January 25, 2026 - Fr. Steve Moore
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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.
In a recent address last Tuesday, Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, delivered a speech at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. In that pretty momentous speech, he made this statement: In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later president, wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless. In it, he asked a simple question: How did the communist system sustain itself?
And his answer began with a grocer. Every morning the shopkeeper places a sign in his window: “Workers of the world, unite.” He doesn't believe it. No one does. But he places the sign anyway to avoid trouble—a sign of compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper in the street does the same, the system persists, not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.
Havel called this living within a lie. The system's power comes not from its truth, but from everyone's willingness to perform as if it were true. And its fragility comes from the same source. When even one person stops performing—when the green grocer removes his sign—the illusion begins to crack.
Powerful words to identify and name perhaps the moment we are in, in our world, when our perceived narrative of how our world works has cracked and we recognize that we have lived in half-truths. For many of us, this, I imagine, is shocking—very difficult to take in.
But for those of us who are Christians, this is nothing new. In fact, we've dealt with this kind of division from time immemorial. In our second reading today, from the First Letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul is writing to the church of Corinth, warning them about division. Notice it is about division, not difference.
Many scripture scholars will point to the possibility that in the church at Ephesus there were at least two Christian communities—a Johannine and a Pauline community—that seemed to exist side by side and yet were following different apostles. But Paul is talking about something different here. People are saying, “Well, I follow Paul.” “Well, I follow Apollos.” “Well, I follow Cephas, Peter.” And Paul says, maybe even some of you follow Jesus—which is the point, right?
Divisions creep in. We live within lies. We live in times where illusions give us comfort, but they also offer us half-truths. It's certainly the story of my life. I love the church and I hate the church. I'm being very honest.
I grew up Roman Catholic. I loved my church. It was what brought me safety during difficult times in my adolescence—when my parents divorced, when all sorts of things in adolescence upset me or set me astray. It was my church community primarily who anchored me. My priests were wonderful. My parish was supportive. And in that time, in the little town of Hudson Falls, New York, we had eight Sunday Masses and a church at least twice this size, and most of them were pretty full.
But I was also ordained in the wake of the clergy sexual abuse crisis. And that church that I had loved crumbled before me to the point where I couldn't minister in that church any longer. Now, many of you probably wondered if I left the priesthood to get married. I'm happy I did, but that's not why I left. Why I left was because I had a shaken faith in the church.
Now, granted, I found my way into another denomination and I still consider myself in the church, but I live very differently. And for all of us, I think we live in that world, because the idea that the church itself is this wonderful place where we all get along is something that's crumbled long ago.
Now, we can't deny that we have within us those very beliefs that were stamped upon us as children. As the great American poet and essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote, “We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe. The record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of superstitious fears which were early implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them.” He will still feel as the famous woman did about ghosts: “I don't believe in them, but I'm afraid of them nonetheless.”
We all live with these half-truths that we cling to, that still haunt us. And at the same time, we have to, with clear eyes, recognize that the times in which we live and the communities in which we live are not perfect—made up of broken people, and yet striving to do the good.
This weekend, as we gather at Grace to celebrate our annual meeting, it is perhaps a time when we are called to re-examine our lives in this community. The presuppositions that this church was built upon were true. Our foremothers and forefathers were those who believed that God had called them in this time and in this place to witness to the reality of Jesus and the Spirit in our world in powerful ways. And we are to do so specifically here, in this community.
We can look back over our history and be proud of all that we've been given, all that those who have gone before us have accomplished. And yet, in this time and in this place, with all these new challenges—when the world order seems to crumble, when American citizens are murdered on our streets for trying to help one another, when we are left to feel confused and rudderless, and so many people believe that faith is irrelevant—we are called to choose a different way.
We are called to be different. In his work Does God Need the Church?, Gerhard Lohfink wrote:
“No matter how much the cult of relics was corrupted, in all centuries it reflected the Church's knowledge that community is impossible without some people who have given their whole lives. To that extent, community is something dangerous. Where it exists, it lives out of the death and resurrection of Jesus—or not at all. Where it exists, it has a share in the great history through which God leads God's people. Therefore, it cannot be made, but it is created by God alone.”
Hence also the many disappointed people who come together to make something new for themselves, usually to meet their own needs, only to see the new things slip through their fingers. If we at Grace gather together to meet our own needs, we will fall short. And if we gather together to do something that seems to make sense, we will fall short.
Because Paul reminds the community at Corinth that the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us it is the power to be saved by God. This is foolishness to the world around us. This is foolishness, Christy Noem said, to the words of Rob Hirschfield, the Bishop of New Hampshire, whom I quoted last week. And Bishop Hirschfield's response was, she's right—it is foolishness, but that's what we are called to.
You and I are called to be fools again in a new way. And if we imagine that this will make sense, then we are going to fall short. All we know is that God has called us to be together here at this time and in this place, at this moment in history. We don't know why. We're not exactly sure how. But we do know that if we trust in the action of God in our midst, we will not fail.
Jesus walks on the scene proclaiming that the kingdom of God has come near. We are all struggling to figure out what exactly that means. But what we do know is that if each and every one of us responds to the call of God within us in this community, in this time, in this place as Grace Church, we will do foolish and amazing things.
We can do foolish and amazing things. But we have to recognize that the half-truths and the divisions that we get caught up in are the things that will ultimately lead us astray. Isaiah tells us that the people who have walked in darkness have seen a great light. Indeed, we have. We may not see the whole path ahead of us, but we're not meant to.
We do recognize that we stand on the shoulders of giants, those who have come before us. And we should also recognize that with God as our guide, we will never go astray.
