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.

 

 

Homily: The Second Sunday in Lent [March 1, 2026] All Saints, Beverly Hills

            All of us have come to church this morning with the joint U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran on our minds. I’m sure there is a wide range of opinions on this, and since I’m not the rectorI don’t think it appropriate to share mine with you.

            Christians of good will can differ on issues of war and peace. In January of 1990, as the first President Bush contemplated invading Kuwait, he called our Presiding Bishop, Ed Browning, to the White House for guidance. Bishop Browning advised against Operation Desert Storm. Unsatisfied with that counsel, the president called in Billy Graham who told him to go right ahead.

            Christians will always differ among ourselves when these issues arise. But one thing we do not disagree on  is that we are called to stand and work for peace. As Thomas Merton said, “Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.”

            As events in the Middle East unfold, it is our job as Christians to pray and work for peace between nations and peoples. 

            In the words of the Prayer Book Litany we sang last Sunday in this building, we pray “That it may please thee to make wars to cease in all the world; to give all nations unity, peace, and concord; and to bestow freedom upon all peoples, We beseech thee to hear us good Lord.” Amen.

            Now to the sermon.

 

Anyone who has ever taught school at any level knows the student who skips class and then comes up to you at the start of the next one and asks, “Did I miss anything?” Being the snarky cuss that I am, I was always tempted to answer, “No. We were so bereft by your absence that we sat here for an hour in the dark.”

            Nicodemus has always struck me as the kid who missed class and then expects you to teach it all over again just for him. In today’s Gospel [John 3: 1-17], he comes to Jesus by night and seeks answers that he is perhaps too afraid to seek in broad daylight. To many in the church he has become the figure of the earnest inquirer, the secular doubter who is intrigued but unwilling yet to commit. To me he’s a guy who just wants super-secret special attention.

Perhaps that’s unfair. Nicodemus does display an interest in Jesus, but he is not a tortured doubter—he is after all a leader of the Jewish community. He is drawn to Jesus but perplexed by him as well. And, following my student analogy, as this passage develops he does seem to be the dense kid that doesn’t get it. He mistakes being “born from above” for literally re-entering the womb. And at the end he throws up his hands with a despairing cry: “How can these things be?”

            If this were the only occasion on which we were to meet Nicodemus he would seem to be a dead-end character. But we actually see him twice more in John’s Gospel. Later in the story, he stands up for Jesus when others in the leadership want to arrest him: “Our law does not judge people without first giving them a hearing to find out what they are doing, does it?” [John 7:50] And then much later, after the crucifixion, when they are preparing to bury Jesus, we learn that “Nicodemus, who had first come to Jesus by night, also came, bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, weighing about a hundred pounds.” [John 19:39] Nicodemus has an interesting faith trajectory. Although he began as a timorous inquirer, by the middle of the story he has become an ally, and at the end a committed disciple. 

            So the first point today is a reminder of how mysteriously God works in people’s lives. To my mind, the whole Nicodemus story is an argument for a gradual process of conversion, a progressive deepening of belief. You start out tentative,  you risk more involvement, finally you’re totally committed. We are born again not necessarily in a moment of baptismal immersion nor in a blinding flash but in a process that works its way over time. At least that has been my own experience, and I presume that of many others here today as well.

            Even if I find the early Nicodemus a trifle annoying, I do admire who he becomes and I find his persistence admirable. The second point of this story for me is the way it highlights the disparity between those of us who are drawn toward the holy and those who seem to live quite happily without it. [The late Louis Simpson expressed this in a poem he published in 1998, “The People Next Door”:

 

He isn't a religious man. 

So instead of going to church

on Sunday they go to sea. 

 

I hear them returning

worn out and glad to be home. 

This is as close to being happy

as a family ever gets. 

I envy their content.

 

When I first read this poem, I thought that the “content” he envied was that of living in a nuclear family. But reading it now, I wonder if their Sunday satisfaction is really the experience affluent worldly leisure without any perceptible spiritual depth. The people next door seem perfectly satisfied with the creature comforts of capitalism. They certainly don’t appear to question the justice of their having a boat while others live in trailer parks. And their excursion does not even explore the wonders of nature:

            They cruise up and down, 

see the ferry coming from Bridgeport 

to Green Harbor, and going back 

from Green Harbor to Bridgeport...

When the kids start to get restless 

and his wife has a headache

he heads back to shore.

 

Neither Louis Simpson nor I think of these neighbors as “bad” people.]* We/I merely marvel at the ability of many to accept the world on its face, no questions asked. Isn’t there more to life than  brunch, or boating (or cycling or playing golf or shopping) on Sunday? Isn’t there any nagging restlessness in their souls that drives them to explore what might be the meaning and purpose of all this?

            Now this is not one of those sermons where the preacher beats up the people who are in church on behalf of all the people who are not in church. I know that you and I are fellow travelers in nagging spiritual restlessness. None of us would be here if we weren’t drawn at least to think about what is behind and beyond all this. As Emily Dickinson says, “It beckons and it baffles”. You didn’t have to get out of a warm bed to come here this morning. But you did, while thousands didn’t. What is it that makes worship indispensable for some and marginal at best for others?

            I’ve pondered this question a lot over the course of my life, and I have never found an answer that satisfies. But as we think together about Nicodemus and his journey by night to see Jesus, I want to suggest that this nagging restlessness is neither an innate nor learned trait. We are not born spiritually curious, nor did our families make us this way. Rather, this nagging restlessness is a sign that God is at work in us. When Jesus says that we must be born from above, he is talking about the mysterious way God goes about drawing us in. As with Peter at the Transfiguration, so Nicodemus has been taken into new life. He began as a seeker and ended as a disciple. This transformation is what Jesus calls being born from above. He has experienced a change that is God’s doing, not his. 

            While we can’t give credit to Nicodemus for his own conversion, we can at least congratulate him for placing himself in circumstances where it could happen. The problem with contemporary life is that it offers us so many attractive opportunities to avoid thinking deeply about anything. [Louis Simpson wrote about his neighbors before the advent of social media. Today, the poem’s family could scrap the boat entirely and simply sit at home and scroll on their phones.] I’m not saying that going to church is the only place you’re going to encounter God. But I am saying that it’s hard to be open to the mystery of God’s purposes for you and your world if you never open yourself up to the possibilities of joy and wonder. And here is primarily where that happens.

            God transformed Nicodemus’s inner and outer life over time. Lent is the season you have been given to let God do that same work in us. Over these several weeks you are invited to step away from at least some of life’s distractions and move toward contemplating what really matters: God, the world, other people, yourself. As Jesus says toward the end of today’s Gospel, 

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. 

 

That’s not just a slogan to be put on signs held up at ball games. That’s the clue to what this whole Jesus experience is about. God wants you to have life and have it abundantly. Lent is the season and today is the day to take God up on this offer. Amen.

*Omitted for length because of Iran attack disclaimer.

 

Homily: The First Sunday in Lent [February 22, 2026] All Saints, Beverly Hills

            In the 1980s I served as vicar of St. Aidan’s Church in Malibu—hey, somebody had to be there—right across the PCH from Paradise Cove. I was also in graduate school at UCLA. Along with a group of energetic parishioners and some faculty friends I organized a monthly after-church hike in one of the many Santa Monica Mountains parks adjacent to Malibu. A group of us parishioners would gather after church, changing into our copious Patagonia/REI/L.L. Bean gear, and head off to conquer the wilderness.

            The hike I remember best was in Point Mugu State Park, on the trail called La Jolla Valley Loop, a 6.7 mile walk with an elevation gain of 1,568 feet. As we disembarked from our cars, laden with sun hats, walking sticks, daypacks, and hiking boots, a familiar parishioner’s car pulled up. It was a convertible driven by our church treasurer, a man named Tony, who said he had impulsively decided to join us at the last minute. As he emerged from the car, we could see he was sporting only swimming trunks, a polo shirt, and Gucci loafers with no socks. 

            I remember advising Tony that he might  a bit unprepared for a 7-mile hike over rocky trails. He scoffed, saying he’d done longer walks than this a million times. We set off, and, sure enough, after about a half hour of walking on the rocky trails in his loafers, Tony developed cramps and blisters and had to turn back.

            The rest of us persevered, but after we had walked seemingly for hours, we realized that we were seeing the same scenery over and over again. My wife Kathy grabbed the map from me and figured that we were walking in a circle. “There’s three Ph.D.s on this hike,” she said, “and it took a simple librarian to find a way out.”

            We kept walking, finally now in the right direction, but we eventually began to run low on water. As we walked single-file on a narrow ledge, Kathy remarked, “If one of you Einsteins goes over the side, remember to throw up your canteen on the way down.”

            Today’s Gospel [Matthew 4: 1-11] tells us another outdoor story, this one of Jesus being “led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil”.  Jesus’s journey into the wild is no camping trip. Today we tend to think of the wilderness as a place to go and unwind; in our hyper-urban lives we see nature as friendly. In the ancient world, the wilderness was a dangerous, frightening place--literally chaos,  a zone without order, patrolled by wild beasts. Jesus is not on an Outward Bound experience. He is in for a time of testing and trial. This is a matter of life and death.

            Jesus goes to the desert mountain so he can fast for 40 days and 40 nights, numbers that remind us of Noah’s time in the Ark and Moses’s wanderings in the desert. And just as the patriarchs were tested in nature (Noah by too much water, Moses by too little) Jesus meets the one Matthew calls “the tempter”.  Much has been said about the possible identity of this tempter. Is he literally “the devil”, or, as in the Book of Job, is he more of an accuser who is an agent of God’s plan? In some sense it doesn’t really matter, because the story’s focus is on who Jesus is and what he is going to do.

            The three temptations on offer—turning stones into bread, testing God by throwing yourself into midair, holding unlimited worldly power in exchange for serving evil—these temptations represent pitfalls any leader (especially a religious leader) will have to consider. We often confuse personal charisma for spiritual depth. People didn’t follow Jesus necessarily because he was handsome, charming, or funny. They followed him because he radiated truth.

            The exchange between Jesus and the tempter becomes a kind of scriptural Battle of-the Bands. In each interchange Jesus responds to the temptation by quoting the Bible. (“One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God,” “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”) After the first two tries, the devil finally gets it and tries using scripture himself: 

        “He will command his angels concerning you,” 
and “On their hands they will bear you up, 

so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.” 

 

To which Jesus replies, “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.” It seems that scripture can be used (or misused) to support any argument. What is important here is that Jesus does not fall for the tempter’s appeal. Scripture is often the veneer behind which selfishness hides. Each of the temptations involves power, the permission to use God’s gifts to serve only oneself. The tempter is betting that Jesus will opt for self-aggrandizement. Jesus responds not only with better Bible verses, but with selfless love. And love is always the thing which will send the devil packing.

This wilderness encounter with evil takes place at the very beginning of Jesus’s ministry. He has just been baptized by John. From here he will go about the country preaching, teaching, and healing. The question posed at the outset of his work is the question each of us faces, not only in Lent but as we make our ways in the worlds of family, work, and community. Are we going to use God’s gifts to serve ourselves, or are we going to use them to heal the world? 

There are some perverse forms of Christianity that see material prosperity, personal success, and even national glory as evidence of God’s favor and blessing. These traditions would be very much at home in the world of the tempter, quoting scripture to their own purposes. Jesus rejects the false, outward signs of God’s favor in order to claim the true blessing on offer. It’s not just that he can quote scripture better than the devil; it’s that he understands what scripture is really for.

At this early point in his ministry, Jesus chooses to orient himself in a vision of God and the world that will ground him in a commitment not to power but to love. He will preach and teach and heal not as a magic trick to embellish his reputation; he will preach and teach and heal to bring God’s love to bear in all human relationships. As Jesus goes around Galilee people will grow better and kinder and healthier around him. People touched by him will touch others and so transform the world.

Just as Jesus began his 40 days of wilderness self-examination, so you and I now begin our 40-day walk together toward Easter. Are we going on this Lenten wilderness trip equipped for what will meet us, or are we trying to navigate life’s rocks in a flimsy pair of Gucci loafers? Jesus could conquer the desert alone, but you and I are not Jesus: we need each other—our families, our friends, and the church community with its sacraments, its teaching, its healing, its pastoral care, its fellowship—we need all of this and each other to make it through.

Lent and life are a wilderness journey. It is dangerous nonsense to think you should or can go it alone. God has given you and me each other as our essential outfitting for this path. Use these 40 days and their gifts to know yourself so you can love the world. It is easy to feel faint when facing life’s difficulties. Remember: God was with Jesus and will be there with you. And as you travel this rocky path, be sure to look for that canteen making its way up toward you as you navigate the trail beside the rocks. Amen.

 

            

            

 

Homily: Ash Wednesday [February 18, 2026] All Saints, Beverly Hills

Bless the Lord, O my soul, *

and all that is within me, bless his holy name.

 

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

 

            Today, Ash Wednesday, marks the beginning of Lent, our 40-day journey toward Easter. In the church it is easy to get caught up in all the rules and processes of this penitential season, but at the outset it is important to remember: the point of Lent is not to feel bad about yourself. The point of Lent is Easter.

            We have heard some relevant scripture this [morning/afternoon/evening]: the prophet Isaiah calling Israel to proclaim a fast to “loose the bonds of injustice”; Paul in Second Corinthians announcing that “now is the acceptable time” and “the day of salvation”; and Jesus himself telling us whenever we fast not to “look dismal” but to fast in a way that “may be seen not by others but by your Father who sees in secret”. All three of these readings emphasize the penitential nature of Ash Wednesday and they are important reminders of how to go about our Lenten self-examination.

            Yet, for me, none of them gets at the heart of this day and this season as does today’s Psalm, Psalm 103, especially its opening verses:

Bless the Lord, O my soul, *
and all that is within me, bless his holy Name.

Bless the Lord, O my soul, *
and forget not all his benefits.

He forgives all your sins *
and heals all your infirmities;

He redeems your life from the grave *
and crowns you with mercy and loving-kindness;

He satisfies you with good things, *
and your youth is renewed like an eagle's. 

The Lord executes righteousness *
and judgment for all who are oppressed.

 

            What is the point of Lent? The point of Lent is Easter. And the story of Easter begins with the grand sweep of God’s connection with us.

            The story of God and us is told in some detail at the Great Vigil of Easter, and indeed in bonsai form in the Eucharistic prayer we say today and every Sunday. Our story starts in the Garden of Eden, continues through the early days of Israel and its Exodus from slavery, goes on in its settled life under David and other kings, and culminates in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. This story has its ups and downs, but it is essentially a love story—a tale of how God made us, we got lost, and God repeatedly came back to find us.

            The psalm we are reading today—Psalm 103, given in its entirety on page 733 in the prayer book—is one I read every day in the season of Lent. I read it to remind myself of God’s deep and abiding commitment to me and to the whole human family. God forgives all my sins and heals all my infirmities. God redeems my life from the grave. And, perhaps in Lent most appropriately, God forgives all my sins and is slow to anger and of great kindness. I read Psalm 103 daily in Lent because it grounds me in the grandeur and depth of what we in the church are up to. We bless God and God’s holy name not because we are ordered to but because, if we’re honest with ourselves, we know that God has given us life and every other good gift with which we are blessed. As Emerson said, “the benefit outweighed the cost from the beginning”. 

            To say that Ash Wednesday and Lent are ultimately about gratitude and trust is not to say that there are not things we have to repent of. God’s story with us begins in creation, but it is immediately derailed by our first parents, Adam and Eve, who eat the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The so-called apple they eat has nothing to do with sex. Rather, it represents our desire to live life without limitation, even at the expense of others and the creation itself. You can see this as a story of ambition and desire for more. You can see it as a violation of creation itself. We always seem to want more than our share. 

            Adam and Eve’s problem is our problem. The minute they realized that life had limitations—that we are finite, limited, dependent creatures—they wanted to remove those strictures and be, in a sense, like God. And one way to see the rest of the story—from the Genesis patriarchs through Israel’s history to the life of Jesus himself—is to see it as God’s attempt to help us accept the ecology of our circumstances. You and I are part of a human community. We are part of a non—human environment. Wanting to have and be everything violates the logic of the creation we share with one another. Lent is a time to remember and reset ourselves.

            And that is how we come to the sentence that the priest will say when imposing ashes on our foreheads. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” It is customary, I suppose, to hear that phrase as bad news, as a death sentence, as a reminder that we are mortal. But the older I get and the longer I live the life of faith in the church, the more I hear this sentence as good news. I am dust, and to dust I shall return. That is not a judgment or a condemnation. That is simply the truth. I am part of the world that God made, and I will be a part of that world even after I die. 

            What comes after death, of course, is the subject for an Easter sermon. But for now, as we begin this Lenten walk together, let us hold on to the blessing inherent in those words. As Psalm 103 says, 

For he himself knows whereof we are made; *
he remembers that we are but dust.

Our days are like the grass; *we flourish like a flower of the field;

When the wind goes over it, it is gone, *and its place shall know it no more.

But the merciful goodness of the Lord endures for ever on those who fear him, *
and his righteousness on children's children;

 

            We have long considered Lent a time to abstain from something or to take on a service project. As we think about the blessing and gratitude given voice in Psalm 103 and what they suggest about this season, it helps to remember that we do not observe Lent for Lent’s sake but for the sake of Easter. Over the course of these several weeks we are preparing ourselves to take in both the sorrow of the cross and the joy of the resurrection. We give things up and take things on not because we are bad people. We do them because we want to help God open us up to the big, gracious realities in store for us in Holy Week and at Easter.

            Bless the Lord, O my soul, *

and all that is within me, bless his holy name.

 

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.  

 

God made us. We got lost. God came to find us. Lent is not a punishment. It’s a gift. Use it to get ready for what is coming toward you at Easter. Amen.

 

Homily: The Last Sunday after Epiphany [February 15, 2026] All Saints, Beverly Hills

 

Early in my time as a seminary dean I had to attend a “New Presidents Seminar” in Savannah, GA. The seminar was OK, but Savannah was the star. It’s an 18th century city set in a tropical climate: imagine Boston surrounded by Florida. We were then living in Chicago, so we experienced Savannah in January as a gift. 

Savannah also boasts two great native citizens. It is the birthplace both of songwriter Johnny Mercer and author Flannery O’Connor. While I was learning the ropes of educational administration, Kathy was learning all about the city. Having read the novel and seen the movie, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Kathy wandered into a themed gift shop filled with movie souvenirs, and with true southern hospitality, the proprietress said, “Hon, I’ve got to run an errand. Can you watch the store while I’m out?” And she left Kathy on her own in the otherwise empty shop for a half hour. Imagine doing that on Hollywood Boulevard.

When the program ended, Kathy and I went to see O’Connor’s family home, a modest 19th century townhouse. There wasn’t a lot to see there, but the visit rekindled my longstanding love of her novels and short stories. Flannery O’Connor was a lifelong pre-Vatican II Catholic, and she wrote fiction that embodied deep theological truth. When I taught English at UCLA, I regularly used her short story collection, A Good Man is Hard to Find. They’re pretty gruesome stories, but it was a sneaky way for me to get undergraduates to think both about religion at least once in their college careers.

In the title story “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, a hardened criminal, called “The Misfit”, hijacks the car of a family heading to what will surely be a dismal vacation in Florida. The grandmother is a hateful, crabby old lady, and manages to make everyone in the car miserable. In the course of the abduction, she finally gets a close look at The Misfit and sees that he is a man wracked with spiritual agony. She suddenly cries out, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children.” In that moment, her understanding is transformed. She no longer sees The Misfit as subhuman but now as a fellow sufferer. She experiences a kind of grace that calls her out of her constricted self and offers her a new expanded vision of life.

If you know Flannery O’Connor, you also know that notwithstanding this moment of grace The Misfit will shoot her anyway. He then observes, “She would of been a good woman . . . if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

            There are no Misfits in today’s Gospel [Matthew 17: 1-9], Matthew’s version of the Transfiguration story. But there is a similar big moment of grace: just as the story’s grandmother sees The Misfit revealed as a real human being, so Peter, James, and John now see  a Jesus whose “face shone like the sun”, and whose “clothes became dazzling white”. Something important is revealed here, both about Jesus and about his three friends. No one is quite the same after this mountaintop encounter.

The transfiguration story tells us something about Jesus.  When you read the earlier parts of the gospel narratives, it is easy to think of him simply as a profound teacher and healer. Jesus healed lepers, restored sight to the blind, made the lame walk. In a world filled with suffering and pain, who wouldn’t be drawn to such a figure?

But, as we know, there was more to Jesus than that. Shortly before this transfiguration story, Peter has confessed Jesus to be the Messiah, the anointed, the promised king and savior of Israel. Today’s Gospel gives us the fulfillment of this Messianic revelation: Jesus appears before them in visual glory, and a voice from the cloud verifies it. “This is my son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased. Listen to him!” 

Peter responds with a bizarre offer—“I will make three dwellings”—and this reminds us that our first response to holiness and beauty is often to try to freeze them in place. Peter wants to stay with the transfigured Jesus (along with Moses and Elijah, who also appear) because he wants to hold on to this moment of transcendent holiness. Who among us would not? God knows what Peter would have done with an iPhone. Imagine the selfies. 

But Jesus is not going to let them build a triumphal arch on the mountain. He is going to take them back down to sea level. They are now embarked on a process that will take them away from Galilee and toward Jerusalem, where Jesus will be arrested, tried, crucified, and risen. We now see Jesus revealed in his true glory, not only as teacher and healer, but now as savior, too.

The Transfiguration story also tells us something about us humans. Peter and his companions now see and understand themselves in a new way. It is easy for us to think of the Transfiguration as a spectacle, but it is more than that. It is also a call and a commission. Jesus is bringing his companions into a new life of liberation and service. God’s transformative power is now at work in them, too. They are to be bearers of God’s light, blessing, and hope in an often dark and broken world.

There are times when we suddenly see things in a way that changes everything. This is one of them.

Only very rarely do we get a glimpse of the reality of God. Only very rarely do we get a true glimpse into ourselves. As St. Augustine says, “Of course you don’t understand yourself. You are a mystery because God is incarnate in you, and God is a mystery.” In today’s transfiguring moment, we too have been caught up into the divine life of God and sent down the hill to bear witness to the glory which shines in God, in Jesus, and in every human being. God’s light will now shine in the world primarily through us. We don’t always understand it, but we help bear it into the world.

Lent begins with our observance of Ash Wednesday this week, and Lent is the season we have been given to think about the implications of our encounter with the transfigured Jesus. There is more to him than meets the eye. There is more to you than meets the eye. You, too, are caught up into this divine mystery, and in this mountaintop encounter you can hear God saying two clear things which are trustworthy in a dark time: “This is my son, the beloved. Listen to him.” If you want to see the truth, then keep your eyes on Jesus, the one whose love is the light of the world.  And then Jesus says, “Get up and do not be afraid.” Look also into yourself and see that you, too are a bearer of that light. Go out and bear God’s light where you are. 

The Savannah gift shop proprietress clearly saw something in my wife Kathy that Kathy did not see in herself. In the same way, God sees something in you that you don’t even know is there, and Lent is the time to find and explore it. We will always be a mystery to ourselves, but this transfiguring moment as we perch on the edge of a new season assures us that God sees us, knows us, loves us, and calls us to be light and love bearers too. Amen.

 

 

Homily: The Fourth Sunday after Epiphany [February 1, 2026] All Saints, Beverly Hills

            Over the course of my working life as rector, high school principal, and dean, I’ve had jobs that required me to hire and supervise colleagues, many of them clergy. You may not believe this, but one of the things you have to look for in hiring a priest is to get a sense of their toughness. To put the question bluntly, are they mean enough to be a priest? You take a lot of incoming in this racket, and the last thing a rector needs is a curate who will collapse in tears every time somebody comments on their appearance, their preaching, or the kind of car they drive—each of which happened to me in my early days. 

            I once interviewed a man for a church position who I suspected had been a golden boy since infancy. He carried himself as if he knew he was everybody’s darling. I began to press on that, and I asked him increasingly challenging questions.

            “Have you ever had anyone criticize your preaching?”

            “No.”

            “Has anyone ever questioned your integrity?”

            “No.”

            “Has anyone ever questioned your judgment?”

            “No.”

            I became increasingly frustrated at how smoothly this man’s life and career had gone, so I asked,

            “Has anyone ever just hated your guts?”

            “Not that I can remember. Everybody likes me.”

            I took a second and then said, as nicely as I could: “I really want to wish you luck in your ministry. And I hope in your next parish job you will line up a support system for when someone finally goes after you, which I am sure they will.”

            Today’s Gospel [Matthew 5: 1-12] gives us Matthew’s familiar account of the Beatitudes, the sayings with which Jesus begins his sermon on the mount. The teachings in this section are very challenging because they propose a moral world that seems upside down. The word [Μακάριος] Matthew uses and we translate as “blessed” actually means something more like “happy”.  He’s saying not only that we’re blessed when we’re poor, meek, merciful, and mourning; he’s saying that we’re happy in those conditions. Conventional wisdom says that happiness consists in wealth, power, retribution, and celebration. Jesus is telling us today that we’ve actually got it backwards.

            The final beatitude is even more bizarre:

Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven . . .

 

            It’s one thing for Jesus to tell me that I’m happy when I’m poor and meek. It’s another for him to tell me I should be thankful that people are talking smack about me. It’s like the fraternity initiation scene in Animal House: “Thank you, sir. May I have another?” I don’t think the man I interviewed had ever read this passage. He had no idea of the wonderful things that lay in store for him.

            What does it mean to be blessed/happy when they “revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account”? 

            Of course, Jesus’s original audience consisted of his followers, women and men who knew (or would soon learn) that following Jesus would entail opposition. But most of us who now follow Jesus are not in line for the kind of martyrdom the Romans handed out to our predecessors. But we all come in regularly for the kinds of slander that Jesus seems to be talking about. Christians are horribly misunderstood in the 21st century from both sides: unbelievers see us as people living in a fairy tale, and the rest of the culture confuses real Christians like us with the nationalistic clowns who claim the media spotlight. 

            The point about this last beatitude, at least to me, is that if you’re not encountering opposition and misunderstanding, then perhaps you’re not doing it right. In my Washington days, I came to believe that conventional wisdom is almost always wrong. It’s one thing to value the opinion of others. It’s another to let them tell you who you are.

            But how about these other hard sayings in this challenging passage? How are we to make sense of a world whose values defy our conventional wisdom?

Blessed are the poor in spirit . . .

Blessed are those who mourn . . . 
Blessed are the meek . . .

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness . . .
Blessed are the merciful . . .

 Blessed are the pure in heart . . .

 Blessed are the peacemakers . . .

 Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake . . .

 

            It’s important to understand that these sayings are not really ethical rules for living. They are a statement of what the world looks like from God’s point of view. As finite, limited people, we cannot help but see the world from the perspective of our own self-interest. That is what original sin is all about—our tragedy is that we’re locked in to our own selfishness. These beatitudes are a summary of what the kingdom of heaven not only looks like. They’re a summary of the reality  being brought about by the life of Jesus and the faith of those of us who follow him in this world.

            At this beginning point in Jesus’s ministry, we now get a glimpse of the promise of what the world is supposed to be. Conventional wisdom (and some perverse forms of so-called Christianity) seems to think that wealth, power, and security are signs of God’s favor. Actually, says Jesus, the truly happy ones are the ones who know their need of God. Only, it seems, when we are up against it, only when we suffer through loss, grief, illness, defeat, are we open to the depth and power of God’s love for us. It’s not that God loves the poor and sick more than the rich and healthy. It’s that only in those moments when we’re poor and sick we become open to the grace and mercy on offer in the boundless reaches of God’s love for us.

            These teachings of Jesus sound upside down to us because our world and its conventional wisdom are upside down. You and I who seek to follow Jesus live and walk in the light of a promise. The Beatitudes are the sign of that promise. Even now, God is at work in you and me and the world we love and serve. God is constantly making us and remaking us in the image of Jesus, one who made peace, consorted with the poor, healed the sick, and proclaimed liberty to the captives. Our job is to live in a way that will make these promises a reality, to be peacemakers and healers ourselves.

            Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven . . .

 

            Not every person on earth is going to like or understand you. But Jesus does, and that knowledge is more than enough to live by in a world turned upside down. Amen.