A sermon for the Third Sunday after Pentecost, June 29, 2025. The scriptures are 2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14, Psalm 77:1-2, 11-20, Galatians 5:1,13-25, Luke 9:51-62.

Many airports have moving sidewalks that help people get across long expanses. Recently, I noticed a practical sign on these walkways. It says simply, “face forward.” In some places, there’s a graphic that helps convey the same message, but they’re basically trying to prevent someone from talking, or being on their phone, or simply looking back, and then missing the spot when the moving walkway ends.

Facing forward is practical advice for moving sidewalks, (and stationary sidewalks, for that matter) but it’s also helpful advice for moving through life.

Looking back can be tempting. In airports, we might want to say goodbye to someone, or look at something a little longer. We might really want to face the person we’re talking to. In life, we sometimes want to look back to a time that feels happier or simpler. Or maybe we want to look back and rehash, or reargue, or redo some conversation or period of our lives.

But that effort of looking back takes energy and time. It means we’re not looking forward. And it can lead to problems.

In today’s Gospel people DO want to look back. They’re just not ready to move ahead, and they long for the past. It might be that one prefers a simpler past (or at least their memory of a simpler past).  Others are weighed down by to-do lists, and obligations, but really, these thing belong more to yesterday than today.   Sometimes living in the present takes the wind out of us, and makes us lose faith. It used to be easier, we think. And having already lived the past, we know what’s there—no surprises and no interruptions of our own will.  But there is also very little room for miracle in a staid and static past.

God, also, keeps moving—sometimes quickly, sometimes at a glacial speed—but moving forward. 

This is what Jesus is pointing to in today’s Gospel. Luke uses the great phrase that Jesus’s “face was set toward Jerusalem.” And it’s exactly this direction, this intention, this energy of Christ that points forward and will not be stopped. 

When Jesus and his disciples visit a village of Samaritans, the Samaritans can’t be bothered.  They’re not impressed and don’t feel compelled to follow Jesus. The disciples are confused by this, and can’t quite figure out how to respond.  They err on the side of action, and suggest calling down the wrath of God. James and John ask Jesus, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?”

But notice that Jesus barely hears them.  Jesus is moving forward.  He’s already forgotten the unbelieving Samaritans, and has moved an inch or two closer into the Kingdom of God with no time for holding grudges or getting slowed down by people who “don’t get it.”

When we think of some of the bullies and “bad guys” of our world, we might sympathize with James and John—“Can’t we call down fire from heaven on our enemies, on our opponents, on those especially who twist the words of God into words of hatred and violence?”  But Christ is saying, “No.”  Move forward.  There’s a lot to be done.  We’re going to Jerusalem and there’s no time to look back.  There’s no time to settle old scores.  There’s no time for vengeance or gloating.

In his Letter to the Galatians, St. Paul pushes this point further.  If victory, justice, and fairness bring some privileges, he argues, they also bring opportunities that should be carefully navigated.

For freedom Christ has set us free…. Don’t use freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become servants (slaves, even) to one another…. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.”  And so, live by the Spirit, whose gifts are “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” (Galatians 5:1, 13-25, passim)

Jesus shows us how to live in that kind of freedom.  As the Gospel from Luke describes it, Jesus has set his face toward Jerusalem and the trouble with the Samaritans is only the beginning.  The joy and love of Christ is infectious, so as people hear him and meet him, they want more, and they want to follow, but some want to follow on their own terms, or to follow at some future day, just not today.

One volunteers, “I’ll follow you wherever you go.”  But Jesus warns him, “It’s not going to be easy.  It’s not a life of palaces and fine dining.  It will be more often a way of homelessness and heartbreak.”

Jesus invites another to follow, and the man seems willing but offers what sounds like a reasonable excuse for delay.  “First, let me go and bury my father.”  Here, Jesus sounds heartless as he says, “Let the dead bury the dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”  But Jesus is calling that man to move forward.

During Jesus’s life, there was a strong sense that the end of the world was upon them in some way.  This is a part of the urgency to Jesus’s preaching and living and the moving toward Jerusalem.

But, as the disciples and the early Church began to understand later, even when the end of the world is delayed, the urgency still stands because God’s kingdom is already breaking in on us—on those who will be a part of it.  That’s what Jesus is trying to convey—don’t miss the kingdom for the checklist you’re trying to complete.  Don’t wait until you’ve got this done or that done, or you’ve gotten beyond this hurdle or that one—the kingdom of God calls us to move forward, toward Jerusalem—the place and way of justice, peace, mercy, forgiveness, and love—the place where we do our best to live out those values Paul just talked about in Galatians.

Finally, a third person wants to follow Jesus but first needs to go home to say goodbye.  Again, Jesus sounds harsh, saying, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

In other words, there’s no time for looking back. God moves forward.  We see a bit of this in our first reading about Elijah the older prophet and Elisha, his protégée.  Elijah is ready to move with God, but Elisha isn’t sure he’s ready for God’s plan to unfold.  Can he just stay with his teacher and mentor a little longer.  He’s not ready to go it alone.   As so, as Elijah tries to move forward into the full presence of God, Elisha refuses to let him go alone.   Finally, Elijah leaves this world, and there Elisha is left—alone, disoriented, and not sure what to do next.  But then, he notices something.  Before he died, as he was moving away, Elijah left his mantle, his cape, symbolizing all that Elijah had taught the younger prophet.  The mantel symbolizes that God is with him and will continue to be with him.  He has what he needs to follow.

No one who looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.  This is not to say we ignore history or ignore the past.  But we don’t let it hold us captive, either.  Some of us grew up with racial stereotypes.  We are slow to move out of prejudice with regard to color, or class, or size, or age.  We may have a long way to go before we arrive at the Jerusalem of God’s dream, but with faith, we make our way forward, one day at a time.

The month of June has become a special time in which Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender people march, and speak, and love with pride.  Some people wonder—especially with the relative advances made in our country—why make such a big deal with a weekend like this one, with rainbow flags and a parade.  Well, as with almost any celebration, the occasion will mean different things to different people, but especially for Christians.  Not only is the acceptance of all God’s children as they are a basic characteristic of following Jesus, I also think the Pride celebration can serve as a reminder for us to follow Christ forward—in body, mind, and soul.  Follow Christ forward, resisting the prejudice of the past, the misplaced shame of the past, perhaps the misunderstanding or rejection of ourselves or others in the past.  Follow Christ forward, and once there has been forgiveness, embrace the full calling of Jesus Christ and don’t look back.

The Jesuit theologian Teilhard de Chardin wrote,

Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge. (Chardin, The Omega Point)

Whether we feel Christ’s hand pushing us slightly from the back, or gently leading us from in front, may the Spirit give us what we need to follow in faith. Even when powerful cultural and political forces want to look back, may the Holy Spirit give us the strength to keep looking and moving forward in faith. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

A sermon preached for the 175th Anniversary of St. Stephen’s Church, Rochester Row, London, the link parish of Holy Trinity, Manhattan. The scripture readings are 1 Kings 19:1-4, (5-7), 8-15a, Psalm 42 and 43, Galatians 3:23-29, and Luke 8:26-39.

It’s very good to be with you again at St. Stephen’s, especially for this anniversary celebration. I bring prayers and greetings from Holy Trinity where, last year, Father Graham was with us to celebrate our 125^th Anniversary. The similarities in our parishes are striking. Both were founded through the vision of a strong socially minded woman, both were built to serve communities in need, both have formed faithful laypersons, religious, community organizations, charities, priests and bishops. And today, both are diverse and welcoming communities who seek to live out the love of Christ in a complicated world.

I have checked several times with Graham and Jessie, your Parish Administrator, to make sure I had the scripture readings right for today. I wondered if we might focus on the Eucharist and celebrate the Feast of Corpus Christi. That would have given us an easy sermon on partaking in the Body of Christ as we are transformed into the Body of Christ to feed the world. I thought you might also have been using readings for a Dedication Festival, as we could have given special thanks for Christ’s Body the Church, and recommitted ourselves to our ongoing fallible but faithful intentions.

But no. We have demons to discuss.

As I’ve been trying to deal with the demons, I’ve thought of a wonderful line from G. K. Chesterton’s “Father Brown.” We still get the Father Brown episodes and I’ve seen some of the new ones and most of the old ones several times over. Most of you know that Father Brown is a parish priest who is good at solving murders.  Sometimes he seems to see into people’s souls so deeply that they wonder, (like people wondered about Jesus) how Father Brown can possibly know such dark thoughts and impulses. In one very revealing situation, the priest sees into the soul of a man so clearly that the man blurts out, “How do you know all this? … Are you a devil?” Father Brown responds, “I am a man,” … “and therefore have all devils in my heart.”  (G.K. Chesterton, “The Hammer of God” in The Innocence of Father Brown.)

It’s tempting to think that the “devils,” the demonic, the evil forces of the world are outside, over there, consuming that person.

When there’s some horrible act of violence or terrorism, there’s a temptation to label it as “evil,” and explain it away as the work of the devil.  When a parent neglects or abuses a child, the language of “evil” comes easily. Leaders who have no respect for humanity, show no mercy, and seem to be driven by nothing but profit and vainglory, seem to be possessed.

But Father Brown’s character reminds us of the deeper truth. That we, too, have devils in our heart, because we are human. But when we attribute people and events too quickly to “evil” or the “demonic,” we ignore aspects of our own community and culture that are complicit.  And we can misunderstand the work of demons.

In today’s Gospel we have a sad story.  A man is not in his right mind. He can’t keep his clothes on.  He can’t keep up a household.  He’s homeless, living near the tombs, probably in caves.  People must have passed him by whenever they went that way, but they didn’t dare go close.  He was scary, dangerous, and possessed by demons, after all.

Though we don’t know his name.  We sort of know him.  This man must have seemed to the Gerasenes like so many people appear to us today—those who live not in natural caves, but the caves made by overpasses, abandoned buildings, and alleys. Their problems seem overwhelming.  Often, we do what we can.  We say a prayer. We give an occasional dollar or two.  We might buy a sandwich, but we wonder, “What’s to be done?”  Is it a matter of public funding?  Is it a matter of physical or mental healthcare?  Is it a family problem? A demon would have us assume it’s the work only of that demon, and either blame the person, or blame the demon and go on our way.  But the reality is much larger and more complex. 

A little more than 175 years ago, Angela Burdett-Coutts and her friend Charles Dickens refused to accept what the society of their day relegated as “evil.” People spoke of Devil’s Acre, around Pye Street near the Abbey, and avoided it. Frederick Farrar, a canon at Westminster wrote about the poverty:

I think it would have been difficult to have found a spot more full of crime. The whole street drank hard while such plunder lasted. I received a message one day to administer Holy Communion to a dying girl in Pye Street. She was in the last stages of consumption, and her story was to the effect that her husband lived on her wages, which he forced her to obtain by a life of sin… She summed up her repentance in one sentence: “I have worked very hard, and I am very tired.”

And so, Dickens and Burdett-Coutts created Urania Cottage to give prostitutes a way forward, and in 1846 plans were made for a new church to be built that could honor Sir Francis Burdett, Angela’s father, and could serve as a center of faith, renewal, and new life to this area. Burdett-Coutts and Dickens, from different perspectives, understood that demons are usually not individual, but are fed by social and societal forces.

Walter Wink was an American theologian who wrote a lot about the way demons enter not only individuals, but also institutions and structures.  Wink’s writing points out that one way the demonic works is by rigidly classifying those who are “in” and those who are “out.”

A reader and commentator on Wink, Jeffery John (retired dean of St. Albans) reflects on this idea as he points out, “The profundity of this miracle story [of the man with the demon] is shown in the fact that Jesus goes out to heal the very one…who is the symbol of the alien oppression…Jesus steps outside the territory of Israel into ‘unclean’ territory, heals the most untouchable of the untouchables, and makes him in effect his first apostle to the other Gentiles.” [The Meaning in the Miracles, Canterbury Press, 2001, p. 84-97]

A part of the healing is Jesus’s daring to go where others say it’s useless.  Jesus is unwilling to be captive to the demons of prejudice, rumor, gossip, assumptions, or conventions.  Jesus heals people throughout scripture by transgressing societal, cultural, or gender norms in order to bring a human touch, which is also the touch of God.

As the Letter to the Galatians reminds us, “In Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

Demons are not always what they seem.  Reading the scriptures closely, in some places it is clear to a modern health profession that a person in the Bible who was thought to be “demon possessed,” was epileptic.  Leprosy was not caused by demons, but is what we now call Hansen’s disease, an infection caused by bacteria and curable through medication. Melancholia was thought to be from a demon. Homosexuality was (and sadly is still thought by some) thought to be caused by demons.

The real demonic is, and always has been, in the way that people are separated, kept in ignorance, and never allowed to question received information.

Demons make us overlook the details and only see the broad strokes.
Demons thrive on prejudice, ignorance, and scapegoating.
Demons love a fictional view of the past and refuse to take into consideration the reality of the present.
Demons lead us follow a dead god, while the way of Christ leads us to a Living God who continues to reveal.
Demons (perceived or real) can get us down.

We heard in our first reading how the demonic energy of Jezebel drove Elijah into a cave. He questions his calling, his purpose, his faith, and even his life. But God shows up in a new way, a different way, a quieter way.

Like Chesterton’s Father Brown, if we’re honest with ourselves we can begin to see the demons that are living within us and ask God to free us.  We can ask God to exercise the demons that still live in our churches and institutions. Together, we can expose the demons that want us to live in fear and helplessness. We can face down the demons that blame particular ethnicities, or groups of people.  And we can call out the demons that get lodged in our laws and our lawmakers.

On this day, we given thanks for the blessings of St. Stephen’s Parish, for all the many who have given of themselves faithfully and sacrificially through this place. And I invite you to recommit yourself to Christ at a deeper level.

Be clear about the demons within and ask Christ to tame them or take them away.
Be slow to dismiss others as demon-possessed and beyond hope.
And let us go again into the Devil’s Acres of our world to show and share the love of Christ.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

A sermon for Trinity Sunday, June 15, 2025. The scriptures are Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31, Romans 5:1-5, John 16:12-15, and Psalm 8.

Most of you know that for the past week or so, 12 of us from Holy Trinity have been on pilgrimage, walking 100 kilometers or so to Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Since the 9^th century, Santiago has been a holy destination for venerating the burial place of St. James the Apostle, one of the first of Jesus’s disciples, and the first to die a martyr’s death.

Though the destination is part of the pilgrimage, the journey is equal, if not more important. And that journey continues, as we live out the idea that “El Comino comienza en Santiago,” or “the Camino begins in Santiago.”

One day last week, I felt the richness of that journey as Leona Fredericks and I met a young man from New Orleans named Vinod. As he and I walked on for a while, we began talking about where we were from, what we do, why we came on the Camino. And eventually, I said the name of our group, that we were from the Church of the Holy Trinity.

We then went on to talk about his upbringing in a secular Hindu family, and various aspects of Christian belief. At one point, Vinod said, “You know, Hinduism also has 3: the Trimurti: Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. Brahma is the creator, Vishnu is the preserver, and Shiva is the destroyer.”

We talked about similarities and differences, both laughing that we were out of our depth, but enjoying the conversation.

As Vinod eventually walked on ahead, I kept thinking about our conversation. I eventually came to that point that lots of theologians must come to when thinking about the Trinity—that whatever the theology might be trying to express, the bottom line is that

The Holy Trinity is God’s love in community, and God wants to include us in that love.

For Christians, this is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or in language that isa little like Vinod’s, “Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.” The Trinity is God’s love in community and God wants to include us in that love.

In Proverbs we meet a character hinted at last week on the Day of Pentecost. Wisdom is personified as a woman who goes through the city, who journeys throughout the earth, looking for anyone who will hear. And we learn Wisdom is not just a holy woman, but Wisdom is very closely related to God—before the creation itself, she already was. She was God’s “daily delight.” One version describes her as the architect by God’s side, playing happily in the presence of God.

In Paul’s Letter to the Romans, we’re reminded that God has given us the Holy Spirit as a kind of second wind, a wind to lift us up when we’re down, to urge us forward when we’ve stumbled, and a wind to invigorate our faith whenever it’s grown tired or confused.

Jesus promises that the Spirit will continue to guide us even after Jesus has left this world. Jesus says that what is of God, is also of Jesus, and what is of Jesus, is also of the Spirit. The three are one and God’s intention is that we be absorbed into the life of God, the life of God in the Trinity.

One theologian (George Handry) has put it this way: in Christ we have God with us. In the Spirit we God in us. But while we have both of these, we also and always have God over us.

God the parent is over us, Mother, Father, the author of all life, the one who holds us, cares for us and sets out the plan in which we find our way.

God the Son, Jesus, is God with us, walking before us and beside us as an elder brother, a friend, a companion, a shepherd, a guide, and a support.

God the Spirit is God in us, giving us strength, probing our conscience, showing us where the world most needs God, which is to say, where the world most needs us to show God and be the love of God.

But even all of that can seem abstract.

As I was talking with my friend Vinod on the Camino, I was participating in the life and love of the Trinity as God the Creator was in the beauty all around me, and the goal of my walking. God the Spriit was the wind behind me and within me, compelling me onward. And God the Incarnate one showed up in the human form of a new friend, walking along with me.

Those who participated in yesterday’s “No Kings” demonstration may have felt this: God the Creator as the source of justice and goodness and truth that undergirds our being. God the Holy Spirit who turns up the fire in us because it’s part of God’s Holy Fire, and compels us to DO something. And finally, God the Incarnate one, as body-to-body, people make their presence known.

We have a reminder of God’s love in Trinity on our church pews.

On the edge of each pew at Holy Trinity there is a carved a “shield of the Holy Trinity.” Most of the ones we see in our church just have a design, but if you come up into the choir area, you’ll see pews with words added.  They’re words in Latin, so they might also look a little like symbols.

But the Holy Trinity shield, popular in the Middle Ages, labels each of the circular points with a person of the Trinity:  Pater (Father), Filius (Son), and Sanctus Spiritus (Holy Spirit).  In the middle is the Latin word Deus, for God, and connecting each of the outer circles is a line in which is written, “Non est”, or “is not.”  This shield is a reminder that God is movement, God is dance, God is never standing still—the Father is not the Son, is not the Holy Spirit.  But each of the other circles, (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) “est” or IS God.  The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God.  The shield, whether with words or without words, is a little like those spinners that kids play with—a blur of action and energy, with direction that’s hard for us to predict.

God invites us to join in this community of love—the love of God that overflows into all of creation. It doesn’t matter if we always feel God’s presence in each of the Persons of the Trinity. It doesn’t matter if it’s all a little fuzzy. The point is that God is love in community, God wants to include us in this love.

May God the Holy Trinity bless us this day and forever; and may God help us to recognize the divine in one another and in ourselves.

In the name of that love, Amen.

A sermon for the Seventh Sunday of Easter, June 1, 2025. The scripture readings are Acts 16:16-34, Revelation 22:12-14,16-17,20-21, John 17:20-26, and Psalm 97.

During the Season of Easter, we’ve followed the old church custom of having our first reading on Sundays be from the Book of the Acts of the Apostle, instead of a reading from the Old Testament. The Book of Acts shows us some of the energy, excitement, and confusion that fueled the spread of the Way of Jesus. We’ve heard stories of healings and conversions, and today’s reading is no different.

Typically, when this scripture passage is preached, the focus is on the conversion of the jailor. Paul and Silas are imprisoned, there’s an earthquake that is so strong, it shakes the foundations of the jail and the doors spring open. But Paul and Silas don’t escape. They stay right there, presumably because they suspected there was something of God’s hand in this, so they waited to see what might unfold. Sure enough, the jailor is so relieved that they didn’t run away and get him in trouble, and perhaps noticing their calm and being curious, the jailor asks about their God. Paul and Silas tell the jailor about God’s love in sending Jesus, and the power of Jesus to bring us through life and even through death, and the jailor and his whole family are baptized. They have a feast, and give us a great story of faith and joy.

But let’s back up. Let’s notice why Paul and Silas were put into jail in the first place. It wasn’t their preaching and healing that got them in trouble—but the WAY in which they did ministry.

The story begins with the slave girl whose name we don’t know. She had a talent for seeing the future and she seems confident enough to follow Paul and Silas and make fun of them. She seems to delight in the fact that while she IS a slave, they use language of slavery to refer to their relationship with God. I wonder if a part of her “trolling” them and proclaiming “These men are slaves of the most high God,” isn’t also a way asking the question: “is slavery” an appropriate image for one’s following a loving, freeing God? Are they really “slaves” in that as male Roman citizens, they seem to have quite a bit of agency and privilege.

Paul has enough of this, and so, out of annoyance, he prays over the slave girl and makes the spirit leave her alone. But that puts the slave girl into unemployment and robs her employers of their income. There’s nothing in the text that suggests the slave girl asked to be healed of the spirit, or even wanted to be healed. Her employers certainly didn’t want her to be healed. I’m not even sure Paul cared about her being healed. We read simply that “very much annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, “I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.” And it came out that very hour.”

There are other places in scripture where annoyance translates into faithfulness, sometimes doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. Jesus tells a parable of a desperate widow and an unjust judge, a judge “who neither feared God nor had respect for people.” But the widow kept demanding justice until finally, the judge says to himself, “because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.”

A similar thing happens even with Jesus, when a Canaanite woman, a non-Jew and foreigner, asks Jesus to heal her daughter. Jesus ignores her. The disciples are bothered by the woman’s persistence and complain about her to Jesus, so he says very clearly, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”  When she gets inside the house and kneels, Jesus replies with that nasty-sounding phrase that probably was based on a saying in his day, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But the woman brilliantly responds, “Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the table.” Jesus praises the woman’s faith, and realizes his own calling is bigger than he thought, and heals the woman’s daughter.

I like these passages of scripture where someone’s annoyance is turned into faithful action. It gives me hope for the times and places when I might reluctantly manage to do the right thing, but I do it for less-than-holy reasons.

But I also take a warning from the Acts reading about Paul. How often do we do what Paul is trying to do? Whether it’s out of annoyance, or perhaps just a strong desire to DO something, we act, we manage, we control, we manipulate, but we don’t take into consideration the opinions or agency of the people involved.

Paul healed the slave girl out of annoyance, but he might have even justified his action by saying that she had been possessed of a Spirit and would be much better off without that spirit.  But what will she do for a living? How has Paul’s intervention made things worse between the slave girl and the owners or employers? Did he even notice that, rather than help the situation, he had made it much worse for everyone but himself.

This is a classic mistake made by leaders who go to great effort to what they believe is the “best or just” thing, but sometimes they consider the people who are affected most. I can’t help but think this is a part of what explains the backlash against progressive politics in our country. Sometimes, programs and leaders have acted on behalf of individuals and communities for noble goals, but have not always considered the day-to-day ramifications of those policies. And so, they voted for people who don’t worry at all about the larger good or the greater goal and only talk about what affects the individual or the individual family. As people gradually realize the extent to which they have been lied to and used by the current regime, there will be space for new leaders and for all of us to listen to what others actually need, and partner with them for change.

Certainly politicians and policy makers sometimes decide what people need before really asking them, and Christian missionaries have this all over the world.  But also, there have places where another approach was taken. 
In 19^th century England, a number of religious orders, especially the Anglican nuns in the Community of St. John Baptist, ran what were called Houses of Mercy. While the men in government passed increasingly restrictive laws around what they perceived as criminal activity, the Anglican nuns welcomed women who were prostitutes into their convents, educated them and gave them skills to get jobs in the world. The sisters took these women seriously and treated each one as a child of God, not as a problem to be solved.

It takes practice and prayer to resist the “urge to fix” and instead, actually listen to people.

It’s hard to put aside our own expectations, hopes, ideas, and suggestions. As a result, we can sometimes do dumb things for good reasons with our colleagues at work, with friends, and with family members.  Sometimes we see so clearly how they can fix their lives, or how they can solve a particular problem—”if they would just do this”…. And we can sometimes feel like it’s our duty or calling to get into he middle, to act, to fix, and to manage—just like Saint Paul in Philippi.

Even though the grace of God works with and sometimes in spite of our annoyance or our need to control and manage, the ideal put forth by Jesus is one of union and communion.

In the Gospel today, Jesus is praying with and for his disciples and it is a prayer for unity. He prays that each one of them—each one of us—might be so connected to God through the Spirit, that we are able to act like Jesus in our world. This is an ideal, but it’s a worthy ideal for us to reclaim and pray for, along with Jesus.

To pray for unity, to live for unity, in our day is itself a radical stance. From almost every direction, we’re told to take care of ourselves, put ourselves and our family first. That instruction of the flight attendance to put your own face mask on first to obtain oxygen before helping a child, is taken to a crazy extreme to apologize for self-centeredness and fear of the other. But this is heresy. This individualism is of the devil, who is always about dividing, breaking apart, and tearing down.

Just before his death, Pope Francis wrote a Letter to the United States Bishop underscoring and clarifying the direction of Christian love.  Especially as it relates to immigration, but to all issues, Pope Francis reminded people of all faith:

Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings! The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception . . . But worrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations, easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth. (Pope Francis’s Letter to US Bishops, February 11, 2025)

God’s work is of building, bringing together, reconciling, and making union. Every day, we have choices to make about which way we follow. May we resist the temptation to act before asking, to “do unto” without “inviting into,” and may we remember Francis’s encouragement to pray and act for unity, for sisterhood and brotherhood with all.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.