August 30, 2026 (Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost) - Adam Eichelberger

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In the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

I want to ask a question as I get started. Does the acronym PIP mean anything to anyone in this room?

The letters P-I-P. Pip stands—

Oh, yeah. Chuck. What is it?

What's a PIP?

You're thinking very Episcopalian with that, but that's not what I was going for. But that is technically correct. Chuck said “Person in Process,” which is somebody who is discerning joining, being clergy in the Episcopal Church.

No, the acronym I was thinking of is a Performance Improvement Plan. Does anyone know what a Performance Improvement Plan is?

Chuck also knows. It's usually something used by management, typically in the corporate world, when a manager is not super happy with the performance of a subordinate and they want to fire them. But this can't just be because I don't like them. They need evidence. So they put them on this thing called a Performance Improvement Plan that says there's these guidelines or guideposts or goals that you have to meet. And if you do all of that, maybe, just maybe, we'll let you keep your job.

But it's usually a sign of the end when you're put on a PIP. They just need that documentation to make sure that you know that you're kind of screwing up at work.

The first thing I think of when I hear the beginning of today's Gospel is it kind of feels like good old Peter is getting put on a PIP.

Because I don't know if you remember what Deacon Chuck shared with us last week, but a week ago in the Gospel, what does Jesus say to good old Peter?

He says, “You are Peter, you are rock. And on this rock I will build my church.”

And as somebody who spent about forty years as a practicing Catholic, this is a big deal to me when I look at Scripture, because what does that mean? I was always raised with the idea that that means Peter is the first pope. He's going to be—he's going to take over the family store someday. This is a big deal that he's going to—he's going to talk about him like that.

And then we flash forward to now, and it's a really bad day at the office. It's almost like one day Peter's getting a glowing performance review and the next he's on a PIP.

“Get behind me, Satan” is pretty harsh language for good old Peter.

What does the Gospel say?

Because what Peter's doing here, he's horrified at what Jesus is telling him: that I have to go and I have to die.

And Peter says, “Not on my watch. Not going to happen.”

And Jesus is telling him this has to happen.

Peter wants Jesus to be successful. He wants Jesus to be safe. He wants Jesus to stay alive. He just confessed him as Messiah. And presumably Peter has a picture in his head of what a Messiah is supposed to be.

And Jesus is essentially telling Peter, “You don't have a clue what victory actually looks like.”

That's a really relevant question to us today. What does a successful life look like for us?

And we tend to measure it in a lot of really easy metrics, right? Like how much we accumulate, how secure we become, how comfortable we are, how admired we are, how much influence we have, how long we live.

And what does Jesus say?

“What will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their lives?”

I think we can look at the news this week, and we can see two very diametrically opposed ideas of what it looks like and what it doesn't.

I want to bring up a name. Some of you may know this person. Some of you may not. I have made it my personal mission to troll this individual on the internet. Don't tell my boss.

His name is Ennis Kanter. Does anybody know the name Ennis Kanter?

Ennis Kanter was at best a below-average NBA player who was forced into retirement in 2022.

Now, I'm not going to say that that doesn't mean he wasn't a good NBA player. I think maybe the best—the worst NBA player of all time is better than me on my very best day. So I'm not judging his athletic abilities.

But Ennis Kanter, at the end of his career, was traded to another team for basically a cup of coffee and then was released eight minutes after that trade occurred. He went out on a very unceremonious note.

And recently, Enes Kanter, who has now changed his name to Ennis Kanter Freedom, has made it his personal mission to protect women and women's sports by stoking the fear-mongering around trans women in women's sports, saying, “It's men in women's sports.”

And I bring that up because he went so far this week as to sit courtside at a WNBA game, to heckle people while they were doing their job, and even got thrown out because he created a confrontation with my new personal favorite WNBA star, Natasha Nice of the Chicago Sky.

I already told Kate I'm ordering a jersey. She wasn't having it.

And this man has made it his life's work to be incendiary and work for clips and grab at cash amongst those who would share his perspectives on what life and sports should look like.

It kind of feels to me that he's building a legacy built on sand and it's sinking quickly. He's not famous or notable anymore, and he's desperately trying to cling to relevance. All of the things that the world has promised him went away. All the things that society values are slipping out of his fingers.

And I wonder what it is he's actually gaining or what he may be forfeiting.

But something else happened this week, and it was kind of a doozy for some people, for a lot.

There was the Queen, Dolly Parton.

She, by virtue of her immeasurable talent, did gain much of what the world tells us constitutes success. Dolly had fame. She had money, won awards, had influence. She was an award-winning musician and actor. She had a megastar career. She became one of the most recognizable people in the world, one of the few people that, upon her passing, I couldn't find anyone who had a bad word to say about Dolly Parton.

But what was striking to me about the legacy that Dolly left behind is the things that people are talking about the most this week. Aren't those things that she accumulated. They talked most about what it was she gave away.

Anyone here familiar with the Imagination Library?

Three hundred million books given away through her work with Imagination Library.

The reason she founded the Imagination Library—she grew up a poor girl in Appalachia, and her father never learned how to read. And she used that as the impetus for making sure that kids never had to go without the knowledge of how to learn to read.

She gave enormous amounts to charitable causes. She funded a COVID vaccine when the world was so afraid, she stepped up.

And that suddenly makes this sound so very different.

The question isn't whether Dolly gained the world, because I think maybe she might have. She gained a great deal of it.

The question is, what did she do with what she's been given, what she was given, I should say?

Those who lose their life for my sake will find it.

Jesus isn't necessarily telling us that Christian discipleship is blowing up our lives. We're embracing all of the suffering that the world has to offer, or necessarily saying that every dollar in your bank account has to be given away.

But it is a life of self-gift, and Dolly Parton lived a life of self-gift.

There's this beautiful illustration in the Gospel. What happens when we take the things that we've been given and we use them for somebody else?

Your talent isn't ultimately yours. Your money isn't ultimately yours. Your time isn't ultimately yours. Your influence, not yours. Even your life isn't yours.

They're gifts.

And the question we need to ask ourselves, siblings, is what are we going to do with the gifts that God gave us?

The tricky part is knowing what we do with it.

Sometimes love itself can become an obstacle when we're not loving for the right reasons. We can love people and still want the wrong things for them. We can love our church and want it to be comfortable rather than faithful. We can love our families and want to protect them from every difficulty. We can love ourselves and spend our time trying to avoid anything painful, uncertain, or sacrificial.

But Jesus says that's not where life is found.

The cross tells us that God doesn't simply meet us on the other side of suffering. The cross tells us that God enters into our suffering.

That's an important distinction.

The world sees one thing. God sees another.

Peter looks at the cross and sees defeat. He says, “God forbid it.” He sees suffering. He says, “I'm not going to have any part of that.”

Jesus sees the suffering and says, “Follow me.”

The cross is what happens when the world looks at something through human—through human eyes, and God looks at something through divine eyes.

The cross is valuable because it shows us that love is stronger than suffering.

Jesus doesn't tell Peter, go find something terrible to endure. He tells him to follow.

We discover that following Jesus will sometimes require us to surrender the things that we would rather keep—our certainty, our comfort, our money, our grudges, our need to be right, our desire to be admired, our fear of losing our—and perhaps most importantly, our insistence that we get to decide what a successful life looks like.

I'm going to deviate a little.

There's something really beautifully Episcopalian about Dolly Parton. She was flamboyant without being pretentious. She had—she was successful without needing someone to know that she was successful. She was religiously grounded without constantly needing to prove her religiosity.

She would—she could inhabit contradictions: rhinestones and humility, enormous wealth and extraordinary generosity, celebrity and accessibility, humor and seriousness, country music and pop culture, Appalachian roots and worldwide fame.

And the most important thing about Dolly Parton is Dolly Parton made room for people.

So what do we do with all we've been given?

We give it away.

Like I said, not to say that we plunge ourselves into destitution, but we see all that we've been given by a gracious and loving God and use it for others.

They're gifts that God has meant to be shared, not stored up.

We look at a culture that is starving for love and acceptance, and we live into that, like Dolly.

We accept the cross is a guidepost, a sign of life, not a sign of death.

We accept that the simplest path that gives what the mob calls us success is not for us.

It is not our job to jeer or to marginalize or incite or grift.

But it's our job to share, to give, to sacrifice and to love without question.

So I think if this Gospel is a call to our performance review, I think Jesus is saying, “Grace Church, no PIP. Today you're doing a good job.”