St. Michael and All Angels
We seek to be a light of Christ in the community, where all are welcome to experience God's love and blessings.

June 26, 2022 - Third Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 8)

What’s God been doing in your life lately?

Today’s readings were a struggle for me as I tried to come up with a sermon response. I tried and tried to get them to fit together into a sermon that made sense to me as a unit that would inspire us all to action based upon the readings. I kept trying, but I never got there. And then this hit me:

Jesus never asked us to worship him.

But Jesus did persistently ask us to follow him. In today’s Gospel, we hear “Follow me” (Lk 9:59).

The trap we need to watch out for is that we don’t replace following Jesus with the “right” way to worship. Our worship and our creeds, the ways in which we interpret our faith, have created division.

But following Jesus results in unity with diversity. With this diversity, more and more people would be included in the Reign of God here on earth. They may not be part of one institutional church, but they would be working to bring others to the knowledge of the love of God.

Don’t get me wrong – there are times when the institutional church is good. It can be good for people. It can provide a structure that helps us to find ways to be closer to God. But it can be detrimental to the Reign of God here on earth.

Meetings run by Roberts Rules of Order can become petty. And when we become petty and try to squash voices to hear the voice of the majority and neglect the minority, we work against Jesus’ agenda.

Following Jesus isn’t easy work. It’s not about things we think. It’s about what we do. It’s about breaking down barriers so that we can gather together. When our heart leads us to Jesus, we can successfully vault barriers. And we can help to level them so that others can make their way to Jesus too.

Where does Jesus lead us? Just listen to the advice we hear from him weekly on how to live. If Jesus tells us to love our enemies, we follow and our creed is in our actions, not in our words. If Jesus tells us to visit the sick, we follow and our creed is in our actions, not in our words. The list in the Gospels is endless – there is hardly a page that does not point the way for us to go, where Jesus has gone before us.

But there is not just one way. We don’t need to argue about the right way. We don’t need to argue about whether our way of worship draws us closer to God than the Methodist way of worship, or the Roman Catholic way, or any other way.

We may want to take easy paths through our life, someone else’s way, but Jesus may want us to follow another path. That particular trail might be difficult. It might take us up a steep mountain path. It might be through the thickets and barely discernible. It might interfere with our daily lives – perhaps that’s what we’re hearing from the individuals in our Gospel story today. The twists and turns of our lives, the daily intricacies that require our attention, can distract us from the important work of finding our path to Jesus.

Today’s Gospel reading jars us into asking, “How are our lives different as followers of Jesus than what they might have been otherwise?” I remember a bumper sticker asking, “If you were on trial for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?” Discipleship means living in ways we might not otherwise live. Little did Jesus’ disciples know that they would soon become nomads on this earth, traveling all over, with no fixed home, living in often frightening and hostile circumstances, as followers of their Lord. But they — and we — were also pilgrims, because pilgrims do have a final destination, namely in eternity with God.

Whether we think of ourselves as aliens, strangers, nomads, or pilgrims on this earth, it is because we follow Jesus, and that often takes us into new ways of living! There should be no excuses or hold-ups for us. Let’s go and follow Jesus now. We believe that God’s Spirit is active within us daily… So my friends, what’s God been doing in your life lately?