So there’s one big thing in this story that can be distracting or even scary. It’s the idea that when the rich man dies, he is sent to a place of suffering. A place of flames where he’s desperately thirsty and can’t get relief. That’s pretty scary, right? 

Some of you/the grownups might have grown up in churches that talked a lot about how our beliefs and actions in life might mean we go to Heaven – or Hell – when we die. 

(You may have noticed that’s NOT stuff we talk about a lot here!)

In the story that Jesus tells, the places where the rich man and Lazarus end up when they die are not Heaven and Hell. 

In Jesus’ time people had a lot of different ideas about what happened after you die – just like today. 

Some people thought nothing happened. 

Some people thought you would sleep for a long, long time. 

Some people thought that you’d go to the land of the dead. Some parts of that land were really beautiful and lush and comfortable – like the valleys of Abraham. And some parts of it were terrible and dry and scorched. And there’s a chasm – a great big split in the ground – between those two places.

Jesus is using that idea to tell this story. 

He is not answering The Big Question about what happens after we die, here. There are a couple of other places in the Gospels where he seems to be trying to say something about that – like when he says, In my Father’s house there are many mansions. But it seems like what happens after we die is pretty hard to explain. And he’s not trying to explain it, here.

That’s not what this story is about at all. 

The point of this story is not that the rich man should have been kind to Lazarus TO AVOID PUNISHMENT AFTER HE DIED. 

That is not the reason he should have been kind!

God does not want us to do kind and right and just things because we are afraid. 

That was the church’s idea, I think. 

Fear is not a healthy heart-reason to do good things. 

The point is that the rich man should have been kind to Lazarus because it was the right thing to do.

It was what all the teachings and traditions of his faith told him – 

As well as just basic empathy and humanity! 

So, the point of this story isn’t to make us worry about burning for eternity! But what IS the point of the story? 

What does Jesus want to make people think about, here? 

One thing he wants us to think about is what can happen inside of people who have too much money.

Is that a strange idea – too much money? … 

Right before he tells this story, Jesus says, “You cannot serve both God and money.” Only what he really says is, “You cannot serve God and Mammon.” 

What’s Mammon? 

Mammon is an interesting word that shows up a few times in the Bible. It means wealth, like a lot of money – a LOT of money.

But it doesn’t just mean money. 

It means money that people are treating like a god. 

Mammon means that people are putting money at the center of their lives, instead of God or other people or the wellbeing of their community and world. 

The great reformer Martin Luther wrote about Mammon. He said, “Many a person thinks they have God and everything they need when they have money and property. They trust in those things, and boast of them so stubbornly and boldly that they don’t care about anybody or anything else. A person like that fixes their whole heart on their god Mammon, that is, money and possessions. Mammon is the most common idol on earth.”

I know people who have enough money to share and are very generous and thoughtful about sharing.

I don’t think I know anybody who is super duper rich. But it does seem like people who are super duper rich are not always very happy? … 

Jesus wants us to notice how Mammon is at the center of the rich man’s life. His wealth lets him make everything around him just the way he wants it – his home, his clothes, his food. 

Maybe he gets so used to having everything exactly the way he likes it, that when there’s something unpleasant – like a poor, sick man lying on the ground – he just doesn’t even see it.

It’s like he’s wearing special Mammon glasses. 

There is a lot going on in this story, even though it seems pretty simple, and there are a lot of things it might leave us thinking about or wondering. 

But maybe the thing Jesus would want us to hear in this story today is actually a word of consolation and reassurance. 

It could be easy to hear this story as telling us that we’re supposed to reach out and help people who are struggling or alone or in need… 

And then to feel guilty or ashamed or overwhelmed. 

Because we know about A LOT of suffering!! … 

I know the grownups and the big kids hear about news from all over the world. People hurt and sick and hungry and afraid in Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, Haiti. 

We hear scary or sad news from across our country, too. Acts of violence, communities under threat, ecological disasters. 

I don’t know what grade they start showing you news in your classrooms, but at some point even our younger kids start hearing about some of this stuff – from school, or from other kids, or from their parents and older siblings talking about it at home. 

A lot of us feel an obligation to stay informed. We’re citizens of a powerful nation; there’s not much that happens in the world where our country doesn’t bear some kind of responsibility. So, in turn, we feel responsible – to learn, pray, advocate, donate, vote. 

That is the righteous work of citizenship and community. 

 And also: it’s much more than the folks who first heard Jesus tell this story would have had to deal with.

They didn’t have a 24-hour news cycle.

They didn’t have Instagram reels from war zones. 

They might hear, eventually, about a famine in that country, or a plague in that region, or a battle over there. 

But most of the suffering people knew about was the suffering they could see. The needs and struggles right there in their community, in their neighborhood. 

The rich man in the story isn’t reading about Lazarus in the newspaper. He’s literally walking past him – maybe stepping over him! – on a daily basis. 

So much information comes at us about human suffering around the country, around the world. 

I think sometimes it can be really too much for us.  

We get overwhelmed, discouraged, paralyzed. Numb. 

Sometimes it might even have an impact on our capacity to see and respond to the needs and struggles that ARE close at hand. That we could reach out and touch. 

Nobody, nobody in this congregation, 

if someone were literally bleeding and starving on your doorstep, 

would just step over him and do nothing. 

Nobody. 

But maybe we need permission 

to lift our eyes from our doorstep, but NOT TOO FAR. 

What’s the human suffering… on my block? 

Within a mile of my home, my work, my school? 

To read our local papers, and wonder: what are the ways people are struggling or suffering in my city, my town, right here?

Sometimes people could feel like focusing more locally means they’re ceding responsibility or closing their eyes and hearts to big needs elsewhere. We all need to find our own balance, and feel deeply inside us what we need to carry and stand for. 

But there are good reasons to think locally about how to connect and help and serve. I’ve learned this from folks with a lot more wisdom and experience about how to respond to needs, tend folks’ humanity, and build towards a better future, so my list of reasons is not going to be comprehensive! But here are a few. 

Responding to local needs may mean we’re more able to make a real difference, because we have a better understanding of the stakeholders and the needs and constraints and possibilities.

Responding to local needs can build networks and relationships that will help us better respond to other situations in the future. 

Responding to local needs is wise – shrewd! – in a time when some of our friends and neighbors are under threat and living with a lot of fear – because local, real-life connections can be safer and more trustworthy ways to connect and help. 

In our Godly Play classroom we ask, I wonder where you are in this story? If the person in Jesus’ story that you feel closest to is Lazarus – if you are down or struggling, in pain or in need – I hope this community will respond to you with compassion and care. 

Maybe what we need to hear in Jesus’ story today is permission not to try to carry the weight of the whole world – that’s the consolation, the reassurance I mentioned. 

And instead, an invitation to look for who and what is hurting, in our neighborhoods and networks, and to ask ourselves and each other what we can do about it.

How we can help, even a little – not because we’re afraid of eternal flames, but because that’s the kind of people God made us to be. 

Not to step over a suffering neighbor, 

but to step into our shared humanity. 

May it be so. 

We are living in complicated times. Difficult times. Unprecedented times. I hear it so often – I say it so often – that the words start to feel like ashes in my mouth. And yet: it’s true. These are bitterly, deeply, foundation-crackingly complicated times in which to live. 

There are moments and places and circumstances where things feel crystal clear. Things like our desire to protect our trans and nonbinary friends, loved ones, selves; our determination to stand with immigrant neighbors; our outrage about threats to access to healthcare, huge cuts to lifesaving research, protections for the environment we all share.

AND there are also moments and places and circumstances when things feel incredibly murky – around and within us. Maybe you feel trapped in daily choices, compromises and constraints. Maybe it feels like your bedrock values, the ones that have led you to be who you are and do what you do, now have to be whispered – if not entirely silenced – instead of shouted from the rooftops. Maybe you struggle with knowing how to feel, let alone what to do or say. 

I’m hearing hints of this murkiness from folks who work for the federal government. From folks who work in education and health care. From folks with any kind of public profile or platform. From people just struggling with how to read the news and then get up and go on with their day. 

These kinds of conversations have reminded me of the idea of moral injury. Moral injury happens when life injures your sense of being able to trust your leaders and do what’s right. The concept arose out of studies of healthcare personnel prevented from providing care by institutional constraints, and military veterans who had experienced their leaders, friends, or selves doing things that felt wrong, in the moment or in retrospect. A PTSD diagnosis didn’t fully capture the moral anguish these folks expressed. 

The International Centre for Moral Injury states that moral injury “involves a profound sense of broken trust in ourselves, our leaders, governments and institutions to act in just and morally ‘good’ ways,” and the experience of “sustained and enduring negative moral emotions – guilt, shame, contempt and anger – that results from the betrayal, violation or suppression of deeply held or shared moral values.” (All citations from Wikipedia, Moral Injury entry.) 

Moral injury seems like a pretty good name for some of the internal murkiness – and associated distress! – that people are naming to me. Today’s Epistle from the first letter of Timothy urges Christians to pray for our political leaders, “so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life.” Pragmatic advice from a community at risk of political persecution – but I know that some of you struggle with how to respond to our liturgy’s invitation to pray for all those in authority, every Sunday. 

I know, too, that many have grappled deeply with how to feel, let alone what to say, in the wake of the killing of Charlie Kirk – whom some folks knew of as a Christian motivational speaker, and others knew as an incendiary voice who built his movement on targeting marginalized groups and stoking fear to mobilize outrage. Activist Gwen Snyder commented on Bluesky, “I think it is corrosive on a spiritual level to live in a world where we are so unused to justice that a political assassination feels [to some people] like cause for celebration.” Disciples of Christ pastor and writer Derek Penwell captured some of this corrosive confusion, writing, “Jesus says love your enemies. The timeline says humiliate them. I’m not trying to referee the news; I’m just trying to shepherd my own heart while the barometer drops. I’m stuck between the Sermon on the Mount and the comments section.”

Into all this disorienting murkiness, the Gospel of Luke drops this incredibly murky parable.

Some of Jesus’ parables have really clear messages! Like the lost and found parables: God loves us and will always seek us out! Good news! Some parables are a lot more perplexing, and this one is close to the top of that list. Not just for me! Every commentary I’ve looked at says some version of, Whoo. This one’s a doozy. 

Jesus tells different kinds of parables. They don’t all work the same way. For example, I often remind us not to assume that the king or the boss in every parable is a stand-in for God. Sometimes yes; sometimes no. Here, I think, no. This is a wisdom parable, not a kingdom parable – meaning it’s about the world as it is, not the world as God means it to be.

I suspect that the parable as Jesus told it ends somewhere before the word “Whoever.” It’s not clear whether that last little bouquet of sayings belongs with this parable, or not. Sometimes the Gospel writers added explanations to the parables, to make it clearer what they thought Jesus was talking about. Luke, here, is working with a source document consisting of a bunch of stories and sayings of Jesus. Sometimes he’s just trying to figure out how to string it together and fit it all into the Gospel narrative he gets from Mark. So these sayings may not match this parable at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if Jesus’ version ended with these words: “People who belong to this world are more clever in dealing with their peers than are people who belong to the light.” Or in the more poetic language of the NRSV translation: “The children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.” 

Let’s make sure we understand the story. There’s a boss, a rich man, a master, and there’s his business manager, sometimes called his steward. And the boss gets word that the manager has been wasting his money. 

Fun fact: the same word is used for the prodigal son’s wasting or squandering of his inheritance, in the story that comes just before this one! We don’t know what the manager has been up to, but apparently it’s nothing that has made him any lasting friends, or provided for his future – no secret account in Turks and Caicos. 

The boss calls the manager in to see him. What’s this I’m hearing about you?!? Bring me the account books immediately, show me what you’ve been doing! And then turn in your keys; you’re out. 

Jesus’ storytelling is so wonderful as he gives us the manager’s internal monologue: What am I going to do!? I’m not strong enough to dig, to earn my keep by manual labor, and I’m too proud to beg. I know what I’ll do – so that when I’ve turned in my keys here, some people will still welcome me into their houses. 

And then he starts calling in the people who owe something to his master. Maybe tenant farmers who work on the master’s land, maybe just ordinary neighboring folks who have gotten into hardship and had to borrow from the local wealthy landlord. 

The manager opens the account books, where the record of what is owed is kept, and he starts changing the numbers. Jesus gives us a couple of examples – a man who owes nine hundred gallons of olive oil has it reduced to four hundred and fifty; a man who owes a thousand bushels of wheat has it reduced to 800. But we’re to assume that this happens over and over, with ten, twenty, fifty different debtors. 

Walk with me briefly into the weeds about these debts. It was and is against Jewish religious law to charge interest to other Jews. But we know from ancient records that people found ways to make a debt grow without calling it interest. The manager would likely also have taken a fee from every debt he handled. 

So we don’t know whether the cuts to these debts are reducing the principal, what was originally borrowed, or just taking off all the extra. If the manager is changing the debts back to the original amount – as some Biblical scholars think – then that’s very clever, because it leaves the master in a bind. It would be hard to publicly demand back all that that interest, forbidden by religious law. There’s a wonderful irony in that from the master’s point of view, this is yet more “squandering” on the part of the manager. 

The manager isn’t liberating the debtors entirely – he doesn’t just burn the files – but he is easing their burden somewhat. But he’s not doing it out of altruism. He’s doing it so that when he gets fired, in, like, ten minutes, he’s not public enemy number one. So that some people might give him a little food and let him sleep in their barn for a while. 

Who are we supposed to side with, here? The verses tacked on at the end include this question: “If you haven’t been faithful with someone else’s property, who will give you your own?” It’s easy to read this as a condemnation of the manager’s squanderings. But by making lucrative, predatory loans, the master has ALSO arguably been unfaithful with other people’s property. I suspect that Jesus himself did not care very much about people paying back their debts to the penny, especially in a brutally exploitative economic system that ground down the poor and enriched the wealthy and corrupted the middle management. And Jesus’ original audience, mostly working-class folks, probably empathized with the debtors – and appreciated the manager’s cleverness, even if his motives were skewed.

What are we supposed to make of this parable?…

In the translation we read today, the master commends the manager for his cleverness. In other translations, the original Greek word there – phronimos – is translated as shrewd. 

Shrewd is an interesting word. To call someone shrewd is a compliment, though sometimes a grudging one. It means someone’s good at understanding a situation and making things work out the way they want. But shrewdness is hardly a virtue – in fact it’s oddly amoral; we might equally note the shrewdness of allies or enemies. Likewise clever – it’s not necessarily praise. 

Phronimos, that Greek word, is sometimes translated as wise or wisdom. But it’s a very different wisdom from the more often-used Greek word sophia – wisdom as deep insight with a quality of moral rootedness and righteousness. Sophia-wisdom is associated with the holy, with God, with seeing things as God sees them. Phronimos is a much more contextual and ambiguous kind of wisdom – the wisdom of knowing which way the wind blows, and which side one’s bread is buttered on. 

What I’m hearing from friends, from family, from all of you who are both friends and family in this household of faith, is that the internal murkiness of this season is really hard. Living with moral injury, with ambiguity, with compromise and silence, with trying to make the best of a wide variety of bad situations – when it’s often really unclear what the best is, or what best is even possible. 

It feels bad and weird and gross. 

If, like me, you come from a middle-class white family, you may feel very deeply that standing up, being your authentic self, and speaking your truth – even if your voice shakes, as they say – is always the right and good thing to do. Your responsibility and your birthright. Holding back our words, keeping our opinions to ourselvses, can feel like fire shut up in our bones, in the words of our friend the prophet Jeremiah. 

Many of us face hard questions about how to be able to keep doing the most good we can, under our general and particular circumstances. And our information is imperfect; we just have to make our best guess, and try – and sometimes, that trying means that tolerating or participating in things that are deeply uncomfortable to us. That violate our values and sense of self. 

Back in May, I was invited to a gathering of clergy to talk about how to preach and pastor in these times. A number of Black church pastors were part of the group. Our Scripture theme was the turn from the Book of Genesis into the Book of Exodus. At the end of Genesis, Joseph has ingratiated himself with Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, and he and his people, the Hebrews, are doing great, treated as part of the elite in Egyptian society. But a few generations pass and there’s a new Pharaoh, who doesn’t know or care about Joseph. And now the Hebrews, Joseph’s people, are enslaved, bitterly oppressed. 

At one point during our gathering, one of the Black clergy noted how surprised and distressed the white clergy seemed by our national circumstances. He leaned in and told us all – clearly, kindly – “We’ve always known we couldn’t trust Pharaoh.” 

It’s not news to us – he said, without saying – that the powers that be do not have our interests at heart. That the status quo was not built for our people’s flourishing, whether the party in power starts with an R or a D. 

One thing we can do – that white, middle-class “we” – in these frightening and murky times is to listen to those kinds of voices. To learn from people who have never assumed that they would be free to live as they please and speak their truth boldly. Who’ve had to be shrewd, clever, prudent, strategic – first to survive, then to build strength and move forward together.  

The little group here that’s been reading the work of 20th century Black theologian Howard Thurman together has appreciated grappling with and learning from Thurman’s mapping of the inner murkiness of life and ethics and humanity for Black folks in Jim Crow’s America. 

People who belong to this world are more shrewd in dealing with their peers than are people who belong to the light. We’re supposed to be people of the light, right? You are the light of the world; let your light shine, Jesus says elsewhere! But we also seem stuck being people of this world. And Jesus himself was, among other things, a man living in occupied territory. Shrewdness may not be a spiritual virtue – but if you read the Gospels with some understanding of the power relations of the time, you see Jesus being pretty shrewd. There’s a lot of strategic not-quite-saying things, a lot of ducking and dodging and plausible deniability – until the point when he’s ready for the final confrontation. Until he thinks his followers and his movement are ready to continue what he’s started without him. (If you’d like a fuller understanding of Jesus’ life and context, we’re planning a study on the Gospel of Matthew this winter; watch this space!) 

At the end of the parable, the master commends the dishonest manager for his shrewdness. Remember: The master in this story isn’t secretly God. But I still think it’s pretty interesting that Jesus ends the story with the master saying, You’re still fired, but that was pretty clever. 

And Jesus almost seems to echo the master’s grudging respect, as he observes – commends? – the shrewdness of the people of this world. He might be hinting that the people of light can be a little naive, a little idealistic, when it comes to doing what needs to be done in the murky reality in which we live. 

In Matthew’s Gospel Jesus tells his disciples that they’ll need to be as wise as serpents and innocent as doves. The word wise there, in the Greek, isn’t sophia. It’s phronimos. Shrewd as serpents.  A little sneaky, a little slippery. 

What we have in this quirky, murky parable, I think, is – not an endorsement, but an acknowledgment of the necessity of shrewdness. Sometimes squeezing some tiny bit of strategic goodness, or at least less-badness, out of a lousy situation is the best we can do. 

I want to be clear that I’m not telling people that I think you should be more quiet, more careful, more strategic. I’m speaking to the many of you who are already feeling like you have to be quiet, careful, and strategic – and are struggling with what that means for your conscience, your heart, and your soul.

It’s a murky season, beloveds. 

But the people of light can be shrewd when we have to. 

May God help us live in the tension of these times, and help us be both serpents and doves, shrewd and wise, light-bearers and world-dwellers. Amen.

Today the lectionary, our calendar of readings, brings us two well-known and important parables of Jesus: the lost sheep and the lost coin. But there’s a third parable that completes the set – the story known as the Prodigal Son. The lectionary breaks them up; we got that one in Lent earlier this year. But in Luke’s Gospel, it follows these two simpler stories. It’s printed in the Sunday Supplement for those who may not know it! In brief: there’s a man with two sons. The younger one demands his share of his father’s wealth, then leaves home and wastes the money on profligate living. When he’s flat broke, friendless, and feeding pigs for a living, he realizes that he could just go home. He thinks, “Even if Dad makes me live like one of the farmhands, I’d be better off than I am now.” So he heads for home, rehearsing his apology speech as he goes. His father sees him coming and RUNS to embrace him. The son starts his little speech: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you… But the father isn’t listening; he’s giving the servants orders to throw a party. Soon everyone’s celebrating – except the older son. He’s coming in from working in the fields when he hears music. When he finds out what’s going on, he’s furious. His father comes out to talk to him. The older son says, I’ve been working like a slave for you for all these years, and you’ve never held a party for me, but you do THIS for that irresponsible scumbag? And the father says, Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found. 

It’s a complicated story; there’s a lot going on! But we grappled with some of that back in March. Today we’re looking at the set of three lost and found stories that appear here together – only in the Gospel of Luke. The similarities are obvious. Something or someone is lost – a sheep, a coin, a son. Someone is seeking what is lost – the shepherd, a woman, a father who stands on the road scanning the horizon. 

And when the sheep, the coin, the son is found – there’s a celebration. A party! The shepherd brings home the wandering sheep, and calls together his friends and neighbors, saying, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost!” The woman finds the coin, and she, too, calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, “Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.” Surely the party costs more than the value of the lost coin! And the father tells the servants, “Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate, for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!”

I’ve heard, read, and preached sermons on these parables that focus on the straying, and the seeking. Back in March, a friend shared a sermon on the Prodigal Son story that focused on the celebrating. I’m going to share some of his insight today – from a sermon preached by Eric Biddy, rector of St. Paul’s, Augusta, Georgia. Eric writes, “Luke often gives some interpretation for a parable in the setting, the context, that comes just before. And here, the setting is scandalized religious folks. ‘All the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’ Jesus tells three parables in response to their complaints… I think this context of offended religious folks can help us see that the first point of the parable is not the ways that we are prodigal or resentful [like the sons]. Rather, the first and main point of the story is about the scandalous love, mercy, and joy of God.”

Last week – just a few verses before this text – we heard Jesus say, “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple,” and advising people to sit down and consider whether they really have what it takes to follow the way of Jesus.  

Whether they’re ready for everything that it could cost them – family harmony, earthly wealth and security, even their lives. It’s a pretty big pivot from all that caution, to all these parties. 

Yet these passages don’t clash, exactly. The invitation to join Jesus’ mission to seek and find the lost is deadly serious. Let’s peel away – if we can – the layers of religious rhetoric that treat lost as a shorthand for not Christian. Look at the people Jesus hangs around with: people who are pushed to the margins, seen as unimportant at best, unwanted and unclean at worst. For the sheep in the story, lost means alone and in danger from harsh terrain, weather, and predators. For the coin in the story, lost means that its value may never be seen and shared, that it won’t get to fulfill its purpose. For the sons in the story, lost means broken relationships, broken hearts, broken lives. 

When those are the stakes, the risks, the costs – then of course you throw a party when lost is found. When danger finds safety, loneliness finds belonging, pointlessness finds purpose. Last week I said that following Jesus isn’t all rainbows and puppy dogs and s’mores around the campfire. But sometimes it is! 

Eric writes, “[God’s] constant love for us and for others saves us and unsettles us, but it also throws a party. And that party I think gives us another chance to locate ourselves in [the] story [of the two sons]. Because, sure, we are used to finding ourselves here as people who know we need mercy, or who resent the mercy given to others. But I think that we together, as the church, might be the party that God’s outrageous love throws, out of sheer delight of being with us. There is more here than just the salvation of individual souls. There is also a communal party that is a kind of spilling out of the father’s love and joy… At that party we are certainly not the father, the source of mercy and grace. We are the partiers, sharing and sharing in that mercy, love, and grace.”

Maybe last week and this week’s Gospel texts together invite us to hold two things together: both the seriousness and urgency of following the way of Jesus – and the possibility, indeed the responsibility, of joy. 

There’s not much joy in today’s Old Testament lesson from the book of the prophet Jeremiah – or the Psalm that echoes its themes of intransigence and calamity. Writing this sermon, I pulled out the folder from my seminary Old Testament classes, twenty years ago, to remind myself of Jeremiah’s story. 

Jeremiah was called to prophetic ministry, speaking God’s words to God’s people, in a particularly tumultuous time for Judea and Jerusalem. The Northern Kingdom of Israel had already been conquered; Judea has become a vassal state of the Assyria, under their authority, forced to send their wealth to feed the appetite of the empire. Jeremiah begins his prophetic ministry in the year 627 before the time of Jesus. He preaches through the religious reforms of King Josiah, and Josiah’s death. Through the Babylonian Empire taking over from the Assyrians, and the installation of King Jehoiakim as a puppet king for Babylon. Jeremiah preaches through Jehoiakim’s rebellion against Babylon, his defeat and death, and the first deportation, when the Babylonians took most of the upper classes away from Judea to live in exile, with the intention of further subduing the territory. Jeremiah preaches through King Zedekiah’s rebellion against Babylon, through Babylon’s invasion of Judea and destruction of Jerusalem in the year 587, and through the second deportation, in which most of the surviving population are dragged away from their homeland, their holy land. Jeremiah himself is taken to Egypt by a small group of survivors, but continues to correspond with the exiles in Babylon. 

My Old Testament professor, Ellen Davis, described Jeremiah as prophesying over Jerusalem as her night comes down. The looming destruction of Jerusalem and Judea – as we see it in the terrifying poetry of today’s reading – is the central theme of the first 30 chapters. The text is full of oracles of warning and judgment: Turn back now, return to God’s ways! Though Jeremiah seems to have little hope that this will happen, and rightly so. 

In this passage, Jeremiah has a vision of the future – a vision that will be catastrophically fulfilled by Babylon’s invasion, years later: darkness, death, and desolation. Cities ruined, land abandoned and barren. A future that feels inevitable because the people and leaders are skilled in doing evil, but do not know how to do good. 

The Psalm picks up that theme: The foolish have said in their hearts, “There is no God” – meaning, here, that it doesn’t matter what I do, because there’s no power, no moral standard, to hold me to account. All are corrupt and commit abominable acts; everyone has proved faithless; there is none who does good – no, not one.  

There’s a kind of grace in encountering texts like this, sometimes – anybody else feel that? Because it makes us feel less alone in the chaos and bleakness of our times. When we feel untethered, unprotected, un-led – at least Jeremiah and the poet of this Psalm are right there with us?… 

Later in Jeremiah’s work – after the worst has happened – there is a shift in tone, towards imagining a future for God’s people beyond destruction and exile. This part of the book is sometimes beautifully called the Book of Consolation. In a few weeks, we’ll hear about Jeremiah buying a field while Jerusalem is under siege – a gesture of absurd hope. We’ll hear Jeremiah’s counsel to the exiles in Babylon: Live. Don’t give up. Your story isn’t over. It reminds me of a favorite line in a favorite song, Tom Rosenthal’s Throw the Fear: Keep watering the plants, love. 

Keep watering the plants, love. A gentle invitation to keep putting one foot in front of another. Not exactly a party. But: not giving in to despair, either. Holding onto life, love, the possibility of joy. And there are passages in the Book of Consolation that do imagine future celebration – like these verses from chapters 31: “Again I will build you, and you shall be built, O daughter Israel! Again you shall adorn yourself with your tambourines and go forth in the dance of the merrymakers!”

Which is all just to say that the Book of Jeremiah is one great big lost and found story. God’s people had wandered off like that wayward sheep: torn by thorns, menaced by lions and wolves, endangered by storms and the harsh, stony landscape itself. Lost. 

But God does not forget them. 

God seeks them out, and promises to bring them home. 

God throws a party. 

Eric Biddy writes, “…This is what it means to be members of the party that is the church. We are not those who have lived so righteously that we have deserved an [invitation]… We are those who were dead and have come to life again, to share in the scandalous joy and mercy that has brought us back to life, and to new and deeper life.To be a community made by this outrageous grace of God makes us a little odd. It should mean that at times our convictions and habits surprise and affront some of our neighbors. Because it means that we live by the currency of mercy, rather than esteem; of forgiveness rather than debt; of hope rather than reputation. It means that we think by the logic of resurrection, where what has seemed dead can come to life as long as the love of God keeps spilling out of all the containers within which we try to enclose it.” 

There are a lot of metaphors for the church – the local parish church like this one, or the capital-C Church, the whole messy body of Christ’s people throughout the world. Maybe the church is like a family, or a household. The church is like a city, or a building, or a ship. 

I’m taken by this idea of the church as a party. An ongoing celebration. Rejoice with me! Because somebody or something lost is always being found. And part of what attracts me about this idea is how strange and challenging it feels to think of church as a party, church as a place for the intentional cultivation of joy, when we’re living through such difficult times. When we’ve lived through a difficult freaking week! Is it OK to laugh? To be playful? To be planning parties and talent shows and community meals? 

I think it’s okay, and more than okay. I think it’s necessary. My smart friend Kyle Oliver says, Joy is a catalyst for change, not a reward. Louie Crew, who spent decades patiently nudging the Episcopal Church towards inclusion for LGBTQ+ folks, lived by the motto, Joy anyway! Alongside the undoubted seriousness of striving to follow Jesus in difficult times, we need joy. We need the release of laughter, the comfort of friendly companionship. We need to feel cared for and celebrated, and we need opportunities to care for and celebrate others. We need the work that joy does inside us and among us. 

Eric concludes, “We have been brought back to life whether we deserved it or not, and we keep hoping for the same among others, even our enemies, whether they deserve it or not.”

We have to celebrate and rejoice, because what was lost has been found.

Joy anyway, beloveds.

Amen. 

Did anybody notice that part of the Gospel sounded familiar? Maybe when Jesus said, “Give us the bread we need for today. Forgive us our sins…”? 

Did that remind you of something we do in church?… 

Do you know what that prayer is called?…

It’s called The Lord’s Prayer because Jesus, who we sometimes call The Lord, taught it to his friends. 

Anybody remember praying it with everybody saying the same words together at the same time? …  (Anybody see the movie Sinners?…) 

We used to do it that way here, too. A couple of things made us start to change, maybe seven or eight years ago. We were using the version that starts, Our Father in heaven… Instead of the version with the fancy old language that starts, Our Father who art in heaven… Because the fancy old language can be kind of confusing! Like, what does art mean? … But in the prayer it doesn’t mean that. It’s a fancy way to say is.

But! Some people like the fancy old language. Including some of our youth – big kids who have grown up and graduated now, like Simon and Florence. They sat in the front row, and they prayed with the fancy old words, and I could hear them. So people were already praying in a couple of different ways.

Then… I went to General Convention, which is a GREAT BIG gathering of Episcopalians from all over the place, to meet and talk and argue and worship together. And at General Convention, in worship, they tell us, Please pray this prayer in the language of your heart. Because not everybody there speaks English – or even if they do, it might not be their heart-language. 

So I got to see what it felt like to be in a room with a thousand other people who were praying the Lord’s Prayer in English and Spanish and Swahili and Creole and Navajo and French and ASL and so on. It was pretty cool!

So in our worship here, we started to say, Please pray in the language of your hearts. And we put a Spanish version in our bulletin, because Spanish might be some people’s heart-language here. And I put in another version that I liked to use, because it talked about God in different ways and just gave me some fresh words. And since then we’ve added or swapped in some other versions too. On All Ages Worship Sunday we sometimes add a few ASL signs to pray with our bodies too. 

I bet some people like the way we do it and I bet some people find it a little overwhelming! I understand that all those voices saying different things could be hard for some people’s ears. I think if you need to gently cover your ears and maybe close your eyes to get enough quiet inside yourself to pray, that’s OK. 

What I like about it is that I have a chance to really say the words and think about them, instead of just kind of keeping pace with everybody else. Does anybody say the Pledge at school? That can get kind of automatic, right? You don’t really think about the words, you just say them because it’s time to say them and everybody else is saying them. For me, the way we pray the Lord’s Prayer here helps it not be like that. 

Let’s talk for a minute about what’s actually in the prayer. This version is very short and simple – I bet it’s a lot like what Jesus really said, and that other stuff has gotten added on over time. 

Jesus calls God Father, here and in other places. He wants his followers to think about God as a loving parent. Now, listen: Human parents are imperfect! Some people had a parent who might give their child a snake, or a scorpion, or nothing. 

That’s a hard truth. For people with that experience, part of your life work is healing from not being loved well when you were a kid, and becoming someone who can love well. I have deep respect for people who do that work. 

Calling God Father can be hard for people who maybe had a not so great human father. Same with Mother! What Jesus wants us to know is that God loves us the way we hope a parent will love their children. 

The part right after that is a little hard to understand! Today we read, “Uphold the holiness of your name.” Many versions say, “Hallowed be your name.” “Hallowed” is a fancy way to say, “make holy.” I think this part of the prayer is to honor God, and remind ourselves that we’re talking to God, not just another person. 

Then it says, “Bring in your kingdom.” Jesus talks a lot about the kingdom of God and the ways it’s different from the way we run things here on earth. This part of the prayer is important for me! I like to pray for this world to become more like God’s dream. 

Then we get to, “Give us the bread we need for today.” Notice how simple that is! Last week some of the kids heard a book about MORE and ENOUGH. This is a prayer about ENOUGH. We might WANT lots of things, but what we NEED is enough food to get us through till tomorrow. 

Then Jesus’ prayer says, “Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who has wronged us. And don’t lead us into temptation!” In this part of the prayer we ask God to help us live right. When we do things we wish we hadn’t done, or don’t do things we wish we had done, we ask God to forgive us – and we remind ourselves that we should try to forgive other people, because we mess up too. And we ask God to help keep us out of trouble! 

That’s it! We turn towards God. We ask for the world to get a little bit more like God means it to be. We ask for the most basic things we need, and for help living the way God calls us to live. 

Our friend JonMichael likes to point out that Jesus was probably just giving his friends an example – like, here’s one way to pray! – but his friends grabbed onto it, like, THIS IS THE ONE WAY CHRISTIANS SHOULD PRAY, EVERY DAY, FOREVER.

Because we pray it SO much, every Sunday, maybe every day for some of you, I’ve sometimes gotten pretty bored with the Lord’s Prayer. But right now it feels like kind of a relief. There’s so much to pray about, and this prayer covers a lot of ground, simply. 

You can read whole books about the Lord’s Prayer if you want to! But that’s a little bit about what it is, and why we do it the way we do. I have some pages here with a question – what do YOU think is important to pray about, every single day? I would love to see whatever you might write or draw as an answer. 

But I’m going to talk a little bit longer. This is more of me talking than I usually try to do on All Ages Sundays. But when I started working on today’s lessons, I realized that this is in what I call Big Questions territory. This particular Big Question being, Why don’t I get what I pray for? (Which ties in with a possibly even bigger question, What is prayer?, but we will not tackle that today!)

Why don’t we get what we pray for? It seems like, in this Gospel, Jesus says we will. He says, “Ask and you will receive. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened to you.  Everyone who asks, receives!” Right? So how come I don’t always get what I ask for in prayer? 

It is a big question. I’ve thought about it myself; I’ve heard from other smart and wise people about how they understand it; I’ve talked with folks who are wrestling with it in their lives. I don’t think there’s one big answer. Here are some answers that I have found helpful. There are eight of them, if that’s helpful to you!

Number one: We’re praying for something we don’t need. Our culture tells us we need a lot of stuff that we really just want. Who knows the Janis Joplin song,  “O Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz? My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends…” Everybody else has fancy cars so she wants a fancy car too! It’s fine to want a fancy car… but does anybody need a fancy car? Sometimes we might pray for things that just aren’t really God’s department. 

Have you ever gone to a grown-up that loves you because, like, maybe you can’t get past a hard part in a video game you’re playing? And you can tell that they care that you’re upset, but they really don’t care about the problem in your video game? I think God feels like that about us some of the time.

Number two is related: We’re not praying for what we really need. That might sound the same as what I just said but it’s different. Maybe we’re praying, “Please let Stephanie be my friend again,” when the prayer underneath the prayer is, “Please help me find a friend I can trust and feel safe with.” Or, “Please buy me a Mercedes,” instead of, “Please help me feel good about myself. Please help me not be driven by envy and insecurity.” Sometimes if we can peel back what we think we need to what we really need, we might see how God is responding to that deeper need. 

Raise your hand if you’ve ever had somebody you love who really really wants something that you kinda hope they don’t get, because you don’t think it would be very good for them.

Number three: Maybe what we’re praying for breaks the rules. That’s a simple way to talk about something pretty mysterious. Here’s an example of what I mean. About a year and a half ago, we found out that our dog Kip had something wrong in his brain that meant that he was going to die, but probably not for a while. When we learned that, I didn’t start praying that that thing would go away. I prayed that we’d have some good time together, and that we’d be able to take good, kind care of him, and that it would be really clear when it was time to help him through death. 

And you know, I think we got what I prayed for. No pet lives forever. No person lives forever. Our bodies belong to this world; they break and wear out and wear down. I think maybe death seems like a much bigger deal to us than it does to God, because from God’s point of view we’re with God the whole time, during this life and after death. 

Now, listen: Sometimes I pray big fierce angry stubborn prayers! GOD, YOU FIX THIS RIGHT NOW. THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE. I don’t care what the rules are!! God doesn’t mind those prayers! God wants us to pray from our hearts! And sometimes, surprising, amazing, wonderful things happen. I know people who have experienced miracles. You should pray for what you truly, deeply hope for. But if it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t mean God didn’t hear you, or doesn’t love you or the person you’re praying for. 

Number four! The world isn’t the way it’s supposed to be! This is important. Some people like to say, “Everything happens for a reason.” I understand that can be a really comforting thought sometimes – although I think we have to be really really careful about saying it to other people who are going through something hard. I think I know what people mean when they say that everything happens for a reason, and I would say it a little differently. I would say: God, and people acting on God’s behalf, can bring some good out of terrible situations. 

Two weeks ago my wonderful, loving brother-in-law, John, was up on a ladder trimming branches on his property, when a falling branch somehow swept the ladder out from under him. He fell, breaking his elbow, ankle, pelvis, and several ribs. I know many of you are holding him in prayer – thank you so much! 

I don’t believe this accident was God’s intention for John, that God did this to John to punish him, or teach him something, or build his character. He’s quite a character already. 

But I do believe God can bring good out of it. I’m praying for silver linings, for healing and hope and possibility. When I was writing this sermon on Wednesday, 81 people had donated to a fundraiser for John and his wife Kelsey, to help support them while John is out of work. The money helps, but it’s also really amazing to see that network of care – family, friends, churches, friends of friends, friends of family, friends of churches, and so on. The money helps meet practical needs, but all those people choosing to help somebody that a lot of them don’t even know really helps lift hearts and spirits. 

Which brings me to point five! Maybe our prayers aren’t answered because somebody else isn’t cooperating. This might sound a little woo, but there are times when I feel God tap me on the shoulder and tell me to give someone my time, or pay attention to something and see how I could help. And I have sure seen many of you find moments and opportunities where you can step in and be a helper, a companion, someone who makes a difference, who turns something around or at least nudges it in the right direction. We’re not God’s dolls or God’s puppets; we’re free. God asks us to help make good happen, sometimes. And sometimes we miss it, because we’re too tired or busy or overwhelmed or scared, or maybe we just don’t wanna. Lots of good things that could happen, don’t, for all kinds of ordinary human reasons. 

Point six: Our prayers are answered, but not in the way we’re looking for. I bet a lot of people have experienced this, though you might have to think to remember when. A prayer journal can be a good tool for looking back and seeing: Hey, I was praying really hard about this, or for that, a while ago, and now, that’s resolved, it’s come to some kind of peace, it’s not at the top of my list or the top of my mind. Maybe something happened out there, or maybe something changed inside of me; but somehow, that thing isn’t driving my thoughts and my prayers anymore. 

I don’t really keep a prayer journal but I do keep a list of people I’m praying for, and even with that I can see how things get resolved, or released, or just get less important, even when the outcome that our prayers were pointed at doesn’t happen. 

Point seven – out of eight: There’s a bigger picture we don’t understand. There’s a bigger picture we don’t understand. Now, if somebody said that to me when I’m struggling with something hard or sad, I might punch them. But I also do think it’s true. A couple of years ago I read the apocryphal book of 2 Esdras. 2 Esdras is DEEPLY weird, but there’s one verse I really like. Esdras asks an angel, “Why are our years few and evil?” And the angel answers, “Don’t be in a greater hurry than the Most High. You indeed are in a hurry for yourself, but the Most High is in a hurry on behalf of many.” Let me put that in simpler words: You’re focused on your own little circle of needs and concerns. But God is trying to work for good and right and mercy and peace and justice and healing throughout the whole cosmos, the whole world, the whole system. It’s not that that makes my concerns less important. It just reminds me to have a little perspective, and to try to trust that God is working for good in all things, even when I can’t see it. 

Point eight. If you found the others unsatisfying, you’ll hate this one! Point eight is: I have no idea. The whole business is a mystery. A few thousand years ago God told the prophet Isaiah, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not my ways.” And Paul writes something similar in his letter to the Romans: “God’s riches, wisdom, and knowledge are so deep! They are as mysterious as God’s judgments! All things are from God and through God and for God. May the glory be to God forever. Amen.” What I like about that is that thinking abut how big and mysterious God is doesn’t make Paul feel overwhelmed or scared or lost; it makes him want to praise God. Even when it’s frustrating that there aren’t easy answers or quick solutions, knowing that Someone ultimately wise and ultimately kind is watching over things and working through things, in ways I can’t begin to underhand, holds some kind of comfort for me. 

So, this could just be a list of eight excuses for God not to answer our prayers. But I think it’s more like a list of eight reasons why the whole idea of answered prayer is kind of complicated, maybe a lot more complicated than Jesus makes it sound in today’s reading. When we ask, maybe what we are asking for isn’t what God wants for us. When we knock, maybe the door that opens isn’t the one we’re knocking on; maybe we don’t even realize that a door opened over there somewhere. 

I think what Jesus really wants us to know is that God is not like a gumball machine, but God does hear, when we pray; and God cares, and God often responds, one way or another. So we should talk to God about the things we want and the things we think we need. And maybe we can also talk to God about how we can help with the things God wants, for us or our loved ones or our communities or the world. 

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.