Metanoia – Where the Wind…

Sermon for Sunday, September 13, 2026 || Proper 19A || Matthew 18:21-35; Steven Charleston, excerpt from “Nothing is Lost” from Ladder to the Light

Last Sunday we began our Season of Creation with a reminder from Pope Francis that we are not apart from or above nature. We are nature. The natural world is neither simply the scenery for our lives, nor an object for us carelessly to use and discard. The natural world is a subject unto itself, a subject filled with other subjects, each a piece of the creativity of God. Today, we’re going to zoom way out so we can see humanity’s place in Creation, and then we will ask forgiveness for choosing domination over stewardship.

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Sermon for Sunday, December 8, 2019 || Advent 2A || Matthew 3:1-12

About ten minutes into The Princess Bride, we meet Vizzini, Fezzek, and Inigo. The three brigands kidnap Princess Buttercup and set sail across the sea to another country, where the giant Fezzek scales the imposing Cliffs of Insanity with the other three strapped to him. All the while, the Man in Black has been chasing them, but Vizzini dismisses their pursuer, saying it would be “inconceivable” that anyone would have known they kidnapped the princess in the first place. And yet the Man in Black starts climbing the cliffs after them. “Inconceivable” says Vizzini again. Vizzini cuts the rope, and the Man in Black hangs onto the rocks: “He didn’t fall? Inconceivable!” The Spanish blademaster Inigo Montoya looks at Vizzini and says one of the more quotable lines in a film full of quotable lines: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

That line from one of my all-time favorite movies always comes to mind when I read today’s Gospel lesson because John the Baptist uses a word, a very special word, and I do not think it means what our society thinks it means.

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