The Fourth Sunday of Easter

[Hold up the flask]

This is water from our font.

I am going to carry it across France.

In five days I will leave for the Camino de Santiago — walking the ancient pilgrimage route called the GR 65, through the river valleys and limestone villages of southern France. And I will carry this water with me. Your water. This community's water. Water that has touched the foreheads of the baptized, water that has blessed the dying, water that holds the prayers of everyone who has ever stood at this font and said yes to God.

I want to tell you this morning why that matters. Why water. Why now. Why any of us — pilgrim or not — should care deeply about what we carry and where we release it.

Peter is writing to people who are lost.

Not lost in the sense of confused — lost in the sense of scattered. Displaced. His letter is addressed to "exiles of the dispersion" — people who don't quite belong anywhere, who are moving through a world that doesn't fully recognize them. Sound familiar?

He tells them: follow in his footsteps. Walk the path he walked. And at the end of the passage, he offers this image — you were straying like sheep, he says. Going in every direction, pulled by fear and grief and the noise of the world. But now you have returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls.

The Camino is one of the oldest expressions of that truth. For over a thousand years, Christians have walked these roads not because they had somewhere to go, but because they needed to be found. You walk to be emptied. You walk to remember that you are a creature, not a machine. You walk to return — to yourself, to God, to the ground beneath your feet.

But this morning, on this Earth Day, I need to tell you something about that ground.

We live in the desert. We know what water means.

Beneath our feet right now, the aquifers are dropping. The Colorado River — the river that made this city possible, that makes this region livable — is in crisis. Scientists have been saying this for decades. The data is unambiguous. And yet we have treated water as if it were infinite, as if the earth's generosity had no limits, as if creation were simply a backdrop for human activity rather than the living body of God's gift to us.

This is not only a scientific crisis. It is a spiritual one.

When we lose our reverence for water, we lose something in ourselves. When a river dies, something in the human soul goes dry with it. The mystics knew this. The indigenous peoples of this land have always known this. And on this Earth Day, the church is called to say it plainly: water is not a resource to be managed. Water is a sacrament. And we are failing to protect it.

I have spent thirty years as a climate scientist watching this unfold. I have read the data, written the papers, sat in the rooms where decisions were made and unmade. And I can tell you that what we need now is not more information. What we need is transformation — a change in consciousness so deep that we begin to treat the earth the way we treat this font. As holy. As irreplaceable. As the dwelling place of God.

So why am I leaving?

I want to be honest with you. There is a part of me that has wondered the same thing. The world is on fire — or more precisely, on drought. The border is thirty minutes from where we sit. Our immigrant neighbors are living in fear. The work is urgent and it is everywhere. Why walk away for six weeks to wander through France?

Here is what I have come to understand about pilgrimage: you do not go to escape the world. You go to be made capable of returning to it.

The pilgrim's road empties you of everything you think you know. It strips away the title, the credential, the carefully constructed identity. It gives you blisters and bad weather and strangers who become, somehow, beloved. And in that emptiness, something moves in. Something you cannot manufacture in an office or a committee meeting or even, God forgive me, a Sunday sermon.

You go to be emptied. You return to be poured out.

And so I will carry this water.

Somewhere on the GR 65 — perhaps at the edge of the Lot River, whose ancient waters have carried pilgrims' prayers for a thousand years — I will kneel down and I will release it. And when I do, I will speak your names. I will pray for the Colorado. I will pray for the aquifers beneath this city. I will pray for every drought-stricken community and every dying river and every child who does not have clean water to drink. I will carry your prayers and your waters into the landscape of southern France and I will give them back to God.

That is a prophetic act. Small, yes. Symbolic, yes. But the prophets of Israel knew that symbolic acts done in faithfulness have a power that policy papers do not. When Isaiah walked barefoot through Jerusalem, people noticed. When Jesus knelt to wash feet, the world tilted on its axis. When a deacon from a desert church carries baptismal water to an ancient river and prays for the waters of the earth — something real is happening. Something the universe registers.

And here is what I need you to hear before I go.

You are pilgrims too.

You do not have to walk the Camino to live the pilgrim life. Every time you choose to treat creation as sacred rather than expendable — you are walking the road. Every time you show up for a neighbor in fear, carry water to the thirsty, speak an inconvenient truth in a room that would rather not hear it — you are following in his footsteps. Every Sunday you bring your drought and your grief and your bewildered love for this broken world and you place it at this font — you are doing what pilgrims do.

We are all, as Peter says, sojourners. We are all carrying something. The question is whether we carry it consciously, prayerfully, with our eyes open to the holiness of what we hold.

[Pick up the flask]

In a moment, I am going to ask you to do something. I am going to invite you to extend your hands — or simply your hearts — toward this water. And together we are going to bless it. Not just for my journey, but for all the waters of the world. For the Rillito and the Colorado. For the rivers of France. For the wells of sub-Saharan Africa and the glaciers of the Himalayas and the rain that this desert is waiting for.

We are going to send this water out as prayer. And it will carry us with it.

Because here is the thing about baptismal water: it doesn't belong to any one of us. It belongs to the whole body of Christ, which is to say it belongs to the whole earth, which is to say it belongs to God. When I carry it, I carry you. When I release it, I release you into the hands of the shepherd who has never once lost track of a single one of his sheep.

"We were going astray like sheep. But now we have returned to the shepherd and guardian of our souls."

You carry the water.

The water carries you.

Go in peace.