October 26, 2025

I had an opportunity this past week on Thursday evening and then all day Friday to spend time in deep discernment with a number of our aspirants to ordained ministry. About a year, year and a half ago, the bishop asked me to serve on what's called our Commission on Ministry, one of the elements of diocesan life, one of the commissions who journey with these folks as they discern their call either to ministry in the diaconate or ministry to the priesthood. Every two years we have a retreat with the aspirants for priesthood ministry for priestly ordination, where we gather with them. We spend time getting to know them, discerning with them this call that they feel on their lives.

We gathered at the Claggett Center. Now, if you haven't had a chance, I invite you to go up. It's kind of funny for me, at least, because for many of our fellow Episcopalians in the Diocese of Washington, it's quite the journey north, especially for our folks all the way down in Calvert, Charles, St. Mary's counties. But for us it's about a 20-minute drive, just up in Bucky's town.

Claggett is named for Bishop Thomas Claggett, the first bishop of Maryland, who spent his entire life on the coastal plain, along the Chesapeake, even some amount of time here, kind of in this Piedmont transitional zone. But he never went beyond the mountains. He lived his entire life kind of in this ethos. And I think it's kind of interesting that Claggett is where it is because you see those first rolling foothills of the Blue Ridge as you look across the fields and the spaces that you were provided at that retreat center.

I was thinking about that barrier that the mountains presented for so many in the early years of European settlement here in Maryland. And I was thinking about it in the context of this ordination journey and in the context of what we hear in our gospel lesson today from Jesus.

In the first case, as we talked to these aspirants, to a person, they highlighted at some point in their sharing with us the place of brokenness or the place of incompleteness that they encountered. They had some point at which they came to realize they could not do life on their own. They could not follow this call on their own. They could not deny any longer the things that Christ was inviting them into. There was fundamentally, at some level, a recognition that community, that support, that greater engagement with others was their path forward.

That might seem somewhat of a strange juxtaposition if we think about at least the narratives that we have been taught about that barrier of the Blue Ridge, of the Alleghenies. The great mythos we have around these early frontiersmen and women, Daniel Boone and his family, John Cressop here in Maryland, one of the earliest settlers in Cumberland. This idea that they left community, that they made it on their own. They struggled and found a path forward, that they had a resiliency within themselves that helped them to survive.

Just recently, I've learned that there's actually a growing body of scholarship that suggests for many of these folks, Cressip, Boone, others, who were crossing the mountains in the 1750s, they were in point encountering a landscape devoid of humans, but a landscape that was only recently devoid of humans. That in many instances, the tragedy of smallpox had impacted Native American communities that were quite numerous and quite present in a lot of those places just on the other sides of the mountains. But those communities had dwindled. People had relocated.

And so when Boone, when Cressip encountered these spaces, they saw an empty landscape, but one that nevertheless had remnants of cultivation that they didn't recognize as human impact. They saw it as some sort of divine engagement of God setting the place of goodness before them. And yet, in truth, they were able to flourish because of what had come before. Because of those who had tended and cultivated the landscape before them.

I want to really focus on that today, because I think so often in this particular parable, our takeaway can be that final statement of the author of the gospel, that Jesus looks upon these and says, "Those who exalt themselves will be humbled. And those who humble themselves will be exalted." We see it fundamentally as a matter of pridefulness, as a matter of arrogance.

But I want to focus us on where Jesus begins. In verse 9 we hear, he also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves. And I want us to focus on that today. Because I think our experience of arrogance, our experience of pridefulness, the pitfall that those things have for us in our society are often the pitfall of thinking we can go it alone. It is such a fundamental part of our national narrative: the pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality, the self-made man and woman, that we do not need to rely on anything or anyone beyond our own abilities.

That kind of makes sense when you think about what this Pharisee is doing, too. Because what is piety? What is devotion? Except that seeking or that openness to seeking that which is beyond you, larger than you, that which helps you enter into a greater and more meaningful whole.

And surface, fake piety. It's piety that thinks, "I just need to do this for the showmanship of it, to look good amongst my friends. I don't actually need these acts of contrition, these acts of prayerfulness, because at the end of the day, I can take care of myself. I can do everything that needs to be done."

I want to suggest, friends, that that kind of thinking, that kind of trap, is so very prevalent today, and is as prevalent today as it was for this community to which Jesus was speaking. We so often find ourselves enamored with our own echo chambers, with our own beliefs and our own capabilities. And the place of greatest growth, the place of greatest goodness, the place of most profound truth that we have on offer to us, is those spaces and places of community and connectivity and relationship.

There's so much doom and gloom today about the church, unfortunately. And some of you may well have seen this, heard it. It's not uncommon to have thought pieces written in popular media about the decline of the church. And even in point of fact, within the church itself, we can get wrapped up in this kind of individualism: What do we need to do to pull ourselves up? What do we need to be? How do we need to contort ourselves to make the most of the opportunities we have before us? Such a very easy trap to fall into.

And yet, our invitation today is to step back from that kind of thinking and to reorient ourselves, not around our own drives and motivations, but where we are finding community, how we are cultivating community, how we are resourcing the support and love of others to be most fully who we are being called to be.

In the study of mission in the church, there's a specific way of talking about this. For so many decades and frankly centuries in the Christian tradition, we have talked about the mission of the church. What are we doing to go to other people to get them to become Christians, to convert them to our denomination, to convince them of the rightness of our way of being in the world? And in the last 50 years, with the rise of post-colonial theology and other academic reflections on this subject, conversation has shifted to the question: What is the Missio Dei? That's your fancy word for the day. The Missio Dei: the mission of God. What is God doing? What is God on about? And how as a community in relationship to God, a God because of God's Trinitarian nature who is fundamentally community God's self, how are we participating in the work of that larger reality? The moment we get mired in those go it alone attitudes is the moment we lose sight of that greater call and truth that we should fundamentally be oriented towards.

The more we've lived into that, the more we've cultivated that sense of community, the more we've found our path forward. In the midst of all the doom and gloom thought pieces, we've now seen in the last year to 18 months a number of new observations: that especially on the other side of the pandemic, this incredibly isolating and individual experience of loneliness, folks are seeing the need, are desperate for the place of community again. And yes, the church is a part of that, spaces and places in society as well.

But we're reinvigorated in our sense and in our recognition that we cannot go it alone. And that whatever our great national narratives are about who we are, we're finally coming to that recognition that we are only who we are when we are fully together and fully supportive of one another.

And you may look at me today and say, "Father John, I cannot see that in the landscape of all the chaos currently surrounding us." And I hear that. I see the places where things are falling apart. But, but, I still see. I still hope for those green shoots of new life that even in incremental and kind of stagnated ways are beginning to bring forth that transformed and new way of being.

So friends, today I invite us to embrace the invitation into community, to be those people of deep humility like this tax collector, and to offer ourselves anew to the greater work of community that is before us. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.