November 30. 2025

This morning at the 8 a.m. Masses, Mark and I were preparing to start the service. We realized that the Gospel book had not been set for today, and I sort of offhandedly quipped to Mark, "We'll just flip back to page 1," and sure enough, our reading today was page 1 in the Gospel book.

Because here we are, friends, back at the first Sunday in Advent, year A in our three-year lectionary cycle. We begin in the axiom of the Benedictine tradition that I've talked about the last few weeks. Here we are beginning again this journey once more into a new year, into a new season, into a new moment of life in our faith, an opportunity to deeper reflection and discernment of where we find ourselves and what we find ourselves called to do.

This, not only in the Christian tradition, but I think throughout the course of human history, this experience of... the cold darkness of winter. Those of us who've lived in the northern hemisphere have this sense of thinness in this time of the year, this experience that things kind of move in different ways, that the experience of linear time is not so very concrete, especially for us in the church, where our seasons of life, the way in which we live liturgically, is not linear, but instead, this kind of experience of a coiled reality. There is certainly some linearness. We begin this Sunday with my fifth year among you. And yet we return again and again. It's this sense of cyclicalness, even as we experience movement and growth. But it's also a thin time in this sense of a connection with the past, an orientation towards the future, a sense of living, maybe sometimes tenuously, in the present moment.

As I mentioned last week, Julie, Anna, and I took our yearly trip to Long Island. And this year, Anna was old enough that we spent a couple of days in New York City. And when we got up Sunday evening, we were staying in New Jersey, we got ourselves settled in the hotel, and I went for a run along the Hudson. And as I was running along the river, I heard a train whistle off in the distance. And it was this immediate sense of familiarity. And it struck me. It struck me profoundly because New York was always that place of otherness growing up in the Midwest and so-called flyover country. It was the place where all the big attention gets drawn. It's the place where all the major newscasters, all the major programs that we would watch on the television were centered, either New York or L.A. But it was the locus of everything that society seemed to care about. And it was always a dream to get there, to experience it, to have this sense of awe in the presence of such an important part of our social fabric and identity. And now, to do that so regularly is a kind of disorienting experience.

But in the moment of running along the Hudson hearing that train whistle, I was brought back to the full arc of my life. I actually went and looked this up after thinking about it, and I've never lived more than a couple of miles from train tracks. For the vast majority of my life, that auditory sound of the trains passing through is just a fundamental part of my reality. Larry McMurtry has this beautiful reflection in his first book on his Thalia series of listening to the Katy Railroad fly across the high plains of West Texas and envisioning what life must be like for those passing by on their way to some big place, some big... some big experience that's not the lonesome, isolated reality of High Plains ranch life. And in that moment of experiencing that train whistle on the Hudson, I was brought back into a present moment of all of these layered experiences and emotions that I've had throughout my life, these senses of location and dislocation, the ways in which all of that kind of comes together in the present moment.

How in many ways I feel the privilege and blessing of standing on the shoulders of my ancestors who toiled to offer the opportunity I have. My grandfather who grew up in a boxcar in a train yard for some years in his early life. To now have the experience, the privilege of the experience that I have is such a remarkable gift. But in this moment, this moment of kind of dark cold winter, this moment of advent, in this beginning anew, all of that sort of seems to be brought into this experience of the eternal present.

I was struck in reading all of our readings for this Sunday, that there's every single tense offered in these readings. Some reflection on what has been, where we have been in the past, some reflection on where we are in this present moment, and some reflection of where we are headed in this future time. All of it brought together in this moment of engagement, this moment of departure, this moment of this first Sunday of Advent.

And so friends, today as we gather, as we hear our Lord's admonition to stay awake once more, I invite us also in that process of staying awake or maybe becoming awoken to the reality of our Lord's presence anew. I invite us to embrace this time of thinness, to spend opportunities as they come up to step back, to take a moment in the quietness of this time of life, of this season of life, to feel the presence of the past, the present, and the future in this immediacy of the present moment, to reflect on this season of waiting, even as we look reflexively back on the first incarnation. This dual reality of celebrating what has been done, but what will be done anew in the coming age.

To be a people, a people of prayerfulness, that hear and sense the presence of our Lord, in a time where things seem very uncertain and chaotic. An opportunity to find a new grounding, a new steadiness, a new sense of calm, even in the midst of so much chaos. Because when we take those moments, those opportunities, those spaces where things feel thin, and we feel the realities of all that has come before and the possibilities of all that may come ahead. In those moments, especially, I think there is an opportunity for closer and deeper communion with our God who is even now outworking the realities of his kingdom in this present age. Even now is in breaking anew through the work of the Holy Spirit, in our lives, and in the lives of all, in our community and around the world.

And I invite us in this season of expectant waiting, to embrace this opportunity to be people of quiet, determined, prayerful contemplation, that we may be ever drawn more fully into the heart of our God. Who has been, is now, and will ever be, as he comes present to us again, and as we await his coming and his second return, in the fullness of time, and then the bringing of all things to completion.

November 23, 2025

I have a secret sermon editing tool that I've never shared with you all before. And no, it is not ChatGPT or another soulless AI bot. It is, in fact, my barber, Joe, over in East Gaithersburg. Joe is in his early 30s, and he is a man that speaks to my soul, works hard to make ends meet for his family, to make things work, to care for his two young daughters. I showed up just the other day to get my haircut, and he was down on all fours putting in new track doors at his barber shop. And he immediately got up, dusted himself off, and said, come on, come on, and came right in and started cutting my hair. And like any good barber shop, Joe and I always attempt to fix and work out all the problems of the world for the hour or so that we spend together each month.

And so it is very frequently then that I bring to Joe whatever I'm working on for this upcoming Sunday. I work through the points of my sermon. And I know inevitably if I get that glassy eyed blank stare, that I've got to go back to the drawing board. It's just not working out. And he and I were talking on Friday about this reading. He's Roman Catholic, and so they too are celebrating Christ the King Sunday this week. And we were talking about what that means, what kingdomship means, and how we work all of that out.

I was telling him about a clergy retreat day that I'd just gone to the day before on Thursday with Brother James Dowd, who is an Anglican Benedictine. He's associated with Holy Trinity Monastery, which is in West Park, New York, just up the Hudson from New York City. In the last two or three years, he's actually been dispatched to, of all places, Omaha, Nebraska, to develop a new community of young contemplatives in the diocese of Nebraska. And he came to share with us how the Benedictine charism can help shape and inform where we are as a society today, what we often wrestle with as clergy as we encounter our experiences and realities that we are seeing in the parish.

And his gift to us, his fundamental point, was that what Christianity offers is hope in a time of despair. And interestingly, I didn't know this, he played etymologically with that term. Despair goes back to the Latin, desperare, meaning an absence of hope. To despair, to have desperation, to be desperate, any of those cognates of that term, all of that fundamentally means to lack hope. And he also reminded us that lacking hope is not simply this sense of woefulness, this struggle that we might have emotionally and internally. But that also works out in an acceptance of cynicism. An acceptance that the world is the way it is, that these things are not going to ever get any better, so let us just do the best we can. And he suggested that as the church, as the church shaped and informed specifically within the purview of his Benedictine charism, that what we have to offer in the good news, the gospel, is hope in the time of cynicism and despair.

The dichotomy I think that we see today is in St. Luke's gospel. The dichotomy of the two criminals. The one who has given in to cynicism: "Jesus if you can't do anything about your circumstance, how can I embrace anything that you're offering here? How does anything you say matter when you're in the same station of life as I am, in the same situation that I am in?" And the other criminal, in the exact same boat, who says, "but even if there's a chance that this is true, even if there's a chance that you say who you are, remember me when you come into your kingdom."

Brother James offered in the context of his retreat day, the three-fold charism of Benedictine spirituality: which are the centrality of contemplative life. You may have heard that term contemplative prayer, but he also talked about the act, the deep act of contemplative listening. The way in which we can cultivate a deeper, richer presence with each other. The charism of community that's central to Benedictine spirituality is being together and having a well-developed and deep sense of connectivity to each other. And then the ministry, the charism of hospitality. Contemplative living, and contemplative living shaped by community, the embrace of hospitality.

And so I brought all of that to Joe as I sat in that barber chair Friday morning, working through what that means. And we kept coming back to the observation that it's about relationship. You know, the whole arc of the biblical witness, the whole trajectory of our faith life, is about our relationship to God and God's relationship to us. It is the story of relationship. And when we embrace and live out our life as Christians, as people of faith, central to that is what it means for us to have right and proper relationships, not just with God, but with each other. It's what it means to be a kingdom people.

And I want to stick with that for just a moment, because I think that is the power of this Sunday. The reminder that whatever else happens in the world, wherever else we find ourselves in the world, we are first and foremost a people of the kingdom of God. A kingdom people.

Years ago, right after I had graduated from seminary, I was offered a full time position at the seminary I had attended. But I needed a Sunday church to serve in. And as you can well imagine, many churches these days are not well resourced enough to just add extra clergy on the side. And so, Bishop Marianne, in her support of me, put me in contact with a congregation further down in Montgomery County, a large, well-resourced, corporate-sized parish with several hundred people who attended every Sunday. And she said, I just think that they might have some opportunity to support an additional clergy person. So I called the rector up, and he and I began chatting. And I had heard through the grapevine that this parish was a little bit unique in the Diocese of Washington. And God bless Father Ed who did embrace me and accept me and I served there for some number of years. But I immediately put my foot in my mouth when we started talking because I said, "now this isn't a deal breaker for me, but I've heard that you all are the conservative parish."

And he said, "I'm stopping you right there. That's the language of the world. We are not a conservative parish. We are not a liberal parish. We do not identify ourselves according to these terms and frameworks that the political class or larger society use. We are a kingdom church. We are a kingdom people. And sometimes that means that we will be conservative on things that the world views as conservative. But that means that we're also going to be liberal sometimes on things that the world views as liberal. That we don't accept that dichotomy. That is not definitionally a way that we talk about ourselves or identify ourselves. We operate on the principles of our king. We live our lives as a people of a kingdom, not of this place." And to be fair, over my years of service there, there were times where I felt like that position, that balance, wasn't struck in just the way I would have struck it. But I was so appreciative. I was so very blessed by the fact that my very first call was to a church so oriented. Because in this place, in our larger region, it is so very, very easy to fall into the trap of defining ourselves by the markers of secular society. And yet we are reminded again today that ultimately who we are is a people of a kingdom not of this place.

And so going back to what it means to be a people of kingdom, and the sense of what it means for that to be in a deep way a question of relationship in this moment in time. What does it mean for us to really and truly live that out in the here and now? And what does it mean for that living out of the kingdom to be so centrally connected to relationship?

The very first line of our catechism asks, as humans, what are we by nature? And the answer is that we are told that we are part of God's creation, made in the image of God. We, every single one of us, every single human being that has ever walked the face of the earth, is part of God's creation, made in the image of God. And just as we were reminded two weeks ago, three weeks ago, when we had a baptism, in our baptismal covenant, we promise, with God's help, to respect the dignity of every human being. No matter who that other is. And sometimes, sometimes the most difficult other for us to respect is ourselves. Sometimes it is another. But to be a part of the kingdom, to truly be kingdom people, we have a duty, a responsibility to work on that respect. To deepen that sense of dignity.

And to acknowledge and be honest about the complexity of that reality. As we were talking around some of those dynamics, Joe shared with me a story about a client he had had just a few years ago. This client had come up to D.C. from the south, the borderlands in Texas, and his family had for generations lived on either side of the border. And that presented some challenges and some complexities for them in terms of how they lived their life as a cohesive family. They were often frustrated by the system that kept them apart across that landscape. And yet he said, about six or seven years ago, this client came in one day and he was telling me that his sister had just married a border patrol agent. And he said that was a really complicated and fraught situation. Because he said, my client told me, part of the family really struggles with this reality. And yet, my brother-in-law is providing a stable, good job for my sister. The work that he does gives a stable and solid foundation for my nieces and nephews. And even though this is a complex reality for our family, there is also a deep goodness in what he is able to do for them. And both of those realities are true at the same time. I think that is an example of what it means to hold kingdom relationships in a kingdom orientation. Life is messy and complex. But the door to restitution, redemption, and relationship is never shut. That is what the kingdom is all about.

I'm going to end with this. I was putting all of that together, figuring out how I was going to finish my sermon last night. And Anna and I came for the Saturday service of our CSI brothers and sisters. And interestingly, Christ the King Sunday is a uniquely Western Christian celebration. It's not celebrated in Eastern Christianity, or celebrated in the same way. And so for our CSI brothers and sisters, yesterday was just the final Sunday of the liturgical year, the final Sunday of ordinary time. However, every Sunday has a theme to it. And yesterday's theme was peace in the context of violence. And the prayer for the service yesterday, the Collect, was:

"God of peace. We thank you for your constant love and comfort. You brought peace on earth by sending your son, Jesus Christ, our Lord, who empowers us to love our enemies as you loved us in all our iniquities and weakness. strengthen us to forgive and be forgiven, even in the context of violence, and enable us to turn violence into peace through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever."

And if there was any point at all to celebrating Christ the King Sunday, it is this. What a remarkable serendipity for this prayer on just another Sunday for our Indian brothers and sisters to be the prayer that we receive today. Because to be a people of the kingdom is to be a people of peace. So may we, may we in celebrating Christ's kingship today, hear again that last petition. Enable us to turn violence into peace. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.