September 27, 2026 - The Rev. Andrew Stravitz, Associate Priest

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be ever pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer.

Amen.

About five years ago, I shut down a church that I had started and led for about four years prior to that.

And when it closed, I said, that's it.

I'm done with churchy stuff.

I'm I don't want to be a professional Christian anymore.

I get to have bloody Marys and experience whatever this brunch thing you guys have been doing your whole lives.

I was really relieved.

No more unlocking doors, no more setting up chairs, no more refereeing communion between capitalists and communists.

Real story.

It was a great community.

But I really was truly, I thought, glad to be done and done for good.

And so naturally, that next Sunday, after having dreamed about Bloody Marys, I walked to Trinity.

Father Troy took me in.

You gave me and my family a seat.

The choir led me in ascent to God, and I have been a part of something, a part of you, ever since.

And how did I not know that that's what I wanted?

How did I not know what I wanted?

How did I not know enough about myself to know that that's what was needed?

I was joking with some friends recently.

We were talking about how now that we're in our 40s, we're finally ready to be in our 20s.

And when we were in our 20s, we really just wanted the, you know, the the clout of being in our 40s.

How can we be so unaware of ourselves so often with really kind of like obvious, uh seemingly obvious ways in hindsight?

But it was easy to become a part of you.

And now it's my joy to be one of your pastors, one of your priests.

And by the way, I've had like a handful of people ask me in a couple weeks.

We we can use both pastor and priest.

We use both words.

Here's what I remember about those first Sundays being here.

Nobody asked me for my resume, nobody ran a background check on the pitiful priest in the back row.

Nobody made me explain myself.

You let me stay a bit of a mystery.

You did not try to see through me.

And that's something because most of the time we really do want to see through people.

We want to grasp them for ourselves.

We want to, you know, scroll through their posts, we want to read their yard signs, we want to look up their platform, certain people we do.

And we want to do that so that we can know the whole story about them.

Who are you really?

And it doesn't end there.

We also deeply want to know about ourselves.

We want to figure out our Brit Myers-Briggs letters, and then we want to figure out our Enneagram numbers, and then we want to talk to dumb old therapists like me to discover how we're dissociative or how we're enmeshed, and then we want to get diagnosed because who am I?

Really?

How can I know myself?

We are all so opaque, so often.

Something is opaque when you can't see through it.

A window is clear or translucent, it lets light and sight through.

But we have in us what Judith Butler calls opacity, an impossibility of being able to truly and perfectly know yourself, truly and perfectly know someone else.

And we want to see through God too.

In our first lesson at Refiddin, there's no water.

The people are thirsty, they're scared, they're grumbling and arguing, and they bring God to a court and they want proof.

Is the Lord among us?

Is the Lord who the Lord says the Lord is?

Show us, make yourself clear.

Who are you?

And God does not show them a face, He's been showing them a cloud, a mist, or a fire that probably blurs and blinds the eyes.

But God says, I will be standing there in front of you, literally before your face.

Panim.

My grandmother, she was Jewish and she would always say, like, look at your little punim.

It's a Yiddish word for like your chubby cute face.

And probably comes from this Hebrew word panim.

God stood there before the Israelites' face, the ones who were accusing God.

And what does Moses see when he looks?

He sees a rock, a big, dumb rock.

The Lord was among them the whole time.

They just couldn't see him in the cloud or in the fire or in the rock.

God was opaque to them, and that made them quarrel.

The rock was not discernible.

The only thing they could see of God at Refidim was the mercy of life-saving water.

Jump to the temple scene where Jesus is being hounded by the elders, the priests, the politicians, if you will, the elders of the people, and they come to Jesus and they want to see through Jesus too.

By what authority are you doing these things?

Who do you think you are to be undermining us?

Who gave you this authority?

They want to catch him.

They say, show us your papers.

Tell us what box to put you in.

And Jesus jukes them.

He evades them.

He diverts.

He becomes even more obscure, more obsidian, if you will.

He asks a question in response to their question.

That's a great way of not being seen, not being known the way someone wants to apprehend you.

He asks a question in response to these elders.

He says, uh, he asks a question about John the Baptist, and you've got to understand who John the Baptist was, right?

That John the Baptist was this wild man living out in the wild.

He was eating and drinking wild things like bugs and bug juice, and saying wild things like forgiveness is as free as the river that I am baptizing you in.

No temple needed, no temple fee needed, no approved coin, no priest's permission, no pretenses and no pretenders.

Come honest, come home, come to the river and drink deeply of God, was John the Baptist's message.

And when the power brokers showed up, John called them a bunch of snakes.

The snake is someone who sneaks, is someone who does not want to be seen.

And the crowds loved John for this, for calling out the elders for their pretenses and their pretending.

And they believed John was a real prophet because of it.

So this is a super loaded question that Jesus is asking these leaders, these elders.

Who are you?

It's a test of who you are based on who you think John was.

Was John from heaven, from God?

Or was he just a Joe Schmoe drifting on the people?

And those elders hide.

They step back and they whisper if we say John's from heaven, then he'll ask us why we didn't believe John, why we didn't believe God was there offering free, flowing forgiveness.

And we'll look stupid.

But if we say John was just a shmo, that he was grifting on the people, then the crowd's gonna turn on us and we'll look even stupider.

They know exactly what they think, and they just won't say it.

They play dumb instead.

My dad used to always say to me, It's amazing how dumb you become when you're the one who's guilty.

I may have been guilty quite a bit.

Jesus responds to these leaders and he says, Then neither will I tell you who I am.

I won't tell you my authority.

Jesus was not going to be seen through, not by them, not on their twisted terms.

So there are in this story two kinds of hiding.

One is a hiding one's face behind a mask in order to protect their fragile power.

And the other one is Jesus staying hidden in order to protect something else, something holy, something mysterious.

One is a mask, and the other is the face of God.

Jesus tells a story about two sons.

It's a story about faces and facades, and ultimately about what God looks like in the wild.

The father says to the first son, Go and work in the vineyard today, and the son says, I don't want to.

But then he later on changes his mind.

Maybe the protest faded.

And the father says to the second son, the same thing, and the second son says, Aye, sir, yes, sir, right away, sir, and then he never goes.

And if you'd looked at their faces in the morning, can you imagine each face?

You would have gotten them both wrong.

The one who said no, take a hike, dad, eventually went and did what dad said.

And the other one who said yes and presented as so willing, bailed.

Neither son seemed to know himself.

The first son thought he did, and maybe surprised himself when he his protest faded away and he went and did what his dad said.

And the second son knew exactly what to say.

Aye, sir, yes, sir, right away, sir, but it was a mask.

It was a good mask, right?

The kind that gets you, you know, through church or through an interview or through small talk.

And Jesus asked these conniving leaders, which of these sons did the will of the father?

Who are these two boys?

Which one is faithful to the father?

And they all quipped quickly.

Well, the first son, obviously, the jerk of the son, that jackwad who, you know, blew God or blew his dad off, but then eventually listened.

And then Jesus squares them up and he says, likewise, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.

That's who the kingdom of God is for.

The grifters and the whores get God before you leaders do, because they're not pretending.

They don't wear masks, they don't cover up despite not knowing this or that about God or not really having all the fancy God talk.

They went to drink deeply of God's forgiveness.

Everybody thought they could read those people in a glance.

The tax collector, thief, the prostitute, sinner.

You could know their whole story from across the street just by looking at them.

But something was happening inside of them, a mystery, that nobody could see.

They heard John, they turned toward the message of mercy, free mercy for all.

They went down to the river and were transformed by the free flowing mercy of God, and they closed their eyes as they went under and let God wash over them.

And the leaders and the elders and the priests and politicians, they all missed it, trying to keep their eyes open, their head on a swivel.

Even after you saw it, Jesus says to them, even after you saw the people receive God.

You didn't change your minds.

At Rephidim, God gave water instead of a face.

God won't be seen through.

But in Jesus, God gives us a face we can actually look at, just not the face we expect.

Finally, in our epistle, Paul tells us in a hymn, possibly the first Christian hymn ever written, which is all about what God looks like in the wild.

Though Jesus was in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God as something to grasp, to exploit, our translation said.

Christ had the face of God.

He didn't grasp at divinity and power.

He didn't make a statue or a bust of himself.

He emptied himself, taking the form, not just of a human, but of a slave, being born in human likeness and being found in human form.

He humbled himself.

God humbled God's self by emptying God's self of power.

That's what God looks like.

That's what the humble human looks like.

Nobody could see the face of God at Rephedim, but they could taste the self-giving, life-giving water.

Nobody can know where God is, but we can feel the free-flowing forgiveness of God.

Everyone was unsure of the face of God in Jesus at that time, but they knew it when Jesus gave himself to the poor and the poor in spirit, and gave himself in peace to the violent.

If we want to know what God looks like, we must look at Jesus, who took the side of grifters and prostitutes, the poor and the needy, the immigrant and the felon, the extortionists and the loose.

Which means every face that we see is hiding more than we can see.

The tax collector and the prostitute, the Republican and the Socialist, the bartender and a CFO, the stranger or the enemy.

In each face, if we have eyes to see, we may find the face of Christ.

Or at least we will have, as Paul says, the mind of Christ, who said, Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.

Just like God, who humbled God's self, did.

Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others, and let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.

This is how we work out our own salvation with fear and trembling.

Fear and trembling.

We cannot know everything about everyone.

We cannot know everything about ourselves, but we can, with fear and trembling, work out our salvation, because it is God in us, Paul says, who is at work in us, accomplishing every good work for God's pleasure.

So despite how little we can know and see of ourselves, of our neighbors, of our enemies, this is good news that God knows us perfectly, works in each of us to be like God to one another, and to be merciful and self emptying for one another.

Amen.