Follow this Foolishness, Proclaim this Power

Third Sunday after the Epiphany, Year A
Sermon for January 25, 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, Epiphany. It is very, very good to be here with you this morning. It has been two weeks since I last preached, but my last week has felt like a month; I spent 24 hours in Chicago with the family, then I came back to the office, then I went via Grand Rapids and O’Hare to Houston, Texas, for a couple of days, then all the way back here yesterday, getting in last night. We weren’t sure if travel yesterday would be impacted by this winter storm, but it was far more difficult trying to get out of Michigan than it was trying to get back in. There’s probably a joke there to make, but I won’t make it.

I left town for my annual spiritual retreat, my first as your rector, but one I’m hoping to make each January during my ministry. This should not surprise you, but it is important for your priest to have a strong relationship with God, a strong foundation from which to teach and to minister. You might liken it, these days, to an army medic on the battlefield; I cannot be bleeding out myself while trying to tend to any wounds. Given all that has happened in the last year, the last 370 days or so actually, given what happened yet again yesterday in Minnesota, it has been difficult for all of us not to bleed. The next year does not promise to be any easier, though there are signs of hope around, if you can find them.

One sign of hope for me at least came yesterday during my layover at O’Hare. Many of you know this, but when I am out and about, especially when I feel like I am working or that I need a reminder of my chosen vocation, I wear my clericals, my black shirt, my priestly collar. I wore them all week in Houston, in museums and parks and while eating fajitas and barbecue, and I wore them while traveling through these airports. I personally lean toward the Catholic style tab-collar, rather than the Anglican round, band collar, that goes all the way around, I think Jim and Jeff like those… mainly for convenience sake, if I’m honest, but also for relatability. People recognize this look, and they identify me in connection with the Church. That is not always a good connection, I realize, but in times like these, you might be surprised. As a friend put it yesterday, “people are desperate for moral leadership” now. It’s hard to find it in anyone elected or in the news these days.

Anyway, I have at least a handful of good collar-related stories to tell from my three-day trip, but yesterday, after hearing the news about Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old nurse who was executed in the street yesterday by federal agents, I got off my plane at O’Hare and had a quick walk down Terminal C to get to my flight to Grand Rapids. On the walk, I heard someone say, “Excuse me, sir, minister,” and I turned to find a man sitting down with his laptop open. Muhammad was wearing a “Free Palestine” shirt, with a Keffiyeh scarf laid across his shoulders. He started by asking if I was “a nun, or you know, Christian,” and I said, “Yes, I’m a priest.” He asked why he had seen so many people with collars at the airport that day, if there was a church conference in town, and I told him I wasn’t sure, but it was possible they were heading to Minneapolis.

Clergy from across traditions have been called by our colleagues and leaders to travel to Minnesota as “reinforcements.” There was a big gathering there on Friday, and more are on their way. That, of course, led to a brief conversation with Muhammad, one about Gaza and the West Bank, about the similarities he now saw between Israel and America, how, as he put it, “It seems your chickens are coming home to roost.” I shared with him, as you might expect, that clergy and Christians everywhere are called to love, to nonviolence, to Martin Luther King Jr.’s example that I hear Pastor Bob preached about last week, and that there was more power in love than in anything else, anything any government could put out there, that maybe the clergy presence at the protests would remind people of Christ’s love, of kindness, of loving your neighbor, that I hoped protestors would not give up on love. He seemed doubtful, skeptical, as I sometimes am too, but he kindly and warmly thanked me for the conversation, and then he thanked me for my courage. We both wished each other well, and to stay warm, and I left to board my plane home to Michigan.

This morning’s gospel text is the continuing story of Jesus’s ministry. We have left the three big Epiphany stories of the Magi, the baptism in the Jordan, and the wedding at Cana (which Matthew skips), we have left those behind; we are now into the business of calling disciples, of proclaiming the good news, of preaching repentance, of curing diseases and sicknesses among the people. Our lectionary year gives us only a few weeks between Epiphany and Lent to talk about Jesus’s life and teachings; much of that comes during our season after Pentecost, Ordinary Time, all summer long, so in these weeks, we hit some highlights. Calling Peter and Andrew, James and John to be disciples, this is one of those highlights.

Andrew has been given the title “Protokletos” by the Byzantine Church, meaning the first called; James and John earned lofty positions in Jesus’s group, he called them “Sons of Thunder” for their fiery personalities. Andrew’s brother Simon was renamed completely by Jesus himself, who called him Peter, or Cephas, which means “rock” in Aramaic, the rock on which Jesus would build his church, the foundation. There is plenty to preach on there, about how firm a foundation Peter would be, how the man who constantly got in Jesus’s way, who never seemed to get it, who denied Jesus three times at his crucifixion, how this imperfect, flawed man, like all of us, how he could become the foundation. 

But I want to focus this morning on the calling of these disciples. I focused this week on my own call to be a priest, and I heard an ordination sermon on Friday night by a Bishop from Malawi that reminded us that we are all called, that God should sizzle on our lips like good Texas brisket. But these disciples were called to leave everything behind and follow Jesus, and Matthew writes it succinctly: “Immediately, they left their nets and followed him.” “Immediately, they left the boat and their father and followed him.”

Bluntly, this sort of following is irresponsible in today’s world. I’m not asking anyone this morning to leave their jobs or their mortgages or their spouses or responsibilities to go join a monastery or a nunnery, though a few of you have tried that for a time. We are not all called this morning to follow Jesus in the same way, though I bet if Jesus walked through that door back there and said, “Follow me,” many of us would consider it.

But we are still called to follow him. Here at Epiphany, we much prefer the language of invitation, and I think rightly so: we are all invited into this life of following Christ, into living in this way of love. So, what does that look like? What does following Jesus like the disciples did, what does that look like in 2026 America? Friends, let me introduce you to our annual report. I’m only half-kidding, we are not at the Annual Meeting part of our day just yet, but our 2025 Annual Report is a 34-page document that anyone can pick up and read, full of some very good examples of what it is to be the church, what it is to follow Jesus, how we have done so in the last year. Many of you probably didn’t even fully realize that this is what it means to follow Jesus, because so many of you do this so naturally, so well: we care for each other, we love without reservation, we welcome without exception, we look for ways to impact the world around us, to help those in need.

We love as God loves us, we love as Jesus loves. That is what it is to follow Jesus.

But this love, it can feel like foolishness to anyone who sees those with power and money and weapons dominating those without. For Muhammad yesterday at O’Hare, his doubts and skepticism were completely understandable, maybe even justified, when I talked about love being the answer, when I said love was powerful, when I said the clergy and all Christians who were there on the ground in Minnesota would strive to be examples of Christ’s love. “Sure, priest, that sounds nice,” I’m sure he thought. Maybe some here think the same on occasion, and I wouldn’t blame you. “Maybe a little violence against evildoers wouldn’t hurt too much. Just a little?” But in our second reading this morning, Paul writes this to the Corinthians, “The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” Love without end, not any violence, dying for others instead of killing for them, not power with weapons raised but power with love and arms open wide, this may all seem like foolishness, but this is the very power of God.

Friends, this morning, we are to follow Jesus in this foolishness, in this love. We are to do it in the ways we’ll discuss at our annual meeting, in all the ways we do it here at Epiphany, and we are to dream together of new ways to follow Jesus in the years to come, in response to the many needs of the world around us, the world in which we live. We are to proclaim the power of God, as Jesus did, with our very lives. And, we are to invite others into this love, not be ashamed of it, not be quiet about it. We are all invited, not just your clergy and staff and ministry leaders, but all of us, to invite others into the love of Jesus, to proclaim the good news of the kingdom alongside Andrew and Peter and James and John. We experience the unending and unlimited love of Jesus here at Epiphany all the time, and it would be silly and selfish of us not to share it.

May we all confidently, courageously, follow the foolishness of Jesus and proclaim his love, nothing less, because to those of us who know it, we realize it is the power of God and the hope of the world.

Amen.