If you do what you always did.... Easter 5, Year C, 2025

This is another sermon preached at St. Raphael's Church, Crossville, Tennessee.

In today’s lessons, I was struck, and you will understand why in a bit, by the collect,”Grant us so perfectly to know your son, Jesus Christ, be the way, the truth of the life, that we may steadfastly follow his steps in the way that leads to eternal life.”

Which is a great lead in to the trouble of the 11 (because Judas has left) -  the trouble of the 11, and the women who are in charge - look, it's a dinner party; the women are in charge - when Jesus says, “I'm about to leave and you can't follow me,” Now, they don't really have a clue what that means just yet. This happens as a part of the farewell discourses in John. That is, after they finish dinner, before they go to the Garden, and the Passion narrative starts. They will know soon. Right? They will know when they get to the Garden. They will know as they watch the Passion. They will know as they wait after the Crucifixion, and they will still know some in that period of time that we talk about between Easter and Pentecost; and the Church will come to wonder, “What do we do now? 

“We know what it looked like to follow Jesus when we were all wandering around the Holy Land together. And this was a model that we all knew.” This was a very common model. You would have your teacher and your teacher would have the disciples. They would live together, they would talk together, not so different from the Athenian Academy. or the same kinds of educational efforts, if you will, in Alexandria. They knew what that was like. 

“But now he's not here. And how do we go on?” And we get hints that they fall into a very human kind of response to that. Peter said, "Well, I'm going back to go fishing." We heard that a few weeks ago. 

Funny thing. Peter is the one who shows up again today. because Peter has been confronted with something entirely new. And what we have in chapter 11 of Acts is not the event itself. It's Peter telling the Jerusalem Church about the event, in the face of their question, “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?” 

See, institutionally, that's pretty much the same thought process as, “I don't know what else to do, I'm going to go back to fishing.” Stop and think about that. We have institutional ways of talking about that. We have a church way of talking about that. Everybody should know this. “What are the seven last words of the church? We've never done it that way before.” Or in, you know, corporate speak, “fI you do the what you always did, you’re going to get what you always got.” 

And honestly, for a lot of people, and a lot of times, that's comforting. Years ago, I was listening to a segment of “Morning Edition” on NPR. In those times these were short segments, and they were called “The Hidden Brain.” It has now become a whole hour long podcast, and what they do is they look into neuroscience research. And they see studies about how human beings respond to various kinds of circumstances and how we live with one another. And it seems that we are hardwired to be more anxious about what we might lose, than to be excited about what we might gain. 

And sure, that makes sense. That's evolutionary. That's what got us into trying to conserve things for hard times. And as a response, we don't stop to think that we get bogged down because getting what you always got actually feels safe and secure. You know, it would have been a bad hypothetical, and happily, it never happened, for Peter and Andrew to put their heads together and one say, “Okay, I'm the leader now.” And they continue wandering around as a group of now 11 or 10 or losing people, talking about Jesus, but as the same institution, just under new leadership. 

And that's where the question from the Jerusalem community comes from. “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them? Because we've known what it's been like to follow Jesus as Jews. as Jews who saw the Messiah in Him rather than somewhere else.”

And we have Peter's response. “Well, it wasn't what I was planning to do. And then. three nights in a row, I had this dream, and in this dream, this vast tarp gets lowered by four angels. And in it, there's every kind of animal imaginable. And I hear a voice says, ‘You hungry? Eat!’”And the vision had four footed animals and but four footed animals would include kosher animals like cattle and non-kosher animals like pigs. And birds of the air would include kosher birds like chicken and un-kosher birds like vultures. I have no idea what they were going to do with the reptiles. But you see my point. And Peter said, “God, I can't be indiscriminate like that. I've never been indiscriminate like that.” And God, as much as says, “If you do what you always did, you're going to get what you always got:” he said, "If I say it's clean, it's clean." 

So as Peter has come back to Jerusalem to tell his story, he says, “So God has given me this perspective, this literal change of vision, or vision of change. Play it either way. And then, these people show up. And they bring me back to meet this centurion. and his household. And the Spirit said, ‘Preach.’ And I preached. So far, so good. And then they had the same experience in that household that we had on Pentecost.” Remember, this encounter is after Pentecost, and Peter has gone out. “They had the same experience of the Spirit that we had on Pentecost. Okay. Sounds pretty Godly to me. What am I gonna do?” Or as he said, "Who was I that I could hinder God?" 

“Peter, if I tell you it's clean, it's clean;” or, “Peter, if I say, he's clean, he's clean. If I tell you, he's mine, and you see the same evidence that he's mine that showed that you're mine, It runs directly in the face of, ”You’ll get what you always got.” 

Honestly, we know it could be a great challenge to us. to look forward in hope. Because there's always loss in looking forward. Always. I mean, I have things I hope for. And over the years, I've had many things I hoped for, and every time I took the step forward, there was also something I left behind. I had to be intentional about it. but…. 

So as I reflected on the collect; and as I reflected on Peter being called to do something that he'd never imagined; and Jerusalem recognizing and accepting something they had never imagined, I thought about another collect. And you've heard it before, most of you. You may have heard me preach on it before. It's a favorite of mine. “O God of unchangeable power and eternal light. Look favorably on your whole church, that wonderful and sacred mystery. By the effectual working of your providence, carry out in tranquility the plan of salvation. Let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up. And things which had growed old are being made new. And that all things are being brought to their perfection by Him through whom all things were made. 

That's the answer to the issue in today’s collect. To follow in the footsteps of Jesus is to look forward and hope for what is new, to be available to recognize that God may well do something that never occurred to us. That God may well call someone that we never thought to recognize. That God may put us in a position to love someone that we weren't sure about, and to recognize that is our vocation. By the way, if you don't know that collect, we use that in three circumstances and all of them look forward. One is as the last prayer in the Solemn Collects on Good Friday. One is the prayer after the ninth lesson on the Great Vigil of Easter before Lent is actually closed, looking toward Easter. And one is that every ordination in the church. Every person called a ministry has that prayer said over them.

These two  collects together call us forward. Every one of us has been called to look for those places where we're called to see something new. It is not easy. We are more hardwired to worry more about what we might lose than to look for the promise of what we might gain. It is so much easier to do what we've always done and accept what we've always got. and not see where God might be calling us to something unexpected. It is easier. But it's not what it really means to follow Jesus.

"Though I walk through the valley of the shadow" Easter 4, Year C 2025

Once again, I'm a little behind posting sermons. This is one of several preached during Eastertide at St. Raphael's Church, Crossville, Tennessee. 

“Though I walked through the valley of the shadow of Death, I shall fear no evil.” 

It was after midnight, and they paged me. And they paged me to a floor and to a room. And so when I got to the floor, I stopped at the nurses station, and the nurse said, "I need you to talk to Mrs. So-and-so in room such-and-such. She can't sleep. And she wants to talk to the chaplain.” 

Okay. So I walked in, and I sat down beside Mrs. So-and-so. and I said, “I'm the chaplain. How can I help you?” She said, "Chaplain, I'm terrified.” 

I said, “What are you terrified about?” 

'When I was coming out of surgery, I heard voices talking about me. and I heard the devil and Jesus talking about me. I heard the devil saying that I was his, and he was going to claim me. And I'm terrified.”

“Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death.”

Now, I'm going to tell you two things. One is, I grew up in East Tennessee. I have roots deep in coal country. I do not automatically dismiss that there is a spiritual world that we don't know about. I had a test when I was in seminary. They required of all of us the General Ordination exams, and they gave us pretests to prepare us for the big exams. And one of the questions was about a woman that wanted to come for counseling in the office because she was hearing voices. One of my classmates wrote, "Okay, I have a referral to make for you to a local psychologist." My response was, "Okay, what are the voices saying?”

The other side of this is that it's really not uncommon to have some kind of delusional or hallucinatory event after anesthesia. All kinds of things are experienced by people after anesthesia. And sometimes the people that hear about it dismiss it, and sometimes the people that hear about it get excited. Most of the time, and this includes the near death experiences and all of that, the professionals that hear about it say, “Well, that's interesting. Tell me all about it.” And they file it among those things that are interesting and real, and that we don't understand.

So this woman very likely could have had a post anesthesia hallucination, hearing this conversation. And I said to her, “Well, tell me this. Are you a Christian?” 

“Oh, yes!”

I said, "Have you been baptized?" 

“Oh, yes!!

We began to talk about baptism. And then we begin to talk about scripture. 

Never hurts to be able to talk about scripture. (Well, mostly it doesn't hurt.) We continue to use and to find the 23rd Psalm terribly comforting. And we find it comforting more than anything else because of that one verse. “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Death, I will fear no evil, because you are with me. And your rod and staff, they take care of me.” And obviously, that concept, if not always that explicit image, goes all the way back to whenever the Psalms were established. I'm not the biblical scholar to remember those exact dates; and because I love listening to those scholars, I know that there are arguments about those exact dates. But we hold on to that image.

And so it makes sense that when the the institutional hierarchy of the community in Jerusalem - I always want to remind people that when John talks about the Jews, he's not talking about your neighbors next door, who are in temple, in synagogue on the Sabbath. He's talking about leadership. He's talking about people in power - They're frustrated with Jesus. They’re there at the Temple for Hanukkah, the Feast of the Dedication we know as Hanukkah, the rededication of the Temple because it had been defiled, and in that rededication, the oil lasted days longer than it had any right to do. And that was a sign that God was present. So here they are in the Temple remembering that God is present in an ordeal, - this rededication happened after the Maccabees had just defeated the Greeks, the folks who wanted to make Jews act like Greeks- in battle. They say, "If you're the Messiah, out with it." 

This is an interesting context for that. There were folks that would remember Judas Maccabeus, Judas the Hammer, who led the Jewish forces against the forces of the Greeks. Maybe they thought of him as messianic at times. This was the image of the Messiah, right? We've talked about it many times, that the image of the Messiah was a military leader, a battle leader. And to Jesus, and they say, “So, if you're going to be the one to do this, throw out the Romans now, tell us plainly.” 

And once again, what Jesus takes on is an understanding of what it means to be Messiah and what it means to see God present that was not what they were looking for. God present was supposed to raise an army and cast out the Romans and establish Israel as an independent kingdom. The Messiah that we know, because we know the story, responds, “ I have told you, and you don't believe. The works I do testify to who I am.” And understand what that means, because the works didn't testify to him being a great military leader, but they did testify to God being present in him. “The works I do testify.” This is a common theme in John. The evidence of God being present is in what Jesus is doing. And it's not going to end up raising an army. “You do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep.” That is, you don't believe, because your community is looking for a different image. Your community is not willing to see the Messiah in God's presence as opposed to the historical, now we would say the historical memes, but the historical ideas of what a Messiah was supposed to look like.

“My sheep, hear my voice.” My sheep see the presence of God. And they see the presence of God in healing and feeding and raising the dead. “Though I walked through the valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no evil, because you're with me.” The presence of God, he says, is what Messiahship is about. The presence of God is what the community, the sheep, the faith in God, is about. And, he said, “Because God is doing this in me, I have sheep, they follow me, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. What my father has given me is greater than all else,” - which sort of sounds like bigger than everything- “and no one can snatch it out of the Father's hand, and the Father and I are one in this. No one will snatch them out of my hand.” And ever since, to talk about the presence of God, to talk about being part of the sheep, to talk about not being afraid, is about looking for the presence of God. 

And that, I think, is why Luke, or the author of Acts, is so quick to pick up on the raising of Dorcas, because the raising of Dorcas looks an awful lot like some raisings of Jesus. Would they have been conscious that Tabitha get up sounds like Talitha, Kumi? Probably not. And the reason I say that is because we believe that the Gospels came together in different phases and in different communities. And we're not sure what John's community knew about Matthew and Luke. Although, I have had clergy pick up on that in things I've read in the last week. But what Peter does looks like a theme of the presence of God literally going back to Elijah. Elijah with the widow of Nain’s son. Elisha has a healing that looks like this. Jesus has more than one healing that looks like this, and so it is still evidence of God present, working in and through Peter, that the community sees in Joppa: God present in bringing life, in healing, in feeding, in raising the dead. 

So, in the middle of the night, on this floor, in this room at Saint Luke's Hospital, I said, "Let's talk about John.” And I remembered this passage with this patient. And I remembered in another place in John, where Jesus says, “All that the Father gives to me, come to me, and I will not cast any of them out.” And I said, "Is that how you believe?”

“Oh, yes!”

A different John asks us who are those in white? Those who have come, we hear from a different John, through the great tribulation; and certainly surgery is great tribulation. But it's not the only kind of great tribulation. Indeed, a fair number of people that I've been reading through this week say, “Look, life is tribulation.” And I think we can make an argument that the times we live in are times of great tribulation. 

And sometimes it's hard to keep track of Jesus's voice. Sadly, we seem to see a lot of people around us who have decided they're really less interested in Jesus' voice than in another. But for Jesus’ sheep, no, because we listen for Jesus's voice. And in the valley of the Shadow, we know God is present because we are hearing Jesus' voice. And we can trust that nothing will be snatched out of his hand. This is really quite in keeping with Paul in Romans when he says, "Nothing in all creation. can come between us and the love of God in Christ Jesus. What the Father has given me is bigger than everything, and it will not be snatched out of our hand.”

And so I talked to her about how she could not be snatched out of God's hand. That that battle was won, that it didn't matter how much arguing happened, that dispute was over. That she could not be snatched out of Jesus' hand.

And she slept.

Grief and Hope: A sermon for All Saints, Year B

This is an edited version of the sermon preached on All Saints Sunday, November 3, 2024, at St. Raphael's Episcopal Church, Crossville, Tennessee.

So, I've been away. You may have noticed that the last month was a little disrupted. It was, in its own interesting way, a month of hope.

Some of you know that at the beginning of the month, my wife and I were away in Kansas City, for our Bonus child. I say that because that's how she listed us in the wedding party, as Bonus Parents. Our Bonus Child is now married. We are happy and delighted. They are married to a very fine young man, and I think they're going to do well together.

Weddings are always moments of hope. It is very rare - I won't say never; I've learned in my life to say never, almost never -  but people, by and large, marry in hope and in good faith. And we all know things can happen, but in that moment there is great joy and great hope and great excitement and a great looking to the future. It's interesting to see how they begin to see their future. So, it was a time of great hope. 

And then came what was in its way the hard part. We had been home only a few days and found that my wife’s sister-in-law had a cardiac event and was not going to recover. My wife said, “How can we go up there so fast?” I said, “We can be turned around in two days. We can do this.”

And so we had a trip to Maryland to be with family, to support her brother, to support her family, to attend the graveside - because we were in Maryland, to eat a lot of crab cakes; it’s required. And to appreciate that for us, for us, funerals are opportunities for hope.

Now, never ask a chaplain to undervalue grief. Everybody grieves. Everybody grieves differently. And while often we don't know how to help them grieve, there is little that is more problematic than trying to get in the way of that grief. I had a conversation with a medical resident many years ago who wanted to describe a patient's grief as problematic because she was still grieving a partner's death six months later. And I said, oh, no, no, no, no. Talk to the chaplains who know this. So I'm not talking about not grieving. I'm not talking about not knowing the pain. But there is a reason that we, and we as Episcopalians especially, say that every funeral service is an Easter service. 

Now, there's a lot in today’s lessons that gets at the grief side of things. In Wisdom: “In the eyes of the foolish, they seem to have died and their departure was thought to be a disaster and they're going from us to be their destruction.” And “from us” and “destruction,” that separation, we know that feeling. All of us in some way - sometimes some more recently and more acutely than others - all of us know that feeling. And we have this concern: “Though in the sight of others, they were punished.” And yet the author of Wisdom comes back to hope.

I look at the Gospel lesson and I look at how Jesus interacts with Mary and Martha. Let me remind you of the broader story. Jesus is not there. Jesus is some distance away. And word comes that says, “Lazarus, whom you love, is sick.” And Jesus said, “Not to worry. It won’t lead to death.”

And so Jesus seems to drag his heels and Lazarus dies while Jesus is on his way. And both Mary and Martha show up in turn and say,  “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.” After all, they have seen what Jesus in God had done.

I wonder when it says “Jesus was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” How much of that was his love for Lazarus? And how much of that was, “I've been trying to show you hope all this time.” And so he says, “We’re going to show them hope.” And I say we because he says, “Father, I thank you for having heard me. I know you always hear me.” So he's making a point of how he is in God and God is in him. And God is in this hope. 

And when he says, “I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here so that they may believe that you sent me:’ again, I wonder. Is that that same? “I've been talking hope all this time. And they haven't got it yet.”

And Martha doubts. “Some degradation to that body has to have happened. Lord, it's been four days.”

Jesus says, “Lazarus, come out.” And he comes. And he stands. And he lives. 

Catch the nuance, though, in the setup. Again, this is again and again something that happens. Because we have hope, and we have hope especially in the Gospel of John, in the understanding that Our God is here. Not somewhere out there. Our promise is here and not somewhere distant in our future. Yeah, resurrection is there. But one of the things that the Gospel of John repeats again and again and again is that Jesus is evidence, and what Jesus does is evidence, and all of the Jesus event is evidence, that God is here now. And the kingdom, however partially, is present now.

And so we look at Revelation, that other work from the Johannine school, from a different John, perhaps. Note that the residence of God is with his people. In all of the various books attributed to all the various Johns, God is with his people now, and in that we have hope. We have hope that the separations we know, the losses we feel are not the last word. In fact, I have gone so far over the years to suggest that the losses we know, the separations we see, are not as real as we would like to think. We are a people who say that we are in God's Spirit; that in our baptism we participate in God’s Spirit; that when two or three together are gathered, God's Spirit moves us. Just as in John, Jesus says. “Believe me, you won't see me either, but the Spirit will be with you”. The Spirit that over the years the Church came to realize was not somehow separate from God or or some distant extension of God, but somehow in a way we don't understand - and don't try to understand because sooner or later our heads explode - the Spirit that is present is God in fullness. We are the people who claim God is with us now. 

And that doesn't make the losses go away. And that doesn't make the pain disappear. And I have prayed hard for a whole number of people who I have never slugged while I listened to them tell grieving people, “You should hope in Jesus and be happy.” 

And yet, as every wedding is an opportunity for hope for a future of people together, for us a funeral is an opportunity for hope of people together; and not just together some then, out there, but now.

Or as I often said at the bedside we are in God now; and those we lose are in God now, even if we don't know exactly how. And in God ee are still united with those we love but see no longer.

No, Jesus Is Always Watching: a Sermon for Pentecost 15, Proper 18A

Again, this is a sermon that's been waiting to be edited. This was preached at St. Raphael's Episcopal Church September 10, 2023.

I may have told this story before, but I don't think I've ever told it from the pulpit. And I'm going to have to be delicate in how I tell it. You will understand why. 

I was in one of the hospitals I worked in, and I walked into a conversation. It happened all the time . One of the people looked up and saw me and said, “ Uh oh, God is watching. Better be careful!” 

And I said, “You know, God is always watching.” 

And she laughed and she gave a certain hesitant chuckle:  “Well, I hope God isn't always watching.”  

And I said, “Oh, no. God is always watching.” And her eyes got a little round. 

And then I didn't see her for nearly a week. I don't know why; our schedules didn't mesh. And she said, “Marshall, my fiancé is really mad at you!” 

I said, “Why?” 

“Well, every time he starts to get affectionate, I start thinking about how God is always watching….”

Now, we believe God is always watching. Indeed, we say we are the people of Emmanuel, of God with us. But, how conscious we are of God being with us?

 Well it varies, doesn't it? And we have some frameworks of that in today's lessons, if you think about them, not in terms of when we think they happened or were said, but of when we think they got written down. I'll say more about that. 

  

Think first about the night of the first Passover. Boy, were they conscious of God being with them! Moses is saying, “This is what God says. Make this preparation because God's going to be in your living room tonight. God's going to be walking past your front door. And what God sees on your front door has consequences.” Their sense of God being present took this frightened and vulnerable community and said to them, “Here, now, God is in the midst of you. God is coming among you.” And this was the first night of what for them would be 40 years. As they left after this night with the Egyptians, as Scripture said, driving them out, giving them their valuables to bribe them out, to get them to leave, they went, led by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. 

And when Moses came down from the mountain, his face shined; and from what Scripture says, continued to shine for the rest of his life so that he wore a veil over his face, lest the presence of God in his face terrified people. 

In great crisis sometimes it's hard, but we can also claim a sense of the presence of God. But crises, they don't linger. I mean, not withstanding the way our normal news cycle runs from crisis to crisis to crisis (and God help our brothers and sisters in Morocco this morning), crises don't linger. 

And we begin to see this as we look at the New Testament lessons. There's a difference between the Romans lesson and the Gospel as scholars see it. And that is that Paul, if we understand the New Testament timeframe, was wandering around in the late 30s AD and these things were recorded on paper by the early 40s AD. And in that community there was a very clear and present sense of people who could remember Jesus, who could remember the crisis for Christians, which was the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. And for whom some sense that this was still “with us” was present. That's why Paul says at the end, “Make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires because you are closer now than you ever have been.” 

Now if you ever ask me about the second coming, well it's there in scripture. I do believe it. And I believe it could happen on any given Thursday. But Paul was enough closer to Jesus incarnate that he figured it could be next Thursday. And so he's talking to them about how to live as a community with some sense of God's presence while you wait for this to happen. And when you're trying to figure out how to live waiting for the next crisis, a simple principle that's easy to hold onto works. “Owe no one anything except to love one another for the one who loves, has fulfilled the law.”  And he goes through the commandments and comes back to “love your neighbor as yourself.” Now remember that the Gospels at this point probably weren't down on parchment. And there might be people who remembered, but for more of his community that would be more familiar from Leviticus, Leviticus 19:18 that says, “Don't do injustice in the gate, in the public square, and love your neighbor as yourself.”

For them, that memory from Torah would shape them to understand that love is an active word. It's not about affection, it's about how you treat people. It's not about wanting to be with someone. It's about treating them the way they should be treated. It's about doing justice in the best possible sense. 

I grew up in this culture. My mother's people are from Caryville, which is, oh, about 50 miles northeast. So I grew up with a very high sense of duty. You can talk about high church and low church and how we understand theology and liturgy in the Episcopal church, whether we're very formal and structured or where we're more relaxed. I grew up in that sense with a high sense of duty. Duty is an expression of love. We often think of it as expression of love of something bigger than ourselves. Some of you - I did not - some of you served in uniform, you will have a high sense of duty. I grew up with that too. It was enculturated into me. That's what Paul's talking about. To love has encased in it that sense of how you're gonna treat people. "Love does no wrong to a neighbor. Love is the fulfilling of Torah." So, when you're waiting for Thursday, when you think the times are coming, a simple principle holds you in place.

Which is how we get to the Gospel. Scholars understand that Matthew probably came together sometime after 64 AD; and if you wanna get into deep weeds, you can get into a conversation with a scholar as to whether Matthew is the original and Mark is the Reader's Digest Condensed version; or Mark is the original and Matthew is what we would now call the Director's Cut with all the added scenes. But it came together after 64 AD, so, 20, 25, 30 years after Romans. And this is a community that's having to figure out how to live with the thought that it's not next Thursday, with a thought that we've got to figure out how to live together, and we need some rules for this. And so we have this model of how to resolve a conflict. Now, I want to caution you, it's a decent model of how to resolve a conflict. It's not the only one. And for a lot of things it's not the best one because, you know, if you have to choose two or three people to go with you, if you choose the right people, then how can they argue? And it sort of misses another nuance of language in that, in this context to listen also implies to accept, even to obey; and we still use it that way sometimes. But trust me, when I was Director of a department working for a health system, I had to help people sometimes understand that I heard them. I just didn't find what they told me compelling. 

So this is not the model for every kind of dispute. But when you're trying to figure out how to live together, not expecting the next crisis, you need to put these kinds of models together. In fact, we're pretty sure this is late because Jesus doesn't talk about church. Jesus wasn't part of “church.” “Church”hadn’t come together until after the Resurrection. So this is the community building on Jesus's words to say, “Okay, now how are we gonna live with you together?” And then it does come back again to this basic principle that is, “Whenever two or three are gathered in my name, I'm there. I am there. I’m there, who we will also proclaim is Love. Whenever two or three are gathered, I - Love - should be at the middle of it."

Now, that makes an interesting sort of spin on conflict resolution, or any human interaction. We can think about how many of you will see me at Kroger after church, and when we talk to each other, to kind of figure out how God is among us. When I was instructing students as chaplains, I would focus and say - and those of you that have been in social work, in education, you'll grasp this - the encounter happens in the relationship. And I would say, “What's going on in the space between you, and what is God doing in that space linking you?" When two or three are gathered, I am with you. 

Now, I say we create structures to hold onto that. And we are a people who now know that there've been an awful lot of Thursdays since the Resurrection. It could happen this coming Thursday. And as I often say, if it does, we'll have many other concerns. But there've been a lot of Thursdays since the Resurrection. And we have to stop and think about how we embrace the presence of God with us. 

Well, one of those is to go back to the night of the Passover. Because as Moses said, “God says, make this the new beginning for you. Make this a day that you remember.” And to this day, our Jewish brothers and sisters, remember. I don't know if any of you have ever been to a Passover Seder, one that begins with someone saying, “Why is this night different from any other night?” It is to take them in that shared meal, shared standing, eating roast lamb and bitter herbs, that they bring themselves back to that night, to remember how God was, and to recognize how God can be, present in their community. 

This, of course, is meaningful for us because, honestly, this is the first last supper, their last supper in Egypt, their last meal - you know, they're gonna be out there for a few days, run out of provisions, and it's going to be manna until they're in the Holy Land - which is also our last supper. Remember what Matthew will tell us Jesus is doing in what we talk about as his last supper. It is a Passover meal. He is with his disciples, he is with his close contacts, men and women. Somebody at that table was probably planning on saying, “How is this night different from any other night?” for Jesus to tell the story.

And instead, Jesus tells something different to hold together the community that will form around him. And that is what we do. We say the Communion is food for our journey, but more, it is a way that we recall how God has been present among us in flesh and blood to help us be prepared for God to be present with us when we're not here, when we run into each other at Kroger, when we have someone with whom we have a dispute, to stop and say, “God help me.” And to wonder how God might be acting as we look for resolution, as we look for reconciliation. Remember that I said last week, “it's not about me,” It’s about how God is calling me to be for another. So even in the hardest reconciliation, how is God calling me to be for that person? In this gathering certainly, or in evening meals, or even in the produce section at Kroger, among ourselves we can think about how God is with us. And then to take that into even the most difficult situations. And remember that when anyone is gathered, if you remember the name of Jesus, Jesus is there. What will the world look like when we always remember to act like Jesus is actually present and watching?