The Rev. Scott Walters: Bound to Be Free by Calvary Episcopal Church

Paul had come to Philippi because he had seen a vision of a Greek man saying, ‘Come and help us.’ Instead of finding that man, he was led to this enterprising businesswoman who wound up helping him!

You may need to pray your way into the story differently. But since the theme is so pervasive in the Bible, from the first pages to the last, I do believe each one of us would do well to enter this story with at least some part of ourselves we can’t imagine anyone would ever welcome or pay loving attention to, especially God.

“The best thing for being sad is to learn something.” If this is true, and I think it might be, one of the ways that Jesus calls to us from the grief and brokenness of our lives is with this invitation to learn, to become a disciple, again and again, to learn and to unlearn and to relearn. When we are each feeling lost and ready to surrender, we are encouraged to discover more about the world, more about ourselves, more about the ways of God.

Sometimes evidence that we are loved shows up in the simplest of attention paid to the most ordinary of things, doesn’t it? Somebody loves us all. And he wants us to pass that love along, in this world of ordinary things, even on the resurrection side of Easter. Maybe especially on the resurrection side of Easter.

I feel that the message that usually comes with this gospel is something along the lines of “it’s wrong to doubt God. Take the disciples at their word. Don’t underestimate God.” But I disagree. One of the things I treasure most about the Episcopal church and this environment I’ve grown up in is the way we welcome those doubts. We try to answer the questions we can and sit with those we can’t.

I want Jesus’s resurrection, whatever happened at the tomb that day, to change and heal my life. I want its power to change and repair this broken-down world. I want it to matter to lives like ours and a world like this one. Don’t you?

The ancient Hebrew people saw ram’s horns as similes for that which in humans aspires toward the highest. The horns, while they reach up to the sky, are rooted in the animal. They are signs of joining together heaven and earth. That is what this night is all about.

Yes, it can all come undone. And too easily. With a word, with a kiss, with a missed moment to say the brave thing, with nothing at all we could have done differently. And yet, as all the threads and yarns unravel, as the tapestry comes to shreds, somehow God is still here. Even now.

While the command to love is old, the demands of love will always be as new as the moment at hand and the person in front of you. It may even be that love is not the action, so much as it is the curious attention itself.