April 6, 2025 Sermon

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It is amazing what our souls and bodies can't remember when our minds are a thousand miles away. I love music, but I've recently been keeping my mind distracted by listening more to podcasts and other kinds of written materials, audiobooks, etc. However, this past Thursday night, late into the evening, I found myself restless and overwhelmed by the state of the world. My heart was particularly troubled and weighed down by the ongoing tragedy of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland father, who regardless of whatever past sins he committed, everyone agrees, was mistakenly sent to a prison in El Salvador and is now stuck in this Kafkaesque nightmare without a clear path forward.

But in this moment of overwhelm, something came over me, and I decided to listen to Steve Earle's 2002 album Jerusalem. The music, now 23 years old, incredibly still had this phenomenal prescience. The title track of the album Jerusalem begins, "I woke up this morning and none of the news was good. And death machines were rumbling across the ground where Jesus stood. And the man on my TV told me it had always been this way. And there was nothing anyone could do or say. I almost listened to him. Yeah, I almost lost my mind. Then I regained my senses again and looked into my heart to find. 1 That I believe that one fine day all the children of Abraham will lay down their swords forever in Jerusalem." 2 And I found, in that very moment, I found myself filled with tears.  As I said, it's amazing what our souls and bodies remember. As the clock struck midnight that Friday morning, I realized it was the birthday of my best friend Mark, who had tragically died six years ago at 33, and who himself was a fanatical music connoisseur. I'm convinced that he nudged me towards this 36-minute soul-soothing audio interlude. It was a moment of joy in the midst of so much darkness, a moment of quiet optimism, of quieting my brain and regaining my senses when I almost lost my mind. And that is at the heart of our final theme for this year's Lenten journey. Four weeks ago, we entered Lent with the theme of embracing quiet as an act of emptying. And we've developed that theme as we further reflected on quiet as listening, quiet as waiting, quiet as returning. And this Sunday, we embrace quiet as an act of rejoicing.

Our gospel passage from St. John today is an act of quiet rejoicing in the midst of so much darkness. The first-century Lent was filled with darkness. State oppression, violence, hatred, civil unrest. Jesus' earthly ministry highlights over and over again the overwhelming needs of this community. The physical, spiritual, and otherwise that constantly weighed people down. And it surrounded his lived context and experience. And yet, in the midst of so much work to be done, so much need that continued surrounding him, here he is, taking time to celebrate and to feast with his friends.

Now, Judas' criticism aside, because we know that he was corrupt, that he was abusing the common purse, that he had his own motivations. Jesus responds not by saying, don't criticize her because of your corrupt intentions. But instead, "You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me." That's a profound observation, an admonition for us to pay attention to. Because, in essence, what I hear Jesus saying today is that the needs of the world, the problems, the difficulties, the challenges are always going to be present until Christ comes again, until everything... and its ultimate solution is made right and worked out in the coming kingdom of our God, we're always going to have problems. We're always going to have difficulties and challenges. But we're always also going to have the opportunity to experience that brief reprieve, to celebrate. To find the joy in the world of darkness.  

In thinking about Mark, and remembering him, as I often do at the time of his birthday, and in July on the date of his death, I reach out to his mother. Send a brief note and check in with her. And I was telling her about this experience of listening to Steve Earle and how I felt Mark coming near me in that moment. And she said something super profound. We were talking about this together. She said, "Every act of kindness contributes to the collective justice movement." And so these moments of rejoicing are not necessarily incompatible or separated from the problems and the challenges of this world. But in fact, the moments of joy, the moments of kindness, the moments of compassion are in themselves acts and works of justice.

And I invite us today, as we enter this moment of quietness in our Lenten journey, let us be reminded that sometimes in quiet, what we find is an opportunity to rejoice. This was most powerfully brought before me and to my lived experience three years ago. When I was in the Holy Land in August of 2022, this was before October 7th, before the dramatic uptick in violence that we now see in the region. But it was still a period of time, as these last several decades have been, where violence was just a part and a way of life in that context. I was with my dear friend, Cannon Wadia, who you all may remember joined us via Zoom a couple of years ago. And there was a church, or is a church still, in Noblis, in the West Bank. Noblis is where Jacob's well is, where Jesus interacted with the Samaritan woman. And Noblis, on the day in question, the day I'm talking about, had seen a flare-up of violence, and there had been some amount of violence against the Israeli forces there. They had retaliated, and everything was very tense and on edge. People were being encouraged to stay inside their homes, to not be out in public, not to make any kind of big public display, and so Wadia had been wrestling with whether he should go and conduct the service that Sunday. The priest was out of town, and he was filling in. But he talked to the vestry of the parish, and they said, "No, we're going to be there. If you show up, we will come." And so Wadia and I made the decision to drive into the West Bank together from Jerusalem to kind of risk the tenuousness of the situation to go and lead the service. And we did that.

And after the service was over, we gathered with two young men in the community who were in the process of discerning a call to the priesthood. And we retired to a small little cafe. The owner himself, a Christian man in the community, opened up just for us. And we sat out on the terrace, had coffee and tea, and talked about all of the challenges around them and in that community. And a few minutes into our conversation, we started hearing pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. And of course, we got very tense for a moment, thinking that something had happened. Only to discover what we were hearing were not the sounds of gunfire, but the sounds of fireworks and little, you know, celebratory fireworks. Because there was a wedding and a wedding feast that was continuing to happen even in the midst of this very tense and fraught situation. This wedding group, this wedding feast, was not going to let the difficulties of the community and the world around them distract them from the opportunity to celebrate the gloriousness of the commitments that were being made and the gloriousness of the wedding feast that was about them. And I was reminded in that moment of how often people around the world who are in much more dire and difficult situations than we often confront here in the United States find opportunity to celebrate and be joyful even in the darkest of hours. That that act of rejoicing, that act of generosity and kindness, as Gretchen said, contributes to the collective justice movement, to the optimism of a better world ahead of us.

And I invite us again in this Sunday to take this opportunity of quiet reflection in this time of Lenten fasting and penitence, to see joy and to experience rejoicing. We will have the darkest days of our liturgical year just ahead of us in a little over a week. The darkest hours of our Christian journey in that long night of prayerful contemplation with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane after Maundy Thursday. The pain and the sorrow and the silence in darkness of Good Friday and Holy Saturday. But even now, even now in the midst of that darkness, we know that in a short 72 hours, there's an empty tomb, a resurrected life, a new and transformed reality that awaits. So may we take this opportunity to joy and rejoice in that joy, knowing that the pain, the sorrow, the darkness are not the end of the story. But may we also take that joy, take this moment of quiet rejoicing to recognize that in each and every moment of joy and rejoicing, we contribute to the coming kingdom, to the coming collective justice movement that moves ever so incrementally, sometimes so incrementally we don't even notice it, but moves that needle and that arc of God's reign, coming kingdom, and justice ever more slightly in the direction of the good and the whole and the things of true importance. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

March 30, 2025 Sermon

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I recently discovered one of my favorite little regional oddities, and it's up in Frederick County off of Maryland 194. Right before you get to New Midway Elementary School, there is a very permanent road with a very permanent road sign.

And this road is called Detour Road. What's even better is that in digging into this strange occurrence and strange road name, I discovered that Detour Road leads to, of all places, Detour, Maryland.

It will not surprise you to know that Detour, Maryland, population somewhere south of 2,000 folk, is still unincorporated and still out of the way of most of the world outside its borders. Detour was and is aptly named. At the beginning of last century, the Pennsylvania Railroad built south into Maryland. And for some reason, in their infinite wisdom doing the surveying work that they did, they determined that this little out-of-the-way place was the perfect location for a station stop.

Even though it existed decently far from any of its antebellum neighbors—Thurmont, Emmitsburg, Taneytown, etc.—it was from the get-go an honest detour, a diversion from the long-established and expected pathways.

I've been thinking about that image of a detour this week as we reflect on the great parable of the prodigal son and our Lenten theme of quiet as returning. As a priest, it is almost axiomatic that detour is part of my life. I remember my first week of seminary. We broke out into small groups and shared our call narratives with one another—that is, our story of how and when we experienced our call to ministry. And without fail, I think every one of us had some narrative of, "I had a call. I detoured and tried to do anything else, but it just wouldn't go away."

I suspect that many of us can relate to this experience of detour as diversion. Like the prodigal son, we get off track pursuing desires or drives of our own making that get us tied into knots and disoriented. Only then, like all good detours hopefully do, to eventually find us back pointed in the right direction and back on track.

Like the prodigal son, the Israelites in our passage from Joshua today experience an almost instantaneous reprieve, a sense of relief that they are at least headed toward the light again. The Israelites are not yet fully in their new life in the land of promise, but they’re at least out in the wilderness, and they’re able to enjoy the first fruits of their return.

Even before reaching his father's house, the prodigal son has this sense of relief. He has this sense that he is finally going back to something that is better. That even if he returns as a laborer in the field of his father's house, his life will be better than it is now.

It's like those times when you take a detour, and the signs and guideposts seem to be taking you further and further away from where you thought you were supposed to be heading. And yet, at some point, there's that moment—that landmark or some sort of indicator that pops up—and you think, "Ah, I know where I am again. I now see the path of return. I now know how to get back on track."

There’s a sense of immediate relief in all of this. If you remember back to the very beginning of this season, we had a call to a holy Lent on Ash Wednesday. In that call, we are exhorted in this season to be put in mind of the message of pardon and absolution set forth in the gospel of our Savior and the need which all Christians continually have to renew their repentance and faith.

The detours we find ourselves on are journeys back to repentance and faith, moments of quiet as emptying, quiet as listening, quiet as waiting. Now, in this fourth Sunday of Lent, it is quiet as returning—the beginning of the process of renewal and getting back on track.

This Sunday, Laetare Sunday, Rejoicing Sunday—the Sunday when we are back on that final stretch, the final few weeks of Lent—our detour is finally showing us signs and guideposts that are familiar, welcoming, and recognizable. Our journey is not over, but we see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I'm also, however, struck by detour as a destination in itself, as we find with Detour, Maryland. So often, we think about detours as the sideways, the indirect or alternative paths that we sometimes go down, where things sometimes go sideways, as it were, from which we return to the path that we were originally on.

But the root of detour is of Middle French origin, destourner, which does not just mean a temporary diversion but also a turning away—a reorientation into a new direction entirely. A detour that takes you in a different direction from the one in which you were headed, and possibly a direction that is new and different from the one in which you came.

I think about that sense of detour as we hear our epistle reading from 2 Corinthians, where St. Paul says, "If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation. Everything old has passed away. See, everything has become new." The detour is the new reality, the new beginning, the new way of life.

As is often observed, our Lenten disciplines are not just temporary acts of contrition or repentance, but they are an invitation into a new way of life. The hope, the aspiration, is that these practices we take on in this season will become our new normal. They will become the new way in which we live and move and have our being in God, and the way in which we communicate the gospel news of Christ’s coming among us to the world around us.

So this Sunday, as we focus on quiet as returning, as we consider the detours of life that we encounter—the ways in which we are brought back onto the pathway, or sometimes discovering a new pathway entirely, a new way of life, a new way of being—I invite us to embrace that return. To embrace the light at the end of the tunnel, to see the new path before us, the returned path, the love and light of God, which guides us into greater joy, greater love, and greater compassion.

And as we hear this invitation today, may we, like the prodigal son, like the Israelites, have a glimpse of that joy. This Sunday of reprieve, of rejoicing, may we rejoice too. Even as our journey continues, may we have that sense of elation that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

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