Witnesses In Weakness To God's Great Grace & Powerful Love - Sermon for the Seventh Sunday After Pentecost (July 7, 2024)

Scripture Readings: Ezekiel 2:1–5 | Psalm 123 | 2 Corinthians 12:2–10 | Mark 6:1–13

[The Lord] “said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.” (2 Corinthians 12:9).
 
Today we gather to worship the Living God as the stewards of the enduring witness of St. Luke’s Church, a place of worship which has stood vigil in this community, pointing our parishioners and neighbours to the Gospel of Jesus Christ for nearly 200 years. The gravestones around us serve to remind us of the many lives of those who have faithfully served Christ Jesus in this community, and who have now gone before us into glory.

​Today, we give thanks to God for their lives, and their labours… laying many of the foundations on which we have continued to build today. And whether we here can remember all of their stories in detail or not… we rejoice that they are all remembered by God, and trust that they now find their rest in His loving arms. Their time and presence here in this Parish matters. These brothers and sisters in Christ were all a part of God’s work in this part of God’s world… helping those around them live out their faith, grow in God’s love, and share the hope of the Gospel.

And their presence here also reminds us that our presence here matters too. That we now serve as witnesses to God’s work here in Gondola Point… a much needed service, especially as fewer and fewer of our neighbours seem to be familiar with the Good News of Jesus: with God’s saving love, the forgiveness of sins, and the New Life offered to all in His holy name.
 
Faced with this high calling, it might be easy for us to get a little discouraged at times: to feel the great weight of the legacy that we’ve been entrusted with, while also not necessarily knowing how best to share the Good News of God’s New Life with those around us.
 
Thankfully, our Scripture readings this morning have some encouragement to offer us: important reminders of the strange and wonderful ways the Living God works through His faithful people, helping them share in and point others to His power at work even in our weaknesses.
 
In our first reading from the book of the prophet Ezekiel, we heard a clearly less than positive message from Yahweh: God was sending Ezekiel to share His message with a stubborn and hard-hearted people, and there was no guarantee at all that they would listen to him.
 
And yet, despite the discouragement that he might have felt that his fellow Judaeans in exile in Babylon would likely not heed God’s word, Ezekiel could be confident that the Lord would be at work in and through him in ways that God alone could truly foresee.
 
And sure enough, though his contemporaries paid little heed to his faithful prophetic service, God did work in and through Ezekiel in powerful and unexpected ways. For example: Ezekiel probably had no clue that his words would be read by a bunch of New Brunswickers in Gondola Point thousands of years later, as we seek to live God’s way today! You and I are part of his story… a part of a living community that reaches all the way back to those ancient times… whose members have passed down the faith, one generation to the next… one people group and culture to the next… sharing the Good News through their faithful words and deeds, despite all sorts of hardships, missteps, misunderstandings, rejections, and even persecutions.

And as our Gospel reading reminds us, Christ Jesus our Lord Himself faced fierce rejection by His own people… first in Nazareth, and then ultimately at the cross. But the Good News is that God transformed that rejection into God’s gracious gift of reconciling love through the atoning death and resurrection of Jesus Christ again from the dead. What seemed like utter defeat and failure became the ultimate victory of God’s great love. A love that we have tasted, and share in today, and are called to share with those around us.
 
After the episode in Nazareth, Christ Jesus sent out His first disciples to share the Good News of His Kingdom with their world… inviting one household, one neighbourhood, one community after another to receive it.
 
And Christ continues to do so today through His disciples gathered in His name, even here in Gondola Point. We too are a part of this same story: called to share his Good News through the lives that we lead, and through the love that we share. And this is true even when we feel weak and uncertain of our own abilities.

In our second reading, we are reminded of St. Paul the Apostle’s faithful service, carried out despite the great difficulties that he faced… including a persistent problem he referred to as a thorn in the flesh and “a messenger of Satan”. He pleaded repeatedly for the Lord to remove this chronic problem, whatever it may have been, but instead the Lord assured Paul that His divine grace would be enough to see Paul through… that God’s power is made clear in the weakness of His servants.
 
2 Corinthians 12:7-10, “Therefore, to keep me from being too elated, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated [That is, too puffed up or exalted]. Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.”
 
Now the point St. Paul is making is not that we should go out of our way to make ourselves weak, or to seek out suffering. But rather, to see that our weaknesses, troubles, and struggles pose no barrier at all to God’s Kingdom work, and can actually serve to reveal the power of God’s great love in ways we could never have imagined or planned. We are called to place our trust in Christ’s power, and in God’s grace, not in our strengths… or in what we see as stable circumstances. With God we are strong even when we are weak… for His power and love are at work in us.
 
So many of our sisters and brothers in Christ who have gone on before us have had to face times of great uncertainty, struggles, and weaknesses, and yet God’s grace was enough for them, and carried them through to the end.
 
And so, like St. Paul, and these our brothers and sisters, whose bodies lie buried here, and who now are at rest in the arms of the Risen Lord, waiting until His coming again, let us in our time be faithful witnesses to Jesus Christ in every circumstance that we face, trusting that His grace is enough to see us through, and that He will keep on working in and through us to share the power of His saving love with Gondola Point and our world. Amen.