“May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.” (Ps 19:14)

We are surrounded by choices.  Every day is filled with them.  Some are more important than others.  This past Tuesday voters agonized over who to vote for in the New Hampshire primary.  It was reported that they were so conflicted that many couldn’t make up their minds until they finally walked into the voting booth.

Other choices are not as consequential.  One would be where we do our grocery shopping.  Last Sunday after church, Sharon and I went into Northampton to return a few unused items that had been purchased for the Youth Group Spaghetti Supper.  I go up to the Courtesy Counter at Big Y to return a couple of jars of Parmesan Cheese. 

This is when the lady behind the Courtesy Counter was very courteous to me.  She had a bit of a smirk on her face, but other than the quite understandable smirk, she was very understanding when she informed me that the Parmesan Cheese that I was trying to return to Big Y, was actually the generic Stop and Shop brand that I had purchased at, logically, Stop and Shop. 

I was embarrassed and apologized, but she took it in stride.  I don’t think the choice of grocery stores was a life-defining choice even for the Big Y employee.

Another choice that lies in-between the level of importance of these two examples is the choice to save … that is to save your work on the computer.  I’m home typing today’s sermon.  Not very far along.  My needy dog gets off the couch and comes over for some attention.  I pet him for a bit and then I turn back to the computer.

Mason, my dog, was not satisfied.  He tried to stand-up and lean on my lap, but my lap was covered by the computer’s keyboard.  I don’t know what the beast hit on the keyboard, but he hit something that closed down Microsoft Word.  When I brought it back up again, maybe the last two or three sentences I had typed were gone.

So, talking about the choice to save, let’s move on to this morning’s readings, which are about a more significant kind of saving.  The selection that Wunderly read for us from the Book of Deuteronomy is a closing statement at the end of the books of Law. 

There are five books of Torah, Jewish Law, that stand at the beginning of the Bible.  There are the first four, and then the fifth is a retelling of the Law.  That’s where the word Deuteronomy comes from.  It’s the second telling of Torah.  And today’s selection is at the end of the Law and the re-telling of the Law.

This is the context for Moses’ statement when he testifies to the whole people of God:  “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses.  Choose life …” 

This is a stark declaration.  God has endowed us with the ability to think for ourselves and to choose for ourselves.  We have the capability to over-ride our instincts and to choose how we will live. 

I accept the science of evolution.  I accept survival of the fittest as the best explanation for the diversity of creation that we witness.  I believe this process continues even today. 

But I also believe that we have the God-given blessing of choice, that we can think beyond our survival instinct and that we can imagine a better alternative, that we can choose morality, that, in Moses’ words, we can “choose life.”

Morality is the counter-intuitive notion that we should act for the good and benefit of the many, possibly even the all, rather than just for myself.  To choose morality over instinct raises us up and helps us walk that path that leads to higher truths, but it also leads to blessings here and now.  Morality lets us choose life.

When I first moved back to Western Massachusetts in 1988, I left the city of Scranton, Pennsylvania.  I remember talking to a woman from Montague at the time.  I don’t remember the context of our conversation, but she told me that she never locked her house.  The door was always left unlocked.  If she went out, when she went to bed for the night, the door was never locked.

You wouldn’t do this in Scranton, and I remember being surprised by her never locking the house.  But in Montague, she felt safe enough to not have to worry about someone entering her home to do anything bad.

When enough people in society choose morality, it changes life.  When enough people would never dare imagine walking into someone else’s home without permission, our lifestyle is so much healthier than when we must enforce morality with more police or more guns or whatever. 

When we choose morality, we choose life – not only eternal life, but the life we lead right now.  Morality is a blessing.  It transforms life.  It repairs our broken world.  It makes us kinder.

Morality can’t be enforced anywhere near as well as it can be embraced.  This is part of what Jesus is getting at in this morning’s passage from the Gospel as we continue to read the Sermon on the Mount.  The Torah, the Law, is explicit in its treatment of acts of violence such as murder or rape.  And I use the word rape intentionally because often times in the ancient world, and sadly too often today, adultery was often just rape with the blame thrown on the woman as well.

But Jesus pushes morality beyond just what we do.  He digs deeper.  Jesus goes to the root of what may eventually lead to violent actions. 

This is why Jesus talks about the sin of anger and the sin of lust, even when they only lurk in our thoughts and have not yet broken out as actions.

Jesus is trying to convert us from the inside out.  He’s trying to help us choose morality, to choose life, not as something imposed, but as a choice embraced.

We have choices to make every day.  Some important.  Others not so much.  But church is a choice that helps us choose life.  Church can help save us from ourselves.  Church preaches morality, and morality moves us beyond instinct, and morality lets us work for a greater and shared good. 

It is such a blessing to choose life.  It frees us from the meanness and selfishness of the world.  It gives us hope that we can repair the world and make it kinder. 

So like Moses said thousands of years ago, “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses.  Choose life …”

May we seek more than survival.  May we choose life.  And may our shared faith as this church community help us nurture the awesome privilege of our freedom to choose, and our freedom to choose kindness.  For this we pray in Jesus’ name.  Amen.

“May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.” (Ps 19:14)

As I have said before, I’m not a football fan.  I don’t usually watch the Super Bowl, and that’s even when the Patriots were in it year after year.  But last Sunday evening, Super Bowl Sunday, I went down to my Masonic Lodge in Amherst because we just purchased an 85” television.  Some of the guys got together to watch the game and I figured I’d go over for a while. 

Well, I talked more than watched, but I also ate.  They had every kind of junk food imaginable:  pizza, hot dogs wrapped in some sort of pastry puff, chips and sandwiches.  One conscientious soul brought a vegetable platter.  It sat in the middle of our circle and I mean it just sat there.  I think most of the vegetables went home at the end of the night.  Most everything we did eat was not on any hospital menu.  As a matter of fact, it’s probably the stuff that sends you to the hospital.

I do remember an unopened bag of Doritos that I asked a friend to bring over to the couch we were sitting on.  I don’t know how many Doritos he ate, but by the time we left, the bag was empty.  I don’t eat like that too often.  Sharon and I are pretty good.  But I think I ate most of a whole bag of Doritos.

When I got home and then throughout the night, I was parched.  I kept drinking water.  Even after I went to bed, I had to drink more water.  My body was not prepared for all the salt I had eaten at the Lodge.  The salt wasn’t saltier.  I just consumed a whole lot more of it than usual.

I share this story with you because of Jesus’ warning in today’s Gospel that unsalty salt is useless and thrown away.  But salt doesn’t lose its saltiness.  Salt is a chemically stable compound.  This is true now and it was just as true 2,000 years ago.  The chemistry hasn’t changed.
 
Salt can, however, become diluted and lose its saltiness that way.

Jesus’ warning to us is about diluting our faith and the way we live our faith.  We are the “salt of the earth,” He says.  Salt was used in Jesus’ day primarily as a preservative.  It kept people healthy because it kept food healthy.  What Jesus is asking us to do when He says we are the salt of the earth is to help keep the world healthy.

What does that mean, that grand statement that we are called upon to keep the world healthy?

Today’s Gospel passage continues with Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.  He has just finished offering the Beatitudes.  That was the passage we read last Sunday. 

It began with blessed are the poor in spirit, which means blessed are those dependent upon God.  It means we realize we can’t do it all on our own.  It’s a blessing to realize we need God in our lives.

Blessed are those who mourn is a statement about empathy, which is the truth that we also need each other. 

This leads logically to the Beatitude that blessed are the meek.  This is a pronouncement against self-pride, the belief that we don’t need anything from anyone, and even if that’s true or believed to be true, it can then give rise to the callousness that no one should expect anything from us.  (Rugged individuals) 

The opposite of this sort of selfishness is blessed instead are those who are not only righteous, but who hunger and thirst for righteousness, who need it as much as they need food and drink. 

Blessed are the merciful, says Jesus, because then others will hopefully do the same, and the world changes person by person.

Blessed are the pure in heart, or put another way, blessed are the single-minded whose center is God, who don’t push faith to the sidelines, who don’t sacrifice what is right when a difficult choice needs to be made, who are willing to face the consequences rather than ignore their conscience.

Blessed are the peace-makers in a world filled with war mongering.  These brave and often ridiculed souls are called the “children of God” by Jesus.  Remember last week’s story about Jonah?  He was the prophet who relished judgment and destruction and thought these were the marks of God.  And remember also that instead God was compassionate and forgiving.  This is why the peace-makers are named the children of God.

And then the Beatitudes come to their end and Jesus warns, “‘Blessed are you” for you will be persecuted if you live like this.  In a world filled with insult, intimidation and violence, we will be blessed by God if we choose to live differently, to live deliberately as Christians, to live like Jesus’ Beatitudes expect.  This is what it means to be “the salt of the earth” and to help preserve the earth.

(Not like JBap.  Not retreat from society, but make a difference in society.)

Think back to the reading Maureen shared with us.  Paul enters the city of Corinth, a prosperous, commercial hub of all kinds of activity.  It’s a city that lived by trade.  There was a lot of money to be made in ancient Corinth, if you played by the rules, and if you were more than a bit ruthless.

Paul enters the city and preaches Jesus, and Paul doesn’t dilute Jesus or His gospel.  He comes right out and reminds them in today’s Epistle that he didn’t preach with words that would be hailed as wise and learned.  Instead, says Paul, “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.”  And the faith took root and it grew and it literally changed the world.

That’s what being the “salt of the earth” is all about.  It’s about keeping the world healthy in a sense, and to do that we can’t allow our faith and our faith-lives to become diluted with so many other things that they lose their saltiness, that being a Christian isn’t all that different from the world. 

When it comes to my diet, too much salt is not a good thing, but when it comes to Jesus’ imagery that we are “the salt of the earth,” it is a very good thing. 

Let us choose in turbulent times to be steady in our witness to Jesus.  Let us challenge ourselves to live the Beatitudes and know them as blessings not sacrifices.  Let us encourage each other because what we are called to do and to be is hard, but let us also be optimistic because we don’t ever act alone.  Jesus is always with us. 

​May we truly be the “salt of the earth,” and may we be as salty as the snacks at a Super Bowl party.  For this we pray in Jesus’ name.  Amen.

“May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.” (Ps 19:14)

Last Sunday afternoon I was out for a bit and someone told me for no particular reason that Kobe Bryant had died in a helicopter accident.  When I got home, I turned on the television to find out more. 

I think the first news report I heard had listed five killed in the accident, one of whom was Kobe’s 13-year-old daughter Gianna.  Soon that number increased to nine killed.  There was a father, mother and their 13-year-old daughter Alyssa, who was a teammate of Gianna’s. 

Two additional deaths were that of a mother and her daughter Payton who was another teammate of Gianna’s.  The girl’s basketball coach from Kobe Bryant’s sports academy was another one who died that day, and there was also the pilot.

I completely understand why Kobe Bryant’s death was the one that turned this tragic accident into headline news, but I was still bothered by announcements that grouped the others together anonymously. 

There was nothing the reporters could do.  I understand this.  They had to report about Kobe Bryant’s death even before the rest of the details were known and confirmed, but I was still bothered by the fact that people who were loved by family and friends just like Kobe was by his family and friends, were lumped together anonymously.  “Kobe Bryant, his daughter Gianna, and seven others,” is what I kept hearing.  And again, I understand why this happened, but it still bothered me.

Kobe Bryant is a world-wide phenomenon.  I’m not much of a basketball fan, and since I did once love and follow Larry Bird’s Celtics I definitely was not a big fan of the Lakers, but even I knew who Kobe Bryant was when someone blurted it out to me last Sunday. 

And Kobe Bryant was a good man.  He gave back after a spectacular and lucrative NBA career.  He became an investor in start-up companies.  He was trying to help young people, to give them a better chance. 

I heard an interview with him.  The reporter asked if he were more proud of his basketball career or his work with start-ups.  I was surprised by his answer.  He said that you can win a championship or an MVP, but the next year it’s done all over again, and someone else takes your place.  But when you help a young person get started, when you inspire the next generation ... that's when you create something forever. 

Kobe Bryant was a talented man, and a good man, and I understand why his death got so much more attention than the others on that helicopter, but their anonymity still bothered me.

Tomorrow evening we’re going to meet for Bible study, and I don’t know if we’ll make it all the way there, but we’re supposed to talk about the Old Testament Book of the Prophet Jonah.  This is a great story for kids – the prophet being swallowed by a great fish, but there’s also an extremely important message being shared that is sometimes swallowed also by that great fish.

I’m not going to repeat the whole story, but this little four-chapter book ends with God chiding His prophet because Jonah resents God’s mercy.  Jonah wants God to destroy the city of Nineveh, but God responds and the book ends with God asking:  “Should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a 120,000 persons?”

Jonah personifies a negative “righteousness,” a morality that resents compassion, that dwells on judgment, that forgets that God cares about people, that God doesn’t only care about the people who are like us and who we like, but that God cares for everyone, the stranger, the alien, the widow, even the people of hated Nineveh. 

The way God looks at us, all of us, is not at all like those first reports of Kobe Bryant dying and 8 others with him.  God knows and cares for everybody.  He knows us all by name.  None are anonymous for God.  We all matter.

We need to remember this, and as we do, we need it to keep us from imagining that God loves judgment as much as we do.  God’s compassion actually angers Jonah, and that’s the very adult lesson of a very child-like story.

I’m sitting down having breakfast on Monday, and I’m finally making my way through the rest of the Sunday Boston Globe.  I start reading Yvonne Abraham’s column about Michelle Carter being released from jail.  She’s the young woman and girlfriend who kept sending texts to her boyfriend encouraging him to go through with his suicide plan. (https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2020/01/25/michelle-carter-out-jail-but-not-out-spotlight/Ouazpks0qZGxg4LkFDledL/story.html)

She is far from a sympathetic character, but Yvonne Abraham was being sympathetic.  I resented it, and then as I was sitting down to write today’s sermon, I realized that I was like Jonah.  I resented her compassion.  I had chosen and liked judgment.  It’s so natural I didn’t even realize it.

This is why we need to constantly keep in mind God’s message that compassion is more godly than judgment, that everyone matters to God, and so everyone should matter to us. 

This is why Jesus shared with us a recipe of how to live our lives when He gave us the Beatitudes. 

This is why we should try to remember and repeat what the prophet Micah reveals:  “What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” 

Everyone matters to God because ours is a compassionate God and we are to be a compassionate people.  May we do our best to live according to our faith.  And for this we pray in Jesus’ name.  Amen.

“May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.” (Ps 19:14)

Today’s Gospel tells us about the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry.  This is the Jesus we know.  Before this point, Jesus is mostly hidden.  Now He starts to peak out at us from history.  Now we can share in the stories that were told about Him among the earliest generations of believers.

I was at a meeting in January.  The holidays were just over.  We were sitting around our dining room table.  We were all mostly in my age vicinity.  And there was talk about becoming the senior generation in our families. 

Parents had passed and we had taken their spots.  An old New England Yankee and an African-American woman both shared the news that they had become the keepers of their family stories as they gathered for Christmas celebrations.  Younger family members turned to them to hear about the old days. 

Something similar happens with the Gospel stories.  We’re not told first person accounts in the Gospels.  The generation that witnessed Jesus, they preached.  They didn’t write.  They told stories about Jesus.  And those stories became sacred.

We can see this playing out when we look at Paul’s Letters as an example of those first-generation Christian leaders. 

One of the members in Corinth is a woman church-leader by the name of Chloe.  She warns Paul in a letter that divisions are forming in the community.  Paul writes back to the church to deal with the problem. 

What we don’t see written are Paul’s stories about Jesus.  Paul, of course, preached Jesus to all of these cities and towns around the Mediterranean.  What he preached, built those churches, but we don’t have any record of what he said because he didn’t write, he preached - in person. 

That’s what those first-generation Christian leaders did.  They preached.  That’s what Linda read for us from Paul:  “For Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel ...” 

This is why the first Gospel wasn’t written until about 40 years after the life of Jesus.  Second and third generation Christians were worried that the stories would be lost.  That no one would be able to sit down and tell them any longer. 

So they put quill to parchment and they began to write down the stories they had heard about Jesus.  Their intention, however, was still to preach.  They weren’t only telling stories about fishing in Russell or sitting around a dining room table to share facts.  They were telling these stories to introduce people to Jesus.

This is why it isn’t as important that there are differences among the Gospels.  What’s important is why they tell their stories.

If you were here last Sunday, you may remember that Andrew was the first called disciple in John’s Gospel.  He was standing beside John the Baptist and when the Baptist pointed to Jesus as the Son of God and the Lamb of God, Andrew started to follow Jesus.  That is most definitely not the story we heard just minutes ago from Matthew. 

It doesn’t mean one is right and the other wrong.  It means they’re telling different stories for different reasons.  This is where the truth of the Gospels lies.  It’s in their message.  Paul, in today’s reading, calls this message the “power of God.”

We see this “power of God” at work in today’s Gospel story of the calling of the two sets of brothers:  Peter and Andrew, and James and John.  At this point in Matthew’s Gospel, all we know is that Jesus has returned to Galilee from His time with John the Baptist. 

But Jesus doesn’t return home to Nazareth.  He is no longer the carpenter.  Instead, Jesus relocates to Capernaum, a small fishing village at the northern end of the Sea of Galilee.  This probably means that Jesus knows no one and no one knows Him. 

And He starts to talk.  No other signs of power beside His presence and His words. 

He walks along the shore.  There must have been many people out working that day, but the story tells us that Jesus approaches only two sets of brothers in particular and for reasons only known to Jesus.  Then something unexplainable happens.  Jesus asks them to follow Him – and they do. 

Think about this.  A stranger walks by and says, “Follow me,” and the story tells us they did.  Why in the world would they?  Yet they leave everything behind and follow Jesus.

At least when John told this story, as we heard last Sunday, Andrew was looking for something.  He was already out in the desert with John the Baptist.  But today, the two sets of brothers are at work, like they are every day except the Sabbath.  Why did they leave everything and follow Jesus?

Well, the simple answer is we don’t know, but the story gets us thinking.  We heard Paul say today that the message is “foolishness” to some, but that same message is “the power of God” to others. 

There had to be something shared that was more powerful than only the words themselves, and the same must be true about the sacred stories that continue to ask us still to get ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)
 
Today we didn’t only hear a story about Peter and Andrew, James and John, we heard a story meant just for us, just for you and for me.  Will we follow Jesus?  Will we let our lives be interrupted by Jesus?  In other words, will we let Him make a difference in how we live?

[American philosopher William James - we have to experience the religious revelation directly.]

We started off this morning’s worship Service with a moment of silence for the victims of the Holocaust.  The example is extreme, but there were a lot of Christians who helped or tolerated the Holocaust.  They may have gone to church on Sunday and then watched the trains arrive in Auschwitz on Monday, unloading thousands of people, but no trains ever leaving with people.  But they did nothing.  Church and Christ were confined to a box on Sunday mornings.

Let’s finish our Service with the prayer that we will hear Jesus’ invitation to follow Him, that we will let Him interrupt and even change our lives, and that these stories we continue to share will fill us with the “power of God” so that we live as church not only in this building on Sunday mornings, but every day in every way.

For this may we pray in Jesus’ name.  Amen.

Monday marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Today world leaders are gathered in Israel to remember this somber anniversary.
At the 3-minute mark in the linked video, we hear: "The Holocaust was caused by people. It wasn't a cosmic event, and it wasn't monsters. It was human beings who were motivated by ideas more than anything else."
​
https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2020/01/23/holocaust-remembrance-day-75th-anniversary-yad-vashem-jerusalem-sidner-pkg-intl-ldn-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/intl-stories-worth-watching/

As church we have an important connection with people and ideas. On Sunday we will pause and remember the human depravity of Auschwitz and also the continuing Antisemitism that is on the rise in our world, and in our nation. Hopefully, when enough of us share the message of the universal, human family we can help protect ourselves from this sort of evil.
Rev. Randy

“May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.” (Ps 19:14)

A while back I was reading an article about a family on a ski-trip in Maine.  The family had been skiing all day and were starting to drive back to their hotel.  The father typed in the address of their lodging and off they went trusting their adventure to the handy guidance system in the car. 

He probably did what a lot of us do.  He chose the “quickest route” option.  Doing what it was told, the GPS was ready to send this guy down a logging road because it was the most direct route between the slopes and the hotel. 

I wish it wasn’t the father, but it was.  They all saw the signs that warned the logging road was closed for the winter, but the father disregarded the signs and figured that it didn’t look all that bad.

You already know what happened.  Deep into the Maine woods they got stuck. 

The father had a choice to make while driving.  What was he going to follow?  The GPS that promised the quickest way back, or was he going to follow the directions on the sign that warned the road was closed? 

He had probably already committed himself to the GPS by the time he saw the sign about the road closure.  He’d have to backtrack who knows how far to get to an alternate route.  He chose the “quickest route” option on the GPS, and backtracking would be just the opposite.  So he chose to keep the course that he had already invested in rather than make a change.  

All right.  Now let’s go to this morning’s Gospel.  This is a different baptism story than the one we heard last Sunday, and if you want to talk more about that, think about coming to Bible study tomorrow evening.  But for now, let’s just stick to the way John tells it.

We’re again out with John the Baptist in the wilderness around the Jordan River.  One day John sees Jesus and praises Him as the “Lamb of God” and the “Son of God.” 

The next day the same thing happens again.  Hearing this for the second time, two of John’s disciples make the difficult choice to change course and follow Jesus. 

I don’t know how closely you were paying attention to the Gospel reading, but there were two of John’s followers who decided to change course and follow Jesus.  One is Andrew and the other is left unnamed. 

John the Evangelist does this on purpose.  He didn’t forget the name.  He intentionally leaves the other disciple unnamed because we here are that other unnamed disciple.  This happens throughout his Gospel.  John isn’t sharing with us a history of somebody else’s story.  He’s telling us our story of choice.  Will we choose to follow the timeless Jesus or will we stick to the course told to us?  

There are many warning signs posted that the way of the world is a dangerous drive.  All we need to do is pay attention.  Sometimes the violence, greed and lack of compassion get so bad I have to take a break from the news.  It’s too depressing and bleak.

Every Communion Sunday, on the other hand, we share in a prayer of thanksgiving when we say together:  “For the vision of the day when sharing by all will mean scarcity for none.”  That is pure gospel, pure good news.  This is why it is shared around the Communion Table.  Even if we’re only slightly familiar with the New Testament, this prayer sounds like Jesus.

Today is the Sunday within the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.  Every year at this time Christians and their churches are asked to pray for unity.  Unity is not the same as uniformity.  We don’t all have to be the same, but we all need to respect each other as one in Christ.

Remember when I mentioned that John’s Gospel-story of Jesus’ baptism is not the same as the one we shared last week from Matthew.  There have been differences in our faith ever since there was our faith, but those differences didn’t separate us.  One Gospel follows another in the New Testament.  They see Jesus differently, but they stand together.  That’s what Christian unity is all about.

The theme of this year’s Week of Prayer is drawn from the last chapter of the Acts of the Apostles.  Paul is being transported by sea to Rome to there stand trial for his faith.  During the voyage, he is shipwrecked in a storm and the survivors wash up on the shores of the island of Malta. 

The people there show these strangers “unusual kindness,” and that New Testament passage has been chosen as the overall theme of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity because in our world today, all of the different Christian churches of the World Council of Churches agree, kindness is unusual. 

There is a mean-spiritedness that abounds.  Separation and division are the ways of the world.  Kindness is unusual.  Jesus, though, is another route.  Following Jesus is asking us to show “unusual kindness.”  It’s our choice which road to follow:  the world’s or Jesus.

Just like that unnamed disciple, who is us really, we have a choice to make.  Do we continue to follow the course told to us or do we choose to take another route and turn around and follow Jesus? 

Remember what Amy read for us from First Corinthians:  “[We] are called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours.” 

We’re all called to be saints, and it’s all about the choices we make every day on what road to follow.  May we, like that unnamed disciple, choose to follow Jesus, and a big part of this is to embrace “unusual kindness.”  In His name we pray.  Amen.

“May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.” (Ps 19:14)

The other day I emailed my daughters to let them know that they should think about getting a refund for one of the Christmas gifts they gave me.  I mentioned that the gift was broken, that it hadn’t worked since I received it.

The gift was a pair of socks.  On the bottom of one sock it reads, “If you can see this,” and on the bottom of the other it says, “Bring me a cup of tea.”  Well, I’ve had my feet up a couple of times already wearing those socks around the house and Sharon never, not once, ever bothered to bring me a cup of tea, and I know darn well that she could see what was printed on my socks.  So obviously the socks must be broken.

We all know that’s not the way things work.  That’s what makes the socks funny rather than Sharon beating me up every time I wear them and point out that I’m expecting my cup of tea.  This is probably also why Sharon is away for a girls’ weekend in Boston today.  You can only take so much of this.

It’s not only what we believe, it’s not only what we claim, it’s not only what we hope, it’s what we do that makes things happen.  But the two can’t be completely separated either. 

Our aspirations hopefully drive our actions.  They inspire us.  And this is where faith and church feed each other.  What our faith believes gives us the motivation for our church to act, and in turn, the life of the church inspires what we believe.

Think about the story in today’s Gospel of Jesus’ baptism.  We don’t know much of anything about Jesus’ life before He goes public.  The oldest Gospel, Mark’s, does refer to Jesus as a carpenter.  This implies that as Jesus reached the age of young adulthood He was still a working man up in the village of Nazareth in the area called Galilee.

He’s not satisfied though.  He knows He’s called to do something else, something more, but if we allow ourselves to be honest with the story, Jesus doesn’t seem to know exactly what that something else is.

It’s winter.  It’s going to be a cold 70 degrees outside this January afternoon.  But if you get the chance when it does get colder and you want to sit inside with your “bring me a cup of tea” socks on, think about grabbing Christopher Moore’s book Lamb.  It was recommended to me by a couple of clergy friends at the last Conference Annual Meeting in November. 

I was skeptical before I started reading it.  I was skeptical as I started reading it.  But it turned into an actual eye-opener.  It’s a fanciful tale.  It’s even a bit mischievous in the way it treats Jesus’ story.  But its intent is right on the mark.  It brings out the human nature in Jesus so that it is not completely overshadowed by Jesus’ divine nature.

Again, it’s a fanciful story, but when it’s read with a background context of the Gospel stories, it helps the reader to wonder again at the amazing journey for Jesus of Nazareth to reach the realization of who He really is and what He is called to do. 

The story emphasizes that while Jesus was always faithful in the search, it was never easy or obvious.  

This struggle to find meaning led Jesus out of His carpentry shop in Nazareth and brought Him out into the wilderness of Judea to a group of seekers who had gathered around a strange prophetic character everyone was calling John the Baptist.

John, as we mentioned during Advent, left behind a privileged life as a Jerusalem priest.  He traveled out into the desert because he was disgusted with the ways of the world.  And there he preached about a coming kingdom that was going to force out the old order so that the new could come barging in.

Jesus walked away from His old life and literally walked all the way from Nazareth to Judea, about a five-day journey, just to be a part of this community of seekers. 

This is why we can’t make light of Jesus’ spiritual journey.  It wasn’t simple and straight-forward.  It was laboured. 

All of this had taken place before Jesus asked to be baptized by John.  This is important to remember because of the revelation that occurs at His baptism.  The Father in heaven speaks:  “‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’” 

The bewilderment of “my Son, the Beloved” drives Jesus further out into the desert where He will stay for 40 days, but that’s a story for Lent, not for now. 

What I want to speak about today is that Jesus hasn’t even started to do the work of His public ministry.  He hasn’t preached one word, performed one miracle, called one disciple, and yet the Father is well pleased. 

The Father is pleased because Jesus has made Himself open and available to the work that will be done.  Sometimes we may forget that the first step in doing the work of God is to make ourselves available to God.

It’s not enough to think about what we can do.  It’s to trust what we can do with God.

The church, just like John the Baptist, is an alternative to the way the world is.  The church is a place for seekers who believe in something different.  We’re called here just like the crowds were called to come out to John.

God is pleased not only with what we accomplish, but with our willingness to make ourselves available.

Nothing we do as church is small or inconsequential.  It is the work of God. 

It’s not like putting on my tea-socks and waiting for the tea to come to me.  The work of God begins when are willing to go to God and to be open to what He would have us do.

Not only what we think we can do, but what becomes possible when we trust in what God can do with us and through us.

May we all make ourselves available for the work of God so that God may be well pleased with us, His sons and daughters.  In Jesus’ name we pray.  Amen.