August 31, 2025: Nothing can Separate Us from the Love of God

Lisa Wiens Heinsohn

Nothing Can Separate Us From the Love of God

Homily by Lisa Wiens Heinsohn

given for the people of St. John’s Episcopal Church

August 31, 2025: Luke 14:1, 7-14; Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16

This week, a terrible tragedy visited our city and our community—the shooting at Annunciation Church and School. Many of us did not hear about this event first from the newspaper but from family and friends and neighbors, because we are close to Annunciation. St. John’s members attended school there. Annunciation children came to our Peace Frogs summer camp last month. Some St. John’s members have family who are members at Annunciation, some of whom had planned to be at the mass where the shooting happened but ended up not going. One St. John’s person has a very close friend whose child currently attends Annunciation and who thank God is alive, but they spent frantic hours on the phone together Wednesday morning wondering if their child was OK.

So we planned to have a prayer vigil on Thursday because this was not an event that happened far away, but very close to home. We ended up deciding to cancel our vigil in order to go to the interfaith prayer service at the Basilica, to have a single mass gathering for the entire community. When I arrived there someone noticed I was wearing a clergy collar and to my surprise they directed me to a room where many other clergy had gathered – men and women, Christian and Jewish and Muslim, queer and straight – and we processed up and down the aisles of this huge beautiful cathedral in all our different clergy attire and sat up in front. I never thought that as a woman and a priest, I would be in a collar processing in a Catholic church, but it happened. It happened because we all came together. It happened because this week our theological differences mattered much less than standing with one another in our grief. Expressing our anguish and solidarity together was more important than anything else and we did it. Miracles do happen. God was present, the God we all worship using different names, in different ways, the Creator of all who made those children and who surely is weeping with us.

Because we are so close and this has not been just a newspaper event, I know that we have all been experiencing many things. If you’d like, please close your eyes for a moment and just become present to yourself with great compassion for whatever your experience has been.

I’d like to invite us all to imagine gathering up this collective experience and offering it to God, the God who for Christians is best understood through Jesus, who surely knew what suffering is. The God revealed to us in Jesus is not far distant, watching impassively from on high. Our Scriptures reveal a God who will not be God without us. Our sacred stories describe a God who so yearned to be with us that God took human form in the person of Jesus, and has suffered in solidarity with every person whose blood has been spilled on the ground since Cain killed his brother Abel.

In today’s gospel reading Jesus says something curious. He says, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

When I listen deeply to this teaching, I notice Jesus is inviting us away from a transactional quid pro quo way of thinking and being in relationship. In fact he is inviting us to do the extreme – go look for ways to do something generous that you can never get anything back for. That you will never get anything out of. I believe this is because in the economy of God’s love, no goodness or effort is ever wasted. No generosity or kindness is ever lost. Although Christians don’t really have a concept of karma per se, Jesus does clearly say here that what you give out comes back to you in the form of what he calls the resurrection of the righteous, or the ongoing unquenchable life of goodness that cannot be crushed in this life or the next.

And this helps me at times like this. What helps me is to be grounded in the assurance of a different way, a better way, the way Jesus describes and embodies, Jesus’ Way of Love. Even if it seems that way will never work, we still must insist on it and live it and embody it. Even if we never see the fruits of our labors, if we are never repaid for our efforts, Jesus is inviting us to give freely anyway. Even if it seems that any and all kinds of guns will always be easily available to anyone who wants one, we still must do the right thing and insist on sensible restrictions, even if we lose. Even if it seems that there is no end of suffering people taking out their pain and rage on others through mass violence, we still must insist that healing is possible, that a better way is available, and do all that we can to address the hurts of suffering people before they resort to violence. Even if we fail, we must still do what is right, and doing what is right and insisting that what happened Wednesday is not normal and pointing toward Jesus’ Way of Love is what will help us to preserve our souls in wholeness and in the love of God. This helps me. In a certain way of thinking, you know, Jesus failed. He died a terrible death. His ministry was cut off in the prime of his life. And yet here we are, two thousand years later, nourished and inspired and molded by his teachings and his presence that is embodied in this community, the body of Christ.

We should not ever let ourselves think that the efforts we make toward goodness and justice and radical inclusivity and reasonable gun laws and help for the stranger and food for the hungry will ever be wasted even if we seem to fail. These efforts will not be wasted. Their energy goes out into the universe and we may not know what difference they make, especially if we get nothing back from them. But if we pour out our hearts and lives to make a difference for one person who needs it who can never repay us, that matters and is remembered in the heart of God and it makes it all worth it.

Love is the one thing that grows the more you give it away. It is contagious. It can’t be quantified or commodified. It operates by different laws, almost like quantum physics operate using different laws than the ones we know in ordinary reality. The minute you try to make a quid pro quo transaction out of love it isn’t really love any more. Jesus shows us a beautifully radical, liberating and healing kind of love that just gives itself away in utter joy and freedom, without keeping track, a love that loves for the sake of loving. No one could take that love away from Jesus and no one can take it away from us.

The measure of our grief is the measure of our love. Today is not the day to whip ourselves into a frenzy of action, although action is needed and some of us who have that gift will be leading the charge in the days to come. Today is the day for giving and receiving love, for remembering that love is never wasted, for remembering that goodness goes out and accomplishes the purposes of the heart of God even though we don’t always see the result. Today is the day to ground ourselves once again in the radical, overwhelming, unconditional and unquenchable love of Christ, who is with us now and who will never leave us. This is why in our funeral liturgy we say, even at the grave we make our song alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. We do not and never can celebrate violence or hatred or intolerance. But we do celebrate that no force on earth can take the love of God away from us. As the Apostle Paul says in Romans chapter 8: neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor demons, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.  

10am Service