Tag Archives: Kingdom of GOD

Man, Have You Got the Wrong Idea

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a Sermon for Lent 3C
Text: Luke 13:1-9

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Jesus raises a question about providence this morning. A question about GOD. About good and evil. About the way of the world. He tackles what is perhaps the most enduring question in human history: why do bad things happen?

And yet, before tackling the big question, He asks the gathered people a question:

“Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?”

He asks if they believe this thing: that all tragedy is a result of sin. That people get what they deserve.

No, he says, it doesn’t work that way.

But He knows they don’t believe Him. He knows they already have it wired up here:
There is good and there is bad. Good things, good people, bad things, and bad people. Then good results come from good actions and bad results from bad actions. So good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. And we think GOD plays an active role in how this plays out.

Michael Danner, a Mennonite pastor, approaches this idea in his commentary for this morning.

People believe this in spite of the facts. No matter how many good people suffer, people still believe this. No matter how many bad people prosper, people still believe this. Why? Because people really, really, really want the world to work like that. In a world where that is true people have a say in the matter of suffering. In that world, if people are good, they can avoid suffering.

In other words, control. Now hear this again: “people really, really, really want the world to work like that.” We have imposed this order to the world. It isn’t scriptural. It’s more like Greek philosophy. It doesn’t speak to GOD’s sense of justice. It speaks to our devotion to balance and fairness. And it confines GOD, transforming that which cannot be understood into a dispenser of carrots and sticks.

Reject and replace

Jesus rejects this view of the world, and of GOD. But He doesn’t explain why. This should be a familiar characteristic of Jesus to us by now. Jesus isn’t a wisdom dispenser. He is a teacher, a rabbi, and his disciples, then and now, are to not just learn, but follow.

What Jesus does say, however, is that we will meet their fate unless we repent. This sounds bad, doesn’t it? But we must take these two things together.

First, Jesus rejects out of hand any perceived causal link between having bad things happen to somebody and the suggestion that they must be bad people. Doing bad things doesn’t mean you’ll eventually get your comeuppance. Lacking strong morals does not mean GOD will manipulate your environment so that you don’t get into the program you applied for or that an anvil will land on your Wile E. head. Jesus flat out rejects this. Do you believe this? He asks them, then before they can answer, He says “No, I tell you.”

Second, Jesus seams to suggest that all are fated to death, unless they repent. You remember that repentance involves three things:

  1. acknowledging one’s sin
  2. confessing it
  3. accepting a new way

So repentance involves rejecting one’s old life and embracing a new one: rejecting the way of our world and embracing the way of GOD’s Kingdom.

Jesus is inviting his disciples in every age to reject this human understanding of providence and embrace a way of becoming a different people. We are called to reject this specific construction, this way of understanding the order of things, this Platonic dualism of good and evil. That GOD doesn’t engage with us that way. GOD isn’t responsible for our labeling of good and evil. It isn’t how the world is ordered. We made it up!

And we are called to replace that, not with another construction for explaining away providence, but with a way of walking in this world. It is a way because it isn’t enough to believe certain ideas and it isn’t enough to do certain things and it isn’t enough to be a certain way. We are to become something new. Always becoming new.

Replace beliefs with a journey

The challenge for us, then is that Jesus is asking us to tear apart this frame of understanding the world that provides comfort to us and then doesn’t give us an identical replacement. I know that many of us have a hard time rejecting something without a replacement. Don’t throw it away without getting a new one! But Jesus is telling us to do just that. Our idea is wrong. GOD’s mercy and judgment doesn’t work that way.

So that’s pretty uncomfortable.

Jesus seems to be saying that, as usual, our attention is focused on the wrong things. Reject the empire’s ways—the ordering, the certainty, the purity, the authority—and embrace GOD’s way—the way of discipleship, of following, of becoming what GOD dreams for us. Don’t worry about the natural law—where is Jesus leading us? How might we best feed His sheep? These are our questions.

Like Abram, we are called to a life of exploration and fascination. A life that is not just a set of conditions or an orderly belief structure, but a Sabbath journey of hope and courage. It is a way of living in our world as an immigrant, a wanderer, a sojourner on a pilgrimage.

Like the Woman at the Well, we are called to a new life, a changed life, a life of rejecting the old and embracing the new. Of witnessing the power of Christ in our midst, proclaiming it to our family, friends, and neighbors. And to be transformed by the power of the Spirit.

For us, may this journey continue.

Love King? Live Kingdom.

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As we observe Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I have decided to do us all a favor and keep my reflection brief. MLK was a visionary, not because he was a civil rights leader or because he was faith leader, but because he understood Jesus’s vision. And he cast it out for us to see. A world in which we lived the Kingdom of GOD, not just paying it lip service. A vision in which he famously dreamed of his daughter playing alongside someone completely different. Not as two color-blind children, but as two children of GOD.

picture from iheardin.com

picture from iheardin.com

As we celebrate today, with the confluence of the presidential inauguration and the observed day of a famed civil rights leader, let us take a moment and acknowledge something fundamentally missing from the narrative.

This isn’t just about race.

This isn’t just about equality.

This isn’t just about faith.

This isn’t just about geography.

This isn’t just about politics.

This isn’t just about tradition.

This isn’t just about charisma.

This isn’t just about the United States of America.

This isn’t just about people.

This isn’t just about today.

This isn’t just about a dream, a fiction, or a hope.

This is about what GOD has called us to do, what Jesus came to show us, and what the Holy Spirit is guiding us toward: a radically transformed world with different values than the empire. It is about making that happen. Everything else is a small piece in a much bigger puzzle. A puzzle we call the Kingdom of GOD.

For more on King, go here.

Stand Up!

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a Sermon for Advent 1C
Text: Luke 21:25-36

Perpetual Crisis

Each of us has come across someone who thinks the world is going to end soon. We had Harold Camping predict the world would end, twice. He was wrong. Many believe we have 19 more days thanks to one interpretation of the Mayan Calendar. And there are the TV blowhards like John Hagee that have made a whole lot of money telling people of our impending doom thanks to GOD’s displeasure.

Years ago I stumbled across a site that assigned points to certain current events to determine how close to the End Times we are at any moment.

We know that most of this is ridiculous. Part of us knows that, like the coming of the bridegroom, we don’t know the hour of Jesus’s arriving so speculating is simply that. But that means we have to believe that Jesus would return. And part of us isn’t so sure we believe it would happen this way.

I can’t speak for everyone, but the coming of the Kingdom of God as Jesus describes it here, doesn’t really sound like something I want to participate in. And it certainly doesn’t square with what we normally associate with Jesus’s description of GOD’s dream for humanity. The lion laying down with the lamb, for instance. People sharing incredible, generous love with one another.

And we might be tempted, as humanity always has, to read the current state of things into these calamities. That we are perpetually in the midst of not just an earthly crisis, but a heavenly one.

Spoiling for a Fight

The line in the text that pricks up my ears, however, is Jesus’s first statement. If we back off the apocalyptic, end times talk for a minute, we can hear an interesting statement about Jesus’s line of thinking. He says:

“There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves.”

It says that the signs are going to be in the sky but we’ll be confused by the water. GOD will have us look up, but we will be arguing about what is below. This isn’t a sign of the apocalypse; this is everyday life for us! GOD offers to help us and we can’t hear it for all of our fighting and wrong-headedness.

But Jesus does play on our confusion about Jesus’s coming again and the unsettling utter transformation of the world, speaking of a future moment in which mass confusion and missed signs will leave most of us confused and frightened. And in the midst of this great re-raveling of the world, Jesus will be there. And in that moment, we are to stand up and face what is coming.

Sounds like a good plan and all, but I’m not sure how we’re supposed to be so calm. When our own problems make us feel as if the sky is indeed falling already.

Standing Against the Wind

The context of this reading is right after Jesus has foretold the destruction of the Temple. If you remember, we had that reading from Mark two weeks ago. Luke has a very similar parallel. So Jesus foretells the destruction of the Temple, then Jerusalem, and then the coming of the Son of Humanity. And for how frightening we have made this passage out of our confusion, it is far less scary then what came before it: the armies that were to surround Jerusalem and destroy it; the mothers unable to care for their children. That was terrifying. Like those distressed nations, we’re “confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves.”

The recurring theme in Jesus’s talk about the coming Kingdom from the Kingdom’s point of view is to say that we are to prepare for it because we aren’t going to know it is coming. Our job, however, is to draw it closer. Not in trying to instigate wars or cause confusion, but in being Kingdom people here.

Notice we are twice invited to stand up in the midst of this confusion and trouble. Jesus doesn’t say this because we are to be full of ourselves or demonstrate bravery for the sake of bravery. It is because we are to be prepared for the better world that is to come and that we are to embrace it.

In short, that the posture demonstrating one’s love for GOD’s dream for humanity is that we stand ready for it. That, as everyone else is afraid and clutching their babies, we know that GOD will not destroy us; that we are to face this time, with our heads up, to see the signs where GOD puts them: up above us: where we aren’t.

Just Strolling

There is plenty around us that could get us down. There is plenty that lead us to think the sky is falling. But this passage reminds us of who we are to be, regardless of the storm. Maybe a little like Andy Dufresne.

Red, Morgan Freeman’s character in The Shawshank Redemption describes Andy, Tim Robbin’s character this way:

I could see why some of the boys took him for snobby. He had a quiet way about him, a walk and a talk that just wasn’t normal around here. He strolled, like a man in a park without a care or a worry in the world, like he had on an invisible coat that would shield him from this place. Yeah, I think it would be fair to say…I liked Andy from the start.

Andy was dealing with his own craziness: in losing his wife, being wrongly convicted of her murder, and being sent to prison for life. This is his apocalypse. And through most of it, Andy strolls.

The Shawshank Redemption

The Shawshank Redemption (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This text is the reminder Jesus gives us as we start another year. He invites us to stand against the storm, but the truth is that we stand up regardless of the weather. We stand up for ourselves and we stand up for others. We stand in the wind and in the sun. We stand whether or not we are ready for what GOD has for us. Because there’s no way we can be ready when we’re on our butts…or our knees.

When Pilate Finds Jesus

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a Sermon for Proper 29B
Text: John 18:33-38a

Here Jesus stands. It is Friday morning. This is what condemning the Temple and the order of things gets you. Face to face with Rome’s appointed commander for the region: Pontius Pilate. Jesus is quizzed like a commoner.

What is truth? Deutsch: Was ist Wahrheit? Fran...

What is truth? Deutsch: Was ist Wahrheit? Français : “Qu’est-ce que la vérité ?” Le Christ et Pilate. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Those that attend our Good Friday worship get the whole Passion gospel from John each year. And today, the last day of the church year, we are given an interesting snippet from Jesus’s final hours. A discourse between a rebellious rabbi and Rome. Jesus is asked simply and directly about the charge brought against him: that he is calling himself King of the Jews.

And every Good Friday we are given the opportunity to explore what brought Jesus to this moment and what happens next: he is convicted and punished and killed by crucifixion. Then late Saturday night or Sunday morning, we acknowledge that Jesus has left behind an empty tomb.

Since it isn’t Good Friday, but the 26th Sunday after Pentecost, our church’s New Year’s Eve if you will, we have a different view. We have Jesus, our teacher, in perhaps his last teaching moment.

“Are you the King of the Jews?”

Jesus could simply say “no.” It would be honest in every way. King Herod is literally the King of the Jews. And spiritually, Jesus has spoken of a much broader ministry than that. But as always, Jesus answers in the form of a question:

“Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?”

Here we should acknowledge that Pilate, the Roman authority always believes he has the upper hand in a situation. And in every conceivable way, he does here. But Jesus isn’t here on accident. He put himself here. He is still working on bringing the Kingdom of GOD closer. Therefore he isn’t on trial, but working on the Kingdom. It is Pilate who has been put in the strange situation: deciding on religious and spiritual matters that aren’t his to mediate.

And yet he is there with Jesus. He is the one standing before Jesus, asking spiritual questions of the great rabbi. Did he hear the Good News? Does he know of what is happening in the world? Was he invited to the party?

“I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?”

Clearly Pilate recognizes he isn’t the one to try Jesus, for this isn’t his work for the Emperor. He isn’t to mediate a religious spat. He is to keep the peace. He is curious about who this stranger is before him. He has heard about Him. But what has he heard?

“My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.”

Instead of answering the question Pilate gives Him, Jesus makes a much bolder statement. He is not the leader of the Jewish people: he is the leader of all people. Instead of claiming Herod’s throne, Pilate hears Jesus claim a throne; a different one. Perhaps it is the emperor’s throne.

The lectionary tries to give Jesus the last word: that Jesus was born to testify to the truth and everyone with ears to hear it will get the truth. But Pilate responds with a provocative question

‘What is truth?’

before telling the people that he has found no reason to punish Jesus.

I don’t know if the lectionary preparers were aware of the deep irony in putting last week’s gospel next to this one. That Jesus condemns the Jewish leadership, bringing with him an anti-king self-identity. That the leader is to be the servant of all; that power is expressed through humility; that the poorest among us should be treated like wealthy benefactors. The kind of kingdom Jesus brings is an anti-kingdom that doesn’t need bankers and lawyers, but generous servants, giving not from their abundance, but out of their poverty.

That is what we’ve been talking about. Then they tell us to see Jesus as a king.

We don’t need a king.

We need Jesus.

We need the Jesus presented here. He is asked if he is a king. His response: “you say.” This is one of the few things absolutely consistent in all four gospels. When Pilate asks if he is a king, Jesus doesn’t say “yes,” but “you say.”

“You say.”

We say. We make Jesus a king. Like Peter making Jesus a messiah—the sort that will lead a bloody revolution—as opposed to the sort that will lead a revolution in death.

The trouble we get ourselves into is that we think Jesus said “yes.” And some translations actually have Jesus say “Yes, I am!” We think that Jesus is a king. That if only stores were closed on Sundays or more people came to church, we’d have a better look at that Kingdom that we are called to bring closer. As if we can force the world to join our way. Or trick it. Or coerce it through legal measures. Or put it on our currency. Like any of these violent, reckless approaches moves the kingdom. They simply install Jesus in a position that He doesn’t want.

Jesus isn’t our king.

Jesus is our teacher. Our savior. Our liberator. Our guide. Our lover. Our friend. Our coach. Our inspiration. Our devotion. Our faith. Our understanding. Our Way. Jesus is all of these things and so much more. And it is in recognizing what it is that Jesus has been telling us all of our lives that we can begin to understand that very thing Pilate doesn’t get: the truth. We get there by following Him. We don’t arrive, like some all-knowing holy man perched on top of a mountain, but we journey with Jesus. We follow. We explore. We learn. We see. We listen. And we hear. We’re going to need those ears to hear in the coming weeks as we prepare for the coming of Jesus after Advent.

We don’t need the church to dominate the world: we need to be Jesus for the world. As everyone else is running around trying to buy love, we’re finding it in the one place Jesus told us to look: GOD. And we’re sharing it with everyone, not in a preemptive wish of “Merry Christmas” well before it is time, but in generous and humble service to friends, family, and strangers. This isn’t an order to go and do something for Jesus, but an invitation to follow where He is already going.

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Priorities

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a Homily for Thanksgiving
Text: Matthew 6:25-33

 An Unthankul Story

Tonight we’ve gathered to give thanks. More specifically, to give thanks to GOD for all of our blessings and all that we have to be thankful for. To give thanks to a GOD for so much wonderful stuff.

But we know not everyone feels that thankful.

Last fall, one of my wife’s friends from high school asked for prayers on Facebook. His family was suffering through a job loss and were fearful for their future. He described that he was trying to be faithful in the midst of the struggle because he knew GOD would provide. The comment field broke in two directions: most responded by telling him, just as Jesus seems to be telling the crowd in tonight’s reading, “Don’t worry! God will provide!” A few people seemed to chastise him for a seeming lack of faith; suggesting that his circumstances would improve if he just believed more or better.

My wife, however, was livid. We were struggling through our own job loss and to hear such ridiculous talk and cavalier attitudes about faith and GOD’s providence from people who weren’t struggling themselves were personally insulting. She was praying more than she ever had. But prayers didn’t pay the electric bill. She did when she wrote out the check. Prayers didn’t put food on the table. I did when I went to the grocery store. Our problems aren’t solved that way.

Now a Thankful Story

We have a story that deals with this.

In Exodus, the Hebrew people are rescued by GOD, brought across the parted sea, and arrive in the wilderness. Once they are free, they do precisely what any of us would do. They turn to each other and say “now what?” Then they start complaining about being hungry and thirsty. They whine about it incessantly. So Moses goes off to ask GOD what can be done. And GOD gives them clean drinking water. Then after more whining, some food. Then after more whining some more water.

I am fascinated by this because GOD doesn’t yell or punish the whining. It all seems expected. It has an “Oh, you need water? Here you go!” vibe to it. However, when it comes to the food GOD gives conditions. First, this sticky, flaky substance will show up in the morning. Eat up. It isn’t the bare necessity, you’ll get just what you can eat. In the evening you’ll have meat. But don’t save any until Friday; you’ll get a double portion that day for the Sabbath. Of course they test it out and it gets maggoty, just as GOD promised.

This story, often told as a test of faith for the people is really a story about generosity and preservation. They are given good food and a lot of it. And it isn’t dependent on their faith. They asked for food and GOD gave it. And kept giving it. Of course they eventually wanted a menu change. I’m sure they got pretty tired of that manna after a few weeks.

Don’t Worry, Feel

When Jesus invites the crowd to quit worrying about their stuff—food, clothes, shelter; the basic necessities—he doesn’t seem to be saying that these are unimportant. He doesn’t seem to be suggesting they ignore their needs: to not pay the electric bill and see what happens. He seems to be saying that’s not what I want you to focus on. Instead, focus on GOD. Our worry gets in the way.

Of course, this a tall order: to quit worrying. I don’t think we’re really supposed to. I think we are supposed to feel all of that. This passage comes to us in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount. This sermon begins with the Beatitudes, a litany to those who are moved by injustice in the world. The whole sermon is a testament to creating and embodying a more just world. So when Jesus tells us to stop worrying, He is saying this isn’t our first priority. What we’re wearing? Not our first priority. What we’re going to have for dinner? Not our first priority. Even where our next meal is going to come from—not our first priority. First priority? The Kingdom of GOD. Period. We’ll be cared for, not because of our faith, but because this is how the Kingdom of GOD works. We love GOD so that we can even know what love actually is. And we start loving. We become people who love. The Kingdom grows out of us—out of that love—our love for GOD and our neighbors.

Our Thanksgiving Ministry

As people charged with this same apostolic ministry to bring the Kingdom of GOD closer, to “strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness” we’re invited to see our thankfulness a little different this year. To bear witness not just to all this good stuff in our personal lives or the beauty of GOD’s creation, but to the breaking through of that Kingdom. To provide fertile soil for spring plantings of justice. To give from our abundance as the need is uncovered. To aid the oppressed and usher in change to the systems that oppress them.

Like our ancestors in the desert, we are given precisely what we need. We don’t need more people or more money or more of anything to strive for the Kingdom of GOD in St. Clair. We just need to make it our first priority.

And to be thankful, not because it’s time to do that, only to rush out and bowl people over for $20 Blue Ray players on Friday. But because GOD believes in us, loves us, and cares for us.

When we gather around our tables tomorrow, may our hunger and thirst be satisfied, not by the food we eat, but through the justice we seek.

We Don’t Need a King

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When the Hebrew people were captive in Egypt, GOD sent Moses to lead the people to liberation. When they had trouble listening to what GOD was telling them to do, the people were given laws on how to create a just society. When the people had trouble maintaining their society, GOD sent judges to lead them and keep the society just. Then the people demanded a king: the neighboring tribes had kings, so they wanted one too. So GOD called David to be their king.

The scope of our early history is a persistent problem with leadership. We had trouble living into the world GOD intended for us and so GOD kept trying to give us what we needed. The story after we get a king is more like a testament to “be careful what you ask for: you just might get it.” Our history was not served well be the kings. A lesson that was made worse by each succeeding generation.

There is an old tradition to seeing Jesus as descending from David; as being the true heir to divine kingship. But what are actually saying? When we call Jesus our king, I fear that we are expecting the wrong thing from Him. That, like Peter calling Jesus “Messiah” and expecting a military leader, do we call Jesus “King!” and see a patriarch? Is he ruler? Does He command us to jump and we say “how high?” Is his authority so dependent on intimidation and centralized economic power?

Or is Jesus a king in the same way He triumphantly entered Jerusalem on a colt? A ruler who doesn’t actually rule; a leader who follows.

This Sunday is called the Feast of Christ the King, a relatively new feast day in the church, dating to the early 20th Century. It is the day we acknowledge the supremacy of Christ as head of the Kingdom of GOD. I worry that we lose sight of what kind of king we are talking about. A king that serves, that sacrifices, and that loves radically. A king that looks the complete opposite of virtually any king any of us has ever read about. It is an image that is too hard for us to understand and far too easy to misuse.

That is why I say we don’t need a king today. We don’t need a leader or conqueror or a hero. We need Jesus. Just Jesus, Son of Humanity, whose example is humble, not glorified; generous, not treacherous; hospitable, not exclusionary.

The one who came to save us from ourselves. Like our Hebrew ancestors, we don’t need a king. We just need The Way.

The Thunder Blunder (Eating Scripture)

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Eating Mark 10: 35-45

This whole arc in Mark has been about discipleship; about following Jesus where He is going. Which is Jerusalem and death. And then resurrection.

After Jesus foretells His death for the third time, we have this third epic fail. And it is a doozy.

Unfortunately for us, even though we recognize half of the problem, we aren’t likely to even notice the other half. Perhaps the more important half. The half Jesus is more interested in. The half that deals with what kind of leaders these disciples are.

Eating Scripture is a short video series in which we explore the juicy and the crunchy in this week’s gospel in four minutes or fewer.

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Deconstructing Marriage (Eating Scripture)

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Eating Mark 10:2-16

Jesus has been talking about children a lot lately. He said that how you treat a child is how you treat GOD. Then he angrily scolds the disciples about any little one that gets a stumbling block from them should cause them to cut off their hands or feet. He is speaking about community, the Kingdom of GOD, and about the way we treat each other.

Then somebody asks Him about what The Law says about divorce. And a thousand evangelicals dig their heads in the sand and say “see, he hates divorce!”

What Jesus really says is something else. He argues that their very understanding of marriage is wrong.

Eating Scripture is a short video series in which we explore the juicy and the crunchy in this week’s gospel in four minutes or fewer.

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David Henson on Marriage

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As I prepare this week’s Eating Scripture, I read this piece on this week’s gospel by David R. Henson:

Just Marriage: Jesus, Divorce and the Vulnerable.

Do yourself a favor and read it.

Move, You’re in the Way!

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a Homily for Proper 21B

Text: Mark 9:38-50

The Call Story

Ten years ago, I decided to change my life. In the previous few years, I graduated with a BA in English Literature from Alma College, moved to a suburb of Boston to begin an MFA program at Emerson College, then I moved to Lansing, worked at Barnes & Noble for a couple of years, met my future wife. During this time, I was wrestling with GOD. I kept doing what I thought was the right thing and it wasn’t. It was just a different thing.

Then one Sunday I got the message I had been avoiding. Because that’s normally what we do with GOD. We shove our fingers in our ears and shout “La la la!” over that still, small voice and go on with things until GOD tries to whisper to us again. So I had one of those moments in which I was distracted and hadn’t prepared my fingers for submission into my ears when I got the tickle. That’s what Bishop Leidel liked to call it: a tickle. It was at All Saints’ Episcopal Church in East Lansing.

It really was a strange tickle. It wasn’t a voice telling me anything, let alone, “have you thought about seminary?” I was going into worship and it just happened to be a day in which they were using the New Zealand Prayer Book. As a life-long Episcopalian I was provoked by a way of worship in which every piece was subtly different. Every element of worship was highlighted because the wording was not what I had memorized, but the structure and current of worship was identical. And what I heard were some of the most beautiful prayers in the English language. I was nearly moved to tears.

The grind of the next several years was to go through all of the hoops of our ordination process. And there are many. I visited with Bishop Leidel. I moved to re-establish residency in my old diocese. I needed to be in a particular faith community for so long. I had to initiate and lead a major project, and on. Seminary itself was full of new hoops and that whole process transformed me. I was just telling someone the other day that the more interesting story isn’t the call story, part of which I just described, it is how I changed and how my understanding of my call to ministry has changed since that one Sunday in East Lansing. But I’m talking instead about calls and what we do to them. For me, the learning happens near the end. One particular moment that helped me see everything about being called by GOD in an entirely new way.

I was in my third year at seminary when Bishop Todd became the second bishop of Eastern Michigan and the diocese was going through a transition. Committees and structures were adapting to new leadership. And I was one of the first guinea pigs. When I got to one of the last hoops of ordination: the interview with the standing committee, I didn’t know what kind of strange nightmare scenario I was walking into and that my entire process could get derailed by a simple 20 minute rubber-stamp conversation turning into an hour-long train-wreck.

My ordination story clearly had a happy ending, but I was thrown face-to-face with one of the oldest conflicts in Christianity: when GOD’s plans and our plans don’t match up.

Get Behind Me 2

Going back to last week, we remember that the disciples seem to be avoiding what Jesus is trying to tell them. They don’t want to hear it. Partly because it is about death and they don’t want to go there. Partly because Jesus is asking something of them that is really hard. Something that they’d rather avoid altogether. Then, right on cue, John comes up to Jesus to say that the disciples are trying to stop some random stranger from doing disciple work. He wants Jesus to but in and put a stop to it. Apparently because the guy doesn’t have his papers or a disciple of Jesus license.

Then Jesus launches into an extended scolding that transforms the whole conversation. He’s just told them that they need to take a backseat to children. Now he’s saying Stop getting in people’s way! They’re doing my work, which is the whole point! Listen to why Jesus is scolding them. If their job is to reveal the Kingdom, then they need to stop preventing the Kingdom from being revealed.

My own experience with the standing committee was important in so many ways, but it revealed one of the ways we are all too eager to prevent GOD’s Kingdom from being revealed. Because we have our plans. We have our own way of doing things. We want the Kingdom to look strangely like the world as we know it: the world our parents and grandparents passed down to us, not the world GOD is ushering in. And perhaps worst of all: the main reason we’re so confused is not because we believe there is anything wrong with a person’s call; we just don’t know what to do with them when they don’t fit the normal mold.

Unlock the Gates, Keepers

The challenge for a church like St. Paul’s is that we have all of these established ways of doing things. They benefit all of us when we can walk in and know that the altar guild has set up the table, the ushers and greeters are helping people prepare for worship, and the readers and servers are ready to go. These established patterns make life easier. But what happens when someone is called to a ministry that doesn’t fit? Are we ready to help them? Or are we just going to shut them down?

On Wednesday nights, our video series has challenged us to see the current age as being led by the Spirit: that unlike previous generations, we are being awakened to the Holy Spirit’s work in our midst. If we are being honest with ourselves and trusting in GOD, then we must listen when the Spirit speaks up. When the Spirit takes off in a new direction and whispers “follow me!” That there are voices in our midst who are called to ministries that don’t yet exist or ways of ministering to this church that have not been explored in more than a generation.

Regardless of what we think or what we’ve been taught or what we wish our church looked like, there is one discernible truth that we’d much rather ignore than embrace: GOD is calling way more people to do ministry in way more ways than we’d like—and often we’re the gatekeepers holding back the Kingdom. We’re being called today to open the gates and help new ministries to flourish: new ways of gathering, new practices, and new contributions to our church. Not because we all need more to do, but because many of us are called to do something new: something that does not yet exist outside of GOD’s dream for us.

We need you.
You are the one.
We are putting our trust in you.

And the rest of us are being called to get out of their way. Because I just know there’s some Kingdom work brewing that is going to rock this place.

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