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 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.
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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Sermon for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany
January 26, 2025
Delivered by the Rev. Dr. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas at St. John’s Episcopal Church, Ashfield, MA
Psalm 19
Luke 4:14-21
Fulfilled today in our hearing
Friends, before I say anything else I want to say how blessed I am to be with you this morning as preacher and celebrant. I’ve worshiped at St. John’s on and off since 1998, when my husband Jonas and I bought a house in Ashfield and began spending part of our summers here. When I finally left parish ministry and began serving the diocese as Missioner for Creation Care, this church gradually became the place on Sunday mornings where I most wanted to pray when I wasn’t on the road. And now I’ve retired, so here I am! It is good to be with you.
I especially treasure the opportunity to preach sometimes over the next few months because things are changing fast. It’s been quite a week. We’ve entered a new era in our life as a nation. In this uncertain time, filled with so much worry and woe, I am grateful to have an opportunity to reflect on how God is calling us to live out our faith. As we just sang, “I want to walk as a child of the light. I want to follow Jesus.”1 How do we follow Jesus in “such a time as this” (Esther 4:14)?
Our readings this morning have a thing or two to say about that. Let’s begin with the psalm. As you know, I’ve devoted much of my ministry to speaking about God’s love for the whole Creation and about our Christian calling to protect the web of life. So, I rejoice that the opening lines of today’s psalm proclaim the sacredness of the natural world (Psalm 19:1-4):
“The heavens declare the glory of God,*
and the firmament shows [God’s] handiwork.
One day tells its tale to another,*
and one night imparts knowledge to another.
Although they have no words or language,”
and their voices are not heard,
Their sound has gone out into all lands,*
and their message to the ends of the world.”
St. John’s Episcopal Church, Ashfield, MAThe psalmist knows that the living world declares God’s glory and conveys God’s presence. We’ve been trained by our culture to view the natural world as little more than objects or resources for us to use and exploit, whereas the Bible insists that the Earth belongs to God and is alive with God’s presence. When we gather to worship God inside this building, our worship is joining the worship already going on outside, in the wind and sunlight, in trees and streams. God comes to us through the natural world, so it’s not surprising that many of us, in times of anguish or stress, find solace in turning our attention away from the noise of human chatter and conflict and toward the silence of wild creatures and landscapes. The other night, when I couldn’t sleep, I got up and spent a long time watching the moon rise over the ridge beside our house. In her calm and silvery light, I felt God’s presence and I felt God’s peace, and I praised God with a grateful heart.
Because our faith and experience link God to the natural world, it’s deeply disturbing to witness its destruction. It hurts. When a new Administration comes to power and immediately withdraws from the Paris Climate Agreement; when it rolls back climate protections, ramps up domestic drilling, and spurns clean energy; when it turns a blind eye to the signs of Mother Earth’s distress, spoken in the language of massive wildfires and droughts, flooding and heat, my heart breaks with outrage and sorrow. Maybe yours does, too. The web of life upon which all our lives depend is fraying, and so, too, is the social fabric that knits our country together.
So, let’s turn to the passage from Luke’s Gospel, which comes like medicine to our weary souls. Jesus, “filled with the power of the Spirit” (Luke 4:14), returns from forty days in the wilderness and begins to teach in the synagogues of Galilee. You’ll remember that he was baptized just weeks before in the Jordan River, where the Holy Spirit descended upon him and a voice from heaven told him, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased” (Luke 3:22). The same loving Spirit drives Jesus out into the wilderness to face his temptations and to renounce the self-centered patterns of thought or behavior that could pull him off course. By the time Jesus returns to his hometown of Nazareth, he has purified his intention to give himself wholeheartedly to serving God.
The Gospel passage tells us that in Nazareth Jesus goes to the synagogue on the sabbath day, “as was his custom” (Luke 4:16). It’s clear that Jesus was a faithful Jew who shared in the liturgical life of his community. Synagogues generally had no professional rabbis; instead, the person presiding at the service would ask some respected person in the congregation to speak. Jesus was invited to teach that day, and so our scene unfolds.
The congregation watches as he stands up and receives the scroll. They watch him unroll it and find a passage from chapter 61 of the prophet Isaiah. The congregation listens as Jesus reads aloud. Maybe we can imagine the quiet authority in his voice as he reads: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18). The congregation watches as he rolls the scroll back up, hands it back to the attendant, and sits down – as was the custom of the time – before he begins his sermon. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue are fixed on Jesus as they wait in silence for him to speak.
What does he say? It’s probably the world’s shortest sermon: “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21). I suppose I could have spoken that sentence from the pulpit this morning and left it at that. I imagine something like a surge of energy being released around the room when Jesus said those words. Today the Scripture has been fulfilled, he says – not some other day, not some distant day, not some moment in the far-off future, but today, this very day, the Scripture has been fulfilled. To fulfill is to make actual, to bring to completion. Today this Scripture has been fulfilled, a fulfillment that his listeners have been ardently awaiting for years, for decades, for generation upon generation. The people of God – and the whole Creation – have long been waiting for the Messiah to come, waiting with expectation for the anointed one who will come at last to heal the broken-hearted and bring good news to the poor, to liberate the captives and give sight to the blind. Our weary, weary world has been longing forever for fulfillment – “groaning,” as St. Paul says in Romans (Romans 8:22-23) – as it waits to be made whole and to be set free, suffering like a woman in childbirth as it waits for an end to brutality and injustice, to war and natural disaster, and for the coming of peace, for the sounds of harmony and laughter.
“Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” I take this as Jesus’ mission statement, as Jesus’ announcement of who he is and why he’s come, in essence the same declaration which he expresses in the Gospel of John as “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). Jesus has been anointed by the Spirit to bring good news to the poor, to give sight to the blind, to proclaim release to the captives. He knows who he is – the Beloved of God – and he knows why he’s here and what he’s been sent here to do. Everything he does from this point on – preaching, teaching, healing, standing up to the unjust powers of this world, suffering, dying – everything he does will be for the sake of his mission, following that true north on his compass. His whole ministry will flow from this inaugural sermon and its vision of carrying out God’s mission of healing and reconciling and setting free.
Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in our hearing. Today is our day to claim our identity in Christ as the beloved of God, our day to affirm that we, too, have been anointed in baptism and are filled with the same Spirit with which Jesus was anointed and filled. We listen to the same inner voice of love to which Jesus listened. And we are sent out, as Jesus was sent out, to embody and make real the healing and liberating presence of God. It’s in dark times like these that we pray, “Shine in our hearts, Lord Jesus,”2 and, with whatever light we’ve been given, we find a way to serve and to set free.
I’ve never been prouder of, or more grateful for, the Episcopal Church than I’ve been this week. Shortly after the new President took office and began issuing executive orders related to deporting undocumented immigrants and restricting asylum, the top leaders of our Church sent a letter to the church affirming our Christian commitment to welcoming the stranger and protecting the most vulnerable among us. And I don’t think I will ever forget the moment when Bishop Mariann Budde paused on Tuesday during her sermon at the Washington National Cathedral, took a breath, looked directly at the President, and made a heartfelt appeal for him to have mercy on gay, lesbian, and transgender communities and on undocumented immigrants. If you haven’t yet watched her sermon online, I hope you will. It’s available on the National Cathedral’s YouTube channel This is what following Jesus looks like. This is what nonviolent resistance looks like.
Snow in forestLiving out our Christian calling can be risky and can be costly – indeed, just moments after Jesus finishes his sermon, the congregation runs him out of town and almost throws him over a cliff (Luke 4:28-30). But Jesus is undeterred. God willing, we will be, too. We can do difficult things when we feel led by the Holy Spirit.
I’ll close with three brief suggestions.
Here’s one: protect your inner stillness. Guard the peace within your heart. Do what you need to do – gaze at the moon, study the hills, feel the wind on your face. Listen to music. Breathe in the love of God. Taking time to pray is countercultural, even revolutionary work. As theologian 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.”
Next, make space for grief. Welcome God into what you’re feeling just now, whatever it may be – fear, sorrow, outrage, numbness, overwhelm. The God whom we know in Jesus loves us utterly and sits with us as we mourn or rage or rejoice, holding us in love and helping us see what we need to see, accept what we need to accept, and find courage to change what we need to change.
Finally, take your own next right step. Maybe you’ll reach out to someone who is lonely or to someone who is fearful of attack by the new Administration. Maybe you’ll join me in an activist group like ThirdAct.org, which is for folks over 60 who want to protect democracy and the climate. Maybe you’ll sign up for action alerts from the Episcopal Public Policy Network. These are just a few of the many ways we can offer healing and justice in a perilous time. The main thing is this: we know who we are, and we know why we’re here. For today this Scripture has been fulfilled in our hearing.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
1. Hymn #490 (words by Kathleen Thomerson) in The Hymnal 1982.
2. Ibid.
This morning, the day before the 2024 election, I awoke feeling immobile, almost paralyzed. It wasn’t fight or flight today – it was deer-in-headlights freeze. Curious, I listened for words that might arise from within. I heard “petty,” the tempting tug toward avoidance and distraction. I also heard “immensity.” The immense waves into which our country has been plunged are too vast to be seen clearly. Full understanding will come later.
Image by pinkzebra from Pixabay
Meanwhile, politicians, pundits, and opinion-purveyors rush to explain what’s going on and what’s likely to happen next. How did our country reach this degree of internal division and distrust? How much chaos and violence will erupt in the days ahead? To what extent will brutality and cruelty become official policy? How many lies will be spoken and driven like nails into a crucified Earth? Drill, drill, drill. Climate change is a hoax. I haven’t even mentioned the looming threats to the separation of church and state or to democratic norms, national security, immigrants, women, racial minorities, those who are gender nonconforming, or the poor.
With so much hanging in the balance, we search for signs in polls, focus groups, and interviews. I empathize with the ancients who scanned for messages in tea leaves and stars. Until the polls close, some of us will valiantly knock on doors, join phone banks, or plead for last-minute funds. Yet even after all the votes have been cast, the election won’t be over. We await the unspooling of conspiracy theories, along with claims of election fraud and stealing. Our nerves are taut. We brace ourselves. We try to breathe.
I turn to the poets. In “The Second Coming,” written shortly after World War I, Yeats gives us words to express our dread as we shiver at the brink of a harrowing election. The first stanza reads like a news report from the AP wire. It rings true. Whoever wins, contests, or unjustly seizes the election, we recognize that things are falling apart. The center does not hold.
I walk with the narrator into the second stanza, yearning with him for breakthrough and transformation, for the release of justice and mercy, for the triumph of goodness and truth. Indeed, I long with the narrator for Christ’s Second Coming. But no – what the poet sees emerging from the collective unconscious, from the Spiritus Mundi, is something else entirely: not God’s reign of mercy, love, and truth, but a terrifying Beast with vacant, pitiless eyes, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born. Resistance is futile – the desert birds may be “indignant,” but they are merely “shadows” that “reel” helplessly against the Beast’s inexorable approach.
I sit for hours with the poem, which means sitting with the possibility that the human experiment has failed. Have we indeed lost forever any sensitive attunement between what is human and what is wild, between falconer and falcon? Is everything flying apart and breaking down? Was human innocence nothing more than a “ceremony,” a superficial performance now drowned once and for all by the bloody reality of our lust for violence and power? Are we in the process of experiencing what some students of history consider the collapse of our civilization?
Just as I turn to the poets, so, also, I turn to Scripture. Less than four weeks from now, on the First Sunday of Advent, Christians will hear Jesus speak about his second coming – that last, great day sometime in the future when everything will be gathered up in love, when all that is broken will be healed, all that is estranged will be reconciled and forgiven, and the Lord of life will return at last to reign in glory.
This is the Second Coming that Yeats called into searing question even before human beings carried out and endured the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust, even before all the other instances of genocide and injustice enacted in the hundred-plus years that have passed since Yeats wrote this masterpiece of a poem. Beset by despair, do we sense already the hot breath of the Beast against our neck?
Yet to followers of Jesus, the promised Second Coming does not overlook or minimize the reality of social and ecological breakdown caused either by random forces or by human ignorance, malice, or greed. Biblical texts about the Second Coming sound a tragic note, for Jesus is bracingly realistic about the human condition. In several Gospel passages he foretells “wars and rumors of wars” (Mark 13:7); in mythic terms he speaks of earthquakes, famines, and persecution; he describes “distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken” (Luke 21:25-26).
As we head to Election Day and beyond, I hear three messages in passages about the Second Coming that give me strength. The first is: Don’t be surprised by suffering. Jesus warned of social breakdown and conflict. He anticipated natural and even cosmic disruption. Don’t be surprised by suffering, these texts remind us. Don’t take your suffering or the world’s suffering to mean that God is powerless, doesn’t care, or has abandoned us. Everything we experience is held within the loving gaze – indeed, within the embrace – of a just and merciful God. So, don’t be surprised.
A second message: Don’t be afraid. Although many people “will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world,” we should take heart. “Now when these things begin to take place,” says Jesus, “stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near” (Luke 21:28). “Stand up!” he says. “Raise your heads!” What bracing words to hear when we may feel like curling up in a ball or ducking our head under a pillow! It’s easy to feel hopeless about ecological collapse and climate change, easy to feel overwhelmed amidst a society being rent asunder. What can I possibly do? We may say to ourselves. What difference can I possibly make? But here comes Jesus, telling us to stand up and not be afraid. Our redemption is drawing near. He is very close (Luke 21:27).
And here comes message number three: Don’t fall asleep. Stay awake, says Jesus. “Be alert at all times” (Luke 21:36). Look for the small but telling signs that God is among us, bringing forth something new. Just as the branch of a fig tree becomes tender and puts forth its first, soft leaves, assuring us that summer’s abundance is near, so Jesus urges us to notice that even amidst chaos, violence, and endings, God’s kingdom (kindom) is drawing near. Even as some things collapse and fall away, something beautiful and new is being born.
As I hear it, Jesus is calling us to stand up and take part in that birth – the birth of a new community, the birth of a new society that lives more lightly on God’s good Earth and treats human beings and our fellow creatures with reverence, compassion, and respect. Here we are, in this perilous time, being called to stand up, raise our heads, and bear witness in word and deed to God’s never-failing love, which embraces the whole creation.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
When does a funeral become an act of resistance? When we come together to mourn everything we’ve lost because of a rapidly changing climate. When we dare to disclose how much sorrow and dread we feel every day as we watch the living world being destroyed. When we use the power of ritual to pull us out of fear and isolation into solidarity, courage, and the resolve to act. When our broken hearts impel us not only to grieve in private but also to protest in public.
Photo credit: Ken Schles
On July 8, two hundred people gathered on a sultry summer morning at the Manhattan headquarters of Citigroup, the largest funder of fossil fuel expansion to the tune of $396 billion in the last eight years alone. Our memorial service was organized by ThirdAct.org and one of a series of nonviolent direct actions being carried out this summer to protest Wall Street’s ongoing financing of climate chaos.
This was perhaps the most moving and memorable climate protest I’ve ever attended or helped to lead. Unlike the multitude of climate rallies whose mood is almost predictably defiant, this one was somber. After listening to speakers, of which I was one, we walked in slow procession around the massive, glass-fronted headquarters of Citigroup, led by a bagpiper. The stream of mourners included eight people dressed in sackcloth and ashes, walking single file and wearing signs such as “Ocean acidification,” “Hurricanes,” “Heat domes,” “Bleached coral.” When we reached the area in front of the building, mourners transformed the plaza into a cemetery, setting up tombstones that named individuals killed by heat and other climate stressors. Many people lay down as if dead, while others outlined their bodies in chalk: this wasn’t just a mass death, this was a crime scene. Instead of exchanging familiar chants (What do we want? Climate justice! When do we want it? Now!), we kept silence and listened to bagpipes and to the wail of a single voice, a woman’s anguished keening – “Can you hear the Earth? She is crying. She is dying.”
When the gong was sounded three times, the people risking arrest crowded the doors of Citibank, lying down or locking arms. Forty-six people, including Bill McKibben, were arrested, adding to the hundreds already arrested this summer in a variety of direct actions that, whether playful or solemn, family-friendly or intense, aim to disrupt and defy the ongoing corporate greed that drives fossil fuel expansion.
What strikes me now, looking back, is that actions like these remind me how to live well in a perilous time: we find friends, we link arms, we open our hearts, we stand with the trees, we stand with the suffering, we stand with the poor, we pray for the dead, and, yes, we fight like hell for the living.
I was the closing speaker before the procession began. Here is what I said:
I know it’s hot – but let’s pause for a moment to appreciate the living world around us, to notice the gift of sun and sky overheard, to notice the trees and green-growing things which give us oxygen that fills our lungs and with whom we exchange the elements of life as we breathe in and out. Let’s notice the good Earth beneath our feet, supporting our every step.
We are here today to stand up for life and we are not alone. We breathe and speak and march in the company – and with the support – of all the creatures and elements with whom we share this planet. We affirm our kinship with them, our interdependence, our mutual belonging.
With every religious tradition and with people of faith and good will everywhere, we renew our insistence that the Earth is holy and that it was given to us to cherish and protect, not to destroy.
Some of us are here because we’re frightened. Big banks like Citibank which finance fossil fuels and fossil fuel expansion are pushing the planet to record levels of heat, causing massive droughts, floods, monster hurricanes, wildfires. It is frighteningly clear that unless we change course fast, we won’t be able to leave our children and our children’s children a habitable world.
Some of us are here because we’re sad. Big banks like Citibank which fund fossil fuels are unraveling the web of life before our eyes, and we weep to acknowledge what we have lost and may soon lose, from coral reefs and glaciers to predictable seasons and moderate weather.
Some of us are here because we’re angry. We’re morally outraged when big banks like Citibank continue to pour money into building new pipelines and new fracking wells, although climate scientists around the world and organizations like the International Energy Agency and the United Nations have called for an end to any fossil fuel expansion. We’re outraged when big banks like Citibank continue to exploit and pollute frontline communities and to devastate the lives of Brown, Black, and Indigenous people.
Fear, sorrow, anger may have brought us here. But above all, we’re here because we love. We love this beautiful Earth. We love its creatures. We love each other. We love our children. The spirit of love that connects us to each other and to the land compels us to call upon Citibank: Quit propping up fossil fuels! Quit funding climate chaos! Invest instead in clean energy, and climate resilience, and healthy communities!
I was a parish priest for 25 years, and I’ve officiated at many funerals. I’ve prayed over, and laid to rest, the bodies of young and old. Today we’re going to participate in a funeral for the world we love. That breaks my heart. And it puts steel in my spine. I stand with you to proclaim that life, not death, will have the last word – to proclaim that love, not hatred or indifference, will have the last word. I stand with you to say that together we will fight for a better future.
We gather not only with fear, sorrow, and anger, but also with the fierceness of love, as we demand that Citibank quit funding dirty oil, gas, and coal, and turn with us toward life.
People of faith and good will cry out: Let it be known. Let it be known. The Earth is sacred, and we won’t stand idly by and let it be destroyed.
ThirdAct.org, the community of climate and democracy activists over 60 that was founded by Bill McKibben, was the lead organizer of this event and produced an excellent two-minute video.
Rev. Margaret is quoted in Common Dreams, “Elders Arrested Protesting Citibank Funding of Planet’s Destruction” (July 8, 2024), saying: “Citibank is destroying the world that God loved into being and entrusted to our care. At this decisive moment in history, we teeter on the brink of climate chaos. Now is the time for Citibank to choose life and to stop financing fossil fuels.” The article includes photos and a good short video.
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.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________
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 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.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________
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. 
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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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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