Do it Again
Every weekday our family routine follows the same pattern. Here’s a morning sample: we wake, we eat breakfast together, together we panic around 7:25 AM because we are not ready for the five-minute walk to the bus stop.
The details of our morning - what we eat for breakfast, how we brew our coffee or the time we finally roll out of bed - may change during the week but the pattern for ordering our lives stays the same. We eat breakfast at the same table, sitting in the same chairs. We see the same cars and bicycles with the same church people waving good morning around the same time as our pattern and their pattern overlap for a brief moment.
The patterns of our lives intersect, influencing the way we move through the day and week. What appears to be separate journeys are woven together. Our pattern becomes part of your pattern and vice versa.
Our neighborhoods have patterns as well. Every Monday night we hear the sound of trash and recycling cans making their way to the curb. The contents of these containers are affected by the prior week’s pattern which in turn affects the movement of the containers as they settle in their place at the end of the driveway. A gathering of friends may add the clanging of bottlers while at Christmas we hear the sound of cardboard being dragged across the asphalt or gravel of the driveway, and in the spring there will be piles of brush cleared from flower beds to make space for soon to bloom bulbs.
The patterns of our daily routines and shared communities make up the liturgy of lives.
Liturgy is a word typically reserved for Sunday morning gatherings in worship. Liturgy is “the service or worship of God, and particularly the order that is followed in that service.” Put more simply, liturgy is the work the people of the community do together. Even if we think we are not following a liturgy during a worship service, we are. There is always a patter the community uses to navigate our time together, placing our focus on God and not on any individual in the community. We can change a song or prayer during worship and the liturgy stays the same. Even if we were to overhaul the entire order of worship, we would not be ridding ourselves of a liturgy. We would establish a new liturgy, a new pattern by which our community’s worship would be organized.
Jesus has traveled from the banks of the Jordan River eventually arriving in Capernaum. Jesus had not yet turned towards Jerusalem, the religious and political hub of the region. Instead, Jesus stayed in the region surrounding the Sea of Galilee.
Galilee was a region home to revolutionary-zealous movements. Galilee and the cities located in the region were considered to be on the outskirts of the region. Capernaum, even Nazareth (Jesus’ hometown) were removed from the structured patterns of Jerusalem. Galilee is what we would today refer to as a “melting pot.” The liturgy of the community was influenced by those who may not have been comfortable establishing the patterns of their life in an area with stricter adherence to religious law.
It was in Capernaum where Jesus picked up the pattern, continuing the preaching begun by his cousin, John the Baptist - “Change your hearts and lives (Repent)! Here comes the kingdom of heaven!”
In Jesus, the Kingdom of Heaven had come. The Kingdom of Heaven arrived in Capernaum, in Galilee, in a place where the liturgy of the community played fast and loose with the law and the community was not considered Biblically pure. Gentiles lived in the community and the patterns of paganism influenced the patter of Jewish life in the region.
The people living in Galilee still went about their daily liturgy. This is where Jesus found Peter and Andrew, and James and John fishing by the sea. It was amid these men’s daily liturgy, the repetitive routine of mending nets, setting off to fish, returning to shore, selling their catch, and mending their nets that Jesus called them to follow him.
“‘Come, follow me,’ he said, ‘and I’ll show you how to fish for people.’”
“Come, follow me, and I will show how to bring people into my Kingdom.”
Icon Calling of the Disciples
Jesus’ new pattern for life in the community pulled Peter and Andrew, and James and John from their occupations (fishermen) and vocations (sons) within the community and invited them to not only experience God’s grace but to be instruments of the same grace extended to them.
This new liturgy would take them from the backwoods of Galilee and thrust them into the religious and political hub of the region. Later the liturgy of the Kingdom of Heaven thrust them into the religious and political hubs of the known world for the one purpose: extending the same invitation to the grace of the Kingdom of Heaven.
This morning we are continuing our sermon series: Won’t You Be My Neighbor.
Grace is a word we, people like me and Pastors Ed and Jeff, throw around in the church and rarely define or explore the implications. This “stained-glass” language turns many off not because of its offensiveness (and when we dig down, the unmerited love of God can offend our sensibilities) but rather because those charged with bearing this Grace to the world do not take what we bear seriously. The Grace of God - the unmerited, there is nothing you can do to earn or lose it, love of God - is ours every day of the week. In the nitty-gritty, daily grind we find ourselves in God’s Grace, while we may not recognize it or see it, is ours. Not only is God’s Grace ours, but it is also ours regardless if we want it nor not. God’s Grace is ours to receive and when we step into God’s Grace we are changed and so is the neighborhood.
The invitation to grace was part of what made Mister Rogers and the Neighborhood of Make-believe tick. Fred Rogers was a Presbyterian minister. His calling was to care for children, me and you, in a world that often neglects the intelligence of children in exchange for easy distractions and questions unanswered. Mister Rogers once said, “Love isn’t a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.”
This is grace at its most basic definition, extending love and acceptance to someone exactly as they are, exactly where they are. This is precisely what Jesus did in going to Galilee instead of Jerusalem. Jesus went to a place where the law, the thing that was supposed to guide the liturgy of the community was not always followed. He went to this place and said “Here comes the kingdom of heaven, not because of your ability to follow the liturgy of the community perfectly but because, as you are and where you are, God has come down from on high to heal and share the good news that while we may be filled with sin, God still loves you. God has not abandoned us, leaving us to figure it out on our own. The new liturgy for this community, for the world, we will write it together, guided by God’s love.
The pattern of our community may not always mirror God’s plan but God, in Christ can work with us, guiding us to a new pattern of holiness. This is at the heart of Jesus’ invitation to Change your hearts and lives!” Repent, turn towards God because God’s Kingdom is at hand.
Jesus extended an invitation to the disciples he called by the Sea of Galilee and it is the same invitation he extends to use when we answer his call to follow him and we emerge from the waters of baptism. This invitation is to change the narrative of the community by changing the pattern, changing the liturgy that guides us. The patterns created by our lives together do not change because of anything we do but because we have been changed by Christ’s invitation to grace and cannot imagine doing anything but changing.
A liturgy of grace, the work of God’s love we participate in does not remove us from the weekday and weekend liturgy of the neighborhood. Our work continues.
We go to the bus stop, and there are things to do after the bus pulls away.
We still see Brian riding up 16th Street, and we continue about our day.
We wrestle the trash cans to the curb and then bring it back to the house.
This is why Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood ended each episode with “I’ll be back when the day is new…” Christ’s liturgy grace continues. We get to do this again. Even if we mess it up today the invitation remains and tomorrow, when the day is new, with new ideas and things to talk about we have the opportunity to jump back into the patterns of Christ’s community of grace.
The patterns we engage in now, because of the grace of God and the change in the narrative his ministry sparked, are what author Shea Tuttle describes as “times of holy exchange.” Moments where the good news of God’s reign in Christ touch us and our neighbors.
