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We hear this morning in the Gospel, “When they hand you over, do not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say; for what you are to say will be given to you at that time; for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.”
There are times where we can clearly see these words at work. There was a man I once knew who was a stanch atheist. He happened to also be a great golfer. So the priest at his wife’s church asked him to go and play a few holes with him. He continued to refuse until his wife, who had never asked him to go to church with her, broke down and through her tears said, “Frank, the man just wants to play golf with you!”
While they were on the course, this priest said “So what’s your problem, Frank? Is it with the resurrection.” Well, these words slowly opened this man’s heart so that one day he was able to say, “Lord, I believe!” Frank went on to become a priest himself in the church. And he told many of us one Sunday in his Christian Forum that when he went to this priest who had helped him and about the power of his words, the response he got back was, “Frank, I don’t remember saying that to you.”
Sometimes it is clear that the Spirit is speaking through us. Other times it is not. When I was going through discernment, I prayed and prayed over this passage of Scripture. I prayed that God would give me the right words to make it through the process smoothly. But overtime, I got the same thing. "You need to wait a little bit longer. What you’re doing quite what we want to see, we want you to try this instead.”
And what I heard instead was “You’re still laking.” And what I felt was that God hadn’t heard me. That maybe I was doing something wrong. That I wasn’t good enough.
But part of this was because I was looking at things the wrong way. Or at least, not completely the right way. For one, no one ever told me they doubted my call to ministry. Just that there was something else I needed.
Maybe this was the direction God wanted it all to go in. I can't say. What I can say, is that even though I felt I had screwed up, I got two of the best experiences of my life that helped shaped me to be who I am today.
One of those was City Year. For those who may not know, City Year takes young adults and puts them in struggling schools to help tutor and mentor at-risk students. Working as an Americorps member, for as difficult as it was at times, changed me. It made me more confident, more outgoing, more assured of myself. It got me used to wearing a uniform with all that meant. It made me a stronger, and hopefully better, person.
The other came the year after when my mentor Heidi Kinner asked me to come work for her in Helena, Montana. And working out there gave me the chance to explore my call by seeing what ministry really looks like. It equipped me with tools that have helped me to this day. It let me know what I still needed to prepare for my life of ministry.
They say hindsight is 20/20. Because it is. All those times I was asked to wait, I felt like a failure. But God used that failure, if that’s even the right word for it, to continue to work in me and prepare me for what lay ahead. To prepare me for things I couldn’t even see yet. And a big part of that was to lead me to you at this time.
The point of the Gospel message today isn’t that if we ask God for help, He will magically wave His hand and make all things go our way. Because it isn’t about our way. It’s about God’s way. And asking Him for the right words isn’t about what helps us. It’s about how best we can accomplish His will in the world.
Because we can’t always know what it is that God is leading us towards. Or even how He will take the bad things that happen in life and redeem those events for the better. We don’t know what will happen later down the road. But we do know that if we are not anxious and if we trust in God, eventually we will find ourselves on the better path. And sometimes that path is one we never would have expected.
If we follow God, we can live our lives without fear. Not without fear that bad things will happen, but without fear that all hope is lost. Without fear that our path will lead to destruction, but instead with hope that we will walk with God in the ways of life and resurrection.
There is another thing Jesus says in the Gospel this morning. “The harvest is plentiful, but the harvesters are few.” All of us here are called to be harvesters. To go out into the world to love and serve the Lord. If fear of what to do or say has been holding you back, let it do so no longer. Because as long as the Lord is with us, we have nothing to fear.