The call to come to Jesus and take up his yoke is not easy, but it is good and will bring joy because he is with us and is what we and the world most deeply need. 

Vicar Emily Beckering; Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 14 A; text: Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30.

In the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me;
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” [1]

These are the last words of Emma Lazarus’ poem engraved on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. On this holiday weekend, we celebrate Lady Liberty’s words as though this is what America is all about: offering a world-wide welcome to the exiles, the poor, the hungry, the down-trodden and then melting them all together for success and freedom. In actuality, that is the exact opposite of our nation’s history.  Each wave of immigrants in every part of the country and anyone who looks or thinks differently is often met with suspicion and resistance, sometimes even to the point of violence. This poem sings a golden depiction of our nation that is as shiny as it is fabricated. Despite best intentions, Americans have proven these words false time and time again and offered empty promises for hundreds of years.

Jesus’ words today are not unlike those of Lady Liberty’s when he says, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest,” but unlike our engraved image, Jesus exposes our true reality. We are like the crowds who heard Jesus and John the Baptist, but refused to listen.

Today, Jesus promises that he will provide rest for our souls and that the yoke—the way of life into which he invites us—is life-giving.

Sometimes, we may look at the condition of the world around us and at our own lives and reject Jesus’ words because all that we can see is death. When all that you can see is death, then only a funeral seems to carry the weight of the loss that we experience in this life. Only a funeral allows us to name pain, hurt, and disappointment:

Those whom we love still get sick. Our children, our spouses, our friends and those most dear to us still die.

We continue to struggle with our relationships and with ourselves; we still carry the burden of what we have done and what we have left undone, or as Paul says, we continue to be unable to do the good that we want, but do the very things we hate.

When we are weighed down by all of this, we may find ourselves protesting Jesus: we do not want to be comforted with words that deny the depth of our pain or the brokenness of this world.

When we feel like calling Jesus’ promise into question and dismissing his words as cheerful, pie-in-the-sky optimistic fluff that doesn’t hold enough weight for the real cares and worries of this world, then we are like the children in Jesus’ parable who want to play funeral, accusing Jesus, “we wailed and you did not mourn,” as if he doesn’t understand what life is really like, what it really feels like to suffer.

And yet, there are also times when we yearn for Jesus’ words to mean that if we just surrender to him enough, believe in him enough, then he will protect us from anything unpleasant or painful, that we will no longer hurt people or be hurt by them, that once we are his, everything really will be rose-colored.

Sometimes, it really would just be nice to escape everything, to not have to deal with it all.

Wouldn’t it be relaxing to live without a yoke, to be free of any responsibilities, any work?

We may even resent Jesus’ call to discipleship as too demanding. Instead, we long for safety, rescue, and relief: to cherish in our hearts the good news that Jesus loves us and forgives us, and let that be the end of it.

I will confess to you that this is where I was this past week and this is what I wanted to preach today, so much so that I even asked Cha before she printed the service folder for today, if on the cover art she could white-out the cross in Jesus’ hand. Then we could just have an open-armed Jesus without any call to the cross. Cha was a little uneasy with that and offered some objections. And indeed she was right.

When we find ourselves feeling this way, then we are like the children in Jesus’ parable who only want to play wedding, complaining, “Play the flute. We just want to dance!” In other words, “Lighten up, Jesus! We hear enough gloom and doom on the six o’clock news. Give us some good news to celebrate!”

The truth is that we can’t separate one from the other because Jesus’ call to him is always a call to the cross.

We have been hearing this summer of what our Lord requires of us. It is the cross, and it is anything but easy:

Two weeks ago we heard, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth, I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother.”  (Matt. 10:34-35)

And earlier this spring we heard, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matt. 5:48)

And we will soon hear again: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” (Matt. 16:24-25)

If we hear these words and feel overwhelmed, then it is because even God’s good gifts and call for our lives can be distorted into a burden from which we also long for relief.

Jesus himself raised the question: “If it is possible, let this cup pass from me.”  (Matt. 26:39) Yet, that cup—the call to love the world to such an extent that he would lay down his life for all—that cup could not pass from him because that kind of love is God’s way.

The cross is always at the center and always held out in Jesus’ hand because the world is what it is: broken, and Jesus is who he is for that world. The self-giving love shown on the cross is the very nature of God, for the Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

Grace, compassion, forgiveness, and persistent, unwavering love: that is what the Triune God bestows on us.
This is the yoke that Jesus invites us to place on our shoulders: grace, compassion, forgiveness, and relentless love.

A more helpful translation of the word, “easy” is, in fact, “good, loving, kind, pleasing.” With the promise of this life, Jesus neither brushes our cares aside nor offers us empty words to pacify us.

He does not say to us, “Pretend that everything is right in this world,” and we don’t hear, “Take everything on and try to fix it yourselves,” but instead, “Come to me, and I will give you rest.”

This is the invitation that we are given because this is what we and the world most deeply need.

As Jesus laments over Jerusalem, so he also yearns to gather us and the entire world under his wings: he invites us into relationship once again, to know his love and care, and then to go out refreshed in order to offer that same love and comfort to all people by living in such a way that people know what it’s like to rest and be comforted when we are with them.

Jesus not only invites us, however, he actually makes this life possible by promising to be with us always, to help us do what he asks of us, and to bind us together in love as two oxen are bound in one yoke so that we can share the load together. What we cannot do by our own understanding or effort, the Holy Spirit can work through us.

We know this from our life together here at Mount Olive. When we pray for each other, call each other, take the time to listen intently to one another’s joys, struggles, and fears, wrap one another in prayer shawls, fill each other’s weekends with laughter, feed the hungry, and forgive when it hurts the most, then we bear one another’s burdens and the load really does feel lighter. We really do experience joy and fulfillment even in the most unexpected places.

God’s love is no longer something that we just talk about; it becomes a love that we hear from one another’s lips, feel when we are together, miss when we are apart, and see in the eyes of everyone who walks in those doors or is waiting on the other side of them.

When Christ makes this yoke—this way of life—evident in us, then he brings the Kingdom of God among us. Living in this way is not easy, but it is good, kind, loving, pleasing, and it will lead to joy because it is this for which we have been created. There is a cost to following Jesus, but it is far less than the cost of not following him. We are, as we prayed in the prayer of the day, restless until we rest in our God.

Whereas centuries of our ancestors and we ourselves have failed to protect the weak, to welcome the poor and the hungry, and to live as God intended, Jesus has never and will never fail those who need him. In him, there are no empty promises, no false notions of what this life is all about, and no offers to escape reality. Instead he offers an invitation to face ourselves, one another, and this creation for what we really are: broken, then to enter into that brokenness with him and with our sisters and brothers tied to us on every side, and watch how the greatest love ever known will flow from him through us to heal it. So come here to the table all who are weary and carrying heavy burdens where we find the One—the only one—who can give rest and joy.

Amen.

[1] Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus,” 1883. http://www.statueofliberty.org/Statue_of_Liberty.html

As he did for St. Peter and St. Paul, Jesus calls us to follow him so that we—imperfect and flawed though we may be—may witness to his forgiveness and the love of God.

Vicar Emily Beckering; St. Peter and St. Paul, Apostles; texts: Acts 12:1-1, 9:1-18; John 21:15-19; 2 Tim. 4:6-8, 17-18.

In the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

It might be rare, especially for congregations in the ELCA, to celebrate the festival of St. Peter and St. Paul this Sunday. So why do we join with the greater church throughout the world today in remembering these saints? Is it to learn from their example? To hear of their faith in order that we might imitate them?

We are mistaken if we focus solely on what the apostles did, for their very lives witness to what the Triune God did through them. We do not keep the feast only to honor their names, but in order to attend to how God worked through them for the sake of the world so that we can hear and see and know Christ’s call for our own lives.

Jesus’ call to them is the same that he gives to us today: to follow him.

Part of these apostles’ witness is that often before we can follow Christ, we must first turn back from where we have been going, from harmful ways that we have been living.

Jesus’ first word to us today is an invitation to turn around, to change. 

This is how Jesus begins his work in the apostles: by calling Peter and Paul to turn around. He asks Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me?”

It is likely that Peter could not but help remember denying his Lord as Jesus asked him three times if he loved him. Jesus, however, does not scold him or punish Peter. Instead, he asks this question, and with it, he calls Peter back to his side. Peter is called back from the fear that caused him to deny Jesus, and even more, back from the fear and shame of this betrayal so that he may once again follow him. The three questions and commands that Jesus speaks to Peter are an absolution: Peter is forgiven. Jesus has not given up on Peter, but rather is calling him back into relationship and putting him to work.

When Jesus first called Peter to follow him, he put down his fishing nets and left them behind in order to fish for people. Now, Peter must put down his failure in order to follow once again.

Jesus also brought about a change in Paul through a question. We recall from the book of Acts that on the road to Damascus, Jesus asked, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” In order to follow Jesus, Paul had to turn from killing the sheep to feeding them. Christ did not destroy Saul, even though he has so grossly misunderstood God’s will and work. Instead, Jesus calls Saul by name, forgives him, and gives him a new purpose.

Today, Jesus also asks us a question, “Do you love me?” With this question, we too are invited to turn from harmful patterns, from everything that holds us back from following our Lord, from all the ways that we have failed to feed the sheep, and thus failed to reflect Christ, the Good Shepherd.

Jesus calls us back from feeding ourselves, our desires, our interests by insisting on our own way, from feeding the hungry only when it is convenient for us, from not binding up the injured by ignoring the wounds of our neighbors and the wounds that we ourselves have inflicted, from not bringing back those who have strayed because we are afraid of telling the truth, from seeking the lost with force instead of carrying them in love, from all the times that we are nudged by the Spirit to reach out to someone, and ignore it because of what we think it might cost.

If we are to follow him, then we must leave all of this behind.

Yet, with the command to feed his sheep, Jesus not only turns us from harmful patterns, but restores our relationship with him and with one another. In response to all the ways that we have not reflected him or his love, Christ proclaims to us today, “You are forgiven.”

With this forgiveness, Jesus calls us back from worrying that we won’t be able to recognize him or the Spirit’s work in our lives. In our first reading, Peter didn’t recognize how God was at work for him through the angel until after he had already been rescued from prison. We don’t always need to know—and we won’t always know—how God is at work in us for our neighbors or in our neighbors for us. But the witness of the lives of Peter and Paul is that even in prison, in rejection, in failure, in denial, in death—in all the places where it is most difficult to see it—Christ is still at work leading us and all people back to the Triune God.

With this forgiveness, Jesus also calls us back from the fear that because we have failed before, we have lost value in his eyes, and from the fear that we have messed things up beyond the point of repairing, that we won’t be able to do what he asks or that we don’t have what it takes to follow him, to love as he loves. Even before Peter learns to feed the sheep, Jesus already welcomes him in and entrusts the ministry to him.

In response to our tendency to fall down, to fear, to wander away from where God would have us go, Jesus does not cast us out into the outer darkness, but turns us around, forgives us, and invites us to follow again saying, “Feed my sheep.”

Through him, we see the very heart of God; the God who refuses to lose any one of us. The God who yearns to have relationship with us and all people. Rather than force us into that relationship, however, God has chosen to invite us into it, to transform us and the world through love: a love that is shown through imperfect disciples. 

Because Jesus’ command to Peter to tend the sheep follows Peter’s denial, we know that Jesus’ choosing of Peter has nothing to do with Peter’s own abilities. There is no special worthiness on his part. He witnesses and cares for the church because Christ calls him and strengthens him to do the work to which he was called.

Likewise, as Paul testifies to us in his second letter to Timothy, the strength of his witness, his ability to fight the good fight, to finish the race, to keep faith all rests solely on Christ, who stood by him and gave him strength so that through him the message might be fully proclaimed. We are promised that as was done for Peter and Paul, the Lord will stand by us and give us strength so that we too might witness to Christ’s love.

The choice of Peter and Paul demonstrates God’s working through the weak things of this world. God chooses what is foolish, weak, low, and despised so that anyone who boasts may boast in the Lord.

This, in fact, is how God has always worked.

The entire narrative of scripture is full of broken people. God created a nation to bless all nations through Sarah, who laughed at God’s promises, and Abraham who continually tried to take matters into his own hands because he couldn’t trust. God rescued all of Israel from slavery through Moses, a murderer who would spend his life speaking God’s word even though he couldn’t speak well on his own. God led a rebellious nation through David who committed adultery and killed the innocent. God called the Ninevites and set them free from sin through Jonah, who resisted God’s call and resented God’s mercy. God saved all of creation through the Son whom we rejected. God used the witness of these two flawed saints to build the church and to bring us to faith. And now the Triune God will love the world into believing—into relationship—by loving them through us, we who are weak and broken.

We celebrate the festival of the Apostles Peter and Paul because we need to be reminded what discipleship is and isn’t, what it does and doesn’t look like to follow Christ. 

Following Jesus is witnessing to his love and mercy with our very lives.

This means time and time again to turn from saying, “Look at me,” and instead pointing and saying, “Look at Christ” when we see him at work in our lives and in the lives of those around us. Discipleship does not mean doing everything perfectly, but watching for how God’s perfect love is at work around us and through us. Discipleship is not having all the right answers or knowing where we are going, but trusting that the Holy Spirit will strengthen us to follow Christ.

We know what we are to do, how we are to witness; we have heard it three times today from our Lord, and he will continue to whisper it to us day after day and year after year as he walks with us, leading us: “Feed my sheep.”

We are to follow in Christ’s footsteps and do for one another and for this world what Christ has done for us.

Sometimes when we follow our Lord, we will be led out of prison. More often, however, Christ will lead us to give ourselves away. The death that Peter and Paul died glorified God because they reflected God’s very nature. If we follow Christ, then we will offer forgiveness when we are hurt, love when we are insulted, and seek relationship again and again even when it seems that all hope is lost. This is what it means to lay down our lives for one another, to feed the sheep, to love. By this witness, by our love, Christ will make himself known.

On this day, through the Apostle Peter and Paul, we are reminded just what God can do with the weak and broken. The Triune God takes imperfect people with tempers and thorns in their flesh who murdered and doubted and denied and uses them to invite all people into God’s work of redeeming the world. Today we are asked to do the same so that by our witness, others may come to know God’s love, forgiveness, and call in their lives.

To those of us who feel as though we have never heard him before, to those of us who have fallen away or are tired of walking, to those of us who have heard him many times, and many ways, the call is the same. Jesus says to us, “I have called you by name. You are mine. Follow me.”

Now, what will we leave behind, and who through our love will we tell?

Amen.

To follow Christ is to be transformed in how we see and how we love, to see with the eyes and love with the heart of Christ; such transformation might in fact cost us, as it did our Lord.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen, Second Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 12 A
texts:  Matthew 10:24-39; Jeremiah 20:7-13; Psalm 69:7-18; Romans 6:1b-11

Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

For someone who follows Christ, who claims to be a disciple, there may be something troubling about these readings.  In all these words we hear from God’s Word there is a consistent theme that believers who seek to be faithful to the true God either are facing great adversity as a result, as with Jeremiah and the psalmist, or are warned to expect it as a certainty, as Paul and Jesus so clearly speak.

So what are we to think if our lives of discipleship have not experienced setbacks like that, persecution, animosity, as a result of our faithful living?  To hear these words and consider one’s life as a Christian can be to wonder if we’ve sometimes missed the point altogether.  That is, if your experience is like mine, and you don’t recognize the pain and difficulty of what is being shown here.

Here’s another way to look at it.  Jesus says that if he, our Master and Lord, is called “Beelzebul” by others, we shouldn’t expect any less ourselves, as his faithful disciples.  So when was the last time someone said you were from the devil because of how you lived your faith?

That’s actually a helpful thought, though, isn’t it?  Because there is at least one situation in the lives of many here where, if the language wasn’t actually naming us demonic, it was at least clearly stating that we were not faithful to Scripture and so were against God.  Close enough to Beelzebul, at any rate.  That, obviously, is in relation to the long-standing position of this congregation, and in many of our personal lives, to claim that welcoming those of different sexual orientations is not only God’s call, it’s Scripturally warranted, and the way our Lord Christ would have the Church live in the world.  For many, that caused rifts and accusations even in their immediate families, many here lost jobs and careers as a result, or family and congregational ties.

That’s not insignificant, and it’s hopeful to me.  Because apart from that particular issue, I can honestly say that I don’t recognize the pain and anguish of Jeremiah in the cost of his speaking faithfully what God has called him to say, and I don’t recognize the ostracism and family splits that Jesus speaks of.  And even on the issue of welcoming all, I have to say it hasn’t been a terrible cost to me personally, unlike the experience of many of you here.  In that, you are my models and my teachers, and I’m inspired by your witness to the cost of faithful discipleship, a cost we are led to believe we should expect, rather than be surprised by.

So the question remains, even if some of us have experienced just what our readings say is possible, and the question is this: if following Christ Jesus faithfully leads to a cross, to suffering on behalf of others, and we don’t find such a cross in how we are following, do we need to ask if we’re following in the right direction, going the right way?

That is, if sacrificial love is the mark of the Christian, and we can’t think of when we are called to sacrifice regularly on behalf of others, lose ourselves for another, risk ourselves for Christly love of the other, are we missing something?  And even if for some here that has happened in the past, should we not all expect it to continue into our present and future, on all sorts of issues, if we are being truly faithful?

It might be that Jesus gives us a direction for our answer in his first words today, that the disciple and the master eventually begin to look alike.

It’s why he says if he’s called the devil, we should expect to be, too.  But on a deeper level, that’s our entry into understanding true discipleship.

Jesus, the Son of God, lives in the world with God’s priorities, God’s way of seeing the world and loving the world.  Eventually that puts him, as it did Jeremiah, directly in conflict with others who would protect their way of seeing the world.  The cross, for all it means on a deeper level, is at the start the sign of Jesus’ faithfulness to his Father.  Because of how he lives and loves and reaches out with God’s Word, he is killed.

So our first question isn’t the consequences of faithful discipleship, it’s the question of whether we look like our Lord Jesus or not.  If we do, then Jesus says, we should expect adversity.

But perhaps we should back up even one more level, because looking like Jesus in our behavior starts before the behavior itself.  What is clear is that the behavior of Jesus is the result of his deeper identity within the Triune God, as the Son, especially in the way God sees and loves the world.

So if we are beginning with the question of whether or not we’re recognizable as followers of Christ Jesus, we start not with our behavior but with the way of seeing and loving that leads to faithful behavior.

To be like our Lord and Savior, then, is to see as he sees, and love as he loves.

Our natural tendencies are actually the reverse of that.  If you look at how we normally act toward others it looks something like this:

When it comes to needs and wants, we tend to think of our own first, and make them a priority over the needs of others.  So we’ll say or think, “I know you think you’ve got it bad, but you should try what I’ve got going in my life.”  Or we’ll be so focused on our problems or our pain that we don’t even see the pain and problems of the other.

On the other hand, when it comes to sinfulness and wrongdoing, we look in the opposite direction.  We tend to want to focus on the wrongdoing and offenses of the other and give those priority over any reflection on our own.  So Jesus actually has to say that we’re like people who look at the speck of wood in our neighbor’s eye while overlooking the 2×4 sticking out of our own eye.  And it’s true.  We’ll completely miss ways in which we hurt or offend others and quickly note every time someone hurts or offends us.

Jesus calls us to the opposite way of seeing and loving, to God’s way.

First, to train ourselves to love as Christ loved, that is, to love others and seek their good before we seek our own.  To look to the needs and suffering and pain of others first, before our own, and to do this because we, as disciples of the Christ who loved the world so much he offered his life for all, we can do no less, can love no less.

And second, to train ourselves to see our own sin first, and address that, while forgiving others.  To begin to understand Paul’s admonition that we seek death to our old way of being in the world because it cannot live in a disciple of Jesus.

That means painful honesty with ourselves about the ways we hurt others and hurt God, and clear vision of the truth about ourselves, while offering forgiveness, grace, and understanding to others.  And we do all this because we, as disciples of the Christ who asked forgiveness for those who were killing him, we can do no less, can love no less.

This is the way of transformation the Holy Spirit seeks to create in us, and it will be a transformation.  The more we seek this way, the more we will see and act differently in the world.  We’ll begin to see the world as God sees the world, and love the world as God loves the world.  And act accordingly.

And that’s when we’ll find out the cost of such a new life.

The cost of being made new, being made into people like Jesus is that the world doesn’t like people like Jesus.

The world is comfortable with the way the world works, and people don’t like others to shake up the status quo.

Think of a parallel example of transformation we know, when someone goes through rehabilitation from chemical addiction.

For many who are successfully going through rehab and the 12 steps, while it’s a transformation of their life, it can be a real challenge to live in this new way among their family and former friends.  Sometimes recovering people are actually counseled to avoid former friends, who won’t understand or welcome the change and will work to bring the person back into addiction.

And often enough families can be uncomfortable with the “new” person in their midst, because their way of openness and understanding can seem to disrupt family systems that can’t handle such a way.  Sometimes families can even wish that the loved one return to drinking or drugs because they liked things the way they were.

Change is threatening to people.

And change into the way of Christ is also deeply threatening, if we live transformed lives.

To be people who are unafraid of losing everything in a world that protects itself and operates on threat, is to be people who are impossible to control or manipulate.  And that’s threatening to others.

To be people who insist on God’s justice and peace being extended and shared among all people in a world that is built on getting your own and not worrying about other people, is to be people who make others feel embarrassed or judged for their selfish attitudes.  And that’s threatening to others.

To be people who see our own sinfulness and regularly ask forgiveness of others, who seek to grow to be more Christlike in our actions and choices and thoughts, even people who actually forgive others, in a world that holds grudges and counts offenses, is to be people who reveal in our lives the destructiveness and smallness of the world’s way.  And that’s threatening to others.

So Jesus says, be ready for that.  It’s a mark that you’re following me if you find such a cross.  We should expect it.  Sacrificial love for the world should mean sacrifice for us.

And actually, that leads to another source of resistance: ourselves.  Seeing and loving in a way that looks to the needs of others and is critical first of our own sinfulness is a little like dying to who we were.  Paul’s right.

So we might find ourselves the greatest resistance to walking the faithful path, because it will cost us to see differently, love differently.  We lose our insistence on our own self-centered way, and that’s uncomfortable and often painful.  True honesty about our own selves before God is rarely easy.  We might be our own worst opponents in this faithful path.

But here is the hope today: our faithfulness and our path are in the way of our Lord Christ, whose love for us and the world made this path, and who is always with us on it.  We can never lose sight, even in these somewhat frightening words of Jesus, of the fact that it’s Christ Jesus, our risen Lord, whom we are following.

The one who tells us, shows us, embodies for us, the love of almighty God who notices every little bounce every sparrow makes on the ground (a likely better translation).  Think of what that means, that God takes note of every little bird and every little movement of every little bird.  That’s the one we’re following, whose love for us therefore cannot be doubted.  For we are loved even more than sparrows.

We are following the one whose love for us and the world led to the cross, and in rising from death ended the power of pain and suffering and sin and even death to do anything to us.

So even if we find that in following Christ and looking like Christ even some in our family can’t abide us, or love us, even if we find that we don’t like what it asks of us, we know that God loves us fully and always, and that all will be well.  And that goes for anyone else who might hate us or run over us or marginalize us or ignore us or make fun of us because we are becoming more and more like Christ Jesus.  Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

And let’s also remember this about the one we are following, the one we seek to be like: the Son of God says that the love of God is for all things, even little sparrows.  That means even those who hate us for who we are are loved by God, and in God’s plan of salvation, and will be continually sought and eventually found by the roaming Spirit of God who seeks to bring all sheep back to the Good Shepherd.

Because of all this, our Lord says today, “have no fear.”

This transformed life we seek, this life of discipleship and sacrificial love the Spirit is calling us to live and is seeking to grow in us, is a life lived in the undying, powerful love of God revealed in Christ Jesus.  Nothing can ultimately harm us, and all is in God’s care.  Let’s not forget that.  And let’s put aside our fear.

And let’s also remember that we are called together in this, as a community.  The life of discipleship is not a solo life; following Jesus is never an individual activity.  We are called to live this life together, to encourage each other, to speak “do not be afraid” to each other as we walk this path as faithfully as we can.  We are all in the hands of the Triune God whose love for us and for this whole world is unshakeable.  Let us walk together, then, and seek this faithful, sacrificial life, and the fullness and joy it is intended to have for us and for the world.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen