People Who Say, 'Thank You' (or, Praying Shapes Believing)

Sermon for Thanksgiving
Nov. 27, 2025

When I was growing up, Thanksgiving was a day of ritual for me, and I imagine some of you had a similar experience.  I’d wake up and watch at least some of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV.  I loved the huge balloons.  Plus, we were home from school; and even with the inane commentary, the parade was the best choice among Springfield’s four channels.  

But I didn’t watch much of the parade because of the next Thanksgiving ritual for us: church.  Probably not surprisingly, that wasn’t my favorite part of Thanksgiving, that we had to go to church two days that week.  But once we got there, and I put on my choir robe, and we came into the church singing, “Come Ye Thankful People, Come,” the gears in my heart slipped into place.  “Oh, yeah,” I thought.  “I do have a lot to be grateful for.”  And it was good just to sing that song again, a song people have been singing since 1844 to help them remember just how thankful they are.

After church, we’d go home for the other Thanksgiving rituals:  Football – both on TV and in the yard with my friend, Ted.  Family – whoever could get there, given my sisters’ obligations to spouses and their families.  And my mother’s turkey gravy – which truly is the best in the world and for which the turkey was just a necessary ingredient.  With the rituals completed, we did indeed find gratitude and the peace that gratitude brings … right before slipping into a turkey coma.

We each have our Thanksgiving rituals, right?  We have gatherings or practices or foods that make the holiday the holiday.  You may even think your mother makes better gravy than mine, which, in the spirit of Christian charity, I’ll strive to forgive.  But why do we keep these rituals?  Other than the comfort of habit, what do the parades and football and turkey and pie give us?

Rituals help us remember.  It’s the power I felt standing at the back of the church as a kid, hearing that old familiar hymn rise once again.  Rituals bring past, present, and future together for us, helping us see that the moment we inhabit is just that – a moment – but one connected to moments across time and space.  That’s what we remember when we say the Eucharistic prayer – when, each week, regardless of the liturgical season or the form of the prayer we’re using, we remember that we’re joining with “angels and archangels and all the company of heaven” as they offer this prayer with us.  As we stand here before God each week, we never stand alone.

And as we gather with one another and that heavenly company, ritual binds us around a common experience.  In fact, the theologians would say that ritual brings the common experience to life.  The Greeks had a word for it – anamnesis, which means active remembering, the kind of remembering you do when you hear a baby cry and you’re transported to your own child’s crib.  Anamnesis is bringing memory into lived experience, making the past present and banking on it for the future, too.  It’s what happens every time we offer that Eucharistic prayer and connect our bread and wine to Jesus feeding the 5,000, and the Last Supper, and the heavenly marriage supper of the Lamb.  We say we experience the real presence of Jesus in that meal as he brings us a feast out of nothing, and gives himself so we can live forever, and welcomes us home to the banquet that never ends.

And one of the most important memories our rituals bring to life is the active remembrance of “thank you.”  It’s no accident that this meal we share in worship is called Eucharist, which means “thanksgiving.”  Every week, we come together for the ultimate Thanksgiving dinner, reminding us of the full scope of gratitude – blessings past, present, and future; people we have loved, and do love, and will love; belovedness from the God who created us, and redeems us, and will sustain us eternally.

This is why we’re here today, when we could be doing anything else to enjoy a day off.  This is why ritual matters.  It reminds us who we are, which is fundamentally people who say, “Thank you.”  And “thank you” cures a multitude of ills.  It reminds us we’re in relationship with a power far greater than we are.  It reminds us that the nature of that power is love.  It reminds us that the consequence of love is always blessing.  And so, it reminds us that, no matter what, in all things, the right response to the love that creates and redeems and sustains us is, “Thank you.”

That doesn’t mean life isn’t hard.  Any one of us, every one of us, can lament the burdens we carry, the losses we’ve suffered, the cost of an embodied life.  But ritual helps us there, too.

Every morning, my routine includes a time of prayer.  Both the form and the content matter.  I make a cup of coffee, with sugar and half and half, my one cup of coffee a day like that.  I come into the sunroom where my wife, Ann, kept her indoor plants, nearly all of which are still alive.  I light a candle, and the dog and the cat join me in what was Ann’s favorite chair.  Then we listen to a podcast of Morning Prayer, which ends with something called the General Thanksgiving.  It’s the prayer we’ll offer here this morning, in place of the Prayers of the People, to voice our hearts on this day of gratitude.

Now, this ritual doesn’t guarantee that I’ll come out of prayer time happy.  A life of embodied blessing doesn’t work that way.  But it does guarantee that I’ll remember to say thank you – as that General Thanksgiving puts it, thank you for “for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all for [God’s] immeasurable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ; for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory” (BCP 101).  My sunroom ritual is a way to remember, every day – “Oh, yeah, that’s right.  That’s who I am – someone who starts with, ‘Thank you.’”

What Are You Looking For?

Sermon for Nov. 23, 2025 – feast of St. Andrew, transferred
Matthew 4:18-22

As we celebrate St. Andrew this morning, I want to tell you a story.  No surprise – it’s his story, which seems right for this day.  But I’m going to tell it to you backwards because, sometimes, the best way to know where we’re going is to know where we’ve begun.

So, let’s start where we find St. Andrew now.  Spiritually, that would be here, and in countless other congregations in the Episcopal Church and around the world.  You might wonder, what’s the Episcopalian connection to St. Andrew anyway?  On our Episcopal shield, you find the X-shaped cross of St. Andrew – why that instead of any other disciples’ symbol?  It’s because of our historical connection to Scotland, where Andrew is also the patron saint.  It was Scottish bishops who consecrated the first Episcopalian bishop for the new United States, Samuel Seabury (you’ll find his window up there, on the lectern side); and it was the Scottish Church’s prayer consecrating the bread and wine for Eucharist that we put in our first American Book of Common Prayer.

OK.  There’s our connection to Scotland.  So, what does Andrew have to do with Scotland?  It’s a good question, given that Andrew never went there while he was alive.  Instead, the story is that Andrew’s remains were lifted and taken there from Greece in the 300s by a monk named Regulus.  The monk had a vision telling him to take Andrew’s bones and sail to the ends of the earth, wherever the Holy Spirit and the prevailing winds took him.  It turned out Regulus’ ship ran aground at what’s now St. Andrews in Scotland, which was pretty much the end of the earth for 4^th-century Greek sailors.  There, the monk founded a cathedral and a center of Christian learning to help bring the Good News to the people of Scotland.

OK, Andrew’s bones were taken to Scotland from Greece.  So, how did a Galilean fisherman end up being buried in Greece?  Tradition says Andrew was martyred around the year 60 at Patras in western Greece, crucified on an X-shaped cross.  That’s what’s under Andrew’s arm in the stained-glass window over the altar, just to the left of Jesus.  Tradition says Andrew taught about Jesus in Greece after stops in Thrace, a region that straddles what’s now Bulgaria and Turkey.  In Byzantium, later Constantinople and now Istanbul, he’s said to have consecrated the first bishop for this place that became an important patriarchate of the Orthodox Church.

Of course, we don’t have hard evidence for any of that, and other countries’ traditions remember different stories about Andrew’s travels.  He’s honored as a patron saint in the nations of Georgia, Cyprus, Ethiopia, Malta, Romania, and, ironically, both Ukraine and Russia, one of the few things uniting those countries now.  But the dominant tradition is that he ended his life on that X-shaped cross in western Greece.

So, if that’s how Andrew answered the call to be Jesus’ witness “to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8), what do we know about Andrew as he traveled with Jesus himself?

Well, the last word we get about Andrew in the Gospels comes from John.  Just after Jesus rides into Jerusalem in triumph on Palm Sunday, with everyone shouting “Hosanna!” and proclaiming him king, a couple of non-Jewish strangers come up to the disciple Philip and say, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus” (12:21).  Philip takes these outsiders up the chain of command to Andrew, and Andrew makes the call that these two “Greeks” are worth Jesus’ time and attention (12:20).  For Jesus, it’s his sign that the time for his glorification has come – because not just the Jews of Jerusalem but also these representatives of other nations are seeing in Jesus the light of hope and healing.  I think it’s also an important sign for Andrew, maybe something he hadn’t seen before – that his call doesn’t stop with walking alongside Jesus there in Galilee and Judea.  He’ll find himself talking to lots of “Greeks” as he takes Jesus’ hope and healing on the road.

Earlier in the Gospel story, Andrew takes center stage in John’s version of feeding the 5,000.  When Jesus tells the disciples to give the crowd something to eat, Andrew is the one who finds the boy with the five loaves and two fish.  Of course, that doesn’t seem like much.  But – and I think this is important –Andrew isn’t ashamed to bring to Jesus precisely what God has given him.  He’s living in the hope that Jesus can take what we see as our meager gifts and use them to bless thousands.

But when did Andrew actually sign up for this gig as a disciple?  For most of Jesus’ followers, the Gospel writers don’t give us a specific story.  But for those who were part of Jesus’ inner circle, we get vignettes that draw on their past to reveal something special Jesus sees in each of them.

And the first of those is our Gospel reading today, where we overhear Jesus calling two sets of brothers – Andrew and Peter, as well as James and John.  All we’re told is that “they were fishermen”– in fact, that’s what they’re busy doing as Jesus walks by and rocks their world (Matthew 4:18).  Jesus sees Andrew and Peter “casting a net into the sea” (4:18) – which, as any fisherman knows, is fundamentally an act of faith.  Are the fish actually there?  Am I in the right spot?  Do I have the right equipment?  Who knows, right? You just cast out your net or cast out your line in the assurance that, eventually, your work and your faith will be rewarded.  It’s amazing, the faith of a fisherman.  Well, Andrew and Peter must have been blessed with that kind of persistent faith – and for Jesus, this moment seems like just the right time to cast the net himself.  He yells out to them, “Follow me, and I’ll make you fish for people” (4:19).  Somehow, that offer must have seemed much more rewarding than the kind of fishing they knew, because they left their nets “immediately” to follow him (4:20).

I’ve always been skeptical about this story.  I mean, what small-business owner closes up shop permanently to follow a wandering preacher?  In Matthew’s Gospel, this is the first time we meet Andrew, so we have no backstory to help make sense of his decision.  But if we look to another source, we find backstory that Matthew apparently doesn’t know.  It’s from John’s Gospel again, very early on.  In the story, Jesus hasn’t even said anything yet; all we know so far is that John the Baptist is pointing to Jesus as the Lamb of God, the one who’s come to take away the sin of the world.  Well, when two of John the Baptist’s followers hear this, they break off from John’s group to go check out the new guy.  One of these two is Andrew, making his first appearance in the Gospel story.  So, Andrew and his friend tag along after Jesus, which Jesus notices, being Jesus.  He turns around, looks them in the eye, and asks, “What are you looking for?” (John 1:38).

Let’s pause the story just a moment because this is one of my favorite verses in all of Scripture.  It’s Jesus, God in the flesh, just cutting to the heart of the matter and asking the question that starts every spiritual journey:  “What are you looking for?”  Talk about God meeting us where we are.  Jesus gives no order to follow religious rules.  He makes no demand for worship.  He doesn’t even expect service right off the bat.  Instead, Jesus’ first question to Andrew is God’s first question to you and me, too:  “What are you looking for?”  I think that might be the richest question we could take with us today, something to chew on long past Thursday’s turkey.

Anyway, back to the story.  Andrew and his friend respond saying, “Teacher, where are you staying” – probably just trying to come up with something to say rather than standing there, slack-jawed, when Jesus comes up and talks to them.  And Jesus replies with maybe the other best line in all of Scripture.  The God who starts out with life’s richest question then offers them life’s richest invitation:  “Come and see” (1:39).  And they do.  Andrew and his friend hang out with Jesus all day.  When the sun starts setting and the divine interview comes to an end, Andrew heads back home to find the person he loves most, his brother, Simon Peter – because, when your life truly starts opening up before you, you can’t keep it to yourself, right?  So, Andrew says to Peter, “We have found the Messiah,” and he brings Peter to meet Jesus … thereby starting a movement that will change the world.

I think Andrew’s origin story matters.  After all, none of the rest of his discipleship would have happened without Andrew’s willingness to engage Jesus’ rich question and invitation:  “What are you looking for?  Come and see.”  All the rest of Andrew’s faithful work begins there.

We are no different.  We may not have universities and golf courses named after us.  We may not die a martyr’s death and see ourselves in stained-glass windows.  We may not travel to the ends of the earth to share God’s love with others.  But our journey starts just where Andrew’s journey started – with Jesus asking us, “What are you looking for?”

Once the turkey dinner and the football games and the weekend’s shopping are behind us, we’ll begin a journey ourselves, a four-week journey starting next Sunday – the season of Advent.  Now, the Church would tell us that Advent is a time to prepare our hearts to receive Christ anew and to prepare for his coming at the end of the age, when he returns to set the world to rights.  Yes … and … maybe before all that, Advent is a time to hear God asking you, “What are you looking for?”  The answer’s probably not parties and presents and too many commitments.  The answer’s probably more along the lines of … healing, and purpose, and meaning, and peace.  Well then, Jesus says, “Come and see.”

There are many ways to do that.  I don’t pretend to have just the right answer for you, but you’ll find several possibilities to consider on the Advent page of our website – ways to breathe and connect with what you’re truly looking for.  It might happen in a book study.  It might happen in a class on grief during the holidays.  It might happen in the silence, chants, and candles of a Taizé service.  It might happen in a Saturday spent in retreat.  It might happen through giving of yourself to bless neighbors in Kansas City or kids in Haiti.  It might happen simply through lighting a candle, finding a prayerful podcast, and turning in a new direction.

However you do it, the point is to start a journey.  You don’t have to measure up to anyone else’s definition of what it means to follow Jesus.  Like Andrew, all you have to do is take Jesus up on the offer.  All you have to do is “come and see.”

Peace the World Cannot Give

Sermon for Sunday, Nov. 9, 2025
Job 19:23-27a; Luke 20:27-38

In this stewardship sermon series, we’ve been looking at different ways we work with God to let blessings flow through both giving and receiving.  The first three weeks of the series were about giving: giving God thanks and praise, giving others a share of God’s blessings, and giving a share of those blessings back to God.  Now we’re in the “receiving” portion of the series.  Last week, Mtr. Jean spoke about receiving deep meaning and purpose in our lives.  And today, the topic is peace:  Receive peace the world cannot give.

That promise comes from Scripture – from John’s Gospel, where Jesus tells the disciples, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.  I do not give to you as the world gives.  Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.” (14:27).  I take great comfort in that.  In fact, that verse is on the wall in my dining room, up there with 20 photos of Ann and the kids, a print of Rembrandt’s painting of the Prodigal Son, and a painting by a parishioner imagining my wife Ann’s heavenly garden.  So, given where that verse is hanging in my house, I put a lot of stock in it – in Jesus’ promise of peace that the world cannot give.

Well, today, we don’t have that passage from John among our readings.  Instead, for our Old Testament reading, we have some verses from the Book of Job.  Job is fascinating – a 42-chapter reflection on theodicy, which is a five-dollar word meaning a vindication of God’s justice in the face of human suffering.  It can imply something like a cross examination of the Sovereign of the Universe.  How can it be, Lord, that some egregiously unjust situation is allowed to exist in your good creation?

Contrasted with that is our popular understanding of the Book of Job – that it’s a character study in patience.  That’s the source of the familiar phrase, “That person has the patience of Job.”  This sense of the story comes from just the first two chapters.  Job is a good, righteous, and very successful man, with a lovely family and deep respect in the community.  Well, Satan comes before God in the heavenly council and talks God into letting Satan mess with Job.  Basically, they make a bet about whether this good and righteous man will crack under pressure and curse the God who had blessed him so richly.  So, God gives Satan permission to ruin Job’s life, though Satan isn’t allowed to kill him.

And Satan outdoes himself.  He takes away all Job’s fortune and kills his children through enemy attacks, a storm, and a fire from heaven.  And Satan afflicts Job with awful, itchy sores all over his body.  Job’s wife, the reasonable voice in the story, tells Job to go ahead and curse God already so God will get it over with and kill him.  But Job’s famous patience shines:  “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away,” Job philosophizes. “Blessed be the name of the Lord.” (1:21)

Our collective memory of Job’s story tends to stop there.  But where the story goes is even more interesting.  First, Job is visited by three “friends” who completely fail to comfort Job in his grief.  A quick aside:  If you don’t know what to say to someone who’s suffering, always choose to say nothing over something.  Or, better yet, just say “I’m so sorry” and “I love you.”  But don’t follow the lead of Job’s friends, who fill the silence with bad theology about how Job’s suffering is his own fault.  Job finds himself arguing with them, and with God, for 36 chapters before God finally gives a divine defense … which is, basically, who are you to be asking me to defend myself?

Along the way in Job’s argument with his bumbling friends comes today’s passage.  Christians hear it with ears tuned to the Easter story, right?  We hear Job pointing toward the risen Christ, God in the flesh, who redeems us from the power of sin and death and stands “on [our] side” eternally (Job 19:27).  But for the Jewish people who knew this story first, the message wasn’t resurrection.  Job simply wants his words to be written down, read into the court record as part of his testimony of unjust suffering.  Even better, Job says, he wants an audience with the Lord God now, on this side of the grave, so he can make his case for justice in person.

Well, here’s the spoiler alert:  Job never does curse God, so God wins the bet against Satan and doesn’t strike Job dead.  In fact, in the end, God restores Job’s earthly life with physical healing, more children, and even greater wealth.  But before the story gets there, Job demands an accounting from the Lord Most High, an explanation to satisfy his need for justice.  In a nutshell, Job’s cry is this:  “God, how could you?”  

Does that plea resonate with anybody else?

Job wants answers.  Job wants vindication.  Job wants justice.  That may seem like a lot to ask of God; but I think Jesus might say that Job wasn’t asking for enough.  Job, along with the rest of us, wants suffering to make sense.  Instead, Jesus offers us peace – peace that the world’s explanations cannot give.

As many of you know, before my wife, Ann, died nine months ago, she’d struggled with lupus for 24 years.  There was a time – in fact, there have been several times – when I wanted explanations, when I wanted to know why.  Of course, you can answer that question several ways.  Ann had a positive family history, ancestors who had “the rheumatiz”; so that part of her genetic inheritance was … suboptimal.  Maybe that DNA would have expressed itself as lupus eventually anyway.  But the presenting circumstance 24 years ago was more direct.  She received an infusion of a new medication for her diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis, and a couple of weeks later she was in the hospital with a raging lupus flare, which nearly killed her.

We never pressed it.  We decided pretty early on not to invest our time and our spirits trying to prove that this drug had induced lupus for her.  From one point of view, maybe that was stupid.  Maybe there would have been a nice settlement.  But we decided that wasn’t how we wanted to spend the remaining time we had together, striving for legal justice and trying to get even.  We invested in living instead.

Why am I telling you this?  Because of the point I hear Jesus making in today’s Gospel reading.  What I hear is this:  There’s more to finding peace than meets the eye.  In fact, what truly brings us peace is precisely not what meets the eye.

In today’s reading, Jesus is being questioned by Jewish legal scholars from the sect of the Sadducees, the opponents of their more-famous spiritual cousins, the Pharisees.  What sets the Sadducees apart is that they didn’t believe in the resurrection of the dead, while the Pharisees did.

So, these Sadducees think they’ve pinned Jesus to the wall theologically by presenting a case that turns resurrection into a joke.  You can almost hear these guys chuckling as they pose it.   If a woman marries seven brothers who die in sequence, whose wife will she be in the resurrection – “for the seven had married her” (Luke 20:23).  Huh, huh, huh.

Jesus responds not by joining their argument from the absurd but by offering deep trust in the greatest hope God offers: eternal life, on God’s terms.  What’s important isn’t whose wife the woman will be, Jesus says.  In fact, those in heaven “neither marry nor are given in marriage,” Jesus says, so the point is moot anyway (20:35).  What’s important is that “those who are considered worthy of a place … in the resurrection from the dead … cannot die anymore because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection” (Luke 20:35-36).  “And the fact that the dead are raised” is proven by the lawyers’ own Scriptures, Jesus says, which name Yahweh as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – not long-dead historical characters but living dwellers in God’s paradise – “for to him, all of them are alive” (Luke 10:38).

Hmmm.  Now, I don’t know about any of the rest of you widows and widowers out there, but I want to take Jesus aside for a second.  I’ve always kind of assumed one of the benefits of eternal life is getting to continue building relationships with the people you love most.  I’d like for that to include my spouse.  But marriage as we know it apparently doesn’t simply roll over into marriage eternally, based on what Jesus says here.  And what should we make of that?  Well, it makes sense, actually.  Given that we can’t know the specifics of anything about heaven, why would we think we can know the specifics of how heavenly relationships work? So, given that, I’ll trust God to work out the details of my eternal relationship with Ann.

What I do know is this:  It sure can seem satisfying to put God in the witness stand and demand answers for the mystery of unjust suffering.  It sure can seem satisfying to make someone pay when life goes sideways, when caregivers’ best efforts fail.  It sure can seem satisfying to shove eternity into a little box, demanding answers in our suffering because meager certainty now seems to beat astonishing hope later.

For me, I’ll take hope over certainty any day.  I’ll take the Christian spin we put on Job’s cry to God, proclaiming what we say at every funeral:  “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth”; and that “after my awakening, he will raise me up; and in my body, I shall see God … who is my friend and not a stranger” (BCP 491).  I’ll take releasing my bitterness over Ann’s illness rather than working for a check from a legal settlement.  And I’ll take the assurance that this life is just a warm-up for the eternity of loving relationship that awaits us, despite the fact I don’t know what that looks like.  

I’ll take all that because, at least for me, the world’s answers are overrated, and “certainty” turns out to be nothing but today’s best guess.  Instead, I’ll choose to trust that God makes good on God’s promises, even if I can’t quite see how.  And in that trust, with my heart untroubled and unafraid, I’m glad to take a breath and say thank you for peace the world cannot give.