From the Burden of Doing to the Grace of Being

Old Testament Reading: Psalm 139:1–3, 13–16 (NRSVUE)

O Lord, you have searched me and known me.

You know when I sit down and when I rise up;

you discern my thoughts from far away.

You search out my path and my lying down

and are acquainted with all my ways...

For it was you who formed my inward parts;

you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Wonderful are your works;

that I know very well.

My frame was not hidden from you,

when I was being made in secret,

intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.

In your book were written

all the days that were formed for me,

when none of them as yet existed.

New Testament Reading: Luke 19:1–10 (NRSVUE)

He entered Jericho and was passing through it. A man was there named Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was rich. He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way.

When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.” So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him.

All who saw it began to grumble and said, “He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.”

Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.”

Then Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.”

I. Introduction: The Holy Curiosity of New Beginnings

It is a profound joy and a privilege to stand before you today, to look out at your faces, and to share in fellowship with this congregation for the very first time. Whenever a preacher steps into a new pulpit, there is a beautiful, holy anticipation in the room. You are likely wondering who I am, where I come from, and what kind of heart I bring to this sacred space. And I look out in great curiosity and wonder about your diverse and beautiful stories and the community of faith you have created in this beautiful place. I look forward to getting to know you better! But first, we have the little matter of a sermon to get out of the way!

So, let's take a deep breath together and get to the heart of the matter.

How do you judge your own existence? When you lay your head down on the pillow at night, what is the metric you use to decide if your day—if you—had value? Is it the number of items crossed off your to-do list? The progress made on a career goal? The sheer exhaustion of feeling like you ran as fast as you could just to stay in place?

We live in a world that is constantly grading us. We are measured, evaluated, and weighed by our performance, our productivity, and our bank accounts. In a thousand subtle and overt ways, the world tells us that we have to earn our right to occupy space, to be respected, and to be loved. We carry this quiet, heavy pressure every single day.

But look at how the Psalmist challenges this entire framework:

“O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away... You knit me together in my mother’s womb.”

Notice what is completely absent from those verses. There are no performance metrics. There are no achievements listed, no tasks completed, and no milestones achieved. God’s deep, intimate, and eternal knowledge of us has absolutely nothing to do with our performance. Indeed, the Bible is full of verses where God tells us to be still and reminds us that it is by God’s grace alone that we are loved.

Yet, look at how we live. How much of our daily lives do we actually spend trapped in high-stakes doing—measuring our worth by our frantic production—compared to how much we focus on the quiet sanctuary of simply being?

We are a society obsessed with action, with production, with checking boxes and running the endless treadmill of achievement. We often treat our lives not as a gift, but as a relentless, exhausting list of tasks to complete to prove we have a right to exist. And some of us are wired more like that than others.

If you are looking for a case study in how to get the balance of doing vs. being completely, monumentally wrong... well, look no further than the person standing in this pulpit today. Until recently, my life has been a pretty good example of how to focus entirely on the doing at the expense of the being.

II. Getting it Wrong: The Childhood Blueprint

My obsession with doing took shape decades ago in the state of Iowa. As a young boy navigating the deep, heavy, and quiet shame of growing up both overweight and gay in a world that did not know what to do with me, I felt profoundly vulnerable.

I learned very quickly that the world can be an unkind place for a child who doesn't fit the mold. And so, as we all do in our own ways, I looked for a shield. I looked for a way to protect myself, and I found it in hyper-achievement.

At a very young age, I cracked the code. I figured out exactly what made the adults happy, what brought praise, and what made me feel—if only for a fleeting, desperate second—like I was safe. Like I was loved just a little bit more.

Before I had even reached my eighteenth birthday, I threw myself into a frenzied state of doing:

• I brought home pristine, flawless report cards, ensuring every single letter was an 'A'.

• At one point between church and high school I was singing in 5 choirs at the same time

• I discovered I had a natural knack for foreign languages, speaking Spanish fluently by the time I was 15, and navigating Japanese by the time I graduated.

• I collected every gold star the academic system could hand out—AP classes, the National Honor Society, and every accolade I could possibly grasp, eventually entering college as a second-semester sophomore and graduating with honors with a double major, a minor, and a year abroad.

  
  

I thought that if I did enough, I would finally be enough. But it was an exhausting, bottomless pit. I was learning to measure my worth entirely on performance, convincing myself that love was conditional on what I could produce. And despite growing up in a very loving UCC church, I felt totally disconnected from God’s grace. I had it all backwards. What we DO should flow from who we ARE, yet I was ignoring the liberating truth of God’s grace. But it was going to take me a few more decades to finally get that through my thick skull!

III. The Cost of the Hustle

I left Iowa when I was invited to move to Washington, D.C., for my first corporate job. And then, the hustle truly began. I eventually moved to Europe. I learned to speak five languages fluently, lived in four different countries, and climbed the corporate ladder rung by painful rung to the level of Vice President on the board of a successful technology company up in Arlington. I checked every single box the modern world hands us to define "success." Cars, houses, vacations—each one better than the last.

And for a long time, it actually felt like happiness.

But a funny thing happens when you finally climb high enough. You get to the top of the summit, you look down, and you realize you were climbing the wrong mountain. The illusion completely vanishes. From that height, looking out at the landscape of our world—especially in these fractured, heavy, and deeply unjust times—I could see that the land below me was not a land of fairness, equity, or mercy.

I looked at my life and realized that while I had well-being in abundance, my soul was starting to starve. I had spent my entire life making money for large corporations and wealthy individuals—some of whom were good people and some of whom weren’t. After decades of working to make rich people richer and opening my heart to the injustice and suffering and disconnection from God in this world, my heart stopped caring about the metrics of the corporate ladder.

It started longing for something infinitely larger, sweeter, and more holy. My heart started longing not just for my own comfort, but for the true well-being, the thriving, and the flourishing of all of God’s children, especially our LGBTQIA+ siblings who have been told repeatedly throughout our lives that God does not love us, while nothing could be farther from the truth.

And that’s how I ended up here, having started the long process of walking away from that world, and beginning to devote my life to the church. Because I finally realized that my soul’s deepest longing was not to do more, but to be present to the suffering and the joy of God's people, and help them to see that they are fearfully and wonderfully made as beloved children of God for who they are, not for what they do.

V. Zacchaeus: A Change in Being

Zacchaeus was the ultimate man of doing. He was a chief tax collector. He had climbed to the very top of that deeply corrupt, transactional, and extraction-based Roman system. He had spent his entire life viewing his neighbors as line items, exploiting them to secure his own wealth, safety, and access to power. He had the wealth. He had the status. But his life was empty of peace. He and his kind were universally despised by their fellow Jews.

So, he climbs a sycamore tree just to catch a glimpse of Jesus. And what does Jesus do? He doesn't look up at Zacchaeus and demand to see his resume. He doesn't ask how many taxes he collected, how many languages he speaks, or how much wealth he has accumulated.

Jesus looks up and says, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.”

Jesus invites him down out of the climb, out of the transaction, and into a relationship.

And then, we see this incredible moment: Zacchaeus stands there and says, “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.”

Now, look closely at that moment. It is easy to look at his pledge of restitution as just more doing—more action, more transactions. But that is not what Jesus blesses. Jesus does not look at the financial math of Zacchaeus's pledge and say, "Ah, excellent, the math checks out, now you are saved."

No. Jesus blesses the profound shift in Zacchaeus’s values. He blesses the radical transformation of his heart. He blesses his new way of being in the world—moving from a state of extraction to a state of relationship; from greed to generosity; from isolation to community.

His transformation proves a glorious, liberating truth: It is never too late in life to have a change of heart and change your direction.

VI. The Checklist and the Soul

But I have to be completely honest with you this morning. This struggle to prioritize being over doing is not just a ghost from my corporate past. It is a live, active, and very humbling challenge in my life right now. Even in ministry!

My journey to this pulpit has been a long one. For the last four years, I have walked the path of a Member in Discernment. If all goes as planned, and if my heart is examined by my conference and found worthy, I will likely be ordained this fall pending a call from a congregation to be their pastor.

It is a milestone I have longed for, prayed for, and worked toward. It is how I want to spend the rest of my life. Yet, even for those who devote their lives to ministry, there is a profound irony in this journey. God never fails to have a sense of humor.

See, the United Church of Christ is a beautiful, progressive denomination. We preach radical grace, spiritual freedom, and the unconditional love of God. We explicitly proclaim that we are a "still-speaking" church where your soul is valued just as you are. The ordination path is meant to be a deep, prayerful journey of the spirit, a holy time of listening to where God is leading.

And yet, the very moment you step onto this spiritual path, what is the first thing the institution hands you?

A checklist.

An endless, towering list of tasks to accomplish to enter ministry. Classes to take, theological papers to write, psychological evaluations to pass, background checks to run, and committee after committee to satisfy.

For me, even in the church, it is so incredibly easy to turn even a holy calling into another corporate ladder to climb. It is so easy to fall back into my childhood coping mechanisms of hyper-achievement, trying to "do" my way into ministry, trying to perform for committees to prove my worth, rather than letting my soul rest in the hands of the Spirit.

VII. The Paradox of Preparation

It is easy to look at the checklists of life—whether they are corporate KPIs, academic degrees, or even ministry requirements—and see them as the enemy of our souls. But perhaps the grace of being is not about escaping the checklists altogether, but changing how we carry them. When we treat the checklist as our source of identity, we drown. But when we treat it as the latticework upon which we construct HOW we want to show up in the world as human beings, we can begin to breathe into God’s grace.

It was precisely when I felt most buried by the checklist of preparation for ministry in these last few months where I finally realized that - even in the doing - it is the BEING that is still most important.

VIII. The Holy Work of Presence: Clinical Pastoral Education

Over the past five months, I have been deeply engaged in Clinical Pastoral Education—the hands-on chaplaincy training where you are invited to walk directly into the quiet, complex landscapes of human suffering. In those moments of spiritual care, I discovered something that completely broke open my old understanding of success.

The people sitting in front of me didn’t care about what I had done.

They didn’t care about my corporate titles. They didn’t care that I speak five languages, that I lived in Europe, or how many BMWs I have owned. None of my past achievements mattered one bit. They only cared that I could be with them. They only cared that I could sit beside them in their pain, listening with deep compassion and radical humility, and be the physical presence through which God expressed God’s loving presence.

I think of a man I visited in a quiet, sterile hospital room who was suffering from terminal cancer. He didn't need a presentation, a checklist, or a strategy. He just needed someone to sit in the heavy quiet of his room and hold space for his fear.

I think of another man who came to Cathedral of Hope in the grips of an acute episode of auditory hallucinations. He was terrified, disoriented, and desperately seeking a blessing and help. In that moment, I could not "do" anything to fix his clinical reality. My only job was to hollow out my ego, to quiet my own frantic need to find a solution, and simply be the presence and love of God for that person in that terrifying moment.

That is the kind of relationship, and that is the kind of work, I am called to now. It is not the hustle of achievement. It is the holy work of being.

X. A Message for Every Season

I look out at this beautiful congregation today, and I see a community rich in life experience. Some of you are here at the beginning of your lives, and I hope you will consider this message as you begin your journey. Others are in the autumn and winter seasons, and you have already climbed your mountains. You have worked the long hours, raised the families, built the careers, achieved the goals, and done the incredibly heavy lifting of life.

Perhaps some of you look at your past and see years spent exhausted by the demands of doing. Perhaps you feel the twinges of regret for times when relationships became transactional, or when you chased accolades at the expense of your soul. Perhaps you feel like the years have marched on, and it is simply "too late" for you to experience a deep, radical transformation.

If that is you, I want you to look at Zacchaeus. I want you to look at me, entering my sixties, finally realizing that the true longing of my soul was not to achieve, but to help others experience the unconditional grace of God.

It is never, ever too late to climb down from the tree of performance.

Whether you are eighteen, fifty-eight, or ninety-eight, God's invitation to experience true well-being, happiness, and grace has no expiration date. Your worth today is not measured by what you can do for this church, or what you can do for this world, but by the beautiful reality that you are a child of God, fearfully and wonderfully made in God’s image to bring your unique way of being into the world.

XI. Conclusion

My friends, my journey from the business world into ministry was not a career change. It was a spiritual rescue. It was the slow, agonizing, and beautiful process of letting go of the need to do so that I could finally embrace the sacred covenant of being a beloved child of God, and helping you do the same.

My prayer for us is that this church will be a sanctuary where we can all put our checklists down. A place where we stop keeping score, and start keeping covenant. With ourselves, with each other, and with God and all of God’s people.

So I leave you with this question to carry in your hearts today:

What would it mean for you, this week, to step off the treadmill of doing, to climb down from the tree of performance, and to simply exist in the unconditional, resting grace of who you already are in God's eyes?

Celebration on the Lake United Church of Christ, may it be so.

Amen.