"Show and Tell: Waking Up to Participation"Show and TellMost of us remember show and tell from elementary school. You brought something from home — something that mattered to you — and you stood up in front of the class and you showed it and you told about it. Why it was special. Where it came from. What it meant.It was a simple practice. But underneath it was something profound: the assumption that what you've experienced, what you've been given, what you've come to love — matters to other people. That your story is worth telling. That the room is changed when you share it.That's the practice we're talking about today. Except the stakes are a little higher than a favorite baseball card.The Viewmaster and the CommissioningFor the last month we've been using Easter stories the way you use a ViewMaster — holding them up to the light, letting the depth and color and detail get in us, and then setting them down changed by what we saw.We're not here to relitigate what literally happened two thousand years ago. We're here to ask: what do these stories do to us when we really look at them? What wakes up in us?And here's what's interesting: every single one of the writers of the four gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John… the life and times of Jesus…  ends their account of these resurrection stories with some version of the same moment, which doesn’t always happen.. Jesus gathers the people he's been walking with, and he says: go. In different words, with different emphases, but the same essential movement. “You've seen something. Now go and live like it.”Four different writers, writing to four different communities, with four different angles on the same moment. And in every single account — the last thing he does is send them out.The word for someone who is sent — the Greek word apostolos, where we get the word "apostle" — literally just means: one who is sent. It’s a word basically used in Christian spaces, so it often sounds like a religious status, but that’s it… someone who has been given something, and is sent to share it.That's it. That's the commission.You've been given something. Go share it.The Whole Series in One MovementSo let's trace what we've been given over these five weeks — because I think it forms a single, cumulative movement, and I don't want us to miss it.Week one: Mary at the tomb — waking up to being seen. You are known. You are named. You are not invisible. Even in your grief. Even when you can't see clearly. Someone calls you by name.Week two: Breakfast on the beach — waking up to being fed. There is enough. More than enough. The fire was already burning before you got to shore. And the story of scarcity that tells you there isn't? That story is manufactured, and we don't have to live by it.Week three: Thomas returning to the room — waking up to belonging. The wound is allowed in the room. You don't have to clean yourself up to come in. Saying the true thing is what keeps you connected, not what disqualifies you.Week four: The road to Emmaus — waking up to beauty. The image was already there. The presence was walking beside them the whole time. Soften your gaze. Pay attention. What you've been looking for might be right in front of you.And week five — this week: waking up to participation. You've been seen, fed, welcomed, and awakened to beauty. Now the stories ask: what are you going to do with that?Awakening is Not PrivateHere's where I want to say something plainly, because I think it matters:Awakening is not a PRIVATE ACHIEVEMENT. It is a COMMUNAL RESPONSIBILITY.There is a version of spiritual growth that becomes a kind of spiritual consumerism — where we collect insights, feel transformed in the room where transformation is happening, and then go back to our regular lives essentially unchanged. Where the ViewMaster stays pressed to our eyes and we never put it down and bring what we saw into the world.The commissioning — in all four versions of its telling — pushes