![The steeple of the Memorial Church](/sites/g/files/omnuum7126/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/2025-02/160725ChurchCalArt4.jpg?itok=rG9ZvXzh) # First Sunday of Spring Term January 30, 2026 - [ Blog ](/news-categories/blog) *By the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D ’13* *Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity* *Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church* *(The following is a transcript of the service audio, Jan. 25, 2026)* Welcome back, everyone. It's good to see all you brave souls who ventured out into the weather today. Please be safe going home as the storm hits us this afternoon. We need some bravery. More about that in a minute. So it is the beginning of the term. Appropriately, in our gospel lesson from Matthew this morning, we have some beginnings. Jesus begins his ministry in Galilee. In the gospel, he's just returned from the temptation, John is arrested, and then Jesus goes and begins his ministry. And we also have the disciples beginning their ministry, or for them at least, Jesus comes and calls for, and they set out with him and begin again. So it's appropriate we have this lesson, and I'm going to talk about that. But we also have this line that the gospel writer cites from the Hebrew Bible, talking about those who sit in darkness in the region and shadow of death. That sounds familiar. It's a scary time. I find it to be a scary time. The world seems frightening in lots of places. Things feel unstable. Things feel like they're falling apart. Things are unstable. They are falling apart. The question is, what do these beginnings have to do, if anything, with the world around us, this world that appears to be falling apart? This passage from Matthew, it is in two parts. We have the beginning of Jesus' ministry, we have the beginning of disciples' ministry, and I want to talk about how those things were related. There are these two halves to the gospel, but I'm going to add, I guess, a third half to this gospel lesson. The beginning of Jesus' ministry, the beginning of the disciples' ministry, what about us, what about our ministry? So I'll take those in order. Jesus begins his ministry here in Galilee. It's important that it says that John has just been arrested. John is going to be murdered by Herod. And John has just been arrested because he's been wandering around and he's been saying this thing, he's been saying, "Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand." The chapter before this, it cites that this is John's message, the thing for which he is arrested, "Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand." And then, John is arrested, and immediately, Jesus begins his ministry. And what does he say? "Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand." From the first step, from its first moments, Jesus is stepping into this place of risk. The man who baptized him has just been arrested, he's about to be killed, and Jesus, without hesitation, takes up his ministry in Galilee, saying exactly the same thing. We hear these lines so much, as those of us maybe who have gone to church a bit do, I think maybe they lose some of their impact. Why is this line, "Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand," why is that so dangerous? Why would that cause John to be arrested and killed? It's implicitly political, maybe explicitly political, this call, "The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand." Both John and Jesus are calling back to a phrase from the Hebrew Bible, which was called the rule of the God of Israel, and if you are walking around in a land ruled by the Romans and you start talking about the rule of God being restored, that's a provocation. Now, this line, provocation though may be, can be read a couple of ways, and I think there are easy ways to misread it. At first glance, it can have a kind of apocalyptic tone. "Get ready, the time has almost come. The Kingdom of Heaven is near, it's almost here, it's just over the horizon. Wait just a little bit longer, it's almost time for this cataclysmic transformation to happen." And that was largely how it was read in the first century and for much time since. In our faith and life forum, as you heard, we are reading the letters of Paul, and that's how Paul is taking it, especially early in his writing career. Paul is saying, "Just a little bit longer, everyone. It's about to happen." Harvard Memorial Church · The Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts Ph.D. '13 - Jan. 25, 2026 | Sunday Sermon I don't know how much it helps for us to read it that way. I mean, first of all, it's been 2,000 years. Second, and more pressingly maybe, in the current moment, we want to know, I want to know, how to live in this world, not how to wait for the next. We need an answer for the here and the now, for where we are. In one of my classes, I have students read a book by the poet, Kathleen Norris, and in her book, she says this, "We want life to have meaning, healing, even ecstasy. But the human paradox is that we find these by starting where we are, not where we wish we were. We must look for blessings to come from unlikely everyday places, from out of Galilee, as it were, and not in spectacular events." Jesus is in Galilee, this backward, out-of-the-way place, and he starts walking around and saying to folks, "The Kingdom of Heaven is near." And I don't think he means it's just over the horizon. "It's almost here, just wait a little bit longer." I think he's saying, "It is near, it's right next to you. You can reach out and touch it." In fact, in the King James version of this verse, in that translation, it says, "The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand." You could reach out and touch it. Waiting for it, expecting it to come later on, just over the horizon, might cause you to miss it where it is, right under your nose. Another way to say this is that if we are waiting for justice with a capital “J” to come establish itself, I fear we may be waiting too long. It might not just walk up on us out of the blue to transform our world while we are busy mending our nets, because, and now we turn to the second half of this passage, because even when it did walk up out of the blue on these four men mending their nets, it didn't immediately transform the whole world, or at least not in the way these men hoped or expected. I think this is why they got him wrong so often, I think it's why we get Jesus wrong so often, because he comes to them and says, "The Kingdom of Heaven is close, it's so close." And they look around and they don't see it, so they say, "Oh, it must be coming down the line. Let's look. Let's wait for it." They start looking over the horizon, waiting, expecting. And meanwhile, Jesus is just doing it. The last line of this gospel passage, Jesus just gets to work, recognizing, serving and caring for the Kingdom of Heaven right where it is, right at his hands, literally in his hands, seeing it in the suffering people among him, among them, preaching God's mercy to the poor, healing the sick, comforting the outcast. It's all right there in Galilee already. It's not over there in Jerusalem. It's not way up there in Rome. It's not waiting for the end of the empire or the end of history. It's right there in front of them, literally in Jesus' hands, as he takes up the sick and the poor. So, the third half, what does this mean for us? This story, the story of beginnings, comes at the beginning of Jesus' ministry. It also comes in a particular gospel, the Gospel of Matthew, the gospel we're going to be spending some time with the next several weeks. It's one of the first things Jesus says, "The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand." In the Gospel of Matthew, one of the last things Jesus says, from Matthew 25, he says, "By the way, whenever you do reach out to these outcasts, to the poor and the despised and the sick, whenever you do it to them, it's them, it's also me. You also do it for me." We see these disciples and Jesus walks up on them, meets them out of the blue, sometimes I wonder, if I were them, mending nets, with my dad in a boat, if I would have recognized Jesus walking up and asking him to follow. But the truth is, if Matthew 25 is correct, the truth is all of us, every one of us, receives the same invitation every day, all the time. It does walk up on us out of the blue. Sometimes, most of the time, we or I am too busy with my nets. Sometimes, most of the time, I'm looking for something else, looking for something over the horizon. Sometimes, most of the time, I'm filled with despair because I can't dismantle the carceral state today on my own. I can't fix immigration policy today on my own. I can't house this city's homeless during this awful storm. I can't provide gender-affirming care to all the scared queer kids in our state and in our country. I can't do that all today on my own. But I can love my neighbor. I can visit a prisoner. I can make a meal. I can support a scared immigrant or a scared trans kid. This is the third half of our lesson, our portion. The Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Heaven, is not off in some apocalyptic future. The Kingdom does walk up on us out of the blue every day. We just rarely put down whatever else it is we're working on and think to follow. This is good news, it's here. It's not great news. It's frightening news, scary news. It's risky. Because another problem is the one we follow is not a king who will overthrow the powerful with his own greater power, even if that's maybe what John the Baptist wanted, even if it's definitely what the disciples wanted, even if, a lot of the times, it's what we want. The one we follow is not the one who crushes the powerful. The one we follow is the one willing to be crushed by the powerful for the sake of caring for others without exception, every neighbor, everyone at his hands, worthy of his love. Again, Gospel of Matthew is really specific about this, the tax collector, my namesake, he gets loved too, and the centurion who oppresses his people, he gets loved too, and his enemy, the Canaanite woman, and yes, even from the cross, the men on the ground killing him, they get love too, the ones harmed and the ones causing it, and that also scares me. Following the call of Jesus is both simple and difficult. It means caring for neighbors, all of them, good and bad, enemy and friend, now, in this moment, in your neighborhood, in your world. It's not about waiting for the system to catch up and do it for us. It means doing it ourselves, even when it's risky, even when it's dangerous, even when it doesn't seem to make a big difference. I'm not saying we should not agitate for systemic change. We can and should. Look around, we have to, we must. But justice with a capital J, even if that justice is unreachable at a systemic scale in this moment, it is always already, at least a little bit, in our own hands. We can always begin in Galilee. Even if you can't single-handedly transform the justice department or the carceral system or the healthcare system today, you can love your neighbor, like many folks in Minnesota and Maine and elsewhere are doing right now, standing up peacefully, taking risks, and loving their neighbors. But as we've seen in those places, loving your neighbor is risky. It always has been. John the Baptist is killed. Jesus Christ is killed. Andrew, Simon, Peter, James, the older brother, all of them are killed too. The luckiest one of this bunch, the younger brother, John, is exiled for the rest of his life. The Kingdom of Heaven means insisting upon the holiness of those whom others demonize, whom others despise, and this is risky, riskier than it ought to be, riskier than the disciples could have realized it would be, riskier than at least two of our dead fellow citizens in Minnesota ever imagined it could be. That's why it's frightening. That's why I'm frightened, why I pray for comfort, why I'm grateful for bravery, because as our term begins and as unrest rises this morning, like every morning, Jesus comes to us and Jesus meets us with love, and then Jesus turns toward our burning, broken, beloved world, the world right at our hands, and commands us, "Follow me." ## Full Sunday Service ## See also:- [ Pusey Minister ](/blog-categories/pusey-minister) - [ Sunday Service ](/blog-categories/sunday-service) - [ Sunday Service ](/archive/sunday-service) - [ Sermon ](/archive/sermons) - [ Matthew Ichihashi Potts ](/media-archive/matthew-ichihashi-potts) Share on:- [ Facebook ](#) - [ Twitter ](#) - [ Linkedin ](#)