November 23, 2025

I have a secret sermon editing tool that I've never shared with you all before. And no, it is not ChatGPT or another soulless AI bot. It is, in fact, my barber, Joe, over in East Gaithersburg. Joe is in his early 30s, and he is a man that speaks to my soul, works hard to make ends meet for his family, to make things work, to care for his two young daughters. I showed up just the other day to get my haircut, and he was down on all fours putting in new track doors at his barber shop. And he immediately got up, dusted himself off, and said, come on, come on, and came right in and started cutting my hair. And like any good barber shop, Joe and I always attempt to fix and work out all the problems of the world for the hour or so that we spend together each month.

And so it is very frequently then that I bring to Joe whatever I'm working on for this upcoming Sunday. I work through the points of my sermon. And I know inevitably if I get that glassy eyed blank stare, that I've got to go back to the drawing board. It's just not working out. And he and I were talking on Friday about this reading. He's Roman Catholic, and so they too are celebrating Christ the King Sunday this week. And we were talking about what that means, what kingdomship means, and how we work all of that out.

I was telling him about a clergy retreat day that I'd just gone to the day before on Thursday with Brother James Dowd, who is an Anglican Benedictine. He's associated with Holy Trinity Monastery, which is in West Park, New York, just up the Hudson from New York City. In the last two or three years, he's actually been dispatched to, of all places, Omaha, Nebraska, to develop a new community of young contemplatives in the diocese of Nebraska. And he came to share with us how the Benedictine charism can help shape and inform where we are as a society today, what we often wrestle with as clergy as we encounter our experiences and realities that we are seeing in the parish.

And his gift to us, his fundamental point, was that what Christianity offers is hope in a time of despair. And interestingly, I didn't know this, he played etymologically with that term. Despair goes back to the Latin, desperare, meaning an absence of hope. To despair, to have desperation, to be desperate, any of those cognates of that term, all of that fundamentally means to lack hope. And he also reminded us that lacking hope is not simply this sense of woefulness, this struggle that we might have emotionally and internally. But that also works out in an acceptance of cynicism. An acceptance that the world is the way it is, that these things are not going to ever get any better, so let us just do the best we can. And he suggested that as the church, as the church shaped and informed specifically within the purview of his Benedictine charism, that what we have to offer in the good news, the gospel, is hope in the time of cynicism and despair.

The dichotomy I think that we see today is in St. Luke's gospel. The dichotomy of the two criminals. The one who has given in to cynicism: "Jesus if you can't do anything about your circumstance, how can I embrace anything that you're offering here? How does anything you say matter when you're in the same station of life as I am, in the same situation that I am in?" And the other criminal, in the exact same boat, who says, "but even if there's a chance that this is true, even if there's a chance that you say who you are, remember me when you come into your kingdom."

Brother James offered in the context of his retreat day, the three-fold charism of Benedictine spirituality: which are the centrality of contemplative life. You may have heard that term contemplative prayer, but he also talked about the act, the deep act of contemplative listening. The way in which we can cultivate a deeper, richer presence with each other. The charism of community that's central to Benedictine spirituality is being together and having a well-developed and deep sense of connectivity to each other. And then the ministry, the charism of hospitality. Contemplative living, and contemplative living shaped by community, the embrace of hospitality.

And so I brought all of that to Joe as I sat in that barber chair Friday morning, working through what that means. And we kept coming back to the observation that it's about relationship. You know, the whole arc of the biblical witness, the whole trajectory of our faith life, is about our relationship to God and God's relationship to us. It is the story of relationship. And when we embrace and live out our life as Christians, as people of faith, central to that is what it means for us to have right and proper relationships, not just with God, but with each other. It's what it means to be a kingdom people.

And I want to stick with that for just a moment, because I think that is the power of this Sunday. The reminder that whatever else happens in the world, wherever else we find ourselves in the world, we are first and foremost a people of the kingdom of God. A kingdom people.

Years ago, right after I had graduated from seminary, I was offered a full time position at the seminary I had attended. But I needed a Sunday church to serve in. And as you can well imagine, many churches these days are not well resourced enough to just add extra clergy on the side. And so, Bishop Marianne, in her support of me, put me in contact with a congregation further down in Montgomery County, a large, well-resourced, corporate-sized parish with several hundred people who attended every Sunday. And she said, I just think that they might have some opportunity to support an additional clergy person. So I called the rector up, and he and I began chatting. And I had heard through the grapevine that this parish was a little bit unique in the Diocese of Washington. And God bless Father Ed who did embrace me and accept me and I served there for some number of years. But I immediately put my foot in my mouth when we started talking because I said, "now this isn't a deal breaker for me, but I've heard that you all are the conservative parish."

And he said, "I'm stopping you right there. That's the language of the world. We are not a conservative parish. We are not a liberal parish. We do not identify ourselves according to these terms and frameworks that the political class or larger society use. We are a kingdom church. We are a kingdom people. And sometimes that means that we will be conservative on things that the world views as conservative. But that means that we're also going to be liberal sometimes on things that the world views as liberal. That we don't accept that dichotomy. That is not definitionally a way that we talk about ourselves or identify ourselves. We operate on the principles of our king. We live our lives as a people of a kingdom, not of this place." And to be fair, over my years of service there, there were times where I felt like that position, that balance, wasn't struck in just the way I would have struck it. But I was so appreciative. I was so very blessed by the fact that my very first call was to a church so oriented. Because in this place, in our larger region, it is so very, very easy to fall into the trap of defining ourselves by the markers of secular society. And yet we are reminded again today that ultimately who we are is a people of a kingdom not of this place.

And so going back to what it means to be a people of kingdom, and the sense of what it means for that to be in a deep way a question of relationship in this moment in time. What does it mean for us to really and truly live that out in the here and now? And what does it mean for that living out of the kingdom to be so centrally connected to relationship?

The very first line of our catechism asks, as humans, what are we by nature? And the answer is that we are told that we are part of God's creation, made in the image of God. We, every single one of us, every single human being that has ever walked the face of the earth, is part of God's creation, made in the image of God. And just as we were reminded two weeks ago, three weeks ago, when we had a baptism, in our baptismal covenant, we promise, with God's help, to respect the dignity of every human being. No matter who that other is. And sometimes, sometimes the most difficult other for us to respect is ourselves. Sometimes it is another. But to be a part of the kingdom, to truly be kingdom people, we have a duty, a responsibility to work on that respect. To deepen that sense of dignity.

And to acknowledge and be honest about the complexity of that reality. As we were talking around some of those dynamics, Joe shared with me a story about a client he had had just a few years ago. This client had come up to D.C. from the south, the borderlands in Texas, and his family had for generations lived on either side of the border. And that presented some challenges and some complexities for them in terms of how they lived their life as a cohesive family. They were often frustrated by the system that kept them apart across that landscape. And yet he said, about six or seven years ago, this client came in one day and he was telling me that his sister had just married a border patrol agent. And he said that was a really complicated and fraught situation. Because he said, my client told me, part of the family really struggles with this reality. And yet, my brother-in-law is providing a stable, good job for my sister. The work that he does gives a stable and solid foundation for my nieces and nephews. And even though this is a complex reality for our family, there is also a deep goodness in what he is able to do for them. And both of those realities are true at the same time. I think that is an example of what it means to hold kingdom relationships in a kingdom orientation. Life is messy and complex. But the door to restitution, redemption, and relationship is never shut. That is what the kingdom is all about.

I'm going to end with this. I was putting all of that together, figuring out how I was going to finish my sermon last night. And Anna and I came for the Saturday service of our CSI brothers and sisters. And interestingly, Christ the King Sunday is a uniquely Western Christian celebration. It's not celebrated in Eastern Christianity, or celebrated in the same way. And so for our CSI brothers and sisters, yesterday was just the final Sunday of the liturgical year, the final Sunday of ordinary time. However, every Sunday has a theme to it. And yesterday's theme was peace in the context of violence. And the prayer for the service yesterday, the Collect, was:

"God of peace. We thank you for your constant love and comfort. You brought peace on earth by sending your son, Jesus Christ, our Lord, who empowers us to love our enemies as you loved us in all our iniquities and weakness. strengthen us to forgive and be forgiven, even in the context of violence, and enable us to turn violence into peace through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever."

And if there was any point at all to celebrating Christ the King Sunday, it is this. What a remarkable serendipity for this prayer on just another Sunday for our Indian brothers and sisters to be the prayer that we receive today. Because to be a people of the kingdom is to be a people of peace. So may we, may we in celebrating Christ's kingship today, hear again that last petition. Enable us to turn violence into peace. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

November 16, 2025

I had a moment of extreme contradiction in my life just a couple of weeks ago. It was a particularly difficult and challenging Wednesday morning. Anna was more restless and active than normal, and it took everything I had to get her up, dressed, and out the door for school. If memory serves correct, I think it took me four different tries to make sure I had everything in the car as we were leaving. Once we got there, I remembered something else. A second time, a third time, a fourth time. It was ridiculous. And then that night, as I was trying to go to sleep, my mind decided that it was going to go through the greatest hits reel of the most extreme embarrassments I've ever had in my life. And there that morning, I could not remember the simple things I needed to get out the door. And that night, in the greatest, most minute detail, I could replay these events that have occurred 20, 25, 30 years ago. It's so very fascinating how we so very often are able to think about those things.

One of those memories that stuck with me was, and I will confess to you it's one of the most embarrassing moments of my life, was an occurrence I had in 2006. I was hired for a call center, and we were selling business lines of subprime credit to small businesses in French Canada. I did that job for exactly two days before I was offered another job working in a grocery store. And to this day, I regret that I just never showed up again. I did not talk to the very lovely lady who was my supervisor. I did not say, "Hey, here's what's going on." I just didn't bother ever going back there again. And sometimes, in the depths of those dark nights of restless sleep, I think about how I probably let that lady down, the way in which I should have handled that so much better. But how many of us have had that moment of clarity, of places where we came up short, didn't do what we should have done?

That was the kind of capstone on a fairly difficult and honestly one of the darkest periods of my life. I had just finished my sophomore year of college. I had what I now recognize as a major depressive episode that spring. And this was a small liberal arts college, very intimate, very close-knit community. And my gracious professors gave me a list of incompletes at the end of the academic year as I had all these outstanding term papers that I just hadn't been able to muster the energy to complete. And I got a very lovely letter from the provost explaining that if I didn't resolve this, I would be put on academic probation. And my parents, my stubborn parents, who would not leave me behind, sat me down that summer and made me resolve all of that. So I got a second very lovely letter at the end of the summer telling me that I was back in good standing and all was well.

But I needed some kind of break. I needed some kind of change of pace, some kind of reorientation. And that fall, I took a semester off from college. That fall, I had that momentary experience with the call center, ended up taking this job with this grocery store. This grocery store that was the budget kind of bargain grocery store in our college town. And I ended up being there for two years. And that place, that place of landing in the midst of brokenness, ended up being an experience of redemption for me. Fraught as I was, tied up in knots as I was about all the places of brokenness in my own life, I encountered people on the margins who were struggling and wrestling just to get by in their day-to-day life. And it kind of put a lot of my own challenges in perspective. It gave me a sense of what redemption and resurrection can look like. It empowered me to go on and do everything I've done in my life. I really, to this day, think that that was a turning point for me. That experience of being in a place where I really saw how difficult life can really and truly be.

And I bring that, I bring that to mind this morning because of the admonition we hear from Jesus in this section from Luke. The destruction of the temple is not only the physical prophetic witness of Jesus, but metaphorically, it's the admonition, the preparation that Jesus is giving us to recognize that all of the temples in our lives are unstable, are impermanent, are only the concrete real thing that we experience them to be for a season. And none of them have the staying power that the true and lasting things of the kingdom have.

In his introduction to the works of the Episcopal lay theologian William Stringfellow, the United Methodist pastor Bill Wiley Kellerman observes: "When Jesus looked upon Jerusalem, he did indeed foresee the destruction of the temple and city. In the movement he brought to town, he set before the city a real alternative to its destruction. He could read the signs of the time. He did so in tears, weeping for the women and children who would be caught in the crush of historical events. In the coming collapse, not one stone would be left upon another. In times of tragedy, theological innuendo penetrates the headlines. In point of fact, there are many ways in which such tragedies offer us literally an apocalyptic glimpse into America. Apocalyptic in its sense of unveiling, revealing, Exposing the apparatus and machinations of history."

And that's kind of a heady, very academically worded reflection on our passage from today. But I think it has a real true and heavy weight for us. The reality. The reality that what we experience is that loss of stability. That loss of stability in the things of concreteness that we have put our trust in. The many times in which we fall prey to this same inclination in our lives, seeing our jobs, our political structures, our larger societal dynamics as being things of lasting and permanent substance. Things that we can put the full weight of our trust in. And yet, inevitably, inevitably, in ways big and small, they can come up short. And there's a brokenness. There's an incompleteness. Many times. In many ways. There's a sorrow, a pain, a physical, objective suffering.

You know, thinking about the light at the end of the tunnel, the great and glorious joy of the coming kingdom, it's the promise of our faith. But it can very often be a promise that seems far too distant. Far too uncertain. Far too optimistic. But it is the truth of our faith. It is the place of stability in the midst of an unstable and chaotic world. My colleague Ben DeHart up in New York City, who I have quoted before, really cut to the heart of that reality earlier this week. He reflected: "There are days when the life you knew is simply gone. The marriage won't heal. The diagnosis won't reverse. The person you love isn't coming back. The job that gave your days shape has ended. Your own body has quietly betrayed you. You stand in what used to be your life, and the temple, the structure you built everything around, is now rubble."

"We all have temples. But Jesus doesn't say how to rebuild. He doesn't say how to get back to normal. He doesn't even say how to avoid more pain. He says don't be led astray. Don't chase false messiahs. Don't surrender to fear. There will be wars. There will be betrayals. There will be suffering. Some of you will die. And then, right there, he says, but not a hair of your head will perish. It sounds like a contradiction, but it's not. Because the promise isn't that death won't touch us. The promise is that death won't have the last word."

And this year, this year in particular, I think that that hits home for us as a community, especially powerfully. The ways in which our lives have been upended. The ways in which so much of our stability has been thrown into chaos. And Jesus does not shy away from acknowledging the brokenness and the pain and sorrow that that brokenness brings forth. But what he promises is that that place of darkness is not the final word. And I think for many of us today, that is the word needed. That is the truth that we need to hear in this time of great uncertainty.

In just a couple of weeks, we will enter our season of Advent. And Advent has always had this dual focus. The more prominent, the more popular, the easier focus is on the first incarnation. God coming among us in the pure, the simple, the beautiful birth of a baby. But there's always a dual emphasis. Not just on that first coming of God in the incarnation, but on the second coming. In Christ's ultimate return. In the eschaton. The ending of all things, and the setting of all things to right. And in this particular year, the things of lightness, in both senses of that word, the things of joy, the things of happiness, the things of light in the midst of darkness, may seem very difficult to hold on to. May seem ever more difficult to cultivate. And yet, in the midst of that challenge, we have this promise that the darkness, the oppressive darkness, will not be the final word.

And so no matter how dimly that light comes forth this year, it is still present. It is still among us. It still has a quiet vitality. That if we let ourselves focus, if we give ourselves the space, if we pause and return, we might hear that still small voice of compassion, of love, of assurance that things will be better. That the new dawn will come. And it may not be soon. It may not be in a timeline that we want it to be. But it will be. The lasting and permanent reality.

And so today, friends, as we come to the beginning of the close of our season after Pentecost, as we begin to turn our eyes more fully towards Jerusalem, as we begin to enter that time of intentional and purposeful waiting on the coming of our King. Let us bring the fullness of who we are and where we are in our time of struggle and turmoil today. Let us be authentically present to all of the challenges and difficulties that we are facing in this moment. Let us bring all of that, all of that into a space, a space of gentle holding, recognizing that Christ, even in this time of darkness, is still inviting us through the brokenness to the other side of new life and transformation. And may we hear that assurance of ultimate victory. Even now, in this time of struggle. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.