January 25, 2026

Friends, as I read our lessons for this week, I was taken back in my mind to some degree to my years of training in seminary. And when you think about it—and I suspect some of you maybe have had similar circumstances—it's inevitable when you put a whole bunch of people together who have a very narrow focus in their life's work, that the intricacies or the small minutia of debate and division within that scope becomes even more pronounced, more present in the midst of your community.

The seminary I attended, Virginia Theological Seminary, is in Alexandria, and it was founded in 1823. It was actually founded at a time in the history of the Episcopal Church in the United States when there was real concern about the theological direction that we were taking as a denomination. There had been an effort to establish a training facility for clergy at the College of William and Mary down in Williamsburg, Virginia, but a group of Episcopal men in the sort of DC region became very concerned about the influence of deism.

Deism is the kind of theological position that God is the creator and the initiator of the world, but then sort of takes this hands-off approach where everything works as it is naturally inclined to do—the sort of image of the watchmaker creating the watch and then letting it run of its own volition. They saw in that a real challenge to Orthodox Christianity, to the belief of a relational, loving, personal God who has a vested interest in our lives as human beings. And so they pushed against the effort to sustain the theological training facility at Williamsburg and eventually created Virginia Seminary in Alexandria.

But it was created in this tension between different ways of being Christians. It was created in this time and in this space where there were debates about what authentic Christianity entailed, and down through the generations, some of those debates continued to percolate or to manifest in different ways. At the time I was in seminary—and I think this to a degree is still some of our present reality—there were different divisions over what constituted sort of right and proper worship.

I had some evangelical classmates who were quite dismissive of our 1979 admonition in the new prayer book that we have Eucharist every Sunday. To them, the part of our Christian experience is the interpersonal, the convicting and transforming reality of God speaking to us, not through the sacraments, but through the experience of hearing the words of scripture and being transformed by those words and being renewed in the teaching and the preaching of the church. They were dismayed by the kind of broad shift towards the centrality of the service being the Eucharist.

Meanwhile, Anglo-Catholic classmates of mine felt like not only have we anchored ourselves now in the Eucharist, but we still have more work to do. We need to be mindful of the many ways that the saints and those who have gone before us are a lively part of our experience; that they remain alive within our prayer lives, that they are intercessors for us. And we need to embrace ever more fully the fullness of the Catholic gifts that are given to us in our tradition within Anglicanism.

You may hear me talking about these today and feel your eyes glass over. And rightfully so. These are very "in the weed" details of the sort of intricate divisions that you have when people spend way too much time reflecting and thinking about these things. And you might also think, in this present moment—and I think rightfully so—what does any of that have to do with who we are as the church and what we are on about as Christians?

I think St. Paul hits the nail on the head here in this passage from 1 Corinthians. Inevitably, when we as Christians get together, we start nitpicking at the finery. We start nitpicking at the stylistic choices, or we start focusing or obsessing over the details of who we are as a community. And we become insular. We become too focused on ourselves and our "rightness" or righteousness instead of focusing in every moment on the larger reality of Christ working within us.

We as Christians, as the church, are fundamentally the body of Christ. We are the bride of Christ. We are the conduit through which Christ manifests himself in the world and through which Christ works in the world. We participate in the work that God is unfolding because it is precisely our vocation. It is our reason for being to be the people of that gospel and good news in the world around us. And so often, we can get sidetracked from that reality and we can lose the focus of who we are and what we are on about.

So when we reorient ourselves, we then have that question: what does it mean to be the body of Christ? What is that ministry when we can lay aside our differences and be united? Well, I think our gospel lesson gives us some examples. Jesus moves at the very beginning of our gospel lesson today because of an example of state violence. The powers that be have taken John into captivity and have killed him. Jesus is acting in a moment of great upheaval, in a moment of great despair, of great anguish.

But he does not simply react to that. He is reacting in relationship, in transformation, and inaugurating his ministry and seeking out these men to follow him. He is moving forward with the work that he is on about. And there's a powerful element to the gospel narrative today—one that I think sometimes we read and simply gloss over—and that is the instantaneousness with which the disciples follow him. He calls them once and they leave everything to seek after his teaching.

How incredible that is. How many of us have done that? I dare say that there's probably a fairly small percentage of us who have experienced that kind of transition. So often in our lives, even when we have a powerful mountaintop experience—maybe a retreat or a service that revives our soul—it might last for a season. But inevitably, it seems again and again that our mind begins to wander. We begin to come back to those old patterns, those old habits. The "high" of that moment of transformation seems to wane.

But with the disciples, there's no indication that they ever give up. Peter profoundly says at one point, "Where else would we go? We've already given up everything to follow you." One of the greatest testimonies to that kind of reality that I've ever encountered is my friend Santino, who worked at my seminary. Santino comes from what is today modern South Sudan. He was one of the "Lost Boys" that you may remember from the news back in the 80s and early 90s. He came out of that region of violence and desolation that is Darfur.

Santino's life radically changed in one day when his village was attacked. He and some other boys ran into the bush and in that moment never turned back. They kept going for days until they reached a refugee camp, eventually making their way to Kenya, and finally to the United States. An instantaneous experience changed the entire course of his life.

You think about the upheaval, the devastation, the darkness of that moment. And yet, Santino so often expresses the gratitude that he has in his life for the blessing he's had to come to the United States, and for the gift of life that he continues to enjoy while he works to alleviate the pain and the struggle that his fellow countrymen continue to experience. He sees nothing but blessing in the transformation that trauma brought about in his own life.

I'm not trying to excuse away or minimize the pain, the sorrow, or the hurt that happens in traumatic experiences. Moments of violence and hatred in this world should be condemned and resisted. But even in the midst of violence, even in the midst of dark hours, new life—transformed life—is at hand. And that's what Jesus invites us into today.

The moment we find ourselves caught up in the minutia of debating which camp is right and which camp is wrong, losing the larger sight of the call to transformed living, then we have missed the mark. It is for us, always and forever, to be the conduits of that grace and that gospel good news. May we hear that invitation anew today. May we evermore show forth the light of transformed living and call every single one of us into that light of new life.

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

January 18, 2026

For my own mental health and well-being, I largely avoid social media these days. I've more or less extricated myself from the variety of different platforms I used to be entangled within. I have occasion every now and again to jump back on certain medias, like Facebook, where I have a group of clergy colleagues that I remain connected to. And so it was just yesterday that I was on and noticed that it was the 16th anniversary of Julie and I joining the Episcopal Church that we did in Arkansas, St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Conway, Arkansas.

As many of you have experienced or know in your own lives, you're able to join the Episcopal Church as an individual member of an individual congregation and then eventually in some form or fashion deepen that connectivity through reception as a confirmed Christian or to be confirmed yourself if you've never been confirmed before. But this was our initial foray into engaging with committing to that specific church and the larger Episcopal Anglican tradition as a whole. Almost from the beginning, a call narrative began to develop in my life. Because not having any family who had ever been in any significant way connected to the Episcopal Church, we were inundated with requests to explain ourselves. Why in the world are you joining the Episcopal Church? What is it that you are seeking or what have you found?

In sputtering and stilted ways, I began to sort of shape and form what it was, because in some sense the first and primary reason was that it was where we felt God calling us. Julie and I had been trying to find a church to join together as part of our budding relationship. And we had visited a Presbyterian congregation, a Baptist congregation, a couple of other places as well. But we stepped into that church that morning in the fall of 2009 and knew immediately that we were home. There was just something about the experience that clicked with us, something about that specific congregation, that specific community, and the way that they lived their lives that spoke to us.

Over the course of my journey into the discernment process, through the discernment process for ordination and on to seminary, that sense of call became more and more fundamental to the way in which I talk about my faith journey. As was observed in seminary and has played out over the course of my life, it almost inevitably is the first question I get asked when I meet someone new. Whether a dinner party or a cocktail hour, when someone finds out I'm a priest, they say, "Why?" But not only why; often I get, "Why did you choose that?" As if it were a choice, as if, like for many of us, it was simply a job that seemed attractive that I decided to pursue.

And I find that an instructive experience because so much of our society and world is shaped around this sense of our own volition—this sense that we guide and make our own decisions in life, that we have an autonomy about how we live our lives, that these things are choices that we make. So much of what we hear today is the importance of call. Going back to our Old Testament reading from Isaiah, we have this great sense that God has shaped and formed us from the beginning. Even before our birth, there is a knowledge of what is to come, how we are to live our lives, and the complexities of the issues we will confront—that God has gone before us in setting that path.

This was particularly important for the hearers of Isaiah. As Pastor Jobi of the South Indian congregation mentioned last night, they also had a reading from Isaiah. Isaiah is the Bible within the Bible because it is one of the longest books of the Bible, and it was also written in three different sections at three different times. It kind of, in many ways, experiences or communicates the arc of our entire faith journey just within the one book. And this section, this last section of Isaiah from which our reading comes today, is in the exilic period as the people of Israel are longing for, envisioning that return from Babylon, and the reestablishment of their identity and way of life in Jerusalem. Isaiah is showing them that path forward—that even in a time of dislocation and disconnection, they are fundamentally still being guided by the God who loves and cares for them. That there is still fundamentally a call on their lives.

It's interesting, too, to have heard Job preach yesterday, because as I was finalizing, shaping, and forming my comments for today, so much of what he preached overlapped with what we encounter in our scripture readings because he talked about the importance of building community. That was central to the text that they had before them last night. Pastor Jobi observed that when we are the church, God does not just gather us. The church is not just about being a people together. He said, "A community with Christ becomes the church, but a community without Christ becomes a club." And so many times we can fall into that trap of simply being a club of people who like each other, who like spending time with each other, but don't have a deeper sense of our call as a community of faith. He said God does not just gather us; He forms us and builds through us. When we are the church, we are shaped and formed to be participants with God in the work that God is doing in the world around us. There is a call on our lives.

The passage from John today is so valuable and rich in that imagery as well: the sense of what it means to be called, what it means to seek and to find. Bishops, both in the Anglican and Episcopal traditions and in the Roman Catholic traditions, often will find or establish a piece of Scripture that they use as kind of their guiding motto or their guiding principle of their episcopacy. One bishop, a deep friend and mentor of mine who is the current bishop of Pennsylvania, has used this section from John, "Come and see," as his guiding light for his ministry. That what we as a people of God are on about is the invitation into the realities that God is unfolding—the work of Christ in the world around us—and to invite people to come and witness that work that is being done in each and every location that the church exists around the world.

But what is that work? It's easy to say "come and see what we're doing," but what are we doing? The bishop that I came into the Episcopal Church under in Arkansas, I think, is instructive because his guiding motto, his piece of scripture which shaped and formed his episcopacy, was Micah 6:8: "He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God." When we are invited to come and see, we are invited to come and see the works of justice, the loving of kindness, the walking with humility.

Today we encounter this invitation into call, as both individual Christians here gathered today and the ways that God is speaking to us in our own senses of call, but also who we are as the larger community of faith. What it means for us to be a church with a call—a church with a call towards justice, kindness, and humility. Pastor Jobi said too last night, "In a world in crisis, we are the repairers of relationship." That what it means to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly is very often the work of deepening and enriching relationship. And that can often be at odds with the way the world works; it can often be a misunderstood reality.

Our life is not just shaped around Sunday morning worship, but also the prayer life of our morning and evening offices, the prayer life I'm sharing during our forum hours at 9 a.m. on Sunday mornings. And this morning's Old Testament lesson in the morning prayer office was from Genesis, where Noah is encountering his call: his call to preserve and abide in the midst of a chaotic and desperate time where the world has gone askew, where hatred and visceral reactions dominate the discourse, where love and charity and relationship have waned. There is a coming consequence of those problems, and Noah is being called to be the one who will preserve, the one who will endure, the one who will see through to the better day. Again and again throughout scripture, that sense of call is often the sense of call to see the light of the new day in the midst of dark and troubling times. That, too, is the context of the section of Isaiah that we have from our Old Testament lesson.

So friends, this morning, as we encounter anew our Lord's invitation to us to come and see, as we encounter anew the invitation to deepen and experience our own sense of call, I invite us to be diligent in discerning it, to prayerfully consider who we are as a people and what we are on about. What are the works of justice, kindness, and humility that we are committed to? Just a few weeks ago, at the very end of our Advent series, I offered a set of resources, and I invite you to look them up through the newsletter and finding the PowerPoint presentation that I've shared. Because in it, you will find all of these groups—from the hyperlocal in Damascus Health and the Up County Hub and even some of our engagement with King Commons, through to more regional, national, even international organizations—of which we are all a part, doing these works of justice, kindness, and mercy, all of that within a humble spirit.

Because as we, the church, live into this call, we are moved beyond ourselves back out into the world to help discern and address and respond to the many needs that the world has around us. That in coming to see what Christ is doing is also a coming to see how we can participate in it. To be people of good work and not just good relationship. That being community together is also being called in that community to do the work of restoring the breaches, repairing the relationships, and building up the kingdom around us. So friends, today, may we hear that call anew in our lives. May we encounter a renewed sense of call as a community. And may we forever walk forward, seeing the work of God ahead of us, and joining with Him in the work that we are being called to do in our own day. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen