8 July 2018 – 7th Sunday after Pentecost

Readings:

Ezekiel 2:1-5
Psalm 123
2 Corinthians 12:2-10
Mark 6:1-13

I’m going to do something scary this morning. I heard something different in the readings than what the sermon I prepared says, so I’m going to let go of what I had prepared and listen to the Spirit’s call to preach what I just heard.

There are two sets of themes that run throughout this morning’s readings: Call and Response, and Strength and Weakness. Scary as it may be, these two go hand in hand.

Ezekiel was called this morning to stand up, to let God’s spirit fill him and set him on his feet, and to go to God’s chosen people to be God’s presence amongst them. From his knees, where any of us might find ourselves were we to actually hear God’s voice calling us to a difficult task, Ezekiel is set on his feet and sent out.

He was sent out because Israel, God’s chosen people, as a community had become sure of themselves. They had become strong. And in their strength, they had begun to believe that they could make it on their own. Like many of us, they had let their strength come between them and their faith and had stopped listening for God’s voice.

Ezekiel wasn’t asked to Convert anyone or to change them—in fact God said God was sending him to a people who had become stubborn and that they probably wouldn’t listen. He isn’t called to attach any expectations to God’s word, just to Go. But even if no one heeded his words, at the least the people would know that one who is in relationship with God had been amongst them.

To this God, the Psalmist lifts up their voice. From a place of weakness and powerlessness, our Psalmist looks to the one who offers us strength, protection, and sanctuary.

In his own way, Paul also speaks of the overlap between calling and weakness. Paul, who so frequently reminds his listeners that he has cause to boast, today counts it as nothing. It’s not the point, he says. The Super Apostles he refers to were gathering disciples by telling of their spiritual superiority—of their grand visions and encounters with the divine that gave them authority to lead God’s people. Paul asserts his place amongst them as one who has been brought up to the third heaven, has seen paradise, and has heard things that no mortal can repeat. But it’s meaningless. It’s not the point. The point is to BE Christ’s presence in our

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communities. For it is in our communities, in our relationships, with God amongst us, that we find our strength. As Paul says, power is perfected in weakness, precisely because we can’t do it all alone. We can’t survive in isolation. But it is only in community that we find the strength to do what we need to do.

Today’s gospel similarly depicts Jesus as he has come to his hometown. There, the people remember him as a child, remember him as one whose every need was taken care of by those in that community that he now returns to offering wisdom and new perspective on God’s word. They respond by asking “Where did he get all this? Isn’t this the carpenter’s son who grew up here? Aren’t his brothers and sisters still amongst us?

When it says Jesus couldn’t do any deeds of power there, I don’t believe it was because he was unable. Rather, it was that the people were unable to vulnerable with the one who had been vulnerable as a child and was now grown and offering something back to them that they couldn’t accept. They were closed off from him and couldn’t ask him to help them. Those that could, as it says, he healed. And then he goes off to neighboring towns to care for others. And he sends out his disciples—much as Ezekiel was called and sent—not to convert anyone, not to change anyone, but to go. To bring God’s word, God’s love, God’s forgivness, and God’s compassion to all those they meet. To take God’s abundance into the world—to heal, to forgives, to encourage, and to empower those around them with God’s love. And if they aren’t received— they’re simply to shake the dust off their feet as they leave, and move on. The point isn’t what deeds of power they can claim to do, but simply to go. They are to take no provision that keeps them from recognizing their need to be in community to survive. Rather they are to become part of the communities they serve, and to do God’s work amongst them.

I got back from Camp Galilee just a week ago… and the whole reason I go to be camp chaplain for a week each year is because I feel called to be in that place where kids come from all over— from as far away as Washington and Oregon, as well as California and Nevada—and many of whom don’t go to church. But they come to Camp Galilee because it is a place where they can feel loved, supported, and where they can be invited each year to see God alive and active in the beauty of the natural world around them, hear God in the voices of nature and one another, feel God in the community that comes together to love and support them, and be encouraged to take that experience home with them to let it impact their lives and other communities in new ways. For some the week is transformative—as only a community of love and support can be. For others it’s just a week away from home. But all of them at least go home knowing they’ve been to a camp where people care about them and where God’s love shines.

I agreed to serve on the Bishop’s Search Committee because of many of the same reasons.
While camp may represent the ideal, the kind of community we form at camp is the same kind of community that ties our whole diocese together. The calling of a new bishop is a chance to listen both for God’s calling and for how our candidates will respond to that calling in our diocese as they lead us into the kind of community that allows each of us not only to encounter God, and know we’re cared about, but that invites us into bringing that experience to all of our communities beyond the church as well: Into our places of work, into our homes and families, to our friends—church or unchurched.

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Whoever we call as our new bishop needs to know that—needs to be a part of that.

I’ve said many times before that I feel at home here. Calvary is a place where I can be vulnerable because you are also willing to be vulnerable. Again, as Paul said, our strength comes from our weakness and our willingness to work as a community that has found its voice and found its power and strength in our relationships with one another and with God. That voice needs to be present in our bishop search.

Encounter with God is the invitation to all. Each week, as we come together, we find ourselves invited into encounter with God in worship. Each day, as we go out into the world, we are similarly invited, though in quite a different way and context, into encounter with God in relationship to the world around us and all whom we encounter.

Out of our countless encounters in the overlap between the world and our relationships with God, we too are called. We too are invited to be filled with the spirit that sets us on our feet and sends us out to be God’s presence, to be God’s love, to be God’s compassion, to be God’s forgiveness to the world around us.

We aren’t called to change them. We aren’t called to convert them. We are simply called to go. And yet we are called so that the world can hear that there are those who do care, who do love.

It is my prayer that I remember that I am not enough on my own. I can’t do it all. None of us can. And it is my prayer for all of us that we remember who we are as a community in Christ that brings strength and power to the world around us as a gift of God’s love that invites others to encounter God in surprising and liberating new ways.

Amen.