Category: Uncategorized

Posted on

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?

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

Podcast Episode: Sermon: Proper 15 RCL A1 – “Story of the Heart”

Pip: There's a sermon at Candle in a Cave that opens with a man proposing marriage — and his girlfriend immediately asking about someone else. Which, honestly, is a better setup for a theology lesson than most theology lessons get.

Mara: Fr. John uses that story as a way into something the sermon calls "the story of the heart" — what God actually finds when he looks past the surface performance of faith. Let's start there.

Sermon: Proper 15 RCL A — "Story of the Heart"

Pip: The question this sermon is really asking is whether religious observance and genuine faith are the same thing — and the answer, it turns out, is that God is not fooled by the difference.

Mara: The sermon anchors that claim in Psalm 139, with the opening line setting the frame: "O Lord, you have searched me and known me! You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar."

Pip: So the premise is that the search is already happening, whether you invited it or not. The real question the sermon puts to the listener is whether you actually want God to find what's there.

Mara: And the honest answer the sermon gives is: not always. The words are, "Do I really want God to do that? I mean, I know my heart, and sometimes… it's best left hidden."

Pip: That's a braver thing to say from a pulpit than most people manage.

Mara: The sermon then traces the problem backward through Isaiah, where God tells Israel he is weary of their feasts and offerings — "your hands are full of blood" — while they go through every outward motion correctly. The external performance is intact; the interior is the problem.

Mara: Jesus makes the same move in Matthew 15, quoting Isaiah directly: "This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men."

Pip: And then the sermon does something structurally interesting — it treats the very next scene, the Canaanite woman, not as a change of subject but as the proof of the lesson.

Mara: Right. The disciples tell Jesus to send the woman away. What comes out of their mouths, the sermon says, is "prejudice, contempt, judgment, anger, impatience." The woman, by contrast, keeps pressing — "Lord, help me" — and Jesus names what he finds: "Great is your faith."

Pip: The disciples followed every tradition. She broke every boundary just by being there. And she's the one who gets the blessing.

Mara: The sermon closes by returning to Psalm 139 as an invitation and a request together — not just "search me," but "if you find anything amiss, lead me out of it and into your ways." It calls that a good prayer, and also, honestly, a frightening one.

Pip: The sermon's final question — "what is the story of your heart?" — is one of those that doesn't let you off the hook by answering it quickly.

Mara: And it lands harder because the sermon already admitted the honest answer isn't always flattering. More from Candle in a Cave next time.

Posted on

AI-Generated Podcast Episode: Sermon: Proper 13 RCL A – “Providence and Prayer”

Pip: A three-year-old invoking the name of Jesus to score twenty-three boxes of chocolate chip cookies — honestly, that is the most theologically efficient prayer in recorded history.

Mara: That story opens a sermon by Fr. John, and it turns out to be the perfect door into something much larger: what prayer actually does when God already has a plan.

Pip: Right — and that tension between providence and petition is exactly where this episode lives. Let's get into it.

Providence, Prayer, and a Busted Hip

Mara: The central question here is one that anyone who has prayed and waited and heard nothing will recognize: if God has a wise, loving plan already in motion, what is the point of asking?

Pip: The sermon lands its answer through Jacob — a man who wrestled God at the Jabbok River and refused to let go. Here is the line that frames everything: "Jacob prayed, 'Bless me,' and the Lord replied, 'What you are asking is good, but it is too small.'"

Mara: That reframe is the hinge of the whole argument. Jacob got his blessing — but it arrived as a dislocated hip, a new name, and a lineage that eventually produced Jesus of Nazareth. The prayer was answered; it just expanded far beyond what Jacob could have conceived.

Pip: So the sermon is not really arguing that God ignores us. It is arguing that our requests are structurally too small for what God is doing.

Mara: Exactly, and three reasons for prayer follow from that. The first two are fairly direct: Jesus commands it, and prayer enlarges the soul to receive more of God — the sermon uses the image of a teaspoon versus a five-gallon bucket both dipped in the ocean. Neither empties the ocean; one simply holds more.

Pip: The third reason is the one with some weight to it.

Mara: It is. The sermon draws on Paul's letter to the Corinthians: "We are God's fellow workers. You are God's field, God's building." The claim is that prayer is not just petition — it is participation. God wants us asking so we can be woven into the work itself.

Pip: Which reframes the unanswered prayer entirely. You are not being ignored; you are being incorporated.

Mara: And when we do not know what to ask for, Paul's words from Romans carry the load: "The Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words." Our feeble attempts, the sermon says, are taken and perfected.

Pip: Twenty-three boxes of cookies, or a busted hip — either way, you are not praying into a void.

Mara: The through-line is that providence and prayer are not in competition — prayer is how we become part of the story rather than just recipients of it.

Pip: Jacob limped away from that riverbank with everything he asked for and more than he bargained for. That seems about right. More next time.

Posted on

Podcast Episode: Sermon: Proper 12 RCL A – “Providence”

Pip: Eleven shells hit a fuel tank. None of them exploded. One contained a handwritten note in Czech. Fr. John is asking what you call that — and the answer is not luck.

Mara: This episode follows a sermon on providence — the claim that God's governance holds even when evil is the instrument. Let's start with that question: luck, fate, or something else entirely.

Sermon: Providence, Luck, and the Shells That Didn't Explode

Mara: The sermon opens with a World War Two bombing run — eleven shells lodged in a fuel tank, none detonating, one carrying a handwritten note from Czech prisoners of war. The frame is a question: what do you call a result like that?

Pip: The note inside that shell is the hinge of the whole argument. The translation, when Intelligence finally found someone to read it, was this: "This is all we can do for you now."

Mara: And the point is that neither luck nor fate can hold that story. Luck is pure chance — spin the wheel. Fate is predetermined and immovable. Either way, there is no room for free will and no need for God.

Pip: Providence is the alternative — defined in the sermon as "God's wise, loving, and continual governance of all creation, by which He sustains the universe and directs history toward His good purposes while respecting our free will." That is a precise claim, not a vague comfort.

Mara: The precision matters because the sermon extends it to evil, not just good outcomes. The Czech prisoners were in a Nazi labor camp. That was not a good thing. But the sermon argues God used that evil to preserve the crew — and that this pattern runs through all of history, including the crucifixion.

Pip: Peter's line from Acts 2:23 lands hard here: Christ was "delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God" — and still killed by lawless hands. Providence and human evil, occupying the same sentence.

Mara: The sermon draws the practical consequence plainly: if God redeemed the greatest evil ever committed, then no evil in your life is beyond his power to redeem. The question becomes how you respond when evil arrives — and the sermon offers exactly two options.

Pip: Option one gets its own parable — the Devil's Supply Store, where discouragement and doubt are kept off the shelves because they are too valuable to sell. Hopelessness, the sermon says, is the weapon that causes a soul to do nothing, which is far more deadly than anger or lust.

Mara: Option two is Paul's confidence in Romans 8: that nothing — "neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come" — can separate us from the love of God. Providence is the ground that makes that confidence possible, not naive optimism.

Pip: Saint Padre Pio gets the closing word before the prayer: "God is our Father, so what have you to fear while you are the child of such a Father, through whose providence not even a single hair will fall from your head?" Lean on that and see what it holds.

Mara: The thread running through all of this is that the frame you bring to events — luck, fate, or providence — changes what you do when things go wrong.

Pip: Right. And the note in the shell is still there whether you read it that way or not. More to come from Candle in a Cave.

Posted on

Podcast Episode: Sermon: Proper 11 RCL A – “Identifying Weeds”

Pip: There is a cave, and there is a candle — and this week, someone lit it by asking who gets to decide which plants are weeds.

Mara: That question runs straight through the posts Fr. John published recently — a sermon that moves from a Charlie Brown comic strip to a Persian king to the parable of the wheat and the weeds. Let's start with the field.

Sermon: Proper 11 RCL A — Identifying Weeds

Pip: The sermon opens with a very relatable Lucy moment — she tells Charlie Brown his problem is simply that he is himself — and uses it to name something the sermon treats as a persistent human instinct: the confidence that we can correctly identify who the troublemakers are.

Mara: The sermon sets up that instinct and then runs it straight into Isaiah, where the Lord designates a deliverer for Israel. Here is the passage: "I have stirred him up in righteousness, and I will make all his ways level; he shall build my city and set my exiles free, not for price or reward, says the Lord of hosts."

Pip: And the deliverer in question is not David, not Gideon, not Jesus — it is Cyrus, a pagan king who worshipped idols and had never heard of the God of Israel. Which means the people hearing Isaiah's announcement would have looked at their liberator and seen exactly the wrong kind of person.

Mara: That is precisely the tension the sermon develops. Cyrus conquered Babylon, freed the Israelites, and funded the rebuilding of Jerusalem — all without sharing their faith. The sermon then moves to the gospel parable, where a farmer's field fills with Darnel, a poisonous grass nearly indistinguishable from wheat until the grain head forms.

Pip: By the time you can tell the difference, the roots are so tangled that pulling the weed destroys the wheat. So the farmer says: wait. Which is, frankly, a harder instruction than it sounds when you have already mentally drafted your weed-pulling list.

Mara: Augustine is quoted directly on this: "How many sheep are outside, how many wolves within! And how many sheep are inside, how many wolves without! How many are blaspheming Christ who will yet believe in Him!"

Mara: The sermon holds up Paul as the case in point — present at Stephen's stoning, feared by the early church, and yet the future Apostle to the Gentiles. The people who saw a wolf were not lying; they were simply wrong.

Pip: So the sermon's practical instruction lands in Romans 12 — repay no evil for evil, feed your enemy if he is hungry — because the alternative is letting someone else's sin generate yours.

Mara: And the sermon closes with a sharp reversal: those who crucified Jesus believed they were doing exactly the right kind of weed removal. The job of identifying and pulling, the sermon argues, belongs to the angels at the end of the age — not to us.

Pip: What stays with me is Cyrus — the idea that the person you would most confidently label a weed might be the one God has already called by name.

Mara: That tension between what we see and what God sees seems like territory worth returning to. More to come from Candle in a Cave.

Posted on

Podcast Episode: Sermon: Proper 10 RCL A – “Soil”

Pip: Candle in a Cave — where the sermon opens with a statistical case against chocolate mint ice cream, and somehow that is exactly the right move.

Mara: Fr. John's recent writing takes the Parable of the Sower as its anchor — what it means to have good soil in your heart, and what quietly erodes it. Let's start with the sermon itself.

Sermon: Tending the Soil of the Heart

Mara: The Parable of the Sower is usually read as a sorting mechanism — which type of person are you? But this sermon pushes past that framing and asks a harder question: even if the seed landed in good soil, what happens to that soil over time?

Pip: The setup is a statistics lesson. Before getting to Jesus, the sermon walks through a set of perfectly true, perfectly misleading correlations — nearly everyone who dies from cancer has eaten chocolate mint ice cream — to make a point about how easily we bend evidence to say what we want, including scripture. Then comes the turn: "However, today Jesus said, 'Not so fast,' and, in a rare instance, told us what he meant."

Mara: That's the hinge. Because Jesus actually interprets the parable himself, there's less room to spin it. The soil is the heart. The birds are the devil snatching the Word before it takes root. Rocky ground is shallow faith that withers. Thorns are the overwhelming noise of the world choking off what grew.

Pip: And then comes the move that makes this more than a conversion story. The sermon turns directly to people who already believe — the ones who think the parable isn't about them.

Mara: Right, because the soil doesn't stay fixed. The sermon uses a Montana farming image to explain it: rocks don't sink in soil, they rise. You pick them out in spring, and if you don't, they're back. The sermon puts it plainly — "if you do nothing to tend the soil, over time the rocks will work their way to the surface, and the once-fertile soil becomes rocky."

Pip: The washing machine flood, the "Insufficient Funds" stamp on the mortgage — those aren't hypotheticals, they're the actual mechanism. The bird doesn't wait for crisis; it works with whatever's already loose.

Mara: St. Paul and St. Josemaria Escriva both get quoted here. Escriva's image is striking — the world, the devil, and the flesh as adventurers trading you "the poor bauble of pleasure" for "the pure gold and the pearls, the diamonds and the rubies, drenched in the living and redeeming blood of your God."

Pip: That is not a subtle metaphor.

Mara: It isn't. And the sermon lands on a practical response: pray, cooperate with grace, and stop shooting yourself in the foot while asking God why your foot hurts. Paul's line from Philippians frames it — "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling" — meaning tend the gift, don't just receive it and walk away.

Pip: Soil maintenance as spiritual discipline. Which, given how the sermon started, is a long way from chocolate mint ice cream — but the logic held the whole way through.

Mara: The through-line is vigilance — not anxious striving, but the steady, daily work of keeping the ground clear.

Pip: Guard the soil. Tend it. And maybe don't let the mail lady open your letters first.

Blog at WordPress.com.