It’s so good to be home after a whirlwind trip to Virginia last weekend. I can’t remember a time when I was more grateful to see Lake Pontchartrain come into view out an airplane window. There is surely nothing more powerful in life than knowing where your people are, knowing where you are loved and held just as you are, knowing you are fully at home in your life. I carried you all with me on my trip to Richmond. I didn’t know what in the world I would say to a divided room of heartbroken and angry and grieving people who are saying goodbye to the seminary they have called home for 30 years. I knew I was called to speak the truth and to speak the truth in love because that’s what we do here at St. Charles. For our almost six years together we have been actively figuring out how we tell the truth about our lives as a community of love.

I don’t say that to suggest anyone who stood in this pulpit before me didn’t value love or truth-telling. I say that as awareness of my unique calling and mindful of this particular moment in which we are being church together. We are called to loving boldness and loving kindness in 2019 in a new and dynamic way. And so when I thought of the 21 students graduating from the Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond, some already serving as pastors, others looking for new work in churches, and others committed to the greater work of the church in the world, I knew my role was to invite them to join me in this particular moment to this ancient work of love. This is what we are about as people who follow the Way of Christ. 

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President Bridges, Faculty, Staff, Trustees, Alumni, Friends and Families, newly transferred seminarians, and 2019 Graduates, it is an honor to be here with you on this marking day. This morning we celebrate the accomplishments of these 21 students and their commitment to service in the church and in the world. Today we also hold some sacred space for what has been and what will be. 

We are all over the map when it comes to our thoughts and feelings today, and I find it’s a whole lot better to name that and make some space for it—set a place at the table for these complexities—than it is to pretend everything is okay. Different than most any other commencement across the country this May, we are standing in the middle of all kinds of transition moments right now. Some of us right here in this room and watching online from a private spot are angry, many are heartsick, others are calmly stating what must be. The pioneers among us want to blaze a new trail and show us all the possibilities of an innovative and vibrant future. I suspect some folks really want to keep holding a road map that might take us back to what was familiar and good for a time. And then there are the ones holding the burial shrouds who are prepared to bless an ending. 

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We’re sheep this morning. Let’s give into this image with all of its offense and imperfection. Release the connotation of mindlessness. Release the concern about odor. Release the implication of powerlessness. Just be the sheep. We are the sheep being guided from place to place by a wild shepherd who doesn’t follow the rules of polite society. He doesn’t honor property lines or acknowledge land ownership. He’s taking his sheep to the green pasture and guiding them to the still waters because it is what the sheep need and deserve. And we’re sheep, after all, so we don’t know that property lines and land ownership exist, right? We know the shepherd’s voice. We know this pasture is a good one. We’re delighted to find a stream for drinking some water and taking a nap. When we are with the shepherd and our flock, we are safe and at home. Our minds are wherever our bodies are. We are in the moment, in that place, and our thoughts do not wander to the next task or worry about lack. As long as we are tuned into the shepherd’s voice, we have everything we need. 

This is God, scripture tells us. The Lord is my shepherd. I would gather you under my wings like a mother hen. I am the Light of the world. The Word was with God and the Word was God. A devouring fire. A fountain of living water. The true vine. The great physician. Cosmic ruler and king of all. Wind. Breath. Hovering Spirit. Can you feel the pace of scripture? Almost running between metaphors. Not frantic and breathless but delighted and soaring like a child chasing a butterfly. God is shepherd! God is king! God is mother! God is Light! God is Wind! God is Vine! Scripture is setting a table before us with a feast of images to satisfy our appetite for more of the Divine. 

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I don't feel like I really have a right to this grief, certainly not the way her husband and family and closest friends do, but I am crushed. Other than the time spent reading her words, I only spent a weekend with Rachel Held Evans in real life. She stayed on the other side of our double on Panola Street when she came to New Orleans back in 2015; pregnant with her first child. We drove around and chatted, ate good food, and she led our first Mabel Palmer Lectures here at St. Charles on a Saturday then preached on Sunday--joining her voice to the long line of fine folks who have preached in this pulpit. 

Time with her was easy. Like we'd been friends for years. We had Alabama football and our Southern, Christ-haunted landscape in common. She put everyone at ease and then allowed the expansiveness of her presence and the gentleness of her Southern accent to make the space she needed to untangle the old barbed wire of conservative evangelical theology that was choking the life out of so many of us. She held that space wide open for thousands of us.

It was three weeks ago tonight that I began to worry alongside so many others. She was hospitalized on Palm Sunday and shortly after was placed in a medically induced coma for all kinds of reasons the general public will likely never know. An infant daughter and three-year-old son. A loving, kind, gentle husband. Thirty-seven-years-old. The cruel, arbitrariness of sudden loss in one so young and so vital is nearly impossible to process. I so wanted her to wake up. I wanted a miracle. I wanted her to wipe the sleep from her eyes and mother her two little ones. I am heartbroken, even though I mostly knew her through her written words.

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Mrs. Joseph is the first one I can remember, though I’m sure there were others. My recollections of her are splashed with primary tempera paint in old orange juice cans, dressed in a 1970s pastel, poly-blend suit, soft with laughter, and dancing to Ella Jenkins “Play Your Instruments and Make a Pretty Sound” as we moved with rhythm sticks and castanets. I didn’t know how radical Mrs. Joseph was for believing in the power of play and the full humanity of all children. I didn’t know she was a pioneer in racial equity before we had language for such a concept. At 4- and 5-years-old, I also didn’t know Ella Jenkins was a force of nature, graduating with a BA in Sociology in 1951! A woman! Of color! in 1951! And she learned interfaith multiculturalism from her Jewish roommates. And cherished musical diversity learned through Puerto Rican and Cuban friends. Then the beats she learned and the messages she inherited were infused in that music that my little body moved to with those rhythm sticks and castanets. Mrs. Joseph was telling us stories at the cellular level with music and art and play—telling us a story of how big and high and wide the love of God is.

Mrs. Conley taught us bible stories and made a birthday cake for Jesus. I remember going to her house for that Christmas party more than I remember almost anything else. Being in her personal space. She was an actual woman! With a real house! And a kitchen! And she didn’t just live at the church for Sunday School! If you asked me how old she was when I was an 8-yr-old in her Sunday School class, I would have surely guessed she was 97 or 103. Yesterday, my mother confirmed she was actually no more than 80—born around 1905. I don’t recall how the structure of her classes went, but I remember her gathering us in a semi-circle and telling us stories. She told us the stories of Jesus healing the sick and feeding the poor. The ones of him getting in trouble for loving tax collectors and sex workers and not casting stones in bogus trials with trumped up charges. She had us memorize verses of sacred text about loving our neighbors as we loved ourselves. And I took her seriously because why would you NOT?!

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This morning we step onto the bridge of Holy Week that carries us from Lent into Easter. Culturally and socially, this is our initiation into Spring. Even if temps have already swelled into the mid-80s in recent days, and crawfish boils abound, it is the next week that officially welcomes linen and seersucker and little girls in white shoes. It feels good to have the palm branches waving and the music of worship returning to a more celebratory pace. What does the invitation of this week offer you? Perhaps we give ourselves to a little sacred imagination in reading today’s text and assure ourselves we would have been in the crowd yelling “Hosanna” for Jesus—we would have been ones who understood Jesus’ mission—we would have gotten it as he processed into Jerusalem. Or maybe, like me, you feel the pull of Spring and planting a summer garden and find yourself distracted by the pull of the ordinary with not quite enough patience for the extraordinary. If so, you know all too well how prone we really are to wander away from the palms and the passion.

In these last breaths of the Lenten season, we run the risk of letting go of the biblical story not just out of distraction but out of pure excitement for the cultural one. Enough with the introspection and self-denial or practices that draw us to our best. Let’s relax all of that and just live our lives already. Ah, but let’s resist the false dichotomy of that pull just a bit longer. Let’s give ourselves to this story for the week. Let’s hear the invitation to whole, integrated, purposeful lives. Let’s hold on just a little while longer.

We return to Luke this morning, where we have been anchored since Advent. And each time we’ve reached into Luke’s gospel, we have recalled the very particular time and place in which Jesus is born and living and preaching. Luke wants us to remember that Jesus was born when Quirinius is still Governor. Luke reminds us that Jesus is baptized in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar—when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea.

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