By The Rev. Anne Michele Turner

The tomb is empty.  Is the morning of the third day, and the tomb is empty.   And the question now: how do you respond?

If you are Peter, you are lucky this morning, because it comes to you quickly.  You run, and you come to the stone pushed aside and you go and, and you see those linen wrappings lying like a discarded towel.  And you understand, and you believe.

If you are that beloved disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, you have it pretty easy, too.  Because you also run to the tomb and maybe you stand aside for a bit, maybe you need some coaxing, but you go in, too, and you understand, and you believe.

But if you are Mary Magdalene, you do not have it so easy, do you?  And I think most of us are Mary Magdalene.

All she wants is a body, really.   All she wants is Jesus back.  She comes as early as she possibly can, all by herself, determined to be the first at the tomb in her grief.  Maybe she just wants to cry alone.  And when she sees the empty tome, she doesn’t understand, and she doesn’t believe.  Her first thought is that someone has stolen the body: “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.”

Even after the others figure it out, her heart is unconvinced.  She just stands there crying. Angels talk to her—“Woman, why are you weeping?”—and she still doesn’t get it.  She insists to them that someone has stolen Jesus’s body.  And then when that body appears in front of her, alive and talking and asking the same question—why are you weeping?—she’s still stuck in her conviction of death.  “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him.”

All she wants is a body.  She would be content with a corpse.  Her heart is so broken that she has no anticipation of a world without heartbreak.  Her imagination is so limited by pain that she cannot dream of a world with peace in it again.  I think she just wants things to be the way they were, because every day brings some new trauma.  First Jesus is arrested.  Then Jesus is killed.  Then his grave is desecrated.   And she just wants him back.

I admire understanding and I aspire to belief, but I have a clingy and backwards-looking heart.  This is the emotional life I know: I just want it back, whatever it is.  When I hurt, I want it back the way it used to be.   Mary Magdalene is me and I think she is a lot of us, us people who struggle with loss and challenge and hurt and change.

It is to her, and it is to us, that the resurrected Jesus speaks: “Do not hold on to me.”  Not now, not yet.  Jesus knows that the first thing Mary wants to do, the first thing any of us want to do, is to fling our arms around that body and grab tight.  But Jesus also knows that grabbing tight does nothing except make us rigid.  The man who has been to hell and back knows that there’s no point in clinging to the past.

Here we have the gift of Easter, which turns out to be a rather complicated gift: the tomb is empty, and Christ is risen, and God is changed.  Jesus is not who he has always been.  The way things were is not the way they are going to be.  How can we respond?

A lot of preachers will talk about Easter joy this morning, but I’m not sure joy is the only emotion we have on this day.  John’s gospel, actually, doesn’t record joy.  Read carefully through the text, in fact, and you will realize that there is no specific emotion recorded at all.  The other gospel writers talk about joy—but when they do, it is accompanied by fear, and indeed bewilderment and confusion and anxiety seem to be the main responses to the resurrection.  Jesus is alive?  We know how to cope with death.  Life?  That’s another story.

I don’t mean to suggest that is not a good day.  It is.  But I want to be honest in naming the way resurrection works for most of us: new life scares the pants off of us.  We are so entrenched in the patterns of our world that we look for death and we expect death.  And following after the living Jesus means that we have to let go of the corpses we would cling to.

Mary came looking for the body of her friend.  She came looking for the teacher and healer that she thought she knew.  What about you?  Who was the Jesus you came looking for this morning?  Who is the Jesus you want to hold on to?  What would happen if you let him go?

We all love the way things were.  In our own lives—we love the homes that were never supposed to change, the jobs that were never supposed to end, the people who were never supposed to die.  And in our lives together—we love the parish that was supposed to be the ground under our feet and the rock under our faith.   Even if you haven’t been in these doors in years—maybe especially if that’s the case—you probably have this sense that some things are never supposed to change, and that God is one of them.

But God does change.  And God’s creation changes, too.  Because after Jesus Christ defeated death, all things are being made new.  And we have the gift and the challenge of opening our hands and our hearts to that new creation. Because our resurrected life is more than nostalgia, and more than memory, and more than inertia, and more than continuity.  Our resurrected life is new.

The good news of Easter is this: we do not get what we want.  Because our wants are too small.  God gives us, as they prayer book says, infinitely more than we could ask or imagine.  We cannot grasp it but we can bear witness to it.  We can name what we have seen.  We can speak, like Mary, the name of the God that is dear to us, seeing him constant with us even as he is someone he has never been before.  We can speak, like Mary, to those around us, telling them the truth of our upended lives: that Jesus is risen, that Jesus is going ahead of us, promising, always, life out of death, beginnings out of endings, blessings out of the grave.

The tomb is empty.  How do you respond?

By The Rev. Anne Michele Turner

Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.

If I could only choose one gospel story to have with me for the rest of my life, this might well be it.  Because I think that this night tells us what we most need to hear from the Christian story. This night tells us about being loved to the end.

It doesn’t seem an auspicious beginning, not at first.  Because, this story makes it pretty clear, pretty early on, that the disciples are not an especially loveable lot.  Throughout John’s gospel, they are remarkably slow on the uptake, over and over again the dullest knives in the drawer.  Wait, you mean he wasn’t just talking about bread there?  If there is a metaphor to be missed, they will miss it.

And when we meet them here at the last supper, they are characteristically inept.  Or worse.  The first thing we hear is that Judas has already decided to sell Jesus out.  And he is sitting at the same table with Peter, who is no prize, either; he either has to resist Jesus or swamp him with enthusiasm.  And in between the two of them are all of those other disciples who don’t seem to get what’s going on and who sit in this passive, befuddled silence while everything happens to them.

And Jesus—well, Jesus doesn’t have to be there.  John makes that repeatedly, explicitly clear to us.  He could be anyplace else.  Jesus knew “that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God.”  John’s gospel has what’s called a high Christology, which means that, more than any other Gospel, Jesus is divine.  He could snap his fingers and be out of that upper room, off to be with some more suitably angelic peers.

Except he doesn’t.  And this is what’s so weird about this gospel, and so stunning, and so powerful, and so important.  Given the choice of being able to do anything, Jesus chooses these things: a towel, and a basin, and the company of a bunch of inept, fair-weather friends.  Given all the power in the universe, Jesus chooses the most powerless, thankless job.  Culturally, foot washing was more common in Jesus’s time than it is now, but feet are still feet.  John makes it clear that the force that was there at the founding of creation, the light that lit up the first dawn of the world—that that light is now crawling around on the floor and scrubbing calluses and being gentle with ingrown toenails.

Jesus chooses this.  Jesus chooses treacherous, bumbling humanity.  Jesus chooses us.

We are just as inept as those disciples, aren’t we?  I like to tell myself that I have clean feet and good command of metaphor and a fairly consistent moral code, but I know that’s only a small part of the truth of me.  Because I have dirt on my soul, too.  I act out of anger, and I act out of fear.  And I cheat.  And I can be mean, and petty, and indifferent, and small-souled.  I am a sinner, and telling myself or you or anyone else anything different is just a lie.

We are all sinners.  You and I:  we are not the people we want to be.  We cannot play the long game of goodness, and quite frankly most of us suck at discipleship, every bit as much as the first disciples sucked at it.

And yet there is no amount of suckage that will keep Jesus from us.  There is no amount of dirt that Jesus will not wash.  There is no amount of sin that will deter our God from loving us.

When the gospel says that Jesus loved his own to the end, this is what I think it means.  Not that Jesus kept it up to the finish line, to the logical conclusion of the narrative arc of the story.  Loving to the end was not an act of time but one of degree.  Jesus loved his people—which is to say all of us—to the very limit.  To the edges of whatever behavior they might display, to the boundaries of what actions they might take, to the very edges of whatever atrocities they might dream up in their bent, flawed minds.

In Christian theology, the reform tradition has a doctrine called total depravity, which is the belief that there is no part of the human soul that is not warped by sinfulness.  I’m still not sure I agree with that, but I do believe that Jesus’s love is the opposite of total depravity.  It is total grace.  It is a love that will find us at the bottom of whatever pit we have fallen into, covered in whatever muck the world has shed on us, worn down by whatever journeys our life has taken us on.  And it is a love that will pick us up, and wash us off, and embrace us gently.  No matter what.

If I have to choose one story, this is the story I choose.  It is the story I would leave you with, this night, and perhaps every night.  That God loves us ridiculously, awkwardly, disproportionately, unstoppably, irreversibly, eternally.  God loves us to the end.

Maybe, in just a few minutes, you will come get your feet washed.  I know that not everyone is comfortable with it.  It’s weird and awkward.  In that respect, it’s kind of like love, which makes us indebted and beholden in ways that most of us are uncomfortable with.  But whether you take off your socks or not, I hope you will recognize that Jesus already has a hold of you.  Jesus gathers together all those parts of you that are most vulnerable and most dirty.   And he holds them.  And he loves them.  And he does not and will not ever let them go.

By The Rev. Anne Michele Turner

Jesus’s resurrection is easier to think about than my own.

I am completely down with the idea of Easter morning.  I will gladly preach about Jesus’s triumph over death.  In fact, I look forward to doing so in two weeks.  I can celebrate Christus Victor, as the tradition names him, the cosmic Jesus who did battle with the powers of darkness.  I will argue for the bodily resurrection of Jesus, for the reality of those hand and foot wounds.  I can sign on to all of that.

My resurrection?  That’s another story.  One that, conveniently, I don’t have to think about as much.  When I talk about the defeat of capital D-death, I conveniently gloss over any more personal deaths, be they physical, emotional, spiritual, intellectual.   They are too close to home to look at directly.  I exclude them.   I’d rather not ask if they, too, can be defeated.  I’d rather not ask if resurrection applies to me, too.

Perhaps you do this, too.  A lot of us have this odd way of excluding the personal from major categories of faith.  We are fine with the general truth of doctrine.  But the personal truth is a little more challenging.  Believing that resurrection is true is one thing. Believing it is true for me?

The lectionary has been having us think about outsiders during Lent—about the ways our communities get fractured by privilege, by shame, by scapegoating.  And in this final week of Lent, it takes what it perhaps the most emotionally challenging turn of all: it asks us to look inside our own hearts for those places, those aspects of self which seem beyond saving.   It asks us to go with Lazarus into the tomb and look at all the stuff that we think is dead.  And then it asks us whether, in fact, Jesus might want to resurrect that, too.

This is a huge gospel, but I want to think mostly about that end part—after the waiting and the going, after the confession of Martha, after the weeping of Mary—about that part when we finally come to the tomb.  There is every sign there that death is real and that death is it.  There is this big huge tomb, and a stone is rolled against it, because in that time and place the only real way to protect a dead body from animals was a cave and a rock.  And just in case we think maybe there’s some mistake—because in that time and place, people were sometimes buried mistakenly, and so the funeral rituals incorporated three days of double-checking—the gospel makes it clear that this has been four days, past the margin of error.   It smells.  Lazarus is not mostly dead.  Lazarus is all the way dead.

It seems important to the gospel writer that we know that, because he wants to make clear that Jesus is not offering some beefed up healing, and he’s not offering some parlor trick.  Jesus is coming to the worst, stinkiest, awfulest, deadest place there is.  All the way dead.  And into that place, he speaks: Come out.  Be unbound.  Let this one go.

Jesus does not just proclaim this as a victory of his own making.  He does not even trumpet this as a declaration about Lazarus.  He says this to us.  He says this about us.  This resurrected life: this is not some exemplar that we appreciate from afar.  This is for us.

This morning, we sit here with all kinds of death.  Some of it is probably very public: the illness we know, the losses of mourning that cannot be hidden no matter how much we try.  A lot of the death we know is more inward.  In fact, the deadest places in us are often the most secret, the most banished, the most cobwebby, exilic corners of our hearts.  We leave things untouched back there because they are way too painful, and when we give up hope when push them into those places where they aren’t going to get bumped any more.  This is the tomb where we have put the disappointment that we cannot talk about, the addiction that we cannot give up, the depression that seems like it will never leave us, the memory that is too terrifying to live again, the failure that is too shameful to admit even to ourselves.  This is the graveyard of the heart.

And this is where Jesus calls.  Not to someone else, not at some point in history, not in abstraction, but in specificity.  To you, to me.  Anne, come out.  You, there, in the back, come out.  You off to the side trying not to be noticed, come out.  You who gave up long ago, you who decided that you were dead.  You are not.  Come out of your tomb.  I would roll away your stone.  This is what I do for you.

If you thought we were supposed to wait until Easter for resurrection, you’re wrong.   The lectionary gives us this story today, narratively, because it happens before the events of Holy Week.  The resurrection of Lazarus is, in fact, the final straw for the religious authorities who decide to do Jesus in.  But it’s not just narrative logic here.  Hearing this story in this Sunday, at the end of Lent, reminds me that resurrection is not a reward for a life lived well.  Resurrection comes crashing into this life, and resurrection is not a conclusion but a beginning.

Here at the end of Lent, I hope you no longer think that this is a season about being made worthy of God.  It is about begin found worthy, which is a completely different thing.  We are found worthy, through grace, to receive new life.  We don’t have to wait until the calendar tells us that the time is right, and we don’t have to look and see if we have measured up, because there is no right time, and there is no way to measure up, and appropriateness and merit are not the point, anyway.  Jesus invitation does not wait on those things.  Jesus invitation is for this moment.   The Roman Catholic priest Jean Vanier said, “the resurrection is a process that begins every morning, every night, every day.”  It begins this morning, this day, this now.

Jesus spoke to Lazarus in that other time and in that other place, but this is not a gospel for some other Christians somewhere else.  Jesus speaks to you and me still.   Come out.  Come out of that dead place.  Roll away the stone.   Take off the bandages.  Live again, and live anew.

By The Rev. Anne Michele Turner

You don’t have to raise your hand, but a little poll.  I’m wondering how many people here know what a narthex is.  Or a chasuble.  Or a diocese.  I’m wondering how many people in this room have been to a confirmation service.  I’m wondering if I said, the Lord be with you, how many people who know the correct response—or the ostensibly correct one.  What are the answers you know?

I am thinking today about insider language, and insider knowledge.  We all have it in one way or another, don’t we?  We definitely have it here at church, where we claim to be welcoming but still love our shibboleths, our signs of identity, those little anachronistic words or habits that separate those truly in the know from the newcomers.  Insiders can tell you what’s going to happen next in the service without looking at the bulletin.   Insiders know.

It’s not only in church, the insider impulse.  It happens in every corner of life.  Wherever there is knowledge, knowledge can become power, and we humans grab onto that power.  Just visit a middle school cafeteria and you will see the dynamic at work.  Certain people know how to dress, and certain people haven’t figured it out yet, and so insiders are born.  Visit any office hang around the water cooler and listen to who is taking about what to whom, and so insiders prosper and thrive.  Look at the machinery of politics and watch who knows what influence to exert and when and how.  So insiders thrive and occasionally fail and more often than not succeed.

I am thinking about insiders today because our gospel is thinking about insiders.  All during Lent, we get these character studies—stories of men and women who encounter Jesus and so are changed in the process.  Most of them are outsiders, people on the margins of society.  But we hear today about Nicodemus, about this man who is not at all on the fringe,  who instead starts out as an insider, with all the knowledge and power that term represents.   And we hear what happens when that knowledge and power encounters Jesus.

John describes Nicodemus as a Pharisee, as “a leader of the Jews.”  The Pharisees were not the only powerful party within the Judaism of Jesus’s time, but they were an influential reform movement, one that sought to re-energize Judaism by encouraging a return to Jewish identity.  The Pharisees seized all the parts of tradition that had gotten wishy-washy—the externalities, the way people dressed, the way they ate, the way they prayed—and sought to shore up what was really most Jewish.  And so as a Pharisee, Nicodemus was a Jew’s Jew.  He knew his stuff.

Even if John hadn’t given us that insider label for Nicodemus, we might have guessed it by the way he approaches Jesus.  First off, he comes by night.  We might read that now as a sign of shame—Nicodemus sneaking around because he was embarrassed to be visiting Jesus.  And perhaps that’s the case.  But the ancient tradition held that night was the only appropriate time for studying Torah.  A real Torah scholar got down to work after dark, because it was only by night, freed from the distraction of the labors of the day, that a person could really understand the mysteries of God.  And so coming to Jesus by night, Nicodemus is playing a kind of insider’s game.  Merely by the timing of his actions, he proves himself to be in the know.  This isn’t his first metaphysical rodeo.

And clearly, he’s pretty certain in himself—at least, he is to start.  Because note that he doesn’t actually ask Jesus anything.  It’s not like he’s coming full of questions.  In fact the first thing out of his mouth is a statement of his own certainty.  Nicodemus has shown up to deliver something that looks like an answer, or something more like a pronouncement: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.”  Basically, he’s saying to Jesus,, we’ve talked about it, and we’ve decided, you’re OK with us.  We think you might meet our standards.

This is an insider who has no interest, it seems, in becoming anything else.  He is doing the very rational thing that insiders always do, which is to affirm and extend their own power.

Except that he does this to Jesus.

And Jesus’s response is totally baffling to him.  Because instead of being grateful for the validation, or even recognizing Nicodemus’s authority at all.  He goes off talking about the kingdom of God and who can perceive it, which is sort of unnerving but not as completely baffling as the rest of the stuff he goes on to talk about, which is all about rebirth, and water and the Spirit.  Instead of playing into Nicodemus’s game, instead of trading the poker chips of power and influence, Jesus does something different.  He invites Nicodemus into this larger life, a life where God moves across boundaries, where salvation is not just for a few but is, in fact, for the whole wide world.

And we can see poor Nicodemus trying to follow along but he can’t quite keep and he’s finally reduced to asking, “How can these things be?”  It’s the rhetorical equivalent of, “huh?”  The language of authenticity and freedom that Jesus is speaking is alien to the system in which a Nicodemus thrives.  He just can’t get it.  And Jesus points out that disconnect to him: “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?”  I hear the question underneath the question: Nicodemus, is this really who you want to be?

I have been using the term insider to describe what’s going on here, but another way of talking about it might be privilege.  Its one of those terms that has cropped up in popular culture in the last few years, spurred on by the Black Lives Matter movement, and I think it’s a helpful way of talking about what insiders have.  They have privilege.  Maybe it is the privilege to walk down the street unmolested.  Maybe it is the privilege of assuming a job will be waiting.  Maybe it’s the privilege of asking bold questions of a teacher, or of making bold pronouncements as one in the know.  Insiders have that privilege. We have that privilege.  Because all of us sitting here are all insiders, in one way or another, in one area or another—by virtue of gender, race, religion, class.   The question is not whether, but which one, and how many.  Everyone here has something.  Everyone here is inside some bubble.

Jesus invites us to something different.  Jesus would pop the bubble.  Whether it is the confidence born of years on the inside or just the confidence that comes when we think we know the right stuff—Jesus asks us be confident in—literally, to have our faith in—something different.

Jesus offers real salvation.  Jesus offers real light.  Jesus offers real love.  Jesus offers real belonging.  But to really belong, we have to give up fake belonging first.  To be a part of this authentic, world-embracing love that Jesus offers, we have to stop putting little scratch marks around the part of the world that is sanctioned by our approval.  To be ready to receive Jesus’ power, we have to be willing to give up our own.  Are we?

This episode sort of trails off.  Maybe you think the story just got cut off by the lectionary, but, actually, it doesn’t really end.  It just sort of stops.  And then John moves on to the next day and we never find out what happens, never find out if Nicodemus came up with any answers, or even any better questions.

But: later in John’s gospel, we do get this one weird detail: after Jesus’ death. Nicodemus shows up again.  And he has a hundred pounds of spices to embalm the body.  I’m not entirely sure what to make of that action, but to me it sounds like a man who stopped worrying so much about giving Jesus his seal of approval and instead just gave him his heart.

I do not know how you came to church this morning—whether you were feeling like you were on the inside, feeling that you were in the know.  Or maybe wondering if you were.  Maybe wanting to be.  But I hope you hear loud and clear the invitation of Jesus: to leave the hankering for inside behind.  Risk more than safety of knowledge and the security of privilege.  Risk love.  Jesus is waiting to show us more than we thought we could ever know.

By The Rev. Anne Michele Turner

Last summer, I ran away from home.  Just a little bit.  I decided to walk the length of Vermont on something called the Long Trail.  It is the country’s oldest long-distance hiking trail.  I walked alone.   For three weeks, I carried a tent and a sleeping bag and I ate a lot of dried food.  I climbed up ladders and I crawled over boulders and I squelched my boots in mud.  I counted the birds I heard singing each morning and grew weary by mid day when they fell quiet.  I looked out at the moon as I feel asleep at night.  I was fascinated; I was uneasy; I was bored; I was exhilarated.   I just wanted it to be over.  I never wanted it to end.

I’m not sure of whether I was trying to find myself or leave myself behind; the reality, in the end, was that I did both.  I discovered, like so many others who have gone into the wilderness, that I was not only leaving home.  I was also coming home.

Here on this first Sunday of Lent, we find ourselves in the wilderness.  It is an ambiguous place. It is the place of testing, and it is also the place of proving.  It is the challenge from God, and it is the gift from God.  Our lectionary gives us not one but two stories of identity in the wilderness.  Together these stories ask us  important and complicated questions about who we have been, and who we might be becoming.

The first story comes from Genesis.  We find Adam and Eve, there in Eden, fundamentally and deeply at home.  The first identity of human beings is that they are insiders, people at who belong to a place—God took the man and put him in the garden.  And then, through this series of events with the serpent, they lose track of who they are.

What seems so important to me is not so much how the fall happens—because to some extent the power of sin is a mystery, isn’t it?—but what seems important the consequences that Genesis describes.  “Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.”

If you know the story, you know what happens next—Adam and Eve first hide from God, and then eventually are sent out from God’s presence, into the land east of Eden.  But this first moment tells it all.  We see people who no longer feel at home in their home.  They literally don’t feel comfortable in their own skin any more.  By the time they are sent out of the garden, the punishment is almost a technicality, because they have already been banished.  They have become outsiders in the place that was supposed to be their refuge.  They are, literally, bewildered by what has happened to them.

Is the wilderness in fact our punishment?

Our second story is Matthew’s version of the temptation, the conclusion of Jesus’ forty days.  And it is, in many respects, the reverse of Adam and Eve’s story.  Because Adam and Eve took their home and became strangers—but Jesus goes to the place of strangeness and claims his identity there.

Jesus is there in the wilderness and, much like Adam and Eve, he faces this inexplicable moment of temptation.  But where they moved further from the truth of their belonging—where they chose to believe themselves inadequate, unprepared, insufficient without that fruit—Jesus instead trusts the sufficiency of God.  Repeatedly, the devil suggests to Jesus that he is at odds with his environment, that the world around him is a hostile place.  It is a place where there is hunger, a place where there is danger, a place where there is powerlessness.   But Jesus will not believe it. And so he finds himself, in this externally barren place, powerfully trusting in God.  And deeply at home with God.

Is the wilderness, perhaps, our salvation?

If you looked at the Lenten brochure you’ll know that promised this Lent to that I would preach a sermon series, and I said would call it The Outsiders, because I think that this is what the gospels have to talk to us about in the coming weeks—about outsiders and insiders, about exclusion and belonging.  And I think that theme begins here, not at the  broad level of community but at the level of the individual soul and its relationship to God.   To what extent have we become outsiders to the lives God has graciously given us?  To what extent do we need to step outside those lives to see them clearly?  To what extent do we need to become strangers in our ordinary world in order to make ourselves at home with God?

We each stand at the beginning of a long trail.  This time of Lent is the time to find ourselves by leaving ourselves behind.  The journey of these forty days would, literally and metaphorically, dis-orient us, if we let it.  It would take us to a place of vulnerability, a place where we let go of our baggage and the frail protections we sew together, a place where we give up power and confidence and security, a place where cannot assume ourselves to be safe. And then this time would show us a new understanding of what it means to trust, and a new understanding of who we are and where we really belong.

Sermons usually tell you what to do, but I don’t want to do that this morning.  Instead, I want ask you the same questions that I think scripture is asking you.   What does home mean to you?  When have you trusted it?  When have you needed to leave?  What is made possible by separation?  What can you risk?  What can you trust?  What does God need you to discover about yourself?  What does God need you to discover about God?

We began our liturgy this morning with the exhortation, the historic invitation to search one’s conscience before the eucharist, to “examine your lives and conduct.” It is similar to the exhortation of Ash Wednesday, with its plea for “the observance of a Holy Lent” beginning with self-examination.   I hope you leave this morning with the unfinished business that they suggest. I think that’s what this moment asks of each of us.

Who have you been?  Where does God need you to go?  And what wild journey might you need in the weeks ahead to get there?

By The Rev. Anne Michele Turner

Acts 15:22-26, 30-33, 16:1-5; John 10:1-10

Today our church celebrates the feast of its patron, the Feast of Saint Timothy.  I have to confess that despite my years of bible study, I didn’t remember a lot about Timothy, so I went researching to see what inspirational nuggets of biography I could find.

Truth is, there wasn’t a lot.  Among the saints, Timothy is no leading man.  He’s more of a character actor.  One source I found described him as a “timid, affectionate” person.  He was young, and Paul refers to him as “my child.”  The bible attributes two letters not to his authorship, but to his reading; he is the recipient of 1 and 2 Timothy.  They are kind of bossy letters.  There is not a lot of theology but there is, instead, a lot of instruction for a presumably uncertain apostle.  Apparently, Timothy also had a nervous stomach, and so he is the patron saint of those with gastro-intestinal disorders.

Rightly or wrongly, I have a picture of an eager, nerdy young guy in my mind.  The Book of Acts tells us that Timothy was a closed and trusted companion of Paul, and I have a hard time putting the voluble, impassioned Paul next to this earnest teenager with a bottle of Tums.

But—Acts tells us that Timothy was chosen by Paul as a companion because he was “well spoken of.”  And that description gives me pause.  Because it makes me ask an important question.  What does it mean when we think well of one another in a community?  Or, to put it a different way, what makes a person useful to a community?  What makes a community trust a person, and a person trust a community?

The gospel chosen for today, in which Jesus talks about himself as a good shepherd, addresses that question of community and utility and trust.  We get to hear about the sheep and the shepherd, about the flock who is gathered in the fold together, safe from thieves.  We hear about how the sheep will follow the right voice, about how only a good shepherd will lead them to good pasture.

And my first instinct was to say to you that whoever picked this gospel did so as some kind of nod to Timothy’s role as an apostle.  Timothy is maybe a junior apostle but he is an apostle nonetheless, like Peter and Paul and all the rest, and so he knows a thing or two about shepherding.  He knows, and perhaps he can teach us, about emulating Jesus, about pastoring one another.  This is what it means to be trustworthy in community, right?  We can trust this person to be a leader.

But the more I think about it, I don’t think the point of this day is about trusting Timothy—or Paul—or anyone else.  It’s about trusting Jesus.  What makes Timothy useful is not that he is like Jesus.  What makes Timothy useful to the community is that he is, like everyone else in that flock, gathered up by this one shepherd who refuses to leave anyone outside the fold.

That’s what Jesus wants to tell his disciples, of course.  That’s what Jesus wants to tell us.  That his work is to gather his people together, to make them safe together, to create am embrace in which they might find abundant life, and where they might find that life not one by one but together.

If we hear this gospel and think about how we can care for the flock, that’s well and good.  But it’s more important to be reminded that we are the flock, that we are in need of care and love, and that we are dependent on Jesus and no one else for that love.

What makes a person useful to a community?  The answer is evidently a lot more basic than our achievement- and action-oriented culture might have us think.  It is not being eloquent, like Paul, or diligent, like Timothy.  It is not being patient or eager or thoughtful or impulsive or compassionate or wise or any other quality of personality, no matter how good.  What makes us useful to community is simply being in community.  What makes us matter is that Jesus loved us and embraced us.  And so we trust one another, and so we work with one another.

Jesus put us in the fold together.  And so we embrace one another, whoever we find ourselves to be.  We cannot work alone, we who follow Christ.

The implications for us who worship under the name of Timothy are clear.  We need the leading lights and we need the character actors.  We need the prophets and the apostles, and we need the administrators and the caregivers and the listeners, too.  We need saints of all kinds here.

And, it seems, we are invited to treat one another as saints, too.  So often, we regard one another instrumentally, in church, in the rest of the world.  I am as guilty of this as the next person.  I am trying to accomplish something, whether it’s renewing my drivers license at the DMV or renewing my soul at a worship service somewhere, and I begin to treat the people around me as instruments to my ends.  I wish that person were faster, or louder, or gentler, or more this, or less that, and generally more like me, because of course I know all the answers, right?

And then, if I’m lucky, I remember: this is another person who Jesus loved.  This is another soul for whom Jesus died.  This is another marvelous person whom God created.  And I have to treat that creation as precious.

It has to be true here in church.  We are one another’s companions on the way.  Like Paul and Timothy alongside one another, we travel our Christian journey, trying so hard to build something up, trying to hard to do good.  And this is a critical time in our parish life together.  This feast day reminds us that it is not only what we accomplish, but how we accomplish it that matters.

It has to be true in church.  And, if we are to be real followers of Jesus—well, it has to be true outside of church, too.  Because Jesus didn’t limit the scope of his love.   I first started thinking about this sermon, it was early in the week, and what was on my mind what all the church governance that was planned in this week—our Diocesan Convention, our vestry retreat—and so I was thinking a lot about what happened inside the church.  But the news Friday and yesterday brought me up short and reminded me that it is not only or even primarily inside of church that we need to be reminded of the way in which we belong to one another, and the ways in which we matter to one another.

We live in a moment when hatred, xenophobia, racism, and bigotry are rampant.  In some quarters, they are acceptable.  The Christian community should not be one of them.  This church should not be one of them.  There is no innocent standing by in the time like this.  We who follow Jesus, who bear the mantle of his apostles—we should know better than anyone that what matters about is nothing that we have done and nothing that divides us, but it instead the one thing that unites us: the love God bears for us.  We all matter to each other because of the way we matter to God.

We can be expedient and efficient, whether in church or country or anywhere else; we can raise up leaders who seem talented and promise one another to get things done the right way, by the right people.  Or we can remember what makes us really useful.  We can remember that we all have the gift that enables sainthood, which is the gift of Jesus’s love.

This is our sheepfold, this church, this world.  Jesus chose each one of us to be here.  And so, I hope, we will we choose each other.

By The Rev. Anne Michele Turner, Bridge Rector

A friend of mine has, for a couple of years, been encouraging me to join Twitter, and a little while back, I went poking around on the site, trying to figure out if I wanted to.  I noticed that most people described themselves with a series of labels:  Knitter.  Bird-watcher.  Scientist.  Father.  Runner.  Patriot.  Cook.  It made me think about what label I might give myself.  Mother?  Priest?  What is my identity?

Our culture gives out lots of labels.  Some of them we choose for ourselves.  Others get stuck on us.  A lot of them cling to us unintentionally, even insidiously in this culture of social media.  The internet knows what I look at on line, and my browsing history has clearly labeled me as a shoe-shopper, a hiker, and a heavy user of Amazon Prime.  Ads on the sidebar tell me so.  You can understand who am I and what I think is important, presumably, by which Washington Post articles I click on, which charities I donate money to.  We are all branded, aren’t we?

In this cloud of labels, it’s hard to know which ones are the right ones.  It’s hard to know what is reflecting who I am, and what is shaping who I am, and what is trying to change who I am.  You and I live in a world that makes us doubt who we are. In a world of brand loyalty, what should our brand be?  Do we even get to choose?

Today we hear about the branding of Jesus.  Today we hear about the most fundamental mark of identity that there is: the mark of baptism.  Jesus comes to John at the Jordan river and is washed in the water there and comes up and receives this unmistakable proclamation from heaven: This is my son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.

In celebrating Jesus’ baptism, we remember not just that first baptism, but the very act of baptism—the gift of the sacrament to the church.  Which is another way of saying that we celebrate the gift of identity.  Because Jesus’s baptism was an act of identity—marking him as the one that John had foretold, as messiah, teacher, savior, anointed.  And all of our baptisms are acts of identity, too.  They brand us at a level far deeper than Twitter or Amazon could ever reach.

The act of baptism, of course, has many components—there is the ritual washing, and in our modern infant baptisms there is often the first presentation of a child in church.  In fact, baptism is often equated with infant naming ceremonies in other cultures.  And, indeed, there is a giving of a name.  But it is not the infant’s name that matters, so much—not John or Elizabeth or anything like that.  It is the giving of God’s name, the mark of God put on us that counts.  I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  That’s the identity we get.  That’s the brand to which we are made loyal.  Once that name is given, it becomes the most fundamental layer of our selfhood.

Who are you?  Maybe a runner or a cook or a shoe shopper or any of the rest.  But once you have been baptized, the most fundamental, indelible truth of you is that you are a Christian.  You are in Christ.

It’s important to unpack what that means, though, in this culture of labels—because, honestly, “Christian” can become just another hashtag, interchangeable with the rest.  In our political and cultural climate, “Christianity” can become another marketing tool, a catchphrase with particular and even arbitrary signifiers.  I’m guessing that a many of you have had that experience of being in a place where naming yourself as Christian lumped you with a particular and narrow brand of evangelical theology.   So if we say that being “Christian” is at the bedrock of our identity—well, whose Christianity?  Whose Christ?

I think the gospel today tells us.  It is Christ the Beloved who marks us.  Our brand is beloved.  That is who we are.  We are the ones who are loved by God.

This may sound ordinary and kind of obvious on the surface.  But think about it for a little while, and it’s really kind of revolutionary.  The most important thing that we who are baptized with Christ can say about ourselves is that we are loved.  How often do you really, actually believe that about yourself—that you are loved?  How often do you live that way?

When I first became a priest, I thought I would spend time helping people think about theological problems, or working with them to understand suffering, or wrestle with them to understand their sins.  I was wrong.  The hardest thing for almost all of us, I’ve come to realize, is to believe we are loved.  It’s so hard to understand that love comes as a gift before we have done anything and not as a reward in response to our merit.    I don’t get why it’s so hard.  But it baffles us.

Can you know that you are loved?  This is both the gift and the challenge of this gospel: to embrace our particular Christian brand, the brand of grace.  And to embrace it not just for ourselves, but for our whole human community.  Because once I realize that I am loved, not for what I’ve earned by instead as the completely wonderful and random gift of God—well, then I have to accept that the person next to me is probably loved the same way.  And the person next to her, too.  And the guy down the street who bugs me.  And the person in pew behind me who I had a fight with last week.  And the uncle at Christmas dinner who voted for the other party.  And that woman at work whose Facebook postings are completely offensive to me.  Beloved.  All of them.  All of us.

There was a piece in the Washington Post opinion section last week, and I’m not quite sure how it wound up there among the partisan sparring, but it said something pretty important: “it we must prove our worth, it is possible to be worthless.  If we earn love, it is conditional and fickle . . . It is maybe the work of a lifetime to live as if we are loved.”

This is our work, here and now, the work of grace.  You are beloved.  Live that way with one another here and now, and live that way everywhere you go from this place.