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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.

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.

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?

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.