This morning, we join Jesus and the Disciples at the Last Supper, during which, for five full chapters of John’s Gospel, Jesus is preparing and reassuring His friends for His imminent departure and death. In the midst of what must have been an anxious time for the Disciples, Jesus makes a mystifying promise to them… that He will not leave them, but will give them “another Advocate” who will be with them forever. And… whoever this “another Advocate” is, He will actually come to live in them… forever! Even 2,000 years on, we strain to fathom the wonder of all Jesus promised them (and us) on that evening before His death.

          So, especially on this Sunday when little Oliver Joseph is baptized and receives his own Gift of the Holy Spirit “Advocate”, Jesus gives us an ideal moment to reflect upon who God’s “another Advocate” is. Today is Olive’s new-birth day, and he will be “sealed and marked as Christ’s own forever” …  and everything will change for him.

Meg and I were on vacation out of the country last week. Before boarding our flight home, they checked our passports six times before we boarded our plane for the flight home. Six times, and three of those included scanning them electronically.

We had no problem with that. We appreciate the security assuring our safety and well-being. But six seemed a lot, and all of that to ensure that she was her and I was me, that we belonged on this flight and were cleared for international travel. And that we pose no threats to others’ safety.

I’ve been vetted way more deeply than that along the way to ordination and for each position I’ve held in the church, including being your rector. You need to have confidence that I didn’t just show up and take this job without education, training, experience, background checks and character references and on and on. Our identity matters.

Laura and I have always enjoyed watching nature at the lake where we live. We see alligators, otters, fish, ospreys, hawks, and Bald Eagles. We enjoy them all, however, our favorites are the ducks. Wood ducks especially. We even put cracked corn on the beach every day to entice them to come near. We have 5 wood duck boxes which are occupied at this time of year. While I’m pretty-much sure that it is pure luck, we occasionally catch the baby ducks plopping down from the box immediately after hatching.  Momma duck is down on the beach under the box encouraging the babies. Shortly after, we see the mother with her brood of babies in the shallow water at the edge of the weeds. While sitting on the screen porch on our upper deck last Sunday evening we saw 2 groups of 10 to 15 baby ducks with their mothers. One group on the neighbor’s beach and one on our beach. Before long they all came together, all mixed up together. Laura was concerned that they would get lost with the wrong mother. As we watched, each mother moved away into the water, each began calling and within seconds, the mixed-up bunch became two separate groups just like before. Each mother moved her babies away to a different weed patch.

The “Road to Emmaus” was also the gospel passage for last Wednesday and I’m going to hone in on some of the same points this morning. Hopefully, we will all gain from learning and refreshing our understanding.

Please turn to page 857 in the Book of Common Prayer. At the bottom of the page, you’ll find a Q & A on the Sacraments. The first question is, “What are the sacraments? The answer is, “The sacraments are outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace, given by Christ as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace.

This is, of course, from our catechism right in the prayer book. It is essentially what I memorized for my own confirmation and remains the teaching of our church. But what does it mean, really, “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace”?

One hundred years ago yesterday, the weather was balmy; lows in the mid-60s and highs in the mid-80s. Lake Wales was at the peak of the Florida Land Boom, with lots of people moving into the area. Traffic was terrible. Bok Tower was a set of blueprints. (They would begin construction on it the following year.)

It was an exciting day. The missionary community formed under the name Church of the Good Shepherd gathered to celebrate Easter Sunday. It was their very first service in their brand-new church building, their own worship space, which elevated them from “mission” to “parish” status. They had worked very hard for months to raise the funds and build that wooden church on this very spot.

Scripture lessons like the ones we just heard are the stories of Our God reaching down into the lives of His chosen people. His Grace, and Blessing to a people who truly didn’t understand the gift that they were receiving. A people that had done nothing to deserve this grace. God didn’t wait for a change of heart from His people; He made the first move.

Come let us imagine that night with Jesus and the disciples as they enter the upper room for their Passover meal. Jesus had sent the disciples ahead to make the preparations. They assumed it would be like the other Passover meals that they had shared with Him in the past. Little did they know, this Passover meal would be different, much different. It would be the last meal with Jesus before He went to the cross. 

Caesarea Maritima was a fabulous city built by Herod the Great – the Herod that was the King of Judea when Jesus was born. It – not Jerusalem – was the capital of the Roman province of Judea. It sits right on the beautiful Mediterranean Sea, and Herod built the first man-made harbor there. The trading of goods and flow of people all came through it.

It had a large outdoor theater, a hippodrome where they would have chariot races and gladiator fights, and numerous temples including one to Emperor Tiberius. And Herod built his palace on a promontory reaching out into the Mediterranean, with the sea on three sides. He also had a large freshwater swimming pool in the middle of it. Very impressive.

 Of all our modes of transportation, trains are unique: they go where the tracks take them, by design, not merely by schedule. The tracks set where they go. Freight trains, Amtrak, commuter railroads, subways, even streetcars go where they go. I’m not talking about schedules, planes and buses run on schedules. I mean the rails. They run on tracks. Those tracks are necessarily parallel. They go to the same places, but they remain distinct. And the cargo or the people go with them.

Jesus’s life has two distinct and related themes that run parallel, as straight and true as railroad tracks. One rail is the Kingdom of God. That is the culmination of God’s will. The other is the revelation of Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah, who came into the world to accomplish his Father’s will. That is the culmination of Jesus’s will, which is his own and is aligned perfectly with his Father’s will. The Kingdom and Jesus at the Father’s right hand go together, parallel, forever.

Many Christians have been raised by Christian parents in the church and have known God all of their lives, which is a truly beautiful blessing. Many Christians come to faith through an adult conversion experience, which can be sudden or it may grow over time. And many Christians fall somewhere in between, with some mix of belief, sense of the goodness of faith and moral grounding, and a growing understanding of its importance.

No matter who we are or where we fit into that complex stew, there comes a point of personal revelation that Jesus is Lord and we’ve got to respond to him.

The name John Newton may not ring much of a bell with many of us. But if I say that he wrote Amazing Grace, we recognize him as having written perhaps the most beloved Christian hymn of all time.

Sometimes a full moon looks so big, so close, that it seems as though we could reach out and touch it: so beautiful, so close. Sometimes it is actually closer, but mainly it’s the atmosphere acting like a magnifying glass. But of course, we cannot touch it.  But a few people have. The first, of course, was Neil Armstrong’s “One small step” from Apollo XI. 

The world watched and everyone remembers exactly where they were in that moment.  Those of us in central Florida during the 1960’s had a front row seat. We could see the launches. If you went to Titusville or Cocoa Beach, you could feel the whole world shake.  I remember my parents getting my brother and me out of bed to watch Armstrong walk on the moon on TV.  It was exciting and is generally regarded as the greatest human technological achievement of all time.

But it wasn’t just a moment.