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.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

19 Pentecost

October 18, 2025

 

Genesis 32.22-31; Luke 18.1-8

+ Last week in my sermon, I mentioned a word.

 

Ekphrasis.

 

Ekphrasis was a word I recently heard about from a colleague of mine Concordia College in which an artist responds artistically to a piece of visual art.

 

For example writing a poem about a painting or a photograph.

 

That is ekphrasis.

 

Well, we’re going to use another form of ekphrasis today, in which we are going to look at this.

 

This very famous piece of art.

 

This of course is Dore’s very famous etching of Jacob wrestling with the angel—the same story we just heard in our reading from the Hebrew scriptures.  

 

Most of us know this well.

 

We have seen this countless times.

 

And for most of us, THIS is the image we have in our heads when we think of Jacob wrestling with the angel

 

It’s compelling for us because it is detailed.

 

And, it’s compelling because we can relate.

 

When we see this, we see ourselves in it.

 

It is a story we often personalize.

 

More importantly, it’s a story we know.

 

Let’s face it.

 

We’ve been there.

 

We have done it.

 

We too have wrestled with God.

 

We too have struggled with God.

 

We have too have had those late night shouting matches with the angel.

 

And in almost every situation when we have done it, we have come way limping.

 

There’s a similar midrashic story you have heard me share many times.

 

But I love this story as much as I love the story of Jacob and the angel.

 

I’m sharing it again this morning, because it sorts of echoes our reading from Genesis today, which is another story I love.

 

In this story, there was once a very wealthy king.

 

He was a good king, who loved God dearly.

 

One evening, he was walking in his beautiful garden, admiring the trees and the flowers and the plants.

 

And as he did so, as the joy and beauty of it all came upon him, he found himself singing psalms to God.

 

The psalms just seemed to well up from within him.

 

Suddenly, an angel appeared to him.

 

It was a mighty, beautiful angel and the King was amazed.

 

He was so excited that an angel of all things appeared to him!

 

Just as he was about to exclaim his joy at the angel, the angel raised its hand and struck him hard across the face.

 

It actually knocked the King off his feet and threw him into the dirt and mud.

 

The King was shocked.

 

He had never been struck before!

 

And he was confused.

 

As he looked up from the mud, his clothes torn, the angel’s hand-print on his  face, wracked with pain, he cried, “Angel, why did you strike me? What did I do wrong? Here I was singing God’s praises in this beautiful garden and then you struck me! Why would you do such a thing?”

 

The angel replied, “Of course, you can sing God’s praises as you wander about in your beautiful garden, dressed in fine clothes, with joy and happiness in your heart. That’s easy. But now, try. Try to sing God’s praises after you’ve been struck across the face by an angel.”

 

We’ve been there too.

 

We know what it feels like to be struck down when we have been most happy.

 

I am of the opinion that we haven’t earned our stripes as believers in God and followers of Jesus unless we have the limp, or the hand print of the angel upon our cheeks.

 

Unless we’ve emerged from that struggle, bleeding and limping, we still live in some kind of halcyon understanding of God.

 

Because what this struggle is really about is about deconstruction.

 

It is about facing God for who God really is and not the God we have created for ourselves.

 

Our wrestling with the angel is about being forced to see that God is not that sweet bearded man in the sky on a throne giving good things to good people who do good and meting out pain and punishment on bad people who do bad.

 

God, as you have heard me say a million times, is NOT Santa Claus in the sky not is God a genie granting us wishes.

 

Let me tell you, wrestling with God and being slapped by God quickly destroys those human-made images of God quickly.

 

The God we know and struggle with and come way from limping is so much more than any of that.

 

And sometimes the realization of that is what truly causes us to limp and bleed.

 

As you have heard me say a million times, God answers all prayer.

 

But the answer is one of three things.

 

Whata re they?

 

Yes

 

No 

 

Or not yet.

 

And often our struggle with God involves accepting whatever the answer is to that prayer.

 

 And in our limping away from our struggle we realize that maybe we have been praying about the wrong thing.

 

Our Gospel reading is a prime example of that.

 

What does the widow in Jesus’ parable pray?

 

“Grant me justice against my opponent,” she prays.

 

This also a truly interesting story.

 

This widow, who would not take no for an answer, persisted.

 

She too struggled with the angel.

 

This widow, who, in that time and place without a man in her life was in bad shape, was demanded to be heard.

 

This widow who had been taken advantage of (someone cheated her of her rightful inheritance) did not let discouragement stop her.

 

This widow prayed day and night.

 

She struggled.

 

She wrestled.

 

She lashed out and shook her fists at God and others.

 

And what happened?

 

God heard her and answered her.

 

And the answer was “yes.”

 

God turned the hearts of the unjust.

 

That, definitely, speaks to us right now.

 

That is what we should be praying for right now in this country.

 

See, God is definitely speaking loudly here to us through this scripture.

 

We could pray that those we despise are destroyed and burned to ash.

 

We could pray that destruction is brought upon those we fight against.

 

But the answer is usually (hopefully) no.

 

However, maybe what we should be praying for is justice, not only against our opponents.

 

We should be praying for justice in all things.

 

In all ways.

 

We definitely should be praying for justice in this country and this world.

 

Please, God, turn the hearts of the unjust! And grant us justice!

 

The scriptural definition of “justice” is “to make right.”

 

So, to seek justice from God means that something went wrong in the process, and we long for “rightness.”

 

We too need to be praying hard, over and over again, for justice.

 

We too need to keep struggling.

 

We need to keep wrestling with God in the garden.

 

We need to shake our fists and stop believing in a god made in our own image, with our own limitations and biases.

 

Because the fact is, God—the real God, the living God—loves us.

 

Even when we are wrestling with God.

 

Even in those moments of engagement, just like in the Dore painting, God loves us.

 

And knows us.

 

And knows our very prayers before we ask.

 

The struggle, if we notice, is about us.

 

The angel could end that battle at any moment.

 

But chooses not to.

 

The struggle itself is important.

 

It is vital.

 

It is what sometimes needs to happen for us to realize we have created expectations for ourselves that are not God’s expectations.

 

We sometimes need to struggle to realize that we not in control of anything.

 

Sometimes we need the struggle—and the limp, and the slap—to remind ourselves that there is something planned far beyond our understanding.

 

Sometimes we need to stop trying to control the situation and the world.

 

And God.

 

Because we’re not going to win on that one.

 

And sometimes we have to simply believe that God does know us.

 

That God knows best for us, even when it seems like God does not.

 

Sometimes we simply have to lean into God’s love instead of fighting it and controlling it.

 

 

Maybe then, our struggles will be seen as less of a battle.

 

Maybe we will see it less as a fight, head to head.

 

Rather, maybe we can see all of this as something so much more.

 

Maybe we can see it instead as . . .

 

…an embrace. 

 

Amen.