October 25, 2026

Just a quick note at the outset, this passage that we have from St. Matthew's Gospel today, and specifically this verse 46 that we end with, is one of my favorite passages in all of Scripture, and every time this comes up in the lectionary cycle, I can't help but notice the snickers and laughs when it says that from that day, no one dare ask him any more questions. You get the sense of exasperation that the Pharisees, the Sadducees, all of these power players in Jerusalem, the point that they have gotten to with Jesus where they just don't know what to do with Him. And not only that, they've been rendered speechless. They're completely besides themselves trying to figure out what to say in response.

But I want to step back from that a moment, and talk about something else, more or less entirely. And that is things particular and things not so particular. I suspect, like every one of you, I have things that I am particular about and things that I am not particular about. For example, I actually have a fairly rigid... clothing particularity. There are certain brands that I am loyal to. If you ever see me outside of this in my civilian clothes, you'll notice I wear Levi jeans, Wrangler shirts, and a particular pair of Canadian cowboy boots. And if not that, then Red Wing work boots. And I'm just, I'm sort of stuck in that. Not in a bad way, but I have my particularities.

I'm also of all things, very, very particular about the brand and style of chewing gum that I chew. And I drive Julie nuts with how much chewing gum I consume in a day's time. So that's not an insignificant particularity for me. But one thing I'm not particular about at all is my coffee. Don't get me wrong, I love espresso. I have some of the fondest memories of sitting in a street cafe in the Middle East or in the south of Spain, having some of the best espresso pulled that I've ever had in my life. But then I'm also not adverse to the run-of-the-mill drip coffee or my memories of the tins of General Foods International instant coffee my great-grandmother would drink or the jars of Nescafe instant coffee I consumed in my years abroad. And even, even sometimes, there's a particular familiarity with those last burnt dregs of gas station coffee in the glass brewing container. They all have their place.

And I was thinking about that this week a lot because not only in reference to our gospel lesson, which I'm going to enunciate or elaborate on in a minute, but it's because of this celebration of Reformation Sunday. There's this concept in our Christian tradition that goes all the way back to the earliest years of the church, not just our Reformation period in Europe. And it is this difference between things that are diaphronta or essentialia, which are the things essential, the things necessary, versus the things that are adiaphora, the things that are indifferent. Essentially, those things that are dogmas for us, that are the demarcation lines of what our faith is and how we believe we define ourselves as insiders and outsiders, and things that we're not terribly particular about, that we could go one way or the other on.

Some of these questions, some of these precise delineations, are very much at the heart of what happens with the European Reformation. Figuring all of these little things out. And many of you may know that pithy little statement that we, as the Anglican tradition with the heritage of the Church of England, have threaded this needle of being a via media, a middle way between some of these different contestations, some of these different demarcation lines that were defined by different groups of the Reformation era.

But the reality is that we're more unsettled than that. It's not so much that we found a middle path as it is that we've kind of loosely held extremes together. I'll give you an example. When Henry VIII, King Henry VIII, established the Church of England as an autonomous and separate entity from the council or the authority of the roman pontiff, the pope, he essentially was making an ecclesiastical, a church stand about who the authority of the church was. But the worship, the theology, the kind of ethos of the royal chapel household remained completely unchanged. They still prayed to the saints or prayed intercessory prayers on behalf. They've asked the saints to pray for them. They still had all the pomp and circumstance with all the flourishes and the bells and whistles that were true of medieval English churchmanship.

But then, just 20 years after King Henry VIII died, we have the production of what are called the 39 Articles of Religion, which was this entirely different stream of thought within the English church. And if you look in the back of your prayer book, we still retain the 39 Articles as one of our historical documents. And this was generated out of the group that we will come to be... They will come to be known as the Puritans, the ones who wanted to purify the church of all of these heretical doctrines that they saw.

A couple of examples: Article 22 of the 39: “The Romish doctrine concerning purgatory, worshiping, and adoration, as well as image of relics and the invocation of saints, is a fond thing vainly invented and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.”

And then, just a little bit further down, Article 25, of the sacraments: “The sacraments are not ordained of Christ to be gazed upon or to be carried about, but should be duly used, and in such only as worthily receive the same, they have a wholesome effect or operation. But they that receive them unworthily purchase to themselves damnation, as St. Paul saith.”

There's these clear demarcation lines between what is inside and what is outside. What is clearly ordained and what is heresy. Or not only heresy, but demonic influence of the worst kind on the church.

And the reality is we never really ended up on one side of that equation or the other as what we now call the Anglican tradition developed. We sort of kept that uneasy balance. You will find today throughout the Anglican communion, folks dressed just like I am, celebrating this very kind of, for lack of a better term, Protestant way of serving. We even have Anglicans today who still affirm that the sacraments are a memorialization. There's nothing sort of inherently present of God in these things other than they recall for us the sacrifices that Christ made.

And then, just like we will experience next week with All Saints Sunday, we will have all the bells and whistles, the incense, the flourishments, the vestments, the beauty and the grandeur of that service with the elevation of the sacraments as I normally do each week with the bowing, the genuflecting, the real and proper reverence that we bring into that moment. And even at that, you hear my own prejudice coming out.

But we sort of find a way of holding these things together. Of trying to thread this needle. Of recognizing those elements that are very dogmatic for us. And those things that are less essential. Those things that are indifferent. Or at least that we can coexist with.

And not only am I bringing this up because it's Reformation Sunday. But I think there's something of this at the very heart of what Jesus is teaching us in this instruction and this admonition to love God and love our neighbor. You know, one of the great truisms or professions that came out of the Protestant Reformation in Europe was the Lutheran concept that the law condemns, but that the gospel liberates.

Some of you who grew up in Lutheran traditions or have some familiarity with Lutheranism, that won't sound unfamiliar. And there are many within our Anglican fold who also preach a very similar theology. And it's very compelling at some level that the law, especially the law of our human construction, operates to keep us in line, to condemn us, to convict us. But what breaks through that is the good news and gospel that Christ brings and liberates us and brings us into the new and restored life as children of God and people of the kingdom.

But there's a little bit of an ambiguity here, is there not, this Sunday? I listen to two Lutheran pastors every week on a podcast where they kind of talk about the upcoming week's readings and they reflect on them and sort of think about the homiletical or preaching elements of these readings. And they were really wrestling this week with today's gospel. Because in point of fact, the good news, the gospel, for today's instruction is to abide in the law—so it is not that there's a dichotomy of one or the other here, but it is precisely the liberation of obedience, the liberation of being law-abiding, of following those two great commandments to love God and love your neighbor.

And I think at the end of the day, this dichotomy that we often draw between things that are dogma and things that are adiaphora, things that are our demarcation lines and things that are indifferent, just like today's instruction, we often find that those dichotomies we construct at some level and in some way break down in the larger reality of what God is doing in Christ in the world now. And frankly, always.

That in some ways, we are always brought up short. No matter how we figure these things out, no matter how we draw our own lines in the sand, they're incomplete. They're not quite right. That we, in the language of St. Paul, see through a glass darkly. We always have this imperfect perspective. And very often it's the case that Christ surprises us, breaks through in new and refreshing ways.

I'll give you a kind of funny historical example in the Episcopal Church of how some of these things have played out. In 1831, a man named Levi Silliman Ives was elected the Bishop of North Carolina. And he had been very taken with the subject of church history and very taken with a movement that was just underway at that time in Oxford, England, that was trying to reclaim and rehabilitate the beauty and the pageantry of the historic worship in the English context with, again, all the bells and the whistles and the things that for many of a more Protestant persuasion seemed like an intrusion of Roman practice once more.

But he was elected Bishop of North Carolina, and in that time, shortly after the election, he sought to establish a worshiping community at Valley Cruces, one that still exists to this day, centered on prayerful obedience to the offices of the church: the morning and evening prayer offices, the pageantry and beauty of this rich liturgical tradition that was a part of our history. And so he recruited two young priests from Boston to go down and establish this community at Valley Cruces. And on their way south, they stopped at a church supply store in Philadelphia that, as it happened to be, was a Roman Catholic church supply store. And they bought candles to put on the communion table, or as they would have called it, the altar. And they bought a cross to put on it as well.

And all of a sudden, this began to raise red flags. And in 1848, Bishop Ives was brought up on heresy charges in the House of Bishops for being essentially a secret Roman Catholic trying to infiltrate the Anglican communion, trying to infiltrate the Episcopal Church. And so for several years, there was this back and forth, this wrestling theologically with all these principles.

And then in 1852, he came to a compromise with the House of Bishops: he would take a six-month sabbatical to go off and to pray and reflect on his ministry, to see if he could find this way of sort of reorienting himself in accord with his fellow bishops. Well, a few weeks after he went on sabbatical, he got on a ship, sailed to Rome, and was received by the Roman pontiff at the time, Pope Pius IX. And he sent a nice little letter back to the House of Bishops and said, you know, I reflected for a few weeks, and I've actually joined the Roman church.

And it really didn't help his cause. It didn't help the cause of the Anglo-Catholic experience in the United States. Because it basically, in a way, sort of proved what so many of these more Protestant folks in the church were fearing.

But the reality is that those tensions, even as they kind of lived their lives in our denomination, caused these controversies and these tensions, they often distract us from the reality of what it means to be in right and proper relationship with each other. They kind of catch us up because we get tangled up in all of these divisions and these demarcation lines in the sand that we are so very passionate about.

But the reality is, to go back to that kind of breakdown of the law convicting, the gospel liberating, when we recognize that things aren't as clear-cut, that there is this kind of grayness, that there's this seeing through a glass darkly—that is so often a part of our experience. We have to figure out how to thread that needle in our own time. And in our own way. We have this kind of constant balance that we work through. In knowing what it means to love our neighbor. But also to have this conviction of being obedient to the law. To the gospel. To the good news. That is of liberating and life-giving substance.

Let me give you, as one final thought, a very concrete example of how challenging this can be. If we look all the way back at our first reading in Leviticus, what do we hear? But picking up again in verse 15: “You shall not render an unjust judgment.” Not, “You shall not render judgment,” but, “You shall not render unjust judgment. You shall not be partial to the poor nor defer to the great.” How often do we sort of side on one side or the other of that? “With justice you shall judge your neighbor.” Not, “Do not judge,” but, “With justice you shall judge. You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people. You shall not stand idly by when the blood of your neighbor is at stake. I am the Lord.”

There is so much in this. We are called to action. We cannot be a people on the fence. We cannot stand by while injustices promulgate. While our neighbors are being vilified, are being shamed, are being hurt physically, abused and oppressed. We have a call to render just judgment to a world that is unjust, to a world that is broken, and yet it is a world filled with our neighbors. We are rendering justice to the unjust who are also our neighbors.

How do we do that? How do we stay true to this call? How do we authentically and authoritatively stand on the power of this transformative word while also doing it without a conviction of hatred? Without this depth of disgust? Without dehumanizing the one that is on the other side of so many of these issues for us?

And I wish I had a really simple and easy answer for you. But I don't. The reality is I think this is that imperfect tension that we always live with. It's kind of like our Anglican tradition. It's not that we found this kind of clear, mutually agreed upon middle path that we can all be happy with, but it's that we live together with the uneasy balance of the difference. We live together with the reality of that diversity ever-present.

And I think sometimes that this is the reality of fully loving our neighbor, because it can be very easy to disregard the law entirely, to see everything as adiaphora, to live and let live. But then what do we do when that kind of attitude allows for the perpetuation of evil, the perpetuation of discord, the reality of the pain and violence and suffering that we see in every moment of every day around us? That's where the conviction of the law comes into play, that is where our call to obedience becomes ever more manifest.

I think it's particularly acute in this moment as we look just a week from now when we prepare to go to the polls, to vote, to exercise this political and social right we have in this country at a time when so much is so bifurcated, where so much is so dogmatic. Where there are these clear and rigid lines in the sand. And how do we navigate that? How do we stand firmly on the particularities of our faith while at the same time loving our neighbor in the fulsomest sense of that commandment? In a way where we stand firmly and yet still love?

It's hard. It is impossibly hard. It is something far beyond our own human ability. But the reality is that it is not up to us. It is ultimately up to the faith that we have been imbued with. To go back to the collect that we started with today, that it is God's ability to increase in us the gifts of faith, hope, and charity. It is an impossible task for us to do on our own, but it is through the power of the Spirit that we are able to do as we are commanded, that we are able to love even in the most difficult of circumstances, and that we are to find a path forward even when tensions remain, even when the balance is ever more precarious, that through Jesus Christ our Lord, we may love as he commands.

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

October 18, 2026

I want to start with a brief commentary about where we are in the gospel of Matthew this week, last week, where we'll be for a little bit yet, and to make a comment about that in the context of where we are as a society and a moment in time in our own lived experience. Being just a few mere weeks away from our midterm election cycle, I suspect that this encounter between Jesus and these Jerusalemite elders, these Herodians, those in the know and kind of people of influence in Jerusalem, is not an unfamiliar scene to us if we understand what is happening. Just last chapter, in chapter 21, Jesus has had his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and now, over the course of chapter 22, going into chapter 23, we have these series of dialogues and confrontations and experiences of kind of complicated nuance between Jesus and these different leaders, but overarchingly, theme and the kind of takeaway here is that they're constantly playing these gotcha games with Jesus. Not dissimilar to what we're probably hearing if any of you have the energy or capacity to kind of follow the political situation right now. I certainly am struggling to have that level of engagement. But you will find more and more frequently today this kind of framing, very similar to what we have in this gospel, where questions are posed or asked of politicians with this intentional entrapment. There's not a clear right answer. The idea is, I can ask you something, and no matter how you reply to it, I can spin it in some sort of negative way. And that's precisely what's happening here.

If Jesus, on the one hand, had said, well, of course you should pay taxes to the emperor without any kind of ambiguity, that would have set him in opposition to the majority of the Jewish community in Jerusalem who felt the burden and the oppression of this tax structure. And they knew that. They knew, ah, if you reply this way, we'll be able to pit you against all of these people who seemingly have some kind of regard and respect for you.

But on the other hand, if he had said, well, clearly you should oppose this tax structure. It's oppressive. It's causing us harm. It's not liberating us to live our lives in peaceable ways. They could say, ah, see, you're opposing the state. You are in opposition to the emperor. You're a rabble rouser, and we can get you in trouble with the authorities. They thought they had him perfectly positioned in order to spend this negatively. But as so often is the case, Jesus replies in a way that completely throws them off guard and disorients them where they're left essentially speechless and in wonder of his adeptness.

But I want to back up for a moment and really start in a different location, that little preface aside. I speak a lot about my family from Texas, my dad's side of the family, and how meaningful and kind of influential their experience has been on my life. But I was equally shaped and formed by my mom's family, and especially thinking about my maternal grandfather. He was born on a mountaintop called Petit Jean Mountain. If you read it, it's actually pronounced, or it's spelled more like Petit Jean in the French, but in the patois of Arkansans, it's Petit Jean.

He grew up in a tiny little town called Saugahatchee, Arkansas. It almost looks Welsh with all the weird combinations of consonants and vowels in it. But he told me one time, the year that I was studying abroad in China, the year actually that Julie and I met in Shanghai, we were talking over Skype, the kind of predecessor to Zoom. And he said, when I was growing up, Little Rock, just a mere 50, 60 miles from Saugahatchee, Little Rock was the other side of the world. We could not even conceive of what big city life looked like for those in Little Rock. That was just so far beyond our reach, so far beyond our scope of life, that it was a completely different planet, a completely different world. And now here you, my grandson, are 70 years later, 75 years later, literally living on the other side of the world.

That parochialism, that sort of closed system of awareness was radically expanded for him in the course of his life. That he had so much more robust and bigger of a picture of what the world looks like in its fullness. And I was thinking about that this week. Because in my own life experience, in my own Christian background, so often, teachings like this one today, which I suspect some of us have some familiarity with, it's a very famous passage, a very famous interaction Jesus has with the pharisaical and Herodian authorities here. It has often a provincialism for us. We think about it in the limited scope of our own U.S. American experience. You know, I remember in the tradition I grew up in these kind of snide remarks about the oppressiveness of the tax system that we live in in the United States. How we are forced to pay for things that are diametrically opposed to our Christian faith. How we live lives of oppression as Christians in this country, that we are not free to exercise our faith in a fullness and robustness.

And to some degree, I see that even in our current discourse. Sometimes folks kind of on the opposite end of the political spectrum today talk about the fascism of this administration, how we are experiencing this oppressive and constraining reality at the top of our country that do not let us exercise with freedom the principles that we have of caring for our refugee neighbors, caring for the marginalized. And friends, on both ends of that reality, the kind of conservative experience of that that I grew up with, this more progressive lens that you hear maybe some more prominently today, I want to really push back on that for a moment because for all of our warts and faults as a country, we are far more secure, far more safe, far more better off than so many of our brothers and sisters in so many other parts of the world.

To truly understand the fulsome reality of this challenge that Jesus is confronting today, we have to get beyond our provincialism, beyond our own little sort of fascinations with U.S. tax systems, and think about what it really means to be within a political social system that is truly oppressive, that is truly resistant to the life and flourishing of Christians, of Christian communities, of people of good faith and honesty.

This past week, that was really brought to mind for me, because from Thursday evening until yesterday, I had the opportunity to spend a significant amount of time with Archbishop Hossam Naom, our Anglican Archbishop in Jerusalem. As I've shared before, I serve on the board of an organization called the American Friends of the Diocese of Jerusalem. And we had our biannual board meeting in D.C. these last several days. And Archbishop Hossam is an Israeli-Palestinian. You might hear that as a contradiction in terms, but it is not. He is Palestinian by ethnicity, Israeli by citizenship. And he knows intimately the reality of living in the in-betweenness of today's parable. What it means to participate in a political structure that is oppressive, that often subjugates his people, his family, his community in second-class citizenship statuses, if not even worse.

And yet, what does it mean to render to Caesar what is Caesar's? To nevertheless participate in the structures of governance, to be a part of a larger society seeking and desiring to make it better, transform it to something more compassionate, more holistic, more embracing of all. And to do that while simultaneously seeking the things of the kingdom, living in these transformed lives and transformed ways, even now in the midst of such great oppression.

When we turn on our nightly news every day, all we are confronted with is the depth of the struggle, the complexity and the tragedy and the challenge of life in that region. And yet in the midst of that, with an almost supernatural grace, he is able to offer a vision for not rejecting and outrightly opposing the fullness of the state, while simultaneously recognizing the places where it needs to be transformed and made anew. To render to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's.

And that is but one example. I think back to ten years ago during my time at Virginia Seminary in Alexandria. My classmate Vijayathan Daniel from Sri Lanka. My classmate Saw Nikamwe from Myanmar, Burma, depending on how you name it, what side of certain political realities you exist on. The great struggle and challenge that both of them faced and lived being Christians in inhospitable environments with the challenges and travails that that brings forth. And yet, nevertheless, to be a part of a larger political system, to find ways of being agents of change towards the good in those systems, rendering within those systems the things that belong to them, and holding fast to the things of God, to the things of true and lasting permanence in the kingdom.

It really begins to put into perspective the realities of our own context, the limited and incomplete ways that we so often try to maximize our own perspective, that we think we are the end-all be-all of these realities. And yet, when we really take seriously the fulsomeness of our human experience, we have a much grander, much more expansive vision for what God in Christ is calling out of us and calling us into.

But then again, provincialism is not all bad. And there is a question before us. What does it mean for us in our context to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's? What is the call to us in our experience that Jesus is pointing to in today's gospel passage?

We too have these same struggles, maybe in less dramatic, less intense ways, but we are not dissimilar from our first century friends in Jerusalem falling into these bifurcations, where we see either this issue of taxation and estate being a challenge, or in another regard, this lack of robustness in the church, that we don't feel like the church is doing what it should do, that there's an opposition there. We so often find ourselves concretely stepping in one camp or the other, and so very rarely living into the reality of these kind of ambiguous in-between spaces that seem so often the heart of Jesus's ministry and his own life, bringing together folks across all of these myriad places of division and boundary setting. Living into a reality that transforms and transcends those divisions and barriers of separation.

Here in Montgomery County, we can spend unlimited amounts of time grousing about our own taxation, grousing about the things that our local governance does or does not do. And then we just layer that on: the complaints we have about the way the state is handling things or the national system of governance is handling things. We get really excised about where our tax dollars are being spent and how we think things should be done in better and different ways.

And yet, if we come back to Jesus' point here, we are to look beyond those realities, to not break the bifurcation in a way of siding with one camp or the other, but instead to seek transformation beyond the noise, to break down the bifurcation, break down the division, offer the way of the kingdom in place of the way of the world, and to render to the world the things that are of the world, to participate in the things of this place, of this time, of this material circumstance that we find ourselves in as citizens of this country, of this state, of this community. And yet, even in the midst of that, to live ever more transformationally into the things of the kingdom that are not the impermanence of this place, but are the things of lasting substance and truth.

And we will be surprised when we do that, because the reality is the judgments, the places of limited view that we often live our lives with, that is an unavoidable reality for us, get upended, dislocated and transformed. And we see that. For those of you who have been participating in the Bible study, this won't come as a surprise. But we see that in our Old Testament lesson. Because Cyrus, named here at the very beginning of this passage from Isaiah, is a king on the outside. He is not of the people of the book. He is in many ways diametrically opposed to the Israelites and their lived experience.

And yet what does it say of God? The Lord has anointed him. Cyrus is the anointed of the Lord. This one who is the outsider, this one who is the opposer, is the anointed. And again and again, what does it say of Cyrus? But that he will be utilized to bring forth the kingdom. Even, as God says over and over again, you do not know me.

And so very often, when we see realities like that for us, it is very easy for us to simply write off and reject the one who we see as the other, the one who does not fit our expectation for what an anointed of the Lord looks like. And yet again and again when we seek the things of the kingdom, we are surprised by the places and ways in which the kingdom shows up.

And so as we move forward, practically, in the fraught and fitful ways that we do, seeking the kingdom but rendering to the world the things of the world, I pray that we will have ever greater clarity about how to thread that needle, but also that we will be surprised and enlivened by the places where God shows up and in the people God shows up within, showing us a path forward, navigating the complexities and challenges we always and forever confront, but in a way that brings us to the things of the kingdom while we still participate and work through the things of this world.

And in a final sense, may that journey bring us ever more fully in every moment of every age of our life into the greater completeness, joy, and fullness of the kingdom of God.

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

Amen.