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Spiritual hope is harvested unseen after many seasons of patiently, gently, and consistently caring for our innermost parts. Parts that need constant gardening. How do we do this inner, spiritual work when we cannot immediately identify our wheat or our weeds?
Today’s sermon is about how limitations can become sacred sites of liberation. Limitations may be what we are born into: a body, a family, a society, a time in history. Limitations we had no choice but to live within. Limitations may be imposed upon us by principalities and powers over which we have no control. Limitations, innate and imposed, can be both frustrating and liberating.
“Gifts can only be gifts when we give them entirely away. The true meaning of our lives emerges when we humbly receive and generously give The Holy Spirit’s Love Divine to everyone. This Love Divine that flows generously through us is Christ’s deep river of living water.”
The Holy Women teach us how to speak the joyful truth in love even when we feel afraid. We must ensure that women on the margins of dominant culture, who have survived the horrors of coloniality, can speak joyful truth in love, especially in the face of man-babies who are terrified of love and truth. Marginalized women have been proclaiming the joyful and life-giving Gospel truth for centuries.
“Note that in today’s Gospel, Joseph does not speak a single word. Joseph acts with quiet yet life-saving integrity. Perhaps Joseph has no words because, as Abraham Joshua Heschel says, ‘There is not enough grandeur in our souls to be able to unravel in words the knot of time and eternity.'”
The destruction of evil can become more than a mere distraction. The destruction of evil can become an idol. When we stare too long at the evil being done, we might unconsciously become so obsessed with destruction, that we forget God’s Present Continuous creation.
“To turn away from worshipping the death-dealing idol of the Second Amendment and its anti-liturgies of gun violence requires a complete re-evaluation of our values. To turn away from cracked cisterns that hold no water, and to turn back to God, the fountain of living water, requires a complete change of heart. “
“What languages and cultures saturate your daily life? Who made your shoes? Who picked your coffee beans? What are the untold origins of the music you love? Racist, xenophobic, Christian Nationalism will fail. God loves diversity.”
“The more we try to make exclusive distinctions between us and them, the more God makes differing bodies bridges between them and us. Holy Baptism and Holy Communion are the sacramental sites of God’s bridge-building in our very bodies.”
“This Great Vigil of Easter removes Empire’s fears, erasures, and stone-cold-heartedness and replaces God’s holy, loving, and liberating spirit within our hearts of flesh. Christ’s love fills us so fully that we too come out of Empire’s tombs.”
Rejoice, Mother Church: and come together all of you that love her: sing with joy, you that have been in sorrow: that you may exult, and be filled from the breasts of God’s consolation. Amen.
Tho…
I don’t know what you did to cope, but I retreated into old school love songs to survive last week. Many of us feel betrayed. Betrayed across lines of gender, race, and class. Betrayal hurts both the victims and the perpetrators. I cope with this pain of betrayal by overindulging in old school love songs.
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