Third Sunday after the Epiphany - January 26, 2025
Father Vincent Pizzuto, Ph.D.
St. Columba's Episcopal Church
Neh. 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10 + Ps 19 + 1 Cor 12:12-31a + Luke 4:14-21
Grace to you, and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. + I speak to you in the name of the Three-in-One and One-in-Three. Amen.
It is 5:17am on Sunday, January 26th. I sit in my study in the vicarage. A hot cup of coffee steaming beside me on my desk, filling the room with its gentle aroma like incense in the pre-dawn hours. A taper candle of pure bee’s wax flickers on my altar before the icon of Christ, “Lover of Humanity” whose gentle eyes gaze out at me as they have for over 30 years since it was first gifted to me.
There are many weeks throughout the year when time will not allow me to turn to my sermon any sooner than these early morning hours. But this week I knew there was little I could write until now. After much preparation and anticipation, we gathered at long last yesterday for our Appreciative Inquiry Summit. I experienced our time together as nothing less than graced and I could not be more grateful to you all for your whole-hearted participation, your honesty and your shared vulnerability. To so many of you who came together to support Sarah Johnson in every stage of the planning, you have my deepest gratitude.
I know the work of integrating and responding to what we have learned, what we have voiced and what we have dreamt has only just begun, and I look forward to that process with you and our Bishop’s Committee in the months to come. Perhaps today, in my last sermon before Fernando and I depart for sabbatical, I would like to begin the process of that reflection and integration with a reminder that the ultimate purpose of our gathering was to discover and clarify our mission and vision as a contemplative Christian community.
Like the liturgy itself, named for the moment of our departure, our ‘dismissal’ (from the Latin missa, or “Mass” as it is called), so too was that beautiful time we spent together oriented toward our departure, our ‘being sent’ out into the world. And the world in which we held our summit is a deeply troubled world, a deeply fractured world, a world in which the specter of oligarchy and the darkness of despotism have descended upon us – a blinding darkness that is clear for all who have eyes to see. Thus, if we are to be a beacon of light in the midst of that world, then what unfolded at our summit yesterday cannot be fortress or segregated from the world which Christ summons us to serve.
14You are the light of the world [says the Lord]. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. 15No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lamps stand, and it gives light to all in the house. 16In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven. (Mt. 5:1416)
There is little reason for me to rehearse the litany of crises we face as a nation and a globe. The harsh realities we now face are abundantly clear to anyone who has eyes to see and ears to hear. Rather, I want to hold up, exemplify, and indeed magnify from this pulpit the power of the Gospel to speak clearly, gently, and unambiguously to this present darkness as we witnessed so powerfully in the words of The Right Rev. Mariann Buddy, Episcopal Bishop of Washington, as she addressed the sitting president during the inaugural prayer service at the National Cathedral last, January 21st.
What The Bishop did and how she did it: The gentleness of her tone, the kindness of heart and the generosity of spirit was precisely the voice of the church that needs to be amplified. While her entire sermon is worthy of reflection, it is her final words, addressed directly to the president, that lit up the internet like a Christmas tree, and which deserve to be both echoed and amplified here:
In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and Independent families, some who fear for their lives. The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. They…may not be citizens or have the proper documentation. But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. … I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. And that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land. May God grant us the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, to speak the truth to one another in love and walk humbly with each other and our God for the good of all people. The good of all people in this nation and the world. Amen.”
There could hardly be a better argument made for the separation of church and state than this moment in our modern history – when the man who holds the most powerful office in the world was required to listen in public view to the summons of the Gospel. This is the voice of the Church unshackled from imperial power, a voice both merciful and courageous; a voice of liberation spoken on behalf of the outcasts in our own society today. For the bishop this message delivered in our national cathedral came as a plea, but for Christ some two thousand years ago this same message delivered from the pulpit of a small synagogue in his home town of Nazareth it came as a promise:
[Unrolling] the scroll [of Isaiah, he] found the place where it was written: 18"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 set free those who are oppressed, 19to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor…. Then he began to say to them, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." (cf. Luke 4:16-19).
What the gospel doesn’t tell us today is that in the next several verses this narrative concludes with the town’s people literally trying to kill him! Luke writes:
28When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. 29They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. 30But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way. (Luke 4:28-29)
Inevitably, every message of liberation, whether it comes as plea or promise carries with it a corresponding implication that the oppressive party must either cede power or have it wrested from them. Like the leaders of Jesus’ own faith community or the those of the empire in which he lived this kind of plea or promise never sits well.
So, we should not be surprised that the president would sneeringly refer to the bishop’s remarks as coming from a “woke” church, that “Isn’t what it used to be.” (A phrase which is but a thinly veiled reference to a former iteration of the Episcopal church as the hoity-toity country club denomination people once called “The Republican Party at Prayer.” At least at that time, not so many decades ago the republican party still had a soul. Still had a shred of integrity. Still had a modicum of decency. All of which have been sacrificed at the Altar of Trump.
In fact, there is nothing ‘woke’ about the bishop’s message. Anyone who gives even the faintest blush of attention to the pages of both Old and New Testaments can hardly escape the persistent, indeed relentless call to care for the outcast of society – and often through much harsher, terrifying, and inflammatory prophetic oracles.
Yet it is with no small degree of irony that this plea made to the president came from the heart and the lips of a female bishop whose very person and presence embodied the power of Mother Church to counter a resurgent patriarchal and toxic masculinity embodied in this current administration. One that blindly – and as history will prove, falsely – believes it can accomplish ultimate political ends through the means of brute force. Indeed, to call her message “woke” is the height of ignorance and nothing more than the delusional ravings of a petty tyrant.
The fact that this entire administration has responded so adamantly, so disparagingly, so vociferously to a gentle plea from a woman so small in stature, yet so large of spirit speaks volumes of their egoic fragility. It takes but three minutes to listen to Bishop Budde’s address to hear the absurdity, indeed insanity of Trump’s response:
“The so-called Bishop who spoke at the National Prayer Service on Tuesday morning was a Radical Left hard line Trump hater. She brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way… her service was “uninspiring,” “nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart.” “She is not very good at her job! She and her church owe the public an apology!”
Truthfully, I don’t even know where to begin. By any objective measure whatsoever, not only is every word of his response factually untrue but betrays an unqualified ignorance in the political nature of the Gospel to challenge the kingdoms of the world by the One whose Kingdom is not of this world. But let us not be distracted by the ravings of a lunatic.
I’m pretty sure Pontius Pilate said Jesus wasn’t very good at his job before they crucified him. I’m pretty sure Cesar believed Jesus brought religion into the imperial politics of Rome in an “ungracious way.” I’m pretty sure the Sanhedrin to turned Jesus over to Roman authorities believed Jesus owed them a public apology. I’m pretty sure they referred to him as a “so-called” Messiah and “so-called” king of the Jews as indicated by the plaque that hung over his head while he hung suspended on the cross.
Indeed, if you will permit me only a slight paraphrase or John chapter 22, the evangelist is explicit in describing this precise response to Jesus from the Scribes no less than Pontius Pilate. John writes: [When they crucified Jesus] 19Pilate had an inscription written and put on the cross. It read, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews….” 21Then the chief priests…said to Pilate, “Do not write, ‘The King of the Jews,’ but, ‘This man is the so-called King of the Jews.’” 22Pilate answered, “What I have written I have written.
Pilate’s motivation for keeping what he had written was not because he believed Jesus was king, but because he wanted to make clear: This is what happens to any so-called king in the realm of the one and only king, Ceasar. So, what else do we expect a tyrant to say? What else do we expect from anyone who is too weak to stand up to the threat of real power, gently but persistently reminding him that his days of brute force are numbered and, in the end, will not prevail. Rest assured, Caesar is dead and Christ lives! The imperial city of ancient Rome is but ashes and the kingdom of God lives on!
This, sisters and brothers, is the context in which the work of our Appreciative Inquiry is unfolding. It is the world in which our communal work, our shared mission, collective vision and Christian vocation is unfolding. Let not the difficulties we face in our world today dampen our spirits but rather fill us with firm resolve that we do this work as beloved community not for ourselves, but for the world that needs us to be a beacon of light among so many other beacons shining from the hearts of people of good will across the world.
The hand of Providence is already leading us on. Christ is already in our midst. The Spirit is already at work. Our hope is not to be found out there, but within ourselves, among the members of this beloved community. The more we know ourselves the more we will be able to respond to the call to be contemplative disciples in the world. But know this: we do not stand alone. This is the moment we are summoned to dispense with lip-service, and to ask ourselves whether we are ready to commit ever-more so to becoming the Body of Christ in the world, trusting (as Mother Church has taught across the centuries) that the Christ whom we profess is indeed the Alpha and Omega, the First and the Last. The Beginning and the End. And reigns, even now, victorious.
Let me close then with a stanza from the poem, “The Present Crisis” penned in 1845, by James Russel Lowell at a time when our country was bitterly divided as it is now, and hopelessly under the shadow of the tyranny of slavery. Yet in the midst of that political crisis Lowell offered the assurance of God’s ultimate victory over tyranny:
Careless seems the great Avenger;
history's pages but record
One death-grapple in the darkness
'twixt old systems and the Word;
Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne, —
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow,
keeping watch above his own.
And may that great Avenger bless you, liberate you, and transform us evermore-so into that beautiful, mystical, glorious Body of Christ: + The Three in One and One in Three. Amen.