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. 

These women, headed to the tomb at early dawn: what are they thinking? What are they feeling? 

They know where they’re going because they watched Jesus die. They watched his body taken down from the cross, and hastily wrapped in a linen cloth, because it was almost the Sabbath, when work had to cease. They followed those carrying the body to a tomb carved from the rock, and saw him laid there. Then they hurried home, and prepared spices and ointments to tend his body once the Sabbath was over. 

They are grieving, deeply. These women have been with Jesus on the whole journey, traveling with him just like the twelve disciples – or perhaps I should say the twelve men disciples? We know some of their names – Mary Magdalene, the other Mary, Joanna, Susanna, Salome – but there were others whose names the Gospel writers did not bother to record. 

These women have lost a beloved friend and leader. Someone who helped them imagine that God’s dream of a world ordered by justice and mercy might someday, somehow, come to pass. But also: someone who saw them. Who knew their names. Who made them feel like they mattered. Jesus’ friendships with women are notable, not to be taken for granted. They have lost someone who made them feel real. 

But it’s not just personal grief. Jesus didn’t die of old age or cancer. He was crushed by the state, because some of his own people turned against him, named him as a criminal, handed him over to the imperial government; and the imperial government said, Sure. We’ll get rid of him for you. 

These women are feeling grief layered with rage and fear and helplessness and despair. Their friend is dead and the bad guys won. Power won. Control won. Hatred won. 

Every good or hopeful possibility – gone. 

Things are forked at a systemic, societal level. 

There’s no point to anything, and nothing left to do – except this: Care for his body. Wash it. Anoint it with oil. Wrap it more carefully. Lay him to rest with dignity. With love. 

All of this is speculation; Magdala and Joanna and Susanna aren’t here to tell us what they were feeling. But we can see hints of their emotions in their fierce commitment to caring for Jesus’ body, the only way left to them to show their love. As soon as sabbath is over, at early dawn, they go to the tomb. John’s Gospel says they set out “while it was still dark.” I looked it up: Sunrise in Jerusalem at this time of year is around 6AM, with darkness starting to ease around 5:15.  A few of you are natural early risers, but for the rest of us, if we’re up and out by 5AM, there’s a reason. A plane to catch. A loved one’s illness. Something necessary that needs dealing with before the normal work of the day begins. Something you couldn’t do the night before, but that you are driven to do as soon as humanly possible today. 

That drivenness is what we see, here, as these women hurry through quiet streets and out of the city in the murky gray light before sunrise. 

To find… a shock, and a puzzle. The stone that sealed the tomb has been rolled away, and Jesus’ body is gone. Before they’ve even had time to move on from perplexity to fear or anger – who took him, and why? – two strangers are there, dressed in dazzling white, saying: Why look for the living in the place of the dead? He’s not here. He has been raised. 

Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, way back before any of this, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.

Remember. 

The Gospels record Jesus telling his friends again and again to expect his death, and to know – when it happens – that that’s not the end of the story.

But grief and shock and anger and fear and confusion and overwhelm have a way of shaking us out of ourselves, don’t they? Of scattering or shattering our sense of self, our sense of direction. We forget, or just lose track of, things that make us who we are and tell us what to do next. 

We feel unmoored, adrift, cut loose from what anchored us. 

Maybe you have felt – are feeling – something like what these women are feeling. Maybe you know all too well what it feels like when the people or institutions or values we thought we could trust in and build our lives around – things we thought were stable and reliable – are suddenly in danger, or gone, overnight. Maybe you’ve been grieving and raging too.

The strangers at the tomb – Matthew uses the word angel – tell the women: Remember. It’s an ordinary word but also an evocative, important word. Your friend might tell you: Remember to bring fruit for the potluck! Your therapist might ask you to remember formative experiences. Your spiritual director might urge you to remember the truths that ground and orient you. 

In my own – still new! – contemplative practice, remembering has an important role. I have to gather my scattered self before I can come to center and open my heart to God. My personal Rule of Life includes the sentence, “Remember snow falling on the prairie.” But in fact my whole Rule is a practice of remembering. I read a chunk of it every day, to remind myself of what God and my own deep self have taught me about how best to be in the world and do what’s mine to do. 

Remember. What do these women – Mary and the other Mary, Salome, and the rest – need to remember? 

First, I think they need to remember how they got into all this in the first place. What made them up and follow Jesus, walking away from lives and roles and responsibilities – a big deal, especially for women in this time and place. What stirred their hearts about Jesus’ words and actions; the hope and sense of possibility he gave them, the feeling that they belonged and they mattered and they could offer their skills and resources and hearts to something good and important. 

They need to remember why they are here: in Jerusalem, far from home, in this cold stone tomb in the gray dawn, jars of scented oil in their hands. What mattered so much that it brought them here? And where will it lead them next? 

I find that it’s easy to be lost in my own head, my own fears or overwhelm. Good news, hints of hope or possibility, really can feel like an idle tale soemetimes. 

When you feel shattered, shaken, adrift: What do you need to remember? What shaped you; what grounds you? What experiences and relationships and have made you the person who is feeling these feelings? What loves and values and commitments are at the heart of your anger, your fear, your frustration and grief? What mattered so much that it brought you here? And where does it lead you next? 

The second thing these women need to remember is that they’re part of something bigger. They’re not alone – even in grief, overwhelm and despair.  In the other three Gospels, the messengers at the tomb tell the women: Go tell the others! And even though they don’t say that in Luke’s account, that’s what the women do: rush back into the city to tell the other disciples what they have seen and heard. 

Go tell the others! Get the band back together! Spread the word. Expand the movement. Start building what comes next, because the story is not over. Not at all. 

We, too, are part of something bigger, even when we feel overwhelmed or helpless. We’re not alone – whether with personal griefs or struggles, or with feeling the weight of large scale turmoil, danger and loss.

In this season at St. Dunstan’s I see us doing some important and fruitful work exploring how to show up for each other and look out for each other. I hope we’ll keep leaning into that. And showing up for, looking out for, our neighbors is just a half-step further. Let’s keep seeking opportunities to connect, to build community, to ask for help and offer help, to practice mutual care and mutual aid. To build what comes next, because the story is still unfolding.

The third thing the strangers challenge these women to remember is that God is still at work in all this. Remember how he told you, way back in Galilee, that these things were going to happen. Even when everything seems hopeless, all is held in love. God is working in ways we can’t perceive or even imagine. More can be mended than we know.  

Maybe this was easy for these women to believe, because the evidence of God’s power was right in front of them: Jesus had been raised from the dead! But actually, there were many more plausible explanations for the absence of his body than miraculous resurrection. They had to take a big leap of faith, to accept that God had reached in and tweaked the rules of the universe in this way. Like Paul says in today’s Epistle: It better be true; we’ve staked everything on it.  

The worst had happened, yet – the strangers remind them – it has not derailed God’s deep redemptive work of justice and love. It’s all part of the plan. Remember? 

I don’t believe that the things that weigh on our hearts and spirits today are God’s plan for us and for the world. Nevertheless: I do believe that God’s redemptive love is still at work – not least through all of us, in the holy work of caring for ourselves and each other and our human and non-human communities. 

Mary and Mary and Susanna and Salome and Joanna and the others had to stretch their minds and hearts and imaginations to accept that God and goodness and love were not defeated – that this man and this message to which they’d given their hearts had not simply been snuffed out. 

But they do it. They dare to believe. They dare to hope. 

Easter is a complicated happy ending.  Yes, death is defeated. Yes, love wins. But, but, but. 

Things don’t suddenly become some rosy, hunky-dory new reality. And they don’t just go back to the way it was before, either. Jesus isn’t dead anymore, but he’s not back, either. The community, the movement, of Jesus’ friends and followers is sadder and wiser, now. 

But they’re also bolder and braver – as we see in the sequel to Luke’s Gospel, the Acts of the Apostles. 

What do we need to remember, beloveds? 

Remember what made you who you are, your foundation stones. What mattered so much that it brought you here? And where does it lead you next? 

Remember that you’re not alone. We’re in this together – for many definitions of “this.” 

Remember that God is still up to something, and always invites us to be collaborators, co-conspirators, in the holy work of justice and love. 

Remember that the story isn’t over. Not at all. 

Take care of each other. Tend your communities. Keep telling people who are weighed down by rage and grief and despair that it’s worth keeping on. There will be an After. Hold onto each other and keep doing what matters. Spread the good news that fearful, repressive power does not have the last word.

Christ is risen. Then and now and always. Remember.  Alleluia, alleluia. Amen. 

I’m going to sneak in a tiny sermon here, before we continue with more holy stories. In the story we just heard, Moses is an adult, and a leader of his people. But let’s remember how the story began. God’s people, the Hebrews, were enslaved in Egypt. They were forced to make bricks for the Egyptians’ many building projects. But God helped them thrive anyway. And Pharaoh, the King of Egypt, got nervous. He was afraid the Hebrews might become so numerous that they would rise up against the Egyptians. So he told the midwives who helped the Hebrew women give birth that they should kill all the baby boys. But the midwives were not on board with that plan; they made excuses to Pharaoh: “Oh, the Hebrew women are so hearty and rough, they just drop their babies before we can even get there.” 

One woman, Jochebed, gives birth to a son – and decides to hide him. She’s able to keep the baby hidden for a few months, but when he starts to get too big and too loud, she and her daughter Miriam take a basket, use tar to make it waterproof, put the baby in it, and put it in the reeds at the riverbank of the Great River, the Nile. Miriam stands by to keep an eye on the situation, and pretty soon Pharaoh’s own daughter, a princess of Egypt, comes down to the river to bathe. She finds the baby and decides to adopt him. Miriam immediately pops up and asks if the princess would like her go to find a woman who’d be willing to nurse the baby for her… then fetches her mother. You have to think this was all planned!… 

So, Moses grows up a man of two worlds, Egyptian and Hebrew, which is hard and complicated and also perhaps exactly what God needed in a leader to confront Pharaoh and lead the people to freedom. 

A few weeks ago I saw a video of the Reverend Sheleta Fomby preaching about Moses at a church in Maryland. She points out Pharaoh’s error in thinking the males were the greatest threat, by saying, “Kill the boys.”

He thought those baby boys would grow up to become warriors and take up weapons and fight back against their oppressors. 

“In his misogynistic short-sightedness,” she says, “he messed around and he let the girls live.” He never saw women as the true threat, or as worthy opponents. But the courageous, subversive women and girls of this story “used their God-given intuition and strategic innovation to set the stage for the deliverance of a people.” The midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, who “quietly but defiantly disrupted Pharaoh’s plan;”Jochebed and Miriam; and Pharaoh’s own daughter! (The Vivian Wilson of her time?) 

Reverend Fomby says, “When we read Exodus, we go straight to Moses, but the only reason Moses could be a deliverer was because Moses had been delivered.” She concludes, “They never saw the women coming!” 

The Bible is complicated and conflicted and argues with itself. But there are overarching themes – or maybe deep, underlying themes – and those are what I try to seek out, the things I think God is really trying to get through to us across the millennia. 

And one of those deep themes is the significance of the insignificant. The power of the powerless. 

Not just women and girls, but also folks like the three young men in the story we’ll hear soon: immigrants targeted because they were seen as outsiders, strange, dangerous, vulnerable. 

Folks like God’s people at the time of Ezekiel’s vision – burdened, burned out, fearful, crushed to the point where it felt like there was no more life in them. 

Can these bones live? Oh God, you know!

People like Jesus, disruptive teacher and enemy of the state, crushed under Empire’s heel. Made an example of, to show others that they should keep their heads down and cooperate. 

But it didn’t work. 

It didn’t work. 

The marginal, the insignificant, the powerless, survive. Revive. 

Persist. Adapt. Endure. 

Fight and evade and feed each other and raise children and weep and sing and shout and tell stories and laugh and make art and love and live. 

That’s the story of tonight. 

That’s the story of Easter.

That’s the story of now. 

Let me name one more thing – a resistance, a friction with this story: the joy of the Biblical text at the drowning of the Egyptian army. Yes, those soldiers were following cruel orders. But does that mean we dance and sing in response to their deaths? And what about the poor horses? 

Triumph at the destruction of one’s enemies is certainly a familiar human emotion. But it’s not one we may choose to endorse, or to hallow, to treat as holy and good. 

Aurora Levins Morales is a poet and scholar of Puerto Rican and Ukrainian Jewish background. Here’s part of her poem called “Red Sea.” She envisions us standing once more on the shore of the Red Sea, yearning to cross over to something better, and she insists that for the waters to open this time, the path to freedom has to be for everyone, friend, stranger, enemy, together. 

Read the poem here. 

In a few minutes we’ll read the Gospel of the Passion of Jesus Christ – meaning, his trial, crucifixion, and death – according to Saint John. We’ll read about Jesus’ enemies bringing him before the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, to seek the death penalty. Pilate will ask: What charges do you bring against this man? And they will reply: “If this man were not an evildoer, we would not have handed him over to you.” 

If this man were not an evildoer – some translations say, If this man were not a criminal – we would not have handed him over to you. 

Every year, that sentence makes my skin crawl. 

It does so much in a mere sixteen words.

It dehumanizes Jesus by labeling him: an evildoer, a criminal. A malefactor, in the grand old language of the King James Bible. 

By definition – then and now – a kind of person about whom we don’t have to care. A kind of person who deserves whatever terrible things may happen to them. 

And it does this work with horrifying simple and effective circular logic: If he weren’t a criminal, he wouldn’t have been arrested. If he weren’t a bad person, he wouldn’t be in custody right now. If he weren’t an evildoer, we wouldn’t be demanding his execution. 

There’s no offramp in that logic. There’s no falsifiability. 

There’s no room for exploration of guilt, circumstance, responsibility. 

There’s certainly no room for repentance or rehabilitation. 

If this man were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you. 

At times the church’s language makes a big deal about Jesus Christ being an innocent victim. I like to point out that, in fact, Jesus had done at least some of the stuff they say he did. 

For example, in Luke’s Gospel, the charges against him are, “He stirs up the people by teaching throughout all Judea, from Galilee where he began even to this place.”

Yeah. He did that. He taught people. And they got stirred up. 

Jesus’ innocence or guilt is really not the central question here. The question should be the use of state violence. The question should be whether we think teaching should be a capital offense. Whether things we’d name today as free speech and free assembly should be met with crushing, repressive force. 

If this man were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you. This line makes my skin crawl because it’s not just then and there. It’s also here and now. John’s Gospel names something here that remains a dynamic of state violence all over the world – and here, in America. 

Brian Stephenson’s work with the Equal Justice Initiative has begun to show us how many especially black and brown people are wrongly accused and unfairly tried, incarcerated for decades, even executed, because nobody with the power to do something about it cared enough to give their case a second look. 

People who’ve been involved in advocating for criminal justice reform, and for reform of our immigration system, which has also held huge numbers of people – including children – in detention centers, under presidents of both parties, would say that this dehumanizing and circular logic remains alive and well. 

There’s nothing new about this. 

And yet we are facing something new right now. 

This is scary to talk about, but it just hasn’t left me alone. 

I promise this is a sermon about Jesus. Bear with me. 

You’ve probably read some news stories about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the father of three who was illegally deported from the US on March 15 and sent to CECOT, a terrorist detention center in El Salvador notorious among human rights watchdogs. The Trump administration acknowledges that Abrego Garcia was wrongly deported, but is refusing to comply with the Supreme Court’s call to facilitate his return to the United States. 

But Abrego Garcia is only one of many caught up in this brutal situation. Maybe you’ve heard about some of the others, too. Like Merwil Gutiérrez, a 19 year old living with his father in the Bronx. He was seized by ICE agents just outside his apartment. A friend heard one agent say, “He’s not the one,” as if they were looking for someone else. But another agent said, “Take him anyway.” Merwil has no criminal record, and his family says he has no ties to gang activity. 

A cruel irony of this situation is that many of those who have fled to the United States from Venezuela and El Salvador came here to try to escape endemic gang violence in their home countries.

Like Kilmar, Merwil was taken to CECOT in El Salvador. CECOT does not have programs for inmates to learn, serve, or earn freedom by good behavior. There’s no due process, no trial by jury or review of evidence, involved in getting sent there. And there’s no way out once you’re there. CECOT does not have a process for people to be released, to return to their families and communities. It is explicitly intended for lifelong detention. 

The US Holocaust Museum has a definition of a concentration camp: “What distinguishes a concentration camp from a prison… is that it functions outside of a judicial system. The prisoners are not indicted or convicted of any crime by judicial process.” 

My oldest child is 19, the same age as Merwil. I cannot imagine the agony of anxiety and grief of having my child in such a place, with no way to reach them, help them, or free them. 

If this man were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you. 

There’s no offramp in that logic. There’s no falsifiability. There’s no room for exploration of guilt, circumstance, responsibility. There’s certainly no room for repentance or rehabilitation. There’s no escape, and no mercy. 

Sometimes the church makes Jesus too ordinary. A wise and kind teacher who got crosswise to the authorities.

I do believe Jesus was God. I believe something extraordinary is happening in the story we tell each other today. 

But sometimes the church makes Jesus too extraordinary, too. 

As if he were undergoing something uniquely awful. 

In fact, what Jesus endures here is relatively commonplace.

Crucification is a terrible way to die. It was not a particular form of torture devised especially for Jesus. It was just one of the ways the Romans killed people. It was a mode of public execution intended as a deterrent. You execute somebody by crucifixion if you want other people to see it happening and think, “You know, maybe I won’t start that rebellion.” There were mass crucifixions following several revolts against Roman rule in the first and second centuries. Scholars think that by a conservative estimate, the Romans may have executed 300,000 people by crucifixion during their time of empire. 

Dying by crucifixion was not special. 

In the Passion Gospel, Jesus is entering into the commonplace horrors humans have created for millennia. And it starts before he’s nailed to the cross. It starts when he’s drawn into the criminal justice system of his time and place. 

Into the circular and dehumanizing logic of:  If he were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you. 

This is the sense in which Jesus died for our sins: 

He died with and like one of us. 

Christ himself, God themself, entered the jaws of our brutal system of scapegoating, dehumanizing, punishing. 

He allowed himself to be chewed up. Consumed. 

Today we bow before the humbling reality that God submitted Godself to the kind of senseless cruelty that humans regularly visit upon one another. Today we wonder at God’s fierce love shown to us in God’s willingness to walk with us into the dark. 

But. And. The fact that God goes there too doesn’t make it OK. 

If Christ stands with us, so too are we called to stand with Christ. 

With Jesus, the Christ, who told his followers: When you help the hungry, the outsider, the sick, the prisoner, you’re helping me. 

What does our fidelity to this story – to the man at its center, to the God we know through this man – what does striving to keep faith with Jesus look like, today? 

What would you do – how would you live – if you weren’t afraid?

Maybe that’s not quite the right question. There are many reasons to be afraid. What would you do – how would you live – if fear didn’t bind you? 

One of my favorite parts of my job is sitting down with folks who are new to St. Dunstan’s to hear their stories and start to get to know them. A few weeks ago I did that with Sarah and Ingrid. Ingrid told me about what an impression our crucifix made on her when they first came to worship here. It’s big! It makes an impression on a lot of people! Ingrid said she thought of it as a kind of visual aid, like a PowerPoint slide, that shows the power of not being afraid of what anyone can do to you. Not letting fear that the worst might happen make your choices for you. 

And of course, she said, people need to come back and see that every week, because that’s a really hard way to think and live. You go out into the world and there are so many things that put you back into a small, self-focused, fearful mindset. You have to come back here often, to this gathering under the cross, to keep training in how to live a different way. 

This past Wednesday, April 9, was the 80th anniversary of the execution of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Dietrich was born in 1906 to an educated, middle-class German family, one of the youngest of eight children. His family were Lutheran Christians, like many Germans. He had a strong faith as a child, and felt drawn to the study of theology, seeking deeper understanding of God and faith, from a young age. He started his theological studies at 18. 

By that time, Adolf Hitler was already on the rise, feeding on the struggles and dissatisfactions of post-World War I Germany. Hitler attempted a coup in 1923; it failed, and Hitler was jailed. He wrote Mein Kampf during that imprisonment. 

As the violent nationalist thinking of Hitler and his inner circle simmered beneath the surface of German public life, Dietrich studied, traveled, and matured. In 1930, he spent a year in New York City, studying at Union Theological Seminary. But the most important thing about that time was not his studies but his friendships. He became close friends with a young Black man, Frank Fisher. He went to church with Frank and experienced prophetic preaching and powerful music. He traveled the country with Frank, and saw overt racial discrimination firsthand. Another deep friendship with a student from France – an enemy nation in the recent war – shook loose Dietrich’s deep assumption that duty to God and duty to country would always run in the same direction. His time in America left Dietrich with two questions that he’d explore for the rest of his life: What is the church? And, how is the church called to love the other, those outside the church? 

He returned home in 1931, to a country where Hitler’s promises of a Germany restored to strength and glory were gaining popular appeal. Hitler was appointed chancellor by the aging president in 1933. Soon afterwards, a mysterious fire at the German legislative building, the Reichstag, provided the justification for an edict taking away all civil liberties, including free speech, free assembly, and a free press. Hitler began calling himself Der Fuhrer – The Leader – and started talking about his plan to purge Jews and other minorities from German society. As part of his total takeover of German society, Hitler convinced German church leaders to see him as the head of the church, as well as head of state. Many churches gladly joined the movement, pledging faith in Hitler and God. But not all. 

Bonhoeffer knew all this was wrong. He published a paper outlining three ways the church should respond in such circumstances. First, question the state and its methods: a true church must reject government encroachment on its beliefs. 

Second, help the victims of state action. The church has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering of society. Third, strike back. Bonhoeffer wrote, “It is not enough just to bandage the victims [caught] under the wheel – but to put a spoke in the wheel itself.”

Other like-minded German Christians began to gather and connect. Eventually they called their movement the Confessing Church. Bonhoeffer gathered a group of students in a small German coastal town and began an informal rebel  seminary. During that time, he wrote two important texts, “The Cost of Discipleship” and “Life together.” 

Meanwhile, Hitler continued to consolidate power and crack down on dissent. By 1937, churches were forbidden to publicly pray for anyone resisting the Nazis, and nearly 800 Confessing Church leaders had been arrested – including Martin Niemöller, who wrote the famous lines, “First they came the socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a socialist…”

At the same time, Hitler’s intentions to invade and conquer much of Europe were becoming clear. Germany annexed Austria in March of 1938. Some of his generals and other leaders had concerns. They saw his cruelty and limitless ambition, and they feared for Germany, and the world. Gradually, some of those doubters began to coalesce into circles that conspired to hamper Hitler’s plans or even eliminate him. Through some family connections, Dietrich became connected with one of these groups; this one included several high-up members of the Abwehr, the German CIA. 

The increased attacks on Germany’s Jews fueled Dietrich’s resistance. He wondered, if the church doesn’t exist to protect others, in a moment like this, is it really a church at all? But the risks for those who resisted the regime were increasing. 

Early in 1939, a network of family, friends, and allies managed to get Bonhoeffer out of Germany, back to New York City – free, and safe. But he felt desperately alone there – and far from God. He felt a call back to Germany, convinced that he had to be part of Germany’s present if he wanted to be part of its future. He rushed home, on one of the last ships before the war began. He felt God’s presence once more, but still struggled to know the path ahead. 

One question began to rise again and again in his soul: Would God forgive one who murdered a tyrant? What could it mean to put a spoke in the wheel of the Nazis’ oppressive violence? Soon after his return to Germany, he wrote, “If I saw a lunatic plowing his car into a crowd, I could not casually stand on the sidewalk and say, ‘I am a pastor. I’ll just wait to bury the dead afterwards.’”

Germany invaded Poland in the fall of 1939. Reports from the front lines of mass executions of civilians, including women, children, and elders, drove Hitler’s secret opponents to begin plotting to assassinate Hitler. Dietrich still felt conflicted about being part of the conspiracy – yet so much evil came from the words and actions of just one man! Bonhoeffer became almost a chaplain to the resistance, talking with others about what faithfulness could mean in those terrible times. 

The first assassination attempt took place in March 1943; it failed. Another followed just two weeks later; it also failed. The conspirators were able to cover their tracks to some extent – but Germany was beginning to lose the war, and pressure on internal dissent grew ever stronger. Bonhoeffer was arrested in April of 1943. The charges against him were refusal to enlist in the Army; he was suspected of conspiracy against the regime, but the Nazis had no proof. Dietrich was in prison for two years. For much of that time, he was able to write and receive letters, and sometimes even visitors. The guards liked him, and he provided spiritual support for other prisoners too. 

In July 1944, there was another – final – attempt to assassinate Hitler. This time the bomb went off – but Hitler survived. Afterwards, Nazis found records linking Bonhoeffer to the Abwehr conspirators. Dietrich was moved to the custody of the Gestapo. He knew his life was in imminent danger. John Hendrix writes, “Bonhoeffer had… called for a radical obedience [to God] that was not cheap but costly. Faith wasn’t just about creating a set of comforting thoughts about God; it was living out an ethic that called for sacrifice. You didn’t just pray for the tanks to stop rolling. You threw yourself in front of them.” Bonhoeffer himself wrote, “The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation is going to live.” And elsewhere: “If we want to be Christians, we must have some share in Christ’s large-heartedness by acting with responsibility and in freedom when the moment of danger comes…. Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behavior.” 

By April of 1945 the Allies were marching across Germany. Hitler was terrified and furious. He ordered the execution of all conspirators still in custody. On April 8, Bonhoeffer and others were subject to a rapid “trial” and condemned to death. That night, Dietrich dreamed of wading into the ocean, down into the depths – then swimming upward, to where he could see the feet of someone standing on the surface of the water – someone who reached down and pulled him up into the light. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged on April 9th, 1945. His last words were, “This is the end – for me, the beginning – of life.” 

“If we want to be Christians, we must have some share in Christ’s large-heartedness by acting with responsibility and in freedom when the moment of danger comes….”

What would you do – how would you live – if you weren’t afraid?

Maybe that’s not quite the right question. There are many reasons to be afraid. What would you do – how would you live – if fear couldn’t bind you? 

In today’s Gospel, we meet three friends of Jesus: Lazarus, Martha, and Mary. But they’ve shown up in the Bible already, and you may have heard about them. They live in Bethany, a village a couple of miles outside of Jerusalem. The story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection comes to us in four books of the Bible, called the Gospels. They record the work of four different people or communities trying to put together people’s memories of these important events into a coherent story to pass on to the future. The Gospels overlap in lots of ways, but they’re different too. And what they say about this household overlaps, but is different too! 

Mark’s Gospel, the earliest written, doesn’t name these people, but does place Jesus in Bethany several times. On one of those visits, a woman breaks open a jar of costly ointment and pours it on his head. Luke’s Gospel has a story about Mary and Martha: Jesus comes to visit; Martha is very busy, tending the household and probably preparing a meal for her guest and his dozen-plus friends. Meanwhile, her sister Mary just wants to sit at Jesus’ feet and listen to his teaching. Martha tells Jesus, Tell my sister to come help me! And Jesus says, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part.” That’s all Luke has to say about Mary and Martha – but we do hear their names, and get a sense that they were close to Jesus. Consider that Martha felt comfortable complaining to him! That makes them feel very real to me. 

And then there’s the gospel of John, the source of today’s story. It’s interesting how much John’s Martha and Mary sound like Luke’s Martha and Mary – another hint that these were real people! 

Today’s reading comes from Chapter 12, but something pretty big happens in chapter 11: “Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill.” It’s interesting that John points forward, here, to a story he hasn’t told yet; notice that in today’s reading he refers back to this story, saying, “the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead.” I guess he wants to make sure we read these stories together. 

Mary and Martha send a message to Jesus, asking him to visit and heal Lazarus. Even though we haven’t met them yet, this is an established friendship – John says, “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.” But he stays away for a couple more days – and Lazarus dies from his illness. Then Jesus and his friends come to Bethany. Jesus weeps with the sisters… then goes to the tomb, has the stone rolled away (despite concerns about the smell of death), and brings Lazarus back to life. 

Today’s scene follows quickly in John’s Gospel, but some time has passed – a few days or weeks? The plot to kill Jesus has advanced, and Jesus spent some time lying low away from Jerusalem. But now the great Jewish feast of Passover approaches, and Jesus knows it’s time for him to fulfill his mission. So he and his friends head to Jerusalem – and stop over with his friends in Bethany for a meal. That’s today’s Gospel story. 

Let’s pause and notice a couple of things about this household. 

Apparently we have three single adult siblings, living together. That would be somewhat unusual here and now, especially if they’re over 30 or so. I won’t pretend to know how unusual it was in Jesus’ time. Certainly the norm was for people to live with a spouse, plus some extended family. 

But people died a lot, for all kinds of reasons. Maybe one or more of the three had lost spouses.  Maybe somebody just never got married, for any of many reasons. One gets the sense that Martha is holding the whole thing together, looking after both Lazarus and Mary. However you read it, I find it endearing that this somewhat unconventional household were such dear friends of Jesus. 

The other thing to notice is their economic status. There are only a few clues. They have the capacity to host a large group of guests, and they have enough standing in their community that everyone shows up when Lazarus dies. But it doesn’t seem like they were really wealthy – Martha is dependent on Mary to help around the house, not a bevy of servants. So Mary’s expensive bottle of scented oil is probably not an everyday luxury. 

Lazarus, Martha, and Mary. Lazarus never does anything very interesting except die. I’m a big fan of Martha; she deserves a sermon of her own sometime. But today I’d like to hone in on Mary, who’s at the center of our Gospel story. This is the last of three stories; what picture do we get if we layer those stories and see what they show us? 

Let’s start with that story from Luke, the one where Mary just wants to sit at Jesus’ feet and Martha is annoyed that she’s not helping set the table. Last week we heard Jesus’ parable about a younger son who’s impatient with life on the farm with his father and older brother, demands his share of the inheritance, and runs off to blow it all on dissolute living. I’ve never put that story side by side with this little scene about Mary, Martha, and Jesus before… but it’s interesting to do so! I had to re-read all the Mary and Martha stories to convince myself that it doesn’t actually say anywhere that Martha is the older sister, because I am so sure that Martha is the older sister! 

But even if that’s not true – I see some resonances between Mary and the younger son in the parable. How might Mary be a little bit like the Prodigal Son? I have the definite impression that this is not the first time that Martha has had to ask Mary to help out. In this scene, she’s not helping because she’s listening to Jesus, and she gets praised for that! 

I wonder what she does instead of helping, when Jesus isn’t around? Drawing… reading… napping… going for long walks… gazing into the middle distance. Maybe she tries to help but doesn’t track what needs doing very well. Maybe she pretends to try to help and then breaks a dish or spills something to escape. Maybe Mary and the younger son are both people who are just not especially interested in, or suited for, the roles and the work that their households expect them to fulfill. 

The big difference between Mary and the Prodigal Son is that Mary does seem to really love her family. We see that in the second story, John’s first story. When Jesus arrives in Bethany after Lazarus’ death, Martha meets him first, saying, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” They talk briefly about death, and resurrection. Then Martha goes to find Mary, and tells her, “The Teacher is here and is calling for you,” and she hurries to meet him. So much tenderness hinted at, there – that Jesus asks to see Mary; that Martha wants her grieving sister to have time with their friend and teacher. 

Mary kneels at Jesus’ feet and says the same thing as her sister: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” You get the sense they’ve been saying it to each other a lot, over these agonizing days: If only he had been here! That’s all Mary can say; she is overcome by weeping, so much so that Jesus begins to weep too. 

Then Jesus goes to the tomb, works his greatest miracle yet, and restores Lazarus to his sisters. That only deepens Mary’s devotion, as we see in today’s story: “Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.” 

We can see things we already know about Mary in this moment: She loves deeply – her family, her Lord. She listens closely to Jesus when he speaks. She’s not the most pragmatic or practical. This is the third time we’ve found her at Jesus’ feet – sitting close to listen; weeping in overwhelming grief; now, tenderly anointing and wiping. This extravagant, richly symbolic act seems like a culmination of sorts. 

Why wash someone’s feet? We often talk about this on Maundy Thursday, the Thursday before Easter, when we hear the story – also from John’s Gospel – of Jesus washing his friends’ feet before his arrest. People’s feet got really dirty, in the ancient Near East. People generally wore sandals or other open shoes. Roads and streets were dusty, with animal poop and garbage and worse, especially in the cities. Foot washing became an act of hospitality for guests, both to offer comfort and relief, and to prevent all that filth getting tracked into your house. 

But it wasn’t just a pragmatic act. It had social and interpersonal meanings too. Because feet were filthy, foot washing was done by people of lower status – often servants or slaves. That’s why the disciples struggle with it when Jesus wants to wash their feet. Foot washing was also something wives would do for husbands, as an expression of physical care and intimacy. 

In reading around about this story, I saw some debate over whether Mary’s act expresses transgressive intimacy, or not. 

It is hard to interpret all the meanings of a gesture from another time and place. But it seems to me that there’s a big dose of deep resistance, here, to the idea of anything sensual or “inappropriate” involving Jesus – a resistance that flies in the face of the facts. Just think about what’s happening here: she’s pouring oil over a man’s feet, perhaps rubbing it around to cover every surface, then wiping it off with her unbound hair. Imagine seeing someone do that at a dinner party! Imagine having someone do it to you! On the one hand, having your feet washed by someone else was much more common then than now. On the other hand, physical contact between unrelated men and women was much less common, and more culturally fraught. It seems undeniable to me that this was an act of uncomfortable intimacy for the onlookers. Maybe when someone complains about the waste – only John blames it on Judas – that’s the discomfort that they’re really expressing. 

What is Mary doing here? Anointing, too, is an act with particular cultural meanings. Kings and priests were anointed for their roles, with holy oil poured on their heads. That’s what Messiah, the Hebrew word for God’s promised, long-expected savior, means – the Anointed One. That’s what Christ means – the Greek equivalent of Messiah. The special, scented oil we use in baptism is called chrism – same word as Christ. But, though there are other stories of oil being poured on Jesus’ head, that’s not what happens here. 

People also anointed dead bodies with oil, as part of the cleaning and care shown for one’s beloved dead. That’s the meaning Jesus offers for Mary’s act: “She bought [this oil] so that she might keep it for the day of my burial.” If that’s true – if Mary bought or set aside this perfumed oil in anticipation of Jesus’ death – that tells us something about how closely she’s been listening to him. 

Jesus has been talking a lot about what’s going to happen to him – what has to happen to him – but the other disciples keep resisting, misunderstanding, and denying. But Mary hears. Mary believes. Mary understands. Mary knows it’s coming, and that it’s coming soon. So she anoints her beloved friend’s feet, and wipes them with her hair – a gesture of devotion and tenderness that perhaps can only be expressed in action, not in words. The extravagance – the waste – is clearly part of the point. 

What do we take from this exercise – of looking at Mary across the texts that name her? I’d never done it before, and I enjoyed it. She has come to life for me, a sister in faith across the centuries. I see and appreciate her quirks, her yearnings, her warm and responsive heart. 

Ultimately, though, what I find here is not just a fuller picture of Mary, but a fuller picture of Jesus.  Standing beside Mary, trying to get shoulder to shoulder, eye to eye with her, I start to see what she sees in Jesus – that he was someone who inspired this kind of devotion, tenderness, and trust. That says a lot. Think about the people in your life you feel that way about; it’s probably a short list. 

That man – Mary’s beloved teacher and friend – that’s who we’re about to follow into Holy Week, friends. That’s who his friends and loved ones are about to lose.