Note: As part of my new job, I get to preach a sermon next Tuesday as part of the church's Lent program. They gave me the choice of "sharing my faith story" or delivering a sermon, and of course I jumped at the chance. So here's the sermon I'm going to give. It's introduced with the song "Blackbird" by the Beatles (lyrics).

There's an old story about Saint Kevin, who was a fifth century Irish monk. One day during Lent, while he was sitting in prayer with his arms out, a blackbird came and laid an egg in his outstretched palm. Saint Kevin didn't move; he sat that way until Easter Sunday, when the bird--rather symbolically--hatched and flew out of his hand.

This is a very nice story in retrospect. But I wonder what a passing farmer might have said if he'd come upon Saint Kevin just sitting there, unwashed, unshaved, wearing weeks-old robes. Probably something like, "Who's the idiot with the egg?" Then, if he'd been around on Easter Sunday and seen that blackbird egg hatch, magically, mysteriously--he might have said, "Oh, I get it. Well, of course I get it now."

Did Saint Kevin know that this tiny little miracle would take place on Easter Sunday? I don't know. Maybe he was just remembering the words of the Psalm: "Wait for the Lord; be strong and let your heart take courage. Wait for the Lord."

Before the Last Supper, in Matthew, Jesus tells the disciples that he is going to be handed over to be crucified. That isn't what the disciples want to hear. They want a Messiah, someone who's going to triumph, remove the Romans from power in Judea, and be the next King David. And now Jesus is telling them that it isn't going to happen that way. This is not the triumph they were expecting. Peter, poor Peter, who swears that he will never desert Jesus, later says to a serving-girl, "I don't know the man." "I don't know him. Maybe I thought I knew him. But maybe not." And then, of course, the cock crows--another conveniently timed bird--and Peter is miserable and weeps bitterly, and we think, "Serves you right, buddy!" But wait--we shouldn't be so hard on Peter; he doesn't know the ending of the story. He doesn't know how it's all going to turn out. And then when Jesus appears at the Resurrection, we can just hear Peter saying, "Ohhhhh. I get it. Well, of course I get it now."

When snow falls, it makes everything seem pure and clean for a little while, doesn't it? But if you live in a place where snow sticks around for awhile, you start to notice something. The snow on the side of the road, over time, starts to turn gray, then charcoal, then black. It's almost as though it's forgotten what it was like to be those beautiful, unique snowflakes and has given up, clumped together into this sooty, dirty stuff.

And when the sun finally comes out, the snow melts; it dies; it stops being snow and becomes runoff. It pours into drainage ditches and gullies and then into streams and rivers and finally back into the ocean again, where the sun beats down and lifts it up as vapor into the sky, up to the stratosphere, where one day it will become snow again.

That blackbird hatchling, sitting on Saint Kevin's palm, might have been terrified, huddled inside its little egg. It might have said to itself, "You know, I'm getting bigger, and this egg isn't. And that yolk sac is starting to look pretty thin. If I'm not careful, I'm either going to starve to death, or crack this egg open, and then my whole universe will come to an end." And then, on Easter Sunday, the shell did crack open, and there was Saint Kevin and all the other monks, and it turned out that the world outside the shell wasn't such a bad place after all.

These are all stories of renewal. So many, many things in God's world teach us about renewal, reminding us of Christ's promise of new life. The blackbird in its shell will one day emerge into the light; the crucifixion makes way for the Resurrection; the black snow will melt and become snow once more, purified.

But it's not always that easy, is it? Because when you are a black bird in the dead of night, like in the Beatles song, all you can see is . . . black. All those promises just seem like words, don't they? Words you thought you understood, but now--maybe not. Just like with Peter, this is when we weep the most bitterly.

When my first daughter was about three months old, the company I was working for went belly up, out of the blue. The president of the company said that there wasn't enough money to cover our paychecks, and--by the way--our health insurance had been canceled four months ago for nonpayment. For weeks, I looked for another job, but May of 2001 was not a good time to be a computer programmer here in Austin. We lost our savings; we lost our house. And then, just to add a little pizzazz, I tripped and broke my foot. It was not a pleasant couple of months.

I had to give up the image of the person that I thought I was. I had no choice--that person was essentially stripped from me. And the person who was left felt like a black bird in a dark place. I got another job programming, but I didn't like it. Every day I told my wife, "I have to quit this." And then finally, I quit, and I got another job. But I didn't like that one either, and every day I told my wife, "I have to quit this." I was like the little bird growing inside that egg, and each day my troubles seemed to get bigger, and my resources for dealing with them seemed to get smaller and smaller.

And then one day I realized that it wasn't this job or that job that filled me with despair. It was the knowledge welling up inside me that I was on the wrong path. And I had to change. And I didn't want to change. The new path, as it turned out, led to seminary, and a job at St. Mark's, and that was not what I had planned. And now, here I am, pushing out of that shell, trusting now that the world outside of it is a better place. And like that bird hatching on Easter Sunday, all this is mysterious and miraculous to me.

When I think about things that are mysterious and miraculous, I think of music. What could be more wonderful than music? The fact that so much of our faith is expressed in song is--I think--no accident. Music is magical; it joins us, it engages our minds and our hearts and our bodies, and it transforms us. It is a gift from God, a means of grace.

I sometimes don't know how to express what grace is, or what faith is. But I think it's fair to say that grace is the music that God puts into us. And faith is nothing more than the song we sing back to God. It is our affirmation that despite how things might look right now, God keeps promises. And if we are singing, then we are not just a dark thing in a dark place. We become a blackbird singing in the dead of night. And that is not a vision of despair. It is a vision of hope. The song of our faith is the little light we keep burning when everything else is dark; it sustains us; it keeps us during those long hours. Faith says, "I do not know how all this is going to turn out, but I will wait for the Lord. I will be strong and let my heart take courage. I will wait for the Lord. I will be a blackbird singing in the dead of night."

And when we do that, we are saying that there will come a moment. We may not know it until we see it, but when we get there we will understand that we were only waiting for this moment to arise. This moment to hatch from our egg, this moment to evaporate from the ocean, this moment to come to life again. And when that happens, we say, "Ohhhh. I get it. Well, of course I get it now."

But until that moment, we wait. We abide. We take the music of God's grace and sing it out into the dark night. And then the darkness has to recede a little bit, to make room for our hope.

It may be dark now. But wait, the light is coming. Let us warm ourselves on the little flame of faith that burns inside us. And let us sing.

In the name of the father, and the son, and the holy spirit, we say: Amen.