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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

The first:

 

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

The last:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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