<![CDATA[Amy Courts - Written Things]]>

<![CDATA[Amy Courts - Written Things]]>Wed, 27 May 2026 17:41:28 -0700Weebly<![CDATA[PENTECOST (John 20:19-23, Acts 2:1-21)]]>Wed, 27 May 2026 21:57:12 GMThttps://www.amycourts.com/written-things/pentecost-john-2019-23-acts-21-21

"What the Fire Brings" ©Jan Richardson

This sermon was first preached at Augustana Lutheran Church in Portland, OR on The Day of Pentecost, May 24 2026. The full livestream of the service may be viewed here (sermon begins at 35:45). The sermon with captions may be viewed here or below .

Scripture texts:
John 20:19-23, Acts 2:1-21

Good morning, Beloved of God! And what a Good morning it is. Today we celebrate the Feast of Pentecost, the Birthday of Christ’s Church by the Power of Mother Spirit, and the Third in a Trinity of High Holy Days in the Christian Liturgical Year. With the Holy Mother and the Midwives, we witnessed the Very Good Love of Eternal God born in flesh at Christmas. With Mary Magdalene and the women who stayed, we tasted the everlasting goodness of the Bread of Life, the Living Water who is Christ, Resurrected at Easter. And today, with the 12 Apostles, a few other men, and at least a hundred Women, according to Acts 1, we are Born anew of Breath and Fire, formed into One Body — the Body of Christ, and His Second Coming— by the Indwelling of God’s Eternally Hovering Holy Spirit. Our Beginning, Our Brother, Our Breath: One God, now and forever. And so I pray:

Holy Spirit you are welcome here
Come flood this place and fill the atmosphere
Your glory, God, is what our hearts long for
To be overcome by your presence, Lord (1)

As many of you know, I traveled down to San Antonio, TX at the end of April for a gathering of almost 200 visual artists and musicians by invitation of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice. We spent three intense days together, teaching and learning and learning how to teach and write Songs in the Key of Resistance: That is, new songs for a new generation of human and civil rights organizers, activists, and marchers for peace and justice. Since returning, I’ve gotten to teach and lead a number of those songs both here and at broader public actions like MayDay down in Salem, and will continue to do so.

But for today, I want to tell you more about the last thing we did as a gathered mass of cultural organizers. We left before dawn on our final morning and headed up to the South Texas ICE Processing Center in San Antonio which detains, processes, and traffics thousands of people each month to other for-profit detention centers, which are really concentration camps for our disappeared siblings. We were invited there by a local pastor whose congregants have made daily presence at the facility a sacred act of worship, who asked to come not as agitators or protestors, but as family called in to offer presence, bear witness, and testify to who and what we saw, and to the power of testimony in itself.

When we arrived around 9:30 that morning, we marched in silence from our buses to the facility about a quarter mile away and arranged ourselves in a wide horseshoe around the facility. We occupied every sidewalk to the end of the street so that every single one of our stolen siblings who entered the valley of the shadow of death could know:

No están solos, No están solos
Juntos hacemos la liberación (2)

“You are not alone, you are not alone, together we bring about liberation.” We prayed, we chanted, We raised our fists in solidarity with the detained, and looked in the eyes of every driver that came and went, filling and emptying their vans of God’s Beloved, not to shame them but to proclaim that we would not let them hide behind the blacked out windows of their 21st century death trains, and to plead with them by the Divine Power of Spirit humming and thrumming between us, to un-bury and resurrect their humanity from this cemetery of hate. And we sang. Over and over, we sang our songs of Freedom.

We were only supposed to be there for 30 or 45 minutes, but having heard and seen our convocation, someone from inside came out to tell us a man set for deportation would be in front of the judge soon, and if we could stay just a little longer it might save his life, so we stayed. And we sang.

At some point, our body of witnesses contracted from a wide arc to a tight, small circle surrounding the driveway into the building’s underground garage, and as we did, the literal vibration of holy energy intensified, the sparks of creation crackled, and new songs were born. A couple of our youngest leaders -- two kids from Atlanta -- started a stomp and clap rhythm, another woman, a Black sister, started singing a simple descant: Freedom, Freedom, Freedom. As others joined in the rhythm and harmony, new bass notes bellowing to anchor the hymn, a second canticle blossomed from our Latiné sisters, “Liberación, Liberación, Liberación,” and we became a symphony on the street. It went on like this for 5 or 10 minutes, more and more voices weaving new harmonies and descants into and around that Declaration of freedom. But then, as that song faded to its natural end while the energy stayed hot like a livewire, another song rose from the center, led by a brother with a deep, booming voice, and it went like this:

They tried to bury us
They tried to bury us
They didn't know
That we were seeds (3)

Our chorus ascended, voices weaving in and out, over and around, as our voices and bodies became one triumphant murmuration, moving to the rhythm and pulse of freedom.

I wish I could convey the gravity and grandeur of our collective experience so you could experience it yourself, but I can’t. It’s too much, and much too holy for words. Which is why, I suspect, to some passers by who witnessed us Witnessing that day, and maybe even a few listening to my testimony this day, we looked like an intoxicated horde of weirdos and crazies who ought to be detained right alongside the disappeared. Kind of like how the Church in Acts sounded drunk on something as each person spoke and was spoken to, understood and was understood in their own and other languages. We might have looked or sounded like that.

But the Truth is that Spirit fell upon us and we were filled, And I mean filled with Her power -- a power beyond our making or manipulation, which could not be contained or controlled, but only conspired with. And so we did -- conspire that is. She filled our lungs with her breath and we breathed liberation, She gave us tongues of truth and we declared it on that street. And God became incarnate in and among us, transforming that place of terror into Holy Ground. If only for a moment.

And the reason I know it was the Spirit of God and not some other spirit of drunkenness or disorder, is this: Those who came to that building not knowing when or how or if they’d ever leave, entered not with a spirit of fear or timidity, but filled with the sustaining Breath of Peace, the bolstering presence of our host of witnesses, and the knowing that if nothing else they were not alone but surrounded in the Love of Christ that casts out all Fear.

Listen: We did not dismantle any systems that day. We did not defeat fascism. We didn’t confront any of the powers or people whose complicity preserves and protects those systems or even that particular ICE center.

Which is not to say that agitation and strategic escalation through direct action is never warranted or necessary -- it most certainly is, especially as those powers escalate their violence and increase their stranglehold on all of us. Indeed, sometimes the Spirit falls in fire and fury, empowering us to burn down and raze to the ground systems of oppression lest they bury more of God’s Beloved.

We have seen that many times! We’ve seen Her fire called down by prophets of old who delivered God’s people through fire and sea, and we’ve seen Her turn to ash literal buildings like the first White House and Minneapolis’s 3rd precinct -- buildings built on the backs of the marginalized, demonized, ostracized, pathologized, criminalized, and economically pauperized, whose bodies Empire steals to then produce their profits and pay their bills.

Over and over we’ve seen her fill the people who fill the streets with a Word of Truth to Power for the liberation of their neighbors in every city where the powers and principalities of this dark age trample on people and crush our spirits.

It is no small or particularly unique thing when Spirit shows up in a violent rush of wind like She did in Acts 2.

But this day down in San Antonio wasn’t about fire or fury… It was just about presence. All we did was show up. Bear witness. Sing. Surround. Send our siblings in to a tomb with the fullness of our resurrection hope. And, yes, we got to see one man walk free from that building instead of being deported to parts and places unknown as he and his lawyers had expected, when they walked in.

So even though our singing swelled with the fullness of Spirit’s presence into a momentary piercing of the cosmic veil, during which we all felt and saw and experienced God’s eternity, the day itself felt a lot more like the Johannine Pentecost in the Upper Room where Jesus’ disciples were huddled behind locked doors, tormented by the State’s torture of their brother, utterly terrified of what was coming for them next. Those disciples are who I think of when I consider the State-imposed paralysis of our Trans siblings who cannot travel without fear of beatings or worse; of our siblings forced to travel in secret to neighboring states for the reproductive care they need but are denied and even criminalized for seeking.

And they’re who I remembered as I watched some of our snatched siblings taken into that locked building while others chose to surrender themselves to a fascist regime rather than hiding in fear of its deputized Thieves.

Because Back in the upper room on the night of his resurrection, Jesus came to them as he had before, present in his own very-real, still-wounded flesh and blood body, for them to touch and hold and smell and see -- because God is not and has never been something to be thought or intellectualized or spiritualized, but someOne who is always, always, incarnate among us. He invoked the Peace he left them with the last the they gathered in this very room just three days prior.

And He called on Holy Spirit -- the very same Paraclete he promised them at the end of that supper in John 14: Spirit of comfort and consolation, Spirit of Truth, their Helper and Advocate who would be within and beside them through all that was to come. When he called on Her, she came less like a Consuming Fire and more like a Breeze. He breathed her into them, the way She breathed life over the formless void at the dawn of all Creation, the way She breathed resurrection into that Valley of Dry Bones in Ezekiel, the way a Mother breathes calm into her wailing child by drawing them near to share her own deep, long, steady and steadying breaths and offering the safety of her heartbeat in rhythm with theirs.

That’s a real thing, you know? You probably already know that when you pull an anxious person into your own calm embrace or are pulled into the calm embrace of another when you’re all pins and needles, that calm spreads. Indeed, it’s a scientifically studied and sustained phenomenon that if you hold that hug for 20 seconds or longer, it triggers the release of oxytocin, the “cuddle hormone” that nurtures your sense of safety, bonding, and trust, which in turn literally lowers your heartbeat and enables the body to reduce and metabolize the stress hormone, cortisol.

Doctors and Practitioners call this powerfully healing exchange of body and breath co-regulation. I call it Pentecost.

For this is Spirit still among us; moving among us, filling our lungs, swirling in our songs, pulsing in rhythm alongside our writhing and dancing and hugging and holding bodies, to sustain us as we sustain others with Her peace that surpasses all understanding and Her power that cannot be contained or controlled by any empire or enemy. She is here, she is here, Beloved of God She is still here.

And so, Beloved, let this be our prayer of Pentecost: May She fill our lungs with Her breath, stir our souls with Her song, and come alive in us as flesh on dry bones, this day and all days that we may be woven into One Body in Christ Jesus, one humming murmuration, One Song of Liberation resounding across our land, to the praise and glory of our Still-Creating Creator: Amen, Àshe, Ahó, Lord let this be so.

(1) Holy Spirit performed by JesusCulture. © Bryan Torwalt/Katie Torwalt. Used with permission.
(2) No Están Solos written by Francisco Herrera, Emma’s Revolution and The Peace Poets. This song was written in collaboration with migrant justice and anti-militarism organizers from the School of the America’s Watch in front of Eloy Detention Center in Arizona. Always powerful song to sing to those who are inside and to each other as we bravely speak out and act for justice. Learn more at https://kairoscenter.org
(3) They Tried to Bury Us. Shared and learned at SKOR San Antonio in April 2026. This song was based on a quote often attributed to Mexican migrants but originated in ancient Greece by a man (ironically) criminalized for homosexuality.

]]><![CDATA[A Dangerously Holy Menace (John 14:1-14 + Acts 7:55-60)]]>Sun, 03 May 2026 07:00:00 GMThttps://www.amycourts.com/written-things/a-dangerously-holy-menace-john-141-14-acts-755-60

"Saint Stephen" ©TheModernSaints (Etsy)

This sermon was first preached at Augustana Lutheran Church in Portland, OR on May 3, 2026.

The full livestream of the service may be viewed here (sermon begins at 35:45). The sermon with captions may be viewed here or below .

Scripture texts: John 14:1-14 | Acts 7:(1-54) 55-60

Good morning, Beloved of God, you whose heart and hearts may be troubled by this world. At least my heart is. Which is problematic in the face of Jesus’s opening instruction. “Trust me,” he says: “Do not let your hearts become agitated, trust me instead, and trust my father in whose house there are many rooms which I’m going to prepare for you.” We’ll come back to this in a bit, but for now I have to confess that I am troubled. My spirit is agitated and I have often found myself terrified of what is and is to come in this particular age of empires. Friends, I am troubled, because the times are troubling. And I am alive.

Even so, or better said and so, today I choose to venerate the Word -- the Living One -- who delivers an incomprehensible promise of union with him and the Great Father, Mother, Holy Other to his closest friends on the last and worst night of his life, his last words to them before he is executed as an enemy of the State; and I want to honor Stephen, a man whose story is a blip we rarely cover, but who is so rooted in this Christ and his Way that he faces his own killing and killers with supernatural clarity and empathy as they lynch him as an enemy of God and of Truth. Both of them, one killed by the state, the other by those who wish they had that kind of power, tenderly remind us that nothing is new under this blessed sun, and even here, even now, even amidst all of the escalating alls, we know the Way.

To enter Stephen’s story, we must enter the book and world of Acts for a moment, which is the sequel to and the continuation of Luke’s gospel. It roughly covers the years 30-60 C.E., tracing the Life of the Apostles from the immediate aftermath of Jesus’s death and resurrection to the execution of Paul. But because It wasn’t actually written until between 88 and 90 C.E., nearly 60 years later, we are wise to hear these stories alongside those for whom they was written, with all the era’s grotesquely violent religious and cultural persecution, faction wars, social and cultural destruction, and ever-escalating political turmoil in mind. Those six decades saw some truly diabolical evil, including the crucifixions and killings of tens of thousands of Judeans as rebels against Rome, which culminated with the new Roman Emperor’s decimation of Jerusalem and razing of Solomon’s Temple to ash in 70 C.E., which settled once and for all that the world belonged to the Roman Empire, and as Brigitte Kahl writes, “proclaimed the emperors’ triumph not so much over a competing world power as over [the] rival worldview that people should be free to live in independence of imperial domination.”

We aren’t then yet. But that plundered and pillaged Temple is at the heart of today’s story and its importance among the religious elite becomes the impetus for their own grotesque violence. See, Stephen will be stoned precisely because he proclaims the good news that neither that Temple nor any other house built by human hands can contain God, any more than God’s presence can be controlled or limited or withheld from anyone by anyone, not even those who lead in God’s name according to God’s law which they, like their ancestors, actively defy from within the Temple which has become their idol. God is in us, Stephen says. Indeed that word may become very good news to his killers or their descendants who remember his speech decades later in the wake of the Temple’s destruction, but for now his sermon is sacrilege, and punishable by death.

But before we get there, let’s look at Stephen’s context in the early chapters of Acts, just after Jesus ascended.

Christianity, as it will come to be called by the Roman Empire, is spreading like wildfire, not just because the Apostles have persisted in preaching and worshiping under Roman occupation and in resistance to its threats, but more so because -- crucially -- they are continuing in the Way of Jesus. And this Way, as we read in Acts 4 and 5, is distinguished by the selling of all personal property and possessions, and the pooling of all proceeds and resources for the just and equitable distribution of all things to all the people according to their need. As Pastor Mark briefly underscored last week, they’ve very carefully and intentionally expanded the socialist network of mutual aid and solidarity — we call it hospitality — which Jesus established in diametric opposition to and rebellion against the extractive, extortionist structures of the Roman Empire.

          And, this sharing of resources is so essential and fundamental to their Spirit-led- and -empowered communal life that at least two people -- Ananias and Sapphira -- have already been struck dead by the Spirit after keeping for themselves some of the proceeds of their property sales. Which is to say, the apostles and earliest believers understand at least one thing at their core, which is that they cannot Go the Way of Jesus -- the Way which is Jesus, according to today’s gospel -- apart from radical and radically mutual care.

On that point, let me depart to the Gospel for just one moment here and name that Jesus’s famous words -- that he is the Way, the Truth, and the Life -- are not merely a summary declaration of who He is to the exclusion of all other ways of meeting and knowing and experiencing Divine communion. When read in context of and in response to Thomas’s question in John 14:5 -- “If we don’t even know where you’re going, how can we know the way there?” -- Jesus’s words do not offer a map to a destination at which they will eventually arrive if they follow his directions. Instead, they are an invitation into a Way of Being-With that is as inherently and indivisibly relational as the Trinitarion Union itself. As professor Dr Laura Holmes underscores, the English translation of “many rooms” which Jesus says he’s going to prepare for his disciples, doesn’t do us any favors here. The word Jesus uses is moné which comes from the Greek word meno which is not a place, but means to remain, dwell, or abide. In other words, Jesus is the Way not to heaven or some place beyond this realm, but to an Eternal Dwelling in and with God which we experience and manifest in this realm as we live with each other like Jesus lived with us. That is the community the apostles are growing, and why they come to be known as People of the Way.

And their inherently pragmatic, physical, embodied practice of pooling and sharing resources is also so intrinsically spiritual that it becomes the definitive mark of Spirit’s presence among the people. Which is to say: If you want to know where the Holy Spirit has fallen and dwells, find where people are feeding, clothing, housing, helping, and caring for one another. You’ll find her everywhere if you look, like under bridges where the houseless and their friends are feeding each other in community, or at MayDay actions where people are handing out water and food and hope like candy; at detention centers where neighbors bear witness and record the names and light candles for the stolen; and at memorials for those executed by the Occupying Powers in cities like Minneapolis and Ferguson and Chicago and right here in Portland, where canteens of hot chai and bags of flour and masa seemingly, miraculously, never run out no matter how many samosas and tamales are made with love and given freely to any who come hungry.

   That is how and why the Apostles’ fellowship keeps expanding, by the hundreds even, to welcome more and more people drawn to The Way by the promise of both material and spiritual belonging; And that expansion is outpacing the 12 apostles’ ability to reach and serve them all well, kind of like how Augustana’s growth and expansion outpaced one pastor’s ability to care for everyone, and so you called a second pastor to help out. Not only that, but it seems, according to the first few verses of Acts 6, that there may be some implicit bias moldering among the Hebrew followers of Jesus, such that the widows among the growing cluster of Hellenist believers are being neglected in the daily distribution of food. And to their credit, the apostles hear this critique and take it seriously enough to call everyone together to select from among them 7 people of good standing, who are full of Spirit and Wisdom to be appointed to the specific ministry of service, so the 12 may continue in their Ministry of Word. Indeed, friends, this is the first ordination of deacons who Minister in Word and Service, and in case you were wondering how I’d ever get us there, the first of those seven deacons named is Stephen, who attends, cares for, serves and advocates for the full inclusion of an oppressed community in and with whom he’s found home.

   According to Acts 6:8, Stephen is full of grace and power, and able to work great wonders and signs among the people. He is also a well-educated Jew who’s been prophetically stirring some pots among certain people in certain synagogues, who are frustrated and angered by his arguments but cannot refute them. So they start a whisper campaign, accusing him of blasphemy, which reaches the elders and scribes who then seize him and drag him to trial. There, like Moses before him, Stephen’s face becomes like the face of an angel and the high priests begin their interrogation. Stephen then proceeds to give the longest sermon in all of Acts -- which is still shorter than either mine or Pastor Mark’s tend to be -- which culminates in a proclamation of where and with whom God Dwells that gets him killed.

And to be clear, his proclamation doesn’t come from nowhere; it is meticulously rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures which is why it’s so upsetting to these religious folk: Holy Texts are never more aggravating or dangerous than in the hands of those whose purpose is to weaponize them. Not only that, but Stephen’s message mirrors Jesus’s continual message to the religious elite throughout his own ministry, which you might remember began in Luke 4 with his quoting of Isaiah 61 and his proclamation that he was the anointed one upon whom the Spirit of the Lord came to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, inclusion to the disabled, and liberation to the oppressed. And just as Jesus’s prophetic message stirred the people into such a violent frenzy that they tried to drive him off a cliff, so too does Stephen’s prophetic message provoke his hearers to murderous violence. But unlike Jesus, he does not escape. Instead, as we see in verse 54 at the start of today’s text, the more truth he speaks, the more enraged they grow, and the more committed they become to demonstrably false and incomplete theologies that look a lot more like the empire that oppresses them than the Sacred Way of Belonging handed down from Abraham to Joseph to Moses and David and even Solomon, whose temple, Stephen underscores, was just a place, only a stand-in until the time came when we would become the Temple of God by the power and indwelling of Holy Spirit. They only hear him renouncing the Holiness of the Temple and their standing in it, when he is, in fact, proclaiming it too holy for brick and mud, so holy it is only suited for incarnation in flesh and blood. So they are furious.

As they burn with rage against him, Stephen, full of Spirit, sees the heavens opened up and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God just as Jesus did before this same council in Luke 22, at which they cover their ears and rush him, dragging him out of the city, taking care to drop their overshirts at the feet of a young leader named Saul, who will approve of Stephen’s murder and go on to persecute many many more before he is blinded, confronted, and converted to Stephen’s way by Christ himself on the Road to Damascus. But for now he watches over the garments and the people who stone him to death. And as he dies Stephen, full of grace and power, and radical compassion as well, prays as Jesus taught and with Jesus’s own words: “Lord, receive my spirit, and do not hold this sin against them.”

I am troubled, because this episode, like all the ones it echoes and precedes, is troubling. Not only because Stephen is the first of many believers who either will be slaughtered by Empire, or sacrificed by religious folks whose thirst for power exceeds their hunger for righteousness. But also because it is a pain we know and have witnessed, as our neighbors are sacrificed at the altar of God-and-Guns, as our taxes fund the genocide and ethnic cleansing of siblings far and wide, and as Christian siblings champion and cheer the dehumanization, degradation, and decimation of people and cultures deemed expendable by their false and incomplete theologies as they forge unholy alliances with the forces of evil. Violence needs no justification from Empire, but will always find one by chapter and verse among the faithful who are ignorant or weary of the Way.

Indeed, It’s a terror we know, and that we’re going to see more of, in and from this imperial core, as its death rattle grows louder.

But Beloved, do not let your heart be troubled, because Acts and Stephen’s story in it, like Jesus’s before them, are also and more importantly a testament to the singular goodness and power of the Way -- who is Christ, and who, as I’ve said before and will keep on saying, does not promise or even pray for our extraction from this realm, but instead pleads for our protection from the evil one, and perfects it in our protection of and among each other. Our Way does not promise an end to evil, only Spirit’s power in our rebellion against it, which is perfected in the sacred goodness of our intentional Presence and radical hospitality with each other, which subvert imperial oppression and supplant it with belonging. And so, our Way is not and will never be Safe. As long as we remain in Christ and him in us, made one by the Holy Spirit, we will also remain a threat to the powers of earth and ether whose authority and reach depend on our separation and isolation from each other. There is nothing safe about this Way of Being-With. We gotta let that go and instead cling to the truth which Stephen embodied in life and preached to his death: That we who dwell in God are indwelt by God, and those aren’t just words. We are God’s Holy Temple, enveloped in and inhabited by Eternal Being Itself. The one who birthed creation is still birthing new creation, in our flesh and fellowship, as we embody the Way of radical belonging, and become an increasingly irresistible and irrepressible Rebellion of Hope and Hospitality against fascist imperialism. We are dangerous, because while we cannot force the end of death, we do know the Way of Life. We know we are not just made for the Way, we are born of it, full of it, and indeed, in Christ we Are It. So beloved, let us be the Way of Jesus, that dangerous and holy menace to empire, to the glory of God by the power of Her Spirit that all may be liberated and live.

Amen, Àshe, Ahó.

]]><![CDATA[Thomas, Faithfully (John 20:19-31)]]>Sun, 12 Apr 2026 07:00:00 GMThttps://www.amycourts.com/written-things/thomas-faithfully-john-2019-31

"The Incredulity of Saint Thomas" (Caravaggio c. 1601)

This sermon was first preached at Augustana Lutheran Church in Portland, OR on April 12, 2026. The full livestream of the service may be viewed here (sermon begins at 35:45). The sermon with captions may be viewed here or below . Scripture texts: John 20:19-31

Peace be with you, beloved of God.

This morning we get to peek into the mind, body, and heart of a man who’s been veiled in a very particular reputation over the millennia since Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. He’s been known across time as “Doubting Thomas,” and to be honest, the first time I was tasked with it, I was not thrilled to preach about the disciple I was taught never to be like; the disciple I seemed to mirror anyway, in all the wrong ways. I have always doubted and always wanted proof because my faith has never been an easy blessing but something I’ve worked out in such fear and trembling that I was well into my 20s before I permitted myself to entertain what author David Dark calls “the sacredness of questioning everything.” It took a few more years after that to lose god altogether, which I did …about 10 years ago. And when I tell you I lost god, I mean it in the most literal sense: In the midst of 2016 Syrian civil war, as babies were washing ashore and being pulled from the rubble of bombed buildings, I laid awake at night asking some of the heaviest and hardest questions of my life. Questions about evil and suffering and why God never did anything about the world’s unmitigated grief and violence. And then I woke up one morning with an overwhelming clarity that it was because, simply, there is no god. It’s not that I stopped believing, but that god had never existed to begin with. And my life was a lie.

The loss was exactly that sharp, terrifying, and painful, but it was honest.

So I went quiet and gave myself permission to enter the absence of God. I left the church I’d led worship at for years and joined Redeemer Lutheran in North Minneapolis which might sound weird, except that I was clinging to my spouse, the only safe place I had left, and he wanted to go back to his Lutheran roots. When I told Pastors Kelly and Babette that I didn’t believe in God and was tired from a lifetime of church work, they hugged me, welcomed me, told me they were my home, and gave me permission to heal in the dark heaviness of Holy Saturday for as long as I needed to. When they served me the meal saying, “Amy: This is the body of Christ and blood of Christ given for you,” I cried. I didn’t believe in this meal at all -- but it fed me.

Eventually, they started saying I should go to seminary, insisting that all the agnostics like me who showed up in our pews every week without any certain belief -- more than the church likes to admit -- deserve to be seen and heard and held by pastors who get it, are undaunted, and make space for them to come exactly as they are. So I went. In the fall of 2018 I started seminary, still fully agnostic, but committed to going until I could go no further. And that’s how it happened, how I came back to life: Not all at once, but through the slow and careful gathering of the tiniest, most beautiful shards of possibility, and re-fitting them into something resembling faith. I took the bread and wine when offered, and learned to re-member my Baptismal belonging each time I went for a run in the rain, or swam at the lake, or splashed water on my kid in whom I was so pleased. By the end, the inevitability and inescapability of my life’s trajectory toward ministry in Word and Sacrament became as hilariously obvious as their non-existence was that day I lost God. But even so: I’m not who I used to be and neither is my faith. That death was real, the wounds were real, and the scars remain.

So now: having rebuilt a brand new kind of faith from the shrapnel of the one that was shattered by utterly reasonable doubts, I did not relish the idea of exploring John’s “Doubting Thomas” or explaining why neither he nor I are the kind of disciples you should listen to. Blessedly, I had him all wrong.

We’ll enter his story via the garden of verses 8-18. Peter and the other disciple have just confirmed the emptiness of Jesus' tomb but still do not understand what it means, so they return home, leaving Mary Magdalene alone to weep and wail in mourning and fear. Her grief is interrupted twice, first by angels, and then by the Christ she mistakes for a gardener when he asks, “woman, why do you weep?” And, in what I imagine to be a rush of anxious frustration, she replies to each in turn that her Lord has been taken to some place she does not know, and if they could just tell her where he is she could go to him!

But then Jesus speaks her name, just her name: “Mary.” And, with heart ears attuned to the sound of her name on his lips, she immediately sees Jesus, her Lord, her beloved “Rabbouni,” and rushes into his arms and clings so forcefully that Jesus has to tell her to let go because he will soon ascend to His father -- who is also HER father -- and she must go and tell the disciples before he comes to them.

So she goes, which is how we come to the locked room of today’s text that very same evening, where the disciples are gathered, hiding in fear of being caught and crucified like Jesus, and He just appears, greeting them with Peace. “After this,” the scripture says, “he showed them his hands and feet,” and looking, they rejoiced at Jesus’s presence. But still -- they don’t get it! Not fully, and not until Jesus says again, “Peace be with you” -- offering the kind of Peace that is wholeness, oneness, and rest, to directly address and disarm their abject fear -- and “Breathes the Holy Spirit into them,” sending them in the Spirit’s power to do all the Father sent him to do; a sending which itself prefigures Pentecost when the same Holy Spirit Breath will fall on all the people, the same Holy Breath that comes to us still, breathing new Life into us for all our healing, wholeness, and peace. Now they believe.

But Thomas -- beloved Thomas -- he is not there this night. He was not with Mary in the garden and he does not see Jesus' wounds or receive Holy Spirit breath into his lungs along with the other disciples.

He was there when Jesus was arrested, tried, tortured, and crucified. Just like he was undoubtedly there for hundreds of crucifixions throughout his life, it being the Roman empire’s favorite feast of humiliation, degradation, and threat. Which means he’s watched time and time again as another one dies the slow, breath-stealing death of the cross, and not a single one has ever come back to life. So off the bat, Thomas does not -- will not -- believe any of his brothers’ preposterous stories of a risen Jesus who beat crucifixion.

Not only that, but Thomas may well still be reeling from the Lazarus incident, where we first meet and get to know the kind of man he is. Remember that? How in John 11, when Jesus tells the disciples that Lazarus has died, Thomas speaks for the first of only three recorded times saying, “Let us also go, that we may die with him”? That one sentence plunges us into the depth of Thomas’s love for and devotion to those he calls brother, into the truth that wherever Thomas goes, he goes fully with his tender heart on his sleeve and unashamed of his big, dramatic, out-loud feelings.

Remember that as you imagine him now, a week later: hearing that Jesus has risen and knowing that’s not how this works, that resurrection from the dead is not something anyone gets to witness ever, never mind twice in one lifetime. The total unfathomability of that notion would keep anyone from even entertaining it.

So maybe, he reasons, they’re imagining things. That in their grief and pain, one or two of the other disciples either mistook a stranger for Jesus, or conjured an apparition, and all the rest latched on to the story, so desperate for it to be true that their messed up minds saw, or they said they saw exactly and only what they wanted to see, despite all real facts and demonstrable reality. And Thomas will not, for the sake of his own sanity, join them in that delusion. He will not be swayed by group think or persuaded by impossible stories, no matter how convinced or convincing his best friends are. He is, I suspect, a man consumed with grief and rage at the Empire, utterly crushed, and done with impossibilities. His big, deeply wounded heart cannot bear the sharp edges of such radical, impossible hope.

And so he responds to their stories the best and only way he can, and issues an ultimatum as grotesque and offensive as their stories are to his grief, saying that unless and until he puts his very own fingers into the still-open holes of Jesus’s hands, and digs them into Jesus’s sword-pierced side, the wound that proved him all the way dead, he will not believe.

Put another beautiful way by author Andrew Prior, “Thomas will not trust a Christ without wounds.” Never mind one made up of words.

Do you sense where I’m going here?

It’s not that Thomas is a petty doubter or a faithless fool. In fact, he isn’t demanding anything less or more than the other disciples got: The day of his resurrection, Jesus gave his own body to each of them in the particular ways they would receive -- his voice to Mary’s ears, his wounds to the disciples eyes, his breath in their lungs -- and then they believed.

Rather, Thomas is SO faithful to the one, singular Christ he gave up his life to follow, the Christ he saw nailed to the tree, the Christ whose body, after only eight days, should still display those raw and gaping wounds if he’s real -- Thomas is so faithful to this Christ that he will accept no tale, no testimony, no matter who or how many tell it, not even his most trusted friends — nothing but that very man’s flesh, his wounds of death, at Thomas’s own fingertips.

What Thomas needs is the only One whose still-tender wounds can speak to his own still-wounded heart.

And Jesus -- oh, I love him so. Because at the end of it all, when Jesus re-enters that locked room full of disciples, he speaks Peace and turns away from the group to face Thomas, the way the good shepherd leaves the 99 for the one, and offers himself to his broken friend in exactly the way he’s demanded: He says, “Come, Tender Thomas. Put your fingers where the nails pierced my hands, put your hand into my side. Grab hold of me and release your unbelief. It’s okay to hope. It’s safe to believe. It really is me, and I am yours.”

This moment always takes my breath away and brings me to tears. In my holy imagination, that room has gone silent as everyone watches Thomas with Jesus. Thomas’s steeled exterior cracks open and he lets out a sob of grief -- the kind that mixes with joy the way bitter blends with sweet, the way spit is mixed with dirt to make mud that can make a blind man see. Can you hear that sob give way to messy, snotty weeping, when, with a choked voice and red-rimmed eyes, Thomas confesses Jesus “His Lord and His God”?

We don’t even know if Thomas actually touched Jesus’s wounds, and it doesn’t really matter. Because here at the end, however it happened, Thomas becomes the third disciple, after Mary Magdalene the Tower and Simon Peter the Rock -- and the first after his resurrection -- to confess Jesus as Christ, the Lord God; and WE see fully that it was not doubt that kept Thomas from believing Jesus had risen, but deep faithfulness to him, and a fiercely guarded loyalty deep within that would not permit him to entrust his hope to any but the Wounded One.

There is so much Thomas teaches us about faith in these few verses. Like how choosing doubt can be the most faithful thing. Like how it’s okay to scream at God and demand answers that reach us in ways and places no one else knows exist. Like how beautiful and blessed it is to be given a faith that thrives without ever seeing or touching or screaming or losing. On this point, the author of John is perfectly right. For as grateful as I am to the God I met through the painful collapse and rebuilding of my faith from scratch, as astounded as I am in how they still come to me in ways my eyes can see and ears can hear, I wish such loss on no one. No one who’s lost or buried the god of their heart and endured an endless string of Holy Saturdays when the dead are JUST dead, would ever wish it on anyone else. So yes, blessed are those who believe without seeing.

And I pray that Blessed faith is yours and that you remain steadfast in its fullness, today and always.

But if that’s not you -- if you came here today like Thomas, or like I did to Redeemer, waiting on or done with a God you’re not sure is real; and unwilling or unable to believe until God meets you in your need and gives you what your trust demands, Hear this: Your questions are sacred. Your doubt is holy. Your faith and doubt are yours alone to entrust to the trustworthy in your own time. You are welcome here and loved just as you are, without condition or caveat. We are your people. We will be your home.

May Peace be yours. Amen.

]]><![CDATA[I Don't Know Love (John 13: 21-35)]]>Thu, 02 Apr 2026 07:00:00 GMThttps://www.amycourts.com/written-things/idontknowlove

This sermon was first preached at Augustana Lutheran Church in Portland, OR on Maundy Thursday of Holy Week, April 2, 2026. It was not livestreamed. Video and lyrics of the song "Judas" which I sang at the end of this sermon are below. Scripture text: John 13:1-17, 31-35

Good evening, Beloved. I know I say this about all the Holy Days, but Maundy Thursday is my favorite. Partly because it was entirely new to me in 2018 -- in my evangelical tradition, we didn’t mark the Last Supper, the night when Jesus spilled water and love for his disciples before spilling his blood. And partly because at that service, during the stripping of the altar, my friend Dave performed a song he wrote in which the chorus just repeated “If you can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, if you can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.” Amidst all the endless and extreme police violence against our Black siblings, it moved me deeply.

Which was weird, because at that point in my life, I was faithless. I had lost god altogether, and religion didn’t make a lot of sense to me. But that song, during the coming-apart, the taking-apart of the altar, rang like a bell in my body. I didn’t understand it, but I felt it. And it made me want to write a song, too. A song about grief and betrayal, about what it means to stay with someone during the breaking of their body and remain a witness to it all. About love and its lack.

And believe me, I tried. Many times over the coming years. But songs are tricky. For me, at least, they aren’t so much written as they are born, and like babies, they’re rarely born on time. So I let it go. And I started another chapter because, and this is true, after that same Maundy Thursday service, as Dave and I talked about how powerful his song was, he said, “You should go to seminary.” Like I said -- I didn’t even believe in god, and I told him so! But he was insistent, like Pastor Kelly -- I swear they were in cahoots -- that there were more people like me in the pews than most church leaders wanted to admit, and they deserved pastors too. I told him he was bonkers, that it wasn’t gonna happen, and started seminary the next fall.

Four years later, I was finishing seminary with my pastoral internship during which I was tasked with designing some kind of project to define my year and my pastoral identity. I stumbled upon what ultimately became mine somewhat accidentally -- or, perhaps a better word would be providentially -- when my supervising pastor Tom, a man who became a friend, confidante, mentor, sage, and father figure of sorts when mine was nowhere to be found; a man who doggedly championed me and made space for all my gifts to find breath and space and life in the congregation, invited me to sing for the first time on my other favorite liturgical Holy Day, All Saints Sunday. As I searched for a song to fit the day, what happened instead was that I wrote one of my own. Not long after that, I wrote another that followed the Baptism of Jesus and his first miracle at Cana, marking the beginning of his ministry.

It had been a long time since songs came to me like that, more or less writing themselves. After Elijah was born and we moved from Nashville where I’d spent the previous 8 years as a professional recording and touring artist, I thought that part of my life was done. So I was surprised, delighted, and overcome, really, when a few songs of grief, protest, and sacred fury poured out of me in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. I was two years deep in seminary with that part of my self packed away, but in those long, brutal days when we were in the streets screaming for justice or spending overnights in church basements organizing mounds of clothing and food donations, and re-stocking street medics with necessary gear for the uprising that would and should not sleep, I felt deep kinship with the prophet Jeremiah who said, “God’s word is like a fire in my heart, a fire shut up in my bones, and I cannot hold it in.” Which is not to say I am a prophet; only that when Spirit moves, especially after years of drought, it’s impossible to contain. So I spilled, I sang, I wrote. And it felt for a moment like resurrection.

But after that, songs went quiet again for another year and a half. Words wouldn’t come, and they can’t be forced. So I sang those old songs over and over, and I waited.

Until November 2021 during my internship when I wrote the first song I ever played here, “Feast of All Saints.”
And I decided that for my project I would write liturgicalish songs to mark significant moments in Jesus’s life and in the life of the Church. It was my way of saying “Yes” to the movement of the Spirit, to Her permission and Tom’s insistence that I not silo my songwriting self away from my preaching or pastoral self.

So of course, as we approached Holy Week three years after my first Maundy Thursday experience, I was itching to finally write my own song about Jesus’ New Commandment to love as he loves. But my eagerness turned to anxiety as it failed utterly to materialize.

In retrospect, I suspect that’s because, despite my empathic nature and willingness to hurt with those who hurt, it feels impossible most times for me to even imagine loving those who do the hurting. And the reason is this: I don’t have to imagine the pain of Jesus’s betrayal, because I have not only witnessed that kind of betrayal -- the kind we’re still seeing literally today as popular evangelists proclaim during holy week that God’s will according to scripture is that Iran be destroyed, and that God has raised up the current president to do it; Not only am I watching Christ being betrayed and handed over to empire in the name of border control and public safety, over and over by those who claim to love and worship him; Not only have I witnessed such betrayal, I have been betrayed by those closest to me; I have felt the sting of abandonment by those who claimed to love me unconditionally, just as I am, so long as I changed. I have watched, baffled, as every Gospel truth I was taught is burned to ash, to make room for a more expedient politics. I have had my love and my need to be loved weaponized against me, and used as a cudgel to beat me down and make me submit, or at least cry. And I have seen it weaponized endlessly against other Beloved Image Bearers in the same way.

Which is to say: the pain of betrayal isn’t the problem for me; it's the Love. Because all I have in me toward those who betray and batter God’s Beloved is fiery rage. I don’t know how to love them, and, frankly, I don’t always even want to love them. Those who hurt us don’t deserve our love any more than Judas deserved Jesus’s love, any more than we deserve Jesus’s love —

which is the point …and the impossibility.

Maybe this is a lot to take in. As a pastor, it shouldn’t be so difficult for me to preach love, right? It’s right here in the Maundy Thursday text: Jesus gives a new commandment to love the way he loves, and the way he loves is to wash the feet of betrayers, to set the table for deniers, to try one last time to rally the abandoners to a purpose he knows is beyond them -- which is why he later promises to send his Spirit to help them.

Like every law or commandment God ever gave, this new one is simple, and clear, and direct: He says, “Love each other like I do: selflessly and sacrificially with everyday things like water and bread and wine, because communal love is The thing, the only thing, that will sustain you in my absence, carry you through what is coming, and keep you from becoming like those you despise.” He tells them, “where I’m going you cannot follow: You will remain in this world, and in order to survive here, your love for others must be as audacious, resolute, and foolish as my love is for you.”

In his book, ‘A History of My Brief Body,’ Queer Indigenous poet and author Billy Ray Belcourt puts it like this: “To love someone is to firstly confess: I am prepared to be devastated by you.”

”To love someone is to firstly confess: I am prepared to be devastated by you.”

This is the love of Jesus for us, the love to which Jesus calls us.

My friends, I will tell you the true truth: I hate this. I am tired of devastation! But if, as a pastor and leader, I am called to model the way of Jesus, then the first thing I must do is confess that I don’t know how to do it. Sometimes I don’t even know how to think it.

Which brings me back to songs.
The kind that aren’t born when or how I want.
Sometimes I can’t find the words, and sometimes the words I try aren’t true. And so I wait for the words — and the Word, the Living One, the Spirit of Christ — to find me in the mess and devastation.

And beloved, She did. As I pondered this scene in the Upper Room and considered this New Commandment, and the people… and the pain …and the Christ, what I finally birthed was not a proclamation, but a confession. And that, not of love, but of its lack.

And so I want to share it with you now, because even though I know we must, I still have no answers or advice on how to love; I only have my humanity, and some faith -- more than before -- that confessions are seeds in Spirit’s garden, and She always, only grows love.

]]><![CDATA[Jesus Blinds the Seeing (John 9:1-41)]]>Sun, 15 Mar 2026 07:00:00 GMThttps://www.amycourts.com/written-things/jesusblindstheseeing

This sermon was first preached at Augustana Lutheran Church in Portland, OR on March 15, 2026. The full livestream of the service may be viewed here. The sermon with captions may be viewed here or below .

Scripture text: John 9:1-41

Good morning, beloved of God, you who bear God to this community in your many and varied bodies, you who show us who God is in your very flesh as it is today. I bid you good morning and declare it to be one, because we get to spend this time together.

Here at Augustana, we make a point every Sunday to affirm the vastness of God’s beauty, the fullness of God’s glory, and the divinity of God’s image as it is revealed in every one of us. We joyously proclaim that when we say “all are welcome as you are,” we mean it, and that when you’re here you’re home. And almost every week, we affirm to each other out loud that we are made in God’s image and are beautiful as we are.

I’m grateful to be in such a community -- it is one of the reasons I so enthusiastically accepted your call. I am also hyper-aware, this week in particular, of how vast is the gap between what we speak, believe, and do, as a nation, society, and church. Because we are people living in both time and eternity, both on the ground and in glory, we live in tension between what is and what ought to be and where we fit on the bridge between them. And even though we love hard and love well, there will always be room, as the Apostle Paul said in 1 Thessalonians, to “Excel still more.” Excellence is often, I’m sorry to say, expensive and inconvenient.

This is all especially real to me today because our Gospel is about more than the miraculous healing of a man born with blindness -- in fact, some suggest and I’m inclined to agree it’s not actually about that at all. It is, instead, about us, and our relationship to him.

Let me start by saying that I am a disabled person whose home is full of disabled people.

I have generalized anxiety, major depression, and ADHD. And I have explicit permission to share that both my spouse and son are AuDHD -- autistic with ADHD. Our road to self-discovery and diagnoses began when Elijah was in third grade. After a months-long process of neuropsychological evaluations, the doctors called me and Paul in for results. As they told us he is autistic, I remember how the energy in the room was heavy, constricted, and morose, as they asked how we, his parents, felt after hearing this “difficult information.” But for me it wasn’t difficult but liberative. Now I had answers and context for the ways that Elijah shows up in this world, in our home, in his schools, and in his skin, and answers for why his teachers so often targeted him with worry, discipline, or condescension.

And let me tell you: When they learned of his official diagnosis, their behavior and tactics changed near-immediately. Their constant annoyance and aggravation were replaced with accommodations they’d previously withheld and they no longer treated his behaviors as ‘acting out’ but acknowledged his ‘overstimulation.’ What’s more, that dread and despair his doctors expected from me came not from learning his diagnosis but from seeing how many of his teachers required one before they were willing to treat him like a person, a little kid, whose inner workings and sensory experiences and expressions deserved a place to both shine and rest rather than be constantly policed.

I also joined groups on facebook for “Autism Moms” and quickly learned they were not the place for me, when I did not share their lamentation, disappointment, or impulse to “fix” their autistic kids because I did not think mine was broken. Instead, with the help and guidance of a couple autistic adults I know, I joined groups like ‘Ask Me! I’m Autistic!’ and Autism Inclusivity, and learned to listen to and believe Actually Autistic people first. I learned that there’s a vast canyon between what they say they need and want from society, and what a lot of autism moms and “advocacy” groups like Autism Speaks say about them. And I learned how much harm abuse autistic folks have suffered because parents and caretakers insist on speaking for and about and over them rather than letting them speak for themselves.

Which is all to say, when I stepped into the gospel of John and began to study it for the first time since all these diagnoses, I came with new questions and sought answers from different kinds of people, including disability justice theologians Amy Kenny who authored the book My Body is Not a Prayer Request, and Eli Claire who wrote Ideology of Cure. And I began to notice things I hadn’t before.

Like how the text doesn’t say whether or not Jesus asked the man born blind if he wanted to be “healed,” or if he was okay with having saliva-mud slathered across his face, nor did Jesus tell him the mud would “cure” his blindness. Jesus just did it, then told the man to go wash at Siloam, which he did. That made me wonder how many other would-be miracle workers or just passers-by over the years felt entitled to touch him or do something similar, such that he didn’t fight or resist but simply went to bathe.

The text doesn’t tell us what happened to or in him when he received sight either, how he experienced the sudden onset of a new sense -- only what everyone around him had to say about it. Was he terrified? Did he understand what was going on? Did he think he was going crazy, with all these new colors and unfamiliar shapes and shades and lights and shadow bombarding him in the eyes?

When I asked Elijah what he might feel like if he woke up one day and wasn’t autistic, he laughed and said, “How can I know? I’ve always been autistic!” Which was the most honest answer I could expect, I suppose. But when I asked Paul the same, his answer was more earnest: “I wouldn’t be me. That would be terrible,"he said.

So yeah, I wonder if the man born blind felt healed when he opened his eyes at Siloam, or if he felt more broken and mixed up than ever. I wonder if what people called “sight” felt more like blindness to him. And who, if anyone, was nearby to help him navigate this abrupt and extreme physical transformation? We’re limited by and to our sanctified imaginations, because the text doesn’t tell us.

And that’s part of the point, I think: The text never tells us anything about the man’s own lived experience of gaining (or losing) sight; but revolves entirely around the experience of those around him, and what they say and think about it. How his sight disturbs their peace and upends what they’ve been taught to think and believe about his disability.

We know what they do to him, as a result of him being “cured:” They debate amongst each other about whether or not he is who he is, and then interrogate him endlessly while remaining incredulous of the truth he speaks. They drag him before the religious authorities for further interrogation and insult, as they attempt to add him to their catalog of evidence against Jesus Christ who performed the sign on the Sabbath. They ignore and dismiss him out of hand every single time he lifts his voice to say, “I am he, and I can see because of the man Jesus.” They even call in his parents to testify about and against him, which must have been humiliating. He is a grown man, and they called his mom and dad. When his parents defer to his testimony -- which, the text says, they do not out of respect for his agency and autonomy, but to avoid the scrutiny and judgment of those who’ve got him by the neck -- the religious elite drag him in again, and begin a back and forth that finally comes to an explosive head as the man reclaims his personal agency and the truth and authority of his experience, and exposes that their debate is rooted not in their hunger for God’s glory, but in their envy and resentment toward Jesus whose power they lack, despite that they are disciples of Moses who heard and saw God on the mountain, and should therefore be able to recognize God’s work among them.

Now, folks -- now they’re listening to him. Why? Because the man born with blindness Sees them exactly as they are.

And so the story ends just as it began: The man first excluded for the sin of being born blind is once again cast out for the sin of seeing what they can’t.

When Jesus hears about the whole debacle, he comes to find them and reveals himself as the Messiah. The man believes and worships -- not just because he sees, but because finally he is being Seen. Which is all beautiful and incredible, and still resolves nothing.

See, according to the text, the man who received sight is no less a problem for those around him than he was when he was blind, he’s still cast out and excluded from all the same places he was before. They still withhold the respect due him as a human and neighbor.

And that’s because their eyes have yet to be opened. They have not, do not, and cannot see him as anything more than his diagnosis. To them, he was from birth and still remains a Thing with a Problem: His body, which was first an object of pity, scorn, scrutiny, and charity, is now a topic for debate, scientific inquiry, and wonder. He is never the subject of the story.

Now we come to the crux of today’s gospel: The problem was never that a man couldn’t see, but that his community refused to see him. Which is why I’m not inclined to read this story as a revelation of God’s glory in the curing of his blindness, but of a story of our blindness to God’s Glory revealed in people with disabilities.

Friends, it is not difficult to see the same storyline playing out all around us still, both in public and sacred spaces. In conversations around justice for persons on margins, Disability Justice rarely ranks. Even as the ADA crumbles and people with physical, mental, developmental, and so-called “invisible” disabilities lose what few legislative, economic, and institutional supports we have, outrage over our persistent dehumanization, stigmatization, and infantilization never seems to catch.

As Amy Kenny writes, “our bodies and lived experiences in them remain problematic abnormalities, relegating us as people who need to be fixed or healed through the charity and love of those who pity us, or erased from existence entirely through eugenics.”

All of it because our “normal,” “neurotypical,” “able-bodied” culture -- which is rooted in and inextricably bound up with capitalism’s assessments about the productivity and profitability of our bodies -- cannot fathom a life worth living if it not normal, neurotypical, or abled.

And because we do not listen to disabled people who have their own voices and can speak clearly, plainly, and authoritatively as the experts of their own experiences.

But it does not have to be this way. If there’s anything we can learn from all those neighbors, friends, family, and religious folk, including Jesus’s disciples, who talk about and around and over and for but never to or with the man born with blindness, it’s this: If we are intentional about seeing people, specifically people with disabilities, whole as they are; and deliberate about letting them speak for themselves and listening deeply, we will see new revelations of God’s Glory in them, and that will heal us.

Amy Kenny encapsulates this truth far better than I can, so I will close with her own message to us, her siblings in the church:

To assume that my disability needs to be erased in order for me to live an abundant life is disturbing not only because of what it says about me but also because of what it reveals about people’s notions of God. I bear the image of the Alpha and the Omega. My disabled body is a temple for the Holy Spirit. I have the mind of Christ. There’s no caveat to those promises. I don’t have a junior holy spirit because I am disabled. To suggest that I am anything less than sanctified and redeemed is to suppress the image of God in my disabled body and to limit how God is already at work through my life. [Beloved] we need to be freed not from disability but from the notion that it limits my ability to showcase God’s radiance to the church. What we need to be freed from is ableism.

Oh God of Liberation, may it be so. Amen, Àse, Ahó.

]]><![CDATA[In the Chrysalis (Transfiguration)]]>Tue, 17 Feb 2026 23:15:43 GMThttps://www.amycourts.com/written-things/inthechrysalis

This sermon was first preached at Augustana Lutheran Church in Portland, OR on February 15, 2026.

The full livestream of the service may be viewed here (sermon begins at 35:45). The sermon with captions may be viewed here or below .

Scripture texts:
Exodus 24:12-18
Matthew 17:1-9

Good morning, Augustana! And welcome to the end of the beginning, or perhaps the beginning of the end. Today is the culmination of the season of Epiphany, the celebration of the manifestation of God in Christ. And a curious end it is. After spending six weeks reveling in the magnificent vulgarity of God transgressing the boundaries of eternity to become flesh and blood in the birth of baby Jesus, a sacred transfusion of holiness into the humdrum of humanity; today we come to the mountaintop, alongside Peter, James, and John, to witness God transcend the boundaries of flesh and blood and earth and matter, to reveal Their blinding majesty in the transfigured Christ.

I, for one, love that every single year on Transfiguration Sunday we have occasion to read The Very Hungry Caterpillar in worship and wonder for a moment at the similarly magnificent transmogrification of a caterpillar into a beautiful butterfly. That story skips over the vulgarity of the process, even as it shows us in vivid color what a caterpillar must do to Become with a capital B. But we, friends, will not skip over it today, because it’s incredible and illuminating.

See, in nature, metamorphosis -- which is the English translation of the Greek word MetamorPHOo, which our Scriptures translate as “transfiguration” -- is an extraordinary process of utter, total, disgusting un- and re-becoming, of death and resurrection, of transfiguring from one kind of being and body to another one entirely, through a four-stage process from egg to larva to pupa and, finally, winged adult. According to Wonderopolous, an educational hub created and designed for kids but is also perfect for my own grown-up imagination, it is “during this Pupa stage that the caterpillar’s old body dies and a new body forms inside a protective shell known as a chrysalis…. There the caterpillar's body digests itself from the inside out: The same juices our Very Hungry Caterpillar once used to digest all that delicious food as a larva, it now uses to break down its own body…into imaginal cells. These Imaginal -- or, imagined -- cells are undifferentiated, which means they can become any type of cell which come together to form the new body” from the sludge.

What’s striking to me about that whole process -- aside from the fact that it’s magical and gross -- is that 80% of all animal species do it. Not in the exact same way, but they do go through metamorphosis. It also strikes me that biologically speaking, humans don’t -- at least not according to what we know so far. Except….we know it can happen. Because it has happened, and way more than once.

After all, before Jesus’s metamorphosis on the mountain today, Jesus was the metamorphosis of God: The Intangible Infinitude of Eternal Being Itself transfigured into the flesh and blood and bone of Mary’s infant.

Not only that, but in the short time since Jesus called his first three disciples who now join him on the mountain today, Peter, James, and John have themselves already witnessed Jesus heal countless people, cast out countless demons, and even, on at least one occasion, transform a dead girl back into a living one.

So I guess it shouldn’t surprise us that none of them seem especially amazed by Jesus’s transfiguration into glowing face and body of light, or particularly startled by Moses and Elijah showing up for conversation with the Ancient of Days. Indeed, it would appear that they are, at most, starstruck and honored to be standing in the presence of such towering figures. Which is why Peter doesn’t yet fall to his knees but instead says, “Lord, it is so good to be here,” and then does precisely what Jesus taught them to do, which is to offer hospitality, with the hope of prolonging the mystical affair. My old professor Matt Skinner might be right, that Peter just figured they may have a lot to talk about and perhaps they’d like to sit down for a while?

I don’t know, but in my holy imagination this whole moment feels a lot like walking into a party you didn’t know was happening, whose guests are all way more famous and important than you, and, realizing you have been brought into something even bigger than you already knew, you offer up the only thing you’ve got: A cheap bottle of wine you hope they’ll appreciate enough to drink a couple glasses; to linger long enough for you to stay a fly on the wall of a holy house.

And, look, I love them for this: I love that these three guys who have already seen and have probably, themselves, already done some impossible things, are, in this moment, absolutely just trying to be cool and stay casual in the presence of their long-dead heroes as Peter, their spokesman, asks, “Would you like a tent, sirs?”

We don’t know how long the six were up on that mountain before Peter did ask -- perhaps it was immediate, or maybe they’d all been there for long enough that Peter offered the tents, the way you might offer a seat once you realize the quick chat with someone who just popped by to say hello has turned into something more or deeper.

Regardless, as Peter is offering hospitality, a blindingly bright cloud moves over them all and a Voice speaks from within it, saying, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!”

And this, friends, is where the disciples don’t just falter, but fall: facedown on the ground, the text says, utterly terrified and awe-struck. And not just because none of them were there at Jesus’s baptism to hear God declare how deeply they Love and delight in Their Son, nor even because of what the Voice tells them.

They already listen to Jesus, and enjoy the Epiphany of God in Christ, the revelation of the infinite in flesh. They have testified to Christ’s miracles, received his authority to do the same, delighted in Jesus’s friendship and feasted on his wisdom.

In fact, in the days immediately preceding this mountaintop experience, Peter even recognizes and confesses that Jesus is the long-awaited Messiah. But none of it has yet transmogrified their inner being -- a truth made utterly clear when Peter responds to Jesus’ revelation that to be the Messiah is to suffer and die, by rebuking him for even suggesting such a preposterous thing.

Jesus, of course, rebukes Peter right back, saying, “get behind me Satan! You’re still thinking like a man who expects a soldier king, and I am not that.” And continues to uncover over the next six days leading right up to this mountain, that true discipleship is cross-bearing self-denial, meaning that following him will cost them their whole selves -- even as it rewards them with new life.

This is what all they’ve been told but have not yet heard; what they have consumed but not yet digested when they ascend the mountain with Jesus and find themselves in the midst of a wholly different kind of apocalypse:

This one is made not of words, but of the Voice that births creation from them. One where time simultaneously collapses into the hitch of breath and expands into eternity as the veil between Right Now and Forever becomes literal mist, and everything they cannot yet rationalize in their minds or resolve in their brains, finally begins to rattle their bones, dragging them to the dust, and transfiguring them from ones “who have heard it said” to direct hearers of Creation’s Own Voice.

If you’ve ever stood in front of a speaker as your favorite musician plays your favorite songs, you know that Sound is more than mere noise, Voice is more than mere vocalization, and that Melody can so fully permeate your being that your veins meander to its mood and your blood and oxygen bend to its rhythms, as your very pulse turns into that Psalm, and brings you to your knees in abject wonder. And you know that you return home a different person than when you left.

That is where Peter, James, and John are atop that mountain, only amplified times eternity. It is the chrysalis moment for them, when all they’ve been devouring and digesting, which has given them such vibrant, fullness of life, dissolves into the stuff that begins to devour them in ways they cannot possibly imagine. What they do know is they’re no longer interlopers of the discourse between the three holy men.

For the same Voice that called to Moses from a burning bush; that whispered to Elijah with a still small voice; that claimed Jesus as Their Beloved over the waters of the Jordan, has come to them and directly entrusted to them Creator’s affirmation of Christ’s singularity, and their obligation to listen to him -- not just with their ears but from their bones.

As they descend the mountain, Jesus offers no explanation, and they do not ask for one. Truth be told, none could suffice because experiences of God’s immediacy and eternity do not lend themselves to language. What they do is translate whatever has been said or heard or taught into a dangerously concrete and unsearchably mysterious reality which they will never understand but to which they are now indelibly bound. They have become and begun something new.

Nothing has materially changed on the ground: Jesus may have turned into Light up on that mountain, and God’s voice may still be pounding in their literal hearts, but little boys are still suffering grand mal seizures that throw them into fires and water alike, and their dads are still desperately hunting for their healing. There will be more sermons and parables and lessons to give, more hungry mouths to feed and more sick people to heal, all under the watchful, increasingly threatened eye of Empire. Things will not get better but they will continue to be uncovered, until we come to another Mountain where instead of blinding light, darkness will rue the day. Instead of Moses and Elijah, two thieves will hang at Jesus' sides. And instead of reveling under the Father’s unbound Love, Jesus will suffer and die with the weight of His absence.

As one of my former professors once preached, Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration is the God we want; but Jesus on the mount of Golgotha is the God we get. What stretches out between here and there, now and then — how we choose to move from one mountain to the next — is our chrysalis:

Where the question is not if we’ve been to the mountain, but whether we are seeing the Transfigured Christ moving all around us right down here -- in Trans and Queer and Migrant and Black and Brown and Native and Fat and Disabled and Old and Young and Rich and Poor and Neurospicy Bodies, and reveling in the radiance of their glow? Are we listening for the Voice of God in Christ who calls to us from the earth and sky, in water and fire, and always, always from the mouths of children -- are we rejoicing in their counsel? Are we ready to be brought low in awe of God’s delicious bounty that hovers, hangs, and hums in everyone and everything around us; and fall to our knees in anguish for Christ when he is crushed under the heel of white body supremacy, patriarchy, christian nationalism, and xenophobia?

I pray, Beloved, such wonder will define us in the days ahead: That we will delight in and defend how all of us, each and every one of us, is a transfiguration of God, a divine apocalypse, bearing in our own flesh and blood the meticulous mastery and mystery of Creation’s Voice. Let us revel in it all and make a fat feast of it on Tuesday, that we may enter our Lenten Odyssey, ready to begin and Become.

Amen, Ashe, aho, Oh God let it be so.

]]><![CDATA[Stay Salty, Shine Bright (Isaiah 58 ✦ Matthew 5)]]>Mon, 09 Feb 2026 20:55:35 GMThttps://www.amycourts.com/written-things/staysaltyshinebright

This sermon was first preached at Augustana Lutheran Church in Portland, OR on February 8 2026. The full livestream of the service may be viewed here (sermon begins at 46:30). The sermon with captions may be viewed here or below . Scripture texts: Isaiah 58:1-12, 1 Corinthians 2:1-16, Matthew 5:13-20

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable to you my God. Amen.

Good morning, Beloved of God. As we begin, I want us to hold this truth that adrienne maree brown articulated which has been rolling around in my body all week, all these past few weeks, for months, for the past 10 years: “Things are not getting worse, they are getting uncovered. We must hold each other tight as we continue to pull back the veil.”

It’s hard to sit with all the alls and believe that things aren’t getting worse, right? And yet we know it’s true: the longer humanity perseveres, the more iterations of the cycle we have to witness and learn from: from hard fought revolutions and the periods of reconstruction and world-building that follow, to seasons of relative peace and progress when the ripe fruits of labor are sweetest and juiciest, to the momentary ease of napping in the expectation that it will always be this good, even as powers and principalities reorganize against us, until the time comes when we’re once again shaken from our slumber by the violence of unrelenting forces which demand from us an even more relentless hope.

There is nothing new under the sun, nor is any of it especially surprising to our Maker, Mother God, nor even to students and survivors of history. Nothing that is secret will not be made known. Let us hold each other tight as we pull back the veil, because the things we have seen and have yet to see need all of our witness, all our prophetic and parental and personal presence and action.

And let us be thankful and attend to God’s word, which remains both living and active across the ages, especially today. For in both Isaiah and Matthew, we are given clear permission and decisive instruction on what precisely is required of us in these moments of revelation and revolution.

What are we to do when we learn that one of ICE’s field directors -- a man who spends his weekdays overseeing the rampant violations of person and property, the detentions and deaths, the taking of babies and the terrorizing of neighborhoods -- steps into the pulpit each Sunday to declare, as a pastor, his nearness to God?

How are we to respond to a farcical prayer breakfast where the president to whom so many of our christian siblings now pray, spent 77 minutes extolling not the Lord God Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, nor any other god other than himself, with occasional offerings of praise to his personally army of federal agents who are “beating the crap” out of our neighbors?

What is required of us after taking in all we can stomach of the newly released files, whose pages are filled with unspeakable horrors committed by so many people with so much power that they cannot all be prosecuted without the whole system collapsing -- as if immediate and total collapse is not precisely what any such system deserves and demands?

And what about all the people of Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Venezuela, Ukraine and other bombed and genocided places that’ve simply vanished from headlines under the weight of all of this? When so much is so rapidly uncovered, what are we to do?

We are to “Shout it out, and not hold back!” To do as Isaiah proclaimed, and barge into their services, like Nekima Levy-Armstrong and Chauntyll Allen did in St Paul, whistles ringing and voices raised, to Name the open rebellion of God’s people, the vacuity of their piety, and expose the sin of those who claim to seek God day in and day out while utterly forsaking God’s justice!”

And we are to remember and remind ourselves and each other, over and over, that “the worship God wants, the worship God requires, isn’t our performance of rituals in Sunday worship or our self-righteous prayers for everyone else — but our resolute determination to “loose the chains of injustice that agents of hate tighten around the bloody ankles and wrists of those they disappear. To break the yoke of the oppressor who’s busy breaking the backs of the oppressed; to set people free from concentration camps and trafficking rings, and never resign ourselves to their reality or their replication.

The sort of Diabolical evil we are uncovering requires the direct engagement of our whole selves: Body, mind, spirit and imagination. It is not enough to simply want it to stop; it must be stopped.

But and also. But and also, Beloved, there is always an also: There are myriad ways to break the machinery and arrest the motility of evil’s many permutations, not just with words that cast blessings and curses (though those are important), words that liberate and bind up, but with things like salt and light.

So let me tell you a story: Back in 2002 when I bought my first car -- a real clunker from a lemon shop I paid $1200 for in $20-a-month installments -- I had no idea the destructive power of salt. I knew it had some rust around the frame, but my dad, who famously fancies himself a car aficionado but notoriously is not one, said it was fine, normal, no big deal and I drove it off the lot. Well I learned the truth real fast the very next winter when, in the middle of literally nowhere Nebraska, 60 miles from any whisper of a town and before the ubiquity of the personal cell phone, one of my wheels started wobbling side to side on the highway. Not a tire! A wheel. And, well, the long story short is I was rescued by some very suspicious but thankfully harmless truckers and their gal pals who drove me to the next town where I called my dad who picked me up in the next-next town and got me home. A couple days later, after my dad and a neighbor who owns a tow truck went to pick up my car from where I’d abandoned it, another neighbor who ran the only auto shop in town found that the entire undercarriage was rusted from years of driving on salted roads without regular car washes. And that wheel -- bearing, and bore, and bolts oh my! -- was rust, disappearing.

A couple weeks later I drove back to school in the boatlike Ford Taurus another neighbor -- the third, if you’re counting -- simply gifted to me, across the long, winding back roads and county highways that mapped the bulk of my straight-shot 12 hour drive between north central Nebraska and Northern Minnesota where street lamps are nonexistent and you find your way by the strength of your high beams and the brightness of the stars and moon across the ink-black sky. It took my breath away — still does, in fact — to make my way out of the light pollution of big cities and feel like I’m in the darkest darkness imaginable, until my eyes adjust and I realize there is more light, unquenchable light, than you can conceive when turn off your brights and look to the sky. When the moon is full, it’s bright enough to light the road half a mile ahead or more.

What I’m telling you is this: If you pour a pound of salt into a gas tank, you’ll destroy the car in record time, but it doesn’t take all that to turn a vehicle into inoperable rust. It just takes sustained saltiness: Year after year, winter after winter, new salt continuing the work of last year’s salt, until the whole machine erodes into an orange-brown dust of nothing. Salt melts ICE and also rusts their trucks.

What I’m also telling you is what the sages and survivors have been telling us for eons: that “it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness” because just one single flame can both defy and define the darkness. Beloved, no darkness, not even all the darkness in the world, can ever extinguish the light of a distant star or our very own sun; of a raging fire or its very last ember: Darkness can neither contain nor consume it. Light is light, and it always lights.

What does this mean here and now, on the ground? Well, as a lifelong champion of the underdog, as a still-and-always Minnesotan who is now also an outside interloper who only gets to visit and bear witness to the burden my friends are bearing under siege, here is what I know to be true of salt and light and prophetic witness; This is the mystery of Gospel revealed to me through years of organizing plus one short visit to Minneapolis, mystery that once flickered like stars but now blinds me like the sun:

Gospel is not just the truth we speak to power or the preachers we interrupt at the pulpit. Gospel is a kingless and leaderful organism that shapes itself by and for and around the needs of each cell in it. It is an unquenchable, uncontainable network of lights as decentralized and defined as constellations in the night sky; It is as debilitating to empire as calcified salt is to cars, and it is always evolving and rapidly adapting to empire’s slower machinations. Gospel is creators creating.

In Luke 10 it looked like Jesus sending out 72 disciples in pairs of two, each to a different town with its own particular needs and unique relationship to occupying forces, but all with the same mandate to feed and clothe and heal and liberate people into communities that feed and heal and liberate more people.

In Minneapolis it is a loosely connected network of dozens of hyper-local mutual aid hubs operating under that very same gospel mandate, in ways and means as unique as each block of neighbors who are co-organizing to get it done.

In 1 Kings, it was Elijah and the Widow Zeraphath whose jar of flour never ran out, and in Matthew 14 it will be Jesus feeding 5,000 people from seven loaves of bread and a few small fishes.

But in Minneapolis it is Somali and Latine and Indigenous elders showing up 24/7 to nourish the thousands who keep vigil day and night at multiple memorial sites, with endless trays of fry bread and samosas and tamales, and bottomless cups of wild rice soup and spiced chai; And it is restaurants closing for business but staying open on a donation-only basis to feed a hungry community without paying the taxes that fund their occupation.

In Isaiah 58 it is God’s declaration that worship is feeding the hungry, opening our houses to the homeless, clothing the naked, and refusing to hide from the least of these as if they are not ours; and in Acts 2 such worship will shape itself into the sale of all property and the pooling of all wealth, so that any and all who come may be baptised into Christ, and into the reciprocity and mutuality of beloved community.

But in Minneapolis it is thousands and thousands of regular people like you and me, across dozens of neighborhoods collecting handwarmers and mittens and gas masks and goggles to hand out anywhere people gather; it is their constant delivery of groceries, the patrolling of schools, the ferrying of families to and from legal hearings and medical appointments; it is networks of volunteer doctors and nurses taking medicine to the sick who cannot safely leave their homes; it is midwives and doulas delivering babies by facetime with people in labor who cannot even open their doors lest they be taken.

All of is radical and miraculous and as beautiful to behold as the terror is to witness. But friends, it is also utterly practical and entirely replicable. This is what organizers asked us clergy who came from all over the country to take back to our congregations: Everything they’re doing is replicable.

Which is not an invitation to copy and paste all the thousands of ways Minnesotans are showing up with and for each other like colonies of bees or ants, like murmurations of birds in flight and formation. Rather, it is a call to replicate the movement, to gather into our own colonies, to get in formation, not just to create a thousand more threads of connection, but because we are Creators, connected.

In both Isaiah and Matthew, from both the Prophet and Christ, the language in today’s texts is clear: Neither commands us to do something, but declare to us who and what we already are and have eternally been.

In Isaiah 58, when we break the chains of injustice and liberate the captives and the oppressed, we do not shine the light that breaks the dawn, we are the light that breaks the dawn. When we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and house the homeless, we don’t just flip on the porch light that pierces the darkness; we are that light.

In Matthew 5, Jesus does not ask us to scatter the salt of preservation or corrosion; he says we are the salt that preserves and erodes! Neither does he tell us to shine the light of the world on this or that, he declares that we are the Light of the World, a City on a Hill no darkness can hide.

Which is to say my friends, we are not called to carry the gospel, to preach the gospel, to spread the gospel here or there: Beloved of God, hear me when I say: We are Gospel. We are Good News.

Which is why empire hates and hunts us down, and also why it will never win.

Every thread of connection woven, every channel carved underground by mutual aid, every constellation of care created corrodes the gears of the imperial apparatus and forces the powers to try something else which will also and inevitably fail. Every mouth fed, every family protected, every foe turned friend welcomed to the fold, not only defies empire and all its depravities, but defines it as anything and everything but Gospel.

And when Gospel spreads, no fear, no threat, no promise of power over others can compete with the belovedness of reciprocity, mutual care, and belonging that everyone deserves, and which I know — because I’ve read it on these pages and have seen it with my own eyes — I know everyone can have. Another world is possible; we are already watching it become! Praise God!

And my prayer for us, Beloved, is that we will — wherever, however, and in all the ways we can — do the same: stay salty and shine bright, that life may keep becoming on earth as it is Heaven.

Amen, Aṣẹ, Aho: Let this be so. Thanks be to God!

]]><![CDATA[Mother Wisdom Comes to Me (John 1 ✦ Sirach 24)]]>Mon, 05 Jan 2026 19:55:49 GMThttps://www.amycourts.com/written-things/motherwisdomcomestome

“Ancient Spirit of Wisdom” ©Jassy Watson Art

This sermon was first preached at Augustana Lutheran Church in Portland, OR on January 4, 2026. The full livestream of the service may be viewed here. (It may viewed here or below. The sermon begins at 32:00.)
Scripture texts: John 1:1-18 , Sirach 24:1-12

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing to you Oh Lord, my pulse, my breath, my life. Amen.

Blessed new year, friends, and welcome to 2026! All is not well. Yesterday, our authoritarian leader kidnapped another authoritarian leader and his wife, for committing the same alleged crimes he already pardoned another authoritarian leader for committing. As nations, and people, hang in the balance, to us a child is born.

Last night, bombs our taxes pay for instead of healthcare and education rained down on our siblings in Gaza and Venezuela, killing God’s Image Bearers. And as the whole world looks on in horror at what demands deep analysis — why and how we got here, and what we ought to do to claw our way to some kind of sanity — to us a child is given.

When everything in us cries out for justice, answers, a step by step YouTube video for saving ourselves and our neighbors, Christ comes, but alas: not as a king or a general; not as a professor with a syllabus, or a justice with a gavel.

He comes as a baby, as A Word — a Living One, an ancient one, but still just a Word. Calling us to a different posture: of listening and hearing, not hustling. No, this Word will not be hustled. He will take decades to become the man who will stay dashing the expectations of those thirsty for war rather than a Way through. He will stay moving like Mist, like Mystery, like Mother, among those itching for a Master.

Because he is, we’ll come to find, a Mama’s Boy, and She’s not so much visible in the color of his eyes and hair, as in the shuffle of his steps and the way he smooths his garments; in the tender way he holds his disciple’s feet as he washes them, and the way he cloaks his words in wait for ears to bend.

A few weeks ago we plumbed Jesus’s human lineage and met Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth, three of his four Great Mothers, the roots who remained alive and unbroken even after the axe of Assyria reduced Israel to the Stump of Jesse; The Roots of Jesse, the Prophet declared, would “stand as a banner for the peoples; rallying all nations” to the Branch of Jesse, the promised child of Isaiah 9 who we met on Christmas Day, when Jesus, born, sprang from the roots of relentlessly Alive Mothers.

But today we’re called into even deeper, more ancient waters than we’ve yet seen, where nothing but visceral Being and swirling Breath dance about a Formless Void; where nothing yet Is but Is-ness itself, and all that can be known or heard or felt is a humming I AM.

So, as we meet him today, not as the descendent of those ancestors but the Son of the Void, John’ s gospel begs us, and I with him, to lay aside intellectual rigor: Do not take notes or try and collect every brick like we’re building a structure. We’re not. Instead, breathe and stay close in the flow of what follows, and revel in whatever lands like a butterfly about to flit away, because it might and that’s okay.

This Word, like Spirit and Wisdom, is not meant to be studied and grasped, but experienced and gasped: hallowed, not held. Like a song that transports you to another realm; like Jazz. So I invite you to breathe and feel.

I’m not trying to be poetic or abstruse here. We have the Gospel of John and Wisdom Herself to thank for that, and for an opening line that sucks us through a wormhole into another time:

“In the Beginning,” John writes, “was the Word.”

From a strictly literary perspective, these first words brilliantly set up the entire prologue that follows in todays gospel, at once giving everything and nothing away: For those without context, it will be a mess of artful gibberish, like jazz to the uninitiated.

But for those with ears to hear, these first five words immediately and explicitly invoke the first five words of God’s story as told among the Israelites in Genesis 1: “In the Beginning God Created.” From this we’re meant to hear: “ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God who created the heavens and the earth.”

But at the same time, with this preexisting capital “w” Word, John plunges us deeper still into the unwritten, untold Lore of God: the origin story not of Creation but of Creator, which can only make sense to the senses as the Shapeless Ones move intangibly, though not imperceptibly, throughout the pre-cosmic void.

Here, Divine Mystery cannot and is not meant to be thought or understood, but experienced. It’s the viscerality of God becoming Flesh that John wants us to feel in our own flesh, which is why he takes us to where time-before-time and place-before-space are entirely beyond our comprehension.

And to be here and stay here, we must gather in the depths of Wisdom.

She is more than a mere attribute of God the Father, more than knowledge known and passed down in the Son and Spirit. She is Divinity without a Body, pulsing through every body: Eternal as Creator, Word, and Spirit, and as unique in her own Being as she is inseparable from them. Which is to say, as she dances and twirls in and through God in the eternity that precedes the Beginning, she is Their unfurling. She is Creator’s partner and consort, the master architect and designer who some even say enables the creation of all God will make.

If this sounds like heresy, worry not: A lot of Scripture does, especially to those who’ ve never read it.

In truth, our strictly-trinitarian language fails to capture God’ s fullness, and actually hinders us from Knowing God as the sages and prophets once did, as Jesus’s great mothers did, as the patristics and mystics once knew the God who eternally Was, before Being had breath and bones.

And this failure was one of mankind -- by which I mean the kind of men — who labored over centuries to blur and erase God’s Divine Femininity, and contain the One God in three male persons. As if Three in One makes any more sense than Four in One might; as if the Creator who made us in Their likeness, male and female and every ineffable shade, gradient, and ombre between and around them, is Themself limited to a strictly binary male identity. Ha!

Indeed they are not, and Scripture makes that clear. The Holy Spirit has always been feminine in kind and kindness, and Creator’s love for creation has always manifested “like a woman in childbirth gasping in pain,” Isaiah wrote, as “a mother who comforts her child,” “who would never forget the babe at her breast, or be without compassion toward the child she birthed.” Even so, mankind made Creator, Son, and Spirit in their own Likeness, ironically transgendering God in the doing. That truth is plain enough.

But Wisdom… well how many of us have ever encountered Wisdom the Woman instead of Wisdom the thing? It’s not an accident that She has, for centuries, been plucked from her throne in a pillar of clouds, reduced from Creator’s Partner to an attribute He possesses, made into a Quality of God’s when she is his Queen of Heaven.

But take heart: the Word stays loud. Throughout the books of Wisdom and across Hebrew Tradition, her everlasting intimacy with Creator is proclaimed: In Proverbs 8, she is “the master architect,” neither birthed nor created, but twirling and dancing and pouring herself into and out of God: Before water, mountain, dust and cloud, the Word says, She Was. Sound familiar?

As Creator set the heavens in place, gave the sea its boundary, and marked the foundations of earth, Proverbs says, She was His Consort and his constant, ever at His side, delighting in His work and rejoicing in his presence, and he, in hers.

Put another way, beloved, when the Creator formed the world from nothing, according to Wisdom’s design, all things were brought to Life from their mutually everlasting delight and pleasure. And that’s just Proverbs 8!

In today’s first reading, Sirach 24, we are called to witness and hear God’s Wisdom (as in, God’s Woman) as she sings her own praises in God’s High Holy presence, and glories in the midst of Her people, it says.

What goes without saying is that no one who was not worthy of such praise would ever dare boast it in the Presence of the Most High, but Sophia does:

Behold, the Knox Translation reads: “I am the first from the mouth of the most High, the primal birth before creation ever began, spreading like mist through it all.”

Before the Word was spoken, before the Spirit hovered over the waters of Chaos in Genesis, here Wisdom lingers like a deep breath, not held but sighed.

“Through me,” she sings, “light rose in the heavens, inexhaustible; I encircled the vault of the skies and walked on the waves of the sea, traversed the earth to every nation and people, presiding over them all, seeking a place to Dwell." Then, Creator gifted me a place to Abide, an everlasting Home in Jacob: His own domain and heritage.”

Today’s reading in Sirach ends there, but I want you to hear the rest of the song she sang when Wisdom was really feeling herself: She took root and grew like a tree that shaded her people, she lingered in the city like the perfume of frankincense and myrrh; like a vine, her blooms became fruit for her people.

And at the last she cries out, according to the Latin Vulgate: “Come to me, you who hunger for wisdom: For I AM the mother of all fair love. I birthed all reverence, all true knowledge, and the holy gift of hope. In me is all grace, of the Way and of the Truth; in me is all hope of Life and of virtue.” “Come to me, and eat your fill... For the remembrance of me is sweeter than honey, and my inheritance sweeter than the honeycomb. You who hunger and thirst for more will be satisfied; for those who come will not be put to shame.”

Have you heard this song before? I know I have.

Sink into the music: Not just Wisdom’s own song, but the symphony of all Creation, and the fog might lift enough to catch a glimpse of the eternal. Let it rattle in your bones or even buzz just a little bit, and the energy of Life crackling from the foundational what of Genesis to the transfiguring Whom of John’s gospel, may well pull you into the deep, resounding, primordial collision of Love Made in Creator and Designer. It thunders into Sound, and Sound into Word: The incantation of creation, of brand new worlds made from nothing but Love, erupted!

What I’m saying, friends, is that what scientists have long called the Big Bang, I am now more inclined to see and hear and feel as the Cosmic Love Story of Creator God and Mother Wisdom, of Breath and Birth, of Son and Spirit, of everything and everyone-else words cannot contain and should not confess, lest the glorious mystery lose its resonance altogether.

Sometimes, beloved, it is best to soak and dwell and revel in the Mystery and Magic of Creation, until a truer Word comes.

And he does. Right here in John. The ancient eternal Word comes in a rush of blood and placenta from a stretched and weary womb; in flesh and bone, with the face of the Father’s creative glory, and the tenderness of Mother Wisdom pulsing in his veins.

I hope you hear that music as well:

The harmonies Jesus will weave into Wisdom’s melodies, as he embodies her grace, hope, and virtue, and becomes the Way, the Truth, and the Life Sirach says was Hers, in grace.

I hope you feel proud Sophia humming, “That’s it, beloved, just like mama taught you,” as Jesus gives real food to the starving, and says, “Come: eat and drink for the sweet remembrance of me,” promising a satisfaction that lasts.

And when she squeals with delight the way She did at the dawn of Creation, and then breaks into earth-quaking groans of grief as she witnesses Christ the Son offering up his own body and blood, and emptying himself for the Beloved — the way she, Mother empties herself for her own -- I hope her wailing bears down like an anvil in your heart, breaking you open too. So you can experience in your flesh and bones what cannot be expressed with words: The creative force of Love, visceral and alive.

Soon enough the Wise Ones will come: Having followed Sophia across the cosmos to his crib, the son of Wisdom, who perfumed her city with frankincense and myrrh, will receive their same gifts in kind.

But we aren’t there yet.

For now we’re still here at the beginning: when the Living Word who was with God, who was God, and with Them brought all things into being, comes to us with ten tiny fingers and ten perfect toes, with Mother Sophia’s “inexhaustible Light” of Life, shining for all people.

For now, the Word has only just become flesh and made his dwelling among us, the way Mother Wisdom made her dwelling in Jacob.

And so for now it is enough to dance and twirl and get dizzy in the wonder and mystery of Love’s first and greatest, most ancient Word, suckling at Mary’s breast, giving flesh to all His Great Mothers’ wildest dreams.

Breathe it in, Breathe it out, Beloved. And let it be, Amen.

]]><![CDATA[A Living Lineage (Matt. 1:18-25)]]>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 19:52:00 GMThttps://www.amycourts.com/written-things/livinglineage

images L-R: "Tamar Belle-Fille De Juda, 1960” (Marc Chagall) | “Rahab” (artist unknown) | "Ruth Takes Away the Barley" (James J. Tissot) | “Bathsheba" (Marc Chagall: 1962–1963)

This sermon was first preached at Augustana Lutheran Church in Portland, OR on December 21, 2025. The full livestream of the service may be viewed here. (The sermon begins at the 41:49)
Scripture texts: Isaiah 7:10-16 • Romans 1:1-7 • Matthew 1:(1-17) 18-25

Good morning, beloved of Christ!

This week I’ve been thinking a lot about ancestry. About how little I actually know about my own apart from each of my sets of grandparents, and the fact that I was named for my great-grandmother Amy. In fact, just this past summer I was talking to my parents about her over dinner, revisiting this old story they told about how her real name was Amelia Josephenie. But since my parents didn’t know that until I was 7 or 8 years old, they named me Amy Jo, as she was called, and I escaped being called such an old-timey name. I went on to share that over time, as I’ve grown older and wiser and, I like to think, more sophisticated, I lament my parents’ faulty knowledge. Because now, at 44, I would love such a beautiful and timeless name to be mine!

Well, as I was retelling this, my mom was looking at me funnier and funnier, and by the time I was done, she said, “that’s not true. We never told you that! We always knew her name was Amelia, though they always called her Amy, and we picked Jo for your middle name because it was easy.”

When I tell you, friends, how aghast I was! I swear I did not make that story up, and none of us know where the tale originated or how it became part of my personal lore. I suspect it was another one of my sisters’ tall tales, like when they all got together to convince me I was adopted. That was terrible.

In any case, I have since learned through some digging that her full name was actually Amelia Henrietta Terry Craig, which is also beautiful, and makes me want to learn more about where she came from — where I come from. But for today’s purposes, it just made me really interested in the part of Matthew chapter 1 that we skip over to begin at verse 18 in today’s gospel.

So I’m going to take us back into it for a bit, not just because it lays the firm and vital foundation that Matthew’s entire gospel is built upon, though it does. What interests me is how much it tells us about who God is, and how God wanted to be known when God was born:

Because Immanuel wasn’t born as some pristine out-of-nowhere starchild. He came as One who chose to make certain histories his own when he took on flesh and blood, and dwelt among us.

I say chose for good reason: According to the ancient prophets, the Promised Messiah whom God would send to deliver God’s people, would descend from the Kingly tribe of Judah. And Matthew, more than any other gospel writer, underscores this point at length and in great detail, as he testifies to all the ways Jesus was the fulfillment of each those promises. All the way down to the details, like his descendancy from King David.

The thing is, though, David’s lineage would not be his genetically, by birth of and to Mary — her ancestry is undisclosed, and wouldn’t have mattered anyway because Hebrew lineages were recorded through fathers and sons, not mothers and daughters. Instead, Jesus would have to be adopted into that lineage, and this through the line of Joseph. He is whose particular line God chose for Their advent among us. And his lineage, as recounted by Matthew, is chock full of people whose stories we know well, from Judah to Boaz to Solomon and Hezekiah, and so on.

But. Among the 28 generations named, only four of them are especially remarkable because they shouldn’t even be there. They are Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba. Four women who each survived by the skin of her teeth. Four women whose lives and legacies are reduced to the scandals they endured, until they’re named as the four great-grand-mothers of God’s own self. So let’s meet them:

Tamar’s story begins in Genesis 38 when she marries Judah’s oldest son Er, a wicked man who dies before she bears any children. As was custom, she then married his brother Oman who was also wicked and died without any heirs. At this point her father-in-law Judah, who is now responsible for her progeny and future, condemns her to chaste, childless widowhood. But after years of waiting for justice, she takes matters into her own hands, subverting Judah’s abandonment and condemnation, and compelling him to fulfill his sacred obligations to honor and protect her legacy, ultimately giving birth to Judah’s twin sons. This is important, because it is through one of them, Perez, that Tamar becomes the great- great-great-great-great grandmother of Boaz.

Boaz was also the son of Rahab, the second woman named in Joseph’s lineage who also, you might recall, used scandalous means to secure her and her entire family’s survival and futures.

And thank God she did, because her son Boaz would famously marry Ruth, the third ancestress Matthew’s gospel names. Just like both Tamar and Rahab, she used her own feminine wiles to “uncover Boaz’s feet” — a biblical euphemism for you-know-what — and so persuade him to fulfill his obligations as her and Naomi’s kinsman redeemer. A love story for the ages.

And just two generations later, Ruth and Boaz’s grandson, Rahab’s great-grandson, would be King David. The king who sent for and took Bathsheba — known to Matthew’s readers only as “The Wife of Uriah,” whom David had killed in order to keep Bathsheba for his own.

And from that great tragedy, Bathsheba would give birth to Solomon, the 24th Great-grandfather of Jesus. The God-child adopted by his father Joseph, into a lineage of some great and terrible men; And some of the most cunning, strategic, and scandalously subversive women in God’s ancient story.

All these extraordinary women deserve more than a sermon — indeed a deep study into their lives, their survival, all they overcame to become the matriarchs of Christ’s family — the mothers God chose as God’s own. But for today it is enough to see why Joseph’s particular lineage matters.

Within a religious and social structure that meticulously recorded men’s ancestry all the way back to Abraham, these women, especially, matter.

Their stories were legendary among Jews, having been recorded in a narrative written and dominated by men. But more than that, their revolutionary inheritance was alive in Joseph as much as, if not more than all those great and terrible men. This we know because we can see it beating like a heart in today’s short gospel, from the very beginning when Joseph found out his betrothed was pregnant by another: "He was a righteous man, faithful to the law, and yet was unwilling to expose her to public disgrace. So he resolved to divorce her quietly."

Joseph’s ancestor Judah sought the death of Tamar when he heard what she’d done; and Kind David killed Bathsheba’s husband when his own sins found him out — just two of too many shameless men who projected their own lawlessness onto the women they “owned,” without regard for their honor or disgrace. Men who today would feature prominently in certain files.

And yet here is Joseph, publicly humiliated by his unfaithful bride’s pregnancy, still choosing her good. This is not a man descended from ruthless forefathers, but one persuaded by his radical foremothers, which manifests brilliantly as the rest of his short story unfolds:

For here, in verses 20-25 we meet a man who is not halted by fear of disgrace, but is moved to act boldly in ways that will guarantee it. A quality he will pass on to his adopted son.

Here is a man who knows how to dream and, more importantly, knows how to take dreams seriously enough to cede his life and all his ambitions to the conviction that God’s own self has chosen him for the highest calling of being brought low, so that Salvation and Liberation may come to all people — even those who will regard him for as long as he lives as a harlot’s cuckold of a husband.

Here is a man who awakens from that dream and offers no words, is given no voice, either to process or discuss or clarify or rationalize his way out of the wholly irrational vision. Instead, he trusts what the living Word tells him, as nakedly absurd as it is, that this son will be the very presence and essence of God in skin.

He acts immediately and decisively, taking Mary as his wife, knowing how dearly it will cost his reputation. And he honors her for the duration of her pregnancy, declining to take her body which is rightly his by marriage. Choosing what is right over his own “rights."

And, when the time comes, he fulfills his ancestral obligation as a father by naming Jesus his firstborn son and heir of his messianic lineage.

None of this, Beloved, and I mean none of it, was a reasonable ask of Joseph. Indeed, as the beginning of today’s Word underscores, a righteous man like Joseph was not just allowed but legally obliged to divorce Mary, given how utterly she dishonored him. And among all his ancestors, indeed all of Abraham’s descendants, there are precious few men who chose to love and care for scandalized and whore-ified women without first being duly compelled.

But Joseph did.

With all disrespect to cultural norms, which defined women exclusively in relation to the men who owned them, and in radical rebellion against his own patriarchal privileges and rights by which he could have had Mary publicly shamed or even killed, he chose instead to be recorded and remembered by Matthew and his readers as “Joseph, Husband of Mary, the Mother of God.”

Beyond this vignette, Beloved, little is said about Joseph throughout the rest of the gospels, save the few times he is referred to as Jesus’s father or “father.” But what a profound witness these seven short verses are to a man who descended from great kings but claimed the inheritance of discarded and disgraced women instead.

Most of us, I bet, descend from ancestors as storied as Joseph’s. We’ve borne the weight of our ancestors' transgressions even as we've labor to heal them in obedience to God’s sometimes absurd and unreasonable callings on our lives, right? We all literally contain multitudes.

My own lineage, for what it’s worth, is full of brave and beautiful people who fought in the American Revolution and stayed to build this country, sometimes with stolen labor from enslaved persons. Some who crossed oceans with pennies in their pockets to make a life in a new land, albeit land stolen from displaced Indigenous tribes. They were people who loved God deeply and passed down to me a myriad of redemptive and repulsive beliefs, revolting secrets and hidden truths, moments of pure selflessness and devastating acts of weakness.

I am, as far as I can tell, the first in the family from both sides, across many generations, to come out as bisexual. Mine is a family that exclusively affirms a strict cis-hetero-normative binary, and finds nothing about my identity to be as public or proud of as I am. And I am the first woman pastor in a huge tree of pastors, who to this day do not acknowledge my pastoral calling because women are to be obedient wives, mothers, and homemakers. Because I have chosen to be honest and open about all, I’ve also been cut off from many relatives. Generational curses abound.

Which is just to say that in some small measure, I think I understand what it cost Joseph to listen to God, to choose Mary and Jesus and all the risk of disgrace attendant to it. Perhaps you do too.

But I am also convinced that while I do not yet know their names, I am not — because I cannot possibly be! — the first queer preacher in my family’s lineage. And so I lean on my unnamed ancestors to cover and sustain me in this increasingly dangerous and tyrannical time; To keep me radical, subversive, and wise as I listen for God and say Yes to bold risks and acting immediately to do justice especially when it’s costly. To do like Joseph and break ancient patterns and carve new family lines for our own and future generations to be their full resplendent selves, bearing God to this world in majestic and mundane and all manner of ways, for the salvation and liberation and restoration of all and all and all God’s creation.

This is the legacy we get to choose, with Joseph and all his great grandmothers, all praise be to Christ, his beloved son, whose birth we still and always await.

Amen and amen, and all the people said: Amen!

]]><![CDATA[WHAT IF THEY KNEW?]]>Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:12:07 GMThttps://www.amycourts.com/written-things/december-04th-2025

"Jesus Said Love Everyone" © J Kirk Richards

A number of years ago I was sitting and talking with a very Calvinist family member about the nature of God and humans. Generally speaking, I hate those conversations because they aren't about contemplation, curiosity, or learning; instead, they're performative competitions to see who will say the "best" thing and who will say the "wrongest" thing. I especially hated these discussions with this particular person, because they were always trying, more than anyone else in the family, to prove they belonged: That they were smart enough, self-loathing enough, argued well enough to ride with the family. It often made them mean and cruel, both directly, in how they deliberately baited, mocked, and tried to humiliate me, and indirectly in how they egged others on to do the same. They were, I think, another black sheep in the world who found a place among my kin where, if they played it right, they could appear slightly more white next to me and a couple others, and they played as often as they could.

Anyway, at that point in time I was deeeeeeep in agnosticism and everything was a question. Which, for me, was so liberating. I'd never had permission to actually question or doubt or altogether scrap religious doctrines or ideas -- at least, not the deep deep ones I was told hold everything together -- but then the bottom fell out and everything I knew was in dust and pieces and the only thing you can do at that point is sift through the mess to see why and how it crumbled, and decide if it's worth reassembling, and with which bits. It made it so much easier and funner to engage the topics at hand, because I had nothing theologically to win or lose either way. I was free. Suffice to say, my family was not with me on that journey.

So as we "discussed" (read: as this family member worked to talk me into a "gotcha" corner), we came around to this idea that God loves us. People. And this was the one thing I was (and am) steadfast about: If God exists (and that's a big IF), and made us, and made us in God's own image (i.e. "like and of God"), then God definitely and irrevocably loves us, full stop. That, I had already decided, was my baseline.

They did not agree. In fact, for the next ten minutes they argued that God hates them and all the rest of us, and that this is right and good and holy. They contended that they are actually so abominable and disgraceful, so full of sin and shame and garbage, that they deserved all the medical hell they'd recently suffered, and infinitely worse. And that the only reason they didn't suffer and die from all that painful agony, the months spent in the hospital, is because they are "saved by Jesus" who died in their place and made it so when God looks at them, God only sees Jesus. Which is good, because God does Love Jesus. God really respects Jesus for all that suffering he endured to assuage God's wrath and satisfy God's rage. And however much God hates and despises them and the rest of us -- and boy howdy, they said, God really does hate and wants to send all of us to hell forever -- God loves Jesus even more. And that's how they're saved; that's how all salvation works.

God loves and respects Jesus more than God hates the rest of us.

As I listened, it didn't so much as stun me as it did quiet me all the way to my center. I had no idea that was what they thought about themself or what they truly believed about how God sees them and me and everyone.

I told them, softly then, "I don't really know what to say about that." Weirdly, that made them drop their guard. They weren't used to the other party having no rebuttal (or at least passionately agreeing, as the choir must). They weren't used to someone not knowing what to say next. So the energy shifted and got a little rounder. And that's how we left it. Me, in the dead silence of their truth -- them with its deafening roar.

In the hours and days and years that followed, my only and abiding thought was and remains: What if they knew they are loved?

And not just loved, but lovable.

What if they knew in their belly that God and other people really do love them, Jesus aside, and all sin and humanness considered:
God loves them. We love them.
(( I )) love them.
Fully, irrevocably, without condition or caveat,
just because they are made of love and wonder and God, and are inherently and indelibly lovable.

What would they be like if they knew they cannot out-run or out-sin or out-anything their belovedness?

]]><![CDATA[Of Kings and Kin (Luke 23)]]>Sun, 23 Nov 2025 08:00:00 GMThttps://www.amycourts.com/written-things/ofkingsandkin

This sermon was first preached at Augustana Lutheran Church in Portland, OR on November 23, 2025. The sermon alone may be viewed below. The full service livestream may viewed here. (The sermon begins at the 48:09)
Scripture texts: Jeremiah 23:1-6 • Colossians 1:11-20 • Luke 23:33-43

Good morning Augustana and welcome to the Feast of Christ the King -- aka the Solemnity of Christ, aka the Reign of Christ, aka the Majesty of Christ Sunday. It’s the last day of the Liturgical year, and the culmination of our journey through Luke’s gospel, as we prepare once more to enter a season of waiting through the cold dark of night for Christ to come again and again and again. It is the newest Feast of the church year, instituted by Pope Pius XI in 1925, but the reign of Christ is by no means a new idea or doctrine — it is merely the Church's annual commemoration of the ancient and essential truth which was passed down through the ages and has long been a central tenet of Christian theology. It dates back to Cyril, the 5th century Archbishop of Alexandria, who served during a socio-political era marked by the peoples’ excessive debauchery and violence. To these he declared that Christ’s “dominion over all creatures is not seized by violence nor usurped, but [is] his by essence and by nature. His kingship is founded upon the hypostatic union -- [that is, the total and impenetrable fullness of both Divinity and Humanity extant in Christ alone.] And so, “Christ alone is to be adored by angels and men [as He alone] has power over all creatures.”

Of course Cyril’s proclamation was just a more-defined affirmation of the Nicene Creed we still affirm today, which was an elucidation of what the author of Colossians wrote in today’s second reading, which was, going back even further, a summation of what the Apostle Paul wrote in his epistles to the Romans, Corinthians, and the Philippians in particular.

That said, Pope Pius XI’s reaffirmation and commemoration of Christ’s eternal reign was anything but incidental. In fact, his Quas Primas encyclical was written in the aftermath of World War I, which saw the violent fall of no fewer than four empires, and so was a direct confrontation and scathing criticism of the global rise in secularism, white supremacy, and ultra-nationalism. It was also a declarative summation and explication of all that ancient church wisdom up to and including, significantly, the work of Pope Leo XIII who consecrated the whole of humanity to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, in his 1899 proclamation that the promise and hope of Christ’s eternal reign belongs not just to “Christians” but to everything and everyone whom God created and imbued with Their divine image.

And dare I say, beloved, we still need the promise and proclamation of Christ’s primacy now as much as ever, do we not? We, too, live in a moment in time when self-styled kings are working feverishly to establish and maintain their own dominion and rule. When religious leaders have aligned themselves with political ones, as Israel and Judah once did, not yet aware that their cooperation with the Empires of earth will only and inevitably lead to their and their peoples captivity and oppression. There are scores of pastors and preachers who’ve traded confrontation for collaboration in an attempt to install “christian” kings, to theologically and politically rule over the nations, despite that every emperor who’s ever been converted to Christianity has in turn, and invariably, converted Christianity to Empire.

So whether it’s called Emperor or Capital or King or President or Mammon, the Prophet’s cry still rings out with the urgency of Jesus’s own warning in Luke 16 that we cannot serve two masters. And unless we are decisive, deliberate, and dogged about who we worship and serve, the king of the day will, whether by fascination or force, enslave us to itself. There is no middle ground or moderation, there is no option to abstain. We must choose. And however simple we might say that choice is, the follow-through can be a slog, because we live in time, where the powers and principalities of this age are not playing.

Which is precisely why I find today’s text -- and all of Luke’s gospel, really -- so liberating and beautiful: For in these pages, Jesus never competes for a Kingdom. Despite that he is crucified as the King of the Jews, he never once claims that distinction for himself, nor does he embody or express that sort of power or dominion. He never seeks to be anyone’s king, but is instead, from the start, everyone’s kin.

That is what makes him an existential threat to the rule of Empire and its lords.

For between the idea of kingship and the embodiment of Kinship there stretches a chasm as wide and fixed as the one between the rich man and Lazarus. And the sources from which each draws its authority and power could not be at greater odds.

Kings and Kingdoms, the Empires of this Age, we know rely on fear: Fear of pain and suffering yes, of poverty and oppression, but more than any of that, the fear of dispossession and isolation: of living and dying alone, without a witness. It is Empire’s greatest weapon over and against its subjects, and the primary means by which it organizes society, enforces its laws, and maintains its control. Those who submit, assimilate, and obey may to some degree enjoy the tenuous protections and provisions of Imperial order. But those who defy or disrupt it will be made an example of when punished, either by public torture and humiliation, or by expulsion beyond society’s reach and memory, where the devouring dark awaits.

Empire knows the human mind, body, and spirit are not designed to tolerate such violence either as its objects, agents, or witnesses; and that even to those who only bear witness, it can feel like their only protection against the onslaught of Imperial violence is to shut it out: To go numb and pretend it isn’t happening, or that, at least, it cannot and will not happen to them so long as they stay compliant.

Crucially, as Walter Brugemann writes in his book Prophetic Imagination, this is the primary function of Empire. “Empire lives by this numbness… it expects numbness [in response to] the human costs of [its violent militarism], [and] goes to great lengths to keep [that] numbness intact. The imperial consciousness [can only survive] by its capacity to still our groans and go on with business as usual as though none were hurting and there were no groans.” Empire needs people numb because those who are numb or in denial of what is, are unable to face the catastrophes caused by unchecked Domination, never mind challenge it. (Brugemann, Ch. 5: “Compassion")

Where kings and kingdoms depend on numbness, embodied Kinship deliberately presses into it, welcoming the needling pin pricks of empathy and compassion that awaken us to the reality and gravity of feeling, and rescue us from the immobilization numbness always produces. Among kin, groans can’t be stifled or stilled, and grief can’t be buried or denied -- it is voiced, shared, and observed. Among kin, wounds aren’t ignored; they are tended, dressed, and healed. And yes, sometimes pain and grief shared with us in solidarity can become so big and heavy that they take on a life of their own in us. But this, too, is holy, as the weary are relieved of their burden by kin who make it their own. This is why Jesus was such a danger to Rome.

He was neither immobilized by the enormity and constancy of suffering around him, nor was he controlled by the fear of Imperial violence. Instead, he bore the blows of Empire in solidarity with all its victims and enemies, making himself their brother, and declaring Creator’s favor for everyone and everything Empire despised. This he did not to irritate or agitate the rulers of the age, but because he knew his own personhood and power were inextricably bound up in his kinship with the poor and powerless.

Within the dominant culture of fear and fealty, knowing as he did that he would eventually be victim to Empire’s most grotesque impulses, Jesus embodied a kinship and cultivated a community so entirely counter to it, that even women like Mary Magdalene and Joanna, who received the strategically-distributed wealth that Empire hoarded, turned around and gave it to Jesus knowing he would re-distribute it, because he would redistribute it among the hungry, poor, the sick, and outcast. And they did so not to curry favor with Jesus as one might with a king, nor to prove their worth to his kingdom. They did it because Jesus welcomed, healed, and honored them first, as sisters and equals. Because he bore their burdens as his own, they made the burdens of the community their own. This was the way of Christ’s Kinship.

From the moment of his birth Which heralded the scattering of the proud, the toppling of the mighty, the exaltation of the lowly, and the filling of the hungry, as the rich were sent away empty; to his first sermon sermon in the Temple when he proclaimed that freedom for the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, liberation of the oppressed and the day of God’s favor were at hand in his own coming; to his crucifixion on the cross where we meet him today: At every turn, Jesus was not just with the people, he was one of them and belonged to them.

Indeed, God did not come from the body of a nobody to play-act at personhood or “go undercover boss,” experiencing the weariness of living but only to a point and with an eject button always at hand.

He was born and lived and ate and drank and played and laughed and worked and argued and delighted and suffered and died with and as a nobody. And by choosing their kinship over Kingship, he became too close with too many people who cared for him too deeply, that if Empire let him go on feeding and healing and living among these other nobodies, more people -- officers, outcasts, and numbed folk alike - might start thinking they mattered too.

That’s what Kinship does: It relieves the fear that we must suffer alone or that our suffering doesn’t matter. It gives us the power to transform private, intangible griefs into public, communal proclamations that "suffering matters, that it must be taken seriously, that one another’s pain must never be made an acceptable sacrifice" to the false gods of comfort and security.

And this, Brugemann wrote, is “the one thing Empire [and its culture of dominance] cannot tolerate or co-opt: Our ability to stand in solidarity and kinship with the victims of the present order. It can manage charity and good intentions, but it has no way to resist solidarity with pain or grief.” (Ch. 5: Compassion)

It will always, of course, with every weapon at its disposal, slaughter the guilty in pageants of public humiliation and desecration, in order to silence, suppress, or subdue its spread.

But again, take heart, and look upon the cross: Bear witness to Empire's last and final failure, as Christ dies an enemy to no one, but at utter peace in solidarity: with both death itself and each of its agents, pleading the Father’s forgiveness for their ignorance; with the agony of abandonment in its power to so thoroughly crush his spirit; and with the brother hanging next to him, the one declared most undeserving, whose companionship in death Jesus will carry into paradise. To this brutal, bitter end, when Empire had dealt its most fearsome blow, the crucified king of the Jews chose kinship with all.

This is the Kin-dom of Christ, alive with us, raised in us, which calls to us as a mother to her beloved. So let us, Oh God, by your promised and ever-present Spirit, be the incarnation of your transfiguring Kinship, the embodiment of your transforming kin-dom, that we may bear in our bodies and as Christ’s One Body, the reconciliation of everything and all things to you, almighty and merciful one Christ our Kin. Amen.

]]><![CDATA[Be Here Now (Luke 20 • HAGGAI 1 • 2 Thes. 2)]]>Sun, 09 Nov 2025 08:00:00 GMThttps://www.amycourts.com/written-things/be-here-now-luke-20-o-haggai-1-o-2-thessalonians-2

This sermon was first preached at Augustana Lutheran Church in Portland, OR on November 9, 2025. The sermon alone may be viewed below. The full livestream of the service may be viewed here.
Scripture texts: Haggai 1:15-2:9 • 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5 • Luke 20:27-38

Good morning, Augustana! I am excited to be with you again today, to preach God’s word. And so I pray that the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart may be pleasing to Creator God, Brother Christ, Spirit of Breath and Fire.

Before I begin, I’ll just note how rare it is for me to preach more than one, never mind all three, lectionary texts at one time but I will today, and for good reason, so buckle up and hold on tight because we’re gonna do some time traveling, and we’re going to start with a little imagination exercise I heard a few years ago when the hosts of one of my favorite podcasts made a whole episode about how truly bonkers the notion of time travel really is:

Imagine, they said — and I invite you to do so now — imagine a person from the from Bronze Age stumbling upon a portal to Now, a fantastical time when all information, knowledge, and wisdom from every age, civilization, and empire that’s ever been — including their own — and every human advancement, from paper and ink to digital art and auto and air travel, and doctors who can replace a person’s heart with someone else’s, and computers and the internet through which we can organize people from all over the world for time-coordinated actions of global resistance to tyranny, or conversely teenagers can create mountains of dank memes; is available to them and everyone else they encounter, every moment of the day through a little black mirror of lights and sounds and moving pictures that fits in the palm of their hands and in the so-called pockets of these leg contraptions called pants.

Imagine they’re stuck here for a decade or two, and somehow, against all odds, they learn to live with us — to speak our languages, grasp our technology, and participate in our cultural rituals like baptism and beer pong.

And when they return to their own timeline with their iPhone that somehow remains connected to our modern satellites which can transmit all that Wondrous Reality Beyond to their community way back then, they are not immediately detained and executed but survive to share the mysteries of ages beyond, and try to explain it to all their neighbors. Imagine them attempting to explain the fact that other worlds exist beyond this one, beyond the moon, billions of lightyears away, and we know it because humans created tools that allow them to peer into the past, present, and future, through long metal tubes with a pieces of glass on each end which, when you look through them, can make imperceptibly tiny things huge and bring infinitely far-away things up close. “Look, let me show you,” they would say. “And let me tell you about how they’re learning to reconceptualize time altogether through the theory of quantum physics.”

As they tell their tale, they gain a following of devotees who truly believe them, and think they must be some kind of god from beyond, which they kind of are. But along with the fanatics are groups of people who haven’t lost their minds but are actually reasonable and understand how asinine these claims really are. So, for everyone’s sake, they set out to prove the traveler is a charlatan and liar, with “gotcha” questions that’re sure to be their undoing -- questions that will be, of course, rendered meaningless and nonsensical in light of the truth.

I bet some of you can see where this is headed, but let’s not get there too soon.

Because there’s so much story to cover, beginning with the exiles of Judah who, in our frist reading, have returned to Jerusalem after years of occupation, with the support of the Persian King Cyrus, who even provided them with supplies to rebuild their temple. But things are not what they were, and they’re discovering what everyone eventually learns: That there is no going back to Life pre-apocalypse, to a time when catastrophe and devastation of the magnitude they survived were only a bad dream and not the mounds of rubble and crumbling remains of their new reality. They have a governor but their king is Persian -- and while they have a high priest and did build a temple, it is all, as Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney underscores, embarrassingly lacking, even shabby, especially to those exiles who’re old enough to remember the splendor and glory of Solomon’s temple. They want to please God and worship as they once did but they can’t. They all know it and feel it, and God even names it, right before telling them to take heart: That their work is good enough -- that they are good and enough -- and God reminds them of the very First promise: that just as God was with them in and out of Egypt, through the wilderness and into their years of glory, through the fracturing of their one kingdom into two, and the two into exile, God remains with them now, God’s Spirit abides among them, and will remain with them into future glories they cannot possibly conceive. Do not be afraid, God says, be Here, Now, with me. For I Still AM.

I could end it there, right, and Spirit would preach. But we only get to be with the Church at Thessalonica a few Sundays each year, and I don’t want to skip them, because they, too, are a worried and worrisome fellowship. As a congregation they seem to be living through some perilous times -- what kind, we don’t know -- and have heard some troubling information that left them afraid they may have missed Christ’s return and aren’t really saved. So they write to the apostles seeking clarity and hope.

Before we go further, friends, let me just park here for a bit here and say how intensely I relate to these beloveds. I was raised deep in evangelical pre-millenial, pre-tribulation end times theology, with people who listened to and lived by the threat and promise of Larry Norman’s song “I Wish We’d All Been Ready.” We were trained to believe that Jesus would literally return to earth some day to blink his eyes and take all the prayed-the-sinners-prayer born-again Christians up to heaven, leaving everyone else to the reign of the anti-christ. That was their punishment for not praying. This rapture, it was called, would happen either before, in the middle of, or at the end of a seven year “tribulation” during which the anti-christ would come to power, and all manner of natural and human-made disasters and calamities would upend the world and its empires. At the end, Christ would come back for the Final Battle of Armageddon, which would take place in the Valley of Jezreel located in Israel on the northern outskirts of the modern-day West Bank. There, in a war of unspeakable violence and bloodshed, Jesus would defeat the anti-christ once and all, and every human left would die, except a remnant of 144,000 Jews. Then, Jesus would bring all the Christians back down to earth and he would reign for a millennium from the Holy Land.

This, friends, is why so many Christians right now not only doggedly defend the ongoing genocide of Palestinians across Gaza and the West Bank, but even cheer it on as they demand our own government keep funding and arming it: They believe that war and violence in the Holy Land are the most crucial evidence that the end times have come, and that by championing the current violence they are hastening the Lord’s return and their own perfect lives that’ll start seven years later.

If you’ve never heard any of this and it all sounds like violent, chaotic gibberish, I praise God and beg you to do the same, for you have been spared a mighty weight. I was not spared. Like the Thessalonians, I was fed theological lies by people who claimed apostolic authority to keep me fearful and faithful to their teachings, even when they betrayed Christ’s own. So I spent much of my childhood and youth absolutely terrified of the end times, and praying, repraying, and repraying again for my salvation to take so God could rapture take me to heaven before all the real violence started.

It never occurred to any of us that such eras of tribulation weren’t necessarily the mark of “things to come,” but were instead the tragic but entirely predictable and consistent and inevitable marks of human powers cooperating with the powers and principalities of cosmic evil to exalt themselves above all others and establish their own reign on earth as god.

While the modern mess of end-times theology was most certainly not on these peoples radar, the Thessalonians were nonetheless persuaded by certain events, the rise of certain leaders, and some fraudulent letters sent by unknown actors that the apostles who brought them the gospel had withheld some crucial bits of good news and instruction, and they were afraid. Afraid they might not be good enough Christians, that they might be getting their theology wrong, and especially that they might have already missed Christ’s return and their chance at heaven and an afterlife to come. How, they’re asking, could they have failed to see Jesus come to them?

In response these authors, writing in Paul’s name and with his authority, again name the very real fear that’s eating them up, and beg them not to believe lies told by deceivers or passed on in letters the apostles never wrote, but to instead stop watching and waiting for things to come — things none of us are equipped to predict or even recognize. Instead, they are implored to stand firm in the truth that salvation wasn’t a singular event past or some foggy future thing to come; it is their sure and certain Now. Their salvation simply, if confoundingly, IS. The way God is I AM. Do not be afraid, they beg, and do not busy yourselves with discerning the time and signs of Christ’s return. Through the Spirit who is Breath and is your breath, Christ is already with you, in you, moving through you, Here and Now. And so too should you Be: Here, Now.

Which brings us all the way back to the very beginning to our journey with the Bronze Age Time Traveler and into today’s Gospel where Jesus is put on the spot by Sadducees who don’t believe in the resurrection, which is demonstrably absurd. These fellow rabbis think they’ve got him trapped with their question: To which of the seven imaginary, heirless, and dead brothers, who all married the same woman, will said wife belong after the resurrection?

It’s a preposterous question for sure, but I don’t think we should write it off entirely, because at its root is a perfectly reasonable and common one that I myself have wondered about. Because I really do love my husband and I really cannot imagine an eternity apart from him, or one in which we know each other but aren’t partners, in which our sons are not our sons, and our family is not our family. I’m not sure I like the idea of “heaven” without him, anymore than I like the one where we all have our individual private mansions but don’t ever visit them because we spend 100% of all of eternity worshiping before the Blinding Light that is God, which to me, frankly, sounds boring!

And I’m not the only one -- in fact, I think those who haven’t wondered about such things are the exception. Which is why I believe Jesus answers them seriously, not to trap the trappers, nor even necessarily for their benefit, but for those witnessing the debate in real time, and hearing their own questions asked. We all want to know what resurrection is, how it happens, where we go when we die, and what then?

But Jesus’s very serious answer is that they’re trying to fit their heads into whatever lay beyond time and space and knowing, a brain-melting reality utterly outside their imaginations, but still asking questions that only make sense and have answers within the context and cultural norms of their own life and world. It won’t ever work. Eternity and resurrection can no more be explained to us who live in time than Earth of 2025 can be made rational to the Traveler’s neighbors who still live in the Bronze Age.

But, ah… They can be trusted and believed. They can be witnessed and experienced in our bones and bodies the way Moses argued with I AM in a speaking burning bush. The way Mary bore I AM to flesh through the tearing of her own. The way the disciples and so many beloveds shared meals with I AM before he died, and then again once he was raised. The way the Thessalonians would see and meet and welcome I AM over and over again in how they met and welcomed one another.

The way, the way, the way…

Beloved, there are so many ways to witness and experience I AM, and all of them, every last one of them, begins with
Being. Here. Now.

We all know as well as Judah’s exiles life can never go back to how it was. Many of us, like Jesus and the Sadducees, have probably gotten tied up in useless debates over doctrines that can’t be proven right or wrong and have no material impact on our current lives, or lost hours, even days to questions that paralyze us in their unanswerability. And most if not all of us have been like the Thessalonians, so wrapped up in who Christ will be or what he’ll look like if or when he returns in glory, that we ignore Jesus when he comes home from school and wants a snack, shows up on a Tuesday asking for cash, when he cries out “I can’t breath” as a knee crushes him to death, or begs us to protect him from masked men with badges, guns, and whiteness come to haul him away.

We’ve missed Jesus in the caw of crows, the whisper of falling leaves -- have you heard them!? — in mountain ranges that are older than bones, and gravity of ocean waves and kiss of everyday raindrops, that beckon us to remember and bask in our baptismal belonging which is more eternal than even these ancient waters where time began. Christ is everywhere everywhere everywhere in everyone and everything in every time, but especially in every person.

Across the hundreds of years between each of their stories in Scripture, and the millennia distancing them from us, to this very moment and hour and day, our stories are the same, and God’s Promise and Petition to us stays one thing: Come back to the Present, They say. Touch Grass! Engage every one of your senses to Be Here, Now, where I AM.

Beloved, let us revel in being here, together, now. For Christ is surely, most certainly with us. All thanks be to God. Amen.

]]><![CDATA[Just Faith (Luke 17 • HAB. 1)]]>Sun, 05 Oct 2025 05:00:00 GMThttps://www.amycourts.com/written-things/just-faith-luke-17-o-hab-1

“Yellow Mustard” © Astrid Dao

This was the final sermon I preached at Gethsemane Lutheran Church in Hopkins, MN, on October 5 2025. As my last service with Gethsemane, this service also included my release from call. The full livestream of the service may be viewed here.
Scripture texts:
Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4
Luke 17:1-5

Good morning. I have spent much of this week with one question in mind which is this: how the heck do you preach one last sermon? Do I try to encapsulate every word of counsel or encouragement I’ve ever offered, or summarize all that I hope and pray for you as you continue to bloom and become long after I’m gone. I considered doing one more deep-dive word nerd study just for funsies. I also considered trying out a Greatest Hits type sermon where I lay out one more time all the things you’ve heard me preach during our two years together. That would be fun, right!?! Rattling off sermon points like one of those hit mash-up songs from a decade ago — a decade ago!?! — a decade ago. I’m aging myself, I know.

But I ended up doing what I always try to do, which was to listen for Spirit’s whisper through the cacophony of All the Things happening in and around me and let me tell you what a cacophony it has been and remains: from prepping a house for sale to donating bags and bags of our life to thrift stores, to attending one last Bishop’s Theological Conference with pastors John and Lydia and other clergy from our Synod, to attending a vigil in Appleton in solidarity with and for the protection of our immigrant siblings, to my last rehearsal ever with my beloved Simple Gifts family (one of whom is playing violin today — thank you so much, Nate), to commending our beloved Wes Lindstrom’s life to God’s eternal rest and Bishop Yeheil Curry to his new call as our Churchwide presiding bishop, this week has been loud.

And Spirit is often too quiet to hear until I hunker down and feel for Her breath, but as I did, the Word She gave me to give to you, to us, on this brutiful day, is as simple and obvious as it is profound. Faith. Just: Faith.

Of course, there is no “just” to Faith. That word alone feels at once full to overflowing with infinite meaning and possibility, and conversely, emptied, drained, utterly flattened by overuse, misuse, and abuse. Which is unfortunate for us Lutherans who confess as our most fundamental identity that We are God’s Alone by Faith Alone through Grace Alone, by nothing but the power of Christ Alone, lest any of us should boast.

And what a bold and brave proclamation that is, especially at a time when Faith is being weaponized as both shield and sword against our most vulnerable neighbors — immigrants, Trans folks, the poor, homeless, the sick, the starved, occupied, exploited, bombed, and slaughtered, all across the world —with so-called faith underpinning it all.

And so, given that today’s Gospel revolves around this messy word Faith and its unmatched power in the lives of the beloved, I want us to dwell not on what Faith is but what Jesus tells us true Faith Does. Because it’s not any of that.

In fact, what Jesus begins with in today’s gospel is a weird and uncomfortable promise to his disciples: “The way before you will not be clear. There will at various turns be boulders to climb, chasms to cross, waters to part, storms to calm, and always, always, roots at your feet threatening to twist your ankles and break your hearts. You live in time and space. Here, the powers & principalities are always present, always plotting, through circumstances ever-evolving, to trip and entrap us in sin.”

And although we humans are often tempted to pray, “Lord come quickly, take us home,” Jesus’s prayer for us has only ever been the opposite: Nowhere is this truth more clear than in John 17 when, just after he’s promised his disciples the peace they will need to endure the persecution, hatred, and suffering that awaits them, and just before Judas betrays him to the empire, he lifts these words the Father: “I am not asking you to take them out of this world, but protect them from the evil one.” Which is to say, beloved, we do not belong to this world, but so long as Spirit breath is in us, we do belong in it.

So. "What are we to do with this one wild and precious life?"

Well for starters, Jesus says, don’t go throwing stones or laying traps for others to fall into, and don’t be party to the ruin of “these little ones.” Who, by the way, according to the Greek are not just little children, but all those who are dismissed, diminished, and otherwise made small by systems, circumstances, status, or station. These little ones are to be protected above all else. Those who do cause such ruin would be better off drowned at the bottom of the sea. Better than what? I don’t know and I don’t need to ask. All I need to know is this is the faith foundation Jesus lays: It is a basic morality, a general ethic of life, right? This is where we start: Do no harm.

As Jesus goes on to tell his disciples exactly what Faith does with skin on, it is all about — you guessed it — Beloved Community.

At this week’s Bishop’s Theological Conference, we got to sit at the feet of Pastor Leila Ortiz, former bishop of the Metro D.C. synod. And she described this baptismal community Jesus calls us into as an estuary or a bog — the muddy, smelly, weird in-between place where fresh river waters run into the salty ocean: Where neither river nor ocean is entirely itself but is redefined and reshaped by its relationship to the other; Where the two come together to create a whole new and unique ecosystem, birthed of the in-between, and so become the only place on earth where certain lifeforms can live and thrive — like pink dolphins.

Which is to say, the community Christ imagined, established, and modeled for us is not all harmony among a homogenous body of like-minded folk. It’s the nitty gritty mess and mud of real life with real people with the power to both hold us together when we’re broken and shred our very last nerve to pieces. A community made of people who both sin and serve each other, where we hurt and heal, comfort and confront one another, where we dive into difficult conversations, and confess and repent and forgive one another, over and over and over — seven times in a day when it comes to that, Jesus says.

So of course — of course — the disciples reaction is to cry out in chorus, “Lord increase our faith!” the way parents cry out “Lord increase my patience” when their three year old asks “Why” for the 300th time in as many seconds. Right? And as every parent knows, that’s not a great question to ask because God will provide, not by magic, but with more opportunities to practice patience, usually by trying it. Right? Be careful what you wish for.

Similarly, Jesus’s irritated response — as indicated by the Greek syntax — tells us theirs is again precisely the wrong question to ask.

By responding with exaggerated imagery of mustard seeds producing earth-shaking disruptions, Jesus tells them they don’t need more faith. They’re asking for quantity when Jesus is talking about kind and quality, saying they already have all the faith they need to uproot trees and replant them in the sea, so the question is, “what kind of trees will they choose to uproot? And which will they plant?” How will they practice faith?

Now, what Jesus says next is arguably the most important, albeit confusing, portion of this text, but its slave-master imagery can also be deeply problematic to us modern readers so we have to be careful.

Because, as Dr. Lois Malcolm underscores, “a slave, in ancient times, was not only a socioeconomic entity, but also one who was wholly devoted to another” — which we see when Simeon enslaves himself to God in Luke 2, in Jesus’s warning in Luke 16 that you cannot serve both God and Money and so much choose whose slave you’ll be, and even in Paul’s appeal to the Galatians that they who’ve been liberated in Christ ought never again submit to the yoke of slavery but instead enslave themselves to one another in love. That’s the kind of enslavement Jesus is talking about.

Yet even within that ancient context, what Jesus says next neither defends nor legitimizes those socio-economic and political systems but, in fact, as always, calls us to reverse them.

His question in verse 7 — “Which of you who owns a slave will invite them to take their place at your table’” — is not rhetorical or figurative. Grammatically, this phrase, “Who will” isn’t about who may or can do a thing; anyone who owns something could or might do something with it. What He is asking is which of them — which of us — will take the concrete steps needed to transform and revolutionize our collective relationship so that the least are made greatest, the last are first, so that kings become servants, and servants become kin until everyone gathered at the table is family? Which of you, he asks, will do this.

And then, to put an exclamation on it, Jesus asks which of them would dare expect thanks or praise for doing this thing, which is no more or less than they are obliged to do as faithful servants in the Kin-dom of God come to earth.

To quote Rev. Francisco J. Garcia, “Everything in this passage — even the troubling verses…that employ the master-slave motif to speak of the requirements of discipleship — as well as the overall tenor of Luke’s whole gospel, points to faith as a praxis, an ongoing spiral-like process of reflection, action, and grace [for and with each other] that only ‘increases’ as the process itself unfolds and expands in breadth and depth.”

At the radical center of this passage — that is, the the root and seed — is this: Faith cannot be measured or portioned, only cultivated and practiced; It cannot be earned or obtained, only, as Rev. Garcia writes, “felt and experienced within “the [kinship of the Beloved Community].” And this kinship, according to Jesus and the gospel articulated in Luke and Acts, “prioritizes the poor and the marginalized, critiques the rich and their wealth, and calls for a cooperative, egalitarian, and even utopian re-ordering of society.” The gospel of Christ commands a faith that wholly reverses the way things are, because “all our liberation is bound up with each other, none of us is free until [What?:] All of us are free, so we gotta get free together.” This is what faith does: It liberates.

The way Jesus’ brother James put it, faith is a living, breathing thing, and what we do in solidarity with the hungry, naked, poor, and needy is its flesh and blood. Without this breath and blood, it is dead.

Which brings us all the way back to where we began, to Jesus showing us what faith does to and in community: Injustice in our world is inevitable; our participation is not. Disagreement is unavoidable; disdain for one another is not. Sin is certain; resistance, repentance, repair, and forgiveness are not: They are deliberate acts of mutual love and submission we offer each other for the sake of the whole Body; and this, not in service not to ourselves but to the gospel of grace. We do this with confidence in their power to uproot and cast into the sea trees of systematic oppression, interpersonal resentment, brokenness, strife, and all manner of dis-ease, until radical love transforms and transfigures us, and “all is made well, and all is made well, and all manner of thing is made well.”

This is the muck and mud and miracle of faith, the Beloved Community to which you are called and the sacred mess in which you belong.

You are the baptismal bog, the marsh, the estuary where new life swarms and swims like pink dolphins, not because you are all the same or perfect or even alike, but because you are not.

May you, Gethsemane, Remember this baptism,
May you grow new forms of belonging,
May you never forsake this Beloved Community, but remain devoted to each other in mutual love.
To the Glory of God, by the power of Spirit, In the name of Christ, for the sake of His gospel,

Amen. Amen. Thanks be to God, Amen.

]]><![CDATA[THE MASTER'S TOOLS (Amos 8 • Luke 16)]]>Mon, 22 Sep 2025 19:54:46 GMThttps://www.amycourts.com/written-things/the-masters-tools-amos-8-o-luke-16

"Homeless Jesus" by sculptor Timothy Schmalz

This sermon was first preached at Gethsemane Lutheran Church in Hopkins, MN, on September 21, 2025. The full livestream of the service may be viewed here. The sermon alone is below.
Scripture texts: Amos 8:4-7 • Luke 16:1-13

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” For those who’ve never heard those words before, they were written by Feminist Poet, Author, and civil rights activist Audre Lorde in her 1979 essay of the same title. In it she writes at length about the systems and structures of power under which all managers and marginalized people are held captive and turned into each other’s enemies, by the masters of wealth, class, and politics. She rightly recognizes that, “The master’s tools may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”

And friends, her words still ring true. In view of our culture’s dominant economic, social, and political systems, social transformation can feel impossible to those who recognize that it relies upon a kind of reversal these systems are not designed to create or even tolerate. Which means that so long as we, whether by ignorance or intention, remain participants in the current order, which may appear at times to favor us while oppressing others, or vice versa, none of us will ever really be free.

Put another way: As it has always been throughout history, including when Jesus lived and taught and died, so it remains: Our world and its institutions are built to work more like casinos than cathedrals of liberty. Some individuals will always be allowed to get lucky and win big, if only to keep everyone else hopeful enough to spend more, but the House will always win. And none of its tools or games -- even in the best and most skilled or sly hands -- will ever be able to take the house down.

Before you ask what any of this has to do with us, let me tell you it has everything to do with Jesus’s parable in Luke 16. Because what we see happening in today’s text is precisely what Audre Lorde wrote about:

For here we have a Rich master who wrote the rules to a game he cannot lose; and a shrewd but fired manager whose last act is to slash the debt of the master’s debtors. In doing so, we’re told, he makes friends with the indebted poor whose solidarity he’s gonna need now that he’s jobless. And he sets the Master up to lose either way: He can either draw the ire of his debtors by reinstating their balances and dragging the manager to court over the bit of wealth he redistributed to them through debt-relief; Or he can let that money, let the manager go, and stay the “gracious creditor” who eased his debtors’ burden, albeit without that money. Either way he won't get that money back. The master, for his part, recognizes a game well-played and even commends the manager for winning the round and “temporarily beating him at his own game.”

But the game is still rigged, and the House remains standing, unassaulted because, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

That’s where we begin. So before we go any further, it’s crucial to note that in this parable, Jesus isn’t telling us what the Kingdom of Heaven is or will be like, nor does He suggests we are free and unbound by the norms and regulations of earthly kingdoms. We live in time and space where the game is always being played. Instead, he is reiterating what he’s been saying all along and will say again, through the parables of the Fig Tree, the Good Samaritan, the Rich Fool and the Faithful servants, of the Wedding banquet and the Great Banquet and the next parable, of the The Rich Man and Lazarus, which is that, “You cannot serve two masters, and you cannot serve both God and wealth.” In the words of Bob Dylan: You gotta serve somebody. But we do get to choose, so Jesus is teaching us how to choose well.

Since his time, not a lot has changed. Like the disciples to whom Jesus spoke, we are also “sheep sent out among wolves” in the kingdoms of earth. And like them, we are surrounded by all kinds of rulers, masters, slavers, and false gods, all of whose power can be traced back to one thing: Their accumulation and hoarding of ill-gotten wealth, stolen from poor underclasses and wielded against them, to purchase and preserve their own continued dominion. If you follow the money it will almost always lead you back to more money.

That is what happens when a tool we all must use in order to survive in a currency-based economy, becomes a god we worship. That god, whose name is Mammon, will always require those it enslaves to go to war with each other in order to steal or secure more and more riches for themselves. And to be sure, its slaves -- which the Greek word describes as “affectionate and devoted servants” -- will do so with a pride and joy they reserve for no other thing.

Wealth is and has always been power in the empires of this earth. And both are intoxicating drugs to those who worship and chase the high. Which is why the richer a person is, the richer they want to be, and the tighter the chains become, binding them to the Master of that House. All the while they miss the profound irony of the fact that the thing they believe gives them absolute power over their lives and world, in fact possesses and controls them absolutely: body, mind, and soul. It’s a tale as old as time.

Lest we think this is just about rulers and the rich, we need only glance at Amos 8 where God names and calls out the people of Israel for trampling on the needy and bringing the poor to ruin; for being so eager to accumulate more and more wealth that they shamelessly employ dishonest and unlawful practices in the marketplace, defile the Sabbath and holy law, and exploit the poor for silver and slavery. If God’s own people were vulnerable to such merciless idolatry, we would be fools to presume we’re immune to the seduction of this realm’s god. We’re not.

And so, Jesus tells us to be cautious and deliberate about how we use spend, save, and accumulate money. We can’t pretend we’re exempt from the systems into which we are born, so we must instead learn to use the tools of a losing game without losing ourselves and becoming co-conspirators to injustices that reinforce and uphold an Unholy House.

In this one way Jesus says we are to be like parable’s shrewd manager. That guy figured out how to use dishonest and ill-gotten wealth to reverse the order of things, if only by a little, and build solidarity with the poor who are now his own people. And this is what Jesus is talking about when he calls us to “be faithful with dishonest wealth” and so prove ourselves “trustworthy with true riches.”

The question is never what we’re faithful with but, always, who we’re faithful to with whatever we have. On this, Scripture is clear, from Genesis to the law and the prophet Amos, to the Gospels and Acts and all the epistles: Money itself is not evil -- it’s necessary -- but it becomes a god faster than almost anything else when we’re not paying attention. So we better pay attention.

Money should only ever be one among many tools we use in faithfulness to people and creation. We are called not to hoard it but to share it along with everything else we have, in common with others, pooling all our resources together in order to distribute to all according to need.

That’s the thing about today’s text: Jesus doesn’t offer us two choices; he just reveals the choice we’ve always had and must always be making between God and Wealth. Both have the power to reorder our lives and restructure society -- in fact we are watching that happen right now as the wealth to purchase power and influence is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a very few, obscenely wealthy billionaires. And we can choose to chase that dream, try to play the game, climb the ladder, and cozy up to the ultra-wealthy in hopes that our proximity to their power will trickle down to us, despite that it never has and never will because that is not what it’s designed to do.

Or, in a world where so many serve and worship and belong to Mammon, we can serve, worship, and belong to God which directly translates to serving and belonging to each other, caring for each other, and sharing all we have in mutuality with each other. This we do it from a deep knowing and trust that everything we have comes from God, who not only provides but transforms both massive and meager offerings into more than enough, with an abundance of leftovers to boot.

Together, we can divest from the violence of wealth, press our way ever outward to the margins, setting up camp in and with and as One Body, the Beloved Community.

That is where and how the genuine change Audre Lorde spoke of is nurtured and it is "the soil in which true and liberative transformation is rooted."

The farther we are from the gravitational pull of Mammon worship, the easier it is to recognize the ways it forces us to compete for finite resources and jockey for position among power brokers; and the clearer it becomes that the master’s tools cannot and will not ever dismantle the master’s house.

And so we have to create a different set of tools and build a different kind of house. One where Mammon-made patterns of separation and self-segregation into race and class and gender based hierarchies, are reversed and replaced by interdependency. A house where our diverse identities, experiences, social locations, and spiritual gifts no longer feel like a threat or liability, but instead become, as Lorde wrote, a font “of polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialect.” Through interdependence, our differences will "generate the power we need to seek new ways of being in the world, [along with] the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters,” with justice and mercy in mind.

When we’re free from the architectural rules and tools that built the master’s house, our collective imagination is liberated to create whole new worlds and kin-doms we have not yet conceived and could not conceive alone.

If such a kin-dom sounds fantastical, hear now that it is not. It's just a prophetic illustration of the kin-dom Jesus promises will come to the poor in Luke 6; the one Christ keeps revealing in parables; the one the disciples were commissioned to proclaim, in which the first is last and the least is the greatest; And the one, Jesus promised, many of them would taste and see before dying.

Which is to remind us again and again: The Kin-dom of God is not some unattainable realm reserved for the hereafter. It is the miraculous and mundane incarnation of Christ who taught us, Lives in us, who loves through us, and establishes with us a place of belonging for everyone. The Kin-dom is the Beloved Community, where diversity is a gift and money is just another tool for deepening our roots, expanding our tables, and liberating all God’s children from the tyranny of wealth in this realm.

Today, we get to decide whether to bind ourselves to wealth or to each other. And, Beloved of God, I choose us. I will always choose us, as I pray we all do. Amen.

]]><![CDATA[Setting the Table (Luke 14)]]>Sun, 31 Aug 2025 05:00:00 GMThttps://www.amycourts.com/written-things/setting-the-table-luke-14

“Christ Breaks the Rifle” © Kelly Latimore Icons

This sermon was first preached at Gethsemane Lutheran Church in Hopkins, MN, on August 31, 2025 in the aftermath of the mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, MN. The full livestream of the service may be viewed here. The sermon alone is below. Amy opens with the song“A Kin-dom Here” [by Amy Courts] and closes with “Flags” by Brooke Ligertwood from her album of the same title. Scripture texts: Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16 • Luke 14:1, 7-14 . **Poor sound quality during the livestream of the sermon and songs could not be corrected.**

Beloved, I begin here today, not at the pulpit but with a guitar and a song because today is brutal. This week has been brutal. As a mother, a neighbor, a pastor, I just haven’t had words. And so often, when I am without words, Spirit sings to me and in me and for me, birthing pleas and prayers for some way forward — this, a prayer written in the wake of another act of barbaric violence, because all my hope for whatever else is to come is rooted in my desperation for a better Kin-dom — one birthed in us and by us. I want to trust the birth pangs, that Life will make its way when death is all around.

In truth, I spent a lot of this week crying — in my car, in my therapist’s office, at the piano, in bed, in the shower… just crying with grief for parents who lost whole universes this week, and whose universes survived but not without injury or trauma, and listening to songs on repeat that helped me cry more.

As I cried, Spirit reminded me of so many weeping mothers in Scripture — like Jeremiah 31:15, which Matthew quotes early in his gospel, describing the terror of King Herod’s slaughter of all the baby boys in around Jerusalem: “A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.”

I clung to the promise of Isaiah 2, when the Temple of the Most High is finally established, and where, from God’s throne on high on that Holy Mountain, God judges between the nations, not to usher in new waves of death, but to instead settle their disputes. Then, instead of warring, the people, “will beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.” Can you imagine? Weapons of death turned into tools of life?

I dug into Hebrews in which the author, probably Priscilla, tells us how to Live when death and destruction abound.

She writes in chapter 12’s lead-up to today’s text, that since we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, we ought to throw off every sin and hindrance that keeps us from doing the work to which God has called us, keeping our eyes on Jesus who endured the cross, scorned its shame, and sat down at God’s right hand in that Kin-dom Isaiah proclaimed. That we ought to resist assimilation to this world and live at peace with everyone, because we are Children of Mount Zion, the Living City of the Living God, by Christ, God’s son, whose blood speaks a better Word than the blood of Adam’s murdered son, Abel.

As citizens of a city which cannot be burned by fire or destroyed by storms, she goes on to say, let us worship in reverence and awe — and how?, by remaining resolute in our love for one another, and our hospitality to stranger and neighbor alike. By remembering the incarcerated as if we ourselves are incarcerated; and caring for the oppressed as if we ourselves are oppressed. It’s a call to grieve with the parents of murdered children as if we ourselves are the parents of murdered children, to act in solidarity with those who crave hope because we, ourselves, crave hope.

It’s a powerful letter, no doubt, but what Priscilla is teaching us in Hebrews 12 and 13 is really just an echo of what Jesus teaches us in Luke 14 and across the gospels: To let go of our obsession with wealth and influence, of our desperate need for a seat at the tables of power and privilege, and instead set our own table — not for the rich and well-resourced, but for those whose suffering produces their wealth and ease: the poor, the sick, the grieving, homeless, hopeless, helpless, and outcast who know the gravity of this world’s callousness and brutality because they are crushed by it every day.

These were Jesus’s people because Jesus was these people! Which is to remind us, again, that God has never been far away, uninterested in what terrorizes us or unmoved by our pain, but is inside of it — incarnate right here with us. Far from abandoning us to our burdens, Christ bore them to the Cross. There, God his Mother, who birthed and loved Her son as much and more than any of us has ever loved ours, bore the agony of watching Her whole universe suffer and die, and still made a Way out of No Way — not by killing the killers but by rendering Death itself dead, by the power of resurrection.

When our children are killed, whether with guns, or in war, or by a culture of individualism, loneliness, racism, radicalization, and weapons-worship that puts those guns in the hands of shooters and celebrates their march of terror, it can feel impossible and even naive to maintain relentless hope and a resurrected imagination.

And yet we must. Our whole work as people of the Cross is to remember, the way we remember to breathe (that is, it must become so innate and native to us that we do not need to remember because it simply is) — we must remember, as Dr King preached and Rev Angela Denker affirmed in this week’s Star Tribune, that violence in return for violence will only ever beget more violence; that we will never be able to “hate hatred out of existence.”

So instead, we trust God’s promise incarnate in the Jesus we follow. We meet the demon head-on, as Jesus did for the son of the man in Mark 9, who believed but needed help with his unbelief, and we proclaim resurrection. We pray for resurrection. We await resurrection. We believe (oh God help our unbelief) that we will, as we already have and do, witness resurrection.

Still, I know.

There are troubles we cannot contain, forces against which we feel utterly defeated before we even begin. Times when the enemy’s unquenchable thirst for death leaves us asking, again, “What can we do against such reckless hate.” And to be sure, there will be time in the weeks and months to come for us all to meet this moment with dogged resistance and active rebellion, to demand and create a world in which children are not gunned down at school. I pray we will be ready for it— that we will commit ourselves wholly to the work of beating swords into plowshares that grow food, and melting guns into griddles that feed the hungry. I pray our hope will rise as triumphantly as Jesus did.

But for today, it is Good Friday in Minneapolis. So we gather. We grieve. And we set the table, not for the powerful in hopes they will return our hospitality with promises to fix what is broken in our state and nation and world, but for the hungry and hurting. And we offer the only things we ever really have: Ourselves, our table, our community of Belovedness that can sometimes do nothing more than sit and cry and listen to one song on repeat, like this one that held me all week.

A KINDOM HERE
© Amy Courts Music

All this laboring and toil
We are tired, we are tired
Of tending to good seed and soil
For the thief to come set it all on fire

Where are we to go
And how are we supposed to grow
A Kin-dom here

Mother God, do you not see
We are weary in dis-ease
When will you come to our relief
And be near, and be near

Where else can we go
And how are we supposed to grow
A Kin-dom here

Come by us now
Be our guard and place of rest
Dry our tears and be our breath
Come by us now
And let your justice roll down

Let not our labor be in vain
Be our good defense
again and again
As we labor in your name
To birth your Kindom

FLAGS
© Brooke Ligertwood

Come, tell me your trouble
I’m not your answer
but I’m a listening ear
Reality has left you reeling
all facts and no feeling
no faith and all fear

I don’t know why the good man will fall
while the wicked one stands
And our lives blow about
life flags on the land

Who’s at fault is not important
Good intentions lie dormant
and we’re all to blame
While apathy acts like an ally
my enemy and I
are one and the same

I don’t know why the innocents fall
while the monster still stands
And our lives blow about
life flags on the land
I don’t know why our words are so proud
yet their promise so thin
While our lives blow about
like flags in the wind

…oooh…

You who mourn will be comforted
You who hunger will hunger no more
Oh the last shall be first
of this I am sure

You who weep now will laugh again
All you lonely, be lonely no more
Oh the last shall be first
of this I am sure

I don’t know why the innocents fall
While the monster stands
I don’t know why the little ones thirst
But I know the last shall be first
I know the last shall be first
I know the last shall be first

]]><![CDATA[One Body to Hope (Ephesians 1:15-23)]]>Thu, 21 Aug 2025 17:01:18 GMThttps://www.amycourts.com/written-things/one-body-to-hope-ephesians-115-23

This sermon was first preached at Gethsemane Lutheran Church in Hopkins, MN, on November 17, 2025 as part of our August sermon series, "The Body of Christ." The full livestream of the service may be viewed here. The scripture text & sermon alone are below. Scripture text: Ephesians 1:15-23

Good morning, beloved of God. Today as we dive into the meat of Ephesians 1 and the culmination of this Pauline author’s greeting to another Beloved Community, it behooves us to do so with eyes as wide open as he prays their hearts will be. For this is more than a salutation from a writer to his readers; it is, in all its flourish, a bold proclamation of one thing and one thing only, which is that in Christ, our kin, sits the fullness of Creator’s majesty, glory, and power. Which is why this passage is typically reserved for the final Sunday of the liturgical year, when the whole Story of God, from the garden to Christ to his already-but-not-yet eternal reign is celebrated at the Feast of Christ’s Reign. And I’m glad for the gift it is to us today, because we live in a moment in time when the reminder of Whose we are and, in turn, Who we are and are made to be, cannot be rendered too often. It is no secret that across world theaters, self-made kings and despots are rising like the heads of hydra to besiege all that lives, compel submission, and destroy anything that stands to resist their rule. The weight of it all can feel unbearable, and a great many of us feel more helpless and hopeless than ever.

But, take heart, Beloved, because it is neither a new moment, nor even a particularly surprising one.

In fact, the reign of Christ has long been a central tenet of Christian doctrine dating back to Cyril, the 5th century Archbishop of Alexandria who served at a moment when Socrates wrote that, “The Alexandrians are more delighted with tumult than any other people: and if they can find a pretext, they will break forth into the most intolerable excesses; nor is it scarcely possible to check their impetuosity until there has been much bloodshed.” To that socio-political context Cyril declared that Christ’s “dominion over all creatures is not seized by violence nor usurped, but [is] his by essence and by nature. His kingship is founded upon the hypostatic union -- [that is, the total and impenetrable union of full Divinity and full Humanity extant in Christ alone.] From this it follows that only “Christ is to be adored by angels and men [as He alone] has power over all creatures.”

And of course, Cyril’s proclamation was just a more-defined affirmation of the Nicene Creed we still affirm today, which was an elucidation of what the author of Ephesians wrote in today’s text, which was, going back even further, a summation of what the Apostle Paul wrote earlier, in his epistles to the Romans, Corinthians, and the Philippians in particular.

Which is to say, when the Pope Pius XI instituted the Feast of Christ’s Reign in his 1925 Quas Primas encyclical, it was not new but merely the newest affirmation of Christ’s eternal reign in and through and over any and all who would exert their own rule over humanity and all creation. Neither was his inauguration of the Feast at that moment in time incidental. Written in the aftermath of World War I, which saw the fall of no fewer than four empires, it was a direct -- and, if I may say so, scathing -- response to growing secularism and ultra-nationalism. His affirmative declaration of this ancient and essential truth was, much like the letter to the Ephesians, a summation and explication of wisdom passed down through the ages, including from Pope Leo XIII (13th) -- the most immediate namesake of the current Pope, Leo the 14th -- who consecrated the whole of humanity to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, proclaiming that the promise and hope of Christ’s eternal reign belongs not just to “Christians” but to everything and everyone whom God created and imbued with Their divine image.

Indeed, as Qohelet wrote in Ecclesiastes, long before any of the preceding, "there is nothing new under the sun." For this I give thanks, because it means we are never without hope.

But to understand that reality, we need to acknowledge another reality both Christ and his apostles addressed at length, and which infuses the whole of today’s text.

But first let me just note that when you hear me refer to “The author of Ephesians” in contrast to “The apostle Paul” it is because scholars are divided on whether or not Paul actually wrote Ephesians and a few other epistles, for very good but very impossible to get into right now reasons. They all do, however, follow Pauline patterns and show us, at very least, how Paul’s teachings were passed on, received, and interpreted throughout his life and beyond.

Like many of Paul’s letters, Ephesians begins with the author’s exultation over his readers for their specific and local faith which he has heard much about. But, as Dr Kristofer Phan Coffman writes, he expands quickly from the specific out to the cosmic, “like Alice eating cake and then growing enormous.” He will continue this pattern of drawing the eyes and ears of his particular readers out from their unique context to the cosmic realms of the Eternal Christ, and then back again to their personal, familial, and communal relationships, throughout the letter.

But for today, we’re out in the expanse where, Dr Coffman continues, “In describing Jesus’ exaltation," the author “touches upon one of the themes that his modern interpreters often under-emphasize, namely Jesus’ conflict with demonic powers…” We’re talking about something we Lutherans like to leave to the evangelicals and Pentecostals: spiritual warfare.

Stay close, though, because this cosmic conflict is one the “[Pauline epistles] consistently refer to, [albeit] with abstract terminology.” Here in Ephesians 1, Christ’s conflict is with “rule and authority and power and dominion.” In Ephesians 6, which you’ve heard me refer to at least a dozen times, it is “the rulers and authorities, the powers of this dark world and the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” against which we do battle.

While it is, I think, reasonable to be skeptical and even agnostic about what the powers of evil look like or how they’re named; about whether they operate as individual entities like Satan and Demons, or simply as a pervasive force at work against us, it’s crucial to remember there are powers beyond this world, beyond humanity. And that even though there will always be human actors colluding with the cosmic powers for personal profit, wreaking havoc on our world and in our communities, and compelling us into fear, hatred, and war with one another, they are not our true enemy.

Our battle is never against each other, or any other flesh and blood.

We must root down into the essential truth that the whole of creation is consecrated to the sacred heart of Jesus Christ who created and holds all things together by his Word. Root down and stand firm, because if we lose it, we will make monsters and animals of our neighbors, and become like those who, having lost their own humanity, cheer the destruction of siblings they can only see as snakes. And this they do not to the glory of God, but to the glory of the powers that have forever defied God.

So where, then, does that leave us? In the words of Théoden: “What can man do against such reckless hate?” What, precisely, is the Hope to which we are called?

It’s right here in the text, Beloved:
Christ’s reign is not imperial, it’s eternal.

It is not the kind of rule won by war, bloodshed, or the conquest of land forcibly separated from its people -- Despite that, since the time of Constantine, there has been no shortage of Christians who’ve sought to transform Jesus into what Deryn Guest** calls, “a model emperor presiding over a shadow government in heaven,” appointing popes and kings on earth to enact his holy will. Indeed, countless denominations across time -- including plenty in our own -- very much prefer the Constantinian Super-Emperor to the Christ we actually meet and know in Scripture.

But Christ’s reign is not that. The “exceedingly great” Power of God is His by nature. And by this same Power that raised Christ from the grave, Death itself died -- and with it every measure and manner of authority and dominion that lesser lords exert over we who are sealed by One Spirit through One Faith in One Lord by One Baptism into One God, the Mother and Maker of all, who is over all and through all and IN all of us.

This is the power that comes to us -- not as a better king, but as our brother and Kin; Not as the head honcho atop a dehumanizing corporate or political hierarchy, but as the Head on our shoulders from which all life and living stems.

And if this Christ is our kin and we are His body, even His fullness, as Ephesians so boldly proclaims in today’s reading, then as Dr C. Clifton Black and Dr Coffman both preach along with so many others, we are not and cannot ever be “helpless victims in or to a world whose powers have colluded with The Powers. [Instead,] “we are conduits of Christ’s immeasurably redemptive power.”

So the Hope to which we are called -- that is: the cosmic certainty and expectation to which we are called -- is that "our local acts of solidarity and love have transformative power." And through them, all are filled with the full, death-defeating goodness and love of God which fills us and is us, Christ’s One Body. We are the resurrected Christ. We are his second coming.

So, Beloved: Take heart, Love hard, and Act boldly against all power but God’s, because you are -- we are -- Christ in this world, through the power of God, to Their praise and glory Alone. Amen.

EPHESIANS 1:15-23
15 Because of this -- that I have heard of your faith in Jesus the Messiah, and your love toward all the saints, 16 I do not cease to give thanks for you all as I make mention of you in my prayers. 17 [I do so] in order that the God of our Redeemer Jesus the Messiah, the Origin of Glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know God. 18 [This] so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you all may know what is the hope to which God has called you, what is the glory of God’s inheritance among the saints, 19 and what is the surpassing magnificence of God’s power for we who believe, according to the working of the power of God’s strength. 20 [Power that] God worked in the Messiah when God raised Jesus from the dead and seated him at the right hand of God in the heavenly places, 21 far above all governance and authority and power and dominion and above every name that has been named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. 22And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.*

*Verses 15-21 translated by Wilda C. Gafney in A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church, Year C (©2024, Church Publishing, New York, NY). Verses 22-23 from NRSV.

**Quote misattributed to Deryn Guest was written by commentator Karl Hand in The Queer Bible Commentary: Ephesians .

]]><![CDATA[Martha, Martha, Dragon Tamer]]>Tue, 12 Aug 2025 19:16:15 GMThttps://www.amycourts.com/written-things/martha-martha-the-dragon-slayer

This was the first sermon I ever preached, on November 3, 2019 at the annual women's retreat for Redeemer Lutheran Church in north Minneapolis. It can also be read with greater context at Church Anew's blog. Gospel Text: Luke 10:38-42

Seven years ago, just a couple months into my seminary career, I was invited to preach my first sermon at my church’s annual women’s retreat. I was super hesitant, but when Pastor Babette asks you to preach, you do it. Not because she’s bossy but because she’s the boss who usually knows what you need to do before you do, and so she is how you figure out what you need to do. Of course I said yes.

When, a few days later, a member of the planning team told me the weekend’s passage was Luke 10:38-42, about Mary and Martha, I visibly cringed and invisibly gasped, because seriously? Another women’s retreat concentrated on this story of Martha the distracted busy-body who needs to be more like her sweet sister, Mary, always sitting at Jesus’ feet when there’s work to be done? Gag. I am an Enneagram 4 and the youngest of four sisters, and I need exactly no one and nothing telling me to be more like my sisters (sorry, not sorry).

Still, I decided that if I was ever going to be a preacher-pastor I'd have to preach some texts I don’t like and I might as well practice with women who love me. So I dug in, intent on finding something new and powerful for Mary and Martha, and discovered this incredible public theologian named Mary Stromer Hansen who literally wrote the book about these sisters and this passage.

Her stunning, elucidating work helped me to love this text. It turns out that what we’ve been handed (especially women and Queer folks) is full of garbage mythology and patriarchal projections onto history which strip two radical sisters of their agency and place within their context. Reality, as usual, is much more complex and far more beautiful.

So I invite you to come with me into this flashpoint in Martha's life -- and stay close, because it involves a good bit of Greek.

As they went on their way, Jesus came to a village where a woman named Martha received him. She had a sister named Mary who also was one who sat at the Lord’s feet, always listening to his words. (10:38-39)

From the jump, two things are immediately clear from Luke’s introduction of these women. Firstly Martha is alone when she -- a certain woman, third person singular -- received Jesus. Secondly, this "certain woman" and her sister Mary are both disciples of Jesus. While many if not most translations entirely skip the word καὶ -- “also” -- in verse 39, it is clearly present in the Greek telling us Mary and Martha had “sat at the Lord’s feet.”

And about that: This notion of “sitting at the Lord’s feet” isn’t a literal thing telling us where Mary was located when this all went down. Rather, it was a common idiom indicating the dedication of a student to their teacher. So here you have them, two sister-disciples of Jesus: Martha is in the village of Bethany and Mary is somewhere else, likely among the 70+ other disciples Jesus just sent out at the beginning of Luke 10 to preach a bountiful harvest in need of workers.

As we move into verse 40, we learn that their discipleship was an active, full time ministry:

“But Martha was constantly περιεσπᾶτο (periespato) concerning much διακονίαν (diakonian).”

Again, this word perispato, translated “distracted,” is more than the bother of a wandering mind; it really means “greatly troubled” which, according to biblical scholars, indicates "persistent, ongoing stress."

And Martha is constantly stressed by burdens directly related to… diakonian.

Folks. *Deep breath*

Throughout the New Testament this word diakonian is translated as “ministry." It is the vocational service of ministers — apostles, disciples, pastors, prophets. Yet, somehow and for some reason, in this passage diakonian is translated as “tasks.”
(I’m not here to call bible translators sexist.)
(But they definitely are.)

We’re beginning to see a different image of Martha emerging, no? One of a woman, a disciple of Jesus, not distracted by a to-do list, but overwhelmed by the needs of ministry. So, Luke continues,

“She εἶπεν (eipen) -- “set upon” or “confronted” or “commanded” -- Jesus, saying, ‘Lord! Does it not make you anxious that my sister has μόνην με κατέλειπεν (monēn me kateleipen) -- left me alone -- to διακονεῖν (diakonein) -- minister?” (10:40)

This Greek word “kateleipen” means “to leave” — to go away, to physically abandon or desert one place and go to another.

Again: Mary is so not in the home right now. Sister is gone. And she has left Martha alone (monēn) to diakonein. Diakonein is a verb describing the everyday acts and practical works and services which define relational ministry. It is not just the patriarchally-defined “women’s work” of cooking and cleaning (which already assumes that feeding people and providing them a warm, inviting place to be is somehow lesser labor, but I digress). No, this is all the daily work that defines vocational ministry. Meaning, while Mary is gone out among the 72, Martha is making meals for the community, gathering meals for the hungry, praying with grieving neighbors, visiting folks who are incarcerated and incapacitated, taking care of kids, and doing all the other daily labor of a minister.

And she is tired. So she tells Jesus,

“εἰπὲ (eipe) -- bring word and command -- her to help me.”

(...here is where her story takes its crucial turn...)

“Answering (Ἀποκριθεὶς / apokritheis) her, the Lord said, “Martha, Martha. You are μεριμνᾷς (merimnas) and θορυβάζῃ (thorybazē) about πολλά (polla).” (10:41)

Jesus names Martha — twice — calling her out of the Mary narrative, back into her own body.

And he names what’s actually going on for her.
See, up to this point all we’re told is that she’s overburdened by the daily work of ministry. But Jesus peels back that layer and names the True Truth:
Martha is merimnas
— anxious, to the point of being divided into pieces
and thorybazē
— agitated to the point of panic
about polla
— many things.

This last word, polla -- this one truly is wholly unrelated to ministry, and is instead (as my dear friend Sara likes to say), simply, “all the alls.”

Martha confronts Jesus, commanding him to bring Mary home, and instead he calls her back into herself and names the very real worry and agitation that are tearing her apart, the anxiety and panic that she’s tried to bury with the busyness of ministry. And he tells her, “What Mary has chosen is a good portion, and it will not be taken from her.” (10:42)

This is where that original myth of Mary physically sitting at the feet of Jesus becomes so brazenly problematic: She’s not even in town, never mind sitting at his feet. She is a woman out doing disciples’ work in a world that is not made for or kind to women, having left Martha at home to do the same alone.

It is her absence, not laziness, that so agitates Martha.

It is to her agitation that Jesus provides the comfort that her worry is unneeded because Mary has chosen the portion that is good for her" -- It's not “the only good portion,” as some translations imply. It is just her good portion, one for which she is particularly well-suited.

This moment is everything. It's the moment when Christ meets Martha's humanity with his own, showing us not a woman who can't handle her own portion, but one who loves her sister deeply and is deeply anxious over her absence.

She is alone and lonely. Afraid for her sister and herself. It's all coming out sideways looking like resentment and rage, and so Jesus answers her panic with presence: His presence in her home; her presence in her own body.

He names her, sees her, hears her, validates her, and frees her not to be like Mary, but to be herself -- and let Mary be Mary.

The coolest thing about Mary and Martha, I think, is that far from being a swooning sitter and her busybody sister, they trailblazers of the faith, apostles with and to and of the apostles, who were so well-known, beloved, and respected that, together with others like Mary Magdalene, they became matriarchs of the church.

But Martha? She gets such a bad rap when really her fortitude is unmatched.

She is the community organizer who doesn’t sleep because police violence doesn’t sleep.

She is the church mother taking in and feeding the kids after finding their mom a ride and a suit to wear to an interview she spent the last few weeks prepping her for.

She is the pastor taking meals to the home-bound, showing up to parole hearings, and preaching each Sunday and making sure someone is there to greet Jesus every time he comes to town.

She is a woman in a man’s world doing “mens’ work,” and is close enough with Jesus to speak freely and boldly to his face when she needs answers.

She is criminally selfless.

She is tired and overworked.

She could use a pair or three of extra hands.

And by medieval times, she became known as the Dragon Slayer or Tamer, which is the legacy she now leaves to us.

So now: To you Marys who’ve been told to go home?

Don’t.

Don’t go home, because Jesus didn’t call Mary home.
Whether you’re preaching or marching or teaching or traveling, don’t stop because it is your good portion. If God Themself won’t take it from you, let no one else pry it from your hands.

And to all you Marthas doing the tireless, thankless, endless work of organizing and presence and ministry at home?

Don’t stop. We need every blessed Martha we can get, and yours, too, is a very good portion.

Hugs and Kisses, Babes.

]]><![CDATA[A Better Inheritance • Luke 9:51-62]]>Tue, 01 Jul 2025 22:48:09 GMThttps://www.amycourts.com/written-things/a-better-inheritance-o-luke-951-62

This sermon was originally preached on June 29, 2025, Pentecost Sunday, at Gethsemane Lutheran Church. The full worship may be viewed on online. The sermon is below and on YouTube.
• • •
Gospel: Luke 9:51-62
Epistle: Galatians 5:1, 13-25

“If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine,
then let us work together.”

These are the words of Indigenous Australian artist, author, and poet Lilla Watson who, in 1985 delivered that timeless and transcendent message at the UN Decade for Women Conference in Nairobi just four years after I was born, in 1985.

It wasn’t until many, many years later, probably about 10 years ago, that I read her words for the very first time. And when I did, they vibrated and echoed in my bones like a trumpet through a canyon, and I understood -- viscerally, if not yet intellectually or practically -- that she was preaching the Law of Love and speaking gospel truth. Her words recast Scripture for me in a way that utterly transformed my theology, my actions, my whole person, and grounds me still to this day in a vision of Christ and eternal salvation through the lens of Mutual Liberation in the right here and now.

So I was thrilled to find today’s epistle is Galatians 5:1 and 13-25 which opens with this trumpeting proclamation from St. Paul: “It is for freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to your own enslavement… You were called to freedom, beloved siblings, not to give you an opportunity for self-indulgence, but that through love you may become slaves to each another.” Across that canyon of two thousand years and countless empires raised and felled, Paul’s words resounded and rhymed and were echoed in Lilla Watson’s. And both, of course, were echoes of what Christ said -- and didn’t say -- in today’s gospel.

But to hear them like the bell they are, I want to go back a bit for a birds-eye overview lest we forget how we got to the Samaritan village in the first place.

Because leading up to today’s text, Jesus had performed countless miracles, among them being last week’s gospel where he liberated the Geresene demoniac from a legion of demons, after which he stilled a raging storm with a word of rebuke, raised a girl from the dead, and staunched the heavy menstrual cycle of a woman whose natural but “unclean” bleeding had long relegated her to the margins of society. That was chapter 8.

Chapter 9 then begins, in verses 1 through 6, with Jesus sending the 12 disciples out with his same authority over diseases and demons, to proclaim God’s kin-dom “everywhere,” the text says, but with one crucial caveat: In going, they were to leave literally everything behind but the clothes on their backs, and make themselves entirely and exclusively dependent on the hospitality and mutual care of those who received them.

Between verse 6 when they’re sent, and today’s text beginning in 51, we see Jesus feed more than 5,000 hungry people in a single afternoon, perform three more exorcisms, warn the disciples twice of his coming death and resurrection, affirm Peter’s monumental confession of his Messiahship, take Peter, James, and John up a mountain where he transfigures before them, and then rebuke them, just as he did the storm, for having the audacity, after all that, to argue about which of them was the greatest.

Now, whether all this happened chronologically or was written down by Luke in this particular order for narrative continuity and dramatic effect, I do not know, nor do I think it matters. What matters is that Jesus and the 12 have been B U S Y up to this point when, as the end draws nearer, he sets his face toward Jerusalem and sends messengers ahead to secure lodging. And this he does because -- as verses 57-62 make plain -- Jesus is also homeless, penniless, and utterly dependent on the mutual aid of those he visits.

So I want us to notice, here, before we look at anything else, that Jesus never asked his disciples to do anything he was not already doing, to live with any less than he himself had, or to make themselves any more vulnerable to hunger, houselessness, poverty, or rejection than he already was. His invitation to discipleship was more than an offer of cosmic authority over the powers of the realm; it was also -- crucially -- an offer to become nothing.

Again and again, Jesus affirmed they were all in the same boat, and that whatever God gave him, he in turn gave to them -- be it the power to command the natural and spiritual realms, or powerlessness against the realities of unnatural, human-made perils like the hoarding of resources and refusal to share. They were alike in both power and poverty, both totally dependent on the generosity of reciprocity of strangers with whom they were sent to share the exceeding abundance of the Creator, regardless of how they were received.

And while he instructed them in verse four to “shake the dust from their feet” and move along when leaving towns that did not welcome them, it’s apparently not something they actually had to do often or at all, if James and John’s reactionary outrage today is any indication.

It would seem they were all so used to receiving both generosity and reciprocity, in abundance, that this village’s unwelcome was new. And, as Luke implies by explaining that it was “because Jesus had set his face toward Jerusalem,” this new unwelcome signaled a critical turning point in his and the disciples’ ministry. It set them on what commentators call “The Lukan Travel Narrative” marking the beginning of the end of Jesus’s journey to the Cross. This was the final turn, and there was no going back.

Which is to say that the Samaritans’ rejection of Jesus is not the story here, except as an example of what can happen to those who actually follow Jesus and are treated like him. Instead, what Luke intentionally draws our eyes and ears and full attention to in this moment, is the total polarity of responses we see from the Brothers versus Jesus.

We already know James and John to be zealots whose unyielding beliefs and unwavering allegiance to Jesus’s cause are alive and active and buzzing in their bodies. It’s why Jesus aptly nicknamed them the “Sons of Thunder.” So their impulsive reaction here is unsurprising.

That doesn’t make it any less jarring to witness, for at least a couple reasons. “First,” as Chelsea Brooke Yarborough writes, that’s quite presumptuous of them to make an offer like that to Jesus. “If [he] wanted [to call down fire from heaven to consume the whole town,]...he could have done it for himself (and it still would not have been right, emphasis mine).” Still more jarring than that, though, is how “their immediate response to a boundary or a ‘no' was violence toward an entire town. It would not have been the entire town’s decision, yet they were quick to conflate all people — including the elders, the children, [and] those on the margins — with whoever had the power to say no.”

Let me pause here so we can name the elephant in the room. This scene is neither theoretical nor distant, but is, in fact, our own reality right now. We don’t have to conjure up or imagine examples of entire cities or groups of people being held violently responsible for the choices of a powerful few. In fact, I’d be willing to bet most of us already have in mind a few reports or images from the last week or two alone, of elders, children, and other marginalized people upon whom all-consuming fire and fury have rained down from the sky. We do not have to search for people who’ve been burned and bombed, scattered, starved, or shattered by violence for the choices of leaders whose power is well beyond their reach or influence. It’s everywhere, always right now.

It is the natural order of this World, capital W, and the inherent impulse of the Flesh, capital F. This is what humanity does with unrooted, unmitigated power: we weaponize it against and over others. Whether as individuals or as a collective, the impulse is strong and pervasive to punish those whose autonomous choices undermine our more-righteous ways, or simply get in the way of us having whatever we believe our god has entitled us to. None of us are immune to such impulses. We all participate and are complicit.

Jesus’s response, on the other hand, is that trumpet in the canyon, calling our whole selves to attention in the fundamental truth at the root of all of the gospel. Unlike James and John, he doesn’t call down fire upon the Samaritans because he does not consider himself entitled to their welcome, regardless of how their rejection surprises or affects his plans, and despite that He is actually God in flesh.

In fact, it’s because he is God in Flesh that he honors their decision. To him, whether or not their choice was good or loving or reasonable, it was theirs and theirs alone to make. And by honoring it, Yarborough says, “Jesus reminds us how crucial agency and choice are to Love.” They are inextricably bound up together.

What was not — and will never be — celebrated as a good, right, loving choice was the Brothers’ impulse to call down the power and authority of God, “to punish…harm…[and] destroy in Christ’s name, simply because they were inconvenienced or thought another choice” would’ve been better.

In his simple rebuke, Jesus makes clear it’s not just that the reactionary impulse toward violence against those who oppose us is a reprehensible embodiment of everything the powers and principalities of the World embrace in their opposition to God (though it surely is).

It’s that the Christ impulse to Love is the precise and perfect opposite, and is defined and proved true by its resolute fidelity and submission to the liberation and liberty of the beloved.

Which brings us back, at last, to Lilla Watson’s theology of mutuality, and St Paul’s admonition to the Galatians about what their Baptismal liberation is and means in practice. He knew, like Lilla knew, like we all know, that no one is free to do whatever we want, regardless of the power we have. We are beholden to the laws of nature and the laws of the living.

And the thing about living is that we will always be entangled with every other living thing. It is the inescapable reality of being made of the same stars and dust and water and soil and breath as everything else that has or ever will exist: We cannot ever be separate entities unto ourselves; we are inherently bound up with others. But we do get to choose our binding.

We can, Paul says, use our freedom to bind ourselves to self-indulgence, hyper-individualism, and the self-destructive lie that ego is all that matters. We can bow as vassals of earthly kings who promise us freedom in exchange for submission to their bomb-dropping, warmongering, scorched-earth yoke of power. And all either will produce is “enmity, violence, injustice, warfare, slander, hatred, gossip, etc.,” leading us inevitably, if ironically, to one thing only. mutual cannibalization, and an inheritance of mutually assured destruction. We can use our freedom like that, and lots of us do.

Or we can bind ourselves to one another in the transformative and liberating Love of mutual submission that does not come as a savior or leech, but as sibling. THAT, Paul says, is the Liberation to which and for which Christ set us free. We are free to embody the same radical reciprocity, interdependence, empathy, humility, and solidarity that Jesus and the Apostles not only survived on, but passed down to us on paper, in practice, and in Power of Spirit. We can be and bear the Spirit’s Love as we share the abundance of joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control which grow only -- but always and assuredly -- out of mutual submission. We can claim a better inheritance as heirs of the Kin-dom of God. And that is, as ever, Beloved: To be Loved, and Be Love, as One Beloved Community, the Body of Christ.

So let us, let us, let us Love one another.

]]><![CDATA[PENTECOST (John 14:8-15, 25-27 Acts 2:1-21)]]>Sun, 08 Jun 2025 05:00:00 GMThttps://www.amycourts.com/written-things/pentecost-john-148-15-25-27-acts-21-21

This sermon was originally preached on June 8, 2025, Pentecost Sunday, at Gethsemane Lutheran Church.

The full worship may be viewed on online. The sermon alone is available below and on YouTube.

Gospel:
John 14:8-15, 25-27
Epistle: Acts 2:1-21

***

Blessings, beloved siblings,
and Happy Birthday to the
Church of Christ!

Today we celebrate the Feast of Pentecost, the Birthday of Christ’s Church by the Power of Mother Spirit, and the Third in a Trinity of High Holy Days in the Christian Liturgical Year.. With the Holy Mother and the Midwives, we witnessed the Very Good Love of Eternal God made flesh at Christmas. With Mary Magdalene and the women who stayed, we tasted the everlasting goodness of the Bread of Life, the Living Water who is Christ, Resurrected at Easter. And today, with the 12 Apostles, a few other men, and at least a hundred Women, according to Acts 1, we are Born anew of Breath and Fire, formed into One Body — the Body of Christ, and His Second Coming— by the Indwelling of God’s Eternally Hovering Holy Spirit. Our Beginning, Our Brother, Our Breath: One God, now and forever.

Today we are invited to cease any efforts to wrangle the wind and instead practice presence: To dwell within the ineffable who dwells within us by the promise of the Son who was indwelled by the Father in whom he also dwelled.   If it all sounds and feels chaotic and confusing: congratulations and welcome to Pentecost! We are in Very Good company as we enter the scene and witness Spirit, who comes more like a crashing hurricane or a raging fire than a balloon that flits and floats and weightlessly falls into the eager arms of those She has come to transform.

Before we go further, a word about my use of feminine pronouns for Holy Spirit.

I do not use them simply because using gender-expansive language for our Unspeakable God is a fun practice, especially during PRIDE month, although that would certainly be reason enough. Nor is it just a nod to the Triune One who claimed They/Them/Us pronouns in Genesis 2, though They most definitely did. Instead — really, also — I have, did, and will continue to refer to Her in the feminine because that is how Jesus referred to Her. Not in the Greek, which, like many Latin-based languages, misgenders Spirit; but in the languages he actually spoke: For in both his native tongue Aramaic, and Hebrew, his ancestral and rabbinic language, the Spirit who breathes and births us into Being, first in the Beginning and now here at Pentecost, is a distinctly and definitively feminine Presence. And if there’s one thing Pentecost demonstrates in most spectacular fashion, it is that Words have power — words are power -- and language matters. It mattered at the Beginning when God told us who They were. It mattered to the Living Word who spoke all creation into being. It mattered to Spirit whose indwelling landed as foreign languages in the mouths of the faithful. So it matters to me, especially today, as we celebrate Her coming in fullness, all wind and fire and Breath.

Now, while this is a unique pouring-out of Her Power and Presence, it is not the first. She is one strand of the Eternal Triune thread who, together with Jesus Christ and God the Father, weaves Right Now into Back Then and Always Was, even as all that was and is, including all of us, are stitched and sewn into What Forever Will Be; the whole of it a glorious tapestry called Eternal Life.

So I’d like, for a moment, to trace the length and breadth and strength of that thread, not just from Pentecost to Easter to Christmas, but even farther back, with the Apostle Peter, to the prophet Joel. For it was Joel who received Spirit’s visionary promise of the Eternal Kin-dom into which all are called in our own language, and from which none of us are excluded. And it is his vision which Spirit Breathes to Life at Pentecost, when the people are transformed and the Church is born. But it is more than the fulfilment of Joel; It is also, as Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney writes, “a transformation of Shavuot, The Jewish Festival of Weeks, which marks the end of the holy days that begin with Passover just as Pentecost now marks the end of Easter season. Passover marked redemption from slave labor. Pentecost was marked by rest from honest labor. Passover memorialized a bitter harvest with the bread of affliction. Pentecost memorialized the new harvest with its first fruits. Passover commemorated the procession out of Egypt and the death of their firstborn. Pentecost was commemorated with a procession of newborns as the first fruits of their families.”

So we begin to see that the God of the Prophets, who led Israel to Liberation through the Red Sea and the Desert as a Hovering cloud by day and a pillar of Fire by night; is the Same Spirit who rushes in like wind and fire at Pentecost, to birth and indwell the Church Eternal. It is the same tapestry, and the same Thread woven throughout.

If we go back even further, to long before the prophets, and even before Israel’s enslavement and Exodus from Egypt, we can witness Holy Spirit the first time she birthed new life through language, in Genesis 11’s Story of Babel.

Now, while some theologians, including many I respect, admire, and generally yield to, warn against such comparisons because they’ve been used to spark wildfires in strangers’ lands, I’m a glutton for a hot take, and I firmly believe this particular spark can be — like most all fire can be, especially Spirit’s fire — the kind that warms the bones in the deadest of winter and lights the whole house from the hearth. Through the light of Her glow we see a Truer Truth revealed in the weaving of Babel and Pentecost .

Again, the wisdom of Dr Gafney: “It may not seem like it but even the tower of Babel…is about God’s preference for diversity in the family of God. Yes,” she says, “at one level the story is about the Israelite low opinion of Babylon. That’s where the story is set. The story is the Israelite version of Babylonian history, not exactly unbiased. We are supposed to think that those Babylonians are…arrogant to build a tower to reach up into heaven. And we are supposed to notice that their efforts were so puny that God had to come down to even reach the top. But if we just ridicule the Babylonians, we miss the point that they wanted to reach heaven, to be in contact with their God, they wanted a direct path. That’s not a terrible thing. And even though the Israelites considered them to be enemies, God came down to see about them just as God came down to see about Israel.”

She goes on: “The Babel Story is topsy-turvy: People reach out to heaven and are pushed away. People working together harmoniously are separated and confused. God doesn’t need towers or temples to reach God’s people, so God directs peoples’ creative energy elsewhere. God creates diversity out of uniformity. What looks like chaos and confusion is community building. The babble of Babel is not non-sense. People found themselves able to understand some of the people around them, those people became their people and each group grew into a distinct people with their own language and culture, enriching the beauty of God’s creation. God scattered them across the earth, that the world might be filled with diversity.”

You see where we’re headed as we move into the heart of Pentecost, don’t you?

What Babel and Pentecost both show us is that unity, oneness, and life are not created as unique individuals and cultures are amassed and contracted into a single homogenous center -- a center that sucks everything into itself, consumes all particularities, and swallows each one’s light the way a Black Hole does, producing nothing regenerative in the end; just radioactive toxicity.

Instead, and always, Life extends and expands ever-outward like an earth covered in cultures and languages; like a universe full of galaxies that are full of stars that are each full of their own remarkable light and life -- Stars that connect across and throughout the cosmos, always reflecting and be reflected in each other’s brilliance, even as new lights are continuously exploding to life. Ever since the very same Breath and Fire who breathed us into Being, began Her work with them billions and billions of years ago, the stars have sung this song: That to be made whole is to be made of infinite parts. That each and every part -- like each and every one of us, with all our distinct languages and cultural touchstones, in endlessly imaginative expressions and identities — is as unique as we are essential to the wholeness of Christ’s body. In fact, we are essential because we are unique.

If that sounds impossibly beautiful and/or utterly ridiculous, welcome, again, to the ungraspable mystery that is Holy Spirit. She cannot be purchased and will not be possessed but She is always, always present, in every breath we breathe. So, Beloved, just breathe and stay present. Because now, finally, we come to what must be understood: The Why and To What End of Pentecost. On this, both Word and Spirit are clear.

First, the Word of Christ in verses 26 and 27 of our gospel: Why does He send Her to us? So that through Holy Spirit, whom the world does not know, we may experience the Peace of Her Consolation which the world cannot give. Hers is Peace born of Breath, Fire, and Presence, and is the precise and perfect rebuttal to the Pax Romana and all other manner of false and manufactured calm. The Peace of Christ through Spirit is created not kept; enfleshed, not enforced. It is cultivated, not coerced, through accord if not agreement, and never through assimilation. So that we may be freed and unafraid.

And why does He leave us the Fearless Freedom of Her peace?

So that when ever Spirit falls in fire and wind, in a collision of cultures we don’t recognize and a flurry of words we don’t understand, we will neither hide in terror nor mock those She indwells, but will instead breathe Her presence and dwell in Her Mystery.

Then what we will hear is the Living Word calling out: through the visions and prophecies of our friends and neighbors, our children and elders, our Queer and marginalized, our poor and oppressed, unhoused, incarcerated, undocumented, discarded -- From these the Word will pour out, until every one of every color and kind, from every nation and culture, can hear in their own language the promise of Christ; and see their own self reflected and at Home in His Body. When that day comes, we will celebrate the Day of the Lord’s Favor, when all -- all -- are saved, and we who are many are finally made Whole and One in Christ Jesus, our Lord to the Glory of God. And until then, Beloved, may our prayer of invocation be: “Holy Spirit, you are welcome…. you are welcome here.” Amen.

]]><![CDATA[Clothed in Dignity (Acts 9:36-43)]]>Sun, 11 May 2025 05:00:00 GMThttps://www.amycourts.com/written-things/clothed-in-dignity-acts-936-43

Icon of St. Tabitha of Joppa - 20th c.

This sermon was preached on May 11, 2025 at Gethsemane Lutheran Church, and was based on Acts 9:36-39, the story of the resurrection of the disciple Tabitha, and the Widows.

Both services may be viewed online. The sermon alone is available below and on YouTube.

I’ve been thinking a lot about fashion this week. About what we wear, what it means, and what it communicates to others. And this week was chock full of fashion statements from across the world. Which may sound unrelated to scripture, but I promise you it’s not, so stick with me.

Last Monday was the annual MET Gala fundraiser where celebrities dress -- or, more precisely, are dressed by some of the world’s most distinguished designers -- in extravagant, over-the-top suits & gowns, paying homage to the year’s theme. And with five Black men chairing the Gala for the first time ever this year, its theme was, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” and the dress code was “Tailored for You.” Inspired by Monica L. Miller's book, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, the Gala was an unapologetic, emphatic celebration of Black dandyism, which “is at its core,” Ty Gaskins writes, “a fashion revolution, a movement steeped in history, resistance, and pride. … a cultural statement, an act of protest, and, above all, an enduring celebration of individuality.” And wow, was it ever all that!

Then on Thursday, in a much different but no less extravagant event halfway across the world, white smoke billowed from the chimney of the Sistine chapel, and Cardinal Robert Prevost was named Pope Leo XIV. In the eternity between the release of white smoke and Pope Leo’s presentation on the balcony, I openly wondered to my clergy sisters why it was taking so dang long, while the former catholics among us explained that popes wear really big outfits so it takes a long time to get dressed. And when he finally did step onto the balcony in different robes than Pope Francis had worn, we listened intently to MPR’s discussion of how some popes choose their robes as they do their names, both a reflection and declaration of who they are and intend to be as pontiff. Pope Francis, you may recall, was always robed in the white minimalism of his Jesuit roots which spoke to his intentional kinship with the poor and powerless. The new Pope -- the first born in the US, progeny of Black Haitian and Creole ancestors, whose spiritual roots lay in the Augustinian tradition -- chose to wear more traditional papal garb: a cardinal’s white cassock with attached red pellegrina, under the same ornate red and gold stole donned by Popes Francis, Benedict, and John Paul before him. It was kind of a let down, if I’m honest.

But even prior to the week’s events, I was already on a journey into the significance of fabric and flesh which began as I thought about Peter and Tabitha in our Easter stories. In last week’s Gospel, when he recognized Jesus on the beach, Peter's immediate reaction was to cover his nakedness and jump in the lake. That reminded me of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden where they were unclothed and unashamed until they believed the lie that God was withholding goodness and beauty and fullness from them, and ate the fruit. Then, as Genesis 3 tells it, “Both their eyes were opened, they realized they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together to make coverings for themselves.” When God called out looking for them, and Adam said they were naked and afraid and so they hid, God’s reply was a simple but telltale question: “Who told you you were naked?” I guess they didn’t know how perfectly clothed they’d always been in God’s love and goodness.

That brought to mind Matthew 6, where Jesus points to lilies more beautiful than Solomon in all his splendor, assuring the worried poor that the God who so adorns fields of grass, will certainly clothe them too. And as I wandered from there through the Bible in my mind, I began to realize just how often stories in scripture are punctuated by clothing, like in the many allusions to the Hebrew custom of wearing sackcloth and ashes during periods of mourning and repentance and, conversely, the excessive, almost comical design of Priestly Garments prescribed under the law in Exodus 28 and 39: Their robes were to be spun of the finest linen, sewn with blue, purple, and scarlet yarn; With a breastplate inlaid with an array of precious stones set in gold filigree; and a crown of solid gold to be worn with a turban on the head. Without a doubt, these Holy Vestments were a far more extravagant get-up than anything we might ever see at the Met or on the Pope.

But then I also thought about all the women of the Bible whose stories were punctuated not by their dress but by their undress: Women accustomed to exploitation and erasure, who, like Rahab, Tamar, Ruth, and Hagar, knew God personally, and learned to use their nakedness, vulnerability, and sex, to secure a future for themselves and their people. I thought about women like Mary Magdalene, apostle to the apostles, the first to preach the risen Christ to unbelieving men; Mary the Tower who was central to the story of God in Flesh, but was later whore-ified and turned into a scandalous footnote by men who either could not or would not concede her significance and authority.

And of course, then, I thought about my own experiences of whorification and erasure, which began when I was told at just 4 years old that I couldn’t wear a two-piece swimsuit because “I might cause men to stumble.” The ironic vulgarity of such a thought is obvious to me now, but as a little girl I had neither the framework nor the power to call on Jesus’s dire warning in Matthew 18 against adults who cause children to stumble under the weight of their own depravities. And so, over time, I internalized the oft-repeated message that what I wore could bring down even the holiest of men. And those messengers robed me in hatred and fear of my own body. It not only came to dictate all my fashion choices, but also launched me into decades of disordered eating and deformed self-perception.

So you see, clothing does matter. A lot: From one of the most lavish events of the year to one of the most consequential elections of our lifetimes, from the pages of Scripture to the shirts I now thrift, cut, and hand-sew into my own unique priestly garb, in the words of writer Haniyah Philogene, “every stitch [tells] a story. Every hem is a declaration.”

And Tabitha -- beloved Tabitha -- knew this.

One of only 3 dozen or so women named in all of the New Testament, Tabitha was named by parents who clearly understood the assignment, and gave her one which, according to Dr Wil Gafney “is revelatory.” By naming her Gazelle in three languages, her parents clothed her in the swift strength and nimble grace she would need to thrive under occupation. By naming her Tavitha -- a name rooted in the Hebrew word for gazelle, “zivyah” -- they robed her in the majesty and royalty of “one of Judah’s great queen mothers who ruled for her son when he ascended the throne at the tender age seven...” And by naming her in Aramaic, the language of former “empires that had once dominated their people,” and giving her a name which “so easily translated into Greek, the language of their current oppressor,” her parents dressed their daughter in the defiance by which their ancestors outlived their oppressors, and which would sustain her and her descendents for generations to come. Which is to say, Tabitha’s name was more than a word, it was a wardrobe. So it’s no wonder she became a maker of wardrobes for others.

But she is more, still! For she is also the only woman in all of scripture to be named a disciple in its feminine form, which is mythetria in Greek. She was not, of course, the only female disciple -- but the fact that she is the only one given that specific designation speaks to the specific kind of work she was doing. And here in Acts 9, Rev. Michele Ward explains, her works and deeds are described with phrasing typically reserved for “[the] healing, miracles, and teachings” of the disciples and apostles we already know. So when Luke uses that phrasing in reference to Tabitha it is no doubt meant to draw our close attention. So let us attend:

Because now, Tabitha is dead. Her body has been ritually cleansed, anointed, and dressed in burial linens by the very women she dressed in life. And it’s been carried to another upper room where it will be attended until the funeral, or until Peter arrives. And when he does, a day or maybe two later, Peter is taken up to that room and immediately surrounded by grieving widows who are wailing and showing him all the garments Tabitha had made for them.

This is significant. These were women living on the margins of society, widowed and unmarried, many of them probably very poor and otherwise destitute. And they lived in a society where clothing was expensive, and even most middle class people could only afford one or two well-made garments, which they would wear, mend, and repair for as many years or even decades as they could. Without the resources of marriage they were relegated to the lowest echelons of society where their options for employment were as threadbare as their robes, and forced to depend on the kindness of others to meet their basic needs and keep them, as Tabitha did, from the humiliation of wearing garments so worn out they might as well be naked.

So when this throng of weeping widows surrounds Peter, waving their robes and other clothing before him as they wail over the woman who clothed them, they are grieving more than the death of a tailor. To them, Tabitha was a healer and miracle worker who, by fitting them with garments that honored their bodies, and embroidering their lives with unassailable worth, restored them to life. By creating robes and dresses that would last their whole lives and longer, she declared with every stretch of fabric their eternal belonging to the beloved community. And by making their problems her problem, and identifying with them in their suffering, she wove her life together with theirs, stitched their burdens into her own kind of priestly garment, and crowned them with all dignity, respect, and new life. What I’m saying is that Tabitha made resurrection so real among them, that when she died, they died with her, and when she was raised by Christ, through Peter, they were all raised again, too. The widows are who I think this story is really about, for theirs is the resurrection we cannot miss.

Friends, I don’t know how many of us will ever get to see the dead breathe again the way Tabitha breathed again. But I do know, like those widows, that resurrection is much bigger and more mysterious than clothing designers called back from death. And I understand, the way Peter understood, that the mechanics of a mystery are far less interesting than learning to recognize its manifestations all around us, because they are all around us. Resurrection is everywhere, and the mystery of the gospel is being revealed every single day.

In disciples like Tabitha, who was as profoundly normal as the rest of us. She could’ve been anyone or no one, except that in devoting the mundane everyday work of her own hands to dressing those widows’ in honor, she became a healer, a miracle worker, and the only woman in scripture to wear the feminine name disciple. And why? Because she cared. That’s it: She cared deeply. Tangibly. For the least of these within her reach.

And so beloved of God, Let us go and do likewise that we may also raise the dead. Amen.

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