 By Rev. Heather J. Blais, Rector
Families are messy and complicated. We don’t have to look far to see these dynamics within our own families, and when we turn to the scriptures, we find we are in good company. Including Jesus' family, which features a teen mom, an adoptive dad, and brothers that reject him. So when we are struggling with our family, lift these challenges up in prayer, because Christ quite literally knows what we’re going through. Today’s parable draws our attention to a father and his two sons. One fascinating element of this story is how the family sidesteps the normative inheritance practices followed by Jews since the time of Moses. Like now, inheritances were generally distributed upon the death of a parent. Asking a parent to advance an inheritance was akin to saying ‘I wish you were dead.’ The eldest son typically received a double portion, as they were expected to carry on the family estate which supported the wider family. If a family farm keeps being divided, it runs the risk of eventually not being large enough to support the family. By accommodating the younger son’s request, the father was required to sell off assets. If we think about how compound interest works, this means it’s not just the sold assets that were lost, but all the interest those assets would have produced had they waited until the father died. For example, if the father sold off a cow - how many calves would that cow have produced that would have generated further income for the family estate? By acquiescing to the younger son’s desire, the father is creating a potential financial strain on the inheritance that belonged to the older son and his lineage. We’re not told how the father or older brother felt about any of this. What we know is the father distributed his inheritance in life. The younger son took the cash and got as far away as possible - free at last. Meanwhile, the older brother has now inherited the family estate. The father now owns nothing. He is dependent on the older son to care for and financially sustain him. Now let’s fast forward to the brother’s return. The father is so overjoyed to see his younger son, that he adorns him with a robe, ring, and sandals. He orders a calf to be killed for a feast. Which all sounds swell, except, none of it was his to legally give away! It’s like taking one child’s lego set - which they had great plans for - and giving it to their sibling who had already built their set, and sold for profit. Of course the first child is going to be upset. For them it would be a great injustice. Except this father and his sons were not disagreeing about lego sets. Having gotten his cash, the younger son left the country, and was living large until he ran out of money. When a famine overtook the region, things started to get rough. He became a hired hand for a local farmer. Yet this job did not provide enough to resolve his hunger. Remembering how the hired hands were treated at his family farm, he decided he would tell his father he had sinned - to acknowledge that he was no longer worthy to be called son, but would his father please take him back as a hired hand. The younger son may be sincere in his regret. Though some scholars doubt it. The younger son’s comment is offered in a way that is reminiscent of Pharaoh speaking to Moses and Aaron during the plague of locusts. Pharaoh says: “I have sinned against the Lord your God and against you. Now forgive my sin once more and pray to the Lord your God to take this deadly plague away from me.” (Ex 10:16) In other words, saying whatever is necessary to get what you want. In that context, it makes the younger brother’s comment seem less sincere. Yet when someone apologizes to us, we can’t really know their intentions. We have to listen to our instincts. Or in some instances, ignore those instincts, and offer forgiveness anyways - because we know it is the right thing for the whole family or community. In any case, when the father saw his younger son off in the distance, walking towards the family farm, he was, “...filled with compassion.” In one of the most moving acts of love within scripture, the father, who is presumably an old man now, physically runs to his son.He throws his arms around him, and kisses him. The father doesn’t even seem to acknowledge the younger son’s apology. He is too busy wanting to celebrate the greatest thing possible. His son has returned home, his family is finally together again. “For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!” This is a level of joy that is beyond day to day. It is a life altering moment for the father, no matter his son's intentions. To compound the family tension, no one even bothers to tell the older son that his brother has returned home. He is out working in the fields, while his father gives away his property to celebrate the return of his brother. It isn’t until he asks a nearby slave what is happening that he learns about his brother's return. All this is to say - if the older brother seems livid, he is certainly within his rights. Anger is a funny thing. It is generally a secondary emotion, covering up deeper feelings within us. The older brother could have heard the news and stormed into the family party and made a scene. Instead, he swallows his rage, like a carbonated beverage bottled and shaken up. It will blow on whomever dares open it. So when the father comes out to the field, and pleads with him to come inside and join the celebration, the older son erupts. Behind his angry statements are not only the anger at this one event, but the bottled up resentments that have been sitting and stewing for some time. This was the final straw. The older son compares the work he’s done to support his father, like that of a slave. He laments there has never been any kind of celebration for his presence, and he has never been anything but respectful and hard working. He is so full of hurt and injustice that he can’t even refer to his sibling as a brother. Yet when this son of yours comes back after wasting everything you gave him and abandoning our family, you throw him a party? His father tells him, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.” There is nothing about this situation that seems fair. So what do we do with this text? How do we make sense of it? It begins to make more sense if we consider the wider context in which Jesus tells the parable. Jesus had been hanging out with the kind of folks that nobody ever wanted around. The folks that make us wary and want to call the authorities to move them along. Jesus was breaking all the agreed upon social norms by eating with them. The Pharisees saw this, and were once again deeply troubled. We often vilify those who challenge Jesus, such as the Pharisees. But generally speaking - that’s a mistake. Challengers often represent religious leaders who were doing everything they could to protect the traditions of their faith, as they understood them. They thought they were doing the morally right thing. As one commentator noted, the offense these religious leaders are trying to get at, is that these people Jesus is eating with, don’t deserve to be spending time with Jesus.* The sheer fact that Jesus is eating with them elevates their dignity, and from the perspective of the religious authorities, such an elevation lowers Jesus' dignity. Yet in telling this parable alongside a couple of others, Jesus is saying to them: Yeah, that’s the point. Why would Jesus eat with those society had considered beneath him? Well, because he was trying to help society rediscover mercy, grace, forgiveness, and compassion as God intended them. In her book, Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy, Anne Lamott defines mercy as, “...radical kindness. Mercy means offering or being offered aid in desperate straits. Mercy is not deserved. It involves absolving the unabsolvable, forgiving the unforgivable.”** She compares this kind of forgiveness as setting a prisoner free, only to discover all this time, that the prisoner was really you.** She explains that mercy is not something we do. Rather, “... it is something in you, accessed, revealed, or cultivated through use, like a muscle. We find it in the most unlikely places, never where we first look.”** In this parable, the father is able to absolve the unabsolvable, forgive the unforgivable. Irrelevant of whether the younger son is sincere or not. The motivations behind returning home simply do not matter to the father. Instead, he has compassion on his younger son’s troubles, and shows him the kind of love that will remind him just how precious he is in the eyes of his father. What the older brother struggles to understand is that when the father elevates the younger son, it does not lower the value of the older son, and everything he has done to support his father. It’s completely unrelated, as hard as that is for the older son to believe. In spending time with those on the margins, and flipping community norms, Jesus is proclaiming an ancient truth - each and every person is inherently valuable in the eyes of God. Each and every child of God will have their own lived experiences, their own ways of struggling, growing, and changing. Irrelevant of our choices or behaviors, we are cherished by God as their very own. This is not a free pass to act out or be horrible. Those kinds of actions grieve God, and like a loving parent, God is always calling us back towards being in right relationship with God, one another, and the wider world. This season of Lent is the time when we are invited to pay closer attention as we examine our actions, behaviors, and relationships as we look towards the cross, grave, and resurrection. As we try to make sense of the chaos and uncertainty unfolding in our world, we remember we have a role to play in both giving and receiving mercy. This Lent, are we going to stay angry in the field or will we do something truly daring, by going inside and joining the feast? I pray we'll all find the courage to notice the joy and mercy of our God in our complicated families and in our messy world. I pray that we will risk it all by embracing mercy, and going into the feast. Amen. * Working Preacher Podcast for 4 Lent, 2025. ** Anne Lamott, Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy, 10, 19, 49, 51
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 By David Sund, Lay Preacher
Thanks to the Lenten emphasis of the lectionary, we have another opportunity to think about repentance. But today’s Gospel passage doesn’t start with a call to repentance, it starts with talk of disastrous days. It’s almost as if someone had ripped tear-stained, above-the-fold headlines from the Jerusalem Gazette Recorder and tucked them into a fanny pack before heading out with the crowds that were always swarming around Jesus. Given our current national and global circumstances, the first verse weighs heavily. Like me, do you feel buried alive beneath mountains of distressing headlines; confused, frustrated, stalemated? Do we value Jesus’ opinion enough to bring those headlines to him? If he offers a peculiar perspective on our disastrous days, will we allow that perspective to fix our blurred focus? In Luke’s Gospel, there is a recurring phrase, “[Jesus] set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Lk 9:51, 13:33 17:11). When it came to his perspective on life direction, Jesus was definitely laser-focused. His clear-eyed intent would become confusing and frightening for His followers. But he was un-deterred. While crowds shuffled up clouds of dust from Galilee to Jerusalem, the incessant words of Jesus’ sceptics, critics and detractors were a like a buzzing cloud of flies, unable to harm (much to their chagrin) but annoyingly persistent. All along the way they hoped to discredit, tarnish or ideally derail this Messiah-in-the-making. Their attacks were crafted around hypothetical scenarios and loaded questions. But in Luke, 13 the conversation turned to real-life current events. Someone pulled the crumpled headlines from the fanny pack and recited them to Jesus. Were his enemies delighted with this gift of current events? When faced with brutal or tragic deaths of real-life people, how would Jesus react? There was a backstory for the first disastrous headline. The Roman governor Pilate, like every good Roman, made a religious sacrifice to the Emperor—every Roman acknowledged the Emperors as demigods. But adding injury to insult, as a part of that burnt sacrifice, Pilate slaughtered protesting Galilean Jews, and placed their remains on the sacrificial pyre. Horrific? Unquestionably so! Then, practically in the same breath, someone shares news that a tower in Siloam has fallen, crushing eighteen people. Tragic? Unquestionably so! The interest of the crowd is piqued: In the back of everyone’s mind was a universal question; a question that had echoed throughout the Hebrew scriptures, throughout the recorded musings of Greek philosophers, and reverberates still; a question that will probably outlive all of us! It was a one word question: “Why?” We humans have a subconscious, calculus that quickly muddles circumstances with consequences. Like Job’s uncompassionate friends, there is the assumption that God has his thumb on the divine scales, intent on meting out retribution. If the victims in the gruesome news were “good people” surely God would have protected them from Roman swords and toppling towers. I’m pretty sure that none of us here would verbalize anything like this. None of us wants to admit indulging in the blame game. But deep down in our all-too-human nature there is that judgmental eight year old child that wants to draw black-Sharpy-marker-lines of clear connection. The blame game is a default setting. While we might not blame the victims we ache to blame someone. That’s one of the ways we try to make sense out of senseless tragedies. Doubt this impulse? Haven’t we all had one of those days, where we’re running late, only to discover a flat tire on top of it all? Or we’re baking for a special event and the leavening agent has failed? Or the kids have been dressed for a special occasion and the family pet conspires with the youngest to create a filthy mess? Or more seriously, there is a heart-wrenching divorce or an ominous diagnosis, or even the death of a loved one….Aren’t the first words out of our mouths often, “WHY me? “ It’s an angry reflex, and self-centered, but the blame game still! Truth be told, often there is someone or something to blame: a cruel dictator, a greedy corporation willing to cut corners, a vindictive former friend, an embittered family member, a lapse of self-discipline or an impersonal but potent weather front sweeping across a continent… Someone or something really can be blamed for igniting disasters big and small. But Jesus is quick to quench the fatalistic assumption that bad things only happen to bad people. In our Gospel narrative Jesus refuses to play the blame game. He anticipates it and deflates it. He quenches the toxic impulse to blame the victims. “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way, they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you.” “Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you.” The victims from the disaster headlines did not die because they were especially sinful. These victims of tragedy died because life is fragile and unpredictable. That fragility and unpredictability of human life is the basis of Jesus’ peculiar perspective on our disastrous days. Almost as if we skipped a paragraph in the story, Jesus changes the narrative. There’s no “why” given. His peculiar perspective kicks in. Jesus begs us to see our frailty and mortality as OPPORTUNITY. Again, I’m convinced that Jesus wants us to see our frailty and mortality as OPPORTUNITY. He doesn’t want us cowering in fear over our unpredictable futures. He doesn’t want us hiding behind the blame game in an attempt to deflect accountability and responsibility. Instead he encourages us to own our weaknesses and failures and then take a path to healing and wholeness. Jesus says, we all make mistakes and lose sight of God’s will for our lives, in short, we are all sinners. If we will acknowledge that, if we will embrace his call to repentance we will find an exit from the crisis mind-set and a way through disaster. What does it mean to repent? Most of our dictionaries would answer something like this: “to feel or express sincere regret or remorse about one’s wrongdoing.” Mea culpa, mea culpa. But that is merely an Apology! Sincere repentance should have a component of regret over past sins. But, like the word “conversion,” Scripture uses the word “repent” in the potent, figurative sense of “turning around,” and “changing direction.” I don’t know about you, but especially in crisis, I want to reinforce my narrative, batten down my hatches and dig in my heels. Jesus’ peculiar perspective of repentance feels threatening. With God’s help, and an honest assessment of our own lives, we can make fertile choices that will have fresh consequences. Repentance means that we pro-actively steer clear of fruitless, self-destructive choices and seize every opportunity to walk in God’s grace. The value of repentance is built into our Anglican tradition when week after week, there is time for confession. Confession of course simply means “telling the truth.” And what is the focus of our weekly, corporate truth-telling? We recognize our impoverishment to FIX everything that is wrong with this world, AND admit our complicity in that wrongness. Confession is the first step in a repentant direction. Jesus says there’s too much at stake for us to waste time assigning culpability. This is especially important if, when we’re pointing out a problem with some one or some system, we refuse to examine where we might be the wrong ones too! The great prophetic voices of the Hebrew Scriptures set a precedent: In prayers of confession on the behalf of their besieged or exiled nation, even the most praise-worthy prophets included themselves in their pleas for mercy: Forgive US, deliver US, heal US… In our Gospel reading, those judgmental voices in the crowd willfully ignored this precedent. “Hey Jesus, look at THEM! What about THEM? Of course the unspoken comparison is, ‘since we’re still alive and well, we must be O.K. Those corporate confessions don’t really apply to us; we’re just joining in for the benefit of the real losers…the real offenders. Ignoring our need for confession and repentance will always have sad consequences. Did you notice how Jesus words about repentance are full of urgency? That’s probably because existence is precarious. God is infinitely patient, but our finite lives mean that time is running out to participate in the productive life of faithful, fruitful community. Especially in disastrous days; justice, kindness, compassion, making amends, and generosity are urgent business. This sort of repentance can’t be just a when-convenient side-gig or merely a rare spontaneous, emotive reflex. Repentance cannot be seen as a once-and-done transaction. Repentance might be an annual Lenten theme, but to be real it must be ongoing; a daily life-style. Repentance isn’t so much about ideas or feelings. It is about Being and Doing. As a preacher friend of my likes to say, “It’s doing that makes the difference.” More specifically, in the familiar prayer of Saint Francis, repentance looks like this: “Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.” I was recently introduced to a popular, charismatic chorus with this refrain: “You rescued me out of the mess I was in…now I’m dancing on the grave I once lived in.” Jesus’ brand of repentance isn’t about shame, or blame. It isn’t vain regret over the past. It has a purpose-filled, future focus. If we will own our wrongness rather than projecting it, if we will seek reconciliation with God and others, we can learn to dance on the graves in which we used to cower. Finally, when we’re tempted to sort the world into camps of Good Guys and Bad Guys, let’s cling to the focus of repentance: Love. In a recent email message from the Society of Saint John the Evangelist, Br. Curtis Almquist put it this way: “Who is on your list of appalling people? These same people are the people Jesus associates with and welcomes indiscriminately. It seems the Jesus even loves them. He tells us to do the same. If loving them is too far of a reach, then remember that God loves them, and that the God of love is not done with them yet… nor with you and me. (Brother Give Us a Word: Enemy 3/5/25, SSJE) AMEN.  By The Rev. Dr. Molly Scherm
Our readings this morning speak to us of unease, of longing, waiting, and lamenting. As is so often the case, scripture touches the realities we are living in our own lives. We’ve heard two stories. Both of them involve longing and waiting, and they shine a light on what it is to live in the complexities of being faithful. The first of the two stories involves a moment of encounter between God and Abram from the book of Genesis. Abram had been spoken to by God twice before, at this point, but while God had spoken, Abram had not responded with words. Now, Abram replies to God. He has a burning question, an unfulfilled longing he can no longer keep silence with: he has no heir, no inheritance. For Abram’s people, having “everlasting life” consisted in having the legacy of descendants to carry on one’s memory, and an estate to provide for them. At the point of today’s passage in Gen. 15, God had already promised heirs and land, but to Abram, the promise is not really real. He has heard God’s promises, but has no lived reality through which to make sense of them. For Abram, they are empty words. He has been faithful: he has followed God’s direction in leaving his home without knowing where he is going, traveled to places appointed, and continued through various challenges and hardships. But he is having an increasingly hard time trusting the promises when there has been no confirmation IN EXPERIENCE. Abram has been waiting, and waiting is eroding his confidence. So God reiterates the promise: “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them." Then he said to him, "So shall your descendants be. I am the Lord who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess.” But still Abram longs for a sign, and questions: "O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?" And so Abram and God enact a ritual. To us it is a pretty strange ritual, but it is customary to that time and culture. When two parties are making covenant, they jointly offer animal sacrifice, splitting animal carcasses into two and passing between them. The act symbolically states their willingness to suffer same fate as the split carcasses if they should dare to break their covenant promises. In the Genesis text, a flaming torch – foreshadowing the pillar of fire that will indicate God’s presence in leading Israelites in the wilderness after their delivery from Egypt – passes between the parts, signifying God’s commitment to God’s promises. The storyteller doesn’t tell us, however, whether Abram’s disquiet was eased by the vision. Today’s gospel also speaks of longing and of waiting Jesus’ daily ministry involved the work of healing, providing what was needed to those he met. He demonstrated the presence of God’s Realm, God’s Kingdom, breaking into the world by his acts of providing what was needed -
Jesus does these acts of deliverance and healing as demonstration of his message of God’s love and God’s nearness. At the point at which we listen in on today’s story, Jesus is also traveling gradually toward Jerusalem – the city that had historically rejected and killed the prophets. He had received recent news of Herod’s beheading of John the Baptizer, and now a group of Pharisees inform him that Herod wants to kill him. Jesus knows, in general at least, that this is the fate he is traveling toward, but has his own timetable. He has more work to do before his work is complete – today and tomorrow (he says)- … and on the third day I will finish my work. Third day refers to the time of resurrection. Jesus’ work includes his daily ministry AND his arrest and death and resurrection, which will allow his disciples to finally understand the whole point of his life and teaching, that God’s Realm is present here and now. Jesus’ ministry does not end with his death, but is completed on the third day. Just as Abram longed for an heir and a legacy, and for certainty regarding God’s promises, Jesus expresses, in response to the news of Herod’s dangerous intentions, his own longing. His response to the Pharisees’ reminder of what lies ahead is compassion.
Abram longs for an heir, a legacy, understanding of G’s promises. Herod longs to eliminate Jesus as a threat. Jesus longs to protect Jerusalem from its own worst inclinations. Longing for that which will bring us respite from the worries and fears of life is always a part of the human experience. Often we long for relief from the difficulties of our personal lives, for ourselves and those we love
In this time in the history of our nation and the world we are also living with tremendous anxiety (and often with anger) in relation to the ways in which the policies and practices of our nation have shifted. We read in the news, daily, of the loss of protection for the vulnerable in our nation and world, of the loss of livelihood for many, of the abandonment of measures that support the wellbeing of our environment. So, much of our longing, like Abram’s, is for assurance that the future is not as bleak as it looks. For Abram, and for the author of the psalm we sang together this morning, the answer is that we must maintain trust in God to provide what we need, and that we must accept God’s timetable, rather than our own. Honestly, it is hard to feel reassured by this when we see suffering, and fear that terrible mistakes are being made in our world. At the same time, there is some relief (for me, at least,) in knowing that even as we are obligated to do what we can do to work for what is right, at the end of the day, we can leave it in God’s hands. From Jesus we learn two things.
And in these troubling times, we need to up our games by calling out for the justice we long for, by sending our postcards to the White House, and calling our representatives, and signing petitions. As we continue to move forward with as much patience and hope as we can muster, let us remember and find comfort in the words of the psalm we have sung together this morning: The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom then shall I fear? One thing have I asked of the Lord; one thing I seek; * that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life; O tarry and await the Lord's pleasure; be strong, and God shall comfort your heart; * wait patiently for the Lord. Amen  By Rev. Heather J. Blais, Rector
The Church across the world is invited today to begin the observance of a holy Lent. Ashes are imposed by drawing the sign of the cross on foreheads, while reminding us of an eternal and unavoidable truth. “You are dust, and to that dust you shall return.” This is not a condemnation. It is a gift. A reminder of how precious life is, and our shared responsibility to make this journey with faith and intention. We are invited to observe Lent by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word. I want to spend a few minutes this evening sharing some ways we might embrace this invitation. They may or may not be right for you. What matters is that we each discern how God is inviting us to observe this Lent. We might observe Lent by focusing on self examination and repentance. We begin with self-examination. Looking first at where we may need reconciliation with God and/or ourselves. Asking:
Then we consider where we may need reconciliation with our family, friends, and neighbors. Asking:
Finally, we reflect on reconciling with our enemies. Those we believe are vehemently wrong or hold with contempt. And if we don’t think we have any enemies, I would push back a bit. Think about the politicians, business leaders, or groups that we believe are acting deplorably. Can we distinguish between their disturbing actions and the truth of our faith - that they too are made in the image and likeness of God? That they too are beloved by God? And if so, can we more consistently model that in the way we speak about them? Once we have gotten clear on where we need reconciliation, we find a way to repent and mend those tender places. This may be in prayer or journaling; talking to a trusted friend or therapist; changing a behavior or action; or sitting down with whomever we are called to reconcile with. We might bring this tender concern to God during the confession in Sunday worship, or meet with the clergy about the sacramental rite of reconciliation. Another way to observe Lent is by focusing on prayer, fasting, and self-denial. When Bishop Beckwith was with us a couple of Sundays ago, he proposed a Sabbath Fast from Food, Finance and Media. What might it look like if throughout the Church, some choose to embrace a second Sabbath, where we:
Imagine the space that might be generated as a result of this fast. Space to pray and discern what we want our relationship to be with the production/consumption system. Now maybe the demands of caregiving or mid-life leave us feeling unable to take a second day of Sabbath. Maybe we have a hard enough time trying to hold space for a Sabbath. If that’s the case, we might instead double down in our intention of honoring the Sabbath. Choose one day a week that we will intentionally gear towards rest and renewal. On this day, we won’t shop online or run around doing errands. Rather we will make ourselves more available to God. If you’re interested in exploring this, please see the links posted with this sermon to Bishop Beckwith’s blog. We might observe Lent by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word. Molly introduced me to a lovely Lenten devotional that comes from the Communities for Spiritual Vitality, a ministry of the Diocese of Vermont & Diocese of Massachusetts. The devotional is focused on the prophet Isaiah, who was a prophet of both rebuke and hope. Something we all need right now. Each daily devotion begins with an invitation to pray the included Collect of the Day, and a particular passage from Isaiah. Then we’re invited to reflect on the passage:
Then read the daily reflection, and notice where we’re drawn in and where we pull back. Lastly, end in prayer, including prayer for the writer, their worshipping community, and their diocese. This devotional features writers from all over Province 1, including our own Jimmy Pickett, Julie Carew, Molly Scherm, and Will Harron. If you’re interested in this devotional, please see the link posted with this sermon. No matter what you discern, this Lent, remember you are invited to wear your ashes, to claim repentance, grace and deep relationship with God for the challenges of your daily life. Amen. |