Readings: Isaiah 9:1-4, Matthew
4:12-23
Let us pray: God of all time and all peoples, be with your
people here today as we ponder the words of scripture. Help us to have open hearts and minds to your
word for us and to offer ourselves to your vision and your purpose, in the name
of Jesus. Amen
This is the time
in the church year between Christmas and Lent we know as the season of Epiphany
– but it can also be called ‘ordinary time’, the same terminology as can be
used for the period that stretches from Pentecost to Advent- ‘ordinary time’ –
the part of the church year when we are neither aiming at or celebrating
Christmas or Easter, when we are not concentrating explicitly on the birth,
death or resurrection of Jesus. And in
the end around 33 or 34 weeks of our 52 week church year can be called
‘ordinary time.’ If you can imagine the year as a pie chart with the liturgical
colours put in, this time would be a small wedge of green – a small wedge about
2 o’clock (apologies to the digital among us) - and then there would be almost
half of the circle on the opposite side – say 6-12 also green – it really is
the dominant colour of our time as a church year. Much of it, in this hemisphere, is winter time
– can we say this year all of it!
And we have this
bit of green (ordinary time) now – isolated, stranded from the other, on both
sides, by the Christmas and Easter purple and white. What might we read from that? Well that there is a sense that we are being
reminded in these weeks that we also need to be grounded in the ordinary, that
the ‘high celebrations’ are not by themselves enough to sustain us in the hard
work of following Jesus in our daily, often very ordinary, lives.
This viewpoint is
encouraged when we look at the focus of the Gospel readings over this time –
from the Sermon on the Mount: where
Jesus teaches us the very basics of what it means to be a Christ follower –
practical foundation stuff for us to follow everyday.
Jesus is preparing
us for understanding in a new way the meaning of the incarnation: the intricate relationship of God and Jesus,
human and divine, into which we are invited.
This ordinary time is our time to know God through the man Jesus, or as
Dominican theologian, Herbert McCabe says:
“We do not simply examine Jesus historically to see what he was like; we
listen to him, he established
communication and friendship with us, and it is in this rapport with Jesus that
we explore a different dimension of his existence…. It is in the contact with
the person who is Jesus, in this personal communication between who he is and
who we are, that his divinity is revealed in his humanity.”
And so Jesus
begins: to proclaim, to teach, to heal and to disrupt. And what is it that he says to the fishermen
Simon Peter, Andrew, James and John, to us today: ‘Follow me!
Follow me not in
the hype of Christmas, not in the pain and passion of Easter but follow me
today, just follow.
The question then
for today? How are we to walk in the light of Christ in the midst of the
everyday, of the ordinary.
Maybe the first
thing to say is that no day, walking with Jesus, is boringly ordinary. Every day brings blessings, insights, acts of
love and challenges. Every day through
prayer and stillness and the beauty that surrounds us we encounter God and know
anew the power of love to heal and to minister.
So no never just ordinary – I may have shared this with you before but I
realised after my dad died that the best way I could describe him was as an
extraordinary ordinary man – no big spectacular epiphanies or moments of great
celebration but it was in his everyday constancy of living well and faithfully
that I found this sense of greatness, of inspiration that encouraged and grew
me.
I think too of the
people that came here on Friday and spent a good part of the day preparing
placards for the march championing women on Saturday morning – a small voice
against the powerful roar of a political bully but believing in the ability of
that voice to speak out.
I heard some
beautiful words this week, from someone asked for their sense of purpose to
their call: they said that it was about ‘converting Christians to the wonder of
their own faith, the bigness of what faith can be.’
I think that this
was where Isaiah was at – in the midst of the turmoil of the time oppression,
exploitation of the poor, the rule of fear) in the midst of that, he held out
and on to the vision of a world at peace, the wonder of a world where God was
made known through the day to day actions and ways of living of the ordinary
people. The ‘bigness’ of faith will
overcome the pain of the world. The
light of Christ will shine in the darkest corners and make a difference.
Perhaps one of the
foundation concepts that helps us here is best told by a story, and I am sure
many of you will have heard this in some form or other: An American minister
remembers his childhood and the fact that the family was never allowed to have
the television on during dinner – except that is on Sunday when there was this
show ‘Wild Kingdom’ that explored the wonders of nature. His father said that every episode reminded
him of the wonders of God’s creativity and imagination in the natural world
(I’ll come back to those words later).
But there was one particular episode showing the elephant seals of
Argentina – and a mum and her newly born seal pup. Mum took off to feed and ended up coming back
to a different beach. The young boy that
was watching didn’t see how they could find one another, ever, but the mother
called and searched and listened until she was reunited with her pup – and the
host of the programme told of how, at birth, the sound and scent of the mother
are imprinted in the pup’s memory and the sound and the scent of the put are
imprinted on the mother’s memory. The
boy’s father kind of nailed it when he said: ‘You know, that’s how it is with
God, we are imprinted with a memory of God and God, even before we are born, is
imprinted with a memory of us –we will always find each other.
That realisation
that there is a presence in our lives that refuses to let go, is always filling
our lives with longing and hope is a corner stone of our faith.
So too is the
understanding that the light of Christ permeates all places, all dark corners
and brings peace and vision where our own is struggling. That by living in the
teachings of Jesus we are spreading that light in our everyday living –
generosity, compassion, justice while going about our ordinary lives.
So too is the
knowledge that we are a people of repentance – aware of our failures, able to
bring them before God, able to try again, always seeking to be more like Jesus
for it is there we are coming close the fulfilling of love, God’s purpose for
the world, Isaiah’s ‘great light’ that would bring joy to the nations and
freedom from their oppressors.
Therefore, the
scripture passage from Matthew today of the invitation to follow, does, I
believe, require of us a wholehearted response.
It is an invitation to a new way of living not just at the high
festivals but this week, all those green weeks of the year, and we are asked to
have not just the faith, the capacity to see beyond things as they are but also
the imagination and work towards things as they might be. To hold to the vision
of the good news within our relatively ordinary lives and to live it out with
energy and enthusiasm because we truly believe that it will make a
difference.
We might not
understand just what that light might look like always, we just know that it is
needed and we are the vessel. We will
not always have the imagination to see just where our path might take us but we
trust in the vision of God. We might
find it hard to lift our sights to the good and the peaceful and the just when
we are surrounded by oppression, political lunacy and greedy systems but do it
anyway – for there we will encounter the kingdom of God, again and again and
again.
The call to follow
Jesus invites us to be the light that no darkness can ever put out. Amen. So be it.
Margaret Garland
