Witnessing The Transformation
Church,
I often spend my Sunday mornings running between the Modern Worship stage and my seat with my family. It’s always entertaining to watch my 4-year-old daughter, Max, throughout the worship service. A few weeks ago, as I returned to my seat after the sermon, she was beaming ear to ear and holding up something that she had received from her Kids’ Ministry Worship Bag.
I asked her what it was, and she told me it was a “Pop It,” which, if you don’t know, is a simple, interactive toy designed to occupy children just long enough to make it through a sermon. She proudly held the small plastic toy in her hand for me to see. Here’s the best part - when I asked who gave it to her, she paused. Then she smiled even bigger than before, and this time with her big brown eyes sparkling, she answered, “JESUS!”
First, I love her enthusiasm. But also, she makes an interesting point: Jesus seemed to give the best gifts, and they often appeared at first as small, ordinary things.
Consider how amazing it would have been to have followed Jesus during his three-year ministry on Earth. How incredible would it have been to watch mud turn blindness into sight? To see thousands fed by a single basket of fish and bread? Can you imagine witnessing the transformation of tax collectors, prostitutes, zealots, and sinners into brothers and sisters in faith because of an invitation to a meal?
The beauty of these moments would have made the pain of Jesus’ last days even more excruciating.
Consider how gut-wrenching it would have been to see Jesus arrested and taken away; tortured and killed; buried. But that doesn’t seem to be the end of the story - some claim to have seen “visions of angels” and the tomb’s stone rolled away. Jesus was killed, and yet his body isn’t there. And it’s precisely here in the story where we pick up in this sermon series: stories of estranged, scared, grieving disciples wrestling with the mysterious rumors of an empty tomb, and later, the reality of the resurrected Jesus.
In this series, we encounter some disciples hiding and others traveling, and some who are even doubters and deniers. Over and over, Jesus shows up - revealing the gift of resurrection life - to tell them that His work isn’t finished, and neither is theirs. Neither is ours!
I think about Max and her gift from “JESUS!” You know, I’m open to the possibility of a resurrected Jesus appearing before my toddler and giving her a Pop It (we are in the Easter season, after all), but the more “ordinary” story is that she got it from her church. Because she’s a young child, and she hears us talking about Jesus all the time, she assumed that any gift the church gives her must be a gift from Jesus himself. For all I know, she probably thinks of Jesus as a living person who lives and works somewhere at University.
In a strange sense, she’s right. The gifts that we offer one another, both inside the community of faith and beyond - gifts like forgiveness, grace, compassion, mercy - are representative not just of our congregation, but of the living Body of Christ at work in the world.
During these weeks after Easter, as we explore encounters with the resurrected Christ and discover what it means to be a people transformed by God’s radical love, we bear witness to the Gospel in a number of seemingly “ordinary" ways. We donate items for children and we pack bags for teachers. We walk our neighborhoods and write cards for those who helped to shape us. What if there’s something extraordinary happening all along? Maybe it’s not just bags, walks, or cards, just like it was never just mud, just bread and fish, just a place at a table. We believe that in all of this, the Spirit of the Living God stirs up wells of hope, constructs bonds of love, and consecrates ordinary things for our growth, and for the good of our city.
For these weeks, let us venture into the ordinary, praying a prayer that is anything but: Father, Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on Earth - in San Antonio - as it is in Heaven.
Grace & Peace,
Pastor Parker