January 11, 2026

I lost a titan of a mentor this past week when my dear friend and former college professor John Farthing passed away on Thursday. I've spoken often about him from this pulpit, and his sonorous southern Virginian accent will forever ring in my ears. But as I thought over my years of seeking his counsel, especially at times of difficulty when I was piecing the fragmentary shards of my own life together, I realized that he was a profound example in some significant ways of the complex issues and situations that we confront in today's lessons and in the celebrations that we are weaving together between this, Jesus' baptism in the Jordan River, and this delayed celebration of the epiphany.

On this Sunday of the baptism of our Lord, it can be very easy—and often is the case, I've done it myself—to focus on our own baptism. How are we called into recommitting to our baptismal covenant, restrengthening the promises made in baptism in light of Jesus' baptism? But one of the things Dr. Farthing taught me and shaped and formed within me is to never take the easy road. Never go with the easy answers. But always look for the deeper and more complex meanings in a given text. And I think today, I want to invite us to really spend time reflecting on what this means in terms of who Jesus is, and how this outworking of baptism shapes and impacts his ministry.

This is the inauguration of his public ministry; it's the moment that Jesus arrives on the world stage as a public figure. Interestingly, baptism is somewhat unusual in this moment. Because what is the baptismal experience? Even before John goes to these desert spaces east of the Jordan River in the wilderness, it is a cleansing—a cleansing from brokenness, of sinfulness, of something in the law that has been violated within you that you need to be reconditioned for or cleansed of. And none of that applies to Jesus. Jesus is the pure offering even in this moment.

So often we think of Jesus taking on the weight of the world's brokenness at the moment of the crucifixion. But I want to invite us today to consider that he takes on the world's brokenness in this moment of baptism. It is entering into the waters of new life and transformation that he joins with us in precisely those places of shortcoming that those waters seek to cleanse. From the very moment of his public ministry, he is acknowledging his journeying alongside of us in the many complex and challenging ways that we fall short in life.

But also, as I said, it's the inauguration of his ministry. And what is that ministry? I think the lectionary gets it right in joining this gospel passage with our reading from Isaiah. Because Isaiah answers the call of Jesus' life in a very plain way: "He will bring forth justice to the nations. He will not cry or lift up his voice or make it heard in the street. A bruised reed he will not break. In a dimly burning wick he will not quench. He will faithfully bring forth justice." In a sense, it is a quiet and steady ministry to those on the margins. Not a ministry that is primarily face-forward and aggressive—though he does turn over tables, and he does categorically dismiss sectors of society that operate as oppressive forces. But over and over again, it is a ministry rooted in relationship, companionship, and the life of transformed people in community.

I want to suggest this morning that we have in his ministry an expansive view of marginalization. Very often we think of marginalization in the categories of the Beatitudes: those who have been left behind, those who are meek, those who are under the heavy weight of oppression. But what if the people that Jesus categorically dismisses—the agents of the state, the tax collectors, the Pharisees—well, what do we find in the gospel tradition? Jesus calls Matthew, the tax collector, out of such a state into a new life. He calls Nicodemus, the Pharisee, even in the silence of secrecy, into a transformed life. The people on the margins can sometimes actually be the people in power who are internally marginalized themselves.

In the 80s and early 90s, a group began talking about language around moral distress that became the term we use today: moral injury. It's the concept that when we are in positions of institutional behavior where we are being called to do something by virtue of our job that butts up against our own moral compasses, we have this cognitive dissonance. That internal distress can be an element of marginalization—a moment where we too are broken in need of that compassionate light that Christ is offering. In entering into the baptismal waters, Jesus says that no body and no experience is beyond redemption.

Sometimes that can be really hard for us to accept. I'll give you one example I wrestle with every year. We're also celebrating the Epiphany, and there's a part of that narrative we never seem to talk about. We usually end with the Magi leaving by another road to avoid Herod. But in verse 16, when Herod saw that he had been tricked, he was infuriated and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under. God gave the Magi a direction in a dream; they listened and responded, and the result was the death of children. What do we do with that? How do we comprehend that in the larger arc of God's working? I don't have a good answer. While scholars might explain it as showing how Jesus fulfills Torah promises, that doesn't ease the challenge of this moral injury for me. I have to wonder if those Magi later heard of the massacre and became distraught over their role.

It's an example of how, even with the best of intentions, we sometimes find ourselves broken and perpetuating systems of brokenness. Dr. Farthing helped me see this in profound ways. He had a marriage that didn't work out; he had a son he deeply loved who struggled with drug addiction; he had me, a student who struggled to do what was asked of me. But he never stopped loving or caring.

Jesus offers us that light of new life today. We have two opportunities. One is a reflection on our own life—the places where we get ourselves tied up in knots—and the reminder that nothing is ever broken beyond redemption. The second is the invitation to imitate Christ by taking up the call toward compassion and justice. Yes, it is appropriate to call out structural and institutional powers that corrupt and violate. But those institutions are filled with broken people who need compassion, love, and a new story.

As Jesus joins with us in the brokenness of our lives in these waters of baptism, may we be reminded of the restoration we receive. As he joins us, may we join him and evermore be a people of peace, compassion, and justice. May we be people who bring forth justice to the nations and not grow faint until that justice is established on earth. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Christmas Eve, 2025

There was a church much like our own: vibrant, with a lot of excitement and enthusiasm around the Christmas holiday. Just like we did this past Saturday, they decided to organize and stage a Christmas pageant in the days leading up to Christmas Eve. The pageant script the directors chose told the classic rendering we often hear of the nativity story, with Mary and Joseph arriving in Bethlehem without anywhere to stay. There, right at the climactic moment in the search for an inn—after repeated refusals—they are told again that there is no room. Without missing a beat, a young voice from the back of the audience yells out, "You should have booked online before coming!"

That is so indicative of our journey this time of year, isn't it? In a secular sense, so much of what we do this season requires an incredible amount of planning and waiting. The weeks and months we put into coordinating schedules, making travel arrangements, buying presents, cleaning houses, preparing meals, and choosing outfits—it's all about the forethought. And then we wait. We wait for this night and this time. I think, too, of the incredible work that Rachel and Tom have put into selecting and preparing the wonderful music you hear tonight; the weeks and months the vocal and bell choirs have put into practicing their pieces; the weeks that we as the altar team have put into cleaning and setting the space, practicing our readings, and preparing ourselves for this service. To all of us, we wait. We wait with anticipation for this very hour.

I also think about the longer arcs of waiting. I recently read a story about a man who very well may have the most interesting job in the whole country. His name is Eric Posey, and he is the head gardener of the Rockefeller Center in New York City. In that role, he is responsible for selecting each year's Christmas tree for the world-famous display in Rockefeller Plaza. This is not just about planning each year's season, but in a sense, it's a lifespan pursuit. Eric spends years cataloging and tracking potential evergreen candidates up and down the eastern seaboard. Every year, he waits. He waits until just that right moment for just that right tree to be selected. It is a beautiful example of this interplay between planning and waiting, anticipation and arrival.

And yet, sometimes in our lives—many times in the course of human history—we land in a place of ambiguity. We may plan everything to a T only for things to go awry. We may look forward with great anticipation for moments or experiences that never come to fruition. We may have our whole lives planned out, only for a wrench to be thrown into the system that throws us into a state of despair and desperation. For 2,000 years now, from our ancestors in the faith down to our very own lives today, we have heard the repeated admonition of Jesus in our context in Advent to stay awake and be prepared for his return. And yet in all those centuries, in all that planning, in all that alertness, we still wait.

But that is not so very new. That was the experience of those in Jesus' time, too. For millennia, they had been planning for and anticipating the arrival of the Messiah. Centuries upon centuries of faithful Israelites had planned and longed for the arrival of that moment—the arrival of the moment that we re-experience this very night. And like so much of life, no amount of planning and longing quite prepared the people of Bethlehem for what happened within their midst. Sometimes our plans just don't go the way we think they will, and we are faced with the question of what to do when that happens.

This provides a final wrinkle in the story: the very nature of the manger scene itself. As Western Christians, with our centuries of images of A-framed mangers and stories of rejection and desperation, we often miss the fact that none of that is actually in the text. If you go back and you read the narrative again, St. Luke simply says that Jesus was born in the manger because there was no room in the inn. As the incredible New Testament scholar Kenneth Bailey has noted, in first-century Judea, the "inn" was the community space where out-of-town travelers would stay, whereas the manger was actually a part of individual people's homes.

The Judean hill country is a semi-arid desert land, and it gets very cold at night, especially in the winter months. So, homes were built in such a way as to maximize the benefit of the residual body heat that the family’s livestock would produce. This meant that mangers were unfinished entryways or lower parts of private residences, and very often the warmest part of the home.

For Jesus to have been born in a manger means that a family had taken Mary and Joseph in as an act of hospitality and care. It makes all the sense in the world that a newborn baby would be nestled among the livestock for warmth and comfort. The response the people of Bethlehem had to an unplanned development was not frustration or despair, but hospitality and generosity.

So tonight, friends, as we come into this night of Christ's birth and in our own cultural context wrestle with the complexities of the unplanned, the chaotic, and the uncertain—those unexpected wrenches thrown into our neatly planned out systems—may we find in our faith our own wellsprings of welcome and hospitality. May we, even when things don't go exactly as we thought they would, find the charity and strength to be a people of generosity, of embrace, and of hope. And ultimately, wherever we are in our journey, however difficult the uncertainties of the age prove to be, may we in welcoming the Christ child this night experience the hospitality of a God who welcomes us into his house and into his kingdom of new and everlasting light. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.