July 5, 2026

So, if you go down I-95 and you go through Northern Virginia, you deal with that absolutely atrocious stretch of road between Springfield and Fredericksburg. Once you get down south of Richmond, just on the other side of Petersburg, you can turn and take I-85 as it goes southwest into Dinwiddie County, Virginia. It's in the Piedmont region.

If you know anything about the geography of the Mid-Atlantic, we basically have three different regions. Right along the coast, you have the Tidewater—that kind of sandy, loose soil that goes all the way to the ocean. You have the region we live in here, the Piedmont—this kind of rocky, hilly, sloping region. And then you have the mountains—the Alleghenies on the far end and the Blue Ridge Appalachians here in the middle. This geography plays a vital and important role in the history of our church tradition as Episcopalians, and in the history of the earliest European settlement of our country.

Down in Dinwiddie County, when you get off the highway and take some back roads, you come across Sappony Church. Sappony Parish features a wood-framed church built between 1725 and 1726 that still stands to this day. Part of that is absolutely mind-blowing to me. It is the resting place of the Reverend Devereux Jarratt and his wife.

Reverend Devereux Jarratt was a prominent and important figure in the life of the Church of England in Virginia prior to the Revolution, and then in the years after the Revolution as we established our own identity as Episcopalians. Jarratt was a proponent and significant supporter of the First Great Awakening, and specifically the Methodist renewal within the Church of England that was being promulgated by John Wesley. He felt very strongly that this gave a vitality and a new energy to the church in Virginia, which by that point was recognized as a staid and rather solemn affair. It was the church of the powerful elite right on the coast. It was not only the church of the elite, but it was quite literally the political power center; the vestries of the churches would act as agents of the state within each of their parish boundaries. Jarratt broke through all of that with a sense of renewed life in the evangelical awakening, offered through the spirit of this new age of religious vitality.

But in 1784, things collapsed. Jarratt, for so long a strong, ardent supporter of Methodism, had promised all of his fellow Episcopalians that they had nothing to worry about. He had assured them that this vital and new way of experiencing God was not a threat to the church, but a deepening of its commitments and convictions. It was not there to undermine the power of the church, but instead to renew it and make it ever stronger for its mission and ministry in the world around it.

However, in 1784, John Wesley ordained a set of elders for the American context in the years immediately after the Revolution. In so doing, he created a fundamental rupture with the newly established Episcopal Church and created essentially a new denomination that would become Methodism in the United States. Jarratt, by that point an old man, essentially retired from his ministry. He kept moving forward, but he was so disheartened and devastated by this promise not kept—by the years that he had dedicated to showing the beauty and the vitality of this faith, only for it to seemingly have been ruptured.

I want to invite us this morning to spend a few minutes reflecting on that, because I think there are, in some ways, some parallels for us. What we experience in our service today—the language and the structure of this traditional form of our prayer book—has a staid and solemn character to it. It can feel like a cold, unapproachable faith that lacks vitality, a spirit of new life, and transformation.

I also think there's a connection this weekend with the observances we have around the 250th anniversary of our country. There is a sense in which this rupture is true for some of us, maybe even many of us, in the ways we are experiencing this moment in our life as citizens. The promises, the foundational beliefs, and the things that we held so vitally true about who we are and who we believed ourselves to be seemingly have been undermined, ruptured, and torn away.

We hear a beautiful passage from Jesus at the end of our reading from St. Matthew's Gospel today: "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls."

As I prepared for this service over the weekend, I couldn't help but think of that incredible poem etched on the side of the Statue of Liberty—Emma Lazarus's 1883 poem, The New Colossus—and its most famous second stanza:

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

This is the promise of what we claim to be: the promise of a place of respite, of new life, of transformed life, and of opportunity for goodness, joy, and safety. Yet, I suspect many of us in this moment wonder how true that is of us today. How accurate of a picture is that for who we claim to be as a people? So many people I know have wrestled with how, or even whether, to celebrate this weekend and how to mark this occasion, considering all of the difficulties, challenges, and pains that we are experiencing as a society and a nation today.

And yet, I think we have a forerunner in the example of Devereux Jarratt—one who, even during a great rupture in his life, nevertheless maintained fealty and commitment to the principles of his faith, to the principles of this way of living transformed lives in the spirit of new life in God. Though we were a sort of state apparatus in our historical context, we have a ministry now of truth-telling, of justice-seeking, and, as the Catechism says, of respecting the dignity of every human being and being ministers of that truth to a world so desperate to hear it.

I think in this moment, both as people of faith and as citizens of a country that has the best of ideals in its DNA, we have an invitation once more to recommit ourselves to those ideals. We need to be reminded of them anew. Even in this moment of darkness, we can rest in the assurance of better days ahead, while recognizing that Jesus routinely reminds us through his gospel ministry that we have a call and a mission to embrace and live out those principles. We are called not just to be the proclaimers of this good news, but to embody it in an enfleshed way—to be committed to these principles in our very lives.

Remarking on the 250th anniversary of our country a couple of days ago, the mayor of New York City said this: "What a privilege each of us has to live in a nation that every one of its inhabitants can shape. What a responsibility each of us possesses to prove ourselves worthy of all those who came before. What power each of us holds to bring America ever closer to the greatness so many have seen when they looked upon these shores—the greatness that for 250 years has been America."

By right, in his lived experience and the experience of his people, he has many valid reasons for looking askance at the promises we have made as a country to refugees and to others who have sought new life here. And yet, he doesn't take the tact of criticism. He doesn't take the tact of rejecting who we are as a country or abandoning it altogether. Instead, he invites us to embrace it anew—to embrace the best of who we can be, and to remind us that to embrace that call is to take up our own responsibility to make this country the best that we can make it.

Coming back again to the fundamental point that we are a people of faith—to take St. Paul's words, we are a people set apart. We, too, have a moment and an opportunity to remember our call to be transforming agents in the world around us, to proclaim the goodness and dignity of every human being, and to work for the justice and peace of every people and every place.

So this week, as we celebrate this Sunday, and as we reflect on who we are as a people celebrating the 250 years that we have gathered together under this flag and under this identity of being citizens of the United States of America, may we feel the whole of this call anew. May we champion the best of who we are and be the people of compassion, love, and grace that we most ideally can be and should be, now and always.

Amen

June 28, 2026

I don't know this for a fact, but I'd hazard to guess that this Sunday's lectionary readings may be some of the shortest readings of any of our lectionary readings in the whole of the three-year cycle. So it gave me some time to kind of ruminate on what we hear and sent my mind off in a variety of different pathways.

I was particularly thinking these last couple of weeks, and preparing for this Sunday, about what it means to follow or to be a follower. You know, back at the beginning of the year as I started talking about preparing for my marathon that I ran back in May, several people came up to me and they said, "What kind of training regimen are you following?" Just now, in the midst of the World Cup going on, so many people will ask, "Are you following the matches? Do you have a team that you follow? Are you following what is going on?" Or, you know, how many of us talk about following or not following, maybe, what's going on in the world around us—how overwhelming the negativity of the news can be, and we just want to shut it off and not pay attention.

So I was contemplating all these different ways of following, or what it means to be a follower, and thinking about all of the different definitions or ways we can conceive of that concept. When I deal with a difficult issue, normally what I do is I ask Anna about it, because if I need just a straightforward answer, usually she is able to provide one. So I asked her, I said, "What does it mean to be a follower?"

And she gave me three answers. She said: you do what the leader does, you say what the leader says, or you follow where the leader is going—you walk in a line behind the leader. Those are three really good answers, so I want to think about that in the context of the readings we have, but also where we have been in this journey over the last several weeks. What it means to do what Christ does, to say what Christ says, and to follow in his footsteps.

It's a good place and a good way of thinking about how we bring to a close what we've been reflecting on these last three Sundays as we've journeyed through chapter 10 of St. Matthew's Gospel. Because remember, this is a commissioning. It's not the Great Commission that we hear in chapter 28, the one that sends us out to all the world, to Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth. But it is nevertheless a commissioning. It is a sending out. And it is, when we kind of reflect on it as hearers in our own day and context, a commissioning into our immediate circumstances—the immediacy of the world we live in, to the communities in which we exist, our local people to whom we go.

Thinking about this commissioning, this localized sense, I think it connects, too, to what we hear in this section of St. Paul's epistle to the Romans in chapter 6. Because in reality, if we step back for a moment and let go of our hang-ups about language—and I don't want to dismiss those—but if we can kind of hear what St. Paul is saying and break through those barriers, we can appreciate, I think, that we all are enslaved in our own ways. We are enslaved to passions, and we all are unavoidably followers. We follow some regimen or routine in our lives. We follow some thought leaders and people that we listen to in terms of understanding the world around us. And so the ultimate question is not "Do we follow or not follow? Are we enslaved or not enslaved?" but "Who and what do we follow, and to whom or what are we enslaved?"

The simple answer to cut through everything is that we should always and forever follow and be enslaved to the things of God, the things of righteousness, as St. Paul talks about. Not the things of this world, the things of sin, of temporality, of impermanence, but the things of everlasting substance, the things of the kingdom.

But what does that mean? It's easy to say that, but how does that impact or frame our lived experience? I want to go back to Anna's answer about following, because I think those three answers can kind of give us a sense of what this means for our everyday lived experience.

So what does it mean for us to do what Christ does? Well, we heard one answer to this back three weeks ago when we entered chapter 10. In verse 8, Jesus is instructing his disciples as he's sending them out in this commissioning, and he says: "Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment. Take no gold or silver or copper in your belts." He's giving specific instructions to live in the way that he lived, to do the things that he did—that we, as his followers, as his disciples in this age, are empowered to do the things that he does.

We see that kind of manifested here at the end of chapter 10, too, this reflection of providing the material things of substance in this world, of giving that drink and glass of cool water. So often I think this is manifested in the way we see our mission and ministry as St. Anne's. We do the things that Christ did. We go out. We help those in need. We help to cure the sick, to lift up the brokenhearted, to feed the hungry, to raise up the poor. This has been the heart of our identity since our founding those 60 years ago.

But there's more to being a follower of Christ than just doing what Christ did. We also have to say the things that Christ said. We have a ministry, a proclamation, that we should be on about as well. And we get a glimpse of what this can look like in a section of scripture that we're actually going to miss entirely, because we end chapter 10 today and next week we actually pick up in the middle of chapter 11, beginning in verse 16. But the first 15 verses of chapter 11 are a story about John the Baptist sending his disciples to Jesus to kind of clarify who Jesus is, to make sure that they understand what he is doing and what his ministry and mission is.

And it says, beginning in verse 2, that when John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, to Jesus, "Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?" And Jesus answered these disciples of John, saying, "Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me."

When we say the things that Jesus says, not only do we proclaim the power of who Jesus is, but we proclaim the works done in his name. It's not that we just participate in those works, but we proclaim them. We lift up the places where justice is breaking through. In a context and in a world today mired in so much pessimism, when we say the things that Christ says, we show the power of the kingdom in this broken world. We point to the things of transformation that upend the things of brokenness. We show the things of righteousness in a world mired in the things of sin.

And then what does it mean for us to follow in Jesus' footsteps? I was trying to piece that final part of this together, even as late as last night. Anna and I came, as we so often do, to worship with our Church of South India brothers and sisters, and they had a visiting pastor, Reverend Sherwin Doss from Dallas. Their readings last night were from the Gospel of St. John, but it was this discourse on discipleship.

Reverend Doss told this apocryphal story from Tamil Nadu, where he is originally from. There is this story that in the middle of the 19th century, an English missionary arrives on the Indian subcontinent, all inflamed and vigorous for the proclamation of the gospel. He arrives in this rural village, goes up to a farmer out in the field, and says, "Sir, do you know Jesus Christ?" And the man responded to him, "No, sir, I do not know Jesus Christ. But if you go into the village and find the headmaster, he has a list of all the families in the community, and he can tell you where Jesus Christ lives. He will have his address."

I think so often we kind of actually have that mentality. We think about Jesus in this kind of settled and stayed historical period. He is a wisdom teacher of the first century, Second Temple period in Jerusalem. He was a man of good works, a man who transformed the broken systems of injustice in society. But we limit who Jesus is to that period—to a historical figure that we emulate, whose teachings we share. We don't think about him as the lived, present, real person who continues to walk; whose ancient footsteps we do not follow, but whose present-day footsteps we follow, even as he is on about the work of transformation in this world at this very moment.

As Episcopalians, I think we often hear that kind of evangelical sensibility and are not quite sure what to do with it. We are not a people who are well-versed in the language of relationship, of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. But there's a power in that. There's a power in the proclamation that we have and in the personage of the real and present Christ who goes before us even now.

When we talk about what it means to follow in his footsteps, we talk about the lived presence of Christ in our lives, the places where we see him moving even in this moment, and the ways in which he is transforming our journeys—the paths we follow as he goes before us and works through us, and in us, and around us, turning the places of sin in this world into places of righteousness, turning the places of brokenness into places of new life, turning the places of injustice into places of justice and peace.

And so this morning, friends, as we bring to a close this season of reflection on commissioning, as we think about what it is that Jesus has taught us over the course of this chapter 10 in St. Matthew's Gospel, may we be renewed in our call to do what Christ does, to say what Christ says, and to follow in his footsteps. Because it is not one of those individually, but all of them together, that is the fullness of what it means to be a Christian, to live fully into our call as Christians, and to proclaim anew the goodness and glory of the God who is even now transforming the world around us.

To go into our context, to be the people of good news, of gospel, in our neighborhoods and to the people that we go, is to be a people of doing, of saying, and of following. May we be reminded and renewed in that commitment today and always.

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