January 18, 2026 - Fr. Steve Moore
The grace and peace of God our Father, the love of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
While not making national news, last week the Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire, Bishop Rob Hirschfield, made a splash on social media with a talk he gave at a prayer vigil following the murder of Renee Good in Minnesota.
In that speech, he talked about how words and statements have fallen short. And if you haven't seen it, it's worth a look on YouTube. He noted that he's told the clergy of his diocese that it's time to put your affairs in order and make sure that your wills are written, because this is a time when we might have to put our bodies on the line. He recounts the martyrs of our church, who not through words but through deeds, such as Jonathan Merrick Daniel, a seminarian from New Hampshire who died in the South putting his body in front of a shotgun blast to save a young African-American teenager working for voting rights, serve as an example of how Christians are called to stand up and be present.
Especially during times of civil unrest, times of division in our country, this may seem rather poignant. It may seem somewhat abstract to some of us, but we have been here before. In fact, this is where we live, I would argue.
Our first reading from the book of the prophet Isaiah was written during a time of exile. Sometimes I want to say, if you think things are bad now, they were worse. The people of Israel, the people who had been saved from Egypt by Moses, those who were called in covenant by God to Abraham, those who had been reigning under the glory of King David and King Solomon, were conquered and sent into exile in the land of Babylon. They were defeated and demolished. There was a question whether Israel would even continue to exist.
And so these prophetic words of Isaiah talk about that experience: “Before we were born, we were set aside for you.” But Israel said, “I have labored in vain. I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity, yet surely my cause is with the Lord and my reward is with my God.”
That feeling of having labored in vain, that feeling of having fallen short, resonated, I believe, deeply with the people of Israel—perhaps in a similar way to what many of us are feeling in this day and age. We had thought that our world would be different, that the ideals of our faith—of love, of justice, and community—while we might not agree, we could at least work together and care for those who are in need.
And yet God said to the people then, as he says to us now, “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach the ends of the earth.” There is in the promises of God, hidden, locked within like a seed within the earth during the winter, the promise of hope and new life that cannot, that will not, be extinguished.
In our gospel reading today, it is rather curious that John the Baptizer sees Jesus and identifies him: “Behold, this is the Lamb of God.” Now, that was not a term used for the coming of the Messiah. People would not have been like, “The Lamb of God—great.” The Lamb of God would echo the lamb of sacrifice. That is the first identification of who Jesus is.
And it gives us a clue to Jesus’ glory, which is a crucified glory. The suffering Messiah is the one that we follow, and we are challenged to keep our eyes ever upon that fact, lest we fall back into the complacency of so many Christians who speak in the language of power and domination and wealth rather than love and justice and peace.
This weekend we celebrate the legacy of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And we preachers have lots of choices. He was a great preacher. He has so many good quotes. But I’m not going to go to his mountaintop speech, or A Letter from a Birmingham Jail, or his quote about “hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that,” or “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Look, I just dropped them all in one little bit.
But I want to focus on his last book, Where Do We Go from Here: From Chaos to Community. Because in that book, he is looking at his legacy as a mature person writing in 1968, just before his death. And he noted in that work:
“Among the forces of white liberalism, the church has a special obligation. It is the voice of a moral and superior authority on earth. Yet no one observing the history of the church in America can deny the shameful fact that it has been an accomplice in structuring racism into the architecture of American society. The church, by and large, sanctioned slavery and surrounded it with a halo of moral respectability. It also cast a mantle of sanctity over the system of segregation.
“The unpardonable sin, thought the poet Milton, was when a man so repeatedly said, ‘Evil, be thou my good,’ so consistently lived a lie that he lost the capacity to distinguish between good and evil. America’s segregated churches come dangerously close to being in that position.
“Of course, there have been marvelous exceptions. Over the last five years, many religious bodies—Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish—have been in the vanguard of the civil rights struggle and have sought desperately to make the ethical insights of our Judeo-Christian heritage relevant on the question of race. But the church as a whole has been too negligent on the question of civil rights. It has too often blessed a status quo that needed to be blasted and reassured a social order that needed to be reformed.
“So the church must acknowledge its guilt, its weak and vacillating witness, its all-too-frequent failure to obey the call of servanthood. Today, the judgment of God is upon the church for its failure to be true to its mission. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.”
And we find ourselves in that time and space now. For many, the church is irrelevant, something to be passed on Sunday morning rather than to be entered into. And so many have abandoned the faith, not because of a lack of faith in Jesus or God, but because of a lack of witness from those of us who profess that we do.
When the disciples of John saw Jesus identified as the Lamb of God, they went in search of him. You have that curious exchange—Jesus basically saying, “What do you want?” and the disciples saying, “Well, where do you stay?” Rather strange, but it worked. And he invited them to come and be with him.
The challenge, I believe, for all of us is to seek to come and be with Jesus—the person of Jesus—not a church building, not a philosophy, not an ideal, but the real, lived experience of the words and actions of Jesus who laid his own life on the line, whose words were most often about not judging, about forgiving, words of comfort to the poor and the oppressed—the Beatitudes, the different ways in which he brought healing to those around him.
When we live out that experience of Jesus, we reclaim our moral authority. When we live into that reality and we recognize, as St. Paul says, that in Jesus Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free—skin color, sexual orientation, gender identity—none of it is as important as our connection with our God, which was present, as we read in Isaiah, before we were born. We are connected to this God.
It is living out of that reality that marks us in this moment. No matter what people say about the importance of power over all else, or our right to act over our own personal morality because we want to do it, we as believers, as followers of Jesus Christ, are charged to put our words and our bodies on the line.
Who knows what that will require of each and every one of us. And yet, we at Grace are called always to reflect on how we are doing in this walk of discipleship. Are we drawing close? Are we living deeply the values of the gospel? Or are we going our own way?
