July 20, 2025

My friend Chris was someone I grew up with. We were very, very close friends. And he's one of those oldest friends that I even go back in my mind and can't really remember a time that I didn't know him. We grew up in the church together.

Through our childhood years in the high school, even though we lived in two separate communities, we continued to cultivate and have a deep and lasting relationship. One of the things that I remember most distinctly about Chris was my ability to be a kind of non-confrontational, non-anxious presence in his life. He had some developmental and behavioral difficulties that would sometimes make it really difficult to be a kind of functioning, positive presence. And the adults in the room would just get frustrated and not exactly know what to do.

And so often, I was able to just sit with him, to be that presence for him until he was able to kind of reorganize and reorder himself and come back in a more gentle and kind of approachable way. I learned later on in life when I started training to be a psychotherapist that there's a descriptor for this, called active listening skills, and I'm sure many of you in your own professional capacities have encountered this principle, that you're present. You're present in an engaged way, where you're paying attention, and you're responding to the other person, not obsessed, not fixated on what your reply is going to be or what your next thought is or how you might turn the conversation to something you want.

Now, admittedly, inasmuch as those are skills that I have cultivated professionally over the years, I still find myself often coming up short. I can't tell you the number of times that those active listening skills have been challenged when Anna has just one more thing she wants to say before brushing teeth, or before getting pajamas on, or before finally winding down for the end of the night. But it's still, in the back of my mind, that place, that wellspring of generosity, of compassion, of presence, that I know is ultimately the place of real nourishment and connectivity.

And today, we have one of the classic examples of this presented to us in our gospel passage, where Jesus is with Mary and Martha. And this passage is really striking if we understand the fuller cultural context as well. Mary is not just sitting at the feet of Jesus listening to him. But she's actively upending or avoiding what would have been culturally appropriate.

Hospitality is such a deeply rooted part of Levantine society to this day, to this day, that the first and primary impulse would have been to do, would have been to prepare, would have been to serve, to do all of the things that Martha is doing. And it's not a fault of hers that what she is caught up in is this place of service. It's what she would have naturally been inclined to do. And Jesus, in his responsiveness, upends the expected narrative.

But there's a more important, I think more fundamental piece of this too. Hospitality, kindness, compassion, generosity, those are all elements and hallmarks of a good, and loving society. But what is the end of those things? What is the purpose of them? And ultimately, it's the purpose of relationship, the deepening and strengthening of relationship, of caring for one another that we might be in fuller and closer fellowship with one another. The Westminster Shorter Catechism talks about our first and chief end as humanity being people who glorify and worship God so that we might enjoy God forever. But what is worship and glorification about if it's not ultimately about relationship?

And I think that's where Jesus is really drawing our focus and our attention today. It is about that commitment to relationship. And I dare say, even though in some ways we don't have the same cultural conditionality around hospitality, we very much resonate with this same impulse. We as Americans are a people of action. So much of our history is rooted in this impulse to do. You know, they talk in some ways. Historians of Christianity in the United States, even larger kind of cultural historians of our society, talk about the deep impact and influence that the so-called Protestant work ethic has had on the American psyche. This idea that we are only as valuable as our output, that we are only as meaningful as what we do. It's that same kind of impulse towards action that a context or a culture of hospitality has, but shaped and formed in a little bit different way. It's all at the end about our work, what work we have done, and what we can show forth with that work.

And all of that. All of that is being uprooted and reordered and challenged in today's readings. I love this section from Colossians that St. Paul offers us. Because when he talks about who Jesus is, there is this image that I have in my mind of the iconography of the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Because we have this beautiful descriptor of these attributes of Christ and who he is in the fullness of his being. And there's this tradition in Orthodoxy of the icons, the icons, these images. Being not static representations of things in the Bible, but windows. That's actually where this language of iconography comes from. Icons as windows into the reality of what you are seeing. And so quite literally as you sit before the icon, you are seeing the truth of the kingdom made real before you. You are seeing the lived experience of the church in the present moment. But that is drawn out, that is made real, that is made present by our ability to be present, to be quiet, to be attentive, to listen.

And so much of the time, we as a gathered community talk about action. So many times I stand here before you at this pulpit calling us to action. But all of that, all of that in some fundamental way is secondary to relationship. Because what is our action devoid of the purpose for which we do the action? What is our ministry if there's nothing more than hospitality and kindness behind it? Who are we as a people? And what is our offering of new life to the world beyond the activities we are involved in? What is it that we are giving in the fullness of our being to those around us?

And it is, I would offer today, the relationship that we are granted and a joy and given in the presence of our Lord, of our God, who shapes and forms and sends us out. Because it's not sufficient just to dwell on the worship, the relationship, the depth of presence, even as that may be the focus today. Because ultimately, if we take the fullness of Jesus' teachings, action must necessarily be a part. Our responsiveness must necessarily be a part. But it is an integrated whole with this element of relationship.

And so today as we encounter this great story of Mary and Martha, I think it's so very easy for us to bifurcate the two. To say that Mary was in the right and Martha was in the wrong. In a sense, that's what Jesus is suggesting. But if we take the larger narrative of the Gospels as a whole, of Jesus' earthly ministry as a whole, of even St. Paul's teachings to us as a whole, and the whole of Holy Scripture. What we learn is that it's not that Martha was right or wrong. It was that she wasn't being present to the moment that was before her. That her impulse towards action was not misplaced as it was so much just a misappropriation of that energy. At the time that it was needed.

And so for us, in this present moment, in a world where things seem so chaotic and frenetic. And our impulse is to do something. In that moment of chaos. To do anything. To act. There are times, like this present moment where we are simply called to be present, to be quiet, to listen, to worship, and to hear what our depth of relationship with Christ is bringing out of us.

One of my favorite poets who I've quoted many times before from this pulpit is the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. And I want to offer this as an ending for us today. Because the other side of this too is that that place of presence is not always confined to the places where we expect it. And as much as I want to sit here and tell you all how important it is to be here in this place for this community and this style and form of worship today. Sometimes that place of deepest relationship comes in the spaces and places which also are unexpected.

One of Heaney's most famous poems is called When All the Others Were Away at Mass.

"When all the others were away at mass, I was all hers and we peeled potatoes. They broke the silence, let fall one by one like solder weeping from the soldering iron. Cold comforts set between us, things to share. gleaming in a bucket of clean water. And again let fall little pleasant splashes from each other's work would bring us to our senses. So while the parish priest at her bedside went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying, and some were responding and some were crying, I remembered her head bent towards my head. Her breath and mine are fluent dipping knives, never closer the whole rest of our lives."

Relationship is found in many places and spaces. And even within our own community, we have those experiences of finding that depth of relationship here and in places far from here.

But I want to invite us this morning to be attentive to those spaces and places of relationship. To be attentive to the moments of quiet. Quiet and silent and present contemplation. Where we can hear and be more attentive to the presence of God in our midst. And maybe too, to be attentive and present to the places where we are being God for each other. Being Christ for each other. Being the people of deep and lasting love. The attentiveness that we hear in God's presence through others in our lives and the spaces and places where we might be that presence for others.

And it all led us in the depth of that moment, that presence, that sense of deep listening, find evermore the wellspring and love of our relationship with God. That we might eventually go back out and do and be the things for this world that we are called to be. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

July 13, 2025 Sermon

Eighteen years ago this summer, I went on my very first trip to China, which solidified for me my kind of growing interest and passion at that time in Asian studies and sent me on the course that would take me through the rest of my academic career as an undergrad and keep me engaged with Asian studies even up to the modern era or the present day as things have maybe shifted a little bit west and I'm focused more on the Middle East. But I've continued to kind of develop that passion and that interest. But I remember after coming back from that experience, I started studying Chinese language. And my first Chinese language professor in the States started talking one day about lawfulness. And we were kind of comparing how laws are experienced between the United States and China. And she said, you know, it's very interesting. In China, we have a law for everything, even every little tiny issue. And yet, we don't follow half of them. In the United States, you have fewer laws, but you seem to enforce them more regularly.

And I think about that, because I think so often in our reading today, and in many cases throughout the gospel tradition where Jesus talks about the law, we end up thinking in these kind of mechanical, material physical ways about lawfulness. What is the law? Are we following it? Even in the ways we talk about our own denominations, sometimes we get trapped in that kind of thinking. How often I have heard people talk about the Episcopal Church as being Catholic-lite. We just don't have as many rules, as many laws. You don't have to worry so much. But that kind of misses the point entirely of what Jesus is getting at in almost every instance he talks about the law. Because for Jesus, going all the way back to what we hear Moses communicating in Deuteronomy today, he is talking about something that is fundamentally a part of our being, inscribed on our hearts. Something that is very much a part of who we are, not just a set of rules or regulations that we are following.

And when I think about that, I think about another experience in my life. Eight years ago, I had the privilege of being a part of a grant project that was looking at how we engage Scripture as a resource for peacemaking around the world. There were four different groups that worked on this project together. I was part of a team from the United States, there was a team from Liberia, a team from Tanzania, and a team from the Middle East. And we were using a technique called scriptural reasoning. Usually scriptural reasoning is done in a kind of ecumenical context where you have people of Abrahamic faiths coming together, Jewish folks, Islamic folks, Christian folks, and you read a scripture passage together and you talk about what it means from each of your different traditions. For us, we were all Christians. But we were reading scripture together and recognizing the differences we saw cross-culturally in the same text.

And out of these four teams, we solidified or we came to all connect with one particular reading. And that is the other major reading about Samaria in the gospel tradition. And that's John chapter 4 where Jesus interacts with the Samaritan woman at the well. And it was fascinating because for each of our different contexts, we read the exact same story and saw or heard different things. For us in our American context, thinking about division, thinking about what was dividing the church, we found ourselves drawn to the woman's kind of complicated relationship status. This is the woman who had been married multiple times that Jesus talks to her about. And in our context at this time, so much of the division centered around matters of human sexuality, and we were drawn to the emphasis of Jesus offering transformed life in the midst of that discussion. For our Liberian colleagues, in a context where cultural tribal divisions had long been an issue, they saw the emphasis of Jesus as a Judean Jew interacting with this Samaritan and the cross-cultural dynamic there and the transformation there. For our friends from Tanzania, they saw that it was Jesus, a male, interacting with this woman, a female, in a very revolutionary, transformative encounter.

And then for our friends from the Middle East, they noticed something very interesting, that the text says Jesus had to go through Samaria, which they knew intimately from living in that context that that was absolutely not the case. Samaria was, like we hear in our reading today, the dangerous route. It was the route that was least traveled because it was the one most fraught with peril. You would either go to the east or the west to come north or south. You wouldn't go through Samaria. So for Jesus to have to go through Samaria says something unique.

And I bring all of that up today because I think this reading that we have, this parable of the Good Samaritan, is maybe one of the most frequent and common parables of Jesus that we think about and know as a Christian community. How often do we talk about this as an example of what we are supposed to do, how we are supposed to live our lives, who we are supposed to be as Christians in this world? And yet, how often do we actually step back and think about the fullness of the story? Think about what exactly is being communicated, what is being called out of us, how we might be challenged. Because often it is so very easy for us to just simply see ourselves as the Samaritans. If we are doing right by others, then we must be the people in the right ourselves. We must be doing a good work. But I think sometimes, maybe very often, no matter the good we are doing, and I don't want to discount it, it's good work, there's a blind spot, a place of coming up short, a community, a people, an opportunity that we neglect because it's just not on our radar. It's not the people or the place or the time that we expect to be needed. And so, even when we are very attuned to our own circumstances, there's often an opportunity for the outsider, the one who is seeing things differently, to help shape and form our perspective and perception anew.

And when I started thinking about that, thinking about where we can be challenged and kind of pulled in new ways today, I also thought about the reality of us experiencing this both as individual Christians where we locate ourselves in this narrative and story, but also who we are as a community. Where are we as a community of faith in this story? Not just how are we called as individual Christians to love our neighbors as ourselves, but what does it mean as a body to love our neighbors as ourselves? And when I started thinking about that and started kind of reframing what this means to follow the law, what it means to fully have the law inscribed on our hearts, I began to kind of see some creative opportunities for us to encounter this story anew.

One of them that I was captured by is the inn and the innkeeper. I think that's one of the most neglected parts of the entire narrative. We love to stand in judgment of the priest and the Levite, to laud and lift up the compassion of the Samaritan. And sometimes, I think, on many occasions, I've heard incredibly powerful sermons about being the one who has been set upon—the times of brokenness and pain and suffering that we've experienced in our own lives—and how those of good faith, of full faith, have shown up to be the people of compassion and love and care for us. But I don't think I've ever heard anyone reflect on the innkeeper and the ministry of the inn itself. Because it is ultimately this place of safety, this place of restoration, this place of care that brings the man fully back to health. And if we think about ourselves as a community of faith, as that place of relief, as that place of refuge, how are we challenged to be better and more full embracers of the law in this time?

And I began to think about the contours of that. And there are sort of two things that really struck me. One is the compassion shown. That we are a place of care and comfort for those wearied, dislocated and suffering in the world around us. That we can be a place of deep hospitality that helps to restore and renew. But also, there was an openness to the Samaritan. An openness to recognize the one bringing in the suffering soul. And I think that that's another layer of this that we can often neglect. Because we can be a people of compassion and care all the day long, but sometimes have those blinders on where the people we're offering compassion and care to are the people that are within our gaze. And how might we be alert and attuned to those bringing in ailing souls for us to support and care for and comfort? How might we be stretched and pulled in new ways to be newly compassionate to folks that may not be on our radar, may not be within our sight?

And that's not really something that we can kind of concretely, materially answer today. But I invite us, I invite us in this season of discernment around who we are as a community—this ongoing theme that I'm developing about what it means to be community and all of its diversity and multiplicity. Today I want to invite us to consider how we are, as a community, a place of restoration, respite, and care. How living as a community with the law inscribed on our hearts, we embrace anew this call to be a center and centering presence for restoration of health and experience of new life. And in doing that, we necessarily need to be open to the people that show up, the people that bring others to care, the people who stumble in the doors hurting and downtrodden that need their own experience of new life. To be stretched and pulled and humble enough to be open to the new realities that God is putting before us.

This is such a revolutionary text today, just like the encounter with the Samaritan woman, because the Samaritan would be the last person that they would expect to do the right thing. And yet it is that person who shows fully the embrace of God's call to love the neighbor as oneself. And so I invite you today to also discern and explore and reflect on where you see a connection in this story. Who is it that you most fully see in yourself? Who do you see us as a community being? And how might, wherever we locate ourselves in this story, how might we be dislocated so that we can be more fully present to the new ways that God is calling us to be the church in this present time? And how ultimately can we be ever more expansive in our view and embrace of the law? To be those people of faith, like Paul talks about in this beginning of his epistle to the Colossians, a people with such zeal and love that our powerful witness to the good news and transforming news of the gospel is front and center of everything we do. And may all of that ever more fully shape and form us in each and every moment of the day that we may go forth from this place renewed in our own spirit so that we may be that renewing force in the world around us. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen