September 18. 2026

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Dear Friends,

Grumpy Jonah. Grumpy laborers. Merciful God, generous manager. Those are the standout characters of our texts this week. Everybody knows about the story of Jonah and the Whale, but that’s just the first act of the story. In the last act we find Jonah, having been forgiven by God for fleeing his duty as a prophet, settling into a comfortable position to watch God rain fire and brimstone down upon Nineveh. He was ready for wailing and crying, weeping and gnashing of teeth, for prayers to go unanswered. It was going to be an awesome display of the power of God! Except the Ninevites repented from their sins, and God awesomely displayed restraint. Jonah was not happy, not one bit, displaying the same petulant character evidenced in the first act, and reminding the reader that Christ tells us not to forgive seven times, but seven times seven—or perhaps more, if you’re dealing with Jonah.

And the Gospel parable shows a landowner hiring day laborers, some in the morning, some at noon, and some in the afternoon for just a few hours, and paying them all the same. This, of course, irritates the men who worked the longest hours. “Not fair,” they said, expecting to get paid a bonus for working the whole day. The landowner says, “This was our deal, this was our contract. I honored it. For the others, it’s my money and I can do with it as I please. Why are you mad that I’m generous?” Mercy is unjust, as is grace. And it’s never too late to come within the reach of Christ’s saving embrace.

I find the first story funny. I find the second disturbing. I spent a summer working as an apprentice union organizer with hotel workers in Chicago, which left me with an abiding distaste for hotels and respect for the people changing the sheets and washing the bathrooms, which is hard, literally backbreaking work. The summer I worked was a summer of pure adrenaline, since the union had just crushed the Hotel corporations in Vegas and won a big increase in wages and a reduction in hours for the housekeepers through a massive strike that brought the hospitality business (two words that should never go together) to its knees. The workers in Chicago saw what had happened and decided they could win the same fight in Chicago. The C-suite executives decided the same thing, and they won a new contract. When I think of the laborers in the parable, I think of those workers, and the hierarchy of pay and seniority and the strict rules to keep things fair. And yet—an older worker who finally won a new contract did not begrudge the fortune of a younger worker, who would be able to make much more money over her career with a slightly lower risk of injury.

We have an analogy to this parable in our own time. Just drive by any Home Depot or Lowes and you will find day laborers, men who work for a day’s pay. Jesus was craftsman’s son—perhaps a more skilled sort of laborer, but he made his living perhaps in a similar way (although the scholar Geza Vermes notes that ‘carpenter’ and ‘carpenter’s son’ could mean a learned person). So Jesus knew about a day’s work for a day’s wage—he brought his money home at the end of the day, back tired, hands sore. And then, as now, the ones with most of the money weren’t the ones breaking their backs.

I do have an entry to this parable this year, and it’s there in Jesus’s aching body, his craftsmanship. He is king that knows the life of the serf, the boss that has been a worker. And rather than pinching pennies, he opens the purse strings. Mercy and grace are not fair; generosity is not apportioned to the deserving. They are all much more than anyone could deserve, or they would not be mercy, or grace, or generosity. Our God has more than any of us deserve and gives us richly from his store.


See you soon,

Pastor John

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September 11, 2026

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Dear Friends,

Twenty-five years ago I stood in a gyro shop in Berlin wondering why I had not seen a preview of a movie involving planes flying into the World Trade Center, and slowly realizing I wasn’t watching a movie. I was watching real life.

Years after that day I settled in New York, but even as late as 2009 the clean up and construction continued, until 2011, when the 9/11 Memorial and Museum opened. I was in a Long Island firehouse when the news of Osama Bin Laden’s capture and killing was reported—and watched the news land on the shoulders of men who remembered their comrades that died that day. Indeed they were more than comrades—they were sons, brothers, family. I had not known anyone who had lost someone in 9/11. Now everyone I knew had lost someone they knew.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that history turned on 9/11. When I left for Europe, anyone could come to the gate with me. There were no security lines to get in the airport. You went in, found your gate, and gave your ticket to the gate agent. That was it. As security ramped up, so did the surveillance state, the mobilizing for war, and so many other aspects of our life now. Today the Taliban is in control of Afghanistan, Iraq remains destabilized, and the militarization of security infrastructure has infiltrated police departments across the country. In some ways, the world after 9/11 is a darker and stricter place.

But there are many reasons for this. Across the world authoritarians are growing in power and working together to suppress democracy. The Covid-19 pandemic further eroded whatever institutional trust remained in our culture. I think both developments are in large part due to the presence of misinformation and disinformation pumped out by Internet algorithms, but it is also due to the forever wars, the money for bombs, and the falsehoods that led our nation and many others into Iraq. Today we also notice the chronic health conditions and deaths from exposure to the toxic dust of the 9/11 site, and the shameful reluctance of our government to provide care for the people who watched their friends and family die as they worked through the rubble to rescue people and recover the remains of the dead.

In the end, our remembrance of 9/11 must focus on people: the people that died in New York City, the people that lost people, the people that got sick quickly or slowly, the people across the world that died in violence that erupted. If we can see anything in this memorial, we can remember that violence begets violence, but perhaps there is another way. And perhaps by focusing on the real people, we will find that path.

See you soon,


Pastor John

 

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September 4, 2026

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Dear Friends,


I am back from a great week walking around waterfalls in the Finger Lakes. I learned that the lakes are actually babies, as far as lakes go. They were made just in the last Ice Age, only 10,000 years ago. On the other hand, the forces that formed the lakes were in play hundreds of millions of years before, just as the streams that cut the gorges and flood the waterfalls continue to shape and reshape the land. I’ve seen those Ithaca is Gorges T-shirts for a long time, but I didn’t really get how gorgeous the region really is until last week, when we stood on the shores of Seneca Lake, walked under waterfalls in Watkins Glen, and watched the birds of prey circle on the walk to Taughannock Falls.

Sometime during that walk, I heard some news: thirteen global church communions, from Roman Catholics to branches of the Pentecostal church, have together proclaimed September 1st as the Feast of Creation of Christ. This means that this Sunday, September 6th, approximately 1.7 billion people will be turning their hearts and minds to the creation brought into being through Christ, and held together in him. Since the 8th Century the Orthodox church has officially started their church year on September 1st, which they call the Feast of Indiction, from the Greek work for proclamation, as in, “Let there be light!” As usual, the world catches up to the ancient practices the Orthodox have safeguarded. 

I have been obsesses with this announcement all week. We will be celebrating it here at OSA with the white paraments, which we use for the Feast Days of Baptism of Our Lord, Christ the King, Transfiguration, and so on. And we have been using a liturgy that really focuses on the natural world, and employing prayers specifically written for the day. 

But beyond the churchy huff and puff, there is a real miracle here. Humanity needs this festival. We need a party right now, something to celebrate and honor. And God has moved the church to say, “Look at gift of life itself—look at the streams, the stones, the seas. Look at the sunlight as it breaks through the forest canopy. Look at the beauty of all things singing their praise. Come on and join us.” 

I have tried incorporating climate change in so many of my sermons. I don’t know if I’ve ever been successful at anything other than scaring people. But we have plenty of fear now—especially among the young, whom the older generations have burdened with cleaning up their mess. And anyway too much fear just leads to people shutting down, curling up, and shutting off the world. A feast, a party, is a much better way to address an existential crisis.

The work of creating or adopting this holiday has been decades in the making, which seems long, but is a short time in church years (and less than a speck in geological time). In 1989 the “Green Patriarch”, the Orthodox prelate Patriarch Bartholomew challenged the entire Christian world to adopt September 1 as the Feast of Creation because he saw the environmental crisis unfolding. This was a mere year after James Hansen’s famous testimony before Congress, alerting the world to the problem of global warming. The party has come.

It’s easy to get sentimental about nature. But then you get bitten by a tick or infected by a virus and nature gets a lot less sweet. But the beauty of God’s creation soars above sentiment. We have a place in it, we human creatures. And God also asks us to celebrate our lives, and the being of the ticks and elephants, the mountains and plains. I believe that celebrating them will spur us to protect them. The love we have for them will lead us to do what we can to save them. I believe that’s the image of God at work in us. 

So come party with us this Sunday.


Pastor John

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