I guess one of the reasons I'm an Episcopalian and not a Pentecostal is that I believe that the greatest miracles of our life together come not in ecstatic emotional experiences, but in the committed journey of life together where the transformation of peoples' lives take place-journeys that take some folks lives from bitterness to joy, from barely suppressed anger to openly expressed compassion, from cold chips on our shoulders to hearts warm enough to care for each new person yearning to belong in community.

Still sometimes I think, in our Episcopal lives, we sell God short when we allow our worship to become too sedate, or when we carry the gospel book out into the middle of the aisle with no anticipation that new life may be just about to explode from it into our midst.  Poet and writer Annie Dillard described her own frustration with the unexperienced potential in stories that are told from Scripture each Sunday.  In her book, Teaching a Stone to Talk, she wrote:  "The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning.  It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church.  Instead, we should all be wearing crash helmets.  Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews."

That's the sort of potential that our Easter Season Gospel lessons tell us stories about - not always stories full of drama and emotion, but transformative stories touching on the most intimate parts of our relationships with God and each other.    In the language and imagery of today's Gospel lesson from John, these people who were about to become the first Christians were still learning how to hear and follow the voice of Jesus.

In these early Christian communities we're watching as people learn to recognize and discern the call of God in their lives.  And in hearing their stories told we begin to learn how to do the same in our own day, when so many competing voices also call out to us - from the White House to Wall Street, from Madison Avenue to the iTunes store, offering -- selling things that play to our vanity and self-centeredness. John's Good Shepherd gospel offers a powerful story of Jesus, standing at the gate where thieves and bandits wish to break in to kill and destroy, calling us out into the green pastures of life, calling us to do nothing less than to live abundantly.   To be able to recognize and follow this voice of their shepherd is for the sheep, as dear as life itself.

The Book of Acts shows us again and again examples of early Christian communities praying together in a communal life, learning together how not to be driven by resentment and jealousy or covetousness of power, but by joy, abundance and love.  The early church in Acts was discovering itself to be a community full of the spiritual fruit of possibility, and risk-taking, and prophetic hospitality.

They were learning, too, that it's no picnic to commit to live and think and serve God as a community of faith together.  It isn't now, and it wasn't for the first members of the church, who faced the spiritual challenge of sharing their privacy, time, food and money, plus all the other pressures and demands of life together.  For to be a community of Common Prayer today, no less than at the church's beginnings, requires the same sort of patience and endless capacity for forgiveness.