberating love.

            The Letter to the Ephesians goes on to claim in later chapters that the existence of a church made up of Jews and gentiles is in itself a proof of God’s greatness. Who could have imagined such a thing? God has brought two human groups who cannot stand each other and put them together in one shared community. A church made up of Jews and gentiles is as startling as would be a church made up of Israelis and Palestinians, of MAGA Republicans and members of ANTIFA, as Trojans and Bruins. What we need to see through the antique reasoning of Paul or his follower is that all of us, together, are recipients of God’s love and grace. The truest thing about us is that we are forgiven, accepted, and loved. All other claims to status are ultimately false. As my late friend, teacher, and lifelong mentor Harvey Guthrie used to say, “We’re all on cosmic relief.”

            You here at St. James have lived through ecclesiastical controversy and come out on the other side. We all have lived through Super Tuesday and now will endure another eight months of bitter squabble until November’s general election. In this Lenten and prolonged campaign season, perhaps the best thing we followers of Jesus can do is to remember the words from John and Ephesians as we make our ways through the dissension and contention of our shared, civic life. : “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” “By grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God-- not the result of works, so that no one may boast.”

Snakes are slithering all around us, whether we’re in Malibu, Newport Beach, or Washington, D.C. When surrounded by these malign serpents, let’s keep our eyes on the one lifted by Moses and Jesus on the cross. These, and no other nostrums, are the antidotes we need.

            “We’re all on cosmic relief.” If God can make a church out of Jews and gentiles, God can make a society out of left, right, rich, poor. As Lent rolls on into Holy Week and Easter, let us remind ourselves and the world of God’s generosity, our dependence on it, and the divine love that sustains us all. Amen.