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.