We Need A Miracle

Acts 2:1-21       

On the day of Pentecost the small band of disciples were hunkered down in their upper room. They were all together in one place. In one room.

Everybody in that room had – not long before – been a part of the crowds who were gathered in the streets below. Not very long ago they had been a part of that community, the people who made pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the Jewish festivals. That’s just what they had done, in fact, for the Passover festival. About seven weeks earlier. But a lot had changed since then.

Now their community was much diminished. Now their community was comprised of a group small enough to fit into this upper room. And, sadly, the people in that room viewed many of those outside their room as enemies.

It was kind of a low moment for the People of the Way. They were still waiting on something, something … they didn’t know what.

The community of the People of the Way – it was not strong. Yet.

But something was about to happen that would change all that. That something was the Holy Spirit. It came in with a violence that was shocking. The rush of a violent wind filling the entire house, tongues of fire resting over every head. Sharp, shocking violence – but not for the sake of violence. The Spirit brought gifts that shocked this little group into becoming a force for something much greater – for all the grace of God through Jesus Christ.

The Spirit gave them power to speak languages they didn’t know, for the sake of creating community they couldn’t yet imagine.

And outside their window, down in the street below there were crowds of people from all over the diaspora. Suddenly, all these diverse people could hear the words of love spoken in their own native languages.

Something miraculous had happened. The little tribe in that upper room had suddenly forged connections with people of every nation, all who were gathered in the holy city for the festival of Pentecost. Now we know, for sure, that because of this Pentecost miracle, the good news would go with them to all the nations they called home.

Community happened. And it was big. And it was love. It was gospel.

And here’s what it was not. Political. Partisan. Divisive. Community in Christ is not tribal. Community in Christ is all about erasing the boundary lines.

I struggled to write a Pentecost sermon this week, because things kept happening, and made me continually ask: what is the real message of community for us today? How does the Spirit of Pentecost speak to us today?

Throughout our country, as we continue to battle the pandemic, does the Spirit speak into the divide that wants to turn public health into a political minefield? Where the decision to wear a protective mask can derisively be called “political correctness?” How does the Spirit speak into this mess?

In the Pennsylvania State House, does the Spirit speak in the midst of extreme partisanship? So extreme that members of one political party decided to share news of a potential COVID-19 outbreak only with members of their own party, hiding it from the opposing party. How does the Spirit speak into that mess?

In Minneapolis, does the Spirit speak in literal flames of fire? People protesting a long history of police brutality toward black men and women reaching a boiling point. Yes, the protests turned violent. Property was destroyed. But their message is: do our lives, our bodies, not matter more than property? Are we not more than property? A man was killed on the street by police officers for a counterfeit 20 dollar bill. Are we not members of the same community?

How does the Spirit speak into such an unholy mess?

The scriptures speak to us of beloved community, boundary-less community. I have spoken frequently over these past ten weeks or so about the beauty of community that connects us to one another no matter where we are. The certainty that the Spirit of God can hold us together even when we are physically apart. We are not bound by the former things – the old ways of thinking about what it means to be together. What it means to be community. We know that the Spirit of God moves where she will and how she will. She is untamed, free.

But it grieves me to acknowledge that the ways of the Spirit do not come naturally to us. We look at others whose languages are different. Perhaps the actual language they speak, but perhaps it is the lens through which they see the world. We don’t all see the world the same way – there are difference by race, by culture, by education or income level, by political affiliation. We don’t always see the world the same way, because the world has not treated us all the same way.  Sometimes we don’t understand the others when they try to speak to us, and we condemn them.

Beloved community does not come naturally to us. Grace does not come naturally to us.

We need a miracle for all that. And sometimes we get one.

In our Bible study last week we read about a special bond that has been forged between two unlikely groups: the people of Ireland and the Native Americans. A bond forged more than 150 years ago, when the Choctaw nation took up a collection for the Irish during their great famine. One people who were suffering saw a kinship with another suffering people.

And so it happened that thousands of Irish citizens have made donations to a fund to support the Navajo and Hopi elders during the pandemic. An effort to ensure that they have enough food to eat, enough water to survive. One people who have a collective memory of suffering, nurture the bonds of kinship with another.

They were guided by an old Irish saying that can be translated as, “We live in each other’s shadows.” The meaning of the saying is that we are all dependent on one another to shelter us from life’s difficulties. We are all in this together, even though we may not see it, and we all need one another to live and to flourish.

The Navajo people have a similar guiding principle: called K’e, which can be translated simply as kinship. The kinship of all living things.

Thousands of miles apart, speaking different languages, living in almost completely different worlds, community was forged by the power of compassion – a miracle.

Today, on this day of Pentecost, we are community – even while we are physically apart. Today we are church – even while we are not together in the building. But that’s not all we are.

Brothers and sisters, we are commissioned by Christ to be his church, wherever we are, in whatever ways the Spirit empowers us to be. We have been given the power of the Spirit to participate in and witness to miracles. Let us put this power to work in a world that badly needs to see the miracle of community.

Where Are You Looking?

Acts 1:6-14

Kim and I think our little dog Chuy is really sweet, but we know he’s not that smart. We don’t kid ourselves. He definitely has a certain amount of street smarts, because he’s been out on the streets a lot – a born wanderer. We’ve had to Chuy-proof our backyard fence to keep him from escaping. But in terms of intellectual capacity? Higher level cognitive function? We never had high expectations.

Although at one point we thought maybe we had underestimated him. Our house in Ohio sat on a corner lot and Chuy would sit out in the backyard with us, watching the world pass by. When he saw somebody walking a dog coming up the sidewalk toward the house, he’d go bananas. He’d run as fast as his little legs would take him over to the side fence to give his greetings. Then, when the walkers would turn the corner that’s when Chuy surprised us. He went tearing across the yard to get to the other side of the house because he knew that was where they were going to reappear.

I thought, “Wow, he has object permanence!” Which is the psychological term for knowing that something still exists even after it disappears. I started to think Chuy was smarter than he looks. But, still, not that smart.

He would race over to the other side of the house – so much faster than the dog and human walkers had any chance of getting there. But then Chuy would get confused. Because they weren’t there yet, so he would begin to second guess himself, thinking maybe he hadn’t analyzed this situation right. He would tear across the yard again, back to where he had last seen them. But now they weren’t there anymore. Even more confused he would run back to the other side of the house, and… they weren’t there yet. So back he goes to the first place.

Kim and I would sit on the deck, cheering him on, thoroughly enjoying the show – this tiny dog leaping across the yard expending every bit of energy he had in his body in the hopes of seeing those walkers again. Chuy never got any smarter, but he got lots of exercise.

And I still give him credit for this: he knew where to look.

Then I think of these disciples of Jesus standing, glued to the spot. Faces turned upward, gazing at the clouds where they last saw him. Unable to see where to go from there. And I know these guys had object permanence because they’re full-grown human adults. But they just didn’t know where to look next.

On this last Sunday of the Easter season, we are needing to face the same reality that the first disciples did, that Jesus is not with us in the same way that we want our loved ones to be with us. And like the first disciples, we don’t know when he will be coming back. This is the truth that the church has been dealing with for about two millennia. So we’ve kind of gotten used to it.

And, at the same time, we are also facing our own reality that many of our loved ones are not with us in the way we want them to be with us. And the same reality that we don’t know when we will be coming back together. Or how we will be coming back together. It turns out none of us know as much as maybe we thought we did, even just a couple of months ago.

The disciples looked pretty foolish, really, standing in that spot gaping up at the sky. To be fair, they were dealing with divine mystery – not just garden-variety object permanence. But they still had to get a grip on what they would do next.

It would take some angelic interference for that to happen. As they stand rooted to the spot, faces to the sun, the two men in white, in other words, angels, appear beside them to point out to them the utter pointlessness of what they are doing.

They tell them Jesus has been taken away, stating the obvious. And so you have no business being here any longer.

So they went back to where they were before, that upstairs room in Jerusalem. To wait it out. They probably thought Jesus was coming right back, so they would just wait.

After his death and resurrection, he had been with them 40 days, the first verses of Acts tell us. After his suffering, by which is meant his death, it says, “he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them over the course of forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God.” Then, shortly before he disappeared, he told them to stay in Jerusalem and wait for the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Of course, they didn’t know what that was, the baptism of the Holy Spirit. But they could understand “stay in Jerusalem,” and so they did.

It’s impossible for us to know what was going on in the minds of those disciples during this time. We just know that they were in territory they had never been in before. They didn’t know the lay of the land; they didn’t know which way to look.

They were still looking to Jesus, in a very literal sense. Because even after he told them that he was leaving and that they would have the Spirit, they turn to him and ask, So, is this when you’re going to restore the kingdom of Israel? Like, now?

Eternally patient, Jesus says to them that it really isn’t for them to know the timing of such things. Then he turns the conversation away from himself and what he might do, to these disciples and all that they will do. “You will receive the power of the Spirit, and you will be my witnesses to the ends of the earth.”

And so they did. And so they were.

And so we also are.

First, though, they had to figure out where to look, and so do we.

They made their way back to their upstairs room in Jerusalem. That much they knew how to do. And then they did the next thing they knew how to do, and that was pray. Peter, John, James, Andrew, Philip Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Zealot, Judas son of James. All these men and others, along with some women, including Mary, the mother of Jesus; all these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer.

Too often, we overlook such verses in the scriptures. I have sat in Bible studies where we read verses of scripture like this, and when I ask the question, “What did they do?” everyone scours the verses looking for clear action and completely overlooking the act of prayer.

And yet for people of faith isn’t prayer one of the first actions we should take? When everything that is familiar has been ripped away, when we are suddenly living in uncharted territory, shouldn’t our first resort be prayer?

When you just can’t do the things you’ve done before. These disciples couldn’t pepper Jesus with questions that drove him to the brink of his sanity, not any more. They couldn’t follow him into boats out on the lake, or down roads through the villages of Galilee – not any more. No longer would they run errand for him, making themselves feel useful, fetching donkeys or food to eat. All that was apparently over, and they didn’t yet know what would be next. But in the meantime, they devoted themselves to prayer. And that is actually a very important and potent thing to do when you don’t know what’s next. Prayer draws us close to the source of power, wisdom, love.

I guess those silly disciples weren’t so silly after all. Once they got over the shock of Jesus being taken from them – again – they really did know where to look. They looked to prayer. Something that seems to us so insignificant, the act of prayer.

Sometimes it’s the little things that matter.

Photo: Chuy, resting but always alert.

We Are All Right Here

John 14:15-21      “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.

“I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”

+++

The writer Louise Erdrich is drawn to bird’s nests. In one of her books she described some of the nests in her collection. There are different sizes and shapes for different birds – she is curious about the ways various birds construct their nests. She notes the types of materials they use, how loosely or densely they pack these materials. But the one thing that most captured my imagination is that bird’s nests aren’t just made out of natural materials, like mud and grass. Birds gather up all kinds of detritus that humans leave behind. Bits of plastic Christmas tinsel, strands of brightly colored knitting yarn, shreds of discarded Kleenex. All these things woven in with the twigs and moss and flower stems.

One winter she saved up the loose strands from when she brushed her daughters’ hair. She scattered them outside for the birds to find. The next fall she found the nest, woven with middle daughter’s blond hairs, eldest daughters rich brown, and the fine pale strands of the baby’s hair.

She took the nest, the home no longer needed, and brought it inside. Thinking about how this nest woven with her babies’ hair had cradled the baby birds, just as her arms had cradled her babies. The way life holds life, over and over again.

We have borrowed the term “nesting” from birds and other animals, to talk about some of the things women do to prepare for new life. A woman in the last weeks of her pregnancy might get a burst of energy for preparing a home for her new baby. Cleaning, organizing, making all things ready. When a new baby comes into the world there is a need to make a place for the newness of him. Nesting – this beautiful construction that wraps around life, holding it and protecting it and nurturing it.

It’s a good image for the way we move through the world – everything is continuous. Endings lead right into new beginnings. Life is not linear – it is circular. It can almost make you dizzy.

That’s the way I feel sometimes when I read Jesus’ words here in John, where he says to his disciples, “I am in my Father, and you are in me – and I am in you.” You know, linearly, I don’t think that is possible. But life is not really linear.

There is another, he says, who will be with you when I am no longer with you – the Advocate, the Spirit of Truth. This Spirit will abide with you, will be in you. And I will be in you, as you are in me.

You begin to get the sense that there is no real separation between Jesus and this Spirit. Or the Father either, for that matter. They are one.

But not only are they one all together, we are one with them somehow, too. Yes, we are a part of this mysterious circle with the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.

As Jesus speaks these words, we might remember where and when this is happening. This is the evening before he will be arrested. It is an evening when his disciples began to feel the ground shifting from under their feet. Soon he will be leaving them.

It is a time when they need some words of comfort, which he gives them. I am not leaving you orphaned, he says. Another Advocate will be with you. And, in a way, we will all be together – right here. And perhaps he would have said, it is not for you to understand, but simply for you to know.

Well, we are creeping up on Trinity Sunday and you can hear it in our texts from last week and this week. Two weeks from now will be Pentecost Sunday, the day we celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the church. The week after that is Trinity Sunday, when we pause to reflect on all the persons of the trinity – the Father, the Son, and the Spirit – and the complex, mysterious nature of our triune God.

Western, logical minds always want to take a linear approach to it. We want to line these personalities up – Father, Son, Holy Spirit. We want to assign duties, a sort of job description, to each one, and then assume we fully comprehend it. The trinity we have created as a Limited Liability Company.

But Eastern minds see it differently. The Eastern Orthodox Church has long had a different model for the trinity, called the Perichoresis. It comes from two Greek words, meaning around, and making room; imagine the three persons of the trinity in a dance together circling round and round. This is who they are, and it is not possible to separate them from one another.

That actually sounds like what Jesus is describing to his disciples at their last dinner together. But, even more, Jesus includes the disciples in this circle.

He draws a picture of a circular relationship – Father, Son, Holy Spirit, You, Me. We are all right here. It seems important for him to say these things to his disciples on that night of all nights. Because he will be leaving them soon.

When he leaves them they will all scatter – for various reasons. Guilt. Fear. Grief. Confusion. Loss of purpose. But they won’t go far from each other. They will come back together to recreate what they had before. Or, create something new with the Advocate – the Spirit.

It’s a concept that continues to be meaningful for the church – although in ordinary times we might forget why. When things are just cruising along on autopilot, we don’t need mystery. We don’t need complex imagery about a complex God and where we fit into all of it. We’ve got our notches cut out.

But when things fall apart, it’s different. When pandemic sends us all scattered, separated from one another, it’s different. When all the normal systems break down, we have to start figuring out again what it means to be the church. Who we are in relation to one another and God.

And we have to find out if we will come back together to recreate what we had –

Or to create something new.

I think that Jesus’ disciples wanted, more than anything else in the world, for Jesus to come back to them in that upper room and just resume normal activity. For them to continue being his disciples in the same way they always had. But that couldn’t happen, because it was time now to move on to the next step. You don’t go back to where you were before. But you take what’s needed from before and go forward.

In the best possible outcome, that is what we will do. We will come back together again. But it will not be just like it was before. We will be changed. And the church will be changed.

If we go back to the image of a nest – a sort of container – we can think that this room, our sanctuary, was the container that held us together as a community, the body of Christ. But then we scattered, and we have developed new containers – electronic, telephonic, technological nests, to hold us as the body of Christ. Weird, yes. But true.

In the course of doing weird new things we are learning things about ourselves and about our relationship to the world. I know how painful it is to feel like we are in limbo. It is frightening to wonder what will become of us. But let us trust that God is, indeed, at work in this COVID chaos, and let us watch closely for signs of the Spirit’s work, creating new nests, with pieces of the old as well as pieces of the new things.

Robert Cording, a poet, writes:

More than we imagined,
visible now that we can see
through the leafless branches -
nests, in the lilacs, near
the trunk of a weeping cherry,
on a maple branch horizon.
In them, the past
summer: dead grasses,
milkweed and dandelion
down, our lost cat’s
white fur, line I cut
from a fishing reel, bits
of scattered fingernail-
sized eggshells – a robin’s
pale blue …

Even as the bird gathers up and uses what others discarded, she leaves bits of herself behind in the nest she makes, for others to find and, perhaps, use. In so many ways, life is circular.

Let us watch closely for the work of the Spirit, gathering us up in a nest of familiar things and weird things and creating something new. This circling, gathering, triune God will never let us go. God is here and we are all right here, too.

Photo: By Jerry Kiesewetter jerryinocmd - https://unsplash.com/photos/hgyjSUlEe40archive copy, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62181987

In Times of Trouble

John 14:1-14      

We have known for some time, you and I, that hardship can bring deep meaning to our lives. This is not to say that we enjoy hardship – not by any means. But we realize that some good can come out of it.

We like to recall our experience after 9/11, when so many Americans reconnected with their faith, and church sanctuaries were filled on Sunday mornings. In times of trouble we seek meaning.

Yet, we should also remember, that resurgence in church attendance after 9/11 was actually very brief. It was a blip on the timeline. Nothing worth bragging about or celebrating, really. In fact, it showed us just how fickle our tastes are, how shallow our passions can be.

Because not too long after 9/11 we were beginning to form a new passion. We fixed our attention on a clear enemy and went to war.

Finding meaning in our lives is essential to being human. But when it is colored by fear or anger, it can lead us down some dark and ugly paths. And now we are seeing it again.

It didn’t take very long for all kinds of conspiracy theories to emerge to explain the COVID-19 crisis. Very early on we heard suggestions that it was a biological weapon created in a lab in China and unleashed on the world. And no matter how many times this theory is debunked, it keeps bouncing back. Because it sounds like something that could be true.

There were other attempts – both subtle and not so subtle – to blame China for it. But if we’re looking for somewhere to place blame, we have other options, too. There’s the Bill Gates conspiracy theory, because anyone who cares as much as he does about getting people immunized must have ulterior motives.

The good Dr. Fauci is another candidate. The story here is that he knew about the supposed Chinese scheme and kept it secret. And then there’s the theory that hospitals are faking the numbers on COVID-19 diagnoses because the reimbursements are higher. And, tragically, there are more.

All of these stories have some aspect of believability, and so they spread. All of them sound like they could be true. And so they spread. More accurately, we spread them. Because they sound to us like they might be true.

Years ago, the comedian Stephen Colbert made up a new word – truthiness. The definition of truthiness is that something seems true, therefore it is believable even in the absence of any evidence.

We latch on to these stories that have the quality of truthiness because we have a need to find meaning – preferably, a simple explanation of why things happen. And if the reason involves propping up some enemy that can be blamed for our trouble, all the better. You see, if all the trouble can be blamed on some “other,” some enemy, than nothing much is required of us, other than to get angry. And that’s easy.

In times of trouble we look for an enemy to blame. But that’s not the way Jesus showed us.

When he set out on his ministry, and began to call his first disciples, there was no map they were following. Jesus was leading them into uncharted territory. He knew where he was going, but all the disciples knew was that they were following him. And that seemed to be enough.

For the time being.

The problem, they gradually began to see, was what would happen if there ever came a time when he wasn’t with them.

In this story from John, Jesus is gathered with the disciples on the night before he was arrested. And he begins to speak in parables, telling them about the place he is going – a place where there will be room for them, a place to which they know the way.

But they don’t know what he is talking about. They don’t know where he is going, so how could they possibly know the way there? Up until now, he has been their way. Up until now, everything has worked simply because they followed him. But if he is no longer with them, how will they possibly know the way?

He says to them, let not your hearts be troubled. But clearly, their hearts are troubled. If their teacher leaves them, they will be lost and their lives will be utterly without meaning. They’ve left everything else behind.

They say to him, show us the Father. If Jesus is going to leave them, then he at least needs to give them a replacement to follow. Show us the Father so we have someone to follow. But then he says the strangest thing – something they surely don’t know how to interpret. That in essence, Jesus and the Father are the same. I am in him and he is in me. If you have seen me you have seen him. We are one and the same.

He is showing them a new way of seeing. Learning a new way of seeing is never easy.

His disciples will need to see Jesus even when he is no longer walking with them, leading their steps, setting an example, teaching them what to do. They will need to find their way, without actually seeing the way. Somehow, they will need to see Jesus – and the Father – without actually seeing them, but trusting that they are with them, empowering them and guiding them.

As the church, we proclaim the oneness of the Father and the Son, along with the Holy Spirit, which he will speak of further on in the chapter. And we profess our faith that this triune God is in our midst, working within us, between us, all around us. It is these beliefs that make us who we are, make us a community of faith. And it is these beliefs that guide us through life’s troubles.

So now I must ask: how do these beliefs guide us as we seek to make meaning in this particular time of trouble we are now in?

What will be the way forward? How will we navigate it? If Jesus is our way, then there are a few things we can, and should, know.

We can know that it is not easy. As much as his followers would have liked it, Jesus did not clear away all the obstacles before them. He made a way through hardship – but he did not eliminate hardship. The way, he said, is not easy. But take my yoke upon you, he said, and learn from me.

We can know that it is a way of accountability and forgiveness. On that night when he sat surrounded by his disciples, Jesus looked at them and held each one accountable for what they would do. For the ways they would fall short, the ways they would fail him. He didn’t pretend it was nothing. But he forgave them. As he forgives each one of us, too.

We can know that this way is essentially about where we are now and where we are going. It is not a backward way. The disciples did, fairly quickly, find their way forward. With the help of the Spirit, they began to figure out that knowing the way doesn’t mean having a map with the route all laid out, highlighted in yellow. They discovered that following the way meant trusting in God to show them the next step forward. And forward they went.

The church moved ever outward into the world. It spread like a virus, each person touching several others, and each of them touching even more.

The church moved in and through every kind of trouble. Always demonstrating that the way of Jesus Christ is the way of love and grace. The way of Jesus Christ pours beauty on everything.

What we know from the way of Christ is that love shows its strength in times of trouble. We know that faith grows stronger in times of trouble. We know that by following the way, we will follow a path of being woven together into an ever-widening fabric of community, founded on love and truth –

Not truthiness.

Perhaps God always works through trouble because times of trouble seem to give us tremendous motivation to find meaning and purpose. And Christ gives us a way.

If we follow the way that Jesus gave us, we will look for the ways to be church in these new times. If we trust in him to lead us, to be our way, we will look for the ways he gives us to serve and connect with and love one another.

His way is not a way of fear, nor anger, nor vengeance. So let us turn away from the ways of truthiness, blaming, conspiracy-theorizing. There is no real meaning in such things.

The meaning is to be found in the way of Christ – the way of love and grace, of gratitude and generosity. Let us get ourselves on this way, brothers and sisters. Because there is much need, there is much possibility, there is much for us to do. So –

What can we do?

In a time of new beginnings, we might look to the early church as a model. As the book of Acts tells us, they devoted themselves to prayer and scripture. That is just what we are trying to do. Every evening at 5:30 pm.

You can find me on Facebook Live with daily scripture readings and prayers. We stay close to the Word, and we lift up all the needs of the world that are on our hearts and minds. It is good to be together in prayer; it is like drops of water on a parched land.

But those who are not on Facebook can still pray, knowing they are adding their voice to a community at prayer.

God is at work showing us a way through this current trouble – about this there is no doubt. Let us use this moment faithfully. Let us devote ourselves to prayer and scripture, as the church did at the beginning. Let us look for the movement of the Spirit, showing us our next steps, connecting the Word of God with the Way of Jesus for the sake of the world.

Photo: daily choice of masks in Corona times.  By Islander61 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=90093129

Someone to Watch Over You

Acts 2:42-47

John 10:1-10      

There wasn’t a lot of children’s programming on TV when I was young, but there were a few shows and we tended to love them indiscriminately. I mean, back in those days, anything that was made just for kids – that was special. But for a while when I was very small, the show I loved most was Romper Room. I planted myself on the floor in front of the TV every day to watch Miss Beverly and the lucky children who got to play with her in her TV classroom. I was so jealous of them. I adored Miss Beverly – she was pretty and kind. Her classroom was fun. I loved everything about Romper Room. But the moment Miss Beverly picked up her magic mirror at the end of the show was, without fail, a moment of preschool angst for me. Because here’s what would happen.

She would begin to name all the children watching at home whom she could see through her magic mirror: Bobby and Cathy and Barbara and Jimmy, Lucy and Davy and Billy and Nancy, and on and on. Every day I sat holding my breath waiting for her to see me, but she never saw me. Maggie. Every day I waited in hope. Every day I was tragically disappointed.

If Miss Beverly had said my name just once, I would have pledged myself to her for eternity. But, alas, she never saw me. She never knew me.

And that’s sad. It’s just nice when they know your name.

I think it’s fair to say that knowing someone, really knowing them, involves at the very least knowing their name.  That’s where we usually begin.  It means something to us, when someone remembers our name.

The shepherd, Jesus says, knows his sheep and calls them by their names.  And they follow him because they know the voice of their shepherd when he calls their names. He knows their names and they know his voice. Just as Mary Magdalene knew the voice of Jesus when she heard him call her name in the garden. 

He knows our names, too, and cares for us as his own. Whether it is as the shepherd, as he says further down in the chapter, or the sheepfold gate, as he says in verse 7, it is clear that Jesus is identifying himself as the one who watches over us. He is the one who is strong enough to protect, the one who cares enough to save us. Jesus can be trusted to guide us in and out of the sheepfold. In our coming and our going, we may rely on the one who would lay down his life for us.

This is the gospel message: we have a savior who knows us because he chooses to know us; he loves us enough to suffer on our behalf for the sin of the world so we may have life, and life abundant. He knows our names.

It gives us comfort to know that we have a good shepherd watching over us. But, just like the little boy who was frightened by a thunderstorm one night – his father reassured him saying Jesus is right beside you. But the boy said, “I know, but daddy, I need Jesus with skin on!” We need the warmth, the firmness, the tenderness of flesh and blood companions who care for us.

I know Jesus loves me and Jesus saves me. I have known it since I was very young. But sometimes I am more concerned about whether there are people who know me, love me, care for me, and are willing to protect me if need be. I know I have a friend in Jesus – I have always known this. But sometimes I am more concerned about how many true friends I have in Jesus’ church. And what’s more, I am concerned about whether my love is great enough to be a faithful friend in Christ’s name – a friend to my brothers and sisters in Christ, as well as those who are outside the sheepfold.

I am concerned that we may rest too comfortably in the knowledge of Christ’s saving love and let it go at that. The hard truth is that there is nothing Christ did for us that he does not also ask us to do for others.

As followers of Christ we must ask ourselves how well we are doing at providing this kind of love and care to others. Do we know one another’s names? and their needs? Jesus assured his followers and even those who didn’t follow him that he will know them and care for them individually. But Jesus needs us to do that.

How are we doing at the shepherding? And just as much, how are we managing the sheepfold gate? Jesus says I am the gate and whoever enters by me will be saved. Are we opening the gate to those who need comfort, who are seeking pasture?

Everybody in this world needs that – comfort, belonging. Every one of us needs to have that feeling that we are all in this together, living the life we have been given, taking turns holding one another up when we need to borrow some strength. Everyone in this world needs to have a place of safety, a sheepfold where somebody knows their name and cares about who they are.

Everybody needs somebody to trust. Are we willing to be that somebody? to earn their trust? Are we willing to love them unconditionally, showing them the grace of God and the care of the Good Shepherd? Do we care enough about them to learn their names and their stories? Are we willing to watch over them and protect them from harm?

You know, in the story from Acts we heard that the earliest disciples devoted themselves to learning and fellowship, the breaking of bread and prayer. How are we doing at that? the basic acts of being church?

These days, our forced quarantine makes it harder – to be church in the ways we know. But I read an interesting bit of information last week. The Pew Research Center finds that people are saying that since this pandemic began, their faith is growing. So how are we living that stronger, deeper faith? And how will that make it different when we come back together again?

And when we come back together again, will we manage the sheepfold gate with generosity and love?

Christ offers himself as the good shepherd and the gate. He lays down his life for us and everyone else. He calls us by name, and he expects us to be able to do the same. Let us follow in Christ’s example for this world, to know one another by name and watch over one another in his name.