Tag: Podcast

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.

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.

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.