What I Tell You in Darkness, Speak in the Light

I want to begin this blog post with something personal, because the readings this Sunday landed personally, and I think you deserve to know why.

Sunday, June 21, is my birthday. It is also the birthday of my wife, Deacon Dana Godsey. Dana and I share this day, which has always seemed to me like one of the less random facts about our life together.

Sunday is also, as of this year, the beginning of my twenty-eighth year as a bishop in the Old Catholic tradition. On June 21, 1999, I was consecrated to the episcopate. Twenty-seven years ago today. I was a much younger person in a much simpler situation, and I had very little idea of what twenty-seven years of this work would actually ask of me.

I tell you this because this Sunday’s series word is SPEAK. And after twenty-seven years of speaking from the bishop’s chair, the question the readings raise is not abstract for me. It is the question that comes back, again and again, in every season of this work: what gives you the ground to keep speaking when the cost is real, when the room is not always friendly, when the years accumulate with their losses as well as their joys?

The readings this Sunday answer that question. And I want to walk you through them before you come to Mass.

Jeremiah was not a one-sermon prophet. His ministry stretched across approximately forty years, through the reigns of five Judean kings, ending with the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon in 586 BCE. Forty years of saying things that the establishment did not want to hear. Forty years of being called a troublemaker.

The passage assigned for this Sunday is from what scholars call the confessions of Jeremiah, a series of intimate laments scattered through chapters eleven through twenty. Just before our reading, Jeremiah says something devastating: he says that when he tries to stay quiet, there is something burning in his bones and he cannot contain it. If he speaks, he is a target. If he stays silent, he burns from the inside.

That is the texture of long-haul prophetic work. Not triumph. Not clarity. A fire in the bones and no comfortable option.

And then, in the middle of all of it, this:

Not vindication in his lifetime. Not the persecution stopping. Simply: the Lord is with me. That is enough to keep speaking one more day.

After twenty-seven years, I understand that sentence from the inside in a way I did not when I was younger.

This Sunday is week two of our new series, The Kingdom Worth Everything: Costly Discipleship in Ordinary Time. Last week the word was CALLED. This week the word is SPEAK.

Jesus is telling the disciples what to do when the going gets hard. And his answer is not to retreat into private faith. It is:

The darkness is not the enemy in that sentence. The darkness is where the teaching happens. What is received in private is meant to travel to the most public place available. And the reason to speak despite the cost is not confidence in the outcome. It is the sparrow.

Jesus says: not one sparrow falls to the ground without your Father. The hairs of your head have all been numbered. You are worth more than many sparrows.

That is the theological ground for speaking at cost. The God who sees every sparrow fall sees you when you open your mouth and pay the price for what comes out. That divine attention is not a guarantee of safety. It is something more durable: the knowledge that the one who sent you knows exactly what the sending costs.

On my twenty-seventh anniversary in this work, that is the word I most needed this week. I suspect some of you needed it too.

One week from today, Saturday June 27, Saint Francis Parish and Outreach will have a booth at Augusta Pride 2026.

This is what SPEAK looks like outside the sanctuary walls. We will stand in a public place, with our name on a sign, and say to every queer person who walks by what this community has been saying from this pulpit for years: there is a church that means it when it says all are welcome. The Father has numbered the hairs on your head. You are worth more than many sparrows.

We want you to come. If you are part of this community, come and stand with us. If you know someone who has been told by the Church that God does not want them, tell them we will be there.

The kingdom worth everything begins with a call. Then it asks you to speak. Then it asks you to show up in the places that matter with your face and your name attached to what you believe.

Augusta Pride is one of those places for us.

Happy birthday to Dana. Happy Father’s Day to all who carry that role. And thank you, from the bottom of twenty-seven years of this work, for being the community that makes the speaking worth it.

Pax et Bonum,

Bishop Greer