March 1 2026, Migration, Wilderness, and the Holy Spirit

Lent 2, March 1 2026, Migration, Wilderness, and the Holy Spirit

 

Migration, Wilderness, and the Spirit

Second Sunday in Lent, March 2 2026

 

What binds today’s readings is movement—not movement as strategy or transformation or ambition, but movement as response.

 

“The wind blows where it chooses…”

“Go from your country and your kindred…”

Both John’s Gospel, and Genesis insist on the same unsettling truth: the Holy Spirit does not regard our desire for roadmaps, plans, control, borders, or certainty. The Spirit calls people into motion before we know where they are going, and often before we know how we will survive.

We learn from Genesis and the Koran that Abraham does not begin as a hero of faith but as a restless seeker. He walks out under the night sky and watches the stars. A star shines — and he wonders if this is God. But the star fades. Then the moon rises — beautiful, luminous — yet it too disappears. Then the sun floods the world with light — surely this must be ultimate — yet even the sun sets. And Abraham says, I will not give my heart to what comes and goes. I turn, I move toward the One who does not disappear.

From that moment Abraham begins to resist every false certainty his society depends on. He breaks the idols, the trade of his family, and not only statues, but the systems that promise security while demanding conformity. For this he is thrown into the fire — and God does not remove the fire but transforms it into a place of peace.

And then comes the call that always follows awakening: leave.

“I am going to my Lord; He will guide me,” he says. Abraham becomes, in the Islamic telling, the first migrant for God — not fleeing failure, but walking away from safety toward truth. Faith is not merely believing differently; it is relocating one’s life.

Jesus deepens this in conversation with Nicodemus. “The wind blows where it chooses.” The word Jesus uses—pneuma—means wind, breath, Spirit. The Spirit is not a possession. The Spirit is movement itself.  Like water, our breath is in constant movement, shared with all of creation.

Jesus reaches back into Israel’s memory and says something even more startling:

“Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.”

In the wilderness, poisonous serpents appear—symbols of how fear, despair, and distrust can become deadly. When the people cry out, God does not save them from the desert. Instead, God instructs Moses to lift up a bronze serpent on a pole. Those who look at it live.

This image comes from Israel’s long wilderness journey. The people are already migrants—freed from Egypt, not yet finding a home. They are tired, afraid, and vulnerable. They complain without ceasing, not because they are evil, but because life on the move, in transition, is exhausting.

In the story from Numbers, poisonous serpents appear among them—symbols of how fear, despair, and distrust can become deadly in the wilderness. When the people cry out, God does not remove or save them from the desert. God does not cancel the journey. Instead, God instructs Moses to lift up a bronze serpent on a pole.

A snake on a stick…. And those who look at it live.

Healing does not come by denying danger. It comes by facing it honestly, by trusting God in the midst of vulnerability.

Wilderness with snakes becomes the very place where salvation happens.

When Jesus says the Son of Man must be lifted up, he is saying: This is how God saves. Not by avoiding suffering, but by entering it fully. Not by condemning the world, but by standing in its wounds.

The cross functions like the serpent in the wilderness. It lifts up what the world fears and rejects and exposes it to God’s healing mercy. To “believe” is not merely to agree with a doctrine—it is to turn toward God when fear tells us to turn inward, to harden, to exclude.

Scripture unfailingly teaches that migration is not a sign of faithlessness, but a sign of faith.

Abram migrates and all the families of the earth are blessed.

Israel migrates out of Egypt.

Jesus becomes a refugee. The early church grows within the movement of displaced people.

Migration with dignity means recognizing migrants and refugees not as threats or burdens, but as participants in God’s unfolding promise. It means rejecting systems that humiliate, cage, disappear, or exploit people responding to forces beyond their control. Welcoming the stranger is not charity—it is alignment with the Spirit’s movement in the world.

Many LGBTQ+ refugees and migrants today are fleeing death, torture and humiliation. Our kin whose very existence is criminalized in their homelands, and increasingly demeaned even within our own nation. Some face deportation to countries like Uganda or Iran, where same-gender love can bring imprisonment, torture, and execution. These are not abstractions in a policy debate; they are children, brothers and sisters, human beings made in the image of God. Many live in The United States.

I received a call from Matthew, a gay man living up north. He was a refugee from Texas. He found work and was beginning to build a life in Minnesota. His husband, an immigrant still living in Texas, was trying to decide whether to risk migration to safety. We spoke of their fear. We spoke of Minnesota being a safer place to live. We shared contacts. We prayed

And so, we must ask ourselves the uncomfortable question: What are the snakes in our wilderness now?

Policies that force migrants into deserts instead of ports of welcome and entry.

Policies that place children in cages separated from parents.

Policies that criminalize queer and trans bodies.

Sadly, too often we have learned to tolerate these venomous structures that wound families and poison our common life.

In the wilderness, God commands Moses to lift the truth into the light.

Healing begins when we stop pretending that we are not wounded.

Caduceus        name of the medical profession logo

You name the wound.

You expose the disease.

You accompany the vulnerable.

You apply care with love, wisdom and patience.

 

The cross is not a glorification of suffering, but God’s refusal to look away from it. Life is saved when suffering is faced.

To follow the Spirit is to choose care over cruelty, treatment over punishment, accompaniment over abandonment.

The church cannot bless policies that depend on making people wounded or disposable in order to feel safe.

Nicodemus asks, “How can these things be?” It is the question of someone standing at the edge of change.

God tells Abram, “I will bless those who bless you.”

The wind is still blowing.

People are still being called to leave home.

And we must decide whether we will enact quotas, build walls and gates pushing back against the breath of the Holy Spirit—or become a welcoming shelter in its path.

 

Let us begin from a place of love, and most often we will find what is “right,” however when we start from a position of “right” we will rarely find love.”         ― Edward Mooney, Jr.

10am Service