Feast of the Ascension

If Jesus was raised bodily from the grave, why isn’t he with us bodily today?

Today is the feast of the Ascension; it comes 40 days after Easter and 10 before Pentecost.  This is the feast in the Church’s calendar when we recall Jesus being taken bodily into Heaven just as he was taken bodily from the grave.  Like most things written about Jesus in the New Testament, there are different accounts of this story.  Matthew and John do not write about it at all, Matthew ends his Gospel with a commission from Jesus to baptize and teach, and John closes with Jesus walking down the beach with his friends.  Luke’s story doesn’t end with his Gospel, but continues into the book of Acts, where the disciples receive the Holy Spirit and broaden the audience of the Gospel message towards Gentiles and eventually the center of the imperial world in Rome.  For Luke, the Ascension is an important step in this narrative: Jesus is “carried up into heaven,” the same place from which the disciples will be “clothed with power from on high,” clothed, that is, with the Holy Spirit.  Jesus goes up and the Spirit comes down.  Perhaps this is another way of communicating what John tells of Jesus’ departure: “if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself, that where I am, you may be also.” (Jn 14:3) 

These are all different ways of grappling with a question at the center of Resurrection faith: where is our risen Lord, now?  The great mystery of our faith was sparked by the fact that after the death of Jesus, his followers still experienced his presence.  The New Testament documents these experiences in all their myriad forms: visions, appearances, a body not yet as solid as flesh, a ghost who passes through walls, a stranger on the way who suddenly becomes remarkably familiar.  At some point in the early Church, the norm for experiencing the presence of Jesus beyond death came to be in community: wherever two or three are gathered; often, in the sharing of stories, intercessions, and in the breaking of bread.  It was known that the power that brought human bodies together in this kind of communion with Jesus beyond the grave was the Holy Spirit he had promised in his earthly life.  The risen Lord is here, among us, yet also beyond us, with God, a mystery that escapes the grasp of words and logic.  Ascension stories are one way of trying to communicate this mystery in written form.  Jesus lives bodily with the transcendent God of all creation, and dwells spiritually in the bodies we lend to his service here on the earth.  Jesus brings something of our humanity with him to God, and through his Holy Spirit with us we bring something of God to those we encounter every day.  Part of our faith believes that the distance between our God and our humanity has been forever wed in the death and new life of Jesus, and grows closer and closer still every day.

I am perpetually fascinated by artistic depictions of the Ascension.  In many paintings such as the one above by Hans Seuss von Kulmbach, the only thing we see of Jesus are his feet, just before they are taken into a mysterious cloud which the disciples gaze heavenward towards.  For me, they are a symbol of the last thing the disciples might have been able to grab hold of before having to part with the tangible, bodily reminder of their friend and teacher.  If you have ever experienced the loss of a loved one, you may be familiar with the surprises that come with what we are able to hold on to.  It may be a photograph, a book, a place, something or somewhere that we can hold onto and ground ourselves in with our memories.  As we begin to release our hold on these objects, we may make our peace with the fact that our beloved dead have gone to a place where we, for a time, at least, cannot follow.  What new life comes in that release? What relationships grow in the letting go? The body of Jesus was familiar to his followers, without it, what new expressions of his life were born!  A few summers ago, while I was interning as a hospital chaplain in San Francisco, I wrote a poem about this letting go, you can read it here if you’re interested.  For this entry, I’ll leave you with a prayer for Ascension Day by Janet Morley, and the hope that we may all find rest between the letting go of our familiar loves and the spirit of new life waiting for us on the other side of our release.

O God,
you withdraw from our sight
that you may be known by our love
help us to enter the cloud
where you are hidden,
and surrender all our certainty
to the darkness of faith
in Jesus Christ, Amen.

The Book of Revelation meets Stevie Wonder, Part II

See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them.

“Where I am going, you cannot come.” I start off with that only because some of you may not know that next Sunday afternoon I begin a four-month sabbatical. And, as Jesus tries to communicate to his disciples in these last weeks of Easter season, wonderful things are in store for all of you while I’m gone.

Last week, I preached about the Book of Revelation and its aim as a source of comfort for disciples under persecution. I talked about Revelation as the literature of God’s people in their powerlessness.  At the church door I got a comment from a very faithful person, the kind of person I describe as a mature Christian —not because of age but because of temperament. It was the kind of comment that clergy hardly ever get and which I, for one, truly appreciate. She leaned into me and she said: I beg to differ with you. I have to say, on behalf of all of my preaching colleagues, lay and ordained, we really do love it when you tell us, on the way out the door, how much you love our sermons. But when someone has a bone to pick, I love it just as much. It lets me know they take themselves seriously as a theologian, and I know they’ve really been listening.

“I beg to differ,” she said, and then she said: “being a true disciple means being Christ in the world, and thus you are not powerless but all powerful.”

And—being a person occasionally able to think fast on my feet—I said: “It’s a good thing this was only Part I of my sermon on the Book of Revelation. Just you wait until next week.”

So here we are with another chance to look at what this complex and oft-overly-reduced book of the Bible has to say to us about discipleship.

Last week I talked about powerlessness, as I said, and about suffering. To be a disciple is to suffer, and to be the Christian church is to suffer. And I don’t think anyone back then thought about suffering in terms of an unbalanced budget or the lack of air conditioning in the sanctuary. So where is the good news, in the reality where we live right now at this moment? The good news is that if we are truly Christ in the world, the principalities and powers of the world need not have any more power over us than they ultimately had over Christ. Or, as I heard at the church door last week, “being a true disciple means being Christ in the world; thus you are not powerless but all powerful.”

So where is powerfulness in the Book of Revelation? Well, all through it. In all its psychedelic glory, Revelation is the place where power and powerlessness meet and dance together. Today’s reading gives us a vision of the New Jerusalem, the place where God’s power and our power as disciples intersects. The New Jerusalem is the author’s way of talking about the Kingdom of God. If you’ve heard me preach more than once or twice you know I believe the kingdom is within our reach, and that our job as disciples is to point to it, proclaim it, and reveal it in how we live our lives.

The Holy City, the New Jerusalem is not “up there” somewhere, but comes down to us. One reader imagines it like the Emerald City, floating on the horizon in the land of Oz. I imagine something much less ethereal and more real. Imagine if the new Jerusalem is all around us. God’s kingdom is here, where we are, in all of our broken, fallen mortality.

God is in the alpha and the omega—the beginning and the end—but also in the middle. The home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God, says our text this morning. The middle is where we experience powerlessness and suffering, conflict and grief. Right now. (Well, not right now, I hope, but you know what I mean.) And this middle, between the alpha and the omega, is where we experience the power of Christ within us, the power of being Christ in the world.

Jesus tells us about this power in today’s gospel: I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples. It is simple, and yet, easier said than done, right? But love is the how for Christ’s power in the world, and for the transformation of the world into the Kingdom of God. Love one another, love the world, love the work and the play of the world, the mundane and the mystery. Love our neighbors, love our enemies, love our bodies, love our collective soul with all its dark and confusing places.

If we interpret the Book of Revelation as only about end-times, about the elect 144,000 who will actually get to the New Jerusalem, then we can say we are in the world but not of it, with our sights set on what some might call “pie in the sky.” But this would be to deny the text and all of Jesus’ teaching. Our response to the suffering in the world and in our own lives is not to imagine an alternative universe beyond our grasp, but to engage the world where God is. The home of God is among mortals.

These past few weeks I’ve been meditating on a passage of poetry from one of the great soul-searchers and soul-proclaimers of our time, Stevie Wonder. What has caught me, as we’ve been reading hearing these Easter snippets from the Book of Revelation, are these lines from his song “As”:

We all know sometimes life’s hates and troubles 
Can make you wish you were born in another time and space 
But you can bet you life times that and twice its double 
That God knew exactly where he wanted you to be placed 
so make sure when you say you’re in it but not of it 
You’re not helping to make this earth a place sometimes called Hell 
Change your words into truths and then change that truth into love  

This is my last sermon for some time. Next week I’ll be here with bells on, but the Bishop will be our preacher. So, as is my wont, I’m leaving you with a few questions: Where do you see God making a home among mortals? How will you live out the power of Christ within you?

The Book of Revelation meets Stevie Wonder, Part I

And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.

In my first or second year of seminary—I can’t remember which, and the whole period is fading into the past much faster than I’d like—but somewhere back then in the very early 2000s there was tragic death on campus; a young man who had everything going for him died suddenly of an aortic embolism. I don’t know about you, but I live in terror of that exact kind of thing happening to me or someone I love.

My seminary was in New York City in the time right after 9/11 where every bad thing that happened in our pressure-cooker, fishbowl community reminded everyone of every other bad thing that had ever happened. The faculty member scheduled to preach the next community Eucharist after his death was one of the scripture professors. She titled it “Mulholland Drive and The Book of Revelation.”

Anyone remember that movie? It’s a David Lynch film made in 2001, American “neo-noir” about an aspiring young actress who meets a young woman with amnesia and tries to help her figure out her story. There are many surreal and bizarre subplots that all come together in the end, kind of, but not in any way I could ever figure out. When I came home from seeing that movie, I lay awake for hours trying to make sense of it all.

The professor who preached on “Mulholland Drive” in connection with the Book of Revelation was making two points: one, one oughtn’t try too hard with the Book of Revelation to turn it into linear sense. And two, human experience is full of horrible inexplicable things that sometimes we simply cannot piece together.  We certainly know this latter truth from the experiences of the past week and the unfolding story of the two young men who engineered such a violent and tragic attack. People who live in parts of the world where this kind of violence is a daily occurrence live constantly with the struggle to make sense out of surreal experiences with subplots they will never understand. And for them, the incomprehensible experiences just keep on coming.

This would have been the life experience of the people for whom the Book of Revelation was originally written, who were the first martyrs, victims of the earliest persecution of Christians.

My New Testament professor was not the first person to link the Book of Revelation with a movie. A generation ago (at least), a preeminent scripture scholar with the unfortunate name of Eugene Boring wrote about Revelation in terms of the 1967 American classic, “The Graduate.” How many of you remember that one?

Boring writes about how the Book of Revelation talks of the end-times but contains no closure, and he makes a connection to the end of the Graduate. The Dustin Hoffman character stands behind a stained glass window during a church wedding shouting “Elaine!” The Graduate leaves us with an image rather than a conclusion. And Revelation is nothing if not a collection of images, without a conclusion in sight. Ending without closure.

We tend to dismiss the Book of Revelation as hopelessly incomprehensible. Some people have speculated in all seriousness that the author must have been writing under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs.

Because Revelation contains some of the most creative and powerful images in all of scripture, I’d like to try to rescue it from its exile.

Revelation is the literature of God’s people in their experience of powerlessness. It is written to a particular people in a particular time: early Christians learning, first hand, not just from Jesus’ earlier preaching, that to be a Christian is to be a martyr. Revelation reminds us that God does not prevent suffering, even for faithful Christians. Like many good sources of comfort, the book provides images and poetry, rather than parables or history. It is not a code for us to crack to predict our own future, but a lens through which to see the transformation of the world that has not yet come and is always becoming, where the powerless are granted full life with God.

In and among all the psychedelic aspects of Revelation are words of comfort. If the passage we heard this morning sounds familiar, it is because it is often read at funerals.

So why do we read Revelation during Easter season? I have a couple of theories. One is that it’s an important complement to the book of Acts. In Acts, we read about the earthy day-to-day on-the-ground life of the apostles on the other side of the cross, figuring out what it means to be disciples, what it means to be the church. Revelation reminds them that what it means to be the church is to suffer. We do well to remember that, especially when we find ourselves complaining about aspects of first-world, twenty-first century parish life. Revelation reminds us that for us, triumph is to be found in the symbol of the utmost powerlessness, the Lamb.

I think another reason we read Revelation during the Great Fifty Days of Easter is to remind us that Easter begins with death. My guess is that most of us are more comfortable with the world of Acts than with the world of Revelation. Revelation reminds us—quite frankly—that death is a part of discipleship. No wonder no one wants to read the thing! Revelation also reminds us, over and over again, that God and the Lamb have the final victory, not death.

Anyone who reads the history of the early church knows they just don’t make martyrs like they used to. In the first centuries after the resurrection, to witness to one’s faith meant to be willing to die. This witness became, in fact, a form of evangelism (also a word for witness). The second-century author Tertullian famously said “the blood of martyrs is seed,” meaning that with every Christian cut down, many-fold more will grow up. In the nineteenth century, as they were marched to their death, the Martyrs of Uganda sang and prayed for forgiveness of their enemies. The crowds who watched this converted to Christianity on the spot, and the government could no longer keep them silent. Martin Luther King, Junior, a student of the Book of Revelation, said:

We will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will match physical force with soul force. We will wear you down by our capacity to suffer.

There are times and places where suffering and death is a powerful Christian witness. However, the word martyr simply means witness. The Book of Revelation is a call to, and a tribute to, patient, faithful witness. How do we serve as witnesses to our faith? How do we keep the Church faithful to that witness? How do we engage the very real powerlessness that is what it means to be a follower of Jesus?

Playing with Clay

For our last session together, the Following the Way group spent time playing with clay. Artist-in-Residence Leroy Goertz talked a bit about creativity and his own experiences with clay, while the rest of us pounded, rolled, pinched, destroyed, rebuilt, fiddled, explored, talked, and listened. This experience, which I’ve been lucky enough to have a few times since LeRoy set up shop in the lower level art studio, never ceases to amaze me. I begin by getting in touch with all of my own inadequacies as an artist, mixed in with painful memories of childhood ceramics classes, where certain things came naturally to a handful of kids, and the rest of us made ashtrays (thank God our parents all smoked back then). Then gradually all of that subsides, and I let myself enjoy the tactile experience, and let it go at that. Tonight, because there were a bunch of us, the best part of the evening–for me, anyway–was seeing everyone else’s creations. Take a look.

It started as a cave. And then it became a seashell.

And if you wish you were there, it’s not too late. This summer’s Faith & Story Project will be all about fellowship and creativity, and you’re invited. The best way to know about specific upcoming opportunities is to read our weekly enotes. If you’re not a subscriber, go to our webpage, scroll down to the bottom, and enter your email address.

Shelf fungus. Right?

St. Michael the Archangel. Indeed!

“Container-guy”

Lindsay made this dogwood, just in time for St. David’s dogwood to bloom sometime next week.

Megan and Anne came to Following the Way AND had a girls’ night out all at the same time!

A contemplative dude.

Nurturing turtle

Resurrection: A never-ending story

Blessed are those who believe.

And blessed are all of you who are here today. Statistics tell us that there were three times as many people here last Sunday as this Sunday. And why do we come back the week after Easter? Many of us are here because this is what we do on Sundays, any Sunday. Some of us are perhaps here because we look forward to church getting “back to normal” after all the hoopla for Holy Week and Easter.  And I hope that some of you came back—whether for the first time or the fiftieth time—because you want to know more about the life of faith as we live it out in this community. Because you want to know more about the Jesus whom we encounter so intimately during Holy Week, whose resurrection we celebrate so vigorously at Easter.

Did you see it? Did anybody actually see him get out of the tomb? Did you see the resurrected Jesus? Did anyone you know personally ever know anyone who actually saw Jesus walking the earth? How do we know?

After the wonderful liturgies of Holy Week and the glorious celebrations of Easter which we experienced in this place last Saturday, last Sunday and in the days leading up to it, it is striking to me that every year, no matter where we are in the 3-year lectionary cycle, the next time we all get together after Easter, we hear this story of Thomas and his refusal to believe without proof. As this story has been handed down to us through generations from the first Easter, Thomas has been given the name “Doubting Thomas.” Not Disbelieving Thomas, or De-bunking Thomas, but Doubting Thomas.

In the midst of any life of faith, doubt comes in all sorts of ways for all kinds of reasons. We’re tired, we’re hurt, we’re vulnerable. We’ve spent ourselves, whether in rejoicing, or in working on a relationship that may fail, or in working toward an important goal that always seems just out of reach, or in praying to be healed from an illness. Doubt comes in to protect us from further disappointment. Doubt comes in to say God cannot possibly be in charge of the messy, chaotic, complicated lives so many of us lead.

Thomas speaks for all of us at one time or another. I say this every year at this time: just as Jesus is the bearer of our sins, so I believe Thomas is the bearer of our doubts. Thomas was not the first disciple to doubt, and he will certainly not the last.

Thomas stands for the human need to touch and see in order to believe. When I look at Thomas, when I look at my own life, I come to the conclusion that doubt is not about unbelief, it is about the longing to believe. Think about how we use the word in daily life. Perhaps the sun will come out this morning. I doubt it. Perhaps so-and-so will smile at me today. I doubt it. Perhaps all of this will work out just right. I doubt it. Doubt is not about unbelief, it is about the longing to believe.

So what do we do with our doubts? We do what Thomas did. We go to where our friends our, to where Jesus might be, and we share our doubts. We go to church, the beach, Hopworks, Lucky Lab, People’s Co-op, Powell’s, little t, and we wrestle through our doubt. Maybe we do this with a friend, or maybe on our own. Maybe shaking our fist at the sky that may or may not hold the One we may or may not believe in. Any kind of wrestling with doubt is, in itself, an act of faith.

In his words, Thomas is completely focused on the need to believe, rather than the practice of faith. But in his deeds, he acts out his faith. He practices. Driven by hope, he seeks out the disciples, goes back to where they met the Risen Lord. Then he makes this audacious request to put his hands in the holes made by the nails and the spear, and Jesus grants it.

But it starts with Thomas acting through his doubts: going, asking, and believing.

In our collect today we prayed: grant that all who have been reborn into the fellowship of Christ’s Body may show forth in their lives what they profess by their faith. Many of us need to show forth our faith in our lives before we actually believe it. To put it another way, we need to act ourselves into right thinking, rather than think ourselves into right acting. That’s why our baptismal vows are all about action. When we renew these vows, as many of us did last Saturday night, we promise to break bread, to seek, serve, pray, persevere, strive, respect, repent, and return. Action words.

It is in our actions and our interactions that we encounter the Risen Lord. In seeking out the poor and poor in spirit, in breaking bread with neighbors and strangers, in coming to this table, that we might touch and taste Jesus, in praying for those with whom we struggle—even when we don’t want to or we don’t believe that God is listening—these actions bring us closer to Jesus and give us “proof” of resurrection.

And it is through us, as we minister our way through our doubts, that others experience the Risen Lord. As we act our way into right thinking, we touch the lives of those around us with our actions. The Benedictines have long held to a principle of hospitality, inspired by St. Benedict’s teaching that “all that come to the monastery be received as Christ.” What if we received all that came to our church as though each one of them were Thomas? Think about today’s gospel scene as a model for Christian ministry: Thomas, who missed the disciples’ first encounter with the Risen Christ, is given a second chance. He is greeted with love and grace, with an invitation and the assurance that Christ is truly alive. He is offered the Peace of Christ, and he is blessed.

I’m going to close with a portion of the General Thanksgiving in the morning prayer service:

And, we pray, give us such an awareness of your mercies,
that with truly thankful hearts we may show forth your praise,
not only with our lips, but in our lives,
by giving up our selves to your service,
and by walking before you
in holiness and righteousness all our days;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit,
be honor and glory throughout all ages. Amen.

The Empty Tomb

But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.

Then Peter said “wow! Those women were telling the truth after all. Maybe I should have listened to them in the first place!”

Peter had to see for himself.

Many of you probably remember, at least by title, the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1990s: Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. The scene in this morning’s gospel could be taken right from that book, or others like it published around the same time. Look at the contrasts between women and men in the gospel story:

The women, when they encounter the guys in dazzling clothes, which I always call superhero outfits, are terrified. They don’t know what to make of the empty tomb, and they bow their heads. They know they are in the presence of the holy, and they intuitively act with humility and reverence. The guys in superhero outfits, on the other hand, think it’s obvious. Don’t you remember? They say. While he was still in Galilee, he predicted that he would be crucified and rise again. The women take their time letting this sink in. Ohhhh, now I remember, they each think to themselves. Could it be? They begin to believe, and they run to tell the other apostles. But to the apostles, their words seemed an idle tale, and no one believed them. Peter, the concrete guy, had to go see for himself. He went, and got religion from a pile of bloody linen rags.

We need everyone’s voice to tell the story we just heard: the guys in dazzling clothes, the women at the tomb who are afraid then exuberant, the apostles who first doubt and then believe. This day is about how to incorporate all the voices—men, women, those that proclaim, those that doubt, those that wonder. It’s about the voices of Baptists, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Episcopalians, Buddhists, atheists. It’s about incorporating all of these experiences of faith into how we are in the world.

How would you tell the Easter story? What would you take on faith, and what would you need to see, in order to believe? What would be the turning point to make you believe?

It is easy to spend a lot of time thinking about whether or not we believe in the resurrection. We all know people—some of us might even be those people—who say: “I believe in the Jesus, but not the resurrection.” There’s not a lot of hard evidence, after all. All we have for evidence is an empty tomb. An empty thing is an odd symbol of faith.

Although I did discover recently that there are some companies that make empty tomb jewelry, coffee mugs, and t-shirts, and I even found a fascinating recipe for empty tomb cookies.

An empty thing is an odd symbol of faith. Absence is a strange symbol of faith. And so we use the cross instead. The cross is something we can see, something we can put our hands on. It is a tangible symbol for sacrifice and suffering. If we leave it bare and lay it on the floor here, it makes us sad. If our children cover it with flowers on Easter morning, it makes us happy. If we turn it sideways, it becomes the bridge we walk across to get to new life, God’s triumph over death. All of this is not proof, but faith. Which brings me back to the empty tomb. It is the empty tomb that makes the cross a symbol of resurrection rather than a symbol of torture and execution.

I don’t know about you, but I am here because of the mystery. I am here because I have no clue whatsoever about what happened between the time when they laid Jesus in the tomb and sealed it up and when the women discovered the two superheroes on Easter morning. I am here because I love that our faith teaches us that the very most important thing that happened in Jesus’ life—God’s defeat over death—is something that we actually can never know for sure. I am here because that never-knowing-for-sure has engendered some of the most beautiful art and music and writing on the planet. I am here because the empty tomb creates space for hope and uncertainty to coexist.

I am here because the empty tomb signifies the already/not yet nature of the kingdom of God. Like Christmas in Narnia, the kingdom of God is always coming, but not quite here. Unlike Narnia, we are not under a winter spell of an evil queen, but rather we are Easter people, always in the process of becoming citizens of a kingdom where the hungry are fed, captives are freed, the sick are healed, and the poor have good news preached to them. The empty tomb is the sign-post pointing to this kingdom. The empty tomb says that the wild reversals Jesus preached about really will happen, have in fact already happened, and have not yet happened.

Who are you in the Easter story? What will you do next? Whom will you tell?

Holy Saturday: This is the Night

You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own, forever.

This is the night. This is the night when new fire burns in our hearts.

This is the night, when you brought our mothers and fathers, the childrenof Israel, out of bondage in Egypt, and led them through the Red Sea on dry land.

This is the night when the stories of creation and deliverance rekindle our corporate memory as the beloved people of God.

This is the night, when all who believe in Christ are delivered from the gloom of sin, and are restored to grace and holiness of life.

This is the night, when Christ broke the bonds of death and hell, and rose victorious from the grave.

This is the night for deliverance, for the movement from darkness to light, from ancient story to the story of now.

This is the night when we proclaim resurrection and victory over death, ours, and Christ’s.

This is the night when we recall that our deliverance is through the waters of baptism. As St. Paul writes in the words we hear every year at this Easter service: We have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead, we too might walk in newness of life.

This is the night for baptism. The way we do baptism here is highly symbolic but I thought a full immersion tub, especially for three adults, might put the altar guild over the edge.

This is the night we proclaim resurrection by making, anew, our baptismal promises.

This is the night when we make new Christians, who drown in the waters of baptism and emerge with a new identity as little Christs. This is the night when Capers, Derek, and Megan are marked as Christ’s own, forever.

This is the night when their new clothes, their baptismal garments, are a sign to all of us of the new life we share as the body of Christ.

The white alb, which many of you are used to seeing on some of us on Sunday morning, has its origins as a baptismal garment. When those of us “up front” put on albs, it is not because we are special, but because we are ordinary. It is a symbol of the baptismal ministry that we all share. In the ancient Church, those who wore these white robes at the Easter Vigil were the newly baptized.

In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, when the baptismal robe is placed on a new Christian, the priest says something like “The servants of God are clothed with the robe of righteousness….” and the choir sings: “Vouchsafe unto me the robe of light, O Thou who clothest Thyself with light as with a garment, Christ our God, plenteous in mercy.” To be baptized is to be clothed in Christ.

This is the night when we are all clothed in Christ. This is the night, when we have renewed our own baptismal covenant, to reflect on our Christian wardrobe. Listen to these words from the Letter to the Ephesians:

Put on the whole armour of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil….Fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace…[T]ake the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

I have a friend who keeps this passage taped to her mirror, and every morning she recites it as she gets dressed. She puts on her belt, and prays that it will be the belt of truth. She puts on her jacket, and calls it the breastplate of righteousness. When she brushes her hair, she thinks about the helmet of salvation. Not a bad way to start the day.

This is the night when we suit up in the promise to join God’s army and fight for justice, dignity and peace for those who need it most. This is the night when we remember that we are prayer warriors, linked through time and around the world to strangers, enemies, neighbors we haven’t met, joined together through prayer. This is the night when we remember that it is our feet—not necessarily our words, as Episcopalians are forever shy of using words to proclaim the gospel—it is our feet, our actions, that proclaim the Good News of Christ.

This is the night when we remember not only our Christian wardrobe, but our Jesus tattoo. Each of us who has been baptized, whether or not we remember it, has been marked as Christ’s own forever. You can’t see it, but it’s there. Trace it on your forehead with your thumb. The Jesus tattoo is a cross made with fragrant oil we use only at baptism. If you’re sitting close to Megan or Derek or Capers, you might be able to smell it. Oil of anointing, because in it we are anointed as followers of Christ, marked as Christ’s own forever.

This is the night when we promise, among other things, that when we fall into sin, we will repent and return to the Lord. Not “if” we fall into sin, but “when.” This is the night when we remember that God is always there, that when we mess up and turn around, there is God. Kind of like a mother waiting patiently at the end of our street, when we’ve run away from home. We decide it’s time to return after all, and there she is. This is very good news for Megan, Derek, Capers and the rest of us. This is the good news of Easter.

A friend used to say: “What part of ‘marked as Christ’s own forever’ don’t you understand?” This is the night when we understand.

Derek, Megan, and Capers, you are marked as Christ’s own, forever. What this means to each of you is as different as each of you is from each other. To all of us it means we belong, not just to this crazy church, but to each other, and to God. God loves us, God has our number, God has our back, and we are marked as Christ’s own forever.

This is the night when there is much good news, indeed. Alleluia, Christ is Risen.