Saint Francis Parish and Outreach Newsletter - June 25, 2026

From the Blog

The Hardest Word

This has been one of the more difficult weeks I have had in a long time.

I want to be honest with you about that, because I think the pastoral relationship between a pastor and a community requires honesty, and because what I have experienced this week is not separate from what I want to preach about on Sunday. It is the same thing.

A a week ago I stopped to help an African-American woman who was in medical distress. We were one hundred yards from the entrance of a local hospital. The medical professionals at that hospital refused to come and help her.

I posted about what I witnessed. About a woman in need being failed by people who were trained and obligated to help her. About the specific and documented reality that Black people in this country receive systematically worse medical care than white people, and that what I watched happen to her was not an isolated incident but a pattern with a name.

The response broke my heart. Not because people disagreed with me, but because the energy of that response went not toward the woman who had been failed, not toward the hospital, not toward the systems that produce that kind of failure, but toward me. A week of organized attacks from people claiming I am not a real bishop, not a real priest, that I am dangerous. Why? Because I named what I saw.

I am telling you this not to ask for sympathy, though the kindness of this community has meant more than I can say. I am telling you this because it is the world we live in right now, and I think we need to talk about it.

Something has shifted in the temperature of public life. I do not think I am imagining it and I do not think you are either.

The level of anger in our public discourse has reached a place that I find genuinely alarming. Not the anger that comes from injustice, which is appropriate and often necessary. The anger that comes from fear that has curdled into contempt. The anger that looks for targets rather than solutions. The anger that is organized and directed and that has found in social media a delivery mechanism of almost perfect efficiency.

People are being hurt by this. Not abstractions. Real people. The woman who was refused care at the hospital entrance is a real person. The families being separated by immigration enforcement are real families. The queer teenagers in Augusta who have been told by their churches and their schools and sometimes their own households that they do not belong are real teenagers. And the pastors and advocates and ordinary people who stand up for them are real people who pay a real cost for doing so.

The anger being directed at those who speak up is not random. It is strategic. It targets the people whose voice most threatens the comfort of those who benefit from the current arrangement. It is designed to make the cost of speaking high enough that people stop.

I have watched it work on people I respect. I have watched voices go quiet that should be loud. I have watched communities pull back from commitments they made when the cost was theoretical and the attacks were not yet personal.

I understand it. I have had the last week to understand it from the inside.

This Sunday’s series word is CROSS. It is week three of The Kingdom Worth Everything: Costly Discipleship in Ordinary Time, and this week we arrive at the word that sits at the center of everything the series has been building toward.

I want to say something about the cross that I think gets lost when we make it decorative.

The Roman cross was not a symbol. It was an instrument of state terror. It was the empire’s tool for executing people who challenged the existing order: slaves, criminals, and political agitators. The condemned carried the crossbeam through public streets to the execution site. The whole point was visibility. The message was: this is what happens when you stand between power and the people power has decided are expendable.

When Jesus tells the disciples to take up their cross and follow him, they know exactly what he is talking about. There is no softness in the image. There is no metaphor. There is a concrete, specific, politically loaded description of what it costs to follow the one who said the last shall be first and the meek shall inherit the earth and whatever you do to the least of these you do to me.

The anger being directed at people who speak up for the vulnerable is not a new phenomenon. It is the cross, in the specific form it takes in 2026 in the United States of America. It is the cost of standing in the way of the systems that benefit from the silence of the Church.

And the question the text puts to us is not whether the cost is real. It is. The question is whether we are going to keep going anyway.

The first reading this Sunday is about a woman in the town of Shunem who noticed that the prophet Elisha passed by frequently and decided to make room for him. She prepared a small upper room: a bed, a table, a chair, a lampstand.

She did this knowing that aligning her household with a prophet who spoke uncomfortable things to power was not a neutral act. She did it anyway. And what she received in return was the thing she did not know she was asking for.

Making room for the difficult truth, for the uncomfortable witness, for the person whose presence in your house marks you: that is the cross at the scale of a spare room. It is not dramatic. It is specific and practical and it costs something and it is what faithful people do in every generation when the easier option is to look away.

This community has been making room. For the immigrant family. For the queer young person who found every other church door closed. For the Black woman in medical distress who needed someone to stop and stay and say: what happened to you matters. For the voice of the prophet who passes by frequently and needs somewhere to rest.

Keep making room.

I want to say something direct, because I think the moment requires directness.

Hatred is a spiritual condition before it is a political one. The organized campaigns of contempt and dehumanization that are filling our public life are not primarily a political problem, though they have political expressions. They are the fruit of a spiritual formation that has gone badly wrong: people who have been trained to find their identity in who they oppose rather than who they love, who have been taught that the world is divided into the worthy and the unworthy and that cruelty toward the unworthy is not only acceptable but righteous.

The Church has, in too many places, contributed to that formation rather than challenging it. Too many pulpits have given religious sanction to contempt. Too many communities have built their identity around exclusion rather than welcome. And the people who paid the price for that are the people who are always expendable: the poor, the immigrant, the queer person, the person of color.

What this community is called to be is the counter-testimony to all of it. Not by matching the anger, but by refusing to be moved by it from the thing we are called to do. The antidote to hatred is not counter-hatred. It is the kind of love that is costly enough to be worth taking seriously: the love that makes a room for the prophet, that gives a cup of cold water to the least of these, that takes up the cross and follows.

That is what we are preaching about this Sunday. Come and hear it.

Before I close I want to say thank you. To this community for the kindness you have shown through a difficult week. To the people who sent messages of support after the posts. To the people who came to Mass and brought their presence and their prayers.

The attacks from people who want me to be quiet have not worked. I am still here. I am still speaking. And I will continue to be, as long as there is a woman one hundred yards from a hospital entrance who needs someone to stop and stay.

The kingdom is worth everything it costs.

See you Sunday.

Pax et Bonum,

Bishop Greer