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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“Love your enemies” (Luke 6:27). That’s got to be one of the most distinctive, startling, and difficult things that Jesus ever said. The whole first sentence of today’s Gospel passage is worth re-reading: “Jesus said, “I say to you that listen, ‘Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.’” What happens inside you when you hear Jesus make this appeal? How do you receive this message in such a chaotic and frightening time? It’s not so easy to love our enemies these days – not that it’s ever been easy, but the new political reality into which this country has suddenly been plunged makes Jesus’ message even more demanding.
A sign at the Presidents Day rally held in Springfield, MA, February 17, 2025Over the past four weeks the impact of the current Administration has been compared by critics and supporters alike to a natural disaster. With approval or disapproval, people in this country and abroad have compared our newly elected leaders to a tornado, a tempest, a flood, a tsunami, a volcanic eruption, and an earthquake. This Administration is forcibly pushing aside whatever stands in its way, breaking down and emptying out the structures in its path, and rapidly re-shaping the landscape. Just about everything we care about is under threat: clean energy and a stable climate, public health, public education, medical and scientific research, immigrants and refugees, racial justice, gender justice, economic justice, human rights, the rule of law – the list goes on. I’m guessing that many of us in this room know someone who’s already been affected.
Love your enemies? Our response might well be, “I don’t think so! That’s an impossibly high bar, and not even a desirable one, when people and communities I care about, and values I hold dear, are being trampled and cast aside.” What’s circulating in many of us – including me – are feelings like anger, shock, anxiety, overwhelm, maybe even despair. Being asked to love our enemies can sound hopelessly sentimental, naïve and weak, out of step with the world’s harshness, out of touch with reality.
Research tells us that we humans react like other animals when we perceive danger. When we’re in a stressful or traumatic situation, our nervous system quickly – almost instantaneously – triggers one of four defense mechanisms to protect us: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.1 When we fight, we feel intensely angry, we act aggressively, we fight fire with fire. Cut me off in traffic? I’ll cut you off. Insult me? I’ll insult you back, but louder. Tit for tat, an eye for an eye, and before long the whole thing escalates into the world we see before us, the dog-eat-dog world of violence and war. I can’t help thinking of the anecdote about a parent who hears the kids squabbling and asks, “Hey, what’s going on? Who started this?” One child looks up, righteous and aggrieved, and says, “It all started when he hit me back.” That’s how it works, right? We’re practically hard-wired to react with aggression when someone threatens us, and it’s a snap to blame someone else for starting the fight.
Rather than fight in the face of danger, we may instead feel an instinctive impulse to flee – we just want to get out of there, to leave, to run away. When fight or flight doesn’t seem like an option, we may freeze in place, as threatened animals sometimes do – we “play dead”; we shut down emotionally; we feel numb or confused or as if we can’t move; we hold our breath. Or, as a fourth reaction, we may feel the impulse to fawn: that’s when we try to placate and please the one who is threatening or abusing us; we play “nice”; we do what we’re told; we pretend to agree; we kiss the ring.
Fight, flight, freeze, or fawn are all normal, involuntary, and immediate reactions to stress, triggered by fear and the wish to survive and stay safe. Much of our country is experiencing trauma right now, so it’s no wonder that many of us are freaking out and getting stuck in emotional reactivity.
Jesus was just as human as we are, and I’m guessing that he experienced these reactions, too, and with good reason: he was living in a time even more dangerous than ours, when the Roman Empire was occupying his homeland and ruling with an iron fist. Yet Jesus showed us another way. He could see that bouncing around on turbulent waves of fear and emotional reactivity left people adrift, thrashing about and drowning in a sea of endless suffering and violence. Jesus learned to live below those waves, from a deeper, quieter, calmer place, in union with the God he called Father. Love your enemies, he said – don’t go after them tooth and nail. Don’t be overcome by fear.
Why should we love our enemies? Because God loves them. Because God’s love is expansive, extravagant, and (to our possible annoyance) all-inclusive.2 As Jesus puts it in today’s Gospel text from Luke, “[God] is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked” (Luke 6:35). Jesus makes the same point in Matthew’s Gospel: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you… for [God] makes [the] sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:44-45). Like sunshine and rain, God’s boundless love is freely offered to everyone, without weighing their merit. God’s love embraces not only the people we love but also the people we reject and hate. As Anne Lamott puts it, “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
But loving our enemies doesn’t mean that we passively acquiesce to evil or injustice and become pious doormats. Far from it. What it does mean is that our activism and our efforts to heal and transform the world, our efforts to stop the harm and redress the wrong, come from a deeper, more grounded place. That’s where all the world’s great nonviolent movements for social justice have come from – from the discovery that beneath those agitated waves of fear and anger, there is a holy Love that is infinitely greater than our own small selves, a Love that bestows dignity on every human being and that sets us free from our own reactivity. Rooted in that love, we find strength for creative, nonviolent moral witness. We are less tempted to demonize each other and less prone to mirror the behavior of our enemy. We don’t have to react so automatically and blindly to anger with anger, to hatred with hatred. We learn not to react but to respond.
How do we live from that deeper, freer place? We learn to listen. I find it interesting that at the beginning of today’s Gospel passage, Jesus says explicitly that he is speaking to those who listen: “I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you…” Listening to his voice inside us is a discipline, a spiritual practice, as we pause to notice the impulses and the feelings that are swirling through us, give them space and a good hearing, and keep listening for the inner voice of love that is always sounding in our hearts. Because “[God] is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked,” we can feel free in prayer to be real with God: to confess and to share not only the parts of ourselves that we like and are proud of, the parts that we consider noble and good, but also the parts of ourselves that we’d much rather project onto our enemies – our murderous rage, for instance, our greed, our desire to dominate. Everything that we see outside us is also inside us – there is a Hitler inside us, and, yes, there is likewise an inner Trump – and our spiritual work is to keep making those parts of ourselves conscious, to keep offering them to God for healing, and to keep letting Love shape us and guide us and order our steps.
A banner outside St. John’s Episcopal Church, Ashfield, MA, reads “Immigrants and refugees welcome“For those of us who’ve been reeling with anger and fear, today’s psalm is worth praying through slowly, with its wonderful refrain repeated three times: “Do not fret yourself because of evildoers… Do not fret yourself over the one who prospers… Do not fret yourself; it leads only to evil” (Psalm 37:1a, 8a, 9b). How do we learn not to fret? The answer is hidden in verse 7, in the center of the psalm: “Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him” (Psalm 37:7). In stillness and silence, we wait for God to speak. We place our trust in the One who is always with us and who will never let us go, no matter what happens. When our actions spring from that kind of inner assurance and security, what we do is more likely to be effective and wise.
Whether we know it or not, God is at work behind the scenes and can take what was meant for harm and use it for good. That’s the crux of the story from Genesis: Joseph’s brothers did something evil when they sold him into slavery in Egypt, but now, years later, Joseph can see that God overcame their evil, setting Joseph on a circuitous path that resulted in his being able to provide plenty of food amidst a famine. When Joseph encounters his enemies again – in this case, his own brothers – rather than seek vengeance and retribution, he can love and forgive them, because he trusts in the providential care of God.
That’s how God’s love works, surprising us with the power to forgive, and blessing us with the longing, as John Wesley put it, to:
Do all the good [we] can,
By all the means [we] can,
In all the ways [we] can,
In all the places [we] can,
At all the times [we] can,
To all the people [we] can,
As long as ever [we] can.
There will be plenty to do in the days ahead as we look for ways to express the love of Christ and respond to the forces that have been unleashed in this country. The push for social change has historically included economic boycotts, and a campaign is building on social media to urge Americans not to buy anything from major retailers, online or in-person, this Friday, February 28, for 24 hours.3 This one-day, nationwide economic blackout is particularly aimed at large corporations that rolled back their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. It will be followed in March and April by several week-long boycotts of national chains like Amazon and Walmart.
Are we witnessing the first stirrings of a massive movement? I don’t know. What I do know is that we are children of God, made in God’s image, and that, with reverence for ourselves and for all created beings, God’s love can flow in powerful ways through our hands and eyes and words and choices.
To stay centered, day by day we can give ourselves the gift of stillness. We can listen inwardly and ask to be guided by what Dante calls “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.”4 Let’s take a moment of silence now, to rest in that love.
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1. Sarah Schuster, “The 4 Trauma Responses: Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn,” updated October 17, 2023.
2. C.f. Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 266-267. Wink calls loving our enemies “the acid test” of Christianity.
3. Ashley Parks, “Will Nationwide Economic Blackout on February 28 Work?”, Newsweek, February 13, 2025.
4. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Cantica Three, Paradise, trans. Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds, Canto XXXIII, line 145 (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1962), 347.
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.
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1. Hymn #490 (words by Kathleen Thomerson) in The Hymnal 1982.
2. Ibid.
Sermon for the First Sunday after the Epiphany: The Baptism of Our Lord
January 12, 2025
Prepared by the Rev. Dr. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas for Preaching for God’s World
I can’t think of a better day than today to speak about our Christian calling to care for God’s Creation. Today, on the First Sunday after the Epiphany, we hear, as we always do, the story of Jesus’ baptism. It’s one of the few events in Jesus’ life that is recorded in all four Gospels. Jesus is plunged by John the Baptist into the waters of the Jordan River. When Jesus emerges from its depths, the heavens are opened, the Spirit of God descends on him as gently as a dove, and a voice says: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased” (Luke 3:22).
We return to this story year after year because Jesus’s baptism is one of the basic stories that reveals who he is. It’s also a foundational story of our life in Christ, a story that reveals who we are, too. Most of us probably can’t remember our baptism and we may not give our baptism much thought. Yet today’s Gospel invites us to explore the power of Jesus’ baptism, and of ours. We live in challenging times, and I wonder if tapping into the power of our baptism can help us to live with clarity, compassion, and moral courage.
Before I reflect on baptism, I’d like to say a few words about the challenges that confront us. Just to look squarely at those challenges without tuning out or turning away is an act of courage. It takes courage to see clearly what human beings are doing to our precious planet. It takes courage to hold a steady gaze and to witness the melting glaciers and bleaching coral reefs, the withered fields and bone-dry reservoirs, the flash floods and massive downpours, the record waves of heat. It takes courage not to look away but to hold a steady gaze as climate change makes sea levels rise and islands disappear, as oceans grow acidic and full of plastic, and as vast populations of our fellow creatures disappear.1
Last October, a group of top scientists published the 2024 State of the Climate report.2 They were clear about the predicament in which we find ourselves. They wrote, “We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled.” They went on to say that “For half a century, global warming has been correctly predicted even before it was observed – and not only by independent academic scientists but also by fossil fuel companies. Despite these warnings, we are still moving in the wrong direction; fossil fuel emissions have increased to an all-time high, we are failing to avoid serious impacts, and we are witnessing the grim reality of the forecasts as climate impacts escalate, bringing forth scenes of unprecedented disasters around the world and human and nonhuman suffering.”
This is the world in which we live today, a world created and cherished by God, yet reeling from the heavy burden of human activities. So, as we return to the story of Jesus’ baptism, I consider it with a deep sense of seriousness and curiosity. Is it possible that in our baptism we’ve been given more power than we know? Is it possible that in this perilous and precarious time, we can draw fresh strength from our baptism? Is it possible that in our baptism God has given us great riches – riches that can give us strength to rise to the occasion and to act with compassion, clarity, and courage?
Image by falco from Pixabay
I’d like to name three of the riches that we receive in baptism. Maybe you can think of others – but here’s what I’ve got so far.
First, baptism gives us the power to live in love, to be rooted in love, to belong to a love that will never let us go. When we are baptized into Jesus Christ, we are baptized into the same compassion that led Jesus to step into the waters of the Jordan River and to be baptized by John. If you think about it, you’ll notice that Jesus didn’t need to be baptized. John the Baptist was preaching repentance from sin, but Jesus had no sin. He had nothing to repent, nothing to confess. He could have skipped the baptism and held himself separate from everyone else. He could have kept his distance and simply watched the masses of people crowding down to the river to confess their sins and receive forgiveness. And yet – he took the plunge. In an act of radical solidarity with all humankind, he stepped into the river and claimed the truth of interconnectedness.
Jesus chose to identify with all human beings, to identify with you, to identify with me. And not only with human beings but with the whole of God’s Creation. As John the Baptist said, those who are baptized into Christ are baptized “with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Luke 3:16). And you know what? The fire of God’s love keeps burning away all the chaff (Luke 3:17). Quickly or slowly, it burns away everything in us that is not love, opening our eyes so that we come to see the world as God sees it: as precious, sacred, and filled with God’s presence. The divine love into which we were plunged in baptism extends not only to us, and not only to human beings, but also to every sparrow and whale, every earthworm and orca, every maple tree and mountain.
So, baptism into Christ isn’t about joining a club or belonging to a tribe. It isn’t about affiliating with people who look like us or think like us. Baptism into Christ is a radical act of humility and compassion that joins us to the One who identifies with every human being and with the whole community of Creation. It joins us to a love that will never let us go.
Here’s a second gift of baptism: it puts our death behind us. In baptism, we are immersed in the waters of death. We have died in Christ; we have died with Christ. In a sense, our death has already taken place. It’s done. It’s over with. In baptism, we have died and been buried with Christ, and through the power of his resurrection, we are raised, here and now, to live with him. What this means is that we can acknowledge and face bad news without being overwhelmed by fear. The water we splash on a child at the baptismal font may seem inconsequential, but it’s a sign that we have nothing to fear from the death of the body. In fact, in the early centuries of the Church, Christians were called “those who have no fear of death.”3 To whatever extent we understand and trust that our death is behind us, we are set free from anguish and anxiety. We are set free to love without grasping, without possessiveness, without holding back.
And here is gift number three: baptized into a love that extends through all Creation and knows that life and not death will have the last word, we arise as healers and justice-seekers, as prophets and activists, as people unafraid to confront the powers-that-be. That’s what the early Church was known for. Remember the complaints that were lodged against the first followers of Jesus? They were charged with “turning the world upside down” and “acting contrary to the decrees of the emperor, saying that there is another king named Jesus” (Acts 17:6-7). As Christians we obey a higher authority. We refuse to settle for a killing status quo.
So – watch out, world! Wherever Christians are found, you will find people working – sometimes in difficult circumstances and against terrible odds – to bear witness to the love that has set us free. There are countless ways we do this, beginning with listening to the voices of Indigenous peoples, racial minorities, and the poor – the communities that are hurt first and worst by a changing climate. Some of us will resolve to ease back from a high-consuming lifestyle and begin living a more climate-friendly life, to cut back strongly on our use of fossil fuels, to switch our households to clean sources of energy, to eat less meat and to shift to a plant-based diet. Some of us will plant community gardens and pollinator gardens and find ways to support local land trusts that protect forests and farmland. Some of us will push big banks to quit funding fossil fuel expansion. Some of us will press elected officials to advocate for strong climate legislation, renewable energy, and good, “green” jobs. When speaking inside the halls of power isn’t enough, some of us will join the growing numbers of faith-filled people who bring our message to the streets, carrying out disruptive, peaceful civil disobedience and putting our bodies on the line.
Baptism gives us more power than we know – the power to attune ourselves day by day to the divine Love that created, redeemed, and sustains the whole Creation. If ever there were a time to bear witness to our faith and to the power of our baptism, now would be the time. If ever there were a time to hold fast to our vision of a world in which human beings live in right relationship with each other and with all our fellow creatures, now would be the time. Now is the time to take hold of the prophetic power of our baptism and to confront the forces within us and around us that are unraveling life on Earth.
How will you live out your baptism in the year ahead? How is God calling you to tap into the power that is yours in Christ?
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1. This paragraph is from Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, “Spiritual Practice and Sacred Activism in a Climate Emergency,” published in Buddhist Christian Studies, https://revivingcreation.org/spiritual-practice-and-sacred-activism-in-a-climate-emergency/
2. William J. Ripple et al, “The 2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth,” BioScience, Volume 74, Issue 12, December 2024, pp. 812–824.
3. Olivier Clement, The Roots of Christian Mysticism (first published in French as Sources, Paris: Editions Stock, 1982; first published in English, London: New City, 1993), p. 107.
This sermon is published here at Preaching for God’s World.
Sermon for the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 19B)
September 15, 2024
Delivered by the Rev. Dr. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas at the closing Eucharist for “Spiritual Resilience in Days of Trouble,” a conference and retreat for Provinces IV & V, held in Nazareth, KY
Isaiah 35:1-7, 10Proverbs 1:20-33Psalm 19Mark 8:27-38
Who are you? The ecological self
We’ve spent the last few days praying and reflecting on how God speaks to us in and through the natural world. On this Sunday morning in the very center of Creation Season, I wonder which of today’s readings most quicken your heart.
Maybe it’s the opening Song of Praise from Isaiah, where the prophet holds up a vision of the wilderness rejoicing and the dry land bursting into life, bursting into song. The God we love promises to come in glory, and although all of us shiver in fear sometimes when we consider what lies ahead as the Earth continues to warm and as eco-systems tremble on the brink of collapse, the poetry of Isaiah dares to set before us a future shaped by hope: we place our trust in a God who is with us and who comes to heal and save not only human communities but also the whole of God’s Creation. Because we are eager to align our actions with that longed-for future, we join the prophet in saying, “Strengthen the weary hands, and make firm the feeble knees… Be strong, do not fear!” Our liberating, life-giving God is among us and will give us strength day by day to serve the divine love that encompasses every person, every creature, every leaf and tree, every grain of sand. Like all the prophets, Isaiah reminds us that God planted within us an unshakable longing for justice, for kindness, for the Earth to be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea (Habakkuk 2:14). That’s the future the prophets hope for, and when that God-fueled hope awakens within us, we feel God’s energy. We are pulled off the sidelines and into the holy struggle to save everything we can as we work to build the more beautiful world that we long for.
The low wall of a gazebo served as our altar. During the service we gazed at the trees and felt the breeze.Or maybe it’s the passage from Proverbs that speaks to you, with its poignant image of divine Wisdom as a woman wandering the streets and public squares. She is crying out in search of someone who will listen to her counsel. She is warning that panic and anguish will be upon us if the wayward and the complacent refuse to listen, refuse to change course (Proverbs 1:20-33). I’m guessing that today’s prophets feel a lot like that – I know I sure do, and maybe you do, too – for scientists tell us that we have only a short span of time in which to change direction, to make a swift and just transition to clean renewable energy like sun and wind, and to avert the most catastrophic level of climate change. The reading from Proverbs is a piercing call to repentance for the sake of God’s Creation.
Or maybe you want to linger on Psalm 19, with its breathtaking opening line: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows [God’s] handiwork.” Those words are uttered by someone whose eyes are open to the presence of God in the living world, and we know what that’s like: we’ve spent time reflecting on how we meet the living Christ not only in the pages of Scripture, but also in the natural world. We’ve felt the quiet joy that can come upon us as we roam the gardens and trails of this place, as we listen for God in the wind and the birds, as we lift our eyes to gaze at an expanse of trees or look down to examine the smallest twig. And I haven’t even mentioned the moon and the bats and the fire! Psalm 19 reminds us that the crucified and risen Christ is at every moment giving himself to us in and as the living world around us.
All these passages reward contemplation, but it’s the Gospel passage that caught my attention. It begins with Jesus asking his disciples an easy question, “Who do people say that I am?” The answers come quickly – oh, some say you’re John the Baptist or Elijah or one of the prophets. Then Jesus sharpens the question: “But who do you say that I am?” There’s nothing like a good question to put us on the spot and shake us awake! Peter, like a good student, supplies what is presumably the correct answer: “You are the Messiah.” Yet it quickly becomes clear that Peter has no idea what that means. He doesn’t understand that Jesus is a Messiah who freely shares in our suffering and death, who endures humiliation and rejection, and who calls us to take up our cross and follow.
My point is that Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I am?” can’t be answered glibly. We’re all on a journey to discovering who Jesus really is, who God really it. Even a supposedly “correct” answer must be held lightly and patiently re-examined. Some questions are best kept open and lived into. As poet Rainer Maria Rilke famously advised in his Letters to a Young Poet, “Try to love the questions themselves… The point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.”1
That reminds me of how Francis of Assisi prayed. He spent most of his life outdoors, and I learned somewhere that when he prayed, he simply opened himself to God’s presence and contemplated two questions, “Who are you? And who am I?” Holding those questions changed him: he began to experience himself as interpenetrated with the rest of God’s Creation, so that eventually he could speak of Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind and Air, Sister Water, Brother Fire, Sister Earth, our Mother. Francis came to experience himself as kin with everything – he didn’t imagine that human beings were separate from the rest of the world that God created, much less that humans were “above” or “better than” the other creatures that God cherishes, or that we had any right to dominate or oppress them.
We began the retreat with a contemplative meditation on weeds, leaves, and wild flowers.So, let’s do what Francis did – let’s ask Jesus the same question that he asks us, “Jesus, who do you say that I am? Who am I, in your eyes?” We could explore who we are by considering passages from Scripture, but instead I suggest we take a moment to pray with a guided meditation from Rooted and Rising.2 Who are you? That’s a great question to ask as we close out this retreat.
If you like, feel free to close your eyes. I invite you to bring awareness to your body and to notice that as you breathe in, you’re taking in oxygen, which is released by trees and all green-growing things. As you breathe out, you exhale carbon dioxide, which in turn is being taken up by trees. Breath by breath, you are exchanging the elements of life with plants. . . As you follow your breath, let yourself feel your connection to the air, and to trees, the grass, and everything green.Now let yourself feel the weight of your body in the chair…. Notice your connection to the earth. You are as solid as the earth, and made from the same atoms of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen that make up the earth. To the earth, in the end, your body will return – earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. . . As you feel the weight of your body in the chair, feel your kinship with the earth.Now let yourself sense the inner motions within your body…. Maybe you’re aware of gurgling in your belly or the throb of your beating heart. Maybe you sense the circulation of blood as it moves through your body. Most of your bodyweight comes from water, just as most of our planet’s surface is made of water. Your blood is mostly water, and the saltwater content of your blood’s plasma is the same as the saltwater content of the sea. It’s as if within your body you were carrying rivers, lakes, and the ocean. Let yourself savor your body’s kinship with all fresh waters and with the sea.Now scan your body. Get a sense of your body as a whole. We’ve considered how your breathing connects you to the air and to plants. . . how you’re your body connects you to the earth. . . how the waters inside your body connect you to the planet’s waters and seas. . . Now consider this: all the elements that make up your body come from stars that exploded millions of years ago. . . Your body is made of the same elements – the carbon and nitrogen – that circulated through all the creatures that have ever lived, far into the distant past, and that will circulate through any beings that inhabit the world far into the distant future.Our bodies connect us to the air and to plants, to the earth, to waters and the sea, to the animals, and to the stars. Let yourself appreciate the goodness of the amazing body that God has given you and feel your kinship with the whole creation. Amen.
Thanks for sharing in this. Did you feel it? Did you glimpse your intimate connection to our brother-sister beings and to the Source of life itself? Joanna Macy calls this the “ecological self,”3 the self with a wide-open identity who knows we are part of the living body of Earth and of all that is. Joanna Macy may be Buddhist, but her deep insight into the nature of things shouldn’t surprise Christians. If we asked Jesus, “Who do you say that I am?”, I wonder if he’d say: “You are members of my body, you are members of each other, you are beloved members of the living world that I create, redeem, and sustain. You are never separated from me.”
That’s why he gave us the sacrament of Holy Communion, a core practice to sustain us and to strengthen our resilience and resolve to take bold climate action and join in the great work of building Beloved Community and healing God’s Creation. In a few moments, we will gather at this holy table so that everything in and around us can be lifted up and blessed – not only the bread and the wine, but also we ourselves and the whole creation. When the celebrant lifts up the bread and wine, all of Creation is lifted up. When the celebrant blesses the bread and wine, all of Creation is blessed. Christ meets us in the bread and wine, and once again God gives God’s self to us through the natural world. When we stretch out our hands to receive the bread, we take in what is natural and we take in Christ.
In the strength of the blessed and broken bread and of the blessed and poured-out wine, we dare to hope that we humans will respond with grateful hearts and come to treat the living world not as an object to exploit, but as a gift to receive, as something perishable and precious, utterly loved by God. We dare to hope that we will remember who we are and become at last who we were meant to be, a blessing on the earth.
After the post-communion prayer, we will hold a simple ceremony of commissioning as we bless each other on our way.
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1. Rainer Maria Rilke, “I want to beg you… to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer,” in Letters to a Young Poet, revised, transl. M.D. Herter Norton (NY: WW Norton & Company, 1934, 1962, 1954), 34-35.
2. Leah Schade and Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, ed., “Kinship with Creation,” Rooted and Rising: Voices of Courage in a ClimateCrisis (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019), 76-77.
3. Joanna Macy, World as Lover, World as Self, foreword by Thich Nhat Hanh (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1991) and Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone, Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in without Going Crazy (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2012). See also the work of Thomas Berry, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and Brian Swimme.
Sermon for the Fifth Sunday of Easter
April 28, 2024
Delivered by the Rev. Dr. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas
All Saints Episcopal Church, Worcester
1 John 4:7-21John 15:1-8
Earth Day: Abide in love
My message today boils down to three words: Abide in love. I hope you’ll keep listening, but I will confess right up front that everything I have to say will be a riff on that. Years ago, when I was in seminary, someone told me that a preacher should never say the word “love” in a sermon unless the readings assigned for the day clearly justified it. It’s advice I’ve ignored in pretty much every sermon I’ve ever preached, but if any day called for preaching about love, today would be the day. By my count, the word “love” shows up in some form a full 29 times in today’s passage from the First Letter of John: “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love…” (1 John 4:7-8). And so on.
And there’s another word that gets almost as brisk a workout in today’s readings: the word “abide.” That one shows up 14 times in our readings from the Letter of John and the Gospel of John. Put them together, and here’s what you get: “Abide in love,” and John himself will say it: “Those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them” (1 John 4:16b).
At All Saints Church, Worcester, with the Rev. Sam Smith (Rector) & the Rev. Meredyth Ward (Priest Associate)Abide in love. There’s rich meaning in those words on every level. To start with the most interior level, what would it be like for our minds to abide in love? Our minds are often quite scattered and distracted, jumping from one thing to the next like drops of oil bouncing on a hot frying pan. Moment by moment our minds are looking ahead and making plans; now they’re looking back into the past; now they’re analyzing and judging, having opinions about this and that: I like it, I don’t like it.
Abiding is different. Abiding in love means that our agitated, jumpy minds learn to become steady so that we can rest in the present moment, giving everything we do our full attention. Abiding in love can mean what’s sometimes called practicing the presence of God: we find ways throughout the day to keep bringing our awareness back to God’s loving presence, maybe by repeating the name of Jesus or by bringing awareness to our breath, consciously breathing in God’s love every time we inhale. Abiding in love can mean taking regular time to pray alone and in silence so that we can listen to the inner voice of love that is always sounding in our hearts. We tend to think that we have to reach out for God, as if God were far away, a distant destination we will eventually reach, maybe after we die. But in fact, as many spiritual teachers attest, through an attentive practice of quiet prayer we come to realize that God already abides within us, that God is our Source and is simultaneously within and beyond us.
Abide in love! What an invitation that is to go through the day with an intimate sense of God’s presence!
The invitation speaks at a wider level, too, in our relationships with other people. What would it look like if you were abiding in love in your contact with others? Abiding in love might mean renewing the intention to be honest and vulnerable and real; it might mean listening carefully to someone, offering encouragement and support, trying to “be there” for the other, even if it comes at a cost to ourselves; it might mean the hard work of admitting mistakes, of apologizing and making amends; it might mean reaching out in love to those who are different or forgotten, to the stranger, the marginalized, the lost. Abide in love – that’s about creating and cultivating relationships that flow from the love that God’s Spirit is always pouring into our hearts (Romans 5:5).
But there’s an even larger level to think about: what might it mean to abide in love in relation to the living world around us? Jesus invites us in today’s Gospel to abide in him as he abides in us. To express that intimacy, he uses an image from nature: he is the vine, and we are the branches – that’s how close we are to him. Have you ever noticed how many of his parables and stories use natural images? I think of him speaking about sheep and seeds, about sparrows, lilies, weeds, and wheat. Jesus lived close to the Earth. In the Gospels we see him walking along the seashore and up mountains, taking boats out on the lake, spending weeks alone in prayer in the wilderness. Jesus understood the inherent sacredness not only of human beings but also of the whole created world, all of it lit up with the presence of God.
And his life, death, and resurrection was good news not only for human beings but also for the rest of the living world. The Bible tells us that God loved the whole world into being, sustains all things through the Holy Spirit, and through Christ redeemed and reconciled all things in heaven and on earth “by making peace through the blood of the cross” (Colossians 1:19). Protecting the Earth that God entrusted to our care is not just an “add-on,” a sideline or optional hobby for a few Christians who call themselves “environmentalists” – it is central to being Christian.
So, when Jesus says, “Abide in love,” I hear a summons to take hold of the deep ecological meaning of what it means to follow him. We need to hear that call to abide in love, for we have broken faith with the living world. Our society’s relentless extraction and burning of coal, gas, and oil is pushing our planet wildly out of balance. Every living system is in decline and the web of life is unraveling before our eyes. The world keeps breaking records for heat, and last year was the warmest year on record, by far. We now live in a world where atmospheric rivers can fill the sky and a month of rain can fall in one day; where wildfires can be so intense that they create their own weather; where hurricanes can be so fierce that we need to create new categories for storms. It’s not surprising that many of us can lie awake at night, wondering what the future will hold for our children.
So – now is the time to reclaim our God-given connection with the earth. Now is the time to renew our union with God and all God’s creation, which includes not just our human fellows but all living creatures and the larger eco-systems on which we all depend.
I hope you’ll join me after the service to talk about what we can do. Now is the time, as theologian Sallie McFague would say, to recognize that the world is not a hotel, but our home.1 When we visit a hotel, we may feel entitled to use copious amount of hot water, to throw towels on the floor, to use and discard everything in sight and then to head to the next hotel – in short, to exercise what she calls the “Kleenex perspective” of the world. But when we realize that in fact the earth is our home – that God created it and loves every inch of it and entrusts it to our care – then everything changes. We realize that we live here; we belong here; we can no longer tolerate a lifestyle that exhausts the planet’s resources and that treats land, sea, and sky alike as receptacles for waste.
In a few moments we will share the bread and wine of the Eucharist, given to us by God in Christ with such tenderness and at such great cost. We will gather at that holy table, as we always do, so that everything within us and around us can be lifted up and blessed – not only the bread and the wine, but, also, we ourselves, and the whole creation, every leaf of it and every grain of sand. Sharing the Eucharist helps us to perceive at last not only our own belovedness, our own blessedness in God, but also the fact that everyone is beloved, all beings are blessed. Everyone and everything are part of a sacred whole, and all living things are kin. In the strength of the blessed and broken bread and of the blessed and poured-out wine, we dare to hope that human beings will respond with grateful hearts and come to treat the world not as an object to exploit, but as a gift to receive, as something perishable and precious. We dare to hope that we will become at last who we were made to be, a blessing on the earth, a people who abide in love.
1. Sallie McFague, A New Climate for Theology: God, the World, and Global Warming, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008, p. 53.
Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Easter
April 20, 2024
Delivered by the Rev. Dr. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas
St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Southborough, MA
John 10:11-18
Following the Good Shepherd on Earth Day
Friends, it’s been a joy to spend the day together, to celebrate the pilot phase of An Episcopal Path to Creation Justice, to learn from each other, and to feast on the wisdom of some of our generation’s most visionary thinkers.1 And isn’t it fitting that we end the day in worship! Worship is at the heart of everything we do.
Saying that reminds me of an afternoon ten years ago when I had just started my job as Missioner for Creation Care in the Diocese of Western Mass. There was so much we needed to figure out, like: What kind of Creation care webpages do we need to build? What material should they include? Should we start a monthly newsletter? Creating a diocesan ministry around Creation care was all so new, and we were making it up as we went along.
So, what did I do? I headed straight for Vicki Ix, our diocesan Canon for Communication, so that we could have a good long talk and do some brainstorming. That’s where we came up with the framework for Creation care that we’ve been using in our diocese ever since – Pray, Learn, Act, and Advocate. It’s the framework behind An Episcopal Path to Creation Justice, and it’s one that several other dioceses around the Church have begun to pick up, too. I like this framing because it’s so comprehensive, making it clear that a full-bodied, wholehearted, clear-eyed response to our Gospel calling to love God and neighbor commits us to keep learning, to keep acting, to keep advocating, and – yes – to keep praying.
With the Rev. Rachel Field, Project Manager of An Episcopal Path to Creation JusticeYou’ll notice that in the sequence – Pray, Learn, Act, and Advocate – we put Pray first. We could have lined the words up alphabetically, so they begin with Act, but to me it was important to begin with Pray. Prayer is at the heart of everything we do. I think of that wonderful prayer for guidance in our prayerbook, the one where we ask God to direct us in all our doings so that “in all our works begun, continued, and ended in you, we may glorify your holy Name” (For Guidance, 832). Prayer comes first, before we do a thing. Prayer comes in the middle, in the very midst and heat of action. Prayer comes at the end, as we let go and put the results in God’s hands.
Today our prayers take place on the weekend before Earth Day and the weekend in Easter when we celebrate Jesus as our Good Shepherd. Scripture gives us many ways to imagine Jesus. In the Gospel of John, for instance, Jesus names himself as “the bread of life” (6:35), “the light of the world” (8:12), “the door” (10:7), “the true vine” (15:1). Each image has its own resonance and meaning, but Jesus as “the good shepherd” is the image that many of us treasure most.
I am grateful that this year Earth Sunday coincides with Good Shepherd Sunday, for I need to be drawn again into Jesus’ consoling and empowering presence. Maybe you do, too. As we take stock of the living world around us and consider the faltering health of our planet, we recognize that the path our society has traveled for the last two centuries has led to an unprecedented human emergency: we are hurtling toward climate catastrophe and watching the web of life unravel before our eyes. Great populations of creatures – even entire species – have vanished in less than 50 years. In what scientists call a “biological annihilation,” human beings have wiped out more than half the world’s creatures since 1970. Meanwhile, the relentless burning of fossil fuels and the logging of forests are accelerating climate change, pushing our planet to break records of all kinds. Last year was the world’s warmest year on record, by far.
Linked to these ecological challenges are the social justice challenges of economic inequity and white racism. Racial justice is so closely tied to climate justice that I’ve heard it said that we wouldn’t have climate change without white supremacy. Where would we put our urban oilfields, our dumping grounds and trash, our biomass plants and toxic incinerators – if we weren’t willing to sacrifice Black, indigenous, and people-of-color communities? The Sierra Club’s Director of Organizational Transformation, Hop Hopkins, has pointed out that, “You can’t have climate change without sacrifice zones, and you can’t have sacrifice zones without disposable people, and you can’t have disposable people without racism.”2
In a world of so much injustice, violence, and uncertainty, where do we turn for guidance, solace, and strength? We turn to the Good Shepherd of our souls. How does his presence speak to you today? One thing I notice is that, as our good shepherd, Jesus holds everyone and everything together. A shepherd is the person charged with keeping the flock intact, united, and heading in the right direction. I find it reassuring to contemplate the image of God in Christ drawing us into something unified and whole, because right now so much seem to be splintering and breaking apart. The tapestry of life that was once intact is being torn apart as greenhouse gas emissions disrupt the planet’s atmosphere. Our human communities are likewise being torn apart by political division, economic division, racial division.
But when we turn to the Good Shepherd, we touch the sacred unity within and beyond all things. We touch the Ground of our being. We meet the One through whom all things were made, in whom all things hold together, and toward whom all things converge (Colossians 1:16-17). At a time when so much seems to be divided and falling apart, we’re invited to sense the underlying wholeness and unity of all things and to sense the love that embraces all things, connects all things, sustains all things. On the surface, in the realm of our five senses, we may notice only differences, only what separates us from each other, but in the deep center of reality we meet the good shepherd who is holding everything together and luring us into communion with each other and with God.
We hear the shepherd’s voice when we take time to quiet ourselves in prayer, to sit in solitude and silence and listen to the inner voice of love that is always sounding in our hearts. The good shepherd is the one who knows us through and through and who calls us each by name. Held in the embrace of that intimate love, we don’t have to keep trying to hold ourselves together – we are free to let go, free to fall apart, free to let ourselves feel our grief, feel our anger and fear as we respond to the climate crisis and to all the challenges of our lives. The good shepherd is there to hold what we cannot hold by ourselves, there to listen, there to protect and keep company, there to help us understand how deeply we are loved – and not just we ourselves, but all people – and not just all people, but all beings, the whole of God’s creation.
That very personal experience of being loved keeps getting larger! The circle of love keeps expanding! As Jesus says, “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd” (John 10:16-17). It’s as if, beneath all the ways that human beings try to separate ourselves from each other and from the rest of the natural world, presuming that we can dominate and destroy with impunity – Jesus keeps calling us forward into one living, sacred whole.
One of our three speakers, Robin Wall Kimmerer, gave a moving presentation about what it means to live in harmony with and to restore the land.We belong together for we are all kin. Our Good Shepherd created, redeems, and sustains the whole Creation, and that’s why we’re using such expansive prayers today – prayers that seek to honor the sacredness of the whole living world that is so lit up with the presence of God. We may be praying inside a building today, but our prayers are joining the prayers that are already going on outside, uttered in the wind and sunshine and by the birds and trees! Our voices are joining the voices of all Creation as we give thanks to God for loving us into being.
When we tap into that deep-down truth of our basic belovedness, we discover fresh energy for life. We experience the same wave of Easter hope that filled the first followers of Jesus. When they saw that the stone had been rolled away from the tomb, when they met the Risen Christ in their midst and in their hearts, when they realized that life and not death would have the last word and that nothing could separate them from the love of God, their lives were charged with fresh meaning and purpose. They realized that they belonged to a sacred mystery that was larger than themselves, to a love that would never let them go. Sure – they were still mortal and frail, still vulnerable and imperfect people in a big, chaotic world, but they knew that they participated in a long story of salvation to which they could contribute, every moment of their lives, by choosing compassion over indifference, kindness over cruelty, love over fear. Their inner liberation gave them courage to resist the forces of death and destruction, and to obey God rather than any human authority (Acts 5:29). Indeed, the first Christians got into all kinds of trouble. Peter and the other early Christians were accused of “turning the world upside down” (Acts 17:6), for their devotion to the Good Shepherd apparently led many of them to spend as much time inside as outside the walls of a jail. Their witness to a transcendent, all-embracing Love shook the foundations of their society.
That same wave of Easter hope fills Christians today and carries us now, every one of us who feels impelled to join our Creator in re-weaving the web of life, in building a gentler and more just society, and in getting us into what Representative John Lewis called “good trouble” as we fight to keep fossil fuels in the ground and to dismantle white supremacy. In a moment we will be nourished at this table as we share in Christ’s body and blood, and then we’ll hold a simple ceremony of commissioning as we bless each other on our way. On this Easter-Earth-Day weekend, we give thanks for the Good Shepherd who laid down his life for us, and we renew our resolve to be a blessing to the Earth that God entrusted to our care.
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1. At our Earth Day conference we heard from Robin Wall Kimmerer, Bill McKibben, and Mary Evelyn Tucker.
2. Hop Hopkins, “Racism Is Killing the Planet” The ideology of white supremacy leads the way toward disposable people and a disposable natural world, June 8, 2020, https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/racism-killing-planet
Sermon for the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost (October 15, 2023)
by the Rev. Dr. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas and posted at Preaching for God’s WorldMatthew 22:1-14
Your invitation to love’s banquet
Jesus’ parable of the wedding feast has been interpreted in all sorts of ways, some of them helpful – some of them, not so much. Over the years, commentators have interpreted the parable as an angry rebuke of the religious authorities who rejected Jesus; as an allegory to justify the destruction of Jerusalem by Roman soldiers in the year 70 C.E.; and as an account of why early Christian communities opened their doors to Gentiles as well as Jews. At their worst, interpretations of the parable smack of conscious or unconscious anti-Semitism; at their best – well, let’s give it a shot. What meaning can this parable have for us today? In particular, can it give us any spiritual guidance in these turbulent times?
Let’s take it from the top. Once upon a time there was a king – a wise, all-powerful king who decided to hold a wedding banquet for his son. He got everything ready and prepared a feast of the finest foods. He sent out invitations to his chosen guests, saying “Everything is ready; come to the wedding banquet” (Matthew 22:4). But the guests refused to come. Twice they were asked, and twice they turned him down. They “made light” of the invitation, the story tells us, and some “went away, one to his farm, another to his business” (Matthew 22:5), while the rest attacked and killed the messengers.
If we read this through the lens of spiritual experience, what might this part of the story mean? What comes to my mind are the many times that I refuse those invitations to the feast. Too often I act like one of those guests who is handed a beautiful, hand-engraved wedding invitation: I cross my arms and say, “Nope; not interested.” Has this ever happened to you? Maybe you’re sitting indoors, and you’ve been inside all day, getting some work done, and you look up and notice that the sun is now low in the sky, casting a marvelous golden light across the purple underbelly of the clouds, and some part of you stares and says Oh! And you want to get up and gaze out the window for a while – or even step outside. But you don’t.
Or maybe there’s a man with a loose gray coat and an unshaven face who is standing on the sidewalk where you just parked your car, and as you put a quarter in the meter, he mumbles a request: could you give him money to buy a cup of coffee? You look across the street and sure enough, there’s a coffee shop right there; even if you don’t want to give the man cash, you could perfectly well walk across the street and get him a cup of coffee. But you don’t.
Or maybe you feel stressed and distracted, or maybe sad and discouraged, and you sense a deep tug to prayer. You know that new life will blossom in you only if you get yourself to sit down and pay attention to what is going on inside, only if you let yourself rest for a while in God’s embrace. But do you let yourself pause to take in that nourishment? You don’t. You’ve got other things to do – good things, important things. That inner tug can wait. If you ignore it long enough, maybe it will go away.
Invitations to love’s banquet can take many forms, and they come not just once, but every day, and many times a day – maybe as an invitation to gaze at the beauty of the world, or as an invitation to be generous, or as an invitation to pause for a while to give the lover of our souls our full and undivided attention in prayer. Yet how easy it is to say No! I have a million excuses – I’m too busy, too focused on my own agenda, too distracted or overloaded to relinquish my worried, busy mind and to let my awareness open and to drop into my heart.
That’s a loss, because deep at the center of our being is an unquenchable thirst for union with the divine. Deep in our guts, our bones, our very DNA, is an irrepressible yearning to move toward the Source of life, the All, the Ultimate, the Holy One. Call it what you will – human beings the world over, whatever their religion, share a desire for what one writer calls “the union on this earth and in this body of the human with the divine. This is the true spiritual marriage, the consummation of love that in one way or another is the aim of every ritual and every practice in every religion.”1
It’s no wonder that the Bible so often uses wedding imagery to express the complete and intimate union of God and God’s people, or of God and the individual soul. Sometimes the Bible depicts the bridegroom as God; sometimes the bridegroom is Christ. Sometimes, as in this parable, we are invited to be guests at the wedding, and sometimes we ourselves are the bridegroom or we ourselves are the bride.
Love poets and mystics know all about the ecstasy of spiritual marriage. Take, for instance, St. Francis of Assisi, whose feast day we recently celebrated. Francis gazed deeply into the natural world as if into a mirror, and he saw reflected back to him the outpouring love of God. For him, God was not an entity “out there” – God was within him and around him; God infused and sustained and shone out from all things. Here is a little poem adapted from St. Francis2:
Such love does
the sky now pour,
that whenever I stand in a field,I have to wring out the light
when I get
home.
The human longing for union with God is universal, but how quickly we repress it, ignore it, or push it away! Who knows why? Maybe we don’t want to feel our need and vulnerability; maybe we’re afraid to relinquish control; maybe we’re convinced we’re not good enough and we can’t possibly be loved that much. But if we keep pushing God away, if we keep shutting ourselves off from the invitation to love and to be loved, then before long we will start to experience God as the enemy, and that’s the next part of the parable: some guests mock the messengers and blow them off, and other guests seize, mistreat, and kill them. The passage tells us that “the king was enraged” (Matthew 22:7). He sends in his troops, destroys the murderers, and burns their city down.
As a spiritual story, this parable is quite accurate and exact: when we turn ourselves into the enemy of God, eventually we begin to experience God as an enemy. God has not changed, but we have – we have pushed God away and have deliberately alienated ourselves from the divine. Before any spiritual union can possibly take place, maybe that stubborn, resisting part of the self needs to be brought low and to fall away. All of us who, at some point, have made a mess of our lives, who have made terrible mistakes and headed too far down a willful, self-centered, and defiant path, know what that’s like. Sometimes the ego must be crucified before the soul can be born.
Yet the invitation to love never ceases. In fact, it keeps getting wider, deeper, more expansive, and more inclusive. There is no guest list now. The king’s love reaches out to everyone. The wedding is ready, he says; the feast is about to be served and the food is hot. He sends messengers into the streets to invite everyone to come, both good and bad, and they stream into the wedding hall until it is filled at last.
If you read this as a story of the interior life, it seems that only now – after our pride and defiance have been humbled and brought low – only now can we understand that every part of ourselves is being invited to the feast, that everything in us that we have cast away, abandoned, and rejected is being invited into the presence of God to be welcomed and healed and made whole. Our whole selves are invited to the feast, and everybody else is invited with us. There is no need now to shrug hopelessly and to say that we must settle for being alienated from each other, that we have keep living driven, restless, distracted lives, that we have to make peace with poverty, with racial injustice and economic injustice, that we have to condone destroying the earth and that we have to tolerate an endless succession of wars. Now we know the truth: we have been invited to feast at the table of divine life. We have been invited into the very heart of God, and in the strength of that divine presence we are sent out into the world to bear witness to God’s justice and mercy and love.
The parable ends with the startling little story of the guest who comes to the feast with no wedding robe and is summarily bound hand and foot and thrown into the outer darkness (Matthew 22:11-14). Maybe this is a reminder to stay humble: God loves us completely and invites everyone to the feast, but we have our own work to do: to clothe ourselves day by day with the intention to love. As St. Paul puts it in Colossians, our job is to “[strip] off the old self with its practices and [to clothe ourselves] with the new self…” The passage continues: “As God’s chosen ones… clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and…forgive each other… Above all, clothe yourselves with love” (Colossians 3:9-10, 12-14). In short, we wear the right clothes to the wedding feast of life when we clothe ourselves with love.
We are living through a time of extraordinary stress, a time in which each of us must clarify who we are and what we value. So, here is what I want to tell you. When love’s holy invitation comes, I want to say yes. When love calls me to marvel at the sunset, to stop and gape at the beauty of the world, I want to say yes. When love calls me to walk across the street to bring someone a cup of hot coffee and to add some honey to it, and some milk, as well, because that’s the way he says he likes it, I want to say yes. When the divine call comes to sit down in prayer and to give the lover of my soul my full and undivided attention, I want to say yes. As Mary Oliver writes in her poem, “When Death Comes,”3When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
I want to say yes to life, yes to God, yes to the One in whose invisible, irresistible Presence we step fully into life, daring to connect deeply with ourselves and each other, refusing to be spectators, refusing to hold back, stepping out to create a world – and to fight for a world – in which everyone has a chance to experience how deeply God loves them. The banquet table is prepared, Jesus says to us. Will we come to the feast?
I will give the last word to Rumi, a Sufi poet who ends one of his poems4 like this:
On a day when the wind is perfect,
the sail just needs to open
and the love starts. Today is such a day.
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1. Roger Housden, For Lovers of God Everywhere: Poems of the Christian Mystics, (New York City: Hay House, Inc., 2009), xiii.
2. St. Francis of Assisi, “Wring Out My Clothes,” in Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West, translated by Daniel Ladinsky (New York, Penguin Compass, 2002), 48.
3. Mary Oliver, “When Death Comes,” New and Selected Poems (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 10.
4. Jalaludin Rumi, “On a Day When the Wind is Perfect,” in Love Poems from God, 80.
Sermon for the Feast of the Transfiguration, August 6, 2023
Delivered by the Rev. Dr. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas at the Chapel of St. James the Fisherman, Wellfleet, MA
Exodus 34:29-35Psalm 992 Peter 1:13-21Luke 9:28-36
Transfiguration: When we see Earth shining
We couldn’t ask for more powerful readings than the ones we consider today on the feast day of the Transfiguration. Today we are summoned to the mountaintop to celebrate the transforming power of God. In our first reading, Moses is coming down from Mount Sinai, carrying the Ten Commandments that establish the covenant between God and God’s people. He has been praying on the mountain, listening to God with the love and attentiveness with which one listens to a friend (Ex. 33:11), and the skin of his face is shining (Ex. 34:29). He is radiant with God’s glory.
Today’s Gospel passage from Luke is also set on a mountain. Soon after Jesus tells his disciples that he will die and rise again, he takes with him Peter, John, and James and goes up on the mountain to pray. In the solitude of that holy mountain, with its long, sweeping vistas and its cold, clean air, Jesus’ prayer grows into an intense religious experience that recalls the experience of Moses. “While (Jesus) was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white” (Luke 9:29). To describe this change, Greek manuscripts use the word “metamorphosis” (metemorphothe); Latin manuscripts use the word “transfiguration” (transfiguratus est). Whatever you call it, it’s the same thing: at the top of the mountain, Jesus is swept up by the love that sustains the universe. What Dante calls “the love that moves the sun and other stars”1 so completely embraces Jesus that who he really is, who he has always been, is briefly revealed. A dazzling brightness emanates from his face, his body, even his clothes. The sacred radiance at the center of reality is shining through him, bursting through his seams, streaming from his pores, and even the three sleepy disciples can see it.
What just happened? The holy presence that secretly abides within every person and every part of the created world has suddenly, briefly become visible to the human eye. The vivid image of Jesus lit up from within aligns with the experience of mystics from every religion who speak of a vibrant, shimmering energy or light that flows through everything, although usually we don’t see it. In Asia, the cosmic life force is called chi in Chinese and prana in Sanskrit, and in many Eastern traditions, enlightenment is associated with a flow of energy throughout the body.2 Christian mystics speak of the Holy Spirit as a Presence or energy that moves through our bodies and the whole body of Creation. For Christians, there is something deeply personal in this energy: it is the dynamic, creative Presence of the Holy Spirit. When we sense its presence in ourselves or in the outside world, God seems to light up the edges of things or to shine out from within them. We see the hidden depth behind the surface of ordinary reality. The eternal makes itself known to us, and we may experience it as light, although it is beyond the reach of ordinary sight. That’s where the language of paradox and poetry comes in, where mystics speak of a “dazzling darkness” or a “dark radiance,” just as in this passage Luke uses the language of paradox when he describes Jesus’ experience in terms of both a dazzling light and an overshadowing cloud (Luke 9:29,34). Something about perceiving that radiant darkness awakens our love.
Breezes flow through the Chapel of St. James the Fisherman in Wellfleet, as we join the rest of the natural world in praising God.We may not consider ourselves mystics, but anyone who has ever been overcome by the beauty of the world – anyone who, in contemplating the world, has ever experienced a wave of wonder and gratefulness and awe – anyone who has ever spent time looking into the eyes of a baby or studying the details of a leaf – anyone who has ever gazed for a while at a mountain range or watched the sparkling waters of the ocean knows what it’s like to see the hidden radiance of Christ, whose living presence fills the whole creation. Whenever we look at the world – whenever we look at each other – with eyes of love, we see the hidden radiance, the light that is shining within each person and each thing, although they may know nothing about it. Seeing the world with eyes of love is to see the world shining – to see its suffering, yes; to see its brokenness and imperfection, yes; but, also, to see it as cherished by God, as precious in God’s sight, as shining with God’s light. To see the world with eyes of love is to see it with God’s eyes.
As we gaze at Jesus transfigured on the mountaintop, shining with the radiance of God, we see what Moses saw, what Jesus saw, and what poet Gerard Manley Hopkins saw: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”
I believe this is one of the great gifts that people of faith can offer the world in this perilous time: the perception of creation as a sacred, living whole, lit up with the glory of God. For let’s be clear: we were born into a society that does not see the Earth like that. Most of us were not taught to see the natural world as sacred and lit up with God’s glory. It’s as if a veil were placed over our minds, just as Moses placed a veil over his face (Ex. 34:33). When our minds are veiled, we no longer see God’s glory. We see the natural world as nothing more than the backdrop to what really matters: the human drama. Nature becomes something to be ignored, used up, exploited at will, dominated, assaulted without a second thought. We experience ourselves and other human beings as essentially separate from and even “above” the rest of creation, entitled to do anything we want to it, with no regard for its integrity or value or needs or rights.
By now we know where that perception of the world has taken us: scientists are reporting with alarm that the web of life is unraveling before our eyes and that human civilization is at risk of collapse. Gazing at Jesus shining on the mountain is like medicine for our troubled spirits. It removes the veil from our eyes and restores our inward sight. We are gazing on the one who loved us into being, the one who tells us that life and not death will have the last word, the one in whom all things hold together (Col. 1:17) and whose presence fills the whole creation (Eph. 4:10). We are gazing at the one who, at the end of Mark’s Gospel, commissions his disciples to go into all the world and proclaim the Gospel good news to the whole creation (Mark 16:15). That’s our mission, as disciples of Jesus: to bring good news in word and deed to the whole creation, for the whole world is shining with the love and presence of God.
So, when we see God’s creation being desecrated and destroyed – when we see God’s good Earth being poisoned by toxins and pollutants, and laid waste by corporate greed – when we learn from scientists that a mass extinction event is now underway, a “biological annihilation”– when we recognize that burning coal, gas, and oil is pushing the planet to break stunning new records for heat, causing droughts, floods, and monster hurricanes, drowning cities, and accelerating wildfires – when we understand that the people hurt first and hardest by the effects of a changing climate are the poor – when we realize that, unless we change course fast, we will not leave our children and our children’s children a habitable world – then we are moved to take action. For we want to bear witness to the love of Jesus that is shining on the mountain and shining in our hearts. We want to honor the sacredness of God’s creation and to protect it from further harm.
When it comes to tackling climate change, there is so much that individuals can do – maybe we can fly less, drive less, drive electric, install solar panels, avoid the clothes dryer and hang our laundry out to dry, eat less meat and move to a plant-based diet – and so on. You know the drill.
Making personal changes is important, but because of the scope and speed of the climate crisis, we need more than individual action – we also need systemic change. The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states very clearly that we must transform our society and economy at a rate and scope that are historically unprecedented. To do that, we must join hands and work together for collective action. What are some possibilities? Here on Cape Cod, we can join Faith Communities Environmental Network, which inspires eco-justice on Cape Cod and the Islands and is part of the Cape Cod Climate Change Collaborative. Or we can join 350Mass, the grassroots, climate action group in Massachusetts that has a node right here on Cape Cod. If we have money or credit cards in one of the four biggest banks that fund fossil fuels – Citibank, Chase, Bank of America, or Wells Fargo – we can move our money out and join the campaign to pressure banks to stop financing fossil fuel expansion.3 If we’re over 60, we can join ThirdAct.org, the new group started by Bill McKibben just a year or two ago that has already attracted thousands of old people like me who want to do everything we can to slow climate change and protect democracy. Last but not least, in September the U.N. Secretary General will host a first-of-its-kind Climate Ambition Summit to demand that world leaders commit to stopping the expansion of fossil fuels that drive the climate emergency. I hope that you will join me and thousands of other people who will take to the streets of New York City on September 17 in the March to End Fossil Fuels, the largest climate march since the pandemic. There is so much we can do! Together we intend to build a world in which everyone can thrive. I’ve made a one-page handout of resources that you can pick up at the door to the church.
Today we stand on the mountaintop, soaking up the light of Christ and letting ourselves be filled with his love. Even now, the glory that shone through Jesus Christ is shining in our hearts, longing to blaze up like fire and to melt away everything in us that is less than love. As we give ourselves to the great work of healing God’s creation, I trust that we, too, are shining.
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1.William Johnston, “Arise, My Love…”: Mysticism for a New Era, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2000, 115.
2. Johnston, “Arise,” 115.
3. For more information about this campaign, visit ThirdAct.org. For suggestions regarding climate-friendly credit cards, check this pdf produced by 350Mass: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R8jbw3laMOcOrilbnOsQdVlM7MDkf1zP/view?pli=1
Sermon for the Third Sunday of Easter, April 23, 2023
Delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas at Sts. James and Andrew, Greenfield
Luke 24:13-35
Walking our way to climate hope: Earth Sunday
May the grace of God enfold us, the love of Christ uphold us, and the Spirit of truth set us free. Amen.
Friends, what a blessing to be with you as we celebrate Earth Sunday. Thank you for inviting me to join you and thank you to everyone who contributed to creating this special service. As you know, I serve our diocese as your Missioner for Creation Care, and I travel around preaching, speaking, and leading retreats about our vocation as followers of Jesus to protect and heal God’s Creation. If you’d like to know more about what I’m up to, I hope you’ll visit my website, RevivingCreation.org.
I’m especially happy to be here because of your efforts to heal the living world entrusted to our care. Let’s give a shoutout to your Green Team for the monthly Environmental Sunday Series and to your Youth Group. I shouldn’t have been surprised a few days ago when I received a newsletter from the Anglican Communion Environmental Network – a newsletter, by the way, that goes out to Anglicans all around the world – and noticed that it included a story of this church hosting a panel of teenagers advocating for bold, collective action to address climate change. As your rector commented when I shared this news: Whoa! Thank you for the ways you bear witness to the Lord of life.
Altar, Sts. James & Andrew, Greenfield, MAWe have a wonderful Gospel text to consider this morning, the third Sunday of Easter. It’s a story that’s familiar to most of us: two confused and grief-stricken disciples walk the road to Emmaus and unexpectedly encounter the risen Christ. I can’t imagine a better story to work with on Earth Sunday, for it expresses in a nutshell how those of us engaged in the battle to save life as it has evolved on Earth can draw strength and sustenance from the wellsprings of our faith. That’s the gift that Christianity can bring to a frightened, troubled world: the gift of spiritual teachings and practices that empower us to move from passive despair to active hope, from confusion to clarity. So, let’s join the disciples on their walk and see if we can find our place in the story.
It’s late in the afternoon of the day of the resurrection. We don’t know exactly who the two disciples are, but since they share a home, it’s likely that they are husband and wife. One of them is named Cleopas, and if this is the Clopas referred to in John’s Gospel (John 19:25), then his wife, Mary, was among the group of women who stayed with Jesus at the cross. As the two of them head down the dusty road, late in the afternoon of the first Easter, they are struggling to speak about Jesus’ crucifixion. Surely, they are traumatized: they’ve just witnessed an act of unspeakable brutality and violence inflicted on someone they dearly loved. Not only that – the cruelty and suffering they’ve witnessed has triggered a crisis of meaning: what can they trust, what can they believe in, what kind of future is possible now that the one whom they hoped would save them has been killed? To make matters even more bewildering, they’ve heard a rumor of hope – reports that Jesus has risen from the dead. None of this makes sense. They’ve got things to talk about.
We’ve got things to talk about, too. What would you bring to a conversation about the crucifixion of Mother Earth? Maybe you’d confess your heartache about dying coral, melting glaciers, and thawing tundra, or your anxiety about sea-level rise, massive droughts, and severe weather. Maybe you’d speak about your grief for the species that are vanishing and for those that are struggling to hold on, as their habitat is swallowed up by palm oil plantations and cattle ranches, by freeways and malls. Maybe you’d express outrage that so many corporate and political powers are determined to perpetuate and even expand the extraction of coal, gas, and oil, despite the fact that burning fossil fuels is causing a dramatic rise in global temperatures, and every living system of the world is affected and in decline. We are living at a decisive moment in history, for climate science has made it clear that we won’t be able to leave our children and our children’s children a habitable world unless we change course fast.
We need to talk, just as Cleopas and his unnamed companion needed to talk. We may not think that other people are frightened or concerned, but in fact they are. A recent survey1 of 10,000 children and young people in ten countries around the world found that 59% were very or extremely worried about climate change; more than half reported each of the following emotions – sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty; almost half of these young people said their feelings about climate change negatively affected their daily life and functioning; and fully three-quarters said that they think the future is frightening.
Is this a good time to talk, to name our fears and share our concerns? You bet it is. Talking about climate change with friends, family, and co-workers – and with our elected leaders – is an essential step to building momentum for change. When we end what’s been called “climate silence” and start talking with each other, start walking the road of life together and speaking about our deepest fears and naming our possibly very faint traces of hope, today’s Gospel story assures us that even though we may know nothing about it, Jesus is walking beside us.
That’s what the two sad disciples discovered, to their great surprise. It seems they traveled miles with an apparent stranger and talked with him at length without recognizing that the one they longed for was walking right beside them. It’s a poignant scene, for how often we, too, get lost in our sorrows and fears and have no idea that the risen Christ is walking with us. Maybe it’s a frustrating scene, too, for Jesus sounds impatient when he bursts out, “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe!” I think it’s a funny scene, too, for the person whom the disciples are lecturing about recent events in Jerusalem is the very person who knows more about those events and their meaning than anyone else on Earth. As Frederick Buechner once put it, “Blessed are they who get the joke.”
Our Gospel story invites us to acknowledge and name our climate grief and anxiety and to give thanks for the assurance that God’s love is walking with us, sustaining us, and mysteriously present with us, even though, like the two disciples, for a while we may know nothing about it. That’s the deep truth of Christian faith, a truth that I pray the whole world will come to see and know in this perilous time, for God’s abiding love alone can guide us forward and help us forge a new path, a new, more excellent way of walking on the Earth.
What happens next in today’s story? When the disciples fail to recognize Jesus, he patiently interprets all of Scripture to them until they begin to perceive and understand. Jesus is gentle and deeply respectful: he doesn’t force himself upon the two disciples as they approach the village, but instead he walks ahead, as if he were going on. He waits for the two disciples to invite him to stay with them, and only then does he enter their home. And it’s there, around the table, when he takes bread, blesses, and breaks it, that their eyes are opened, and they recognize who he is.
Our story not only conveys the deep truth of Christ’s abiding presence with us – it also provides two practices for experiencing the risen Christ: reading and reflecting on Scripture, and the blessing and breaking of bread.
When it comes to Scripture, the eyes of our faith are being opened to perceive the deep ecological wisdom in the Bible. Like many of us, I grew up believing that the Bible cared only about human beings and God, as if for some reason only one species, Homo sapiens, was worthy of God’s attention. It turns out that this interpretation of the Bible is far too small, for in fact, from the first words of Genesis, when God created all that is and pronounced it “very good” (Gen. 1:30) to the last pages of the Book of Revelation, which speak of “a new heaven and a new earth” (Rev. 21:1), the sweep of our salvation history embraces the whole creation. The New Testament tells us that Christ lived, died, and rose not only to heal the human soul and the human community, but also to heal the Earth community, to reconcile all things on earth and in heaven, “making peace through the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1:19-20). As Archbishop Desmond Tutu once put it, the “supreme work”2 of Jesus Christ is to reconcile us to God, to one another, and to God’s whole creation.
This means that caring about the health of the Earth, and the fate of the Earth, isn’t some extra, new-fangled add-on to Christian faith, one more “issue” to add to our many other concerns. No, protecting, healing, and loving the Earth is core to Christian faith, and once our eyes are opened to it, we find this message running throughout the Bible.
Ferns, AshfieldWe meet the living Christ in the pages of Scripture, and we also meet the living Christ in the natural world. You know what that’s like – the joy and wonder that may come upon us when we lift our eyes to gaze at the Holyoke Range, when we look down and see the fern unfolding its tiny green fist, when we listen to the call of cardinals, and when we feel the wind or the rain on our face. The crucified and risen Christ is giving himself to us in and as the living world around us. As Martin Luther once said, “God writes the Gospel, not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and the flowers and the clouds and stars.” The living Christ meets us again and again in the book of the Bible and, also, in the book of Nature.
And Christ meets us here as we share the bread and wine of Holy Communion. When the celebrant at the altar lifts up the bread and wine, all of Creation is lifted up. When the celebrant blesses the bread and wine, all of Creation is blessed. The bread that is placed in our hands is made of wheat, earth, and sun, of rainwater and clouds, of farmers’ hands and human labor. Christ dwells in the bread and wine, and God gives God’s self to us, once again, through the natural world. When we stretch out our hands to receive the bread, we take in what is natural and we take in Christ.3
You and I have practices to sustain us in the days ahead, practices that strengthen our resilience and resolve to take bold climate action and to join in healing God’s Creation. As with the two disciples, the risen Christ will meet us in our honest conversation and lament, in our reflection on Scripture, and in our breaking of the bread. When our eyes are opened, we, too, will understand that the risen Christ was with us all along. And then, as in today’s story, he will likely vanish from our sight. Why? Maybe because he has other places to go, other people to strengthen and inspire. Or maybe because his living presence is now fully within us, so that we can embody his love in fresh and creative ways.
The two disciples of our story have had a long, traumatic day and have walked many a mile, but now, with their hearts burning within them, they find the energy to leap up and travel the seven miles back to Jerusalem to bring their joyful news to their community. At the beginning of today’s story, hope is only a rumor. By the end, the disciples themselves embody hope: they will give their lives to the possibility that God’s love will be fully expressed in the world. Rather than quietly accepting a killing status quo, they will join God’s mission to reconcile and heal, and they will bear witness to a love that nothing can destroy.
On this Earth Sunday, we celebrate the risen Christ who is in our midst, calling us to be healers and justice-seekers. How is God calling you to step forward?
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1. Caroline Hickman et al, “Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: a global survey,” The Lancet, December 2021, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(21)00278-3/fulltext#
2. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, “Foreword,” The Green Bible (New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers (HarperOne), 2008, I-14.
3. This paragraph is adapted from Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, Joy of Heaven, to Earth Come Down (Forward Movement, 2012,2013), 35.
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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