Once upon a time there was a land of snow and cold. The winters were long and hard, the wind fierce and frigid. For months on end there was blizzard after blizzard. The snow piled up as high as the roofs so that the people could be trapped in their houses for weeks on end. This was hard on everyone, but it was especially hard for two young girls. Their names were Sophie and Nadia, and they were best friends.

Forgiveness can be hard. Sometimes very hard. So, Peter’s question is a good one. “If someone sins against me,” he asks Jesus, “how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Peter had clearly picked what he thought was an impossibly large number. And yet what is Jesus response? “Not seven times,” Jesus replies, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.” Essentially, Jesus was saying, “Don’t even ask. Just keep doing it.” This is how God forgives us, after all. Why should we expect to do any less for others? That’s the point of the parable that follows.

“Where two or more are gathered in my name, there I will be among them,” Jesus says in today’s reading from the Gospel of Matthew. Many of us know this quote very well. We hear it often in church. Sometime people say it when it’s time to start a service. Other times they say it when not as many people have shown up as they expected. “Well,” someone is sure to say at some point, “as Jesus says, ‘Wherever two or more are gathered in my name…’ Often they don’t even have to finish it. We all knows what comes next: Jesus will be among us.

Today Matthew comes to a critical point in his story. He’s already half way through. So far, Jesus has called his twelve disciples. He’s healed many people. He’s proclaimed an astonishing message of forgiveness, openness and peace to a crowd gathered around him during his sermon on the Mount. He’s even calmed the storm and walked on water. He’s been busy, in other words, but he really hasn’t said that much about himself. And meanwhile his followers have just tagged along after him and formed whatever conclusions they could about all this. Now, suddenly, probably late at night as they are all sitting around a fire after dinner, Jesus asks his followers what they think this all means. “Who do people say that I am?” he asks.

You know, over the years I’ve become convinced that most people know the right way to treat others. I know it does not always seem that way. Still, I believe it’s true. I believe this for two reasons. The first is that, when it comes to those we really care about, most of us do try to treat them well. Oh, I know, we often go off the track. We go off the track a lot of the time in fact. As the old song goes, “You always hurt the ones you love.” We get irritated and take it out on those closest to us. We build up resentments that can become very hard to heal, but still, we do try to heal them. We make amends. We go to marriage counselors. We may even go so far as to say we’re sorry. — Yes, it happens. — The fact is, most people are really doing their best. They are making a genuine effort to treat those they care about well. Just because they often miss the mark doesn’t mean they’re not trying.

Sooner or later we all need to learn to walk on water.

Perhaps that seems a strange thing to say. I mean, human beings really aren’t meant to walk on water, are they — unless the water has frozen, of course.

So, what do I mean when I say that sooner or later we all need to learn how to walk on water? I mean just this. I mean that sooner or later we need to learn how to put all our trust in God to help us with things that would be impossible for us without that help.

Let me ask you: have you ever noticed how there are some people who are just never satisfied? Jesus did. He makes that clear in today’s Gospel: Look how people respond to me in comparison with John the Baptist, he says. Here we are, about as different as two people can be. John the Baptist lived alone in the dessert. His clothes were ragged, and he ate practically nothing. As a result, most people avoided him. They thought he was crazy. They called him a demon. But then I come eating and drinking, and socializing with everyone — even those who most people saw as sinners — and how do people respond? They reject me, calling me a glutton and a drunkard. They miss the point entirely.

One of the things I was taught in seminary was to preach on the gospel as much as possible, and that’s what I generally do too. And yet sometimes there are other readings that I just can’t ignore. Take this week’s Old Testament passage, for example. Here is one of the darkest and most troubling stories in the entire bible. The Jews call it the “binding of Isaac.”

Let me tell you what it meant to be a tax collector in Jesus’ day. To begin, though, I’d like you to try to imagine a history that didn’t happen. I want you to imagine that WWII had ended with a German victory. The Nazi’s had won. They had not only overrun Europe, but invaded England, and crushed Russia. Then as a final blow, they had stormed the United States and defeated us too. It’s a horrible thought isn’t it, but stay with me a moment. Now decades later, the Nazis rule the world, and among all the other nightmares of that picture, the Nazi Empire is now draining the world dry, funneling all the money of those defeated countries back to Berlin in the form of taxes — taxes on everyone and everything. The thing is, they know that whoever actually collects those taxes will be hated, and they are hated enough already, so instead of collecting it themselves, the Nazis hire citizens from the conquered countries to do it, which means that in United States it’s Americans who do it.

Christianity primarily deals with the three main ways that God can come to us. First, God comes to us as an awesome mystery. This is God the Father, God the creator. We encounter this form of God, on a dark starry night, for example, when we look up at the sky and realize just how small we are and how vast the universe is. Next, God comes to us in the form of other people. This is the form of God that Jesus showed us, God the son. This is the God we meet whenever someone is kind to us or shows us love. It’s the form of God we try to give to others too. Finally, there’s the form of God that comes to us as a quiet little voice we hear whispering in our heart — the thing that some people call their conscience — the silent voice that lets us sense which way we should go or that lets us know when we’ve done something wrong.

“Look at them,” someone said. “Look at how all these people are acting. They must be drunk.”

That was Peter’s cue. That’s when he knew it was time for a sermon.

“You’re wrong,” he said holding up his hands. “I’m not drunk. None of us are. “It’s only nine in the morning after all.”

We make a terrible mistake whenever we begin to think of God as separate from us. We do this all the time, of course. We all do. Everyone. No one escapes. Each and every one of us occasionally falls into the trap of thinking of God as “up there” or “somewhere else,” or in “some far off place” — some place that we need to try to get to. We are here; God is there. Who of us doesn’t think that way at times? There’s only one problem with this. It’s wrong.…It’s wrong.

Today’s reading from the book of Acts gives the fullest and most complete account we have of what a sermon by Saint Paul looked like. It’s a beauty, too. It’s also a sermon that we badly need today. … So, where do we start? Well, why not start here Paul did? He began by noticing that that the Athenians had an altar to what they called “the Unknown God,” so we could start with the Unknown God too.

At the core of today’s readings is a very simple message. It’s this: follow Jesus and you will never get lost. You’ll be safe….. Have you ever been lost? By lost, I don’t mean just temporarily turned-around. No, I mean really lost. I mean lost as in all alone and thoroughly disoriented on a dark, deserted dead-end street with no one to ask and nowhere to turn — that kind of lost. Have you ever been lost like that? I have, and it’s scary — really scary.

Jesus’ appearance changed how we think about ourselves. And how did he do that? Well, let me explain by telling you about a dream I once had.I had this dream many years ago, and yet I never forgot it. It still haunts me. It still inspires me. As with Jesus’ Easter appearance, it’s changed how I think about everything, especially myself, but all others too.

Jesus came down into the pit of our rejection of God to join us in our pain, and loneliness, and sense of isolation, showing us — in part with his words and even more with his presence — that there is another option than the despair of rejecting God … showing us that we do not have live a life without purpose, or meaning or hope.

Until I was eleven, my family and I attended a church in Upland California, some 30 miles east of LA, called the Brethren in Christ. The Brethren in Christ is a small denomination. It began in Switzerland about 400 hundred years ago. Then, around the year 1700, most of its members relocated to Pennsylvania to escape persecution.

For a long time I’ve had a strange fantasy. I imagined a blind man coming up to me and shouting in anger, “You’ve been lying to me. All of you — all of you so-called sighted people. It’s all a lie. Color, light ¬— all the things you tell me you see. It’s all a lie.

If you think about it, the gospels are mostly stories of people who want something from Jesus. Today’s story is a little different. This time it’s Jesus who wants something.

Are you born again? Has anyone ever asked you that? It’s happened to me. Many times, in fact. It’s a question that pops up often . . .