And It All Came Together

I was struggling all week with how exactly I wanted to approach the sermon.  Three of Sunday's readings were about God calling us: Samuel being called by God (1 Samuel 3:1-20), a praise of God for searching us out and knowing who we are even when we do not (Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18) and Jesus calling the first disciples (John 1:35-51).  But there are four lessons and that one can be sung "One of these things is not like the others, one of these things doesn't belong" - 1 Corinthians 6:12-20, Paul writing against fornication as it is a sin against the body.

It was however that 1 Corinthians reading that struck me in the light of the others.  That God is calling our whole selves to follow Christ, not just part of us.  And when we escape through sins such as sexual fornication, but you can add drug & alcohol addiction, fornication with money, even giving into peer pressure and acting in ways that are not our true self, then we are not able to truly follow Christ.

And so I struggled all week as I tried to express this.  I wrote one version of the sermon, but wasn't a real fan of what I wrote.  And on Saturday I heavily edited it and added to it.  But still I didn't like what I wrote.

And then it all came together as God and God's word struck me through song.  Our first hymn was The Summons or as it is better known as Will You Come and Follow Me.  The 4th verse has a line "will you love the you you hid if I but call your name?"  And that is the nugget that I needed, the phrase that pulled my entire sermon together.

We hid behind sin, or behind ways that we feel that we should act, through peer pressure, through how the media portrays people.  We feel like we can't truly be disciples of Jesus because we aren't willing, or don't feel called to be the person who asks people on the street corner if they have accepted Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior.  Or the person who takes a knee and prays in the endzone in front of millions of people.  Or the person who can follow blindly, without questioning what the church or what Jesus truly means.  And yet Jesus doesn't want us to act that way.  Jesus doesn't want us to be someone we are not.  Jesus wants us, our true selves to follow him.  Jesus wants the person who we often hid to follow him because that if we are too busy hiding we aren't able to come and see.

And so my sermon was re-written, in the moment, in the midst of this song, in the midst of hearing the congregation sing God's Word to me so that we were able to preach the damn gospel together in conversation.