Sermon | Dr. Samuel Ernest | June 28, 2026
Proper 8, Year A, Track 2
Trinity on the Green
America, America Sermon Series
Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass
“Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity / When I give I give myself.”
– Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Good morning! I’m Samuel Ernest. I bring greetings from St. PJ’s in Wooster Square, where I worship. Thank you to Rev. Luk and Rev. Heidi for inviting me to preach this morning and to all of you for having me. It is a pleasure to be here.
I just received my doctorate in theology from Yale, and I am starting a publishing company for gay/queer/trans theology and literature called Homodoxy, to preserve some of the writing I’ve found and to uplift new voices.
In part because I’m starting a press, this story has stuck with me:
This week, eight people who participated in a protest of the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Texas were sentenced to a total of over 450 years in prison. During the initial arrests, one protestor, Maricela Rueda called her husband at home, Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada, to warn him that ICE might come knocking. Daniel, who was not even at the protest, was sentenced to 30 years in prison for transporting a box of anti-fascist publications from one house to another. Because he moved a box of texts that are protected under the first amendment, the government considers him a domestic terrorist. I don’t know about you, but I own plenty of books that are critical of authoritarian rule.
One of them is the Bible. So, let us turn to scripture.
In Jeremiah, we witness an exchange between two prophets: Hananiah and Jeremiah. Judah is perpetually rocked by turmoil, always subservient to a neighboring empire, the Assyrians and then the Babylonians. Zedekiah is now king of Judah. The Lord has told Jeremiah to wear a yoke and tell Zedekiah to submit to King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon until the time comes for Babylon to fall.
Hananiah prophesies the fall of Babylon, but he is early. Hananiah says the yoke Nebuchadnezzar has put on Judah is broken, what has been taken will be restored. In our passage today, Jeremiah says, basically, “Sure, that would be great! But peace will come when peace will come. It’s out of our hands.” Hananiah then takes the yoke that Jeremiah had been wearing around his neck as a sign and breaks it. The Lord rebukes Hananiah for prophesying peace when there is no peace and Hananiah dies shortly after.
Hananiah’s false prophecy was calling something over before it was over, thus stepping on the toes of God. Jeremiah, however, knew Judah’s troubles weren’t over.
I understand Hananiah’s temptation to embrace a hopeful message before its time. However, Hananiah’s prophecy risks blinding him to what is actually happening in the world and what will actually happen. We have to be concerned with what is actually happening. When we know God, who is beyond time, and when he hear God, who is beyond our conceptions of space, we do so in history. God lives and moves among us and works among us, and so, as time-bound historical creatures, we meet God in the times we live in. We don’t get to fast forward through difficult times, darlings, and we shouldn’t, because God is here, now.
So, what do we do?
Our reading from Matthew comes after Jesus sends his disciples out into Israel to heal the sick, cast out demons, and proclaim that the kingdom of heaven is near. Jesus tells his disciples that they will be met with arrest, persecution, even death. In proclaiming the good news, Jesus’s disciples may lose their families—that’s last week’s reading.
Today, Jesus says, “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.” Who are we in this passage? Well, the majority of Christians are Gentiles. And Gentiles are not in this passage. Only later in the Gospel of Matthew does Jesus send his disciples beyond the people of Israel into gentile nations to heal their sick, cast out their demons, and proclaim the kingdom of heaven.
There is a lesson here, though. We must read today’s passage alongside Jesus’s continuous call to find him in the poor, the widow, the orphan, the outcast. Although we might be tempted to place ourselves in the position of the disciples being sent out, in today’s passage, that is not our place. Our lives of faith consist first in welcoming the stranger as a messenger of God. We must welcome the prophet, welcome the righteous, welcome these who society regards with little importance, and to give them even a cup of cold water.
In a gay bar some months ago, I ran into an older acquaintance, who, after Trump was re-elected, made plans to move to Mexico. As much as I understand the impulse for self-preservation, I have reservations about white gay men upping and leaving when things get a little tough for others. But, he said something like this: “I’ve lived through AIDS. I remember neighbors disappearing. I can’t do that again.”
In a time of disappearing and unjust incarceration, we must insistently love our neighbors, and practice loving our neighbors. If you don’t know your neighbor, you won’t notice or even care when they are under threat and indeed if they disappear. You won’t know how to act. That’s one stake of Christian love in this moment.
I wanted to pick a text for this sermon series that would help me imagine, as Christian, what our role in this country could be without trying to turn the country into a Christian nation or turning our church into the state church and thereby becoming Christian nationalists. The church is a pilgrim people, as Augustine said, sojourning on earth. As such, we are inescapably political and bound up in the nations and struggles of our times; but, we are not inescapably bound to the political imagination and structures of our country. We have a higher law.
Christian love of neighbor can look kind of like the mutual respect and civic regard that make a democracy possible, but they aren’t the same thing. Certain Christian relationships like marriage can look a lot like relationships recognized by the state, but they are not the same thing—they do not have the same purpose. The state longs for stability, and to achieve stability seeks power, and will sacrifice anyone who stands in its way. Christians seek God—God incarnate in frail human flesh. We do not seek power. When we enter politics, we enter as neighbors seeking the well-being of neighbors.
So I chose a text that might help us see loving our neighbors in a new light in the hopes that we might leave church this morning newly curious about our neighbors and newly willing to be welcomed by them and to welcome them—that is to love them and be loved by them—in ways that heal and cast out demons.
Walt Whitman’s life spanned the 1800s. He worked as a printer, a teacher, and an unofficial nurse in the Civil War. He is best known as a poet. He loved the United States. In his preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass, he said that the “United States themselves are the fullest poetical nature.” He loved the different textures of each state and how they were supposed to be unified in and despite those different textures. He saw poetry in everyday Americans. He was educated in a Dutch Reformed Sunday school in Brooklyn, but Whitman was not a Christian. When asked if he held the church’s creeds, he said, yes, in fact he believed in the creeds of all sects. His poetry is an overflowing of his extraordinarily open-ended embrace of everyone and everything.
Whitman first published Leaves of Grass in 1855 with no author named, no author photo, and no biography, just a wild preface and a sheaf of poems. You didn’t know whose words you were reading. You were suddenly in the presence of a stranger who is somehow, through his words, reaching out to you, curious to know you, comprehend and love you. His poems are not structured in quatrains, sonnets, or even blank verse, they weren’t rhymed. They reach generously across the page, unbound by any limit except by what the poet needs to say. Whitman republished Leaves of Grass again and again, adding more poems as he went.
Whitman is a famous or infamous individualist, meaning, he really does seem to believe that he can absorb everyone and everything into his own perspective and then channel everyone and everything back out through his poetry.
The first stanza of the first poem in the book, “Song of Myself” is: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” By “you” he really does mean everyone in the United States, from the deacon to the machinist to the disabled to the young girl sold at the auction block to the new bride, the young and the old, the free and the enslaved, the awake and the sleeping. He writes, “And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them.”
Whitman is not concerned with being respectable, which allows him some honesty. He sings of his lovers, mainly men—the joy of looking at them, touching them, smelling them. His embrace extends to felons. “Who am I that I should call you more obscene than myself?” he asks in another poem. “I feel I am of them—I belong to those convicts and prostitutes myself, / And henceforth I will not deny them—for how can I deny myself?”
What I assume, you shall assume. I feel I am of them.
Something happens for Whitman simply in observing others. He wants to be part of their lives. In some cases, yes, he wants to be their lover. He longs to give himself fully to people who are strangers to him. Again “Song of Myself”: “Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity. / When I give I give myself.”
All-embracing desire is crucial to Whitman’s understanding of democracy. In 1860, he adds to Leaves of Grass a couple of collections of poems that display the hope that love between men—and for the most part, I do think he meant men—could hold the country together. Mind you, this was before the word “homosexuality” existed. There wasn’t one single understanding of sexuality as an orientation, certainly not a psychological predisposition. So Whitman is imagining a love available to all in the realm of civic life.
For example, from “For You O Democracy”:
Come, I will make the continent indissoluble,
….
I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers
of America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and
all over the prairies,
I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each
other’s necks,
By the love of comrades,
By the many love of comrades.
In another poem, he proclaims, “I announce the Union more and more compact, indissoluble / . . . I announce adhesiveness, I say it shall be limitless, unloosen’d, / I say you shall yet find the friend you were looking for.”
Whitman’s vision of unity through manly love did not come to fruition. Given its founding on the genocide of indigenous people and the theft and enslavement of Africans, this country was broken before it was built. Soon after this new edition was published, the South seceded from the union. Yet here is Whitman, imagining that love could keep the country together. If he was a prophet, as some call him, he was a Hananiah.
Still, Whitman’s vision feels important to me in this moment: specifically, the way he sees others both so broadly and so intimately. I believe he has something to teach Christians. He can go on for pages listing the people he sees and the particular things they are doing:
The connoisseur peers along the exhibition-gallery with halfshut eyes bent sideways,
The young sister holds out the skein, the elder sister winds it off in a ball and stops now and then for the knots,
The opium eater reclines with rigid head and just-opened lips,
The President holds a cabinet council, he is surrounded by the great secretaries. . .
Do we look at strangers and love them, want to be part of their lives? For those of us who don’t have vows to keep, can you observe any stranger and, like Whitman, fall in love? Probably not!
More basically, though, do we even see the people around us? I invite you this week to practice Whitman’s eye. Go somewhere public, bring a pencil and paper (not your phone), and jot down everyone you see, with a detail about them.
I am a member of a community that has become a community in no small part through desire for strangers. Gay men. At this end of Pride month, I think of the ways LGBTQ people package our lives to be palatable as citizens of this country and as members of churches. These institution often misrecognize our different forms for love as inherently sinful, when it is in the beautiful particularities of our own lives and relationships that God comes to us, frees us, and grants us eternal life.
And God may take the form of a stranger. Will you welcome God? Will you give yourself?
Amen.