Have a Galilee Moment: Jesus is Here as He Always Has Been

Father Richard preached up a storm today . . . and reminded us all (Saint Paul’s!) that we need to have a “Galilee moment.” Jesus began His ministry in Galilee and when He rose from the dead He returned. Some of the disciples had received the call to follow Jesus there and they ate breakfast with Him by the Sea as the Church Age began.

The good Father reminded us that all of us need to return to where we first met Jesus. Just now this is a message we desperately need to hear.

This is not because we cannot meet Him anyplace else. Old memories can become idols and in Victorian times this was a serious problem. God’s last outpouring would become the pattern for every outpouring and hinder the new thing God would say. Empty, decaying churches are not a reminder of the resurrection and the empty tomb, but the empty Garden after the Fall of man.

When we decide on the pilgrimage, we find idols and not icons at the end.

Instead, Jesus Himself calls us to return to our first love and often to the physical place where we first met him. Jesus sent His friends to Galilee. God created in poetry and He often chooses to work in meters that are hard for us to hear or follow, but one pattern He uses (to help us!) is to return to the beginning at the end.

Why?

Pilgrimage that He sends us on are performance art, a living icon. We stand where we stood. If the Victorians were too apt to live in the past, we are too eager to forget what should never be forgotten. We cannot live there, but we must return there. Our life in Christ is more a spiral upward than a linear progress, more Dante than Bunyan. We corkscrew up to Heaven . . . always upward, but moving over the same places. We experience them from a higher plane, but Galilee is still Galilee.

I have been back to Clendenin where at the Advent Christian Church I first heard good news and went down to the river to be baptized. It was the same church, the same river, and the same God. I was more changed than the place and God had not changed at all. Our journey upward is around the constant, unchanging, eternal Will of God. He never moves, but we experience Him differently as we change.

We return to Galilee and understand now many things Jesus said to us that made no sense. He would die and rise again. He would tear down a temple and make us fishers of men. We get it . . . and after we return to Galilee for the second or third time, we realize that we are always getting more from the same Word. 

Jesus is here. I cannot go to Clendenin today, but I can close my eyes and see the river. I can feel the cold water of April. My eyes were open and I could see brown water, Dad, and what turned out to be a fish leaping over my head. I recall going home and being asked to pick up some sticks I had used for a fort in the yard and during that job feeling the spirit of God. Jesus was there. I am there. I recollect and it lives.

There are no empty churches if we recollect them filled. There are no idols if we refuse to worship any creature and instead transmute them to windows to heaven. If you are discouraged, go back to Galilee.

Thank you, Father Richard.