Jesus sends out messengers, but he doesn’t give them weapons. He sends them out like lambs among wolves. Not warriors. Not watchdogs. Not even shepherds—who might at least carry a heavy stick. Lambs. Lambs in the midst of wolves.

It’s not an image to build much confidence. Lambs are fragile, dependent. Cute and fluffy, perhaps—but seldom fierce. And yet this is how Jesus commissions his followers for their first important task. Not with swords or talking points or strategy. But with vulnerability.

Stuff. Most of us have too much of it.

That’s a literal reality— But it’s also a metaphor.

Because it’s not just closets and drawers that get cluttered. It’s our calendars, our habits, our identities. We carry old roles, old expectations, old fears— Sometimes long past their usefulness.

“Don’t be afraid.” It’s the most repeated sentence in Scripture. Not “be good.” Not “love your neighbor.” Just this: Don’t be afraid.

Jesus doesn’t offer those words as mere comfort. He commands it—because he knows how quickly fear can take hold, and how thoroughly it can distort our souls.

Fear can make it hard to see God, hard to hear God’s call.

The Trinity can be hard to understand. But one thing the Trinity definitely is is a community. God is relationship itself: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, all part of a dance that our faith allows us to enter into. The Trinity reminds us that we were made for connection, for love, and for community.

When I hear the story of the Tower of Babel—the story of a people who sought uniformity and greatness, a people who were afraid of being scattered—I get it. They want predictability. Familiarity. They want to stay put, with people who speak like them and think as they do. The physical tower usually gets all the attention in the story of Babel, but it's not actually at the heart of the story. It's a story about people trying to protect themselves from the unknown.

And so God does what God so often does. God disrupts their plans.

Salvation isn’t just about what happens after we die. It’s about how we live. It’s about whether we stand with the imprisoned, the wounded, the afraid. It’s about whether we remember who we are—even in the dark.

Sometimes, liberation looks like walking away from what binds us. But sometimes it looks like staying—with open eyes and willing hearts—because someone else’s freedom depends on ours.

The Church was born at the margins—outside the gates, in hidden spaces, among people others overlooked. The Church didn’t start at the center of things.

We see that Church of the margins in today’s reading from the Book of Acts. Paul has a vision. A man from Macedonia (modern-day Greece) pleads, “Come and help us.” And so Paul travels for the first time to a region that we’d call Europe, to the city of Philippi.

Once there, Paul and his companions don’t start preaching in the town square. Instead, they go outside the city gate. To the river. To a quiet place of prayer. To a gathering of women.

And there they meet Lydia.

The familiar is comforting.

The familiar is comforting. And change is hard.

Human beings are wired to stick with what we know, to turn inward. It’s natural. It’s human.

But, unfortunately, sticking with the familiar isn’t very Christian.

The story of Christianity is the story of a widening circle. It’s a story of people following Jesus into the midst of change—Jesus, who himself broke every boundary.

In a time of peace, a new community of Jesus-followers grew in the seaside town of Joppa, forty miles from Jerusalem. One of the disciples was a woman named Tabitha. She didn’t do anything extraordinary. Well, not anything miraculous, anyway—at least as far as we know. She cared for people in need. She made clothes for them. Maybe she worked to feed the hungry. Maybe she sat with the sick and dying. Maybe she used what money she had to help others. Maybe she spent time in prayer. She was probably a widow, but that’s not entirely certain.

We really don’t know much about her. Joppa was an ordinary town in which ordinary people lived. And Tabitha was an ordinary woman.

Time and again the Church has found itself closer to Jesus, closer to the Holy Spirit, in the times when it’s been furthest from power as we usually understand power.

May we find in our own time the confidence that Peter and the others showed. May we, like the first apostles, be fearless witnesses to the work of God in the world.

Every year, we celebrate Easter with shouts of Alleluia, with fresh flowers, colorful clothes, and altogether too much chocolate. (Is there such a thing as too much chocolate?)

I love our Easter traditions. But our celebrations don’t look much like that first Easter Day, the day of Jesus’s resurrection. The ragtag group that followed Jesus during his years of ministry didn’t respond to his resurrection by singing “Hail thee festival day!” and shouting “Alleluia!” They didn’t rush out to buy a bouquet of lilies and a ham. They responded with confusion and terror and questions upon questions.

And who can blame them?

A member of St. Paul’s sent me the text of a blessing that fits well with this week, a good melding of the physical and the spiritual. A good reminder that the road to Easter is a hard road. Here’s how it goes:

“May God bless us with discomfort — discomfort at easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships, so that we may live deep within our hearts. May God bless us with anger — anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that we may work for justice, freedom, and peace. May God bless us with tears — tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, hunger, and war, so that we may reach out our hands to comfort them and turn their pain into joy. And may God bless us with foolishness — enough foolishness to believe that we can make a difference in this world, so that we can do what others claim cannot be done.”

The parable of the prodigal son is one of the richest passages in scripture. No matter how many times you’ve read it or listened to it, you can find something new. The parable is like a lens with many surfaces, a prism you can hold up to your eye and look through to find a new perspective—a new perspective on grace, on family, on sin, on forgiveness, on responsibility.

Repent! It’s a refrain of the Lenten season. We heard it again in today’s Gospel—and with a particularly stark warning. “Unless you repent, you will all perish.”

But what does it mean to repent?

What does it mean to live a life of faith?

Is faith mostly about believing certain propositions about God? Belief is part of faith, certainly. But if you think of faith as just an intellectual exercise, you’re missing out on a lot.

I have a ceramic sign in my office that says, “All shall be well.” It’s a quotation from Julian of Norwich. “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

I believe that’s true. But there’s an unspoken “someday” at the end of the phrase. All shall be well...in God’s time. All shall be well...in the final analysis. All shall be well...eventually. All shall be well...someday.

But maybe not immediately.

We need the reminders that Ash Wednesday gives us. We need to remember that we are mortal—and fallible. We need the disciplines of the season of Lent—maybe especially in a time like this.