Come, Follow, Be Known by Love

The Second Sunday after Pentecost, Year A
Sermon for June 7, 2026

My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.

Good morning, Church of the Epiphany. Welcome to the season after Pentecost, ordinary time. It is officially summer break now for our kids, I think for most schools in the area. I love to see South Haven filling with people, no matter where they live. I hope you do too.

This morning, we have a few different stories, at least three, in our lectionary texts, in the Old and New Testaments. We have a quick story about Abraham, known then as Abram, the first real father of the Old Testament. From Abraham, we get Isaac and Jacob and all the people of Israel. He’s kind of a big deal in the Jewish faith, and thus also in our own. We also have a very brief story about Matthew, the author of the first book of the New Testament, a tax collector. I think it’s fair to call him a minor character in the story of the gospels – no disrespect intended, Matthew – but his name doesn’t come up very often. And then we have the third story, one of Jesus healing a woman with hemorrhages and then raising another girl from the dead. The last story is the most interesting, to be sure, two miraculous healings, one passive, one active, but I’m going to put it aside for a little bit to talk about the men’s stories first, focusing on Abraham and Matthew instead of the two women. (Cue the groaning.) Don’t worry folks, I promise to come back to them.

I read these stories early in the week, as I do, and there were two words that formed the basis of my entire week as a result. You know this is how life works, right? When you spend time with something over and over, it becomes a part of you, it seeps into your bones. Good priests spend time with the scripture, and I’m trying my best there. As another example, Lily spends time with her violin; I mentioned to her this weekend, when she was sad she couldn’t go to orchestra class every day this summer, that she needs to find ways to keep her daily practice time in June and July. My trainer at our wellness center says the same thing: regular repetition helps change you, right? You all know this. 

So, as I read this text this week, two words kept popping up, two words that Jesus says to Matthew, the only two words directed his way in the entirety of the Bible, two words recorded in the three synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Those two words, as you know, are “Follow me.” In all three of our gospel accounts, his response is the same: Matthew got up and followed him. Luke adds that he left everything behind to do so.

Abraham experiences a similar story. Genesis 12 is the first time we really meet Abram, as he’s known then; he is mentioned briefly at the end of Genesis 11, the end of a genealogy tracing his roots back to Noah. But here we meet him, and then: he’s the main human character of the next 13 chapters of holy scripture. Today, he serves as a pillar for three major world religions, literally billions of people. Abram is the son of Terah, born in the land of Ur of the Chaldeans, what we know today as Iraq. At the point we meet him in Genesis 12, he is already 75 years old, married to Sarai, and caring for his nephew Lot. We don’t need to dive into all of his story today, he’ll be with us for a few weeks, but this part matters today: God tells him to go, and Abram goes. “Go from your country and (all you’re familiar with) to the land I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you… in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” Now, that is not a small promise, and we’re not told how the Lord said this to Abram, but we read that it is convincing enough that he goes “as the Lord had told him,” and he puts up his tent and builds an altar to the Lord in what we know as Palestine and Israel today.

Abram hears God’s voice, telling him to go, and he goes. Matthew sees Jesus and hears him say, “Follow me,” and he follows. These two men likely had plans and lives of their own, expectations, jobs, yet they somehow decide to leave everything behind to follow.

This might be an easy place to land the sermon, right? God says go, so, go. Jesus says follow, so, follow. But we do not live in an easy world, do we? Without a burning bush or a pillar of fire from heaven, without a prophet in the wilderness or a resurrected Jesus at our side, without tongues of fire above our heads or violent winds inside our rooms, how do we know when we’re hearing from God today? In 2026? How do we know what God is asking of us? How do we know when, as we sang last week, as these two did in the lectionary this week, how do we know when to “trust and obey”? Now the plane isn’t so easy to land, is it? Now we have a much bigger issue. How do we know when it’s God speaking to us or something else, how do we know who to trust? Who is speaking for God, who is in line with Christ, who is worthy of following? How do we know?

I’ll admit this is difficult even for me, someone who is genuinely in scripture and prayer each day, wearing crosses around my neck, and doing my best to represent you, represent the church in our community. See, it’s difficult because it’s easy for me to find those who confirm my already-held beliefs and then assume they are the ones speaking for God, or for justice, or for peace, because I already agree with them, right? I easily conflate those with opinions like mine with those who must be speaking for God. “I’ll walk that road,” I think, “because that looks like God’s road,” even when really, it looks most like my own.

So, how do we know? How do we determine which road to walk, which way to follow, which decision to make? How do we know what is even Christian, anyway? Let me tell a brief story. In 1966, a priest serving on the South Side of Chicago, Father Peter Scholtes, was doing good work. The young people in his parish were serving the poor, were standing up for civil rights and equality in a very difficult time, not terribly unlike our own some sixty years later. Fr. Peter was charged with finding music for an ecumenical gathering, and he could not find a suitable hymn, so he wrote his own. It begins like this:

“We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord. We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord. And we pray that all unity may one day be restored. And they'll know we are Christians by our love, by our love. They will know we are Christians by our love.”

The two verses that follow begin with these lines:

“We will work with each other, we will work side by side. And we'll guard each one's dignity and save each one's pride… We will walk with each other, we will walk hand in hand. And together we'll spread the news that God is in our land. And they will know we are Christians by our love.”

As Bishop Michael Curry famously said, "If it's not about love, it's not about God." Friends, we do know what road to walk, we know what leader to follow. We know what it is to be truly Christian, even if there are so many voices saying something else.

In the remainder of our gospel story this morning, the portion about the two healed women that I promised I’d return to, we see Jesus pulled in two directions, leaving to save a dead girl, touched by an unclean woman. Jesus, of course, heals them both, one by her faith, the other, in the midst of derisive laughter.

This, friends, this Jesus is the one we are to follow. This is the incarnation of our one true God.

We see what God is like throughout the scripture, throughout the gospels, as Jesus eats with tax collectors and sinners, as Jesus is friends with people no matter their station or socioeconomic class. We see Jesus healing and associating with all those who come to him. We see Jesus breaking down barriers, caring for those whom society deems unworthy, disrupting the social norms, working outside of the systems of power, giving radical teaching about who is welcome and who is loved. And of course, we see Jesus loving, all throughout his life and then at the end, laying down his life as the ultimate sacrifice, suffering, dying, and rising again.

Friends, this morning, I know it can be difficult to follow, to lay down everything else, to follow God in our lives today, in our small decisions, in our big ones. We may not know how to follow, we may not know when to follow, we may not want to follow. But we do have an example to follow, an example of our loving God incarnate on this earth. And, that very example is calling out to us, begging us to follow him for the sake of the world around us, if only we would choose to spend the time being shaped by his example. If we actually take that time to be shaped, to respond to his call, to follow each week, each day, in the big choices and in the small ones, then we will find ourselves living into the words of Father Peter’s song, “They will know we are Christians by our love.”

Friends, may we remember the courage of Abram and Matthew who heard the call and followed, may we be shaped into the image of God we were born to bear; may we follow Jesus into a life marked by love.

Amen.