The Gospels contain a good handful of stories about Jesus healing on the sabbath. There’s this one, the story of the man with the withered hand, here in the Gospel of Mark – and also told in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, which use Mark as a source text. There’s another in Luke chapter 13, when Jesus heals a woman who has something wrong with her back; she is bent over and can’t stand straight, and has been living with this condition for eighteen years. In the fifth chapter of John’s Gospel, Jesus sees a man who has been disabled, and living as a beggar, for thirty-eight years, and he heals him; later on he also restores sight to a young man who is blind, also on the sabbath. 

In each of these stories Jesus is challenged about these acts, which some onlookers see as violation of sabbath-keeping. And he has a number of snappy responses. He says, “Shouldn’t this woman be set free from her bondage on the Sabbath day?” He says, “My Father is still working [today], and so am I.” He says, “It is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.” And in today’s Mark passage, he says, “The Sabbath was created for humans; humans weren’t created for the Sabbath. This is why the Son of Man is Lord even over the Sabbath.”

These many accounts make me think this is something Jesus really did. He healed and helped a lot of people, and sometimes he did it on the Sabbath, the holy day set aside to rest from work; and that upset some people, who felt that this was breaking the sabbath, or perhaps upstaging God on a holy day. 

To really understand these stories we need to pause and talk about sabbath. What does that mean? In Judaism, the Sabbath is a day, once a week, set apart for rest and worship. God practices sabbath in the Biblical day of creation – creating light, dark, earth and water, and all living things, then resting on the seventh day. 

Keeping Sabbath is mandated in the Ten Commandments, the way of life given to God’s people through Moses long ago: “Remember the Sabbath day and treat it as holy. Six days you may work and do all your tasks, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. Do not do any work on it—not you, your sons or daughters, your servants, your animals, or the immigrant who is living with you.” (Exodus 20:8-11, CEB).

For modern Jews who observe the sabbath, that means things like not flipping light switches or turning on the oven to cook a meal – because the Book of Exodus says, “You shall kindle no fire in your dwellings on the Sabbath day.” If you have a fancy lunch after Sabbath worship, members of your community can’t prepare it or clean it up.

It’s important for us as outsiders to understand that those practices – those restrictions – are not the heart of Sabbath. Those are outwards signs intended to move people into a way of being, a mindset of intentional rest. It’s a time of the week, Friday sunset to Saturday sunset, separated from the rest of life by a hard line – set apart as a reminder that they are a people set apart, called and chosen to honor God by their way of living. 

Many of us recently lost power for a few hours or a few days. Think about how you would organize your life if there were going to be 24 hours every week when you could not turn anything on. It would become an important rhythm in your life; you would orient much of your week around preparing for and protecting that holy time. 

So what does it mean when Jesus says that the Sabbath was created for humans; humans weren’t created for the Sabbath? 

It means, for one thing, that Sabbath isn’t something God needs. That’s a common theme in the books of the prophets from before the time of Jesus: God doesn’t need our religious observances.

The Hebrew Bibles states pretty clearly that none of the religious observances of God’s first people are set up to meet God’s needs. For example, God doesn’t ask for animal sacrifices because God is hungry. 

Rather, these practices are tools to form God’s people. That’s the reframing Jesus is doing about the sabbath – and it’s both radical, and consistent with the witness of the prophets before him. He’s saying that the point of the sabbath is to point us towards God. And if there are aspects of our sabbath-keeping that don’t point us towards God, then maybe change is needed. 

And Sabbath is also, fundamentally, explicitly, about rest – so that God’s people don’t work themselves to utter exhaustion and depletion. Which means that sabbath is also about human wholeness and flourishing. 

So there are two different ways in which the sabbath was made for humanity, as a gift: to help people turn back towards God, our loving Creator, and to provide a weekly pause, a time of rest and recovery. 

Matthew and Luke tell this story, from Mark, in their Gospels. But they don’t like this saying of Jesus! They’re comfortable saying that Jesus – the Son of Man – is Lord of the sabbath. But both of them edit out Jesus saying that the Sabbath was created for humans. I think they’re just too committed to the Judaism of their ancestors to feel OK about the idea that how we keep sabbath is less important than what sabbath does inside of us. 

For Jesus, refusing to heal someone – to offer them a physical restoration that they desire – because it happens to be the sabbath, feels like itself a violation of sabbath. He seems to feel that these leaders who are saying, “Just wait and do it tomorrow,” have a distorted sense of sabbath that’s no longer pointing towards God and God’s intentions for humanity. 

As our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry likes to say, If it’s not about love, it’s not about God. 

Let me gesture towards a couple of nuances! I want to be clear that the pushback on Jesus’ Sabbath healings seems to me like a religious leader thing, not a Jewish thing. As somebody who presides over public worship, I understand the feeling that there’s a decorum and an order and a purpose in spaces like this that can be disrupted, even by good things. I think we’ve gotten pretty good at handling joyful disruption here at St. Dunstan’s, but that has taken time and work, and it’s somewhat countercultural with respect to the wider church. Many of the people who feel called to roles like mine are people who like know what’s going on in the room and what’s going to happen next, and that’s probably true always and everywhere. 

The second nuance has to do with disability and healing. It’s not clear in every story, but I sure hope that these people approached Jesus seeking healing – and that Jesus didn’t see a withered hand or a crooked back and think, “Well, we gotta fix THAT.” There’s a big project underway, church, of shifting our understanding of human wholeness and flourishing so that it doesn’t presume bodies look or work in particular ways – or minds either, for that matter. 

There’s a book I’d like to read – maybe some people would like to read it with me – called, “My body is not a prayer request: Disability justice in the church.” There are good reasons for people to desire physical healing – especially in societies that limit and stigmatize on them. There are also good reasons for us all to come to greater respect for disabled people, and their presence, giftedness and worth. 

Okay. Back to sabbath. As Christians, we don’t keep sabbath. Just a few weeks ago we read about the early church’s active and somewhat contentious discernment process about what aspects of Jewish law should be binding for Christians. And Sabbath did not make the cut. People will sometimes talk about Sunday as our sabbath but we did not, in those early decades and centuries, take on the prohibitions and practices that would have really set apart Sunday as a true sabbath in that way. 

There are a few Christian groups that have more of a true sabbath practice, but it’s never been dominant in our faith. 

So does Jesus’ saying here – the sabbath was made for humanity, not humanity for the sabbath – have anything to say to us? 

We as Episcopalians are not sabbath keepers, but we can be a little particular about how we worship. We’re a few weeks out from our next General Convention, the every-three-years gathering of bishops and elected deputies from across the church to pass legislation on church matters. Which means we’re in the throes of another round of angst about liturgical revision. 

I will not get into the weeds about that here! It does not concern us much. But when we’re talking about altering our received patterns of worship – revising or editing the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, for example – we are very much talking about whether humanity was made made for the sabbath, or the sabbath for humanity. 

Are these ways of worship a requirement from Above that we must enact precisely in order to fulfill all righteousness, or are thee just tools to bring us into God’s presence, such that when they are not doing that very well, we should change them? 

As Anglicans, our way of faith BEGAN with one great big discernment that we needed to dramatically change our way of worship for it to actually bring people closer to God. 

Thomas Cranmer, charged by King Henry VIII with creating an English church, wrote in the preface of the first English Book of Common Prayer in 1549, “There was never any thing by the wit of man so well devised, or so sure established, which in continuance of time hath not been corrupted…” Sometime, grab a prayer book and read that preface in full; it’s in the Historical Documents section in the back of the book. 

It’s very clear that Cranmer’s motive for advancing worship in English instead of Latin, and for simplifying worship and including more Scripture in worship, was to help ordinary people develop their own piety and spirituality. Cranmer emphatically believed that the sabbath was made for humanity, and that time-honored practices of worship could – must – be changed in order to help humans approach the Holy. And he did not think he was creating the one thing that would work forever. He anticipated continued revision. 

I’m astonished sometimes by the degree to which some Episcopalians in the larger church can lose the plot on what makes us Anglican, and start to talk as if we were made for the 1979 Prayerbook, and not the prayerbook made for us. 

The purpose of liturgy, and how best to fulfill it, is interesting to me; it may be interesting to a few of you as well. If so, let’s chat; I’m thinking of re-gathering a liturgy committee later this year and maybe you’d enjoy being part of that. But let me turn to something relevant to more of us. 

Sabbath as a word and concept has escaped its specific historical and religious context and is used somewhat more broadly, in secular contexts. 

When I hear people talk about sabbath in that more general sense, I think they mean not just a break from the pace and demands of daily life, but a time that allows some restoration of what has been worn or depleted or damaged by that pace and those demands. 

Sabbath includes rest – sleeping and napping, or down time without much agenda. Space to do things you enjoy, things you can choose freely to do – or not.

Sabbath is different from vacation, because vacation can be its own kind of work, right? Keeping up with the itinerary, dealing with logistics, checking things off the bucket list, attending to everyone’s needs and expectations. Vacation can be exhausting. 

I try to take two days off a week – usually Saturday and Monday, my “weekend,” though there is sometimes church stuff on Saturdays. Like everyone else, I have a certain quota of adulting, of small and large responsibilities to attend to, during the hours that aren’t committed to my work as rector of St. Dunstan’s. 

It does not happen every week, but it feels so good when, now and then, I have enough time that I can finish doing one thing and the next thing isn’t already cued up: checking the bank account, doing laundry, making dinner. Instead, I can ask myself, “What would I like to do now?” 

That kind of time is hard to come by. But I feel like that’s an element of sabbath. Sabbath isn’t just a day off work to do all the other work that life requires. It’s time – a lot or a little – that’s somehow spacious enough that we can follow our hearts, and truly rest. 

And because God’s agenda for us includes human wellbeing and flourishing, this is not really a secularization of the concept of sabbath. This is just … Sabbath. Returning to ourselves; having time to tend to ourselves, and to people and activities we love. 

This week brings the end of the school year for some of our kids and their families. It’s a season when patterns and rhythms change, for many households – which does NOT mean more free time, and indeed can mean more scrambling, and less of the comfort of structure and routine. 

For me summer always feels like a ten-week struggle for the right balance between taking time at work for some bigger-picture thinking and planning for the year ahead, AND trying to work less and rest and play more. It has its own kind of intensity, and sabbath can be just as elusive as during the program year. 

Here on the cusp of summer, friends, whatever your circumstances, whatever the turn of the season means or doesn’t mean for you: it’s never a bad time to think about sabbath. 

To remember that God called God’s first people to pause, and re-center, and rest… and still calls us to the same. 

To wonder about whether and where we might be able, through some strategic saying No to this or Yes to that, to open up even a little bit of sabbath spaciousness in our lives and hearts. 

And to know deeply that what God wants for us, from us, includes rest, restoration, playfulness and joy. 

Our Acts lesson today is a slightly abbreviated version of Acts Chapter 15. 

This chapter of Acts, about the leaders of the church in Jerusalem deciding to endorse the mission to the Gentiles, is not in the Sunday lectionary. And I think that’s a shame, because it’s an important story! Most of us are here because the early church, by the guidance of the Holy Spirit, made this decision. 

Father John Rasmus and I talked about this story a couple of weeks ago, as we often talk about upcoming readings. With his extensive knowledge of Scripture, he helped me notice some things about this story. Luke, the author of the book of the Acts of the Apostles, is telling this story a certain way. Peter and James, core leaders in the Jerusalem church, are the main characters. Peter is shown as a strong supporter of sharing the Gospel with Gentiles. And Luke makes it sound like the church came to a clear and settled consensus at this meeting. 

But we have a lot of Paul’s letters included in the Bible as Epistles, and Paul tells this story a different way. He describes this meeting in Jerusalem, in Galatians chapter 2. In Luke, Peter says, “Early on, God chose me from among you as the one through whom the Gentiles would hear the word of the gospel and come to believe.” Whereas Paul says, “…They saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel for the uncircumcised [Gentiles], just as Peter had been entrusted with the gospel for the circumcised – for the One who worked through Peter making him an apostle to the circumcised also worked through me in sending me to the Gentiles.”

Peter met a Roman once and said, “Huh, I guess you could actually become a Christian too!” Paul poured out his life preaching Christ crucified and risen to Gentiles, making disciples and founding churches. 

But: Peter was understood to be Jesus’ chosen leader for the early church. So Luke – writing this history later than Paul’s letters – tells the story in a way that puts Peter more solidly on the right side of history than he probably was at the time. 

In fact, Paul tells an additional story. Sometime after this big meeting, Peter comes to visit the church in Antioch, and at first he shares meals with the Gentile Christians there. But then he gets a rebuke or warning from people who are still saying that there’s something unclean about Gentile Christians who don’t follow Jewish law – and that Peter, as a faithful Jewish Christian, shouldn’t be sitting at table with them. And Peter stops sharing meals with the church. 

Paul calls him out for hypocrisy, and for betraying the Gospel! He says to Peter in front of everybody, “If you, although you are a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, because though the Gospel you no longer follow the rules of our Jewish faith, then how can you force Gentiles to live like Jews?!?!” (Galatians 2:14). 

Now, Paul is telling the story in a way that puts HIM on the right side of history, certainly. But it complicates Luke’s narrative. Father John wonders whether they had to send some extra people to carry that letter because Paul disagreed with the letter and refused to be their messenger. In that letter, the Jerusalem leaders say that Gentiles need to avoid meat from animals sacrificed to idols – killed as part of the rituals of other religions. Paul writes about that issue a couple of places in his letters, and he thinks that’s nonsense – that those idols are false and empty, those rituals are meaningless, and that meat is meat. 

There’s nothing strange about all this; indeed it might feel all too familiar. People with strong opinions wrestling their way through big change. A complex, conflicted process being described after the fact as if it had been simple and clear. People in institutional leadership being retconned, or retconning themselves, into having always held the position that is now the correct position to hold. 

Change is messy. Consider the last 60 years in the Episcopal Church. Prayer book revision; the ordination of women; the movement towards the full inclusion of LGBTQ+ people; working to decenter whiteness in a church with deep cultural roots in the white middle class. I could point to so many examples of big struggles and debates. Of movements for change and movements of resistance. Of leaders who feel uncomfortable with a particular change, but can see that it’s where the Spirit is leading the church. … And leaders who can’t. 

People on the vanguard are always frustrated with the people who are dragging their heels – like Paul’s frustration with Peter. But some of those dragging their heels aren’t just doing it for its own sake; whatever change is in the air just feels big and new and strange to them. 

In this gathering in Jerusalem we see an honest effort to hash out an issue that folks have very deep-seated feelings about, and to try to discern where the Holy Spirit is leading – even though it feels to some folks that the church is letting go of some really important, holy stuff. 

But people tell stories. And maybe even more importantly: People listen. And through listening and sharing, as much as though stating and debating, openness begins to emerge. 

The church begins to be able to make room for the new thing God is doing. It’s not easy; it’s not clear; it’s not settled. That takes much longer. But something breaks open, begins to unfold. 

This story makes me feel grounded and grateful – aware of the ways the Church today is a lot like the church two thousand years ago, and that somehow, in spite of ourselves, God keeps working with and through us. May it always be so. Amen. 

On Sundays in Easter season, instead of Old Testament readings, our calendar of readings gives us texts from the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. Acts is the sequel to the gospel of Luke, which tells about what happened after Jesus’ resurrection – how the disciples began to share the Gospel far and wide, and to found a network of faith communities. There’s a lot of exciting stuff in the book of Acts – funny stories, scary stories, adventure stories. This year I’ve tinkered with the lectionary calendar a bit, to give us a little more of the larger story of Acts. 

With that, let’s turn to today’s story. First: Who is this Philip? There was a disciple named Philip, one of the Twelve, but this is not that Philip. This Philip is one of the first deacons. In Acts chapter 6, we read, “Now during those days, when the disciples were increasing in number, the Hellenists complained against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution of food.” 

There’s a lot implied here; let’s unpack. The Christian community in Jerusalem is growing fast, and it includes both people of Jewish background – Hebrews – and non-Jews, Gentiles, here described as “Hellenists.” And: One of the things the brand-new Christian community is doing, is feeding the hungry – distributing food. 

Last week we heard, “There were no poor people among [the first Christians]. Those who owned properties or houses would sell them, bring the proceeds from the sales, and place them in the care and under the authority of the apostles. Then it was distributed to anyone who was in need.” Widows – women without a man to provide for them – were a particularly vulnerable population. So the church is providing food. But because the core leadership of the church are all Jews at this point, there is either a bias in food distribution, or a perception of bias in food distribution, in favor of the Jewish widows. 

The leaders of the church – the Twelve Disciples, who have rebranded as the Twelve Apostles – offer one of the classic responses of authority challenged: They say, “That’s not our job.” They say: “It is not right that we should neglect the word of God in order to wait at tables.” So they have seven men chosen to take charge of this humble task of distributing food fairly. And seven men are duly chosen, and the apostles pray and lay their hands on them. Luke never uses the word “deacon,” but these are understood to be the first deacons – people called by the church, and ordained to a role of service, both within the church and towards the wider community.

But! It very quickly becomes clear that some of these deacons have been chosen either very badly or very well, depending on your perspective. One of them, Stephen, immediately goes out and starts preaching the Gospel – and arguing with critics. Many people become Christians because of his words. He is arrested, tried, and condemned to death, and becomes the first Christian martyr. So much for waiting at tables.

And then there’s Philip. After Stephen’s death, many leaders in the Jerusalem church scatter. Philip goes to Samaria in the north; he preaches there and casts out demons, and many people are converted, including a former magician named Simon, which is a fun little story. Then he gets this message from God to head down to the road that leads south from Jerusalem towards Gaza, and see what happens. There he meets the Ethiopian eunuch, and today’s story unfolds.

I want to be clear that Philip is not only stepping far out of the role to which he was called; he is getting well ahead of the church. The people of Samaria, north of Judea, were seen by other Jews as religiously dubious. That’s part of the background for the parable of the Good Samaritan, for example. 

When a bunch of people there become Christians through Philip’s ministry, Peter and John – the core leaders of the early church – have to come to Samaria to make sure all of this is in order. 

And then Philip rushes off and baptizes an Ethiopian eunuch, who is even more of an outsider than Samaritans. At this point in the book of Acts, Paul, who will become the great apostle to the Gentiles, hasn’t even become a Christian yet. He was literally just holding people’s coats while they stoned Stephen to death. The early church will not fully endorse ministry to non-Jews until chapter 15, and it takes some real discernment and argumentation to get there. 

Philip does not wait on church consensus. He hears God say, Go there. Talk to him. And he goes, and talks. 

After Acts chapter 8, which is mostly about Philip, we don’t hear anything else about him except a brief mention in chapter 21. Luke and others visit Philip in Caesarea, and meet his four young daughters, who have the gift of prophesy. I feel like it’s very on brand for Philip to have a houseful of young people who are just full to overflowing with the spirit of God. 

So. That’s Philip. Now let me say a little about the Ethiopian eunuch. Tradition has given him several names, and using a name feels better than referring to him by these labels, so let’s call him Simeon. But we need to talk about his labels. First, he’s Ethiopian – that’s straightforward enough. Ethiopia is in East Africa, south and east of Egypt and the Sudan. It’s one of the oldest civilizations in the world, with cultural and economic relationships to Ancient Egypt, Rome, and many other kingdoms and empires over the millennia. 

It’s not surprising that an educated first-century Ethiopian would have been familiar with Jewish faith and scriptures, as Simeon is, nor that a wealthy Ethiopian might travel as far as Jerusalem. (There is still a significant community of Ethiopian Jews in Israel!) 

As for Simeon’s job, the Candace or Kandake seems to have been a queen or a queen-mother figure in the Ethiopian kingdom of Luke’s time. There’s archaeological evidence for this kind of role: a female ruler, the king’s mother or sister, secondary to the king, but with her own court and treasury. 

Which brings us to the more difficult part of Simeon’s identity: That he was a eunuch. Look, it would be easier to assume we all know what that word means and hurry along, but my commitment to understanding Scripture won’t let me do that. (I was going to prep this story as a Sunday school lesson until I started to think about it!) I am not going to go into details, but let me read a few sentences from the Wikipedia entry, OK? 

“A eunuch is a male who has been castrated… Over the millennia…, [eunuchs] have performed a wide variety of functions in many different cultures… Eunuchs would usually be servants or slaves who had been castrated to make them less threatening servants of a royal court where physical access to the ruler could wield great influence… Eunuchs supposedly did not… have loyalties to the military, the aristocracy, or a family of their own. They were thus seen as more trustworthy…Because their condition usually lowered their social status, they could also be easily replaced or killed without repercussion.”

I think that’s helpful in terms of not just the physicality of Simeon’s identity as a eunuch, but the cultural and psychological aspects. 

He carried great trust and responsibility – because he was seen as someone who didn’t have a stake in anything, no agenda of his own to advance. I hasten to say that I don’t think the capacity to produce biological children has some intrinsic tie to personality and motivation! – but that’s the understanding at work, here. 

In Jewish law, as laid out in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, eunuchs were forbidden to enter the tablernacle or temple – the holy places where God’s people came before God. That prohibition was a reflection of a general discomfort, in Mosaic Law, with things that are neither this nor that, that don’t fit into the dominant categories.

So Simeon was a double outsider, to Philip. A non-Jew, a foreigner, visibly different due to his dark skin, though that would not have carried the same racial implications it does today. And a eunuch – a social role that bore a paradoxical combination of privilege and stigma. But Philip – being Philip – seems totally unconcerned by any of that. They talk about the Bible, and Philip talks about Jesus, and then Simeon asks about baptism, and Philip says: Let’s do this. 

I want to pause on the fact that this encounter happens on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza. Gaza as a place-name goes way back; in the Bible it’s first used in Genesis. For millennia it’s been a region close to Israelite territory – sometimes enemies, sometimes just neighbors. I wondered about that road, so I put it into Google Maps – How does someone get from Jerusalem to Gaza today? Google Maps told me, “Sorry, we could not calculate driving directions.” The road is there, but it stops at the northern border of Gaza. The borders are closed, right now – to civilian traffic and to most humanitarian aid. 

Philip and Simeon’s encounter happened during a time of open roads, under the paradoxical peace of the Roman Empire – the Pax Romana, in which many nations and kingdoms were, for a while, under one global power that made them get along. I don’t think a new worldwide empire is a good solution today. I just want to notice that Simeon and Philip could meet – and so much of the missionary work of the early church was possible – because of those open borders. Because people were able to move and share and connect. God’s holy possibilities have the best chance of unfolding into human realities when we aren’t barred and bound from encountering one another. 

I have spent a lot of time with the story of Philip and Simeon in the past few months because of my role helping grade the General Ordination Exams, the written exam taken by everyone seeking ordination to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church. The question I graded this year asked candidates for Biblical texts to support the Episcopal Church’s position on the full human dignity of transgender people. This story is one of the texts many candidates chose – probably because they have read queer theology or Bible commentaries that use this story to help make a Scriptural case for the full inclusion of LGBTQ+ people. 

The fact that Simeon was, undeniably, a stigmatized sexual minority, has become a stepping stone to theological work building bridges from Simeon to gay, trans, and other queer identities in the church. 

There are really important ways Simeon’s identity as a eunuch is different from transgender identity. Becoming a eunuch in the ancient world was not the emergence from the inside out of a deep and true sense of self, as a gender transition can be. Rather, it was something forced upon you, a violent act by people with power over your body and your future. 

Furthermore, the whole point of eunuchs was this idea that they would be fully loyal to their role because they couldn’t have children. Trans people can very much have children and families – and I think we’ve gotten a little wiser about not assuming that having children is the only path to a meaningful life! 

Simeon was not transgender. Or at least: We have no reason to think that Simeon was transgender. But he was someone who didn’t fit people’s categories, with respect to sexuality and gender, in a way that was stigmatized, that pushed him to the margins. 

A young friend recently shared a video clip of a trans woman explaining that God made her trans as a test. She goes on to clarify: Not a test for ME. A test for other people. To see if they’re able to love me the way God loves me. 

This story about Philip and Simeon – it’s not a conversion story, in which someone without faith comes to faith. Simeon is already a believer in Israel’s God; that’s why he made pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He has taken the first big step into belief already, and now he wants to understand more deeply; that’s why he’s studying Scripture. 

Philip seizes the opportunity presented by the particular Isaiah passage he’s reading – one of the so-called Suffering Servant songs, which Christians have been interpreting as pointing towards Jesus since, apparently, this exact moment. Philip tells Simeon about Jesus, this man who preached justice and love, and welcomed those at the margins; and who was executed, but rose from the dead, and told his followers to baptize people into this new family of faith, the church. And Simeon hears something that touches his heart – and when they see some kind of seasonal pond along the road, he asks, “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” 

I love that phrasing. It’s like he’s challenging Philip to withhold baptism, to prove that this Gospel is not as welcoming as he claims. At the temple in Jerusalem, Simeon would have been doubly excluded – as a eunuch and as a non-Jew, despite his belief – from anything beyond the outermost Court of the Gentiles. He wants to know: Does Jesus, and Jesus’ church, welcome me fully as I am? Here’s some water. Prove it. 

Philip doesn’t convert Simeon. Simeon already believes; God is at work in his heart and his life. This encounter isn’t a test for Simeon. It’s a test for Philip, and for the church.  

Philip is whisked away to preach elsewhere, and Simeon goes on his way, rejoicing. I wish, a little bit, that the story ended differently: that Simeon brought his voice, his background and faith, his beautiful and challenging self, to the Jerusalem church, and helped shape its growth. But instead, he takes the Gospel home, to Ethiopia. Christianity takes root and spreads there, and boy, does it bear fruit. 

Christianity becomes the state religion in Ethiopia in the year 330, a full fifty years before the same thing happened in Rome. The Garima Gospels, dating from around the year 500, are the world’s oldest surviving illuminated Christian manuscripts. Ethiopian Christianity is not well known in the wider world but it is deep and old and rich and lovely. Our smaller processional cross is Ethiopian, decorated with the distinctive style of Ethiopian Christian art. Our practice of honoring the Gospel book by carrying a canopy above it in procession is borrowed indirectly from the Ethiopian Orthodox churches. 

And look up some photos of Ethiopian church forests online sometime! Listen to this short description: “The church forests in Ethiopia are small fragments of forest surrounding Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Churches. Northern Ethiopia was once covered in forests, but due to deforestation for agriculture, only about 4% of the original forested lands remain. Church leaders have long held the belief that a church needs to be surrounded by a forest, and these sacred forests have been tended for some 1,500 years…. There are around 35,000… church forests in the region.” (Wikipedia)

All of this, I find, leads me to questions rather than conclusions. I have focused here on trans folks because of all those GOE essays – and because I do believe that the Episcopal Church in general and St. Dunstan’s in particular are called to deeper affirmation of the holy belovedness of trans and non-binary people. 

But I think there are lots of kinds of people who could sit in Simeon’s seat in this story. Some of them wait in frustration for the church to see them as prophets instead of problems. Some of them aren’t connected with church at all, and are building new worlds driven by their own inner sense of holy possibility, while the church misses out on coming to know them, because we’re too fearful or shy or invested in the way things have always been.

What people of deep and eager faith are just waiting to be seen, named, and welcomed, today? 

What new churches is God longing to build, in our time? 

Before we continue into the Passion Gospel, I want to offer a brief reflection on the Palm Gospel. Why are people waving palms at Jesus? Why are we waving palms at Jesus? 

I don’t know when it became a custom to cut palm branches and wave them as part of a celebratory procession. But it’s described quite clearly in the first book of Maccabees, written maybe 150 years before the time of Jesus: “[The people entered Jerusalem] with praise and palm branches, and with harps and cymbals and stringed instruments… because a great enemy had been crushed.” (1 Macc 13:51). And then in Second Maccabees, the people use palms to honor their hero: “Carrying ivy-wreathed wands and beautiful branches and also fronds of palm, they offered hymns of thanksgiving to [the one who had purified their holy place].” (2 Macc 10:7). 

That all sounds a lot like what happens in the Palm Gospel, right? So: it’s a thing people did, to celebrate a triumph or honor an important leader. And we know from the writings of a Christian pilgrim named Egeria that by the 380s or so, Christians in Jerusalem were observing Palm Sunday with a procession waving palms. So, fairly early on, the church started to not just tell these holy stories at this special time of year, but to act them out, to some extent. 

Why palms? The simple answer is: Palms were around. There are various kinds of palm trees that grow all over the world. (Did you know that palms, as a family, are very old, and that palms are more closely related to grass than to other trees?) 

But you don’t see a lot of palms in Wisconsin, right? Generally speaking, palms like warmer places. 

So what happened when Christianity moved out of warmer parts of the world, to places where palms didn’t grow… and before you could order palms shipped to your church in Wisconsin? 

A friend shared some research on Facebook a few weeks back that got me thinking. I learned that in Ireland, where palms were not readily available, branches from local trees like yew, fir, spruce, and cypress were used. Those are all conifers – probably because in Ireland as in Wisconsin, Easter often arrives before our deciduous trees have leafed out! 

Palm Sunday became known as “Yew Sunday”… and one historian recalled that in his childhood in Ireland in the 1830s, yew was always called “palm.” That seems to have been true in parts of England as well. 

In other parts of Europe, Christians used willow wands instead of palm branches, when decorating for Palm Sunday. One source from 1530 describes “Palm” as “the yellow that groweth on wyllowes.” 

Has anybody ever seen a pussy willow, the kind of willow with the cute little gray fuzzy buds on it?… In some parts of Germany that was called “palmkätzchen,” meaning “palm kitten”! 

And in Finland, on Palm Sunday, children dress up as Easter Witches and go around to houses in their neighborhood trading decorated willow branches for candy! How does that sound?… 

This is all very charming but I think there’s something deeper here. The only really honest Palm Sunday I’ve ever had is the year Phil and I were in Uganda, and people WERE just cutting palm branches from the palm trees surrounding the church – as the crowd outside Jerusalem would have done, in Jesus’ time. 

I wonder if we went wrong somehow when we all started importing palms from Florida or South America for our Palm Sunday observances – spending money and resources to bring in something that doesn’t belong here. As if what kind of branches we were waving was important to how well we tell this story. 

Some churches have shifted away from palms to use whatever is local, and it’s not a new thought for me either. But I’m thinking about it a little more deeply this year, for both ecological and theological reasons. 

Ecologically speaking: It would make a very small difference if St. Dunstan’s stopped ordering palms that have to be shipped and refrigerated, using fossil fuels, to get them into our hands. But it would make a difference. 

Theologically speaking… It seems to me that when we go out of our way to use palms in our enactment of this story, we are treating them as a prop, like in the world of theater. When you’re preparing to perform a play, if the play calls for a sword, or a lion, or a palm, you come up with a sword, or a lion, or a palm. (Though if this were REALLY theater, we’d probably make some nice sturdy cardboard palms we could use again and again!) 

But what we do on Palm and Passion Sunday isn’t theater. Even though we have people reading lines, telling a story together with their voices – even acting out parts of it. 

It is close to theater. But it’s something else – in ways I’m struggling to put into words. Partly it’s that we are all participants, not audience, even though only some people read the voices. Partly it’s because this isn’t a story that some of us offer to others; it’s a story that belongs to all of us, that encompasses all of us. Partly it’s that, while many kinds of stories carry deep truth, this story makes a particular claim to truth, for us – on us. 

So. I wonder. I wonder if we would be entering the story more fully by using sprays of the yew and cypress and spruce that grow gladly on our church grounds. Maybe we could develop a custom of a spring pruning, the week before Palm Sunday.

Listen: If you’re thinking, but I *like* the palms, please know: I don’t want to shame anybody for feeling some resistance to this idea. I decided to order the palms, this year – and every previous year!  

And I understand the appeal of tradition, our attachment to what is familiar, what reminds us of childhood. I actually quite miss the long palms we used to order before we, along with many other churches, shifted to fair trade eco-palms a few years ago. I have happy memories of folding and plaiting those palms during long Passion Gospel readings. 

If this were a light decision, we would have made it already. 

But maybe we can think about it, today and over the coming months, and decide together before the turning of the year brings Palm Sunday around again, whether we’d like to root our annual encounter with this story in our ecology and climate, our place, our lives. To incarnate the story a notch more authentically. 

Because this isn’t just a matter of placing an order, or not. When I was talking about this a couple of weeks ago with Father John, he pointed out that when churches use the plants that grow nearby, then those plants carry that meaning for them all the time. Maybe we won’t start calling our arbor vitae trees “palms,” but maybe they will remind us of Palm Sunday, the things we do and say and reflect on, today and every year. And Father John reminded me that we have a word for that – for when something ordinary that we can see and touch every day, like the water of baptism or the bread and wine of Eucharist, becomes a container for the holy. We call it a sacrament.

I’d like to call this holy gathering onward into the gospel of the Passion. 

Shout out to my cousin Trelawney for sharing this wonderful research! Here are some of her sources… 

https://www.irishcultureandcustoms.com/…/PalmSunday.html

https://thefadingyear.wordpress.com/…/irish-folklore…/

https://pinguicula.typepad.com/blog/2007/03/palm.html

TUESDAY, APRIL 2 IS OUR SPRING ELECTION! Participation in our civic life is an important Christian responsibility. Please plan to vote for local and state officials, in addition to the presidential primary. There are also two important ballot questions on our ballots. For both, the Wisconsin Council of Churches election guide says, “A ‘Yes’ vote is favored by conservative and “election integrity” (meaning the most restrictive reading of voting laws) groups; “No” is favored by voter participation and access advocates.”  See the WCC’s full election guide, below.

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