As we go marching, marching, in the beauty of the day,

A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,

Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,

For the people hear us singing: Bread and Roses! Bread and Roses!

This is the opening stanza of a poem by James Oppenheim, penned at the height of the labor movement and women’s suffrage movement at the turn of the 20th century. This famous slogan “bread and roses” had become a rallying cry for women and workers and it encapsulates a particular philosophy, a theology even, of what is necessary for human flourishing. Daily bread, or food and water, is of course, the bare minimum required to sustain human life, and each day that we have food on the table is a blessing from God indeed, which we know is not afforded to every human being in this world. However, it is also true that even when this lowest common denominator of being fed is satisfied, living hand-to-mouth is a far cry from life in abundance.

f there is one story that communicates the essence of the Gospel, it is the Parable of the Prodigal Son.  This story is absolutely stunning in it’s beauty, it’s poignancy, it’s power, and most importantly, it’s truth.  It’s deep truth about us and about God.

This parable is particular to the Gospel of Luke.  Luke has been called the portrait painter of the Gospel, and for good reason.  His storytelling creates clear images in our minds.  And not only clear images but images that evoke powerful emotions. It is little wonder that Rembrandt, the Dutch master who was perhaps more effective than any other painter in history at expressing the depth and complexity of human experience, chose to portray today’s story in breath-taking splendor.  Rembrandt was a master of color and light.  In his painting of the Return of the Prodigal Son, he shows a repentant son, kneeling at his elderly father’s feet.  The son’s clothes are tattered, his head is shaved like a slave and he is barefoot.  The father looks upon his son with absolute love and forgiveness, and he lays his large, gentle hands on his son’s shoulders.  The father and son are bathed in a warm, glowing light, a light that shines not just ON them, but comes from deep WITHIN them.  The painting captures a moment of stillness, grace, and profound gratitude.  This son was LOST but now is FOUND.  

How do we respond when tragedy befalls us? The answer Jesus gives is to repent. What in the world could our good Lord mean? I do think our initial shock at this answer comes from a misunderstanding of what it means to repent, which is what I’d like to explore with you today, because I think repentance is really a remarkable gift, not a punishment.

One day God asked the Archangel Michael to give a report on the state of things on earth. After conducting his research, St. Michael sheepishly shared that things were not going very well. 90% of the people on earth were behaving very badly and seemed to have little confidence that God could do anything about it. The other 10% were doing pretty well. They were trying their best to live a godly, righteous and sober life but were feeling discouraged and unsure of what God’s will for them was. So God, in His infinite wisdom, came up with a plan. He told St. Michael to send a group text message to the righteous 10% with instructions on what to do so that the other 90% would have a chance to amend their ways and follow him. And do you know what that text message said? I don’t know, I didn’t get it either.

Every year, on the First Sunday in Lent, we hear the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, from either the Gospel of Matthew, Mark or Luke.  And in all three, Jesus is led by the Spirit of God into the wilderness immediately after his baptism.  As he comes up out of the water, Jesus hears the Voice of God, saying, “This is my Son, the Beloved, in whom I am well-pleased.”  In that moment of profound grace, Jesus knows who he is and what he has been called to do.  He knows that he is one with God and that God’s love for him is everlasting and that God has a mission for him to share that love with the world.  Jesus’ baptism is a moment of ecstasy, a transcendent experience, a spiritual high.  But Jesus is not allowed the luxury of dwelling there.  The Spirit immediately leads him into the wilderness to be tested.  All three gospels make the explicit connection between Jesus’ baptism and his time in the wilderness.  Jesus’ clarity about his purpose and mission at his baptism is immediately put to the test before he begins his ministry.  

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, amen.

Today is the last Sunday of the season of Epiphany, which is a season focused on helping us see the ways that God shows up for us tangibly in the world. It begins with the first Epiphany experience, when the Magi visit the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Christ child after His birth and it ends with this mysterious event known as the Transfiguration, which we hear of today. Now before I get into the Transfiguration, I want to say that it’s always been fascinating to me to think about sacred geography; that is, where spatially God shows up for us. Throughout scripture you’ll notice a common pattern of God revealing Himself to us in two specific places – deserts and mountaintops.

Love your enemies and turn the other cheek. This is perhaps one of the most difficult teachings of Christ presented to us in all of the Gospel. When I first read these words last week I thought that this is either the worst possible timing for this Gospel lesson to appear, when country, and neighbor, and even household is so bitterly divided, or it is the Gospel we need desperately to hear now more than ever. Love your enemies and turn the other cheek.

“…Blessed are those who trust in the Lord,

    whose trust is the Lord.

They shall be like a tree planted by water,

  sending out its roots by the stream.  

It shall not fear when heat comes,

  and its leaves shall stay green;

In the year of the drought it is not anxious,

  and does not cease to bear fruit….”  Jeremiah 17: 5-10

When we were traveling around the country with my husband Robbie’s naval career, people would often stop him and say “thank-you for your service.”  I was always really touched by that because it demonstrated that he was seen, valued and appreciated for his dedication to our country and peace-keeping around the world.  People still tell him thanks to this day and it is always a blessing when they do.  People in the military are often away from home for long periods of time, they work long hours and their lives are sometimes at risk.  Our family went through a lot of times being concerned for Robbie’s safety and missing him when he had to be away, but we knew that what he did was important.  It was for a larger purpose.  

Friends, I can’t tell you how good it is to be back with you today, and if you are visiting or new, then welcome. In case you have forgotten, my name is Paddy Cavanaugh, the associate rector at St. George’s, and for the past three months I have been on paternity leave with my wife Winnie, who gave birth to our first daughter, Mary Winston, in October. Since then I have been wrapped in a blanket of wonder, love, and praise, at the miracle which new life promises.

Today we remember the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  MLK was a prophet, very much in keeping with the Old Testament prophetic tradition.  In our reading from Isaiah today, the prophet speaks to a people who had been in captivity in Babylon for many years and are now experiencing a kind of PTSD.  They are divided, disillusioned, and lack a common vision.  Some have stayed in Babylon.  Some have returned from exile to their homeland.  And a new generation has been born after their return that do no share that earlier experience of captivity with their parents and grandparents.   

In their book, “The Christmas Journey,” author Sally Fisher and illustrator Douglas Sardo, offer an imaginative retelling of the story of the three kings from today’s Gospel.  Fisher’s inspiration for the tale was her visits to see her grandmother in New York City at Christmastime.  Every year, as she was growing up, they would go the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see the famous Christmas tree and creche.  The 20 foot tree is magnificently lit and looms over a gorgeous nativity scene with a multitude of life-like figures and glorious angels hovering above on the tree.  The figures depict Naples’ multi-cultural population in the 18th century.  After Fisher and her grandmother shared this annual ritual, they would go back to her grandmother’s apartment and she would tell her granddaughter her own story of the journey of the tree, the angels, and all of the people and animals beneath the tree.  Fisher’s book is her remembrance of the tale that enchanted her so much, a story that sparked her own curiosity and wonder about how to make meaning of today’s Gospel.  What follows is my retelling of her story.  I shared it with you for the first time several years ago. Wonderful stories are worthy of being told over and over again.  They invite us to come along and learn something new every time we hear them.

Poetry, beauty and wonder.  That is what this morning is about.  Our souls long for the profound mystery at the heart of Christmas, the gloriously impossible reality that God’s power and God’s love came to us as a little child.  God’s ways are clearly not our ways.  We come together today as people who walk in a land of deep darkness.  There is so much right now that threatens our sense of well-being.  But into that deep darkness, a light has shined, “for a child has been born for us, a son given to us.”

Good evening St. George’s and merry Christmas! It is a joy to be back with you on this night. For those of you who are new or visiting – welcome. I’ve been away for the past few weeks celebrating a small nativity of my own with my wife Winnie. In October we welcomed the arrival of our first child, Mary Winston, who is right here in the pews with us tonight. There is nothing like a fresh new baby to bring the miracle of Christmas to life, is there?

Today’s Gospel is the beautiful story of two women caught up in the mystery and wonder of God. Both are carrying sons who are divinely commissioned by God to bring about God’s purposes for the world.  

Elizabeth is carrying John the Baptist, the one who will prepare the way for Jesus.  And her cousin Mary, is pregnant with Jesus, the Savior and Redeemer of the world.  Both are miraculous pregnancies.  Elizabeth was thought to be beyond child-bearing years, and yet she and her husband are expecting a son.  And Mary, her much younger, unmarried cousin, is carrying a child that she conceived after an angel announced that she would be bear God’s Son.  Mary and Elizabeth are participants in God’s work of salvation, and when they meet, they are immediately aware that their lives are intertwined in a way that goes beyond their understanding.  

On this Third Sunday in Advent, there are no more fitting words than “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say , Rejoice.”   Christmas is just two weeks away and we look forward to gathering on Christmas Eve for beautiful worship services, either here or with family and friends elsewhere, to celebrate the Feast of the Nativity, and the coming of Christ to be with us in the flesh.  There is no greater joy than that.  And this afternoon, we will get a sneak preview of Christmas with our Lessons and Carols service, where we will be together with fellow Saint Georgians and with people from the larger community to experience this lovely treasure from our Anglican tradition.  If you didn’t get a chance to see our Minister of Music, Dr. Ben Keseley’s, Dragon Bytes article in video form this past Thursday, I highly recommend watching it when you get home today.  Ben recorded it inside the organ chamber and it’s both educational and funny.  I was especially interested to learn that the first Lessons and Carols service was held in 1880 on Christmas Eve at 10 pm and was intended to keep people “out of the teeming public houses,” a.k.a. rowdy, crowded bars.   

his summer my husband Nick and I traveled through West Virginia for a week-long summer vacation. We entered West Virginia on highway 55 (US 48) headed toward Blackwater Falls State Park. As we drove on Rt 55, I was in awe at how flat and smooth the road was as we headed across the mountain range. The highway led us over tree covered valleys with beautiful rushing streams and rivers. As we gazed up at the mountaintops we saw hundreds of windmills that I am told power Northern Virginia. This highway through these rugged mountains, forests and streams was awe inspiring. It reminded me of the Isaiah 40 passage in our gospel reading that speaks of making a level, straight and smooth path so the glory of the Lord will be revealed. 

Wow, this has been quite the last couple of weeks!  The aftermath of the presidential election has left some of our fellow Americans feeling completely elated and triumphant, and others altogether bereft and discouraged about our future as a nation.  And most people in Arlington and here at Saint George’s are in the latter group.  Roughly 80% of voters registered in Arlington voted for Vice-President Kamala Harris and roughly 20% voted for President-elect Trump.  But whomever we voted for, whether we voted with the majority of Americans overall or whether we voted with the majority of people in Arlington, we can all agree that this is the most consequential election of our lifetimes to date.  When people are having a hard time agreeing on much of anything right now, we can all generally agree about that, whichever political perspective we are speaking from, that this election signals a major shift in direction.  There will be a lot of changes and yet we do not know for sure what initiatives will come to fruition.  There is so much uncertainty right now and human beings do not deal very well with uncertainty.  So it is especially important for us to be reminded of how we are called to live as Christians during this time.   And our reading from Hebrews today has a lot of wisdom to offer us. 

Today is All Saints Sunday, the day in the church year when we focus on what it means to be knit together in the communion of saints.  We are reminded today that we live our lives in the here and now mindful of all the faithful people who have gone before us.  Those people are still with us as our heavenly cheerleaders, encouraging us and helping us onward.  Today I am mindful of faithful Saint Georgians who have died.   I remember seeing them at church every Sunday and hearing what was going on in their lives.  I can still see where they sat, and recall the ministries they served in.  I remember visiting them and sharing communion when they weren’t able to be in church anymore.  I really miss them but take comfort in knowing that they are with us still.  I am also aware of family members, my grandparents, my father, my mother-in-law, my brother-in-law.  You may be mindful of people in your own life who have died.  Even if it has been a while, their memory is still alive, and not only that, they are very much alive in a spiritual sense.  Every Sunday in the Eucharistic Prayer we praise God with the angels, archangels and all the company of heaven.  They are  the company of heaven , all those who we love but see no longer, and that is a comforting and empowering thought.   

While reading Mark, I sometimes wonder if sight is overrated. Generally we regard sight as the most valuable of the senses. Some 2,400 years ago, the philosopher Aristotle ranked the five senses in hierarchical order, and praised sight as the most noble of them all. No doubt he was influenced by his teacher, Plato, who wrote that sight was the foundation of all knowledge in a work called Timaeus, which some biblical scholars associate with our Bartimaeus, the blind beggar in today’s Gospel lesson, whose name literally means ‘Son of Timaeus.’ This is possibly an ironic head nod to the wisdom of an unsighted man overturning the wisdom of a man praising sight.

This past Friday, the sports world was shocked to hear the announcement that UVA basketball coach Tony Bennett was retiring.  Bennett is one of the “winningest” coaches of all time.  He has had a stunningly successful career.  He is also widely regarded as a person of deep integrity.  He said that he could longer continue because he did not believe in the direction that college sports were going and feared for the well-being of his athletes within a system that was becoming more and more like professional sports.  Coach Bennett said that he knew it was time to acknowledge that he was not equipped to take the program forward in this new environment, describing himself as a square peg in a round hole. 

Last Sunday Reverend Shearon preached an excellent sermon on the faithful Christian response to suffering, and today I’d like to continue that thread by exploring the question of what, then, is God’s response to suffering?

How can we profess that God is good in the face of all the human suffering we witness every day?  Wars rage around the world, people die from starvation, and hurricanes wipe out whole communities.  The list goes on and on.  Some suffering that we experience in life is the result of our own actions.  And that requires us to take responsibility, asking for God’s forgiveness and the forgiveness of those we have hurt and asking God to help us live differently going forward.  But so much suffering in this life just happens to us.  It has nothing to do with anything we have done and is totally undeserved.  That is the central dilemma that he Book of Job explores.    

The dean of Virginia Seminary has a habit of opening his sermons with a joke, and he even wrote a book about Episcopal humor, which I’d highly recommend, so I thought I’d take a proverbial page out of his book today.

How many Episcopalians does it take to change a lightbulb?

When I was in seminary, I had a professor who always said that when you are trying to decide which reading to preach on to “find the passage that begs a lot of questions and preach on that.”  And our reading from Proverbs today certainly does that.  “A capable wife who can find?... She is far more precious than jewels.  She girds herself with strength, and makes her arms strong…She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue….” 

In today’s Gospel, Jesus has just had a dust-up with the Pharisees, the religious authorities who were always challenging his teachings.  Jesus has just called them hypocrites and chastised them for failing to “love thy neighbor as thyself,” as the law of Moses demands. Then Jesus leaves the predominately Jewish region where he has been preaching and teaching and heads to a mostly Gentile, or non-Jewish area.  He wants to keep a low profile, according to Mark, but the news of his healing ministry has preceded him, and a Gentile woman approaches him and throws herself at his feet.  She is desperate because her little girl has an “unclean spirit”.  This could have been a physical illness, a mental health issue or something else.  We just know that the little girl was seriously unwell in some way and that her mother is beside herself with worry.  She has heard that this wandering preacher heals people.  

Hello, my friends!  It is so good to see all of you!  I am very happy to be back with you after my sabbatical.  My time away was wonderful, refreshing in so many ways.  We had time for travel, time with family and friends, time in creation, and time at home.  I came back on Tuesday and wow, what a lot of great happenings to get caught up on!  The top hits of the summer seemed to have been the preaching series, the youth service trip and the choir residency in Gloucester.   So much life, so much joy, so much for which to give thanks. 

’d like to tell you a story today. It was written in 1897 and the title of the story is The Happy Hypocrite: A Fairy Tale for Tired Men, which I think is a hilarious title. The story goes like this. There was a man named George Hell (which is also very funny) and George was a selfish man of many appetites. He was a gambler, a flirt, and he loved nothing more than a raucous all-night party. Then one day he met an incredible woman named Jenny and became enraptured with her. Now Jenny was everything that George was not. She was selfless and kind, generous and humble, and she loved God far more than any worldly delight. Hopelessly smitten by her goodness, the scoundrel George confessed his love and asked for Jenny’s hand in marriage, but Jenny playfully replied that she would only marry a man with the face of a saint.

I have a dog who is what dog trainers call “food-motivated.” I gather that not all dogs are like this—I have friends who have a dog who, when they put food down for her, will eat a few bites and then walk away. Not our dog—when we put her food down, she eats it in approximately 15 seconds and then looks up at us, expectantly, as if to say: “is there any more?” 

Whether or not all dogs are food-motivated, I’d venture to say that all of us humans are, at one level or another, food-motivated. We are hungry beings. We are bodies that need to be fed, and this is why Jesus meets us through giving us food and drink. This is why the only one of Jesus’ miracles to be recounted in all four Gospels (and twice in Mark and Matthew) is the feeding of the multitudes. This is also why the feeding of the 5000 in John’s Gospel unfolds into Jesus’ longest discourse in John, and also, in the church’s lectionary, is spread over five weeks. We began hearing the story last week, and the implications of this miraculous feeding continue to unfold, in our Gospel readings, this week and for the next three weeks after that—because this feeding story speaks to our most basic physical need.

Alright, I’m gonna just jump right into the Gospel today. The feeding of the five thousand. This is one of Jesus’s most iconic miracles, so iconic, in fact, that it’s the only one of his miracles to appear in all four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, so it’s clearly important. Now, there are two common interpretations of this miracle and I’d like to lay them both out for you and then we’ll work on figuring out what we should take from this event. The first interpretation is that this is truly a miracle, a miracle of bread being physically multiplied by Jesus. The second is that it’s more of a miracle of people sharing what they already have. I’ll start with the first interpretation, the miracle of multiplication.

I get it.

He said to them, ‘Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest awhile. (v, 31.)  Curious as to just what had so upset Jesus to make Him want to withdraw, I remembered further back in Mark’s Gospel—to where we had left off last Sunday (MK:  6: 14 – 29.)  Seeing what that was, well…I can understand it.