"When a plan comes together" - Sermon for the 4th Sunday after Pentecost, 6-21-26

† I am a crossword puzzle snob. I only do the Friday and Saturday puzzles in The New York Times as they are the most worthy of my time. And I use an ink pen, not a pencil, a sin for which Sonny, a street parishioner, says I need to ask God’s forgiveness, being arrogant and all. The puzzles are most always challenging at the start, but as I work my way in, the clues become clearer, the letters drop in place, and I complete the grid. I rarely make mistakes, but when I do, I’m good at shaping a wrong letter into the right one. My goal is always to finish in one sitting, over coffee, say, or, on nicer days, perched on the rectory stoop. When I finish the puzzle, I think of the penultimate line from the 1980’s TV show “The A-Team”, when George Peppard’s character Hannibal Smith says, “I love it when a plan comes together.”

Who among us hasn’t said something like that after we have finished a puzzle, or a difficult household project, or mastered a new recipe or piece of music, or successfully completed any other complex challenge that seemed daunting at the start. We love it – don’t we! – when a plan comes together.

Sometimes life itself seems a complex challenge. We find ourselves staring at a puzzle with too many confusing clues and not enough absolute answers. We don’t know just where to begin and can scarcely imagine a successful end. But, with a bit of bravado and a smidgen of faith, we dive in and start solving, one square and one line at a time, making mistakes here and there, until the metaphorical last letter drops into place. We love it when a plan comes together … as they usually do.

However … a couple of weeks ago, I simply could not vanquish the vexing northwest corner of one New York Times crossword grid. After a few days of picking the puzzle up and putting it down, picking it up and putting it down, I admitted defeat. I put down my pen and I surrendered.

Following Jesus can be like this. Mostly successes, but some failures, with mistakes along the way. Our scriptures and traditions give us lots of clues, some of them confusing, and we in our modern lives and contexts have to come up with the right answers to complete life’s grid.

This morning, we find ourselves continuing in Jesus’s cost-of-discipleship narrative. Jesus gives the twelve disciples, and us, plenty of clues of just how difficult this puzzle will be: unreliable hospitality along the way, persecutions from religious and political authorities, the reordering of our personal priorities, divided families, dangers to our lives and souls, and, as ever, the cross – which itself has the horizontal and vertical lines that make up a crossword puzzle. We don’t always know until well after we begin discipleship’s puzzle just which of these many hardships will be ours – apart from the cross: there’s always the cross.

Long before the Incarnation of the Son of God with the arrival of Jesus, and long before Jesus selected his twelve disciples and sent them on their way, Jeremiah, one of the prophets in the Kingdom of Judah, endured a most challenging puzzle in the service of God. Like Cassandra from the stories of the ancient Greeks, Jeremiah foresaw and foretold the disaster that awaited his people, and nobody listened. Rather, Jeremiah was dismissed and derided and detained. At times he wanted to give up, for the puzzle of speaking God’s word to this obstinate people was just too much. Jeremiah’s complaint today – against God and the people – is both searing and despairing.

God, Jeremiah laments, is an enticer and an overpowering seducer. God’s word, Jeremiah cries, provokes not the people’s repentance but their ridicule. Jeremiah is stuck. It burns him to speak God’s word. And it burns him to hold God’s word in. This puzzle has bested him. He puts down his pen in surrender.

But the thing about crossword puzzles, and life’s discipleship opportunities, is that there is the next one. Jeremiah, whose puzzles wouldn’t get any easier, picked his pen back up and wrote that “the Lord is with me like a dread warrior … Sing praise to the Lord!”

Jesus’s disciples, writing arrogantly in ink, would make many mistakes filling in their puzzle grids. They must have been so ashamed and discouraged after Jesus’s crucifixion. They laid down their pens in defeat. But then came the new mornings of Easter and Pentecost and they picked their pens back up and worked on the complex puzzles of constructing this new thing called the Christian Church.

After my defeat, I didn’t shy away from the next day’s crossword puzzle. I picked up my pen, started fresh, and eagerly dove in – one clue, one square, one cruciform horizontal and vertical line at a time. And this time I finished.

My dears, you will not solve every one of your life’s puzzles. You will not solve every one of discipleship’s puzzles. Jeremiah and Peter and Paul – even prolific Paul – felt the sting of defeat from puzzles that bested them, and they put down their pens, only to pick them up again and take on the next day’s challenge.

Jesus himself put down the pen of his very life on the cruel grid of the cross. But he rose victorious in triumph, and he writes of his love for us indelibly in the squares and lines and crosses of our hearts. He writes of his love with the clear yet permanent ink of baptismal waters – a baptism, Paul assures us, which is our participation in Jesus’s death and resurrection, his defeat and his victory.

When your life of discipleship gets the better of you, it is okay to admit defeat – but only, only if you promise to take up your cross, and pick up your pen, and begin tomorrow’s puzzle, with a bit of bravado and a smidgen of faith.

You love it when a plan comes together. Jesus does, too. †

Father Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP

Pentecost 4A, Proper 7 – June 21, 2026

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco

“When a plan comes together”