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