Open my Lips, O Lord, and my Mouth shall show forth your praise. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Beloved in Christ,

I did not expect to be giving a homily today. I have been on sabbatical since August of 2025, caring for my family through illness, and I had hoped for quiet, rest, and distance from the weight of public speech. But there are moments when silence ceases to be pastoral and becomes a failure of duty. There are moments when words on paper are no longer enough.

This is one of those moments.

This office has written many statements. Declarations have been issued. Words have been placed on paper. But paper costs nothing. A voice costs everything. A voice bears the weight of breath, presence, and risk. There are times when a bishop must be heard, not merely read. When mercy is punished and conscience is crushed, silence is no longer restraint. Silence becomes consent. I will not consent to that.

The readings appointed for today are painful because they are honest.

Isaiah does not pretend that darkness is symbolic or distant. He names it plainly. The people walk in deep darkness. A heavy yoke rests on their shoulders. The rod of the oppressor is real. Boots trample. Violence leaves marks. Isaiah does not deny the suffering. He declares that God sees it. And then God does something unexpected. He does not begin with vengeance. He begins with light. Not a light of denial, but a light that breaks the yoke, lifts the burden, and ends the rule of fear.

The Psalmist does not say there is nothing to fear. He says the Lord is light in the presence of fear. One thing he asks. One thing he seeks. To dwell in the house of the Lord. When the world becomes unstable and violent, the faithful do not harden their hearts. They cling to God as their orientation, not their escape.

Paul, writing to the Corinthians, speaks into a divided and anxious Church. He warns them not to fracture into camps of power, personality, or fear. The cross, he says, is foolishness to those who trust domination and coercion. The cross refuses to become a weapon. It exposes cruelty by refusing to imitate it. Paul knows that when the Church fractures, it loses its ability to proclaim the Gospel truthfully.

Then Matthew tells us something that should unsettle us. Jesus begins his public ministry after an arrest. John has been taken. Power has already shown its teeth. Jesus does not retreat. He does not remain silent. He goes into Galilee, into the mixed territory, into the place of tension and fear. And there he proclaims repentance, not as shame but as reorientation. He heals the sick. He restores bodies and souls. He gathers ordinary people and calls them into a way of life shaped by mercy.

These texts hurt because they are not distant. They are present. They are reading us.

In recent days, we have witnessed the deaths of two children of God. Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Renee Good was killed by a federal officer, she was a mother, a wife, a devout Christian. murdered in her car, with her dog present. We all saw the videos, and heard the administration try to justify it. There is no justification for that.

Now, Alex Pretti, a thirty seven year old intensive care nurse, murdered while acting in aid of another. He was a caregiver by vocation. He served veterans. He spent his life tending wounds that most people never see. He did not seek conflict. He did not seek recognition. He moved toward someone who had been harmed. He chose mercy over fear. For his conscience and for the care of a woman in need, he was shot over and over until dead. His crime? Engaging in a constitutionally protected activity. He was disarmed and murdered in cold-blood. If such an act was to have taken place on a battlefield, the Geneva Convention would declare it a crime against humanity; clergy and medical professionals are non-combatants. Any harmful act done against them is a crime by international law. Yet, in the United States, a nurse can be murdered in broad daylight by federal agents for the simple act of recording them and somehow that’s acceptable to people. I have no words. 

Now, some of my own colleagues will refuse to discuss it.  so I will name this plainly. What occurred was cold blooded, calculated, and malicious murder of two beautiful children of God.

The Church cannot pretend otherwise. I will say this as strong as I can, with every fiber of my being, anybody supporting ICE after this is not a Christian; I will treat them the way I would treat an unrepentant evildoer. I will love them because Christ commanded all Christians to love those who hurt us. I will pray for them, even being charitable to them because I am commanded by the gospel of Christ to do so. However, my respect and my trust they shall not have. My friendship or my presence shall not be abided with them. On my Authority, with the full weight of the office I hold by vocation, I declare that President Donald Trump, his cabinet, ICE agents, and every lawyer, judge, or citizen who protects or excuses ICE or this administration, are hereby Excommunicated in this denomination. They shall not take communion or participate in this denomination’s worship while the blood of innocent lives are on their hands; until they truly and humbly repent, they shall not be welcome here. I will not, and cannot, sanctify or bless what they have done. Their actions are not of Christ, as revealed by scripture, and they have excluded themselves from the Christian life as far as this denomination is concerned. 

God is the source of all good because God is Good itself, and therefore goodness is not an independent substance floating around the universe like moral dust. Scripture’s basic posture is that every genuinely good thing participates in God’s life and originates from God’s generosity. James, the brother of our Lord, says it plainly: every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father. In the Gospel register, this is why Jesus can say that the tree is known by its fruit, because goodness is not only an idea, it is a discernible output of what is alive in a person. It is also why Christian morality is not merely rule-following but conformity to the character of God. Goodness is God’s signature on reality.

That goodness is not only “out there.” It is pressed into the human conscience by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit convicts, illuminates, and inclines the heart toward what is right, merciful, and life-giving, even when the cost is high. That is why the works Scripture consistently calls “good” are not abstract virtues but concrete acts: protection of the vulnerable, care for the wounded, defense of neighbor, truth-telling, restraint, mercy. When someone sees harm and moves to help, and when someone witnesses wrongdoing and refuses to lie about it, the Church recognizes that as the sort of fruit the Spirit produces. In other words, the Spirit’s work becomes visible precisely in those moments where fear would normally win and yet mercy prevails.

Now, we also have Christ’s warning that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit has a defined context and a defined criterion. In the Gospels, Jesus performs manifest works of mercy and deliverance, and his opponents respond not by denying that the works occurred, but by re-labeling them. They take what is recognizably good and declare it evil in order to justify opposition and harm. Mark’s phrasing is the key: Jesus speaks this warning because they were saying that the Spirit’s work in him was the work of an unclean spirit. That is the essence of the sin: the knowing inversion of the Spirit’s merciful work, treating the light as darkness so that violence, suppression, or cruelty can be dressed in moral clothing. This is not a category for mere doubt or confusion. It is a category for hardened moral reversal.

That is why, in the judgment of this office, the conduct of ICE and the administration’s defense of it rises to the level of Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit in word and deed. When recorded evidence and eyewitness accounts indicate that the man was holding a phone, was pepper sprayed, was pinned to the ground, and was shot, and when that conduct is nevertheless publicly framed as justified “self-defense,” the moral inversion is not incidental, it is the point. Reuters reports that DHS claimed he approached with a handgun, but the bystander video reviewed showed him holding only a phone, assisting others, then being pepper sprayed and shot while pinned down. Other reporting similarly describes video and eyewitness accounts disputing the official threat narrative. In that posture, what is being defended is not merely an interpretation of events. It is the re-labeling of visible mercy, restraint, and aid as threat, and the re-labeling of lethal force as righteousness. That is the very pattern Christ warned against: calling the Spirit’s fruit evil so that evil can be called good. Final judgment belongs to God alone, and His mercy is His to give. But the Church is not permitted to pretend it cannot see what is in front of it, nor to bless a narrative that requires the denial of visible good in order to justify bloodshed.

Jesus also teaches though that, Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. These are not poetic words meant to comfort us from a distance. They are the words of one who stood before power and did not flinch. They are the words of one who taught mercy as the measure of faithfulness.

The Gospel does not first ask what label a person carried. It asks what work they enacted. In the parable of the sheep and the goats, the righteous are surprised to find themselves identified with Christ because they fed, healed, visited, and protected. They did not know they were serving Christ. They simply acted in mercy. Christ claims them anyway.

So when we look at the lives of Renee and Alex, we do not see abstraction. We see action. We see conscience at work. We see love made visible. And when such mercy is punished, the Church must speak.

I will now read the acts of canonization for Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

[Canonizations are read aloud here]

Beloved, this is not about politics. This is about discipleship. The Gospel has always been dangerous to systems that rely on fear. That is why Jesus began preaching after an arrest. That is why the early Church remembered martyrs. That is why we speak these names aloud. Scriptural History has never been kind to those who chose safety over fidelity to God. Herod, client King of Judea, put a gold eagle on the temple to appease Rome. It was removed by Jewish leaders, and they were executed. He lost the respect of the Jewish people. He commanded daily sacrifices to Caesar be offered in that same temple. That is what happens when you choose safety over fidelity. Upon Herod’s death, Rome was quick to overthrow his son and claim the province. We see Caiaphas, the high priest during Jesus’ time, appease the Romans; but what do we expect, he was installed by them. He appealed to Rome to get Jesus crucified. He curated temple taxes that benefitted his coffers, but hurt the poor. He reigned for 18 years, all the while betraying God for the protection of Rome. Scriptural history makes it clear that cozying up to power doesn’t earn you any points with God, and in many cases puts you fundamentally at odds with the creator.  

In the end, the call remains the same. Walk in the light. Refuse cruelty. Do not become what you oppose. Listen to the Spirit when conscience calls you toward mercy, even when that call is costly.

Into thy hands, O merciful Father, we commend the souls of our brothers and sisters here departed. Grant them eternal rest, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May they rest in peace.

Amen.