Love Wins

Homily for
The Seventh Sunday of Easter
Acts 1:6-14

By The Rev. Isaac Everett
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The closest I ever came to leaving The Episcopal Church

  was when I learned how our church

  responded to the Civil War.

I was taking a church history and polity class

  as part of my preparation for priesthood,

and I'll be honest —

  my road to becoming an Episcopalian

    had not been an easy one.

I'd started working for the Episcopal Church in New York City

  as a church musician back in 2001,

    and it was definitely not love at first sight.

The worship felt alien,

  the hierarchy felt opulent,

    and the culture felt… self-satisfied.

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But gradually, slowly,

  I discovered what the Anglican tradition has to offer.

I realized there was much to love.

And after fourteen years of working for the church —

  fourteen years of slow, reluctant circling around its edges —

I realized this is where God had planted me.

  It was time to put down roots and grow.

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So I was received into the Episcopal Church.

  A year later, I became a postulant for the priesthood.

And then… I took this class.

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If you're not familiar with the history:

  our church split during the Civil War,

like many denominations with significant membership

  in both North and South.

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The Southern dioceses formed

  the Protestant Episcopal Church

    in the Confederate States of America,

and one of the first things they did

  was release a pastoral letter in 1862 —

affirming the institution of slavery

  as a sacred trust

    and a missionary opportunity.

Slaveholding, they wrote,

  was a duty of Christian stewardship.

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So you'd think the northern church responded

  with a letter condemning slavery —

the way the Congregationalists did,

  the way the Quakers did,

    the way the Unitarians did.

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No.

Our response was to lament the split

  and affirm that church unity

    mattered more than earthly politics.

We reduced the enslavement of human beings

  to "politics."

We cared more about keeping the peace,

  more about preserving our big-tent institution,

than we cared about the moral atrocities

  being done to enslaved people.

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I remember sitting there reading all this, thinking:

  This is why I waited so long.

    Maybe I shouldn't have become Episcopalian.

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That memory came back to me last week,

  traveling in South Africa with my mother.

We spent a day at the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg —

  an absolutely extraordinary experience.

The museum tells the story chronologically:

  pre-colonial history,

the arrival of the Dutch and the English,

  the institution of segregation,

    and its hardening into the system of apartheid.

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Walking through decade after decade,

  I kept asking myself:

    what was the church doing through all this?

And the answer was, again, disappointing —

  and painfully familiar.

There were Christians on every side,

  Christians in the middle,

    Christians who just wanted to quietly preserve the church.

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Anglicans tended to oppose apartheid.

The Dutch Reformed supported it

  aggressively, theologically, enthusiastically.

Everyone had scripture.

  Everyone had arguments.

And the followers of Jesus had no coherent,

  unified moral voice to offer the world.

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It’s not just two failures.

  It’s a pattern.

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What was the church doing during Nazi Germany?

  What was the church doing during segregation?

What was the church doing

  during the displacement of Indigenous Americans?

Sometimes the answer is inspiring.

  And sometimes… it is not.

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So I find myself wondering

  what future generations will think,

years from now,

  when they open their history books and ask:

What was the church doing in 2026?

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What did the church do

  when voting rights were gutted?

What did the church do

  when migrants were detained without due process?

What did the church do

  when brutally destructive wars of choice

    were waged in our name?

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The thought that keeps haunting me is this:

  we are the ones who will write the answer to that question.

The church has been entrusted to us.

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I wonder if the disciples felt that weight,

  standing on that hillside,

    watching Jesus leave.

They certainly weren't ready —

  even at the last moment,

    they were still asking him:

"Is this the time when you will restore the Kingdom?"

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Still expecting him to fix things.

Still looking for the intervention

  that would make the hard choices unnecessary.

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And Jesus redirects them —

  gently, but clearly.

You're asking the wrong question.

  The question is what you will do,

when the power of the Holy Spirit comes upon you.

And then he's gone.

  Ascended into a cloud.

And they stand there, staring skyward —

  in sadness, perhaps, or shock,

or simply the silence of people

  who don't know what comes next.

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Until two angels ask a pointed question:

  "People of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?"

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Their gaze is redirected earthward.

  Toward Jerusalem.

Toward Judea and Samaria.

  Toward all the ends of the earth.

This is the moment the story of Jesus ends

  and the story of us begins.

The mantle has been passed.

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But if they feel unprepared,

  they are not unprepared.

Three years of learning, listening,

  healing, hiding,

    working wonders and making mistakes —

they have been given everything they need.

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And we, too, have been prepared for Ascension Day.

We began in Advent,

  sitting with the darkness,

naming our longings and our fears,

  singing songs of waiting and prayers for deliverance.

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At Christmas, hope was born —

  and with it,

the joy of knowing

  that light can actually enter the world.

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Epiphany showed us the way of Jesus:

  that another world,

    a divine world,

is not only possible,

  it is already here

for those with the eyes to see it

  and the courage to dwell in it.

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Lent called us to honest reckoning —

  taking stock of our limitations,

confronting the things inside us

  that keep us from stepping fully into the life Christ intends.

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And Easter gave us the one thing

  we cannot manufacture on our own:

    the certainty that love wins.

That life defeats death.

  That even the most powerful empire on earth

    could not keep one man in the grave.

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All of that was for something.

All of it led us here —

  to this hilltop,

to this question of who we are

  and what we will do,

as Jesus places his ministry into our hands.

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"People of Galilee,

  why do you stand looking up toward heaven?"

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Because we are the ones

  who will now speak for the Father of orphans

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