Honoring Florence Nightingale, with guest preacher Dr. Tamara Zurakowski.
This tension between the now of our present needs for healing, and the promise of a future reign of God, is at the heart of Jesus’s command earlier in Matthew’s Gospel—in his Sermon on the Mount—that we “love our enemies.”
The kingdom of heaven is collective liberation made manifest, One Way of love and justice with many paths. Jesus talks about those many paths in the parables we read today, going from gardener to baker to treasure-seeker to trader to fisher. A world rooted in a God that is one-in-three necessitates diverse and interconnected ways of practicing God’s love and justice.
The sower in Jesus’ parable does not see “less than.” The sower sees soil worth sowing in. God’s Word does not depend on perfect soil. God’s call does not depend on perfect bodies. God’s grace does not depend on perfect minds. God sows because God sees possibility where the world sees limitation.
We are set free from the power of sin and death, and from the need to perform flawlessly all the Commandments prescribed by the law, but we are not set free to do whatever we want. We are now constrained by the law of Love, and that very limitation is the space of our freedom, because it is the space of the Holy Spirit, who is always free.
Mr Johnson’s words and work, I believe, embody the wisdom in Paul’s Letter to The Ephesians. Paul reminds us: “For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”
Let’s assume for today that God does want personal communication with us, he is our mover and Trinity is our way of understanding the movers’ ways of communicating and being present with us. That is what I experience, direct communication with God. So, let’s wonder about some readings.
If you want to know and understand the mission of the church in the world, you couldn’t go far wrong reading and meditating on the Solemn Collects. The catechism says that mission of the Church is to reconcile all things to God in Christ. That’s the ministry Paul claims for himself and for the church at Corinth. The Solemn Collects spell that ministry out in detail.
Guest preacher Nicole Starr is diakonal minister with the United Church of Christ and works as a District Court judge in Ramsey County where she holds tightly to the ideal that “justice is what love looks like in public.” (Dr. Cornel West, Union Theological Seminary).
Jesus speaks the words that echo across history: “It is finished.” Not “I am finished.” Not “This is the end.” But “It is finished”—the work of love, the work of reconciliation, the work of bearing the world’s brokenness.
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