All relationships, if they are to thrive, find their way to a pattern of regular conversation. It is no different with God. Prayer, the communication that crosses the divide of human and divine life was for Jesus a conversation of ongoing relationship. And we see this in how Luke describes him. Jesus is regularly engaged in specific times and practices of prayer. But now, almost halfway through Luke’s Gospel, Jesus’ students have noticed and they want some specifics. What he gives in reply is a form of prayer that, though simple, contains all the elements necessary for a life of ongoing conversation with God.

Jesus never enters a home unless invited. He never heals unless asked. When he encounters a blind man calling out on a roadside, he doesn’t immediately heal his vision. Instead, he says, “what do you want me to do for you?” In that question he acknowledges the autonomy and personhood of the one in front of him. If we want to follow Mary in following Jesus, if we want to offer our help to those we encounter in need, then we must learn to hear and listen. We have to take the time to be develop relationships with particular people who have names and stories and gifts to offer.

The Trinity may seem a strange concept, and it is. It may seem mysterious and hard to grasp, that’s for certain. But in the Trinity we can see the beauty of a God who desires our place at the table and is willing to enter even our suffering to bring us there.

We have different ways we talk about trees. Go camping in a National Forest and we might remark about of the beautiful trees around us. Get a logging contract for that same forest and we’d talk about the timber. Biblical Greek is no different. Dendron is the word for tree, the kind you might see camping, but the word xulon—that meant timber or lumber. And strangely it is xulon that is the word used in Revelation for the tree beside the river. What we read as “the tree of life” could more literally be translated as “the timber of life.” Not quite the same ring to it, but it is an accurate rendering.

On the road to Damascus, in that long war torn land of Syria, Saul had an encounter with disruption of a different kind—an encounter that changed his identity and name. Instead of bringing change into the world through violence, he was changed by the one who had taken the violence of the world onto himself. Paul met Jesus and through the disruption of his life he found what he was looking for—a life of reconciliation with God and neighbor that can only come through a letting go. Paul found healing disruption, not by bringing a resistant world into order through violence, but by joining Jesus on the cross. It was through way of the cross, Paul found, that resurrection and the healing he’d so long sought could finally be realized.

Baptism, for Paul, is a means of practicing death and as such it is the door to freedom. That’s what we heard tonight from the Epistle to the Roman. Our attention this week has been on Jesus, and rightly so, but Paul reminds us that our call is to join with Jesus in his death, to participate with him in the crucifixion. The call to discipleship we answer in our baptism is, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer once put it, an invitation to “come and die.” And through this practice of death we have been made free.