In the name of God ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
“Woe is me! I am lost.” Those words of the prophet Isaiah describe well what many have been feeling over the past several weeks. Another translation puts it as, “I am undone.” These days, there are two camps that most people identify with. One is just so sick and tired of the nonsense and division of politics that they have little to no tolerance for hearing about it at church. They want a respite and a shelter from all of that. They want church, and specifically the sermon, to speak about eternal truths instead of temporal realities. The other group wants to know that the Church sees the eroding of our democratic norms, they are perhaps afraid for themselves or someone they love, and they want assurance that God is aware of injustice, that this is a community that stands for something, and that our faith is relevant in our modern world.
In that tension is where the preacher stands. I ask that you please keep all preachers in prayer. We are trying to do the holy work of speaking a word on behalf of Jesus into the brokenness of our world. In a time in which emotions are high, little benefit of the doubt is given, and it is so easy to give and take offense, speaking about important things is a perilous task. But it is a sacred one.
As you’ve probably figured out by now, if I’m going to err, it’s going to be on the side of saying too much instead of too little. Silence, in my discernment, simply is not a faithful option. For one, milquetoast preaching is an insult to you. You deserve preaching that meets the realities of your life. A sermon that does not take seriously what we’ve been hearing about all week is a sermon that gaslights you, insults your intellect, and does not trust you to listen with the ears of faith. You deserve to hear the Word of God, and I’m not going to stand in the way of that.
Secondly, silence speaks just as loudly as words do. I could ignore what is going on in the world of politics, but that would not mean that the sermon stayed out of politics, it would simply mean that either the church condones whatever assumptions you’ve come in with or has nothing to say about such things. But faith is not irrelevant or impotent. The Gospel always matters, and so the Gospel will always be preached from this pulpit.
And thirdly, tension is how we grow. Transformation comes when the right amount of pressure is applied to a situation. This is the art of preaching – finding enough pressure to create cracks and crevices for the Spirit to get into our lives, but not too much pressure to break us. It is with much prayer, discernment, and godly fear that I dare to speak. Please know that I take this task extremely seriously and strive to never offer my opinions, never to be unfair in my speaking, and never to preach something less than the love of Jesus. But, just like Isaiah, “I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips.” So I ask for God’s mercy on my mistakes and your forgiveness in my shortcomings as a messenger of the Gospel.
Beloved, I don’t know what the coming weeks, months, and years are going to be like in our country and world. I pray for wisdom and peace, but I just don’t know what’s coming. What I can promise you is that the Eucharist will be celebrated here each Sunday – that sacred meal in which we are gathered across difference and are fed with God’s abundant love for us. When you need comfort and refuge, you will always be able to find it at this table. And I also promise you that the message of Jesus will never go silent at St. Luke’s – we will provide welcome to the stranger, the seeker, and the afraid, we will always be a church where it is okay to not be okay, we will use our voices and resources for the work of justice, we will confess our sins and rely on the gracious mercy of God to make all things new. This will always be a beloved community for all.
With that being said, I want to give you a word that may well be our way forward: holy. We heard that word used three times by the heavenly beings around the throne of God in Isaiah’s vision: “Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD.” Our hope and our calling is towards holiness.
The word “holy” means sacred, set apart, or different. So, the sanctuary of the Temple in Jerusalem was called the “holy of holies” because it was a place that was separate from the rest of the Temple. Holy does not necessarily mean better, cleaner, or more devout – as in “holier-than-thou.” At the foundational level, holiness is about difference. At St. Luke’s when we say that we aspire to be a place where all can “come and see the difference Christ makes,” we’re saying that we strive to be a church in which God’s holiness is apparent.
And the reason why so many are feeling lost and undone right now is that we know that things aren’t right in our society. We long for something holy and different. Both Episcopal Migrant Ministries and Lutheran Family Services have had funding cut off with the result that many people in those organizations have been laid off and the Biblically mandated work of welcoming the stranger is being impacted. Now, maybe you think that such work should be fully funded by the Church and individuals and not the federal government. That’s a fine debate to have. But cutting off funding so quickly and severely is overly harsh and punitive.
Some are feeling undone by the dizzying pace of change to how our government functions and are concerned about the lack of accountability and checks and balances, particularly when it comes to stripping away environmental protections and due process. It’s the story we see throughout the Old Testament – when the kings of Israel concentrated power and ignored their advisors, the nation crumbled and the people suffered. Understandably, some are feeling lost as it seems that our nation is moving towards the Siren Song of power.
Others are feeling lost and undone because they are no longer safe to be who they are – as gay and trans rights and protections are being eroded. Again, we can have a discussion about human sexuality, but what is not up for debate is the dignity of any human being. And, to be clear, this extends to Trump, Musk, and all the rest. Their dignity will not be diminished or called into question. We walk the way of love, and we will not stand against injustice unjustly nor will we brutally work against brutality. Love is always the way. The world has enough hatred and violence in it, we don’t need to bring more.
And there may be personal reasons you are feeling undone – perhaps the cancer has come back, maybe your child has relapsed, it could be that certainty of your paycheck is less certain. Even in the calmest and best of times, life can be hard and has a way of making even the most strait-laced of us come undone.
This is where the call of holiness speaks to our souls. Holiness is why people say that they are “spiritual but not religious.” Holiness is what we come to this sacred space seeking each Sunday. Another way of naming the attraction we have for holiness is that we desire an alternative. The world tells us that our differences should divide us; but it is holy to recognize diversity as a gift. Those in power might say that compassion is unfounded and weak; but Jesus says that it is more blessed to be merciful than correct. Some will tell us that other people are getting what they deserve; but Jesus says that all people are God’s children who deserve dignity and respect. The economy might tell us that we live in a world of scarcity; but faith assures us that we live in a world of abundance. Our fears and uncertainties might make us think that death is eternal, that sins are unforgivable, that hope is naïve; but the Resurrection proclaims that all things are being made well by our Good Shepherd. Our public discourse might make us believe that politics is the most important thing going on right now; but the Church reminds us that Communion remains at the center of all things.
This holy and blessed difference is encapsulated in the Eucharist. The sermons between Epiphany and Lent are drawing our attention to our worship – shedding some light on what we do when we gather in intentional worship. The central act of worship in the Episcopal Church, and for the vast majority of the 2,000 years of Church history, is the celebration of the Holy Eucharist. There is something holy and life-giving that comes from orientating ourselves around this meal. The Eucharist has been called the “source and summit of our faith” – meaning that the sacrifice of Jesus which is at the center of the Mass is the source from which all of our faith flows from and that the receiving of Body of Christ as we gather as the body of Christ is the epitome of our faith. And what makes this reliably true is the holy nature of Communion.
When we celebrate the Eucharist, we always sing or say the Sanctus, which is the Latin word for “holy,” and the name of the song of the seraphim in Isaiah: “Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might; heaven and earth are full of your glory.” The rest of what we sing is called the Benedictus and comes from Psalm 118 and Matthew. But the Sanctus is the very song sung around the throne of God. This is why you’ll notice that I always bow during those words – for those words sacramentally transport us, along with Isaiah and all the faithful across time and space, to the heavenly temple of God. And, at least in my sense of piety, I feel a godly urge to humbly and reverently bow before my Lord.
But there’s another action that I do during the Sanctus that maybe a few of you have noticed. The acolytes really are some of the only people who can see it, but as I’m bowing, I’m also bending my knees three times. It’s a sort of dancing that I’m doing. Because when we come before our Maker, yes, we bow in reverence, but we also dance with joy. As Psalm 149 puts it, “Let the people praise God’s name with dancing.”
I incorporated this idea of dancing at the Eucharist back in 2012 when I visited the Western Wall of the Temple in Jerusalem for the first time. There, I noticed faithful Jews flexing their knees in a dance like fashion. I learned that this motion is known as “shuckling,” coming from the Yiddish word “to shake.” It’s a rhythmic swaying that one person told me is about dancing with joy before the throne of our loving God. Yes, our faith is about reverence, but it’s also about joy. When I do this bit of liturgical dance at the Eucharist, I’m reminded of the first verse of a great hymn, “I come with joy to meet my Lord, forgiven, loved, and freed, in awe and wonder to recall his life laid down for me.” And, for me, that’s the perfect mindset to come to Communion with – with a sense of joy and peace that the world cannot give.
One Psalm notes that “You, O Lord, have turned my mourning into dancing.” That’s a part of the holiness of the Eucharist – it is a reminder that sorrow can be transformed into joy, that calamity can be redeemed, that death leads to Resurrection, that in giving we receive, that something as simple as a bit of bread can also be a token of our most precious belovedness, that there remains the most excellent way of love, that there is an alternative to meanness, to fear, to holding grudges, that, indeed, Christ is making a difference in our lives and world.
Testifying and giving ourselves to this difference is our call right now. You might think of it as being a part of the resistance of love, the refusal to meet violence with violence, the way of love, or doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly – these are all the holy difference Christ makes. We heard in Luke that Jesus told the disciples that they soon would be catching people. When Jesus says this, he uses a different for “catch” than was used earlier when speaking about fishing. The word is the one you’d use if you were capturing a hostage and taking them alive instead of killing them. In fishing terms, it’s not catching the fish for dinner, it’s “catch and release.”
Our call is not to bring more people in to join the club of St. Luke’s. Our mission is not to increase our numbers as a sign of our success or charisma. No, what the world needs of us at this moment is for us to point to Jesus as the holy alternative to the mess that we’ve made for ourselves. Our holy work is to bring people into the difference that Christ makes and set them free to go into the world as people who are forgiven, loved, and freed. And what makes this possible is that, though we might feel lost and undone by all that is going on, Jesus has come to us, assuring us of our dignity, meeting our mistakes with mercy, and uniting us in his love that is making all things well. And therefore, our anthem is today and ever shall be, that he is holy, he is holy, he is holy.
