May 18 2025, Easter 5, Do Justice, Love Mercy, Walk Humbly

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May 18 2025, Easter 5, Do Justice, Love Mercy, Walk Humbly

Lisa Wiens Heinsohn

Do Justice, Love Mercy, Walk Humbly

Homily by Lisa Wiens Heinsohn

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

May 18, 2025, the Fifth Sunday of Easter

In today’s Scriptures there is a sense of shifting, of leaving and coming, of ending and beginning. In the book of Revelation, we get a glimpse of the dream that shines at the end of our scripture, the dream of a new heaven and a new earth, where God dwells directly with people in the City and personally wipes the tears from their eyes, where God offers water from the spring of life as a gift to all who are thirsty. Although it wasn’t in the reading for today, in the same chapter in Revelation this City includes at tree at the center, whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. At the beginning, at the center, at the end of our scriptures are trees: in Genesis, the two trees in the Garden of Eden; the tree that was the cross; and the tree for the healing of the nations at the end. And in the midst of this image which is a constant, throughout scripture there is also a continual rhythm of ending and beginning, of death and resurrection, of change. In today’s gospel reading Jesus is at his last supper with his disciples, the night of his betrayal and arrest. He tells his disciples that he is going, and that they cannot come; so he leaves them the one thing he wants them not to forget, which is to love one another, and which is the kind of energetic signature of his followers. This is how the world is to recognize us. By love.

That night of the last supper, Jesus puts forth the constant, the one thing that does not change in the midst of the rhythms of change that sweep our lives from beginning to end, from the annual rhythms of winter and summer to the rhythms of birth and death that every one of us participates in. Love is the constant. Like the tree that appears at the beginning, the middle, and the end of scripture, love is the one thing that can and must and shall survive the great apocalypse of our time. Love is the primordial force, the first energy out of which God created the world, and it is the energy that must drive all our choices: resisting evil, remaining generous toward the hungry and the stranger and those in prison and the thirsty, telling the truth with love, saying yes and saying no, choosing to believe in the goodness of God’s world and of all God’s children despite the depravity and evil of which humanity is sometimes capable.

Two things happened this week that made me feel both the loss and the hope of our faith, the death and resurrection that is the pattern of life in the universe. Perhaps some of you are familiar with Episcopal Migration Ministries. It is the body of the international Episcopal Church which has helped settle refugees here in America, in a decades-old bipartisan partnership with the federal government. As you know, in January the government put a halt on virtually all refugee resettlement into the United States, even for people who had already been vetted and approved. This applies across the board to refugees from many countries. Several weeks ago, the U.S. government informed Episcopal Migration Ministries that it would be required to resettle white Afrikaner immigrants from South Africa, but would not be allowed to continue to resettle other refugees. The Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe chose end our partnership with the federal government and say no to this demand, which was an expression of the racial injustice to which both South Africa and the United States have long been guilty. Bishop Rowe sent out a public letter explaining his decision, which is linked to my sermon manuscript and which I encourage you to read.[1] The Archbishop of Southern Africa replied to clarify that what the U.S. government refers to as “anti-white racial discrimination” is “nothing of the kind.”[2] He said that measured by income disparity, South Africa remains the most unequal society in the world, with the majority of the poor black, and the majority of the wealthy white. He says this: “we cannot agree that South Africans who have lost the privileges they enjoyed under apartheid should qualify for refugee status ahead of people fleeing war and persecution from countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and Afghanistan.”[3]

The great clash between worldviews continues, with public manifestations that are both distressing and empowering. As followers of Jesus’ Way of Love, we are called to stand with truly marginalized people, and I am proud of our church for refusing to participate in a selective and race-based distortion of the truth. But that it has happened at all feels like an ending, a manifestation of the death-dealing powers of the world that are not based in love, three months into a four-year regime with no end in sight. To be clear, the regime that I am referring to is not the regime of classic Republican party values, which began with Abraham Lincoln, but the regime that disrespects the rule of law and of basic human rights, of women and immigrants, of trans people and the collaboration among nations that is the true hallmark of healthy international relations.

On the other end of the spectrum, resurrection happens. Yesterday several of us from St. John’s and other churches volunteered at Good Courage Farm, the regenerative Episcopal farm in Hutchinson, Minnesota that explores food justice, regenerative farming, and faith. Any of you can also volunteer at the farm and I highly recommend it. We are in partnership with Good Courage Farm to help feed the hungry at First Nations Kitchen and Casa Maria, and to learn what it means to be taught by nature how to care for nature. In the midst of the bleakness of our times and this week, I can’t describe enough for you the joy of taking care of ducks and chickens and goats, of moving solar powered electric fencing so that the chickens and goats could now graze and browse on the fields of different rotating crops. So we moved the fencing to the pear fields, then hauled the chicken coop to the new pasture and opened the door. A glorious flock of glossy healthy chickens poured out of the coop, glossy tawny red and black and white checkered and blue bantams, looking very pleased at the new selection of bugs and weeds they get to eat. The ducks were grazing the apple orchard, and we moved the goats to a wooded area so they could eat all the buckthorn leaves, which they did with speed and delight. We collected duck and chicken eggs whose shells were so thick we sanded them to get the gunk off. These eggs will be given to hungry people at Casa Maria and First Nations Kitchen, our other fourth Sunday partners, free healthy eggs for people in poverty in a nation where the price of eggs is way up.

And then we took a break to pray. At Good Courage Farm, they use an empty silo as their chapel. We sit in a circle at the bottom of the silo, the round top open to the sky, listening to the wind, and chant our echoing prayers and discuss scripture together. Yesterday we discussed Jesus’ teachings about him being the gate for the sheep, opening and closing so that the sheep could go in and out and find pasture, so that they would have life and have it abundantly. We talked about the rhythm of being in the chicken coop and then being released to the pasture, of confinement and openness, of protection and safety on the one hand and freedom and exploration and risk on the other.

The risk and gift of following Jesus are both very real. This week our church is losing significant federal funding and will no longer be able to resettle refugees in the same way, and we have continued to trigger the ire of this administration. But we are shifting our operations so that we continue to support immigrants in every way possible, in new ways that do not depend on the vagaries of politics. Mother Kerri at Good Courage Farm gets up and starts farm work at 5am every day and does not stop until 9pm. The work is hard, and continual, and real. But it’s about abundant life. It’s so that we can participate in the wholeness and thriving of all creatures. It’s what love in action looks like.

And the end game is a world in which God dwells with people without any need for temples. It’s world in which there may still be tears, but God wipes them from our eyes with tenderness and closeness and the promise of healing and new life. It’s a world in which if you are thirsty, you receive the water of life as a gift, not a transactional quid pro quo, and that is the hallmark and job description of the one sitting on the throne. It’s a world in which the leaves of trees exist for the healing of the nations.

It is our job as people of faith to keep that dream alive and work as if it is already here, with God’s help. Throughout history there have been people of faith, true followers of Jesus’ Way of love, who have shown us how to do this, from Desmond Tutu to Dorothy Day to Oscar Romero and Mother Theresa. The joy and life and love of God are real, and available to us. God has given us imagination and the capacity to create what we imagine—whether that imagination is the worst or best case scenarios. Our scriptures are a treasure trove of indigenous wisdom, healing imagination, and creative inspiration that can help us if we will only explore then with courage and the willingness to work and love as if we have nothing to lose. In a sense that is true. We will suffer loss, but we will lose the things we cannot keep in any case, including ultimately our own lives. Let us work for justice and for the well-being of all creatures. Let us work for the thing we cannot lose unless we give it away, which is our souls, our dignity, our integrity, our joy, and remain generous and hopeful; let us do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with one another and with our God. Amen.