Storied Grace

A sermon for the Fifth Sunday of Easter
Rogation Sunday
May 15, 2022

The title of my sermon today is “Love Like a Farmer.” It’s not the best title. It sounds more like a country song than a sermon–or worse, like a five cent harlequin romance novel. But bear with me; you’ll see where I’m going. 

Before we get there, though, we need to talk about what today is. Today, on the fifth Sunday of Easter, we are celebrating Rogation Sunday. We haven’t done this as a community before, although I have visited many of your farms and gardens on Rogation days in the last couple of years. Rogation days are an ancient custom of the church, when we set aside a special time to pray for our farmers, our land, our crops, and our communities. At the end of today’s service, before we dive into the pork butts and all that delicious food, we will go outside and we will follow the cross around our property. At each four spots, we will read a passage of scripture and say a prayer, beseeching God to bless our farmers, to watch over our crops, and to give us an abundant harvest for the good of the world. My hope is that our two churches will continue to gather here at St. Peter’s, year after year, to pray these prayers together. 

These Rogation days were once rather common. One of my favorite poets, who was also a priest in the Church of England, is George Herbert. Herbert was the priest at a small rural parish like this one in the 1600s. He writes that “[the Country Priest] loves [Rogation] Procession, and maintains it, because there [is] contained therein […] a blessing of God for the fruits of the field.” As you can see, Rogation days go way back. Over time, however, the Church got away from a regular Rogation celebration. As folks moved off the farm and into the city, the old customs and agricultural prayers were forgotten, even though they are still in our prayer book. We can’t do that here. Other parts of the country may have forgotten about rural America, but we cannot. We have chosen to live here. Many of you have chosen to work the land; for some of you, the very land passed down to you from generation to generation as an inheritance. You have chosen the hard work of agriculture, the work that Adam undertook in Genesis, the work of toil in the soil. If I’ve learned anything over the last three years as your priest, I’ve learned that your work is hard and honest, and that you truly rely on the Providence of God from seedtime to harvest. That means your work is holy. God bless you for it.

Our readings today don’t seem to have a lot to do with growing crops or blessing fields. The psalm is about how all of creation praises God, and that includes our soybeans, corn, and rice. They praise God in their growing. But other than that, there doesn’t seem to be much of a connection to agriculture work. 

That brings me back to my title, “Love Like a Farmer.” It is inspired from today’s gospel passage. Our passage comes from the Last Supper, just after Jesus has washed his disciples’ feet. He comes back to the table, and he gives them a new commandment. “Love one another,” he says. “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

Our world doesn’t know much about love. We equate it with a warm fuzzy feeling we have while we are holding our beloved. We think of love as those butterflies we get in our stomach at the homecoming dance. In short, we think of love as an emotion. 

Love can have an emotional element. We often feel love that way. Think of your wedding day, or when you first held your child, or when as a child you ran and jumped into your parent’s outstretched arms. All of those are emotional things; we feel love. The problem comes, however, when we stop there. When we say that love is just a feeling. If we stop there, what Jesus says today is shallow and vague. “Love one another,” he says. We can think he wants us to have warm, fuzzy feelings in our hearts when we’re around one another. 

But that’s not what Jesus means. Jesus is talking about something deeper. Jesus is talking about love as a decision–a decision to show up for one another, to fight for one another, to sacrifice for one another, to lay down everything for one another. That’s the type of love Jesus showed us. For Jesus, love is a concrete action: It’s washing feet; it’s hanging out with the outcasts and sinners; it’s forgiving someone when they’ve hurt us; it’s laying down our lives so that someone else can live. 

Farmers are called to love like that. They love the earth. They must take care of their land; make sure it has what it needs to grow; pay attention to the health and composition of the soil; think about how what they do today will impact the farmers who are caring for this land in 100 years. That’s love–real, concrete love. 

They have to love their neighbor. They love the neighboring farmer–not their competitor, but their neighbor. When they’re in trouble, they show up to help in whatever way they can. I’ve seen it happen, and so have you. Farmers also love people they haven’t even met, working hard so that people everywhere will have something to eat, so they don’t go to bed hungry. That’s love–real, concrete love. 

And in doing all of that, they love God. Not abstractly, but concretely. Caring for God’s creation. Caring for their neighbor and the total stranger they will feed. That’s holy work. That’s what it means to love like a farmer. 

In whatever we do, whether we farm or work in an office or work on the road or build houses or volunteer or spend some well-earned time in retirement, Jesus tells us we must love. We must love concretely, with actions. We must love the world God has made and care for it. We must love our neighbors as ourselves and care for them. In doing so, we love God. 

Love concretely. Love like a farmer. Because loving like that makes our work and our entire lives holy, offerings to God. 

A sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Easter
May 8, 2022 – Mother’s Day

“The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.” We know these words from Psalm 23. Attributed to King David, himself a shepherd at the beginning of his life, this image of a shepherd continues to enliven our imaginations and teach us about who God is and what God is like. Jesus, who calls himself the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep, says in our reading from John, “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand.”

Granted, we don’t know a lot of shepherds today. We don’t have them in our world in the same way they were in Jesus’s world. Shepherds were often a metaphor for kings. Shepherds were overseers, watching over and caring compassionately for the sheep, or the people. And yet, even with this princely association, they were despised, held at arms’ length, rejected and excluded and marginalized and kept in their place. The shepherds at Jesus’s birth, smelly and lowly as they were, were not welcome in royal palaces. 

David knows this negative side when he calls the LORD his shepherd. But he calls God a shepherd anyway, because God, like a shepherd, gives himself, cares for the sheep, sacrifices his very body if necessary. Jesus, also, leans into this metaphor, knowing full well both sides of this shepherd image–the good and princely, the bad and despised. But he calls himself the Good Shepherd, the watchman, the protector when enemies are around, the provider in the valley of death, the One who leads us to what we need for life, the compassionate One who lays down his life and gives up everything for the sake of the flock, the Church, us. 

Shepherds: both princely and despised. It’s a powerful contrast. Christ the King is mocked as a criminal. The Sacred Head is sore wounded with grief and pain weighed down. The Word who calls creation into being is rejected by that very creation. The Good Shepherd, the pinnacle of princely images, is despised, marginalized, cast out, slaughtered.

Today in the secular calendar, we commemorate Mother’s Day. It’s not a church feast, but it’s a good day to give thanks for and celebrate the mothers in our lives. Mothers of all kinds: biological, adoptive, foster, emotional, spiritual. It is also a day to remember and care for those who desire to become mothers or who cannot become biological mothers. We remember and support those who have difficult relationships with their mothers or their children. We remember mothers who have lost a child, and children who have lost their mothers. For all of these, this day can be supremely painful. If that’s you, I hope you’ll hear this: God loves you, and so do we. 

On this Mother’s Day, I wonder if something from what I have said about shepherds sounds familiar. I cannot help but to see some parallels. On this day of all days, motherhood is extolled as a princely estate, a pinnacle of human vocation. And while not all mothers are good, if you had a good mother, you can identify with that. Mothers give of themselves wholly. Indeed, they give of their very bodies to give life, sacrificing who they are, sometimes painfully, for another. 

I was once at a lecture with a renowned theologian, a very learned, wise, and holy man. During the Q&A, he noted something along the lines of how mysterious it was that God would sacrifice himself, his very life, his very body, in Christ Jesus, and all for us. A profound theological thought. Later, I heard a classmate of mine, at the time nursing her child, respond. It didn’t seem so mysterious to her. She was, after all, sacrificing her very body for the life of this infant. What was perhaps mysterious for the theologian was natural to this mother-priest. Perhaps that is why some say, if you want to know more about the love of God, look at the love of a mother for her children. 

This insight was also shared by St. Julian of Norwich, an English mystic and the first woman to publish a book in the English language. In her Song of True Motherhood, she said this: 

God chose to be our mother in all things
and so made the foundation of his work,
most humbly and most pure, in the Virgin’s womb.

Christ came in our poor flesh
to share a mother’s care.
Our mothers bear us for pain and for death;
our true mother, Jesus, bears us for joy and endless life.

Julian of Norwich, “A Song of True Motherhood” (EOW 1, 40)

And yet, just as with shepherds, mothers, this pinnacle image of goodness and nurturing love, can be vilified, marginalized, despised, cast out. As with shepherds, mothers receive both messages. Consider how women are sometimes ridiculed for nursing their children in public. Or take, for instance, my own mother. When I was a toddler, we took a trip on a Greyhound bus. I was fussy, as you might expect a toddler to be on a bus or, indeed, anywhere. After about an hour, another woman on the bus rushed forward, grabbed mother by the arm, and shouted, “Get that baby to shut up! Mothers these days don’t know what they’re doing!” Something embedded in the bedrock of our society gave that woman permission to do that–to approach another woman struggling with a toddler in the middle of the night on a bus, not to offer help, but to accost her. Not one passenger said a thing. 

Side bar: If I ever hear of something like that happening in this church, we’re going to have a problem. This church belongs to our youngest members just as much as it belongs to you or me. And if they want to praise God by making some noise, we had better not stop them. I hope we can all be like Bebe Townsend, who reportedly said to Leah Carter while she was trying to sootheFinley, then an upset infant, “That baby is not bothering anyone.” 

If you want to know what the love of God is like, look at the love of a good mother. Look at her compassion, her care, her selflessness, the way she won’t give up on her children. Look at how she sacrifices herself, her very body, to feed her children, to protect her children, to help her children grow. Christ, the Good Shepherd, is also like a mother. Jesus gives us himself, sacrifices everything, to redeem us and to feed our souls: This is my Body, this is my Blood. Do this in remembrance of me. And all because of love–a mysterious yet natural love. As Julian of Norwich said, “Christ came in our poor flesh to share a mother’s care.” 

A sermon for the Third Sunday of Easter
May 1, 2022

Have you ever been to an old fashioned testimony service? You know the ones, where folks stand up and tell the story of how they came to Jesus. I have to tell you, I hated them growing up. Sometimes they can turn into a sort of game, a competition to see who among us was the worst before they found Jesus. Who had fallen the lowest? Who had sunk deepest into the mire of sin? Who was the hardest, in our human eyes, to redeem? Perhaps I didn’t like those testimony services because I could never win at that game. I’m pretty vanilla. My sins are pretty normal, boring even. 

Churches that have testimony services focus a lot on conversion–change–how someone came to know Jesus. Testimony services ask us to tell our conversion stories. When was the moment that God grabbed you out of the mire and set you on a new path, they ask? Churches like ours don’t tend to ask that question. I think we’re missing out. Not because I think we should engage in this game of who-was-the-worst, but because I think it’s important to tell our stories, to tell how God has come into our lives and picked us up. Elaine Murphy likes to ask that question. One afternoon, sitting on her back deck, she asked it this way. “Mark, tell me what you know about Jesus.” 

Conversions don’t all look the same. Some are dramatic. Some are boring. But they are all conversions. Nor is there only one conversion. No, we all have many conversions, many changes that happen to us over our lifetimes. And as long as we’re on this planet, our conversion stories don’t end. God is always converting us, changing us, all the time in all sorts of ways, if we allow the Spirit to move in our lives. 

Sometimes we’re converted from. Converted from a life of sin, taken off a path of destruction. That happens to all of us, whether it’s dramatic or not. It was certainly dramatic for St. Paul. In our reading from Acts, he is still known as Saul, and he is hunting down the early church. He is merciless; he is mad. He’s on his way to Damascus to do his worst when God shows up. A light shines, a voice speaks, Saul is knocked from his horse and struck blind. “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” St. Paul would win that testimony service game of who-was-the-worst. But he wasn’t too far to be reached by God. No one is ever too far gone, too far out of bounds to be reached by God’s loving hand. Nor is anyone ever too good not to need God’s hand reaching out for them. We all need God. We all need Jesus to show up in our lives, to set us free from the power of sin and death.

Peter learns something about that today. Hi conversion here in John 21 is far less dramatic than Saul’s. It happens while they’re on a fishing trip, over breakfast. While they’re out, the resurrected Christ shows up. Peter, who denied Christ three times, swims to Jesus. Jesus makes breakfast for them. While they’re eating, Jesus picks Peter up and restores him, forgiving him for his past denials. “Peter, do you love me?” He asks this question three times, one for each time Peter denied him. It’s Jesus’s way of calling him back. 

Sometimes we’re converted from, and sometimes we’re converted to. Converted to new life, to a new path, to a new way of living, to a new way of seeing, to a new way of thinking, to a closer walk with Jesus. Ananias could tell us something about that. He shows up in today’s reading from Acts, too. He is already a devoted Christian, a faithful man, and he has heard about Saul. He knows Saul is coming, and he knows he wants to stay away from him. But then Jesus calls. Jesus needs Ananias to go to the very man he feared, this persecutor of the church, to lay his hands on him and pray for him. Ananias pushes back a little: In case you haven’t heard, Lord, this man is not good. Jesus tells him again: go. So he goes. When Ananias shows up, he calls Saul something unexpected: “Brother Saul,” he says. “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on your way here, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” A conversion has happened again, this time to Ananias. It wasn’t dramatic, like Saul’s; Ananias wouldn’t win that testimony service contest; but this is still a conversion, a change. Ananias has been given a new way of seeing, of seeing this persecutor of the church, not as an enemy, but as a brother in the Christian fellowship. He has been converted to newness, brought closer to God. 

Peter, too. In our gospel lesson, Peter is first converted from, taken from that path of denial he had been on. Then he is converted to–to newness of life, to following Jesus again. Jesus tells him, “follow me.” “Feed my lambs.” “Feed my sheep.” Be a disciple and walk a new path with Jesus. 

God is calling us to the same kind of conversion to that Ananais and Peter experience today. It may not be dramatic, but it’s still a conversion to new life, to a new way of living, of seeing, of thinking, of being in this world. But we have to be open to it. 

Sometimes we’re converted from; sometimes we’re converted to; every time, we are converted by. In other words, conversion is not something we do to ourselves, but it is something done to us. We are converted by God, who is reaching out to us, calling us, and whose power is able to bring us closer no matter what. It is Jesus who knocks Saul from his horse. It is Jesus who tells Ananias to go. It is Jesus who shows up on the lakeshore, makes breakfast, forgives Peter, and tells him to follow. It is all Jesus. Conversion, change, isn’t something we can do for ourselves. It must be done to us and for us by Jesus himself–but we must allow him to work and let his grace in. 

Tell me what you know about Jesus, Elaine asked me. I’ll tell you what I know: Jesus shows up in our lives; he loves us as we are; but he doesn’t leave us the way he found us. He changes us. He converts us. He makes us more like him–if we will allow him to. 

So tell me what you know about Jesus. What’s your story? Believe me, you have one, even if you don’t think you do. If you really examine it, you will find it’s a story of one conversion after another: conversion from our own way; conversion to the way of Christ; conversion by Christ himself, grace. Maybe it’s dramatic, and maybe it’s boring. Maybe it’s a little bit of both at different times. But it’s your conversion story nonetheless. It is a story that will not end, as long as we allow God to keep working on us. For God will never stop drawing us in, bringing us closer in relationship and in love. 

A sermon for the Second Sunday of Easter
April 24, 2022

Old doubting Thomas. We get this familiar reading from John’s Gospel every Low Sunday, the Second Sunday after Easter. Christ, resurrected and alive, shows up to the ten disciples, minus Thomas and Judas, of course. They tell Thomas Christ is alive. He doesn’t believe it. Defiant, he says, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” We know the end of the story. Christ shows up the next week, on Low Sunday. This time, Thomas is there. And Christ invites him to see and touch the mark of the nails and the hole in his side, the wounds of the crucifixion. Thomas believes: “My Lord and my God.” 

But let’s back up. Let’s take a good look at Thomas, because I don’t think this is a basic case of doubt. After all, all the other disciples, those other ten, they doubted, too. They didn’t believe Mary Magdalene or the women. 

Thomas appears a few times in the gospels. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, he only appears when all of Jesus’s disciples are listed. In John’s gospel, he is part of a few key stories. We heard one of them this morning. Another important moment comes from John 11, when Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. You remember the story: Jesus has got word that Lazarus is sick, but he delays. Finally, Jesus says, well, gang, let’s go to Judea to see Lazarus. The disciples are not fans of that plan. They remind Jesus that the religious authorities in Judea were just trying to stone him. Why would you go back into danger? But Jesus is adamant; let’s go. He tells them Lazarus is dead, and he has to go raise him. 

It is at this moment that Thomas gets one of his big lines: “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” Thomas is resigned. He’s saying, let’s follow Jesus, and we’re going to die, but let’s go anyway. Thomas has unwittingly discovered something here: following Jesus means we must die. Thomas would die a martyr’s death, giving his life for Christ. So would countless others, like Bonhoeffer, a German pastor killed by the Nazis. He said it this way: When Christ calls someone, he calls them to come and die. You and I may not die a martyr’s death, but we are called to follow Christ and die just the same–to die daily to sin, to die to our own will, to die to ourselves, and to put on Christ, to put on holiness, to put on newness of life in God. At this point, Thomas is sure: he will follow Jesus and die with him. That’s what any good disciple would do. Thomas thought himself a good–maybe even a perfect–disciple.

This episode shadows the one we read today. Thomas, who was once willing to follow Christ to his death, has now discovered something about himself. When Christ was arrested and taken away, tried and crucified, Thomas fled. As sure as he had been that he would follow and die with Christ, when the time came, he couldn’t do it. He ran away and hid out. And he was left with shame, with guilt, with disappointment in himself. He was faced with his true self–and it’s a far cry from that grandiose person, that perfect disciple he thought he was. He’s not willing to just accept that Christ is back from the dead. Such a sight would confront him with those memories of fleeing, the disappointment he harbored at his response, the shame and guilt he felt at what he had done. 

More than doubt, I think Thomas struggled with a sort of perfectionism, a perfectionism that had been destroyed that Good Friday and replaced with internal shame and loathing. The events of Holy Week showed him he was far from the perfect disciple he thought he was; no, he had fallen, and fallen all the way to the bottom. 

Have you ever been confronted with yourself like that, with your own failings that strip you of any illusion that you are perfect? If you have, perhaps you can understand Thomas’s response to his fellow disciples. 

This happens to us in all sorts of ways. We start diets and exercise regimens, and we don’t live up to our expectations. New Year’s resolutions end before January is out; sometimes Lenten fasts don’t last a whole 40 days. We make plans–financial plans, careers plans, family plans–and they fall through. We break our promises: our promises to our friends, our promises to our children, our promises to our spouses, our promises to ourselves, our promises to God. Like Thomas, we are confronted with a hard truth about ourselves at each failing: We are not perfect, and we cannot live up to that perfect version of ourselves that lives in our minds, that we try to cling to. And we suffer for it. We carry around shame and guilt. Our esteem is damaged. It all weighs us down, a heavy, self-imposed yoke. 

Then Christ shows up. In Christ and his perfect love, we are painfully confronted with all of those ways we don’t love, those things we have failed in, the brokenness in our lives. We are confronted with that heavy yoke of suffering, of promises broken, of pain imposed, of perfection thwarted. But what does Christ do? He invites us to come to him and lay those burdens down. Come here, Thomas, Jesus says. “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” Yes, Thomas, you fled, you hid out, you did not live up to your own expectations of perfection. But come to me anyway, and lay down those heavy burdens you have heaped on yourself. 

In Matthew Jesus says, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” It’s Jesus’s invitation to Thomas, and us, today. Come to me, lay down your burdens of past failures, of promises broken, of disappointment at your own human imperfection. Lay all of that down and just come to Jesus. And he will give you rest. Take off that heavy yoke of perfection you have made for yourself. And put on Jesus’s yoke. For his yoke is easy and his burden is light. 

The 50 days of Easter are about God’s victory over sin and death, God’s victory over everything in this world. Nothing is too big for God: No sin is too great, no fear is too insurmountable, no burden too heavy. God has conquered all through the death and resurrection of Christ. And that includes our failings, our missteps, our disappointments, our human imperfections. For in the end, Christ does not ask us to live up to that vision of perfection we carry around within us. He knows we cannot live up to that. No, he just asks us to come to him; to die to our sin, our way, our illusions of perfection; and then to live. To live by him and with him and in him, forever and ever. 

A sermon for Easter Day
April 17, 2022

“Woman, why are you weeping?” Mary Magdalene has come to the tomb of her friend and teacher. She has come to anoint his body after the unimaginable, after a tortuous death, a brutal death, a public death. After resting on the Sabbath, she has come to do her part, to give this man executed as a criminal the last religious rites: the anointing of his body. She no doubt spent the Sabbath preparing. Preparing the spices. Preparing herself. Preparing herself to see him again. To see his mangled corpse. There had been much weeping. 

She comes to the garden. The other gospels tell us other women joined her. John just focuses on Mary. She arrives. The stone is rolled away. The place abandoned. She runs to tell the others. They come and see, and then they leave again. She stays. She weeps some more, her eyes nearly spent from crying. She looks in the tomb and sees the angels, perched at the head and the foot, just like the angels on the Ark of the Covenant. It doesn’t register. “Why are you weeping?” “They have taken away my Lord and I do not know where they have laid him.” 

Another man approaches. “Woman why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” She doesn’t recognize him, either. She pleads with the gardener. 

Grief does strange things to a person. It sends us headlong into a fog. We put ourselves to work at a task–preparing spices and ointments, calling the funeral home, writing the obituary. But there is a fog that doesn’t lift for some time. Through this fog we cannot see clearly. Mary Magdalene cannot either. She has the tunnelvision of grief. Where is the body? I must anoint the body. 

Jesus speaks. “Mary!” “Teacher!” she cries. His voice of love expels the fog. His voice of love expels all of those other voices screaming in Mary’s ears–the voice of worry, the voice of anxiety, the voice of fear, the voice of grief and death. He speaks. She recognizes her Lord. 

In chapter 10 of John, Jesus says, “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.” That’s Mary. She hears the voice of Jesus. She is snapped from her all-consuming, tunnelvision, grief-stricken reality. Her Lord is standing there. Alive. And in that moment, the fullness of the Church, the fullness of this Body that confesses the Resurrection, is held completely and entirely and only in Mary Magdalene, the Apostle to the Apostles. She has seen the Lord. She has heard his voice of love. It is not a mirage. It is not some cheap metaphor. It is a real Resurrection. Christ is as alive as you and I are right here, right now. 

Of course, this isn’t the only time God has spoken in a garden. God is a gardener from way back. In Genesis we have a similar story. You remember it. Adam and Eve have eaten from the fruit. They have sinned. They discover their nakedness. They have listened to those other voices–the voice of the serpent, the voice of going their own way, the voice of pride, the voice of greed, the voice telling them they can be greater than God. And then the voice of God, the voice of love, speaks. “Where are you?” Adam, son of earth, where are you? Adam and Eve stay hidden in the bushes. Mary lunges for the risen Christ, her teacher and Lord, clinging to that voice that banishes all others. She’s a sheep who will follow. Adam and Eve hide out, ashamed. They know the voice of God, but unlike Mary, they are not keen on running toward it. They have bought into the other voices. 

Today, as Christians, we celebrate the Resurrection of Christ. Not a metaphor. Not a neat story. But a real story, with a literal Resurrection, a real body that was really dead but now is really alive. And that Resurrected One is calling our individual names, just as he called Mary’s name. “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.” Will we follow? After all, there are plenty of other voices competing. The voice of pride calls to us, telling us to lift ourselves up and our wants up over God. The voice of hatred calls to us, telling us it is okay to hate others who aren’t like us. The voice of conceit calls to us, telling us we’re better than others for whatever reason. The voice of war calls, telling us love and peace are fools’ errands. At their root, it’s the voice of fear. The voice that says we’re not good enough. That God doesn’t care for us. That we have to look out for ourselves because no one else will. That we have been abandoned, left to our own devices. Take that fruit from the tree. Resign yourself to your fear. 

In the middle of all of that, the voice of Love calls you by your name. The voice of love speaks through the fog, through pride, hatred, conceit, violence, all of our fears. And that voice of Love, of Love that is resurrected and alive, that perfect love casts out all of those fears. If we will allow him. 

Our duty and delight is to run toward his voice. To cling to that voice. That’s what we do in worship and prayer. Like Mary, running toward her Lord, allowing that voice of Love to thunder over the competing and cacophonous voices of the world. Like Mary, we will hear the Resurrected Christ, that Voice of Love, calling us, by name, to new and transformed resurrected life. Right now and forever. 

A sermon for the Great Vigil of Easter
April 16, 2022

For us and for our salvation, he came down from heaven: By the power of the Holy Spirit, he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures.” 

Do we believe this? Over this Triduum, these three holy days, I have been asking this question. Do we believe? We say this statement week after week in the Nicene Creed, but is it something we truly, really believe? That Christ came for us, that he died for us, and that he was literally and bodily and physically raised from the dead, for us and for our salvation? 

I have been telling us Ann’s story. Her story is not so different from ours, really. A respectable woman in a middle class family. She grew up in the church, but fell away for years. She came back when her kids were teenagers, not for them, but for herself. She needed Jesus, and she met Jesus at her church, just as we do, week after week. Several months after she started coming back, the Bishop visited. Her teenagers and her husband were confirmed; she renewed her baptismal vows alongside them, just as we did earlier in this service. She reaffirmed her renunciation of evil and renewed her commitment to Jesus Christ. She said, “with God’s grace I will follow him as my Savior and Lord.” And that’s what she has done–by God’s grace. 

When I met her several years ago, it was in a Sunday school class. We were all sitting around a table. It was the Easter season, and she spoke up. She wasn’t shy about sharing her opinion. “Can I be honest?” she asked. “I have always had trouble with the Resurrection. I mean, how can someone who is dead come back to life? We know that isn’t possible!” We spent the rest of the class talking about the Resurrection and what it means. 

Our reading from Luke takes us to that empty tomb. We don’t see Jesus, not yet. But the women see a couple of angels. “Why do you search for the living among the dead?” they ask. “He is not here, but has risen.” The women rush back to tell the others. But Luke tells us, “these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.” Ann would have probably called these words an idle tale, too. A metaphor for something else, perhaps, but not physical, not literal. It just didn’t make rational sense to her. 

That began to change one Holy Week a couple of years later. Ann was busy. Busy at her office, and busy at the church, like many of you. She had a full work schedule, but she also enjoyed helping with the Holy Week liturgies. She was a reader, on the altar guild, helped with flowers. All of this while caring for her father in his early 90s. He lived in the same town as she did, in an apartment at a senior living community. She would go see him everyday. In Holy Week, she would pick him up and take him to each service. They were cut from the same cloth. 

It was Holy Saturday, the day before Easter Sunday. The Vigil would be that night. She called her father on Saturday morning to tell him the schedule. No answer. He must be out for coffee. She called around lunch. No answer. He must be out for lunch. She called at 2:00. No answer. Worried, she called his neighbor. Yes, his car was in its usual spot. She drove over. Her father had died in his sleep the night before after the Good Friday service. They called the manager of the senior living community, who called the coroner. She and her husband called the priest. He arrived before the coroner, and they knelt by his bed to say the litany at the time of death. Last rites. She doesn’t remember the rest of the day. Losing someone at any time is hard. But losing her father at Easter, with all this talk of death, burial, and resurrection, seemed extra painful for her. Of all times, why Holy Week? Why Holy Saturday? Why Easter? She was in darkness, in the tomb. It was night for her, indeed.

Time passed on, as it always does. Grief doesn’t go away, even for a man who died at 94. But it does get easier to carry. Eventually the sting of grief was softened with gratitude, gratitude for the many years together, for the wonderful times, for the memories. Like it always does, Holy Week and Easter came around again. 

The next year, she had a different experience of Holy Week and Easter. On the advice of her priest, she didn’t help with anything. No reading. No altar guild. No flowers. She just came to pray. She heard the stories from the pew. The Last Supper. The talk of Jesus’s coming death. The arrest, trial, and torture. The death on the cross. The burial. And she was like those women we find at the tomb tonight. Her grief came back. Her cheeks were stained with tears, her heart full of pain. 

She visited her father’s grave on Holy Saturday. She took flowers. She prayed the prayers for Holy Saturday morning, while Christ is still in the tomb, just her and her dad. “O God, Creator of heaven and earth: Grant that, as the crucified body of your dear Son was laid in the tomb and rested on this holy Sabbath, so we may await with him the coming of the third day, and rise with him to newness of life.”

To newness of life. Standing at the grave of this man she loved so much, more than life, that phrase caught in her throat. To newness of life. That’s the promise of the Resurrection of Christ: newness of life. St. Paul says it this way in our reading from Romans: “For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” If we have been united with Christ in baptism, resurrection awaits us. 

Suddenly for Ann, this reasonable skeptic who had trouble believing in a literal, bodily resurrection–suddenly a metaphorical resurrection wasn’t enough for her. Because if Jesus were only metaphorically raised, then what did that mean for her dad? It meant that he would only be metaphorically raised, too, perhaps as a memory that would last a few decades and then pass away forever, as his name was lost to the annals of time. A metaphor wasn’t enough. No. The resurrection had to be literal, physical, bodily. Because if Jesus, the first fruits, was physically and literally and bodily resurrected, then that meant her dad would be physically, literally, bodily resurrected, too. She would see him again in glory. And he would never be lost. Not to God. Not to her. At that moment, a fire of hope was kindled in the darkness of her grief, like the first fire of the Easter Vigil. Not optimism. Not wishful thinking. But hope. A real and eternal hope you can hang your hat on. 

Do we believe that in that hope? Do we trust in that promise? Do we live as if this is the defining reality of our lives?

“For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” That promise is for Ann and her dad. It’s for you and for me. It’s for all who have died with Christ in Holy Baptism. Thanks be to God, and alleluia!

A sermon for Good Friday
April 15, 2022

“For us and for our salvation, he came down from heaven. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate. He suffered death and was buried.” 

Do we believe this? As I said yesterday, my sermons over this Triduum, the three holy days, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Great Vigil of Easter, all center on this same question: Do we believe? Do we believe that Christ has come for us and for our salvation? That Christ accomplishes our salvation and all that we need for our souls through his life, death, and resurrection? Do we believe? 

Today we gather with the church stripped of its usual ornaments. In a few moments, a rude cross will be placed in our midst. Not a fancy cross. Not one covered in gold. But a wooden cross. It is a reminder that Christ died, not on one of those fancy crosses we wear around our necks, but on a wooden, Roman cross. An unsanded cross with splinters. A most brutal tool of execution, of prolonged suffering. We see this cross, we remember this death, and we call it all good. It is a horrible death, but it is a saving death. It is a terrible Friday, but it is a good Friday–the best of all Fridays. For in this act, in Christ’s dying, in his blood shed, we have the forgiveness of sins and the hope of new life. All of this is for us and for our salvation. 

Yesterday I talked about Ann and about how she came back to church. She found that there was a place in her soul that was reserved only for God. Nothing in this world could satisfy that longing, that restlessness within her heart. For it is the Temple of God, the place where God desires to reign from the midst of our lives. Ann came to believe that Christ has really given us himself, in the bread and wine at the Eucharist, his Body and Blood, to nourish us and feed that part of our soul reserved for him. 

Ann is a good Episcopalian now. Like us. She has served on her church’s vestry. She and her husband pledge annually. They are at church on Sunday–I would bet at church right now for Good Friday. They try to pray Morning Prayer and remember to say grace before meals. But Ann is also human. She is a sinner. Like us. She would tell you that. 

For as many years as Ann was out of church, she fell right back into a church routine. She found her activities, her friends in her big church. They put the Episcopal shield stickers on the back of their cars and shared their church’s social media announcements. Ann and her family look like they have it all together. Just like us. 

Ann and her husband are classy people. You only ever see them at their best. Their home is always picked up, the yard always pristine, the cars always washed, their dogs don’t shed. They have a good public image. So good, in fact, the church put them on an ad this year. “Come worship with us this Easter,” the ad says. The picture on the ad is a picture of Ann, her husband, their two boys, ages 16 and 19. Their dog is in it. They are standing in front of their church. Looking at that ad, you might be tempted to think, “Hey, they have it all together. That must be the church where all the together people go. The people who know what they’re doing, who aren’t too bad.”

Christ died for them. Christ died for Ann and her husband and children. Christ died for all the together people. Christ died for all the unkempt, the untogether people, too. Christ died for those with good yards and pretty homes. Christ died for those who have concrete instead of grass, who live in cardboard boxes. Christ died for those with family photos lining the hallways. Christ died for those who have no family, or no family they want to be with. Christ died for those with nice cars and hypoallergenic dogs. Christ died for those who are just hoping their car will start, who can’t afford to take the dog to the vet. Christ died for all the lovely people. And Christ died for unlovely, too, for those who are impossible to love. Christ died for those who will go into that church, and this church, on Sunday. And Christ died for those who don’t even know it’s Easter. Christ died for all. Christ died for you. 

Christ died. For us and for our salvation. So our sins might be forgiven. So his righteousness, his holiness, his blood might cover our lives and make us worthy before God. For all of that, Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, came to die. To break our curse of sin and death, the curse that has haunted humanity since Adam and Eve took the fruit. 

It’s a curse we all have–this sin and death. It’s a reality for Ann and her put-together family. It’s just as much a reality for them as it is for that person who never steps foot in church, for that person who lives on the streets, and for you and for me. For all of us he came to live and to die. To really die. There is no last minute magic trick. There is no slight of hand. There is no anesthesia to numb the experience. God in the flesh, God Incarnate, God is dead as a doornail on the cross. Jesus’s body begins to decompose. There are no vitals. He is dead. Brutally dead. For us. For our sin. In order to take away our curse of death, of sin, of shame. 

That’s why we call this horrible death, this terrible Friday, good. A Good Friday. The best of Fridays. Because Christ has died in our place, taking our sin, taking our death, and giving us the hope of eternal life, of redemption, of forgiveness. 

But sometimes, I think we believe that Christ only died for the best part of us. I think we only believe that Christ died for that postcard version of us, like Ann and her family on the church advertisement. It’s easy to believe that Christ died for that–for us when we’re put together, our best behavior, everything figured out on our own. But can we believe that Christ died for us when we’re at our worst? Can we believe that Christ died for us–the part of us very few others, maybe no one else, sees? The part of us that remains hidden, secret, tucked away, unloveable? The part of ourselves we hide in shame? 

Christ didn’t die for you at your best only. Christ’s death and the salvation that comes from that death does not come with conditions or asterisks. Christ died for you–for the real you, the you that perhaps only you know well. Christ died for everything you are–your good qualities and the most shameful part of you. For you, even at your worst moments. Christ died for you and the salvation of your whole soul. Not just the parts we like to show off to other people, not just the parts we show off at church or on social media, but for all of who we are. 

And here’s the thing: his cross, his blood, his death, they are enough. They are enough for you. They are enough for all of you. The grace of his death, the grace of this Good Friday, the love of God shown in this sacrifice, it’s all enough to cover you and everything you are. It’s enough to cover every part of us. 

Christ died for you. For everything you are. Do we believe that? 

A sermon for Maundy Thursday
April 14, 2022

“For us and for our salvation, he came down from heaven.” We say these words week after week in the Nicene Creed. My question for us this Triduum, the question that I will ask tonight, tomorrow night, and Saturday night, is this: Do we really believe that? Do we really believe that Christ has come for us and for our salvation? 

At one point in her life, Ann would not have known what to tell you. She was raised in the church, like most everybody else in her hometown. Baptized, confirmed, the whole thing. She went off to college and got off track. She didn’t get off track in any big way. She lived a respectable life, nothing shocking. She would still pop into church occasionally when she visited home. She was married by the Episcopal priest. She had a couple of kids. A happy marriage. An interior designer, she put in hours and hours. Her kids were baptized in the church, like she was, but they rarely went to church. Easter and Christmas mostly. 

It happened one day, a normal day, nothing special about this day. Her kids were now teenagers. She woke up next to her husband, 6:30 am. One of her kids’ alarm clocks had been going off for a solid 10 minutes. She yelled at him to get up–a normal thing. She turned on the coffee pot and watched the coffee drip. Then something hit her. What it was, she couldn’t say. 

There are many words to describe it: a cloud, a veil, a curtain, a void, a sadness, an uncertainty, a falling oblivion, a restlessness, a spiritual malaise, an emptiness. Staring at that coffee pot, all she could think was, “What is this all for?” This life, this routine, this rat race, everyday the same–why? What is meaningful in all of this? 

She had had different answers to that question at one point or another. Success in her career–but she had a thriving interior design company, and there was still an emptiness. Financial security–but they were doing fine, more than fine, and still there was an emptiness. Participating in community causes–she was on several boards, active in everything, but that didn’t take the emptiness away. Making memories with her kids–she loved that more than she could say, but why was there this emptiness gnawing at her? 

There was a hole in her soul. An emptiness. A restlessness. And nothing, no matter how good or praiseworthy or noble or pure or lovely, nothing seemed to fill that void. Ann’s is a common dilemma. It’s the human dilemma. 

Without God, there is no way out of this dilemma. We cannot puzzle our way out on our own. We cannot work our way out of this spiritual malaise. That void in our souls was meant for God, and nothing else, no matter how good or praiseworthy or noble or pure or lovely, nothing in this world can fill that emptiness. It’s the place reserved for God and for God alone. St. Augustine of Hippo said it this way: “You have made us for yourself, O God, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” 

You likely know where I’m headed with this. Ann found her way back to an Episcopal church. The first Sunday, she settled in a pew. It was not the same church she grew up in. But she knew the words. The prayer book seemed to fit naturally in her hands. The words–words she thought she had long forgotten–bubbled up, almost like natural instinct. And when she went up for Communion, everything was automatic. Her hands unfolded to receive the bread as naturally they ever did. “The Body of Christ, the bread of heaven.” The chalice, as awkward as that exchange can sometimes be, transported her back to receiving Communion with her parents and grandparents. “The Blood of Christ, the cup of salvation.” And in some way, although not all at once, that curtain began to lift. That veil edged up slightly. That emptiness didn’t feel so heavy; the restlessness was not so daunting. 

Each of us has a space in our soul for God. Our hearts yearn for God, they are restless for God. And we try to fill that yearning, that restlessness, in so many ways. Not necessarily in bad ways. We throw ourselves into our good work. We contribute to worthy causes and work hard for our communities. We spend time with our family, make memories with our children. These things are all good and praiseworthy and noble and pure and lovely. But it’s not all there is. There is a space yet reserved for God, and for God alone. 

On Maundy Thursday we remember the Last Supper, that first Eucharist. Christ takes bread: This is my Body. He takes the cup: This is my Blood. Do this in remembrance of me. We read those words tonight in St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, written around 50 AD, a mere 20 years after Christ’s death. From the time of the Last Supper, Christians have been gathering weekly with bread and wine, praying the prayers, and taking the Body and Blood of Christ. Here, 2,000 years later, we do the same thing. And just like Christ was there at that Last Supper, he is here tonight. The bread that we break is his Body. The wine that we share is his Blood. He is really here. He has put himself, his presence, his life, on offer for us. And this bread and wine, this Body and Blood, this spiritual food is feeding that part of our souls that only God can reach. 

For us and for our salvation, he came down from heaven. Do we believe that? Do we trust that? Are we willing to take him at his word? He came down from heaven in order to give us himself: this is my Body, this is my Blood. Do this in remembrance of me. And nothing else in this world can take his place. 

In a few moments we will break that bread and share that cup. And Christ will be here. Christ will be present in the bread and wine. Christ will be present at your fingertips and on your lips. Christ will be present in your heart, in that spot in your soul that only God can reach. And like Ann, we will find that we are fed–fed with true food and true drink, with Christ himself, who gives us himself completely and without reservation–for us and for our salvation. Everything our souls need for eternity is at this Altar. Do we believe that?

A sermon for Palm Sunday: Sunday of the Passion
April 10, 2022

This is not what we expected.  

“This is not what we expected,” said the crowds that laid down palm branches and cloaks to herald the Messiah on a donkey, who now hangs suspended between heaven and earth on a Roman cross. The victorious conqueror they imagined appears to be vanquished and conquered, breathing his last, yet another example of the brutality of the Roman Empire in their occupied land. 

“This is not what we expected,” said the twelve disciples as Jesus took bread and wine at a familiar feast, and said, this is my body, this is my blood. They revolt at the announcement that Jesus was near death’s door. They take offense at his claim that they would desert him. 

“This is not what I expected,” said Peter after the arrest, as he followed Jesus from the garden to the courtyard. He thought he could stay by Jesus’ side, but he denied–one time, two times, three times–I do not know the man. 

“This is not what I expected,” said Pontius Pilate, as he washed his hands. Here was a man in which he could find no fault, and yet the crowds cry, crucify him, and give us Barabbas. 

“This is not what I expected,” said Simon of Cyrene, a passing visitor in town for the Passover, as he was forced to pick up the cross from a struggling man, badly beaten, whom he had never seen, that he would be bathed in the blood of this man sent to die for reasons Simon didn’t even know.. 

“This is not what we expected,” said the women at the foot of the cross, as they watched Jesus suffer, cry out to God forsaken, and die. Their grief and shock were overwhelming. And how could they, all women, be the only followers of Jesus there?  

“This is not what I expected,” said the Centurion at the cross, as the sky turned black, as the veil of the Temple was torn in two, as the earth shook. “Truly this man was God’s Son,” he said as he watched the lifeless body of Jesus, still nailed to the tree. And yet this Roman soldier confessed  who Jesus is: the Son of God. 

“This is not what I expected,” said Joseph of Arimathea, as he led a group with the body of Jesus to a new tomb. Joseph thought that he would lie there with his family, but now this great rabbi lies there instead.  

Is this what we expected? Did we expect that God would become man and die? Did we expect that God’s power would be shown in weakness, in pain, in suffering, in death? Did we expect that we, mere fickle human beings, would turn so quickly from shouting “Hosanna” to “Crucify him!”? 

Palm Sunday reminds us that this story we know so well, the story we tell week after week at the Eucharist, is something unexpected. God in Jesus Christ subverts what we think of power and strength, for in Jesus Christ power is shown in submission, and strength is shown in weakness, even to the point of death. We look for God and find God where we do not expect: in a beaten, tortured man on a cross; in a scarecrow lifted high and mocked as a king; in a dead man laid in a borrowed tomb. 

It is still in the unexpected that we find Jesus. We find him in those places where we don’t tend to look, in forgotten places, in unseen corners of the world. We find the crucified Christ in people who do not look like us, who are so different from us, in the faces of the poor and the oppressed. We find the crucified Christ in the war torn areas of our world, among the scared and dying. We find the crucified Christ in ourselves, staring back at us in the mirror, in the middle of our broken lives. We find the crucified Christ in our suffering, in our pain, and in our death. 

This is not what we expected. This is not who we expected–God Incarnate, riding into our lives on a donkey. God in the flesh, on a cross, sharing our death. 

Today, we remember and celebrate all that is unexpected about Jesus as we are invited, once again, to walk his final steps to his death with him through this Holy Week.  Come and see and be surprised to discover the depths of his Passion for us, the great unexpected shock that awaits us all on the other side of his cross.  

A sermon for the Fifth Sunday in Lent
April 3, 2022

We learn early on to count our losses and gains. Growing up I had a toy abacus, one of those ancient instruments for counting and commerce. It had five or so rows of different colored beads. I would move the different colored beads from one side to the other to count and compare sides of a ledger, keeping track of what was pulling ahead, what was falling behind. I think the point of the toy was to help with math. But at a deeper level, perhaps, toys like this make us learn to attach value to things, to quantify everything. The one who has more is the winner, and that’s good. That means you’re worth something. The one who has nothing–or worse, the one who has less than nothing, who owes something–is the loser, less than. We can calculate worth on the beads of an abacus. 

This impacts our friendships. Researchers have shown that when we buy gifts for other people, we equate the value of a friendship with money and the monetary value of previous gift exchanges. We think, “They got me a gift last time; it was probably $30. So I should spend $35. Yeah, my friendship with them is worth $35.”

We can count worth on the beads of an abacus. But it also impacts our own life. This old pattern we learned from the time we were toddlers dies hard. As we grow, we can figure out a percentage of how worthy we are based on papers or tests we turn in, or by an ACT score or scholarship amount, or by our number of volunteer hours. As we grow older yet, we can calculate our worth with a calculator; our value is tied to our 401(k), our investment portfolio, the number of degrees we have, the number of streams of income we have, the number of toys we have (boats, cars, ATVs). We race to a finish line in life, worried whether at the end we will be a winner, or if the market will beat us down into losers. 

Yes, we can calculate worth on the beads of an abacus. It is a dangerous game. It is consuming. If we aren’t careful, it eats at us until it devours us, until our soul is replaced by a pocketbook, by prestige, by power. This game is nothing new. The things we count changes over time, but the danger is the same: We only see our value in countable things outside us. We fail to see our belovedness as children of God–a belovedness that has nothing to do with what we have done, but only with what God has done in Christ.  

In our reading from Philippians, Paul is writing along the same lines. Paul is writing to a group of people he knows and loves dearly, people who have been there for him. At times his writing in this book is poetic, breaking out into song about the mystery of the Incarnation and the love of God. Today’s passage is sandwiched between these better known, uplifting passages. But it sounds a little different. 

Paul is taking up an old discourse, a conversation already in progress, a conversation that has defined his ministry to the Gentiles. There are those who are preaching that the Gentiles must do more to be accepted into the covenant. Paul rejects this. While Paul himself is a Torah observant Jew, like Jesus himself was, Paul believes Gentile converts do not need to keep the Law in all the same ways that Jews do. 

Paul begins by reviewing his resume–and it is some resume at that. He writes, “If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more.” He calls himself a Hebrew of Hebrews, someone who has followed the Law faithfully from his birth. He calls himself “blameless.” That is some claim. He is calling out his rival preachers and beating them at their own game, on their own terms. He is moving the beads of the abacus, one by one, to his side of the ledger. 

But then he breaks the abacus. “Whatever gains I had,” Paul writes, “These I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.” His confidence. Loss. His religious credentials. Loss. His righteousness. Loss. 

We all have things we are proud of. Like Paul, we have worked hard–tirelessly–for some things. Degrees. Jobs and promotions. Toys. Friendships. And like Paul, even our religious devotion. All beads on our abacus. We can reimagine what Paul is saying: I am a Christian of Christians. A member of the Episcopal branch of the Jesus Movement. I am faithful in worship and giving. I give to the poor. I fight for justice and peace. I keep my Lenten fast. 

But the problem arises when these things become idols. When these things are lifted up above what is truly important, when instead of pointing to God, they point to ourselves. For while these things are important and praise-worthy–while these things are even necessary, they cannot begin to scratch the surface of God’s love for us and the grace we have received. Nor can these things earn us anything, for we have been given everything already. All of it is loss in comparison to what God has done in Christ.

When our striving sidelines grace, when our own righteousness replaces faith, we’ve missed the mark. Paul is calling us to break the abacus. Paul is calling the Philippians and us back to Christ. “I want to know Christ,” Paul says. “I want to know Christ.” This is not about deeds of righteousness or checklists. It’s not about resumes or accomplishments. It’s not about quantifying impact or importance. It’s not about our ledger of value and worth. It is about falling into the heart of God. It’s about sharing the life of God. It’s a journey into Christ. 

Break the abacus. Let’s put on Christ. Let’s see ourselves through the eyes of God. Let’s understand ourselves, at our core, to be beloved of God. Break the abacus. 

Someone once told me that Paul’s letter to the Philippians is a love letter–a love letter between Paul and this faithful congregation, a love letter about the love of God for us. Philippians is a love letter, they said–except chapter three. A love letter–except the part we read today. Today’s passage just did not seem to go along with the rest. It seems competitive, boastful, out of place. 

I do not think that’s correct. I think this passage is just as much part of the love letter as the rest of it. Paul is pouring out his heart here, just as much as he is elsewhere. It is a word of warning to people he loves, a word of warning about where we put our trust, about how we value ourselves. And it’s a word of encouragement about seeing ourselves as Christ does, seeing ourselves beloved of God, seeing ourselves floating in a sea of grace, surrounded by God’s endless love.  

It’s a love letter to us. It’s an invitation into love, into belovedness, into a truer way of seeing our lives.  Break the abacus. You can’t count your worth there. There aren’t enough beads to even begin to scratch the surface of how loved and valuable you are to God.