God as christ Jesus literally enters the world and commands the fishermen to follow.
When churches become escapes and spiritual temples separated from the world, buffered from the goings on outside their doors, they are all too easily silenced by the principalities and powers of the world.
But Jesus will not let us go.
Matthew 4:12-23
Music from https://filmmusic.io
"Slow Burn" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
It's a radical notion in a world of unreality, with all manner of worldly opportunities to withdraw from each other:
We are not spiritual beings having a human experience - no, we are humans made of spirit and flesh, and we are meant for one another.
Music from https://filmmusic.io
"Slow Burn" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
There can be no socio-religious indifference, no Christian solitary life, in a community that sings Hannah’s song.
Preached at Virginia Theological Seminary.
Music from https://filmmusic.io
"Slow Burn" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
The Holy Spirit comes down then, on everybody. Peter’s friends are so astonished - what does all this mean? They come to understand. God’s Spirit falls upon whoever God’s Spirit wishes to fall upon. God loves even “these” people. Even “these” people. Just like that.
You and I don’t get to decide who God loves. God decides - just like that.
Acts 10
Music from https://filmmusic.io
"Slow Burn" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
The Christ-child breaks in. Hope breaks in.
For even those who have their wages stolen, their dignity taken away, their lights and heat turned off, the evicted, the homeless, the poor, the rejected, the tormented - hope comes. Hope will come.
It is our presence as Christians in the lives of others that is the present-day icon of Christ’s love in the world. Today when we sit around hearth and home around our own common tables, or as we gather in warm churches and sing, or as we serve the poor, give blankets, sit with the sick and the dying, as we visit the lonely, or when we calm the fear of the anxious or reassure the depressed of God’s love for them and our love for them, when we give to those who cannot repay, those with no recompense - we are the hope that comes.
In fact, in serving, in making humanity our business, we find that they, those to whom we are sent, those to whom we go - that they represent Christ to us.
The season is the opportunity to enact the community that God imagines.
