Sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.

There is something about Baptism that makes me feel that someone is about to tumble down the rabbit hole. And maybe find themselves in an encounter like this.

"Who are you?" asked the caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation.

Alice replied, rather shyly, "I . . . I hardly know, Sir, just at present. At least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then.What do you mean by that?" said the caterpillar. "Explain yourself. I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, Sir," said Alice, "because I'm not myself you see."

It is about identity.

Alice’s Wonderland is home to a character who wears the oddest headgear; it is the locale of a mysterious, never ending tea party – a party that attracts the strangest guests; a realm that runs by puzzling protocols and uses an esoteric vocabulary.

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

I leave it up to you to assess the similarities between Wonderland and us. The Cheshire cat maintains, “We’re all mad here.”

Alice protests that she is not.

The Cat replies, “You must be, or you wouldn’t have come here.”

Mad or not we keep coming back; finally understanding that there are more doorways into the mystery than we ever knew and that question of ‘who are you’ is put to us over and over again – requiring new and different responses to address new and different circumstances, companions, challenges.

Living a baptismal vocation is always a journey into the mystery of God and of other human beings – and into the mystery of ourselves.

Professing our love and lives and energies and passions in service of something and someone beyond ourselves, will carry us into fantastic realms – down other rabbit holes, maybe through a looking glass, or a wardrobe; or a stranger teaches you how to fly.

You find yourself in strange new worlds with strange new people. Baptism begins the adventure; there is more, much more to come.

So, who are you? And how do you know?

For half a century an odd adventure called Education for Ministry has confronted a lot of Alice’s like us, with the caterpillar’s question – “Who are you?

Then without warning, the whole process pushed us into the even deeper mystery of whose are you?

A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; you shall be my people, and I will be your God.

Like Ezekiel and his people, we need to learn that there is no such thing as a truly religious experience that does not call us to do life and love and God differently, and to the kind of freedom known only in a holy identity.

So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

Like St. Paul, we learn that the rhythms of death and resurrection will mark our entire existence.

For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.’

Like James and John, and the rest of Jesus’ angry friends, it is often when our ambitions are questioned and our fondest hopes are dashed, that we come face to face with God’s agenda for our lives and work.

“Who are you?” asks the world, in every Christian generation.

“I hardly know,” replies the Church, “just at present. At least I know who I was when I got up this century, but I think I must have changed several times since then."

"What do you mean by that?" says the world. “Explain yourself."

Week after week, in myriad EfM gatherings all over the country and beyond, how often have you and I tumbled down yet another rabbit hole, facing questions we cannot answer, exploring metaphors we are not sure we like, shocked at the stuff we never learned in Sunday School, invited to commit out loud to do life and ministry differently. And wonder what it means for the church and the world.

The craziness and corruption of Alice’s Wonderland gives us new insights on our own. Full of violence “Off with their heads,” shouts the Queen whenever she is displeased. Truth is distorted and Alice’s certainties are relentlessly challenged. Alice needs to know who she is becoming in the midst of the chaos. As do we.

Alice finds something more in her adventures – a realm full of strangeness, and also rare beauty, characters who are flawed to the core, yet intrigue her and sometimes charm her, and invite her to be part of their fantastic story.

It is like what happens when EfM tumbles us into the realms of scripture and church history.

We cannot know who we are, until we know whose we are.

So EfM gathers staff and advisors, and spiritual sojourners, and mentors and trainers, and anyone who will join us in an intentional community to take on the task of understanding our heritage as Christians, and how God calls us to live and love and act in our crazy world.

EfM reminds us that is of great importance for Christian believers to have reasonable, sane, mature persons say in our midst “God is. . . “and go on to complete the sentence intelligently.

Incredibly, EfM intends that the likes of us, all of us, will become that reasonable, sane, mature person.

It is okay, EfM tells us – to think about God and not just make random guesses.

It still has to do with identity.

Moses came down from Sinai with a daring mission for runaway slaves.

Between the brickyards of Egypt and the promised land, a new people come into being. They may not look like it; it wasn’t their idea; but God makes them a holy people, born, not of cleverness or courage, or of the designs of visionary leaders, but by the deliverance of God.

A people set apart by God, not for their own sake, but for the worlds’ sake to show by their life together the nature of God. That hasn’t changed.

• It didn’t happen instantly, (It still doesn’t) the capacity to live into this new identity; into a mystery marked by faithfulness, and compassion, by justice, generosity, and hope.

• It is hardest whenever worldly power, success, military prowess, and economic inequality distort human existence.

• It happened most profoundly in an exile, when all they thought that marked them as God’s own, was stripped from them - a temple, a king, a promised land; and they found that all they had left was God and each other.

• Again and again, they lost a sense of themselves; as do we; again and again, God found them. And us.

• But in hard and heavy times, it is easy to forget the promises of God whenever it seems that you cannot touch the presence of God.

Who are you, when life gets complicated and confusing?

The answer comes still on a dangerous journey to Jerusalem, a journey that takes us to a cross and only then moves us to an empty tomb – a journey with a man and a message of the Kingdom come near, and a ministry fashioned out of a healing human touch, a shared meal, and a company of fractious, fallible followers.

So, who are you, called into this adventure by an elusive spirit?

We hardly know some days who we are; only that we are no longer who we were.

• Drawn now into a strange endeavor because we have seen something of healing and hope at work in human lives and followed it to gatherings like this.

• Or we know of the yearning to believe, to belong, to behave more humanely.

• Or something or someone has shown us a promise of holiness and a hope of heaven.

• Or, we have tumbled down the rabbit hole of our grief, or fear, or loneliness and ended up in a fantastic realm in spite of ourselves.

Who are we? -- when it is up to the likes of us to close a credibility gap of sometimes unnerving proportions between the gospels and what passes in popular consciousness for Christianity.

Our world needs folk like us, a Church, who thinks about God and bears witness to the Gospel. To show the world what the Baptized can accomplish in the midst of hurt and hate and hunger.

• A people who by word and deed will show and tell the world how it is with God.

• A people who will do what Jesus does, - heal the sick, and forgive the sinner, and feed the hungry, and welcome the stranger and outcast.

• Who will speak truth to power; defy the lies and stand up for justice.

That is why we are celebrating 50 years of Education for Ministry this week, because of all the ways it has given us the tools to ponder identity, to probe the mystery, to gather community, to take Gospel truth to our troubled world. And to commit ourselves to another half-century of the same.

This is our call, our mission, our reason for being.

• We have been well equipped to tell the world the truth about a God who breaks out of heaven and joins beloved creatures in the messy mystery of creation itself.

• A God who wears flesh and blood to show us what being fully human looks like.

• A God who will be present in suffering and dying to show us what love really means.

• A God who breaks free of death to show us what life really means.

EfM is for all the confused and frightened Alices in the Wonderland of our time and place, even us, to help make the connections between the Word we meet in Scripture, in the Sacraments, in the Baptized, in the bishop, and that same Word, alive and active, and at work in our beautiful and broken world.

After the ‘who are you’ and ‘whose are you’ questions, EfM has more.

• “So what?”

• What are you going to do about it?

• How will we put flesh on God’s stories, by how we live, by what we proclaim, by how we dare to act in the name of God for the sake of God’s creation?

The vocation of the baptized. And the point of EfM.

It is a kind of madness in a sensible world.

But it wasn’t a white rabbit who led us here. Rather, a crucified and risen Lord, bids us follow and then a Holy Spirit pushes us one more time, into another blasted rabbit hole -- into realms more amazing than Wonderland or Neverland or Narnia; a realm as amazing as the Kingdom of God, challenged and changed and charged, for God’s mission, as Christ’s body, in the Spirit’s power.

Now we join those folk once again, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, at the mysterious, never-ending tea party.

The Cheshire Cat is right. We are a little mad, by some lights; but if we weren’t we wouldn’t have come here.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, EfM!