Sermon for June 14

Gospel: Matthew 9:35, 10

By Pastor Adam Woods

Alright. Let’s start with the bad news in today’s Gospel reading: Being a disciple doesn’t mean being comfortable; it doesn’t lead to being above the cares and concerns of the world; it doesn't offer a way of transcending the messiness of life.

Being a disciple of Jesus involves tumultuous political reality, navigating sharp social divisions, and confronting systemic disorder. Being a disciple is holy and hard work because it means you have been summoned, equipped, and sent among those who are like sheep without a shepherd, and at the same time it’s like being a sheep among wolves.

Jesus is informing his newly commissioned twelve disciples that it’s time for them “to walk a mile in his shepherding shoes,” as my Church downtown.

The Messiah has come, as it turns out, not to solve humanity’s problems for us, but to encourage and empower disciples to solve them, in effect recruiting people into becoming full participants in God’s work of love and redemption.

That sounds inspiring, but keep in mind what that means—disciples have to then actually be deeply engaged with the challenges and complexity of the world. And then consider who we’re talking about when we read that Jesus sends out disciples. They’re not a particularly impressive bunch. Peter, who will deny him. Judas, who will betray him. Some are fishermen with no particular status. Matthew, the tax collector. Simon, the zealot. This is not an impressive group by most standards.

These weren’t governors or emperors. Here there’s no indication that Jesus picked great scholars, compelling public speakers, or in any way qualified people to do what he was sending them out to do. And yet these are exactly the people Jesus entrusts with the work of the kingdom.

When it comes to commissioning the disciples—the calling, equipping, and sending of the twelve—Jesus makes no mistakes. He’s not sending out sub-par representatives to do what he himself could do a better job at. Instead he’s sending out those who are the right people going to the right places at the right time to make things right in God’s eyes.

So what makes disciples of Christ qualified to love, heal, cure, and save in his name? It’s Jesus’s very own compassion. Jesus is revealing that whenever and wherever there is a need, his compassion causes him to send others to meet those needs. Jesus is revealing that to be his disciple means going beyond just noticing the suffering and unmet needs of others. It must involve going forth on Jesus’s behalf to bring health and healing, proclaim hope and good news, opposing the unclean spirits and demons of violence and oppression. 

Christ’s compassion is what provides both the foundation and the fuel for disciples sharing and showing Christ’s compassion.

It’s all from Christ, but flows through us. And that’s the good news of today’s Gospel reading, my friends. This means that the work of proclaiming

• the coming reign of God,

• embodying the love of Christ,

• and extending the grace of the Holy Spirit

is not based on our own level of interest, qualifications, or even power.

Actually, this is great news. We all too often as Christians fail to have the eyes that actually see the crowds of people who are harassed and helpless in our communities and in our world, yet Jesus sees them and has compassion on them.

All too often, we as Christians avoid conflicts or confrontations with systems, ideas, or policies that cause sickness, death, marginalization, or harm to others. We aren’t willing to speak against injustice or even to hear the cries of others calling out for justice.

Yet with deep compassion and clear intention, Jesus says,

“As you go, proclaim the good news,

The kingdom of heaven has come near.”

All too often, we as Christians confuse real persecution with just being disagreed with or with being asked to learn from someone who has a different understanding or life experience than we do.

Yet a compassionate Jesus promises that when faced with true opposition and persecution,

his disciples will have the words to speak truth to power.

Thanks be to God that the foundation and fuel for this holy but hard work is the unstoppable compassion of Christ, and not the level or interest, qualifications, or even our wisdom and power of the people he sends forth.

In this passage, Jesus makes it abundantly clear that it will not be easy work to proclaim, embody, and extend his ministry. He’s sending out ordinary folks to do extraordinary work that will not be received well at all by those who like things the way they are.

But he’s not making any mistakes.

This passage is how we better understand the way being disciples of Christ turns our lives around, upside down, and in a new direction.

Discipleship turns us from inward focus to outward love and real life acts of service. In turning us outward from ourselves, we now go to the margins, toward the outcasts, away from comfort, and into the way of Christ.

In many ways, turning to the way of Christ simply means
loving your neighbor boldly,
practicing hope in the midst of great challenges, and
staying connected to the compassion of Christ that empowers and unites us.

Now to be fully transparent, that idea to love boldly, practice hope, and be connected is just me plagiarizing.

In case you didn’t notice, I've been away the last two Sundays at United Methodist annual conferences. First Michigan in late May and then Wisconsin last weekend. Both of them had great themes. Michigan’s was to “Love Boldly.” Wisconsin’s was to “Practice Hope.”

A few weeks earlier, I attended the Friday first half of the North/West Lower Michigan Synod Assembly with its theme of “Connected.”

In other words, I’ve met my quota for how many denominational meetings I can take for right now.

But what I took away from those three gatherings are inspiring ideas that brought up big questions.

Who am I called to love boldly?

What does it look like to practice hope?

How can I truly be connected?

Turns out, all of these annual denominational gatherings ended up all being about how do we continue our work as disciples of Christ.

And you know what? This gospel reading has some helpful things to say.

And it all comes back to the good news that you, I, and we are here through the compassion of Christ and the great news that it’s his compassion that empowers, equips, and sustains us.

The compassion of Christ is God’s way of

sending us forth to practice hope,

turning us outward to love boldly, and

keeping us going forth connected to Jesus as we walk a mile in his shepherding shoes.

Amen.

Sermon for June 21

Gospel:

Xxxx

Sermon for January 21

Gospel: Mark 1:14–20

Who Are OUR Ninevites?

I love the introduction that we have for our reading from Jonah today. For years I’ve been telling folks that I think Jonah was originally a skit that the Israelites acted out around their campfires at night, with just enough humor to keep us laughing at Jonah’s many faults, and just enough solemnity to make us stop and think about our own many faults.

Well, the folks who publish the introductions to our texts have now—apparently—officially come on board with me on this one. They write, “The book of Jonah is a comedy starring a reluctant prophet who is given a one-sentence message: Nineveh will be destroyed in forty days. Much to Jonah’s dismay, the people of Nineveh repent. The point of the story is to get the reader to wrestle with the question, ‘On whom should God have mercy?’”

I’d only change a few things about this introduction. I’d say, “Much to Jonah’s dismay, the people of Nineveh repent. But even more to Jonah’s dismay, God repents!”

I think that’s the real problem here for Jonah, because according to Jonah’s message, God had already decided what the outcome was going to be. The city of Nineveh—"that great city with more than 120,000 people and also many animals”—was going to be utterly destroyed in 40 days. God had decided, God had declared it—God had made God’s word heard on the subject. The people could basically stay there and ignore God’s word and perish, or they could heed God’s warning and run from the destruction to come and perhaps survive.

That’s it. Those are the options as Jonah sees them. Although there has been this other pesky little thought needling Jonah, the thought that maybe—just maybe—God will wimp out on that promise to destroy Nineveh just like God had done in the past when God had declared that God was going to wipe out all the Children of Israel who had followed Moses. Only God had a change of heart—a moment of repentance—and God chose to hold back the destruction God had planned for them.

Jonah is thinking, “What if the prophet Jeremiah was right about God being the kind of God who was always willing to change God’s mind? And what if God is about to do that again, do it now?”

What if God was just raising Jonah’s hopes that the evil city of Nineveh was finally going to have to pay for their wretched godless ways, and setting up Jonah to go out and proclaim that message, only to have God turn from that plan at the last minute and repent of the evil God had planned for the Ninevites. Wouldn’t Jonah look like a complete idiot?

I imagine that Jonah didn’t want to look like an idiot, and he really did want to see the people of Nineveh suffer. He wanted to see them suffer because they were the very opposite of everything that his people stood for. The people of Nineveh were self-centered, self-serving idolators. Just the fact that God allowed such people as these Ninevites to exist made a mockery of those who—like Jonah—attempted to please God. Jonah had, you see, already judged the people of Nineveh and found them to be worse than guilty. Jonah had condemned them. In his mind the Ninevites—and all those like them—were an abomination, and the sooner God struck them down with a very public curse and cut them off, the better it would be for all right-minded people.

But, apparently, God wasn’t quite as sure as Jonah about all that. Even though Jonah was 110 percent convinced of their worthlessness, God still found something in them worth loving and caring for and nurturing back into health and wholeness.

That’s what really rankled Jonah, a God who was willing to love and forgive those that Jonah had tried and found guilty and condemned in his own heart. That was the last straw for Jonah. That was enough to cause Jonah to cry out against God’s injustice. That was enough to make Jonah long to curl up and just die rather than to go on living in a universe where God might choose to show mercy on those that Jonah would condemn, a universe where God would be a God of grace for all people rather than a God of grace just for the deserving people like Jonah—and me—and our own peculiar favorites.

I love this skit. I really do. Because I can so readily see the flaws in Jonah—the prophet of the Lord—and I can mock him for it. But I also hate this skit because I can so readily see myself in Jonah, and it makes me squirm beneath the indignity of my own guilt.

Friends, who hasn’t judged some other—or some group of others—and presupposed that since we hate them, God must hate them too? Who hasn’t assumed that only those like ourselves deserve God’s love and mercy? Who hasn’t felt that twinge of joy at the thought that the hated others are finally about to get their just desserts? Who hasn’t felt the rush of anger when those we had written off as unworthy are given the rewards—the fame, the riches, the glowing accolades—that we think only we deserve?

Who among us doesn’t need to stop from time to time and ask ourselves who the Ninevites in our own lives might be?

Really. Who do we think of as the worthless ones, the abhorrent ones, the abominations, the ones God definitely will never allow in God’s heaven, God’s kingdom, God’s embrace? Who?

Are they those who follow a different political agenda? Are they those who sense their gender identity as something other than the simple “this or that” that we were raised with? Do we assume that those poorer than us are deservedly poor? Do we assume those richer than us must therefore be greedier and more corrupt than us? Do we assume the very worst of those who enter our nation through dubious means? Do we suspect that the unhoused thousands must have gotten themselves in this scrape because they were less honest, less upright, less intelligent, less hard working, less holy than we are? Do we assume that God hates all those who were raised to know God under a different name and through different set of scriptures?

Who are our Ninevites? Who do we relish the thought of seeing finally get their “comeuppance”? Who do we long to see suffer the eternal destruction that WE believe our Lord has vowed to save only us from? Who will it be that—when we see the Lord extend grace to them—will drive us to our knees, not with praise and thanksgiving for God’s great goodness, but with anger and jealousy and genuine disgust?

Oh, I wish I could stand before you today and say that I honestly don’t have a person that comes to mind, but that would be a lie. I still have a bit of Old Jonah in me. I still have a touch of lingering hope that a few of my favorite Ninevites will suffer a bit for their sins. I still savor a little hope that God’s grace won’t extend quite as far as the more thoughtful side of me believes it will.

I

Sermon for January 14

Gospel: John 1:43–51

Come and See
By Adam Woods

I have to tell you that I am somewhat conflicted about all the jumping around we do with our Scripture texts this time of the year. This is the second year in our three-year lectionary rotation, so this is the year of Mark, and you’d think we might just start reading the Gospel of Mark and stick with that. But instead, here we are bouncing back into the Gospel of John. On the one hand, I think we lose a lot of the continuity of the text. But, on the other hand, I think that at this moment, as we enter the season of Epiphany, John’s Gospel is the perfect fit.

Epiphany is a season of revelations. It is a season in which our eyes are opened to new insights about God and God’s love and grace as revealed to us by God through the Scriptures, through nature, through the amazing powers of God, and, most clearly, concisely, and fully, through the Word made flesh—Christ Jesus, our Lord.

So here’s why I think John’s Gospel is perfect for this moment—because John’s Gospel is a gospel of signs.

A sign is something that points us in the right direction . . . we hope. A sign says, there is the city you’re looking for. Stay on this road for 30 more miles, and you’ll see it on the right. A sign reveals the way to our destination.

And that’s exactly what John’s Gospel does: it very strongly leans Into the idea that each event, each person, each story and act of Jesus is always about pointing us in the direction of who Jesus is, just as Jesus is pointing us to the true identity and nature of God.

In John’s Gospel we have this chain of witnesses who act as signs. Jesus is baptized by John, and a dove descends from heaven on Jesus, and that is a sign for John that Jesus is indeed the Son of God. So John points his own disciples away from himself and toward Jesus. Then Jesus reveals himself to Philip, and Philip finds Nathanael and points him toward Jesus, and this chain of witnesses grows, and they become signs for the crowds and for us. Each of them revealing something unique about Jesus through their own relationship with him.

I think this story of Philip pointing Jesus out to Nathanael is really a very telling example about how we are to live as signs and witnesses revealing Jesus to others.

In the story, once Philip has met Jesus, he is—apparently—just filled with a sense of joy, and wonder, and hope. He can’t help himself. He can’t hold it in, and he can’t hold himself back, so he runs to find his friend Nathanael, and he proclaims just what he has seen and heard.

He doesn’t give Nathanael a lecture or a sermon or a theological treatise on prophetic views of the Messiah from Moses to Zephaniah. He just blurts out his truth to him, “We’ve found this guy who we think might be the one God promised to send. It’s Jesus from Nazareth. Do you think this could be him?”

And Nathanael says, “Nazareth? Nazareth? That Podunk little nothing of a town. Where do the Scriptures even hint at Nazareth? Where in the Scriptures is Nazareth even mentioned? And, given Nazareth’s reputation, can anything good come from Nazareth?”

I tell you what, if I were Philip, I would just love to dive into it with Nathanael. “Oh, Nathanael, you little smarty-pants! Nazareth may not be named in the Hebrew Scriptures. But all through the texts, the Messianic hints are about who Jesus descends from, not where. He will be the offspring of David, and you know as well as I that that might be a metaphorical offspring of David rather than a physical descendant of him. It could just as easily be that God’s promised one will be someone who epitomizes God’s justice and wisdom and grace in a manner like David—or even surpassing David . . . and that would make him—metaphorically—a branch of David.

Oh yeah, I would have loved to have gone nose-to-nose with old Nathanael and have it out with him in a theological debate.

But Philip was so much wiser than I am. He didn’t try to argue or debate Nathanael into a belief in Jesus. Instead he just says, “Well, humor me . . . come and see.”

And Nathanael must have figured it was the least he could do for his buddy Philip, so he went down and they found Jesus. And Jesus revealed himself to Nathanael in a way that uniquely spoke to Nathanael and convinced him fully and passionately that Jesus was indeed the absolute Son of the Living God. Nathanael followed Jesus.

That’s the template for us as well. In the season of Epiphany, we are not called to just sit back and marvel at the way God has revealed God’s self to humanity throughout history. It’s not a matter of being wowed by the memory of God’s appearance to Moses on the mountain It’s not about recalling how the prophets once spoke God’s message to the people. It’s not about remembering God’s mighty acts that defied science and nature and logic—and therefore communicated the presence of the one who is beyond nature, above the mundane, and the very definition of the divine. It’s not even about us reflecting on the acts of Christ Jesus in our Scriptures.

The Epiphany season is not a season to just look over our shoulders into the past. It’s a time for us to open our eyes to who Jesus is to us now. It’s a time to see how Jesus’ presence in our lives impacts us in our now. It’s a time to consider whether or not we still see in him the power and grace that reveals God’s true identity to us . . . and if so, it’s a time for us to ask ourselves how that changes us, grows us, and drives us on into a better future because of it.

The deal is that if this doesn’t excite us as much as it once excited Philip, then maybe we need to ask ourselves why that is.

Why am I not running to find my friends and share with them what it is that I think I’ve found in this man from Nazareth? Why am I reluctant to speak, reluctant to admit my faith, reluctant to own my faith in public? Is it because I’ve forgotten the truth of it? Is it because it has somehow become so mundane to me that I now just take it for granted? Do I no longer believe in the aspects of this faith in God revealed through Christ Jesus that were the most vital and compelling and life-giving to me in the beginning? Do I worry that if I called someone to “come and see” with me, we might end up seeing nothing at all anymore?

I’ll grant you that that might be the case. Maybe we’re not so naïve as we had once been. Perhaps our faith in his revelations had a limited shelf life, and now we no longer believe like we once did, and we only continue because our tradition and sense of loyalty demand it.

But if that’s the case, I would remind us that the God of power and might—the creative energy that brought this world and universe to life—is still as full of power and love and creativity as God was in the very beginning. God has not given up caring for us and showing up for us in our daily lives. God’s miraculous signs still happen today. They happen in hospital rooms and school rooms and grocery stores. They happen wherever two or three meet and find a way to love one another even if they happen to worship God under a different name, or vote for that other party, or watch that other cable news network.

God’s nature is still revealing itself to us today through the Scriptures and the mighty acts of God, and also through those who dare to encounter God face-to-face, honestly and humbly, and who find God through the man from Nazareth, who sees us as we are and loves us where we are and longs for us to come and see more closely . . . and invite our loved ones to come and see with us as well.

Amen.