Ninth Bishop of Texas

We are often fooled into believing in different narratives. School, politics, Twitter, whatever. They buttress our own buffered selves, souls, and egos, reassuring us: "no, really, you are alone."

The Gospel offers something very different. God beckons us into God's community - and invites us to imagine the grandeur of God and God's hope for us.

Music from https://filmmusic.io "Slow Burn" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

No one can live perfectly - and that's the point.

What we understand immediately is that we cannot possibly achieve these things without Jesus.

Not a community that has escaped from the world, but a community that is engaged in remaking itself for the sake of the world.

Music from https://filmmusic.io "Slow Burn" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

The church is not the sum of the people who call themselves Christian. The church is the sum of people who do these things:

Find in the world Christ and to join God there, pointing God out, revealing and living the narrative where God is the primary character. Perform acts of service; intervene in the world.

Music from https://filmmusic.io "Slow Burn" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

God as Christ Jesus literally enters the world and commands the fishermen to follow.

When churches become escapes and spiritual temples separated from the world, buffered from the goings on outside their doors, they are all too easily silenced by the principalities and powers of the world.

But Jesus will not let us go.

Matthew 4:12-23

Music from https://filmmusic.io "Slow Burn" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

It's a radical notion in a world of unreality, with all manner of worldly opportunities to withdraw from each other:

We are not spiritual beings having a human experience - no, we are humans made of spirit and flesh, and we are meant for one another.

Music from https://filmmusic.io "Slow Burn" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

There can be no socio-religious indifference, no Christian solitary life, in a community that sings Hannah's song.

Preached at Virginia Theological Seminary.

Music from https://filmmusic.io "Slow Burn" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

The Holy Spirit comes down then, on everybody. Peter's friends are so astonished - what does all this mean? They come to understand. God's Spirit falls upon whoever God's Spirit wishes to fall upon. God loves even "these" people. Even "these" people. Just like that.

You and I don't get to decide who God loves. God decides - just like that.

Acts 10

Music from https://filmmusic.io "Slow Burn" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

The Christ-child breaks in. Hope breaks in.

For even those who have their wages stolen, their dignity taken away, their lights and heat turned off, the evicted, the homeless, the poor, the rejected, the tormented - hope comes. Hope will come.

It is our presence as Christians in the lives of others that is the present-day icon of Christ's love in the world. Today when we sit around hearth and home around our own common tables, or as we gather in warm churches and sing, or as we serve the poor, give blankets, sit with the sick and the dying, as we visit the lonely, or when we calm the fear of the anxious or reassure the depressed of God's love for them and our love for them, when we give to those who cannot repay, those with no recompense - we are the hope that comes.

In fact, in serving, in making humanity our business, we find that they, those to whom we are sent, those to whom we go - that they represent Christ to us.

The season is the opportunity to enact the community that God imagines.

See with different eyes God, the world, and the people around us. The higher work, the profound work, is for us as Christians to see the hidden and invisible workers who gather around us every day, without us knowing names or faces. Just as God does.

Advent II: Matthew 3:1-12

Preached at Christ Church South, Tyler.

Music from https://filmmusic.io

"Slow Burn" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)

License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

God in Christ Jesus comes to us in the physical world of our everyday lives;

God comes to us in the person of others in the human fabric of life.

When the time comes, we will need to be ready;

for the God we believe in is not a god who dwells in our heads, or of our minds, or who inhabits words alone...

Matthew 24:36-44

Preached at St. Paul's, Waco.

Music from https://filmmusic.io