How often do you find yourself saying, "I think I've met you before" to someone...and whether the response, is ‘yes you have and my name is'-- OR -- ‘no you haven't'-Well, I don't know about you, but it catches me off guard and I feel a bit embarrassed about it. Getting to know one another is at the center of our mission as a parish.  Inside and outside of church we're identified in multiple ways.

• We have name tags-and if you don't have one, we'll get you one;
• A lot of us carry photo ID's, debit cards, have internet home pages, frequent flyer miles;
• We're our salaries, the breed of our dog and location of season tickets or tattoos.

We have answers about who we are even while many things compete for our identity.  Weight, age, retirement portfolios-size matters, money matters, style matters, profit margins and winning matters.  Yadda, yadda, yadda...we've heard it all, even believed it at times, surely trusted our egos to pundits and peer pressure. 

But then, there comes a time when abruptly none of this matters-times we're stripped naked, pretenses laid waste, our lives left vulnerable as a newborn child in a crib born next to oxen and ass.  These are times we stand before God for whom "all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid."  Embarrassing times.  Heartbreaking times.  Times we'd like to forget, but can't.  Times we wish were over, but seem to last and last.

Such times can come with the death of a loved one-thrust upon us before we're ready, taking away sources of love, reverence and sheer joy that no one can replace.  Such times can come in separation or divorce from a beloved-one's most personal decisions and failures on public stage for others to watch, while our grief and neediness devastate family and friends. The sorts of times when we're laid raw, lives lewdly displayed, beyond consolation can be times that seem to bring out the worst in ourselves as well as those trying desperately to love us.  Times when nothing we'd counted on before matters. These are times of great risk as well as possibility...a holy time when we decide what's essential-- who we're willing to let God call us to be. These times put things into perspective...the altered viewpoint that allows us to see whom we are and ultimately, whose we are-from a vantage point we don't usually have.  This sort of perspective is the experience of transcendence, the view of forever through a crack in the fence around everyday life.

Perspective may also come in the form of another sort of experience, when an unexpected grace overtakes us...that gift of moment when the wind catches the sails of our soul and takes us flying across the water towards unimagined possibility-a job that we hadn't expected to land materializes, a friend we thought lost forever comes back and offers a hand of reconciliation.  Perspective means a new vision, a renewed infusion of life, hope and future.

When his first followers met Jesus-and listened to what he said and watched all the things he did among them, he gave them a dramatic shift in perspective.  They thought they knew the rules.  And then there was Jesus-who embodied the new rule-Jesus is the radically different perspective.