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.

            

            

 

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

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

 

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

 As we just heard in the gospel,

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

 

 Hoom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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