Jesus – Page 9 – By Another Road

To the Edge: An Advent Reflection

I delivered the following reflection at an Advent retreat I facilitated on Saturday, December 7th, 2019 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN.

In western Scotland, there is an archipelago known as the Inner Hebrides—a collection of wild, sparsely populated islands that hug the coastline like an outcropping of jewels, ensconced in the swirling gray-green tides of the north Atlantic ocean. On a map, they appear easily accessible to the mainland, but to visit them is to enter a world apart.

The Inner Hebrides are home to wild birds—puffins, and rock doves, and golden eagles— and hardy, weather-beaten plants—heather, and thistle, and a host of insistent wildflowers. They contain small fishing villages and hillsides covered in roaming sheep, whiskey distilleries and ruined monasteries. Some of the islands are vast and mountainous, a series of craggy cliffs and broad, low plains; others are barely a speck of gray rock, grazed by the wings of passing seabirds–namelessly residing amid the roiling waves.

But for all their remoteness, streams of travelers make their way to this cluster of islands, over 100,000 people each year. They come for a variety of reasons: for hiking, or fishing, or whiskey tasting, or perhaps for a bit of windswept solitude; but they come especially to visit one place in particular: the tiny island of Iona, perched at the outermost edge of the Inner Hebrides, accessible only by boat.

Iona is humble in size—only a mile wide and a few miles long, with a population of just 120 people—but it looms large in the imagination of many, for it was here that St. Columba arrived from Ireland in 563 CE and established a monastery that would become the center of what we now call Celtic Christianity—an ancient form of the faith, nourished in the misty hills and valleys of what is now Ireland and Scotland, and shaped by the cultures of their early people—a form of Christianity that long predates the establishment of a church in this region with any direct tie to the authorities in Rome.

It was here, on little Iona, at the rocky edge of the known world, that for centuries monks and scholars and warrior-kings traveled for an encounter with the living God, the One who came to be among us as Jesus, the Christ. It was here, at the edge of the sea, where they dwelt and prayed and studied and died, seeking some whisper of God’s voice in the wind and in the silence.

And so it is that, still, pilgrims go there, to visit the tiny village, and the crumbling ruins, and the reconstructed Abbey, and the ancient stone Celtic crosses with their inscrutable symbols. They travel by train, and then by boat, and then by bus, and then by boat again, to reach this holy place, this thin space, this island of craggy, rock-strewn grace because…because for some reason they must.

Because for some reason, each of us is drawn in some way to these places that lie at the edge of knowing, these places where the land and the sea merge, these places where what we know is overwhelmed by that which we will never fully understand. We go to these places to be silent, to listen, to watch, and then to return home, perhaps a bit more awake, a bit more alive than we were before.

Iona has that effect on people.

Advent also has that effect on people.

Advent, as you might know, is derived from the Latin word adventus—it means “to come”—and so this liturgical season is the one in which we focus our attention on a very particular coming—that of Christ, whose birth is proclaimed on Christmas and whose return is promised at the end of the age.

It is a season of hope and expectation, but also of some severity—for we know that in these comings, our lives will never be the same. The world will never be the same. Arrivals of this magnitude require reflection. Preparation.

And for the same reasons that some make the journey across the moors and the shores to seek out a tiny abbey church on a Scottish isle, to seek the presence of God in a wild land, so each of us ventured here, today, to seek out the importance of this season and what it means to “prepare the way” for the coming presence of Christ.

That phrase, “prepare the way,” the theme of our retreat today, is taken from tomorrow’s Gospel lesson from the third chapter of St. Matthew:

“In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said,

“The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:

‘Prepare the way of the Lord,

make his paths straight.’”

Now John wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan, and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.

It is worth noting that John the Baptist, in his mission to proclaim the coming Messiah, does so in the wilderness, not in the city—he is wandering across the uninhabited landscapes of Judea, crying out his message of repentance and preparation.

Matthew tells us that it is the people of Jerusalem and all Judea who come to him, leaving behind the security of their homes to seek something of God in an unguarded landscape, to be baptized by a wild man in a wild river, to embrace a salvation that is spoken of as a cleansing, a burning, a harvesting—an elemental experience, undomesticated and savagely beautiful.

And like those Judeans, so we, too, venture beyond the familiar in Advent. We come here, not into a physical wilderness, but into the expansive, mysterious, silent heart of this season, a season whose core purpose is to instill in us a sense of Christ’s imminence, his urgent imminence—both in the form of a child, born unto us in a manger, and also in the form of a king, descending again one day in glory to judge and redeem creation at the end of all things.

We enter this season by stepping beyond what is safe and predictable, into a liminal space—a space between knowing and unknowing, a space between the stories told and the stories yet to be told.

We are drawn, like the Iona pilgrims, to stumble to the outer edge of the human heart, to gaze into the cloud-draped horizon and to be quiet, to listen, to watch for the One who is coming, like a wave, like a storm, like a still small voice speaking out of the whirlwind, surging over the coastline of our longings and carving them into his likeness, reshaping our hearts like stones polished by the sea. THY kingdom come, THY will be done.

Advent, it must be said, is not a season for the indifferent or the timid. If we go out to meet it, to answer its call, it will change us.

But what does all of this talk of wilderness and pilgrimage and change have to do with our gentle program today, focused on silence and prayer? Quite a bit, actually.

Because, you see, we spend our lives surrounded by noise; this is especially evident at this time of year, when the onslaught of saccharine commercialism joins forces with the pervasive noise of toxic online discourse, idle gossip, and media chatter to create a din that is, ultimately, numbing to the soul.

We careen from one task to another, often with very good intentions, and yet we are often left, at the end of the holiday season, with a sense of depletion and disorientation.

If Christ has indeed come into our midst through all of this, we run the risk of losing track of him, and thus we might end up cozy, perhaps well-fed and entertained, but unchanged. Untransformed. Untouched by the wonder of God, who gazes back at us through the eyes of an infant, who takes on our innocence and our frailty and imbues it with Divine Love, to show us how special, how good this life can be.

So in order to break free, in order to find him, in order to find ourselves, we must venture elsewhere, as pilgrims tend to do.

We need not travel to an island. Silence and prayer and Scripture are our pathway on this journey. They invite us into the presence of God and shape our lives as God’s people. They require us to notice everything, both inside of ourselves and in the world around us—the good and the bad—so that we can discern God’s abiding presence in all of it.

Because God is, indeed, present. God has come to us in the birth of Christ—the first Advent. God comes to us sacramentally in the Eucharistic life of the Church—the continuing Advent. And God will come again at the last day to redeem our turbulent history—the final Advent.

Our prayer and study, then, remind us not simply that “Jesus is the reason for the season” while blithely going about our frantic business as usual. Our prayer and study instead suggest that the season of Christ’s coming actually asks something of us—no, demands something of us—something that has nothing to do with consuming or producing, nothing to do with the further commodification of our love.

Advent requires, with its voice crying out in the wilderness, that we make space, that we clear out the noise and the haste, that we “prepare the way” in our hearts and in our societies for the cold, vivifying gust of salvation that will soon be borne on the wind, on the waves, on the breath of the One who approaches, toppling old injustices and healing old wounds.

The One whom John the Baptist proclaims. The One who, even now, hovers at the edge of our perception, like an island shrouded in mist, so close we can touch it, though we cannot quite see it, yet. The One who will make us, and our winter hearts, and our flagging, tired dreams, new again. The One who will bring us to life.

Today you are making a journey of your own—a journey to the edge—into the realm of Advent, where nothing is resolved and yet everything is possible. You do not have to achieve anything today. You are simply invited to make the trip, to pray, to listen to the silence and to yourself, and to one another.

Simply to do this is an act of courage, an act of pilgrimage. Simply to do this will help prepare the way for Jesus to enter your life more deeply. And when he comes—and he will come, as sure as the ebb and flow of the tide, a sure as the beating of your own heart—you will know that there is, ultimately, no wilderness in which you are alone. There is no distant shore where he cannot reach you. In Advent, he comes to us. In Advent, you will find that he is already here.

From my own pilgrimage to Iona in April, 2018.

“Who Is This King of Glory?”: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on November 24, 2019, Christ the King Sunday, at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary texts cited are Luke 23:33-43 and Colossians 1:11-20

Recently, I enrolled in a weeklong evening workshop to learn how to paint an icon—those beautiful religious images that are especially associated with the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition. We were tasked with creating an icon of Christ on the cross, and after nearly 20 hours of sketching, painting, applying gold leaf, and layering colors, the last step was to add Jesus’ name, in Greek, and a title above the cross: The King of Glory. This final act of inscribing the name and title, our instructor told us, gave the image its sacred quality. It defined who the icon was, and how it should be viewed by those who gaze upon it.

And it is this title which I carefully added to the icon, “The King of Glory,” that has been on my mind all week.

It is a designation found in only place in the entire Bible, in the 24th Psalm:

Lift up your heads, O gates!

and be lifted up, O ancient doors!

    that the King of glory may come in.

Who is this King of glory?

    The Lord of hosts,

    he is the King of glory.

And the question keeps presenting itself to me, like an insistent whisper: who is this King of Glory? Who is he indeed? Where is he to be found? What sort of king is he?

On this day, Christ the King Sunday, at the conclusion of the church year–at the threshold of Advent–we, too, are asked to open the gates and doors of our hearts and ask ourselves this question: who is this King to whom we have pledged our lives, our resources, and our trust? Who is this King whom we worship and wait for?

There is, perhaps, no more important question we will ever ask ourselves, because the nature of our King—the one in whom we place our identity and our destiny— tells us, fundamentally, who we are and how we are to live. To understand Him is to glimpse our ultimate significance as God’s people.

But truth be told, there is a strangeness in naming Jesus as king and ourselves as his subjects. Not just because you and I happen to live in a country where the concept of monarchy is foreign. But because humanity’s usual ideas about the nature of a king and of royal prestige are wrapped up in power dynamics that Jesus seems to undermine at every turn.

Far from being a mighty ruler in the gilded halls of influence, our King is the one who walks dusty roads alongside the marginalized, the one who hangs pitifully on a cross, scorned and abandoned, and who, at the end, offers no satisfying retribution against his enemies; only forgiveness and a whisper of paradise.

This is a far cry from the King whom the Psalmist describes; in the Psalm, the King of Glory is the Lord of Hosts, the Lord of mighty armies, charging into battle to defend his people with impressive strength. He is the one who subdues the nations and ensures his justice by the power of the sword.

And frankly we know a lot about kings like that—too much, in fact; they haunt our violent history, and their successors are still rattling around among us, weaponizing power and treating the world like a playing field for their own deluded ambitions.

But this is not what we are given in Jesus, and I think it is a mistake when we attempt to fashion him in those terms. As revealed in today’s gospel, it is a Crucified King who reigns over us: a man of sorrows, whose earthly palace is the Place of the Skull; whose coronation is an execution; and whose royal title, “The King of the Jews,” is a cruel bit of imperial irony. There is no pomp and splendor here, no adoring crowd, no royal feast.

Christ is, in fact, revealed to us on the cross as the anti-king, the one who upends our entire notion of dignity and honor and power, who reveals himself to the world not in the heights of glory but in the depths of vulnerability and weakness. And this tender pathos is part of him always; even the risen Christ still bears the wounds of his humiliation.

So when we sing of thrones, we also sing of thorns, because in Jesus the two realities—the glory and the sacrifice—are bound up in one another. For our King, true power is revealed in the moment when power is given away for the good of others. For our King, it is a surrender to God’s will, not triumphalism, that leads to eternal glory.

And all of this makes *Christ the King Sunday* a rather subversive occasion.

Because just as the earliest members of the Church proclaimed that it was Jesus, crucified, risen, and ascended, who revealed the true nature of kingly authority, and not the passing tyrants of a declining Roman empire, so we, as Christians, must proclaim the same thing today to all the would-be leaders of our own time: that their power is contingent. That they are answerable to something greater than themselves, greater than all of us. That justice without mercy, and strength without humility, is an abomination.

This is an uncomfortable position, no matter where one falls on the political spectrum, because it requires each of us to relinquish the illusion that any one person or party or movement will save us, or any one earthly ruler, even those whom we admire. It requires us to challenge both those with whom we tend to disagree and those whom we desperately want to follow.

These leaders will not save us. They cannot save us. Because the ultimate questions of power and destiny have already been resolved by another—by Jesus Christ, the King—the firstborn King of all creation and the Last King, who will return to us in a blaze of mercy. This is our King of Glory, the only authority who has ever mattered, and who reveals himself in a most unexpected way: born in a shed, living in obscurity, dying in shame, rising again in quiet, piercing light.

In the end, our only duty is to seek him in the shadow of his cross and in the radiance of his love, and to live as he would have us live. Our true identity is found only here—in Christ’s kingdom, where we are not merely passive subjects, but active citizens, patterning our lives after his own, proclaiming his mission of justice and reconciliation, and trusting that his eternal glory will belong to us as well.

This requires much of us—everything, in fact, that we have to offer. And as the cross reveals, it is not a life that guarantees comfort. But there is nothing more true, nothing more real, nothing more for which we were made. And so, as St. Paul prays in his letter to the Colossians, “may you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience.”

Who is this King of Glory?

For us it is Jesus, broken and yet eternal; wounded and yet wondrous; rejected and yet reigning supreme. It has always been Jesus, the Christ, Our King. And it always will be.

The Eternal Moment: A Sermon on Baptism

I preached this sermon on August 18th, 2019, at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN, where I now have the privilege of serving as Curate. We celebrated the baptism of two infants during the liturgy, and the Gospel text cited is Luke 12:49-56.

“I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three.” (Luke 12:49-52)

I wonder if you have ever stood at the edge of a lake on a quiet evening, watching the sun bleed into the sky with a beauty so intense that you can barely speak?

I wonder if you have ever walked down a city street and perceived how the beating heart of each passer-by is deeply connected to yours, even if you will never see one other again?

I wonder if you have ever sat beside a person whom you love as they breathe deeply in their sleep, and you realize, with quiet amazement, what a gift it is to be able to love them, for however long or short a time you are given?

I wonder, in other words, if you have felt that strange sweet shock of being fully immersed in this collection of moments we call life.

And then, I wonder if, in those moments, you ever think of your baptism?

I don’t necessarily mean the day you were baptized—many of us who received this sacrament as young children have no memory of the actual occasion, save for a faded photograph, a christening gown, or a candle in a dusty box.

But do you, in your moments of deepest joy or longing, remember that you are indeed baptized? That your life was permanently changed by that moment of contact with water and oil and the Holy Spirit?

Do you feel, in those depths, that your baptism is an ongoing reality which suffuses the unfolding narrative of the person whom you are still becoming? Do you understand that your baptism has drawn you into a story so grand–and yet so intimate–that the God who is both Parent and incarnate Son has become the author of your days and the abiding Spirit who dwells within your heart?

I hope that you might. And, if you are not yet baptized, I hope that you hear these words as an invitation to contemplate the rich possibilities of such a life.

Today we celebrate the initiation of two beautiful little ones into the Body of Christ, and in so doing, we are also given the opportunity to recall our own incorporation into that Body— the opportunity to consider what it means to belong to Christ and to one another. To reexamine how baptism shapes the contours of a life—your life—and how the holy water streaming from the font, even now, seeps into the cracks of a soul— your soul—to drench you with the fullness of God’s love.

Because it’s easy to forget—or perhaps to never fully comprehend— how that water, that immersive torrent of life-giving water, continues to infuse you with its mystery long after the day it was poured onto your head. It is your lifelong companion, that baptismal water: flowing through your veins and leaking out of the corners of your eyes and freezing in the vapors of your breath on a winter morning like incense rising up to God.

As our Prayer Book states, you are “marked as Christ’s own forever” in baptism and thus its sacramental reality and its transformative power are always with you, always shaping the ways in which you are alive to this world, and pointing you towards the ultimate significance of the seemingly random, beautiful, sorrowful, mundane, holy events of your life.

The sunsets, and the city streets, and the bedside vigils: Christ is beside you in each of them, tending to you in each of them, because you are His, now, forever. And so each time you give yourself over to the hope and promise and heartbreak of life, you do so as one enveloped in His holy embrace, washed by His tears.

Jesus was deeply aware of this unfolding, enduring nature of baptism, and he tells us so in today’s gospel with words that hit forcefully, like a wave off the sea. He speaks of fire and division on this earth, frightening at first, but we might also perceive a note of distress and longing in his voice as he does so. Jesus is not angry and vengeful so much as he is frustrated—frustrated by his realization that the peace of God, the peace which passes all understanding, the peace which flows smoothly and swiftly like a river, is so often dashed upon the rocks of human frailty—the frailty of we who have a desperate need to take sides, to draw lines in the sand, to stand two against three and three against two.

The splendor, the majesty of God’s peace is sometimes too much for us to bear, and so we crucify it amongst ourselves—even in our most intimate, cherished relationships. He knows that we do this, and he knows how that division will impact his own journey.

“I have a baptism with which to be baptized,” Jesus proclaims. “What stress I am under until it is completed.” His is a baptism which must pass through the inevitable heartbreak of being alive, and loving, and losing—even losing his life. For Jesus, the anointed one who emerges from the chilly waters of the Jordan, that original moment of water and Spirit is not a victory or a resolution, but the inauguration of something as yet unfinished—the water still doing its work upon him, his body still caught in its current, carrying him towards Jerusalem, and Calvary, and the tomb, and beyond, into the fullness of his Father’s glory.

And so it is for us who share in his Body. Baptism, Jesus tells us today, is not a magical solution to life’s woes; it is not a ritual action that makes everything serene and safe. We who are baptized know all too well that the waters of faith remain turbulent throughout our lives. To be marked by these waters in baptism was and is, for each of us, the first, irreversible step of a new journey—Christ’s journey, and now, by the work of the Holy Spirit, our own, too—which we wade through together as fellow travelers.

Such a journey is never easy. It is not without discord and confusion. It will likely require sacrifices, some of them large, to be sure, but mostly a thousand small daily gestures of love outpoured, as we give ourselves away to each other in the same way that Christ gives himself away to us, on the Cross and on this holy table. That self-giving is the consummation of his baptism, and we must follow where he leads us.

That mutual giving, dear friends, is why we are here, generation after generation, in the Church. That is why our life together in this parish is sacred. That is why we rejoice at these two children joining the family of the baptized today. Our lives, and now theirs, have been swept up into the water of God’s reign, and we return again and again to this community to teach one another how to swim in it, and to carry one another when we get tired.

It won’t be safe or predictable. We are promised very little that is certain or secure in this life. And those moments like the ones I described earlier, in which we keenly perceive the fullness of love, the fullness of life—they are rare and fleeting.

But our baptism can never be taken from us. The abiding presence of Christ can never, ever be taken from us. And today, for these two children, and for us as well, this is the moment–the eternal, unfolding moment–when that is made abundantly clear. We will never be forsaken. We are Christ’s own forever.

We will continue swimming within the current of God’s love. We will continue navigating the rapids of our brokenness until the baptism with which we are to be baptized is completed. Until we stumble, laughing and crying and dripping wet, onto the shores of peace, where He is waiting for us.

Come to the water, little ones. Come to the water, brothers and sisters. It is your moment now, your journey now, and ours, and Christ’s, together, always. Let us remember how to swim and let us show you how. The water is deep and mysterious, but there is life here.

Step in.

On Julian, God, and Gender: A Sermon

I preached this sermon today, the feast day of the English mystic Julian of Norwich, at All Saints Chapel, Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Berkeley, CA. The Gospel text cited is John 4:23-26.

When my mom was pregnant with me, she and my dad went about the usual business of considering baby names and preparing a nursery (mine was full-on Beatrix Potter characters). And in the early 1980’s, ultrasound predictions of an infant’s sex were not as common as they are today, so it was, for them, a matter of speculation whether I would be a boy or a girl. My mom was convinced that I was going to be a girl, and my name was going to be Ashley.

My parents had an artist friend around this same time who gave them an oil painting as a baby shower gift. It features a pastoral landscape with small human figures here and there: my dad carrying a fishing pole, and my mom standing by a bassinet with a little blond baby under a pink blanket.

After my birth (surprise! It’s a boy!) their friend changed the painting—brown hair, blue blanket. Now, in retrospect,could they could have kept it pink, and I’d have been perfectly happy with that! But I love that when I look closely at the painting now—it’s hanging in my room—you can still see little traces of the blond and the pink peeking through, the shadow of a different existence–a different, unrealized identity.

And I wonder about that other child who is not me—the Ashley who never arrived—and what her life would have been like, shaped by the expectations that are assigned to certain types of bodies. I am sure it would have been very, very different, and perhaps much harder in ways that I’ll never fully understand as a man.

And yet, in a way that I can’t fully explain, I still feel like I a carry a piece of Ashley inside of me; the part of my identity that doesn’t conform to some of the gender expectations that came along with that last-minute painting revision. Who we are is never quite as simple as appearances might indicate.

I tell you this story because it reminds me of the constructed nature of our identities, and especially of the ways in which our bodies and our genders and our culturally-mediated self-understandings are always engaged in a process of becoming, from the moment we take our first breath, all the way up to our very last. Whatever labels have been assigned to us, rightly or wrongly, and whatever identities we claim for ourselves, their meanings and significance can and will develop, both by the unfurling of our interior self-knowledge and by the changeable nature of our changing contexts. Who we are as social beings is always contingent, always being revealed ever more in its fullness. It is the journey of a lifetime, one that is never finished.

And that, I think, is as it must be, because the fullness of ourselves, the maximum horizon of our complex, nuanced personhood, is located in the heart of the God who draws us across time and space to a place as yet only partially revealed to us, as we are now, sitting here this morning. Today we might understand ourselves primarily as a seminary student, as a gay man, as a person of color, as a professor or a priest or spouse or child, or, in the case of our Gospel passage, as a Samaritan woman kneeling beside a well. And in our present contingency we know that we are also other things, other identities… some that we want to forget, and some that we yearn to become.

But Jesus tells each of us today that the hour is coming, and is now here, when the “true worshippers” will worship the Father in Spirit and in truth. In other words, the hour is coming and is now here when we will understand that God loves the fullness of who we are —this is God’s truth; AND the hour is coming and is now here when we will understand that God’s loves the fullness of every other identity too, especially those that the world has called suspect or worthless—this is the work of the Spirit. And in this confluence of truth and Spirt, we will know perhaps for the very first time how SPACIOUS God truly is. How FREE God truly is. How the love of God includes all of us, as we are now, and as we are becoming.

Julian of Norwich, the deep lover of Christ, the medieval mystic, the earliest known woman author in the English language, the person whom the Church honors today, was intimately acquainted with the spaciousness of God’s identity. Her text, Revelations of Divine Love, which describes her ecstatic visions of Jesus’ passion and the Holy Trinity’s deep yearning for the salvation of all creation, is one of the most beautiful accounts of Christian wisdom ever recorded. It is also a text, written in the late 14th century, whose treatment of God’s gender and identity is so fluid and liberating that it challenges any notion that the language of patriarchy is the only appropriate way of speaking about God. She writes:

“So Jesus Christ…is our real Mother. We owe our being to him—and this is the essence of motherhood! God is as really our Mother as he is our Father. He showed this throughout, and particularly when he said that sweet word, ‘It is I.’ In other words, ‘It is I who am the strength and goodness of Fatherhood; I who am the wisdom of Motherhood; I who am light and grace and blessed love; I who am Trinity; I who am Unity; I who am the sovereign goodness of every single thing; I who enable you to love; I who enable you to long. It is I, the eternal satisfaction of every genuine desire.” (Revelations of Divine Love, 167).

I say take some of that and put it in the Book of Common Prayer revision.

What Julian saw, and what she blessed us with in recording her visions for posterity, was the capacity of God to take on multiple identities, each in its precious specificity, and in so doing, to show us that all such identities—every last one—are holy in themselves.

And so, no matter how we continue to grow in self-understanding through our lives and relationships—whether we end up claiming for ourselves a pink blanket or a blue blanket or perhaps we decide we don’t want to be confined by any color blanket at all, thank you very much—whatever our becoming looks like, God holds it. God loves it. God IS it.

God is our Mother and our Father and our Spouse and our Sibling. And God is Spirit and Truth, and God flows through our fluid identities, bolstering their unfolding current with Christ’s life-giving waters, as we travel together with Jesus towards something beautiful and vast and mysterious, something in which all of who we are, all of the ways we name ourselves, ALL OF IT is revealed in its magnificence—in a place where we will indeed and at last be “true worshippers” in the fullness of our hard-won, fully embodied truth.

I pray for that day. I long for it. I hope I’m courageous enough when I leave seminary in a few weeks to keep working towards it alongside each of you.

Julian is perhaps most famous for one particular quote from her text: “All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” It’s a lovely sentiment, but there’s an important clarification that must be made: these are not Julian’s own words. It is not a speculation on her part, or a vague, facile hope for the future. No, these are the words that Jesus speaks TO Julian in her vision, to assure her about the destiny of all creation.

And so Jesus says, to her and to us: All shall be well. ALL shall be well. All manner of thing—every person, every searching heart, every identity we name and encounter, every single thing—shall be well, in the fullness of what it is because it is OF GOD. It is OF SPIRIT AND TRUTH. That is our shared identity, commingled with all of those others we are carrying and discovering and painting in new layers over the landscapes of our lives. Pink, blue, something else—it doesn’t matter. God is in all the colors. God is in every possibility.

All shall be well.

Love, Named Twice: A Sermon

This sermon was preached today, March 17, 2019, the feast of St. Patrick, at Christ Church, Alameda, CA. The lectionary text cited is Luke 13:31-35.

How many of you have either read or seen Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet?

I would guess that the most famous scene in the entire play is the balcony scene, when Juliet, just having met and fallen instantly in love with Romeo, the son of her family’s mortal enemies, leans out into the night and sighs, “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?”

In that single line, a whole universe of emotion is encapsulated: the thrill of new love, deep desire for the beloved, and a sense of resignation that the fruition of this love will face some serious obstacles. And for Juliet and Romeo, most of us know how tragic those obstacles will prove.

Romeo…Romeo. A name said twice, softly. So simple, this repetition, and yet so full of significance. To call out a name just once is utilitarian and authoritative: PHIL! That might be an identification, an invitation, or a command. But to say a name twice is to linger on it, to express attachment, investment, yearning. It is not the pronouncement of a ruler, but the call of a lover.

And so there is Jesus, the consummate Lover of creation, calling out in today’s Gospel: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem!” In these two words, in the name of that beloved and holy and imperfect city, uttered twice, is contained the entire pathos, the entire sweet misery of God.

Jerusalem is the city that embodies God’s chosen people Israel, and yet it is the city that kills God’s chosen prophets. It is the city of promises kept and the city of hope abandoned. And just as Juliet intuits in her bones when she sighs into the darkness for Romeo, so Jesus knows in his bones that his love for this radiant, wretched city is both the fulfillment of his life and the assurance of his death. “Jerusalem…Jerusalem.” It is the longing of God uttered on the human lips of God.

If we look back through Scripture, God often names twice the ones who are beloved:

“Abraham! Abraham! Now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son”

“Jacob! Jacob! Do not be afraid to go down to Egypt”

“Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”

In each of these instances, just as in Jesus’ calling out to Jerusalem, God is offering us, at the same moment, both an assurance and a question. The assurance is that from the foundation of the world, God has loved us, and called us by name. God will never stop calling us name. The question is this: can you find it in your heart to return that love? Can you return the cry and say “Lord, Lord, here I am?”

This, I think, gets to the heart of what we are doing in Lent. We are slowing down a bit; we are getting rid of some distractions; getting quiet, and asking ourselves: who is the person, what is the place, what is the thing that our heart is reaching for? To where or to whom is our deepest love and longing directed? If we were to stand with Jesus, looking out over the landscape of our lives, to whom would we call out, twice?

Because if we can figure that out, if we can name it, we will get a clue about what God needs us to do next.

I am reminded of St. Patrick, whose life we are commemorating today. Surprisingly, Patrick was actually not from Ireland, but likely from what is now northeastern England. As a teenager, around the year 406, he was kidnapped by bandits and taken away to Ireland as a slave, where he was in bondage for six years. Eventually he escaped and made his way back to his family in England for what might have been a simple, happy ending to his hardships. But that was not the end of the story.

Church tradition tells us that in the middle of the night, Patrick started having dreams and visions of the people back in Ireland, the people who had been his captors, and he heard their voices from across the sea calling out to him, asking him to return: “we beseech thee, holy youth, to come and walk among us once more.” I would like to imagine that perhaps he heard his own name whispered in the dark. Patrick…Patrick.

And so he went. With a small group of companions, without any protection, he returned to the land of his enslavement to preach the gospel. He ventured willingly, like Jesus, back to the place of his greatest despair, back to his own version of Jerusalem, back to what was, for him, the “city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it,” back to the place that he feared and yet, the place that his longing led him. And in doing so, he fulfilled his calling as a bearer of the gospel, as the apostle to Ireland, and as one of the saints we cherish most dearly…with green sweatter, and big parades and green beer. And prayer, of course!

As Jesus knew, gazing down at Jerusalem, and as Patrick discovered, returning to the shores of Ireland, when we attend to the deepest longings of our hearts, we are attending to God’s longing that we will become everything we were meant to be. By listening and responding to that longing, we are taking a step into the fullness of life that God offers us, the fullness of life lived in and for Christ.

If the news of the past few days tells us nothing else–the murder of our brothers and sisters in New Zealand, the senseless destruction and scandal that we see at home and around the world–if they tell us nothing else, then these things tell us we don’t have the luxury of ignoring the longing of God that calls out to us. We have to follow it, now, as seekers of truth and reconciliation. We must respond.

And so I ask you: what is your deepest longing? Name it to yourself, twice.

It could be the person with whom you need to reconcile. Name them, twice.

It could be a cause of justice or service toward which you are drawn, especially one that scares you a little bit. Name it, twice.

It could be a new place, or a new vocation, or a new relationship, or a new practice that will bring healing to yourself and others. Name it, twice.

And just as Jesus cried out “Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” and as Juliet sighed “Romeo, Romeo,” find within your own heart that mix of love and generosity and hope and trepidation and name it. Follow it into a place of service. Follow it into a place of risk and holiness. Follow it into the city, follow it to the farthest shore of your imagination. Follow it with reverence and joy. Because this is the task for which we are created. This is the longing of God enacted through us.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem. Two words, containing in the space between them all the weight and glory and possibility of life. All the weight and glory and possibility of the love of Christ.

Jerusalem.

…

The Dust Matters: A Sermon

I preached this sermon today, Ash Wednesday 2019, at Christ Church, Alameda, CA. The lectionary texts are Isaiah 58:1-12, 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:10 and Matthew 6:1-6,16-21.

It’s been almost seven years since my father died, quite unexpectedly, and one of the clearest things that I remember about flying home for his funeral was the shock of seeing the little black box that held his ashes, and looking in at them, and realizing that, physically speaking, this was all that was left of a man who had been so full of life and humor and compassion. And how surreal it was that the man who cradled me in his arms when I was a baby, I was now cradling in my arms as a box of dust. It defies my comprehension, even to this day.

And I was, then (and often still am), tempted to say—as I think we often do when someone dies—no, he’s not in there. This box of ashes is not actually him. This little box can’t contain the man whom I loved and admired, a person who lived so deeply, so fully, and so well. I am tempted to say these ashes are nothing but a shell, that they have nothing to do with that person. And yet…I took those ashes home with me, and for the longest time I would take them out and look at them, and I couldn’t let them go.

Why is that?

I ponder the same thing when I walk by columbariums like the one here in Christ Church, which holds a lifetime’s worth of love and memories in each quiet chamber, with a name engraved on the front. We stand before these rows of names and ashes, and we ask, “where are you? are you here in these chambers? Are you in my heart? Are you in a place beyond this place, somewhere I can’t even begin to imagine?”

The dust of our loved ones gives no answer to these questions. They rest, silently, like those ancient ruins mentioned in Isaiah, the foundations of many generations, placed lovingly in columbariums and cemeteries, scattered across land and sea. But while the dust does not answer us, it does bears witness, both to our own impermanent bodies and to our enduring bewilderment about what becomes of us, when we are no longer *this*. The Psalmist says, “God remembers that we are but dust,” and on days like today we try to remember that too, even as it remains inconceivable that all of our vitality and memory and longing could be so shockingly reducible, so small and earthbound.

But as inconceivable as it might be, we can’t seem to escape the dust. As much as we might like to, we can’t shake it off. We are drawn back to it, over and over again, because we know, intuitively, that whatever happens after death, this dust that was once our flesh somehow still matters. It is not easily forgotten or discarded.

I bring up this meditation on flesh and dust so that we might deeply consider the meaning of these ashes we are about to receive, and the fullness of what they symbolize. Too often in our tradition they are treated only as a sign of death or penitence, and we wash them off later in the day and move on until next year. If we leave it at that, I think we miss something beautiful. And this is especially important because our scripture readings warn us against practices of empty, unexamined piety.

Isaiah, for example, tells the people that true humility and repentance is found in loving each other, not just putting on sackcloth and ashes. And in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says that fasting and praying should be about an intimate connection with God, not a big gesture to show off to our neighbors. These texts starkly reject showy displays of piety…on the very day that we receive big dark smudged crosses on our foreheads and wear them out into the world.

So we must reckon with the significance of what we are doing here today, Ash Wednesday, to articulate why these ashes–and those ashes in the columbarium–matter, and what all this talk of ash and dust conveys, not just about the tradition of the church, but about our lives.

Our faith, as we often say, is Incarnational. That word, incarnate, literally means “into the flesh”. We affirm that God came into the flesh, human flesh, and lived among us as Jesus of Nazareth, himself a mortal man of dust, and somehow in our union with Jesus, God seeps into our dusty flesh, too. Through Jesus, the love of God has not just redeemed a “spirit” or “soul” within us, but has permeated our very bodies; we are like that watered garden of which Isaiah speaks, drenched in God, nourished by the spring whose waters never fail.

And this incarnational movement of God into our unremarkable flesh reveals something crucial about the language and symbol of Ash Wednesday: that this dust of which we are made—it MATTERS to God. The dusty remains of our loved ones, which seem so far removed from who they once were—they MATTER to God, too. Our bodies, mortal as they are, all matter to God, because they are caught up in the divine story of God, the divine story that is revealed and enacted in our bodies, in relationship with one another.

We might be made of dust, but it is beloved, holy dust.

This dust makes up the fingers that we use to caress the face of our beloved;

This dust makes up the eyes that behold our children and grandchildren for the very first time;

This dust makes up the ears that we use to listen deeply to one another.

These small perishable parts of us MATTER to God, they are part of God’s indwelling in the substance of creation, and they tell a story of the goodness of being alive, of being human, of being part of one another.

From this perspective, the ashes we wear today are certainly not an empty act of piety, and they are far more, even, than a mark of penitence. They are a reminder–an affirmation–of what it means to be that which we are: a body that is at once dying and yet imbued with eternity, at once broken and yet redeemed by love. A body, as Paul says, which appears as having nothing, and yet possesses everything.

When I receive the mark on my forehead today, I will remember my father, whose ashes I finally let go and scattered into the ocean about a year ago, so that the dusty remnants of his kind eyes and his quiet smile might be carried on the waves, to dwell with God in the uttermost parts of the sea. With this smudge of ash, I am anointing myself with the dust of his memory, and with the conviction that his mortal life, his mortal body—and mine, and yours, and all the people who have come before us—will always matter to God. We are beloved, we are not forgotten, even when we become the silent dust, even as we wait, in hope, through the quiet season to come.

Waiting by the Road: A Sermon

I preached this sermon today, October 28th, at my field-education parish, Christ Episcopal Church, in Alameda, CA. The lectionary texts are Mark 10:46-52 and Jeremiah 31:7-9.

Bartimaeus is sitting by the road out of Jericho and into Jerusalem. He is waiting: waiting in darkness, waiting in despair, waiting in hope. He wants to go, somewhere, anywhere other than this place, where he is forgotten, invisible, little more than a breathing corpse, a ghostly figure in a home that has become more like a tomb.

…

At this very moment, there is a caravan of 7,000 refugees—men, women, children—walking north from Honduras, fleeing poverty and violence, trying to get to Mexico City, or the US, or anywhere they might have a chance to survive—anywhere other than a homeland where they cannot feed themselves, where they cannot protect their children—a home that, for them, has become more like a tomb.

…

There are countless families grieving today—11 people dead in a Pittsburgh synagogue, yet another horrific episode in a seemingly endless torrent of gun violence. Lives, and bodies, and memories piled upon memories. We see the news, we feel fear and anger and helplessness, and sometimes we want to be somewhere, anywhere other than this time and place, where our beloved country, our home, has become more like a tomb.

…

And then all of the sudden, there is Jesus, passing by. He’s leaving Jericho, headed toward Jerusalem, on a mission. Bartimaeus hears that he is near, and from the depths of his soul he cries out—Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me! This is the cry of a person who has nothing, who has been stripped of all presumption, all illusions of safety. It is the raw and urgent voice of Life itself, crying out to God for acknowledgment. It is a plea, a lament, and a demand to be seen.

The crowd tells him to be quiet, to keep the peace, to mind his place, but he will not—he cannot. Because at the end of the day Life is insistent. It asserts itself, no matter how much the structures around us try to squash it. Life speaks, and it speaks loudly.

Life says NO—we will not acquiesce to violence as the defining characteristic of our culture.

Life says NO—we will not be silent when leaders give in to corruption and complacency.

Life says NO-we will not sit in the dust on the side of the road and wait to die—we will get up, we will join the caravan, we will travel until we reach the place that God has promised for us, the one where, as the prophet Jeremiah tells us, all people are gathered together—those who are blind, those who can’t walk, those of us who are in labor, those who are Jewish, and homeless, and transgender, and everyone, everyone who cannot and will not be forgotten by God, because God SEES them, even when the world refuses to do so.

LIFE says we are on this journey together, and even though it might all look like shadow and darkness now, we will leave this valley of death where our home has become more like a tomb and we will spring up like Bartimaeus and we will throw off the cloak of our despair, and we will come forward, out into the light, out into presence of God who is the source of our life and the fulfillment of our longing.

Take heart! Get up! He is calling you!

…

And so Jesus asks Bartimaeus: What do you want me to do for you?

What do you want me to do for you? It is the question upon which our entire life depends. What would we have the Son of God do for us? The possibilities are infinite. We could ask him for an end to pain and hunger. We could ask him for consolation and courage. We could ask him for justice. We could ask him for peace. We could ask him to take us away from this place of death and towards the Kingdom of Life. And so we do, every time we pray.

But Bartimaeus knows what he wants, and it’s quite simple: he wants to see again. He wants to see the face of Jesus. He wants to see the dusty road and the people, he wants to see the world and get up and move in it, and in doing so to BE seen again by those around him, all those who have chosen to ignore him and told him to be quiet.

To see and be seen is to be in relationship, and to be in relationship is what it means to LIVE as God would have us live, rather than to merely exist. Bartimaeus knows that isolation is death, and he is not ready to die. In restoring his sight, Jesus heals Bartimaeus’ physical infirmity, but, even more importantly, he restores him back into relationship with the world around him. Bartimaeus’ home is no longer a tomb, but a place of possibility. With new vision, physical and spiritual, he joins the caravan to Jerusalem and walks toward Life.

We have been given that same vision—the vision of God’s dream for creation, the vision of Life restored to fullness in Jesus. And if the ever-mounting perils of contemporary life tell us anything, it is that this vision is precious, and often elusive. It is obscured every day by both tragedy and triviality. And so it is our responsibility, as Christians, to be the bearers—the stewards—of that vision. Stewardship is not about funding an institution—it is about ensuring that God’s vision of love and life will continue to be proclaimed in a world that often seems hell-bent on blinding us.

What would we have Jesus do for us? We, too, must ask him to see—to see the world as it can be and will be in God. We do that first by opening our hearts, as Bartimaeus did, and by asking for that vision to be restored to us, time and again, as we seek the face of Jesus. And then, having beheld that vision’s promise, we give everything we can give to it—our trust, our energy, our resources, our whole selves. We get up, and we go. We join the caravan. We follow were God leads us. This is the road you are invited to walk as part of this community, as part of Christ’s body. This is the road out of death and into life.

…

It has been a difficult week. And there will surely be more difficult weeks that we must face together.

We are sitting by the road out of Jericho and into Jerusalem. We are waiting: waiting in darkness, waiting in despair, waiting in hope. We want to go somewhere, anywhere other than this place, this home that has become like a tomb.

But take heart! Get up. He is calling you.

A Sermon: God, Our Lover

I preached this sermon at my home parish, Grace in the Desert Episcopal Church, Las Vegas, NV, on Sunday, September 2nd, 2018. The lectionary reading used is Song of Solomon 2:8-13. I offer it to you and to the heart of the God who loves and desires each of us.

“Arise my love, my fair one, and come away; for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.”

The Song of Solomon, a piece of which we encountered in today’s readings, has a rather controversial history in the Christian tradition. It is, on its face, an exquisite poem about the ecstatic love between a man and a woman—one that comes out of a long poetic tradition in the cultures of ancient Israel and the near east. It’s an unabashed expression of longing and desire between two people, and its heightened sentiments might sound familiar to those of us who have experienced the soul-stirring rush of romantic attraction.

At various points in the history of our faith, the Song of Solomon has also been reinterpreted as a metaphor of Christ’s love for His bride, the Church. The thought for some, I suppose, was that such a frank expression of bodily desire did not align with the sanctity and moral discipline of the Christian ethos, and so the Song was instead taught and understood as coded language that communicates God’s pure and holy desire for creation; the consummation of a bond between two lovers became an analogy for the Church’s mystical union with Jesus Christ.

So what do we do with this text, then? Do we stick with those Biblical scholars who read it as an ancient Israelite love poem, a beautiful erotic relic? Or do we cordon it off as a spiritualized metaphor, one that conveys a sanitized interpretation of Jesus’s bond with his Church? Or is there something else here for us?

To answer this question, I want to tell you a brief personal story. Last year I was meeting with my spiritual director, a Franciscan friar, and we were talking about prayer—specifically, my prayer life while at seminary. I was telling him about the various ways that I was trying to relate to God, and how on some level I was more comfortable praying and talking to God the Father rather than directly to Jesus. I felt, quite honestly, like I didn’t know how to relate to Jesus. As a teacher or guru figure? An older brother? A King? (too intimidating) A close friend? (too familiar) As someone who is a disciple of Jesus, as someone who has pledged myself to serving this very personal God who is Son as much as Father and Spirit, I was troubled by my struggle to connect on an emotional level with Jesus, and not just a theoretical one.

And then my spiritual director said something surprising that I will never forget. He said, “why don’t you relate to Jesus as the one who is in love with you?”

I had two immediate reactions. First: my brain’s knee-jerk response: “No way! Jesus is God incarnate. I can’t think of God in the same way I would someone I am in love with. That kind of romantic love is only for human beings.”

And the other reaction, from a much deeper place in my heart: a door opening. The feeling of an unspoken, unrecognized truth suddenly brought to light: our God was also, somehow, human. Our God, in Jesus, had a heart and body like mine. And with this heart, God might not simply love me in a paternalistic way, or with a generic, impassive offering of good-will, but that God could be IN LOVE with me. That God could be IN LOVE with all of us.

“Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.”

The Song of Solomon clues us in to something—that desire, that romantic love, as much as any other form of love, is a doorway to understanding the ways in which God relates to us. And that’s not in the detached, polite manner of interaction that you might offer an acquaintance on the street. No. God loves us passionately, ardently, with a fury and a longing. God is the burning bush in the desert that calls out to us and burns and burns and burns and yet is never consumed.

And it’s with this insight that we come to understand that the romantic bond between two people—straight people, gay people, young lovers, or lifelong partners— this bond is bound up in the outpouring of divine love that permeates creation. It is our nature, it is a good thing, to long for each other, to yearn for the union of our body with another, because God longs for us in the very same way. It is this longing that erupted in the Incarnation, the Passion, and that brought forth the Resurrection. In the human heart, the divine heart, the beating and burning sacred heart of Jesus, God has not only sanctified our human love and desire—He has experienced it, as a human being, firsthand, coursing through Him.

This truth about the heart of God is what allowed the medieval English mystic Julian of Norwich, writing down heavenly visions in her monastic cell, to refer variously to Jesus as father, as mother, as brother, and as husband—the One Who fulfills every need, Who encapsulates every type of love we have been blessed to receive in this life, and every type of love for which we are still longing to find.

This truth about the passion of God is what St. Clare of Assisi was referring to when she wrote, of Christ: “Draw me after you! We will run in the fragrance of your perfumes, O heavenly spouse! I will run and not tire.”

This is a love that enfolds us, no matter our gender, no matter our sexuality, or our relationship status. Christ looks upon us and loves us, He sees our longing to be understood, to be admired, to be held, and He says:

I’m here. I’ve always been here. I love you. I am in love with you, every part of you. Why else would I have endured the folly and suffering of the cross, if not for that burning love? Why else would I show up here at this altar, week after week, to kiss your lips with bread and wine, if not for an all-consuming desire to be one with you?

And the voice of the poet, who is us, sings in response,

“Look, he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills.”

“Look, there he stands behind our wall, gazing in at the windows, looking through the lattice.”

The Song of Solomon, like all of Holy Scripture, is an invitation to love and be loved, in body as well as heart and soul. Those who would read the text as “only” an erotic poem AND those who would read it as “only” a spiritual metaphor are actually making the same mistake: they are constructing a false boundary between our bodily experience of human love and that of the divine love we participate in through Christ. The two are intertwined, and in our humble passions we find a reflection of the One Consummate Lover of all creation—the God we know in Christ, who calls out to us, wooing us, consoling us, as only a lover can do.

The only question that remains, then, is whether we will respond to the invitation to “arise and come away“. If your beloved calls to you, will you go running and cast yourself into their embrace? Will you venture out with them, into that landscape of abundant possibility where “the fig tree puts forth its figs, and the vines are in blossom”?

I pray that each of us will take such a chance. I pray that we will respond with the same intensity of feeling that Jesus offers us, for it is He who will always be the Supreme Love of our lives. I pray for a world blessed by the consummation of our desire for God and for each other. I pray that such a world will give way to a new love poem, one that never ends. Its title will be the Song of the Kingdom of God.

“Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away, for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come.”

Both Shepherd and Sheep: A Sermon

There is so much I could say and need to say about the experiences of the past few weeks, but I just don’t have the words at the moment. In the mean time, here is a sermon I offered yesterday, April 23rd, at my placement churches: St. Mary’s Mirfield and St. John’s Upper Hopton. The text is John 10:11-18, wherein Jesus describes himself as the Good Shepherd.

As many of you know, I have been given the privilege of living and studying in the UK for the past few months as part of an exchange program between my seminary in California and the College of the Resurrection here in Mirfield. Getting to know the people and the landscapes of West Yorkshire has been a joy, but when we were given a break after Easter, I was eager to go a bit further afield. And so I boarded a train to Scotland, determined to see as much as I could in a week. And sightsee I did—I saw medieval cityscapes, glorious cathedrals and museums, Highland lochs, the holy island of Iona in the Inner Hebrides….and sheep. Lots and lots of sheep.

Scottish sheep really have it made, as far as I’m concerned. They are free to roam across those dramatic Highland landscapes, munching on wild grasses and heather, disturbed only occasionally by the odd passing tourist gawking out of a train window. And while I was gawking at them, I noticed something interesting, which perhaps you have seen, too: the sheep are all marked. They have splashes of color painted onto their fleece, some green, some blue, some red. I looked this up later, and I learned that these colors all have a practical purpose—they are called “Smit Marks”, and they are used by the sheep farmers to keep track of which sheep belong to them. Since the countryside is open, and the sheep can roam wherever they like, these markings are a quick means of identification when it’s time for them to be gathered back in for shearing, etc.

The Scottish sheep, with their vibrant Smit Marks, were lingering in my mind’s eye as I pondered this week’s Gospel passage from John, in which Jesus describes himself as the Good Shepherd caring for his flock. It’s such an evocative image, isn’t it? One that is deeply ingrained in our idea of relationship with God—through the recitation of the beloved 23rd Psalm, in church art and in hymnody. It is an image of protection and guidance and self-giving love: the Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want. The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. For us.

And we are marked, too, are we not? Not with a streak of color on our backs, of course, but we have our own Smit Marks, indicating to whom we belong—they were placed on us in the water of baptism and the oil of anointing. As it says in my favorite line in the service for Holy Baptism that we use in the Episcopal Church, we are “sealed by the Holy Spirit…and marked as Christ’s own forever.” No matter where we wander, no matter how far we stray into shadowy valleys or foreboding wilderness, we bear the mark that tells us who we are, and by Whom we are guided—Christ, the Good Shepherd, who stands on the brow of the hill at dusk and calls us home. It can be hard to see and the path is often rocky, but His lantern is lit for us to follow—it burns in the sanctuary of every church where his Eucharistic presence is encountered, and it illuminates every place where we, the people of God, pray and minister in His name.

It’s remarkable what you can discern from looking at a field of sheep!

There’s a catch, of course. If we were to simply bask in the image of Christ as the loving Shepherd and ourselves as his beloved flock, we’d only be getting part of the picture. Because Jesus is more than a model of a capable guardian and overseer; in fact our faith depends on the fact that he is much more than this. As Saint Augustine asked, “What sayest Thou, O Lord, Thou good Shepherd? For You are the good Shepherd, who art also the good Lamb; at once Pastor and Pasturage, at once Lamb and Lion.” In the mystery of his death and resurrection, which we continue to marvel at this Easter season, we cannot forget that Jesus the Shepherd is also, paradoxically, the paschal lamb who was slain, who was given, if you’ll allow me to stretch the metaphor, his own Smit Mark by the Father to fulfill the plan of human salvation, and who was called home through the valley of the shadow of death in his glorious rising to new life.

This is the One whom we encounter in sacrament and prayer and service. The Shepherd who is the Lamb. The Lamb who is the Shepherd. Whose death was, in the light of the Resurrection, not a demonstration of God’s failure to care, but proof that God will do anything to gather us close into a merciful embrace.

If we follow this train of thought, though, there is one missing piece. Because if Christ is both the Good Shepherd AND the Lamb of God, then we, as people who share in his life, also share in this dual identity. We cannot merely see ourselves as sheep to be protected. As much as I envied those Scottish sheep in their pastoral idyll, I knew I had to continue on my journey, that I could not linger in the field. There was much to see, and much yet to be done. So it is for all of us. If we believe, as St. Paul claims, that it is not we who live but Christ who lives in us, then the Good Shepherd is the One who lives within us. The One Who must guide, and seek out, and yes, even lay down their life at the feet of those whom they serve. He is the one who animates our very beings. In the same moment that we are the beloved flock, you and I are also the brave, good shepherds of God’s mission. We were marked as such on the day of our baptism, when we were knit into Christ’s body, and it is an indelible mark. It cannot be undone. It is our vocation, each and every one of us.

So as we approach the table to take part in the banquet feast of the Lamb who was slain for us, let us remember the deep bond that has drawn us here, the bond of a Good Shepherd calling his flock back to him for rest and renewal. But let us remember, too, that by taking Him into ourselves, we have been transfigured by His abiding presence into shepherds. And so we, too, must seek the flock. We too must measure the worth of our lives by the amount of love we are willing to risk pouring out. We, too, must walk the landscape, lighting the way to guide others into safety.

The world is vast, more vast even than those Highland valleys, and there are many who are seeking home. Let us take up our staffs, light our lanterns, and call out. And may the Good Shepherd within each of us provide the words to pierce the silent gloom, to bring near those who wander towards the light.