Satisfied

What do you hunger for? What is the one thing/idea/place/person that you just know will satisfy all your desires? Or do you think that complete satisfaction is an impossible goal or ideal?

Jesus’ sermon about life in God’s Kingdom here and now tells us that complete satisfaction comes when we hunger and thirst for righteousness (as some translations use). Notice Jesus doesn’t say people who ARE righteous are satisfied but those who want righteousness, those who are hungry for it.

What is righteousness? The first occurrence of a character trait being referenced that can be translated as righteousness we have in God’s Story is with Abraham (known then as Abram). We are simply told that Abram believed God when God said Abram’s descendants would outnumber the stars and God counted his belief as righteousness. That’s it. Not ‘Abram saved the whole world’ or ‘Abram did everything perfectly as God told him to’ or ‘Abram conquered God’s enemies’ but that Abram believed God’s promise. Abram trusted that although it had been years since God made the original promise, God would in due time do what appeared humanly impossible. And God considered Abram righteous.

Jesus says we are blessed when we know that this belief, this ultimate trust in God’s Way and God’s time, is life giving nourishment to our souls just as food and water is to our bodies. The blessing of complete satisfaction comes when we trust God.

This doesn’t mean that we won’t ever doubt God or sometimes won’t be able to see any possibility of God fulfilling God’s promises. Abram and Sarai got tired of waiting and took matters into their own hands. And God still fulfilled the promise.

To be righteous, to trust in God, means that we live in such a way that we participate with God in answering the prayer “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” And it means that we won’t always get it ‘right’. And it means that God will still use our efforts to bring about good. And it means that God will redeem those times when we get tired of being patient and take matters into our own hands.

Being righteous isn’t about being right or perfect. Being righteous is being who God created us to be, living into the image of God in each of us as we seek to see and respond to the image of God in everyone else. When we follow Jesus with the prime directive of loving as we are loved by God, we will be satisfied and fulfilled in all that we do because we know it is God’s righteousness that transforms this world into The Kingdom here and now. What more could be possibly desire?

Invaluable

Good morning! How’s your Tuesday and your coffee?

As we continue our conversation on Jesus’ description of living in God’s Kingdom in the here and now, the third descriptive can be difficult for some to consider because most translations of Jesus’ sermon say “Blessed are the meek.”

Meek in our modern culture is almost always used as a negative quality. Merriam-Webster offers several meanings: Enduring injury with patience and without resentment; deficient in spirit and courage; and not violent or strong. Some good can be tweezed from the first one but the other two are not only terrible but counter to the quality of character that Jesus teaches.

To be patient and without resentment are good qualities, whether or not there is an injury to endure. I would argue that to be meek isn’t to be deficient in spirit or courage but strong in both. If I can resist lashing back at you for injuring me, I am showing strength of spirit and great courage because I know that I will not gain true strength by putting you down. Violence and strength are not equivalent; it takes great strength to resist responding to violence with violence.

As we interpret the meaning of Jesus’ words from a Kingdom point of view, to be meek, to be humble (as the Common English Bible translation reads), equips us with the greatest strength, courage, and self-assurance because true humility comes from knowing who and whose we are. This is the blessing.

When we discover who we are as God’s beloved children, we discover that to God we are invaluable. We discover that we are loved as we are. We discover that we don’t need to earn anyone’s approval or prove ourselves worthy. Being God’s beloved is enough.

And when we discover that being God’s beloved is enough, we can love ourselves as God loves us and then we can love others as we love ourselves. We no longer need to dominate others to feel important. We no longer need to seek revenge or retaliation when we are injured. We no longer need to put others down to lift ourselves up. We no longer need to prove that we are better than others because we not only see the image of God in ourself but in everyone else.

Hear God say, “You are enough; You are invaluable.”

When Small is Big

The Lectionary Readings for the Second Sunday after Pentecost are found here.

It is a small world. When my son was born while I was living in Anchorage, Alaska, a neighbor we had not met yet saw the “welcome baby” lawn sign our friends had put in our yard (on top of the 8 feet of accumulated snow) and brought a meal to us. Their grandchildren lived far away and they wanted to celebrate Ike’s birth with us. As we talked we discovered quickly that they had grown up in the same area as my dad in small-farm-town-Texas and knew my dad! When I lived in California and worked for a major bank, one day a teller walked over to my desk and asked if I recognized him. Embarrassed I said no and he said we had gone to the same high school in New Mexico and that he had been in the class two years behind me. As an Episcopal priest, I’ve discovered that, despite what Kevin Bacon may say, we rarely need more than two or three degrees of separation to find a connection. It is a small Episcopal world!

We all have ‘Small World’ stories like this. What we really mean with the phrase isn’t that our world is tiny but that we are surprised by the specific and unexpected connections we find in this great big amazing world. And these connections actually make our world so very big!

In the Good News story we read today, we have two statements from Jesus that at first glance can seem disconnected but actually explain each other. The crowds have begun following Jesus to hear him teach and to be healed and the religious leaders are getting nervous because they perceive Jesus as a threat to their own usefulness and power. Instead of seeing and experiencing the power of God in Jesus, they accuse him of being from the devil.

Jesus tells them that a house divided against itself cannot survive so why would the leader of the demons send him to cast out demons and he finishes with a curious statement about blaspheming (which means to show contempt for) against the Holy Spirit.

Jesus’ mother Mary and his siblings were there and had tried to stop him from speaking, presumably in an effort to protect him from the religious leaders who wanted to catch him blaspheming. Jesus’ own family, it seems, was letting their fear overpower their trust in what God had sent Jesus to do.

When they send word to Jesus that they are waiting for him, he turns to the crowd and says, “this is my family. My family is big enough to include everyone who seeks to keep the house of God together and to help it grow larger and wider.”

Every human being is created in the image of God; it is the Spirit of God that from the beginning of creation breathes life into us; by the power of the Holy Spirit we are bound together as the Body of Christ. To follow Jesus is to recognize this unity, this community, this family of every human being.

If we seek to divide God’s Kingdom by using Jesus’ teachings to decide who we will exclude, we are denying the power of the Holy Spirit to bind us all together.

When Jesus cautions against dividing God’s Kingdom, he is teaching of the importance of recognizing our unity. When Jesus says these are my mother and brothers, he isn’t discounting Mary and his siblings. He’s including them in something bigger than themselves. He’s including them in the household of God just as he includes every one.

When we put on the lens of who’s in and who’s out, our world can only grow smaller, not bigger. When we seek to prove who’s worthy of The Kingdom, we aren’t participating in building God’s Kingdom but shoring up our own kingdom to keep others out – the very opposite of what Jesus teaches and preaches.

When we define our group by who we exclude, our world can only get smaller because we can always justify excluding more.

When we define ourselves as Jesus does, recognizing we are all created in God’s image, bound together by the Holy Spirit, our world can only get bigger and bigger because that’s how love works. The more love we offer the more we have to give.

It is a small world after all because we are all connected and bound together because we are all beloved children of God. Amen.

Embraced

I was recently reminded of a phrase that was told to me by a mentor as I prepared for seminary and the path to ordination: “the Gospel brings comfort to the afflicted and affliction to the comfortable.” I realized that I’ve incorporated this into my priestly framework but for the most part dropping the word ‘afflicted’. Not because I don’t think people are or can be ‘afflicted’ just because I don’t like that word so I teach and preach that the Gospel message brings us great comfort but will never leave us comfortable.

In his teaching on what life in God’s Kingdom is, Jesus says we are blessed when we mourn because we will be comforted.

We’ve all had so much to mourn, to grieve over this past year plus. We’ve lost loved ones and friends to a terrible virus. We’ve lost jobs and income. We’ve lost relationships because somehow caring for each other became a political issue instead of a human one. Some have lost a sense of security and safety because others have stood up and said ‘we’ve never had that and we have a right to feel safe and secure just like you do.’

Do we feel blessed in all of this loss and trauma? I think all of us know there is no way to avoid grief and pain. I also think that many of us try to compensate for this by downplaying the pain and grief with trite phrases like: ‘this too shall pass’ or ‘you’ll get through it’ or worse yet ‘cheer up’ or even worse ‘God doesn’t give us more than we can handle.’

Somewhere along the way we humans decided that the good life is completely pain free. And Jesus says we are blessed when we experience pain and loss because in our deepest grief, God is with us.

It’s easy to let go of our awareness of God when things are good, when we are comfortable. God’s people have been doing this throughout the course of history. We build a ‘good life’ based on the world’s standards, creating our own kingdoms from the very things we know won’t endure. And we either consciously or unconsciously decide we don’t need God.

Then, when this life we built for ourselves inevitably crumbles, we remember who and whose we are: God’s beloved children. We realize the true blessing is living into who God created us to be: citizens of God’s Kingdom on earth as it is in Heaven participating with God to bring love and grace into this world. This is the good life that endures; what no one take from us because it comes from God.

The loss and trauma are not the blessing. The promise of comfort in the loss and trauma is the blessing. The wisdom that comes from sitting with our grief and loss instead of trying to gloss over it or ignore it is the blessing. Growing in our relationship with God and each other, growing our awareness of God through all of life’s experiences is the blessing.

In all that you have experienced in the past year and in all that you will experience today, feel God’s embrace. Know you are beloved. Share the blessing of this comforting love.

Being Satisfied

In last Thursday’s post, we talked about what it is to be a disciple, to follow Jesus and learn to be like Jesus. As we continue our journey together through this Ordinary Time, I’d like to take some time to really dive into what the good news writer Matthew gives us as Jesus’ first major sermon or teaching. I’ve written about this before here and here. This time I want to go deeper, spending time with each statement we call the Beatitudes and really look at what they mean for us as we follow Jesus in our day and time.

Jesus is seeing the huge crowds that he’s beginning to draw because of what he’s taught in their synagogues and the healings he’d done. Matthew tells us that Jesus claimed up a mountain with his disciples and begins to teach them with a series of statements that begin with “you are blessed when ….”

We often use the word ‘blessed’ to mean “I got what I wanted” or in the same way we’d use the word ‘luck’ but we want to sound more grateful. Jesus takes this understanding of blessed and turns it upside down.

He starts with ‘blessed are the poor in spirit.” Other translations say “hopeless” or “at the end of your rope.” Do we feel blessed when we feel this way? Would we ever hear ourselves saying “I’m so blessed. I just lost my job and I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

When Jesus extends the invitation “follow me” he’s asking us to learn to see and experience the world differently, to look at our lives through a new lens. Being blessed isn’t about getting all the good stuff – money, house, clothes, cars, gadgets, etc. – that the world says we should have or that we deserve. Being blessed is about knowing who and whose we are at all times and in all circumstances, knowing we are God’s beloved children so that we can share that love we know with others. Being blessed is about offering who we are and what we have to those around us as we live the prayer “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

When we are poor in spirit, when by the world’s standards we have no hope, when we feel like we are at the end of our rope, we are loved by God. We are blessed when we now that regardless of our circumstances, we are infinitely valuable in God’s Kingdom because when we see ourselves as God sees us, we see others the same way. And when others feel hopeless, we can share the abundance of God’s love that we know so confidently.

Being blessed in the economy of God’s Kingdom means that we find all that we need to be satisfied in our relationship with God and others. If you are feeling at the end of your rope, hear God say, “I love you.” Hear Jesus say, “follow me and let me show you how to be satisfied living life on earth as it is in heaven.”

God’s peace,
Mother Nancy+

Accepting The Mystery: A Sermon for Trinity Sunday

The Lectionary Readings for Trinity Sunday 2021 are found here.

One of the things I most enjoy about doing supply is that I get to worship and connect with lots of parishes as a beautiful reminder that we are all a part of something so much bigger than ourselves. And I really like getting to be at the same place for a couple of Sundays in a row because I get to work in the continuous flow of the good news with y’all.

As you know, last week was Pentecost, the day we celebrate the new birth of Jesus’ Church and today we celebrate the Triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It’s impossible to talk abut one of these without referencing the other. Pentecost is our inauguration as The Church and the Trinity is the foundation of our communion and community as Jesus’ Followers.

Attempting to explain the Trinity has caused a lot of grief and conflict throughout the history of Jesus’ Church. Much ink and much blood has been spilled. Our human brains have a difficult time grasping this concept of one-yet-three-yet-one.

One of the more common metaphors is the Trinity is an egg: shell, yolk, and white. And while the egg is a good symbol for life, as a metaphor for the Trinity it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. An egg can be separated as all bakers know and as we all learned from Humpty Dumpty, you can’t put it back together again. So, the egg is out. And so is the apple, water, clovers, and any other comparison you can find with Google.

Another comparison I’ve heard is the various roles each of us has in our family units: I am a daughter, mother, and sister all at the same time yet I’m one person. This is close, but my roles aren’t distinct enough to truly reflect the Trinity. And it doesn’t at all take into account Trinity as our ultimate model for community. If I start talking about the daughter me, the mother me, and the sister me as working together to accomplish things, I have a bigger issue than trying to understand the biggest mystery of all time and y’all would need to call a psychiatrist not a theologian to straighten things out.

When I was in seminary, during a late-night mid-semester study session, we came up with a Boston Cream Donut analogy: cream filling, tender pastry, and chocolate glaze. Yeah. By morning we had realized the error of our ways and swore we’d never speak of it again. I’m counting on y’all’s discretion as well.

The greatest lesson I’ve received about the Trinity came from a conversation I had with a Greek Orthodox priest. While in Toronto, I discovered this beautiful Orthodox-church-that-was-once-a-synagogue as part of an ecumenical assignment in my liturgy class and when I could find the time (not often enough), I’d go and just sit in their worship space and pray. I could feel the blessing of years of prayer and worship in this space like a warm safety blanket wrapped around me as I sat. One day the priest came over and asked if he could sit with me and we began to talk. I asked him about the many beautiful icons in the space and in reading one to me that represented the Trinity he said that he didn’t understand why the western church insisted on explaining the Trinity.

The Trinity is a mystery, he told me, a gift that helps to keep us oriented in our relationship with God. Accepting the mystery of the Trinity reminds us that although we are created in the image of God, God is God and we are not.

When we convince ourselves that we can explain the Trinity what we are really doing, whether we realize it or not, is shrinking God down so that we can fit God into our human understanding and contain the very power that created us.

Like our friend Nicodemus in today’s gospel reading, when we try to fit God into our human brain, we miss out on so many gifts.

Nicodemus thought he had it all figured out. He rightly tells Jesus that only God could do the mysterious things Jesus did so he knew that Jesus was from God. “Well said, Nick!” says Jesus and then he tries to take Nick to the next level, which ironically isn’t better knowledge but requires letting go of our need to explain the holy happenings of God in human terms.

Accepting that Jesus is from God isn’t a piece of knowledge we put in a book and set on a shelf, it is the wisdom that reveals who we are and how we are to live.

Jesus says, “Unless we are born from above, we can’t see God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.”

Nick is so sure of his own understanding that he misses what Jesus says. Instead of ‘born from above’ he only hears ‘born’. Instead of letting what Jesus says give him a bigger worldview, he tries to shrink Jesus down to his narrow view.

“How can an adult be born?”

And so Jesus tries again, “Not physical birth but spiritual birth, by baptism, a new life in God’s Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, the life I teach and show and live. Keep your eyes on me and you’ll discover this new birth, the life you are created to live.”

This is the life given by God the Father, revealed by God the Son, and empowered by God the Spirit. The Trinity.

This mystery provides understanding of who and whose we are and teaches us our ultimate purpose: to be in communion with God and to live in community with each other.

The Trinity shows us how we are to pattern our life together: united in love, distinct yet inseparable, all necessary.

Our life together is based on and grounded in God’s love for each of us and our differences are necessary as we talked about last week: it takes each of our gifts and talents and treasures woven together to make the Kingdom complete like a beautiful tapestry.

Our culture and society tell us that our differences are to be used to divide and separate us: Instead of letting your way of seeing the world expand my view, I must preserve my view and tell you yours is impossibly wrong.

But when we let the Unity of the Trinity hold us together, our way of seeing, our worldview, widens to see everyone as beloved children of God.

With a proper acceptance of the mystery of the Trinity we come to know that we are a part of something so much bigger than ourselves. Letting go of our need to fit God into our understanding doesn’t make us less significant but enables us to see our infinite value in God’s Kingdom.

And the more we open ourselves up to each other, the more our understanding of this world grows and together with the Triune God we discover what it is to be a part of the prayer “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

And so, let me end our time together with the words of Paul as he closes his second letter to the church in Corinth:

“And that’s about it, friends. Be cheerful. Keep things in good repair. Keep your spirits up. Think in harmony. Be agreeable. Do all that, and the God of love and peace will be with you for sure. … and may the amazing grace of Jesus Christ, the extravagant love, of God, and the intimate friendship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.” Amen.

What are you looking for?

In ChurchLand we use the word disciple a lot. We use it to describe people who attend church and we use it to describe classes we attend and teach. For most folks, the word has come to mean a student or learning about what the Bible says.

In the time and culture in which Jesus calls his first disciples – the Jewish culture in first century Palestine in a society ruled by the Roman Empire – the role of disciple was more along the lines of what we would call an apprentice, except the disciple didn’t learn a trade but a way of living. Disciples followed their teacher everywhere watching and observing how the teacher lived. The teacher asked deep questions that taught the disciple how to view life through God’s eyes, discerning and interpreting life, not just living it on the surface.

When Jesus called his first disciples, he didn’t say ‘enroll in my school’ or even ‘come learn what I know.”
He offers an alternative way to do what they know to do: “Follow me and I will show you how to fish for people.
And he asks questions like “what are you after?”
And extends the invitation of “come and see.”

Jesus offers the same to us, an alternative way, a better way, The Way.

Jesus’ invitation to discipleship is about living life as God intends it for us. It is so much more than just learning about Jesus. It is learning to be like Jesus.

Jesus’ invitation to discipleship is about relationships with the prime directive to love God, our neighbor, and ourselves. Success isn’t measured in how many fish we catch, or to modernize it the size of our paycheck or title on our business card, but by how we love.

Jesus’ invitation into discipleship is a call to live in the here and now as citizens of God’s Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. When we answer the invitation, our lives change, our worldview changes, we are changed by the love and compassion we receive in the invitation.

With this invitation, God seeks us, comes to us and says, “you are my beloved. Let me show you who I created you to be, the life I created you for. A life not dictated by keeping up with the Jones’ but a life guided by my love for you.”

Following Jesus isn’t about getting all the right answers. Following Jesus is a journey of life, The Life, The Way of Love.

What are you after? What is it you seek? Together, as we follow Jesus, we will discover what we are really looking for.

Ordinary

This past Sunday was the Feast of Pentecost, the day we commemorate the gift of the Holy Spirit sent by God to empower all who follow Jesus to proclaim God’s goodness to the world. The Day of Pentecost moves us into what we call the Season After Pentecost in the Church Year. This is the longest season, stretching from 50 days after Easter to Advent which is the four weeks prior to Christmas.

We refer to this as Ordinary Time, time in which we reflect on what it is to live in the meaning of Jesus’ Resurrection in our regular and typical days, in other words, in our ordinary life. Please don’t read ‘ordinary’ to mean insignificant. God created us for this life of waking and eating and sleeping and working and playing and loving. It is how God has ordained all of us, the order of things in God’s Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.

It is our understanding of ‘ordinary’ that informs what we consider special or extraordinary. It is the ordinary days that make the special days extraordinary. Somewhere along the way, we humans (at least we humans in the United States of America culture from which I write this) decided that every day, every event, every meal, every thing needs to be special and extraordinary. We decided that ordinary was bland and boring and even bad. And this extraordinary pressure to live outside of who we are created to be is depleting our ability to be grateful. This ‘every day must be extraordinary’ mentality keeps us in constant competition with each other because my extraordinary must be better than your extraordinary.

As we begin to venture out of the necessary separation and seclusion of the COVID19 pandemic, I find our transition into the Ordinary Time of the Church calendar so appropriate. We’ve all had an extraordinary year-plus. None of us are the same. Our world is not the same. And we are faced with a choice: we can struggle to return to the way we were pre-covid or we can move forward, following Jesus in the ordinary days to come, rethinking what we consider ‘normal’ in light of the Resurrection.

So, I invite you to join me over these days and weeks and months of Ordinary Time, on a journey with Jesus. Let’s look at what the ministry, sermons, parables, and prayers of Jesus can teach us about living as Resurrection People in our everyday ordinariness.

Jesus tells us that he came to give us real life, life far better than we can imagine (see John 10:10). To open ourselves up to receiving this real life, we have to let go of the life we think we should have based on the world’s standards. We need to let Jesus reset our imagination based on a Kingdom view of the world rather than the worldview of our own kingdom.

If you know folks who’d like to join us in this journey, I’d be grateful if you’d share this with them. See y’all Thursday.

Use Your Pentecost Voice

A sermon preached at St. John’s-McAllen on May 23, 2021:

Lectionary Readings for Pentecost are found here.

What a joy it is to be with y’all again! Please do not mistake my giddiness to be early morning drunkenness as some did the disciples in their exuberant proclamation of the good news. Getting to share the good news of Jesus with people we love and adore is worth being over-the-top excited about!

And, getting to be with y’all on Pentecost makes it even more thrilling! This is the place where I first began to discover my priestly voice as I learned how to lead others in finding their kingdom voice.

I remember one particular Sunday – I’d been here about a year and a half or so – as I began the Eucharistic Prayer, it felt different, I felt different. The words sounded different even though they were the same words I’d spoken behind this altar many times before. And a few of you noticed and said something either that day or in the week following.

The difference wasn’t anything I had done and, no, I hadn’t snuck into the wine cabinet before the service. It wasn’t even a special Sunday like Pentecost, it was just an ordinary Sunday. An ordinary event transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit.

When the disciples gathered together to celebrate the Jewish festival of Pentecost they didn’t know that this festival they’d celebrated their whole lives would be transformed, that God would use something common and familiar to transform them and all who heard their voices.

These ordinary Galileans were transformed into holy people of hospitality as everyone, regardless of their background and heritage heard of the mighty works of God. Where language had been a barrier, God created connections and relationships. In a civilization formed in the us vs. them of the Romans and Israelites, God issues the invitation to everyone: all are welcome into this new life in God’s kingdom.

AND just as important as the invitation itself is the delivery. We are all called – and empowered – to proclaim the goodness of God in our own unique way with our own unique voices. One of the many formative lessons of Pentecost is that God didn’t design nor does God call us to be identical robots.

Each of us has something unique and necessary and needed and wanted in the building of God’s Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. My voice and skills and talents cannot be complete without all of yours and yours are not complete without each other or mine.

We are only completely who God created and calls us to be with God and each other. We do not and cannot follow Jesus independently.

The extraordinary events of that day some 2000+ years ago transformed Pentecost from a festival of God’s law into an invitation for everyone to come into the Kingdom. That’s fairly easy to see in the story as told in the Acts of the Apostles that we read each year on this day.

The challenge for us is in how we, reading this story in a different time and culture, carry it with us out of these doors and into the ordinary moments of our lives.

We know that after Peter assures the crowds that the disciples aren’t drunk and that they are witnessing the fulfillment of God’s promise, the disciples didn’t just look at each other and ask “what’s for brunch?” and resume life as they had known it. They went out with their newly transformed voices and proclaimed God’s love to the ends of the earth as they had the ability and were equipped by the Spirit.

How do we do the same? How do we take our own Spirit given Kingdom voice and proclaim God’s love to the ends of the earth? Or at least proclaim it in our neighborhoods and workplaces?

For me, the best story to help us answer ‘how do we do the same’ is the conversation between Jesus and Peter on the beach sometime after Jesus’ resurrection as told by John. And although it isn’t what we are scheduled to read on Pentecost, y’all know how I like to redesign the lectionary from time to time1.

Jesus has just shared a beach breakfast with Peter and the disciples when he asks Peter, “do you love me more than these?” Peter assures Jesus he does and Jesus says, “Feed my lambs.”
Then Jesus asks, “do you love me” and Peter again assures Jesus he does to which Jesus says, “take care of my sheep.”
And yet again Jesus asks Peter, “do you love me?” And Peter, we can imagine a bit frustrated and perplexed at the repetition of the question says, “you know I do”.

Jesus responds with “Feed my sheep” and reminds Peter of his original invitation to discipleship: “Follow me.”

And Peter, oh, dear Peter, instead of keeping his eyes and attention on Jesus, looks around and says “what about him?” What if his relationship with you looks different than my relationship with you? What if he has something I don’t have?

It encourages me so much that the one whom Jesus proclaimed would be the foundation of the church is as fallible as I am. Peter doesn’t give us some unattainable perfection example of being a disciple but the very real and authentically human way. Isn’t it good to know that when God chose to bring about his kingdom on earth that he factored in our authentic humanness?

On our own, by ourselves, without God, we’d make a slippery, shaky, crumbly foundation for anything. It is God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that glues us all together. I don’t want to get ahead of myself here because we’ll get to more about this incredible ‘thing’ called the Holy Trinity next week.

For now, lets get back to Jesus and Peter on the beach.

Jesus reminds Peter that following him isn’t a competition of who gets more but a companionable journey on which we all receive the abundant benefits of God’s salvation.

We are all the beloved children of God and God doesn’t have favorites because God loves each of us as if we were the only one, the one sheep who’s wandered off, the one pearl of great price, the single piece of treasure lost and found and worth celebrating. And together we make up this amazing Body of Christ, the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven, Jesus’ Church!

Together we proclaim the good news of God in our own unique voices, using our abilities and skills, our talents and treasure to feed and care for each other, our families and neighbors, others in our community, and in other parts of the world as we are able.

Pentecost isn’t just a day or a celebration, it is the way of life, the way of love, that Jesus calls us into with the invitation “follow me.”

God has poured out the Holy Spirit on us and we proclaim the goodness of God with all that we are and all that we do, extending the invitation of Jesus to everyone we know and encounter. The ordinary days of our lives are transformed as we become more and more aware of God’s presence with us at all times and in all places.

We are The Church and, yes, we come together from time to time in this building to worship but that’s not the goal. Our holy worship of God together is one of many ways we open ourselves up to the continuous transformation by the Holy Spirit so that we, too, proclaim the good news with our Kingdom voices.

This Pentecost, our new birth as The Church has been transformed yet again as we begin to venture into the world forever changed by the COVID19 Pandemic. Our collective voice of God’s Love is more necessary than ever. And your particular way of proclaiming the good news of Jesus – and yours, and yours, and yours, is desperately needed by someone.

Use your Pentecost voice!

1I was preparing my regular weekly blog posts and this sermon at the same time this previous week. At the time of the blog posts, I hadn’t planned to work the story of Peter and Jesus on the beach into the sermon but it just sorta worked itself in there. So, if you are a regular reader, I’m tempted to apologize for the redundancy but then again, it’s always a good thing to hear a good story more than once.

More than a Season

Our season of Eastertide is drawing to a close. Do you sense a change in the air? Do you feel the anticipation of the coming friend/helper/another whom Jesus promised would come to us?

In John’s telling of the time after Jesus’ Resurrection, our friend Peter does what he knows how to do, he goes fishing. Can you picture the scene: Peter and the others are sitting around pondering what the previous days have held for them and what the future will be. How do they continue to follow Jesus if Jesus isn’t physically present? How do they live this new life Jesus talked about when the world around them looks just like it did before? The Romans are still in charge, there are still corrupt individuals among the Temple leaders, and they had given up everything to spend the last three years following Jesus and what do they have to show for it?

And, so, Peter does what Peter knows to do, announcing to the group, “I’m going fishing” to which they reply, “We’ll go with you.” They spend all night on the boat and catch nothing. As they are coming to shore, Jesus is there, telling them they’d been looking in all the wrong places to find what they are looking for. And after doing as he instructs and bringing in the largest haul of their lives, Jesus invites them to breakfast.

The conversation between Jesus and Peter following their shared meal is the most telling and tender exchange between teacher and disciple. In a three-fold question and response that mirrors and redeems Peter’s three verbal denials of knowing Jesus, Jesus answers their pondering of “what now?”

Do you love me? Yes. Feed my lambs.
Do you love me? Yes, you know I do. Show your love for me by taking care of my sheep.
Do you love me? Stop asking, it’s making me uncomfortable, just trust what I say and let’s get on with what’s next. Feed my sheep.

What now? What’s next? How do we follow Jesus without Jesus being physically present? We love. We feed. We care for. The very actions that Jesus did with the disciples are the actions that we do as we follow him.

We live in Jesus’ Resurrection now by looking not to the world for direction but to God’s love for all.
We live in Jesus’ Resurrection now by letting go of our way and walking Jesus’ Way.
We live in Jesus’ Resurrection now by participating with God to make life on earth as it is in heaven.

The Resurrection isn’t a season we move through or an event we simply celebrate and honor each Sunday. It is the life Jesus calls us to live in the here and now, following him as Resurrection People every moment of every day.