1 Christmas/St. Stephen

 

December 28, 2025

 + This morning you’re probably looking around and seeing sort a mishmash of things.

 We’ve got both red and on the altar.

 We’re doing this because it is officially the First Sunday after Christmas.

 But we are also transferring the feast of our patron saint, St. Stephen to this day, as well

 We’re not doing it just to do it.

 There is always a method to our madness here.

 And we are doing it today for one big reason.

 This morning, we are officially kicking off our 70^th year of ministry at St. Stephen’s.

 And what better way to do that than to celebrate our patron saints?

 After all, what better patron saint could we have?  

 Besides St. Hildegard of Bingen that is…

 St. Stephen was a person who could look into the future, who held strongly to his Christian faith, who was loudly able to proclaim that faith and live that faith out by his very life. 

 Those first founders of our church were a smart bunch.

 They also were a prophetic bunch.

 Naming our church after St. Stephen was a smart thing.

 Of course, the reason they came to this name was because St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Casselton, ND had just closed in 1953.

 And we inherited much of their furnishings.

 But St. Stephen was a great saint for us to have as our patron.

 In the Orthodox and Roman traditions of the Church, the patron saint of a church is viewed as more than just a namesake.

 They are seen as special guardians of that congregation. 

 And so, it is especially wonderful to celebrate a saint like St. Stephen, who is our guardian and who is, no doubt, present among us this morning, with that whole communion of saints, who is always present with us at worship, along.

 St. Stephen, of course, was the proto-martyr of the Church

 “Proto” is the important word here.

 Proto means, essentially, first.

 He was the first martyr of the Church.

 He was the first one to die for his open proclamation of God’s Gospel of love.

 He also is considered a proto deacon in the church.

 He is a special patron saint of deacons—like Deacon John, and Deacon Suzanne, and myself sine I am still a deacon as well—and of all people who share a ministry of servitude to others.

 What better saint can we claim as our patron than St. Stephen?

 He was the first to do many things. 

 Just like we, as a congregation, have been the first in doing many things.

 St. Stephen, in his stance on a few issues, was not always popular obviously.

 There is a reason they dragged him out and stoned him.

 The great Archbishop Demond Tutu, who died on the feast of St. Stephen back in 2022, stood up and spoke out against injustice and racism and homophobia and all the things we at St, Stephen’s have stood up and spoken out against.

 Archbishop Tutu once said,

 "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality."

 Well, we certainly have never been shy here at St. Stephen’s for speaking out against injustice in our own Church or in the world.

 And speaking out and making the stance we have in the past and the reaction we have received from others, let me tell you, I can feel for St. Stephen.

 So yes it’s appropriate that this congregation that has been the first to do many things, is named after St. Stephen.

 When we look back at our 70 year history, just think for a moment about all those people who came through the doors of this church.

 Think about how many of those people who have been hurt by the larger Church.

 Think about how many were frustrated with the Church.

 And more often than not, their relationship with God suffered for it. 

 But they came here searching.

 Searching for true religion.

 Searching for a welcoming, inclusive and open community.

 So what is this true religion? 

 I see the Episcopal Church, and specifically St. Stephen’s,  as making a real solid effort at true religion.

 For me, St. Stephen’s personifies in many ways, what true religion is.

 The Church should be like a dinner party to which everyone is invited. 

 And St. Stephen’s has always been the place that knows this one blunt fact: The only thing there is no room for in true religion is for those who cannot love each other.

 St. Stephen’s is a place very much like a family.

 We don’t always choose the people God has brought into our lives.

 They sometimes irritate us, or say things embarrass us, or do things with which we don’t agree.

 But we always—ALWAYS—have to love them.

 So what is true religion?

 True religion begins and ends with love.

 We must love one another as God loves us.

 True religion begins with the realization that, first and foremost, God loves each and every one of us. 

 When we can look at that person who drives us crazy and see in that person, someone God loves wholly and completely, then our relationship with that person changes.

 We too are compelled to love that person as well. 

 Even if we don’t want to.

 Love is the beginning and end of true religion. 

 Certainly, St. Stephen’s has always been a place of love. 

 Love has never been a stranger here.

 Love has been offered to God not only on this altar, but among the pews and in the undercroft and in the narthex and in the parking lot. 

 And most importantly in the lives of our members out in the larger world.

 That Love that God has commanded us to share has went out from here into all the world.

 We who are gathered here have been touched in one way or the other by the love that has emanated from this place and these people.

 We are the fortunate ones—the ones who have been transformed and changed by this love.

 We are the lucky ones who have—through our experiences at St. Stephen’s—been able to get a glimpse of true religion.

But our job now is not to cherish it and hold it close to our hearts.

Our job now is to turn around and to continue to share this love with others.

Our job is take this love and reflect it for everyone we see.

So, in a very real sense, we, at St. Stephen’s, are doing what that first St. Stephen did. 

We are striving to do what Archbishop Tutu did.

We have set the standard. 

We have embodied who and what both St. Stephen the Martyr and Desmond Tutu stood for.

Even when it was not popular.

Even when people felt it wasn’t time.

We have stood up again and again for what we have felt is our mission to accept all people in love.

We have journeyed out at times into uncharted territory.

And most importantly, we have, by our love, by our compassion, by our acceptance of all, been a reflection of what the Church—capital C—is truly capable of.

We do all we do as St. Stephen and Archbishop Tutu did it—with our eyes firmly set on God, with our lips singing and praying, with our head held high, with love in heart, even if stones and rocks are falling around us.

We do so affirmed in our many ministries.

This is where we are as we begin our 70^th year of ministry.

Those founders of our church would be amazed at what this congregation they envisioned in 1956 would one day be.

As we begin another year of ministry, let us do with gratitude to God and one another in our hearts.

Let us shake off the negativity and those nagging doubts that may plague us.

And let us, like St. Stephen, be strong and firm in our faith in God and our convictions of serving others in love.

And may our God—that source of all love, that author and giver of all good things—continue to bless us with love and goodness and strength.

May we continue to flourish and grow. 

May we continue to venture bravely forward in  all that we continue to do here among us and throughout the world. 

May we continue to be the prophets we are, heeding this voice of God, out here, in Fargo, North Dakota.

May we continue to heed the call of our God who continues to call us to do radical things, to speak boldly and to, always, always, love each other.

Amen.

 

 

Christmas Eve/Christmas Day

 

December 24, 2025

 

Luke 2.1-20

 

+ It’s kind of a Christmas tradition here at St. Stephen’s for me to tell this story.

 

It’s a story I LOVE to tell on Christmas Eve because it is not the typical Christmas Eve story.

 

It’s actually been a couple of years since I shared it.

 

But…this Christmas Eve story does not involve your usual cast of characters.

 

It involves rather a very famous High Church parish in New York City and a very famous actress from a by-gone era.

 

The story involves Tallulah Bankhead.

 

Now some of you are thinking: I haven’t heard that name in years.

 

Others are maybe saying: I have never heard that name before in my life.

 

But Tallulah Bankhead, star of stage and screen, including, most famously, Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, she also made a great appearance on I Love Lucy, was also an Episcopalian.

 

And in fact quite the High Church Episcopalian.

 

When she was in New York, she attended the Church of St. Mary the Virgin just off Times Square.

 

If you have never been there, it is truly the place to see—if in fact you can see it.

 

This church is so High and is notorious for using so much incense it is affection ally called “Smoky Mary’s” (and it is one of my favorite places to visit in Manhattan).

It’s so High Church, it makes Smoky St. Stephen’s look like a Quaker Meeting House!

 

In the 1950s, the priest at smoky Mary’s, was Fr. Grieg Taber.

 

Fr. Taber was one of the interesting and eccentric characters in the Episcopal church in the day.

 

There have been many stories of Fr. Tabor.

 

But this one is one of the best…

 

One Christmas Eve in the 1950s Fr. Taber—good and loyal priest that he was—was sequestered in his confessional.

 

Back then, even some Episcopalians felt compelled to go to confession before receiving Holy Communion at the midnight Mass.

 

And Smoky Mary’s was so High Church that, yes, it even had a confessional.

 

Hmmmm. A confession! Could that be Fr. Jamie’s next project here at St. Stephen’s?

 

Nooo!

 

Well, Fr. Taber was there in his confessional, awaiting penitents, when he heard the oh-so-very-familiar, low, smoky voice of Miss Tallulah Bankhead.

 

There was certainly no mistaking who it could be.

 

As he peeked out through his curtain, there he saw her making her way through the church.

 

She paused and looked up at the giant crucifix above the altar, with its almost life-sized figure of the crucified Jesus.

 

Suddenly she exclaimed, in her wonderfully Tallulah Bankhead way,

 

“Smile, Dahling! It’s your birthday!”

 

 

There’s actually another very famous story regarding Tallulah Bankhead at Smoky Mary’s, which I also love.

 

One Sunday morning, a Bishop was visiting Smoky Mary’s, about to officiate at a service there.

 

As he and the procession were in the vestibule waiting to enter the church, the thurifer (the kid with the thurible) has to use the restroom.

 

He asked the Bishop if could hold the thurible while he went off to the bathroom.

 

The Bishop was standing there in his mitre and his cope, swinging the thurible when who should stumble in, but Tallulah Bankhead!

 

As she passed the bishop, she looked, reacted, then leaned close and said,

 

“I love the hat, Dahling, but your purse is smoking!”

 

The Bishop who ordained me to the Diaconate, Bishop Andy Fairfield, who was pretty straight-laced, told me that story once.

 

I love these kind of stories, because it shows that the Episcopal Church has always been filled with some amazing characters.

 

And the story of Tallulah Bankhead greeting Jesus on he cross on Christmas Eve is truly one of my favorites.

 

Now, for some people, at first hearing, it might sound irreverent or possibly even downright sacrilegious.

 

Ah…but if you believe that, then you miss the whole point of that wonderful little anecdote.

 

What some people might perceive as sacrilegious and disrespectful I see as wonderfully intimate.

 

There is a wonderfully intimacy between Bankhead and Jesus in that moment.

 

And let’s face it, intimacy is what Christmas is about.

 

An intimacy from God to us.

 

An intimacy very unlike any other kind of intimacy.

 

When we think long and hard about this night, when we ponder it and let it take hold in our lives, what we realized happened on that night when Jesus was born was not just some mythical story.

 

It was not just the birth of a child under dire circumstances, in some distant, exotic land.

 

What happened on that night was a joining together—a joining of us and God.

 

God met us half-way.

 

God came to us in our darkness, in our blindness, in our fear—and cast a light that destroyed that darkness, that blindness, that fear.

 

In this dark, cold night, we celebrate Light.

 

We celebrate the Light that has come to us in our collective and personal darknesses.

 

We celebrate the Light that has come to us in our despair and our fear, in our sadness and in our frustration.

 

And as it does, we realize---there is an intimacy to that action on God’s part.

 

I am very fond of saying that if we only look at Christmas as something that happened then and there, then we have missed the point of Christmas.

 

We objectify Christmas and make it something wholly “other.”

 

We can easily say to ourselves—it’s a quaint little story from ancient times but it doesn’t have anything to do with me, here, right now, in Fargo, North Dakota, on this night in 2025.

 

But, the fact is, it does!

Because if we truly follow Jesus, if we truly are Jesus’  followers in this world, we know that, because of Jesus, because of his birth and life and death, we too are to become like Jesus.

 

Or rather, what Jesus was, we too are to become.

 

We too are to be anointed children of God in this world.

 

We too are called to do what Jesus did and he who Jesus was to others.

 

And in doing that, we realize that what happened in Bethlehem on this night, happened at our birthday too.

 

Just as Jesus’ birth is holy, so too were our birth holy as well.

 

A Light from God shined on each of us as well when we were born.

 

And continues to shine on us now.

 

Just as we Jesus embodied God’s love, so we are called as well to embody God’s love now and always in this world.

 

And in doing so, we experience an amazing intimacy.

 

Or, as one of my favorite poets, the great Anglican poet Christina Rosetti put more eloquently:

 

Love came down at Christmas,

love, all lovely, love divine;

love was born at Christmas:

star and angels gave the sign.

 

 

That love that comes down at Christmas—that love, all lovely, love divine—that love dwells in each of us. Right now. Right here. Tonight.

 

And star and angels truly give the sign.

 

For each of us.

 

We find ourselves expressing our intimacy back to God.

 

Each of expresses our love differently.

 

People like Tallulah Bankhead cry out happy birthdays to crucifixes on Christmas Eve.

 

The rest of us probably aren’t quite that dramatic.

 

Well, some of us, aren’t that dramatic!

 

But the intimacy we feel between ourselves and God is a very real one tonight—in this very holy moment.

 

We find that this love we feel—for God and for each other and for those we maybe don’t always love, or find difficult to love—that radical love is more tangible—more real—than anything we have ever thought possible.

 

It is here, within each of us tonight.

 

And that is what we are experiencing this evening.

 

Love came down.

 

Love became flesh and blood.

 

Love became human.

 

In Jesus.

 

And in each of us.  

 

And in the face of that realization, we are rejoicing tonight.

 

We are rejoicing in that love personified.

 

We are rejoicing in each other.

 

We are rejoicing in the glorious beauty of this one holy moment in time.

 

If that isn’t intimacy, I don’t know what is.

 

This beautiful night, let us each cling to this love that we are experiencing tonight and let us hope that it will not fade from us when this night or the day tomorrow is over.

 

Let us cling to this holy moment and make sure that it will continue to live on and be renewed again and again.

 

Love is here.

 

Love is in our very midst tonight.

 

Love is so near, we can feel its presence in our very bodies and souls.

 

So, let us share this love in any way we can and let us especially welcome this love— love, all lovely, love divine—this love made real and present in the shelter of our hearts.

 

4 Advent

December 21, 2025

Isaiah 7.10-16; Romans 1.1-7; Matthew 1.18-25

It’s either an advantage or a disadvantage having a poet for your priest.

 

Because, as a poet, as you all know, I obsess over things.

 

Like words.

 

I will take a word and just examine it from every side.

 

I will weigh it and throw it around and take it apart and put it together again.

 

And sure enough, this morning is one of those morning wherein we encounter a word I’m kind of obsessed with.

 

Because in our readings today, we have a word that sort of permeates everything we hear.

 

And that word is. . . .

 

Emmanuel.

 

Emmanuel is not a word we think about very often, unless we know someone by that name.

 

Certainly, throughout our scriptures readings today, we  hear that one common echo:

 

Emmanuel.

 

It’s beautiful!

 

It just kind of rolls off the tongue.

 

Emmanuel.

 

In our reading from Isaiah today, we find God speaking through the prophet announcing that, through the lineage of David, Immanuel will come to us.

 

Paul in his letter this morning talks of how God worked to bring about this revelation of God’s Son.

 

And in our Gospel reading, the angel calls Joseph, “son of David” and that through this lineage, through Mary his spouse, we have Emmanuel.

 

Sadly, we almost never hear it in our reading outside of Advent and Christmas.

 

But here it is.

 

And in addition to it being a beautiful word—it really is—it’s also a vitally important word.

 

It means, “God with us.”

 

In Hebrew, the “El” is the word or name for God.

 

Emanu means with us.

 

So God is with us.

 

In the Jewish understanding of this it means that God is not only with us—God’s very Presence is with is—but that in being with us and present with us, God is also faithful.

 

Now we see why it’s so important to us.

 

Just think about what that word and name means.  

 

God with us.

 

God is here with us.

 

Right now.

 

In our turmoils.

 

In the difficulties of this life.

 

In the griefs we are enduring.

 

Understanding that and embracing that we realize:

 

Our relationship with God changes.

 

No longer is God that distant presence—out there.

 

That word, Emmanuel allows God to become a real presence. Right here.

 

And we feel—truly feel—that God truly does LOVE us!

 

And accepts us.

 

Fully and completely.

 

For who we are and what we are.

 

This coming week, like almost no other time in the Church Year, we recognize that what happened in the birth of Jesus is the collective experience for us who have experienced that intellectual and spiritual realization that God is truly with us.

 

We realize that we, like Jesus, are anointed.

 

We, like Jesus, are called to be the Presence of God in this world to others.

 

We are called to be Emmanuel as well.

 

I know that seems somewhat overwhelming.

 

It seems strange that Emmanuel is something each of us can embody as well.

 

But that is what we are called to do as followers of Jesus.

 

We are all called to be like Jesus.

 

And in being like Jesus, we are called, as Children of our loving God, to embody God’s Presence in our lives, and share that Presence with others.   

 

This coming week we are very strongly and uniquely reminded that God is no longer that distant, vague God out there.

 

We celebrate God’s Son coming among us in that manger, born to the Virgin Mary.

 

But if we only objectify that birth, if we only see it as an event that happened then and there, in that time, in some place distant from us and our current world, we have missed the point of what it means to truly follow Jesus.

 

That birth of Jesus then is a reminder that each of our births was sacred and holy in their own right.

 

That God was with us in our own births.

 

That each birth is a kind of Emmanuel moment.

 

Emmanuel shows us that there are no longer barriers.

 

No longer is there is a distance.

 

No longer is there a veil separating us from God.

 

In Emmanuel, we find that meeting place between us as humans and God.

 

God has reached out to us and has touched not with a finger of fire, not with the divine hand of judgment, but with the tender, loving touch of a loving Parent.

 

This is what Incarnation is all about.

 

And Incarnation, it’s important to remember, continues to happen.

 

It happens in each of us.

 

Jesus shows us that reality.

 

God came to us, where we are, and met us.

 

God dwells among us, within each of us.

 

Now.

 

We may not have asked for it happening.

 

We may not even have imagined how it could have happened.

 

But it did.

 

And we are so much better for it.

 

This time of Advent and Christmas reminds that “God is truly with us”

 

Emmanuel is that point in which God and humanity met.

 

This week, as we celebrate that event in a special way, let us never forget that fact God continues to reach out to us where we are.  

 

Let the events of this week remind us in a beautiful way that God truly  breaks through the barriers and, in doing so, destroys those very barriers.

 

Hopefully this realization that each of is Emmanuel as well will transform us and leave us ultimately changed in ways we might not even fully realize or appreciate even at this point.

 

The coming is Emmanuel—God with us—is here.

 

Because of Jesus’ birth, we are Emmanuel to those who need God’s Presence in this world.

 

This week, we see the trees, the lights, the Santas and the reindeer.

 

But the real Christmas—that life-altering event in which God has come along us where we are—is here.

 

It is in each of us.

 

It is in those we encounter in our own lives.  

 

Truly this is Emmanuel.

 

 

Because God is with us, we should rejoice.

 

So rejoice!

 

The star that was promised to us has appeared in the darkest night of our existence.

 

It is a sign.

 

It promises us light, even when all seemed bleak before.

 

There now is a way forward through the darkness.

 

And we will not travel that way forward alone.

 

And that light that reminds of this holy and amazing fact is now shining brightly, right there, before us.

 

And its light is burning away those dark clouds of fear and doubt and despair.

 

I don’t know about you, but that for me seems as good of a reason as any to rejoice.

 

Amen.