July 31, 2022 will be my final sermon as pastor of Davis Community Church. Below is the first of three sermons that will close my ministry as a pastor. On September 6, 2022, I’ll begin a new expression of ministry as the manager for the Center for Loss and Hope at YoloCares (formerly Yolo Hospice) At the Center for Loss and Hope, I will devote myself to the kind of work that has always given me the greatest sense of meaning and accomplishment: to work interpersonally at the intersection of life and death, loss and hope, and help people find meaning there. Here is where my gifts and experience, my interests and my passions meet the deepest human need.

In this first of three final sermons I explore the question that forms the first words Jesus speaks in the Gospel of John. The sermon is based on John 1.35-42 and was preached on July 17, 2022. The video of the sermon can be found here.

In my final three sermons I want to tell a larger story in three smaller parts. In telling this story over the next three Sundays, I want to celebrate the journey we’ve walked together, and invite each of us to continue on the journey, even though we’ll be walking separate paths.

Today is about what I was looking for as I came to you in the winter of 2015. Next Sunday will be about what I’ve found among you. And on July 31st, my last sermon, I’ll explore what I see going forward.

One larger story about us all, told in three parts.

The story of my coming to DCC begins with a question spoken to me almost ten years ago.

It was October 2013. I was on an eight day retreat with a couple dozen Presbyterian pastors. Each of us had come to this program of clergy renewal because we were all asking big questions about the church and our ministries. We were at Mo-Ranch in the Texas hill country—a beautiful setting for prayer, conversation, and discernment. The faculty at this retreat were all there to help guide us through a process of discerning what we wanted to do with our future, what we felt called by God to do and be, where we were feeling led by the Spirit.

On the sixth day, we spent a day in prayer, mostly alone. I was troubled. I’d been at University Presbyterian Church, Fresno, for almost fourteen years. I’d guided the church into profound change, and the church was flourishing. There was one change I knew was necessary, but I feared leading there would be difficult—it would take a lot out of me; it would mean profound conflict. I didn’t know if I had it in me.

University Presbyterian Church was a traditional evangelical church when I arrived in the fall of 1999. They were a marvelous group of people, and over time they joined me as I invited them to expand their vision of the gospel, change their way of worshipping to include younger generations, embrace social justice, and engage the community around them missionally and not just gather for worship on our piece of property surrounded by a lot more diversity outside our walls than we had inside. Most of the leaders were traditional in their views of human sexuality and gender identity. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered friends, relatives, and visitors were welcome so long as they were willing to change and give up what the traditionalists considered sinful life choices.

In October of 2013, I sat in the grass at Mo-Ranch, my back against a tree, looking at the Guadalupe River. It was overcast. Gloomy. And the gloom matched my mood. “I don’t know what to do, God,” I prayed, “I’m afraid to lead them into the inclusively I’m convinced you want for us. People will leave the church if I do. Friends are going to be mad; they’ll feel I betrayed them theologically. What am I going to do?”

Just then the clouds parted and the sun broke through, light shimmering on the river in front of me.

“That’s pretty,” I thought. Then the clouds closed again and I went back to my gloomy thoughts.

“What am I going to do, God?” I prayed again. “I can’t not preach the gospel of inclusion. But I’m afraid. People will leave the church. Friends will say I’ve abandoned the Bible. They’ll call me a heretic.”

I sat in the quiet for a while.

And then into my gloom I heard God whisper, “What are you looking for?”

I wanted an answer from God, not a question. But the inner voice was insistent. “What are you looking for, really?”

“I want you. Big. Bigger than the boxes we put you in. Bigger than anything I’ve known. Bigger than anything I can know. I want freedom to follow wherever you would lead me into your Bigness. I want courage to go wherever your Bigness wants to take me.”

Just then, the heavy clouds parted again, the sun broke through and danced on the surface of the river.

“Oh, that’s convenient,” a cynical part of me said to the rest of me. “I suppose you’re going to think this is a sign from God.”

And then I heard the voice again—that whisper that’s not the voice of my Inner Critic or any other voice inside my head. “I am Big,” the voice said, “Bigger than you can imagine. And if I am what you’re looking for, I’ll lead you into freedom, I’ll inspire courage. Follow the light I’ll give you.”

And the sky closed again and the light was gone.

Seriously. I’m not making this up.

I went back to my congregation from the Texas hill country and within a year and a half, through immense conflict and the courage to face it, the church board voted to become a church fully welcoming of the gifts LGBTQIA+ persons are to the church and to the world.

Some people left the church, but not as many as I’d feared. Some friends called me a “heretic,” and “a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” One man who had once been a god-parent to my sons called me “a very dangerous man.” But other friends and new people to the church thanked me for finally confirming what they’d believed for a long time but were afraid to say: that God made their relatives and friends and coworkers and neighbors just the way they are and loves them that way, and that the church should too.

It was painful, but not as painful as I’d feared.

It was hard; harder than I’d thought it would be.

But I found that God is so Big that the pain and the difficulty shrank in comparison. I encountered a God who was blowing my mind. And I wanted more of God and the freedom to pursue God.

What’s more, I’d been called a “heretic” and I found that I liked that. The word “heretic” comes down to us from a Greek word that means, “freedom to choose.”

When I came to you, I came as a heretic. Free to choose. I’d been set free by God to find a God who is also a heretic: Free, Big, Vast, Evolving, Uncompromisingly Inclusive, Iconoclastic, and Mischievous—always moving beyond our small ideas, our narrow habits, our foolish attempts at control, and the cramped spaces of our bunkered religious institutions.

But the so-called orthodox ignore all this; they disregard the heretical nature of God—the freedom of God to choose.

The first words out of the mouth of Jesus in three of the Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—are identical: “The Kin-dom of God is among you.” They’re words that signal the truth that God was free then, and always is, to do something new that the orthodox didn't expect and wouldn't appreciate. And that’s precisely why Jesus was a killed—for following and revealing the heretical nature of God.

Those first words of Jesus in the first three Gospels are different from the first words Jesus speaks in the Fourth Gospel.

In today’s reading from the Gospel of John two of John the Baptist’s disciples began to follow Jesus. Then, we’re told, Jesus turns and, seeing them, asks the same question that I heard whispered to me as I sat, gloomily, on the banks of the Guadalupe River in Texas: “What are you looking for?”

I like that in John’s Gospel the first words from Jesus are a question.

Questions, more than statements, open us. I think that’s exactly what the writer of this Gospel was up to. Opening us up to something Big, Vast, Uncompromisingly Inclusive, Iconoclastic, Mischievous. And by doing so, the writer wants to see if we’re willing to follow the God who refuses to be domesticated by our party politics, who resists our efforts to control the minds and bodies and souls of the people around us, who demands that we step out of our comfort zones into the heretical imperative, the freedom to choose a better way.

Jesus says, “What are you looking for?”

And the followers say, “Where are you staying?”

According to John’s Gospel, to know Jesus is to know God. And so, their question isn’t about a house; it’s about the Holy. They are looking for the presence of the divine; they want to know where to find the fullness of God; they want to experience the bigness of God.

What are you looking for—really?

In one way or another, philosophically, psychologically, theologically we are all looking for God—not the the small gods of our own making, not the manufactured gods of our ego projections, not the jealous gods of our social, cultural, governmental, and religious conventions. We are all looking for the presence of the Holy; we want to find the fullness of the Divine; we want to experience the bigness of God.

To have that experience, we have to be free to choose what will comfort us, but only by first disturbing us. We have to be free to choose what will heal us, but only after first hurting us. We have to remain free to what will set us free, but only after showing us how captive we really have become to lesser visions and banal experiences.

We have to become heretics—in Greek, hairetikos, which means “able to choose.”

“What are you looking for?” Jesus asks.

“Where will we find the presence of God?” we respond.

“Come,” says Jesus, “I’ll show you.”

When I came to you, I’d led the University Presbyterian Church for almost sixteen years. I’d loved them. Most of them had loved me. We’d grown together over the years—through births and deaths, marriages and baptisms, divorces and illnesses, dinners and baseball games, a lot of potlucks, retreats in the mountains, and countless committee meetings.

We’d lived life together. Just as we have here.

And before I left in the winter of 2015, they made the biggest leap of faith in the church’s history; they plunged into the depths of the Divine who cannot be domesticated, limited, or captivated by anyone or anything. They freely chose to fully welcome LGBTQIA+ people into the life of the church without reservation, without qualification.

They were looking for the God who is far Bigger than their predecessors had dared to imagine. And they found the presence of God right there among them, guiding them, inviting them to follow. They made that historic vote and then I left to come to you.

They are thriving today in ways I didn’t then dare to imagine because they were brave enough to keep following the One who keeps saying to us when we ask, “Where are you, God?” and to listen for the One who says,“Come and see.”

And now I’m getting ready to leave you. I’ll say farewell on July 31st. It’s not a great time to leave you, for many reasons. Leaving didn’t make sense in the winter of 2015 when I left University Presbyterian Church to come here. They’d just made the most momentous decision of their lives—to break with the orthodoxy of a past that excluded people based on sexual orientation and gender identity. They thought they needed me. But God is bigger than we think. That church is thriving today, in ways neither they nor I could imagine back then.

I came here looking for freedom to choose, to practice the heretical imperative, to break with the dead chains of yesterday, and do at last what I’d come into the world to do—what each of us has come into the world to do. We’ve not come here to blindly follow a dogmatic tradition; we’ve not come here to merely perpetuate a religious institution; we’ve not come here to uncritically promulgate a sectarian vision. We’ve been born into this life to find the freedom to experience the vastness of God—God, who is one with and yet bigger than this colossal cosmos of billions of galaxies, trillions of stars, zillions of planets, the One who our minds have only barely begun to understand.

You gave me that freedom. And I gave you that freedom too. And there is nothing more important than the freedom to pursue and find God.

As I leave you, there’s a lot we’ve accomplished, so much to be amazed by. But there are a number of important things we’ve only begun, things I couldn’t finish, things I believe you will carry forward in ways that will lean into the freedom and bigness of God, ways that will one day astonish me—in all the right ways.

First, there’s the work of untangling ourselves from the racism that plagues our world and still biases our congregation’s life. We may not intend to exclude anyone, but our way of life still does. Unconscious bias affects us all. To follow the God revealed in Jesus you will need to go farther than we’ve already come. Keep going.

Be creative. Be brave. Be heretical—that is, be free to choose better ways than we’ve known in the past.

Second, there’s the work of embracing the presence of God in and with the whole of Nature. This is key to my philosophical and theological vision of creating a community where “spirituality comes naturally.” God is not separate from the natural world, but is one with and in all things. The climate crisis we face today is serious, deadly serious. Too much of Christianity, with its “not-of-this-world” vision, has had a disastrous influence on the planet. We’ve too often been “so heavenly minded we’re no earthly good.” We’re changing that here. Our work is to find heaven in this world, not somewhere else.

So keep going. Be creative. Be brave. Be heretical—that is, be free to choose better ways than we’ve known in the past.

I end with a visual meditation you may have seen before. It’s a short video by the masterful filmmaker Travis Reed of TheWorkofthePeople.com. I’ve partnered with him over the last years on several projects putting my prayers and poems and new translations of scripture to his visual artwork.

This visual meditation represents what I hoped to find among you; it’s a witness to what I was looking for: a God worthy of our worship; a God who is able to break down every wall that separates us; a God who is big enough to heal the massive wounds of the world—all because God dances in every atom, and waltzes through every galaxy—who frolics in you, and rollicks in me.

This is what I was looking for when I came among you: freedom to love and be loved by this:

[play video: find it here. And below are the words of my prayer]

O Radiant Light,

O Flame Divine,

as shines the light of Easter’s dawn—

Come, bless the embers of the earth,

sparks flung from our eternal birth.

O Word of God,

the Source of Life,

you rouse us from the night of fears

to open souls and minds and ears

and hear the music of the spheres.

You are the Fire that birth’d all things,

the Force that spins the galaxies;

you are the Flame within all flames,

the Hidden Power that knows no name.

From you all things that are were sent,

and into you does all extend.

Peal back the bark of any tree,

lift up a stone—they blaze with Thee!

O Happy Light

We feel your heat

The starlight shining in our bones

You fill us all with cosmic grace,

We host your presence in this place.

O Risen Christ,

you shine in us,

the radiance of your holiness;

against the curse of death and strife,

we rise to dance this Dance of Life.