Readings:
Sermon:
One of the delights of the summer holidays is spending a few days by the sea. As the long drive comes to an end and the children stir from their naps, we smell the salt in the air, carried by the breeze. Even though we can’t see it yet, there is the unmistakable smell of the sea, and we know we are getting close.
Engaging our senses---Seeing, feeling, smelling, tasting---these are all different ways of knowing. But believing? That is an entirely different dimension of knowing. We project our thoughts and experiences into a space that we may enter but may not touch. We may feel but may not hold. We may imagine but may not control.
Love, trust, hope, and faith live in that dimension.
The litmus test to knowing if we love Jesus is to see if our actions match his commands. As we heard in today’s reading: Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me.
Loving Jesus is an imaginative knowing that takes us on our journey of faith.
On this journey we are not given a map with markers for rest stops and roadblocks. We are simply told to trust.
We are told to imagine a reality beyond the brokenness we stand on because creativity and imagination were gifts breathed into us at existence.
We are told to believe in a love that is so self-sacrificial that no matter what we do, or how far we stray, there is always a way back. It is a love that weeps, wonders, waits for us and delights at our return, even though we may be distraught and dishevelled.
And yet----we are not told how the road will look, how long the travel will be or who we will meet on the way.
There is nothing neat or straightforward about following God’s commands. The more we try and micromanage the details along the way, the more it becomes our direction, not God’s.
However, we are promised that we do not need to set out on this journey alone, we are given an advocate to travel with us, our guide, the spirit of truth.
Jesus is very clear that the world cannot see or accept the spirit of truth, and therefore there will remain a perpetual tension between them.
Our role and vocation, in all the different ways we have been called, is to be fully alive to the Spirit’s calling, to follow Jesus’s commands and embody the kind of love that calls us to a place we cannot yet see but we know exists.
Just like the salt spray we smell before we even set eyes on the sea, we are told what the Kingdom of God looks like. It looks like nurture and belonging, food and fellowship, and empowered relationships. Despite every fracture we see on earth, the Kingdom of God looks like hope found in the unlikeliest of places, with the unlikeliest of people – like you and me.
Amen.
Questions:
- Do we choose our journey based on what is visible, reliable and quantifiable, or do we trust the Spirit to reveal our direction in companionship with God?
- And when that companionship reveals the cost----are we then still willing to follow?