December 14, 2025

On what I remember to be a quite sunny and somewhat cool October day just over eight years ago in Little Rock, Arkansas, I stood before Bishop Larry Benfield, at the time the diocesan bishop of Arkansas, as he said to me, my brother, every Christian is called to follow Jesus Christ, serving God the Father, through the power of the Holy Spirit. And later on, as a deacon, you are to assist the bishop and priests in public worship and in the administration of God's Word and sacraments, and you are to carry out other duties assigned to you from time to time.

And as I've mentioned before in our tradition, you do not lose orders as you become differently ordered in your ministry of the church. And so today I am as much a deacon as I am a priest. And it was in such a capacity about an hour and a half ago, those other duties as assigned included being outside with a shovel in hand, clearing off our sidewalk, preparing for you all to be here with us this morning. And I appreciate your efforts to get here.

But I was thinking about that because my experience of journeying towards ordination, the years of discernment that came into play in that process, were brought to mind for me as I read through our readings for this week. You see, I've mentioned this briefly before, but I haven't really shared with you all the fullness of my journey. I grew up in the Southern Baptist Church with a fairly significant dose of Roman Catholic influence as well. But as a high school student in St. Louis, going on a mission journey my sophomore year, I began to have some inkling of a call to ordained ministry, a call that I expressed later on in my high school career, one that was affirmed and lifted up by the congregation I was raised in. I was what they call licensed to preach before I went off to college. And I thought at the time that this was going to be a very clear and easy journey. I would go to college, study religion, go on to seminary. I had it all worked out in my mind.

But very quickly, things went sideways. And I very quickly felt myself disoriented by the tradition I was raised in and the sense that that's not where I belonged. That's not where I was meant to be. And it took about six years before I landed in the Episcopal Church, before I felt that renewed sense of call in the tradition in which I now reside and preside.

But it was in those years of longing, those years of discernment and struggle that I really in a very deep sense began to understand the depth of this sense of waiting that we are invited into in today's scriptures. I was very powerfully captured by John's message to Jesus: Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?

This waiting is not, in a sense, a temporal waiting. Are we to wait next week, next month, next year? Things seem like they're moving. Things seem to be right around the corner. Is it really truly you? But in a greater, more significant sense, this was a cosmic waiting. This was the longing of the people of Israel. This was centuries, millennia old. This deep, deep desire for the Messiah to come, for the world to be set anew again.

John's question is one that I think is very prescient for us today. Not that we have a Messiah in our midst that we are discerning, but this question of when, Christ, are you coming? How long do we have to wait? Where is your presence in this present age?

And it's in that that we have this beautiful reflection from our epistle from St. James. This admonition to be patient. This patience that is not again the kind of short, often truncated patience that we experience in our lives today. But this elongated, deeper, more lived experience of patience. You know, this imagery, this agricultural imagery that St. James uses is one that I think for many of us we've become kind of disconnected from, even though there are some in our own communities who still experience this. This patience for the harvest. This patience for both the early and late rains is often a months long waiting. It's a cultivating. It's a gentle working of the land. A keeping things going. But it's a waiting. A waiting for the right time. The right opportunity.

Years after I had left my Baptist church, worked through the many complexities of my experience of waiting, a lot of fitful starts in different directions that I thought were the right ones and ended up not being so, I finally got to this place of belonging in the Episcopal church that Julie and I joined in Arkansas. And then even after initiating that process of discernment, I was sat down by the bishop and said, look, I'm very proud and happy of you, happy for you to discern this call, and I want to support you. But it's going to be another three years. You've got X, Y, Z things before you, before you can even think about seminary.

And we went through all of those hoops, went through all of those movements, got to the end of that road, got permission from the bishop to go to seminary. And then we sat, Julie and I, with him in his office, and he said, I hate to tell you this, but I've already committed as many people as I can this next class of students going in. So I need you to wait an additional year.

And it all ended up working out well. But it gave me this deep, elongated sense of patience that so often the time of God's choosing is not the time of our own construction, our own desires, our own wishes and whims.

We have this dichotomy in this season of Advent of the alertness that we are called into and the waiting that is so often a part of that process too. That it is to be alert and to wait simultaneously. That's a very... very narrow road to walk. Often one with a lot of frustrations and difficulties. But it's precisely the call that we have in these times and in this season of life.

And I think for many of us, we can find ourselves falling to one side or the other of that. In our desire to be alert, we find ourselves activated, wanting to do constantly, to find places and outlets for that sense of call to action and to alertness. And then for others of us, we are comfortable in that space of waiting, but maybe sometimes complacent waiting. We like the stability of what we have. We like the ease of our lives where they are. We're not quite ready to move. And if God could just hold off on doing anything big for a little while, that would be just fine with us.

But this season, this season calls us out of both of those extremes. Calls us to be alert and patient simultaneously. To frustrate both of those places of default orientation. And that's a challenging road to walk. But it's the road that we are invited into today.

And I want to leave you with one final observation about how these things kind of play out in a practical sense. As I've talked about for pretty much every week for the last several weeks, we are doing this forum hour discussion of Benedictine spirituality and how it shapes and forms us as a Christian community and as individual Christians. And today, we heard an extended quote in the Forum Hour from the great lay Episcopal theologian William Stringfellow. And I invite you, if you have a chance, to go and listen to the recording of that sometime later this week.

But I want to highlight just two elements of what he said that are specifically prescient for us. He said the church is the embassy of the eschaton, which is that fancy word for the end of all things, the coming of the kingdom. That we, as a church, are the embassy of the new kingdom of God. We are the ambassadors of that new kingdom. The church is the image of what the world is in its essential being. That the ideal God has for the world is lived out most authentically when the church is being most authentically what it is meant to be.

To the world as it is then, William Stringfellow goes on to write, the church of Christ is always as it were saying yes and no simultaneously. So very often, so very often we get trapped in the material dichotomies, the political and cultural dichotomies that the world voices upon us. We as the church can so very easily fall short of our call when we slip into those roles, placating one side or the other. But when we are most authentically that ambassadorial presence of the world to come, we frustrate and break down that dichotomy. We simultaneously say yes and no. That we hold together the tension, for example, in this season and in this Sunday, of a call to action and a call to patience, a call to further stay alert and responsive to what Christ is doing even in this moment, yet as we wait for the fullness of the coming of the kingdom, which remains ever on the horizon.

And so, friends, this morning, this morning as we wrestle with these various dichotomies, as we find ourselves precariously balanced in this call of the both-and-ness, of being alert and being patient, I invite us to hear again the call from our author of the epistle of St. James: Be patient, therefore, beloved. Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near. Strengthen your hearts even in this time of waiting, this time of alertness, this time of struggling and finding that balance of doing both of those things.

May our hearts be strengthened. And in that strengthening, may we find the patience and the alertness to ever be the people of God that God calls us to be. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

December 7, 2025

You know that old adage about a stopped clock or a broken clock being right at least twice a day? So for years, the house I grew up in, the house my parents moved to in Arkansas, we’ve had a framed quotation prominently displayed somewhere in the house. And it’s a quotation attributed to Calvin Coolidge. And I bring that up because Coolidge is considered by some lists to be one of the worst presidents that we’ve ever had in the United States. And yet, this quote offers some profound truth:

"Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not. Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not. Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not. The world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent."

And I dare say that there is a sense in which this has been kind of a defining feature of my family's life story, of my own story throughout my own life. My grandparents, as I’ve talked about many times before, who I spent significant time with growing up, who deeply shaped and formed me, all four of them had come from very difficult and challenging backgrounds and achieved great things in their lives. My parents, both of them, completed PhDs simultaneously, together, and had my younger brother in the middle of all of that.

And then in my own life, I’ve had a lot of different times of trial, of struggle, of places in which I have had to put my head down and simply push through and persevere. And I think, looking back on it, that was something that significantly connected me here to St. Anne’s. Because I think our faith journey as a community has been, in a very fundamental way, a story of persistence, of perseverance in times of great difficulty and challenge.

And you might wonder where that connects with anything today. But I want to offer that reality as a part of what John [the Baptist] is saying in this wilderness space east of the Jordan River. I think the most striking phrase in the whole of the gospel passage today is his admonition to these Pharisees and Sadducees: “You brood of vipers! Who told you to flee from the wrath to come?”

So often, in our settled, comfortable, easy lives, when struggle is before us, it is so very easy to run away. So very easy to seek solace, to find the escape. In the weeks after the world shut down in 2020 with the pandemic, one of the outlets that Julie and I found to stay sane was a group of friends who we would get together with on Zoom, and we started a book club. And, appropriately, fittingly, the very first book we read was The Decameron, this mid-century, 16th century work of Italian origin about a group of people facing the plague who run away into the countryside. To forget the ills of the world. To live life in ease and luxury. While everything else is collapsing and falling down.

But truly, honestly, in those moments of great chaos and tumult, as Christians, as people of faith, we are called to be in the muck and the mire. First century Israel was a place of great tumult and chaos. The Pharisees and the Sadducees were very much involved in some of the major political divisions and debates of the day. And for them to come seek John is to leave all of that behind. And I think that’s instructive for us. Because we laud and celebrate what John is doing as the forerunner of what Christ will do. So in a way, they’re appropriately responding. They’re coming to receive this baptism. They have a vision of the light.

But they are taking advantage of that light. They’re, instead of using it as a place of grounded and foundational orientation, they’re using it as an excuse to get away from the difficulties that they are facing. Now, I’m reading into that a little bit. But I think that may be what John’s getting at in his criticism of them. Because even as they may be doing what we might perceive as right, seeking his counsel, his baptism, the transformation that he is preaching, what does he do but send them right back from where they came? Who told you to escape? Who told you to give up on the places that God has placed you?

I was very profoundly moved just a couple of weeks ago when I went to our clergy day retreat. When Brother James Dowd, an Episcopal Benedict, and I referenced him last week as well, said, and he’s a gay man who lived even before he joined the order in New York City in the 80s. He said, “This is the second pandemic of my life.” He said the 1980s for us in New York had the same uncertainties, the same fears, the same traumas that all of you have now experienced in the pandemic. I’ve done this two times now. And how very powerful that was. Granted, I was born in 86, so I have the vaguest memories of that time. But there’s a sense. There’s a sense in which so many of us stood by, sat by, while so many struggled and were in pain and were dying.

And so today, when we look at the needs of the world around us in our present circumstance, what does it mean for us to stay in the muck and the mire? How do we continue to live lives of service even as we work on ourselves and deepening and developing our connection to the kingdom? What does it mean to both await, as we do in this season of Advent, and to act? How do we do those two things simultaneously?

Well, one approach, one response, I think, is the gift of the Benedictine tradition that I have been sharing with you all over the course of the last few weeks. As I mentioned, we are journeying in our formation offering between the two services in a reflection over this period of Advent on how the Benedictine gift, the tradition of Benedictine life can help deepen and shape our sense of what it means to live this tightrope of action and awaiting.

One of the most significant sections of the whole of the Rule of Benedict is Chapter 7, which is the virtues of life that we are to cultivate when we embrace Benedictine spirituality. And one of the principal virtues, maybe the singular principal virtue, that Benedict identifies, is the virtue of humility. And yet he immediately then goes on to describe humility in ways that we as modern hearers might think quite abrasive and problematic. Humility as an act of humiliation, of self-denial to the point that we let others abuse or oppress or step on us.

The great 20th century Benedictine nun and spiritual writer Joan Chidester, in her commentary on the Rule of Saint Benedict, I think helpfully describes this balancing act. And she wrote this. I want you to hear. This is a little bit of a long paragraph. But she wrote this in 1993, 30 years ago. Over 30 years ago. And yet how prescient it is for us today too. She writes:

"The Roman Empire in which Benedict of Nursia wrote his alternative rule of life was a civilization in a decline not unlike our own. The economy was deteriorating. The helpless were being destroyed by the warlike. The rich lived on the backs of the poor. The powerful few made decisions that profited them, but plunged the powerless, many, into continual chaos. The empire expended more and more of its resources on militarism designed to maintain a system that, strained from within and threatened from without, was already long dead. It is an environment like that into which Benedict of Nursia flung a rule for privileged Roman citizens calling for humility: a proper sense of self in a universe of wonders. When we make ourselves God, no one in the world is safe in our presence. Humility, in other words, is the basis for right relationships in life."

"Later centuries distorted the notion and confused the concept of humility with lack of self-esteem, and substituted the warped and useless practice... of self-neglect. The warped and useless practice of humiliation. In other words," she says, "it is the basis, again, for right relationships in life."

I want us, as we think this morning, about what it is that we are hearing called to in John’s admonition, to consider what it means for us to respond with humility in a time of waiting. Because it’s not just about living our lives in our little bubbles in our echo chambers in a better, more Christ-centered way. But humility, humility is also, when we embrace it fully, a call to action, a call to life lived in the public square.

Later on in the Rule of Saint Benedict and then in the Benedictine tradition, we have this concept of fidelity that gets developed. In Latin, conversio morum, a conversion of manners or a conversion of life. And it’s not just a conversion that happens. Our English doesn’t really do this very well—happens in a once-off situation where it’s done and we move on—but it is an eternal present, an ongoing conversion of life that happens every moment of every day, a constant process of living newly. As we talked about last week, that Benedictine adage that we always begin again.

And I think it’s in that space then, in humility, that we are able to see the goodness of the world even in times of great brokenness. That we have someone like Calvin Coolidge, one of our least liked presidents, offering such a profound observation on the power of persistence and perseverance. When we consider anew what John is calling us to, the admonition against running away, the call to stay in the muck and the mire.

We have a call to be present. Prayerfully. Humbly. Committedly. To the needs and challenges that we face in the world around us. Even when things seem difficult. We have a call to stay. To await. And to work.

So friends, on this Second Sunday of Advent, as we continue this journey of awaiting, as we continue to seek the light and await the light in a time of darkness. May we hear this invitation to humility anew. Refresh our commitment to our call to walk with humility. And to ever more focus and center ourselves on the actions of compassion, love, and work of renewal that God is calling us into in this time and always. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.