May you continue to move forward in faith. Now. May God help us to listen. Now. Help us to indeed listen carefully, actively, constantly, for hope…. Now and forever. To listen …for as long as it takes…

How we love and serve God and neighbor will be different for everyone.  We’re free to follow wherever the Spirit leads us.  Not because we have to in order to earn God’s love and forgiveness, but because we are children of God, freed from everything that separates us from God.  Freed to be who we truly are meant to be.  Freed to be generous.  Freed to be loving.  Feed to servants.  Freed to follow Christ wherever He leads. 

What are the injustices we cry out for God to address?  What kind of justice do we long to see?  Are we as persistent in our demand for justice?  Or do we get quickly discouraged, or feel so overwhelmed and disheartened by injustice that we give up?  Do we feel like we’re not making a difference so why bother?  Do we lack persistence in prayer or in action? 

To be grateful for the ways in which God is with us through the Sacraments and the Word, in both the big and the little moments of life, transforms our lives into ones that center God and God’s salvation promises of life, health, forgiveness, justice, and redemption.

Photo by ross tek  on Unsplash Luke 17:1-10 Grace and peace to you all from God the Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ....

We are transformed by the Spirit into people who seek God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven.  Let us commit ourselves to closing the chasm, breaking down barriers, and creating a better world.  Following the call of Jesus and participating in the new creation God is building. 

On this Feast Day of St. Matthew, I am especially reminded how much of a blessing it is to be St. Matthew together.  To share the good news of Jesus Christ with the world and to embody God’s inclusion and hospitality for each other and to our neighbors outside these walls.  I’m so grateful to be a part of this community, and to be the Body of Christ together.

We are found over and over again by God in our baptismal promises and when we eat the bread and drink the wine during communion. These gifts of Word, Water, Wine and Bread are the ways we know God is seeking us and finding us.

It’s hard to consciously act weird. It’s why God blessed us with church communities where we can be weird together, where the Holy Spirit empowers us to keep being weird until it’s no longer weird at all to dedicate our whole selves and all that we have to blessing and serving each other as beloved neighbors. Let’s get weird – the world needs us.

This morning’s story about a dinner party has given us two related meanings in one story. One story showing us what it looks like to live humbly as God’s named and claimed children in service to the neighbor and in our humble position. And the same story giving us a theological image of Christ the Servant that delivers a promise of freedom from striving to become so that we can merely be.

Through this Gospel message today we have encountered how God wants us to live: as healed and unburdened persons. So, let’s hold onto that promise as our great hope together in faith!

Jesus’s message of fire and conflict, when examined closely through a practice of exegesis – is actually sharing a message of hope that God’s Kingdom is on the way and that Jesus has gone through the purifying fire for us, and we are now promised to be the newly baptized children of God, members of God’s Kingdom which we pray will come such that God’s will may be done.   

Grace and peace to you all in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.   It is truly amazing to see a hundred or so young...

We are blessed to be the church together as a sign for others. The strong and the needy, and those perceived to be flawed who actually are not... Our faith has given us a vision. Jesus Christ is the very image of that vision. We can see the direction even if we cannot see the future. Care, help, feed, speak out … not by amassing treasures or power for ourselves. But by treasuring the values of Jesus Christ.

In our Gospel text today, Jesus gives us a prayer – the most famous of them all: The Lord’s Prayer. It’s a starting point for our dialogue and a little lesson in expectations as well. The Lord’s prayer reminds us that we pray to God with our needs and our hopes and God responds most often with what God knows we need: our daily bread. And not really with the Bugatti we’ve been dreaming about...

Perhaps the way this text speaks into our lives is help us see some extremes so that we might instead choose balance between our doing and our waiting, to be better in-tune with the God who is here speaking to us and calling us.

When we see our fellow humans as beloved children of God, as our beloved neighbors, our service to our neighbor is no longer about justifying ourselves to God, it’s no longer about what we should do to gain God’s love… it’s about living into God’s love that is already poured out.  It’s about seeing all people as God sees all people: in care and compassion.

Today, we are take a brief break from our typical worship to come outside with the barebones necessities to enjoy the singing of creation, as the Psalm says today, and we are called to proclaim the nearness of the Kingdom of God with all that we have - sometimes that’s a lot and sometimes it’s not much.

I commit to you to do my best at getting out of the way of Jesus’s own words to let them work on all of us so we might see him bringing about the unstoppable love of God for all of creation.

I begin this Ascension Sunday with a brief story from an historian… John Meacham… He has crossed my path in the past few years.  You may...