Grace has been meeting publicly for a year now. And we’ve been doing it not because it’s our tradition to do so – because we are new – but because we are drawn here this morning by the resurrected and living Jesus Christ. This is the center that holds us together. We don’t have fences keeping us in; we have a watering hole drawing us in.
And as a church that is following the liturgical calendar and the seasons of the church year, we are in a time just after Christmas in which we think about the Epiphany of the Lord, or the revealing or the manifestation of God in Jesus as the Christ.
I remember when I met the resurrected and living Jesus Christ, when he was revealed to me.
I was 18 years old, a freshman in college and I met him. Believe it or not, he was in Lubbock, Texas, at a house party on a Friday night. Shouldn’t he have been home reading his Bible or something? Anyways, he took on the form of a bunch of college guys in a fraternity who were living with and for one another in the Spirit of God.
The only part that met what I had expected this Jesus to look like was that they were wearing sandals like a first century Jew would. Well, they were wearing Reef flip-flops, so it took a bit of imagination. It was him; it was Jesus. Plain as day. I had come face-to-face with Jesus.
But my meeting with Jesus didn’t stop there. Every Sunday and many days in between, I find myself face-to-face again with the God-made-manifest, the God revealed. For the past year or so, he has been revealing himself in Grace’s worship services, gatherings, and everyday lives.
My encouragement to you, is that if you will look for him today – it might take a little bit of imagination, I know – but you’ll see him. I hope the liturgy does that, we work hard to help that happen, but even if not I’m sure the faces of those around us will do that. They’ve been doing that for me for over a year now and I’m excited to see how God reveals himself among us again everyday.
Rev. Matthew Hanzelka is the Ministry and Missions Pastor at Grace Baptist Church.