Sermon for the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity
“Friend, go up higher”
It is one of those wonderful biblical phrases that can act like a maxim, an ordering principle, for how we proceed with our lives. Here Jesus wants the very best for us and he expects the very best from us. And Paul also shows what this means in his strong exhortation to us to “walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called.” Against the easy complacency and acceptance of mediocrity in our world and day stands this challenging statement; “Friend, go up higher”. Even more there is the whole matter of our awareness and acceptance that we have a God given vocation.
We may not like to be challenged. We may not like the implications of such a call. It means recognizing that things are not altogether excellent, right or good with us in our lives. We may prefer instead to expect God to take us as we are, “to bless our mess,” as it were, and to leave us where we are and to make no demands of us. But that is not the Christian religion. Neither true mercy nor genuine charity. It is fundamentally false. It denies the transforming power of God’s grace in human lives.
If we are hostile and resentful about this teaching, then we are exactly like those before whom Jesus speaks and acts. There was a healing done on the Sabbath under the watchful eyes of hostility. There was a parable spoken in the face of resentful silence; a parable told to counter our arrogance and our hypocrisy, a parable told to challenge us. Jesus speaks and acts. He teaches. At issue, then and now, is whether we will be teachable. Only so can we ever hope to “walk worthy of the vocation wherewith [we] are called”.
