Today is Trinity Sunday – a day to celebrate the Church’s teaching that we know and serve one God in three Persons. When theologians talk about the Trinity, the word “Persons” has some specific technical meaning – but it also means more or less what we mean by “person” in everyday life. The Father, Son, and Spirit – Source, Word, and Breath – are not just different aspects or costumes God wears sometimes, but different People, within the unity of one God. It is paradoxical, and mysterious, and there have been so many arguments over it, and so many books written, over the course of church history. I’m more or less with Ann Lamott: “I don’t need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity. I just need to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees.”  Which is to say, I’m OK with not having the Trinity all figured out. But  that’s not to say that it’s not important to me. It is. 

This has been a troubling – a frightening – week in the news. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE, is under pressure from the White House to detain and deport as many undocumented immigrants as possible. Finding it difficult to meet their quotas with criminals and drug dealers, ICE is seeking out ordinary community members – folks who work in construction and agriculture and food service, and other jobs that we all depend on. ICE is staking out places where people come to do immigration check-ins, in compliance with federal policy, and then seizing people. They are reportedly seizing undocumented children from their foster homes. They’re raiding graduation ceremonies, hoping to seize family members gathered to celebrate their kids’ accomplishments. After ICE raids in Los Angeles, community members turned out to protest, and in response, the National Guard and Marines have been called in, raising the threat that military force could be used against American civilians, on the pretext that these protests against the kidnapping of neighbors amount to a “rebellion.” 

What does a Trinitarian faith do for us in times like these? 

When I look at what’s happening in Los Angeles – when I wonder what might happen in Dane County, and what I, and we, will do – it helps me to know that we are grounded in faith in a God who is making the universe and holds all in love. It helps me to know that we have Jesus Christ’s teaching and example to show us what it looks like to stand in love with, and for, our neighbors. It helps me to know that we are given the gift of the Holy Spirit within and among us. I’m trying to trust her to do the things that Scripture promises she will do, and that I have known her to do: Guide me, help me know which way to turn and what path to follow. Help me know when to listen closely – and when to speak up. Give me the courage to know and to do what is mine to do. 

Later this morning we’ll sing one of my very favorite hymns – I Bind Unto Myself Today, sometimes called St. Patrick’s Breastplate. I wrote about this hymn a few months ago for Earth & Altar, an online journal of all things Anglican; the editor-in-chief is another priest of this diocese, Chris Corbin. Check it out! 

We sing this hymn every year on Trinity Sunday because it’s a Trinitarian hymn. But there’s more to say about it. I’m going to share – and expand on – what I wrote for Earth & Altar, here. 

My first and deepest memories of this hymn are not in the jeweled light of stained glass windows at church, but in the comfortable darkness of my bed. My mother used to sing it to me at bedtime to help me fall sleep. I asked for it often, because it was long. I don’t know why she often agreed to my request, a transparent bargain to extend her presence in my room. Maybe she went along with it for the same reasons I’d later sing it to my children regularly: because a long, familiar song allows a certain amount of autopilot while your mind wanders; because singing a lengthy and detailed prayer of protection feels like a good way to commend a child to the night; because she liked it, as I do.

I did sing St. Patrick’s Breastplate at church too. We showed up just about every Sunday at St. George’s in Riverside, California until I was seven, when we moved and became regulars at St. John’s in Lafayette, Indiana. But yet again, my relationship with this hymn would deepen not in church but with my nose in a book. As a kid I read two different “chapter books” in which this ancient prayer formed a significant plot point. The first was The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull, one of John Bellairs’ spooky young adult novels. While my memory of it is hazy, I recall that before some boss battle with the forces of evil, the main character’s priest friend tells him to use the words to this hymn for protection. That’s the first time I remember realizing that the familiar hymn was something more than just a hymn. 

The second book was Madeleine L’Engle’s A Swiftly Tilting Planet, my favorite of her books. L’Engle uses what seems to be her own version of the first verse of Patrick’s prayer as part her story of a cosmic battle between good and evil through time. This version of the prayer lives in my heart alongside the hymn: 

At Tara in this fateful hour I call on heaven with all its power, and the sun with its brightness, and the snow with its whiteness, and the fire with all the strength it hath, and the lighting with its rapid wrath, and the winds with their swiftness along their path, and the sea with its deepness, and the rocks with their steepness, and the earth with its starkness; all these I place, by God’s almighty help and grace, between myself and the powers of darkness. 

For a child deep in the thrall of various fictional worlds more obviously enchanted than our own, it was an appealing idea: that this hymn, previously notable for its length, was actually something special and powerful, something bordering on the magical – although Bellairs and L’Engle, both Christians, were careful not to suggest that divine power could be commanded, only invoked or invited. 

The way this ancient hymn-prayer was used in these books is arguably more true to its origins than singing it at St. John’s, Lafayette, on an ordinary Sunday morning. The earliest written fragments of the Irish text behind the hymn date from the 9th century – the same time frame as the Book of Kells. In an 11th-century text, a more complete version of the prayer is accompanied by an account of its origin. That text explains that Saint Patrick, the great evangelist of Ireland, who lived in the fifth century, composed and sang this song-poem as a prayer for protection, when a local king was trying to attack him and his monks to stop them from spreading Christianity in Ireland. In my household we often refer to this hymn-prayer as the Lorica – a Latin word for a breastplate or body armor. In the early Irish Church, by analogy, that word also came to mean a prayer for protection. Hence the common name for this hymn, St. Patrick’s Breastplate. 

In the 19th century, the fiercely talented Anglo-Irish hymn-writer Cecil Frances Alexander translated the Irish text and turned it into a hymn. (She also wrote “All things bright and beautiful” and “Once in royal David’s city,” among others.) Her version appears as number 370 in our hymnal, minus a couple of verses that were too weird to make the cut. If you need a prayer against lust or evil wizards, you’ll have to find the original text online. 

The origin story of the text connects it with Tara, a site in the east of Ireland, north of Dublin. On our recent trip we had a chance to stop at Tara, briefly, and stand on that windy green hill, and look out over half of Ireland, and feel deep, deep history thrumming beneath our feet. The Hill of Tara is an ancient burial and ceremonial site, which has been seen as a place of power for 5000 years or more. Kings were crowned there for millennia, and it was an important pre-Christian holy site. Those associations – with the kingship and pre-Christian religion – explain why this was a significant site of confrontation for Patrick and his mission. 

We might have slightly mixed feelings about the hymn’s origin story, as part of the conquest of Irish indigenous religion by Christianity. But let’s notice how Celtic hymn is – how much it reflects the indigenous spirituality of the western British Isles: the sense of the natural world as immediately reflective of God’s grace and power. The detailed lists and layers that weave a dense fabric of prayer – in this hymn, the verses touch on not only the natural world but also moments in the life of Christ, the angels and saints, and aspects of God’s divine being and power. There’s the sense of space and sacred direction in the B-section, the verse that breaks format to invoke Christ on all sides of the singer or pray-er: Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ behind and before and beside me. 

The Lorica is specifically a prayer for protection. I bind unto myself today means, Let whoever tries to fight me find that they’re not just fighting me, but all God’s angel army, the powers of Creation, the good deeds of all righteous people, and so on – tapped into like batteries to power my personal holy deflector shield. I don’t remember the details of how this prayer worked in those books I read as a child, but it was an effective deterrent to the forces of evil. I envision the protagonists surrounded by some kind of glowing orb of holy shelter, while the powers that seek to corrupt and destroy the creatures of God reel back, dismayed. I don’t know that that’s how it works in the real world, but I also don’t know that that’s not how it works in the real world. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.

I do know that praying the protection of the Trinity, with these fierce ancient words, reminds me that I am named and known and held by a Love stronger than anything that can come at me or those I love. Belonging to God doesn’t mean we’ll be always be safe – Christ Crucified should disabuse us of that notion. But Christ Risen points us towards trust in a loving Power stronger than the powers of death and destruction. 

When I became a parent, just about twenty years ago, it was my turn to sit in the dark and sing a child to sleep. Sometimes I would sing Hymn 370 – favored, as always, for its length, somber gentleness, and sense of wrapping God’s protection around a beloved child. Our two children tolerated us singing to them at bedtime for an astonishingly long time. We spent over a decade singing to a child, or two, for part of every evening. How many times did we sing the Lorica? Two thousand? Three?

I don’t sing the Lorica very often anymore – sometimes only when it comes around at church a couple of times a year. I miss singing my children to sleep, not least because it was a chance to sit in the dark and tell them how much I love them for half an hour every night, wrapping them in prayer like a warm blanket. 

There’s a lot to be fearful about, beloveds. In the face of many-layered threats to our health and dignity and work, our communities and neighbors and sacred landscapes, it helps me to know that we are grounded in faith in a God who is making the universe and holds all in love. It helps me to know that we have Jesus Christ to show us what it looks like to stand with, and for, our neighbors. It helps me to know that we are given the gift of the Holy Spirit to inspire, guide, and encourage us.

Writing about this hymn, last winter, got me thinking that I need to work it into my prayer life more regularly – to call on sun and moon, earth and sea, the vigilance of angels, the witness of the faithful departed, the great Name of the Trinity itself, to tend and guard all those whom I love and commend to God in prayer. 

Writing about this hymn, this week, made me want to offer it to all of you as well. This hymn is more than a hymn. It’s a cry from the heart in the face of danger. It’s a naming of what is good and strong and holy, a reminder that all is not lost. It calls on God to show us what is always already true: that we are held in love, and never forsaken. 

Maybe that helps us sleep through the night, or get up in the morning. Maybe that helps us speak our truth or stand with our neighbors. Maybe that helps us persist, endure, even thrive, in strange and difficult times – with the power of lightning and wind, rock and sea, angels and saints, tomb and resurrection, the Three in One and One in Three, standing between ourselves and the powers of darkness. 

May it be so. Amen. 

Today is Pentecost –  the feast of the gift of the Holy Spirit to the first Christians, to give them the courage and joy and sense of purpose they needed to go forth and preach the Gospel. 

The Holy Spirit was not a new idea or way to encounter the Holy. There are lots of references to the Spirit of God at work in the Old Testament – literally beginning with the first verses of the Book of Genesis, when the spirit of God hovers over the waters of chaos before creation. In pre-Christian texts, God’s Spirit is described in various ways, as an emanation or aspect or servant of God. Seeing the Holy Spirit as one Person of a Trinitarian God – Father, Son, and Spirit – was a Christian innovation. Next Sunday is Trinity Sunday, so maybe more on that later! 

You’ll notice – if you haven’t before – that I use she/her pronouns for the Holy Spirit, as a counterbalance to the masculine God-language of our received traditions, and of Jesus’ habit of naming God the Source as Father. There are some good Scriptural foundations for treating the Holy Spirit as feminine, too. Ask me if you’re curious! 

It’s hard to pin down or sum up the role and work of the Holy Spirit. She’s kind of all over the place. She inspires and protects and guides and mends and transforms. She coaxes and comforts and convicts. Unlike God the Creator and Jesus, we have very little that’s spoken in her voice in Scripture; we know her more as a force than a Person. But she is a Person, with her own priorities and powers, just like God the Source and Christ the Word Incarnate. 

Still: Her mysterious and paradoxical nature mean that over the millennia, our faith-ancestors have tended to name and describe Her through metaphors and images. We have two of them in the Pentecost reading today – did you hear them?… (Fire and wind.) 

Let’s talk first about fire. After a week like this of hazy skies and poor air quality due to wildfires in Canada, we may feel very aware of the destructive potential of fire. But learning to control fire was crucial for humanity – and those writing down our Scriptures would have been mindful of that, as people who had to make and tend fires on a daily basis – not like us who just flip switches and turn knobs when we need heat or light! Fire meant warmth and survival in the cold; fire meant light and the possibility of spending time on craft, art, and study even when nights were long. And fire meant cooking – so easy for us to take for granted: that ability to take ingredients that were unpleasant and in many cases inedible or dangerous in their raw state, and turn them into food that is digestible and even delicious. Truly a transformative gift! I suspect all those aspects of the power and usefulness of fire are simmering, if you will, in the metaphor when the church describes experiencing the Holy Spirit like fire.

The flames of the Holy Spirit driving the apostles to preach also makes me think of the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, who says that if he tries to hold in the prophetic words God has given him, it feels like fire inside his bones. I see that burning urgency to proclaim God’s message here, too. I wonder if you’ve ever felt like that – like there’s something you just HAVE to say. Maybe sometimes it’s something you wish you hadn’t said, later; maybe sometimes it’s something really important to say – something brave and important and true. 

The Pentecost story also describes the Holy Spirit as like a mighty wind that rushes in among the apostles. Wind is a great metaphor for the Holy Spirit because you can see what it does, but you can’t see the thing itself. Like blowing on a pinwheel – you can’t see what makes the pinwheel go, but it goes! 

On our trip to Ireland we visited the Burren, a unique landscape of exposed limestone highlands in the far west of the country. 

We learned there that when people build stone walls on the Burren – to confine sheep or mark boundaries – they build the walls loosely, with space between the stones, so the wind can blow through them. Otherwise strong winds off the ocean, unsoftened by trees, are more likely to blow the walls down. It sounds a little too metaphorical to be true – but earlier this spring Iona and I took an architecture tour in Chicago and marveled at Jeanne Gang’s amazing blue skyscraper, the St Regis, which was built with blow-through floors to reduce how much the building sways in the wind. I think I need to spend some time with the idea of the strength that lies in not being all solid and locked together, but having some space for the wind to blow through… 

In the third chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus tells the seeker Nicodemus, “God’s Spirit blows wherever it wishes. You hear its sound, but you don’t know where it comes from or where it is going. It’s the same with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” I think that’s both interesting and puzzling! Jesus describes those who follow him or seek to know God through his life and teachings as being “born of the Spirit.” (As Paul says in our Epistle today: “All who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.”) But Jesus also seems to say here that even if you’re born of the Spirit, you still should not expect to know what the Spirit is up to. You may hear the sound of that Spirit-wind blowing, but you don’t know where it comes from or where it’s going. I find that kind of comforting, actually! Glad to know it’s not just me. 

I want to share one more image or idea about the Holy Spirit – one that I haven’t talked about before. It comes from the writings of Hildegard von Bingen – who lived in Germany in the 12th century.  I remember the late 1990s when Hildegard had an odd moment in popular culture and music. I found a Rolling Stone album review that described a Tori Amos album by saying it sounded a little like Hildegard von Bingen? 

But I’ve never studied Hildegard – which felt both astonishing and a little embarrassing when I read her bio: “Hildegard of Bingen was a German Benedictine abbess and polymath [a fun word that means somebody who knows a lot about a lot of different things] active as a writer, composer, philosopher, mystic, visionary, and as a medical writer and practitioner during the High Middle Ages. [She was also an advisor to both popes and emperors.] She is one of the best-known composers of sacred monophony [that means music that follows one melody line]… She has been considered by a number of scholars to be the founder of scientific natural history in Germany… [She founded two independent religious communities for women…] Hildegard wrote theological, botanical, and medicinal works, as well as letters, hymns, [poems], and antiphons for the liturgy… She is [also] noted for the invention of a constructed language known as Lingua Ignota.” [Adapted from Wikipedia]

Doesn’t she sound like someone worth knowing about? I may have ordered a few books… 

One really central idea for Hildegard is the idea of viriditas, a word that comes from the Latin word for green. Viriditas is a greening life-force that pervades the world and gives life to living things. But it’s spiritual as well as biological – the wellspring of human vitality, inspiration, creativity and wellbeing, individually and collectively. Humans are like trees, says Hildegard, and viriditas is the sap that flows within us, that makes us green and living instead of dry and brittle and dead. And that greening, life-giving sap comes from God. 

Theologian Matthew Fox writes, “Hildegard teaches that the only sin in life is drying up. She wrote [to] bishops and abbots, telling them they were drying up, and should do whatever it takes to stay ‘wet and green and moist and juicy’.”

It’s not clear to me – as someone very new to her work – whether Hildegard herself connects viriditas directly with the Holy Spirit, though many of her readers make that connection. Possibly, although she was bold enough to develop her own theology, she felt more constrained about re-imagining the Church’s core teachings. 

But viriditas as she describes it sure has a lot in common with ways Scripture and the Church have described the Holy Spirit. There are many places in the Bible where God’s Spirit is described as the life force of Creation – like Psalm 104: “When you send out your Spirit, [all living things] are created, and you renew the face of the earth.” Hildegard writes, “This vigor that hugs the world, it is warm, it is moistening, it is firm, it is greening… this is so that all creatures might germinate and grow.”

Hildegard wrote poetry and hymns giving voice to the force of Viriditas: 

I shine in the water, 

I burn in the sun, and the moon, and the stars.

Mine is that mysterious force of the invisible wind.

I am the breath of all the living.

I am the one whose praise echoes on high.
I adorn all the earth.
I am the breeze that nurtures all things green.
I encourage blossoms to flourish with ripening fruits.
I am the rain that causes the grasses to laugh with the joy of life.
I call forth tears. 

I am the yearning for good.

Lovely. But Hildegard also understood that the deep, holy connection between humanity and the non-human living world doesn’t always work out well. She believed that care for our own souls, and care for the world, were deeply connected. 

And when humans grow disconnected from the greening life-force in our own souls, bad things happen. Eight hundred years ago, Hildegard wrote:

“[When] the greening power of the virtues faded away… all justice entered upon a period of decline. As a result, the greening power of life on Earth was reduced in every seed because the upper region of the air was altered in a way contrary to its first destiny. Summer now became subject to a contradictory chill while winter often experienced a paradoxical warmth. There occurred on Earth times of drought and dampness… As a result, many people asserted that the Last Day was near at hand.”

In the book of meditations on the Stations of the Cross that we use in Lent, there’s a poem from Hildegard on the same theme:  “Now in the people that were meant to green, there is no more life of any kind. There is only a shriveled barrenness. The winds are burdened by the utterly awful stink of evil, selfish goings-on. Thunderstorms menace. The air belches out the filthy uncleanliness of the peoples. There pours forth an unnatural, a loathsome darkness, that withers the green, and wizens the fruit that was to serve as food for the people.”

Many honor Hildegard’s wisdom today because she saw so keenly that deep connection between human and ecological wellbeing. For us, at Pentecost, her work offers a renewed way to think about the Holy Spirit’s action in the world and in us – as that greening sap that, when we welcome and nurture it, refreshes, connects, inspires and empowers us – not least towards care for creation. Hildegard wrote, “We shall awaken from our dullness and rise vigorously toward justice. If we fall in love with creation deeper and deeper, we will respond to its endangerment with passion.”

Pentecost completes Easter Season. Now we begin the longest season of the church year – variously called the Season After Pentecost, Ordinary Time, or in the language of our Godly Play curriculum, the Great Green Growing Season. May Hildegard’s viriditas, her recognition of the holy in all that springs towards life and growth and fruitfulness, offer us another way to notice and take delight in the Holy Spirit at work this season: sprouting of seed, bud becoming flower becoming fruit, song of bird and frog and bug and wind in trees. 

And may Hildegard’s insight also encourage us to attend to the connection between our souls, our human communities, and our non-human neighbors and surroundings – and to do whatever it takes to stay ‘green and moist and juicy’. Amen! 

SOME SOURCES: 

https://www.themarginalian.org/2025/01/07/hildegard-viriditas/

https://dailymeditationswithmatthewfox.org/2024/01/11/hildegard-on-greening-power-spirit-nature-humanitys-creativity/

https://www.globalsistersreport.org/news/spirituality/column/why-st-hildegards-spirituality-viriditas-extraordinary

https://fccucc.org/sermons/hildegard-of-bingen-our-greening-god/

https://www.cloisterseminars.org/blog/2015/4/18/viriditas-welcoming-spring

We just heard what’s called the Ascension Gospel, from Luke. 

At Easter Jesus returns from the dead, but things don’t just go back to the way they were before. He’s alive again, but he’s not with his friends in the same way – walking and eating and talking and laughing together, the way they used to.

He’s there sometimes – but he’s different, even when he’s there.

And then there’s a moment when he says, I have to leave now. You’re not going to see me anymore – at least, not the same way. It’s time for you to take this on, take this out – what you’ve seen and heard and experienced with me. It’s time for you to stop being a community gathered around me, and start being a community scattered out into the world. No longer disciples, which means a community of students, learners, but apostles, which means, people sent out to do something. 

The Gospels describe this moment in different ways, but there’s a common thread of receiving marching orders. In John’s Gospel, we heard the story of Jesus’ last appearance to his friends a few weeks ago, when he made breakfast for them on the beach and told Peter to tend his sheep. In Matthew, Jesus tells the disciples, Go and make disciples of all nations, teaching them and baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. In Luke – well, actually, in the first chapter of Luke’s sequel, the Book of Acts, when he tells the same story again with a little more detail – Jesus tells the disciples to stay in Jerusalem and wait for the Holy Spirit, and then, once they have received the Spirit to empower them, to be Jesus’ witnesses and spread the Gospel in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the ends of the earth. 

But even as Jesus is telling his friends what they’re supposed to do once he’s gone, he’s also telling them that they are not left alone, not abandoned. 

In Luke there’s the promise of the Holy Spirit to dwell with them and guide them. In John’s Gospel, on the last evening before his death, Jesus talks a lot about how he and those who follow him will always be bound together in holy love. Abide in me, and I will abide in you. And Matthew’s Gospel ends with Jesus’ words, “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” 

Abide in me, and I will abide in you. 

Lo, I am with you always. 

It’s easy to think of God as far away. Something we have to go looking for, probably at a great distance and with considerable effort. 

It’s harder – at least, I find it harder – to recognize, to remember, that God is as close as my next breath. 

Even though that’s what Scripture assures us. 

Even though I have found it true, many times over.

The fifth century North African theologian Saint Augustine wrote, “O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, you were within me, but I was outside myself, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you.” 

Elsewhere he writes that God is “closer to me than I am to myself.” 

Sometimes, I know this. 

I am working on knowing this more deeply and more consistently. 

My fledgling and faltering contemplative practice helps. 

But it’s not easy. 

It’s not as if I can just go into a quiet room, put down my phone, close my eyes, and experience the presence of God, guaranteed every time. 

There’s at least as much jumble and chaos and noise inside of me as there is outside. 

But I’m very slowly learning to trust, just a little bit more, that God’s in there too. Waiting in my heart, in my depths, to meet me. 

Jalaluddin Rumi was a 13th-century Muslim poet and mystic – meaning, someone who seeks oneness with God. 

In Islam Jesus is seen as an honored prophet, thought not as God. And our Gospels are taken seriously as holy texts, though the Quran is primary. 

I think it’s important for Christians to be cautious and respectful in using other traditions’ holy texts and symbols as part of our own religious reflection. 

But in the poem I’d like to read you, Rumi quotes the Gospel of Matthew, so I feel like this is fair game. 

He begins with a playful idea: one night, the full moon appears inside his house. 

But he and his friends run outside, looking at the sky. Where’s the moon? The whole neighborhood wakes up; everyone’s out in the street, looking for the moon, or just confused. Is the cat-burglar back? What’s going on? … 

All that commotion, looking for the moon, when the moon is right there inside Rumi’s house. 

Then he writes, 

“Lo, I am with you always, means that when you look for God, God is in the look of your eyes, 

In the thought of looking, nearer to you than your self, 

Or things that have happened to you.

There’s no need to go outside. 

Be melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself.”

Pause. 

I love this story from Acts. We’ve done it as a drama before – with the girl shouting over and over again, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation,” until Paul sends the spirit out of her in sheer exasperation. 

I think we’re meant to understand that the “spirit of divination” that makes this unnamed girl holler at Paul and Silas made good money for her owner, because it could predict the future, perhaps helping people make good investments or bets. That’s why Paul and Silas end up in jail for performing this exorcism, sending the spirit away. 

Luke would probably say that the point of this story is the power of God, working through and for the apostles. But I also see something here about human worth. This girl is only valued because of something she can do – or something that a spirit can do, though her. I hope that this story is an unbinding, a liberation, for her, a chance to be more fully herself. She matters because she’s a beloved child of God, not because she makes money for those who claim to own her. 

And then there’s the jailer – who is ready to take his own life because he expects to be executed, for having failed at his duty, having lost the prisoners placed in his charge. But he, too, matters because he’s a beloved child of God, not because of how he does or doesn’t perform the work of his role. 

Today I have the privilege of baptizing a child into God’s church. I will never, ever take that for granted. Today we all have the privilege of praying for and welcoming that child.

Our baptismal rite testifies to our belovedness, and to God’s nearness. 

Each of us: named before God, in God’s name.

Each of us: marked as Christ’s own, forever. Lo, I am with you always. 

Each of us: endowed by the Holy Spirit with curiosity, insight, courage, and the capacities for love, wonder, and joy. 

Beloved and worthy – as our human selves, mortal, messy, and magnificent; and also, always, as temples of the presence of the Holy, that Beauty, ever ancient and ever new, as near as your next breath. 

Let’s continue with the rite of Holy Baptism… 

This doesn’t have anything to do with Dunstan except that it’s about Christianity in the British Isles a couple of hundred years before his time! But, some people have kindly asked to hear a little about our trip, so I’m going to tell you a very little right now – about the Book of Kells. Raise your hand if you’ve heard of it? … The Book of Kells is an illuminated manuscript, which is a fancy way of saying that it’s a handwritten book with pictures, made in the time when all books were handwritten. It contains the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It was probably started in the 700s, maybe the 600s, on the island of Iona off the coast of Scotland, where there was an abbey, a monastic center, founded by the great Celtic evangelist Saint Colmcille (or Columba) in the 500s. It was probably finished at Kells, in Ireland, in the 800s. 

The book of Kells is a wonder of the world, and has been for 12 or 13 hundred years. There’s no nothing I could really say, or share in a picture or two, that would convey its beauty and power. You just have to promise me that you’ll look it up online later. The book reflects the work of somewhere between five and eight artists and calligraphers who wrote and drew its pages, so artfully and beautifully, giving glory to God by not only recording the text of the Gospels but illustrating it so that it still takes people’s breath away a millennium later. It also reflects the work of those who prepared parchment and cut quills and gathered materials to make pigments. It’s an extraordinary work of devotion and skill. 

We got to see it, in Dublin. Phil and I were both struck by how good it looks. The images are crisp, the colors are vibrant. You would not guess that it’s 1200 years old. It’s also smaller than I imagined – about this big, which makes the skill of artists and calligraphers all the more staggering. 

The fact that the Book still exists today is also the work of countless unknown people down to the centuries, who have tended and protected it. It is a miracle several times over that it still exists. 

Beginning in the late 700s, Vikings began to raid the coasts of the British Isles. They would attack settlements, killing people, burning homes, and stealing anything of value. In some areas they also established settlements of their own, eventually taking over much of southern and eastern Great Britain. 

The Vikings attacked Iona Abbey repeatedly in the 790s and early 800s, stealing and destroying holy treasures. In 806, 68 monks were massacred. After that attack, a group of monks fled across the North Channel to Ireland, to settle at Kells, in hopes of escaping further violence. They brought some of their surviving treasures with them – including, probably, the book that would become known as the Book of Kells. Most scholars think the book was finished at Kells during the 800s. Kells itself was raided by Vikings several times during the 900s. The book was actually stolen in 1007 – a medieval account of the theft describes the Book as “the most precious object in the western world.” But the book was found after two months, half-buried in the ground, its jeweled gold cover torn off but otherwise intact. In the mid-1600s, the radical Puritan English leader Oliver Cromwell, who hated any expressions of religious faith through images or beauty, had troops stationed in the church at Kells. The book could easily have fallen victim to the destructive contempt of Cromwell’s soldiers. But the Earl of Kells sent the book to the great library at Trinity College in Dublin for safekeeping – where it remains today. 

We got to visit Kells, at the end of our trip. The Abbey is long gone, but there are traces, like several beautiful 10th or 11th century stone crosses which would’ve helped mark the sacred site. There’s a round tower high on a hill in the center of the city, next to the 18th century church built where the abbey once stood. The tower has five windows, which look out on all the major roads coming into the city.

There’s also a strange little building nearby, known as Colmcille’s House, likely built in the 900s. It may have been a place of remembrance and honor for this great Celtic Christian saint. The building looks ill at ease among modern houses; it ought to be surrounded by wattle and daub huts and the smoke of cook fires and the bleating of sheep. Through a friend of a friend, we were allowed inside. There’s a high vaulted stone ceiling; in the ceiling there’s a tiny hatch to an even higher room that may have been a place to hide out, with a few people and a few precious objects. Maybe the Book survived a few Viking raids in that tiny room.

I’m really struck by the juxtaposition between the fearful, watchful architecture of those remnants of the Abbey at Kells, and the very real dangers and terrors they reflect, and the beauty and workmanship of the Book created there. People could have chosen to make simpler, hastier books – with just the Gospel text, or minimal decoration – to simply transmit the core information without creating books of such preciousness that they would be tempting to steal and tragic to lose. But that’s not what people did. Dislocated, grieving, fearful, the monastic community of Iona which became the monastic community of Kells doubled down on beauty. On using the utmost human craft and skill to honor God by making a wonder. And this isn’t unique; there are stories that rhyme with this one littered across human history. Berthold Brecht once wrote, “In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing, about the dark times.” 

This is one of the beautiful and holy truths about humanity: In times of danger, struggle, uncertainty, fear, we still want to make beauty. We still want to tend what is precious. We still want to offer our gifts and skills to something that matters, something bigger than ourselves. The Book of Kells shines the light of the Gospel across the millennia, but it also shines the light of the human spirit, of comfort and courage down through the ages. 

“Much of the church has forgotten that we worship a disabled God whose wounds survived resurrection.” That’s the first sentence of the blurb on the back of this book – one of the books some of us read together in Lent: My Body Is Not a Prayer Request: Disability Justice and the Church, by Amy Kenney. I talked about it a little on Maundy Thursday; I’m going to say a little more right now. 

One core question Kenney raises in this book is whether people see her body and other disabled bodies as marring the image of God, or as enlarging our image of God. Is a disabled body something that needs saving and redeeming, or needs care, respect, and deep understanding? She explores the mindset of ableism, and the many obvious and subtle ways it manifests in churches. Here’s a definition of ableism, which Kenney quotes from Talila Lewis: Ableism is “a system that places value on people’s bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normalcy, intelligence, excellence, and productivity.” 

Kenney asks us, “What if everything we think about bodies – every idea that some bodies are better than others – is wrong?” (149) She challenges the “deficit lens” that sees disabled bodies primarily through what they cannot do, and suggests a very different framing: “We are a parade of extraordinary experiences that can teach the world about what it means to be embodied.” (110, 113) She distinguishes between the physical experience of disability, and the social experience of disability – and argues that the social experience is often more difficult than the physical aspect. 

People and institutions are resistant to learning, supporting, accommodating, and including – so disabled people are devalued and shut out in all kinds of ways that have nothing to do with their actual physical state of being. Kenney writes, “The hardest part of being disabled isn’t the pain, it’s the people. It’s trying to explain.” (116) 

Late in the book she sums up her mission: “I am just one disabled girl, sitting in front of the church, asking them to love us. We need to learn from the embodied experiences of people with different types of disabilities to deepen our understanding of God, Scripture, and an embodied life of faith.” (158) 

“Much of the church has forgotten that we worship a disabled God whose wounds survived resurrection.” That’s our Gospel story this morning – the risen Jesus, still bearing the wounds of his crucifixion. Kenney talks, briefly, about Thomas. He reminds her of the many people she’s met who respond to her disability by trying to make sense of it, to fit it into a theology where every story has a happy ending, or a concept of health where every malady has a cure. She writes, “Thomas seeks to understand what can’t be fully explained… Perhaps instead of [trying to make sense of disability], we should welcome its disruption to our limited understanding of how bodies function.” (51) 

But more than Thomas, the wounded Jesus is important for Kenney. She writes, “The disabled God, on the cross, is the one I most relate to. I’d probably still follow that Jesus even without the resurrection.” (166) A few pages later, she proclaims: “I refuse to be ashamed of my disabled body because it displays the crucified Christ. It is twisted and twitchy and tired, but it is triumphant.” (169) 

You may have heard people draw a distinction between curing and healing, with curing defined as a more biomedical process focused on eliminating disease, and healing as a more holistic, sociocultural process of becoming whole – a process that may or may not include a cure. In our book group, we had a fascinating and inconclusive conversation about a related issue: the words wellness and wholeness. I wondered out loud about the words I use when I’m praying for folks. 

We found that some of us felt resistance to the world wholeness because it implied measuring someone against some standard of right or complete. But others of us likewise had a resistance to the word wellness because of the company it keeps – the baggage of the wellness industry and fads like celery juice and beef tallow, and the ways “wellness” has been used as a euphemism to privilege bodies that look a certain way. To use either word in prayer – in church – it feels like we need an expansive, holistic, joyful understanding of what we mean by it, and it’s hard to pack all that into a prayer! I still don’t have good answers here, but I’m grateful for the way the conversation stretched my awareness and curiosity. 

What does it mean to be well? What does it mean to be whole? What does God desire for us? What if God’s desire for us is not to conform our bodies or minds to some norm, but for us to be free from pain and to be welcomed and loved by community? 

The challenge of the book, of our conversation about it, and of today’s Gospel, of Jesus’ risen, redeemed, imperfect body: There isn’t a way people should be. There’s just us, together. And the holy joyful obligation of that is to listen and learn and become a community where we can each be our whole selves.