In this past Friday's Washington Post, a column by Michael Gerson entitled, "Reasons for Good Friday," reviews the new book by Timothy Keller entitled simply, The Reasons for God.  Gerson writes that Keller is the pastor of a 5,000-member congregation in Manhattan-which includes intentional outreach to 20 and 30 year olds as one of her missions...where on any given Sunday a Republican speechwriter may be sitting next to a songwriter for Madonna.  Many of Keller's congregation are self-described as deeply skeptical of the religious right, untroubled by evolution and begin their complex spiritual journeys with serious doubts.  Reading about Keller's congregation reminded me a lot of St. Thomas' Parish (well, except for the "songwriter for Madonna" part).   We're a congregation of both members who have loved this place and worshipped here for years as well as a place filling up with those seeking spiritual community, some for the very first time.   Keller himself describes members of his congregation as often arriving at the doors of the church having a deep morality but no idea why.  Keller's congregation, like our own, is caught in the generative tension between having had life experiences that have taught just how exclusive and intolerant traditional forms of faith can be, while at the same time having an abiding and growing conviction that God is the only thing that can help us make sense of what we love. 

At St. Thomas' Parish we strive to be not only a place where you can bring your skepticism and doubt, where your complex spiritual journeys can bring you here already longing for a deep morality, even if you don't yet have any idea where that's come from or where it's leading. Our community is also a place where you can get to know why we believe that Jesus shows us the greatest love that God has ever mustered, and how God's gift of love to us in Christ can form the foundation of a love that we can return not just to God, but to one another in acts of inclusiveness that witness to hospitality that is radical, even prophetic, in its scope and depth.  In the Holy Eucharist that is the center of our worship life at St. Thomas' Parish, we discover again and again that Jesus does not simply beckon us from across thousands of years to "follow him," to admire his moral and spiritual example, to look up to him as a mythical character, or as the hero of merely symbolic stories of faith. In the bread and wine of communion we affirm the ongoing divine presence among us, binding us to God who has shared life as we experience it, as person, as flesh, and who binds us in Holy Communion to one another in life-changing, hopefully deepening interrelationships.

From the very start, the Good News that "Christ is Risen" calls people into relationship with one another, into community.  Jesus did not call Mary alone, but in the company of the other two "Spice Girls."  And they in turn told the eleven disciples.  And before long even the community itself wasn't large enough to contain the movement that had begun with an empty tomb on the first Easter Morning.   In the community of the church, gathered by God's radical hospitality around a table that turns no one away, we discover ourselves to be part of a movement of prophetic hospitality that reaches out to others, as did Jesus, without qualification, no matter what.

The lesson of Holy Week, and today the lesson of Easter, is that Jesus offered himself in love, so that we could love God back, precisely by loving others, without reserve, starting here in the company of friends and strangers called the church.  "Christ is Risen," means that even here in Washington, DC, we are being bound together in the community of Christ's Body by a love far larger than we're capable of alone.  "Christ is Risen," means that even in a city that often seems to epitomize-- nationally and internationally-- incivility, arrogance and entitlement, the church is capable of witnessing to a loving, compassionate, even counter-cultural alternative.