For Such a Time As This | 1/18/26
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It was mentioned that the church often needs to own up to its "toxic history" and seek repentance. On a personal level, how do you distinguish between the life-giving parts of your faith and the cultural or religious habits that might actually be causing harm to others?
The sermon touched on a time when a church board explicitly stated they would "always be a church for white people." While we might not be that blunt today, what are the unspoken "policies" in your own life or community that might still be making certain people feel invisible or unwelcome?
When you find yourself in a conflict, do you tend to focus more on the facts (the thinking), your habits of avoidance (the behavior), or your internal feelings of fear and anger (the emotions)? Which of those three areas usually derails your ability to stay engaged?
The discussion turned to immigration and how we view people in detention. How do you personally guard against the tendency to categorize people as "the other" or "the worst of the worst," and how can you practice seeing their individual humanity instead?
If you took the challenge to "be the epiphany" this week, what is one small, concrete change you could make in your daily routine to reflect the hope and healing you want to see in the wider world?
Transcript:
Steve:
Grant us peace. The words of that anthem are a prayer. And it’s a prayer that needs a response. Peace, so often, I think in our world, feels elusive. And it’s elusive, not because it's impossible; it's elusive because too often, we pray a prayer but then don’t live into the responses that would actually make for the thing that we asked for.
So today, you’re going to hear a conversation that I think speaks into that very prayer, and an invitation to think about how you and how we might live in response to a prayer for peace, and for goodwill for all of humanity, and for beloved community, which we remember today.
You know, in the Methodist tradition, the Sunday that is the day before Martin Luther King Day is recognized as Human Relations Day. Every year, Human Relations Day is this day, and it's a reminder for us that life and love are lived out in relationships. And the way in which we relate to our siblings in the world matters. How we speak, how we act, and how we show up matter. So we are in the middle of this series on Everyday Epiphanies, and today it's going to be a conversation that leans into that idea as well.
I'm going to begin with a scripture reading that I think helps frame our conversation for today. This is from the third chapter of Ephesians in the New Testament.
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father,[a] 15 from whom every family[b] in heaven and on earth takes its name. 16 I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit 17 and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. 18 I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth 19 and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
The last couple of weeks, we have shared with you all a definition of the word epiphany from the Reverend Jim Harnish, who is a retired clergy from the Florida Conference and author of the book, Everyday Epiphanies, the same title that we're using for this series. The definition you see on the screen: "Epiphany happens for people who are prepared to see, willing to follow, and open to surprises along the way".
I'm very grateful to Gary and David for joining me for this time today. As we start, I wanted to invite each of you to respond to this idea of epiphany and how that resonates for you with the work that you have been called into, in your life and in your ministry.
Gary:
It's been interesting, Steve. I think our conversation has been an evolving conversation because as I was sitting there, I was saying to myself, "What are missed epiphanies?" You mentioned Martin Luther King Day is tomorrow. Martin Luther King Jr. once said it is possible to be too late in history with the right answers. The British Bulldog, Winston Churchill, also said one gets a little bit tired of saying things which are first mocked and alas, adopted much too late. So let me just suggest (I’ll be provocative, but why not? It's the last service). Can the church miss its epiphany?
I think the church has many times missed its epiphany. I think one of the biggest things on the agenda for the church, and I haven't said this today, I said that at Emory University, where I was speaking there a few weeks ago for a week: I think the biggest agenda for the church globally is repentance. I think the church needs to own up for its toxic history. Why do I say that? Let me call to you Jonathan Sacks, a brilliant Jewish scholar who sadly died a few years ago of cancer, living in London. Jonathan Sacks said on one point, and that is a substantial one: "The critics of religion are right. Religion has done harm". It has led to crusades, inquisitions, pogroms, and jihad, and to shed the blood of human sacrifice in the name of high ideals.
So let's be honest, people have hated in the name of the God of love, practiced cruelty in the name of the God of compassion, waged war in the name of the God of peace, and killed in the name of the God of life. I mean, those are undeniable facts. They're absolutely terrifying. And interestingly, the great divines of another generation—Steve, the people we learned about when we did theology a few years ago. Gulliver's Travels, a book we probably all remember, (remind me of the author... it's just slipped my mind)... Dean of Christ Church... it'll come to me.
Jonathan Swift—he was dean of Christ Church in Dublin, and he said, "We have just enough religion to make us hate one another, but not enough religion to make us love one another". C.S. Lewis—I'm still playing a little bit of squash at my age as my good colleague here is playing a bit of pickleball; we're still hanging together on planet Earth. My squash club literally faces C.S. Lewis's boyhood home. C.S. Lewis, many people don't know, was born in Northern Ireland. But C.S. Lewis says, "I think we must fully face the fact that when Christianity does not make a man very much better, invariably it makes him very much worse".
And I think we need to have that conversation; I could spend from here to midnight telling you horror stories of how religion was manipulated, deceitfully used, and they ended up Catholics and Protestants murdering each other in my space for 30 years. I mean, even today, 28 years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, more people in my context have committed suicide through conflict-related issues than actually died in the conflict. So that still haunts a relatively peaceful space. Twenty-eight years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, as an outsider looking into the United States, I'm not a Republican; I'm not a Democrat. I mean, primarily, I have an eternal identity. And so while my British/Irish citizenship is important, it's not more important than my eternal citizenship because Paul reminds all of you, no matter how much your American identity is important to you, he says very clearly and very categorically: your citizenship is in heaven.
My concern is, sometimes American identities, British identities, Israeli identities, South African identities are actually temporal. I don't need a passport to get into heaven, but I need an eternal passport. So I just want to ask you, as regards this possible epiphany: what's more important, that American identity, important as that is, or your eternal identity, and even more important, which one is going to last?. So maybe we need a new epiphany. Whatever other church needs an epiphany, that's up to you to find out, not me.
David:
I just want to say that Gary gets better with every service. I mean, I'm just like, "Wow, man, this is powerful," and I don't want to miss the epiphany. I've been a United Methodist clergy person for 29, going on 30 years. And when I went to Northern Ireland to learn the story of the conflict there, I went with a cohort of clergy seeking to be agents of reconciliation, leaning into the ministry of reconciliation that we're called to as the church. And I remember sitting in a restaurant, and Bishop Carter made this comment: he said, "I hope for some of you that this is more than just a nice trip". He wanted it to be transformational; he wanted us not to miss the epiphany.
For me, serving at that moment in my life as co-pastors with my wife, Carolyn, at Grace United Methodist Church in Saint Augustine, there was a lot of opportunity. We were talking about the problems that we're facing, and I said my dad always talked about problems as opportunities. There were a lot of opportunities to do good things in the name of Christ in my community. When I moved to Saint Augustine, I didn't know that Dr. Martin Luther King had been there in 1964. He was arrested there; the week after he was arrested, there were 16 rabbis that he had called and encouraged to come to be a part of the demonstrations, disrupting segregation as usual, disrupting the barriers to the ballot box that people of color had experienced. And they were arrested. They wrote a beautiful letter from the jail where they were about why they went. You should Google "16 rabbis, Saint Augustine, why they went"—beautiful letter.
I didn't know that people who were 15, 16 years old—two boys and two girls—were arrested at the Woolworth's counter for trying to buy a hamburger in 1964. I didn't realize that the church that I was serving had eight people of color and a white man from Massachusetts come and worship on the Sunday after Easter in 1964. Now, when that happened, it was like they were invisible. No one said "leave"; no one said, "We're glad you're here." The Wednesday after that Sunday, the official board of the church met and wrote a letter of policy saying, "We've always been a church for white people, and we will always be a church for white people".
At that particular moment, as I'm learning these stories, I hear the cries and the hollers in my community for the removal of symbols of the Confederacy from public land in our city. Now, I'm a son of the South. I have ancestors who fought for the Confederacy. My picture is next to the tombstone of my great-great-grandfather, who fought for the Cobb County Legion. And I had a moment where I thought to myself, "Am I going to simply just attend the next prayer vigil for people of color who are murdered in the name of white supremacy?" Because nine people at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston had been murdered not long before that, unarmed black men had been killed by police in subsequent times, and Charlottesville happened. Should I ignore the voice of my colleague, Reverend Ron Rawls, who is at Saint Paul AME church, calling for the city to remove these symbols of the Confederacy, or do I just stay out of it?. My epiphany was: I need to follow Jesus into the places of brokenness where hurt and harm had been done with hope—hope that we belong to a story that leads to healing, to communion, to belonging. Yes, it was uncomfortable, but that was my epiphany: that I was to move into that space.
Steve:
As I listen to both of you share, I'm caught by the idea that there is this need to listen closely. And that often the move toward an epiphany begins with listening. And in the listening, there is learning that takes place. And then there comes this moment of epiphany, which, if we're willing to follow, as Harnish's definition says, it will move us into some form of action. So, as we think about what that means for us as Christ followers, can you talk a little bit about best practices for engagement as we follow Christ into uncomfortable and disruptive spaces?.
Gary:
Just before I answer that... I'm still just smiling there, David, because I have immense bother with that church in the 60s in your city of Saint Augustine, realizing that Jesus couldn't get into your church because he was olive-skinned. So I'll not go into that today, but that's a story for another time, to put it mildly. I was thinking there—I will never call it "painful listening". And sometimes if we don't listen to the temperature in your space—and we didn't listen very well in the late 60s and early 70s—we actually ended up killing each other for 30 years. I've listened to a colleague, and I want to tell you a story because it illustrates this better: if politicians and religious leaders had done some difficult listening to each other in the 70s, I, as a little kid, may never have lived into adulthood through a bloody, barbaric internal civil war.
This young man's name—he's not young now, he's my generation—is Alan McBride. I co-officiated at his wedding with another clergy person in the late 1980s. His wife and father-in-law, completely innocent civilians, were murdered on the 23rd of October, 1993, by the IRA in a bomb on the Shankill Road. Nine completely innocent civilians. I'll never forget that day. I've thankfully never taken anti-depressants in my life, but I probably store some trauma in my tummy from what I've seen over those 30 years. Particularly when I was in ministry. That day, I was called to the Shankill. I held Alan in my arms as he said to me, "Gary, she's gone. She's gone". 29 years of age with a two-year-old daughter. Her father also died in that bombing.
That evening, I was at the bedside of Wilma McKee, a 38-year-old woman who, on the Friday before the bombing on Saturday, got the all-clear from cancer. And like many of you women, I know how you celebrate, being married to Joyce, you want to go shopping. So she decided to go out for a shopping trip that day. Was caught up in that bomb; serious neurological injuries. I was at her bedside at 8:40 p.m. that evening. The neurosurgeon said to me, "Gary, she'll be dead in four hours". I can still close my eyes today, 33 years later, and I can tell you the color of the suit I had on that day. I can tell you the color of my clerical collar and the color of my shoes. I can tell you the color the hospital corridor was painted in, as I told her mom, her dad, her 14-year-old, her 12-year-old, and her husband, “It's not looking good.” I can't remember what shirt I had on on Friday.
Why had I to suffer that? Because many religious leaders and political leaders in our space haven't got the biblical courage to do uncomfortable, painful listening to one another's pain. I'm just saying to you graciously and humbly, don't make the same mistake because I said in the previous two services, I know some of you here, but not many of you. But one thing I can guarantee you without contradiction: when you stand before Jesus Christ and that judgment, which we all will experience, Jesus will not be asking you, "Were you a Republican or a Democrat?" Categorically. Any more than he will ask me, "Gary, were you an Irish nationalist or a British unionist?" He'll be saying, "The least you did to one of these, my brothers and sisters, Gary, you did it to me". Tell me what you did when you were on planet Earth: were you destructive, or were you a person who facilitated healing, listening, conversations? The choice is ours.
David:
The work that I support clergy, congregations, and communities in doing is making the space to have these difficult dialogues where harm has been done across any number of variables where inclusion and exclusion occur—be it around race, politics, gender, sexual orientation, religious identity, ability, or age. You name the place where someone experiences inclusion and exclusion. We hold space for people to think about how to stay in those spaces. What I'm realizing is that there are three dimensions that have to be addressed: our thinking, our behavior, and the emotional dimension.
Our thinking can involve misinformation about the "other" that needs to be transformed. Behavior involves our habits, like avoiding contact with people who are different from us. Just think about how often you actually make contact with someone with whom you have either deep disagreement or big cultural differences. Then there is the emotional dimension. As Gary mentioned, deep harm and violations of boundaries lead to anger, which can lead to bitterness, withdrawal, or violence. Deep sadness over such loss can lead to depression, despair, and hopelessness. Deep fear, whether real or perceived, can also lead to separation. And so, without attending to ourselves and caring for ourselves in this emotional dimension—building up a capacity for emotional intelligence—it's difficult to stay authentically engaged in the work of peacebuilding. So that's some of the work that we do and encourage people to attend to.
Steve:
As Claire was leading us into prayer a little earlier today, she reminded us that in our present context, civil unrest is not just a memory. Civil unrest is a reality in this present moment. And with all that we are seeing flying at us in the news reports—all kinds of things that just a few years ago would have felt unimaginable for us to be sitting in right now. A question for you in the work that you both are doing: Where are you seeing signs of hope?.
Gary:
I think across the U.S., and maybe this doesn't get the publicity—it'll not be on Fox News or CNN tonight, I can assure you of that. But organizations like the One America Movement, I spoke to the CEO of that in DC a matter of months ago. Braver Angels. I spoke to one of the most conservative talk show hosts with a brilliant conversation by Zoom. He's very involved in Braver Angels. The work of the late President Jimmy Carter Center, who in May 2024 brought conservative Republicans and more progressive Democrats and spent a week with me in Belfast looking at the ramifications of a civil war. And they were stunned; the 26 years after it, we're still wrestling with that.
In a matter of weeks, I've lost some significant, conservative Republicans who will be nameless from this state, along with Democrats, in conversation about better relationships. Most of these people are people of faith, asking how faith spills into the chaotic mess of life. And I think for all of us, we need to get out of what I call—and I'm not knocking church services because we need them—the kind of at times fusty, musty, dusty, rarefied atmosphere of church and ask the question: Does my faith spill into the public square, and what does that actually look like in your context?. To me, to tell you, I could just say: proceed with caution. If I were to give a health warning, as you have on cigarettes in your space and my space, my health warning is, “If this goes really downhill, you're on a hamster wheel from hell.”
Because we had 30 years of chaos—lives ruined, mental health issues. We have the highest dosage of anti-depressants in Western Europe, one of the highest in the world. One in five ex-prisoners is drinking themselves to death after self-medicating, and they're passing the pill seamlessly from generation to generation. The keyword there is not "the pain"; the keyword is "seamlessly". They don't even notice it. So it behooves the church leaders here within your church to deal with these issues, because they will not go away on their own.
David:
Hope that I have is on Sunday evenings at 4:00. There are a lot of Methodists, people of other faiths, and people of conscience who are standing in front of the Everglades detention camp and naming the stories of people being targeted by current immigration policy and enforcement practices. They are illuminating the fact that it just simply isn't true that "the worst of the worst"—the rapists, the murderers, and the convicts—are the ones being rounded up in these camps. Over 70% have no crime other than trying to navigate a complex immigration system. I have hope that people in Tallahassee are doing the same thing at the same time.
For the 20th week in a row tonight at 4:00, standing in front of the old Capitol, again naming the experiences of people who are targeted by these policies and calling upon our elected leaders to recognize that the camp in the Everglades and other models like them around our state are simply not helpful for humanizing people or making our communities more safe. It is also not helpful to require our police and our sheriff's departments and our state police to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers because they have two different roles. We need our police, our sheriffs, and our state police to protect and serve our communities, to do the community policing work that they've been working on, to repair the legacies of suspicion and mistrust and harm that have happened, especially in communities of color over the years.
And this collaboration with ICE through these what we call 287(g) agreements are just simply not helpful. And so when I hear people of faith, many United Methodists and other faiths, people of conscience coming out and just being present to name that to the people who make our laws and policies, I have hope. I have hope on this weekend, when we remember the legacy of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, that we are reminded that we continue that legacy today by making a commitment to nonviolence in our opposition to injustice. This means that we don't fight people who are evil; we fight injustice that undermines our humanity. And so we can differentiate between the evil that exists in the world and the injustice that exists in the world and the people that are around us.
And finally, I would say that we have everything that we need to do this work, you and I, in this room right here and right now as we come to this table of communion very soon. We'll remember that our trajectory is communion—it is belonging. That's the end that we're working for. It is not the destruction of our enemies; it is the transformation of the world. And we as people of faith are called to live that faith out here in the world. Communion is our trajectory.
Steve:
Thank you for that. We could sit here for a long time and keep having conversation because there's a lot to share and to talk about and a lot to glean from David and Gary and from their witness and experiences. The good news is, while we're not going to continue the conversation right here for very much longer, there is a lunch coming up after the service today. And along with that lunch will be a time of Q&A. And even if you didn't make a reservation for the lunch, I would welcome you to stay and be a part of the conversation and the question and answer time. If you want to run, grab a quick bite somewhere, or if you want to wait and see if there's still some food left over, you're welcome to do that, but we'd love for you to stick around and be a part of that. I want to ask you all one more before we end this time today, though.
So here at Trinity, we have a vision statement. And the first phrase in that vision statement, which was very intentional when a group of leaders in this congregation came together to discern that vision back in 2018, 2019—not knowing what all we would be living through since then—was that we are called to be a courageous witness for Christ. Final thoughts on what it looks like for us as Christ followers and as a church to be courageous witnesses?.
Gary:
Courage is crucial. Don't twin courage with being bombastic or arrogant because sometimes that can actually spill into that psychologically. Being courageous is being directed by God—that's having an eternal courage and a spiritual courage. I was just thinking that a reading around Dietrich Bonhoeffer, many of you would remember how he stood up against the Nazis. But again, there, Steve, the power of influence. Nietzsche, as you know, was a philosopher who profoundly influenced Hitler. But Nietzsche said this—and many people don't know this—Nietzsche for a time in his life began to hang out with Christians. But he said this, Steve: "These people will need to look a lot more redeemed before I can believe in it".
And as you know, he was the forerunner of the Aryan Superman race, which Hitler bought into. I've often asked myself the question, Steve, as somebody who had the courage to be courageous and not a hypocrite, as we all can be from time to time: in relation to Nietzsche, would Nazism have ever happened?. That's sheer conjecture, but Nietzsche had profound influence on the theory of the super man Aryan race. So a gracious, kind, gentle courage. Not a big mouth, loud mouth, arrogant, bombastic. In other words, be a courageous spirit person whose blueprint is the fruit of the spirit. That's your mandate.
David:
Yeah, mine's similar. I would say being courageous means simply recognizing that you are the epiphany you want to see in the world. You're the change that you want to see in the world rather than thinking about it, "I wish everybody else would be different. I wish our politicians would be different". I wonder what it would be like if every single one of us said, "What would it look like for me to live in the world differently, more courageously step into the uncomfortable places knowing that Jesus has gone there before me".
Like we are as a Methodist, we're really good at this: recognizing that the grace of God goes before us, right?. So before I ever step into an uncomfortable place of conflict, I know Jesus is already there. He's already moved into that neighborhood with hope for transformation and healing. And so I just ask myself the question, "How will I be the change? How will I be the epiphany that I want to see in the world?". And I courageously step into that, knowing Jesus is calling me to do it.
Steve:
So the verse in Ephesians that immediately follows the ones that I read earlier this morning says this: "Now to him who by the power at work within us—the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine—to him be honor and glory in the church now and forever".
