Homily: The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost [September 6, 2026] St. James, Newport Beach

I’m happy to be back with you at St. James this morning. I have just finished a stretch serving as priest in charge at All Saints, Beverly Hills. Hey, somebody had to be there! Actually, I enjoyed my time at All Saints very much, though regular commuting from Santa Clarita to West Los Angeles almost did me in. 

My wife Kathy will tell you that I harbor some bizarre pet peeves, the strangest of which is a kind of righteous anger provoked every time the Postal Service raises the cost of a stamp by just one cent. In the 1990s and early 2000s there was a streak of one cent stamp raises, and (in those days before we all paid bills electronically) year after year I would have to stand in line at the post office merely to buy a sheet of one cent stamps. Why didn’t they just raise postage a nickel at a time and leave us alone for a few years? This whole thing really rotted my socks. I would come home from my 90 minutes at the post office muttering expletives questioning the parentage and legitimacy of the US government in general and the postal service staff in particular.

            As luck would have it, my first public appearance at Washington National Cathedral in 2012 was for the unveiling of that year’s Christmas stamp. They set up a press event downstairs in Bethlehem Chapel, and the two speakers were the US Postmaster General (the Honorable Patrick R. Donahoe, you can look him up) and me. As the Postmaster General and I waited in the cathedral’s vesting room for the event to begin, I realized that I had been given a once in a lifetime opportunity to press my case. It was time to speak truth to power! So after a bit of chitchat, I turned to Mr. Donahoe and said, “I’d like to speak to you, sir, about these one cent postage raises. They’re really inconvenient. Every year I have to go to the post office and wait in line for over an hour. Can’t you raise them less frequently, a few more cents at a time?”

            I wish I had a video of the way the Postmaster General’s face changed. The light suddenly went out in his eyes. You could see from the look on his face that I had gone in his estimation from ecclesiastical dignitary to dangerous weirdo. The conversation suddenly ended when he remembered there was a phone call he needed to make. It was probably to security or his therapist.

            I came to realize that trying to tell the Postmaster General how to run his agency was a bit like what the British call “teaching the Queen to suck eggs”. He’s the expert; you’re the novice. In the same way, I feel a little sheepish today talking to this parish about reconciliation and forgiveness. St. James’s experience of congregational exile and return has taught you lessons that no sermon can impart. I know: I walked with Cindy through a good bit of it. Nevertheless, today’s Gospel asks us to consider how we handle the wounds we inflict on each other, especially in the church. So I approach this Gospel understanding that you are the experts and I the novice.

            It’s clear from the context that, in today’s reading, Jesus is talking about conflict within the church, but the process he outlines will serve for other relationships as well. If someone offends you, take it to them in person. If that works, great. If not, bring a couple of others along and try it again. If that doesn’t work, set the conflict before the whole church. So the steps are: one-on-one, small group, whole church. It’s important to remember that the church Jesus was describing was probably the size of a house church, a couple of dozen people. Nevertheless, his point is clear: try to resolve things personally before you take it to Facebook.

            I haven’t been involved in a lot of church conflict in my working life, but a few years ago I ran afoul of a particularly toxic group of young clergy who call themselves “Weird Anglican Twitter”. They’re essentially Gen Z Anglo-Catholic Socialists who blame people like me for the decline of the Episcopal Church. We Baby Boomers, they say, ruined Christianity by making it more inclusive and less rigid. They want a church that is socially progressive and theologically conservative, kind of like Bernie Sanders meets Franklin Graham. People like me really seem to annoy them.

            So because I had been vocal about social issues during my time in Washington, my friend the author Diana Butler Bass and I suddenly found ourselves the joint objects of their scorn, enduring endless daily personal attacks on Twitter. Diana and I solved the problem by figuring out who their bishops were and contacting them directly. To their credit, the several bishops admonished these weird Anglicans by reminding of them of Jesus’s advice in today’s Gospel. Before you go public, try to work things out in private. In any event, cool it with social media.

            When we read today’s Gospel, we often forget the larger point that Jesus is making here, and this has relevance for our lives at home, at work, and in society at large. Justice is not necessarily everybody getting what they consider fair. Justice is about restoring the community for the good of the whole. Restorative justice is just that: it restores relationships. We live in a litigious age, and we tend to think of conflicts being resolved by lawsuits with compensatory damages. But the church, the family, and the neighborhood are not boxing rings. They are covenanted communities, and the highest good is not winning but the healing and restoration of the living organism of the church, the household, the city or state.

            Because we live in a time of escalating use of social media, it is tempting to bring our beefs to the internet before we talk to the person who we believe has wronged us. It is now customary not actually to resolve conflicts but to heap shame on those who offend us or, perhaps worse, to paper over unresolved issues with polite fictions. A seminary ethics professor I know used to assign Emily Post’s book of etiquette as one of her required texts. When I asked her why, she said, “In the Episcopal Church, what people call ethics is usually just etiquette.” We revert to polite Episcopalian behavior and thus often protect those who can inflict serious harm. It is not polite to call out bad behavior, so often we look the other way.

            As in my encounter with the Postmaster General, so in today’s sermon I don’t want to presume to tell a group of people who have had to call out bad behavior and go to the church for restorative justice how to resolve your personal and community conflicts. But I do want to express my gratitude that in Jesus, we follow one who values us enough not only to tell us the truth but who calls us to find a gracious way to tell the truth to others. In our Baptismal vows we all promise to “respect the dignity of every human being”. One way we respect each other’s dignity is to tell hard and sometimes difficult truths. The good news this morning is that we live in a universe in which families and churches and even societies can be torn asunder and still find a way to come together in a just reconciliation and thrive. Being right is at best a momentary high. Being reconciled is a sign of the blessed and abundant life into which Jesus calls us. And abundant life is what our being together with Jesus is all about. Amen

 

Homily: The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost [August 23, 2026] Calvary Church, Stonington CT

 

            The invitation to preach in such a literary hotbed as Stonington reminds me of a conversation I recently had with another retired priest friend of mine about the use of literature in sermons. “In our day,” he said, “a sermon had three points and a quote from T.S. Eliot. Today it’s two points and a quote from Mary Oliver.” I’m afraid he’s right, though I worry that by the time I sit helpless in the nursing home chapel it will be one point and a quote from Amanda Gorman.

            You’re in luck this morning. I do not come armed with arcane literary ammo, though I suppose I could find a few dystopian quotes to buttress my observations about the state of things both in nature and the nation. I live in California, and the heat there this summer has been apocalyptic. And I’m not taking political sides when I say that the state of our nation and world is perilous. Ecologically and politically, we are a mess. And starting with an acknowledgment of that plain fact gives us a way in to understanding our Gospel for this morning.

            The world in which Jesus lived, taught, and healed was one dominated by national and local oppression. Rome occupied Jewish Palestine, and they took so much money and food to support their standing army that the people were always broke and hungry. One of the main aims of Jesus’s ministry was to show how we survive in a time of scarcity. Our normal human tendency is to hoard what we have. In feeding the multitudes, Jesus shows that we thrive in bleak times by making common cause with each other.

            Things were bad for Palestinian Jews in Jesus’s time, and those perceived as troublemakers lived in constant jeopardy. That is perhaps why Jesus takes his companions today to the far north of Israel, Caesarea Philippi—about as far away as you could get from Jerusalem—to query them about the word on the street about him. [Matthew 16:13-20].  “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” Note the guarded nature of this question. He’s asking about himself in the third person, just in case someone might be eavesdropping.

            And note the answers his disciples give him. They don’t say, “Jesus the healer” or “Jesus the teacher”. They reply, “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets”. Biblical prophets were considered dangerous people, and the disciples’ oblique answer to Jesus’s circuitous question adds up to an admission that, yes, people think you’re a troublemaker.  One of my lifelong mentors, an Old Testament scholar, used to say that the role of the prophet in Israel was not to predict the future nor to call out injustice but simply to tell the truth about the ways things are.  In his words, “The prophet sees reality and verbalizes it.”

            Like Isaiah and Jeremiah before him, Jesus describes the world as it is and tells the truth about it—always a dangerous business in combustible times.

            When Jesus turns from the word on the street to the word in the group, Peter blurts out, “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God.” In their centuries living under various forms of exile and oppression, the Jews had developed the expectation that a Messiah, an anointed king like David, would come to lead them out of their current mess into a time of stability and peace. This was both a religious and a political hope. Peter and his friends had come to believe that there was more to Jesus than his miracles and parables. They hoped he would be the king who would finally throw the Romans out.

            It is easy to see why first century Palestinian Jews, living under Roman rule, would long for a miraculous figure to overthrow the bad guys and bring things back to the glory days. It is easy to see why some of us, 21^st century Americans, would hope for a magical benign leader to take us out of political darkness and environmental catastrophe.  But, two thousand years on, we have to admit that a Messianic hope is pretty much still just that—only a hope.  No Davidic king has come back to restore Israel, and if Jesus was the Messiah, then he exercised his kingly authority in radically unexpected ways.  If anything, Jesus was an anti-king, dying between two thieves in the Roman manner usually reserved for revolutionaries. The earliest Christians believed that Caesar did not exercise true authority. Jesus did. And his authority was based on something other than brute power.

            So far in this passage, we have learned that Jesus is a truth-teller and the opposite of a king. Now we come to what is for me the most interesting thing that Jesus says to Peter:

And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

 

            By giving Simon the new name “Peter”, which means “rock” in almost every language but English, Jesus is making a pun. “You are ‘Rocky’, and I’m building my church on you.” And then he says the curious stuff about the keys of the kingdom and binding things on earth and in heaven.

            It is easy to glimpse the hand of a later editor in language that buttresses the power of the church with talk of keys, rocks, binding, and loosing. It is entirely likely that well-meaning scribes put institutional commercials into Jesus’s mouth, especially about Peter and his papal successors having a lock on the kingdom of God. But it’s the line about binding and loosing that seems most authentic to me. “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”

            The institutional church (which I represent) has long taken this binding/loosing language to refer to the absolution of sins. But note that the Gospel text does not actually refer to sins as such. In fact, the two Greek words Matthew uses here 

Δέω and λύω mean, respectively, “imprisoned” and “set free”. This moment of Messianic transfer is about much more than institutional prerogatives. It is about the true gift of liberation we know in Jesus. In this act of bestowing, Jesus sets us free from whatever it is that binds us: our guilt, our remorse, our pain, sometimes simply ourselves. We all walk around carrying so much weight from the past. Jesus now sets us free from everything that ties us up in emotional knots. 

            And not only us. Jesus’s gift to Peter and the community he creates is the power of liberation for everyone. You and I, as Jesus’s companions and the members of the body of Christ in the world, now have the power to bind and loose, to defeat all the forces that seek to imprison human beings and the creation. In today’s Romans reading, Paul calls us the body of Christ. He means that literally, not figuratively. You and I, together, are Jesus in the here and now. We have the authority to set free ourselves and all who suffer under various kinds of oppression, degradation, and confinement. In this moment Jesus makes us all agents of personal and social liberation.

            Who did they say Jesus was? He was a prophet, one who told the truth about the way things are. He was also one who gathered around him a group who would continue his work long after his death and resurrection. You and I are members of that group, and we have been given the authority to liberate each other and the world from all the hateful, tyrannous forces that imprison us. And if Jesus is the Messiah, a kind of anti-king who knows human suffering in its very depths, then you and I are the ones who, know that suffering ourselves, have been empowered to heal people and set them free. 

            As much as we all hope for a mythical magic superhero like Odysseus or Spiderman to come from the clouds to save us, the good news this morning is this: you and I have been given each other and the authority to set ourselves free. Our job, as Jesus’s present-day companions, is to take this authority and use it to love each other, ourselves, and those who suffer because of the cruelty and sin that will continue to persist in our world. You and I, together, as the body of Christ in the world, are the Messiah we hope for. We have been given the keys to fling open the prison doors. Let us use them to set ourselves, each other, and the world free from the forces that will always finally fail in their futile attempts to bind us and those we love. Amen.

            

Homily: The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost [August 9, 2026] St. Stephen's, Santa Clarita

            Like many Santa Claritans trying to beat the heat this summer, my son and I spent three hours we’ll never get back at the Regal Cinema in Valencia watching Christopher Nolan’s movie The Odyssey, in Imax no less. There are things I liked about the movie, things I didn’t. I’m not sure I understand why The Odyssey has become such a cultural phenomenon. But at least it has helped get our minds off  some of the horrible stuff going on this summer, and for that we can be grateful.

Watching The Odyssey did get me thinking about mythology in a way I hadn’t done for a long time. The Israel that produced our Bible and its faith in one God was surrounded by peoples who worshipped a panoply of deities. One of things that makes Biblical religion unique in the ancient world is the way it pictures the human relations with the divine. Odysseus wandered the sea for ten years because he offended Poseidon. In polytheistic religions like those of Greece and Rome, human beings are the playthings of the gods. In the religion of the Old and New Testaments, we humans carry God’s very image and so are precious. Jesus got into trouble with Rome in good part because he took people and their needs seriously.

            In a funny way, seeing The Odyssey set me up for thinking about today’s Gospel, the familiar story about Jesus walking on water and Peter’s amusing attempt to imitate him. In the polytheistic religions of Jesus’s day, walking on water was a divine prerogative, and earthly rulers often tried to make it look like they could do so, too. The ability to walk on water was, in Jesus’s time, a symbol both of godly authority and human presumption. The Roman Emperor Caligula built a 50-kilometer temporary bridge across the Bay of Naples to make it look as if he were skimming above the waves. Human rulers pretended to be gods, and what better way to buttress your bona fides than to make yourself look like a human hovercraft?

            The connection between water walking and divinity is key to the part of our reading where those in the boat proclaim Jesus to be the Son of God. For Jesus’s companions, this miraculous event is yet another demonstration of his claim to divine authority. But for me the heart of this story lies not in the walking on the water itself but in the reason Jesus does so in the first place. His companions are in a boat far from land and battered by the waves. He walks toward them in order to comfort them. And he says these powerful words: “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” A Roman god wouldn’t do that. Jesus would.

            This story isn’t about a magic trick. It’s about God’s response to us when we are in danger or despair. “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” Like the disciples in the boat, you and I regularly find ourselves in situations beyond our control. God’s response to us in those moments is the same: “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”

            Peter’s attempt to duplicate Jesus’s feat of walking on water leads to his rescue by Jesus, and our Gospel story ends with these words:

Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.” 

            The apostle Paul knew what he was talking about when he said to the Corinthians, “We are fools for Christ’s sake.” Some saw Christian charity and compassion as foolish: if our gods don’t care about people, the God of Jesus must be crazy. But over time this foolishness became wisdom and is the hallmark of what makes us Christians unique. Like Jesus, we care about others. Like Jesus, we are willing to look foolish when we respond to human need.

            For a moment, Peter was willing to act like a fool—to try to walk on water, to do something courageous and unheard of. And then he began to think about it. He second-guessed himself. He allowed his mind to overcome his heart.

            Over the course of the Gospel stories, Peter becomes the exemplary disciple, and his rash desire to imitate Jesus by walking on water can strike us as a mere comic touch. But we shouldn’t be so quick to judge Peter here. In a sense, imitating Jesus is what the Christian life is all about. We imitate Jesus whenever we do acts of mercy, compassion, and forgiveness. Peter is willing to be seen a fool when he jumps out of the boat. But aren’t our acts of justice and generosity seen as foolish in a world ruled by modern Caligulas?

            The Jesus you and I encounter in word and sacrament is one who constantly calls out to us as he did to Peter and his friends: “Take heart. It is I. Do not be afraid.” With that kind of assurance, we should know we have nothing to fear. And yet we let the doubts creep in. It won’t work. It’s never been done. I’ll look like an idiot.

            Today’s Gospel story serves as a reminder of the two great truths of Christianity. Truth one: we are in the embrace of one who knows us, who loves us, and who is always there for us when things get too big or difficult to bear. “Take heart. It is I. Do not be afraid.” And truth two: because of that one’s continual presence, we are empowered to do similar acts of love, justice, and compassion ourselves. This is a story about us—about the permission we have been given to live and act like Jesus. We overthink things and come up with all kinds of reasons why we cannot live generous, open, compassionate lives. Who wants to look like a fool? Better to stay hunkered down in our corners than to reach out our hands in love.

            Countless opportunities to express generosity and kindness present themselves to us every day: at our workplaces, when we’re out and about, even and especially in our households. We let them pass by because we overthink the consequences of doing something that might makes us look weak or vulnerable. We constrain ourselves and limit our possibilities.

The world of The Odyssey is a violent and selfish world, overseen by gods who are only out for themselves. The world of the Bible is the same world, but the God who presides in this world is One who knows, loves, and values each and every one of us as we are. We do not have to strive, like Odysseus, for glory and revenge. Today’s Gospel shows us that there is always another way to live. “Take heart. It is I. Do not be afraid.” Let us step out, like Peter, to share the blessing of this news with others. Peter second-guessed himself, and we might, too. But the One who calls us out of ourselves will be there to sustain us as we try. Amen.

Homily: The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost [August 2, 2026] All Saints, Beverly Hills

            In the words of the great Michael Corleone, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” I’ve been gone for a bit more than a month. Like the kid who missed class, I want to ask, so: did I miss anything?

            Actually, it’s good to be back. Over the last several weeks I have managed to survive a trip to Michigan without contracting cyclosporiasis, 10 days of Canadian wildfire smoke, and (perhaps most heroic of all) sitting through Christopher Nolan’s 3-hour film of The Odyssey. I’ll save my review for coffee hour, but if you have followed the Sunday Old Testament readings for the past month it’s hard to miss how closely Homer’s hero Odysseus resembles Israel’s patriarch Jacob. Both heroes live under constant stress, both are wily, and both ultimately persevere.

            In today’s reading, Jacob approaches a meeting with Esau, the brother he has cheated, and he is wracked with fear and guilt. He knows he has wronged Esau, and he fears the consequences. Now, on the verge of the encounter, an angel of God wrestles with Jacob until daybreak. I’m not a psychiatrist, but it’s clear that this wrestling match represents Jacob’s internal struggle. Like many of us, he projects his  inner conflict onto the world. As an epic hero, Jacob, whose name will be changed to Israel, stands for his people. They carry the mixed blessing of living as God’s chosen. Their life is a constant struggle with themselves, with the world, and with God. It is telling that the angel can only subdue Jacob by wounding him in the hip. God, it seems, does not always play fair.

            Today, I am interested in what Jacob’s divine smackdown tells us about being human. As did Jacob, so do you and I live our lives under constant stress. As did Jacob, so do you and I carry the burden of having done things we’re not proud of. As did Jacob, so do you and I find ourselves under the uncomfortable scrutiny of God’s attention. Stress, remorse, and judgment: let’s think about these three things in turn.

            As to stress: if you are alive on planet Earth, you know that life is stressful. Heck, if you drive in Los Angeles, you know that too. A lot of what my son calls “Newsweek sociology” tells us that life today is harder than it was in pre-modern times. But reading the Bible or Shakespeare or history, I’m not so sure. Jacob may not have checked his iPhone every fifteen minutes, but he did face constant pressures from his society and environment. The Bible’s Garden of Eden story is our shared cultural fantasy about how we wish the world were: peaceful, abundant, and pleasant. The Jacob story is a reality show about how life actually is. 

            Our desire to live a life without stress is both universal and understandable, but it is a fantasy. The point of the Jacob story—indeed the point of the whole Bible—is to show us how one can live a life of joy and abundance in the world as it actually is. If you know the rest of the Jacob story, you know that Jacob will go on to be the embodiment of God’s blessing. His life will be full, but it won’t be easy. His wrestling with the angel in many ways stands for the way humans best handle adversity. Jacob looks his adversary full in the face. They wrestle around in the desert. He finds a way both to go forward and to thrive.

            So stress will always be with us. Living with remorse makes it worse. As Jacob contemplates his reunion with the brother he has wronged, he cannot help but struggle with his own conscience. A good deal of the anxiety he feels comes out of his awareness of his own fault. If he hadn’t stolen the birthright he wouldn’t be who he is today, but he also wouldn’t experience the guilt of having wounded his brother. 

            All of us live with regret and remorse. We all have done things we wish we hadn’t, things we wish we could undo. Even if we are well-intentioned, we often hurt others in the daily give and take of life. Pursuing our own interests, as Jacob does, sometimes impinges on the prospects of others. The Jacob story is an extended reflection on the costs of living in human society. I’d like to go to my grave knowing that I’d always made everybody around me happy. But, like the dream of a stress-free life, that wish is also a fantasy.

            If Jacob’s story is a tale about how we live in the world as it actually is, then in some sense it advises us about how to make peace with our regrets. Jacob rues the things he has done to his brother, and he only gets out of the angel’s grasp when the man dislocates Jacob’s hip. Wounding others hurts not only them but us. Jacob’s encounter with God hurts him because it is always painful to come to terms with the truth about oneself. Jacob will persevere, but he will do so “limping because of his hip”. Regrets and remorse are real, and they come with a cost. But they only immobilize us if we give them the power to do so. We make our peace with our past and move on, but the cost of the past is always a part of us.

            And then there is judgment. When Jacob encounters the angel of God in our story, it is he, not the angel, who insists on continuing the contest. “I will not let you go until you bless me.” In these Genesis stories, God’s blessing is always at risk. It is carried by Jacob’s forbears Abraham and Isaac, and now it is Jacob’s turn to carry the blessing like a fragile flame through the surrounding darkness. Jacob prevails here, and the angel tells him, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.” This wrestling match turns out to be a moment of judgment, and the primary judge turns out to be Jacob himself. Under the stress of living, Jacob has made some bad decisions, but also some good ones.  This coming to account has wounded him, but that wound has not fully disabled him. He has taken a personal inventory, regretted his mistakes, and resolved to go forward.  The things he feared will turn out to have been illusions. The brother he wronged will embrace him. He will have a new name. “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.”

            The Odysseus/Jacob comparison only goes so far. As good as Matt Damon is at portraying Odysseus, Homer gives him a character we know solely from the outside. Our biblical hero, Jacob, is another story. We see both his actions and his soul. He’s a subject, not an object. He’s exactly like you and me.

            The Bible is a book about making our way with God through life in the world as it actually is. We live our lives under stress. We achieve things we can celebrate, and we make decisions we come to regret. Life is a mixed bag. Jacob’s encounter with God shows us how we can come to terms with ourselves and go forward. Jacob survives the night and greets the dawn if not as a new person than as the old one forgiven, blessed, and healed. This, in a nutshell, is the Christian life. We come to terms with our past, confess our regrets, and then meet the new day with joy, even if we must do so limping into the sunrise. Amen.

 

Homily: The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost [July 26, 2026] St. Stephen's, Santa Clarita

 

My wife Kathy and I have just returned from two weeks in the Midwest—a week each in Michigan and Chicago where we used to live.  In coming home, we seem to have exchanged dangerous Canadian wildfire smoke for a Southern California tropical heat dome. Crazy weather like this forces us indoors, and that’s a good place to contemplate the peculiar sayings Jesus puts before us this morning.

Today’s Gospel gives us a string of parables in which Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven to a mustard seed, the leaven in bread, treasure in a field, a pearl of great price, and a miraculous catch of fish. You don’t have to be a Bible scholar to see that all these stories have something to do with abundance in the midst of scarcity. Jesus lived and taught among people who were poor and therefore went hungry much of the time. All of these stories assure us that, even in the midst of privation, the God we know in Jesus will meet our needs.

Out of all this string of comparisons, I would like to concentrate on the first saying and then the last.

The first:

 

“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.” 

The last:

“Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”

As to mustard: If you have ever seen a mustard seed, you know how small it is. Jesus’s parable describes how this minuscule seed can produce such a gigantic bush. The ancients were fascinated by seeds. They lived before the advent of  biological science, and so to them seeds were little packets of miraculous power. This tiny thing contains the secret of life. It is also crucial to food production, and a successful harvest makes the difference between satiety and starvation.

As I think about the way tiny seeds  produce giant bushes, I see Jesus giving us an image of the way God works. The world God has given us has more than enough to satisfy our needs. But because of social inequity, most of the time most of the people go hungry. By showing us the explosive growth packed in a tiny seed, Jesus illustrates God’s ability to bring forth much out of nothing. The abundance of the natural world gives us a living illustration of God’s will that everyone can have enough if we only reorganize our ways of distributing what God has given us.

And then there is this second saying, about the scribe who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.

Last week at the Art Institute of Chicago I revisited a painting there I always return to, Nicolas Poussin’s 1640 picture, “Landscape with Saint John on Patmos”.  The painting depicts the evangelist John, retired on the island of Patmos, engaged in writing the Book of Revelation. John is sitting on this beautiful island amid the ruins of classical Greek architecture—you can see the broken columns of former ancient Greece’s departed glory. The book of Revelation, of course, is the last book of the Bible, and it ends describing God’s creation of a new heaven and a new earth. As John receives and transcribes this glorious vision of the future, he is surrounded by the remnants of a broken past. 

Surrounded both by the beauty of the natural world and the markers of a time that has passed, Poussin depicts John the evangelist reaching into what is old and bringing about something absolutely new. It seems he can only give voice to his vision of the future by contemplating the artifacts of the past. In its own way this picture gives us both a theological and a personal truth. As Jesus says elsewhere in Matthew’s Gospel, 

Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfil. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. [Matthew 5: 17-18]

 

Jesus’s teachings are both new and old. Yes, they are sometimes startling, but they arise out of  all that has gone before.  Similarly, there is a personal truth here for us as well. A follower of Jesus is “like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old”.  Just as Jesus does not reject what has come before him, so you and I need to see that our present arises out of our past. Our American penchant for what we call “reinventing ourselves” ignores the simple truth, often voiced by the great classicist Mary Beard: “The past is all we’ve got.” You are your history. That doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t do something new. It does mean that your life has a logic and a trajectory, and that the present “you” is a product of all that has gone before in your life.

I’m never entirely sure why we want to beat up on our collective or personal pasts in the way we do. Today we smugly assume that we in 2026 are morally better than those who lived in 1826, 1526, or 26 BC. In the same way, we often dwell on our own personal pasts, and flagellate ourselves for things we did then that we naively think we wouldn’t do again today if we only had the chance. In today’s Gospel I hear Jesus telling us, in the language of the street, to “get over ourselves”. Who we are now is pretty much who we were then. The question is not, “how can I reinvent myself?” The question is, how can I take out of my treasure that which is new and that which is old? How can I weave a fabric of my life that makes peace with the past, looks with hope to the future, and lives with purpose and joy in the present?

A longtime priest friend of mine always ends every conversation with the words, “Be gentle with yourself.” He knows from experience. We continually beat ourselves up over the past—things we’ve done, things we should have done, mistakes we’ve made, people we’ve hurt. Be gentle with yourself. You think you’re smarter now than you were then, but chances are if you faced the same people or situations today, you’d do exactly what you did years ago. The past may not quite be all we’ve got, but it’s a part of us that we cannot simply deny or try to forget. Make your peace with your past. Bring out of your treasure that which is new and that which is old. 

In today’s Gospel, Jesus offers us some startling new comparisons of what he is doing to a mustard seed, the leaven in bread, treasure in a field, a pearl of great price, and a miraculous catch of fish. These ideas are new, but they arise out of his deep engagement with the tradition called by Jews the “law and the prophets”. God is doing a new thing, but it comes directly out of the long historical sweep of God’s loving faithfulness. As you make your way into your own future, it’s a good idea to follow Jesus’s advice: take from your treasure what is both new and old, and go forward in the assurance that there will always, somehow, be enough to see you through. Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

Homily: The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost [June 21, 2026] All Saints, Beverly Hills

Today is Father’s Day, a greeting card holiday which never gets quite the attention in our church or culture that we give to Mother’s Day.  A parish I served some years ago was very big on Mother’s Day. Year after year on this Sunday the ushers used to hand a rose to every woman who entered the church. Every time I would rather facetiously ask what we were going to give the men on Father’s Day. I never received an answer, and so one year I took matters into my own hands: I drove to Costco, bought several cases of those small spray cans of WD-40, and instructed the ushers to present one can to each man as cheerfully and lovingly as they had the roses to the women. While the ushers were a bit grumpy about this practice, the guys actually liked it. I left that parish before I could follow up the next year distributing gift rolls of duct tape.

In our family we don’t make a big deal about greeting card holidays, but we do observe them. So I want personally to thank the people who put our lectionary together for giving me these inspiring Gospel words to work with on Father’s Day:

For I have come to set a man against his father, 
and a daughter against her mother, 
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; 
and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.

 

Thank you, Jesus, for those heartwarming words. And watch your back at the family cookout.

Luckily, there are some other sayings to work with today, so I don’t have to spend all my time up here telling you to beware of your relatives. Today’s Gospel (Matthew 10:24-39) is a collection of sayings loosely following from last week’s passage in which Jesus commissioned the twelve disciples and sent them into the world preaching the good news. Although one of our verses today has Jesus telling us that we are worth more than many sparrows the core of this passage seems to lie in its final words: “Whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”

Precious sparrows and heavy crosses. I’d like to spend the next few minutes thinking with you about what taking up the cross entails for us Christians and what being worth more than many sparrows might mean.

Some of you might be old enough to remember my late friend George Barrett, former Bishop of Rochester, New York and a Southern California native who returned here to Santa Barbara on retirement in the 1970s. George used to tell the story of being on TV in Rochester back in the days of lavaliere mics. During a break a technician came over to him to see if they could rearrange the microphone which was banging up against his large pectoral cross. “What’s the problem?” George asked. The technician responded, “It’s the cross. It’s causing interference.” To which George replied, “It always does”.

It is easy to think of the cross and the suffering it represents as the ants at the picnic of faith. We Episcopalians like to talk about God as the author of nice, beautiful things: sunsets, flowers, puppies, and the like. The church I mentioned with the Mother’s Day roses changed the name of its Sunday School to “Department of Sunshine and Rainbows” after I left. That’s greeting card religion in a nutshell.

The cross causes interference. It gets in the way of our comfortable notions of God and how God might love and care for us. Except for Good Friday, we tend to push the Passion narrative and all biblical references to suffering into the background. Those prosperity gospel preachers (and many theologically progressive clergy) won’t go anywhere near the cross. It is unseemly and irrational. So when Jesus tells his disciples, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell,” he is alluding not only to his own date with the cross but also to what German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer aptly called “the cost of discipleship”.

Not many of us will be called to go to the cross with Jesus or the gallows with Bonhoeffer. But many of us will be asked, sooner or later, which side we are on. There are two kinds of suffering: one we take on for a principle, the other just comes with being human. Jesus knew that God was with him even at the cross. All of us will experience suffering we have neither expected nor deserved. Suffering is built into being human. Everyone experiences it, and all the world’s religions seek to address it. If the cross has not yet come into your life, just wait. It will. God’s promise is not that suffering will pass us by. God’s promise is that we will know God’s love and presence even in whatever trial may come our way. Good Friday and Easter are built in to the human experience.

First the cross and now the sparrows.  Here again is this saying in the middle of our passage: 

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.

Jesus is saying two things here: the first is that you and I undervalue these tiny birds. If you can get two of them for a penny (the price charged to poor people who couldn’t afford more expensive animals to sacrifice in Temple worship), they must not be worth very much. Yet, says Jesus, “not one of them will fall to the ground” apart from God. Translation: Even these tiny, seemingly worthless, birds are precious to God. 

And then Jesus dares to tell us that we “are of more value than many sparrows”. That sounds like an insult, but it is merely a quirk of translation. The word Matthew uses here is πολλῶν, a Greek adjective meaning “many, much, numerous, a great amount”. πολλῶν is the same word that gives us “hoi polloi”, meaning “the masses”. Jesus is telling us that we are worth a gigantic number of sparrows, too numerous to count. What this saying adds up to is something like this: “Each one of these two-bit birds is indescribably precious to God. And you are worth an infinite number of these cheap but precious creatures.”

If the first point reminds us that suffering is a part of life and the consequent struggles we  encounter are inevitable, the second point pretty much overwhelms the first. Yes, you will suffer, and yes, even in the midst of and face of that suffering you will be in the loving sustaining care of a God who will not even let a sparrow fall to the ground. Those tiny birds are worth everything, and you are  infinitely more precious than all of them put together.

I don’t have any WD-40 or duct tape to distribute this morning. Handing each of you a sparrow would be both inconvenient and messy. So on this fourth Sunday of Pentecost, let’s leave it at this: human life will always be a mixed bag, but as Emerson said, “The benefit overran the merit the first day, and has overrun the merit ever since.” Precious as we are in God’s estimation, the cross will continue to cause interference for each of us. But we have no option other than to take it up and follow the Jesus who went there himself, who knows we are precious, and who promises that he will be with us even when it seems as if no one else seems to care. Amen.

 

Homily: The Third Sunday after Pentecost [June 14, 2026] All Saints, Beverly Hills

Two of my favorite literary characters are George and  Martha—not the squabbling leads in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? but the two lovable hippos from James Marshall’s children’s books. My wife Kathy is a children’s librarian—the priest and the librarian: hey, what a power couple!-- and she introduced me to these lovable hippos when we were first going together in the 1970s. George and Martha are best friends, and they have pretty tame adventures—taking dance classes, going to the beach, and playing practical jokes on each other. They often argue, but they always make up. They would be good role models for present-day Washington.

My favorite of all James Marshall’s wonderful George and Martha illustrations portrays these two enormous hippos sitting at their kitchen table. The wall behind them displays a needlework sampler that reads, “We love our friends”. It’s kind of surreal seeing two hippos at a kitchen table, one of them wearing a blue gingham dress. And their motto—“We love our friends”—seems at once sweet, funny, and obvious. Of course we love our friends. They’re our friends! Why wouldn’t we love them?

I’ve often thought that George and Martha’s motto might easily serve as the mission statement of most Episcopal parish churches: “We love our friends.” Church is the place where we make deep, lifelong connections, and that is a wonderful thing. Church people support each other in times of crisis, joy, and everyday life. Singing, praying, and working together builds community. But because our parishes are so good at doing these things, they often have a hard time seeing the world beyond themselves. When Mariann Budde, the Bishop of Washington who started there around the time I began at the cathedral, finished her initial visit of all the congregations in the diocese, I asked her what she had learned. She replied, “Most parishes know a lot more about their history than they do about their neighborhood.”

Today’s Gospel tells us of Jesus commissioning the twelve disciples—later apostles. He doesn’t do this out of the blue. He sets aside these apostolic coworkers because, as Matthew tells it, “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” He instructs his new colleagues, “As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.” The twelve are first called, then sent, because Jesus looks around him and sees a world in trouble. He empowers the twelve, and by extension us, to proclaim and heal as he did. It’s kind of a daunting task.

Every church I have served—even those ostensibly committed to social justice— has found itself caught in the tension between “We love our friends” on the one hand and “proclaiming the good news” on the other. As a result, these parishes have struggled with what seems, at least to me, like an impossible contradiction. We want the church to grow. And we want it to stay the same.

When I joined the staff at All Saints, Pasadena in 1990, George Regas put me to work to learn everything I could about church growth. I went to Fuller Seminary, Saddleback Church, even (God help me!) the Crystal Cathedral to see how those places were doing it. Here’s what I learned: growing a church is easy. Getting permission to do the things you need to do to make it grow is often impossible. In my Michigan years I did church growth workshops around the Detroit area, visiting struggling churches to show them the easy steps to growing your congregation: build and project an identity, invite people in, welcome newcomers, put them to work, engage their ideas about worship, music, and service projects. At the end of almost every visit, a parishioner would ask me, “Father, is it possible for us to grow without changing?” Churches that grow are focused on the people they’re trying to reach. Churches that shrink are pretty much centered on themselves.

Matthew’s account of the call and sending of the twelve reminds us that Jesus’s message was always focused on serving others, not on celebrating himself. The crowds coming toward him are harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Jesus’s response to seeing the crowds is to take action by building what may well have been the world’s first social service organization. Yes, he wanted to bring people in, but he also wanted to serve their basic human needs.

We are not the first generation of Christians to become confused about the nature and purpose of the church. The Roman Catholic Church built a monolithic world structure that needed to be reformed. Each of our other denominations, in turn, has had to examine itself and reclaim the reasons for its founding. As Emerson said, “Love of the hero corrupts into the worship of his statue.” [“The American Scholar”] We become deluded into thinking that the mission of the church is the perpetuation of the status quo. 

It is a natural thing to think of the church as a gathering of friends, a warm community of the like-minded. But the church isn’t here to serve us. It is here to serve the harassed and helpless crowds who were of such concern to Jesus. The great William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury during World War II, once said, “The Church is the only organization that does not exist for itself, but for the benefit of those who live outside of it.” We are a missional community, called into being by Jesus to extend the healing and love of God not only to each other but to the world.

You and I are only here together in this church this morning because the twelve whom Jesus appointed responded to his call and reached out to bring in others, who then reached out and so on in an endless chain of expansive invitation. Once here, it’s easy to think we have some proprietary claim on this place, that we are the guardians of the traditions handed down to us. But the only Christian tradition that really matters is the missional command that we bring what Pope Francis called the “joy of the Gospel” to those on the outside so that they, with us, may experience what you and I find so valuable here.

My old boss George Regas used to say, “You can’t sell from an empty wagon”. What he meant by that was that the preacher needed to have a rich interior life in order to climb into the pulpit and presume to advise others how to live. In the same way, a congregation cannot serve the world if its community is not open, loving, and engaged. Our love for each other is precious and it matters.

I love the George and Martha quality of All Saints. We do love our friends. And I also know that churches are primarily in the business of serving those who live outside us. The more we seek to serve and know those people, the more they will love us and the God we serve. But we will never come to know, love, and serve them if we always try to keep things the way we are. We cannot grow if we do not change.

It is possible to love both ourselves and the world. So here’s the good news: we have already got George and Martha’s motto down. We do love our friends. Here’s the better news: it is time for us to bring the affection and support we experience here to those we do not yet even know. Amen.