I invite you to listen to my reflections on the Conversion of Paul
by clicking HERE to watch my video.
Thank you and blessings,
Richard +
Tuesday, January 20, 2026
Saturday, January 17, 2026
Who Do You Say That I Am? Reflections on the Confession of Peter
Confession of Peter [i]
18 January 2026
Parish of Saint Helen’s West Point Grey
Vancouver BC
Click HERE to listen to the Sermon.
As a preschooler our daughter Anna attended Berwick Preschool on the campus of the University of British Columbia. I remember some sort of parent gathering and the staff had prepared lovely name tags for all the parents – but not the kind of name tag you might expect. On each name tag the staff had written the child’s name and the adult’s relationship to that child. Mine read ‘Anna’s Dad’. Some parents were a bit bemused, but I loved it and for many years it adorned my office door at Vancouver School of Theology. I have a suspicion that it’s still tucked away in one of my archive boxes.
“Who do you say that I am?” Well, I’m Anna’s dad as well as David and Owen’s dad. I’m Paula’s husband and Tegan and Brayden’s uncle. Our Anglican ordination rite will tell you that I am a pastor, priest and teacher. I could go on and on, as could each one of us. The answer to the question, “Who do you say that I am?”, depends a great deal upon the relationship between the person asking the question and the person answering it.
Peter and his companions within the inner circle of Jesus have been travelling around with Jesus for some time. They’ve seen him teach; they’ve seen him heal. They’ve seen him engage in conversations and relations with people outside the boundaries of socially acceptable Jewish behaviour of the times. So, when Jesus asks them this fateful question, “Who do you say that I am?”, it’s no wonder that there are different answers – “John the Baptist back from the dead!” “Moses the lawgiver!” “One of the prophets!” “The Messiah, the son of the living God!”
In all these answers the evangelist Matthew is giving us a glimpse into the religious debates that surrounded Jesus’ mission, ministry and identity. These debates fuelled controversies within the earliest Christian communities as well as their opponents and curious outsiders. To this very day there are still controversies about who Jesus is.
But all these controversies and debates, whether in the past, the present and the future, must wrestle with something I shared with in my sermon last week. As my late professor of Christian theology said on the very first day of my very first class in seminary, “When you meet Jesus of Nazareth, you meet God.” I dare say that everything that flows from this statement which I believe to be true and central to our identity depends upon how we understand our relationship with this Jewish rabbi from first-century Palestine who was simultaneously radical and traditional.
From the very beginning there have been Christian teachers who have emphasized the divinity of Christ. Even though Christ comes among us in human form, it is his difference from us that enables him to reconcile us to the living God. In the Gospel according to John, for example, Jesus is the incarnation of the Word, a Greek philosophical term that describes the fundamental pattern of the universe. Jesus knows what his opponents are thinking and carries on his mission with a degree of assuredness. This so-called ‘high’ understanding of Jesus finds its expression in the Nicene Creed with its lengthy philosophical treatment of Jesus in its second paragraph.
But also from the very beginning, there have been Christian teachers who have emphasized the humanity of Jesus. He suffers; he hungers; he sits down with people to eat with them and to talk with them. In the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus can even express his doubts and fears at the path that lies before him. This so-called ‘low’ understanding of Jesus influences, in my opinion, the Apostles’ Creed which tells the story of Jesus in its second paragraph.
But the path of Christian discipleship is more than the recitation the Creeds or any other theological explanation of the mission, ministry and identity of Jesus of Nazareth. Christian discipleship is a life-long journey punctuated by moments where the question, “Who do you say that I am?” is turned around and compels each one of us to ask, “Who do I say you are?”
If I say that Jesus is my Lord and Saviour, what does the ‘lordship’ of Jesus mean in my life? Sometimes when I hear the phrase, ‘Jesus is Lord’, I hear the strains of the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ from Handel’s Messiah – majestic sounds that herald a cosmic monarch descending from the heavens to establish a divine and powerful kingdom. I admit that there are times when I would like that very much, but then I see how that image has been usurped by Christian nationalists. It’s in those moments that I remember Jesus our Lord washed the feet of his disciples and, on more than one occasion, spoke of servanthood as the truest expression of discipleship.
If I say that Jesus is my Lord and Saviour, what then does Jesus save me from? Or, as one of my teachers was fond of saying, what does Jesus save us for? Jesus saves us from the sin of the world in order that we can become more fully Christ-like. What is the sin of the world? It’s our desire to be God and sovereign rather than to be who we are, creatures who participate in a web of inter-connected relationships with the human and non-human dimensions of creation. What does it mean to more fully Christ-like? It is to choose to participate in God’s on-going work of reconciliation and renewal, to serve God’s mission rather than our self-interests, to restore right relationships rather than create new rifts in the fabric of human communities.
On Wednesday evening we welcomed somewhere between 75 to 100 of our neighbours who came to hear what may or may not be the future of West Point Grey, Kitsilano and Dunbar. Some were members of our congregation; many were not. But we welcome them because we believe that Jesus is present whenever two or three are gathered in his name. And on this occasion his name is ‘lover of neighbours’.
Every day of the week there are childcare programs that meet in this building. True, they pay rent. We also have scouting groups that meet here. Some were members of our congregation; many were not. But we welcome them because we believe that Jesus is present whenever two or three are gathered in his name. And in those places his name is ‘embracer of the little ones’.
Every week there are people who gather for healing. Some were members of our congregation; many were not. But we welcome them because we believe that Jesus is present whenever two or three are gathered in his name. And in those places his name is ‘healer of our souls and bodies”.
Now when Jesus comes into the neighbourhood of West Point Grey, he asks us, “Who do you say that I am?” Some say, ‘welcomer of neighbours’. Some say, ‘embracer of the little ones’. And others say, ‘healer of our souls and bodies’. And then he asks us again, ‘But who else do you say I am?’
Tuesday, January 13, 2026
A View from the Vicar: Thoughts on Matthew 16.13-19
After a couple years of silence, I've decided to return to preparing a weekly video series newly entitled, "A View from the Vicar".
Here is my first instalment: Reflections on Matthew 16.13-19.
I hope that you enjoy these reflections.
Richard +
Saturday, January 10, 2026
Being a Covenant to the Peoples: Reflections on the Baptism of Christ
Being a Covenant to the Peoples
Reflections on the Baptism of Christ
RCL Baptism of Christ A[i]
11 January 2026
Saint Helen’s Anglican Church
Vancouver BC
Click HERE to watch the video recording of the Sermon.
Focus Text
I am the Lord; I have called you in righteousness; I have taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, so that I, the Lord, may open the eyes that are blind, so that I, the Lord, may bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness.[ii]
Some years ago I was one of three theme speakers for the annual gathering of the BC and Yukon Anglican Youth Movement along with the late Bishop Jim Cruickshank and the Very Rev’d Beth Bretzlaff, now Dean of Ottawa, but then a young priest in the Diocese of Kootenay. I had chosen the baptismal covenant from The Book of Alternative Services as the structure for my interactive session with the young people from across BC and Yukon.
As I’ve done many times with the covenant, I recited a section and then asked the young people what they thought that it meant for them in their lives, for example, “What does it mean to call God ‘Father’?” or “What does it mean to call Jesus ‘Lord’?” Things were going well, I thought, until I reach the commitment we make to resist evil and repent and return to the Lord. I asked the young people, “Where do you experience evil in your lives?”
At this point one of the adult group leaders said, “Father Leggett, I think that this is a bit too heavy for young people.” Before I could respond, more than one young person said, “No, we want to talk about this. There are bad things in our lives, and we want to know how we resist that evil.” I am happy to say that the young people won the debate, and we continued with a really good discussion about the evil that young people experience in their lives.
Last week in my sermon for Epiphany, I spoke to you about the difference between the question, ‘Why do bad things happen to good people?’ and ‘What do good people do when bad things happen?’ It’s appropriate on a day when the Christian community throughout the world remembers the baptism of Christ and its meaning for all those who have gone through the waters of baptism and now bear the name of Christ and have chosen to be one of his disciples.
We heard in our first reading these words: “I am the Lord; I have called you in righteousness; I have taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, so that I, the Lord, may openthe eyes that are blind, so that I, the Lord, may bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness.“[iii] These words were spoken to a people who were still in exile but hoping to return to their homeland, a people who were wondering why the ‘bad thing’ of the exile had happened to them. To them the prophet responded by turning the question around and directing them to be a ‘good people’, a covenant people, in whose life God would do ‘infinitely more than (they) could ask or imagine’.
In many and various ways, we are a people living in a time of exile, what some might even want to call ‘bad’ times. When we look around the world, we are besieged by images of war, civil unrest, natural disasters and human needs that tax our compassion. As a nation, we are aware that our old assumptions about our relationships with other nations, especially with our neighbours to the south, no longer serve us well. We know that many of our neighbours here in the Lower Mainland face what is now termed the ‘affordability crisis’. And, adding to our burden, are the upheavals in the life of this congregation over the past decade and over the past two weeks.
But we are a ‘covenant to the nations’; we are a community whom God has called to be witnesses to the blind gaining their sight and to those who are held in any kind of bondage are being set free. Let me share with six things that good people do when bad things have happened and are happening.
When bad things happen, good people gather for strength, comfort and renewal. It is tempting to shut the door, climb into bed and pull the comforter over our heads. We might even remove all social media from our digital devices and cancel our subscriptions to news services. But that won’t serve us well. We continue to gather here, Sunday after Sunday, to hear the Word of God proclaimed, to offer our prayers for the world and ourselves, to be strengthened by the bread broken and the wine poured, and to go forth to do what needs to be done.
When bad things happen, good people resist the evils that distort and deny the purposes of God. We need to be willing to speak openly about all that works against the good news of God in Christ, to acknowledge our own failures and shortcomings, and to re-commit ourselves to lives of reconciliation. We do not forget the past, but rather than be held hostage to that past, we choose to re-vision the future.
When bad things happen, good people tell the story of how, even in such times, God is at work among us. Friends, the good news of God in Jesus Christ is simply the story of human lives that have been transformed by our encounter with God’s love incarnate. The good news speaks whenever you and I share what God has done and is doing to help grow into greater likeness with Christ.
When bad things happen, good people serve their communities, loving their neighbours as themselves. It’s tempting to put a hold on everything until we get our own house in order, but I don’t think that actually works. Do we need to get our house in order? Certainly. But in the meantime, as we doing what we need to do within our walls, we still have obligations to take care of our neighbours and our neighbourhoods.
When bad things happen, good people strive for justice and peace, so that the dignity of every person is respected and treasured. It is easy in bad times to create categories of ‘us versus them’ or ‘insiders and outsiders’ or ‘friends and foes’. But that is not God’s way; we choose a different path. Every human being has been made in the image of God, that is, the power to be life-giving rather than life-denying. Our vocation as a community is to empower each other to become more life-giving in all of our relationships.
When bad things happen, good people care for ‘this fragile earth, our island home’. I remember hearing someone being interviewed and asked, ‘What if you knew you were going to die in an hour, what would you do?’ ‘Plant a tree,’ was the answer. Whether actual or metaphorical, let’s plant trees that will grow to give shade and life. This and so much more is what good people do when bad things happen.
Let us pray.
O God of unchangeable power and eternal light, look favourably on your whole Church, that wonderful and sacred mystery. By the effectual working of your providence, carry out in tranquillity the plan of salvation. Let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raise up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Thursday, January 1, 2026
More Than We Can Ask or Imagine: Reflections on the Epiphany
More Than We Can Ask or Imagine
Reflections on the Epiphany
RCL Epiphany [i]
4 January 2026
Saint Helen’s Anglican Church
Vancouver BC
In April of 2023 my family spent a week in the old city of Cartagena in Colombia attending a family wedding. Cartagena is one of the oldest European-settler cities in the Americas with most of the buildings in the walled old city dating back to the early 1700’s if not earlier. The streets are narrow and houses are built very close together, sometimes even sharing walls. Often the only distinguishing feature between one home and another is a painted door with a distinctive brass door knocker. What lies behind the door remains unknown, a mystery revealed only to those who enter.
For example, the door into the house where we stayed brought us into a home with its own art gallery, small swimming pool in the open-air atrium and a dining room and kitchen sheltered by the floor above but open to the cooling air flow from the atrium. It was beautiful; it is beautiful, but you would never guess what lay inside from what is visible from the street.
In Cartagena you can catch a glimpse of what the urban world of the writer of the Letter to the Ephesians experienced. The ancient cities of the Mediterranean world also had narrow streets with houses built close together or adjoining. Only their doors opened out onto the streets; few if any had windows on the street-side of the house. To know what lay inside, one needed to be invited in and then the plan, the design, the quality of the house would become apparent. The English word ‘mystery’ comes from mystērion, a word in ancient Greek which has as one of its meanings ‘the concealed interior plan of a house’. [ii] One explores a mystērion; one delves into it, peeling away its layers like an onion only to realize that the onion is getting bigger not smaller. We discover that faith is always seeking understanding and that questioning is a sign of maturity.
“In former generations [the mystery of Christ] was not made known to humankind,’ writes the author of the Letter to the Ephesians, “as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit: that is, the gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.” [iii] For the first followers of Jesus, all Jews, it came as a great surprise that non-Jews, peoples whom many Jews considered to be strangers at best, enemies as worst, began to embrace the good news of God in Jesus. This is not what the Jewish believers expected to see when they entered through the door into the household of faith in Jesus. It was as unexpected as seeing a Muslim immigrant wrestling a weapon from the hands of a terrorist targeting Jews on Bondi Beach. It does not fit the ‘narrative’, the story, we have come to believe is being lived out in our world.
But the author of the Letter goes one step further. Not only is the mystery of God in Christ made known in the growth of Gentile believers, but the church, the followers of Jesus, is the agent through whom this mystery is spread throughout the world in order “ . . . to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things, so that through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.” [iv] My friends, to many people in the world today, the good news of God in Christ is like one of the houses on the narrow streets of Cartagena. People see the various doors, some of those doors painted in lively colours with fancy door knockers, but they do not know what is behind the beautiful colours and fanciful designs. The only way that they will know is if one of us, the disciples of Jesus, open the door and invite them in to explore “the wisdom of God in its rich variety”.
Among all that I believe about what it means to follow Jesus, I share this with you: People come into the household of faith when they are invited. I know that many Anglicans freeze when they hear the word ‘evangelism’. It conjures up images of slick TV preachers who would fit right at home as the cast of programs such as ‘The Price Is Right’ or something on one of the shopping channels. To be sure, many of our neighbours and friends are equally unlikely to respond to these hucksters. But our reticence to invite people to step across the threshold and into our midst is an opportunity that is missed more frequently than I dare to say.
If they were to cross our threshold, they may join us in our life-long exploration of the mystery of God made known in Jesus of Nazareth. For example, in a world where many people ask, ‘Why do bad things happen to good people?’, we might share that this is not the most helpful question. The more helpful question is ‘What do good people do when bad things happen?’ The first question can lead to despondency and even hopelessness; the second leads us into self-examination and a commitment to renewed vision of God’s future for us and for our communities.
If they were to cross our threshold, they could join us in acknowledging that, as Paul writes in 1 Corinthians, “For now we see only a reflection, as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love remain, these three, and the greatest of these is love.” [v] We live in what is sometimes called ‘the already but not yet’ of God’s reign of peace and justice. In Jesus we have seen the embodiment of that reign. Through the Spirit we are empowered in this in-between time the power to do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. [vi]
One of my favourite prayers comes from Evangelical Lutheran Worship, the worship book of our sisters and brothers in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada. For me it is a prayer for all seasons, but it feels right for such a time as this in the life of this congregation, of our church and of our world. It is a prayer that is prayer rooted in the mystērion of Christian discipleship. It is a prayer that beckons us to open the door to discover what God is doing for us, with us and in us to reveal the glory of God in human lives.
Let us pray.
O God, you have called your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
[i] Isaiah 60.1-6; Psalm 72.1-7, 10-14 (BAS); Ephesians 3.1-12; Matthew 2.1-12.
[ii] I am grateful to my colleague, the Rev’d Rick Fabian, sometime Rector of Saint Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco, for this observation made to me many years ago.
[iii] Ephesians 3.5-6 (NRSVue).
[iv] Ephesians 3.9-10 (NRSVue).
[v] 1 Corinthians 13.12-13 (NRSVue).
[vi] Ephesians 3.20 as paraphrased in The Book of Alternative Services 1985, 214.
Saturday, November 22, 2025
Resistance Is Never Futile: Reflections on the Reign of Christ
RCL Reign of Christ C [i]
23 November 2025
Saint John’s Anglican Church (Shaughnessy)
Vancouver BC
In December of 1995 my wife, Paula, was ordained to the priesthood at Saint Mary’s in Kerrisdale along with two of her classmates from Vancouver School of Theology. Our oldest child, David, was nine years old and was well-known to have an opinion for every occasion. During the reception following the ordination, one of our colleagues went up to David and said, ‘This is quite the occasion, David. Your dad’s a priest and now your mum is as well.’ ‘Well,’ David replied, ‘don’t confuse it with the kingdom of God.’
I can’t help but wonder whether Terry and Joe’s children would share a similar point of view!
What David observed and what we cannot help but observe is the contrast between the feast that we are celebrating today, the Reign of Christ, and the world that we see around us. Although the prophet Jeremiah was speaking to people living more than twenty-five hundred years ago, his words are as apt now as they were then: “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! says the Lord. Therefore thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who shepherd my people: It is you who have scattered my flock and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the Lord.” [ii]
As we sing hymns that proclaim that Jesus is Lord, we cannot ignore that there are forces that are actively at work in the world to deny this conviction. As we hear the words of the writer of the letter to the church in Colossae that Christ is the image of God, that Christ is the pattern of all that exists, seen and unseen [iii], we must admit that the world does not seem to resemble a Christ-shaped society. As we join in Zechariah’s song of praise after the birth of his son, John, we can be forgiven if we do not yet see the salvation promised by the prophets and the favour promised to those who are faithful to God’s vision of world where justice and righteousness overcome injustice and self-interest. [iv]
I say these things to you this morning not as a message of doom and gloom, but out of a conviction that Christ has conquered the powers of evil and death, that Christ does reign, and that the promised reign of justice and peace will come – despite all efforts by the powers and principalities of the world to thwart that promise. I say these things because those powers and principalities are working hard to convince us that we are powerless to resist their efforts. For those familiar with the fictional Star Trek universe where a technocratic and hive-minded society called the Borg absorb other species with the phrase, ‘Resistance is futile’, the good news of God in Jesus Christ is this: ‘Resistance is never futile.’
You may have heard the question, ‘Why do bad things happen to good people?’ I’ve always thought that being a disciple of Jesus and believing in the coming reign of God means asking the question, ‘What do good people do when bad things happen?’ The reign of God does not take the form of the Christian nationalism espoused by some far-right groups in the United States and, I regret to say, in Canada. The reign of God takes shape when followers of Jesus, whether individually or communally, choose to make that reign known in the choices we make – despite all the forces that strive to obstruct us or to divert us or to suppress us.
Whenever we continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers, the reign of God is not only proclaimed but made present. And the moral arc of the universe bends ever so closer towards justice.
Whenever we persevere in resisting evil and, whenever, we fall into sin, we repent and return to the Lord, the reign of God is not only proclaimed but made present. And the moral arc of the universe bends ever so closer towards justice.
Whenever we proclaim by word and example the good news of God in Christ, the reign of God is not only proclaimed but made present. And the moral arc of the universe bends ever so closer towards justice.
Whenever we seek and serve God in all persons, loving our neighbours as ourselves, the reign of God is not only proclaimed but made present. And the moral arc of the universe bends ever so closer towards justice.
Whenever we strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being, the reign of God is not only proclaimed but made present. And the moral arc of the universe bends ever so closer towards justice.
Whenever we strive to safeguard the integrity of God’s creation, and respect, sustain and renew the life of the Earth, the reign of God is not only proclaimed but made present. And the moral arc of the universe bends ever so closer towards justice.
Do these words sound familiar? They should. They are the commitments that we have made each time there has been a baptism in this Parish, each time we have participated in a confirmation, each time we have renewed our baptismal covenant. These words are a guide to resistance in a time when coercion and privilege exert themselves over persuasion and the common good. These words are a reminder that through the death and resurrection of Jesus and in the power of the Holy Spirit a small community of Jewish women and men became the agents of transformation.
Thirty years ago my older son was right: living in a household with two priests should not be confused with the kingdom of God – yet. We’re still working on that – in our own home, in our family, in our neighbourhood. We resist as best as we are able the temptation to be overwhelmed by the awareness that our world is not yet what God would have it become. This world may not yet be the kingdom of God, but there are signs of that kingdom that breaking in upon us – I’d say more, but that’s another sermon!
So, my friends in Christ, “(may) we, who share (Christ’s) body, live his risen life; we, who drink his cup, bring life to others; we, whom the Spirit lights, give light to the world. (May we keep) firm in the hope (God) has set before us, so that we and all (God’s) children shall be free, and the whole earth live to praise (God’s) name”. [v] Because resistance is never futile.
Saturday, October 11, 2025
We Praise You, O God: Reflections on Harvest Thanksgiving
BAS Harvest Thanksgiving III [i]
12 October 2025
Saint Thomas Anglican Church
Chilliwack BC
We praise you, O God.
During my first year of theological studies, a story circulated among the students about the harrowing experience of a recent graduate. He had been travelling in a small two-engined plane to a remote mountain community when both engines stopped working. The plane immediately began to dive towards the ground in an area where surviving the crash was very unlikely.
As the plane continued in its dive, the priest began to pray – for himself, for the other passengers and the crew and for the families who would have to deal with the loss. But the expected did not happen. The pilots were able to restart the engines, and the aircraft was able to land safely at its destination.
The priest’s seatmate had heard the quiet prayer the priest was reciting as the plane was in trouble. It was only after being asked what he was praying that the priest realized he had been reciting the Te Deum laudamus, an ancient hymn of praise and thanksgiving:
We praise you, O God,
we acclaim you as Lord;
all creation worships you,
the Father everlasting.
To you all angels, all the powers of heaven,
the cherubim and seraphim sing in endless praise:
Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might,
heaven and earth are full of your glory. [ii]
This is not exactly the first prayer that would come to my mind in such a moment, but it says something about the character of this priest. Even when facing death, his first instinct was to praise God and to give thanks for all that is, seen and unseen, earthly and heavenly. His choice of this hymn to be his final words in this life echo the spirit of Paul:
Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. [iii]
The words we use are more than sounds; they are tools by which we accomplish God’s purposes for us and for all creation.
Gratitude for a windfall
The English philosopher of language, J. L. Austin, pointed out seventy-five years ago that we use language to do things as well as to express ideas and emotions. We use language to make promises as well as to share thoughts, to assert authority as well as to nurture relationships. What we say and how we say it matters. Words matter because we use them to build up and to tear down, to be life-giving and to be life-denying. Our language shapes our very identity as individuals and communities.
Today we gather to observe our annual Harvest Thanksgiving and, in typical Anglican fashion, we do so by celebrating the eucharist. At the heart of the word ‘eucharist’ is the Greek word charis. We often translate this word with ‘grace’ or ‘gift’, but these words fall short of giving the full meaning. Charis means ‘a gift given by someone who is under no obligation to give a gift to another person who has done nothing at all to deserve a gift’. I think that the closest word we have in English to charis is ‘windfall’.
We are here today to acknowledge that everything we have is gift. Yes, I know that we all work hard and that we are proud of accomplishments, but one of the abiding sins of our world is a lack of humility. The humility that I am speaking about is the recognition that we are all part of an inter-locking web of human and non-human activity. There is no such thing as a self-made person and no one is truly independent of other people. We are inter-dependent upon each other and upon the mystery of a creation we did not bring into being.
I believe that the only attitude that is life-giving in such a world is one of gratitude. To celebrate the eucharist is to give thanks and praise for the gift of “a world full of wonder”. [iv] And that world of gift and wonder includes the lands and buildings that previous generations have entrusted into our care. But our gratitude is to be more than words uttered; gratitude requires action.
So some more words to guide our praise and thanksgiving: mission, clear-headedness and commitment to the long haul.
We are a people with a mission.
God is at work in the world and we, as baptized disciples of Jesus, are co-workers with God in this urgent work of re-creation, reconciliation and renewal. This Parish and the many others throughout the Diocese who are discerning how best to be faithful stewards of their resources begin by asking important questions:
· What is the most urgent work God is doing in the world today?
· What is our role, both as individuals and as a community, in that urgent work?
· What resources do we bring to this work?
· What resourced do we need for this work?
· Who are our partners in this urgent work? [v]
We do not ask these questions in an abstract or theoretical way. You may know the saying, ‘Think globally, then act locally.’ The American theologian and writer, Frederick Buechner, put it this way:
(When) you wake up in the morning, called by God to be a self again, if you want to know who you are, watch your feet. Because where your feet take you, that is who you are. [vi]
The Parish of Saint Thomas has been called by God to serve this community of Chilliwack where many roads come together, and many people dwell. How does this Parish take care of this neighbourhood and make known God’s re-creating, reconciling and renewing love – rooted in its past, embodied in its present and envisioned in its future?
We need to be clear-headed.
There is nothing wrong about and much to say in favour of dreaming. As Bishop Gordon Light writes in his hymn ‘Draw the Circle Wide’: “Let the dreams we dream be larger, than we’ve ever dreamed before; let the dream of Christ be in us, open every door.” [vii] Dreams show us possibilities that excite us and give us hope.
But we also need to be clear-headed about our ability to make our dreams come true. Because we love this community and desire its well-being, we would not be faithful to our role in God’s mission if we cannot finish the work we have begun.
We are in this for the long-haul.
I think that one of the strengths of the Anglican way of discipleship is that we have a long-term vision of what we believe God is doing and how we participate in that work. Sharing God’s dream is important; finishing what we start is important; but perhaps even more important, committing to the on-going, sometimes difficult and unexciting work that follows the realization of our plans.
The Fifth Mark of Mission of the Anglican Communion is the commitment “to strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth”. [viii] Remember what I mentioned earlier – ‘Think globally, then act locally.’ We are here to sustain the integrity of this local embodiment of creation we call Chilliwack. That is not a one-year commitment or a five-year commitment. That is a commitment that extends beyond the lifetimes of many of us who are here this morning.
We praise you, O God – again!
I have no need to recite the challenges that we face as people of faith in a world where justice is denied, loving-kindness is cast aside and humility is a rare commodity. I have no need to recite the litany of uncertainties and even fears we have about our churches. I don’t think that we are in an aircraft plunging to earth, but I do think that we need a renewal in understanding our words are how we shape the future we hope for.
We are a people of praise and thanksgiving, and that praise and thanksgiving empowers us into mission. We are a people of Word and Sacrament, and that Word and Sacrament enlivens us to dream of our community as it can be rather than as it presently is. We are a people of a chequered past, and that chequered past compels us to shape a future where all God’s children shall be free. [ix]
[i] Deuteronomy 26.1-11; Psalm 100; Philippians 4.4-9; John 6.25-35.
[ii] English Language Liturgical Consultation, ‘Te Deum Laudamus’, https://www.englishtexts.org/te-deum-laudamus accessed on 11 October 2025.
[iii] Philippians 4.4-7 (New Revised Standard Version).
[iv] ‘Eucharistic Prayer 5’ in The Book of Alternative Services 1985, 204.
[v] Adapted from Kathleen Henderson Staudt, “Annunciations in Daily Life”, Sewanee Theological Review (Easter 2001).
[vi] https://www.frederickbuechner.com/quote-of-the-day/2019/4/1/where-your-feet-take-you accessed on 1 August 2025.
[vii] Hymn #418 in Common Praise (1998).
[viii] https://www.anglican.ca/ask/faq/marks-of-mission accessed on 1 August 2025.
[ix] The Book of Alternative Services 1985, 215.
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