June 14, 2026

This morning, before we begin, I want to offer just a further bit of scripture, as sometimes the pericope — the verses that are chosen for the lectionary — need to be expanded just slightly to give us a little bit more context. You all may remember that last week we were also in Matthew chapter 9, but this week we pick up in verse 35, missing about nine verses from where we ended last week and begin this week. And in those nine verses we have two healing narratives, with verse 33, right before we pick up today, with this statement: "And the crowds were amazed and said, never has anything like this been seen in Israel. But the Pharisees said, by the ruler of demons, he casts out demons."

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

Well, here I am, 1,055 miles later. And again, thank you so much for all of your prayers, though I will admit to you that I may have a bit of a thousand-yard stare for the next few days as I continue to recover from the journey. But I went to Arkansas and helped my parents pack up and begin that journey of movement from Conway, Arkansas, where they have lived for the last 22 years.

Conway is amongst a number of cities in the United States that advertises or identifies itself as the "city of colleges." And to be sure, there are a number of institutions of higher learning — a rather unique feature for the state of Arkansas and for the region in general. So it's a befitting name. But I think also, equally, Conway might be said to be the city of churches. Now, anecdotally, I couldn't pin this down precisely, but I was told at one point in the past — back maybe in the 80s or early 90s — Conway had more Christian churches per capita than any other city in the country. And I don't know if that's exactly true or not, but it certainly could be the case. One of the main drags through town has this section of about a quarter of a mile, if that, where literally side by side by side by side are five different churches, all of different denominations.

Also, it is a truism that when you get to Conway, one of the first questions you get asked is, "What church do you go to?" Not, "Do you go to church?" But, "What church do you go to?"

And these two realities might seem in some ways in tension with one another — the city of higher education and the city of faith. But those two things are not so entirely separate at this time of year. I suspect that this is one of the very few times in the calendar year where our societal ethos is almost paired precisely with the ethos that we encounter in our lectionary readings and this season of who we are in our church life.

This is a season of commencement and commission. When we look around, high schools and colleges and universities are wrapping up their academic years, students are preparing to graduate, and in that season of commencement — that sense of beginning — there is very often also a season of commissioning, a pairedness with that beginning of a new era, a beginning of a new journey. Because when you listen to commencement speakers, they almost always present a commission: with this new era of your life, with this new beginning that you are moving into, here's how you should live into that most fully.

And this is a season of commission for us in the church. If you remember just a few weeks ago, the Sunday before Pentecost, we celebrated the Ascension. And we celebrate it this year with that great passage from Matthew 28: "Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you." That language of the Great Commission — the singular commission that we often think about when we think about that term in our Christian life.

But the reality is that is not the only commission in the Bible. Over and over again, God commissions his people and Jesus commissions his followers. This is not exclusive to Matthew chapter 28. And so I want to invite us today to think about the commissionings, the commissions, that we encounter in our readings.

First, we have this passage from Exodus 19. And in verse 6, we hear, "You shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation." That is very much a way of commissioning — it is an identification of the Israelites with a mission. That's where "commission" comes from: with a missio, with a focus for their life and their work. Martin Luther took this language, especially in Exodus 19, as one of his primary bases for articulating the theology of a priesthood of all believers — that the call to be priestly, the call to be holy, is not exclusive to a certain group of people, a subset of Christians, but it is to apply to all the chosen people, to all who are of the fold. That we all have a call and responsibility to these priestly vocations of gospel proclamation, of holiness in life, of communicating the power of transformation that God is on about.

And then we have the commission that we encounter here in chapter 10. Quite honestly, this is maybe a little bit more awkward of a commissioning. And to be fair, in light of the Ascension, in light of Pentecost, the descent of the Holy Spirit, these two-plus millennia later, we take everything in Scripture all together and sort of see it as an integrated whole. But we have a commissioning here in Matthew chapter 10 that is one I think we often fail to think about. It is a commissioning that is much more localized, much more focused on the realities of relationships in our very context, in our very communities.

David Schmidt, a professor at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, puts it this way: "It is not that mission is in foreign, exotic places — or that mission in foreign and exotic places is wrong — but there is mission in the middle of our ordinary life. And I think that is what our Lord is doing. He is opening our eyes to see that mission begins in compassion, and he's opening our eyes to see that he has surrounded us with people ripe for the harvest."

So often, when we think about commission, we can kind of exclusively focus on this universalizing sense of Matthew 28. But we are simultaneously called to this mission of the local, to this mission of the people for whom we are engaged. And very often, at least in our context in the United States, this is a mission and a commissioning to people who are already Christian — people who are sort of similar to the context of Matthew chapter 10: people of the book, of the fold, of the faith.

And it can be very easy for us, in our kind of progressive, comfortable, not very confrontational lives, to not want to get into the messiness of theological debate and discourse, to avoid dealing with the complexities of differences that we might often encounter when we are in relationship with those who are already Christian but of a different persuasion — or to deal with the awkwardness of the differences that we might have denominationally, doctrinally.

And I have to admit, I find myself many times avoiding these same confrontations. Just this past week, the denomination I was raised in proclaimed a rather heavy-handed and conservative take on women's roles in society and in the church — a rejection of any kind of role of leadership that women can have in the church. And more often than not, my response has been one of saying, "That's not who I am anymore. That's not my community. It is not for me to speak into that situation. I am no longer a part of them." And I think Jesus is challenging me today — maybe challenging us — to not so rigidly hold those dichotomies, but to recognize that in our ministry and vocation, in this place, as this community of faith, with this particular charism and gift of faith that we have been bestowed, we do have a ministry, a proclamation, even to those who are like us, even to those who we may often avoid confronting.

And so I want to spend a few minutes today thinking about the nuancing of that, and the complexity of what it means to have this kind of localized call — this commissioning that may sometimes be to those who look most like us, instead of just to those who are different.

We are in the Gospel of Matthew for this liturgical year. And there is this profound passage in Matthew chapter 18 that we often equally avoid or sometimes just ignore outright — Matthew chapter 18, verses 15 through 17. Jesus is offering guidance for how we deal with discord, with those who have violated some kind of precept or covenant, those who have in some way sinned. And the beginning of that prescription is a private, one-on-one encounter. It is only as the one to whom we are addressing this admonition rejects that counsel that we escalate the issue to more and more public spheres.

So often today, in our kind of social media, frenetic, soundbite culture, we jump to the public condemnation first. We fail to do this deep work of relationality, this deep work of encounter in these one-on-one spaces. And so the first thing to think about when we think about this commission we have from Jesus today is to think about what that means relationally for us, one to another — how we are to cultivate these relationships as a part of our proclamation of the good news that we have been entrusted with.

And then, two, we have the reality of what it means to be these people of proclamation, and how it is that we move into this form of ministry — to live most fully into this sense of commissioning. This goes beyond the structures of what we hear in Matthew chapter 10, but is certainly connected to and informed by it.

In John chapter 4, we have another passage in which Jesus uses this language of harvest, where he sees those to whom the disciples are going as the people ready and prepared for transformation. In John chapter 4, verse 35, Jesus says, "I tell you, look around you and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. The reaper is already receiving the wages." And who is it in that example but the Samaritans?

Now, this seems to violate precisely what Jesus prescribes in Matthew chapter 10: "Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans." And yet that is precisely what he is doing here. And I want to suggest that even in the kind of confining parameters that Jesus sets up in chapter 10, when we begin to go to our community — to those who are more like us than not — even in following through that commission, our eyes are opened more fully to the expansiveness of who the people of God are.

To pull from St. Paul elsewhere in his epistle writings, even as we hear this admonition of restriction in chapter 10, what we know in the end result — taking the fullness of Scripture together — is that there is no such thing as a Gentile or a Jew. There is no division at the end of the day. And so for us to go to each other, for us to go to our brother and sister, is in a fulsome sense to go to all the world.

But as we hear in that beautiful passage from Acts chapter 1, to do that is to go to everyone — to Judea and Samaria. And sometimes today I think it is easier for us to think about the Samaritan, easier for us in our context to think about going to the one who is radically other, radically different. And the most difficult — the most difficult call — is to go to the one who is most like us, the one for whom it is very convenient to agree to disagree, to not get into the challenging weeds of these doctrinal divisions that we have.

And yet, in the fullness of our faith tradition, we have a powerful witness to the equality of all in the call to ministry — through the role and power that women can play in being proclaimers of the gospel, in being leaders and guiders of the faith; the role and witness that we have to play in raising up the dignity of every human being; the diversity of created order; the experience of those who have a variety of differences, whether they be on matters of human sexuality or disability or anything else — that we proclaim the goodness, the beauty, the holiness of all of life's expressions.

And we have a powerful witness in being able to offer that to those who are most different from us, and to those who are most like us. And when we go back to that passage that I began with — those last two verses preceding our reading today — we are reminded that this is not going to be an easy road. There are those we will encounter, those who are very much like us, who will be amazed, who will say that never have they heard anything like this, that it will be a fresh and new way for them to encounter the loving, compassionate God that they desperately seek. But we will also find church leaders, we will also find those in authority, who say, "Clearly this is demonic. What you are on about is demonic." And both of those realities occurring should not obscure or diminish the call we have to proclaim the gospel that we have been entrusted with.

And so, friends, today I invite us, as we move forward from this place, to embrace this commissioning that we have — to embrace this call to be a people of good news, a people of transformed life, in the ways that God has given us that ministry. To be those who minister to ones most like us and to ones most different from us, but to be open to all the spaces and places that God has given us as our fields, as our places of harvesting.

May we be nourished and renewed today in that commitment, and embrace that call now and in the time to come. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

June 7, 2026

What is in an identity?

Last week, I asked you all to think about why we are here, what ways we feel liberated and renewed in a sense of new life in this place. What draws us here within this community, within the fullness of our faith journey? What is it that enlivens our spirit?

Today, I want to probe that same theme a bit deeper and in a little bit different of a way. And I want to think about what it means to have identities, to embrace and live our faith in the midst of the many identities that we own and encompass in the course of our lives.

I want to start in a rather strange place with a thought about boundaries. For the first three years that Julie and I lived in the region, in the DMV as it is called, we lived in Alexandria. And I would have told you at that time, when we went back to Arkansas, when we traveled to other places, that we lived in D.C., right? It was the kind of catchall term that located people in a general sense to where we were. But that was a more true statement than I realized because the apartment complex we lived in, the Braddock Lee Apartments at the corner of Van Dorn and King Streets, if any of you know Alexandria, was literally a quarter of a mile, if that, from the historic boundary marker for the District of Columbia.

Because when the district was first laid out in the 1790s, it was a perfect diamond, encompassing parts of Maryland and parts of Virginia.

But, as with so many identities, there was kind of a darker edge to the D.C. identity. For all of its goodness—and I guess sometimes we don't think about D.C. as being particularly good—there's a lot to embrace about the culture and history of the place. It was the progenitor of go-go music. It's the creator of the half-smoke. It was actually the origin of the football huddle, of all things.

But in the 1840s and 1850s, there was a significant number of people within the district who were passionate about the cause of abolition. And that rubbed up against the reality that the East Coast's largest slave market was in Alexandria within the district boundaries.

So, the very white, very powerful people in charge at the time decided to ease those tensions, to resolve that dissidence by ceding the Virginia part of the district back to Virginia so that the district could move forward with its plan for abolition and Alexandria could continue to prosper off the backs of so many enslaved people and troubled, sorrowful people.

There's a darkness to the reality of why the district is what it is today. And as much as the identity that we might claim as people in this place, as people of this thriving metropolis with all of its great cultural opportunities, there's a part of that identity that is complicated and complex and troubled.

We lived in Alexandria because I went to school at Virginia Theological Seminary, often considered today the preeminent seminary in the whole of the Anglican Communion. And even when I was there in the early 2010s, there was a narrative that we conveniently ceased operations and kind of put on pause the seminary during the Civil War years because, in point of fact, our seminary facilities were commandeered by the Union Army to create a hospital complex.

But what isn't talked about, what wasn't acknowledged, is that the seminary did not cease operations. No. They just moved south and continued in exile in Richmond. Because the majority of the faculty and seminarians at the outset of the war were Southern sympathizers.

And so this place, this institution with a profound impact on the life and vitality of the Anglican Communion, has its dark and troubled history itself.

So many times these identities are complex and layered. And I bring all that up today because identity kind of plays a leading role in the Gospel passage we hear from St. Matthew.

This passage, especially this leader of the synagogue with his ailing daughter, is found in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. But interestingly, in this rendering, Matthew and Jesus are the only two people who are named explicitly. Everyone else is kind of a categorical identity. You have the disciples. You have the tax collectors, the sinners. You have the Pharisees. The leader of the synagogue, unnamed. You have his daughter. You have this other daughter who is this ailing woman, a woman troubled by years of hemorrhages.

None of these people are given the dignity of a given name. Now, in Mark and Luke, we are told that the leader's name is Jairus, but we don't have that in this rendering. They're all identified by their identities, their location in society.

But there's a larger reality too, because June, in many ways, is often a month about identities.

Just yesterday, we honored an identity that is very quickly disappearing: the 82nd anniversary of D-Day. And there are very few of those who served, who fought, who landed on those beaches in Normandy who are still with us. The last vestiges of that greatest generation that was so much a prominent part of our mid-century identity as an industrious, powerful nation in those post-war years.

And then, on June 28, 1969, a group of folks with an amalgam of marginalized identities within what would become known as the LGBTQ community got fed up, got exhausted by the constant oppression and constant vitriol thrown their way and rose up in the streets of New York City outside the Stonewall Inn and said they weren't going to take it anymore.

And that was a catalyst, a significant catalyst, for the LGBTQ rights movement that would take off through the 1980s and 1990s into the modern era. And it's been so much a part of the leading front of our denominational identity as we proclaim boldly that every human deserves dignity, that all are welcome, that we have a place of belonging for all within God's diversity of human creation.

And so how do we bring all of this together?

Well, I want to suggest a couple of things today. Very often in my journey with you all, I talk about the kingdom of God and about us being kingdom people. That we are, in that beautiful language of Hebrews, foreigners by faith. That we do not stake our claim here, but in the coming kingdom of God.

And that's an important thing for us to constantly remember and orient our lives around. But that reality should not and does not flatten our many worldly identities that we take on.

St. Paul, in his many epistles, reflects powerfully and meaningfully on his ability to do the work he's doing by virtue of his Roman citizenship. There's this worldly identity that supports and invigorates and brings together the work of his ministry.

We and our many worldly identities have a place to use them fully and wholesomely in the deeper and more robust proclamation of the Gospel that we are on about.

In 2007, an incredible documentary was released called For the Bible Tells Me So. And at least to my memory—and some of you may offer alternative experiences in your own life—it was one of the first major moments where there was some kind of national publication, in this form a documentary film, that showed how one can be both an out and proud LGBTQ person and a deeply faithful Christian.

Those two identities are not diametrically opposed to one another, but can have a fulsomeness, a wholeness to them.

And there are many ways in which we find that similar reality, where our identities—and sometimes they are messy identities, complex and troubled identities—nevertheless have a place of meaning and value and robustness to them that we should not obfuscate and cannot deny.

One of Julia's and my very close friends, as a young college student, served as a missionary within his evangelical denomination. I remember him reflecting on how one of the first cracks in his theological lens was going to the Philippines on a mission trip and realizing that this particular effort was in as much an effort to turn these isolated, remote Filipino communities into little vestiges of Southern U.S. culture as they were about proclaiming the Gospel of Christ, offering the transformed new life that is the reality of our faith.

And so often, as I talked about last week with the complicated and messy legacy of missional work within our faith, we have very often obfuscated or layered those identities in ways that are hurtful and harmful because we haven't been honest about what those identities are and how they integrate into our faith.

It is not an either-or, but it is an integrated whole. In being true and honest about who we are, we can be more fulsomely true and honest to the faith and the transformed life that God is calling us into.

And so, in reflecting on that, and as we journey through this particular season of Ordinary Time this year, my fifth year with you all, we're going to do something new: a kind of fulsome engagement of who we are as a people of faith within the Episcopal tradition.

For this season of Ordinary Time, we are going to utilize Eucharistic Prayer C.

And I have avoided it. I generally, to be completely transparent with you all, avoid it—not just here, but in my other previous calls as well—because there's a very troubling part to it in the preface that we hear at the very beginning of the Eucharistic prayer.

And yet, inasmuch as that's true, this is very much a part of our tradition. And it's a prayer that, for its faults, also has this incredible robustness about the cosmic implications of our faith. That this is not just a lived experience for who we are as a people on this human planet, but who we are in the universal created order, who we are in the location of the full cosmos, everything that God has created.

But at the very beginning of this Eucharistic prayer, one of the first lines we hear is:

"From the primal elements you have brought forth the human race, and blessed us with memory, reason, and skill. You have made us the rulers of creation; but we turned against you, and betrayed your trust; and we turned against one another."

Many of you, myself included, maybe have encountered this Eucharistic prayer for years, for decades, and this statement goes in one ear and out the other. But if we're careful in paying attention, the implicit suggestion in this stanza is that what makes us human is our memory, reason, and skill, and our ability to rule over creation.

And I hope that if you spend just a few seconds thinking about that, you'll immediately begin seeing some of the problems within that frame.

How many of us have had loved ones whose memory has been compromised? Who have what society would deem a compromised level of reasoning? Or through injury, or age, or bodily diversity, had a lack of what society would deem skill?

And yet we wouldn't for a moment say to anyone in any of those categories that they lack human dignity, lack human worth. And yet that seems to be the suggestion here.

And that is not to say anything of this kind of implicit suggestion of what has become known as dominion theology: that we, as humans, dominate, have dominion over the world as rulers of creation instead of companions and partners of creation, that we are a part of the whole of the created order.

And yet there is some redemptive quality in this prayer too. As I say, its cosmic elements, its universalizing lens, help really put the fullness of our experience in the fullness of God's created order. It helps us to see our location within the whole of reality.

And so, inasmuch as I really grate at and struggle with the language at the very beginning of this prayer, it has its redemptive elements too.

And isn't that a metaphor for the church as a whole?

Because in the language of the modern Roman Catholic Catechism, we are a pilgrimage experience. The church is not pure in its essence today. Even as we are the body of Christ, we are the broken body of Christ, which is journeying toward its ultimate unity and the ultimate reality of God's enfolding and developing work of salvation in the world around us.

And in that journeying, we still have places of shortcoming. Still have places where we don't quite hit the mark. Where we're compromised. Where we don't do as we should.

And yet even in that, again, we have places of redemption.

And I go back to where I began. Alexandria was one of the largest slave markets on the entirety of the East Coast. And the exact location of the slave market itself, the slave market stone, the auction block, sits underneath the altar of Meade Memorial Episcopal Church in Alexandria, a historic and prominent African American Episcopal church in the whole of the United States.

This thing, which was a dark and troubled reality, a place of pain, of death, of sorrow, has a redemptive and new life in the life of a community who preaches the transformed love of a transforming God.

And so today, friends, as we encounter this journey that we are setting out on in Ordinary Time, as we encounter our diversity of identities that we bring into the complexity of our life as individuals, as the community of St. Anne's, I invite us to be honest and to lift up and to celebrate the goodness of those diverse identities.

And as much as we continue to proclaim the ultimate reality of our location as a kingdom people, proclaiming the transformed kingdom of God that is coming and is now and enlivens us in those diversities, may we wholesomely and fully proclaim the joy and goodness of our God who speaks to each and every one of us and folds all of us in all of those diversities into the greater work of the coming kingdom.

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