22 Pentecost

 November 9, 2025

Luke 20.27-38

+ As most of you know, I have been on a reading binge for over a year now.

I am averaging about five books a month.

Reading has been my lifeline—or maybe I should say my escape—from some of the realities of our world.

If it’s been my escape though I have to say: it’s been failing me.

The realities are still creeping in and I’m still having to face them and speak out against them and fight the realities of them.  

Still, my reading adventure has been interesting.

And lately I have been finding myself reading some of the theologians who have influenced me over the years.

I re-read my Paul Tillich.

I’ve re-read Dietrich Bonhoeffer (who continues to speak quite effectively to us right here and right now in our current situation)

I have re-read Thomas Merton and Dorothee Solle (who I truly love) and the liberation theologians.

I have re-read the desert mothers and fathers.

And some new thinkers too.

I recently recommended to Stephanie Garcia (who jokes with me about my lack of belief in an eternal hell) a book I read called The Gospel of Inclusion by Bishop Carlton Pearson.

There’s even a Netflix film about this book called, Come Sunday.

It’s about his realization that he cannot believe in Hell any longer and how his church reacted to this realization.

It’s an alright film, but I think more important than anything, it does open up a conversation about why people really, really WANT to believe in hell, even when they are presented with the option that it might not exist—certainly in the way we have popularly believed.

Another one of the theologians I have been re-reading is none other than the late great, John Shelby Spong, the former Episcopal Bishop of Newark, New Jersey.

One of the first books of his I read in my twenties was a book called Resurrection: Myth or Reality?

 I don’t think I’m giving the end away by saying that Bishop Spong’s answer to that question was: Myth.

Bishop Spong believed that there was no resurrection—rather that whatever resurrection one believed in was purely metaphorical.

Yes, Jesus died on the cross.

Yes, he lives on among those of who believe in him.

But there was no bodily resurrection, according to Spong.

In fact, in this book, Spong asserts his belief that Jesus’ body was probably taken down from the cross and given to the dogs to feed on.

The tomb is empty, Spong said.

But not because of any supernatural events.

The tomb is empty and Jesus is not here because he was never there in the first place.

It’s an interesting read.

And I find that I still don’t agree with Spong on many points, including the fact that I don’t believe Jesus’ body was thrown to dogs after he died.

And Bishop Spong would’ve been all right with that disagreement (which is why I like Bishop Spong).

But the issue of resurrection is still an interesting one, and one we usually don’t give a lot of thought to outside of the Easter season.

Certainly the Sadducees in our Gospel reading today viewed the Resurrection of the body in a different way of understanding the resurrection.  

Now, to give them credit, the Sadducees were smooth and they were smart.

They knew how to present a sly argument without being blatant.

You can hear the condescension and sarcasm in their question.

And they did believe that by bringing up the resurrection, they would show Jesus to be the fool and the charlatan.

For the Sadducees, the resurrection of the body was a fairy tale.

It was something gullible people hoped in.

It was absurd and ridiculous.

And so they present this question to Jesus, which is actually a very good question.

It is a question many of us ask as well, especially any of us who have been affected by divorce or death of a spouse and remarriage.

In the resurrection, whose spouse will we be?

My mother, who had a very messy first marriage before she married my father, would often ponder this.

In fact, she would be blunt and say, “When I see Roger [he first husband] in heaven, I hope he stays far away from me!”

I always gave her credit that she believed Roger would actually be IN heaven, to which she would just roll her eyes and say, “it not up to me.”

Jesus, in response to this, in that way Jesus does, flips their argument back around on them.

Jesus lays out a heaven in which there is no longer a need for things like marriage.

In heaven we will all be like angels.

He then lays out this amazing statement,

God, he says, is not the God of the dead, but a God of the living.

Jesus' God is the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, who, he implies, are not dead at all, but alive.

Present tense.

This particular scripture has been meaningful to me after reading Eric Metaxas biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

For all my issues with Metaxas himself which I’m not going to get into this morning, there is a passage in that book that references this scripture that just blew me away when I read it.

In a paragraph referencing the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the notorious SS monster who essentially orchestrated the final solution on the Jews, we hear this,

“At the end of May [1942], the albino stoat [I love that word “stoat”] had been ambushed by Czech resistance fighters while he was riding in his open-topped Mercedes [in Prague]. Eight days later, the architect of the Final Solution fell into the hands of the God of Abraham, Issac and Jacob.”

Our God is a living God.

And, according to Jesus, somehow, in some way, we go on.

For him, that is what resurrection is.

Christians—in our typical way—have over the centuries went to extremes to explain and define what resurrection is.

And they have made it one of the defining beliefs we must have to be saved.

Essentially, to be resurrected we must first believe in resurrection.

Hmmm. I don’t hear Jesus telling us that anywhere here…

But, us Christians love to just squeeze the nuances out of everything!

I once had a former parishioner—a cradle Episcopalian—who later joined the Eastern Orthodox Church over his belief that the Episcopal Church had lost its way regarding belief in the Resurrection.

He refused to receive Communion from priests whom he knew did not believe in an orthodox understanding of the Resurrection of Jesus.

In fact, one of the first questions he would ask a new priest when he would meet them is: So what do you believe regarding the Resurrection?

I luckily passed that test, but not without a good deal of spiritual searching and struggling and some verbal nuances of my own.

But, the fact this morning is this: what do we believe about the resurrection?

Certainly we profess our collective faith in the Resurrection every Sunday in the Creed.

But have we really thought about it?

Well, of course,  one of the best places to look when we are our examining our faith is, of course, our trust Catechism, found in the back of the Book of Common Prayer.

So, let’s take a looksee at what the Prayer Book says about the resurrection.

If you will take your trusty old prayer books and turn to page 862.

There we find that question,

“What do we mean by the resurrection of the body?”   The answer is: We mean that God will raise us from death in the fullness of our being, that we may live with Christ in the communion of the saints.

I love that definition of resurrection.

God will raise us up in the fullness of our being.

Wow!

That is beautiful!

And that is something I can agree with and believe wholeheartedly in.

Now, what that means specifically is not easy.

And, you know?

I don’t want it to be.

I don’t want to examine that answer too closely.

I just want to kind of bask in the glow of the beauty of those words

God will raise us up to the fullness of our being.

Isn’t that our goal after all?

To live into the fullness of our being?

Isn’t that what trans people, and lesbian and gay and asexual and bisexual and straight people have been striving to do all along?

Live into the fullness of their being?

Isn’t that what all of us as living, breathing, searching, questioning, doubting human beings are striving for?

To live into the fullness of our being?

We don’t need to squeeze the meaning out of those words, as we are apt to do.

Because if we do, we will lose the purity and beauty of that statement.

 When we start becoming too specific, we start losing something of the beauty of our faith.

We lose the purity and the poetry of our faith.

When we start trying to examine too closely how the resurrection will happen and when it will happen and how a pile of bones or cremated remains or a body destroyed in the sea can be resurrected into another body, bit by bit, we find ourselves derailed.

What we do know, however is that what the resurrection promises is being raising up in the fullness of our being by our living God.  

The whole basis of what Jesus is getting at in today’s Gospel, in this discourse on marriage, is that the resurrection is not, as the great Anglican theologian Reginald Fuller, said, “a prolongation of our present life, but a new mode of existence.”

It’s not an extension of this world.

It’s something…different.

We will still be us, it seems from what Jesus is saying, but we will be living into that fullness of our being—with a different understanding of what it means to be alive.

Issues like marriage and divorce and remarriage will no longer be an issue.

Now some of us might despair at that fact.

We want to know that when we awake into the fullness of our being, into that resurrected life, we will have our families there, our spouses and our loved ones.

I have no doubt that our loved ones will be there, but it seems that it will be different than here.

We will have a truly fulfilled and complete relationship with all of our loved ones, and also with those who we may not have loved.

What this leads us to is, at the same time, a glimpse of the freedom that we will gain at the resurrection.

Just as some things such as marriage will no longer be an issue, all those other issues we are dealing with now in our lives and in the church will also no longer be with us.

The issues that divide us as a country, as a church, as a community, will all be done away with at the resurrection.

And these bodies too will be done away with as well.

These bodies that will fail us and betray us—these bodies that will die on us and be buried or be burned will no longer be a part of who we are anymore.

We will, at the resurrection, be made whole and complete and perfect by our living God, the God of our forebearers.

The reason we know this is because the God we serve—the God we have gathered together to worship this morning, is not a God of the dying bodies we have with us now.

The God we serve and worship is a God of the living.

When Jesus identifies God as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, he is saying that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are alive and that their God is the God of the living.

So, Resurrection is important to us.

It is VITAL to us.

It is important to us because when we long for and strive to live into the fullness of our being, we are living the resurrected life.

Resurrection is essential to our faith, because in it we have met and faced death.

Death no longer has control over us.

It longer has any power in our lives.

The power and strength of death has been defeated in the resurrection.

In the resurrection, we have the almost audacious ability to say, at the grave, that power-packed word of life: Alleluia.

Praise God!

Praise the living God of the Living!

For our God is not a God of the dead, but of the living.

So, let us live into the fullness of our being.

Let us live into the resurrected life that is our inheritance and our legacy.

And only in life—in this precious, beautiful and wonderful life, given to us by our God—can we fully and truly serve our living God.

 

All Saints Sunday

 

November 2, 2025

+ Yesterday—November 1—was, of course,  All Saints Day.

It is one of the most very important days in the Church.

It is the day in which we commemorate all the saints who now dwell with God in heaven.

It is a beautiful feast.

And we, here at St. Stephen’s, have been celebrating this feast day for a few weeks already.

We celebrated several new saints.

Well, kinda new saints.

New saints to us, anyway.

Over these last few weeks we have been burying the ashes of several individuals whose ashes were unclaimed, some for over 40 years.

(Your priest has been busy digging graves over these past weeks—something they do not teach a priest to do in seminary).

And today, we will do it again.

After our Eucharist today, we will process out at the end of the service to our memorial garden, and we will bury the ashes of George Smith.

George died on February 19, 1984.

1984.

Just think about that for a moment.

I’m going to read you his obituary

 

 From the Fargo Forum, Tues,. Feb. 21, 1984

 George E. Smith

 George E. Smith, 62, 839 23^rd Ave. S., Moorhead, died Sunday.

 Mr. Smith was born Jan. 29, 1922, at Brantford, Ont, and received a master's degree from the University of British Columbia. He was assistant professor of education at the University of Victoria and at Moorhead State University from 1968 to 1980. He married Rosemary N. June 12, 1967, at Seattle.

 He is survived by his wife; two sons and two daughters, three who lived in Bellevue, Wash., and a another who lived in Seattle.

 It seems Rosemary moved shortly after his death to Tacoma without claiming his ashes.

 There appears to have been no funeral, no memorial service for him.

 (until today—41 years later)

 Just cremated.

 And 41 years on a shelf at Korsmo Funeral Home.

 He was just kind of forgotten.

 Until now.   

 Now he is one of our own.

He along with Thomas (a homeless man who also died in 1984), Baby Matthew  (who died in December 1986) and Kimberly  (who died in 2023 and whose ashes were buried last Wednesday), are now a part of our community.

And a reminder that we are all part of the community of saints in this world and the next.

We Episcopalians do these things well.

We do funerals well, we do commemorating our deceased loved ones well.

We celebrate the saints—those who are both well-known saints and those saints who might only be known to a few—very well as Episcopalians.

And when anyone from St. Stephen’s dies, or when anyone close to someone at St. Stephen’s dies, you will always receive an email with a request for prayer.

And the request for prayer will usually begin with these words:

“The prayers of St. Stephen’s are requested for the repose of the soul of …so-and-so.”

Occasionally, someone will ask me about that prayer request.

Someone will ask,

Why do we pray for the dead?

Why do we pray for the repose of their souls?

After all, they’ve lived their lives in this world and wherever they’re going, they’re there long before a prayer request goes out.

It’s a good question.

The fact is, we DO pray for our dead.

We always have—as Anglicans and as Episcopalians.

You will hear us as Episcopalians make the petition for prayer when someone dies that you won’t hear in the Lutheran Church, or the Methodist Church or the Presbyterian Church.

Praying in such a way for people who have passed has always been a part of our Anglican tradition, and will continue to be a part of our tradition.

And I can tell you, I  like that idea of praying for those who have died.

But, I want to stress, that although we and Roman Catholics both pray for our dead,  we don’t pray for people have died for the same reasons Roman Catholics do.

In other words, we don’t pray to free them from some sort of mythical purgatory, as though our prayers could somehow change God’s mind.

I want to stress that our prayers do NOT change God’s mind!

Rather, we pray for our deceased loved ones in the same way we pray for our living loved ones.

We pray for them to connect, through God, with them.

We pray to remember them and to wish them peace.

Still, that might not be good enough answer for some (and that’s all right).

So…let’s hear what the Book of Common Prayer says about it.

And, yes, the Book of Common Prayer does address this very issue directly.

I am going to have you pick up your Prayer Books and look in the back, to the Catechism.

There, on page 862 you get the very important question:

Why do we pray for the dead?

The answer (and it’s very good answer): “We pray for them, because we still hold them in our love, and because we trust that in God's presence those who have chosen to serve [God] will grow in [God’s] love, until they see [God] as [God] is.”

That is a great answer!

We pray that those who have chosen to serve God will grow in God’s love.

So, essentially, just because we die, it does not seem to mean that we stop growing in God’s love and presence.

I think that is wonderful and beautiful.

And certainly worthy of our prayers.

But even more so than this definition, I think that, because we are uncertain of exactly what happens to us when we die, there is nothing wrong with praying for those who have crossed into that mystery we call “the nearer Presence of God.”

After all, they are still our family and friends.

 

We still love them!

They are still part of who we are.

Now, I know that this idea of praying for those who have died  makes some of us very uncomfortable.

And I understand why.

I understand that it flies in the face of some of our more Protestant upbringings.

This is exactly what the other Reformers rebelled against and “freed” us from.

But, even they never did away with this wonderful All Saints Feast we are celebrating this morning.

This morning we are commemorating and remembering those people in our lives who have helped us, in various way, to know God.

As you probably have guessed from the week-long commemoration we do here at St. Stephen’s regarding the Feast of All Saints, I really do love this feast.

With the death of many of my own loved ones in these last few years, this Feast has taken on particular significance for me.

What this feast shows me is what you have heard me preach in many funeral sermons again and again.

I truly, without a doubt, believe that what separates those of us who are alive here on earth, from those who are now in the “nearer presence of God” is truly a very thin one.

And to commemorate them and to remember them is a good thing for all us.

Now, I do understand, as I said before, that all this talk of saints makes some of us a bit uncomfortable.

But…I do want us to think long and hard about the saints we have known in our lives.

And we have all known saints in our lives.

We have known those people who have shown us, by their example, by their goodness, that God works through us.

And I want us to at least realize that God still works through us even after we have departed from this mortal coil.

Ministry in one form or the other, can continue, even following our deaths.

Our witness has followers of Jesus can continue on.

Hopefully, we can still, even after our deaths, do good and work toward furthering the Kingdom of God by the example we have left behind.

For me, the saints—those people who have gone before us—aren’t gone.

They haven’t just disappeared.

They haven’t just floated away and dissipated like clouds out of our midst.

No, rather they are here with us, still.

In these last few years, after losing so many people in my family and among close friends, I think I have felt their presence most keenly many times, but often times most keenly here at this altar when we are gathered together for the Eucharist then at any other time.

I have felt them here with us.

And in those moments when I have, I know in ways I never have before, how thin that veil is between us and “them.”

You can see why I love this feast.

It not only gives us consolation in this moment, separated as we are from our loved ones, but it also gives us hope.

We know, in moments like this, where we are headed.

We know what awaits us.

No, we don’t know it in detail.

We’re not saying there are streets paved in gold or puffy clouds with chubby little baby angels floating around.

We don’t have a clear vision of that place.

But we do sense it.

We do feel it.

We know it’s there, just beyond our vision, just out of reach and out of focus.

And “they” are all there, waiting for us.

They—all the angels, all the saints, all our departed loved ones.

And so too are Thomas and Baby Matthew and Kim Meissner and George.

So, this morning—and always—we should rejoice in this fellowship we have with them.

We should rejoice as the saints we are and we should rejoice with the saints that have gone before us.

In our collect this morning, we prayed that “we may come to those ineffably joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you.”

Those ineffably joys await us.

They are there, just on the other side of that thin veil.

We too will live with them in that place of unimaginable joy and light.

WE are all the saints of God, here and now.

And that is a reason to rejoice this morning.

 

 

20 Pentecost

 

October 26, 2025

 

Psalm 84; Luke 18.9-14

+ Well, we have a new bishop.

 

A bishop we have been praying for every Sunday and every Wednesday for the last several months.

 

And here we are.

 

I, for one, am very happy.

 

I think Shay Craig is just exactly what this diocese needs at this time.

 

And as I shared with our delegates yesterday at Prairie Knights at Standing Rock:

 

This is a new era in our diocese.

 

A much anticipated era for us Progressive Christians in this diocese.

 

Shay, I hope, is the answer to the prayer many of us have been praying for.

 

For 36 years our Diocese has been known as a very conservative diocese.

 

And for those of us who labored here, who endured policies and not-so-wonderful treatment for our convictions, for our beliefs and foresight, those 36 years were hard ones.

 

This December it will be 10 years since St. Stephen’s sought Delegated Episcopal Pastoral Oversight (or DEPO)  so that we could make sure all people—especially our LGBTQ loved ones—were able to have the marriage rites of the Church.

 

As many of us know, the days that followed were often dark days.

 

We felt, at times, alone in this Diocese

 

We endured being the odd ducks for our stance.

 

We endured shunning and downright negativeness for that stand we made.

 

In those dark days, many of us hoped and longed for a time when what we stood for would be the norm.

 

In fact, there were times when the Psalm for today spoke directly to us:

 

Those who go through the desolate valley will find it a place of springs, *
for the early rains have covered it with pools of water.

They will climb from height to height, *
and the God of gods will be revealed in Zion.

 

Thanks to our provisional bishops and now with the election of Shay, that

hope, I believe, is being realized.

 

In fact, it warmed my heart and the hearts of many of us at Convention that in Bishop-elect Craig’s first address to the Diocese, she began by expressing her appreciation for St. Stephen’s and all we stand for.

 

I don’t know about you, but I felt that all we have stood for and spoke out for and fought for was most definitely validated in some way with those words.

 

We have much to rejoice about today and in these coming months.

 

Now, I know you have heard me expound mightily from this pulpit in the past about my frustrations with the diocese.

 

In fact, as most of you know, for several years I simply stepped back from diocesan involvement.

 

Not only was I frustrated but I was realizing that my frustration was making me into a toxic element in this diocese.

 

As can often happen, especially when we express our anger at things instead of keeping quiet, but then just live in that anger.  

 

There were times, as many of you heard, when I felt that our efforts in this diocese were for naught.

 

I believe the phrase I used was: “I feel like we’re rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.”

 

And I wasn’t alone.

 

I was talking to another priest of this diocese at convention who expressed that same feeling to me.

 

But over these last several months, I have stepped back into diocesan involvement.

 

As you know, I was a part of the Nominating Committee (along with Dan Rice).

 

I was part of the Transition Committee (along with John Baird).

 

And on Friday I was elected to a three-year term to the Standing Committee.

 

I will say in all honesty that I am excited to once again be serving in the diocese.

 

The future is looking more brighter than it did before—at least in this moment.

 

And I truly do believe and hope that things can be done to revitalize and renew our diocese.

 

Of course, if we think a new bishop can magically do that for us, we will be disappointed.

 

It is not the new Bishop’s sole job to do that anymore than it is the Rector’s sole job to do that in a parish.

 

It is out job. Together.

 

And an innovative, committed leader can help lead us to do that work.

 

But with the energy that a new visionary bishop brings to the diocese, we can be rejuvenated and well.

 

We can be motivated to step up and help.

 

We can actually do some of the things that we have been hoping to do before this and simply could not.

 

As I said, this is the dawn of a new era in our diocese.

 

And we should celebrate that fact.

 

But that change begins with us.

 

Each of us.

 

For me, it began when I recognized my own toxicity and worked hard to move beyond it.

 

 

It also helped that I made a real and true effort to actually started praying for the diocese in a concentrated way.

 

Prayer is the key.

 

Not controlling prayer.

 

Rather, prayer that allows us to surrender to God’s will.

 

Prayer that allows God’s Spirit to truly work in our midst.

 

Prayer that opens ourselves up so that the Spirit can actually work through us.

 

That’s essentially what’s happening in today’s Gospel reading.

 

In our story we find the Pharisee.

 

A Pharisee, as you probably can guess, was a very righteous person.

 

They belonged to an ultra-orthodox sect of Judaism that placed utmost importance on a strict observance of the Law of Moses—the Torah.

 

The Pharisee is not praying for any change in himself.

 

He arrogantly brags to God about how wonderful and great he is in comparison to others.

 

 The tax collector—someone who was ritually unclean according the Law of Moses— however, prays that wonderful, pure prayer

 

“God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”

 

It’s not eloquent.

 

It’s not fancy.

 

But it’s honest.

 

And it cuts right to heart of it all.

 

To me, in my humble opinion, that is the most perfect prayer any of us can pray.

 

“God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”

 

It’s a prayer I have held very, very dear for so long.

 

And it is a prayer that had never let me down once.

 

Prayers for mercy are probably one of the purest and most honest prayers we can make.

 

And what I love even more about this parable is the fact that the prayer of the Pharisee isn’t even necessarily a bad prayer in and of itself.

 

I mean, there’s an honesty in it as well.

 

The Pharisee is the religious one, after all.

 

He is the one who is doing right according to organized religion.  

 

He is doing what Pharisees do; he is doing the “right” thing; he is filling his prayer with thanksgiving to God.  

 

In fact, every morning, the Pharisee, like all orthodox Jewish men even to this day, prayed a series of “morning blessings.”

 

These morning blessings include petitions like

 

“Blessed are you, Lord God, King of the Universe, who made me a son of Israel.”

 

“Blessed are you, Lord God, King of the Universe, who did not make me a slave.”

 

And this petition:

 

“Blessed are you, Lord God, King of the Universe, who did not make me a woman.”

 

So, this prayer we hear the Pharisee pray in our story this morning is very much in line with the prayers he would’ve prayed each morning.

 

Again, we should be clear: we should all thank God for all the good things God grants us.

 

The problem arises in the fact that the prayer is so horribly self-righteous and self-indulgent that it manages to cancel out the rightness of the prayer.

 

The arrogance of the prayer essentially renders it null and void.

 

The tax collector’s prayer however is so pure.

 

It is simple and straight-to-the-point.

 

This is the kind of prayer Jesus again and again holds up as an ideal form of prayer.

 

And sometimes it’s just enough of a prayer that it can actually kill off a bit of that toxicity we have allowed to fester within us.

 

Sometimes it’s enough of a prayer that it can soften our hearts and open our spirits to God’s love and lights.

 

Sometimes it’s enough of a prayer that it can actually change us in a positive way to do the work God is calling us to do.

 

As we being this new era in the Diocese together, let us do just that.

 

Let us do the work God is calling us to do with our hearts and our minds open.

 

Truly open.

 

God, have mercy on all of us

 

Let us look forward to a potentially bright future with true hope and true joy.

 

And let us be willing and able to work hard alongside our new bishop to make this potentially bright future the reality we have be longing for and praying for.

 

May God bless and have mercy on the Diocese of North Dakota as we being this new era.

 

May God bless and have mercy on Bishop-elect Shay Craig as she leads us forward into this new era.

 

May God bless and have mercy on St. Stephen’s as we continue to live out our visionary ministry.   

 

And may God bless and have mercy on each of us as we heed our calling from God’s Holy Spirit to do the work we need to do to renew and revive our diocese today and in the days to come.

 

May we truly rejoice to find the desolate valley renewed into a place of springs as we climb from height to height, finding that God is being revealed to us here in our midst.

 

Amen.