I had trouble sleeping Saturday night. I was angry. Angry that George Zimmerman wouldn’t be punished, for the fear that has beset the African American community, for all the bullshit post-racism talk of my white neighbors. Mostly, I was angry that I was feeling powerless as a church leader to express myself.

It frightened me to think that the denunciation of a minor’s death would be seen as “too political” for Sunday worship. That the desire to find some culpability in the law for creating an altercation with a boy and then killing him may be too controversial or too improper. That people might get angry, not at the injustice, but at me for naming it injustice.

How far we stray from the gospel. A gospel that convicts us for our complicity. A gospel that challenges us to quit ignoring the invisible because they our powerless and demand that those around us not only see them, but raise them up, recognize their humanity, and still radical in this era, to consider them equals.

So I woke up Sunday, went in and tinkered with my homily. How appropriate that a real-life example of hating and fearing one’s neighbor would pair with an invocation to love them. I was already mining that same territory, as I planned to preach that we must put faces and names to our hatred, so that we can see our prejudice and repent. So I named our neighbor Trayvon Martin. Perhaps knowing in the back of my mind that George Zimmerman is also my neighbor, but he isn’t half dead by the side of the road, or full dead and buried.

I also realized that, as we gather for our prayer concerns, I wanted to not only acknowledge the tragedy, but the silence I felt compelled to keep. That, in Christian community, the denunciation of a killing should never be too controversial. That no way of the world should overpower the way of the Kingdom.

As much as I felt empowered by these decisions, there was something missing. It needed a visual. I saw that the Rev. Mark Bozzuti-Jones processed in a hoodie last year. He’s a good Episcopalian. I was certain I wouldn’t be the only one. So I took the hoodie I keep on the back of my office door, robed up, and prepared for worship.

I began to sweat immediately. An undershirt, a clergy shirt, a hoodie, an alb, a chasuble, and a stole and no air conditioning. I processed with the hood up and removed it at the opening acclamation, feeling this sense of a great reveal.

Sitting for the lessons, the sweat swelled along my hairline and my glasses began to slip from my ears. When I processed the gospel book to the middle of the congregation, my whole head was damp with beads of water rolling down my cheeks. And as I read the scholar/lawyer’s response to Jesus:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”

a bright spot appeared in my vision. The first sign of a migraine. Some day I’ll write about this, but for now, I stilled myself, finished the gospel and preached one of the most impassioned homilies I’ve written. The tears I shed in rehearsal stayed home, the only wetness on my cheeks from the exhausted sweat glands.

I almost lost it at the end: a parting prayer for mercy, for allowing our hearts to be broken, to be far from safety, to be where Jesus is.

The migraine never arrived. Nor comments. We went to work preparing for our annual Brass on the Grass concert on the front lawn. Things going back to normal. But I hold out hope that my prayer was heard and that today, many of us woke up in the gutter with our hearts broken. For that’s where Jesus sleeps.