Between Sundays for Week of January 22, 2024
Last week, Pastor Amy suggested that discipleship is an invitation to become entangled with Jesus – to come and see and abide with him, to hang out through thick and thin, to journey together and face the challenges of every day life – and to become entangled with this world God so loves.
But sometimes, our entanglements in this world are exactly what keep us from following Jesus. This week, our Scripture readings (from Jonah and Mark) proclaim repentance. And it makes me wonder…if discipleship is about entanglement, then maybe repentance is about disentanglement, removing ourselves from situations and relationships that keep us entrenched in our well-worn ways of being and thinking that do not reflect God’s love and grace.
Every minute of every day presents us with choices about where and with whom we foster deeper connection and when to pull back. Will we choose to deepen the ruts of the well-trod road we’ve traveled before? Or will our choices lead us to change direction – to turn again and again towards God? Will our choices lead us to follow Jesus?
These choices sound more binary than they are in real life. Imagine trying to undo this knotty mess:
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Just when it seems to be loosening in one spot, another part tightens. I think the web of discipleship and repentance might be similar. We take a step, we make a choice, we find ourselves more bound up with God in one moment, and in the next, we are pulled back into our old ways, our patterns of disconnection or resistance.
The good news, of course, is that no matter what, we can’t disentangle ourselves from God’s love and grace. God won’t let us go. When we run the other direction, like Jonah, God finds us in the belly of the whale. When we fail to turn from our evil ways, like the Ninevites, God sends a messenger to save us. When we are fickle and floundering, like the disciples so often are, God gives us God’s Son.
Because that’s who God is. God is relentless about staying entangled with us so that we might experience abundant life and love with God. By the grace of God, sometimes we are part of helping others experience the same. Thanks be to God!
P.S. Sunday worship can viewed online or visit blcfairport/share-in-worship/. From there find links to previous worship videos available on Facebook and YouTube.
After the Bustle – Abby and Amy talk about the longing for light that goes hand-in-hand with living through winter in Upstate NY and the ways that they have been experiencing and seeking light in their own lives. Read the poem Found by Frederick Buechner.
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Ponderings
The gospel describes the first disciples as fishermen, likely also a common profession among those in the early Christian movement. Other imagery common in early Christianity includes water, as used in baptism, believers as water-dwellers, the net as the gospel, and the boat as the church. The early Christian creed, “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior,” is the basis for the representation of the fish as a symbol of the early Christians. The first letter of each of the Greek words in that creed spell the acronym i-ch-th-u-s, which is the Greek word for fish, which swim through much Christian iconography.
