Entangled States

The Gospel reading for this week has a parable and its interpretation once again – just like last week. And once again, the reading skips over part of the narrative that St. Matthew is constructing. Given that it can seem like parables are just a funny sort of rhetorical device that rabbis used in Jesus’ day to teach their disciples, whereas in truth, the hard work of trying to unpack the meaning or meanings of a parable is how the path of wisdom was shown to the hearers.

We do ourselves a disservice when we skip from teaching to interpretation in the lectionary. When that happens it seems like we’re demonstrating that faith is easy, just know the answers to the questions and good things will come to you. (And that’s certainly been a message I’ve heard from preachers over the years.) But that’s not at all how this works, and I don’t think it was what Jesus was saying in this passage or in any of the others where we hear his teachings to his disciples.

Spiritual growth requires friction. It requires us to live into confusion and discomfort and a kind of lack of clarity as we struggle to make sense of who God is and what God expects of us. Honestly, most learning, real internalized learning, requires enough friction that we can internalize what we have grasped. Superficial, easy answers give way to simple learning that is quickly forgotten. It’s one of the many concerns I and others have about using Artificial Intelligence in unwise ways.

You can watch the full sermon directly at this link.

This week’s Gospel reading skips over the, to my mind, most interesting part of the reading. In between the parable of the sower and its explanation is a vignette where the disciples take Jesus aside apart from the crowd and push to know why it is that he teaches in parables rather than speaking the truth plainly.

Jesus doesn’t really explain it. He makes clear that he is doing so, and that in doing so, some people will not be able to hear the Truth. He says that the disciples who are with him and hearing the Truth, but the others, the crowds will not. He quotes a teaching from Isaiah to remind us that this isn’t a novel idea. But he doesn’t explain it – at least not in a satisfying way to my mind.

What’s going on? I’m not sure. But what is clear is that there is more going on in what Jesus teaches that meets the eye at first glance. There’s a depth and a richness that will only be clear after study and discipleship – and that not all will have that opportunity. But for those who are so moved, the fruit that their study and struggle will bring them will be amazing.

If you are called to go deeper – and I expect you are simply because you’re reading these words when you could choose to do something else with your time – then understand the profound nature of the gift you have been given, and how greatly you will be rewarded.

And what a gift you are, and can be to others as well.

You can view the sermon directly at this link.

This Sunday’s Gospel (Matthew 10:40–42) is only three verses long, but it quietly rearranges the way most of us keep score. We’re trained to read résumés: titles, degrees, the things a person earns and accumulates over a lifetime. And we tend to assume God reads us the same way, tallying up what we’ve managed to make of ourselves.

But that’s not how Jesus talks about reward in the reading. He doesn’t say, “whoever does great things.” He says, “whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet.” The reward hinges not on what we’ve achieved but on whom we honor. And I guess, just as importantly, why we honor them.

God isn’t scanning our credentials; God is asking who our friends are. Who do we recognize? Who do we receive? To whom do we hand even a cup of cold water? And here’s the wonder of it: when we honor someone because of how God already sees them, we are drawn into their reward. Relationship, not résumé, turns out to be what counts. At least if we’re looking to be blessed with an extra helping of blessing.

You can view the full sermon directly at this link.

We read the Bible as though we are always meant to be focused on Isaac, the chosen one, the child of the promise, the one the story is about, the one who is the ancestor of Israel. But this story is also, quietly, about the one who gets sent away, the one who exits the story at this point in Moses’ account of his people. God says something remarkable to Abraham: do not be distressed about the boy. As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring.

Ishmael is not a mistake to be cleaned up. He is not a loose end. He has his own destiny, his own future, his own nation, a future God promises to protect, out there, beyond the edge of the family that did not want him.

It is a hard thing to learn that not every story is about us and that sometimes we are not the main character at all, but rather a bit player in someone else’s deliverance. And it is harder still to learn that the people we are tempted to write off, the ones we are sure need to leave, may be carrying a destiny from God that we simply cannot see.

You can view the sermon directly at this link.

This Gospel, The Gospel, is not about the people whom God will accept, who God wants to accept, who are outside the walls right now, waiting to hear the Good News. It’s as much about us, the good people who have come to worship God. We are the descendants of Gentiles, we are not the Children of Abraham, but because of God’s love and compassion, and in spite of everything that we have done, we are now adopted into the family of the insider, we are the Daughter, the child of God.

You can view the full sermon here.

The encyclical released this week is being characterized primarily as a Critique of AI. But to be frank it’s not so much of AI as of the economics, and particularly the disparity between wealth and poverty that is behind AI’s rise. And also of the exploitation of people, the environment and the spiritual realm that seems to be happening too.

Parenthetically: The Encyclical is mostly about the terrifying ways we are abusing power and the lies we tell ourselves that justifies the abuse. It’s a pretty devastating critique of end stage capitalism, of the Unfettered Free Market and the nonsense that Ayn Rand penned.

Pope Leo grounds his thinking in what it means to be human, and to be made in the Image of God, a God who is Love.

At the core of Pope’s Encyclical, that Image of God, is understood through the lens of the Trinity. The true Unity of God is shown forth to us in Scripture by the revelation that God is One Being in three Persons. That paradoxical statement is shown to be possible because the persons of the Trinity are united to each other through a self-giving, self-emptying love for each other. It is their mutual and perfect love that is the Unity that makes God totally and completely One being. (We worship One God, we are monotheistic. The loving relationships, the mutuality, is why we can say that about the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.)

Because God is a Perfect Unity that emerges from the perfect Love of three persons, and because, as the Bible says in Genesis: humanity is created in the Image of God, then humanity is meant for relationship and for love.

We get that wrong a great deal, but that is why we are. It’s the end goal of what humanity was created to become. And it is what the AI we are creating will not achieve.

You can view the full sermon at this link.

I apologize for missing yet another week of posting a new sermon. I’ve got two school graduations this weekend and we are hosting the Archbishop of York for Evensong this evening in Westerly. I really do think though that I’m through the post-Easter diocesan crunch and that things will be able to get on a manageable schedule in the next week.

So with that, I’d like to repost the sermon I preached for Pentecost back in 2022. As I read it again, I recognized that many of the points I made then still need to be made today, four years later.

You can find the sermon and summary here.

The story of Pentecost is best understood in the context of the story of the Tower of Babel. The stories in the Bible have layers and layers of meaning, and both of these narratives contain multitudes.

The Tower of Babel at its core is a critique of human desire that is separate from God’s action. When nations work their human designs, they are destined to fail. The Day of Pentecost is the recasting of that story. The fired bricks of mud described in the building of the tower are replaced with the stones (such as Peter) now on fire and alive in the divine life of the Holy Spirit. The common human purpose is replaced with the diversity of God’s mission as the nations are gathered and transformed, still retaining their diversity.

There’s a lesson for this moment of American political history in all of this.

Most of us carry, somewhere beneath the surface, an image of how we think we ought to appear before God. It is usually the image of our best self — and more often than not, it is also our younger self. Strong, unbroken, theologically coherent, morally uncomplicated, capable of the kind of sustained prayer and clarity that we may have managed on some good days decades ago and cannot quite manage now. We imagine that to stand before God we must first somehow get back to that self. We have the instinct of the Capitol fresco of George Washington being made a God: the ascension will complete us by removing what time and failure and grief and illness have done to us.

But the prayer that Jesus prays in John 17 is not prayed from strength. It is prayed from within the knowledge of imminent betrayal, within the shadow of the cross that is hours away. And it is in that prayer, that wounded, clear-eyed, unflinching prayer, that the tradition hears the voice of the great High Priest, the holiest intercession in the Gospels. God is not waiting for us to be unbroken before God can hear us.

The Ascension, properly understood, says something startling about your body. About your memory. About the specific and particular history that has made you who you are at this moment. The marks of aging are not disqualifications. The wounds, the ones that healed badly, the ones that didn’t heal at all, the accumulated grief of long life faithfully lived, are not obstacles between you and God. They are part of what is being received.

This is what it means that Christ ascends with his wounds still present. St. Thomas touches them. The disciples recognize him by them. They are not removed in the resurrection; they are transfigured. They become the very marks by which the risen Lord is known. What the light of God does is not erase them – it illuminates them. It passes through them and makes them luminous in a way that unmarked, unwounded glass simply cannot be.

You can view the full sermon here.

In this week’s reading, which follows directly after last week’s Gospel, Jesus reassures the disciples that, even though he is leaving them, his teaching and his Spirit will remain with them. That Spirit — working in them — will fulfill what they lack. The Advocate, the one who will speak on their behalf in moments of judgment and inspire their speech in times of testing, will lead them more deeply into the truth of God’s love and God’s will for the world.

We will hear much more about the work of that Spirit in a few weeks. But for this moment, I want to emphasize what Jesus is telling his disciples as he bids them farewell just before his suffering: If you do what I do, Jesus says, you are doing God’s will. If you do God’s will, you will have the power you have seen in me — and that power can change the world. Not by doing self-serving miracles, but by changing the nature of human relationships.

Remember what Jesus taught them one last time at that meal as a sort of summary of all that he had done with them during his earthly ministry. He washes their feet. It is what we reenact on Maundy Thursday, and it is the act that continues to make us uncomfortable — and part of the reason I think attendance at that service has been declining over the years. To love God is to love Jesus. To love Jesus is to do what Jesus does. Jesus humbles himself, even taking on the role of a servant, a slave, to wash the dirt off our feet. To love Jesus is to do the same for the people around us.

If you are unhappy with the way things are in your life — if you are frustrated by the way things happen in our community — if you despair when you watch the national news — then you should know that there is something you can do that will begin to change things and make them better. You can love your neighbor just as Jesus did. You can serve them and put their best interest ahead of your own. And in doing that you will change them, and you will change your relationship with them, and you will change the world.

The disciples, after the Passion and the Resurrection and the Ascension, did exactly that. Empires fell. How we think about ourselves and each other has never been the same.

And what is remarkable is how this pattern keeps repeating itself throughout history. In moments of despair and confusion — moments not entirely unlike our own — someone rises up and shows the rest of us what it looks like to love God by loving the way Jesus loved.

(It’s been a few weeks since I’ve been able to find the time to record and post my Sunday sermons. I’ve been preaching – many times a week over the past month or so – but between meetings and travel, I’ve just not been able to squeeze in the time to record, edit and post. I’m hoping I’ll get back on track again, but in the meantime, please accept my apologies.)

You can view the sermon recording here.