Pip: If you have ever added a completed task to a to-do list just so you could cross it off, this episode is going to feel uncomfortably personal.
Mara: Fr. John's recent writing at Candle in a Cave takes that small, relatable habit and uses it to open up something much larger — what faithfulness actually looks like when the reward never arrives.
Pip: Let's start with the sermon that frames all of it.
Love Is Not a Checkbox
Mara: The sermon opens during St. Matthew's annual pledge campaign — but the real question it's asking is whether love is the kind of thing you can ever finish.
Pip: The setup is the to-do list, and the first exhibit is not a productivity guru. It's the Grinch: "Four o'clock, wallow in self-pity; four-thirty, stare into the abyss; five o'clock, solve world hunger, tell no one; five-thirty, jazzercize; six-thirty, dinner with me — I can't cancel that again; seven o'clock, wrestle with my self-loathing."
Mara: Which is a genuinely funny way to arrive at a serious point — that we are people who need completion, who need the satisfaction of the check mark.
Pip: And then Jesus shows up and says the greatest commandment is love, which, as the sermon notes, nobody has ever put on a to-do list. The quip writes itself, and to the sermon's credit, it doesn't write it.
Mara: Instead it turns to Moses. At a second Meribah, forty years after the first, God tells Moses to speak to the rock. Moses strikes it instead. Water flows anyway, but the disobedience costs him entry into the Promised Land. The sermon puts it plainly: "Because you did not believe in me, to uphold me as holy in the eyes of the people of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land that I have given them."
Pip: That is a hard verdict for a man who parted a sea and endured forty years of complaints.
Mara: But Moses stays. He leads the people to the border, climbs Mount Nebo, sees the land, and dies there. Paul's letter to the Thessalonians gives the sermon its language for what that means: "So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us."
Pip: Faithfulness as love-in-action even when the outcome is withheld. That reframe is doing real work.
Mara: It's also where the pledge campaign enters honestly. The sermon names three founders of St. Matthew's — Captain Hassler, Judge Steen, and Mrs. Pay — who stood on their own Mount Nebo and gave toward a church they would never sit in. A pledge, the sermon argues, is the same gesture: committing to parishioners you will never meet.
Pip: So the ask isn't really about a dollar amount. It's about whether love is something you practice past the point of personal payoff.
Mara: Exactly — and the sermon closes on that note. "We can never check it off the to-do list." The tithe is mentioned, the practicalities of pledge cards and online giving are covered, but the frame holds: faithfulness is not measured by how much of the Promised Land you get to see, but by how faithfully you help others get there.
Pip: Which is, quietly, a much more demanding standard than a percentage.
Mara: The through-line here is completion — what we finish, what we don't, and whether that's even the right measure.
Pip: Moses never crossed love off the list. Neither, apparently, did the founders of St. Matthew's. Maybe that's the point — some things stay on the list because they're supposed to.
Mara: More from Candle in a Cave next time.
