Esau's Blunder

And so, Esau despized his birthright.
                                                      Genesis 25:34

"I am going to another church."

"But why?" I asked. "Why are you leaving?"

"I just went to a Bible study and felt that God wanted me to go…"

And so the conversation goes. I find it so hard when someone decides to go somewhere else to church, but our back door must be open as our front door is open. This is not a cult and I cannot force people to stay. But it does break my heart.

It is not uncommon for the new member, feeling so moved and inspired at first, will one day come to church and find it so so, and it is at that point that they begin to look for another church home, a place where they can find that emotional high again. And they will move from church to church, seeking that feeling of being inspired. They will leave whenever someone disappoints them, when they have a disagreement, when they get bored.

The divorce rate is at an all-time high in this country. More and more people are falling out of love just as easily as they fell in love. They will come and tell me that they no longer love each other, but what they really mean is that they don’t have the in-love feeling anymore. And without that exciting feeling, they just don’t want to stick it out. From this new perspective, marriage is much less romantic and much more like hard work.

Jacob and Esau were brothers, twin brothers. They fought all the time. They even fought in their mother’s womb (Esau won that battle and came out first). And they were so different. Esau was read and hairy. Jacob was bare and pale.

Their parents made this competition worse by playing obvious favorites. Their father loved Esau best, their mother loved Jacob. Esau was a practical man, an impatient man. He was a hunter, used to being on the move. His brother was quieter, more thoughtful. It was Esau’s impatience that was his downfall.

One day, Esau came back from hunting and he was famished. And I don’t mean normal hunger, I mean the hunger of a growing young man who had just finished at least one full day of strenuous exercise. Esau could think of nothing but food.

I can just imagine the tent. The smell of sweaty exhausted Esau must have competed with the smell of the cooking. Esau would drop down on the floor of the tent in pure exhaustion. All he would want is some food. His mind would be totally focused on that one thing, food.

And Jacob had soup. Not just soup, stew, the red lentil stew. The kind whose scent can fill an entire house while it is cooking, making your mouth water and your stomach ache. Jacob had the stew. There was not enough for both of them.

“Give me some of that red stuff,” Esau says. He was a man of few words, and he meant what he said.

Jacob asks for Esau’s birthright in exchange for a bowl of stew and Esau, thinking only of the surface of life, agrees. He gives up the line of the patriarchs, the favor of God, for broth and vegetables.

In American culture, we believe that the faster something is accomplished the better. But fast is not always best. And those who seek results quickly may give up their birth-right for stuff.

Think of Eve in the Garden of Eden. Satan said, “Just take it. Don’t think about it. I know God said not to, but don’t think about that too much. Just take, just do it!”

How often the greatest mistakes in our lives are made because we did not give ourselves time to spend with God, time to wrestle with God, time to absorb and grow. The spiritual life is not like McDonalds. You don’t pull up to church in your car for McEucharist. We ask you to come week after week, month after month, to pray and to give regularly. This is a way of life that takes time to foster and grow. It is not instant gratification. It is called discipleship.

When Jesus speaks to us about the spiritual life, he speaks to us in terms that come from nature. He knew that the people of the Galilee would know about rain and harvest, plants and vines. He knew that this was their language and when he used these images, they would relax, open their hearts, and listen.

In today’s gospel, Jesus uses images of seeds falling on the ground. The seeds are made by God and they are good stuff. The seeds are the presence and love of God, which God showers upon you like rain, upon the good and the evil, the children and the elderly, the strong and the weak. God showers love and grace upon us all in equal amounts. The question is not whether or not God loves us, it is what we will do with that love and grace.

We are the soil. We are the ones who receive his grace, his love, his patience and kindness. But our soil varies a great deal depending on the kind of life that we have led. And good soil takes time to become rich and fertile.

Do any of you have compost piles? If so you know the process. God takes the experiences of our lives, our mistakes and our failures, and God lets them distill down within us, decomposing down into rich, fertile soil. The process takes time. Christians are baptized once and for all, but disciples take years to be formed.

I want to encourage all of you not to sell your birthright. You are a child of God, baptized and beloved. This world will ask you over and over again if you would like to trade in that birthright for a successful career, for romance, for respect. Just tell a lie, the snake will say. Just make fun of that person, don’t think about it, just do it. Just take that drug, that drink. Just gossip, cut someone down, hurt. It’s not that serious. Don’t think too much about it. Everybody else is doing it.

And before you know it, you have traded God in for popularity, for some money, for a good time. And you are left with nothing.

Seeds cannot live for long in shallow ground. They may spring up, but they will wither and die if they are not deeply rooted in the soil of life. Life with God takes time and it takes commitment. It takes years of love and generosity, prayer and community. It takes time.

God causes us to grow, not just in the inspired moments, but in the humdrum, the day in and day out faithfulness of life. Don’t chase the high, even if you are hungry for excitement or think that you must have something now. Be patient.

You have been given the most precious gift in the world. Don’t hand it off for ANYTHING.

This fall, we are not going to do a pledge drive. Instead we are going to ask you to make a life pledge. I am going to get you to think of your life as a gift to God, a long-term gift. How will you pray? What will you do to form a small group that meets weekly? What will you give? How will you devote time to your loved ones? How will you care for your body?

And you will say, why. Why are we being asked to pledge all these parts of our lives? Because true discipleship takes a long time. It takes consistency and devotion. It takes a lifetime of prayer and a true community of people who know you intimately and meet with you regularly. It takes commitment.

And so, Jacob became the father of nations while Esau gave all that up for STEW.

God bless poor Esau. Let us not make the same mistake.

Freedom

One hundred and forty-eight years ago today, soldiers from this country fought against one another at the Battle of Gettysburg. On July 3rd of that year, the Confederate army charged the Union army on Cemetery Ridge in what would become known as Pickett’s Charge. The Union army fought off the Confederate soldiers with artillery fire. Young men died in droves. In the three day battle, 50,000 men died. Never has the United States lost more lives than we did in the war that we waged against ourselves.

I am from the North, a Yankee by ancestry. My husband is a Southerner, his family fought on the Confederate side. Sometimes I think about that Battle, how brother fought against brother and died. Blood soaked that field on that day. Men who could have loved one another were driven to kill one another.

Abraham Lincoln would later say that it happened so that the liberty of all people could be restored. And that is what we give thanks for today, for our freedom. We give thanks to God today for this country and for the freedom that we all enjoy, the freedom to argue and disagree, the freedom to make decisions move and live where we wish. The freedom to be able to gather here in church and worship God without fear. Unless you have visited countries where there is no freedom, you cannot even begin to understand what we have here. It is part of the air we breathe, the fact that we are free. We take it for granted.

God wants you to be free. God wants us all to be free, but there are many kinds of bondage. And the bondage that is worst of all occurs when we are unable to forgive.

In the gospel, Jesus tells us that we are to pray for our enemies, that we are to love them. “Be perfect,” Jesus says, “Just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

It is the highest form of love, the love of your enemies. I cannot say that I am very good at it. It is the stuff that makes the gospel unique in every way. It is at the heart of the message of Jesus. We are to pray for those people who hate us and persecute us. Pray for them and love them.

This means that, as a country, we must pray for Al-Quaida. This means that, as an individual, you must pray for the woman who hates your guts and tells everyone how awful you are. And you can’t just pray for her to fall into a deep pit. You must pray for her wellbeing.

Why must we pray for our enemies? Because if we do not forgive them, our hatred and resentment will drive us to pieces.

In the movie True Grit, a 14-year-old girl named Maddie goes on a hunt for revenge. Her father was killed by a man named Tom Cheney. She considers it her duty to hire killers and avenge her father’s death. This act of revenge will set her free from the hatred and grief that consumes her. So she makes her way through the dust and violence of late 1800’s West to find a man who will act out her aggression. And once she has found him, a man with what she calls True Grit, she rides with him out into the wild to catch and murder this Tom Cheney.

It is a story of despair. The man she has hired is a drunk who has shot more men than he can count. They are accompanied by a Texas Ranger who is also on a mad hunt for the same man. When they finally come across this enemy, Maddie succeeds in shooting him, but the kickback from her gun sends her flying backwards into a pit where her arm is broken and she is bitten by a rattler.

Maddie’s life is spared but her arm is amputated. She never marries and spends her life remembering her trip of revenge. But she is not free. She is never free.

Not forgiving someone, it’s like drinking poison and hoping that the enemy will die. Maddie sought revenge and she consumed her life with it.

Be perfect, Jesus said. As your heavenly Father is perfect. The word in the ancient Greek is complete. Be complete, be whole. Do not drive yourself into pieces over the wrongs of another person. Forgive them, love them, and gain your life, gain your freedom.


Who is it that makes you really angry? Who is it that treats you unfairly or makes you feel unworthy? Everyone has someone who rubs them the wrong way. And many of the people who treat us poorly are very close to us.

Whoever it is that really makes you angry, whoever it is that really gets your goat, it is that person that you must study and come to understand, because they will teach you something valuable about yourself. If you are to declare your independence from them, then you must know them and even love them.

Think back to the Revolutionary war and the Declaration of Independence. This country was defined by its enemy. We wanted freedom from the tyranny of Britain. We wanted to be a people who were free to elect our own rulers, free to make our own decisions, pay our own taxes. It was Britain’s rule of us, Britain’s taxation without representation that brought us to know ourselves. You could say that our enemy was our best teacher. Because of our vehement need to define ourselves as free, we created a democratic nation. Our greatness was influenced most by our enemy. If we hadn’t wanted so badly to be independent, if we hadn’t wanted so badly to be free, we might not have become who we are today.

Do you want to be truly free? If you do then you must declare your independence from the ones who treat you worst by praying for them and yes, by loving them. By love, I don’t mean feeling all warm and fuzzy towards them and I don’t even mean that you should not defend yourself. I mean that you should understand them and want what’s best for them. I mean that you should trust God enough to place them in God’s hands.

We are defined more by our enemies than by our friends. So we’d better get to know them well.

At our wedding, some of JD’s relatives flew up North. These folks had never been to the North. JD’s tone-deaf Uncle Homer from Tennessee danced at the reception and sang out loud. JD hired a Memphis funk band and the southern blues rocked the house in Connecticut. North married South and it was a blast.

My brother and father decorated our Jeep with all the normal just married stuff. We were to drive down to Kennedy airport just outside of New York City the next morning. As we got into the city, something incredible happened.

Normally nothing makes me more frustrated than driving in New York City. It is like being trampled. Everyone is honking, there are no lanes, people lean out their windows just to swear at you. Everyone hates everyone, it is just part of the deal.

We landed in a traffic jam at a toll booth outside of the city. “Oh, no,” JD said. “This is going to last forever.”

Then something amazing happened. A souped up BMW, blasting rap music, beside us, honked his horn.

“JUST MARRIED! COME ON!!YEAH!!”

He let us in. Then another old junky car, with Mexican guys all crowded inside started cheering. The cars began to move. Audis and Vans, trucks and beetles. Everyone understood what had happened to us, everyone was honking and cheering. The lines just seemed to part. Everyone was smiling and waving. It was like the Kingdom of heaven.

I had never seen anything like it. I had never felt more free than that day, in the middle of a traffic jam.


If you truly want to be free, then you must love your enemies. Love them and forgive them.

Trinity

In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was without form and void, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while the Spirit of God moved over the waters.

This is the very first sentence of the Bible. And already we are talking about God in two forms, the One who creates and the Spirit who moves or the Hebrew means broodes or sweeps, wanders or dances. And the darkness, it covers the face of the deep, but the deep in Hebrew also means the chaos. And the Spirit moves over the face of the waters while God makes everything.

And when God speaks, God says, Let US make man in OUR image…”

Why Us? Why the royal We? For thousands of years, we did not understand why, but, then again, there was much about God that we did not understand.

Then Jesus came, and he told us that he was the Son of God, that he was one with the Father in Heaven. And we were more confused still. And just before Jesus left us, he instructed his followers to baptize and to do so In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Why did he say it this way?

It was not until the third century that theologians came up with the word TRINITY. The Three-in-One concept, a way of pointing to God. It is theology at its best. It is poetry. It tells us a deep truth about God.

God is One and yet God is three. And this makes no sense. Which is exactly the point. We cannot understand God and the Trinity, fundamentally, cannot be understood. Each time someone has tried to explain the Trinity rationally, their theory becomes a heresy. The Trinity is Mystery. Nothing can be one and three at the same time, it defies all rational explanation. But isn’t that just perfect for God?

The Trinity teaches us much about the nature of God. Not only can God not be understood, but God is not alone. God was never alone. We were not created because God was lonely. God has all community and all love within the Divine self. God is complete in a way that you are I are not.

And God is ever-changing, ever-moving. The number three is unbalanced, it is dynamic, it moves and changes. God is always doing a new thing. God is full of surprises.

A week and a half ago, Tim Tuller came to the organ to practice and found that he had company. There was a possum who seemed to have taken up residence in the choir stalls. So Tim consulted Robert Hyde, our properties manager, and they decided to set a trap for Mr. Possum. After all, it was essential to catch the beast. Having a possum join the choir on Sunday might not go over too well. So they put some meat in the cage and set the trap.

But there was just one problem, the possum did not take the bait. No one seemed to be able to catch the little beast. Until finally, on Sunday morning, one of the Vergers came to the rescue and caught the possum with a bucket. Don’t ask me how this was done, the Vergers are a group with many mysterious skills. But God did a new thing at this Cathedral, and we decided to feature a color picture of the possum in the E Eagle for posterity.

God is ever-moving, ever full of surprises. God is Trinity and the Trinity is not only mysterious, it is surprising. God as Trinity plays with us, dances with us. God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are always wanting to show us a new thing. I think God brought us a possum to make us smile.

How could God be ever-changing and yet eternally the same? Again, it is beyond all human comprehension. Don’t even try to understand!

A few years ago, I was celebrating the Eucharist in Kansas. We were midway through the service. I had just made the announcements and was about to go up to prepare the altar when something happened. A voice came over the sound system…

THIS IS GOD.

I just stood there. Was there a drunk man who had gotten hold of a microphone? What was going on? Was it really God? There was nothing about this in the Prayer book…I just stood there for a moment and then I said, “Well, I’m glad that you’re here.”

I worried that God might speak again at the service and if so, I did not know what else to say. But God was silent. It was not until after the service that I discovered what happened. One of the older youth, whose voice had changed and had a deep baritone, was testing the microphone in the fellowship hall. For some unknown reason, it sounded in the sanctuary.

Open your eyes. God does new things with us every day. God comes up with new ideas and new plans. God plays with you and loves to show you a new thing. As Alice Walker wrote in her book, The Color Purple, “I think it makes God mad when you pass by the color purple in a field and don’t notice it…” God loves you and is ever changing, ever dancing with you.

I painted an icon this week. All my adult life, I have wanted to paint an icon. For well over 20 years, I have gazed at the face of Christ to say my prayers , looking at his face before I fell asleep each night and as I woke in the morning. I knew that I wanted to paint his face, but I also knew that I was not a painter.

I am the kind of person who buys paints and paper and with a lot of excitement, starts to paint. Then what gets put on the paper shocks me because it is terrible! I do not understand how to paint perspective, I don’t have a clue about color and I generally make a mess. So I had settled on coloring books with Max until this icon workshop came around.

We painted for 5 days from 8:30 to 4. We prayed and generally kept silence while we painted.

It was like loving Jesus every minute. I got to think about what his hands might have looked like, his face, his hair. And every day was full of surprises. I was shocked to see how much he looks like everyone I love, how much my own he is. The painting itself was full of surprises, new discoveries every day.

I want you to think of God not as something stagnant and boring, like some adult figure who sits stagnantly in heaven, observing your every move. Think of God instead as three-in-one, completely beyond your comprehension, yet always moving and dancing and loving. Like the ocean, think of God as always looking different to you, always revealing something new, something beautiful. Think of God as speaking to you in new and changing ways every day, through color and sight and sound. Wake up to the presence of the Holy Trinity that surrounds you and embraces your life. The more you look, the more you will see Him: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Are We There Yet?

It took one hour to get from my childhood home in New Haven , Connecticut to Salem, where we got to see my cousins. One hour. And yet, it seemed like a lifetime. I remember vividly sitting in the backseat, fighting with my little brother and asking the same question over and over again, “Are we there yet?”


Sure enough, I hear echoes of my childhood self when we take road trips today. TV and games help, but there is still the same longing question that often comes from the backseat. “Are we there yet?” One time Max asked this question just twenty minutes into a trip from Kansas to Colorado. I did not have the heart to tell him how much we were not there yet. After all, his mind could not have grasped the ten hour trip at the tender age of two.

As we move further and further into the Easter celebration, we move deeper into the story of Christ’s resurrection. Today we remember how, after appearing to the disciples many times in the resurrected form, Jesus ascended into heaven. He left bodily, physically. And he would never come back in that way again.

But before Jesus left, the disciples asked him the same question that I asked my parents so long ago, the same question that Max asked me. Are we there yet?

The disciples wanted to know if this was it. Was this the end of the world, the time when Christ would come in all his glory and defeat all the darkness, the time for us to rise with him to eternal life? Was this it? Are we there yet?

And Jesus looks at them and gives them the same answer that he gives us two thousand years later, It is not for you to know the times or the periods that the Father has set…

It is not for you to know.

Just look at things from our vantage point today. We are now more than two thousand years after the ascension and still, we wait. The disciples could not have conceived of this. Their minds would not have grasped it. Just as you and I cannot grasp God’s timing today.

2012 has become the next hotspot in terms of end of the world foretelling. Evidently, the Mayan calendar ends on that year. Probably, this is because the Mayans could not conceive of the human race lasting longer than this, but many people have taken this to mean that the end of the world is to occur in 2012.

I do not believe any of this. You see, I truly think that Jesus knew what he was talking about when he told them that it is not for us to know. Whenever human beings get in the business of fortune telling, of trying to examine the future as if it is some game that God has given us clues to, some kind of puzzle that can be solved if we just piece together slivers of our lives or the lives of others, we make a mess and we waste our time. Jesus told us that this kind of thing is God’s business. We are not to know.

I walked through the MOSH museum yesterday. They have a great planetarium. There are photographs from the Hubble spacecraft: photographs of nebula, of whole galaxies dancing in the darkness, of blue stars and supernova. These photos represent events that are so vast and I cannot take in their size. They are so beautiful that I find myself wanting to stare at them for hours. They display the glory of God, a glory that is simply beyond human understanding. As I stood before them, I felt awe.

In the movie Contact, Jodie Foster is a scientist who courageously volunteers to travel light years away from earth in a ship designed by aliens. She sees beauty that is so spectacular, so beyond human comprehension, that she finds herself speechless. She tries to record all that she sees by speaking into a tape-recorder, but when she comes to the events of the cosmos, she pauses in great silence and she says, “They should have sent a poet….They should have sent a poet.”

Why is it so hard for us to simply not have the answers? Some things are simple to great for words. Some things simply cannot be described or calculated. Why can we not leave certain things up to God? The disciples wanted the whole story wrapped up in their life-times, they wanted it all clean and neat. What was about to happen was so much larger than that.

People will often ask me about the salvation of souls. When a man dies who was angry or who took his own life, I will be asked the question, “Is he going to hell?” But the truth is that I cannot answer, or I could answer but my answer would be insufficient. I do not know the times and I do not know the places. All I know is what Jesus promised, that if we know him and love him we will come to Him.

And whenever we get into the business of determining the salvation of others, we get in just as much trouble as we do when we try to figure out the schedule for the end of the world. We just make a mess of things. Why can we not simply leave this up to God? It is our job to tell others about Jesus and our love of him, but salvation is not for us to determine. It is God’s job, not ours.

When Jesus ascends into heaven, the disciples are left standing there staring after him. They no doubt are wondering where he went, wondering if he will come back. They don’t want to move on with their lives because that would confirm that he is gone, so they just stand there gaping. Two men, messengers of God, angels, have to appear and tell the men that he has gone, but that one day, he will come again in the same way that he left.

So the disciples go home, or the closest thing that they have to home. They go to the Upper Room and they meet together, lost and confused. And that is where the Holy Spirit comes.

If they had stayed looking up to heaven, trying to calculate Jesus’ next arrival, they might never have become the Church. The Holy Spirit came to them when they went back to their lives and tried to figure out how to live in the present moment. For the Holy Spirit does not come in the past nor does God live in the future. God meets us in the now and helps us to see more clearly now, not then, but now.

I would love to see Jesus come again. I would love for Him to come and make all the wrongs right, fix the brokenness of the world, ease the pain, punish the wicked. Sometimes I still look up to heaven and want to ask, Are we there yet? But every time I do, I just get this deep silence in response. For I cannot begin to fathom the answer.

When we were on our way to Colorado and Max asked that question, I leaned over from the front seat (JD was driving) and I looked at his little face. “It’s going to be a while, buddy,” I said. “But I will be with you every step of the way.”

Maybe that is the better question, instead of asking Jesus, Are we there yet or Jesus, Is so and so going to heaven, or Jesus What will happen next, what if we asked one simple question,

God, will you stay with me, every step of the way?

I think that God answers that question, for we can fathom His answer.

Yes, he says. Yes.

Sheep

This past Friday night, the Baccalaureate service for Episcopal High was held at the Cathedral.  The procession was very long, with well over a hundred seniors, faculty, Board of Trustees, Administration and clergy. Most of the seniors sat in the first few rows, but one row was directed to sit in wooden chairs in front of the altar rail. The vergers ushered them to their seats. They looked around, feeling uncomfortable.  And then they all stood up and promptly left their seats, marching to the back of the transepts where they sat in folded chairs. When I got to the front, I wondered where they were.  Once I located them in the back, I wondered if I should stop the service and herd them back to their assigned seats. I decided not to, but I thought to myself, "Ah, sheep!"


When the early Christians began to form a community, there were no processions and noformal liturgy, but they did have rules. And their rules were no joke. Many of us today would see their community as communist or at least monastic. They had no private ownership. Everyone brought their money and belongings to the community and the leaders divided it all up. In other words, everybody shared.

When Ananias and Sapphira sold their property, they only gave the apostles a portion of the income, holding back some of it for themselves. When Peter accuses Ananias, the man falls down dead. And later, when his wife comes in, Peter asks how much she sold the land for. She, too, lies and gives the lower price. Peter accuses her as well, and shows her the feet of her husband, who lies dead on the floor but the disciples have covered up his body with a sheet so only his feet are showing. When Peter accuses her of lying, Saphira too, falls down and dies.

It is not exactly an advertisement for private ownership. But how do we compare the community of the book of Acts with our lives today? It would be simply unacceptable for me to tell all of you that we are all going to share our money and belongings. It would be chaos. You would not accept that and even I would wonder if it was really a good idea.

I think that we get stuck on the ownership issue and fail to neglect the main point of the early Christians. That point being that they were really interconnected. For Peter and Paul, life as followers of Christ meant life together, as a group. You did not believe alone. You believed in community.

A man visited with me after a funeral a few weeks ago. He told me how the funeral meant so much to him, that it warmed his heart like some kind of resounding bell had been sounded deep inside, a bell that had been silent for a long time. I invited him to return to church.

“I’m spiritual, not religious,” he said. He told me that he prayed alone, in the morning. He liked to walk in the woods and contemplate the majesty of God. “I used to go to church, a long time ago. But the people disgusted me. They were so petty. I just figured I’d be closer to God out here.”

Being together is frustrating. It is much easier to pray alone. In church, we have kind people and we have jerks. Sometimes it is so hard to get along with one another that we can hardly worship. Believe me, there are times when I myself feel like fleeing out to some pasture alone to contemplate God. It would be a heck of a lot easier.

But the disciples saw the Risen Lord in community. Even Mary Magdalene, who saw the Lord alone, was told by him to go and tell the others that he had risen. Most of the Resurrection appearances were in the company of at least a few of the community. The Holy Spirit came to the Church when they were gathered in community. It is when we come together that God is most potently present.

“When two or three are gathered in my name,” Jesus said, “I am in the midst of them.”

Why? Why not just let us be church alone? It would be so much easier.

The reason why God told us to worship together is because God knew how very interconnected we are. We are not really ourselves unless we are together. Human beings are communal creatures. As much as we get into fights and skirmishes with one another, we function as one body. We were meant to be together, not alone.

Jesus tells us that we are like sheep. And sheep always travel in packs. If they wander off alone, it is usually bad news. Their safety and their salvation are in sticking it out together. And that is what we are supposed to do.

In America, we live by a myth called the Self. We truly believe that you can make yourself happy. We train you to think for yourself, focus on your own health, your body, your education, your career. We ask one another “How are you?” as if it is the individual whose mood is most important. And we neglect to recognize how much the lives of those around you affect your own happiness.

If a newborn baby is not held, it will die. So you must be held and supported and you must hold and support, in order to be fully alive. We sheep have to stick together.

Max and I are reading a book. It is called Follow the Drinking Gourd. It is about the Underground Railroad and how the slaves in the South were led to freedom before the Civil War. These slaves were taught a song by a man named Peg Legged Joe. Peg Legged Joe would hire himself out as a handyman to plantation owners. While he was working on the plantation, he would teach the slaves a song. Follow the Drinking Gourd, the song went, Follow the Drinking Gourd. The song had details about how to follow the Drinking Gourd, what we would call the Big Dipper, northwards to freedom. The song detailed markers along the way north. Once the slaves had the song well-memorized, Peg Legged Joe would move on to another plantation, to teach more slaves the song.

The bravest slaves would follow the song, letting the big dipper led them north to freedom by night. But the slaves would not have made it were it not for the people that they met on the way. They were hustled into barns, fed in secret rooms, hidden in wagons full of corn. Mile by mile they traveled on the wings of those they met. Without the community of the Underground Railroad, they would not have survived.

Think over your life for a moment. You would not be here were it not for the love of others. Someone fed you as a child. Someone gave you a job reference. Someone introduced you to your best friend, your spouse. Someone invited you to church. We do not exist apart from one another. We cannot survive without one another.

And so God comes most potently to us when we are together. In fact, I am not allowed to celebrate the Eucharist alone. It simply does not work. The bread and wine will not become the Body and Blood of Christ for me alone, only for us.

The early church knew that they must stick together. The disciples shared everything because they knew the truth, that everything is ours, not mine. My future belongs to my children, my past to my parents. Last Sunday I stood between our former Dean, Edward Harrison and our Seminarian, Quinn Parman, and I realized it that I was standing between the past and the future. I am part of something much larger than myself. That’s why we worship together, because this is much bigger than any one of us.

When you wake up in the morning, don’t just think about how you are doing, what your day will bring, think about us. Think about your church, your family, your country. How are WE doing? That is really the question. For you cannot really think of yourself apart from your community.

It is such a relief, the day that you leave me behind and begin to think about us. It is such a relief because not everything is up to you. You are one of the sheep. I am one of the sheep. And we are most joyful, most faithful, yes, most challenged, but most blessed when we are together.