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Last Epiphany Year C 2025: Exodus 34:29-35

When I was in college, I took a class called Human Rights in Theory and Practice . In that class, we had a discussion about where our rights come from. And the consensus in the class was essentially that they come from being human; they are intrinsic. I would add that they come from God. After class on the day of that discussion, I was talking about it with my stepdad, who taught civics. I posed the question to him and his response was “from the government”. When I pushed back with the answer my class had discerned, his reaction was, “well that’s nice, but who is enforcing it?” And I see his point. But I still think my class of potentially overly-idealistic undergrads was right. Just because a community is unable to act on the rights which are given by God does not mean that they don’t deserve those rights. There have been plenty of times throughout history when people’s knowledge that they should have the rights that their government is withholding from them call those whose rights ar...
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7 Epiphany Year C 2025: Luke 6:27-38

When I was working at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Arlington, VA, we held a children's chapel during the liturgy of the word every Sunday. One Sunday, we were talking with the kids about the call to love our enemies. The kids were struggling with the lesson because none of these K-3rd graders had enemies. Plus, their only exposure to an enemy was probably in a superhero cartoon, so of course none of them had an enemy like the Green Goblin. And so the kids had a really hard time understanding what it was to love an enemy because they couldn’t understand having an enemy. While adults understand that enemies occur in real life and usually don’t have masks and superpowers, we oftentimes have the same problems with this text as the kids in children’s chapel had. We wouldn’t identify people as enemies. Sure there are people that I don’t particularly like. There might even be people that I think are actively against me, but I don’t feel comfortable calling them enemies. It just feels li...
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6 Epiphany Year C 2025: Luke 6:17-26

When you begin seminary, there is a whole host of new vocabulary to learn. My friend Fr. Stephen calls them “Ten Dollar Seminary Words”. For example, if you want to get lunch, the place to go is not the “cafeteria” but instead the “refectory”. If you are writing a paper on some scripture, it isn’t a “section”, but rather a “pericope” - a word that you have to be careful with, because Microsoft Word will auto-correct it to “periscope”. And if you are in a Bible class and looking to talk about someone’s method of biblical interpretation, the Ten Dollar Seminary Word there is “hermeneutic” - a word I had to look up every time I encountered it for a while. It just wouldn’t stick, because I could not understand why we needed another word when “biblical interpretation method” was working just fine for me. There are four main schools of hermeneutics: literal, moral, allegorical, and anagogical. What is important to know is that any time you read scripture, you are approaching it with a hermen...
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5 Epiphany, Year C 2025: Luke 5:1-11

Elizabeth Ann Seton was born in New York City on August 28, 1774, and was raised as an Episcopalian. In 1795 she married William Seton, and their family came to include five children. In 1801, the family business went bankrupt. In 1803, her husband developed symptoms of tuberculosis, and they set sail for Italy in the hopes that the warm climate might cure his disease. The Italian authorities, fearing yellow fever, quarantined them in a cold stone hospital for the dying, resulting in William’s death. Elizabeth, now a young widow struggling to support five children with few resources, was befriended by Roman Catholics and, as a result, was drawn to the Catholic Church. Returning to New York with five children to support, she found herself alone and in financial straits. She turned to Catholic clergy for support and, in 1805, she formally became a member of the Catholic Church. In 1806, she met Father Louis Dubourg, who wanted to start a congregation of women religious, patterned after t...
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3 Epiphany, Year C 2025: Luke 4:14-21

When I was a seminarian, there were two times in those three years when I was applying for church jobs at the same time as my entire class of fellow seminarians. The first time was toward the end of my first year, when we were all “church shopping” for our field education sites. In this process, there’s one particular “bid day” where supervising clergy are to call and offer you their seminarian “job”. It’s meant to make it more fair - it helps keep positions from “filling up” because supervisors can’t just hire the first seminarian they interview, but it can make the waiting feel like it lasts forever. The second time was at the end of my last year, when everyone was applying for their first jobs out of seminary. These times are stressful for two reasons: first, it feels like all of your friends have now become your competitors. Although this is not entirely true since we all bring different gifts, perform liturgy differently, and will be better fits for different parishes, it still fe...
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2 Epiphany, Year C 2024: John 2:1-11

I love going to weddings. While it might be en vogue to complain about them, I’m on the positive end of the complaining spectrum. Even when the couple has made choices that I wouldn’t have made, or that I think they’ll cringe a little bit about some of those choices when they look back on the day in a few years, I always have a great time. There’s a special kind of optimism at weddings that permeates the space. It’s an opportunity to get together, get dressed up, and to celebrate a love that everyone at that event intends on being everlasting. And in the Episcopal marriage liturgy, everyone witnessing the marriage is asked, “Will all of you witnessing these promises do all in your power to uphold these two persons in their marriage?” to which the people respond, “we will”. Everyone in attendance makes a promise to be a community, a support system, for this newly formed family. And there’s something exciting about  that joy and optimism. Like a small child’s birthday party: an even...
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Baptism of Our Lord, Year C, 2025

Sitting on the desk in my office is a glass bottle of water. There’s a little bit of sediment on the bottom that you can see if you pick it up or just look at it from the right angle, but otherwise, it just looks like a bottle of water. But, as you might guess by virtue of my telling you about this bottle, it isn’t just ordinary water. My friend Mother Angela was on a trip to the Holy Land where she dipped that bottle into the Jordan River and brought it back to me in Colorado. The original intention of that water was to add a bit to baptismal waters every time there’s a baptism, thereby physically linking it to the River Jordan, where today we celebrate the occurrence of Christ’s baptism. Due to the spooky looking sediment in the bottle, I’m a bit hesitant to add it to water that will be poured onto people. Even without adding some of the Jordan River water to our baptismal water, you can still appreciate the symbolism. Long before people had a word for diffusion, it was a well unders...
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