Sermon for the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 21 (September 27, 2026)
Transcript
This transcript was generated by YouTube AI and further edited by AI for readability.
May only truth be spoken here and only truth be heard. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.
Today Jesus is asked by the religious authorities, “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you that authority?”
It might be helpful to notice that the scene has changed. Jesus is now in the temple with his disciples.
So when we think about what the religious leaders are asking him—“By what authority do you do these things?”—what are the things that Jesus is doing?
Help me out. Not a rhetorical question. What is Jesus doing?
Healing. Yeah. That always comes first.He’s healing people.
Forgiving sins.
He’s teaching. Teaching them a lesson, ha! —yeah, he is. He is teaching in the temple.
And who remembers the thing that might have been upsetting to the priests and the religious authorities that Jesus did when he got into the temple?
Yeah. He got the tables. Remember the tables where the money was being collected and the gifts were being bought and sold? And what does he do to the tables?
He turns them all over.
So Jesus is making everybody very upset. And so they come to him and they ask him, “By what authority are you doing all these things? And who gave you the authority to make everybody upset?”
And I want us to think about authority today.
I want us to think specifically about our own inner authority, which is God’s gift to us by the Holy Spirit, which is being poured into our hearts.
And each of us has probably had an experience where the inner authority of our hearts is directing us to say or to do or to be something or some way that is going to upset some people.
If that hasn’t happened to you yet in your life as a Christian, it will.
Your inner authority—the Holy Spirit, which has been poured into your heart—will guide and direct you to speak or to do or to be some way that stirs things up.
That’s why Jesus says, “Blessed are you who are persecuted for my sake,” right? “Blessed are you when you are reviled for the sake of my holy name.”
Now, it is not easy, and we’ve talked about this. It’s not easy to learn to attend to the voice of divine authority within.
We’ve talked about the ways that it can be confusing because there are many voices within, and it’s not always clear which ones to listen to, which ones have divine authority. And there are many voices without, right? And it’s not always clear which ones are inspired by divine authority.
But we are all bound to think: What is our own answer to this question?
“By what authority do you do these things? And who gave you that authority?”
And to live lives and to be thinking and acting and praying in such a way that we can stand on the ground of our own divine inner authority, even when assailed by many questions or worse.
Now, our own beautiful Anglican tradition gives us a helpful image about sources of authority.
Have you heard of the three-legged stool?
It’s a three-legged stool, naming three sources of authority when it comes to faith.
If I put a three-legged stool here in front of me and I kicked one of the legs out, what happens to the stool?
Stool fall.
Thank you for the sound effect. [laughter]
So it falls.
So that means that these three all bear the weight of authority, and we do not use them without one another. If we try to take one away, or even if we shorten one leg, make it less important, the faith wobbles, the authority wobbles.
So the three sources of authority are Scripture, tradition, and reason.
Holy Scripture, as divinely inspired by God through human authors in their own particular times and places, and as interpreted through the power of the Holy Spirit in our communities.
Scripture, tradition: the treasure of the teachings of the Church passed down from generation to generation by the faithful.
Sometimes when I teach about tradition, I talk about if I took a rock and I passed it to Gail and Gail held it and touched it, and she passed it to Anne, and we passed it, passed it, passed it through millions and millions of pairs of hands. Would the rock be exactly the same shape at the end?
No. It would be molded by the people who have treasured it from one generation to the next.
So tradition isn’t, “Twenty years ago we did it that way and we better do it that way today.”
Tradition takes the treasure and passes it from hand to faithful hand.
And third, reason, which is not somebody doing math problems in a notebook. You know, it’s not logic, per se, the way we sometimes think of reason. It’s not even rationality.
A more expansive understanding is the intellect and the curiosity and all the questions you bring to church and to your faith.
Also your experience—your own experience, which dances with the Scriptures and the traditions—and also the experience of other people who, by the grace of God, in Christian community, are people you might never have met otherwise.
People who might be very different from you.
People who have had totally different experiences from you.
Their experience is also part of reason.
And the gift that we give one another when we share our experience, who we are, where we came from, and who Jesus is and has been and will be for us, specifically us.
And all of these sources of authority, we are constantly training ourselves in so that we might better attend—better attend—to what in the Book of Kings we hear referred to as the still, small voice.
The inner authority of the Spirit, which is our advocate and our guide, as she speaks to us and as she teaches us who we are to be, what we are to do, and what we ought to say, even when there is a cost.
This week, a colleague of mine—and of Gail’s and of Joseph’s—the Reverend Flourish Clink was in a major New York City newspaper back in March, on a Trans Day of Visibility.
Flourish was invited to preach at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and Flourish proclaimed a sermon in which they explored and wondered what trans people’s experience of God and Jesus and of their own lives might teach the Church, and what trans people’s response to Scripture and to tradition might offer the whole Church.
Like every other sermon at St. John the Divine, it was recorded and it was posted on the internet.
So why did this sermon get into the paper this week, you ask?
Well, I will tell you.
A fundamentalist podcaster—there are lots of them—found this sermon and prepared an episode this week which spread like wildfire through social media, calling out Flourish as an apostate.
And after this major New York City newspaper, known for its screaming headlines and desire to foment outrage, picked up the story, Flourish started to receive threats, right?
Of course.
And then calls that they should be defrocked.
“By what authority do you say these things?
And by what authority do you proclaim the good news to all of God’s people?”
Right?
Even when there is a great cost.
Now, when the cries for Flourish to be defrocked and removed from the priesthood started coming up, our bishop put out his own message.
And I would like to read it to you, remembering that he is the ultimate human authority in our diocese and in this church.
Human authority and divine authority don’t always find each other so nicely, but I believe in our bishop, and through him the Spirit speaks.
So here is what Bishop Matt wrote:
“Every person is made in the image of God.
Our trans siblings are completely beloved by God.
They belong in this church, at the altar and in the pew.
I ordained the Reverend Flourish Clink.
They are a faithful priest and a gifted pastor. I am proud to serve alongside them.
Their voice is important.
When one of us is singled out, we stand together.
That is what the body of Christ does.
We meet Christ in one another.
Amen.”
I read this and I thought, that is so true, and certainly St. James has done this.
If one is singled out, we stand together.
We listen for one another’s authority with love and respect.
And we will continue to do that because we trust the Spirit which has been poured into our hearts.
St. Paul says, “We’ve all got things to work out,” right? “With fear and trembling,” he says.
And again, it is hard, especially when we are being questioned for what we say or what we do or who we are.
We start to doubt.
And I think St. Paul is right that we need to live and speak and act with a certain amount of humility, knowing that we are human beings. We’re not Jesus. Our discernment is not always perfect, and we are subject to many voices.
And yet it is our calling to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ with all the authority that God is pouring into our hearts.
And I want to say this: theologically, you might get it wrong.
Nobody has ever seen God. John 1.
And now we see in a mirror dimly, right? The First Letter to the Corinthians.
But we will see face to face, in that day, on the last day, when we are all reconciled to God and to one another.
And then we will know who said the right things about God and who said the wrong things.
But now we see in a glass darkly, and we spend time day by day with Scripture, and we immerse ourselves in tradition, and we pray our way through listening to our own experience and questions and those of the people that God has given into our care, our community.
But I will—I will say this.
You might get it wrong.
You might.
Maybe Flourish got it wrong. Maybe they got it exactly right.
In that parable that Jesus tells, there are two brothers, right?
One says the wrong thing, but he does what is right.
The other gets the words just right, but he can’t live them.
And that’s the measure for us, because that authority, that still, small voice—there is one thing that you can always be sure that it is saying to you, which is: love the Lord your God with your whole heart and love your neighbor as yourself.
On this it all hangs.
So whether you say or do or are exactly right doesn’t matter so much as that you are chasing the command of that authority, which is love.
Loving neighbor, loving God, loving the people given into our care.
Every person is made in the image of God.
We meet Christ in one another.
Amen.