Threads

A sermon preached at St. Francis by the Lake, Episcopal Church, Canyon Lake, TX.
The lectionary readings for the sixth Sunday after Pentecost are here.

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Have you seen in the news that the company that produces Facebook has launched a new social media platform that is like Twitter called Threads? My first thought was, “oh sure, social media has been so good for our culture, let’s make more.” But since there isn’t a sarcasm font, I didn’t post this thought on any platform, just spoke it out loud to Jim in my kitchen.

Do you have the same love/hate relationship with social media that I do? Do you embrace it fully? Or stay away from it all together? Being able to display our every thought or meal publicly may be new but what seems to be the predominate attitude on social media has been around for millennia.

When Jesus asks the question “to what shall I compare this generation” he is talking through history right to us. We express publicly our way of moving through this world and then get our feelings hurt when others don’t respond to us just exactly how we want them to. Just like the characters in Jesus’ comparison, we can get upset when we are happy and others don’t dance to our tune, or when we are sad and others aren’t. We want others to think and behave just like we do.

But that isn’t in line with the reality of how God created us. Yes, we are all created in God’s image but we are also each created to move through this world differently, uniquely. Jesus invited 12 different personalities and never told them to stop being who they are but to continuously grow as the people God created them to be. God’s Kingdom isn’t some cosmic version of The Stepford Wives.

Jesus didn’t meet the messianic expectations of most people. And most folks refused to shift their expectations, dug in their heals, and refused to see the good he was doing. They were more concerned about being right than they are about growing in righteousness. This is another attitude that has continued through the generations from the marketplace of first century Palestine to our current culture.

The purpose of following Jesus isn’t to be in the right but to be witnesses of God’s righteousness and to learn from Jesus how to live our life loving God and our neighbor with our whole being – heart, mind, and strength so that others want to join us on the journey. Jesus makes loving our neighbor as central to who we are as loving God is. And when Jesus tells us to both pray for and love our enemies it is so that we learn to see them as our neighbor.

Being inclusive isn’t “come be just like us.” Welcoming others into the Kingdom is about journeying together to be who God created each of us to be, all necessary and needed in the Kingdom on earth as in heaven.

Our prayer today says it so beautifully – we pray that by the grace of the Holy Spirit that we will be devoted to God with our whole heart and united to one another with pure affection. This is what we are created for, whose and who we are – God’s beloved children commissioned to reveal the loving God of creation to the world; to shine the light of God’s love for us into the darkness that seeks to overcome our hearts, our minds, and our strength.

Following Jesus isn’t about a set of knowings or even knowing about God. Our faith is about living in relationship with God and trusting in the Way that Jesus teaches us to live even when it means letting go of what we think we know about how the world works. Even when it means resetting our expectations of what life should look like and accepting the reality of God’s Kingdom on earth.

Jesus says “come to me all who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest.” The expectations we carry in life are heavy, they weigh us down. When we live life expecting others to be just like us, we are burdened with the fear of those who are not. When we live life with the need to always be right, we are burdened with resentment. When we see others as a means to our own ends rather than fellow companions, we are laden with loneliness and emptiness because we lost sight of the image of God in others and ourselves.

As we follow Jesus we are freed from these burdens as we walk in love, curious about others, wanting to know who someone really is and not just what they can do for us. The gentle and humble burden of following Jesus is to learn to love better, seeing others with a holy curiosity so that we see the image of God in them and erase the line between our predefined “them” and “us”.

God created us social beings, not to post threads with some technology but to be the threads in the tapestry of the Kingdom of God on earth as in heaven, woven together in pure affection by the grace and power of the Spirit. Amen.