sermons
Summer at Reservoir
Breathlaughter & Truthquake
Ivy Anthony
Jul 13, 2025
Good morning everyone — and happy July, I hope you enjoyed last Sunday doing whatever it is you find yourself doing instead of being in this Sanctuary! I often forget how full the month of June is here at Reservoir. We had Pride Service and Juneteenth service and appreciation parties for volunteers and the last week of June was of course A FULL week of SOCCER NIGHTS! This is our 17th year of being a part of Soccer Nights — a free soccer camp for 1st – 8th graders in the community. One of the sure fire ways over the years that I’ve experienced the love of God, the gift of community and the joy of living…a week of Beloved Community visible across soccer fields.
June for me on a personal note was also very full of good celebratory things — our daughter Mae, graduated high school — wooo! Our son, Reed turned 17. We got to be a part of our niece’s wedding in Virginia — and right in the middle of June my husband Scott finished his last round of scheduled chemo for now. — Wooo! (*thanks for all your prayers, food, hugs, texts and memes — I’ve gotten to know so many of you on a deeper level because of the memes you’ve sent!).
June felt like a culmination of an intense season of holding and carrying and trying to remember to breathe and those celebratory markers offered to me the permission to feel: You’re here. It’s done, for now.
So naturally, I thought:
“Well, I should definitely volunteer for Soccer Nights, then!”
And I did, admittedly at the very last minute. I checked off the box, “I would like to volunteer for ‘logistics’ (that felt like the appropriate amount of energy I could put out) and my assignment came through that evening as Head Coach (!) — this felt like a slightly different lift of energy.
Nevertheless, with Coach Makayla’s assistance, we “coached” 8, 1st and 2nd graders. Which mostly consisted of me constantly counting to make sure everyone was actually on the field. 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8. Every few seconds I would say to Coach Makayla,
“where is Solyanna? Where is Ebenezer? Where is Omaid?”
Now the beauty of this chaos — was that it kept my head up — scanning the field, the stands, the sidelines for our 3 little wanderers who have the same color shirt on as 300 other players…
And to be able to take in this vista of an abundance of humanity — 29 countries of origin, many religions, races, and socioeconomic levels — all playing soccer, running wildly, families sharing meals on blankets and tea. Tiny little siblings toddling out in the midst of scrimmages (!) — it was all an abundance of goodness to my Spirit. Like a FULL, LONG breath of Goodness that I hadn’t taken in for awhile. There’s that verse in Hebrews that says something like,
‘and when everything is shaken through only truth and goodness remain.’
That’s what it felt like.
And after months of feeling kind of like being in a stormy season, it felt like laughter was just rumbling and echoing around the field and through my body and just could go on and on and on.. (along with sweat of course — lots and lots of sweat, my gosh it was so hot!))
Joy — kind of unceasing….
It reminded me of something I once heard the writer Jason Reynolds say…
Which we’ll get to in just a moment after we pray together, join me:
Prayer
Oh Steady God, cultivate within us attentive tenderness. Guide our attention spans to land on what is honest, and good and true of you. Align us, O God, that we might embody what truly sustains our hearts and souls for this thing called life. Come Spirit of God and bless our love for one another, and bless us with the abundant love you have for us — love that never runs out.
Jason Reynolds and “Breathlaughter” (Source: onbeing.org)
Jason Reynolds is a poet and a writer of young adult novels. He’s written Ghost and Long Way Down. And at the invitation of Ibram X. Kendi wrote the YA companion to Stamped from the Beginning. He’s known for his belief in kids. In never talking down to them, but regarding them as whole, complex individuals, not “half-formed beings.”
Jason Reynolds talks about the alchemy of language –how words lined up just so can spark something new. And so he’s in the habit of creating new words, made-up words. He does this with kids — invites them to create synonyms for words they have heard many times to help them navigate identity and grief.
He says if you think of something like freedom. What are the synonyms that come to mind? He thinks of “breath” and “laughter.” And so he puts them together, BREATHLAUGHTER. When he thinks of breath, he thinks of life — and of how it doesn’t stop. Of how when you exhale, what comes out of your mouth spreads and spreads and spreads. It goes and goes and goes and goes. Of how when we breathe out or breathe in — it’s a constant recycling of energy.
And so he says,
“what if laughter could also be recycled in that way? What if it could just go? And ‘what if freedom was like that?’….That is freedom, to me, if it could just go and go and go and go and go — if it could be the ripple in the water. To me, that feels free.”
Breathlaughter – even when it’s hard, even when you’re tired, even when the world remains tumultuous, dangerous and inequitable.
That word, breathlaughter stuck with me. It feels like a Spirit-filled- authored- action. In some ways like prayer. Prayer made flesh/embodied. It’s what I experienced at Soccer Nights – breathlaughter —a living prayer in motion — for goodness and joy to ripple through without ceasing, through each meaningful, small moment of connection.
Embodied prayer.
And not surprisingly Jason Reynolds also has some thoughts on prayer — how do we open up that word PRAYER to hold MORE than we might often regard it to. How is it alchemized, how does it spark something that we’ve forgotten or laid by the side — in the way we speak of it, regard prayer, engage prayer, LIVE OUT prayer.
And the way he explains it — especially through the story of caring for his mother — is moving to me. So I want to show you a short video clip where he shares this in his own words.
CLIP (1:15)
Prayer can’t just be asking.
I mean it can be asking — but it can be more than asking!
There has to be embodiment — a turning toward each other, with attentiveness, with dignity, with care. Not out of obligation, but out of love. And yes, that love may cost us something — our sense of “security”, certainty, comfort..it might be messy.
But it situates US as part of the prayer. Saying,
“here I am. Let me be a living part of this prayer – flesh embodied.”
Here in our body, is where the Spirit begins to stir. Right? It’s where we get a twinge if something feels honoring and true, and moving and powerful — and we also get feedback from the Spirit if something doesn’t feel right, feels unjust… Our bodies are the dwelling place of the Spirit’s presence, guiding us toward truth and love.
“If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.”
So I want to invite you to listen to Jesus’ words this morning — to listen beyond the words that maybe you’ve heard many times, beyond a sense of moral platitudes — but unto a bold call to live counterculturally, to consider what it means from your social location to be a living prayer in a world that desperately needs embodied justice and healing.
Luke 6:20-26 (New International Version)
20 Looking at his disciples, he said:
“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
21 Blessed are you who hunger now,
for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.22 Blessed are you when people hate you,
when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man.23 “Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven. For that is how their ancestors treated the prophets.
24 “But woe to you who are rich,
for you have already received your comfort.
25 Woe to you who are well fed now,
for you will go hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now,
for you will mourn and weep.
26 Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you,
for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.
Now this passage is known as Jesus’s “Sermon on the Plain.” Jesus has just chosen his 12 apostles and he steps down to a level place amid a large, diverse crowd—and it is the first major, public time where Jesus exposes the values of God’s Kindom and challenges by not just teaching, but inviting people to follow Jesus, and LIVE and HEAL alongside one another.
“Now the first century Jewish understanding of the word ‘blessed’ referred to God’s special favor. It was a way of saying “God’s on your side.” Of course, Jesus loves everybody. That’s one of the reasons he’s so great. But when he has the opportunity to announce who God favors he doesn’t say “You’re all blessed.” Jesus only announces God’s favor to the poor, hungry, weeping, hated, excluded, reviled, and defamed communities.
The way Jesus used the word ‘poor’ is also different from how it’s commonly used today. Biblical scholar Bruce J. Malina explains that, from the ancient Mediterranean perspective, the poor are those
“who cannot maintain their inherited status due to circumstances that befall them and their family, such as debt, LOSS OF WORK, being in a foreign land, sickness, death (widow), or some personal physical accident. Rather than a fixed social class, poverty functioned as “a sort of revolving class” — a shifting experience marked by vulnerability and instability. Malina further clarifies that day laborers, landless peasants, and beggars were not considered poor simply because of a lack of money, but because of “the precariousness of such a person’s social position.” In other words, to be poor was to be at risk — socially, economically, communally. (Source: enfleshed.com)
*The stories we heard in our collective, public prayer time —the real, vulnerable, raw experiences of people’s lives — people that are sitting next to you right now. Those stories that hold loss and injustice aren’t far away; they are here, close to us, part of our community.
And maybe that’s part of the point of Jesus’ radical blessings — to awaken us to what Beloved Community really is.
During the lifetime of Jesus and those that heard his words the church was not yet an institution or structural grouping of common practices and beliefs. The church was a living organism that communicated the good news of Jesus, through relationships. (Richard Rohr)
“In the same vein Jesus also used the word ‘rich’ differently from how we commonly do. In the ancient Mediterranean context, the “rich” were not simply those with wealth but those who had gained it through exploitation. Malina explains that wealth was assumed to have been amassed by “depriving others; defrauding and eliminating others; prospering by having others become wretched, pitiable, ill, blind, and naked.” The rich, then, were grouped alongside those who wielded power for vainglory, like kings and generals, and those who overstepped social boundaries. The “rich” are not just the wealthy, but those whose comfort comes at the cost of others. (Source: enfleshed.com)
Jesus offers a radical reordering of everything we think we know about who matters and why.
It is why as a church we seek to embody these values as well. Freedom — breathlaugher — is only achieved through prioritizing the needs of the poor and oppressed. We are all set free when the oppressed are free. From this perspective we don’t “bless the poor” by giving them what they need. We give the poor what they need because they are blessed. (enfleshed.com)
When Jesus blesses those who are marginalized, he’s inviting us into a prayer that is active and incarnational — a prayer that refuses to separate faith from action, from tangible love. It’s the kind of prayer that shows up in the thru-line of HOW WE LIVE. The meals shared with neighbors, the hands that hold each other through grief, the voices that stand up when dignity is denied. This prayer lives in the messy, beautiful reality of human life — It isn’t just a list of who’s blessed. It’s a seismic reversal — a quake of sorts…
Jesus didn’t speak these words from a distance. He was surrounded by crowds desperate not only for teaching but for healing — for touch, for restoration, for wholeness.
Healing for Jesus was and IS deeply relational, a subversion of the systems that exclude and divide. It wasn’t/it isn’t only about curing physical bodies but about restoring people to community, repairing the fractures in society — being, as the prophet Isaiah put it, “repairers of the breach,” loosing the bands of wickedness, undoing the yoke of oppression.
I heard Reverend William Barber speak a few years ago in Jamaica Plain and he said,
“The Spirit does not just come to comfort. The Spirit comes to quarrel with every injustice….
Sometimes the Spirit stirs in us a holy unrest.
That homing device within us — the Spirit of God goes off when something isn’t right when injustice is prowling.
The truth that lives within us at our core — quakes when in the face of injustice. We can feel it. It’s a refusal to accept any diminishment of human dignity.
And that quarrel, that divine discontent, is part of our healing too.
Because when we participate in the Spirit’s quarrel — when we stand alongside the oppressed, when we mend what’s been torn — we’re not just offering healing to others. We too are being healed. We become living prayers, breathing agents of God’s justice and love in the world that hopefully can go on and on and on and on. .. . .
I’ve been trying to give language to this feeling — this inner shift when the Spirit quarrels with injustice. Trying, as Jason Reynolds models, to do a little word alchemy — to shape a word big enough to hold that sacred, holy ache.
Because I’ve felt it, you know? Maybe you have too —
personally, familially, collectively, organizationally, nationally, globally.
And the word I’ve come to is:
Truthquake.
The two summers before my grandmother died of MS, I stayed with her –so she wouldn’t be alone at night. From my earliest memory she was in a wheelchair. And I would unplug the toaster at night, and lock the doors, and get her water.
I got to know her more those two years — her humor in the face of such suffering and constraint. Her joy at sitting in the sun. Asking me to put lotion on her legs that had long lost feeling and function. If I had had the word then — “breathlaughter” would have felt like an accurate descriptor of our times together — a freedom of spirit that she invited me into — that still stays in my lungs (especially in tough moments today).
Being close to her, caring for her — I also saw how systems were failing her. Systems meant to support her were not holding her.
Her aging body.
Her fragile health.
The bureaucracy she had to navigate just to access basic care.
The way our society regards the elderly, the disabled, the ones who no longer “produce.”
There’s the truthquake.
The Spirit stirred in me, saying: This is so messed up. This isn’t good and true.
And the best I could do at the time was care for her, honor her dignity, — hand her her clip on earrings and put sunscreen on her legs… bridge the gap….
That truthquake isn’t just private—it trembles in all the systems that fail the marginalized and the vulnerable.
It echoes in the loss of healthcare for millions,
Through the rolling back of civil rights, reproductive rights, trans rights —
When ICE shows up at someone’s home, in the streets, at their workplace — and detains them without reason.
The truthquake is communal.
The Spirit quarrels and tries to shake up the world to bring truth and justice.
And the Spirit shakes within us.
The spirit is not neutral.
The gospel is not indifferent.
And asks us not to be either.
I want to close today with a story from the Gospel of John, Chapter 6, I’m not going to put the whole chapter on the screens, but it may be familiar to you.
In fact, we often hear this chapter as two separate stories — the feeding of the five thousand, and the storm on the sea — but it’s actually one continuous account. One day in the life of being human. One day in the life of following Jesus.
The first part of the story takes place on a hillside, with thousands of people. Many of them hungry. A small boy offers a few loaves and fishes and Jesus blesses, breaks, and shares. And everyone is fed. Full. With baskets of leftovers to spare. There’s laughter. I imagine it as a sunny day, the disciples bearing witness to a Spirit of freedom. Abundance. Provision.
The sun sets, the crowds leave, and the disciples descend from the hillside into the dark to the shore.
They get into a boat — something familiar (for many of them fisherman) — but the waters turn. The storm rolls in. The wind rises. And they are terrified. And they feel alone.
The same disciples who had just handed out basket after basket of abundance — with Jesus, now can’t even see what’s ahead of them. Everything once steady is now unsettled, unmoored. They cannot locate Jesus….
The very definition of injustice for me is an inability to locate Jesus. Where there is an absence , a betrayal of the Beatitudes — the radical values Jesus affirmed…… a toxic microclimate threatening to overtake Beloved Community, the kindom of God within our reach.
Sometimes life is like that, isn’t it?
Abundance and injustice. Joy and weeping.
Breathlaughter and truthquake — in a single day.
Moments of joy that leave us full, followed by waves that leave us feeling sick and empty….wondering if goodness and truth really do remain or not?
Jesus, though, does come into view for those disciples and he says, “It is I.”
NOT always that clearly — like an audible voice saying, “It is I”….
But sometimes I sense that presence when I ASK in prayer.
And sometimes I get a sense of that when I ACT in prayer.
Sometimes I hear it in the belly-laughter of five-year-old year old running across the soccer nights field (or on my street),
And sometimes I hear it in the outraged voices that say, “this. is. not. Fair.”
Sometimes I feel it when I see a hummingbird.
And sometimes I hear it in the echo of a chemo bell traveling down the hallway….
Sometimes God’s presence feels familiar and warm and close and embodied.
And sometimes it feels ghost-like.
And yet like breath, like laughter, like truth, like quaking the presence of God ripples throughout all of our days and goes and goes and goes and goes through us, and with us and among us and even in spite of us.
May your days this summer embody both breathlaughter and truthquake. An outpouring of joy with a rumble of justice – the most holy of prayers.