May 24, 2026

I've been a news junkie for most of my life, but with the advent of modern technology, I've gotten into this bad habit of flitting between one article and the next on my phone. I often read just the first couple of sentences, get distracted, and move on.

I almost gave up recently on an article whose headline had caught my eye. It was published by Scientific American, and it was about how artificial intelligence might help us solve some of mathematics’ greatest mysteries. The author, Joseph Howlett, is a PhD-trained particle physicist, and I almost threw in the towel in the second paragraph when the author acknowledged always feeling a step or two behind in understanding the subject being written about.

I thought, “Great. A PhD-trained physicist feels that way. I have no hope of understanding anything that comes after this.”

But I’m glad I stuck with it, because the heart of the article held a truism that I think has incredible importance for us today as we celebrate the descent of the Holy Spirit on this Feast of Pentecost.

Here’s the deal, as I understand it — and if any of you know more about this than I do, I’d love to talk after the service.

Apparently, identifying and understanding prime numbers continues to be a very big deal in mathematics. As a reminder for those of us trapped in our arts and humanities worlds: prime numbers are whole numbers greater than one that can only be evenly divided by themselves and one.

For millennia, humans have sought to understand where and when such numbers occur. Mathematicians work with a variety of conjectures and hypotheses that approximate prime numbers and their locations, and much of our modern world and technology relies on these conjectures and hypotheses being true.

But we don’t actually have proofs that they are true.

We have yet to completely unlock our understanding of prime numbers. In a manner of speaking, we take it as a matter of faith that they are where they are, and that the systems we build operate the way we think prime numbers operate.

Step back for a moment and think about that. The most concrete, material elements of the world we experience are realities fundamentally beyond our understanding — realities we can only relate to, in a sense, through faith and trust.

In this case, faith and trust in systems or frameworks of knowledge that help us navigate the complexity of the world.

I want to invite us to spend some time thinking about the nature of Spirit today.

We celebrate the descent of the Holy Spirit, yet there remains a kind of fuzziness around the nature of the Holy Spirit — what it is, how it operates in our lives, and how we are to live in relationship with it.

This is made even more complicated by the fact that there were many readings available for today’s service. I suspect this may be one of the Sundays with more liturgical options than almost any other.

Let’s walk through some of them, even the ones we didn’t hear today, because together they help flesh out how we might approach — even if not fully understand — the Spirit and its work in us and in the world.

At the most basic level, we have Acts 2: the narrative of the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. This is why we celebrate this Sunday as we do — remembering the descent of the Spirit and its ongoing presence through generations.

But the Spirit has always been present.

Jesus prepares the disciples for this moment in John 20, after the resurrection, as Jesus instructs them and prepares them for the Ascension. Even earlier, in John 7, Jesus says:

“Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.”

John tells us Jesus said this about the Spirit, which believers were later to receive.

So Jesus prepares the disciples for the unfolding presence of the Spirit, yet we also recognize that the Spirit has always been at work — co-present with God the Father and God the Son throughout history.

In our reading from Numbers, we see the Spirit active even among the wandering Israelites in the desert. The Spirit descends not only upon the gathered elders, but also upon others in the camp.

Moses does not reject this. Instead, Moses says, in effect: “Who am I to judge the work of the Spirit unfolding in this place?”

So what is the practical outworking of the Spirit for us today?

I want to begin with a caution.

The spiritual writer Norvene Vest observes that Christians, especially American Christians, can become trapped in forms of faith that either depersonalize God or reduce spirituality entirely to the self.

On one side, God becomes distant and impersonal, and faith becomes merely acts of charity or social improvement.

On the other side, faith becomes entirely individualized — about self-actualization and personal fulfillment.

Neither truly hits the mark.

Our faith is personal, grounded in relationship with a personal God. But God is also active and engaged in the world — empowering us toward justice, goodness, and righteousness through the Spirit.

One of the optional readings for today from 1 Corinthians reflects beautifully on this:

“There are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit… To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.”

Paul goes on to describe gifts of wisdom, knowledge, healing, prophecy, discernment, tongues, and interpretation.

The power of Pentecost is the activation of these gifts in us individually and collectively — how we together become the Body of Christ empowered by the Spirit.

Throughout Christian history, awkwardness around understanding the Spirit has often pushed people toward extremes: either over-individualizing spiritual experience or theologizing the Spirit into abstraction disconnected from lived life.

Yet the fullness of the Spirit is beyond complete understanding. It transforms us and empowers us to become the people God calls us to be.

Still, there are traps and pitfalls.

It can be difficult to distinguish between the Spirit of God and the spirit of the world — between truth and deception, life and destruction.

I think our relationship to science can help here.

The scientific method begins with hypotheses that are tested, observed, and refined. We see whether they bear fruit or lead toward destruction.

I think spiritual discernment works similarly.

Too often Christians cling so tightly to certainty that faith becomes rigid and controlling. But today we are invited into humility — into recognizing the power of the Spirit while remaining open to ongoing revelation and transformation.

Moses gives what I find to be one of the most powerful teachings in scripture on this subject. In Deuteronomy, Moses says:

“You may say to yourself, ‘How can we recognize a word that the Lord has not spoken?’”

And the answer is essentially this: if a prophet speaks and the thing does not prove true, then it is not from the Lord.

Do not be frightened by it.

Many Christians experience faith as anxiety-producing — as if everything must fit into rigid categories of saved or damned, insider or outsider.

But through the Spirit we are given another way.

We are invited to test what we hear, to prayerfully discern what bears good fruit. Not every path we pursue will prove life-giving. Sometimes we will realize we were wrong.

And when that happens, we can graciously let it go.

Not all hypotheses work out the way we expect.

But this process allows us to continue seeking the heart of God — to live embodied lives while remaining open to the Spirit’s ongoing work.

May we go forward today empowered by this Spirit, enlivened to do the work we are called to do.

May we have the humility to try, to follow as best we can, to embrace what is generative and life-giving, and to let go of what is not.

And through all of this, may we be drawn ever more deeply into the heart of God — into our own moment of Pentecost, our own experience of the Spirit descending upon our lives.

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

May 17, 2026 Blessing of the Vines

So I maybe ought not to tell this story, but I’m going to anyway. I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.

There we were, sitting in our hotel room in Albuquerque after a long day of visiting cultural sites and doing some shopping. I happened to glance over, and Julie was taking some tags off something she bought, otherwise doing something with her hands. I looked over, and there she was, grasping a pair of full-size scissors.

Now, Julie had flown out to Albuquerque with just a carry-on. Somewhat startled, I said, “Where did those come from?” And she said, “Well, after I had gotten through TSA and was at my gate, I felt something weird poking me in the back. I opened my bag to find this pair of scissors from work.” She had made it all the way through security with them hanging out right there in her backpack.

Now, I had brought a checked bag with me, so we had a plan for action for going home. But I tell you this story because when we went back to the Albuquerque airport to leave at the end of our trip, we dutifully went through TSA, and this time my bag was pulled off to the side for further inspection.

And what was in it? Some holy dirt that I was bringing home from El Santuario de Chimayó, one of the most important Christian pilgrimage sites in the United States. I’ll tell you more about that site in a minute.

Julie and I had a good laugh when the TSA agent kind of knowingly looked my way and said, “Do you have some holy dirt with you?” Apparently, a full pair of scissors can make their way through the security apparatus at a Washington airport, but in the small Albuquerque airport in New Mexico, a container of dirt warrants a very fulsome inspection of my luggage. They had to wipe it down with swabs, run it through their machines, and even get approval from higher-ups before I could pack everything back in and move on.

But I think there’s something really profound in this, too—that there’s something really dangerous in the power of this dirt, and in the power of what we believe it to be.

The story starts in a small community in southern Guatemala called Esquipulas, where there is a very famous 500-year-old crucifix called the Black Christ of Esquipulas. The tradition is that this crucifix was found buried in the ground, and not only is it venerated, but the clay soil around it—the soil from which it was dug—is considered to have miraculous healing properties.

Two thousand miles north of there, in the early 1800s, Don Bernardo Abeyta, a pious landowner in what is today New Mexico, established a small chapel in Chimayó dedicated to this miraculous dirt of Esquipulas. There, too, over the centuries, a sense has developed of tierra santa—holy earth—that people come to for nourishment, renewal, and healing.

There is power in that place and in what people seek there.

And why is this all so dangerous? If we remember back to our Ash Wednesday traditions or our burial liturgies, we are reminded that we are dust ourselves. But we are also made in the image of God. We are holy dirt—part of a whole, holy creation.

What we do with this knowledge—what we do when we gather at these special times to sanctify the earth, to bless it, to pray for it—upends one of the most foundational beliefs of the powers and principalities of this world.

To get our hands dirty, to feel the power of the earth around us and on us and in us, is to discover our smallness, to see our interconnectedness with all of creation.

The powers of this world are fixated on control and domination. That is the great temptation—to impose our will and believe we can control everything. This is true whether we hold power or feel marginalized. In either case, we can become anxious, frustrated, and driven by a desire to take control ourselves.

Now, don’t misunderstand me—acting in the face of injustice is critically important. But what practices like this do is remind us where that action comes from. The true power of our faith is in recognizing that we are not the ones in control. It is not our will, but God’s will working in us.

This connects to another tension in this moment. On Thursday, we celebrated the Feast of the Ascension, when Christ departed from the earth. One might expect this to be a moment of sorrow, but in Luke’s Gospel, the disciples respond with joy. They return to Jerusalem with gladness, continuing in worship and prayer.

Even in a time of waiting—before the coming of the Spirit—they are not consumed by anxiety. Instead, they celebrate. They center themselves in worship. They find joy even in uncertainty.

We, too, live in a long season of waiting. Since the earliest days of the Church, there has been an understanding that Christ’s return is not immediate. We journey in a world that is not always hospitable, living as people of faith in a kind of exile.

And yet, again and again, we are reminded that even in this journey, we can have joy. We can laugh in the face of systems that seek control and domination. We can see more clearly our place as part of a greater whole.

Sometimes that grounding happens in physical places—like the temple for the disciples, or like this church, St. Anne’s, for us. These are places of devotion and gathering. But our faith is larger than any one building. It extends into the fullness of the world around us.

We have opportunities like today—to be outside, to experience the goodness of creation. In all of this, we see God at work—not with ourselves at the center, but as part of something larger and more profound.

So this week, and in the weeks and months ahead, I invite you—as individuals and as a community—to practice that awareness. To physically touch the earth. To be present in creation. To remember that we are part of something greater.

In doing so, we discover both the glory and the danger of that truth. Simply recognizing ourselves as part of a larger whole is a powerful antidote to a world obsessed with control and power—forces that are not only insignificant in the long run but often harmful.

Today, we take that larger perspective. We reorient ourselves. We recommit to the soil of this land—to the earth that we inhabit and that forms us. We remember its holiness and its wholeness as part of all creation.

And we honor God in that, praying that God will continue to bless us and draw us more deeply into all that God is doing, now and always.

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