About two years ago, I got ordained. My ordination service happened in the height of COVID. Everything was on Zoom. It was all women. When I say all women, I mean like, only women. Women were the elders. Women were the musicians. We had somebody who was dancing as a part of it. The leader and preacher were women. I gathered all of the women from the classis as ministers of Word and Sacrament.
Friends, this morning, I have a question for you:
What emotions come up for you when you have to ask for help?
Do you feel embarrassed? Nervous? Excited? Guilty? All of these emotions are real!
The Scripture lesson today comes from the book of Leviticus, chapter 19, verses 9 through 18. Much of this reading has ties to agriculture, and like I tell everyone, you can always relate anything back to agriculture because it is involved in everything that we do. I chose this Scripture because my interests and career path help me to hear the good news in it.
After Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, a crowd followed him. They saw how he helped the sick. He performed miracles. Jesus went on top of a mountain and sat down with his disciples. He looked up and saw a huge crowd coming towards him, and the first thing he said was, “How are we going to feed this crowd!?” This shows that Jesus cared.
It doesn’t seem that Peter is handling the aftershocks of Easter particularly well. It is never a good sign to be found naked in a boat. Your reaction may be like mine—this is risky content for the Bible, and this is not even the first story in the Good Friday/Easter narrative to mention someone without clothes! In Mark’s Good Friday account there is a “certain young man wearing nothing but a linen cloth” who, while fleeing the Gethsemane garden, “left the linen cloth and ran off naked.”
Jesus knew exactly who was going to betray him. Yet he acted out of love to provide a foot washing for each of the disciples. In a sense, Jesus knows that we are going to be tempted to betray God in our words, actions, and deeds, and yet God acts out of love to provide for us a cleansing, called baptism. Remember your baptism.
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