“Who called me by my name and ran…”

It’s the time of Spring when the apple blossoms are bursting out, and that means that we get to enjoy the apple trees in our yard, and make a pilgrimage to see two of our favorite apple trees in Southeast Connecticut.

To the Hazel Wood

I’ve really wanted to look at them this year because I discovered a poem by William Yeats, The Song of Wandering Aengus. It is a mystical poem, one about fire in the head, salmon turning to glimmering girls, and lifelong yearnings for deeply spiritual experiences.

I wish I could claim that I knew it because I know Yeats, but I’m afraid not. I need to read more Yeats. The more I read him, the more I feel fed. But alas, I discovered this poem only because I was touched by a song of the same name by Noriana Kennedy from the Irish band Solas. It brought me to tears, and I wanted to know the lyrics. You can listen here:

Beautifully played… poignantly sung. And here’s the poem….

The Song of Wandering Aengus¹

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire a-flame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And someone called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done,

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

Yearnings…

It’s so strange and compelling to me. “And when white moths were on the wing, And moth-like stars were flickering out…” “And pluck till time and times are done, The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun.” Just lovely.

It’s the lifelong compulsion of poor Aengus to find that glimmering girl that wells up the tears for me. Aengus is not sad or hopeless with looking—quite the opposite. “I will find out where she has gone,” he says. It’s a foregone conclusion, although he has grown old with wanderings “through hollow lands and hilly lands.”

I entered into the story of a man the other day who had a very difficult life, and who also had a profoundly spiritual experience as a child. On the strength of that mystical occurrence, he built a life that transcended his hardship. And now, lying in the hospital, I feel his yearning… his deep desire to know just what it was that “called me by my name and ran, and faded through the brightening air.” His story reminded me of Wandering Aengus.

And so too, I yearn, like there’s a fire in my head, and like I’m blowing a fire aflame. I can’t even say what I am searching for, but somehow I know I will find it, growing old in the looking, and walk among long dappled grass. It touches my heart to think about it… and I can’t quite say why. Both the poem and the song push gently on that heartbreak, though.

We behold our favorite apple trees…

The first is an ancient tree at Haley Farm State Park in Groton, CT. This apple tree was old when this was a working farm, early in the last century, and it is beautiful in full bloom.

The second apple tree stands along the shores of Long Island Sound at Harkness Memorial State Park in Waterford, CT. Because the micro-climate is a little different here, this one is not quite in bloom, but the reds and pinks of the very pregnant flower buds are stunning.

We’ve written about this tree before:

Twisty Old Apple

Beholding. Now, that’s the word for what we’re doing. We stand under these trees, mouths wide open, arms spread, and we’re “being-held” by them and their beauty. Beholding is what you do when you find an object of beauty… when you encounter the spiritual moment… when you find that glimmering girl with apple blossom in her hair…

¹ Poetry Foundation. (n.d.). The song of Wandering Aengus. Poetry Foundation. Accessed on 5/3/2025. Taken from William Yeats book The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)

Marco Breuer writes about paying attention to small things… spot on!

Take a Look at the Flowers Along the Path

The Rev. Ron Steed is an Episcopal Deacon in Southeast Connecticut and a chaplain at Lawrence & Memorial Hospital in New London, CT. He writes haiku and lyrical prose that he hopes will help others put the head and heart in right-relation.

Top writer in Art, Watercolor, Haiku, Sermons, and Episcopal Church.

Click here to follow Refresh the Soul to stay updated with the latest!

Yearning for Apple Blossoms was originally published in Refresh the Soul on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Thirsty, happy poems…

Wisdom Texts

One of my morning practices is to dwell in one of seven “,” suggested by Tibetan Buddhist Lama Rod Owens. On Tuesdays, there is the second one, “Wisdom Texts and Authors.” This is the list of books and authors I sit with:

• Biblical Stories: Romans 8, Isaiah 58, The Prodigal Son, The Good Samaritan, and the Sermon on the Mount
• The Book of Common Prayer
• Spiritually Heavyweight Authors: Samuel Wells, NT Wright
• Mystical Authors: The Cloud of Unknowing (anonymous author), Brother Lawrence, Cynthia Bourgeault, Thomas Keating, Richard Rohr, Thomas Merton, Julian of Norwich, Marshall Davis, Desmond Tutu
• Favorite Theologians and Psychologists: William Stringfellow, Walter Wink, Richard Beck, Henri Nouwen, Marion Milner
• Unity Awareness Books: Dao Tse Tung, Gospel of Thomas
• Favorite Poets: Mary Oliver, John Keats
• Wisdom Authors and Speakers: Cristene Cleveland, Neil Douglas-Klotz
• Wisdom Novels: The Overstory, Brothers Karamazov
• Best Book on Chaplaincy: A Hidden Wholeness by Parker Palmer
• Tantric Books: Kali Rising; Tantric Jesus
• Book about “the way of tears and fire”: The Fountain and the Furnace by Maggie Ross

It is a nice practice just to be with this list for a while and feel gratitude for these works and authors, some of whom are unknown. As my eyes rest for a while on this list, I ponder their lessons, or perhaps feel a nudge to take one down to look for something within. Tuesdays are juicy for me in that way.

Heart Touchings

While all of these are favorites, and all have been life-changing, I would say that poet, Mary Oliver’s book Devotions,¹ published the year before she died, continues to inspire, awe, and touch my heart.

Mary is a jewel. Her word choices are simple, rhythmic, and almost always about the natural world. She paints with words… I can see what she is writing about. Take The Poetry Teacher, for example:

The university gave me a new, elegant
classroom to teach in. Only one thing,
they said. You can’t bring your dog.
It’s in my contract, I said. (I had made sure of that.)

We bargained and I moved to an old
classroom in an old building. Propped
the door open. Kept a bowl of water
in the room. I could hear Ben among
other voices barking, howling in the
distance. Then they would all arrive — 
Ben, his pals, maybe an unknown dog
or two, all of them thirsty and happy.

They drank, they flung themselves down
among the students. The students loved
it. They all wrote thirsty, happy poems.

I can just see all those dogs coming in to the delight of her students!

And I love her theology. In a word, I would call it “enchanted” (literally, “sung into being”). Take this poem about her beloved dog Percy, The First Time Percy Came Back (sounds like it happened more than once!):

The first time Percy came back
he was not sailing on a cloud.
He was loping along the sand as though
he had come a great way.
“Percy,” I cried out, and reached to him — 
those white curls — 
but he was unreachable. As music
is present yet you can’t touch it.
“Yes, it’s all different,” he said.
“You’re going to be very surprised.”
But I wasn’t thinking of that. I only
wanted to hold him. “Listen,” he said,
“I miss that too.
And now you’ll be telling stories
of my coming back
and they won’t be false, and they won’t be true,
but they’ll be real.” And then, as he used to, he said, “Let’s go!”
And we talked down the beach together.

So sweet… the spiritual as something present but unreachable, like music; as something that is not false and not true, but real. Honestly, I tear up every time I read it. “I only wanted to hold him…”

Attentiveness

Mary had an awful childhood that I wouldn’t wish on anybody, but it drove her into nature and writing and gave her a luminous gift for conveying the wonder of things.

At the very top of my morning devotions is this quote by Mary. It is one I try to live by every day:

Ten times a day something happens to me like this — some strengthening throb of amazement — some good sweet empathic ping and swell. This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.²

May we all have strengthening throbs of amazement!

¹ Oliver, Mary (2017). Devotions. Penguin Publishing Group.

² Oliver, Mary. “Low tide: what the sea gives to the human soul.” The Amicus Journal, vol. 18, no. 4, winter 1997, pp. 32+. Gale Academic OneFile, . Accessed 20 June 2024.

Judy Walker sings about transforming our grief into wildflowers… just lovely…

The Ordinary Miracle

The Rev. Ron Steed is an Episcopal Deacon in Southeast Connecticut and a chaplain at Lawrence & Memorial Hospital in New London, CT. He writes haiku and lyrical prose that he hopes will help others put the head and heart in right-relation.

Top writer in Art, Watercolor, Haiku, Sermons, and Episcopal Church.

A Life-Changing Book: Devotions was originally published in Refresh the Soul on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A big “NO!“

Communion

While I was at a writer’s retreat last weekend with poet , we had a little conversation about the current American situation—not a lot, really, just a little. We had actual work to do. During one of the small discussions, Davyne said, “Writing is an act of resistance.”

That’s true on many levels and against all kinds of political powers. One way writing can resist is by making your brain healthier, more connected across its hemispheres, and in communion with your intuition. All of this is very effective pushback against brain-numbing drivel.

Toward a more balanced way

Dr. Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World,¹ talks about the kind of world we would have to live in if we operated by the left hemisphere of the brain alone. In his professional opinion, it would look a lot like the kind of dysfunctional and misdirected world we are living in now!²

If you want to live in a more just, vibrant, and kind world, one of the most effective ways to do so is to engage the right hemisphere of your brain in thinking. And one way to do that well is to write, particularly writing that is imaginative, poetic, and lyrical.

I’m thinking (with both hemispheres of the brain) of the kind of writing that causes you to suspend time every now and then… to lean back in your chair as you look out the window… to pause your pencil and sip tea. Give the right hemisphere of your brain time and silence to do its imaginative work because that silence matters.

It’s the kind of writing Mary Oliver refers to in her poem I Happened to be Standing:

…While I was thinking this I happened to be standing
just outside my door, with my notebook open,
which is the way I begin every morning.
Then a wren in the privet began to sing.
He was positively drenched in enthusiasm,
I don’t know why. And yet, why not.
I wouldn’t pursuade you from whatever you believe
or whatever you don’t. That’s your business.
But I thought, of the wren’s singing, what could this be
if it isn’t a prayer?
So I just listened, my pen in the air.

I’m talking about the kind of writing where you “follow the pen,” as Davyne put it, which makes you wonder who does the writing, where maybe you have to set your notebook aside for a day or two until the idea suddenly reveals itself to you.

I’m imagining the kind of fully-absorbed effort that Roxanne and I love: “We found ourselves more and more in that delicious and self-forgetting flow state that comes where you realize, only with the last dab of paint and the final period, that three hours have passed you by with a wink and a nod.”

This kind of writing is one where, as you are focused on a budget at work, that word you were looking for is suddenly there, and you have to grab your notebook to scribble it down for later. That’s your “Deep Mind,” ³ giving you a nudge.

The kind of writing is one where it is more helpful to your composition to go walk in the woods than it is to scroll through the headlines—to listen to the chatter of the songbirds and mycelium than it is to listen to a news podcast.

Further enhancements

Consider using analog writing tools rather than digital ones⁴—paper and pencil. As your fingers grasp the pencil and glide it across the paper, that is your left hemisphere doing exactly what it is supposed to do. Your right and left hemispheres together form the thoughts, passing them back and forth in a flash, before they travel down your writing arm to the paper. There is a physicality to analog tools that enhances your brain work far more than digital methods.

You can hone the edges of your craft by responding to prompts (and Nancy Blackman, MASF is masterful at these on Refresh the Soul!) or writing morning pages as Julia Cameron suggests in The Artist’s Way.⁵ Another good practice is “Free Writing,” where you write, stream-of-consciousness style, whatever comes out of your head. Your right hemisphere, with its wide open aperture of awareness, attends to connections that you have never imagined before. Free writing can breathe life into those connections.

Dr. McGilcrist states that the corpus callosum, the part of the brain that connects the two hemispheres, is sized in humans to limit the flow of information between the left and right hemispheres. He does not know why it is this way or what advantage it gives us. It seems to me that we might want to put that connection under some capacity stress, and writing might be a way to do that!

All of this puts your head and heart in balance, communion, and harmony. And, it is a big fat “NO!” to our politicians.

So, save yourself, your neighbors, and your nation… write!

¹ McGilchrist, I. (2019b). Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press.

² Dr. McGilchrist has a number of very informative YouTube videos on this topic.

³ “Deep Mind” is a term used by author Maggie Green to describe the activity of the right hemisphere, which receives our intensions and returns with flashes of insight.

⁴ I drafted this article first with pencil and notebook.

⁵ Cameron, J. (2022). The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. A TarcherPerigee Book.

I’m going to push my own book (Ron & Roxanne Steed) here, which is full of other artful practices that you can use as acts of resistance:

Adventurous Soul Earthside writes not only about the mind-numbing effects of doom scrolling but how to get that good dopamine using some seriously analog ways!

The Doomscrolling Trap

The Rev. Ron Steed is an Episcopal Deacon in Southeast Connecticut and a chaplain at Lawrence & Memorial Hospital in New London, CT. He writes haiku and lyrical prose that he hopes will help others put the head and heart in right-relation.

Top writer in Art, Watercolor, Haiku, Sermons, and Episcopal Church.

Click here to follow Refresh the Soul to stay updated with the latest!

Writing is Resistance was originally published in Refresh the Soul on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Deep listening from the inside…

I’m on a writing retreat this weekend, where we were given a prompt to listen deeply to what was happening around us. Then, we were asked to list the things we heard both externally in the room and internally, using our imagination.

Our loving leader, poet Davyne Verstandig, armed us with this quote from Rachel Carson as a help:

The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and to listen to what our subject has to tell her.

For context, we were working in a large rustic room with cathedral ceilings and a view into the rainy Connecticut woodlands.

External Sounds (those we hear with our ears)

Water brewing, the sound of footsteps, water flowing into a cup, my tinnitus, the dunking of my teabag, the crinkle of my notebook as I write, the brush of denim on the plastic tabletop, the creaking of a chair, sliding leather on a wooden floor, the heating of water and then its stopping, the sipping of tea, a cough, the deep base resonance of a coffee cup on the table, the bell of an idea, a ventilation fan, the echo of a large and carpeted room, a microwave fan, a distant crow, water pulses, chair groans, and the way a room enlivens as people move about.

Internal Sounds (those we hear with our imagination)

Two ways of knowing, contradiction, the sound of fog bathing the forest canopy, the sound of water droplets collecting on the bottom half of a window pane, the sound of softly swaying tree trunks, the sound that lichen makes when it radiates sage color on black bark, the sound that broken branches make as they hang precariously over the ground far below, the sound of slumbering woodlands under gray sky, the sound a tree makes when it awakens in Spring, the sound of rapt attention at a window, the sound of phrases as they make their way down the writing arm, the sound that a pen makes as it is suspended over the paper, the sound of harsh light on a pianoforte, the sound that light makes when it is squeezed through a translucent shade, the sound that the hearth-stones made when they were released from the glacier as till, the sound of a weaving tree with scoliosis, the neighborly chatter of mycelium, the sound of Spring as it bounces off the window panes, the sound of thoughts as they wander around crinkly brains, the sound of sharpened pencils as they sit waiting to be used, the way that blue speaks and olive listens, the sound of glasses as they are looked through, the sound of readiness that emergency lights have, the prayerful way an altar holds on to a walking cane, the sound that books make while waiting to be read, and the giggles that books on a shelf make as they lean on each other.

What a joy! What sounds are YOU hearing in the space you are breathing in?

Linda Lang writes about listening within and seven ways to tap into deep knowing… I’m all in!

The Power of Listening Within

The Rev. Ron Steed is an Episcopal Deacon in Southeast Connecticut and a chaplain at Lawrence & Memorial Hospital in New London, CT. He writes haiku and lyrical prose that he hopes will help others put the head and heart in right-relation.

Top writer in Art, Watercolor, Haiku, Sermons, and Episcopal Church.

Click here to follow Refresh the Soul to stay updated with the latest!

Prompt: The Sound of Things was originally published in Refresh the Soul on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Putting on the Mind of Christ

A sermon given at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Madison, CT, on Good Friday, April 18, 2025, during Holy Week¹

An Awful Truth

I made a mistake the other day. I know! It’s hard to believe! But one of our parishioners, reflecting on things they are witnessing in the world today, asked me, “What happens when evil seems to get the upper hand? What happens when evil gets its way?”

My response was something kind of flippant; that “God will get God’s way in the end”. Now there IS a truth in that. As Christians, we are resurrection people. We think that Good Friday is not the end of the story.

But my response skipped too lightly over an awful truth, the Good Friday truth; that when evil gets its way, the worst can happen. The worst WILL happen. People will get hurt… people will die… there will be injustice.

And so the mistake was forgetting to remember what I talked about last night on Maundy Thursday, that the Christian heart has to hold a paradox, two opposites, if we are going to follow Jesus:

• First, profound human suffering and tragedy,
• At the same time, the playful love of God.

Profound suffering; playful love. My answer spoke only to the love and left out the suffering.

So, I think it is important to make a point and to make it clear; evil is evil… it wields the power of death, and death hurts. There is no bactine or band-aid in Christianity, or in any human experience, really, that can domesticate this truth away from us. You don’t get to resurrection without going through death. You don’t get to Easter without Good Friday.

The Fears of Dying

In my Chaplain work with the dying, I often have the opportunity to talk with people while they are still lucid. Many will talk to me frankly about death and dying. When I ask “Are you afraid?”, many will tell me that they are afraid of three things:

• They are afraid of the pain of dying; it's going to hurt.
• They are afraid of death itself… at the unknowing they feel about the other side of death.
• They are afraid of losing relationships that are dear to them… they fear no longer having their beloved ones in life. Often, it is at this point- at the loss of relationships- that the tears begin to well up.
• Sometimes, there is a fourth fear; the fear of dying unjustly… the fear of dying for nothing, and at the hands of people and forces who do not care. And for those who feel this sharply, there can be a lot of anger. I remember one man who had fought in World War Two. He told me that he thought the world was awful now, and said, between pursed lips, “I feel like everything I did in my life was useless… it was good for nothing.” I didn’t try to change his mind about that or to make him feel better about it. We just sat together in the cesspool of injustice he was feeling at the end of his life.

A Good-Enough Cover Story

Good Friday tells the story of evil and death without looking away. It is the first story told in history from a victim’s perspective, and we see the very same elements of that story playing out today. We watch powerful leaders as they jockey back and forth to find a good-enough cover story so that an innocent man can be put to death:

Leaders: “Well, the fact that we brought him to you shows that he is a criminal!”

Pilot: “Try him yourself!” Which is to say, “I need a better story than that! Try again.”

Leaders: “Well, he’s violated a law of ours that says he ought to die…he claimed to be the Son of God!”

Pilot: This accusation is a bit closer to the mark, because Caesar himself claimed to be the Son of God, and that really catches Pilot’s attention. “What is this Jesus guy about?” he wonders. Still, “Better, but not good enough.. try again.”

Leaders: “He claims to be a King and that sets him against Caesar, and WE have no King but the emperor!”

Pilot: That’s it. A perfect cover story; one that gives Pilot the plausible deniability that he needs, one that seems to satisfy the crowds- the polls show it to be popular, and a story that debases the Judean leaders by making them endorse their fidelity to Caesar in a way that might be useful to Pilot in the future. It doesn’t have to be a true story since truth is whatever Pilot says it is; it just has to be a good-enough story… it just has to be “truthy”.

A Compelling Story

And so, an innocent man is sent to a painful death with everyone’s consent; factional leaders and people share the same opinion, and those leaders and people who don’t agree have run away in fear. Everyone has a hand in it, including the ones who aren’t there.

It would be a compelling story, even if that is all there was to it! But that’s not all. It was not just an innocent human who is going to the gallows; it was the self-emptying God… the God who made all of the universe… the God who made and sustains and loves and wants to be with, even the factional leaders and the people who condemned him, even the ones who ran away in fear.

And more. Good Friday is a story about how this God responds to evil and death and injustice. Jesus reacts the same way we react, with fear. He is afraid of all the things we are afraid of:

• He is afraid of the pain; it's going to hurt.
• He is afraid of the unknowing about the other side of death. Even though he is God Incarnate, he lives under the same veil that we live under, and there’s uncertainty under the veil.
• He is afraid of breaking relationships that are dear to them… the fear no longer having beloved ones in life.
• He is afraid of the fear of dying unjustly at the hands of people and forces who do not care.

Luke’s gospel, which we heard on Palm Sunday, makes this plain to us in the Garden at Gethsemane. As the arresting soldiers, led by Judas approach, Jesus puts on the mind of Christ, self-empties, and meets them.

So; “What happens when evil seems to get the upper hand? What happens when evil gets its way?”

Jesus responds with fear… a very human fear… fears we share with him today. And with all his fears to carry, Jesus has one more thing to carry: his cross.

On Good Friday, Jesus carries his cross. In the darkness of the evil of these days in which we live, Jesus invites us to carry our own cross with him. How should we respond to that fearful invitation? How will you respond to it?

We ARE resurrection people. We know that Good Friday is not the end of the story. The Christian heart has to hold a paradox, two opposites, if we are going to follow Jesus: profound suffering and playful love. So… let’s not be too quick to skip over the fear that Jesus’ disciples felt on that first Good Friday… before they knew that there WAS more to the story… before they knew about the empty tomb and the breathless women with fantastic news.

In the end, there is no answer to Jesus’ invitation to carry our cross that words can furnish. I think there is only one truly human and divine response to the fearful invitation of Good Friday: to put on the mind of Christ, in silence. So in that spirit, let’s just sit quietly for a little while….

¹ Taken from John 18:1–19:42

Refresh the Soul writer Chris B. MASF/ My Soulbriety writes about Alcoholics Anonymous in this article. In my experience as a hospital chaplain, I have many patients who have come to a deep spiritual maturity at AA and in community with suffering others. It can be profound…

Finding Success With an Authentic God: Alcoholics Anonymous and Sobriety

The Rev. Ron Steed is an Episcopal Deacon in Southeast Connecticut and a chaplain at Lawrence & Memorial Hospital in New London, CT. He writes haiku and lyrical prose that he hopes will help others put the head and heart in right-relation.

Top writer in Art, Watercolor, Haiku, Sermons, and Episcopal Church.

Click here to follow Refresh the Soul to stay updated with the latest!

Sermon: A Fearful Invitation was originally published in Refresh the Soul on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Profound suffering; playful love

A sermon given at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Madison, CT, on Maundy Thursday, April 17, 2025, in Holy Week¹

Paradox

To be a Christian is to hold paradox in the heart; truths that are impossible to BE true at the same time. Paradox is maddening to our heads, and if you think too long on the paradoxes of Christianity, you’ll find yourself running around in circles, or you’ll walk away from it shaking your head, or more likely, you’ll settle for something that says that it is Christianity, but is not.

Only our hearts seem able to rest quietly with paradox, and then, only by letting go… letting go of what we think we know… letting go of who we think we are… letting go of how we think the world works. And letting go is very hard. When the tears begin to well up and spill over, take it as a sign that you might be getting close.

We encounter the Christian paradoxes most starkly during Holy Week as we watch Jesus walk toward a humiliating destruction at the hands of human powers, with his hapless disciples tagging along in his wake. In the end, the paradox is so strongly felt, so deeply disturbing, so unreconcilable, that Jesus is abandoned by those closest to him, and he is left alone, hanging on a cross.

The first Christian paradox is this: life comes out of death.² And by death, I don’t just mean the death we suffer at the end of our lives. I mean all the ways we die, great and small, during our lives as well. The death we suffer when we lose a job, when we experience homelessness, when we bully someone, when parents die, when a child dies, when we fail a math test, when the college we long to go to declines to accept us, when we witness injustice or cause injustice, when we suffer debilitating illness. All the deaths that wound and confound us. Christianity tells us that life, this life that we live, comes out of deep, deep suffering.

The second paradox is harder to accept: that weakness is strength; that in acts that seem like folly, there is wisdom; that in self-forgetting, the self is found.

These two paradoxes are not plucked out of the air. We learn them from Jesus about God. They are the way Jesus is, and so they are also the way that God is. Jesus embodied these paradoxes during his life and most profoundly during these three days that we begin to celebrate tonight.

Both paradoxes come from the fundamental paradox of God; that the Creator of the Universe loves us deeply, wants to be with us with all God’s heart, and the WAY God does this is by self-emptying into creation. And because God is this way, and Jesus is this way, we are invited to respond by self-emptying ourselves into God and into one another in the same way. We have to hold two opposites in our hearts if we are going to follow Jesus:

• First, profound human suffering and tragedy,
• At the same time, the playful love of God.

A Play in Four Acts

Profound suffering; playful love. Can you hold those together? In tonight’s gospel, Jesus puts on a four-part play for his disciples that tries to demonstrate these paradoxes:

• Jesus gets up from the table and takes off his outer robe. This is Jesus leaving heaven and self-emptying, taking off the power of God.
• Then, he ties a towel around himself. This is Jesus incarnating as a human, and putting on the role of a servant; the lowest of the low. This is deeper self-emptying.
• Then he pours water into a basin and begins to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that is tied around him. This is Jesus dealing with human suffering on the one hand, the road-dirt that we pick up as we walk in the world, and on the other hand, doing it with the absolute tenderness of human touch. It is an act that acknowledges that we pick up the grime and suffering of the world. And then, if we deal with it the way God deals with it, we clean off the grime from one another with self-forgetting love and tenderness.
• After he washes their feet, he puts on his robe and returns to the table. He once again dons the power of God and goes back to heaven, leaving us transformed, cleansed and changed and taught how to love one another.

The play makes the point so well, that some of the disciples find it too disturbing to accept. Let’s consider two of them.

An Angry Man

First, Judas. The gospels suggest that Judas betrayed Jesus for the money. I’m not so sure, because in the end, Judas kills himself. I think he did that because Judas had a plan; a plan that didn’t work the way he thought it would.

I think Judas is an angry man; angry at the Romans, angry with the leaders of his nation for collaborating with the Romans, angry at the suffering of the people under a system of oppression that is not unlike many of the oppressions we are experiencing today. If you are angry at what is going on in the world today, you might have a little insight into Judas’ anger.

As Judas is having his feet washed by Jesus, I think he is incandescently angry at Jesus. Judas thinks to himself, “This is just weak, it’s folly, it’s self-defeating… what we really need is what you’re supposed to be doing, Jesus, as Israel’s Messiah, raising an Army to crush the Romans!” Judas already knows what he will do. He will create a crisis by helping the authorities to arrest Jesus. He knows some of the disciples have swords. When the arrest comes, the swords will start swinging, and the revolution will be underway. Jesus will have no choice but to lead it then, and Judas will join him as one of Jesus’ military commanders. That’s his plan… that’s what he thinks will happen.

I’m sure Judas loves Jesus deeply, and, he is angry at Jesus. Judas cannot hold the paradox of Jesus in his mind, and his heart has been taken over by other concerns that he cannot release. Judas thinks that the way of the world, dominating military power, is the way out of the world’s suffering. He thinks that Jesus is a weak leader who is over his head. Jesus needs a forceful nudge by someone who understands the truth of the world; someone like Judas, to fulfill the destiny of his people to rule the world. When Judas doesn’t get that, it is more than Judas can bear.

Then, there’s Peter

Peter is embarrassed for Jesus. Jesus is the Messiah, God’s anointed one, and washing feet is not what Messiahs do; it is what servants do. Now, Peter is a poor fisherman. I’m sure he washed his own feet because he couldn’t afford servants. But along the way with Jesus, the disciples ate with wealthy people, and what they experienced was servants washing their feet, an act of hospitality that the rich could afford. It was probably deeply embarrassing for Peter to have someone serve him in this way. So, to watch Jesus take on the servant’s role is mortifying to Peter.

Peter practically orders Jesus: “You will NEVER wash my feet!” Then he turns it around so that Jesus gets to be the Messiah he thinks Jesus is supposed to be… “wash all of me… let ME be the servant who is cleansed by his Messiah”.

“No,” Jesus insists, “I have to be the lowest servant who invites you to receive this service. And if this seems too debased for you, you have no idea how utterly debased I’m going to be in 24 hours. If you can’t receive the kindness of a foot washing, how will you accept the self-emptying salvation that I am offering to all of humanity?”

So there it is, a small play about the paradox of God’s self-emptying love.

Self-forgetting

There are so many parallels between the world of the Roman Emperor and the world of today. They are not so very different. How are you responding to it? Are you angry like Judas? Are you embarrassed like Peter? Are you just confused and trying to understand, like most of the rest of the disciples?

Can you accept the way that Jesus responded? Can you wash the grime off your neighbor? Can you receive a washing from your neighbor? Can you do it with tenderness and love? Can you hold in your heart both the profound suffering of your neighbor and the playful love of God?

I invite you to try to act that out tonight, to respond to the suffering of today’s world, by washing your neighbor’s feet and letting them wash yours. I know this seems hard. But there is something that might happen to you if you can do it. You might find that, in the middle of it, you forget yourself. You just focus on the person you are washing, and the one who is washing you… the warmth of the water… the feel of human skin on your own… the gentleness of their touch… the heft of the towel in your hands as you dry them off. It’s the self-forgetting that is the point, I think. You just might find that your heart is more capable of holding paradox than you think.

¹ John 13:1–17, 31b-35 (NRSV)

Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.

The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him. And during supper Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him.

He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” Jesus answered, “You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” Peter said to him, “You will never wash my feet.” Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!” Jesus said to him, “One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you.” For he knew who was to betray him; for this reason he said, “Not all of you are clean.”

After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord — and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.

Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

² Some themes for this sermon are derived from Ross, M. (1987). The Fountain & the Furnace: The Way of Tears and Fire. Paulist Press.

Refresh the Soul writer John Wiseman writes about a few favorite affirmations, among which are several about getting past the ego so that the real parts can shine through. We’re not so very far apart, I’m thinking…

Soul Affirmations

The Rev. Ron Steed is an Episcopal Deacon in Southeast Connecticut and a chaplain at Lawrence & Memorial Hospital in New London, CT. He writes haiku and lyrical prose that he hopes will help others put the head and heart in right-relation.

Top writer in Art, Watercolor, Haiku, Sermons, and Episcopal Church.

Click here to follow Refresh the Soul to stay updated with the latest!

Sermon: The Paradox of Christianity was originally published in Refresh the Soul on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The God Who Self-Empties…

A sermon given at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Madison, CT, on Sunday, March 23, 2025, the Third Sunday in Lent¹

You’re Not Going to Like It…

We are living in hard times, and a lot of us are stressed. Some are looking for a rung to grab onto… something that will crystallize for them, the sense of resistance that they feel. They are looking for a symbol.

If you are looking for a symbol of resistance that is appropriate and compelling for our times, I have one for you, and you’re not going to like it. It’s this; an empty bucket. I’m just going to set this symbol on a stand before the altar for you to think about as I speak.

Lives Saved

A friend of mine became an alcoholic and was hospitalized, jaundiced and on the cusp of liver failure. His doctor changed his life. “As I look down on you lying in this hospital bed”, he said, “I feel like I’m looking at myself. I was an alcoholic, just like you.”

The doctor went on, “You are at a crossroads now. If you keep drinking, there is only painful and certain death, and soon. But if you want life, come with me to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and you might have it. No guarantees, but if you want life, I can offer you that possibility. It is the only path of life open to you.”

My friend listened, went to AA, and stayed. I would not wish the tears he shed on anybody, but he did it with a lot of help from others. He was sober for 20 years before his death. He went on to be a sponsor himself and saved the lives of many other men and women.

What my friend experienced in that hospital room was a burning bush moment. These are moments when it seems like the voice of God is pouring into you with an offer you cannot refuse, like Moses.

Full of Himself

Moses is not all that different from my friend. He has lost everything. The adopted son of Pharaoh, he’d led a life of power and privilege as a prince of Egypt. But finding his heart strangely affected by the brutal forced labor of the Hebrews, he kills an Egyptian overseer. Full of fear about retribution and death, he flees to Midian to lead the life of a shepherd, a job usually given to 10-year-olds, and one far different than what he had known.

Moses is a man whose bucket is full… full of ego, privilege, self-agency (which is why he killed the man… “I can fix this myself”), full of self-pity and anger at his loss of power, full of fear at being brought to justice back in Egypt. Moses is a man full of himself, and completely entangled and constrained by his anger, fear, and hopelessness.

And then, he sees a fiery bush, and something in him stirs. A nudge… a felt-sense of curiosity about something other than himself. And THAT is the point where it starts… where Moses begins, ever so slightly, to self-empty².

Harder Than God Thought it Would Be!

I have a homework assignment for you to read Exodus chapters 3 and 4 about the burning bush. This morning’s reading shortens the give and take between Moses and God, which kind of deprives you of a humorous and poignant attempt by God at co-creation. Moses begins the conversation by saying “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”, which essentially says “You’re nuts! I’m too afraid to do the job… Pharaoh is going to kill me!” God explains why it will be alright. It goes back and forth for four more objections:

• “I’m going to be embarrassed if they ask who sent me and I don’t know your name”
• “What if they don’t listen to me?”
• “I’m not a great speaker; I’ll be embarrassed!”

In every case, God carefully details the ways in which this won’t be a problem. But Moses is too full of himself… his bucket is almost filled with ego, pride, and fear. Finally, he says:

“O my Lord, please send someone else.”

Friends, when you have your own Burning Bush moment, maybe don’t say that! The storyteller says “The anger of the Lord was kindled against Moses.” I think this is the moment in the conversation when God realizes that this is going to REALLY hard; harder than God thought. God shows admirable restraint and patience, however, and eventually, Moses is off to do the job.

The Symbol of Resistance

The story of Exodus is the foundational story of the Hebrew people and their journey out of bondage in Egypt to a land full of possibility. And it is ALSO the story of Moses and how he emptied his bucket of ego, rage, and self-pity, so that he could be filled again by God. So empty is Moses, that when God re-fills him, his face glows.

And this why the empty bucket is such a powerful symbol of resistance for today.

The God we worship, the God of Moses; this God wants nothing more than to be in relationship with the creation that God made. And the METHOD of relationship, the WAY that God will be with creation is to self-empty. God self-empties into creation… God pours out into us as a gift. Incarnating as Jesus in a human body is God self-emptying. Jesus emptying himself so that he is able to say “The Father and I are one”, is Jesus imitating God by self-emptying. Jesus on the cross is God self-emptying.

And if our bucket is full of ego, anger, self-pity, and fear, then we can’t receive what God has to offer; there is no room.

We are the image-bearers of God… we mirror God. If God is the one who self-empties to be in a relationship, maybe we are supposed to self-empty back. Maybe THAT is what an authentic relationship looks like. Maybe we are supposed to empty ourselves of security, status, dominance, and reputation. Maybe we are supposed to forget ourselves. Maybe we are to stand before God as an empty bucket so that the Self-Emptying One can pour into us love, glory, and mercy. Maybe, that is what it means to “put on the mind of Christ”.

Turn Toward Holy Ground

When I look at a lot of world leaders today, I see Pharaoh, full of ego and self-righteousness, full of dominance and retribution, full of violence and contempt. When I look at the poor and the marginalized around the globe, I see their misery, I hear their cry on account of their taskmasters, I know of their sufferings. Do you know what fueled that burning bush in the desert? It was the tears of the Hebrews under the oppression of the Pharoah. Tears kept that bush kindled. And all around me today, I see holy fire after holy fire kindled by the tears of the oppressed.

Friends, our call in times like this is the same call that Moses received. Our call is to notice that burning bush… to turn aside from our path and approach it, to turn away from self and toward holy ground. Our call is to empty ourselves so that the One who burns with the tears of suffering ones, can self-empty into us. And then together, we will co-create with God to respond in God’s way. To respond with possibility.

That’s what my alcoholic friend did. He had his burning bush moment, and he self-emptied. God filled him to the brim. There were tears… lots of them. He could not have imagined his outcome… it was unimaginable from the prison of that hospital bed.

Seeds Planted Decades Ago…

I don’t know what your burning bush moment is going to be. Some of you have had them. I am not sure how you will self-empty like God self-empties, but I know how I do it. Meditation is a great practice since it is really the practice of turning away from thought and back toward the silence of God. You’re like an athlete training your self-forgetting muscle memory. Another is to enter into the stories of suffering others, to forget yourself as you listen to the authentic stories of their heartbreak. I have done that with many others including some of you, and there were often tears.

Keira Schwartz is an example of someone who has self-emptied by entering into the stories of those experiencing homelessness and poverty in New Haven. Her heart has been filled with a new and unexpected call to serve them, and she has invited you to join her. I don’t know if Keira has been given the gift of tears, but it wouldn’t surprise me. All that she has been… all the gifts that have been poured into her across the journey of her life, are now being used in a new and fresh way. None of us knows where this will lead; all we know is that it looks like possibility.

All of you are the precious person you have become. The seeds of your future relationship with God were sowed from when you took your first breath. The skills you need to thrive with God in times like today were planted decades ago. You are doctors, and lawyers, and students, and business owners. When you self-empty, and God fills you up to the brim, you will still be those things, but for new causes and in new ways you cannot imagine.

The Way of Tears and Fire…

Since control is an illusion anyway, let go of trying to imagine. Just get into the flow and forget yourself and God will fill you up. A sure sign that you are on the right path of transformation is tears. If you find yourself welling up and spilling over for unexplainable reasons and at inappropriate moments, take it as a sign that the work of self-emptying is well underway. I know, I REALLY know that the gift of tears does not FEEL like a gift sometimes. But lean into it and let them track down your face.

“The gift of tears is a sign of change, of conversation of heart. The tears that are a gift are a sign of willingness to let go, of desire to let go, and the power of God acting in response to the person’s prayer of longing. …The gift of tears is a sign of self-forgetfulness… a desire that comes from within to create space for God by letting go of … security, power, attachment …. The way of tears, while not seeking pain for its own sake, is a willingness to be continually confronted not only by painful truth about one’s self, but also seeks to know this truth on a universal level of human suffering … The way of tears quickly proceeds … to an orientation toward the Other … choosing to be related to the creation” ³

May God self-empty into your bucket. May it be a good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over. And may there be holy tears. Because where there are tears, there is fire.

¹ Taken from Exodus 3:1–15 (NRSV):

Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed.

Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this [gives up control… he’s curious… self-emptying to a small degree] great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.

Then the Lord said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.”

But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” He said, “I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.” But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.’” God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’: This is my name forever, and this my title for all generations.”

² Themes for this sermon were derived from Ross, Maggie (1987). The Fountain & the Furnace: The Way of Tears and Fire. Paulist Press.

³ Ibid. p45

Refresh the Soul author Trisha Lewis. just published this article on tears. She says “But I soon saw these tears as a good thing — a healthy, loving release.”

Spot on.

I’m Happy To Make People Cry

The Rev. Ron Steed is an Episcopal Deacon in Southeast Connecticut and a chaplain at Lawrence & Memorial Hospital in New London, CT. He writes haiku and lyrical prose that he hopes will help others put the head and heart in right-relation.

Top writer in Art, Watercolor, Haiku, Sermons, Refresh the Soul Weekly, and Episcopal Church.

Click here to follow Refresh the Soul to stay updated with the latest!

Sermon: The Way of Tears and Fire was originally published in Refresh the Soul on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Finding transformational relationships in the chaos of the world

A sermon given at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Madison, CT, on Sunday, February 9, 2025, the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany¹

Rage and Narcissism

In 1980, during the summer before my senior year in college, the Navy sent me on a cruise aboard a submarine deployed in the Western Pacific. I met the boat in Guam when they arrived for repairs.

The next morning, I was with the Captain and officers in the wardroom to talk about the repair plan. The Captain and the Weapons Officer were having an energetic conversation about some preparations the Captain wanted to see, but the Weapons Officer wasn’t having it. Finally, in exasperation, the Weapons Officer spoke to the Captain with tone and attitude, “Oh-kaaaay Captain, if THAAAAT’s what you want to do….”

Until that moment, I had never seen a 40-year-old man explode in rage. The Captain crushed that man… completely… totally. And not just him. His explosion of rage was directed at all the uncomfortable officers in that room, as if to say, “If I tell you to do something, I’m not interested in your reluctance to do it or your bright ideas about how to do it better. I am the Captain, and you are not. End of story.”

In addition to learning that “tone and attitude” were probably arrows best left in one’s quiver, I discovered that this Captain was a narcissist. I had a front-row seat in a narcissist’s organization for the whole summer. In my subsequent career as a submarine officer, I found that my best moments were when I acted the exact opposite of that man, and my worst, least effective, and most shameful moments were when I acted a whole lot like him. I know narcissists when I see them now, and I know the kind of chaos they sow in organizations and the suffering they cause all around them.

Singularly Unimpressed

Chaos and suffering were precisely what happened in Judea in Jesus’ day. The Roman Emporer, always more mindful of his self-image than his subject’s welfare, had established a system of burdensome tariffs on the land, people, and goods produced in Judea. These tariffs made life in Judea nearly impossible for fishermen, farmers, and merchants. The rich, of course, found ways to curry favor with Rome and enrich themselves at another’s expense. And as is always the case where tariffs are concerned, their most significant impact was on the poor, like Peter and his fishing partners.

So when Jesus showed up with a crowd and preached from Peter’s boat, Peter’s heart was hard and unimpressed. Whatever Jesus said to the people was not enough to sway Peter.

As Jesus turned to Peter afterward and suggested that he “put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch,” Peter responded with tone and attitude. If I had been there, I would have waved my hands and stage-whispered, “No! No!” Luke’s gospel gives us a hint about what Peter might have said:

PETER: [with tone and attitude]: “Listen… Jesus… you’re a carpenter, right? Well, I’m a professional fisherman… have been since I was a boy. And me and my partners here have already been out there all night, fishing in that chaos of a lake, and I’m hear to tell you, there’s nothing to catch out there! Buy hey! You’re the Holy Man… so, sure… we’ll go out there and drop our nets. And people will see the kind of person you really are…”

I’ll note for the record that Jesus did not explode at this point, which might tell us something more about the kind of people who do.

Disconnection and Connection

What Peter experienced with that biblical haul of fish—with that over-the-top abundance caught out of the deep waters of chaos—was enough to bring him to his knees in shame, fear, and self-loathing. “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” This is a really interesting response to hear from an iron-age story.

Modern psychology ² tells us that our natural and healthiest response to stress is connection and social engagement — unless we fear rejection or ridicule when we reach out. That is what Peter thinks will happen with Jesus. After his tone and attitude, he expects Jesus to reject him. And I think it might be what Peter would have done to Jesus if their roles were reversed. So, rather than connect with Jesus, Peter disconnects, “Go away from me, Lord.”

But that’s not what Jesus does. Jesus connects with Peter in a tone of love and an attitude of transformation. Jesus responds to one of Peter’s deepest human needs, the most healing thing he could have done in that moment of stress—to connect and have a relationship. So, we have an abundance of fish mirrored with an abundance of connection. Both are miracles… both are over-the-top.

Jesus, it turns out, really knows a thing or two about fishing! Is it any wonder, then, that Peter and his partners walk away from everything right then and there? They walk away from grueling manual labor, from tariffs and emperors, from narcissism and poverty, toward this man who responded with connection.

Of course, we know what they could not have known at that moment, that what they joined was not any easier! It would still involve all of those things and crucifixion as well. But following Jesus is not about being easy. We know it will be cross-shaped but also deeply transformative and relational…and that’s the point.

The Heart-desire for Relationship

I want to draw a big, fat line under this point: our lives in this chaotic world depend on connection with God and one another. This transformative relationship with humanity is what God wants with every fiber of God’s being. God wanted it with Peter, just as he was, tone and attitude and all of it. God wants it with you and me, including all the parts of us that are embarrassed and ashamed.

There is nothing beyond God’s heart-desire for a relationship. There is no Gospel on the other side of this transformative relationship. God loves you and wants to be with you even when you make yourself hard to love. God demonstrated this by becoming human, experiencing all the microaggressions and shade that Peter and others would throw his way, and by being crucified. God could have given up on us at any point. God could have said, “Too much trouble!” God didn’t. That’s the miracle! God stayed with us until death and then resurrected to show that not even death could keep us apart.

The Chaos and Connection of Human Hearts

There is a second point I want to underscore here. In every Bible story, there is chaos, starting with Chapter 1. There is in this story, too. In the Bible, oceans, lakes, and rivers often symbolize chaos. When Jesus tells Peter to “put out into the deep water,” he’s sending Peter into chaos. We are meant to remember stories like this.

The human problem is in the chaos and disconnect of our hearts—every human heart. The solution is also there in the deep waters and in the connection of our hearts—every human heart. Out of the chaos of the deep came light. Out of the chaos of the Red Sea in Egypt came the People of God. Out of the chaos of the Jordan came the anointed Messiah Jesus. Out of the chaos of Lake Gennesaraet came the transformed Peter. Out of the chaos of illnesses came healing. Out of the chaos of crucifixion came the risen Christ. Out of the chaos of our times comes the Prince of Peace. Out of the chaos of our hearts comes transformation.

Turn then, my friends, toward the chaos of your hearts. Go into the deep waters and let down your nets, and you will haul up the abundance of God’s love from deep within. Open your hearts then, and give that love to your neighbor—the one who is close at hand.

Going Bravely into Dark and Chaotic Places

Since all this is about the heart and not the head, I don’t know quite where to send you to get the kind of heart transformation that Peter experienced. Here’s what I can say about my moments of transformation. I have found them in the chaos of human suffering and experienced them relationally with others.

For you, it might be the chaos of a fired co-worker who breaks your heart wide open. It might be the chaos of a frightened immigrant who sets your heart on fire. I met a patient the other day who broke mine wide open. It was the most gut-wrenching conversation I’ve had in two years of chaplaincy, but Jesus was right there in the middle. Transformation can be found in chaos, and it is deeply relational.

In times of chaos like we are experiencing now, everything we do as a church expresses this mutual longing for transformational connection. To God, to everyone, even to the ones who make it hard for us to like them, even to narcissists like my former Captain.

My hope is that the fullness of this worship will wash over you like a healing balm in these times. We come together to hear God’s word and proclaim God’s good news. We pray for ourselves and others. We own up to where we’ve missed the mark and exchange the peace with our neighbors. Then, we tell again the story of God’s connection with us, no matter what; we come to this table to be fed.

We go out into a very broken world, equipped by the Holy Spirit, full of the Word, good news, forgiveness, peace, and the presence of Jesus within us. We have what the world desperately wants; we are in a transformative relationship with the one who spoke light into being out of chaos.

May you bear that light bravely into dark and chaotic places with a tone of love and an attitude of transformation.

¹ Taken from Luke 5:1–11 (NRSV):

Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat.

When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” Simon answered, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.”

When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon.

Then Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.

² With gratitude for my friend Tyler Zabriskie who provided this idea during Bible Study.

Refresh the Soul writer Adventurous Soul Earthside talks about trusting your heart more than your head… That’s right up my alley!

Navigating Life’s Moments With Intuition

The Rev. Ron Steed is an Episcopal Deacon in Southeast Connecticut and a chaplain at Lawrence & Memorial Hospital in New London, CT. He writes haiku and lyrical prose that he hopes will help others put the head and heart in right-relation.

Top writer in Art, Watercolor, Haiku, Sermons, Refresh the Soul Weekly, and Episcopal Church.

Click here to follow Refresh the Soul to stay updated with the latest!

Sermon: With Tone and Attitude was originally published in Refresh the Soul on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Three plot twists in the gospel

A sermon given at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Madison, CT, on Sunday, January 12, 2024, the first Sunday of Epiphany¹

I am Your Father!

Way back in 1980, I was among those who fell hard for the Star Wars movies. In that year, the second film came out, The Empire Strikes Back. At the very height of the action, where Luke and Darth Vader are fighting it out, we get this shocking plot twist where Vader says, “Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father,” and Luke responds indignantly, “He told me enough! He told me you killed him!” “No,” Vader says, “I am your father.”

I was so not ready for that. I was filled with expectations, all right, but it wasn’t about that!

Now, I have to admit that in 1980, I didn’t exactly think about the Baptism of Jesus story as one having a similar plot twist, but it does.

Plot Twists

Luke tells us that “the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah” (Luke 3:15). John himself is full of expectation about the Messiah, imagining winnowing forks, threshing floors, and unquenchable fire. All of them were expecting a Messiah who would lead Israel to a great military victory over the Romans. There would be unquenchable fire, alright, in Rome!

What they got was a plot twist— three plots², each of them contradictory with one another and full of surprises that no one was expecting. I want to talk about these three Gospel narratives and where we might see them foreshadowed in this baptism story.

The Messiah of Salt & Light

The first story is about Jesus as Messiah. While there wasn’t a consistent job description for the Messiah, there were expectations that the Messiah would be the one to vindicate the People of Israel and either sit on the throne of David as King or make way for God himself to be Israel’s King. There was a prophecy in the book of Daniel about all that came to fullness in Jesus’ day, so people were looking for a Messiah, and the Romans would be his logical opponents.

Now, the story of the Messiah in the Gospels is one of victory and winning. It is about Jesus who comes with the power to restore Israel, to liberate Israel’s people from oppression, to vindicate and fulfill Israel’s purpose on Earth; not to dominate the world though, as many imagined, but to be the salt of the Earth… a light to enlighten the Gentiles. In other words, the surprise of the Messiah story is that it is not about raising an Army to crush the Romans but rather bringing God’s Kingdom to all the world through a people who would be the world’s salt and light.

In Luke’s baptism story, we see this foreshadowed in two ways. First, he is baptized along with his people. As Messiah, Jesus is the representative of his people; what is true of him is true of them. He is enacting symbolically this representative alignment. And second, Jesus is anointed Messiah by the Holy Spirit, in physical form, so that all can see. There was no doubt that it was Jesus and not John who was Israel’s Messiah.

There are two points I want to make here for modern readers. First, the term “Christ” is not a surname for Jesus like Smith or Jones, but rather the Greek title for Messiah. So, the Messiahship of Jesus the Christ is vital to his story.

Second, nothing about being the Messiah required the person to be divine. There were others, before and after Jesus, who claimed this title; none of them claimed divinity. Divinity is a different story.

This winning story of Jesus as Messiah runs through about half of Luke’s gospel until a second storyline develops.

Suffering Servant

The second surprising storyline in the Gospels is Jesus as the Suffering Servant in Isaiah. This is a story about losing. It is a story about conflict, punishment, and death. That there’s conflict is no surprise since people already in power are not so interested in anyone taking it from them, not even the Messiah. The surprise is that Jesus, who could crush his opponents, chooses not to but takes what they dish out to him. When we imagine that the purpose of God is to be with us no matter what, this is the story about the “no matter what” part.

If you’re unfamiliar with Isaiah’s suffering servant songs, please look them up. They are worth reading, and you will instantly see how well they converge with the story of Jesus. They seem thematic for what we read in the Gospels, particularly in the passion narratives.

No one imagined this. No one expected that Israel’s Messiah would willingly suffer in this way. It is such a counterintuitive story; it is just not how power gets exercised in the world. And yet, Jesus’ suffering is the heart of the passion narrative.

In Luke’s Baptism story, the Suffering Servant story gets foreshadowed in three ways:

First, baptism itself symbolically represents death and resurrection. When you entered the river where John was, John’s firm hands grasped you by the head and shoulders, forced your body completely under the water, and kept you there for a while. I imagine someone in that predicament, “How long will he hold me under? Will I drown?”

Finally, just as you might be convinced that John is killing you, he heaves you back up into the air, sputtering and taking in that fresh breath. That feels like death and resurrection, and it foreshadows this in the gospels. We domesticate baptism today by pouring water over a baby’s head, but now and then, one of those babies reminds us that symbolic death and actual death are not so far apart!

There’s more, though, in what the voice has to say about Jesus.

When God says, “You are my Son, the Beloved,” it might remind us of the only other place in the Bible when a son is called beloved, which is in the story of Abraham and his son, Isaac (Genesis 22). Here, God commands Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son, Isaac, only to stop Abraham just as he is about to plunge the knife into Isaac’s body. It’s not my favorite story. I don’t find the parallels between it and Jesus’ crucifixion helpful, and I wonder if Isaac spent the rest of his life in therapy with Daddy issues over that. Nevertheless, these words invoke a story of deep suffering.

Similarly, the entire Baptism scene is taken right from Isaiah 42:1 at the beginning of the first Suffering Servant song: “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations.” Well, that’s about as clear a reference as you can find in the Bible. So, there’s much in Luke’s account that foreshadows the Suffering Servant.

The Cosmic Jesus

The third surprising storyline is a cosmic one. The story of God Himself coming to Earth in the person of Jesus the Messiah and doing with God’s arm what we could not do for ourselves. This is a story of transformation and glory, and we find it throughout the gospels—in the changing of water to wine, when Jesus walks across the sea or stills the storm, when thousands get fed from a handful of food, when Jesus turns to dazzling light at the transfiguration, and of course, when He is resurrected and then ascended back across the veil. This is where we get the idea that Jesus is more than human; He is divine.

These are the stories of God’s strong desire to be with us no matter what… this is the “God with us” part.

In Luke’s Baptism story, all three members of God are present at the same time. This is a being so tightly relational that we call it God, so distinct that we call it the Trinity. Further, with the Holy Spirit’s presence over the waters of chaos, we are taken back to Genesis 1, where God speaks light into being. This is transformation and glory at the river Jordan.

Poles in a Tent

So there you have it—three surprising stories in one. The Messiah who wins through salt and light instead of armies, the Suffering Servant who loses but is with us no matter what, and the Cosmic One who transforms us with light and glory. All three are foreshadowed in Jesus’ Baptism. It might be best to see these stories not as contradictions but as poles in a tent. Sometimes, we are closer to one or two of these in the fabric of the narrative than with another, but all three are always present, and all three stories are in the gospel.

All three are part of our lives, too. Jesus calls us to be salt and light in a world that desperately needs both. We are called to take up our own cross and follow Jesus, and we experience God’s transformation and glory throughout our lives, sometimes with subtlety, sometimes with great power. The fabric of our lives is woven with the same three polarities.

In a moment, we are going to renew our baptismal vows. Look for these three stories in them; they are not hard to find. We will renew our trust in the cosmic Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and in the same breath, we will talk of suffering at the hands of Pontius Pilot. We will follow the Messiah by proclaiming his good news and follow the Apostles in the practices they learned from the Messiah, which are practices of salt and light. We will vow to resist evil, repent from sin, serve Christ in our neighbors, strive for justice, peace, dignity, and protect and renew the Earth. All of these are things that many lack and suffer as a result, including ourselves.

May your Epiphany season be one of exploring what it means for God to be with us no matter what. May you be filled with expectations, and may your expectations be filled with discovery and surprise. And, of course, may the Force be with you!

¹ Taken from Luke 3:15–17, 21–22 (NRSV):

As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

² Some themes in this meditation are derived from Wells, S. (2009, January 14). Sunday Sermon — Jesus’ Inauguration Day — Sam Wells. YouTube.

Refresh the Soul writer Duncan Pond writes this meditation with such counterintuitive themes: death, wholeness, woundedness, sleeping, harvest… it is like Thomas Merton talks about; there is “in all visible things, a hidden wholeness”…

The Wounded Soul — The Hole in the Whole

The Rev. Ron Steed is an Episcopal Deacon in Southeast Connecticut and a chaplain at Lawrence & Memorial Hospital in New London, CT. He writes haiku and lyrical prose that he hopes will help others put the head and heart in right-relation.

Top writer in Art, Watercolor, Haiku, Sermons, Refresh the Soul Weekly, and Episcopal Church.

Click here to follow Refresh the Soul to stay updated with the latest!

Sermon: What Obi-Wan Never Told was originally published in Refresh the Soul on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Things that scare me in 2025…

Nancy Blackman, MASF, in Writing Prompt 58, asks, “What is one thing that scares you (in a good way) that would be a good challenge for 2025?” This put me in a mind of growth edges, those difficult and scary places where we are invited to grow and change. I have them… I bet you do, too.

A Knot in the Stomach

A growth edge happens when an unconscious judgment runs ahead of a held conviction. The result is an uneasy feeling that something regarded as known and settled is not so settled anymore. It’s like the inside me, and the outside me are no longer aligned.

I know I’ve encountered a growth edge when I say something without the confidence I once felt or with a sense that it no longer seems true. Or maybe I do things I’ve always done with a knot in my stomach that didn’t used to be there. At first, I might not notice these feelings or feel that I’m mistaken, but over time, they can’t be ignored.

Doubt

Growth edges are closely linked with doubt, and no one has written more keenly about doubt than John Patrick Shanley in the preface to his play “Doubt: A Parable.” ¹ In his preface, John talks about the subtle (and sometimes violent) feelings that doubt gives us:

Let me ask you. Have you ever held a position in an argument past the point of comfort? Have you ever defended a way of life you were on the verge of exhausting? Have you ever given service to a creed you no longer utterly believed? Have you ever told a girl you loved her and felt the faint nausea of eroding conviction? I have. That’s an interesting moment….

That’s the feeling of a growth edge, right there: discomfort, exhaustion, disbelief, “the faint nausea of eroding conviction.” Oh yes, I’ve felt that!

Where does this come from? That’s the scary part! These feelings of doubt well-up within me, seemingly out of nowhere, but there’s more, and it’s way worse…

It is Doubt (so often experienced initially as weakness) that changes things. When a man feels unsteady, when he falters, when hard-won knowledge evaporates before his eyes, he’s on the verge of growth. The subtle or violent reconciliation of the outer person and the inner core often seem at first like a mistake, like you’ve gone the wrong way and you’re lost.

These feelings are awful: weakness, evaporation, “subtle or violent reconciliation,” mistake, and loss. These are the hard feelings that bring me to my knees. This is more than just a nagging suspicion that something is wrong; this is the feeling that I am wrong, as a person.

Signs & Signals

Yet… did you notice something in what he said? “…when hard-won knowledge evaporates before his eyes, he’s on the verge of growth.” Right there… just when things feel like a disaster, like something is wrong with me at the core, it turns out that I am on the very cusp of growth. That’s the growth edge.

But this is just emotion longing for the familiar. Life happens when the tectonic power of your speechless soul breaks through the dead habits of the mind. Doubt is nothing less than an opportunity to reenter the Present.

Ahhh… there it is. These emotions are just a sign and signal of my baggage… my desire to rest in familiar “dead habits of the mind.” John tells us that the familiar is not life and that the soul has “tectonic power.” That’s what makes growth edges so terrifying and scary. Their soul power is not small but planetary, and it moves us. Slowly, like the continents, but on the move with forces we can’t imagine. It’s like peering over the edge of a great abyss!

Doubt requires more courage than conviction does, and more energy; because conviction is a resting place and doubt is infinite — it is a passionate exercise.

Courage and energy are needed to walk along the knife edge of my growing places. Conviction is rest; growth is passion.

Are growth edges scary for me? Oh yes, they are! That’s why courage, energy, and passion are needed.

May 2025 be for you and for me a year of holy discomfort… a year where we find our emotions unsettled and eroding, longing for the familiar, dead habits of the mind. May we see these emotions for what they are: signposts and signals of growth edges. May we take counsel from these emotions, even when they seem like mistakes at first, and reach deep into our soul for courage, energy, passion for growth, and new direction… toward living life in the present and with tectonic power.

¹ All quotes from John Patrick Shanley’s preface to “doubt.” Commonweal Theatre. (2024, August 22).

As if to punctuate this meditation with a massive exclamation point, Refresh the Soul writer Adventurous Soul Earthside talks about discomfort at a signal for future growth! “The more you do things that make you uncomfortable (scared, anxious), the more likely you will be to take risks to move forward in life!”

Discomfort is Not the Enemy

The Rev. Ron Steed is an Episcopal Deacon in Southeast Connecticut and a chaplain at Lawrence & Memorial Hospital in New London, CT. He writes haiku and lyrical prose that he hopes will help others put the head and heart in right-relation.

Top writer in Art, Watercolor, Haiku, Sermons, Refresh the Soul Weekly, and Episcopal Church.

Click here to follow Refresh the Soul to stay updated with the latest!

Navigating My Growth Edges was originally published in Refresh the Soul on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.