Place, Space, Grace
"I will not leave you orphans, I will come to you."
The following is an edited transcription of a homily given on May 3rd, 2026 (the Fifth Sunday of Easter) at St. Matthew’s Church in San Mateo, CA.
Love as the Reason We Gather
I recently had the privilege of witnessing something I won’t soon forget. Fedde, who is Buddhist, and Rosa, who is Catholic, came together to have their civil marriage recognized by the Church. I was honored to be part of a ceremony that integrated both Catholic and Buddhist traditions. Fedde’s family traveled to California from the Netherlands and Rosa’s family is first generation Mexican. Different countries, different languages, different religious traditions—all of it converging in one small space for one reason.
Love. Love is the reason everyone showed up.
And I keep thinking about that. Because we know this, right? We feel it. All of us want to love and to be loved. It might be the most fundamental thing about being human—this gut-level awareness that we are not meant to be alone in this world. And yet most of us have also felt, at some point, maybe more than a few times, that we don’t quite measure up. That we are somehow not worthy of love. Unlovable. If you don’t think you have felt that way, I can guarantee that the person next to you has.
I’d be the first to raise my hand.
God as “Father”
When Jesus speaks of God as Father in the Gospel, it can slide right past us. We pray the Our Father so often that the words barely register anymore. But stop for a moment and imagine hearing that language for the first time—as many of the people standing in front of Jesus would have. Certain devout Jewish men and women, for whom speaking of God with that kind of intimacy, that kind of casual familiarity, would have felt deeply inappropriate. Almost offensive. Too close.
And Jesus just keeps pressing it.
Because what he’s getting at isn’t primarily theological. It’s personal. He is saying: you have a place in this world. Every single one of you. Your existence is not an accident. You are not an orphan just moving through the motions, trying to make the best of things. You were given life. You were given existence. And that—that is a gift that comes from love and can only point back toward love.
The Complicated Reality of Human Fathers
Now, I know that “father” language is not uncomplicated. We live in an increasingly fatherless society. (Maybe it’s why some people identify more with Mary, the Blessed Mother rather than Jesus.) And even those of us who had present, loving fathers—even the very best human father eventually falls short of what Jesus is pointing toward. Human love is always partial. It’s always limited. It can wound us even when it tries not to.
But here’s what I keep coming back to. The love of God the Father doesn’t wait for our earthly fathers to get it right. It doesn’t require a particular family structure or a particular kind of upbringing to reach us. It comes—and I mean this—by any means necessary. Through a stranger’s unexpected kindness. Through a community gathered around two people from very different backgrounds in a wedding ceremony on a Saturday afternoon. Through moments we didn’t plan and couldn’t have predicted.
If we’re willing to loosen our grip just a little on where we expect love to come from, we start to notice that it’s been looking for us all along.
Three Deep Breaths
I like to do this with my students often. When anxiety is running high—and in a high school during finals season, it always is—I’ll stop and ask everyone to take three deep breaths together. Just three.
It sounds almost too simple to mean anything. But I mean it theologically.
Every breath you take is evidence that you are here, and that you are supposed to be here. Nobody breathes by accident. If you are drawing breath right now, something—Someone—is sustaining you in this moment. Your presence is not incidental. It is grace.
Place. Space. Grace. We each take up space because we have been given a place, and that place is pure grace. You don’t earn your way into existence. You receive it. You were received into it. Sit with that for a moment, because it changes everything about how you move through the world.
Finding Your Place
Maybe the question we really need to sit with isn’t Who is God the Father? or even Who is Jesus?—because the honest truth is, the full answer to either of those questions will always be beyond us. Maybe the more useful question is simply: Where is my place?
And the answer, as best I can tell, is: right here. In this situation. With this person who has walked into your life today. The love of God doesn’t require us to go searching for it in some abstract theological category. It meets us in the concrete. In the ordinary. In the face of whoever is standing in front of us right now.
We feel unloved, I think, when we insist that love can only arrive through the channels we’ve already decided are legitimate. But what if God is less interested in our expectations and more interested in just finding us? Wherever we are. However we got there.
That’s what Easter keeps trying to tell us. We are not alone in this.
The love that we desire is as close to us as our next breath.
