Hope for a Boy

I sat in our fellowship hall with two women. Our adult classes and small groups had concluded and we were waiting for the children to emerge. It was close to 8 pm on a Weds night.



A single mom came in and her ten year old boy soon followed. She works full-time at McDonalds and takes the bus to come to us every Wednesday and every Sunday without fail. I could see the strain on her face as she handed her son his math homework and told him to sit down and start. I invited him to come and sit by me.



Within two minutes, I could see a few things about this boy. He had more energy than he knew what to do with. He was smart. And he was struggling to concentrate.



“My teacher hates me,” he said to me.



“I get my problems wrong.”



I watched as he did his math. He understood it but he was rushing and guessing just to get it done. I worked with him on a few problems. He found it hard to concentrate.



I asked his mother if he had ever been evaluated for ADHD. “Oh, yes, he has it!” she said. “But I have never brought him to the doctor.”



Within twenty minutes, I had asked the head of an Episcopal School to email me the name and address of the best psychologist for children in town. And I had someone make a donation to pay for the visit.



This little boy’s life may be altered by his ability to concentrate. And all this happened within a half and hour one evening at church. Such is the power of community.



Why come to church? For certain, we come to learn about God, to give thanks to God and to worship, but we also come to see God at work in the community. There is a great strength that comes when members of a community are united in caring for one another. I have experienced this kind of support in my life and I will never forget it.  It can alter a person's life, this kind of pervasive love.



If we could bottle to advertise community, everyone would want to join. But there is no way to adequately explain the grace and power of church until you experience it. The only thing that we can do is continue to invite people in, again and again and again.



Come inside, we say. Come and see. You are welcome here.

I am so glad that this little boy has come inside.

The Lost

I have a terrible sense of direction. Anyone who has ridden in my car with me can attest. I live with my GPS. We have a close personal bond. It is a GPS for dummies and it is perfect for me. You would never believe how many times I have to drive back and forth to a place before I know my way. It has been ten months since I moved to Jacksonville, and I still use the GPS religiously. I am a person who is easily lost.


There are many ways to get lost. Many of us get lost in our lives. We don’t know how to make the right decisions or who to ask for help. We make decisions sometimes that hurt ourselves and others. We go off in a completely wrong direction and only add to the brokenness and confusion in the world.

Take this crazy guy in Gainesville. How in the world did he come to the conclusion that burning the Quran would make things better on Sept 11th? And how in the world did the media get the idea that it would be wise to blow this all up out of proportion? Will he burn the Quran or won’t he? That seems to be the question. The media is selling loads of papers and everyone is watching as a furniture salesman gains the attention of the world, not through goodness, but through threats of book-burning.

Why do we pay attention to such craziness? Why are we buying papers or turning on our televisions? How could we have let our attention get so diverted?

20 million people are now watching a reality show that films pregnant teenage girls as they decide what to do with their lives and the lives of their babies. Viewers hone in, fascinated as families yell and scream, cry and blame. Millions of dollars are made from people’s pain. From watching the lost.

What does it mean to be lost? Spiritually, it means to have lost a connection to the compass of life that is God, to be going in the wrong direction. To sin literally means to miss the mark in the ancient Hebrew, so there is a sense that anyone who is hurting others or leading a life filled with mistakes is essentially lost from God, they do not know the way home so they wander in a land that is waste and misery, holding onto things that will not bring them peace. And the farther we wander from God’s presence, the greater the chaos and pain that we produce.

Why does the sheep wander away from the fold? It is not that the sheep wants to move away from the shepherd, it is that they become distracted, lured by a scent or a curiosity, and then they find that they have lost their way, lost their sense of direction. There are many things that can distract us from God, and hurt and hatred are among the most potent distractions.

Jesus ate with tax collectors. In other words, he dined with the IRS. And he dined with prostitutes and criminals. These were the people that scare us and make our skin crawl. These were people who we would think of as bad or even evil. He shared a meal with them, why? Because God does not abandon see the human soul as bad. God sees the human souls as the lost, God seeks them out.

Ben Clance is a deacon here at the Cathedral. Ben goes into the maximum security prisons here in Florida and he talks to the prisoners about God. Ben sees terrible things, things that I cannot mention in this pulpit, but whenever he sees a man mistreat his own body or try to hurt another man, he does not walk away or leave, he says things like, “How dare you treat yourself in this way? How dare you treat me in this way?” Ben is tough and Ben never leaves. He will visit the same men for months and years, and some of them still refuse his love, they still refuse his company, they want nothing to do with communion. But some turn around and begin to wonder, and others turn their lives around.

Ben calls prison The Belly of the Beast and for ten years he has been going in there, bringing communion to the lost. He seeks out the truth that lies deep within them. Is it still there? Is there some glimpse of God’s light that can be found in this man who has been locked up for life? Is there anything left to seek?

When a man is being executed, Ben goes and washes his feet. He seeks out their goodness, hoping to find some part of them that is willing to be found and to be forgiven.

But you don’t have to be in prison to be lost, and you don’t have to be half-crazy either. Sometimes we all are lost. Sometimes everyone of us wonders if there is any point to our lives at all. When I think back to Sept 11, 2001, I feel lost. I think of the people who joined hands to jump from the windows of skyscrapers and what it must have felt like to hurl through the air knowing that your life would end in a breath, and I feel helpless.

My brother is a surgeon and he rushed to the hospital in New York City that morning. He was ready to have some direction, something to do to help, and no one came in. It was empty. Because everyone was dead and he felt lost.

There are moments in all of our lives when we cannot see the way forward and we don’t know which way to turn. We wonder if the decisions that we have made in life have been the best decisions, we wonder where we would be if we had done things differently. And we don’t know which way to go.

The Psalmist writes You look for truth deep within me.

God actively seeks out the lost, searching hard. In fact, if the parables that Jesus tells us today are right, God looks harder for the lost than He does for those who are on the right track. To get lost is to ensure that God will focus harder on us, not to glory in our brokenness but to find us and help us find our way home.

If you feel at your wits end, saddened by the state of the world and unclear about how to help, God is looking for you.

If you feel aimless and unsure about your future, God is looking for you.

If you feel that there might not be a God, and maybe this is all a sham, God is looking for you.

With the intensity of a blood hound, God is moving closer to you in your darkest moments, the moments when you feel that God is nowhere to be found. There God is, searching.

And we are called to be like God, to search for the broken and the lost. When you look around this morning, when you go to coffee hour or offer someone the peace, look for the person who seems lost. Don’t just greet your friends. Find those who have no friends and let them know that you are there.

And when you wake up on Monday morning, walk in the steps of Jesus. Seek out the man who sits alone on the side of the road with no place to sleep. Even if you are afraid that he will ask you for money, say hello. Speak to him and look him in the eyes. Find him and see him, even if all that you can say to him is to give him directions to the shelter.

We Christians are not placed on this earth to just enjoy life. We are called to follow the Shepherd and that means walking into the brokenness of the world and offering food. That means looking for the lost and helping them find their way home.

This is your home. This altar here, where you are fed every week. This is your anchor, your resting place, so that you may go out into the world and do the work of the Shepherd. Each week you kneel down together, rich and poor and you are fed.

I have never seen someone more lost than the man who lost his wife of 50 years. We had to nearly carry him through the funeral, for he could hardly walk. He was like a lost child, like a baby, he could not hear a word I said, so I just put my arm around him as the coffin was lowered into the earth, and then I took him to get something to eat.

When a baby is lost and afraid, it cries. When it needs to be comforted, it will put something in its mouth. That is what God is doing here, God puts something in your mouth because when the rubber hits the road and we face death and the meaning of life itself, we are all lost. We are all infants, facing something so unknown that it frightens us beyond imagining. So God puts something on our tongues, God feeds us. God finds us. Again and again and again, God seeks you out and God finds you.

Overhearing the Gospel

Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple, Jesus said.



Herbert O Driscoll was walking in an old cemetery years ago. He heard voices on the other side of an old stone wall. The wall divided one area of the cemetery from the other. The voices were speaking softly and he found himself listening.


An old man was explaining something to a boy. He was explaining death and how his son, the boys father, could still love them even though he had died. The old man explained everything with deliberate carefulness, gently, calmly. And the boy continued to ask questions. “But can my dad hear me, grandpa?”

“Yes, dear, he can hear you.”

“But is his body in the ground?”

“Yes, but his soul rests with God.”

“Is he asleep?”

“No, he is very much awake, I think.”

“Why did he die?”

“I wish I new, my love. I wish I knew.”

And lastly, the boy asked, “Is God mad at me?”

And the old man said, “Oh, no. God loves you so much, even though this is hard.”

O’Driscoll said that he felt that he was overhearing something so intimate that he should not be listening. And yet, on the other hand, he somehow felt that he was meant to hear it, all of it, all of the pain and the love.

He walked on, his feet moving through the thick grass of the cemetery, and something came to him. I have just overheard the gospel, he thought to himself.



For years he would ponder what it means to overhear the gospel. Not to just hear it, but to overhear it. You see, in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, we are overhearing conversations that Jesus had with particular people in a particular time and place. And yet, the gospels were written for us to hear. The writers wanted us to know what Jesus said, how Jesus acted. They knew that coming to know Jesus would change our lives. They knew that he was talking to us too. God meant for us to overhear the gospel. God meant for us to listen to Jesus’ conversations across time and space, through years of stone buildings and churches, and to hear his voice as if from far away. God means for us to hear it and God means for us to listen.



Today’s gospel is disturbing. There is no way around it. It is just plain disturbing.



Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple, Jesus said.



I looked up the Greek word for hate. That is what I do whenever the gospel makes no sense to me, I look up the Greek word and often it means so much more than what the English translation means. But I’m afraid that I ran into a dead end in the Greek. Miseo does mean hate. It also means ignoring or letting go. But its primary meaning is to hate. There is no way of getting around that. Jesus chose to use a very strong word.



Does that mean that I am supposed to beat up my mother-in-law or abandon my children in order to be a disciple? That makes no sense to me. Does Jesus mean for families to be broken up or to ignore one another? That does not seem to make sense given the entirety of Jesus’ teaching. Jesus told us to love one another. Jesus took care of his mother when he was dying on the cross. He made sure that John, his beloved disciple, would take care of her. He loved her. So what was he saying here?



It is vital to remember that we are overhearing the gospel here. We are hearing a conversation that was taking place between Jesus and a crowd of people. This crowd had just blitzed him on the countryside. There he was, walking along, when they came up to him, a huge number of them, and said that they would like to be disciples. They had no preparation, no knoweledge, they just walked up to him and said that they wanted to follow. Jesus knew that they had no idea what they were asking.



Are you willing to leave everyone that you love behind? Are you willing to have everyone in your family convinced of your insanity? Are you ready to abandon everyone for me? You have to be willing to abandon your family to come with me. I don’t think that you have any idea what you are asking.



Jesus was willing to give up having a family, having a home, making money… Every normal kind of life comfort was denied to him because he chose to travel the countryside telling people about God. Did they want to follow him? They had no idea what they were asking.



So what is Jesus saying to us? Does he want us to leave our families or hate our relatives? Or are we supposed to give up everything that we own, as he asked the young rich man to do? What would Jesus say to us?



Jesus was responding to the presumptuousness and pride of the crowd, just like he responded to the pride of the wealthy young man who thought that he was the perfect disciple. Jesus was trying to tell all of these people that they can do nothing if they are proud of themselves and they can do nothing if God is not their first priority.



If you want to follow Jesus, you will be asked to leave everything behind. Everything.

So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.



Jesus did not call everyone to walk with him. He did not call Mary or Martha or Lazarus. He did not call the Samaritan woman or Jairus or the centurion. And yet he loved every one of them. Jesus knew that the call to abandon family was reserved for only a few.



But for all of us, regardless of whether we become monks or faithful family members, if you cannot put God ahead of everything that you love and value, then you cannot be a disciple. God must come first.



Which is why you and I need to practice putting Jesus first. Ironically, you cannot have a successful marriage if you love your spouse more than you love God. And you cannot be a successful parent if you love your child more than you love God. For if you put any of your family members over and above God, you will distort your relationship. It will become idolatrous, for you will have put your loved one in the place of God. You will hold on too hard, and you and your loved ones will suffer.



The only One who is capable of being your first priority without disappointment and without dysfunction, is God. And ironically, to love God first means to love everything else more fully.



Let me say that again, to love God means to love everything else more fully.



Jesus may have put God ahead of his family, but in the end he loved all of us more than any of us had ever been loved before. We all became his family. His love was made perfect because he loved God first and foremost, and all other relationships became reflections of his love for God.



There will come a day when Christ will call you to follow him. For many of us, it happens quietly over the course of our lifetimes. For all of us who love him, it will happen when we die. Jesus will come to us and he will hold out his hand and, if we are to take his hand, we must leave everything else behind: our stuff, our families, everything. There will be nothing else to hold onto but his hand.





In Kansas, a new couple joined our parish. They had been married for over 50 years and they were so loving. They had just retired and were planning to travel together when Wayne came down with stomach cancer. His wife was devastated and mad at God. He quickly began to wither under the chemo and was soon on hospice care. She became more and more angry. When I visited their home, she would be lying in his bed, literally holding onto him, telling him that she did not want him to die.



He lingered in great pain for weeks and weeks. I urged her to give him permission to die, she could not do it.



In the middle of the night, after three weeks of dying, he sat up in bed. He had not spoken for three days and had seemed comatose. He spoke in a loud voice, clear as a bell…



Jean, I am going… Horray! Horray!



And he lay down and died.



She could not believe that he had said Horray. He had never used that word before. And there was such a look of ecstasy on his face. She knew that he was going to Someone who could love him and show him beauty that she could not show him. He was gone.



I see over and over people getting stuck in their lives because they are living for another person instead of for God. Expectations and attachments to our loved ones cripple our lives and make us less than we could be. Don’t put your loved ones in front of God or you will hurt them and you will hurt yourself.



Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength. And everything else will come from that.

Joseph of Genesis

It happened one Sunday in church. I had just finished the announcements when a voice came over the sound system. “THIS IS GOD.” I stood there, dumbfounded. I was just about to say the offertory sentence. It was just three words, but clear as a bell. “THIS IS GOD.” Was it really God? I had prayed for years for God to be present with us in worship. If it was God, I was not so sure that I wanted Him to be so vocal. He didn’t have a place in the liturgy. And, sadly, I found myself doubting that it actually was God. My first thought was that a drunk man had grabbed a mic. “Lord, please help me,” I thought in that one moment of dumbstruck silence. The congregation was looking at me as if to see what I was going to do.


“I’m glad you’re here,” I said. And I turned around and walked to the altar. I was sure that God would speak again, but he didn’t. Turns out one of the Senior High youth was playing with the sound system in the fellowship hall. “THIS IS GOD,” is what he chose to say into the mic before a usher raced down the hall to turn it off.

I have thought about that incident a lot mainly because I am ashamed. It turned out that I didn’t want God to distrupt the liturgy or alter my life. I said that I wanted God there, I told him that I wanted him here, but in reality, my first response was panic. Because in that moment, I understood that God might mean messiness and even disruption and I was not sure that I wanted that. Not a struggle, not a surprise. I only wanted God if he brought me joy and comfort, prosperity as I understood it. I did not want God to interrupt things or make things hard.

The Scripture says that the Lord was with Joseph. The Lord was with Joseph, it reads plainly. But instead of prosperity and success, the Lord’s presence means that Joseph gets into a mess. First, he is sold into slavery by his jealous brothers and then, in today’s reading, he is framed by the wife of his master. She desires him and pursues him, but when he rightfully refuses, she frames him, lies and has him thrown in prison. For someone who had the Lord on his side, life sure didn’t seem to be so good for Joseph. He was listening. He was faithful. He does not lie or cheat and yet, he suffers and is treated unfairly. Life with God is no picnic for Joseph.

A few days ago, I was walking through our bookstore when I glanced up and saw two copies of The Prayer of Jabez. The Prayer of Jabez is one of my least favorite books. I considered buying both copies and throwing them away, but then my conscience got the best of me. Who am I to censure books? Could I put up a sign that said Dean’s LEAST favorite book, read at your own risk!? In the end, I decided that, as Episcopalians, I should encourage you to think for yourselves and read even that which I find wrong, for God gave you all minds and I am not your pope but rather your advisor and your guide in your relationships with God. So the book stayed on the shelf. But here is why I dislike it so much.

The Prayer of Jabez is a best-selling book about how to become rich. Basically, the premise of the book is this: if you pray hard enough and invite God into your life, you will be successful and happy. And of course, if you are unhappy or unsuccessful, you must not have invited God in. So God’s presence is equated with comfort, wealth and abundance. And that must mean that all who suffer don’t know God.

It’s rubbish! God was with joseph and he suffered! God was with Jesus and he gave himself up to the greatest agony known to man. The presence of God does not automatically bring joy and peace and wealth and prosperity. In fact, I call that kind of thinking The Prosperity Gospel. It is a lie. God does not bring success or comfort or money to those who he loves. Sometimes, those who God loves suffer even more than those who do not love God. Listen to Jesus today. Does Jesus say that it is easy to follow him? Does he talk about getting wealthy or having a good time? He talks about ripping us apart! He talks about swords and parents being ripped from their children. There is nothing nice or comfortable or successful about what Jesus says. He talks about hardship and pain! Why is it that we can’t listen?!

Sometimes God asks things of us that are hard and painful. Sometimes, people become ill or are involved in accidents and it is not God’s doing at all, but the result of the fallen nature of our world. Those who love God and invite God into their lives are not rewarded with prosperity. But what we are rewarded with is God’s presence itself, and strength to make it through the days ahead. And deep down inside your heart, no matter how hard your life may be, to serve God is to know a great and profound joy. To be used for God’s purposes may be painful, but it is also the greatest joy known to humankind.

When Joseph is framed and thrown in prison, most people would have asked themselves why God abandoned them. Joseph did not ask such a question. Instead he walked the path that lay before him, a path that took him from favor and the love of his father to slavery and prison. He walked the path that lay before him, continuing to listen and pray, even in the midst of great failure and injustice. For he seemed to know that God had a larger plan.

When you and I are children, we dream of doing great and powerful things. We dream of becoming President of the United States or curing cancer. But when the reality of life begins to roll upon us, we realize that we are lucky to pay all the bills and live to a ripe old age. We find that our loved ones die or suffer and we do not have the kind of job we once dreamed of. Some of us are unemployed, some never quite found their passion in life. Some struggle to be perfect parents and find that they are always failing. And we realize how insignificant our lives have become, that we have not changed the world, but we are just trying our best. And we wonder if we went wrong somewhere along the line.

But God is present in the insignificant details, in the smallest of moments when we say a kind word to someone. And God is present in our wanderings and even in our failures, especially in our failures. God does wonders with us when we struggle.

God needed Joseph to fail and remain faithful. That was part of the plan. Not greatness, not at least right now, but just faithfulness in the midst of a cruel and unfair world.

A few years ago, a television series ran that had great implications about faith and our relationships with God. It was called Joan of Arcadia. The show was about a teenage girl who is struggling with high school when God shows up and starts talking to her. God appears to speak to her through people that surround her. Sometimes God is a cleaning lady, sometimes a mailman or a fellow kid at school. At first, she thinks she has gone crazy, then she realizes that it really is God and that when she follows God’s advice, she helps people.

The prom is approaching at her high school and Joan is hoping that the guy she likes will ask her. God appears as a punk-rock senior and tells her that she is to ask a boy to the prom. “Do you have to meddle in my love life?” she says. (Joan has this way of talking back to God that is both bold and kind of stubborn but it makes for great scenes and she always ends up doing what God asks of her.) Joan asks who the guy is that she is supposed to take. God points to a young guy named Russell. He is overweight and a complete loser. He has no friends and seems to be always angry. He wears a black leather jacket. Joan is appalled. She yells at God and complains, but she does it. She walks up to Russell in the middle of the hallway and asks him to the prom. He seems startled, but he says yes.

The prom with Russell is a nightmare. He sneaks in booze and tries to get her to drink, then they leave the dance and drive to an abandoned parking lot where Russell pulls out a gun and begins to shoot cans. Joan is terrified and demands that he take her home when the cops pull up and Russell is arrested for disturbing the peace.

The next day at school, God shows up as the punk rocker again and Joan is furious! ‘Why did you make me take him!” she yells. ‘I had a horrible time. It was a nightmare. It was dangerous and he seemed miserable too. I completely failed.” No, says God, you did exactly what I asked of you. Let me show you what would have happened if you hadn’t asked Russell to the prom. God then takes her back to the day when she asked Russell. When she walked up to him in the hall, Russell was carrying a gun. He was planning to shoot two of the football players, a teacher and then himself. All this was averted simply because Joan asked him to the dance. She gave him something to hope for.

I did not ask you to be perfect, just to be there for him, God says.

Sometimes, when we listen to God and allow God into our lives, we expect to do great things, to make a huge impact on the world and be successful in some way. But we do not see what God sees and sometimes just our faithful presence in the midst of suffering is all that God wants of us. Sometimes we are called to walk the walk, or as it says in the book of Hebrews, to run the race that is set before us. And we will not know what God had in mind until the finish line.

We forget that Joseph was a complete failure before he was ever great. But for better or worse, his response was always faithfulness and obedience, and that is why we remember him.

Miracles from the Pit

I just got back from my annual family reunion in Connecticut. When I was a child, it was mandatory. One did not miss it, or my grandmother would, well, I’, not sure what she would do but whatever it was scared us enough never to ask. Nobody ever missed the family reunion.

And each year, my grandmother, God rest her soul, would ask us the infamous question. “Well, dearies, what did you accomplish this year?” Unwittingly, she pitted her grandchildren against one another. Who was going to the best colleges? Who had the best jobs? Who was raising their children well? Without knowing it, she played favorites, comparing us, complaining about our mistakes, reveling in our successes. I got to the point where I felt like going on a diet before the family reunion just so that I didn’t get her evil eye. What kind of a vacation is that? Now that she has died, the family has relaxed so much. We don’t dress up for dinner. We laugh and cry and eat and act silly. God bless my grandmother. I did love her but she etched competition into my skull.

Joseph was a favorite in a family where his father played favorites. And their competition was not just for a once-a-year family reunion. Joseph lived with his competitors all the time. Joseph was one of twelve brothers, born of four different mothers. All four of the mothers were in constant competition with one another so it is no surprise that there was near constant rivalry going on all the time among their sons. It must have been an intense atmosphere to grow up in. Joseph was younger than most of his brothers. By the time the Biblical story begins, he is seventeen and most of his brothers are grown men. Joseph’s mother was his father’s favorite wife, so Joseph became his favorite son. Joseph’s father gave him a coat with long sleeves, which would protect him from the sun. An obvious sign of favor, this coat enrages his brothers. The competition rises to a feverish pitch and soon his brothers want him dead.

Have you ever read the book Lord of the Flies? It is a must read for anyone raising boys. A gang of boys are shipwrecked on an island without adults. They gradually become wild, reduced to their baser natures without any supervision. They begin to bully one small boy. The bullying goes unchecked and eventually becomes violent. In the end, they kill the smaller boy. It is a horrible story about the cruel realities of young men when rivalry goes unchecked.

Couple competition with numerous unsupervised young men and you soon get Lord of the Flies. With no adults around, Joseph’s brothers become ugly when he boasts of a dream that he had in which they bowed down to him. Joseph was either so innocent as to trust his dreams or so naïve as to be unsuspecting of the depth of his brothers hatred. They are about to kill him when one brother gets a conscience and intervenes. As an alternative, they decide to throw him into a pit.

It must have been incredibly dark in that hole. Israel has a very dry climate. Joseph could have died of thirst or starvation. Maybe he thought that it was a practical joke at first, that his brothers would relent, cool down and change their minds. But they did not.

When slave traders approach, Joseph’s brothers decide to sell him as a slave.

Thus, in an instant, the favored boy is reduced to slavery. Bound by ropes, he is dragged to a foreign land to work himself to death.

This is the beginning of a three-part sermon series on the life of Joseph. Why? Because he was a man who listened to God. In my first year as your Dean, together, we are trying to determine God’s will for the future of this church here in downtown Jacksonville. It is time for us to listen, and Joseph is going to help us learn how. When listening to God, there is no better place to start than with the stories of Scripture.

From all human perspectives, Joseph’s life just about ended in this passage today. He went from prosperity and favor to slavery and poverty. He lost everything and not through some random tragedy but through the betrayal of his family members, the people who were supposed to love him the most. Joseph was at a dead end

Life could have ended for him that day, but it did not. The reason his life did not end was because he never stopped listening. He believed that God could make something from the bottom of a pit. And he was right.

In all the best stories of Scripture, there is a dead end: a death, a crises, a loss. In all these stories, life never seems to go as we would have chosen. And yet, God seems to do his best work at the bottom of a pit. The dead end is resurrection time.

Be awake, Jesus says in today’s gospel. Be awake and aware, for you do not know when God will come. You must be willing to follow him, even in the middle of the darkest night.

If Joseph had not been betrayed by those who loved him, he would not have served God in the magnificent way that he did. If he had not suffered, he might never have listened to God with the intensity that he did. Joseph let God run his life. Later, as a prosperous ruler in Egypt, he would literally save his family from starvation. Every Savior must die to himself before being truly able to save. And every one of us must stare at the walls of a dead end before God can wake us up to truly listen.

I have been learning a lot about our neighborhood here in the heat of downtown Jacksonville. A lot of people think that we are nowhere. No one comes here. This church is no longer on a main drag. Downtown has suffered. How many times have I heard people say, ‘I just don’t go down there anymore!” Or “I remember when we used to go downtown to shop and work, remember that?” People want to know what it’s like downtown, as if I have moved to the Sahara desert. “Is it dangerous?” they ask…

The new Courthouse is nearing completion. Soon many of the lawyers will move their offices from this district to be closer to the new courthouse. What will happen to this corner of downtown? Will we become a place of abandoned properties and half-way houses? It feels as if we are hitting a dead end.

Alleluia. Sounds like just the right time for God to become intimately involved. I believe that we were all called here to this dead end of downtown for a reason. If this Cathedral does not care for this district, no one will. God is giving us a call here, folks, I am convinced of it.

And another thing, I am almost at the point where I want to put up a huge bill board that says, “Where would Jesus be?” with a picture of the heart of downtown. He would be here! I am convinced of it. He worships with us every Sunday.

Joseph saw some hard days in the service of God. He was framed and imprisoned, he was left to rot in jail. By many accounts, his life was a mess. And yet God kept raising him to new heights, using his misfortune to make him wiser and to get him where he needed to go.

I say that the poverty and homelessness around us tell us one thing as a Cathedral- that we are exactly where we are supposed to be. This is our time to impact this city. And as we listen, vision is taking shape.

I knew a woman who was one of the best psychologists in town. Everyone respected her. Her practice was full for she could be so genuinely loving and so very tough all at the same time. As a member of my parish years ago, she told me that she had suffered from massive clinical depression for years. It got so bad that she could not go to work, but lay in her bed under her blankets all day. Her husband was terrified and did not know what to do. She would lie there alone in the dark, wishing that she would simply cease to exist. After months of suffering that continued despite the best of medical care, she awoke in the middle of the night in the pit of darkness and something happened. Even years later, she had trouble putting the experience in words. Peace was a word she used. The peace that passes all understanding. A feeling of such beauty and deep joy came to her. And it altered her life forever. She got out of bed. She ate. Her life began.

“It took me years to understand that I had to experience that darkness in order to help people the way that I do. I had to see the pit in order to know the grace of God, in order to know what it means to be lifted up, to be saved. I understand salvation now. I really understand.”

God has us here in the heart of downtown for a reason my friends. There is a reason for all of this. This city is our greatest struggle and it is our greatest opportunity. For it is here that we need a Savior. It is here that we can find Christ and be saved.

Amen.