The Reading: Colossians 1: 9-11
Therefore, since the day we heard about you, we’ve been praying for you unceasingly and asking that you attain the full knowledge of God’s will, in perfect wisdom and spiritual understanding. Then you’ll lead a life worthy and pleasing to our God in every way. You’ll multiply good works of every sort and grow in the knowledge of God. And by the might of God’s glory you’ll be endowed with the strength needed to stand fast and endure joyfully whatever may happen.
The Gospel: Matthew 14: 34-36
After making the crossing, they landed at Gennesaret. When the people of that place had knowledge of Jesus, they sent word to the surrounding villages. They brought to Jesus all those who were sick, who begged him to let them just touch the hem of his cloak, and all who touched it were healed.
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Teach us, Good Lord, of how to walk in Your ways. Give us the courage to seek Your will for our lives. May all that I say and all that we think on bring You glory now and forever. Amen
Today we continue our Winter Walk in the Spirit. I hope by now, that you have begun to identify some patterns for your own spiritual growth. There are two main reasons that I like to preach sermon series. One is that God’s truths are so abundant that it is difficult to adequately address most of them in one 12 or 15-minute sermon. And since I don’t advocate returning to the 19th Century tradition of 2-hour or more sermons, it makes sense to continue from one week to another. Secondly, I believe that the Spirit uses the time in between the sermons to raise questions in our hearts, if we will listen. I hope that many of you take the time to ponder or discuss with another the insights that you gain along the way.
Our story today about Jesus is a profound one and, yet, it is so small that many fail to give it much notice. These three small verses record what happened after Jesus had performed some pretty memorable miracles. He had already fed the thousands with just a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish. He had already scared the disciples to death by walking on the water across the Sea of Galilee in the middle of a storm. He had already stilled the storm and His disciples had recognized Him as the Son of God. So after all these marvelous, powerful works, it would be easy to miss completely the significance of these few verses.
It is, in itself, a humble story compared to the ones who come before, almost like a bridge in a song that mostly serves no purpose other than to get you from one verse to the next. But, this story has much to tell. I like this story—it gives me hope and something interesting to ponder about my own life. When Jesus and the disciples crossed over into Gennesaret, something very amazing happened. People knew who He was and seemingly what He was. No huge crowds gathered to hear Jesus speak, though the crowds did come. They came for healing. They came to stand next to this man who merely stood or walked among them and allowed people to touch the hem of His garment.
Gennesaret was an interesting little piece of land. It lay along the northwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee, just a little south of Capernaum, which is where Jesus did so much of His earthly ministry. Gennesaret was only 3 ½ miles long and in some places only 2 miles wide. But it was great farming country—its name means “Garden of Riches”. It was a beautiful, but fairly ignored place filled with humble farmers. No rich rulers or learned theologians here, just farmers who cared enough about their neighbors to run tell them of the special Man who had come into their village.
All that it took was for people to know who He was. Our scripture says, “when the people of that place had knowledge of Jesus, they sent word to the surrounding villages”. And the crowds flocked to him for healing and they were healed by touching the hem of His garment. In other words, they were healed because they recognized in their hearts and spirits that He, by His mere presence was able to restore them to health and wholeness.
Is this not the essence of spiritual knowledge? Knowing not only Who Jesus is, but what He can do merely by being present. And growing in spiritual knowledge means that, we like Jesus, can become healing agents in others’ lives merely by being present to them. Ultimately, this is what it means to walk in the Spirit, and to be used by God to heal others. But wait, my mind cried, “surely there is more, perhaps knowing the right words to say, having worked out ahead of time how I’m going to invite this person to church, having all the psychological and emotional insight to say just the perfect thing to this person who is hurting—surely there is something that I must do, or learn to do.” Following the example of Jesus, in this passage, we are confronted with the sometimes hard to hear fact, that there is nothing we must do, we must just be.
And how to describe this be-ing? We are trained to think and reason from a young age. How many of us have heard as children or said to our own children, “now, do you understand this or that?” This does not serve us well in our spiritual lives. This need for reason and explanation stops our spiritual pilgrimage cold as we claim a need to understand and then experience faith rather than experience faith which leads to understanding. We struggle to appreciate the mystery of the sacred journey. The people who came running to Jesus to stand near him, to touch him, to be healed by him believed because of what they had heard, not because they understood how or why Jesus healed, but, simply, because they believed.
Paul, in our passage, which is really a prayer, speaks eloquently to this: “We’ve been praying for you unceasingly and asking that you attain the full knowledge of God’s will, in perfect wisdom and spiritual understanding.” Paul has been praying to God, that the Colossians will be filled with the knowledge of God’s will. Paul is asking God to do this—the point is clear—we cannot do this for ourselves, God must grant us this blessing of knowledge and spiritual understanding. Sometimes, I think we read Paul’s letters and believe that they are all prescriptions for what our lives should look like. We miss the very real truth that Paul is praying for the churches and asking God to do for the people what they cannot do for themselves. That’s right, we as people can seek God, but only God can fill us with perfect wisdom and spiritual understanding.
It’s a very practical and useful prayer when you think about it this way, and we must not miss the point that Paul is asking God for us to become filled with the knowledge of God’s will. Now as human beings, we often think about God’s will, but, quite frankly, it happens most often when we honestly don’t know what else to do. And so we turn to God—where to work, when to retire, where to volunteer, where to give our money or time. And those are all good reasons to seek God’s will. One pastor I know suggests that those prayers often sound like this, “O Lord, show me your will so I can carefully consider it to see if it fits into my plans.” Ah, honesty, hurts like you know what sometimes, but opens our hearts to something more.
So let’s return to Paul, and here is where it becomes connected with our brief story of Jesus’ ministry in Gennesaret. Paul is talking about a level of knowledge where we are completely filled to overflowing with the knowledge of God’s will. Is it not possible that Jesus was able to heal scores of people merely by allowing them to touch the hem of His robe, because He was filled to overflowing with God’s perfect wisdom and spiritual understanding—that God, the Creator, would continue creating in these people’s lives and by so doing, heal and make whole—that wholeness is God’s will for all creation—that it is good, and pure, and complete.
Jesus, in touch with God, as no other, did not have to ‘figure it out’. He stood and quietly let God do what God does. When we can wrap our hearts and heads around this, it comes as a great relief in ministry and in life itself. But here is where many of us get stuck. We think of doing God’s will as something akin to diagramming sentences or reciting the periodic chart of the elements or memorizing mathematical formulas. And this is where we fail to open our hearts. When we wholly trust God to have at the core of the Divine Heart our best interest, hearing the will of God for our lives becomes a sacred journey that grows more vivid and exciting with each turn. God’s will for us, in itself, is our passion for life. Our passion—what we long to do more than any other thing, becomes one with God’s will for our lives. When we open our hearts to the full knowledge of God, we are brought alive—alive to be all that we are created to be. That may well look different for each and every one of us here and well it should. Think of the overwhelming joy and celebration that we are experiencing as this church becomes the place where anyone who seeks will experience the full knowledge of God. Freed from the world’s expectations of us and propelled forward by the Divine Mystery, we learn that by opening our lives to the overflowing will of God, we will be used, as Jesus was used, to bring wholeness and healing to the world. Amen and amen.
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