Thankful Memorial, Chattanooga
February 6, 2022
Year C, Epiphany 5

Isaiah 6:1-13
Psalm 138
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Since the first season of the podcast was released last month, some folks have contacted me because of my involvement in the Small Churches, Big Impact Collective.  These leaders of small congregations have looked at my background and the information about Thankful available on the internet and they seek out my advice: “How did Thankful get to be so successful?” they ask me, as though I’ll have an easy answer, a secret weapon to magically make more people appear in their pews and more children sit quietly in rapt attention on Sunday morning.  Clearly, these folks haven’t heard the joyful chaos that is in-person worship at Thankful!

But I can’t fault these small-church leaders for asking the question because, by many of our traditional standards of measurement, Thankful has been “successful” in the past decade.  Covid notwithstanding, our membership has expanded since ten years ago, even including the past 24 months.  If and when we ever get to hold our annual parish meeting, we’ll all be able to celebrate that kind of measurable growth. 

But the quantifiable “success” that Thankful has experienced is not the story I tell when folks come asking for my advice.  Because the truth is, the measurable growth we’ve seen is really just a lucky side effect of the real growth that’s happened in our community.  Thankful is a successful parish not because we have more people in the pews than we did before, not because our finances happen to be in the black at any given moment, not because we count lots of young families among our membership.  No, Thankful is a successful parish, a vibrant, healthy congregation because we are committed to living together in love, to discerning God’s will for us as best we can, and following it, to nurturing and nourishing those who join us, no matter their age or race or gender or anything, so that we each may better serve the mission of Christ in the world around us.

Now don’t get me wrong: the growth in numbers is nice; I’d very much like us to keep our finances balanced; and goodness knows how much we love our Thankful kiddos.  But these things make up only the smallest part of the story of Thankful.  And it’s certainly not the point of the work that we do together in community.  The point is our faithfulness – our trust in God’s faithfulness to us. 

And there are times when such faithfulness doesn’t look so “successful.”  Take Isaiah, for instance, whom we hear in today’s scripture.  Though understandably and rightfully scared at first to answer the call of an almighty and all-good God, Isaiah accepts God’s grace and the accompanying mission he is given to speak the truth in love to God’s people.  And guess what?  It definitely does not result in a lot of people in the pews on the Sabbath! 

On the contrary, Isaiah’s message is not received by the masses but only a very small few, a “holy seed,” who, as Isaiah himself has done, recognize that it may be hard or even painful, but nonetheless sign up for life in God’s kingdom.  They become the faithful remnant who remain open to God’s work in their world and in their lives and give in to the process of being “turned” and “healed” by God. 

At first glance, the story we see in Luke’s gospel today might seem to contrast the reminder from Isaiah that doing the work of God’s kingdom often doesn’t look “successful.”  After all, thanks to their encounter with Jesus, the earliest disciples haul up more fish than they know what to do with.  Such a large catch was certainly miraculous – not just on the face of it, but for the fact of what it would have meant for that Galilean community.  For once, there would be enough to go around.  For once, they could pay the hefty taxes of the empire and still feed their families – and then some.  Simon and James and John must have realized immediately that this haul represented more personal wealth for them and their families than they had ever had before if they capitalized on it… which they don’t. 

No, instead of reveling in this moment of personal success, tucking something away for a rainy day and building on their newly-caught wealth, Simon and James and John “left everything and followed [Jesus]” on that fateful day and onwards to the cross and what lay beyond. 

But that’s the thing about Kingdom-work: it never goes quite as we expect.  God’s standards for “success” can’t be measured and counted by our spreadsheets and reports.  And just when we think we’re experiencing the well-deserved fruits of our labors, God may very well call us to something brand new, something that requires us to leave behind everything we took such pride in, to faithfully follow the Christ, something that reminds us that the outcome of our work is not in our control but in the hands of God.  

But if it is true that “success” in God’s kingdom is often unseen by the world, then it is also true that when it looks, by the world’s standards, like all is lost, like everything has broken, like we have failed, God’s kingdom may yet be hidden just below the surface.  When it feels like our work has accomplished nothing, when we are exhausted by our efforts with only empty nets to show, when we are distressed, despondent, anxious or fearful, there’s every likelihood that God will show up and direct us in a new way forward.  And if we have the eyes to see God in such seemingly unlikely places, the ears to hear the good news when the news outlets only ever report the bad, and the faithfulness to move into the “deep water” of a future over which we have no control, who knows what abundant life we will discover?    

So when I am asked what makes Thankful so successful, this is the story I tell: Thankful Ones are among the most faithful people I have ever known.  Together, we have walked through lean times and full ones, trusting in God’s providence.  Together, we are weathering a pandemic without ever losing sight of our love for each other.  Together, we look to the future with courage and curiosity about God’s call to us as a community of Christians in this time and this place.  These are things we cannot measure by any of the usual means, but these are the things that count in God’s kingdom.  Amen.