God is Known to Us
St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church, Owings Mills MD
May 10, 2026
Year A: The Sixth Sunday of Easter
Acts 17:22-31
Psalm 66:7-18
1 Peter 3:13-22
John 14:15-21
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!
Why, yes, it is still Easter. How could you tell?
It’s still Easter – it’s the Sixth Sunday of Easter.
And in today’s gospel lesson we pick up right where we left off last week. Jesus is gathered with his friends at the Last Supper.
And as time grows short, Jesus reassures his friends that he’s not abandoning them – Jesus does not abandon us – we will not be orphaned because God will send us the Holy Spirit.
So, yes, it’s still Easter, but today we begin to look ahead to the great feast of Pentecost which we will celebrate in two weeks.
Today we begin to turn our attention to the gift of the Holy Spirit.
So, I’ve been thinking more than usual about the Holy Spirit – how the Holy Spirit has guided my life, how the Spirit has nudged me in the right direction, leading me to people and places that I could have never imagined or discovered on my own.
I’ve been thinking about the Holy Spirit.
And I know this is a leap, so stay with me, but I’ve also been thinking back fifty years, back to America’s Bicentennial.
Maybe some of you saw the story in the New York Times about the historian Jesse Lemisch, who, in 1976, had the foresight to collect as much Bicentennial memorabilia as he could – not the official items, not, you know, things like the decorative plates sold by the Franklin Mint – not the fancy stuff, but the items that most people probably barely noticed and just threw away: straw wrappers, cookie boxes, toilet paper packaging, diaper bags, popcorn buckets, TV Guide covers, and lots and lots of other things – what the Times referred to as “schlock.”
Reading the article and looking at the pictures of all that stuff brought back my own memories of the Bicentennial.
In 1976, I was nine years old and I was a very dedicated stamp collector, and I remember adding each of the Bicentennial stamps to my collection, all those little images commemorating the battles and the heroes of that time. It was, by the way, a great way to learn a lot of history.
On top that, as you may have heard, my family lived in Jersey City, which is just across the Hudson River from New York City, and I vividly remember all of us going to the waterfront to watch the parade of tall ships sail into the harbor.
All very cool.
Now, for a number of reasons, I don’t think there’s quite the same excitement about this year’s 250th anniversary, but there is always a lot of interest in the group of men usually referred to as the “Founding Fathers” – Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, and the rest.
They were complex and flawed people who did extraordinary things, and they’ve kept historians and biographers quite busy for a couple of centuries.
And you may remember from your US History classes that most of these men were officially Christian, but many of them could also be described as “Deists.”
They believed in God, they believed that God had created and ordered the universe – but they also believed that God had little or nothing to do with creation, little or nothing to do with us.
In this view, God is often described as a kind of clock-maker – God builds this most intricate mechanism, sets this vast universal clock in motion, and then that’s it.
And, of course, in this view, the clock never knows its maker.
The “founders” were also great admirers of the Ancient Greeks. They borrowed ancient Greek ideas about government, they copied their architecture, as we can plainly see in Washington DC and lots of other places.
So, presumably the “founders” would have loved to visit ancient Athens and probably they would have really appreciated an altar there dedicated “to an unknown God,” because that was their idea of God – distant and unknowable.
Well, as we heard in today’s first lesson from the Acts of the Apostles, St. Paul did visit Athens and when he saw an altar dedicated “to an unknown God,” he didn’t admire it but he saw it as a sign that these Greeks had an intuition that there was a God they did not know, not an idol of stone or metal, but a God who created and sustains everything.
And Paul had the best news for these Greeks: this God wants to be known – this God finds ways to be known by us.
Now, with our little brains and small hearts, we can’t perfectly know the God who is the Source, the Ground, of everything. And yet,
God is known to us in creation itself.
God is known to us through God’s Law and the prophets.
And, most of all, God is known to us in and through Jesus.
Some of you may know that Thomas Jefferson took it upon himself to edit the New Testament. He cut out all the miracle stories, everything that might be described as supernatural, and in his cut-up bible, Jefferson presented Jesus as a great teacher of wisdom and ethics.
Now, no doubt, Jesus was a great teacher of wisdom and ethics, but if that’s all that he was, then the church would just be a historical association or a scholarly society getting together for weekly meetings to study this interesting man from the past, like we might gather to study Plato or Aristotle or even Jefferson himself.
But that’s not what the church is.
We know God, not just because of the historical figure Jesus of Nazareth, but because of the Risen Christ who is alive, here with us today.
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!
And that living presence of Christ is the Holy Spirit – the Holy Spirit who we’ll celebrate in a big way two weeks from now, the Holy Spirit who is always present with us, especially when we gather together.
As is often the case, I felt the Holy Spirit present at our Wednesday service, especially during bible study.
Last week, we talked a lot about the Holy Spirit, and some parishioners shared beautiful and powerful stories of how they had experienced the Spirit in their lives.
Those are not my stories to tell – but maybe some time we’ll offer an opportunity for more of us to tell our Holy Spirit stories.
But, you know last Sunday I stood here for my birthday blessing – and, although this birthday is not a milestone birthday – it’s the birthday before a milestone birthday – it’s gotten me thinking about my story – how did I get from that stamp collecting boy in Jersey City to who and where I am now?
And, as I reflect on that journey, I can think of a few times when I’m sure the Holy Spirit was especially hard at work, nudging me, making God known to me.
One was when a teacher colleague invited me to come to her church “sometime.”
That’s a good story, but it’s a story that most of you have already heard!
But another time was about six years ago when Sue and I were thinking about where we might go next, looking for a different challenge, another adventure.
And when I came up with Baltimore, honestly, I was really thinking about Baltimore City (I’m not sure I even knew there was such a thing as Baltimore County!)
And when I made some inquiries, the Diocese of Maryland let me know there were at that time three churches looking for a rector – one in the west, one in the east, and one in a place called Owings Mills.
At first, I thought none of those seemed quite right for me, and since I was in no rush to go anywhere, I just sort of set aside Baltimore.
Maybe later.
But then, there was kind of like a spiritual soft tapping at the back of my head, a whisper telling me to look again, to reflect more carefully about this church called St. Thomas’ – and, well, after a while, I finally told Sue that I thought I should explore this opportunity and see where it might lead…
Today we begin to look ahead to Pentecost.
We turn our attention to the Holy Spirit, the living presence of Christ, never abandoning us, always accompanying us, sustaining us, nudging us in the right direction.
God is not distant and unknown.
Thanks to the Holy Spirit, God is known to us.
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!
Amen.
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