God Is in the Poor
Lections: The Fifth Sunday After the Epiphany , AD 2026 A Homily: Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great. Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. I was raised in a Pennsylvania German Lutheran congregation that valued education, worship, and active service at every stage of life. It was a place where I felt safe to ask any question, even more so than at school. A place both of reverence and of mirth. My family’s was a deeply healthy religion: love of God, love of learning, love of neighbor. And to this day I must continually remind myself, to my own dismay, that many if not most American Christians have had a very different experience of religion. “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ,” wrote Frederick Douglass, “I recognize the widest possible difference.” The one thing that Jesus cannot seem to stomach, in our Gospel narratives, is hypocrisy—especially the hypocrisy of...
