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.

Meeting Jesus in the Storm

Here’s a riddle for you: Why did the disciples cross the lake? To get to the other side!

In Jesus’ day, the Sea of Galilee was a stormy place to sail anyway. It is actually a lot like sailing across the Great Lakes of North America. Water behaves differently on big inland fresh water lakes than they do on open oceans. The least bit of wind can create quite a tempest.  So, when the disciples were going across the water it was very rough going very quickly and they were stuck in the middle all night long, trying to make headway against a storm with an itty-bitty sail and oars.

The early church remembered Jesus’ miracle because they could identify with it immediately. Not because they were sailors or fishermen, but because the new, young church was like, to quote the prayer of St. Brendanthe Navigator, being in a very 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 across the water means “going to the other side” from a safe familiar place to a new, foreign or unknown place of mission—by definition a risky and stormy trip.

Matthew is telling the story of what Jesus because the young church knew that they were sailing through a storm.

Around here, we know about storms. Not far from my house, there’s a sign on the road to the airport that is on a pole 15 feet high. It says that the storm surge from the bay will reach or cover that sign.

Many of us in these parts listen closely to the weather in hurricane season, put together a storm box in case the power goes out, know our flood zone by heart, and keep “go bags” at the ready in case we are told to bug out.  Mostly, we deal with them as best we can. We try to keep the water out and, if necessary, try to stay afloat, even if we don’t always make headway.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus walks across the water and through a storm to meet 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 very wet, and he probably looked like three miles of bad road when he finally did climb into the boat. 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. The miracle is that he was not overpowered by it.

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

As he comes to the boat, the disciples see him and are afraid because they don’t know what to make of what they are seeing. But Jesus says to them the same thing he said on that third day in the upper room on that very first Easter: “Do not be afraid!”

Jesus comes and he brings peace, but the storm doesn’t stop. Not right away.  Which leads us to the rest of the story:

Oh, Peter. Poor old Peter!

We tend to give Peter short shrift because Jesus’ words to him after he is rescued sound to our ears like a rebuke: “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” We hear the words “little faith” and think “no faith.” We humans are very binary, very “1” or “0” about almost everything. We expect ourselves to either have the kind of faith to move mountains and accomplish the impossible, or to have no faith at all. The truth is that we are all somewhere in between. We are all people of “little faith.”  Martin Luther said that we are simultaneously saints and sinners.  Which is why we identify so much with Peter, because he is a lot like us: a lion of the faith with a heart of gold who is at the very same dense, afraid, and reactive.

The disciples are not spiritual klutzes who can’t shoot straight. They are faithful people on a difficult journey, and Jesus meets them in the midst of storms.

We forget that Peter did in fact do what Jesus did. He walked on the water! Until, well, he didn't. Still, I'll bet he walked farther than I would have, that's for sure!

St. Brendan the Navigator

Being a Christian is all about imitating Christ, and Peter wants to be like Jesus and do what Jesus does. He asks Jesus to call him and he answers the call. Only the storm is real, and as Peter moves into the storm, he says “uh-oh!” But even as he is sinking, even as he feels overwhelmed, Peter still calls out to Jesus. And Jesus helps Peter and brings him back to the boat. Safely aboard the boat, still beset by the storm, Jesus stills the storm. 

How many of us have done exactly the same thing? Who among us has never bitten off more than that we can chew spiritually?

Every summer for about thirty years, I go to Icon Camp, where I gather with other artists, most of us amateurs to paint an icon—an ancient Eastern Christian form of religious art found in Russian and Greek churches. We take a week to gather at a monastery where we paint, pray, eat, kibbitz, and then paint some more. 

One year, we worked on an icon based on today’s Gospel. Part of the work that week was to do a study of Jesus’ hand grasping Peter’s wrist in the midst of a maelstrom. That study is the heart and focus of the larger icon. That study was not just a lesson on artistic technique but also a reminder of the three miracles described in today’s Gospel: Jesus walks on the water. Peter walks on the water. Jesus stills the storm.  But first, before all that everyone (Peter and Jesus included) gets wet.

And no matter what, Jesus calls us, watches us, and rescues us.

Every Christian will experience storms. Baptism does not make us waterproof! We will all 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 is with us in the storm. We cannot still the storm or walk on water alone. But Jesus has power over the storm. The storm will not defeat Jesus. 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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This is the Bulletin for Worship for The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost: August 9, 2026 at St. Chad's, Tampa, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for 10 Pentecost (Proper 14A) Sunday, August 9, 2026.

Learn more about the Diocese of Southwest Florida here.

Jesus' manna moment

So, I have a question: was Jesus a foodie? Or did he just like dinner parties and big bashes?

I ask this because so much of Jesus’ teaching and even some of his miracles happen while there’s food around. Think about it: after the opening poem in John’s Gospel, the first thing we see is Jesus at a party turning water into wine. During another dinner with a bunch of religious leaders and lay people, a women crashed the party and washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and dried them with her hair? Remember how, during his sojourn in the desert, Jesus is tempted by Satan to turn stones into bread—but, as hungry as he was, he doesn’t do it? On the other hand, when Jesus had dinner with Matthew and his tax collector friends, some of the local clerics and lay leaders grumbled about his gluttony? And, of course, there’s the last supper in the upper room where he washed his disciples’ feet and then celebrated a Passover meal with them! Remember how the risen Jesus appeared after the resurrection to the disciples as a group, around that very same dinner table, and how another time, the Risen Jesus cooks his fisherman-followers breakfast over a campfire?  After walking along the Emmaus road with a pair of sad, grief-stricken followers of Jesus, they didn’t recognize his risen self until he breaks bread with them in their own upper room.

So many encounters over so many meals! I guess we shouldn’t be all that surprised that Jesus would choose to feed a big crowd of people who came to hear him with baskets and baskets of food that he blessed and multiplied out of a kid’s bag lunch.

The miraculous feeding with the loaves and fishes must have on made an impression on Jesus’ followers, because it shows up six times in all four Gospels. Six! All the Gospels have at least one account of this, but Matthew and Mark have two… when Jesus fed 5000 of mainly Jewish listeners, and 4000 mostly Gentile folks in a place called the Decapolis. 

This repetition is a very big deal!

The people in the four early church communities that gave us the Gospels remembered these miracles not just because they were spectacular, but precisely because they were repeated. My hunch is that miraculously feeding lots of people from a small grocery bag was a regular, or at least not infrequent, part of Jesus’ preaching and proclamation. It sits right up there with the various healings and his way of teaching.  Jesus demonstrates the abundance of God’s love, grace, and care for all of us in that is once practical and spectacular: by feeding hungry people.

There feedings were Jesus’ manna moments. Not just once, as with the miracle of the manna in the wilderness in Exodus, but time and time again. And just like Moses’ miracle in the desert, Jesus feeds the people both freely and abundantly every single time.

Today, we associate the Eucharist with the very stylized but spare meal that we do in church every week. But in the early church, the line between a festive dinner, often called an Agape meal, and the Eucharist was almost indistinguishable. Sometimes early Christians got so carried away with the festivity, that the parties could get out of hand. At one point, the Apostle Paul had to remind the Christians in Corinth not only to settle down, but also that the folks who could afford catered meals had to look out for (and share with) people who could only bring a small casserole or loaf of bread.

Eventually, the Eucharist got separated from the banquets, so that today we celebrate, in a very ritualized way, the infinite grace imparted using only a tiny piece of blessed wafer and a sip of sacramental wine. After that, we proceed to the parish hall for coffee, iced tea, and yummy treats, or sometimes to a wonderful meal.

I will never forget how my first parish had a community meal (aka, a soup kitchen) six days a week, and that every week a Eucharist preceded it every Wednesdays at noon. That simple celebration was often attended by the same people who both served the food and those who shared the meal. For a lot of these folks, that meal was their only meal of the day, and that service was their only church. And for them, the two meals, both the one in church and the one in the dining room, were deeply linked. They couldn’t have one without the other.

Today’s Gospel reminds us that the grace imparted in the Eucharistic meal and the grace seen in the feeding of the five thousand are both practical expressions of God's never-ending, generous love.

But more than that, Matthew’s church remembered how Jesus fed the 5000 and put in their Gospel story an act of practical reminiscence. Because when Jesus took this small offering of food, blessed and broke the bread, and gave it to his disciples to hand out, he demonstrated what all of Jesus’ images of small seeds growing into big shrubs, yeast rising into loaves, someone finding treasure hidden in a field and buying it, a woman turning her house upside down to find a lost coin was really all about. The feeding of the five thousand was for them, and us, a living demonstration of those little kingdom parables.  Jesus showed us that the kingdom of God is all around us all the time, and that God's grace abounds not only in sanctuaries but in fields, on hill tops, and in the homes, farms, and shops of ordinary people. The reign of God is found in lunch boxes as well as in temples. Jesus shows us we are all called to love, care for, and feed one another, and that in God’s economy the smallest acts of kindness and compassion makes all the difference in the world.

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This is the Bulletin for Worship for The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost: August 2, 2026 at St. Chad's, Tampa, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for 10 Pentecost (Proper 13A) Sunday, August 2 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.

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.

There is sight, and then there is sight

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

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

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

Let’s see what happens!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is sight, and then there is sight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learn more about the Diocese of Southwest Florida here

Location matters

Location matters.

A long time ago, I was a young priest seeking a new cure, and I dutifully sent my resume and profile to wherever the church’s computer said that I might be a decent match. One of those churches was in Virginia. They called me up for an interview. Now they were polite, but they were not really interested in a newbie priest from Connecticut, no matter how nice I was. 

That is, until I mentioned that I was born in Virginia and was baptized at an old, historic parish there. My, did their tone shift! It did not matter that for all practical purposes I had not set foot in the Old Dominion since I was two, my pedigree had clearly improved.

On the other hand, I only grew up in Massachusetts and Connecticut, which never made me a true New Englander. I once asked a parishioner of my first parish in Northeast Connecticut (a woman who could trace her ancestors back to the first Puritans in New England) about this and she said “Well, if a cat has kittens in an oven, does that make them biscuits?”

Now, I’ve lived in Southwest Florida for five years and all I know is that because I live here year round and don't make the annual trek up and down either I-75 or I-95, I am no longer a “snowbird,” but does that make me a Floridian? Who knows? Whatever the case, where we are raised has an effect on us. Location matters.

Jesus was not born in his hometown, either. In today’s Gospel he talks about something far more serious and he talked to Nicodemus about how our spiritual birth is far more important than our physical birth. Nicodemus came to Jesus with a sort of hesitant curiosity. Nicodemus was a leader of the Pharisees and he had questions.

Now, this may come as a surprise to you, but despite what you may have heard, the Pharisees were actually the good guys of Jesus’ day. Think of them as sort of first-century Episcopalians. Today, we think of Pharisees as legalistic, 'my way or the highway' kind of folks, maybe even fundamentalist. But of all the different movements and styles of Judaism in the first and second centuries, Pharisaism was probably the closest to what Jesus taught and what  Christianity became.

One of the great errors that many Christians make today is to assume that to be a good Jew meant (and means) following all these arcane rules and rituals strictly and by the book. It is one of the great slanders that Christians perpetrate on our Jewish sisters and brothers (and by extension our Muslim siblings): that their faith is all about rules and our faith is all about grace! You hear it all the time from pulpits and Christian radio, "They are all about "law," but we are all grace all the time!" And nothing ends an argument among Christians more quickly than when one side evokes a kind of theological Godwin’s Law by accusing their opponent of being “pharisaical.”

Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish scholar who teaches New Testament and Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University wrote about the bad rap that Pharisees get from many preachers and New Testament scholars and sums it up this way: "After two millennia, surely the time has come to stop bearing false witness against Pharisees and their Jewish descendants. Christianity does not need to bear false witness against Judaism in order to proclaim its good news." 

Okay, then, so just who were these guys, anyway? The fact is that the Pharisees sought to modernize things—to revise Jewish consciousness about faith and geography--to get Judaism out of the Temple in Jerusalem and into the places were Jews actually lived, all across the ancient world. They represented the working and merchant classes of 1st century Jewish culture, especially in the diaspora. 

Before the Pharisees, many (but not all) Jews whether they lived in Galilee or Alexandria or Rome or Ethiopia, may not have felt complete until they went to the Temple in Jerusalem at least once in their lives. The Pharisees, on the other hand, said that being Jewish is a matter of knowing who you are and about loving God with all our heart, soul, and mind and our neighbors as ourselves. They wanted the Jews of their day to live their faith from their hearts, and their ethics to grow out of that faith. Pharisees taught that the local synagogue—their local community—was the center of Jewish life, not the Temple. 

Jesus was deeply influenced by Pharisaism from a young age. I'll bet that the rabbis who taught him as a youngster were Pharisees (Luke 2:41-52). Pharisees set the stage for Judaism to survive the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD and their exile and dispersion outside of Palestine and into Europe, Africa and Asia Minor. In short, modern Judaism in all its forms (and Christianity, for that matter!) is a direct descendant of Pharisaism!

So Jesus and Nicodemus have a lot in common! Both wanted to relocate the heart of Judaism from a place to a people… not just of ancestry but of faithfulness. Both teachers agreed that our morals and ethics grow out of the heart of our faith… to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind and to love our neighbor as ourselves... that what we do shows who and whose we are. But while both Jesus and Nicodemus understand that the Spirit is not confined to a building, no matter how local, or even a nation, for that matter, Jesus takes it a step further when he says, "Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above."

I am sure that you’ve heard the phrase before. It’s usually translated as being “born again.” It could mean that, or "You must be born anew." But, basically, the word means "from above." When Jesus tells Nicodemus that one must be born from above, he is talking about a kind of spiritual awakening that is initiated and animated by God which enlivens and re-defines us.

Archbishop William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury during World War II, was once asked if he was born again. He said, “I’ve been born again, I am being born again, and I hope to be born again tomorrow.” He was not talking about salvation, but about sanctification. He was talking about the life of holiness. All of us have the chance to change, to grow, to deepen our life in Christ, as Jesus reminds us in John 3:8 that "The wind blows where it chooses."

Listening for that wind is one of the great disciplines of the Christian life. Awaiting the chance to be born again and again is one of the great disciplines of the Christian life. And a good place to start is in our Lenten discipline today.

The wind of re-birth is the wind of freedom and love, and it is far stronger than where we typically imagine where we find stability in life. It is stronger than the place where we were born, stronger than our ancestry, stronger than what Jesus calls the flesh. So, even though it may blow us to new places, we are – in the Spirit – more stable than ever!

One of things I’ve discovered since moving to Southwest Florida is that everybody here is from someplace. But, as Christians, we are natives of that place which Jesus calls the kingdom of God, which is a kingdom which we enter by faith and baptism. Life in God’s reign is the life of walking with Jesus and letting our identities be shaped and re-shaped by this marvelous wind, this breath of the living God.

The location that matters the most is our heart. In living our life in Christ, we have a choice: we can think of it as a punch-list of tasks we have to accomplish; or we can see the movement from baptism and Eucharist, of daily prayer and sacraments, as the places where we discover again and again our identity in Christ.

Lent is our time to discover again that no matter where we are or where we are from, God is always present to us and that our identity is found with Christ. As baptized people, we are always at home with Christ.

You have been born. By faith and baptism you have been born from above. And as you grow and mature in Christ, in your prayer, your encounter with Scripture, in your Sacramental living you are being born again and again and again. Every time we allow ourselves to follow the wind of God, the Spirit of God, we find ourselves located in the heart of God and that our identity is located in and consists of grace and power.

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Here are the Scripture readings for 2 Lent A, March 1, 2026

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

Learn more about the Diocese of Southwest Florida here