But we have.

We have tasted so much death, and still, we are waiting for Jesus to return to us.

Two thousand years later, long after his disciples have entered into the choir of saints, we are still waiting.

What did Jesus mean?

Why would Jesus tell his disciples this, but still leave them waiting? Was he mistaken about the time of his return? Was he speaking in some metaphorical way? Or did Matthew put those words into Jesus’s mouth? Writing all those years after Jesus’s death, still waiting, maybe getting nervous, did Matthew want to comfort and give hope to the community waiting with him?

We don’t know. We only know that many of the disciples who were there did die, and many more afterward, and the risen Jesus has not returned – at least, we don’t think so. If he has, it’s not in the way we expected!

Jesus never does what we expect.

Today’s passage reminds us of that frustrating fact over and over again. We didn’t even talk about how quickly Jesus moved from giving Peter the keys to the kingdom to saying “Get behind me, Satan!” These two stories feel universes apart!

Once again, the Greek original offers us an interesting possibility. In English, when Jesus explains that he is going to suffer and die, Peter says, “God forbid it, Lord!” And this is a pretty fair English translation. It’s the best equivalent we have. But the Greek, which is likely also a translation of a Hebrew saying, is more like, “God’s grace to you!” or “God’s mercy to you!” Again, “God forbid” is probably the best way to render it in English, but it is missing the grace. And the grace is very important. It reminds us of our covenant, our promise from God to be gracious to us.

This phrase is our key to why Jesus reacts so strongly to Peter. Peter is saying that God’s grace would never allow such a terrible thing! Jesus says, “Peter, don’t you get it? This is God’s grace! You knew who I was just a moment ago! This has to be a trick of some kind. Get behind me, Satan.”

This is God’s grace: the suffering servant who suffers for us, out of love for us, and to come closer to us, to understand us more deeply.

This is God’s grace: to take up our cross and follow.

Bonhoeffer was right. It’s anything but cheap.

But now we’re back to square one, because what does it mean to take up our cross in these latter days where we are still waiting? When Matthew was writing his Gospel, Christianity carried real risk. The Temple in Jerusalem had been torn down by the Roman Empire. Matthew’s community was probably terrified about what would happen next.

Now, two thousand years later, things are very different.

I do not want to minimize the cost Christianity can have on those who are from parts of the world where it is a minority religion! We have friends in this church, and connected to this church, whose religion has isolated them from their families due to lack of understanding and suspicion. I myself have been received with fear, suspicion, and anger because of my faith – sometimes by those who have been deeply harmed by the church, and sometimes by those who disagree with how I live my life, or my theology.

But here, in Canada, I’m not going to be arrested for being a Christian. I’m not afraid of being attacked or executed for being a Christian. There are people around the world who are, but not here.

What does it mean to take up a cross then, in a country where being a Christian is so often a privileged position?

Maybe we have to keep reading: “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”

This is another confusing line, but again, the Greek has some nuance that’s missing in the English. ‘Saving one’s life’ carries urgency, and so does ‘losing’ one’s life. But then, putting ‘lose’ next to ‘find’ makes it sound more like something done through carelessness. You lose and find your keys, or your wallet. If I say you’re going to lose your life, that’s scary – but to find your life is a less common turn of phrase. When Matthew says, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” the Greek suggests that you hear,

“For those who want to protect their life will find it destroyed, and those whose lives are destroyed because of me will receive life.”

Why might someone’s life be destroyed because of Jesus?

It might be helpful to turn to a mystical understanding. God’s grace is experienced during times of great suffering – not because suffering on its own is valuable, but because to love as deeply as Jesus did, by its nature, invites suffering.

We suffer when we see children starving in Gaza, or living in war zones in Ukraine and South Sudan; when we see the horrifying footage of flooding in Nepal; when we see leaders acting unjustly; when we hurt others and when others hurt us. We suffer because we know this isn’t how things should be.

We also suffer when the people we love suffer. We suffer when they struggle, when they get sick, and when they die. And we suffer when we can no longer do the things we once did; when we see others worry about us and our health; and have to re-imagine how to serve the people we love in the world as our abilities change.

The truest, healthiest, and most well-adjusted love in the world still comes with suffering.

Perhaps Jesus is telling us that we need to learn to welcome it, to take up that cross and learn what compassion means – com/passion, to suffer alongside.

And yes, we are still waiting on his return – but perhaps, when we take up that cross of compassion, Jesus does return, in a smaller way, and perhaps that is what he meant when he said that some standing here would not taste death before they saw the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.

When I read today’s passage, I think of two things.

The first is a memory from my pilgrimage to the Holy Land, which I’ve talked about here before. One afternoon on that trip, we drove to the area once called Caesarea Philippi. Weaving through the Golan Heights on our large tour bus, our Palestinian guide cautioned us to stay on marked paths to keep safe from unexploded bombs and mines. “If you see any fences,” he said, “don’t cross them. It’s a one-way ticket.”

In Banias, though, where our bus stopped, things appeared peaceful. People hiked trails, birds sang, and the Jordan River, January-strong, roared beside us as we passed under a Roman bridge. The hills which slope beside Mount Hermon enfolded us like loving arms. Near an abandoned hydro-electric mill, an old man sold warm pita slathered with chocolate and honey out of a hut for a few dollars.　

We walked through the reddish-brown ruins of King Agrippa II’s palace, past the few weathered stones of a Byzantine chapel, up to the source of the spring, an ancient grotto once dedicated to the Roman god Pan. Here the Jordan flows much cleaner and sweeter than the brown and muddy baptismal site we had visited earlier in the week.

We sat on the pavement just below the grotto and closed our eyes as the dean of the college read this very passage, “Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, ‘Who do people say that the Son of Man is?’ And they said, ‘Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.’ He said to them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’”

We pondered the question in silence.

I think, for me, the silence continues even until today.

“Who do you say that I am?”

The second thing I think of when I hear this passage is a course I took in seminary where we studied Jesus in novels and films. We watched Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Story Ever Told, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, the Johnny Cash musical Gospel Road, Jesus of Montreal, and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. The novel I chose for my class book report was Live from Golgotha by Gore Vidal, a book which I still remember fondly because I found it hilarious as well as blasphemous!

At the end of the course, our professor told us, “The relationship you have with the Christ of faith, the person you encounter in times of deep prayer and devotion, can never be fully reconciled with the Jesus of history. Every time you form a picture of that Jesus, you are looking down into the bottom of a well at your own reflection.”　

This didn’t mean that our own version of Jesus is wrong, but that no one had the complete picture of who he was, and that who we imagine Jesus to be is always going to be coloured by who we want him to be, and who we are.

“Who do you say that I am?”

The world and its many nations have given us so many Jesuses. He has been a warrior and a pacifist, a symbol of God’s unconditional love, and a warning against the dangers of hell. His name has been used to uphold tradition and family values and to destroy them. He has been celebrated and despised. In artwork, he has been every colour. People of all cultures have seen themselves in his story, just as they have seen themselves in the story of the Exodus.

“Who do you say that I am?”

When I came out of that class, the only thing I could say for sure was that Jesus had to have had a presence so compelling that it was almost impossible to describe. It was such a magnetic and unstoppable force that its power continued even beyond death.

The Apostle Paul, for example, never even met the Jesus of history, but he met the Christ of faith, and it led him to a complete and total overhaul of everything he thought he believed. It’s interesting that Paul never shares any of the Gospel stories of Jesus’s miraculous birth, healing miracles, or the resurrection in his letters. He also never tells his own conversion story as it is told in the Book of Acts, saying only that God revealed Jesus to him, and that Jesus came to Paul last, after all of the other apostles who had known Jesus personally. Paul does proclaim the crucifixion and resurrection, and Christ’s eventual return. He does talk about Jesus in terms of relationship, repentance, humility, the reflection of God’s glory, and trust. It’s as if the details don’t matter. Paul, like us, only knew the Christ of faith, and yet this one encounter was powerful enough for him to first overturn and finally surrender his life.

“Who do you say that I am?”

Even the disciples could not quite agree. While Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell this story of Peter confessing that Jesus is the Messiah, the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of sayings which is not included in our Bible, has its own version of this story, and I find it fascinating.

In the thirteenth of these one hundred and fourteen sayings, we read this:

‘Jesus said to his disciples, “Compare me to someone and tell me whom I am like.”

Simon Peter said to him, “You are like a righteous angel.”

Matthew said to him, “You are like a wise philosopher.”

Thomas said to him, “Master, my mouth is wholly incapable of saying whom you are like.”

Jesus said, “I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated from the bubbling spring which I have measured out.”

And he took him and withdrew and told him three things. When Thomas returned to his companions, they asked him, “What did Jesus say to you?”

Thomas said to them, “If I tell you one of the things which he told me, you will pick up stones and throw them at me; a fire will come out of the stones and burn you up.”’

Who is Jesus to you? Is he a teacher? Is he your saviour? Your friend? Your beloved? Your master? An interesting guy who was important to people you love? Son of God? Son of Man? Is he perhaps one of these things one day, and then another the next?

Or are you like Thomas, incapable of saying?

After two thousand years, without anger or impatience or duplicity in his voice, Jesus is still asking, because he honestly, genuinely wants to know.

“Who do you say that I am?”

There are many, many sermons that try to soften it, and most of them don’t do a very good job. I remember Anglican clergy arguing about what the story meant on Twitter, when I still frequented Twitter. Many of them refused to believe that Jesus would intentionally be so narrow-minded or cruel, and that this whole episode must be some sort of elaborate morality play Jesus is putting on. They said that it was inexcusable to imply that Jesus could be bigoted. They explained away his use of the word ‘dog’ by saying it was an affectionate, playful term.

It’s not.

As uncomfortable as it is, the story helps us to reckon with Jesus’s humanity. We proclaim him as the Son of God, but he was also a man – a man and not a child. Most of us know that children don’t tend to be bigoted, at least before a certain age, but adults often are. All of us inherit a certain degree of prejudice toward those who are different, no matter how hard we try to avoid it. As the old saying goes, “Your first thought on seeing someone different is what you were taught to believe. Your next thought actually shows your character.”

But this story still shows us something beautiful of the character of God.

When Jesus says, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs,” he’s referring to his own people, the people of Israel, and how only they are entitled to the spiritual wisdom he brings. The ‘dogs,’ or Canaanites, it seems, are not entitled to it. Here we are given a window into a very old conflict. The Canaanites were historic enemies of the Jews, being the people that the Israelites drove out of the Promised Land. Jesus here is affirming God’s preference for his people, something that all of his disciples would have understood and believed.

However, we must not think that this belief is unchallenged in the Hebrew Scriptures, or Old Testament. Our old friend, Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine, reminds us in a reflection on this Gospel passage, that there are two righteous Canaanite women in the Bible who were judged as righteous, and managed to secure blessings for themselves, like this woman who approaches Jesus.

One of them is Tamar, daughter-in-law of Jacob’s son Judah, who manages to avoid being disinherited through her own crafty resourcefulness in the face of Judah’s lack of care for her, and whom Judah judges as “more righteous than I.”

Another is Rahab, a sex worker who shelters two Israelite spies in exchange for her family’s protection during the Israelites’ eventual takeover of Cana. My Jewish Study Bible commentary states, “A foreign prostitute, the most dangerous trap according to wisdom literature, is here presented as being well-acquainted with the typical acts of salvation God has bestowed upon His people.” Compared to the two spies, who are messengers from the righteous Joshua, Rahab is articulate, clever, and informed about their liberating God.

Both of these women are labelled as righteous, and Rahab is named in a lineage of those who were a part of the salvation history of Israel. Some of the rabbis of old even believed that she married Joshua, the successor of Moses.

Amy-Jill Levine then reminds us that the very first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew states explicitly that both of these women, Tamar and Rahab, were ancestors of Jesus.

We have to remember that, while Jesus was the Son of God, he grew up in a small town. Nazareth was such a tiny settlement that we don’t even have any records of it outside of the Gospels. There were probably only about two hundred people living in it. It was an insular, tight-knit community that held fast to its Jewish roots among a multitude of other cultures. Those of us who have lived in other countries and on other continents might know how it feels to hold onto our culture in a sea of difference and possible misunderstanding and suspicion. Jesus also clearly felt called in those early days to minister to the house of Israel alone; he says this in the sending out of the seventy.

But this Canaanite woman’s witty remark – not cruel or harsh but clever – is what changes his mind.

And this, too, is something that happens often in Hebrew Scriptures.

Abraham argues with God about Sodom, convincing God that it should not be destroyed even if there are only a few righteous people living in it. Although there are, apparently, no righteous people left there at all, God does agree to Abraham’s terms.

When the people of Israel build a golden calf on the slopes of Mount Sinai, God is furious and prepared to slaughter them all in a hail of fire and make a great nation of Moses alone, but Moses, who has been endlessly annoyed by his people for months, pleads on their behalf, and God changes God’s mind yet again.

The prophet Amos, upon receiving visions of God devouring the people, first in a plague of locusts and then in holy fire, utters his famous cry, “O Lord God, forgive, I beg you! How can Jacob stand? He is so small!” God relents both times, saying, “It shall not be.”

The psalms, which do contain vast rivers of praise, also contain bargaining, reminding God of the covenant established with Abraham. Psalm 79: “Do not remember against us the iniquities of our ancestors.” Psalm 89: “How long, O Lord? Will you hide yourself forever? How long will your wrath burn like fire? Remember how short my time is – for what vanity you have created all mortals!” Psalm 119: “I will keep your law continually, forever and ever. ...I will also speak of your decrees before kings and shall not be put to shame[.] ...Remember your word to your servant, in which you have made me hope.”

Here, in his willingness to be encountered and even changed by the full expression of human emotion – not just trembling fear or silent unquestioning obedience but loud advocacy – Jesus truly does show us the character of God: not domineering or inflexible but lively and open to us.

This is good news! We are not children of an absent Father-knows-best God. We are children of a God who wants real relationship, the kind of honesty and openness that might remind us of those early years of parenting, when our children do not hesitate to ask exactly for what they need. It might make us uncomfortable, and we might have said no often, but good parents know there are times when we should listen and be willing to be changed by the little ones we love.

Through the quick-witted banter of this woman, we can rest assured that God is not put off by our self-advocacy, and God may be approached with strong-worded prayers and calls to remember the promises made to our ancestors in the faith. The patriarchs and matriarchs had no problem calling on God to remember the covenant, and even bargaining for the salvation of the people they loved. Even those whom we would not expect God to advocate for are given their request, as proven by this brave woman who would do anything to help her beloved daughter.

Be bold in your prayer, friends.

Be bold and expect healing.

In a world hungry for love yet all too often hostile toward the eternal and boundary-breaking message of Jesus, it is good to be here.

In a world beset by fascism and fear and the forging of idols that whitewash and defang and defile our Saviour, it is good to be here.

In a world that claims that the Church of Christ is irrelevant and broken and on its way out in favour of the church of white supremacy and capitalism and so-called endless growth at all costs, it is good to stand here and look out at all of you, and see the body of Christ.

As my Anglican siblings at Church of the Redeemer in Toronto have said,

“We are the body of Christ!

The hand clapping, toe tapping, heart pumping, mouth tasting, arms embracing, justice seeking, hymn singing, love making, risk taking body of Christ!”

We are the body of Christ. I can say that with my whole chest, because in the words of that letter named after John the Beloved Disciple who snuggled with Jesus at the Last Supper and whispered into his ear,

“We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life – this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us – what we have seen and heard we also declare to you so that you also may have fellowship with us, and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with the Son Jesus Christ. We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.”

This is the good word of the queers among you. “What we have seen and heard we also declare to you so that you also may have fellowship with us.”

This is a call and response message. Say it back to me: “We declare that love is here!”

Love is here and love is in our bones and in our schools and in our offices and at our tables and in our beds, if we would only allow her to sashay in, in all her glory, and make herself at home.

Life is here and we queers have seen it, and all we want to do is show it to you, as it was revealed to us.

Again we hear in the letter named after that sissy boy John, “This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in God there is no darkness at all.” I wish that writer would have used a word other than darkness but they were a human being like me, so let’s meet them where they are.

Again we hear, “Whoever says, ‘I have come to know Jesus,’ but does not obey his commandments is a liar, and in such a person the truth does not exist; but whoever obeys his word, truly in this person the love of God has reached perfection.” Harsh words, but necessary, in a world where many say “I have come to know Jesus” and then pick up the phone to call ICE on their neighbours, or vote to cut healthcare and school lunches, or gather in protests to advocate residential school denialism and transphobia.

Harsh words, but necessary. When you love someone, you tell them the truth. Even the most hateful of my siblings in Christ will affirm that. But the truth told in love is so much more shocking than they could ever imagine. Thank God for that.

Again, the letter of John the mad lover says, “Beloved, I am writing you no new commandment but an old commandment that you have had from the beginning; the old commandment is the word that you have heard. Yet I am writing you a new commandment that is true in him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining. Whoever says, ‘I am in the light,’ while hating a sibling, is still in the darkness. Whoever loves a sibling abides in the light, and in such a person there is no cause for stumbling.”

The prophecy of Pride Sunday, and Pride month, and Pride life and Pride love, is this love – love that exists for its own sake, covenant that exists for its own sake. For years we were told by the Western Church that we existed outside of God’s law, outside of creation’s parameters, outside of light. But our truth is not an innovation. No, it is an old commandment we have had from the beginning. Humanity was made for more than convention. Humanity was made for more than a default. Humanity was made for more than ‘the way it’s always been done.’ Humanity was made for more than imprisonment and isolation via medicalization.

Humanity was made for God, and since God became incarnate in Jesus Christ to walk among us, that means we were made for each other.

We declare that love is here!

And so, again in the words of that letter, “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent God’s only Son into the world so that we might live through him. ...Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.”

This is the truth given to us at that Last Supper, the truth embodied through the very table that is still being denied to the rainbow children in some traditions; the very table of our teacher, our master, our Beloved; this table which is a cipher for that table where John spooned with Jesus and put his lips to his ear to say, “Who is it, Lord, who will betray you this night?” in an act that in its time would probably not have been remarked on because men in that culture were actually permitted to have passionate and abiding friendships without it being shamed; an act that today would never be permitted in a non-affirming church space and even in one as progressive as this might make some good people uncomfortable because of the spiritual slavery patriarchy imposes on the lives of men in our world.

The truth is that we should love one another, and Jesus said it with his lips but also with his whole chest, which had a dude pressed up against it the night before he died – and could we possibly doubt that Jesus put his face into John’s hair and inhaled so he could enjoy the smell he must have loved one last time before the state could rip him from the arms that adored him; a smell he would have to remember because for some mysterious reason he could not be held after he returned to us in that beautiful broken body in the garden – not because the holding was sinful or impure but perhaps because he could no longer be contained by just one lover or one student. He now belonged to the world and was not content to choose a primary partner, except maybe the Church.

This is the truth, that because he loved us, we should love one another, and we should love one another as he loved us, which is to say, the way humans do: messily, awkwardly, wildly, tenderly in a most unseemly manner.

Jesus did not come to make us tidy. He did not come to save us from being cringe. He came to save us from being fossilized, from being cut off from our bodies, from being apathetic, from covering our eyes, from missing the mark, from being imprisoned and alone.

And so I return to that letter one final time, return with a message from sissy boy John to all the queers and people who love them – and if you’re not one of those, you’re permitted to listen in so you know the score:

“I am writing to you, little children,
because your sins are forgiven on account of his name.
I am writing to you, elders,
because you know him who is from the beginning.
I am writing to you, young people,
because you have conquered the evil one.
I write to you, children,
because you know the Father.
I write to you, elders,
because you know him who is from the beginning.
I write to you, young people,
because you are strong
and the word of God abides in you,
and you have overcome the evil one.”

Nothing can separate us from his love.

We declare that love is here!

We declare that love is here!

Amen.

Love,

Cal

On a sunny day in June of this year I landed in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, for my second ever visit. My first visit last year was a flurry of activity as Cathedral dean Vincent Fenga (who has since transitioned from a Very Reverend into a Right Reverend!) found ways to connect me to the community so that he could jet off to General Synod. I made a lot of connections, but not with much depth.

Here was my chance to deepen my relationship with some of the new friends I’d made, and go on a terribly fun excursion.

I was driven to the Old Log Rectory and picked up there by Judy Greenhill, a parishioner of the Cathedral. Along with her husband Rick Avery, she is Canadian folk and children’s music royalty. For my Millennial compatriots: Rick and Judy introduced Sharon, Lois, and Bram to each other.

Judy swung me by the Superstore to pick up provisions for the empty kitchen at the rectory, and once I had availed myself of my favourite things I was bundled in to the apartment, which, by the grace of God, had no WiFi and could therefore provide a lovely container for the quiet few days I had before the weekend, when Rick and Judy would sweep me off to Haines Junction, about two hours west of Whitehorse, for the Kluane Mountain Bluegrass festival. Every year, Rick told me, he and Judy attend, volunteer, and provide music (on theme!) for the tiny Anglican parish of St. Christopher’s, which does morning prayer with a licensed lay preacher once a month.

We arrived and got settled at the former bishop’s rectory in town, and I ventured outside to stare gobsmacked at the mountains which hug the southwest corner of the town. At the Kluane National Park and Reserve Visitor Centre, loads of information on the Indigenous peoples of the area was on display, from time immemorial to contact and beyond.

Wandering into an area of the centre with massive floor to ceiling windows that offered an even more beautiful view of the range, I was more gobsmacked than ever to realize that those mountains – Mount Cairnes, Archibald, Martha, Kathleen, and Dalton Peak – were only the first gateway into Kluane National Park, which was pictured on a topographical map in one room, showing me the absolutely dizzying height of the peaks to the southwest. On this map, the mountains I just named were barely a bump. Mount Logan, Canada’s tallest mountain and the second tallest in North America, was superb to behold just on the map itself, when one imagined the whole thing “to scale.”

Judy and I enjoyed a delectable lunch at Frosty’s, the local burger and ice cream joint, then went to pick up our tickets and mingle as guests began to arrive. It only took about fifteen minutes before we were singing “O My Darling Clementine” with a couple of other folks who had set up in front of the conference centre where the main stage was to be held.

Before long, it was time to begin! We moved back and forth between the main stage and the church itself, where it was quite a treat to watch these groups move from bigger “arena”-type energy in their sets to smaller and more intimate tunes and tones.

Although this particular festival – “the only bluegrass festival north of 60!” – is called a bluegrass festival, Rick told me that over the years it loosened its boundaries, now including old time, folk, and roots. Bluegrass purists (I overheard several) bickered amiably about what songs could be slotted into which categories, although plenty of musicologists will tell you the lines are blurrier than most would care to think. 2026 included groups like Tennessee’s High Fidelity (who could have stepped right out of O Brother, Where Art Thou?), Florida’s Remedy Tree (more of a punk edge, and I have never seen anyone play mandolin like Bryce Griffin; the only appropriate word for what he did was “shred”), and Ontario’s The Barrel Boys (bluegrass harmonies belted into the microphone in a football huddle), Shari Ulrich and the Unfaithful Servants (a dream of a super group), and North Carolina’s The Burnett Sisters Band (outfitted in truly Instagram-worthy Christian homesteader chic), all of whom had the sort of sounds I expected to hear. But the line-up also included Cape Breton’s Cassie and Maggie (who lit up the stage with east coast fiddle tunes, dancing, and a genius mash-up of “Bury me beneath the willow” and “Walkin’ after midnight”), and BC group The Fugitives. I’d called Cassie and Maggie traditional and the Fugitives roots, but both were welcomed and appreciated. Several other more local groups rounded out the line-up.

I’d originally thought to dive into the theology behind bluegrass, and so I’ll say that one of the reasons I love it so is what I might call a ragged commitment to reality. I found myself particularly drawn to it during lockdown, when there wasn’t much to do but practice my dad’s mandolin and lean into the weirdly comforting pathos of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” “Down in the Valley,” “A Flower Blooming in the Wildwood,” and “Gallows Pole.” Here was music that wasn’t afraid to lament with its whole chest, and usually in only three or four chords to boot.

But in the end, I didn’t have to do much research, because I had a deeply spiritual experience right there in the church – which the following Sunday’s service brought into sharp focus for me, and drew a new song of my own, “Perfect Offering,” out of me, which I shared at the Whitehorse Worship Arts and Music Festival a couple of weeks later.

The last show of the night on Friday found me in St. Christopher’s listening to The Fugitives. At one point, one band member began to introduce a song that they’d written about a friend who had since died. He took a sip from the beer can in his hand...then placed it on the altar, next to a line of water bottles I hadn’t noticed until then. On the credence shelf next to it, I also saw they’d put their picks and other little tools for the show.

Being an Anglican priest, I winced. Sir this is not just a table! But no one knew I was a priest, and no was there for church. They were there for a bluegrass concert, and if I hadn’t been there, probably no one would have cared.

“For them, it’s just a table,” I said to myself, “and it’s not being used for anything else at the moment, so let it ride. Besides, didn’t St. Brigid herself call for a lake of beer for the King of Kings?”

That was all it took for my mind to start spinning, as it does.

Well, they need that water to keep their voices fresh. They need those little tools to do the work. And, as I listened to the fellow talk of the friend they’d lost and memories of watching the Northern Lights with him, I thought, “Heavy stuff. And this guy’s in front of a lot of people. A can of beer (responsibly portioned!) helps take the edge off, I reckon.

“It’s such lovely music they’re sharing with us. There’s some beauty there that God would surely appreciate. Beer on the altar is cool by me.”

As the show came to an end, they introduced another song, words largely improvised, about all of the tiny annoyances of life, and how enduring them kept us humble and grateful for happier times. The last chorus, which was taught to us so we could sing along, was “All this trouble in the world: let it come.” At the tail end of the song, we began to sing it over and over, like a Taizé chant, and I, with a beautiful but heavy year on my heart, fully leaned into it just as I would any prayer chorus, thrilling in the occasional cry of encouragement from the band leader: “Come on! Again! Pick it up!”

The next day, Rick, Judy, and I gathered for Morning Prayer at the very same church. There were no beer cans on the altar. Rick and Judy and I piously sang “Bright Morning Star a’rising,” “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” and a truly goosebumpy “Amazing Grace” which Rick lined out in true Isle of Lewis/Appalachian fashion. During the sermon (“The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few”), the lay preacher said, “Even Jesus needed help with the work.”

The Holy Spirit whispered into my ear: “It’s not just the harvest that goes on the altar. It’s the tools as well.”

I thought of that beer can, and the music that touched all of us gathered in the little church, last night and this morning. I thought of sheaves of wheat and the sickle that cut them being offered up; of music ringing out in a church and the tools required to produce it laid upon the altar. I thought of how that evening show felt like a sister to the morning ritual we were enjoying right now.

And I thought, “Isn’t this just what humanity is about: moments like this, singing with voices braided together like sweetgrass, coffee and cream, whiskey and soda; moments like this cradled by wooden roofs or mountains or oceans or a wide prairie sky; moments like this when variegated voices somehow become one.”

So I’d like to tell you briefly about a course I took at VST a few weeks ago, led by Dr. Kenny Wallace, a Choctaw Pawnee/African-American professor of worship studies, musician, and hoop dancer.

The course was on music and dance for healing, and every class began with ritual. We smudged. We gave thanks for water and blessed ourselves with it. We ate bannock and strawberries, weaving the story of Sky Woman with the Last Supper.

And one day, Dr. Kenny told us the story of Rabbit and the wolves. He’d adapted it slightly to speak to his African-American heritage, and spun an incredible tale of Rabbit, who escapes hungry wolves by charming them with songs and dances. But in Dr. Kenny’s telling, these were not Choctaw or Pawnee songs and dances, but songs like “Steal Away to Jesus” and “Wade in the Water,” tying Rabbit to enslaved peoples who often used those songs to express subversive ideas in public.

The act of storytelling is one of the most powerful forms of actual honest-to-God magic that human beings perform.

So when we hear the little section of today’s passage left out of the reading, “Jesus told the crowds all these things in parables; without a parable he told them nothing,” we should keep that in mind.

On this Emancipation Sunday, what are we to make of these parables, these “short stories by Jesus,” as Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine calls them? Each one is its own ecosystem. Today let’s just explore three. And as Matthew links them together, so shall we, in a way that takes us on a journey, like all good stories should.

Let me quickly tell you about another great storyteller: Lori Ann Bird, a local Métis herbalist, who recently published the wonderful book Revered Roots. I often joke that with Lori Ann, you can take twenty minutes to get from your doorstep to the edge of the sidewalk, as she points out every single plant neighbour she can see. It makes it hard to walk on the grass when you’ve been around her long enough!

Lori Ann never uses the word ‘invasive.’ She’ll tell you which plants hitchhiked here from other places, and she’ll talk about how some plants crowd others out, but she won’t use the word invasive. Instead, she’ll tell you what health benefits the plant has, and then say that since it grows aggressively, you can take as much as you want – for food, for medicine, for homemade dyes, for basket weaving.

Then she’ll tell you that the plant wants to heal you. I still laugh remembering the dramatic bow-legged walk – or dance, maybe – she used to show us the generosity of Himalayan blackberries sending out their ndless runners, as if calling, “Here I am! Come and get some! I’m so good for you!” Take the berries for food. Brew the leaves in tea for their antioxidant properties. Clip the thorns and cut open those annoying runners and you’ll find fibres for weaving, or making paper.

Everything has a purpose in God’s beautiful creation – and so, too, does the mustard plant. Story Number One.

It’s been used as a medicinal and food plant since at least 3000 BC. They’re definitely not trees, though. They’re shrubs, and mostly grow wild. People sowed them as natural fencing around vegetable gardens, protecting food crops while also providing free access to the nutritious greens and the spice and medicine provided by the seeds.

The kingdom of heaven is like this, says Jesus: a mustard seed, small but sowed purposefully, which provides everything from food to shelter.

God has written care into creation – care which is to be freely accessed by all.

It is lunacy to enslave people in a world that has mustard plants.

Story Number Two: The yeast. Often people link yeast with impurity, but leavened bread is kosher. You can have it any time but Passover. There’s nothing wrong with yeast: you just have to make sure it’s the right kind of yeast.

In English, the Bible says the yeast is mixed with the dough, but in Greek the woman hides the yeast in the dough. Makes sense, contemplating parables and their possible secrets, and especially when we have it alongside the parable of the hidden treasure in the field.

We also know that this woman hides the yeast in three measures of flour, which is not three cups of flour, by the way. Three measures of flour is between forty and sixty pounds. This is extravagance on par with the Godly extravagance of a mustard plant. Three measures of flour is what Abraham tells Sarah to use when providing lunch for the three angelic visitors at the Oaks of Mamre; three angelic visitors who will tell Sarah that she is going to...well, have a bun in the oven soon! And you can’t get mad at my bad pun because I actually stole it from Amy-Jill Levine.

The world begins with abundance.

The natural response, mandated to humanity, is hospitality, characterized by abundance.

It is lunacy to enslave people in a world where hospitality is mandated.

A mustard plant’s generosity is the natural state of creation. A woman baking a wedding banquet’s worth of bread for angelic visitors – which in Jesus’s time occurred at a communal oven – doing something which is hidden, mundane, and also kind of miraculous (carrying a child, baking bread) is the platonic ideal of the human posture toward God.

Creation, then covenant – Torah covenant.

And then, of course, Jesus. Our pearl of great price.

All too often, sermons make the kingdom of heaven into a commodity to be purchased, ignoring the fact that it is not the pearl that is like the kingdom, it’s the merchant, who does something no sane or business-savvy merchant would do. In fact, Levine notes, he actually surrenders his whole identity for this pearl, because you can’t be a merchant if you only have one pearl. Commentators who suppose that he goes on to sell this great pearl are being fanciful. The parable ends with the purchase. He sold everything for one thing which cannot feed or shelter him, because it’s worth that much to him.

It’s one thing to be the guy who finds the treasure in the field. That’s luck. His decision to sell all his stuff and buy the field makes sense.

The merchant’s doesn’t. Looking for fine pearls, he finds the finest pearl of all, and then trades everything, including his own identity, for it.

This is the posture Jesus encourages in his disciples.

But like the old saying goes, “All may, none must, some should.” Some disciples are itinerant, selling all they have to follow him. Some, like the wealthy women Luke mentions, keep the bread coming. This is also the work of the kingdom.

Creation evolves into Torah covenant, and Torah covenant encourages reckless behaviour for the pearl of God.

The lunacy of enslavement demands the sanity of gaining freedom at all costs.

Freedom is also a pearl beyond price. God’s original intent for creation was freedom. In a fallen world where slavery was and still is imposed, emancipation is the only sane response to covenant. In the Way of Jesus, returning the world to that state, however it occurs – by giving up everything or by literal or metaphorical baking of bread – is the only authentic response to salvation we have gained through baptism.

So on this Emancipation Sunday we thank enslaved peoples for their bravery and persistence and struggle, and we thank Black people across Turtle Island and the whole world for calling us constantly to this truth, even in the face of indifference and violence.

May we too risk everything for that pearl.

May we hold the values of Torah covenant in our bones.

May we come home to ourselves as part of creation, which was made for abundant liberation.

In the class I took, I made a new friend, Ross. He is a deacon in the Episcopal Diocese of Alaska, and we got along right away.

One day, before class had started, he asked me if I would be available to preside at the Eucharist at community worship the following week, using the Salal and Cedar Eucharistic prayer that we sometimes use here at Holy Cross. He wanted the priest at the table to be familiar with the prayer. Of course I said yes.

We arrived at Epiphany Chapel on UBC campus. At Indigenous Summer School, whenever we gather for worship, the people and the space will be smudged, given cleansing smoke to those who gather as a way of preparing to come before the presence of God. It is powerful and moving to watch two students – one with an eagle feather or fan and abalone shell full of plant medicine such as sage, and one with matches to help keep the leaves alight – passing around the circle and brushing the smoke toward the baptismal font, the pulpit, the altar, and those who would receive it with the eagle feather. Usually in the past, it’s been my friend Diane who smudged, wearing a pretty ribbon skirt. That day, she stood before me, holding the eagle feather up high, giving space for me to bring the smoke toward me: my hands, my eyes, my mouth, and my heart. A lot of people will turn around so the one who smudges can brush the smoke along their back and down to their feet, and I did that too. When they’re done, they’ll give you a tap with the feather so you know when to turn around. Even though I’m a settler born to settlers on this land, smudge smells like home and healing to me, because I’ve always smelled it in places of reconciliation and healing, like when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission gathered here in 2013, or at an open house for victims of the opioid crisis at the Cathedral, or in gatherings just like this one.

The service went very well, and while Ross and I were having lunch afterward, he happened to mention that a week before at worship, Ray Aldred, the director of Indigenous Studies, had wordlessly handed the shell and feather to Ross so that he could smudge everyone. Ross, who is white, was shocked! He’d been smudged many times, but had never been asked to smudge other people before! He related a humorous story of offering the smoke to a Maori woman from New Zealand who whispered, “Oh...what do I do? This is my first time!” and he almost whispered back, “Mine too!”

Then he told me that a couple of days later, when the time for smudging came again, an Indigenous elder pointed at Ross and said, “Let that guy do it.” Ross and I laughed about how sometimes, the Spirit moves unexpectedly, and we just have to keep up.

It’s not just that, though. Sometimes there is a moment of grace extended to us in good faith.

Reading this week’s parable, I remember being baffled. What kind of gardener allows for weeds to grow up with wheat? But upon reading and researching, I learned that the weeds here, which the gospel of Matthew calls ζιζάνια, an Aramaic word, probably refers to a ryegrass plant called darnel. Darnel is sometimes called ‘false wheat.’ It looks extremely similar to wheat for most of its early growing period, until the ear of the wheat plant appears. It was against Roman law to sow darnel among the wheat of an enemy, which is why we think it’s the plant in the parable. Darnel isn’t just a nuisance. It can be infected with a fungus that can cause illness and intoxication in humans, almost like ergot poisoning.

Knowing this, it makes more sense for the sower to instruct his servants not to gather up the weeds right away. They seem to be able to tell that something’s wrong, but the sower still seems concerned that they will have trouble telling the difference between the two plants, so he instructs them to leave them alone until harvest time, when they’ll be easier to tell apart.

While the latter part of this parable may be a bit distressing – no one wants to be the weeds! – we might wonder together about a God who allows for weeds to grow up with wheat, weeds which apparently hide in plain sight. Some of our Christian siblings may read this parable and contemplate the sneaky nature of the devil, but I wonder if we instead might contemplate the nature of a God who allows for the full fruition of our deeds before instructing those reaping angels to begin their harvest; a God who will not allow for judgment until there is no question of whether one is wheat or weed; a God who, like Ray and the elder, watches, discerns, and presumes good faith before making a decision about how to involve someone in the work of the Kingdom.

I am constantly annoyed at the endless presumption of good faith in circumstances where it is not merited; where people insist on making space at the table for someone I just know is gonna flip it and set it on fire.

The sower still practices discernment. He knows that there are weeds in there, and must keep watch.

Ray and the elder gave Ross something small to do. They were okay to do that because he has been serving among Indigenous communities in Alaska as a deacon for some time now, and has been in relationship with the Indigenous Studies Program for some time. Knowing him, watching how he moves in the space, and presuming good faith, they offered him a new responsibility to see how he would handle it.

He must have handled it well, because the elder, having seen him do it once, asked him to do it again.

Now weeds and wheat are not people. Weeds and wheat can’t change what they are. People can make choices about whose children they want to be: children of the Kingdom, or children of the evil one. And maybe sometimes it’s easy to make the choice, and sometimes it’s not. Maybe sometimes we wake up as wheat, and sometimes as weeds.

As we continue to contemplate what it might mean to be offered the grace to grow and mature in faith, I offer the following wondering questions:

I wonder what good seed you have sowed in the world?

I wonder if you have ever found your good seed set upon by weeds?

I wonder if you, a servant, have ever asked Jesus how all these weeds ended up in his beautiful garden?

I wonder how he would answer you?

One of the activities we were to do at the festival was something called Wild Church. This involves being outside in nature. The folks that were supposed to lead Wild Church had an emergency back home that meant they couldn’t come to do it, so I was asked to fill in. I had to get up very early to do it, which was a little tough, but once we got to the spot, about twenty minutes from downtown Whitehorse, it was lovely – quiet and still, on the shores of Jackson Lake. We had a fire and a firekeeper, and I shared what little I’d learned about the Kwanlin Dün First Nation, whose lands we were visiting. Then folks had some time to walk about on their own. We saw squirrels, little grey whiskeyjack birds, and fish jumping in the lake. We also saw fir trees, quaking aspen, reindeer moss, and cowberries.

My friend Ben, who was the primary organizer of the event, told me that the winter had been very tough. We talked about the short blooming season up north, the way the land suddenly explodes in a firework of flowers, knowing how little time it has before the cold will come back.

I was thinking about this as I read today’s parable of the sower.

Let’s just enjoy the lively movement in this parable. Let’s not worry about which seeds are which kind of people. Let’s not even look at Jesus’ explanation. Instead, let’s think about children sowing seeds.

Teaching a child to do basically anything takes a lot of patience and love. Parents, do you remember your endless repetition of, “Gentle, gentle,” and “Slow down!” and “Not too much!”? For a moment, let’s imagine a small child, safe but without any adults about, with a skirt full of seeds, running along the path, throwing them everywhere, throwing them without looking, throwing them with that ear-piercing shriek that toddlers get when they’re just so darn excited about something, the kind of shriek that makes us wince but maybe also makes us giggle, because maybe we remember being that kid, astonished and delighted by the world and its wonders.

Imagine her getting to the end of the path and just letting go of the end of her skirt so that the last few seeds just scatter at her feet. Imagine her looking down and examining them with that funny intensity that very small children have. Imagine her looking back at the chaos she hath wrought and then just booking it back up the path, so proud of her work.

Christians were never meant to love small.

Our work can be small – tending a few blossoms by the side of the road rather than a whole set of palace gardens – but our love was never meant to be. The world can make us feel like there’s not enough to go around, that no matter how much we sow, there is always more that goes untended.

Jesus does mention this in verses that are cut out of today’s reading:

Then the disciples came and asked Jesus, “Why do you speak to them in parables?” He answered, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance, but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.

That last part sounds awful, doesn’t it? I think we’ve all seen that happen to someone. But we’ve also seen the folks who seem to have everything and yet are restless, constantly worried about the next need, the next empty space, convinced that they have nothing, even though they own the world. And we all know those folks who have very little but treasure the good things they do have, and live life with gratitude.

Jesus continues, “The reason I speak to them in parables is that “seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.”

We know that some people can go their whole lives without ever seeing the good or the growth or the gains. We know pain, and Christianity was never meant to hide from it. But like the earth turning in space, Christians are in shadow and light simultaneously, and we turn from one to the other. Hope and joy are not the same as optimism and happiness. Hope and joy have teeth. They demand much from us, and it’s hard. It’s hard in a world that focuses so often on the negative and the tragic. It’s hard in bodies that evolved to hoard for the lean times rather than embrace generosity. Generosity and openness and faith have risks.

But blessed are your eyes – our eyes – for they see, and your ears, for they hear.

God called you here, and God continues to call you.

You who are here because your parents made you come, many years ago or today: that’s part of the call.

You who are here because you’ve been coming all your life but on the hard days you’re not really sure why you still bother: that’s part of the call.

You who are here for the first time and you’re still not entirely sure why you’re here today: that’s part of the call.

You who come because you know that the Voice of Love which lives in all things has made itself at home in the open space in your heart: that’s part of the call.

Bring back to mind that little child, booking it down the path throwing seeds to the wind, the chaos of seeds scattered hither and yon.

Resist the urge to tame the child, to make things tidy, to gather up the seeds that didn’t make it. Resist. Instead, water the ones that made it to the good soil. You will know them by their fruits: joy, peace, love, devotion, sacrifice.

It may be that they will blight, or never grow. It may be that they will grow as tall as trees. And it may be that the ones which fell on the path become the ones that are poking little green fingers through the cracks in the stone some time later, doing their work unseen, creating a network that will burst right through. It may be that the ones which were swallowed by birds are then carried across vast distances to new places, and left in better soil. And it may be that the ones which grew up among thorns provide unseen nutrients for microorganisms which work silently in the dark earth and feed many other plants.

Allow yourself the freedom, the joy, the love, to become that child, and to scatter the word recklessly. We can sow and water and feed, but only God brings the sun.

It’s not all up to us.

We can afford to be a little silly. A little reckless. A little wild.

I have, though, been writing, both sermons and more on the Sexton series. I may offer another reading soon, of the opening scene of the third novel. We’ll see what happens!

In the meantime, here are the few sermons that were missed! Blessings to my subscribers, especially the new ones and the ones who have recently shifted to paid status! You’re all wonderful!

“You may be an ambassador to England or France

You may like to gamble, you might like to dance

You may be the heavyweight champion of the world

You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls

But you’re going to have to serve somebody, yes indeed

You’re going to have to serve somebody

Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord

But you’re going to have to serve somebody.”

This iconic Bob Dylan tune, written in 1979, won him a Grammy, but lot of Dylan’s fans hated the album it came on. Dylan had recently converted to Christianity, and they didn’t like the new material. One of the most famous haters was none other than John Lennon, who said, “Guess Dylan wants to be a waiter now,” and then composed his response to Dylan’s tune, “Serve Yourself.”

I do think there’s a reason that “Gotta serve somebody” won a Grammy, though. It has a certain universal appeal. It’s direct, but not judgmental. It’s Christian, but it also transcends the label. Dylan does not offer instructions on how to serve, or even what will happen to you if you choose to serve one or the other. The song’s other verses give us a long list of people, some of whom are good, some of whom are neutral, and some of whom are immoral. Dylan does not offer any opinion on their behaviour. He lists them, then says “But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.”

This week, we confront one of the Bible’s most disturbing stories: the binding of Isaac. When Christianity was in its infancy, our ancestors, who still identified as Jews, used several Bible stories to understand the story of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection.

One of the stories they chose was the story of Jonah and his three days in the great fish.

The other story is the binding of Isaac.

It’s a distressing story, not just because of what it contains, but because of what’s unsaid. It’s not entirely clear if Isaac knows what’s happening. We don’t know how old Isaac is. We don’t know how he reacted to being bound and laid on the wood by his father. We don’t know what Abraham is thinking. The storytelling becoming sparse, almost clinical. And then, the angel intervenes, and all is well.

Maybe – because now there’s more that’s unsaid. Oh to be a fly on the wall for the conversation between Isaac and Abraham coming down from the mountain!

Jewish commentaries have lots to say on the story, with most of the rabbis claiming that Isaac was an adult and consented to the sacrifice. It became one of the most important Biblical stories in rabbinic theology. Early Christians understanding Jesus through this lens was quite a natural progression; the Genesis Rabbah, a 5^th century Jewish commentary on Genesis, when commenting on Isaac carrying the wood for his own sacrifice, “It is like a person who carries his cross on his own shoulder.”

There are many, many interpretations of this text. Some see it as a story about God condemning child sacrifice. Some see it as a failure on Abraham’s part based on the fact that after the story takes place, God no longer speaks to Abraham, and Sarah dies almost immediately, as if she couldn’t handle the stress! Jewish commentary welcomes speculation, so all are fair to consider.

This is one of those stories where the gulf between us and the ancient world is deeply apparent. There is a worldview at play here that is as foreign as the dark side of the moon. What does seem clear is that the ancient Jews saw Isaac as a martyr figure whose sacrifice evokes the Passover lamb. If we look at the story from this lens, Isaac’s silence makes a bit more sense. A lamb does not know where it is being led; if it trusts the one who leads, it will follow without question.

Abraham’s almost robotic acceptance of this horrifying command, though, still doesn’t make sense to me personally – particularly after we know that he was perfect willing to bargain with God over the possibility of righteous people living in Sodom.

How could a father be willing to do something so awful without a word of protest? Could it be that Abraham thought, since Isaac was his miracle baby promised by God, maybe Isaac was never really his to begin with?

Maybe.

And maybe, after Abraham heard that terrible command, he slowly got up, let out his breath, and thought, “I guess I had to serve somebody.”

He’d already moved his little family thousands of kilometres from home. What’s another impossible task between friends?

Today’s Gospel passage might feel out of place next to this high drama. But in context, there is some resonance. These few verses come at the end of a long teaching by Jesus about the risks of becoming his disciple. He warns those who wish to follow him that they should expect to be met with hostility, and that he himself has not come to bring peace but a sword. He claims that those who love their families more than they love him are not fit to be his disciples, and that whoever finds their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life will find it.

After all of this threatening stuff, these few verses seem to offer some hope. Although the cost of discipleship is great, it seems like those who extend kindness to disciples, or to others in the name of those disciples, can also expect to be rewarded. Like every good rabbi, Jesus reminds his listeners of stories in the Hebrew Bible of those who welcomed prophets and received rewards for doing so.

Perhaps Matthew is offering some actual good news: that there are many ways to serve.

You’re going to have to serve somebody.

Bob Dylan has two options in his song of who to serve: the devil or the Lord. But really, there are so, so many more.

To a certain extent, we are called to serve bosses, families, friends, and other organizations, just by necessity. Some may be a joy, and some may be a burden. A certain degree of service is a part of life. It’s what makes society function.

But we know this isn’t what Dylan was talking about.

I don’t agree with John Lennon’s response song, but we could choose to serve ourselves – and that’s not always a bad thing, or counter to God’s will. I’ve met plenty of people who left abusive churches and families and believe they served God in their leaving by honouring their identities as beloved children of God. God’s will for us is transformation, and true transformation is chosen voluntarily, with joyful consent.

But there are many more people and concepts we could choose to serve.

We could choose to serve wealth. We could choose to serve our basest urges. We could choose to serve a person who may or may not have our best interests at heart. We could choose to serve the spirit of individualism that says we owe no one anything. Or, we could choose to serve the Christ of peace, justice, compassion, and solidarity.

Dylan doesn’t judge – and Jesus says that even if we’re not actively serving the call to carry our cross, if we welcome prophets and disciples, we will be rewarded.

But you can’t opt out. You’re going to have to serve somebody.

In the Anglican Church of Canada, National Indigenous Day of Prayer began after being declared in 1971 by our General Synod, the main governing body of the church. The push to recognize and fully observe the day stalled a bit until a period of Indigenous revival in the mid 1990s. Across the Canadian church, earlier campaigns for the day were revived alongside the movement toward a self-determining Indigenous church. Resources for prayer and partnership at the national church level were being collected and collated, leading us to the special day we observe today.

Last year for National Indigenous Day of Prayer, I was in Whitehorse, in Kwanlin Dün territory, which is not unceded. Those aware of territorial acknowledgements in British Columbia will know that for most of the territories that occupy this province, we call the land unceded. This means that it was never sold or negotiated for with the settlers who came here. It is why I will often say during my own territorial acknowledgements that the land is stolen. Many of the people in this community of Holy Cross understand all too well how these sorts of things can occur. In other parts of the country, land parcels were negotiated in treaties with Indigenous peoples, some old and some modern, and so the land is occasionally referred to by its treaty number, like Treaty 6 land in Saskatchewan and Alberta.

For many, many decades, the tribes and families that make up the Kwanlin Dün First Nation in the Yukon fought valiantly for the land that had sustained them for thousands of years, becoming a self-governing First Nation in 2005. So when you go to that territory, you might not hear territorial acknowledgements at all, although plenty of settlers still take note of its status as an act of respect. Our diocese’s Indigenous elder in residence, Rikki Kooy, teaches that land acknowledgements are not about whose property we’re on, but about naming and honouring the land itself, making it clear that it is a living being which sustains us, rather than an object solely for our use.

My Indigenous Peoples’ Day was the highlight of my first trip to Whitehorse. We went along the river to the Kwanlin Dün cultural centre, a wonderful place free for all to access and packed with art and community activities. My husband and I participated in a round dance, watched a regalia fashion show, contests for jig dancing and bannock baking, tried Indigenous crafts, listened to stories from elders, and played hand games, which are a beautiful mystery to me but are incredibly fun to watch. The mood overall was triumphant, celebratory.

This time around, as I walked by the cultural centre and the swiftly moving Yukon River, I was put in mind of that day. Driving up into the mountains to look over the stunning Indigenous council lands I’ll be visiting during the first Whitehorse Worship Arts and Music Festival in a couple of weeks, lands which contain an outdoor labyrinth, cobalt blue lake, and whispering trees carpeted in black reindeer moss, put me in mind of that day.

Finally, a fascinating discovery I made in a book called Church of the Wild put me in mind of that day – and today.

Church of the Wild was written by Victoria Loorz, a self-identified ‘wild church’ pastor and spiritual director who conducts worship outdoors. The wild church movement is a decentralized group of communities who seek to reconnect people to the beauty of creation, sometimes named as “God’s first revelation” by early church fathers. The Salal and Cedar community, whose Eucharistic prayer we use in Eastertide, is a wild church community.

Loorz’s book introduces the reader to the concepts that underlie wild church worship, but in one chapter she shared a discovery that cracked Scripture open for her, and it was something that I myself hadn’t heard before, or if I had, I’d forgotten all about it.

While studying Latin translations of the first chapter of the Gospel of John, Loorz discovered that there was some controversy among scholars about how to translate the word for...well, word. “In the beginning was the Word.” Most scholars would translate the Greek word logos into verbum in Latin. But many of the ancient Church fathers, and other scholars like Erasmus of Rotterdam, used the Latin word sermo instead. Sermo is where the word “sermon” comes from, of course, and it can be used interchangeably with verbum.

Why does this matter?

Well, the thing about verbum is that it mostly refers to singular words.

Sermo, though, is a conversation.

“In the beginning was the conversation, and the conversation was with God, and the conversation was God.”

Rather than Jesus showing up as one single solitary word, Jesus is a conversation.

Jesus is a connection.

And of course this is so, because God is a connection.

God, in fact, is the connection.

This is a spiritual revelation that Indigenous people have always understood. Relationship is the underpinning of everything in so much of Indigenous culture. Maintaining relationship is the highest good that should be sought as much as possible. In restorative justice circles (many of which are conducted according to particular Indigenous protocols), rather than establishing proof of what happened and determining financial compensation as happens in white Western courts, both parties are brought to a face-to-face meeting where each describes what happened in their experience, and work out how to move forward together. People who have engaged in this type of reconciliation often describe it as the most difficult thing they’ve ever had to endure...but then add that the exercise made a much deeper level of healing possible than the standard court system, because they were pushed to fully confront the consequences of their actions by connecting those actions to a human face.

This is incredibly important teaching that we would do well to heed, not just because of the fragmentary, isolated world we live in, but because humans are hard-wired for relationship with one another, and our success as a species, for good and for ill, has always been dependent on how well we work with one another.

We talk often about what it means to be made in the image of God. As we contemplate a God who is triune, three-in-one, perhaps the image we carry is our natural inclination to relationship with one another and other beings, including the land.

Perhaps it is time to turn hyper-focus away from solitary words, and re-enter the conversation.

I’ll close with teaching from our Anglican National Indigenous Archbishop Chris Harper.

“Indigenous circles of community have hand drums, the small drum of individuality. With these drums we sing our personal songs and join with others in circles of round dance songs, bringing the many together in voice and heartbeat. The great ground drum used in pow wows is the great voice of Mother Earth, creation’s heartbeat, resounding and drawing everyone to sing and dance as one in the Creator’s blessing – the blessing of a shared heartbeat.

Whether with the hand drum or ground drum, our songs go out in celebration of and unity with peoples and nationhood. Our heartbeat, the gifted drum of the Creator, is our song of life and faith, the song and beat we build and write each new day to the glory of God. It will be our unifying song and beat that we will all sing before the Creator. So today, sing your song, add to the great circle of creation and celebration. May the drumbeat of your heart be one of peace, faith and unity and a celebration of life this day.”

It must be. Abram’s journey is, in some ways, beyond audacious. His first journey, from Ur to Haran, is nearly a thousand kilometres. Then Haran to Canaan is about 640 kilometres. All this occurs because of God’s promise to him. I’ve always wanted to ask him if he actually talked to his wife Sarai or his nephew Lot first before picking up and moving on! If he did, that scene is not included in Scripture!

And yet, as audacious as it is, many of us have lived that story. We all know what it means to go forth into something brand new, whether that’s a marriage or moving halfway round the world. It may not feel audacious, but there are always moments of audacity in every human life.

But maybe the real audacity is God’s.

We are never told why God chooses Abram, never given an account of his good deeds or his noble character. The only virtue he appears to have is that when God tells him to go, he goes. How audacious of God to call him forth so far from home when a human’s relationship to the land was everything. As we enter Indigenous History Month, we’ll hear Indigenous elders and teachers calling us to reconnect to the land, to enter into relationship with it, to know it better in order to be in balance and harmony. But here, Abram is acting more like a refugee – and why? There isn’t any danger to flee.

Only a promise.

Then compare Matthew, who doesn’t even get a promise! He just gets “Follow me”! Talk about audacity!

The Baptist minister and preaching professor Cleophus J. LaRue writes, “Jesus calls people out of the ordinariness of their lives. It is not that they don’t have anything else to do, it is that they don’t have anything more important to do than to hear and heed the Savior’s command.” The same could be said for Abram, only it was God that made the call.

God calls us forth out of ordinariness into something extraordinary.

That’s good news.

But there’s good news, and then there’s great news.

The great news is that an audacious God responds to audacious people.

In the Gospel reading for today, Matthew is the only one Jesus calls. Everyone else calls upon Jesus.

Matthew presumably invites Jesus to his house, and the house fills up with “tax collectors and sinners.” In today’s world, the word “sinner” often makes us think of folks caught in ordinary but mundane vices, like gamblers and smokers. In Jesus’s world, sinners were truly audacious: those who caused breakage or conflict in their families or communities. Tax collectors, who did the dirty work of the empire, were certainly among them. These are people the community would see as actively harmful – and Jesus is eating with them! Only when we understand this does the audacious, radical nature of his work become clear.

Notice too that we don’t get to hear what Jesus and these sinners are talking about as they hang out together. Is he telling them to leave behind their wicked ways or they’ll burn? Or is he asking them questions, trying to understand who they are, trying to see what led them to do the things they do, in order to show them another way? We don’t get to know that. Maybe Jesus was trying to create space for them to share freely and feel seen and listened to. In an article by journalist Robert Evans, former IRA terrorist Shane Paul O’Doherty said that what truly brought him out of his mindset of violence was the British officials he had wanted to murder befriending him in prison. He said, “I’ve always felt that the acts of those people, to go to the enemy and listen and learn and engage, saved me.”

But it’s not only audacious sinners that are drawn to Jesus. We also have less metaphorically sick ones: the woman with the hemorrhage, and the daughter of this community leader.

In the Gospel of Mark, the leader is given a name, Jairus, which in Hebrew means, “he shines.” And he does in this story, just as this unnamed woman with the hemorrhage does. But where the leader shines publicly, stating before his whole community that he audaciously believes Jesus can bring his daughter back from death, the woman shines privately, audaciously touching the fringe on the end of Jesus’s coat, mindful that to do so in her state of ritual impurity is to invite scandal.

Both of them reach out from desperation. While Matthew doesn’t include this detail in his story of the woman, Mark includes a line saying that in her search for a cure to this debilitating condition, she had spent all she had. We can easily see this as being possible in Matthew’s version of the story, as he does affirm, like Mark, that she has been suffering for twelve years.

Imagine suffering since 2014. “All of me” and “Royals” were on the radio and your suffering has just begun. The Lego Movie and Guardians of the Galaxy is in the theatres and your suffering has just begun. Stephen Harper and Barack Obama were world leaders and your suffering has just begun.

Twelve years and yet her faith is so strong that she thinks, “All I need to do is touch the tassel on his cloak.”

And Jesus sees her, and says, “Yes. That’s all you need to do. What incredible faith you have. A moment of audacity is permissible. It’s made you well.”

Jesus sees the leader, hears his grief, and says, “Your daughter’s died? I’m glad you came to me first. A moment of audacity is permissible. That’s made you well.”

Some may think it’s their strong faith that leads to reward, and that’s certainly part of it. But their audacity is also a part of it – the audacity to reach out at the end of your rope, to demand not merely healing from sickness but raising from the dead.

It has to be the audacity too, because that links these two back to those sinners who dared to come near to Jesus, knowing that just being with him was enough to turn everything upside-down.

There is an audacity to leaving everything behind you’ve ever known, trusting in God to companion you across thousands of kilometres on a promise and a prayer.

There is an audacity to approaching God with the demands of a heart weary with struggle and pain.

If you think that the grace, the power, the healing, the salvation couldn’t possibly be for you, don’t be afraid to reach out and demand the impossible.

A moment of audacity is permissible.

The story isn’t complex: a wild boy of the wood falls in love with a princess and they have to battle an evil being known only as Darkness – played masterfully by living legend, Tim Curry – to stop him from plunging the whole world into an everlasting winter’s night. It’s a fairy tale, but it’s 1985 so it’s incredibly dark and a little weird. I guess it’s up to you all whether I turned out okay after growing up on fare like that.

Since it’s a fairy tale, of course there’s an epic battle, and the wild boy of the wood and his clever friends figure out a way to harness the light of the sunrise to thwart Darkness. As they shine the light in his face, he says, “You think you have won. What is light without dark?” This line ties into the film’s main theme, which states that there can be “no good without evil...no love without hate...no heaven without hell...no light without darkness.” So the film is about binary opposites, how they must be held in balance, and how the struggle to maintain that balance leads to the birth of fairy tales.

When we talk about the Holy Trinity, it’s easy to get confused about the mechanics. Our ancestors certainly did! They argued for generations over how the three persons related to one another. Many of them got very good at deciding what the Trinity was not, but still often came up short when trying to figure out what it was, and I think we struggle with that still!

The Trinity resists the binary. There is no struggle for balance. A Christian who believes in the Trinity believes that the universe was created through it, and therefore that balance, held through multiple persons, is written into the universe.

We’re just not sure how. And maybe we’re all quite at sea now. I am. Oh dear.

So let’s go back to light, and legend: the story of Genesis.

As I was looking over that passage, I found a note in the Jewish Study Bible commentary: “Since the sun is not created until the fourth day...the light of the first three days is of a different order than what we know.”

There are ancient Jewish legends about what this mysterious other light would have been, and where it could have gone once the sun and moon were created. Some claim that it was hidden away after the fall of the tower of Babel, waiting to be revealed a righteous generation. I’m sure astrophysicists could help us understand cosmic light from a scientific perspective, but I got to thinking about the nature of light, and how we can explain light pretty easily if we use scientific terms. But if you don’t use science language, and if you’re trying to explain what light is rather than what it does, I’m really not sure how you could describe it! It’s like trying to describe colour to someone who’s been blind from birth.

Light just...is.

And without it, this planet would not be.

So I wonder if maybe the Trinity might be a little bit like that. Maybe the Trinity is, in fact, like that first light, which we can’t really hope to understand, because we have never known a time without the sun. It has always been there, ensuring our flourishing.

We would have nothing without light, and this knowledge is written into most languages. Light has a whole host of emotional and spiritual meanings attached to it. Light contains multitudes even as, on planet earth, it comes from one simple source.

In the Gospel passage for today Jesus invokes the Trinity as a necessary part of the baptism ritual, saying that all believers must be baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It’s odd to find this formula here and not in Paul’s letters, which makes scholars wonder if perhaps it was added to Matthew’s text later, as the Christian Church began to explore a theology of these three persons. It seems a maddening choice as a reading for the day, because there is so little there for us to unpack, other than linking the Trinity to baptism!

But once again, think of light, which is both simple and unnervingly complex, and we’re led out of that binary system and into the world of prisms, which split light into its many colours. All of these are contained within one beam of light, but our eyes cannot perceive them unless they are so split. The prism is not something that actually changes the inner nature of light itself, but simply makes it possible for our eyes to separate the colours by bending and refracting it.

It changes the light...but it doesn’t.

It’s the same light going in and coming out. It’s just made separate.

And maybe that’s what the Trinity is like: something that appears as one, but contains multitudes, and which our Scripture occasionally acts upon like a prism. The prism of Scripture then becomes a teaching tool, rather than a magical item, showing us the disparate parts without compromising the structure of the whole.

Okay, that was a fun exercise. What does it matter?

I’m still not really sure myself.

Light just is, and without it, we wouldn’t be.

It warms our planet to the perfect temperature. It helps us to see. It feeds our plants and therefore all of us. In some parts of the world, it powers cities. It can be a disinfectant. If we don’t have respect for its power, it can cause harm. Don’t forget to wear sunscreen!

It exists and offers all of this, as far as we’re aware, without consciousness. It offers up abundance and life just by its nature.

It provides us with beauty and wisdom.

It is so much more than simply the absence of darkness. It contains multitudes.

The Trinity does and is all of this, consciously.

It does all of this out of love, a being existing in relationship with itself – containing all colours, which we can separate and focus, as we can with the three persons.

If this is what God is like, and Jesus is calling us to be closer to God, then it stands to reason that this is what we are being called to return to, at this imagined end of the age: fully integrated multitudes. Fully integrated trust. Fully integrated relationship.

It has to be, because the last time we had that, we were in Eden.

“There once was someone who said such wonderful things and did such amazing things that people began to wonder who he was. One time, when they asked him who he was, he said, ‘I am the Light.’”

Jesus was the Light of the World. And maybe we are fire-keepers.

Fire-keepers have existed since time immemorial, maybe to remind us of whichever of the many named ancestors – Prometheus, Mātariśvan, Māui, ǀKágge̥n, Coyote – who stole fire from the gods, or the sun, or some other powerful being. Ever since that ancestor struck their first match, we’ve been keeping and tending fire, in one way or another.

In County Kildare in Ireland, Brigidine sisters lit a new fire in 1993 to re-start a fire-keeping tradition that St. Brigid and her nuns had done hundreds of years before. That flame has been burning continuously since then at their retreat centre.

On this land, Indigenous peoples of many different nations practice fire-keeping. One or several people watch over the fire while sacred ceremonies are being conducted. I’ve seen sacred fires tended everywhere from the PNE grounds during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to our Cathedral’s Hillman Garden during a gathering for victims of the opioid crisis to the streets of Vancouver during protests. A fire-keeper in many of these situations receives special training to do it. It’s not just watching over a campfire. It’s holy work.

I’m not as versed in Japanese types of fire-keeping, but I know that sacred fires are a huge part of many Japanese festivals.

For a huge number of cultures world-wide, fire-keeping is not just about making friends with the element that keeps us warm, illuminated, and fed well. Fire, like water, is seen to be holy and purifying. While we might be curious about why John the Baptist talks about baptisms of water and fire, really it makes sense to pair them. Fire and water can be both gentle and fierce, necessary and destructive. When we don’t respect their power, we get ourselves into trouble. When we need them and don’t have them to hand, we risk everything.

We are at the end of the Easter season, a fifty day celebration of resurrection, new life, and forgiveness. And yet, we are also looking ahead to a new beginning as we remember, in a sense, the birthday of the Church universal, which is really what Pentecost is. To put this feast in dialogue with Easter shows us the power of God in our lives in an almost disturbing way.

See, Easter is an overturning. The normal rules no longer apply. Dead is not dead. Revenge is unnecessary. Abundance of all kinds blazes forth like dawn. But, although all of this beauty is for us, in the Bible story it does not quite touch our bodies. The disciples, hidden in the locked room, meet Jesus, and he breathes on them, but they are not able to pass through locked doors as he is. Peter races to meet Jesus on the beach in Chapter 21 of John, but he is not able to walk on water. They are changed, but really, they are the same.

Pentecost changes us. The Holy Spirit arrives in wind and flame. She rests, hovers, above the disciples. She gives them new languages. She baptizes with fire, and it is only then that the Church is able to truly be born. Jesus enters a locked room, but the Holy Spirit blows the door off its hinges.

The Church goes from being an idea to being a movement.

The Church goes from being a group of individuals to being a firekeeper.

In the passage we read from John, Jesus is present at the Temple for the festival of Sukkot. This commemorates the wandering of the Israelites in the wilderness. The people would make little temporary huts outside to remember this period of pilgrimage. Several Sundays back, we read the story of the waters of Meribah bursting forth from the rock during that wilderness time. Here, during this time of remembrance, Jesus puts himself in the place of the rock, the source of water, and calls us forth to drink. The Bible passage he quotes here is translated oddly. The quote is not, “Out of the believer’s heart,” but more accurately, “For the one who believes in me, as the Scripture quotes, ‘Rivers of living water will flow out from their gut.’” A bit startling! But the gut was seen as the seat of emotions for the people of the time, so it’s like ‘heart,’ but a bit more...well, visceral.

Here Jesus is showing us that God will never abandon us. Even when the people of Israel bickered with Moses in the desert, God still provided water, and not just from creating a new oasis. No, the water came out of solid rock. Out of solid rock, which was then named Meribah, “Quarrelling” or “Bickering.” Even out of the solid rock of stubbornness and fear and mistrust, living water, one of the most powerful and unchained forces on our planet can be made to flow.

At Pentecost, Jesus shows us that God will never abandon us. The disciples were scorched by the power of the Spirit and given the ability to speak and testify. They had done nothing heroic. They had abandoned him, but he returned and bestowed this blessing. Even out of the trembling clay of frailty and fear and fallenness, one of the most powerful and transformative forces on the planet can be made to purify.

This is just as true for us as it was for them.

Let me show you. Let’s borrow from Godly Play again.

I’ve got these tealites here. I think I’ve got enough to have one for every single person in this room.

“Look. The light is growing bigger and bigger. And look here. The light that all the light is coming from is not growing smaller. I wonder how so much light can come from one light?”

“Look at all this light.”

Look at all these firekeepers.

“Now let me show you something. Let’s change the light. We’re not going to put it out. That’s not what this is. Watch. I’ll show you with mine first.

Do you see how all this light is right here in the flame? It is easy to see then. Now watch. It changes.

See the light is spreading out. It is filling up the room. Just because you can’t see it anymore doesn’t mean that it is gone. Anywhere you go in the room today, there it will be. Our room will be full of invisible light.”

See, this is a different kind of firekeeping. Jesus’s body is no longer with us. We keep and tend and share the memory of the fire, because if we do that, it can do things it couldn’t ever do when it was just in one place.

Now, anywhere you go in this room, you will bump into the light. And when the door opens, the light will go out, into the world, and you’ll be called to chase it, and find it again.

When the door opens, you will go out, just as you always have before.

But this time, you know you’re not going out the same person you were when you came in.

You’re going out on a river of living water.

You’re going out with a heart of light.

You’re going out a firekeeper.

How does it feel to hear those words? You are a gift.

Maybe you feel loved. Maybe you feel awkward and uncomfortable. Maybe you feel like it can’t be true.

It is inescapable. You are a gift.

And now maybe you’re thinking, “All right. I’m a gift. But to whom? To my parents? To my partner? To my friends? To my kids? To my community? What?”

Brace yourself.

You are a gift to Jesus, from God.

Jesus says in his prayer to God, “I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word.”

So you are a gift to Jesus, from God.

Now maybe you’re thinking, “That’s a lot of pressure! I don’t think I’ve been wrapped yet!” If you’re like me, you might be thinking, “I must be the last-minute bought-it-at-the-airport-duty-free gift!”

We’re not gonna go there, okay? Stay with me for a moment. Stay in the awkward.

Whatever you do, don’t immediately start to think about all the things you should have been doing, or all the people you should have been.

You are a gift to Jesus, from God, and I’m going to tell you why that is enough.

Chapter 17 of John’s Gospel begins what some scholars call “the Book of Glory.” This part of the Gospel has that name for a number of reasons, but primarily because the word ‘glory’ and ‘glorify’ get used so very much. And yes these are bell-ringing words, like we talked about back in Lent. They come up all the time throughout these couple of chapters.

So when I was looking through trying to think about what threads to pull this morning, I thought of the word ‘glory,’ and I was curious about what that word might tell us. I looked it up and found the word in Greek, which some of you might be vaguely familiar with. It’s δόξα from which we get the word “doxology”. That’s the prayer we say that begins with “Glory to God, whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.” “Doxology” actually means something like, ‘words of glory.’ This word δόξα basically means the same thing in English: splendour, majesty, honour.

Then, as I often do, I tried to find a Hebrew equivalent in the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible. It’s good to compare the Hebrew word because Jesus was steeped in that Scripture, and the words he used would have contained all of that context and call-backs. The Hebrew word is כָּבוֹד, and I discovered that, while it does mean the same things, it also has a meaning of ‘heaviness.’ When I looked up where it first shows up in the Hebrew Bible, I saw that the first several uses of the word, in the Book of Genesis, did not refer to God, but to wealth and riches held by people. In the Book of Exodus, the word becomes linked to God and God’s acts of liberation.

At first, I was a bit put off by the linking of glory to wealth. But then it became clearer. The connection to “heaviness” is the key here.

God’s glory is about abundance.

God’s glory is about much-ness.

God’s glory is about there always being enough.

It then makes sense that, in John’s Book of Glory, one of the other words that comes up over and over is “give.” God has given Jesus authority. God has given eternal life. God has given Jesus the disciples. God has given Jesus words and he gave them to the disciples – to us.

God’s glory is abundance.

But there have been enough sermons about all of the blessings God has given to us. Of course gratitude is so important. But we’re going to come back to that another time. I know this community understands gratitude.

But do you understand that you are a gift to Jesus from God?

And, of course, that means that you are a gift to God from God.

Only God could be so ingenious as to craft a gift to Godself out of Godself!

Again, I want you to rest in it for a moment. Don’t go straight to gratitude. Don’t go straight to, “Oh what shall I do with this? How shall I live my life? How do I make amends? How do I be the best me?”

Stay in this moment. Stay in the awkward. Stay in the glory.

You are a gift to Jesus from God.

You are a gift to God from God.

Like Abraham, like Mary, we do not understand why the disciples were chosen. The text is not clear or explicit about who they were to be chosen. We make assumptions about why based on their responses to God, but we don’t get a long list of admirable qualities when we first meet them in the text. These are ordinary folks doing ordinary things, living ordinary lives – until they aren’t.

God chooses them, and through them does amazing things. And of course, ordinary folks are who God always chooses to do amazing things. Otherwise the things wouldn’t be so amazing.

So don’t think about who you’re supposed to be. There will be time to live into that, and it may very well happen without you even realizing it at first. Often we don’t realize how resilient or amazing we are until we’re riding a tidal wave and crashing into the shore. At some point, you may have once said to someone, “I can’t do this,” and had the blessed response, “Yes you can, and you will.” But often, we don’t even get that. We just realize that it happened, and not quite know how.

And I’m starting to think that might be what God loves about us most.

You are a gift to Jesus from God.

You are a gift to God from God.

A gift may be useful. As we get older we begin to appreciate the useful gifts more and more: the new gadget, the fresh socks, the class or workshop. But again, let’s not go there yet. Let’s go back to childhood, when the best gifts were never the socks. The best gifts were the ones that were just for fun, for joy, for colour and sound and play.

It may be that even those, in the end, were useful. It’s useful to have time and space for uselessness, for play!

But don’t worry about that.

In Chapter 16, just before the passage we read, Jesus says, “Take courage: I have conquered the world!”

“Take courage” in Greek is θαρσεῖτε. In the Greek this command also comes up in the stories of Jesus walking on the water. It is what he says when the disciples see him and think he is a ghost.

He is not a ghost. He is exactly who he says he is, and he has done the work. He has conquered the world, the world which tried to destroy him, and couldn’t. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness could not grasp or conquer it.

There is nothing left to do but be a gift.

You are a gift to Jesus from God.

You are a gift to God from God.

There will be plenty of time to think about what to do with that revelation.

There is always enough.

“Glory to God, whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Glory to God, from generation to generation, in the church and in Christ Jesus, forever and ever. Amen.”

Mansur al-Hallaj was born around 858 in Iran during the time of the Abbasid Empire. His father was a cotton-carder; his grandfather a Zoroastrian magus. We believe the Three Kings who offered their gifts to the infant Jesus were Zoroastrian magi. It goes to show that Hallaj was primed for the mystical.

He went on to become a foundational figure in Sufism for a number of reasons, some of which had to do with his commitment to walking and working among ordinary people, and some of which had to do with the wild and even offensive things he would say in periods of spiritual ecstasy. These types of sayings are known in Islam as shath and they were common in Hallaj’s time. Hallaj had many, but his most famous was “Ana’l Haqq,” or “I am the Truth.”

Sound familiar?

You should hear a capital T on that ‘truth.’ Al-Haqq is a special title given to God. To say this as a single person, especially in a faith as devoutly monotheistic as Islam, is to court blasphemy. I say court because the legal notion of blasphemy was fuzzy at the time, and so those charged with it tended to be people that the judges and accusers didn’t like. This was definitely the case for Hallaj, whose preaching was radical enough to inspire hundreds of disciples and even spark popular reform movements in Baghdad. He was eventually arrested and, despite attempts to free him, he was condemned to death, tortured, executed, and burned. His ashes were scattered in the Tigris River.

The execution was both religious and political. Hallaj’s tendency to avoid wearing traditional Sufi garb in favour of ordinary clothing, and sharing mystical teachings with ordinary folks when most Sufis of the time wouldn’t dare do so, made him a controversial but now deeply respected figure, with his ecstatic utterance being interpreted not necessarily as blasphemy but as a moment of deep spiritual intimacy with God.

“I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

I know you know how that verse often lands. It’s been used and abused for generations to frighten people into the faith, to condemn other religions, to shut down earnest questions when cognitive dissonance can no longer be maintained. And I would be lying to you if I said that that interpretation was just flat out wrong. The writer of John was writing during a time of deep fissure in the infant church, beginning its painful split from Judaism. The exclusivity here is echoed in other John passages. It is a part of John’s story.

And there is more to the story.

Lovers of John will know that Jesus made a whole series of statements beginning with the phrase “I am.” “I am the Good Shepherd.” “I am the Bread of Life.” “I am the Light of the World.” All of these are prophetic utterances like Hallaj’s, illustrating deep truths about how Jesus shows up in the world.

As difficult and occasionally frustrating as John is, there is a truly remarkable skill in the crafting of that gospel, and a beauty of intimacy woven throughout, both between Jesus and his disciples, and Jesus and God. I’d like to share some of those with you.

There are a couple of little gemstones in the wider passage we just read. First of all, the way it opens: “Do not let your hearts be troubled.”

It sounds sweet and comforting in English, but the Greek is a bit different. The word for troubled, ταράσσω [tarazo] means ‘roiled up,’ or ‘disturbed.’ This word is used in some other scenes in the gospels, specifically the ones where Jesus stills the storm and walks on the water.

So it’s not so much Jesus telling us, “Don’t be scared.” It’s him saying, “Be steady.”

“Put your trust in me.”

“Be a rock, a living stone.”

The word that the King James Version translates “mansion” and our version translates “room” is also better translated “dwelling place,” and best translated “abiding place.” The word “abide” in the Gospel of John is a powerful word that comes up again and again. It is what we are invited to do with Jesus, and it is what we are promised in the presence of the Holy Spirit.

“Be steady, as I am. As God is. As the Holy Spirit is. Abide, and be a living stone.”

And this is the heart of John.

Like Hallaj, Jesus finds himself doing nothing outside of God’s will, and yet so closely in tune with it that he is in perfect union with the divine. But Jesus also insists that we too are to be like him. Jesus tells Philip that the one who trusts in him will do even greater things. We are all called to the same intimacy with God, and the way the intimacy is to be attained is through embodying the posture of Jesus, the posture of solidarity, of compassion, of love for one’s community and the world.

The posture of feeding. The posture of healing. The posture of foot-washing.

It is hard work. It’s a rough road, a weary way. Jesus himself is clear that it may lead to conflict and death. It did for him, just as it did for Hallaj.

Sounds alarmist, but in these days of actual blasphemy shared by heads of state, in these days where fighting for one’s rights or one’s neighbour’s rights may bring down the wrath and bullets of the state, it’s not as far-fetched as one might think.

It’s hard work.

But we must be steady. We mustn’t let our hearts be troubled.

Whoever has seen Jesus – Jesus the healer, wisdom-teacher, friend of sinners, advocate for the marginalized – has seen the Father.

Do not let your hearts be troubled. Abide, and be a living stone. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it. The writer of John believed this so fervently that they didn’t just write that in that one line. They actually wrote the whole concept stylistically into the passage just before the one we just read.

Trace it with me. Chapter 13, the one just before this one, opens with Jesus washing his disciples’ feet, a teaching moment. This is followed by his prediction of Judas’s betrayal, which of course happens right afterward, with Judas walking off into the night. Once Judas has left, Jesus says, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him.” Then he gives us the New Commandment, to love one another. He then predicts Peter’s denial, which will also happen in the dark, before the cock crows. Finally we’re here at Chapter 14, when Jesus begins his farewell teachings.

The light of the new commandment is bracketed by human betrayal taking place in the dark. That human betrayal is further contained by teachings and blessings. The footwashing is there for Judas. The new commandment and Jesus’s long prayer for his disciples is there for Peter.

Judas walks away from the beloved community. Despite faltering, Peter, who lives up to his nickname and becomes the living on which Jesus builds the church, does not.

And as wicked and dreadful and monstrous as it is...directed by his teacher, who says, “Do quickly what you are going to do,” even Judas fulfills his task.

Perhaps even the truest blasphemy, the selling out of the Saviour of the World, was redeemed in that one night.

And if that is possible, then there’s always hope for the rest of us.

Rumi would be proud to look upon this modern-day update of his fable of the harpist in the graveyard.

When things fall apart, sometimes we do things that don’t make sense.

About twelve years ago, when I received the news that my father died, I came home to discover that my husband had made a pot of tea. He did this because he knows I love tea and it’s a comfort…but it might also have been what I’d call an “ethnic reflex.” This is what our people do.

Last month, when my stepdad and I kept watch over my mother as she began her transit into eternity, I brought snacks for the vigil. Later, care aides solicitously told me about the plates of food they’d laid aside for us in the fridge. When Mum died, friends sent us so much food that our dining table and freezer were full for weeks. Lasagne, bread, pastries, a gift box full of packaged goods, DoorDash and Skip the Dishes cards.

When things fall apart, sometimes we do things that don’t make sense.

When people die, we eat.

We eat as if to prod death with our life, to stir up the invisible microscopic life inside our guts, to silently scream our ability to fill what death hollows out. We eat as if to prove that we are still here, present with other people in the raw and physical. We eat because it’s something we must do, and it helps us pick up the dropped stitches of one life and try to knit ourselves back together. We eat because it’s aggressively normal.

It’s sort of like whistling in the dark. Playing in a graveyard. Singing in the ruins.

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus spends a lot of time eating. He ate with outcasts and sinners, rich and poor, healthy and sick. Jesus ate with us because it’s aggressively normalizing to eat with those whom we would rather not touch or talk to.

Most of all, Jesus ate with us to remind us that the great kingdom feast had come near – here, into this place, not some perfect or untouched place, but an impoverished, starving, unjust, lonely place.

Every feast he attended, therefore, was funereal as well as joyful. Every feast was a ruin – but when Jesus showed up, a simple ruin became a tavern, a place for foolish, sacred, drunken love.

People knew this about him. Why else would some random woman have wandered in once off the street to anoint his feet and wipe them down with her hair? She knew what was up.

“This,” Jesus says incessantly in Luke, “this is the kingdom of God.”

No wonder he was frustrated with these two disciples. They should have figured it out! No wonder it all seemed so obvious to him that he called them foolish.

But let’s have some patience for them. Let’s make much of those three very poignant words: “We had hoped…” We had hoped Jesus would be the one to redeem us, to overturn things, to restore us to a blessedness that we could really see, to liberate us from the chains of imperial Rome, to turn graveyard into garden. “We had hoped…”

Don’t we all? Haven’t you ever hoped that you could rewind a conversation? Haven’t you ever hoped that a mistake could be undone? Haven’t you ever hoped that your day was all just a bad dream?

And maybe we can have some patience for them not understanding that it is only through things as ordinary as eating that God chooses to make Godself known. It’s easy to take eating for granted if you’re not accustomed to being hungry. Maybe that’s why Jesus’s message really resonated with the poor and the marginalized. They knew that getting to eat can be a miracle, and getting to eat with other people can be on par with resurrection.

Things in the story then take a decidedly Eucharistic turn. Jesus begins by explaining the role of the Messiah in Scripture, just as we are doing now. This is the part of church we call the liturgy of the word.

But then things get radical.

Because that is not what makes them see.

I can’t tell you how many Christian films I’ve seen that include a montage where a character opens a Bible and then, in a few artfully composed shots, seems to come to some manner of amazing revelation, and then their whole life turns around. I find those scenes fascinating, not just because I always want to know what part of the Bible they’re reading, but because I think it betrays a deeply self-centered approach to the faith.

Christianity is not about reading alone in your room, as lovely as that is to do of an evening. Christianity is not about having a Bible college degree or an MDiv.

Christianity is about relationship.

And here is Luke’s proof.

The disciples do not see Jesus after he has explained the Scriptures to them.

Instead, after he has done this, he moves to continue on without them.

And these two disciples – who are unnamed, because they’re us – say, “Stay with us.”

“Stay with us, because it is almost evening, and the day is nearly over.”

Stay with us in the dark, in the graveyard, in the ruin.

Stay and eat.

Even if it’s just the three of us, we want you here, eating with strangers, because it’s what we do when the shadows grow long and we are afraid of what comes after. It’s what we do when things fall apart. It’s what we do when the people we love die.

And so Jesus does, because we invited him. We invited him, and he accepts.

He always will.

And the ruin becomes the tavern.

Cemetery becomes sacrament.

It was never about intelligence, or scholarship, or understanding. It was never about power or riches or ability or privilege. It was never about being good enough.

It was about invitation, about leaving the door open.

It was about saying, “Stay with us, Jesus, because it is almost evening, and things have fallen apart.”

“Stay with us, Jesus, because we’re so scared, but your words make our hearts burn within us. Stay with us, Jesus, because we’re so tired, but it’s not so bad when we sit down together. Stay with us, Jesus, because when you decided to join us all those years ago, we made a place for you. It was a paltry place, but really, it was our best, because our best is not palaces of gold but the spit and dust and tears and blood we mash into crumbling bricks out of love’s sheer stubbornness. You deserved a cradle for a king and we gave you a manger. You deserved an imperial procession and coronation, and we gave you a hot and horrific stumble through the back streets of Jerusalem and...well, there was a coronation, but it wasn’t the one you should have gotten.

We gave you these broken things...but we also gave you a mother and father, weary and wide-eyed and wondering.

We gave you faithful women at the foot of the cross, who would not leave your side and who cared for your body even at great personal risk.

We gave you friends – fickle and inconstant and afraid, but yours, now and forever.

We’ll give you these small things, because we know what you can do with mustardseeds and spit-soaked mud and jars of water.

Stay with us, Jesus. It’s getting dark. We’re hungry, and we want to sing.

And, with the voice of a kamancheh amid the rubble, the voice of a broken harp in a cemetery, you whisper, “I will.”

The award-winning British-Somali poet Warsan Shire wrote this in a poem called “Home” which shares the experiences of young refugees she spoke to at the abandoned Somali embassy in Rome, where they had made their home. After an excruciating few stanzas about the horrors experienced by those fleeing violence, imagined as being chased by the concept of Home, gone from a safe haven to a shark, the final stanza turns everything upside down.

It reads,

“no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i don’t know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here”

“But Thomas...was not with them when Jesus came.”

Where was Thomas? I wonder, reading this. And then I wonder if a better question is, Where was home?

Was Thomas not there because the room in which the disciples gathered was now the mouth of a shark? After all, the last time they were together, it was. There was a predator in the room, a predator with freshly washed feet, a predator with a bag full of thirty pieces of silver and a heart full of malice, a predator who walked out into the night and then disappeared from the story forever.

There was also a betrayer, a disciple given the nickname Peter, “Rocky,” the solid foundation, who would instead falter and crumble, turning away and insisting that his teacher, his beloved, was in fact a stranger.

There were also cowards who deserted and ran away, even after three years of bearing witness to Jesus’s power and teaching.

Did the community which Jesus had taught to love one another now feel like the mouth of a shark to Thomas? Is that why he wasn’t there?

Or was this actually about the disciples? Maybe they were locked together in that room because to them, the outside world felt like the mouth of the shark, the outside world that had arrested and unjustly convicted and whipped and beaten and crucified and pierced their teacher. Maybe the outside world of the fearful and the furious was the mouth of the shark, and the disciples fled and locked the doors, while Thomas raged against it, or sought for broken shards of resurrection among the rubble.

Could Thomas even have been on the hunt for Jesus? Mary had told the disciples that she had seen him, after all. Maybe Thomas went running out to find him, Thomas who had said, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” seeking Jesus with the same fervour that he had once said, “Let us also go to Bethany that we may die with him.”

So where is home?

Is it out in the world, dodging Roman soldiers in a foolish, endless search for the Beloved, or is it inside this locked room, confronting the possibility that even if we might be Judas or Peter or deserters, Jesus loves us and washes our feet anyway?

Is it out in the world, speaking out and clapping back against tyrants who threaten murder and genocide at the slightest hint of resistance or criticism? Is it out in the world, picking our way through barbed wire and bullets and fists and screams and indifference? Or is it here, in the locked room of the capital-C church, navigating shrinking congregations and bank accounts, bullies, abuse, cover-ups, and corruption?

Where is home?

Who is the doubter?

Is it Thomas, unwilling to believe in resurrection, unable to believe that the other disciples, even Judas himself, could have been redeemed after such a horrible thing as crucifixion, or is it the disciples, unwilling to go out and seek Jesus for themselves?

Is it Thomas, struggling to believe that a locked room full of cowards and deserters could possibly be redeemed, or is it the disciples, struggling to believe that Jesus could redeem a world full of pain, struggling to believe he could possibly be present anywhere but in this tiny locked room?

Who is the doubter? Where is home?

The Sufi poet Rumi, beloved disciple of the great teacher Shams of Tebriz, awoke one day to discover that Shams had disappeared. To this day it is unknown what happened to him, but most scholars believe that Rumi’s jealous son had him murdered. Rumi was devastated, but after a time of grief, he arrived at the sacred truth of the matter: Shams was not lost. He carried Shams within himself. There was and is no separation between lover and beloved – not for humanity, and not for God.

So perhaps world and locked room are both home.

Perhaps Thomas and disciples are both doubters.

In the end, what truly matters is where Jesus can be found.

He is found in both and redeems both...but most importantly, he loves both.

For in the end, despite it all, there is much to love about both.

Our world has so much suffering alongside tremendous beauty: the beauty of astronauts choosing to name a crater after their commander’s departed wife.

Mary finds Jesus standing outside the tomb, in the world, but in a garden. This is no accident. This garden should put us in mind of another garden, a long-forgotten garden which had also become a locked room, guarded by an angel with a flaming sword. But this new garden is unlocked. The stone has been rolled away. A new paradise is emerging, as tender as the dawn springing up around it.

That little locked room, the Church, also has so much beauty: the beauty of a community Easter bringing disparate people together.

The disciples find Jesus when they are gathered together, in a locked room, but this too is no accident, because this locked room should put us in mind of another room, an upper room where food was shared and feet were washed. But this new room is unlocked. Jesus has come in, somehow. And he is offering them a banquet of peace, through his breath, his Spirit.

Jesus is in both. Jesus loves both.

Thomas was outside, where Jesus had been last seen. Thomas seems to believe that the world could be redeemed. But perhaps he is less certain about the disciples. Can Jesus return? Of course! Will he, breathing peace to a bunch of cowards and betrayers? Why would he?

But he does.

And not only that. Jesus has no anger for Thomas, no punishment.

Thomas wants proof of this earth-shattering love. He receives it. “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.”

We don’t even know if Thomas accepts the invitation. He immediately responds with faith and trust. “My Lord and my God!”

Then, the heart of the Gospel.

“Jesus said to him, ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.’”

Blessed are those who have not seen me arrive here in this little room, blessed and broken, to wash and bless and breathe my Spirit into saints and sinners alike, with no regard for whether they deserve it or not, and yet have come to believe that I can and will do that.

And blessed are those who seek me in the world, blessed and broken, seek me with that burning heart that pushed Abraham into the desert and Muhammad up the mountain and Rumi into whirling and Francis into stigmata.

Blessed are those who seek me in the rubble; who, emboldened by my Spirit, pick up the shattered pieces left behind by empire, make mortar with tears and compassion, and lay bricks of peace.

Blessed are those who, against all odds, find me – even in the mouth of a shark.

Last year, maybe just after Holy Week, I compiled this piece and then utterly and completely forgot all about it. I discovered it late in Lent a few months ago and thought, “Where did this come from?!” Then, of course, I decided to share it with the Holy Cross community, who perform the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday every year.

I quite like the Stations of the Cross as a concept, but I usually like to add sparkle or adornment to it in some way. For this piece, I sourced a variety of quotes from poets, activists, and luminaries to provide context to each station, prioritizing in particular writers of colour and other marginalized identities, while retaining the traditional prayers.

I’m more than happy for you to use this devotional, and if you’d like to use it with a group in a public setting, please just reach out to me and let me know. I don’t really feel much desire to gatekeep its public use, since none of the words are mine, but I’d love to know how far the collection has travelled.

A content note: Some of the poems are a little intense, and there is one piece in particular that includes a BIG swear word. When I offered this the first time, I invited the reader (we pick them on the fly) to skip over or switch out the word if they felt uncomfortable saying it in church, but explained that Good Friday is a day to recognize the all-encompassing nature of human suffering, and to hold in our hearts that all has been redeemed in the work of Jesus. Intense words are okay, and if even something as horrific and humiliating as crucifixion can be caught up in God’s work of love, so can the F-word. ;) I then said that if the reader did choose to read it as it was written, everyone should hear the word in that spirit of reaching out to God with everything we have. I invite you, if you use this publicly, to offer a similar disclaimer.

Blessings on your Easter season, everyone!

THE WOUNDED HEALER STATIONS OF THE CROSS

A poetic rendering of the Stations of the Cross

Compiled by the Rev. Clare Morgan

Hymn

Opening Prayers

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Lord, have mercy.

Christ, have mercy.

Lord, have mercy.

The Lord’s Prayer

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven. Give us today our daily bread, and forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us. Save us from the time of trial, and deliver us from evil. For the Kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours, now and forever. Amen.

We will glory in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ:

In whom is our salvation, our life, and our resurrection.

Let us pray.

Assist us mercifully with your help, O Lord God of our salvation, that we may enter with joy upon the contemplation of those mighty acts, whereby you have given us life and immortality; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

Station 1: Jesus is condemned to death

“The shift from denial of injustice to recognition of injustice can’t be unmade. What your eyes have seen they have seen. Once you see the injustice, you can never again in good faith deny the oppression and defend the oppressor. What was loyalty is now betrayal. From now on, if you don’t resist, you collude.”

-Ursula Le Guin (American novelist and poet)

We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you:

Because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.

Let us pray.

Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord. Amen.

Trisagion

Holy God

Holy and mighty

Holy Immortal One,

Have mercy on us

Station 2: Jesus takes up his Cross

“It has never ceased to amaze me how so many people can be tricked into hating people who have never done them any harm.”

-Assata Shakur (American activist and revolutionary)

We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you:

Because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.

Let us pray.

Almighty God, whose beloved Son willingly endured the agony and shame of the cross for our redemption: Give us courage to take up our cross and follow him; who lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen.

Trisagion

Holy God

Holy and mighty

Holy Immortal One,

Have mercy on us

Station 3: Jesus falls for the first time

I came to you

Lord, because of

the fucking reticence

of this world

no, not the world, not reticence, oh

Lord Come

Lord Come

We were sad on the ground

Lord Come

We were sad on the ground

-Jean Valentine (American poet)

“I came to you,” from Door in the Mountain

We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you:

Because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.

Let us pray.

O God, you know us to be set in the midst of so many and great dangers, that by reason of the frailty of our nature we cannot always stand upright: Grant us such strength and protection as may support us in all dangers, and carry us through all temptations; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Trisagion

Holy God

Holy and mighty

Holy Immortal One,

Have mercy on us

Station 4: Jesus meets his mother

“I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.”

-Ta-Nehisi Coates (American author, journalist, and activist)

We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you:

Because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.

Let us pray.

O God, who willed that in the passion of your Son a sword of grief should pierce the soul of the Blessed Virgin Mary his mother: Mercifully grant that your Church, having shared with her in his passion, may be made worthy to share in the joys of his resurrection; who lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen.

Trisagion

Holy God

Holy and mighty

Holy Immortal One,

Have mercy on us

Station 5: The Cross is laid on Simon of Cyrene

“My friends, how desperately we need to be loved and to love. With it we are creative. With it we march tirelessly. With it, and with it alone, we are able to sacrifice for others.”

-Chief Dan George (Chief of Tsleil-Waututh Nation, actor, musician, and poet)

We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you:

Because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.

Let us pray.

Heavenly Father, whose blessed Son came not to be served but to serve: Bless all who, following in his steps, give themselves to the service of others; that with wisdom, patience, and courage, they may minister in his Name to the suffering, the friendless, and the needy; for the love of him who laid down his life for us, your Son our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Trisagion

Holy God

Holy and mighty

Holy Immortal One,

Have mercy on us

Station 6: A woman wipes the face of Jesus

“Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.”

-Viola Desmond (Canadian civil and women’s rights activist)

We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you:

Because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.

Let us pray.

O God, who before the passion of your only-begotten Son revealed his glory upon the holy mountain: Grant to us that we, beholding by faith the light of his countenance, may be strengthened to bear our cross, and be changed into his likeness from glory to glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Trisagion

Holy God

Holy and mighty

Holy Immortal One,

Have mercy on us

Station 7: Jesus falls a second time

“It’s no big revelation but our bodies are the places where the violence of politics is played out.”

-Luke O’Neil (American journalist and writer)

We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you:

Because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.

Let us pray.

Almighty and everliving God, in your tender love for the human race you sent your Son our Savior Jesus Christ to take upon him our nature, and to suffer death upon the cross, giving us the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his suffering, and also share in his resurrection; who lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen.

Trisagion

Holy God

Holy and mighty

Holy Immortal One,

Have mercy on us

Station 8: Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem

“And I cried...for all of the women who stretched their bodies for civilizations, only to find ruins.”

-Sonia Sanchez (American poet, writer, and professor)

We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you:

Because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.

Let us pray.

Teach your Church, O Lord, to mourn the sins of which it is guilty, and to repent and forsake them; that, by your pardoning grace, the results of our iniquities may not be visited upon our children and our children’s children; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Trisagion

Holy God

Holy and mighty

Holy Immortal One,

Have mercy on us

Station 9: Jesus falls a third time

“And on the sidewalks, after they’ve emerged from the stations, after being sandpapered by the jostling and scraping that a city like this does, all the lives they’ve hoarded, all the ghosts they’ve carried, all the inversions they’ve made for protection, all the scars and marks and records for recognition – the whole heterogeneous baggage falls out with each step on the pavement. There’s so much spillage.”

-Dionne Brand (Canadian writer, poet, documentarian, professor)

We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you:

Because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.

Let us pray.

O God, by the passion of your blessed Son you made an instrument of shameful death to be for us the means of life: Grant us so to glory in the cross of Christ, that we may gladly suffer shame and loss for the sake of your Son our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Trisagion

Holy God

Holy and mighty

Holy Immortal One,

Have mercy on us

Station 10: Jesus is stripped of his garments

“With Christ’s light let us illuminate even the most hideous caverns of the human person: torture, jail, plunder, want, chronic illness. The oppressed must be saved, not with a revolutionary salvation, in mere human fashion, but with the holy revolution of the Son of Man[.]”

-St. Oscar Romero (El Salvadoran archbishop)

We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you:

Because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.

Let us pray.

Lord God, whose blessed Son our Savior gave his body to be whipped and his face to be spit upon: Give us grace to accept joyfully the sufferings of the present time, confident of the glory that shall be revealed; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Trisagion

Holy God

Holy and mighty

Holy Immortal One,

Have mercy on us

Station 11: Jesus is nailed to the Cross

“The ‘civilized’ have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children...and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the ‘sanctity’ of human life.”

-James Baldwin (American writer and civil rights activist)

We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you:

Because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.

Let us pray.

Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace: So clothe us in your Spirit that we, reaching forth our hands in love, may bring those who do not know you to the knowledge and love of you; for the honor of your Name. Amen.

Trisagion

Holy God

Holy and mighty

Holy Immortal One,

Have mercy on us

Station 12: Jesus dies on the Cross

“Like Jesus to the crows

that gathered there along his arms,

upon the invitation of a slender limb.

And not oblivious to human violence

perhaps needed rest or needed to offer

the succour of presence, despite the

stiff collar of their feathers, despite

each one being no less the children

of a father who claimed an upper realm.

It is not true they pecked his eyes. Nor

did they consider his wounds

their own. They were neither irreverent

nor quiet. They spoke in the tongues

they knew. They cawed full voiced

and would have released him from his

bindings had their beaks held the power

and had there been time in that place.

Like them, I have sought to comfort and

so be comforted. Like them

I have seen the failure of miracles when

they were most needed. Like Him, I

have called upon those so unlike myself

when my father failed to answer.”

-Vievee Francis (American poet and professor)

“Like Jesus to the crows,” from Forest Primeval

We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you:

Because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.

Let us pray.

O God, who for our redemption gave your only-begotten Son to the death of the cross, and by his glorious resurrection delivered us from the power of our enemy: Grant us so to die daily to sin, that we may evermore live with him in the joy of his resurrection; who lives and reigns now and for ever. Amen.

Trisagion

Holy God

Holy and mighty

Holy Immortal One,

Have mercy on us

Station 13: The body of Jesus is given to his mother

“and it doesn’t matter / that I am crying so hard1

I cannot breathe / or that another one / of us

is dead / in the streets / with everybody’s mama

watching / and screaming / and grieving the perfect

distance apart / some stranger says / yes that’s

just right / no touching now / and a smile / that asks

do you understand children? / this is how it has to be

and it doesn’t matter / that I want to cradle everyone”

-Jillian Christmas (Canadian poet)

We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you:

Because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.

Let us pray.

Lord Jesus Christ, by your death you took away the sting of death: Grant to us your servants so to follow in faith where you have led the way, that we may at length fall asleep peacefully in you and wake up in your likeness; for your tender mercies’ sake. Amen.

Trisagion

Holy God

Holy and mighty

Holy Immortal One,

Have mercy on us

Station 14: Jesus is laid in the tomb

“I do not have much faith in justice, but I have no choice but to believe in it. The other option is nihilism – total lack of faith in humanity – which I reject. We must reject nihilism because that way lies fascism. We must reject despair and embrace healing, slow and imperfect though it may be, and turn instead to love – love strong enough to live without faith. ...We must encourage love – love that is radical, love that digs deep. Love that asks the hard questions, that is ready to listen to the whole story and keep loving anyway. ...We can choose to consume each other, or we can choose love. Even in the midst of despair, there is always a choice. I hope we choose love.”

-Kai Cheng Thom (Chinese-Canadian writer, artist, activist, and mental health worker)

We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you:

Because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.

Let us pray.

O God, your blessed Son was laid in a tomb in a garden, and rested on the Sabbath day: Grant that we who have been buried with him in the waters of baptism may find our perfect rest in his eternal and glorious kingdom; where he lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen.

Trisagion

Holy God

Holy and mighty

Holy Immortal One,

Have mercy on us

Final Prayers

“Thomas Merton once wrote

that love intensifies life

I’d like to submit that love

it inaugurates life

we wouldn’t be alive without it

My veins, they made a covenant with each capillary

My bones, an agreement with each ligament

Every organ, a lifelong pact to keep me here

But when the world cracked

Everything inside this body

needed something more

So I found you

my beautiful friend

made a promise

no, the promise

“i love you”

and for the first time i felt alive

a humble proposition:

place a love poem at the back

of every anatomy textbook

teach the difference between life &

mere existence”

-Alok Vaid-Menon (American writer and artist)

“Humble Proposition”

O God of unchanging power and eternal light, look favourably on your whole Church, that wonderful and sacred mystery.

By the working of your Holy Spirit, bring about your plan of salvation.

Let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God for ever and ever. Amen.

Hymn

“I need you now / No other

Go ahead, get loud / like thunder

The storm’s coming down

You’re my lighthouse, you save my soul.”

The song “Lighthouse” by Canadian Indigenous artist William Prince has been on my mind and I’ll tell you why. In my work at the Cathedral, I spend Mondays and Wednesdays talking to people who want spiritual advice and prayer. These people are from all over the world, but most of the ones who come talk to me tend to be younger, and usually people of colour.

In other positions I’ve held, most of the young people I talked to were doing something called “deconstructing,” trying to heal from spiritually abusive faith communities which used fear and shame to keep believers in line. Deconstructing people are suspicious of anything that sounds too similar to the language they remember from those bad old days. They are also often quite black and white in their thinking, a holdover – or, maybe, hangover! – from churches that said you were either in or out, bound for heaven or hell, with no room for nuance or questions. I’d give those folks a lot of room to ask themselves what they really think God is like, and what role they want God to play in their lives. Sometimes I tell them to take time away from church to process their thoughts and feelings, to learn what it means to feel safe in community. I don’t want to become one more pastor telling them what to do or think. I don’t believe in a God that would create and give us such a magical organ as a human brain and not want us to actually use it.

By contrast, the people who have sought me out at the Cathedral often have a powerful faith in a God of love. They are thankful for all the blessings they feel God has given them. Many of them tell me they see their careers and relationships as chances to live out God’s will for them in the world. Like the ‘deconstructers,’ they’re often pretty hard on themselves for their everyday failures in patience and compassion. But unlike many of the ‘deconstructers’, this self-criticism seems to be more about the desire to be unfailingly kind, calm, and non-judgmental, rather than crippling fear of God’s wrath if they mess up.

What does come up in the prayers of these young people, though, is uncertainty, even frustration, that God is not making God’s will for their lives clear. “I feel stuck in a holding pattern,” they often say. “I’m not sure what God wants me to do. I’m asking and asking, praying and praying, and I don’t hear anything.”

They want clarity – not because they are scared of what will happen if they don’t do God’s will, but because they want to do it, with their whole hearts, and they can’t figure out how.

So when I pray for them, my words often sound a bit like William Prince’s lyrics:

“I need you now / No other

Go ahead, get loud / like thunder

The storm’s coming down

You’re my lighthouse, you save my soul.”

Now, thinking about those young folks, and thinking about how the disciples must have felt as they left everything behind to follow Jesus, I also think about the first verse of that song:

“A ship in the harbour will always stay safe
Tied up to a dock ain’t why it was made
Craves wind though the sails, its wood on the waves
Paired to the great unknown.”

Rather than being steadfast and unwavering in faith, Jesus’s disciples appeared to stagger back and forth between belief and unbelief: from leaving everything behind to bickering over who was the greatest, from walking on water to sinking, from “You are the Messiah” to “I do not know him.” And yet clearly their first “Yes” was all that mattered. They left the harbour of their fathers and mothers and paired themselves to the great unknown.

In the third verse of the song, William Prince sings,

“Magenta sky in the morning, less gentle by noon

means the whitecaps will surely kick the heel of the moon.”

If ever there could be a proverb for the disciples of Jesus, it would probably be “Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.” To follow Jesus, particularly in the Gospel of John, is to invite suspicion and turmoil. Their first “Yes” led them to this: mistrust, conflict, betrayal, injustice, abuse, horror, execution, death, burial...and then, an empty tomb, not yet good news, because they still didn’t understand what it meant.

Mary Magdalene is confronted by silence, until silence is broken. The shepherd knows the sheep and calls them by name. I’m often haunted wondering how she must have felt. I can imagine everything inside her mind and heart going completely still; dead calm, to keep with the nautical theme. All she can do is respond automatically – Rabbouni! – and then, presumably, reach out to touch him. Or maybe she grabs him. The Greek isn’t clear whether she is trying to touch him or touching him. But Jesus says, “Do not hold onto me.”

Right at the moment that our greatest hopes and dreams for resurrection and liberation are proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt...Jesus says, “Do not hold onto me.”

Why not? We need you now. I need you now.

“Do not hold onto me.”

How can I say that to those young people who desperately want clear answers?

William Prince has his own answer for that too, in the most mysterious part of the song. At the very end, he includes a little bridge, and I think it sounds like a response to the chorus I’ve been sharing with you:

“You keep waiting on me / can’t keep waiting on me

Why you waiting on me? / I’m gone.”

“Do not hold onto me.”

Is this a letting go, a turning away, a refusal – or is it more like when you let go of the seat of your child’s bike to watch her start to pedal on her own? Is it more like walking away from a situation that’s crushing your heart because you finally realize you’re worth more than that? Is it more like waking up to the sunrise on a new day after the worst day of your life, and realizing that yes, you’re still alive, and maybe if you woke up today you can wake up tomorrow?

“You keep waiting on me / can’t keep waiting on me

Why you waiting on me? / I’m gone.”

“Do not hold onto me – because I’m going ahead of you, and I want you to chase me. I’m not gonna tell you where we’re going. That would spoil the surprise. You’re just gonna have to leave the harbour. Come on and chase me like a fool. Once you understand where we’re going, you’re not going to care how many times you roll your kayak. You’ll show up to your destination drenched and laughing, and when you do, you better believe I’m not going to tell you to let go of me.”

The young people that ask for prayers and guidance want God to be loud. Maybe you want God to be loud too. I’d love it if God was always loud to me.

Well, maybe that’s why churches have people ring bells on Easter.

This is as loud as God is gonna get.

Alleluia: Christ is risen.

Underneath these instructions is one final line: “Dedicated to the memory of Tyler Robinson.”

Kirsty Sykes, the landscaper who installed the phone, did not come up with the idea by herself. In fact, the first telephone installed for this purpose, called “the Telephone of the Wind,” was placed on a hilltop in Otsuchi, Japan, in 2011, shortly after the earthquake and tsunami that left so many without loved ones. Mourners lined up by the hundreds to speak into this phone to the ones they had lost, telling them both ordinary and meaningful things. Word spread about the project, and other people in other countries began to make their own “Telephones of the Wind,” which inspired Sykes to install her own after the death of a beloved friend.

In an interview she said, “You could write [your feelings] in a journal, but I just think sitting and speaking out loud is important as well. It’s a natural gift that we have to use communication that way.”

I thought of this story as I prepared this week’s sermon, because I was thinking about the silence of Lazarus in the Gospel passage. Then, as I looked at the other readings of the day, I saw that silence was a common colour.

In the reading from Ezekiel, the valley of bones also must have been silent – before the rattling, before the wind, before the return of flesh.

In the psalm, the psalmist cries out to and waits for a god who may seem to be silent.

And Lazarus is silent, even after returning from death. We never hear his voice, or what happened to him from his own perspective. It is his sisters who pray and plead with Jesus on his behalf, and later, it will be Mary who anoints Jesus’s feet in gratitude, perhaps with nard she bought to anoint Lazarus’s dead body.

The experience of death is often punctuated by silence. When we lose someone, the voice we loved only exists in memory, or, if we’re lucky, on tapes or videos. Some of my most treasured possessions are audio clips of my dad playing guitar – and now, my mum singing.

But the silence that comes is not only from the dead. When we try to talk about our pain, often words fail. Likewise, our friends and family may have things to say, but they are often hollow and without meaning. In English we call these “platitudes.” In Japanese, ありきたりな表現. We say these things because we’re not sure what else to say, and silence is scary. Maybe we’re afraid that adding silence to the already loud silence of a death makes it worse. When the platitudes run out, another kind of silence often begins: the silence of avoidance. People stop talking about the dead, or the disabled, or anything “unpleasant.” Grieving people, cancer patients, and folks who develop disabilities often talk about losing friends who can’t handle being around them because it’s too distressing.

It takes courage to face a valley of bones, even when they’re not yours.

It takes courage to cry out to God from the depths when you’re not really sure if God’s listening.

I think it would take courage for me to approach that Telephone to Infinity, because if I started to talk into it, I have no idea what I would say...and I don’t know if I’d be able to stop.

When Martha speaks to Jesus, she tells him that if he had been there, Lazarus would not have died, but then she shows her faith. “But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask.”

When Mary speaks to Jesus, she can’t manage that. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” We don’t know how she says that: if she’s angry, sad, frustrated, or faithful.

But even though John doesn’t tell us that, we can all imagine how it sounds, because I think all of us have said something like it at least once, right?

“Lord, if you had been here...”

“Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost.”

But our beloved dead are silent. We fall silent. Our friends fall silent. The breeze stops, and a hush falls over the valley. Only bones.

Silence – maybe for moments, maybe for hours, maybe for days, weeks, months, years.

Silence.

But, dear beloved of the Lord: God is not silent.

Sometimes, it very much seems like God is. God often does not speak to us in the way we would like, or in the way that we expect.

But God is not silent.

When the people we love die, we gather together to mark it, to pray against the silence – and bone returns to bone. God weeps with us, and the Spirit which had deserted returns and opens graves, fills us up, and we are able to stand once more.

We cry out to God from the depths because we know God has promised to draw us up from deep waters. We know God can, because God did it before and will do it again. With God there is plenteous redemption.

We cry out, “Lord, if you had been here...” and Jesus responds, “Lazarus, come out.”

Sadly, Jesus is not here to perform a sign like this today. But what happens to Lazarus is not really resurrection. He would go on to die again, and in fact, we do not hear the last part of the chapter, which sadly tells us that the religious authorities plot to have him killed, because his return to life is so threatening. The worst thing an Empire can do to someone is kill them. If death is open to negotiation under the command of Jesus, that’s bad news for Empire. The Romans had already done horrible things to the Jewish people when they had challenged Rome’s authority. The religious leaders knew how dangerous this was. They were afraid for their people.

But even when the Empire did its very worst, which we’ll hear about in just a few more days, silence couldn’t win.

God is not silent.

Lazarus went on to die again, but Jesus didn’t. Just as he befriended the sinners around him, so too I like to imagine Jesus befriending death, taking away her sting, swallowing up her terrors in his victory. I like to imagine him greeting her, hashing out a new covenant before the Sabbath, then using that very Sabbath to open the gates of hell and free all those imprisoned there, as some of our ancient Church ancestors believed. I like to imagine him giving her some manner of affectionate glance or touch before returning to the garden, and turning the world upside down, again breaking the silence with one gentle word: “Mary.”

God calls us by name, because we belong to God, and to God we shall return.

We may fall silent.

Our friends and family may fall silent.

Our beloved dead may fall silent.

But God is not silent.