Years ago, when I was a young adult and completely baffled about my vocation – What was my life about? What kind of work did I want to do? What spiritual path, if any, did I want to follow? – I signed up for a workshop called “Opening the Heart.” For several weeks, a group of us met in a church parish hall, listening to a series of presentations and doing some guided meditation. One evening, the instructor explained that each of us had come into the world for a reason. Each of us had come here because there was something we needed to accomplish and to learn. She invited us to lie down on the floor, to relax our bodies and quiet our minds. Before long, the room fell silent. Then she invited us to imagine that before we came into the world, we chose who our parents would be. She asked us, why had we chosen our mother? Was there something we’d wanted to learn from our relationship with her? Why had we chosen our father? Was there something we’d wanted to learn from our relationship with him?
Answers floated into my mind as I lay there, reflecting in silence. Then came a final question: When the time came for us to be born, what had we come here to do? This time, the answer came through me with such unexpected force that I sat bolt upright and looked around in surprise. Surging through me was a single word: Love. The purpose of my life was to love. It was as simple and certain as that.
Early-summer morning, AshfieldThat experience turned out to be a touchstone moment – one of those moments when we have an experience that feels so vivid, so authentic and true that for the rest of our lives we can measure other religious experiences against it – do they feel similarly trustworthy and real? I came home that night knowing that whatever else I did with my life, I needed to follow a spiritual path that was about learning to love.
I mention this, of course, because our brief passage from John’s Gospel is about as clear and straightforward as can be. Jesus is preparing to leave his friends. The hour of his passion and death are almost upon him. Judas has slipped out into the night to fetch the soldiers and temple police who will carry out the arrest. As the door closes behind Judas, Jesus turns to his disciples, not with anxiety or fear, nor with anger against the person who will betray him, but with the same outpouring love that he expressed when he gave his body to them in the bread and wine, and when he humbly washed their feet. “I give you a new commandment,” he says, “that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:34-35).
These are urgent and tender words, the words of someone facing death and eager to convey what really matters. Jesus repeats the command to love many times in the chapters that follow. “This is my commandment,” he says in John 15, “that you love one another as I have loved you.” “You are my friends if you do what I command you.” “I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another” (John 15:12, 14, 17).
Command, command, command – that’s a strong word, isn’t it? Most of us aren’t too fond of being commanded to do something. Besides, how can someone “command” us to love, as if loving feelings or even a loving intention could be forced upon us or could be turned on and off like a faucet? If we imagine God as a power-hungry boss up there there who wants to order us around and tell us what to do, then we’ll probably want to dig in our heels if such a God commands us to love. Not interested.
But the God whom Jesus knew and loved is no autocratic bully “out there” but rather a compelling and gentle Presence whom Jesus met in his depths and whom Jesus cherished within all things and beyond all things. I take Jesus’ “commandment” that we abide in his love, and that we love one another as he loves us, as a way to describe the structure of reality. Because we humans are made in the image of God, we are made from love, we come from love, and we return to love at our journey’s end. In the meantime, during the short span of this life, whenever we abide in love and act in love, we are being true to who we really are. I wonder if the so-called “commandment” to love might not actually express the deepest longing of our hearts.
In any case, when John the Evangelist was very old, that was the message he eagerly brought to one community of faith after another: “Little children, love one another.” After spending time with Jesus, after years of meditating on Jesus’ life and teaching, the aging evangelist could find no more direct route into the heart of the Gospel than simply to say, “Little children, love one another.”
It takes a lifetime to follow Jesus and learn to love, and it’s easy to get it wrong, doing things that aren’t a bit loving and holding back from doing things that are. So, it’s no wonder we need to keep returning to self-examination and prayer, returning to worship and to Christian community, returning to practices of humility and gratitude, to practices of courage and curiosity, so that we can make ourselves available again to God’s loving Presence and keep growing into the love that is who we really are. Whenever we do come home to ourselves, whenever we do re-connect with the God who lives in our depths and in our midst, we discover again the sheer joy of saying the loving word that touches another person’s heart. We know again the pleasure of giving ourselves in love to the people around us. We feel again the happiness that comes when we find ways to love other people wisely and well.
The Rev. Addison Hall & Rev. Margaret outside St. John’s Church, May 18, 2025You know, there’s something about God’s love that always wants to expand, to go deeper and wider, to include people we might otherwise avoid. That’s what we see in our reading from the Book of Acts, where Peter learns in a vision that followers of Jesus are called to reach beyond the borders of Judaism and to welcome and include Gentiles, as well, for the Holy Spirit is clearly at work among them, too. The circle of love gets larger still when we turn to Psalm 148 – one of my favorite psalms! – with its ecstatic portrayal of every element and every living creature glorifying God. The whole of Creation, from top to bottom and everywhere in between, is praising God and filled with God’s love.
I’d like to say a word about last week’s diocesan clergy conference, which was led by the Rev. Stephanie Spellers. You may recognize her name, for she spent nine years alongside Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, whose well-known catchphrase was “If it’s not about love, it’s not about God.” With characteristic enthusiasm and verve, Stephanie summoned us and the whole Episcopal Church to embody the Jesus Movement. She argues that the Church is not a building and not an institution: it’s meant to be a movement, just as surely as the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-apartheid movement, the Gay Rights movement, and all the other movements that have drawn people together to fight for justice and freedom. Stephanie laid out several reasons why more than ever we need to understand ourselves as a Jesus Movement, and I’ll mention two.
First, we are presently living amidst a breathtaking degree of chaos, lies, corruption, and cruelty at the top levels of government. We brace ourselves for each day’s news, watching aghast as the social safety net is shredded and people lose health care or go hungry, as farmers suffer, as millionaires and billionaires enrich themselves, as individuals are picked off by masked agents and whisked away without a hearing, as our public lands and waters and all the creatures that depend on them are opened up to brutal exploitation, as members of the executive branch push to seize control of every part of our common life and punish those who oppose them, harassing judges, law firms, universities, and the media.1 We need a Jesus Movement in a time like this – a movement of people rooted in the love of the God and ready to work for justice, since, as Dr. Cornel West famously put it, justice is what love looks like in public.2
A second reason we need a Jesus Movement is because that resonates with young people. Stephanie recently spent two months traveling around the country and speaking with young people about their hopes and dreams and spiritual lives. She learned that many young people don’t trust the Church and they don’t trust Christianity. What they do trust is Jesus. We need a movement that centers Jesus, a movement that explicitly follows his path of creative non-violence and his mission of compassion, mercy, and hope.3 Stephanie walked us through the commandments – that word again! – of the Civil Rights Movement.4 The first one is this: “Meditate daily on the teachings and life of Jesus.”
I don’t know what we members of the Jesus Movement will feel called to do in the days ahead. Some of us dream of a mass mobilization and of non-violent resistance across all sectors of society, especially including labor, immigration, and climate. The day after clergy conference, I joined a hundred people carrying white roses who stood in the rain in front of Northampton’s City Hall to honor the memory of Sophie Scholl and the “White Rose” movement in 1940’s Germany. The movement’s greatest legacy is its message of resistance to fascism with peaceful nonviolence and civil disobedience. I was moved to learn that the last thing that Sophie’s mother said to her daughter before Sophie was executed was “Remember Jesus.”
This is my last sermon at St. John’s for a while, and I am deeply grateful for this sojourn with you as a supply priest over the past five months. I’ll be back before long to worship beside you in the pews, but I can’t think of a better message to convey in my parting words than to encourage all of us to welcome the love of Jesus and to meditate daily on his life and teachings. Years ago, when I taught classes on prayer at Episcopal Divinity School, I would invite my students to pick something every day that they would do with Jesus, or for Jesus, or to Jesus. That’s a practice that Mother Teresa of Calcutta taught her novices to do, and I think you’ll find, as I have, that even the simplest and most ordinary of tasks, like making your bed or washing the dishes or walking down the street can light up with new meaning when you do it with Jesus, or for Jesus, or to Jesus. We come to realize that every moment matters. That every word matters. That every choice we make matters. That love can flow through us at every moment of our lives. And that we want every person we meet this day to be as sure of love as they are of sunlight.
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1. Heather Cox Richardson, “Letters from an American,” May 14, 2025, reflects on a New York Times op-ed about “competitive authoritarianism.”
2. Dr. Cornel West is a theologian, political activist, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor of Philosophy & Christian Practice at Union Theological Seminary. He says: “Justice is what love looks like in public, just like tenderness is what love feels like in private.” To get a sense of Dr. West’s passionate commitment to justice, view his one-minute account on YouTube of his course on “Dietrich Bonhoeffer and James Baldwin.”
3. Thank you, Bishop Doug Fisher, for this phrase.
4. David Swift, “Martin Luther King’s Ten Commandments for Non-Violence,” Buffalo Quakers.
I’ve preached about God’s love for Creation for over 35 years, so – as you might guess – this is a topic dear to my heart. I don’t know what questions about preaching you bring to today’s discussion, but here are several questions that interest me: What aspects of our ancient and ever-evolving Christian faith need to be highlighted in our sermons about the Creator and the world that God created? What is God is calling us to preach at this precarious time in human history, when the web of life is reeling and the human experiment on this planet is at risk of collapse? What do we want our sermons to do?
Here are three things I hope our sermons will do: Restore reverence for the Earth; restore the feminine face of God; and restore agency and hope. I’ll take them one by one.
(1) When it comes to restoring reverence for the Earth, we know that our global economic system treats the living Earth as nothing more than inert material, as resources to be wantonly extracted, exploited, polluted, and thrown away for the profit, comfort, and convenience of a few. In such a society, people grow up treating the natural world as an “It,” as nothing more than an object. Of course, Christian teachings about dominion have for too long been supremely unhelpful, claiming that God authorizes and even blesses the assault of one species, Homo sapiens, on the rest of the created order.
View from Hotel Fontebello, Assisi
Restoring reverence for the Earth means holding fast to the deep biblical truth that God created, redeems, and sustains the whole of Creation, and that, as the psalmist says, “The Earth is the LORD’s and all that is in it” (Psalm 24:1). We preach about the sacredness of the created world not because we worship nature, but because God loved the world into being, has redeemed it, and fills it with divine Presence. We don’t preach about a far-away God in the sky, but about a transcendent God who is also intimately present to us. As we hear in Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, Jesus “ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things” (Ephesians 4:10). That’s why we encounter the crucified, risen, and ascended Christ in the natural world and why so many of us, in times of anguish or stress, find solace in turning our attention away from the noise of human chatter and toward the sounds and silence of wild creatures and landscapes. The Earth is the dwelling place of God – indeed, some theologians even imagine the created world as God’s body.
In my sermons I try to make it clear that nature is a place where humans have always encountered the Divine. As the Jesuit priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins, proclaimed, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” The created world is filled with God’s presence; it is sacred. Destroying the living Earth is therefore a desecration, a sin against the Creator, and participating in its healing and in the struggle to create a more just and gentle way of inhabiting our common home is our sacred calling as faithful disciples of Jesus. As I see it, restoring reverence for Earth should be a basic aim in all our preaching.
(2) Our second challenge and task to restore the feminine face of God. A Feast Day that honors the Creator invites us – no, summons us – to explore the Mystery of the First Person of the Trinity. As preachers, we can’t let our parishioners settle for the familiar image that automatically pops into everyone’s head when we talk about God: the old white guy in the sky, the man upstairs. As students of the Bible and theology, we know that that image is inadequate. Scripture, tradition, and our own lived experience tell us that the sacred Mystery we call “God” – a word that we can toss around glibly, as if we knew what we were talking about! – can’t be encompassed in any single image. The divine Mystery to which we gesture when we speak about the Ground of Being, or the Source of life, or the Creator who births the universe, that Mystery is beyond gender.
So, when we preachers use exclusively male metaphors for God, habitually refer to God as “he” and “him,” and implicitly assume or – God help us – assert the masculinity of God, I fear that we are controlling and limiting the experience of the members of our congregations. When we use exclusively male images for the Divine – King, Lord, Father – I fear that we are shutting down other ways of knowing and experiencing the First Person of the Trinity and unintentionally suggesting that women, unlike men, have no direct experience of the Divine. When we preachers lead our listeners to believe that women, unlike men, are not made in the full image and likeness of God, then I fear – and know – that women’s sense of personal power and authority and their trust in their own worth as human beings can be deeply damaged.
I welcome a Feast Day to honor the Creator as an opportunity to enlarge our religious imaginations and to preach in fresh ways about the Creator, who is present in all Creation and who is as much feminine as masculine. In my own spiritual journey, I have found it deeply meaningful – indeed, transforming – to pray to God not only as Father but also as Divine Mother. As I meet Her in prayer, I find Her pouring out love on this troubled world, grieving with us as we mourn the suffering that our planet is undergoing, and filling us with strength and courage to rise up as healers and justice-makers who birth new life. When we Christians perceive and experience the Divine Feminine in every Person of the Holy Trinity, a new energy for love and justice will be released among us to bless our ailing planet.
(3) A third vital aim of our preaching on Creation Day is to restore agency and hope. The forces arrayed against us are daunting. Authoritarian governments that care little for ordinary people, much less for the other creatures with whom we share this planet or for the generations yet to come – these unjust powers and principalities are muscling their way forward in my own country and in many countries around the world, expanding gas and oil production, cutting down forests, destroying fragile ecosystems, and tearing communities apart. Understandably, many of us wrestle with fear, outrage, and despair.
Our preaching must honor the hard facts that we face, both socially and ecologically, and give us space to grieve – and it must also push back against helplessness and restore our sense of agency and hope. We grow in hope by taking faithful action, so in my sermons about Creation I always include suggestions about things we can do, which, depending on our context, might include cutting back sharply on our use of fossil fuels, moving toward a plant-based diet, going solar, protecting forests, planting trees. Individual actions to reduce our household carbon footprint are essential to our moral integrity and they help to propel social change. Yet the scope and speed of the climate crisis also require engagement in collective action for social transformation. I love this quote from environmental justice activist, Mary Annaise Heglar, who says, “I don’t care if you recycle. Stop obsessing over your environmental ‘sins.’ Fight the oil and gas industry instead.”
Assisi sunset
So, in my sermons I encourage parishioners not only to live more lightly on Earth but also to engage in political change and to build cross-sector coalitions that safeguard life. Depending on our location, we can support the growing movement to push banks to stop financing fossil fuel projects. We can lobby for policies that support renewable energy, clean green jobs, and a just transition to a clean energy economy that addresses the needs of poor communities and communities of color, as well as the needs of workers in the fossil fuel industries. If we have financial investments, we can divest from fossil fuels. If we’re college graduates, we can push our alma mater to divest. Right now, leading activist groups in the United States are organizing for Sun Day on September 21, a national day of action in the U.S. to celebrate the power of renewable energy – a day that falls right at the center of Creation Season. (You can learn more about it at the website, Sunday.earth.) By inspiring significant action, preachers can challenge the deathly status quo of “business as usual” and rouse society out of apathy and hopelessness.
Here’s the bottom line: When we deliver a strong sermon and trust in the power of the Holy Spirit, we’re like the boy in the story of Jesus feeding the five thousand (John 6:1-14): we put our words in Jesus’ hands. Through his grace and power, maybe our small offering will become a catalyst that enables a crowd to be fed. Maybe our words, like those of the prophet Ezekiel, will be infused with the Spirit, enliven that valley of dead, dry bones, and breathe life into a multitude (Ezekiel 37:1-14).
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ This essay is from a presentation on preaching that Rev. Margaret recorded for the second annual international ecumenical conference in Assisi, Italy, which explored how Western Churches can incorporate a Feast Day of Creation into their liturgical calendars. Held in May 2025, the conference was entitled Creation Day & The Nicaea Centenary: Crystallizing the Ecumenical Dream of the New Liturgical Feast. The YouTube video is here.
Rev. Margaret contributed a 15-minute video about preaching to the second annual international ecumenical conference in Assisi, Italy, which explored how Western Churches can incorporate a Feast Day of Creation into their liturgical calendars. Held in May 2025, the conference was entitled Creation Day & The Nicaea Centenary: Crystallizing the Ecumenical Dream of the New Liturgical Feast.
Rev. Margaret reflects on three things that sermons should do: Restore reverence for the Earth; restore the feminine face of God; restore agency and hope.
Sermon for Easter Sunday
April 20, 2025
Delivered by the Rev. Dr. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas at St. John’s Episcopal Church, Ashfield, MA
John 20:1-8
Resurrection: Be the seed
Americans generally don’t put much stock in miracles. We’re a pragmatic, practical, down-to-earth bunch. Give us cold, hard facts, something we can measure, predict, and control. Proof is what we like. Objective evidence. Laws of nature. Give us logic, reason, an orderly universe whose workings are easily grasped by the human mind.
Miracles violate scientific proof. They fly in the face of the laws of nature. They make light of reason and logic, and they blow open the careful constructions of the mind. So, generally, we prefer not to believe in miracles. Maybe we come to church on Easter. Maybe we come to church every Sunday of the year. But we may tell ourselves: “Now, let’s not get carried away. Miracles aren’t real. Jesus didn’t really rise from the dead. That’s obviously impossible. I’m sure there’s a logical explanation. Maybe some disciples secretly stole the body so that they could point to the empty tomb and claim that Jesus had risen from the dead. Or maybe Jesus was only in a coma when he was taken down from the cross, and he eventually recovered. Or maybe the story of the resurrection is nothing more than a story, just a fantasy, just a legend.”The miracles we usually like best are the ones that are nice and small and safe. They make life pleasant. They don’t give anyone any trouble. We water our plants with Miracle-Gro. We mix our tuna fish with MiracleWhip. We listen to ads touting the latest “miracle” in computer software or laundry detergent or hair replacement. The only miracles that are real, says the market economy, are the “miracles” you can buy in your local store. Miracles are trivial things, consumer items, commodities: buy one, buy several. Stock your shelves. Either miracles are not real, we tell ourselves, or if they are real, they aren’t very important, they don’t matter very much.
Into this world of skepticism and doubt explodes the miracle of the first Easter: an empty tomb, two angels in white. We have no reports of what Jesus’ resurrection looked or sounded like, though some of us imagine it being something like a supernova, an explosion of light. But from our own experience, many of us resonate with what happened to Mary Magdalene in today’s Gospel story from John, which is the most intimate of all the resurrection stories. Many of us know what it’s like to be deep in grief, to weep as Mary did, standing outside the tomb, to feel desolate, hopeless, and lost, and then to be surprised by the sense of a loving Presence nearby. Maybe you felt personally addressed, as if you could hear deep within you, just as Mary Magdalene did, the sound of a voice tenderly saying your name. That’s how quiet and subtle the first stirrings of resurrection can be, coming to us not as a great flash of light but as a voice of love that we hear within us in the stillness of the quiet.1
That’s the beginning of miracle, the beginning of new life, and let me tell you – it’s a miracle that makes a difference, a miracle that the unjust powers and principalities that rule the world tried in vain to prevent in Jesus’ day and that to this day they try to conceal or deny. Why do the unjust powers of this world, the powers of Empire, try to suppress news of resurrection? Because resurrection threatens any society that worships domination and greed, any society in which the billionaire rich grow increasingly rich and sweep aside the safety net that protects those in need, any society whose leaders hoard their privilege and wealth and treat Mother Earth with the same casual disregard with which they treat the vulnerable poor.
Into this world of corruption, chaos, and war walked Jesus, a man of peace, a man so radiant with the all-embracing loving-kindness of God that to be in his presence was to be in the presence of God. He walked a path of non-violent love, teaching, healing, and blessing everyone he met, challenging them to understand that they too were children of God, born to express God’s love in everything they said and did, born to create communities of love in which no one was left out. When at last he confronted the imperial powers, he endured in his own body the brutalities of this world and conveyed until his last breath a spirit of forgiveness and non-violence.
And then, on Easter morning – ah! – something was unleashed into the world, a release of energy, an explosion of light. From out of the empty tomb, from out of our empty souls, the living Spirit of Christ springs forth, breaking open everything that is fearful, clenched, and small, unleashing a love that softens our hearts, melts all barriers, and encompasses all beings.
I love it that today is not only Easter Sunday but also Earth Sunday, the Sunday closest to Earth Day, April 22, when people around the country commit themselves to restoring the planet that we call home. I love it that this year Easter Sunday and Earth Sunday fall on the same day, for our Easter liturgies proclaim that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is good news not only for human beings but also for the whole of Creation – for rivers and mountains, forests and fields, hawks, whales, bats, and bees. At last night’s Great Vigil of Easter, we started by lighting a fire in the darkness, and we listened to Kevin Blanchard chant the ancient words:
Rejoice and sing now, all the round earth,bright with a glorious splendor,for darkness has been vanquished by our eternal King.Rejoice and sing now, all the round earth! Christ is risen!Creation Care banner made by St. Andrew’s Guild (Kathryn Aubry-McAvoy, Diane Kurkulonis, & Molly Scherm) of Ss. James and Andrew Episcopal Church, Greenfield. Pole stand by Jonathan A. Wright, author, artisan, and retired sustainable builder.
I don’t know about you, but I grew up thinking of “spirituality” as completely ethereal. The God I grew up with had no body. Being a good Christian was all about distancing oneself from the body and transcending the body – both my own body and the “body” of the natural world. The natural world and its wild diversity of creatures was essentially irrelevant and dispensable, just the backdrop to what was really important: human beings. Since the time of the Reformation, most of Western Christianity has had little to say – until recently – about the salvation of the natural world and the cosmos, as if only one species, Homo sapiens, were of any real interest to God. So, what a healing it is, what a restoration of the ancient biblical understanding – an understanding that was never forgotten by the indigenous people of the land – to know that the Earth is holy. Its creatures are holy. The whole created world is lit up with the presence of God, the presence of the risen Christ.
Dear friends, if Christ is alive, then we are embraced by a sacred power that can roll away stones, restore the dead to life, and offer meaning and hope in the very places where meaning has fled and hope has died.
If Christ is alive, then into our world a power has been released that is stronger than death, a source of love and energy and hope that nothing and no one can destroy.
If Christ is alive, then there is no suffering we can endure, no anguish we can bear, no loss or disappointment we can undergo that Christ himself does not suffer with us.
If Christ is alive, then each person is beloved and cherished by God, and we are drawn – no, we are summoned – to create new forms of community that overturn the systems of rank, privilege, and domination that divide us from each other and that destroy God’s Creation.
If Christ is alive, then we have no need to settle for a life that is overshadowed by the nagging fear of death, for eternal life does not begin after we die – it begins right here, in this very moment.
If Christ is alive, then we are free to be our largest, truest selves: a people free to be vulnerable, free to be generous, free to fall in love with life.
If Christ is alive, then there is nothing more real than love, nothing more true than love, nothing more enduring than love.
Through the power of resurrection, a great energy has been released into the world, and that power is already at work within us. It springs to new life when we gather to resist the forces of destruction and when we stand up to protect democracy and the rule of law. It springs to new life when we stand with the marginalized and the outcast. It springs to new life when we take time to pray and when we gather around the table to break bread in Jesus’ name. It springs to new life when we speak words that are truthful and kind, and when we treat ourselves and every human being with compassion and respect. It springs to new life when we refuse to abandon and abuse Mother Earth and when we search for ways to re-weave the web of life.
The powers-that-be will always try to stop resurrection. They will try to cancel the miracle, declare it impossible. They will try to shut down the dissidents, tear apart communities, and silence the song of life. But you can’t silence resurrection – not forever, not for long. Spring is on its way. Life will push up from the ground and break through the hard-packed soil of hopelessness and despair. As the old saying goes, “They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.”
Be the seed. Practice resurrection.2 It’s not enough to gaze at Christ’s resurrection from afar. Christ is not separate from us. It’s not only his miracle – it’s our miracle, too, a miracle in which each of us is invited to participate every day. Christ has risen to new life – and so have we.
Alleluia! Christ is Risen!
The Lord is Risen, indeed! Alleluia!
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1. “In the stillness of the quiet, if we listen, we can hear the whisper of the heart giving strength to weakness, courage to fear, hope to despair.” – Howard Thurman
2. Wendell Berry, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” https://allpoetry.com/poem/12622463-Manifesto–The-Mad-Farmer-Liberation-Front-by-Wendell-Berry
Sermon for Maundy Thursday
April 17, 2025
Delivered by the Rev. Dr. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas at St. John’s Episcopal Church, Ashfield, MA
John 13:1-17, 31b-35
Love at the core
Tonight’s service reminds me of a movie that came out a while back. I’ve only seen the trailer, not the movie, but I know it received some pretty dreadful reviews. The movie is named “The Core,” and according to Wikipedia, in a poll of hundreds of scientists about bad science fiction films, “The Core” was voted the worst.1 It may have been an impressively bad movie, but in the context of Holy Week I find the premise of the movie quite interesting. The idea behind the film is that the hot liquid center of the earth has stopped spinning, and the only way to save the planet from complete destruction is for someone to go down there and jumpstart the core by exploding some nuclear warheads. The science may be ridiculous, but isn’t the premise interesting? Here’s what it’s saying: there is a problem at the center of things and the only way to solve it is to bring in massive weapons and blow something up. That can be a pretty satisfying fantasy. If something deep down is wrong, we’ll grab some weapons, unleash a few bombs, and – wham-o! – problem solved. We will have saved the day, saved the world.
In general, I like action movies, but this Hollywood flick is delivering far more than entertainment. It’s also delivering a worldview, one that’s familiar to everyone here. According to this paradigm, our deepest problems can be solved by force. Whatever is ailing us or the world can be fixed by violence. Domination, intimidation, fear – these are the weapons we must use every day if we want any kind of lasting security or peace. When push comes to shove, we’re gonna haul out our arsenal of weapons and let ‘em fly.
Altar prepared for Maundy Thursday service, St. John’s, AshfieldI know what it’s like to jockey for position and to look out for number one. There are many ways to explode our own little power bombs – maybe by name-dropping or boasting or bullying, by spreading gossip or speaking harsh words of judgment, even contempt. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, right? That’s the worldview we learn to call “realistic,” and it’s reinforced every day. In a competitive marketplace, we’re taught that the bottom line is money, power, fame, and individual success. We learn to look at each other with wary eyes. What can I get from you? How can you be useful to me? In the words of Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel, we learn to suspect our neighbors as ourselves.2
Into this anxious and belligerent world comes the one who says, “I am among you as one who serves. My only weapon is love and my only desire is to set you free.” In Jesus, God comes among us as one who renounces worldly power and rejects the grasp for domination and control. Jesus offers a new paradigm and a new worldview: the only way to peace and security is to serve each other, to listen to each other, to make room for the stranger, to reach out to the marginalized and lost. The core of the world can’t be mended by violence. Force and fear will never save the world, much less save our souls. Only love can do that. Only love.
Now, more than ever, we must consider this second worldview and explore its creative possibilities, for evidently our federal government has been captured by the lust for domination and complete control. Under the thumb of domination, many of us – especially those directly targeted by the Administration – now live in fear. We have good reason to be afraid, but, to quote the Sufi poet Hafiz, “Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I’d like to see you in better living conditions.”
Jesus comes to show us the way out of fear, to give us a path to fullness of life. What does he do? “During supper, Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him” (John 13:2b-5). This is a gesture of deep humility, the gesture of someone who seeks not to dominate but to serve, not to hoard power but to bless and serve and strengthen those around him. Jesus is living in occupied territory under the boot of the Roman Empire, but he refuses to react to these harsh conditions with fear or force. Instead, he embodies – and he releases among us – a different kind of power, the power of God’s love.
In a moment, we will be invited to re-enact what Jesus did. Anyone who wishes may come forward, take off your shoes, have your feet washed and wash someone else’s feet. For many of us this is a vulnerable moment, a moment, perhaps, of having our dependence on each other uncomfortably exposed. Peter speaks for many of us when he flinches and draws back. “Lord, are you going to wash my feet? You will never wash my feet.” It is hard to be vulnerable, even with people who love us and want to support us. It is especially hard to be vulnerable in a power-hungry world where people elbow each other out of the way in their rush for domination and control. We long for unconditional love, but so often we draw back in embarrassment or suspicion when it is freely offered to us. How much safer to keep other people at a polite distance, to do our best not to need anyone and to go it alone! But that’s what love is about: the willingness to lay aside our weapons and our shields, the willingness to disclose who we really are and to encounter each other with kindness and respect.
Crocuses. Photo by Rachelle Kritzer-FilipekIn a world so bewitched by the drug of force, so addicted to the thrill of domination, we gather tonight, as we do in every Eucharist, inside a different paradigm. Tonight, we proclaim the power of community, the power of service, the power of working for a world in which no one lives in fear. No one. Tonight, we say: This is what God is like. This is the power at the center of reality and the center of our being: the power of love. Fear is not the only force at work in the world today,3 nor will fear have the last word.
Jesus is with us tonight as we wash each other’s feet and as we share in the bread and wine. Tomorrow, he will give himself to us in his outpouring of love on the cross. “Take me,” says Jesus. “I am holding nothing back.” Will we accept his love? Will we follow where he leads? Which path, which paradigm, will we choose?
I’ll close with a poem by Michael Leunig4:
There are only two feelings. Love and fear.
There are only two languages. Love and fear.
There are only two activities. Love and fear.
There are only two motives, two procedures,
two frameworks, two results. Love and fear.
Love and fear.
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1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Core
2. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, quoted by Rabbi Michael Lerner, “Spiritual Politics and the Post-Iraq Realities of Global Discourse,” from a talk given on 3/31/03 and excerpted in an email from the Tikkun Community.
3. Slogan spotted years ago on a poster from United Methodist Church at the Amtrak train station in Stamford, CT.
4. Michael Leunig, A Common Prayer: A Cartoonist Talks to God.
Sermon for Palm Sunday
April 13, 2025
Delivered by the Rev. Dr. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas at St. John’s Episcopal Church, Ashfield, MA
Luke 19:28-40 (Liturgy of the Palms)
Luke 22:14-23:56
Resistance rooted in love
I’d like to begin where today’s service began – with Jesus’ triumphal procession into Jerusalem, riding on a donkey. As you may know, theologians Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan pointed out with great insight some twenty years ago that this procession is charged not only with spiritual meaning, but also with political meaning. Jesus is heading “to the capital city of his people to confront Roman imperial power and religious collaboration with it.”1 He is heading to Jerusalem to proclaim the power of God’s love over the powers of this world that rule by force and domination.
That’s the procession that we remember every year on Palm Sunday and that we re-enact as we walk into church, palm branches held high. But, as Borg and Crossan point out, today we also remember a second procession that was entering Jerusalem at the same time, at the beginning of the week of Passover. Passover was what they call a “tinderbox time” in Jerusalem,2 when the Jewish people, oppressed and crushed by Roman rule, celebrated their divine liberation from the Egyptian Empire. Riots against the Roman Empire would sometimes break out at Passover, so every year the Roman governor – which, in the time of Jesus, was Pilate – would ride up to Jerusalem from the west, from the imperial capital of Caesarea, in a mighty show of force.
Our theologians invite us to imagine that imperial procession – cavalry on horseback, foot soldiers, banners, weapons gleaming in the sun, the sound of beating drums and marching feet, the smell of dust. Pilate’s procession from the west symbolized Roman imperial power.
By contrast, Jesus entered the city from the east, in what these theologians call a “counterprocession.” Whereas Pilate rode into the city on a war-horse, Jesus entered on a donkey. He chose to ride this humble animal because it recalls the prophet Zechariah, who predicted that the king of peace would come on a donkey (Zechariah 9:9-10). The king of peace would bring an end to war – no more chariots. No more war-horses. No more bowing and scraping. No more empire.
The procession that we re-enact on Palm Sunday is an act of resistance. The scene recorded in Luke’s Gospel in the Liturgy of the Palms sounds a lot like a conversation among people in the underground who plan in advance and speak in passwords to keep their arrangements secret. Jesus tells two of the disciples to go into the village ahead and to find a certain colt (that is, a young donkey), and he says, “If anyone asks you, “‘Why are you untying it?’ just say this, ‘The Lord needs it’” (Luke 19:30). If you’ve ever been part of a secret plan for non-violent civil disobedience, this is what it sounds like.
So, Palm Sunday presents us with two processions on a collision course: Jesus and Pilate, the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of Caesar.
I thought about this last week when I marched with tens of thousands of people through the streets of Boston. I know that several of you were also in Boston, and that others took part in local protests. Indeed, last Saturday over 1,200 “Hands Off” mass action protests were held across the country. Millions of Americans expressed their protest of what looks to many of us like the beginning of a police state in which opposition is silenced, dissidents are punished, the rule of law is overturned, and power is concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy men.
As I wrote in a blog post about the Boston rally, I rode the bus to Boston and shared the march and rally with Bishop Doug Fisher. I found it particularly moving to walk with him past the Episcopal cathedral in downtown Boston as the crowd slowly made its way up Tremont Street to Boston City Plaza. A big sign outside the cathedral listed the upcoming worship services for Holy Week, starting with Palm Sunday. And here we were, two thousand years later, in our own resolute and peaceful procession to protest Empire. The cathedral’s steps were filled with demonstrators and its doors were open to welcome anyone who wanted a quiet space, a drink of water, a bathroom break, or some words of support or prayer. I was grateful once again for Episcopalians and for all people of faith and goodwill who stand up against tyranny.
We are now entering the holiest days of the Christian calendar and marking the final week of Jesus’ life. Most of us have experienced these services many times and have contemplated many times the story of Jesus’ last days. Every year, through acts of prayerful imagination, we listen to these stories, and we try to visualize what Jesus was enduring and find our own place in the narrative. But this year feels different. This year, the reality of Empire, the reality of the machinery of cruelty and greed, has suddenly become vivid to us, suddenly become real.
I am filled with questions. How did Jesus find the strength – how do we find the strength – to proclaim the sovereignty of God in a society so corrupt and unjust that dissidents can be picked off the streets, detained on bogus charges, subjected to torture and humiliation, and, in Jesus’ case, almost casually executed? How did he – how do we – come to love God and neighbor so passionately that we are willing to give our lives to express that love? How did he – how do we – find the physical and moral courage to keep standing with the outcast and the condemned, to endure great suffering, and yet to maintain a merciful and forgiving heart? These are some of the questions I hold as we enter Holy Week.
I know that Jesus will help us find our way and give us the strength to follow him through this dark time with courage and faithfulness. I invite you to come to all the services and to give yourself the gift of being close to Jesus as we walk with him, and he walks with us.
I’d like to end by sharing a very simple way of praying that has meant a lot to me over the years and that you might find helpful as we walk the way of the love with Jesus. As I imagine it, the cross is not far away in Golgotha or limited to any single place and time. The cross of Christ is planted deep within me, deep within you, and at the cross I can pour out my anger, my fear, my grief, for I trust that at the cross of Christ, everything is perpetually being met by the forgiving love of God. Whatever I need to feel and to express – rage, sorrow, fear, guilt, whatever – all of it is being met by the never-failing, boundless love of God. Everything that we bring to God is transformed at the cross. It’s like alchemy, like piling up food scraps and turning it into good compost. As I see it, crucifixion is the place where God breaks through our numbness and denial and our hearts open wide to love the world in all its suffering and pain, in all its beauty and fragility.
At the cross, we allow ourselves to feel anger – because anger is an expression of love. We allow ourselves to feel emptiness – because emptiness creates a space for something new to arise. We allow ourselves to feel sorrow – because shedding tears can water the soul and bring new life. We allow ourselves to feel fear – for that in itself is an act of courage.3 Praying at the cross is where we can finally face and bear what we find so challenging, and where God in Christ can hold and bear for us what we cannot bear ourselves. Learning to breathe into the cross, allowing the power and love of God to make contact with everything that’s in us, sets us free from being reactive and helps us weave God’s love and strength into our very being.
We are not alone. Jesus is living these days with us and through us. From within your own life, with all its responsibilities, what is yours to do in this precarious time? How is Jesus inviting you to walk the path of love?
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1. Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, “Collision Course: Jesus’ Final Week,” Christian Century, March 20, 2007, p. 29. This homily is indebted to these scholars’ work. For a longer treatment, see Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach about Jesus’ Final Days
2. Ibid.
3. I’m indebted to Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in without Going Crazy (Novato, California: New World Library, 2012), especially the exercise “Breathing Through,” 73-75. For a more detailed presentation of the prayer that I call “Grounding in the Cross,” see Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, Christ’s Passion, Our Passions: Reflections on the Seven Last Words from the Cross (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 2002), 9-12.
Crammed inside a boisterous crowd, tucked between raincoats and elbows, strollers, banners, and dogs, with my ears ringing in the din of excited chatter, I couldn’t gauge the size of the throng around me on the Boston Common, much less hear the speakers holding forth from the Parkman Bandstand.
This is a good problem to have. So many thousands of people had gathered from far and wide to join Boston’s protest of the Trump administration that it was impossible from the center of things to get the big picture. I thought of those scenes in War and Peace where soldiers on the battlefield can see only what’s right in front of them. This wasn’t a war – the “Hands Off!” rallies marshalled in Boston and across the country on April 5, 2025, were explicitly intended to be non-violent – but Americans have suddenly been thrust into a high stakes battle. Everything we love and depend on – from clean air, clean water, and a livable climate to public health and public education, from Social Security, Medicare, and gun safety to free speech and human rights, democracy and the rule of law – everything is at risk or already being decimated. Now is the time to fight for what we hold dear.
I helped to organize two buses from Northampton, and at least eleven charter buses drove to Boston from western Massachusetts. I rode with Bishop Doug Fisher of the Episcopal Diocese of Western Massachusetts, and I was glad to march beside him past the Cathedral Church of St. Paul as the crowd slowly made its way up Tremont Street to Boston City Plaza. A big sign outside the Episcopal cathedral listed the upcoming worship services for Holy Week, which begins on Palm Sunday with Jesus’ nonviolent procession into Jerusalem to confront the powers-that-be. Here we were, two thousand years later, in our own resolute and peaceful procession to protest Empire. The cathedral’s steps were filled with demonstrators and its doors were open to welcome anyone who wanted a quiet space, a drink of water, a bathroom break, or some words of support or prayer. I was grateful once again for Episcopalians and all people of faith and goodwill who are standing up to tyranny. I thought of a sign I’d held just a few days before in a multi-faith protest outside a Northampton church: “This Christian is against Christian nationalism.”
It wasn’t until later that I would hear accounts of the millions of people taking part in simultaneous “Hands Off!” protests, see an aerial view of the crowds in downtown Boston, or hear excerpts of the rousing speeches (for that, check out a4-minute news clip from NBC). For now, as I swam in a seemingly endless sea of people moving toward Boston City Hall, I admired the creativity, determination, and resilience expressed in the handmade signs that were bobbing all around me.
One sign was a small poem: Where do I start?
so much wrong
so little cardboard
Another was even shorter: Hell no
One was a single word: No
Some signs were edgy and vulgar, using ridicule to express dissent. To cite one of the tamer examples, a photo of the President was pasted alongside the words: Does this ass makes my sign look big?
Some signs used a broad brush to convey the wrongs: So awful
even introverts are here
Many signs identified particular concerns: Hands off immigrants
Hands off farms and farmworkers
Hands off libraries
(dystopian novels should be fiction)
We need groceries, not Greenland
Medical research saves lives –A Ph.D. in Ebola
Some signs expressed alarm: Wake up America Your house is on fire
If you tolerate this you will be next
America: This is not a drill
Some were chilling: The Holocaust started out
as a mass deportation
Some expressed outrage: They seek safety and dreams Trump gives them cages
Stop pretending your racism is patriotism
Some deployed humor: Be responsible and neuter your DOGE
Clean up on aisle 47
I couldn’t afford to buy a politician
so I made this sign –Proud unpaid protester
Let’s just admit we may have taken this “Anyone can be President” thing a bit too far!
So much destruction
such little hands
Some signs made pithy declarations: Where law ends tyranny begins
No Nazis No kings
The only minorities
destroying our country are billionaires
Trans people should not bother you
more than Nazis
Some signs drew from history to bolster our resistance: They want 1939 Germany
Let’s give them 1789 France
Other signs called upon Boston’s leadership in the War of Independence: Boston:
Throw oligarchy in the harbor
Boston: Making tyrants nervous since 1775
We listened to drummers, and we joined in chants. Patriotism was in the air. Several times our part of the crowd joined in singing “America the Beautiful.” Not long after that, I heard a penny whistle play a merry “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” By now, rain was falling, and the wind was picking up. American flags, large and small, waved in the breeze.
Some of the signs appealed to our highest values: Love is resistance
Make lying wrong again
Empathy is not a weakness
Courage is contagious
I will never obey!!
Some signs were addressed not to the Administration but to fellow people in the crowd: Pace yourself Love yourself This is a marathon, not a sprint
Revolutions never happen If you are sitting on your couch
I noticed one man standing quietly beside a tree as the crowd streamed past. He was holding a small cardboard sign that read Blessed are the meek.
If you want to read an inspiring report on the scope and purpose of the Hands Off! protests, the biggest protests to date of the second Trump administration and the harbinger, God willing, of greater resistance to come, read Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Millions Stood Up: April 5 Hands Off Day of Action. Among other things, Solnit quotes journalist L.A. Kauffman, who commented, “A massive decentralized movement like this – everywhere all at once, with everybody pitching in – is extremely difficult for any regime, even the most autocratic, to derail. There are too many leaders, coordinating in too many different ways, for a movement like this to be easily neutralized.”
On the day after the “Hands Off” rallies, Christians gathered for Sunday morning worship and heard the words of the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 43:18-19):
Do not remember the former things,
or consider the things of old.
I am about to do a new thing;
now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I wonder if God’s Spirit is summoning ordinary Americans to do something new – to lay claim to our deepest hopes and highest values, to break out of old patterns, and to build community as we work together for a better world.
In the meantime, I must quote one final sign: No one let go of anyone’s hand.
What if I told you that when you walked into church this morning, you were one sort of person, but that when you walk out after the service, you’re going to be someone new? That you will be changed in a basic way? That’s the promise of the Gospel – that in Christ we enter a process of transformation that quickly or slowly changes who we are. St. Paul makes this clear in today’s epistle: “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” (2 Cor. 5:17). As one writer puts it, “That’s a description of earth-shaking change that goes right to the core of our being – something so fundamental that it changes the axis of our entire bearing.”1
“The Prodigal Son” at the altar of St. John’s, AshfieldIn Lent we’re given forty days in which to look closely at the axis of our lives. Where do my thoughts, attitudes, and choices still revolve around my own small self and the anxious, defensive question, “What about me? What’s in it for me?” And where have I begun to find a new axis in the expansive, never-failing love of God and neighbor? Transformation is what we’re up to in Lent – inner transformation that de-centers and de-thrones our little ego and reconciles us to God and neighbor. As St. Paul cries out in today’s epistle: “We entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Cor. 5: 20).
I can think of no finer story about reconciliation with God and neighbor than today’s parable from the Gospel of Luke. It’s often called the parable of the Prodigal Son, but of course that title isn’t quite accurate, since the parable is really about a loving father who has two sons. Some folks consider it the greatest short story in the world, and it’s certainly one of the best-known and best-loved parables that Jesus ever told.
This morning, I brought in a reproduction of part of Rembrandt’s painting, The Return of the Prodigal Son, which was given to my husband Jonas and me by Henri Nouwen, probably around the time that he was writing his classic book, The Return of the Prodigal Son2 – a book that has inspired thousands of Christians and countless sermons, including this one. The poster is a bit frayed around the edges, since in the course of leading retreats, my husband and I have carried it to many different places, but you can still make out the basic scene: the father is a bearded, nearly blind old man in a red cloak who has placed his large hands on the shoulders of his returning son. The son – half-barefoot, exhausted, his head shaven like that of a prisoner or a survivor of a concentration camp, robbed of his identity – wears no cloak, only torn undergarments. He kneels before the father, and his cheek is nestled against the father’s chest, as if he were listening to the heartbeat of God.
The original oil painting hangs in the Hermitage Museum of St. Petersburg, and it’s much bigger than this poster. In fact, it’s huge – 8 feet high and 6 feet wide – and it includes not only the scene that we see here, the embrace of the father and his wayward younger son; it also portrays the elder son and several other figures standing nearby. It was probably one of Rembrandt’s last works, painted when the artist was close to death.
The story starts like this: “There was a man who had two sons” (Luke 15:11). We don’t know why, but for some reason the younger son decides to go it alone. He’s itching to leave, to hit the road and do things his own way. He asks his father to give him his portion of his inheritance in advance – a quite presumptuous and irregular thing to do in that culture – and off he goes, money in hand, to what the story calls “a distant country” (Luke 15:13), where he squanders it all in “dissolute living” and eventually goes hungry. Desperate, he hires himself out in a job considered shameful: he feeds pigs, which are unclean animals according to Jewish law. Humiliated and close to starving, he wishes he could eat the very pods or corncobs that the pigs consume. That part of the story ends with the awful words that ring like a death sentence: “No one gave him anything” (Luke 15:16). He is entirely alone.
Let’s push the pause button and stop for a moment. I identify with this first part of the story and maybe you do, too. I know what it’s like – as maybe you do, too – to choose the go-it-alone path, the I-don’t-need-God path, the rebellious path that the Twelve-Step program calls “self-will run riot.” I’ve been there, done that, and maybe you have, too. We can do it for brief moments every day, and we can do it for long stretches of our lives. Whenever we choose that path, we leave our home in God – that place within ourselves where we feel seen and known and loved. Renouncing love, forsaking God and neighbor, we seize what we can for ourselves, and we do what we darn well please – the consequences be damned.
There are many ways to wind up in a distant country far from home, knowing we’ve betrayed our better selves. Somewhere along the way we took a wrong turn or made a bad choice, and now here we are, as isolated and desolate as the prodigal son with the pigs, feeling helpless and full of self-reproach. Lent is a good season for reflecting on how we as individuals have abandoned or rejected the God of love and squandered our inheritance – not to wallow in guilt, but to take a frank and fearless stock of our lives in the presence of the Holy One who heals. As it says in a poignant prayer of confession in the Book of Common Prayer, we know what’s it’s like to “[wander] far in a land that is waste.”3
But it’s not only we as individuals who can wander far in a land that is waste – whole societies can do that, too. The path that most of humanity has taken for the last two hundred years has brought us to a situation in which the web of life is unraveling before our eyes. Great populations of creatures – even entire species – have vanished. Global temperatures keep rising as we keep burning fossil fuels, and the current Administrations seems hell-bent on accelerating that deathly process, taking a chainsaw to the norms and laws that maintain democracy and keep the fabric of society knit together.
Is our society like the prodigal son, wandering far in a land that is waste? It sure feels that way. So how sweet it is to reach the story’s next line, its turning point: “When he came to himself…” (Luke 15:17). The young man comes to himself, he turns, and he starts to travel home. That’s such a great line: “He came to himself.” It’s as if he began to wake up, he began to break through the spell, he remembered who he was: someone created to love himself and his neighbor, to love the natural world, to love God. When we come to ourselves, we begin to make the journey home to God. Our basic nature, our truest nature, is found as we turn and head toward God, our divine Father and Mother, the lover of our souls and the source of all life.
What would it look like if we, as a society, “came to ourselves”? Maybe it would mean turning away from the illusion that we are separate from each other and must go it alone. Maybe it would mean taking hold of the truth that we belong to each other, that we belong to the Earth that sustains everything that lives, that we are made for connection and community. I can think of no more beautiful way to spend one’s life than to take part in what leaders like Joanna Macy and David C. Korten call the Great Turning, the epic transition from a deathly society to one that fosters life. That’s what philosopher Thomas Berry called the Great Work: our wholehearted effort to create a more just and sustainable world. And that’s what Archbishop Desmond Tutu called the “supreme work” of Jesus Christ: to reconcile us to God and to each other and to the whole of God’s Creation.4
In a time of such divisiveness and uncertainty, it’s powerful to remember that God loves it when we come to ourselves and begin the journey home to God. God gets happy when we make that turn, even if we’ve still got a long way to go. That’s what we see in the next part of the parable: The father, who seems to have been waiting eagerly for his son’s return, catches sight of him while he is “still far off.” “Filled with compassion” (Luke 15:20), he runs out to greet him. It’s completely undignified, this decisive moment when the old man hikes his robe above his shins and runs, breathing hard, sandals slapping and forehead perspiring, until he reaches his son and catches him up in his arms.
That moment of reunion is the one that Rembrandt portrays. It is a wordless moment, a moment of enormous stillness, in which the gentle arms of the father embrace the repentant son and draw him close. Can you imagine those kind hands on your shoulders? Can you imagine your face sheltered in the shadow of that warm red cloak, resting against the father’s loving heart? Our souls long for that experience of acceptance, forgiveness, and reconciliation. We may need to gaze at that scene for a long time until we can really take it in.
The repentant son tries to launch into his long apology, but the father will have none of it. He wants to throw a party. It’s all about joy – the father’s joy and the joy of the repentant son. Meanwhile, in the painting, the elder son, who resents his young and dissolute brother, stands in the shadows. He feels left out of the party, when – hey! – he was the brother who did everything right! He followed the rules! It’s not fair! But he, too, is deeply loved and invited to the table to share in the joy.
“My son,” says the father to the angry elder son, “you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours” (Luke 15:31). “Come home,” the father is saying. “I have always loved you, and my love for your brother in no way diminishes my love for you.”
That’s the scandal of the father’s love – and the scandal of the Eucharist, as well – for everyone is welcome to the feast, prodigal and respectable alike, all of us equally needing and equally embraced by the unconditional love of God. It’s a meal that can transform our consciousness and shift the axis of the self, so that we discover our center, our true self, in the unmerited and boundless love of God.
So – as a Celtic prayer puts it – come to the table of Christ, “you who feel weak and unworthy, you who come often and you who have stayed away. Come, you who love him and you who wish you could. Come, you who are hungry for friendship or forgiveness. Come, you who long for meaning or a just world.”5
Come. The Father is waiting for you, arms outstretched.
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1. Ronald H. Love, “Are we willing to throw a feast?”, SermonSuite.
2. Henri J.M Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Meditation on Fathers, Brothers, and Sons (NY: Doubleday, 1992).
3. The Book of Common Prayer (The Seabury Press, 1979), 450.
4. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Foreword, The Green Bible, New Revised Standard Version (New York: HarperOne, HarperCollins, 2008), I-14
5. Ray Simpson, Healing the Land: Natural Seasons, Sacraments, and Special Services, The Celtic Prayer Book, Volume 3 (Suffolk, England: Kevin Mayhew, 2004), 154, based on a prayer of the Iona Community.
Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? (Isaiah 58:6)
When my friend Bishop Mark Beckwith invited me to join him every Wednesday this Lent in a Sabbath fast from food, finance, and media,1 my first reaction was to flinch. I do not fast casually. I am in long-term recovery from an eating disorder that included long bouts of fasting. I know what it’s like to restrict food in a willful, desperate, and ultimately futile effort to regain control. Fasting to punish myself, to compensate for compulsive binges, or to lose weight gave me no path to freedom – quite the contrary. It only tightened addiction’s grip on my body and spirit.
Nevertheless, the forty days of Lent are traditionally a season for “self-examination and repentance,” “prayer, fasting, and self-denial,” and “reading and meditating on God’s holy Word.” Over decades of recovery I’ve discovered that fasting with a spiritual purpose can be a powerful tool for personal transformation. What’s more, in this nerve-wracking, bone-chilling, heart-breaking era of cruelty and chaos, with no end in sight, it’s time to reclaim the ancient practice of fasting.
I decided to join Bishop Mark this Lent in a weekly fast from eating, engaging in economic activity, and reading, watching, or listening to the news.
Why do I – why do we, why does anyone – carry out such a fast?
We fast to break out of the habits and routines of daily life and to say that something matters more than business as usual. Business as usual must stop.
We fast to break through the paralysis of disengagement and despair.
We fast to awaken from the trance of daily life and to regain our interior lives.
We fast to see through the illusions of an addictive culture inflamed by pleonexia, the Greek word for “a passion for more, an insatiability for more of what I already have.” Even if we hate shopping, it’s easy to be seduced by the notion that if we feel restless or uncomfortable, we should buy something. The purpose of advertising is not only to persuade us to buy one object or another, but also to create a climate of craving. What if we acknowledged the truth of the poet’s cry, “The world is too much with us; late and soon / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers”?2 What if we refused to let production and consumption define our lives?
We fast to listen closely to ourselves, to drop below the strident commercialism of the mall and the marketplace, below the cash register’s loud ka-ching! and the quiet click of a credit card sliding into place. We fast to listen to the deeper hungers of our hearts.
We fast to step away from the relentless onslaught of news primed to deliver outrage and shock.
We fast to give ourselves space to honor our pain for the world, which, as Joanna Macy has told us time and again, is how we develop compassion, the willingness and capacity to “suffer with.” She writes, “Of all the dangers we face, from climate chaos to nuclear war, none is so great as the deadening of our response.”
We fast to grieve and to mourn, praying our way through our anger, sorrow, and fear. We fast to admit our mortality and vulnerability, and our radical uncertainty about the future.
We fast to recognize our dependence on the grace of God and on the gift of the next breath.
We fast to listen in silence, with full attention. When the clamor of our minds has stilled, might we hear the silent melody of a deeper, subtler and more enduring song, a love song between God and the whole created order, between God and the soul?
We fast to attune ourselves to the love that wants to be the center of our lives.
We fast to purify ourselves. We fast to express repentance and remorse for the ways we have participated in, colluded with, and benefited from a system that is killing life.
We fast as an act of protest, longing to express in and through our bodies our grief and moral outrage that corporate and political powers are tearing this country and this planet apart. We fast to protest systems that privilege billionaires, crush the poor, and devour the Earth and all her communities. Many social-justice Christians have signed a pledge circulated by Faithful America to join a Lenten fast from pro-Trump corporations. We refuse to buy anything from corporations that have allied with Trump “through political contributions, removing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies, or placing their CEOs in powerful positions of government.” (You can find more information here.)
We fast to proclaim that another world is possible. We fast to share in the yearning of the whole Creation for redemption and restoration (Romans 8:22).
We fast to stand with everyone who is hungry, especially those whose stomachs are empty because of poverty, injustice, or a changing climate, where drought or heat have withered crops or where extreme storms and rising seas have destroyed homes.
We join our hunger to the hunger of every living being, human and more-than-human, that hungers for life and a healthy, peaceful, and habitable planet.
Our hunger pangs invite us to hunger for what really matters.
We fast to prepare ourselves for the work that lies ahead.
We fast because, as Karl Barth once said, “The contemplative who can stand back from a situation and see it for what it is, is more threatening to an unjust social system than the frenzied activist who is so involved in the situation that he [she] cannot see clearly at all.”
Friends, I am glad to be with you tonight as we observe Ash Wednesday and enter the Lenten season. In this time of political turmoil, it is especially precious to step into a season that invites reflection, repentance, and the recognition that we depend on the mercy of God.
Tonight’s reading from the prophet Isaiah makes it abundantly clear that living in alignment with God’s purposes is crucial not only for us as individuals but also for how we live together in society. The passage resounds with moral clarity: a nation may pretend to practice righteousness; it may claim to be drawing close to God; it may try to cloak its acts of injustice under the mantle of religion, but if people are in fact serving only their own interests, if the economic system is unjust and oppressive, if people refuse to share food with the hungry or provide shelter for the unhoused, then society has lost its moral compass and is rebelling against God. By contrast, in a society marked by justice and by the readiness to satisfy the needs of those in need, then – oh, what beautiful words! – “your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly… [Y]ou shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail… Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt… [You] shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in” (Isaiah 58:8a, 11b, 12b).
Winter shadows, AshfieldRepairers of the Breach is a national organization that takes its name from this passage from Isaiah. Inspired by Isaiah and the whole prophetic tradition, Repairers of the Breach aims to “[train] moral leaders and [build] social justice movements” that uplift “our deepest moral and constitutional values.” I’m glad to say that this morning, Repairers of the Breach, led by its founder, Bishop William J. Barber II, gathered clergy and faith leaders at an Episcopal church in Washington, D.C., for an Ash Wednesday National Call for Repentance and Truth-Telling. They called on our nation to “turn away from injustice, apathy, corruption, and oppression and recommit to the path of righteousness, truth, justice, and love.” After lament and prayer, they held a procession from the Supreme Court to the U.S. Capitol. Now that’s a meaningful public way to launch the 40 days of Lent!
But Lent also has a very private and personal side. Because we want to be close to Jesus, this season is a precious time to look closely at our lives and to ask God to help us see where we have not been living in right relationship with ourselves, with our neighbors, with the living world around us, and with God.
I’d like to say a word about two impulses that can spur that vital inner work: guilt and desire. Guilt is that uncomfortable feeling we get when we recognize that we haven’t been true to our deep self. We haven’t allowed God’s love to flow freely through us. In one way or another we’ve blocked that flow, as if piling rocks in a river. It’s easy to see what happens when a society is overtaken by greed, hardness of heart, and the grab for power – we’re witnessing it right now. But what happens when these energies overtake us? Can we stop to look closely at what’s going on? Can we ask God to give us strength to amend our lives?
Facing ourselves in the intimacy of our hearts is interior, solitary, and sometimes painful work. As Jesus observes in today’s Gospel, our spiritual practices are not for parading “before others in order to be seen by them” (Matthew 6:1). When we give alms or fast or pray, we don’t look for admiration and praise and “sound a trumpet before [us], as the hypocrites do” (Matthew 6:2). Rather, in the secrecy of our hearts we come before God in our weakness and need, trusting in God’s mercy.
I have to say that, as difficult as it may be, there is something wonderful – even liberating – in acknowledging our guilt. Admitting one’s sin is a great relief to the psyche, for at last we are released from the exhausting effort to keep presenting ourselves to ourselves and to others in the best possible light. At last, we can stop working so hard to shore up our self-image and can instead admit to ourselves, to others, and to God that in some ways we’ve failed, we’ve blown it. We are mortal, we are fallible, we have limits, and we’ve made mistakes, even dreadful mistakes. The more we grow in spiritual awareness and maturity, the more we will likely become even more sensitive to the darkness within ourselves. Teresa of Avila suggested the image of a glass of water held up to the light: when the light is bright, the motes of dirt in the water can be seen clearly. In the light of God’s presence, we can see more clearly how we’ve not been acting in loving ways.
But if Lent is motivated only by our failings, then we risk becoming increasingly self-hating, self-rejecting, and self-absorbed. Dwelling only on our guilt can slide us into a kind of depressive swamp, in which we become tempted to self-centeredness and despair. That’s why in some circles Lent has gotten a bad rap as nothing more than a morbid season in which to beat ourselves up.
So, alongside guilt, I want to highlight the other great motivator of the spiritual quest: desire. “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth,” Jesus tells us tonight, “but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven. . . For where your treasure is, there your hearts will be also” (Matthew 6:19a, 20a, 21). Jesus is speaking here in the language of desire. What is most precious to you? What do you love most? To what, to whom, do you ultimately want to give your life? Jesus is seeking to arouse desire is us, to make us restless with the puny identity that our culture gives us: consumers who want only to be entertained, distracted, well-fed, and comfortable. Jesus longs to generate in us a kind of holy impatience, a longing for real transformation. Deep down, something in us wants to awaken, to come alive, to fall in love with life and with the divine Source of life. Something within us wants us to grow. Sin is sometimes defined as the refusal to grow, as the stubborn insistence on staying the same and on separating ourselves from the love that is always available to us.
I invite us to take hold of these forty days as a gift to strengthen and support our journey of transformation. Some Lenten practices directly address guilt: we can ask God to guide us in fearless, honest self-examination. We may want to make a sacramental confession and to make amends. Yet some Lenten practices may be better framed in terms of desire. From a yearning to draw closer to God, many of us will renew our intention to set aside time for daily prayer. To sharpen our desire for God and to open ourselves to the flow of God’s love, some of us will fast, since every pang of hunger can remind us of our deeper hunger for God. Of course, fasting can take many forms, such as fasting from gossip or complaining, from carbon or from single-use plastic.
Some of us in the Diocese of Western Massachusetts will carry out a particular kind of Lenten fast this year, inspired by the work of Walter Brueggeman, who is one of today’s most influential Old Testament scholars. In his book Sabbath as Resistance, Brueggeman critiques a society in which production and consumption define our lives. So, our plan is to step out of that production-consumption economy every Wednesday in Lent and to fast from food, media, and finance.1 Maybe you’d like to join us.
God loved us into being and God longs to draw us close. When guilt or sorrow spur us to repentance: Thanks be to God. When desire for fullness of life pulls us forward: Thanks be to God. And for the God whose love embraces us every day of our lives and who will gather us home at our journey’s end: Thanks be to God.
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