Come Holy Spirit:  Touch our minds and think with them, touch our lips and speak with them and touch our hearts and set them on fire with love for you.  AMEN. 

          Alleluia! Christ is risen!

          The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia! 

          ¡Aleluya! Cristo ha resucitado.

          ¡Es verdad! El Señor has resucitado. ¡Aleluya! 

Throughout the Diocese of San Diego, in this constellation of communities of hope and heart, these words will ring forth. They will be spoken in English and in Spanish. They will be sung in Vietnamese. They will be shouted in Arabic and Dinka with joyful ululations. There will even be replies in the Karen dialect of Burma. The people of God in our faith communities join with those around the planet in a symphony of difference that blends to a harmonic unity in our Easter accord. 

We gather this day, in this place as a people, who especially have a sense of resurrection and new life. Today, you the people of St. John’s Episcopal Church return to worship in your historic church building. You are joined by your brothers and sisters from around our diocese. We are here with you because we are aware that you have experienced much travail. Indeed, you know Good Friday. On Easter, your presence here is an outward and visible sign of new life. Possibility and hope for the future is very much present. 

And yet on this Easter, we also must note that while we rejoice at our return, others have experienced loss. Indeed, our celebrating this day is preceded by a long season of contending where some with whom we previously raise shouts of Alleluia now feel as though they cannot be with us. As your bishop, this remains an abiding sorrow for me and I suspect for you. Probably at some level it is for them as well.  

My hope had been that through the miracles that God is continually doing for God’s people that on this day those who left our fellowship and you could be brought back together in an even more powerful Easter proclamation. That would be an absolutely amazing Easter witness. Yet that Easter witness did not get enfleshed today. I think it is what Jesus would want and so for that reason, I would like to imagine that has indeed happened. And that rather than preaching to the proverbial choir, I would like to pretend to preach to those who left and have not returned and to you who have remained. And in my imagining, this is what I would say. 

Welcome home; welcome home to each other’s hearts. Welcome home to the brotherhood/sisterhood ordained by God. We are a people of one gospel. We may at times think we believe different things because we use what amounts to different languages. But we all believe in Jesus. We all try in our awkward and imperfect ways to follow him. We believe that God looked upon the world he created and saw that it was marred and broken. God set out to redeem that world, first through the law, then the prophets, and in the fullness of time by sending his Son Jesus Christ to live among us. We believe in Jesus. We believe that he lived as one of us yet was God among us. We believe that through his death and resurrection he opened the way of new life for us. In our table fellowship, we witness to this. Our memorial acclamation, "Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again," is the air we breathe. There are things that we cannot agree on but we agree on Jesus and his saving love. 

Our Lenten fast has ended. Let us now begin a new thing: a fast on judging and a feast of loving. We will leave the judging to God who seems to have a greater capacity for charity than we can ever match. And we will try to capture God’s capacity for loving which is as unlimited as eternity. That is what I think I would preach if we were all gathered together. 

But since that day is not today, we need to remember that we have work to do. It is a work of prayer that the people of God can find unity in Jesus, the unity that he prayed for in John’s gospel, that we “may all be one.” We have work to do in being clear that we are a people who follow Jesus; that our work is to serve the poor for whom he had particular concern.  We have work to do in making our Eucharist be one where all are welcome at the table of Jesus, just as he welcomed tax collectors and sinners. We have work to do. 

To do this work, we must claim to be an Easter people. We must be a bold people willing to risk. We need to risk offering our love, our relationship, our home, and God’s altar.We must risk extending ourselves both to heal the church where it is broken and to serve those at risk in the world. There is a story that I heard a couple of years ago that might paint a picture of what that risk will look like and the fruits that it just might bear. 

It is from 15th century Dublin. Two clans were locked in biter conflict, the Ormonds and the Kildares.There was a lot of violent killing and things came to a head when the leaders of the Ormond clan locked themselves inside the chapter house of St. Patrick’s Cathedral to escape slaughter. For many weeks the Kildare clan waited outside with their swords at ready. A siege had begun. But one day something amazing happened. The Earl of Kildare had a moment of grace and clarity, and said to himself, “This is foolish. We are two families living in the same land and worshiping the same God.” So he walked up to the chapter house, and called for them to come in peace and to be reconciled. There was no response. What happened next has gone down in Irish history. With his sword, he gouged a hole through the wood of the great door. On the other side were men with their swords, yet he thrust his hand and his arm through the door. And his hand was grasped by the hand of the Earl of Ormond. They shook hands, the door was opened and the feud was over. 

We are to be those willing to extend our hands and risk ourselves in uncomfortable places. Our hands will extend to those who are different. The hands we will grasp will be hands worn by poverty. They will be hands shaking with addiction. They will be hands of a prisoner or an undocumented worker. They will be hands in a food line, at a deathbed, or across a deep political divide. And they will also be the hands of those who once were here with us but now worship the same Jesus in a different place, down the road. 

This is who we are as a people of God. To be sure, we are a work in progress, of becoming more like Jesus. Our posture is summed up in a quotation whose citation I have lost:  “there are no ordinary people.  You have never talked to a mere mortal…but it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit…Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.” And so we must extend ourselves in the work of an Easter people who trust Jesus and believe in the powers of resurrection. For it is ultimately in how we look and move towards the other that we learn to be like Jesus and teach those whose hands we clasp the glory and beauty of resurrected life. 

We are a people born anew by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We have work to do so let’s get started.