Brothers and sisters, when you get a chance, go into the nave where we worship, up into the first couple rows, and face the altar. Then turn to your left and look out the windows. What you will see there is a call story for us today. We have worked and planned and struggled and contributed for years, and now the North Wing is nearly built, nearly done. And all of us, in one way or another, have sacrificed time and treasure and evenings and weekends to build the North Wing. We have crammed more activity into already busy days, we have had meetings and pledge drives and votes and we are on the verge of success. The building is nearly done.

And now Jesus is calling us again, reminding us of what we lack. Jesus looks at us and loves us, we have done what was asked and now we lack only one thing. We need to turn back to God’s dream of the Kingdom of God, to gain strength and certainty and energy from God’s dream for that Kingdom, and we need to start again.

We don’t need to start from scratch. Indeed, because we have done what God asked we will have a wonderful new facility to do God’s work in. But now we need to fill that building with praise and life and love. We need to come back to God’s dream for us to get new heart and new hope and new goals. We need to come back to God as children and ask, “God, what do you want for us here? How are you at work among us? What do we lack?”

Is it teaching our children? Is it showing our young people and grown-ups how to live? Do you want drama ministry? Bible study? Outreach to the community? Music ministry? Yarn ministry? Story-telling? A men’s group?

We have been focused on doing the North Wing and doing it right. Like the young man, we have kept those commandments for years, to focus and to save and to build. And God has blessed those efforts with what you will see out those windows. And now comes the hard part. Now we have to look into our hearts and see what we lack.

What you can see out those windows are new opportunities for you to do the work God has saved you for, to live the dream that God created you for. The building is not the dream. The Kingdom of God is the dream. The building is a way of building the Kingdom of God.

In our focus on the North Wing, we can never lose track of God’s dream of inreach and outreach. Reaching into ourselves to give of our treasure and our time and our talents, reaching into ourselves to become the people God wants us to be. With new facilities come new expenses and we will need to dig deep to meet the bright and shiny new mortgage for this bright and shiny new facility. We will need to give of our time and our talents to make this a place full of worship and music and light. Come to worship, every week. Come to let the spirit of God into your life. When you’re not here, you are missed.

And we need to be reaching outside ourselves to invite new people to join us. We’ve had six baptisms in the past two weeks and I got a lovely note from one of the grandpas saying how friendly and welcoming the congregation was and I was so proud. We’ll be admitting another half-dozen wonderful families into our membership in a couple of weeks and more people are out there who need to hear Christ’s word of grace. These wonderful families mainly came by being invited by friends who are members here – don’t you want to be an evangelist? Don’t you want to save someone’s life?

The Gospel reading that begins this article is about a young man who needs to start over, but he can’t. It’s good news for us, a congregation that needs to start again, and can. And will. The good news is that with God, nothing is impossible. Nothing.

Pastor Greg