Epiphany 3A
January 26, 2020
Grace, Waseca, MN
Matthew 4.12-23
“From that time Jesus began to proclaim, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’”
You know those young people who leave the church after Confirmation? Well, I was one of them. I looked around our church, Hope Lutheran in South Minneapolis, and I only saw hypocrites. At the time, I wasn’t sure there was a God, but I was pretty sure I wanted no part of their God. I stayed away from the church through high school and college, even at Gustavus, a Lutheran school. The only time during my four years there that I entered the chapel was when giving campus tours to prospective students.
After college, I didn’t make it to grad school as planned. I needed a job, so I took a flyer on a management trainee position at Minnesota Fabrics, a fabric and decorating store. It was one of the best things that happened to me because I had started drinking more and when I drank, I smoked. It seemed I was destined to follow in my parents’ footsteps, who were highly functioning alcoholics.
That’s until I met LuAnn, a fellow Minnesota Fabrics employee, who invited me to the young adults group at her church, Trinity Lutheran of Minnehaha Falls. Long story short, that group loved me and prayed me back to the church where I could engage my deep faith questions. And so, it was that in May 1978 I rededicated my life to Christ. In other words, I turned around and started following Jesus. Not unimportantly, it was in that same young adults group that I met my wife Cindy and subsequently stopped drinking and smoking. Other than Communion wine, I haven’t had an alcoholic beverage or smoked a cigarette in 40 years.
I don’t tell this story to present me as some sort of hero in the faith. I’m not the hero in this story. If anyone is a hero, it’s LuAnn and the young adults group who loved me and gently helped me turn around. “From that time Jesus began to proclaim, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’” Jesus’ call to repentance may confuse some of us in the church because we view repentance in a strictly moralistic sense, as if we have done something wrong and needed admit it. Indeed, I had much to regret about my life as a young adult. But the word for repent is metanoia, which literally means to change one’s mind or a acquire a new mind. It can also mean to turn around and go in a different direction, to change your attitude. As I learned from that young adults group, Jesus didn’t come to shame us into a new way of being; Jesus invited us into a new way of thinking, a new way of going.
When Jesus calls his first disciples to follow him, he calls them to a life of radical transformation. In fact, Jesus invites them to become agents of transformation themselves by serving others. Jesus invites them to question the prevailing political, economic, and social systems of the day and think differently. Jesus invites them into a different reality, one where God’s overwhelming love for all people breaks into our hurting and broken world, where forgiveness, resurrection and new life are possible. In other words, what the disciples (and us) will come to know is a reality defined by the cross.
Today is our annual meeting, a time to look back on the year and celebrate where God has been at work in, with and through us in this place. Our annual report is full of stories of just a few times where we have been agents of transformation, of how we have been Christ to others, how we have made a difference in the lives of so many people. I hope you will read them if you haven’t already done so. Yet, if I may be so bold, I think it is also a time for repentance. By that I mean that we need to acknowledge those times when we’ve fallen short of God’s intentions for us, but we also need to listen to Jesus’ voice that invites us to turn around and follow him.
In Jesus, the kingdom of heaven has come near, breaking into our world with the gift of abundant life. With that gift comes a call on us to not only receive that gift but to share it with others in word and deed. You are worthy of that call, sisters and brothers, not because of who you are but whose you are. So, please, can we spend the time at our meeting and in the year ahead discerning together what that means? Can we spend less time on proper procedure and more time on how we proclaim the good news? I know we can do that because I see you striving mightily each and every day to do so. Bless you for that good work. I look forward to walking with you as we discover what it means to follow Jesus. Amen.
For an \audio version of this sermon please click here.
No comments:
Post a Comment