But we encounter a different kind of fire this morning. In our Exodus reading, Moses was far away from home, an exile in a country not his own, keeping his father-in-law’s sheep in a wilderness he had no reason to think was anything but dirt, when he caught a glimpse of something well off the trail; a bush fully engulfed in flames. Nothing strange about that really; in an arid wilderness a dried-up bush goes up in a second and is gone. Anyone who’s burned Christmas trees or greens on Epiphany knows how fast and intense a fire like that can be. But this bush burned and kept on burning, engulfed in intense flame but still standing, every branch, every leaf still there, and Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.”1

So why didn’t it burn up? We just named the frightful power of fire we know too well, yet this fire burns but does not consume. Clearly this isn’t just any fire, nor was this ordinary ground. After Moses removes his sandals to stand on holy ground; listen to what the Voice from the fire says to him, “I have seen the misery of my people; I have heard them crying out; I know what they are suffering; and I have come down to deliver them.”2 Seen, heard, known, come. Even before God identifies himself, he tells us who he is: the One who notices the people nobody notices, who hears the cries of the suffering, who comes the full way to meet them. But before he does, he gathers this one lost sheep from the wilderness and gives him the fire and the passion to free God’s people.

When God calls Moses to bear the light of that fire, Moses recoils: “Who am I to stand in front of Pharaoh?”3 An ironic question, given that he’s standing in front of the Almighty blazing before him. But God reassures him with a promise: “I will be with you.”4 Even when God gives Moses his name, that same promise is held out again: “I Am Who I Am.”5 I am always there with you, whatever happens. Moses need not be the fire; he need only carry it.

Our Gospel lesson from Matthew reminds us that there is always a cost to bearing the fire of God. Jesus said to his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”6 There is an old monastic saying that holds the same hard paradox: “If you die before you die, you won’t die when you die.”7 The early Fathers and Mothers of the Church taught that faith was never meant to be merely a matter of believing the right things in your head, but rather we are meant to be so transformed and transfigured into the likeness of Jesus that you begin to look like him, taste like him, smell like him; indeed, to bear the divine fire itself. Thus, to carry the fire of God is to be willing to burn in it. This is the strange arithmetic of the cross, that the ones who lay down their lives and let themselves be spent for the sake of others are the ones who are not consumed.

This week has come with a lot of death. For some of us that grief is close enough to touch; some of it has reached us from the far side of the world; and some of it is for a woman most of us never met. Dolly Parton’s death, but perhaps more importantly her life, is something not only our little section of Tennessee has held this week. But why are people around the globe grieving her the way we are? In a region and a country that seems dead set on division, she was someone nearly all of us from both sides of the aisle still felt was ours; she was one of us; she was the best of us. A girl from a cabin up in these mountains, who was never once ashamed of where she came from, who made room for everyone regardless of what you looked like, what you believed, or who you loved, and she refused to sell out her values of inclusion, knowing full well it would cost her.

Consider what she did with a life and a fortune she could have spent on herself any way she pleased. After the fire came over that ridge into Gatlinburg ten years ago, she gave a thousand dollars a month to over 900 families who had lost everything, month after month until they could get back on their feet. She opened Dollywood in 1986 to provide jobs in her hometown; today it directly employs over 3000 individuals and has created over 23,000 jobs in the area. Her Imagination Library has given over 300 million books to kids around the world. When the pandemic hit, she quietly gave a million dollars to the researchers at Vanderbilt, months before anyone knew it would help fund the early work behind the Moderna vaccine; and when people tried to credit her with helping end a plague, she waved it off and said she got more credit than she deserved. Twice her country offered her the Medal of Freedom, its highest civilian honor, and twice she declined it, saying plainly that she did not work for awards. She asked the Tennessee Legislature to remove a bill that would have raised a statue of her in the capitol building. She could have spent a fortune building monuments to herself, but she spent it on other people’s children instead. She’d have laughed at anyone calling her a true disciple of Jesus. But she denied herself, she took up her cross, she poured out her life for so many and got an abundance of joy in return. Call it what you want, but to me, that looks like the Kingdom breaking in.

Now that same call comes to all of us. The voice that called a runaway shepherd out of the wilderness and told a rabbi’s working-class followers to count the cost of discipleship, that same voice from the bush still burning in the wilderness calls to us this morning as it called to a little girl in an East Tennessee holler, saying: Let love be genuine. Outdo one another in showing honor. Rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. In a world paralyzed by division, refuse to answer cruelty with more cruelty, and overcome evil with good.8 And, remember friends, you don’t have to be a country music star to do it.

So, take off your shoes! The ground you are standing on is holy. Turn aside here and look! Come, taste and see! And let God set you ablaze! Then go back out into a grieving and divided world and carry that fire through the long dark night until the light of a clear blue morning breaks over us all. And remember God’s promise to Moses, Jesus’ promise to his disciples is still a promise to you: I will be with you. Always.

8

Romans 12:9-21

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Image: The Dolly Parton Mural in downtown Knoxville, TN adorned with flowers, candles, and notes of gratitude after the news of her death this past Tuesday, August 25, 2026.

She sent her maid to lift it out, and when the lid came off she was looking down at a crying child.

She knew what she is holding before the words are even out of her mouth. “This must be one of the Hebrews’ children,” she said. She, of course, knew the decree of her father, the Pharaoh, had ordered. The latest outrageous promulgation that all the Hebrew newborn boys were to be thrown into the river, this river, the one warm around her ankles; the Nile which her own people celebrated as the source of life and was now being made a grave for the innocent.

This was just the latest of debasing attempts to demonize and dehumanize a people who had once saved Egypt. Four hundred years earlier, Joseph, the son of Jacob, had been the Pharaoh’s top governor, and had saved Egypt from a seven-year famine. The Hebrew people, once Egypt’s saviors, were now perceived as a domestic threat, foreigners living on their turf. This Pharaoh did not remember Joseph, and was attempting to subdue the Hebrew threat by enslaving them, then by ordering the midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, to exterminate the male children as they were born. A plot those women conspired to thwart.

Pharaoh’s daughter grew up in the Pharaoh’s palace. So, whatever she had been told about the Hebrews, she had likely never met one. That was the point. As the Egyptians’ slaves, those people were forced to labor away from polite society and kept out of sight. A daughter of the court could pass her entire life in the palace and never once encounter a Hebrew herself. She was immersed in the story the Empire; so all she was taught about those slaves was that they bred too fast, that they were becoming more numerous than us, diluting our culture, and that in a war they would turn and side with our enemies. A people she had never seen, taught to her as a threat. But now one of them is crying in her arms.

Things were different when those Hebrews were just a phantom or a statistic. But this baby had no idea he was contraband; he only knew that he was hungry and alone and wanted to be picked up, like any other baby she’d held. Pharaoh’s daughter had a choice in that moment. She could have closed the lid and let the river do the will of Pharaoh. But she held him close instead. Something inside her older than the Empire’s malice, something deeper and stronger and more human, stayed her hand as she lifted him from the basket, wet and furious and alive.

Suddenly out of nowhere, a young Hebrew girl appeared, who happened to be the baby’s older sister. She had been hiding there the whole time. Pharaoh’s daughter didn’t see her because she was not meant to; she was placed there, far enough back to be missed and near enough to watch what happened at the water’s edge. Which means none of this was an accident. Somebody waterproofed that basket and caulked it against the river water. Somebody knew the hour the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe, and the bend of the bank where she came, and set the child there, in her path, in the reeds, and left a girl to watch. This was a conspiracy.

Notice what the sister does. She offers to fetch a Hebrew nurse, which sounds like a girl simply being helpful; it is the tell of the whole conspiracy. The princess agrees, and the child goes back to his own mother’s breast, under the palace’s protection, and the Empire pays her to do it. Notice also that the daughter of Pharaoh asks nothing: not how the little Hebrew girl had found them at just the right time, not where the nurse came from, and not the question any of us would ask: whose child is this? Its almost too convenient, but perhaps that’s part of the genius of this little conspiracy.

We would like the story to stop here, with the basket, the child pulled out and dried and handed back to his mother, the decree of a tyrant undone by a handful of women who would not do as they were told. It is a good place to stop. But we do not get to stop there. Before we move forward, we have to turn back to the river.

For this one little boy drawn out, how many others went under, their names forgotten, their mothers devastated on the river bank? One child lifted out does not empty the Nile of the children Pharaoh fed to it. And if we tell this as the tale of the lucky one who made it, we have told it the way Empire would want it told: proof that the system works, that the fortunate make it by pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps and the rest were simply collateral.

That is not what these women believed. They knew they could not save everyone, but they could save this one, so they did. And the one they saved is the one God calls to break the whole thing open; the baby drawn out of the water becomes the man who leads a nation out of Egypt. The girl who stood watch near that basket, if the tradition has it right, is his sister Miriam who three chapters later stands on the far shore of the Red Sea with a timbrel in her hand and leading a nation in song, because she had seen this happen before, only now it is not one child come through the water, it is her entire people.

This is how God works, and it’s easy to miss. No great signs of burning bushes and ten plagues and splitting of the Red Sea, not yet. Look again at how deliverance began with the simple courage of ordinary women. Shiphrah and Puah, the midwives who feared God more than the king. A mother who refused to surrender her son to the water. A sister in the reeds with a plan and the nerve to stand up to power. A daughter of Pharaoh who decided, at the river, that she would not let the child in her arms be what she had been told to fear. Hebrew and Egyptian, slave and royal, every one of them with reason to keep her head down and stay in her place, but instead they broke ranks, one after another, quietly, deliberately.

And do not imagine this is just some nice mythological story out of the ancient past. The same fear still writes the same orders today, still turns an entire people into a threat and a rumor kept safely out of sight. This is not ancient history. It is happening today, and not far from here.

Pharaoh’s daughter drew one child up out of the water, and she gave him the name, Moses, which means “the one drawn out.” That is your name too. At the font it was given to you: drawn out, lifted from the water that was already closing over your head, wet and furious and alive, and held in everlasting arms that will never let you go. You are Moses, all of us, a people drawn up out of the water, a people who came through the flood. But a people who came through the flood cannot walk the banks of this world’s swollen rivers and forget who is still in the water. We were drawn out to become a people with the courage and the faith, hope, and love to resist.

Image: “Frames of Reference” by Manu. Oil on canvas. 2024. Columbo, Sri Lanka.
www.manufineart.lk

Thousands upon thousands had poured into the gates of Jerusalem, packed in shoulder to shoulder, as the priest Ezra ascended a large wooden platform above them with the great scroll of the Law of Moses in his arms. God’s people had come home at last. After a lifetime of exile in Babylon their banishment was over, the city was theirs again, the walls were being rebuilt stone by stone, and when the words of the Lord were read out loud the people wept. Then lifting their hands, they cried out: Amen, Amen, for the joy of the LORD was their strength.1

He was a son of the Exile, born to a family once counted among the nobility of Jerusalem. He’d grown up with the songs of a city taken from his people before he was even born. The elders told the story to him as a living memory; how the armies of Babylon had besieged the city of Jerusalem and starved it; how the walls were breached and the Temple of the LORD was stripped of its gold and set ablaze; how the survivors were bound in chains and driven across the desert, weeping, while Zion burned behind them. He carried their grief as though it were his own.

Babylon was a city of strange gods and stranger splendor, of ziggurats climbing toward heaven and gates overlaid in blue and gold, and its language was foreign. And because he was clever and handsome even as a child, he was taken young for the king’s service and kept inside the palace walls. There he bore his people’s exiled shame in that service, and without consent the knife wrote that shame into his flesh, altering him, mutilating him, so that he would father nothing and threaten nothing, being made a eunuch: a shame to his people and to himself. Beside the rivers of Babylon, he too wept with his people: “How could we sing the LORD’s song in a foreign land?” as the silenced harps hung on the willows.2

Then one day after years and decades had passed, that empire finally fell and the word rang out that he and his people could finally go home; home to a homeland only their parents had known. They came back haunted by everything the exile had cost them and hungry to set it right; and out of that grief grew a fierce zeal for the LORD’s house; a fervor to repent of their ancestors’ sins, to purge impurities and restore what had been lost.

On that day of fever-pitched jubilation, this man stood at the back of the crowd, listening intently; hopeful but dreading the lines Ezra the priest was about to read from the Torah scroll he knew so well, knowing they would fall on him like a stone. The priest read from the scroll: no one whose body has been mutilated or genitals severed shall be admitted to the assembly of the LORD.3 Those words of the Law crushed him to tears as he now stood outside the gates of the promised city he had spent decades dreaming of and had journeyed across a lifetime and a desert to reach; barred from entering.

But he was not the only one forced outside the gate. Standing beside him was a foreign-born wife with a mixed-race child on her hip; a man whose family could not be found in the register to prove his citizenship; a foreigner who had come to love the LORD God of Israel, but told he must now keep his distance.4 Their numbers grew, standing outside the gate, having sung the same songs, carried the same dreams, made the same journey, only to find the door shut on them when they finally arrived.

…

But then, over the crowd, above the gate, a voice rose strong and clear. It came not from the platform where the scroll lay open but from the threshold itself, from the very gateway the keepers had bolted; it did not ask for permission and it could not be kept silent, but grew over the heads of the gathered thousands: the voice of the prophet proclaiming that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was not finished speaking: Awake, awake, O Zion; put on your strength; shake yourself from the dust and rise.5… Let all who thirst, come to the waters. And let those who have no money, come, buy and eat, without price. And all who are weary, let them come to the Lord!6

From the outside, with tear-filled eyes the man raised his head, and with him the foreign-born wives, their mixed children, the God-fearing Gentiles, and so many others that had been purged and left outside the gates. The oracle continued: Thus says the Lord: Maintain justice and do what is right, for soon my salvation will come and my deliverance be revealed… Do not let the foreigner joined to the LORD say, “The LORD will surely separate me from his people.” And do not let the eunuch say, “I am just a dry tree.” For thus says the LORD to the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths… and hold fast my covenant, I will give them… an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.7 And to the foreigners who join themselves to the LORD… these I will bring to my holy mountain and make them joyful in my house of prayer for all peoples.8

For you here today who have been cast out, ostracized, despised, marginalized, counted as less than, as outsider, as foreigner, may you hear these words that God is speaking to you this day: I will bring YOU to my holy mountain, and make YOU joyful… for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.9

Friends, we gather in this sacred place to hear the Word of God proclaimed to us week after week, but in our solemnity I wonder who we might be excluding who would seek refuge here, those who have longed for a place to call home but have been rejected time and again. I wonder in what ways we police the way that person dresses, or the how she has a certain politics, or the way he expresses his gender, or how they love. How do we speak of holiness and purity in words that shame the very ones God is seeking to gather? Who in our community do we treat like dogs begging for scraps from the table?10

There is mercy yet, my friends, for everyone who comes to worship at this Table, and even for us who tend it and have grown used to thinking of ourselves as its keepers. But, this Table does not belong to St. Andrew’s, it does not belong to the Episcopal Church even; this is God’s Table, and it is already set, invitations already sent, the doors already opened wide. And so, we are invited to approach with open hands and humble hearts: rich and poor, native-born and stranger, the long-faithful and the newly arrived, and there, pressing in among us, the man who once stood weeping outside a bolted gate, his hands held open like ours, fed at last in the house of prayer for all peoples.

Come, risen Lord, and deign to be our guest;
nay, let us be thy guests; the feast is thine.11

Note: I expanded the RCL reading to include all of Isaiah 56:1-8, which includes the excised verses 2-5 that focuses on eunuchs.

11

George Wallace Briggs, “Come, Risen Lord, and Deign to Be Our Guest,” in The Hymnal 1982: According to the Use of the Episcopal Church (New York: Church Hymnal Corporation, 1985), hymn 305, 306.

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Image: “La Derelitta” (The Outcast) by Sandro Botticelli. c. 1480-1495. Tempera on wood panel. Palazzo Pallavicini-Rospigliosi in Rome, Italy.

At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, that blast of light opened over Hiroshima, and in an instant an entire city was vaporized, leaving shadows burned into stone where human beings had been standing. Weeks before, watching the first test fire in the New Mexico desert, the physicist who led the project, Robert Oppenheimer, reached for the Bhagavad Gita, for the moment when Krishna, the god who had ridden into battle disguised as a mortal charioteer, unveils his cosmic form in a radiance like a thousand suns, proclaiming:

Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.1

On August 6^th, the Church remembers another blinding light. Six days after telling his friends that he would suffer and die for the sake of the world, Jesus led Peter, James, and John up Mount Tabor, and there a brightness broke over the three of them; uncreated light beyond even what the eye can see; his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white, and Moses and Elijah stood speaking with him. And as a cloud of unknowing enveloped the mountain, a Voice spoke saying nothing of destruction, but of belovedness.

Today we hold the awful memory that humanity possesses the capacity to wield the power of atomic light itself for utter destruction, but also the capacity to be filled with divinity itself. One is the false light that unmakes the world; the other is the uncreated light by which all of creation was made.

The mountain of Transfiguration is a promise offered to all of humanity. The glory blazing in the face of Jesus is the firstfruits of a harvest, a glimpse of the kingdom breaking in ahead of its fullness, a glimpse of what every human body was fashioned to hold. “For the Son of God became human so that we might become God.”2 That brightness suddenly burning unhidden in the body of Jesus is the birthright of all human bodies, the splendor each of us was created to carry.

The great irony of this day is that this truth is exactly what the bomb denies. What broke over Hiroshima was Eden’s grasping yet again, humanity reaching out to seize as possession what was only ever intended to be received as gift. And so, the human flesh of Hiroshima, endued by its Creator with unfathomable dignity, was ruled expendable and even necessary to be unmade in a single flash to prove a point, to “save American lives”; a flash that left shadows of their bodies scorched into the stone.

Empire has always claimed that real power is absolute control enforced by the sword; the mushroom cloud its truest icon. But the Transfiguration of our Lord declares the opposite, for the Voice from the cloud speaks not of conquest but of belonging:

This is my Son, my Beloved; listen to him! 3

So let us listen, and follow the One who refused the almighty glory of the mountaintop and turned his face toward Jerusalem and the Cross; who shows us that the power to remake the world is found not in wielding it over others but in laying down one’s own life, descending all the way down in pursuit of the dignity of every human being.

3

Matthew 15:7, Mark 9:7

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Image: “Transfiguration” by Alexandr Ivanov. Pencil and watercolor on paper. 1824.
Tetyakov Gallery, Moscow.

That is where we find Jacob today.

Two Sundays ago, we were with him on the night he ran from home, facedown at Bethel with a stone for a pillow, a thief who had just stolen his brother Esau’s birthright and blessing. We were with him again in Laban’s tents, where the cost of his scheming fell on Leah. Now he is rich, with wives and children and flocks, and God commands him that he must return home. But home means the one thing he has spent twenty years trying not to think about. Home means Esau.

Esau, whose birthright he bought for a bowl of stew, whose blessing he stole off their old blind father, and who swore he would kill him. And now that Jacob is on the road home, word comes that Esau is already on his way to meet him, and he is bringing four hundred men.

So, Jacob does what Jacob always does. He schemes. He splits his company in two, so that if one is struck the other might escape. He sends droves of goats and camels on ahead as gifts, wave after wave, hoping to buy back with livestock the brother he robbed. He sends his wives and his children and everything he owns across the ford of the River Jabbok in the dark. And then Jacob was left alone.

Alone and in the dark. With his anticipation of tomorrow’s encounter. Whatever lies on the other side of the Jabbok, Jacob waits that night with nothing but himself.

And suddenly, without a word of explanation, a man appears, wrestling with Jacob all night, like a dream too real to be a dream. But who is he? Is it Esau, come alone in the dark? Is it Jacob’s own fear of his past come to collect in the dark? Is it God? Scripture does not say, and I think that is on purpose. All night the two of them strive and neither lets go. The schemer, for once, has nothing to bargain with, no way to weasel out or gain the upper hand. Like mirror images of one another, they strive, and when Jacob’s opponent sees he cannot prevail he strikes Jacob on the hip and throws it out of joint, but Jacob still holds on. “I will not let you go,” he says, “unless you bless me.”

Two Sundays ago the blessing was given freely to this man who had tried to steal it from his brother and father, who immediately began to bargain: if God will be with me, then the Lord shall be my God. But now, there is no if left in him. He has nothing to trade and no one to trick. The blessing he once received lying down, asleep, he now must hold on to with his whole strength, gripping his nameless opponent in the dark, and it is going to cost him.

There, wounded and clinging, he is given a new name. No longer Jacob, the trickster, the heel-grabber, the supplanter, but Israel, the one who strives with God and with humans and prevails. He does not win; he prevails, which is a different thing. He holds on until the day breaks.

And when the sun comes up, he’s alone again, and Jacob names the place Peniel, which means “the face of God,” saying “I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.” Two Sundays ago, God came down to him, at Bethel, and blessed him; but Jacob was asleep for it. This time he is awake. This time it is a struggle that will leave him with a limp.

But notice where Jacob is wounded. Jacob came into the world grasping his brother’s heel; he has spent his whole life quick on his feet, getting out ahead, running from Esau, outmaneuvering Laban, always in motion and always with an angle. Now he is struck in the socket of the hip, and suddenly the man who could always run away is made to limp. He will go out to meet his brother slowed and exposed, unable to flee if it goes wrong, with none of the advantage he has spent a lifetime securing. He will have to stand there and be seen.

And that’s where our reading stops. As it did with Jacob’s vow two weeks ago, as it did with Leah’s sons last week, the lectionary cuts off the most important part of the story.

Jacob crosses the river, looks up, and there is Esau coming with his four hundred men. So, he goes out ahead of everyone, hobbling from his injury, in eye-sight of his brother, and bows to the ground seven times, bracing for the blow he has feared for twenty years. And then this:

But Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept. (33:4)

No knife of vengeance in hand. No four hundred men charging to wipe him and his family out. Only a brother running across the open field, to fling his arms around his brother’s neck, the two of them weeping there, reunited. Jacob, who has spent his entire life scheming and fleeing, who has just spent the night grappling with God and his guilt and his fear, says to his brother Esau, “truly to see your face is like seeing the face of God.” (33:10)

Jacob arrives where he started, at the edge of the land he fled, in front of the brother he was born grasping. The same place. And he knows it now for the first time, because the brother he wrestled and feared and ran from, the twin who wears his own face, is the very face of God. The home he could never earn is handed back to him as grace.

Friends, in a few minutes I will stand in front of this Table and say, “The peace of the Lord be always with you,” and you will turn to the person beside you and offer them your hand. We do this every week as part of the liturgy itself; we do this purposefully then just before we offer our gifts along with bread and wine. For Jesus said, “when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.” (Matthew 5:23-24) The Peace is not an intermission in the service; it is Peniel; it is the ford of the Jabbok; it is Esau running across the field to embrace his brother.

So, when you turn to your neighbor this morning, look at them. Really look. And then think past this room, and remember the one who is not here: the sibling who’s always been your rival, the friend you don’t speak to anymore, the family member who remains absent at family dinner. Think of the one who wronged you; and the one you wronged. Reach out your hand to the neighbor beside you and keep that person in mind, because it is practice for the harder reaching out still to come. The one you are most afraid to face is where God has been waiting for you all along, but to cross that distance with open hands is to arrive, at last, at home.

As T. S. Eliot wrote:

… the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.1

1

T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” in Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943)

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Image: “Forgiveness” by Sofiya Inger. Acrylic on canvas. 2013.
www.sofiyaingerart.com

The sun is not quite up yet. And Jacob wakes in the gray light and turns to the woman he has worked seven years to marry, seven years that passed like a few days because he loved her that much, and the light comes up slowly across the tent. But when he turns it’s not Rachel beside him. It is her sister, Leah. Every one of us hears this as a catastrophe, because Scripture has handed us Jacob’s eyes to see it with, and through Jacob’s eyes the arrival of this wrong woman is the worst thing that could have happened. Let’s put his perspective over to the side for a moment. We’ll come back to it before we’re done.

You’ll remember that Jacob is the younger of twin brothers who wanted the older brother’s first-born birthright and took advantage to essentially steal it from him. You’ll remember that he also deceived their blind father Isaac in the dark, wearing his brother’s clothes to smell like Esau and with goatskin strapped on his arms to feel like him to trick the old man into blessing Jacob instead of Esau. Last week, we left him on the run for his life, in the middle of a field at Bethel with a stone for a pillow, where God met and blessed him, the wrong man, before he had repented of a single thing. But just because Jacob received God’s grace and promise does not mean that his choices didn’t have consequences.

In Laban, his future father-in-law, Jacob meets his match. The man who took the firstborn’s blessing by deceiving a blind man in the dark has himself now been deceived in the dark. Jacob fell in love with Laban’s daughter Rachel, and agreed to work for Laban for seven years before she would be given him in marriage. And on the wedding night Laban brings her older sister Leah instead, veiled, in the dark, and Jacob does not know until the sun rose. The deceiver is deceived, and if the story ended there it would be a tidy thing about what goes around coming around.

But it does not end there, and the one who pays is not Jacob. Yes, Jacob works another seven years and gets Rachel too and he walks away with both sisters and his wages besides. The one who pays is Leah, who deceived no one. She is carried into that tent and handed over in the dark and discovered in the morning as a disappointment, and then she is bound for life to a man who does not choose her and does not want her, and across all the years the story gives them, he will not ever love her. Her whole life is settled in a bargain between two men in a room where she has no voice, and when the sun comes up she is the woman nobody wanted to marry.

Our lectionary, again, cuts off the end of the chapter, in effect centering Jacob and Rachel and doing to Leah what is always done to her. But this morning, let us see Leah. Continuing our reading in Genesis:

So Jacob went in to Rachel also, and he loved Rachel more than Leah. ... When the LORD saw that Leah was unloved, he opened her womb, but Rachel was barren. Leah conceived and bore a son, and she named him Reuben, for she said, “Because the LORD has looked on my affliction, surely now my husband will love me.” She conceived again and bore a son and said, “Because the LORD has heard that I am hated, he has given me this son also,” and she named him Simeon. Again she conceived and bore a son and said, “Now this time my husband will be joined to me, because I have borne him three sons”; therefore he was named Levi. She conceived again and bore a son and said, “This time I will praise the LORD,” therefore she named him Judah. [29:29-35]

She was not just unloved, she is the hated wife, and God sees her heartbreak, and that seeing turns out to be the underlying hinge of the whole story.

Listen to how she names her children. The first son comes and she calls him Reuben, which means “see”, as in see a son! Surely my husband will love me now. The next year, she bears another son, and she names him Simeon, which means “hear”, as in the LORD has heard that I am hated, and yes still she waits for Jacob to turn toward her. The next year a third son, Levi, which means “joined”, as in surely this time my husband will finally be joined to me. Three sons, three namings, three times she reaches across that cold tent for a man who seems to only be interested in the progeny she might bear. And three times the tent stays cold. It is one of the most human stretches in all of Scripture, this woman doing everything her world allowed a woman to do to earn a love that was simply never coming.

And then her fourth and final son came, and something brakes open. She calls him Judah, which means “I will praise”, saying, “this time I will praise the LORD.” The longing for her husband is gone. She has stopped asking Jacob to be what he will not be. She is not joined to Jacob; she is joined to God.

And this is where perspective shows us the long view of God. Out of her son Judah’s lineage will come David, the shepherd boy nobody bothered to call in from the field when Samuel came looking for a king, because the LORD does not see as mortals see; we look on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart. And from David’s lineage, in the fullness of time, comes Jesus. When Matthew sits down to write the genealogy of the Messiah, he does not run the line through Rachel, the wife Jacob wanted, the wife he worked fourteen years to win. He runs it through Leah, the unloved wife nobody chose. The promise God gave to Jacob and the covenant God made with Abraham runs straight through this woman most of us have forgotten.

And that is what I want you to see this morning. Leah stays a minor character to the end; she gets no chapter of her own, no scene where Jacob finally sees her and weeps and repents. She never gets to be loved as she longed to be. But the promise of God runs through her anyway, quietly, while every eye in the story is fixed on someone else.

What God gives her is not a rescue. What God gives her is presence in the middle of a brokenness that is never fully healed. She is not chosen, but she is not abandoned either; she is not loved by her own husband, but she is also not forgotten by God; she is not the focus of the story, but she is the bearer of the promise.

This is the good news this morning for everyone who has done everything right and still not been chosen, everyone who has poured out their heart and soul and got nothing in return, everyone who has held a family or a marriage or a church together with no acknowledgment, thanks, or applause. The world runs on an economy that defines who is worthy by their appearance or wealth or influence, handing its blessings to the beautiful Rachels, while exploiting the Leahs. But God sees by another light. God saw Leah when Jacob would not, and the whole promise of God came down through the one nobody wanted to marry.

In a few minutes, we will all be invited to this Table. Some of us come this morning feeling sure of our place in this community, grateful for the body we belong to. Some of us come knowing Leah’s ache, the pain of being unloved or rejected or forgotten. Most of us carry a little of both. So come! When the love you long for does not arrive, when your hopes fall apart, and the world around you is collapsing, here is where we turn and find the One who has seen you and held you all along. Here, shoulder to shoulder, the fullness of grace is placed into every outreached hand. Come and turn, with her, toward the One who has never once counted worth the way we count it. And then go and do likewise; learn from Leah to see with open eyes, to recognize those left behind and discarded, whether in another’s face or the one in the mirror.

This time we will praise the LORD.

Image: “Pregnant Self Portrait” by Ghislaine Howard. Oil on board. 1984. https://ghislainehoward.com/

Maybe it was a cathedral, light coming down through colored glass onto a floor worn smooth by centuries of kneeling. Maybe it was a monastery at the hour the bell calls for prayer. Maybe it was out under open sky, in the Smokies with the fog lying in the coves, or out on the water, or in a room where someone you loved was dying and the air itself seemed to change. Maybe it was right here in this very room, on a morning you did not expect it.

Hold that place a moment.

For the last 20 years or so, it has been the balds of Roan Mountain for me, about a 3-hour drive from here, up on the line between Tennessee and North Carolina almost in Virginia. The trailhead starts in the trees; thick evergreens and moss and mist, little trickles of water crossing the trail, the whole world close and green and dim. And then suddenly the path breaks the tree line, and the ground opens, and there is nothing above you but sky and nothing around you but the ridges of the Appalachians running out in every direction, blue on blue on blue. The quiet up there is enormous. The sound of wind, and now and then a single songbird, and otherwise a silence so deep you can feel its presence. For centuries, the native Cherokee knew that ground was holy long before I ever walked up into it.

Here is the thing about a place like that. We might go looking for those places of transcendence. But grace is always and only a gift, a gift that can only be received, and never taken. So whether we have quieted our minds and hearts through practice, or we are physically in a place where we feel our own smallness, or we have hit rock bottom and have nowhere else to turn, those are the places where grace can only be received and never taken.

Jacob was certainly not searching for transcendence when he fell asleep one night in the middle of field with nothing but a rock to lay his head on.

Jacob was on the run. He had just cheated his brother Esau out of his birthright, his entire inheritance. Jacob had found him starving to death at the end of his rope, and instead of generosity, Jacob traded Esau a bowl of stew for Esau’s birthright. After this Jacob deceived his own father Isaac, an old blind man likely on his deathbed, and stole the blessing meant for someone else. Esau was furiously angry and sought to kill Jacob. This where we find him: on the road being hunted down by his brother, three hundred miles from home, alone, with a rock for a pillow because the sun had gone down and he had nowhere else to lay his head. Quite literally rock bottom.

This is place the heaven shows itself. It’s here at his lowest that the door is shown to be open.

He lies down in the dirt, this schemer, this thief, this deceiver, and while he sleeps the door of heaven is opened above him and ladder or a stairway descends with the angels of God going up and down upon it, and the Lord stands beside him promising him land, and children, and blessing, and that God would be with him wherever he went. Jacob has done nothing to earn a word of it. While Jacob is asleep, unconscious, using a rock as a pillow, after running from a mess entirely of his own making, this gift, this grace, appears anyway.

And when he wakes up, astounded he says, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.” He fell asleep at the very gate of heaven and did not realize it.

I want to speak to you plainly this morning, because grace is easy to hear and hard to believe. By all accounts, that ladder came down on the wrong man, at the wrong time, in the wrong place. He certainly didn’t deserve it, and that wrongness is the whole gospel. Grace is the thing that finds you facedown in the dirt on the worst day of your life, or in the silence of your heart, or the humble realization of your own mortality or those you love. No one earns it. That is what makes it grace.

But our lectionary reading cuts off what Jacob does next. Let’s take a look at that, because it is the most typically human thing in the whole story:

Then Jacob made a vow, saying, “If God will be with me and will keep me in this way that I go and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, then the Lord shall be my God… (28:20-21)

Jacob makes a vow, and the vow begins with a word that gives the whole game away. If. If God will be with me, if he will keep me, if he will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear and bring me home in peace, then the Lord shall be my God. Still scheming, still trying to weasel his way into an advantage. Jacob has just been handed everything, freely, and his first move is to draw up terms. He wakes at the gate of heaven and starts to negotiate.

And most of us do something similar. We encounter the divine all the time, and fail to recognize it. The bargaining is what keeps us in the dirt long after the ladder is down. We would rather owe God on our own terms than be loved on God’s, and so we never look up. We are like those picking blackberries in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem Aurora Leigh, which uses the image of the Burning Bush in Exodus as a lens:

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries...

Indeed, heaven is all around us and we are immersed in the very throne room of heaven, but we live our lives as if God were not faithful to answer the prayer: thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth... Like the Creation itself, we receive the whole thing as gift and immediately begin working out what we own and what we owe, what we must do and what we haven’t done, how good we have to be to have deserved it. And all the while the ladder is still down and doorway flung wide. God does not wait for us to get our affairs in order; he never did.

Let’s visit Jacob here again, on the ground, so low that he’s using a stone to rest his head, because that is where the Scripture leaves him this morning. Still a cheat. Still calculating. Newly astonished by this vision of heaven. It would be tidier to skip to the end of his story, to the wealthy man who has his life together and reconciled with his brother. He became that man in time, but not right away. But notice that the gift came first, while he was at the lowest point of his life, his face literally in the dirt. It was there that God showed up before Jacob turned around. And friends, that is the only order in which grace ever comes.

You know a place like Bethel. You have knelt in it. You have cried in it. You might even have returned to that physical place over and over to remember. In a few moments you will come to this rail, and there will be bread here, and a cup, ordinary as a stone on a mountain path, and heaven will open over it. Today, some of you come running, some out of habit, some of you justifying, some of you sure you have no business at this table at all. Come anyway!

Surely the LORD is in this place—and we did not know it!

Image: Photograph. Roan Mountain near Carver’s Gap, Pisgah-Cherokee National Forest. Taken by RJ Powell. 2024.

I wonder if he had not transformed that yoke what might have been its fate. Most likely it would have eventually been discarded in a move along the way, a relic of a way of life long forgotten by the modern world.

As I was contemplating the words of today’s Gospel lesson that coincided with this particular weekend as our nation celebrates two hundred and fifty years of independence, I found myself sitting with these words of Jesus: “Take my yoke upon you… For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” That image of a yoke conjured this memory of my grandfather’s yoke-lamp, and had me thinking, pondering, meditating about how we’ve come to the present day of our nation’s history. As we celebrate the declaration of our independence from Great Britain, I wonder if by cherishing our liberty as a fragile, precious treasure we have done a similar thing to those freedoms that my grandfather did with that yoke: An object of strength, a costly thing of real-everyday-practical value, a thing intended to do hard work, but something we have hung on the wall where it’s preserved, where it’s seen for its outward beauty, but no longer functions as it was intended… as a yoke. But a yoke on the wall means that somewhere there’s a field that goes unplowed.

In 1864, a hundred and sixty years ago, in the middle of a war over exactly this question having just signed the Emancipation Proclamation, President Abraham Lincoln told a Baltimore crowd that the world has never had a good definition of the word liberty; “We all declare for liberty,” he said, “but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.”1 Somewhere along the way, the idea of freedom in America became more about rugged individualism, about acquiring wealth by any means necessary, about becoming unfettered from the responsibilities to others, and “finding one’s self.” Freedom has come to mean that I don’t wear anyone’s yoke on my neck, nobody has claim on my time, nobody constrains my choices. But today, as the smoke clears from the fireworks displays and we clean up after our cookouts; and this morning, as we offer God thanks for the astounding blessings we all share in this country; let us also consider again the very nature of that which we celebrate. Because as Saint Paul will tell us, we did not hang up our liberty so much as forgotten who and what that liberty is hitched to.

In the epistle to the Romans, Saint Paul gives us some valuable insight, because he too lived what he thought was an upright, principled, even sanctified life. He was zealous, educated, and blameless by his own accounting of the Law of Moses. So certain of his own righteousness, that when a man named Stephen was stoned to death for preaching another so-called Messiah, young Saul stood by approvingly, holding the coats of the executioners.2 And it did not stop there. He later went house to house hunting down the disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, dragging off men and women alike, and when they were condemned to death, he tells us himself, he cast his vote against them.3

Many years later, after he experienced the risen Christ himself and finally saw what and who he had become, Paul wrote to the Church in Rome about his own divided human heart; he wrote as a man who learned this lesson the hard way: I do not understand my own actions. I do not do what I want, but the very thing I hate is what I do. In the lead up in his letter just before our lesson today, Paul describes what his heart was tethered to and that he realized that there is no such thing as an unyoked heart; the only question is: yoked to what?4 Paul thought he was living a free life, but he had really yoked himself to his own ambition, his own self-righteousness, his own zeal without regard for how his actions affected anyone else, especially those marginalized the Torah he was so zealous for intended to safeguard. And how did it leave him? In his own words: Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?

But here is good news, Beloved: Jesus does not offer a better what to be yoked to. He offers us a Who.

“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens … take my yoke upon you.” Jesus does not offer to unharness us; the liberation he offers doesn’t mean we’ll be unyoked, he knows us too well for that. Instead, he offers a different yoke, his own yoke, a training yoke built for two. When he says take my yoke upon you, he is not loading something else onto your back and walking away. He is standing in the other bow of the training yoke.

Learn from me… he says, because this is exactly how a young mule learns to plow a field, harnessed beside another who is already seasoned and shares the load.

For my yoke is easy… The Greek word translated as “easy” here is chrestos, which is usually translated as “kind.” For my yoke is kind… Kindness is a different promise than ease or comfort. Only one chapter earlier in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus told these same disciples they would be dragged before kings and be flogged and some even face death.5 Jesus never hid that there was a cost for freedom. The yoke is kind because of who wears it with you.

My grandfather took an old wooden yoke whose purpose was thought to be obsolete and preserved it by transforming it into something new. But with us, Jesus works in the other direction: he takes the freedom we have hung up as a decoration, a polished and celebrated relic, and gives it back to us, not only showing us that it still works, but it transforms us when we aren’t walking alone. When the work is shared: the work of feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, tending the sick, and liberating those in fetters; when that work is shared, the work truly is kind. And my dear friends, there’s an entire team of co-workers behind you called the Church, working to plow this field together. Freedom was never just a wide-open field for us to wander alone in; real freedom is found shoulder to shoulder with your neighbor, your friend, your Brother Jesus, who has promised to never leave or forsake us.

5

Matthew 10:16-20

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Image: Photograph of the Yoke-Lamp made by my grandfather, Bob Powell.

To get a better understanding of what’s going on here, we have to go back much earlier in the story, back before Isaac was even born; back to where God’s covenant promise to Abraham was made.

In Genesis 15, God comes to Abraham in a vision. Abraham is already quite old; his wife Sarah is barren; they have no children together, no heir, no future. But God promises Abraham that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars in the heavens, that God would give him a land of his own, and that through his descendants, all the families of the earth would be blessed.

But this promise, this Covenant, was not just a contract in the modern sense; it was the seal of a relationship; like a blood-brothers’ pact, or adopting a child, or a marriage – God and Abraham were now bound together. So, this is most definitely a two-sided relationship! God, the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, chooses to become vulnerable, dependent on Abraham receiving it and to live in complete trust that God would be faithful in return. That vulnerable trust is the heart of covenant relationship.

But then Abraham fails. Not once, but over and over again.

First, he takes matters into his own hands. He knows he’s been promised by God to have innumerable offspring, but he’s getting old and his wife Sarah is barren. So, at his wife Sarah’s suggestion, has a child with his slave Hagar. After this, Abraham and Sarah found themselves in a dangerous situation; when a foreign king takes notice of Sarah’s beauty, so Abraham passes her off as his sister and gives her to this king to save his own skin. By the way, he did the same thing to her years before in Egypt, passing Sarah off as his sister to save his own skin… and he got rich off of it in the process too.

Again and again, when faced with fear, Abraham does not trust the God who has bound himself to him, and he chooses do things his own way to save his own skin rather than believe that God would fulfil his promise. And at what cost to others?!

But notice how God is the vulnerable one in this covenant relationship. Even after Abraham forgets God and goes his own way, God does not abandon the covenant relationship. Despite Abraham’s failures, God upholds his end of the bargain, to remain vulnerable and in relationship to this man who doesn’t seem to trust that God will actually follow through.

Years pass and, miraculously, 90-year-old Sarah finally gives birth to Isaac. God had proven himself to be faithful by giving him and Sarah a son in their old age. But God still doesn’t know if Abraham loves and trusts him. Which leads us to this ultimate test: God says to the now 100-year-old Abraham: “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering.”

Frankly, I don’t think God knows what Abraham will do. Given Abraham’s history, given that Abraham has time and again chosen self-preservation over trust, God genuinely does not know if Abraham will choose differently this time. The outcome is not predetermined. God has bound himself to this covenant, and now God waits to see if Abraham will finally trust him with everything, even with the son on whom the promise of innumerable descendants is dependent.

I’d like to interject something for those of you who just can’t get over how God could ask anyone to sacrifice their child, and how Abraham seems so willing to obey: In the ancient world, child sacrifice was practiced in many of the cultures around ancient Israel, and indeed has been practiced around the world in a variety of cultures. While it would certainly have been distressing and agonizing to any parent, child-sacrifice in the ancient world would not have been completely unheard of. Indeed, our modern world has certainly not abandoned the practice of killing our children.

As we just read, God speaks to Abraham and commands him to do this horrible thing. So, Abraham packs his knife, gathers wood and his son, and they travel to Mt. Moriah. On the third day, he can see the place in the distance. He tells his servants who were traveling with them: “The boy and I will go up there and worship, and then we will come back to you.” But does Abraham really believe this? He is going there to kill his son.

They climb. Isaac, carrying the wood for his own sacrifice asks his father, “Father, I see the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” And Abraham says, “God himself will provide the lamb.” But again, does Abraham really believe this? He knows he intends to kill his son.

They reach the place. Abraham builds an altar, he arranges the wood, then binds Isaac to the altar, and with tears flowing and hands shaking, raises the knife to kill him.

This is the moment! This is where Abraham’s faith is tested not as abstract obedience, but as willingness to surrender everything. And Abraham does it. He is about to kill his own child.

Just then God stops him. An angel of the Lord calls out to him: “Abraham! Abraham!” And Abraham answers, “Here I am.” And the angel says, “Do not lay your hand on the boy. Do not do anything to him. For now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.”

The Christian tradition confirms this, but in an unexpected place. Traditionally, this story of the near-sacrifice of Isaac was read on Good Friday, making parallels to Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. However, if the Cross was the binding of a new covenant, then I think our story about the testing of Abraham is better answered by the post-resurrection appearance of Jesus when the risen Lord asks Peter three times, “Do you love me?”1 You’ll recall the night Jesus was arrested and crucified, Peter denied him, failed him, three times before the cock crowed. But here, Jesus doesn’t ask Peter to apologize or even, “Will you obey me?” He asks, “Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?”

This is what we see in both stories; a God deeply, faithfully committed to human beings, a relationship bound by trust and loving-kindness, vulnerable to whether we will love and trust him in return.

This is the God at the heart of our faith. Not God the all-present, the all-powerful, or the all-knowing One. But rather a God terribly, terrifyingly vulnerable in love. A God who has bound himself to us and waits, genuinely, to see if we will love and trust him in return.

Today we have been called to this altar where the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, gives and binds himself to us again, vulnerable, in bread placed in our hands and wine placed on our lips, who asks each of us: Will you receive this bread? Will you trust me in how you live your lives? Will you meet me in the faces of neighbors and strangers alike? Do you love me?

1

John 21:15-19

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Image: “Le sacrifice d’Isaac” by Marc Chagall. 1966. Oil on canvas.
Musée National Marc Chagall, Nice, France.

From the depths of exile, among a people who had lost their homeland, their pride, perhaps in fear of losing their very identity, the Spirit again came alongside the prophet Isaiah and his broken people to tell them they were not forgotten; that what Babylon meant for evil, God was even now bending toward good; that God’s faithfulness to his fallen bride, his tenderness toward her in the very rubble of her ruin, would show her yet to be “a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind and bring the prisoners out of the dark.”(Is. 42:6-7) That same Spirit who hovered over the first waters, who walks alongside Israel and alongside the nations who sit in darkness and alongside the whole groaning creation, was speaking: “See, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare.” (42:9)

Today, we remember one of the servants of that Spirit, who like his ancestors, lived in the shadow of empire, among a nascent movement of disciples of One who proclaimed the fulfilment of those ancient promises and blew the doors wide open to the scope and scale of that prophetic vision.

He enters the story without fanfare in Acts 4:36, first introduced to us as Joseph, a Levite from Cyprus. But the Apostles gave him a new name: Barnabas, which we’re told means, “son of encouragement.” The Greek phrase here is huios Paraklēseōs, drawn from the same root as Paraklētos [Paraclete]; the name Jesus uses for the Holy Spirit in John’s Gospel: the Advocate, the one who comes alongside. Barnabas doesn’t just encourage with words. He does what the Spirit does. He walks alongside. He lifts up. He strengthens in solidarity.

When news reached Jerusalem that even Gentiles in Antioch were turning to Jesus, the community sent Barnabas to investigate. And what was his reaction when he got there? The text says, “When he saw the grace of God, he rejoiced.” (Acts 11:23) No suspicion. No tests. No need to control the situation. Only joy. He came alongside these new believers, encouraged them, taught them, and stayed as long as he was needed.

But this wasn’t a one-off event for Barnabas; it was the pattern of his character. When the newly converted Paul was met with fear and distrust in Jerusalem, it was Barnabas who came alongside him and vouched for him to the Apostles (Acts 9). When Paul later rejected John Mark for abandoning a mission, it was Barnabas who gave John Mark a second chance (Acts 15). Again and again, Barnabas stood beside those on the margins of belonging and made room for them.

His ministry reflects what Jesus commands in today’s Gospel: “You received without payment; give without payment.” (Mt. 10:8) Like the disciples, Barnabas traveled light. No money, no spare tunic, only peace to offer and grace to share. His was not a strategy for maintaining boundaries, drawing lines between insiders and outsiders, or for institutional preservation. His was a way of life, a vision of ministry, rooted in inter-dependence, humility, mutual generosity, and discovery.

We’ve all come to this Mountain: some to study, some to teach, some to work, some to rest. But we all come to this Table as guests, to learn from the Spirit of Jesus and to be fed with his very being. Here we remember, whether as laypeople, deacons, priests, or bishops, that our deepest calling is to come alongside. To walk in love with one another through joy and struggle. To discern where the grace of God is already at work. And then to rejoice. To bless. To give as freely as we have received as we await the Dawn where God’s Spirit will “open the eyes that are blind and bring the prisoners out of the dark.”(Is. 42:7)

For indeed, “the old has passed away, behold the new has come.” (2 Cor. 5:17)

Image: Icon of St. Barnabas. Written by the monks of St. Paul’s Monastery, Marietta, WI.

Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’ – John 7:38

Last week, we remembered the Ascension of Christ as the necessary prelude for the arrival of God the Holy Spirit. But in ascending “to the right hand of the Father,” Jesus does not leave his physical body behind. He brings it with him, and in doing so elevates the created, material, human world into the very heart of God and onto the living throne of heaven. As Malcolm Guite describes in his poem Ascension:

We saw him go and yet we were not parted
He took us with him to the heart of things
The heart that broke for all the broken-hearted1

This is what Colossians means when it speaks of the ascended Christ: “Christ is all, and is in all.”2 The fullness of God now permeates all of creation through the embodied, risen, and now ascended Christ.

If the Ascension is God’s inhale of the brokenness of creation, then Pentecost is God’s exhale of healing upon it.

The sudden blast of his breath sounded from heaven like the howling of a fierce wind. Flames of fire alighted on each one of them gathered in that place, set ablaze yet not consumed. They were all filled with the Holy Spirit, which flows from the side of the glorified Christ. But recall that the King of Glory was glorified not upon the throne of heaven, but rather in being nailed to and lifted up on the Cross. The Holy Spirit flows from the glorious wound of Christ, the breath of that ascended Body now exhaled back into the world he has taken into himself.

Because Pentecost was a major Jewish festival, there were devout Jewish pilgrims from every nation under heaven arriving in Jerusalem, and when they heard the sound of the wind, they gathered and were astonished, because everyone heard the disciples speaking of the resurrected Christ in their own native language.

Luke’s list of the peoples represented there is striking: Parthians, Medes, Elamites, residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, Libya, Rome, Crete, Arabia. What might be missed from our distant 21^st Century perspective is that some of the nations named no longer existed even in the now ancient first century; specifically, Parthians, Medes, and Elamites… all far more ancient peoples associated with the Tower of Babel early in the Book of Genesis. Luke mentions them on purpose to conjure in our minds that ancient story and demonstrate how the arrival of the Holy Spirit is the fulfillment of the Prophet Joel:

I will pour out my spirit on all flesh;
your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
your old men shall dream dreams.3

You remember that story of the Tower of Babel. The kings of Babylon tried to build a tower into heaven, that they might take upon themselves the splendor of divine power. So, God confused their speech, not to stop humanity from acquiring divinity, but rather to expose what exploitation had already destroyed: the powerful elite had broken communion with the poor and lowly they used and exploited to build their tower, and when that relationship, that communion, breaks down, so does communication. The confusion of tongues simply made visible what was already true. And the construction project ground to a halt. The confusion of language in the story serves as a great equalizer, a dismantling of the mechanisms of empire.

But on the Day of Pentecost, that confusion reverses. It does not reverse by giving everyone one common language. Rather, Pentecost reverses Babel by making genuine comprehension, recognition, and understanding possible across difference. A few are not elevated to be like God, rather God lowered himself to become one of us.Then having taken the very stuff with which we are made into his very heart, then poured out his healing Spirit upon his broken creation! “I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one.”4 Divinity is a gift to be received, never taken.

This is what the Spirit does, because this is what Christ does.

Look at the whole shape of Jesus’ ministry. He moves toward the leper, toward the woman with the hemorrhage, toward the man no one would touch, toward the criminal dying beside him. Every step is further in, not further out. And the cross is not an interruption of that pattern. It is the pattern, carried to its furthest possible depth. The crucified and resurrected Christ ascended into everything, in order that his Spirit might move through us and call us toward everything, toward every person, toward every stranger, toward the one across the table whose convictions are not our own.

In the summer of 2018, I stood in a hearing room at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas, my husband beside me, waiting to give testimony on Marriage Equality. The room was full. People had come from across the church to speak, for and against, out of theology, out of history, out of deeply held conviction, out of their own lives.

I gave my testimony directly after Bishop Greg Brewer of the Diocese of Central Florida. We did not agree on this issue. He said so plainly, grounding his position in his own reading of Scripture. And yet he spoke in favor of Resolution B012, the compromise before the Convention, because he had concluded that marriage equality was not a central issue to the Gospel of Jesus Christ; but that unity, love, and forgiveness were. He was not willing to fracture the church over it.

While the hearing was still going on, I stepped outside. Bishop Brewer followed me out and asked if he could buy me a cup of coffee. We sat down together and spoke generously to one another. While we did not leave that table in agreement, somewhere in the conversation we recognized one another as brothers in Christ, and neither of us could say to the other, “I have no need of you.” The compromise resolution B012 passed a couple days later, and the church found a way to walk together. Today, I am proud to call Bishop Brewer a brother in Christ.

Friends, the Spirit of Jesus does not shield us from the noise and the rage and the painful divisions of this age. Christ, who has ascended into everything, into every last soul, now calls each of us toward each other by calling us to himself. The Church is born in that dynamic of communal calling, from the chaotic waters over which the Spirit hovered and brooded like a mother hen, until those waters became the fountain of baptismal life. Again, turning to Malcolm Guite, he writes:

For now the Lord will give you your desire
And set you high upon his holy hill.
He draws you to the garden through the fire

Back to the fountain where those waters spill
That christened you as his belovèd child
That you may find your peace in his good will.5

The Spirit draws us there. Not up and out of this world, but back and in, through the fire, ever deeper and deeper into the mire of this world, not to be abandoned there, but to find the very source of those waters that named you beloved. To the place where you first heard your name spoken by the One who made you, who made us all. And from that place, from this very Table, sent out again. Back toward one another, for “Christ is all, and is in all,” and “out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.”

5

Malcolm Guite, “II Quare Fremuerunt Gentes,” in David’s Crown: Sounding the Psalms (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2021), 2.

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Image: “Pentecost” by Donald Jackson. Mixed media. 2002. The Saint John’s Bible, Saint John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Into that room Jesus speaks: “Do not let your hearts be troubled. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.”

We often hear these words out the context in which they were spoken, plucked out to stand by itself. As a result, most of us hear those words in a particular way: that heaven is a distant location up where God lives, somewhere beyond death or up beyond the clouds; a place Jesus is going ahead to prepare like some kind of celestial real estate development project, which fits the popular understand of the afterlife… until you actually really read the Gospel of John seriously and find that that geography is totally off.

Jesus has barely finished speaking before Thomas interrupts him. “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” It is an honest question, and a revealing one. Thomas heard “dwelling places” and “going to prepare a place” and drew the obvious conclusion that Jesus is describing a destination. A location elsewhere. Some place needing a journey to get to.

But Jesus responds to this assumption by refusing the premise: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” Not “I know the route, let me draw you a map.” But rather, “I am the way.” The person, the destination, and the path are not separable things. Which means Thomas is asking the wrong question. It is not a matter of knowing where Jesus is going. It is a matter of knowing Jesus.

Then Philip tries his hand in asking from a different angle. “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” Philip has walked with Jesus for three years. He has listened, watched, followed, questioned. He’s heard all of Jesus’ sometimes difficult teachings and parables, but on this night of all nights, when the tension is at its highest, he asks for something more, something clearer, something he can hold onto. He just wants a straight answer.

Jesus’ reply is patient and searching: “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” The dwelling place of God is not limited to a temple or even the heavens themselves. It has been standing in front of Philip for three years right in front of him. I wonder if he didn’t somehow know this on some level.

To understand what Jesus means by “my Father’s house,” we need to follow the phrase back to its only other occurrence in John’s Gospel. Jesus is standing in the Temple in Jerusalem, overturning the tables of the money-changers. “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.” (John 2:16) When the authorities demand his credentials, he says, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” (John 2:19) John clarifies for the reader that he was speaking of his own body.

The Temple was the locus of divine presence in the world, the place where heaven and earth were understood to meet. If at any place on earth you might find the location of God, that would be it. But Jesus announces its replacement. Not by a bigger, better building. By a body. First his own, then, as the rest of John’s Gospel makes clear, ours. “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places” is not a description of the afterlife. It is a description of what the Resurrection makes possible here: a new reality, a new Creation.

We have long read “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” as a kind of border checkpoint to get into heaven. We even have cartoons with St. Peter guarding the pearly gates making sure you confess the correct doctrines about Jesus for entry. But the interpretive key to what Jesus is describing is verse 9. “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” Jesus is not setting up new rules to access God or how to get to heaven. In fact, quite the opposite. What he’s saying is that his life is so fully oriented toward the Father, so free of the rivalries and distortions that characterize ordinary human existence, that to look at him is to see what God actually looks like in human form. God has made his dwelling among us, right in front of us the whole time. In short, God has come to you and heaven is come to earth.

And what does that look like? It looks like healing those no one else would touch. Eating with those polite society had written off. Refusing, even at the last, to meet violence with violence.

If that is what the Father looks like, then the Way Jesus is teaching is not a doctrinal test. To follow Jesus as the Way is to be drawn into that same orientation toward the world, it is to converted, changed, transformed to do what he did, to walk and eat and heal as he did. The moment we turn “I am the way” into a weapon against those who believe differently, we have already abandoned the way, and make Jesus into an idol of our own tribalism, which is precisely what Jesus refuses.

Then come the verses we almost always move past, and they are the strangest in the passage.

“The one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these.”

Greater works than healing the blind, raising the dead, feeding thousands. We tend to read past with some embarrassment, knowing we certainly don’t live up to those standards. Jesus must have been hyperbolic. He was not!

“I will do whatever you ask in my name.” We have reduced this phrase in to a formula appended to the end of our prayers. “…in Jesus’ name, Amen.” As though the name were a kind of magically Open Sesame that unlocks or manipulates divine action.

But in the ancient world, to act in someone’s name carried far greater weight. It meant to act as their authorized representative, to carry their character into a situation so fully that your action and their action were not distinguishable. An agent acting in their principal’s name was expected to want what the principal would want, to do what the principal would do. The name was an identity.

So, to ask anything in Jesus’ name is not some kind of a mystical formula. It is to make an identity claim. To ask something in Jesus name is to ask as one formed by him, shaped by him, converted and transformed into something that resembles him. The prayer and the person making it are not separable.

This is why the asking requires what the New Testament calls metanoia, the word we translate as “repentance,” but which means something more like a reorientation of the whole self, a transformation of our entire vision and desire. Metanoia is not principally about remorse, though it may include it. It is primarily conversion. The slow, often difficult process of having one’s perception corrected so that one begins to see how Jesus sees, want what Jesus wants, love as Jesus loves.

The promise is not that God will deliver whatever we request. The promise is that as we are drawn more fully into the life of Christ, our asking is itself transformed. We begin to want differently, to pray from a different place. And from that place, the works that need doing, people that need healing, and feeding, and raising from the dead begin to become visible.

Philip wanted to be shown the Father in a single clear moment, like Peter, James, and John had seen on the mountain of Transfiguration. A revelation he could finally hold onto. But as we learned from that vision, it doesn’t work that way. The Father is known through the Son, and the Son is known through the life that he demonstrates on earth in real time in real flesh. This is not a one-time mountaintop vision. It is a continuous dwelling, an abiding to use John’s term for it.

The dwelling places Jesus is preparing are not rooms in a distant mansion. They are lives being made spacious enough to hold the presence of God. He is building his Father’s house here, among us, through us, in us. Think of what it looks like when that actually happens: a person who was closed begins to open, someone who could only see an enemy slowly learns to see a neighbor, a community discovers, against considerable resistance, that it has become a place of welcome.

Philip’s request still stands: Show us the Father. It is still honest. It is still brave. And the answer Jesus gives is the same answer he has always given: Come and see. Stay close. Let yourself be changed by what you find here. Taste and see.

This is the Way.

Image: “The Way Home” by Dawn Richardson. Acrylic on Canvas. 2024. https://dawnricherson.com

And then what? The disciples did what any of would us do. They went back to what was familiar, back to the upper room. They picked up the pieces of their shattered routines. They walked roads they had walked a thousand times. We read this morning about two of them, Cleopas and his companion, were on the road back to Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, going through the motions of a conversation, trying to make sense of what had happened.

We are two weeks out from Easter morning. You’ve gone back to work, back to school, back to the rhythms of an ordinary week. The world is still spinning with all the madness as it can devise. And maybe, like those two on the road, you’re still trying to figure out what any of it means, why any of it matters.

That is exactly where this Gospel story finds us. Because at some point we have to move from remembering the resurrection to experiencing it.

At the end of the Road to Emmaus story we just read, after Jesus became suddenly known to Cleopas and his companion in breaking the bread, they rush back to Jerusalem, back to that upper room to the other disciples to tell them how Jesus appeared to them on the road, when all of the sudden Jesus, again, shows up out of nowhere as if he’d been with them the whole time. Then just as suddently, Jesus interrupts their conversation, saying, “Peace be with you,” he says. They see him, they hear his voice, but they don’t quite recognize him even though they spent years with him face-to-face. They “thought that they were seeing a ghost.” They knew Jesus was crucified, died, and was buried. They knew dead men don’t come back to life. This could only be a ghost, a spirit without a body, or some illusion of guilt, a hallucination of despair, or a trick of the mind.

The tomb is open but their hearts are closed, unable to recognize the holiness that stands among them. They continue to live, think, and understand in their old human categories, separating spirit and matter, divinity and humanity, heaven and earth. But these binaries are forever condemned by the Resurrection of Jesus!

In the Resurrection, God shatters human categories of who God is, of where God’s life and energy are to be found, and how God works in this world. Resurrection can never be comprehended, contained, or controlled by human thought or understanding. But the mystery demands us, compels us, urges us to step into this ineffable new reality to behold the holiness in the world around us, in one another, and even in ourselves! Jesus’ resurrection shows us a way through our usual human binary, dualistic categories that pit heaven against earth, us vs. them, Jew vs. Greek, male vs. female, white vs. black, straight vs. queer, Republican vs. Democrat, and breaks down the gates of hell itself, inviting us enter into the divine reality that is all around us.

Jesus said to his disciples, “Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” Then “he showed them his hands and his feet.” After this he ate a piece of broiled fish in their presence.

The resurrected life of Christ, it seems, is revealed in and through the created order. It is not, however, bound by the created order. Rather, the resurrected body and life of Christ unite the visible and invisible, matter and spirit, humanity and divinity. On the one hand, Jesus has a real body. On the other hand, it is not subject to the natural laws of time and space. But, it’s not one or the other. It’s both. It is a new and different reality.

Perhaps because this new reality is so difficult for us to comprehend is the reason Jesus commanded us to meet regularly around this Table so that whenever we break bread together, we “do this in remembrance.” To remember is not merely a cognitive exercise, not simply to recall and retell the story (that is part of what we do, but it’s not everything that’s going on here). Remembrance, “Anamnesis,” is both a spiritual and physical action. When we are around this Table together, we recall the great events of Christ in Creation, his Incarnation, his Life and Teachings, his Death, Burial, Resurrection, and yes! even his Coming Again. Yes! We even remember the future promise, culmination, and renewal of all things of the Great Feast of the Lamb. All of that is somehow present here at this meal. This kind of remembering is part of that non-dualistic Resurrection Reality.

Somehow the Christ that was raised from the dead, who has now ascended to his heavenly throne, is also the one who walked through locked doors, appeared to his friends who didn’t seem to recognize him until he revealed himself. Somehow this Christ who is the Lord and God of all, is very present with us when two or three are gathered, is present to us in bread and wine, and in each soul that we encounter every single day. It is that Reality that we are called to both be aware of and to bear witness!

But perhaps you’re asking yourself how we can bear witness to something we have not seen ourselves. In the Epistle to the Colossians, St. Paul writes:

If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory. … For Christ is all and in all.” (Col. 3:1-4, 11b)

Do you not know that you too are Resurrected this day too? Do you not know that those who have come through the waters of Baptism have died with Christ? And if dead with him, then alive with him as well.

In his book Being Disciples, Archbishop Rowan Williams writes, “God is eternally uttering the word, the name, that is making you and me real, now. If God stopped uttering that word, that is Christ, you and I and the whole universe… would just stop being there.”1 That word was spoken into a tomb in Jerusalem and the tomb could not contain it. It was spoken on a road to Emmaus and two tired, grieving travelers felt their hearts burning within them without knowing why. It was spoken over bread and wine at a table, and they recognized the resurrected Christ standing before them. That word continues to be spoken even now.

The road to Emmaus runs through every human heart. You are likely on it right now, walking away from Jerusalem, still trying to make sense of everything. Or maybe you are running back, breathless, having caught just a glimpse of Christ out of the corner of your eye. Either way, the road leads here, to this Table, where we will break bread together and where that same word that emptied the tomb, that opened the eyes of those two weary travelers on the road, will be spoken again through, with, and in these ordinary things.

That road that led us here, leads us out of these doors too, into a world where others wait behind locked doors, longing to hear the good news we have encountered. Friends, your life, your real life, is hidden with Christ in God. So come now, taste and see. Receive what you are. Then go and tell what you have witnessed.

Be present, be present, O Jesus, our great high priest, as you were present to your disciples, and be made known to us in the breaking of bread; you who live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.2

2

The Book of Common Prayer, 1979. p 834.

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Image: “Supper at Emmaus” by He Qi. Gouache and ink on rice paper. 1998.

Peter had just laid out some hard reality of what we remembered during Holy Week: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested by God through signs and wonders, was handed over to be crucified. And then he says: But God raised him up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power. (Acts 2:24)

Impossible. Not merely unlikely. Not some miraculous fluke. Impossible! As though death had overreached itself, had taken hold of something it had no business dealing with and had no capacity to keep.

But let’s take a closer look right here. We just heard read: “God raised him up, having freed him from death” (2:24, New Revised Standard Version). The Greek in this verse has a slightly different spin from that translation: it is closer to Jesus is ‘freed from the pangs of death.’ The Greek word Luke uses for what God freed Jesus from is worth pausing over. It is the word for pangs, the same word used for the labor of childbirth. God freed Jesus from the pangs of death, which means that in Luke’s telling, the Resurrection is not simply an escape from death. It is a birth through it. The tomb was not a grave that was emptied. It was a womb from which something new entered the world. The birth-pangs of child labor are hard, costly, disorienting work before they are transformed into joy, as any mother here can attest.

And then Peter makes his point: This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses.

When the authorities hear the apostles’ testimony, the high priest accuses them of trying to bring Jesus’ blood upon them. It sounds to our modern ears like the kind of charge that has fueled centuries of Christian anti-Semitism: blood guilt and collective condemnation on the Jewish people; and we are right to be alert to that history. But look harder at what Peter actually does with the cross. He does not use it as a weapon. He does not end with accusation. Echoing Joseph in the book of Genesis: “What you intended to do harm, God intended it for good.” (Genesis 50:20)

The naming of complicity is not the destination. It is the necessary passage through which forgiveness becomes available. The offer cannot be received by someone who refuses to see their own part in what happened.

This is the thing witness requires. What stands between any of us and the forgiveness God is extending is the deeply human tendency to locate the violence of the cross somewhere other than in ourselves. We blame the empire, that old empire or the new one we’re living in; we blame those other religious people, we blame that other crowd with certain political beliefs, we blame those immigrants or those addicted people or those queer people… anywhere but right here in us. But Peter doesn’t allow that evasion. The cross is not just something that happened to Jesus because of one group of people… In that old story who was to blame? The religious authorities, Pontius Pilate, the governor, the Roman soldiers, Judas, the Apostles who abandoned him? The list could go on. No, the crucifixion is something that happened because of the accumulated weight of human sin, which belongs to all of us. To hold the cross up as a mirror rather than wield it as a weapon is to see ourselves honestly, and there, in that raw honest look at ourselves before God, find the transformative power of forgiveness.”

We do not have to look far to find the crosses of our own time. Those crosses are in the bodies of people eaten alive by addiction, in the faces of those sleeping in doorways whose names we have not bothered to know. Those crosses are erected in our prisons, where we have warehoused more human beings than any nation on earth. Those crosses are seen in the wide eyes of families living in terror of a knock on their door by ICE. Those crosses are among the rubble of cities destroyed by genocide and wars our own choices have helped sustain.

This is the weight Peter was asking his hearers to see and to own.

But God’s response to our implication in all of this is not condemnation. It is Resurrection. It was the birth of something totally new out of the absolute worst thing we could possibly do. The pangs of death became the labor pains of the New Creation. That is what we are witnesses to.

The Church, at its best, is the community that continues to bear witness to the reality of the Resurrection: that the death we see all around us in this world does not have the last word, that hell does not get to keep what it takes, that forgiveness is available to those willing to receive it honestly. This testimony we have received has crossed centuries and oceans. It has been sung in dangerous places, carried through misery that should have silenced it, proclaimed by people who had every reason to despair but chose to hope in the Resurrection instead. It has been passed from hand to hand across every boundary that human beings have used to divide themselves from one another.

We are heirs to that testimony, brothers and sisters. What we do with it matters. Witness is not simply believing the right things. It is allowing what we have received to shape how we live: the willingness to stand in the honest light of the cross, to acknowledge the brokenness of sin and the devastation in our world that we find there, and then to receive the astounding, world-changing, forgiveness God is offering on the other side of that honesty.

The pangs of death could not hold Jesus in that tomb. The New Creation was born out of that place of death and is still being born in us! Of that power of forgiveness, of reconciliation, of healing, all of us are witnesses! That is the hope we carry together out of this place! So go! Shine the light of Christ in the darkness!

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

Image: “Disciples in Jerusalem” by Ed de Guzman. Acrylic on canvas. 2010.

Mary of Magdala,
In your grief you heard your name
and in your name
you recognized
someone who had always seen you.
We do not know you
as much as we would like.
But we ask you to focus our eyes
on what gives life.
Because we remember you
who remembered your friend
even at the end.
Amen.
— Pádraig Ó Tauma1

A phrase from an ancient Good Friday hymn has been in my heart as I sat with these scriptures this week: “Who will give me water for the tears I must weep?” They cast the grief that Mary Magdalene carried as she ventured out into the pre-dawn darkness on that first Easter Sunday to the place they had laid her Lord days before.

The sun had not yet crested the hills east of Jerusalem when she rose and dressed and moved through the dark streets that were just beginning to grey at the edges. She knew where she was going. She had watched them lay him there. She was there as they forced him to carry his own cross up that hill after nearly beating him to death. She was there as he agonized over every breath until his last. She remained there at the foot of the cross when nearly everyone else had fled, and she had followed when Joseph of Arimathea carried the body to the garden, wrapped it in burial cloth, and rolled the stone into place. She knew exactly where he was.

Many of us have experienced the grief of returning to a loved one’s grave, the silent stillness of that liminal place, like the peaceful devastation after a storm, knowing exactly where someone is, and knowing that they are not coming back.

Mary didn’t go there because she expected anything. She went because… what else could she do? She went while it was still dark, because the darkness was honest. Silent. Almost numb. Somehow it matched what she was feeling.

The traumatic horrors of Friday were still very fresh. She had watched the machinery of empire do what it always does: flex its muscle, ensure order by way of power, peace by way of war, stamp out any threat of rebellion, remind everyone who was in charge. She had stood at the foot of that cross, unable to look away or stop it. That kind of trauma leaves a mark. You don’t walk away from it unchanged, and you cannot stop returning to it in your mind, turning it over and over and over again, asking what it means that the world works this way, that love gets disposed of so efficiently, that the powerful always seem to win while the world burns around them.

And so she came. Walking through the dark, carrying all of it.

But when she arrived, the stone was gone. Suddenly all that trauma was snatched away at this new shock.

She ran to tell the disciples. Peter and the beloved disciple, probably John, came running, inspected the empty tomb and the burial cloths lying in that strange settled stillness, and then they just went home, shocked and perplexed.

There’s an innate, almost instinctual, logic to visiting a tomb or a grave. You come to remember, to grieve, to begin the slow work of organizing meaning around the absence of one you loved. The grave becomes a new kind of grounding. The place you return to, the shrine where loss is transformed into something you can live with. The silence there is peaceful and grounding, but it’s final.

When the two disciples came and saw the empty tomb, the grave ritual was suddenly on its head. Graves are supposed to be final. The end of the road. What was their reaction to Jesus grave being wide open and empty? Shock? Fear? Confusion? Maybe a glimmer of hope? I’m not sure, but they left that place and went home.

But Mary Magdalene could not leave.

After a while, she looked up through her tears and was greeted by two angels from inside the tomb, but not with “Do not be afraid” or even “Hail, Mary.” The angels don’t comfort her or announce anything. They simply ask a question. And then the man she mistakes for the gardener asks it again; the same question, twice, from two different voices, as if the whole of Easter morning is leaning in, waiting for her to hear what is just underneath it.

Why are you weeping?

It’s not as accusation. Nor is it comfort. But rather an opening, a door being held ajar, an invitation to step into a whole new world.

And then he says her name. Mary.

One word, and her questions are answered. Not in the way she expected, not by the restoration of what she had lost, but by something she could not have anticipated: being known. Being called. Being spoken into being by someone who knew her name the way the Creator, the One who walked in the Garden, knows the name of every creature he has made.

G.K. Chesterton wrote that she was not wrong to take him for the gardener. He wrote, “in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn.”2 The world, Chesterton says, had died in the night. What Mary is standing in is the first morning of a new creation, and the first act of the Creator in this new world is to call a grieving woman by name and ask her why she is weeping.

Mary Magdalene stayed. She stayed when the others fled. She stayed through the trial, through the hours on the cross, through the burial, and then she came back before dawn when the grief was still raw and the city was still sleeping. And because she stayed, she was able to hear her own name spoken.

Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe wrote in his Easter message yesterday that Mary’s faithfulness calls us to our own: “we are called to be faithful in the face of grief, injustice, and anguish, even when the world is groaning with despair, and even when we cannot recognize Jesus standing right before our eyes.”3

The world is groaning. We know this. We feel it. The brutal machinery of empire has not gotten any quieter since that Good Friday outside Jerusalem so long ago. Crosses are still being erected in our own world: in our wars, in our prisons, on our borders, among the homeless on our streets, in our grief, our addictions, our fear, our resentments. But friends, Forgiveness has risen from the tomb, and we are an Easter people! We have been given the same calling Mary received in that garden. May we too have the courage and vigilance to go out into the dark to stand witness, and there be given “the grace to watch for Jesus in the most unlikely places.”4

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

4

Ibid.

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Image: “The Resurrection” by Donald Jackson. Mixed media. 2002. The Saint John’s Bible, Saint John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Call me simple, or naïve, or one of those true-believers, but I believe something happened on the Cross of Christ that actually did something: something that changed the course of human history, that altered the functioning of the cosmos, that struck the core of our reality. And yet, in all of the Gospels, Jesus never gave explicit teachings on exactly how his Cross saves us. Rather, Jesus talks about salvation in terms of loving your neighbor, loving God, caring for the poor, eating his flesh and drinking his blood, taking up one’s own cross. But no precise links between Golgotha and salvation. So, be wary of theologies that try to make a neat package of atonement, as if it were something we could possibly comprehend.

Consider instead how efficiently the machinery of power disposed of Jesus. The religious authorities feared his influence. The political establishment saw him as a threat to national security. The crowd, who so recently shouted “Hosanna,” now capitulated to his execution. Even his closest friends abandoned him. In this, we recognize that we still live in that broken world where truth is silenced whenever it threatens the status quo, where the innocent suffer as the powerful wash their hands of it, and the poor must pay the price.

The Romans understood crucifixion perfectly well. It wasn’t just execution; it was theatre. A public spectacle designed to terrify and control. But what they didn’t understand was that in crucifying Jesus, they were playing right into God’s hands. For God takes what the world meant for evil and transfigures it into salvation.

Black Liberation Theologian Dr. James Cone wrote in The Cross and the Lynching Tree: “The cross is a paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the world’s value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat, that suffering and death do not have the last word.”1 Yet God is at work precisely where God seems most absent. The Cross was intended to be the ultimate demonstration of imperial power:

Another rebel silenced,
Another prophet disproven,
Another body left to rot as a warning.

But the Cross became the revelation of divine love.

Good Friday is the day when we enter into the reality of Jesus’ cross and find that we are looking into a mirror, that it is really Jesus —our friend, our teacher, our Lord— who has entered into our lives, into our world’s reality. The betrayal, the denials, the arrest, his being spat on, laughed at, whipped, nailed to a cross and left to die in the heat of the day, and in the end naked and alone —is this not the world around us everywhere we look? Do these things not exist in our own lives, in our own hearts?

Dr. Cone continues: “In the mystery of God’s revelation, the crucified One is identified with all the crucified people of the world.”2 Look around. The crosses are still being erected: in our streets, in our prisons, at our borders, from the Oval Office to Iran, from ICE concentration camps to Salvadorian torture prisons. Their shadow falls over the working poor of Appalachia, over the sweatshops of Southeast Asia, over the genocidal devastation in Gaza, Sudan, and Congo.

We sacrifice the vulnerable to maintain our comfort.
We trade justice for peace.
We abandon truth when it costs too much.

The cross holds up a mirror of truth to all this; and then shatters it with forgiveness,
… but at great cost.

“Are you able to drink the cup that I am about to drink?” Jesus asked his disciples. “You will indeed drink my cup.” We cannot escape it. We are all connected to and implicated in the world’s hatred, violence, betrayal, and denial. Today we must come face-to-face with this reality.

When Jesus said, “Father, forgive them,” he wasn’t simply expressing tenderhearted sentimentalism for his first-century Roman executioners, who were just following orders. His forgiveness from the Cross transforms all our violence, all our betrayals, all the ways we continue to crucify love in our world to this very day.

This is the scandal of grace: that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. That God would rather die than be God without us. That love would go to hell and back to reclaim us, to redeem us, to transform us. God has plumbed the depths of our human reality to the dregs. God is with us all the way through life’s joys and sorrows, through shot up classrooms and immigration holding cells. God is with us through battles with cancer and recoveries from surgery. God is with us as we hold the hands of withering spouses. God is with us in our despair and depression. God is with us as we are isolated at home. God is with you just as God promised, because God loves you.

And that is why we call today Good. Not because there’s anything good about injustice, torture, or death, but because God’s love is so relentless that it can redeem even the most barbaric tool of human execution into the symbol of our liberation.

In a few moments, a cross will be brought in and placed before us. We will be invited to venerate it; to touch it, to kiss that wooden thing, that instrument of torture, that locus of humiliation and death. Here on our knees, we may feel revolt or disgust. We may feel sorrow or pain. We may feel empty or alone.

But look again. Open your eyes and look again. The cross stands as sign that God is still present to every silent cry and collects every last tear. The cross stands here to remind us that we are never alone, even through death itself.

So yes, we grieve today. We grieve for the suffering of our world. We grieve for our own complicity in it. But we don’t grieve as those without hope. The love of God has struck down the power of all the violence, all the sorrow, all the war, all the greed, and lust, and sin, and death we see in our world and in our lives. Love has made a way through it all. Today, on this Friday we call Good, we pause and stand here at the foot of the Cross, at the roots of this lynching tree, amid the raw truth of the world’s devastation, and behold the unfathomable price of love.

We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you,
because by your holy cross
you have redeemed the world.

2

Ibid., 158.

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Image: “Crucifixion” by Kreg Yingst. Woodblock Ink Print on Stonehenge Paper. 2023. https://www.instagram.com/psalmprayers/

“Love one another as I have loved you.”

But something is missing here. You might have noticed that in the Gospel reading a section from Chapter 13 was left out. We actually read it yesterday on Holy Wednesday. What is missing, or rather who is missing, is Judas. Judas had just left the upper room to go and hand Jesus over to the Temple authorities. He goes to light the fuse of the horrors we will face tomorrow.

But not before Jesus washed his feet. And just as Judas left, Jesus commands them to love each other. Knowing full well what Judas is about to do, Jesus has already forgiven him.

“Love one another as I have loved you.”

I wonder, after hearing Jesus’ commandment to love one another, if any of the remaining disciples thought about Judas. I wonder if any of them considered going out into the night to look for him? Did anyone fear for him, or miss him? Even after Judas brought soldiers to the Garden of Gethsemane, when they all fled and abandoned Jesus too, did any of the other disciples consider trying to find Judas, to talk him out of his shame, his anger, his rapidly deepening hell?

“Love one another as I have loved you.”

But no one found him, if any of them even tried. To this day it seems that no one has found Judas. He is still out there, it seems, wandering somewhere in the night of despair, forsaken by every generation of disciples since that first Maundy Thursday so long ago. But we do remember. Every time we gather for this sacred meal we remember… “On the night when he was betrayed, our Lord Jesus Christ took bread.” We remember. We speak of his sin, but we do not even speak his name. We have not searched for him, and we have never found him. His seat at the Lord’s table remains empty.

“Love one another as I have loved you.”

Within a few short hours after washing their feet, all of the disciples will abandon Jesus to his captors. Peter will deny him three times before dawn. Every last one of the other disciples will scatter and hide. We tell ourselves that what Judas did was different, that it was so much worse. But in reality, the night swallows all of them.

It is night, my friends. The blame we’ve heaped upon Judas only distracts us from the truth about ourselves. Every time we harden our hearts with unforgiveness to those who have wronged us, we betray Jesus. Every time we deny justice for the oppressed, or relief for the poor, or safety for the immigrant, we deny Jesus. Every time we turn away from needs of our neighbors or ignore cries of the desperate, the abandoned, the refugee, we abandon Jesus too.

“Love one another as I have loved you.”

Will we now search for Judas? Dare we hope that we can find him? Dare we hope that even he too might yet one day sit among all the rest of us who bear away the scars of our own treachery beneath the white shining robes of forgiveness? But Judas remains out there in the night, wandering alone or swinging lifeless in the breeze; his chair is still set at the table, but he has not returned to take his place, and we have not obeyed this new commandment to love him as Christ loved.

The banquet is set before us, my friends, but who is missing? Who is it that you may still need to forgive? With whom do you need to reconcile? Whose feet might you wash, knowing that they already have it in their heart to betray you or perhaps they already have? Who are they that are out there in the night, angry, disillusioned, hate-filled, hungry, afraid, lost? Who haven’t you loved as Christ has loved us?

As we are all invited to come forward now to wash one another’s feet, keep these questions and these people in your minds and hearts as we kneel and touch water and feet, following the Savior’s example.

“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

Image: “Washing Feet” by Aaron Spong. Acrylic on Canvas. 2018.

“For dust you are and to dust you shall return.”—Genesis 3:19

The dust still hung in the air where Jesus had knelt to mix his spit with the dirt. That simple act; so earthy, so crude, so primordial; became the moment when everything changed for this man born blind. As the mud touched his eyes and the waters of Siloam washed it away, he received more than physical sight. He saw anew that which very likely he already knew quite well, having lived with blindness his whole life: a vision of how the world had always worked, but now, in this encounter, a world transformed.

This man knew what it was like to be considered as cursed. His whole life people had whispered that his blindness was proof of someone’s sin; whether his own or his parents’. “Who sinned?” This simple question identifies the internal logics people use to justify exclusion, the working assumptions that suffering proves guilt: that homeless person “made their choices,” that the immigrant “broke the law.” The social systems controlled by a toxic religiosity needed that blind man to be guilty, because if suffering could be explained as divine punishment, then righteousness could be earned by piety, and piety could be enforced by the powerful. But Jesus shattered that illusion declaring definitively, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” and the miraculous healing proved it was not divine judgement, but rather divine grace that is the true measure of power. In that moment, the scaffolding of sacred violence that props up so much of our human thinking began to crumble.

When the Pharisees interrogated the healed man, their questions revealed their true fear. It wasn’t about Sabbath violations or theological technicalities; it was about maintaining a polarized, us-vs.-them, worldview, where some must be cast out so others can feel pure, or good about themselves, or even superior. “You were born entirely in sin,” they sneered, “and are you trying to teach us?” And with that, they drove him out, completing the ancient ritual of scapegoating that has haunted humanity and divided communities ever since Cain murdered his own brother out of jealousy and pride.

What’s remarkable is the moment they cast the man out, Jesus went looking for him. While the religious machine was spitting out its victim, the Lamb of God, the Scapegoat, was already moving toward the excluded one. “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” Jesus asked. Not “Do you understand?” or “Do you have the right answers?” or “Have you done all the right things?” Only “Do you believe,” “Do you trust?” And in that encounter, the once-blind man saw more clearly than any theologian; he saw in front of him the God who chooses to be with the victim.

This is why we gather at this altar. We come here to bear witness to the Victim who takes upon himself the fury of the world’s violence. We gather here not as an act of private devotion, but as a defiant act of solidarity. We gather aware of what is happening beyond these walls. Aware that our nation wages war in our name, dropping bombs on the homes of the poor for the feeling of security. We capture and cage our immigrant neighbors and call it order. We look at the suffering of distant peoples; Palestinian, Sudanese, Latin American, Haitian refugees; and the ancient question reasserts itself, “Who sinned?” We are not immune from the logic of toxic religion. In fact, we have been formed by it, we are taxed for it, and then we are asked to call it “freedom and justice for all.”

But at this altar, a table spread not by us, not by the Church, but by God; at this table when we break this bread and share this cup, we join in Christ’s creative and subversive work of touching the untouchable, befriending the outcast, standing beside the oppressed, and raising the dead. When we break this bread, it is Christ body which has taken on the world’s violence and suffering upon himself that is broken. Every time we extend our hands to receive, we are practicing, however imperfectly, a different way of being human; one that refuses to let any person be written off as expendable, guilty, or beyond the reach of God’s mercy.

And yet this Table points beyond resistance. The Twenty-Third Psalm which we just read gives us a glimpse of where all of this is going: a table spread not in the absence of enemies, but in their presence; a table that prepared for them too. The cup runs over because there is enough. There has always been enough. The feast God is preparing is not for the righteous few who got it right, but for all people and all of creation, reconciled and restored. The ones we name as enemies today, the ones our bombs fall on, the ones our policies exclude; they will be sitting at this same table. That is the scandalous, inexhaustible vision of the kingdom of God.

Here, at this altar, we meet the Scapegoat who transformed all sacrifice.
Here we meet the One who was cast out so all might be gathered in.
Here, we meet the Creator who remolds the dust that we are into a new creation.
Here we meet the Healer by whose wounds the whole Creation is healed.

Image: “The Peaceable Kingdom” by Edward Hicks (American, 1780–1849) ca. 1833–1834. Oil on canvas. Brooklyn Museum.

Our lesson from John’s Gospel is a story about crossing borders of various kinds. It’s a story of vulnerability and discovery. It’s a story about a strong woman (who may not have felt very strong) surviving in a society that privileged male power. She’s bold. She’s informed. She stands her ground. Jesus literally crosses a geographical border as he travels from Judea in the south, northward into Samaria, on his way to Galilee. You’ll recall that Samaritans and Jews were historic enemies. But Jesus crosses ethnic, political, religious borders anyway, therefore making this Jewish man interacting with a Samaritan woman a very unlikely pair.

So, who is this Samaritan woman? She, like every one of us, has a history. Things done and left undone, some good, some not so good. Faults and regrets. Fears. Secrets. Memories of both joy and pain.

The woman at the well has a reputation of promiscuity. But what is the evidence? We know that she’s had five spouses and is now living unmarried with a sixth man. We know that she comes to this well to collect her water in the mid-day heat, when nobody else is around. She is looked at but not seen. Labeled yet nameless. Easily dismissed as one who clearly squandered her life and relationships. She remains unknown to everyone, going to collect water in the hottest part of the day to avoid judgmental stares and sneers and pejorative whispers.

Let’s not forget that women of her day had very few rights and very little control over their own lives. If she was divorced it is because the men left her. She didn’t have a right to divorce them. That was exclusively a man’s right in a man’s world. But it is not clear if she is divorced or if she has suffered the death of five husbands, or a mix of the two. Either way,

• five times left alone,

• five times rendered nameless and faceless,

• five times starting over again.

Maybe some divorced her. Maybe some died. We don’t know. But we do know that tragedy is the story of her life.

So, let’s not be too quick to judge. We don’t know the details of her past. And we don’t need to. Maybe it is enough that she reflects for us our own lives, and the lives of so many in our community. We too are each of us people with a past, people with a history. We are all the Samaritan woman.

People like her, people like us, live with a deep often unspoken fear of being seen, but never really known.

I think we all yearn to be seen and to be known at a deep intimate level. We all want to pour our lives out to someone who knows us, to let them drink from the depths of our very being, simply to share life. That is exactly what Jesus seeks when he says to her, “Give me a drink.” It is the invitation to let herself be known. To be truly known is to be loved and to be loved is to be known without condition.

We have all gone down to some dry well in our lives, sometimes for years and years. For some, like our Samaritan woman, it might be a relationship well, hoping that the next person will love her and not leave. For others it is the well of perfectionism. Some go to the well of hiding and isolation. Others will draw from the well of power and control. Many live at the well of busyness and denial. And far too many will drink from the wells of addiction. All dry wells with the mirage of water that turns to dust in our mouths.

You see, Jesus sees the Samaritan woman. He looks beyond her past and sees a woman dying of thirst; a woman thirsting to be loved, to be seen, to be accepted, and included, and forgiven, and fully known. Her thirst will never be quenched by the dry external wells of life. Nor will ours.

“Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty.”

Christ invites us to receive the living water of new life, new possibilities, and freedom from the past. In our story from Samaria, to access this well, both the Woman at the well and Jesus had to be willing to be vulnerable. They both had to risk crossing borders of race, of nationality, of social and gender norms in the broad daylight in order to see and trust one another. All of her past was exposed in the bright light of the noonday sun. But instead of shame, she was held in compassion, in forgiveness, and the healing power of love. And her own expectations of what a Jewish stranger could be were also laid aside. Once the weight of guilt and shame, of rights and expectations were let go, she discovered an interior well, where she is seen and loved for who she is. Only then is she able to ignore the haters and find a path to life, and then to invite others to come along. While the disciples are scratching their heads, she is the one who recognizes Jesus for who he really is.

Jesus crossed the borders of race, religion, politics, and gender to meet this Samaritan woman. It was not the normal route for traveling Jews to go through this country of their sworn enemies, much less was it acceptable for him to speak with a woman of obvious ill repute. It is the risk that God took, to meet her where she was. It’s how God continues to meet us where we are, to know us fully for who we are, beyond the labels we have been assigned and beyond all of our flaws and warts and sins.

It’s not enough, however, to hear the Samaritan woman’s story this morning and feel some tingle of sympathy. Remember that Lent is asking us to consider what kind of disciples we are:

• Have you continued to pursue and consume mirages that turn to dust in your mouth?

• From which wells do you drink?

• How much longer will you carry your water jars of guilt and shame?

• How much longer will you live in fear of being found out, fear of someone knowing who you really are?

• Which borders have you failed to cross in order to avoid encountering the neighbors you were taught to fear?

That neighbor is not hypothetical. That neighbor is the woman who slips out before dawn to avoid the ICE agent she fears is stalking her street. That neighbor is a single parent worried how they’re going to make ends meet as gas prices soar over $4 a gallon. That neighbor is the family torn apart by deportation, rendered nameless by a system that sees a legal status rather than a human being. That neighbor is a civilian in Tehran who woke up this week to falling bombs, justified by men with power who speak the language of apocalypse rather than the language of God.

But there is another well, my friends, one that gushes with real life for all people; one by which we are fully known and fully loved, and one by which we also come to know and love others. It lies just beyond the borders of comfort, it lies along the path on which we meet our neighbors, even those we don’t like, those who make us uncomfortable, and those we have forgotten. “Our life and our death is with our neighbor.” So come to the new well. Come to the well of Christ’s life, Christ’s love, Christ’s presence that lies on the border of your life and the world of your neighbor. It begins here in the waters of Baptism, overflowing from the Chalice of this Table, and connects to hearts of all God’s beloved. So come and drink deeply! And then let us go from this place, following Christ across the borders.

Image: Photograph of the Apartheid Wall between Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Photo by Lynda Tredway, 2014.

Transcript:
Every Wednesday morning, a group of community members stand outside the ICE office in here in Knoxville Tennessee holding a bright yellow banner that says “¡Ama a tu prójimo! – Love your neighbor!” We bring coffee and hot chocolate, hand warmers when it’s cold, water bottles when it’s hot. We offer what small hospitality we can to our immigrant neighbors who are forced to stand outside for hours, waiting to check in with ICE officials who hold their lives in limbo.

This particular morning is Ash Wednesday, a day we remember that we are all made of the same stuff, we all share in the same DNA, and we will all one day leave this world with as much as we came into it. One of the psalms used at the Ash Wednesday liturgy reminds us that God “knows whereof we are made; he remembers that we are but dust.” God knows what we are and who we are. I thought about those words as I prepared to come here this morning, to this place where our immigrant neighbors are treated as if they’re disposable, as if they’re less than dust we are all made of.

This work is not new here. We began coming here in 2018, after ICE raided a poultry factory in Bean Station, Tennessee and tore through the immigrant community in East Tennessee. That ICE activity paused during the Biden years. But in December 2024, weeks before Trump’s second inauguration, the dehumanizing policy restarted. And so, every week, as our immigrant neighbors are required to check in, we show up too.

Hope doesn’t look like I thought it would. I thought hope would feel like progress, like winning, like the arc of the moral universe bent toward justice in real time. But the hope I’ve found looks more like refusal. The stubborn, irrational refusal to abandon people when the world has decided they’re disposable.

My friends, we ARE in the wilderness right now. Lent invites us into forty days of wilderness wandering, but we’re facing something longer. Four years? Forty years? We don’t know. We are in the long winter. The Trump regime is systematically dismantling protections for the most vulnerable, terrorizing entire communities, and constantly distracting and misdirecting us as it accumulates more and more power grabs. Even permanent residents and naturalized citizens are no longer certain of their status. The deportation machine is organized, efficient, growing.

Where is God in all of this? Where is hope when showing up every Wednesday doesn’t stop the raids, when our marching in protests doesn’t prevent the detentions, when love seems powerless against the machinery of the state?

Lent gives us two bookends. Ash Wednesday, where we’re marked with the cross in ashes and reminded of our shared mortality. And on the other end, Holy Saturday, the darkest day of all, the day after Good Friday when the violence and hatred of the world seemed to have finally stomped out all hope.

But both of them teach us where God is present. God remembers we are dust. God is present in the ashes, in the austerity and suffering of the Lenten wilderness, through the anxiety, fear, and violence in our world, and even in the grave. In the places the world has abandoned, and all seems lost, we’re shown that is where God is.

On Ash Wednesday we are marked on our foreheads with a cross of ashes, the same sign used at our baptisms, when we were anointed with oil and “marked as Christ’s own forever.” You carry that mark every day, even when it’s invisible. On Ash Wednesday it becomes visible again, if only for a few hours, a physical reminder of our shared humanity with all who suffer: With those forced to leave their homes because of war or violence. With those who now live among us as strangers. With those who have lost their homes to addiction, or lost their families because of their gender identity or sexuality. With our immigrant neighbors standing in the cold outside the ICE office.

The word Lent means “Light.” Yes, we recognize our weaknesses, our mortality, the suffering in our world. But we are not called to sit in our ashes and brood. The point is to recognize who we really are as children of God and to reconnect with God’s other children.

On the other end of this Lenten Season, Holy Saturday, the long day in the tomb after the crucifixion, teaches us that resurrection happens in the very darkest hour of the darkest day. Not before the suffering ends. Not after we’ve waited long enough. But in the depths. In the tomb itself. Holiness is found in that waiting. In the refusal to leave or abandon our neighbors alone in the dark.

Hope is not found in abstract sympathy or thoughts and prayers from a distance. Hope is found in putting our bodies where suffering bodies are, in recognizing our own vulnerability in theirs. Remembering that we are made of the same dust as they are.

So how do we hold onto hope when we don’t know how long the darkness will last? We show up. We put our bodies in proximity to suffering. We learn our neighbors’ names. We bring coffee and hand warmers and umbrellas. We document the abuses. We call our representatives. We organize. We refuse to be silent. Hope believes God is present even in the grave.

This season of Lent, this season of Light, remember that this world and everything in it was created for love. Between Ash Wednesday and Holy Saturday, we walk through the wilderness of that creation’s ruins. We don’t know how long it will last. But let us find God in the showing up, in the marching, in your art, in your music, in our organizing, in the standing with our frightened and suffering neighbors, holding onto the stubborn hope that death and empire do not have the final word.

Friends, it’s going to get worse before it gets better. So remember this: Resurrection happens in the darkest hour of the darkest day.