Sermons

Before I begin, a trigger warning; today we recall Rachel's day, and this sermon will reference the death of children. It's even in our gospel, which the lectionary has given us. This gospel reading has three elements that are all tied together to make a whole. We have Jesus calling Matthew. Yes, it's that Matthew, who is writing the gospel we are reading. Then we have the story of the synagogue leader whose daughter has died, and finally, we have the woman who has been sick for twelve years and who takes healing from Jesus without asking. And all on a day when we are recalling the loss of children's lives to guns in our nation. 

Trinity Sunday is often cited in preaching classes as one of the scariest Sundays to preach. You’re not given a straightforward story of Jesus doing a miracle; you're not given a parable that you can explain using three clear points that the professor in homiletics can swoon over. Homiletics, by the way, is just the fancy word for preaching. No, you are given the very essence and nature of God. You are given the claim that took the best minds in the church over 300 years to really agree on. And even now, some of the smartest Christians can’t entirely agree on what the Trinity is. As a preacher, you are given something so key to our faith that it is the key reason the church separated from the synagogue, and we are no longer Jewish, and yet it only has a few direct references in the biblical texts, and today we read two of them, both only one verse long!

There has been a lot of debate throughout history about what a sacrament is. In seminary, I was taught a helpful phrase to explain: “A sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inward invisible grace.” This statement was first published in English in the Book of Common Prayer in 1662. I love this definition of a sacrament, but it is also a bunch of churchy language. So it doesn’t answer the simple question, “What does sacrament mean?” Dictionary.com tells us that a sacrament is, “an outward sign combined with a prescribed form of words and regarded as conferring some specific grace (a special favor from God) upon those who receive it.” The words and actions of the outward and visible sign are to show something inward and invisible that is being given, a grace. But doesn’t that mean what’s on the outside doesn’t really matter? It's just highlighting what’s happening, right? If God gives grace on the inside, like at Pentecost, anyone can be full of grace, so why do you need that outside sign? 

Today, we have heard the story of Jesus' ascension from the book of Acts and Jesus' declaration before his ascension from John’s gospel: “So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed.” The story of the ascension can seem a little unbelievable. I swear, I was standing right next to him, and then he floated up into heaven. I know this story, it's one told a lot in Waldo County and it's on the History Channel all the time, because it's aliens, right? It's always aliens. Or maybe it's one of those transporters from Star Trek beaming Jesus up. Some of the miracles of Jesus' life seem like the hardest things to accept in our gospels, the stuff of pure fantasy or science fiction (which is just magic with scientific-sounding words). Jesus' moral teachings can be taught without miracles, and maybe they would be more acceptable to the rationally minded, right? Thomas Jefferson thought so, which is why he created his own translation of the New Testament, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, a gospel with all of the miracles cut out. A great moral idea from a man who infamously kept one of his teenage slaves as a mistress. 

You may or may not recall that I have talked before about the fact that we don’t really have much to do with sheep in Maine. So it might surprise you to learn that Maine has its own breed of sheep, the Katardin Sheep. Katardin sheep are really weird sheep, which is not surprising for a Mainer. They were bred to be meat sheep in the 1960’s. Katardin sheep have hair, not wool. Unfortunately, mutton has not revived as a popular meat, and they have remained a rare breed, but if you want to see them in person, there is a flock at Guini Ridge Farm in Union. Maine's history with sheep farming goes way back. Before the financial crash of the 1840’s, most of Maine had been cleared for farm land. Creating a patchwork of 80-acre parcels. Unfortunately, Maine farms grow more stones than crops, so most of Maine was turned over to grazing for sheep, who didn’t mind eating around the rocks, even when they were on steep slopes. Each farmer piled up the field stones into dry stone walls to keep the sheep on their own land. Following the financial crash, sheep farming was no longer profitable, so the pastures were abandoned, letting them grow up into the woodlands we know today. The stone walls collapsed, but can still be found running throughout the woods of Maine, a reminder that once we knew a lot about sheep. 

When the two disciples encounter Jesus on the road to Emmaus, they are returning home on the last leg of a pilgrimage. Ruth Burgess of the Iona Community says that, “Pilgrimage is traditionally a journey to a holy place - a place where saints have walked, a place where God has met people and blessed them.” The nature of pilgrimage is a journey with return. The way I see it, pilgrimage has three parts. First, you are sent out to go to a place where you expect to meet God. Next, you have time at that place, the pilgrimage site. However long you stay, this is often considered to be the highlight of the trip, the thing you tell everyone about when you get home. Third and finally, you have the journey home. Pilgrimages are traditionally there-and-back-again adventures. As we know from good adventure stories, the character who sets out and the character who returns are seldom the same. The process of the journey changes them. 

Mainers are interesting people. Culturally, Maine straddles the line between skeptical, reserved, intellectual, highly educated Yankeedom, and Appalachia. The result is people who think long and hard about things before deciding that aliens are real and have abducted their neighbor's cow. I think it's in part to do with where we live, because Maine is full of woods. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but those woods are full of mystery. Consequently, many of the people who live here report seeing strange and inexplicable things among the trees, including Bigfoot. Or as he is locally known by his French name, the Loup Garou. One of those who believes in the Maine bigfoot, is my brother-in-law. He is a very smart man, who loves hiking with his dogs, going on hunts, and has spent more time in the wilderness than I’ve spent in my backyard. He knows these woods, and the animals who make their home here. He knows enough and is smart enough to know that there is a lot that cannot be explained in the Maine wilderness. 

For seven years from 397 to 404, the Archbishop of Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul, in Turkey, was a man named John. In his lifetime, people started calling him John Chrysostom, which means John, golden-tongued, because he was such a good preacher. Back in the day, before the internet, before TV or even radio, going to a good sermon was entertaining, and John preached from the heart, with the power of the spirit; he didn’t even have notes! In fact, he had his secretary write down everything he said so he could publish it later, which is how the greatest Easter sermon ever preached was preserved. So good was John Easter's sermon that every year, all Orthodox churches read it again. One less sermon to write, sounds good to me. I feel there are a few things God’s spirit wants us to hear John didn’t clearly say, so here is my 2026 remix of the best Easter Sermon ever preached. 

John’s gospel doesn’t talk about miracles; instead, John calls all of Jesus miracles signs. Signs that point to the true miracle, that God comes to us in Jesus with faith, hope, and love. Faith in us, hope for us, love of us, all come to us in the person of Jesus. Jesus is the reality of love. God‘s love comes down into the world of humans. That small, tight-knit social world that we humans create within the wider, more accepting natural world that God has made for us. Jesus is God‘s love come as a person, and Jesus miracles are signs of that love that points to God‘s willingness to risk all in loving humanity as a human. Signs that heal not only bodies, minds, and spirits but also whole communities and the relationships within them. Heals those scarred by separation and hate. If the Christmas story is that love comes down as Emmanuel, God with us, then the story of Holy Week is the story of what God is willing to risk to be love to us. 

This is a long reading, and there is a lot that God can show us from it if we are only willing to chase down each line of inquiry, so I want to pick out two things to consider. First is the question of “why is there suffering?” And the other is the healing nature of Jesus' solidarity with those who suffer. Jesus' disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” 

Today, we’ve read one of my favorite gospel stories, often known as the woman at the well. I love this story because it feels like a conversation gone wrong, yet somehow turned right. It has always felt to me like this woman thinks she’s flirting with Jesus, and Jesus knows he’s not flirting with her. “Lady, please give me a drink”. “Oh, sir, are you asking me for a drink?” She really is not getting what Jesus is talking about. It is clear from the framing of the story that this woman is someone outside her community. In hot countries where water is still collected from a well or pump, people do not get their water in the middle of the day. Water is heavy, and carrying it in the heat makes you very thirsty. Then you just have to go back for more. So people, and when I say people, you know I’m talking about the women and normally the young women, collect water in the morning or the evening when it is cool. Only those wishing to avoid everyone else, those shunned by them, would come out in the middle of the day. 

A few weeks ago, I re-read Jim Wallace’s book, The False White Gospel, which I highly recommend as a timely commentary about the church's role in society right now. In his book, Jim says: “the vital spiritual sequence of social change…(is) almost a liturgy for historical change. First there is the faith, which inspires hope, which creates the action that leads to the change. And that’s often, if not always, the path to real transformation.”1 Processes of transformation are often described metaphorically as journeys; those second half of life journeys where people and even whole cultures are changed as they discover who they are supposed to be when in the right relationship to themselves and to God. In our Old Testament reading today, we have seen the start of a historically crucial transformational journey in the life of Abram, who becomes Abraham. God calls him to leave all that is secure, his family network, his homeland, eventually even his own name, to leave his comfort zone and go out into the world in the hope of a promised land that he has never seen. Abraham’s faith in God leads to hope, which leads to action, which leads to the transformation of the world. 

Growing up, I had this image of Jesus going out into the wilderness, as Jesus going into a desert. Jesus in a long flowing robe, pushing into a landscape that looks like it belongs in a spaghetti Western, dry red rocks in a scrub and sand landscape. While wildernesses are deserted, they are not always deserts. As a child in England, I’d never experienced true wilderness. Hedgerows, fences, and walls bound the whole of England, and there are people everywhere. When I first visited Maine, I was shocked by the lack of boundaries between people's homes. How do you know when to stop mowing the lawn? While there are some truly remote parts of the British Isles, there isn’t any wilderness left. I had to imagine Jesus in an empty place I had never seen. I have a different image of the wilderness now because I’ve been there. It’s not a dead, barren, dry place. It’s the swampy back 40 on an old farm lot where moose and beavers can be found. It’s the vast tracts of the Great North Woods. And it's the empty patches of shoreline where even the lobstermen won't go. 

We are about to enter the season of Lent, which starts this week with Ash Wednesday. On the Sunday before we follow Jesus into 40 days of temptation in the wilderness, we get a revelation of who Christ really is before he begins his journey towards the cross. We see truly who Jesus is in the light of the divine glory that shines out in his transfiguration. In Exodus, a similar but different story is told of Moses. The Hebrew people have been freed from slavery and are about to enter into forty years of wandering in the wilderness. Moses goes up Mount Sinai and is given the tablets of the law during forty days of fasting. When Moses comes down from the mountain, his face shines with reflected glory, and all know that he has been in the presence of God because something of God’s glorious brightness has rubbed off on him. In the transfiguration, we don’t see the glory of God reflected but radiating. Moses is like the moon that reflects, and Jesus is like the Sun that radiates; both are bright and true, but one is the true source of light that overpowers the other with its greater brightness. 

The Mali Empire, at its peak in the 14th century, was the wealthiest nation of the day thanks to its exploitation of gold mines and its control of trade routes across the Sahara, jealously guarded from its capital of Timbuktu. Their Sultan Mansa Musa was widely considered to have been the richest man who ever lived. When he went on the Hajj, the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, he showered so much gold on the communities he passed through that in some places, it permanently changed their economies. Despite this immense wealth, his empire had a problem. In the high heat of the Sahara Desert, there are no sources of salt. All the salt consumed in Mali has to be transported through neighboring countries on the coast. Legend has it that at one point in Timbuktu, the price of salt became so expensive and the abundance of gold so great, that you could trade one pound of salt for one pound of gold. 

I’ve been reading Richard Rohr’s book Falling Upwards, in which Rohr reflects that the journey of life, we are all called to make, is really two journeys. The first journey is the outward life pursued in youth through middle age, in which we pursue security in this world, we find our place, we buy our home, we raise our family, we find our community, and what our role within it will be. The second journey is the journey of the discovery of self, particularly self in relationship with God. This is a journey in which the consistent expectations of our first journey are stripped away. We lose our jobs, our kids go to college, whatever it is, some crisis or a struggle calls us out of our comfort zone into a new way. I’m reminded of a lyric from Baz Lurman’s song, Everybody’s Free to Wear Sunscreen: “Maybe you’ll have a rich spouse, maybe you’ll have a trust fund, but you never know when either one might run out.” 

“When Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. He left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the sea.” When John, the forerunner of the gospel, is arrested, what does Jesus do? He withdraws, going away from the area around the river Jordan, in the jurisdiction of Herod, and he goes to Capernaum in Galilee. A Greek city where Jesus continues John’s proclamation of repentance from sin. In the face of injustice preventing the good news of hope, Jesus goes to a place where he can be safe, just outside the tyrannical reach of the government in Jerusalem, to proclaim that people's sins can be forgiven. Basically, when Jesus' friend and coworker is arrested, he crosses state lines in order to continue preaching. And what is so radical about the forgiveness of sins that John is arrested, and Jesus has to flee? The forgiveness of sins frees people from the guilt and shame that would hold them in their lives. Forgiveness frees them to enter the Kingdom of God, where the law is love and mercy, and the imperative is to act for justice. Guilt and shame are paralyzing emotions, states of being in which we feel like we cannot act, in which we feel disempowered because we place the blame, rightly or wrongly, upon ourselves, and cannot move beyond that point. 

Paul writes to those in Corinth called to be saints, and to all those who have received salvation through Jesus Christ, that is, to us. Telling how we have been strengthened in speech and knowledge, so the testimony of Jesus Christ can be proclaimed. Church communities are established by the spirit of God working through worldly processes, in particular places and times, with particular teachers and church founders, like Paul. Different as each gathering may be, they are all established for one mission: the purpose of expanding the kingdom of God by bringing salvation to those who are lost and for the making of those who were once lost into people who live faithful and blameless lives. 

When we talk about “the church”, we think of a building, we think of those particular places we have worshiped and felt a connection with God and other Christians. We think of somewhere like Emmanuel, with excellent acoustics, Scandinavian aesthetics, and rattly heating. But when Paul wrote to churches, he did not write to buildings. He writes to people who knew Jesus and who gathered together to meet him. Yes, they gathered in a place, but not a specific church building. They gathered in each other‘s homes or barns, in fields and gardens, in public baths or by rivers for baptisms. Wherever there was space to bring the people together, there the church can be gathered. 

In this, the church follows Jesus, who gathered crowds on mountainsides, by lakes, in wildernesses, and fields, not just in the temple or synagogue. Wherever people gathered around Jesus, there the church was created, and that is how the church is still created. Wherever people gather together in Jesus' name, the church is present. In today's gospel, John sends his own disciples to follow Jesus, sending them to go wherever Jesus leads. They hear John's message about Jesus and respond, centering their lives on Jesus, so that they will one day become solid rocks on which the church is founded. They, the disciples, will maintain Jesus’ presence in the world by setting Jesus in their midst after his ascension. 

They make proclaiming John's words about Jesus the focus of their living. What is John’s proclamation? “Behold the Lamb of God”, the one who takes away the sins of the world! This news is so good that the first thing the first disciples do with it, is tell someone else. Andrew’s first action is to tell his brother Simon, “We have found the Messiah.” We have found the Lamb who removes all sin. 

John identifies Jesus as God’s anointed son, who has come to redeem humanity and the whole world from its sin. John, who has called people to repentance, that is, the choice to no longer enact evil in their lives, says that in Jesus, sin itself can be broken. Not just a personal turning from sin, but a complete removal of sin's power in our lives. Jesus' community knew something about sacrificial lambs that removed sin. In the temple, offering an animal was a way of showing repentance for sin. A way of giving something of great value as a means of redeeming a lost relationship. A lamb was a rich way to say sorry, not the equivalent of a box of chocolates, or a bouquet of flowers; it’s more like giving God an apology car. 

But it’s not the material value of the gift that mattered to God, but rather its symbolic nature. A symbolic act of entering into God’s way of living. The symbol of a sacrificial lamb would’ve instinctively reminded Jesus community of the story of Passover, relived annually at a seder, a ritual meal recalling the exodus from slavery in Egypt. In that story lambs blood was speared on the doorpost, and this saved the children of Israel from death. The cooked passover lamb then becomes the food of redemption, a sign of freedom from slavery. So when John calls Jesus the Lamb of God, this is an image of freedom from slavery, redemption from bondage, and of forgiveness. The Lamb is the ultimate power of God to end bondage, the ultimate means of redemption. 

When I first came to Maine, I had a strange experience. I was riding around, and I saw a redemption center. As you know, a redemption center is a place where you can take your redeemable cans and beer bottles to get back that sweet, sweet five-cent deposit. This was something they didn't have in the UK when I was growing up. When I saw that redemption center, I thought it was the most dumpy-looking church I had ever seen, and with the weirdest name. Why would you call a church “redemption center”? But the title redemption center might not be inappropriate for churches. They are those places where we come to be redeemed from our sin, to be redeemed like an old beer bottle from the empty mess, the bad-smelling dregs of our lives. Places where we come to be purchased back from that which has held us captive, because in Jesus, even those that we might think have no value are of great worth. 

For those who choose to follow Jesus, who gather around Jesus as the church, redemption is not just a historical image of freedom from slavery in Egypt, but the reality of freedom from the slavery of our world's sin. 

To redeem a slave means to pay the debt that was owed upon their life. To buy their freedom from an enslaver. To give mastery of a person's life into their own hands. The good news of redemption in Jesus Christ is that we are taken out of sin, and our value is placed in Jesus, who restores to us the mastery of our lives, so that we can choose to freely enter into an eternal relationship with God. 

There are many forms of sin that hold lives in bondage. Some are individual, some are communal, and some are deeply systemic. We in America want to believe that we are free individuals. We do not like to admit that we have masters. We do not want to acknowledge those things that bind our lives. The student loans, the medical insurance, our employers, or the highly unpredictable value of our stock options. The teams we love, and consequently the teams we hate. The places that we value about other places, the hopes we cling to, regardless of the damage they might do. All these and more have some form of mastery over us. Enmeshed in systems that constrain and hold us, would we be able to turn and follow Jesus if he were pointed out to us in the street? And when we do follow Jesus, do we have the courage to tell others? 

This is not a simple journey, but one that drives us to see value in all Jesus would redeem. If we are to be named rocks of faith, on which churches can be founded, we must follow the Lamb of God who bears the sin of the world away. We must resist all systems that seek to make other people the scapegoats for our own and society's sins. As followers of Jesus, we cannot put the blame for our sin onto others. We should not scapegoat immigrants or those from different cultures, we should not scapegoat voters of any political party, we should not scapegoat the rich and powerful, or the poor and riotous. The only Lamb who can take away sin is Jesus, and we need to point to him, owning our own sins and not forcing them on others. 

So this week, as tempting as it may be to blame others for our own sins or society's sins, don’t. To throw blame is to enslave ourselves to the sin of self-righteousness, which destroys Jesus' love for others. Rather, step out solid as a rock like Peter to proclaim God’s forgiveness, through non-violent protest at injustice like Martin Luther King, and through caring for all our neighbors like Jesus. The Lamb of God who came to redeem the whole world from its sin. Amen. 

Merry Christmas, everyone! Yes, we are still in the season of Christmas, which lasts for 12 days and only ends on Epiphany, the feast when we celebrate the visit of the wise men to the child Jesus. That means Epiphany is always on January 6th, and this year we will have a special service on Tuesday at 7 pm to celebrate! Epiphany doesn't often fall on a Sunday, so we normally roll the story of the wise men into the Sunday before or after January 6th. As you know, Christmas is always December 25, so it also doesn’t fall on the same day of the week each year. These two fixed dates at the start and end of the festivities means that most of the time, we only get one Sunday in the Christmas season. This year, we are fortunate to have two Sundays during Christmas. 

By this point in Advent, you may have picked up that we are in the year of Matthew. And in Matthew‘s gospel, today’s reading is the Christmas story. “The birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way.” It seems to be a little bit lacking; it's only 201 words in English, so short it wouldn’t even count as a letter to the editor. We have a story of Joseph dreaming. We have the journey to Bethlehem, and we have the birth of the child, and not a lot else. Matthew will go on to tell the story of the wise men who came to Jesus with gifts, but that is the story of Epiphany. Although we always roll the wisemen in as part of the Christmas story, it is in fact a separate event and feast of the church, which this year falls on January 6th, and we will be celebrating with a special evening service on the day. It's why the baby Mary holds to receive the wise men looks like a toddler, reaching out to grab the gifts, and not a newborn.