Download Sermon TextMaking a Way of No Way
Making a Way of No Way
Making A Way of No Way
Homily by Lisa Wiens Heinsohn for St. John’s Episcopal Church
The Second Sunday after Pentecost
June 7, 2026
Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26; Genesis 12:1-9
Yesterday, our church hosted the funeral of an eighteen-year-old young man who had been shot and killed. This young man, Michael Monger, was a student at Wendy Smith’s school. It was immensely sacred and so very sad. The pastor who led the service told me his only desire was to give the family some hope in their grief. Things should not be this way. We should not live in a world where eighteen-year-old young men are shot. The community came together and grieved and held each other.
In our scriptures for today there is a theme that resounds, over and over again like a heartbeat, the same theme that was resounding yesterday in the pastor’s deep desire to give hope to this family. It is the theme of God making a way of no way. It is the theme of being past hope, past any expectation of change or help, and God showing up in precisely that moment and offering the Spirit and a newness that you can’t make up or predict. When Abram was 75 years old, he and his wife had had no children. They were both past childbearing. They were well off and settled into their lives and established. And in the middle of their old age, God said to them: Get up and leave everything you know and travel west to a land I will show you, and I will make of you and your descendants a great nation. There was no internet for them to look up the place toward which God was leading. There was no mail service. This was the ancient world in which people were far fewer and the earth far wilder. There was no way to find out anything about what lay west of their home. But something in Abram and Sarai trusted the call of God and they set out. They probably looked like fools to the people who knew them. Maybe they seemed crazy. But they went.
In the gospel reading, Jesus calls Matthew, a tax collector, as a disciple, and then goes and eats at his house. The tax collector was the worst kind of person. A Jew who collaborates with the might of the Roman oppressor to extort money from his fellow Jews, and profits personally from it. Tax collectors were understandably despised. Yet Jesus called Matthew. When the Pharisees saw it they were indignant. How can you call a person like this, a person who benefits from the oppression of his own people, as a disciple, and then socialize with him? But Jesus said, God didn’t send me to the well but to the sick. Go and learn what this means, what the scriptures say: I desire mercy, not sacrifice. Jesus didn’t call Matthew evil; he called him sick, and said he was all about healing.
In the middle of all this a synagogue leader comes to Jesus and says, my daughter has just died, but you can heal her if you come right now. This sounds like the desperate hope of any parent who has lost a child. This was a time that was past hope. I know the family of young Michael yesterday would have given anything to get Michael back, as would any of us who has ever lost a child. No one thinks it’s possible. When Jesus gets to the house and tells them she is just sleeping they laugh at him. Yet he calls her spirit back to her body and she lives. On the way there a woman who has been sick for twelve years comes just to touch the fringe of Jesus’ clothes. Maybe she is too embarrassed to ask him for help. Her hemorrhage has meant she is socially outcast under the societal rules of the day. But she touches him and power flows out of him, compassion flows out of him, and he is healed.
There is in Jesus the power of boundless compassion. The power of looking past the surface circumstances of things and into the heart. The power of seeing the true sacredness of each person and inviting better from them. And it is this boundless compassion that makes a way out of no way. It is this refusal to demonize anyone, this refusal to label someone evil and instead calling them sick, that makes change possible. In the case of Abram and Sarai, there was in their spirits some mustard seed of imagination that hoped in the promise of God that the whole world would be blessed through their descendants, the descendants it was no longer possible for them to even have.
This world is full of beauty and pain, goodness and sickness, good choices and bad choices. It can be very easy to look around and read the news and be caught in an endless cycle of outrage or depression or morbid fascination with the latest tragedy or wrongdoing. But we live in the middle of a deeper story, a great story. We live in the latest chapter of a story God’s Spirit is writing those themes are about resilience and hope and God making a way out of no way. The people of God have been in times like these many times. Over and over again we are called to practice our way into believing. We don’t have to have it all figured out. We don’t need all the information in advance. We can never have it anyway. What we need is a mustard seed of hope that the goodness and compassion of God can make a way of no way.
A little later in this service we are going to celebrate the 50th wedding anniversary of Peter and Caron Stebinger, the 45th wedding anniversary of Mike & Stacy Walters, and the 25th wedding anniversary of Roger Rose and Sue Everson-Rose. When they got married they had no idea what was in front of them. There is no way one can prepare for what it truly means to commit to a person. There is no way one can understand what it means to have a child. There is no way to fully comprehend what it means to say yes to God and step forward onto Jesus’ Way of Love. As Bilbo Baggins says in the Hobbit, stepping out your front door is a dangerous thing, because this very road is the same road that can take you all the way to Mirkwood and the Lonely Mountain and beyond. Saying yes to God and putting one foot in front of the other on the journey that insists that all life is sacred, that anyone and everyone has goodness in them, that continuing to show up for your spouse year after year is worth it, that nothing is ever truly lost even if tragedy and violence and death happen—this kind of hope is a powerful antidote to the sickness in our world that wants immediate gratification and that is quick to judge and condemn and dismiss.
Where in your own life do you need a mustard seed of hope? Where are you invited to open your heart to compassion instead of judgment and hatred? Where does God want to make a way of no way?
May you know in your heart what God is asking of you. If the way seems impossible but it leads to love and belonging; if you are past hope but God is insisting that goodness is still possible; if everything before you looks barren but God is saying that the world can be blessed through your willingness to take the next step; then may God’s Spirit grant you the ability to say yes, so that God may make a way of no way. Amen.
