Monthly Archives: November 2025

Rector’s Annual Report, 2025

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November 16, 2025

As I reflect on the past year, I realize the extent to which our lives have been dominated by events in the world and by construction—both our own new roof and plans for the restoration of the gardens. There is also all of the construction that is taking place on North Carroll St.—both the new Wisconsin History Center and the conversion of the Churchill building to a boutique hotel. In fact, I wrote much of this report at home because of the distracting noise outside my office windows.

We should all take great satisfaction in the project that has consumed so much of our time energy and financial resources over the last few years—preparing for and accomplishing the replacement of the slate roof on our nave. As I have often said, our forebears at Grace have bequeathed a great legacy to us in this beautiful and historic building and what we have done this year is ensure that we will be passing that legacy on to future generations, future members of Grace as well as the wider community that appreciates its beauty and its sacred presence on Capitol Square.

There are many people to thank for their contributions to this project, not just the many donors, but those who worked so hard over the years to see it to fruition: above all Roof Committee Chair Deb Anken-Dyer, Project Manager Fred Groth, members of the Roof Committee: Suzy Buenger, John Wood, Amy Robinson, Joe Bartol, Jane Hamblen. Similarly, our Fundraising Committee deserves thanks: Mark Hope, chair, Suzy Buenger, Amy Robinson, James Waldo, and Jane Hamblen.

While the roof is complete, there will be more construction in the coming year. As you have heard, while making masonry repairs related to the roof, we discovered that the wood trim around the stained glass windows has experienced significant deterioration. We will be moving forward in the spring to repair them and once that work is complete, the gardens will be restored. Fortunately, we have received a significant grant toward the garden restorations, and while landscaping cannot be included in the Historic Tax Credits, the window repairs can be.

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the lay leadership of the parish—…

And the staff. We are blessed to be served by amazing people in the office. Kristen and Erin are a joy to work with; good-natured, incredibly competent, going far above and beyond their position descriptions and their normal working hours to make sure things run smoothly and problems solved. And, when necessary, they will transport the rector to the Emergency Room. It is truly an honor to work with both of them and I can’t imagine what life at Grace would be like without them—or what my life would be like. Our financial manager, Andrew also does a great job while working remotely.

I would also like to extend a word of thanks to our music staff. Mark continues to do great work on the organ and piano and his flexibility is an inspiration. Matthew has stepped into the role of Music Director after Berkley’s retirement and has wowed us (or at least me) with his musical selections. I’m still thinking about the Schütz that was sung a few weeks ago. 

Mary Ann and Brad do so much to create opportunities and a welcoming environment for fellowship and Vikki continues to do stellar work in the pantry in these challenging times. We should all extend our thanks to all of them because they are often the face of Grace to the outside world, to visitors and newcomers and they are our partners in ministry, in sharing God’s love in our community.

This year saw the retirement of Deacon Carol, who served among us for around eighteen years, with countless pastoral visits to the hospitals, nursing homes, and homes. She was a constant presence at the altar, and a joyful face. As she stepped away, Deacon Georgeanne stepped up and makes her presence felt in our worship, through pastoral care, and in supporting many other aspects of our ministry. We’ve also been blessed over the last five  months with Jonah as he grows into his priestly ministry. We will be saying Good bye and Godspeed to him and Olivia next week as he enters a new call elsewhere in the diocese.

Friends, we are facing some significant challenges in the coming year. It’s not just about the maintenance and repair of our physical plant and gardens that takes up so much of our time, energy, and resources. Over the last few years, we have lost some significant contributors to our financial well-being and need to come to terms with what that means for our ongoing operations. We are fortunate to be well-endowed, with the Grace Foundation to support capital repairs and improvement and the Development Fund Trust to strengthen our ministry and mission but without increased revenue, we will not be able to sustain operations at their current level.

Fortunately, Junior Warden Mary has organized a Strategic Planning Committee to strategize about Grace’s future. That effort should bear fruit as we look to increase membership and reach out more effectively into the community. But we face headwinds. In spite of the continued growth in Madison and Dane County, the reality is that Christianity in the US is in decline, the Episcopal Church is in decline as well and while our message proclaiming God’s love and inclusion of all is a powerful draw, Christianity in general is losing its appeal as it is being coopted by forces of division and narrowly identified with a particular political perspective.

As we continue to work to make our spaces and grounds welcoming and attractive, we need to translate that to our common life as well. We are uniquely positioned to grow as we are blessed to have many visitors in our pews every Sunday. While many of those visitors are from out of town, we also have many who are looking to connect with God, with a community of the faithful and I don’t think we do a good enough job of inviting them in and incorporating them in our common life. The Welcoming Committee that did such great work in the years leading up to the Pandemic needs to be reinvigorated. But I think we also need to develop more opportunities for newcomers as well as long-time members to grow in their Christian life, through bible study, and learning about the Christian faith.

It’s also true that much of the work that is done by volunteers is done by a relatively small group of people. We need to encourage newcomers, and not so new-comers to become more involved; to not just attend Sunday services, but to participate in them by serving as ushers, lectors, chalice bearers, acolytes, and altar guild. Worship is something the whole people of God engage in, and by participating more actively in worship, people deepen their own experience of God even as they help others encounter the divine.

One area of our common life and ministry that has languished recently is our Christian Formation program. When Erin stepped away last summer, we struggled to come up with a solution and conversations with parents are ongoing. With our limited financial resources and the reality of life for families right now make it difficult to find space, energy, and opportunity to develop a successful program. Still, we have done that in the recent past and it should be possible to rebuild that program. I ask your prayers as we continue to discern a way forward.

We live in uncertain and challenging times. We are watching as old certainties are collapsing and even our assumptions about our nation and society seem to be subverted. With all of the noise, the uncertainties, the anxiety, fear, and anger, it can be difficult to think clearly and to discern faithfully what we should be doing as individuals and as a congregation. But that discernment is crucial, and working together to craft a future should be our faithful response in this moment. May 2026 be a year when our conversations are deep, our prayer life is rich, and we are blessed by the Holy Spirit’s ongoing work in our community.

Visions of the Future: A Sermon for Proper 28C, 2025

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Proper 28C

November 16, 2025

I have to tell you. I find it more than a little ironic that the gospel reading on the Sunday of our annual meeting, in two out of three of the three years of the lectionary cycle concerns Jesus’ prediction of the destruction of the Jerusalem temple. Did we spend over $1 million dollars on replacing the slate roof this year? Are we anticipating around $300000 in additional expenditures on the building and grounds over the next year? (You’ll hear more about that later). Does Jesus’ prediction of the destruction of the temple suggest that such expenditures are not in keeping with God’s will? I’ll leave that question for you to ponder.

And to be honest, even as we have talked about ensuring the continued presence of Grace Church on Capitol Square, not least by installing a slate roof with an expected lifespan of 80-100 years, I wonder sometimes whether this building will be standing a century from now. With climate change continuing, and the massive disruption it poses to life on earth, will this planet be habitable in 2125? 

We may not like to think that far in the future, unless we’re watching some Hollywood post-apocalyptic movie but our lessons today force us to confront such questions, if only because they present us with strikingly different visions of the future. In the gospel reading, we’re told that there will be wars, famines, earthquakes, and that followers of Jesus will be persecuted. It’s tempting to plot those events on our own situation, to wonder, as Christians are prone to do, whether all those things that are taking place in our world today, are portents of Jesus’ return. Especially this week, with the images of clergy being manhandled, pepper-sprayed and arrested as they bear witness to the injustice of ICE detentions and deportations at Broadview in Chicago, we may indeed wonder whether we are in the last days.

I’ll come back to that gospel reading in a minute but first, I want to draw your attention to the passage from the book of Isaiah, and the very different image of the future envisioned by the prophet. 

The passage from Isaiah is full of hope—written at a time when great things seemed possible. The Babylonian exile was over, the exiles had been allowed to return to Jerusalem, and they were rebuilding their lives, the city, and most importantly, the temple. It’s a reboot of creation with God promising to create a new heaven and a new earth, for the former ones had passed away. Other biblical texts tell us of the struggles the returnees had, of the devastation they encountered and the hard work they faced. The situation was so dire that in fact many of the exiles chose not to return. They had built comfortable lives in Babylon and preferred that to the uncertainty and struggles they would have faced in Jerusalem.

But still it’s a vision that captivates us as it has captivated Jews and Christians, artists and writers over the millennia: 

The wolf and the lamb shall feed together,
the lion shall eat straw like the ox; 
but the serpent– its food shall be dust!

They shall not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain, says the Lord.

To express such hope and faith in God, in these circumstances and after so much had happened—the destruction of the temple, being carried off to Babylon, fifty odd years living in a foreign place, and then to return and to face all of that struggle:

For I am about to create new heavens
and a new earth; 

the former things shall not be remembered
or come to mind.

The gospel reading puts us back into the last week of Jesus’ life. It’s an incident recorded in all three synoptic gospels, Matthew and Mark as well as Luke, but Luke does something interesting with it. Remember that Jesus and his disciples are coming from Galilee to the big city. They staged what we call the Triumphal Entry and then immediately, Jesus and his disciples go to the temple. He upends the tables of the moneychangers and then over the next days teaches in the temple.

In Mark’s version, the remark about the temple’s grandeur is made by some of Jesus’ disciples, and in that way, it might be something tourists might say when they see a remarkable building. But Luke changes it to “some in the crowd” and so Jesus is addressing his follow-up remarks, not just about the temple’s destruction but about the signs of his coming and persecution to a wider audience than his closest disciples.

Remember, Luke is writing after the cataclysmic events of the Jewish revolt and the brutal Roman repression that culminated in the destruction of the temple. Around the end of the first century, Luke and his readers are still processing those events and wondering what the fallout will be. It’s likely that there is also some concern among the early Christian communities because the Second Coming of Christ that they had expected imminently, perhaps even in conjunction with the temple’s destruction, had not occurred and they were wondering what it all meant.

But in among all of those warnings—not just of catastrophes like wars and earthquakes—but the dangers to come for followers of Jesus: persecutions, imprisonments, trials, and martyrdom are promises as well: “I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict.” 

And further: “Not a hair of your head will perish. Through your endurance you will gain your souls.”

As I said, following this service we will gather once again in Vilas Guild Hall for the annual meeting of our parish. This congregation has survived some 185 years; our church building around 170.Over those years, there have been enormous changes. Sometimes I wonder whether those who embarked on the construction of our nave in 1855 had any idea that in six years a Civil War would break out in our nation, and whether, had they known, they would have started construction.

We may not want to think about the future. We may, like so many people today, bury our heads in the sand and say to ourselves, and to future generations, that it’s not our problem: climate catastrophe, environmental devastation even if we contributed to them, are things they’ll have to deal with—or perhaps, they can colonize Mars and start the whole cycle over again.

Yet, there is another option. These readings remind us that our God is a God of history, working God’s purposes out in every age. The visions may be radically different—and Edenic paradise of a new heaven and a new earth or a dystopia of wars, rumors of wars, and earthquakes. But in both visions, God is present with God’s people, promising God’s providential care for all. The lucan passage ends with the remarkable promise that “not a hair of your head will perish” and that “through your endurance you will gain your souls.”

We don’t know what the future holds—whether it is climate catastrophe or a dystopian vision worthy of Hollywood or a sci-fi author, or something else. But whatever comes for us and for future generations, we know that God will be there, caring for God’s people, bringing about God’s reign, redeeming, forgiving, and remaking humanity. Thanks be to God!

Resurrection Life: A Sermon for Proper 27, Year C, 2025

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November 9, 2025

On Thursday evening, I had the opportunity to meet with a small group of people who are participating in “100 Days of Dante” a national program that engages readers with Dante’s Divine Comedy. For me, it was an opportunity to return to a text I knew well. When I was teaching, I participated every year in Interdisciplinary Humanities Programs that included at least the Inferno on the reading list for the Medieval semester. It’s an expansive and detailed vision of the afterlife, encompassing Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise and peopled with figures from Italian history and Greek and Roman mythology. It’s also the story of Dante’s pilgrimage from a dark wood of uncertainty to eternal certitude.

While it is a great work of literature, it is also quite funny at times and very human. Wouldn’t you like to imagine where in hell you would put your enemies and how they would most appropriately be punished? That’s exactly what Dante did.

One topic we touched on briefly on Thursday was the way in which Dante’s vision of the afterlife influences our own. For example, how many of us imagine a hell in which unrepentant sinners are punished according to their desserts and the worse the sinner, the worse the punishment, and the closer to Satan. Similarly, do we imagine a heaven in which there is a hierarchy and the greater saints are closer to God, while we are further away?

I pose these questions because today’s gospel reading is all about our perceptions of the afterlife. But first, let me offer some context. There’s the context of Luke’s gospel. For many weeks now, we have been following Jesus on his long journey to Jerusalem. What the lectionary skips over now is his actual entry into the city, which we reenacted way back on Palm Sunday. Immediately after his entry, Jesus goes to the temple. Luke says that he spent every day teaching in the temple.

In fact, Luke recounts a series of encounters between Jesus and religious leaders in which Jesus is asked questions that seem intended to trap him. First, it’s the chief priests, scribes, and elders. Then Luke says they sent spies to trap him—that’s the question about whether it’s lawful to pay taxes to the emperor. And now Sadducees come and ask about the resurrection.

The Sadducees were a movement within first century Judaism. We might regard them as conservative or traditionalist. Unlike the Pharisees, who had an expansive view of scripture that included the prophets and writings, much of what would later become the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible, the Sadducees regarded only the Torah, the Five Books of Moses as authoritative. 

The Sadducees were also closely aligned with the priestly caste and the temple. When the temple was destroyed in 70 CE, the Sadducees faded into history. That they were unfamiliar to Luke’s readers is suggested by his side comment that they didn’t believe in the resurrection (a belief that isn’t attested in the Torah).

One more word of explanation. The question the Sadducees pose has to do with what is called Levirate marriage—the custom, attested in the Torah, that if a man died without a male heir, his brother was obligated to marry the widow in order to ensure his bloodline would continue. Now there’s no evidence that this was practiced in first century Palestinian Judaism, so what we have here is not an honest attempt to seek Jesus’ opinion, but an obvious attempt to point out the absurdity of the resurrection as a doctrine, and to ridicule Jesus, who like the Pharisees believed in it.

But Jesus will have none of it. In fact, the Sadducees made a fundamental error, and it’s one I think we’re prone to as well. In their opposition to the idea of resurrection, they imagined it to be something very like the life we have now. But Jesus tries to explain it to them. There will be no marriage in the resurrection, because resurrection life will be categorically different from the life we have now. That’s what I think he means when he says they will be like angels, children of God, children of the resurrection.

I think what Jesus is saying about the qualitative difference between our lives now and resurrection life is something that St. Paul was grasping at in I Corinthians 15 as well: 

What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable.  It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power.  It is sown a physical body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body.

One commentator points out that the doctrine of the resurrection emerged from a fundamental realization that earthly life is unfair and unjust. To believe in the resurrection is to believe that God will make things right in the end. One reason the Sadducees rejected the resurrection was because they had it pretty good in this life. They were wealthy and powerful and had no need to imagine a better life. 

There’s something else. The question posed by the Sadducees reveals a profoundly unjust reality. Think of a poor woman placed in that situation. Her only value is her ability to produce male offspring for her husband. She is locked into that system, lacking agency of her own. Her desires, her hopes, her feelings are ignored. Can you imagine what resurrection might mean for her? To be freed from that unjust, patriarchal system, free to live a life seeking meaning and fulfillment!

But, and this may be the most important thing, it is not a life lived for oneself. The passage with an intriguing statement: “Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.” Alternatively, the Authorized Version (KJV) reads “all live to him.” Resurrection life is not about self-realization but is life for God. Just as life comes from God, in the end, we will live in and for God.

As we consider all the ways our society exploits and demeans people; as we watch while our neighbors struggle with the ending of SNAP benefits, or fear that they will be seized from their homes and families and unjustly deported, as we struggle with the rise in neo-Nazi rhetoric, antisemitism, and the attacks on vulnerable communities, we realize how fragile was the pluralistic society we were attempting to build. The same people who claimed Christianity was oppressed now seek to prevent prayer, witness, and pastoral care at ICE facilities.

To proclaim the resurrection is to proclaim that the reality we see and experience is not the reality desired by God, that God’s reign is a reign of truth and justice, promising wholeness and healing to all people. To believe in the resurrection is to believe that the chains that bind us to this unjust and and oppressive world will one day be broken and that we will all live freely—live in and for God. May that belief fill us with hope and courage for the coming days. May we all live in God!

All Saints’ Sunday, 2025

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All Saints’ Sunday

November 2, 2025

You may have seen the article in the State Journal earlier this week which described the mood at local food pantries in the days leading up to the cessation of SNAP benefits yesterday. Our own Pantry Director, Vikki Enright, was quoted among other pantry employees and volunteers across the county. As we have watched the dismantling of nearly 100 years of federal support for our nation’s residents, and witnessed the effects of those changes on ourselves and our neighbors, we are filled with trepidation as we await the impact of the end of support for millions of food-insecure Americans.

Another recent article strikes an ominous note for our community. As local governments and service providers scramble to secure funding for operations of the new men’s shelter on the east side, there are growing concerns that the shelter will be overwhelmed by the demand. The answer seems to be: “let’s reach out to the churches.” I’ve heard that remark second-hand from several people reporting on conversations they’ve overheard, but perhaps surprisingly, no one has reached out to us. And frankly, I’m not sure what I would say. After nearly 40 years hosting the men’s shelter, and struggling as we sought to provide adequate space and services while also advocating for the need for a new shelter, I’m not sure we at Grace have the capacity or energy to take on the responsibility of providing space to help unhoused people.

All this is taking place against a backdrop of ICE raids targeting vulnerable immigrant communities; the rampant growth of White Supremacy and Christian Nationalism, collapsing institutions, a society and culture in disarray—perhaps best symbolized by the images we’ve seen of the destruction of the East Wing of the White House to make way for a ballroom. The rubble shown there is a mirror of the rubble that engulfs us all.

Our exhaustion, fear, anger, despair bubble over, overwhelm, render us impotent, keep us awake at night and on edge during the day. As the chaos swirls around and in us, the Church, in all its magnificence, history, and foibles, directs our attention to our fellowship with all those who have come before us and served as models and inspirations, on this All Saints’ Sunday.

All Saints’ is an occasion for us to reflect on that larger communion of which we are a part, not just Grace Church, or the diocese of Wisconsin, or the Episcopal Church, or even the worldwide Anglican Communion, fractured though it may be. All Saints’ draws our attention to the communion of saints, our fellowship with all those who have gone before us in the faith, all those who still surround us as a great cloud of witnesses.

So what, who are the saints? And why All Saints? Today’s commemoration has its origins in the earliest centuries of Christianity. During the Great Persecution, many Christians were martyred for their faith. Of those, some were remembered. On the anniversaries of their martyrdoms, surviving family members and members of the local Christian communities would go out to the graves of the martyrs and have feasts, including Eucharist to commemorate their witness and faith. But the Church realized that there were many martyrs whose stories and names were unknown, so a commemoration of all of those unremembered but faithful saints was created and eventually was observed on November 1—All Saints’ Day. 

Over time, faithful Christians wanted to honor ordinary people as well as the saints, the heroes of the faith. They wanted to remember their loved ones who had passed on, to commemorate them, and beginning in the Middle Ages, to pray for their souls who were believed to be in Purgatory. And so, alongside All Saints’ developed the Feast of All Souls, traditionally observed on November 2, the commemoration of all the faithful departed. With the Protestant Reformation, and its attacks on many traditional forms of piety, The Feast of All Souls was removed when the Book of Common Prayer was published.

So on this day, we do both things. We rejoice in the communion of the saints and we remember the faithful departed. It is a powerful reminder that, whatever our particular concerns and worries at this moment, as individuals and as a congregation, we are part of a much larger whole, one that encompasses all Christians who are worshipping today throughout the world, and just as important, all those Christians who have come before us, and are worshipping before the heavenly throne, as well all those Christians who are yet to come.

In the gospel reading, we hear Luke’s version of the beatitudes. It’s rather different from Matthew’s much more direct and connected with the realities of daily life: blessed are you who are poor now; blessed are you who are hungry now, blessed are you who weep now. And he adds a corresponding set of woes—Woe to you who are rich now, woe to you who are full now, woe to you who are laughing.

This set of blessings and woes, not blessings and curses—It’s hard for us to understand just what Blessed and Woe mean in this context. One commentator suggest we think rather in terms of “satisfied” and “yikes, or watch out” It’s not that one group is “saved” and the other “damned” but that the hungry and the poor receive God’s favor, and the wealthy and well-fed need guard against losing God’s favor.

These are stark binaries; and it’s easy in our world and divided nation to think in terms of such stark binaries as well. But we in the church are a communion of saints, part of a new community, a new social reality called together by Jesus, a new community that crosses every boundary of socio-economic, racial, gender, and ethnic status. It is a community that even breaks down the boundary between the living and the dead. There are no binaries in the kingdom of God.

At a time when people on the margins are being vilified and attacked—just in the last few days we’ve seen numerous politicians scorning food-insecure people who are reliant on SNAP. At such a time, it is part of our witness to the communion of saints to embrace and support all people, no matter their immigration status, their socio-economic position, their race, ethnicity, or gender. The kingdom of God, the communion of saints bears witness to and embodies all of human diversity.

We come together to worship, to be community, to be in solidarity with those whose lives are very much unlike our own. Together, we gather around the Lord’s table; together, we eat and are Christ’s body. Together, we are the communion of saints. 

May we experience that community of all the saints, and may we walk together in mutual support and love, inviting others to join us as we experience Christ’s love.