Scripture: Genesis 12:1-9; Matthew 9:9-13; Matthew 9:18-26; Luke 10:25-37; Jeremiah 29:4-7 Series: Easter
Drawing on Abram’s call to leave everything and Jesus’ summons of Matthew the tax collector, Wilson preaches that Jesus walks through the world unafraid—seeing no one as a threat—because he clings to nothing but people and encounter. The call to follow is more radical than we admit: it asks us to lay down the ‘pickles’ we grip for comfort—possessions, identities, family loyalties, even fears that make us demonize others. Using Heat and the Tom Hanks pickle-jar sketch, he urges the congregation to discover what Jesus is asking them to release so that ordinary time can become the freest season of their lives, walking the road together into the love revealed in Christ’s death and resurrection.
Illustrations: heat-walk-away, celebrity-jeopardy-pickle-jar, kids-school-rule, wilson-sports-loyalties, benedictines-vs-franciscans, good-samaritan-purity-threat, jeremiah-gardens-in-exile
June 7, 2026
Walking Along
Genesis 12:1-9 Matthew 9:9-13;18-26
Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
So Abram went, as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot and all the possessions that they had gathered and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran, and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. When they had come to the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him. From there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east, and there he built an altar to the Lord and invoked the name of the Lord. And Abram journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb.
Genesis 12:1-9
As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax-collection station, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up and followed him.
And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with Jesus and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” But when he heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous but sinners.”
While he was saying these things to them, suddenly a leader came in and knelt before him, saying, “My daughter has just died, but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.” And Jesus got up and followed him, with his disciples. Then suddenly a woman who had been suffering from a flow of blood for twelve years came up behind him and touched the fringe of his cloak, for she was saying to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well.” Jesus turned, and seeing her he said, “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.” And the woman was made well from that moment. When Jesus came to the leader’s house and saw the flute players and the crowd making a commotion, he said, “Go away, for the girl is not dead but sleeping.” And they laughed at him. But when the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took her by the hand, and the girl got up. And the report of this spread through all of that district. Matthew 9:9-13;18-26
When Jesus walks along, he does not see other people as threats. This is not because he has angels watching his back, or a black belt, or years of experience as a special operations officer. Jesus simply doesn’t see others as a threat as he walks along.
There were plenty of threats in the ancient world, and some were different from ours today. There was the threat to life and limb. There was the threat of robbery. And there was also the threat to purity. This is what’s so instructive for us about the parable of the Good Samaritan. The people walking by weren’t ignoring the man wounded on the side of the road because they didn’t have time for him or because they thought they were too good for him. They passed by because they were threatened by the possibility of losing their purity—of becoming ritually impure through contact with the blood of the man on the side of the road. This is why people call Jesus out when he eats with sinners. He’s not threatened by them.
But it’s important to point out part of the freedom Jesus has as he walks along: he has nothing that anyone could take from him. He’s not afraid that robbers will take all his money and goods, because he has no money and goods. This was a major point in the Middle Ages: huge arguments took place between Benedictines, who gathered lots of assets, and Franciscans, who took a vow of poverty. If we want to be like Jesus, we need to be like Jesus even materially—because there’s a freedom in faith, in being like Jesus, in not being dependent or fearful.
Whenever my kids want to take something to school, I always tell them: only take it if you wouldn’t mind it being lost or broken. If something matters tremendously to you, don’t take it. But the only things that mattered tremendously to Jesus were the people he encountered—the animals he encountered, the fish, the encounter itself. This is what a life of faith can look like. This is what being like Jesus can look like.
The call of Jesus is always more radical than we give it credit for. It’s always pushing us, no matter where we are in our life of faith. Reading the Gospels is provocative—it provokes us. We may consciously bracket off aspects of Jesus, but when we encounter him again and again, we’re confronted by questions about our own lives, our own loyalties, our own realities. This isn’t about reciting the creed, or where we believe we’ll go when we die—it’s about how we live day to day. Are we walking along under the weight of fear over what we might lose? Or are we walking along in full faith in the God who has given us everything?
Michael Mann’s movie Heat has this great back-and-forth between Al Pacino and Robert De Niro—two actors whose careers had been circling each other ever since they were both in Godfather Part II. Pacino plays a kind of alcoholic cop; De Niro plays a straight-laced bank robber. So much of the movie—the reason it’s called Heat—comes down to this: are you able to walk away, no matter what, if the heat is around the corner? What are you able to walk away from? Spoiler alert: at the end of the movie, De Niro is not able to walk away.
Really, this is what God tells Abram to do. Walk away from everything you’ve ever known. Go. It’s not an easy thing to do, to go, to leave. But the difficulty of the challenge depends on what we’re holding on to. What are we clinging to?
This is where the most radical call of the Gospel takes place. Jesus goes to the seashore and says, “Follow me. Lay down your nets and follow me.” Lay down the source of your income. Lay down the source of your identity. Lay down your family tradition. Follow me. In today’s world, we don’t often take up the professions of our parents. So what are the things you cling to? Sometimes we take on the sports teams of our family. What if Jesus came to me and said, “Follow me, Wilson. Lay down the Astros and the Longhorns, and I will teach you to be a fishers of men”? Anything but that! I don’t want to. I don’t want to do that.
Jesus had the freedom to walk along and call the disciples to a new life because he wasn’t clinging to anything in this world. Now, I don’t think Jesus is saying that we all need to be mendicants, itinerants with no home, moving from place to place. One of my favorite passages in the prophet Jeremiah has to do with building gardens in exile. It comes down to this: you can’t walk along if you’re clinging too tightly to your old self.
It’s like that Celebrity Jeopardy sketch where Tom Hanks is playing Tom Hanks, and he gets his hand stuck in a pickle jar. At first, Will Ferrell as Alex Trebek asks where the pickle jar even came from—I was confused by that part too. Then he says, “Just let go of the pickle.” And Tom Hanks says, “But I want a pickle.” His hand stays stuck in the jar because he refuses to let go of the pickle.
In all our lives, wherever we are on our journey with God, there are pickles we cling to that keep us stuck—because we just want a pickle. We think it’s fine. We just want a pickle, and we hold on to it. They’re sources of comfort. And sometimes those sources of comfort become ways of demonizing the people around us, seeing threats everywhere, so that we stay in the familiar. The point is not to live a reckless life, a foolhardy life. But neither should we cling so tightly to what we have and what we expect of ourselves that we end up trapped and stuck, denying the freedom God offers us.
When Jesus was walking along and came across you, what did he tell you to drop? What did he tell you to let go of? What is he telling you today to let go of, so that you can be free? This summer, this ordinary time—how can this be the freest moment of your life, in God’s love? How can you remember, more and more, that you are forgiven, that you are given life, that you are not your mistakes?
Take a step along the path of Jesus. Walk along. Free. And the great thing is, God doesn’t call us alone. God calls us together. We are together in this journey. We are together on this road. We each have our own pickles we’ve got to let go of. But the road gets us all back to where we need to go: into the heart of love, revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Let us go. Let us rise. Let us answer the call.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.