October 11, 2026

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

Please be seated.

Earlier this past week, I read a fascinating article about affordable housing in Albuquerque, and it sort of started the gears turning. I'm working on a homily related to that, and actually related, of all things, to Route 66 and its 100th year anniversary, which is coming up on November 11th. The article related to affordable housing was also related to Route 66, and so I'm already kind of piecing all of that together.

But it also put me in mind of my grandfather, Ed Musser, who was born just three years later and grew up on the Mother Road in the Panhandle of Texas. He moved around some, though, and experienced life in all of its complexity and hardships in that landscape. I think about him every time I read Larry McMurtry's The Horseman Passed By. There's this image about three-fourths of the way through the book of 17-year-old Lonnie Bannon sitting on the porch of his farmstead out in the panhandle, watching a passenger train fly across those high plains, thinking about where all those folks must be going, what their lives could be like in the great economic and industrial centers of the coasts.

I think about my grandfather growing up in the circumstances and challenges that he did, seeing these folks pass by on Route 66, because he had a drive within himself. He graduated near or at the top of his class in high school, went on to Texas A&M University, joined what at the time was the Army Air Corps—which became the Air Force—flew during the Korean War conflict, got out, flew commercially, and really made a very profound and successful career, especially considering where he was from.

But the reality is, even though he was from the panhandle, from this circumstance of kind of being on the outside looking in, that was not of what he was made. He was from there, but not of there. My dad and his brothers, my uncles, talk about how he would often play on Saturdays the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcast out of New York City. And when I was a kid, he and my grandmother—who had retired back to the panhandle and were very minimal TV watchers, really having no use for television—nevertheless had a cable package so that he could watch WGN and keep up with all the news in Chicago, where they had lived for many years. He had this expansive view of the world, of what it meant to participate in the world, a complexity about the world that was so far beyond and kind of different from the circumstances and the background from which he came.

I want to suggest that being from some place but not of it—nesting that element of our lived experience—is a principal theme in today's Gospel lesson of being of the Kingdom, regardless of where we are from, what our backgrounds are, or how we identify ourselves in the world around us. But it's more profound than just being of something and not from it, or being of something even as you're from somewhere else. It's a call to transformed living—a reality that we do not often strike super well as Christians.

Let me just back up for a moment and talk about what we hear in this Gospel passage, because it's very easy for us to focus on the narrative of these outsiders, these who have been left behind, marginalized, who are on the fringes of society, being welcomed in to the great banquet feast—that they are given a place in the Kingdom. It's very sympathetic to other teachings we have of Jesus, where we hear that the last will be first, that those who are on the fringes and margins are actually the first and the primary keepers of the Kingdom of God.

But it's more than that, because we have this very sort of difficult and complicated part right at the very end of our reading today, where the king enters the great banquet feast. After all of these folks, this ragtag group of people from off the streets, have been invited in, there is still one who is in the clothes that he wore in off the street. I think we often have this gut reaction that it's no fault of this man's that he doesn't have the wedding garment. What assumption would he have had waking up that morning that he would have been called to this great banquet feast, this wedding feast for the king's son? And yet he is cast out for not being robed in the wedding garment.

The reality is, if we pay attention, everyone who has been invited into the feast is coming from the same man's circumstance. But everyone else seems to have been transformed. They have the new garment of new life that they are putting on themselves.

Since the 1960s, we in the Episcopal Church have often erred on the side of these—and I say this as someone who has a background in psychotherapy, as a trained psychotherapist—we've erred on the side of psychobabble: that the fullness of what it means to be human is this lived authenticity, this integration of self, all of these different measures by which we sort of experience the fullness of our life. To be sure, there's a prophetic edge to that. We have been a refuge for folks on the margins of society who have been told for one reason or another that who they are or what their lived experience is does not belong in the Kingdom of God. And we have been right to offer a place of welcome, a place of support for those communities.

But we offer that with the recognition that what we invite people into is a transformed life. That no matter who you are, no matter what circumstance you come from, you have a place here. But you have a place here in a way that transforms you, in a way that pulls you, that grows you, that makes you someone new in the light and life of Christ. This authenticity and integration element is not the totality of our faith journey. We are called to the wedding feast in the new garments of transformed living.

The great Anglican theologian and higher-life Keswickian preacher John Stott put it this way in his 1981 work called Culture and the Bible:

"Obedience is a precondition of understanding. We need to repent of the haughty way which we sometimes stand in judgment upon Scripture and must learn to sit humbly under the judgment instead. If we come to Scripture with our minds made up, expecting to hear from it only an echo of our own thoughts and never the thunderclap of God's thoughts, then indeed He will not speak to us and we shall only be confirmed in our own prejudices. We must allow the Word of God to confront us, to disturb our security, to undermine our complacency, and to overthrow patterns of thought and behavior."

To put on this new wedding garment is to be challenged, is to be stretched, is to grow ever more fully into the life that God has planned for us. This is not an easy journey. It often comes with real challenge and complexity that we should and will wrestle with in the full journey of our faith life.

Let me give you a very prescient and concrete example—one that I suspect almost every one of us will find uncomfortable at some level and in some way. This is one of the great dichotomies that we live with in our society in the United States. It relates to the Roman Catholic concept of a consistent life ethic.

Back in 1994, a research group polled different Christian groups, and they found that between Roman Catholics and Episcopalians, there was this sort of inverse reality. Roman Catholics, in 1994, opposed abortion at about a 65% level—65% of Roman Catholics opposed abortion—while close to 70% supported the death penalty. We in the Episcopal Church were almost exactly flipped: 65% of Episcopalians, or thereabouts, supported access to abortion, and about 70% opposed the death penalty.

For decades, the Episcopal Church has had a clear and unequivocal opposition to the death penalty, and one that I am proud of. It's just come to light in these last couple of weeks; it's been on full display in light of the tragedy of Krista Pike's botched execution in Tennessee and the now planned public execution of Nidal Hasan. We have been right, and the leaders and clergy in our denomination have been right, to call out the injustice and the immorality of these actions and behaviors.

And, to be fair, if you listen to the talking heads—and, frankly, many clergy and leaders in our own denomination—you might think that we have been equally clear and unequivocal in our support for abortion. In fact, I mentioned 1994 because that same year, we as a denomination passed a resolution at General Convention. There's an ending paragraph in that resolution that you hear quoted all the time:

"We believe that legislation concerning abortions will not address the root of the problem. We therefore express our deep conviction that any proposed legislation on the part of national or state governments regarding abortions must take special care to see that individual conscience is respected and that the responsibility of individuals to reach informed decisions in this matter is acknowledged and honored as the position of this church. And be it further resolved that this church expresses its unequivocal opposition to any legislative, executive, or judicial action on the part of local, state, or national governments that abridges the right of a woman to reach an informed decision about the termination of pregnancy or that would limit the access of a woman to safe means for acting on her decision."

And that seems rather straightforward and clear. However, when people quote that—presiding bishops, I'll be honest, and clergy—they almost always fail to read everything that comes before it. In the passages above that final paragraph, in this same resolution in 1994, we read:

"All human life is sacred from its inception until death. The church takes seriously its obligation to help form the consciences of its members concerning its sacredness. Human life, therefore, should be initiated only advisedly and in full accord with this understanding of the power to conceive and give birth which is bestowed by God. We regard all abortion as having a tragic dimension, calling for the concern and compassion of all the Christian community. While we acknowledge that in this country it is the legal right of every woman to have a medically safe abortion, as Christians, we believe strongly that if this right is exercised, it should be used only in extreme situations. We emphatically oppose abortion as a means of birth control, family planning, sex selection, or any reason of mere convenience. Whenever members of this church are consulted with regard to a problem of pregnancy, they are to explore with grave seriousness with the person or persons seeking advice and counsel alternatives to abortion, other positive courses of action, including but not limited to the following possibilities: the parents raising the child, another family member raising a child, or making the child available for adoption."

We are not good about this consistent life ethic. I suspect every single one of us finds something on one side or the other of this uncomfortable. Maybe we're folks that struggle with the concept of the death penalty, seeing the truly abhorrent and demonic actions of perpetrators of evil in this world, and what feels to be the right and just outcome of those actions—as the Old Testament teaches this "eye for an eye" concept—that these are deserved outcomes for those actions. And we wrestle with the reality of opposing the death penalty.

Or maybe we're those who have a clear conscience on the issue of the death penalty, but struggle with this mediation of individual liberty and moral clarity on the issue of abortion—that we don't want to deal with the nuance and the complexity of having a clear and stable moral position on the sacredness of life from conception till death.

But to live transformed lives, to be truly people of transformed living, we are called to that higher life, to that higher orientation of Kingdom justice, of Kingdom valuing. We are called to take on the garments of the new Kingdom, of the wedding feast of our Lord—to be people who don't just stay where we are, who don't live into the fullness of our authentic lives as an end-all, be-all of our faith journey, but who constantly and forever strive to live more fully into the lives that God is calling us to lead; to recognize that this is a lifelong journey of holiness, of developing and working on ourselves, ever more fully being present to the places that God is calling us into renewal and new life.

As it says in those final verses of our Philippians reading today:

"Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things."

And not only think about them, but embrace them. Make them present in your life. Call to account the places of shortcoming. Turn and repent and be transformed. Be invited into the wedding banquet. Take on the new robes of new life, and evermore seek after the fullness of the transformed life that God is calling us into, this time and always.

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