"You duped me, O Lord, and I let myself be duped."

That is about as honest a prayer as you will find anywhere in Scripture. Jeremiah is not thanking God this morning; he is accusing him. He took this call to preach because God overpowered him, and now the word has cost him -- he is being mocked and laughed at, and the loss of friends he once had. And here is the part that gets me every time I read it. Jeremiah says he tried to stop. He tried to hold it in, to say nothing more in God's name, and he simply couldn’t do it. "There is in my heart as it were a burning fire, imprisoned in my bones. I grow weary holding it in, I cannot endure it."

That is what it looks like when the word of God actually takes root and springs to life in a person. It is not a comfortable feeling. It is a fire. And fire, once it catches, cannot be talked back into staying small, it grows… remember when Jesus compared the Reign of God to a mustard bush and how uncontrollably that grows, well that is how the Word of God is when it takes root in someone.

The psalmist knows this same fire, though it comes out as longing rather than complaint. "O God, you are my God, for you I long. My soul thirsts for you, my flesh pines for you, like a dry weary land without water." That is not polite religious language. That is the language of someone who has fallen in love and has no other words to speak than amazing truth.

And then St. Paul, writing to the Romans, tells us plainly what gets in the way of that kind of love. Conformity. He begs them not to be conformed to this age, but to allow themselves to be transformed by Christ, so that they can actually discern what God is asking of them. Paul knew, and we know, how easy it is to let the world's priorities quietly become our own, comfort over conviction, safety over sacrifice, until one day we look up and realize our zeal is waning.

Which brings us to the Gospel, and to Peter, who I have a real soft spot for, because Peter is me, Peter is all of us. Just last week, remember, Peter proclaimed Jesus the Christ, the Son of the living God, and Jesus praised him for it. This week, when Jesus starts talking about suffering, rejection, and the cross, Peter pulls Jesus aside and rebukes him. He wants the Messiah without a cross. He wants the glory without the Passion. And Jesus, in that same breath, calls him Satan…get behind me. Because whoever wants to save their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for Jesus’ sake will find it.

That is the hardest sentence in the Gospel this week, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Discipleship costs us something. It always has. It is not a decoration we add to a comfortable life, like we see happening all around us. Sometimes it is a literal cross. Many people have died for their discipleship of Jesus Christ, and still do! More often, for most of us, it is figurative, but no less real. It is the courage to say the true thing when silence would be easier. It is choosing mercy and compassion when the world around us is choosing suspicion, fear and cruelty.

And I have to name where I see that cost being asked of us right now, because I would not be honest if I did not. Our country continues to turn away immigrants and refugees at our doors, families fleeing violence and desperation, and calls it strength. People of color and women are still struggling for real equality in this country, and everywhere we turn we see erasure instead of inclusion. Real discipleship this week means refusing to let that become normal to us. It means remembering that the God we thirst for in Psalm 63 is the same God who told us plainly, whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me. Carrying that cross is not glamorous. Most days it looks like showing up, speaking up, and refusing to look away when it would be so much easier to conform, to keep the conversation comfortable, instead of speaking the truth of the Gospel…love one another as I have loved you, feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, house the homeless…that has become counter cultural. But it is the heart and soul of discipleship.

But I want to go back to the beginning of todays thoughts, because Jeremiah's story, and Peter's story, and our story, do not end in the fire alone. They end in relationship. Jeremiah, for all his complaining, never actually walked away from God. He kept preaching. The fire that exhausted him was also, somehow, what sustained him, because underneath the anger was a love he could not extinguish even if he tried. That is the paradox of real discipleship. It costs us, and it fills us, both at once.

And through every mile of that costly road, Jesus is not sending us out alone. He walks it with us. He told us plainly that whoever loses their life for his sake will find it, and that is not a casual comment, it is a profound promise. He comes with us into the valleys, into the hard conversations, the moments when standing up for the vulnerable makes us unpopular, and he does not leave us there. Even when we cannot feel him, even when the fire feels like exhaustion rather than comfort, he has not abandoned us. He never will.

So let that fire burn in you this week. Let it be uncomfortable if it needs to be. And trust, the way Jeremiah eventually had to trust, that the God who placed that fire in your heart is walking every step of this road right beside you. And never forget that you are deeply and passionately loved by God, just as you are!

Blessings,
Fr Tim

In today’s Gospel, Jesus asks his disciples a question that he really only asked once, but it has been asked of every generation for the last 2,000 years. "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?" And then, more pointedly, "Who do you say that I am?"

Peter answers with some of the most profound words anyone in the Gospels speaks. "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." And Jesus tells him that mere flesh and blood did not reveal this to him. It came from the Father. It came from somewhere deeper than reasoning, deeper than some intellectual understanding. It must have come from that quiet place within where God speaks, and if we are still enough, we can hear him. And Peter heard that still, small voice. And Isaiah gives us some insight into how God works that might be helpful to us. Shebna, the palace official, is stripped of his office and his royal clothes because he used his position to build himself up instead of serving the people entrusted to him. And God raises up Eliakim in his place, clothes him, and gives him the key of the House of David on his shoulder. Whatever he opens, no one can shut. Whatever he shuts, no one can open. That same language of “the key” returns in the Gospel when Jesus hands Peter the keys of the kingdom of heaven. The pattern is consistent from Isaiah to Matthew. Real authority is never about elevating yourself. It is about opening doors for people who have been locked out! And here is where I have to be honest with you, because I cannot preach on these readings and pretend I do not know what door locking looks like in our country right now. Families fleeing violence are being turned away at our border. Immigrants who have lived here for years, who have worked, paid taxes, and worshiped with us and raised their children among us, are being rounded up and deported without the mercy that the Gospel demands of us. And at the very same time, funding that keeps food on the tables of the poor and healthcare in reach of the sick is being cut, with out fanfare, in budget lines we are not supposed to read. The doors that should be open, for the stranger, for the hungry, for the sick are being shut. And I will not stand up here and pretend that does not grieve the heart of God.

So where is God in all of this. That is the honest question underneath headlines these months. And Saint Paul gives us an answer this morning that does not resolve the mystery, but does something better. It holds it. "Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God. How inscrutable are his judgments and how unsearchable his ways." Paul is not offering us a tidy explanation. He is telling us that God's ways run deeper than we can trace, deeper than any single news cycle, deeper than any single lifetime. The arc of God's justice does not bend on our timeline. It bends on his. And that is not an excuse for us to sit back. But rather, it is an invitation to trust that even now, even here, God's wisdom is at work guiding and guarding what belongs to him from the plunder of those who would take it for themselves.

But guiding and guarding through what? Through whom? Most often, through us. Through our voice raised for the voiceless. Through our hands that feed the hungry and welcome the stranger…at our food pantry, through Feast on the Streets meeting up with the unhoused and meeting their needs. God’s guiding and guarding through our feet that walk into rooms other people have decided to avoid or have decided should be locked. The still small voice that spoke to Elijah on the mountain is the same voice that spoke to Peter when he called Jesus the Christ. It is the voice that speaks to us, if we are quiet enough to hear it, telling us where the Kingdom needs our hands today.

And through it all, hear this promise, because it is the one thing I most want you to carry out of this church today: Jesus does not stand at a distance watching us struggle through the darkest valleys of our lives, or the darker chapters of our nation's story. He is with us. He promised that we would remain in him and he in us, and that promise does not depend on whether we feel his presence in a given moment. It does not depend on whether the headlines look hopeful this week. He is already there, in the valley, before we even know we need him, walking beside the immigrant family, standing beside the person deciding between groceries and medicine; present in every place where the doors have been shut, waiting for someone, with a key.

We may be those keys. Our hands, our voices, our willingness to see Christ in the stranger and to act.

So let us breathe deeply this morning, and rest for a moment in that Divine presence, dwelling within each and every single one of us.

The God who holds galaxies in balance holds you too. All things, he holds. All things, including you, including this weary, struggling world are held in his hands, and he has not let go. And, he never will let go. Amen.

Blessings,
​Fr Tim

In today’s Gospel we hear that Jesus withdraws to the region of Tyre and Sidon... foreign territory... Gentile territory, and a woman comes running after him. She is not one of his own. She is not part of the covenant. She is, in the language of that world, an outsider... a foreigner... a Canaanite.

And she will not stop shouting.

"Have pity on me, Lord, Son of David. My daughter is tormented by a demon."

And Jesus... says nothing.

Let’s sit in Jesus’ silence for a moment, because it is an uncomfortable silence. The disciples want her gone. "Send her away, she keeps calling out after us." She is a nuisance to them. She does not belong in their story. And when Jesus finally does speak, what he says is harder still, even more uncomfortable: "It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs."

Friends, that is a slur. Let us not soften it. Jesus, in that moment, speaks the language of exclusion that his own people used against her people.

And she does not walk away. She does not even argue the insult. She faces him and takes the very words thrown at her and turns them into a door. "Please, Lord, even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from their master's table."

Frist she asks for mercy. Then she recognizes who Jeus is, “Lord, Son of David”…the Messiah of Isreal, then she recognizes that even the crumbs of his mercy are more than enough to heal her daughter.

And everything changes: "O woman, great is your faith. Let it be done for you as you wish."

That is the reversal at the heart of this Gospel. A woman with no standing, no claim, no place at the table, becomes the one who challenges Jesus, and teaches us, what the table is actually for.

Because look at what surrounds her story this Sunday in our Scripture. Isaiah promises that foreigners who love the Lord
will be brought to God's holy mountain, (foreigners on God’s holy mountain), and then God says, "my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples." Not some peoples. All peoples.

The psalm cries out, "let all the nations praise you." And St. Paul, writing to the Romans, tells the Gentiles plainly that the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable, and that God has mercy on all peoples.

“All”. That word will not let us go this weekend.

I cannot preach on this Gospel and pretend we are not living in a moment when the word "foreigner" is being used again, in our own country, the way it was used against that woman at the border of Tyre and Sidon. Immigrants and refugees are being spoken of today the way the disciples spoke of her... as a nuisance, as someone to be sent away, as someone who does not belong at the table. Families are being separated. People fleeing violence are being turned back. The stranger among us, whom Scripture again and again calls us to welcome, is being met not with hospitality but with open animosity and even cruelty.

I say this not to make a political point but because it is impossible to read Matthew 15 honestly and not hear our own headlines echoing inside it. The Church has never asked us to abandon prudence or the rule of law. But she insists that we look for and discover the face of Christ in the migrant, the refugee, the one who comes to us from outside our borders and outside our comfort zones. Isaiah's house of prayer for all peoples is not a slogan. It is a description of what God's own house actually is, from the very mouth of God’s own prophet.

But here is not where I want to leave you, because this Gospel does not end in confrontation. It ends in healing. The Canaanite Woman’s daughter is made whole. Jesus does not simply tolerate this woman...he is moved by her, he praises her, he holds her up as an example of the very faith he has been searching for. The outsider becomes the model disciple. The religious leaders of his time have missed who he is, his disciples are often bewildered as to his true identity, and here, this foreigner, a pagan, a woman, really sees him for who he really is, believes in him, and names him out loud for all to hear.

And that is good news for every single one of us because every one of us knows what it is to feel like when we are on the outside. We all have had reasons when we called out and it seemed like heaven gave us silence. A diagnosis. A broken relationship. A child, a sibling, a parent, or a friend, we cannot reach. A grief that will not lift. We have all stood, at some point, in the space of that woman, crying out into what feels like an empty void.

Here is the promise this Gospel leaves us. Jesus was never actually walking away from her. He was moving toward her the entire time...he chose to go into Gentile territory, into the very place she lived, before she ever called out his name. That is who God is. God does not wait for us to arrive at the right address. God comes to where we already are, and is with us!

So when you walk through your own dark valley, and it feels like the silence is winning, remember the Canaanite Woman. Do not stop calling out. And trust that the Lord who seemed silent for a moment was never absent for a moment. He is already there, before you even knew to ask. Remember “the Lord is with you” always!

Blessings,
Fr Tim

I want to take a look at our first reading today, because I think Elijah is having a very significant moment. Elijah is a man who has given his whole self for God. He has preached in the name of God, he has confronted the powerful, he has stood his ground against political leaders when standing his ground was genuinely dangerous. And now he is hiding in a cave on a mountain, exhausted and afraid, waiting for God to show up and make it clear as to what God wants him to do next. And God does show up, but not in any of the ways Elijah expects. First comes a wind so fierce it splits mountains and shatters rocks. God was not in the wind. Then there was an earthquake. God was not in the earthquake. Then fire…God was not in the fire. And then, after all of that, a tiny whispering sound. A still, small voice. And that is where Elijah finds God.
I think many of us feel as though we are in that cave right now.

We are living through a moment in this country that feels like sustained wind, earthquake, and fire all at once. The political noise is deafening, the chaos is destabilizing. The divisions are deep and painful. There are policies being pursued right now that are causing real harm to real people: to families living in poverty who cannot stretch a paycheck to cover rent and groceries both, to people of color who continue to carry the weight of systems that were never designed to see them fully, to women whose dignity and autonomy are still subject to political negotiation, to immigrants and refugees who came here seeking safety and found fear and discrimination instead. These are not abstractions. These are the people God has placed in our path. Many of them are in this church. And in the middle of all that noise, God says: I am not in the earthquake. I am not in the fire. Listen for the whisper.

That is not a call to retreat from the hard work of justice. It is a call to make sure we are rooted in something that the storm cannot blow away, because the storm is real and it is not going away anytime soon, and if all we have is outrage, eventually the outrage runs out. But if we are rooted in the God who speaks in the still small voice, we have something that does not run out.

Which brings us to Peter...soaking wet and embarrassed, getting back into the boat. I love this story, and I love Peter, because Peter is us. The disciples are out on the water in the middle of the night, the wind is against them, and they are terrified. And then Jesus comes walking toward them on the water and they think he is a ghost, which honestly I think is a reasonable response given the circumstances. And Jesus says to them, take courage, it is I, do not be afraid. And Peter, in his desire to please Jesus, says: Lord, if it is really you, tell me to come to you on the water. Now think about that for a second. The other disciples are gripping the sides of the boat. Peter is the one who says, Lord, call me out onto the water. There is something genuinely beautiful about the real faith displayed in that impulse. He wants to go where Jesus is, even if where Jesus is happens to be the middle of a stormy sea in the dark.

And Jesus says, come. And Peter gets out of the boat. And he actually walks on the water. For a moment, Peter is doing something that defies every reasonable expectation. Because his eyes are on Jesus. Then he notices the wind. He looks away. And he sinks. Jesus reaches out immediately and catches him, and says, O you of little faith, why did you doubt? And I want to be careful here because I think this line is sometimes preached in a way that makes Peter feel small and makes us feel guilty every time we struggle. That is not what I hear in it. What I hear is something closer to tenderness. Why did you doubt? Not as accusation. As an honest question. You were doing it, Peter. You were walking on the water…then what happened? Because here is the truth: Peter didn’t sink because he lacked faith entirely. He sank because he shifted his gaze from Jesus to the storm. He sank because the wind was real and loud and frightening, and for a moment it was bigger in his eyes than the One who had called him out onto the water. I think that is the spiritual challenge of this particular moment in our national life. The wind is howling. The waves are real and crashing on our shores. The suffering of those pushed to the margins of our society is real, and it should grieve us, and it does grieve us. Paul in the second reading describes a grief that is almost unbearable, a sorrow and constant anguish of heart for people he loves who are struggling. Paul knows what it is to be broken open by the suffering of others. And he does not dismiss that grief. He carries it. But he carries it in Christ.

So the question I hear the Gospel putting to us today is…where are our eyes focused?
Because if our eyes are fixed on the storm alone, we will despair. The problems are too large, the forces arrayed against the poor and the marginalized are too powerful, the political dysfunction is too entrenched, and despair starts to feel like the only honest response. But despair is not what Jesus calls us to. Not because the suffering is not real, but because the storm does not have the last word. We are not a people of despair, we are a people of hope!

Jesus has the last word. And Jesus says come.

Come out onto the water. Come toward me. Come into the places where the comfortable will not go, to where the powerful have turned their backs to, where women and people of color and immigrants and the poor are told their lives matter less. Come there. I will be there. Keep your eyes on me.

And when we sink, and there will be moments when we sink, Jesus will do the same thing he did for Peter. Immediately, he stretched out his hand and caught him. There is no hesitation in God's mercy. There is no delay while Jesus decides whether or not Peter deserves to be rescued. He just catches him. Jesus will catch us.

The psalm today gives us language for what we are asking God to do. "Lord, let us see your kindness, and grant us your salvation. And justice and peace shall kiss." That is a beautiful image. Not justice in place of peace, not peace as a cover for injustice, but justice and peace together, inseparable, embracing one another. That is the world God is building, God’s Reign. That is the world we are called to work toward, even on the days when the wind is howling.

So this week, when the noise gets loud, find the whisper. When the waves rise, fix your eyes on Jesus. And when someone around you is sinking, be the first one who reaches out a hand. Because that is exactly what Jesus would do.

And remember Jesus’ words…“Take courage. It is I. Do not be afraid.”
​
Blessings,
Fr Tim