Come and see, Take 1.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
Please be seated.
As a born-and-raised Texan, I had to really restrain myself this Sunday because, as you heard in our epistle reading, this is the Sunday where we hear St. Paul declare that vegetarians are weak and that I guess we should all eat meat. The beef industry loves this reading. And yet, I like vegetables, and I like a lot of vegetarians, so I'm not sure that is exactly what Paul was saying; so we won't preach on that today.
Rather, look at how every year around mid-September, right about now, there is a familiar current of anxiety that ripples out throughout Westchester, and throughout the country really, especially the Northeast. The train platforms crowd back up, inboxes overflow more than usual, and calendars get ruthlessly booked, and then overbooked, and then over-overbooked. Kids hoist heavy textbooks or iPads onto their shoulders, adults shove their laptops into their totes, and our culture begins humming again with that favorite, relentless lie it tells us all: that we are only as valuable as what we can accomplish.
I don't think that cultural script is new; I think it is probably as old as Pharaoh.
In our reading from Exodus, we heard about the parting of the Red Sea. When I think of the parting of the Red Sea, many times it feels very cinematic: towering walls of pristine water on each side, theatrical thunder. But if you stick with the dust and grit of the text itself, I don't think Exodus is about a tidy, Hollywood-created miracle. I think it's about a traumatized, exhausted people realizing that the empire holding them hostage does not actually get the final word.
Picture them on that shore. Behind them is truly the greatest military-industrial machine the ancient world had known (Pharaoh’s chariots, a brutal status quo of endless brick quotas, extraction, and human disposability). In front of them lies an impassable sea. They are wedged between imperial violence and an unforgiving abyss. In sheer panic, they start crying out to Moses, wondering if they were brought into the wilderness just to die right there in the dark.
God does not drop an airtight escape plan from the sky. God doesn’t demand that the Israelites muster up heroic, unshakable faith. Instead, the angel of God moves behind the Israelites, placing a divine presence through a pillar of cloud between their vulnerable bodies and the machinery of their oppressors. The cloud provides darkness to the empire, but light to the trembling crowd.
And then, God blows an east wind all night long. This isn’t God just chopping off the water to make walls of water; it is an east wind so powerful that it clears the ground in front of them.
Liberation rarely arrives as an instantaneous flash of magic. More often, it begins as a stubborn, quiet wind working through the dark while we are terrified, carving a narrow, muddy path right through the middle of chaos.
God does not whisk them over the water, but rather tells them to put one foot in front of the other and walk straight down into the deep. They had to step onto that churning seabed while the waters were still held at bay, licking at their feet. Faith for them was not absolute certainty; it was taking the next step, and the next step, and the next step into that mud, trusting that the God of life was pulling them toward the other shore, toward a shore of freedom.
The tragedy of empire, however, is that even when we escape its physical borders, we carry its ledgers in our minds. When you spend your life in a system built on extraction, debt, and conditional worth, you start treating God, each other, and yourself like Pharaoh treated you.
Looking at the Gospel lesson, this is precisely what Jesus confronts. Peter walks up to Jesus wanting an audit: “Lord, how many times should I forgive them? As many as seven?” Peter is trying to be generous (seven is a lot of times), but he is still thinking like an accountant. He wants a cap; he wants to know when the ledger closes so he can finally settle everything and release a statement.
Jesus shatters that ledger. He says, “Not seven times, but seventy-seven times.” In these types of writings, scholars have mostly agreed this does not necessarily mean literally seventy-seven times; it means infinity, a number so high you lose count.
The parable that follows, of the unforgiving servant who is pardoned from an astronomical debt only to turn around and choke a peer over pocket change, is a stark example of what happens when we refuse to let liberation sink into our bones. The servant was freed from the financial burden, but he remained spiritually enslaved to the arithmetic of retribution.
Paul sees the exact same spiritual sickness in Rome. In our reading from Romans, we hear Paul talking about a community tearing itself apart over dietary scruples and sacred calendars, measuring who is truly faithful and who is falling short. Paul cuts straight through that posturing and asks, “Who are you to pass judgment on another’s servant?” We do not belong to our self-righteousness, and we do not belong to our anxieties; we belong to the Lord.
We need to drop the clipboard; we need to drown the scorecards. Because this is what liberation looks like: this is where the phrase you've seen on many things, “Come and see,” ceases to be church marketing and becomes simply good news.
For too long, the church has treated evangelism as institutional recruitment: a desperate scramble to fill pews, balance budgets, or enforce rigid dogmas.
Invitation is an act of liberation. It is pointing toward a gap in the waters and saying, “Look, the sea is opening. You don’t have to carry this crushing weight alone anymore.”
When the first disciples asked Jesus where he was staying, he didn't hand them an entrance exam. He didn't ask for their credentials. He said, “Come and see.” It was an openhearted invitation to step out of the machinery of performance and discover what God was already doing.
In 1898, nineteen Episcopalians gathered in the Harrison firehouse. They had no stone sanctuary, no massive endowments, and no blueprint for the next century. They were an ordinary group of people standing on their own uncertain shore, simply trusting that the Holy Spirit could breathe life into a humble beginning. And for 128 years now, people have walked into All Saints, bringing their real lives, their questions, their heartbreaks, their doubts, and their exhausted hope, and discovering that this table has room for all of us.
That is why today we invite you to bring up any bag you carry through your week: backpacks, laptop sleeves, briefcases, tool bags, diaper bags, totes, whatever it might be. After the announcements, we will do a blessing of these bags. We do this because the God of the Exodus does not stay confined behind an altar railing or church doors. God goes with us into commuter trains, classrooms, boardrooms, hospital rooms, and the quiet loneliness of an empty kitchen. The Holy Spirit moves at ground level, breathing courage into the everyday rhythms of our lives.
Looking back at those ancient Israelites, when they finally reached the other side of the sea, Miriam picked up a tambourine. Miriam, who had watched Hebrew baby boys thrown into the Nile, who had known the backbreaking cruelty of the brickyards, who carried generations of trauma in her body, did not wait for the wilderness journey to be over. She didn't wait until they reached the promised land. Right there on the wet sand, with miles and miles of uncharted desert ahead of them, she grabbed her tambourine and led the people (the women first) in defiant song.
Joy in the kingdom of God is not the naive absence of struggle. Joy is an act of resistance.
Joy is Miriam’s tambourine rattling against the memory of empire, proclaiming that Pharaoh's power has drowned and God has made a way out of no way. Miriam's tambourine proclaims that the impossible is never impossible when God is on your side.
The east wind is blowing, the water is parting, and Miriam out there has picked up the tambourine. It is time to spread joy throughout the world. It is time to step onto that path, foot after foot, and come and see what Jesus has in store.
Amen.
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