Each Day a Grace
(Proper 20A Epistle)
10:30 a.m. Sung Mass
20 September 2026
Mission
Church of St. Paul the Apostle, Crescent City CA
Jonah 3:10-4:11
Psalm 145:1-8
Philippians 1:21-30 Matthew 20:1-16
God, give us hearts to feel and love,
take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
Friends, Will and I are so happy to be with you here again in Crescent City! This happiness at being with you is mixed with sadness, however, at the news of the terrible accident that happened a few days ago to Katie, your parish office clerk and all-purpose den-mother, who I hear remains comatose in an ICU in Redding. Yikes. Life is so good, yet so fragile. It is sweet, but at times bitter. We see God’s providence, yet at times life seems so random.
So instead of preaching the gospel reading today as I usually do, I thought I’d talk to you about the Epistle reading and then tell you of a personal experience of mine that has made me think a lot about our sweet life and the randomness we sometimes see, about God looking out for us, and what seems to be at times God not looking out for us.
First, the reading. Here is how I translate it. Paul is writing to Christians he has converted in the city Philippi, many people think near the end of his life:
21For to me, Christ means life itself, and so dying at times [so I can be with him] seems something to be desired. 22Yet if I go on living in the flesh, that only means more time for productive work got me. If I had to choose between the two, sometimes I just don’t know which I’d choose! 23I am caught between the two. I want to leave this life so I can be with Christ: that seems prefereable! 24But it would be better for your sake for me to remain alive here. 25I know this all too well: as long as I continue to be with all of you, it’s so I can help you progress and find greater joy in the faith, 26so you can take overflowing pride more and more in Christ Jesus that I will see when I come to visit you again. 27You just have to remember to conduct your common life the way the way gospel demands. That way, whether I come and see you or not, I’ll hear this news of you: that you are standing firm in complete unity, showing exactly how good the Gospel is!” (Phil 1:21-27, adapted from The Ashland Bible)
Paul, who has seen a bad stuff in his life, is tired, and is ready to go and be with Jesus. But he still wants to live, since he wants to help those he loves, and life and love is so sweet.
Elsewhere he writes this (again, my own translation):
1For we know that if this body, this this earthly thing we dwell in, as flimsy as a tent, is destroyed, we will then find ourselves living in a proper house, one built by God, not by human beings, that lasts forever in heaven. 2For in this tent we groan, because it just doesn’t provide that much covering, at least not as much as that heavenly house of ours. 3And we don’t want to run around naked now, do we? 4For while we’re in this tent we can only groan, afraid of being stark naked wanting more clothing. I’m talking here about wanting to be fully alive, not half dead like we are here. 5And that’s precisely what God has already prepared for us, and given us a foretaste of it, God’s active presence in our day to day lives. 6That’s why can be so happy here and now. We know that God is there for us, even in the absence from God that we suffer by being in this mortal body of ours. 7After all, that’s what faith is all about isn’t it, not completely knowing but still believing. (2 Cor 5:1-7, adapted from The Ashland Bible)
My story is actually very appropriate this week, the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Here goes:
In 2001, I was working at the U.S. Department of State in the Public Diplomacy regional office of the East Asian and Pacific Bureau, living in North Chevy Chase, Maryland.
I needed to go to Seoul Korea for three
weeks to prepare for and carry out a program. At that time, Narita Airport in
Tokyo was a grim, unpleasant place and I wanted to avoid it at all costs, and
booked a flight accordingly—an early, early morning flight on September 11 out
of Dulles airport through Los Angeles, on direct to Seoul.
Less that a week before my departure, I had a very pointed argument with my
dear wife Elena about—what else?—money and family finances. We had two kids in
college and one just about to start and it was a sore topic. We both
emotionally kind of shut down, and Elena stopped talking much to me.
Knowing I was about to leave for three weeks, and that my schedule required me
to get up at three a.m. to meet an airport shuttle, I knew that I was going to
leave that morning unable to have a breakfast or chat of any kind with my wife.
And I did not want to go off for three weeks on opposite sides of the world not
on speaking terms.
So I asked my secretary to change the booking for later in the morning, so
Elena and I could wake up and have breakfast together before I left.
The booking that came up was a noon flight out of Reagan National through San
Francisco, then Narita, then Seoul. Not good, but I wanted that time at home.
The morning of my flight, I got up at our regular time, and had a nice
breakfast with Elena. We had started to talk again, knowing it was important to
reconnect before I flew off.
A cab picked me up at 9:15 a.m. for the noon flight from National. We headed
down Rock Creek Parkway, that gem of an urban park that looks like the wild
woods down the middle of metropolitan Washington D.C.
Twenty-five minutes later, as we emerged from the Park onto the broad
bottom-lands of the Potomac near then then thriving Kennedy Center, my
Pakistani driver and I noticed a lot of smoke coming from across the river and
heard a lot of sirens. It looked like the Pentagon was on fire, but that
couldn’t be.
Just as we took the turn onto the 14th Street Bridge to cross the Potomac, a
Park Police car cut in front of us and stopped us, the first car stopped as
they shut down all traffic across the bridges.
“Please officer, can you let us get over? One last car? Otherwise, I’ll be late
for my flight at Reagan.”
“You won’t be flying anywhere today, sir. The FAA just shut down all air
traffic in the continental U.S. Haven’t you been listening the radio?” he
added, suspiciously eyeing my distinctly Middle-Eastern-looking cabbie, “the
nation’s under attack. The Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon just
minutes ago.”
I thought for a moment that I needed to have the driver take me to the State
Department, but realizing that major federal buildings were being evacuated,
told the driver to take me back to my home. It took 25 minutes to come down
from there, but five hours to get back. Cell phones were not working. The
traffic of the city quickly slowed to full gridlock.
Listening to the radio in the car now, I felt a terrible chill when the details
started coming out. I checked my travel papers in my briefcase, which still had
the original booking listed, the one that my secretary had canceled to give me
time for breakfast with my wife.
It was AA 77, flying Dulles – Los Angeles, the plane that had been crashed into
the Pentagon.
Had I not wanted a few extra minutes to repair things with my wife, I would
have been on that plane.
When I finally got home, we hugged a long time, grateful to be together, to be
alive.
Our youngest son Charlie hugged us as well. He already knew then that the
father of one of his best friends at school, a gay man who worked in WTC Tower
One, was missing. His remains were never found or identified.
I told this story to a friend in Beijing 10 years after 9-11, a Mennonite minister
in charge of food aid to the starving in North Korea. Canada was still a close
ally of the U.S. He asked, “So what did
you learn from this? What is the take-away?”
I had often thought about this in the ten years after the attacks.
I answered him this way: I guess the easy meaning is that God looked after me
and took a bad thing (our argument) and turned it into a good thing (keeping me
from dying that day). There are many, many examples in scripture where God
turns bad things into good.
But that is a little dissatisfying, especially since there were people who were
not saved from taking that flight. I think I heard once that the wife of Ted
Olsen, George W. Bush’s Solicitor General, had been booked on AA77 at the last
minute. She died on the flight together with everyone else.
A simple take-away is that I wanted just a few more minutes with my wife before
I took off for three weeks, and the actual result was the blessing of many
additional years of sweet, wonderful life. God gives us way more than we
deserve, and God’s blessings are ridiculously overabundant when they come. But
again, there remains the mystery of suffering, the puzzle of those not spared.
I would be a pathetically ungrateful person if I did not thank God for
intervening and keeping me from harm that day. Because despite the apparent
randomness of my changing that ticket booking, it really felt to me like God
was looking out over me and my family that day.
But I would be a pathetically selfish and obtuse person if I did not mourn
deeply those not spared, and wonder at the mystery of a loving almighty and
all-good God in a world where true evil and seemingly random horror exists. I
would be a total jerk to feel that I somehow deserved saving and those who died
didn’t deserve to be saved.
I do not believe that randomness and horror—whether it is in the statistics of
victims of terrorism, the random victims of natural disasters, or in the great
amount of waste found in natural selection and the evolution of species—is
evidence that there is no loving, almighty, all-good God and Maker of us all. I
still believe in providence and in the loving God that Jesus called Father.
The fact that Jesus ended up on a cross is no proof that his faith and hope
were empty wishes. The very fact that he could continue to declare his trust in
God while on the cross (read the rest of the psalm beginning “My God, My God,
Why have you forsaken me” that he recited while hanging there, Psalm 22), the
very fact that in the midst of all the randomness and horror that seem to be
the norm of most human life, our hearts simply will not accept this as right
and normal, this to me is evidence that we are not created for this world
alone, and that in fact we are children destined for another home which we have
never yet seen. This is what I told my friend in 2011, and they remain my
feelings to this day.
This has become all the clearer to me in the last few years, with our nation's
turn from its feeble efforts to pursue its better values and its embrace of a
hateful, lying, and at time insane leadership that mistakes national greatness
for brutality, coercion, and bullying. The rise of such a loathsome cabal as
Donald Trump and his Republican Congress and Supreme Court enablers to me is
not a sign that there is no God or Providence. Rather, the fact that most
people in the country and the world, even increasingly people formerly
hoodwinked by this con-man, see this as so evil and abnormal is evidence that
there is indeed Good at the heart of the world.
Twenty-five years on from 9-11, I feel that each day in my life since then has
been a grace, an added plus, a blessing from God. The most important work I did
at State Department, much of it now undone by that cabal, came after the
attacks. I finished my Ph.D. in Biblical studies. My calling as a priest came about 5 years
after I was granted this extra time. So did the ten years of helping as
principal caregiver my beloved Elena through her suffering and death from
Parkinson's disease. As did my retirement from State and subsequent work as an
Episcopal Priest, first full-time and now retired, in Southern Oregon, Hawaii,
and now Northern California. I've seen my kids struggle and thrive as adults,
and now seen my grandchildren growing into adulthood. And I fell in love and married Will, and
found joy as an out gay man. I am making great progress on my work on the
Ashland Bible. All of this is a blessing, a grace.
And maybe that is the point: all our times and all our days—of each and every
one of us—are graces. And this despite the pain we feel at times, like that at
Katie’s accident and current state. We must
cherish the time we are granted to enjoy and help those we love.
No--We must be thankful for each day, and all
the blessings we see, and know in our hearts that God loves us all. After all, that’s what faith is all about,
not knowing, but still believing.
Thanks be to God.
