A sermon on
Luke 21:5-19
given November 16, 2025
As many of you will have heard by now, we elected a new bishop yesterday. God willing, on May 23rd, 2026, The Rev’d Sarah Fisher will be consecrated as the 9th Bishop of the Diocese of East Carolina. And as many of you will have heard, no doubt, she is also a… (wait for it)
human being
. I know. Imagine: A human being. As a bishop. [gasp]. Though the funny the thing about human beings, especially lately—is that we’re remarkably good at forgetting that other human beings are, in fact, human beings, too.
Wendell Berry writes about this in his book
The Need to Be Whole
. He says: “
A great many people now seem to have abandoned any willing membership in the great category of ‘all humans,’… Instead, they have withdrawn into subcategories composed of people like themselves.”
We don’t ask “Where are you from?” anymore because the answer is likely “Nowhere” or “Everywhere.” We don’t ask about your story, your people, your place—because we’ve become too mobile- physically and electronically, too rootless and too disconnected to bother. Instead, we sort ourselves into categories: political party, sexual orientation, racial identity, etc. And once we’ve sorted ourselves, we can dismiss everyone outside our category as representatives of their category rather than persons with a story.
Berry puts it sharply: “To those who identify themselves by political category, every person is a merely representative person.” To liberals, all conservatives are the same. To conservatives, all liberals are the same. We reduce each other to slogans, to threats, to caricatures. And we withdraw into our subcategories and barricade ourselves against the difficulty of seeing each other as fully human.
And that’s exactly what Jesus is confronting in today’s Gospel. The disciples are standing in front of the Temple—this massive monument to their religious identity, their subcategory as “God’s people”—and they’re impressed. They see the structure. The institution. The monument that tells them who they are and who’s outside. And Jesus says: “The days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.”
The disciples panic. If the Temple falls, who are we? If the monument that defines our category collapses, what’s left? And Jesus says: You. You’re left. Human beings. Not categories. Not representatives. Not monuments. People. Vulnerable, fragile, fully human people. And that’s exactly where God meets you.
“By your endurance, you will gain your souls.” Or a better translation: “By your endurance, you will gain yourselves.” You’ll discover who you actually are when the monuments fall and the categories fail and all you have left is your shared humanity.
Berry offers that, beyond sloganeering and protests, an earnest and ongoing conversation between persons of goodwill is essential if we are to live together. And he’s right. But here’s what the Church offers that Berry doesn’t quite name: earnest conversation between persons of goodwill is impossible unless you first see the other person as a person—not a category, not a threat, not a representative of all the people you disagree with—but a particular human being with a story, a place, a life.
And that’s what Jesus does. That’s who Jesus is. The God who doesn’t avoid human beings but becomes fully human—not just as a representative of all humanity, but as a particular person: Jewish, male, poor, from Nazareth, a carpenter’s son. Jesus doesn’t flatten our distinctions or pretend we’re all the same. He shows us that being fully human means being fully particular—and that God meets us in our particularity, not in spite of it.
Yesterday afternoon, when Sarah Fisher learned she’d been elected bishop, she responded to our diocese with these words:
“Before a major transition in my life some years ago, when I was feeling that moment right before everything changes, Paul’s words came to me: God is doing in us infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.’ And I think this is so true for East Carolina: that infinitely more than we can ask or imagine is happening. And I see it in so many of your ministries. So I think we keep praying to the Holy Spirit, that the Holy Spirit will reveal infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.”
Infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Not because we’ve sorted ourselves correctly. Not because we’ve built the right monuments or defended the right categories. But because God keeps showing up in particular human beings—messy, complicated, fully human people—and inviting us to see each other as persons.
Sarah Fisher is a woman (unlike the previous 8 bishops of our diocese). She’s married to a woman (just like the previous 8 bishops of our diocese). And she’s a human being called by God to serve as our ninth bishop. All of those things are true. They are parts of what make her fully who she is, but not the sum. Yet, the whole of who she is is exactly who God is calling to lead us in this moment.
And if some part of that makes you uncomfortable, ok. Sit with it. Endure. Because that discomfort might be the place where you stop seeing a category and start seeing a person. It might be the place where you come back to yourself, in the rubble of all the monuments and slogans and subcategories we all build. There, you may remember that you, too, are a particular human being with a story- not a caricature, not a statistic, not a genre- but a person. Beloved. Known. Called by name.
That’s what Jesus does: He calls people by name. Zacchaeus. Mary. Peter. Lazarus. He sees them in their particularity and says: You. Come. Follow. Be whole. And the Church, when it’s being the Church, does the same. We don’t gather here as subdivisions. We gather as a body. We break bread together. We tell our stories. We learn each other’s names. We ask things like “Where are you from?” and we listen to the answer. We practice being fully human with each other, because we follow the God who became fully human to show us how.
For all our sakes, God has some work ahead of us. Enduring with Jesus never involves a passive withdrawal into our subcategories. It involves showing up. It’s staying in conversation. It’s continuing to see each other as fully human even when the world makes that hard. It’s believing that God is doing infinitely more than we can ask or imagine—not in the monuments we build or the categories we defend, but in the messy, complicated, beautiful particularity of every human being God calls to us.
Sarah ended her response yesterday by saying: “Until I see you in person, please know I’m continuing to pray for you. I bid your prayers for me, and I can’t wait to join you.”
I
can’t wait to join
you
. She can’t wait. I imagine that’s because she sees what the world needs to see in us: not categories or threats or slogans, but people. Particular people with stories worth hearing, lives worth knowing.
And that’s the gospel the world is dying to hear right now. In a culture hell-bent on reducing people to something less than who they truly are, our Church can stand up and says: No. You are a person. You have a name. You have a story. You are beloved. And so is the person standing next to you. We are a Church that refuses to reduce people to anything less than who they are to God—and so we are here again learning to see what God sees around this table: people who are cherished, known, and welcome.
That’s the good news. That’s what Jesus came to show us. That God sees us—all of us—as holy, beloved human beings. And when we practice seeing each other that way, we become the Church the world needs.
Thanks be to God.
View profile for The Rev’d Andrew Cannan
The Rev’d Andrew Cannan
Rector
View profile
for The Rev’d Andrew Cannan
The Rev’d Andrew Cannan
The Rev’d Andrew Cannan
Rector
Andrew appreciates the diversity of the journeys that bring people to find a home at St. Paul’s. He was baptized a Methodist, majored in religious studies at a Baptist university, married a Presbyterian, received a Master of Divinity as a Devil (the blue, basketball-crazed variety), and was ordained in a congregationalist church prior to finding his way as an Episcopal priest. “I was drawn to this strange Church that accepted the messiness of life and embraced it with grace and dignity. That sounded like a place where I could learn to live with God. That and I was always wanted to dress like Johny Cash.” In their downtime, Andrew and his wife, Ashley, enjoy East Carolina evenings in the backyard with their sons. On days off, he likely won’t be found fishing a remote section of the Eastern Pamlico that he is reluctant to disclose.
Category:
News & Events
,
The Diocese of East Carolina
,
Worship
Post navigation
Previous:
Previous post:
New Realm Privacy Settings