Homily: The Third Sunday of Easter [April 19, 2026] All Saints, Beverly Hills

If you regularly go to the theater or come to church, you know that drama and religion are full of examples of characters, even gods, walking around in disguise. Now Jesus gets into the act. On Easter he appeared to Mary Magdalene looking like a gardener. Today he’s more of what Mark Twain would have called a “mysterious stranger”. 

Today’s Gospel [Luke 24: 13-35] gives us Luke’s beloved account of Jesus’s appearance to his disciples on the road to Emmaus. This is a story we clergy just love to preach about, especially because of its final line: “He had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.” The Eucharist is the holiest thing we Christians do, and it is not a big homiletical leap to say that we meet Jesus when we take communion together around the table.

Now that is certainly true, and nothing I’m about to say should be taken as a challenge to it. But, the more of these Emmaus sermons I hear over the years, the more I think they amount to a kind of special clerical pleading. I was ordained around the time the new prayer book (with its renewed emphasis on Eucharist) was adopted, and over the course of my life in the church I’ve seen the communion service force out all other kinds of corporate prayer. There was a time when churches couldn’t do anything—including a vestry meeting—without it being part of a Eucharist. When I was in seminary, the students who played volleyball wanted to have their year-end game as part of a Eucharist. (The dean, wisely I think, turned down their request to exchange the traditional elements for  beer and pretzels.) And, of course, you can’t do communion without a priest. So, in a way unintended by the prayer book revisers, clergy became even more central to public worship than they had been before. There’s job security for you!

The Roman Catholic Church also experienced this phenomenon after Vatican II, the liturgical renewal that sparked our own prayer book revision. There have been a number of catholic studies suggesting that the range and variety of lay-led services in their church has declined over the decades just as it has in ours. Praying without a priest has seemed for some like a letdown, so why do it at all?

Now, in fact, I do believe that we meet Jesus in the breaking of the bread. It happens every Sunday. But the Emmaus story says something a bit more copious than that. As the disciples themselves say after Jesus’s vanishing from them, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” Yes, Jesus was made known to them in the breaking of the bread. But he was also revealed to them in the opening of the scriptures, in his recounting and proclaiming a sacred story.

When the disciples tell this mysterious stranger how perplexed they are about the events of Easter, he responds: “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” 

And then, we hear, “ beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.” So, long before there has been a mystical breaking of bread, there has been something like an exchange of stories. The disciples have told Jesus their story, and he has told them his. Together these stories make up a new and fuller sacred narrative, one that sends them back to their friends with a new and expanded sense of meaning and purpose.

This story exchange is perhaps the most important thing that happens in this Emmaus encounter. The two disciples tell the stranger the events that took place in Jerusalem—the arrest, trial, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus; then Jesus tells how their story fits into the big, long, scriptural story—“Moses and the prophets”. The Holy Week and Easter events are a story unto themselves, but they only make sense as parts of a bigger and deeper story that goes back to the creation itself. The two disciples need the big story to make sense of their own experience. The community needs their story of this encounter to complete the larger plan of salvation that is unfolding over time and space. Jesus tells the big story. Cleopas and the other unnamed disciple tell theirs. Together, these stories produce a new, deeper version of the truth.

If we mean what we say about all of us being made in God’s image; if we mean what we say about God being incarnate in Jesus and now in you and me; then it should be evident that every person’s history matters, that every human life is a new window into the experience and purposes of God. You have a story to tell. It is important to you, of course. But it is also important to me. We will never understand the fullness of God’s work in the world until we exchange the big story with the smaller ones and build them up into one new and gracious whole.

The older I get, the less interested I am in telling you the official, church-sanctioned version and the more interested I am in hearing what God is doing in you. It’s probably a good thing I’m about to retire again: it’s not a good corporate look to have a sales representative who thinks the customers are more interesting than the product.

Here’s why all this matters: when we talk only about meeting Jesus in the breaking of bread, we make it sound as if our business with God is a one-way street. I, the priestly authorized representative, impart to you, the lay consumer, the official sign of God’s presence at a highly-polished altar rail in an authorized liturgical rite. But reading the Bible tells us that God never works precisely like that. Even the Jerusalem Temple and authorized prophets could not regularly deliver the goods. It always took an outsider—David, Amos, Jesus, Paul—to rise up with a new truth. Biblical truth is almost never official and always messy. Your life experiences may not conform to your image of what holiness looks like, but they, too, are sacred story, and the witness of Christians across the centuries is that God is at work in even the most complicated and bumpy lives. You have a unique story to tell. We all need to hear it. 

Well, I should probably stop talking now before the theology police come for me with their butterfly nets. I am grateful that Jesus opened the eyes of Cleopas and his friend to the larger things going on. And I am certain that Jesus took a new and expanded understanding away from that encounter himself. The big story is sacred history. Your story is holy, too. As Easter season unfolds, let us continue to gather and give thanks for the resurrection which is its heart, and let us speak and listen to each other so that we, too, may know Jesus and ourselves in the breaking of the bread. Amen.

 

Homily: The Second Sunday of Easter [April 12, 2026] All Saints, Beverly Hills

Those of a certain age will remember going to Saturday matinees as children. I was such a crazed movie-goer that I would show up for the kiddie double feature and then stay for the adult double feature. I always emerged from 6 to 8 hours in the dark shielding my eyes from the blinding glare of early evening.

My favorite kiddie matinee movies were those historical epic pictures made in Italy with the American actor speaking English and everyone else sloppily dubbed from Italian. These movies regularly made a hash of history, mixing epics, scriptures, heroes, and eras with abandon. They had titles like “Goliath versus Hercules”. You get the idea.

But as bad as these movies were, they genuinely sparked my interest in stories both classical and biblical. 

You may remember one of the great scenes in classical literature: Homer’s depiction of the moment toward the end of The Odyssey where the returning Odysseus is recognized by the aged woman Eurycleia who had nursed him as a child. Odysseus has been gone for many years, first at the Trojan War and then on his travels homeward, and he has returned to Ithaca in disguise. As a boy, Odysseus had been wounded in a hunting accident. And when he returns home Eurycleia washes his feet as a gesture of hospitality, much as we did together on Maundy Thursday. She recognizes Odysseus by his scar. In Emily Wilson’s translation:

The old slave woman, 

holding his leg and rubbing with flat palms, 

came to that place, and recognized the scar. 

She touched his beard and said . . .

 

“You are Odysseus! My darling child! 

My master! I did not know it was you 

until I touched you all around your leg.”

—The Odyssey, Book 19 [Emily Wilson]

 

Just as Odysseus’s recognition hinges on his identity being verified by a wound, so in today’s Gospel does the credibility of Jesus’s wounds validate his identity, at least to the apostle Thomas.

One church I served had (and perhaps still has) a weekly men’s group called the “Doubting Thomases”. The Episcopal Church has always been a congenial home for educated skeptics—people who can’t quite buy the virgin birth, the empty tomb, or walking on water. And for many the doubts expressed by Thomas— "Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe."—these doubts have turned him into the poster child for people who have questions.

Now I’ve never been a so-called “doubting Thomas”, but the men in this group were very good friends of mine and some of the most faithful members of the church, so I do not intend here to make light of them. But I do want to suggest that, for all their emphasis on thinking before believing, they actually misunderstood what Thomas is doing here.

The Jews of first century Palestine who both opposed and followed Jesus were all Pharisees, and the Pharisees (unlike the Saducees) believed in the resurrection. So when Thomas says "Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe” he is not expressing doubt in the possibility of bodily resurrection. He wants to make sure that the risen person they saw was actually Jesus of Nazareth. 

For all the spiritualized nature of John’s crucifixion account—it is much less brutal than the other three gospels—it is only John’s gospel that mentions the nailing of Jesus to the cross and the piercing of his side with the spear. Thomas is asking to see the signs of the event they all have witnessed together. But the credibility of the whole thing rests, for Thomas, on Jesus’s wounds, on the tangible marks of his suffering.

Why this emphasis on physical wounds and scars? I think there are a couple of answers.

First, Thomas clearly remembers who Jesus was in life and what he taught and stood for. The power systems in Jesus’s world killed him because Jesus knew their power was false. Thomas’s refusal to believe until he sees the wounds expresses his affirmation, not his doubt, about the very nature of the resurrection. He followed one who died rather than submit to false power. If this is really the resurrection of Jesus, then these wounds tell the story of just what it means to be true to God’s values. Thomas will not believe nor follow just any risen person. He will only believe and follow this risen person, Jesus of Nazareth, whose wounds attest both to his identity and his faithfulness.

Second, much earlier in John’s Gospel, Jesus had predicted his crucifixion in these words: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” [John 12.32]. If Thomas has ideas about the nature of the resurrection, he also has ideas about its purpose. For Thomas and for Jesus, the whole point of going to the cross was to save the world. 

For John, the crucifixion is also a “lifting up”, an exaltation. It was both the final manifestation of God’s glory in Jesus and the first act in God’s drawing in of all people into the divine embrace. Seeing and touching Jesus’s wounds validated the identity of the risen One standing before Thomas. And it also reaffirmed God’s commitment that this act of love extend to the far reaches of the human community. At his first Easter appearance, Jesus had given the Holy Spirit to the disciples, telling them they now have the power to liberate people from their sins. At this second appearance, Jesus gives them the gift of peace and expresses compassion for everyone who is not preset, including you and me. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Thomas now has his hopes for the risen Jesus confirmed: his mission, and our task, is to draw all people to him so that all might know how deeply and irrevocably they are loved.

As much as I admire Homer’s Odyssey, there is a great difference between Odysseus’s scar and those of Jesus. Homer’s epic is about the saving and redemption of one fictional man. John’s Gospel is about the saving and redemption of the real world. You and I might identify with Odysseus in his travels, but his suffering does nothing for us. Jesus is a different story: in Easter season we begin to realize how much the empty tomb and upper room events mean for our lives and those of the world. Jesus has gone to the cross so that his lifting up would reconcile God and the world. You and I have been caught up into that wonderful moment. Like Thomas, we may have our questions. But also like him, when we take in all that has happened over these weeks, we are left with nothing to say except, “My Lord and my God!”

They don’t much have those kiddie matinees anymore, and movie technology is much more sophisticated today than it was in the late 1950s. But sitting in the dark, gorging on Junior Mints and Sno Caps, I always found myself taken up into even crummy old world epics. The story you and I now tell—one of cross, wounds, and empty tomb—is even less technological, but so much better. First of all, it’s true. Second of all, it’s for you. The one who was pierced is now lifted up and calls you to himself. That’s a lot to take in and understand, but for now the best response is simply to say, along with Thomas, “My Lord and my God!” Amen.

Homily: Easter Day [April 5, 2026] All Saints, Beverly Hills

            Loving popular culture as I do, I am always somewhere between amused and shocked by the ways biblical figures are depicted in movies and shows. Jesus and his companions were first century Palestinian Jews, but on TV they all look like members of the Norwegian luge team. I’m just glad I’m not famous enough for a biopic. I shudder to think of whom they might cast to portray me. Probably one of those K-Pop kids with a grey wig and glasses.

            No one has suffered more from this kind of misrepresentation than Mary Magdalene, portrayed almost everywhere in our culture as what they used to call a “fallen woman”, a tradition that started erroneously in the Middle Ages and for which the Roman Catholic church has repeatedly apologized. Nothing, alas, could be further from the truth. There is no evidence that Mary Magdalene was a woman of the evening. In fact, Mary was a woman of substance who was one of the most generous and faithful of Jesus’s followers. She witnessed the crucifixion and was the first of all Jesus’s companions to see him risen. She was a moving force in the early church. She was a woman of faith and action. It is not by accident that she got to the empty tomb ahead of everybody else.

            The reading we just heard from John’s Gospel has always been one of my favorites, especially the line about Mary mistaking Jesus for the gardener. Fra Angelico’s great Renaissance fresco of this scene depicts Jesus carrying a mysterious implement that might at once be a rake, a hoe, a trident, or a shovel hidden behind his halo. A contemporary artist might well depict him carrying a leaf blower or a chain saw. 

            In today’s Gospel, Mary goes through a spiritual process that feels familiar to those of us who seek to take in Jesus’s resurrection. Her first response to the empty tomb is to weep. She then fails to recognize Jesus until he calls her by name. When she does recognize him her confusion turns to joy. And at Jesus’s instruction to go tell the other disciples, her joy turns to action. Grief, confusion, joy, action: the path taken by Mary, our exemplary believer. Let’s follow her and she where she takes us.

            The grief Mary feels after Good Friday is all too familiar. Jesus was brought to the cross by powerful people who found his manner of living and teaching dangerous. The power structures of the Roman Empire did not take kindly to the kind of “open commensality” Jesus embodied in his life and ministry. The empire was neither just nor compassionate, and the witness of one who lived a free, loving, and generous life was a threat to those in power’s hold on the populace. So Jesus died not because God wanted him to but because the system couldn’t tolerate him. Who wouldn’t weep to see perfect love trampled to death by rage and fear?

            When she stops crying and sees the one she thinks is the gardener, Mary is confused. The idea of the one she saw murdered on a cross now alive in a garden is too much to take in all at once. Gardens are significant in our biblical story. Our relationship with God began in a garden from which our selfishness got us expelled. And now in Mary’s meeting with Jesus we have the garden back. Easter is about many important theological things, but at its core it is about the healing and restoration of our relationships with God and the world. We were at home in our first garden. We lost it. And now, through the love and faithfulness of God and Jesus, we have it back. The world and we are renewed. 

            And getting back something you loved and lost is perhaps the greatest cause there is for real joy. Jesus was dead and now he lives. We were exiled and now we are home. Mary Magdalene’s joy is the believer’s expression of gratitude for a blessing that exceeds her capacity for wonder. My favorite Prayer Book collects puts it this way:

O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good
things as surpass our understanding . . .your promises . . . exceed all that we
can desire . . .

            

            In her garden encounter with the risen Jesus, Mary Magdalene has seen a good thing that surpasses her understanding. This answer to her prayer exceeds all that she can even hope for.

            And that, to me, is the central point of Easter. We modern or post-modern people tend to think that the point of these stories is about whether we believe them or not, what kind of risen body Jesus might have had, or the literal date and time of the resurrection itself. The point of Easter lies not in its quantifiable answers. The point of Easter lives in the astounding nature of the transaction of which we are witnesses. God has restored Jesus to life, and from the earliest days Christians understood that in doing so God has promised new life to us, too. This event which transforms Mary from weeping friend to apostolic witness holds within it the promise of new life for her and you and me. She came to the tomb hoping at best to give Jesus a decent burial. She leaves the garden understanding that she and the world have been reborn, that our future holds blessings that surpass our understanding. There is more going on here than we can even hope for.

            If we think about our story with God, a story that begins and now culminates in a garden, we can’t help wondering at God’s persistence in seeking us out. Time and again in both the Old and New Testaments, God reaches out for us and we consistently refuse the offer. The story of Jesus, his death and resurrection, is the whole Bible story in miniature. God comes among us. We reject God. God comes back. Again, and again, and again.

            It seems, therefore, that God will not be stopped in the divine quest to love and save us. Do what we can to say “No”, God always responds with “Yes”, what Seamus Heaney called the “aye [A-Y-E] of God”. God would not be stopped in the search for us. God would not be stopped in loving us, often in spite of ourselves. God will not be stopped in bringing us, sometimes kicking and screaming, into that new horizon of risen life that exceeds all that we can imagine, hope for, or desire.

            The final step in Mary Magdalene’s process took her from grief, confusion, and joy to action, perhaps the most important of all. Mary did not passively hold the good news of the risen Jesus and our hopeful future to herself. She immediately told her companions and then the world. On this beautiful Easter day, in a world filled with confusion and grief, let us, like Mary, become witnesses of joy, liberation, forgiveness, and hope. God will not be stopped, and neither it seems would Mary. Now is the time for each and all of us to get on the Easter road with Mary and her brothers and do all we can to love and serve each other. Mary mistook Jesus for the gardener, and perhaps he was. His tools are in our hands now. It is our job to love and tend the world. Amen.

            

            

 

Homily: Easter Vigil [April 4, 2026] All Saints, Beverly Hills

“Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”

 

            It’s Easter, and tonight everyone is on the move (except, perhaps, those waiting in TSA lines tonight). The Israelites are heading out of Egypt, the disciples are following Jesus to Galilee, and you and I are moving from the darkness of Holy Week to the light of Easter, from the death of the cross to risen life. It is no accident that Easter regularly coincides with Passover. Tonight you and I pass over the Red Sea, the Jordan, and the space from Golgotha to Galilee. Our vigil with Old Testament stories helps us take in the sweep and majesty of what God is up to tonight. Everything that abuses and oppresses us has been shown up as false. Even death itself will not have the last word.

            The resurrection of Jesus does not come out of nowhere. It comes as the culmination of a process that has been brewing since the creation. In making our world, its creatures, and us, God has created a community of beings made to be in relationship. The Old Testament lessons we have heard tonight bear witness to the various ways in which God has sought connection with us and how we, for our own perverse reasons, have sought to shut God out. One reason we listen to this succession of Bible stories is to get a glimpse into God’s dogged persistence. 

            It’s Easter, and everyone is on the move tonight. God accompanies the Israelites on their flight out of Egypt. The women who follow Jesus lead the way to the tomb which they find empty. Even God, it seems, is on the move, too. When the risen Jesus meets the disciples, he says, "Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me." 

            Haven’t these people gone through enough? Why now do they have to pack their bags and make the journey from urban Jerusalem in the south to rural Galilee in the north?

            I’m not sure there is a perfect answer to this question. But we should remember that Jesus was originally from the town of Nazareth in Galilee, and you might recall Philip’s snarky remark when first told about Jesus, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” All four Gospels suggest a contrast between the rural poverty of Jesus’s native region in the north and the urban affluence of the Jerusalem area.  They also tell us that Jesus got a better reception as a healer and teacher in Galilee than he did as a critic of religious and political structures in Jerusalem. 

            I don’t think Jesus returns to Galilee simply because it is more friendly territory. I do think he returns there because, as a region that was open to his message, it is the best place to begin a mission that will transform the world. Jerusalem, the seat of political and religious power and authority, did not open itself to his message. Galilee, the home of people who lived on the margins of Roman and Israelite society, the place where Jesus taught, healed, and fed the people, will be the place where the Jesus community can regather, recover from its traumas, and grow.

            I have some other things to say about Easter, and if you want to hear those you’ll have to come back tomorrow morning. But for tonight let us rest in these two thoughts.

            First, let us just pause and take in the grandeur of this Easter/Passover moment. In a few minutes, we will together renew our baptismal covenant because Baptism is itself the church’s enactment of this movement from death to life. In Baptism we die to our old, Adam and Eve, selves and rise to our new, risen Jesus selves. Just as Israel found new life in a movement from freedom out of slavery, so you and I find new lives in claiming our solidarity with the One who passed from the cross to the empty tomb. The sweep of this story draws us in to a vision of the unimaginably wonderful gift we discover here. Death, the thing we fear the most, has been vanquished. Jesus is alive, and that means we will be, too. We have nothing to fear. We can live the kind of open, generous life that Jesus and his companions did because the things we thought were powerful turn out in the end to be paper tigers. Tonight you are offered a life of abundant joy. And there is nothing now to prevent you from moving towards it and saying “Yes”.

            And here’s the second. The Roman values that brought Jesus to the cross were akin to those held by Egypt’s Pharaoh. Power structures, whether they be political, economic, or religious, tend to believe their own publicity. They think that might makes right, that elites are more important than regular people, that power itself is a sign of divine favor. The Bible’s power vectors--Egypt, Babylon, and Rome---thought themselves, in George Saunders’s words, “special, invincible, and permanent”. As things progressed, they turned out to be none of the above.

            Whatever in your life that oppresses you—illness, grief, loss, failure, broken relationships—is neither special, invincible, nor permanent. The Romans who crucified Jesus thought they had won. Pharaoh believed he had a lifetime supply of slave labor. Neither of those things turned out to be true. The second great point about Easter is that it not only offers you risen life in the future. Easter also offers you hope for transcending the things that oppress you now. Whatever painful condition you lament does not define you. The only thing that gives your life true meaning is your own beloved particularity as one for whom God did all this in the first place. The late, great German theologian Jurgen Moltmann called Easter the “festival of freedom”. As Jesus was delivered from death to life, so you and I are being set free from those conditions and problems that weigh us down. We, like Jesus and the Israelites, are free now to be truly alive.

            It’s Easter, and everyone is on the move tonight. Israel is leaving Egypt, Jesus is going to Galilee, and you and I are now heading toward the next, open chapter of our lives. The resurrection is not just an event to be believed. The resurrection is an earthquake that rearranges everything. Christ is risen. Israel is free. You are and will be alive in new and surprising ways. 

            So let us all, with Jesus and his friends, get on the road and get moving. Your problems are neither special, invincible, nor permanent. The Passover of Jesus at Easter has overcome them. "Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me." Amen.

Homily: Good Friday [April 3, 2026] All Saints, Beverly Hills

And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water

And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower

And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him

He said all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them

But he himself was broken long before the sky would open

Forsaken almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone.

 

This familiar verse is from Leonard Cohen’s most famous song, “Suzanne”. With all the chaos and suffering surrounding us this Lent, I have found myself re-listening to all the songs of Leonard Cohen, the Canadian singer and poet who died almost a decade ago. In my experience, of all the singers  of his (and my) generation, only Leonard Cohen has the Biblical depth and religious imagination to give voice to the paradoxical pain and joy of being human, especially in times like these.

Cohen’s powerful double image of Jesus as both sailor and sinker—as water walker and drowning man—reminds us that, in Holy Week, we hear two distinct versions of the Passion story. On Palm Sunday we heard Matthew’s more straightforward narrative read, and today we heard John’s more poetic narrative sung. In Matthew’s Gospel Jesus is at the mercy of other people’s aggression. In John’s version Jesus is always in charge.

The Church decided long ago that it could live with narrative versions of events that contradict each other. Clement of Alexandria, writing a mere century after the events we observe this week, said: : “John, the last of all, seeing that what was material was set forth in the Gospels, on the entreaty of his intimate friends, and inspired by the Spirit, composed a spiritual Gospel.” Matthew gives us the (mostly) straightforward story of suffering. John sings us a song of divine glory. The community that gave us John’s Gospel already knew Matthew’s narrative facts and took them as the starting point for some theological embroidery on what it all meant.

Why do you and I come out of a beautiful spring afternoon to sit in church for an hour to remember these events? I think we do so because we know, at some deep level, that Good Friday is both about Jesus and about us. Yes, Jesus suffers and dies; but so do you and I. Many years ago I participated in a Good Friday reading of John’s Passion at a monastery, and the monks there flipped the script. They had the congregation read the part of Jesus together, and they had the senior monks read the roles of the bad guys. They knew that this story is only partly about Jesus. It is also about us.

And so we come out of a spring day to observe these events because, like our Benedictine brothers, we know that as Jesus goes through all this he is standing in for us—not only in the sense of dying for us, but in the greater sense of dying with us. In taking on one particular human life, God knows what is to suffer and die. This event is less about a sacrifice for sin than it is an expression of divine empathy. When you and I suffer—which, alas, we all do and will—we suffer in solidarity with the One who goes to the cross. The God we pray to knows what it is to be us. We reach out in pain and confusion to One who has also been there.

In some sense, all the world’s religions seek to answer the question of human suffering. Why do we suffer? Do we suffer for a reason? Is it for some larger, divine purpose?

Ever since the Book of Job, well-intentioned, pious people have tried to explain suffering as if it’s part of some larger plan. Job’s friends give him all kinds of religious reasons for his anguish. They tell him in so many ways that it’s his fault. When God finally speaks, God rebukes them all for their simplistic blaming of the sufferer for his own pain and sorrow. Countless generations of Christian preachers have tried to blame you and me for Jesus’s crucifixion. Yes, human beings much like us sent Jesus to his death. But my monk friends knew something the preachers have forgotten: in going to the cross, Jesus stands for and with us. We are quick to see God as the cause of our suffering. We are slow to understand that God also shares our pain.

In his great novelistic memoir of Auschwitz, Night, the late Elie Wiesel told this story of death in the concentration camp:

The SS hanged two Jewish men and a youth in front of the whole camp. The men died quickly, but the death throes of the youth lasted for half an hour. “Where is God? Where is He?” someone asked behind me. As the youth still hung in the torment in the noose after a long time, I heard the man call again, “Where is God now?” And I heard a voice inside myself answer: “Where is He? He is here. He is hanging there on the gallows.”

 

In a deeply biblical way that Leonard Cohen would understand, a Jewish writer got at the deep mystery going on at the cross better than most of us Christians do. God in Jesus goes to the cross both for and with us. That knowledge does not erase our own suffering, but it does somehow make it more bearable.

Sharing Jesus’s Passion together helps us take in the depth of what is happening here. But it doesn’t necessarily answer the simple question, “Why?” Why did God in Jesus go through this in the first place?

            The answer to that question lies in the way the Gospels tell us Jesus lived. In a world of enmity he displayed compassion. In a world of scarcity he fed people. In a world of suffering and condemnation he brought healing and forgiveness. The secular and religious authorities found Jesus’s way of living a challenge to their possession and projection of power. Someone living in Jesus’s manner could not help but pose a threat to those invested in the status quo.

Many years ago I saw Desmond Tutu being interviewed on the Today Show. Tutu said something about there being things worse than death. The incredulous host stopped and replied, “What, Archbishop, can possibly be worse than death?” Tutu thought for a moment and replied, “If I woke up one morning and said to myself, ‘You know, Desmond, apartheid isn’t so bad.’ THAT would be worse than death.”

            As we gather at the cross today, let us look for ourselves in Jesus, and let us look for Jesus in us. In going to the cross, Jesus stands with and for us in all the various ways we suffer and fear and lose in life. You and I, with Jesus, hang on that cross today, too. You and I are there with Jesus, and Jesus is here with us. He shares all our suffering and sorrow. He calls us to live now as he did, knowing that giving in to hatred and fear is worse even than death. What happens here today is both horribly and hopefully true.

And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water

And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower

And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him

He said all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them

But he himself was broken long before the sky would open

Forsaken almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone. Amen.

Homily: The Fifth Sunday in Lent [March 22, 2026] All Saints, Beverly Hills

            Today’s Gospel tells the story of the raising of Lazarus. John tells us that Lazarus was in the tomb for four days—or just about the amount of time it took to read the passage we just heard-- before Jesus came on the scene. I don’t understand the need for these book-length Gospels in Lent. I’m just glad they didn’t ask us to stand and listen to a reading of Moby Dick. There are many interesting aspects to this very long reading, perhaps my favorite of which is that Jesus waits two days after hearing of Lazarus’s illness before he heads over to Bethany to see the family. Because of the delay, Martha accuses Jesus of letting her brother die, to which Jesus answers, “Your brother will rise again.”

            There are many conjectures as to what Jesus was doing during his two-day pause. My guess is that he was thinking and praying before committing to a course of action. I once went to hear a talk by a Russian Orthodox bishop from England named Anthony Bloom, who had written a book about prayer. When anyone in the audience asked him a question, Bloom actually closed his eyes and prayed for a long moment before answering. At first these pauses felt kind of weird. But we all eventually relaxed and realized that there just might be something to a reflective pause before speaking. One of these days I’m going to try it.

            In a world that values action over reflection, Jesus’s delay feels frustrating at best. And Martha, the sister in that Bethany family who always seems to value action over contemplation, is quick to blame the delay for Lazarus’s death. It is only her dialogue with Jesus that takes her out of her reactive mode and deepens her understanding of who Jesus is and what he is up to. This interaction is a good object lesson for all of us who often act without thinking.

            One point of the Lazarus story concerns the way Jesus affects the people he encounters. Martha is engaged and her understanding is transformed. But this story also reminds us that Jesus can affect people in other, negative ways. We learn later in John that the raising of Lazarus prompts the authorities to want to arrest, try, and execute Jesus. In fact, right after this story, they try to kill Lazarus himself. When God’s light and love come into the world, some of us are warmed and some of us are frozen. Jesus engenders contrary responses. Some are converted, and some become persecutors. In this respect, Jesus is a clarifying mirror in which we see ourselves and either want to embrace the truth or kill it.

            I think the other powerful thing going on in the Lazarus story is the short pithy statement, rendered as a single verse in the King James Version:  “Jesus wept.” We learn this as Jesus first sees the body of his friend. Both the evangelist and the onlookers say that Jesus loved Lazarus. We have a miracle story here, but the raising of Lazarus is entwined with Jesus’s love for his friend. This is not a magic trick. It is a healing done in the context of a long and deep relationship.

            The first section of John’s Gospel is often called the Book of Signs, depicting seven events which reveal Jesus’s identity and elicit either a faithful response or resistance. Turning water into wine is the first; the raising of Lazarus is the seventh. In between Jesus will also feed the 5,000, walk on water, and give sight to the man born blind. These are not so much miracles as they are indicators of who Jesus is and what he is up to. Each one gives us a window into some aspect of God.

            It is clear that this final sign is telling us something about resurrection, the event we celebrate at Easter and the point to which our entire Lenten season is tending. We preachers often talk about resurrection as if it’s simply about life after death. But, especially in John’s Gospel, resurrection is as much about the quality of life now as it is about its duration beyond the grave. The transformation of Martha’s understanding shows us one aspect of resurrection. The liberation of Lazarus from the tomb shows us another. 

            Jesus raises Lazarus after much prayerful deliberation. He does it in the context of his own friendship, Lazarus’s family, and a supportive community. The life to which Lazarus will return is determined by these markers. It is not only biological life. It is life lived fully in relationship. Risen life for you and me has all the marks of Jesus’s way of being. It is loving. It is courageous. It is compassionate. It is committed to justice. And it is available to you and me in the here and now.

            Here are the two things I take away from today’s Gospel. 

            The first is that all this happens in the context of Jesus’s love for Lazarus and his family. Jesus raises Lazarus because he loves him. When we’re obsessed with our problems or the world’s chaos or the cruelty and suffering of others, we tend to lose sight that the whole encounter between God and us is about love.  Jesus goes to Lazarus’s tomb out of a deep loving commitment to Lazarus, and his raising of Lazarus is the result. In the same way, God loves you and will raise you. God offers you not only life beyond death. God offers you life within life. You are invited to live today as Jesus shows us how to live in the Gospel. You can be just, caring, compassionate, forgiving, and fearless now. You don’t have to wait for that kind of life until you die.

            The second thing I learn from this story is expressed in Jesus’s command, “Unbind him and let him go.” Lazarus was bound in the traditional cloths of burial. God’s commitment to you is a promise of liberation. There is a reason why prisoners and slaves and oppressed people have always looked to Jesus in hope. Just as God will free Jesus from death, Jesus will unbind Lazarus from his funeral garments. In the same way, God seeks to liberate you from everything that binds, imprisons, and oppresses you. The risen life on offer in Jesus is not abstract. It is specific. Lent is the time to look at whatever within you and outside you is holding you back from being the fully alive person God created you to be. Lent is the time to let all that go.

            Next Sunday, Palm Sunday, is the day we begin our Passiontide walk with Jesus from triumphal entry to betrayal, arrest, trial, crucifixion, and the empty tomb. It is possible to experience Easter without everything that leads up to it, but the shared experience of Holy Week will help us to take in the depth and power of this process in the context of our church community. Jesus loved both Lazarus and his family. God loves both you and the church. Our time together will show us the depth of that love, and it will empower us to live as truly alive and risen people in the here and now. So let’s do all this together, and rejoice in who we’ll have become when the stone is finally rolled away, and we, like Lazarus, are unbound and let go. Amen.

 

            

 

 

 

 

Homily: The Fourth Sunday in Lent [March 15, 2026] All Saints, Beverly Hills

Some of you know that I served on the staff of another All Saints Church (this one in Pasadena) in the 1990s and early 2000s. Because I was not the rector I didn’t get to preach very often. Late in the 1990s  a parishioner asked me when I was preaching next. I answered, “Some time in Al Gore’s second term.”

The culture at All Saints Pasadena was and is a bit different from the culture here. We associates didn’t preach very often, but when we did we had to be attentive to the extreme ideological and personal sensitivities in the congregation and especially the staff.

I did get to preach every once in a while, and on one occasion I preached on the very (long) Gospel we just heard, John’s story of the man born blind. At the staff meeting on the following Tuesday, one of my colleagues had a pained look on her face and said wanted to give me some “ constructive criticism” of my sermon. The phrase “constructive criticism” alerted me that I would be taking incoming, so I braced myself for the assault I knew was on the way.

She didn’t complain about the sermon as such, but she took me to task for talking about the Gospel story’s use of blindness and sight as figures for understanding. “You compared being blind to not understanding. I invite you (another loaded phrase in progressive circles)” she said, “to stop using metaphors of disability in the pulpit. That would include no longer singing ‘Amazing Grace’ because of the line ‘I once was blind but now I see.’”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Oh for heaven’s sake!” I blurted without thinking. Not use metaphors of disability? That idea is so lame.” Not, I imagine, the response she was looking for. She didn’t get the joke, but you do.

Speaking abstractly, she was right, of course. We should not compare deafness or blindness to lack of understanding. But the problem is that I wasn’t the one making the analogy. It is Jesus himself who seems to be explicitly making the comparison. I was merely along for the metaphorical ride.

Today’s Gospel [John 9: 1-41] is a long narrative, a story the scholar Andrew McGowan has compared to a drama in five scenes. It tells the story of a man blind from birth whom Jesus heals. The Pharisees get involved and so do the man and his parents. In the final confrontation between Jesus and his accusers, Jesus tells them: “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” The healing of the blind man is contrasted with the seemingly willful refusal of the Jewish leaders to understand who Jesus is and what he is up to. 

As my reactive Pasadena colleague rightly noted, we should be careful when using physical disabilities as figures for states of the soul. As a person who has worn glasses since age 10 and hearing aids since age 60, I would wince if someone used my nearsightedness to accuse me of moral myopia. And, though I may not always hear you, I am not deaf to your concerns. And much of Western literature has turned the blindness/sight question on its head. Tiresias, the blind seer in Sophocles’ Oedipus plays, sees things that others don’t. Sometimes blind and deaf people are the ones who truly get it.

But the inadequacy of the comparison should not get in the way of our understanding the spiritual process going on in this story. Jesus, called earlier in this passage “the light of the world” is bringing God’s clarifying light to bear on us and our doings. What we see in his life and ministry is the willingness to look the truth full in the face and to act on what he sees there. He does not accuse the blind man of having been born in sin. He lovingly responds to the man’s need by making a paste of mud and putting it on his eyes. The early church father Irenaeus saw in this act a reprise of the Genesis account of God’s making human beings out of the mud of the earth. Jesus ushers in a new creation, and the world he heralds does not disparage anyone because of the physical or social or racial or economic or sexual identity they bear. The “light of the world” shows things both as they are and should be, and our job is to help God turn what ought to be into what is.

There is another aspect of this story that has always interested me, and that is the willingness of almost everyone to throw the man born blind under the bus. Everyone, that is, except Jesus. The disciples treat him as the object for a lesson about sin. The Pharisees use him as a weapon to wield against Jesus, and when he resists them they drive him out. Even his own parents shift the responsibility away from themselves and onto their son. “He is of age,” they say, “ask him.” It is only Jesus who treats the man as a fully human being, as a person with more to his story than his blindness. Far from throwing the man under the bus, Jesus invites him to climb on board.

The point of this story is less about the miracle of restoring sight to the blind than it is about who Jesus is for you and me. The so-called experts in this story cannot see him at all. It is only a man born blind from birth who is open to the possibility of new life on offer from the one who is the light of the world. Jesus sees the man for who he is beyond his physical characteristics. The man sees Jesus as the one who is bringing light and love into a broken world.

You and I inhabit a time similar in its gloom to the one in which Jesus lived. Our world is no stranger to the knee-jerk judgmentalism exemplified by the Pharisees in their interrogation of the man and his parents. Even on good days we can attribute base motives or bad acts to those we do not agree with or understand. We make snap judgments based on appearances.

Jesus is the light of the world. If we are going to proclaim that with integrity, we will need to be willing not only to believe in him but to commit ourselves to acting toward others as he did to the man born blind. Jesus looked at him, loved him, healed him, and saw him as a particular, loved human being. Jesus knew that the man’s blindness did not define him.

In the same way, when God looks at you God sees you in all your wonderful particularity. No matter what our external markers, we have been made in the image of one who knows us and loves us as we are. In following that One, we claim God’s loving  acceptance of us and commit ourselves to working to see each other as God sees us. 

We have all, in a sense, been born blind. It is the light and love and blessing of life in the community that gathers around Jesus that allows us both to be seen and to see. Those aren’t metaphors of disability. They are states of the soul. And we find the gift we give thanks for today in the way God sees us, loves us, and calls us to lives of gratitude and compassion as we seek to follow the One who brings light and a new creation into our lives and the world. Amen.