A father overheard his two sons playing church. One of them was explaining to the other what all the parts of the liturgy were about. "Do you know what it means at the end of the service when the pastor does this?" he asked, making the sign of the cross. "It means some of you go out this way, and some of you go out that way."

The lad was right. The cross sends us and scatters us out into the world. Someone has said that the really important thing for any church is not how many it seats but how many it sends, with a strange-looking power, the greatest power the world has known, the power of suffering love. So we are sent, you and I, sent to live out our Lord's kind of whimsical and yet lavish grace and with the glory of being marked with the cross, a strange-looking glory sought by few, but which is glory indeed.