Your Call

Proper 5

Fr. Tim Nunez

May my spoken word be true to God’s written word and bring us all closer to the living word, Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen

Often, when faithful people encounter hardship and tragedy, we reflexively say something like, “God has a plan” or “Everything happens for a reason.” We trust God, even when we cannot see any good in the situation. There’s a gap between those two a mile wide and we cannot see any connection, but we remain faithful. This morning’s scriptures bring us to consider how our faith intersects with our lives. Our most difficult trials, our deepest losses and hardest decisions can and should reinforce our faith in how God fills that huge gap.

When we say, “God has a plan,” that doesn’t mean he is actively laying out your life as a particular maze for you to find clues and grope your way through, and heaven is your reward at the end. When we say, “Everything happens for a reason,” it’s not as if God has designed your life as an obstacle course with tragedies and disasters tailored just for you. As Lamentations 3:33 says, “for he does not willingly afflict or grieve anyone.”

Let’s look first at these three encounters with Jesus in this morning’s gospel with that in mind; his call of Matthew the tax collector (the author of the Gospel), the healing of the woman with a chronic hemorrhage, and the raising of the leader of the synagogue’s dead daughter. Each of these incidents illustrates an aspect of how Jesus heals and redeems.

Matthew collected taxes for the hated, pagan Romans, and collected his own commission, all using the Roman’s idolatrous coins. Matthew the tax collector was on a miserable path, one he willfully chose. Had nothing changed, no amount of money could have overcome the pain of constant scorn from his own people and the misery of his soul.

Jesus walked up, called Matthew, and Matthew followed him. Getting up and following Jesus was an act of faith that changed his entire life. Unlike Peter, James and John, who were just honest fishermen, Matthew went from being a despised leech on his people to bearing the Good News of Jesus ever since; right up to now and beyond. When Matthew answers his call, all of that misery is redeemed. It becomes a dramatic contrast to the promise of new life to be found in Jesus.

The woman with the hemorrhage had to have suffered physically, but there was much more to it. She was also ritually unclean. She was cut off socially and spiritually from her family and community. Her poverty, loneliness and hopelessness would have been crushing. She didn’t choose her circumstance, but suffered a miserable life from an accident of her health.

Reaching out to touch Jesus’s garment was an act of faith that changed her entire life. Physically healed, she could become ritually clean and pursue a normal life; work, family and community. Her past suffering becomes a dramatic example of the promise of new life to be found in Jesus.

The little girl was physically dead. The delight and joy she brought to her father and her family was dead, too, along with their hopes and dreams to watch her grow up and build her own life.

Her father kneeling before Jesus and voicing his hope that Jesus could make her live showed desperate faith. Jesus brought her back and she resumed her entire life. The girl got up, and that’s really all we need to say. Her death-to-life story stands as an astounding affirmation of Jesus’s power over death itself.

Each of these stories shows how faith in Jesus brings new life into dire circumstances, but they are not preserved merely to tell us what happened to Matthew, a sick woman, and a grieving father or even to demonstrate Jesus was a miracle worker. Did God “willingly afflict or grieve” them? No. They show us how God works in every life that connects with Jesus. They point us to the larger reality of God’s plan and how everything and anything gets woven into it.

You’re going along in your life, trying to be a good person, doing the best you can. Maybe you do really well in many or even most respects. But you make mistakes along the way. You make poor decisions.

Some things happen to you that you never deserved. People hurt you physically or emotionally or both. People betray you. You suffer with some awful disease or condition. Worse, bad things happen to people whom you love. (Further, the more you love Jesus, the more the pain and suffering of people you’ve never even met hurts!) These are sore points. Left to their own ends, they lead to ruin. Saying “God has a plan!” and “Everything happens for a reason!” feels shallow if we don’t recognize these phrases are shorthand for a deep, life-giving truth. 

Begin at the end, your end. Because you know him and love him, Jesus stands as a beacon. You know his voice. He is like a powerful spiritual magnet such that at the end of your life, no matter what, you will ultimately be drawn to him. He has made you aware of this. (If not before, then hear it now.) This is your ultimate call.

Since we know that end point, we come to see all the twists and turns, the ditches we fall into, the sins we commit and the sins others commit against us all in light of that end point. “My life was awful and I was awful, but Jesus called me.” “I thought life was going along pretty well until the doctor told us the difficult news, but I know where this is going.” “I miss the people I grieve so badly, but I know Jesus has them and I know he has me.” Everything is redeemed by his call to us.

That’s the reason. That’s the plan. Not every dip and twist and turn in between. Remember, God is above and beyond time. He sees all of time, all of our lives, at once.

This explains that last verse in the reading from Hosea. What binds us to God is not the perfection of our actions but the covenant relationship he establishes with us—as we come to know and love him; not rote obedience and sacrifice.

And as Paul affirms, Abraham was “as good as dead” with regard to his and Sarah’s potential to realize God’s promise of descendants, but he believed in God who gives new life to the dead. That put him on the right path. He still made mistakes. Bad things happened to him. But his faith kept him on the right path. Now his promise is being fulfilled for the world through Jesus. But is place with God was and is fixed.

Jesus is the one redeeming everything for those who cling to him in faith. God's plan is to draw us into Christ, and from that destination he redeems even what once seemed meaningless.

Matthew got up from his tax booth.

The woman reached out and touched his garment.

The father knelt before him in hope.

Each came to Jesus from a different kind of death. Each found new life with him. Christ is enough. Christ is everything.

Whatever burden, grief, failure, or fear you carry today, hold fast to him. He is already holding fast to you. And in the end, he will redeem everything.

AMEN!