I bet if Jesus told you how little you were allowed to pack for your missionary journey, well, that just might be the final breaking point in your discipleship. Because we simply don’t want to have to rely on anyone else. We don’t want to risk not having what we need. We want to live in a world that we can fully manage. A world that’s under our control.

There have been times in my life I have been suffering and I would surely have loved one of Jesus’ miracles. There are times I have sat helplessly next to people who are suffering and wished for, prayed with every fiber of my body, for a miracle for that person. But it never came. And on the flip side there are people who get miracles without appearing to ask, or even give God a passing thought. So what do we make of that?

I can relate to the disciples who were terrified—in an out of control situation—and there is Jesus, snoring away—sleeping as if he didn’t have a care in the world. I would be right with them thinking, saying, “what is WRONG with you—get up and FIX THIS NOW’.

Kings become despots, ever more bent on amassing power. And it doesn’t matter to them who’s trampled in the process, how extensive the collateral damage of their rule might be. We think we want someone to fight our battles for us, until we end up becoming the enemy.

Stories are how we make sense of the world, how we build meaning. Stories help us place ourselves in the sweep of history—help us identify our people and see how they lived. They help us understand why we are the way we are. And they help us understand that, even when we are sure we are one of a kind we are really just the most recent players in the age-old dramas of life and death that connect us to every other human being who has ever walked the face of this earth.

Although the God that we Episcopalians profess is a lot less condemnatory than many other versions of God out there in American Christianity, I’m not sure we Episcopalians are really all that much better at love than most other Christians. We definitely talk about love more than most. But I think that often, what we’re really talking about is something more like acceptance. And proclaiming acceptance just isn’t the same thing as practicing love.

If ever there was a moment we needed Pentecost, needed this particular communion creating work of the Spirit, it is now. Division, hatred, rancor, pain, and injustice haunt our nation. Our political discourse is poisonous. While you might think that Christians would at least agree on basic issues of human dignity, on Jesus’ call to serve the last and the least, we do not. In fact, some of the worst divisions are within and among Christian churches. We are infected with tribalism, ignoring or demonizing those who are different from us.

Christianity was born in a difficult environment and faced daunting challenges in attaining a place of security and respect within the cultural landscape. Christians were literally mocked for worshiping a leader who not only laid claim to be the Son of God but died on the cross. Relatively few Jews were enthusiastic about abandoning their deeply held traditions and expectations from their own religious beliefs. Rome was pressing its power and opposing these independent and uncooperative religious groups who threatened Rome’s agenda of absolute control. As usual, those with the power win in the short run, though Christianity continued to spread and, to some extent, flourish in an underground form for more than two centuries. Christians undoubtedly took pride and received some consolation in their status as persecuted outcasts, and certainly looked to the words and example of Jesus for solace and support.

When Jesus calls us friends, we should be startled. Because in many ways, we’d rather be followers than friends. We’re happy to receive Jesus’ teachings. And we try to enact his precepts as best we can. But when it comes down to it, we still want to be able to walk away. We don’t want to get in too deep. We want to maintain a semblance of freedom.

It is hard to know how to talk to outsiders. Hard to approach them, the ones whose lives, beliefs are very different than our own.