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[Sermon] Not Meant to Be Comfortable

Pastor Hector Garfias-Toledo



Pastor Hector opens with an unexpected teacher: his physical therapist, coaxing him to finally touch his own healing wound. Her words become a lens for the Greek word behind "church," ecclesia, a term that once meant a people mobilized for purpose, not a building to visit. Drawing on Matthew's account of Jesus and Peter, Hector reminds us that Jesus builds his church, not us. The sermon names a hard truth: healing requires discomfort, and the church is called to touch the wounds of the world rather than avoid them. It closes with a vision of the church as movement, not place, reflecting Jesus alive, united, and sent.



Sermon Transcript

From YouTube's automatic captions, lightly edited by AI for readability.


Grace and peace to you from God, our Father, Mother, Creator, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who we probably would not know when he comes. And we say, and you said, "Amen." Yes, okay, we will know. We will know, as David said, we will know when he comes.

 

All right, are we ready for some action? I'm going to give you a couple of instructions, and I hope that we can do something here. I would like to invite you to identify a couple of people around you, not necessarily the people who are next to you, but especially people who you may not know and are not familiar with. If you are able to move around, please go to them. And if you are not able to move around, just wait for somebody to come to you, and try to check with two or three people quickly.

 

One thing, what you're going to ask and what you're going to answer and hear from each other, is what comes to your mind, what comes to your mind or your heart, when you hear the word "church"? Simple. What comes to your mind when you hear the word "church"? And try to answer in one or two words. So start looking around, and please go to someone and just talk to each other, and later you're going to share what you heard from others. You have 30 seconds to do it, because it's quick.

 

For those of you participating online, you can type in the YouTube chat section.

 

Ten more seconds.

 

All right, let's wrap up. Go back to your seat when you are able. And I would like to ask you to ponder on the things that you heard, because in a few minutes you will be sharing a little bit of what you heard. But I had to stop you because I already heard you were talking about where you're going to go after the service for lunch. So I said, I don't think I asked that, but if you invite me, I'll probably go with you.

 

Well, my siblings in Christ, as David was saying, we never know exactly how Jesus is going to show up, and if we are going to identify Jesus when Jesus comes to us. But I can tell you that perhaps I have a face I can put in that picture that David showed us. And you'll probably figure out whose face that will be, once I tell you that I think God continues to teach me about life and about God's love, grace, and mercy through my healing ankle.

 

So my therapist said, "Let's take a look at your ankle." She removes the sock I was wearing, and she says, "Well, it's still swollen, actually, very swollen." She looks at me and says, "Do you mind if I use some lotion?" And I said, "What kind of lotion are you going to use?" Seriously, I asked the question, because in my mind I was thinking, "Wow, maybe this is one kind of magic lotion. If she sees a swollen ankle, she asks me if I want lotion. The lotion must be the type that's going to reduce the soreness of my ankle." I said, "Of course you can use lotion. What kind?" And she said, "Oh, just cocoa cream." And I told her, "Oh, I thought it was something more special, something that was going to help me." She said, "No, there's no magic lotion. The magic comes with the hands."

 

And I said, "Okay." So as she is looking at my ankle, she says, "Have you touched your ankle?" And my answer was no. And inside my mind it's like, are you crazy, how am I going to touch that? I'll do something and hurt myself. Or perhaps I was in self-denial, pretending that I don't want to see the actual wound, the actual incision, the scar, and the stitches. Sorry for the graphic information I'm sharing with you, but I believe many of you have gone through this and know exactly what I'm talking about.

 

Inside me, perhaps there was this fear of the discomfort of looking at it, but more than anything else, the discomfort of feeling with my fingers the texture and the way the wounded part is right now. She continues to look at me as I was thinking all of this, and she starts applying the magic lotion, and she says, "Touch it. Spend some time and touch it. Spend some time and feel it, because by touching it, your brain and your foot will become aware of what is happening there, and they will be connected. And yes, it's going to be uncomfortable, but discomfort is needed for healing."

 

Discomfort leads to healing.

 

For the past few weeks, my siblings in Christ, and Megan reminded us today that this is already the 13th Sunday after Pentecost, during this past thirteen Sundays we have been reflecting on the reign of God and what it means to be the church in the world. We have been talking about how the unfolding and unstoppable reign of God is like. Jesus is telling us the reign of God is like, giving us stories for us to imagine, to think about how God continues to come to us every day, every moment, in our lives.

 

And I believe the passages we read today bring us two important aspects of what it means to be the reign of God, the church as the instrument of God's power, might, and mercy into the world. One, in the words of the apostle St. Paul, who tells us of the corporate nature of the church when he says that we are members of one body, and he encourages us to go ahead and be what we are made to be. And in the gospel we heard today, the Lord Jesus, in talking with Peter, is helping Peter, the disciples, and us, to remember that Jesus says, "On this rock I will build my church," that the church is Jesus' church, and he is the one who is building his church, not our church, not us building it, but us being part of it.

 

So as I'm listening to the passages, listening to my therapist preaching to me in some ways, I come across this article that I shared with the council a couple of months ago during the retreat. It was written by clinical psychologist and Catholic author Sean Tobin, I don't know if he's related to the Tobin family here, but he wrote this article, titled "The Church Was Never Meant to Be Comfortable." How does that sound to you? Perhaps it sounds to you like it sounded to me: "Okay, what is that about?"

 

Well, and here is where I want to invite two or three of you to share a word or two that you heard when you were talking to somebody else earlier. What comes to your mind when you hear the word "church"? Anyone who can share what you heard?

 

"Family." Family. "Community." I hear "stewardship." "Home." Home. "Music." Music. "Peace." "Love." Love. "Strangers." Strangers. "Belonging." Belonging. "Sanctuary." Sanctuary. "More than a building." More than a building. "Safe place." Safe place, safe place. Thank you. And I invite you to continue this conversation as we conclude the service today.

 

But these are some of the things. Now, it is Jesus who builds his church, and St. Paul says it is a body, the church is a body, and all the members are interconnected. However, and this is where things get interesting, the word "church," when Jesus says, "On this rock I will build my church," the word in Greek is ecclesia. And ecclesia sounds like the Spanish "iglesia," but it's also the word you've probably heard in "ecclesiastic" or "ecclesiology," other complicated, churchy, theological words. But ecclesia is the word used in the Gospel according to Matthew when Jesus talks to Peter, and here's where it gets even more interesting.

 

The word ecclesia, before it was used in the New Testament, among the Greeks conveyed a different meaning than what we have in mind regarding church. Ecclesia conveyed the idea of an assembly convened to make military decisions, elect officials, and declare war. So imagine the disciples, Peter, and the audience of the Gospel according to Matthew, what they heard when the word ecclesia, or "church," was said was perhaps not the same image that you and I have about church, because it had a different connotation, a different reality. And as our dear theologian-in-residence Jeff Tobin would say, it depends on the context of the conversation.

 

This word is used only in the Gospel according to Matthew. So putting this all together: ecclesia means the people called out for a purpose that could not be reduced to ceremony or comfort. Church is not only ceremony and comfort, it's action. It's an entity that is alive, an organism that produces, an organism that grows, an organism that is faced with challenges, an organism that also experiences hurt and wounds.

 

Today it's common to hear that the church is a community. It's a place to belong, a space to encounter God, a space where we are encouraged and nurtured for the next week, or month, or year. But in Jesus' words according to Matthew, church is not just a sanctuary or a social gathering. It's a word that carries in its very bones the idea of people mobilized for something. But tradition has co-opted the word church, and the meaning of church, and made it into a concept and an institution. And we could get into Christendom and everything else, but we're not going there today. Let's put that aside, not today.

 

It's an institution that seeks to mold Jesus into its rules, traditionalisms, and behavioral patterns. And when I say this, I don't say it specifically to one side of the social-political spectrum of our lives, but to both sides. Every time the church is taken to an extreme with ideologies and used as a platform for ideologies, I believe we are walking away from the meaning of what Jesus said: "On this rock I will build my church."

 

In the first century, Paul was writing to a highly anxious community struggling with spiritual pride and overarching egos. His target was not just the prophetic advocacy of the church speaking to the hurts of society. His target was the human control and micromanagement within the community, using the authority given to Peter to control minds, bodies, and communities.

 

So the ecclesia was never just a place we go. It is a people who carry Christ and the image of Christ through our words and our actions, every day, everywhere, all the time, in an alive, united, and sent way. Paul talks about the ecclesia, the church, as the body of Christ, and each one of us, in his words, in the passage we read, finds our meaning and function as part of his body.

 

So going back to my therapist, this is where her words really resonated with me and spoke to me. She helped me realize that church is not comfortable or uncomfortable just for the sake of being uncomfortable. And when I say this, it's because many times we believe the church needs to be this agitator for the sake of being an agitator in society, that the church is a platform, as I said earlier, to bring positions that sometimes punish, shame, and exclude others, on both sides of the political extremes we live in. The church is uncomfortable because, as my therapist said, it is the place where you and I are invited to touch the wounds, to touch the wounds that make us aware of the pain present in our lives, as individuals, as a congregation, and as a community. Because our society, sometimes like me, pretends by looking at the wound that it's not there, or tries to avoid it, just imagining that touching it is going to mess things up, going to cause pain, going to feel gross when we touch it. We prefer to walk away, into the traditionalisms of becoming insular churches that eventually become bunkers where people live inside for themselves.

 

But because the church is called with a purpose, the purpose is discomfort for healing.

 

Healing needs discomfort. When the body stops moving, church stops being a body. It becomes closed, inwardly driven, stagnant, and eventually dying. Jesus teaches us, with his life, his words, his actions, that we need to keep moving, because the church is a movement. Jesus moved toward the outcast, not despite his holiness, but because of it, and he gently touched the wound to begin the healing. Being ecclesia is uncomfortable because healing, reconciliation, and wholeness require us to intentionally touch the wounds, both our own and the wounds of others. Because it's only when we are aware of our wounds that connection happens, that we realize we need each other. When we realize the interconnectedness, the interdependence, of each one of us as members of the body of Christ, touching our wounds brings pain, vulnerability, and struggle, and that brings light, so that transformation can begin in us.

 

So the question, perhaps for us today, may be: what may be the hurts in this world that the church is called to touch? What may be the wounds or scars we need to touch, to be reconnected with the body and experience healing?

 

The church is not a place to go. It is an expansive movement of the people of God, who reflect Jesus, alive, united, and sent, and remind the world that there are no more barriers between heaven and earth, because God in Jesus has touched us and reconnected us with him. And that, my siblings in Christ, is good news. Thanks be to God. Healing requires discomfort. Amen.

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