From The Pulpit: Fr. Daryl T. Hay

Why do we pray for the dead?

Fr. Daryl asked that on All Saints' Day, and his answer was four words long:

**Because we still love them.**

That's it. Not because it changes anything on a ledger somewhere. Because we still hold them in our love, and because we trust that in God's presence those who have chosen to serve him will go on growing in it. As we say at every funeral here: for them, life has changed, not ended.

He began on Patmos — John in exile on a rock the Romans used for troublemakers — and the vision John was given there: a multitude too large to count, from every nation, every tribe, every people and language, gathered around the Lamb.

That's the communion of saints. Not a roster of heroes. Paul used the word *saint* for everybody who said yes. The whole family of God, living and dead, "those whom we love and those whom we hurt," bound together.

Which means, Fr. Daryl said, that we are not alone. We're part of something that runs across time and across space — joined not only to one another and to Christians around the world, but to everyone who has knelt in this room before us.

The Summary of the Law this week, and the best hook in it is a number: 613 commandments, 248 of them “you shall” and 365 “you shall not” — and Jesus picks two. That concrete arithmetic is the kind of thing people stop scrolling for, so the first draft opens there and closes on his neighbor definition, which works in both directions and makes a natural comment prompt.

The second leads on the vocabulary idea instead, walking through law, love, and neighbor in turn. A little more contemplative, a little less punchy.

Both drafts also use Fr. Daryl’s admission that he wasn’t sure he’d explained the David riddle well at the eight o’clock service. That self-deprecation has been the most human moment in several of these sermons now, and it reads well on Facebook.

One caution: he opens with T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton,” and that poem is still under copyright. He seems to be quoting from memory and the audio blurs a word or two, so I’ve paraphrased Eliot in both drafts rather than setting the lines out as verse. I’d keep it that way in the posted version.

"You too, St. Andrew's, are a model."

That's what our bishop told us on Sunday.

Preaching on Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians, Bishop Kai Ryan described a young church in a hard place — a community that got run out of town, harassed, and opposed, and that kept giving to the poor, kept telling the story, kept inviting the neighbors anyway. Paul called them an example to every believer in Macedonia and Achaia.

Then she turned the comparison toward us: the welcome we share with Espíritu Santo, the ways this parish reaches people in downtown Bryan who don't yet know us, and what she heard from Fr. Daryl and the vestry about how God is at work here.

The line that will stay with us came from stewardship leader Terry Parsons:

**"Stewardship is all that you do with all that you have — once you believe."**

Not just the check. The hours. The ministries. How we treat people who aren't like us. All of it.

Which led the bishop to her question for the week: not what do you do once you say yes to God — but **how do you live once you believe?**

"Rejoice in the Lord always."

Paul wrote that from a prison cell.

Fr. Daryl opened Sunday's sermon with that detail, because it changes everything about how the line lands. Paul wasn't comfortable, wasn't safe, and had no idea how his story ended — and he was still writing to thank the Philippians for their kindness to him and to tell them to rejoice.

Then Fr. Daryl shared something he heard on the radio and liked enough to save.

You've probably heard the old counsel to give until it hurts. The speaker he heard didn't believe that was the right spirit at all. His version:

**Give until you smile.**

Not a burden. Not a bill. A joyful practice of putting something where your heart already is — because how we spend says a great deal about what we love.

Fr. Daryl also reminded us that none of us owns this place. "We're kind of like renters. We're here just for a short while." We're the current stewards of St. Andrew's, holding it for the people who come after us the way it was held for us.

Weird hair. All black. Music nobody else was listening to.

That was our rector in high school.

Fr. Daryl told the confirmation class this week that he didn't quite fit in back then — "and it wasn't just because people didn't include me. It's because I didn't want to be included, to some degree."

But youth group was the one place he felt welcomed. The one place he could just be who he was. Looking back now, he said, that was the beginning of the path to ordained ministry, though he had no idea at the time.

Sunday's sermon moved from Moses on Sinai to Paul — a man with every credential who counted all of it as loss for the sake of knowing Christ. Paul called it a gift. But Fr. Daryl pressed on the part we tend to skip:

"Somebody can give me a present, but I still have to open it to enjoy it."

The gift is given. Opening it is a choice we make each day.

A father asks his two sons to go work in the vineyard.

The first says no — then goes anyway.
The second says "Yes, sir" — and never shows up.

Jesus asks the religious leaders which one did the father's will. They get it right. Then He tells them the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom ahead of them.

In Sunday's sermon, Fr. Daryl sat with that sting — and with a confession most of us have felt but rarely say out loud. John the Baptist preached the axe at the root of the tree and the chaff burned with unquenchable fire. Jesus preached "my yoke is easy and my burden is light."

"I like that message," Fr. Daryl admitted, "more than I like John's message."

His point: Jesus never uses His authority to dominate or condemn. He uses it to forgive, to restore, to heal, and to welcome. And like the first son, we may say no and turn away — but by God's grace, we can always change direction.

"All of us, young and old, are really latecomers."

On Sunday, Fr. Daryl sat with the parable of the laborers in the vineyard — the landowner who pays the workers hired at the end of the day exactly what he pays the ones who started at dawn. It offends our sense of fairness. That, Fr. Daryl suggested, is rather the point.

The kingdom of heaven, he reminded us, can't be reduced to any political or economic system we've built. It's a mustard seed, the smallest of them, growing into a great bush. It's yeast worked through the flour until the whole loaf rises. It's a king who wears thorns instead of a crown and hangs on a cross instead of sitting on a throne.

Quoting the theologian Karl Rahner: everything we are and have is God's generous gift. If that's true, then none of us is early and none of us is late — and that, Fr. Daryl said, should make us gentler with one another.

First Sunday of Advent, 30 November 2025

Saint Andrew's Sunday, November 23, 2025.