Text: Galatians 5:22-23; Luke 4:14-21
Speaker: Mark Rupp

As was already mentioned, the fruit of the Spirit that we are focusing on this morning is “faithfulness.” Faithfulness can be a slippery word. In our culture, it’s often reduced to religious belief or loyalty to a group. But in scripture, especially as Paul often uses it, faithfulness is closer to trust. A deep, ongoing trust in God’s work and God’s ways. Trust that doesn’t just live as a belief in the mind but is embodied. Faithfulness as trust shows up in how we walk, how we live, how we respond when the road gets rough.

So when we think about faithfulness, we ought to consider where we place our trust and with whom we walk this journey. Faithfulness cannot be reduced just to loyalty, as if our faith is merely in this or that congregation or the Mennonite Church as a whole. But when our churches and our denominations are at their best, they are about bringing people together to discern what it means to be faithful here and now, what it means to trust the Spirit of God who continues to grow fruit in us and anoint us for the work of the kin-dom. 

I’m thankful to be reflecting on faithfulness as I continue to reflect on the recent Mennonite Church USA national convention that I attended along with a handful of others from our congregation. Our faith is centered on Jesus not in the Mennonite Church, but these connections with folks who have similar values help us to consider how to best be faithful to Jesus. 

At the convention, we were invited to center ourselves around a deceptively simple call: “Follow Jesus.” This simple theme focused the worship services throughout the week and, in a general sense, guided the seminars, hymn sings, celebrations, and everything else we did. There are obviously a lot of different ways to take this simple theme of “Follow Jesus,” and with seminar topics ranging from “Reimagining Peacemaking through Poetry” to “Queering Our Anabaptist Archives,” (which are just two of the ones I attended) the convention explored the theme in a number of different ways.  

This call to “Follow Jesus” is one that resonates deeply with our Anabaptist-Mennonite heritage, a tradition shaped by the belief that Jesus’ teachings aren’t just interesting ideas but an actual way of life. It is a way of life we choose over and over again, not just in moments of clarity and joy, but also–and perhaps more importantly–in moments of confusion, hardship, and doubt. This convention celebrated the 500 year anniversary of Anabaptism by offering ways to look back on these histories of our denominational streams but also by asking us to look forward and consider how the Spirit is speaking to us in new ways today. 

Each worship service during the convention focused on a different portion of the passage from Luke read earlier and each speaker explored what it means to “Follow Jesus” through a slightly different lens. And so today, I want to reflect on my experience of the convention and explore what the fruit of faithfulness looks like through the lens of this passage and through the lens of our own Anabaptist-Mennonite stories, asking not just “What does it mean to believe in Jesus?” but “What does it mean to follow Jesus faithfully today?”

Luke tells us that Jesus returns to Galilee “in the power of the Spirit”. That line (“in the power of the Spirit”) is doing a lot of work. Because where has Jesus just been?

In the wilderness. Alone. Hungry. Tempted.

On the second night of worship at the convention, the speaker was Lerone A. Martin, the faculty director for the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University. For this service, Dr. Martin shared with us a sermon from MLK on the temptations of Jesus in the wilderness, which comes immediately before the Luke passage. Martin invited us to consider how King’s words help us think about faithfulness to Jesus and his mission by considering where Jesus has been, what he has come through, said no to, in order to arrive where he can boldly proclaim his mission, his yes to the kin-dom of God. 

Dr. Martin and Dr. King reminded us that Jesus was tempted by the devil to change course before his ministry even began. “Turn these stones into bread,” the tempter says, “if you’re really the Son of God.” In other words, feed yourself, prove yourself, take the shortcut. “Worship me,” the devil says, “and I’ll give you power and influence.” In other words, just compromise a little, and you’ll get so much more done. And finally: “Throw yourself off the temple. Make a scene! Get noticed!”

Jesus resists all of it. His faithfulness is not about spectacle or force or compromise. He rejects any method that betrays the mission. He chooses a slower, harder road. He chooses to trust the Spirit who led him into the wilderness to now lead him into ministry.

In order to understand where Jesus is going, we have to consider where he has been. For our passage today, that’s our starting point: faithfulness is resistance to the temptation to take the easy way out. Faithfulness is trusting in the sometimes slow work of God, knowing that the ends cannot justify the means by which we get there. 

In our Anabaptist story, early followers faced this very temptation. Stay quiet, play it safe, go along with the religious authorities. They could have done that. But they believed that to follow Jesus required costly decisions, even in the face of rejection. For them, and for us, faithfulness often means figuring out what we need to say “no” to in order to say “yes” to the Spirit’s work in us. 

So Jesus, fresh from the wilderness, steps into his hometown synagogue. He’s handed the scroll of Isaiah and reads words that will come to define everything that follows:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

In some ways, this is Jesus’ mission statement. Not just for one sermon, but for his entire ministry.

And this is the part we ought to remember: these words aren’t new. Jesus is quoting from the Hebrew Scriptures—from Isaiah 61. He’s not rejecting his tradition; he’s reclaiming it, remixing it, renewing it in the light of this new day. He’s showing what it looks like when the ancient wisdom of God is set free to breathe again. He’s saying, “This is the tradition rightly lived. This is what it means to be truly faithful.”

This is also what Mennonites have always tried to do. To go back to Jesus, not to discard tradition, but to renew it. To ask ourselves: What does it look like when the Church lives out the teachings of Christ, not just with our mouths, but with our hands and feet?

Faithfulness means aligning ourselves with Jesus’ mission: good news for the poor, liberation for the captive, healing for those pushed outside the community, freedom for the oppressed.

On the third night of worship services at convention, we were graced by a panel discussion from those who live and work with people with disabilities, including CMC’s own rockstar Sarah Werner. The three speakers invited us to consider what healing looks like through the lens of disabilities. Jesus reads from the scroll about “recovery of sight to the blind,” yet our faithfulness to this mission ought to be less about praying for miraculous healing and more about making sure that all people, regardless of specific abilities, are fully a part of our communities. Faithfulness means removing any barriers to full participation and being open to receiving the unique gifts that each person offers our communities. 

This panel discussion was a beautiful reminder of the ways we, like Jesus, take the words, the rituals, the liturgies of our tradition, and we listen for how the Spirit is calling us to breathe new life into them today. Each new season is an opportunity for new fruit of the Spirit to grow and nourish us once more. And sometimes the fruit of previous harvests must be allowed to compost, to break down but also to enrich future growth. 

Now, I cut off the reading for today at the point where Jesus makes his point and drops the mic, and if the story truly stopped here, we might think: what a powerful moment! Everyone in the synagogue surely applauded, right?

But many of us probably know that’s not how the story goes.

At first, yes, they are amazed. But then Jesus keeps talking. He reminds them that God’s love has always extended beyond their boundaries—to outsiders like the widow in Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian. Once again these are stories deeply embedded in the tradition that Jesus is bringing to new light. 

But that’s when the crowd turns. They become so enraged that they try to throw Jesus off a cliff.

Why? Because Jesus refuses to offer them a comfortable nationalism. He refuses to let them believe that their chosen status exempts them from the work of justice and compassion. He says, in essence: God’s good news is bigger than your tribe. And if you want to follow me, you have to let go of your control over where and to whom God’s Spirit flows.

During the final evening worship service, the speaker, Frank, identified only by his first name because of safety concerns, shared a heartfelt, honest, and emotional sermon where he spoke of the realities he is seeing on the ground in his home state of California. He told stories of the wildfires ripping through his community. He shared about how armed men in unmarked uniforms were detaining neighbors in the middle of the night. He was honest about his fears about an upcoming visit to his country of origin and whether he would be able to return. 

At a convention where worship services often featured flashy lights, beach balls being batted around, and lots of upbeat interpretations of what it means to “Follow Jesus,” Frank entered in and got real with us all. He stated plainly, “We live in a world built on the oppression of others, and there will be a confrontation [with the powers of evil].”

He invited us to consider not only where Jesus has been, not only what his mission is for the present, but to be real about considering where Jesus is going and whether we are ready to follow him. He stared down a hall filled with Mennonites and asked whether we would be willing to put our skin on the line to follow Jesus.

Faithfulness is costly.

It will cost us the illusion of safety. It may even cost us our reputation, or our belonging, or our privilege. And it will absolutely call us to action, not just belief.

That was true in Nazareth, and it’s true today. To follow Jesus is not just to agree with his ideas, it’s to have skin in the game. To risk something. To trust that walking in the way of Jesus, even when it’s difficult, is still the most faithful path.

So where does that leave us?

Faithfulness is not about repeating the right creeds or saying the right prayer to secure a spot in heaven. Faithfulness is trust. Trust in where the Spirit is leading today, in this moment. Trust in Jesus’ mission, which is still good news today for the poor, the oppressed, the captives, the brokenhearted. Faithfulness is trust in a vision that challenges us, stretches us, and calls us to live for something beyond ourselves.

Frank didn’t just leave us in this heavy spot; he ended his sermon with the reminder that we cannot be faithful alone. We need one another to lean on, to challenge us, to encourage, to stand alongside. Following Jesus is costly and scary, but we do not walk that path alone, and we walk it knowing that Christ walked it first and walks with us now in the Spirit of God. 

So may we, like Jesus, step into the power of the Spirit. May we hear the words of Isaiah and say, Yes, that’s our mission too. May we follow Jesus—not just with our ideas, but with our lives.

And may we, by God’s grace, bear the fruit of faithfulness, not as something we force, but something that grows when we trust deeply, walk humbly, and follow boldly.