The Wild Work of Asparagus (The Spirit)

The Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year A

Sermon for May 10, 2026

God of our mothers – Sarah, Hagar, Miriam, Rahab, Ruth, Mary, Phoebe, Junia, Clare, Kateri, Julian, Barbara, Phyllis – mothering God, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of all of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord. Amen.

Hello. It is so good to be with you again.

It is a delight to continue our relationship with each other. It is wonderful. Last year some of you came and prayed at the farm, and then we came, and I preached, and we prayed together and feasted together, and it has been a delight. So, thank you for having me again.

My name is Emily Ulmer, if you don't know, and I am one of the co-directors of Plainsong Farm and Ministry. And I also have two of our Episcopal Service Corps fellows with me, Becca and James, who are in the back row. I didn't warn them that I was going to shout them out, but they are here. It is good to be with you.

Today, some in the church are celebrating Rogation Sunday. Did you know? Which can trace its roots to 500 CE. Just before the Feast of Ascension, the community would gather to walk the boundaries of the parish, praying for a good harvest, praying for protection from blight, sufficient rain, but not too much.

Next week, Plainsong will be enacting our version of this old tradition. We will pray for good weather. We will pray for the endurance and health of all who work on the farm, particularly Plainsong's Episcopal Service Corps fellows who have come from across the country to work and live and pray and ask big questions of God and the world. We will pray for curiosity and imagination for all who come for programming at the farm. We will pray for all those who will eat the bounty of our fields, for the one third that we know who buy a share from the farm and pick up food from us every week in the summer. And we will pray for the two-thirds of people who receive our food who we don't know, who access it through food pantries and a mobile food truck in our county. We pray for their health and their flourishing and their delight.

We pray and we'll pray for the ecosystem, for the flourishing of the oaks and the bluebirds and the fireflies and the cornflowers. You are welcome to join us. It's next Sunday at 4:30 pm, followed by a potluck, and it will be warmer than last year. I just checked. I can imagine those communities of old gathering, having survived another cold and dark winter, and remarking on the life all around them.

Visiting the neighbors' fields they never interact with in their day-to-day and exclaiming, “Look how that tree has grown. Look at these spring ephemera. Look what God is up to, the God who made heaven and earth, the soil and hydrogen, the God who made the lakes, the God who is not enshrined in altars made by human hands but is the very breath and being of who we are.”

If you were to walk the boundaries of Plainsong Farm, which I do every day with my very old dog, you will often stumble upon asparagus. Now, asparagus is not unexpected, because at one point, Plainsong was predominantly an asparagus farm. Back in the day, someone's hobby was to grow asparagus, and we have very sandy soil. So, the ag fields used to mostly be asparagus and onions.

But the asparagus is all over the farm, in very unexpected places. In fact, we often only find it because asparagus, when it goes to seed, becomes very fluffy. Have you seen this? Maybe you've seen it on the roadside. And so then in the fall, we try to mark it. Oh, here's the asparagus. But every year, I discover new asparagus in the woodlot, randomly over there. Mostly my dog finds it because he loves it, so he self-harvests the asparagus.

But I think I bring this up because I, I've been asking people this week as I thought about coming and being with you all, I've been asking them about their experiences with the Holy Spirit. And I kept hearing again and again, these surprising encounters. One person said, “it's like suddenly you step down and you swoosh into a slide.” “It's like you're caught up in a dance suddenly.” “It's an asparagus, unexpectedly, in a very odd place.”

There is life and possibility with the Spirit. And even as we do our best to mark, “here is the Spirit in this building,” the asparagus shows up in other places. The Holy Spirit shows up in wild places. We do not expect it.

What an incredible gift to be so desired by God. That God is at work in places we do not even know or expect God to be.

Now, I was also curious about this word, advocate. I think in our moment in history, we think about advocates as a very legal thing. We have court appointed advocates. We have advocacy. We have people who their whole job is advocacy. But it is a very specific task often in our community. It's somewhat a special job.

So, I started playing with this word. What if it is also an ally or an accomplice? What if the Spirit is not just our advocate, but our ally or accomplice in this work, in this life? It is our accomplice as we move more and more and more into what God would have us to be. And it is our accomplice, our advocate from God, as we move more and more into deeper relationship with who God is.

Howard Thurman calls the Spirit “the sound of the genuine.” Others call it “alive.” I want to mark in that: with the Spirit, there is life.

Dorothy Soll, who was a child during the rise of Nazi fascism, did a study of the Spirit in the world, and how it was living. And part of what she saw again and again, trying to make sense of what happened in her community, why there was life some places in the church and not life in other places in the church, she noted that there is not an experience of the Spirit that can be privatized, that becomes the property of one, the Spirit always opens us up to more and more relationships with one another, with the ecosystem. The Spirit in that's advocating for us to be more and more who Christ would have us to be, connects us, attunes us, joins us with those we may not really want to be joined with.

That is, in fact, the story of Acts, the story of Paul. I think nowhere did he expect to be the apostle to the Gentiles, to welcoming more and more and more into the goodness that is life in the Spirit. But that is where the wild work of the Spirit took Paul, to say, there is another God, a God you do not have a name for, who desires you more and far beyond what is expected of you by these enshrined versions, by these enshrined idols, by your small definitions of who God is and what God would have for you. The Spirit does wild work.

I was so struck by this invitation to not be afraid, not being intimidated. And part of the reason that I was struck by it is because I feel like so often in my faith, I am not afraid, in part because I'm not really doing anything to be fearful of.

So, I want to tell you the story of my friend Kay and her life in the Spirit. Where she is now, how she celebrated Easter in this last month, looks radically different than how her family of origin celebrated Easter. And they both celebrated Easter. And Kay often asks, why? Why am I so different from my family of origin? What happened to me that I don't recognize my community anymore?

I think the only answer to that is the small nudgings of the Spirit over and over and over again to get her further and further out into different kinds of community, so that the way her Easter table looked was radically different than the one that she grew up in.

So at 14, she said yes to a mentor inviting her over for dinner at an intentional community. These were Christians. They were folks living their lives differently. And they talked about art and ideas and scripture, and it left a mark on her. And then in college, she was looking for a job. And she took a job at a fair-trade store. And suddenly, she started being connected to the whole world of global trade and started to understand the economy in ways she never would have if she had gotten a job at the Gap.

She started to see these connections in the nudging of the Spirit moving her further and further. And then, because she had no money, she took a job at an academic institution where she was mentored by some pretty radical Christian folks, who started talking about what nonviolence looked like. What it looked like to follow God with one's money, with one's time, with one's actions every day. This led her to get into farming and community development. She also has a child in her life who is different than any child she would have expected to have had. And that child, too, is inviting her to ask questions around racism, and who is in and who is out and who is being joined.

And so, this last Easter, at her table for Easter, there were several different families represented. At her family of origins’ Easter dinner, there was only one family represented. At her Easter dinner, there was flan from a family who was in hiding right now, being worried about being picked up by ice. There was beef from a cow that a friend had butchered down the street. There were eggs from many, many backyard chickens in the city. There were vegetables preserved from the year before. And there was singing, and there was prayer, and there was a joining of many stories around one table. And at her family of origins’ dinner, there was also singing and prayer, and then there was TV and dessert.

And none of that is wrong. And also, when we get involved in the Spirit, somehow we are joined out and beyond where we ever expected.

The people at our tables, the food at our tables, and how it connects us, moves us into community. And maybe that is where the fear is. Maybe that is where we have to be ready to give a defense. Because when we go out with the Spirit, it connects us to our neighbors and to our ecosystem and to the strange asparagus popping up at the farm. We don't know where it will lead.

My father flirts with Episcopalianism. He's Presbyterian, but he often complains about the Presbyterians being the “frozen chosen.” And the seasons that he has gone to the Episcopal Church, he has delighted, although my father can no longer kneel, my father has delighted in the kneeling and the standing up and the Eucharist and the eating and the consuming and the full body engagement that is the worship of the Episcopal Church.

And so, when he comes to the farm, he says, this makes sense. Not only are you worshiping God with all your time and your energy and your life, but also you're putting God, the work of God into your body. You're putting your body in the place of the life of the Spirit. Putting our body in the place of hope, in the work of hope, even though we don't know where it will often lead us. And I appreciate that reflection from my father. I'm like, well, most days it's just hard work, but I appreciate you being so delighted by this.

But one of the ways that we try to inhabit at the farm, it's putting our bodies into the work, into the joining of the Spirit, into this connection with God and neighbor and all of creation is by praying with our bodies.

And so, I ask you to pray with me, and this might be dangerous. So be warned, the Spirit might pop up in unexpected places and do radical things with your life, and make it so that your Easter dinners look radically different than they ever looked before.

But if you will, I would invite you to pray a body prayer that we pray at the farm on Tuesday mornings. It is a prayer that is inspired by Julian of Norwich. So I'm hitting all of the Feast Days this week. We celebrated Julian of Norwich's feast on May 8th. Today, we are celebrating Rogation and Mother's Day, and this coming week, we'll be celebrating the Ascension. So just know this is a happening time with the church.

But if you will, pray this prayer of Julian of Norwich. There's gonna be four postures. And I'll invite you to stand if you are comfortable. But I'm gonna show you the postures first.

The first is gonna be await. And we're just gonna put our hands in front of us. We are gonna await. And then we are going to allow. We're gonna put our hands up, allow. And then we're gonna put our hands over our heart, accept. And then we are gonna put our hands out to the world, attend.

And I, I'm going to pray this. And I hope that you would join me in praying with us as an invitation to come and to the Spirit to come and do its wild work in our lives, to take us places that we might be afraid to go, but places that join us with all of God's creation.

So if you will stand as you are able.

We are going to await, await the Spirit's presence, however it may come. Await.

Allow a sense of the Spirit's presence to come, or not to come. To come as a song that reminds us of who God is and God's goodness to all creation. To come as an asparagus in an unexpected place. Allow a sense of the Spirit to come, or not to come.

Accept. Accept as a gift, whatever has come or not come. Accept the nudging of the Spirit as it advocates for you, as it comforts you, as it helps you. Accept.

Attend. Attend to what the Spirit is stirring up in you today, what is stirring up with you this year, this moment, this Easter tide. Being willing to be in God's love in the world. Attend to how you are being called in to hope and justice. Attend.

Amen.