Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it and said, “Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.” Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me!”
(Isaiah 6:6-8, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)
“It is a time for the courage and freedom to engage in contestation with the totalism among us that is killing in its force and authority.”—Walter Brueggemann
Last Tuesday, on the first full day of his second term as president of the United States, Donald Trump attended a prayer service at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., led by the Episcopal bishop Mariann Edgar Budde.
Budde’s sermon called for unity.
“The kind of unity,” she explained, “that fosters community across diversity and division—a unity that serves the common good. Recognizing that her audience in the cathedral was “not naive about the realities of politics,” she acknowledged that in the course of public policymaking, “not everyone’s prayers will be answered in the way we would like.”
“But for some,” she continued, “the loss of their hopes and dreams will be far more than political defeat, but instead a loss of equality and dignity and their livelihoods. Given this, then, is true unity among us even possible?”
She went on to express her belief that, with God’s help, Americans can still come together, if we turn away from “the culture of contempt that has become normalized in this country” and ground our actions on a foundation of humility, honesty, and honor for the inherent dignity of every human being. Those principles, I believe, spurred her to make “one final plea” which immediately became the only thing most people remember about her sermon:
“Millions have put their trust in you, and as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families, some who fear for their lives.
And the people, the people who pick our crops, and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. They may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurdwaras, and temples.
I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away, and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here.”

Neither Trump nor his supporters took kindly to this gentle confrontation.
Nor should we have expected them to.
The scriptural passage quoted above begins with Isaiah experiencing a vision of the Lord attended by seraphs (six-winged angels). He feels unworthy to behold such a sight, “for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips.” One of the seraphs addresses Isaiah’s reluctance, removing his alleged disqualification for the prophetic summons and freeing him to volunteer enthusiastically. But then the Lord lays a whammy on him—this people, the Lord tells Isaiah, will not comprehend what they hear, nor understand what they see, and they will not “turn and be healed… until cities lie waste [and] the land is utterly desolate.”
As Walter Brueggemann tells us in The Prophetic Imagination, “The one thing the dominant culture cannot tolerate or co-opt is compassion, the ability to stand in solidarity with the victims of the present order.” What Brueggemann calls “imperial consciousness” thrives by convincing its followers that it and it alone can make things right, or “great again,” for them, and whatever happens to anyone else simply doesn’t matter, or isn’t even really happening. (No one group has a monopoly on this behavior; you may recall how supporters of the previous presidential administration celebrated the health of America’s economy, ignoring the protests of people struggling to meet basic material needs.) Prophets give voice to the pain of the oppressed, making them impossible to ignore, calling the legitimacy of the empire into question by reminding us we don’t have to live like this.
Empire clings tenaciously to power, though, and those at the top will do anything to maintain their positions of privilege. They usually start by moving swiftly to discredit a prophet lest she convince anyone to fix their hearts and repent of the imperial consciousness. Immediately after the prayer service, Trump tried to dismiss Budde’s message as “not too exciting.” Later that evening, as her words spread and did, in fact, excite the minds of many who heard or read them, he tried to hit back harder, saying she had been “nasty in tone.”
Reread the extended quote above, and tell me if you can find any “nasty” parts.
I said earlier that I thought principle spurred Budde to say what she said last week, but I wonder if the explanation runs deeper than that. Historically, Quakers have not believed that Spirit only moves within the meetinghouse, nor that God only has messages for members of the Religious Society of Friends. Thus I raise the possibility that God chose an Episcopal bishop, with the eyes of the nation upon her, to tell the truth about the world in which we live and deliver a prophetic vision of one far more blessed.
If we were to recognize what happened at the National Cathedral as the fulfillment of a leading, what could you and I do to honor and extend that vision? And should Spirit call on us to get more directly involved, could we echo Isaiah’s “Here am I; send me” with as much fortitude?
Incredibly brave words by her. What can we do to help. We agree