I was ordained as an Anglican priest in January 2012. Preaching was the first responsibility mentioned in my charge. Since that time, I have preached nearly every Sunday.
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Week by week, I am called to work with passages from strange and very old books and to find ways to make these texts speak to a community and a moment. I am also called to continue to struggle with the texts the church holds to be central. Not to put them forward for any kind of literal belief, or without critique, but to hold that there are things in those texts that speak to us still.
Since 2013, almost all my preaching has been done in the Church of St. Stephen-in-the-Fields, a tiny inner-city Toronto church with a staggeringly diverse congregation. My church has a history of intellectual exploration and progressive theology, a high Anglo-Catholic liturgy with incense and bells, and a deep commitment to serving people marginalized by power.
My homilies address the difficult set of realities that seem to have been brought to a head by the COVID-19 pandemic and escalated afterward: income inequality, extreme poverty, visible homelessness around the community and the church, and, worldwide, a turn toward conspiracy theories and strongman authoritarianism that has gathered a terrifying momentum.
And in the midst of all this, my little community of racialized and queer and neurodiverse people has gathered to carry out ancient rituals and to consider ancient texts even when it seems, as it seemed to some of the writers, that we are staring down the end of all things.
2025 was the year when many things seemed to enter a crisis phase at the same time. The collapse of the United States into authoritarianism, and the effects of this reaching into Canada; the climate crisis escalating rapidly into an undeniable climate catastrophe, with constantly burning wildfires flaring up to consume communities and heat waves threatening lives; genocide in occupied Palestine; and, everywhere, fear and anger and the desperate search for someone to blame.
This is the context into which I have had to preach; it is the time in which I have found myself, in which we all have found ourselves.
Here is some of what needs to be said: No human being is illegal, and borders are a human invention. Trans and gay and lesbian and all queer people are real and beloved. The climate emergency is real, and becoming rapidly worse, and the poor are bearing most of the cost. It is a sin to amass immeasurable wealth while children starve. Pride and greed and vicious self-interest are sinful. We are all one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of you; and an injury to one is an injury to all. And if Jesus is Lord, then no one else is. No one, no leader, no government, no institution, not even the church. We may form strategic alliances with those who share some of the values of the kingdom of God, but none of them deserve, or can hold, our loyalty.
Even to say some of these things now in the United States could be genuinely dangerous. If things go badly enough, it may become dangerous here. It is the preaching of the gospel which had people calling for the deportation, or worse, of Bishop Mariann Budde, who challenged Donald Trump to his face, carefully but firmly, from her pulpit in the National Cathedral, in what one watcher called “her refusal to surrender these ancient teachings to the latest face of empire.”
Bishop Budde’s mandate for that service was to preach on “unity”—if you read the full text, you will see that she takes this and transforms it by moving the focus from the word “unity,” and its often dubious history of papering over conflict, to “community,” the calling to be one body, the only principle by which we can survive as human souls.
I’m going to quote a few lines from a traditional spiritual, which I often allude to, and which gave the title to a great book by the tremendous James Baldwin, lines which give the lie to the idea that the spirituals of the Black church were ever about pie-in-the-sky consolation: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water—the fire next time.”
I think about that, and I think also about the wealthy man who, as the Pacific Palisades fire tore through his neighbourhood, posted to Twitter, “Urgent, need private firefighters who can protect my house, will pay any price,” and about the other person who quickly tweeted, “Urgent, need someone to get this camel through the eye of a needle, will pay any price!”
When the fire really comes down, and it is coming down, wealth will not save you. But maybe, perhaps, being embedded in a community, a community of mutual care and support and service, just might. If we need, in this time, to build a sort of ark, let it be an ark of community and diversity and love and resistance. Most of us will never have an opportunity to preach to the president of the United States. But we are all called to a moment, and we must respond. We all have moments when we can speak out, moments when we can take risks to defend those more vulnerable—or even to defend our own vulnerable selves.
And we have moments when we can build, when we can create, when we can carry on the good life of the created world. One of our volunteers this week drew to my attention a wonderful saying from the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him): “If the Final Hour comes while you have a shoot of a plant in your hands, and it is possible to plant it before the Hour comes, you should plant it.”
