It’s a slogan I believe Paul would have admired, and I think it captures some of the spirit of the opening to the 12th chapter of his letter to the Romans. Scholars have wrestled with one another over just who Paul was, and what made him tick, but there seems to be consensus on at least one thing: Paul was an extremely weird dude.

So what made him that way? Paul himself makes the case that it was his encounter with Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus, and subsequently committing the rest of his life to living out the implications of Jesus’ gospel. Paul clearly lived what he preached, and I think it’s safe to say that he was not conformed to this world.

But then Jesus in the Gospels seems pretty bizarre himself. His closest friends can barely make sense of the things he says and does. His own family wonders if he’s gone completely insane. Poor Pontius Pilate has never seen anyone remotely like him.

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I believe Jesus’ weirdness springs from his being utterly free—not just in the way he ignored social boundaries, but free from the toxic effects of selfishness, fear, pride. And because so few of us have experienced the sheer freedom that Jesus enjoyed, and that he inspired in disciples like Paul, we find it strange, and even a little scary.

And yet this is precisely the freedom Jesus wants to share with us, and which Paul is inviting us to claim:

Do not be conformed to this world, he says, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.

The Greek word Paul uses for “transformed” is metamorphao—which gives us the English word “metamorphosis” and is the same word Mark and Matthew use to describe what happened to Jesus’ body on Mt Tabor, when it was transfigured by the uncreated light of God. Paul believes that same transformation is possible for everyone, but unavailable to those who are conformed to this world.

After Jesus’ ascension, the apostles, filled with the Holy Spirit, set about creating a community that can carry out that kind of transformation. And needless to say, everyone thought the first Christians were incredibly weird.

First of all was their stunning, unprecedented claim that the creator of the universe, the one true God, could be found hanging from a cross. And that his power lay precisely in his weakness, his refusal to resist, and his willingness to forgive his executioners. This was preposterous to the pagan Romans, and to most of Jesus’ fellow Jews, who were waiting on a much different kind of Messiah.

And it didn’t stop there. The early church also refused to conform to the socio-economic norms of the day. The Book of Acts tells us that what possessions they had were held in common, and most were sold for money to assist the poor. They buried the dead whom no one else believed were worthy of burial, and left unattended: slaves, widows, and orphans.

They worshipped God through sacraments drawn from their Jewish roots but recast in the light of Christ’s passion. They baptized one another not just with water but with the Holy Spirit. And they shared a ceremonial meal, called eucharist, in which they believed the risen Christ was present, as bread and wine became his body and blood.

It was also weird that there weren’t any barriers to entry. Anyone could join and belong. It didn’t matter who you were or what your background was: Jew or Greek, male or female, slave or free. The only requirement was faith in Christ and a commitment to living and sharing the gospel of his death and resurrection.

As the church grew, and more and more people came to experience the freedom of transformation, the rest of the world started to panic. Roman diplomats wrote letters to the Emperor warning of this strange and potentially dangerous new sect. James, the brother of Jesus and leader of the Jerusalem church, was stoned to death by Jewish religious officials. Peter and Paul were martyred in Rome not long after.

For the next few generations, the church suffered a series of pogroms. And that brings us to maybe the weirdest thing of all. Not only were these first Christians willing to die for their faith in the Gospel, some of them actually aspired to it. They took Jesus literally when he told his disciples that in order to follow him, they too had to take up their cross.

And then, suddenly, in the 4th century, everything changed. Against all conceivable expectations, the Roman Emperor made Christianity the official state religion. From that moment, being Christian was perfectly normal, and safe. The church was now mainstream, no longer at violent odds with the world.

This is more or less the form of Christianity that dominated for the next 1500 years, the form that most of us recognize and assume is normal. A church that’s fully assimilated, sanctioned by the state, inseparable from the dominant culture, sets moral boundaries and governs behavior.

For 1500 years, the weirdest thing you could do was not belong to the church, not conform to its expectations, which were largely the same expectations of society in general.

And it’s not clear to me that this church would have had room for someone like Paul, or any of the early apostles and evangelists. I even wonder, as Dostoevsky wondered, whether this church, with its institutional hierarchy and doctrinal inflexibility, would have had room for Jesus himself.

But then, almost as suddenly as it came into being, over just the past few generations this dominant institution has started to unravel. We can see its worldly power and privilege fading away. More and more people are looking elsewhere for moral guidance and spiritual nourishment. We still set Sundays aside, but not for church; instead most now practice the religion known as NFL football.

In fact, especially here in the northeast, being Christian is almost weird again. That’s a reality that might be harder to grasp for those of us who are older, and who still see church the way our parents and grandparents did. But for our younger members here at St. Mary’s, things are much different.

Anyone you see here under the age of 40 or so has made a deliberate choice to be here. And that choice sometimes comes with a cost. In certain circles these days, being Christian can even be a liability, something you avoid talking about in public. I experienced this personally in my years working for the New York Times.

But if that’s true, if the church has suddenly become weird again, I could not be happier. To me, the best thing that could happen to the church is for it to once again be completely independent from worldly power. To reclaim its role as a prophetic voice on behalf of the poor and vulnerable, to live as a reflection of God’s kingdom.

To offer not an affirmation of but an alternative to the world’s values; to be a community that practices sharing, forgiveness, and peace in a world that encourages competition, consumption, and conflict.

I want a weird church not just because it means a return to our apostolic roots, and a more authentic representation of the Gospel. I also think a weird church will once again have the power that Paul saw, to truly transform hearts and minds; to keep us from conforming to this world, with its cynicism, its selfishness, and cruelty; to form us instead in the image of Christ, who loved us so much that he gave himself on the cross so that we might come to know and show that same love to the whole world.

And here’s maybe the weirdest thing of all: I believe this is actually the best way to grow the church. I don’t mean in numbers. I don’t think we’ll ever regain the kind of influence, popularity and power we once held (thank God).

Instead, our growth will be in faith, in the depth and power of our witness, in our capacity to once again put our lives on the line for the goodness, truth and beauty God has revealed to us in Christ.

The future church will be a much smaller church, a poorer church, certainly a weirder church; but also a church, I believe, that’s much stronger, more sustainable and more faithful. A church capable of truly transforming human lives, and giving the world a glimpse of God’s glorious future now.

The Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Chappaqua, NY
The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost, August 23rd, 2026

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1. The scholarly consensus is that John wrote his Gospel sometime around the year 100 CE (not “BCE” as I mistakenly said).

2. It’s Luke and Matthew (not Mark), whose Gospels include stories of Jesus’ birth and fill out our picture of Mary.

Many thanks to my talented in-house editor for spotting these. I’m always happy to correct the record, if you happen to find other errors in anything I’ve posted, please do let me know.

Sincerely,

Chris+

Technically it was yesterday, but the Prayer Book allows a congregation to observe its patronal feast on a Sunday. And I’m grateful for that, because it means, first of all, we have the pleasure of retelling the story of Mary and her unique witness to the Gospel.

It also gives us the opportunity to reflect on the question of our identity, on what it means for our congregation, in this time and place, to bear the name of the mother of our Lord and Savior.

If you grew up in the Roman Catholic tradition, you might remember that August 15th is specifically known as the feast of the Assumption—when Mary is taken up into heaven at the end of her life. But that story isn’t actually in the New Testament, so many Protestants chose to abandon it at the time of the Reformation.

As Episcopalians, we follow much of the Reformers’ theology and practice, but we never fully left behind our catholic roots. And so we make room for the veneration of saints like Mary the mother of Jesus, while not straying too far from what scripture says about them.

And what does scripture say about the Blessed Virgin Mary? The first thing I’m sure we all think of is the Christmas story: the Holy Family, Bethlehem, the baby Jesus in a manger. A lifetime of unforgettable images and songs. And the last thing I want to do is spoil any of that.

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But I do want to encourage taking a deeper look at the actual biblical foundations for our picture of Mary. Because the full story is both much more complicated, and to me more wonderful, than we typically imagine. And most importantly, the story of Mary, I believe, has a direct impact on our own stories, as witnesses to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The story is more complicated for several reasons. First of all, the modern era pressures us into making a binary choice about how we read scripture. In the case of Mary’s story, we’re led to believe we either have to accept something that seems impossible as literal fact, or dismiss it entirely as fiction.

Meanwhile, most of us have no idea that the earliest Christians, like their Jewish ancestors, read these stories with much more care and much more wisdom than we tend to.

They recognized and appreciated allegory, metaphor and most importantly, the interweaving of history and theology. They understood what any modern reader of literature takes for granted: that fiction and poetry often get closer to the truth than so-called objective history.

(If you doubt that, just ask yourself why a three thousand year-old poem about a mythic Greek warrior became the highest grossing IMAX film in history this summer.)

So what does any of that have to do with St. Mary? It means we can assume that the New Testament writers were not trying to write history or biography as we understand it. Their one and only concern was to proclaim the Gospel: the good news of what God has done through his crucified and risen Son.

And this meant re-telling Jesus’ story through the lens of the cross. For them, the Gospel story truly begins not in Bethlehem, with Jesus’ birth, but in Jerusalem, with Christ’s passion.

That explains why the New Testament gives us so many different accounts of Jesus’ origins. Paul, who’s writing to the Galatians about twenty years after Jesus’ passion, says Jesus was born of a woman, but doesn’t bother to give her name, or add that she was a virgin.

Twenty years later, the earliest Gospel writer, Mark, begins his story with Jesus’ baptism, and says nothing about his birth. John, writing around the year 100 CE, famously begins his Gospel by tracing Jesus’ origins not to Bethlehem, or his baptism, but to the very beginning of creation.

Only with Matthew and Luke, writing about fifty years after Jesus’s passion, do we get the familiar birth stories, which identify Jesus’ mother as a virgin named Mary. And that’s basically the only thing their two stories have in common; the details are completely different, and incompatible.

Is that because Matthew and Luke are ignorant, or unsophisticated, or just dishonest? Well, no serious Biblical scholar, Christian or not, believes that. They understand that the New Testament writers were trying to express a truth that can only be expressed through literary artistry.

We will never know with complete certainty the name of Jesus’ mother, much less the medical facts surrounding his birth. But the apostles’ faith in Mary and her virginity didn’t depend on census records or a birth certificate, and neither does ours. It’s founded on our belief that Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, is Lord.

In other words, we know who Mary is because of the cross. In the light of the cross, the mother of Jesus becomes something more than a historical figure; she becomes the Blessed Virgin: an image, and an expression, and an embodiment of the Gospel itself. Whatever else it may be, the Christmas story is an ingenious re-telling of Christ’s passion and resurrection.

The virgin womb from which Jesus emerges into earthly life is an echo of the unused tomb from which Christ rises to eternal life. Joseph who attends to the birth of Jesus, stands in for Joseph who arranges for his burial. And Mary who’s the first to embrace the infant Jesus is an echo of the Mary who’s the first to encounter the resurrected Lord.

I know this is a lot to take in. I told you things were more complicated than we tend to assume! I also said the story was more wonderful, and here’s why I think so.

To see the story of St. Mary the Virgin as more than a question of history and biology is to expand our imaginations and open our hearts to the God whose deepest desire is to be with us in Christ; the Creator who brought all things into being for that very purpose: to live and die as one of us, so that in our own dying, we might rise with him into eternal life.

Leaving behind our desperate need for certainty and control sets us free to see the Virgin Mother as some of earliest Christian theologians did: as a powerful symbol of the church itself; the womb which gives birth, by water and the Holy Spirit, to the body of Christ; which nourishes us with the bread of life and the cup of salvation; which inspires us to prophesy, in the unforgettable words of Mary’s song, proclaiming to the poor and vulnerable the good news that God

has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly…has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.

And if these things hold true for the whole church, how much more true are they for our congregation, which bears the name of St. Mary the Virgin? What a blessing, what a privilege, for us to be identified with the one who gives birth, who nourishes, who prophesies, who stands in solidarity with a suffering world that longs for God’s healing and justice.

In our threefold mission of worship, formation and service, we embody the Blessed Virgin in the lifting of our voices to glorify God, our faithfulness in prayer and study, and our compassionate care for the least of these. And in all these things, we sing with Mary:

My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.

The Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Chappaqua, NY
The Feast of St. Mary the Virgin, Sunday August 16th, 2026

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And of all the books we made our way through together, from the Dr. Seuss bibliography to the Harry Potter saga, there was one that stood out. In fact we still have it, so worn out it’s barely held together with brown packing tape. It’s a book called Guess How Much I Love You.

The story is about two rabbits, one big and one little, who attempt to outdo each other in describing their love for one another. “I love you as high as I can hop,” says the little rabbit. To which the big rabbit responds: “Well, I love you as high as I can hop.” “I love you across the river,” says one. “I love you across the river and over the hills,” says the other. I think you get the picture.

What was so lovely about this book, and why we remember it so fondly, was that the rabbits’ game spilled over into our own everyday life. Often I would overhear Julie and one of the boys exchanging fantastically inventive scenarios. “I love you more than all the bagels in Brooklyn.” someone would say. “Oh yeah? Well, I love you more than all the subway stops put together!”

Of course, eventually the boys moved on to supposedly more serious pursuits like homework, piano lessons, and travel sports. But I like to believe that the time spent with this little book, and the innocent and carefree game it inspired, laid a foundation of tenderness and vulnerability for them; that it gave them the assurance of unconditional and unshakable love; a love that, no matter how harsh and unforgiving life may get for them, will always hold them, and never expire.

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We’ve spent three weeks now with the 8th chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans. I’ve tried to highlight how remarkable it is, encapsulating in just a few dozen, tightly compressed verses, the essence of the Gospel. We’ve seen how what Paul says here both contradicts some common assumptions people have about Christianity, and raises some challenging questions for us.

You may remember that Paul begins the chapter with a bold declaration. Those who are “in Christ,” the community of the baptized, have been forever set free from sin and death. Having received the Spirit of God, our minds are now oriented towards life and peace.

And although our mortal bodies still suffer the desires of the flesh, Paul says, Christ’s passion and resurrection give that suffering new meaning. Our prayer of “Abba, Father” harmonizes with Jesus’ cry from the cross, and with the groaning of creation itself, which is laboring to give birth to the renewal of all things.

So the sin and suffering we still experience becomes the source of our hope, the sign that God is at work, albeit in ways we cannot see, healing and glorifying the whole creation.

In our passage this morning we heard the closing section of the chapter, which ends with some of the most rapturous language in all of scripture. And it reveals Paul’s primary motivation, what he wants his readers, more than anything, to feel: a sense of assurance; that the gospel Paul is proclaiming is true and real and something we can have absolute confidence in.

And that assurance is grounded, above all, in God’s infinite and eternal love for us.

Again, Paul knows very well why someone would doubt him. He’s heard all of the objections. What happens, for example, when the crises and chaos of life completely overwhelm us, and make our prayers feel utterly useless?

That’s when the Spirit steps in, Paul says, interceding for us in our weakness, praying in us the prayer that lies beyond words, the sighs that move directly between the very heart of God and our own. Allowing the Spirit of God to move in us, we’re inspired and empowered to join in God’s healing work in the world, the work God’s children have been called to do.

And who are God’s children? Here we move into territory that has been misunderstood for centuries: the language of “predestination,” which has been used in order to exclude, frighten and control.

But within the larger context of the letter, I think it’s clear that when Paul talks about those whom God “predestined,” he is referring not to a privileged elect, but to all of humanity.

Paul, after all, is the apostle to the Gentiles; his mission is explicitly to bring the good news of God’s saving love beyond Israel, to people of every nation, and celebrate their adoption into God’s family. For Paul, there is no barrier to being in Christ. Jew or Greek, male or female, slave or free, all are wanted, and all are welcome to become members of Christ’s body the church.

So many of us were trained to see the church as exclusive and moralizing, harsh and unforgiving; we’ve been encouraged to believe that God is angry at us and that we have to work to earn God’s favor back.

That’s what happens when the church becomes obsessed with power and control, as it has much too often over the centuries; forcing its members to accept a single, biased reading of scripture, or worse, discouraging them from reading it altogether.

And that means many of us were never actually given the good news. We never heard what Paul proclaims so clearly, right here: that God is not in any way against us but entirely for us; that thanks to what God has done in Christ we’ve been justified, forgiven, set free, forever. That there is nothing that the God who did not withhold his own Son will not also give to us, his beloved children.

Who will separate us from the love of Christ? It’s a rhetorical question, but Paul can’t resist answering it, eager to illustrate the profound depth of God’s desire to hold and heal and glorify all of creation, and to be with us in Christ forever. Guess how much God loves you. So much that

neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Whatever you’ve heard, whatever you were taught to believe, I’m here to affirm the truth that God loves you. That’s the treasure hidden in the field, the one pearl of great value.

And it’s not just my own personal opinion, or interpretation, or wishful thinking. It’s the Gospel itself, printed right there in your bulletin, in black and white. I invite you to take it home with you. Read it every morning, so you can remember just how much God loves you.

It’s so much that, rather than abandon us to sin and death, God in Christ endured the cross, conquered death, and breathed his own life into us through the Holy Spirit; giving us a glimpse of creation’s ultimate purpose and destination, and revealing the truth about not just who God is but who we are: creatures made in God’s image, creatures made for communion, creatures made, more than anything, for love.

The Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Chappaqua, NY
The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, July 26th, 2026

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Things went sideways from the very start; local residents were expecting the gang, and opened fire on them from the street outside. Several civilians were killed, and every member of the gang was wounded. They rode off with only a few bags of nickels to show for their trouble.

It was the beginning of the end for Jesse James and the notorious James-Younger gang.

I grew up with a pop culture view of Jesse James as just one of many colorful outlaws of the old west. Someone who did what he did purely for the money and the thrill of getting away with it.

But historians have come to think differently. They now believe Jesse James and his crew were motivated mostly by politics, as part of a larger campaign of violence in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Jesse and many others like him in his home state of Missouri had fought for or alongside the Confederacy as guerillas. They and others across the South refused to accept the Union victory, and devoted themselves to preserving the old order of slavery and white supremacy. So although the war had officially ended, the resistance continued, through anger, hatred and violence.

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Last week, we heard Paul tell the church in Rome that those who have the Spirit of Christ are no longer condemned, because on the cross, Christ defeated sin and death forever. And I raised an obvious question: if that’s true, if Paul is correct, why then is there still so much sin and evil in the world? How can he claim victory, when we still see so much suffering all around us?

The answer lies at the very heart of Paul’s theology. Paul earnestly believed that the cosmic war was over, that through his passion and resurrection Christ had won the victory over the power called Sin, the enemy of God and God’s creation, whose ultimate weapon was death.

But Paul also believed that the full impact of that victory would unfold over time; that sin, death and the devil would continue to resist it. And Paul believed that it was now the adopted children of God, those who have inherited the Spirit and the life of Christ, who have been called as witnesses to God’s ongoing renewal and ultimate glorification of all things.

So for Paul, our time is an in-between time. A time of “already but not yet.” We live in the aftermath of victory, but before the enemy’s final surrender.

Paul thinks we can see and experience this most clearly and directly through our own mortal bodies. Our minds may have been renewed by the Holy Spirit, but our bodies are still subject to sin, through the needs and desires of the flesh.

And Paul argues that we have a choice here, the same choice that Moses gives the Israelites just before they enter the promised land. We can choose life or death. We can serve the Spirit we’ve been given and truly live, or we can return to the slavery of the flesh, and a kind of living death.

And it’s this very experience, the experience of our own bodies as a battleground, of the suffering we endure as we try to do what’s right and good, that Paul sees as the very sign of God’s renewal at work. Paul sees the continuing struggle against sin as proof that God’s love is breaking in, and the new world is beginning to emerge.

And in fact it’s not just our bodies, but the whole world that’s involved in this transformation. As Paul puts it, in one of his most memorable lines: We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now.

Christ’s resurrection is just the first fruits of what’s to come—a preview of the redemption that awaits not just our own bodies, but all of creation. And here again we see that the vision of heaven is not of some other world up in the clouds, but of this world, this earth, these human bodies, being brought to perfection by God’s love.

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us, Paul says. Yes, sin persists; yes, suffering exists. But Paul has given us a way to understand suffering—our suffering now has meaning. Our cries of agony are harmonized with those of creation, and those of the Spirit within us crying “Abba, father!”

And in that song of lament, Paul hears the labor pains of a new world being born.

Our suffering is not a sign that God has forsaken us; rather, it shows that God is working in and through and with us—the body of Christ—to bring about the glorification of all things.

Of course, that’s a hard thing to accept. Indeed, Paul is inviting us to do something quite challenging, he’s inviting us to make the persistence of sin and suffering the source of our hope.

And his argument has an inescapable logic. Because after all, if the world we all long for, the world transfigured by God’s love were already here, hope would make no sense. Hope that is seen is not hope, Paul says; we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

And isn’t this how we actually, in fact understand the world around us? Do any of us truly believe that, just because racism and white supremacy still exist in our country, the Civil War, the 13th Amendment, and the Civil Rights Act were not decisive victories? In spite of ongoing resistance to full equality, do we not believe that these were crucial milestones on the way to a more just, more free, more loving society?

It’s true that the world is still plagued by evil and violence. It’s true that sin and death continue to exert a powerful influence over us. But they’re fighting for a lost cause. Thanks be to God, the war is over.

Do you ever notice that the horrible things we see happen every day are also depressingly familiar? And by contrast, whenever and wherever justice and peace break through and take hold—doesn’t that always feel unprecedented, like a brand new beginning; doesn’t it often seem like a miracle?

The devil, apparently, has very few new tricks, whereas God is constantly at work in the most surprising ways.

When it comes to suffering—depsite the real pain it brings—we’ve seen it all before. But every advance in kindness, compassion, freedom and equality feels unique, like a step into the future—a future that, although it has yet to exist, we can still imagine through hope.

The church exists—St. Mary’s exists—to fire that imagination and embody that hope, by living God’s future now. We’ve received the Spirit, who inspires and empowers us to reflect hope in the midst of suffering, to remind the world that in the passion of Christ, we felt the first sharp pangs of new birth.

And in his resurrection, we’re offered a glimpse of what’s to come—the whole creation, liberated, redeemed and glorified.

The Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Chappaqua, NY
The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, July 19th, 2026

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People go to church so that they can learn how to get to heaven, and how to avoid hell. That’s more or less the church’s purpose. The church tells us what we have to do, the kind of people we have to be, so that when we die, God will whisk us away somewhere to watch Netflix and eat ice cream sandwiches forever.

And how does the church know what to tell us? Well, that’s what the Bible is for. The Bible is an instruction manual for how to be a good person. It provides a long and comprehensive list of “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots,” and as long as we’re able to obey the former and avoid the latter, all will be well.

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For centuries, this picture of church is mostly what kept people in the pews. Many were motivated by the sheer terror of possibly spending eternity being punished in an infernal prison. Some were simply hedging their bets, going along with it, just in case it was true. And many others went purely because everybody else did.

But these days, this picture of church is clearly a big reason why people are leaving the pews. Many no longer find the story plausible. They can’t believe in a God who would delight in punishing people, including his own son. Others have left because they’ve simply found more joy, love and meaning outside the church. And I don’t blame them one bit.

Even those of us who have stayed, who have a much more positive experience of church, who are convinced that there’s more to the Christian life than this crude picture of divine reward and punishment—we ourselves still struggle to let go of that popular and pervasive view of faith and the church and the bible.

Although we might think we know better, we still have stuck, deep in our hearts, the feeling that we may not be worthy, that we may not be doing enough—or at least enough of the good stuff—to secure God’s favor.

Deep down we’re anxious that maybe we won’t make it to heaven after all. And so we go to church, we sing, we pray and we serve our little hearts out, hoping we might finally earn our way there.

We do it all so that, when the end finally comes, we’ll receive God’s commendation, and escape God’s condemnation.

And this is our outlook despite the fact that Paul tells us, clear and plain as day, that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

I think I ought to say that again: There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Any fear we have that God may condemn us is baseless, and senseless, because Scripture tells us—there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

You’ve been set free. You are off the hook. There’s not only nothing more you need to do, there’s nothing more you can do, to be worthy of God’s love.

How can Paul be so sure? Because, he says, you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you.

And how is it that we are “in the Spirit” and the “Spirit of God” in us? Well that’s simply another way of saying we’ve been baptized. Through sacramental grace, we’ve died with Christ and been reborn with him into his resurrected body and life—a body and a life possessed by the Holy Spirit.

That’s why, although we each still inhabit a physical body, and suffer the needs and desires of the flesh, our minds are no longer enslaved to sin and death, because they are now set on the Spirit that gives life and peace.

So let me repeat, once more, what Paul is saying. There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. You are worthy of God’s love, you are free from sin and death, your salvation has been accomplished. And it’s a gift that’s freely given to you, because you trust that on the cross, God in Christ has condemned sin—forever.

That’s the good news—the gospel—that Paul has for the Romans, and for us.

It’s the very opposite of the picture that dominated the imagination of the church for so long. The picture that at first kept people in the pews out of fear, and then emptied the pews because of its total failure to heal and inspire. A picture that was anything but good news and that, sadly, most of us inherited.

This 8th chapter of Romans offers us the true picture in a microcosm. It’s the beating heart of Paul’s theological vision, a tightly argued masterpiece that spells out, according to the Scriptures, exactly why God’s desire was always the glorification of all humanity, and the transformation of this world, our world—into something like heaven.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll hear more about and reflect on these things, and also address some obvious questions.

Questions like: why were we stuck with the wrong picture for so long?

Or, why is there still so much sin in the world—still so much sin in me—if Christ has defeated sin?

And if Christ has made me right with God, forever, why can’t I just go on sinning, without consequence?

Finally, what about those who are not “in Christ”—what happens to them?

As I think about how we’ll tackle these vital questions, it strikes me that as much as anything, the church exists to be a place where trust and unity enables God’s people to discern together, over time, the unfolding mystery of God’s loving action in the world and in our lives. To tell and retell God’s story, and learn to recognize our own story within it. And by simply being with one another today, to practice how we will be with God forever.

The purpose of church, in other words, is not to tell us how to get to heaven someday. The purpose of the church is to be heaven—to participate in heaven, to embody heaven—here and now.

Because heaven is not some distant other place where God is waiting to welcome the disembodied souls of good people after they die. Heaven is this earth, this universe—God’s good creation—perfected by God’s love for it—and populated by God’s beloved children: you and me, fearless, forgiven and free.

The Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Chappaqua, NY
The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, July 12th, 2026

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Imagine living under that excruciating pressure, and then hearing Jesus speak these words:

Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.

This weight you’re carrying, this is not what God intended, and not what God wants, Jesus is saying. And I’ve come to show you—to show everyone—another way of life.

Now try to imagine someone closer to our own time, someone who constantly carries the burden of being persecuted, stripped of their dignity, and threatened with violence. Someone who’s decided they cannot tolerate another day in their own country, and has risked everything to set off on a perilous journey for a place where they and their children can live freely and without fear.

What would they make of these words, inscribed on a plaque inside the Statue of Liberty, in New York City?

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me…

These lines come from a poem called “The New Colossus,” written by a woman named Emma Lazarus. The United States of America, they remind us, is a nation created explicitly to provide refuge and sanctuary for vulnerable and marginalized people. Yesterday, we celebrated 250 years of this unprecedented experiment, which has captivated the entire world.

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Emma Lazarus’ words, like Jesus’, are nothing but good news to the poor and vulnerable, whoever and wherever they may be. And I believe the similarity between them is anything but an accident; because consciously or not, the society envisioned by the American founders, the new nation created on July 4th, 1776, with its Declaration of Independence, was saturated in the values of the Gospel and of Christ’s church.

That’s why I’m so baffled by the argument currently taking place about whether America is a so-called Christian nation or not. On one side, we have some who are loudly calling for an exclusive, racist and sexist society which is blatantly unbiblical and unchristian. On the other side we have secular liberals who seem offended and terrified by any appeal at all to a transcendent authority.

But of course that’s precisely what Thomas Jefferson does in the Declaration:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The deep biblical underpinnings of that statement ought to be obvious to anyone with even a passing familiarity with Scripture—from Genesis to Revelation. But ours is a culture that no longer takes the Bible very seriously, including, and perhaps especially, those who claim to take it literally.

But more importantly, I think, what both Christian nationalists and secular atheists miss is just how deeply the promise of universal equality, dignity and freedom is received as good news to those who have been deprived of these things.

To those who’ve been carrying impossible burdens, who’ve been made homeless, who are seen as inferior—a Galilean peasant in Jesus’ day or a Palestinian refugee in ours—the hope of finding rest is not just a sentimental ideal, but a matter of sheer survival.

Does the United States need a clear and workable immigration system? Of course it does. But that’s a matter of policy, and the church is called to do something else entirely. The church is called to prophecy, and to faithful witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The church is called to remember that this nation was settled not just by immigrants but by refugees, who faced violence and persecution in their home countries, and who came here wanting nothing more than to worship their God freely and peacefully.

The church is called to remember the story of Israel, who God delivered from suffering and slavery, but who periodically forgot what God had done for them, turned and oppressed the stranger and the refugee, and brought ruin and destruction on themselves and everyone around them.

The church is called to remember that the Lord and Savior we follow began his own life as a refugee from state persecution, was rejected and cast out of his native town, betrayed and abandoned by his own people.

And above all, the church is called to be alive and responsive to the reality of sin. We of all people should understand what Paul knew so well: that despite our best efforts and intentions, the sin which dwells in our members will always prevent us from being morally perfect. And so the church is called to absolute humility; we must always be ready to repent of our sins, make reparations, and seek reconciliation.

By doing all that, we become a blessing to our neighborhood, our country, and the whole world; we model what a “Christian nation” would actually look like. A nation of universal welcome and full equality; a nation where all are protected from persecution and violence; where all are cared for and no one goes without basic necessities. A land of rest, and a land of hope.

A nation that, by seeking Christ in the face of every human being, fulfills the promise expressed in the Declaration, and embodied by Lady Liberty in the New York harbor. A people always striving to emulate the self-giving love poured out in Christ’s passion, crucifixion and resurrection, and to share without reservation God’s abundant and unconditional gifts of life, freedom and joy.

The Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Chappaqua, NY
The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost, July 5th, 2026

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Today is a perfect example. When many of us are looking forward to celebrating Father’s Day, what does the Lectionary give us? Jesus making this cheerful announcement to his twelve most trusted disciples:

Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father.

And Jesus doesn’t stop there; he goes on to say that his followers must love him more than their father—and more than mother, more than their children even. Anyone who wants to follow him, Jesus says, must be willing to take up their cross, and lose their life for his sake. Happy Father’s Day!

To our ears these words are confusing at best, and even frightening; some people may find them downright offensive, and it’s hard to blame them. How can the prince of peace, a man who’s told us to forgive those who hurt us and love our enemies, suddenly say he’s come with a sword? How can someone who taught us to pray to God as a loving father now tell us to hate our human fathers? Is Jesus being hypocritical, or deliberately cruel, or both?

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Taken out of context, these words do sound especially harsh and out of character. So let’s take a step back and place them within the larger Gospel narrative.

We know Jesus was a masterful preacher and teacher. He attracted and held large audiences not just because of what he had to say, but how he said it. Jesus is famous for speaking in parables; but another common tactic Jesus uses is hyperbole. He exaggerates to push us out of our comfort zones. He overstates his case in shocking ways, to force us into seeing things from a new perspective.

And one of the things Jesus wants us to see is that, in the kingdom of heaven, the concept of “family” is much bigger than we normally understand it. Because if we’re all created in God’s image, then we are all God’s children—one family—and so our concern and compassion for each other should transcend blood relationships or tribal affiliation.

This is what astonished and eventually angered Jesus’ opponents so much—the fact that he was totally “impartial.” He refused to observe the normal boundaries. Jesus treated strangers and enemies no differently than he treated his family and friends, because that’s how it will be in God’s kingdom.

And this is terrible news for those who benefit from these artificial divisions. There is always power to be gained—and profit to be earned—from maintaining boundaries, policing and defending your tribe against rivals; exploiting and scapegoating those who are different, and especially those who are weaker.

The Gospel represents a direct challenge to this system, and to those who benefit from it. Those who enjoy and preserve the status quo see Jesus as anything but a peacemaker; to them, his unconditional love cuts like a sword through their power. And they’re determined to fight back.

This is one of the deep ironies of the Gospel: that in a fallen world, in a world that has drifted so far from the unity and harmony that God desires for us, Jesus’ message of love and mercy is bound to generate hatred and conflict.

But of course Jesus knows this, and so here in Chapter 10 he’s trying to prepare his disciples for what they will face, as they go out to preach and to live God’s kingdom. And he refuses to sugarcoat it. He pulls no punches. There is no bait and switch. The disciples will be taking this message and this way of life out into a world that is openly hostile to it.

That’s why he tells them that whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. He’s not saying they’re bad people, but that they’ll be ineffective as disciples.

To fight injustice, disciples have to be willing to go where Jesus goes, be with the people Jesus keeps company with—the poor, the oppressed, sinners of the worst kind. Disciples are taught to learn to see these people as family—even if it risks rejection by their own flesh and blood families.

And Jesus thinks this decision, whether to follow him into God’s kingdom or not, is a matter of life and death. Those who find their life will lose it, he says, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.

Those who spend their lives pursuing status, comfort and security become enslaved to these things. On the other hand, those who are able to trust that in Christ God has given us everything we need will know the joy of living free from the fear of never having enough.

This presents a real challenge to many of us, who don’t have to worry about money, who already enjoy comfort and security. Who in their right mind would want to lose the kind of lives we have—and in many cases worked hard to achieve?

And beyond that lies an even more uncomfortable question: is Jesus saying we can’t be his followers unless we’re able to throw everything we have away?

The temptation here is to say to ourselves: “I’m sorry, this is just too hard, there’s no way I’ll ever be able to do what Jesus is asking.” And so we give up trying. We walk away disappointed, like the rich young man who Jesus tells to sell his possessions and give the money to the poor.

And the first thing I want to say about that is, despite what he says in the Sermon on the Mount—in another moment of hyperbole?—I don’t think Jesus expects us to be perfect. What he wants is for us to make his vision of God’s kingdom our vision, our standard, our deepest desire, and to follow him down the path that leads to real life.

What if we took just one small step each day? Where would we find ourselves 5, 10, 15 or 50 years from now?

But what’s really interesting to me is that we act as if the decision to lose our lives for Christ’s sake has not already been made!

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.

Paul reminds us that in baptism we’ve already taken the decisive step, we’ve already accepted citizenship in the kingdom of heaven, and become members of Christ’s body. We’ve already lost our old lives and been given a new, cross-shaped life that’s grounded in selfless love, forgiveness and non-violence.

And it’s ok if we don’t live this life perfectly every single second, as long as we remember where we came from and who we belong to, and as long as we’re clear about where we’re going.

Because that is the knowledge that allows us to truly celebrate on a day like today. To see the world not as a place of scarcity and threat but of God’s endless abundance. To look not just to our fathers but to every father—and mother and sister and brother and son and daughter—with the same love and gratitude. To allow the infinite love of our heavenly Father for each and every one of us to radiate out of our lives and into a world that is being transformed, even now, into God’s heavenly kingdom.

The Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Chappaqua, NY
The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, June 21st, 2026

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And then imagine being told what your job really involves. You can’t take anything with you—none of the comforts you’re used to. No money, no luggage, just the clothes on your back. You’ll be entirely dependent on the hospitality of others. You’ll be utterly vulnerable and exposed, like sheep in the midst of wolves.

And that’s just the beginning. You’ll also face violent persecution, from both the religious and political authorities; your own family will reject you; you’ll be hated by all because of your faith in Jesus. So much for the great honor and privilege of being an apostle! How can anything that comes with so much suffering possibly be a blessing? Who in the world would want the job?

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And if all that weren’t enough, Jesus wraps up what has to be the worst sales pitch in history by twisting the knife, telling his apostles that the one who endures to the end will be saved. That’s right, according to Jesus, our salvation lies on the other side of suffering.

Many of you know that most Thursdays I visit Bedford Hills Correctional Facility and celebrate Holy Eucharist with a small group of women there. It’s one of the most fulfilling ministries I’ve ever been involved in, except for one thing: I have no idea how to preach to them.

Part of the problem is the diversity of backgrounds. There are members of the congregation who struggle to read, while others are pursuing advanced degrees in theology. How can I say something that will feed all of them?

But a bigger barrier is the stark contrast in life experience. To put it bluntly, these women have experienced suffering on a level that’s almost unimaginable to you and me. And this past Thursday it really hit me—who am I to preach about the meaning and value of suffering to them?

I know it’s not a competition. I’ve suffered in my life, just as you and every other human being has. And yet I still believe that being incarcerated—not to mention the actions that led to their incarceration—produces a unique and profound kind of suffering.

And so I needed to hear from them: how do they feel about suffering? Do they agree with Paul? Does their experience match his claim that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope? Do they believe that, as sinners, people the world sees as “ungodly,” Christ died for them, and that the Holy Spirit has poured God’s love into their hearts?

And their answer, which I should’ve known, was simple. You see us here, every Thursday, don’t you?? Despite the daily indignities and degradations that come with prison life, they make time each week for church. While living in an environment of violence and despair they’ve kept the faith that God has forgiven their trespasses, the hope that there is somehow life on the other side of those bars, and the love of a community which bears each other’s crosses, shares each other’s burdens, so that no one suffers alone.

We know that the first Christians suffered. Jesus’ predictions for the twelve apostles were terribly accurate—many of them would be martyred, some even by crucifixion. The members of the church in Rome who received Paul’s letter certainly knew suffering—many were slaves and most lacked the protection of social status. And because of their adherence to a strange new faith, all of them risked persecution at the hands of the Empire.

But instead of assuring them that their suffering was unjust and would one day end, Paul tells them instead that their suffering is something valuable, something they should be proud of.

What in the world is Paul thinking? How can suffering produce anything but shame and despair? The answer, quite simply, is the cross.

Those who’ve heard the gospel—those who believe God raised Jesus from the dead—are bound to see suffering in a brand new light. Because the cross reveals a God who loves us and the world so much that he refused to abandon us to our suffering, a God who took on our human flesh, and endured the worst suffering we could possibly inflict, even death on a cross. And in the movement from cross to resurrection, we see that not even death can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

That’s why the cross is the source of our hope. Because we recognize in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ the power that enables us to endure suffering in our own lives. In the cross our suffering is given meaning, it’s transformed from a curse into a blessing. In the cross we learn to see suffering as the gateway to the love that is the source and salvation of all creation.

And yet the cross is also a scandal, a stumbling block, a deal-breaker—even for many people who consider themselves Christians. How dare I tell someone that their suffering is a blessing—me, who was born into and enjoys immense privilege in this life.? For that matter, why is there suffering in the first place? If God is all-good and all-powerful, why does he allow suffering of any kind? Why couldn’t God just create a world without suffering?

Because a world without suffering would be a world without love. There is no love without suffering. We know that—nothing could be more obvious. Because every true relationship we’ve ever had—as parents, children, spouses, friends—is one for which we’ve suffered. Because to love another person is to give ourselves fully to them, to make ourselves vulnerable, to sacrifice our desires for their sake—all of which opens us up to suffering.

Jesus and Paul are not saying suffering is good in itself and that we should deliberately seek it out. They know we never have to go looking for suffering—because suffering will always find us. So then what about random, innocent, involuntary suffering—the suffering experienced by victims of natural disasters, or hideous diseases, or human evils like the Holocaust? Where is love to be found in that kind of suffering?

That’s of course a much deeper and more challenging question. But here again I think we can find the beginning of an answer in the cross. The message of the cross is not just that God knows that we suffer, and cares about our suffering. On the cross God knows our suffering, because God himself suffers. God who is infinitely more powerful, infinitely more intelligent, infinitely more benevolent is nevertheless willing to suffer with us.

And that burning desire to be with us even unto death is proof of God’s unconditional love for us—no matter who we are or what we’ve done.

And in fact it’s more than that; it’s proof that God is love—the love that’s both our source and our salvation—and a love I believe is well worth suffering for.

The Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Chappaqua, NY
The Third Sunday after Pentecost, June 14th, 2026

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Our ancestors struggled to understand a world which seemed unpredictable at best, and hostile at worst. The only thing that was clear to them was that they were not in charge. It was obvious that both their existence and their survival depended on something greater than themselves.

And that “something” was most often a pantheon of gods, powerful beings whose whims determined the most important things: things like the weather, or who would be king, or which side would win a given war.

So it became really important to keep the gods on your side, by keeping them happy. The first religious activities were organized around how to give the gods what they wanted so that they would benefit your people. And these activities usually involved some form of ritual sacrifice which, as horrifying as it is to us now, often included humans.

The Israelites, however, were different from other ancient tribes, for a few reasons. First of all, they were unique for believing in just a single god: the One Most High, who created the universe, called Abraham out of Mesopotamia, drew the Israelites into Egypt, and chose Moses to lead them out after Pharoah had enslaved them.

Another difference was that, although the Israelites did believe their God required sacrifices, unlike other tribes, they were convinced that God loathed and prohibited human sacrifices, especially child sacrifice.

And here’s yet another difference, another way that ancient Israel’s understanding of God was unique. Unlike other gods, Israel’s God desires above all to be in covenant with his people. He certainly gets upset when Israel misbehaves, and she’s often punished for her transgressions. But God never abandons Israel, he never breaks the covenant. God remains faithful to Israel, because he loves Israel.

This is made clear on Mt Sinai when God explains to Moses that he is a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. And God immediately proves it, when he remains with Israel despite her infidelity with the golden calf.

Now that phrase “steadfast love” is very important. It shows up all throughout scripture to describe God’s feelings towards Israel. The Hebrew word for “steadfast love” is hesed, and it’s also translated as “lovingkindness” or simply mercy.

So in the Torah, we can see two competing answers to that ancient question “what does God want from us?” One answer is similar to every other tribe’s answer: God wants sacrifices, made on an altar, following the appropriate rituals. This is a purely transactional approach. If we do this, then God will give us this.

The other answer to the question is a more relational answer. It’s based on faithfulness to the covenant made at Sinai, where God and Israel pledge their love, their hesed, for one another. What God wants is for Israel to return God’s hesed for her through faithfulness to him.

And the story of Israel, from the Exodus to the exile, is largely one of God constantly calling his children back from their frequent infidelity, God again and again forgiving Israel and pleading with her to remember the hesed, the steadfast love and mercy that defines their covenant, and is the key to Israel’s flourishing.

By the time of the exile, however, it’s clear that the sacrificial system has failed. Although they’ve been ticking all the right religious boxes, performing the correct behaviors at the proper times, they still keep being invaded and conquered by powerful neighbors. The transactional approach to keeping God happy is simply not working.

So what needs to change? Gradually, Israel remembers that her covenant with God is essentially relational. This awareness begins to emerge in the Psalms, including our psalm for this morning. God could not say it more clearly:

Do you think I eat the flesh of bulls, * or drink the blood of goats?
Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving * and make good your vows to the Most High.

Here, unlike in the Torah, God expresses a clear preference. What good are sacrifices if Israel forsakes the covenant, by failing to return the love and mercy they’ve received from God?

The prophets pick up on this idea and take it even further. Through Hosea, God delivers the same clear message to Israel: I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.

And it’s no accident that this is the exact line Jesus uses to answer the Pharisees, who have attacked him for eating with tax collectors. They want to know why he’s breaking the law, by dining with people who are despised because they’re seen as “unclean.” Jesus has even had the audacity to include these tax collectors and other sinners among his disciples.

But when Jesus looks at these people, what he sees first and foremost is a beloved child of God, not whether they are ritually clean or unclean. And the way to “purify” those who’ve strayed from the covenant, the way to bring them back to God, is not by ostracizing them and demanding they jump through religious hoops. It’s through the healing power of love and mercy.

Just as physicians seek to serve the sick, Jesus has come to save sinners, not saints. Because they’re so estranged from God, it’s sinners who most need to know that God loves them, that God forgives them, that God will be faithful to them.

And of course, the truth is that there is both a saint and a sinner in each and every one of us. Jesus has come to save humanity, to show us God’s hesed, and to inspire us to return that love and mercy to God through love of God and neighbor. That’s the salvation Christ offers—salvation based not on cold, hard transactions, but on the warmth of genuine relationships.

When our relationships are founded on love, we come to see that showing mercy is itself the most powerful form of sacrifice. When we give up our need to control and dominate one another, when we put the needs of our beloved before our own—just as they sacrifice their needs in order to meet ours—we create space for the hesed of God to flow through us.

That’s why the cross is the ultimate sign of God’s love, and why we say Christ made a perfect sacrifice for the whole world. Through his passion, crucifixion and resurrection, Christ embodies the self-sacrificial love that’s the only effective response to the world’s violence.

On the cross, the perfect love of the Trinity is poured out into the world, and draws the world up into its divine life. And so our “sacrifice” now is one of praise and thanksgiving, for the gospel that has freed us from a life dominated by the fear of death.

So in the end, I believe the question we should be asking is not what does God want from us. The real question is what does God want for us? Certainly not a life filled with anxiety about whether our religious practices are perfect. No, what God wants for us is to fully enjoy the relationship, the covenant we’ve inherited from Israel, through our baptism into Christ.

What God wants for us is full communion—with God, with one another, with ourselves, and with creation. What God wants for us is a life overflowing with the hesed, the steadfast love and mercy that will save the world.

The Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Chappaqua, NY
The Second Sunday after Pentecost, June 6th, 2026

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One of the many arguments that fuel this division is the debate over whether the United States was founded as a “Christian nation”—and whether it still should be. And a very vocal group, so-called Christian nationalists, have increasingly asserted that the answer to both questions is an emphatic yes.

Now let me say first of all that I think they are basically correct about the country being founded as a Christian nation—though not for the reasons they think.

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It’s not because each individual signer of the Declaration of Independence was an orthodox Christian. They didn’t need to be, because the fact is that the country’s founders were all operating within a shared worldview that was shaped almost entirely by biblical faith.

Even Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration and a notorious skeptic, invoked “Nature’s God,” and described the equality and inherent rights of every human being as truths that were “self-evidently endowed” by a Creator. This kind of claim is impossible without centuries of church teaching behind it. Whatever his personal doubts were, Christianity was the air that Jefferson and his peers breathed, the water they swam in.

But what Christian nationalists can’t seem to accept is that America, precisely because it was founded on Christian convictions, is a nation that welcomes all people—regardless of race, sex, religion, class, education, or ability—to participate fully and equally under the law.

And that commitment has allowed us to grow into a vast and glorious tapestry of human diversity, with citizens from every conceivable background living and working together in a way that would have been unimaginable to the founders.

And of course the irony here is that this is exactly the kind of community first imagined and made possible by the apostolic church, in the aftermath of Christ’s passion and resurrection.

The heart of the Gospel is that God’s love, revealed in Christ, according to the Scriptures, calls into being a truly human family, one that transcends blood and soil—a love that sees our differences as the source of our unity, and not our division.

But Christian nationalists reject all of this, proclaiming instead a made-up, tribalistic religion grounded in racism and sexism rather than universal love. It’s a preposterous travesty of the Gospel, and so hard for me to take seriously that I have to actively remind myself that Christian nationalism is also heretical and dangerous.

Thankfully this morning, on the Day of Pentecost, we get a vivid reminder of why that’s not just my opinion, but the clear message of both scripture and tradition.

Let’s begin by hearing, once again, the Collect of the Day:

Almighty God, on this day you opened the way of eternal life to every race and nation by the promised gift of your Holy Spirit: Shed abroad this gift throughout the world by the preaching of the Gospel, that it may reach to the ends of the earth;

Our reading from the Book of Acts describes the events of that day in vivid detail. The disciples, gathered together, experience the promised coming of the Holy Spirit as a theophany—a vision of God’s glory, that includes booming sounds and flaming tongues.

The spiritual pyrotechnics are so striking that sometimes it’s hard for us to separate them from the event’s real message and meaning. What’s important here is not individual ecstatic experiences, but the ability to communicate across difference, and the invitation to both Jews and proselytes—insiders as well as those on the margins.

In other words, Pentecost is about how the Holy Spirit’s arrival empowers the church to unite all the peoples of the world, not despite but in virtue of their differences.

Paul captures this well in his letter to the church in Corinth. He reminds them that whatever their background—Jew or Greek, slave or free—they were now, through baptism into Christ, members of one body. And the Spirit now moves through each of them, giving each member a unique function within the body—for the common good.

I recently came across a passage that beautifully illustrates this promise of Pentecost. It’s long, but I hope you’ll also find it beautiful, and true.

Men, women, and children, profoundly divided as to race, nation, language, manner of life, work, knowledge, honor, fortune…the Church recreates all of them in the Spirit. To all equally she communicates a divine aspect. All receive from her a unique nature which cannot be broken asunder, a nature which no longer permits one henceforth to take into consideration the many and profound differences which are their lot. In that way all are raised up and united in a manner which is truly catholic. In her none is in the least degree separated from the community, all are grounded, so to speak, in one another by the simple and indivisible power of faith…Christ, too, is all in all, He who contains all in Himself according to the unique, infinite, and all-wise power of His goodness—as a center upon which all lines converge—that the creatures of the one God may not live as strangers or enemies one with another, having no place in common, where they may display their love and their peace.

You might assume this was written last week, by a modern, liberal biblical scholar. In fact, this magnificent statement was written in the 7th century, by a Syrian monk named Maximus.

And while he may not be a household name, Maximus is no marginal figure. Both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches venerate him as a saint, and he expresses here the real Christian tradition, where difference is celebrated and unity in love is the purpose of creation.

Many of you have come to me with concerns about Christian nationalism and its influence over the direction of the country. You want to know what you can do in response.

Besides fasting from toxic online discourse, and exercising that most American of all freedoms—the freedom to vote—the first thing I would recommend is simply to remember that our current situation is nothing new.

Christian nationalism is an oxymoron that’s always existed in some form, ever since the Roman Empire appropriated Christianity as its official religion, way back in the 4th century. And the true church has survived because of ordinary people like you and me, who remain faithful to proclaiming and practicing the Gospel.

So I would encourage you to re-familiarise yourself with what the church has believed and taught from its earliest days until now. Become fluent in the language and ideas in the Book of Common Prayer, the Book of Acts, and Paul’s letters. Learn to tell the difference between true, historic faith and fashionable nonsense that passes for tradition.

More importantly, keep the habit of coming to church, where these sacred texts are read and interpreted communally, as preparation for entering— along with fellow members of Christ’s body—into his presence in the Eucharist, where together we embody the heavenly community that Pentecost has called into being. A community capable of showing the world what human beings were created to be.

And of course, pray about all of this. Take time to talk to God, every single day. Or better yet, sit in silence and allow God’s grace to go to work on your heart, and slowly transform you into someone who trusts that in Christ’s passion, death and resurrection, God has poured out the divine love that will save us all—not just our country from the tyranny of today, but the whole of creation—always and forever.

The Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Chappaqua, NY
The Day of Pentecost, May 24th, 2026

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And no agora was more famous than the one in Athens, where, a few hundred years before the birth of Christ, legendary figures like Socrates and Pericles laid some of the basic foundations of modern society, developing ways of thinking about democracy, rationality, morality that we take for granted today.

The Book of Acts tells the story of early apostles like Peter and Paul, who fanned out across the Mediterranean world to evangelize, baptize and plant new churches. And we’ve come to know these communities, in ancient cities like Ephesus, Corinth and Rome, from the letters sent to them, which now form almost half of the New Testament. In today’s reading, we hear about Paul’s time in Athens, where he finds a city overflowing with religious images, statues and monuments dedicated to a bewildering variety of gods.

At first Paul is overwhelmed by this riot of iconography, but eventually he senses a golden opportunity. He makes his way to the agora, determined to introduce the city’s sharpest minds to his gospel: the radical new understanding of God and creation, made possible by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

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And Paul’s performance in the agora is so provocative that he’s brought to something called the Areopagus, to explain himself further. The Areopagus was a local council, who took their name from their meeting place—“Mars Hill” in English—which stood right next to the agora. And that’s where our reading picks up this morning, just before Paul gives one of the most masterful sermons in the entire New Testament.

He begins very wisely, by complimenting his audience. Covering their city with objects of worship shows that the Athenians clearly have a special genius for religion. Paul then asks them to consider one monument in particular—an altar that’s inscribed “to an unknown god.” And he proceeds to explain why this shrine is so different from all the others.

By paying tribute to a God who cannot be known as every other god is known, Paul believes the Athenians have come closer to the truth than they realize. Human beings can never capture the true and living God in statues or paintings. Even our human languages, concepts, and knowledge are all too limited to fully grasp who God is. And that’s because, as Paul tells them: God is not an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.

So then who is God? God is the one who made the world and everything in it…who is Lord of heaven and earth…and gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. God is the one in whom we live and move and have our being. God is who made and sustains us, not the other way around.

And, Paul continues, because the true God can never be possessed by one single race or nation or tribe, and because God is the giver and sustainer of all life, we are all God’s children. And the Athenians themselves know this, he says, because their own poets have said so.

Finally, Paul reaches the climax of his argument. Something incredible has happened, he says; one single event has changed everything. The “unknown” God, who exists beyond all human art and imagination, has nevertheless been revealed, once and for all, in the raising of Jesus from the dead.

The love of God has been poured out through the cross, the powers of this world have come under judgement, and the age to come—the kingdom of heaven—has broken into human time.

And this event, this gospel, which Paul and the apostles are now traveling the world at immense risk to proclaim, means that all people are now invited to join this new fellowship called the church, through repentance and the forgiveness of sins.

And what do the greatest minds in Athens have to say in response to this bold new claim? Well, our reading today ends before we get to hear it—but I’ll tell you what happened. Unsurprisingly, many scoffed at Paul’s proclamation of the resurrection, and many others simply walked away, unpersuaded. Only two people, we’re told, joined him and became believers.

In other words, most people preferred to stick with their familiar, “known” gods—gods that could be captured and possessed in religious images or ideas. Gods who could be controlled, and who served the needs of human beings—promising them comfort, security, and prosperity.

And so I wonder how much has really changed since Paul’s visit to the Areopagus. The agora has certainly expanded since its heyday in Athens, becoming in our digital era one vast, electronic network, where most of human life—commercial, cultural, political and spiritual—is now conducted. The Internet, as a global public square, is the new agora.

And the religious landscape, especially within American Christianity, reminds me a lot of the one Paul found in ancient Athens. Spend a little time online and you’ll see.

Not only is it just as crowded, with denominations ranging from global institutions like the Roman Catholic church to single, storefront Pentecostal missions, it’s also just as contentious, since everyone seems convinced that they alone possess the true faith, and that anyone who thinks differently is in danger, or in error, or simply lost to God.

What each of these factions forget—and I would even include the Episcopal Church here—is what Paul tried to explain in Athens: that the true and living God, the creator and sustainer of all creation, remains largely an “unknown god”—and that any church which claims to have captured the absolute truth about God in their preferred theology, or tradition is actually committing the great sin of idolatry.

The liturgy, the Scriptures, the Creeds—these are all beautiful and necessary things because they point to God. They are true in the way a compass is true. They are finite objects that speak of an infinite subject—a person—who we recognize in Jesus Christ. Someone we can be in relationship with, not by capturing and possessing him in an idol, but by contemplating and enjoying him through the created things of this world—objects like paintings and poems, but also the beauty of the natural world, and especially the faces of other human beings.

So just like the ancient Athenians, we are extremely religious in every way. But that’s a good thing only as long as we remember that God cares more about us than about our particular religious beliefs and practices.

The value of our holy objects—our images, hymns, scriptures or sermons—lies in helping us move closer to the mystery of God—who raised Jesus from the dead, giving us the assurance of God’s righteous judgment; and who sent the Spirit of truth to abide with us, pouring into our hearts the love that surpasses all understanding.

The Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Chappaqua, NY
The Sixth Sunday of Easter, May 10th, 2026

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Whether the subject is immigration, income inequality or the war in Iran, the media has given the newest Bishop of Rome a platform to speak out in ways that contrast sharply with the messaging and conduct coming out of places like the White House.

Watching the conflict play out in viral headlines and video clips has encouraged us to see it as the story of a spiritual leader choosing to ”cross over” and “stand up” to political power at a particularly fraught moment. But that’s not quite how I see it.

While the world sees Leo intervening in its affairs, for better or worse, what I see is a Pope who’s simply doing his job—proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which is always relevant, and always applicable, precisely because it transcends human power, human institutions and human history.

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In our text from John’s gospel this morning, a confused Thomas asks Jesus a question that I suspect is on all of our minds, as we look out into an increasingly dangerous and chaotic world—how can we know the way? And Jesus reminds Thomas that he already knows the way—because Jesus is the way, and the truth, and the life.

Against the forces of dishonesty, greed, violence and evil, Leo is witnessing to this way, this truth, this life of Christ. He is patiently preaching the good news: that God has a special preference for the poor, the oppressed, the refugee; that the amassing of great wealth inevitably blinds us both to God’s ultimate sovereignty and to the real needs of our neighbors; that Christ’s ministry and especially his resurrection reveal that evil and violence can never have the last word.

And the church has a name for those who do what Leo is doing, witnessing to the truth of the Gospel in the face of hostile resistance—the church calls them martyrs.

Our lesson from the Book of Acts captures the final moments of the apostle and deacon Stephen, who is recognized as the church’s first martyr. As an early and effective evangelist, Stephen has run afoul of the authorities in Jerusalem.

Stephen uses his trial to passionately and elegantly defend his belief in Jesus Christ, and is condemned to death. And in the moment before the crowd begins the grim task of stoning him, Stephen receives a vision of heaven, and prays to Jesus, asking him both to receive his spirit—and to forgive his executioners.

If you recognize a pattern here, you’re on the right track. It’s no accident that this story of Stephen’s trial and death so closely resembles that of Jesus. This witnessing, even at the risk of death, to the truth of God’s revelation, first to Israel and definitively in Christ, is held up as the paradigm of discipleship in the early church. To follow Christ was to live and die like Stephen did, in direct imitation of Christ.

Now I know that sounds pretty extreme. Was martyrdom really necessary? Couldn’t Stephen have simply kept his mouth shut, and gone on feeding the hungry, healing the sick and encouraging his friends rather than taunting his enemies?

To understand why Stephen’s martyrdom became the model for Christian discipleship, we have to remember that the church would never have existed without the passion and resurrection of Jesus.

At the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry, the disciples had betrayed, denied and abandoned him. His movement was seen as a total failure and would have been quickly forgotten had it not been for the stunning events of Easter, the Ascension and Pentecost.

The memories of Jesus, his words and actions, so difficult to understand in the moment, suddenly made perfect sense in the light of the cross. And so faith in Christ and membership in the church involved commitment to a way of life whose meaning is defined not primarily by a set of propositions or religious practices, but by Jesus’ journey to the cross.

For members of the early church, operating constantly under suspicion and often persecution, that journey was readily available. No Christian needed to seek out martyrdom; the only question was whether, if the authorities came for them, they would keep the faith, and witness to the truth.

And many in fact prayed for that opportunity to come, believing that, in taking up the cross and dying the kind of death Christ did—the death of a witness, of a martyr—they would finally be born, as fully human, inheriting the new life of Christ—an eternal life of glorious, joyful, divine communion. Precisely the life that Stephen glimpses as the stones are raining down on him.

I realize it’s almost impossible for us to relate all of that to the lives we’re actually living, here and now. Thanks to modern concepts like freedom of speech, human rights, and due process, most of us never have to worry about risking our lives for proclaiming the Gospel. Martyrdom may have been what early Christians aspired to, but we live much different lives, in much different times, than they did.

And yet I also believe that now, more than ever, the church needs martyrs. Who else but the church is capable of meeting the anger, hatred and violence that threatens to consume our society with the love, mercy and peace the world so desperately needs?

And that goes especially for the church itself. The only way to respond to the heretical forms of so-called Christian faith that saturate our media and influence our government is to more confidently embody in our lives and in life at St. Mary’s what we know to be true—from our engagement with scripture, from our liturgy, and from serving the least of these: that God’s power lies not in an ability to dominate others through coercion, material wealth and war; God’s power lies in what the world sees as weakness—the humble, vulnerable self-emptying love of the cross.

Am I saying more of us need to die for our faith? Absolutely not! Because contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to die to be a martyr.

One of the greatest 20th century martyrs, in my view, is Desmond Tutu, who risked his life for the gospel, preaching reconciliation and non-violence in the face of the injustices and atrocities committed by South Africa’s apartheid regime. Tutu’s willingness to put his body on the line for the truth, and to absorb the hatred not just of his enemies but at times even of his allies, connects his witness directly to Stephen’s, and to Leo’s—and to Christ himself.

On the surface, these examples might seem impossible for us to follow; but they can still be our model, as long as we’re willing to live out the promises made at our baptisms: to resist evil and repent of our own sins; to proclaim the gospel in word and deed; to seek and serve Christ in all people and respect the dignity of every human being.

And in fact, in baptism we’ve already undergone a kind of martyrdom. It’s all there in the Prayer Book. We were baptized into Christ’s death, drowned in the waters and reborn into Christ’s life; in the font we died to the values of the world, so that we could live by the values of God’s kingdom.

And that transformation—that struggle, to love and serve others as Christ loved and served us—plays out every single day in our relationships, with friends and family, strangers and enemies. Whenever we have the chance to take up our cross and imitate the selfless love of Christ, we are witnesses—martyrs—to the way, the truth, and the life of Christ.

The Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Chappaqua, NY
The Fifth Sunday of Easter, May 3rd, 2026

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Matthew, Mark, Luke and John each give us very different accounts of what happened on Easter Day. Was there one angel at the tomb, as in Matthew and Mark, or two, as in Luke and John? Did Jesus appear to the disciples in Galilee, like Matthew says, or in Jerusalem, as Luke tells it? Why is Jesus instantly recognizable in some stories while in others he appears as a complete stranger?

And then there’s Paul, who, remember, is our earliest and only first-person eyewitness to the resurrected Jesus. Paul tells the Corinthians that the risen Christ appeared to him in a radically transformed “spiritual body”—an appearance so overwhelming that we’re told Paul was knocked to the ground and temporarily blinded.

It’s hard to imagine that Jesus calmly eating fish with his buddies, as he does in Luke and John.

So what are we to make of all this confusing and even contradictory data? Some people of course take it as evidence that the resurrection simply never happened. If the Gospels can’t even agree on the basic details of the story, how can we be expected to believe it?

Others attempt to harmonize the various accounts, taking the details literally as historical facts, and turning the resurrection of Jesus into a kind of true crime documentary.

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In my view, neither of these approaches address the most important question. What I really want to know is not exactly what Peter or Paul or Mary Magdalene saw and when they saw it. What matters to me is this: how do these stories enable us to understand and experience the risen Christ here and now?

After all, the Gospel is not primarily a claim about the past. The church’s proclamation is not that Christ was risen but that Christ is risen. Whatever it was that happened in Jerusalem in 33 AD, our faith is that Christ is alive and present and with us today.

So while I appreciate and even enjoy some of the attempts to “prove” that the stories of Jesus’ resurrection are historically accurate, what’s much more important to me is the spiritual truth they have to offer, the deeper reality they reveal, and how that truth and that reality impact me and how I live my life in the present.

What does it really mean to say Christ is risen, not just then but now?

I don’t know of a better place to start looking for an answer to that question than this morning’s reading from Luke’s gospel. We hear the story of two disciples making their way out of Jerusalem and into the countryside, late in the afternoon on Easter Day.

They’re dejected and close to despair. Jesus of Nazareth, the powerful prophet they’d been following—who they believed would deliver Israel from their oppressors once and for all—had been arrested, handed over to the Romans, and crucified as a seditious criminal.

As they’re discussing this catastrophe, a stranger walks up alongside them, and buts into their conversation. They’re slightly annoyed by the stranger’s cluelessness, but they patiently explain everything to him, including the experience of the women and the empty tomb, and the pair of angels inexplicably claiming he was alive.

And the stranger’s response to all of this is rather blunt. He calls the two disciples fools and slow of heart. Don’t they understand what’s happening? Haven’t they read the Scriptures? Then the stranger proceeds to show them, step by step, how all of the law, the prophets and the psalms show that the Messiah should suffer…and then enter into…glory.

The disciples are intrigued but still don’t quite get it, so they ask the stranger to stay and share a meal. And in the exact moment that he takes bread, blesses and breaks it, the disciples suddenly see, suddenly understand—Jesus has been raised from the dead, just as the angels said. The stranger sitting before them is Christ himself. And then, in another instant, he vanishes from their sight.

The disciples are shaken to their core by this experience. They run to tell the others what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread. I hope it’s becoming clear what’s happening in this story, and what it’s trying to say to us.

When do Jesus’ disciples recognize who he truly is? When do they come to know him as Christ and Lord? Not during his ministry—they just see him as an especially strong prophet; not during his passion—that’s when they betray, deny and abandon him; not at the empty tomb—they’re confused and afraid by that; not even when Jesus is walking right beside them do they recognize him.

It’s only when he’s revealed to them through the scriptures and in the breaking of the bread that the disciples recognize Jesus as Christ. The opening of the scriptures and the breaking of the bread—these are the ways in which the risen Lord, Jesus Christ, the crucified and exalted one, is made known.

And we, too, know these ways. They could not be more familiar to us. Because of course what Luke is describing is something we do, each and every week, in our worship—this story is an allegory of the church’s liturgy.

It’s all there, in exactly the same order: the procession, the reading and interpretation of scripture, the eucharistic feast, and finally the sending out, to proclaim that Christ is indeed risen from the dead.

Take a minute to think about what that means. It means that Christ’s disciples today—all of us, who gather to open the scriptures and break the bread—know him in exactly the same way as the apostles, who walked alongside him did. We know him no less intimately than Christians over twenty centuries have known him.

Then and now, Christ is made present to his disciples in the opening of the scriptures and in the breaking of the bread.

And it’s even more than that. In the Eucharist we become members of Christ, by partaking of his body and blood. If you’re looking for “proof” of the resurrection, look around you, because this is it—a community of ordinary people, mystically and sacramentally transformed into the living body of Christ.

Is that not why he “vanishes” as soon as he’s recognized? Because Christ now lives within us, working through us, in communion with us—his body’s members—who carry out his ministry in the world: taking up the cross on behalf of the lost and the unloved, showering compassion on all of God’s creatures, reconciling all things to God through Christ, who even now is transfiguring this fallen world into the kingdom of heaven.

The Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Chappaqua, NY
The Third Sunday of Easter, April 19th, 2026

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I’ve come to believe that the biggest obstacle to Christian faith in the 21st century is the Bible. Now while you’re catching your breath, let me explain what I mean by “the Bible” here, because it’s probably different from what you think it is.

The Bible as we normally understand it is one big book that tells a single, linear story, starting with Genesis and ending with Revelation. You can go to any Barnes & Noble and pick up a copy, in almost any language. There used to be one in every hotel room—though I haven’t checked in awhile because, thanks to the internet, I can now have a Bible on my phone.

And all of this would have been inconceivable to any Christian living before the 15th century, because the Bible as we know it today is an invention of the printing press. Before Gutenberg’s world-changing machine, books were prohibitively expensive and mostly inaccessible to the average person—who wouldn’t have been able to read it anyway, since the vast majority of human beings were illiterate.

Now I’m certainly not saying it’s a bad thing that anyone can carry around a Bible in their pocket. After all, I make my living from it, and use it every single day. But the Bible in this form has become so familiar, so accepted, that we forget it’s a relatively recent invention. And it makes us take for granted the ways in which this novelty of having our own, personalized version of “the Bible” has come to completely reshape our ideas and experience of church and of Christianity.

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We forget that long before there was a single book called “the Bible,” Christians were gathering together to share a ritual meal called eucharist. They were initiating new members through baptism and organizing ministries and missions to the surrounding communities. They were ordaining bishops, priests and deacons.

And, as faithful Jews, the earliest Christians were reciting and discussing their sacred texts, the Hebrew Scriptures, the law and the prophets; but they were doing so in a radically new way. They were using the Scriptures—what came to be called the Old Testatment—to try and make sense of their experience of the passion, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus.

See, for Jesus’ disciples, Easter changed everything. The experience of Christ’s risen presence opened their minds to understand their Scriptures as they never had before. They now recognized, to their utter amazement, what Peter tells the crowd in our passage from Acts: that all the prophets testify about him. Moses, Isaiah, Daniel, they’d been pointing to Christ all along, speaking about the one to come, the one who would liberate all of creation from slavery to sin and death, just as Moses had liberated Israel from slavery to Pharaoh.

So Easter is not the story’s grand finale but its starting point. The church came into being first of all as a fellowship of those who shared the experience of Christ’s life, death and resurrection, all of which they now understood “in accordance with the Scriptures,” as the Nicene Creed says.

And the church grew through the spreading of this good news—what became known in Greek as the euangelion, or in English, the Gospel. Gradually at first, and then quite rapidly, the church expanded throughout the Mediterranean world, with apostles and evangelists who hoped to inspire and persuade others that Christ was a unique revelation of God’s Word, sent to inaugurate God’s new eternal kingdom of peace, where all of creation, reconciled in love and raised to new life, will be with God for ever.

After a few decades had passed, the church began to produce its own writings, to be read alongside the Hebrew Scriptures. And the purpose of these texts was not just to preserve the memories of Christ’s earthly life, but to reaffirm the story of Easter by retelling it, using themes and images borrowed from the Hebrew Scriptures.

So the New Testament, which these writings came to be called a few centuries later, is not the source, but a record of the first Christian preaching about Christ’s death and resurrection, in accordance with the Scriptures.

The Bible, in other words, is a creation of the church, not the other way around. And the authors of this incredibly diverse collection of texts are not trying to tell us “what really happened” thousands of years ago. Although many of the stories feel historical, and in some cases have a historical basis, they are not history as we understand it today, and certainly not science.

They do what all great literature does—they rely on allegory, symbolism and metaphor to express a truth that’s too profound to be expressed in any other way; they point to a reality that remains largely a mystery.

And that brings me back to our situation today. Under the influence of our modern, single-bound, mass produced Bible, which obscures this rich tradition, the modern church makes it seem like we have only two choices—and neither of them is very appealing.

On the one hand, we can be fundamentalists, and insist that the Bible is the “inerrant” word of God, and tie ourselves into knots trying to resolve the countless contradictions. Or, on the other hand, we can take the more liberal, historical-critical approach, and analyze the Bible like any other ancient artifact—while blissfully ignoring the most important question: is there a God who speaks to us through scripture?

So if the modern conservative approach to the Bible is impossible to believe, then the modern liberal approach leaves us with nothing to believe in. So thank God these are not our only options! We can put both of them aside, and learn to read the Bible in ways that are both more faithful to tradition, and which make it more relevant—and credible—today.

So how do we learn those ways? Well my first recommendation is to start spending your Sunday mornings here at St. Mary’s, or join us for Bible Study every Wednesday at 12:30pm. Beyond that, we can follow teachers like the Orthodox priest and scholar Fr John Behr, whose work inspired much of what I’ve said here, and who encourages us to learn once again to read the Bible as the early Church did, in the light of Easter.

What Easter reveals is that the God who created us, and who loves us, will never abandon us. On the cross, Christ shows us both what it means to be God and what it means to be human.

By entering into death, for the love of the world, Christ defeated death, so that we might be able to live fearlessly and fully in the face of our own deaths. By confessing our sins, breaking bread together in thanksgiving for our blessings; losing ourselves in acts of selfless love, bearing our own crosses and the crosses of those we minister to, we become who we were created to be—people made in the image and likeness of God, citizens of heaven, members of Christ’s body.

We come to see the movement from Adam to Christ as the story of our growth as human beings, both collectively and individually. We read the stories of patriarchs and matriarchs, prophets and martyrs as parables reflecting the choices and challenges that we face, every single day.

We begin to recognize our own stories within the biblical story and find newer and deeper meaning in our lives as parents and spouses, friends and neighbors. We begin to discover, in the many deaths we experience over a lifetime, the signs of resurrection.

And slowly but surely, the biblical story becomes our story; we begin to hear the voice of God speaking through it. We begin to hear Christ saying: Greetings! Do not be afraid. Follow me.

The Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Chappaqua, NY
The Feast of the Resurrection, Sunday, April 5th, 2026

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These days we almost never use the word “good” this way, in reference to something as holy or sacred. We use it almost exclusively in terms of morality. The study of ethics is built around the idea of things and people “being good.” And the desire to “be a good person,” to “do good in the world,” is a widely-held aspiration. In my experience, that aspiration is especially dear to a certain kind of modern, liberal Christian.

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In fact I would say that the dominant attitude among Episcopalians over the past few generations could be described as something like this: “at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what you believe. It doesn’t really matter if Jesus performed miracles and was raised from the dead; it doesn’t really matter whether he was divine or not. What matters is being a good person.”

That’s what Jesus’ message was really all about, goes the argument. If there is a God, he just wants us to be good people, and to make the world a better place. After all, Jesus’ main teaching was something that’s found in virtually every religious tradition—the golden rule: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Of course it’s absolutely true that Jesus includes this piece of wisdom in his famous Sermon on the Mount. And I wholeheartedly endorse it myself.

But I also feel compelled to say that to reduce Jesus’ ministry to the golden rule is to fundamentally misunderstand both the Gospel and the faith of the church. Because the way Jesus describes life in God’s kingdom makes “doing unto others” much more difficult than we like to imagine.

For example, in that same sermon Jesus tells his followers that anger is equivalent to murder, that lust is the same as adultery, and that divorce is prohibited; he tells them not to resist someone who attacks them, and that if someone takes their coat, to give them their cloak as well; he tells them to love their enemies and pray for their persecutors; he tells them not to worry about seeking food, clothing and shelter, because God will provide all those things.

Now I don’t know about you, but none of those things sound like common sense to me. Honestly, they don’t even sound sane. Are these the kinds of things you think of when you think about being a good person or making the world a better place?

This leads me to another, deeper point. We have to ask ourselves: if all Jesus was doing was telling us to be good, then why in the world was he arrested by his own people, and then executed by the Roman authorities? How could the golden rule possibly be that controversial, that dangerous?

And more importantly, if Jesus’ message could be boiled down to “be a good person”—a message that can be found anywhere—then why in the world, two thousand years later, are we still venerating the image of his body, marred in appearance, beyond human semblance, hanging from an instrument of capital punishment—the cross?

The answer, of course, is that the first Christians saw something in the cross that’s infinitely deeper than a simple lesson in morality. On the cross they saw the supreme outpouring of God’s love into God’s creation, the definitive act of forgiveness for all human sin, and the overcoming of death by eternal life.

And if they’re correct, then this Gospel—this good news of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ—is a message that should transform not only our ethics, but our very existence. And the fact that the cross has in fact profoundly changed human life and society over the last two millennia should at least make us wonder whether it’s telling us something more than “do unto others.”

There are approximately 2.5 billion Christians across the globe. And the majority of them do not worship Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior because he taught the golden rule. They worship him because, on the cross, the Son reveals the love of the Father for the whole world, a love that’s stronger than death, that conquers death by willingly entering into death. On the cross, Christ shows to us both what it is to be God and what it is to be human.

In Isaiah’s words, he poured out himself to death, and was numbered with the transgressors. God’s suffering servant gives himself away, makes himself utterly vulnerable, puts himself in the place of the weak and powerless, so that we might follow him and do the same, taking up our crosses and loving our neighbors as ourselves, losing our lives to find them.

This is not typically what we mean by making the world a better place. Our desire to be good usually doesn’t extend to putting our lives at risk for the sake of strangers and enemies.

Now please don’t misunderstand me. There’s nothing wrong with the desire for kindness and compassion, the desire for a world ruled by peace and generosity. But the word “good” means different things in different times and places. It was good for the chief priests to arrest a dangerous blasphemer; it was good for the Romans to execute a petulant political rebel. In their eyes, they were making the world a better place.

If you asked someone to give you an example of a good person, they might mention a particular saint—say Francis of Assisi, or Mother Theresa, or even Martin Luther King. But the word “saint” doesn’t mean “good” in the moralistic sense. The word “saint” means holy, sacred, set apart.

And saints don’t see themselves as good people. They know, better than any of us, that they are sinners. And their ambition is not to make the world a better place; their only desire is to be faithful and obedient to God. Isn’t that remarkable, how it’s people with the deepest recognition of their flaws, those whose only aspiration is the humblest forms of service, who actually bring the most good and beauty into the world?

And here’s something else worth remembering: you and me, all of us here—we are all saints.

Through baptism we’ve been crucified with Christ so that we might share in his resurrected life. In the Eucharist we affirm and experience as Christ’s body the divine unity of all creation, giving thanks to God who calls us into relationship, whose only desire is to be with us; who loves us, not because we’re “good people” but in spite of our sins. God who became, on Good Friday, the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.

The Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Chappaqua, NY
Good Friday, April 3rd, 2026

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One famous occasion happens well before that, about halfway through the story, when Peter goes out on a limb and tells Jesus what many people are starting to believe: that he is in fact the Christ—the figure whom the Jewish prophets claimed would come to deliver Israel from its enemies, and establish God’s rule on earth, once and for all.

But this so-called confession of Peter is almost immediately retracted when Jesus explains what he will have to do, that his destiny is to go to Jerusalem and be arrested, tortured, and crucified, before rising on the third day.

This is more than the disciples are able to handle. How could a convicted criminal, executed in the most shameful way imaginable, possibly be the Messiah? They were yearning for the exact opposite: a conquering king. And so they either dispute, disbelieve or simply ignore Jesus’s bizarre prediction about the way things would unfold.

The truth is, they’d had a hard time understanding who he was and what he’d been saying from the very beginning. They’d been attracted by his singular charisma; somehow they were able to trust him in spite of not being entirely sure of what he was up to. But this fragile trust and loyalty was about to reach its limit.

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These disciples, who had given up everything to follow him, when push came to shove, would eventually betray, deny or abandon him.

And what makes it especially poignant is that Jesus tells them so. At their very last meal together, a Passover banquet, Jesus calmly tells the group that one of them would betray him. And after he blesses, breaks and offers them bread and wine, mysteriously calling it his body and blood, he tells them: You will all become deserters. And all of them—even Judas, who knows it’s true—deny it.

Why would they do that? Why would they turn on the one who had picked them out of obscurity, inspired them and loved them? The one whose movement had grown like wildfire and was now at its absolute peak?

Jesus had entered the holy city with great fanfare. Riding on a donkey to fulfill the prophecy of Zechariah, through a pathway made of palm branches and exulting in the chants of the crowd:

‘Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!’

It was the kind of welcome appropriate for a prophet and a king. But Jesus is not the kind of king anybody expected. He went entirely off-script, giving himself up to his enemies without the least resistance, even prohibiting his followers from defending him.

Jesus himself seemed to be deeply conflicted over what he knew had to happen. In Gethsemane, awaiting his arrest, he’s deeply grieved, even reluctant to accept his fate. He asks his Father to relieve him of his burden.

On the cross this struggle reaches its climax as Jesus cries out the opening line of Psalm 22, probably the most anguished prayer ever prayed: my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

And we, along with those first disciples, inevitably find ourselves asking: what in the world is going on here? What kind of Christ is this? What kind of God is this?

In the aftermath, in their experience of his risen presence, the disciples will arrive at some extraordinary answers to these questions. They’ll come to see that Christ’s passion is not an aberration, a horrible and tragic turn of events that negates his kingship; instead it’s precisely what confirms it.

They discover this in, among other places, the words of Isaiah: I gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I did not hide my face from insult and spitting.

The disciples will come to understand the cross, not as a shameful sign of weakness and defeat, but as the supreme victory of good over evil, love over hate, life over death. The cross will become the perfect expression of who God is—the Father who is determined never to abandon his children, who chooses, through his Son, in the power of the Spirit, to be with them to the end.

The Romans, meanwhile, learn what all empires learn—that you cannot kill a God who is willing to die for the love of the world. Because a love like that is stronger than death.

And it means that we who follow Christ today can take up the crosses in our own lives—the countless disappointments and deaths we experience—in the light of Christ’s passion, knowing that the way of selfless love is our only way home, the only road to freedom, joy and peace.

Even when we ignore, deny, or betray that reality—even when we’re blind to the presence of Christ’s love within us, and to the Holy Spirit’s work in the world—even when we cry out with all our strength Let him be crucified!—God takes our selfishness, our shame and fear—all of our sin—and transforms it into beauty, truth and goodness.

We are powerless to stop God from saving us; nothing can stand between the reconciliation of Creator and Creation. We’ve already committed the worst possible crime—we’ve crucified the living God. And God’s judgment has come down upon us.

So what is God’s verdict? Jesus has been raised from the dead, and the way to God’s overflowing mercy, unconditional love, and eternal life has been opened for all the world.

The Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Chappaqua, NY
The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday
March 29th, 2026

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I owe this historical insight to the Orthodox priest and theologian, Fr John Behr, who reminds us that the Christian calendar we take for granted today did not always exist as it does.

We enjoy, throughout the year, multiple feasts to celebrate the various milestones in the life of Christ and his church. But we tend to overlook the fact that, like the New Testament itself, it took several generations for the liturgical cycle as we now know it to develop. The church did not always celebrate Christ’s birth, death, resurrection and ascension on separate days, throughout the year.

And this makes sense if you think about it. Because the church only comes into being after Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, which changed everything that came before. It’s only in retrospect that the apostles understand who Jesus is—Christ and Lord—when their minds are opened to the scriptures and they encounter him in the breaking of the bread.

Their starting point, then, is not in Bethlehem, where Jesus was born and raised as a human being, but in Jerusalem, where he died and was raised as the Christ.

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All of the crucial events—passion, crucifixion, resurrection—happened during the Jewish feast of passover. And so for many of the earliest Christians, the date of passover—or pascha in Greek—became the day when the church celebrated its one major feast.

As we’ve seen and discussed in Lectionary Lunch, the New Testament came into being as a recapitulation—a recap—of the Hebrew scriptures, what we call the Old Testament. The New Testament is the written record of the Apostles and Evangelists trying to make sense of their experience of Easter “in accordance with the scriptures.”

This meant learning to read and understand scripture and tradition in a radically new way: through the lens of Christ. And this led them to associate passages like Isaiah 7.14, for example—the young woman is with child and shall bear a son—with the one who bore Jesus, the one called Mary.

For all of Luke’s insistence on being a scrupulous historian, he is also no less committed to this project of recapitulation. Like the other NT authors, Luke surely asked himself: how can I best memorialize this experience of the crucified and risen Christ, preserve its meaning, and persuade others of its importance?

So the story of the Annunciation is much less about trying to establish “what really happened” on “Christmas Day in 0 BCE,” as a modern historian might, and much more about how to describe the stunning reality that God’s Word has entered into human history, in the form of Jesus of Nazareth.

Remember that March 25th, the date when this feast is celebrated, is always at or near the beginning of passover. So Gabriel’s announcement to Mary about what is forming in her womb is an echo of the anticipation of Christ’s paschal journey—her labor pains recall his passion, her virgin womb symbolizes the unused tomb, and Jesus’ birth stands for his resurrection.

In other words, Luke is only able to tell his story of the Annunciation in the light of pascha: it only becomes possible because of, and can only be told after, the passion, death and resurrection of Christ.

I know this is a challenging way to think about this. I myself can barely get my head around it—and I think about this stuff every single day! It goes against centuries of ingrained habits. We just take for granted that the Bible is trying to tell us a linear story of more or less “supernatural” events that have occurred over the course of human history.

But that’s not how the first Christians understood the scriptures. For example, as Fr Behr points out, if you read the writings of people like Irenaeus in the 2nd century or Athanasius in the 4th, you’ll find references to the “Virgin Mother.” But almost never do they associate this Virgin Mother with the woman called Mary. They simply weren’t thinking in those terms.

So then who is the Virgin Mother in the imagination of these early Christian theologians? She is none other than the church.

For them, it’s the church who is the pure womb in which, through baptism into Christ death, we are born into new life, as the body of Christ. The church is the virgin mother, giving birth to the Savior’s body, through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Mary, the mother of Jesus who we encounter in the NT is thus perhaps better understood as a symbol of the church—and not the other way around. The annunciation can then be seen as a form or “recap” of pentecost—the coming of the Holy Spirit into human history, to transform the world.

And the Magnificat now makes even more sense, as an expression of the church’s prophetic witness. The gospel proclamation heard in a new key, through the voice of Mary—the marginalized daughter of an oppressed people, the “lowly servant” who unleashes God’s liberating love and justice.

That means the vocation of our own congregation—we are, after all, St. Mary the Virgin—becomes charged with potential and promise. We are a womb that nourishes and gives birth, that baptizes and brings into communion with God those who once lived under the shadow of death, but now confess faith in the one whose cross and resurrection hold out the promise of eternal life

Our church is a virgin mother called to produce children who likewise take up their crosses, who die to self daily through acts of unconditional compassion for their neighbors, people who no longer fear death because through baptism they’ve already entered into Christ’s death—and so are now truly and perfectly free, to live only to and for love, and the for the glory of God almighty.

The Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Chappaqua, NY
The Feast of the Annunciation, March 25th, 2026

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I often feel God’s presence in the beauty of nature, or when moved by powerful works of art. I make contact in moments of deep contemplation, losing myself through playing sports or cooking or simple manual labor. I experience something of the divine in the enjoyment of other people—whether celebrating with friends and family, or making an unexpected connection with a total stranger.

What’s so remarkable about the life of the church, what I’ve always cherished and craved, is that, for me at least, many of these wonderful things come together in one place. In worship, I’m brought into the presence of God through the unique experience of beauty and community in our liturgy; and in the church’s ministry and mission to the wider world, I find grace constantly emerging from the most surprising places.

All of this resonates well with our passage from the letter to the Ephesians. All of the places and events I mentioned bring with them, for me at least, an overwhelming sense of things that are good and right and true. They’re experiences of enlightenment in a world that can be very dark.

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And the letter seems to be saying that this is the place where the baptized ought to find themselves whenever possible. That our job is always to leave the darkness behind and strive for the light. And it’s not just because when we live in the light, it’s better for us—Paul believes it’s also pleasing to God.

But I have to confess, for me, in own my experience, things are a lot more complicated than that. For all its blessings, my life has not been an unbroken succession of beautiful moments and experiences of enlightenment—and I doubt yours has either. The letter makes it sound as if we have a simple choice, that we can just decide either to live in darkness or move into the light. That it’s entirely up to us.

But life isn’t like that, to say the least. It’s full of mistakes and bad decisions. We misbehave in spite of ourselves, and then spiral into shame and regret. And of course sometimes we find ourselves in dark places through no fault of our own. As hard as it can be for people of faith to accept, bad things happen to good people, and sometimes they never recover from it.

In our text from John’s gospel Jesus encounters a man who was born blind. In the ancient world, it was common to believe that physical afflictions were a form of punishment. That anyone who found themselves sick or disabled must’ve done something bad or wrong to deserve it.

We encounter this theory throughout scripture. It’s what Job’s so-called friends assume; even though Job insists he’s done nothing to deserve his fate, they can’t imagine any other explanation. And it’s how the prophets account for Israel’s downfall; they see conquest and exile as God’s punishment for disobedience and idolatry.

And so Jesus’ disciples naturally want to know—what in the world did this poor man, or his parents, do? What kind of sin is grievous enough to cause a child to be born blind?

And Jesus gives them an unexpected answer: nothing, he says. Neither he nor his parents did anything to cause his blindness. He was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him. So Jesus, after calling himself the light of the world, brings the man out of darkness, and heals his blindness.

And then a funny thing happens. No one, not even the man’s parents, seem to be happy with this turn of events. No one is celebrating that this man, afflicted and living in darkness his whole life, has now been brought into the light and, for the first time, can see.

At first they simply refuse to believe it, repeatedly interrogating the man and his parents. When they don’t get the answers they want, they become angry with Jesus, they blame the healer, accusing him of sinning, by healing on the Sabbath. Ultimately, they kick the formerly blind man out of their congregation. They have no place for someone who has received the gift of vision.

It’s as if they’re afraid of what the blind man has come to see. Namely, that his blindness is not a punishment for sin. He was born that way—we’re all born that way. Our coming into being separates us from our creator, and our lives are about navigating our way, as flawed creatures through a fallen creation, back to the one who created us.

So the question isn’t: what did we do to cause ourselves to sin. It’s: are we blind to our sinful condition, or can we see that we need help? And when once we know we need help, are we able to ask for it?

This is especially relevant for our journey through Lent: it’s not our sins that make us blind; on the contrary, it’s our sins that enable us to truly see. Remember that Christ cures the blind man not by washing, or by shining divine light into his eyes, but by rubbing dirt into them.

And that means that, along with all those wonderful ways of connecting with God I mentioned earlier, we can add another—a way of experiencing the presence of Christ that’s much less popular. We meet Christ whenever we’re willing to see and confront the mud and mess of our own lives.

Christ is the light that enables us to clearly see our own sin, the darkness in our hearts; and in exposing it, we come to know ourselves fully. We begin to recognize things about ourselves that we were blind to, and we see that we can change, and turn away from destructive habits, and towards the light. We discover the meaning and the value of repentance. And little by little, God’s works begin to be revealed in us.

God’s judgment is not some kind of angry punishment; it’s the light of grace and truth that shows us who we really are—setting us free from all the things that stand between us and the life God has created us for. We were blinded by sin, but in the presence of Christ, the light of the world, now we see.

After all, Jesus himself told us he did not come into the world to save the righteous; he came for sinners. And his ministry to the afflicted, and ultimately his passion and his cross show those who are convinced that they already see—the self-righteous and morally superior—that they’re the ones who are blind.

So Lent is the time to ask ourselves the same question the Pharisees asked: surely we are not blind, are we? Now is the time to expose the works of darkness within us to the light of Christ, knowing that everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that becomes visible is light.

Knowing that all our sins are transformed by God’s forgiveness, given at baptism and nourished through eucharist, purified through prayer, and offered up again in love. Knowing that in the valley of the shadow of death the Son of Man is waiting for us, and has come into the world so that we who are blind may finally see.

The Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Chappaqua, NY
The Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 15th, 2026

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There’s something about the kind of creature we are, that we both encounter and explain the world around us almost exclusively in the form of stories. And so it’s the great story-tellers among us who not only enable us to navigate life, but to fully enjoy it.

Richard Maschal, my stepfather, was one of the greatest storytellers I’ve ever known. It wasn’t just that he had the material—drawn from his days as a teenage swing drummer in his native Bayonne through his adulthood in the sprawling, tragicomic tapestry of the American south that became his home.

The key to Richard’s virtuosity was his delivery: an uncanny knack for imitation, for gesture, voice and timing, combined with pathos, grace and a bountiful sense of humor. I can’t count the times I sat spellbound as another tale unfolded, relishing not only its peculiar plot and characters, but the purity of Richard’s genius, and his generosity in sharing it.

Surely it was this fascination and facility with stories that led Richard into journalism. He chose, like so many storytellers before and after, to reap his harvest not from the fields of fiction and fantasy but out in the real world, searching for stories that reflected the full range of our humanity, showing that truth, beauty and goodness can be found everywhere, from the late night police beat to the rarefied air of high end art galleries.

This concern for real people, the patience to actually listen to them, and the commitment to making them heard points to what I know was another motivation for Richard and his dedication to journalism—a yearning for justice.

As I see it, with its focus on witness, on telling stories from the margins, and on speaking truth to power, journalism at its best is a secularized form of ministry. And I say this with all due respect, having worked for thirteen years as a professional journalist myself, a shared bond that Richard and I both delighted in.

So I know from personal experience that there’s plenty of natural overlap between these two institutions—the press and the church, including a common mission to hear and serve the least of these. And that surely has something to do with how Richard eventually found his way down Tryon Street, here, to St. Peter’s, where he worshipped and served faithfully for several decades, including a term as Warden.

And over those years, life, as they say, happened. Alongside times of joy and celebration, there was also heartbreak. So that by the time I came to know Richard, he’d become much less active in the church and, I have to confess, it seemed to me, disillusioned with it.

And from where I’m sitting now, I understand. Because I’m afraid that Christians have largely forgotten their own story—or at least forgot how to tell it well. And master storytellers like Richard simply don’t have patience for badly told stories.

They are especially sensitive to those times and places where stories simply fail. Places beyond the reach of logic and reason, where appeals to hope and faith ring hollow. A wilderness some of us may have navigated, and in which Richard found himself, confronted with the unspeakable in-justice, and unfathomable grief, of losing a child.

If I’ve learned anything at all as a pastor, it’s that words are the last thing a loss like that calls for. Only a holy silence can hold the space, until the possibility of another response gradually emerges. And that response is almost always best expressed not in some theological doctrine, or religious bromide, but in the form of a question that cuts right to the heart of things.

Who will separate us from the love of Christ? It’s a rhetorical question obviously, but as usual Paul can’t help himself, and answers it anyway. Nothing. Nothing, not even death—especially not death—can separate us from the love of God in Christ, who created all things and is gathering all things together at the end of time.

That is God’s story—and the church’s story—in its most fundamental form. And that’s what the church has to offer—all it really has to offer—in the face of death: a story that takes the suffering and sorrow of the cross and transforms it into glorious new life; that shows our sin cannot conquer God’s saving love.

A story which says that our mortality—though an inescapable fact—nevertheless has no dominion over us; that the sole purpose of this life—which none of us choose, and yet all of us will lose—is to learn how to love one another as Christ loved us.

And the great mystery, the real miracle, is how that love lingers, even from the grave. How in his love for us, his friends and family; his love for Laura and Ben; his love for Missy and for his beautiful grandchildren—Esmond and Teddy, Olin and Alma, the Cruz-Martinez siblings and my own two sons, for whom “Babbo” was the only grandfather they really knew—through this love, Richard remains with us—even as he’s passed from this world, and into the bliss, peace, and comfort we have yet to know, but through faith, know is to come.

And we who love him, who have every right and reason to grieve his absence, also have every right, and even more reason, to rejoice, to sing out in celebration that our beloved brother Richard has been set free from suffering and death. And now waits with eager, open, loving arms, to be reunited with us in the reconciliation of all creation—when God’s story and our story become—finally and perfectly—one story.

St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Charlotte, NC
The Feast of Gregory the Great, March 12th, 2026

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