We listen for what God wants, what Jesus, God’s Son, says is compassion and love; in our listening we have God’s gift of Elis who help us hear.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Second Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 9 B
Texts: Mark 2:23 – 3:6; 1 Samuel 3:1-20; Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18

Dear friends in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

What do you hear when you listen for God?

What insight or guidance comes? Do you hear God’s compassion for the creation, God’s undying love for all? Do you hear God’s judgment and wrath on others, on you?

There is no question in human history that has caused more destruction and suffering than “What does God want?” Bitter wars have endlessly been fought between different faiths and within the same faith. Hatred and violence and abuse and oppression and evil beyond comprehension have been done by humans to humans, to other creatures, and to the creation, because someone claimed, “this is what God wants.”

The story of Samuel begins, “The word of the LORD was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.” It was long since the last judge, and no one was hearing God speak and telling the people. But now God calls this little boy – how old we don’t know – to be a prophet. God speaks to Samuel, who will declare to the people what God is thinking, what God wants. But right now this boy, our writer says, “did not yet know the LORD.” Samuel had never heard God speak. The word of God was rare.

What about you? Have you heard? What do you hear when you listen for God? And how do you know you’re listening to God, and not someone or something else?

This is the dispute between Jesus and the Pharisees today.

The Pharisees aren’t bad guys here. Like Samuel, like Jesus, they listen to God, and teach what God is saying. So they know God’s Sabbath commandment is central, one of the Ten. They’ve faithfully created rules to help the people keep this law, do what God wants.

When Jesus lets his hungry disciples work on the Sabbath – picking grain was work – they rightfully say this violates their understanding of Sabbath law. When Jesus heals a withered hand, again, they declare him in violation.

But this rabbi Jesus, the Son of God, hears God differently. They don’t recognize him as God’s Son, of course, only as a teacher. But this rabbi declares that the Sabbath commandment was designed to be a blessing to humanity. A gift from God. Something Orthodox Jews today would completely agree with. So, Jesus reasons, if Sabbath is gift, letting someone go hungry, or delaying someone’s healing, violates that gift. As he asks, do you think it’s lawful to do good on the Sabbath, to save life?

This is just a normal dispute between Jewish rabbis over following God faithfully, though it ends with ominous foreshadowing. So as we witness this, wondering what God wants, who’s got it right?

Well, we who are baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection and filled with the Spirit of God find that’s an easy answer.

We believe Jesus is the face of the Triune God, who reveals the Father’s heart and gives us the Holy Spirit for new birth. If Jesus, God’s Son, says that compassion and love is how to interpret God’s commandment on Sabbath-keeping, that’s our final answer. Jesus is the living Word of God, God’s desire, God’s intent, in our flesh. We read the written Word of God through Jesus: his take on Scripture and God’s will is our norm.

Yet this doesn’t answer “what do you hear when you listen for God?” Because believers in Jesus have led the killing and destruction over God’s will for the world. We’ve killed millions: each other, and people who weren’t Christian. We’ve permitted the destruction of the environment, and either quietly or openly supported oppression and prejudice and hatred, all in the name of the Christ who wouldn’t let a man wait a single day more to have his hand healed.

In our nation alone, an outside observer of Christians would conclude that there are serious, nearly unsolvable disagreements between Christians over what God wants. When we hear what some Christians say about the poor, immigrants, war, race, gender, really just about everything, we wonder if they’re even Christian at all. And they say the same of us.

Maybe Eli can be of some help.

Samuel may not have heard God before. God’s Word might have been rare then. But Eli had heard God. Eli had been faithful. He was flawed, yes. His sons were evil and destructive, and God said this was partly Eli’s fault.

But this story is about Samuel. And Eli is God’s gift. When Samuel hears a voice, Eli realizes who is calling. Eli helps Samuel recognize what he has no experience with: knowing when God is speaking to him.

Carrying this wisdom, Samuel now hears God speak, and begins his path to be one of God’s greatest prophets. One who, our writer says, never let a single word of God “fall to the ground.” Eli made it possible for Samuel to find this faithful path of listening to God, holding on to God’s words, and carrying them to the people.

Eli still works today. That’s God’s gift.

When you struggle to hear God, to know what God wants and desires, look around. Find an Eli to help you sort out what’s going on.

Think: who has served as Eli to you in your life? Who has said, “I think that’s God leading you,” or sent you to a place in Scripture, or to worship, or to a community of faith, where you could hear God more clearly?

In this place we gather to worship when we could easily each pray at home, because here we meet God in Word and Sacrament. God speaks to us through Scripture, and through the actual presence of Christ in this place. We find the heart of God’s love in the Meal of grace we share that gives us forgiveness and life.

But we also have each other as a means of God’s grace, as Elis. You have others here who are also listening for God, trying to understand God’s desire. These Elis help you listen. And in the mystery of God’s Spirit, you are also Eli, to others here, and even in the world.

As we help each other listen, we hear God’s desire clearly from Jesus today. Love and compassion for all. A desire to heal and not destroy. A love that God will unmistakeably prove in dying on a cross and rising to new life. It may even be with the Spirit’s grace we can serve as Eli to other Christians who don’t hear this love, don’t offer it to others.

Thanks be to God, our times aren’t like when Samuel was called.

God’s Word, alive in the risen Christ and in our hearts through the Spirit, is with us constantly. It’s not rare. And we have the written Word to shape our listening and discerning. We have each other as Eli, opening our ears.

So always keep listening. How God’s compassion and love are to unfold in this broken world will need your best mind, your keenest ears.

And as Eli says, your first step is always to say, “Speak, for your servant is listening.”

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

We are born in the Spirit into the very life of God, part of the family of the Triune God, and are no longer “I” but “we,” living each day with God.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Holy Trinity, year B
Texts: John 3:1-20; Romans 8:12-17

Dear friends in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

To be in a family is to belong. To be connected. To be a “we,” not an “I.”

In a family, everything is more complicated. Your own needs and wants are counted among everyone else’s, so meeting them is always a conversation, a give and take, a sharing of life.

But what a glorious thing, to be a “we” instead of simply an “I.” There is life and joy and hope and love in “we”.

The Trinity shouldn’t be so hard for us to grasp, then, should it? God is also a “we,” not an “I”. That’s always how God comes to us. Whatever we understand about the Triune God, the relationship of family, community between Spirit, Son, and Father is probably the easiest and most helpful for us to imagine. God belongs to God – one God, yet three Persons – living together in love and dance and joy. A divine “we” creating all things.

Consider what this means for us, created in the image of God.

As I wrote in this week’s Olive Branch, God’s creating word in Genesis 1 is deeply significant: “Let us make humankind in our own image.” If the Triune God is an “us” not an “I,” and this communal God created humanity in God’s image, then this is our deepest reality. We are God’s image when we are connected to each other, to all humanity.

God created a beautiful diversity of genders, languages, colors, and shapes in humanity, and all this, says the Triune God, all this, is God’s image.  This rich diversity is the way God expresses the breadth and depth of the truth about God.

So without every child of God, every person, included, we can’t see or be the whole image of God. You were made to be complete in connection with all God’s children. I cannot be who I am made to be apart from you. There is only “we.”

In this community of faith here we learn how blessed this is, and are taught to be family in a way we can take beyond here to our whole world. Each of you is necessary to this family gathered here, whether it’s your first time in this room for worship or your fiftieth year. Here in this community we glimpse the grace of being a “we” not an “I” and our eyes learn to see how being connected to all God’s children of all kinds is our true identity.

This alone is wonder and joy enough for us today. But then we hear the astonishing words of John, chapter 3.

Father, Son, and Spirit are all here, but we tend to focus most on the first two. We repeat John 3:16 and the love of the Father, print it on signs and posters and bumper stickers. We focus our faith on the grace of the Son being lifted up on the cross, as Jesus says here, for our healing and life.

But the greeting with which I begin each Eucharist, Paul’s greeting in 2 Corinthians 13, speaks not only of the grace of Jesus Christ, and not only of the love of the Father. There is also this wonder: the fellowship, the koinonia, the sharing in the Holy Spirit, as Paul literally says.

And that’s in John 3, also. Perhaps, like Nicodemus, we’re so confused by the idea of a new birth from above we skim right past it. Clearly Jesus isn’t talking about a new physical birth. And not a “born again” moment once and for all when we each, as individuals, somehow find a depth of faith.

Jesus simply says: You are born of water and the Spirit. The Spirit mothers you into new life. And if you are born of the Spirit – and Jesus will repeat this often – you are born into the life of God. The Spirit gives you birth into the “we” that is God.

Paul says today we are joined into God’s family. Heirs of God. Jesus says the Spirit is our mother, giving us birth, and, as Jesus promised last week, walking alongside us, our Advocate, our guide, and she delivers us into the family life of the Triune God.

So you are never apart from God, born into God’s internal, eternal family life.

And that changes even how you view yourself individually. The 14th century Sufi Muslim poet Hafiz describes it this way. He says he used to wake in the morning saying “What am ‘I’ going to do?” But a seed cracked open inside him, he says, and now he is certain that he is not the only one “housed in this body.” There are two of us, he says. Two “doing the shopping together in the market and tickling each other while fixing the evening’s food.”

“Now when I awake,” he writes, “all the internal instruments play the same music: ‘God, what love-mischief can ‘We’ do for the world today?” [1]

Can you imagine such joy? To dream not “what will I do today,” but “what will we – God and me, living together – do?” The Spirit of God is within you, your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, Paul says, so you are no longer only an “I.” You are a “we.” God and you, as one, walking in the world, loving your neighbor, joined to all humanity.

This is our true reality: “we” with each other as the image of God, and “we” within the Triune God in every breath we take.

You might not feel either kind of “we” deeply right away. Whenever you join any family, there’s time needed to live into that family’s life, learn what the family feels like. If you’ve never even thought about God within you as a “we”, or all people together as the completed image of God, it will be new. But it will be beautiful. And in our life together as a community, as a “we,” we help each other. As a friend of mine said, our calling is to be the midwife of the Holy Spirit. She gives birth to all; we help that birth along in each other and in the creation.

As you awaken to the Spirit within you, mothering you in the family of the Triune God, showing you your life with all people, knowing it is true is a good start. From there you live into the reality, until you also find yourself waking up each day and saying, “God, what love-mischief can ‘we’ do for the world today?”

What indeed.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

[1] From The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, the Great Sufi Master, translated by Daniel Lodinsky; Penguin Compass, 1999.

 

The Spirit still comes, gives us the ability to reach the world with God’s Good News, gives us the language – rich and broad and diverse – to tell all what God has done, and is doing.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Day of Pentecost, year B
Texts: Acts 2:1-21; John 15:26-27, 16:4b-15; Ezekiel 37:1-14

Dear friends in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

Language has always delighted me.

I love learning words, using words. Foreign languages come easily to me. But love of language isn’t always a blessing. On my first report card in the first grade I received a C in citizenship. My teacher wrote there, “Joseph over-exercises his freedom of speech.” And Mrs. Peterson actually liked me!

My verbal fluency also didn’t help me when I became a parent. I had many frustrating experiences as a father in the years when my children were non-verbal. This went both directions. I couldn’t understand their needs sometimes, especially after trying food, changing, or holding, and I couldn’t explain anything to them. I loved it when, with each child, I could communicate with my beloved words, and could hear them speak.

“Give us language to proclaim your Good News,” we asked the Holy Spirit at the start of this liturgy. But language is more than words. Even once my children learned to speak, my tone of voice, my body language, my facial expression, even my volume, I’m sorry to say, conveyed more to them than my actual words. Communicating love is complex, challenging, and richly diverse in how that communication happens.

So when we ask the Spirit, “Give us language to proclaim your Good News,” when we hear once more of the pouring out of the Holy Spirit onto the faithful believers, we are asking for words, yes. And for much, much more.

This Pentecost event meant finding language – so a diverse group of people could hear the Good News about what God was doing.

Imagine the scene. At the Passover, Jerusalem was filled with Jews from all over the world, who carried news of this strange death and resurrection back to their various homelands. Fifty days later, Jerusalem is filled again, for the harvest festival of Pentecost. It’s an astonishing litany of nations represented, as far away as Rome – over 2,000 miles – and northern Africa – over 1200 miles – and as near as Asia Minor, faithful Jews filling Jerusalem to overflowing once again.

What a cacophony of languages represented there! Only one hundred and twenty followers of the risen Jesus were gathered, speaking only Aramaic, though some knew Greek. How on earth would they tell all these foreign people what God is doing in Christ and what the Spirit is bringing into life?

The Spirit gave them the ability to communicate, Luke says. Over 3,000 joined that group of 120 believers that day. These thousands heard, saw, marveled. And they believed God’s Good News.

The Spirit gave the believers the ability to reach these people.

That’s why we ask, “give us language to proclaim your Good News.” If we’re going to witness to God’s love for the universe revealed in Christ Jesus we’ll need as much help as those hundred and twenty did 2,000 years ago.

We’ll need help to communicate that the God of the universe can bring life even to dead, dry bones. That the God of the universe loves all creatures beyond our understanding and description. That the God of the universe lived a human, mortal body among us and showed us the path of vulnerable, sacrificial love that can heal the earth. That this God will draw all creation into the love and dance of the life of the Triune God. And that this love of God we’ve found gives us life and joy – and hope for us and the whole creation.

How on earth can we tell all this? Well, the Spirit gave them the ability. That’s our only hope.

And the language we pray for is words, and much more than words.

In the Church we constantly pay attention to the words we use. We cherish our ancient words, and here at Mount Olive we lovingly tend that tradition. But we also listen and hear that some words we use, even beloved ones, block others from hearing of God’s Good News. We need the Spirit’s help to hold the balance between beloved tradition and new language, so people aren’t prevented from hearing of God’s love, but are drawn into the heart of God’s love.

We also pay attention to our other languages. St. Francis said, “Preach the Gospel at all times. If necessary, use words.” We attend not only to what comes out of our mouths, but what our mouths look like, our faces, our gestures. Our bodies are gifts of the Holy Spirit, and we will convey compassion, grace, forgiveness, and love far more by how we are with people than by the words we choose. This is true in this place, and our hospitality to guests who sojourn here for a day or months or years. But it is true for every place you go. In your home, at the market, at work, on the street.

What do God’s children you don’t know see in you when you meet them? Do they see welcome, love, grace? Do they see judgment before a word escapes your lips? Is God’s love visible in you? The Holy Spirit fills you to be the embodied love of God. The language you need for that witness is the fullness of communication: voice, hands, heart, eyes, posture, attitude.

Jesus promised God’s revelation wasn’t completed with his teaching.

The Spirit will guide you into all the truth, when you’re ready to bear it, Jesus said. That’s why we delight in this Pentecost language we pray for. We carry the words and attitudes and bodies of our ancestors to proclaim God’s Good News. But as we’re ready, as you’re ready, the Holy Spirit will teach new things to add to the old. Will sometimes urge a change in words or actions. Will remind you of your call to love.

Pentecost isn’t really about that event 2,000 years ago. It’s about the truth of God’s Holy Spirit continuing to give birth to witnesses today, among all God’s children, young, and yes, Joel says, even old ones.

The Spirit will give you the ability. So be ready. It’s breathtaking when God’s wind and fire blow into your life. And just imagine whom God will reach through your witness!

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

Prayer is opening one’s heart into the presence of God, living and breathing inside the life of God and inside the community of those whom God embraces, and prayer changes the one who prays. Even God.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Seventh Sunday of Easter, year B
Text: John 17:6-19

Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

Why do you suppose Jesus commanded us to pray for our enemies?

Jesus said, “I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” (Luke 6:27-28) These are huge asks, even for Jesus. Love even enemies. Give good for hate. Return curses with blessings. Everything that’s counter to our instincts.

But that final command is the critical one. “Pray for them,” Jesus says. Pray.

This says as much about prayer as it does about our enemies. Often we think of prayer as just our talking to God. We wonder if prayer “works,” if we get what we pray for. But Jesus understands prayer so much more deeply and richly, a blessing that would change our lives, if we could grasp it.

We see this in this astonishing moment on the night of his betrayal. God the Son prays to God the Father, inside the life of the Triune God. God prays to God for us. For you.

The thought of God praying to God is pretty confusing. We don’t know how that even works.

How can God ask God for things? Doesn’t God the Father know everything God the Son knows? Isn’t God the Spirit there? Why would prayer be necessary?

Prayer as we often call it – asking for things – wouldn’t be. But God understands prayer very differently, and we see that clearly today: prayer is opening up one’s heart into the presence of God. Jesus, who has loved these women and men for nearly three years, opens his heart and puts them in, and in prayer opens God’s heart and carries them into the life of God.

Prayer is the atmosphere of relationship, where love and grace between beings lives and breathes. Between people we don’t call it prayer anymore, though older forms of English did. We call it communication, loving, embracing. Listening, empathy, sharing. Joining with others in loving relationship, from those closest to us to the stranger we love on the street who is Christ, this is prayer we have between each other.

And here God’s Son prays us into the very life of God, and shows us that the same life we find with each other is a life we can have and do have with God. In prayer, Jesus has wrapped us all up together and surrounded us in God’s embrace, God’s life, God’s joy.

Such an opening of the heart is bound to change the one who prays.

Loving our enemies, doing good to those who hate us, and blessing even those who curse us, that’s more than we can imagine doing. Many times I’ve not only struggled to do such things, I didn’t want to.

But everything changes when you pray. It’s easy to keep hating someone, to return evil for evil. It’s impossible to do either while carrying that person – their life, their well-being – into God’s heart. Your heart opens to them by the mere fact of your carrying them to God. Now that person – whether loved one or enemy – is embedded in your heart. How will that not change you?

When you open your heart to anyone, whether it’s to you yourself, or to another person, then lift yourself or them into God’s heart, your heart expands. Your empathy grows. Your love deepens.

And this is true for God, too. Such prayer as we hear from Jesus today expands God’s heart, opens God’s life, brings more into the dance and joy of the Triune God. God is changed.

Prayer draws us into community – inside God and between us.

When we pray, we open our hearts to God and to each other and to the world. Prayer keeps us from thinking faith is a personal, private thing. Prayer is how we live and breathe and love our faith with God. How we live and breathe and love in community with each other in Christ. How we live and breathe and love in community with those who are Christ out in the world, those we don’t know, those we think hate us, even those we’re pretty sure we don’t like either.

Prayer pulls us away from being exclusive about being surrounded by God’s love. From thinking that our little sheepfold is the only one, and everyone else is outside. Or at least certain people or groups we don’t like. As Jesus told you a couple weeks ago, you belong to a Shepherd who has other sheep and sheepfolds you don’t know about or control. Being drawn into God in prayer, and drawing yourself and all others into your heart and God’s heart in prayer, removes all barriers of exclusion. God will and does surround all.

Realizing prayer removes walls and barriers between us and God and us and others means new realities, new vision, new experiences.

That’s scary. What’s your world going to be like with all the fences removed? What’s your heart going to be like with no one to fear or hate? Won’t it be dangerous?

But that’s the grace of this particular prayer Jesus prays today. God lifts you up to God to be protected and cared for as you live in this frightening world. Not that pain and suffering be prevented: Jesus says they’re guaranteed on this path. Maybe not a cross, but you’ll be vulnerable. You’ll be hurt at times.

But Jesus prays that you are surrounded always by God’s love and life so you are never alone. Living in community with the world as Christ, and living inside the communal life of God: what better joy could you have? Do you think anything can ever really harm you inside such love?

So let us pray. Really pray. And watch God draw all things together.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

We might say we love people in theory, but loving them in practice is much harder. It’s what Peter experienced when the Holy Spirit sent him to Cornelius, and what we experience whenever God challenges us to love someone outside our comfort zone.

Vicar Jessica Christy
The Second Sunday of Easter, year B
Texts: Acts 10:44-48, John 15:9-17

Where are the limits of your love? How far are you willing to go, and how much are you willing to lay down before you draw the line? Who are those people who you pray that God loves, because you don’t think that you can?

Today we see the early Church wrestling with the limits of its love. Our reading from Acts is the culmination of a story in which Peter visits the home of a faithful centurion named Cornelius. But the apostle doesn’t go there of his own volition; both he and Cornelius’ household are guided by the Holy Spirit. Peter is staying in a nearby city when he has a strange vision of a giant sheet descending from heaven, filled with all manner of unclean animals – four legged creatures and reptiles and birds. And he hears a voice saying, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.” Now, because Peter is Peter, he fights back – not once, but three times. He objects that he has never eaten anything impure, and he has no desire to start now. To give Peter his due, the problem isn’t just that he thinks that eating a lizard sounds gross. He objects because he loves the law. It’s a fundamental part of who he is. The teachings of Moses were how Peter and his people stayed faithful to their God in a world that constantly threatened them with extinction and assimilation. And now God is instructing him…to let go of that? To turn away from the sacred teachings that have meant not only ritual purity but identity and survival and a sure relationship with God? What God is asking of him is terrifying. God is telling him that he must die to himself in order to be reborn as something new.

Then three men appear and tell Peter that an angel has instructed them to bring him to the home of a Roman officer, and Peter understands what God is asking of him: in order to carry the Gospel where it needs to go, he has to break bread with Gentiles. He will need to lay down his life as he has known it in order to serve others. He goes and announces the good news of Christ to all of Cornelius’ household. And before he’s even finished talking, the Holy Spirit comes down on his audience. That same Holy Spirit that descended on Peter and the believers in Jerusalem on Pentecost now comes to this Roman household. There’s no difference. In this moment, there is no more us and them, just one Spirit-filled people. Peter’s companions are astounded by this sight. They can’t believe that God would come to these foreigners.

Now, this shouldn’t be news to any of them. Peter traveled with Jesus, saw him heal people of all faiths and ethnicities and walks of life. On Pentecost, he quoted the prophet Joel saying that God’s Spirit would be poured out on all flesh – all flesh, not just some. Peter and his followers knew that God’s love could extend to Gentiles, at least in theory. But as we’ve been hearing these past weeks, love isn’t love when it’s just a theory. Peter had proclaimed the expansive love of the Spirit, but embracing the physical reality of what that meant, that was something harder. When he was asked to make that love incarnate, to see it and touch it and eat it, his first instinct was to fight back. He wanted God to love all people, but he hadn’t been ready to do it himself.

And isn’t that what we always do? In this place, we are bold to proclaim God’s limitless, unconditional love for all people. We strive to create a community where everyone can find warmth and welcome, and to live lives that carry God’s mercy into the world. But believing in God’s love is much easier than being God’s love. In reality, there people with whom we’d rather not share fellowship. There are places we’d rather not go. There are differences we’d rather not work to overcome. So who are you afraid to love? Who do you wish you could love not just in theory but in practice, but don’t know how? Is it people with different political beliefs? Is it people of different nationalities or languages? Is it people of different social classes? People whose bodies look or work differently from your own? Who makes you want to leave the room, or look away, or cross on the other side of the street, and say, “sorry, God, but this person isn’t for me.” I wish I could say that my answer was “nobody.” I wish I could love all people without reservation or qualification. But if I said I did that, I would be lying. I believe that God’s love is for everyone, but faced with the flesh and blood reality of what that asks of me, I often shy away. All the time, I choose to love people who are easy and comfortable and safe rather than allowing the Spirit to lead me somewhere new.

But the Holy Spirit is not about what is easy. She pushes us out of our safe, comfortable places and challenges us to be more, to believe more, to love more. No matter how big we think God’s love is, it will always be bigger than that. When we see its incarnate reality, it will leave us astounded. The immensity of God’s love breaks us open and shakes us out of what we know. Sometimes that comes at a real price. Like Peter, we might be asked to rethink who we are and what we believe. We might need to let go of things we cherish – good things that have served us well, but cannot take us where we need to go next. We might need to lay down parts of our lives so that we can recognize new people as friends. This can be scary and painful, so thanks be to God that we don’t do it alone. The Spirit goes out before us and does the real work. She brought Philip to the Ethiopian official, and Peter to Cornelius, and she shows us where we need to go now. She is the one who inspires, and who baptizes, and who brings new life. Our job is simply to follow along, to recognize what the Spirit is doing, and to not withhold the water.

The best way – and indeed, the only way for us to know God’s love is to love each other. Christ says that we abide in the love of the Trinity when we keep God’s commandments, and the ultimate commandment is that we love one another. There are times when that love can only emerge through sacrifice, even loss. But Christ tells us that the love that lays itself down is the greatest and most godly love of all, and he promises that the feast that awaits us at God’s great banquet is far better than whatever meals we eat at our own tables. It is only natural that we feel some fear when we let go of the familiar and venture into the unknown. There’s nothing wrong with trepidation, so long as we hold to God’s truth that perfect love will cast out all fear. If we follow where the Spirit leads, yes, we will astounded, but on the other side of that astonishment is the fullness of the body of Christ. On the other side of that astonishment is God.

Amen.