Challenging Jesus

There is something strange going on in today’s Gospel. Did you notice? Maybe it struck you as odd but shrugged it off because it doesn’t fit with how we typically picture Jesus… but there it is as plain as day. 

Did you notice it? In today’s Gospel, Jesus the Rabbi is taken to school. 

When we read the Gospels, we see Jesus teach, yes; and he certainly heals and shows power; but there is something else, Jesus learns and he changes. What was said about Jesus as a child—that he grew in wisdom and knowledge (Luke 2:52) — still happens for the adult Jesus. Jesus not only teaches, but he also learns. He grows in wisdom. 

Wisdom is a constant theme of many movies, TV shows, literature, and even graphic novels, although it rarely described as such. 

Remember The Matrix? Neo undertakes a journey to discover his role in overthrowing the Matrix starting with his first meeting with the Oracle, a grandmotherly figure peering into an oven baking cookies, in an apartment where the students hang out as if they are doing their homework after school.

In The Empire Strikes Back, Luke Skywalker learns the ways of the Force under the tutelage of the ancient Jedi master Yoda, who seems at first to be an eccentric, slightly annoying little creature but turns out to be steeped in ancient wisdom.

The film The Way, director Emilio Estevez cast his father, Martin Sheen, as a man named Tom who walks away the Camino de Santiago, “The Way of St. James.” through northern Spain. Along the way he encounters all kinds of people and discovers the difference between the “life we live and the life we choose.”

And we mustn’t forget Spider-Man, who is always learning that with “great power comes great responsibility.”

In the Hebrew Scriptures, Wisdom is the personification of God’s knowledge, creativity and transforming love. Rather than focusing on the power of God that sent plagues to Pharaoh, parted the Red Sea and those other miraculous special effects, Wisdom is how we meet God through other ways of knowing. It is more intuitive, depends on our senses, and comes out of reflection, artistic and musical expression. 

Wisdom is where heart, emotion, and thinking meet. 

That’s why, when the earliest Christians looked for ways to describe their encounter with Jesus, it was the Wisdom literature that spoke to them the most. Their experience of Jesus was not just of a person who did powerful things, but their encounter was one that opened their eyes, their hearts, and their minds to the very presence and person of God. In Jesus, they experienced both the knowledge of God and the welcome of God. 

Wisdom is at the heart of Jesus’ encounter with the foreign woman in today’s Gospel. 

Jesus and his disciples travelled through a Gentile region near Galilee when a woman from those parts approaches Jesus and asks him to heal her daughter. At first, he flat-out ignored her. He wouldn’t even acknowledge the request.

She pleads and shouts after Jesus and his disciples. 

Finally, when he turns to her and speaks the conventional wisdom concerning the Messiah, he says that the Messiah is only for the Jews, not for Gentiles like her. He brushes her off saying that “it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Did you hear that? He called her a dog!

Nevertheless, with courage and desperation, she persisted. “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Finally, the picture begins to make sense. Jesus commends her faith and affirms her as a beloved child of God. “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And, the Gospel tells us, her daughter was healed instantly. 

I don’t know about you, but this story startles me because it does not fit with my soft, cuddly picture of Jesus, who here acts in an arbitrary, harsh, and unloving manner—until she changes his mind!

For centuries, preachers have struggled to make sense of it—and to explain away Jesus’ rudeness. We can’t imagine that the guy who would flip over tables in the Temples or go toe to toe with the religious leaders of his day could be… sarcastic! And the lengths they’ll go to smooth it over is incredible. Some say that the Greek word Jesus used for “dog” really means “puppy.” (Uhm, no. It doesn’t.) Some say that he was critiquing the cultural norms of the day… really? By being callous and unkind? Maybe Jesus was using this encounter to test and stretch his disciples’ understanding of God? Hmm… we’ll see.

Here’s an idea. Maybe the Gentile woman taught Jesus… that in saying that God’s covenant extended to everyone regardless of their status was bigger than they imagined. And maybe the early Church remembered their encounter because they were learning that lesson for themselves! The lesson? That God’s reign is bigger than tradition or culture or “the way we’ve always done things.” 

Remember, Jesus grew up in the first century and that he lived his early life only among Palestinian Jews. He spent almost all of his ministry among the Jews – the children of Israel. His training was Jewish. 

His bible was the Hebrew Scriptures. He lived in a social and religious culture that saw Gentiles as “other,” often as unclean, or taboo.

Was Jesus was stuck in such a mindset or was he deliberately pushing the envelope? I think he was pushing the edges of faith outward, taking it to new territory literally and figuratively. I think he chose to bring Good News to everyone. After all, he did deliberately go to a place where Gentiles lived when he encountered this persistent woman. What did he expect? Either this encounter caused him to re-think commonly accepted views about Gentiles… or it was his chance to prove a point!

Whatever happened between Jesus and the woman, he clearly went from saying “no!” to complimenting the woman for her faith and answering her prayer. I think Matthew’s Church remembered this encounter precisely because those early Jewish Christians were starting to see their Gentile Christian companions in a new light! In short, in this story, Jesus is showing an early Church the importance of learning something new.

Maybe Jesus’ mind changed or he was breaking new ground, but the real news is that the early Church—the Church of Matthew’s Gospel—was changing! They went out from Palestine into the wider world of the Roman Empire; and they were leaving the Synagogues of the Diaspora and going into new communities, and discovering over and over again that Jesus’ teaching, the Holy Spirit, and the grace of God was changing people in unexpected places and in unexpected ways. Over and over again, they were encountering people about whom they would say “…Great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And in that they found healing!

In this transformation we see the challenges and inner struggles faced by every succeeding generation of Christians. Their transforming, God-provoked re-imagining of a long-held, commonly known practices mirror and inform the struggles we experience ourselves in a troubled culture during this excruciatingly troublesome year.

Amid our struggles for inclusion, our long history of racial inequality, the ways we understand Jesus, the Gospel, we will meet and encounter people who challenge our long-held, often cherished notions of faith.

Last Friday, August 14, two different branches of the Church recognized in their calendars the sacrificial witness of two very different saints on the very same day. The Roman Catholic Church remembered the witness Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Episcopal Church remembered Jonathan Myrick Daniels. 

Maximilian Kolbe was a Franciscan priest in Poland who overcame his early, learned anti-Semitism and after the Nazis invaded his country sheltered Jews fleeting the Holocaust. For this he was arrested and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. In 1941, when a prisoner escaped, ten other prisoners were rounded up to be executed. Kolbe stepped in and volunteered to die instead of one of the others, and so the Nazis executed him on August 14, 1941. He was canonized in 1982.

Jonathan Daniels was a seminarian who grew up in Keene, New Hampshire and attended the Virginia Military Institute and eventually the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Cambridge, Mass. In 1965, he answered the call to go to the South and help register disenfranchised black citizens to vote. And on 

August 14th, he was jailed in Haynesville, AL, along with six other Freedom Riders including a Catholic priest. After six days, on August 20th, they were released but while waiting for a ride, they were confronted by a deputy sheriff who aimed his shotgun at a young girl named Ruby Sales. Daniels pushed her aside and was killed in the blast. The priest was wounded trying to protect the others. Ruby Sales continues to be an activist for civil rights and justice to this day.

Sales was so traumatized by Daniels' murder that she nearly lost the ability to speak for the next seven months. Despite death threats made to her and her family, Sales testified at Tom Coleman's trial, where he was acquitted by a jury of 12 white men and said in a CBS television interview a year after the killings that he had no regrets, declaring, "I would shoot them both tomorrow."

Sales herself would later attend the same seminary as Daniels and works today as an advocate for civil rights and social justice.

I don’t know if I would ever have the courage of any of these saints, but their example inspires us to seek faith where it will be found, to speak out against racism, tyranny, and bigotry in all its forms. The story of the Gentile woman challenging Jesus is the story of the Church—of us—being challenged every day to see the image of God in the faces of all the people God gives us every day and reminds us of our baptismal promise to seek and serve Christ in all persons and to love our neighbor as ourselves, whoever and wherever they may be.

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The 12th Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 15A

This is the Bulletin for Worship for The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost: August 16, 2026 at St. Chad's, Tampa, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for 11 Pentecost (Proper 15A) Sunday, August 16, 2026.

Learn more about the Diocese of Southwest Florida here.

Starting at the edges

Nothing really winds me up like buzzwords. People throw around jargon like candy attempting to sound smart without saying very much. Then these words end up in popular usage in places like television, in commercials, in seminars, and in speeches… and it really gets me going… people saying things without really much meaning. It happens in business, in church, and in politics. And when I hear buzzwords, I just want to sigh.

One of today’s most popular buzzwords is “disruption.” They tell us that their product, widget, or process is “disrupting the widget industry… and you should go out and buy it!” Well, friends, disruption is not all it’s cracked up to be… and usually when people are saying it, they don’t really mean it. They say “disruption,” but they mean “more of the same… but all shiny and looking new!” Like a brand-new car body resting on a chassis designed in the 1930’s.

The fact is that real disruption, real innovation, real invention is usually pretty upsetting. That’s why people resist it so much. Not long ago, the idea of flight was reserved for birds, bugs, and balloonists. The funny thing is that after two centuries of invention and innovation, with all the great gadgets we take for granted, very little has changed about how people are. Humans are very inventive in applying all our new gadgets into the ways we’ve always done things.

Change, real change, is hard! It requires a shift in perspective, in habit, in our thinking, and attitude. That’s why it requires not just discipline but grace, vision of what we want to be and the humility to start over… and hearts that listens for God.

Jesus’ first century image for “disruption” was what happens when one tries to put new wine into old wineskins. You know what you get? You end up with a thirsty person standing in a puddle of wine holding a broken, leaky wine sack. No, Jesus said, if you are going to do something new, it needs to be all new!

God is doing something new, Jesus says, and it will neither look, feel, nor operate the same way as how things have operated before. In todays’ Gospel we have three examples: Jesus calls Matthew the tax-collector to follow him; he heals a woman who has experienced a constant hemorrhage her years, and along the way he raises a dead little girl back to life. 

The Gospel puts these three stories together to answer a simple question: what will following the call of God be like? What is God doing in Jesus? In Christ, God is bringing healing, wholeness, and reconciliation to all God’s people.

But God does it differently that how we expect. Our old habits, our old ways of seeing, our notions of good order and how things “have to be” are going to turned upside down. This new wine will not fit in the old containers. The containers can’t take it!

Watch what Jesus is doing and see how he is at once making new wine and creating new wine containers in the lives of the people he meets.

When he walks up to Matthew in his tax-collecting booth, he is meeting a man who, contrary to popular perception, was probably not terribly well-off nor prosperous, but neither was he well-loved nor respected by anyone, including the employer who hired him. You see, in Jesus’ day, the Roman government hired locals to collect the taxes. The contractors would then hire the 1^st century equivalent of day laborers to do the actual collecting. They’d keep a shekel or too, the contractor would keep his cut and pass along the rest to the local Roman official, who probably kept his cut, and so on and so on.

Jesus found Matthew in a booth, where he probably collected tolls or levies from the merchants and travelers using the Roman road. There was no Sun Pass, there was Matthew.

Matthew was probably pushed around by his boss who had the contract, who wanted him to gather as much as possible. The people paying the levy were probably not so nice to him. And when he went home, his Jewish neighbors probably wanted nothing to do with him. Which is why we find Matthew hanging out other folks who, like himself, made their living on the wrong side of the tracks: thieves, extortionists, prostitutes, and other Jews in the employ of Rome, not to mention those people who made their living doing often important but unsavory work that respectable people didn’t talk about.

So when Jesus calls Matthew, he calls one of the most unlikely, least respected persons imaginable to be one of his followers. And he doesn’t even tell him to clean up his act first! No lecture, no harangue, just an invitation to follow.

What a strange thing to do! Why does Jesus risk his own good name and the reputation of a fledgling ministry on the likes of this reprobate … this quisling… Matthew? Jesus is about to show us why in the two healings that follow.

While Jesus is eating and drinking with Matthew and his notorious friends, word comes that a little girl, the daughter of a leader in the local synagogue, has died. He begs Jesus to lay his hand on the girl so that she may live.

Let’s stop here for a minute: notice that the person who approaches Jesus is a leader of the local synagogue. In other words, the Senior Warden! Probably a member of the first century equivalent of local Rotary club and business roundtable. He must have loved his daughter very much and he must have been very scared, because this very respectable person just cross to the wrong side of town to find Jesus in this literal den of thieves! And notice that he approached Jesus while other local religious leaders—maybe his friends and colleagues—are standing outside tut-tutting and shaking their heads.  The passage doesn’t say so, but the implication is that his faith must have been very strong!

Jesus goes with the dad to care for his girl, with Matthew presumably following Jesus for the first time, which leads to another unexpected healing encounter.

Hidden in the crowd of the curious, a woman who has suffered her whole life from some kind of hemorrhage… most likely a disorder that affected her since puberty… was watching Jesus walk by.  The person was not only ill, but she was excluded from ordinary company, including other women, certainly she was never going to marry, and was probably also practically separated from her family. Because by the custom of the day, anyone she touched would be ritually unclean and therefore she risked not only condemnation but also fear-driven violence on a daily basis. But when she touches Jesus’ cloak as he passes, she is healed. Notice that Jesus doesn’t recoil in horror. He is not worried that he might catch her ritual cooties. Instead, he meets her gaze, commends her faith, and then blesses her saying “your faith has made you well.”

When Jesus finally arrives at the official’s house, it’s too late. The girl has died, and the mourning rites have begun. He assures them that all is well, but instead of saying “Watch this guys…!” or “hold my bier!” he observes that she is only sleeping. They all laugh... except apparently the desperate parents and family and a few followers who are holding their breath. After shooing away the professional mourners and after all the hub-bub has calmed down, he takes her by the hand and gently bids her to wake up. And she lives!

If you want to know why it is that we friends, followers, and apprentices of Jesus care about the poor, the sick, and those society would consider strange, weird, or different—if you have ever wondered why we find ourselves hosting recovering addicts in our buildings who might never walk into our worship spaces, or feed or clothe folks in need through our various ministries, or why we speak of love and compassion when the world revels in hatred, fear, and division, this is why: it is what Jesus did. He comes to us in the midst of our complicated lives and sits, chats, and eats with us. He touches us where we experience the most pain. He meets us at the point of our greatest need. He comes into our lives and homes and our hearts and brings life. He sees faith in us when others might only see fault and invites us to follow him.

In all three instances in today’s Gospel, people who lived on the fringes, separated by custom, choice, or circumstance from their communities, were reconciled and brought back into the lives of their families, communities, and daily lives in the company of Jesus.

What does it mean that Jesus called a hated tax-collector and quisling to follow him? It is so that he can live, and work and walk with dignity, respect, and wholeness as a person of God in community.

What does it mean to be made whole and healed and no longer living at the edges of society subject to the alternating vagaries of human pity and condemnation, as the woman was? It is to discover that one’s faith makes us whole and returns us to the family of God! 

What does it mean to experience new life? It is like Jesus coming into your home, and against all expectation, taking you by the hand, and inviting you to get up and live.

Following Jesus changes us. Jesus takes what we have always thought to be true and normal and expected and turning it upside down, inside out and giving it new life. It's not disruption, it's reconciliation! Grace, faith, baptism, sacramental living, and Christian community together all give us a new container—a new wine skin! — to live as Christ’s own forever. We are all called, welcomed, healed, and given new life because with Christ, our faith heals, reconciles, and makes us well.

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This is the Bulletin for Worship for The Second Sunday after Pentecost (Prober 5A), June 7, 2026, at St. Mary's, Dade City, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for The Second Sunday after Pentecost (5A).

Learn more about the Diocese of Southwest Florida here.

Jumping into the Bible with both feet

A friend of mine told me this would happen that when I became a grandparent, it would be life-changing, life-challenging and an awful lot of fun. And one of the things I love to do the most with my grands is to read out loud to them. My wife and I like to take the kiddos to the library or the bookstore, and along the way we’ve built a pretty good little children’s library of our own. We keep the books at kid level, so they can freely pick out a book and either look at it themselves or ask one of us to read to them.

Now we come by this naturally. My wife’s parents were both teachers, and my mom was a librarian, and I still remember my father reading aloud to me and my brother when I was small.

And you know what? Children’s literature is amazing! Stories written for kids contain a lot of truth about life, the world, and what it means to be human. Adults would do well to read more children’s literature, because you never know what a rabbit, a stuffed bear, a dragon, a magical school bus, or a kid on a cosmic adventure might teach us!

Do you have a favorite children’s book? While we all have our favorites, there are two, that are favorites of mine and I think speak to our life as Christians hinted at in the collect and readings assigned for today.

The first is an oldie. The Monster at the End of This Book stars Grover of Sesame Street fame. Grover has read the title of the book and tries very hard to convince the reader to stop reading. Grover does not want us to get to the end of the book. From the very beginning, Grover “breaks the fourth wall” and talks to the reader directly. [And, for some reason, when I read this aloud to the Grands, my voice changes to become very Grover-like!] 

Of course, the book can’t go on without the reader reading, which makes Grover try even harder to stop us; and, I don’t want to give anything away, but the monster at the end of the book turns out to be Grover himself! 

Another wonderful children’s book is one you might never have heard of. It was written by Nancy Patz and is called Pumpernickel Tickle and Mean Green Cheese. In that story, Mom asks her son to go to the corner store and buy one loaf of pumpernickel bread, one pound of cheese, and one very fresh, very green, very big dill pickle. As the boy and his friend (a very silly stuffed elephant) walk through their Baltimore neighborhood, trying to remember the list and of course mixing it up into something very silly – of course, they forget what they were going to the store for! Still in the end, they finish their journey, get what they are after, and bring it home, where they have a nice lunch with Mom.

This is wonderful, I hear you say, but what’s this got to do with today’s readings? Well... Everything!  A few minutes ago we prayed, to God “who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning” that we’d have the grace “to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ....”

This is the only collect in the whole Book of Common Prayer that explicitly refers to the Scriptures themselves. It claims that God is the one who is the source and cause of the writing of Scripture. It does not get into the mechanics of how that happened; it simply says that God is the cause of Scripture. 

Episcopal priest Fr. Joshua Bowron suggests that we are encouraged to engage in Scripture in four ways:

First, we are invited to simply hear the Scriptures. Hearing is a funny thing because we can’t hear more with effort, it is just something we have to allow. We also cannot unhear things, can we? A lot of these stories are familiar, so put aside what you think you know and just listen! If we can hear with new ears, then we’ll be awakened to the newness and wonder of what God is doing. 

Next, the collect encourages us to read the Scriptures. How often do you read Scripture? Sunday mornings we get a great deal of Scripture, both from the lessons and in the liturgy, but how about Monday through Saturday? The Church has long given testimony to the transformative power of daily Bible reading. Forward Day-by-Day and The Daily Office are good places to start!

The collect now gives us a very funny word. What does it mean to “mark” the Scriptures? This prayer was written way before highlighters or even pens were invented, so it doesn’t mean that we mark up our Bibles literally, though doing that might be useful. (There is no prohibition against underlining or making notes in your Bible… I have an old Bible that is like an old friend to me because it has over fifty years of highlights, underlines, and notes in it!) But what “marking” means is that we stop from to time to time and see the gravity of a particular passage and then take the time to reflect and ponder it. We are invited to ask what it is saying to us. What was going on when it was first written? How have faithful people interpreted this passage over time? And in interrogating the passage in that way, we mark its power; mark how it makes us wonder; so we can ponder what God is saying to the people of God and then act on it.

We are encouraged to learn the Scriptures. For too long, Episcopalians have ceded knowledge of the Bible to other groups. I don’t know about you, but for a long time, I always felt kind of beat up by people who could quote chapter and verse at me, usually to tell me that I, or my tradition, was wrong about something—especially something I was passionate about! We should not be ashamed of what the Scriptures say and instead should know them well enough to live by them. This leads us to the last way of engagement described in today’s collect.

How do we inwardly digest the Scriptures? Now, isn’t that a strange image? Or maybe not! There is a rabbinic tradition that a small dab of honey is placed on a scroll of the Torah for children to lick to understand the sweetness of the word of God. St. Benedict urged his monks to ruminate upon Scripture throughout the day. Do you know what a ruminant animal is? It’s an animal that digests food in stages— you know, like a cow, chewing the cud. And maybe like one of those animals, we need to come back to Scripture time and time again in order to digest it properly. 

In other words, instead of keeping the Bible at a respectful distance, we are encouraged to jump into Scripture with both feet!

Very often, we simply accept what a particular passage says without much thought. That’s like stopping one’s ears and singing “la la la.” Instead, allow a passage to settle into your very being. Let it reside there. And while it’s there, allow it to inform your experience. Ask where you agree or disagree, where it causes a pinch, and where it challenges you to grow.  Go ahead and turn it over in your mind. See what happens. This kind of reading and rumination will keep the Scripture with you like a pebble in your pocket.

However you do it, jumping into the Bible with both feet will change you! This kind of conversation with Scripture, and Tradition and Reason is the launchpad for a new, dynamic relationship with God. Without this give and take, then the Bible simply becomes an idol ... or, worse, a dust-magnet. 

Remember, the Bible just didn’t pop out of the air fully formed and edited, but it was gathered over a long period of time… first in the Hebrew Scriptures and then in the early Church. In fact, it was the same Church council that gave us the Nicene Creed that finalized what would be in the Christian Bible…and that was 400 years after Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension!

So how did the Church get along for four centuries without a finalized Bible in their homes and churches? Well, in much the same way we get along with the Scriptures that we have today… by simply being the Church! Like those early Christians, we are followers of Jesus Christ. We are his friends and apprentices who are learning and doing the work of Jesus every single day!

Today’s collect invites us to jump into the Bible with both feet because we are kind of like the “monster at the end of the book!” We are part of the community that wrote that book we call the Bible, the Church. It is fairly mind-bending to consider that the New Testament was written by people who gathered in their congregations just as we do every Sunday. And just like us, they told the story of Jesus and his followers. And just like us, they asked questions and worked out what it means to follow Jesus and how to faithfully live in community serving the people around us. They (and we!) imagined what God is up to in the world and where God is taking us! We are not only people of the book; we are experiencing what that book talks about every day!

Reading the Bible can be a solemn thing. Our lectors work hard to read it well (and they do!). But sometimes I like to imagine myself reading the Bible the way I read a story to my Grandkids, with voices, whimsey, and weight. And that’s how the Bible was remembered long before they wrote in scrolls or printed it in books… by telling the story together! So I invite you to imagine yourself, when you are reading the Bible, to go ahead and “be the monster at the end of the book” and find all the ways to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest the text so that we will engage Scripture, and be transformed by it, and more and more live it. Because, as we do that, we become more and more the Gospel Story for a world that’s so desperate for hope, love, and Good News.

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Scripture for the Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 28, Year C, November 16, 2025

Website for St. Chad's Episcopal Church, Tampa, Florida

Learn more about the Diocese of Southwest Florida here

Here is the bulletin for the Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost, Year C, November 16, 2025, St Chad's Episcopal Church, Tampa, Florida.

Faith beyond the "a-ha!"

It happens to all of us. Sooner or later, we will learn or discover something that changes everything, but it is still too big for us to comprehend. We have an “a-ha!” moment but “a-ha!”  turns out to be some combination of awe, wonder, confusion, and incomprehension all at once. In last weeks Gospel, we heard Peter “get it” but he didn’t “get it” all at once. It will take time for all the pieces to come together.

Well, Peter isn’t alone. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I “get it” but “don’t get it” all at once. It happens to all of us.

We heard in last week’s Gospel how Peter was able to confess and say out loud that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. Peter is “the rock.” He got it. And yet Peter does not understand.

In today’s Gospel we hear that Peter could not bear the idea that Jesus would be arrested and then die at the hands of the very people he is here to save. As soon as Jesus proclaims Peter as the Rock on whom the all of the gathered saints will rest and, Jesus tells Peter that his thinking is backwards; that he is the tool of the devil. Why?

For one thing, Peter came from a world that expected the Messiah to be something quite different than what we’ve heard through a few millenia of Sunday School, sermons, and Christmas Contatas. The conventional wisdom was that the Messiah would be a political leader sent by God to liberate the Jewish people from their occupied and dispersed state. Instead, Jesus shows that the Messiah liberates people from their separation from God, each other, and creation. That’s a big mental and spiritual leap: to move from the idea that Jesus was a prophet to being the Messiah is one thing, but to re-imagine what the Messiah does is something else.

I think the same thing happens for us. We think we understand something because we’ve had the light-bulb go off, only to find that we are immediately thrust into a new set of questions. The “a-ha” answers a bunch of questions and solves a whole host of problems. And also shows off the world in a new, and sometimes troubling light.

Allow me to share three stories.

C.S. Lewis thought he understood pain. He wrote and lectured about the problem of pain. In his book of the same name, he talked about pain in two ways: in terms of the consequences of people’s choices and also about how God allows pain to help us grow. Living through two world wars seemed to verify his point of view—that pain comes from either human choice or from divine purpose. Then the unexpected happened: this Oxford don and lifelong bachelor, fell in love with Joy Davidman, a Jewish-American divorcee who had converted to Christianity partly due to Lewis’ writing. They met in 1953 and in 1956 she became ill with cancer. They were married in 1957 and she died in 1960. This is when Lewis learned about two other truths about pain: that we are drawn to our choices, like love, because we are always looking for something more; that sometimes pain happens; and, finally, that not just religion but all of life is an act of faith. He wrote about all this in his little book A Grief Observed under an assumed name, which ironically was gifted to him several times over by friends concerned about his own complicated mourning.

Henri Nouwen was a spiritual director, a priest, and a scholar. He thought he knew about the mystery of life in Christ, about how suffering can put us in touch with the cross and peer into the resurrection. He decided to put aside the trappings of success to live alongside adult mentally retarded persons in a community called The Arch. His experience of living with people whom society cast aside and who would never succeed, be wealthy or famous, showed him the fullness of life and of love.

Frances Perkins was raised a New England Congregationalist and became an Episcopalian as an adult. She witnessed the devastating Triangle Shirt Waist Factory fire that killed 125 workers, mainly women and children, and in response studied Social Work at Columbia University and would become the first woman to in the Cabinet as U.S. Secretary of Labor during the Roosevelt administration. She led the development of Social Security and Unemployment Insurance and worked out labor and management relations during the war years. During her time in government, she took regular retreat and spiritual direction at an Episcopal monastery and lectured on scripture, theology, and Christian social responsibility in her parish in Manhattan. Perkins experienced God’s grace through Sacramental living in all creation. For her, to live in a loving relationship with God was to participate in the work of grace for all people, especially to working people and the poor.

Paul’s letter to the Romans presents a picture of the Church that is grounded in Christ Jesus. Much more than doctrinal uniformity, Christian community is shown when people change and call out of each other their very best selves. But this change just doesn’t fall off of trees.

Over and over again we hear stories of people who are firm in their faith—who have an “a-ha!” and get it. They are converted from one kind of life to a new life in Christ. And then something else happens, something they cannot avoid, and they are converted again.

This is one thing we learn from Peter. When we follow Jesus Christ, we will be changed. And we will be changed again and again.

Many Christians think that change must happen all at once, and then is locked down. Once and done! Often we fear that our faith will be in vain if we are anything less that 100% certain about everything. But this keeps many people from fully engaging God in Christ, because their need for this kind of certainty keeps them from experiencing the kinds of change the Spirit brings. The thing is that life in Christ does not require us to know all the answers. Faith is trust. Faith is knowing in a different way, over and over again.

The Gospels give us a picture of Peter as the icon of a Christian in motion. And he is so like us! He could not bear to hear that Jesus would suffer and die. In his heart he knew that Messiahs aren’t supposed to do that. But the more he followed Jesus, the more he ‘d learn that for God to transform and make whole creation and heal the rift between us and God, that God would break the rules over and over again.

Peter will discover that faith is fundamentally hopeful. Starting with his confession of faith, the rebuke he heard from Jesus, and moving through transfiguration, arrest, crucifixion, resurrection, the Gentile mission and on and on, would learn again and again that the light bulb, the aha!, is never the end, but is always a new beginning.  He will discover that faith always looks forward.

That kind of faith gave him—and gives us! — the capacity to absorb everything new God taught him. Faith gives us the capacity to move from certainty to openness to change this is how God builds a church that engages and transforms the world.

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Bulletin for Worship for the 14th Sunday after Pentecost, September 3, 2023 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for the 14th Sunday after Pentecost, September 3, 2023.

Here is a video of the Sermon at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on September 3, 2023.

Here is a video of the Liturgy at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on September 3, 2023.

Pestering Jesus

There is something strange going on in today’s Gospel. Did you notice? Maybe it struck you as odd but you shrugged it off because it doesn’t fit with how we typically read the Bible… but there it is, as plain as day. Did you notice it? In today’s Gospel, Jesus the Rabbi goes to school.

This underscores an aspect of the Gospels that we often overlook: Jesus teaches, yes; and he certainly heals and shows power; but there is something else, Jesus learns and he changes. What was said about Jesus as a child—that he grew in wisdom and knowledge—is still happening for the adult Jesus in his three-year mission: Jesus learns. He grows in wisdom.  

Wisdom is a constant theme of many movies, TV shows, literature, and even graphic novels, although it rarely described as such.

Remember The Matrix? Neo undertakes a journey to discover his role in overthrowing the Matrix starting with his first meeting with the Oracle, a grandmotherly figure peering into an oven baking cookies, in an apartment where the students hang out as if they are doing their homework after school.

In The Empire Strikes Back, Luke Skywalker learns the ways of the Force under the tutelage of the ancient Jedi master Yoda, who seems at first to be an eccentric, slightly annoying little creature but turns out to be steeped in ancient wisdom.

The film The Way, director Emilio Estevez cast his father, Martin Sheen, as a man named Tom who walks the Camino de Santiago, “The Way of St. James.” through northern Spain. Along the way he encounters all kinds of people and discovers the difference between the “life we live and the life we choose.”

Recently, the latest iteration of Star Trek has just wound up its three-year story, which was built around an older, wiser, Jean-Luc Picard, imparting hard-earned wisdom to his younger cohorts—and, most of all, the wisdom they impart to him!

In the Hebrew Scriptures, Wisdom is the personification of God’s knowledge, God’s creativity and God’s transforming love. Rather than focusing on the power of God that sends plagues to Pharaoh, parts the Red Sea or those other “big” miraculous things, Wisdom is a way of meeting God through other ways of knowing. It is more intuitive, depends on our senses, and comes out of reflection, artistic and musical expression. Wisdom is where heart, emotion, and thinking meet.

So it makes sense that when the earliest Christians looked for ways to describe their encounter with Jesus, it was the Wisdom literature that spoke to them the most. Their experience of Jesus was not just of a person who did powerful things, but their encounter was one that opened their eyes, their hearts, and their minds to the very presence and person of God. In Jesus, they experienced both the knowledge of God and the welcome of God.

This is at the heart of Jesus’ encounter with the foreign woman in today’s Gospel. Jesus and his disciples went into a Gentile region near Galilee when a woman from those parts asked him to heal her daughter. At first, he flat-out ignored her. He wouldn’t even acknowledge the request.

She shouts after Jesus and the disciples. Finally, he turns to her and speaks the conventional wisdom concerning the Messiah. When he says that he was sent only to the Jews – not to Gentiles like her. He even says that “it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Did you hear that? He calls her a dog!

Nevertheless, with courage and desperation, she persisted. “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Finally, the picture begins to make sense. Jesus commends her faith and affirms her as a beloved child of God. “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed instantly.

I don’t know about you, but this story startles me because it does not fit with my soft, cuddly picture of Jesus, who here acts in an arbitrary, harsh, and unloving manner—until she changes his mind!

For centuries, preachers have struggled to make sense of it—and to explain away Jesus’ apparent bad manners. Some say that the Greek word Jesus used for “dog” really means “puppy.” (Uhm, no. It doesn’t.) Some say that he was critiquing the cultural norms of the day… really? By being rude? Maybe Jesus was using this encounter to test and stretch his disciples’ understanding of God? Hmm… we’ll see.

Here’s an idea. Maybe the Gentile woman taught him! And the early Church remembered the encounter because they too were learning that lesson over and over again themselves! The lesson? That God’s reign is bigger than tradition or culture or “the way we’ve always done things.”

Remember, Jesus grew up in the first century and that he lived his early life only among Palestinian Jews. He spent almost all of his ministry among Jews – the children of Israel. His training was Jewish. His bible was the Hebrew Scriptures. He lived in a social and religious culture that saw Gentiles as “other,” often as unclean, or taboo.

Was Jesus was stuck in such a mindset or was he deliberately pushing the envelope? After all, he did deliberately go to a place where Gentiles lived when he encountered this persistent woman. Did this encounter cause him to re-think commonly accepted views about Gentiles?

Whatever happened between Jesus and the woman, he clearly went from saying “no!” to commending the woman’s faith and answering her prayer. I think Matthew’s Church remembered this encounter precisely because those early Jewish Christians were starting to see their Gentile Christian companions in a new light! In short, in this story, Jesus is showing an early Church the importance of learning something new.

Jesus’ mind might have been changed, but the real news is that the early Church—the Church of Matthew’s Gospel—was changing! They went out from Palestine into the wider world of the Roman Empire; and they were leaving the Synagogues of the Diaspora and going into new communities, and discovering over and over again that Jesus’ teaching, the Holy Spirit, and the grace of God was changing people in unexpected places and in unexpected ways. Over and over again, they were encountering people about whom they would say “…Great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And in that they found healing!

In this transformation we see the challenges and inner struggles faced by every succeeding generation of Christians. Their transforming, God-provoked re-imagining of a long-held, commonly practices mirror and inform the struggles we experience ourselves in a troubled culture during this excruciatingly troublesome year.

Amid our struggles for inclusion, our long history of racial inequality, the ways we understand Jesus, the Gospel, we will meet and encounter people who challenge our long-held, often cherished notions of faith.

Ten days ago, two branches of the Church recognized in their calendars of saints the sacrificial witness of two very different saints on the very same day—August 14. The Roman Catholic Church remembered the witness Saint Maximillian Kolbe and the Episcopal Church remembered Jonathan Myrick Daniels.

Maximillian Kolbe was a Franciscan priest in Poland who overcame his early, learned anti-Semitism and after the Nazis invaded his country sheltered Jews fleeting the Holocaust. For this he was arrested and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. In 1941, when a prisoner escaped, ten other prisoners were rounded up to be executed. Kolbe stepped in and volunteered to die instead of one of the others, and so the Nazis executed him on August 14, 1941. He was canonized in 1982.

Jonathan Daniels was a seminarian who grew up in Keene, New Hampshire and attended the Virginia Military Institute and eventually the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Cambridge, Mass. In 1965, he answered the call to go to the South and help register disenfranchised black citizens to vote. And on August 14^th, he was jailed in Haynesville, AL, along with six other Freedom Riders including a Catholic priest. After six days. August 20^th, sixty years ago today, they were released but while waiting for a ride, they were confronted by a deputy sheriff who aimed his shotgun at a young girl named Ruby Sales. Daniels pushed her aside and was killed in the blast. The priest was wounded trying to protect the others. Ruby Sales continues to be an activist for civil rights and justice to this day.

I don’t know if I would ever have the courage of either of these two saints, but their example inspires us to seek faith where it will be found, to speak out against racism, tyranny, and bigotry in all its forms. The story of the Gentile woman challenging Jesus is the story of the Church—of us—being challenged every day to seek the face of Jesus in the faces of the people God gives to us every day, and to remind us of our baptismal promise to seek and serve Christ in all persons whoever and wherever they may be.

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Bulletin for Worship for the 12th Sunday after Pentecost, August 20, 2023 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for the 12th Sunday after Pentecost, August 20, 2023.

Here is a video of the Sermon at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on August 20, 2023.

Here is a video of the Liturgy at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on August 20, 2023.

"O God, Thy sea is so great and my boat is so small."

Stop me if you've heard this one.

One day, a priest, a rabbi, and an imam are out taking a hike in the forest. They see that they need to cross a wide stream, but there is no bridge for miles in either direction, and they have no boat. The rabbi, shrugs, and steps out and walks across the stream to the other side. The imam looks at the priest, and says “Well, if he can do it, I can do it,” and he walks across the stream to the other side. The priest looks up and down the stream, and then across. The rabbi and the imam shout to him “Are you coming or not? We don’t have all day!” The priest sighs, shrugs, and says “Well, if they can do it, I can do it!” So he steps out and… sploosh!... he’s in the water, sopping wet. The rabbi says, “What? You didn’t see the rocks?”  

So….

Can we please give Peter a break?  After all he did walk on water!  He did ask to have Jesus call him and he did step out. And he certainly got further on his walk on the water than I… and probably any of us… ever would. And even when he got frightened and began to sink, he did reach out to Jesus for help.

Not a bad performance, don’t you think? In fact, I’d say that Peter’s actions was something of a miracle! Certainly compared to the priest in my little story!

We tend to think of sinking Peter. And we say in our hearts—see? He has no faith! He couldn’t do it! It’s like that other joke about this incident ending up in the newspaper and the headline reads, “Apostle Can’t Swim!” In my minds ear, I can hear the other apostles now, kidding Peter endlessly about this and busting his chops with remarks like "you know what happens when you put The Rock on the water? It sinks!”

But in all this we forget that everything that Peter did that day was an act of faith!

That doesn’t make stepping out towards Jesus in the midst of a storm any less scary, or his impromptu swim any less important, because his experience teaches us that our faith lives best is when we focus on Jesus. But when we get distracted and feel overwhelmed, the best we can do is cry “Lord, help us!”

So, I have another riddle for you: Why did the disciples cross the lake? To get to the other side!

When the early church remembered Jesus’ miracle, they could identify with it immediately. Not because they were sailors or fishermen, but because the new, young church was like a being in a small boat on a big sea in the middle of a storm.  So, in the Gospel of Matthew (as in Mark, whose outline Matthew follows) “going to the other side (of the lake)” means going from a safe place to a new, foreign or unknown place of mission—and this was by definition a risky and stormy trip.

Matthew is telling the story of what Jesus… and how he rescued Peter… so that his church can remember what it takes to weather whatever storm we experience.

And we all experience storms. It can be a personal storm—a conflict, facing a dilemma, dealing with a difficult illness or the loss of a job. Or it can be a corporate storm—in a workplace, a family, a neighborhood or even a church. Whatever the reason and whatever the place, we are all familiar with storms. We deal with them as best we can. We try to keep the water out and try to stay afloat, even if we don’t make any headway.

Jesus walks across the water and through the storm to come to the disciples. Some paintings I have seen of this shows a serene Jesus walking across the water as peacefully as a stroll down a lane on a summer day. But I think that when Jesus walked across the water, he got wet. The storm was all around him and the wind was still wailing. The powers of the storm and the wind and sea tried to overwhelm him, but could not. He walked through the storm, not immune from its effects and fully immersed in its reality. He was not overpowered by it.

He would do that on the cross. He would face everything evil and sin has to offer, including death. He would die a true and real death, just as he faced a true and real storm on the sea that day, and he would rise from the dead. In walking on the sea in the storm, he is not just demonstrating his power, he shows us that the storm is real and that the storm does not deter or stop him.

Notice that it is only after Jesus gets into the boat, helping a wet and chastened Peter, that he stills the storm. So there are three miracles here: Jesus walks on the water. Peter walks on the water. Jesus stills the storm.  But first, people got wet.So, let’s give Peter a break. And let’s give ourselves a break, too.

There are moments (at least) when we are all of us people of “little faith.”  Martin Luther has an accurate description of us:  he said that they, and we, are Simul justus et peccator  which means "simultaneously saint and sinner".  Peter is a lot like us: a lion of the faith with a heart of gold who is at the very same dense, fearful, and reactive.

The disciples  are just like us--- faithful people on a difficult journey. A journey beset by storms and it is in the middle of the very real storm comes a very real Jesus to meet them at the scariest moment.

At the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, there is a little plaque that was given the new, young president by Admiral Hyman Rickover, who commanded the US Navy’s Submarine Service. It sat on Kennedy's desk during his presidency and it was the same plaque Rickover gave to every new captain of every boat in his command. It reads: “O God, Thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.”

Every Christian will experience storms. Baptism does not make us waterproof! We will get wet! In fact, to do the ministries we are called to do, we will be sent into some pretty thick weather! But Jesus comes to us, and he is with us in the storm. We cannot still the storm or walk on water alone. But it is Jesus who has power over the storm. The storm will not defeat Jesus—and so the storm will not defeat us! Only sometimes we have a hard time believing that! And we people of little faith, we are at once saints and sinners, need only reach out to Jesus and say “Lord, save me!” and he is there in the midst of the storm to rescue us. 

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Bulletin for Worship for the 11th Sunday after Pentecost, August 13, 2023 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for the 11th Sunday after Pentecost, August 13, 2023.

Here is a video of the Sermon at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on August 13, 2023.

Here is a video of the Liturgy at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on August 13, 2023.