Wicker Park Lutheran Church
Vicar Sarah Freyermuth
June 7, 2026
Have you ever had one of those days where it feels like no one will leave you alone? You know the days I’m talking about, where you’re running from meeting to meeting and it feels like everyone needs something from you, and needs it right now! You’re getting bombarded with texts and calls and advertisements or people popping into your office asking for updates or maybe you’re a parent and little hands are constantly grabbing at you asking for more and more, even when you try to hide in the bathroom for a few moments to find some peace.
Well our Gospel today shows us that Jesus, too, had days like these. In just 14 verses, we hear that Jesus calls Matthew, he eats dinner with tax collectors and sinners, he’s questioned by the Pharisees and then teaches them, a leader tells Jesus that his daughter has just died and he needs Jesus to bring her back, a woman who has been hemorrhaging appears and touches Jesus’ cloak, Jesus tells her her faith has made her well, and then Jesus heals the leaders daughter while a crowd looks on and laughs in disbelief. Phew!
I can at least speak for myself and say that if I had been in Jesus’ spot, I would’ve wanted to hide in a dark room for a couple hours after a day like that. And yes – a day like what Jesus had in our Gospel sounds extreme, but the reality is that our world pushes many of us to live like this constantly. We live in a culture of grinding speed and overstimulation, in a country where many are forced to work multiple jobs to survive, in an economy that prioritizes efficiency over everything else.
Today we are celebrating Creation Sunday, and you might be thinking—wait what does any of this have to do with the earth? But perhaps you also see where I’m going here. Living at warp speed has enormous implications for our planet. It means that the earth is constantly being exploited to feed this ceaseless churn of consumption. It means that we are being pushed ever further into climate crisis by a culture that teaches us to value convenience over relationship, efficiency over care, and endless growth over the well-being of creation. And it means that we’ve become further disconnected from what this culture of consumption costs the earth and one another.
So when we read our Gospel lesson today, it’s tempting to imagine that Matthew and the other tax collectors Jesus is eating with are like the billionaire oil executives and the huge corporations who operate like a modern-day empire, whose policies bear responsibility for the climate crisis, who continually enrich themselves on the backs of society’s most vulnerable. After all, tax collectors in Jesus’ time were viewed as traitors within Jewish society, who worked for the Roman empire and actively profited off of others’ economic oppression. When we view this Gospel story like that, we can understand why the Pharisees felt such righteous judgment.
But I think a much more holistic interpretation of this story involves recognizing our own complicity. Because in our Gospel story, the tax collectors are not the Roman empire. No, the tax collectors are ordinary people stuck within the empire’s system, people who–even as they might have felt trapped within a system they didn’t control–still benefited from it at the expense of their neighbors.
And if we’re honest, when we think about the climate crisis globally, most of us living in the United States fall into the role of the tax collectors in this Gospel. We aren’t the Roman empire, we aren’t charting corporate policy or rolling back EPA admissions, and yet we still benefit from economic systems that rely on the environmental and economic oppression of the world’s most vulnerable. We buy cheap goods made through extractive supply chains and prioritize a convenience and an efficiency that comes with costs we often ignore–costs paid by communities living near data centers and refineries, costs paid by factory workers living half a world away, costs paid by those living in island nations whose shoreline disappears with each passing year.
Like Matthew, we are entangled in a system–a system we didn’t choose and yet still a system that we benefit from on the backs of others. And that reality can lead us to despair. But the good news in our Gospel today is that Jesus calls Matthew anyway. When Jesus sees Matthew, he doesn’t deny the harm of the system Matthew is a part of. But he also doesn’t reduce Matthew to that system. Jesus doesn’t say “Once you’ve untangled yourself completely, then you can come follow me.” Instead, Jesus looks at Matthew just as he is and says “Follow me.” Jesus looks at Matthew and all of us in our complicity and brokenness and begins not with shame but with an invitation, not with the expectation of perfection but with a call toward discipleship.
This is an incredibly important message for us as we face the climate crisis. Because I think so many of us feel stuck, caught between guilt and a sense of paralysis. We know that our lives are bound up in systems that do incredible harm to the earth and to the most vulnerable, and yet the crisis is so massive, so out of our own individual control that we don’t always know where to begin. It can become easier to look away or to numb out. And like the Pharisees in this story, there are many voices in our world that make us feel that if we cannot respond to the climate crisis perfectly, there’s no point in responding at all.
But Jesus still says to Matthew “follow me,” and shows Matthew a different way to respond to the systems he’s entangled in. He tells the Pharisees “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” And then he goes on to demonstrate that mercy again and again when, in the middle of a frenzied and hectic day, in the middle of that type of day so many of us have experienced, he doesn’t prioritize efficiency. Instead, he continues to stop. He stops to call Matthew. He stops to genuinely answer the Pharisees questions. He stops for a grieving father and heals his daughter, even while the crowd laughs in disbelief. He stops to acknowledge a woman’s faith when she touches the fringe of his cloak, even though the world would have considered her unclean and unworthy. In taking the time to notice and care for people the world would have set aside, Jesus is doing more here than simply offering individual support. He’s inviting Matthew and all of us into a radical reorientation of our values–away from a framework of efficiency and into a framework of mercy.
And perhaps that’s exactly the kind of reorientation we need to address climate change. There was a wonderful anthology that came out a couple years ago entitled “Not too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility.” And in it Mary Annaïse Heglar, an environmental author, writes about how people typically try to approach climate change by reproducing this framework of efficiency, with this idea that there is a “single, neat behavioral change” that will fix the climate crisis. She then writes, “There’s no such thing… Responding to this crisis is going to have to become part of who we are. All the time. Once you understand that, you understand that this isn’t about climate action at all. It’s about climate commitment. Climate action is recycling or voting or opting for a vegan meal. Climate commitment includes those singular actions, but is bigger still. It’s a framework. It’s asking yourself: “What can I do next?”
So then, what is next? How are we being called to embrace a framework of mercy in our approach to care for God’s creation? I think part of reorienting ourselves to this framework of mercy is recognizing that if there’s no one, efficient solution, then we deeply need one another. Heglar points out how harmful it can become when we think we have to do it all, do it on our own, and do it perfectly. Instead she writes, “Do what you’re good at… If you’re good at making noise, make all the noise you can. Go to climate strikes, call your representatives, organize your neighbors. Vote… Join something bigger than yourself because this is so much bigger than any of us alone… If you’re raising children, teach them to love the Earth and to love each other, teach them the resilience that shows up as empathy…” She then says, “ the artists I spoke to… lamented the fact that they weren’t engineers or scientists or some other type of “expert.” But, as I told them, it is not their job to design the policy plans for rapid decarbonization… We have people on that. As the writer Toni Cade Bambara once put it, the role of the artist is to “make revolution irresistible.” Make no mistake about it: overthrowing the fossil-fuel industry is nothing short of a revolution, a rebirth… We need a whole new world, and we, every single one of us, has a powerful role to play as a midwife in this rebirth.”
Heglar’s words help us understand that to create a whole new world, to overthrow this empire, we cannot reproduce its logic, its emphasis on certainty and efficiency. Instead, we are invited to face the climate crisis together, embracing a framework of mercy and commitment. Instead, we are invited to continue showing up, paying attention, and using our gifts to care for one another and for this world that God so loves.
Today, our Gospel invites us into a faith grounded in this framework of mercy, a faith that is perhaps best demonstrated in the man who, though his daughter was dead, still believed that Jesus could bring her to life. A faith that is best demonstrated by the woman who, though she had suffered for 12 years, though she had every reason to doubt, still trusted that if she reached for the hem of Christ’s cloak her entire world could be transformed. On this Creation Sunday, may we keep reaching, keep choosing mercy over efficiency or despair, and keep believing that this new world is possible. And then let us go out and join in God’s work of bringing it to life. Amen.