Sermon for the 3rd Sunday after the Epiphany, January 25, 2026: Matthew 4:12-23. Not preached due to cancellation of service due to weather.
While I was at St. Thomas’, Bath, I mostly taught Sunday School. I used
a method of teaching that I had been exposed to in years past called “Godly
Play.”
The method is quite
simple. Tell a biblical story (and I mean tell it, not read it) using props and
ask children to wonder about it. When
you came to the end of the story, you ask a series of questions, that all begin
with two words “I wonder . . .”
For example, in this
story of Jesus calling disciples, you might ask, “I wonder what it was about
these four men that inspired Jesus to call them?” They are always open-ended questions. The children would respond with whatever came
to mind. And then they would further
respond with some craft or drawing or writing, however they felt led.
The point is, “I wonder
…” was the heart of that method.
Wondering about God, wondering about Jesus, wondering about the Holy
Spirit, wondering about our own lives.”
It tell you this because
I think this is another important way in which we are called to be a light to
the world. I spoke about unconditional
love two Sundays ago, and kindness last Sunday.
Today it is wonder.
We are people who before
the mystery of life, before the mystery of God, stand in wonder. Now it’s important to understand that wonder,
if it is to have anything to do with God, and with being a light, is an experience.
In Godly Play the wonder
questions were ways to coax children into the experience of the disciples, or
into the experience of any character in the Bible.
In an essay about the
future of the church, my teacher Elizabeth Johnson (who I quoted last week
also), says
At the heart of it all, what does Christianity
proclaim? It announces the good news
that the reality of God surrounds us with forgiving, abounding kindness in the
midst of our darkness, injustice, sin, and death. All the doctrines and rituals
aim to unpack this basic wonder.
After this sermon we
will recite the Nicene Creed as we do every Sunday. The trouble with the Creed is that it seems
to be an intellectual exercise. It seems as if we are saying, “There are the
things you have to believe in order to be a good Christian.”
But what if that is not
what the Creed is about at all. The clue
of a different way of understanding the creed is to be found in the word
“creed” itself. “Creed,” comes from the
Latin word credo, the first word of the creed in Latin. The Latin word credo Comes from the
Latin word cardia, “heart.” Credo
literally means to set one’s heart on something.
This means that the
Creed should never be divorced from the experiences that are behind it. When in the creed we say, for instance, that
Jesus Christ is “God from God, Light from Light,” we say that because we
experience Jesus as God and as Light.
And that experience has
more to do with wondering than anything else.
It is our gift to the
world that we learn to stand before the world in wonder. It means that we not only respect and stand
in wonder before the mystery of God, we respect and stand in wonder before the
mystery of life itself.
This is the way of
Jesus. If you read the sermon on the
mount, chapters five through seven of Matthew’s Gospel, you will hear Jesus
pushing in this direction. It is why he
says at the beginning of chapter seven, “Do not judge, so that you may not be
judged.”
He’s talking about a
fundamental stance toward the world. You
can stand before life and be driven by judgment or you can stand before the
world and be driven by wonder.
Do we still have to make
choices in life that amount to judgment? Yes, of course, and Jesus certainly
knew that. But judgment with wonder as
its underlying principal is completely different from just straight-up judgment,
whose underlying principal is whatever prejudices we carry around.
We are told that Jesus
went about proclaiming, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” The kingdom of heaven that has come near is
the kingdom of wonder, wonder that if truly engaged will cause us to repent of
our self-centeredness, repent of our tendency to judge between ourselves and
others, allowing ourselves to act not with kindness but with indifference,
suspicion, and even hatred.
The kingdom of heaven is
the kingdom of wonder. It is the kingdom of kindness. It is the kingdom of
unconditional love. It is, as we will
sing in a few minutes, the kingdom of peace.
Embracing and
experiencing these things is what makes us followers of Jesus, what makes us a
light to the world around us.
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