Thoughts, Prayers & Art

Gospel: Matthew 24:9–14

Originally Published: June 3, 2025

“Then they will hand you over to be tortured and will put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of my name… But the one who endures to the end will be saved.” Matthew 24:9,13

Today we remember the Martyrs of Uganda, forty-five young men, 22 Catholic, 10 Anglican, 13 others, many mere teenagers, executed because they would not renounce their Christian faith. These were not seasoned theologians or powerful clergy. They were pages in a royal court, young and vulnerable, yet unwavering in their love for Jesus. They refused to betray their conscience or submit to an empire that demanded silence and complicity. And for that, they died.

Their courage shook a kingdom.
Their blood watered the roots of a living church.
Their faith, fierce, inconvenient, and resolute, still speaks.

We need that witness today. Desperately.
It is tempting to domesticate the Gospel in modern America. To make faith polite, uncontroversial, safe. But Jesus did not come to make us comfortable. He came to transform us, to call us out of allegiance to empire and into a holy resistance shaped by love.

And so we must ask ourselves, here and now:
What does discipleship demand in the face of cruelty and injustice?

Because even as we honor martyrs of the past, there are people suffering martyrdom in our midst.

Today, it is our immigrant and refugee siblings, many of them faithful Christians, who are being handed over, detained, and deported by ICE.
It is families being ripped apart.
It is children living in fear of vanishing parents.
It is women and men, people of God, trapped in for-profit detention centers, criminalized for daring to seek safety and survival.

Let us be plain: ICE is not a neutral institution. It is a machinery of fear and oppression. Deportation is not just a legal process, it is a spiritual wound inflicted on the Body of Christ.

As followers of Jesus, we cannot look away.
To remain silent is to side with the oppressor.
To excuse this brutality in the name of order is to betray the Gospel.

Jesus himself was a refugee, fleeing political violence.
Mary and Joseph sought sanctuary in Egypt.
The Holy Family knows the terror of displacement.
So when we offer sanctuary, when we speak out against unjust policies, when we shelter the vulnerable, we are not being political.
We are being faithful.

The Martyrs of Uganda could have saved their lives by compromising their truth. But they chose Christ.
Let us now choose Christ over nationalism, over fear, over every form of legal cruelty that masquerades as justice.

We do not follow a safe Gospel. We follow a saving one.

So stand.
Speak.
Welcome the stranger.
Disrupt the systems that cage, exile, and forget.
Let your church become sanctuary.
Let your voice become prophecy.
Let your life bear witness.

The one who endures to the end will be saved.
And in that endurance rooted in love, sharpened by courage, grounded in Christ the world just might be redeemed.