7 Easter B: The Sunday after the Ascension

In the unfolding of the church year this Sunday represents the time between the Ascension and Pentecost when the disciples did not know how Christ would be made known in the world. In Jesus' prayer during the last supper in John's Gospel he that his disciples would be one as he and the Father are one. This suggests that the love of Christ is shown through the love among God's people.

7 Easter

Transcribed from a sermon given on 

May 20, 2012

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church Arroyo Grande

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

Every year the Church go through the whole history of Christianity. We recently celebrated Easter and the resurrection followed by the time when Christ was with his disciples and appearing to them after his resurrection. Last Thursday was Ascension Day, which in spite of the fact that it is not celebrated very often is actually one of the main liturgical holidays of the Christian calendar. It could be considered number four after Easter, Pentecost and Christmas.  

We are right now, today, in an interesting spot of the church year. Jesus’ physical presence as the resurrected Christ is not longer with the disciples, he has been taken up into heaven, and yet the Holy Spirit on Pentecost has not yet come upon the disciples. Now represents that odd time of waiting, watching and wondering what’s next. How do we see him? He was alive, he died, then he was resurrected and now he’s gone. How is Christ known in the world now? 

The gospel reading today is a continuation of the prayer of Jesus during the last supper when he is prayed for his disciples. Remember that when he is praying for his disciples it is not just those that are physically present that his is praying for, it is for all of us who throughout time will be his disciples. That prayer is for us.

Once Jesus was no longer physically present, Christ’s presence, God’s presence, is made known in the world through us, through the disciples, through the people of God. 

What Jesus prays is about relationship. He prays that the disciples may be one as he and the Father are one. This means that he prays that we would be one as Jesus and God are one. It is interesting, this emphasis on relationship. It is part of why that wonderful confusing mystery called the Trinity is so important. It is all about relationship. God’s very essence is a relationship among a unity that also has some separateness to it. A unity of three persons. There is only one God but it is in three persons, which is totally confusing, but it speaks to the understanding that God IS relationship. God is often referred to as love and love is about relationship.

In this Gospel reading, Jesus is praying that that relationship manifested between Jesus and the Father would be alive in the community of his followers. That sense of a unity, of oneness, and yet separateness. We are all separate human beings and yet we form one body. We are Christ in the world - in unity. It is a little like a dance of relationship, a dance of love and caring for one another. It is how we manifest Christ in the world. 

Christ is seen by how we relate to each other, which is sometimes good news and sometimes is not such good news. Think about when people come to the church for the first time, when they finally get the courage to open up those doors and walk in. Sometimes they are coming because they hear that we have great music, sometimes they may be coming because they hope that they will get an inspiring sermon. Usually they are not quite sure why they are coming. But the way in which Christ’s love is made known to them is by the community of who we are and how we live as Christ’s disciples. It is our love for one another, it is our relationships with one another and our openness to inviting others into that relationship, that is the way we manifest God in the world. 

We are Christ’s eyes and ears and hands and feet. We are the body of Christ. Some research has shown that after a person comes to a church for the first time, if they don’t within two months have a first name relationship with at least eight people they probably won’t come back. It’s about relationship. We have a couple of months to establish a relationship. That is how God is known. That is how God’s love is expressed.

When we were getting the Sunday School going we agreed that the main priority for Sunday School is that each and every one of those children feel safe and loved and cared about. If they happen to learn some scripture, great, but what’s really important is that they feel cared about and loved because we preach with our relationships. Remember, Christ prayed for us that we would be in unity as he and the Father are a unity. 

He also prayed about the idea that we were in world, but we are not really of the world. As I have been thinking about this sermon I went to a conference at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. At the cathedral they have a labyrinth, which is a circle on the floor that has a path that winds back and forth and back and forth and eventually gets to the middle. The idea is that you walk that path until you get to the middle, you stop and pray there, and then you walk back out. It is a powerful walking meditation that I like. 

I hadn’t been to Grace Cathedral in a long time, so after the conference I decided to go and walk the labyrinth. One of the things about the labyrinth is that it winds. You’re on the outside for a while and then you go toward the middle and then you are back out on the outside again and then you finally find yourself in the middle. So while you are walking it can be a little disorienting. You just have to focus on the path in front of you. 

There were a few other people who were also walking the labyrinth and they were going at different speeds. Some were coming out and some where going in. Sometimes we were far apart and sometimes we were close together. It is kind of how the church community works. We are all walking the path, we are all walking on that faith journey. Sometimes we come real close together and sometimes we look like we are further apart. Sometimes somebody is coming out while you are going in and you almost bump into each other if you are not careful. You’ve got to make room for each other. There is a sense of almost being in a dance. If you are watching some people walking the labyrinth they seem almost like they are dancing when they come close together and then they go far apart. 

That for me is a wonderful description of what the community of faith is like. We are each walking the path to Christ. It is our own path yet we are in relationship as we do that. 

On a beautiful Saturday in San Francisco there are tourists, lots of tourists. Grace Cathedral is one of the places that tourists come. When you come into the cathedral there is the baptismal font and then the labyrinth is right there. You have to walk across the labyrinth to go down the main aisle of the cathedral. When tourists are looking at the stained glass windows, or are looking at the architecture, or are taking pictures, or chatting with each they may walk right across the labyrinth without knowing it. 

Those of us walking the labyrinth probably look really strange to the tourists. We are walking and then turning and then walking and turning. They probably can’t figure out what we are doing because they don’t even notice the labyrinth on the floor. 

It is a very interesting experience to be focused on following this path and then all of a sudden encounter a family that is walking across in front of you or somebody standing and taking a picture. There was a sense that those of us walking the labyrinth were walking our spiritual path, and the world was going on around us. We weren’t separate from the world, we were perfectly aware of the tourists and the cathedral and everything that was going on, but our focus was on following that spiritual path, while these others didn’t even see the path that we were on and probably couldn’t understand why we were walking the way we were. 

I think that is a great description of what our life in the world is like. If we are following whatever path Christ is calling us to walk, and if each step along the way we are trying to follow where Christ is calling us, we may look a little odd at times to the world. Our responsibility is to keep focusing on our own path. We are still in the world and the world is still going on around us. 

Another thing about the labyrinth is that as you walk in you walk toward the center which represents reaching Christ. When you arrive you just stand and experience and let in that presence of Christ, but you don’t get to stay there. There is no bed there to stay in. You can’t set up your tent. You have to walk back out and go back out into the world. That is the part of the spiritual journey where we come together as a community, we support one another and we nourish one another but we don’t do it for our own sake. We don’t nourish each other as a community just because it feels good, we do it to empower us to go out into the world and to share God’s love in the world. To minister to others and to share that love beyond ourselves. 

We are the body of Christ. We are in Christ’s prayer that we might be in unity as God and the Father are one and that we might be in the world, and yet not totally of the world.

Amen

Seventh Sunday of Easter Year C

John's beautiful, poetic and mystical gospel can be difficult to preach about. In this sermon I use the image of a stew in an attempt to illustrate what those illusive words, "...that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us..."

The Sunday after AscensionThe Seventh Sunday of Easter Year C

Transcribed from a sermon given

On May 16, 2010

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

John 17:20-26

I love John's gospel.  There's something about reading John's gospel that I can't just read it straight through.  I'll read it for awhile and then I'll reach something that just moves me and I have to stop and be with it.  It's not like reading a textbook.  It's something else.  It's like poetry.  It's transformative.  I love to read John's gospel. 

Preaching on John's gospel however is a whole other thing because John was a mystic.  In every spiritual tradition there is a mystic tradition.  In the Jewish tradition it's Kabbalah.  In the Islamic tradition it's the Sufis. And there have been Christian mystics since the beginning. Some of them you might know like St. John of the cross or Teresa of Avila.  A mystic is someone who has had an experience of God, a sense of union with God, and then tries to share that experience with others. 

What the mystics always end up doing is writing poetry because you can't describe an experience of God in normal language.  It would be like going to a concert where they perform Beethoven's 9^th Symphony and you are so moved by that final movement that when you come back and you go to tell your neighbor about it.  Now your neighbor has not only never been to a symphony or heard Beethoven's 9^th but they don't even know what classical music is. You are trying to describe to them that experience when the chorus comes in and just blasts everything away. It's just totally transformative. And they are going to go, "Huh?"   

So all you can do is sort of paint pictures, talk in poetic terms. You know what you want to do. You want to go get your stereo or CD player or MP3 player or however it is you listen to music – and give it to them.  Say, "Listen to this.  Experience this."  That's what John is trying to do I believe in his gospel. 

One of the commentators I read talks about John's gospel as not so much attempting to convey information as to elicit an experience.  As poetry elicits an experience from us or a great painting elicits an experience from us.  So you run into things like we have today where it states, "That they may be one as you and I are one, that I may be in them, and you in me and I in you and them in us."  And as you read it, if you try to follow it logically what you end up is one plus one plus one equals one, and then the mind kind of goes, “oh”.  But if you read it as poetry, if you read it as trying to elicit that experience of unity that sense of oneness with God, it can be transformative. 

This particular passage is Jesus praying during the last supper.  It's called the High Priestly Prayer and this is a part of it. He is praying. He is praying for His disciples.  And He is praying for everyone who would believe in Him based on that Word.  That means you and you and you and me.  Here He is, the last night, getting ready to go to His death and He is praying.  Now that last prayer, the last words, the last things we say are sometimes the most important. 

And what does He pray for?  What is it that Jesus wants from God more than anything else?  He wants for His followers to be one.  He wants them to be one as He and the Father are one.  That's what He wants for us. It's like a father about to die. He's in the hospital and his children are all gathered around him and his last request is that they get along with each other.  Treat each other well.  Don't fight.  That's what the heart of a father, or a mother, wants for their children and that was Jesus' final prayer. 

This piece of poetry about union reflects back, reminds us of, the prolog of John's gospel.  Remember John's gospel begins with that enigmatic, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God?”  How can something be with something and also be it?  That what is written at the beginning of John's gospel.  It's a little like a Zen koan.  It's poetry; it’s mystery - that relationship between Christ and the Father where there is oneness and yet separateness.  John is trying to elicit in us as we read this that sense, that intimacy with God. 

So, I'm trying to think about how do I preach on that?  How do I put that into some other words?  Something that might be a little more concrete, a little more grounded, and so I came up with the image of a stew.  Now, if you take vegetables, you have a carrot and you have onions and you have potatoes and you have broccoli and you have whatever else happens to be in your refrigerator or out in the garden at that time. If you put them all in a pot and they sit in the pot not much happens.  They are just being stored in a pot because when a carrot stored next to a broccoli, they don't really interact with each other.  They don't change each other.  They don't learn from each other.  They're just there together. In order for them to come into relationship with each other you have to add the water.  You might think of the water as Christ, and each one of those pieces of vegetable has a relationship with the water.  But of course not a whole lot happens until you turn on the heat and that's the Holy Spirit, right?  And the water starts to heat up and as the water starts to heat up that carrot begins to soften a little bit and some of the flavor of the carrot gets out into the water and spreads and starts to be picked up by the other vegetables.  The onion is also softening up and some of its flavor gets out into the water and gets absorbed by the carrot. Gradually with the water and that heat over time all of the vegetables change and change each other.  If you cook a bunch of carrots together they taste one way, but if you have carrots in with a lot of other vegetables, they pick up the flavor of each other.  And in a good stew that has taken its time, when you have a bite of that carrot you know it's a carrot but it has the flavor of everything else that's in the stew because they've come together.  And so there's a way in which they're all one.  They all form one stew but they each have their own identity, their own essence.  And each one tastes better because of their interaction, because of that chemistry that happens together. 

It's like that for us, for a community. Jesus never talks about Christians as being individuals.  It has been said that you cannot be a Christian in isolation.  The relationship between the individual and Christ is important, but you can't really be a Christian without being in community because you need that stew around you.  A carrot in the water by itself is okay, but it's so much better when it's in the stew. 

So when we come together, as we sit in Christ together, we are enriched by one another.  And you know sometimes hot water feels really good when it's been a long day and you're a little achy and you've got a hot tub and you sit in it and oh, the hot water just feels wonderful.  Other times we can say, "Oh, my gosh – hot water.  I don't want to have anything to do with it."  It's a little uncomfortable because the hot water kind of softens the things, and it can be uncomfortable, and we change.  When we come together as community we are changed individually.  When we really become a community we open ourselves to be changed by the people around us.  And the people around us are changed by the gifts we bring.  And each one of us brings unique gifts. 

One of the great joys that I have is getting to know people.  When new people come to the church and are becoming involved in the church I try to go and visit them.  It is such a delight to discover the backgrounds of people, what their passions are and the work they've done and the unique things that they bring to this community.  Each one has a different flavor, a different taste, different experiences, and each person enriches the whole.  That's how we become one by sitting in the hot water together, by being together, by being there for each other, by showing up and getting to know each other better. 

And this was Jesus' prayer.  Notice His last prayer, His prayer to God when His death was about to arrive was that you and I and each one of us and all Christians everywhere in the world would be one.  He didn't pray that we'd get the theology right.  He didn't pray that we would figure out how we were supposed to live and what the rules are.  He didn't pray for that.  He could have.  He didn't.  He didn't pray that we'd all be nice or we'd all be good.  He didn't pray that the world would all become a Christian nation. 

His prayer was that we would be one as He and the Father are one.  That would be His glory.  His glory is the oneness of His community and his followers.  And that's what we're called to focus on. 

How do we build up the relationship?  How do we enrich ourselves by the people who are here?  We do it by showing up.  We do it by coming to activities.  We do it by picking up the phone and calling somebody you haven't seen for awhile and say, "Hey, I haven't seen you for awhile.  How are you?"  Or going up to a new person or somebody who may not be new but you just don't know very well and saying, "Hey, let's have coffee together.  I want to get to know you better."  Or finding out that someone is hurting and reaching out to help them.  Or celebrating something and sharing that celebration with others. 

It's about relationship.  It's all about relationship, the relationship between God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.  The essence of the universe is relationship and Christ wants for us to be in relationship with one another.  He wants for us to love one another as He has loved us.  Amen. 

7 Easter

Transcribed from a sermon given on

May 20, 2012

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church Arroyo Grande

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

As I have spoken about before, every year we go through the whole history of Christianity. Now we have had Easter and the resurrection and celebrated the time when Christ was with his disciples and appearing to them after his resurrection. Last Thursday was Ascension Day, which in spite of the fact that it is not celebrated very often is actually one of the main liturgical holidays of the Christian calendar. It is sort of number four after Easter, Pentecost and Christmas.

Last Thursday we celebrated Ascension with a service up at Paso Robles with the bishop for the whole area. It was great. Our whole choir was there and Janis played the organ. I was talking to some of the other clergy beforehand and most said that they had never been to an Ascension service before. Since Ascension falls on Thursday, unless you are at a very large church, it doesn’t get celebrated.

We are right now, today, in an interesting spot of the church year. Jesus’ physical presence as the resurrected Christ is not longer with the disciples, he has been taken up into heaven, and yet the Holy Spirit on Pentecost has not yet come upon the disciples. So now represents that odd time of waiting waiting, wondering what’s next and how Christ is to be known into the world now. How do we see him? He was alive and then he was resurrected and now he’s gone. How is Christ known in the world?

The gospel reading today is a continuation of the prayer of Jesus during the last supper where he is praying for his disciples. Now when he is praying for his disciples it is not just those that are physically present then that his is praying for, it is for all of us who throughout time will be his disciples. That prayer is for us.

Because you see once Jesus was no longer physically present God’s presence, Christ’s presence, is made known in the world through us, through the disciples, through the people of God.

What Jesus prays is about relationship. He prays that the disciples may be one as he and the Father are one. Which also means that we would be one as Jesus and God are one. It is interesting this emphasis on relationship. And is part of why that wonderful confusing mystery called the Trinity is so important. It is all about relationship. That God’s very essence is a relationship among a unity that also has some separateness to it. A unity of three persons. There is only one God but it is in three persons, which is totally confusing, but it speaks to the understanding that God IS relationship because God is often referred to as love and love is about relationship.

So Jesus is praying that that relationship manifested between Jesus and the Father would be alive in the community of his followers. That sense of a unity, of oneness, and yet separateness. That we are all separate human beings and yet we form one body. We are Christ in the world - in unity. It is a little like a dance of relationship, a dance of love and caring for one another. It is how we manifest Christ in the world.

Christ is seen by how we relate to each other, which is sometimes good news and sometimes is not such good news. Think about when people come to the church for the first time and they finally get the courage to open up those doors and walk in. Sometimes they are coming because they hear that we have great music, sometimes they may be coming because they hope that they will get an inspiring sermon. Usually they are not quite sure why they are coming. But the way in which Christ’s love is made known to them is by the community of who we are and how we live as Christ’s disciples. It is our love for one another, it is our relationships with one another and our openness to inviting others into that relationship that is the way we manifest God in the world.

We are Christ’s eyes and ears and hands and feet. We are the body of Christ. Some research has shown that people who come to a church for the first time if they don’t within two months have at least a first name kind of relationship with eight people probably won’t come back. It’s about relationship. We have a couple of months to establish a relationship. That is how God is known. That is how God’s love is expressed.

I remember when Marilyn was getting the Sunday School going and I said the main priority for Sunday School is that each and every one of those children feel safe and loved and cared about. If they happen to learn some scripture, great, but what’s really important is that they feel cared about and loved because we preach with our relationships. Remember, Christ prayed for us that we would be in unity as he and the Father are a unity.

He also prayed about the idea that we were in world, but we are not really of the world. As I have been thinking about this sermon and how to relate to that I went to a conference at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. At the cathedral they have a labyrinth, which is a circle on the floor that has a path that winds back and forth and back and forth and eventually gets to the middle. The idea is that you walk that path until you get to the middle, you stop and pray there and then you walk back out. It is a walking meditation and it is a very powerful one that I like.

I hadn’t been to Grace Cathedral in a long time and so after the conference I decided to go up and walk the labyrinth. One of the things about the labyrinth is that it winds. It’s on the outside for a while and then you kind of go toward the middle and then you are back out on the outside again and then you finally find yourself in the middle. So while you are walking it can be a little disorienting. You just have to focus on the path in front of you.

There were a few other people who were also walking the labyrinth and they were going at different speeds. Some were coming out and some where going in. Sometimes we were far apart and sometimes we were close together. It is kind of how the church community works. We are all walking the path, we are all walking on that faith journey, but sometimes we come real close together, and sometimes we look like we are further apart. Sometimes somebody is coming out while you are going in and you almost bump into each other if you are not careful. You’ve got to make room for each other. And there is a sense of almost being in a dance. If you are watching some people walking the labyrinth they seem almost like they are dancing when they come close together and then they go far apart.

That for me is a wonderful description of what the community of faith is like. We are each is walking the path to Christ. It is our own path yet we are in relationship as we do that.

On a beautiful Saturday in San Francisco there are tourists, lots of tourists. And Grace Cathedral is one of the places that tourists come. When you come into Grace cathedral there is the baptismal font and then the labyrinth is right there. You have to walk across the labyrinth to go down the main aisle of the cathedral. So tourists, when they are coming in and they are looking at the stained glass windows, and they are looking at the architecture, and they are taking pictures, and they are chatting with each other many of them walk right across the labyrinth.

Those of us walking the labyrinth probably look really strange to the tourists. We are walking and then turning and then walking and turning. They probably can’t figure out what we are doing because they don’t even notice the labyrinth on the floor.

And it is a very interesting experience to be focused on following this path and then all of a sudden encounter a this family that is walking across in front of you or somebody standing and taking a picture. So there was this sense that those of us walking the labyrinth were walking our spiritual path, and the world was going on around us. We weren’t separate from the world, we were perfectly aware of the tourists and the cathedral and everything that was going on, but our focus was on following that spiritual path, while these others didn’t even see the path that we were on and probably couldn’t understand why we were walking the way we were.

To me I think that is a great description of what our life in the world is like. If we are following whatever path that Christ is calling us to walk, and if each step along the way we are trying to follow where Christ is calling us, we may look a little odd at times to the world. Our responsibility is to keep focusing on our own path. But we are still in the world and the world is still going on around us. It is a wonderful description of what it means to be the body of Christ following this spiritual path.

Another thing about the labyrinth is that as you walk in you walk toward the center which represents reaching Christ. When you arrive you just stand and experience and let in that presence of Christ, but you don’t get to stay there. There is no bed there to stay in. You can’t set up your tent. You have to walk back out and go back out into the world. That is the spiritual journey where we come together as a community and we support one another and we nourish one another but we don’t do it for our own sake. We don’t nourish each other as a community just because it feels good, we do it to empower us to go out into the world and to share God’s love in the world and to minister to others and to share that love beyond ourselves.

So we are the body of Christ. We are in Christ’s prayer that we might be in unity as God and the Father are one and that we might be in the world, and yet not totally of the world.

Amen

Sermon 7 Easter - year A

Here's a sermon I gave in 2011 where I invited people to get to know one another better. It explores what Jesus was asking of us in his prayer on the last night of his life.

7 Easter - Year A

Transcribed from a sermon

Given at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

June 5, 2011

By Rev. Valerie Hart

I’d like you to imagine that the patriarch of a family is dying. He’s in the hospital and he knows his death is near. So he gathers the whole family together - the sons and daughters, their spouses, and the grandchildren. Once they are all gathered together he looks at them and he says; “I have loved you and cared for you and had concern for you, but I am soon going to be gone and my prayer to God at this moment is that you will stay together as a family; that you will love and support one another.” You can imagine that happening and that is basically what we have here today in the Gospel.

It is the night before Jesus is arrested. He is talking with his disciples. He’s giving them the last of his teachings. He is trying to prepare them for what is ahead, and he prays for them. He prays for all of those who have been given to him. Which means us too. We too are his disciples. We too are those whom God has given to Christ. He prays, and his final prayer, his last request, is that they may be one as you and I are one. Christ’s last passionate prayer is that his people will be together and united in the way that he is united with the Father. That we, as he has given his command earlier, would love one another as he has loved us. That’s his final request. And any of you that know anything about church history know that the Christian church has not been real good at doing that. But that doesn’t mean we don’t keep trying.

Today is the 7^th Sunday of Easter; it used to be called the Sunday after Ascension. On Thursday we celebrated the Ascension, which happens forty days after Easter. Jesus spent 40 days in his resurrected body interacting with the disciples, then he took the disciples up on the hillside and, as he stood there, he said to them, “you will now be my witnesses.” He said that I am leaving but you will be my witnesses. Then a cloud came and he disappeared from sight. Now throughout scripture whenever a cloud appears it represents the presence of God. It was as if a door opened between earth and heaven and Christ walked through it. Then he was gone.

In the reading today from the Book of Acts it describes this. What stood out for me was that once this happens the disciples are all looking at Jesus, where he was, and now he is gone. Then these two men dressed in white, who obviously must be angels, because they are messengers from God, appear and ask why are you looking there, where he left? Why are you staring at empty space? And so they stopped and they looked at each other. The next thing we read is that the community is gathered together in the upper room for prayers, for food, and for sharing. The whole family is there, the disciples, some of the women, including mother Mary, Jesus’ brothers and others. The whole family gathered together. It is the family loving one another.

One of the things that is interesting, if you think about architecture, is that it has a strong affect on what we can do in a church, or in a house. Think about an airplane. Now the goal in an airplane is to get lots of people in there close together and not have them cause too much of a fuss. Right? You don’t want them really interacting with each other, you don’t want them getting up and moving around, so you have all the seats lined up facing forward so the only thing you can see is the back of people’s heads and maybe the person sitting next to you. Bt you don’t look too much at the person sitting next to you because that’s not really socially acceptable. You look straight ahead or at your book. On the other hand, if you have people over for dinner you’re going to sit around a table, or gather around in the living room where you can see one another, and you can talk to one another, and you can interact with one another.

Think about how we set up a church. We have all these pews, and you are all sitting here looking up at the cross. Except for the choir, the choir gets to look at the people. But we have the cross up there, and we are all looking at the cross, and that is a fine thing to do to. But the angels said to the disciples, don’t look at where Jesus was, and they looked at one another. So I would like to invite you to be very counter cultural and turn around and look at one another. Really. If you are sitting up at the front you may have to stand up. Look behind you. Stand up and look behind. Look at these wonderful people. Look at this variety of human beings. Every Sunday I get to look at all you folks and see the smiling faces and the sleepy faces and the young ones and the old ones, the familiar and the unfamiliar as you look around at the people. Maybe there are some people here that you have never seen before. Who are they? I wonder if they are new? Or maybe there is someone you see and you think; “I recognize that face. I wonder how long they’ve been coming to church.”

You might see other people that you know their name because of the nametag they wear, but that is all you know about them. And there may be others here that you really are close to and you have come to really value and share deeply with. This is our family. This is the family that Jesus prayed that we would be one as Jesus and the Father are one. This is it. Now to be one with one another as Jesus and the Father are one with one another, we kind of need to get to know each other. When you love someone you want what is best for them. You do what you can to help them. But how can we help someone if we don’t know what their situation is, if we don’t know who they are. If we love someone we value them for who they are. We listen, we appreciate, we celebrate with them, we grieve with them, support them. In order to do that we have to know one another - a little bit more than just “hello,” a little bit more then shaking hands on Sunday morning.

So I would like to invite you to be brave and to trust the Holy Spirit. You will find on most of the pews a basket that has some little pieces of paper. There should be a writing implement in it. Here’s what I’m going to invite you to do. I will tell you the whole thing so I’m not going to ask you to do anything without knowing everything. What we are going to do is to write your name and a way to contact you on a piece of paper. It might be a phone number, or if you prefer to be contacted by email you can put your email address. Then what we are going to do is to collect all these, mix them all up, and then everyone who has put one in takes one out. And we are going to trust the Holy Spirit. We are going to trust the Holy Spirit that whatever name it is that you pick out is someone you need to get to know. I’m going to put my name in here too.

So what you will do is you will pull out a name and you will contact the person you get and you’ll say let’s get together. Maybe you’ll go get a cup of coffee together. Maybe you’ll take a walk together. If it’s someone who has physical limitations you may need to go to their house. Whatever. You can go to the beach together. Whatever it is, it is a chance to listen and get to know someone at a little bit deeper level.

I trust the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit works very efficiently. Trust that the person’s name you get has something you need. Maybe a story from their life, maybe some encouragement, maybe a new idea. And trust that you have something for that person. Maybe they need a ride, or a listening ear, or a good friend. Who knows what the Holy Spirit will do with it. I had one person at the eight o’clock service who told me; “I got just the person that I know I need to talk to.” I didn’t ask any further questions about why the need to talk. I don’t know, but I’m going to be real curious to find out what happens. I’m going to be real curious to hear from people who want to share their story of who they talked to.

Now there is a small chance, a small probability that you will get yourself. And if you get yourself that means the Holy Spirit is saying you better hang out with yourself a little bit. Take some time. Listen to yourself. Love yourself. Or you may get your spouse. And once again, you better spend some time with your spouse. It might be a message that you need to do that.  You may get someone that you know well. You may get someone you have never met. But it is an opportunity to practice loving one another. And so invite you to put in your little slips.

(Time collecting the slips)

I’ll mix them all together. And we’ll pass them around. Take one and pass it on. Don’t look at who it is before you pick it. Trust the Holy Spirit.

(Time passing out slips)

Jesus said to his disciples before he went up to heaven; “You will be my witnesses, in Jerusalem, in Judea, in Samaria, to the ends of the world.” We will be God’s witnesses. What does that look like? We can witness with our voice, we can tell what we know, but it is a much more powerful witness when we witness with how we live our lives. When we witness Christ’s love by loving one another. Most of you may know the old song. “They’ll know we are Christians by our love.” Let us witness Christ in our love for one another.

Amen.