Sermon: Lamb of God

There are moments in the life of the Church that feel less like events and more like thresholds, spaces where time slows, where heaven seems to press a little closer to earth, and where we are invited not just to remember the story of Christ, but to walk within it.

Holy Week at St. Columba’s Inverness, CA is one of those moments.

This year, I had the profound privilege of serving as Deacon for the full arc of the Triduum, from Palm Sunday through the first Alleluias of Easter morning. To step into that sacred rhythm alongside Father Vincent Pizzuto and this Beloved Community was not simply an opportunity to lead, but to be formed. It is no small thing to be entrusted with such holy work, and I remain deeply humbled by the love and trust this community has extended to me over these past two years.

St. Columba’s has become, in many ways, a spiritual home. Tucked along the edge of the continent in Northern California, overlooking Tomales Bay, this little corner of Inverness has been the ground on which so much of my own journey has unfolded. In my visits here and my ongoing relationship with this community, I have been accompanied as I completed my dissertation, was ordained to the diaconate, and began to find my voice, and my courage, as a priest-to-be. Here, I have learned that the contemplative life is not an abstraction, but something lived—together—in prayer, in beauty, in silence, and in love. As I have written elsewhere, our life with God deepens when prayer, silence, and companionship are woven into our shared life.

Holy Week itself is a labor of love in the truest sense. What appears seamless and sacred is, in reality, the fruit of months of preparation, of rehearsals, planning, quiet acts of service, and countless hands offering themselves behind the scenes. It was a joy to serve alongside acolytes, altar angels, the hospitality team, and so many others who poured themselves out so that this community might enter more deeply into the mystery of Christ’s passion and resurrection.

And alongside all of this, I had the gift of learning, hour by hour, next to a master of liturgy and creating and holding contemplative space for people. To walk with Father Vincent is to glimpse a life wholly given over to Christ and to his people. It is, for me, a living picture of the kind of priest I hope to become.

Of course, grace made space for joy beyond the liturgy as well, walking the trails, playing along the shoreline, sharing meals that lingered long after the last bite. And then, at last, the bells rang, the Alleluias broke forth, and we found ourselves carried into the radiant joy of Easter morning.

He is risen. And our hearts are full.

What follows is the sermon that opened the Triduum for this community, a reflection shaped not only by Scripture, but by the lived reality of gathering at this table together. It is an invitation to linger at the table of Christ and to see it anew: not simply as a place of remembrance, but as the place where our identity is formed. A table shaped by sacrifice. A feast where something is given so that others may live. Here, we are drawn into a mystery deeper than memory, into participation. We are invited into the self-giving love of Christ that does not end at the altar, but takes flesh in us.

My prayer is that, as you read, you might find yourself not only receiving this gift again, but hearing the quiet call at the heart of it all: to become what you receive.

Sermon: The Lamb of God

Maundy Thursday April 4, 2026 St. Columba’s Inverness, CA Exodus 12:1-4, (5-10), 11-14; Psalm 116:1, 10-17; John 13:1-17, 31b-35

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Lamb of God - Maundy Thursday

16:53

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It’s so good to be with you tonight. I am sure by now, my seventh journey here to Inverness in the last two years, that you realize returning to this place always feels like returning home for me. We all long for places and people that feel like home to us, people that can take all the scattered pieces of our hearts and makes them whole again.

And more often than not, that longing shows up around a table. We yearn for a table where people are gathered, where food is shared, where stories are told—where, for a moment, things feel like they make sense again.

Tonight is about a table like that. But not just any table. This is a table shaped by sacrifice, a table where something is given so that others may live. We now begin our journey into the three holiest days in the Christian calendar. We have been preparing for the last 40 days of fasting and we long for the feast to come, for the moment we get to cry “Alleluia” again. And it is coming…but not yet. We have much farther to walk with Jesus first.

When we think of holidays—holy days—we instinctively think of feasting. There is nothing that marks a holiday quite like gathering with family and friends around foods prepared just for that occasion. Your feasting may look different than mine as someone from the Southern United States, but we all have an image that comes to mind.

When I think of Easter, I think of ham and deviled eggs. When the Georgia heat begins to give way to crisp fall air, I think of standing in my mom’s kitchen rolling out homemade noodles, pulling out the card table to make room for them to dry before Thanksgiving. If I close my eyes, I can still taste the toasted vanilla pound cake at Christmas.

These moments aren’t just about food. They shape who we are. They tell us where we come from, root us in a story, and become part of our identity. I didn’t fully understand that until I didn’t have it anymore.

When Lee and I, still newly married, moved to Cairo, Egypt just before the holiday season, everything familiar disappeared. Fall was marked by desert heat, not falling leaves. We spent Thanksgiving eating grape leaves instead of turkey. We had people around us, but it didn’t feel like a feast. And the deeper we moved into the season, the more I felt the absence of what had always defined it—and me.

The meal we are exploring tonight defines a people and makes them who they are, too. All our texts tonight center around a table. Exodus and the Psalms take us into the heart of the most important holy day for ancient Israel: the Passover. Nothing was more central to their faith than the confession that Yahweh had brought them out of Egypt.

In Exodus, we hear God’s instructions for remembering that deliverance, and for generations people gathered around tables every year in a time of feasting and storytelling, recounting how God intervened in their history to set them free.

But this remembrance was more than a meal. It was a liturgy, a ritual, a way of remembering that shaped their identity. There were instructions for the sacrifice, prayers to be spoken, songs to be sung. The Psalm we read tonight was one of those songs: “I will lift up the cup of salvation… I will offer you the sacrifice of thanksgiving.” This cup symbolized God’s deliverance, the opposite of wrath, the sign of mercy.

Passover was not only about remembering the past. It was about participating in it. Israel didn’t just remember that God set them free; they ate their freedom together. Again and again, they were drawn back into that story, reminded who they were and whose they were.

And on the night before he suffered, Jesus took that story and placed himself at the center of it. As we enter these holy days of Triduum and move toward the cross, our first stop is at the table with Jesus and his disciples.

Like those who gathered for Passover, we enter this story anew each year. Jesus, knowing what lay ahead, gathers his closest friends for a meal that would become, for them and for us, an identity-forming remembrance.

Paul gives us the words we know so well in 1 Corinthians. This passage is one of the earliest accounts of the institution of the Eucharist, written some 15-20 years before any Gospel accounts. The Eucharistic tradition was already rooted in the early church by the time Paul wrote his letters in the 50s and was already being misunderstood and its meaning misconstrued.

The rich were excluding the poor, and the table meant to unite the community was becoming a place of division. So, Paul reminds them: “This is my body… given for you. This cup… is the new covenant in my blood.” And then he says, “As often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”

He reminds the people that they are to continue in this recollection and reenactment of Christ’s death in anticipation of his return. This memorial, this anamnesis, implies recalling past events to make them a present reality, making that event part of own history. This is not nostalgia. This is participation. In this meal, we are drawn into the death, and the life, of Christ.

And all of this—the Passover, the shared meal, the cup of salvation—comes to its fulfillment in Jesus, but not in the way we might expect tonight. Because when we turn to John’s Gospel, something is missing. John’s account of the events of the night before Jesus’ death do not include, like the others, the words instituting the Eucharist. There are no words over bread and wine. Instead, there is a towel, a basin, and Jesus kneeling.

John, unlike the other gospel writers, does something subtle but deeply intentional with the timing of this meal. Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell us that this supper is the Passover meal itself. But John tells the story differently. He places this meal on the day of preparation, and the Passover begins the next day.

Which means that while Jesus is hanging on the cross…the Passover lambs are being led to the temple. While their blood is being poured out…his blood is being poured out.

This is not a small detail. This is the portrait John is painting for us. Jesus is not just sharing in the Passover. He is the Passover. He is the lamb. He is the sacrifice. He is the one given so that others may live. And this… is a different kind of feast.

That holiday season we spent living in Cairo far from home, I began to understand something about this kind of feast in a way I never had before. That year, Eid-al-Adha, “the feast of the Sacrifice” fell just a few days before Christmas.

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This is the biggest feast of the Muslim year, and it marks the willingness of Abrham to offer up his son as a sacrifice before God intervened with a ram in the thicket. The Qur’anic version of the story is markedly different than the biblical one, but the heart of the story is the same: God provides a sacrifice.

Celebrating Eid in the Muslim world, feels a bit like stepping back into biblical times and it mirrors the Passover feast in many ways. For days leading up to the holiday, makeshift stalls are set up on street corners. Sheep, goats, and cows begin to line the streets. If a family can afford it, they purchase an animal or they share it with another family. The meat of the animal is to be divided into three parts: one for themselves, one for friends and neighbors, and one for the poor.

The morning of Eid felt a bit like Christmas as children made their way to family member’s homes and excitement filled the air. The scene on the street was unlike any holiday I’d ever experienced. We stood at our fourth story window and watched all morning as the animals in the stalls were marched off one by one.

I watched in amazement as the blood red ran down the alleyways as each was slaughtered. I couldn’t look away as they removed the animals from the pens. The goats and cows struggled and resisted, but then I noticed the sheep. It didn’t fight. It didn’t cry out. It silently kicked a few times and gave up his life.

The words of Isaiah echoed through my mind as I watched the scene, tears streaming down my face:

“He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth.”

Every animal sacrifice I saw that day was a longing for something already given, an attempt to make right what is broken in the world, in our lives. And Jesus, he doesn’t just point to that sacrifice. He becomes it.

And this is exactly what John wants us to see. Because on the night when Jesus gives himself, John doesn’t show us bread and wine. He shows us a towel and a basin, Jesus kneeling, Jesus washing, Jesus giving himself away. This is not separate from the Eucharist. This is the Eucharist…embodied.

Jesus, fully aware of what is coming, doesn’t simply tell them to remember him. He shows them how to live. He kneels before them, takes the place of a servant, washes their feet, and then says, “As I have done for you, you also should do.” “I give you a new commandment: that you love one another as I have loved you.”

As the table of the Passover was for ancient Israel, this table is for us the moment of identity-forming remembrance. What Jesus is showing the disciples here, what he shows us, is not just an act of humility. It is a revelation of who God is.

Mark McIntosh, the Episcopal Priest and mystical theologian who informed my master’s thesis said the early church as they were working out how they should live after Christ’s death, began to understand that this self-giving love was not just something Jesus did. It was the very life of God, his identity.

He says: “They understood with increasing clarity that Jesus’ own life was simply and purely a relationship with the One he called Father and whom they knew as the God of Israel…They were convinced God was at work in the world through the continuing work of Jesus. They gradually realized they were becoming the new Body of Christ in the world.”

They were, as we are, a people shaped by self-giving love. Which means this, something I believe this community understands and embodies well: the Eucharist is not just something we receive. It is something we become.

We receive a self-giving Christ, and we are made into a self-giving people. The church is most truly the Church when it looks like this night: kneeling down, gathering around the table, learning again how to become what we receive.

Tonight, we come to this table like we do every week. We take the bread, we receive the cup, we remember a body given, a life poured out, a love that held nothing back. But if we’re honest, this weekly remembrance can sometimes feel small, safe, confined to this space. Something happens here in this moment, yes, we encounter Christ, but it can be easy to go on with our lives after we leave here and not feel changed.

But this night refuses to stay contained, because the same Jesus who gives us this meal also kneels down, takes a towel, washes their feet, and shows us what this meal means.

And again, I can’t help but thank of that other table in Cairo years ago—that day when I had watched the animals, heard their cries, had seen the blood, and felt the weight of what sacrifice costs. That evening, we sat together with friends crowded around a small table in their kitchen sharing their Eid feast.

And then there was a knock at the window. We watched as our friend took the portion of the meat she had set aside as almsgiving for the poor and slipped it to the person outside her window. Without a word, she gave what she had to someone who had nothing that evening. And I remember thinking: This is what a feast is supposed to look like. Sacrifice…and sharing. A life given…so that others might live.

And tonight, we see it again. Only this time, the Lamb is Christ himself, given and poured out for us. We remember his words spoken on this night: “As I have loved you…you also should love one another.” Not in theory, not in sentiment, but like this – kneeling, towel in hand.

Which means this table does not end here. This bread, broken, becomes a people willing to be broken open in love. This cup, poured out, becomes a people willing to pour themselves out for others. This is the mystery of this night: that the sacrament is not just something we receive—it is something we become.

So tonight, we come to the table, not just to remember and not just to receive. We come to be drawn into a life that looks like this: A life of self-giving love. A life poured out. A life shared.

So, come. Come to the table. And then…go and become what you receive.