On Tuesday night, I took up one end of the couch, while my younger son took up the other end. The dog lay somewhere in between. Each of us covered under our own pile of blankets, he stared at his book while I stared at mine.
“Mama,” he suddenly said, looking up. “Why am I so tired?”
I nodded my head: I too was tired, exhausted by the news and by the events of the previous twenty-four hours, exhausted by 2025 as a whole.
“Me too, buddy,” I replied. I looked at my watch – it was 5:30 pm.
I tell you this story because here we are on the Third Sunday after the Epiphany. The word epiphany means “to reveal” or “to bring to light,” and as one author says, “while illumination can be wonderful, it can also bring to light some rather uncomfortable realities. New revelations take time to adjust to and accept.” Perhaps, for some of us, new calendar years can also bring to light some rather uncomfortable realities, both for ourselves and for the world around us.
Why, then, do we meditate on a passage today in which Jesus unrolls a scroll, looks for a particular place, and then says about himself, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Although Jesus uttered these words two thousand years ago, for some of us, the year of the Lord’s favor does not feel quite so applicable now, not to 2025, not to this very time we are living in right now.
In the last week alone, vitriolic hate and violence have become accepted rhetoric, along with “alarming breakdowns in civility and basic kindness” (here). Wildfires continued to burn in southern California this last week, displacing thousands and shuttering entire communities. In the federal government, entire DEI departments and civil rights programs have been shut down or eliminated. ICE raids, taking aim at immigrants, migrants, and refugees, have begun across the country and even here in California, prompting our presiding bishop, Sean Row, and House of Deputies president Julia Ayala Harris to issue a joint letter to the church, emphasizing Christ’s call to welcome the stranger.
The list goes on, as it often does, which is to also perhaps ask, “who on earth would reasonably call our current moment holy, or favored of God?” Where is the Divine in this place, when it feels like the world’s been shaken and turned upside-down and rolled into a heaped-up carnage of rock maple wood bowling pins without so much as our permission? The passage we just read in 1 Corinthians urges us to suffer with those who are suffering, and there are those in our community who are suffering now. Where then is Jesus in this place?
Perhaps for all of us, no matter what side of the political divide we find ourselves on, there is an invitation to now, to recognize the sacredness of the present moment that shines through even in these darkest of days – to see and look for the one on whom God’s Spirit rests; who dares all of us preach a message of good news to the poor, announce pardon to prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind. Who says hey, shout a message of setting the burdened and battered free, because all are included under the wide umbrella of love, because this, this is who I am, and in this time, right now, it is God’s time to shine!
And for some of us, that’s exactly what happened when the Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde made a plea for mercy at an interfaith prayer service on Tuesday.
Although the sermon was largely an ask for dignity, honesty, and humility, in the last three minutes, she made one final ask – this one a plea for mercy to the president himself.
Echoing the words of the blind beggar in Luke 18, she cried out for mercy: called the Jesus Prayer, people around the world utter the words, Lord Jesus, have mercy on me, a sinner.
And in more ways than one, Bishop Budde spelled out the Prayers of the People (Form VI), prayers we too will offer in just a few minutes’ time:
For this community, the nation, and the world;
For all who work for justice, freedom, and peace.For the just and proper use of your creation;
For the victims of hunger, fear, injustice, and oppression.For all who are in danger, sorrow, or any kind of trouble;
For those who minister to the sick, the friendless, and the
needy.
She made real the Way of Love and of this Jesus who brings good news to the poor and proclaims release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind – who, once again, sets free those who are oppressed, (and gulp), proclaims the year of the Lord’s favor.
So we repeat this passage found in Luke 4, because maybe it’s the entire point.
Even if in our tiredness and our exhaustion we had forgotten it, the bishop pointed us back to the one who longs for liberation, who is our liberation.
Perhaps the invitation is this: Seek the Divine in the many different ways the Divine is found and can be found now. For us, right here, right now in this moment we look for God in the songs we sing and the prayers we utter, in the scriptures we hear and in the psalms we speak aloud. We keep our eyes peeled for holy God-sightings when all our beloved selves gather together in Duncan Hall after the service, daring one another to see if “today shimmers with the presence, the blessing, and the favor of God.”
And then, when we go out and leave this place, we do what is sometimes hardest of all to do: we keep keeping our eyes open, remembering these real truths of who God is and of who we’re invited to be along the way too.
After all, we, the children of God, are lookers of light. We are rememberers of the Divine, truthtellers of humanity’s inherent value, and protagonists of the one who came to “set the burdened and battered free, [and] to announce, “This is God’s time to shine!’”
Even in our tiredness and in our exhaustion, this is who we are, beloveds.
Let us not forget it.
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This is from a sermon preached on Sunday, January 26, 2025 at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in San Rafael, California. If you liked this post, I occasionally post sermons, like this one here. You also might like last week’s Substack post, which focused on the beauty of the bishop’s words and the horror of their response.
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