I won’t be with you next Sunday because I have a one-week staycation that begins this Wednesday. I have finally learned, after living in Seattle for seventeen years, not to leave town in the summer. It’s best to take my vacation here to enjoy our beautiful weather and mild temperatures. Our oldest son, Josh, and his family will be with us from Charlottesville, Virginia so all three sons, their spouses, and our six grandchildren will all be in the same place at the same time – mostly at our home. I expect it to be a precious time.

So, when I looked at the readings for today, I was tempted to preach about sibling rivalry and strange family dynamics because of our fascinating reading about Jacob and Esau. But I’ve also spent the last three days working in my yard to get it ready for the convergence of active children and adults. As I trimmed all the plants that I sowed earlier this year, I found myself reflecting upon the familiar Parable of the Sower in today’s Gospel. I’ve also been struggling with my own stinginess as we are contemplating a week of extravagance with so many family members in town. I can’t help it; when it comes to my children and grandchildren, I can be a little too generous. Do I spoil them? Of course not!

The parable seems to be a compelling case for divine extravagance, and its relationship to joy. You heard the story from Jesus. A sower goes out to sow. She throws the seeds upon numerous terrains and there are different outcomes. If your experience is anything like mine, you’ve heard this parable many times and focused exclusively on the four types of terrain Jesus describes. You’ve thought about the people you preach to week after week, and worried about who is hardened, rocky, thorny, or “good.” You’ve agonized over how to find and cultivate more fertile soil in your church or community. You’ve analyzed and quantified, assessed and judged. You’ve evaluated ministry plans and strategies, pruned leadership commissions and committees. You’ve bought special pots, invested in high end fertilizers and weed killers, and counted, sorted, and planted your seeds with exquisite care, placing each bit of God’s good news in its optimal place, to guarantee an impressive harvest. I’ve been the rector of four different parishes. This is what I always thought when I read this parable.

Or else, also like me, you’ve read this parable and walked away, feeling bad about your own faith life. Feeling judged, inadequate, or anxious. You’ve wondered how to make your own spiritual soil less hard, less rocky, or thorny. You’ve designed all sorts of self-improvement projects to fix what’s “wrong” with you. More prayer; less social media. More Bible study; less cynicism. More church; less television. You’ve read the parable as an indictment of your relationship with a Sower who just can’t seem to find an appropriately hospitable environment in your messed up heart.

Now, to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with planning and pruning. There’s nothing wrong with honest and humble self-assessment in our spiritual lives. But I think we miss something crucial when we read this Gospel text as “The Parable of the Four Terrains.” Because that is not what it is. It is “The Parable of the Sower.” It is a parable about the nature and character of God. About God’s kingdom, God’s provision, and God’s extravagant generosity when it comes to us, his beloved creatures.

Consider again the actions of the sower as Jesus describes them: The sower goes out to sow, and as she sows, the seeds fall everywhere. Everywhere. Imagine it – a sower blissfully walking across the fields and meadows, the back alleys and sidewalks, the playgrounds and parking lots of our world, fistfuls of seed in her quick-to-open hands. There is no way to contain that much seed. No way to sort or save it. Of course it will spill over. Of course, it will fall through her fingers and cover the ground. Of course it will scatter in every direction. How can it not?

But here’s the surprising part of the story: the sower doesn’t mind. She doesn’t mind one bit. She has a confident realism, a sense that what needs to flourish will flourish. Maybe not all at once. Maybe not everywhere. But that’s okay. In other words, the sower in Jesus’s parable is wholly unconcerned about where the seed falls or lands or settles - all she chooses to do is keep sowing. Keep flinging. Why? Because there’s enough seed to go around. There’s enough seed to accomplish the sower’s purposes. There’s enough seed to “waste.”

As I imagine this profligate sower walking in and around and through the varied terrains of our lives, I can’t help but wonder about my own contrasting stinginess. The truth is that I don’t tend to believe that there’s enough Good News to go around. I don’t begin with the generous assumption that every kind of soil can benefit from the seed. I don’t have confidence that God’s Word will go out from God’s mouth and accomplish what God purposes for it, no matter where it lands. I don’t trust in God’s endless ability to soften hard ground, clear away rocks, and cut through the most stubborn of thorns to make way for a harvest. I don't care about the birds as much as God does.

In short, I forget that all the terrain is already God’s, under God’s provision and sustained by God’s love. Who am I to tell God, the Creator of the earth and all that is in it, what “good soil” looks like? Who am I to decide who is worthy and who is not of the sower’s generosity? Who am I to hoard what I have been so freely and lavishly given? Who am I to look at God's profligate blessing and call it waste?

How I wish that the Church – the Church across the ages, the Church across all cultures, denominations, and circumstances – were known for its absurd generosity. How I wish we were famous for being like the Sower, going out in joy, scattering seed before and behind us in the widest arcs our arms can make. How I wish the world could laugh at our lavishness instead of weeping in the wake of our stinginess. How I wish the people in our lives could see a quiet, gentle confidence in us when we tend to the hard, rocky, thorny places in our communities, instead of finding us abrasive, judgmental, exacting, and insular. How I wish seeds of love, mercy, humility, and truthfulness would fall through our fingers in such appalling quantities that even the birds, the rocks, the thorns, and the shallow, sun-scorched corners of the world would burst into colorful, riotous, joyous life.

In these crazy political times of scarcity, anxiety, suffering, and loss, what does the world need more than a Sower who is lavish? A Sower who errs on the side of wastefulness? A Sower who'd rather lose a bunch of seeds to inhospitable terrain than withhold a single one?

The thing about this parable is that at some deep, intuitive level, we recognize its wisdom. Whether we want to admit it or not, we know that Jesus is telling us the truth. We know that the most elegant and carefully cultivated gardens can fail, while a profusion of weedy, vibrant flowers pushes through a crack in the pavement and brightens a neighborhood. We've seen how new life can spring from the deadest, most shriveled places in our lives - places we've given up on, places we assumed were hardened beyond hope. We've witnessed inhospitable environments being altered by love. We know that joy follows from selflessness and generosity, not from caution and miserliness.

In the end, the problem is not our ignorance in the face of this Gospel; the problem is our unwillingness to follow in the footsteps of the extravagant Sower. Her carefree generosity worries us. Her seeming wastefulness offends us. Why won’t she discriminate? Why won’t she wait and withhold – at least a little bit? Why won’t she privilege the terrain that’s more deserving?

Because that’s not the kind of Sower she is. Look at her, tossing seeds to the wind with reckless abandon with a daring and delighted smile on her face, inviting us to toss our own handfuls across the earth and share her joy. Shall we do that this summer in Seattle? The invitation is there. Will we take up the challenge?

What kind of origin story is this? We want our founding fathers and mothers to be heroes, don’t we? We want them to be exceptional. We want them to model how we can use our freedom to liberate others and be an example of justice and righteousness to the world – and instead, we get the book of Genesis. Who would write a history like this – with spiritual ancestors who are just as flawed as we are? We have choices; why hold onto this set of stories as our own?

Two weeks ago, we saw Abraham, the one St. Paul calls “the father of us all,” and his wife Sarah treat Hagar shamefully. Today’s reading won’t let us forget that they were, in fact, slaveholders who viewed those enslaved to them as signs of God’s favor and blessing. This is appalling. However long ago the Abraham stories lived as oral history, they were written down centuries later. Given that, I find it fascinating that a people defined by their deliverance from slavery in Egypt would seemingly take pride in their ancestors being slaveholders themselves.

Who knows? Perhaps it’s a sign of moral complexity and humility – a reminder that nothing human is foreign to us, that the roles of oppressed and oppressor aren’t fixed and often have more to do with circumstance than character. That’s more nuance than many of us are prepared for this weekend. I’ll be honest; there are days when I just want my heroes back.

Who better to help me than Marilynne Robinson? In novels like Gilead and Lila, she writes as beautifully about the life of faith as any living writer I’ve encountered – and she published a book in 2024 called Reading Genesis. If anyone can help me hold onto my heroes, she can. And yet, she’s more cynical about Isaac and Rebekah’s “courtship” than I ever thought to be. Yes, arranged marriages based on kinship were common in ancient times. But this relationship seems to be based on love. We’re told that Isaac loved Rebekah, right? Besides, we like having an excuse, outside of weddings, to hear the erotic love poetry of the Song of Solomon out loud in church. It feels a little naughty. Can’t we just gloss over any complicating details and let our romantic notions lie?

Personally, I’ve always drawn strength from Rebekah’s kindness and courage here and, thankfully, Robinson doesn’t burst my bubble on that front. Rebekah passes a test she doesn’t even know she’s taking. It’s one thing to offer a drink to a thirsty man in the desert. It’s quite another to quench the thirst of ten camels. She doesn’t know yet who she’s helping; she simply sees a need and chooses to fill it. Likewise, she then chooses to leave the land of her ancestors to marry a man she’s never met and start a new life. As someone who moved 3000 miles away from my family back East to take this call, I appreciate her choice – and I take comfort in it. She’ll make more questionable, even reprehensible, choices later, but at least they’re her choices. No one else dares to make them for her. I like that about her.

Contrast this with Isaac, the most passive of the patriarchs. There’s nothing wrong with going with the flow, but it doesn’t exactly make him a thrilling suitor. This woman who hauled hundreds of gallons of water for a stranger’s camels is greeted by her prospective husband with not so much as a cup of cold water – at least as we’re given the story here. Our novelist Marilynne Robinson imagines Rebekah reacting as any of us might - who find that the greatest hope of our spouse is that we’ll be just like their mom. She reads Rebekah’s later machinations in the light of this disappointment and sours any simplistic notions of “happily ever after.”

What might this origin story have to do with us as we consider our own origin stories as a nation this weekend? The stories we tell ourselves about the past matter. They shape how we hold ourselves accountable for the present and how we imagine the future. Stories that only allow us to be the good guys are not solid enough to sustain us. They assume that our flaws somehow erase our achievements - when they don’t. They assume that good and evil cannot coexist in the same heart - when we all know that they do. We can still have our heroes, but we don’t need to hold onto them as if they are our hope. Why should their struggle against evil be any easier than ours? Our hope is not in our ancestors’ ability to live up to their highest ideals. It’s in the God who created both them and us for good.

Here is where Marilynne Robinson ended up coming to my aid. She reminded me of what I know on my best days to be true. God’s vast and generous intent for us unfolds over centuries, often written in a hand too big for us to read. God’s love is so strong and loyal and steadfast that it allows space for us to be the complicated creatures we are. God respects the integrity of our choices and lets us live with them - but won’t finally be constrained by them. God will continue working through us and despite us for good. Or in her words, God’s blessing “does not reveal its whole meaning in the course of any life or generation or era. This is the freedom of God in which humankind is free.” That means we can look honestly at what we’ve done and left undone with our freedom these last 250 years. We can claim the grace that sustains all families of the earth, and we can learn to walk in new ways. We can repent and repair what is still broken without it breaking us – and we can celebrate and nurture the good that’s here now and is still possible. In the Name of the One whose freedom sets us free – Amen.

“Oh, my Gawd. Can we talk?” This is a signature phrase from my friend Julie, a native New Yorker, rabbi, and hospital chaplain. She would proclaim this whenever she was confronted with something really challenging. It could be almost anything — misbehavior from our kooky boss, a challenging ethical situation in the hospital, or extreme conflict from a patient or their family. “Can we talk?” was always followed by a deep conversation in my office. Julie would kvetch but was she was not complaining — she was processing. Telling the story, explaining the details, identifying her feelings, listening to my response, and asking tough questions helped her make sense of the senselessness and often led to an insight into a previously impenetrable mystery. “Let me tell you a story,” was another one of her signature lines. She would often interrupt the conversation to tell a story that might seem unrelated at first but would allow us to see things with a fresh perspective, often with deep spiritual insight.

So, this week as I was challenged by the appalling first reading we have from Genesis 22, I called Julie up and said, “Oh my God. Can we talk?” Christians, Jews, and Muslims all struggle with this passage about Abraham being commanded by God to sacrifice his son, Isaac, and we’ve struggled with it for about 4000 years. The command of God seems to conflict with the promise made to Abraham earlier in Genesis. Remember that God promised Abraham and Sarah that they would be the forbears of a great nation, but they were old and childless. Sarah miraculously gave birth to Isaac when she was 100 years old. The command and the promise are in conflict.

I don’t know what’s most disturbing. That God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son or that Abraham seemed willing to do it and Isaac went along with it. It doesn’t make us religious people look very good to the non-believing world. For the atheist zealot Richard Dawkins, it's an example of religion's barbaric cruelty. In his book, The God Delusion, he writes, "this disgraceful story is an example simultaneously of child abuse, bullying in two asymmetrical power relationships, and the first recorded use of the Nuremberg defense: ‘I was only obeying orders' yet the legend is one of the great foundational myths of all three monotheistic religions."ⁱ

So, I asked Julie, “what do you do with Bible passages where God seemingly commands people to kill one another?” She said, “We ignore them. That’s not who God is.” And then she went on, “Whenever God is being obtuse, we make stuff up. We tell stories to get at the true spiritual meaning.” She went on to tell me about midrashim, the stories and commentaries that rabbis throughout the centuries have written to understand, explain, and resolve troublesome texts.

Many midrashists have asked: Where was Sarah when this command was given to Abraham? A variety of stories have emerged to address this lacuna in the text. In one contemporary midrash, Rivkah Lubitch imagines that God comes to Sarah first and says, “Take your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac, and take him to the land of Moriah and offer him up.” Sarah says to God, “No! A mother does not slaughter her children.” Thus Sarah, passes the so-called “test.”ⁱⁱ

The next morning Sarah discovers that neither Abraham nor Isaac are present. With horror, she recognizes that God said the same thing to Abraham, and he has made a completely different decision. She lifts up her arms to God and says, “I know that one who slaughters his son in the name of God will in the end be left without a son or God. Forgive Abraham, who was mistaken about this.” At this moment, the midrash says, the angel of God calls out, “Abraham, Abraham, do not lay your hand on the boy” (Genesis 22:11–12). And in this way, all three are saved.

I love Sarah’s no in this story. It’s so real and comes out of her own wisdom, out of her own struggle and suffering. It also comes out of her instincts: the God of covenantal love would not ask me for something like this. Sarah’s full engagement — her whole self — contends with God in this moment. Sarah sees the threat that everything could be lost: not only her child, but also her relationship with God, and her faith, which is the foundation of her life. The same is true of Abraham.

There are many places in the Hebrew Bible that teach us that our relationship with God is a conversation. In Genesis 18, Sarah’s laughter about the possibility of Isaac’s birth opens a conversation with God about the meaning and purpose of destiny. Later in the chapter, Abraham himself negotiates with God about the fate of Sodom. Jacob wrestles with God who comes as an angel. Moses is in a decade’s long conversation with God about the fate of the Israelites. While there are many commands in these texts, the God of the Torah seems to require our engagement, our willingness to take up the conversation, to wonder, to question, to challenge, and perhaps even to say no.

But the binding of Isaac has never been one of those stories. We always celebrate Abraham’s blind obedience. Perhaps because of its terrifying nature or because God is asking the impossible, the binding of Isaac has most frequently been taken as a straightforward story about obedience. Why do we want to take this story literally? Maybe it’s not about God or our obedient response but rather about how to relate to the Divine within a covenant of love. A covenantal relationship requires trust and vulnerability by both parties.

This story shockingly reminds us that there are many ways to shirk our responsibility when it comes to the ongoing, life-long, profoundly demanding conversation with God. Maybe we imagine that we already know what God is asking of us, and we follow our sense of duty blindly. Maybe we turn over our inner authority to another human being. Maybe we doubt ourselves and our own perceptions so much that we don’t hold up our end of the conversation. Maybe we think we hear the voice of God and we’re just wrong. Maybe we ignore God’s inquiry into our lives. Maybe we silence our inner protest.

One of the things I learn from Sarah’s refusal is that, without engagement and intimacy, obedience is a mindless and brutal enterprise. True intimacy with God is both a conversation and an evolution that emerges from a willingness to speak from our own integrity. Looked at from this perspective, God’s demand that Abraham kill Isaac is a strange gift, but a gift nonetheless. The absurdity of it shakes my sense of reality. It breaks open my cozy, self-satisfied, pre-packaged notions of God. If God only ever tells me what I want to hear, then no conversation is possible.

Instead, we might notice that to avoid becoming a dictator, God needs us to participate, to hold up our end of the conversation, to struggle with what God asks of us. Maybe it’s in saying “no” that we can make a deeper and more authentic “yes” to God in faith. The command and promise are not in conflict because God always provides.

ⁱ Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006.
ⁱⁱ Lubitch, Rivkah edited by Tamar Biala. Dirshuni: Contemporary Women’s Midrash. Brandeis University Press, 2022.

Felicity Mae Ruby Kleve

How are you receiving the gospel this morning? How is your imagination processing the good news as you hear it pronounced by our deacon and lectors, or as you chant responses to the psalm, or as you read along in the service leaflet?

Matthew gives us three gospel tableaus in quick succession. The stories are brisk, told with brevity and yet brimming with an unshakable confidence in the power of Christ’s presence. Power to reconcile disparity in humanity; power to make us well.

I find myself contemplating the fringe of Jesus’ cloak as a pathway to wellness. We heard the story of the woman who trusts that Christ’s life-giving and healing love is as full at the periphery as it is at the center. Her singular courage reminds us to trust that God is with us at our fringes, our edges, our vulnerabilities, our failures, our suffering. In God’s hands, these become markers guiding our journey into the heart of Christ.

Felicity Mae Ruby Kleve found the fringe of Jesus’ cloak here at Saint Mark's when she started attending services last summer. The life and ministry of this cathedral parish community were a safe and stabilizing force in her otherwise troubled world.

I’m sharing what would normally be confidential pastoral information about a parishioner because her family has given their permission and because I know Felicity wouldn’t mind. Tragically, Felicity is no longer alive. She died at Harborview Hospital on May 11, the result of a terrible and tragic accident on a Lime bike.

Felicity’s father and sister from Kansas City knew she’d found a church home she loved. She talked about it with them a lot. But they never had a chance to learn the church's name while she could still communicate.

It’s a credit to Felicity’s Dad, Dan, that he reached out to every single one of Felicity’s social media contacts until he learned his daughter’s faith community was Saint Mark’s Cathedral. He did this in time to find me, and I had the privilege yesterday of leading a committal service for Felicity’s remains on a Bremerton ferry in the waters of Puget Sound and the Salish Sea.

Some of you knew Felicity. Many of you would recognize her. She was so outgoing and friendly. Wearing her big smile, she was unafraid to walk up to anyone to say hello.

She loved rainbows and color and was remarkably adept at assembling some – I’m gonna say – memorable gender-fluid outfits. Felicity was a trans woman in her 20s. The true name she found for herself – Felicity – perfectly suited her joyful personality.

Now, Felicity is helping us engage the good news of the gospel through the powerful witness of her too-short life.

I see parallels with the woman suffering a twelve-year health crisis. Healing for both includes trust in the Christ who draws us all from the fringes into the heart of loving community.

Felicity was having a rough time of it when she first started coming here. She was living in a shelter and hard up for resources. Her world was unstable.

Happily, a couple of months ago, she found her way into an Oxford House – a communal residential dwelling committed to shared goals and rules for maintaining sobriety from drugs and alcohol. Felicity was justifiably proud to be the first person ever admitted with a unanimous vote.

When Felicity died, she was two years into recovery after suffering the consequences and estrangements of her addiction for many years.

I honestly have so much respect for her because somehow she was able to remain sober while she was effectively homeless without stable housing. As someone also in recovery, I honestly don’t know if I could have done that without a roof over my head. I’m proud of you, Felicity.

Going back to church – this time an affirming church – gave Felicity fresh energy and purpose.

With God’s help, Felicity began to rebuild. She built upon the bedrock of her sobriety and her renewing faith. She found a stable home, she found stable people, and she found a stable job as a dishwasher at an exclusive eatery.

The deep source of Felicity’s joy in recent months was this cathedral community. She clung with all her might to the fringe of Jesus’ cloak as she found it here until it drew her, with the prayers and support of her faith community, into a season of wellness, of being made whole.

My friends, it is good to remember we are the fringe. We are all Christ’s holy fringe, and we helped Felicity find her footing as she did her own spiritual and practical work on her journey into wellness.

Felicity’s work was her faith in action. She trusted the gospel promise that we don’t, we can’t, do this work alone. Our help is in the God who comes alongside us in our suffering in the person of Jesus Christ, offering radical solidarity, radical wellness, radical hope, even if we but touch the hem of his robe.

“Take heart, daughter, your faith has made you well.” Jesus says this to the woman who stepped out of the harsh shadows and edges of her social isolation.

The text isn’t explicit about severe measures of ostracization, but we know that Levitical law pronounced her ritually unclean because of her relentless twelve-year bleeding trauma. This woman would have experienced great need, great loneliness, great suffering.

But she finds her way to Jesus, who says, “Take heart, daughter, [courage!], your faith has made you well.”

Your faith has made you well.

++

On a recent Sunday morning, Felicity wrote a poem about her newfound joy and peace in finding a spiritual home.

Here it is:

Felicity’s poem is a legacy gift to us. It bears witness to the fact that at Saint Mark’s we carry God’s grace not only to our familiar neighbors in the pew but also to seekers on the fringes. The gospel is alive here.

We are also wise to remember that Christ’s love desires to be known in the unfamiliar, maybe even sometimes uncomfortable, corners of our human neighborhood.

We must always welcome the stranger.

Felicity’s poem is also a challenge for the times we fail to seek out and acknowledge Christ in the stranger. How many Felicities come here only to leave, unable to find or grasp the fringe of Jesus’ cloak because, through inattention or fear, we’ve hidden it away?

Or how many wounded seekers find only the glittering vestments of our idols and insecurities, wrapped around some of us so tightly we have no freedom of movement or thought to contemplate anyone other than ourselves?

Thankfully, the gospel we carry to others is the gospel given to us, too. We don’t do this alone. Christ not only offers the fringes of his cloak but the fullness of his person. When we reach for him in faith, he responds by drawing us into the center of his sacred, loving heart.

The gospel came to the hemorrhaging woman just as it came to Felicity, and just as it comes to you and me. Reach for it, embrace it, and give it to the next Felicity you find who really needs it. The gospel is felicity. It will change your life.

In the name of the one, holy, and undivided Trinity. Amen.

Bishop LaBelle has released a pastoral letter on this Trinity Sunday, and he has asked that we read it at all our Sunday services. In the letter, Bishop +Phil offers some theological reflection on the Trinitarian mystery as it relates to a recent decision by our government regarding immigration. His letter is about five minutes long, so I will keep my reflections complimentary and brief.

First, two stories. When I was the Rector of St. Andrew’s Church in the Green Lake neighborhood, we took a group of teens to the San Diego-Tijuana border to learn more about immigration and the concerns of migrants. The most powerful experience I had during that trip was spending a night in a migrant shelter in Tijuana with people from all over the world who hoped to find a new home in the United States. My heart was moved by their stories, and I was astounded by their diversity and, at the same time, their similarity to me, their brother in the human family. We all wanted to live in a place of safety where we could provide for ourselves and our families. I felt a sense of unity in diversity as we shared meals together in a large dining hall. Because of that experience, immigration ceased to be a political issue for me. It became a human rights issue.

The next morning, we visited a huge urban farm where the migrants would work while they waited for their immigration interviews. The farmer was so proud of the large garden that was built over a reclaimed dump. He invited us to walk through the garden, to touch things, and notice. After some time in silent reflection, he announced, “Diversity is life. Without diversity, nothing survives.”

When I was being interviewed for a leadership position at the Providence-Swedish healthcare system, I was asked numerous times to “describe a time when you promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion in your workplace.” I answered several times. Then I was asked to explain my understanding of health equity. I said that I believed healthcare is a fundamental human right and that health equity is achieved when everyone can attain their full potential for health and well-being. I must have answered correctly. I got the job.

DEI – diversity, equity, and inclusion. At one time, DEI was a hallmark of life in corporate America, now it seems to be a dirty acronym. The winds have changed due to federal executive orders, changes in legislation, and corporate retrenchment. People throw around the term DEI, but rarely say the words, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Why wouldn’t anyone want diversity, equity, and inclusion in their workplace or for their fellow human beings?

I bring this up not to make a political commentary but to speak of the nature of God on this Trinity Sunday. Our readings today and our beliefs about the Holy Trinity teach us that the nature of God is community and relationship. God is a community of persons bound together in love. Our Trinitarian God is a unity of three persons who are defined by their diversity from each other – a diversity defined by their mutual relationships to one another. God is defined by relationships of innate diversity.

The Holy Trinity is also equitable. No person of the Trinity takes precedence over the other. All the persons are co-eternal and co-equal. They have different relationships to one another, but they are all the one true God. If you’d like to read a nice reflection on this, visit the Creed of Saint Athanasius in the Historical Documents section of your Book of Common Prayer (pages 864-865)¹. Athanasius makes it quite clear that God is a community of co-equal persons.

God is inclusion. The nature of God is to include. Everything that God created is destined for union with God. God was entirely complete within Godself from before time began. But our creation story tells us that God created us out of love. God didn’t need us, but God loved us into existence. The incredible love that binds the three divine persons together spills out in creative action. Some say, God wanted something outside of Godself to love. And that love is creative and entirely inclusive. God loves all that God created. Nothing is excluded. All is destined for union with God.

To my mind, diversity, equity, and inclusion are attributes of the divine nature. They are the pattern of our existence and found naturally in all of creation. So, we can ignore and work against DEI or we can accept what really is. We can embrace God, or work against God. Our Genesis reading makes it abundantly clear that humans have been created in the image of God. What a gift! We are the image of God in the world, the imago Dei. The imago DEI.² On this Trinity Sunday we pray together, “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with” us all evermore. Amen.

What good is a gift if we don’t know it’s ours or what to do with it? On Easter night, Jesus says to his disciples, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you. Receive the Holy Spirit.” Sending implies movement. And yet, 50 days later, they’re still in the same room waiting for further instructions. While we’re dealing with different authors – John in the Gospel vs. Luke in Acts, the question remains: When will the Spirit finally catch fire in them and turn these followers into leaders? More to the point, when will it catch fire in us?

I’m asking on behalf of Charlie, Emma, Logan, and Miles – four spirited children who were baptized earlier this morning. They want to know what difference it makes to be “sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.” Or if they’re not asking that question yet – they will. Yesterday at baptism prep, I talked with them (and their parents and godparents) about the Holy Spirit – how it rides the invisible wind like a dove and comes to us whenever we need strength or power. We can’t see it directly, but we can know that it’s there. We see what it creates, how it fires us up and lights up the world.

The Spirit of God shows up throughout the Hebrew Bible. In our reading from Numbers, for instance, the spirit rests on people – but not in ways we can manage or control. It blows where it will, whether we’re outside the tent with Moses where we’re supposed to be or we missed the memo and are still inside the camp. God’s Spirit won’t stay in the channels we create for it, as helpful and holy as those channels may be. The Spirit is generous and playful. Likewise, in today’s psalm, God’s spirit is like an artist having fun – filling the earth with creatures, making Leviathan, that ancient sea monster, for the sport of it. And as for the Spirit in Joel (as quoted in Acts), it pours itself out on all flesh. It doesn’t discriminate by age or gender; it makes the young see visions and the old dream dreams. The Spirit of God is subversive, it’s creative, and it is radically inclusive; and it will not rest until we respond in kind.

Fast forward to Pentecost. The calm breath of Jesus in a closed room becomes a mighty wind that pushes the disciples out into the open air. It might be hard for us to picture what “divided tongues, as of fire” resting on them looks like, but it wasn’t for our 1^st century audience. They saw it every day on the coin of the realm; a tongue of fire appeared above Caesar’s head on each coin, asserting his power as a son of the divine. Here the Spirit subverts that definition; now, real power rests on each of us. The Spirit gives us the power to speak truth when before we were silent; it gives us the power to lead when before we were content to follow. The Spirit is how we know that we are part of something bigger than those who look and sound like us. The Spirit makes us part of a covenant community whose loyalty transcends national boundaries, that can’t be limited to a single language or class or culture. The Spirit gives us the world.

So then, how do we know the Spirit when we see it? How do we know the gift is ours – or what to do with it? God’s Spirit shows up differently in each of us. See where you find yourself in what follows. Some might find it in a fiery passion for justice; for others, it might be in your clearheaded calm when the rest of the world is raging. We don’t have to choose one or the other as more valuable; we need both. We might find the Spirit in our knowledge born of dedicated study or in the wisdom wrought from hard-won experience. Our community needs both. For some of you, the gift of a rock-solid faith is what brings you to the table; for others, it’s your presence that somehow invites healing in those who are broken around you. Some easily discern what’s helpful or harmful and make decisions quickly; others of us can hold the space with patience while we wait for the community’s wisdom to emerge. Some have artistic gifts that can turn ideas into images and images into life; others’ playfulness and boundless energy point us to the One who created us for both.

The gifts are different, and they can change in us over time, but they’re all needed and they all require power. What’s fascinating to me is that God is the source of our dissimilarity. There is no one model we’re meant to conform to. This is good news for Charlie, Emma, Logan, Miles and all the rest of us who are baptized into the body of Christ. They don’t need to know everything to be faithful, and neither do we. They don’t need to have every skill or talent to be of use, and neither do we. At the same time though, they each have a unique power to act in this world, and so do we. When we’re sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism, we are entrusted with a power that is subversive, creative, and radically inclusive – and at the same time, uniquely ours to use or to waste. That’s the difference that baptism makes, or at least one way that it shapes our lives – no matter how much time we have. Baptism names and celebrates the gifts that are already ours. There is a role that won’t be played in the universe unless we play it, unless we let the divine spark within us catch fire. In the Name of the One who has given us the Spirit and who can’t wait to see what we do with it together, Amen.