“Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit. The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.” Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them.

So again Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and bandits, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved and will come in and go out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”

John 10:1-10

We were on vacation this past week down in Mexico, where my in-laws generously brought us to a resort. We had a wonderful time, I relaxed more than I usually ever do on vacations, read some books I had meant to read and ate things I didn’t mean to eat. If there was only one thing that I felt an uncomfortable disconnect with, it was the surreality that began in the Cancun airport, where the divide was instant: all the travelers were economically privileged Americans, and all the people who worked and lived there were not so. I’ve since learned that 12 million Americans visit there every year, a solid 3.4% of all Americans visit this one region of another country. Unfathomable. And here’s a triple negative for you: if you go, I don’t know how you can’t not think a little bit of the disparity and gap between you and the people there. It’s overwhelming, totally bifurcated everywhere we went, the vacationers to luxury and the workers serving it up.

I say none of that to be ungrateful for the vacation. I also say none of that to be condescending either, because truthfully, it wasn’t just a language or class barrier. When you are the universal customer in someone else’s home and workplace, you are cut off from each other’s entire authentic inner world. As we were in the white shuttle van driving down the desolate highway, undeveloped jungle between paradise, I would feel this awkward tension between me, sitting behind the driver’s seat, and the driver. We’d start up small talk, but it just felt forced. I thought, I have no idea what his life is really like, and I have no idea how to ask him in a way that’s not condescending. How would I begin to know what’s going on with him? And what if the person I’m talking to actually is doing better than I think? What if (with high likelihood) they’re doing better spiritually?

But this really struck me as a tiny tragedy, this distance that is always between us. We can’t totally close that distance with everybody, and probably can’t 1000% close it with anybody, even a spouse. Do you ever feel that too? Is this not part of our human condition? We can have all the social manners, grace, charisma, charm, banter, all that, but we can’t fully close the gap between each other. And often when we try, we do so in deformed ways—we use each other, we abuse each other, we take each other for granted, we impose our experience onto each other so that it feels like there’s no difference between us, but it’s just us being presumptive. Remember Covid-19? (Sorry to jog your memory.) What did we call the thing we all had to do? “Social distance.” If a preacher could ever find a silver lining from the pandemic, it’s that we all now have a shared metaphor for something that’s real all the time. In the pandemic, we had to keep physical distance, but we relationally keep a social distance from each other at all times.

So how, you may ask, does this have anything at all to do with our readings today, where we remember the Lord is our shepherd? Not only do we remember he is our shepherd, but in John’s gospel, Jesus tells us that he’s also the gate. What is that, and what does it have to do with awkward Mexican van rides?

When you think of Jesus as the shepherd leading you, what comes to your mind? What comes to your heart? Probably at least the emphases of Psalm 23—protection, provision, restoration, preparation. Thy rod and staff leading. Much less famously, but in the same register, 1 Peter calls him the shepherd as “guardian of your souls.” (1 Peter 2:25). These are all things that are real and important parts of his pastoral leadership of us. Far more than any human pastor, Jesus should be all of our pastors.

But because Christ likes his paradoxes, especially his paradoxes of relationships, he tells us he’s not just the shepherd, he’s also the gate. Come again, Jesus? If that’s your reaction, that was also the reaction of the group he was talking to: “Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them” (John 10:6). So he says again, twice, “I am the gate.” There were thieves and bandits, he tells us, but he is “the gate.” The thieves and bandits are those who we might think of as false messiahs, false shepherds, people who present themselves to sheep as a shepherd to earn their trust, only to lead them astray. On the one hand, Jesus is talking to us about his role as our path to God. He is the great Mediator (Heb 9:15), where “the only way to the Father is through me” (John 14:6), he’s our pastor leading us upward from earth. Probably few of us have ever been led by someone claiming to be Jesus, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been led by thieves and bandits. In fact, I suspect everyone in this room has been spiritually led by someone who we trusted, only to find out that they weren’t leading us or caring for us, they were there to devour.

But when Jesus talks about himself as the gate, it’s not just being saved upward, but also in the world, horizontally. The sheep “will come in and go out and find pasture” (John 10:9). Hear that freedom—“come in and go out” through the gate and find pasture, a place that will have lots of other sheep who also come and go through him as the gate. He’s not just the great Mediator with us and God, but with each other.

We don’t often talk about Jesus as the gate. There’s no famous psalms, “The Lord is my gate, I shall not latch.” And so to me this is an underrated part of how we think about what Christ can do for us in our lives as Christians: we pass through him. Every moment, and between each person, from freedom to freedom, we have the invitation to go through Christ.

This is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer talked about in his book Life Together, written about the underground seminary he led in Germany. In Christian community, he says, the goal is to go through Christ to one another rather than directly relate. Now this may seem counterintuitive; if we have distance between each other, don’t we want to directly relate? But, Bonhoeffer says, in so many of our worldly relationships, humans devour each other. We might be sheep, but we can be thieves and bandits on each other, wanting to use each other for our own ends, because of the predicament of sin. But when we go through Christ to get each other, he’s not just our mediator between us and God, he’s our mediator between each of us. We can come and go to each other’s pastures. Christ is the gate when we travel through him. As he wrote:

“Without Christ we should not know God and could not call upon him, nor come to him. But without Christ we would also not know our brother, nor could we come to him. The way is blocked by our own ego. Christ opened up the way to God and to our brother. Now Christians can live with one another in peace; they can love and serve one another; they can become one.”

We read a vignette from Acts earlier this morning that always reads as so utopian. If there’s anything anyone knows about utopias, it’s that they don’t exist; the word literally means “no place.” Here it is:

“All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.”

Acts 2:44-47a

Depending on who you are, this might sound more unbelievable than any miracle of Jesus. But they could do this because Christ was the gate. You can almost feel how thick the Holy Spirit’s presence was in those days. The way our society is structured, the incentives are for us to serve ourselves. Maybe this is how we manage the reality of sin on a mass scale, but it means we usually don’t go through Christ; we go through ourselves. But when we go through Christ to each other—using him as the gate—suddenly, we’re making sacrifices like the Good Shepherd. We can do things that would be impossible if we were only out for ourselves. This is life with the shepherd, the gate, and also him as one of the sheep with us, the perfect lamb sacrificed and spilled as our scapegoat. Let him lead you, guide you, dwell in you, and also draw you out into love.

So I’ve been sad that I couldn’t quite get there this past week in Mexico. I didn’t fully take the opportunity with our van driver, but I know there will always be more chances. Maybe you’ve missed those chances too, and maybe you can start with letting Christ simply be your gate to curiosity—sincere, curious love. Just silently go through Christ in that moment, what’s really going on with this person, Jesus? Who is this child of God in front of me? What is their life really like? Lord, how do you want me to show your love to this person?

This is yet another reason why it’s important that we pray for others, not just for ourselves. Every time we pray for people, we go through Christ to see them. When we do this while also holding onto all of who he was in his sacrificial love that died on the cross and his resurrection power that rose again, we aren’t just going through Jesus to feel more empathy for someone. We might ask for the promise in his resurrection to bring life to relationships that were broken and left for dead, to revive our mercy or theirs, or at least be at peace with what we can’t change. We might even start asking, how can I show the same sacrificial love as you did, Lord, to help them? Be careful though, or we might start selling things we don’t need to help people who do.

Something we heard about Marvin at his funeral really reminded me of my granddad: they took any opportunity they could to talk with strangers. And not just talk, joyfully converse, joke, be curious, question, it was just second-hand. Marvin’s son Jason said every 20-minute trip to the store took four hours. My dad has this too, but this instinct hasn’t fully developed for me yet. What I suspect about Marvin and what I can say about my granddad is something they would probably not say about themselves, and it was probably not something they did consciously all that often: they let Christ not only be the gate between them and God, but be the gate between them and every other person in the world. If we do likewise, we won’t always do it perfectly, because that’s impossible. But when we let Jesus be our shepherd and our gate, when we go through Christ, even in the simple ways, he’s not just showing us the path to God. He’s leading us on the path to one another. Pass on through him, for the Lord is your gate. Amen.

For more discussion on our readings this past week:

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Our Parasocial Bible Study #10 - Fourth Sunday of Easter

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8 days ago · 1 like · Joe Welker

Now on that same day two of Jesus’ disciples were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, and talking with each other about all these things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him. And he said to them, “What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?” They stood still, looking sad. Then one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answered him, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?” He asked them, “What things?” They replied, “The things about Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things took place. Moreover, some women of our group astounded us. They were at the tomb early this morning, and when they did not find his body there, they came back and told us that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive. Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said; but they did not see him.” Then he said to them, “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.

As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on. But they urged him strongly, saying, “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” So he went in to stay with them. When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem; and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. They were saying, “The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!” Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.

Luke 24:13-35

Our reading from Luke today on the road to Emmaus is a story that is about the mysterious risen Jesus and is itself a mystery. We have a disciple we’ve never met, Cleopas, and an unnamed friend. We have a road to a place that isn’t mentioned again in the Bible, a place archeologists haven’t precisely nailed down where it was, like a road to somewhere yet nowhere. If we were to try to reimagine the scene in our mind’s eye, we might visualize an arid desert road, dust, hills, and shrubs, but we can’t really see it either. And what could Cleopas and his friend see? Not much. They were, after all, clouded in grief. The confusion and disappointment had overwhelmed them. This wasn’t like a shocking sports upset, this was all they thought they knew to be true being upended. The mystery they were in wasn’t just quizzical or interesting, but a weight. Their hope was dead. The morning came but the soul was in the dark. The chance for redemption of Israel which they were so sure of had fallen apart. The Jesus they thought they knew was now mysterious again, a tragic mystery at that.

Jesus is so mysterious to them that Cleopas doesn’t even recognize him when he’s inches away from his face. So they end up trying to tell Jesus about himself. They are so close to him yet so far, followers yet still foreigners to his kingdom, and they even look at him like he’s an idiot or maybe a spy, “What do you mean you don’t know what’s happened in Jerusalem?” Then they receive the first-ever Christian Bible study in history with the best possible teacher they could have had. And they still don’t get it. Maybe their grief is too heavy.

But maybe because they had been listening to Jesus for some time in the years leading up to the cross, and because there was just enough of the Holy Spirit nudging them, and because while they didn’t know why their hearts were burning, they extended hospitality to the stranger. “Come, stay with us, it’s getting late.” And as Luke describes in words we often say before Communion, “When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him.” (Luke 24:30-31). But then Scripture says a part we often leave out of the Lord’s Supper liturgy: “and he vanished from their sight.” (Luke 24:31)

About ten days ago I had an experience of walking down a road, you’ve probably had one like it before. It was right after our last snowfall, in what might be the last walk through snowy silence of the year. I was a couple miles from the house going towards Shadow Lake on a barely traversible road, and I see this figure from hundreds of yards away, completely still. Dark legs, a thick torso, and two big ol’ ears, a doe standing smack in the middle of the road, frozen and staring at me. I freeze too. Silence. I move one boot at a time. She turns askew, showing off her white tail. Then in three skips, swish swish swish, she flits off into the woods. I follow her tracks down the road, thinking maybe I could catch a glimpse again, but nope. Gone. Nothing more miraculous than a Wednesday in Vermont. But like Cleopas and his friend on their journey, I felt like I was in touch with something comprehensible and mysterious, the sacred beyond my control. A creature that could die, even be hunted, yet was part of a creation that is an ambassador of something utterly timeless.

On our pilgrim roads, Christ is like a deer in the snowy woods: present but elusive, vulnerable yet immortal. Like the disciples, we think we understand Jesus and history, but we really don’t. The second we think we do, if we invite Jesus in with us, he will show us a new part of the mystery, then just as we get a glimpse, he’s gone. We wonder again as the disciples did on the road, who was this Jesus, and what is he up to? And because he is so mysterious, for generations Christians have wondered, should we focus more on who he is or what he does?

This is one of the crucial debates within the last century of Protestantism, that some will frame as a rivalry, a choice we need to make between whether our Christianity is a “religion about Jesus” or the “religion of Jesus.” Some say too much of Christian history has made Christianity “about” Jesus, focusing on worshiping him and who he was as God’s son and our savior. And therefore, some argue, Christianity emphasizes too much about getting the correct beliefs. Instead, the argument goes, Christianity was always meant to be the religion “of” Jesus, focusing on what he did in caring for the less fortunate, loving our neighbors, and so on. I’m sure this resonates with some of us: “Shouldn’t we just get on to doing what he did?”

I think there is some truth to the idea that sometimes our Christianity only focuses too much on one or the other. We might spend so much time learning about Jesus and worshipping him that we forget a way we glorify him is in living lives of service to others, giving generously, sacrificing ourselves for the greater good. But trying to create a rivalry between whether we focus on “who Jesus was” or “what Jesus did” is misguided. We see here on the mysterious road to Emmaus that we can’t separate learning about Jesus and worshiping him and trying to do as he teaches us. I was joking earlier about the “first ever Bible study,” but if we’re going to talk about what Jesus does and follow what he does, here is using Scripture to teach his followers about himself. Throughout his ministry, the gospels tell us how he was interpreting the Law in a way that emphasized a circumcision of the heart (Deut 10:16) to love our neighbors while also teaching how the prophets foretold who he was. In other words, the religion “of” Jesus is at least partially the religion “about” Jesus.

The historian Tom Holland observed that one of the things that made Judaism and then, in turn, Christianity stand out among Roman society was that the Romans separated their sacrificial religions to gods from their elite philosophical discussions. Common people made sacrifices and worshipped their gods to gain their favor, while intellectuals debated the nature of the universe and spiritual life. “What you did” and “how you thought” were separate. But in Judaism and Christianity, ordinary people of all kinds would meet together every week to read Scripture together and discuss theology, while also worshipping God and serving their neighbors. To Jesus, none of these were isolated, but interwoven. Our religious tradition is not just doing, not just thinking, not just worshipping, but a whole way of living with transformed hearts that harmonizes mind, body, and soul.

It reminds me of why I almost don’t like the terms “Bible Study” and “Sunday School.” These aren’t pictures of a full immersion into the Word. Plus, most people don’t get thrilled at the idea of school or study. It sounds like work! Yes, it sometimes takes effort and learning (and I’m not going to try and come up with a better name for Bible study or Sunday school). But pay attention again to all that happens to Cleopas and his friend: they meet Jesus on the road before they knew who he was. Then Jesus, not them, opened up the Scripture they thought they knew. Their hearts were burning. So they invite him in, and they feast together. So if I had one wish today, it would be for anyone who doesn’t read the Bible because it feels like homework to instead believe what can happen when Christ illuminates the Word: it leaves you with a burning heart. It’s not simply “school,” it’s Jesus upending something you thought you knew that leaves your faith a little more renewed and your eyes opened yet again that you may live transformed, doing as he did.

On the road to Emmaus, Jesus is not separating who he is from what he does. Because once we know who he is, that gives us the reason to pay serious attention to what he does. That’s why he begins his ministry in Luke in the synagogue, proclaiming audaciously from Isaiah, “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 set free those who are oppressed.” (Luke 4:18). He’s the Lord anointed, the Messiah; that’s who he is. So pay attention! And what does the Messiah do? He sets free the captives of every slavery; that’s what God does. Pay attention.

But Cleopas and his friend aren’t fully there yet. They’re figuring out who Jesus is and what he does in real time, the earliest image of the church that still knows less than we think we know. But they’re still church. Because church is a pilgrimage from the place we know to the place we don’t, journeying from the events and the history we think we understand (but that only God really understands) into the unknown. So don’t read the Bible like you’re in a classroom, but like you’re on the road. Read it as a pilgrim trying to find the map while walking the territory and saying, “Jesus, this doesn’t make sense, show me more.”

The religion “of” Jesus is not just breaking bread with neighbors, but learning about Jesus being God. But the religion “about” Jesus is not just that he’s God, but that God breaks bread and prepares a table in the presence of his enemies. The question is not whether we take or leave the opinions of a popular wise man, but if we believe that God himself came to dwell among us. If we do, listen to what he told us about what it means to live in love, to forgive as we have been forgiven, and to give generously of ourselves to anyone who needs it.

For he’s not just God among us, he’s God within you. This is not so that we can live quietly enlightened in our living rooms, but so that all rooms in this beautiful but broken world become living rooms. You cannot know about Jesus in your heart for too long before he starts to shape you, re-forming you in his Spirit, and bringing you back to the life of the world in charity and service, truth and love, witnessing to persecution and enduring suffering, giving of yourself but no longer by yourself, but within him, all of us with each other: communion.

And so he breaks bread with us. It’s not just what he does, but also who he is—Jesus is the bread that is broken for us in the presence of our enemies. We know him in the breaking. He is God opening himself up to offer himself to we who are estranged to him and estranged from each other. It’s who he is and what he does, what he calls us to be and what he calls us to do: beloved children of the most-high God, redeemed sinners sharing in the love of God with other redeemed sinners. We may not fully know him until the moment we do as he did. Is your heart not burning?

For more discussion of this week’s readings:

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Our Parasocial Bible Study #9 - Third Sunday of Easter

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15 days ago · 1 like · Joe Welker

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors were locked where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

John 20:19-31

I don’t like calling him Doubting Thomas. Does he deserve the name? Maybe so; he already saw Jesus raise Lazarus, which must have been the most insane thing he’d ever seen with his own two eyes, and in hearing about the risen Jesus, still his reservations.

But he had seen Lazarus raised with his own two eyes. In the week after Easter, other disciples got to see Jesus, but Thomas hadn’t. I mean, seeing one resurrection in your life is already a lot. Seeing two? What are the odds? Call him Doubting if you want, that just sounds like Rational and Reasonable and Discerning Thomas.

But I also like what Scripture gives us as his name, Thomas Didymus, or, “the twin.” As some have pointed out,1 this means Thomas was an identical twin, and as such, he was familiar with mixed-up identity. This was a real and recurring enough problem in history that it eventually became the basis of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors (which a Dartmouth College group toured here last year). So when all of Thomas’ friends insist Jesus, the woulda-coulda-shoulda-been Messiah, had risen, Thomas may not have only doubted because the impossible had happened again. Thomas probably thought the disciples had a case of mistaken identity.

Even worse, Thomas might have thought there was now an impersonator of Jesus roaming around. Thomas’ reservations aren’t just about his disbelief in Jesus, but his self-protection from scam artists. Thomas is really asking, “Is that Christ you saw, or is it just an imposter? Show me the scars.”

Forget mixing up twins, that problem—is it Jesus or is it an imposter—has been with us since the early Church. As Jesus would tell his disciples, “For many shall come in my name, saying, I am the Christ; and shall lead many astray.” (Matt 24:5) For any new people who come into our church or any church, you should check, “Is Christ here, or is it just an imposter?” Perhaps we should be as careful and discerning as Discerning Thomas.

But while critical discernment is a gift from God, and Jesus meets Thomas in his critical discernment, once Thomas is gobsmacked by awe, “My Lord and my God,” Jesus says a line that many Christians have wrestled with over the years: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” This has raised the question for generations of faithful: is it good for our faith to use our critical thinking or not? We Presbyterians have historically loved education and the “life of the mind.” Are we mistaken? And what about the imposter problem?

Complicating matters further is that not all beliefs are made equal. One of Christ’s roles is to be our great Mediator, the go-between us and God. But the problem, as the Reformers saw, is that we have too many mediators with our mediator. Too many things act as middlemen between us and Jesus. Our idea of Jesus is shaped by our culture, upbringing, class, and many other biases, and then we package them all together with Christ. Even Thomas, like all of the disciples, had a particular idea of Jesus shaped by his time. It was as direct an experience of Jesus as you can get to walk among him, yet his idea of Jesus was still not fully developed, still shaped by being a working-class first-century religiously devout man from Judea.

Sometimes, these things between us and Jesus may actually help us reconnect with Christ, like a great friend who also loves Jesus and invites you to church, or a gospel song that lifts you up, or a book that helps you rediscover and make sense of The Book here on the pulpit. But you know how a barnacle gets attached to a whale? And sometimes many, many barnacles wrap themselves onto a whale over its life? Imagine if you thought the barnacle was the whale. That’s what we can do with Jesus. Just as the disciples were, most of us were originally interested in Jesus for a reason other than Jesus himself, or at least, for a version of Jesus mediated by something else.

What do we wrap up on Jesus? For me, sometimes it’s been having the perfect theology, the correct opinions, the enlightened view of the world, and if you are cursed enough to have that, you don’t become an evangelist for Jesus, you become an evangelist for “look at how right I am.” But maybe that’s not you. For some of us, we might wrap a specific church around Jesus, a type of worship service, a favorite pastor, or even just a style of music; maybe it’s unclear whether we believe in Jesus or four-part harmony bluegrass. Again, these can all be great things that God works through. But we can still mix up Jesus and God with these human vehicles.

Another problem is that these vehicles break down. What happens if you come to God through your family and then your family hurts you? What happens if you come to God through a church, and you equate the church with God, and then the church abuses you? Or what happens, as it did for the twelve, if your Messiah dies before the revolution starts? Of course we would have doubts about whether Jesus was real. Like Thomas, we also didn’t see the risen Lord directly in front of us. To respond with discernment and skepticism in any of these cases is natural. And we should use what we know from history, sociology, psychology, and more of our rational faculties to tell a barnacle from Jesus.

Yet eventually, trying to understand Jesus through those human academic vehicles will fail too. You may have (and you may yet) walk through many other failures of people and ideas and things you’ve been attaching to Jesus without even realizing it. An understanding of Scripture, a theology, and most often, other Christians. These will all, on some level and at some point, fail. What is our hope? Can we fix it with better theology, a new interpretive understanding, a new program? These may not be bad. But they aren’t what saves us. What if I suddenly became a world-class preacher? Sorry, though it may make your Sundays better. What if we discerned even harder in the “life of the mind”? No, this does not save us either.

Most Vermonters know margarine is not really a substitute for butter. There is also no substitute for the only thing that can actually jump the gulf between Jesus and us: faith. True faith, a gift from God, received in the heart, mind, and soul, which lets Jesus transform your life.

And faith is a grace, a gift, not a work. When we hear this story, we might think Jesus is admonishing Thomas, as if Thomas just wished harder, he would be a better person. But one of the mysteries (and frankly frustrations) of faith is that it doesn’t come from us. “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” (Eph 2:8) It’s grace all the way down from Christ. When we remember faith is a gift, I hear Jesus less rebuking Thomas than giving a loving ribbing from a friend, “So now you believe, huh? Blessed are those who don’t need to see.” It’s less “favored are you” and more “genuinely, you are fortunate if you don’t need to see the wounds.” Blessed are those who already have the gift of faith in Christ.

If doubt keeps us from God, underneath doubt are true gifts of discernment that are from God. Thank God that we have enough critical thinking and skepticism to keep us from cults and idols. I personally know how they wreck lives. But the gift of reason and discernment that God gave us to keep us safe will also break down, like all human vehicles, if we try to drive ourselves in them across the bridge to God. The gift of discernment was Thomas’ vehicle for knowing God and protecting him from an imposter. But it also broke down when Jesus actually was risen and was in front of him. Jesus sees this and doesn’t wait for Thomas. When he sees Thomas in his broken-down car of skepticism, Jesus stops and helps him on the side of the road. Thomas couldn’t save himself from his own doubt. Jesus did.

Faith is not something we can just produce in an AI chat. We can’t just manufacture faith, for it comes from God. It’s also why it is pointless to think of ourselves as better than anyone for having faith. This is not our own doing. If we are blessed to believe, this is one of the greatest gifts we could possibly have—a real, living, authentically true connection to the real, living, authentically true Jesus Christ.

But we still have a big problem: how do we know we have faith in the real Jesus, and not just an imposter in Jesus’ clothes?

Thomas said, “I need to see the scars. I need to see the wounds.” And I think that was the right question to ask. Because that’s how you know. In case you forgot what we heard a week ago, God bleeds with you. The same forces that oppress you oppress our Lord. The same things that bear down on the world bore down on Christ and bore into his skin. If you doubt whether you are dealing with Jesus Christ or an imposter, look into your own wounds. Look into your own pain. I promise you Christ is there.

If you’re ever asking yourself, “Is this church really Jesus, or just an imposter? Is this movement that calls itself Christian really Christian, or an imposter?” Test them: show me the wounds. If a church, movement, thing, or whatever it is is not able to show you the wounds, or worse, protects itself from the wounds that it causes, that’s how you know it is not God, but an imposter. If something claims Christ but can’t deal with wounds and can’t show you the scars and doesn’t care if it gives you more scars, it needs the real Jesus. And if we protect ourselves when we cause wounds, we need to repent of our barnacles and turn back to the real Jesus.

When Thomas finally placed his hands in the wounds, it was undeniable. He knew. “My Lord and my God!” You are blessed if you do not need to see the wounds. But Jesus doesn’t want your doubt to keep you from him. When you don’t have faith, his grace will move to you first. Instead, he will use the gifts underneath our doubt—our skepticism, our guardedness, our reason—bringing them into his arms of belief, so that they can be used in service of life-giving faith. These are gifts not to keep for ourselves, but to help any of our neighbors who need it.

God told us in two beams of bloodied wood that there is nothing he can’t use towards the flourishing of life. When all the barnacles we’ve attached to Jesus fall off, and when the impostors expose themselves—and it’s often us who are exposed as impostors—Jesus will always be there, drawing our hands to his scars and placing his hands on ours. May you then believe. Amen.

After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. And suddenly there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow. For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men. But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.’ This is my message for you.” So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”

Matthew 28:1-10

Maybe it’s hard to believe, but this was a morning of low expectations. They were so low that almost nobody was there. The wisest religious leaders of their time weren’t there. The elders and scribes weren’t there. Jesus’ twelve closest male disciples weren’t there, no gurus, no influencers, nobody who would have had a podcast in their society was there. If you were trying to make up a story to make the halls of power care about your Messiah, nobody was there that could have helped make the story go viral. The only people who showed up were women who loved Jesus.

We don’t know why they were there; they probably didn’t know why they were there. Maybe you don’t know why you’re here. Something in them that morning just needed to see the tomb. Maybe, at best, a small voice in them was wondering, well, he did raise Lazarus. He did mention a resurrection. He did say something about his body being raised up. But….no, that is insane. That cannot happen. That does not happen. Tombs are for dead men and spices, and it’s already got a dead man, so let’s bring some spices.

And then it got weird. Everything was shaking as if the foundation of the universe had been broken apart. Some dude in a blazing white-hot tunic freaked out the guards. They pass out. And this angel in white didn’t have a ton to say—he was not super into explaining himself—but he said one thing they could not forget: “Fear not. He’s not here. He is risen. Tell your friends. You will see him in Galilee.” Immediately they are overcome with fear and joy, awe and wonder, and then, before they get two steps down the road, there is Jesus, really him, alive. “Fear not! Tell my friends. You will see me in Galilee.”

Now hold up. Galilee. Why Galilee? What is that? Is that just where the party is? It wasn’t just where this unlikely Messiah called home. It was the place of no place. The hinterlands. Really, we here in the Northeast Kingdom are probably the Galilee for our own state and country. What would be our Galilee in Craftsbury, maybe Wolcott—the place you go through to get from home to the rest of the world.

But if Jesus walked out of the tomb on Whetstone Brook Road, he’s not going to the Genny, to the Academy, or to the Outdoor Center, he’s telling us, “Meet me in the place the world forgets about.” Jesus is saying, “This resurrection is not for us here in our bubble. This gift of life is for everybody. This is not just about us. This is a world reclamation project. I am bringing everybody home.”

When Jesus says two seconds after having risen, “I’m going ahead of you to Galilee,” he is saying he is going back to the outsiders to bring this message to them—not to Jerusalem and the religious people who just got the state to execute him. But God is going to weave in the people you forgot about into God’s story. Because all who suffer, all who are oppressed, all who are put under the heel, everybody’s pain, everybody’s sin and everybody’s suffering can all be woven together into God’s story.

He didn’t go to the people who thought they were already found and didn’t need saving. Those people didn’t choose him. We didn’t choose him. We still don’t choose him when we mistreat a neighbor, when we ignore the Galilees of our time, the forgotten places, the places and people we think nothing holy can come from. We still don’t choose him anytime we wield the threat of death for power. We still don’t choose him when we think in “us and them,” which never goes out of fashion.

This resurrection morning is not just about going to heaven when your body dies. To be sure, he rose for you and your one life. But when he rose up out of that grave, God was not rising up out of the grave for one life or one people. He wasn’t rising out of the grave for just part of humanity. I mean, if you’re going to upend the very fabric of the physical laws of the universe, you’re not going to do that for just one people. He chooses all people. The whole reason God comes through one people Israel is because the story of Israel was never meant to be for just itself. God’s people are supposed to live for the world, to be a priestly nation, and to help other people understand God. We’re still called to that, now as the priesthood of all believers. There is no “us and them,” we’re us. He chose himself for the cross instead of us and our death, and he chooses all of us in the new life.

He is choosing you despite whatever you’ve done and whatever hell and death you face. The resurrection didn’t come when it was already light, but when it was dark, and there is no darkness his resurrection cannot work in. I’ve seen it, and I know you’ve seen it.

There’s a Vermont band many of us know called Phish. They’ve been my favorite band since I was 16, and the first thing I ever learned about Vermont was that Phish was from there (make of that what you will). Trey Anastasio was the lead guitarist, a musical genius, one of the best guitarists who has ever played the instrument. Phish had become a giant cultural phenomenon, as big as Ben and Jerry’s, but eventually, it collapsed under the weight of drug addiction, ego, and darkness. In 2004, after their last concert ended in a muddy disaster in Coventry, the band was over, done, dead.

A few years go by, and the guitarist Trey is arrested in upstate New York on drug charges. Later, he would say the officer saved his life that night. But he still had a long road to walk. He goes to drug court, gets convicted, and ends up going from being a rockstar to brushing toilets at the New York state fairgrounds. He starts his recovery, and if you’ve ever gone through it as I have, one of the worst things is not knowing what it means to be just normally alive. For Trey, if you listened to him in this period, it almost sounds like he had forgotten how to play sober, this instrument that he had mastered, but seemingly couldn’t access it without numbing himself, and all his fans could hear it. Any musician could understand what prison that would be.

So while he is still serving his sentence, Trey couldn’t leave New York state, but his friend Dave Matthews happened to be playing in Saratoga Springs, New York. What happened is capture in one of my favorite YouTube videos (from the Ice Age of YouTube) on an old, choppy, grainy video from this 2007 concert. It shows the moment where Trey’s friend invites him to play a song called “Lie In Our Graves.” It’s the first time Trey had been on stage since getting sober. And when his fans watch the start of it, knowing what Trey was capable of as a player at the peak of his powers, it’s almost heartbreaking. He is barely expressing himself on the instrument. He doesn’t look confident, and I wonder if he felt embarrassed at how many people knew what he was going through.

But his friends on stage with him trust him. They let him breathe. And he keeps playing. And it’s like you can see him getting his chops back in real time, the light coming back into his eyes. He starts to believe in himself, and the crowd starts believing in him, and he feels the crowd believe in him. It’s like seeing a man come back to life before your eyes. The jam builds and builds into this triumphant roar before quieting back into stillness. The video cuts out, but anyone who knows the song knows the words that come next: “I can’t believe that we would lie in our graves wondering if we had spent our living days well. I can’t believe that we would lie in our graves dreaming of things that we might have been.”

In the end, Trey got his band back. Twenty years of sobriety and more than 600 shows later (which I’ve seen about 5% of, I did the math), he’s opened a rehab facility, Divided Sky in Ludlow, and inspired tons of people like myself to get and stay sober and to know that resurrection is not naive, but real. He did not lie in his grave. By the grace of God’s resurrection power, he wove in the pain of the soul that was left for dead into a more beautiful life lived for others than he could ever have imagined in the darkness.

But let me be clear, too, that while this story shows what resurrection power looks like as common grace for any of us, I believe there is something weirder going on. Don’t believe me, believe the women who loved Jesus. Believe his friends who would eventually find him in Galilee, with the outsiders, bringing good news to the poor, to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free. And that good news is not just that God loves you. It’s not just that seasons come and go and hope springs eternal. The good news is that death is dead.

Jesus told his friend Lazarus what he tells all of us: get up, for in me you will not lie in that grave, and you will not wonder if you lived well. For the one who chose you said, “I am the resurrection and the life.” He is for all of us. Praise be to God. Alleluia! Amen.

And Jesus told them many things in parables, saying: “Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on a path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched, and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. If you have ears, hear!”

“When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path. As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy, yet such a person has no root but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away. As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of this age and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.”

Matthew 13:3-9, 19-23

Today, on Holy Saturday, our gospel reading is not about Jesus’ death, nor rolled-away stones or angels in white—for that you’ll have to come back tomrrow. Today, rather than his death, we hear one of the great teachings from Jesus’ life, the Parable of the Sower. It’s one of those teachings of Jesus that stuck with his disciples. You can imagine on that Holy Saturday, one of them might have shared it as they traded their favorite stories and sayings from Jesus, not knowing what was ahead. If Jesus were around today, he might have started the Parable of the Sower off with, “There once was a farmer in the northern hills of Vermont…” And today we are, indeed, remembering the Parable of the Farmer; the Parable of Marvin Rowell.

I’m not here to tell you anything about this farmer that you don’t already know. If Georgette wanted one wish for today, it was one word: that it be “dignified”! And I don’t think Marvin would find it dignified for the preacher to focus too much on him in a traditional Presbyterian memorial service homily. After all, this is a farmer who did not work on Sabbaths, who loved singing in the choir and helping however he could, and who respected and loved and trusted the church enough to have his only real wish for his service be that the preacher pick the Scripture (I always said he was a wise man, wise beyond his 95 years).

So yes, I did pick the Parable of the Sower. And if I’m going to preach it faithfully, I must tell you that Marvin is not the star of this story. He’s not the sower, in fact, he’s not the farmer in his own story. Jesus tells his disciples plainly that the seed is the word of God. The only true farmer who can truly sow the Word is not you, not me, or our dear brother Marvin, but Jesus Christ.

No, in the beautiful, incredible story of God, it’s hard to believe, but spiritually speaking, Marvin wasn’t a farmer at all. He was great, rich soil. As Jesus describes, the good soil is that in which the Word took root and bore fruit. Good soil doesn’t produce just a random crop, an independent man standing firm on his own wisdom and prosperity by himself. He came from somewhere; from good soil he came and good soil he has returned. The fruit of that soil was not one great life. The fruit of the soil is all around you in this community, this wonderful, complicated, but beautiful family that Marvin was one part of, along with all the other good soil that y’all came from. This here is what it looks like when some ordinary people from Northern Vermont don’t choke the Word out with thorns or let it get scorched. This is what happens when you don’t let the Word die. And by the grace of God, the church should be and can be a field where good soil is revived by the true farmer of God.

I know it hasn’t always worked out that way. I know a bunch of you have complicated relationships with Christianity. I mean, you think I don’t? How did you think I ended up here? Because I figured out Jesus better than anyone? Because I’m so smart? No, I’m so dumb that I went years letting Christianity keep me away from Jesus. But Jesus was way more concerned about the Pharisees and religious elites giving the wrong idea of the faith with the living God they thought they were protecting, when really they were just protecting their pride. The Pharisees were keeping people from seeing that God was not on a purity project, but a gathering project, a search and rescue mission, and you don’t have to do the searching, you just have to let yourself be found.

Speaking for myself, I’m only here by the grace of God, and I mean that—I have no idea how I got here. Ten years ago I’m in Los Angeles in a drum circle on Venice Beach and the next thing I know I wake up and I’m talking to a bunch of Vermont farmers and their descendants about God. Don’t ask me how. I mean, I can tell you the story of what happened, the events that took place, but I can’t really tell you anything I did to make it happen. Over time, God just walked me back. And everything has been better since I started walking. I don’t know how he has worked or will work in your life, despite of or because of the Church. I just know all the love that’s here in this room, the love in these pews, the love in this building from generations, this is all living proof that there is more good soil from where Marvin came.

And what does Jesus say makes good soil? He “hears the Word and understands it,” which makes him “bear fruit and yield it.” (Matt 13:23). In other words, the good soil is not alone by itself. It receives living water. It bears more and more life of itself. And it knows it needs the farmer. The farmer who, as Psalm 65 tells us, “You visit the earth and water it, you greatly enrich it; the river of God is full of water; you provide the people with grain, for so you have prepared it. You water its furrows abundantly, settling its ridges, softening it with showers, and blessing its growth. You crown the year with your bounty; your wagon tracks overflow with richness. The pastures of the wilderness overflow; the hills gird themselves with joy; the meadows clothe themselves with flocks; the valleys deck themselves with grain; they shout and sing together for joy.” (Ps 65:9-13) The good soil is good because it knows God is always, always, always providing for us.

If you’re like me when I was in between smacks on the drum canvas on the beach, you might be surprised to hear some news: your life is not about you. Even your spiritual journey, your enlightenment, your self-discovery…is not about you. If you want a secret ingredient of good soil, that is it. If we were to get inside the head of bad soil—stick with me here—but if bad soil could talk, it would probably say, “I have all I need on my own. Sure, I’ve got my clumps and my clods, but ain’t nobody telling me what to do.” But good soil knows it has a greater purpose beyond itself. Good soil knows the Word when it encounters it. Good soil and a good life knows that your life is not your own. And this is so far from bad news.

Up above you all is one of the best parts of this church, and only the preacher usually gets to see it. It’s the three crosses on Calvary, the place where Jesus was crucified, an important image of this weekend. As the story goes, there were two violent robbers next to Jesus. After mocking Jesus at first, laughing at this supposed powerful man who was looking just as weak as they were, one of the men finally relents. He realizes he has nothing to live for—it’s over. The kind of mindset that becomes a murderer tends to think that you are above the law, above other people, that you can do as you will because you’re the one in charge of yourself. But here, in his last hour, he finally realizes that it’s done. His life is not in his hands as he thought. And he knows he deserves his fate, and Jesus doesn’t. So he says, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.” (Luke 23:43)

That was it. He realized that his life was not his own. He was not in charge of his fate, but like good soil, he knew Life even when it was dying next to him. And that was all the criteria, not himself, his spiritual genius, his good or bad deeds, but Christ’s mercy and invitation. That’s all it is for any of us. You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to even be particularly good to be good soil. You don’t have to come knowing theology from a wheelbarrow. He just wants you to come.

Alistair Begg once talked about that thief on the cross. Imagine, Begg said, if the man had gotten to heaven and the angel said, “What are you doing here?” And the man said, “I don’t know.” “What do you mean you don’t know?” “Well cause I don’t know!” The angel, confused, says, “Excuse me, let me get my supervisor.” The angel supervisor comes, “So…are you clear on the doctrine of justification by faith?” Guy says, “Never heard of it.” On and on the tests go, until finally the angel asks, “On what basis are you here?” And he says, “The man on the middle cross said I could come.”

Beloved, the parable of the farmer isn’t about the farmer at all. It’s the farmer who knew his life wasn’t about himself. His life was about the man on the middle cross. And he says you can come. Amen.

His whole ministry, Jesus had been trying to help his friends understand the kingdom of heaven. Once, Jesus said it was like an invitation to a wedding feast. The privileged few who first got the king’s invitation did not want to come. Thinking they were perhaps confused, he clarified: you’re invited to a meal with delicious meat, oxen and fatted cattle—it was all ready! Come, eat, drink. But it was strange: those invited ignored the feast before them. They were too busy with work, marriage, and excuses. Some even mistreated the king’s servants.

So, Jesus says, in the kingdom of heaven, the king has taken another approach. He had his servants “go out into the streets and “bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame,” (Luke 14:21), “go out into the streets and [gather] all the people [you can] find, the bad as well as the good” (Matt 22:10). Come, eat, drink, be full.

The Passover was a night of remembrance, and tonight, we remember another banquet. Tonight we remember when our Lord gathered his friends at his table in the upper room for a Passover meal. They were the bad and the good, the financially poor and spiritually blind. Tonight we are gathered in the upper room of our church building, and we are all invited again to his table.

He invites us knowing that we will betray him, just as he knew his friends would. And they all would—one betrayal by a kiss, one betrayal by a lie, and the others betraying through abandonment. We know he said, “One of you will betray me, the one who has dipped his hand into the bowl with me.” But in the rituals of the Passover meal, they all had dipped their hand in the bowl. So yes, while Judas had a particular infamous betrayal, it was not long after the echoes of “Surely not I?” died down that Jesus said actually, you will all fall away from me. And if we say, “Surely not I,” we would be just as mistaken.

But we would be even more sorely mistaken—so badly, badly missing out on the wonderful banquet before us, the wedding between Christ and his church—if we think that just because we betray and fall away from Christ that it disqualifies us from his table. At this same meal, the gospel of John tells us, Jesus says the disciples are no longer servants, rather, “I have called you friends…you did not choose me, but I chose you.” (John 15:15-16) Hear his words again, in the midst of what he knew would happen: “You did not choose me, but I chose you.”

Time and again tonight, we will see many of the ways and things we choose instead of Christ. We will see how we choose violence, choose the crowd, choose mockery, choose lies, choose sin, and choose ourselves over Christ. We did not choose him. He still chose us. He still chooses you today.

There is only one place he didn’t choose you that we also remember. He did not choose for you to be on the cross. On the wooden beams outside the city, he chose himself to die instead of you, to be the Lamb on this Passover night. The Passover was the remembrance of the deliverance from slavery, but now the Lord is delivering us from the slavery from which all other slaveries draw their power: death. In Egypt, it was lamb’s blood that marked households safe from death as part of God’s covenant, and tonight, Jesus says, I am the Lamb, and my blood is the new covenant, the fulfillment of God’s love for you from the very beginning. Tonight begins the rescue of all humanity, his people who have been scattered. And rather than putting any of us on the line, Jesus chooses his own body. “Rather than sacrifice any one of you,” he says to his friends, “I sacrifice myself. Take, and eat of me.”

Jesus chose you also as his friend. You are also invited. And tonight, Christ is really here. His Spirit is fully with us. We not only remember him, we say yes again to tonight’s invitation. The invitation into his love poured out for us in blood, in the midst of our betraying him, in the midst of our being in fear. The invitation to all parts of us, for there is no part of you that is hidden to him. There is no secret misdeed or bad thought that you’ve never told another person that he can’t see. He sees all of you and says, “I still want you at my table, friend. I know you’re not going to choose me when the times become impossible. You’re still my friend. I still pour myself out for you. No, you did not choose me; I choose you.”

Tonight, at his table, Jesus does not eat with those who will love him perfectly. Instead, he eats with sinners. He eats with his friends. Tonight, no matter what you’ve done, he chooses you, his friend, for his table. Come, eat, drink, and be full. Amen.

I wanted to announce the new project I’ve been working on, a podcast called . I started it with my friend Nathan Dufour Oglesby, who is a seminarian at Yale Divinity School who also has a PhD in classics and a YouTube channel full of songs and video essays on philosophy, theology and ecology.

You can subscribe to our Substack to get new episodes, as well as on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

Nathan and I have been working on this throughout Lent and have now put out seven episodes. Essentially, the format is reading the same texts each week that I preach from, which come from the Revised Common Lectionary. We will record and upload every Tuesday with minimal editing and preparation, just reading the Bible together to draw points of connection that we hope will be helpful for you.

If you are a regular reader of Indwelling, think of this as an accompanying conversational piece early in the week while I’m still working on my sermon, and a chance to marinate in the texts with us as the Church moves through the week.

Here is the episode we recorded today, which gets into our Easter Sunday texts:

Our Parasocial Bible Study

Our Parasocial Bible Study #7 - Easter Sunday

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a month ago · Joe Welker

Okay but one question — why “parasocial”?

For the unaware, “parasocial” is a word that often describes our asymmetrical relationships over the internet (it was Cambridge Dictionary’s 2025 word of the year, defining it as “involving or relating to a connection that someone feels between themselves and a famous person they do not know, a character in a book, film, TV series, etc., or an artificial intelligence”).

The title came together as an attempt to poke honest fun at the limitation of podcasts that we all experience, where listeners typically know much more about the hosts than vice versa. Yet we actually hope that this will erode somewhat over time and that we get to know our audience. We plan to do this podcast whether a bunch of people listen or not for our own biblical edification and spiritual formation, but it would be way more fun if this got more collaborative. For now, we’d love for you to comment on episodes or reach out to us directly at ourparasocialbiblestudy@substack.com.

Actually, a second question — will you be automatically signing me up for this against my will when I just wanted Indwelling?

No. Thank you for asking. If you’d like to keep up with the podcast, subscribe on Substack, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

Peace of Christ,

Joe

When they had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, just say this, ‘The Lord needs them.’ And he will send them immediately.” This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet:

“Tell the daughter of Zion, look, your king is coming to you, humble and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”

The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; they brought the donkey and the colt and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them. A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of him and that followed were shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, “Who is this?” The crowds were saying, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.”

Matthew 21:1-11

Hosanna, hosanna, hosanna, they cried. “Deliver us, save us!” We might have pictured this scene in our heads a thousand times and seen it in a movie or two. What was it like to be there, in that old city on the hill? What was it like to be at the start of a revolution? Dirt underneath your nails and your sandals—really, where couldn’t dirt get to in those days—each day a battle for survival, hungry for bread but starving for hope. And there hope was, riding the beast of burden and its baby colt like a sidecar in a motorcade. A panoply of cloaks lining the road, needed not for anything practical, just fulfilling the finally-here prophet, the true righteous heir to David’s throne, the teacher, the Master, the king. It wasn’t a hard day for Jesus to find believers. If you put your thumb on a garden hose and sprayed anywhere inside the walls of Jerusalem, the “city of peace” that had seen centuries of war, you couldn’t count how many Jesus fans you’d hit. Some of the city was just learning who he was, but the crowd knew, at least, they thought they knew. They chose their king. They chose Jesus. So they thought.

Jesus chose this parade on this day knowing what was going to happen to him. We know he knew he was surrounded by people who didn’t know they would betray him. He knew that the rainbow road of cloaks and palms was a road into darkness. How could anyone but him know that the sound of the trot into hell would be donkey clops?

But because the Son of God is, among his other roles, a lover of the prophetically poetic, he chose a donkey. He chose this day to paint this scene into the minds of those who would only later understand its meaning. And he chose his friends despite themselves; he would tell them during their final meal together, a meal we will celebrate and remember again later this week, “You did not choose me. But I chose you.” (John 15:16)

If you can hear it, he says this to you too. You might protest, like the crowds might have had he been so blunt, “Jesus, we do choose you as king!” They thought they were choosing Jesus. But they chose an idea of Jesus. When Jesus did not live up to their idea of a Messiah, they turned on him. The crowds here, his biggest fans, shouting, “We choose you, prophet of Galilee!” That’s one part of him, but not all. “We choose you, Son of David!” Another part. But not all. “We choose you, the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” “We choose you, king, save us!”

They picked part of him. We pick part of him. We pick our favorite ideas of him, but we don’t pick all of him. Again, Jesus tells his closest friends, “You didn’t really pick me. I picked you.” And he did choose you. He even chose the part of you that would kill him and leave him for dead today. Jesus chooses the part of you that is ready to abandon him the second you go back into the world.

If it is not clear by now, Palm Sunday is one of the most delicious ironies of our whole church calendar. I don’t know if you’re like me and you grew up with Palm Sunday kind of feeling like an Easter trailer, like “Pre-Easter,” or “PrEaster.” You got the greenery, the sun’s coming out, the warmth. But there’s a delicious irony baked in here: today, we celebrate in pomp and circumstance to echo the crowds that celebrated Jesus and who would betray him. Really, it’s a day where humanity’s fickleness, our capricious lust for attaching ourselves to power, and the hypocrisy of all Jesus followers are on display. Our thirst for being the winner in the story, for being on the hero’s side, is on display today.

When we came to faith by grace, we might have chosen the idea of Jesus that we liked. In Holy Week, after the crowd’s palms and loyalty have been blown away by the first breeze, if we read with honesty and humility, we will see more of ourselves than we might like in these gospel pages. Maybe we won’t see ourselves in every sin along the stations of the cross, but if we are honest with ourselves, we will sit with and meditate on the story of our Lord and confront in ourselves how much we haven’t and still don’t choose Jesus once the stakes become real.

We will also learn that we are not alone. After all, it was a crowd. Peter didn’t choose the real Jesus. None of the twelve could—at least not before they saw who he was. Yet we do know their lives were changed afterward. We do know the apostles would go to their graves for this man they didn’t choose at first. While many of us have had seasons of doubt about the Resurrection, the people who were there and knew him didn’t have any seasons of doubt after a dead man showed up and blessed them with fish, bread, and living peace three days later.

But we’re getting too far ahead. We’re still in the joyful parade into darkness. And in fact, we can be joyful, not at how great we are, but in marveling how our God is bringing his mercy and deliverance and salvation hosannas we sing in the world. Just not how we expect it.

However big the crowd was that day, almost everybody would be gone by the time it was all over. There’d be a couple of women at the cross with him, the women who knew and loved him. There’d be a few Roman soldiers who didn’t know what they were witnessing until it was too late. A couple of thieves, only one of whom begged for mercy as Christ’s spirit cried out in agony. But the parade crowd was gone with the palms.

Earlier this week, I shared a poem in our newsletter by G.K. Chesterton, a strange poem about today called “The Donkey.” When you hear it, you may even recognize yourself:

When fishes flew and forests walked

And figs grew upon thorn,

Some moment when the moon was blood

Then surely I was born.

With monstrous head and sickening cry

And ears like errant wings,

The devil’s walking parody

On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,

Of ancient crooked will;

Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,

I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour;

One far fierce hour and sweet:

There was a shout about my ears,

And palms before my feet.

If only we could see how God sees this whole order of creation unfolding, year after year after year billions of times. What would you see if you go through every single cosmic step, one molecule and volcanic eruption and ice age and explosion of life at a time, all through the living God who is in all and through all and for all things, and it is all building to an afternoon when the God who we will kill would choose to ride on the back of a donkey. What if you could see every single breath that has ever been breathed in the history of the universe had led to this moment: the God of all creation now chooses to be in the full, sins-and-all child that you are?

As Christians, maybe all we can really be is donkeys. If so, our Lord will still find a use for us. Even though you will fail to choose him many more times before all is said and done, Jesus will still find a holy use for you. He will always choose you.

There are many mysteries of our faith. You may not know why he blessed you with your life or with believing in him at all. Today, the mystery we sit with is that God chose us even when we were enthralled with the wrong ideas of him and ourselves. For God still chooses us even knowing we will betray him. And he will again. Amen.

Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill. So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” But when Jesus heard it, he said, “This illness does not lead to death; rather, it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” Accordingly, though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.

Then after this he said to the disciples, “Let us go to Judea again.” The disciples said to him, “Rabbi, the Jews were just now trying to stone you, and are you going there again?” Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Those who walk during the day do not stumble because they see the light of this world. But those who walk at night stumble because the light is not in them.” After saying this, he told them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going there to awaken him.” The disciples said to him, “Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will be all right.” Jesus, however, had been speaking about his death, but they thought that he was referring merely to sleep. Then Jesus told them plainly, “Lazarus is dead. For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.” Thomas, who was called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”

When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, some two miles away, and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them about their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home. Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” She said to him, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.”

When she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary and told her privately, “The Teacher is here and is calling for you.” And when she heard it, she got up quickly and went to him. Now Jesus had not yet come to the village but was still at the place where Martha had met him. The Jews who were with her in the house consoling her saw Mary get up quickly and go out. They followed her because they thought that she was going to the tomb to weep there. When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”

Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?” So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, “Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.” When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

John 11:1-44

I was at a peace vigil earlier this week, and I almost don’t want to say it because it feels like praying in public, which Jesus tells us not to do. It might sound like the only reason I went was so that I could say in a sermon, “I went to a peace vigil.” But running that risk, I testify I was at a peace vigil. There was singing, there was a poem, but mostly there was a lot of silence. A vigil is a “watch,” and we were silently watching for peace. Peace has not come.

The thing about a vigil for peace, which might sound obvious, is that we only hold vigils for peace during war. When there is already no conflict, when things are quiet and still, you don’t have to watch for peace because it’s already here. There’s no trouble to address, nothing that needs to be glorified, it just is peace. It’s already glorified.

That biblical word, “glorify,” what is it? It means to “reveal God’s glory” through something. Beautiful music glorifies God when it reveals his glory; a parent’s sacrifice glorifies God by pointing to his sacrificial love. You don’t need to glorify peace because the peace God gave us is already glorious. It’s not the already glorious things that need glorifying, it’s the horrible things. Of course, nobody would say, “We should have war so that we can have peace vigils,” or, “Thank God we had this war so that we could get together and pray for peace.” That’d be nonsensical. We don’t pray in the midst of war to make the awfulness of war glorious, but to make God’s glory appear where it seems impossible.

Today in John’s gospel we have another vigil, this one from Mary and Martha. They are waiting and waiting for Jesus. Instead, they get death.

Sometimes we might wonder, why didn’t God create the world without suffering? Why did God make the snake that tempted Adam and Eve? Why did God allow a world where people could die? But I don’t think this is the clearest way to think about it. Remember that it is from a place of nothingness, emptiness, that God created everything that is. Death, while we have a name for it, actually is an absence: a return to nothingness. We are subject to it because we split ourselves off from God to join the world instead of staying in communion with God. Without God, dying is less an active process and more the cold machinery of entropy back to nothing. God didn’t create death, but rather, he created life—all life—pushing constantly against death. He made the life that is the only reason we can perceive death at all.

But this side of the Fall, death is the default. Nothingness, emptiness, nihilism, zero. Without God, things decay towards it. Plants grow, but then they die, get destroyed, burn out, and burn up, all exploding from the Big Bang, that moment in time of God’s creativity exploding into light, water, and life. Eventually, he rested and called it good. But Sabbath is temporary. His work was not done. The patterns of life he laid continue.

And if there is one chief, central pattern we need to understand about the life that God created, it is resurrection. If we need to understand one thing about the Creator, it’s that his very essence overcomes death over and over, and he will. As John says at the very start of his gospel, in the beginning was Christ, for he is light and life.

This is the backdrop for John telling us this story with Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. Good friends of Jesus whose passion was caring for the poor and sick in their community. Now it was Lazarus who was sick. So they tell Jesus, who says something strange. “This illness does not lead to death; rather, it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” He doesn’t say this casually or flippantly; he loves them. But after this strange thing, he then does another strange thing: he waits. And waits. And finally, after this delayed start, when they reach Mary and Martha, they hear news that was utterly not shocking to Jesus, “Lazarus is dead.”

The danger in this passage is hearing that strange saying, seeing Jesus waiting, and saying, “God is fine with death because it gives him an opportunity to look good.” No. The whole reason Jesus is here on this earth is that God is not fine with death. He is overcoming it. Mary and Martha kind of know this, but only in part. They are like, “Yeah yeah, we know Lazarus will rise again on the last day when we’re all resurrecting, but he’s dead now. We are hurting now. You could have saved him now had you been there then. Where were you?” Jesus, in the most loving and authoritative way possible, doesn’t say where he was, but who he is: “I am the resurrection and the life.” I am. The name God gives to Moses, I am. His very name and being is resurrection. He is life.

So no, God is not fine with death. God is so not fine with death that Jesus, even though he is overcoming it, utterly confident that he will, knowing it, he weeps. He is not only sad about death, he is even angry about it. When English translators take John’s words as describing Jesus as “greatly disturbed” and “deeply moved,” or “troubled,” they are underselling it. The words here are more like angry—he’s angry at death. There is a great irony in how we often have trouble sitting with God’s anger in the Old Testament, because it seems against life. But if we drill down to why God is angry in Scripture, if we were to fully understand why, we could see it’s because he is angry at death. He cries when we sin because sin is death. And he weeps every time, whether through sin or disease, death takes another one of his children. He doesn’t shame us when we feel sad and angry about death in our grief. He doesn’t tell us to just get over it. He says, “I am the resurrection and the life. Do you believe this?”

We’ve been reading these long stories in John, and the thing about them is that they all end up in the same place: belief. Why is belief so important? We can really fixate on the intellectual side of it, that belief is primarily “I need to sign off on a set of unprovable hypotheses, and anyone who doesn’t intellectually sign off on them is cut off from God.” Don’t mistake me—theology is important, and getting beliefs right is important because beliefs have consequences. Theology is how we grow in our relationship with Jesus into more and more truth. But when Jesus is face to face with us, like he is with Mary and Martha, belief is about the connection between our hearts and his. A relationship we didn’t know was possible. We Presbyterians have traditionally held that belief is not even something we do, but a gift God gives us, for none of us can “decide” to believe, we either do or don’t. And so belief is the heart of your heart saying “yes” to a relationship—a gift from God that he opens our eyes to see and hearts to believe—with and in and through Jesus to the rest of the world. A relationship between Jesus and yourself, a relationship with yourself in Jesus, and a relationship to the rest of the world through Jesus. The path to all these relationships is belief, and the core to all of them is the rhythm of resurrection.

To believe in Jesus is simply to say “yes” to the new life that God already embedded in your soul, the life that has overcome death, is currently overcoming death in a million ways in a life of faith, and will totally overcome death in the end. As we see with Lazarus, the blind man, and every person Jesus heals and raises and encounters, it is a life where pain is not erased, but included, sanctified, and glorified.

There’s that word again, “glorify.” Jesus says it a lot in John. To “glorify,” to “reveal God’s glory through” something, is done whenever we lift something real up before God. As Jesus told Nicodemus, the Son of Man will be glorified just as the bronze serpent was, physically lifted up so that even mortality can show God’s glory. His body was human so that it would be directly touched by death and thus show God’s glory even in death. Through belief, any of us can bring anything before God that it may be transformed by his glory. You can bring your heartache, your pain, your backache, your bruises, your aging, your embarrassments, your regrets, anything, lift it up before God, saying, “God, I know you are going to work through this somehow, and I don’t even know how yet. Here is something awful, here is something that is not working. Here is even war. Show me how you will reveal yourself through this, Lord.”

Jesus does. His friend Lazarus, “the dead man,” so dead that the stench is bleeding through stone, comes out. But do you see how you can be Lazarus too? Whether you have an illness, your body’s breaking down, your mind’s not working right, you can’t remember stuff like you used to, you can’t work how you once worked, you don’t have the family life you dreamed of having, these all bear the stench of death on them through your bandages. But the question that really matters is: do you believe?

Do you believe that he loves you? Do you believe that he is the resurrection and the life and there is nothing he can’t work through? Do you believe God’s resurrection power just decides to stop before he reaches your neighbors or do you believe that he came to be savior for all? Do you believe that his glory can be revealed in absolutely everything?

Some of us feel that being born into this world is deeply unfair. We were born into a world that, if left to its own devices, would keep returning towards oblivion. But in the midst of oblivion, God did not say, “Well, it’s a cosmic joke, c’est la vie.” God looked at oblivion and said, “I will not abandon my children to nothingness.” To make sure we knew it, he came in the form of one of us so that you would know he feels everything you feel. He walked your walk, not just talking his talk. And he just wants you to believe that sin and death are not in charge, because this transforms your whole way of life so that resurrection love is working through you in all that you do.

No matter how much you believe it, no matter how real it seems that death is in charge, that awfulness is in charge, that our nation is hopelessly corrupt, that our society is becoming more and more immoral, fear not. Believe. Especially if there is a stone of doubt between you and Jesus that cannot move, believe. Not because God wants you to trick yourself into agreeing to something untrue. But because the truest thing, the deepest thing, the realest thing is the glorification of even the thing we thought could not be glorified. Jesus says, “Bring all of your suffering, all of it, to me. Bring it through me and I will show myself through the places deep in the caves you thought were too dark for life. Believe in me. Roll away the stone. Come out.” Amen.

As Jesus walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes, saying to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see. The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, “Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?” Some were saying, “It is he.” Others were saying, “No, but it is someone like him.” He kept saying, “I am he.” But they kept asking him, “Then how were your eyes opened?” He answered, “The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.’ Then I went and washed and received my sight.” They said to him, “Where is he?” He said, “I do not know.”

They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. Now it was a Sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. Then the Pharisees also began to ask him how he had received his sight. He said to them, “He put mud on my eyes. Then I washed, and now I see.” Some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, for he does not observe the Sabbath.” Others said, “How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?” And they were divided. So they said again to the blind man, “What do you say about him? It was your eyes he opened.” He said, “He is a prophet.”

The Jews did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they called the parents of the man who had received his sight and asked them, “Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?” His parents answered, “We know that this is our son and that he was born blind, but we do not know how it is that now he sees, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him; he is of age. He will speak for himself.” His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews, for the Jews had already agreed that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue. Therefore his parents said, “He is of age; ask him.”

So for the second time they called the man who had been blind, and they said to him, “Give glory to God! We know that this man is a sinner.” He answered, “I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” They said to him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” He answered them, “I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?” Then they reviled him, saying, “You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.” The man answered, “Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will. Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” They answered him, “You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?” And they drove him out.

Jesus heard that they had driven him out, and when he found him he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” He answered, “And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him.” Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.” He said, “Lord, I believe.” And he worshiped him. Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgment, so that those who do not see may see and those who do see may become blind.” Some of the Pharisees who were with him heard this and said to him, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.

John 9:1-41

The Oscars are tonight, and even though the ratings are down and people don’t go to the movies as much anymore, it remains such a key cultural touchstone. Why? If you think about what the Oscars fundamentally are, yes, they’re about movies, but even more, it’s our annual cultural check-in asking, “What were the best stories this year?” Because every movie is trying to tell a story, we judge a movie either by how good the story is, how well the story is told, or both, because the craft of how you show stories directly shapes not only the audience hears the story, but even shapes the story itself. Where you edit a story, the details you highlight or omit, and a bunch of techniques which fall under the #1 rule of storytelling, “Show, don’t tell” (and though the rule is “show, don’t tell,” for some reason we don’t call it storyshowing). Showing a story instead of just telling it is what makes it a story and not a lecture. Unfortunately, preaching can be a lot of telling.

Why do I say this? Because all throughout Lent, we’ve been reading John, a master story-shower. John’s read at least some of the other gospels, and a couple of times he tells the stories again. But John uses the craft of storytelling a little differently than the other gospels. Instead of the entire journey of Jesus’ ministry, he gave us a series of very detailed moving pictures of Jesus, more like a movie that is an anthology of scenes rather than a long continuous epic. In each of these vignettes, he wants us to see a different side of God’s glory.

Why do we even need stories? Why can’t we just receive a list of facts? Why are the gospels told as stories, and why does Jesus himself use stories in the form of parables? I believe one reason is that if we didn’t hear the truth in the form of a story, our pride wouldn’t let us hear it otherwise. If someone simply tells you what is true, especially if it goes against the story you’ve already told yourself, you aren’t going to actually even hear it as true; you will hear it as a lie, even if it’s fully true. Stories are sticky that way. Many times, you can only let go of an old story when you finally hear a better, truer, fuller story. And here at the start of this story in John of Jesus and the blind man, baked into the story is hearing the other competing stories that disciples and Pharisees and maybe even the man have been telling themselves. But Jesus has a new story.

The disciples’ old story is familiar to anyone who has gone through a hard time and then had someone, who means well, give you terrible theology; some terrible explanation for your problems or the problems of the world that are so dire, God must be involved. It’s a story embedded into much of human history, something like: “if bad things happen to you, you somehow deserve it.” They weren’t asking “why do bad things happen to good people,” they were asking, “Okay, so since he’s disabled, how is he bad? Was it his fault or his parents’?”

From our vantage point, we might easily see the absurdity here, and I wonder if John is even pointing to it, because the implication of their question is that they are so convinced the man did something to deserve being born blind, maybe he did something in the womb. But as absurd as it is, I actually want to give them some credit. Can we understand where they were coming from? These were devout believers in God who wanted to make sense of God’s justice, God’s goodness, and God’s glory in light of a tragic situation. They didn’t want to undermine God’s justice; I mean, have you considered God’s servant Job, who once questioned God’s justice? Yet as the Book of Job shows, when you can’t make sense of injustice, the mind often turns to blaming the person who is harmed (as Job’s friends erroneously do). Anyone who has worked with abuse survivors is familiar with the phenomenon of blaming the victim, which can happen in every single kind of subculture. So it’s not that hard to believe that the disciples would look at a man born blind and say, “Well, he deserved it,” because people have not really changed that much.

This scene is one of several times when Christ rejects this explanation. He utterly rejects the idea that those who are harmed deserve it. The poor, the downtrodden, those failed by society, you name it, he utterly rejects the idea that they were uniquely bad. In fact, blessed are they. Still sinners in need of grace; still in need of salvation. But for all their struggles, blessed are they who life has unjustly humbled, for not only will God’s justice one day reign, but blessed are they who today know they need God. That is at the heart of this new story of Jesus.

Jesus does miraculously heal this man’s physical eyesight with mud, which is the very dust of the earth from which God made humanity, mixed with water, that is, his water, saliva. But this blind man and his story are really not even about physical blindness as much as spiritual blindness. The man knew he was utterly blind without Jesus. Then even after he was healed, he still knew he needed God. And because he had this innate humility from the tragedy of his birth, innately humbled by life, when he encounters the glory of Jesus, he is utterly transformed by his glory. As Jesus tells his disciples, the man is not how he is because of anything wrong he did, but in fact, he has a special role of revealing that glory to the world. Blessed is he.

Then, on the other hand, you have the Pharisees. We get to hear the story they tell themselves, and it’s something like: “God has laid out the exact time and place and ways in which he works to us, and so now, in fact, we share the perfect vision of God. And we act accordingly.” Does this sound like us Christians sometimes? It’s the other side of the coin from the disciples’ story, the flip side of “people in pain deserve their pain.” The story of the Pharisees is, “people who are blessed did something to deserve their blessing—they earned God’s favor.” This story is so subtle, so common, and so full of the deadliest poison: spiritual pride. The reason pride is a deadly poison is shown, not told, by the master storytellers Jesus and John. But I will be a bad storyteller and just tell you: if the blind man’s humility is what makes him available to be transformed by glorious grace, the Pharisees’ pride makes them totally unavailable to be transformed by grace.

The Pharisees are not ready for that story. And so instead of being available for grace, they interrogate: “How’d this happen? Who is this guy? Why did he do it on the Sabbath? Where are his parents? I mean surely he’s making this up.” The man says, “I don’t know exactly who he was, a prophet, or exactly where he was from, all I know is I was blind, and now I see. And God had to be in the mix somehow.” To which the Pharisees say, “You were born entirely in sin—obviously or you wouldn’t be blind—and you want to teach us? Don’t you know anything about God or justice or theology? Hilarious.” And they drive him out.

Where do the proud drive people? Certainly not towards their own worldview; he didn’t leave that conversation like, man, I can’t wait until Pharisee try-outs open up and I can get on the list. No. Praise be to God that all the proud can do is drive someone straight to Jesus in one form or another. So Jesus finds him again. “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” “Who is he?” “You have seen him. You are speaking to him.” “Lord, I believe.”

We all know the paradox of humility: you can only have it if you think you don’t have it. It’s the joke we all know, the guy bragging, “I’m the most humble person in the world.” The most insufferable I’ve ever been had nothing to do whether I was right or wrong, but whether I was self-righteous, taking myself too seriously and feeling a need to be perfect. When you feel like you need to be perfect, and you try really hard to be perfect, you often self-justify. You often become the reference point of your own salvation. You might think God is your reference point, as the Pharisees do, but really, it’s yourself.

If you you could see yourself as God sees you, you would see you still have sin you just can’t shake. But! The realization that you can’t fully see clearly, and that you can’t fully see yourself as God sees you? That’s realizing you’re blind, even with some sight that Jesus has given you, even after encountering his glory, still realizing you still have limited vision, and we always will…that is the kind of blindness Jesus can work with. If you say, “I see myself and the world totally clearly,” well, then you’re blinder than ever. But if we show up again and again to God in humility, he will transform us, not with more pride, but with his glorious humility.

In our own humility, we can sometimes take the log out of our eye as Christ tells us to do. But glorious humility before God is realizing that there are always going to be logs up in there that only God could remove, and that we truly depend on God. That is a hard pill for so many of us to swallow: dependence on God. We have a hard time with this precisely because of our pride. Being independent and not needing anyone is so endemic in our culture and to our sense of self, the belief in us deserving what we have, which breeds a sense of righteousness. This is the pride in the old stories of the disciples and the Pharisees: “If they are that way, it’s because of them, and if I like the way that I am, it’s because of me.”

But leaning into utter dependency on God, as this once-blind man does, is what opens up his vision. The formerly-blind man’s reliance on God never becomes a posture of “I’ve got it figured out” or “I now have all the answers” or “I am totally correct” (actually, John shows us that his explanations aren’t totally correct). But he knows what we all need to know: that we need to encounter the glory Jesus. Everybody in this story had a chance to encounter glorious grace. But only the humble one was transformed by it. So when you go out from here and see the person who is struggling, hurting, and needs help, a call to help them is not just an opportunity for God’s glory to be shown in their life; it’s an opportunity for you.

So I don’t know who’s going to win tonight. I just know the best sports movies are always underdog stories, and we have an underdog God. This is one of so many underdog stories in the gospels, but it’s not about pitying someone who has a disability. Rather, it’s about giving thanks to God for how God works in the unlikely places. Praise be to God that even if you have no vision, there’s an opportunity for you to see more clearly.

If pride is like putting mud over our own eyes and thinking it makes us see, humility is knowing that Christ’s mud is something else entirely, a mix of earth, water, and the Spirit. And when we open ourselves fully to him by realizing just how blind and dependent on him we really are and always were, there is no telling how he can transform you. For no matter how broken you are, you are someone who Jesus sees fit to show his glory to the whole world. Amen.

Watch sermon below:

From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the Lord commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. The people quarreled with Moses and said, “Give us water to drink.” Moses said to them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?” But the people thirsted there for water, and the people complained against Moses and said, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?” So Moses cried out to the Lord, “What shall I do for this people? They are almost ready to stone me.” The Lord said to Moses, “Go on ahead of the people and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile and go. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested the Lord, saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?”

Exodus 17:1-7

But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life.

Romans 5:8, 10

So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.

A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

John 4:5-151

A voice of many crying in the wilderness: “Is God with us or not?”

This is what God’s people ask. They didn’t only ask it in our Exodus reading. No, this question lies in the hearts of God’s people across time and place, a question God’s people have asked in all kinds of droughts and famines. It’s a question we might ask not only in hunger, but, like the author of Ecclesiastes, amid decadent feasts that somehow feel like famines in their emptiness.

This is the question that tells you you’re in the wilderness, spiritually barren. Like a cold wind across years of built-up sand dunes, where suddenly your life has become too quiet, too many people missing.

But your wilderness may not be that quiet or empty. Your wilderness might look like a digital blitzkrieg. I open up my computer to streams of war, then I take a break from the big screen of my computer with the little screen of my phone, more streams of war (but apparently it’s not a war, according to the Department of War). Wilderness can be an onslaught of information, of endless scrolling, the weight of bad news getting worse, helplessness in a world spiraling out of control.

At its core, wilderness is a place of alienation from God and the world. Estrangement, isolation, distance. It is not hard to feel alienated in a cold New England winter in the woods by yourself, but we can be alienated even if we never lack people. As Carl Jung famously said, “Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.” Many people feel that kind of loneliness. It only makes matters worse if you cannot communicate what you really feel to God, trying to hide with fig leaves from the Maker for eating the wrong apple.

Wilderness is in far more pages in the Bible than nomadic life outside of Egypt. Tim Mackie has described the “Exodus Way” in Scripture, even before we get to the Book of Exodus. In fact, we get two whole chapters in Genesis of being fully connected, unalienated, united with God, where there is no question that God is with us, for we are fully with God as he desired in creation. But we split ourselves off from God before we could even get around to naming the zebras (they’re at the end of the alphabet).

So begins our long distance relationship from God. After that first bite of the apple, God’s very first words were calling to us humans hiding ourselves: “Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9) After breaking God’s heart, we then leave the Garden for the first exodus that we have never fully returned from. While it is a pure coincidence that the “Wilderness of Sin” mentioned in Exodus 17 shares the same word as the English word “sin,” which comes from a totally different origin, it is striking that both describe alienation.

What is a key feature of our human condition of sin, alienation, and estrangement? A word that we know too well, a phenomenon we must have named right after the zebras: war. While we get two chapters of the whole Bible where we are fully united with God, we only have three chapters before there is violence. It seems our war against God makes us at war with each other, and war marks humanity almost as much as being in spiritual exile. For the Israelites, the wilderness included war, and it includes war in our world once again.

War, even for good causes, should not be lusted after, worshipped, or championed, but mourned and respected as an awful fact of our human condition that is in the wilderness away from God’s rest. When we are barraged with information about barrages of bombs, it is not hard to wonder, “Is God with us,” along with its flipside, “Is God with them?” Is God with the ordinary people of Iran in a war they didn’t choose, like the girls killed in the primary school in Minab? Is God with our troops who have sacrificed themselves for this cause? Is God with us when we feel helpless to do anything about it?

So when the Israelites are in their wilderness, in between wars with different tribes, thirsty, and afraid, is it any wonder they would ask, “Is God with us or not?”

What does God do in response to this question? He calls on his servant. He strikes the rock. Paul would later say, “This rock was Christ,” (1 Cor 10:4), and he doesn’t mean Jesus of Nazareth was teleported into the desert; he means that Christ, the eternal Word made flesh as God’s very being, was already at work, split open to sustain and provide for his wilderness people. He did so even when they were in total amnesia about all God had done for them, and he did so even though they would go on to sin and sin some more in the Wilderness of Sin.

But there it was, living water. It was not the Israelites’ wars over tribes that liberated them. It was not their own wisdom that sustained them. It was the protection of God, the movement of the Spirit, the saving Grace before they understood how deep their need for a savior was.

Why did God do this? Because our entire time away from him, God has been trying to get us back in his arms. His “where are you?” is still echoing as he seeks us, and his living water has never stopped flowing. You might think of the love of God in Jesus Christ like one of those “endless stews” you hear about on the Travel Channel (when we still had that) or YouTube now, when restaurants have the same broth going for decades upon decades that just keeps getting ingredients added in, perpetually serving people over and over. This is the love of God, a never-ending pot of life-giving, life-nourishing, sustaining water mixed in with the flesh of Christ, eternal life.

Jesus hints at this to the woman at the well. She was a Samaritan woman, an enemy to the Jews, an outsider also living in the wilderness along with her people. She comes to the same well that God brought their shared ancestor Jacob to all those years ago. And she encounters Jesus. She is just as confused as Nicodemus was when he snuck to see Jesus in the middle of the night,2 and just as confused as Jesus’ disciples in broad daylight,3 but unlike these men who puffed themselves up on their piety, this Samaritan woman is the only one who is offered living water by Jesus and actually drinks from it without waiting to fully understand. How could she understand? How could we? But in encountering the living water, even though she didn’t fully understand, she dropped her jar to be a jar of Christ’s water, sharing it with her town, becoming known as the “first evangelist” in Scripture. For something in her knew in that moment, even if she couldn’t fully explain it, that God was with them, even their enemies.

War continues to rip people apart. We are still enemies to each other, which shows we are still enemies of God, as we have been from the third chapter. We continue to be enemies to God when we continue to be enemies to each other. Perhaps this is why the greatest commandment is two in conjunction: love God and love neighbor. And you don’t need me to tell you that we don’t always do either so well.

But—and here we get a great “but” of grace—as Paul says, “While we were still enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son.” (Romans 5:10). God did not wait for us to be at peace with him or each other. While we were still enemies, Christ died for us. God did not wait, and will not wait, for this war to end. He will not wait for leaders to come to their senses. He will not wait for wicked men to be good. He will not wait for humanity to stop being awful, or else I imagine he’d be waiting forever.

God does not wait in vain. But “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8). While we were asking, “Is God with us or not?” he said again and again and then once and for all on the cross, “Yes. Believe it or not—and you often won’t believe it—I am with you.”

He has always been our water in the wilderness, even when we did not know it. He is water even in the brutal wilderness of war that too many people we have prayed for in recent years have known. I guarantee you that the people of Iran who are caught up in this war are being given grace by God. They are receiving in ways that may be totally foreign to us and in horrible moments most of us will never have to experience, because his grace is hidden in the cracks of tragedy and human depravity. That’s what he does: he is a grace-giver to those who are dying, a helper in times of trouble, with them and us in life and death. They may not know God like we know God, but neither did the Samaritan woman, and at any rate, many of us who follow and claim Christ have no better love of God or neighbor than anyone else.

But Christ died for us all. He did not wait. He struck the rock—he struck himself—so that the living water of grace is offered to all of us. He offers us living water to be transformed by his glory when we lack it. This living water is a river from the desert all the way back into the garden of God’s true rest, the intimacy of his being that all humans call home. We drink of it not by proofs, signs, or AI, but by faith.

While we are in the wilderness, if there is anything we can do to drink from that living water, to grab the hand reaching out to us, it is to grab the cup God offers through prayer. It is to keep praying to extend that cup back out to our neighbors and to do so in our actions. When we pray for everyone in war, we may not know exactly what all we are praying for, especially if we are praying for both sides of a conflict—can one pray for our own servicemembers and for Iranian mothers grieving their children? It depends on what we pray for. If we pray for domination, conquest, victory, and the triumph of our violence, we cannot pray for everyone. But we can pray for everyone when we pray prayers of mercy. Prayers of mourning, for a quick end to war, for the innocent, and even prayers for the guilty who truly need Christ’s mercy.

So, back to the question: “Is God with us? Is God with them?” There is only one answer. For while we were thirsty, God offered us living water. And while we were still sinners, still enemies, still wielding death upon each other, Christ died for us all. May you drink from his waters of mercy, and when you get a cup, run to share it. Amen.

Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. He came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with that person.” Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” Jesus answered him, “Are you the teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?

“Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen, yet you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

John 3:1-17

In these tribalistic, chaotic times, I’ve turned to one of the most reliable, tried-and-true things in our culture: old James Bond movies. Is it because they’re good, deep films? No. Are they Christian? Also no. But do my wife and I bond over them? Again, no, she doesn’t watch. But don’t tell me you don’t miss the comforts of suave, witty spies sneaking around for the stability of the Western hemisphere in the clean “us” and “them” of the Cold War.

Oddly enough, the most famous passage in the Bible, John 3:16, comes during what is almost like an ancient spy movie scene, with the neither suave nor witty Nicodemus, a Pharisee, sneaking in at the cover of night. What was he doing? Was he trying to get top secret intel on the popular rebel threat to the social order? Was he trying to persuade Jesus that he was wrong about something? Was he trying to better understand? Did Nicodemus even know why he wanted to see Jesus?

We don’t really know why he wanted to see Jesus, but we know Nicodemus did not want to be seen with Jesus. Nicodemus was one of the Pharisees, the so-called “separate ones.” He’s religious, he’s diligent, he’s committed, he’s faithful, he attends synagogue every week, he properly washes before meals, he lives within the limits God has provided. He doesn’t like to intermingle with the other tribes of his neighbors, and he certainly wouldn’t want to try to give an “innocent” explanation to his Pharisee colleagues why he sought counsel with Jesus. But the question for us “good,” God-fearing Christians, is why do we act like the Pharisees are so different from us?

For what parts of the gospel do we have to sneak to talk to Jesus about? If you want to figure out this answer, perhaps we can look at our tribes and look at what we can’t admit to our tribe.

The gospel is scandalous in at least two directions. But the first scandal to our ears is one that was not scandalous to the ancients: God judges everyone. Naturally, we don’t want to believe God judges my tribe, my politics, my self-righteousness. The scandal of God’s judgment is offensive when we are always the good guys in our personal spy movie. It also may be offensive to us who only see God as one-sided in his love, that his love is not complex in holding and dealing with evil, that he is just a chill hippie. But Jesus will say just a few verses after our reading today, “This is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.” (John 3:19)

If this scandalizes us, this was not a scandal to the ancients. The idea of humans being deeply sinful and tribes deserving of mass deathly punishment in contrast to the pure goodness of God was not a controversial part of the Bible. Today, we often find ourselves disturbed by Old Testament texts, often because of our Christianity. More widely in society, our default post-Enlightenment humanism says, “Man, God could have figured out a better way to deal with bad people.”

In the Numbers 21 story that Jesus alludes to with Moses and the bronze serpent, Moses only lifts up the serpent after snakes had been the vehicle of God’s judgment, killing many of his repeatedly rebellious people. Jesus isn’t apologizing for this. After all, he is the One who judges.

Ancient readers did not have to be convinced that God really judged people; no, they had to be convinced that God really saved people. The New Testament authors did not have to justify God’s wrath. Instead, they had to justify and reconcile God’s grace.

This second scandal of the gospel for the ancients is also still the scandal for us: God judges everyone, but God saves everyone. This was the scandal for which Nicodemus had to slink in darkness on padded footsteps. God saves everyone, including our outgroup, “those” people, our enemies, whoever you can’t stand. This offends us when we know that “they” are so clearly deserving of judgment—and when we think that, we aren’t even totally wrong about it.

Into the darkness, then, this piercing light beams into the heart: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” God didn’t so love “us” over them, he loved the world, that whoever believes in him is given grace.

This was the scandal that the gospel writers and the epistle authors had to spill their expensive ink on expensive papyrus to share, spread, and explain. We read John 3:16 today like a bumper sticker, but it really functions as an argument in John, an emphasis that God really does love you. Jesus in John 3:16 blasts open our tribalism by saying we all stand condemned, but we all are given a lifeline to light. As this scandal of grace spread in the hearts of Christians, some then started to wonder whether God’s wrath in the Old Testament was necessary, a troubling mystery that is still hard to work out.1

But as we wrestle with why God’s judgment is so violent in the Old Testament, pay closer attention to what Jesus is saying when he says, “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” (John 3:14) The comparison Jesus is making is that what was once the means by which God judged his people became the means by which he saved them; the bronze serpent lifted up by Moses became a site of pilgrimage and healing.2 Moses would repeatedly pray to God for forgiveness of his people, even to those who wanted Moses killed.

So here, Jesus is saying that he, the Son of Man, the One who judges the world (a world that wants him killed), who is, in fact, the only one capable of judging the world, is not the tribalistic warlord we often prefer. What does the Judge do? He chooses to sacrifice himself. The Judge becomes the vehicle of our salvation. He will be lifted up and subject himself to undeserved judgment to blow open the darkness that we lust for. And this was who he really was all along; however we may judge the actions of “Old Testament God,” his name and his place was always primarily in mercy. After all, the utmost dwelling place of God in the Ark of the Covenant was called “the mercy seat.” He was faithful and loyal again and again when his people were faithless, his judgment slow, his steadfast love enduring, offering a chance for his people over and over to be in a relationship with him.

So what does Jesus tell Nicodemus he must do? “You must be born from above.” Receive the Spirit, Nicodemus, so that the presence of God dwells not in the mercy seat of the wooden Ark, but let God’s mercy seat live in your heart and carry it to all you meet. Live as if you know this world is not all that is, and thank God, for it so often loves darkness, and you are going to a place of light. Receive the Spirit, Nicodemus, so you learn and practice how to sacrifice, love your enemies, and forgive. Now let those with ears hear: this is something that this preacher is constantly trying and failing to do well. I still sneak to Jesus at night, not being able to admit to friends all I question about their tribes. I am still way too sneaky, not like James Bond, but like Nicodemus. I know God judges me for this and many other things. But in him, I still choose to believe.

Why is belief the path that Jesus says in John 3:16? The New Testament tries in different ways to explain why it is faith and belief that saves, and not law.3 Paul passionately argues and explains it. But it is still a mystery to me; I must also choose to believe in “belief.”

Perhaps it is because there is a gap between God and us that is utterly immaterial. If it were just a physical difference between us and God, we could bridge it with physics. If it was just an intelligence gap, we could bridge it with AI (and we’re trying!). If the difference between me and God was morality, then I could be God by just being a moral person. But the difference between us and God is not the difference between us and the highest mountains the Psalmist sings of in Psalm 121. No, the gap between us and God is a gap that is ultimately a gap of the true, pure presence of Spirit. Perhaps that is why it takes faith to be an utterly immaterial and often irrational bridge to the Spirit, a bridge reaching out to us in the hands of Jesus.4

Even if we cannot bring ourselves to fully believe today, whether we’re in church or not, there is always hope for us. There was hope for that hapless religious guy Nicodemus, who, like us, may be “so close yet so far” from Jesus when he first encounters him. But by the end of John’s gospel, we see Nicodemus after the crucifixion tending to Christ’s body. He stopped sneaking around. Maybe it was only because it was safe now that Jesus was dead, when the threat to the social order was removed. But nevertheless, there he was, following him.

The challenge and invitation in John’s gospel is asking, which side of Nicodemus are we? Are we sneaking confused in the dark, or are we ready to live life from above while we’re still here below? Are we going to take the risks of love that we are called to take? Will we keep sneaking to avoid scandal by our tribe, or will we try to love the world in the way that God so loved all of us—giving his life for the sake of another?

We can do this if we believe that we don’t only live once. In Christ, as one Bond movie is so named, “you only live twice”: once in our flesh, but then once again in the Spirit. That one is the one for good. Everybody needs it. And everyone is offered it. May we believe in this wonderful, most infamous scandal. Amen.

The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’ ” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die, for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.

Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tested by the devil. He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterward he was famished. The tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” But he answered, “It is written,

‘One does not live by bread alone,
but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ ”

Then the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written,

‘He will command his angels concerning you,’
and ‘On their hands they will bear you up,
so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’ ”

Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’ ”

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory, and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Then Jesus said to him, “Away with you, Satan! for it is written,

‘Worship the Lord your God,
and serve only him.’ ”

Then the devil left him, and suddenly angels came and waited on him.

Matthew 4:1-11

We have come back around to the season of Lent, a time of taking honest stock in where we are and where our sin may be in our walk with God. This naturally involves looking at temptation as our readings do today. And if we’re going to look at temptation, we’ve got to also take a look at how Satan works.

Satan is playing the role of the tempter here in our Matthew reading, even explicitly called “the tempter.” While the snake in Genesis is not specifically named as Satan, he still fulfills the role of the tempter in this notorious seduction of Eve. However, the Bible does not name the figure of “Satan” until the Book of Job. There, Satan does not get his name as a tempter, but rather another role, almost opposite to the Tempter: the Accuser.1

If we’re going to take stock of where we are with sin, our mistakes, and how we deviate from God, let’s think about these two big umbrella names for Satan: the Tempter and the Accuser. These roles are more related than we may think, two opposite sides of falling off the Way that are really entwined in the same thing: spiritual pride. Let me explain.

If you drove by our house this week, there is a good chance you saw my car looking like it was in the middle of the Daytona 500, tilted upwards 45 degrees, but instead of a track, my tires were spinning in snow off our raised driveway. This first happened on the right side of the driveway when I was backing up and just started feeling the slip. I thought, this isn’t so bad, I’m only barely off. So, tempted by hubris, I thought, I can just get out of this myself with a little creative mat placement. When that didn’t work, I thought I’d just turn my wheel the other way, go into reverse, and back up right onto the driveway. This only made matters worse, physics sliding my car further off. I dug out some more snow, waited for my wife to get home so I could push while she drove, and I still thought we could get it, but we just got deeper and deeper into the snow and off the driveway. Round one to hubris, saved by the grace of a tow, but deeply embarrassed.

So a couple days later, I clear our driveway, see the large gash on the hubris side, and say to myself that if there’s anything I’m not going to do, it’s get in that same ditch again. So I back up and overcorrect the other direction towards the house and the deceptively built-up snow. And yes, I fall on the other side, caught on the edge and in the air again. If you thought I was mad at myself the first time in embarrassment, this was true self-loathing (this Lent, I’m giving neighbors the gift of hearing the pastor swear). There was no temptation of hubris in this failure.

In both cases, while there was a physical problem of falling off on the side of the road, the real problem was my pride, showing up first as arrogance, then as humiliation. I was so embarrassed from the first failure, so adamant not to be hubristic, I ended up falling in and creating another gash on the other side. Even after a fresh snowfall on Friday night, these gashes look almost like scars in the snow.

I believe most of us carry some of these scars in the snow of our souls, on one side of the ditch or the other. These scars tell stories of pain, the times when temptation, hubris, and arrogance of our spiritual pride got us off the path of God that it caused us to hurt ourselves or other people. These scars tell a story to ourselves that “I must never do this again.” But perhaps this takes us to the other side of spiritual pride, and we become enamored by intense judgment, either from ourselves or a family member or authority figure or in our idea of God. If we become scarred by this judgment and realize it’s a ditch, we might reject the idea that we must ever feel shame, and there we are back on the other ditch of hubris doing what we feell like. One way Satan works is by feeding our spiritual pride on either side, driving a wedge between us and God by trying to create in us the scars of arrogance and the scars of shame.

This is Satan at his worst as both Tempter and Accuser. The Tempter gives us the pride of excessive non-judgment, that we can come up with our own rules, that God’s will doesn’t matter. The snake does this through his famous question, “Did God really say…?” Satan takes this idea further, goading Jesus by tempting him with Scripture, “Look, here’s what God really said. Now go use that power of yours.” Jesus, of course, counters with more Scripture, discerning the higher priorities, holding onto God’s overarching will.

But we are not like Jesus. We twist Scripture to be what we wish it to be and grab that fruit, seeking that knowledge of good and evil, for at least if we break God’s law, we’ll know something more true about the universe, the dark side of human nature. “Maybe,” we might think, “I can really be like God and know how to use my evil for good.” But the tragic irony is that as we keep trying to take more and more bites of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, we don’t actually gain the knowledge of God; as Paul repeatedly says, the peak of our wisdom is utter foolishness compared to God’s foolishness in the cross. “Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge, but anyone who loves God is known by him.” (1 Cor 8:2-3) And so the devil wedges us away from our love of God and being truly intimate with him, tempted by our own voracious appetite not simply for lusts of the flesh, but power, including the power of human knowledge and human wisdom.

So that’s the Tempter. I think we understand him better than the Accuser. But while the Accuser is Satan’s role in the Book of Job, the Accuser is actually in the snake in Genesis too, embedded within temptation. In Job, Satan plays the role of prosecutor, accusing Job of only loving God because God blesses him so much. But also, implicit in that is Satan accusing God that he is only loved because humans love what he does for them. And so as the story goes, Satan then tempts Job through suffering to curse God, which he never does.

Back to the Garden. In Genesis, the snake is not only tempting Eve, but also accusing both God and Eve through lies (another name for the devil, diabolos, is “the slanderer”). The snake accuses God of envy, saying, “God didn’t give you those rules because he loves you, but because he feels threatened by you. Eat the fruit, open your eyes, be like him.” Quite an accusation. Hidden within this is another accusation, this time towards humans: if you can only become like God by breaking his laws, then the fundamental accusation is that you are not enough for God. You ought to be ashamed at how pathetic you are. You can’t even get your car out of the snow. We religious people should recognize how often we can become the Accuser. The Accuser can be turned just as easily on ourselves as we turn it on other people.

If the Tempter part of the devil says, “Did God really mean that?”, the Accuser says, “You are too despicable for God.” The Tempter, pulling us to the Ditch of Arrogance, tells us that God’s rules are just suggestions, that obedience is unnecessary, and when we fall in that ditch, the Accuser yanks us the other way to the Ditch of Shame, which tells us we are utter frauds, that forgiveness is impossible, and God does not love you after all. The Tempter wants us to seize power by our own rules and become our own gods, while the Accuser says, “What an utter evil fool you were, and your rightful place is there in the ditch.”

Whether the devil is accusing you of being too bad or tempting you to think you’re too good, the goal is to get you off the path of trust and into a ditch of self-obsession by slandering us and slandering God. The very name of Jesus, Emmanuel, means, “God is with you,” and Satan wants us to believe, in one way or another, “God is not really with you. You cannot touch him, and he never wants to touch you.” A deep lie.

There is another option between the two deformed choices, either the Accuser with deformed judgment or the Tempter with deformed non-judgment. In between these ditches, on the Way, is discernment, trusting God’s commandments as reflecting his deep wisdom, receiving his teaching as a beautiful gift for us. In between these ditches is walking with Jesus and knowing he is not disgusted by you but wants to walk with you. In between these ditches is believing no, Satan, God really is with me. He is with all of us.

When we deeply discern, we can’t help but eventually end up at a place of confession. When we realize that yes, we cannot make ourselves like God, we repent of the ways we try to break spiritual laws and instead turn to utter reliance on God. When we realize we cannot perfectly obey the rules anyway, we turn to his mercies, new every morning. We remember that no matter how great or deep our sin is—and it is great and deep—God’s love is even greater and even deeper. It always is.

One of our big mistakes is making the devil too powerful, obsessing over his ditches—perhaps I’ve just done that here. We often end up in one ditch precisely because we’ve obsessed about the opposite ditch; we end up in shame because we’re obsessed with perfection, or we end up utterly depraved because we’re obsessed with not feeling shame. When Jesus faces these temptations and accusations, he simply shifts the paradigm: away, Satan, I don’t want that. I want to be fully with God and to love what he loves. I don’t want to fight your ditches, I want to be with him.

Have you fallen off on one side of the ditch recently? Have you done something awful, or can’t stop doing awful things to yourself? Have you been unkind? Have you been unfair? Have you been inconsiderate or inconsistent? Have you said something you’ve regretted, or held back something you realize you should have said? Have you been the accuser or the tempter? Do you have those scars in your snow? And has it been such a long winter that those tracks gashed into you are a memory that will not go away? Are the scars so deep that even when fresh snow falls, they are still there?

Fear not. The ice and snow will melt under his warmth. Your scars in the snow may still be there. There might still be tire tracks in the spring, there might be a bumper off, or maybe a screw or two loose. But as we carry on in Lent, trying and failing to drive on the path of discernment, never believe the lies of temptation or accusation. Remember that God is always with you. He knows your scars, for he carries his own. Amen.

Then Moses went up on the mountain, and the cloud covered the mountain. The glory of the Lord settled on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it for six days; on the seventh day he called to Moses out of the cloud. Now the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the Israelites. Moses entered the cloud and went up on the mountain. Moses was on the mountain for forty days and forty nights.

Exodus 24:15-18

Moses said, “Please show me your glory.” And the Lord said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you the name, ‘the Lord’, and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for no one shall see me and live.”

Exodus 33:18-20

Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became bright as light. Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. Then Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will set up three tents here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” While he was still speaking, suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Get up and do not be afraid.” And when they raised their eyes, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone.

As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus ordered them, “Tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.”

Matthew 17:1-9

Today on Transfiguration Sunday, we behold a story about a brand new glorious appearance of Jesus. But it’s not only about appearance. It’s also a story about hiding. What do I mean? I mean that the Transfiguration is not only about how Jesus appears to us, but about how we hide from God in plain sight.

Scripture can be tricky for us when it is both familiar and strange, so rather than just read it with our hearts, our brains get into analytical mode. Why does the Transfiguration get its own special Sunday? Why does Peter react how he does? Why does Jesus reveal himself this way and then conceal himself again?

We want to approach it like a puzzle to figure out, rather than being smacked in the face by the awe that the disciples actually felt on that mountain. Granted, it’s hard to have such secondhand awe; we may get more excited listening to a friend’s story about a vacation they just took to an exotic national park than we do hearing this story. And I feel like if I read this story with as much awe and reverence as the disciples felt on that day, some of you might think, “Joe has really gone out to lunch.”

If you do want one clue to this puzzle, take our reading from Exodus 24 where Moses goes up on Sinai and also has an awe-some and awe-full encounter with a new revelation of God. Remember what also happens later in Exodus 33 where Moses wants to see God in his full glory, but God says no, you can’t handle my full glory or it would kill you. You can see my goodness, I will proclaim my name, and I will have mercy on who I will have mercy…but my face? That would kill you. My glory will pass by you to see my back, Moses, but not my face.

Right after, God makes a place for his presence among his people, telling Moses how to build a tabernacle, the special tent that would move with God’s people wherever they went while also keeping them safe from God’s glory.

Why did they need to be kept safe from God’s glory? Because they—we—are sinners. We talked in our Sunday School class about what God’s glory entails, and there’s a lot of ways to slice it. But one way to think of the glory of God is the purest distillation of the creative force at the heart of the entire universe. Could you stand next to the Big Bang and live? Heck, we in Vermont had the eclipse two years ago, and we can’t even look at the sun 93 millions miles away without special little glasses. How are we to possibly see the Almighty who created that?

The Israelites knew that humanity is an impure people. They knew we could never fully and finally resolve our state of decay, which is most embodied in our subjugation to the forces of death. We could make sacrifices to God to ritually purify ourselves before Him, that some of us could be safe enough from his glory in his veiled presence.

So that day when Jesus suddenly transfigures before them into pure white light and a voice booms from heaven with a proclamation, is it any wonder that Peter and the disciples would be terrified? They know what happens when you see God. You die. After Moses merely saw God’s back, he had a glowing face the rest of his life; who wants to walk around with a face you can’t turn off? Seeing Jesus glowing and radiant with old Moses and Elijah, Peter says holy schnikies, we need some tabernacles—stat.

We often make fun of hapless Peter as a disciple. But at least in this story, Peter is merely afraid, not stupid. His response makes perfect sense. He is a sinner, and while he might not know completely who Jesus is yet, he’s now getting a better idea: Jesus is the holy son of God. And what should “good sinners” do with the holy? Hide ourselves. Just like Adam and Eve hid themselves in shame when they became aware of their sin in the garden, the instinct is to put a respectful distance between the Almighty and us. Peter didn’t know that Jesus was changing everything.

Why Transfiguration Sunday today? We remember it at the end of the season of Epiphany, extending the celebration of Christmas, the revelation of God in the world among us. If Christmas made us think that God appears in a beautiful, joyful world in a beautiful package that goes under the tree, the Transfiguration is like another Christmas for sinners—that is, the revelation of God is not to be covered, but to be among us in our impurity. So today we close Epiphany and enter into Lent, the period where we are invited to be reflective and penitent on our sin, by remembering that God really has entered into the world of temptation, of sin, of our ignorance, of our hypocrisy, and he doesn’t want to be cut off from us, but with us.

We remember that’s his name, right? Emmanuel, “God with us.” Sometimes Scripture emphasizes different parts of “God with us.” The Beatitudes we just studied say, “I am with you—the low, the outcast, the persecuted.” The Passion and the Cross emphasize that He is really with us in our suffering; as all of us will, Christ personally experienced slipping away into death in its emptiness. The Transfiguration shows the fullness of God that overcomes nothingness, the radiance of God that overcomes darkness, emphasizing, “I am God, and I AM with you.”

The God with us wasn’t just a political martyr who shares our pain or a nice rabbi ahead of his time. As Peter saw, this is the God who created the sun, the trees, the stars, the very laws of physics. If nature is powerful, imagine the One who made nature, the One at whom nature trembles, the One whom even the wind and the waves obey, who when he says “peace,” the world stills.

This is the God that is with us. This is the God that is with you.

But he doesn’t want us to hide from him. He just wants us to “listen to him.” And if we listen to him, we will come to know that he is among us. That his fingerprints are on all his beloved children. That whoever believes in him carries with them something of the Holy Spirit, and we are in his body together.

Unfortunately, we Christians are very good at hiding. In fact, I used to be less hidden when I wasn’t a Christian. One of the best parts of doing open-mic comedy as I did a decade ago, where you’re bombing to five people in Los Angeles cafes that you don’t know how are paying the rent, was getting to be in a strange, messed up community of people who were very honest about our sins together. Yes, perhaps we were a bit too celebratory in our confessions, but it was a beautiful kind of camaraderie, if not quite a community (it turns out it’s very hard to build a community of narcissists). But as we grow up from being over-honest children and grow older into our adult lives, we get burned for our honesty. Eventually, we are taught by the world and to some extent each other that honesty is not always the best policy. I believe in New England that we culturally affirm that the best policy is polite hiding.

The Church is often not any better at this. It is a place where we come to receive grace, but keep on hiding ourselves from God and each other. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is known most for his opposition to the Nazi regime that led to his death. During that time, he also wrote a tremendous book that is not about Nazism, but about their underground seminary in the 1930s, writing about what it means to live in Christian community. He observed that even our community, which knows we are sinners loved by God, has a hard time reaching true fellowship. He writes:

“The final break-through to fellowship does not occur [if we] have fellowship with one another as believers and as devout people [but] do not have fellowship as the undevout, as sinners. The pious fellowship permits no one to be a sinner. So everybody must conceal his sin from himself and from the fellowship. We dare not be sinners. Many Christians are unthinkably horrified when a real sinner is suddenly discovered among the righteous. So we remain alone with our sin, living in lies and hypocrisy.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

But we need not be this way. We can be with one another in true fellowship. We need not have tabernacles between us and God, nor tabernacles with each other. We can seek more and more honest and authentic relationships with one another. We can be more and more honest with God and each other about our doubts, our failures, and our regrets. We are here to practice growing in holiness, not to perform it nor believe we can perfect it. A church building isn’t a place to protect holy people from sinners, but for all of us to be gathered in God’s presence.

Today, this Transfiguration Sunday, God is daring us to be sinners in his presence. God is daring us to be sinners together. That’s the Almighty God, you know, the one who controls the wind and is brighter than the sun. But, as today’s Affirmation of Faith reads,1 his true glory was in the form of a servant—wisdom in a cross, goodness in receiving sinners.

The true power of our Almighty, transfigured God is that he wants to be in a relationship with you. And he loves when we are in a relationship with each other in his presence together.

Over the weeks of Lent that lead up to the cross, whether we’re giving up chocolate or reading the Bible every day for the first time in years, we will remember Jesus’ journey with us. So listen to him: you don’t need to hide from our glorious God. And if none of us are hiding from God together, then we don’t need to hide from each other. So once more: Merry Christmas, sinners. God is with us. Amen.

But we speak God’s wisdom, a hidden mystery, which God decreed before the ages for our glory and which none of the rulers of this age understood, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But, as it is written,

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
nor the human heart conceived,
what God has prepared for those who love him.”

God has revealed to us through the Spirit, for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For what human knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within? So also no one comprehends what is truly God’s except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. And we speak of these things in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual.

1 Cor 2:7-13

“You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything but is thrown out and trampled under foot.

“You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. People do not light a lamp and put it under the bushel basket; rather, they put it on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Matthew 5:13-20

In our reading from Paul today to his friends in Corinth, he makes a reference to Isaiah. But I couldn’t help but think of one of my favoritee psalms: “I have spent my life Seeking all that’s still unsung; Bent my ear to hear the tune and closed my eyes to see; When there were no strings to play, You played to me.”

No, that’s not a psalm that’s in the Bible, but a song called “Attics of My Life” by the Grateful Dead, lyrics written by Robert Hunter. I would have sung it for you, but it’s a notoriously tricky song that even the Dead did not sing often in their thousands of live shows, structured like a hymn with multi-part harmonies.

I don’t listen to nearly as much Grateful Dead music as I used to, but Bob Weir’s passing had me dabbling again. As a Deadhead, I always thought “Attics” was a love song, and it is—but I missed that it’s really a love song to God.1 While not a Christian, the lyricist Hunter would say it’s a song about grace: “When I had no wings to fly, You flew to me.” “It’s not a song about being stoned,” he said, “But a song about the soul.”

In the attics of my life
Full of cloudy dreams unreal
Full of tastes, no tongue can know
And lights, no eye can see
When there was no ear to hear
You sang to me.

This is almost exactly what Paul echoes from Isaiah to his friends: “As it is written, ‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him’.”

The full 1 Corinthians 2 passages above is a great example of Scripture we are invited to read Scripture slowly, for reading these words in a quiet place is like being marinated with a mystery. It is like being sprinkled with a dash of God’s holy salt, a salty wisdom that Christ would also try to spread like seed, sowing a taste of the kingdom in anyone who really tries to follow him.

While Christ (including through Paul) sprinkles this dash of a vision of heavenly realms, this unworldly wisdom that cannot be seen and cannot be heard and really cannot even be dreamed, the paradox is that he also wants us to actually live a life in this world. He wants us to take that salt and mix ourselves into creation. Along the way, we ought never forget the sacred mystery that is utterly beyond us, nor should we forget the sacred mysteries of the creation and the love of God present among the people of this world. After all, salt and light do not exist for themselves, but to bring tastiness and illumination to the things they touch.

When we meditate on that famous saying of Jesus, “You are the salt of the earth,” we may not know what this would have meant to his Jewish followers he first preached to. The covenant that God established with Israel was sometimes called the “covenant of salt” (Num 18:19, 2 Chron 13:5). Salt was not merely a preservative of meat in a pre-refrigerated time, but according to the Levitical law, salt was something that was to be mixed into every offering (Lev 2:13). Everything that went on the altar before God was an animal of his creation, and everything that went on the altar before God also needed a dash of salt. Why?

While Jewish theologians have wrestled over this (and there is never a singular meaning to biblical symbolism), perhaps salt is present in sacrifices because there is something intrinsically transcendent and incorruptible about salt; if salt “loses its taste,” it is not because the salt has broken down, but because it has been diluted with too much non-salt. So to enter into a “covenant of salt” means to hold onto a unique, everlasting, absolutely sacred bond God has offered to us and not dilute it with the other spices of the world. Yet also to be salt is to not exist for ourselves, but to be mixed in with the world. This is a narrow gate.

To be salt of the earth (and light of the world) is affirming, as Paul does, that you have been given something holy. You have the mind of Christ, the Spirit somewhere within you that can understand God’s wisdom. You have something that the powers of the world don’t have, for if they had it, they wouldn’t have killed Christ thousands of years ago or keep killing Christ today. You have been sprinkled with God’s mystery.

But before you go around strutting, “Look at me, I’m salt of the earth, I’m the light of the world, or maybe before you feel crushed by that (“I don’t want to be salt, I can barely get out of bed”), note that this isn’t about us as individuals. Jesus is speaking to his followers together and speaks to us as a collective body of Christ, just as God was speaking to his covenant of salt as a covenant with a whole people. We have a part to play as individuals, but you cannot be a city on a hill by yourself; there is no city of one person. And you cannot add taste to anything if you are salt by yourself. It’s not all about you.

But in another paradox, while it’s not all about you, you are needed. Let me say that again: you are needed. Can you believe it? Are you too depressed and crushed by the overwhelming powers and movements of the world or the long procession of time on your body to believe that? To repeat earthly wisdom I once heard from a comedian, “It’s hard to be depressed and useful at the same time.” As someone who can get depressed, it’s not always what I want to hear, but it’s also very helpful to hear, and I think it is just true.

I believe everyone who has ears to hear this has a way they can be useful in the world today. Do you know that? Do you believe that you are salt? Do you believe that the world needs you in some way? Do you believe that you are the thing which mixed in with the world can help people be a little more aware of a sacred mystery you carry?

If you do believe that even just a little bit, how do we do that?

It has something to do with how we live. It may still surprise us to hear that Jesus says that he came not to abolish the law, that not one iota of the law will pass before its fulfillment, that we must keep the commandments and be even more righteous than Pharisees. It still surprises me a little bit to read that. Note here that the Pharisees’ name means “the separated ones,” or “those set apart.” A Pharisee thinks you get holy by staying separate.

So how can we be more righteous than scribes and Pharisees? We can’t be more righteous by their standards of following the law, or by being even more separated from the world than them. No, if we are to be saltier than the Pharisees, it means mixing in with humanity just as God mixed himself in with us. It means trusting that there is something he planted in our hearts to preserve our hearts, a mysterious Spirit that is calling us to follow God’s law by following his heart, which sometimes means doing things that will not make you popular with the world yet is done for the love of the world in and among the world.

As followers of Jesus, we are in a covenant of salt. This means we, in the humblest way we can mean it, exist at the focal point of the living relationship God has with the world. We violate that by forgetting how God is calling us to be different, and we violate it the other way by forgetting how God is calling us to blend in—doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with your God. As commentator R.T. France said on this passage, disciples must be both distinctive from the world and involved in the world, neither fully assimilated nor inaccessible hermits (a temptation I still have). We must be unusual but involved, unique but mixed in. When Jesus wants us to be flavorful salt and bright light, he’s saying that you are where God is: as Israel, as a church, as God’s people, as Christ followers, you have been gifted a sacred bond with God. So act like it.

Last week I mentioned the blessing and challenge within the Beatitudes, and there it is again in these words that directly follow the Beatitudes. He just told us that blessed are those who are down and out, but just because you’re down and out doesn’t mean you are exempt from a relationship with God. As the prophets affirmed just because you are under siege in Jerusalem doesn’t mean you don’t have to follow the law. Just because you are in a hard place doesn’t mean you are out of the covenant and exempt from it. It means that no matter how low and down and outcast you may be, you are blessed, for God still has his salt in you. He still has a use for you in his world. He still has sprinkled his holy mystery in you with all the love and responsibility that comes with that.

To echo Paul again, you have a saltiness from God that is beyond totally making sense; you have a flavor of God that we can’t articulate ourselves; you smack of wisdom and love beyond what anyone can see or hear, much less something we can articulate. In those lyrics from the Grateful Dead’s unlikely psalm: in the book of love’s own dream, when there was no dream of yours, He dreamed of you. You carry the flavor God dreamed up to mix into his creation.

You can do nothing to be beyond redemption, for the salt of God is redemptive and purifying of all it touches. Personally, it is strange for me that I can find redemption in the Grateful Dead. Listening to them is often somewhat painful for the times of my life it evokes, a sad hedonia. One can easily seek pleasure all the time and remain depressed, and the Dead were often the soundtrack playing in the background of that time of my life of living for myself, seeking to have ephemeral psychedelic “wisdom” while sequestered from the world. It’s a temptation easy here in Vermont, which I think of as something like America’s monastery. It’s easy to want to retreat here away from the madness of world out there and “down there.”

But God is calling us to risk entering into the messed-up world, trusting that God’s sprinkling salt can redeem any part of his creation and that we are called to join in his work. Not by replicating the power games of the world and diluting the salt, but to share the unique taste of a mystery God has planted in you and to share that mysterious love with the world. For when you did not have a dream of your own, God thought it fitting to dream of you. Amen.

“With what shall I come before the Lord
and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”

He has told you, O mortal, what is good,
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice and to love kindness
and to walk humbly with your God?

Micah 6:6-8

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. And he began to speak and taught them, saying:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

Matthew 5:1-12

For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

1 Cor 1:25

When preachers start preaching the lectionary (the schedule of readings many Christian churches follow), it is generally considered sound advice not to try to harmonize all the texts. This temptation is unfair when three of our texts today are so powerful that they deserve multiple sermons by themselves.

I sometimes listen to pop culture podcasts by The Ringer where they treat movies like sports players, doing “drafts” to make up a roster of your favorite movies. For example, if you were filling out a “team” of movies and were picking from all the Best Picture winners of The Oscars, you might draft Forrest Gump to be your top pick. While all Scripture is sacred, if you had to draft Scripture readings to make a team and were picking the best of the best, you could make a case for each of our readings today for a first-round pick.

Let’s take the Beatitudes (Matt 5:1-12). They open the Sermon on the Mount (I’ve listened to a 10-hour audiobook on the Sermon on the Mount alone, and luckily you don’t have to listen to me talk about it for 10 hours). Blessed are the lowly, the suffering, the poor in spirit, the meek, the mourning; can you rejoice and be glad? For Jesus tells us that where human justice and human mercy fail, God’s justice and mercy will not. This teaching is literally on the “Apex Mountain” of Christ’s teachings.

But if I’m drafting passages from the Epistles, we have been working through 1 Corinthians for the past several weeks, and now we have the capper of just the first chapter, which certainly harmonizes with the Beatitudes: “For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength….God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to abolish things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.” (1 Cor 1:25, 27-29) And so, Paul says, this is why God chose you—chose us—who are not that wise in the grand scheme of things, not that powerful, not that noble, though sometimes we do good impressions of all these things.

And for those of us who really just need something simple (and who doesn’t?), Micah 6:8 is a top pick for so many of us because, finally, the Bible has answered a question directly: “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love mercy,1 and to walk humbly with your God?” Simple commands. I can just stick that in my pocket and carry it with me. Can the preacher improve upon the words? Surely not.

So while Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ posited that life itself was Christ’s last temptation before he took the cross, the preacher’s last temptation is to try and talk about everything. I can’t do that. But if these passages still seem disconnected, I do yearn for you to hear the same harmonies between these passages that I do.

First, a harmony of comfort.

I have to say that anecdotally, among my friends across political lines, family members, friends, acquaintances, random internet strangers, this has been the most challenging time certainly since the pandemic, perhaps even worse than then, or at least different—the widespread demoralization has been significant. Yet because this cacophony of distress is hardly new, and since suffering is the most ancient of human traditions, hear this old comforting harmony among our texts loud and clear: God chooses those who are down.

How many times can Jesus say “blessed” are you who are suffering in every which way? Paul also emphasizes this to the Corinthians, that “God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to abolish things that are.” You are not strong? You have no power? You have no wealth? You feel like you are nothing? Blessed are you—God chose you!

But this pairs with another strong harmony we can hear in our texts: challenge. The mercy and love of Jesus comfort us while challenging us at the same time.

Blessed are you meek, Jesus says, but then in the same sermon, just 40 verses later, he tells us that we must love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us (Matt 5:43-48). What bigger challenge is there than that? Take Micah’s simple instruction that’s still in your pocket: “Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly.” Honestly, those are often (not always) easy to do for people we love. But, Jesus would challenge us, what good is it to do justice only to people you like, have mercy only for people on your team, and walk humbly with those who already walk humbly with you? Anybody does these things with our friends. But what about with our enemies? What about when it costs you?

But there is an even deeper challenge embedded within God’s comfort. For as comforting as these words are, the challenge is this: do you actually believe them? Do you actually live like you do?

Too many of us Christians, generation after generation, become discipled over and over again not by Jesus but by economies of power. And so while we might be intermittently comforted by the words of the Beatitudes, blessing the poor and the meek, how many of us really trust these blessings enough to do the right thing when the right thing might render us poorer or meeker? How much do our actions really reflect the Beatitudes, and how much do they reflect our lack of faith?

This is why Paul says (to flesh out from how he thought of “Jews and Greeks” in his time) that the cross is a stumbling block for us religious and foolish for the secular.2 The true humble, lowly, reverse power of the cross continues to trip us Christians up over and over whenever our actions show we do not really believe in the power of the cross as much as the power that wins human control of the world. To the Greeks, who are the “secular” crowd of Paul’s time, the power of the cross is laughably self-evidently false, and they have no reason to believe it true. But what is our excuse?

For us Christians, both Micah and the Sermon on the Mount only make sense in the context of the foolish cross. Our minds discipled by power say, “Blessed are the strong, the powerful, those who don’t give in, who don’t back down, who press, who insist, who demand,” because that’s what “works” in human power dynamics. But the foolish cross that Jesus was nailed to did not insist or demand. It was so shocking and scandalous because it contradicts everything they and we know about who and what is truly powerful. The cross challenges our basic instincts.

Playing off these harmonies of comfort and challenge, God gives us one more harmony here, the harmony of sacrifice. This is one we can all sing along to.

The divine language God sings through Jesus is the language of sacrifice. Paul will sing it to his Corinthians, and Jesus sang it in his Beatitudes, but God has been singing it all along through our Old Testament through establishing the sacrificial system that allows us to participate in God’s grace. In Micah, God clarifies the nature and kinds of sacrifice he really loves.

The backdrop of our simple Micah advice is figuring out how to repay God for the debts we have incurred through our sin: “With what shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” These are not just hyperboles of Micah’s existing Jewish sacrificial system, but naming things that other cultures were sacrificing to appease their gods of power. What can I sacrifice to make myself right with God? To which God says I don’t want those sacrifices, but your justice, mercy, and humility.

But are these actually opposed to sacrifice? What if we can hear justice, mercy, and humility in the harmony of sacrificial love?

To seek justice is often to sacrifice one’s loyalty to someone who has done wrong. To seek justice often means to sacrifice what is convenient and comfortable (at the very same time when we are so in need of God’s comfort). Seeking justice might paradoxically mean sacrificing our idea of what “mercy” looks like (if we think mercy is “letting someone do whatever they want with no consequences”).

But in the harmony of sacrifice, there is musical, paradoxical tension. Because to love mercy—in Hebrew chesed, or “loving-kindness,” that reflects God’s steadfast covenantal love for us—means sometimes to sacrifice our idea of justice. This is what God does for us in forgiving our sins through sacrificing himself: we have done wrong, but God sacrifices his ability to make the ledger even through vengeance, and instead he makes it even through mercy. Making matters more complicated, in our human justice system (for example) we cannot simply seek mercy for the guilty at the expense of mercy for their victims. Anyone who has ever had to pursue both justice and mercy for people they love knows that this is heartbreakingly impossible for most of us to do both well at once.

How can we, then, pursue both justice and mercy? What is our last sacrifice? Pride; walk humbly. If you want to be countercultural and flout the economies of power, let us walk humbly and keep walking. If you’re like me, your pride and your ego have done good things for you at times, serving you well. They’ve maybe even helped you do some holy work and stand up for others or yourself. Your pride might have helped you to want to be kinder than your unkind neighbors, to be more concerned with justice than the other side’s corrupt politicians. If you were a Pharisee, your pride helped you keep the law. If you’re a Christian, your pride might drive you to be a better Christian. But like rivers of oil, this pride is not the fuel God really wants. He wants us to run on humility. Will we?

In these days where we need God’s comfort more than ever, and when we might feel challenged more than ever to believe in God’s comfort, let us sing in the harmony of sacrifice: do justice, love mercy, walk humbly. Know that you are blessed if you feel cursed, and that God even chose you to love the world through you. For God did not draft the powerful, the well-off, the loud, or the boastful for his team. He drafted us; he drafted you; he drafted any fool who follows the crucified teacher who gave up his power over and over until the nails pierced flesh. May we believe the good news of God’s grace enough to trust it, walk it, and sing along. Amen.

Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you but that you be knit together in the same mind and the same purpose. For it has been made clear to me by Chloe’s people that there are quarrels among you, my brothers and sisters. What I mean is that each of you says, “I belong to Paul,” or “I belong to Apollos,” or “I belong to Cephas,” or “I belong to Christ.”

Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?

I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, so that no one can say that you were baptized in my name. (I did baptize also the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else.)

For Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel—and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power.

For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

1 Cor 1:10-18

Like last week, we are staying in our Corinthians reading again, which has one of my favorite verses when thinking about preaching: “Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel--and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power. For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” (1 Cor 1:17-18). This is both a red sky at night and a red sky at morning, a preacher’s delight and warning: if I preach poorly, then God will be even more glorified than if I try to preach well. Please keep that in mind later.

Sometimes it takes great leaps of imagination to picture ourselves in Scripture and understand what it was like in Biblical times. When I read this passage hearing about all the different teams and factions in the Corinthians church, it is not much of a stretch.

I was reminded of a game I hadn’t thought of in a long time, “Follow the Leader,” the game I imagine most of us played as kids or as parents. It is a delightfully simple game, where a leader is picked, and they march around and do all sorts of things trying to see if everyone else can follow along in a timely fashion. The fun is in seeing just how ridiculous and silly you can be and have people still mimic you—rub your belly and pat your head on one foot while saying the Pledge of Allegiance (let’s not all try that now). In Follow the Leader, you try and do harder and harder things so that people trip up and lose.

Many adult leaders play this game, but with different rules. Instead of harder and harder games, we play follow the leader with easy things to keep us mimicking and following them. Their desire is not to lose followers, but to keep them by stoking hatred, tribalism and spiritual pride. Nevertheless, we as Christians still pray for them.

When we read Corinthians, I wonder what “follow the leader” games were being played. Apollos, according to Acts 18-19, was a good-hearted, correctable, and humble teacher. But we know from 2 Corinthians that other leaders in the Corinth church were more explicitly divisive, offering people what they wanted to hear instead of the gospel. Paul presses with more questions for us about our allegiances: “Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized in the name of Paul?” Denigrating himself primarily, Paul challenges us: who is the leader you are following?

Paul adds that some also insisted, “I belong to Christ,” and one can infer it being said with a certain amount of spiritual pride, that great old diseases which says, “Unlike those other Christians, I actually follow Jesus.” Huh, Paul wonders, “Has Christ been divided?”

When we see the world with resurrection eyes, Paul says all of us sinners are one in Christ, whether we like it or not. I have felt this too often to deny its truth.

Last year, I was grateful to attend the Jesse Strong Patriots Day in honor of our fallen Veterans. Marine Sergeant Strong was killed in action twenty-one years ago tomorrow, January 26th, 2005. As I imagine Jesse would have wanted, and as his mother Vicki ensured,1 his day was not primarily about Jesse. Nor was it only Veterans, and not even only Americans, but all our neighbors who are first responders and Veterans from both the US and Canada in our region.

Out of the many who were honored, the widow of David “Chris” Maland attended. Chris was a border patrol agent shot a dozen miles from us in Coventry on I-91 during a traffic stop. Chris did not deserve to die. But he knew that was the risk he took with his calling. He was not shot by anyone who had anything to do with our current national debates over immigration, but by a member of a bizarre internet cult. Perhaps that is why its time in national news did not last; it did not play into our tribes easily. In some ways it was a blessing that his death was not politicized, for the tragedy in his sacrifice could be more universally recognized and honored in a way that was deserved.

Chris Maland was doing his job to protect our freedom as a border patrol officer. I am sure most who are in Immigration and Customs Enforcement envision themselves doing the same. In the past decade, many in law enforcement have done so despite knowing that part of the job is being hated by large swaths of the public. As one officer once said, it is a strange and hard job knowing that almost every single day, people lie to you.

Chris Maland was from Fairmont, Minnesota. According to his obituary, he was a Veteran of the Air Force and a federal officer, transferred to Newport, Vermont, when he became a Customs and Border Protection agent. Had he stayed in his home state of Minnesota, Chris might have been cared for by a Veterans Affairs nurse who was known as Alex Pretti.

Alex was a nurse at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center. His profession was to treat Veterans. As someone who did a chaplain internship at Charles Georgee VA Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, I can imagine him as a nurse I might have worked with. Almost exactly a year after Chris was killed in the line of duty, Alex was killed yesterday. While facts are still coming out, I can imagine he saw what he was doing as his line of duty to care for others.

In videos, we see Alex filming with his phone, likely to ensure that law enforcement upheld the Constitution that all Veterans swear an oath to defend. In a democracy, transparency is the people’s law enforcement, for where more and more people disregard the law, indeed, disregard the truth, being a witness to reality is an important job. But recording on a phone was not his last act, nor was being shot his last act, for that was not his choice. His last act and last words were asking a woman, “Are you okay?” Alex was a nurse.

I know there are more facts to emerge as we try to discern the truth from our bias and chaos. I do not know what side you are on here or on every issue. I never fully identify with a “side.” I hate that we even have “sides.” But I do not believe Alex Pretti was against your side. The truth that I witness is that ICE agents are not monsters and Alex was not a monster. Nor was Alex a terrorist. He was a nurse.

There is a tradition at the VA that I have had the privilege of witnessing a few times. It is called the Final Salute. It is done for any Veteran who dies while in a VA hospital, even if their war was long ago, even if their service was small, even if they never had to face bullets themselves. Their body is draped with the flag and wheeled out. Taps are played over the hospital intercom. When we hear this, all VA staff who are not in the middle of a procedure come to the hallway. We civilians hold our hands on our hearts while Veterans give a military salute.

Veterans are given the Final Salute even if they might have signed up for war for the wrong reasons. They are honored even if much of the country feels their war was a mistake. They are honored even if the Veteran themselves no longer believes in the cause they once served. They are honored because war is a tragedy, and because they were willing to donate their life for the sake of someone else. They are honored because sacrifice for the sake of others always means something.

Since yesterday’s shooting, someone shared another video of Alex. In this video, there was no chaos, no shouting, but a quiet hospital hallway, where Alex was taking part in a Final Salute in the hospital for someone’s father, a Veteran who had passed away. In the video, Alex recites these words:

“Today we remember that freedom is not free, we have to work at it. Nurture it. Protect it. And even sacrifice for it. May we never forget and always remember our brothers and sisters who have served so that we may enjoy the gift of freedom. So in this moment we remember and give thanks for their dedication and selfless service to our nation in the cause of our freedom. In this solemn hour, we render them our honor and our gratitude.”

Some will argue he should not have put himself in the situation that got him killed. Perhaps an investigation will discover more truth, discerning guilt and innocence in humility before God who alone knows the full truth. But it is horrible.

And so for Alex, the nurse to Veterans, I give a civilian’s final salute, not only for him or Veterans, but to all who have served and sacrificed for freedom. Please take a moment in silence with me to render them our honor and gratitude.

I do want to close by returning to our text, especially thinking about spiritual pride, something I have wrestled with my whole life. Spiritual pride is one of our universal human problems. Because spiritual pride always involves puffing yourself up over someone else, it pairs well with our tendency towards tribalism. We do this as Christians, saying, “If only the Church didn’t have those looney other Christians messing it up, we would be perfect. Thank God I’m not like them.”

I’m sure Paul was at least occasionally guilty of this, too. Yet Paul is also very careful to always return to the unity in Christ and to point out his own failures in humility. Humility does not mean we do not try and discern what’s right and wrong, and that we lose ourselves in moral confusion; a humble criminal court judge must, after all, still arrive at a verdict, but not out of an arrogance that can cloud judgment, but out of a grave humility that the stakes are real and we can only do our best to make decisions based on what is truth. Humility does not cloud our moral thinking, but actually brings clarity. If spiritual pride is a big block of ice between us and the truth, allowing us to only see it distorted, humility melts the ice so that we can see things more clearly.

As a new friend in our local Estuary group asked, how do we talk to somebody who is so convinced they are right? How do we talk to each other when there is so much pride and self-righteousness? Perhaps it starts by melting the ice of pride that obscures our vision.

In that clarity, Paul sees that there is no Team Apollos, Team Paul, or even Team True Christ vs. Team False Christ. There is the human team we are all on, trying and failing to uphold God’s will and love, and there is Christ who dies for us all.

I am often reminded of the time when Joshua gets close to Jericho, he sees a man with a sword, and he asks him, “Are you with us or are you with our enemies?” To which the man replies, “Neither. I am a commander with the Lord’s army. … Take off your sandals, for you are on holy ground.” (Joshua 5:13-15) Joshua does so.

All of us sinners are in Christ, whether we like it or not. The kingdom of God was proclaimed long before and will exist long after we do. The freedom Christ has granted all of us was not free either, but paid in the sacrifice of his blood. It is such a confronting gift for us that we must ask ourselves, “Who is the leader I am following”?

In Jesus Christ, we have a leader to follow in sorrow and pain and sacrifice. He wants us to follow in unity together, even when the world is in great division, knowing that his body was not broken just for some or broken in two, but broken for everyone. This message about the cross, indeed, may be foolish to so many people out there. “But to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” May we hold onto this foolish power. May we hold onto it together. Amen.

Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and our brother Sosthenes,

To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours:

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus, for in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind— just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you— so that you are not lacking in any gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ. He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful, by whom you were called into the partnership of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

1 Corinthians 1:1-9

In today’s epistle reading, we have the first words of the first letter from Paul to the Corinthians. While scholars have debated some of Paul’s letters as authentically Paul, there is virtually no debate that this is truly Paul talking. Scholars also debate, along with the Church in Paul’s time up to our time, how much Paul really speaks for Jesus. It has been common in recent decades for some Christians to say that “I don’t follow Paul, I follow Jesus,” to which Paul today would say, “Good! You read the rest of my letter.” (We will continue stepping through the opening pages of 1 Corinthians this month.)

Paul did not consider himself Lord. Rather, in these opening verses he refers to Jesus Christ as Lord, kyriou, no less than five times in nine verses, like he’s trying to hammer it home: Jesus Christ is our Lord.

But that’s the only hammering here in these opening words. Hear again the encouragement, the love, pouring out of this authentically-Paul. Don’t listen to analyze, just listen to the energy and the emotional tone: “To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours: grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus.” (1 Cor 1:3-4)

So much grace and love and gratitude. Not only is Paul filled up with the grace of God, he sees his brothers and sisters in this faraway place filled up with it too. Not only does he see them filled up with a common grace in a generic way, like “You have a lovely church,” he sees and notices their specific gifts, “For in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind… you are not lacking in any gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Cor 1:5, 7)

What a word of encouragement I could only hope to give. But while we’re here, let me say it: since before I moved here to Vermont, I have felt and been so loved by God through Craftsburians. Not only because the grace of God flows generally through you, but specifically how it does: through the intelligence and education some of you have, to the deep knowledge, wisdom, and experience in working through hard problems of the world many of you have, to the loving patience some of you have demonstrated in really hard life situations, to the persistence to get things done when you know it is what our community needs, to the steady faithfulness of showing up to Bible study to keep learning more (including our dear Fielda, who kept being a student all the way through her 102 years). This just scratches the surface of the ways you have shown the gifts of God and the love you have shown to me and my wife in our young marriage, which we have not and cannot repay. Truly, you are not lacking in any gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ. As Paul would go on to tell his Corinthians, “He will strengthen you to the end, that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful, by whom you were called into the partnership of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.” (1 Cor 1:8-9).

But here’s a funny thing: can you believe that this true, authentic Paul is writing a letter to his haters? Can you believe this is a letter to people who are bitterly fighting and some of whom bitterly detest him? Maybe now I’m jogging your memory about the context of this letter, unfurled in the coming chapters, that this is a group who have serious problems and divisions about idolatry, sexuality, spiritual gifts, ecstatic experiences in worship, and especially over their favorite teachers—Apollos, Cephas, Paul, and in a future letter, some “super apostles.”

But first things are first for this first letter to these Corinthians (and I wonder how many people in history have thought that “First Corinthians” was their church name, like “First Presbyterian”). The first things are overwhelming love and grace from Paul, even to his haters, a smidgen of the love and grace God pours out to his haters through, yes, our Lord Jesus Christ. Because while there would be time to get into the details of the disagreements and clarify what is to be done about certain issues, Paul begins by seeing these Corinthians through “resurrection eyes.”

If we follow Jesus, we are also called to see our enemies through resurrection eyes. Yes, work through right and wrong, justice and injustice, and do so with passion, but also see our enemies through resurrection eyes. After all, Jesus tells us even more explicitly to pray for our enemies than our friends (Matt 5:44). In fact, one could read the Gospels and think that Jesus told us to love our enemies more than our families, who we are to “hate” (Matt 10:37). (Perhaps some of us have solved the problem by making our family our enemies, then we can finally love them like Jesus wants us to.)

We often hear that Jesus is countercultural, and it’s true. I believe that still the most countercultural thing we can do today is to love and pray for our enemies, whoever they might be to you. I know we all have different perceptions of our enemies. We may have specific people in mind or bigger groups. Yet if we cannot write our enemies with a letter that opens with the same authentic love of Christ that this authentic Paul writes, then we may need more time in prayer.

This isn’t to say we are not called to work through issues and, if you feel called to do so, to stand up for what is right and to name what is wrong. However, as one preacher reminded, “God can speak through rocks and donkeys,” meaning, he doesn’t need you to be his spokesman on every issue; God can do more work through a rock and a donkey than a Christian filled with pride. Let the preacher himself understand!

I was inspired by what Pope Leo shared yesterday about the Vatican’s approach to diplomacy; since the Vatican is a country, it actually has diplomats and such. Pope Leo says—and my Presbyterian ancestors are rolling over at me positively quoting a pope—that in the midst of what is happening today, “Our diplomacy is born of the Gospel. It is not tactics, but reasoned charity; it seeks neither winners nor losers; it builds no barriers, but restores authentic bonds. The Pope’s diplomats are called to be invisible, fortified bridges that offer support when events seem difficult to contain, and bridges of hope when goodness wavers.”

This is not just for the Pope’s diplomats, but this work is something any of us can do, even if we have no diplomats and are a nation of one person, to be invisible bridges that offer support when events seem difficult to contain.

That said, we all feel called to different things in this moment. I know so many of your gifts, but I don’t know what each one of you is called to do or be in the body of Christ in today’s America, whether that is to be loud and vocal or to be the invisible bridge and glue. But in the eyes of the broken, bloodied, and resurrected body of Christ, all people are broken, bloodied, and in need of his love. In resurrection eyes, we are all captured in some way by powers and principalities, all captured by psychological and spiritual forces who work on us far beyond our comprehension, including algorithms that give each of us different information catered to our specific egos.

Our instincts are still so often to scapegoat and sacrifice one person or one group or another. Sacrifice the protestor; sacrifice the agent who is the symbol of state power, like a Roman centurion; sacrifice the immigrant; sacrifice your neighbor; sacrifice the Constitution; sacrifice the country. Why and who are we sacrificing each other for, and towards what end, we don’t really know. We give our reasons for it, but I suspect our reasons are window-dressing for our psychological need to get rid of our problems in a broken world—where there is still scarcity and suffering and injustice and pain—by getting rid of people.

But the one Paul calls Lord Jesus Christ five times in nine verses is not one who does this. Lord Jesus Christ wields his authority perhaps because he knows that some people really need authority to respond to, like the Roman centurion, ancient Judea’s version of an ICE agent or any law enforcement officer, who asked Jesus to have mercy and heal his servant, saying, “Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me” (Matt 5:8-9). Not every Roman centurion had a heart to heal those under their authority. Some would mock and beat Jesus on the way to the cross.

But nevertheless, Jesus died for centurions, for those the centurions had authority over, for the Pharisees in their pride, for his pious hypocritical followers in their pride, for you and me. That is why he is fit to be called Lord. He sacrifices himself so that we don’t have to sacrifice each other. This is why John the Baptist, in our gospel reading today, said, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” (John 1:29, 36) The Lamb is not one who sacrifices; the Lamb is the one who is sacrificed. To see the world in resurrection eyes is to see that this is our Lord, a sacrificial Lamb. When all else is failing, we can trust in the Lamb because he is a God of the true law, not the tyranny of the law, but the fulfillment of it by giving of himself, not abusing his lordship.

So while it’s not why the letter is called “first Corinthians,” these Corinthians were the first Corinthians—that is, the first of a long line of churches who don’t know what the future holds and cannot get on the entirely same page. They aren’t all on fire for God in the same way. They aren’t all upright citizens. They did not have it all figured out, and they did not all love each other perfectly.

If they were the first Corinthians, we are the last Corinthians, this body of Christ, standing not at the end of history, but at the uncertain horizon. To both those first and we last Corinthians, may we be encouraged, if not by our gifts and not by our love, be encouraged: God is faithful. Jesus Christ is Lord. Remember this, and he will keep you strong to the end, so that you will be blameless on his day. Amen.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it.

There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

He was in the world, and the world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’ ”) From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is the only Son, himself God, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.

John 1:1-18

Today’s gospel reading is the so-called “prologue” of John’s gospel, which we have read several times in this Christmas season. We could probably do a whole sermon series on just this chapter that would take months, if not years. One theologian said he had a seminary professor who, for an eighteen week course, spent thirteen weeks just on this section alone. We can learn something about ourselves by whether the sound of that excites you or scares you.

If this scares you, but you want to know why it might excite someone, it’s not just because some people are theology nerds. It’s that we who would enjoy this deep dive know that we are going to get attention to detail. That is, we are going to get specific. And there is a surprising amount of love in attention to detail in the specifics.

This is something that every good writer knows—you get to the universal through the specific. If I tell you I drove to the store last week and it was cold and the roads were bad, it’s true, but it doesn’t give you at all the same idea as if I was specific—last week I drove my 2003 Acura to Hannaford when there was still a quarter-inch layer of ice on much of the roads, and my car’s heater stopped working while it was 0 degrees out, so I was wearing a balaclava for the whole ride, and I foolishly went down Town Hill road where it gets really steep at the bottom, and my brakes locked out, but because Tom taught me how to brake in the snow, I stopped just in time from crashing. By giving you those specifics, you probably recognized many things in your own life that this evoked for you.

So it is with God. Because God and the love of God is so universal and so big, we can’t possibly wrap our mind around it. As John says in the last words of his gospel, if he were to write everything about Christ, the world couldn’t hold all the books. And in the first words of his gospel, we are overwhelmed by the absolute bigness of everything. He talks about the entire universe, the cosmos, everything being God, no, Christ. Christ is connected to it all, he is all, in all, all is through him.

And yet this God expresses himself through the specific and particular. Through a particular people of the Israelites, through a particular series of revelations. This God came to dwell among them—and the word John uses is one that is also used for “tabernacle.” This God of everything came to tabernacle among us.

This, of course, is what the Israelites already knew. That the overwhelming God, whose allness that is the power of the universe was far too much for any one person to encounter unscathed, made a place where his people could be with him—the tabernacle. A tent that moved around the desert with the Israelites while they pilgrimed through the lost desert. This is where the glory, the shekinah, the pure essence of this huge God came to be in one specific little place. God, knowing he was so overwhelming to us, too big for any one of us, made himself relatable, an earthly home, inviting us to be with him. And so the tabernacle, and then the Temple, becomes a place where we can safely and assuredly be with this God who is too big for us in a particular, specific place.

But, John says, things are even more specific and particular than that. The fullness of God came to tabernacle with us through a specific, particular person named Jesus. And what’s more, this tabernacling God now seeks to dwell in you through the power and presence of his Holy Spirit if you simply say yes to the invitation.

And so, John thinks, you should know some details about this person of Jesus so that you know some details about the love of God. Therefore every Christmas, we remember the details of his birth every year. What might seem like inconsequential details to an outsider—that he was born in a specific place of Bethlehem, raised in a particular town of Nazareth, to the specific human parents Mary and Joseph—all are meaningful details, and a preacher ought to help you understand why those things matter. (Prizes and participation may vary by location while supplies last.)

But still, you might ask: Why worship Jesus if God is everywhere in the universe? Why would God need to send a specific son? Why do we really need the details?

Right after church today, I'm flying out to be at my grandmother’s funeral. If I tell you “my grandmother loved me,” that tells you almost nothing about love or my grandmother. It’s not a bad starting point, but you don't really know anything about her.

To tell you just a few specifics that are still too general: my grandmother was a woman born and raised all over the South, from North Carolina to Alabama, a lifelong Presbyterian who would never skip church except for health issues. She didn’t generically “love her community,” she served on the Huntsville City School Board, worked with the Huntsville Museum of Art Docents, and loved their local school backpack ministry. From my earliest memories, she always told me I was special all the time to the point where, frankly, I stopped believing it. A big reader, she always told me I needed to write a book. And while I'm sad that it wasn't finished before she passed, I am going to write a book. And it will have to have a happy ending, because she always read the last pages of a book first to make sure it had a happy ending before she committed herself to reading it—as if she knew the gospel insisted upon one.

Every time I was in town as a kid, she would take us to the legendary Chuck E. Cheese and my grandfather would give us $5 each to play video games, enough to have fun but not enough to completely spoil us on the inimitable X-Men arcade game. She loved I Love Lucy and making delicious fried chicken until she got tired of cleaning up the mess, so I guess even her love had limits. The stories could go on and on. As I know with some of our recent memorial services, one reason why we have these gatherings is to get specific.

The reason we study the Bible is the same reason God sent his son, because we can only wrap our minds around the God who is of and for and through the whole universe by getting to know him and his love through the specifics of his son. That’s why some of us get excited at the idea of studying fourteen verses for thirteen weeks. We get to know his Son through closely studying scripture again and again for all the details that we miss all the time. And anybody who studies scripture regularly, routinely, with discipline, will tell you that something different strikes you. There's some new detail that stands out, either that you never noticed before, or that you noticed and you forgot, or it's making some connection. There's always something more specific. There's always a new part of God's love to uncover.

When you give birth to children, you don't call them Thing One and Thing Two. No, you call them Joe, Jesse, Jane, Sukha, Neil, I could go on and on, because while humanity and human nature can be a devastatingly disappointing thing, we know that the holiness of God is born in and shows up in individuals. Each person is sacred. We can’t pray for everybody in the world, but we pray each week in service for specific people and actually get closer to praying for the whole world by praying for specific people in specific situations.

We encounter God’s love and the love of Jesus through these individuals, through my grandmother, through Elaine, Louise, Karen, all our different spouses and friends and relatives we have lost in recent years. The most specific way we come to know the majestic, universal, cosmic love of God here and now is through each other, a love most clearly shown in the love of Jesus Christ, who John calls “a grace upon grace,” that is, a gift on top of a gift, a dwelling God who yearns to dwell nearer and nearer to you.

If this is too big, one thing we can do with all this is simple—pay attention. In Advent, we practiced being “watchful,” staying alert, minding the details. Because, as one of my old New Testament TA’s is fond of saying, details matter. You know they matter because you know the details of your life matter. You are not just Thing 1 with Story A from Town B. You were specifically and lovingly made in the image of God, with a story you carry, and it carried you here today to this church and this specific little town of Craftsbury. There is no church and no place and no thing that is too small for God. On the contrary, it is here, where we are small enough to be specific, where we actually can be closer to him than in the bigness of everything.

And we worship the entire all of everything of God fully by knowing the details of his love, just as the God of the cosmos knows and loves you down to every last detail. God doesn’t just love you—he died for you. He didn’t just die for you, he let humanity, his own people aligned with state power, kill him. He wasn’t just killed by them, he was humiliated, tortured, and died by one of the worst forms of execution humanity ever thought of, a cross. The specific love of the universal God is specifically like this, one that would rather let you kill him than let you hurt yourself. But there’s one more detail, well, for now: this flesh and blood human Jesus Christ, entering the world as a vulnerable baby, is made of a love that would not let death get the last word. You can know the God of the cosmos by this. For death is nothing, but the love of God is absolutely everything. Amen.

Now after the magi had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, “Out of Egypt I have called my son.”

When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the magi, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the magi. Then what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

“A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.”

When Herod died, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who were seeking the child’s life are dead.” Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was ruling Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. And after being warned in a dream, he went away to the district of Galilee. There he made his home in a town called Nazareth, so that what had been spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled, “He will be called a Nazarene.”

Matthew 2:13-23

I admit I am experiencing a (completely sober) Christmas week hangover this morning. It’s not just that there’s been a little extra work for a preacher, but a hangover of the season of joy, anticipation, watching and waiting, capped off with a beautiful Christmas Eve service with all the special music and choirs of human angel. Now we are either basking in the glow of Christmas or recovering from food, or maybe recovering even more from being with our families.

To cap off these post-Christmas blues, on Christmas night, I got news that my grandmother, who had just gone to the ICU days earlier, would be in her last days. She passed on Friday night. I have many grandmotherly accolades I could give and stories to share, but in this moment of preaching, I miss her presence because she used to watch all of our live streams, watching me say words from this pulpit, and until last week, she’d always email me nice words about it later, even if they were not earned. Years ago in my twenties, she would always email me that she was praying for me when faith was the last thing on my mind, and in many ways prayed me back to faith.

There are many worse days to die than right after Christmas, and arguably only Easter would be “better,” but it is a somber and stark reminder of death, a reminder I know several in our congregation have had in the past several years. Even for those who have the most centered-on-Jesus Christmas traditions, it would be hard not to have a Christmas hangover when the reminder of death, that which Christ came to overcome, is right in your face.

If you are also feeling a Christmas hangover today, you might be surprised to learn that yet again you are not alone and that yet again God gets you. He loves you, he knows what you are going through, and he cares about what you are going through, and he lives it with you. Can we hear that enough times? Does our spiritual amnesia rob us of feeling solidarity with God yet again?

God gets you. I know that’s a Super Bowl ad now, but really, whatever pain, malaise, fear, anxiety, even boredom, God has intimacy with us. Through Jesus, God has never lost intimate solidarity with anything you’ve gone through—even feeling estranged from God.

Thankfully, in our Christmas hangovers or otherwise, most of us have not had to flee political persecution at the hands of people who wanted him dead. But Jesus has, and his earthly mom and dad did. The glorias had scarcely stopped echoing in the Judean hills when Herod sought their blood. Imagine the stories they must have told Jesus, especially when he was being a typical boy and running off to the Temple without letting them know. “I didn’t spend years of my life eating Egyptian bread for this, Jesus.” “Listen to your mother.”

Most of us haven’t gone through anything like that. But some of us have. God has.

Most of us haven’t been rejected and scapegoated for speaking truth to power. Many of us haven’t felt completely disenchanted with the world being utterly wrong and following darkness. Many of us haven’t been so hungry that we are tempted to do the wrong thing by hunger, seduced by forces hijacking our bodily chemistry to rationalize harming a neighbor and ourselves because our basic needs have not been met. Many of us haven’t had to choose between jumping off our cross through a lie or standing in the truth that we know will make us bleed. But some of us have. God has.

Really, the idea of a “Christmas hangover” makes too light of the stark reality of evil that Jesus faced, resulting in one of the most horrifying passages of Scripture where Herod mass-slaughtered infants to try and protect his power. Most of us have not faced anything like that. But some of us, even today, have. God has.

Still, in some regard, we who renew our vows to follow Jesus, like the Israelites who imperfectly followed God through the desert, spend our whole lives in a Christmas hangover. We aren’t angels who get to pop in and see how humans are doing in their suffering, give them a bunch of good news, and return to our comfortable lives in the heavenly court in the presence of God.

But it’s actually part of the good news that we aren’t like the angels, because the angels are not really the point or the power of God’s work. As Isaiah said this morning, “It was no messenger or angel but his presence that saved [his people.]” “And he became their savior in all their distress…in his love and pity it was he who redeemed them; he lifted them up and carried them all the days of old.” (Isa 63:8-9) What’s more, as the author of Hebrews also told us this morning, God did not come to help the angels (Heb 2:16). He came for us.

Stop and think about this for a second and what this tells us about God and God’s love. I mean, I’m sure God cares about the angels, but he knows they’re fine. I can almost hear him, “Angels? Yeah, they’re great. Love them. I use them sometimes, they have a good service.” I imagine God sees angels like Fedex or Amazon. They get stuff delivered. That’s great, but also, Amazon’s doing fine. No, God is telling us, “What I really love—who I really love—are the people. I love angels, but I really love angels for how they help me help people.”

This alone may not cure our lifelong case of Christmas hangover. But also remember how God did this. Remember how his glory fully metabolizes and remember how his salvation flourishes: through us sinners, we broken jars of clay, us crackpots. God comes to us as a human to share our sufferings and to call us brothers and sisters. (Heb 2:10-11). He did not come to avoid suffering and he did not come to hang out with angels and be better than us, for he knows that to be with us means to suffer with us and that is exactly what he did before he could even speak a word. Just as miraculously, the great God of the universe, the God by whom and through whom all things are made, the God who reminded Job that he crushes dragons and reminded Israel that they were not in control and neither were their false gods, that God wants to not only be alongside us, not only be inside our hearts through the Holy Spirit and dwell with us, but he even wants to partner with us.

Could God do it unilaterally? Of course he could, he is the Author of life. But there is something about the story of his love which he loves to write with us. There is something about his love that has him inviting us, not forcing us, to join him in the work of his love, whether it is Adam naming animals or Rahab saving spies or King Hezekiah reforming a corrupt Israel or a disgraced woman facing a stoning teaching us something about forgiveness or Mary and Joseph keeping a vulnerable baby Jesus safe, God has a role for us to play in his work. Not to mistakenly believe we can bring it about ourselves if we force others to do it—the exact logic of powers and principalities that God opposes again and again—but for us to look and see who God is, what he is like, and do likewise. To hear the music he is playing, pick up an instrument, and join in the band.

I know that all of our loved ones who lived lives of faith did so. Even though they aren’t here, I know you can hear their music if you try. And when you do, hear again how the music of God played through them. Hear what it sounded like. Remember how God loved you through them. How could we not rejoice at that?

Glory, glory, glory is not top down, nor is it pure humanism with no sense of the sacred. The true glory of God is “God with us,” and that means God is with us. Can we behold that? Can we bask in that? Can we help others who are threatened, like Joseph helped the infant Christ? Can we be vulnerable with our love as God is vulnerable in his love? When we are in the depths of darkness, can we remember there is no depth that can leave behind the love of God?

Do you believe that he loves you? Can you hear it enough times?

Whether you are just a little tired from the holidays or really hurting in the void right now, God’s gloria is in you, is with you, and is inviting you to join in the most joyful work imaginable with him. God’s gloria is calling you in your pain into a role. When you are next in a darker and harder moment than any you can imagine, listen for his gloria and sing back gloria. Let it echo far beyond the hills. He is with you. He is with all of us. Rejoice, rejoice, again I say rejoice. Amen.