Sermon: Worm Work

Church of the Nativity - Fayetteville, GA

October 26, 2025

20th Sunday After Pentecost

Luke 18:9-14

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Worm Work

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I have to confess something: I’m not naturally a contemplative person. People probably assume I am. I just spent three years writing a doctoral dissertation on how churches can engage more deeply with contemplative practice. But silence and stillness do not actually come easily to me.

The truth is, I’m a fixer. A doer. A planner. When I see a problem, I want to solve it. When someone is struggling, I want to help. And if I’m honest, I want to help quickly, preferably with a spreadsheet and a plan.

In the last decade of my life, I discovered contemplation as a counterweight to my natural tendency to always be on the go. It’s my way of resisting the part of me that always wants to rush in and take control. Slowing down, waiting, and listening is counterintuitive for me. But it’s also the only thing that’s ever kept me connected to God when the world feels overwhelming.

This week, I returned from spending ten days in Coastal Northern California with a church community that has become a spiritual home for me. They’re a deeply contemplative community, a place that listens to the land and the silence as much as to scripture. I work remotely for them and get out there as often as possible. I had a little vacation time with my family, preached, and then stayed on to work and attend a retreat focused on creation care and ecological healing.

The retreat drew people who are activists, clergy, and ordinary people who love this fragile world and are tired. They’ve been working for years, some decades, trying to make a difference in the climate crisis. And you could feel it — the exhaustion, the weight of continuing the work.

One day, our group walked along what had been, until that afternoon, the foggy coast. Now the sun warmed us, the cold sand under our feet, the Pacific roaring beside us — and our leader stopped us to read this poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. It’s called “Lumbricus terrestris,” the Latin name for the earthworm:

On a day when the world is weighty, 

dark and dense with need, 

I want to be the earthworm that gives itself over to tunneling,

its every movement an act of bringing spaciousness.

And when minutes feel crushed by urgency, 

I want to meet the world wormlike, 

which is to say grounded, 

consistent, even slow.

No matter how desperate the situation, 

the worm does not tunnel faster 

nor burrow more. 

It knows it can take decades 

to build fine soil.

To whatever is compacted, 

the worm offers its good worm work, 

quietly bringing porosity 

to what is trodden, compressed.

So often, in my rush to repair, 

I end up exhausted. 

Let my gift to the world be my constancy,

a devotion to openness, 

my willingness to be with what is.

Let my gift to myself be patience 

as I tend what is dense and dark.

When our leader finished, he asked us quietly: “What is your worm work?” In our rush to do something in the world for God, we often neglect being. The retreatants walked away from the weekend, reminded that it is staying grounded in God is our work to do. That is first and most important, and everything else we do must flow from our union with Christ.

And I haven’t stopped thinking about that question since: What is your worm work? What is the slow, humble work that is mine to do, not the urgent, flashy kind, but the kind that takes time, that makes space, that tends what is dense and dark?

I carried that question back with me to my chaplaincy internship at Church of the Holy Comforter in Atlanta. Many of you are familiar with this church that also runs the Friendship Center, a weekday program for adults living with severe and persistent mental illness and poverty. It’s a place of radical belonging, of laughter and messy love.

In Clinical Pastoral Education, we’re taught to notice not just the needs of others, but what’s happening inside ourselves as we offer care. It’s uncomfortable work. You start to see your own patterns, the parts of you that want to fix or control, the wounded parts that reach for others out of your own need.

One day, I realized I was spending a lot of extra time with one participant, sitting with him at breakfast and again at lunch. My supervisor gently pointed it out:  “When you start spending more than thirty minutes with one person, it has become about you,” he said. “What are you trying to fix or heal in yourself?”

That one stung. Because I recognized it. I wanted to help. I wanted to make his life better, but that desire wasn’t about him at all. It was about what I wanted, and it was prideful to think I had something he didn’t. Maybe, just maybe, what he needed most wasn’t fixing; it was presence. 

That question — what is your worm work? — has been burrowing through me all week. It keeps calling me back to the slow, grounded work of mercy, to the truth that what God asks of us is not speed or success, but presence. And that’s what today’s Gospel brings us back to as well: not performance, but presence. Not doing more, but standing honestly before God.

Jesus tells of two men praying in the Temple. The Pharisee stands tall, confident, grateful that he’s not like other people. The tax collector stands far off, eyes down, whispering, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” And Jesus says it’s this man, the one who knows his need of mercy, who goes home justified.

One priest’s reflection I read of this passage this week really hit home. He said we have to be wary of our tendency to read this story and start sounding like the Pharisee all over again. “I thank you, God, that I’m humble like the tax collector, and not self-righteous like that Pharisee,” we can say. It’s human nature. We can even turn humility into a performance.

The parable, though, he noted, isn’t primarily about us. It’s about God. It’s about the One who humbles and exalts, who justifies and redeems. He suggested maybe this parable should not be called “The Pharisee and the Tax Collector,” but “The Parable of the Merciful God.”

You see, the thing about God’s mercy is that it reaches the Pharisee in his pride and the tax collector in his shame. All people — the proud and the penitent, the caregivers and the care-seekers — are drawn into the wide mercy of God. And that’s what mercy does: it draws us back down to earth and to a place of humility.

I literally laughed out loud this week when I read that humility, at its root, comes from the word humus, meaning of the earth, the soil. There I was again, with the lesson of the earthworm. The worm is there in the humus, doing its quiet work of renewal. Mercy, like that, brings us low, but in the best way. To be humble is to be grounded, to know our place in the ecosystem of grace. The tax collector’s prayer is earthy, simple, low to the ground. That’s where God meets him.

The early monks of the desert loved this parable. They said it contains the very heart of prayer, not about the words these men say, but about their posture. 

For them, this story wasn’t about two people long ago, but it was about the two voices that live inside each of us: the self that wants to justify itself, and the self that simply cries for mercy.

This story shows us two postures, two ways of standing before God. The Pharisee in us stands tall and confident. Note that the Pharisee’s key word is I: “I thank you… I fast… I give.” He thanks God, but his thoughts are really on himself. The tax collector in us all stands far off, eyes down, focused not on ourselves but on God. Notice that his prayer, by contrast, is only seven words long. It’s not polished or pious. It’s raw and honest. He’s simply standing in the truth of who he is before God. 

From this parable grew one of the oldest Christian prayers, known throughout the centuries as the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” 

For centuries, monks in the deserts of Syria and Egypt prayed this one line, again and again, as a way of shaping the heart. The goal wasn’t to earn mercy but to stay awake to it, to remember, at every breath, our dependence on God.

Abba Theodoros, one of the Desert Fathers, told a young monk who was frustrated at his lack of progress: “Say, my child, that you have never accomplished any good. It is in this way that the tax collector was justified. One psalm said with humility is more pleasing to God than thousands spoken with vanity.”

For the early teachers of prayer, humility wasn’t humiliation; it was truthfulness. Humility meant seeing yourself as you really are, without pretense, and standing there in love before the God who already knows you completely.

That’s why the Jesus Prayer has remained such a central practice in the Eastern Christian tradition. It keeps us honest. It keeps us grounded. And when we stay in that place of humility, we find peace. The repetition of the prayer is like breathing: it becomes the rhythm of the heart, the pulse of the soul that knows it belongs wholly to God.

Jesus ends the parable with one of his great reversals: “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.” That isn’t a threat; it’s a spiritual truth. When we exalt ourselves, when we live from pride or self-importance, we live cut off from the flow of grace. Like me in my chaplaincy interaction, our service to God and to others becomes about us. 

In the eyes of the world, the Pharisee is exalted: respected, successful. The tax collector is despised. But in the eyes of God, it is the humble heart that shines. Grace always finds the lowest place: the open space, the receptive heart. Humility, then, is the posture that makes us ready for mercy and ready to extend the mercy of God we have received to others.

Contemplative practices, like the Jesus prayer, help us stay grounded in the truth of what is, to see things as they really are. Bernard of Clairvaux, the twelfth-century monk, wrote that the journey toward God has three paths of truth: The truth of God, which leads to contemplation; The truth of neighbor, which leads to compassion; And the truth of self, which leads to humility.

These truths of contemplation, compassion, and humility help us see what really is. Humility looks at ourselves truthfully. Compassion looks at our neighbor openly. And contemplation looks at God lovingly. And somewhere in that meeting place, between truth and love, we are made whole.

That is what Jesus is inviting us into — not another thing to fix, but a way to be. To pray, as the tax collector did, “God, be merciful to me.” To show up, as the worm does, doing our quiet, steady work in the soil of God’s world. To let go of the need to be right, to be useful, to be admired — and instead to be real.

So this week, when you feel the world pressing down, when the needs around you feel heavy and urgent, remember the earthworm. Remember the tax collector. Remember that mercy isn’t earned; it’s received. And once we’ve received it, we get to offer it — slowly, quietly, patiently — to a world that is dense and dark and in desperate need of spaciousness.

Maybe this week, we could take up the prayer that those in the eastern church have carried on their lips and in their hearts for centuries: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Say it as you breathe. Let it become your worm work, your devotion to openness, your willingness to be with what is. And trust that God is already tunneling through the hard soil of your heart, bringing porosity, patience, and peace.

Because that’s what mercy does. It softens what’s compacted. It makes space for life to grow. And in the end, that’s how we go home justified, not boasting in ourselves, but resting in the quiet joy of being loved by God.

Amen.