Always Be Ready to Give an Account

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There is a sentence in this Sunday’s second reading that I have been sitting with all week, and I want to put it in front of you before you come to Mass on Sunday, because I think it is one of the most practically important commands in the New Testament for a community that is trying to do what we are trying to do.

First Peter 3:15, from the Catholic Public Domain Version:

“But sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts. Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for the reason for your hope, yet do it with gentleness and reverence.”  (1 Peter 3:15, CPDV)

Always be ready to give an explanation for the reason for your hope.

The Greek word behind “explanation” is apologia. It is the root of the English word apology, but in this context it means something closer to a careful, reasoned account. A defense. A statement of what you believe and why, offered not as a weapon but as a witness.

Peter was writing to communities under pressure. People who were being questioned, criticized, mocked, or worse for what they believed and how they lived. And his counsel was not: keep your head down, do not attract attention, stay safe by staying quiet. His counsel was: be ready to speak. Know what you hope in. Know why you hope in it. And when someone asks, answer them. Gently. Respectfully. But answer them.

That word from First Peter lands very differently in 2026 than it might in a quieter moment. We are living in a time when speaking plainly about justice, about the dignity of immigrants, about the full humanity of LGBTQIA+ people, about the dangers of authoritarian power, comes with a cost. People lose friendships over it. They lose family relationships. In some contexts they lose more than that.

And into that reality, Peter says: always be ready to give an account of the hope that is in you.

Not always be ready to argue. Not always be ready to win. Ready to give an account. Ready to say: this is what I believe, this is why I believe it, and I am not ashamed of it.

Philip in the Wrong Neighborhood

In our first reading this Sunday, Philip goes to Samaria.

This matters more than it might sound. In the world of first-century Judaism, Samaria was the wrong side of every boundary. Samaritans were considered ethnically and religiously impure by strict Jewish standards. They were the people you walked around, not through. They were the ones the respectable community had decided did not quite belong to the story of God’s people.

Philip goes anyway. He proclaims Christ to them. He heals the sick. He casts out unclean spirits. And the text says something worth pausing on: there was great joy in that city.

Not confusion. Not scandal. Not the cautious welcome of people who are not sure they are allowed to celebrate. Great joy.

When the apostles in Jerusalem hear that Samaria has received the Word of God, they send Peter and John to lay hands on the new believers and pray for them to receive the Holy Spirit. The Spirit falls on Samaritans. The community that had been outside the boundary is now inside it, not because the boundary was adjusted slightly to accommodate them, but because the Spirit of God refuses to be bound by the boundaries human communities draw.

I think about the people in our community who have been on the Samaria side of someone else’s boundary. The people who were told the Spirit was not for them, that the laying on of hands was not for them, that the proclamation was not for them. The reading this Sunday says otherwise. The Spirit fell on Samaria. It falls where it will, without asking permission from the gatekeepers.

What the Spirit Builds: SPEAK

This Sunday is week six of nine in our Easter series, What the Spirit Builds. We have walked together through TOGETHER, OPEN, WALK, TEND, and BELONG. This week the word is SPEAK.

The Spirit builds a community that gives account. That does not keep its hope private to protect itself from friction. That knows what it believes and why, and is willing to say so in the public square, in the conversation at the dinner table, in the comment thread, in the letter to the editor, in the sermon from the pulpit.

SPEAK is paired in First Peter with two words that I think are just as important: gentleness and reverence. The call to speak is not a call to be loud, aggressive, contemptuous, or cruel. It is a call to be honest, clear, and courageous, while treating the person you are speaking to as a human being made in the image of God, even when they are coming at you hard.

That is one of the harder disciplines of prophetic speech. It is easy to speak when speaking costs nothing. It is easy to be gentle when you are not under pressure. The discipline Peter is describing is speaking truthfully about the hope you carry, in the presence of people who may not share it or may actively oppose it, while remaining in your own integrity rather than matching their contempt with your own.

In 2026, when the political climate is designed to make everyone loud and merciless and point-scoring, that kind of speech is genuinely countercultural. Not the silence that passes for peace. Not the noise that passes for courage. Something harder than both: truth, spoken with the full force of conviction and the full dignity of the person being addressed.

The Advocate Who Does Not Leave

Jesus says something in Sunday’s Gospel that I want to make sure we do not rush past.

He says: I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of truth. And then: I will not leave you orphans.

I will not leave you orphans.

That phrase is for every person who has ever stood up and said something true about justice or dignity or hope and then looked around and felt completely alone. Every person who has spoken at a school board meeting or a city council session or a family dinner and said the thing that needed to be said and watched the room go cold. Every person who has posted something or preached something or signed something and then wondered whether it was worth it.

The Advocate, the Spirit of truth, is the one who stays when everyone else has left the room. Not as a feeling, not as a vague spiritual impression, but as the active, present, sustaining power of God in the community that refuses to stop telling the truth.

That is the promise Jesus makes on the night before his execution. Not: it will be easy. Not: everyone will understand. Not: you will be safe from the consequences of speaking. But: you will not be alone in it. The Spirit of truth will be with you.

Philip spoke in Samaria and there was great joy. Peter and John laid hands on the people who had been outside the boundary and the Spirit fell. The early church found that every time it crossed the lines that empire had drawn between acceptable and unacceptable people, the Spirit was already there ahead of them. It had not been waiting for permission.

The same Spirit that fell on Samaria is the one Jesus promised to the disciples in the upper room. The same Spirit that empowered Philip to speak is the one that empowers this community to give account of the hope that is in it. Gently. Respectfully. Without apology.

What This Week Asks of Us

I want to be direct about what SPEAK means for this parish in this moment.

We live in a country where the people in power are telling a specific story: that immigrants are dangerous, that queer people are a threat to children, that the Church should stay in its lane and leave politics to the politicians, that anyone who objects to what is happening is an enemy of the nation.

That story is false. And it is not enough to know it is false privately. First Peter says: always be ready to give an account of the reason for your hope. That means in public. In writing. In conversation. From pulpits. In the streets where the Blessing Bag ministry operates. At the Pride booth we are raising money for right now. In every space where the Church has a presence and a voice.

We speak not because we are angry, though sometimes we are. We speak not because we are trying to win an argument, though we believe we are right. We speak because the Spirit of truth has been given to us and we cannot pretend we do not have it. We speak because people who are afraid deserve to hear someone say plainly: you are a human being made in the image of God, and no government and no religious institution has the authority to take that from you.

That is the reason for our hope. That is what we are always to be ready to say.

Come Sunday. Come and be part of a community that is learning, week by week, to speak.

Pax et Bonum,

Bishop Greer

You Are a Chosen Generation

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There is a sentence in this Sunday’s second reading that I want to put in front of you before you come through the door on Sunday, because I think it is one of the most radical things in the entire New Testament, and it gets domesticated into a pleasant affirmation far too quickly.

First Peter 2:9. Here it is in the Catholic Public Domain Version, translated directly from the Latin Vulgate:

“But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, an acquired people, so that you may announce the virtues of him who has called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”  (1 Peter 2:9, CPDV)

Read that slowly. Chosen generation. Royal priesthood. Holy nation. Acquired people.

Peter is writing to communities of displaced people. Sojourners. Immigrants, in the most literal ancient sense: people living in regions that are not their homeland, without the full legal and social protections of citizens, subject to the suspicion and hostility of the dominant culture. And he tells them: you are the chosen generation. You are the royal priesthood. Not the empire. Not the establishment. Not the people who have the power to decide who belongs and who does not. You.

That is not sentimental. That is a direct theological confrontation with the logic of every authoritarian system that has ever decided to define a nation by who it excludes.

What the Spirit Builds: BELONG

This Sunday is the fifth week of our Easter series, What the Spirit Builds. We have walked together through TOGETHER, OPEN, WALK, and TEND. This week the word is BELONG.

BELONG is the word the series has been building toward since Easter Sunday. You cannot have a community that is TOGETHER without asking who is in it. You cannot be OPEN without asking what you are opening to. You cannot WALK beside someone without asking where they started and what they left behind. You cannot TEND without knowing whose names you hold.

BELONG is the answer to all of those questions. The Spirit builds a community where no one has to earn their place. Where belonging is not contingent on language, citizenship, documentation, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, or the particular shape of your theology. Where the table is set for the person who just arrived, not just the person who has always been here.

The early church was not born that way easily. Acts 6 shows us that even in the first weeks after Pentecost, the community was already failing some of its members. The Hellenist widows — the Greek-speaking, diaspora Jewish women who were arguably the most vulnerable people in the community — were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food. This was not a theological dispute. It was a justice failure. People who belonged to the community were not being treated as though they belonged.

The Twelve’s response is the model: they did not minimize the complaint, explain it away, or ask the Hellenists to be patient. They acted, and they gave the affected community power over the solution. Every one of the seven appointed to oversee the distribution has a Greek name. The people who were being overlooked were put in charge of fixing the oversight.

That is what BELONG looks like in practice. Not just an open door and a warm welcome, but genuine structural accountability to the people most likely to be left out.

Many Dwelling Places in a Country That Wants Fewer

Jesus says, in the Gospel of John this Sunday: “In my Father’s house, there are many dwelling places.”

The word in the original Greek is mone, from the verb menein, to remain, to abide, to stay. The Father’s house is not a transit facility. It is not a processing center. It is not a place where some people are admitted and others are turned away at the door. It is a house of permanent dwelling, a house of staying, a house built large enough that there is a place for everyone who arrives.

I want to say something plainly, because I believe a pastor’s job is to name what is in the room.

We are living in a country that is in the process of deciding, as official policy, that there are not enough dwelling places. That some people’s presence here is inherently criminal. That families who have built lives, raised children, paid taxes, buried their dead, and woven themselves into the fabric of their communities over decades can be removed from those communities by armed agents of the federal government with no hearing, no counsel, and no appeal.

That is not a description of a political position I support or oppose. That is a description of what is happening, right now, in our country. In some cases, in our city.

The theological claim of John 14:2 is not a metaphor for heaven. It is a statement about the character of God. The God revealed in Jesus Christ is a God who builds a house with many dwelling places. A God whose first instinct toward the stranger is not removal but welcome. A God who, when he describes his own home, describes it as a place where there is room.

Every government policy that treats the immigrant as a threat to be neutralized rather than a person to be received is operating from a theology. It is just not a Christian one.

Fascism and the Royal Priesthood

I use the word fascism deliberately and without apology because I think imprecise language has protected the precise reality for too long.

Fascism is not simply a political style. It is a specific ideology built on the premise that the nation is an organic body with a pure identity, that certain people belong to that body and others contaminate it, and that the health of the nation requires the removal or suppression of those who do not belong. It always presents itself as protection. It always claims to be defending the real people from the threatening outsider. It always uses the language of crisis and emergency to justify the suspension of ordinary legal and moral constraints.

First Peter was written to communities living inside the Roman Empire, which was the first-century world’s preeminent expression of exactly this logic. Rome defined itself by conquest and by the absolute distinction between Roman citizens and everyone else. The people Peter was writing to were, in Rome’s terms, the threatening outsider. The contaminating presence. The ones who did not belong.

And Peter tells them: you are the chosen generation. You are the royal priesthood. You are the holy nation.

Notice what Peter does not say. He does not say, “You are citizens of Rome who happen also to follow Christ.” He does not say, “Be grateful for your tolerated presence and do not make trouble.” He says, “You are a people.” You have an identity that the empire did not give you and cannot take away. You have been called out of darkness into marvelous light by someone whose authority exceeds Caesar’s, and that calling is the most fundamental fact about you.

That is the theological foundation of every act of resistance to authoritarian power that the Church has ever undertaken. Not a political calculation. Not a partisan alignment. A claim about who people are before they are citizens of any earthly nation.

The immigrant families in this community, the undocumented neighbors who are afraid to leave their homes, the people who are being told by the most powerful government on earth that they do not belong here: they are a chosen generation. They are part of the royal priesthood. They are the people God acquired. And no executive order changes that.

The Way, and the Truth, and the Life

Jesus says something else in this Sunday’s Gospel that I think is worth sitting with. Thomas says, “We do not know where you are going, so how can we know the way?” And Jesus says, “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life.”

In a moment when the word ‘truth’ has been so thoroughly weaponized that many people have given up on the concept entirely, this claim lands differently than it used to. We are living in an information environment deliberately designed to make people doubt whether truth is accessible at all, because a population that cannot distinguish truth from fabrication is a population that can be led anywhere.

The claim that Jesus is the Truth is not an abstract metaphysical proposition. In John’s Gospel, truth is closely tied to faithfulness, to the quality of being reliable, to the character of a God who does what God promises. Jesus is the Truth in the sense that he is the one whose character does not change based on what is politically convenient, whose words do not shift based on who is in the room, and whose treatment of people does not depend on whether they are useful.

That is the kind of truth this community is called to embody. Not merely factual accuracy, though that matters enormously. But the deeper truth of a consistent character is that we are who we say we are, that we treat people the way we say people should be treated, and that our welcome is not conditional on the political climate.

When the world is lying, the Church’s most fundamental act of witness is to tell the truth. When the world is deciding who belongs and who does not, the Church’s most fundamental act of witness is to hold the door open.

Come Sunday

On Sunday we will read these texts together, break bread together, and say with Peter what this community believes: that you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation. That there are many dwelling places. That the Way and the Truth and the Life belongs to everyone who seeks them, not just to those who already have papers that say they are welcome.

If you have been told you do not belong somewhere, I want you to hear this: the Spirit is building something in this place, and the word this week is BELONG.

You belong here. Not provisionally. Not pending review. Not subject to the political weather.

Here. Now. As you are.

Come and see.

Pax et Bonum,

Bishop Greer

The Shepherd Who Finds You in the Valley

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I almost did not write this post.

That is not how I usually begin. But this week has not been a usual week, and I think you deserve honesty more than you deserve a polished opener.

My wife, Deacon Dana Godsey, is in the hospital this week. She is receiving care for mental health. Depression has had a hold on her, and it became more than either of us could manage at home. She is where she needs to be, being tended to by people who know how to tend to exactly this kind of pain. I am grateful for that. And I am also exhausted, and frightened, and carrying a kind of sorrow that sits in the chest and does not move.

I am telling you this because I believe in a Church that does not pretend. I believe in a pastor who shows up as a human being, not as a performance of competence. And I believe, more than I have ever believed anything, that what I am about to say to you on Sunday about this week’s Gospel is not theory. It is testimony.

This Sunday is Good Shepherd Sunday. We read from the tenth chapter of John, the passage where Jesus describes himself as the door of the sheep, as the one who calls the sheep by name, as the one who came not to steal and destroy but to give life abundantly. And we pray together the Twenty-Third Psalm.

I have prayed that psalm more times this week than I can count.

“For, even if I should walk in the midst of the shadow of death, I will fear no evils. For you are with me.”  (Psalm 22:4, CPDV)

The valley of the shadow of death. I used to read that phrase as metaphor. I do not read it as metaphor anymore. There is a valley. It is real. You can be walking in it without choosing to, without deserving to, without any warning that the terrain was about to change. And mental illness is one of the roads that leads there, not just for the person who is suffering, but for everyone who loves them.

Depression lies. That is the first thing I want you to know. It tells the person in its grip that they are a burden, that they are past helping, that the darkness is permanent and deserved. None of that is true. But the illness is loud, and it is persuasive, and it does not fight fair. Watching someone you love in that fight, and not being able to fight it for them, is one of the hardest things a human being can experience.

What I have learned this week, or perhaps what I have been reminded of in a way that has gone deeper than before, is that the Twenty-Third Psalm is not a poem for people who are doing well. It is a poem for people who are in the valley and need to be told the truth: you are not alone in it. The shepherd is here. Not at the edge of the valley, waiting for you to emerge. Here. In it. With you.

That is the God I believe in. The one who does not wait at the top of the hill with good news until you make it out. The one who comes down into the dark and walks beside the person who cannot find their own way back to the light.

What the Spirit Builds: TEND

This Sunday is the fourth week of our Easter series, What the Spirit Builds. Each week one word names what the Spirit is constructing in this community. We have walked through TOGETHER, OPEN, and WALK. This week the word is TEND.

Tending is what Good Shepherd Sunday is about. Not the picturesque shepherd with the staff on a hillside at golden hour. The shepherd who gets up in the dark when a sheep is missing. The shepherd who knows the difference between the sound of a sheep that is resting and a sheep that is in trouble. The shepherd who goes into the difficult terrain that the hired hand will not enter, because the sheep belong to him and he will not leave them.

I am telling you about Dana this week because I want you to understand that TEND is not an abstract series word for me right now. It is what this community is being called to do. Tend to each other. Tend to the ones who are in the valley. Check on the ones who have gone quiet. Ask the question you have been hesitating to ask because you are afraid of the answer.

Mental health is still, in too many places, a source of shame. People suffer in silence because they believe, or have been taught to believe, that struggling is a moral failure rather than a human condition. I am refusing that silence. Not to be dramatic. Not for sympathy. But because I am a pastor, and my calling is to go first into the difficult terrain so that the people in my care know they do not have to go there alone.

If you are in a valley right now, I see you. If someone you love is in a valley and you do not know what to do with the helplessness of watching that, I see you too. You are not doing it wrong. You are doing the most human thing there is: loving someone through something you cannot fix. That is not failure. That is faithfulness.

On Sunday we will also hear from the Acts of the Apostles, where Peter finishes his Pentecost sermon and three thousand people recognize something in the proclamation and ask: what should we do? They were contrite in heart, Luke says. The Greek word means pierced, stung, punctured through to the core. Something entered them that they could not defend against.

I know that feeling this week from the inside. Grief and love and fear have a way of getting through all the professional armor. And what I find at the center of it, when the armor is down, is the same thing those three thousand people found: a God who does not leave the sheep when the wolf arrives.

First Peter, our second reading, is written to communities of people who are sojourning in lands not fully their own, who are suffering unjustly, who are being told in various ways that they do not belong. And it tells them: the one who bore our sins in his body upon the tree, who endured without threatening, who handed himself over to the one who judged him unjustly, is now the Pastor and Bishop of your souls. He tends.

Come Sunday. Bring whatever you are carrying. Bring the valley and the shadow and the table that seems like it should not exist given the circumstances but does. Bring the grief and the uncertainty and the love that does not know what to do with itself.

The shepherd calls each one of us by name.

That has never been more real to me than it is this week.

Pax et Bonum,

Bishop Greer

Were Not Our Hearts Burning?

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There is a story in this Sunday’s Gospel that I keep coming back to, year after year, and it never gets smaller. Two people are walking away from Jerusalem. The city where everything fell apart. The city where the person they loved and followed was arrested, tried, and executed by the state. They are walking away because there is nothing left to stay for.

And a stranger falls into step beside them.

He asks what they are talking about. And Luke, who wrote this story, gives us a detail I find almost unbearably human: they stopped. And their faces were downcast. That is what grief looks like on the road. You stop moving. Your face falls. You tell the story again to the person who asked, because telling it is the only thing you know how to do with it.

The stranger listens. And then, over seven miles of road, he talks with them. He opens the scriptures. He helps them see their own story in a new way. And they do not recognize him. Not yet. They will not recognize him until that evening, at a table, in the breaking of bread.

“Were not our hearts burning while he talked with us on the road, while he opened the scriptures to us?”  (Luke 24:32, CPDV)

That question is the center of everything for me this week.

Were not our hearts burning? They ask it after the fact, after he has vanished from their sight, after the moment has passed. But the burning was real the whole time. They just did not know what it was while it was happening. That is how the presence of the risen Christ so often works. You recognize it looking back. You understand in retrospect what you were in the middle of.

I think about that a lot when I look at this community.

I think about the people who have walked into Saint Francis Parish and Outreach carrying something heavy. Some of them have been told by other churches that they do not belong. Some of them are afraid right now in ways that are very concrete, because their names are on no list that protects them, because their families are split, because their country of birth is being used against them. Some of them are queer and exhausted from fighting for the right to simply exist in public life. Some of them are women who have been told the Church has no room for what they carry.

And they walk in. And they sit down. And something happens that is hard to name while it is happening.

That is the Emmaus road. That is what it looks like when the risen Christ walks beside people who are walking away from everything that fell apart.

What the Spirit Builds: WALK

This Sunday we are in the third week of our post-Easter series, What the Spirit Builds. Each week of this Easter season carries one word. The first week was TOGETHER. Last week was OPEN. This week the word is WALK.

The Spirit builds a community that goes out on the road to where people are. Not a community that sits inside its own walls waiting for people to find their way in. A community that moves. That accompanies. That listens before it speaks. That walks seven miles beside someone who is grieving before it says anything about resurrection.

That is the model in Luke 24. Jesus does not announce himself at the beginning of the road. He walks alongside. He asks questions. He hears the whole story before he opens his mouth to interpret it. And when he does open the scriptures, he does it walking, in motion, on the way.

The Church is a walking community, or it is not the Church. Our ministry at Saint Francis has always been street-level, people-centered, out on the road. This text is not asking us to do something new. It is asking us to understand what we have already been doing and why it matters.

There is one more thing I want to name about this story, because I think it is important and it does not always get said.

When the two disciples realize who they have been walking with, their first impulse is to run back to Jerusalem. Not to sit in the moment. Not to process it quietly. To run back to the city they just left, the city of danger and loss and broken hopes, and tell the people who are still there: the Lord is alive. We saw him. He was on the road with us and we did not know it.

The experience of the risen Christ is not meant to be kept private. It moves outward. It sends you back into the place you were walking away from. It makes you want to find the people who are still sitting in locked rooms, still afraid, still saying it is over, and tell them: I have been on the road. He was there. The story is not over.

I do not know what you are carrying into church this Sunday. But I know that some of you are on a road that has felt very long, and some of you are asking whether the burning you feel is real, and whether anything you are doing matters in a world that seems to get harder by the week.

I believe it is real.

I believe the risen Christ is already walking beside you. That the conversation has already started. That your heart has already been burning and you may not have had words for it yet.

Come and find out. The table will be set, the bread will be broken, and that is when we recognize him.

We will see you Sunday.

Pax et Bonum,

Bishop Greer

Doors the Spirit Opens

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Last Sunday we gathered at an empty tomb and began building something together. TOGETHER was Easter’s word, the first word in our new post-Easter series What the Spirit Builds. This week we stay with the disciples in that same upper room, and the Spirit gives us a second word: OPEN.

The tomb was opened. Now the room needs to be opened too. That is the movement of Divine Mercy Sunday, and it is the movement of the entire season from here to Pentecost.

The Readings: A Room Full of Locked Doors

John’s Gospel places us one week after the resurrection. The disciples are still behind locked doors. They have heard the reports. Thomas has pushed back honestly. And Jesus comes again, walks through walls that fear has built, and stands among them a second time.

His first words have not changed: Peace be with you. He offers Thomas his wounds to touch. Thomas responds with the highest confession in the entire Gospel: My Lord and my God. And then Jesus names something that will carry all the way to Pentecost and beyond: blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.

Therefore, he said to them again: Peace to you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you. When he had said this, he breathed on them. And he said to them: Receive the Holy Spirit.  —John 20:21-22 (CPDV)

The Acts reading shows us what happens when a community actually receives that breath and lets it work. They devoted themselves to teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread, and prayer. They sold what they owned and gave to anyone who had need. They ate together with gladness. They held everything in common and their numbers grew daily. The locked room has become an open table.

First Peter grounds all of this theologically. We have been born anew into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The trials are real. The grief is real. But the hope is more permanent than any of it, because it rests not on circumstances but on the one who walked out of the tomb.

OPEN: This Week’s Word

The doors in John 20 are locked out of fear. That detail matters. Fear is the most reliable door-closer there is. It locks out the stranger, the foreigner, the person whose presence complicates our safety. It locks out the neighbor whose need might cost us something. It locks out the truth that would require us to change.

We are living in a political moment in the United States that is being run on the fuel of locked doors. Borders sealed. Families separated. Courts and processes that are supposed to be open becoming unavailable in practice to the most vulnerable. The message being sent to immigrant communities, to LGBTQIA+ people, to the poor, is consistent: there is no door open for you here.

The Spirit that blew through that upper room in Jerusalem opens doors. Not carelessly, not naively, but with the same deliberate mercy with which Jesus walked through a locked door to reach Thomas in his doubt. The community in Acts 2 did not wait until the world was safe before opening up. They opened because they had received the breath of the risen Christ, and that breath does not leave doors shut.

And all who believed were together, and they held all things in common. They were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing to each, just as any had need.  —Acts 2:44-45 (CPDV)

At Saint Francis Parish and Outreach, open doors are not a metaphor. They are a practice. Our doors are open to the immigrant neighbor living in fear in Augusta. They are open to the person the Church has turned away somewhere else. They are open to the doubter who, like Thomas, needs to say out loud what they cannot yet believe. The Spirit does not ask us to open doors we have the power to lock. The Spirit asks us to stop locking them.

What the Spirit Builds: The Series

We are walking together through nine words between Easter and Pentecost. Each week one word anchors our preaching and reflection, drawn from the lectionary and from the life we share as a parish. Here is the full arc:

TOGETHER   April 5 — Easter Sunday

OPEN   April 12 — Divine Mercy Sunday   ◄ this week

WALK   April 19

TEND   April 26

BELONG   May 3

SPEAK   May 10

SENT   May 17

WAIT   May 24

BURN   Pentecost

These are not abstract categories. They are descriptions of what the Spirit actually does in communities that say yes to resurrection. They are also, each of them, a quiet counter-testimony to what fear builds. Fear locks doors. The Spirit opens them. Fear isolates. The Spirit gathers. Fear silences. The Spirit speaks. We will follow that arc together all the way to Pentecost.

Come and see what the Spirit is building. We are glad the door is open and you are here.

Alleluia. Christ is risen.

Pax et Bonum,

Bishop Greer

The Empire Did Not Win

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We have been walking this road together since Ash Wednesday. We have stood at the well in Samaria, knelt at the grave of Lazarus, followed Jesus into Jerusalem knowing what was waiting for him there. Now we arrive at the three days that hold the whole story together.

The Sacred Triduum is not three separate observances. It is one continuous liturgy moving from a table to a cross to an empty tomb. This year, in this moment in the life of our nation, it reads like a document written for us.

Holy Thursday

Exodus 12:1-8, 11-14   |   Psalm 116   |   1 Corinthians 11:23-26   |   John 13:1-15

The Triduum begins not with a sermon but with a meal and a basin of water. The readings take us to the first Passover, when a people held in bondage ate their meal, ready to move. Paul hands on what he received at the Lord’s table. And then Jesus, the night before he dies, gets down on his knees and washes feet.

This is where empires always miscalculate. They assume power flows downward through force. Jesus demonstrates it flows downward through service. The one at the bottom of the table is the one being honored. The basin and the towel are not symbols of weakness. They are the shape of the kingdom.

In a season when certain people are told they are too foreign, too poor, too other to belong at the table of this nation, Holy Thursday answers plainly: at this table, those are exactly the people Jesus moves toward.

Good Friday

Isaiah 52:13-53:12   |   Psalm 31   |   Hebrews 4:14-16, 5:7-9   |   John 18:1-19:42

Good Friday carries the final Servant Song alongside John’s full Passion account. A man arrested at night. Tried in secret. Handed to a political authority who found no guilt in him and condemned him anyway because it was expedient. The Suffering Servant of Isaiah bore the suffering of others and was despised for it.

He was despised and the most abject of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with infirmity; and his look was, as it were, hidden and despised. Whereupon we esteemed him not. — Isaiah 53:3 (CPDV)

We do not have to strain for the contemporary resonance. We are living in a time when innocence is not a reliable protection. When legal process has become, for many people, a performance rather than a guarantee. When those who are foreign or inconvenient to the powerful face consequences that bear no proportion to any offense they have committed.

The Church stands at the cross on Good Friday and refuses to look away. That refusal is itself a political act. To insist on witnessing the suffering of those the powerful would rather make invisible is one of the most subversive things a community of faith can do.

Holy Saturday / Easter Vigil

Genesis 1   |   Genesis 22   |   Exodus 14   |   Isaiah 54, 55   |   Baruch 3

Romans 6:3-11   |   Matthew 28:1-10

The Vigil is the oldest and most layered liturgy in the Christian calendar. It begins in darkness, a new fire is struck, and the Church tells the whole story from the first day of creation to the empty tomb. Every liberation in human history is gathered into this night.

The crossing of the Red Sea is read at the Vigil every year because Exodus is never just a past event. Every generation of the oppressed has read itself into that water. A people with no legal standing, no rights, and no power over their own fate, pursued to the edge of an uncrossable sea. And then the water opens. Paul in Romans names what baptism means: we have been buried with Christ into death and raised into newness of life. The old order does not have the final claim on us.

Empire says, “There is no way through.” The Vigil says, “We have seen the water open before.”

Easter Sunday

Acts 10:34a, 37-43   |   Psalm 118   |   Colossians 3:1-4   |   John 20:1-9

Peter’s Easter sermon begins with words that have rung as a challenge to every sorting system in every age: God shows no partiality. Not by citizenship. Not by country of origin. Not by language, documentation, or the wealth of the nation someone happened to be born into.

In truth, I have concluded that God is not a respecter of persons.—Acts 10:34 (CPDV)

The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. Psalm 118 has been an Easter text since the Church’s earliest days, and its central image is permanently subversive: the one deemed unfit and thrown outside the wall is the one on whom everything now rests. Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb before dawn and finds the stone moved, and in the middle of all the motion and confusion and astonishment, something is quietly, permanently true. Death did not win. The empire did not win. The tomb could not hold him.

A Word to Close This Series

We began this Lenten series asking what it means to stand with immigrants and to name fascism for what it is as an act of faith rather than partisan politics. Six weeks of scripture asked the same questions the Gospel has always asked: Who do you see? Who do you stay with? Whose suffering do you allow yourself to witness? Whose dignity do you defend when it costs you something?

The resurrection does not make those questions easier. It makes them more urgent. Easter faith is not a retreat into private spiritual comfort. The risen Christ does not tell the disciples to gather safely and wait for better circumstances. He sends them out.

We are sent out too. Into Augusta. Into immigrant communities living in fear in our neighborhoods. Into a political moment that is testing whether the Church has anything to say that is more than performance.

We believe we do. We believe the empty tomb means the most powerful systems in the world do not get the final word over human life and human dignity. We believe that God shows no partiality. We believe that the servant who sets their face like flint is not abandoned. We believe that the one who came to wash feet and share bread is still moving toward the people everyone else is moving away from.

That is the faith we carry out of this Holy Week. That is the faith of Saint Francis Parish and Outreach.

Pax et Bonum,

Bishop Greer

They Have Done This Before

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Palm Sunday is the day the liturgical calendar asks us to hold two things at once. We begin with the procession, the hosannas, the crowds waving branches and laying cloaks in the road. A king is coming. The people are ready to receive him. For one brief, bright moment, it feels like the world is about to be set right.

And then the Passion reading begins, and by the time it ends, the king is dead, and almost everyone who shouted hosanna has either fled, denied him, or stood by in silence.

If that arc feels familiar in 2026, it should.

We have seen this pattern before in human history, and we are watching it again. A moment of popular energy. A figure who speaks to people’s hunger for change. And then the machinery of empire reasserts itself: the trials with predetermined verdicts, the use of crowds to ratify what those in power have already decided, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the silencing of the dissenting voice. The soldiers mock. The officials wash their hands. And the body is left to be claimed by those few who still had the courage to stay.

This Sunday, the Church does not let us skip to Easter. We are asked to stay in this story all the way to the tomb. And we are asked to recognize what kind of story it is.

Isaiah 50:4-7: The Tongue of Those Who Are Taught

The Lord God has given me the tongue of those who are taught, that I may know how to sustain with a word him who is weary. Morning by morning he awakens; he awakens my ear to hear as those who are taught. The Lord God has opened my ear, and I was not rebellious; I turned not backward.  —Isaiah 50:4-5 (ESV)

This is the third of the four Servant Songs in Isaiah, and on Palm Sunday it is read as a portrait of Jesus moving toward the cross. But it is worth sitting with it on its own terms first, because what it describes is a very particular kind of vocation.

The servant’s primary gift is not power. It is not wealth, or eloquence, or strategic brilliance. It is a taught tongue and a listening ear. Morning by morning, the servant’s ear is opened. The servant is formed by sustained attention to the voice of God, and out of that formation grows the capacity to sustain those who are weary with a word.

This is the vocation of prophetic ministry, and it runs directly counter to the logic of every authoritarian system. Authoritarianism requires a closed ear. It requires that the official story be accepted without question, that inconvenient voices be silenced, that those who name what is actually happening be discredited or destroyed. The servant in Isaiah is dangerous precisely because the servant is listening to a different source of authority than the empire recognizes.

We see this dynamic playing out in the United States right now with particular clarity. Journalists, lawyers, judges, immigration advocates, chaplains, and ordinary people who name what they see are being targeted. The mechanisms vary: professional retaliation, legal harassment, public vilification, deportation. What they share is the underlying message: stop speaking. Stop sustaining the weary with words of truth. Fall in line.

The servant’s response in Isaiah is simply to continue. I was not rebellious; I turned not backward. I gave my back to those who strike. The servant does not claim to be unafraid. The servant claims something better: the Lord God helps me; therefore I have not been disgraced.

That is the foundation from which this parish speaks. Not immunity from cost, but confidence in the one who calls us to speak.

The Face Set Like Flint

But the Lord God helps me; therefore I have not been disgraced; therefore I have set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be put to shame.  —Isaiah 50:7 (ESV)

I have set my face like a flint. That phrase describes a posture of deliberate, costly commitment. Flint is a hard stone, unyielding. To set your face like flint toward something is to commit to going there regardless of what meets you on the road.

The immigrant family who crossed a desert to reach safety has set their face like flint. The asylum seeker who appears before a court knowing the odds are stacked against them has set their face like flint. The undocumented worker who shows up to Mass and receives communion and kneels before God in a country that has told them they do not belong has set their face like flint.

The Church does not always recognize courage when it is wearing work clothes and speaking a language other than English. But the scripture does. The face set like flint in the Servant Song is the face of every person who presses forward through suffering toward the mercy of God, trusting that the Lord God helps me.

As a parish rooted in Franciscan values and the call to stand with the poor and the displaced, we are called to set our own faces like flint alongside theirs. Not ahead of them. Alongside.

Philippians 2:6-11: He Emptied Himself

Though he was in the form of God, [he] did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.  —Philippians 2:6-8 (ESV)

The ancient hymn Paul quotes in his letter to the Philippians is the theological center of the entire Holy Week. It answers the question of why Jesus did not simply call down legions of angels when Pilate threatened him. It answers the question of why the one who spoke creation into existence submitted to a Roman execution.

He did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped. The Greek word there is harpagmon, something to be exploited, something to be seized and held for personal advantage. Jesus, who had every claim to power and glory, refused to weaponize it. He moved in the opposite direction: downward, into flesh, into poverty, into the form of a servant, into the vulnerability of a human body in a Roman province, all the way down to a criminal’s death on a cross.

This hymn is a direct rebuke to every theology that aligns the cross with domination. Crosses have been planted on conquered land. The cross has been used to justify slavery, colonialism, and the silencing of the poor. But the cross in Philippians is not a symbol of power asserting itself. It is the symbol of power refusing to assert itself, choosing vulnerability instead, choosing solidarity with those at the bottom instead of identification with those at the top.

Fascism, at its core, is a theology of grasping. It says that certain people are entitled to power, to land, to security, to belonging, and others are not. It enforces that hierarchy through fear, through spectacle, through the deliberate humiliation of those designated as lesser. The Philippians hymn names that as the precise opposite of the mind of Christ.

The call of this text is not merely to admire what Jesus did. It is to have this mind among yourselves, as Paul says in the verse just before this passage. We are called to empty ourselves of grasping, to move toward the servant form, to resist the constant temptation to secure our own comfort and safety by accepting the vulnerability of those around us as an acceptable cost.

Matthew 26-27: The Mechanics of Empire

Pilate said to them, ‘Then what shall I do with Jesus who is called Christ?’ They all said, ‘Let him be crucified!’ And he said, ‘Why? What evil has he done?’ But they shouted all the more, ‘Let him be crucified!’  —Matthew 27:22-23 (ESV)

Matthew’s Passion narrative is long, and it rewards slow reading. But for the purposes of this reflection, I want to draw attention to something that is easy to miss when we know how the story ends: the extraordinary ordinariness of what happens.

Jesus is betrayed by an insider for money. He is arrested with a show of force in the middle of the night. He is subjected to a trial before a religious tribunal that has already decided the verdict. He is handed to a political authority who knows he is innocent but is more concerned with managing the crowd than doing what is right. The crowd, manipulated by those with a stake in the outcome, is moved to demand a death they would not have demanded on their own. A convicted insurrectionist goes free. The innocent one is condemned. The soldiers mock him, dress him up, beat him, and march him to an execution that is also a spectacle, a public demonstration of what happens to those who challenge the order.

None of this is extraordinary. It is the ordinary machinery of empire and of every authoritarian system that has come since. The overnight arrest. The show trial. The compliant official who privately knows better but chooses his career over his conscience. The crowd worked into a frenzy. The scapegoat. The spectacle of violence as a warning to others.

We are watching versions of this machinery operate in the United States right now. People are being detained without adequate legal process. Immigration courts are processing cases at a pace that makes genuine due process impossible. Officials who know that what is happening is wrong are, too often, choosing their positions over their principles. And the public is being offered a steady stream of chosen enemies, people designated as threats, to absorb collective fear and anger and justify the expansion of power.

Matthew does not let us watch this as neutral observers. He gives us a cast of characters, and each of them demands a question of us. The disciples who fled: where do we flee when following costs too much? Judas, who handed over an innocent person for thirty pieces of silver: what are we willing to hand over, and for what price? Pilate, who washed his hands: in what ways are we washing our hands of responsibility right now? The women who stayed at the cross: who among us has the courage to stay?

The Women Who Stayed

There were also many women there, looking on from a distance, who had followed Jesus from Galilee, ministering to him, among whom were Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Joseph and the mother of the sons of Zebedee.  —Matthew 27:55-56 (ESV)

At the end of the Passion narrative, almost everyone is gone. The disciples have fled. Peter has denied him three times. Judas is dead. The crowds have dispersed. And in the distance, watching, are the women.

They are not named until this moment, but Matthew tells us they had been there all along, following from Galilee, ministering to Jesus throughout his public life. They are there at the cross. They will be at the tomb. They will be the first witnesses of the resurrection. The ones who stayed at the end are the ones who will carry the beginning of the new thing.

In the present moment of crisis for immigrant communities in this country, it is worth asking: who is staying? Who is standing at the place of suffering, not from a distance, but close enough to witness? Who is accompanying the families being torn apart, the communities living in fear, the people who have been told by every lever of power that they do not belong?

At Saint Francis Parish and Outreach, we have said clearly that we will not look away. Our commitment to standing with immigrants is not a political position. It is a Gospel position. It is the position of the women at the cross. We are called to be present at the place of suffering and to carry what we see there into whatever comes next.

A Word About Fascism and the Faith

I want to say something directly, because Palm Sunday invites directness.

Fascism is incompatible with Christian faith. Not because Christians are required to hold any particular political affiliation, but because fascism, as a movement and as a governing philosophy, is built on the opposite of everything the Philippians hymn names as the mind of Christ. It grasps. It dominates. It scapegoats. It silences. It humiliates. It makes spectacle of suffering. It demands loyalty oaths to persons rather than principles. It tells the powerful that their power is deserved and tells the vulnerable that their suffering is their own fault.

Jesus was executed by a version of that system. The early Church was persecuted by it. The saints and martyrs of every century have resisted it. And the Church, when it has been faithful to its own Gospel, has always known that the cross stands against the logic of empire, not alongside it.

When we stand with immigrants, when we name cruelty as cruelty, when we refuse to be silent about what is happening to vulnerable people in this country, we are not departing from the faith. We are practicing it. We are standing at the cross. We are among the women who stayed.

We enter Holy Week carrying all of this with us. The suffering of our neighbors is real. The machinery grinding against vulnerable people is real. And the God who raised Jesus from the dead is also real. We do not rush past the death to get to the resurrection. We stay in it, all the way through, because the people we stand with do not have the option of looking away. Neither do we.

Pax et Bonum,

Bishop Greer

Come Out.

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We are one week from Holy Week, and the readings this Sunday are not subtle about where we are. Three of the four texts are steeped in death. Ezekiel speaks to graves. The psalmist cries from the depths. Mary and Martha are in mourning. Lazarus has been in the tomb for four days. The whole liturgy this Sunday smells like grief.

And yet. Into every one of these scenes, God speaks a word that reorders everything.

The Fifth Sunday of Lent is sometimes called Passion Sunday in older traditions, and it carries a weight that the earlier weeks do not. We are deep enough into Lent that the cross is no longer a far-off theological concept. It is close now. The world that killed Lazarus is the same world that will, within days, kill Jesus. And the readings invite us to ask: what does resurrection mean for us when the dying is real, the grief is real, and the tomb has been sealed for days?

That is not an abstract question in the United States in the spring of 2026.

Ezekiel 37:12-14: I Will Open Your Graves

Thus says the Lord God: Behold, I will open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people. And I will bring you into the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people.  —Ezekiel 37:12-13 (ESV)

Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones is one of the most striking images in all of scripture. The prophet stands in a field of death and is asked: can these bones live? The honest, human answer is: I do not know. Only you know, Lord. And then the breath comes.

The context matters enormously. These are not strangers in the valley. These are the people of Israel in exile, a community that has been dispersed, defeated, separated from everything that gave them identity and belonging. They have begun to believe the lie that their situation is permanent. We are cut off, they say. Our bones are dried up. Our hope is lost.

The lie of permanence is one of the most effective tools of systems that want to maintain control. When communities are beaten down long enough, they begin to internalize the message that this is simply how things are. That resistance is futile. That hope is for people who have not yet learned better.

We are watching this play out in our own country. Immigrant communities that have lived here for decades are being told, systematically, that they do not belong here and never did. Poor communities that have been underserved for generations are being told that cuts to healthcare, housing, and education are inevitable and necessary. LGBTQIA+ people are watching rights that were hard-won over decades be stripped back, state by state. Marginalized communities are being told, in a hundred ways, to stop hoping.

Into that very message, God speaks through Ezekiel. I will open your graves. Not maybe. Not if you deserve it. Not eventually, when circumstances allow. I will. The verb is declarative and divine. The God who raised dry bones in a field of death is not done speaking resurrection into places where hope has been declared dead.

Psalm 130: Out of the Depths

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord! O Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy!  —Psalm 130:1-2 (ESV)

Psalm 130 is one of the great De Profundis psalms, a cry from the very bottom. The psalmist does not pretend to be anywhere other than where they are. There is no spiritual bypass here, no reassurance that things are not really that bad. The depths are real. The cry is raw. And it is directed fully, completely, without filter, at God.

One of the gifts of the Psalms is that they model for us what honest prayer looks like. We live in a moment when there is enormous pressure, even inside the Church, to perform a kind of relentless optimism. To always lead with gratitude. To not linger in lament because it might seem like a lack of faith.

But lament is faith. Crying out from the depths is an act of trust that there is someone to hear you. The psalmist does not cry into an empty sky; they cry to the Lord who is attentive, who leans in, who listens for the voice of our pleas for mercy.

If you are carrying depths right now, this psalm is your permission to name them to God without dressing them up first. If you are ministering to others who are in the depths, this psalm is your reminder that accompanying someone in lament is not a failure of pastoral care. It is itself a form of resurrection work.

There is a waiting in this psalm too. The psalmist waits for the Lord more than the watchman waits for the morning. Anyone who has sat with a dying loved one, or held vigil through a long night of uncertainty, or waited for a phone call that would change everything, knows what that watching feels like. The Church is called to keep that vigil with people. To stay in the depth with those who cannot yet climb out.

Romans 8:8-11: The Spirit That Raised Jesus Dwells in You

If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.  —Romans 8:11 (ESV)

Paul’s letter to the Romans is doing something theologically bold here. He is not talking about resurrection as a future event that will happen to us after we die. He is saying that the same Spirit that raised Jesus is already living in you. Right now. In your mortal body. In the body that gets tired and sick and afraid.

That is a radical claim with radical implications. It means the resurrection power of God is not located somewhere else, held in reserve for another time. It is present. It is here. It is at work in the lives of ordinary people who have been filled with the Spirit of the living God.

In the face of everything that is bearing down on vulnerable communities in this country, that word is either delusional or it is the most important thing we can say. We do not choose to believe it because everything looks fine. We choose to believe it precisely because things do not look fine, and yet we have staked our lives on the claim that death does not get the final word.

That faith is not passive. The Spirit that dwells in us is not a quiet interior feeling. It is the same Spirit that animated the prophets, that drove Jesus to table fellowship with the excluded, that emboldened the early Church to share everything they had. When Paul says that Spirit lives in you, he is also saying: then live accordingly. Move accordingly. Speak accordingly. Love accordingly.

John 11: Lazarus, Come Out

When he had said these things, he cried out with a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out.’ The man who had died came out, his hands and feet bound with linen strips, and his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’  —John 11:43-44 (ESV)

The story of Lazarus is so familiar to many of us that we can skim past how strange and disorienting it actually is. Mary and Martha sent word to Jesus that their brother was dying. Jesus waited. By the time he arrived, Lazarus had been dead for four days. Martha meets him on the road and says, plainly, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. That is not a gentle greeting. That is grief with an edge of accusation.

Jesus does not rebuke her for it. He does not explain himself. He asks to be taken to the tomb, and when he sees Mary weeping and the community weeping with her, the text says something remarkable: Jesus wept. The shortest verse in the Bible is also one of the most theologically dense. The one who is about to undo death stops and cries. He does not rush past the grief to get to the miracle. He stands in it. He honors it. He weeps with those who weep.

Then he calls Lazarus out.

Notice the command carefully. Jesus does not say come back or return or be restored. He says come out. There is a directional quality to this word, a calling forward from death into something new, not a return to what was before. Lazarus emerges from the tomb still wrapped in burial cloths, still bound, and Jesus says to the community around him: unbind him, and let him go.

This detail is worth sitting with. The miracle of resurrection is not the end of the work. The community still has a role. Lazarus is alive, but he is still bound. The work of unbinding is given to the people standing there. That is not incidental. It is a direct commission.

We are a people who have been commissioned to unbind. We encounter people all around us who are alive, who have survived things that should have killed them, who are here and breathing and present, but who are still wrapped in the grave clothes of what has been done to them. The trauma of detention and deportation. The weight of poverty and housing insecurity. The binding of shame that the Church itself has placed on LGBTQIA+ people. The burial cloths of systemic racism and the lies we have told each other about who deserves to flourish.

Resurrection is not complete when someone survives. Resurrection is complete when the community does the work of unbinding.

A Pastoral Word for This Week

We stand one week before Holy Week begins. The path from here goes through betrayal and trial and execution before it reaches the empty tomb. Do not let anyone tell you that faith means skipping that part. The death is real. The grief is real. The weeping at the graveside is real.

And the voice that calls us out is real.

For those among us who are sitting with your own graves right now, your own dried bones, your own depths from which you are crying out: you are not beyond the reach of the God who raised Lazarus. Your hope is not foolish. Your waiting is not wasted.

For those among us who are standing near someone else’s tomb, who are in the position of Mary and Martha, watching someone we love wrapped in what feels like a permanent ending: Jesus asks to be brought to the place of grief. He does not wait at a comfortable distance. Bring him there. Stay there. Weep.

And then, when the voice comes that calls the bound and the buried into new life, let us be ready to do what the community at Bethany was told to do.

Unbind them. And let them go.

Pax et Bonum,

Bishop Greer

Who Are We Refusing to See?

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Something is happening in this country that the Church cannot ignore, and this Sunday’s readings will not let us look away. The Fourth Sunday of Lent confronts us with one of the most penetrating questions in all of scripture: who, exactly, is the one who cannot see?

In John 9, a man who has been blind from birth is healed by Jesus. You would expect that to be cause for celebration all around. Instead, what follows is a long, painful scene of interrogation, denial, and ultimately expulsion. The man who now sees is cast out. And the religious leaders who witness the miracle dig in deeper and deeper into their refusal to accept what is right in front of them. By the end of the chapter, Jesus says something that cuts to the bone: those who claim to see are the ones who remain in their blindness.

That is not ancient history. That is a mirror held up to us right now.

Laetare Sunday: Joy in the Middle of the Journey

Before we get into the hard word this text has for our current moment, it is worth pausing on something beautiful. The Fourth Sunday of Lent is traditionally called Laetare Sunday, from the Latin word for “rejoice.” We are halfway through our Lenten journey, and the Church offers us a breath of relief and hope. Some traditions even allow rose-colored vestments instead of purple, a small burst of light in the penitential season.

Laetare Sunday does not mean we set the hard things aside. It means we face them from a place of hope rather than despair. The joy of Laetare is not the shallow joy of pretending everything is fine. It is the deeper joy of people who trust that light will ultimately overcome darkness, even when the darkness feels very thick right now.

And the darkness does feel thick.

1 Samuel 16: God Looks at the Heart

For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.  —1 Samuel 16:7 (ESV)

Samuel arrives at the house of Jesse to anoint the next king of Israel. One by one, the tall, strong, impressive sons pass before him. One by one, God says no. The son who will be chosen is the one nobody thought to bring in from the field. He is the youngest, the smallest in stature, and the overlooked one. He is David.

In the United States in 2026, we are living through a season when a great deal of political and cultural energy is devoted to sorting people by outward markers. Citizenship papers. Country of origin. How someone speaks. Where they worship. Who they love. These surface-level criteria are being used to determine who belongs, who has value, and who deserves to be seen and heard.

The Word of God cuts against every one of those calculations. God looks at the heart. That standard does not bend for nationalism or political convenience. The undocumented farmworker laboring in the fields of Georgia has a heart. The asylum seeker detained at a border facility has a heart. The unhoused veteran sleeping under a bridge here in Augusta has a heart. The God who passed over Jesse’s impressive sons to find the shepherd boy in the field is still looking past our metrics and seeing people we have trained ourselves not to see.

Psalm 23: The Shepherd Who Does Not Abandon

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.  —Psalm 23:4 (ESV)

Psalm 23 is one of the most beloved passages in all of scripture, and on this Laetare Sunday it lands with particular weight. This is a psalm for people who are in the valley. Not people who have escaped it or who are safely on the other side, but people who are walking through it right now.

There are valleys all across this country. There are families in the valley of fear, uncertain whether a knock at the door will separate them from their children. There are communities in the valley of grief, mourning neighbors who have been taken away. There are people in the valley of hunger, of illness without care, and of loneliness and rejection.

The Psalm does not promise an escape from the valley. It promises a presence in it. The Lord walks with those who are walking through the darkest places. That is not a passive comfort. For us as the Church, it is a call. If the Lord is present with those in the valley, then so should we be.

Ephesians 5:8-14: Wake Up and Walk in the Light

For at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light (for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true). —Ephesians 5:8-9 (ESV)

Paul’s letter to the Ephesians doesn’t mince words. Once we were darkness. Not just in the dark, but darkness itself. And by the grace of God, that has been transformed. We are now called to be light. And light, Paul says, has a very specific kind of fruit: goodness, righteousness, and truth.

Those three words are a direct challenge to the cultural moment we are in. Goodness pushes back against cruelty. Righteousness pushes back against the corruption of power. Truth pushes back against the steady erosion of facts that we have been watching unfold in public life.

Paul also says something remarkable at the end of this passage: everything exposed by the light becomes visible. There is a purifying, revealing quality to living in the light. One of the most important things the Church can do right now is refuse to look away. Refuse to normalize what is not normal. Refuse to stay comfortable while others suffer. The light is not meant to stay in the sanctuary. It is meant to shine on everything.

John 9: The Man Born Blind, and the People Who Refused to See

Jesus heard that they had cast him out, and having found him, he said, ‘…Do you believe in the Son of Man?…’ He said, ‘Lord, I believe,’ and he worshiped him. —John 9:35, 38 (ESV)

This is the longest healing story in the Gospel of John, and the healing itself is almost a footnote. The real drama is about perception, denial, and the cost of telling the truth.

A man blind from birth receives his sight. His neighbors are confused. The Pharisees are troubled because the healing happened on the Sabbath. They interrogate the man, then interrogate his parents, who are afraid and deflect. The man himself is brought back for a second round of questioning, and when he refuses to deny what happened to him, when he names the obvious truth plainly, he is thrown out.

Notice what is happening here. A person who was always on the margins, who had been cast as a symbol of sin and misfortune, encounters the mercy of God and is made whole. And the institutional response is to protect its own authority rather than celebrate the miracle. The leaders are not neutral observers who simply got things wrong. They are actively invested in a narrative that Jesus cannot be from God, and they will discard a real human being in order to protect that narrative.

Look around. We can see this pattern clearly. People whose humanity is inconvenient to a preferred story are dismissed, dehumanized, or disappeared. Immigrants who have lived and worked and raised families here for decades are cast out. LGBTQIA+ young people are told by their own families and communities that they do not belong. People experiencing homelessness are criminalized for the act of existing in public. In every case, a real human being is made into a problem to be managed rather than a person to be loved.

Jesus does not let the man stay cast out. He goes and finds him. That small detail is one of the most important things in this entire story. The one who was expelled, interrogated, and abandoned is the one Jesus deliberately seeks out. There is a pastoral model here that Saint Francis Parish and Outreach takes seriously. We do not wait for the expelled and the cast-out to find us. We go and find them.

A Word Directly for Our Parish

Saint Francis of Assisi is our patron for a reason. Francis was himself a man who learned to see differently. Once he saw only wealth and status; then he encountered a leper on the road and could not look away. That encounter changed everything. The ministry of this parish carries that same DNA.

Lent is a season for honest reckoning. So let us ask ourselves plainly: who are we not seeing? Who sits in the margins of our community, waiting to be noticed? Who has been cast out by another church, another family, another institution, and is watching from a distance to see whether we are safe?

And let us ask something harder: are there ways in which we ourselves have been the ones who refuse to see? Are there comforts we are clinging to that require us not to look too closely at the suffering around us? Are there stories we have accepted uncritically because accepting a harder truth would cost us something?

The Fourth Sunday of Lent does not let us stay comfortable. But it holds out this Laetare joy: transformation is real. The man born blind received his sight. Samuel found the shepherd boy in the field. The Lord walks with us through the darkest valleys. And the light, Paul promises, is fruitful.

May we walk as children of light this week, in all that is good and right and true.

Pax et Bonum,

Bishop Greer

Living Water, Hard Hearts, and the Courage to Resist Fascism

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The Roman Catholic Lectionary readings for the Third Sunday of Lent place us at a well at noon, in the wilderness with no water, and in the heart of God’s love poured out for the weak. They are not “safe” readings. They confront a question that keeps repeating in Scripture and in public life: When people are thirsty, afraid, and pressured, will we harden our hearts, or will we turn toward God and toward one another?

Water from the rock, and the temptation to cynicism

In Exodus, the people have a real need. “There was no water for the people to drink” (Exodus 17:1, ESV). Their thirst becomes accusation, then rage, then a dangerous question: “Is the LORD among us or not?” (Exodus 17:7, ESV). That question is not only ancient. It is modern. When a country is anxious, when systems fail, and when leaders want an easy target, the crowd is often invited to turn on the vulnerable rather than confront the truth. That is how scapegoating works, and it is one of the oldest political tricks in the world. Christians should recognize it instantly because Exodus names it with painful honesty.

We are living through a season in the United States where public life is saturated with grievance, suspicion, and an appetite for someone to blame. Immigrants are often treated as a useful “problem” to perform outrage against, rather than as human beings with dignity and stories. Exodus reminds us that fear can make people cruel, but it also shows God’s response: God provides water, and God stays present even when the people are faithless. That does not excuse sin, but it does expose the lie that cruelty is necessary for survival.

“Give me a drink” and the politics of contempt

The Gospel is John 4, Jesus and the Samaritan woman. Jesus begins with a request, not a demand: “Give me a drink” (John 4:7, ESV). He crosses a boundary that His disciples would rather avoid. He speaks to a person his society has trained him to dismiss. He treats her as fully human, spiritually serious, and capable of receiving God. Then He offers what no empire can offer: “living water” that becomes “a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:10, 14, ESV).

This matters for our current moment because authoritarian movements always rely on contempt. They rely on dividing the world into “us” and “them,” and then slowly shrinking who counts as “us.” Jesus does the opposite. He widens the circle. He tells the truth about the woman’s life without humiliating her. He refuses to treat her as a stereotype. He reveals Himself to her with stunning directness: “I who speak to you am he” (John 4:26, ESV). A church that follows this Jesus cannot join the dehumanization of immigrants, refugees, or any group a society labels “inconvenient.”

John’s Gospel also shows the social effect of dignity. The woman becomes a witness. She tells the truth about her encounter, and her whole town begins to move toward Christ. “Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony” (John 4:39, ESV). That is what happens when people are treated as neighbors rather than threats. Fear loses its grip. Hope spreads.

“God shows his love” and what Christians owe the vulnerable

Romans 5 grounds everything in grace. “While we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly” (Romans 5:6, ESV). This is not a sentimental slogan. It is a moral foundation. If God loved us while we were weak, we do not get to despise weakness in others. If God moved toward us when we did not deserve it, we do not get to build a society that only values people who are “useful.” “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8, ESV).

When immigration becomes a political weapon, the Christian response cannot be apathy or performative neutrality. The Roman Catholic USCCB teaching resource on immigration explicitly grounds the Church’s concern in Scripture and in human dignity, and it argues that basic human rights do not disappear because of legal status. It also warns against inhumane treatment and calls for policy shaped by justice, mercy, and the common good. Whether or not we share Roman Catholic jurisdiction, those moral claims match the heart of the biblical witness.

Standing against fascism as a Christian discipline

Lent is training, not theater. One of the disciplines Lent trains in us is moral clarity. Fascism, in practice, is not only a label. It is a pattern: scapegoating, propaganda, coercion, contempt for truth, and the use of state power to punish or exclude targeted groups. Christians resist this not by becoming partisan machines, but by refusing the spiritual logic underneath it. We refuse contempt. We refuse lies. We refuse to surrender the dignity of the vulnerable for the comfort of the majority.

It is worth remembering that the Roman Catholic USCCB’s First Freedom Blog explicitly notes the Church’s historical wounds from state authoritarianism “ranging from Communism to fascism,” and it describes how the machinery of the state has been used brutally against minorities. The point is not nostalgia. The point is vigilance and the courage to say “no” when coercion is normalized.

A parish response for this week

This week, the Scriptures invite a specific kind of repentance. Ask where you are tempted to harden, to reduce people to categories, or to join contempt because it feels safe.

  • Pray with Exodus 17 and name your own wilderness question honestly before God.
  • Pray with John 4 and ask Christ to show you the person you have been trained not to see.
  • Pray with Romans 5 and ask God to make your love sturdier than your fear.

Then take one concrete step. Learn an immigrant family’s story. Support a ministry that provides legal, food, housing, or medical assistance. Refuse to repeat dehumanizing speech, even when it is popular. Be the kind of Christian who offers living water in a thirsty time.

May the Holy Spirit soften what has become hard in us, and may our parish become a well in the desert for those who are tired, targeted, and afraid.

Pax et Bonum,

Bishop Greer

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