The Water's Edge

by Traci Hubbard

A teacher tells her class of young children that they should bring a symbol of their religion to class the next day, for the purposes of cultural enrichment.

The next day, the teacher begins to go around the room, asking children to show what they brought.

The first little boy says, "I'm Jewish, and this is a menorah! We light it to celebrate Hanukkah."

"Very good!" says the teacher. Then, turning to the next student, "Now how about you?"

The little girl stood up and said, "I'm Muslim, and this is a prayer mat. I kneel down on it, facing Mecca, to pray."

"Wonderful!" said the teacher, "Anyone else?"

A young girl stood up, held out a dish, and declared, "I'm a Protestant, and this is a casserole..."

Each one of us has our own idea and wish around what we want the kingdom of God and church to be like, and a wilderness self-emptying experience is not part of our plan. This morning, we find Jesus wandering like a person in the sixties, footloose, but not fancy free and in need of food and dental floss.  He has been baptized by John and seconds later the Holy Spirit leads him into the wilderness for a 40 Day Spa Treatment full of Starvation, Fatigue, and Temptation Treatments. Then his ministry begins without a map, sleeping bag, or vision and mission statement.

Just imagine your new job beginning with your greatest temptations and HR is watching you 24x7 on camera. Good times. There’s no Friday afternoon beer, wine, and snack cart in the culture of his calling. In fact, he never receives a salary or benefits. There’s no CPP or EI to fall back on during hard times. All he has is what he is wearing, his calling, his inclusive love, and his connection with the Holy.  He is vulnerable with no guarantee of a congregation or assurance that his gifts will perform miracles. In fact, the foxes and birds have more stability than he does.

Gifted, sent, and alone, Jesus must first decide what kind of kingdom he is going to bring to the existing civil and religious kingdoms and the secretive tribal zealots. This is how Divine M&P – The Spirit, welcomes Jesus. “Welcome! And I’ve got your back when all hell breaks loose!” When a person is truly called to ministry, time in a wilderness is the first necessary place to get real, to be emptied, so one may learn that servant leadership is wrapped in humility, not power, because they must step into authority, not dictatorship, and they must be able to create and keep healthy boundaries, even while some do not like them or want them.

When Jesus emerges from his wilderness experience, he emerges, “Filled with the power of the Spirit,” and heads home to Nazareth to speak in a church without an invitation. He reads from Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me… to bring good news to the poor… release to the captives… recovery of sight to the blind.”

The towns folk love his sermon. They love his individual ways of being in the world right up until the moment he reminds them that God’s grace has always had a habit of slipping past the insiders and gate keepers and showing up in unexpected places. Jesus turns their trickle down, upside down, finger pointing belief system to a right-side up system of love and grace. Mary’s baby boy is not doing ministry the way they want him to and in the blink of an eye his radical way of doing ministry sends him from Hero to Zero in seconds. Folks, right off the bat, this story teaches us something important. The Kingdom of God is not built around comfort, control, or familiarity. The Kingdom of God stretches us, disquiets us, and refuses to let us remain as we are.

Jesus lives and speaks from the edges to the edges, not from the center and by the time we reach Luke 5, Jesus isn’t speaking in churches, he has his feet in a lake while fishermen are cleaning their nets filled with plastic water bottles, not fish. Did you know that the term ‘empty nets’ is also a term for frustration, exhaustion, and disappointment?

I picture Jesus’ grinning as the fishermen cuss and lament, and again, without an invitation, Jesus climbs into Peter’s boat. If we close our eyes, I bet we can see Peter’s perspective of Jesus being like a naive Gomer Pyle. Then, wait for it…Jesus tells, not asks, Peter to push out a little from the beach so he can talk with the crowd that was following him. And we don’t want to miss this – while Peter’s mouth is hanging wide open in disbelief that some hippie has not recognized that he is the President of The Old Boys Club, Jesus sits down and makes himself comfortable before he begins to speak. No chancel – stage – lights – or live streaming…just the water’s edge. And for me, there is something very holy about this scene. There is something extremely humble and loving about Jesus – there’s something very different. Jesus teaches from the place where land meets water, where people, culture, and economics are unstable, where balance hasn’t arrived, and where fishermen know that no one can control the wind or the waves.

So, what does he want to say in his debut sermon? He begins by saying, “The Kingdom of God is like that—The kingdom of God is like that” - spoken from the water’s edge, not the center of where people are set in their ways and beliefs. Then audacious Jesus turns to Peter and tells him to sail back into the deep water. It seems to me that Jesus is confident in his calling and how to begin his ministry.

By this time, Peter is already two hours late for his seat in the pub, but he manages to keep his cool, stay polite…still his tone communicates what is really on his mind. “Look, Jesus…Yeshua, however you pronounce your name…the guys and me – all of us are trained and seasoned fishermen, and we have been in the deep all night. We know this lake. We’re tired. Our beers are getting warm. But OKKKAAAYYYYY. FIIIINNNEEEE. If you say so.”

No sooner are the nets let down when they begin to break with a lottery of fish. The boys at the pub are going to lose their minds when they hear this. The miracle is spectacular, out of this world, stunning, and for the first time Peter is speechless. But what comes next is even more stunning. Jesus doesn’t say, “Great job Peter. Wow! Look at that! Can you believe it? What do you think of me now?” Jesus says, “Don’t be afraid. From this moment on, you’ll be catching people.”

Jesus says the Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed—tiny, almost invisible, easy to ignore. Children understand small things matter. The Kingdom of God doesn’t arrive with fireworks. It exists in moments small enough that only those who practice the presence of the Spirit and curious notice.

Adults want the Kingdom of God to be efficient, predictable, and well-organized so nothing surprises them – so nothing asks them to change, transform. This squeezes out room for the Spirit to move and give new life.  Children are fine with messy, interruptions, and joy filled insufficiency like something going wrong in a service with a reader, or candle lighter, or with the minister’s speech impediment.  Jesus says the Kingdom belongs to the poor in spirit, which means those who know they don’t have it all figured out and easily go with the flow and pivot. Children understand this. They trust easily. They forgive quickly. They ask big questions without being embarrassed. And they laugh a whole lot more. Which is probably why Jesus didn’t just talk about children. He put them in the center and said, “Look. This. Right here. The child and those who show up with open minds and hearts like a child, this is the edge where the Spirit has room to move.

I read an article in a Reader’s Digest about a small church that decided to host a community barbecue. Simple menu, burgers, hot dogs, iced tea and an “All are Welcome” sign. But here’s the weird thing, they set up the grill outside the church fence, not inside the parking lot. The Chair of Outreach became upset and immediately asked, “Why would we do that?” The minister replied, “Because most of the people we’re hoping will come would never walk through the gate of our fence, much less the door of our church, even for free food.”

Guess what happened? People wandered over with strollers and dogs. Kids dropped by on their bikes. The wandering group of three teen boys wearing their baseball caps backwards and jeans almost falling off their bums slinked in and then stayed to help clean up. Someone asked for prayer. Space was created for conversations to unfold that never would’ve happened inside the building. One of the elders who had been a critical voice around change said, “That evening, I learned that holding the barbecue outside our fence didn’t mean we, our church, were moving away from God. Our Minister led us to move closer to where God already was.” Jesus teaches from the water’s edge, from the city’s edge, from the mountain’s edge, from the edges of tombs and foreigner packed rooms, and pubs full of people pummeled by legalistic Bible Toters.

So, the Kingdom of God is like a barbecue outside the fence. And as our story in Time for All Ages taught us, it is seat offered without hesitation. It’s a  solution that doesn’t wait for permission. A welcome that comes before understanding. A faith that says, “We’ll figure it out together.” The Kingdom of God is not something we achieve through knowledge and doing or by how long we have known so and so and done things this way.  The Kingdom of God lives within to transform us into LOVE and if we want to draw people to us, we must make room for the Spirit’s ways of being love in this time, in our current culture. And if we’re lucky, we might catch a glimpse of it in a child who hasn’t yet learned to overcomplicate love. May we have eyes to see it. Ears to hear it. And hearts open and light enough to laugh along the way. May we make room for menorah’s, prayer mats, and casseroles. And when visitors walk in here, may they discover the Kingdom of God is like us, right by the water’s edge. May it be so, amen.