October 11, 2026

Friends, I speak to you this morning in the name of God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Please be seated.

Earlier this past week, I read a fascinating article about affordable housing in Albuquerque, and it sort of started the gears turning. I'm working on a homily related to that, and actually related, of all things, to Route 66 and its 100th year anniversary, which is coming up on November 11th. The article related to affordable housing was also related to Route 66, and so I'm already kind of piecing all of that together.

But it also put me in mind of my grandfather, Ed Musser, who was born just three years later and grew up on the Mother Road in the Panhandle of Texas. He moved around some, though, and experienced life in all of its complexity and hardships in that landscape. I think about him every time I read Larry McMurtry's The Horseman Passed By. There's this image about three-fourths of the way through the book of 17-year-old Lonnie Bannon sitting on the porch of his farmstead out in the panhandle, watching a passenger train fly across those high plains, thinking about where all those folks must be going, what their lives could be like in the great economic and industrial centers of the coasts.

I think about my grandfather growing up in the circumstances and challenges that he did, seeing these folks pass by on Route 66, because he had a drive within himself. He graduated near or at the top of his class in high school, went on to Texas A&M University, joined what at the time was the Army Air Corps—which became the Air Force—flew during the Korean War conflict, got out, flew commercially, and really made a very profound and successful career, especially considering where he was from.

But the reality is, even though he was from the panhandle, from this circumstance of kind of being on the outside looking in, that was not of what he was made. He was from there, but not of there. My dad and his brothers, my uncles, talk about how he would often play on Saturdays the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcast out of New York City. And when I was a kid, he and my grandmother—who had retired back to the panhandle and were very minimal TV watchers, really having no use for television—nevertheless had a cable package so that he could watch WGN and keep up with all the news in Chicago, where they had lived for many years. He had this expansive view of the world, of what it meant to participate in the world, a complexity about the world that was so far beyond and kind of different from the circumstances and the background from which he came.

I want to suggest that being from some place but not of it—nesting that element of our lived experience—is a principal theme in today's Gospel lesson of being of the Kingdom, regardless of where we are from, what our backgrounds are, or how we identify ourselves in the world around us. But it's more profound than just being of something and not from it, or being of something even as you're from somewhere else. It's a call to transformed living—a reality that we do not often strike super well as Christians.

Let me just back up for a moment and talk about what we hear in this Gospel passage, because it's very easy for us to focus on the narrative of these outsiders, these who have been left behind, marginalized, who are on the fringes of society, being welcomed in to the great banquet feast—that they are given a place in the Kingdom. It's very sympathetic to other teachings we have of Jesus, where we hear that the last will be first, that those who are on the fringes and margins are actually the first and the primary keepers of the Kingdom of God.

But it's more than that, because we have this very sort of difficult and complicated part right at the very end of our reading today, where the king enters the great banquet feast. After all of these folks, this ragtag group of people from off the streets, have been invited in, there is still one who is in the clothes that he wore in off the street. I think we often have this gut reaction that it's no fault of this man's that he doesn't have the wedding garment. What assumption would he have had waking up that morning that he would have been called to this great banquet feast, this wedding feast for the king's son? And yet he is cast out for not being robed in the wedding garment.

The reality is, if we pay attention, everyone who has been invited into the feast is coming from the same man's circumstance. But everyone else seems to have been transformed. They have the new garment of new life that they are putting on themselves.

Since the 1960s, we in the Episcopal Church have often erred on the side of these—and I say this as someone who has a background in psychotherapy, as a trained psychotherapist—we've erred on the side of psychobabble: that the fullness of what it means to be human is this lived authenticity, this integration of self, all of these different measures by which we sort of experience the fullness of our life. To be sure, there's a prophetic edge to that. We have been a refuge for folks on the margins of society who have been told for one reason or another that who they are or what their lived experience is does not belong in the Kingdom of God. And we have been right to offer a place of welcome, a place of support for those communities.

But we offer that with the recognition that what we invite people into is a transformed life. That no matter who you are, no matter what circumstance you come from, you have a place here. But you have a place here in a way that transforms you, in a way that pulls you, that grows you, that makes you someone new in the light and life of Christ. This authenticity and integration element is not the totality of our faith journey. We are called to the wedding feast in the new garments of transformed living.

The great Anglican theologian and higher-life Keswickian preacher John Stott put it this way in his 1981 work called Culture and the Bible:

"Obedience is a precondition of understanding. We need to repent of the haughty way which we sometimes stand in judgment upon Scripture and must learn to sit humbly under the judgment instead. If we come to Scripture with our minds made up, expecting to hear from it only an echo of our own thoughts and never the thunderclap of God's thoughts, then indeed He will not speak to us and we shall only be confirmed in our own prejudices. We must allow the Word of God to confront us, to disturb our security, to undermine our complacency, and to overthrow patterns of thought and behavior."

To put on this new wedding garment is to be challenged, is to be stretched, is to grow ever more fully into the life that God has planned for us. This is not an easy journey. It often comes with real challenge and complexity that we should and will wrestle with in the full journey of our faith life.

Let me give you a very prescient and concrete example—one that I suspect almost every one of us will find uncomfortable at some level and in some way. This is one of the great dichotomies that we live with in our society in the United States. It relates to the Roman Catholic concept of a consistent life ethic.

Back in 1994, a research group polled different Christian groups, and they found that between Roman Catholics and Episcopalians, there was this sort of inverse reality. Roman Catholics, in 1994, opposed abortion at about a 65% level—65% of Roman Catholics opposed abortion—while close to 70% supported the death penalty. We in the Episcopal Church were almost exactly flipped: 65% of Episcopalians, or thereabouts, supported access to abortion, and about 70% opposed the death penalty.

For decades, the Episcopal Church has had a clear and unequivocal opposition to the death penalty, and one that I am proud of. It's just come to light in these last couple of weeks; it's been on full display in light of the tragedy of Krista Pike's botched execution in Tennessee and the now planned public execution of Nidal Hasan. We have been right, and the leaders and clergy in our denomination have been right, to call out the injustice and the immorality of these actions and behaviors.

And, to be fair, if you listen to the talking heads—and, frankly, many clergy and leaders in our own denomination—you might think that we have been equally clear and unequivocal in our support for abortion. In fact, I mentioned 1994 because that same year, we as a denomination passed a resolution at General Convention. There's an ending paragraph in that resolution that you hear quoted all the time:

"We believe that legislation concerning abortions will not address the root of the problem. We therefore express our deep conviction that any proposed legislation on the part of national or state governments regarding abortions must take special care to see that individual conscience is respected and that the responsibility of individuals to reach informed decisions in this matter is acknowledged and honored as the position of this church. And be it further resolved that this church expresses its unequivocal opposition to any legislative, executive, or judicial action on the part of local, state, or national governments that abridges the right of a woman to reach an informed decision about the termination of pregnancy or that would limit the access of a woman to safe means for acting on her decision."

And that seems rather straightforward and clear. However, when people quote that—presiding bishops, I'll be honest, and clergy—they almost always fail to read everything that comes before it. In the passages above that final paragraph, in this same resolution in 1994, we read:

"All human life is sacred from its inception until death. The church takes seriously its obligation to help form the consciences of its members concerning its sacredness. Human life, therefore, should be initiated only advisedly and in full accord with this understanding of the power to conceive and give birth which is bestowed by God. We regard all abortion as having a tragic dimension, calling for the concern and compassion of all the Christian community. While we acknowledge that in this country it is the legal right of every woman to have a medically safe abortion, as Christians, we believe strongly that if this right is exercised, it should be used only in extreme situations. We emphatically oppose abortion as a means of birth control, family planning, sex selection, or any reason of mere convenience. Whenever members of this church are consulted with regard to a problem of pregnancy, they are to explore with grave seriousness with the person or persons seeking advice and counsel alternatives to abortion, other positive courses of action, including but not limited to the following possibilities: the parents raising the child, another family member raising a child, or making the child available for adoption."

We are not good about this consistent life ethic. I suspect every single one of us finds something on one side or the other of this uncomfortable. Maybe we're folks that struggle with the concept of the death penalty, seeing the truly abhorrent and demonic actions of perpetrators of evil in this world, and what feels to be the right and just outcome of those actions—as the Old Testament teaches this "eye for an eye" concept—that these are deserved outcomes for those actions. And we wrestle with the reality of opposing the death penalty.

Or maybe we're those who have a clear conscience on the issue of the death penalty, but struggle with this mediation of individual liberty and moral clarity on the issue of abortion—that we don't want to deal with the nuance and the complexity of having a clear and stable moral position on the sacredness of life from conception till death.

But to live transformed lives, to be truly people of transformed living, we are called to that higher life, to that higher orientation of Kingdom justice, of Kingdom valuing. We are called to take on the garments of the new Kingdom, of the wedding feast of our Lord—to be people who don't just stay where we are, who don't live into the fullness of our authentic lives as an end-all, be-all of our faith journey, but who constantly and forever strive to live more fully into the lives that God is calling us to lead; to recognize that this is a lifelong journey of holiness, of developing and working on ourselves, ever more fully being present to the places that God is calling us into renewal and new life.

As it says in those final verses of our Philippians reading today:

"Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things."

And not only think about them, but embrace them. Make them present in your life. Call to account the places of shortcoming. Turn and repent and be transformed. Be invited into the wedding banquet. Take on the new robes of new life, and evermore seek after the fullness of the transformed life that God is calling us into, this time and always.

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

September 27, 2026

So I may be limiting myself a little bit here with this opening anecdote, but I don't know how many of you are familiar with Spotify, the music app that's on your phone or your tablet or other device, but it is one that is in regular rotation in our household. And at the end of every calendar year, Spotify produces this thing called a Wrapped, which is a kind of dissection of what you've played over the course of the year, and it gives you your top artist and your top genre and whatever else. Well, in the last five years since Anna's been born, Julie and I have seen our account go completely haywire. It just doesn't know what to make of our selections.

And one case in point there is that when we drive somewhere, we often have this practice of rotating our musical choices in the car so that each person gets a little sampling of things that they enjoy. And so it's not uncommon for us to bounce from, you know, like 1970s singer-songwriter selections of mine to 90s indie pop for Julie and then Baby Beluga or any number of other kids' songs that Anna selects. And so Spotify's logarithm at the end of the year is just completely confused by our selections and choices. But I've been thinking a lot about music this week because it actually, if we're paying close attention, plays a significant role in the quote-unquote readings we have, which they are readings, but I'll get to that in just a moment.

Looking back, music has essentially been a part of our human story since the very beginning. It looks as though we might have some proto-instruments made from bone as early as 40,000 years ago. And as long as we've had written and oral traditions, we have had a musical accompaniment to them. There's something kind of fundamental about music in the course of our lives, how it shapes and forms us, how it connects us to our own internal experience, but also the greater kind of universal experience of our human family and the way it connects us to each other.

And I bring that up today because if you pay close attention to our reading from Philippians, what we actually encounter for most of it is music. If you look, and we can tell this from the formatting, St. Paul begins in verse 1 through verse 5 with this kind of expository introduction. It's formatted in that way, right? It's block lettering, it's in a paragraph, it's all kind of nice and neatly, narratively portrayed. But then beginning in verse 6, the formatting of the text shifts. And it's actually in this kind of versical, lyrical format that runs all the way through the end of verse 11. And then we go back to this kind of expository narrative format in the block formatting with verse 12 through the end.

The Philippians epistle was written, as best as scholars can tell, in a five to seven-year period between the mid-50s to the early 60s AD, it was written somewhere in that time period. Not that it took five years to write, but it was written somewhere in that five to seven-year period during one of Paul's imprisonments. So this would have been about 20 to 30 years after Jesus was killed.

And what we have preserved here almost universally is agreed by scholars to be a hymn of the early church. This was a musical piece that was sung and recited by our earliest ancestors in the Christian faith. And through this text, through this music, we have some sense of who they believed Jesus to be. As St. Paul picks up in verse 6:

Who, though he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, assuming human likeness. And being found in appearance as a human, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore, God exalted him even more highly and gave him the name that is above every other name, so that at the name given to Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

And it's fascinating to me—this is one of my favorite passages in the whole of the New Testament—because it's not just that this is a preservation of an early song and liturgical element in our Christian tradition, but it's about what this communicates as to who early Christians believed Jesus to be.

You know, in this modern era, we get all sorts of perspectives and arguments for who these earliest ancestors in our faith thought Jesus was, who they believed him to be, what it meant for them to be Christians. And we have some folks that say he was simply a wisdom teacher to the earliest communities of faith, that basically what they were following were a set of sayings by this Jewish rabbi who walked among them those millennia ago. And that there's a skepticism about these affirmations of divinity, that this was some sort of later accretion, that we complicated the narrative of the faith as it became an imperial force under Constantine. But that just doesn't make sense, right?

We have here in this earliest hymn of the church that is preserved in our writings this very explicit connection to Christ's divinity, that God was made in human form and came among us. We also elsewhere hear St. Paul talk about the centrality and importance of the resurrection. Again, in our day and age, we have folks that make light of that, say it doesn't make sense in our kind of modern, scientific, materialist worldview. Therefore, this must have been something that was kind of added on as a superstitious myth later in the tradition. But St. Paul's very explicit: if the resurrection didn't happen, then what is the value of our faith? If there is not life after death, all of what we do is fundamentally meaningless.

So there's an importance, an importance in paying attention, not just to what we believe today, but its continuity with our earliest brothers and sisters. In this case, brothers and sisters on the very northern edge of the Aegean, far from Jerusalem, far from the land in which Jesus lived and walked, but even now, just 20 to 30 years after his death. This place thousands of miles away in northern Greece in this community of Philippi have come to understand the depth of what it means to have this Christian conviction.

But St. Paul is very careful here because it's not just about this right belief. To use the sort of technical term here, the orthodoxy, the people, the community of faith, have the right way of thinking about Jesus. And to be fair, this hymn is kind of rooted in orthodoxy, right? It's about what we affirm of Jesus, who we affirm him to be, what we understand the nature of his personage to be. But St. Paul doesn't leave us just with the hymn. He says, there's this turn. In as much as it's important to have kind of the right way of thinking and believing about God, it's also centrally important to have this right way of believing, or right way of acting, this right way of practicing and living in the world around us. This is the technical term orthopraxis.

And so often in our lived faith experience, we kind of teeter on the edge of that dichotomy. We sort of emphasize the doxy part of it, the right belief, or we emphasize the right practice, the right way of believing, but we often find it difficult to kind of navigate the two together.

And I think, in some ways, that music has some kind of innate ability to help us find that pathway between the two. You know, I talked before about being an avid sportsman—I run, I backpack, I do all sorts of different physical activities. And one of the things that you often hear people talk about is what music kind of keeps them going. What is it that activates them? What is it that helps them get the miles in on a run or get the weight accomplished in their strength training? So many of us may have background music we use to accomplish other tasks in our lives. My folks talked about using classical music to write their dissertations in the slog of completing their PhDs. There's just something about the nature of music that seems to help keep us doing the things that we need to do and keep us oriented in the ways that we need to go.

And I was thinking about that as I was reflecting on our gospel passage today. You'll notice we are yet again kind of bouncing along through St. Matthew's gospel, sort of jumping from one chapter to the next with all of this material that we lose in between. But if we sort of step out for a moment and look at the larger arc of what's happening in the lectionary cycle—what the editors have essentially chosen in this season of ordinary time in Year A—is to go from one parable to the next. So often each week, what we miss in between is the kind of narrative structure of what's happening in Jesus's ministry between the teaching of one parable to the next.

And I have my criticisms of that. I've shared that with you over the last few weeks. But I do think one value and benefit of doing that is that often the orthopraxis, the right way of living that Jesus teaches us, is communicated through these parables. So the constant connection, the thread in this bouncing around is the focus on how we are to be in the world around us. What it means to kind of have this right way of living in the world and living with each other.

So last week was about this important sense of equity, even when we have all sorts of our own value judgments and barriers to appreciating the worth of other people, we are reminded that it is ultimately God who values us, and it is ultimately God who rewards us for our intrinsic valuing, even when we have all sorts of judgments about each other in the world around us.

And today's lesson is fundamentally about showing up. And it's not exactly parallel to what we heard last week, because what we have in the structure of this parable is simply a task at hand, this labor in the vineyard, which one son promises to do and does not do. Another son says he will not do and does it. But what it fundamentally brought to mind for me was the way in which we show up for each other and respect to that for God. When we are not terribly inclined to do so, the number of times that we kind of begrudgingly take on tasks or favors or do work for someone that we're struggling to like or we're struggling to appreciate, someone for whom there's this kind of exhausting sense of toil—when we take on these invitations of support or labor or compassion.

We've talked repeatedly over these last several weeks about the incredible value of the work we are doing as a congregation with the Up County Hub, the incredible power of the work we're doing with our new food market, where we are now serving over 100 families every month. And yet, how often do we hear in the larger societal narratives these kind of oblique questionings of people who seek that assistance? Do they really need it? Are they gaming the system? How often are they getting support?

And yet, even in the midst of those kinds of errant judgment values, even if we have some of that own wrestling in our hearts and in our minds, we nevertheless show up. We do the work of kindness and compassion, even in the midst of that uncertainty, even in the midst of kind of fogginess and lack of clarity in the world around us.

And so today, as we encounter these readings, as we encounter the power of music, in some ways, to keep us oriented in the world around us, I want to bring us back to this kind of tightrope walk that we often lead. This navigation of right belief and right practice, reminding us and acknowledging that we often fall one side or the other and not quite hitting that nail on the head. But we are called to both. We are called to that hard work of living faithfully, believing faithfully, and in the fullness of both of those things, living the totality of the life that Jesus is calling us to.

And admittedly, I think sometimes there are ways to do that that don't seem so very straightforward. Like the power of music to kind of keep us oriented. We don't always understand or comprehend why it is that it moves us in just the way that it does. Or the multitude of musical selections that might impact us or hit us in just that way. You know, so often when I'm in a space listening to something that is not my preferred genre or style of music, I can kind of have this instinctive reaction to just tune it out and not pay attention to what's happening.

But if I'm honest, even something like Anna's selections sometimes move me in ways that I least expected. I mentioned at the beginning she's had this recent obsession with the movie Huntrix or K-Pop: Demon Hunters and the band in the animated movie Huntrix. And the music that they sing, this kind of K-pop style genre, is not at all my cup of tea. And yet there are some incredibly powerful and profound messages about showing up, about transformation, about new life on the other side of humility that are valuable and vital lessons for the world that we live in today. And there's something profound in what is being communicated. And if we can but hear that, it not only transforms us, renews us in our beliefs, but it can empower us ever more fully to live in the things of God that we are called to live into.

And so may we continue, through the guidance and power of the Spirit, to find that path of navigation in our lives today, being both people of good faith, of right faith, of proper faith, to be people of action, of right living, of compassion, of care, of showing up, even in those times that are hard to do, keeping the promises we've made or showing up even when we haven't agreed to do so, to see the need and to follow it through with a responsiveness of faith and of kindness.

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