November 1, 2026, All Saints Day, Reflections on Matthew 5: 1-12 by the Reverend Carole Horton-Howe

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
"Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
"Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
"Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
"Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
"Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you."

Sermon by the Rev. Carole Horton-Howe

On this All Saints day, I’m reminded that there are a couple volumes that the church publishes that relate to our celebration today.  One is called “Holy Women Holy Men: Celebrating the Saints” and another, companion volume is called “A Great Cloud of Witnesses.” Both of these are several inches thick and rich with the stories of saints, with prayers and readings from Holy Scripture for each of them.  They are arranged by date, by their feast day, so there is a someone to celebrate and a story to take in virtually every day of the year. If you are a book nerd like me, and if a good time for you is just sitting down with a dictionary or encyclopedia and turning the pages to peruse  whatever is there – you’ll love “Holy Women Holy Men” and “A Great Cloud of Witnesses.” 

These are our spiritual ancestors, our inspiration.  And it is their stories we honor and celebrate today. Their stories begin within the Beatitudes. You don’t have to read too many of their stories to see that they universally begin within the heart of God. They are the poor in spirit, the meek, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and the persecuted.

And their story is how they persevered, how in spite of it all, they moved through life focused on their love of God and God’s love for them. The saints are real-life examples of people who put those radical teachings into practice.  They give us hope and a path to follow.   

The Beatitudes are some of those verses that are familiar not just to church goers but in the wider culture as well.  The Monty Python crew wrote into the script of “Life of Brian” lines like “blessed are the cheesemakers.” And it works because most 21st century folks hearing that recognize them as a play on what Jesus said.  This is highly ironic since in the world of Matthew’s gospel, the Beatitudes were not familiar pearls of wisdom. Quite the contrary. The original audience would have been astonished at the words and ideas they were hearing from Jesus.  The folks that Jesus was talking to that day were on the margins of society, a bunch of nobodies from the world’s perspective. But Jesus claimed that something surprising was starting and it was starting with them.

He starts by telling them, “Blessed are the poor and spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven. What does that mean? Jesus was talking about a new kind of reality. From the crowd’s perspective, there’s is a world of violence and corruption where might makes right. But for Jesus, there was a realm where generosity reigns, where there's justice and peace, a world where love is the final word. He was telling them about God's heavenly reality, that heaven was coming to earth beginning with these people.

This crowd is made up of people who knew scriptures, who knew the fate of the prophets.  They also knew that God promised that it would be through them given as a light to the world that God’s Kingdom would be restored over all the world.

There are a few different interpretations of the Hebrew word that the NRSV gives us as “blessed are you.” Some believe it’s best translated as “very happy” are you or “flourishing” are you, even “you’ve chosen the right path.”  Perhaps one of those resonates with you more than the others.  Whichever translation you prefer, these eight Beatitudes define a life aligned with God and God’s grace rather than worldly power, status of self-protection.

To be poor in spirit is to let go of ego by practicing active listening, admitting when you are wrong, and not tying your self-worth purely to career or possessions.

To mourn is to empathize with your own and the personal pain of others, with global pain without rushing past grief or numbing yourself to the suffering of others.

To be meek is to choose quiet strength, patience, and self-control instead of aggressive self-assertion or trying to win every argument.

To hunger and thirst for righteousness is to pursue fairness, truth, and God’s will in your community, workplace, and relationships.

To be merciful is to let go of grudges, offer genuine forgiveness, and show compassion to people who cross you.

To be pure in heart is to living with single-minded honesty, integrity, and undivided loyalty to what is good and true.

To be a peacemaker is to step directly into family arguments, social divisions, or workplace stress to build bridges and restore calm.

To be persecuted for righteousness sake is to hold steady to your values and kindness even when people mock, push back, or misunderstand you. 

Now because we are hearing Matthew’s gospel this year, we have the Beatitudes from Matthew today. But I actually prefer the version from Luke. I prefer Luke’s version which is broader and speaks to how our lives are complicated.  It adds a section of warning, “woe to you.”

But woe to you who are rich,
    for you have received your consolation.
‘Woe to you who are full now,
    for you will be hungry.
‘Woe to you who are laughing now,
    for you will mourn and weep.

 ‘Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.

But then there is the beauty of Luke’s version.  Because for those who most recognize themselves in these “woe to you” verses, he gives them a way back, a path or redemption:

27 ‘But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. 29 If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. 30 Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. 31 Do to others as you would have them do to you.

In the stories of the saints, you see how easy it is to relate to them.  They are mostly normal people living average lives – trying to get through the day, the excitement and the repetitive, mundane parts of life.  Something happens to them – something extraordinary.  A joy, a sorrow, a tragedy, a poverty of spirit - something that takes them out of their normal life, some moment where they can’t stay where they are, some moment where that have to make a choice. 

And here’s what they invariably have in common:  in making that choice, they turn towards God.  In that moment they turn to God in need of God’s power to save, comfort, to strengthen.  And they never turn back.  From them on, their focus is on God.  This isn’t always easy.  But they don’t go back to their old lives.  They keep striving for God.  Because that’s where they are their best selves. Saints are not distant figures with supernatural superpowers; they are ordinary people who refused to let bitterness, greed, or violence sour their compassion. They show us what the Beatitudes look like in work clothes. Saints remind us that holiness isn’t reserved for a mystical elite; it blossoms in daily faithfulness—responding to difficulties with mercy and to emptiness with trust in God.

Such responses are not confined to the saints and beloved in the volumes of Holy Women Holy Men. There are saints among us. Look around. We’re surrounded by saints. Maybe the Church’s Commission on Liturgy and Music hasn’t gotten the word, but they’re among us.

If you take calculus at St. Francis High School in La Canada you’ll have to be in Mr. O’Connor’s class. Nobody looks forward to being in Mr. O’Connor’s class. When his students were interviewed about him and asked, “does the word love come to mind?”   not a single student thought that was accurate.  The truth was that Mr. O’Connor can be kind of a drudge. He tells them things like, “you don’t know what you’re doing.” 

Mr. O’Connor shared his thoughts on teaching and learning in a recent interview: “it drives me crazy when people say that school should be fun.  You can’t make school fun.” The 70-year-old Viet Nam vet says, “I’m not here to entertain anyone.”  The students thought that’s all there was to know about Mr. O’Connor -- until a student named Pat volunteered to head up a student blood drive and went to a meeting at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles.  

Whenever he told someone he as a student at St. Francis, they would immediately say, “Oh you must know Jim O’Connor. Isn’t he wonderful?” Pat had no reply.  Out of both disbelief and politeness he didn’t argue. But he started to understand why they said that when he found a plaque inside the blood donor center listing all the top donors including the record holder – Jim O’Connor. 

Then he learned something even more astounding: when Mr. O’Connor isn’t torturing kids with calculus problems, he’s on a whole different mission: cuddling sick babies.  Three days a week for the past 20 years, Jim O’Connor has come to the NICU to hold, feed, walk and comfort tiny babies.  Nurses there know that when Jim takes a baby in his arms, it will quiet, relax and fall asleep with him. Jim has no kids of his own, but he has fallen hard for these babies. “I just like them and relate to them somehow,” he says. I don’t want them to be alone. I’m not a tough guy – but don’t tell my students.”

  Sometimes you think you know someone but you don’t have the slightest idea. They did find out, though. Once Pat let the other students know about Mr. O’Connor’s softer, saintly side, he saw him in a new way. “I always respected him,” Pat says. “But now it’s at a new level. I want to be like him. He’s the epitome of a man of service.”

True holiness isn’t by flashy miracles, public fame, or religious talk. It’s more about habitual virtues like patience, humility, forgiveness and love. It’s not perfection but is grounded in practical signs of holiness in daily.  That’s what we celebrate to today – saints in our history, saints among us and our desire in turning towards God to be like them, to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Amen.  

October 25, 2026, The Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost, 'agape -- love as a conscious decision about how to behave, no matter what' by the Reverend Jeannie Martz

          How do we come to love God?  How does each one of us come to know what God is like?  And since we can’t see God or touch God, how can we be sure that the understanding of God that each of us has is accurate?

          These questions aren’t specifically addressed in today’s reading from Matthew, but they’re certainly triggered by it.  They certainly flow from Jesus’ conversation with the Pharisees.

          The passage we hear today closes a section in Matthew that we’ve been in for the last five Sundays.  It takes place the day after Jesus’ triumphant “Palm Sunday” entrance into Jerusalem, so we as the Christian community know that this is the final Monday of Jesus’ life – and a contentious Monday it’s been, because he’s been teaching in the Temple; and his discourses with the crowds have continually been interrupted by confrontations with every segment of Jerusalem’s leadership. 

          First off, the chief priests and the elders, the Temple leadership, challenged Jesus’ authority to teach – and he responded by putting them on the spot with a question about the authority of John the Baptizer.  He then directed three parables against them, parables that were also directed against the Pharisees, who were the experts on the Law in everyday life.

          In return, the Pharisees wanted to have Jesus arrested, but they recognized that his popularity with the crowd would make that both difficult and dangerous; so instead, they set about trying to get him to incriminate himself. 

As we heard last week, the Pharisees sent a group of their own disciples along with supporters of the Roman occupation, to ask about the legality of paying taxes to Rome.  According to Matthew, Jesus’ answer to their question left them “amazed.”

          Jesus was later confronted by a group of Sadducees, the Sadducees being Jerusalem’s upper crust socially and the upper crust of the Temple leadership as well.  The Sadducees appreciated the benefits of not rocking the boat, of maintaining an uneasy peace with the local Roman officials; and they probably got along better with the Romans than with the Pharisees, because the two Jewish groups disagreed theologically on several points, one of those points being resurrection.  The Pharisees believed in the resurrection of the faithful on the Last Day; the Sadducees did not – and so the group coming to Jesus was hoping to discredit both Jesus and the Pharisees when they asked him a very contrived question about which of her husbands a woman widowed seven times would belong to in the resurrection.

          Matthew tells us that Jesus’ answer left the crowd “astounded” and the Sadducees silenced (Matt. 22:23-33) and so the Pharisees, still trying to salvage the day, move in here one last time.  Called a “lawyer” – which is to say, a specialist in the Law of Moses – their spokesman asks Jesus, “Which commandment in the Law is the greatest?”

          As with the other questions of the day, this one is also a trap.

          There are 613 commandments in the Mosaic Law: 248 positive ones, and 365 negative ones.  Debate about which commandments are “heavy,” or difficult to observe, and which are “light,” was a standard part of rabbinical discourse and Jesus himself talks about the Pharisees laying “heavier” burdens of observance on others than they take on themselves. 

Discussion about ranking the commandments in order of their importance was also standard scholarship, but the lawyer isn’t asking Jesus to tell him which commandment heads up the whole list of 613; he’s asking Jesus which commandment stands alone as the greatest, apart from the others – and the trap here is that in spite of their different weights, all 613 commandments were understood to be equally binding upon the faithful.  To elevate one commandment above the others would be human presumption in the face of divine grace, and would disparage God’s gift of the Law.

          But Jesus’ answer goes far beyond the Law, because he does two things:  first, he takes two distinct parts of the Law – one, from Deuteronomy, the Shema, which is Israel’s most basic statement of identity: “Hear, O Israel:  The LORD our God is one LORD.  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind”; and the other part Jesus takes is a portion of the directions in Leviticus known as the Holiness Code, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  He puts this Leviticus commandment together with the second half of the Shema and makes them two parts of the whole, saying that the second commandment is “like” the first; and the Greek word he uses for “like”, homoia, doesn’t mean “similar;” but rather means “equal and inseparable.”  (Craddock, 426)

          Jesus then says that these two commandments taken together as one are the key to everything:  “On these two commandments,” he says, “hang all the law and the prophets.”  These two commandments taken together as one are the lynchpin of the whole of God’s divine revelation to the people.  They’re not just the key to understanding God’s Law; they’re the key to, and the source of, everything God has spoken to Israel through the prophets as well.  These two commandments taken together as one are everything.

          One author writes, “To love God is to love in the way that God loves – indiscriminately.  To love God is to love what God loves – everything.”  Total, indiscriminate love.  (Feasting, Mt, Th, 214) 

God is the source of all being, and so to love God is to love everyone, and to love everything, that God loves.  To love our neighbor as ourselves is to see and to value everyone, and ourselves, as God sees and values each and every one of us. 

Needless to say… this is a very, very tall order.

How do we come to love God?  How does each one of us come to know what God is like?  And since we can’t see God or touch God, how can we be sure that the understanding of God that each of us has is accurate?  And how on earth can we ever love as completely as God loves?

As for how we come to know God, I think this happens in many ways.  Some of us may start to find and to know God through nature and Creation, through the wonder of all the things God has made.  Some of us may see God’s handiwork in the beauty of mathematics, or in the emotive power of music.  Many of us start to know God, and to know about God, through other people, people who not only tell us about God, but who show us God’s grace and God’s love in the way they live their own lives, each and every day.

At some point we start to learn about what God has done for us in Jesus; we learn about the God who died on the cross so that we might have life, the God who was raised on the third day, and who now lives, ready to walk with each of us every day, if we’ll let him.  “In this is love,” writes the author of 1 John, “not that we loved God but that [God] loved us and sent [God’s] son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.”  (1 Jn. 4:10)  (emphasis mine)

In the life and the love and the ministry of this same son of God, this Jesus, this visible expression of the invisible God, we see and experience the full revelation of God’s true nature.  We see and experience the true nature of God’s love as being love that is “unmotivated and unmanipulated, unconditional and unlimited.”  “Such love is not a matter of feeling, which cannot be commanded in any case” writes one author, “but [this love is a matter] of commitment and [of] action.”  (Craddock, 25)

This love is a matter of commitment and of emotion.

 God is committed to us and is for us, because God has long since chosen to be so.

Chosen to be so.

And so this is how we come to love God:  we choose to.  We consciously choose to love God, we make an intentional decision to follow Jesus, because we’re told to love God with all of our minds, as well as our hearts and souls.  This doesn’t mean that our love for God can’t involve feelings; on the contrary, some of the Christian mystics have written with great passion about their relationship with God. 

Choosing to love God simply means that sooner or later, each of us will reach a point of sorrow or of disillusionment or perhaps of intellectual superiority where the whole “God thing” will make no sense to us – and at that point we will need to choose to continue loving God in spite of our inclination otherwise.

As Jesus points out today, loving others as God loves them is part and parcel with our decision to love God, but that doesn’t necessarily make it easy. 

Loving as God loves means actively seeking the wellbeing of the other; it means treating the other person as we’d like to be treated ourselves, even when we don’t like, and don’t even want to be around, that other person.

Friend or foe, enemy or neighbor – loving all these is the lynchpin of the kingdom as much as loving God is, but the problem for most of us is that we don’t really want to love our enemies and our foes…which is why we ask God in today’s collect to “make us love what [God] commands”! 

Unfortunately for us, even though in our eyes our enemies may do a pretty good job of not being at all worthy of being loved, Jesus doesn’t turn them away – and neither can we. 

We can, however, start SMALL– please, don’t start with Hitler.  Start SMALL, one person at a time; dealing with one person we don’t want to love, or don’t think we can love, at a time – and again I will say, this isn’t “love” as warm fuzzies and pastel colors.  This isn’t love as reciprocated feelings.  This love is agape -- love as a conscious decision about how to behave, no matter what.

We can start trying to love those we don’t love by praying for their health and wellbeing, by asking that God’s will may be present in their lives.  If that’s too much, we can start by asking God to help us want to pray for them, because when we pray for someone, we invest ourselves in them; we come to have a vested interest in their life.

Towards the end of his Gospel, Matthew gives us an “end times” vision of the Son of Man on his throne, judging all the peoples of the nations and separating the sheep from the goats.  Interestingly enough…and this is very important…nowhere in this vision does the Son of Man ask anyone what they have believed or what they have said; he only recognizes what they have or have not done, relative to their neighbor.  Did they feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, care for the sick, or visit those in prison?  Did they see Christ in unlikely places, or did they not?

The irony is that in serving others, the sheep had no idea they were serving Christ; they just did what they thought was right – and just as poignant as it is ironic, the goats had no clue as to what they were missing.

Jesus said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.  And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.  On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

On these two commandments hangs life itself.   Amen. 

October 18, 2026, The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost, 'The Things That Are God's' by the Reverend J.D. Neal, Deacon

Reflections on Exodus 33:12-23 / Ps 99 / 1 Thess. 1:1-10 / Matthew 22:15-22

When we meet Jesus in our gospel this morning, we find him in a bit of a pickle - dealing with a trap that follows right on the heels of the teachings and parables we’ve been hearing these past few Sundays. Jesus has just swept into Jerusalem to the praise of the crowds. He goes promptly into the temple, clearing out the money changers and merchants and turns the temple courts into a place for healing the sick and needy. When he comes back to the temple the next day, the chief priests and elders, the Pharisees and scribes – all those who control Jerusalem’s religious establishment and benefit from all the buying and selling in the temple – they gather and begin to confront him, questioning his authority and trying to turn the people against him. Over the last few Sundays we’ve heard Jesus’ fiery responses: a series of parables, condemning these leaders as lying sons, wicked tenants, and unfaithful guests who care more about their wealth and properties than about the invitation of their king. 

These leaders are outraged. They believe that they are the ones who get to decide who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ among God’s people – you can hear their frustration about this insult to their authority in the way they needle Jesus about “showing deference to no one.” But the crowds love Jesus, this man who teaches and heals and cares for them. The leaders cannot arrest Jesus directly without turning the crowds against them, so instead they try to lay a trap for Jesus in our gospel today. In order to understand the trap that’s being set for Jesus, we have to pay attention to who it is that questions Jesus while he stands in the temple this morning. 

Matthew tells us that the leaders send a mixed group of Pharisees and Herodians to ask Jesus about whether or not it is ‘lawful’ to pay taxes to Rome. This is an odd pairing, because these two groups are usually at odds with each other. The Pharisees see paying taxes to Rome as unfaithful to the Torah. The Romans are foreign, pagan oppressors who have conquered the lands of Israel, and Caesar considers himself a god-king – paying taxes to Caesar borders on idolatry. The Herodians, on the other hand, come from King Herod, who works for Rome and whose power and privilege depend upon the support of his Roman overlords – for them, paying taxes to Caesar is the only way to keep Rome happy and prevent them from cracking down further on Judea. 

In other words, if Jesus sides with the Pharisees and says ‘no taxes’, he becomes a rebel against Rome and the Chief Priests can turn him into the Roman authorities. But if he sides with the Herodians and endorses the taxes, he is aligning himself with the Roman oppressors and will lose the support of the people, letting the leaders arrest Jesus without the crowds interfering.

And then Jesus responds, cutting through all of the posturing and politicking – stepping right past the trap by simply focusing on what really matters. First, he asks for a Roman coin, a denarius, and the Pharisees and Herodians promptly produce one for him. Archaeologists have found examples of these coins from Jesus’ time, so we actually know what these look like. On the one side is an image of the emperor with the inscription of his name and title. On the other side is an image of the Roman goddess of peace, Pax. 

This is a revealing moment. A coin engraved with these images was a violation of the central commandment against carved images of other gods. It was a big ‘no no’ to carry these coins or offer them in the temple – this is why the money changers set up shop at the temple, they took advantage of the commandment to make a quick buck by exchanging Roman coins for temple-friendly coins without images of other gods. But these Jewish leaders are so used to their privilege and so intent upon tricking Jesus that they don’t even hesitate to ignore the commandment and bring these coins to Jesus publicly in the temple. Jesus’ request reveals to the crowd that these men really don’t care about what is ‘lawful’ – only about eliminating Jesus as a threat to their power and privilege.

Then Jesus asks the question. “Whose head is this, and whose title?” They answer, “the emperor’s,” and Jesus tells them to “give therefore to the emperor the things that are his, and to God the things that are God’s.” Matthew tells us that this answer disarms the Pharisees and Herodians and they leave him in amazement. What exactly is it about this answer that impresses them so much that they give up the fight?

Obviously, the coin has the emperor’s head and title on it, revealing that it belongs to the emperor, but the force of Jesus’ answer lies in his last statement, “give to God the things that are God’s.” What is Jesus referring to? What are the things that belong to God as opposed to the emperor? 

Unfortunately, I think our lectionary translation obscures the force of Jesus’ words here a bit. The word translated “head” is actually the word eikon or “image” – the same word used in Genesis 2 when God creates humanity in God’s “image” and likeness. The word translated “title” is actually a more general term for written words. In Jesus’ time (and in some Jewish traditions till this day), Jewish men were required to wear phylacteries on their head and by their heart whenever they went to pray – small leather boxes containing small sections of the Torah. Wearing these written words marked them as the people of God’s covenant and were meant to be a sign of faithfulness. In fact, in just a few passages, Jesus is going to criticize the scribes and Pharisees for caring more about wearing big, ostentatious phylacteries than about actually being faithful to the words written in those boxes.

So what are the things that have God’s image and God’s words upon them? They are – God’s people are – we are. Just as the coin’s bear Caesar’s image and title and belong to him, so we bear the image of God and the word of God and are bound to God. In essence, Jesus seems to be saying, “Sure, pay your taxes, that’s not the point. The point is who you give yourself to – who you love and serve.” Caesar does not care about you or your heart, he’s happy to leave you alone as long as he gets his taxes paid. God, on the other hand, has marked you as his own, he has given himself to you and loves you. He wants to go with you and dwell with you and within you like he did with Moses and the Israelites in Exodus, and Jesus’ concern is that we receive that blessing and live into that divine image.

The Pharisees and Herodians are amazed and silenced, I think, because Jesus’ response has exposed and challenged them. They are using the Torah as a tool in their attempts to preserve their privilege and power by arresting Jesus. They care more about their comfort and stability than about faithfulness to God’s commands. Their loyalties are divided, and Jesus’ answer demands that they look at themselves and ask – are we giving ourselves to God? 

The greatest command, according to Jesus, is that we “love the Lord our God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our might” and that this looks like “loving our neighbor as ourselves”. That last word, “might” is really important, it’s the Hebrew word meod, it literally means our ‘muchness’. It refers not to our physical strength, but to our whole sphere of influence – our stuff, our money yes, but also our time, our habits, our creative energies and relationships and practical skills – all the things that make up the stuff of our lives and allow us to love our neighbor and express our faithfulness to God externally. Jesus seems to suggest that all of this, all of our ‘muchness’, is meant to be an instrument guided by our love of God to be used in service to him and of others.

So let us leave this morning with Jesus’ words hanging in the air for us to wrestle with this week – sure, we must give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, but are we giving to God the things that are God’s?

October 11, 2026, A Celebration of Marriage, A Homily by the Reverend Carole Horton-Howe

I would like to start, by saying on behalf of everyone who calls St. Matthias their spiritual home, that we are delighted that you, Jasmine and David, chose this as the place you wanted to be married. We know we were not your first choice, or your second, or your third.  You could have chosen any number of lovely venues for your special day.  But you wanted a church, you wanted to start your marriage surrounded by those dearest to you in a church.

But somehow God led you here to this place, a church that is almost 100 years old, that has seen hundreds of weddings, thousands of worship services and celebrations. You chose this place created for God’s people to gather; a sacred space where you knew the Holy Spirit would be present and become an integral part of your union from the start. So bravo to you.

And to all of you, family and friends, for being here today.  Some of you have traveled long distances. And what a blessing that is. Your very presence consecrates this occasion every bit as much as the prayers and blessings we will speak today. So bravo to you as well.

Jasmine and David, your choice of readings today says so much about the path you’ve both chosen and your longings for what your married life together will be.

The reading today from First Corinthians begins in such a tender but gripping way. It tells us first what life is like without love: it describes living a life that may seem purposeful and focused, maybe with an accumulation of intellectual knowledge and a lot of things or wealth - and even a willingness to give away that wealth, even one’s own name.

But in the end we’re just blustering our way through our days making a lot of noise … if we don’t have love. If we’re not saturated with love in what we say and do … we’re lost. And none of it matters.

There’s a popular story about a teacher who asked her 1st grade students to define “love” – and one of the best answers was from Jeremy who said, “love is when you know your name is safe in the other person’s mouth.”

In all those lovely verses, Paul doesn’t exactly give us a process for love. Wouldn’t it be nice if he did? There’s no step-by-step here. But he says, in effect, I can’t define love but I know it when I see it. And where there is love, I see this: patience, kindness, honesty, hopefulness. I don’t see jealousy or resentment or one-upsmanship. It’s all about patience, kindness, honesty, hopefulness. That’s love. Lasting love.

Those qualities of love that Paul describes are what the ancient Greeks called “agape” love.  It is the ultimate form of love. It is – selfless, seeking first and foremost all day every day the well-being of the other person. It is love without conditions, without reservation, putting our own needs and agenda on hold so that we can unreservedly offer our partner love without judging their worthiness. 

Agape love is not primarily a feeling, but choices – one after another after another – choices put into action. And all for the thriving of our beloved. That’s what we’re about here today. That’s the goal. That’s the longing.

To be fully known and accepted must be one of the deepest longings of the human heart. To have nothing hidden. To never be turned away.

“You are the salt of the earth and the light of the world" Jesus says. Not you will be – but you already are. Jasmine and David, both of you bring salt and light into your marriage. In the short time I’ve had the pleasure of knowing you, you’ve shared how your dreams and goals are so closely in sync with each other, how you continue to discover wonderful qualities about each other. You go into this fully ready to share all that you are and pour all that you have into your married identity.

Salting something is a way of preserving from decay that which is precious. Light reveals truth, reveals God. And light drives out darkness and the destructive forces that lurk in shadows. You both have long been beacons of light – as a teacher and as someone called to bring healing. Your saltiness preserves goodness and your light is a spiritual guide, leading others to God through your actions and teachings.

That’s a lot.  Those are big tasks.  That’s a good reason to do them with a partner, a beloved.

Elizabeth Gilbert wrote a memoir called “Eat, Pray, Love.” She also wrote one on marriage called “Committed” because, she said, she needed to “make peace with that complicated thing we call marriage.” In it she wrote about being known. To be fully known, to be fully seen by someone and to be loved anyhow - this an offering that can border on the miraculous. It is miraculous indeed. Because to be fully seen is to have both our courage and our cowardice, our tenderness and our temper, our faith and our fear – all of it - held in the gaze of one who does not flinch, with the one person so committed to you that you know your name is safe in their mouth.

Every week we begin our worship service with a prayer to God says “to you all hearts are open, all desires known and from you no secrets are hid.” And I think this implies “and yet… you love us.”  They are words of an intimate knowing. Of Divine knowing. Today, that divine knowing, blesses you and sends you out into the world as one, salt and light saturated.

Up until this moment, you have been many things to one another.  And in a few moments, you will say to each other words that will take you over a new threshold of life.

If you notice, the liturgy doesn’t require you to answer the question, do you love each other. Instead, you will be asked, Will you love each other in the spirit and truth of agape love. Will you continue in the work of becoming the person you were created to be, all salt and light, so that the person beside you can do the same?

May you always find yourselves in one another. May you keep striving towards that unconditional, agape love so that you will always be able to say,

“See this man, see this woman,

he is my best friend,

she is my helper,

he is my joy, my lover, and

she is my playmate, my heart. 

This is my husband,

this is my wife,

whom I will love forever.”  

Amen. Let it be so.

October 11, 2026, The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost, Reflections on Matthew 22: 1-14 by the Reverend Carole Horton-Howe

Once more Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying: 2 ‘The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. 3 He sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come. 4 Again he sent other slaves, saying, “Tell those who have been invited: Look, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready; come to the wedding banquet.” 5 But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, 6 while the rest seized his slaves, maltreated them, and killed them. 7 The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city. 8 Then he said to his slaves, “The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. 9 Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.” 10 Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests.

11 ‘But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, 12 and he said to him, “Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?” And he was speechless. 13 Then the king said to the attendants, “Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” 14 For many are called, but few are chosen.’

Sermon by the Rev. Carole Horton-Howe

This morning’s parable presents us with Matthew’s vision of salvation.  In it quite simply, we are offered life with God. Ours to have just for accepting God’s invitation. And ours to lose by turning away.  So this is not Jesus meek and mild today.  It is a sort of tough love Jesus. And he presents it to us in a parable:

A king plans an elaborate wedding banquet for his son and sends invitations to all of the local nobility to share in the festivities. At the appointed hour, the king's servants go out to let the guests know that it is time to begin the celebration. But there is an unexpected turn of events - the guests don't come because they didn’t take it seriously, they had other places to be. They decided not to attend.

The king very much wanted to have them as his guests. So he sends out even more servants to gather up these guests. But this time not only do they refuse to come, some actually turn violent killing the messengers sent to them by the king who was offering them a feast.

So as not to deprive his son of the promised feast, the king sends out even more servants this time to round up anyone and everyone to attend the celebration - but not before exacting some judgment on the invited guests who chose not to attend the banquet that had been prepared for them. They and the empire of their making are all destroyed.

Why does Jesus begin this parable by saying that the kingdom of heaven might be compared to this scene? Surely we wonder about the characters in this parable and why they so rudely - even violently - refuse the king's gracious invitation? Who is this king who takes such action against guests choose not to come?   Who are the servants who are slaughtered in the midst of simply doing their jobs?

The king, of course, is God.  The servants sent out with the invitation to come to the banquet are the prophets, the teachers and Jesus himself. The banquet is eternal life and all the joy, and healing and peace that involves. And the guests – well, that’s all of us. There are surely similarities we can see, how ancient people, too, lived busy lives and apparently, could easily say “I’ll pay attention to that tomorrow.”  Even “I hear you, I know what you want and I’ll get to it… but not right now.”  So in the end, the kingdom of heaven is like this: the expected guests are absent and the most unlikely ones are present.

Jesus is still speaking to the religious leaders and the temple authorities in Jerusalem when he tells this parable. Do we think that they take to heart? Or might these first century descendants of the people called Israel, these keepers of the law, might they have believed that the kingdom was theirs by right and by lineage? Did they realize that they, too, were called to live faithful lives?

Many of us may see ourselves among the chosen but if we, like those first guests invited to the wedding banquet, failed to heed the call of Jesus to faithful discipleship and go on about our lives and routines uninterrupted with our true allegiance to the world around us first and our relationship with God second --  or worse deciding to destroy the messengers of God that are sent to remind us of who and whose we are, we will realize the sad consequences of our choices because we create our own separation from God.

Our call is clear: we are called to be a people who are transformed by the love of Christ. Indeed our garment is a garment of Christ's love with a purpose.

And what is that proper garment?  St. Paul tells the Ephesians it is the whole armor of God in chapter 6.

“Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. 12 For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. 13 Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. 14 Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, 15 and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. 16 In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. 17 Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.”

Put on the whole armor of God or experience what Jesus calls “outer darkness.” Don’t attempt to become a guest, a beneficiary of God’s grace, he says, without proper preparation of heart and mind. Judgment of others who make light of the banquet or who go about their business and go away is not our concern. Instead, we are to get busy preparing ourselves for judgment, preparing ourselves to meet the king who gives the wedding banquet.

And we are called to respond to our call to discipleship by following Christ, by loving God and neighbor, by walking in Christ's ways and by setting aside the ways of the world. God's banquet table will be open to the marginalized, to the neighbors who haven't been regular church goers, to those who haven't made it to the top of any who's who list or won any awards. The banquet table will be open to all who are willing to open our hearts to wear the garment of Christ's love and to walk in Christ's ways.

Matthew's gospel clearly dispels any  notion that the long-awaited Messiah has come for any one group of people. Indeed this Messiah has come from all the world, has ministered to the world, and sends his disciples forth into all the whole world to bring everyone to the feast. We are free. With the free will that was given to humankind in creation, we're free to refuse God's invitation.

We are free to be wed to the routines and the existence of our human dictates rather than to walk in solidarity with God's commandments. We're also free to suffer the consequences of our choices. But first and foremost we are loved enough by our God that God will over and over again seek us out to draw us back into relationship. And we are free to choose to accept God's love and to live with God forever.

So today we will present ourselves for holy communion confident that lives grounded in fifth and good works will be acceptable in the kingdom of heaven. The good news, as we will say at the end of communion today, is that the eternal God, our heavenly father has graciously assured us that we are living member of the Body of Christ and heirs of his eternal kingdom. We will pray for the strength to do the work that God has given us to do to love and serve God as faithful witnesses of Christ our Lord.  It’s not an easy gospel to hear.  But there can hardly be one more important. Amen 

October 4, 2026, Feast Day celebrating Saint Francis of Assisi. Reflections by the Reverend Carole Horton-Howe

Today is the Feast Day of one of the most popular and beloved religious figures saints who ever lived, St. Francis of Assisi. It’s almost overwhelming to try to talk about his life and what he means to people.  And I think he’d be a little perplexed, a little sad about that maybe.  And his advice would be to “keep it simple.” He’s been described as the person who changed the church and the world. That description would most likely just make him laugh.  Possibly because of such a grandiose description but also because of his great capacity for joy.  He was one of the most joyful people that ever lived.

When we look at his life I think it uncovers secrets to joyfulness. So here’s just a quick biography: he was born about 1182 in Assisi in the Umbria part of Italy. He was the son of a successful businessman, a cloth merchant. And Francis knew how to spend his wealthy father’s money. Francis was the life for the party always picking up the tab for his friends drinks. Everybody loved St Francis.

It wasn't just enough for him to be the life of the party. He got caught up in the excitement of the military rivalry between Assisi and another town, Perugia. He wanted to be a knight in shining armor just like a lot of his friends. He went off to battle – and it turns out that he wasn’t much of a soldier. He was injured and captured. He spent quite a bit of time as a prisoner of war. This experience changed him profoundly. After he was released, he was no longer the party boy.

He actually wanted to go off to war again to go on a crusade, but he became ill and had to return home. In his eyes, this was another failure on his part. There is a famous story where he retreated to a cave to escape from the world. When he finally emerged from the cave, he stood on his hands. A lot of the stories about Francis seem bizarre and this one is – but in a good way. Standing on his hands, he saw the world upside down. He had this new perspective on everything. From the upside down perspective, if that were right side up, it looked like everything on earth was hanging by a thread, like it's just about to fall off and scatter into the cosmos.  to see everything that's hanging by a thread from the hands of God as a gift falling in your hands  have that's how Francis lived saying I'm just giving it all up and when you just give it all up you start

To sum that up with one word, it's dependence.  He saw the dependence of everything on the will and grace of God. Francis decided he would live that way – always with a desire to be dependent not on the things of the world for protection or happiness. But in faith he rejected everything in the world for constant dependence on almighty God. 

Virtually all the stories we hear about Francis, everything we know about his life, occurred because he relied not on his own accomplishments but on God. And this gave him joy. 

This new lifestyle choice came to a head when he gave away quite a lot of cloth that his father entrusted to him to sell. Francis gave it to the por rather than selling it for the significant profit it would bring. His father was so enraged by this that he threw Francis in jail.  When went to a trial in front of Bishops and a judge - instead of saying hey I'm sorry I messed up, he tore his clothes off.  And standing naked in a court, he renounced his inheritance and proclaimed, “God is my father now.” 

He then began a lifelong passion of caring for society's castoffs, the sick and poor, including lepers. He lived in utter poverty and even went without shoes. But his humbleness, extraordinary kindness and love for humanity attracted the attention of other young men and they also chose to give up worldly pleasures and follow him to spread the gospel and serve the poor. Eventually, as the brotherhood grew, its members traveled to other parts of Europe to preach, including France, Germany, Spain and England. A separate order for women was formed, now known as the Franciscan Nuns or Poor Clares.  Brothers of the order he founded and guided tried to get him to write a rule of life. He didn't want to do. “It's just the gospels,” he told them.

Francis is probably best known for his special close relationship with animals especially the birds. Francis’ first biographer, relates that once when Francis was traveling, he came across a “great multitude of birds” and ran toward them. After he greeted them and saw that they didn’t fly away, he was filled with joy and he proceeded to preach a sermon to them, in which he told them they should acknowledge the gifts they had from their Creator and praise him.  After mingling with them, he blessed them and made the sign of the cross, then “gave them permission to fly off.”

So close was he to creation that he liked to refer to animals as his brothers and sisters. Legend has it that wild animals had no fear of Francis and even came to him seeking refuge from harm.

Francis died on this date in 1226, exactly 800 years ago.  Why is his legacy as strong as ever?  Well there are some lessons we can learn from his life to give joy and meaning to our own:

First, look at the world with a fresh perspective. When Francis first turned his life over to God, the Church was a very wealthy entity. Devoting his life to Christ in the traditional way at that time would have allowed him to live quite comfortably. Instead,  Francis chose to take the Gospel literally and led a life of poverty in the name of the Lord. By determining what was right for his own relationship with God, Saint Francis inspired others and spread the Word throughout the world.  “If God can work through me, he can work through anyone.”

Second, assist those that Suffer.  One day during Francis’ early devotions to God, he came across a leper while he was riding his horse. The young Francis would have looked down in disgust and rode on, the Francis who was dedicating his life to God stopped and dismounted his horse. Francis gave the leper a coin and kissed his hand, and then received a kiss in return. He felt filled by God’s grace and a few days later visited the hospice of lepers bringing monetary donations and serving them with humility. 

“Men lose all the material things they leave behind them in this world, but they carry with them the reward of their charity and what they give. For these, they will receive from the Lord the reward and recompense they deserve.”

And last, speak and practice peace where there is violence in the world.

At one point, Saint Francis wanted to be known for his conquests on the battlefield. Then God spoke, and Francis rode away from battle and started his relationship with Christ. The experience of violence and its consequences, turned his head and heart to peace. On his first visit to the Holy Land, Francis entered an area that was being fought over. But he did not encourage the conflict between religions. His goal was to be a force for peace to the land. He knew that despite differences, individuals can find common ground in God. The prayer of St. Francis which our choir will sing today and we will say together starts with a plea to God: “make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love.”

The legacy of Francis is that real joy in life comes through releasing self-reliance and letting the joy of God’s creation settle into you. Most of us are not called to live as radically as St Francis. But even a modicum of letting go of self-reliance allows us to live life with that upside down, God holding all type of freedom where everything is a gift. Amen.

September 27, 2026, The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, 'Almighty Power' by the Reverend J.D. Neal, Deacon

Lectionary for the 18th Sunday after Pentecost: Exodus 17:1-7 / Ps 78:1-4, 12-16 / Philippians 2:1-13 / Matthew 21:23-32

I want to start today by drawing our attention back to the collect that we prayed together at the start of today’s service. Here’s how it went:

O God, you declare your almighty power chiefly in showing mercy and pity: Grant us the fullness of your grace, that we, running to obtain your promises, may become partakers of your heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

“O God, you declare your almighty power chiefly in showing mercy and pity.” This collect struck me as I sat with our readings this week, because there is something so fundamental to the gospel, so basic to our life as a church community buried in this short sentence – yet something that is so easy to forget.

What do you think of, when you think of God? What comes to mind? For many of us church-y folks, I think words like ‘greatness’, ‘glory’, ‘omnipotence’, or ‘power’ are often near the top of the list. And this makes sense. In a few minutes, we will recite the Nicene Creed – which we do every week – and the Creed begins by having us affirm that “We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth”. This idea of un-ending power is core to our belief in God, but what does it mean that God is all-powerful? What does God do with this power, and what does that tell us about who God is?

Most of the ‘powerful’ people in our culture use their power to selfishly control the world around them – to make themselves rich, to secure themselves, to accomplish their desires in society through political or economic force, to defeat and demean those who disagree with them, those who they consider their enemies. They tell us, out loud or implicitly, that we need to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, work harder, be more productive, more successful, more powerful, more like them, if we are to have any value in their world. But God’s ‘almighty power’ is utterly unlike all this.

As Christians, the most fundamental thing that we believe God does with his un-ending power is to be Jesus. We believe not only that Jesus is God, but, as Paul tells us in Ephesians, that Jesus is “the fullness of him who fills all in all,” the clearest expression of God’s nature and character. In other words, if we have a question about what God is like, we look first and foremost to Jesus.

And what do we see when we look to Jesus? Someone “who, though he existed in the form of God,

    did not regard equality with God

    as something to be grasped,

 but emptied himself,

    taking the form of a slave,

    assuming human likeness.

And being found in appearance as a human,

 he humbled himself

    and became obedient to the point of death—

    even death on a cross.”

The power of God looks like humility, looks like Jesus emptying himself of glory, letting go of his almighty power, taking on pain and shame and eventually death to bring the life and love of God to a world full of people in desperate need of that love.

In our gospel this morning, Jesus confronts the chief priests in Jerusalem with a parable about two sons. The father asks them both to go work in his vineyard. One son says that he’ll do it, but never does. The other initially refuses, but eventually goes out and does the work – and Jesus affirms that the second son is the one who does the will of his father, regardless of the fact that he refused at first.

I think this brief parable reveals what Jesus is here for, reveals what the power of God looks like: no matter what we’ve done, how many times we resist or refuse, how many times we start and stumble and stop – God keeps reaching out, Jesus keeps inviting us back, making a way deeper into life with him. Like the Israelites in the desert, even when we forget God (which we will!), when we ignore the gifts we’ve received and all we can see and feel is the exhaustion and pain right in front of us, God still shows up. And when God shows up in our Exodus reading this morning, he does not shame or punish his grumbling, stumbling people, he just gives them water from the rock. He shows them that he has not forgotten them, that he hears them and will not abandon them.

Our Nicene Creed tells us that the first thing God does with his almighty power is to create all things, to make us. Jesus reveals that God made us to love us, that he does not stop loving us, and that the most important thing he does with his power is to keep reaching out and drawing us back into that love. That is the wellspring from which our life as Christians must flow, the fact that deep down at the root of things, we are loved by God – we do not have to strive to earn it and nothing we do can separate us from it.

A few of us from St. Matthias spent most of yesterday afternoon at the Whitter Pride festival down the street at Whittier College. Throughout the day, a few people came up to our booth and thanked us for being there. They shared that it was meaningful for them to see a church at the event, because their experience with churches in the past had made them believe that God did not love them, that they had to do and be something else in order for them to be acceptable to God and God’s people, let alone loved by God. They had been taught, like I was taught growing up, that God’s power is primarily for separating and judging and punishing those whom God doesn’t like – and it wounded them deeply. Imagine how different their lives might have been, how different our world might be, if their churches had taught them instead that “God declares his almighty power chiefly in showing mercy” – taught them that they were utterly loved by God, that they did not have to work or change to earn it, and that God would always be reaching out to invite them in.

May we at St. Matthias help one another, and every person that walks in those doors, to remember this love. Amen.

September 20, 2026, The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost, Reflections on Jonah 3:10-4:11 and Matthew 20:1-16-4:11 by the Reverend Carole Horton-Howe

Jonah 3:10-4:11

When God saw what the people of Nineveh did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.

But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord and said, “O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” And the Lord said, “Is it right for you to be angry?” Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city, and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, waiting to see what would become of the city.

The Lord God appointed a bush, and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very happy about the bush. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered. When the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die. He said, “It is better for me to die than to live.”

But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?” And he said, “Yes, angry enough to die.” Then the Lord said, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”

Matthew 20:1-16

Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace; and he said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same. And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing here idle all day?’ They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard.’ When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, ‘Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.’ When those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage.

Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?’ So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

Sermon by the Rev. Carole Horton-Howe

At the port of Jaffa near Tel Aviv there is a large sculpture of a fish. That fish is intended to depict the whale of a tale of Jonah’s misadventure. A little backstory for our OT reading today: God wanted Jonah to go to Ninevah, to preach to the people there, to urge them to repent and return to the Lord.  And Jonah didn’t think that sounded like such a good idea. Because the folks in Ninevah were not known as fine upstanding citizens.  “Those people are dangerous,” thinks Jonah. “I’m not going!”

He chose instead to board a boat headed for Tarshish. And you might remember the rest of that tale: a great storm arose and all the people on the boat blamed Jonah for that storm. They threw him overboard where he is swallowed by a great fish. But the fish spits him out onto the shore, where God’s says to Jonah, like I was saying, Jonah, go to Ninevah, get going.

So Jonah did go to do the work that God asked him to do in Ninevah. As a matter of fact, he did such a good job there that the people did indeed repent.  And when God saw their hearts had changed, God changed God’s mind and spared them.  And instead of rejoicing that their hearts were turned or thankful that God has spared them, Jonah gripes to God on a whole new level. “You spared them. You weren’t supposed to spare them. See I knew this would happen, that you are gracious and loving and kind.  And I’ve come all the way here and now you’ve spared them.” “That’s not fair!” we can almost hear him cry.

We don’t know if Jonah really thought that they weren’t deserving of God’s mercy or that they just needed to suffer – pay their dues so to speak - before they were shown mercy.  But Jonah had a real problem with God giving them a second chance. 

And there’s the great irony of this story, isn’t it? Because it’s only because of God’s mercy that Jonah himself knows about second chances. His life has been saved from complete disaster.  And his own second chance has allowed him to preach repentance and be part of the merciful redemption of the people of Ninevah. Somehow it seems that Jonah has forgotten that he is the beneficiary through God’s grace of that most precious of things: a second chance.

Intriguingly this text is linked in the lectionary today with this wonderful text from Matthew’s gospel – we have both an ungrateful Jonah and some ungrateful laborers in the vineyard. Jesus is telling a parable in the gospel today that likens the Kingdom of Heaven to a landowner who engages day laborers for his vineyard.  He goes to the marketplace early in the morning.  And rounds up workers to go work in the vineyard.  He apparently needs more workers throughout the day. 

He continues to go back to the marketplace – at 9:00, at noon, at 3 in the afternoon and at 5 in the afternoon when we think that the day is nearly over.  He keeps finding people at the marketplace when he goes back.  And finally he asks at the end of the day why there are people there waiting.  And the men that are standing there tell him that no one has hired them.

So the end of the day comes for this landowner and he tells his manager to pay everyone.  To pay those last ones that he rounded up first, but to pay everyone the daily wage those who worked only one hour and those who worked all day or an hour.  They are all to receive the same.  And those who had been there and working hard all day are disgruntled.  “Shouldn’t I be worth more than that guy?  I’ve been here all day working away in the heat of the day and the sun.  Shouldn’t I be worth more than the daily wage since I’ve been here all day?”

They may not have considered the fact that those workers who were still standing in the marketplace throughout the day – that there’s a reason for that.  Maybe they didn’t look as strong or as fit as the first folks that got hired.  Some of them might have been sick.  Maybe they were Gentiles or foreigners.  And so they just weren’t going to be the first ones to be chosen.

  I’m guessing that most of us have at some time or another worked an hourly wage job – a low hourly wage job - and so this story grates on us just a little bit. It’s our understanding that we punch a timecard so that the hours are recorded accurately and then we’re paid down to the minute for the hours we worked.  We receive our paycheck and make sure the payroll folks did it right. 

We’d go nuts if a co-worker, who worked an hour, got the same pay we did after working all day.  Right? “That’s not fair!” we would all say. We’d call the state labor board. We’d Google the Fair Labor Standards Act.  That’s the human way where fairness is based on budgets and laws, driven by the bottom-line needs and desires of employers, suppliers, customers.  That’s the human way. 

But we’re talking about God’s economy here.  Matthew’s Gospel today reminds us that we live in God’s economy, that by human standards God is a lousy bookkeeper.  And as a result, God’s mercy and grace are bottomless for everyone all the time.  We look for equity but all we find is generosity.

But for whatever reason, this landowner has decided that these last people who were passed over all day long, that they were going to get the full measure of grace and mercy too because the landowner was willing and able to be that generous to the folks who perhaps needed the most grace and mercy and generosity.

This, Jesus says, is what the Kingdom of Heaven is like – a place where the last, those who have been passed over and disregarded, those who have not known mercy and grace, will find all those things.  But those who were chosen first, those laborers who begrudged their brothers perhaps in the same way that Jonah was smarting at the idea that those Ninevites were not going to face punishment, instead receive mercy.

And here’s the question for all of us: can we live happily, joyfully when those around us are receiving grace and mercy?  Can we do so without comparing our situation with others? Have we sometimes forgotten how many times we have received that same grace and mercy ourselves?

If we’re feeling a little less than generous about God’s grace and mercy it may be that we fear that God’s mercy is finite, that it’s going to run out. Like there’s just not going to be enough, that when it comes to us maybe we’re not going to get our fair share of God’s mercy and grace. But that’s just not true. God’s mercy and grace are never going to run out, they are ABUNDANT. 

What we have realize it not just that we are receiving God’s love and mercy every single day, but we have an opportunity to see ourselves as God saw Jonah – the recipient of grace and mercy who is then sent forth to help others know those same things. Each day is a new opportunity for us to live as people who are grace and love-filled, to embody a grace and love-filled life to the world.

So I think this parable calls us to look at ourselves honestly and lovingly just as God looks as us. It invites us to turn from being judgmental and holding grudges when things don’t go the way we think they should, to let go of the stuff of our lives that stands between us and being a joy-filled and grateful people.

One of the sayings we hear now and then is “get over it.” There’s wisdom in that: to be in a mindset of working thorough things as best we can and then letting go. As long as we hold on, we continue to hurt others and ourselves. God forgives us and loves us and so we must forgive and love ourselves and others. Gratefulness is at the very heart of our faith.

There’s a hymn called “There’s A Wideness in God’s Mercy.”  I’ll share the last verse with you.  Because I think it reminds us of where we all stand as people who have benefitted so much:

“For the Love if God is broader than the measure of the mind. 

And the heart of the eternal is most wonderfully kind. 

If our love but were more faithful we would take God at his word. 

And our lives would be thanksgiving for the goodness of the Lord.” 

Amen.

September 13, 2026, The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Reflections on Matthew 18:21-35 by the Reverend Carole Horton-Howe

Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost                                Matthew 18:21-35

Peter came and said to Jesus, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.

“For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. When he began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him; and, as he could not pay, his lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions, and payment to be made. So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt. But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii; and seizing him by the throat, he said, ‘Pay what you owe.’ Then his fellow slave fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’ But he refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he would pay the debt. When his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. Then his lord summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’ And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

Sermon by the Rev. Carole Horton-Howe

I’ve often wondered, as I come back to this particular text from Matthew’s gospel when Peter asks Jesus how many times he must forgive the person who sinned against him, did he have a face in mind, a particular incident in mind?  

Peter asks, “seven times, isn’t that enough? Seven times should be enough, shouldn’t it?” Afterall seven is a pretty perfect scriptural number - that time during which God could complete creation of the world and rest. So perhaps Peter is thinking that the seventh time that he is called on to forgive that person should be enough.  And he, too, should be entitled to some rest.

Likely Jesus’s response took him aback. Seven times is not enough, Jesus tells him. Seventy-seven times might be getting a little bit closer. Might be.

The gospel can be hard. The past 2 weeks and today we are being brought face to face with some hard texts from Matthew’s gospel and from Paul’s letters to the Romans – hard in the sense that these texts affect us all and remind us of some things that we are called to know about ourselves as Christians.

We are told again and again that we are called to forgive and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

We are told that we are to bless those who persecute us.

We are told that we are not to be overcome by evil but we are to overcome evil with good.

We are told that love does no wrong to a neighbor. But love sure does go to some awfully great lengths to be reconciled with neighbor and with God. And in these last couple of weeks we’ve looked at some pretty powerful contemporary accounts:

An Amish man who wakes every day to the very real struggle to caring for his disabled daughter who was injured at the hands of a man who didn’t even know her.

In the Bibliophiles group a couple weeks ago we read stories of people wrongfully convicted of terrible crimes based on so-called expert testimony, corrupt police and prosecutors or the inaccurate identification by traumatized victims. In one case, an innocent man spent 27 years on death row and was hours away from death when a witness at his trial admitted he had perjured himself after being threatened by a corrupt prosecutor. The truth set him free.

But in today’s lesson from Matthew, we find Jesus telling a very clear parable about why it is important for us to be a forgiving people:

A servant is called upon to settle a tremendous debt, an unimaginably large debt, with the king. He is unable to do so. And he begs the king to have mercy on him. And out of pity, out of compassion, the king does just that.

          But later, when another servant who owed the first servant a much smaller debt was unable to repay it, the man who had been given so much mercy and compassion showed none.  And the king’s wrath poured out on the man who had received great mercy but in turn was unable to forgive. And so Jesus makes the point – if we want to be on the receiving end of forgiveness and mercy then we, too, must be forgiving, merciful people.

Now back to Peter’s question about how many times we should forgive, I’d answer it this way: as many times as we would hope to be forgiven ourselves. And theologian N.T. Wright, a Bishop in the Church of England offers this perspective: “if you’re still counting how many times you’ve forgiven someone, you’re not really forgiving them at all, but simply postponing revenge. Seventy times seven is a typical bit of Jesus’ teasing. What he means is “don’t even think about counting, just do it.’”

Now notice something about this group of texts for the last 3 Sundays: 

These texts are not addressed to the person who has committed the wrong. They are not directed to the person who needs to ask for forgiveness.  The texts are directed to those who have been wronged and who need to be forgiving. If we would ask for forgiveness for ourselves for our own sins, so we must be a people who are willing to forgive the sins and offenses of our neighbors.

We forgive so our own hearts will not harden.

We forgive so we will not continue to suffer because we have been wronged. 

We forgive so that we can find healing and peace.

Now to be clear, to forgive does not mean we need to place ourselves in harm’s way.  We are not required to allow anyone who would cause us harm to continue to do so, to continue to cause harm. For us to forgive is to acknowledge their humanity and our humanity and our collective need for God’s mercy, for God’s forgiveness.

To forgive really may mean surrendering those who have wronged us to God. In the words of composer Renee Clausen, forgiving really may mean to condemning our neighbor to God’s mercy as I mentioned last week.  God did not promise to spare us from the consequences of our own misdeeds.

We are always given a choice. and scriptures shows us the history of those who chose to live as unforgiven people and so be separated from God and from neighbor. God’s desire for us is not for us to live in separation from God and one another but to be bound in love with one another.

A few days ago we remembered saints among us in the commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks in New York, Washington DC and Shanksville, PA and those who sacrificed their lives to save the lives of those who left their homes that morning never assuming they would be harmed.  Our Presiding Bishop, the Most Rev. Sean Rowe sent a letter to all diocese that shows what the path forward once forgiveness is truly given.

Dear People of God in The Episcopal Church:

Twenty-five years on, we live in a world shaped by 9/11. Our lament will never end for those who died in the attacks, those who gave of their lives in the days and weeks following, and those who still suffer. Our grief is particularly sharp on this historic anniversary.

We also mourn that, since that day in 2001, our common life has been deformed by division and fear of one another. Sometimes it seems that the chasm has become unbridgeable.

As Episcopalians, however, we know there is a better way. We saw it then in the extraordinary witness of first responders, and especially in the heroic relief ministry at our own St. Paul’s Chapel in lower Manhattan. We see it now across our church in countless ministries of reconciliation, peacemaking, and in our commitment to interfaith cooperation with our Muslim siblings in faith.

Even in the face of unimaginable evil and suffering, God calls us to be repairers of the breach and restorers of paths to dwell in. I pray that this commemoration of 9/11 renews our commitment to answer that call in our own lives and communities, and together as the body of Christ in the world.

The Most. Rev. Sean Rowe
Presiding Bishop
The Episcopal Church

In remembering, we are reminded what it means to be community that loves one another, that is willing to sacrifice for one another, willing to look past all outer barriers that might separate us and see ourselves only as God’s people – a people forgiven and forgiving. And a people united to one another in love.

Amen.  

September 6, 2026, The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Reflections on Matthew 18: 15-20 by the Reverend Carole Horton-Howe

Jesus said, “If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”

Romans 13:8-14

Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet”; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.

Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.

Sermon by the Rev. Carole Horton-Howe

A priest friend tells the story of a dog, a neighborhood, a dead cell phone and how God worked it all out for love’s sake.

This priest is a petite lady who owns a very large dog.  On the evening of 12th of July, she took him for a short hike in a wooded area adjacent to her neighborhood.  All was well until a firecracker went off.  She had no idea, more than week after the 4th of July, that this might be an issue but it was.  Her dog – a Great Dane mix – was terrified of loud noises and dropped to the ground crying and drooling.  And she knew how this would go.  He would not budge.  Not an inch!  Only the strong arms of her husband, a former college wrestler would be able to hoist Marmaduke up on his paws and get him home. She pulls out her cell phone only to find it is dead as a doornail. No bars. No charge.  And it’s starting to get dark. And she’s about a half mile from her house. 

She was hoping someone would be out taking a walk and would see her and have a fully charged cell phone she could borrow so she could call home and get the help she and Marmaduke needed. And who should walk by but a man she had seen walking around the neighborhood many, many times. She didn’t know his name but it was someone who she recognized and she thought must have recognized her and her dog. She thought surely this is someone who will stop and help. But he didn’t.  So there she was, standing there now in the dark with her dog.  Hoping someone else might come alone.  It took awhile but eventually she sees a couple in the distance, who she didn’t recognize. Again, she waves and calls out to them. They did come over to her and she explained she just needed to borrow a cell phone to call her husband. 

After they offered to take her home themselves, after they offered to stay with her – after they offered everything that they possibly could offer, they parted friends.  They’d never known each other before that moment.

She was so moved by their kindness and generosity that the next morning my friend blogged about it. So this is more about what happened after the great dog caper than the night itself.   

And when she published her blog there was an immediate response, a great outpouring of support.  Calling, texting, messaging and asking are you OK?  Giving advice, take my number, letting her know where they lived, their address so if it happened again to come and knock on their door so they could help. It was incredible how they looked out for her.

She says it is a friendly neighborhood – and very diverse: every race, every religion, young and old, the spectrum of God’s kingdom.  They’re generally friendly.  And the fact that someone in that neighborhood had behaved in a way that was less than friendly, less than helpful offended everyone around.  So as a result, everyone was especially attentive to their neighbors. So now everyone stops everyone and asks “how are you doing, good to see you.”  Everywhere she turns, folks stop her and ask how she’s doing. 

She has folks accompany her on her walks. “How far as you going?  I’ll walk that far with you.”  Neighbors just want to stay in touch.  It’s been amazing to see how everyone in her neighborhood responded to one little act of unfriendliness.  It’s taken the whole idea of loving neighbor to a whole new level. Because everyone is really concerned about how everyone is doing all the time now.  And that has been a beautiful gift that kept on giving long after an incident that wasn’t so wonderful.

This whole concept of loving neighbor sounds really easy. It sounds easy right up until that moment when we’re confronted with a neighbor that is different from us – who doesn’t look like us or maybe doesn’t speak the same language, or love the same people.  And in that moment loving neighbor becomes challenging for us.  

So I want to take a moment to point to both our epistle and our gospel lesson. Paul says something in the letter to the Romans that is a truism if ever there was one. And that truism is, that if you take the 6 of the 10 commandants that deal with how we are to live together with one another – and there are 6 of the 10 - and try to sum them up, the best way to sum them up is to say, “love your neighbor as yourself.” 

Because if you really love your neighbor as yourself, then all of those things that God has commanded us not to do so that we live well with one another, we just wouldn’t do those things.  Because our mindset is, “I love this person that is standing next to me as one of God’s beloved. This person who is made in the likeness and image of God just as I am is entitled to nothing but love from me.”

One of the things we promise in our own baptismal covenant -we renew that covenant periodically - is that we have committed our lives to respecting the dignity of every human being. With God’s help. There are days that this a lot easier than other days, there are times we fall short. But it is the commitment we’ve made.   

How many times have seen a sister or brother being mistreated and not stopped to say “this isn’t okay with me.” We get in our own head, we get in a place of “O, I don’t want to upset someone, I don’t want make someone feel badly.” When what we are called to do is what Jesus says in Matthew’s gospel: we should say something.  We should call them to task.

It’s unfortunate that the NRSV translation says what it says in the first sentence. It doesn’t give us the clearest picture of what Jesus says. The Greek word in that first sentence is “adelphos.” Which means “brother.” So if read that first sentence and we use brother, it sounds differently to us: “if our brother sins against us, then we are to go and take that person - just the two of us - and talk about it. If that doesn’t do any good, we are to get a couple more people to help talk about the issue and try to resolve it.

If those doesn’t do any good, then we come to the entire assembly and try to resolve it there.  And if that still doesn’t do any good, we are to treat them as gentiles and tax collectors.

And that if is a little jarring, then we need to go back in Matthew and look at what’s gone on up to this point.  Because even if Jesus wasn’t clear at the beginning of his ministry in Matthew’s account of his story about the persons to whom he has come to serve, it’s become clear as the story unfolds: he has welcomed Gentiles.  And he’s brought healing and reconciliation, even to those who others would have called sinners and unclean, and not worthy of being in the presence of Christ.

And so now when Jesus says, treat them as a tax collector or Gentile, he’s not saying ostracize them. Jesus isn’t saying push them aside. Jesus is saying “bring them in! Bring in even the ones who you would push away. Bring them in and show them the path to love.”

One of my priest friend’s neighbors said to her in the days following the dog incident something that summed up what lots of the folks in that neighborhood were probably thinking, “what happens to you, happens to all of us.”  Because we are one.  We are one because we are all made in the likeness and image of God. We are one because we share God’s love as God’s beloved.  And what happens to any one of us happens to all of us.

So when we try to convince ourselves in that moment when we’re not sure, “should I say something?  Have I just witnessed an injustice and should I say something? Should I do something? Should I just not ruffle anyone’s feathers and just walk away?”  We are called to remember that what happens to any of us happens to all of us. 

We cannot afford, in our world today, to stay silent in the face of injustice. We cannot afford to walk away when there is suffering among us.  Because we are one. And I will suggest that those who are called to lead in speaking out, are people of faith, are church people.  Because if we are not raising our hands and raising our voices, then how on earth will those who don’t know God’s love ever know it?  They see that love in us, see in us goodness and compassion and power and mercy of God.  They see us come into a space pushing out darkness and filling it with light, filling it with love.

We are all God’s beloved.  May we always remember that what happens to any of us happens to all of us. Amen.  

August 30, 2026, The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Reflections on Matthew 16:21-28 by the Reverend Carole Horton-Howe

Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?

“For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”

Romans 12:9-21

Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.

Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” No, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Sermon by the Rev. Carole Horton-Howe

There isn't a single day that Christ King isn't reminded of the October 2006 morning that Charles Carl Roberts IV entered a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania opening fire on a group of female students. King's daughter, Rosanna, six years old at the time, was one of the youngest students at the school that day. Roberts injured five students and took the lives of five others before taking his own life.  

Rosanna survived the attack but was permanently wheelchair-bound. She died at age 18. The rest of her short life, she could not speak and required round-the-clock care. For her father, each day was a new day in which he had to find the strength to overcome his own demons. Each day was a new day in which he fought back his anger. Each day was a new day in which he worked to forgive.

It would have been easy for him and any other member of the Amish community there at Nickel Mines to allow anger to consume them. Instead, shortly after the identity of the shooter was known, the Amish community visited Charles Carl Roberts’ parents who lived nearby to offer their sympathy to them. They, too, had lost a child that day. The Amish created a human wall to surround his family on the day of his burial so that the family would be shielded and given privacy.

Rosanna’s family allowed Robert's mother, Terri, to help with Rosanna's care for a number of years until she herself was diagnosed with a terminal illness. In turn, they cared for her until her own death.

The Amish community refused to give in to the temptation of allowing anger, pain, grief or any kind of desire for vengeance to consume them. Instead they chose the road less traveled which for them became a path to healing.  But it was the daily work for Christ King every time he looked at his daughter to once again be reminded of what that attack had cost her and his family. 

The truth of the matter is that we too easily fall into anger and bitterness toward those who have wronged us in some way. We want to get even. We want the wrong- doers to pay for what they have done to hurt us. And the desire to seek our own vengeance can quickly allow evil to overcome us.

In his letter to the Christians in Rome, Paul knows his audience even though he's never met them face to face. He knows that the Christians in Rome know a whole lot about the unrelenting persecution of those who are believers. He understands the struggles between Gentile and Jewish converts to this new faith. And he also knows that Christians cannot allow themselves to harbor the same evil thoughts toward one another that they may see reflected in the world around them

And so in our lesson today we hear Paul telling these worshipers not to be overcome by evil, not to hate what is evil but to hold fast to what is good and to overcome evil with good. These verses would function perfectly as a modern day group covenant for almost any church ministry. They give structure and the core values on which both ministries of the church and individual Christians are built. There is a mix of “the usual suspects” along with suggestions that promise to stretch individuals and faith communities beyond what might seem logical, practical or even “good” to them.

Few church members would argue with Paul’s encouragement to hate evil, to persevere in prayer or to celebrate with the joyful and weep with the grieving.
Everyone is on board with that and can feel confident about that. The more complicated part of this text concerns our relationships with those whom we find hard to love. Paul’s call to “hold fast to what is good” flies in the face of popular culture. To say that our core values include not only extending hospitality to strangers but extending blessing, feeding and refusing to take vengeance on enemies will put a strain on our own spirituality and on relationships with those outside the faith community. This passage is not a greeting card slogan but a call to costly discipleship.

How do we hear his words about actively blessing those who persecute us? How can we satisfy ourselves that God's vengeance is more than enough? How can we bring ourselves to feed, to clothe, to show kindness to our enemies? It's the daily work Christ King and the entire Amish community at Nickel Mines. And ours as well. It's an affirmative decision by each of us as individuals to walk in faith with God. It's making the hard decision for a daily journey of choosing the Christ path knowing it is the only way to save our own souls.

Composer Rene Clausen was commissioned to create a musical work in memory of the victims of the 9-11 terrorist attacks. His work, called “Memorial,” includes these words:

“Gracious and loving God,

Pour forth your mercy upon us all.

We pray for our enemies,

All those who hate us,

We condemn them to your mercy.

If there be any grain of hatred in us,

Wash us clean and cleanse us,

Move us to the common ground of Your Being, O God.”

Notice what he says: we condemn them to God's mercy. Rather than our own vengeance, we are encouraged to pray that our hearts be cleansed and purified from hatred that would threaten to engulf us and snuff the very life from us. 

I commend his text to you because I believe that this is a prayer worthy of our daily reflection and contemplation both in response to global and personal events. When we feel divisiveness in our world, we need more than ever to strengthen our relationship with God and seek God's mercy upon us, cleansing our lives of bitterness and hatred so that we may renew right relationship with one another.

It is only when we are able to renew right relationship with one another that we can, without estrangement and without barriers, go about doing the work that God has given us to do -- laboring in the vineyard together supporting the weak, caring for the afflicted, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, showing mercy to the prisoner, and loving all God’s people because God first loved us.

 Amen 

August 23, 2026, The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Reflections on Matthew 16:13-20 by the Reverend Carole Horton-Howe

When Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.

Sermon by the Rev. Carole Horton-Howe

There’s a good story that makes the rounds now and then.  It may have actually happened or it may be a kind of church urban legend.  But there is truth in it.  It goes something like this: a man walks out of church on a Sunday morning following a rousing worship service and bumps into a man on the sidewalk. He doesn’t recognize him as a member of the congregation, he’s a stranger staring up at the church steeple and the cross looking a little lost and a little curious.  He says “excuse me” and steps around the stranger but the stranger stops him and says, “tell me,” pointing to the doors of the church he had attended most of his life. “What is it that you believe in there?” The church member starts to answer and then realizes that he doesn’t quite have an answer, or does not know how to put it into words.  As he’s trying to compose something the stranger says, “Never mind, sorry I bothered you.” And he walks away.

It did bother him.  And I think it would bother all of us if we tried on the fly to think what we would answer in his place. Why do we go to church?  Can we articulate what it is that we believe in here?  Would you recite the Nicene Creed?  Probably not something a man on the sidewalk would stick around to hear all of. Would you say that Jesus is my Lord?  Sure -- but what does that mean to someone on the sidewalk? What is it that we believe?

In today’s lesson, Jesus is the man on the sidewalk, the one who asks the question about what it all means, about what he means to us. In the lesson, Jesus is talking to his closest friends and disciples.  They’ve watched him feeding thousands, teaching about the difference between words and deeds, and last week we heard about his healing a Canaanite woman’s daughter.  And then he quizzes the disciples.  We see him do this now and then. And Jesus doesn’t hesitate to let them know when they have not understood him or his mission. So it’s easy to imagine that they might be a little anxious when he gathers them together. 

“Who do people say the Son of Man is?” Jesus lobs them a softball – the disciples can repeat what they have heard: Elijah, John the Baptist come back to life, or one of the prophets.  There is no great risk to them in repeating what they’ve heard. Jesus confirms none of these. Instead he asks that pivotal question, eternally probing hearts through the ages and still grabs on to us: “but who do you say that I am?” Who knows how long they stood in silence before Peter answered.  The Greek pronoun “you” is emphatic: it is both singular and plural. Simon Peter answers on behalf of the group.

Peter’s declaration about Jesus is largely about identity. The passage is the only account in the New Testament that provides an explanation of the renaming of Simon as Peter. When Simon answers “You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God” Jesus responds with a blessing.  And “you are Peter (petros in Greek) and on this rock I will build my church and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.

Jesus’s statement is not mere simile, Jesus does not tell Peter he is “like a rock.” Instead, he gives him a new name and with it a new identity. It is the promise of Christ to build his church despite the forces of evil and death arrayed again it. 

And although Peter seems to have passed Jesus’s “test” about his own identity since he heaped accolated upon him, there may be other dynamics involved.

The African concept of Ubuntu has its origins in the Bantu languages of southern Africa.  It represents an ancient understanding of being, existence and reality summed up in the statement: “I am because we are; and since we are, therefore I am.” Looking through the lens of Ubuntu, the individual does not and cannot exist alone. We each owe our existence to other people, both past generations and contemporaries. Each person is part of a whole. The community creates the individual, and the individual relies on the group. This philosophical understanding exits in one form or another in every traditional ethnic group on the African continent and would have been consistent with the prevailing understanding of identity formation in Jesus’ day and location.

Might Jesus have been relying on his community of disciples to help him on his way?  Might he have been seeking a conferral of his Messianic identity from the community that knew him best?  Interestingly of the 20 times in Matthew that the word Messiah is used, Jesus never refers to himself as Messiah until after Peter’s declaration.

This passage describes a pivotal occasion in the lives of both Jesus and Peter. Each shares his insights with the other, affirms the other’s identity and prepares the other for the ministry that lies ahead.  Jesus and Peter help each other assume their rightful identities. This is the principle of Ubuntu: “I am because we are.” 

It is by grace alone that Peter makes his declaration of Jesus identity. But a few sentences later, Jesus will stub his toe on the rock that is Peter when Peter begins to argue with Jesus about what will happen in Jerusalem. “Get behind me Satan” Jesus will say to him and accuse him of being a stumbling block on Jesus’ path. How can he be both rock with the right answer and the devil in the path at the same time?  The fact is that Peter is impulsive and opinionated and ultimately denies knowing Jesus at all.  So he may not exhibit the flawless character, the intellectual or spiritual depth we’d like to see at the initial leadership of our church.

Barbara Brown Taylor says that she is glad to hear that Peter’s in charge of heaven’s gates. Someone like Peter, she says, may understand someone like her, someone who finds answers hard to come by, who often finds it easier and safer to repeat other people’s answers because her own do not sound good enough. Peter understands someone who goes ahead and says things and then regrets them or makes brave promises and then loses heart saying not once but 3 times, “I do not know that man.”  

If Peter’s declaration is the rock on which the church is built, then there is hope for all of us because he is one of us.  And perhaps the answer that Jesus seeks is not so much what we speak but how we live our lives.

Author Deborah Meister also has a pivotal question of her own for us to consider:  “What do our words and actions say to others about who they are? Do they say, "Move over; get out of my way?" Or do they say, "You are precious to me, so beautiful that I am willing to offer my time, my care, and myself, so that you may flourish, too?"

So the next time someone asks you what you believe, go ahead and give it a try. You may not know who’s asking the question but you know whose you are and who you are answering.  It may not flow the way you’d like but the important thing is to try – not only to say what you believe but to live it too.    Amen.

August 16, 2026, The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost, 'Great Is Your Faith!', Reflections on Matthew 15: 10-20, 21-28 by the Reverend J.D. Neal, Deacon

When we meet Jesus in our gospel this morning, he has been having a rough time. His cousin John has recently been executed, the people of his hometown (Nazareth) have rejected him, and most recently he has been caught up in another fight with a group of Pharisees and scribes who come from Jerusalem to try to prosecute Jesus and his disciples for not washing their hands while refusing to engage with the substance of God’s commands. He is disappointed, frustrated at the ways God’s people seem unwilling to hear the heart of his teachings – and even his own disciples still don’t seem to be getting it!

Perhaps this is why Jesus relocates for awhile. Here’s what happens. Matthew tells us in v. 21 that Jesus leaves the heart of Judea and travels far to the northwest. Here, a Canaanite woman seeks Jesus out and begins shouting after him, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” Jesus doesn’t respond. He ignores her shouts and keeps walking. Eventually, the disciples get tired of her following and shouting after them and ask Jesus to send her away. Jesus tells them that he “was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel”, and does not send her away. The woman persists, she kneels before Jesus asking for help, and Jesus initially refuses, telling her that he cannot “take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs”. She throws his refusal back at him, saying “even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table,” and Jesus relents, praising the greatness of her faith and healing her daughter.

Now, before I continue, let me pause for a moment. I want to acknowledge that this passage is, in my view at least, the most difficult passage in the gospels. Jesus’ response to this woman seems cruel. He equates her with a dog, which is a slur that Jews of the day used to refer to ‘unclean’ Gentiles. There are hundreds of years of commentaries on this passage that try to explain away the discomfort of this moment, and none of them seem satisfying to me. Who is this Jesus that speaks so harshly to a woman in need? I don’t know how to resolve this tension, and a part of our work as followers of Jesus is to keep wrestling with the Scriptures that make us uncomfortable, to grapple with them over and over searching for what God might have for us in these difficult spaces, not to wrap them up neatly in a bow.

So I’m not going to focus on trying to resolve this tension for us today. Instead, I’m going to focus on what sticks out to me as I wrestle with the details of this passage.

One of the first things I notice is that Jesus has traveled to one of the borderlands between Israel and the rest of the world, to the area of Tyre and Sidon. This is an interesting place for Jesus to travel. This region is not a part of Judea, this is Gentile country. Not only that, but this area has a very bad rap in the history of God’s people. Tyre & Sidon are Canaanite cities on the borders of Northwest Israel, the home of people who were Israel’s persistent, historical enemies. These cities were dominated by Ba’al worship, and in the Hebrew Scriptures they come to represent gateways for idolatry and corruption spreading into Israel through Canaanite intermarriage and influence. Jezebel, the one-time queen of Israel who becomes an archetype of corruption and idolatry in the prophets and in Revelation – Jezebel is Sidonian. This was not a place that devout Jews went for vacation.

And in this unlikely place, Jesus encounters an unlikely person, a “Canaanite woman”. This is an odd way for Matthew to describe this woman, because “Canaanites” as a distinct ethnic and political group don’t really exist at this point. This woman may be descended from the historical people that inhabited this region, but she’s no more a ‘Canaanite’ than I’m a ‘viking’ because my dad’s family is partially Danish. Matthew seems to be describing her this way to associate her with the historical enemies of God’s people, to highlight her ‘otherness’ from Jesus and how surprising it is that she calls him “Lord”. She also calls him by a very Jewish title, “Son of David,” seeming to include herself in the people of God for whom this title would be so resonant.

And Jesus, for the first and only time in Matthew’s gospel, does not respond. No teaching, no rebuke, no miracle - he just keeps walking. When the disciples ask him to send her away, he doesn’t do that either. He still won’t speak to her, instead answering the disciples and saying to them that he was “sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel”. Jesus has said this phrase before, when he sent the twelve disciples out in pairs to minister throughout Israel. Interestingly, Jesus reveals that just as he sent the disciples in that earlier passage, he himself has been sent. The Father has given Jesus a mission for this time of ministry, and that mission apparently has boundaries.

Though Matthew’s gospel contains hints that the mission of Jesus will have implications for the rest of the gentile world, it is not until after the resurrection in Matthew 28 that Jesus receives “authority” over all the earth and sends his disciples to spread the good news of God’s kingdom to the whole world. Even when Jesus heals the Roman centurion’s servant in Matthew 8, he does it in the midst of a crowd of Jews, and turns the healing into a lesson for them. For now, it seems, Jesus’ work is meant to be limited to the house of Israel.

The tone of Jesus’ silence reads a bit differently to me after I notice this. Rather than simply giving the woman a cold shoulder, I wonder if Jesus feels stuck. He is not supposed to minister to the Gentiles yet, but he also can’t make himself send her away. Even before they speak, this woman’s plea, her love for her daughter and her faith in him, seem to have a hold on Jesus that grates against the boundaries of his mission to Israel.

When they do speak, the woman seems to get the better of Jesus. Like Abraham or Moses, bartering with God, this Canaanite woman reaches across the boundaries between them, having the boldness to argue with the one she calls ‘Lord’ for the sake of someone she loves. She takes the hit of being called a ‘dog’ and flips that insult on its head to insist that she and her daughter also ought to receive God’s mercy. And she wins, not only receiving healing for her daughter, but also receiving Jesus’ praise for the greatness of her faith, in contrast to the ‘ye of little faith’ Peter received in last week’s gospel.

What was it about her faith that was so great it caused Jesus to break the boundaries of his mission and let God’s mercy flow to this woman and her daughter? She seems to know something central about God that so many of the Jews around Jesus have forgotten. God desires mercy. She knows God’s mercy, and she insists that the love and power of God could not be ultimately withheld from a suffering girl. She was willing to cross the boundaries of hostility that divided her ancestors from Jesus’ people, to endure Christ’s terrible silence, to risk embarrassment and ridicule to demand that Christ show her the mercy of God.

She knows what Abraham and Moses and the prophets knew, that God is willing to change his mind. That her persistence and tenacity and love for her suffering daughter mean something to God, that her pleas could cause God’s love to burst the boundaries that had been set for Jesus mission and bring forward a foretaste of that mercy that would flow to all peoples in the new age after Jesus’ resurrection… because mercy is at the very heart of God.

If, as Rev. Carole preached last week, Peter stepping out of the boat onto the waters is an image of how God’s compassion meets us in the turbulent realities of our mixture of faith and fear, then the Canaanite woman is an image of what our faith can become: Brave. Tenacious. Willing to risk disappointment and pain for the sake of someone in need. Willing to hold God to God’s promises and insist that he make good on them. Persisting even when our pleas are met with silence and our doubts grow loud in our ears. Trusting, knowing somehow that at the heart of all things is a God whose love is so great that he will hear us and meet us with mercy when we cry out to him. 

May we all, with God’s help, come to have a faith like hers. Amen.

August 9, 2026, The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, Reflections on Matthew 14:22-33 by the Reverend Carole Horton-Howe

Today we find ourselves almost in the same place that we found ourselves last Sunday before the feeding of the five thousand. Jesus is trying to steal a little bit of time away for himself, time to pray. He was trying to get away from those crowds that were besieging him. And he had so much love and compassion for them that he healed them and then fed them nourishing their bodies, nourishing their souls.

 And now that that time has passed, Jesus very likely spent himself. He’s heading away for a time to pray. And he sends the disciples on ahead – you all go ahead take the boat go to the other side of the sea; I’ll catch up with you.

But a storm comes up. By the time Jesus catches up with them they are far from shore and he comes walking across the sea. Not surprisingly, the disciples are frightened by all of that. Jesus identifies himself and reminds them not to be afraid.

And Peter -- oh dear Peter -- needs some proof. “If it really is you, Jesus, if it really is you then you command me to come walk out there with you.” “Okay, Peter, come on.” And Peter starts walking with some real confidence: I got this, I can walk on water. But then he notices that there's really a storm going on around him. He looks around and realizes that this is scarier than he had anticipated. And in his fear he begins to sink. Jesus, of course, is right there.

But it's what happens after they climb into the boat. this storm that has been raging suddenly ceases and then we're told the disciples now they realize this is truly the son of God because he commands a whole lot more than we ever imagined.

I want to talk about Peter for a moment because isn't Peter a lot like us.  “Prove yourself to me, God.” Isn't that a lot like us? When we want to embark on an ambitious undertaking? “Prove yourself God.” We start out pretty confidently but then when we look around us and we see the threats and the storms that surround us, we forget where we are, that we are in God's hands. We fear and we sink because our focus is on the storm.

Jesus says to Peter, “why did you doubt?” This is the question none of us wants to have to answer. And yet we ask ourselves the same words. We might ask ourselves,  “why can’t I trust God? Why am I afraid to let go and let God care for me? I believe I am in God’s hands and that they are good hands, but then I face a setback in life and as I have to navigate through it, my faith goes with it and I begin to sink.”

I believe that God is present and active in the world, but terrible things keep happening. Read the front page of the LA Times or scroll through your online news feed. It seems storms are never ending. I believe in life after death and a bright future  with God but then I get sick, or someone I love gets sick. I pray with great specificity for a miracle but it does not come and the waves creep up around my legs and I begin to sink.

Why do we doubt? Because we are afraid. Because the sea is vast and we are so small. Because so much of life is beyond our control and we are so helpless in its grip. Why do we doubt?  Because we are afraid even when we do have faith.  Like Peter, we have a little and a little is better than nothing, even thought ere are times when it does not seem enough to save us.

Like Peter we take a few steps and when we sink, we cry out “Lord, save me!” and he does – giving us both his hand and his rebuke: O you of little faith, why do you doubt? Hearing that, most of us count ourselves failures.  But I wonder, if we can imagine the story going the other way?  Theologian Barbara Brown Taylor offers this perspective to consider:

What if Peter had not sunk? What if he got out of the boat and, full of confidence, right away started to glide across the water toward Jesus?  What if, then, the rest of the disciples all followed after him – piling out of the boat after Peter and all of them in perfect faith, frolicked on the water oblivious of the storm raging around them?

It would be a different story.  It might even be a better story.  But it would not be a story about us. The truth about us is more complicated: the truth about us is that we obey and we fear, we walk and we sink, we believe and we doubt.  But it isn’t like we do only one and not the other.  We do both. Our faith and our doubt are not mutually exclusive. They both exist in us – at times lifting us up and other times pulling us down, giving us courage and feeding our fears.

This is why we need Jesus. Our fears and doubts may paralyze us but they can also make us cry out for his saving presence. If we never sank, if we could walk on water all by ourselves, we would not need a savior.  Our doubts, fearsome as they are, remind us of who we are, and whose we are and whom we nee din our lives to save our lives.

When we sink, as Peter does, as we all do, our Lord reaches out and catches us, responding first with grace and then with judgment asking “why did you doubt” – but never with rejection. He returns us to the boat, knowing full well that the only reason we are in the boat in the first place is because we believe or want to believe and because we mean to follow him throu all our doubtful days.

 All at once, the wind ceases, the waves calm and in the awesome silence of that night Peter and the other disciples are able to recognize God at work. Because there's power in quiet, there's power in stillness. We need the stillness and we need the quiet to be able to discern God's presence in our lives.

Jesus knows how important it is to find that quiet and that silence and that stillness. That's why this text opens with Jesus going away by himself to pray, to know the quiet. Because it's not in the middle of the storms that we can hear our creator speaking to us.

It's not in the middle of our busyness and urgency. But it's in the quiet. It's when we stop. It's when we are still that we can hear the Creator and know that the Creator is God.  Amen.

August 2, 2026, The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, Reflections on Matthew 14:13-21 by the Reverend Carole Horton-Howe

“Jesus withdrew in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” Jesus said to them, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” They replied, “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.” And he said, “Bring them here to me.” Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass.

Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.”

Sermon by the Rev. Carole Horton-Howe

There are only two miracle stories that are told in all four gospels: we hear one of them today, the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand. And while Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all add different nuances to the story, its importance is underscored by the fact that all four of them felt the need to share it with us.

Matthew's recounting of the story takes us with Jesus to the shores of the Sea of Galilee. He's retreating from the crowds who have pressed in upon him. His reputation has preceded him: people have come knowing that in the sea of hopelessness Jesus is their hope for restoration to health and to community.

And we're told that Jesus had compassion for them. This is particularly important because we know from the verses preceding today’s gospel that Jesus and his disciples have just learned that John the Baptist, who is family, friend and prophet to them, has been killed on the whim of a scorned mistress of Herod. If there was anyone who needed compassion surely it was the disciples and Jesus himself, grief stricken at this sudden, brutal loss. In spite of their own grief, their attention was on this crowd of thousands of people, people no doubt marveling over the healings that had just taken place among them, their bodies being made whole again.

But now it's getting late. They've been following Jesus a long way for a long time. They have to be tired. They have to be hungry. We can just hear the disciples: “let them go now so they can go back to the villages and get some food.” And Jesus tells the disciples something extraordinary: “they don’t need to leave, you feed them.” There's the pivot point, there’s where the lesson begins and where about many years of controversy about it begins. “You feed them,” Jesus tells them and tells all of his followers through the ages.

And the disciples who at that moment are thinking practically and pragmatically – and probably out of their own exhaustion and despair - respond to Jesus, “but all we have are these five loaves and two fish. That's all we've got.”  They’ve left God out of the process. God incarnate is standing among them, but they’ve left God’s goodness and power out of the mix.

In our gospel lesson, Jesus asks the crowd to sit down. This is no small thing. It’s not just an invitation to get comfortable, it’s an invitation to get ready. When a rabbi, a teacher, asked you to sit with him, something extraordinary was about to happen. You were about to experience the gifts that the teacher had to offer, life-changing and extraordinary. It’s like you just got an acceptance letter to a PhD program at Stanford with an expert in your field of interest.  And what the crowd saw and heard was Jesus “taking the five loaves and the two fish, looking up to heaven” and calling for God’s blessing.

Why is this a pivot point? Because here the theological world divides itself into two camps in trying to explain the miracle, trying to determine what’s the real miracle happening here? No one doubts that a miracle occurred, they just interpret it differently.

Some will tell you that the miracle was the softening of people’s hearts, their compassion for their companions in the crowd that day, that they actually did have food with them in pockets and bags, meager amounts of their own bread. And when the disciples started to distribute the little they had, people in the crowd began to share with their neighbors. The miracle, then, according to this point of view, is that thousands of people moved from a mindset of scarcity to plenty, overcame fear of going hungry and turned their pockets inside out for another without worrying what’s in it for themselves.

There’s beauty in this interpretation, this softening, this sharing – and the opportunity to ask ourselves if we are happy to throw in with God and participate in bringing about miraculous events. Or if we aren’t happy enough to let God save the world, do it all and look to God to help those who cannot help themselves while we tend to our own needs. Do we make the mistake of focusing on God’s part and neglecting our own?

When my New Testament professor in seminary propounded this interpretation of this gospel story, one of the students pushed back and pushed back hard. “No,” she said vehemently, “Jesus literally made more bread. You’re watering down the unique spiritual superiority of God through Jesus Christ.” In this view, to explain the feeding of so many as an organized social sharing event, is to deny that Jesus has the same creative power as God in Genesis, and to deny that Jesus has authority over all of nature, all of heaven and earth.

To have faith is to believe in the power of Jesus, looking to heaven and creating a miracle of abundance through his blessing. It strips away the supernatural identity of Christ and ignores explicit scriptural details – or lack of them. None of the four accounts says that “then people reached in their pockets and offered their neighbors a bit of bread.”  The power of God to break into the most unlikely places accomplishing the most amazing tasks is something we cannot deny.   

No one knows the mechanics of how it happened, of how it was that so many were fed. Your interpretation is as good as mine. Either way, what Jesus says to his followers next is as valid today as it was then: “they need not go away. You give them something to eat.” In other words, you take care of them.”

Perhaps the reason that our four gospel writers all share this miracle with us is because of the way that it speaks to us in all of the stages and phases of our lives. At some point in our lives, I think all of us have the opportunity to be the giver of a gift, something in our possession. We might think it's insignificant or unequal to the need. 

No matter the size of the gift with which God has entrusted us, no matter how insignificant it may seem to us, no matter how small its value on the open market might be, God can do mighty things with even the smallest gift in our hands. To follow Jesus is to express our faith in concrete acts of love, justice and compassion for others; to do the loving thing. It’s no accident that Matthew tells us we will meet Jesus in reaching out to our sisters and brothers who are suffering.  

At some point in our lives, we are these disciples. We have been watching Jesus heal and watching Jesus do all kinds of things miracle after miracle we've seen him perform. And despite the fact that we've seen this and despite the fact that he's empowered us to go out and be God's hands and heart in the world, we have that moment of doubt. We see the small gift in front of us and we question whether God can do anything at all with that. We might beat ourselves up for not having more to give. How can this serve God's purpose? What can God do with this and how can God even call us to be instruments of love and grace to take to share to bring God to our sisters and brothers around us?

At some point in our lives, we're one of this crowd, one of the 5,000+ on the shore, sick in body, mind and spirit. We’ve come a long way. We are fatigued and tired. We need healing. We are hungering to be restored to community. We're hungering for the nourishment that can only come from God.

If Jesus telling us “they need not go away, you feed them” strikes fear in our hearts we only need to remember what he says next: bring them (the loaves and fishes) here to me. The promise of the story of the feeding of the 5,000, is that if we join together in unity and faithfulness God will be with us. It’s not a promise that we will not experience pain, that we will not struggle.  Afterall, even Jesus had to walk the way of the cross.  The promise is that God’s intention for love, peace and justice in the world will ultimately prevail.

So we follow and we listen and we seek and we sit and we learn. And when we experience that joyful moment of healing when God invites us to sit down, tired at the end of the day, we are reminded that something extraordinary is on the way, that in the words of the old time religion call and response, “God is good all the time and all of the time God is good.” It's one miracle - just one miracle - but its truth becomes a lens through which we see the entire spectrum of our lives, and the ways that God's people experience the fullness and the grace and the love of God. Amen.

July 26, 2026, The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, Reflections on Matthew 13:31-33,44-52 by the Reverend 'Mother' Lyn Crow

Today we have a parable bonanza.

We may have been hoping for a little drink from the hose – one, maybe two parables.

But Jesus turns the fire hose on us and we get five parables – five stories about the Kingdom of God.

See, Jesus’ main focus in his ministry was to teach his listeners about the Kingdom of God.

And one of the main things he taught was that the Kingdom of God was hidden.  He taught people what to look for – how to see it.

Let me tell you a story – There was a Rabbi who loved the Torah

a.    He was a good preacher

b.    Every Sabbath afternoon he sat at the picnic table in his back yard preparing his sermon for the next week

c.    All the while his children and later, his grandchildren would play hide and seek in the yard

d.    One day the youngest grandchild stands before him crying

e.    He picks up the child, sits him on his lap

f.     What’s wrong?  Hide and seek is my favorite game to play

g.    All week long, I look for hiding places and I wait all week to play with the other kids

h.    I save my best hiding place for then

i.      I’ve been sitting in my hiding place all afternoon and nobody found me

j.      Now they’ve all decided to go play another game

k.    Rabbi dried his tears, comforted him, and sent him back to play

Rabbi went back to his sermon, but couldn’t get his grandson out of his mind

Then it hit him – God, you are like my grandson – you find the best hiding places.

Even on the Sabbath, you sit in your best hiding places and we don’t find you, even when we look in the Scriptures.

Then we get tired of looking and we go off leaving you hiding.

Jesus taught about God’s best hiding places.  So we could find God.

Parables are not intended to give us answers.  In Jesus’ day, rabbis never explained the meaning of the parables they taught.

They left it to the listener to ask questions and to wonder about the Kingdom of God.

So I am not going to tell you what these parables mean, but I am going to give you some questions to ask about them, that could possibly help you to see the Kingdom of God from a different angle.

Take the mustard seed for instance:

a.    Did you know Jewish law dictated what could be planted in Jewish gardens?

b.    And that it was forbidden to plant mustard in with other plants?

c.    Against Jewish law to mix mustard in because it was like a weed and would choke out the other plants

d.    To the Jews, mustard was a symbol of impurity

e.    Jesus was a Jew – he knew this about mustard and yet he chose it to symbolize the Kingdom of God

Or how about the parable of the leaven:

a.    In the ancient world, leaven was a symbol for moral corruption, for the profane, for the unholy

b.    Why?  Because leaven was made by placing a piece of bread in a dark, damp place until it rotted and smelled to high heaven

c.    Jesus knew this too, and yet he used a symbol for moral corruption and ritual impurity to represent the Kingdom of God.  Why?

That is the question Jesus would want his listeners to ask.  That is the question he would want us to ask.

.Hmmm.  Could we be missing the Kingdom of God?  Could we be missing God’s hiding places?

Where have we been looking?  Where might we look instead?

Then there are the parables of the treasure and the merchant

a.    The first thing to notice is that it is not the parable of the pearl, it’s the parable of the merchant

b.    That changes everything

c.    What if the merchant who searches represents the Kingdom of God?    And not the pearl?

d.    The parable of the merchant might give us the answer to the question – how do we discover the Kingdom of God?

e.    Maybe we don’t find it.  Maybe the merchant finds us.

f.     Who or what is the pearl?

g.    Maybe we need to wonder a bit about that!

In the parable of the treasure, the laborer finds something he wasn’t even looking for!  He stumbles upon the treasure.  He didn’t earn it, he didn’t work for it.  He didn’t have to slay a dragon for it.  What does this tell us about the Kingdom of God?

So the parables of the merchant and the treasure teach us how the Kingdom of God finds us and how we find the Kingdom of God.

And then the best news of all, the parable of the Net.

a.    The net is thrown in and dragged through the sea indiscriminately – taking in everything in its path

b.    That means trash and seaweed, good fish and some that are inedible

c.    If the Kingdom of God is like that, who is left out of the net?

d.    Who are the “fish”?

e.    Jesus says that just as fishermen sort the fish and throw out the inedible ones, so, at the end of time, angels will come and sort the good people from the bad.

f.     Is anyone all good?

g.    Is anyone completely bad?

h.    What happens at the end of the age if we are all part good and part bad?

i.      Is this a bad news parable or a good news parable?

Each of these parables that we’ve heard today are good news parables and I promise you that if you dig diligently enough, the good news will be revealed to you.

How can we ever thank God enough that at the heart of all creation there is Good News, there is unconditional Love, there is Grace and Forgiveness.

July 19, 2026, The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, 'Weeds & Wheat', Reflections on Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43 by the Reverend J.D. Neal, Deacon

Our gospel reading this morning, like last week’s reading, presents us with a parable that is probably pretty familiar to those of us who have spent much time in church over the years. Like the parable of the sower we heard last week, it is a story of a man who plants seed in his fields, with mixed results. In this parable, however, rather than the seeds landing on different types of soil, the narrator tells us that someone else comes along, an ‘enemy’ of the farmer, who mixes in ‘weeds’ with the good seeds of wheat. When the seeds grow up enough for the servants to spot the problem, the farmer tells them to hold off. Let the weeds and wheat grow together, and separate them at harvest time – it will take a lot of manual labor to do things this way, but it will keep the wheat from being damaged in the process of uprooting the weeds. 

The meaning of the parable can seem straightforward. The good wheat are the ‘children of God’s kingdom’, the weeds are the ‘children of the evil one’ who co-exist side by side in this world but who, at ‘the end of the age’, will be separated by the judgement of the Son of Man, when the weeds will be thrown into the furnace and destroyed while the righteous will ‘shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father’. As I grew up, the interpretation of my teachers and preachers was clear: the good seeds are Christians, those who ‘really believe’ in Jesus, who think the ‘right things’ about him, and who will go to heaven as a result. The ‘weeds’ on the other hand, are everyone else, the people of ‘the world’ who don’t believe in Jesus, whose lives aren’t ‘biblical’ enough, who will be gathered up and thrown into hell for their unbelief.

Read this way, the parable is an invitation to reinforce anxious divisions between who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ of God’s good graces. It invites us to see ourselves as the ‘good ones’, as God’s people who are in the right with God – and to see those outside our walls, who don’t look like us as the ‘bad ones’ who God will punish. Of course, this interpretation also serves to motivate us to get in line and make sure that we stay on the inside.

But there are some things about the passage that invite us to reconsider this interpretation – let anyone who has ears to hear listen! For one, that word we translate as ‘weeds’ in English refers to a specific plant called ‘darnel’. Darnel is a kind of rye grass that is toxic to humans, which is important to know because it looks very similar to wheat, so much so that it can be difficult to tell them apart until harvest time. Perhaps the parable is inviting us to consider that the divisions between who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ of God’s kingdom are not as easy for us to spot as we might think.

This whole chapter of parables begins with the phrase “that same day”, which is the narrator’s way of cluing us in that these stories of seeds and soil are connected to what has been happening in the gospel story before this moment. So what has been going on for Jesus ‘that day’? Well, as usual, he has been healing people, but on this particular day, his conflict with the religious leaders, the Pharisees, has been heating up. They have been calling Jesus, and by extension the Holy Spirit who empowers his healings, a demon, and have begun plotting to destroy him. They have asked Jesus to prove his authority with ‘a sign’, while ignoring the many displays of God’s loving power that he has been accomplishing for the needy all around them. Jesus, in turn, calls them ‘evil’ – trees that look nice on the outside but are rotten at the root. He implies that they, the public teachers of God’s people, are filled, not with God’s words, but with demons. And, immediately before our passage, he tells the crowds who have come to listen to him that his true family, and by extension the true people of God, are those who ‘do the will of his Father in heaven.’

Who are the ‘good seeds’ of our parable in light of this context? Not the people who Jesus’ listeners would have expected. The Pharisees and religious leaders, the most visibly devout and ‘religious’ and ‘good’ among them are revealed to be men who care more about preserving their systems of belief and security than about obeying God’s command to care for those who God has put right in front of them. The ‘good seeds’ are not those who look good and seem to be full of faith on the outside, but whose words and actions reveal that they are fruitless. Not those who see the Holy Spirit and call her a demon because she is at work in ways that disrupt their assumptions. The ‘good seeds’, in this context, are those who ‘do the will of my Father in heaven’, who hear and do their best to practice the teachings of Jesus to love neighbor and enemy and those in need around them. And let us not forget that there were many among Jesus’ own followers who, in the end, were not willing to follow Jesus down this path.

Rather than inviting us to make judgments about who else is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ of God’s people, perhaps this parable is inviting us to turn inwards, to ask ourselves honestly whether or not some weeds have been mixed in with our own wheat. If a moment of crisis comes, separating the weeds from the wheat, what would be revealed about us? Where do we resist the teachings of Jesus in our own lives?  Where have we surrendered to the temptation to judge and condemn those who are different from us, to stop seeing them as one of God’s beloved children? When have we ignored the gentle tug of the Spirit to care for someone in need because it would require us to do something uncomfortable? What do we actually hold most dear? All of us good church folk run this risk, right? When we are here, Sunday after Sunday, hearing the Scriptures, singing hymns, receiving the Eucharist, it can be easy to start feeling like we have ‘checked the box’, to slowly stop listening for that still, small voice that whispers to us and sometimes disrupts our day-to-day lives, ever calling us into new depths of love for God and for our neighbors. 

As we go back to our day-to-day lives this week, may Jesus’ words help us to see ourselves more clearly. May we turn inwards with honesty and with courage, and, when we do, may God’s Spirit meet us there with patience and love, showing us the way further into new life.

Amen.

July 12, 2026, The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, Reflections on Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23 by the Reverend Carole Horton-Howe

Jesus went out and sat beside the sea. Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. And he told them many things in parables, saying: “Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. Let anyone with ears listen!”

Hear then the parable of the sower. When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path. As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; yet such a person has no root, but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away. As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.

Sermon by the Rev. Carole Horton-Howe

Today’s gospel is the well-known Parable of the Sower.  You can’t spend too much time in church without hearing the word “parable.”  But have you ever wondered what it means and, more importantly, why did Jesus choose to teach using parables? 

I love the definition of parables given to us by theologian C.H. Dodd that a parable is a metaphor that comes out of our common life or nature that causes us to stop and wonder about “its vividness or strangeness, leaving the mind to tease it into active thought.” It's got just enough of the familiar in it to make us comfortable and then teases us into thinking a little longer, a little harder about it.  So the listener must actively participate in deciding what the parable means. 

With the Parable of the Sower we get some explanation of the meaning of the major components – the sower, the soil and the seed.  But even so, we’re not all the way home. We are still teased a bit.  There’s still room to wonder where we see ourselves in it and how this teaching fits into our lives. 

Here we get an idea about why Jesus taught using parables:  if you want to teach people something new, something they might not understand, you’re better off starting with something they do understand. And with the parable of the sower, he presents the people with something so familiar that they can’t help but be drawn in. 

The classic interpretation of this parable is provided for us by the gospel writer – there are four different types of soil.  Four different receptacles for seeds. And they each receive seeds in unique ways.

There’s the hard packed ground that happens when soil has been walked on over and over again. It’s as hard as stone.  When the rain comes it doesn’t soften, it just gets muddy and slippery.  Then it gets even harder.  So what happens when the seed falls on it? It blows away.  Or maybe just gets crushed under foot. Best case scenario, is that it feeds the birds for a day. But nothing more. 

And then there’s the rocky ground. How is this any different than the first scenario we might think. In ancient times farming was much different that it is now.  For western modern farmers their first task is to clear a field of rocks.  They were seen as a hinderance to growing crops.

But ancient people left most of the rocks in the fields because the infrequent rain they had – the only source of water for the crops. The rainwater would pool around rocks giving a sort of reservoir of water long after the rain had stopped.  Good insects could thrive in the rocks. But an ancient farmer knew that soil was thin among the rocks. Seeds that fell on these rocky areas of their field would only yield a weak and disappointing crop that wouldn’t go the distance and feed their family. 

Then there’s the seeds that fell among the thorns.  Ancient farmers would have happily rid their fields of these, but it seems that this was impossible. Thorny bushes grew like weeds. Seeds falling among the thorns were simply lost.  Nothing good was going to grow there.  And retrieving anything that fell into the thorny bushes was so painful and difficult that whatever fell there was counted as lost. Seeds produced nothing.

And finally there was the good soil. Good soil is soft and crumbly. It’s full of nutrients.  As a very amateur gardener I think of good soil as what you get at the nurseries – those huge bags of potting mix marked “organic” with brand names like “Miracle Grow.”  But of course for ancient people, good soil meant hard work, consistently applied over time.

But, thanks be to God, it could be relied upon to produce a quality and quantity of crops that assured that you and yours would survive another year. A good harvest was everything.  It was life. It is this good soil that God wants all of us to cultivate, to nurture within our own hearts. And not to be satisfied with a stone hard heart, a heart that cares lightly or a heart that let’s love die.  But a heart that welcomes the love of God, taking it in – learning, studying the teachings of Jesus so that they grow and thrive within us. 

Even if we’ve spent minimal time gardening, we know certain things to be true.  One of those is that whatever the way dirt is, is not the way it has to stay. Hard trodden paths can be tilled and nourished into better ground.  Rocks and thorns can be removed.  

The seeds in this parable are the teachings of Jesus about the attributes of God, the gifts of God for us to learn and take into our hearts.  And they are seeds to share, to scatter into the world.  They are seeds of mercy, love, hope, forgiveness, joy, compassion, patience that we must first sow into the fertile ground of our hearts.  And then spread widely and extravagantly into the world.

So the important part of this parable isn’t about the difficulties that come with planting. There was nothing new or interesting in it for the folks listening that they didn’t already know.

However, there is one thing that was really shocking to the first people who heard this parable. That was the yield, the harvest. A hundred fold was phenomenal, simply unheard of. Even the poorest yield in the parable was beyond their experience and the greatest almost beyond comprehension. To promise this sort of result was more than optimistic, it was a whole different vision of life.

To sow with this sort of hope and vision is to have the perspective of the Kingdom of God. With this vision you don’t mind the rocks or the birds or the thin soil or whatever else may get in the way. All of that stuff just doesn’t matter. It is swallowed up in the promise of the whole enterprise. This perspective, the promise of a vast harvest, is the heart of this little story.

With the seeds we are given, we are teased into the focus of the parable: that, by the grace of God, the harvest will be great beyond measure, great beyond belief, great beyond imagining. What God will make of our efforts is more than we can imagine. The one who sows is simply called to scatter the seeds, to love and to serve, to trust to continually cultivate the good ground of their own heart. The rest will be taken care of. This is not through our abilities; it is through the power of God.

This perspective of hope and confidence is the gift of the parable. There is a carefree abandon to this image. Out of the good ground of our hearts, we are to love and to serve in broadest way knowing full well that some -- maybe most -- of what we do won’t amount to anything that we can see, that bad things that are going to happen in the world.  But trusting, none the less, in the incomprehensible abundance of the harvest.

Each one of us individually, and our parish itself, all of us together, have at our feet fields to walk and seed to sow. We are called to do that. This parable is a gift to lighten our step and extend our reach. It gives us the wonderful gift of perspective.

There seems to me to be a point at the end of the parable itself, at the moment when Jesus says “this is the word of the kingdom” – that says to us, to the Kingdom Builders which we are – here “take this bag of seeds and throw them.”  Let them fall in the places where these is need of my Father’s love.

There is a story of a Rabbi and his students.  The Rabbi told his students that God places scripture on our hearts.  He said this frequently – ON our hearts.  Finally one of his students asked Rabbi why does God place scripture ON our hearts and not IN our hearts. The Rabbi told them it is on our hearts because, inevitably your heart will break.  And when it does the  God’s words will fall into those broken places to bind up your heart and to heal it.  That’s the gift of being a sower of seeds.

The love we offer in God’s name, God promises, will not return to God empty but it shall accomplish that which God intends for it; and it will prosper in the thing for which it is sent. We can count on that.  Amen.

July 5, 2026, The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost, Reflections on Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67 by the Reverend Carole Horton-Howe

Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67

The servant said to Laban, “I am Abraham’s servant. The Lord has greatly blessed my master, and he has become wealthy; he has given him flocks and herds, silver and gold, male and female slaves, camels and donkeys. And Sarah my master’s wife bore a son to my master when she was old; and he has given him all that he has. My master made me swear, saying, ‘You shall not take a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites, in whose land I live; but you shall go to my father’s house, to my kindred, and get a wife for my son.’

“I came today to the spring, and said, ‘O Lord, the God of my master Abraham, if now you will only make successful the way I am going! I am standing here by the spring of water; let the young woman who comes out to draw, to whom I shall say, “Please give me a little water from your jar to drink,” and who will say to me, “Drink, and I will draw for your camels also” —let her be the woman whom the Lord has appointed for my master’s son.’

“Before I had finished speaking in my heart, there was Rebekah coming out with her water jar on her shoulder; and she went down to the spring, and drew. I said to her, ‘Please let me drink.’ She quickly let down her jar from her shoulder, and said, ‘Drink, and I will also water your camels.’ So I drank, and she also watered the camels. Then I asked her, ‘Whose daughter are you?’ She said, ‘The daughter of Bethuel, Nahor’s son, whom Milcah bore to him.’ So I put the ring on her nose, and the bracelets on her arms. Then I bowed my head and worshiped the Lord, and blessed the Lord, the God of my master Abraham, who had led me by the right way to obtain the daughter of my master’s kinsman for his son. Now then, if you will deal loyally and truly with my master, tell me; and if not, tell me, so that I may turn either to the right hand or to the left.”

And they called Rebekah, and said to her, “Will you go with this man?” She said, “I will.” So they sent away their sister Rebekah and her nurse along with Abraham’s servant and his men. And they blessed Rebekah and said to her, “May you, our sister, become thousands of myriads; may your offspring gain possession of the gates of their foes.” Then Rebekah and her maids rose up, mounted the camels, and followed the man; thus the servant took Rebekah, and went his way. Now Isaac had come from Beer-lahai-roi, and was settled in the Negeb. Isaac went out in the evening to walk in the field; and looking up, he saw camels coming. And Rebekah looked up, and when she saw Isaac, she slipped quickly from the camel, and said to the servant, “Who is the man over there, walking in the field to meet us?” The servant said, “It is my master.” So she took her veil and covered herself. And the servant told Isaac all the things that he had done. Then Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah’s tent. He took Rebekah, and she became his wife; and he loved her. So Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death.

Sermon by the Rev. Carole Horton-Howe

In 2017, Supreme Court Justice John Roberts gave the commencement address to the graduates and their families and friends and at a private school in New Hampshire.  And a portion of it went like this:

“Commencement speakers typically wish you good luck and extend good wishes to you. I will not do that and I'll tell you why.  From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice.

I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty.

Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don't take friends for granted.

I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time, so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either.

And when you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope every now and then your opponent will gloat over your failure. It is a way for you to understand the importance of good sportsmanship.

I hope you'll be ignored so you know the importance of listening to others.

And I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion.

Whether I wish these things or not for you, they're going to happen. And whether you benefit from them - and thrive in spite of them - or not will depend upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes.”

When I read those remarks, I wondered how the parents and family members reacted to hearing them. If they’re anything like most of us, our hope for our children is that things will be better for them than it was for us, right?  We want them to experience success and happiness.  We want their lives to go smoothly.

We don't actively wish them adversity like Judge Roberts.  As a matter of fact, I've had those conversations with parent friends over the years about how they’ve prayed that their children would never know adversity.

The truth is we're all going to know adversity in one way or another. So we just might need to figure out how to be prepared ourselves in our lives so that it doesn't catch us off guard or catch us unable to deal with it.  And that's why I think these lessons that we're getting from the book of Genesis this summer are such important lessons for us.

Because if we start to think that we are alone in our adversity or if we think nobody's known adversity before us these stories reorient our thinking. When something difficult comes along in our lives, it helps us to reconnect to our forebears in the faith. It helps us to recall how from the beginning of time people have known trouble and disappointment and failure and pain and sorrow.  We're not the first ones. And so we've had all of these lessons from the book of Genesis this summer that really deal with adversity.

I think we always want to skip to the good parts. Because we end every one of these lessons all summer long with the good parts. Recall the story of Abraham and Isaac on Mt. Moriah. Suddenly there's a ram in the thicket so everything gets resolved. God is there, God is good all the time. That's where we end all these lessons.

But I want us really intentionally to spend some time thinking about what's not good in these stories because there's a lot that's not good. And so today we have this beautiful looking Love Story. It looks lovely, but we need to rewind so that we can begin to understand what takes place that makes this story what it is.

When we left Abraham in our lesson last week it was really a tough day. He'd waited and waited and waited and waited for the descendants that God promised he was going to have. And by the time anybody comes along he's getting up in years. At least he has his first son Ishmael. That doesn't go very well and Ishmael and his mother, Hagar, are banished into the wilderness.

And then there was Isaac, his son by Sarah. He is referred to as “the son Abraham loved.” This son, God says, you need to offer him up as a burnt offering. This is one of those times we need to pay attention to what Holy scripture does not say: we're not told that Abraham flinches or gives a second thought to it. Abraham immediately obeys. But that's a costly little piece of obedience for Abraham because yes, there is indeed a ram in the thicket. There is indeed something for that offering.

But what we're left with in the Book of Genesis is a fractured family. The next time we hear about them, Abraham has gone to live in Barsabba. Sarah has gone to live and dies in Hebron. And Isaac has made his way to the Negev by way of Beer-lahai-roi, which translates to "well of the Living One who sees me" which also happens to be that place where Hagar and Ishmael were banished off into the wilderness. It's a costly day of obedience for Abraham because this family that for which he had prayed and longed for, now is fractured.

This could have really been the end of the Abrahamic line. Isaac has wandered off by himself and he's not producing any descendants that could be the end.  And Abraham is faced with, “How do I make this right? How do I fix this?” Because otherwise the promise is gone.

So he sends his servant to find a wife because Isaac needs a wife. Isaac who's now wandering around in the Negev by himself needs a wife. He sends his servant out to find a wife and he sends him back to Abraham's own family, his own people to find this wife. And note the discernment of this servant does as he goes looking for this wife. He prays. He asks for signs – for something visible and tangible to help him recognize that he has found the right one.

And where does he end up but at Abraham's brother's own encampment. And the girl who happens to come by is Abraham's brother's granddaughter. He waits and he prays and watches as she does and says the very things for which he has prayed.

In this patriarchal society we would think that Nahor and his offspring would all say, “take Rebecca and go.” But notice they ask Rebecca if she is willing to go. And so right there, we know Rebecca is no ordinary gal. She is something different, something special. She agrees that she will go to this man she's never seen, about whom she knows nothing. She will go.

Because that's a theme in the Abrahamic stories - being asked by God to go someplace without knowing where we're going or what we're going to see; whether there's adversity in front of us or there are good things in front of us. We don't know. But we're being asked to step out in faith with no idea what to expect. Here is Rebecca, one more in the line, saying I will go.

As they are making their way to the Negev to where Isaac has made his home, she looks out and she sees this man, her husband, about whom she knows nothing. She has no idea that he was nearly sacrificed by his father, how he has mourned for his mother. She really doesn't know Isaac at all but there he is.

He loves Rebekah. Love was not a prerequisite for marriage in the ancient world. But Isaac loves her and now he is beginning to find comfort from all of the things that have happened in his life.

So yes we're all going to know some adversity. Abraham and his progeny they all certainly get to know some adversity. But the test for us is how we meet it. How does God help them meet their adversity?

Abraham who watches the promise of generations of progeny evaporate right in front of him, musters up enough faith to continue to believe in the vast, rich promise of faithfulness from God. He does the one thing he can so that the promise doesn't just die.

And then there's Isaac who is still a young man but we can safely assume he has seen a lot and hurt a lot. If Isaac has reached a place in his life where he believes there is just nothing left, that he will mourn and grieve the rest of my days. Some of us really would have folded up the proverbial tent at that point, wouldn't we, if we were Isaac. And said ‘enough.’

But somehow this village that has surrounded him - Abraham and the servant and Rebecca - they all give him that new lease on his existence, that opportunity to take one more step in faith. Because that is what we do for one another in community with all of God's people for one another. We give that reason to take one more step in faith and to believe that all is not lost.

Rebecca has no idea about the backstory for this man that she has come to marry. Her life's going to be rough, too, but she has stepped out in faith and in belief that with God it will be possible. And no doubt as she begins to learn her role in continuing this family, she will understand her value to God as well.

And then we certainly can't forget this this wonderful discerning servant who has prayed who has patiently watched and waited for signs from God that he is moving in the right direction. He encourages this young woman to follow God's plan.

We can't possibly know all of the things that we will face in our lifetime. But what we do know is that we have the promise of God's faithfulness to us. We have the promise that God will not forsake us. We have the promise that God will be with us no matter what. And even when the answer isn't the answer that we think we'd like to hear, we have the promise of God's faithfulness to us.

And so we learn that in those times that we feel betrayed, in those times that we feel disappointed, in those times that we suffer and are hurt, in those times that we are lonely, in those times that we are insulted -- all of those things that Chief Justice Roberts says to the young graduates. What we know is that God is there through all of those things, that God's love is Abiding Love.

What we learn from these Genesis stories is that our prayerful supplication, our own prayerful discernment of what is God is calling us to do and to be, is how we face adversity. And when our will is supplanted by God's will, then we, too, can find our way out of the pain, out of the hurt, out of the disappointment and back to our God.  In the name of God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

June 28, 2026, The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Reflections on Matthew 10:40-42 by the Reverend Carole Horton-Howe

Jesus said, “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet's reward; and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous; and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple-- truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.” In this brief passage from the gospel today we continue to listen in on a conversation that Jesus is having with his disciples and his closing words to them in what is known as the missionary discourse.

Sermon by the Rev. Carole Horton-Howe 

In this brief passage from the gospel today we continue to listen in on a conversation that Jesus is having with his disciples and his closing words to them in what is known as the missionary discourse.  And the topic Jesus chooses to wrap up with, the last words he leaves with them, are about welcome – what it means to truly offer and receive welcome. Something as seemingly simple as extending hospitality to a follower of Jesus has profound implications. And that it that God is the ultimate recipient. But perhaps not the only beneficiary.

Jesus gave them a guide for evaluating welcome in the gospel we heard a couple weeks ago. When they go into a home, they are to offer peace. And if it is returned, the place is worthy of their visit and they are to stay there to teach and offer healing. If their peace is not returned, they should leave that place and go on to look for welcome elsewhere.

In ancient Jewish law and culture, a sent messenger was to be treated as the person who sent them. So Jesus used this familiar concept to give his disciples a kind of official divine authority.

Their survival also called on Jewish culture and tradition. Jesus ordered the disciples to travel light, taking no money, extra clothes, or food. Their complete dependence on welcome is thought to have motivated strangers to feed and shelter them. 

And we wonder if it didn’t also offer emotional comfort.  The disciples faced intense rejection, persecution and even trial and execution. Knowing that welcoming them was equivalent to welcoming God must have provided massive encouragement during lonely travels.

Shawn Smith was a freelance journalist in need of a job, or more precisely a paycheck, when he was asked to meet a Syrian refugee named Omar.  Shawn had ideas about refugees, about Middle Eastern men and their motives that he wasn’t especially proud of that but he wouldn’t exactly set them aside either.

So he wasn’t sure of the welcome he could either offer to or accept from this man.  As a writer, though, he knew that the stories are always hidden from us at first, always waiting in the shadows. They are tentative, skittish things, yearning for light.

Shawn calculated that there are nearly 6,000 miles between Omar’s hometown and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania where they both lived. There were dozens of other countries to which Omar could have been relocated and hundreds of other cities. Yet somehow there he was, less than a mile from Shawn’s house, and the area where Shawn’s ancestors had lived for the last 250 years. What are the odds of their paths crossings? He was still tentative, but his curiosity was stronger.

At their first meeting, he offer a perfunctory thank you to Omar through a translator for Omar’s willingness to meet him here in a strange country.  “It may very well be that nothing will come of our time together,” Shawn says. “But I’m willing to help you tell your story.”  The translator echoed his words to Omar in his own language. He smiled and nodded and replied in Arabic.  “Omar says it is impossible for nothing to come of this. He is glad you are willing to hear his story, but no matter what happens, you are friends now. That is all that matters.”

The words caught Shawn off guard. He thought this Syrian man would be as skeptical as he was. He thought that a Middle Eastern Muslim, would see Shawn, a white, western, Christian, as a potential enemy.  But Omar accepted Shawn without reservation, almost instantly. He called him his “friend” which rocked his world. Shawn wondered perhaps for the first time ever, what the word “friend” even meant to him. 

“Omar, can you tell me about your village?” Shawn asked. “Can you tell me about how you got to the United States?” With a sad smile Omar said, “I love Syria. No one ever wants to leave their home. But we had no choice.”

Omar had gotten a tip that his village would soon be bombed. With his wife and three sons somehow balanced behind him, he guided his motor bike out of their village and into the countryside. Their combined weight wobbled the aged bike from side to side, as he shouted at them, “hold still, hold still.”  From his cousin’s porch, they watched bombs rain down on his village miles away. “That was your house,” he said, then, ten minutes later, “I think that one hit my house.”

The next night Omar walked through the pitch-black Syrian wilderness, his family in a line behind him. He could feel the tension in his wife, the fear in his older boys. Someone ahead shouted, “Get down!” and they all collapsed into the dust, holding their breath, trying to keep the baby quiet. There was the taste of dirt. There were rocks digging into his body. There was the sound of his boys, so far from home and so afraid. “Abba,” they whimper. “Abba.”

Small children crying out for their father echoes the cry of all of us to God our Father and the longing we all have to be safe, to find ourselves in welcoming arms. If we follow Christ, we represent him to the world. Our words and actions are often the only window non-believers have into who Jesus is.

Welcoming others—especially strangers, the marginalized, or those in need—is a direct act of worship, our way to love and honor God by loving and honoring God’s creation. Service to people is treated as service to Christ. He especially remembers those he calls “little ones.”  The Greek word is “mikros” and they are especially beloved of Jesus.  They are the children but also the vulnerable and those who some in society considers inferior.

How critical is welcome?  Jesus’ charge today is a powerful one: those who show hospitality to his disciples, are effectively hosting Jesus himself—and by extension, accepting God the Father.  So everyday acts of kindness are elevated into expressions of devoted worship.

When Shawn set out to write Omar’s story he thought it would be an action-adventure tale following a Syrian family through bombs and bullets to an inner-city US neighborhood that persecuted them for being Muslim. He thought it might be his own story of how a middle-aged man in search of meaning helped a Syrian family find the American dream.

Instead, something happened inside of him. His belief that refugees have little to offer and make communities where they settle weaker was crushed. His belief that they need his help more than they need his welcoming friendship was gutted. His deep-seated, hidden concern that every Muslim person might be inherently violent or dedicated to the destruction of the West was exposed and found to be false.

Instead of a magazine story, he wrote a book which he describes as “a deeply personal story of two fathers hoping for the best, two hearts seeking compassion, two lives changed forever and the opportunities to show love and hospitality to the sojourner in our midst.”

So what is the meaning of friendship?  Shawn discovered it is all in, nothing held back, arms wide open welcome. He never could have imagined he’d become friends with a Syrian man from 6,000 miles away, a Muslim man whose children call him Abba. Shawn’s life changed in ways he still finds difficult to explain. Through all the coffees, drives to Philadelphia, and chats on his front porch, there’s one thing he knows for sure. The role of the welcoming host, in a role reversal he did not see coming, had been taken on by Omar.  Before he even knew him, he called him friend.

For us as modern readers and followers of Jesus, today’s teaching shifts our focus from ancient missionary travel to our own ethics and relationships. It links humanity all the way up to the divine. Welcoming the disciple leads to welcoming Jesus, which ultimately means welcoming God who sent Him. Open doors lead to open hearts. Open doors lead to open minds and a place for love to live. 

The ancient story of Jesus sending his friends and followers into the world and the modern story of Shawn and Omar remind us that we have it in us to be Christs to each other to work miracles of love and healing as well as to have them worked on us.   Amen.