July 27, 2026

Friends, I speak to you this morning in the name of God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Please be seated. I want to invite you all to do something while I'm offering my homily this morning, at least at the beginning. In the pews right in front of you, you'll see prayer books, you'll see hymnals. I invite you to pick one of them up. Maybe you have to pick up a couple. But if you turn to the front cover, in many of those hymnals, in many of those prayer books, you see memorial plates. These hymnals, these prayer books, they've been donated, dedicated by faithful members of our community in ages past.

A couple of years ago for our stewardship campaign, I reflected on the many names of these folks who have been a part of this community over the years and generations. But I want to invite us to think about them, to think about the legacy that they offer us. Maybe this upcoming week, if you have a name in one of your hymnals or your prayer books, pray a special prayer of memory for that person, for that family, for the legacy that they have left us as the people of St. Anne's.

I went to Virginia Theological Seminary down in Alexandria. I've talked about this several times before. Just before I started seminary in the fall of 2010, the chapel burned down at the seminary. It took them several years to rebuild it, but it just so happened that my second year in seminary was the great year of dedication for this new, wonderful building that had been built. It was pristine and fresh, and it kind of felt unlived in.

One of the great members of the international Anglican communion that we had with us at that celebration of dedication was the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. I remember during his homily at this service of dedication, he remarked on the power of prayer. What makes these spaces sacred, what sets places apart, are the generations and layers of faithfulness, of prayerfulness, of lived experience that soak these places in meaning, in this great spiritual power that they come to imbue.

It really captured me in thinking about that, because the work that we do—the work that God does through us—has a staying power, a legacy. It adds to the generations of faithful who have come before, who have in their own ways dedicated their life's energy to keeping the faith alive and real and lived in the many spaces and places in which we reside and go in our lives.

There's this great image, if you ever have the chance to go to the Holy Land, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. There's a pathway down to this crypt where it is said that St. Helena found the true cross of Christ. All along the passageway are centuries, millennia now, of etched crosses that pilgrims have put into the stone walls of that passageway. It is a physical reminder to us of that same layeredness that we experience, and the ways in which we are shaped and formed by that history.

I'm talking about all of that today because we celebrate our patronal feast of Saint Anne, or Saint Anna, today. It is celebrated in conjunction with her spouse, St. Joachim, and they are identified as the parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary. But what's interesting and unique, and frankly kind of difficult about them for me in preaching this Sunday, is how very little we actually know of them. They are not attested to anywhere in Scripture. It's only the Protoevangelium of St. James, an extra-biblical source that comes about 100 years after Jesus died, that preserves their names and gives any kind of description of them.

Even that text focuses almost exclusively on the life of Mary. It's about her, about the power of her faithfulness. So even in the brief sources we have, the majority of what we know of our patron saint, Anne—of the life of Anna and Joachim—is inferred from the life and the faithfulness of their daughter, Mary.

I think that's instructive. It's not necessarily a fault or a difficulty, because it helps us reflect on the same experience we have had as the faithful in our own day and time. We can talk about it as a community of faith, of who we are as St. Anne's, precisely where I invited us to begin today. These myriad numbers of people, many of them unknown to the majority of us as the present-day congregation—though, Janet, maybe you would recognize a lot of these names!—are folks who have come in and out of our lives. They are often forgotten to time, to history, and yet have deeply shaped and formed the experience of who we are today. They have influenced in their myriad ways the culture and character of the way we live out our faith in this time and this place.

They are for us our Annas and Joaquims. Their legacy, their memory, is lived through who we are and the important emphases we place on our life as an ongoing Christian faith community.

Interestingly, we're named precisely because of this dynamic. Many of you may know that our very first building, what is now our parish hall, was built with the financial support of All Saints Church in Chevy Chase. At the time that it was built, we gave to All Saints the opportunity to name our congregation. We invited their rector at the time, Dr. Edward Berger, to come up with a name. He said, "Well, I immediately think of St. Anne." He was born on St. Anne's day himself, but he had also led at one point in his life St. Anne's Episcopal Church in Annapolis.

He reflects in this beautiful letter he wrote to us in the early 1960s on how the quiet and unassuming character of St. Anne shaped and formed him through his life. It was always this kind of background witness to the great saints in heaven through his connection to the feast day and his birth, and also through the lived, ongoing experience of the faithful in this congregation he led at St. Anne's in Annapolis. It's all those unremarkable and unremarked-upon experiences of faithfulness that together build towards this great witness to the Christian faith that so shaped and formed him.

That's us, too. The many ways that we live our faith life today, the many gifts that we bring to our community, have been shaped and formed and concretized by these unknown faithful who have come before us—these myriad numbers, hundreds if not thousands, who have walked through these doors, worshipped in these pews, and guided and shaped us in their own quiet ways.

What is it that we're carrying forward through their legacy? What is it that we offer in our witness? I think we can look around us and name many of those: our commitments to works of social justice; our deep, abiding support of those who have needs in our community through Damascus Help or now through The Hub; through the very many outreaches that we have had to seniors and to others; to the ways in which we cultivate a life of community through our music, through our fellowship offerings; to the many ways that we are a presence of connection to the community and region around us.

These are all the values that we are carrying forward from the generations who have gone before us, who in their quiet, unassuming ways shaped and formed us to be those people in this time and place. We remember them today, inasmuch as we remember Saint Anna and Saint Joachim. We're reminded of their quiet presence, their unassuming witness that has led us to be the people we are in this place.

But there's a final turn, too. It's this reflection on who we are in this moment—what it is that we do in carrying forward our own witness in our own time, how we shape and form those who are going to come after us. What is it that we are leaving them? How is it that we are offering them a vision for the kingdom of God for them to live into, embrace, and support in the times that are ahead, in the lives that will be led in the future?

So often today in our society, in our world writ large, we have this assumption that our legacies last only as long as the structures that we build to memorialize them—that our permanence is related to our memory, that we don't want to be forgotten. We want to have our names on things. We want to have some kind of concrete, physical way of remembering and acknowledging who we are.

And yet, as many of our Eastern Orthodox brothers and sisters have often taught us throughout the centuries (and in other parts of our Christian faith as well), the greatest witness that we have is in our deep humility—in our ability to let go of that need or desire for recognition, for remembrance. It is to let our legacy be the good work that continues on, even if we are not the ones named for it, even if we are not the ones remembered for it, even if the legacy of our work is shaped and formed more by those who come after us. It is nevertheless the work that God is calling us into. It is nevertheless the depth and power of our faithfulness.

So today, as we remember those who have come before us in this place, and as we remember in each of our own individual lives the great many who have shaped and formed us in their own quiet witnesses and ways, may we be renewed in our own commitment to being those faithful witnesses at this time for those coming in the future ahead of us. May those who follow us reflect and live most fully into the things of the kingdom that we help to communicate and bring forward in this day and in this time.

I'll finally remark on this: We are blessed to have Adekoya serving with us today. After we do our prayers for anniversaries and birthdays, we will be celebrating him as he has graduated high school and prepares to transition to college. This is a time of life in which we are brought to mind of this experience of transition, of influence, of remembering those who have come before and acknowledging and celebrating those who are coming after.

Adekoya, I invite you as you make this transition to be ever mindful of those influences of goodness and compassion that have surrounded you, formed you, and shaped you in these many years of your life here. In this moment in a societal sense, where the impulse is to speak loudest and be most dominating, remember the goodness and holiness and quiet fortitude. Remember the goodness and holiness of being present to the present moment in small and maybe often unacknowledged ways—that perseverance of the faith that shapes and guides us over the course of our whole lives.

And so, for all of us, may we have this moment of pause to look backwards and forwards, to celebrate the great legacy of Anna and Joachim, and to be renewed in that same sense of quiet faithfulness for ourselves, now and always.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

July 19, 2026

I don't often want to do this, but I'm going to start this morning with a few things that annoy me. One are lectionary mixtapes—these sort of chopped-up lectionary readings we get where the editors of our lectionary decide to pull verses from here and pull verses from there and knit them together. The other are time changes. I detest time changes. So you would think that I'm really excited and enthused about these efforts presently underway to move us fully into Daylight Saving Time. But even more than time changes, I detest Daylight Saving Time. If we're going to move anywhere, I would rather we actually move fully into Standard Time.

And I'm not alone on this. My friend and colleague at Princeton University, Kara Slade, has mentioned that Standard Time is actually more befitting of our religious calendar and the way in which we orient ourselves in our daily prayer life, and in the seasons and patterns of our praying. When we're in Daylight Saving Time, things kind of go awry. But it's not just a liturgical or religious sensibility; Lindsay Bever and Aaron Steckelberg of the Washington Post published an article on Thursday identifying all of these health consequences to us being in Daylight Saving Time all the time. We actually don't sleep as well, we have higher incidence rates of heart disease, of diabetes, of all of these other health issues. It seems as though Standard Time is a better alternative than full Daylight Saving Time.

But there's a connection here with what we encounter today, because in a way, time is kind of a constructed concept. We, in our cultural context and society, have a way of thinking about time, a way of constructing it and utilizing it. But that's not shared around the world. Different cultures and different peoples at different times throughout history have had myriad ways of constructing and designating timeliness. And yet, even though it's this constructed concept, it has a real, physical, concrete reality to it. It has a real, physical, concrete implication on our life.

I want to connect that to this concept of parable. You know, I talked last week about how we're moving into this season of parables of Jesus, that he's going to be educating us, admonishing us, teaching us through the use of parable for the next little while in our lectionary cycle. Sometimes, in our tradition, in our culture, we can get into the habit of dismissing the teachings we hear because we take them as story, as metaphor, as some way disconnected from reality.

But parable is powerful. Parable also has this real, concrete, immediate implication and impact on our lives. The term parable comes from the Greek parabola, which is literally to "throw side-by-side." It's a comparative word, comparing one thing to another. It's actually the same concept of a mathematical parabola, where you have sort of a symmetrical parallel on one side and the other.

William Stringfellow, the great lay Episcopal theologian that I often reference, has used the concept of Babylon in the biblical narrative as a parable in this Greek sense that it is a side-by-side comparison. We have the historical rootedness of Babylon, of the experience of the Israelites' exile in Babylon, but then Babylon becomes this kind of metaphor, this parable, this comparison to each and every age of the oppressive system, of the powers and principalities of this world that function to impose their will on the people of God. He shows how Babylon is used effectively in the New Testament as this concept of oppressive power, and how even in our age today, we have Babylons in our own context—these powers and principalities that weigh us down. But there's a real, tangible concreteness; these are not physical Babylons, these are not the Babylon of the past age, but they nevertheless function in a clear, concrete sense in the experience of our lives.

And that's sort of similar to this use of parable that we have, as we've received it, from the Middle English—this sense of vignettes or of metaphor. It's a story, but a story with an important real-world application to it. It's this character of storytelling, but not storytelling that's removed from reality. It is storytelling that has a deep and lasting implication for how we are to live our lives. It is how we experience truth and the way we live into truth in each age.

And so that brings me back to my second gripe about lectionary mixtapes, because we actually have a whole little section of Matthew chapter 13 that we miss today. If you look at your reading, it jumps from verse 30 to verse 36. This makes some sense because it's Jesus offering the parable of the wheat and the weeds and then immediately explaining what the parable means. But these five verses in between, I think, help deepen our engagement with what Jesus is teaching today.

It begins in verse 31:

He put before them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches."

He told them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until it was all leavened."

Jesus told the crowd all these things in parables; without a parable he told them nothing. This was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet: "I will open my mouth to speak in parables; I will proclaim what has been hidden from the foundation of the world."

So I want to take all of that together this morning. First, to understand that parables let us see truth that is not always so clear, not always so evident. I think this is what Jesus is indicating when he quotes Psalm 78 there at the very end of verse 35: that sometimes this use of metaphor, this use of storytelling, in fact, enlightens our ability to see truth more clearly.

Secondly, the principle teaching in today's lesson—the one that we hear about these wheat and weeds in the same field—is that the judgment of what is wheat, what is weeds, how they are to be handled, and how they are to be dealt with at the end of the age, is God's work alone, or at least the divine powers alone. We, as the Christian faithful, are not the sowers. We are not the harvesters. We are the wheat among the weeds. This isn't to say that we shouldn't grow, that we shouldn't work to overcome the weeds, or that we shouldn't work to overcome the entanglements and oppression of the weeds of this world. But ultimately, the judgment of those weeds, the systematic judgment of that oppression, is the divine authority alone, and it is for the powers of righteousness at the end of the age to deal with.

And so then that brings me to the third observation, reflecting on the two parables that we miss in this interlude period. When we consider ourselves the wheat among weeds, that can feel very overwhelming, disorienting, and it can almost feel disempowering. Because what are we to do? What are we to do when there's so much evil, so much corruption, so much ill in the soil around us?

Well, we're reassured that the minute, minuscule, tiny little kernel of faith that we cultivate—our rootedness in the rich soil of God's vineyard—is in and of itself sufficient. Even as mustard seeds, even in difficult, in inhospitable circumstances, we can grow into these fruitful, life-giving, nourishing spaces of support, of compassion, of nurturing love. And two, that we, as yeast, can leaven the whole of three measures of flour. What seems like a minuscule amount of faith or work or ability to change the world has these ripple effects that grow and multiply and become larger and larger with time.

I was thinking about that just this past week. You know, about four months ago, we were approached by our partners at the Uptownie Hub about piloting a new way of being a support to our community. In addition to doing our bi-monthly packing of staple goods at the Hub, they said, "Would you be interested in doing a market at the church with fresh produce, with meat, with other forms of support?" And so we said yes. Each month, we prepared to support 100 people. I think the first month we had 35 or 36. The next month we were in the low 40s. Last month we had 56. And this month we had 62.

It's slow. It's incremental. It's not yet that maxed-out 100, but we're seeing the ripple effect. We're seeing the way in which this tiny little stuff of faith is beginning to grow. It's beginning to take root. It's beginning to have a deeper and more impactful reality on the community and world around us.

And so this morning, friends, we confront what at first seems like this kind of difficult reading—one in which, in one way, we might just take the sense that we are to cultivate our own lives, grow to be the fruitful wheat we can be among this patch of weeds, and simply take this as an internal admonition to cultivate our own spiritual health and vitality. But if we take it fully, with the two other parables couched between, we see that it's not just about our own experience, taking care of ourselves. Rather, in being rooted, in nourishing and enriching our faith life and spiritual vitality even in times of difficulty and turmoil, we have an impact on the world around us. We have a ministry to the world around us.

This parable transitions from a thing of just kind of metaphorical storytelling into a concrete, real implication for how we are to be, who we are to be, and the resulting impact that our life as this community can have on the world around us. And it grows. It grows in these small, incremental ways. We have this immediate impact on the community here in Damascus, which then has a larger impact on the regions of northern Montgomery County, which then has an impact on Montgomery County as a whole, and the region of the DMV as a whole, and then the whole of the East Coast, and the whole of the nation, and the whole of the world. Through this effort, through this faithfulness, we grow and multiply in the goodness that we share, and the goodness that comes forth from the fruit of the work that we are doing.

There will be these times—these times of frustration and difficulty, these times where the weeds seem to be overtaking us and overrunning us. But if we remain faithful to our call, if we remain faithful to who we are, if we stay true to being the wheat among those weeds, then God will take care of the rest.

I leave you with one final example. I've used this before, but it's such a good one, I'd like to come back to it again and again. In the depth of the apartheid experience in South Africa, Desmond Tutu actively engaged in work to oppose the system of apartheid. He got to a breaking point in his life where he got overwhelmed; he couldn't see any kind of path forward. He was at a retreat center, and he retired to a cross at this retreat center. He knelt on the kneeler before it and just prayed for what seemed like hours on end.

And a resolution came to him. He turned around the next day and went in to P. W. Botha, the prime minister of South Africa at the time, and he said, "I have an invitation to you. Come and join us. We have already won. You may seem to have the upper hand at this moment, but justice will win out. Justice will prevail at the end of the day. And so, I will lay aside this anxiety I have about having to fix this myself, and I have given over that transformation to God. God will prevail at the end of the day. My work to you is to invite you into the reality of that transformed life that is eventually coming. It may not be tomorrow, it may not be next week, it may not be next year, but justice will prevail. And I invite you to join with me in that movement towards justice."

It didn't happen the next day, and it didn't happen the next week, but truly, it did eventually come to fruition. The system of apartheid collapsed, and Desmond Tutu's invitation remained. The great work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission brought the sides of deep and lasting opposition together to find a new way, a new day, a new path forward.

So let us be that wheat among the weeds. And in being that wheat among the weeds, in that faithfulness, let us let God do God's work. Let us be the yeast. Let us be the mustard seed. So that with whatever faithful, incremental steps we take, we may more significantly point towards the coming arc of justice, of transformation, of new life that is yet on the horizon.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.