God Will Take Care of You

The Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year A

Sermon for April 26, 2026

Heavenly Father, help us to be aware of your presence in our hearts, in our minds, and in our midst. This we pray in Jesus' name, Amen. Please be seated.

What does it mean to be one of Christ's own forever?

Well, friends, I'm asking that question because it's one of our most core parts of our baptism service, which by the way, if y'all wanna follow along, please open your Books of Common Prayer to page 307.

When we get to the point of baptism, after we've listened to scripture, after we've examined the candidates, asked them to make promises and affirm their faith, this happens, and I'm going to start reading from the rubrics, which are those little italic parts that most people just skip over and don't pay attention to. But for those of us who have to actually do stuff, those rubrics really matter, and tell us a whole lot about what we're doing and why we're doing it.

So each candidate is presented by name to the celebrant, that's whoever is leading the service. That can be a bishop, that could be a priest. Theoretically, sometimes it's a deacon, it's not usually. Or that person can be presented to an assisting priest or to a deacon, who then immerses, or pours water upon, the candidate saying, “Person, I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” And all the people say, Amen.

Then the rubrics say, when this action has been completed for all candidates, the bishop or priest, at a place in full sight of the congregation, prays over them, saying. “Let us pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you that by water and the Holy Spirit, you have bestowed upon these your servants the forgiveness of sin and have raised them to the new life of grace. Sustain them, O Lord, in your Holy Spirit. Give them an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, a spirit to know and to love you, and the gift of joy and wonder in all your works. Amen.”

And then the bishop or priest places a hand on the person's head, marking on the forehead the sign of the cross, parentheses, using chrism if desired, and saying to each one, so and so, you are sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism, and marked as Christ's own forever. And then all the people say, Amen.

So liturgically, we do things the way we do things for reasons, usually very good reasons, sometimes silly reasons, but mostly good reasons. And those reasons have been collectively discerned over generations. We've come to find that there are certain best practices and we hold on to them collectively. For instance, after I'm done yapping at you, we're all going to stand up and we're going to say the Nicene Creed.

The reason why we say the Nicene Creed after the sermon is because the sermon is the most kind of contemporary interpretation of our faith. It's a reflection on our scripture or reflection on theology. And for that reason, sometimes sermons can make people really uncomfortable and feel a little unmoored, maybe even like there's been some controversy.

And so after the sermon, the preacher sits down for a minute and then we all stand back up. And we reaffirm the faith of our tradition, this collectively discerned thing that we've been handed down generation over generation, that's supposed to be this basic foundation.

That way, whatever Deacon Beck has said, that might be making you feel a little uncomfortable. We can say, well, well, okay. I might not agree with Deacon Beck about that. I might not be at a place yet where that interpretation makes sense to me. But this is what we hold in common. And this is what we can rest upon.

So, what does it mean to be sealed and marked as Christ's own forever?

Y'all forever is a really long time. Last week, I turned 36. I know, I know, I'm a baby. I get it. I get it. I was 17 years old when I had what I call an epiphany. That was 19 years ago, and that epiphany experience 19 years ago is more than half of my life now. And while I know, I'm a baby, 19 years is not actually that long. I'm not even old enough to drink by that standard, but it feels like a long time. Now, when you think about forever, that's a really long time.

So, I'm going to share with you a personal testimony, and I know that's not a thing that we feel super comfortable about in the Episcopal Church sometimes because it feels a little bit too evangelical-ish, but I want to share with you this personal testimony because I think it ties together our scripture and our tradition in a really beautiful way, and I'm not just saying that because it's mine.

So, I was baptized at age seven in the Episcopal Church. It was a decision that I made. I came from a family that was mostly Roman Catholic, but my father married someone who was not Roman Catholic, and my mother absolutely insisted that infant baptism was not happening to any child of hers. So, I started going to church with my dad when I was in elementary school, and I felt called to receive the Eucharist. And dad said, okay, cool. You're going to have to get baptized to do that, which means you need to pick a church.

We were going one Sunday to the Catholic Church on one side of the street, and then the next week we'd go to the Episcopal Church on the other side of the street. Back and forth, back and forth, because dad was working through some stuff. He said, well, you're going to have to pick one of the churches, so initially I said the Catholic Church, because the Catholic Church was prettier. And dad said, no, that's not a good reason, pick a church. So, okay, well, explain to me the differences. And he explained to me the differences as best he could.

And after learning about the differences, I decided that I felt more called to be an Episcopalian because the notion that there were ways that I could not serve God because of the body I was born with made no sense to me. So I chose to be baptized Episcopalian. And at that point, I was marked as Christ's own forever.

Now life changed, we moved, we stopped going to the Episcopal Church because that was too far of a drive. And then more life happened and it was between right around the time that 9-11 happened and the whole world started to feel real crazy. And I started hearing the Christians in my midst saying things that did not sound like Christ.

And so like a lot of tweens and teenagers, I got up and I left the church. And along that road, I encountered a whole lot of Christians trying to save me. But intuitively, even though I loved Jesus, I loved Jesus' teachings, I had been a good little Sunday school kid, I just knew that they were not speaking with my master's voice. Even though I wasn't quite sure if I believed all of the stuff, I knew that didn't sound like Christ. But even when I did not believe that I was one of Christ's own, looking back, I can tell that God was still guiding me along those right pathways.

Kind of turning me this way, turning me that way, getting me into the books that I needed to get into, getting me to meet the folks I needed to meet, getting me to talk with the folks I needed to talk to. I was still being made to lie down in green pastures where I would be fed.

Now, let me tell you about that epiphany, Epiphany.

So, I was 17 years old and I was a nerd. I participated in forensics. Do you all know what forensics is? I see a bunch of nodding heads. Good nerds, good Episcopalians. So, to folks who don't know, forensics is competitive public speaking. You can do either dramatic interpretation like readers theater, or you can do something more akin to debate, where you have all of these public address categories. And my public address category was oratory, which is also known as bore-atory, because it's an eight to ten minute memorized persuasive speech with no visual aids. It is you and eight to ten minutes of memorized stuff in your head trying to convince people of a thesis that you have.

The first year, I was arguing in favor of scientifically grounded sex ed rather than abstinence only sex ed. You can imagine that did not go over super well when I was at Invitational and more conservative towns, including my own. The next year, I argued in favor of same sex adoption, which again, you can imagine was a little controversial. So for my last year, I did a much less controversial topic because I didn't want the controversy of the topic to get in the way of my scoring: I got a little political and I gave a speech on diet pills and how diet pills were incredibly dangerous.

And with that, I ended up going to state finals and finals at state finals and I was the only kid from a public school who managed to do that. So, I was a big nerd is what I'm telling y'all.

At the end of our season, we would all go up to Mackinac Island and stay at the Grand Hotel and do an invitational up there that was hosted by the Michigan Speech Coaches Association. And we had completely different categories that we competed in. So I went from bore-atory to poetry slam.

And I was bad at it. Because I was so good at dialing in, yada, yada, yada, yada, that being more expressive and free flowing was just not a thing I was very good at. Which meant that I didn't make it very far in the competition. And I had the entire afternoon to do whatever I wanted to do on Mackinac Island.

So I wandered around.

And if you're familiar with the kind of central part of Mackinac Island where you've got that big lawn in front of the fort and along the side of the lawn on the west side, there's a road that will take you up to the fort and along there, there's a little white church. And wouldn't y'all know it's an Episcopal church. And y'all, I had not been in an Episcopal church for about 10 years at that point. But every time I walked past that church, I felt this unceasing urge to go into that church.

I couldn't tell you why it made absolutely no sense because I was absolutely certain that all Christians were jerks. I wanted nothing to do with the church. I wanted nothing to do with Christianity. Jesus was fine. Jesus was cool. I liked Jesus, but religion? Nah, I was fine being spiritual. But I really needed to walk into that church. Every time I walked past it, I wanted to go into that church.

So I finally sidled up and I looked at the sign where it said when the service was, because I knew, because my coaches were good Catholics, they made sure that there was plenty of time before we left on Sunday for kids to go to church if they wanted to. I knew that I would actually have time to go to church on Sunday morning, and that's the time I need to go. All right. So I have no church clothes. I have regular day clothes and I have prom dresses. Those are the two extremes I have. I'm not going to wear a prom dress to Sunday morning church.

So I wear my jeans and my t-shirt, and I go into this church, and the second I walk from the narthex into the sanctuary, I feel this weight lift off my shoulders. Then I sit down and I fumble my way through the service, doing the whole juggling of a BCP and a hymnal and a bulletin as one does. And then the preacher gets up. And this lay preacher, who was a guest preacher that Sunday, I found out later, preached an absolute barnstormer.

You have heard people say this. This is what Jesus says.

You've heard that the poor need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Jesus says, I was hungry and you fed me. You've heard people say that if someone attacks you, you need to fight them back. Jesus says, turn the other cheek and so on all the way down. And all of these things that I had been wrestling with unconsciously were being laid out before me. And I was hearing a person of authority in the church, speak prophetically and relevantly to the things ethically that I was wrestling with about our society and the world we live in. And thank God, thank God, thank God.

I was hearing the voice of Jesus. And I began to weep. And then after the liturgy of the word comes the liturgy of the table, and I go up and I receive the Eucharist for the first time in years. And I feel the real presence of Jesus in that moment. And I weep some more. And then some very nice church ladies in sweater sets and pearls invite me to coffee hour. In my jeans and my t-shirt and my, like, disheveled teenage nests. And they genuinely want to hear about who I am and why I'm there and what I'm about and what I'm into.

And they're treating me like a person worthy of knowing rather than just some scummy teenager that wandered in off the street. They treated me with dignity, like I was a welcome, uh, guest in their space. And after they shoved me full of as many cookies as they could, they sent me on my way.

So then I went back to the church and was welcomed in. This little church had just had a huge schism after Bishop Gene Robinson had been consecrated. And half of the members and three quarters of the money had gone down the street to form a different parish. And everybody who was left was really traumatized and struggling. And they definitely didn't have a youth program. They definitely didn't have any youth group for me to join. So the interim rector just went, all right, Beck. You can join the adult Bible study. And here, come on a Saturday and I'll teach you how to be a Eucharistic minister. And, oh, you want to volunteer? Cool. Well, we have a soup kitchen every Tuesday and you could probably make it after school.

So that's what I did. I served in the soup kitchen every Tuesday. I went to the adult Bible study, even though I was 17 years old. And what the heck did I know about the world? And I served on the altar with the priest. And I was formed, deeply formed out of that spiritual experience into a tradition that supported me and taught me what I needed to know to be grounded in the world.

And even after that, God kept leading me, sometimes more forcefully than others, because I can be kind of stubborn. But most of the time, I didn't even know that was what God was up to.

After my father died, I stopped going to church for a little while because the weight in my heart was too heavy. I was 21 years old and I just lost my best friend. But I showed up at the UMC in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on a Christmas. And I sang all of those Christmas songs with all of my heart. And a nice church lady turned around and went, you sing real good, honey. You need to meet our choir leader. And so she dragged me from the back of the church. I had done the good Episcopalian thing, and I sat all the way in the back and just did my thing. She dragged me all the way to the front of the church: “This is Matthew. You need to know Matthew.” And she goes, “Matthew, I got you a soprano. Real good soprano too.” Matthew went, “Well, we have choir practice on Sunday mornings at nine o'clock and then we have service at 10.” And I went, “Okay.”

And singing in that choir revived my soul. It helped me to re-access my faith emotionally at a time when I felt so dry and so broken. And it healed me. God led me in that moment to sit right behind a lady who would drag me kicking and screaming all the way up to go serve in a way that would feed me.

So then when I moved back to Michigan, I was spiritually ready to serve again.

God is deeply concerned with all of creation. Jesus' death and resurrection wasn't just for one people at one time and in one place. That liberation from the weight of the shackles of death and anything that separates us from God, that doesn't just matter for our individual lives. It didn't just matter for me.

But ours is a God who can create the whole universe and everything in it and still care deeply and particularly for each and every one of us. God was faithful to me even when I didn't know that's what I needed.

Trusting that our God is our faithful shepherd, that we shall not be in want, gives us the freedom to do the work of the kingdom, like we see modeled in Acts today. That peace of knowing God is with us in troubled times even when the shadow of death, of injustice, of turmoil. That gives us courage, comfort to keep going.

Being marked as one of Christ's own forever, doesn't mean not wrestling with your faith. Doesn't mean having all the answers. Definitely doesn't mean being perfect all the time. Again, there is a reason why we say the confession, y'all. We have the ability to come back to God over and over and over. What being marked as Christ's own forever means is that no matter where your journey of faith takes you, God will take care of you.

One of my favorite hymns is “God Will Take Care of You.” And the other day I was listening to a rendition of it by Aretha Franklin from her live album, “Amazing Grace, live at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church.” It's from 1971 when that was recorded. And in the middle of this beautiful hymn, she takes a little breakdown and she reads Psalm 23 before returning back to the words of the hymn.

And I'm going to take a moment because I can see y'all getting a little antsy. Gonna take a moment y'all. And I'd like to invite us to remember the words of that hymn because they mirror the language of our psalm.

Be not dismayed what e'er betide, God will take care of you.

Beneath his wings of love abide, God will take care of you.

This phrase, God will take care of you, occurs 23 times in this hymn. And I invite you to join with me here.

Those days of toil when heart doth fail, God will take care of you. 

When dangers fierce, your path assail, God will take care of you.

All you may need, he will provide, God will take care of you. 

Your need will be supplied, no matter what may be the test, God will take care of you.

Lean weary one upon his breast. God will take care of you through every day, they over all the way.

God will take care of you.

Amen.