Today is a rare occasion. I’ve been ordained for just under twelve years…and I have never preached on this lectionary day. Sometimes it’s because Easter has been late enough that it gets skipped. Three years ago, I was at synod assembly. It’s a little exciting when this happens—almost like I have a completely blank slate with no past-sermon baggage creeping in on the edges.

So, as I was going through the readings, I noticed that there is a theme that comes up the Gospel account. There are really four distinct encounters, beginning with a call story. This is pretty appropriate, as I pointed out last week that the next two months really invite us to think about discipleship in the Gospel readings featured.

I have not gone through all four Gospels to check it out, but I think that the disciple Matthew’s call story may be the shortest one we get. If not, it’s definitely tied for the shortest. Jesus is walking by, sees him sitting at the tax collecting station, and simply says, “Follow me.”

One statement. One invitation. And Matthew gets up, leaves what he has behind, and follows Jesus.

This is immediately followed by Jesus eating dinner with tax collectors and sinners and Pharisees questioning his actions. How does Jesus respond? “I have not come to call the righteous but the sinners.”

Suddenly another religious leader shows up and begs Jesus to come and raise his daughter. While his is on his way, a woman who has been bleeding for twelve years touches his cloak and Jesus declares that her faith has made her well, before finishing his walk and proclaiming that the daughter is not dead, but sleeping.

Four little vignettes crammed into thirteen verses. And three of them make a similar point.

Matthew the tax collector turned disciple. Jesus coming for the sinners, not the righteous. The woman, made unclean by her bleeding, coming to Jesus anyway.

These stories make one point plain: We don’t need to be perfect. We don’t need to meet some invisible or impossible to achieve standard to get to Jesus. Our discipleship, our choosing to follow Jesus, is not contingent on us already having it all figured out.

What does that mean for us? We are encouraged to follow Jesus without having it all figured out, living lives of discipleship as we bump and struggle along, doing our best to seek God’s will for us and the world around us. We don’t need to wait until we feel good enough, ready enough, Christian enough, holy enough, to embrace our own discipleship.

And we are asked to guard ourselves against two very common pitfalls.

The first is letting perfection be the enemy of the good. Getting so caught up in whether or not something is done in the exact right way or the exact way we would do it, that we ignore the fact that it got done in the first place.

A silly example of this probably happens in your home, either now or as you were growing up. Tell me if this sounds familiar: someone else offers to do a chore that you normally do, like loading the dishwasher. You look at the loaded dishwasher, and it looks nothing like how you would load it. They loaded it wrong. …and yet…the dishes still got clean.

When we try something new, when we are learning and growing, we will make mistakes. We will do things incorrectly, imperfectly. But just as we would not tell a Kindergartener that they aren’t allowed to write anymore because they drew the letter “B” backwards, God does not tell us to disengage from ministry when we get mixed up.

Discipleship is not about flipping a switch and all of a sudden being a “perfect Christian,” whatever that means. It’s about seeking out God, striving to follow Jesus, attempting to live in a way that ushers in the reign of God. Doing our best, every day, to do what God calls us to do: feed people, seek justice, care for the earth, provide for others and love our neighbor.

Which leads the other pitfall: can we even picture a world in which all this happens? Can we envision where God is leading us without knowing exactly how we’ll get there? In other words, it’s easy to get stuck in the current reality when we can’t see the way forward. But if we believe that God makes all things new, if we believe that the reign of God will be justice and peace and without hunger and need, can we live into that vision, start working towards it, when we don’t have a roadmap for how to get there.

The obstacles are huge. There are systemic issues of injustice. Cultural issues of prejudice and conflict. Environmental issues that stem from our human actions and are causing real harm here and now. Our own individual and corporate sinfulness that keeps us acting in our own self-interest instead of focusing on our communal identity.

But if we have the vision, that gives us a place to start. It gives us hope to sustain us. It gives us something to hold on to.

A colleague of mine likes to say, “Provision follows vision.” In her ministry, she has seen, time and time again, this to be true. There is a vision in her community about what they want to do, who they want to be for the people around them. They know it will take money and resources, which they have very little of, but they know where they want to go. And, more than once, these vision conversations have been followed by a run-in, a meeting with a neighbor, and connection made at a community event, which has opened up the doors to get to that vision. She has seen grants come through, monetary gifts directly for whatever ministry they were hoping to get started, volunteers step up to make things happen.

Just this week, she shared another example. Her congregation saw the food insecurity in their neighborhood. They knew they wanted to be part of the solution. As they vocalized this vision of being able to feed others, a donation came through of a small outdoor shed with shelves. And another member said, “Let’s fill it up!” Today, they are taking all the food that has been provided to fill this donated shed and they will bless it and thank God for it before putting it out to be shared in their community.

They knew they wanted to feed people before they knew what the feeding would entail. They knew the vision before they knew how it was going to come about. Provision follows vision. God comes through.

Our inability to see the end of the road, or even most of the map, doesn’t mean we can’t begin. In discipleship, it is so often just about doing the next right thing.

What do people need? What can we provide? How can we be the hands and feet of Christ in this desperate, hurting world?

And so, we work to avoid both sides of a ditch. And when we find that middle ground, we thrive in our discipleship. We push against our inclinations to be perfect and let ourselves embrace the imperfect way we engage in God’s mission. And we work towards a future, God’s future, that we envision, even before we know exactly how we’ll get there.

We know where God is leading us. We know that God will be with us, every step of the way. And we know that God is ready for our enthusiasm and passion and participation, in whatever way that shows up—as a tax collector who leaves it all behind, as an outcast woman who bravely takes her chance because her faith is well-placed, as a man who pleads to have his daughter back.

After all, Jesus came for us, not those in no need of help. Jesus came for us.

Amen.

– Rev. Rebecca Ajer Frantz, Lutheran Church of Our Saviour

Image from Sundays & Seasons. All rights reserved.