High Anxiety: A Homily for the Last Sunday of Epiphany

Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, on the Last Sunday of the Epiphany, 15 February, 2026.  Readings for this Sunday:  Exodus 24:12-18, Psalm 2, 2 Peter 1:16-21, Matthew 17:1-9

:But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Get up and do not be afraid.” (Matthew 17:7)

Mountains are scary, wonderful, and mystic places.    During my military career, I had the opportunity to climb three mountains in three days as part of a strenuous kind of holiday that the Army calls Adventure Training.  This wasn't the kind of technical climbing with ropes and pitons, but it was challenging and the mountains, on the Alberta side of the Rockies, had names like The Fortress and Windy Tower.  

I was part of a small group of soldiers, and we were ably led by Major McKnight, who was a qualified Canadian Armed Forces mountain warfare instructor and intimately familiar with this part of the Rockies.    At the start on the first day he told the driver of our van to put the keys under a rock near the parking lot.  When the driver asked why, the Major said "If you fall off the mountain with the keys, I'm not getting home".  That explanation sobered us up quickly.

When you first climb a mountain, at least in the Rockies, you start climbing a forest trail, but eventually you reach the treeline, and at first you can see the tops of the trees, and then the trees just blur into a green mass.   As you get higher, the mountain starts to narrow.   You make your way up, sometimes skirting the edges of steep rock faces, and realize you need to tread carefully.   The air thins a little and you're fully exposed to the sun so you get thirsty.  As we reached the top, it felt like there were just a few feet you could go either way and still be safe.  I felt enormously vulnerable, for I was wrapped in a  sense of great height and almost a feeling of vertigo, which haunted my dreams for some weeks after.  It was reassuring as we rested there to see how calm the Major was, and while I enjoyed the view, I was grateful when he said it was time to go back down.

The author trying not to look down.

When Jesus takes his two disciples up "a high mountain", it's not just for an adventure.   The purpose of the trip seems to be revelation, a chance for the disciples (and for those who heard their testimony, which includes us) to learn who Jesus is.  The theme of learning who Jesus is what the season of Epiphany is all about.   It's therefore fitting that Epiphany is bracketed by two utterances from the divine voice.  At the start of the season, at Jesus' baptism, we hear the voice say "This is my Son, the Beloved, with him I am well pleased".  At the end of Epiphany, on the mountain, we hear the voice say the same thing, but adds the key phrase, "Listen to him".    So in addition to this affirmation of Jesus' identity we get the call to discipleship.  Our job is to follow the Son of God, to learn from him, and to do what he tells us to do.

For the disciples, this message is terrifying, as moments of revelation often are in scripture.   Perhaps the disciples remember the Exodus story from our first lesson, of how Moses went up another mountain to listen to God, who was like "a devouring fire" (Ex 24.16).  In Exodus God's voice on the mountain is like trumpet blasts, shaking the mountain and covering it with smoke, so perhaps the voice that Jesus' disciples hear is equally alarming.   And of course there is the bright cloud, the presence of Moses and Elijah, and their friend and rabbi transformed into a dazzling being of white, so no wonder this all a bit too much for them.  I think in similar circumstances, I'd fall down and find a large rock to hide behind.

I think the most important detail in the story comes near the end, when Jesus touches his disciples and tells them "Get up and do not be afraid" (Mt 10.7).   In the many healing miracles of the gospels, Jesus' touch (or even touching his cloak) is important.  It's a sign of deep connection and compassion between Jesus and his friends, which means that it's a sign of deep connection and compassion between God and humanity, or between the divine and mortals, or however you want to think about it.

It's tempting to think that this relationship of compassion and connection is a new thing in scripture, that Jesus is doing a new thing.  However, even in the terrifying Exodus stories around Mount Sinai, there is also a surprisingly tender moment.  Before Moses goes up the mountain, God invites Moses and some seventy of the leading Israelites to the foot of Mount Sinai for a dinner party.  Exodus reports that "God did not lay his hand on the chief men of the Israelites; they beheld God, and they ate and drank" (Ex 24:10).  So before God gives the law and the ten commandments to Moses, God wants the people to know him.  Maybe in this little passage we see a glimpse of the Last Supper and the Eucharist, and I think it's safe to say that throughout scripture, as in this moment, we see a God who wants to be known by us.  As I've said before, our God is a God of relationship.  If we fear God, then it's not much of a relationship.

Mountain top moments can be moments of revelation and exhilaration, but they can also be moments of fear and anxiety.   In our colloquial speech, when we want to descalate and calm someone, we say that we want to "talk them down".   One of Alfred Hitchcock's scariest films is Vertigo.  A place like those glass floors at the top of the CN Tower may be fun to some but terrifying to others.   Fear of flying is a real thing for many.  Heights underscore our fragility and are a perfect metaphor for anxiety, something this this world seems excessively well stocked with.

We started our worship today with some prayers for the people of Tumbler Ridge.  That mass shootings could happen even in a small Canadian town feels like a violation, an infection of our country's social and political body by forces of violence and hatred.  It can seem like no one and no place is really safe.   Our children are experiencing a crisis of anxiety, which we try to overcome by medication and social media bans.   We adults aren't immune either.  As someone wrote recently, social media helps me stay in touch with friends and helps me learn about new disasters.   

As Christians, we need to cling to Jesus' words "do not be afraid".   The God of thunder and justice meets us as a friend, and takes us by the hand, and leads us down from our mountaintop anxiety.   Jesus comes down the mountain with us, with a message of peace and love for the world.    We are called to follow, to listen, and to tell others that there is a truth and a way of life that is one of peace rather than anxiety.   As Christians, we begin our journey of Lent this Wednesday with ashes and a sign of the cross.  It's important for us as we journey not to think that death and violence have dominion, for the Jesus' appearance on the mountaintop, dazzling white, is a foretaste of the resurrection that lies before us on Easter Sunday.  For ultimately we are Easter people, and God's message then and always is that we have nothing to fear.

Seeing the Unclean: A Meditation for our Après Ski Focus On God's Healing

Our Après Ski services this year feature meditations from members of our clergy team on God's healing as it's described in scripture and experienced in our lives.   Tonight's meditation focus on Jesus and the ten unclean men as described in Luke 17:11-19.

 ¹¹ On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. ¹² As he entered a village, ten men with a skin disease approached him. Keeping their distance, ¹³ they called out, saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” ¹⁴ When he saw them, he said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were made clean. ¹⁵ Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. ¹⁶ He prostrated himself at Jesus’s feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. ¹⁷ Then Jesus asked, “Were not ten made clean? So where are the other nine? ¹⁸ Did none of them return to give glory to God except this foreigner?” ¹⁹ Then he said to him, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.”

You may have noticed that our translation of Luke’s gospel mentioned “ten men with a skin disease” and that may have taken you by surprise because in the versions of this story that we are familiar with, going all the way back to the King James version, the men are described as “lepers” (indeed, the Greek word used in Luke is lepros).  

Our translation today reflects recent biblical scholarship, which notes that what the ancient world called leprosy was not quite what we see in the film Ben Hur, and certainly not what medical science today calls Hansen’s Disease (more medical background here).  In ancient Judaism, what we used to call leprosy could be a wide variety of skin conditions such as psoriasis, dermatitis, scabies, lesions, or even thinning or balding hair.  

All of these conditions fell under a Hebrew word called tzaraat and all these various conditions are decribed in the Book of Leviticus.   The diagnosis would be done by a priest, and if a priest declared you as tzaraat, then you were unclean and not fit to be part of society.   Hence, when Jesus cures the ten men, he sends them to the priests so they can be declared as healed.    Thus, to be tzaraat in Jesus’ time was as much a religious conditon as it was a medical condition.

There is a further religious dimension to this story because of the ten men healed, only one returns to thank Jesus and praise God “with a loud voice”.  Jesus tells him that his “faith has made him well”, which is a little odd, because ten men were healed.  All ten were healed by Jesus, and only one has his faith recognized.  So were the other nine not healed by their faith?  It all seems a little confusing.  What is the connection between faith and healing?

If we step back a bit, we can make some sense of the story by putting it in its larger context.  The story, like most gospel stories, is about the power and authority that Jesus has been given by God the Father.    Jesus, as he says elsewhere, does not abolish the law of Torah - sending the men to the priests to be declared clean clearly shows his respect for Torah.   But Jesus also uses his authority to go beyond law to grace.

The man who returns to praise God is a Samaritan, an outsider to faithful Jews of Jesus’ day.   As we see elswehere in Luke’s gospel and in Acts, outsiders (Samaritans and gentiles) can be as worthy of God’s love and mercy as faithful Jews.  Indeed, the Good Samaritan shows more love and mercy than do the faithful Jews in the parable (Luke 10:25-37).  

So our gospel story tonight is about healing, to be sure.  The ten men are healed by Jesus.  But perhaps more importantly, it’s also about Jesus being willing to see and love and heal those who are not seen.  It’s about Jesus being merciful with the definitions of unclean and outsider.  

In her book Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community, Maggie Helwig begins by saying, in effect, that our society effectively treats the unhoused and most marginal as tzaraat, unclean.   She writes that ”there is a great gulf fixed, and very few people are willing to cross it. People who have not lived in the world of which encampments are part are afraid, and they are angry. And they cannot imagine that there is a way to cross that line, to speak to a homeless person as a fellow human being, without somehow themselves being harmed, being damaged, being touched by a world they would rather deny.”

I think we as a society can actually imagine what it would take to help the unhoused if we wanted to make real, costly investments in affordable housing, in addiction and mental health treatment, in accessible medical care, and a universal basic income.  But before we get there, we have to overcome our secret fear that the unhoused are the new tzaraat, the new lepers.   Today’s gospel story suggests to us that God’s healing can begin when we can let go of our fear of the unclean and see people for who they are, as loved children of God.

Helwig, Maggie. Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community (pp. 7-8). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

I'll Take The Message of the Cross for Five Hundred: A Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Epiphany

 

Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, and St Luke's Creemore, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, 1 February, 2026, the Fourth Sunday of Epiphany (Yr A).

Texts for this Sunday: Micah 6:1-8; Psalm 15; 1 Corinthians 1:18-31; Matthew 5:1-12

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?  (1 Cor 1.20)

Some of you longtime ˆJeopardy fans may remember the Rev. David Sibley, who had a four night run on the show in 2022, and came back in 2024 to win the quarter final but lost in the semi final.  A pretty good showing for the Rector of St Paul’s, Walla Walla, Washington, whose smarts earned him around $78,000, though as he said, his bishop reminded him that his winnings should be tithed.

Sibley is in fact one of three Episcopal (Anglican) clergy who have appeared on Jeopardy, for which, I suppose, we as a denomination might take some pride.   Anglicanism has long valued the education of its clergy, many of whom have been scholars and scientists, such as Edward Stone (inventor of aspirin) and Charles Darwin, who began his career in a seminary.   Indeed, a famous quote from long ago, one of the Popes, then arch enemies of the Anglican church, admitted that the clerics of England were, because of their superior education, the wonder of the world (clericus Anglicanus, stupor mundi).

However, lest we get too self-congratulatory, it’s worth noting that Rev. Sibley was knocked out of Jeopary’s semi-finals because he got a bible and Shakespeare question wrong (what biblical city is Comedy of Errors set in?  Ephesus.  Sibley guessed Corinth).   In life, as in quiz games, our intellects only get us so far, and the same is true of theology, which is what Paul tells the Christians in Corinth in our second lesson today.

So for the last few Sundays, our second reading has been from the first chapter of Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth.   After praising this church as a collection of saints called by God and “enriched in him in speech and knowledge of every kind” (1 Cor 1.5), he then scolds them for falling into rival factions, each with its own leader and message.    For Paul there is only one message, the message of the cross of Christ.  And the message of the cross has nothing to do with things that smart people value (“eloquent wisdom”), rather it is a message that Paul calls “foolishness”.

So what is the message of the cross, and how is it foolish?  First, I think we have to understand what Paul means when he dismisses “earthly wisdom”.  Wisdom for Paul is a lot more than just Rev. Sibley’s command of Jeopary facts and figures.  It is the whole cultural and religious system of his day and what it values.   

For Greeks (and Romans), wisdom was science and philosophy, art and beauty, the purity of math and astronomy and logic.  Greek gods were powerful, handsome and gorgeous.  It made no sense to wise Greeks that a god would die in shame and agony on a Roman instrument of torture.  Likewise Jews saw their salvation in a Messiah who would come like a second King David, so ditto for them not understanding how Jesus could be Messiah when he died on a Roman cross.

So for Paul, the cross is the complete oppositie of what his world values.  It would be like Paul, if he were here  today saying that technology, AI, the stock market, finance, capitalism, ideology, fashion - it’s all meaningless. 

Likewise for Paul, the cross has to do where people are in society.  When he talks to the Corinthian Christians, he reminds them that “not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many of you were  of noble birth” (1 Cor 1.26).   The Corinthian Christians might have had a few well off people in the parish directory, but by and large they did not call the shots.  Some scholars estimate that between 70 to 80 percent of people in the ancient world lived in poverty, either at or below the level of subsistence.   Cities were crowded, political life could be violent, taxes were high, and of course many were enslaved.  Human rights as we understand them simply did not exist in the ancient world.  So if you think about the kind of elite people who gathered last week in Davos, Switzerland, Paul would say, “yeah, not you guys”.

I think that when Jesus looked down at the crowds at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, he knew exactly who they were and what their lives were like,   Matthew tells us that the crowds included “the sick, those who were afflicted with various diseases  and pains, demoniacs, epiletics, and paralytics” (Mt 4.24).   No doubt most of these were poor, or who, like the woman with the hemorhrage in Mark’s gospel, had spent all they had on the limited skills of physicians (Mk 5.26).  Jesus knew who these people were, and the Beatitudes tare about them and about God’s commitment to them.

I think that when we hear the Beatitudes and hear phrases like “Blessed are the poor in spirit” or “Blessed are the meek”, we think that that these are moral commands.  We think that Jesus is telling us to be betters people,  humbler, more peaceful, and more committed to good causes.    In part this is true, but I think the Beatitudes are about the message of the cross, that God stands with those who are as hungry for their next meal as they are hungry for an end of oppression,  that God sees the downtrodden and the unimportant.  The  Beaitudes are as much about the people of Gaza and Minneapolis as they are about the people of Jesus’ day or Paul’s day, and indeed, they are really the same people.

Mixed in with Jesus’ compassion is the same commitment to justice that we see in the prophets like Micah.  When Jesus says that the reward of the righteous will be “great in heaven”, this is more than a consolation of some afterlife where things will be better.  It’s God’s commitment to be there in the struggle until oppression is overcome.  The Negro spirituals which saw freedom as a from slavery to the promised land knew where God’s heart is, as Dr King knew so well, and as the clergy and people arrested in Minneapolis know.  Tech billionaires, oligarchs and dictators may see talk of freedom and human dignity as so much foollshness, but God’s people know better.

So to conclude, the wisdom of the cross is not a celebration of ignorance.   Jesus told his disciples to be wise and innocent.  Perhaps we can say that the message of the cross, and the vision of the cross, is about seeing and valuing the people that Jesus sees.  I’ll give the last word to Rev. Sibley, who put it well after his run on Jeopary:

“One thing that I love about Jeopardy! is that it is, in many ways, a celebration of curiosity about the world around us. So if I can hope for any one thing, it’s that my little turn in the spotlight might inspire you to become more curious — about others, about our world — and in so doing, grow in love of God and neighbor for seeing the beautiful web in which we all live and move.”