Creative Faith

Genesis 1:1-5; Matthew 5:38-48

February 23, 2014

The Bible is a big book, and it’s got lots of characters. But I think it’s fair to say that God is the main character. The first lines of great books sometimes – not always – but sometimes tell us a great deal about main characters.

Think of Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, which begins, “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.” Really, what more do you need to know?

So let’s read, again, the first few lines of the book at the center of our faith and see what they tell us about the main character.

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness God called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

“Isn’t that a wonderful beginning?”

So, seriously, and in the vein of English class, what do you know about the main character from that opening paragraph?

*****

Here’s what always strikes me: God is alone. God is powerful. God is creative.

That can be a volatile mix, to be sure, and what springs forth from the mind of this singular, powerful, creative force includes a great deal of messiness in addition to boundless beauty, love and grace.

It all unfolds on a scale almost incomprehensible in its grandeur, and, honestly, far too vast for me to understand. As the prophet Isaiah will say much later on about the main character, “your ways are not our ways nor are your thoughts our thoughts; your ways are too high for me to grasp.”

To be sure, there are some things that we can and do grasp – or at least we should. We learn very early on that God creates the human creature in the image of God. Perhaps owing to that primal experience of aloneness, God sees that it is not good for us to be alone, so God creates us in and for community.

We also ought to grasp, and be grasped by, those key characteristics of God revealed in the opening of the book, and understand that we, created in God’s image, bear those same marks: we are powerful and we are creative. Therefore we carry, also, a great burden of responsibility.

Perhaps not least of all, we carry the responsibility to imagine more. We draw our circles so very small sometimes, and then we think that nothing is possible outside those small circles – especially when it comes to how we think about God.

God is so much larger than our small circles. God is vast and incomprehensible, and – and here’s one core pillar of my own Christology – in order to bring this down to human scale the chapters about Jesus are a necessary part of the unfolding story of God. Jesus reveals God on a scale we can understand. Jesus shows us what God is like, in human terms.

Jesus springs almost fully formed into the narrative of scripture. We know next to nothing about “Jesus: the early years.” We get the myth-making birth stories, followed by a long silence that stretches over several decades. Then along walks Jesus, baptized by John, calling disciples, ministering with creative abandon, and – responding to the call of a voice that speaks uniquely to him – giving voice to a vision of a future otherwise – the kingdom of God – rooted and grounded in love and justice, and extravagantly overflowing the boundaries of our limited thinking.

You have to figure that in those early formative years, Jesus learned some of the same kinds of things that most of us do: we learn about our families; our communities; about the world of work and how we might fit into it; we learn how our society functions; we learn who’s in and who’s out; we learn who has a voice and whose voices are silenced.

That’s the other thing that I failed to mention about what we can learn about God from the first few verses of Genesis: God speaks. And, as the narrative unfolds, we learn quite clearly that when God speaks it is always to call forth a response from creation. Quite specifically, God speaks to call human beings. God calls humans to serve, to create, to love, and, so very often, to raise their own voices – to speak.

The hardest part about speaking – about speaking authentically, as opposed to just making noise with your mouth – the hardest part about speaking lies in finding your own voice, and learning to speak the truth as it has been given you to speak it instead of just repeating a script provided for you by your social context.

Somewhere along about his 30^th year, Jesus found his voice. Shaped by all the learnings I just mentioned, but responding to a specific call and claim on his life, Jesus found his voice.

Our gospel reading for this morning comes from the center of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, and here Jesus has clearly found his own voice. Not only does Jesus continue and expand decisively upon the script-rewriting pattern of “you have heard it said … but I tell you” that we touched on last week, but he takes things deeper with the exhortation that ends our reading today: “be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Perfection is a pretty tall order, especially when it’s the perfection of God. But the perfection that Jesus is calling forth here is not some static, Faberge egg kind of thing that you can put on a shelf to look at. The Greek that gets translated in the NRSV as “perfect” is a form of the word telos, and while “perfect” is a perfectly adequate translation, it misses the sense in the original of “completion” or “maturity.”

In other words, the call here is to a fullness of life, a “perfection,” if you will, lived into through a lifetime of following the way of Jesus. Aiming that way toward the heart of God, Jesus is calling his followers to lives that are creative and powerful.

Creativity and power come in all kinds of ways, but they can lead us so far beyond where we think we can go.

About three years ago, a friend and colleague – leaning into middle age – decided to embark on that couch-to-5k thing that lots of folks were trying. She’d never really run much at all until then. Last month she completed her first marathon. You never know what you can accomplish until you trust the gifts you’ve been given and begin to live creatively with them.

That’s what it means to live faith creatively, or, better, to live a creative faith. Faith means trust, and it begins with trusting what we have been given.

Jesus calls us to live creative, powerful lives rooted and grounded in love and justice. He knew from his own experience that such a life unfolds over many years, and that, in time, living into fullness involves finding one’s voice.

Because I am not Jesus, it took me a good deal longer than a mere 30 years to even begin to find my voice. Let me sing you a song that I wrote about 13-14 years ago.

Walking With the Wind

That song came to me following a family trip that included stops at the Civil Rights Museum in Birmingham and the Dexter Avenue Church in Montgomery where I stood in Dr. King’s first pulpit. I wrote it down when I finished John Lewis’ brilliant movement memoir, Walking With the Wind.

That song, which came as a gift, played a subtle but important part my finding the voice to speak the truth as I had been given to understand it at regarding the great Civil Rights question on my time: justice for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons in the church and beyond its walls.

I don’t think it’s any great insight or surprise that I should find my voice in and through some creative act. I think that’s how it happens all the time for everyone, and it doesn’t matter what the creative act is. For some it’s music, for others it’s visual art, for still others it comes in cooking. Some folks find their voices through creatively reimagining work or school or space, and for others it’ll be embodied in exercise.

That friend who just ran her first marathon? She published her first book during the training, as well, and I think there’s a deep connection between pushing out beyond what we think we can do and finding our voice in the pushing.

Finding voice in living creatively we discover that we can do so much more than we thought possible. You never know what you can accomplish until you trust the gifts you’ve been given and begin to live creatively with them.

When Jesus said, “be perfect” it was a challenge and an invitation to live whole lives, complete lives, lives shaped and informed by the knowledge – and the faith – that we are created in the image of a creative and loving God.

That faith, lived creatively, enables us to do so much more than we think possible. That faith is what enabled Jesus to see beyond one eye traded for another toward the love of enemies, to see that unless we expand the circle to include even those who hate and reject us, then we’ll just remain trapped within the limited confines of our narrow vision, that faith is what allowed Jesus to see beyond the culture that shaped him to the God who created him.

Jesus calls us to see beyond the borders of our own limited perspective toward something imagined by a God who could look upon the chaos and see the created order, who could look beyond nothingness toward all that ever was or will be.

We are capable of so much more than we think we are. A bold and creative faith opens a way where there is no way. A bold and creative faith plants seeds for a great harvest. A bold and creative faith points the way toward the kingdom of God. Be bold and creative as is the God who created you!

Come! Live in the light! Shine with the joy and love of the Lord! We are called to be light for the kingdom, to live in the freedom of the city of God! Come! Live in the light! Amen.

Reformed Scripts

Matthew 5, selected verses; Isaiah 58 … choose life

February 16, 2014

As most of you know, I was asked to resign from the first pastoral position I held following a sermon I preached on same-sex marriage 13 years ago last month. Being decent and orderly Presbyterians, we don’t do anything with undo haste, so between the Martin Luther King Day Sunday when I had the temerity to suggest that, were he alive, Dr. King would have been concerned with the rights of gays and lesbians, and the Sunday in late February when the congregation voted to dissolve the pastoral relationship, there was a weird and awkward interval when the entire congregation of more than 600 members was talking about me but very few of them would talk with me.

There were a few exceptions, and one, in particular, that I will never forget. A mother of two teenagers came to talk with me, and share her concern that too much positive regard from the pulpit for homosexuality might turn her son gay. She pointed to the various scriptural texts – you know the ones – as “proof” that God disapproved of same-sex relationships.

I recall trying to do some rudimentary Bible study, at which point she asked, “why do we have to interpret anyway?”

Indeed, why do we have to interpret, anyway?

As we approach the season of Lent, during which we will focus on the roots of our Reformed faith, this question, raised in relationship especially to our text this morning from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, seems like a fine place to begin.

Why do we have to interpret? Well, to begin with, to read is always, already to interpret.

Some of us are old enough to remember newspapers, and, if you do, you know that you bring a different lens, a different interpretive schema, to the funny pages than you do to the front page – even here in metro DC. You come to Harry Potter with a different expectation than you bring to Facebook. We read the psalms differently than we do the letters of Paul – or, at least, we should.

The context of the reader also changes the meaning of a given text. That may be a bit harder to grasp, as a general principle of hermeneutics, but you really don’t have to look any further than the district court ruling from last Thursday to understand that new times give us new understandings of ruling texts. The judge might well have written, in her opinion, “you have heard it said that the rights of same-sex couples are of no concern to the United States Constitution, but I say to you ‘we hold these truths as self evident that all people are created equal.’”

Scripture is no different in that regard. The type of writing tells you a lot about what your reading should be like, the context for the writing provides some of the necessary framing for understanding, and the context of reading provides the rest.

Jesus’ interpretive moves in the Sermon on the Mount provide the template for Reformed theological reflection.

When he says, “You have heard it said … but I say to you,” Jesus is saying to his followers – that is to say, to us – “you have to get a new mind for a new time.”

The script that you have followed thus far will not take you where you need to go.

We all follow scripts. We begin learning various scripts for our lives from the moment of our births, and we learn additional ones all along our ways.

We learn what it means to be little boys or little girls – and, sometimes, those basic scripts, which will work for many, do not work. Our very souls tell us that the script is wrong. That’s part of the script for transgender persons: “you have heard it said that because your body is this way, so therefore your gender is this way … but I tell you, that ain’t necessarily so.”

We learn early scripts at home, from school, in neighborhoods, at church, through media. These scripts are not necessarily negative by any means. For example, the script about what it means to be an America reminds us of the fundamental value and dignity of human individuals. That is, of course, only part of the American scripture, and it is, like every script, always shaped and determined to varying degrees by culture and context.

For example, the script that most of us learn today about race is not the same racial script that was imparted to our grandparents. To take another example – and one that Jesus speaks to directly in Matthew – the script about divorce is also not the same one our grandparents learned.

My mom told me years ago that early in her marriage to my dad, my dad’s mom told her that she knew within a month or so of her marriage to my grandfather that she had made a huge mistake. But that was in 1920, or thereabouts, and the script about divorce was pretty clear: you didn’t do it.

Frankly, while I feel sadness for my grandparents’ unhappiness, I’m pretty darn glad divorce was verboten because otherwise I wouldn’t be here!

We learn so many other scripts, and we follow them throughout our lives – scripts about money and work, scripts about addiction, scripts about religion.

At certain points in our lives, though, we want to holler, “get me rewrite!”

That’s what Jesus is saying to his followers in Matthew. It’s the same thing that Isaiah was pointing at, as well.

The people of Israel had learned a script about fasting and prayer, but they had missed something deeper – a script that, while never outside of context, helps us understand better how to frame context, how to understand it, account for it, and live along its shifting borders and boundaries. That script is about justice and love.

I was reading Isaiah in the library on a kids and moms’ morning a couple of weeks ago … why do we fast but you do not hear our prayers? The baby cries and his mom hears and feeds. That script is as old as time.

The people of Israel have fasted a couple of months each year for 70 years – kids have been born, grown up, lived pretty full lives and died – and the prayers of their people for deliverance from their exile and their oppressors have not been answered.

God, it seems to them, is not following God’s part of the script. After all, upon hearing the cries of the oppressed and enslaved Israelites, didn’t God send Moses to liberate them?

Now the people have lived in the darkness of exile for seven decades. Why doesn’t the God of Exodus hear their cries? Why doesn’t God acknowledge their fasting and faithfulness?

Isaiah tells them, and he makes no bones about it. Fasting must be about aligning human priorities with the will of God or it’s just religious show, false piety. So Isaiah calls for a fast, but not a traditional abstaining from food. Rather, the prophet says that Israel must abstain from the worship of affluence, it must fast from privilege, it must turn away from turning away in indifference to suffering.

Isaiah’s prophetic voice offers an insider’s critique to his own tradition. He calls for a return to core principles, on the one hand, and an acknowledgment of fundamentally changed historical context on the other.

That’s what Jesus does, as well. Throughout his teaching, Jesus is clear that the love of God and love of neighbor are core principles. They are the core because they are life giving. Rooted and grounded in this love we choose life.

Love of God and of neighbor are the principles through which we understand ourselves as people of faith, but the way these primary commandments are received, understood, interpreted and lived out changes with changing historical context. You have heard it said … but I say to you.

Later on Paul will do essentially the same thing with Jesus’ teaching, saying, in effect, you have heard it said that the Messiah will come for the Jews, but I say to you that he has already come and it was for the whole world. You have heard it said … but I say to you.

The pattern is the same: a call to core convictions but lived differently for a changed historical context.

As we have witnessed the great bending of the arc of justice around marriage equality over recent months, I have thought back a time or two to our days in Pittsburgh. There is, of course, a smidge of ego for me that does sneak in every once in a while to whisper, “I told you so.” But when the better angels of my nature are in the saddle, I am more prone to wonder what it is that I am missing? Where am I choosing death instead of life? Where do I need to get a new mind for the present time? Where am I stuck in the rut of time- and tradition-bound readings of texts? Where do I need to hear Jesus say, “you have heard it said … but I say to you”?

We have to get a new mind for a new time, all of the time for time is never fixed and unchanging. It’s not that the mind no longer matters. It matter immensely, but it must always be open to being changed as new circumstance and the movement of the Holy Spirit demand.

That is exactly how I would translate the great watchwords of the Reformed theological tradition of which we are a part. We say, in our tradition, that we are ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda, the church reformed and always being reformed.

I can easily imagine a conversation between Jesus and the leaders of the Reformation. Jesus would say, “I have heard you say that you are Reformed, and that is good; but I say to you ‘you stand in need of being further reformed.’”

That’s who we are. We have been given scripts and, as a people of faith whose faith is shaped and formed according to a long tradition and according to the sacred texts of that tradition, we have been given also scriptures.

We’ve also been given minds to understand and hearts to love, such that we are able, through the long struggle to follow the way of Jesus more fully and closely, to rewrite the script, to get a new mind for a new time, to be the church Reformed and always being reformed.

May we be that church, for in being so we choose life. Amen.

Messages and Messengers

Micah 6:1-8; Matthew 5:1-12

February 2, 2014

I believe there’s a football game this evening. Experts in these sorts of things predict that more than 100 million people will watch on TV. That’s a whole lot of eyeballs watching TV screens, and, of course, advertisers are eager to take advantage of the opportunity. So eager, in fact, that they’re willing to pay about $8 million for one minute of air time – not to mention the additional millions they’ll shell out to put their commercials together in the first place.

That’s a whole lot of money to get your message across, so advertisers tend to seek out the most famous, glamorous, and beautiful celebrities possible to sell the message. Scarlett Johansson, David Beckham, Arnold and a host of others will be shilling for one thing or another tonight.

So, if you had a spare $10 million, what message would you share with more than 100 million people? Who would you get to share it? How would you package your message? What themes or memes would you employ?

I don’t know how such decisions are made, but I’m going start with the message first. It seems to me that what you want to say should help you decide how it gets said and by whom.

I was asked in a church job interview once what Biblical texts I would preach from if I was choosing texts to preach what I considered most central to the proclamation of the church. Micah 6:8 was on my list: what does the Lord require of us? Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with our God.

There are other passages that I understand as central and foundational to the gospel, to the good news that we are called to share as followers of Jesus. The Beatitudes, the blessings that open Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in Matthew would also be on my short list. Also from that sermon, the Golden Rule – do unto others as you would have them do unto you – would make the list. The Great Commandment: love God and love your neighbor. The New Commandment: love one another as I have loved you. The simple reminder from 1 John: God is love. Amos’ powerful exhortation to let justice roll down like water and righteousness like an everflowing stream.

These are the messages I would share. These are the core of my proclamation of the good news. At their heart, each of them is about relationships – the relationship between Creator and creature, and relationships among and between creatures.

We are invited, always, into a loving relationship with God. We are called, throughout, to treat one another with love and with justice, and we are called always to practice, with humility, a particular concern for the poor, the outcast and those marginalized by the wider culture.

That’s the message.

So what about the messenger?

I don’t know that you could have come up with a less likely messenger than Jesus. Imagine the Madison Avenue ad team trying to deal with him. “Jesus, first, you gotta get rid of the fisherman. They’re only marginally employed. They’re poor as dirt. They don’t smell very good. Seriously, they are not at all presentable. Oh, and you gotta stop hanging out with tax collectors. Nobody likes them. And the prostitutes – that’s gotta stop. We don’t care what you do with you free time, but you cannot be seen in public with them. And about the lepers – if you want to champion some disease that great, but let’s find one that photographs better. We could get you into a juvenile diabetes clinic. Those kids are cute, and people will eat that up. Now, about your wardrobe. I think we can do a bit better than those worn-out sandals. Oh, yeah, and lose the beard.”

Appearances aside, Jesus was pretty much a loser. No authority recognized him, and the leaders of his own people completed rejected him. He was publicly humiliated, and then brutally executed by the state. He died penniless, alone, abandoned by almost everyone who knew him.

Nevertheless, here we gather, some 2,000 years later, and we remember the messenger even if we’re still a bit unclear about the message. How did that happen?

Well, at least in part, it happened because the movement Jesus began survived him. Inspired by resurrection life – whatever that was like for them – the followers of Jesus overcame their fears and continued to share his message. Eventually, they became the community of the church, and the church – the body of Christ in the world – became the vessel for the message.

The church is, and always has been, the only less likely messenger for the good news than its initial proclaimer. After all, no matter what else you may think about Jesus, he clearly had the reputation of being not only a decent communicator, but, more to the point, of being a fundamentally decent, loving, compassionate human being with really good connections to the divine.

We, on the other hand, are a broken bunch – fearful, addicted, often less than fully honest with ourselves, prideful and arrogant one moment, cowering in escapism the next. Longing for God, but scared to death of actually encountering the Divine. Oh, to be sure, at our best we are beautiful, powerful, faithful, loving, creative, and caring disciples. But, let’s be honest, we are not always at our best, and, often, we are far from it.

Yet, as the apostle Paul put it, in Christ Jesus God was at work reconciling the creation to its Creator, and we have been entrusted with this message of reconciliation. I really hope God didn’t spend the entire treasure of heaven on the message the church delivers!

Yet, here we are, with an incredibly important word for the world.

We, the church of Jesus Christ, “can teach, and witness to, and act out an alternative way in the world” through the practices of hospitality, generosity, and forgiveness, as Walter Brueggemann said in a recent interview.[1]

A world that fears the stranger desperately needs the witness of hospitality. A world that scratches out and clings to and hoards every nickel, and that, as a result, creates a great and growing gap between the haves and the have nots, needs nothing so much as a witness to profligate generosity. A world weary with one eye traded for another, longs for the witness of forgiveness.

These are defining characteristics of the church, and when we live into them in the world we can be the messengers of grace, gratitude and love that God calls us to be.

Our first, simplest and still most profound witness to these practices comes when we gather at this table to recall the message of Christ and to remember the messenger. Let us come to the table, and learn again as we gather that we are called to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God. Amen.

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[1] In “An Alternative Way,” a film produced by The Work of the People, 2014.

Call and Response

1 Corinthians 1:10-18; Matthew 4:12-23; Psalm 27; Isaiah 9:1-6

January 26, 2014

Many years, on the final Sunday of January when we traditionally hold our winter congregational meeting, I’ll use this time for a kind of “state of the kirk” address. I don’t want to ignore that, so I’ll just say, as evidenced by the second group of new members in the past three months, the soundness of the budget we’ll look at during the congregational meeting, and the numbers of folks we’ve fed during the past 12 months that the state of the wee kirk is strong and vibrant.

The state of the larger church, on the other hand, is something else altogether – at least in its North American context. You have, no doubt, heard the stats about the increasing number of “nones” – those who answer “none” when asked about religious affiliation on surveys. You have, no doubt, observed that young adults are the largest segment of the “nones.” Indeed, fully one-third of “millennials” claim no religious affiliation while for the whole U.S. population the figure is about 20 percent.[1]

So the wide angle view is challenging, while the close-up seems more promising.

Still, it remains to wonder what it is that we’re actually looking at when we consider the state of the church.

Do membership rolls and research questions tell us much about the life of the community of faith or about the faith lives of its members? Do such statistics tell us much about what happens when Jesus says, “follow me”? Or about what happens when communities experience conflict, such as was clearly the case when Paul wrote his first letter to the church at Corinth? Do they have anything to offer to our experience of waiting for the Lord, as the psalmist describes it in Psalm 27? Do they suggest anything about what it means to have walked in darkness, and then to experience a great light?

In a recent interview in the Atlantic, author Jennifer Percy, speaking about her decision to switch from her physics major to writing, observed

I don’t think human relationships are ever fully comprehensible. They can clarify for small, beautiful moments, but then they change. Unlike a scientific experiment with rigorous, controlled parameters, our lives are boundless and shifting. And there’s never an end to the story. We need more than science—we need storytelling to capture that kind of complexity, that kind of incomprehensibility.[2]

When I read that, I thought immediately about the question of Christian faith. Faith is, fundamentally, a relationship involving human beings, so it is never fully comprehensible, and it changes. Jesus clearly understood this, and thus he taught in parables – stories – rather than in theological arguments, he issued enigmatic invitations to fishermen rather than edicts about orthodoxy, and he built multiple relationships rather than a single systematic theology.

Paul also understood this, and it probably grated considerably against his logical, argumentative soul. But he understood it, and thus even to the fractious and equally argumentative church at Corinth he would say, “we belong to God,” and, eventually, he would tell them that the greatest gift of faith is the gift of love. Love is about relationship or it is about nothing at all.

So let me tell you a story about a relationship: me and Jesus. He calls, I ignore the call … and he doesn’t stop calling. Sometimes Jesus is like the most annoying telemarketer in the world. He simply won’t take no for an answer. Believe me. I’ve tried.

There are days when I still want to tell Jesus to take a hike, but he always says, “sure, I’ll take a hike … but why don’t you come with me and I’ll introduce you to some friends.” So, in the company of Christ’s church I have taken a hike or two, and those hikes have led me to some amazing places: the hills of Appalachia to restore houses and meet the people who live in them; shelters in Kentucky to feed the homeless and meet them in the breaking of bread; the gates of the White House to pray for peace and seek shalom with people of many faiths; the steps of the Supreme Court to call for justice with rainbow-flag-waving folks from all over; the living rooms and dining rooms of the faithful to break bread and share our lives over simple meals. Following Jesus has gotten me fired and arrested, it’s left my family technically homeless for a few months and economically marginal for more than a few. Following Jesus has taken me face to face with some of the people and situations our culture most often tells us to be terrified of, but it is precisely in those moments when I have learned the most important thing about following Jesus: we are never alone, and we have nothing to fear because nothing, nothing, nothing can separate us from the love of God that we find manifest in Jesus.

For me, this is what it means to follow Jesus; this is what it means to be a member of the church of Jesus Christ.

The gift that the church still retains, and that it is called to share with the world, is the simple gift of relationship with the One who reveals God for us, and with all of the ones who seek to follow the path of trusting the God revealed along the way.

When Jesus said, “follow me,” he was not inviting the disciples to a single church service, he was inviting them to a life of service, and of deep relationships that form the foundation upon which lives of service are built.

At Clarendon we center our lives around the fellowship of the table because, as Jesus knew and as he lived and demonstrated, there is no better way to build relationships that in the breaking of bread, the sharing of a meal, simple fellowship around a common table.

But we don’t build relationships simply for the sake of joyous fellowship. That is an important part of it, to be sure, and nobody wants to be part of a dour group of terminally unhappy people.

But if all we do is enjoy good times and good food, we’ll then we’re the corner pub instead of the church of Jesus Christ. Moreover, if our own joy is the chief purpose of our gathering then when we experience setbacks, trials, and times of brokenness, we’ll fly apart at the seams. Disagreements within faith communities are nothing new under the sun, as Paul’s letter to the church at Corinth should remind us.

If we’re only pursuing our own happiness, then the disagreements that are inevitable in any community will split us apart. But the way through our own differences, our own brokenness, our own suffering, is by way of the suffering of others.

If we’re only following Jesus to make ourselves happy then we’re pretty foolish. There are simpler paths to personal happiness that ask far less of you than does the way of Jesus.

You see, the church exists not for itself but for others, and the way of Jesus takes us straight into the suffering of the world. There are 1,001 self-help books out there promising happiness but none of them invites you to share in the suffering of the world for the sake of the world. And yet, there – in the broken places – there is precisely where we build lives of distinction, of purpose, of meaning.

We cut off the reading from Matthew that opened our worship this morning, but it’s important to note what comes next. Jesus doesn’t call the disciples just to bring together a good group. He calls them for a purpose. Immediately they put down their nets – their means of livelihood, the tools of their trade – and they followed him. Then they went out teaching, proclaiming the good news that everyone is welcome to the household of God, and curing people of everything that ailed them.

That’s what Jesus calls us to do: proclaim good news, heal those who are sick, give rest to those who are weary, teach compassion as we practice compassion, build deep relationships around this table – with each other and with the One who calls us to this table – invite others into deep relationship as well, and live rich, full, lives with passion.

Jesus calls us still. What shall be our response?

Let us pray: O God, in Jesus you call us to lives filled with compassion, to lives lived for the sake of the world, to lives overflowing with love for one another and for you. Give us the courage to set aside our nets and follow. Amen.

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[1] Pew Research Center data widely reported in 2012, including in Religion Dispatches here.

[2] Jennifer Percy (in the Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/01/life-keeps-changing-why-stories-not-science-explain-the-world/283219/)