Let’s talk about relationships….
Year A Epiphany 6
Matthew 5:21-37
Christ Church Christiana Hundred
Let’s talk about relationships….
Year A Epiphany 6
Matthew 5:21-37
Christ Church Christiana Hundred
Year A Epiphany 3
Matthew 4:12-23
Christ Church Christiana Hundred
The Baptism of Our Lord
Matthew 3:13-17
2 Kings 17:1-1, 12-14, 18
Sunday Sermon – January 13, 2019 from Christ Church Christiana Hundred on Vimeo.
Achievement Unlocked: Preach a sermon that incorporates the Matrix
(Also, this is probably the only way I’d ever preach using pill imagergy đ )
âFollow me.â Christâs words to Phillip are also calling us. God calls each of us into a new way of being, and we choose whether we answer, and whether we follow.
Itâs the second Sunday after Epiphany and the second Sunday of our new sermon series: Resolutions. How can we resolve to be better Christians with the gift of each new day, month, year? Last week, Stephen reminded us that God isnât calling us to do things because âweâre supposed toâ. The choices we make with our lives â the choice to be here â should be about what quenches our thirst and feed our hearts. Following Jesus is the best way to quench our thirst, and for all the ways we follow Jesus by keeping the same covenant to love God and to love each other, God also has a unique call to each of us. God doesnât care about checking boxes. God knows the best way to nourish the unique piece of Christ in each of our hearts and call us into something bigger. We have to listen, and we have to keep our hearts open to all possibilities, as we chose to go right or left, north or south, red pill or blue pill.
Have any of yâall ever seen the Matrix? In The Matrix, the protagonist, a hacker named Neo, has spent much of his life searching for answers about the world he lives in and the nature of reality. Even within the wild imaginings of brilliant sci-fi, we can all relate to seasons of searching for answers in our lives. In time, all of Neoâs searching causes some strange things to start happening to him: things that donât make any sense or that he canât explain. Just as Neo starts to fear for his life, he gets the opportunity to sit down with a man named Morpheous, who has all of the answers heâs been seeking but who warns him that these answers donât come easily and he needs to decide if heâs willing to take on the weight of listening to such a big truth. Morpheus tells Neo he has two choices, offering him either a red pill or a blue pill. He can take a blue pill and wake up in his bed, believing whatever he wants to believe OR he can take the red pill and embrace this new Wonderland-like reality heâs stumbled into, and see how deep the rabbit hole goes. Could you ever imagine giving up all you know to leap wildly into something more? How can you even be sure that a wild leap is the right one?
I donât know about you, but sometimes, with all the noise of loud radios and long to-do lists, I worry my own ability to listen. What if I get distracted? I donât want to miss my cue from the Holy Spirit. Luckily, we have the story of God calling Samuel to comfort us in these seasons of worry. God called Samuelâs name four times before Samuel answered. Samuel heard a voice but didnât know the source. When Samuel didnât know what was happening, God persisted. God persists with us, too. If you know me well, you know I can be rather strong-willed, so Iâve tested this. Thoroughly. Godâs will is stronger. God knows that God knows us better than we know ourselves.
God knows we sometimes need to hear things more than once, because God knows us. God knows each and every one of us, In todayâs gospel passage, Jesus calls Phillip, and Phillip calls Nathaniel. When Nathaniel approaches Christ, ready to follow, Jesus exclaims about Nathanielâs honesty. Nathaniel is shocked that Jesus already knows him so well, asking âWhere did you get to know me?â Christ sees every part of us, even the parts of us that we donât yet see of ourselves. God sees all of the good and all of the bad and loves us so completely all the same and it is from this complete, radical love that God calls us, each and every one of us to that path that is best for us and unique to us in the choices we make for our vocations, our relationships, and the rabbit holes of life that we might be bold enough to explore.
Christ called Phillip and Nathaniel differently from each other and differently from how God called Samuel. God called Samuel repeatedly and by name. Jesus spoke directly to Phillip, saying âFollow meâ, but Jesus knew that the best way to call Nathaniel was not with clear instructions from an unfamiliar face. So, Jesus sent Phillip to find Nathaniel, and Nathanielâs call consisted of a longer explanation spoken through someone Nathanael already trusted. One of the many benefits of there being a piece of Christ in every human heart is that Godâs call to us can come through the mouths of those around us, friends and strangers. With Nathanael, Jesus knew he needed to hear from a friend, whether or not Nathanael knew he needed to hear his call that way in order to be able to answer it.
When Eli helped Samuel figure out Godâs call, Eli taught Samuel how to answer readily â to say âSpeak, for your servant is listeningâ Samuelâs answer surrenders his own will in favor of Godâs will and the transforming power of Godâs love. Part of being a good listener means hearing even the things that we donât want to hear, that weâre not ready to hear, and that donât fit with the vision we thought we had of what our lives should be. To let go of the false reality of the blue pill and the choose the life-altering truth of the red one. To be completely open to the transformation of Godâs radical love, we need to surrender any expectations we might have that limit its ability to fill our hearts. We need to say, âHere we are, the servants of the Lord, let it be with us according to your wordâ
God knows us better than we know ourselves. God knows everything we are and everything we can be, even the things we may think we cannot be â or havenât yet figured out we can be. God called Samuel as a boy knowing who Samuel could grow into as a man. Godâs patient persistence journeys with us throughout our lives and through every transformation. Our God is the god who from the darkness created heaven and earth, all that is seen and unseen. Our God is the god who defeated death, and who promises us eternal life. Just as God did these things on Godâs time, transformation that happen on Godâs time, regardless of what our idea is of how things should go.
Our lives are a series of choices. Shouldnât we all be striving to be brave enough to choose the red pill? Choosing to answer Godâs call is a choice we can make every day. It is a part of all of the other choices we make about how we focus our time and energy, our work and education, and our love for all of those around us. Let us resolve today and every day to choose God: to choose to listen and be in relationship; to choose to join together each Sunday and quench our thirst in the waters of baptism and feast on the grace, as we break bread together at the altar. to choose to be open to every possibility God might be calling us to, even the ones that weâd never imagined. âSpeak, Lord, your servants are listeningâ
Â
Happy are they who seek the Lord with all their hearts.[1]
As I was meditating on todayâs scriptures and their common thread of upholding the law, I noticed that this is not the only thing they have in common; in todayâs scripture passages, we hear a lot about minding our hearts. Now, Iâm not talking about minding our hearts in the Valentineâs Day sense, although all of this heart talk is seasonally appropriate. Iâm talking about not getting stuck in our heads  – on reason alone – when weâre trying to think through something in a world that requires a focus on something greater. Interestingly enough, itâs the scripture passage that doesnât use the word âheartâ that captures this best.
The only reading today in which the word âheartâ doesnât appear is the reading from 1st Corinthians. Typical, that Paul would be difficult. I guess thatâs how we know that the Holy Spirit is there though, isnât it? 1 Corinthians best PRÂ [2] is the passage about love that people read for weddings or write in Valentineâs, but this letter â and the rest of the New Testament letters â are about so much more. The letters from Paul that we read in scripture are the story of the early church being formed. The leaders who are persecuted in Acts are persecuted because they dared travel from city to city in the early world and proclaim the gospel and convert people to way of Jesus Christ. Our churchâs bold commitment to being counter-culture is in our deepest roots. Â The city of Corinth, the destination of the letter weâre reading from today, was a key city in Greece, but for all of Paulâs evangelism, he couldnât stay there forever. That just wasnât his call. Nevertheless, he writes to the people of Corinth as his brothers and sisters in Christ to help them mend their hearts. In the first half of todayâs New Testament reading, we hear that there is division among the people of the Church in Corinth. Paul cautions us against a way of life focused only on âhuman inclinationsâ â followed our own individual agendas to best take care of ourselves as individuals. In order to avoid jealousy, quarrelling, and other things that cause us to sin by dividing us from our neighbors, we need to focus on Godâs agenda. As Paul writes to the people of Corinth in todayâs passage, for all of the good work of humans to found the church and share the fellowship, it is always God who makes our faith grow and who calls us to live and love more richly by following Christ [319]
We are each given minds that work in different and beautiful ways, as developmental psychologist Howard Gardner addressed in his brilliant work on the eight-to-ten different kinds of intelligences he believes we all possess in different quantities, but in addition to our ability to reason in whatever type of intelligence God has given us, we must also be careful stewards of our hearts. After all, in todayâs reading from Deuteronomy, what keeps the Israelites from hearing God and living into Godâs commandments isnât their ears or their mindâs ability to process the words.[3] What the Israelites are told to do is to keep their hearts turned to God above all. Our hearts know whether we are keeping Godâs commandments because they can feel whether what weâre doing is good and is bringing us closer to God or whether what weâre doing is sin and is causing division.
In a few days it will be Valentineâs Day, the pressures of which can be challenging. Couples can enjoy hearts-and-candy bliss, if they can rise above the pressures of perfection. Those of us not part of a couple can enjoy a day spent with beloved family or friends, celebrating other kinds of love, but for anyone who is struggling with loneliness or recovering for a particularly potent heartbreak, the day can be filled with sadness or misery, accentuating feelings of loneliness , invisibility, or simply being ânot good enough.â
Loneliness is also common at Christmas time, a fact that is easy to forget in spite of hearing stories like âA Christmas Carolâ or âHow the Grinch Stole Christmasâ. The Grinch, whose bitterness from one bad day, one bad turn, one rough morning commute, one time he encountered a problem before his morning tea turned into a bitter, grumpy, grinchy-ness with so much unprocessed grief and anger that his heart turned away from God  – thatâs how, over time, a heart can shrink down to two sizes too small. Clearly, the Grinch didnât come to church and listen to sermons that called him to be Christmas everyday; after all, he could hardly stand the one.
The Grinch had deep-seated wounds. Â Though we do not know what the cause of these wounds are they are wounds that kept him from being in community. They were wounds that kept him from accepting what good about him. Â They were wounds that convinced him that others did not accept him for who he was, so he lived alone with his dog, max. Â The Grinchâs insecurity around these wounds gave him the kind of bitter thoughts that Matthew cautions us against in today’s gospel passage – the kind that poison our hearts.[4]
All of this poison in his heart made him steal Christmas from every Who in Whoville, but what makes this story so beautiful is how it backfired. For all of the things that the Grinch stole, he couldnât steal what irked him most about Christmas: the part where every Who gathered together and held hands and sang out joyfully. See, every Who who sang knew what mattered, what brings us together every week: the Love. I remember standing on those blue steps in Junior Choir and singing âLove the Lord will all your heart and soul and mind and strength. I will love the Lord with all I am.â Whole self love. Love with an open heart for the Holy Spirit to descend like a dove and help us grow with God. Love that transforms. The collective love of every Who in Whoville helped transform the Grinch, whose heart grew three sizes that day, wide open, transformed by love, and swelling with space for the Holy Spirit to work through him and love him, with the beautiful grace we live into each Sunday when we, too, pray for the forgiveness of our sins.
Last week, I revealed to you all how when my own job search dragged on. For a time, I struggled to keep my insecurities from poisoning me by making me believe that I wasnât good enough. Â âNot enoughâ is not in our Godâs vocabulary and it is not a phrase that will bring us into a deeper relationship with our Creator. Like Gardnerâs theory of multiple intelligences teaches us that there are many ways to try to qualify the beauty of a brain, we as followers of Christ must remember that our God fed five thousand people with two fish and created us in perfect, Goldilocks approved, just-right proportions, whether we are part of a pair or not.
Like the Grinch, we each carry around our own wounds. And like the Grinch we can choose to hold on to them or let them go. Â We can choose to work through them or let them work on us. Â We can choose to walk with them or flee from them. Â If we choose to face our wounds and walk with them then we are able to discover that we are loved by God just as we are, and that the Holy Spirit, in a mysterious way, is living at the center of the wound, descending upon us all like a dove even when things get messy and loving us with a love that transforms even with all of our imperfections.
So just how do you walk with wounds that are so deep and so alienating? Â The answer Paul gives is Christ and the crucifixion. Â Christ who understands and identifies with our loneliness. Â Christ who carries our wounds. And by doing so, shows us the God who loves us. Â It is in Christ that we can learn we belong – belong to a community of the wounded. Â It is in Christ that we learn that we are loved, in spite of our woundedness. Â Â And it is in the community of the wounded who encounter the living God in Christ, in whom we are healed, through our life together; our shared journey; our open, swelling, hearts; and our Baptism. Â Baptism reminds us of the story of Godâs love that comes to us amid our woundedness to give us healing and life. Baptism, just like weeping, requires water. It also reminds us of dying and rising with Christ, whose ugly death in the wounds of the crucifixion was a necessary stop on the journey to resurrection, and sets us on a path of walking with our woundedness in order to find life therein.
So as you walk through those doors today, walk boldly in all your strength from God and all of the imperfections of your wounds, knowing the Holy Spirit can descend upon your heart in joy or in pain. As the psalmist writes, Happy are we who seek the Lord will all our hearts[5]: all our hearts and souls and minds and strength. All our love. All Godâs love. All that we are, wounds included.
[1] Psalm 119:2
[2] 1 Corinthians 13
[3] Deuteronomy 30:15-20
[4] Matthew 5:21-37
[5] Psalm 119:2
Year A, Epiphany 5: Matthew 5:13-20
Sunday, February 5, 2017: The Church of the Holy Cross, North Plainfield NJ
âYou are the light of the worldâŚLet your light shineâ[1]
In todayâs gospel passage from Matthew, we hear some of Christâs teachings from what happens after the Sermon on the Mount. In anticipation of his crucifixion and resurrection, Christ calls us as his followers to be the light of the world â to be the light of Christ in a world where it is always tempting to give in the darkness of things like hopelessness and unkindness. We are called to be bright. As humans, nothing we give light to in our physical world is meant to be hidden. We donât use candles, headlights, and lamps just to hide them in a box to be left unseen. When we give something light, we expect it cast its glow all around. Doesnât it stand to reason that God expects us to shine with the light God has bestowed on us as well? When God called light into being in Genesis, God called that light good.
Christ tells us today that we are the light of the world. (Think about how beautiful that sounds). It is our great gift and our responsibility to let our light shine.
I know that it can be tempting to feel self-conscious about shining, but think about all of the times someone else shining has made you brighter. Let me tell you about a time that someoneâs light left a lasting glow on me:
In my second semester of college, I sat behind a woman named Tanya in my history class. We didnât interact much, mostly in a âtalk to the person next to youâ kind of way or in the venting mutual frustrations before-or-after class kind of wayâŚbut we interacted enough that I recognized her when I ended up sitting next to her again in a literature class the following fall. This time, we spent more out-of-class time together as study buddies and collaborators on group projects, where we balanced academics with cobbler-baking and movie-watching. Still, our friendship didnât really stick until our third class together during my third year at Delaware. This time, our cobbler-centric study parties extended beyond the semester and our time together became less and less focused on studying.. and more and more on being good friends. When I shared with Tanya my discernment of feeling called towards the priesthood, it didnât shutdown or redirect our conversations. Instead, it deepened them. As we talked about how we each experienced Christ in our lives, I felt called to invite Tanya to church. Sheâs maybe the second person Iâd ever invited to church and having her join our campus ministry made it a richer experience for our small but mighty student community as well as St Thomas parish, which sponsored the ministry.
Tanya and I used to joke that God knew we were supposed to be friends, and thatâs why we got all of those chances to get it right by having all of those classes together in college. Tanya could be reserved, but as she learned to trust me with the bright shining light got put in her, my life and my faith became made richer. She was unwavering in her faith in God and Godâs providence. She was always gracious, and even when life was not gracious to her, she was unwavering in her faith in God and Godâs plan. She had a great eye for God winks! Tanya was gracious, grateful and faithful even when she spent her post-graduate school years battling a brain tumor that took away her independence. Seeing her light shine so beautifully connected me to Christ in a new way through the piece that was in her. On the days I feel like my light is going out, the gracious, grateful, and faithful glow of her Christ-light is one of the most inspiring that still shines on me and helps me start to glow again.
We are the light of the world, and we are called to shine. Like the candles we hold each Christmas Eve when we sing Silent Night and all our individual lights combine to make the whole church glow, except that weâre called to be light everywhere. I canât talk about light without quoting the first chapter of John: âThe light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not overcome it.â
I know that the annual meeting can be stressful, for us and for many of our church neighbors, in this diocese and in others. I also know that the transitions weâve been through as a community have brought us much change in not a lot of time. We are not alone in this challenge either. But Iâve also called this place home long enough to know something else. For all of the years weâve faced stressful annual meetings, weâve still shining, maybe brighter than ever because weâre so determined to overcome any darkness that might dare creep across our Holy Cross horizon line. Christâs light may not have led our community where we expected; I talked to you last week about just how hard the Holy Spirit laughs when we try to overplan â but we are most definitely called to shine.
Iâve grown a lot in the light here â the light of this community and the light in each of you, who I am so much brighter for knowing and loving and journeying with. Â But last week, after church, when I stayed to lend my heart and hands to Neighbors Feeding Neighbors, I was reminded that there are still new ways I can find Christ in all of you and in this place Iâve known as long as I could know anything. Â I remembered hearing about this program, when it first started and was struggling to grow, but last Sunday, I experienced it in action. This room full of people from all walks of life â young and old, families and singles â who came to eat the food prepared and coordinated by people in this room and to claim warm winter clothes donated by Bettyâs Basement â another example of what cool things can happen when our light shines in a new way. At Neighbors Feeding Neighbors, I got to be amazed at the light of Christ shining forth from Holy Cross in a new way that connected to all of these new people and that showed me that even in a community Iâve called home forever, I can still find more of Christâs light. Itâs been blowing my mind and making my heart glow all week.
We are the light of the world. We are not meant to hide ourselves under a bushel or behind closed doors. We are not called to play it safe by glowing in the all of the same familiar ways. We are called to glow like fireflies on a summer night, shining in the darkness and stretching our wings as far as we can to light up the night with love as boundless as the sky and full of new places to explore. We are called to take risks and shine in new ways – think about the beautiful new way Christâs light is shining through Neighbors Feeding Neighbors!
We are the light of the world. Letâs shine, shine, shine!
[1] Matthew 5:14, 16
Year A: Epiphany 4
Micah 6:1-8
1 Corinthians 1:18-31
Matthew 5:1-12
Preached at the Church of the Holy Cross, North Plainfield, NJ. Watch it here.
I take a lot of comfort in making plans. When I bake the pies for Thanksgiving dinner with my family, I want to put everything together in just the right amounts and in just the right order. I have a plan and a desired outcome and I know what to expect. It makes me feel more in control to know what to expect, and thatâs comforting. In a world I know I canât control at all, I still like to have a plan to help keep me focused on whatâs important. If itâs too precise, the Holy Spirit usually laughs at me, so I just try to focus on the important stuff, like what Micah says today in the last lines of our Old Testament lesson!
What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?[1]
This beautiful verse pairs so perfectly with the beatitudes we hear in todayâs gospel passage and it gives us a three-ingredient recipe on how to stay in relationship with God, who so unconditionally loves each of us. Micahâs plan is open enough to leave space for all of the chaos of the world, yet focused enough on the key points to give us the direction we need to stay focused on our relationship with God as we navigate that wild jungle out there.
First, do justice. Justice is a transformative virtue that seeks to establish or restore a community, while aiming to balance personal good with the common good. It is a virtue which seeks to make right within the community all that which has gone awry. Justice is a virtue that seeks to consider the relationships within the community and hold all up as good.  In our baptismal covenant, we promise to strive for justice and peace among every human being. We say âWe will, with Godâs helpâ[2] because balancing good within an entire community requires all of our best as well as Godâs grace!
Second, love kindness. Loving kindness is more than just âitâs nice to be nice to the nice.â Itâs more than just that fake, pleasant smile we work so hard to maintain when we kind of want to scream. Loving kindness isnât merely being kind and doing the kind thing. Loving kindness is finding joy in your heart in the act of being charitable to all of your fellow humans, even the ones who are rude customers of the business where you and rude drivers along the roads you travel to get there and people who push you way out of your comfort zone. Kindness, or charity, is both about affection as well as ethical, righteousness-based, respectful, and true love of our fellow humans. Kindness isnât always a smile, sometimes kindness requires us to be a loving presence that is brave enough to tell our friend a hard truth and then support them in living through it. Loving kindness requires us to do right to others for the right reasons, rooted in our love of God and of our neighbor.
Finally, third, we walk humbly with God. We commit ourselves to doing our best in our relationship with God, but no matter how much we feel we might be âsucceedingâ in this, we never let it go to our heads. We do our best to walk with God, but humility demands that we never allow ourselves to fall prey to the temptation to judge someone who is walking differently than we are or whose sins appear to be different from our sins. This one is difficult, especially if weâre doing justice and loving kindness and weâre convinced weâve found someone whoâs diametrically opposed to our God-grounded way of thinking. The temptation to judge or to be proud enough to believe that we as mortals have the power to damn someone is a dangerous temptation. It is the opposite of walking humbly, and weâre not merely called to walk. Weâre called to walk humbly. I did not consider myself a prideful person when I graduated from seminary, but last fall, when my first round of job searching ended unsuccessfully, I found myself swallowing more pride than I even knew I had. Micah does not say this today, but I really do believe that if we donât walk humbly, we will be humbled. Itâs the circle and the nature of our lives.
Humility is vulnerable. The invitation to welcome people in and to love them is vulnerable. Pursuing justice is bold, and when we do it grounded in love and humility, then weâre bolder through that vulnerability. Every Sunday, we gather and proclaim in the Nicene Creed that Christ was crucified, died, and was buried. And on the third day he rose again.[3] I donât always agree with Paul, but thereâs one line in todayâs lesson that really packs it in. Â Paul writes that some ask for a sign and some as for wisdom, but âwe preach Christ crucified.â[4] In order to get to the big and beautiful and light and love-filled resurrection, we have to go through the vulnerable and humbling crucifixion, the ultimate loving sacrifice.
In todayâs gospel passage from Matthew, we hear Jesus teach the disciples the beatitudes. Nine statements in which the humble are exalted and blessed and comforted and promised Godâs loved. I truly believe that any trouble or worry you carry in your love-filled heart today can be comforted with one of more of these lines. When I am sad and weary, it helps me to remember: âBlessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.â
Rising to the challenge to work to be in the best possible relationship with God requires that we do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly; this plan is not always easy to follow, not matter how well we know that the benefits outweigh the costs. Thatâs why Jesus ends his lesson on the beatitudes with the line âRejoice and be glad.â The road is not always easy and we need to embrace joy wherever we can get it. Thereâs joyous beauty and working to do justice and love kindness and walk humbly. For all the ways that radical vulnerability can open us up to things that might hurts us, being open and having all of the doors of our hearts wide open like that also makes more space for the Holy Spirit to descend like a dove and fill us with more love and hope and joy than we can possibly imagineâŚand probably call us into a new radical way of being in the process!
So as you walk out through those red doors today:
Dare to be transformative. Dare to be transformed.
Dare to do justice.
Dare to love kindness.
Dare to walk humbly.
[1] Micah 6:8
[2] BCP 305: Technically, itâs âI will, with Godâs helpâ but I want to focus on the communal nature of the sacrament.
[3] BCP 358
[4] 1 Corinthians 1:22-23
Year A Epiphany 3
Isaiah 9:1-4
Matthew 4:12-23
January 22, 2017 at The Church of the Holy Cross in North Plainfield, NJ
When I was in high school, my aunt and uncle in Mississippi got a boat. In the summertime, when I was on break from college, I would go and stay with my dad, who lived nearby. On sunny Saturday mornings, when the winds were still and the water was smooth, the phone would ring and my aunt and uncle would invite us to go out on the boat and fish. Weâd pack the cooler and race over and the adventure would begin. Many of my favorite memories with my family there are on that boat, even if I wasnât much of a fisherwoman. I canât tie a lure to save my soul, and I willingly admit that the one time I can claim âcatch of the dayâ was dumb luck. I can hardly remember a thing about the fish themselves, but the memories of all of us out there together, catching rays and laughing and riding around – those journeys to nowhere and unknown fishing holes – those memories fill my heart to the brim. I came home often with hands empty of fish and a heart full of joy. The real beauty in those fishing trips was in the people I shared those sunny days with.
But just like Jesus and the disciples at the transfiguration, we canât stay in those big, beautiful, mountaintop moments all the time. Life goes on. Last May, my seminary classmates and I graduated with our Master in Divinity degrees and embarked on our new journeys. We all left our homes and New York to head off to new places. Some went to cities theyâd never been to before. More than once, Iâve found myself on the phone with a friend in a new city brainstorming ways for them to meet new people. Each of our ministries may be tied to beautiful and unique communities, but finding community in oneâs personal life is an entirely different adventure. I guess you could say that the search for community is much like fishing for people, whether itâs an individual in a new place or a church hoping to grow! What lure will lay the groundwork for new relationship?
In todayâs gospel lesson from Matthew, Jesus starts calling disciples. He tells them to drop everything and follow him, saying âFollow me, and I will make you fish for people.â âŚbut how?
As we talked about a few weeks ago, in his gospel, Matthew is focusing an audience of Jews who are trying to figure out if Jesus is the Messiah. Because they are his target, heâs really focused on the point that Jesus is the fulfillment of all of these prophecies that have come before – like the passage we hear today from Isaiah that is again quoted in the passage from Matthew: âthe people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.â In this passage from chapter 4, we again see Matthew continuing to build that foundation which assures that Jesusâ is the fulfillment of these prophecies. Itâs comforting for Matthewâs contemporaries to believe this argument. More than just affirming Jesusâ authority, seeing Jesusâ as the fulfillment of these prophecies suggests that everything that is happening – every bit of beauty and every moment of chaos – is part of a larger plan. Godâs plan! Gaining a sense of comfort from order – especially the sense that we are part of a much larger sense of order – is comforting, and scripture can be a source of comfort on our craziest days. Furthermore, we need to take that comfort wherever we can get it, because for all of the times the words of the Bible can help us calm a storm, they also call us into radical new ways of ways of being – giant leaps of faith beyond the safe confines of the known world of our comfort zone. Weâve all been around the block enough times to know how this story ends: what makes Jesus Jesus is that he calls us to big, beautiful, radical love that is far more amazing and much more challenging than we could possible imagine!
One of the biggest challenges is that when we go out into these uncharted territories, the armor of light that we wear is not some heavy metal, bulletproof, impenetrable chest plate but instead this âarmorâ makes us more vulnerable, walking along the road even when we donât have a map. When these uncharted territories come in the form of a great challenge or profound grief, we probably all react in similar ways. I mean, I know I seek the solace of the ones I love when I feel lost and overwhelmed and brokenhearted. I find great solace in small communities of trusted beautiful souls. Every relationship begins with a handshake, that first invisible hook, luring us outside of our comfort zone and into a new relationship⌠especially when those uncharted territories find us facing and new place: a new job or a new city where we havenât formed that community yet.
âFollow me, and I will make you fish for peopleâ
Jesus call to his disciples was also an invitation. In the charge weâre given to fish for people, weâre invited to follow Christâs lead into big, beautiful, and vulnerable way of being that lures people together and into deeper relationship. Look around this sanctuary! See how Christ has hooked us together with ties like super-strong nautical knots!
âThe people who sat in darkness have seen a great lightâ
Isaiah wrote this prophecy and Christâs light fulfilled it.
You are the light. We are the light. Weâre brighter together, helping each other see the way on the days when one of us might be struggling to shine. There is a unique and beautiful piece of Christâs light in each of our hearts, and when we answer the call to follow Jesus and to dare to be vulnerable enough to let that light shine, the warmth of that light invites others to do the same. It lures them in. Itâs the best kind of fishing for people.
So, dare to follow. Dare to love. Dare to shine.
a 20-something gets down with TEC
Can one find reconciliation in themselves after rejection?