From Royal Screw-ups to Royalty
It doesn’t take much reflection for those moments of bad judgement to surface in the silence of our thoughts. Times when we could have, should have done better. That little “white lie” that wasn’t so little. That excuse not based on reality. Evil thoughts against one’s political foes. Only takes a second.
My friend Dick related the delightful story of a pastor who decided to skip church and head for the golf links.
That Sunday morning he loaded up his bag of clubs and prepared to head out to the course. He told his wife that he had to visit a parishioner who was in the hospital, and then told his assistant from the car that he wasn’t feeling well. He drove to a golf course in another city, so nobody would know him. He teed off on the first hole. A huge gust of wind caught his ball, carried it an extra hundred yards and dropped it right in the hole, for a 450-yard hole-in- one. An angel looked at God and said, “What’d you do that for?” God smiled and replied, “Who’s he going to tell?”
The Bozo No-No move of a royal screw-up pastor. And who’s he gonna tell.
My friend Susan at All Saints told this story of a screw-up as a young mother.
Her son’s kindergarten was having a tea for the parents. All about the classroom were brightly decorated bulletin boards. One of which was labeled “Easter.”
On it were the children’s paintings of their ideas of Easter. There were bunny rabbits, eggs, flowers and such. In the lower right corner was a painting with a grey blob and a black blob. And her son’s name, Jamie.
The first words out of her mouth to her son in dismay were, “I thought you were supposed to make a painting about Easter.” “But it is, Mom!” (This was before Susan was much wiser as a grandmother, when she might have said, “Tell me about your painting.”)
Jamie persisted, “the grey is the stone that was rolled away. The black is the empty tomb. See!”
A minor screw-up, hopefully not inflicting lasting psychological damage. All of us parents have walked into the same sort of blunder.
But some screw-ups can be deadly. Truly royal screw-ups.
As global warming moves towards an increase of 3.75 degrees Celsius at the end of the century – as we’re getting close to making our “island home” uninhabitable, this is what I read.
The headline in the L.A. Times pronounced, “U.S. pays wind developers to quit.” I read that we were paying a wind farm company, Golden State Wind, $885 million to pack up and go home. That after similar payment of $1 billion to Total Energies to pack up and go back to France.[1]
My latest reading details the folly of such thinking. In her book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe[2], the author of The Sixth Extinction[3], Elizabeth Kolbert, warns us that Global Warming is not something awaiting us in the far-off future. It is happening now. With a vengeance.
While we blithely go about burning more fossil fuels, she narrates incident after incident of the effects of our profligacy NOW.
She tells the story of a rather cold destination where tourists can watch the iceberg gently flow down the fjord in Greenland. At Hotel Arctic in the town of Ilulissat, four degrees north of the Arctic Circle, tourists gather to watch huge, awe-inspiring icebergs slowly drift past their windows.[4]
Only now, the glacier off which they calve, Jakobshaven Isbrae, has retreated several miles and thinned out considerably. The icebergs still flow past that hotel, but they are considerably reduced in size.
Just one sign of how we have royally screwed up our home.
When Jai and I lived in Anchorage, Alaska, old timers used to tell us of how about the first weeks of January we’d get two or three weeks of minus 10 degrees weather. That doesn’t happen anymore. In fact, there’s usually not enough snow in Anchorage to begin the Iditarod, the snow-sled race to Nome. Not enough snow unless it’s trucked in.
Another royal screw-up. Unless we repent and change course, a major royal screw-up.
Remember that an increase in temperature of almost 4 degrees Centigrade, due to arrive by the end of this century, much of the U.S. will be an uninhabitable wasteland, a permanent dust bowl. The Amazon will be dried out and burnt out. The same of much of Southern California.[5]
Did I mention glyphosate, the key ingredient in cancer-causing Roundup weed spray? We now spray it in huge amounts in our national forests to kill off the deciduous trees which might choke out the valuable conifers the timber industry favors – but much more highly flammable than those deciduous species.[6]
The author, Nate Halverson, describes walking through a burn zone in Lassan National Forest that’s completely bare. Then he sees something moving. It’s a dust devil, carrying some of the 266,000 tons of pure glyphosate sprayed in our national forests into the air to who-knows-where.[7] Carrying those toxic carcinogens to your city and mine. But we don’t pay attention to the World Health Organization anymore. What’s a little non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma among friends anyway?
And the studies purporting to declare Roundup safe? They were written by so-called scientists paid by Monsanto, whose work was in numerous places edited and changed by Monsanto – yes, there is a trail of emails to this effect.[8] The main author? A pseudo scientist whose work had previously been discredited.
Super, super royal screw-up.
The other day, one of our table-mates at Pilgrim Place lunch, a gentle Quaker lady, on hearing what I had been reading, turned to Jai and asked, “How do you live with him?”
Here’s my take. Following Christ is the willingness to bear my cross. It is to look into the darkness of human sin and folly and acknowledge it for what it is: evil. Destructive to all and to the planet itself.
In our reading from 1 Peter, we are presented with an alternative.
“Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house.”
It is the Spirit that tugs on our hearts and minds, urging and enabling us to accept that invitation to Life. To be as living stones built into the whole stature of Christ.
The author of 1 Peter sums up the invitation:
“But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”
We royal screw-ups are indeed meant for royalty. A royal priesthood, bringing to life that which was formerly dead and hopeless. Bringing to life new possibilities, yes, mighty acts, that all might thrive. This is what it means to play our part in the Jesus Movement. It’s action flowing out of faith.
One of those places of hope and new possibilities in Appalachia is a small college, Berea College. It is committed to two key goals: Enabling its students to graduate with little or no student debt and walking with them throughout their college career to ensure that they do graduate. The record for these two objectives is spectacular.
Their work is Spirit-inspired, Spirit-activated. A Christian college that actually lives the gospel mandate.
Many of their students are from impoverished homes, often riven by violence and substance abuse. Students with potential yet who never dreamed of going to college – that is until a recruiter from Berea College showed up on their campus and lit the fire of hope.
Here’s one story:
Jake Miller, in an inspiring piece, “From the Shadows to the Statehouse,” tells the gospel promise.[9]
It’s the story of Linsey Hogg. She knows injustice, she was raised into it, and yet now she is Kentucky’s assistant attorney general.
Raised in an unstable situation in Rock Spring, Georgia, she bounced around from women’s shelters to friends’ couches to her grandmother’s house where her teen aunt attempted to raise her. “It was a kid raising a kid,” she remembered.
In her home of domestic violence the message, spoken and unspoken, was that she would never amount to anything. Though she had been placed in remedial math, a perseptive teacher saw that she should have been placed in advanced math.
She was good at math. It was a calculus teacher and guidance counselor who paid out of their own pockets for Linsey to visit Berea College.
Linsey knew nothing about college and what it might have offered. She did know that she revered teachers. In her small village, they were people of promise. A royal priesthood if you will.
But, having taken an ethics course, she became a philosophy major, though she had originally thought of healthcare because she and her family never had any healthcare.
She worked in the medical field, saving funds for her new vision — law school. In a few years she was admitted to law school at the University of Kentucky. What had distressed her was people who gamed the system. She called the state director of the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit and asked how to get there. It was surprisingly easy. The director told her that no one seeks out the Medicaid Fraud Unit.
When asked what she had taken from Berea College, it wasn’t grit or determination. It was humility. “It is,” she recounted, “a kind of humility with tinges of pride.”
“Sometimes I tell people, ‘You know that poor Appalachian hillbilly, you’re talking about? That’s me.’”
Like Linsey, in ways great and insignificant, we are called to royalty. Despite the royal screw-ups that we have caused or endured. After majoring in poolhall with a GPA of 1.3, it was a campus minister who called me to royalty. Despite my dysfunctional family violence, despite being an academic royal screw-up, I was destined in God’s story for something greater than just being a royal ne’er-do-well. Besides, I was never that great at the pool table. Always behind the eight-ball.
Speaking of royal screw-ups, have you any idea how many A’s one needs to earn in order to pull such a grade point average up to something close to a 3.0? I burned a lot of midnight oil. Norm Self’s call to me was God’s invitation to be part of that royal priesthood. To realize that I was a person of worth and had much to offer if I simply worked for it.
In humility each is called to the royal priesthood in Christ Jesus. Each with a precious gift to offer: maybe in the statehouse, or maybe simply at a neighbor’s bedside, or working with Miguel to bring in Tuesday’s harvest from the Garden of Hope.
The Gospel Promise and Hope of 1 Peter is summed up in a poem by the Jesuit brother Peter Byrne that my friend Jim Strathdee put to music. It’s called, “We are Simply Asked:”
We are simply asked to make gentle our bruised world,
To be compassionate of all, including oneself.
Then in the time left over to repeat the ancient tale,
And go the way of God’s foolish ones.[10]
And in the time left over, put that ancient tale to good purpose – as a royal priesthood. For the good of neighbor and our butterfly friends. All to the Glory of God. Oh, yes, and in that time enjoy the butterflies. Amen.
[1] Hayley Smith, “U.S. pays wind developers to quit,” Los Angeles Times, April 29, 2025.
[2] Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006).
[3] Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Henry Holt, 2014).
[4] Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes, 1.
[5] Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2008).
[6] Nate Halverson, “The Toxic Forest,” Mother Jones, April, 2026.
[7] Op cit., 41.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Jake Miller, “From the Shadows to the Statehouse, Berea College Magazine, Winter, 2026, 6-7.
[10] Peter Byrne, “We are Simply Asked” as set to music by Jim Strathdee, “Light of the World,” Caliche Records, Ridgecrest, CA, 1982. Words copyright 1976 by Peter Byrne, S.J. Music by Jim Strathdee, copyright 1981.
Build it and they will come. A monarch butterfly visiting our milkweed — Hope for the butterflies and for the some-500 folks we nourish each and every week with healthy vegetables and fruit. We’re now providing for three food banks and a preschool out of our garden.
May 3, 2026
5 Easter
“From Royal Screw-ups to Royalty”
The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney
Acts 7:55-60; Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16
1 Peter 2:2-10; John 14:1-14
On the Road Again
As a child I delighted in those Bob Hope road-trip movies. I especially liked the ones featuring both Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. They usually featured great women, like “The Road to Hong Kong” with both Dorothy Lamour and Jean Collins. An extra plus was Peter Sellers.
More recently, the “Blues Brothers” road-trip is a madcap adventure to raise money for their former orphanage. It stars some of the best musical acts ever – Aretha Franklin belting out R-E-S-P-E-C-T. The band’s version of “Ghost Riders in the Sky” was fantastic.
Then there were the dystopian, post-apocalyptic films like “Mad Max: Fury Road,” “The Road,” “Zombieland,” and “Damnation Alley.” This genre was never my cup of tea. However, “The Road,” taken from a book by Cormac McCarthy, is a powerful meditation on hope in a crumbling society. The unshakeable bond between a father and a son carries the story, as they traverse a desolate, ash-gray landscape. It is a powerful testimony to the human spirit. The book, though somewhat depressing, offers brief glimmers of hope. Towards the end, the father succumbs to failing health and dies. The boy remains with him for three days before he gathers his strength to continue the journey south. He’s found by a family with two children that takes him in. With them, the boy continues to carry the fire of humanity forward in a world at its worst. This is a most powerful metaphor of our present circumstances – a deep meditation on what is ultimately important in our politically ash-gray landscape. Not for the fainthearted. Hint: I thought the book was better than the film, which wasn’t at all bad.
That’s the thing about roadtrips – they’re an uncharted adventure into the unpredictable. Almost anything can happen.
In Luke’s post-Easter story of some men on a roadtrip to Emmaus, likewise, the astounding and unpredictable unfold. Two disciples, Cleopas and another, unnamed follower of Jesus, are on a journey from Jerusalem to Emmaus. About a seven-mile trek.
Luke gives us no idea as to the purpose of their trip. It might have been simply a forlorn wandering through their despondent confusion following the execution of their teacher Jesus.
As they walked, they pondered the tragic events that had taken place over the last several days. How their hopes for a restored Israel had been dashed, had come to nothing.
In the midst of their discussion a third person appears on the road with them. Jesus, though they do not recognize him. Feigning ignorance, he asks them what they had been discussing. They are incredulous. How could this man be the only one in Jerusalem who did not know of the events that transpired over these last days?
When this mysterious stranger asks, “What events?” they spill out the entire story of their teacher, Jesus of Nazareth. How they thought he would be the one who would redeem their people. How Jesus had been a prophet “mighty in deed and in word.” And how the Roman empire, colluding with the local religious authorities, had tortured and executed him, dashing all their hopes. They went on about the stories that some of the women followers had told of an empty tomb and angels announcing that he was in fact yet alive.
“Oh, you foolish men,” the stranger scolded. Slow of heart to believe what the prophets had promised.
My New Testament professor, Dr. Hans Dieter Betz, always marveled that Jesus was known as a great teacher, for what good teacher begins the class by telling his students that they are a bunch of foolish dolts?
He then explained the story of their ancestors to them, beginning with Moses and the prophets.
At this point, admonishing them as “foolish men,” this stranger grounds them in the scriptures and traditions of their faith. Explaining it all in relationship to himself.
Yet they still do not recognize him as Jesus. That is because they lack one basic experience in recognizing him – one essential additional thing that Luke wants us to know.
When they arrive at Emmaus, the stranger makes as if to go on further, now walking ahead of them. But they urge him to remain with them for evening was drawing nigh.
When they set down at table for supper, the man took the bread and broke it and, in that instant, they knew who he was. Their eyes were opened to the reality of Jesus presence; and he vanished from their sight.
Luke, in relating this story freighted with multiple meanings, wants his readers to understand two things. They will know the Risen Lord through understanding their story as passed down through scripture. A story of being in a covenant relationship as a people with a loving God. Struggling through the good times and the bad, ever sustained as a people in the hands of a tender and faithful God.
But this history lesson is not sufficient in and of itself. More than an intellectual understanding is required. Not only of those early disciples, but of us present day followers.
The second lesson: It is in the communal act of breaking bread that the full spiritual reality of the Risen Christ is revealed. In the gathering and the prayers, in the breaking of bread and in the cup of salvation we grow into the Christ’s likeness.
The teaching here is that the faith of the Jesus Movement is not a Lone Ranger operation. It is a faith carried down through the ages by a community of the faithful. Not always understanding the enormity of this spiritual heritage they held in “earthen jars.” Often getting it wrong, sometimes disastrously wrong. Just as many Americans have through the blasphemous Christian Nationalist idolatry of our present day. For such is our contemporary golden calf – the same idol as Moses encountered when he had descended from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments.
But I digress. Back to our road story. Upon recognizing the Lord in their midst, they immediately got up and ran to tell the others. They told them how the Lord had been present in the breaking of the bread. And in their fellowship gathered around that table.
Their hearts burned within them. Something so infectious that it could not be kept to themselves.
And so it is with us as we make known the love we have experienced ourselves. Our St. Francis Garden of Hope is the sacramental reality, the present-day experience of Christ’s will that all be fed, just as we are fed every Sunday around his table.
In the movie, “Field of Dreams,” the word of promise as a corn farmer erects a baseball field In the midst of his rows of corn, is “Build it and they will come.” And sure enough, the spectral baseball legends from times past, ghosts of a bygone era, show up.
The same holds true for our Garden of Hope. And this last week, show up indeed they did. Not ghosts, but an entire group of students and others from several of the Claremont Colleges with their teacher Nancy from Scripps College. The leadership of Uncommon Good was also present, as they distribute what was harvested – if you don’t know their work, Google it.
After a morning of harvesting, the bounty was weighed. Amounting to over 500 pounds of good, nutritious vegetables. Radishes, carrots, kale, Swiss chard, spinach, cilantro, lettuce. All the good stuff that won’t be found in any corner 7-11. This was to be distributed through the program that Uncommon Good operates.
Later that morning, we were overjoyed to hear that the recipients were delighted and astounded at their good fortune. Much appreciated it was.
In addition, the next day, thanks to Miguel, Peggy and Beth, another some 20 crates were hauled off to the St. John’s Food Bank, feeding over 500 persons that day. Yes, taste and see that the Lord is good.
We, like those two men on a road trip to an out-of-the-way place, continue that same journey. In the breaking of the bread and the sharing of the cup – and in the leafy green work of many hands, Christ is yet present. With the same fullness and blessing as of yesteryear. Jesus continues to meet us at his table, today and tomorrow.
Now, isn’t that a most satisfying road trip? A trip leading to good nutrition, life abundant and a taste of eternity.
As I oft say, that’s our story and we are glorified in and through it. Sticking to it we are. The only trip worth the price of the ticket. Amen.
April 19, 2026
3 Easter
“On the Road Again”
The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney
Acts 2:14a, 36-41; Psalm 116:1-3, 10-17
1 Peter 1:17:23; Luke 24:13-35
Was You There, Charlie?
My grandfather, Charles Gross, was quite a raconteur, noted for his tall tales and elaborate embroidering of things that had actually happened. He was a master storyteller. With a wry grin and a twinkle in his eye he would launch into relating something that had happened at the funeral home where he worked after retirement from the Lodi post office. Or a story about someone at his Odd Fellows meeting the other night, or a rumor that someone had passed along.
My grandmother, Edna Mae, had become accustomed to such far-fetched stories. Sometimes in disbelief she would interrupt his narration with, “Was you there, Charlie? Was you there?”
He had quite a way with words, and his letters to the editor were frequently published in the Lodi Sentinel. I am fortunate that my mother saved many of these pieces. They bring back fond memories of the two of us walking down to a small corner grocery store where he would buy me an ice cream or soda – something absolutely forbidden in our house as my dad was a dentist. On the way there I loved to hear his commentary on the events of the day or the local news. And couldn’t wait to get back to their house where Grandma was bound to say at some point, “Was you there, Charlie?”
Despite her skepticism, she took it all in good stride. Their fondness for one another always impressed me. I didn’t witness much of that emotion in our house.
And I can picture her skeptical questioning of the disciples’ tales of having seen the Risen Lord — Was you there, Peter?” Was you there, Mary? Was you there, John? Was you there?
And of course, this is Thomas’s question. He doubts that any of what the other disciples are saying could possibly be true. What have they been smoking? Dead and buried, Jesus was. There’s no use in talking about it anymore.
When he appears in that upper room where Jesus followers were huddled in fear of the authorities, Thomas cannot comprehend the story they tell. He demands proof. “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in their mark and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”
A week later, Thomas receives his proof as Jesus again appears although the doors of the house are shut tight. Jesus’ parting words to Thomas – “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
Doubt is the proper order of the day. As Frederick Buechner said about religious doubt, “Doubt is the ants in the pants of faith; they keep it alive and moving.”
Unfortunately, the great growth of the church, beginning in the 50s after WWII was, by and large, the church of the “comfortable pew.” Sunday was the most segregated hour in America and what parishioners expected of the church was assurance. Velvety complacency was the order of the day.
Such a complacent and inoffensive Christianity was mocked by that song out of the 60s, “Plastic Jesus.” “I don’t care if it rains or freezes / Long as I got my plastic Jesus / Sittin’ on the dashboard of my car.”
Yet there lurked in the background of our mainline congregations a small group of radical folks whose souls had been infected by the gospels. A group yearning for more than pious platitudes and sappy hymns. They wanted a church that entered into the messiness of a wounded world. A church that would bear the burdens of Christ Crucified in the struggles for civil rights, racial reconciliation.
These folks would see Christ, would know him by his wounded body – the Church that bears the wounds of us all. This Sunday, in many churches is what is known as Thomas Sunday. Thomas wants to see Jesus before he will believe. And how will he know that the one he gazes upon is the real McCoy? By the wounds in his hands and feet. By the gash in his side where he was pierced by a Roman spear. He wants the real thing. By his wounds – that is exactly how he will know.
We will know the authentic representation of Christ – for the Church is the Body of Christ incarnate – when we see the wounds. Authentic Christianity enters into the struggle, the heartache of “the least of these.” It bears the wounds, the worry, of the homeless, the incarcerated, the addicted and the defeated.
Christ is the face of thousands.
The authentic, wounded Christ is yet among us still today. Christ is that despairing man in the pew beside you whose wife has just received a terminal diagnosis of cancer.
Do you now see, Thomas?
Christ is that immigrant who has been detained by ICE. Separated from his wife and one-year-old daughter. Picked up as he arrived at his required check-in under the DACA program.[1]
Do you now see, Thomas?
In the recent COVID-19 pandemic Christ was that nurse working 12-hour shifts, sometimes seven days a week to the point of exhaustion.
Do you now see, Thomas?
I recall a Facebook post I put up of a contemporary rendition of the Pietà. You remember the artist’s portrait of Mary receiving the tortured body of Christ from the Cross. The Wounded Christ of the Coronavirus Ward.
In this rendition the Christ of the Coronavirus Ward is portrayed as bearing the disfiguration of that disease. His virus-ravaged body is being lowered from a gurney by doctors, nurses and paramedics. Attached to his chest are still the leads of a heart monitor. He wears a face mask and little else to hide his nakedness.
Do you now see, Thomas?
This modern Pieta is not a pleasant picture. Not what you’d probably want hanging on your living room wall. Not the décor of a sanitized, inoffensive spirituality.
I remember also one woman writing back, not so much as in disgust or indignation – but what seemed an honest question, “Why did you post this?”
I explained that as followers of Jesus we need to enter into the hurt and pain of this world, just as Christ did. As Christ still does today.
For Christ takes on the wounded humanity yet today. In Lebanon where over 250 were killed in less than ten minutes by Israeli indiscriminate bombing of downtown Beirut. This Wounded Christ cries out from the ruins of destroyed homes, from the grief-stricken mother pawing through the remains for her dead children and husband.
Do you now see, Thomas?
Unless I see those wounds in the Church, the Body of Christ, I refuse to believe. Without those verifying wounds, it’s all Plastic Jesus.
When I hear Grandma’s question, “Was you there?” I strive to answer, yes, I was there. Yes, I am still there.
Thomas, here is your answer. In the nursing homes and in ICU wards. In ICE concentration camps. In the suffocating silence of a home ravaged by addiction. In the rubble of Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran.
Do you now see, Thomas?
Christ is in the face of that desperate family that has lost their medical insurance for a child with muscular dystrophy who needs around-the-clock care. Lost their insurance to pay for this senseless war of choice in Iran and Lebanon – a war of untold suffering now engulfing the entire Middle East.
Christ is that man languishing in an overcrowded jail simply because he could not afford competent legal advice or bail.
And Christ is the face of that Legal Aid worker toiling hours for little recompense to free him.
Christ is the face of those who blow their anti-ICE whistles, warning all that government thugs are about. At the risk of brutality, arrest or even death.
Christ is the face of that person who writes postcard after postcard urging infrequent voters to get to the polls. The face of millions in the No Kings Day demonstrations across our nation, from shore to shore. And up in Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. All advocating for a government that respects the dignity and rights of all its citizens.
This Sunday I ask the skeptic in all of us – that Doubting Thomas – might you, in a blind leap of faith, join those folks on the food distribution line, help in a homeless shelter or even greet an unhoused person on the sidewalk with a smile, and maybe a few greenbacks?
Might you now be the face of Christ, putting aside your niggling hesitations and lend a hand to receive his broken body?
Might you be the hands and feet, dare I say the wallet and sweat in our Garden of Hope and Food Bank?
In such generosity of Spirit there is the blessing to be found. Found beyond measure. A smidgen of life eternal.
Oh, Thomas, was I there? Yesterday, today and tomorrow, all of us — we of St. Francis’ and St John’s will be present – bearing the imprint of the wounds of Christ. Touch. Feel.
Do you now see, Thomas?
Amen.
April 12, 2026
2 Easter
“Was You There, Charlie?”
The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney
Acts 2:14a, 22-32; Psalm 16;
1 Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-31
[1] Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. The program that protected undocumented persons brought to America when they were children and who have known no other country than the United States.
Christ the Gardener
We are sometimes blindsided by moments of complete and utter terror. I remember such a night over at our neighbor Jorie’s house where several of us junior high school kids had gathered to watch a new TV program, “The Sea Around Us” in living color. Her family had the only color TV in the neighborhood.
At one point, during an intermission, we broke for snacks that her mother had made. As we passed through the dining room some of the kids were looking out the sliding class door. “Look at that,” one exclaimed. They were all staring at a very large bullfrog out on the patio.
When I looked out the window all I saw was the pitch-black night. I was overcome by a terrifying sensation of being sucked into an empty void. I don’t ever think I have felt such fear since. The experience was one of overwhelming existential terror.
I wonder if that was the experience of those first arriving in the wee hours of dawn to anoint Jesus’ body with spices. When they peered into the gaping black hole of that tomb carved out of rock, what moments of terror seized their souls?
The gospels record no details about what had actually happened at that moment – the seconds when his body was there and when it wasn’t. There were no witnesses. The guards were all asleep.
The entire event, the most seminal happening for Jesus’ followers – and nobody was there. No reporter from NBC Nightly News. No Lester Holt at the anchor’s chair. No bright lights and cameras. No one there.
The first gospel narratives were written a generation or two after those events. Tales passed down from one to another, Mark’s version being the first iteration. John’s version most likely being narrated by his community of faith maybe five generations removed from that first Easter.
Christian writers, attempting to explain the inexplicable down through the centuries. The entirety of that Easter Event still alludes our capacity to understand.
John Cobb, the eminent process theologian in his work, Christ in a Pluralistic Age,[1] explains the astounding experience of that first Easter. That morning, the spiritual reality of who Jesus was, is now let loose into the created order.
Remember, Dr. Cobb would remind us, “Christ” was not Jesus’ last name. It denotes the spiritual reality of his life and message now transcending his death. The core of his being. A new, transforming power let loose in the world. Passed from one follower to another down through the hallowed halls of time by the faithful – a long procession of members of the Jesus Movement.
Christianity so understood, is not a set of dogmas, not a rule book, but a way of life. In the first years after his death, Jesus’ followers were known as “Followers of the Way.” Look out the door of our parish hall to that garden that feeds some 470 people a week — that’s what we believe. That’s how we roll here at St. Francis.
As such, it is a mature Spiritual understanding capacious enough to encompass
the gifts of all religious traditions rooted in the way of compassion and servanthood.
Here is one way in which an ecumenical “generous orthodoxy” works itself out. Let me tell you a story told of an interfaith gathering. Unfortunately, the host pastor preceding the featured speaker of the evening – this pastor who was to give opening remarks and welcome, was from a very conservative church. His agenda was not interfaith understanding. He used his brief moments of introduction to score religious points for Jesus.
He was there to prove the supremacy of his Christian faith. He was solely bent on demeaning the speaker’s faith, proving the superiority of his own, rather than entering into any interfaith dialogue. He cared not a whit about the sensitivities of those in the room who were not Christians.
He addressed the crowd reading from one of the most exclusivistic passages of the John’s gospel. “I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father but by me.”
What a jerk, many thought. Way to make our guest feel welcome!
Most in the audience were embarrassed by this lack of charity, by this lack of basic manners. Folks sat in their seats in stony silence, glued to their places as interfaith relations were possibly set back hundreds of years. As the guest speaker approached the podium, all wondered how he would respond.
The speaker stepped up and benevolently smiled at his audience. After a pause, he proclaimed, “The pastor is absolutely correct.”
“For, what is the way of Jesus, but the way of peace, humility, truth, gentleness and respect. That is the only way one can approach God, enter into the Holy.” No matter what his or her faith might be.
This Hindu man had seen in Jesus that which this pastor failed to register: the Inner Light of God. The speaker had seen the same spiritual luminosity that those Wise Sages saw in that baby’s eyes, lying in the poverty of a manger.
The same vibrancy those early witnesses experienced on that Easter Morning. John Cobb asserts that this is the spiritual reality let loose in creation that yet lives through the humanistic values and ethic of the Renaissance. Christ has infused the spirit of that age. In the work of Michelangelo, DaVinci and Fra Angelica. Artists who through their work testified to that God-spark they perceived in all human flesh and endeavor. Through the milieu of the Renaissance and later the Age of Science, that human capacity for invention and exploration of those men and women who understood the grandeur of the created order – through their lives that same Spirit yet lives. Just as it did among the first astounded followers that Easter Morning.
We will soon baptize Luther James Forney, calling upon the very same Spirit let loose that first Easter — the Holy Spirit, if you will – to give him the same discerning mind and generous spirit as we’ve known in the Risen Christ.
We call upon God to give him the same passion for justice and freedom as those intrepid souls who followed Harriet Tubman through the swamps of the South to new lives of dignity and promise in the North. Following the Drinking Gourd to freedom. Terrifying journeys often steps ahead of the trackers and baying dogs.
We call upon the Holy Spirit to give him the courage to stand for what is right – just as did those German farmers who hid Jews in their fields and barns. Never knowing when Gestapo agents might show up and kill everyone involved. Just as did that family in Amsterdam who for two years hid Anne Frank in their attic. Never knowing when some nosy neighbor might betray them and summon Hitler’s SS agents.
We ask for a discerning mind to speak truth to power as did Bishop Mariann Budde after witnessing our president desecrate one of her churches. Leading an entourage of cabinet officers across Lafayette Park to hold a Bible upside down in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church for a photo op.
For it is in these inspired and intrepid souls that Christ is known today. These are true and trusted people of the Way, the ones of whom that Hindu teacher spoke. For the authentic Way of Jesus, the Risen Christ, is the face of all who daily live out that humble care for their fellows. Yes, even to the point of death, as did two ICE protesters in Minneapolis.
We pray that Luther James might have that same generosity of Spirit as did that Hindu speaker, a capacious understanding of divine purpose that transcends our limited sectarian boundaries. An openness to the magnificent depths of our common humanity and the marvels of this created world, honoring God’s presence in all persons.
Frederick Buechner, in his book The Faces of Jesus,[2] makes the point that we have no idea of what Jesus looked like. Despite all the glorious attempts of our noted artists down through the years. We have absolutely no idea.
Mary Magdalene thought he might have been the gardener. And why not? He is the face of even those who presently tend our St. Francis Garden of Hope. When it comes down to it, in the last reality, the face of the Risen Christ is your face. And mine. And the sweet face of this tiny child Luther James whom we will baptize into the family of the Jesus Movement. Luther James, you are the Easter face of the Risen Christ.
As we gather in thanksgiving and gratitude for his life, as we pour out our prayers, hopes and dreams for him – that he finds his own way as a blessing to our common life as a part of the Beloved Community – we raise the Easter Greeting. Christ is Risen. He is Risen indeed.
Amen.
Christ the Gardener, Albrecht Dürer, c. 1511
April 5, 2026
Easter Sunday, 2026 – the Baptism of Luther James Forney
“Christ the Gardener”
The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney
Acts 10:34-43; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24;
Philippians 2:5-11; John 20:1-18
[1] John B. Cobb, Jr., Christ in a Pluralistic Age (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1975), 33.
[2] Frederick Buechner, The Faces of Jesus: a Life Story (Brester, MA: Paraclete Press, 1974).
This Night
In the Passover liturgy, the youngest son at the meal asks the seminal question, “Why is this night different from all others?”
The narrative of the Passover, the haste in being ready at a moment’s notice to leave Egypt, the hurried meal, so rushed that the dough for the bread has no time to rise. The night of death that hovers about the fleeing families as they hear the howls of anguish from those families touched by the Angel of Death. It must have been most terrifying to the young.
Even if they had no understanding of the danger and the dread of their parents as the readied for a journey into a terrifying unknown – they surely sensed the danger and the silent anxiety of their parents and neighbors as families gathered in bunches on the path outside their houses.
A night like none other.
This story has provided assurance for people fleeing oppression throughout the ages. It was a lamp for the feet of Harriett Tubman and those fleeing enslavement in the south. To hear the baying of the tracker dogs was surely no less frightening than the sound of clanking armor and pounding of horses’ hooves of Pharoah’s approaching army that perused the escaping Hebrews. That night of departure, a night like none other.
I’ve been listening to an oral history of the personages and events around the development of the atomic bomb. What struck me was the fraught moment of decision for many Jewish scientists as the Nazi storm clouds began to envelope Germany.
The recollection of those whose options were diminishing by the moment and the alarm forcing a decision. To leave or stay. I’m surprised by the number in denial, saying, chancellors come and chancellors go. Hitler probably won’t be any worse than the others.
And their other colleagues, university professors and doctors squeezed out of their professions and livelihoods, as options shrank – those intrepid souls who decided to get out while it was still possible. Before doom settled in.
Nights like no other, Krystallnacht, the Night of the Long Knives when Hitler’s Brown Shirts assassinatedmany of the intelligentsia, business and professional classes of Jews who remained behind.
Nights of terror. Nights like no other as Germany sank into a living hell.
Today, US Marines have been called up for duty in Iran. Their commanders have told them to prepare their equipment, steel their spine and make loved ones aware that some of them will not be coming back. Get your affairs in order. Final instructions ought to be given for families to carry on in the case they’re killed in battle are now in order.
Nights like no other as they hastily assemble and prepare to head out.
We all have premonitions of that last night or our last fleeting moments. The time when everything hangs in the balance. A time when we will no longer look forward to that aromatic cup of coffee. A time when we will see that last sunset. The time when we will no longer hear the voice of a loved one or feel their gentle caress. In a real sense, we all face a final night like no others.
As Jesus drew his friends around him, he knew that night would be a night like none other. For all of them. He knew that this would be his last meal with those companions over these last three or so years. Night was closing in. The end was in sight.
A night that would turn the world upside down. Caeser’s arms might momentarily hold sway, but a new, subversive order was in the borning. Not based on might, prestige or outward appearance, but based on humility.
As Jesus took a towel and basin and prepared to wash his disciples’ feet, a gesture so radical, they could not comprehend it. Nothing in their past experience had prepared any of them for this new way of being.
Yes, even at those last hours they still understood nothing. As Luke records the disciples’ bad behavior at that meal and the commandment to serve one another, “They understood none of these things; this saying was hid from them and they did not grasp what was said.”[1] They quarreled amongst themselves at that table. Who would be the greatest? And if they should fall to the Caesar’s sword, who among them might sit at their Lord’s right hand?
They understood nothing; nor do we comprehend this new thing God is doing before our very eyes. Time and again we mess it up. Yet here we are, assembled at this night out of sheer Grace at the Welcome Table..
As we come forward in obedience to Christ’s command to wash one another’s feet, to share in the Bread broken and the Cup of Sorrows poured out — in all humility let us remember and give thanks to that Man for Others who by his example has ushered in a new way of being. A night like no others as we prepare to venture out – not knowing where the Spirit leads, but on the road in faith.
As it has been through the eons of time, for generation after generation – it has ben that the choice is ours. Will we with humble and contrite hearts set our prerogatives aside and join our Lord in the creation of a New Creation – will we join Christ’s vision of a Beloved Community – united as brothers and sisters in venturing into a new way of being? Or will we drift along wherever the Kingdom of Caesar takes us? Lives of lesser purpose. Just a part of the food chain until our eyes are finally shut in sweet oblivion?
O Lord, in this moment, teach us to number our days that we might get a heart of wisdom. Lead us into that Life Abundant that we might truly live. Usher us toward a foretaste of Eternity. On This Night. Amen.
[1] Luke 18:34, RSV.
April 2, 2026, Maundy Thursday
“This Night”
The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney, St. Francis Episcopal Mission
Exodus 12:1-4, 11-14; Psalm 116:1, 10-17;
1 Corinthians 11:23-26; Gospel: John 13:1-17, 31b-35
