A few years ago, at my former parish, we had a Sunday school presentation in which each of the kids was to recite a verse of Scripture. On little guy came up and just stood there, shuffling his feet and looking very uncomfortable; he just couldn’t remember his line… His mother was in the front row to prompt him. She gestured and formed the words silently with her lips, but it did not help. Her son’s memory was blank. Finally, she leaned forward and whispered the cue, “I am the light of the world.” The child beamed and with great feeling and a loud clear voice said, “My mother is the light of the world.”
Today, we have the happy coincidence of celebrating Mother’s Day and contemplating another of Jesus famous “I am” statements: “I am the good shepherd.” I believe that this coincidence can help us to understand this famous metaphor. Last Monday was the feast of Julian of Norwich, the early 15th Century mystic who was given, and recorded, a series of “divine shewings.” In her text, The Revelations of Divine Love, published in modern translation under the title Showings, she wrote this:
The human mother will suckle her child with her own milk, but our beloved Mother, Jesus, feeds us with himself, and with most tender courtesy, does it by means of the Blessed Sacrament, the precious food of all true life.[1]
A clergy person of my acquaintance, following Julian’s vision of Jesus as our “beloved mother,” recast today’s Gospel lesson in terms of motherhood, rather than shepherding.
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin , an 18th century French politician once said, “Tell me what kind of food you eat, and I will tell you what you what kind of man are.”
In today’s Gospel lesson we heard, as we always hear on the Second Sunday of Easter Season, the story of “doubting Thomas.” What is striking about the Thomas’s demand … “unless I see” … is that our Lord accepts and encourages it … “Reach out your hand.”
Easter is a joke. Amen.
Today, as I write this, is Trinity Sunday 2020, but my imagination this morning is not caught up by the Lectionary gospel lesson of the day, the last mountain-top experience of the Eleven when, just before his Ascension, Jesus gives them the Great Commission.
With churches suspending public worship out of concern for the contagion of Covid-19, the noval coronavirus, we Episcopalians (and many others) are prevented from receiving Holy Communion. An ancient practice of the Church in such circumstances, for there have always been those who, for whatever reason, are unable to take the Sacrament, is to make an act of “spiritual communion.” 
Today marks the beginning of the season we call “Lent,” an old English word which refers to the springtime lengthening of the days. What is this season all about, these forty days (not counting Sundays) during which we are to be, in some way, doing what a hymn attributed to St. Gregory the Great says: “Keep[ing] vigil with our heavenly lord in his temptation and his fast?”
A Buddhist tells this story:
“In the Name of God the Broken-Hearted. Amen.”
In the beginning, God said . . . and there is creation.
