Episcopalians aren’t big on sin. I don’t mean we aren’t good at it, erring and straying like lost sheep…I mean we don’t put sin at the center of the way we pray or at the center of what we believe! We do make liturgical and pastoral decisions that reserve the center of our Episcopal identity for God’s love, mercy and compassion—the image in which we’ve been made. For The Episcopal Church, faith means learning to trust completely that deep down, at the heart of things, God’s way of loving us is unconquerable and indelible. Our Lenten theme of repentance is about turning again and again back toward God’s love, knowing God never turns away from us. Sin means wandering or intentionally turning away from our home in the household of God. Repentance, as I said in my Ash Wednesday homily, means that no matter how far away we wander from our path towards God, we can always get back on track —there is always a way back home.

This is what Jesus meant, I think, when he told his followers to think of him as “the way”. For in our relationship with Jesus we’re shown the way back to our path towards God; and no one can find their way as long as they can’t find the road towards God. So Jesus told them, fear not, when you follow me, you’re back on the path, the path towards being fully human, towards being the person God made you to be.

With our pace of life and the multiplicity of secular distractions and seductions, it’s easy to live day to day with little or no thought about Jesus. His birth was so long ago that it’s hard to remember the miracle Christians claim happened in this particular human life—the miracle that in Jesus, we can see exactly what we as human beings are meant to be. In the person Jesus we can find the way, too, towards all that God longs to be for each one of us, no matter what we do, no matter how far we wander.

When we forget that, we tend to muddle along, a little mountaintop here and a valley of lament there, until one day we turn a corner and fall head first into the deepest despair that any crisis can carve into our souls. Although it might be better if we could simply stay right on track with our lives each ordinary day, we know life’s not like that. This is why the figure of Jesus is so central to Christian life and practice, because as Christians we believe that in turning towards Jesus, we discover not a historical figure in the past but a living presence in our lives. When we call out to Jesus, we’re turning towards God who’s already been here and known the life we live, who in coming as the human being Jesus, already knows our darkest fears, not because God is omniscient, but because Jesus has already been here, has already suffered and cried out. An older form of our Prayer of Confession in the Prayer Book described human sin and brokenness like this: “We have erred and strayed like lost sheep.” And so in turning back towards Jesus, Christians speak, too, of trusting in Jesus as the Good Shepherd, who wants not just to soothe the suffering of every member of God’s flock, but wants, too, to bring us back onto the path towards our fullest humanity, who desires always that no one of us remains lost, but that each one of us knows how to find the way back home.

Progressive Christians often feel ill at ease over the biblical language of lost and found, erring and returning, sin and repentance. Whatever words we use to speak of it, however, it remains crucial for us to proclaim the Good News of Lent: turn back, there is always a way back home to the household of our loving and forgiving God.