“BLESS ALL: Serve, Give, Share”

(Micah 6:1-8; Ps 15; Mt 5:1-12) JG White ~ 10:30 am, Sun, Feb 1, 2026, FBC Amherst

Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote: 

I slept and dreamt that life was joy.

I awoke and saw that life was service. 

I acted and behold, service was joy. 

What is it to be a Christian? What does a practicing Christian look like? We are putting this into words, this winter. One of the answers is: to be a Christian is to do good to others. The golden rule. We do this on our own. We do it with others. We serve other people. We give, in all sorts of ways. We share the blessings we have. We actually share the sorrows too - but more of that a bit later. 

That big paragraph from Isaiah today calls for the people of God to do right. Having great, enjoyable worship, and very holy spiritual practices can seem very virtuous goals, but what does it matter if there is no real mercy, no practical kindness, no help for the people in the most trouble in the neighbourhood? Prayer and fasting might be of no use at all if we do not help our neighbours. 

Then the word of Isaiah of old tells us just what Dr. Stephen McMullin told the Liaison Committee the other night. If we do our bit to bless the neighbourhood, God will honour that, and we the church will do well. Hear again from Isaiah 58. 

If you remove the yoke from among you,

    the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,

if you offer your food to the hungry

    and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,

then your light shall rise in the darkness

    and your gloom be like the noonday.

Maybe that is the third time you have heard this in one week, for I read it last Sunday afternoon for the Week of Prayer Service, eh? If we satisfy the needs of others, our own light shall rise in the darkness, dear Church. 

A light in the darkness. ‘I am the light of the world,’ said Jesus, yes. But before He claimed that He declared, “You are the light of the world. Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to… your Father in heaven.” 

Notice Jesus does not say, ‘you will be the light of the world.’ Or, ‘you could be the light, could become the light.’ ‘Some of you will be the light.’ Or ‘You might eventually be the light.’ No, He says, “You are the light of the world.” And then warns a bit about hiding it. As if it could be hid! Even in the ancient world, with no electricity, a city on a hill could not be hidden at night. And every lamp in Bible days is of course an open flame - not something to put a basket over! 

Jesus is a Light in the darkness. And gets shared with us, in us, through us. No wonder congregations would call themselves “Gospel Light Baptist Church.’

So Jesus calls us to be light in the darkness. Not light in the noonday. Not light in a beautiful sunset. Light in the darkness. We are called out into the darkness, or down deep into the dark. We face the darkness. Because Christ faced the darkness. We sing because He lives, I can face tomorrow, yes. But because He died we can face pain, suffering, rejection, injustice, betrayal, pain, death, grief. We can be there for the people who face these things. 

And it is in such moments that Christ, Christ crucified, can become so real and close to people. 

Many years ago, probably about 1985, a dear couple in Windsor NS were concerned about their older son. He was a young man, married and with a daughter. But he was seriously ill. He came to what was to be his final stay in hospital. The parents were there quite a lot with him. A local man, a Baptist pastor, connected with them, and spent times with them in the hospital. Years later, the parents of the young man who died, still tried to put into words - and couldn’t - what that meant to them. Somehow, that was such a sacred time. A holy connection was made, even though they were watching their son Michael, a young father, die. Years later, when I was their pastor, that hard time remained a touchstone of faith for them. There was real care and consolation for them. Christ met them, was Light to them, in the darkness. And was there in the person of Pastor Bartol. 

Christian thinker Andrew Root suggests For the church, to evangelize the world is to bless the world by joining the world’s sorrow, which is the true sacrament of God’s promise to bring back what’s lost. (p. 27) Root spends a whole book teaching that our mission work is the work of consolation in these sad, sad times. 

There is a lot of self-care advice out there these days. Lots of ‘don’t spend your time on people who steal your energy’ and so forth. Which has some truth to it. But we, in our darker moments, need the care of others, we need people to draw near. And, they need us, need us to be ready to be a light for them. 

Years ago a friend who was a musician in churches latched on to  a new song, ‘Go Light Your World.’ It actually was the theme at InterMission one year. You may not know that conference, the annual gathering in the spring of Atlantic Baptist Women. The song says

There is a candle in every soul

Some brightly burning, some dark and cold

There is a Spirit who brings a fire

Ignites a candle and makes His home

Carry your candle, run to the darkness

Seek out the helpless, confused and torn

Hold out your candle for all to see it

Take your candle, and go light your world

One of the great thinkers a few hundred years ago was Blaise Pascal, whose experience of meeting the Spirit of God is a well known story. Pascal had not had a perfect life. Gambling, for instance, was a big problem for him. Then, one day, like the fire of Pentecost, God met with him. Pascal discovered through a direct encounter with the acting God, that it was not in happiness that we meet the living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but in loss, in sorrow, inside impossibility. It is in the dark that God comes to us as more than an intellectual theorem or idea but as a person, who in fire redeems and renews all. 

At times I read how we get to meet Jesus in the face of the suffering, in time spent with the poor, in troubles and disasters. The scriptures suggest this; people say this through the centuries. 

One year during Holy Week, a few Christians from well-endowed congregations in a major metropolitan area spent a night with homeless friends on the street. They were looking for the suffering Christ in the lives of those who spend their days and nights suffering from hunger, disease, and rejection. It was a chilly night, and rain rolled in close to midnight. Looking for shelter, the handful of travelers felt fortunate to come upon a church holding an all-night prayer vigil. The leader of the group was a pastor of one of the most respected churches in the city. As she stepped through the outer doors of the church, a security guard stopped her. She explained that she and the rest of their group were Christians. They had no place to rest and pray. Enticed by the lighted warmth of the sanctuary, she had forgotten that her wet, matted hair and disheveled clothing left her looking just like another homeless person from the street. The security guard was friendly, but explained in brutal honesty, “I was hired to keep the homeless people like you out.” As the dejected group made their way back into the misery of the night, they knew they had found their suffering Christ, locked out of the church. (Andrew Foster Connors, Feasting on the Word, Year A, Vol 1, 2010, p. 318)

So what is Church? For so many it is mercy, showing mercy. Being with people who need mercy. It is giving, serving, sharing. 

We are walking through this ten-part series about the practice of Christianity, considering that it can be seen as belonging to a group, it is behaving rightly, it is worshipping together, it is beseeching - the life of prayer, and so on. I was recently caught up by what Matthew Myer-Bolton said in a “Strange New World” podcast about Church.

It turns out that at its heart, a church is… not a building, not a group, not a community of religious belief, and not a society of moral excellence. It is something else. The first clue Jesus gives us comes down to one word: mercy. 

A church at its heart is above all a place of sending out…

Jesus, to most of the thousands of people he met, says, go, not come follow me. Go in peace, or go and sin no more, or go and declare what God has done for you, your faith has made you well.

The church is a mission, a form of action, and undertaking. 

It is the call to mercy: a call to share and respect, a call to neighbourliness. I guess this is what I’ve called it: Bless All: Serve, Give, Share. It is, as we are learning to sing, “As you go on your way may Christ go with you.”