Thomas the Inquirer

Science is a life of exploration and awe, and so is the life of faith. Too often, we tend to treat faith and science as if they are mortal enemies, so that when we hear the story of the apostle Thomas who demands proof of Jesus’ resurrection, we are tempted to see him either as our hero or a cosmic party-pooper, depending on which side of the equation you find yourself.

I have never understood the popular tendency to see faith in God to be at odds with the work of science. And I have been suspicious of the times when religious people treat faith as if it were science and secular people treat science as if it were faith.

For me, science and faith are like the peanut butter and jelly of human inquiry and meaning, with the arts and music serving as the bread. That’s because I grew up in a household steeped in science, art, music, and religion. My mother was a librarian who served on the altar guild and her father was an engineer who taught an adult Sunday school class. My father was an aerospace engineer who eventually was ordained a deacon. When I was a kid, I followed the space program the way other kids followed their favorite sports team, actor, musician, or celebrity. I loved physics and biology, was so-so in chemistry, but don’t ask me how I did in calculus … and I went to a church where my Sunday school teacher also taught physics at a local college.

This last week, we watched with awe, wonder, and appreciation as the Artemis 2 crew circumnavigated the moon and returned safely to earth ending a fifty-year absence from human lunar exploration.  And I remember when the days when the space race was a contest between super-powers over how best to organize societies. It got so intense that even God was dragged into the Cold War. After Yuri Gagarin was the first human to orbit the earth, Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev loved to say that Gagarin never saw God, heaven, nor angels out the window of his space capsule (Gagarin never actually said that, and besides he was a secret Russian Orthodox Christian, but I digress….). Then, a few years later when Apollo 8 first orbited the moon, and the crew took turns reading from Genesis on Christmas Day. Moving, yes, but it was also a kind of a technological and ideological “gotcha!”

It can be easy to fall into the trap of treating faith like science and science as if it were a religious faith, which can lead to some very strange and silly debates. Remember back in the 1990’s there was a televised debate between a biblical fundamentalist named Ken Ham and the science popularizer Bill Nye. Watching that caused me to want to throw something at the television, not least because it was mainly two people who were not interested in listening but talking past each other loudly, with a moderator scoring points as if it was a ball game. From a theological perspective Ham could have been smacked down by a first-year seminarian, and from what I could see Nye was more smug than scientist in his presentation, so the whole thing was embarrassing.

As you might guess, the whole science versus religion thing has never been a hobby horse that I wanted to ride. Which is but one reason why I found myself drifting away from my adolescent attraction to Biblical literalism, and into a different kind of faith.

When I am asked to share my faith story, I often begin by saying “I was a teen-aged Baptist.” I attended a Baptist youth group in a church that taught a kind of Biblical literalism that included a belief in a seven-day creation, and a version of the Rapture with all the end-times trimmings. I never heard them talk about the sun orbiting the earth, but it wouldn’t have surprised me. What was surprising, though, was that there were members of that church who worked in aerospace or served in the nuclear navy, and others who were doctors, nurses, and allied health professionals, and one or two who even taught science and math in the public schools.

Here’s the thing: the whole Genesis versus Evolution debate is not about science. It’s about how to read the Bible. It’s one kind of Christianity trying to use the creation stories to prove that their way of reading the Bible is the only way to read the Bible. They really don’t give a fig about science. When they say, "if you can't believe in a seven-day creation, then you can't believe in the Bible, and so you can't believe in Jesus" they are presenting a kind of slippery-slope theology that is a particular way of believing and following Jesus. There is nothing about science in this approach. And science popularizers should stop taking the bait.

The whole thing just makes me want to sigh deeply and give everyone back their homework papers covered in red and say, “do over” while sending them to their rooms without their suppers. Every now and then I will get asked whether as a “man of God” I believed in the Garden of Eden, the Ark, Balaam’s donkey, or what my end-times theory is. Not so much about to live and do the work of Jesus. So, there it is. Occupational hazard, I guess.

This is why the apostle Thomas is one of my biblical heroes. He was the apostle who was absent when Jesus made one of his first resurrection appearances, and he would not simply take the word of his excitable friends at face value. And he wasn't skeptical of Jesus, he was skeptical of the other ten disciples-- he doubted their observational skills in the turmoil of the moment. He wanted empirical proof. And he came out with the life of faith.

A week after Easter, Jesus provides it for him when he appears in the upper room a second time and offers to show Thomas his wounded hands and body, but in the Gospel Jesus offers all of us a last beatitude as the punch line, which, by the way, underscores the whole point of the Gospel of John: “blessed are you who have not seen and yet believes”.

Because the story deals with the role of doubt in the life of faith, it also speaks directly to the false but popular division between faith and science. Thomas wants proof…he wants his faith to be grounded in the concrete. Jesus is willing to indulge that need as okay but pushes Thomas to have a faith that is informed by the realities of his world and to have his place in the world to be informed by his faith.

And I like that because I want science to be treated like science, and not like theology. At the same time, I realize that the life of inquiry that drives scientific exploration is fundamentally a life of faith. Now a particular inquirer may or may not have the same theology as me…they may not even believe in God…but their quest is a fundamentally a quest for meaning as much as it is a search for how things work.

Thomas, to me, is the patron saint of the skeptical inquirer. He wants proof before he can make the step of faith. There are times when a literalist approach to faith…scientific or religious…gets in the way. Because the problem is not that our religious stories and our science do not line up, but that they are doing different – although sometimes overlapping – things!  

The real challenge is the meaning that we make out of what we know, experience, and explore. What does it mean that the universe is apparently infinitely small and at the same time infinitely vast? What does it mean that we have the power to change the world we live in, for good or ill? What drives our ethics and whom do we serve? What will ground our ethical and moral choices?

Thomas meets the risen Christ in the upper room and comes to believe. But instead of getting stuck on his skeptical moment, let’s look at what Thomas does with this new knowledge and where his renewed faith takes him. Tradition says that Thomas founded churches in Persia (yes, that Persia… modern day Iraq!) and then in modern day India and Pakistan, where he was eventually martyred.

And where does our confession of the Risen Christ take us? Maybe not so far geographically, but wherever we go, we are challenged to live our faith in the face of life’s contradictions and wounds, and to see the wounded and risen Christ present to us wherever we go.

Our doubts, our unanswered questions, are the ants in the pants of faithful living. Whatever our certainties and whatever our questions, our life in Christ is grounded in the living presence of the risen Jesus who comes to us exactly where we live in the way that we need, in the company of people and fellow inquirers who also experience the Risen Christ in word, sacrament, and Christian community.

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This is the Bulletin for Worship for Easter Sunday, April 5, 2026 at St. Chad's, Tampa, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for Easter Sunday, April 5, 2026.

Learn more about the Diocese of Southwest Florida here.

Easter Lilies in the Morgue

Do you have an Easter story? You know, a story of how you’ve encountered the Risen Christ, or at least seen mercy, hope, and compassion in a surprising way, something that reminds you of or points you to Jesus? I’ll bet you do! Time and again, I have heard people share with me their Gospel stories! Allow me to tell you a favorite Easter story of my own.

A long time ago in a hospital far, far away, I was a chaplain where the Sisters who ran it were very intentional about communicating their Catholic mission and identity. Which meant, among other things, that my colleagues in the pastoral care department did many activities throughout the hospital during Lent.  And it was the job of the On-Call Chaplain over Easter weekend to come in on the evening of Holy Saturday to lead in the transformation of the hospital lobby, other public spaces, and chapel from the austerity of Lent and Holy Week to the festivity of Easter.

The first time I had to do this, I came back to the hospital on Easter Eve, after attending a local parish’s Easter Vigil. The job included gathering up various Lenten displays and putting up the white hangings in the Chapel, changing the veils on various crosses around the building to white (and there were a lot!), and putting out Easter lilies and tulips and spring flowers in the main lobby, the chapel. and some other places around the building. That meant that we ordered lots and lots …and lots!... of flowers!

I commandeered a handcart and, along with other chaplains and some volunteers, we started our rounds.

Only a day or so before, we Chaplains along with many folks from the hospital community had walked through these very same halls in a special way. At that hospital, we did The Stations of the Cross on Good Friday. But instead of staying in a chapel, these Stations were scattered throughout the building—we went to places where people met suffering, pain, hope, fear, loneliness, death and new life. These stations were in the places where people ministered to human frailty, sometimes with awesome technology and just as often with compassion and simple touch. These were the places where divine healing met human need in everyday ways so often that, if you weren’t careful, they would become mundane.

These were the places Jesus walked. The cross stands at the intersection of brokenness and hope. And just two days before, on Good Friday, we walked with Jesus to places where suffering and compassion could not be plainer. At the hospital, we did what a lot of parish church do on Good Friday, placing a plain, rude wooden cross in the sight of all and, in venerating that cross, we confronted all the ways we separate ourselves from God, each other, and creation.

Anyway, back at that hospital all those years ago, when it came time to get those Easter flowers, and they were gone! They were not in loading dock, no one moved them to the chapel, or our offices. They were not tucked away in some corner. Where could they be? I mean how could you lose a half dozen pallets of flowers?  After much searching, I called security.

The guard was expecting my call. He said, “I’ll show you.”

We met and took the elevator to the basement, to a dark hall in the oldest wing of the hospital, a hallway that few people walked. We came to an unmarked door. The guard sorted through his wad of keys and opened the door and we entered the morgue.

Just before he turned the knob, he said to me “Don’t worry, Chaplain, there had been a body in here tonight, but now it’s gone.”

He was right. When he opened the door, there was no dead body. But there was an explosion of flowers! Everywhere there were lilies, daisies, tulips, and spring flowers. They covered the examination table, the counters and overflowed and even the drawers meant to hold bodies, like the ones you see on shows like NCIS, had flowers on them.

A place of sterility was filled with color! The medicinal “laboratory” smell was overcome with the perfume of blooming flowers.  A place of death had become a nursery.

It turns out that the housekeepers had brought the flowers to the morgue because they arrived a day early and they thought they’d keep longer in the coolness of the morgue. “I hope you don’t mind,” the guard said.

So that’s my Easter story, or at least one of them. Easter lilies in the morgue. What’s yours? The thing about these stories is that they don't have to be specifically religious or even mention Jesus by name. But what happens points you in a Godward direction and may even spark a change inside of you. So, where have you encountered the risen Christ or seen signs of resurrected life?

Remember, that as we hear the Easter story, we are not celebrating an empty tomb, much less a morgue. Seeing an empty tomb does not bring life. An empty tomb does not change anything. The Easter story centers on women who came expecting to find a body and instead the found an empty tomb, a vision of angels, and then encountered in person the real, live Risen Jesus. That encounter, theirs and ours, is what we celebrate today.

All the Gospels agree that Mary of Magdala was among the first to meet the Risen Jesus, which, if you think about it, is a very strange choice as the first messenger of Good News because they say she was once possessed by demons. Not the best of credentials. But she was in very good company. Mary of Magdala fits right in the parade of people we’ve seen as we’ve read the Gospel of John all through Lent. The people who met the Christ were changed: such as Nicodemus, the inquisitive but fearful rabbi; or the outcast and troubled woman at the well; or the beggar blind from birth. And then there was Lazarus, the dead man who was brought back to life!

All these people encountered Jesus at the point of their deepest need… and they were all changed!

In Matthew’s Gospel, we hear how Mary came to the tomb to grieve and to care for the dead body of her dead friend, teacher, and healer.

What she encounters is an earthquake, and an angel descending from heaven… it reminds me a little bit of Jacob’s ladder, as if a doorway has opened between heaven and earth… who is dressed in lightning and heavenly glory, who comes down, moves aside the rock door and takes a seat. The angel invites them to go inside and look at the empty tomb and then instructs them to go to Galilee where they will meet up with the Risen Jesus.

In John’s Gospel, something similar happens but first they run to tell the disciples of the empty tomb. Mary runs to the disciples, and Peter and the Beloved Disciple both race each other back to the tomb. They find it just as she said—empty, vacant. Bandages on one side, and the face-cloth neatly folded on the other side. But that is all. The two disciples leave, perplexed. Mary stays behind at the empty tomb, weeping even more.

It is Jesus who comes to her and ministers to her, only she doesn’t recognize him at first. She supposes him to be a groundskeeper who might know something. She is looking for her friend. It is only when he utters her name that she understands.

“Mary” he says. She knows that voice. She knows that person who reached out and touched her heart and cast away whatever was eating away at her life. Her fear is at once replaced with relief, healing and courage.

I love these Easter morning journeys. Can you see your journey reflected in hers?

I don’t know about you, but I see so much of my own spiritual journey in Mary’s zig-zag journey to meet the Risen Christ. So often I come to this space, these sacraments, these liturgies and want only to dwell on the empty spaces in my soul; along with my fears, disappointments, and sense of endless busy-ness. I expect, I demand, that they be filled! But too often I try to do that on my terms, in my way.

The way that works for me is that I tell God what I want God to do for me. I tell God how it is. Sure, I may bring my expectations, my pride, and my pain, but I can’t let go of them. Because I really need them to define who I am. So I tell God to either bless them or fix them. And it’s a pretty safe bet that if nothing happens, I will either blame God or maybe chalk it up as “another blankity-blank learning experience.” Either way, my fears are reinforced, my prejudices stiffen, my attitudes harden.

It's like coming to an empty tomb. Or to a morgue filled to the brim with flowers. I may or may not see Christ in all that. It depends on how I look at it.

So let me tell you where I have met the Risen Christ. I have met the Risen Christ in the person of a grown man who spent his whole life in a state institution for the developmentally disabled but was then moved into a group home and then an apartment—who taught me that Jesus comes to us like a child, even when they are not.

I have met the Risen Jesus in the face of young girl who had brain cancer and literally had half her brain removed, who told me in clear, cheerful words “After the rain comes the rainbow.”

I met the Risen Christ in a quiet man, a man who knew how to listen with his whole heart who asked me once what I was running away from and what I really believed. 

I have seen the Risen Christ in a room full of people who’ve regularly meet in parish halls and classrooms to share their stories and support each other in their recovery from addiction one step at a time.

The Risen Christ has met me in people who have not been intimidated by my anxieties and busy-ness and have prayed me through difficult times.

And who knows? You, an ordinary person, an everyday Christian, may not only have seen the Risen Christ when you have least expected it... you might have encountered a moment of healing, or peace, or acceptance even at the moment when it did not seem remotely possible. The Risen Christ, in my experience, has this habit of showing up when we need God's love and power the most, but when we expect the least. And you might also be the face of the Risen Christ to someone who needs it … and you might not even know what a miracle you are to that person!

The Risen Jesus is made is known in baptismal waters, broken bread and poured out wine--and in the faces of the people God gives to us. The Risen Jesus is made known by people just like us, who hear him call us each by name, and allows us weep with the joy being known and who helps leave our empty places in an empty tomb. Because he is not there. He is risen!

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!

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This is the Bulletin for Worship for Easter Sunday, April 5, 2026 at St. Chad's, Tampa, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for Easter Sunday, April 5, 2026.

Learn more about the Diocese of Southwest Florida here. The Easter message by Bishop Douglas Scharf of SW Florida is here.

Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe's Easter message is here.

This sermon is based on ones that were previously given on April 9, 2023 at St. John's in Clearwater, FL and on February 22, 2018 at Trinity, Easton, PA.

Just Another Day

Good Friday, 2026 

Do you want to know what I find so startling about today, Good Friday, in the middle of most important three days of the Church’s year? It is startling just how normal today is compared to other days. Sure, the stock markets closed today in New York. It's not a bank holiday. The mail was delivered and I see that the UPS and FedEx trucks are out and about. But in my journey to church, traffic was the same, minus the school buses because, yes, the schools are closed. 

In short, life is pretty much going on right around us, with hardly a thought as to what day today is.

Good Friday is important to us Christians, sure; but as far as the culture at large is concerned, it's just another Friday... neither Good, bad, nor indifferent. In our culture, try to go to the mall on Christmas Day. Good luck with that. But today, everything is open for business.

I know that not every big day on the Christian calendar means that everything in the world has to shut down. I get it. But if something is big enough, things just change... maybe not stop, but they'll just feel different! I remember when 9/11 happened in 2001. I was living about 800 miles away from Ground Zero in Marietta, Ohio. And what I remember most about that day and the weeks that followed is that everyone seemed to be equally affected by the enormity of what took place. Flags were everywhere. Respectful silences were observed. People talked in hushed tones.

But Good Friday is not like that. Not at all. Everyone is resolutely going about their business. People are buying…ironically, they are buying Easter baskets and Easter dresses. There have even been Easter egg hunts going on to keep the kids who are home from school busy.

Now some of us may be shocked by that. Those of us who have twinge of nostalgia for the old days…those of us who remember Blue Laws and such…may think of this as bad news. But the news is neither good nor bad. It just is. It is how the world works. It is just this kind of busy, distracted, workaday world that God sent his son into.

There are other moments in our lives when our personal clocks stop but the world just keeps humming along. I remember when my father died, and then six months later, my mother was dying. Both times meant a long drive from southeastern Ohio to New Hampshire, where my parents moved to be near my oldest brother. Both times it meant going through the rituals of hospital visits, funeral home, funerals (in my Dad’s case in two places…one in the parish where he was a deacon, and one at the church where he was being interred), of meeting people—some of whom I had not seen in ages if ever—and then going from place to place and then the long drive home.

And during all of that, when my world was so focused on my parents and my family and each loss, the normalcy of the world around me seemed out of sync with the very small, very slow world I was living in with my brothers and our families. Both times it felt like I was inside a bubble where time, even light itself, seemed to slow to almost nothing, while the world around us sped as if they were on fast forward. 

I think that it was just that way for the people who walked that first way of the cross, when Jesus was crucified. To the locals, the parade of prisoners on the way to Golgotha was probably a nuisance, holding up traffic. The wailing women were a public disturbance. The practiced urbanites of Jerusalem probably saw demonstrations and spectacle (and marches to the gallows) all the time, so they just averted their eyes and walked past as if it weren’t there.

Besides if you stopped to stare at the spectacle, you might be unlucky enough to be picked out by one of the guards and forced to carry one of those gawd-awful filthy crosses. Like that poor Simon of Cyrene. As if the guards were saying, you wanna look? I’ll give you a real close look! Now wouldn’t that just ruin your day?

But even the guards, except for a few who had eyes to see, saw this as just another day at work.

No, the world just went about its business when Jesus was crucified. Time only stood still for those who were most deeply involved. Jesus’ mother and the women who stayed with Jesus through it all, the disciples who watched from a distance: they were inside the bubble. They were the ones that saw the rest of the world in Fast Forward, if they noticed the world all.

For us in here, we who have come into this church and are gathered in darkness at the foot of the cross, it may have something of the same quality. Like being inside a bubble, an alternative world from the rest of life “out there.”

But come to think of it, there is that quality about living life in Christ, isn’t there? That we are aware of something that others might miss. We’d be tempted to hold it over them. To hold it against them. 

Except that I have this strange feeling that if I found myself along the Via Dolorosa before it was called that, that I would be looking at my smart phone, drumming my fingers, averting my eyes waiting for the parade to pass by. Maybe I’d shake my head and mutter a “poor sap” at the poor fellow with the thorns around his head.

This procession, this execution, might have been just another execution of just another prisoner. Just another man without a name, another prisoner without a number, except for the people who did witness was going on and who did understand.

They did not stay inside their bubble for long. The resurrection would burst their bubble, and they would step out of the slow time of grief, and enter, not into the Fast Forward time of the world, but into God’s time. They would come out and first tell each other that this death was like no other death, and this man like no other man. Soon they would be telling a very busy world, that God was there among them and they didn’t even know it and he was killed and he is alive. And through his death, we are made whole. Their seeing allows us to see.

When we walk to the cross, we are not in a different time. We are in God’s time. And when we step out of here, we who have witnessed the cross will through our words and story help others see the cross for themselves.

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Lessons for Good Friday, April 3, 2026 

Here is the link for the Church of the Good Shepherd, Dunedin, FL

Here is the link to the Episcopal Church's Good Friday offering, supporting the work and ministry of the Anglican Province of Jerusalem and the Middle East

Confronting the powers that be

He was called the “Tank Man” or the” Unknown Rebel.” Remember him? Way before our own No Kings Day, 37 years ago, in the spring if1989, students, intellectuals and ordinary laborers protested in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, joining others all over China demanding change in what was called "The Pro-Democracy Movement. They wanted greater democratic reforms, and most of all they wanted an end to the corruption that was a daily part of life in China in 1989. By June, the government had had enough. They sent in the army to break up the massive protest. The Unknown Rebel was a young man who was filmed singlehandedly stopping a column of tanks sent to the Square to break up the demonstration.

The Tank Man stood in front of the tanks, and when the lead tank tried to drive around him, he moved and stepped in front of it again, bringing them to a halt.  Eventually, students from the crowd dragged him away because they were afraid that he would either be shot dead by soldiers or run over by the tanks. We don’t know what became of the Unknown Rebel, but his act became known around the world via news reports and television. He became the symbol of liberty: a free man standing alone but firm against oppression. Time magazine included him as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20^th century.

One spring day in the year 30, in the city of Jerusalem, the local governor of the vast Roman Empire, named Pontius Pilate marched into the city, leading a column of imperial cavalry and foot soldiers. He came through the front door of the city, the West gate, backed up by the greatest exhibition of Roman military power he could muster.

That same day, a rabbi from Nazareth, a wandering preacher and teacher with a gift of both public speaking and, it was said, healing, gathered his followers and marched in the city through the east gate riding a young colt. Jesus came in the side door, effectively the service entrance of the city, and was greeted by the peasants and ordinary people of Jerusalem who carried leaves of palm and other trees, and spread their cloaks, garments, and household carpets (if they could afford them) in his path.

The Imperial procession was a demonstration of power. The Roman government came up to Jerusalem from their own city built by the sea, called Caesarea Maritima, and whenever there was a major festival in the religious heart of occupied Israel, he’d head up the mountain to Jerusalem to remind the locals of the might and power of Rome, with trumpets and drums announcing his arrival accompanied by a legion of soldiers to keep order. Just in case.

Jesus’ small procession, on the other hand, was at once a pitiful thing that in its shabbiness and impressive in its spontaneity, mocking the imperial procession across town. So, while there were no soldiers, no banners, no trumpets, and no drums, there was a crowd of people carrying tree branches and leaves, crying out “Hosanna.”

Have you ever wondered what “hosanna” means in English? I think most of us assume it’s a cry of praise, like “Hallelujah!” Actually, it’s a prayer. It’s a cry for deliverance. Hosanna means “free us!” The crowd is crying out to Jesus, Hosanna! Hosanna free us, we pray you! Deliver us! Save us from Pilate, from Herod, and Caesar and all of the misery of Rome! 

Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem was a prophetic act that underscored the conflict to come. The humility of his triumphal entry signaled that God’s power, God’s forgiveness, God’s reign did not rest with big golden idols, powerful armies, and impressive soldiers, and not even the established religion of the Jerusalem establishment could overshadow Jesus’ humble people’s procession. Jesus was showing that God was sovereign over everyone. God is bigger even than Rome, even of emperors who considered themselves sons of the gods, and that God arrives not in power, but in humility and in service.

Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem was a proclamation that God’s reign is here, present and available to all people, a tangible concrete answer to the grinding oppression of Roman occupiers, and the dulling drudgery of life lived without hope, purpose, or power. Jesus knew that when they saw him riding into the city, everyone would have thought of the prophecy in the Jewish Bible, where a king rides into the city in humility. Jesus arrives as a king of peace.

Pilate’s procession, on the other hand, signified human power and human glory that is established with violence and maintained by force. Jesus proclaims the reign of God, established by a Covenant with God’s people, and maintained by love.

No one really knew what to expect. Some people thought that Jesus would lead a revolt. Others through he’d take over the Temple and call down angelic armies. Of course, none of it will go as planned—or so some thought. Jesus did not rally the people to throw off the chains of oppression. There is no revolution. And while Roman soldiers did not scoop up the people who greeted Jesus... this time!... the authorities exerted their power, just the same. 

Before the week is out, Jesus will be arrested and the might of Rome and the power of the official Temple religion—which was at the heart of the religion and economy of Jerusalem— will fall on the head of Jesus. He dies a public, criminal, traitor’s death on a cross, outside the very gates of the city he rode through, not even a week later.

Normally, that would be the end of the story. We might have remembered Jesus’ entry into the city with the same sorrowful appreciation that we have for the Tank Man. Yes, it was stirring to see one man stand up against the tanks…but the tanks still won. And no one knows whatever became of the brave young man. It might have been stirring to see Jesus’ peasant parade in contrast to the Roman legions. But the legions, it appears, still won.

But the legions did not win, not in a final sense! And what was defeated was not an army or a government or a corrupt merging of power and religion. What was defeated was death. What was defeated is sin. What is defeated on the cross is every human attempt to make things serve in the place of God. What is put down is every complex structure, every kind of manipulation that both make us seem to be in control of our little universes, but which hide the fact that we are God’s creatures and responsible to God and each other.

You and I don’t have armies to show all the wily ways we put ourselves between us and God. We don’t need legions to find ways to hide ourselves from our deep-down fears that we are not who we wish we were. Human beings are adept at denying the ways we forget about our neighbors, ignore those in need and exercise our own self-doubt and try to control our own deep longings. We don’t need armies or governments or even big companies to hide ourselves from God’s purpose of love, compassion, care for one another and creation. It doesn’t take much for us to run away from the fundamental call to follow God’s way, to love God with all our heart, soul and mind, and our neighbors as ourselves. We do it in big and small ways all the time.

Jesus marches in the side door of the city against all of this as well. He is still marching in, showing us all the ways in which power--personal and political-- is used not for good but for ourselves, not for good but for evil. He processes into our lives and addresses the many ways that we put ourselves—our fears and our pettiness and our selfishness--in between us and God. He processes in and reveals the pitiful but deadly ways that people use power not for service but for personal glory. Jesus parades into the service entrance and willingly goes to the cross.

And when he does, he shows us that God’s reign is present right here, right now, and that the cross marks the ultimate end of death’s reign over us, the end of our separation from God and each other and creation, the end of the power of sin.

We don’t know what happened to the Tank Man all those years ago. We don’t know if his quiet protest finally did any good. But during this holy week we will walk with Jesus along the way, we will accompany him to the garden where he pours out his soul and his doubts, we will accompany him to the upper room where he will break bread with his friends and wash the feet of his followers even the ones who will deny and betray him; we will walk with him to the cross and we will greet him as he rises from the darkness of death and walks in to the light of new resurrected life. 

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Here are the Scripture readings for Palm Sunday/Sunday of the Passion, March 29, 2026

Here is a reflection connecting No Kings Day (March 28, 2026) and Palm Sunday.

Here is the website for St. Chad's, Tampa, Florida 

Learn more about the Diocese of Southwest Florida here

"Faithful one! Come out!"

“Faithful one! Come out!” That is what “Lazarus” means, “faithful one,” and so when Jesus calls into the tomb of his dead friend, he is saying, “Faithful one! Come out!”

Lazarus had been dead four days…Jesus got word of his illness but stayed where he was for two days. Before Jesus could get to his house, Lazarus died. When confronted with his grieving, weeping friends, Jesus goes to the grave of his friend, and after a time a grieving himself, he has the stone removed from the tomb and he calls his dead friend back to life. 

“Faithful one! Come out!”

All through Lent, we have been listening to Jesus in the Gospel of John telling the people Jesus’ meets and us what it is like to be a person who believes and follows Jesus Christ. What is like to be a person who meets God in the person of Jesus Christ? What is it like to have our life changed by God?

Well, let’s check the list the Gospel has set out for us:

It is like being born again, Jesus tells Nicodemus.

He also tells Nicodemus that it is like feeling the wind and knowing that it is moving but we don’t know from where it comes from.

Jesus tells the woman at the well that it is like drinking from a well of water that never runs dry. 

John tells us that believing and following Jesus is like coming out of blindness and into both sight and light.

Today, we find out that believing and following Jesus is like being dead and now being alive.

When Jesus calls out to his friend, “Faithful one! Come out!” the Word of God, is calling to the faithful of God to wake from death, as from sleep, and come out. And Jesus shows us what we have to wake up from.

Raising Lazarus from the dead is Jesus’ Ezekiel moment. In our lesson from Hebrew Scripture this morning, Ezekiel dreams that God will knit together “dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones” into a living, restored people of God who hear and live the word of the Lord. Jesus calls us out of darkness and death into life. When Jesus stands outside the grave of his friend, he is giving his last and greatest sign that he is here to animate, breathe life into, humanity.

What Jesus told Nicodemus in the dead of night comes to pass at the grave of Lazarus, who is not only raised from death but also experiences a kind of re-birth.

This is not just theory nor a metaphor to Jesus. It’s personal. Jesus’ friends, Martha, Mary, and Lazarus are all real people from a real family who are experiencing real grief, real anguish, and…real death. So the idea, the concept, of God bringing life to God’s people comes to life when he meets the tears of the two women and the reality of Lazarus’ death.

It’s personal, and the people all around Jesus are handling Lazarus’ illness and death in their own way. They are all over the map. The disciples don’t get it—some think that Lazarus is asleep, and when they learn he is dead, in a fit of fatalism they shrug their shoulders and say “then let’s all die together!” Lazarus’ sisters, Martha and Mary, are grief-stricken and maybe just a little angry and perplexed. Listen to how they both confront Jesus when he finally shows up: “If only you were here, our brother would not be dead!” Yeah, they get the theology. Martha knows that they’ll see Lazarus at the final resurrection, but Mary is not there, not really. In this moment, she only knows her loss.

And there were a variety of responses from the crowd of mourners, as well. Some were grieving the death of a friend and hurting for his sisters. Others were disappointed that they didn’t get to see Jesus heal Lazarus. And, in the ‘No Good Deed Goes Unpunished Department,’ some would be angry when Jesus does revive Lazarus from death. There’s a part of the passage in the Gospel of John that we didn’t hear this morning where Jesus’ enemies begin to plot against both Jesus and Lazarus as a result of this miracle.  So, yeah, Lazarus’ resuscitation leads directly to the cross for Jesus.

Looking at all those responses, it strikes me that Lazarus’ resuscitation is a kind of spiritual Rorschach Test for us. We all look at the same splotch, the same story, but what we take away from Jesus and Lazarus may tell us something about our own faith journey.

Jesus has waded into the stew of life, and while he raises Lazarus, it will be Jesus’ own death and his own resurrection that will allow us to come out of our own tombs and know life. Jesus cries to all of us “Faithful one! Come out!”

Notice that when Lazarus comes out of the cave, he is a dead man walking. He is bound up in the bandages and coverings they put around the dead. He was dressed for death. He needed to be unbound and released to rejoin the community, and he could not do that alone.  We need each other to remove the shell, the bandages, the clothing of death. It turns out that to be born anew we need help. We require Christian community.

How we live together, how we pray together, lift each other up, welcome one another, challenge one another, allow others to experiment, and support each other all help us crack the old shell, remove the bandages, so that we can live a little more as the people God made us to be.

Jesus—who has himself experienced life and endured the grave--stands at the foot of our cave; Jesus opens our tomb and says to all of us, together and alone, “Faithful one! Come out!” And when we come out, we find ourselves among people who with prayer, support, sharing their faith stories, and who encourage us when times are hard, who unwrap us and dress us for living.

What started for us in our baptisms continues every day. Sometimes we find that we have re-entered our tombs, our dark places, our hidey-holes and have to be called out. 

Here is a glimpse of what the resurrected life we share in Christ through baptism is like. It is like having dry bones knit together into new life. It is like coming back to life. It is like having bandages removed from one’s body and one’s eyes. It is like being set free. 

All of us have been called out of death. Now, faithful ones, come out!

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Here are the Scripture readings for 5 Lent A, March 22, 2026

Here is the website for St. Chad's, Tampa, Florida 

Learn more about the Diocese of Southwest Florida here

There is sight, and then there is sight

There is blindness and then there is blindness. There is sight and then there is sight.

Today we hear of a man who was born blind…healed by Jesus he gains both sight and vision.

The man born blind did nothing to deserve Jesus’ attention. He did nothing to earn the free gift of Jesus’ healing. But his healing revealed that there is sight…and then there is sight. And along the way, the gift of sight is passed along to us and other followers of Jesus.

Let’s see what happens!

Jesus meets a man blind from birth both begging for a few shekels for food. He heals the man and tells him to go and wash in a pool that was supposed to be a place where the sick could be healed. Jesus makes a paste or a salve of mud and spit and says go wash. And when he does what he is told, he is healed. And everyone is excited! But not everyone believes it.

The religious leaders are skeptical about Jesus. They’ve seen it all before: snake oil salesmen and religious hucksters were a dime a dozen in Jesus’ day. People claiming to be prophets who were in fact only attributing their own strange ideas to God. Others offering quick fixes for one low, low price. And I am sure that they have seen all kinds of, ahem, interesting people who want to, uhm, share their stories. Sound familiar? Me, too. The truth is, I’m kind of sympathetic to their skepticism.

The problem is that their skepticism doesn’t allow them to look at the evidence right before their eyes. Skepticism means you look at the evidence, not laugh it off just because it looks weird! And you don't write someone off because you've been burned in the past. But listening and investigation requires attention and work, and these folks didn’t want to give this formerly blind beggar the time of day. They try to say that he is not the same man, or that he only pretended to be blind. And when those explanations fail, they essentially stick their fingers in their ears while saying “la la la! I can’t hear you!” by saying that the was born entirely in sin and kicking him to the curb.

As I said, there is blindness and then there is blindness.

Jesus meets the man again. It’s a good thing for Jesus that he did not ask the man how he received his sight, because after the grilling he just came away from, he might have hauled off and popped Jesus one right in the kisser!

Instead, Jesus asks the man if he believes in the Son of Man.  The man says “show me, and I will believe.” Of course, he is being shown because Jesus is standing right there. And the man does believe.

The most religious and righteous people in the land see Jesus and do not believe. But this man, who was blind sees Jesus for who he is, and believes.

There is sight, and then there is sight.

Blindness can come from seeing too much. It can come from thinking we know how the world works and ought to work. It can come from thinking we have everything under control. It can come from thinking that we can get God on our side if we are good enough, smart enough, clever enough. Blindness can come from thinking that we have in ourselves everything we need, and that we don’t need anyone else—and that we above the need for spiritual help.  Often, when we think we see the most, this is when we are the most blind.

But sight can also come when we can see the least. Have you ever wished you could see around life’s corners? Have you ever believed that what you thought you saw turned into something else? Have you ever been let down by what you thought you saw clearly? Have you ever been blind to the world around you—it’s gifts, it’s beauty, it’s possibility? Have you ever turned a blind eye to the people most in need of care, compassion and a taste of hope?

These are the people that Jesus touches. The ones who knew they had no sight, no hope, no direction, only dependence and fear and limitation and dead ends. These are the people Jesus touches and the one to whom he brings sight.

The man born blind did not just get up and dance around the room. There were skeptics. He did not see clearly. He knew that he had been healed, and he knew that his healing was a gift; but it took time from his sight to become vision. His vision grew and grew until he saw and recognized Jesus. He knew the change in him came from God through Jesus and then it all clicked.

Vision is like that. The spiritual life starts with a dim awareness of grace.  And if we follow it, that awareness grows and grows. We know that God is doing something. We know that we are being changed. Those around us may not understand it, they may even discount it. But it is real.

But as our sight grows, as our awareness of God grows, we find that Christ is there. He was the one who touched us. He is the one making us whole.  He is the one who lifted our blindness and allows to see the world for the first time—as if it were through God’s eyes.

There is blindness and then there is blindness. There is the blindness that comes from not being able to see. And there is the blindness that comes from choosing not to see what God has put before us.

And there is sight and then there is sight. There is the sight that comes from resting in our own knowledge, our own power, and our own keen sense of the world as it is. We may think we are being realistic in our skepticism, but we may simply be locking the door on grace. There is another sight, a sight that brings vision. That is beginning to see ourselves and creation as loved, cherished and worthy of being renewed.

There is sight that sees God at work in simple acts of kindness. There is vision to see God at work in the care for the poor, the outcast and the lonely. There is light that comes from encountering the face of Christ in every person that God brings to us.

The world sees Jesus as a long-ago figure of history and myth. The realists in the world see our faith as a desperate allegiance to a good man who failed miserably on an executioner’s cross. The skeptics see us as sadly deluded. All of them can see for themselves.

But we who have been touched by Jesus, and washed in the waters of baptism, and who have seen the Christ in faith, in sacrament, in community, in the faces of our neighbors… we have a different vision. And for all that we have seen and heard, we have only caught a glimpse of what God sees: a people capable of love, of faithfulness, and compassion, and a creation full of wonder and possibility. We don’t claim to see everything, but we know that in Christ, God removes our blindness to gives us hope and the ability to see the world bit by bit and more and more as God does.

So there was only seeing, but now there is sight!

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Here are the Scripture readings for 4 Lent A, March 15, 2026

Here is the website for St. Chad's, Tampa, Florida 

Learn more about the Diocese of Southwest Florida here

Dog tired and bone dry

Have you ever been tired and thirsty? I mean dog tired and bone dry. And I don’t mean just physically thirsty or tired. Have you ever been so inwardly tired and soul thirsty that no matter how much sleep you get or how much you have to drink or eat, nothing seems to refresh us or fill us? That’s what we have in today’s Gospel: Two thirsty people who meet at the well one day. One gets a drink of water and the other gets a drink of life.

One comes up to get a jug of water…but is thirsty inside. The other is tired and thirsty and needs a drink…and is also the well of life.  The woman at the well has water but is thirsty. Jesus who is thirsty, knows the woman’s thirst and quenches it where it really counts…down deep in her spirit.

This is one of those Gospel stories where there’s a whole lot going on.  It’s a lot like the encounter Jesus between Jesus and Nicodemus that we heard last week. In the Gospel of John, we are being taught that to know Jesus is to know God; and to believe in Jesus—to trust him, to understand him, to listen to him—is to be changed from the inside out. So he puts together two stories of two different people to get this across.

The first one, in John chapter 3 is with Nicodemus. The second one is with the woman at the well in Chapter 4.

Here is a piece of (probably useless) trivia for you: There are only three times that Samaritans appear in the Gospels: twice in Luke and once in the Gospel of John.  But those Samaritans, they sure do get around! Whenever you hear about a Samaritan in the Gospels, a little light should go off and a sign should blink, “Difference Ahead!”

So, last week we heard the famous encounter between Jesus and the Pharisee Nicodemus. He came to Jesus, and he learned that if he was to really understand what God was up to, he would need a new identity, a new way of being, a new way of seeing and knowing both God and the world. This new identity, if he took it on, would feel like being born from above. It would feel like the breath of God.

Today, Jesus encounters a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well and, once again, we hear the same thing: if she is to really know how to worship God in Spirit and truth, then she will have to put on a new identity…one grounded in God. This would feel like drinking new, fresh, cold water from a well that never ends. It would be refreshing and clean and new… all the time!

In Nicodemus, we saw a man who was a reformer seeking the heart of Judaism, a leader of the Jewish temple council, but who already knew that being Jewish was more than a building. Still, he was looking for more. The woman at the well is a person that Jesus should not even have been talking to.

Nicodemus speaks to Jesus at night. Jesus speaks to the woman at noon.

Nicodemus begins the conversation. Jesus initiates the conversation with the woman at the well.

Nicodemus has deep a theological conversation with Jesus. Okay... they are both rabbis and they are peers. Today, here is Jesus having an intense theological conversation with a woman— and, what’s more, a foreign woman, far from the center of Jewish life and tradition!

We don’t know right away where Nicodemus goes after his talk with Jesus but wherever it is, it is far away—back into the night, I guess-- but the woman goes and brings a whole town to Jesus. She becomes the first, or one of the first evangelists and apostles. She tells what she has seen and heard.

Here's another tidbit for your trivia file. The Gospel doesn't name the woman, but tradition does. In Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic circles, she is known as St. Photini, and because she told Jesus' story to others, she is considered an evangelist and even, in some   quarters, an apostle. 

Tradition has assumed that the woman at the well is of questionable character. I don't buy it, and I think tradition, even the ones that elevate her to sainthood, does her dirt. Sure, her story is complicated, as we can guess from her conversation with Jesus, but what tradition has done to her story is both complicated and scandalous. 

Photini has outlived or, perhaps, been abandoned by, five husbands in a world where women could neither own property nor support themselves, except under very exceptional situations.  She is ethnically an outsider and by cultural standards of the day living on the edges, dependent on others-- a husband, a father, a son, a brother, another male relative or perhaps a servant or slave -- to survive. Just to get by she must be associated with some man somewhere. 

But too often, both preachers and tradition lays the blame on her for her situation. Whenever we short-handing her story to harlotry or some kind of disreputable occupation, we make her into a sinner in need of repentance, instead of woman who dignity has been denied her by the patriarchal norms of her day. Our persistence in that reading says much more about us and our inattention and prejudice that it says about her. This is a person whose thirst existed on every level: emotional, social, practical, and spiritual. And until she runs into Jesus at the well, Photini has not met anyone who will meet her as she is and quench that thirst.

In John chapter 3, we hear Jesus talk about the spirit blowing where it will and for the need for people to be born from above.  Today, in John chapter 4, we hear of the spirit welling up inside of us and quenching our deepest spiritual thirst. That spiritual well also waters every part of our lives including our need for identity, place and home. 

Both Photini and Nicodemus understood that Jesus is a prophet. They both understood that he has a special insight and a connection to God.  Nicodemus knew that…he read the papers or heard the stories…he was expecting God to send a Messiah or at least a prophet. But for Photini, this was brand new information. She needed a little help. Let’s see what happens here.

Tired from his journey to Samaria, Jesus sits down at Jacob’s well, but he has no cup or bucket with which to draw water. The disciples have gone off to town to buy some food and has left him alone.

Enter Photini, carrying a bucket—actually both a bucket and a water jar.  She is about to carry between 5 and 10 gallons of water and then carry it back to her village in the middle of the day. That is five pounds per gallon plus the weight of the big clay jar. Without even a mule to share the load. In the first century, as in much of the world today, hauling water is woman’s work. In most of the world today, people—mainly women—have to walk one, two or more miles two or three times a day to get safe, useable water. There is nothing particularly special about Jesus asking her for water. He is a man asking a woman for water. Because getting water is woman’s work.

But she and Jesus get into a discussion as deep that well and as important as his conversation with Nicodemus. They talk about their different backgrounds, their different religious traditions. And while she can give Jesus some water, he is offering to quench a much deeper thirst. He meets her at the point of her greatest need…and he breaks down a few barriers in the process.

Jesus knows her story…he knows her heart…and he is meeting Photini as an equal!  No matter how matter how complicated her past is….it doesn’t matter. She can drink from living water. No matter what mountain she thinks God is to be worshipped on, she can worship in spirit and truth.

Photini may be the opposite of Nicodemus in every way, but they are alike in only one way that matters: they are both in need of life deep down inside. They both need birth from above and to drink living water.

And as different as these two people are, there is one difference that counts: she not only gets who Jesus is, she is the one who does something about it. She is the one who tells people.

To this day, Photini the Samaritan woman is honored in many cultures. In southern Mexico, La Samaritana is remembered on the fourth Friday in Lent, when water flavored with local fruit and spice and is given to commemorate her gift of water to Jesus. As I said, the Orthodox know her as St. Photini. In Russian orthodoxy, she is Svetlana, which means "equal to the apostles," and she is honored as apostle and martyr on the Feast of the Samaritan Woman.

She is remembered because when she recognizes the Christ her identity changes. She leaves her water jar behind and goes and finds her friends and neighbors to tell what she has seen and heard.

Jesus breaks down the barriers of gender and nationality and the woman is bold enough to both remind Jesus of what separates them -- he a Jew and she a Samaritan -- and of what connects them -- their ancestor Jacob. Photini is audacious and spars verbally with Jesus and in the process she experiences him as prophet and, more than that, the Messiah. And she takes that news to her village, her family, her people. Both in the encounter and in the telling, she is changed from the inside out.  Two people at the well meet each other’s thirsts.

On another day, also about noon, Jesus will face death and again confess his thirst. On that day, only vinegar will be offered -- in mockery. The gift of his living water will not be apparent to the one holding that sour sponge. But today, when Jesus and the Samaritan woman meet, they conspire to bring life out of death. The water they offer each other, water that quenches the thirst of body and soul, holds the gift of life for all.

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Scripture for the Third Sunday in Lent, Year A, March 8, 2026

Here is the bulletin for St. John's Episcopal Church, Clearwater, Florida for March 8, 2026

Here is the website for St. John's Episcopal Church, Clearwater, Florida 

Here is video of the worship service and the sermon at St. John's, Clearwater, March 8, 2026

Learn more about the Diocese of Southwest Florida here.

Learn more about International Women's Day, 2026 which is March 8th, 2026