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Podcast Episode: Sermon: Proper 25 RCL A1 (Pledge Sermon) – “To-Do List”

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.

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Podcast Episode: Sermon: Proper 24 RCL A1

Pip: If you have ever wondered whether a snowplow could double as a theological argument, Fr. John has an answer for you — and it leads somewhere genuinely worth going.

Mara: This episode follows one extended sermon from Candle in a Cave, working through the question of whose image we carry — and what happens when the world starts stamping its own version over it.

Pip: Caesar's coin, a damaged statue in Santiago, and a bird that cannot take off without wind. Let's start with the coin.

Whose Image Do You Actually Wear

Mara: The sermon opens with the familiar trap question put to Jesus — pay taxes to Rome, yes or no — and the answer that sidesteps the snare entirely. The real weight, though, lands on the second half of Jesus's reply, the half he leaves implied.

Pip: The setup for that implication is a direct citation from Genesis, and it lands like a key turning in a lock. Here it is: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them."

Mara: So the upshot is this — the coin belongs to Caesar because it bears Caesar's image; you belong to God because you bear God's image. The logic is clean, and St. Hilary of Poitiers makes it explicit: "give therefore your money to Caesar, but preserve a conscience void of offense for God."

Pip: But here is the complication the sermon presses on. When a Roman emperor died, the mint started stamping new coins with the new face. The image changed. And the same drift, the sermon argues, happens to us — not that God's image leaves, but that the world layers its own stamp over it.

Mara: The illustration that makes this concrete is a damaged statue in the church of San Fiz of Solovio in Santiago, Spain — a figure that might be the Apostle John, but whose left hand is missing and whose identifying object is gone. A hundred percent positive identification was not possible.

Pip: Which is a quietly devastating image for what the sermon is actually asking: can the people around you still read whose you are?

Mara: And the sermon's answer to distortion is not the lecture everyone expects — more confession, more prayer, more Bible reading. Instead it reaches for St. Francis de Sales and a bird Aristotle called the apode, a creature with legs too weak to launch itself back into the air. The wind has to do it.

Pip: Grace as weather. You do not manufacture the lift; you open your wings.

Mara: The closing line the sermon returns to is from First John: "We love because he first loved us." The image of God may blur, the sermon says, but God's recognition of us does not fail — which is the exact reversal of the opening joke, where God genuinely could not pick Shirley out of a lineup.

Pip: Shirley worked very hard to become unrecognizable. The sermon's invitation runs the other direction entirely.

Mara: Not to make ourselves worthy before approaching, but to bring the distorted image — scars, world-stamps, and all — and open to the grace that has not stopped moving.

Mara: The coin, the statue, the apode — three images for the same question: what does it take to stay recognizable to the one who made you?

Pip: Apparently less effort than Shirley put in, and more willingness to let the wind do the work. More next time.

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Podcast Episode: Sermon: Proper 21 RCL A1 – “Massah and Meribah”

Pip: There's a sermon on this week's feed that opens with a joke about Joan of Arc — and somehow lands in the middle of the Sinai desert without losing anyone. Fr. John has been busy.

Mara: This episode covers one sermon — but it moves through a lot of territory: wilderness thirst, reasonable expectations, a parable about a vineyard, and what the Church is actually for. Let's start with the desert.

Sermon: Proper 21 RCL A1 — Massah and Meribah

Pip: The sermon opens with a question the Israelites asked at Rephidim — "Is the Lord among us or not?" — and it's framed not as ancient faithlessness but as something recognizable. The tension is between reasonable expectation and a wasteland where nothing arrives.

Mara: The setup matters here. The Israelites weren't wandering blindly — they were traveling oasis to oasis, as commanded. The sermon notes, "The whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the Lord commanded." They did what they were told, and they arrived somewhere dry.

Pip: Which is the real sting of the story. This wasn't recklessness punished — it was faithfulness that hit a wall. You followed the route, and the oasis was empty.

Mara: And the sermon is careful not to let the congregation feel superior to the Israelites. It points out that these are the same people who witnessed the ten plagues, the parting of the sea, the cloud by day and fire by night — and roughly forty-five days later, they're questioning whether God is present at all. The place gets renamed: Massah and Meribah, testing and quarreling.

Pip: Right — and the sermon doesn't leave it as a cautionary tale about ancient ingratitude. It pivots to something harder.

Mara: Much harder. It asks whether each listener has a place in their own life that started as Rephidim — a legitimate destination — and became Massah and Meribah. The sermon lists it plainly: "The prayer isn't answered, the relationship cracks, the sickness persists… there is no water."

Pip: That's where the parable of the two sons comes in, and it's doing more work than it might seem.

Mara: The sermon focuses on the first son — the one who says no and then goes anyway. Nothing changes externally; there's still no water. What changes is the son. And the sermon offers two reasons he goes back: obedience, and relationship. It calls obedience "a very distant second."

Pip: The primary reason is that the son knows the father has always been faithful — so he trusts the father has reasons, even when the vineyard is brutal and the water hasn't come.

Mara: The sermon closes with something specific about what the Church can and cannot do. It doesn't promise a timeline. It says, "I can sit with you in Rephidim. When you cannot remember what God has done, I can remember it for you. When you cannot pray, I can pray for you." The community itself becomes the evidence that God is present.

Pip: Which is a quieter answer than most people want — but probably the only honest one available.

Mara: The through-line here is expectation — what we're owed, what we trust, and what we do when the oasis is dry.

Pip: Next time, bring water. Or at least someone who remembers where the last spring was.

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Podcast Episode: Sermon: Feast of St. Matthew

Pip: Fire-breathing dragons, a martyrdom at the altar, and a painter who hid himself in the scene running away — Fr. John has been busy.

Mara: This episode follows a single sermon preached on the Feast of St. Matthew, tracing the saint's legend from Jerusalem to Ethiopia, and ending with a question about what it means to keep looking back at the Gospel even as we walk away from it.

Pip: Let's start with the legend itself, and what it asks of us.

Matthew, Ethiopia, and the Man Running Away

Mara: The sermon opens in apocryphal territory — not the canonical Gospels but the Acts of the Holy Apostle Thomas, where the apostles divide up the known world before scattering to evangelize it.

Pip: The verbatim passage sets the scene directly: "we the apostles were all in Jerusalem — Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother; James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother; Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas, and Matthew the tax-gatherer… and we portioned out the regions of the world, in order that each one of us might go into the region that fell to him."

Mara: Matthew's region, according to Jacobus de Voragine's Golden Legend, is Ethiopia — where he settles with the very eunuch Philip had baptized on the road to Gaza, and spends thirty-three years converting the country.

Pip: Dragons lay down at his feet. A king's son rises from the dead. The king announces, quote, "Come and see God in the likeness of a man" — and Matthew redirects all the gold toward building a church. Quite the ministry.

Mara: The sermon doesn't stop at the legend. It moves to Caravaggio's Martyrdom of Saint Matthew in Rome, where the saint lies on the altar steps, hand raised — not to ward off the executioner's blow, but to receive a palm branch from an angel above.

Pip: And then the sermon finds its real subject: a second face in the painting. Just behind the executioner's shoulder, Caravaggio painted himself — watching the scene and walking away from it.

Mara: The sermon asks what that figure means for the rest of us. The words are plain: "We hear the Gospel. We know what Christ asks of us… And sometimes we do. But sometimes we turn away. Sometimes the demands of the Gospel are more than we want to bear."

Pip: But the man is still looking back. That's the hinge the whole sermon turns on.

Mara: Right — and the sermon holds that tension without resolving it cheaply. The question it leaves is not whether we'd have the courage to die as Matthew did, but whether we have the courage to turn around while we're still alive.

Pip: The palm branch is waiting. The painting says the journey isn't over yet.

Mara: A saint's legend, a Caravaggio self-portrait, and a question about where we place ourselves in the scene.

Pip: Still looking back. Which, apparently, is where grace begins.

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Podcast Episode: Sermon: Proper 19 RCL A1 – “What are You Building?”

Pip: Star Wars, Pharaoh, a donkey with delusions of grandeur — Fr. John is covering a lot of ground this week at Candle in a Cave.

Mara: The sermon for Proper 19 pulls together the Exodus story, the parable of the unforgiving servant, and a question that runs through all of it: what are you actually building with what God has given you?

Pip: Let's get into it.

"What Are You Building?" — Gifts, Empires, and the Kingdom

Mara: The sermon opens with a sweep through history — every great empire, from the British to the Mongol to the Babylonian, eventually collapses. That pattern sets up the Exodus reading, where Pharaoh insists the Nile is his own making.

Pip: And the sermon lands the line that becomes the sermon's spine. After the Israelites cross the Red Sea and receive Egyptian gold as a parting gift from God, they melt it into a golden calf — and the sermon reads that act as Pharaoh's logic recycled: "My Nile is my own; I made it for myself."

Mara: That phrase does the heavy lifting. The Israelites were liberated, given a gift, and then used the gift to rebuild the very thing they escaped — their own version of Egypt, their own small empire.

Pip: Which is where the parable of the unforgiving servant walks in and makes the same point at human scale. The king forgives an impossible debt — the sea parts, the servant walks through free — and then the servant immediately shakes down a colleague for pocket change.

Mara: The sermon draws the parallel directly: "The servant took the gift of mercy and, in his arrogance, began building his own little empire." Liberation received, liberation refused to others.

Pip: And then there is the donkey. Decorated with garlands to carry a sacred icon, he stops mid-procession and brays at the crowd, convinced the adoration is for him. The man leading him swats him and says, "The honor is not meant for you but for the image you are carrying."

Mara: That fable lands the sermon's practical point. The gifts — wealth, education, position, talent — are not the problem. The sermon is clear: "The gold was never the problem. Possessing the gold was never the problem. The question was what they built with it."

Pip: Wealth can build an empire or serve the Kingdom. Same gold, entirely different structure.

Mara: Saint James frames it as the law of liberty — freedom from sin that teaches liberated people how to live, and Saint Peter adds: "use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God's varied grace… in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ."

Pip: Every empire falls. The sermon closes on that contrast — every empire we build eventually collapses, and God's Kingdom endures forever — and asks why anyone would choose the perishable project.

Mara: The closing prayer puts it plainly: serve without counting the cost, labor without seeking rest, spend yourself for glory that belongs to someone else entirely.

Pip: Pharaoh, a servant, and a self-important donkey — same story, different costumes.

Mara: The question underneath all of it stays simple: the gift is in your hands. What are you building with it?

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Podcast Episode: Sermon: Proper 18 RCL A1 – “Reconciliation”

Pip: There's a sermon on Candle in a Cave that opens with Shakespeare, detours through a shrew the size of a penny, and ends with a butcher knife in a teenager's hand — and somehow it's all about forgiveness.

Mara: Fr. John's recent writing takes us into the hard territory of reconciliation — what the Gospel actually asks of us when someone genuinely wrongs us, and why the answer isn't what we'd prefer.

Pip: Let's start with the sermon itself.

What Reconciliation Actually Costs

Pip: The Gospel passage at the center of this sermon sounds, at first read, like permission — Jesus telling us to go confront the person who wronged us. The question the sermon presses on is what motivation we're actually supposed to bring to that confrontation.

Mara: The setup begins with Katherine from The Taming of the Shrew — a character whose fury is her defining feature. The sermon draws a line from her to what it calls the grouch and the shrew in all of us, and then lands here: "It's as if Jesus is giving us permission to be the grouch or the shrew we know we have every right to be."

Pip: Which is a fair read of the text — until it isn't.

Mara: Right, and that's exactly the pivot the sermon makes. The cockroach exercise is where it gets concrete. A dozen teenagers, a paper box with a cockroach image taped to the lid, and a butcher knife. They shred the cockroach completely — and underneath is an image of Jesus, also shredded. The outrage is immediate.

Pip: Probably not the pastoral risk assessment form they teach in seminary, but the lesson lands.

Mara: The sermon draws the theological line directly from that image: "Whatever you do to them, you do to Jesus." And it holds that against the Gospel's one sentence that's easy to skip past.

Mara: That sentence is: "If the member listens to you, you have regained that one." The sermon reads that as the whole point — the motivation isn't vengeance, it's reconciliation. Paul's letter to the Romans backs it up: "Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.'"

Pip: So the upshot is that the passage isn't a license to build a team and stock up on ammunition — it's a call to want the other person back.

Mara: And the sermon is careful about what reconciliation doesn't require. It doesn't mean forgetting, pretending you weren't hurt, or allowing the offender back into your life. What it does mean, as the sermon puts it, is you release the desire to go stab cockroaches — you refuse to let someone else's sin dictate who you become.

Pip: The closing image is the early martyrs who had no great words, just a simple reply when told to renounce their faith or die.

Mara: "I am a Christian." The sermon offers that as the thing to say to yourself in the moment anger tips toward vengeance — not a denial of the harm, but a refusal to be ruled by it.

Pip: And the final line reframes the familiar "where two or three are gathered" — not a formula for a small meeting, but a description of a reconciled community.

Mara: The through-line here is that reconciliation is the shape of Jesus' entire ministry — and the sermon asks whether we're willing to let that be the shape of ours.

Pip: Even when the cockroach really had it coming. More from Candle in a Cave next time.

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Podcast Episode: Sermon: Proper 17 RCL A1 – “Defying the Furnace”

Pip: There's a sermon on Candle in a Cave that opens with a medical transcription disaster and lands, somehow, on the fiery furnace of Daniel. Fr. John has range.

Mara: This episode follows that sermon through three interlocking figures — Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, Moses at the burning bush, and Jesus heading toward Jerusalem — all circling the same question about faith under pressure.

Pip: Let's get into the furnace.

—

Defying the Furnace: Faith That Doesn't Negotiate

Mara: The sermon sets up a central tension right away: what does faith actually look like when the outcome is genuinely uncertain — when God might save you, or might not?

Pip: And the sermon's answer comes straight from Daniel, chapter three. The setup is worth naming: three Jewish men in Nebuchadnezzar's court, condemned for refusing to worship a golden statue, standing in front of a king who asks who could possibly save them now.

Mara: The text gives their reply directly: "Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up."

Pip: "But if not." That's the hinge. They're not bargaining with God, and they're not promising themselves a rescue. They're saying the furnace does not get to decide who they are.

Mara: Right — and the sermon makes the stakes plain: their faith was not contingent on the outcome. It was, as the text puts it, "simply in God and His divine providence, without qualification."

Pip: Which is where Moses comes in, and this is a sharp move. God tells Moses to walk back into Egypt — back into the place he fled, as a wanted man, to confront Pharaoh. God doesn't promise it will be easy. The sermon frames it plainly: "I am sending you into the furnace, and I will be with you."

Mara: That phrase — "I will be with you" — is the thread connecting all three figures. The sermon notes that God never spoke those words directly to Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. But Nebuchadnezzar's own testimony proved them true: a fourth figure, unbound, walking in the fire beside them.

Pip: And then there's Peter, flinching when Jesus announces he's headed to Jerusalem to suffer and die. A very human reaction. The sermon doesn't mock him for it.

Mara: It doesn't. The sermon reads Jesus's rebuke as clarification, not condemnation — Jesus already knows the Father is with him, and he's telling Peter: follow me through the furnace, because I will be with you in yours.

Pip: The sermon ends with a kind of stripped-down catechism. Standing in front of the furnace, all the complicated answers fall away. What's left? "I believe in one God, the Father Almighty." Not an explanation. Not a guarantee. Just that.

Mara: The closing line lands it: "I believe does mean we are not walking into the furnace alone."

—

Pip: Faith that holds without a promised outcome — that's a harder ask than most furnace stories let on.

Mara: It is. And that question of what remains when the answers run out seems like territory worth returning to.

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Podcast Episode: Sermon: Proper 16 RCL A1 – “Holy Purposes”

Pip: What if the whole arc of history turns on someone you never heard of — a midwife, a sister watching from the reeds, a princess who ignored her father's orders?

Mara: That's the territory Fr. John is working in this week — small actors, enormous consequences, and what Paul's letter to the Romans has to say about how gifts get distributed across a body. Let's start with the sermon itself.

Sermon: Holy Purposes and the People History Forgets

Pip: The sermon opens with a provocation: history's biggest disasters and turning points may hinge on actions so small the people taking them had no idea what they were doing. The question underneath the whole piece is who actually carries the work forward when the famous figure is still in a basket.

Mara: The sermon sets that up early with the Exodus story, and the framing lands here: "The story of Exodus is not just the story of Moses. Instead, it is the story of God and the individuals He endowed with specific gifts so that His will might be accomplished in their lives and in the world."

Pip: And Moses, in this telling, is almost beside the point for this particular passage. He rides in a basket, eats, sleeps — the sermon is blunt about it. Four things. Everyone else is doing the actual work.

Mara: The sermon traces four figures who each carry a piece of that work. The midwives Shiphrah and Puah are summoned by Pharaoh to kill male Hebrew newborns — professionals, the sermon notes, important members of the community — and they simply refuse, fearing God more than Pharaoh.

Pip: There's a quiet observation buried in there worth pulling out: the sermon notes that the Hebrew word for the basket Jochebed builds is tevah — the same word used for Noah's ark. She's not just hiding a baby. She's building an ark.

Mara: Right, and then Miriam watches where the ark goes, and Pharaoh's daughter — the one person in the story with every advantage — sees a Hebrew child and chooses pity over policy.

Pip: Which is where Paul comes in, and the sermon earns the connection. The Romans passage lists gifts: prophecy, ministry, teaching, exhortation, generosity, leadership, compassion. The sermon points out the list is short but the categories are broad — broad enough to hold midwives, mothers, watchers, and wealthy women with the courage to contradict their fathers.

Mara: The sermon then pivots to Peter's confession, and the move is interesting. Jesus asks Peter who he says Jesus is — and the sermon suggests turning that question around: ask Jesus who he says you are. The answer, it argues, is usually already visible in what you can already do.

Pip: God, the sermon says, is not going to make a brain surgeon into a carpenter. He takes what's already there.

Mara: The closing line pulls it together: "If we allow it, God will take our natural gifts and give us opportunities to use them for holy purposes."

Pip: Small actions. Tremendous results. The reeds are still there if you know where to look.

Mara: The thread running through all of it is that the people history skips over are often the ones holding the story together.

Pip: Ask who you are. Open your eyes. Apparently the answer is already in the water.

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