Podcast – Candle in a Cave

2 August 2026

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.

20 July 2026

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.

5 July 2026

Podcast Episode: Sermon: Proper 9 RCL A – “In God We Trust”

Pip: If you've ever wondered what pesto, the Cold War, and the Book of Isaiah have in common, Fr. John has done the research, and the answer is more coherent than it has any right to be.

Mara: This episode follows a single sermon that moves from the origins of a national motto to the harder question underneath it — the difference between believing in God and actually trusting God. Let's start with that journey from Virgil's kitchen to the gates of Jerusalem.

Sermon: Trusting God or Just Saying So

Pip: The sermon opens with a question about national identity, but it's really asking something more uncomfortable — whether "In God We Trust" is a conviction or just text printed on currency.

Mara: The setup begins in an unexpected place. Virgil, writing a pesto recipe around 50 BC, produced the phrase that became America's first de facto motto. As the sermon puts it: "out of many, a single color — color est e pluribus unus — and if we shorten that and add proper grammar, we have the phrase e pluribus unum, which the founding fathers added to the Great Seal of the United States in 1782."

Pip: So the founding motto was essentially a salad metaphor. And it held for over 170 years until the Cold War made atheism the enemy and "In God We Trust" became the official counter-move in 1956.

Mara: That shift sets up the sermon's real question. The motto changed, but the sermon asks whether the trust behind it changed with it. And the answer comes through Hezekiah, king of Judah around 700 BC.

Pip: Hezekiah is a useful case study because he's not a villain. He kept the religious observances, ran the temple, did the visible things — and yet Isaiah records God saying, essentially, I've had enough of your burnt offerings.

Mara: The problem was that Hezekiah believed in God but didn't trust him. When Assyria threatened, he sought an alliance with Egypt instead. The sermon quotes Isaiah directly: "Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help and rely on horses, who trust in chariots because they are many — but do not look to the Holy One of Israel or consult the Lord."

Pip: It took the Assyrian army standing outside Jerusalem's gates before Hezekiah actually prayed. Which is a very human timeline for getting serious about trust.

Mara: And the sermon draws that line straight to the gospel. Jesus's invitation to "take my yoke" gets read not as shared labor with a partner, but as a replacement — setting down the yoke of sin, self, and fear, and picking up the yoke of discipleship instead.

Pip: The question the sermon lands on is precise: not "do you believe?" — the congregation already answered that by showing up — but "do you trust him enough to remove all those yokes and put on his?"

Mara: It closes with Thomas Merton's prayer, which holds the tension honestly: "I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me." Trust, the sermon argues, doesn't require certainty. It requires the desire to follow, and Merton's prayer suggests that desire itself is already a form of faithfulness.

Pip: In God We Trust — lip service or a way of life. That's the question left sitting in the pew.

Mara: The thread running through all of this is the gap between profession and practice — saying the words and living the weight of them.

Pip: Belief is the easy part, apparently. Trust is where it gets costly. We'll see what Candle in a Cave brings next time.

28 June 2026

Podcast Episode: Sermon: Proper 8 RCL A – “Empowered Servants of God”

Pip: There's a Peanuts cartoon that opens a sermon, and somehow it leads directly to eternal life — which is either a bold homiletical move or proof that Lucy van Pelt has always been theologically underrated.

Mara: This episode covers one sermon from Fr. John, working through what it means to be part of a body where every gift counts — not just the ones delivered from a pulpit.

Pip: Let's start with the sermon itself, and the question of who actually does the work of the church.

Empowered for the Mission — Every Gift Counts

Mara: The sermon is built around a deceptively simple question: if not everyone is called to preach or heal or cast out demons, what exactly is everyone else doing in the mission of God?

Pip: The answer comes from the tail end of Matthew 10, Jesus wrapping up his instructions to the twelve before sending them out. The setup is that hardship is guaranteed — and so is help from unexpected quarters.

Mara: The sermon lands the key line directly from that passage: "Whoever receives you, receives me, and whoever receives me, receives the Father." The argument is that welcoming and supporting those who carry the mission makes you a participant in it.

Pip: Which is a genuinely generous theological claim — you don't have to be the one casting out demons to get credit for the demon-casting.

Mara: Two Old Testament figures anchor that claim. Elijah and the widow of Zarephath: she shares her last flour and oil, and the jar never empties. Later, her son dies and Elijah raises him. Elisha and the Shunammite woman: she feeds him whenever he passes through, and Elisha promises her a son she had stopped hoping for.

Pip: Both women receive what the sermon calls the prophet's reward — not because they prophesied, but because they made the prophet's work possible.

Mara: Paul's letter to the Corinthians supplies the structural argument: "There are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good."

Mara: The upshot is that no single gift runs the whole operation. The apostles need the widow's flour. The prophet needs the Shunammite's hospitality. The body needs every member.

Pip: And the sermon loops back to Lucy at this point — those five fingers, individually nothing, curled together into something formidable. It is, against all odds, the correct analogy.

Mara: Archbishop Michael Ramsey gets the closing description of what that body looks like across centuries: "Human lives united to Jesus, receiving his presence, and showing his goodness, his love, his sacrifice, his humility and his compassion. Living stones."

Pip: The sermon closes by naming the stakes beyond the prophet's reward — Christ's reward, forgiveness and resurrection, the food that does not perish. The call is direct: find where your gift fits, and get to work.

Mara: The harvest line from Luke lands as the final push: "The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few." Every laborer counts, regardless of what kind of laboring they do.

Pip: One sermon, but the argument keeps widening — from twelve apostles to a widow's jar to every person sitting in a pew wondering if they have anything to offer.

Mara: The answer the sermon gives is yes, unambiguously. The body needs what you have. More on that territory next time.

18 July 2025

INTERVIEW: Tornado Alley Mystery Writers

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to interview with the Tornado Alley Mystery Writers and discuss writing and life. You can listen to the interview (about thirty minutes long) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Buzzsprout.

The book we discussed is the first in the Father Anthony Savel Mysteries series, titled The Golden Fistula. Click the image or link to view it on Amazon.