State-of-the-Parish Address

Annual Parish Meeting Sunday
1 Corinthians 12:13-31a
Jan. 26, 2025

Welcome to annual-meeting Sunday and the state-of-the-parish address.  Of course, there are many ways to frame the state of our parish.  I’d encourage you to take home your copy of the annual report, which you can find in the entryway and on the tables downstairs.  

In terms of the temporal affairs of the church, God continues to bless us with good indicators.  Including both in-person and online worshipers, attendance was up 8 percent last year.  Because of your amazing generosity, giving was 1 percent over projection.  The endowment fund is greater than $3 million for the first time in decades.  I can’t tell you how grateful I am to God, and to you, for the incredible foundation for ministry you provide.

I’m going to focus this morning on the spiritual state of our parish.  As some of you will remember, just before the pandemic hit, we did a spiritual self-study called RenewalWorks, which documented something I think we already knew.  St. Andrew’s is a group of disciples who are much more comfortable following God by doing rather than being.  We’re passionate about serving people nearby and far away, which you’ll absolutely see in the annual report.  That’s all right and good, true to the heart of Jesus and the heart of this place.  And, it’s not the end of the story of our discipleship.

Over the past year, we’ve been pushing on this a bit, trying to build a pathway you can use to grow closer to God not just through service but through study, prayer, worship, and even (God forbid) rest.  We’ve been framing our spiritual journey as following the Way of Love, a phrase coined by our past Presiding Bishop Michael Curry.  We’ve offered a couple of sermon series as well as devotional booklets on the Way of Love.  And we’ve been prioritizing spiritual growth and spiritual leadership in our Vestry, as you’ll hear later from the wardens.  

What became clear through the Vestry’s work this year is that there is no single pathway we all have to follow to grow closer to God.  Instead, we each create our own adventure along the journey, finding the route that’s right for each of us but leading to a common destination – heaven, both in this chapter of eternal life and in the chapters to come.

So, in 2025, what will that journey of spiritual growth look like?  In a time of division and rancor in the world around us, I think it’s important that we grow in our clarity about who we are, who we follow, and what we value.  So, what’s our journey for the year ahead?

In 2025, our parish theme will be “Discovering My Way.”  I want to break that down a bit because the words matter.  In fact, just the emphasis we put on certain words matters.  For example, what if I say, “I love you”?  The meaning’s quite different if I say, “I love you” or “I love you” or “I love you.”  

So, let’s highlight the first word in this year’s theme: “Discovering My Way.”  Now, that may seem odd.  I mean, after 2,000 years, doesn’t the Church already know where we’re going?  Well, we’ll spend this year “discovering” because the eternal truth of God as revealed in Jesus Christ is always new.  From creating the universe, to covenanting with Abraham, to saving people from slavery, to entrusting them with promised land, to leading them back after exile, to redeeming all people from sin and death – through it all, God says, “See, I am doing a new thing, … do you not perceive it?” (Isaiah 43:19 NIV).  Well, in the same way, God is always newly at work with you, inviting you to take the next step on your own journey – to come closer and go deeper with God.  

So, through this year, we’ll be inviting you to do just that.  Your clergy and Vestry are drawing a map you can use to chart your own spiritual adventure with God.  It won’t be complicated – just take a couple of inventories, meet with a clergy coach, and start taking some next steps forward.  When you do, you’ll be amazed to meet the God of new things sidling up next to you.

So, that’s the first word.  Here’s the second, a small but mighty word: “Discovering My Way.”  What happens when we emphasize “my”?  That’s not something we usually do.  Usually, when I stand up here, I’m not talking about “you”; I’m talking about “us” – the Church as the Body of Christ, the Church as a family, even the Church as an organization.  In a world of individualism, the Church is one of the last places in American society where “we” matters more than “me.”  

And yet, as we heard in the second reading today, the Body of Christ is made up many unique members.  And we each follow a unique path deeper into the heart of God.  That’s why we’re encouraging you to take this discovery process seriously for yourself.  There is no one-size-fits-all approach to something as personal as spiritual growth.  We’re here to help you explore your own wiring and explore your own gifts as you explore the love story God’s opening up to you.

OK, how about that last word: “Discovering My Way”?  What way is that exactly?  Well, it’s the way toward what we all long for, deep down.  You can call it “peace.”  You can call it “joy.”  You can call it “the heart of God.”  You can call it “union with the divine.”  You can call it “heaven.”  Whatever you call it, we’re each on a journey to seek our heart’s desire, right?  

Well, the way to get there is the Way of Love.  Love is the only thing that brings us into peace, and joy, and union with the divine.  Love is the only door that opens our hearts to God.  It’s the way of Jesus, and that’s the way we want to help you explore this year.

So, this is our journey for 2025 – a unique journey for each of us as we move toward heaven, living ever more fully into the image and likeness of Love.  And … alongside our individual work of “Discovering My Way,” we know we do that in a particular time and place.  In 1913, God put a missionary outpost of the Episcopal Church here in Brookside; and 112 years later, we’re just as surely called to reveal God’s kingdom where we find ourselves here and now.

You’ll find examples of that throughout the annual report.  Through our 16 Outreach projects and partnerships last year, you witnessed to the power of love with $95,000 given from our operating budget, another $122,000 given by individual parishioners, and 279 opportunities for service in the world.  That’s a powerful witness to the call of Jesus Christ to prioritize the needs of the poor and the hungry, the dispossessed and the rejected.  When the world says, “Those folks don’t matter so much,” the Church says, “Those folks are made in God’s image and likeness, so we serve them as we would serve Jesus himself.”

Outreach ministry is a huge part of that witness to love’s power.  But so is something harder to quantify, and that’s our presence – the way we engage with each other, and our neighbors, and the people God puts in our paths each day.  And in this historical moment, the stakes feel especially high as we Americans engage with each other.  In the past week, since President Trump’s inauguration, our national divisions have come back into full view.  The president is doing exactly what he said he would do related to immigration¹ and sexual identity² and a dozen other issues.  Some of us gathered here this morning will respond with satisfaction while others will respond with fear and anger.  And the question will arise: What will St. Andrew’s say and do in response?  

Well, first, I encourage you to read the words of our bishop, Diane Jardine Bruce, in this weekend’s Messenger and bulletin.  As she says, our primary call as followers of Jesus is to love God and love our neighbors.  Indeed. 

And where might we find a guide to help us live that way?  What’s our touchstone, as a congregation and as individuals?  

It’s the Baptismal Covenant.  This fundamental statement of our faith and practice reminds us that God exists in a relationship of love among Father, Son, and Spirit.  It reminds us we’ve been created, redeemed, and empowered to live out that same self-giving love.  And it describes what living that way looks like week to week, day to day: worshiping God together, resisting evil and turning from it, proclaiming the Good News of God’s love, seeking and serving Christ in everyone, and striving for justice and peace by respecting the dignity of all.  That’s our touchstone.  It’s what St. Andrew’s will promote, and it’s what you’ll hear me advocate.  Just as this summer I suggested you use the Baptismal Covenant as your voting guide, so now I suggest you use it as your living guide for divided times.

Now, when someone asks you what your church has to say about the news of the day, it may be hard to bring those five promises to mind.  So, as you witness to the Way of Love in this fraught year, let me boil down the Baptismal Covenant into an elevator speech.  Actually, it’s been right before our eyes for more than three years now.  You see it every time you come by St. Andrew’s, adorning the wall of HJ’s:  “God loves all.  All means all.  Pass the peace.”

Let’s take it from the top.  First, “God loves all.”  That truth rings throughout the New Testament: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16).  Or, as St. Peter says in Acts: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him” (10:34-35).  Or, in the words of Bishop Michael Curry, “If it’s not about love, it’s not about God,” for love is what God does.

So, first, “God loves all.”  The second sign at HJ’s says, “All means all.”  That may seem unnecessary – of course “all means all.”  But we’re quickly tempted to think, “Well … all but them.”  And who might those “thems” be?  If we look at our own circles of relationship and at our own stories, I’ll bet most of us will find a “them” pretty close to us, perhaps now, perhaps in our family histories.  For me, it’s the LGBTQ+ community that I feel protective of.  I have three family members who are trans men, one who’s bisexual, and one who’s gay.  So, when I think about who’s at risk of exclusion, that’s the “them” who come to mind for me.  It might be good for each of us to ask ourselves:  In my own circle and my own story, when have my people been the other?  I’d wager nearly all of us have a connection to someone whom someone else wanted to exclude.  

But Jesus is having none of it.  As St. Paul puts it in the reading this morning, “Just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with [the body of] Christ…. The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’ … If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.” (1 Corinthians 12:12, 21, 26)

So, if God loves all, and all means all, what are we called to do?  “Pass the peace.”  That’s our shorthand for the Baptismal Covenant’s five promises of discipleship:  Gather in beloved community.  Turn from evil and sin.  Proclaim Good News.  Seek and serve Christ in everyone.  Respect the dignity of all.  In other words, “Pass the peace.”

In a nation that insists we define ourselves by which leader we follow, we must be clear in our answer.  Our leader is Jesus Christ, the Love of God walking among us.  We follow him by living the Baptismal Covenant, serving the God who is love by walking in love ourselves.  What doesn’t align with those promises doesn’t align with who we are.

“God loves all.  All means all.  Pass the peace.”  This is who we’ve been.  This is who we are.  This is who we will be: Unique members of the Body of Christ – hands and feet, eyes and ears – each of us indispensable, each of us discovering our way to heaven, each of us welcoming all the fellow travelers we meet, each of us passing the peace.

1.      https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/01/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-protects-the-states-and-the-american-people-by-closing-the-border-to-illegals-via-proclamation/

2.      https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/defending-women-from-gender-ideology-extremism-and-restoring-biological-truth-to-the-federal-government/

Follow the Wise Man

Sermon for Jan. 12, 2025 (Epiphany, transferred)
Matthew 2:1-12

I think this amazing Gospel reading and these beautiful, exotic visitors are God’s way of asking us a question:  As we begin the journey this new year will bring, whose path will we choose to follow?

On the one hand, our story this morning gives us the path of King Herod.  Herod stands for power as the world typically sees it.  He aspires to be the King of the Jews, even names himself by that title.¹  At least ethnically a Jew, Herod knows his people are awaiting their messiah, and he wants the honor due God’s King for himself.  But, in truth, Herod is never more than Caesar’s enforcer lording it over the Jewish people.  Herod buys into the wrong power, power that only knows how to assert itself in worldly strength.  He does that even to the extent of trying to murder Jesus, the true King, by massacring “all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under” (Matthew 2:16), a story that comes soon after the reading we heard today.

So, Herod gives us one possible path to follow.  For a contrast, let’s look to the other major characters in this story, the magi.  These learned astrologers have discerned that there’s a divine king to be found, so they set out to worship him.  They come to Jerusalem, the center of Herod’s power but even more the center of Yahweh’s worship, and they ask where they might find this newborn king of the Jews.  The question leaves Herod shaking in his boots, so he tries to manipulate the wise travelers, sending them to Bethlehem as his spies.

We don’t get to hear what the silent magi think about that, but they keep their eyes on the star, the divine sign that’s been guiding them ever since they left their homeland beyond the boundaries of Roman rule.  Remarkably, they trust this sign from the God they don’t fully know.  In fact, they welcome what Yahweh’s doing, and they bring gifts that the Hebrew scriptures identify as tribute from the nations for the king who will rule with divine justice and peace.²  Following the star’s light, these wise travelers find real power for all people – the power of unquenched hope, the power that propels us to seek God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.  Again, the magi get no lines here, but they’re “overwhelmed with joy” as they offer their gifts (Matthew 2:10) – strangers witnessing to God’s shocking pattern of saving people in the least likely ways.

Finally, the story ends with God intervening to save the Holy Family, and the wise travelers, from Herod’s corrupt power.  God visits the magi in a dream, warning them to steer clear of Herod.  As the songwriter James Taylor put it, “A king who would slaughter the innocents will not cut a deal for you.”³  And the magi tie up the story with a bow, upending Herod’s plot simply by taking a different way.  It’s stunning the difference we can make simply with the road we choose – and how making that choice blesses countless people as it brings us safely home.

Perhaps it’s in keeping with God’s divine sense of timing that, as we remember the true King being revealed to all nations, our nation remembers its 39^th president, Jimmy Carter.  It might be interesting to overlay the one story on the other, looking at our history through the lens of our faith.  What does this ancient Gospel story of politics and power tell us about where we look for power today?

Of course, Jimmy Carter was a politician.  You don’t get elected president without knowing how to work the system and without an outsized sense of your own capacity and significance.  But still, Jimmy Carter came to office because he was the starkest contrast imaginable to the man elected before him, Richard Nixon, with his imperial sense of the presidency.  Where Nixon was about wielding power to advance his own and his country’s interests, Carter was about channeling power to strengthen human rights and bring peace between ancient adversaries.  And where Nixon skulked away from office in disgrace, spending his post-presidential years trying to write his way back into history’s favor, Carter found his true calling in his post-presidency, as we’ve heard from so many voices in the last week.  For more than 40 years, he channeled the power of his past office, along with his gifts of perseverance and hopefulness, to advance the well-being of normal, powerless folks.  And his work touched millions – eradicating illnesses and pressuring uncaring government leaders to support that work, building homes for people, monitoring elections to ensure votes got counted, removing military rulers from Haiti with no shots being fired.

Now, you can make a good case that, in terms of presidential effectiveness, Jimmy Carter wasn’t exactly a success.  Perhaps Sunday-school teachers don’t make the greatest presidents.  But the greatest presidents embody what Sunday-school teachers teach them.

So, if you’re holding up the narrative of Nixon and Carter alongside the narrative we’re celebrating this morning, it’s easy to see Nixon as King Herod.  But what about Carter?  Which character does he mirror?

Well, the temptation here might be to hold up Carter up alongside the original J.C.  I remember a campaign poster in the 1970s that backlit Carter, and decked him out with long hair and a beard, and proclaimed, “JC can save America!”⁴  Now, you could argue Carter had a bit of a messiah complex, but I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have claimed the title for himself.

No – to me, the characters from our story today that Jimmy Carter mirrored are the exotic visitors we just saw, those wise travelers.  The magi were drawn not to Herod, the conduit of raw imperial power, but to the Christ, the conduit of true power – the divine power that, from the beginning of creation, empties itself for the well-being of nobodies like us.  Similarly, Jimmy Carter was not drawn to the domain of King Herod – the lure of reputation and self-aggrandizement.  Carter could have spent his four decades as a former president raking in cash and jockeying for historical position.  Instead, he lived in his two-bedroom house, taught Sunday school, wrote mostly about faith, and tried to heal the world.  Like the magi, Jimmy Carter was wise enough to bow down before the true King and take that King’s Good News on the road.  Both the magi and the ex-president pointed toward the light of leadership that the world can’t see so well – servant leadership, kingship based in God’s love, power that empties itself of power.

I think it’s interesting in our story this morning that these wise travelers, these beacons of perseverance and hope – they still don’t get any lines when they finally find what they’ve been looking for.  I’d love to hear their reflection on the power they witnessed from “King” Herod versus the power they witnessed when they entered Mary and Joseph’s cave and found the baby King.

After all, the magi had a choice to make.  I mean, we take the ending for granted, but it could have gone the other way.  They could have been taken in and cozied up to Herod. They could have been seduced by God knows what Herod was promising for delivering Jesus to the assassins.  But after they offered their tokens of kingship and worshiped the One who actually deserved it, these wise travelers heeded a voice in a dream telling them to say “no” to Herod’s offer and follow another path.

That’s the choice we bear still:  Follow the path to the palace where Herod’s waiting, or follow God’s own path home.  I’ll leave you today with the words of the wise man Jimmy Carter, in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.  Carter said:

[A]n individual is not swept along on a tide of inevitability but can influence even the greatest human events. …  I worship Jesus Christ, whom we Christians consider to be the Prince of Peace.  As a Jew, he taught us to cross religious boundaries, in service and in love.  He repeatedly reached out and embraced Roman conquerors, other Gentiles, and even the more despised Samaritans.…  The bond of our common humanity is stronger than the divisiveness of our fears and prejudices.  God gives us the capacity for choice.  We can choose to alleviate suffering.  We can choose to work together for peace.⁵

Or, you could put it like this:  We can choose to follow Herod’s path or go home by another way.

1.      New International Study Bible, 1749 (note).

2.      New International Study Bible, 1750 (note).

3.      Taylor, James and Timothy Mayer. “Home by Another Way.” Never Die Young. Columbia Records, 1988.

4.      “Poster: ‘J.C. Can Save America!’” National Museum of American History. Available at: https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_528342. Accessed Jan. 1, 2025.

5.      “Jimmy Carter: Nobel Lecture.” Dec. 10, 2002. Available at: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2002/carter/lecture/. Accessed Jan. 1, 2025.

Hearing Voices – and Trusting Them

Sermon for Jan. 5, 2024 (the Second Sunday of Christmas)
Matthew 2:13-15,19-23

If you were looking forward to the arrival of the Three Kings today, I’m sorry to disappoint you.  With the winter storm and the warnings to stay off the roads, it seemed prudent to delay our royal visitors and have them come next Sunday instead.

Among other disruptions, this change throws the sequence of our Gospel readings out of whack.  Instead of hearing about the magi and King Herod today, we move to the next episode in Matthew’s story.  But, in the category of finding the silver lining in the clouds of our blizzard, this gives us the chance to hear part of Jesus’ family story we usually miss because of the kings’ visit here.

For today’s Gospel reading to make sense, you have to know not only that the magi have just left from visiting Jesus but what that means.  As we’ll hear next Sunday, the story of the wise men concludes in two parts.  First, they give Jesus gold, frankincense, and myrrh, symbolizing his status as God’s own king – the messiah.  But after that, the story ends with an angel visiting the wise men in a dream, telling them to avoid King Herod as they make their way home.  Why?  Because King Herod was trying to use the wise men as spies.  He’d told them to go find the baby King and then report back, supposedly so Herod could go and worship, too.  Right.  What we hear today is what Herod really had in mind, which was to kill his tiny rival to strengthen his grip on power.

So, in today’s story, the spotlight shifts from Herod and the wise men to the Holy Family.  And because it’s Matthew telling the tale, the central character among the Holy Couple isn’t Mary but Joseph.

The reading begins with an angel, a messenger of the Lord, coming to Joseph in a dream.  This time, the angel isn’t offering wise advice; it’s acting as a first responder.  “Get up,” the angel says, “and take the child and his mother and flee to Egypt … for Herod is about to search for the child to destroy him” (2:13).  And then comes one of those lines in Scripture that, by itself, holds enough material for a book: Joseph does what the angel says; the family escapes Bethlehem in the middle of the night, moves to Egypt, and stays there until Herod dies.  I’d like to hear the rest of that story.

Anyway, this was no quick camping trip; this was the Holy Family fleeing to a foreign country as refugees from government persecution.  And they were exactly right to have left because Herod’s next act in the story is to slaughter all of Bethlehem’s children two years and younger, an act of state terror that would have killed Jesus, too.  We don’t know exactly how long Joseph, Mary, and Jesus lived in Egypt but probably a few years as they waited for Herod to die.

Now, let’s hit the pause button on this story and think about Joseph for a minute.  In Matthew’s version of the Christmas story a chapter earlier, there is no annunciation to Mary.  In Matthew, the annunciation comes to Joseph when, you guessed it, an angel visits him in a dream and says, “Do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 1:20).  Now, if we were Joseph, we’d be thinking, “Right; sure that’s where the baby came from.”  But Joseph shows himself to be the paragon of trust.  He may not have been happy with the angel’s news, but he lets it be.  He takes Mary as his wife anyway.

Well, now, the angel is back.  If the first news was strange, this news is terrifying.  The angel tells Joseph, “Remember what I said about this baby being God’s instrument to save people from their sins? [Matthew 1:21]  Well, first you’ve got to save this baby from Herod.”  And, like I said, Joseph follows the angel’s instructions.  He trusts this voice he hears in a dream.  He uproots his family and treks hundreds of miles across the desert to go to … who knows where?  It’s not like Joseph had family in Egypt.  He didn’t even have a plan.  Like Abraham and Moses, Joseph simply went where God told him to go. It’s trust I can barely fathom.

OK, then our reading picks back up again.  We don’t know what the Holy Family has been doing in Egypt, other than not being killed by King Herod.  But eventually, Herod dies, and Joseph has another dream.  The angel tells him Herod is dead, and it’s time for the Holy Family to go back where they came from – well, sort of back where they came from.  Joseph is figuring they’ll head back to Bethlehem, or at least somewhere in Judea, near Jerusalem.  But once they arrive, they learn that Herod has split his kingdom among the three sons he hadn’t killed yet, and the one now ruling Judea, Archelaus, is no better than his father.  So, what to do?

Well, if you’re Joseph, you go to sleep to find out.  Once more, God comes to him in a dream, telling him to take his family north to Galilee instead – still Jewish territory but with a different history and, now, a safer ruler.  And so, in Matthew’s Gospel, this is how the Holy Family ends up raising Jesus in Nazareth.

So, what do we take from this story of the Holy Family and their journeys?  One lesson I hear is that Scripture calls us to take refugees seriously.  In our day, these are people fleeing war and persecution in search of a better life.  For example, the refugees served by JVS, a local resettlement agency with whom St. Andrew’s partners – those refugees have been through a documentation process that’s beyond thorough, registering with our government, being carefully vetted, and usually waiting years before being resettled somewhere like Kansas City.  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph were living the refugee story, fleeing the harm of an oppressive regime.  So, today, welcoming refugees into a new land is being true to the teaching of our Scriptures.

But here’s the other lesson I hear in this story. It’s about Joseph, the saint who usually flies under the radar of the Sunday readings.  I see Joseph as an astonishing example of what many of us – maybe most of us – find to be a huge stumbling block in our relationship with God, and that’s trust.  If someone says to you, “Trust me,” what’s your first impulse?  And that reaction comes when it’s a real, live person asking for your trust.  How about when it’s a voice in a dream?  Spiritual discernment is notoriously tough; as parishioner Doc Worley used to say, it’s hard to know whether what’s keeping you up at night is the Holy Spirit or the chili you had for dinner.  Trusting that what we hear is the voice of God, taking the leap of faith – that just might be the hardest thing God asks of us.  And yet, here’s Joseph.  He hears from an angel in a dream not once, not twice, but four times.  And the response is always that Joseph follows the call the angel puts on his heart.

I say it that way because the heart is where seeds of divine trust blossom and grow.  As you’ve heard me say before, even our primary statement of faith asks us to look to our hearts, not to our heads, to nurture our relationship with the God who is Love.  Each week, we say the Nicene Creed.  And, for those of us who offer Morning or Evening Prayer –  each day, we say the Apostles’ Creed.  That sounds like an intellectual exercise, reciting the claims of these creeds, these fundamental statements we make as followers of Jesus.

But remember where that word “creed” comes from.  In Latin, it’s credo, which means, “I believe.”  But deeper down, credo comes from an Indo-European root that’s also the basis of the prefix cardio.  That ancient root means “heart,” not “head.”  For faith is not about agreeing with intellectual propositions.  Faith is about trusting the Love those propositions describe.  And to help myself do that, I cheat when I say the Apostles’ Creed by myself.  I don’t say, “I believe.”  I say, “I trust” – “I trust in God, the Father, the Almighty, creator of heaven and earth….”

Why do I do that?  Because our faith, Joseph’s faith, is all about the work of trust.  The practice of faith is to remind ourselves, over and over again, that the God who is Love has our back.  That’s good news, always.  But it’s especially good to remember late in the night, when we hear the angels calling us to take the leaps of faith that bring us life.