Spiritual energy put to work

A Sermon on the Second Anniversary of the Partnership between St. John's Episcopal Church and St. Paul's Lutheran Church, Clearwater, Florida

My first encounter with these machines happened on the highway. One day about twenty years ago, I was motoring up the Pennsylvania Turnpike in the Pocono Mountains, when I passed a convoy of extra-long trucks escorted by vehicles with flags and flashing lights. Each flatbed truck had a huge white piece of equipment on it, gleaming like a modern sculpture. What these trucks were carrying was the finished parts for a huge wind-turbine…high-tech windmills. Today, if you drive south out of Wilkes-Barre, PA, through a town called Bear Creek, you will catch a glimpse of a few rows of these huge white propellers on tall towers sitting on top of a mountain ridge slowly turning as they produce electricity. Amazing, isn’t it? That we can take the energy of the wind and turn it into electricity!

Equally amazing are the number of homes and businesses around here that have solar panels on their roofs turning the energy of the sun into electricity or hot water or both. In fact, recently, driving across Florida on Route 60, I saw rows of solar panels sitting on top of one of those mountains of trash where the big green trucks empty their dumpsters! These panels were not only providing electricity, but they were powering the process that was turning the methane from all that trash we throw away into fuel that goes back to homes, schools, hospitals, and other places, powering generators making even more energy.

Everyone is talking about energy…where to get it and how to use it. Whenever I fill up my car with the gas made from the fossils of ancient plants and animals, I am made aware that the cost of energy has gone up. But something else occurs to me. 

Just as cats always find the sunniest spot in the room to warm themselves and plants always lean towards the sun, humans are pretty good at harnessing energy. One of our human ancestors took the potential energy in wood and either with help from a random lightning strike or from learning to bang together two pieces of flint, made a campfire for cooking. Someone first harnessed the energy of the wind to sail a ship or used a rushing river to turn a wheel to grind grain into wheat or drive a loom for cloth.  We’ve unlocked energy from gas and coal to make things go. Now we’ve come full circle, with these great wind turbines that use the wind to make electricity.

Energy is all around us.  But how do we put it to work?

Our lessons today give us three pictures of energy put to work. In one, we see potential spiritual energy. In another we see spiritual energy put to work. And in another we hear about the spiritual engine that makes it all go “vroom!”

In the Gospel of John, the disciples are in the upper room on that very first Easter evening, when the Risen Jesus gives them the breath of the Holy Spirit and the authority to use it. That’s the first picture.

In Acts, we see the second image. The disciples along with other people from throughout the world were gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate the Jewish festival of Pentecost when “Fiery tongues appeared on them, and all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit." The Spirit ignited a new movement and a new people. The energy of the spirit was released and suddenly these people had power to reverse the curse of the Tower of Babel to overcome the languages of division and competition with a new language of God's love and Spirit. The potential energy of the spirit was released and the church was born!

In the third image, the Apostle Paul reminds us that everyone of us, no matter how different, no matter our differing skills, experiences, and gifts, are brought together of the Holy Spirit for God’s work where we live, work, study, and pray. And when we’re in tune, this spiritual energy really goes “vroom!”

One of the most ancient hymns of the church goes like this, "Come, Holy Spirit, our souls inspire...and lighten with celestial fire." It’s too bad that we generally reserve this hymn to ordinations, because it is a prayer that the energy released on that first Pentecost day might continue to burn within the whole church. It is a prayer that God's spirit will continue in each of us and in the whole Body of Christ, so that we might live our faith with zest and commitment and do the work of mission boldly and imaginatively.

The promise of Pentecost is the potential spiritual energy that every person of faith carries is ignited by the Spirit into a deeper, more powerful, more effective Christian living.

One of my favorite stories of potential spiritual energy turned to the actual work of God is of John Wesley, a priest of the Church of England in the 18th century. (You’ll pardon me if on a day we celebrate this partnership between Lutherans and Episcopalians, if I talk about the founder of the Methodist movement?) Anyway, Wesley was a faithful but cautious minister. He studied. He prayed. He wrote. He was thoughtful and earnest. He went to Georgia to minister to English colonists in that rough and wild colony. And you what else he was? Boring! Not to mention stiff and judgmental. The folks in Georgia were so impressed with his earnest, serious preaching that they took an offering... and bought him a one-way ticket back to England!

On the ship, a dejected Wesley, sad and perplexed that his sober, thoughtful, and very earnest ministry had been such a flop, he remembered meeting another group on the way to Georgia when he was coming to America. They were Moravians, and he remembered their energy and fervor. So, on returning to London, he sought them out. And he found them in prayer and song in a little storefront in London, on Aldersgate Street, when something happened. As Wesley recalled, He felt his heart "…strangely warmed...," set afire in a new way with the very Spirit of God. His faith and imagination for the Gospel were ignited for a new beginning of ministry, a ministry of teaching and preaching to ordinary people in the places where they lived and worked, proclaiming a Gospel of renewal and service that extended throughout England and abroad. This new energy brought a new reformation and awakening throughout the cities, mill towns, and mines that had sprung up during the industrial revolution and was changing England.

I suspect that it was the same energy that caused Martin Luther to post his 95 theses on the cathedral door in Wittenburg, or Thomas Cranmer (inspired by Luther!) to turn the ancient prayers of the Church into language that ordinary folk could use and understand. That same spiritual energy inspired revolutionaries and reformers from Katharina von Bora (Martin Luther's spouse and a sharp theological mind in her own right) to Frances Perkins (The Episcopal lay woman who was FDR's secretary of Labor through the Depression and WW2, and the architect of the New Deal and Social Security) to the Rev. Dr. Sister Helena Barrett (first openly LGBT person to be ordained to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church) and the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray (first black woman-- and probably the first trans person-- ordained to the priesthood, an attorney, and a founder of the National Organization of Women) —women whose names don’t usually appear in confirmation catechisms or seminary textbooks—to shake up the church and move us forward into new Godly territory.

I don’t know if you realize this, but we are experiencing that, too. Right now. Besides showing us that the Holy Spirit can speak both Lutheran and Episcopalian, you along with Christians all over the globe, are turning potential spiritual energy into amazing acts of courage, hope, and compassion that makes a real difference in the lives of people and communities.

You might accuse me of hyperbole. I mean what difference can a hundred or so Christians sitting on the border between two Florida cities possibly make in the mission of the whole Church, let alone in our cities? Well, for starters, all of us can take the wind and fire of the Spirit that was ignited in our faith and baptisms, which is fed and banked as we practice the sacramental life, and put it to work. The same Creating Spirit that brooded over creation, spoke through the prophets, and lit up the Church still guides, inspires, nudges, directs, renews, and advocates, re-making us into the people God meant us to be, bringing mercy and compassion and hope to the people we encounter every day.

And that brings us to today’s third image of Pentecost in Paul’s letter to the Corinthian Christians. Here we learn what makes the whole thing go “vroom!” What makes the potential energy of John’s Gospel become the spiritual work of that first Pentecost in Acts is this turbine called the Body of Christ? “There are varieties of gifts,” Paul teaches, “but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone.” We are the ones God uses to turn spiritual energy into holy work, and we are the ones whom God uses to make the lights go on in people’s lives.

Look at what happened when two different faith communities confronted by different yet daunting issues with their buildings, not to mention working through visions for ministry that would inevitably lead them outside the boundaries of conventional denominational wisdom, decided to come together to experiment with something different. Needless to say, we had to work past some skeptical side-eyes from the folks in both our judicatory’s home offices who each proposed more, shall we say, “time-tested” solutions.

But along the way, you’ve demonstrated that what Paul told the Christians in Corinth is true: we have a variety of gifts, activated by the same Holy Spirit, that builds up the whole body of Christ. Every day the Gospel is communicated to a hurting world in creative and new ways by two communities who are choosing to live out Christ’s love experimentally, inquisitively, and faithfully. In a world that thrives on division and is motivated by self-interest and the interest of our chosen in-group, this is a very big deal! The coming together of St. John's and St. Paul's in partnership demonstrates how the power of the Holy Spirit is unlocked and becomes new vision, new energy, and new hope.

For a long time, the task of uniting churches was mainly about bringing people in the same traditions together that for a variety of reasons has gone their separate ways. In America, traditions split over slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, or which had different ethnic or national roots even if they shared the same theological tradition, needed to be brought back together. The ELCA itself is a product of that… bringing together the descendants of a variety of nationalities, all Lutheran, into a new American church. Even so, not all Lutherans signed up for the project.

The Episcopal Church, along with Anglicans around the world, had other fish to fry. Was the church going to high or low? Urban, suburban, rural or frontier? Privileged, middle, or working class? Catholic or Evangelical? And we, like many of sister and brother traditions, needed to work out that ordained leadership did not, after all, have to be exclusively straight, white, or male. 

And we weren't alone. There were other uniting projects over the last century, among them Presbyterians, Methodists, and the United Church of Christ, to name a few.

But more recently, we’ve discovered a different path: instead of building a new super-church; we've discovered the power of creating partnerships and practicing mutual recognition. We are learning that different churches from different traditions don’t have to chuck their heritages or even their denominations… the important thing is that we work together, pray together, share communion together, but to do that, we need to stop arguing about whether “our” sacraments, rituals, and ministers are more “real” than "yours." 

Lutherans, in my opinion, led the way, choosing to celebrate 500 years of Reformation by entering into communion relationships with as many traditions as possible. Episcopalians have joined in and now count full communion relationships with not only Lutherans, but Moravians, and (God willing) Methodists, and are in conversations with other groups, and such as Presbyterians and other Reformed traditions. Recently, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally went to Rome to meet and pray with Pope Leo XIII. We've got a way to go, because it's long hard work to knit together a fabric that has been torn for centuries, but for the sake of mission it's work worth doing.

Along the way we are finding that instead of needing to be one big blanket church, we are like a quilt lovingly stitched together out of a variety of cloths.

The truth is that none of us can go it alone, either as individuals, congregations, or traditions. We still pray the ancient prayer of Pentecost, "Come Holy Spirit, our souls inspire and lighten with celestial fire...." We all have in us the energy, the power, of the Holy Spirit. The Risen Jesus breathed on the disciples on that first Easter and gave them and us the Holy Spirit as well as the authority and mandate to go into the world and get to work. That same spirit is given to each of us and is sealed in us at baptism. 

No matter the path that brought us here, our prayer is that this spiritual energy will be unleashed. We yearn for God’s power to be let loose and light up our hearts and all creation to make a real difference in the world. It turns out that God has a turbine, an engine, to make that work real and alive, and that is us! We, the body of Christ no matter our flavor or tradition, are the ones whom God uses to let loose God’s energy and make it all go “vroom!”

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This is the Bulletin for Pentecost Sunday, May 24, 2026 at St. John's Episcopal Church, Clearwater, Florida and St. Paul's Lutheran Church, Clearwater, Florida

Here are the Scripture Lessons for Pentecost Sunday, Sunday, May 24, 2026.

Learn more about the Episcopal Diocese of Southwest Florida here.

Learn more about the Florida-Bahamas Synod of the ELCA here.

Living and doing miraculous good in difficult times

Every week, we say together that line in the creed “We believe that he will come again….” We’ll say it again in just a few minutes. So, what exactly do we mean by that?

In the Gospel of John today, Jesus tells us he is going to prepare to a place for us and that God’s house is made up of many rooms. And before that, in Acts, we heard that Stephen, the first Deacon of the Church and its first martyr, who was being confronted by his angry neighbors, describes a vision of Jesus coming to earth from his throne in heaven to come get him. Saying that vision out loud was the last straw for the otherwise respectable religious folks who seized him and picked up stones to kill him.

The Book of Acts tells us that the Church was growing in leaps and bounds. Stephen got into trouble for doing "wonders and signs." He is hauled into court for telling people about Jesus. You can read his testimony in Acts chapter 7. But before he launches on his re-telling of the history of God and Israel and the unflattering account of the people’s response to God, we hear that before he speaks, "his face was like the face of an angel."

But an angelic countenance did not save Stephen from trouble. In those days, when someone said something outrageous, they did not drag him before John Stewart and the internet for ridicule. Nope, in those days when someone said something like “God requires us to change,” or “In Christ, there is no nationality or gender or race” and so on, they did not make jokes or post snarky memes on social media. They took him out and killed him in the most up close and personal way possible.

Notice that Stephen’s message of salvation through Jesus Christ was intimately tied to mercy. He helped the Church give to widows and orphans--people who were tossed aside to fend for themselves with no family, no identity and no hope. His vision of Christ coming in glory was also a vision of God ready to forgive everyone, even those who were about to kill him.

There is another vision of heaven in today's lessons. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is talking to his disciples, in particular Thomas and Philip, about where Jesus is going. But he’s not talking about GPS coordinates but the way we make the journey...and what God has in mind for us when we make it. Jesus says something outrageous: that when we see Christ, we see God. If we want to know what God is like, look at Jesus.

But if you want to see what Jesus is like, look at the people who follow him. Now, if that doesn’t leave a lump in your throat, it should. Because, well, I don’t know about you, I’m not terribly good at this imitation of Christ thing. It’s stumble, get up, stumble again, get up again, stumble some more and getting up once again, all the way for me. As Saint Benedict says, “Always, we begin again.”

So it’s okay that we aren’t there yet. We are “on the way.” That’s what some people called early Christians… people “of the (or on the) way!”  Not there yet. On the way. And where are we going? To the place God is preparing for us. We are going to a home inside of God's home. When Jesus says "in my father's house there are many rooms" he is saying there is room for all of us. 

Our lessons today give two startling visions of God; and in both, it is Jesus who comes to us, not we to him. Jesus tells us that God is making room for us. Stephen saw that God is ready to forgive. In both lessons we learn that God is present to us even when things are going wrong. God is bringing heaven to earth.

For a long time, there was (and still is) a whole industry dedicated to telling us not only that Jesus is coming again, but that we should get our reservations in for one of those rooms in the Big Jesus Mansion in the sky. Too often, the image is that place Jesus is preparing for us is a fancy, gilded country club in heaven, where we’ll be waited on hand and foot by angels while Jesus will go back to earth to knock heads and take the names of everyone outside the club. And who are they? Well, that’s easy: it's everyone who looks different from ""us, or loves differently, or lives in the wrong country or neighborhood, or who doesn’t do religion "our" way! The list of who’s not in “our” Jesus Club is long -- if we choose to go there. All we have to do is focus on our grievances and deficits to write our own little book of judgement. Of course, this kind of pop theology fixes nothing but instead blesses our worst tendencies all while missing the whole point of why Jesus comes to us in the first place, which was to bring God down to earth…to be God is with us.

Retired Bishop and New Testament school, Bishop Tom Wright, described heaven this way:

… in the Bible ‘heaven’ isn’t ‘the place where people go when [we] die.’ In the Bible heaven is God’s space while earth (or, if you like, the ‘cosmos’ or ‘creation’) is our space. And the Bible makes it clear that the two overlap and interlock. For the ancient Jews, the place where this happened was the temple; for the Christians, the place where this happened was Jesus himself, and then, astonishingly, [in] the persons of Christians because they, too, [are] ‘temples’ of God’s own spirit.

In Christ, heaven comes to earth. God’s space and our space meet. And as Christians, as God’s people, we are the ones who show off God’s presence in the world. As people who are baptized into Christ’s body, we are ones who discover and communicate God’s transforming love.

We think of judgement kind of like a celestial wrecking ball and power shovel, knocking down creation on piling it in a dumpster. But God is not out to destroy an irretrievable creation and replace it with a new, improved model. And creation isn’t buffering while we wait for the new creation to download. No, God—who called the cosmos ‘good’ at creation—is right now restoring humanity and creation to what God made it to be. Instead, I think that Jesus’ preparation of a place for us looks more like an episode of “This Old House.” Taking something ramshackle and making into something both beautiful and useful.

As we meet Christ in the sacramental life, as we yearn to know God more and more, as we look for Christ in the face of the people we meet, we develop a different kind of vision of heaven; vision that knows that in Christ God is with us, and as we see Christ at work in us and in the world we live in, that vision that changes us and makes a real difference in a world desperately in need of healing.

Instead of waiting to be snatched up to heaven in a second, most believers do great things and often unnoticed things that show us how heaven and earth intersect every day.

Look at what Jesus did and what we do: Jesus taught; we teach. He healed, we heal. He fed, we feed. He transformed, we are being transformed. He challenged, we challenge. He reached out to people beyond his own cultural, ethnic, and religious circle, we reach out. He made faith real to people who were lost by showing them the way, and we make faith real to people who are lost as we learn to live and walk the way, a step at a time.

Every week, we witness a miracle—if we choose to look. Every we see Good Neighbors make sure hungry people all over Tampa Bay are fed through feeding programs and food banks by gathering up food other people might throw away. It’s just as amazing as if we took two fishes and five barely loaves and fed a multitude. In our case, it’s sometimes cans of tomato sauce and lots of pasta.

Every week, we witness another miracle—if we choose to look. Addicted people walk into our building and support each other in the AA/NA meetings here as they reach and maintain their sobriety and look to their Higher Power in the process.

We witness a miracle—if we choose to look, in the ways you assist your partner school,Belcher Elementary in providing a safe, nurturing school and, with every lunch partner and story read out loud, show kids that people care for them as they are..

Every week, in great and small ways, there are people who give themselves to prayer, service, who visit the sick and care for the homebound, who care for the environment, work for justice, who study and listen for God and support each other as they transcend life’s everyday challenges and discover the transforming love of God.

Are you an ethical and just employer? You’re doing a great thing! Do you do your work with integrity and faith? You are doing a great thing! Do you make the hard choices to raise your children well? You are doing a great thing! Do you care for your neighbor, or your sick friend, or give of your substance to forward God’s kingdom? You are doing a great thing! Do you find ways to help people, young or old, express themselves musically or artistically? You are doing a great thing! When you see an injustice, even as small as a person being treated badly because of their race, gender, ethnicity, their place in society, or how they dress or who they love? Your voice has done a great thing! Of course, all these things seem small. Conventional wisdom says that they are insignificant in the Grand Scheme of Things. But you know what? I think that these acts, however small, are the grand scheme of things! And taken together they become a mighty force for good that repairs the breach, transforms creation, and shows that Christ is alive and well and living in our community today.

The temptation is to sit on our thumbs until Jesus returns. The implication is that we are helpless until Jesus can ride down on a cloud and straighten things out. The challenge for we people of faith is to trust God enough to put aside the distractions and get past our hesitations so that what we all do, both great and small, demonstrates the transforming power of God in the everyday lives of people like us. We won’t always get it right, but even when we mess up, when we tell the truth, take responsibility, and start again, we demonstrate how God’s transforming power works.

In the Gospel today, we discover that Jesus’ promise is kept. We followers of Jesus are also his friends and apprentices—every one of us—and in reality, we do greater things than even he did because we are doing what Jesus does. Jesus is telling us that we are all the useful, living signs of God’s love and power right here, right now. If people want to know what Jesus is up to—look at the many ways that his followers are learning and doing the work of Jesus every day.

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This is the Bulletin for Worship for 5 Easter, Year A, Sunday, May 3, 2026 at St. John's Episcopal Church, Clearwater, Florida. Here is the Sermon on Vimeo. Here is the Liturgy on YouTube.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for 5 Easter Sunday, May 3, 2026.

Learn more about the Diocese of Southwest Florida here.

Learn more about Good Neighbors here.

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

"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

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 Photini, 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 by becoming a servant or a slave -- to survive. As with many women of her time, and even today, she must be associated with some man somewhere just to get by. 

But all too often, both preachers and tradition lays the blame for her situation on her! Whenever we chose to short-hand her story to harlotry or some kind of disreputable occupation, we make her into a sinner in need of repentance, instead of a woman whose 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 is a person of dignity and worth, who 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 the 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 only 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 on this day, 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 us 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