Category: Preaching Notes
Ash Wednesday Words: Mark that place
I don’t lead worship or preach very often on Ash Wednesday. One of our congregations seeking a minister asked me to lead their service. It was my honor to be gifted the trust of the pulpit and the ashes. This ritual is a relatively “new” part of my denomination’s expression of Christian faith. Growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, (Disciples of Christ) congregations my family attended didn’t do Ash Wednesday. Somewhere in the early ’90s, this historically Catholic tradition found its way into the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). My companion, the cradle Disciple, calls it “ecumenical creep.” So, I can count on two hands the number of times I’ve been called upon to preach and to smudge ashes on people. We read Jan Richardson’s “Blessing of the Dust” before people came forward, and I reminded them, “You are blessed by God. You are dust.” Here is my homily for Ash Wednesday.
Mark That Place
Isaiah 58:1–12 / Matthew 6:1–6, 16–21
In the book A Walk in the Woods, travel writer Bill Bryson returns to America after living in Europe for many years. Restless in his new, old surroundings, he decides to hike the Appalachian Trail — all 2,000 miles of it. Concerned about going alone, he reaches out to friends. The only one who responds is an old high school acquaintance, Stephen: considerably overweight, with a mild drinking problem, who eats only junk food and insists he must eat every hour to prevent seizures.
They buy all the gear they believe they need. Backpacks, tents, sleeping bags, bear repellent, the right boots, the right socks. They study the trail maps. After a final dinner surrounded by other, more convincing-looking hikers, they set out. What follows is a journey full of low points, wrong turns, unexpected beauty, and mountain vistas that neither of them could have found any other way. They don’t hike the whole trail. But they are changed by the part they do. Lent is something like that.
Advent is one end of the Christian trail, which has many entrances and exits. From the first notes of “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” through the baptismal waters of the Jordan, past temptation and a first miracle, and straight on through to the empty tomb — some Christians sprint from “Silent Night” to “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today” without ever slowing down. Lent is one of the side entrances along the Christian trail and journey with Jesus. It’s a path that takes forty days or longer to hike before you reach the main trail. It’s a choice. You have to decide to take it. Not everyone does. Not everyone can.
We live in a GPS world. Our inclination in this busy, fast-paced, social-media-fueled culture is to punch Jerusalem into Google maps and take the fastest route — straight to Hosanna, and to the stone rolled away. Lent is a reminder that a journey with Jesus meanders. We want the certainty of a quick, direct trip, even if it includes a toll called “giving something up.”
The map for this journey has marked trails, arrows, landmarks, bridges, and a few written directions. Places are marked: wells where strangers meet and draw water for one another, waterfront property that becomes a teaching space, dusty roads where Samaritans live out the commandments better than I do. Around the edges of this incomplete map are notes scribbled in the margins — how to avoid sinkholes and dangerous passages, where to find safe shelter, and who the helpers are.
The words of Isaiah are trying to shake us from a comfortable fasting routine. Speaking to the people returning from Babylonian exile, Isaiah doesn’t say the rituals are wrong — he says they have become self-serving. The people are going through the motions, wondering why God isn’t listening.
Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day and oppress all your workers. Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high. (Isaiah 58:3–4)
Isaiah’s words are for anyone returning from exile — whether from Babylon or from burnout, from disillusionment or from distance — thinking the old ways are by default the right ways, the only ways, or the good old days.
Author and activist Jim Wallis tells of meeting young adults and college students who are tutoring inner-city kids in Washington, D.C. He says they volunteer far more hours than any resume would require. And when he asks them why, the two words he hears most often are meaning and connection. They are looking for meaning. They are looking for connection.1 In a sermon, Wallis reflected on Isaiah’s vision.
The prophet’s call is as contemporary as if it were written yesterday. Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, to bring the homeless into your house, when you see the naked to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own flesh? And this is the key: ‘Then will your light break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up speedily.’ (Isaiah 58:8). Isaiah understands that it’s not the healing of those poor inner-city kids that’s at issue here — it’s our healing. And the college students are finding that the way to get your life together is to do something for somebody else. This is two people being changed. It’s a transformation. Everybody gets different in the process. Everybody gets healed.2
That is the movement Isaiah is pointing toward: not performance piety, but participation in healing. Not a ritual that makes you feel better about yourself, but a practice that makes someone else better, whole, healthy, fed, changed for the good — and in the process, makes you different too.
And that’s a struggle in America right now for Christianity, left-right-center: how to heal from a politicized pop-Christian faith. It requires confession, repentance, and a grace that allows someone to “save face” and be forgiven in the age of cancel culture. What are you willing to do with someone else, or for someone else, that might transform their life and yours? When that happens — mark that place.
Here is where the journey gets interesting. Isaiah calls us outward — toward justice, toward neighbor, toward healing in the world. Matthew’s Jesus calls us inward. That may feel like a contradiction, but it is the “both and” of scripture and the good news of God.
The Gospel of Matthew casts an edgy Jesus. Sometimes his words sound more like John the Baptist than a humble table host. Matthew’s Jesus says:
Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your God in heaven. (Matthew 6:1)
This is where Christians have gotten into trouble throughout the centuries — making a spectacle of outreach, worship, evangelism, morality, or political reach. It is rare these days not to hear a nod to God after a sporting victory, a Grammy acceptance, an election win, or an escape from tragedy. Gratitude matters. But the implication of that public piety is that God chooses winners and losers.
President Lincoln must have wrestled with this. In his Second Inaugural Address, he said:
Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.3
As we meander with Jesus, he asks us to reconsider our piety. Is it a religious statement for you, for the public, or fashionable pop culture?4 Isaiah and Jesus hold the same thing in tension: do justice, love your neighbor, feed the hungry — but do it because it is right, not because it makes you look right.
Don’t do it out of fear.
Don’t do what is right to seek favor, gain power, or virtue signal.
Matthew’s Jesus might paraphrase like this today:
Whenever you give, give quietly. Use the QR code. Whenever you pray, find a room. When you fast, don’t walk around looking dismal so others know you’re fasting. God in heaven already knows why you give, pray, and fast. (Paraphrase Matt. 6: 5-7)
The question Jesus is asking: What’s the why?
Are we seeking approval?
Are we comparing ourselves to other believers, trying to measure our portion of the Spirit?
Are we looking for influence, or hoping to become influencers?
These are worth sitting with quietly — self-reflection and communal reflection are part of the journey.
For me, it helps to think of faith as practice — not in the sense of pretending, but in the sense that a musician practices scales, or an athlete trains. No one becomes a musician, an artist, an athlete, a pilot, or a decent human being without practice. My mother’s advice can be difficult even today: “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” Practice won’t make you perfect, but it helps you become proficient. It helps you improvise when the journey gets hard. It can calibrate disappointment.
Diana Butler Bass encourages us: “Give, pray, and fast. Sing, forgive, do justice. Love your enemies, turn the other cheek, keep Sabbath. Offer hospitality, serve the poor, care for the planet.”5
She suggests that, “By practicing our faith, we actually become all the things we promise to be in our baptism vows, we become citizens of the Kingdom of God, the radical followers who embody the beloved community that Jesus proclaimed.”6
Bill and Stephen didn’t hike the whole Appalachian Trail. They got tired, took wrong turns, and eventually left the path before the end. But they didn’t come back the same. The walk changed them. The low points and the vistas both did something to them that comfort never could. Lent is like that. You may not reach the end of this path before Easter morning. You may find yourself tired, off-trail, looking for helpers. That’s all right. The path is still the path.
Treasure can be many things — dollars and cents, stocks and real estate, family, friendship, church buildings, even eternal life. What treasure helps transform your heart so you can see the image of God in other people? Lent may help you discover meaning and connection. Meaning and connection can illuminate what you treasure most. Mark that place.
If this is your first journey, you may not know where the path begins. Look for the helpers. They will show you a map and point the way. You may have walked this way before but forgotten how difficult it can be. Isaiah is a good marker of the path. So is Matthew. And so is the memory of a time when something cracked open in you, and you were different afterward. You may not have been changed for the better, but might have been changed for good.
The journey through Lent may help you discover that, contrary to conventional wisdom and some traditional Christian interpretation, you are originally blessed. And there — there — your heart will be also. Mark that place.
Someday, you may pass by this way again and need the reminder.
Someday, another person may pass by this same stretch of path — lost, tired, looking for a sign that someone has been here before and found their way through.
God’s grace doesn’t require reciprocity.
You have to choose to accept it.
You have to be willing to be changed by it. Again and again and again.
When you experience it, mark that place.
- Paraphrase of Wallis, speaking to a session at the Society of Biblical Literature conference, November 2006. ↩︎
- Jim Wallis, “We All Get Healed”, 30 Good Minutes, Program #4416, November 21, 2000. ↩︎
- President Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address. March 4, 1865. The Avalon Project accessed February 17, 2026: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln2.asp ↩︎
- I do not wear my religious symbols in public. The fish necklace I wear is my reminder of my call to ministry, my discipleship as a follower of Jesus, and the obligations of my belief in God. ↩︎
- Diana Butler Bass, “Practicing Lent.” 2014. The Cottage Substack, February 14, 2024. https://dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/practice-the-cross. ↩︎
- Bass, “Practicing Lent.” 2014. ↩︎
Snack-Size Good News
Last Sunday, I was gifted the trust of the pulpit at First Christian Church in El Reno. This is a jubilee year for the congregation as they celebrate 135 years of ministry in September. On May 4th (be with you) they celebrated the 25th anniversary of their Associate Pastor’s service with the congregation. The text for the day was John 21:1-19. Here is a lightly edited version of my words.
Good morning, disciples.
It is a great day to gather for worship as we continue to meet Jesus in unexpected places along a journey in faith. Generations of seekers, skeptics, and believers have benefited from this congregation’s proclamation and practice of the good news of God. If you live in or around El Reno and are visiting today in-person or in the digital sanctuary come back and get involved in this congregation witness of faith.
Disciples, you continue to show people that the Lord’s mercies never cease, that the Lord’s mercies are new every morning, that the Lord’s faithfulness extends beyond our ability to see in a mirror dimly, and that followers of Jesus do Jesus-like things.
Thank you for being a voice of gospel from this corner of El Reno for your community and beyond your doorsteps into our fragmented world. Your siblings in faith around the Region and throughout the denomination are grateful for your example of servant leadership and faithfulness as we claim the covenant: Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Oklahoma.
Colton, Tara, and elders, thank you for gifting me the trust of the pulpit today as we recognize a ministry milestone in this year of jubilee.
Disciples, as your spirit is able, please join me in a moment of prayer. Open our ears and hearts, O God, so that our meditations, words, and living reflect our faith in You, who creates, redeems, and sustains all creation and our lives. Amen.
Buckle up. Here we go.
When I think of Tara’s twenty-five years of ministry here in El Reno, I remember some words by the 20th-century theologian Henri Nouwen. He wrote, “the compassionate life is mostly hidden in the ordinariness of everyday living.”1
Tara, you and this congregation have have cast a large net in El Reno and beyond in the ordinariness of everyday living:
Blessing Baskets.
Lunch Bunch.
Snack Bags.
Logos.
Youth Group.
Bereavement meals.
Mission Camp.
International Affairs Seminar.
Summer Camp.
VBS.
Intersections.
Mission Trips.
Tara, you’ve offered teaching, pastoral care, and preaching.
You are also a proud parent, a spouse, and a caregiver to your family.
And, you usually have that backpack full of all kinds of things and snacks.2 You’ve watched and taken seriously the science that children and youth, anyone, can’t do their best work or be the best version of themselves when they are hungry or thirsty.
Physically or spiritually hungry.
Physically or spiritually thirsty.
Along with the power bars and peanut butter crackers, you carry around snack-size good news: supportive prayers and hugs, a problem-solving eye, a “let’s get on with it” approach with some patience, sometimes, and a servant’s heart that knows it needs boundaries, but there is still so much more to do.
Twenty-five years. It is a rare thing these days for a commissioned pastor or ordained minister to walk alongside, argue with, thumb wrestle with, pray for, grieve, and celebrate with a congregation for that long. You, your family, and this congregation have grown up together, and there is still so much waiting to see and do in front of you.3
Disciples, there is still so much gospel to be and do waiting in front of you. I think that is what this fireside breakfast chat with Jesus is all about. He has shown Peter and the others another way. They’ve walked it with him. Lived it. It’s their turn to lead. Their turn to be an example, but you have to choose it. You have to choose it every day. Feed, Tend. Feed.
There is an old story. An itinerant preacher arrives at church on Sunday to find only one person attending worship. He says to the man, “Good Morning. We’ll wait a bit longer, but if there are just the two of us, why don’t we sing a hymn, have prayer, share communion, and skip the sermon. What do you say?”
The man said, “Well, preacher, if I go down to feed my cattle and just one shows up, I feed him. I don’t turn him away hungry.”
So, the preacher led the service and gave a long sermon on God’s salvation. He preached all over the bible, raised his voice, and cursed the devil for 90 minutes. After worship, he asked the man what he thought of the sermon. The man said, “Preacher, it was good, but like I said, if only one cow shows up, I don’t turn the one away unfed. But, I don’t dump the whole bucket.”4
Feed. Tend. Feed.
There is something unique about the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Mark. The author of Mark creates the original prequel about Jesus. It is an outline of the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth. The author of John is overtly weaving a theological parable about Jesus’s story, his identity, and a person’s life after meeting Jesus in a novel about God’s redemption. The gospel writers have different motivations, but they have something in common. Mark and John just end without any hint as to what happens to the characters. Go back and look.
Mark ends with the women fleeing in fear from the tomb, telling no one, and then briefly telling Peter and everyone around him what Jesus had commanded (Mark 16:8). Most New Testaments add the heading “the longer ending of Mark,” and it includes more appearances, commissioning disciples, and Jesus’ ascension.
The writer of John gives us a nice summation: “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But, these are written so that you may come to believe or may continue to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and through that believing you may have life in his name.” (John 20:30-31) And then, our reading for today.
So, like some sermons you’ve heard during life, Mark and John have two endings. Scholars refer to this as the epilogue. It’s the clean-up of storylines to make for a better ending or sending. I know a minister who likes to say at the end of a sermon, “And one more thing,” as the congregation reaches for their hymnal.
In the synoptic gospels, Peter denies knowing Jesus. This fireside chat with Jesus and the Disciples includes callbacks to intimate community, the abundance of fish and wine, and the feeding of 5000 with some snack-size bites. In John’s parable, Peter denies being a disciple of Jesus. That’s more than semantics—more than denying a belief or knowing someone.
Being a disciple, a follower includes living a particular way. Doing specific kinds of things. “You are not also one of his disciples, are you?” Peter responds, “I am not.” Even though Jesus has yet to be sentenced, being associated with him could get Peter, the disciple whom Jesus loved, or any of the disciples into trouble with the powers that be. None of them were willing to take that risk, even if it was “good trouble.”5 After all they had been through, the rock crumbles, and Peter denies his identity as a disciple of Jesus.
All of us, no matter our age, station in life, or maturity in faith, struggle with being a disciple of Jesus every day because we know deep down in the depths of our hearts that disciples of Jesus do Jesus-like things, and they believe.
As this decade unfolds into the next, I think that may be a way we distinguish between the essentials of unity, the non-essentials of liberty, and the charity followers of Jesus practice and proclaim.
In three little snack-size “Do you love me” moments, Jesus invites Peter to reclaim his discipleship, his identity, and a responsibility to feed, tend, and feed young ones and mature ones – and that includes himself.
Dr. Seuss says it like this.
On and on you will hike.
And I now you’ll hike far
and face up to your problems
whatever they are.
You’ll get mixed up of course,
as you already know.
You’ll get mixed up
with many strange birds as you go.
So be sure when you step.
Step with care and great tact
and remember that Life’s
A Great Balancing Act.
Just never forget to be dexterous and deft.
And never mix up your right foot with your left.6
One biblical commentator describes this fish story in John like this: “And so, Jesus shows up on that shore, hosts a meal one more time, and tells Peter, tells us, ‘I believe in you. I know who you are and I love you. And yes, you are exactly the disciple I need, the disciple the world needs, for God to the world.’”7
Disciples, remember that God’s grace and peace are not simply abstract concepts. You have experienced God’s grace and peace in your discipleship and in your experience of the risen Christ. God’s compassion and the way of Jesus are present in this world through your faith and actions. Your individual and collective efforts as a congregation have the power to transform the world around you, even if it is just for a moment. I still want to believe that a moment might be, can be, enough.
Even when you are not sure who is my neighbor, it’s the way you feed, tend, and feed your neighbors.
It’s the way you deal with ones that call you an enemy.
It’s the way you feed, tend, and feed one another.
Sometimes, you can sense it.
Sometimes, you can see it.
Usually, you don’t know how kindness, a supportive word, a question, or an action, small or large, can alter the trajectory of a person’s day, week, or life. And it may take a while to know how that moment affected you.
Jesus of Nazareth met people where they were in life’s journey:
the poor and the rich,
the powerful and the powerless,
the healthy and infected,
the in-group and the outcast.
His living demonstrated that old saying, “Preach the gospel. When necessary, use words.”
His living reminded people to: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Sometimes, that involves simply sharing a snack, offering a listening ear, giving a dollar, or providing coins at the laundromat. Other times, with larger systems, it may require more reflection, more risk, and more intentional action. That’s the object of that old confession, “Forgive me for the things I have done and left undone.” Within a community of believers, we hold one another accountable for the essentials and non-essentials in a spirit of charity.
And, one more thing.
Each morning, I receive a thought from a marketing guru that begins my day wondering. Last week, this thought arrived. “The stories we tell are a choice. Reciting facts lets us off the hook, but telling a true story that causes change is a powerful responsibility.”8
There are so many things Jesus is still doing through you, First Christian Church El Reno. Disciples, the epilogue of Jesus’s story about the good news of God goes on, and you contribute a verse. You don’t have to dump the whole bucket. Let your living be snack-size good news.
- Cf. Henri Nouwen, Here and Now: Living in the Spirit, p 103. ↩︎
- Youth group members begin taking snacks to Tara. ↩︎
- Hat tip Jimmy Buffett for this phrase loosely based on the lyric, “There’s too much to see waiting in front of me and I don’t think I can go wrong.” from “Changes in Latitude, Changes in Attitude” 1977. ↩︎
- Loyal Jones and Billy Edd Wheeler, Laughing in Appalachia: Southern Mountain Humor. August House (Little Rock) 1987. p 36-7. ↩︎
- A phrase used often by Rep. John Lewis (February 21, 1940 – July 17, 2020). He served Georgia’s 5th Congressional District and was part of the Civil Rights Movement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis ↩︎
- Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go! Random House (New York) 1990. ↩︎
- Karoline Lewis, “Do You Love Me?” Dear Working Preacher, April 28, 2019.
https://www.workingpreacher.org/dear-working-preacher/do-you-love-me ↩︎ - Seth Godin, “A powerful story.” April 26, 2025. ↩︎