Be Extraordinary

The tag line for our current worship series is “Ordinary People - Extraordinary Lives.” The idea is that God calls and equips ordinary people like you and me to be extraordinary for God’s sake.

Sometimes I’m afraid the church sells itself short. We tend to let our ordinariness rule the day, and settle for “just fine” when God is really calling us to “amazing.” God operates in the cosmos of miracle and eternity and omnipotent, and much of the time we’re stuck in the muck of relevant and popular and trendy.

Imagine Mary, in all her ordinariness, called by God to give birth to the Son of the Most High, who would be great and inherit the throne of King David, ruling over a never ending kingdom … and what might have happened had her response been, “No thanks. Joseph and I are just fine here in Nazareth.”

The truth is, they were just fine. And they would have been just fine had God not called her to be the mother of Jesus. They would have remained just fine their whole lives, and even been quite comfortably content with Joseph carving and building, having a family, raising their kids.

To hear Christ’s call is to understand that there is more to life than “just fine.” To be a part of the church means you have a deep desire to be extraordinary, to connect to a power that is immense, to be a part of something that is bigger than you alone.

The paradox is, the church is extraordinary precisely in its inherent ordinariness. We are Mary, an ordinary young woman called to participate in a miracle. It is daunting. It is scary. It is humbling.

And yet it is who we are called to be. It is the church. Just us ordinary people, called to live extraordinary lives.