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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.
He will not cry or lift up his voice,
or make it heard in the street;
a bruised reed he will not break,
and a dimly burning wick he will not quench;
he will faithfully bring forth justice.
He will not grow faint or be crushed
until he has established justice in the earth;
and the coastlands wait for his teaching.
I would like to sit quietly, in a room. That is a New Year’s resolution, I suppose, but more accurately it is a lifelong aspiration. It is a plank in my intentional Rule of Life, my Way of Life. When I see others doing it, I admire their maturity and integrity. I want to be the kind of person who can simply sit quietly in a room. I am glad I have a job that asks me to practice doing exactly that, every week.
The march of evil and violence overtaking our nation relies on noisy spectacle: decapitate a nation’s leadership with no plan for what to do next, then threaten to violently seize territory from a NATO ally, then terrorize a high school and murder a woman in her car, then gloat with macho bluster in a viral interview, saying, “...We live in… the real world… that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” These actions and words are all profoundly unchristian and unethical and even monstrous, but mostly it’s all just noisy spectacle. It’s intended to keep us roiled and riled, exhausted, tense, and finally desperate.
I find all of it maddening, sickening, enraging, disgusting, revolting, agonizing. My friend Mark, a native of Minneapolis, has been apoplectic with rage this week, posting daily on social media, echoing the mayor of Minneapolis in his demand that ICE “get the f— out.” I have lived in Minneapolis. I have family there. I still have one niece young enough to attend high school there. I understand and share Mark’s outrage.
Winter-hardy Minnesotans don’t cancel school often. But my niece got a couple of “snow days” last week, not because of weather, but because the Minneapolis schools needed to protect the children in their care from the federal government. That’s where we are right now. My brother John — my niece’s father — texted wryly to our sibling group, “[These are] not the kind of snow days you would hope for.”
But, as outraged as I feel, I really mean it: I want to be the kind of person who can sit quietly in a room. I don’t want to be tossed about, at the mercy of the chaos agents. I quickly feel nauseated by the upheaval. I can barely look at images of certain federal employees, and find it even harder to watch videos of their violent crimes, videos of them murdering a young mother, videos of them tearing children from mothers and fathers. “The collective ache of mothers this week is palpable,” one of the members of this parish posted yesterday. I think we all know that ache.
So, sitting quietly in a room: maybe it will feel like a dream come true, if only for a few minutes. To stop, to breathe, to feel your heart rate slow, to let your body metabolize all the stress hormones zapping through your blood.
But there are some problems with sitting quietly in a room. There are personal problems, and vocational problems.
Here are some personal ones, for me. When I sit quietly, I sometimes am overwhelmed with debilitating fatigue. I just want to sleep. Or I am buffeted by suppressed feelings of rage or anguish, pushing against my lifelong habit of enduring everything with stoic steadiness. There’s a part of my personality that likes to take over when I’m feeling hard and painful feelings: I call her Queen Elizabeth the Third. No doubt most of you have met her, when I’m striding sternly up and down the decks of this ship. “Duty first, self second,” she teaches, full of the self-reliant, latchkey-kid wisdom of Generation X. “One does not wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve,” she proclaims. Queen Elizabeth the Third doesn’t like it when I sit quietly. She prefers I stay up, and stay busy.
Then there are the intrusive thoughts. Do you hear those? “You’re not doing enough,” one of them says. (That voice is not wrong.) “Why bother doing anything?” says another particularly nihilistic voice. Another friend of mine told me that her Gen Z daughter wonders rhetorically why her mother would expect her to feel hopeful about the future, with the world in such endless, outrageous turmoil. If we sit quietly in a room, we are prone to hearing these intrusive voices.
And then there are the vocational problems that arise when we sit quietly in a room. When we stop and rest, when we breathe and listen, God gives us work to do. In the Good News we heard today, Jesus pauses quietly in a river — in his case, the room in which he sits quietly is the Jordan River, the countryside around it, the cruel empire crushing that whole region, and even the whole cosmos itself — and when Jesus pauses there and gets quiet, he hears God’s voice. God declares that Jesus is God’s Son, the Beloved. But this is not just an empty honorific: Jesus is sent on a mission.
And so, in turn, are we. Our lengthy silences in this liturgy are not just moments of Zen, sweet time to just bliss out in serene contemplation of the woodwork in here, or the candles, or the billowing incense. Our silence is an opening, a vulnerability, to God’s call to us, God’s instructions, God’s marching orders.
In a few moments we will interrupt our sitting quietly in this room by standing and reaffirming our baptismal vows. These vows are an acceptance of mission, a “Yes” to the call from God that arrives uncomfortably on our hearts and minds in moments of gentle yet dreadful silence. The mission of Jesus claimed his life. When we follow him, we say yes to entering the fray, to putting ourselves in harm’s way, to joining those anguished parents whose children are in mortal peril, to drawing alongside school kids and teachers and parents who remember their city before it was invaded by their own government.
So: the silence is challenging; the silence is daunting.
But in all this personal struggle and vocational challenge, we do not necessarily need to turn into brash warriors. Now, some of us do shout loudly, and often, as prophets of the Holy One, and God blesses that cacophony! Shout it out! But Holy Baptism also forms us into peacemakers, into skillful allies, into quiet yet effective servants like the one that Isaiah sings about. Isaiah’s song is worth singing yet again:
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.
He will not cry or lift up his voice,
or make it heard in the street;
a bruised reed he will not break,
and a dimly burning wick he will not quench;
he will faithfully bring forth justice.
He will not grow faint or be crushed
until he has established justice in the earth;
and the coastlands wait for his teaching.
This is our calling, our identity, and our hope. As we once again are showered today with baptismal waters, we may just hear God’s affirmation of us as beloved of God, but also hear the call, the challenge, the great daunting task to which God sets us: to be quiet yet effective, merciful yet ferocious leaders, advocates, and healers.
Joseph Fasano, a contemporary American poet, evokes for me this call, this identity: a call and identity that last week cost Renee Nicole Good her life. Fasano did not compose his poem specifically for the community of the baptized, but I will close with it, and then let you return to yet another time of daunting silence. We will once again be encouraged to sit quietly in this room. Here is Joseph Fasano’s poem, titled The Healers:
The Healers
You can hear them
moving among the ruins,
hear them by their silence in the noisy crowds.
You can see them, opening
their little bags, opening
the shrapneled hearts of strangers,
crouching before the body of a child
to lean down and whisper her a story,
a story in which what's happening
is not what's happening.
They mend; they stitch; they carry.
They work; they weep; they lose.
And when nothing can be done
among the rubble,
they kneel there as the fires fall around them
and they cradle the face
of the dying,
the life that is trying
to speak to them,
the life that whispers, listen,
and they do.
***
Preached on the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord (Year A), January 11, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Isaiah 42:1-9
Psalm 29
Acts 10:34-43
Matthew 3:13-17