Mark 8:31-38

Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes and be killed and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

He called the crowd with his disciples and said to them, “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

Sermon Text

Every person wants to belong. Next to food and shelter, connection is the most foundational need in a person’s life. Some might even argue that community is more important than these needs. Ecclesiastes places sharing life with others as the foundation of human joy – even going so far to say that even the hard things of life feel better when you face them alongside someone.[1] To be human is to be in community, and community is where humanity becomes more than just a taxonomic label.

John Wesley put it this way: “There is no holiness but social holiness.” In other words, you cannot be a good person on your own. For one thing, how can someone be good if they have no one to be good to? You might say that they would do so by not doing anything that is bad, but that is not the same as being good – that just means you’re inert. A person can only do good when they have someone to be good to, and that requires a community. Secondly, a person can only be holy in community because we need people to instruct us on how we should act. Since we cannot be good by ourselves, it follows that the best lessons we can derive about what we should do come from other people showing us those lessons.

I know how to love my wife, not because I somehow intuited what the proper way to love her is, but because I had the example of my father and step-mother, my grandad and nan. I saw how people can be married and support each other – learning excellence through their successes and learning about pitfalls from their mistakes. I learned to be a better minister by being surrounded by good ministers – again by seeing the ways they excel and the ways they fail. Community wraps around every aspect of our life. I spoke mostly of being good or bad here, but it is so much more than that. Community is comfort, it is peace, it is where we derive so much of our worldview and value. Community is, often, everything of who we are.

Rejection, then, is one of the most powerful forces working against our happiness and goodness in life. I mean happiness, not just in terms of being able to smile and laugh and feel good, but in the sense of general goodness of life. A sound mind, a sound body, a general ability to live life to its fullest – that is the kind of happiness I mean. When we are alone, we struggle to find that. Humanity was incomplete until the first human had a partner to live alongside.[2] Rejection is the conscious decision of one person to push another away and, in so doing, deny them the opportunity to engage with the fullest aspects of life.

Christ sets out in our scripture the reality of his own rejection. His life was always going to end with him being rejected by the powers that be, turned over to the empire that controlled his country, and killed like a common criminal. Jesus did not come to the world to be accepted, but to be rejected and to ultimately create a Kingdom that was founded in being rejected. Christianity is a group of people who belong to each other, and to Christ, but it is not a group that exists to be accepted by the wider world. We exist to follow Christ’s example and to live so that we will necessarily be rejected by some individuals and, by necessity, so that we can accept all other rejected people into our community of rejects.

To put it more plainly – the Church works best when it is the Island of Misfit Toys and not Santa’s workshop. It feels weird to bring in a Christmas movie in February, but we’re gonna do it anyway. We are where the rejects of the world can come and be a part of a community that builds itself upon being rejected. We do not exist to be respected, we exist to do God’s will.

The problem of the Church, in all time, is that we live within the world, we are built out of its constituent parts. You and I do not come to the Church with a blank slate – we have expectations placed upon us by our family, by our family history, our national history, and the culture within all of these larger identities that we are a part of. We bring into the Church aspects of our background and so end up shaping the Church to look more like our culture than like the Body of Christ. That is an inevitability of people, it cannot be fully avoided, but our awareness of it and the work we do to prevent it being overwhelming must be very intentional.

There is nothing wrong with us being American Christians, or having our worship shaped by our American Context. However, when we push our American ideals onto the Gospel we begin to endanger ourselves. We live in a culture that is inherently about trying to get ahead in life. The “American Dream,” long extinct in practicality but still believed in throughout the country, cannot be applied to Christian life and do anything but diminish the impact of our witness. We are not called to win, not called to succeed even, instead we are called to live a life centered on service, devotion, and growth. That growth can sometimes lead to material success, but one does not necessitate the other. Plenty of successful people are morally bankrupt and plenty of poor folk are saints on Earth. Piety is not a thing we can win, and we cannot impose our expectations on it and expect something good to come out of it.

In our scripture, after Christ explains that he is meant to be rejected and die, Peter pulls him aside. Peter, not yet getting what Christ’s ministry is really about, says something many of us find ourselves saying. “Jesus, love your work, but if you talk like this it might scare some people off. Besides, you’re a winner! None of this downer talk. These guys have had a rough week, tell them about how you’re gonna win in the end, not about this crucifixion business.” Jesus responds to this diminishment of his work in an entirely reasonable way. “Get behind me Satan!”

Peter, who was just pages ago named Jesus’s successor in earthly ministry, is now being called Satan. Why? Because he had heard Jesus preach rejection and got nervous. Peter was all about being part of Christ’s messianic community, being set apart as a special early acceptor of the Gospel, but not about living that Gospel out. If it meant being rejected, if it meant bearing the shame of his savior being killed a criminal’s death, if it meant risking life and limb and even worse – reputation – he wanted another sermon to be preached. Peter wanted the Messiah everyone else was waiting for, not the one that was standing in front of him.

We all are guilty of wanting a savior other than the one we have. You may say, “Not me, never!” But trust me that this is something we often do without even thinking. We look at Jesus’s teachings and we go, “That’s too much! He can’t really mean this!” And so, we tweak things a little. Our Matthew Bible Study ran into several teachings of Jesus that made us deeply uncomfortable, some because of cultural differences between us and the first century, but often because Jesus was asking a lot of us.

How do you love the poor to the point you lose some of your own security? How do you forgive others to the point you will sometimes be taken advantage of? How do you live as Christ called us to live at all? And what do you do when people push back against you. When someone is upset at you for feeding the homeless, will you relent? When someone is mad at you for saying that it is wrong the way the poor suffer under this or that law, do you relent to their accusation you’re being too political? What do you do when the life and death of your neighbors is in your hand, in the finger you’re about to press against a voting machine, and you have to deal with the fact not everyone will agree with your choice?

Christ bids all who love him to come and die.[3] Thus goes my paraphrase of Bonhoeffer’s famous “Cost of Discipleship.” He lived that to the end. Rejected by the German Church that had capitulated to Hitler’s hate, he was put to death for his refusal to accept the idea that any person was inferior to another. He believed that God made all people, and all people had to be respected as such. Bonhoeffer rejected the evil of his day, and so was rejected by those who would rather be successful than to do what is right.

Life is hard for someone who is challenging what society expects of us. The person who feeds the hungry and deals with being accused of enabling them. The many unnamed nurses and doctors who helped dying AIDs patients in the days where polite society treated them as sinful threats to the public. Those who feed immigrants fleeing oppression in their homeland rather than cheering their deaths wrapped in razor wire. Those who speak out against injustice, oppression, and evil however they present themselves will always be written off as dissidents.

Christ was one such person. Killed on trumped up charges of insurrection and blasphemy. Peter rejected him on the road long ago when he told him to quiet down about his future death, and even as he stood trial rejected him three times more. Peter was not willing to do the hard work of caring for people even if it meant people accusing him of all manner of evil. He was willing to take up a sword and fight for Jesus, to die a warrior’s death, but it took him many years to be able to put down his weapons and live for Jesus, to die a criminals death as his savior had.

We too can repent, can change, can be shaped into something useful for Christ. This only happens, however, if we are willing to be rejected by those around us. To accept that our material wealth is not actually that important. We have to stop letting people tell us what matters and instead cleave to what scripture tells us matters. The dignity of all people made in the image of God, the work of relieving all the evils of this world, and to begin the work of both by repenting here and now of our contribution to the world’s evils. We have to change, we have to reject the world as it is – because only then will we taste the rejection Christ once knew. The rejection that, contrary to what it would mean in all other circumstances – breathes life, and life abundant.

Let us repent of our desire to be accepted, and take up the mantle of the reject, standing up for them wherever they are found. – Amen.

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[1] Ecclesiastes 4: 9-12

[2] Genesis 2: 18

[3] Bonhoeffer’s translated quote is properly rendered, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

Genesis 9:8-17

Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, “As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh, and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.”

Sermon Text

Across this Lenten season, we are going to be looking at the different ways that we are sanctified. Sometimes this will take the form of actions we perform and sometimes it will reflect natural consequences of a life lived following the example of Christ. The story, across the scriptures and across our Christian life should be of God drawing close to us, and us in turn drawing closer to God. Every story we tell, every experience we have, these are all just reiterations of the same theme.

The first stories in scripture, the one’s which we are covering in our Genesis class, document on one hand the failures of human beings, and on the other the steadfast love of God. Adam and Eve, blessed with a Garden that had every good thing within it – disobeyed God. Their disobedience introduced death into the world, and the first to suffer its sting was their son, Abel. Abel was killed by his brother out of jealousy, and from that murder evil entered the world in a way it never had before. Sin is first mentioned in reference to Cain’s murder, and the Sin he let through his doorway that day infected humanity with a vicious disease.

We are told that from the days of Cain and Abel to the days of Noah, evil increased in the world. Though we are not given many details, the surrounding context suggests that violence grew and grew across the centuries. People had become accustomed to the violence that was practiced outside of Eden, and now the desire of each person was to get whatever they could – however they could. The offenses were so great, that they are described as something that seeped up into Heaven. God could effectively smell human evil coming off of the Earth, and in the most heart breaking line of scripture, we are told that God regretted ever making humanity when he gazed down at the ante-diluvian Earth.

God’s disgust at human evil was not unlimited, however, and we are given the story of Noah that we all know so well. Noah collects two of all animals, except for some which he may have collected fourteen of, and these animals alongside his family enter a boat. For forty days and forty nights, creation was unmade. The waters locked away beneath the Earth in above the sky in Genesis 1, pour out in Gensis 8. The world was once more formless and void, only a small bit of the old world remained, floating in a box made of acacia wood. Slowly riding on the waves, all that remained of God’s creation.

Slowly, the water receded and the boat landed on a mountaintop. The survivors of this catastrophe climbed out and saw the new slate they had been handed. God spoke to Noah while Noah offered a sacrifice and cut a covenant with him. The Covenant established some general rules for humans to live by – the right to hunt and farm, the prohibition to not kill one another, and to never eat the blood of animals. These all dealt with what human beings were to do, however, God’s part of the bargain is what envelopes the Covenant. God swears never to destroy all life on Earth again, and God points to the rainbow as the sign of this Covenant forevermore. The arc of the rainbow is meant to portray a weapon, a bow pointed up at Heaven, ready to shoot off an arrow if God should violate this promise. God has given up mass slaughter, now begins God’s program of redemption for the world.

Many consider the rainbow to only exist after the flood receded and God made this Covenant. I do not agree with that interpretation. Rainbows are, after all, a product of light interacting with water droplets. The curvature of water droplets, and the prismatic nature of their structure, results in a circular rainbow forming. We only ever see half of it because we’re always at ground level – drones and planes, however, can see the whole thing. This picture is one such circular rainbow.

The rainbow was a natural phenomenon, but that did not make it lack a special quality. The moment God reached out to it and said, “See this as my bow, hung up for good, so that I can never use it against you again.” The Rainbow was transformed. It was no longer just the confluence of natural conditions of water and light, it was a sign of God’s covenant. Just like how water in baptism can become God’s grace when we pray over it, or how bread and juice becomes the body of Christ when we gather to eat it together – the rainbow, through faith, becomes a symbol of God’s everlasting love.

We are asked throughout scripture to consecrate ourselves, a fancy word simply meaning to set ourselves aside for better things. The altar table in this sanctuary is just a table – made of wood and glass – but it is consecrated to serve as the place where our sacraments are delivered to us. The altar rail, again, is just word – yet we have consecrated it as a place where we can kneel and offer our petitions to God. Our lives too should be consecrated, set aside to do as God would have us do. To serve one another in love, to give freely to those in need, and to always be willing to find new ways to better exemplify God’s goodness in the world.

We may look at ourselves as nothing special, the accidents of all sorts of events that simply pushed us out into the world with a certain name in a certain place. Even if that were so, and we accepted our lives as some cosmic accident, that need not divest us of a purpose. We are all called to take part in what God has done, to take up a cross and a yoke that is meant for service. We are God’s people, called by our name, to be what God would have us be. We are not mere matter, we are God’s masterpiece, given new meaning still in our acceptance of our call.

So look in your life at the parts that have not yet been set aside for God. Place them in God’s care. Look to the world around you, and see how nature itself testifies to God’s goodness. And whenever the rain stops, and a bow girds the sky, praise God who loves creation. – Amen.

2 Corinthians 4:3-6

And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing clearly the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’s sake. For it is the God who said, “Light will shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.

Sermon Text

Today is Transfiguration Sunday, the day when we celebrate Christ climbing the mountain and showing a select few of his disciples his full, unadulterated, resurrected glory. The exact way this miracle was possible, how it transpired just so, is unknown to us. Most miracles are that way, beyond any possible explanation or belief. When the disciples went up the mountain, they learned something about the character of Christ they did not know when they stood at the base of the mountain. A voice thundered out and told them, “This is my Son; listen to him.”

I love scripture’s depiction of that miracle, and our celebration of it, because it reveals to us that God is a God of revelation and of mystery. Revelation in that God is always pulling back more of the curtain, always shining out more light into the darkness, always teaching us new things. Mystery in that God is infinitely complex, always able to show us a little more, and capable of wonders that our mind simply cannot comprehend. We know about the ones we encounter regularly – how does baptism give us grace just by pouring water on us? How does Communion become the body and blood of Christ? Yet, there are many more miracles – mundane and extraordinary – that baffle wherever they appear.

For a person with faith, when we find ourselves baffled we often find ourselves celebrating. When the tumor has shrunk and no one can explain why, we celebrate. When the job we lost became a job we found, we celebrate. When the person we have prayed for and loved so earnestly for years, finally seems to have a breakthrough in their life, we let out a hallelujah! Yet the methods behind most of this are completely hidden from us. How did God get one thing to run into another, into another to make life happen the way it did?

Some of the most impactful moments in my life have been complete accidents, at least from my own limited perspective. I met Grace just because we happened to be signed up for seminary at the same time, something that only happened because she waited to go to seminary till after she got her first graduate degree. One of my closest friends and I bonded over the fact I anonymously gave her a marker when we both lived in the dorms – we had no idea who the other was until we worked together and she saw the same style of marker sitting on my desk. Simpler than all of these, I remember better than most moments in ministry, the moment I was able to pray for a parishioner who had come in for a cancer screening, just because they were walking through the door of the hospital as I was entering to visit another parishioner.

These were all moments of impossible odds. Even if we write them off as small pools of people interacting with each other across a certain amount of time, they would all be overthrown by just a little detail being different. A car trip taking a little longer than expected, a job assignment being one building over, or a graduate degree taking one semester longer. God makes all things collide in just the way they need to, so that wonders can happen wherever we look. There are even greater wonders, but we can never talk about them all.

The thing about faith is that we often treat our experience with God the same way we treat scripture. We see our own experience as an index that we can pull information out of as needed – we seek to have answers to the world and to its many problems, to every question we are ever asked, rather than treating our faith and our scripture as a living thing we are encountering. I’ve talked before about how I do not like indexes in Bibles that act as Q and A entries. “Want faith? Turn here. Feeling sad? Turn here! Questioning everything in life? Just read Job!” That’s not how we encounter God. That’s not how faith works. Faith has to be more than just a bag we pull excuses out of. It has to be something we live out and lives through us.

I love Transfiguration Sunday because Christ became light for the disciples. They experienced Christ and learned something through that experience. They were not given a new answer to the questions that life presented to them – but they were aware of the truth in a way they had not been before. Truth is something more than an answer, truth is an essential part of existence. I can give answers to just about any question, but they may not be truth. Even if they are correct, they may not reveal the truth in the world.

What does that even mean? Well, I can tell you that I was in my office earlier today, but does that reveal anything essential about life to you? No! Except that I had to do some paperwork ahead of us worshipping in here. If I tell you, however, that I was praying this morning, and that in prayer I felt myself come closer to the Author of life – then suddenly we are entering the world of “Truth.” Truth is not just an accurate statement of things as they are, truth is a claim to the essential nature of knowledge itself. We are claiming, as Christians, that we hold Truth in our hands every time we talk about what God has done in our life.

Our scripture today has Paul reflecting on God’s revelation in general. The Gospel is not known to everyone, and some seem to struggle to accept it all. The most recent survey of American religious attitudes seems to suggest that there is a growing apathy toward faith.[1] People are not against religion, they do not feel rejected by religion, they simply do not care.

There are many reasons for this – people working themselves to death to pay rent and feed themselves don’t have time to devote to something like faith. We remember the stories of children in the coal fields who, when asked if they knew about Jesus, who responded “He must work in another mine.”

One thing that makes a difference, however, is simply to be frank in how we share our faith. I do not think that having answers is overly helpful. I know for me I did not join the faith because I was shown the Romans Road. I was never interested in memorizing all the scriptures I would need to quote if I felt one way or the other. I wanted to see truth, and I wanted that truth shown to me in the people around me. Paul puts it this way, “We do not proclaim ourselves, we proclaim Christ.”

The darkness of this world is not dispelled by us forming the best arguments. Not by having a perfect life that we can flaunt. Instead, it is simply the act of proclaiming God in every aspect of what we do. The word for preaching in the New Testament is “Κηρυγμα,” (Kerygma,) and it means “proclamation.” At the end of the day, preaching is not making an argument, it is not even telling a story, it is a revelatory act. We make Christ known when we speak about who Christ is, when we live as Christ taught us to, when we enter into the world and roll back the darkness.

Paul did not say that the Gospel was veiled to the perishing to say that they were hopeless, or that God only lets some people have faith. Instead, God asks for us to go out and speak life into the world. The first part of 2 Corinthians is focused on how life is overwhelming, yet truth sees us through the troubles. More than that, it asks us to live a life that lets God shine out fully through our actions – not because we are particularly wonderful, but because the God within us is that wonderful.

Here, in the midst of this celebration of God’s light, we commit ourselves to proclaim God’s goodness. I ask that we join together, that we share what God has done in our life, and we let ourselves be unafraid to show God’s light to all we meet. Not in arguments, not as though we are answering questions like a reference book, but simply as light answers the darkness. Go forward, and in love proclaim what God has done. – Amen.

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[1] Gregory Smith, et al. “Religious ‘Nones’ in America: Who They Are and What They Believe.” Available https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2024/01/24/religious-nones-in-america-who-they-are-and-what-they-believe/

Mark 1:29-39

As soon as they left the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. Now Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once. He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.

That evening, at sunset, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed by demons. And the whole city was gathered around the door. And he cured many who were sick with various diseases and cast out many demons, and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.

In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. And Simon and his companions hunted for him. When they found him, they said to him, “Everyone is searching for you.” He answered, “Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also, for that is what I came out to do.” And he went throughout all Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.

Sermon Text

 Ministry is a complicated thing. As we look out in the community around us, we see all kinds of needs that need to be met. People are lonely, people are hungry, people need clothing, and people need to hear the Gospel. There are as many problems in the world as there are people and there is no way that one Church can meet every need that surrounds their building. If we tried, we would quickly find ourselves exhausted, defeated, and ultimately feel completely lost in the midst of the world’s trouble.

We are blessed in Harrison County to have churches that are active in their pursuit of ministry. There are people working together to tackle some of the biggest needs around us – food insecurity, access to health care, clothing, and so much more. You cannot throw a rock without having it land beside some part of God’s people doing the good work of God out in the world. We are blessed to have the Spirit leading all of God’s people toward something greater than just another week spent in just another set of meetings.

This collaboration is undergirded by individual churches that have their own focus and ministry. Some focus on recovery ministry, others on feeding programs, and others on fellowship. I’ve been blessed through going around our connection with an appreciation for just how diverse the work of the Church can be. From people in Wheeling providing lunch to seniors alongside card games and board games, to people down in the Coal Fields bringing hope into a world that’s horizons seem to close in all around them. Those focuses are able to reach out beyond the broad strokes of larger ministries, filling gaps and making the Kingdom fit like a glove into the world it seeks to give new life.

I think that there is a double-edged sword to the way we understand how ministry walks the line between broad goals that meet the needs of lots of people, and smaller ministries that seek to have greater impact for fewer people. On one hand, we are able to understand that too broad of a ministry scope will lead to running in circles and missing out on doing good work in favor of busy work, and so it is necessary to focus on smaller goals and works that have greater impact. Yet, to lift up the other hand, we are fully aware that focusing in on myopic ministries that only help certain people in certain ways runs the risk of us becoming complacent, saying our work is “good enough,” and eventually only doing things for ourselves.

Faith is always this tug of war between extremes, and it should not surprise us that ministry is not any different. The further we reach out, the more stretched thin we become. The more we contract, the more resources we have but the less we are sharing. The point of equilibrium, the ideal spot of impactful action reaching the correct scope of people – that is what ministry is always striving for. Always reaching a little further than our resources would comfortably allow us to, we trust in God’s provision. Always restraining ourselves from zealous burn-out, we trust that God will see God’s work done without us imploding ourselves.

In our scripture for today, Jesus demonstrates the importance of balance. We are told that he enters a town and seeks to stay with Simon’s family. Jesus heals her and she begins tending to them and welcomes them into her house. This may seem rude to our modern sensibilities, coming into a woman’s house and then within an hour of her being made well having her feeding you, but it was a different time. The biggest impact that came from this exchange was not that Jesus had a warm place to sleep and some food to eat, but that the neighbors quickly learned that a healer had come to town. Many of the people in town, struggling with a variety of problems, came to be healed by Jesus, to be saved as only he could save.

The night goes long, we are not told exactly when Jesus was able to go to sleep, but we know that he left early in the morning to rest. He retreated into the mountains and spent the early hours in prayer, in conversation with God, and foundational to both actions – resting. When the disciples finally found him, they told him that there was still plenty to do in town – but Jesus refused to go back down. Instead, he led the disciples to the next stop on their ministry tour, and then to the next, and the next, and the next.

Jesus could have stayed in the town and done an incredible amount of good. People would have traveled miles to come see him, but Jesus was not trying to set up a permanent place of ministry. Jesus was itinerant by design, not just by accident. He went from one place to another, seeking out the people who needed him, and then left when it was time for him to leave. As time went on, he established other ministers among his disciples to go out and revisit towns he had been to – as well as make new connections in new places. Jesus was modeling a ministry that we all could learn from.

In the modern era, when churches are stationary buildings, we cannot be fully itinerant as Jesus was. In the same way, we have far more people to minister to than he did. The average town in Jesus’s day was lucky to have a few hundred people in it – we minister to thousands. Yet, while the building cannot move – we certainly can. There is nothing that should be preventing us from going out to different areas of Clarksburg, to different neighborhoods on our side of the bridge, and doing things out there in the open!

Jesus intentionally never set up ministry so that people had to come to him, he was always on the move. Jesus never set up ministry so that only he was contributing, he made teams to do the work. Jesus had a focus – to proclaim the Gospel and heal the sick. Those things – movement, collaboration, and focus are all things we have to build our ministries off of. May God add to the work we do in this Church, sending us further out, building our teams up to be better, showing us a kind of focus about what the scope of our work includes. Let us pray that God will show us the way to chase our ministry wherever it might lead.