In honor of my brother, Robert Eugene Sturm  (1949 – 2018). Rest in peace and rise in glory, dear Bob.

The subject of The Good Shepherd is one that is near and dear to my heart, because that was the topic that my sponsoring priest, Amy Richter, preached on at my ordination. I have this beautiful icon of the Good Shepherd hanging in my office so that I don’t forget who The Good Shepherd is called to be.

In 21^st century Christendom, it’s hard to relate to stories about sheep and shepherds. Even in this relatively suburban enclave of the city, there are those among us who’ve never been to a farm. So even the comfort of the 23^rd psalm, which many of us have memorized, is sometimes more about nostalgia because we’ve known it since we were children than it is solace because we can relate to how a shepherd tends sheep.

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.   God is my protector. The one who provides food so that I can thrive and safe shelter from storms and predators; the one who has my back.

He makes me to lie down in green pastures and leads me beside still waters    Sheep graze on meadow grasses for food. It’s not very plentiful in the desert, but during the springtime, just as it is here, there is a profusion of green. That is when there is rain and it ponds right where the sheep are grazing near the village in safety.

In my research, I learned that when grazing land becomes scarce, apparently the sheep become restless and can wander away and get into trouble. The job of the shepherd then becomes harder, because grazing land must be found AND the sheep are restless, so they require more supervision to keep them from straying too far.

Sometimes we are also nomads. Maybe it’s moving from apartment to apartment, relationship to relationship, or job to job. When we are not being fed, we get restless. Something can be missing. So when Isaiah says, “We all, like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way,” he’s describing how we behave when we perceive scarcity, either real of imagined. Is it because we have wandered off from the Shepherd?

He revives my soul and guides me along right pathways for his Name’s sake.    That feeling of coming back to life is such a relief when you have felt world-weary, like evil has beenrelentlessly going after your soul.

When we follow the Shepherd’s guidance we will find ourselves on the right pathways. Sometimes they are a bit rocky, but the shepherd is guiding us along the safest path for us. And there is another reason for US to stay on the right pathways: As Christians, we are The Good Shepherd’s hands and feet in the world. We become the face of God to someone else who might not recognize God by any other means. Why would someone follow the shepherd if the other sheep in the herd were eating each other?

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.    The guidance and provisioning of God are with us always. The shepherd’s rod and staff are not meant to make us feel like the Good Shepherd is a jail warden, punishing us for our transgressions, but they are the tools of the Shepherd. The rod, or sebet was used both to count the sheep and to ward off predators and the staff, or mishena, to lean on. The tools of leadership—God’s leadership are symbols to console us: the sheep of God’s Earthly and rather heavenly pastures.

You spread a table before me in the presence of those who trouble me; you have anointed my head with oil, and my cup is running over.  Whatever awfulness or drama some people might bring into our lives, we are living in the abundance of God’s provision. In the midst of the storms that swirl around us, there is also abundance. The table spread before us is that abundance. Remember this line, because David is saying that it’s right in front of us; that it is not so hard to see abundance. We are anointed with oil—every one of us was marked as Christ’s own forever with chrism (anointing oil) on the day of our baptism. Even in King David’s day, anointing with oil meant a setting apart—a way of consecrating someone. With abundance set before us, and consecration upon us, our lives are all but bursting with blessings that are easy to see, if we open our hearts to them. And there’s one last line.

Surely your goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.    As easy as it is to see the created abundance that God has placed in plain sight before us, sometimes it seems difficult to find God’s goodness and mercy, particularly when we are hurting. We must follow the good shepherd if we are going to stay on the right path. But we also need to know that the mercy and goodness of God are following us. When we hit a rough spot on that right pathway, that’s the time to keep our eyes on the Good Shepherd and trust that the goodness and mercy of that shepherd are bringing up the rear. It’s that very goodness and mercy at our backs, like running with the wind under sail, that keep us moving on the path of righteousness. The arms of the creator tenderly and firmly surround us, propelling us forward through the days of our lives and on into eternity.

What’ve we got to eat?  How often have we heard that at church? Does it give you validation to read Jesus’ post-resurrection words? After all, it does feel a little like proof that we are made in God’s image when even the risen Jesus was hungry! I guess on further reflection, we can’t assume he was hungry—perhaps he just wanted to show his disciples that he really was who he said he was, AND that he was one of them. Maybe it was the exclamation point they needed to understand that the Word really DID become flesh. Hungry, thirsty, living and loving flesh. A man who felt joy and pain and, in the end—unimaginable suffering, all tied up with unfathomable love.

What better way to prove to the disciples that he was really a man, albeit a risen one, than to reveal his hunger—his very human need for food? When Jesus asked, “Have you anything here to eat?” the disciples gave him a piece of fish, and he ate it “in their presence.” They were witnesses to the Word made flesh, the risen messiah who hungered.

That group was essentially a church—an ekklesia, the Greek word for church. Many of our church words come from Greek, because that was the language in which the New Testament was written, and the Greek culture and philosophy has permeated much of Christian culture. I’m telling you that because some of the historic views of the church about the human body have been heavily influenced by the Greek philosopher Plato, who wrote that body and spirit were irreconcilably different, and that to achieve a higher level of wisdom, one must deny the body. That is not the message of Jesus. But unfortunately, many of the authors of the New Testament, and especially Paul, were heavily influenced by this kind of philosophy.

The church has spent centuries arguing that we must focus on our spiritual selves by denying our physical selves. And the sad irony is that there is much to learn in our hunger and physical life about God. If God became a human being, then God must have felt that human beings are mighty special. But we have sinned by trying to convince ourselves that the human body is somehow less important than the human soul. They cannot be separated, and perhaps the only true way to understand Jesus is with our whole selves, body and soul.

As the church grew into an institution with contentious factions, the leaders somehow began to think of God as remote and inaccessible to the ordinary person. We began to speak of the kingdom of heaven as an equally inaccessible and remote place, only to be reached after death.

But Jesus said, “The Kingdom of God has come near!” or in other translations, “The Kingdom of heaven is at hand.” God has tried at every step and turn to say, “I am here—I will not leave you,” and yet the very human members of the church over the centuries have often filled us with nonsense about how wonderful the spirit is and how awful and weak the flesh must be in contrast. We have a history of denigrating the flesh and lifting up the spirit in such a way, that we might be prompted to wonder why God would become incarnate in human flesh—embodied and born of a woman’s painful physical labor. If the human body were evil, why would God choose that the messiah be born of a woman? Why? There can only be one answer. The human body is NOT evil. It is the chosen dwelling place of God! So the needs of these special dwelling places—the hunger and thirst, fatigue and desire, they are not to be avoided, but rather to be explored as pathways to a deeper relationship with God. Jesus himself, risen from the dead looked around the house and said, “What have you got to eat?” And he said it while his friends were amazed and shocked, and it brought them back to Earth, where God actually was, right with them! The reality of relationship with a God that is right here is a special grace that provides the companionship of the Holy One all of the time. Not just in the breaking of the bread, but in every moment, however profound or mundane. This is the God whose arms are around you while you sit in the chair receiving chemotherapy. It’s the God who sits down to breakfast with you while you draw strength to face the day, and the God who rejoices with you when you get a puppy and the God who dances with each new baptism into the Body of Christ.

It is both mystery and inexplicable grace that the Most High is also most near. Oh, how easy it is to tune into the pain and the pleasure of physical existence and completely forget the divine inner core that our lives are wrapped around. It doesn’t mean we have to do the opposite, focusing mightily on the spirit and pretending we don’t have bodies—that we don’t hunger and thirst. Do you remember when the angels asked the women at the empty tomb, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” You might just as well imagine them asking us why we look for the living God in buildings and rituals only and not in each other?

God is here, around us and in us. God is at hand in our hunger and in our thirst, because that is exactly where we need God the most in the sacred dwelling places—our own selves. In the messiness of life is where we are most likely to need our God of grace and love keeping watch while we struggle with disappointment and abuse and illness and death. That is exactly where we need God to show up and remind us that death is not final. It’s precisely because of the intimate entanglement of body and spirit with the God who made us, that we can be assured that resurrection is for all of us, too.

“Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” –John 20:21-23

This is the commissioning, the moment that the disciples were transformed into apostles by the Holy Spirit: the breath of God. And at every ordination of a new priest since that time, the words are repeated. We are asked to forgive the sins of others on God’s behalf. And just as Jesus warned the eleven new apostles, neither are priests permitted to retain the sins of any, because that implies that we have withheld God’s forgiveness. It is a completely different way of living in the world because it allows no excuse for failing to forgive one’s neighbor.

Now as much as this is especially true for all those who, through apostolic succession, are charged with forgiving sins on God’s behalf, it is actually true for all of us who pray the Lord’s prayer, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” or in plain English “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.”

So I am curious: what does that really mean? Does that mean that if we hold on to a grudge, it somehow undoes God’s forgiveness of us? No, of course not! Have we not learned that God’s forgiveness is once for all and permanent? It’s one of the major distinctions between the Bronze Age view of God as a vengeful deity and the more evolved view of God as eternal love.

So if we still get to keep God’s love and forgiveness no matter what we do, why does it make a difference if we don’t forgive the sins of others? Isn’t it our right to simply sue a party who has wronged us and let justice be served?

The rule of law, either civil or criminal, is a convention that we have agreed upon to keep order in our society, and while those laws provide some remedies for both material and social harm, the rule of law is not the way we are meant to conduct ourselves in the Kingdom of God.

We’ve heard enough times that we should be more focused on removing the log in our own eye than on the speck in our brother’s eye. And that’s an important perspective from which to hold the responsibility of being the beacon of God’s forgiveness to the world. Even though we have concluded our Lenten period of introspection, we don’t get a complete vacation from self-examination. John quotes Jesus as having told the disciples, “If you retain the sins of any [one], they are retained.” They are retained in the Kingdom of God—those sins are retained within the fellowship of those who say they walk in the light! We don’t want stuff that separates us from God, because it makes it harder for us to see God, much less the God in each other.

If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.  — 1 John 1:6-10

Jesus commissioned the apostles to be the people who keep the Kingdom of God clean by removing the sins through forgiveness. Without forgiveness, the sins remain with us. They are wedges in between us and God. The instructions of the risen Lord are first to receive the Holy Spirit, and then to forgive sins.

Yes, Easter is about resurrection—the risen Lord, and it’s also about the work he left us to do. Once again, we are to go beyond wondering what’s in it for us to be Jesus followers, and instead ask what we are to do for the sake of the lambs Jesus has asked us to tend in his dear flock—the Body of Christ. And the answer is to do the reconciling work of forgiveness on Earth. That’s our commission. Every single one of us was sealed as Christ’s own forever when we were baptized, but the decision to accept Jesus’ commission is something we must consciously do. In Eastertide especially, we should awaken each day remembering Jesus’ words, “As the father has sent me, so I send you.”

Easter is about love, forgiveness and resurrection.

Love is something that most of us have experienced at least a little bit in our lives, however mysterious poets declare it to be. That’s not to say that we always understand it. For example, why do people sometimes say they love you and then act like they don’t? And why do we make demands on someone who says they love us that they prove it, for example, by buying us a big diamond or by giving us a pony!

Forgiveness is also not completely unfamiliar to us. As a child, I routinely broke the rules, was probably a total pain in the neck to live with as a moody teen, and because I have no doubts that my 91 year old parents still love me—I know I’ve been forgiven for riding my tricycle around the block unsupervised at the age of four, or from coming home after curfew a time or ten when I was in high school. And because my parents have forgiven me for these ways in which I acted up as a kid, I at least have a concrete idea of what forgiveness feels like. So, it’s not that hard to imagine that God also has forgiven me for the petulant ways in which I have often separated myself from the Body of Christ, either by ignorance or willfulness. After all, if my mom and dad can forgive, how much more able is God to do so?

But then there’s resurrection—that one is harder to wrap our heads around. It’s one of the core doctrines of Christianity, but resurrection—how do we begin to understand that one? I would have followed Jesus anyway on the basis of his message and mission alone; he had me at “Love your neighbor as yourself.” I don’t need resurrection to convince me, but here we are, on the first day of a celebration of resurrection that lasts for fifty days! So it makes sense to at least try to understand it!

The first followers of Jesus and the developing church clear up to the present day don’t unanimously agree about what resurrection is. Oh we agree that the stone was moved and the body was gone. We agree that Jesus appeared to Mary and later to the disciples, and that Thomas was invited to touch the risen Lord. But what does it mean? When we profess the Nicene Creed, we say “We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” What does that mean?

I’ll get to the point here. Believers and scholars of Christianity have argued about the doctrine of resurrection and what it means for us since Jesus died. The argument is about whether resurrection is of the physical body or only of an immortal soul. I kind of don’t care. Here’s what I care about—and I hope this is helpful to you. Resurrection is the transformation from one state of being to another. Sometimes the transformation is really pretty concrete. For example, I used to do research on materials at high pressure. I would take crystals of garnet and squeeze them between two diamonds with so much pressure it would be the equivalent of being about 300 miles beneath the surface of the Earth. I spent two years squeezing garnets so I could understand how their physical properties would change when they got smushed. After that many days of squishing garnets, I would get bored, so I would get creative and stick unusual materials between the two diamonds. So one time, I decided to squeeze my favorite material: peanut butter. I carefully loaded it into the apparatus—it’s called a diamond anvil cell, and then I slowly tightened the anvils to create a high-pressure environment: something equivalent to about half the depth to which I was squeezing the garnets. When I released the pressure, the carbon in the organic molecules of peanut butter had become tiny crystals of diamond. A diamond is what you get when you squeeze carbon really hard.

When I finished that research and got my degree, one of my friends congratulated me a card that read, “A diamond is a lump of coal that made good under pressure.” That was twenty years ago, and I still have the card.

There are a lot times that are tough to get through in this life; illness, depression, addiction, loss of a loved one. These are the hard times that Jesus came for. God became flesh so that we could see how a lump of coal makes good under pressure. That ash that was imposed on your forehead in the middle of February is now transformed—resurrected as fifty days of joy. Our sins are forgiven us and we are transformed into the Body of Christ. Whether we are talking about the transformation of peanut butter into diamond, or sinners into saints, we can count on resurrection. Ours is a God for whom despair is transformed into hope, and death is transformed into life. Alleluia, Christ is risen!

Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb? There is nothing so daunting as contemplating how we will accomplish a difficult task set before us, especially if it’s something we haven’t done before. It can paralyze us into procrastination and it can feel like the weight of the world is resting on our own shoulders. We start taking inventory of our own skills, and if we find them lacking, we start looking around for someone else to help us. Maybe the task is too big, too scary, too impossible.

Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb? It is really big and impossibly heavy—it has to be, because we want to protect what is inside the tomb from the wild things that surely wait to corrupt what we are trying to preserve. Remember poor Peter at the transfiguration? He wanted to build those tiny houses on Mt. Horeb so that Moses and Elijah and his beloved Jesus could have places to stay. But nothing material stays in place forever, because it’s the nature of God that everything in creation must keep moving; keep living; and keep dying. Preservation is a little like embalming. It’s a little like imprisonment. It is the way we humans try to prevent the inevitable decay that is associated with being alive so that we can control death.

In the passage of time everything that lives must die because death and transformation are really the same thing. And because God created all of the components that comprise planets and people in one glorious explosion of divine energy we call the Big Bang—13.8 billion years ago, those same components, we call them chemical elements, are necessary to make new planets, new mountains, new food crops, and new people.

But spirit—that’s the stuff that doesn’t die. Everything Jesus did, and what we try to do as Christians is to learn to recognize and communicate to the material and time-limited universe, that there is only one thing that we can hold on to that is here forever—and that is God. Everything else is as ephemeral as a broken human body, laid out in a tomb—with or without preservation.

You have just heard a small selection of stories from our faith history, much the way you would have heard some of the stories had we been at table celebrating the first night of Passover last night. The arc of that history does NOT bend toward justice. That’s giving away the divine presence that lives in our hearts, if we assume that justice will just somehow emerge from history like a statistical trend line. The arc of the history that you heard tonight demonstrates the steadfast love of God. It’s up to us to abide in that love and be the bringers of justice.

Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb, which can far too often be the cold and frightened human heart?  It is God’s own self in whose image we are made, who rolls away that stone. It always has been.

Jesus forgave all from the cross.  Whatever else you think about the meaning of the cross, for Christians, it represents a God who is so faithful, even the execution of Jesus could be forgiven us. Don’t be afraid to approach the tomb. That heavy stone is no match for the creator of the universe, the sustainer of the human spirit, and the author of resurrection.

I ain’t afraid of no stone.

This night, Maundy Thursday,  is about tradition, love, friendship,  and the extent to which Jesus went to fulfill the promise of loving one’s neighbor as one’s own self.

Jesus and his disciples were honoring their cultural tradition of preparing for the Passover commemoration in the upper room. That was the night that God had commanded Israel to celebrate as a festival and observe as a perpetual ordinance. And Jesus and his friends—his beloved people, were obeying God that night in the upper room. Tradition is not just about habit. It has a meaning, and that’s why we have so many traditions in the Episcopal Church—they have meanings with theological underpinnings. We have a Latin saying from long ago in Church history “lex orandi, lex credendi.” It means “how we pray establishes how we believe.” We have a prayer book because of this assumption, and it’s one reason why we pray for one another.

Israel was commanded to keep a festival in perpetuity that celebrates the steadfastness of God; so steadfast love was part of Jesus’ culture. And John tells us that he did love his own who were in the world, and he loved them to the end. What does that love look like?

He got up from the festival table and did something that has a meaning on two levels for his beloved friends. First, in a loving gesture—he did something a servant would have already done before they entered the room. Jesus was telling the disciples that he was there to be a servant. John says that when Jesus got up from the table to get the towel and pour water into a basin, he did so knowing God had put all things into his hands. The people whom God had delivered to Jesus—put into his hands, the ones who would carry Jesus’ message into the future—those people had to be lovingly taught and served, so that they would pay that forward. Jesus needed them to know that the purity codes that were near obsession under the Law were about to be viewed on a fundamentally different level. It was a clean HEART that mattered. Jesus was teaching them that they were clean in the ritual sense, and that it is in loving and serving that our hearts become clean. In doing for one another what Jesus did for them—for us, we are made clean.

A second lesson, one Jesus had repeatedly offered—he delivered again to the disciples. The message was that no one of them was more important than another, “servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them.” He wanted them to know and to remember. Going forward they were to celebrate a new kind of Passover festival every time they ate and drank. In this festival we celebrate the passage from death into life from self-centered existence to Christ centered community.

In our time, we think about loving our neighbors in abstract terms. We know that Jesus taught that everyone was to be considered to be our neighbor, but when you get to the specific and longer term commitment of those whom we call friends– those whom we love, it becomes more personal. And that’s both good and bad. On the one hand, we want to be loved; to be known and understood. We want to be with people with whom we have shared a history. But we are sometimes less excited to give than to receive—less keen on learning how to be the one who gives that experience to the people that God sends across our paths, than we are to receive that gift. It is in the active love that we give to each other that our hearts become clean, and it is in allowing our friends to serve us that they their hearts become clean.

When Jesus washed the feet of his disciples, it was to teach them servant leadership. When you serve, it is not about you—it is about the ones you serve. And that is why Jesus was able to drink from the most awful of cups. Because to Jesus, his life was never about him. May we try just a little harder on this night to be a friend like Jesus.

The people cried out for the release of a rebel murderer named Barabbas, when Pilate offered to release one prisoner as was customary during Passover. We don’t know who Barabbas was accused of killing—whether it was another of the Jews or a Roman citizen, but Mark tells us he was captured along with other rebels during an insurrection. Mark also tells us that the chief priests stirred up some mischief, out of jealousy over Jesus’ popularity as a teacher and perhaps cult figure, recruiting the crowds to ask for Barabbas’ release and the death of Jesus. So whether Barabbas was a local hero or a murderer being supported by the power brokers of the Temple, that was who won the crowd’s vote for release. When Pilate asked the people what he should do about Jesus, the crowd yelled, “Crucify him!” And when Pilate asked, “Why? He’s done nothing wrong.” Mark tells us that the blood lust rose in their throats, and they called all the more fervently, “Crucify him!”

So Barabbas was released, and Jesus was beaten and then handed over to be executed. Slowly. Because as Mark tells us, Pilate wanted to satisfy the crowd. So he called together roughly 500 soldiers in the courtyard of the governor’s palace and that’s where the soldiers tortured and mocked him before handing him, not just the crosspiece, but the entire cross to bear up to the site of his execution.

It was only a day earlier that the same crowds who now fulminated calling for his execution had laid down their cloaks in the road like a red carpet, shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” as Jesus entered Jerusalem on a donkey colt. What a difference a couple of days makes. The people from all over Judea who were in Jerusalem for the Passover festival went from hailing Jesus on one day to calling for his death a day later. They, or should I say “we” because there is no “they” in the Body of Christ—only we, became bullies, allowing mob mentality to seize them with desire to kill. To kill the person they had spontaneously hailed as blessed.

Mobbing is so important a phenomenon that scientists have been studying it for more than fifty years. First observed in the context of predator/prey relationships in animals, anthropologists study “mobbing” in the human social setting. Some of you may even have experienced it in the work place or in school. Mobbing is a deliberate attempt to force a person out of their social setting by humiliation, general harassment, emotional abuse and/or terror. Mobbing can be described as being “ganged up on.” It is executed by a leader (who can be a manager, a teacher, a co-worker, a classmate or a subordinate). And it happens in churches and other religious institutions as well. It happened to Jesus.

When we allow someone else’s agenda of self-interest to cloud our best judgment about what is right and what is wrong, we can do some bad things. We can even kill the angels God has sent to help us. None of us is completely immune to the seductive nature of “me first” mentality—the temptation to believe that if someone else earns respect and attention from others, there will be less of it for us.

Don’t you believe it. Every day, just like the crowds in Jerusalem, we have the opportunity to choose between, honoring the blessing of the one who comes in the name of the Lord or calling for his crucifixion.

Choose carefully; it’s a matter of life and death.

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me           —Psalm 51:11

If ever I were to tattoo a verse of Scripture on my body, it would probably be this one. Creation of a clean heart and renewal of the spirit are evolutionary processes; part of the care and feeding of souls, if you will, and such nurturing must be done continuously.

Even someone as lofty as the great King David, had occasion to recognize when he had gone the wrong way. No one charts a course to the Creator without requiring mid-course correction, because the winds of relationships and events blow us here and there, and it’s near to impossible to make it to safe harbor without keeping watch and intervening with a correction when we blow off course.

Psalm 51 is considered a penitential psalm—one of seven that Christians traditionally use in that context. Scholars attribute this psalm to King David in his misery after the prophet Nathan confronted him regarding his adulterous liaison with Bathsheba and murder of her husband Uriah.

There’s nothing that makes us feel smaller than disappointing someone we love—someone who is so steadfast, we know we’ll be forgiven no matter what. And we all can have that relationship– it’s the one we get to enjoy with our God. Unfortunately, far too many of us were taught that if we don’t believe or say or do the right things, we would be punished.

In a strange irony, even though we do have a stalwart friend and advocate, we still make mistakes. The irony? It’s that mistakes ARE part of God’s amazing design. Error is a gift from God, even though getting it wrong doesn’t feel very good. That’s right—error. Being wrong. It’s a gift from God. That is how God teaches us to try new things. Trying new things must allow for a certain amount of error—mistakes. Because if something were to work on the first try, how would we ever have reason to try again—to do something new?

David was as flawed as any of us. Perhaps he was more flawed than most of us, although our Holy Bible tells us in 1Kings15:5 that David “turned not aside from the commandment of the Lord all the days of his life, save only in the matter of Uriah the Hittite.’’ Wow, one mistake in his whole life? Who’s to say? Not me. I have a pretty keen sense of my own failures, and even though I know I’m forgiven them, I grieve for every one. I would love to be more like David when it comes to penitence: inconsolable that I have offended God. Yet, it often takes a long time to even admit that I have been a disappointment to my God. Do you ever have that experience?

David pleads with God: have mercy upon me, O God, according to your loving-kindness. This is a man who is not pretending that there can be any justification for his bad judgment. He knows the loving-kindness—the chesed of God, and he recognizes that he can ask for it and count on God to give it, because it is God’s very nature to do so. Go to verse 7:

“For behold, you look for truth deep within me, and will make me understand wisdom secretly.” No matter how much of a jerk David might have been, he knows that God will still discover the truth within him—that David really does love God. It brings me to tears when David practically cries out, “Cast me not away from your presence and take not your Holy Spirit from me.” I cannot imagine what it would be like if I could no longer feel the presence of the Holy Spirit, my comfort and my advocate.

A living God is only known through relationship. And the relationship that each one of us has with God is not meant to be a one-off experience like meeting God at a party, but rather a dynamic exchange of give and take just as it should be with any beloved friendship. And how much more reason is there for us to exchange that communication with God? This isn’t just some feel-good Sunday talk—this is real. This is the difference between real life and soul-sucking existence that might as well be death. Vibrant and living relationship with God is life sustaining. That’s the thing we want for ourselves, for our children and for our communities; not some dry adherence to a set of behavioral standards. That is not what Church is for. It is for living and dynamic relationship! And that means we will make mistakes, because if we are not curious, and moving, and trying new things, we are not in living and dynamic relationship with the energizing God in whom we have our be-ing– the God who causes us to move. We grow in the love and knowledge of God over the course of our lives only if we have an active relationship. And that means mistakes. And repentance. And forgiveness. That is the cycle of life.

This is the last Sunday in Lent. I pray that these forty days of self-examination has been an opportunity for all of us to grow and love in the knowledge of a God who will forgive us no matter how many mistakes we have made. Keep Psalm 51 close; it is the catechism for repentance.

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me—

Amen.

The story of Moses with the bronze serpent on the staff has something in common with the beloved verse from John: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” [John 3:16]. This is what I call the “look and live” theme. That’s why the story about the serpent is quoted again in John’s gospel… to show the relationship between the two signs of God’s mercy, ~1500 years apart: the bronze serpent and the incarnation of Jesus. In both cases, those that looked at God’s gift did not perish amidst the perils that threatened, but they lived. God has forever made love and mercy visible to us, but it’s up to us to look up from our own preoccupations to see it. That’s why God is always doing something dramatic to get our attention: to make it easier for us to notice.

Whenever I have read the story about the poisonous serpents going amongst the people in the desert, biting them and killing them, I imagine those snakes as metaphors for sniping and gossiping, telling false tales and sewing discord—psychic poison in the community. Those are the very same serpents that can destroy a community still in the 21^st century!

The writers who recorded that story say that God sent the serpents but I have to wonder yet again why we are so quick to blame God for what we are quite capable of doing all by ourselves—wreaking havoc in creation. It is not God who reacts in anger, but us. God does not possess fear—that’s a human problem, and in spite of constant reassurance that we need not fear, somehow we don’t believe God. We are often too quick to blame, to judge and, historically, too quick to abnegate responsibility for changing a bad situation into a good one. So why would we give away our agency like that? Why would we refuse to look when God tries to show us something new? Why would we refuse to move when God liberates us into the desert to escape to freedom? Why would anyone think that God would bring them out of slavery and then abandon them to die without accompanying them to the Promised Land? I don’t have the answer to those questions, but I do know their solution. It is what I like to think of as a missing doctrine from the church’s two thousand years of systematic theology. A doctrine of personal responsibility.

Our baptismal covenant is really clear about the things that we commit to when we become members of the Body of Christ. Things like promising to proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ. Things like promising to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself. And we promise to strive for justice and peace among all people, respecting the dignity of every human being. Not just when we were baptized, but on every occasion when someone new is brought into the church to be baptized, we renew our commitment. With God’s help, we will.

God’s help, and God’s love, mercy and creativity are the ultimate renewable resources—never running dry. But for whatever reason, our human selves often go into panic mode when we can’t solve a problem that we think we can deal with on our own, and we forget that we really can ask and trust God to help us discern how we should proceed.

During the Exodus, the people seemed to forget God, whining about the conditions of the journey and about the leader of their expedition—Moses. But our awesome God listened to Moses when he prayed for the very people giving him such a hard time. So God gave him a solution, and he listened, doing what God asked him to do. The people looked at the bronze serpent on the pole whenever poisonous snakes attacked them, and they lived.

When we are challenged with a tricky situation and don’t know which way to turn, we can pray to that very same God, the one who lifted up Jesus so that we might look and not perish. By the same mercy and love for the world that has persisted from the beginning of it all, God gave his only Son, so that when Jesus was lifted up, we would look on him and see God’s love for us so that we may not perish but live—eternally.

For thousands of years, God has been showing us marvelous signs of love—outward and visible signs of grace—lifting them up so that we will look, or taste and live. And live. God’s behavior never changes—it’s the nature of God to BE steadfast love. We are always invited to look upon Jesus and live. But doing so or not is a choice– a matter of personal responsibility.