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Part of my job as your priest is to pray every day. I use the Daily Office. It’s a rhythm of prayer and scripture reading that places me inside the unfolding story of God. It’s fascinating, sometimes challenging, sometimes consoling, but always insightful.
I want to thank you for allowing me to pray these prayers on behalf of this Parish. It is one of the greatest blessings of my life.
Right now, the Old Testament reading in the Daily Office comes from the prophet Jeremiah. And let me tell you, he is apoplectic. Here’s a taste of how angry he is:
“They all deceive their neighbors, no one speaks the truth; they have taught their tongues to speak lies; they commit iniquity and are too content to repent. Oppression upon oppression, deceit upon deceit! They refuse to know God!!” (Jeremiah 9:5–6)
His prophetic fury is not directed at “the world out there,” nor his enemies, but at his own religious community.
It seems Jeremiah’s faith leaders are liars who have twisted Judaism into knots to justify their power and position and privilege in the name of God.
Jeremiah implores them to return to God, saying:
“If you truly amend your ways, if you truly act justly with one another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood… then God will again dwell with us in this place.” (Jeremiah 7:5–7)
And if you do not, (to summarize his broader argument) God will leave you; God will abandon you; God will reject you to the delusions of your own imagination, which will leave you tattered, torn, divided, diminished, shattered, and scattered.
The battle that Jeremiah is waging is classic within the context of religion. There are those who pervert the teachings of their religion for their own power and benefit, against those who seek to live it out, purely, in accordance with God’s will.
It is a pattern that has tumbled forward in time, across the generations.
I’ll give you another example that is closer to home than 2700 years ago when Jeremiah was stomping around Jerusalem.
In the 16th century, when Ferdinand and Isabella ruled Spain, and the conquistadors were wandering the world, their policy was: “You could have whatever land you could take, as long as you cared for the people living there as their guardians (my interpretation).” This system was called Encomienda. But it got twisted, bent to privilege the conquerors and diminish, and more so, brutally dehumanize the native people, ending in slavery. Protectors became prison guards.
And along the way, they twisted the message of Jesus, in the same way the Jewish leaders in the days of Jeremiah twisted the words of Moses, abandoning the requirement to care for the alien, orphan, and widow in favor of a warring, conquering, muscular macho theology that claimed they were born to dominate in the name of Jesus.
It is a weird way of thinking about God. It is actually a theology that is pretty weak, with a God that’s pretty lame, if in need of macho men to win the day.
Jeremiah called out this lie. So too, in the days of Spanish colonialism, did a Dominican friar named Bartolomé de las Casas.
He was a man of privilege, securely and safely ensconced within the power structure of Spain. He arrived in the Caribbean in 1502, took control of land, enslaved people, and began to generate his fortune—even as a Dominican friar.
But something changed for him, I’m not quite sure what it was, maybe he was reading the Daily Office and stumbled across Jeremiah, or even Luke chapter 10. Something changed, for in 1514 he freed all of his slaves, and took up the call to own what it truly means to be a guardian… it’s about grace. He wrote:
“What we committed in the Indies stands out among the most unpardonable offenses ever committed against God and mankind.”
(A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, 1552)
His words were not without cost. Of course, it cost him the wealth of his plantation, but it also threw him into the midst of the same debate that Jeremiah found himself in, between power politics and leveraging religion to reinforce personal privilege, over and against what it means to be a follower of that religion, in de las Casas’ case, a follower of Jesus Christ.
It’s funny that this debate would ever be a thing within the Christian community in the first place, because it is so fundamentally clear, over and over again in the Gospels, how we are meant to act in the world.
Here is an example: the Good Samaritan. A priest walks down the road, sees someone bleeding in the ditch, and crosses to the other side. A Levite, a religious leader, we might say a modern-day deacon, also sees someone in need: an alien, an orphan, a widow, a man bleeding in the ditch… and he too crosses to the other side.
But then comes a Samaritan, an outsider, a non-native, a person whose grandparents were probably buried in another country. He stops. He cares. He empathizes… maybe because he knows what it’s like to be hit, hurt, ignored, persecuted, repressed.
He binds the wounds, transports to safety, and pays the bills. And in doing so becomes the defender of the weak, the sentinel of the disenfranchised, the protector of the marginalized, the guardian of grace. He becomes the poster-child for what it means to be a follower of Jesus because it is by his actions that he shows us what it looks like to be a Christian.
What had been entrusted to the Good Samaritan was what he met in the moment. It’s exactly what I preached about last week. He saw the fig tree on the side of the road in the person of the man beaten and left for dead.
And when he met his fig tree, just as when we meet our fig tree, we are called to stop, to step off the path, taking a leap of faith, seeing that God is asking something from us.
And the clue for this? The sign to stop and step off the path? The way we know that we are being called to act as a guardian of grace, as followers of Jesus Christ?
The clue is empathy. That was true for Jeremiah. That was true for de Las Casas. It was certainly true for the Samaritan.
Empathy is the superpower of the guardians of grace.
It also becomes the filter through which we act as Christians. It becomes the way in which we enter the debate within our own Christian tradition about how to act as followers of Jesus in the world.
Pope Francis makes the point. In February 2024, he said:
“If one wants to understand the Christian vision of morality, one must read the parable of the Good Samaritan. That is our ethical foundation, not ideology, not national interest, but mercy shown to the one in need.”
In the Kingdom of God, power plays out when one stops to care for the person bleeding on the side of the road, or as Jeremiah says, to care for the alien, the widow, and the orphan.
True power comes to us through God, given to care for the disenfranchised, to care for the outcast, to lift up the weak and the lowly, simply because they are beloved by God, designed by God, for God’s purposes alone.
And maybe the purpose of their vulnerability is to call forth from us our mission as guardians of grace. The opportunity is to carry out Jesus’ priorities by acting with compassion, generosity, and empathy. For as Jesus says: “To whom much is given, much is required.” (Luke 12:48) Empathy is a superpower within the Kingdom of God.
And so, if you come across someone who claims to be a Christian and also claims empathy to be a weakness, and not an attribute, front and center, for followers of Jesus, then they are a liar, seeking to bend religion for their own purposes.
Our God is not a weak God. Our God is not a needy God. We are the weak ones. We are the needy ones. And in the same way God has mercy upon us, not judging us for what we do, but loving us simply because we are; so too, we reflect that grace, through the empathy we show to others.
In the Kingdom of God, strength and power flow through compassion and empathy. The hard guy is the weak guy. The big deal dude is the little man. The tough guy is the punk. The bully is the coward.
Those who say empathy is weakness are not followers of Jesus. Those who claim empathy is naïve seek to bend religion to serve their own purposes. Those who believe empathy is a liability are not to be trusted, for they, in no way, represent the Gospel message of Jesus Christ.
In the Kingdom of God, it is the guardians of grace who show strength by standing with the disenfranchised, the weak, and the vulnerable. Because our God is strong, because our God is capable, because our God is loving… This is our calling as followers of Jesus Christ, to be guardians of grace.
We gather here together today as guardians worshipping Jesus. It is an act of rebellion against the false gods of this world. Worshipping Jesus, in fact, is an act of hope that says: there is something bigger than the limitations of powerful people and institutions; that there’s a God that is merciful and loving, a God that shows us empathy, and encourages us to do the same as a way of revealing the love of God to all the world. By being here today, standing shoulder to shoulder as guardians of grace, we make the statement that Jesus Christ is Lord of all—and in his weakness there is nothing more powerful.