What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son but gave him up for all of us, how will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ who died, or rather, who was raised, who is also at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will affliction or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword? As it is written,

“For your sake we are being killed all day long;
we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.”

No, in all these things we are more than victorious through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 8:31-39

I told someone before church that as I was not planning to preach on the Genesis passage of this Sunday’s lectionary reading (Genesis 29:15-28). I hesitated to preach on it, maybe for obvious reasons: it’s a story of Jacob’s uncle Laban and his deception that leads Jacob into bigamy, one strange scene in the movie of Jacob, a life of deception. How much time do you got to unpack it?

But today’s Romans reading is one I hesitate to preach on for a different reason, because how can you improve it? “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will affliction or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword?” No, “I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

They say explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog; you understand it better, but the frog dies. I worry that as I preach on this passage I might accidentally run over and squish one of those frogs instead of letting it sing. At risk of that, I hope you hear what I hear.

And to hear what I hear, we have to hear the rest of the song that is Paul’s letter to the Romans, not just these beautiful few bars. The other day, I watched The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly for the first time, which has some of the most memorable film music of all time. I’d heard the theme for years in Super Bowl commercials, and it was kinda annoying. But then when I finally saw the movie, and I heard not just the full songs but how they landed within the film, it was like man, now I hear it.

In the same way, you have probably heard before that God loves you, and that God is love. But there are times when we hear that, and then there are times when we hear that. For me, if we really hear what Paul has been building up to in writing this theological treatise of a letter, we may really hear God’s love. It is not simply affection, sentimentality, a greeting card, an emoji, or positive regard. It is speaking to how God relates to us across space and time, mind and body, atomic and subatomic, across the vast gulf between him and us.

Remember the pandemic when we all had to do “social distancing”? You couldn’t hang out indoors, and if you hung out outdoors, you had to keep six feet apart. I still remember a few of those hangs. And so however much you wanted to socialize, there was always that distance between you. And in some ways, that physically represented and symbolized what always was there, because no matter how much you love and live with someone, there is always some part of them that you can’t access, can’t know, can’t mindread.

And there’s always some distance between us and God. We call it “sin.” And so for much of the prior seven chapters until this apex moment of this letter, we have been hearing all about the pervasiveness of sin. As people who are in bodies on Earth, there is always some bit of sin that keeps us from being like God, from knowing Him, from doing things that fully please Him. Sometimes we outright reject and are at war with Him, much less each other. As John says, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” (1 John 1:8) It can be part of our sin to be deluded that we are not sinners. And throughout Romans, Paul is meticulous in telling us a truth we can observe but often don’t want to hear. Sin is the inescapable pain of our conscious living most clearly seen in our moral imperfection. Some of our Presbyterian ancestors would call this “total depravity,” which is really just trying to say that we should never underestimate sin. There is distance between us and God if we do nothing and distance if we do everything. When we commit “sins,” that is shorthand for saying, “You have done something that creates even further distance between you and God,” like finding a crack and driving a wedge into it.

I know some of us have hangups on Paul, and we certainly can see his flaws, foibles, and sin, so when he tells us about it, we may hear him being self-righteous. But understand that to the extent that Paul exhaustively details sin, he does so to help us understand an important half of the dialectic of Christian life. In Romans 1 and 2, Paul basically says, “Look, I know you have two eyes. I know you can see that there are many people out there in the world who are basically godless and lawless, who just do whatever they feel like. But since you have two eyes and a conscience, why do you do the same? If we’re honest, deep down, we all fall short of the glory of God.” Even when we know what is right to do, we sometimes just do not do it (Romans 7), because all have “social distance” from God.

And here’s what Paul is saying, the whole film you are watching unfold, where sin seems to win again and again as the soundtrack plays: in spite of all this incredible power of sin, there is nothing sin can do to keep you from the love of God. In spite of everything that separates us, nothing will. In spite of being helpless to do anything about the distance between you and God, in Jesus Christ, God has reconciled us and said in Jesus, there is no longer distance from my love.

If we were only left with thinking about the weight of sin, it would crush us. So even though we should not underestimate sin, we as Christians can overestimate it when we do not remember the love of God shown to us in Jesus Christ is even more pervasive; if our depravity is total, his grace is even more total than “total.” Remember this, remember this. The Bible says “remember,” one of the most common commands to Israel, not as the opposite of forget, but to bring it back to the front of your mind and let it guide you. God tells his people all the time not only to “remember” the Sabbath, the peace of God, by keeping one day every week holy no matter what, but to remember who God is and that God is a savior—“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” (Ex 20:2) The Passover meal is a festival of remembering God saves. And when Jesus tells us, “Do this in remembrance of me” at the table, we remember that for however pervasive, pernicious, and inescapable sin is, it has been rendered as nothing in the face of God’s love.

During the pandemic, if you were lucky, you might have had quarantine pods where you swore to each other not to get close to anyone else so you could feel at least a little bit normal (I wasn’t so lucky). With a trusted group, you would actually allow yourselves to unmask, putting your guard down and putting your life in someone’s hands to live more of how life really ought to be. In Jesus Christ, God is doing the same with us. God is inviting us to trust him. And that can be scary, even deadly, because to our old selves who prefer sin, it is death. But the trade-off is life in the Spirit and the love of Jesus Christ that is far beyond our understanding.

If you hear nothing else in Romans 8:38-39, even as you’ve heard before, just hear that God loves you. He really, really loves you. And that may be all some of us really need to hear again. And we may need to really hear it and chew on it and hear that music of his love again, especially if we have felt our trust in God waning.

If you trust the love of God is really with you, you can come to Scripture in all of its challenges, even stories of weird uncles and deceptive nephews, fearless to discover what it may find. You can sit through the ways it will challenge you and disquiet you and read you and the world around us better than we can read it. You can be formed more and more by the Holy Spirit in your walk with Jesus taking you through challenges as you learn more and more that the most important things he has given you can never be taken away. You can take his love and transmute it into love for others in a way that will shock you what you thought was possible you could do with your life.

But if you have a wounded relationship with God, which you might because you might have a wounded relationship with a church, or a Christian who treated you awfully, you might come to God with your guard up, almost looking to prove him wrong. If you are having a tough time trusting God, or finding life-saving nourishment in his Word, or trouble with Christians or the Church, you will always have plenty of material. But it will choke your faith and your trust so much that you may even forget the depths of God’s love for you, much less the love God has for all those people in the world whose sin we can become obsessed with.

But even that cannot separate us. No church or Christian can separate us. Our neuroses and theological hangups cannot separate us. Our most perfect delusions and misguided missions cannot separate us. Our favorite passages that we run the wrong direction with cannot separate us, the most challenging passages that make us swear off the Bible cannot separate us. Our worst moments and times we have most rejected God cannot separate us. Our very death cannot separate us. Not even a demon could separate us from God, nor could an angel, should an angel somehow want to do that. Nothing and nobody. This is the Gift that God is bringing us every day, and to receive it, all it takes and only takes is faith. Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Nothing and nobody.

You will forget this, just like the frogs. Over the winter, we forget they are there; they may have even forgotten they were there. But with the thaw of spring, they wake from their slumber and sing to us again. I remember when we first came to Vermont, driving back from Parker Pie and coming across frog after frog after frog. We got home and just listened to them sing.

When we could not bring ourselves to God, he brought himself into the world. When we could not and cannot defeat sin, he did and he does and he will. When death reigned, God died so that death itself would die. When we go astray, he calls us by name and seeks us out until he finds us, because however elaborate we could say it and however we might dissect it and not believe it, God loves you. Remember this and let it guide you. Even the frogs are singing it. Amen.

Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. And he told them many things in parables, saying: “Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the 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. Let anyone with ears listen!”

“Hear then the parable of the sower. 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 the world 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 13:1-9,18-23

There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and to deal with sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law-- indeed it cannot, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.

Romans 8:1-11

The summers of my middle school were spent on Hampton Heights golf course in Hickory, North Carolina. Hampton Heights was not a club for lifestyles of the rich and famous, but a public course off the highway that closed five years ago to become a housing development. Me and about five of my friends filled our summer mornings up learning not only how to putt and swing a driver—or, as it were, learn how to give up hope of ever properly swinging a driver. I also learned the etiquette of the game, including a full vocabulary of cuss words, and learned the joy of your buddy tomahawking his pitching wedge into the koi pond. But did we learn to love the game? If so, we also learned to hate the game, which we did every time we looked at the scorecard and could quantify just how bad we were. I was reminded of all this when my wife recently got me a set of used clubs, getting me back out on the course for the first time in years, where I shot a -1 (that is, I lost three balls in the woods, but found two).

There are a lot of soils and grasses in golf, the thick rough, the low-cut fairway, the smooth greens (which, at Hampton Heights, had patches of dirt), the sand. When we listen to Jesus tell us the parable of the Sower as we heard today, we often get anxiety about which soil we are. Am I the good soil? Am I choked up, thorny, rocky soil? Or am I a paved cart path that the Word just bounces off into the creek? In my observation, we contain a wide variety of soil within us, a whole inner golf course, where parts of ourselves are more responsive to parts of God’s revelation than others. Sometimes we understand Jesus, sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we can follow some of Jesus’ teaching even when it’s hard, others we don’t want to publicly embarrass ourselves with. Sometimes we don’t even try following what Jesus teaches because we already know we aren’t ready to pay what it would cost us.

But as I heard a wise priest once point out, the Parable of the Sower is not “the parable of the soils.”1 That’s focusing on us. Look at the Sower. Look at how Jesus, the one who came to give us all life in the Spirit, continually scatters grace no matter what kind of soil you are. He is always showering the grace of the Word whether we respond to it that day or not. Jesus doesn’t give up on us; the sower keeps on sowing. Jesus sees all of our sod and our clay and our dust and our gravel and no matter who we are, he keeps sowing.

And because he keeps sowing, we can learn about living this “life in the Spirit” even when parts of us still live on the flesh’s terms. As we heard today in one of the most important chapters of all the epistles in teaching us about the gospel: “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death.” (Rom 8:1-2) Even more than his teachings, Jesus Christ sowed the Word of his life, God’s very being, to defeat the reign of sin. When we respond to the faithful call to live in him, we do not have to do the impossible of being perfect in the Law, for we have a new Law in Christ. “For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.” (Rom 8:5-6)

What does this mean, exactly, to set our mind on the Spirit and to live according to the Spirit or to live according to the flesh? These are the very questions Christians were asking themselves which Paul was trying to answer. What use does the Law have if we don’t have to live by it? Can we still do sinful things? What does it actually mean, in practical, daily living what it means that we live under “no condemnation”?

First, let me say what it’s not. For Christians, life in the Spirit is not like having a really good score in golf. It’s like playing golf without a scorecard at all. It’s going out on the course with whatever clubs and whatever body you have, fully enjoying God in creation through simply abiding in his presence, and just playing. You may take more or less swings on any given hole, but there is no scorecard for those who are in Christ Jesus.

You might say, “Well, if you don’t keep score, how would you ever know you’re any good at it?” And this has a point; as Paul says, the Law was a teacher, “I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law.” (Rom 7:7) But the Law also becomes the enticer and the taskmaster. Yes, there is some benefit to playing golf with a scorecard when you’re learning it because it is utterly humbling and pointing out what is a theoretically possible standard of par. Calvin said that the Law still has uses for us: it is a mirror that we aren’t perfect, it is a restrainer of evil, and it is a guide to what pleases God, for to love Jesus is to keep his commandments (John 14:15).

But if you aren’t careful, you will forget the basic grace of this life, like getting to play a beautiful, weird game invented by some Scottish ancestors, and instead become obsessed with your score. I could get so angry at myself as a kid, constantly setting my mind on my failures. Every now and then, I’d make a good shot, sink a putt, and imagine myself being on TV next to Tiger, tipping my cap and waving to the crowd. But most of the time, golf is the feeling like you’ve tried your best to do everything right, you’ve practiced enough, and you just keep slicing it, or hitting it fat, or it goes in the water, and suddenly you’re on your eighth stroke on a par four hole, written down next to a string of 7’s and 9’s. Maybe this is also your experience of Christianity.

Many of us don’t play golf, but are there areas of life where you are keeping a scorecard? If so, you will either be constantly condemned by it, or worse, deluded into pride. Spiritually thinking, almost the worst thing that can happen to us is getting really skilled at something. Our gifts become a source of pride when we display our talent as better than others, or a source of self-hatred when you don’t live up to it. That’s not life in freedom. That’s life under a million little slaveries. And we do it not just with sports and skills, but with our very sense of being Christ followers—what’s my moral scorecard this week? It’s the soil that we actually feel most comfortable in, where even if you become “number one”—and there’s always someone better—it becomes impossible to live up to for long. But when we live in Jesus Christ, to have his Spirit who has died to the flesh living in us, we are not condemned by any moral score.

That doesn’t mean there’s not a right or wrong way to play. It doesn’t mean all swings are just as good as others, that we can live however we want and it doesn’t matter because there’s no rules. In fact, the rules of love are even harder than golf. The grace Jesus offers us is free, but growing as his disciples will take a lifetime of effort, persistence, and dealing with the constant roommate that is our sinful selves. We Christians can be so close to being right, but then you get one idea devastatingly wrong, and you’re missing it completely. You may even get the gospel completely, and practice and practice, only for there to be something very slightly off—just two degrees left, a grip a little too tight—and next thing you know, you’re in the pine needles.

But as we grow in imperfect obedience our whole lives, Christ will keep sowing and sowing his grace, whether we notice it or not. He will never give up on you. Some of us are Christians despite how hard it constantly feels like we’re never living in the Spirit. But just like it is actually possible to enjoy golf, with the love of God, you can grow in living in the Spirit until you actually enjoy being a Christian (if you can believe it!). But there’s only one path to getting better: love. Love God, and love your neighbor. You only get better at a game like golf by loving the game enough to pay close attention to what makes for good play. Likewise, we don’t grow in obedience to God by hating God, but by loving God enough to mind the details. And then it comes time to play, you have to let go, say a prayer, and just let it swing.

We know what Paul would tell his friends in Corinth about love: it keeps no record of wrongs (1 Cor 13:5). Christ obliterated the moral scorecard by which we all fail. As Luther taught, the Law can diagnose, but it can’t save.2 Likewise, “life in the scorecard” might tell us where we’re falling short, but can make us fixated on what type of sinful soil we are. We must turn our minds back to Jesus Christ.

By looking at Jesus, we can learn the spiritual laws of creation and the physics of loving one another. Jesus teaches us that life in the Spirit is a life of continuous grace, where the Sower is constantly spreading grace to all, whether they “deserve it” or not, because he gave his grace to you when you didn’t deserve it. You don’t get better at loving God and loving neighbor by setting your mind on how bad you are, but by setting your mind on how the Sower lives and moves in love, and doing likewise. And when you hit it in the water again, Christ’s heart will be wounded again, but the Sower will keep pouring his love out on you. Scripture says, “the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.” (Rom 13:8) Just as love is the fulfillment of the Law, love is the fulfillment of the game. Life in the spirit is the pure love of God and love of the game he’s invited us to play.

One week at Hampton Heights, when one of my buddies was especially upset, someone suggested: what if we only used our putters for the entire round? What if we teed off with our putters, hit it out of the sand with our putters, and…come to think of it, what if we putted with our drivers? To this day, that was the most fun I’ve ever had playing golf. I have no idea what we shot. We weren’t thinking about that. Because “the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God,” (Rom 8:7), but beloved, “you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you.” (Rom 8:9) Set your mind on these things. Amen.

For more on this week’s readings:

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Our Parasocial Bible Study #21 - Seventh Sunday After Pentecost

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21 days ago · 1 like · Joe Welker

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

Romans 7:15-25a

Jesus said to the crowd, “To what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another,

‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
we wailed, and you did not mourn.’

For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.”

At that time Jesus said, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.

“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

We often don’t give Jesus enough credit for his humor. Shakespeare asked of his love, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Jesus looked at the crowds and said, “Shall I compare thee to the most annoying children’s songs you’ve ever heard? Because you said John the Baptist was so strict he might be a demon, you saw me and said I’m a drunk who hangs out with drunks. If only you knew.” If only we followed.

As for himself, Jesus compared himself not to a summer’s day or to a children’s song but to the Divine Wisdom of his Scriptures. In Proverbs, Wisdom says, “‘Let all who are simple come to my house!’ To those who have no sense, she says, Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight” (Prov 9:4-6). Jesus says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” But is it so easy, Jesus? Come on. Look at this letter to the Romans, one of the most honest views of the struggle in Christian life we have. It’s an outright spiritual war, says Paul. He knows what he’s supposed to do but he simply can’t. He looks at himself doing the very thing he’s not supposed to be doing while he’s doing it. He tries to do good and does bad. This is the light burden, Jesus?

When I was growing up in a good Presbyterian household, we were allowed to watch most of the cable channels if they weren’t playing something crude, except for one: MTV, “Music Television.” It wasn’t just the music videos with lyrics and videos too lewd for young eyes, but the earliest “reality” shows like The Real World. Yes, you were living in a fake bubble, an illusion of piety; here’s real life with all the pleasure and pain and annoying roommates that come with it. But alas, I was not supposed to see this Real World, because it was under a parental password (which by age 10, my sister and I figured out was 0000). I couldn’t tell you the last time I watched MTV, and you probably couldn’t either. But I do know that nothing made MTV cooler than being not allowed to watch it. We call this the “forbidden fruit” phenomenon because it’s as old as humanity: we humans want to do the things we aren’t supposed to do precisely because we aren’t supposed to do them.

This is part of the spiritual war Paul describes, the part of him where sin still dwells. Sin is less the presence of an evil and more the twisting of a good thing, bending it back in on ourselves in self-centered pride. So it feasts when there is no law and we feel license to pursue our desires willy-nilly. But as Paul learned, sin feasts even on the law that is meant to protect us from ourselves and each other. It never sleeps. This is the inner war.

And we are not well-equipped for this war, whether we are religious or not. As Paul points out, many people who haven’t studied Scripture can still act from a sense of conscience (Rom 2:14-15); many of our neighbors have moral intuitions not derived from Christianity. And if we are half as honest as Paul, we must admit that even though we say we know the right thing to do, we still don’t do it anyway. We return, repent, and then do it again. As basketball coach Jeff Van Gundy said, “If you know better, but don’t do better, you’re no better.” In the end, while we struggle with different sins, all of us know better and don’t do better and are no better.

Sometimes, though, in our struggle, we want to make an adjustment to our conscience to relieve this burden; a little tweak to God’s wisdom so that we aren’t as bad as we think. Being rude isn’t being mean, it’s just being “authentic.” Being selfish is just “freedom.” Taking more than I need isn’t greed, just practical. That famous first question for that forbidden fruit was, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden?’” (It turns out God didn’t actually say that, just not to eat from one tree.) But Paul knows that rationalizations aren’t the way out. Just because we can’t live up to God’s spiritual law doesn’t mean we throw out the truth.

In fact, Jesus says the Law has an even higher standard than what it prescribes at face value, that sometimes what the Law might permit by the letter doesn’t even go far enough: it’s not enough to not murder, you must repent of your anger at a brother or sister (Matt 5:21-22). It’s not enough to avoid adultery, you must not look at a woman in lust or you commit it in your heart (Mat 5:27-28). When the disciples saw Jesus demanding the rich young man give up his possessions and follow him, they threw up their hands and said, “Who then can be saved?” (Matt 19:25) “For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light”? Yeah right!

But maybe they, and we, have misunderstood the yoke of freedom in Christ. The Church Father Justin Martyr imagined that Jesus, as a carpenter, made many literal yokes, wooden frames to join animals together at the neck so that they pull together. They had to be constantly made and adjusted for each animal. When two animals were hitched together whose yokes didn’t fit perfectly, the yoke would be further twisted out of shape under stress. In Jesus’ time and then later in rabbinical Judaism, a yoke was a common metaphor for the things that enslave us (Deut 28:48) or that free us, like “yoke of the Torah.” We can either be yoked to the kingdom of man or, if we are yoked to a rabbi’s teaching, we can be yoked to the kingdom of heaven. When we Christian pastors wear a stole, it is a symbol that we have yoked ourselves to Christ.

But I do need to clear up a common translation error. When Jesus says his yoke is “easy,” chrestos, it is less like a yoke that requires no effort, but rather he is saying that his yoke is true goodness. It doesn’t mean there is no work to be done and no law to live under. It is the yoke that doesn’t injure. It’s a yoke that fits. Jesus is asking us to look at the other yokes that are really making you exhausted and weary. Look at the yoke of hedonism, constant self-centered pleasure in doing whatever you want, and see whether the fruits of that are actually as pleasurable as you think they are, or whether they cause more problems and pain in the long run. That’s one yoke of sin. But another yoke of sin is the yoke of trying so hard to save yourself, perhaps even to be the good Christian that your faith calls you to be, that you pull and pull and pull with the Law as a yoke until your spiritual bones break. Two yokes, same sin. The yoke of lawlessness is in Proverbs, where Divine Wisdom describes folly as a heavy burden, while Isaiah describes idols as a heavy burden. But Jesus says the Pharisees’ yoke ties heavy burdens on people while refusing to share them (Matt 23:4). Even if we want to follow Christ, sometimes the gap between who we know Christ wants us to be and how we end up acting is the heaviest yoke of all.

This weekend, I’ve been thinking about this struggle in our country, too. We live in a country that is a true grace, gift, and miracle to be alive in, for all the sacrifices made for it and all the goodness born of it. I wouldn’t rather live anywhere else. And in this time period, with technological and moral advances, we have more freedom and understanding than ever. Yet we live with such heavy, collective yokes, the yokes of a greater ability to pursue selfishness which our freedoms allow, and the yoke of knowing how much we haven’t lived up to our ideals. For all the litany of blessings we have, we have never fully lived into the ideals of liberty and justice for all, sinners that we are. And it can be agonizing to feel the gap between the promises endowed by God for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the reality that too many neighbors have never fully enjoyed them. If we didn’t believe in our ideals, they wouldn’t bother us, just as if we didn’t believe that Christ was really calling us to a better way, it wouldn’t bother us. We know the right way is not spiritual lawlessness. We know it’s not self-hatred. And if we are honest, we know that by ourselves, we can’t do the very things we know we should. “Wretched person that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Rom 7:24)

Into the heart of this struggle, now hear Jesus again: “Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” Or as pastor Eugene Peterson translated this, “Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me, and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”

Sin wants to take us out of the rhythms of grace all the time. Sin thinks that if we make ourselves wise and smart enough, we can fashion the right yokes. Instead, Jesus says, what we need to do is come to God as a child (Matt 11:25). Sin wants to take our own very conscience that teaches us right from wrong and bend that wood into a shape that it cripples us. But thanks be to God that our savior is a carpenter, who takes the wood of that yoke and bends it back into the shape of grace. And thanks be to God that he does not give us a yoke to struggle alone, but tells us that he is in the same yoke with us. In the shape of grace, we do not deny what is right and wrong in God’s eyes, nor do we believe we can manage it by ourselves. Where sin says to you God’s wisdom is too heavy and you carry it by yourself, Jesus says to you that it is the Way of true life, and he carries it with you.

And because Jesus is carrying it with us, we are called to keep working. Not only for ourselves, not for just our families, not just for our church, and not just for our country, but so that all the world may feel the love of Christ. We can only do this in solidarity with each other’s suffering: “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” (Gal 6:2) The burdens of love are too heavy for us alone, but not for Jesus Christ, who carries us all. No, we have not lived up to the standards of God’s love. But in Jesus Christ, we are forgiven. And every day in Jesus Christ, we can begin together again.

For he has already died to sin and been raised to life in triumph over it, and he lives and dwells in your inmost heart, fitting and forming and molding your heart if you let him, that his Wisdom might fit you more and more snugly in the shape of grace. The yokes of sin are all shaped in death, but in Jesus Christ, the very yokes that once deformed us have been redeemed into life. And so right into the heart of your despair, when you cry, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?”, you can cry with the tears of full assurance, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Amen.t

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a month ago · 1 like · Joe Welker

For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.

Romans 6:14

God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.” So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt offering, and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away. Then Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you.” Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. So the two of them walked on together. Isaac said to his father Abraham, “Father!” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” He said, “The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” Abraham said, “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So the two of them walked on together.

When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place “The Lord will provide”; as it is said to this day, “On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.”

Genesis 22:1-14

For three long days, Abraham walked with his miracle child Isaac. For three long days, Abraham held the most terrible secret. One of history’s greatest philosophers, Søren Kierkegaard, imagined those three long days because this story—the Akedah, the “binding of Isaac”—disturbed him so. In his work Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard helps us imagine Abraham’s walk up Mount Moriah. Imagine how utterly awful and confused Abraham must have felt, the weight of the knife in his hand, the paralyzed numbness of his thoughts, how he must have looked in anguish at his son, the miracle, the son by whom God said Abraham would bless nations.

If we have wrestled with this story, we may, like Kierkegaard, eventually conclude that our attempts to tie this story in a theological bow don’t work. How is God testing Abraham by asking him to do such an awful thing that would directly violate his own promise that he made? What kind of nightmare has he put Abraham into to make sure his pledged allegiance was true? And why would Abraham do this? Our Christian brother Kierkegaard admits that we can’t really make logical or ethical sense of Abraham’s devotion. Even the story is ambiguous; was he lying to his servants when he said, “The boy and I will come back to you”? Or did he know? Did Abraham know he wouldn’t have to kill Isaac when he told Isaac, “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering”? Then why did he raise the knife? We can’t bind this story up into an easy lesson any more than Abraham could keep the first child of the covenant bound.

If we can’t imagine how Abraham felt climbing that mountain with a knife in hand and his son in the other, maybe we can imagine Jesus walking up a hill called Golgotha with giant wooden beams on his back. We can imagine Jesus in the garden, crying, was this cup really necessary? How does sacrificing a Messiah make any sense? Was he not the very person to deliver God’s promise?

Kierkegaard scholars have theorized that he was so haunted by the story of Abraham because he felt the stakes in his own life when he felt God calling him to break off his engagement to fully pursue the philosopher’s life. How that must have hurt him to know that he had to break someone else’s heart and his own to follow God’s call. He was not a theoretical nerd who asked these big questions in academic frameworks, but a man who wrote from what he lived. You may have shared a moment with him if you’ve ever driven down the road in anguish, okay God, you better be real, because I’m really, really trusting you! If you can relate to that kind of heartburn, that “fear and trembling,” you can maybe relate to brother Søren and brother Abraham.

The week before I arrived in Vermont, after a year of wrestling with what I heard God calling me to do, I had to speak out on a bunch of former friends and colleagues involved in my old spiritual community. My whole theology had been coming apart for over a year, and I thought I was being asked to sacrifice the very things that had made me feel sacred, blessed, and loved by God. I had a whole career ahead of me that somehow fell into place, where an average middle-class kid like me wound up at Harvard, a place I never imagined going (and where I would not recommend going), a place where I so did not deserve to be that it must have all been a grace of God. I knew when I became a whistleblower that I would upset many people. I knew the career I had been blessed with was over, this perfect, against all odds opportunity gone. On the very morning I drove here from my old apartment in Cambridge, I hit “post” on my last public statement, jumped into the U-Haul as my dad drove behind me, and then somewhere in New Hampshire had a panic attack on I-93. I had no idea what was ahead of me other than some nice people in the most beautiful middle of nowhere I’d ever seen.

And all year I had been thinking of Abraham. I was so haunted by this story and haunted by what I heard was God telling me to sacrifice that I almost added one last tattoo to my mostly forgettable collection, a ram drawn in the words of a prayer (then I got the quote from the artist, and decided I could just hold that tattoo in my heart). Here God was, I thought, asking me to sacrifice the “child,” the very blessings God had given me.

But I came to realize that the true means of grace was not the child Isaac himself, and for me, not the idols that I thought were God. No, the real gift from God was faith itself. As the author of Hebrews tells us, the true heir of Abraham’s covenant was not his family or those who keep the law, but anyone who also has faith. At its core, the deepest grace of God is not the wonderful things he’s given us, but God himself.

There are implications for this that shape how we live and how we worship. If we try to fully understand God through any of our preferred ways to reach God—our favorite theological systems, our spiritual experiences—we no longer worship God, we just worship our favorite ways to reach God. If we try to love him simply by loving the blessings he’s given us, we don’t love God, we only love what he’s given us. The paradox of faith that lives by grace is that if God calls us, we can let go of the very ways in which God’s grace first found us.

For many of us, one of our favorite ways to reach God is through our reasonableness; what “makes sense.” But our human reason is fallible, broken, and self-interested. In fact, Kierkegaard taught that sometimes the way to grace is in “the crucifixion of understanding.” Don’t be mistaken; we need reason and rationality to navigate the world and keep us from idols, but reason by itself cannot navigate the divine. Reason by itself will never call us into faith. But what is miraculous is that in faith, our reason reaches its fullest potential because it is no longer relying on ourselves alone but walks in hand with God. The crucified understanding becomes resurrected in faith. As Saints Augustine and Anselm said, credo ut intelligam, “I believe so that I may understand.”

The story called the “binding of Isaac,” which ends with the living Isaac, teaches us that we cannot bind God with our reason; no, it is our reason that must be bound in order to live by faith, not that we become irrational, but that reason may fully live too. We do not walk up Mount Moriah by sight, but by faith. Binding up your reason, one of the most precious gifts God has given you, may feel like you’re raising up the knife on your own intellect. But in truth, you will walk back down the mountain with reason in hand. Then we can know by faith that God will never truly ask you to sacrifice that which is truly sacred, especially another human being. Faith tells us that whatever of our own lives we give up, God gives us back far more life in return.

We can’t make sense of this story without starting from the same faith Abraham had. And even before belief, faith starts with trust. You can’t believe in God if you don’t trust God. We can’t listen to what God is calling us to do if we can’t trust him. As Hebrews tells us, “By faith Abraham, when put to the test, offered up Isaac. He who had received the promises was ready to offer up his only son,” for “he considered the fact that God is able even to raise someone from the dead—and, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back.” (Heb 11:17-19)

Like Abraham, we can only trust God if we can trust that his commands are in service of his love. And because he trusted, when Abraham was ready to follow through God’s terrifying command, he learned without a doubt that God’s commands are always in service to his promises. His law is not meant to bind us to the law for the law’s sake. The law is not glorious in a vacuum; it would be hard to find a lawyer in America who would sing about how wonderful the law is. But the psalmist in Psalm 119 can sing over and over the wonders of God’s law, because God’s commands are only there to deliver us more and more into grace that completely surpasses human understanding. But as the Pharisees couldn’t learn, the law does not bind the covenant. Instead, as Jesus Christ revealed to us in his life, death, and resurrection, and as our brother Paul taught us again (today in Romans 6), the only way to make sense of God’s law is to trust that it is bound by God’s grace.

But the paradox is not done. We can only fully experience his covenantal love if we are willing to sacrifice when God commands it. Faith calls us over and over again to step out of what we can intellectually understand, sometimes right into what our friends and family completely don’t understand, and become fully vulnerable in trusting God. Walking in the Way of Jesus may sometimes even mean giving up things we once connected deeply with God, trusting that if they are truly of God, he will intervene. And he will intervene with the blood of his own sacrifice, the blood of his son. He told Abraham, “Now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” And we know he loves us, for he has not withheld his son from us.

As our old brother Søren said, “All that time [Abraham] believed — he believed that God would not require Isaac of him, whereas he was willing nevertheless to sacrifice him if it was required. He believed by virtue of the absurd.” Abraham had such an absurd belief that he knew that if it was in God’s will, he could even raise Abraham’s son from the dead. God didn’t do that. Instead, God raised his own son.

So brothers and sisters, your faith may someday call you into the most emotionally intense places of your life. Your faith may call you into the hardest decisions you’ve ever had to face, like Christ all the way to the cross, who poured out blood more life-giving than any ram’s. Just as he trusted his Father, you can trust in God in the hardest decisions of your life. We may never be able to fully trust other humans or our reasoning or our favorite plans. But we can trust God. Abraham said, “The boy and I will come back.” And we can step into the impossible knowing that God will bring us back with his promise in our hand. For in the darkest moments, the deepest anguish, when you feel the pull between what you’d rather do and what God is calling you to do, trust that God did not withhold his own begotten son from us. He provided. And in your darkest hour, you can trust that he will always provide. Amen.

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a month ago · Joe Welker

Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person-- though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners, Christ died for us.

Romans 5:1-8

If you heard my sermon last week, you know that I’ve been regularly watering a garden for the first time, and reflecting on how God’s blessings of grace just pour out on all of us like water and all that. Now I don’t want to be a one-trick pastor, but as I was hanging out there again with the hose one evening this week, I did find myself getting curious about roots, straining to remember what I learned in high school. What is it that they’re doing? And also, what could I possibly say that a congregation of farming families hasn’t heard?

At first, all I was thinking about was how roots hold the plant in the dirt. They make the plant secure in the ground. And that’s true, but then I learned I had been thinking about roots in a shallow way. As I learned—because I’m a growing little plant too—that is just the effect of what they do. More primarily, what roots do is seek water.

Sometimes I feel like my entire life has been just trading one insecurity for another, depending on where I live and who I’m around and comparing myself to. I don’t have as much money as that person, not as successfull as that guy, don’t look as good as those people, aren’t as smart as them, don’t love God as much as them, and even worse, I’ll never be a real Vermonter.

When we try to get roots in things to make us secure, we are really thirsty for the waters of grace. Because God is so gracious and pours out so much grace, we can find little versions of grace in lots of places that can make us secure in lesser ways, and if we are so dry and thirsty, that can feel like the only place God’s grace lives. So to get secure, we set our roots down in money (after all, stocks are called “securities”), or maybe our looks if we have them, maybe our career if we like it, maybe our tribe if we know them. We can get even realer and deeper roots that soak up the real good stuff of God’s grace, the secure roots of family (if we have them), or the roots of a place and being a real Vermonter (if we are one).

Deep down, we know these things aren’t fully securing roots. We know they’re vulnerable, hard to come by, and fragile to be lost again, or we wouldn’t cling to the soil with them. If they weren’t hard to come by and weren’t fragile to being lost, we wouldn’t hold onto them so tightly. Eventually things change. We take a devastating financial loss. We lose someone. Our health slips, then slips again. If we’re graced, we have more roots in Christianity and our church to help us in those hard times.

But even then, in our long journey as disciples, we may find that even our roots as a Christian are more fleeting than we thought. Oh, we know all the lines about living by grace alone and not by works, but sin can be stubborn and sneaky and find ways around our taglines. We might want to make ourselves secure in how joyful of Christians we are, or how hopeful in Christ we are, or how much we’ve studied the Bible, or how we never miss a prayer at mealtime, or we never say a curse word, or we always do the right thing or have the right opinion about what Jesus said. And then, because the devil loves to have us look at each other even when we’re supposed to be looking at God, the insecure comparing creeps back in. Why isn’t my faith as strong as the saints? Why am I not as good a person as these other church people seem to be? Comparing doesn’t always make us look like a shy form of insecure, but arrogant insecurity, too. “How could they think that?” “Why can’t they just get it together?” But eventually this turns back on us, “Why can’t I just get it together?”

It’s a common experience that we might find ourselves in the pews feeling what’s called “imposter syndrome,” feeling like a total phony going to church. But you know what? We’re kinda all imposters. And Christ died for us anyway.

That’s what our brother Paul tells us today in one of the “mic drop” moments of Scripture. “While we still were sinners, Christ died for us.” If you were to imagine the Bible as one giant complex classical arrangement, it’s like one of the motifs that has been building throughout the Old Testament all the way through the gospels and keeps coming back around, and finally the strings vibrate the melody again: “While we still were sinners, Christ died for us.”

This is the water our roots are really thirsty for, the most liberating news of it all: there is absolutely no other place our roots can fully withstand and grab onto and really be secure but in the waters of the blood of the Lamb that are poured out for all of us by no merit, for our roots cannot draw the water we need from our own human goodness. We draw living water from the one whose rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous alike; for this reason, Jesus tells us, you must “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you if you want to be children of your Father in heaven, for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” (Matt 5:44-45)

In the first part of Romans, Paul talks about the sins of those who are ungodly outside of the Church, to where you can almost hear cheering, “Yeah, get ‘em!” But then he twists it all around and says to his friends in the Church, “So what’s your excuse for how you act?” In Romans 3, he quotes Psalm 14 and 53, reminding us, “There is no one who is righteous, not even one; there is no one who has understanding; there is no one who seeks God.” (Rom 3:10-11). But now, he says, “While we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. … God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” (Rom 5:8)

Our security is in his anguish, his scars, his cuts, in the life he gave up. Our security is in how deeply insecure God made himself, completely vulnerable all the way to the cross, and did so for everybody. And because ultimately our God who made earth and is not of it, whose grace is in nature all around us but is not himself natural, we cannot get to him through the natural but through the supernatural doorway of faith. Right before this, Paul has told us how Abraham, our forefather in blessing, is not our ancestor based on his uprightness, for he was not a perfectly upright man; he had no Law to follow, and if he did, he wouldn’t have perfectly followed it. No, Abraham is our ancestor in faith. Faith is the only root system that can connect us to the living water by giving us a relationship with the living God alone. “The promise depends on faith, in order that it may rest on grace.” (Rom 4:16) And this promise is for everybody.

But even then, our faith will struggle. Our roots will falter. And it won’t make a difference to God’s love, because while we still are sinners, Christ dies for us. When our faith is still weak, Christ still dies for us. We think of the Good Samaritan as helping the person in the ditch, and the person in the ditch is always our neighbor and someone who we should be helping whenever we walk by them. But the story of the gospels is that Christ also dies for the priests who walk by the man in the ditch. For when the religious people who walked by the man in need, they didn’t just turn away from a person, they turned away from the water they also needed. And Christ still died for them, “the ungodly,” the Pharisees, the Roman empire, and your enemies too.

We know deep down how radical this is (“radical,” by the way, means “rooted”). You don’t really need me to tell you how radical this love is. “Indeed,” Paul says, “rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die.” (Rom 5:7) I was thinking about this line, and thinking about how our veterans are so worthy of honor because they have dared to die for good people. They even die in service of people they don’t know, even die for people they know don’t like them. That’s amazing love. And and an even deeper is Christ’s love, for Christ didn’t die for his country, he died for his enemies. And “while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, and much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life.” (Rom 5:10)

So the next time you are feeling anxious and insecure in the slightest, put out your root hairs for God alone and know that he has always been grabbing hold of you. He is “the ground of all being.” There’s nothing you can do to earn his love and nothing you can do to unearn his love. You are his treasured possession (Ex. 19:5), it is he who made you, and you are his. (Ps 100:3)

When we feel that deep in our bones, and the waters of that grace soaking our roots, then God can do amazing things with your heart. We can even begin to “boast in our afflictions” because we are rooted so deeply that nothing, nothing, can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. (Rom 8:39) Rooted in God’s grace, even our sufferings produce hope that is beyond shame, because our only source of pride is that “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” (Rom 5:5) And his love has been given to every one of us. Remember that with each other when times get hard.

When we live in insecurity, we make moral compromises to hold onto the fleeting securities. But because we have been gifted with the deep roots of faith in God’s grace, we can seek justice, love kindness, and walk humbly even when it’s hard and scary because we don’t need to hold onto any of the false securities, as important as they are. We can give from our securities of having enough money, food, or even things like emotional stability to those who can’t make ends meet, don’t know where they’ll eat, and don’t know how much God loves them because nobody has ever really shown them that love. You received without payment, now give without payment. That is our call as Christians, to give from the deep, deep security we have in Christ Jesus to those who need it.

For while we still were who we are, Christ dies for us all. Amen.

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2 months ago · 1 like · Joe Welker

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

Genesis 12:1-3

And as Jesus sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” But when he heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”

While he was saying these things to them, suddenly a leader of the synagogue came in and knelt before him, saying, “My daughter has just died; but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.” And Jesus got up and followed him, with his disciples. Then suddenly a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years came up behind him and touched the fringe of his cloak, for she said to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well.” Jesus turned, and seeing her he said, “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.” And instantly the woman was made well. When Jesus came to the leader’s house and saw the flute players and the crowd making a commotion, he said, “Go away; for the girl is not dead but sleeping.” And they laughed at him. But when the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took her by the hand, and the girl got up. And the report of this spread throughout that district.

Matthew 9:10-13, 18-26

I’ve been learning about gardening this year, by which I mean my wife did all the planning and the digging and the planting and the setting up of our makeshift tomato trellis and the haying, so really it’s more accurate to say that I’ve been learning about watering. As simple as it is, I’m sure I’m not doing it completely right.

It might sound dumb, but I had never really thought about where all the water “went.” Yes, I took science classes in high school, so I have heard the basic geology of water tables and how our wells draw from the saturated waters of the ground. But it wasn’t until I was actually in the dirt each day with our $13 adjustable hose nozzle that I started thinking about the flow of water, flipping through the different settings, like “mist,” “fan,” “jet,” “center,” and (maybe the first one I should have tried) “garden.” My basic instructions were to “water it until it starts to pool,” so that’s what I do. And the first time I watered the hanging basket at head height, I let it get saturated, and the excess water flowed out the bottom of the hole, and I finally realized, “Oh, wow, if you water the dirt enough, the extra water flows out.” I will hold for your slow-clap applause break for this feat of flatlander scientific discovery.

But as I was thinking about that and our readings this week, I thought, what if God has been telling us all along that his grace works the same way? The story of God’s grace goes all the way back to the creation, which we talked about last week, where the breath of God is like a garden hose being turned on, “Let there be light!” Let the trees grow and the water flow. And the blessings keep on flowing from there. Then, of course, humanity comes along and just wants to put our finger on the spigot: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, on and on past Noah until humans start building a Tower of Babel to “make a name for ourselves,” which isn’t just trying to get famous, but wanting to make ourselves great—to think we can actually make ourselves on God’s level on our terms with technological intervention and get all to the way up and up and there’s nothing God’s gonna do but maybe give us a high five from heaven. But obviously humans didn’t get that high five. We didn’t make ourselves great. Our will and our sin made us build the wrong thing for the wrong reasons in the wrong way.

But God does not give up in the face of our evil. He just decides to make the nature of his grace even clearer through this almost-nobody called Abram. What we read today is basically our entire introduction to Abram, apart from listing his family members and that his father had thought about going to Canaan but got to Haran and said, “Eh, this is fine.” Abram is about as nondescript of a human as it gets. He had not done a single thing worthy of blessing, but God turns on the sprinkler and says Abram, I am going to bless you so much that you will be a blessing. Abram’s name meant “exalted father.” But the truly exalted heavenly Father said, “Abram, you are going to be different from those who want to make a name for themselves. I will make your name great.” Remember that when the Bible talks about names, it means more than just what we call them, but something deep about their nature and who they are. So God is not just saying, “Abram, I’m going to make you famous,” no, God is saying, “Abram, I’m going to make you good. I’m going to make you a man who lives up to what you are called. I will even one day change the name you are called into Abraham, ‘father of a multitude,’ because I am going to pour my blessings out so much on you that it will soak down into the roots that will grow from you.” Take it from this seasoned green thumb, that’s how water works. And that’s how grace works.

Like our dearly departed Marvin, the good farmer who was the “great soil,” Christ says we are all spiritual soil in God’s creation, just ordinary people like Abram. We get so arrogant thinking that we can grow without the water of God that is grace. The Tower of Babel is not just about technology; spiritually, it’s when we act like a big pile of dirt that thinks it can grow into a tree. But the story of Abram shows God telling us that his grace is not about us making ourselves great. It’s God making a name of us, forming us in our very being to his character, saturating us with his love and care. God pours his water on us, which has nothing to do with deserving it. As Deuteronomy tells us, “Do not say to yourself, ‘My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.’ But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth.” (Deut 8:17-18a)

What God also says to Abram is what he says to all of Abram’s children, which by faith, Scripture tells us, is every Christian: “You are not just to receive a blessing, you are to be a blessing.” How? As simple as being wet soil: you become a blessing by letting God’s grace flow through you. Soaked up by the blessings of his love, like water flowing down into the roots, you let the water flow on to the rest of the garden that needs it. It’s like when an artist says, “It wasn’t even me moving the paintbrush, it was just something divine flowing through me.” Live like there is an abundance of grace flowing through you, because through the Holy Spirit, it is! You are already overflowing with grace. Even in pain, even in suffering, even when our mind can’t stop telling us what we lack, when we pray and give thanks to God, we can remember this truth: we are overflowing with grace.

Now in contrast to the good soil of our garden, just a few yards away you have our driveway. It’s a mix of gravel and sand that tires have packed down over and over for years. When it rains, water will be pooled up there for days, sometimes weeks if there’s no sun and it’s chilly, because the soil is packed so tight that water cannot go through it. The water just sits there, not nourishing anything, just something for me to splash through every time I come home. Same with the little rut in Shatney Road which, no matter when I walk down it, always has a pool of water. The water can’t flow down through hard soil, and because it’s shaded, it has no sun to dry it up.

It is a great tragedy that we Christians are so often like packed in soil, that when we get the grace of God, we only let it pool on top of us. We don’t let grace sink into our dirt. It just sits there in excess. That’s exactly what the Pharisees are like, too, soil that gets wet but is so tightly packed together that the mercy and love and grace of God can’t pass through. They still feel the mercy moisten them, like the top of my driveway, but it’s not even running off the angled sides to better grass, it is just pooling up in a nasty muddy rut. Jesus got so frustrated at them because here they were, presuming to teach people about God, and they don’t even know how to let God’s grace change their own lives. And because they don’t know how to let it change their own lives and transform their hearts, they don’t know how to let the grace of God flow on to their neighbors. In effect, their goal was to be so strictly disciplined that maybe, just maybe, God would love them. Their name also meant “the separated ones,” and they sure did make that name for themselves. To be sure, one thing we get wrong with criticizing the Pharisees is thinking that growing in holiness doesn’t matter; Jesus doesn’t say that we shouldn’t be disciplined or intentional about our personal piety or that the Law didn’t matter. But Jesus points out in the Pharisees the dark side of trying to make ourselves holy to reach God’s blessings, the religious version of a Tower of Babel. Jesus is teaching us the paradox that we are called to be a blessing, which we can only do by accepting that we are not that holy. We need grace. And we need spaciousness with each other that looks like true brotherly and sisterly love: the space to make mistakes. The space to be forgiven. The space to be able to confess where we have not been as good as we know we should. The space to say you know what, we all need water, and honestly, I’m thirsty. For it is the people who know they are thirsty who are time and time again the people that Jesus seeks out.

When Jesus tells the Pharisees, “I didn’t come for the righteous, but for the sinners,” he’s saying, “I came for the dry soil, not the water that’s already wet. I came to bring life to those who need life.” And because the Pharisees are like tightly packed dirt, Jesus does what his Father did to the generations of Israelites that didn’t help the downtrodden and speaks a prophetic word. When Jesus is a prophet, he’s giving a word that un-clods the dirt like a broadfork. When Jesus is confrontational, he is usually saying that if you are not letting mercy flow, then I will work on you until my grace flows through you. So Jesus tells them, “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’” quoting the prophet Hosea (Hos 6:6). Christ is the one who would do all the sacrificing we need. He would become the very Lamb who pours not only water, but the blood of his salvation. And so in the light of all that was done for us on the cross, no, God is not impressed with religious rituals that keep us compact, isolated, separate, and closed off. We have been blessed by grace. It’s not ours to pool up. Let it flow.

And where does grace need to flow? “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick…I have not come to call the righteous but sinners.” The wet soil doesn’t need more water. Jesus came for the dry soil. And when we are saturated with his grace, we, his body, the Church that is supposed to be Christ in the world, must let his waters flow to the thirsty. To Jesus, his grace flows for the woman who has been ailing for 12 years and not able to enter the Temple, who must have felt so, so distant from God; for the sick child, who they thought was dead; for those who are even doing wrong because they don’t really know God, and are living in ways that you know are wrong, but that’s exactly the kind of soil that needs water.

If the kingdom of God is revealed in all creation, it’s a blessing that God entrusted each of us with our own community gardens to steward together. We are Pharisees when we act like these are just for ourselves, as if the kingdom of God is just our private walled garden. Because gardens are not meant to live for themselves, but to nourish life that begets more life. So though we are sinners, gardens give us a divinely healthy, carefully curated, flourishing, stewarded place of life-giving-life taste of God’s kingdom. Gardens of plants are the same as gardens of people. People need the right conditions to grow and thrive, too: enough space to grow on their own into who God made them to be, some sunlight, and the water of grace that, yes, only God can provide. But Christian love can be as simple as living like a $13 adjustable hose, spreading God’s grace to wherever the soil is dry. All Christians are called to water our community gardens as Christ poured and pours and pours his love on us.

I love the first line of our Doxology, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.” Don’t pack yourselves in so tight that your blessings become a muddy pool. Let your blessings flow. You are saturated with grace. So let his blessings flow. Don’t be a puddle! Let his blessings flow. Amen.

For more on this week’s readings:

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Our Parasocial Bible Study #16 - Second Sunday After Pentecost

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2 months ago · 1 like · Joe Welker

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

And God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.

And God said, “Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.

And God said, “Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.

And God said, “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky.” So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.

And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind.” And it was so. God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good.

Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”

So God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.

These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.

Genesis 1:1 - 2:4a

As a sophomore in high school, I became obsessed with Les Misérables, both the book and the musical, and honestly, I didn’t really know why. I mean, I thought I knew why; I was a theater kid brand of dork, and to my ears, the international cast symphonic recording was a holy grail. But there have been lots of musicals with good music. Why did this one grab me and so many people? Why was this story so popular? Was it the main human protagonist, Jean Valjean? Maybe, but there have been lots of great leads, and the story isn’t really about him anyway. It’s an ensemble show and an ensemble story, named for the downtrodden outcasts of society, or as I expertly translated it from French in high school, “The Miserables.” But why is it still the longest-running musical in the history of London’s West End?

I thought I had moved on from my fascination with this show and that relistening to it this weekend would be simply nostalgic. Instead, I found myself asking another why: why am I a nearly 38-year-old man tearing up in the Hannaford parking lot listening to Jean Valjean sing, “Who am I?” I don’t know, but I had to walk my cart with my head turned to the side to avoid eye contact with passersby.

Our Scripture reading from Genesis 1 today gives us another mystery. We are told how God made the world. But why? These first lines of Genesis don’t spell out the reasons God created, just that in the beginning, God created. All we can learn at first about the character of God is that he does not exist for himself. His essence lies in creating things beyond himself. His ultimate being desires to make other beings.

We quickly begin learning more about this God. How does he create? In the beginning, he gave of himself through speech. He didn’t overwhelm with power; he simply let the Spirit leave his lips. And what does he give? Words. The Word. And the Word he spoke, as John tells us, was himself incarnated, first in the created order of things, and eventually the man we call the Son, God in his physically embodied form. And we learn that while God was creating, he was not completely alone; the Aramaic translation of Genesis in the Targum says that God’s Spirit “fluttered over the waters like a dove.”1

And so in these first three verses, early Christians saw that a Trinity was fully present—the Father, the Word, and the fluttering Holy Spirit. From the very beginning, God was a God of relationships, not existing for only himself. After laying the foundations of the earth in the first three days, in the next three days God, speaks into being the other beings that would fill the earth and ultimately culminate in humanity, we beings made in his image, male and female. He honored us the most with not only being made in his image, but gifting us the great gift of stewarding his gifts. He made us stewards of his love.

What does being stewards of his love look like? God reveals it to us throughout Scripture. We are not merely landlords for cattle and sheep as in the Garden, but God invites us to help him cultivate his world over and over, continuing the work of his creation in freedom. God invites us to help build the Tabernacle together, then the Temple together, each of which not only reflect creation,2 but teach us about how we build up our spiritual bodies, the tabernacles and temples that we are called to be. As Pope Leo described earlier this week in his treatise about AI (which was really a treatise about humanity), we are called to steward creation in all its complexity. We steward not like the Tower of Babel, but like rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem, praying to God in repentance and guidance while serving each other in mutually sacrificial, collaborative love.

And so we steward his creation not simply by caring for land, but by caring for each other in the same self-giving love with which God made everything. In the story of Les Mis—I won’t give every spoiler away, but also, you’ve had a good 164 years to read it—Jean Valjean emerges out of decades of imprisonment an embittered man, seeming destined to be branded as a criminal his whole life, number 24601, until he is taken in by a bishop. Just as promptly as he receives this grace, Valjean robs the bishop of his silver. When the police catch him and bring him back to the bishop, the bishop tells the police no, there’s been a mistake; he had given this silver to his friend, and actually, he forgot the candlesticks. Once the police leave, the bishop tells him, “Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to what is evil but to what is good. I have bought your soul…and I give it to God.” Valjean is forever changed by this encounter with mercy, and he begins to become who God was calling him to be.

When we encounter pure grace, it is the opportunity of a lifetime to enter into a process of discipleship that we might call “becoming.” When Jesus says, “Go and make disciples of all nations” (Matt 28:19), we must first make disciples of ourselves by becoming more and more conformed to the pattern of self-giving, creative love revealed in the fine grains of creation. Take the third day, when God said let there be fruit. Fruit is not something the tree itself needs, but it’s something of itself that the tree gives away. Think about what that means: we know a tree is a healthy tree based on how well it’s giving itself away. Likewise, the fruits of the Spirit are signs that we are healthy because they show we are also giving ourselves away.

Genesis tells us all the gifts of creation act the same way: light does not exist for itself, but to point towards other things in illumination. The sky exists not for itself, but to give shape and structure to the waters. The waters gather together not for their own sake, but for the sake of dry land. And it just keeps going and going as creation keeps on giving and giving—the dry land exists for the sake of trees, which exist for the sake of fruit, which exist for the sake of all creatures, including the human creature. And finally, and here is the rub, the teaching of the rest of the Bible is that the human creature is not meant to live for the sake of itself. We live for God, and we live for God by living for each other. We know this because God lived for us so completely that he died for us as one of us. This is the triune Way. And our discipleship of “becoming” grows the more we walk in it.

But there is a great paradox of “becoming”: we can be so focused on self-becoming that it is, well, unbecoming. I know “unbecoming” sounds like a word your disapproving grandmother would use, that you’re “acting unbecoming of a Christian,” but I like it, because if “becoming” is to grow more and more into resembling God’s self-giving love, we are un-becoming when we do things that go against the pattern of creation, usually through self-centeredness. So the paradox of our development as disciples is that we don’t become better disciples for the sake of being better disciples, as Peter learned many times the hard way. The deepest nature of “becoming” cannot have our personal development as its goal, because we humans were not created to live for ourselves.

And so a big challenge of our discipleship lies in how temptation so often creeps back in to get us to live for ourselves. In that temptation, we live more and more out of fear that God’s grace is actually insufficient, that if we give ourselves over to God, we will not have what we need and will lose what we love about ourselves. This is what Thomas Merton feared before he went to the monastery: “Am I going to lose what makes me me by submitting myself to God’s will? Am I going to become less of who I am? Am I going to lose the things, the pieces of God’s love that I love about who I am, by saying, ‘Not my will, but thy will’?” But what he found, with fits and starts with his own sin, was that we actually become more of ourselves the more we submit to the eternal becoming of God, which we only do by living in the way the Trinity lives, for the sake of the Other.

So the invitation on Trinity Sunday is the invitation in creation: listen to where God is asking you to steward his world in its becoming. As long as we’re in this world, we always have opportunities for becoming by moving outward in love. The triune God so created the world and everything in it, especially you, because he so loved it. He clarified on the cross just how much he keeps on giving and giving and giving of his own spirit for us.

But before I close, I want to confess to you now that I actually do think I know why Les Mis is so good. It’s not because of the music or the human characters. In fact, it’s so good because the humans aren’t the main characters. Sure, it may be called Les Misérables—the poor, the dispossessed, the downtrodden—but the main character is the grace of God, humming beneath the surface, redeeming the outcasts in love and teaching them to better love one another. And the reason this life and creation are good is that, for as magnificent as we humans can be in God’s image, we are not the main characters of creation. The main character of this life is the One who exists not for himself, but whose very Triune being is a self-giving grace that all life is born from.

Jean Valjean’s character arc is just one powerful story of a much more amazing God. His story is powerful because he is a sinner whose journey is a process of becoming—not becoming like anyone else, not like the man society made a criminal, nor like a false image of a local hero, but becoming more and more Christ-like, which he does by becoming more and more like himself, which he does by becoming more and more invested in others. In other words, Jean Valjean only becomes Jean Valjean by caring less and less about Jean Valjean.

As the last song of the musical goes, “To love another person is to see the face of God.” And as the first song of creation sings, “The face of God exists for the sake of loving every other person.” The reason why existence exists is not for itself, but to love beyond ourselves, because love cannot love for itself. May we go and not only make disciples of all nations, but be disciples of his self-giving love for all nations. Amen.

For more discussion of this week’s texts:

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Our Parasocial Bible Study #15 - Trinity Sunday (Featuring the Pope Encyclical)

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2 months ago · 1 like · Joe Welker

When the day of Pentecost had come, the disciples were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs-- in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”

But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:

`In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams.”

Acts 2:1-17

It is Pentecost today, “the Church’s birthday,” and what a party it was, with the Holy Spirit and the wind and the fire and the speaking in tongues that somehow everyone understood. And it’s all vibrant and wonderful. But there is a temptation to look at the ecstatic revival of that day and think, well, where is that for us? Or perhaps there’s a different temptation to look at the people with the most exciting gifts of the Spirit and say wow, how can we all be like that? Just a few years after the Church’s birthday, when the Church was not old enough to drive, we see that’s one of the problems emerging in the early Corinthian church when Paul writes them in 1 Cor 12, our other reading today.

Growing up, I wanted more than anything to be a professional athlete. Didn’t matter the sport, football, baseball, basketball, I loved them all. Like many boys, my idols were mostly professional athletes. For a kid in North Carolina, there was no greater legend than Michael Jordan, and part of the legend of Michael Jordan was that he was cut from his varsity high school basketball team as a sophomore, then worked and worked his tail off and eventually became, well, Michael Jordan. As the son of a teacher, I mean no offense when reporting that this single story of Michael Jordan convinced more young North Carolina men to work hard than anything any teacher could have told them. We all wanted to “be like Mike.”

So even though I was never that athletically gifted, and even though we had a weird, lopsided, half-paved-half-gravel driveway, I asked my parents for a basketball goal so I could practice. And for several years from about 8 years old, underneath the orange street lamp, I would head out there and practice every kind of shot, free throws, layups, three pointers. And after working my tail off, when it finally came time for middle school basketball, I discovered: I was not Michael Jordan. And no, not because I made the team on my first try. It became clear that I just did not have the gifts of my peers, and that they could not be fixed by any amount of late-night free-throws. I’d go on to repeat this pattern with other dreams I had, chasing them for sometimes months, sometimes years, whether it was actor, musician, comedian, whatever.

The point isn’t that hard work doesn’t pay off. Honestly, I probably didn’t really work hard enough at all of these things. Nor is the point that I just am devoid of anything to offer; as it turns out, I did okay at school. But I didn’t care about school. I didn’t think of anything like that as being gifted. The athletes, the musicians, the famous actors, now they had gifts. I could do well at our Sunday School Bible Jeopardy, but as a preacher’s kid, it’d be kinda embarrassing if I didn’t.

I think it’s far easier for us to see the things we can’t attain as gifts than the real ones God gave us. There’s an old observation to this point: every rock star really wants to be a comedian, and every comedian wants to be a rock star. Maybe because when you’ve been given something by God it may not even feel like a gift. You may think, “This is just who I am. It’s just what I can do. I mean, how else could I be?” Even with deeveloped skills, someone might compliment you, “Oh you’re such a good carpenter,” and you might think, “Yeah, well, just cause my dad showed me how.” Or, “You’re such a good pianist,” and you think, “I don’t even really like piano that much but, okay.” Or someone could even say, “I’ve had a lot of friends but you, you’re such a loyal friend,” and you might think, “Well, how the heck else are you supposed to be a friend if you’re not loyal?”

There are so many ways to envy so many gifts we don’t have. But this robs us twice: first, robbing us of seeing that we do have gifts, and then robbing everybody by failing to use them to the fullest. Multiply this across a whole subculture and an even weirder thing happens, where only a couple of types of gifts are seen as truly valuable gifts: athlete, musician, comedian. And then you really have a bunch of unused gifts, and a bunch of people trying really hard to make themselves have a couple of gifts they don’t. After all, we saw what happened when Michael Jordan tried to play baseball (and, to be fair, he still made the minor league team).

Why am I saying this on Pentecost? Because of all the wonderful outpouring of spiritual gifts on that Pentecost day, something strange started to happen in churches that still can happen in churches to this day: Christians started to think that the gifts of the Holy Spirit that really mattered looked a certain way. For the Corinthians, it was miraculous tongues, big pizzazz, an emotional fever pitch. You can imagine them hearing the reports of Pentecost and wanting to say, “Well we want our Pentecost,” and then everybody wanted the glory of being the tongue-speaker, and suddenly more and more Corinthians were speaking in tongues than, frankly, could have possibly been gifted by the Holy Spirit.

And so Paul says hold on now—every gift is spiritual, and it’s all from God, and they all can be used to build up the church (or drive churches apart). If you are a Christian, you have the Holy Spirit indwelling in you, and the Holy Spirit has given you a gift that is just as valid as any other, and more than that, Christ’s body needs you. “Now there are varieties of gifts but the same Spirit, and there are varieties of services but the same Lord, and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone.” (1 Cor 12:4-6) From wisdom to knowledge to faith to healing to power to prophecy to discernment to tongues to interpreting the tongues, and this isn’t a complete list, “All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses. For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.” (1 Cor 12:11-12)

So first and foremost, on this Pentecost birthday celebration, do not be jealous of another church’s celebration, and don’t be jealous of another’s gifts. We should rejoice and recognize how it all glorifies God, absolutely yes, but don’t be Michael Jordan playing baseball (or me playing baseball). Look at what God has given you and glorify him with that.

And I don’t want to embarrass her, but if I were to think of someone who has magnified God today, today I’m thinking of Elsie.1 I can’t think of anybody who has done more for the quiet work of the Holy Spirit that we should lift up on this Pentecost Sunday. All the emails, all the little things, all the preppings of communion, making sure tablecloths are clean, the livestream is doing okay…I mean, I know she says she retired from being a church administrator, but I don’t know if you could really retire the church administrator out of her. An old Methodist bishop said, “Sometimes the Holy Spirit wills us to do things we wouldn’t want to do, or else it wouldn’t require the Holy Spirit to get us to move,” and based on how many times she had to email me to get the bulletin right, I can tell you the Holy Spirit was at work where she was tired of going!

But it’s not just Elsie. I think of the way the Holy Spirit has moved in folks like Lisa, the dedication and willingness to show up and be the point person for our organ playback—thank you Lisa.2 And thank you to our organists who have recorded our hymns, whose gifts pour through those pipes even though they’re not here, just as the gifts of saints gone by hold us up in these pews and this pulpit and this communion table they carved. The Holy Spirit has been at work in the unsung work that’s not listed in our bulletin, folks like Keith, Woody, and Natalie helping people cross the street and doing a thousand other things over the years. I don’t know what else needs to be said about what Tom does for the livestream and keeping our building functioning, or Jenny for the work of the Spirit has kept her going another year as clerk when she is well due to retire there, or Jane for her gift of beautifying the church, or Vicki’s gifts of testimony and interpersonal love, or Sandy’s gifts of technical support and emotional support, or Dave’s gifts of patient wisdom, or our other Dave for all you’ve done for this church, or Bruce’s gifts of historical memory, or Kay’s gifts of lightheartedness, or Valerie’s gifts of faithful dedication, or Jane’s work at the 4C’s and ongoing friendship, or all Neil and Kristin have done for our community through the library, or how the Spirit is moving in Lori to pick up where Elsie has left off, or Paige’s passion for the poor in our community, or Anne Page’s dedication as our treasurer, or how I see the Spirit at work in the kindness of Joyce, Ernie, Sally, and Yvonne each week at the 4C’s, and I feel bad that I know I can’t list everyone, because the Holy Spirit is busy!3

So we may not have tongues of fire appearing anytime soon. But if you’ve stuck around, you’ll see that Pentecost did happen and is here, because the Holy Spirit has been at work this whole time. Because part of the point of this wild firey event happening on Pentecost was to show that the gifts of the Holy Spirit were not only for the apostles, who had already received the Holy Spirit from Jesus (John 20:19-23), but were being poured out on the whole church. Ordinary folks who had traveled from far and wide to be there for that Pentecostal festival, what they called shavu’ot, the Feast of Weeks, and suddenly felt that God had gifted them all. Not just the musicians or the prophets, but the people who just did good, humble work, who cooked meals for their families, who kept the shop running another year, who harvested another crop after another year of working in the fields.

Today, we celebrate that God has blessed all of us who are gathered in Jesus’ name, all of you, with spiritual gifts. We celebrate that yes, the Holy Spirit is in you! Do you believe it? Do you know that the Holy Spirit is in you? And now what are you gonna do about it?

If you don’t know, there’s a way to find out. In fact, I may have made a mistake in this sermon, because we don’t find out what to do with our gifts by looking at each other. That’s not why we gather here each week. Looking too much at each other is the disease that had me shooting free throws at 9pm on a school night. We gather here as spiritually gifted sinners who look not at ourselves for inspiration, but at Jesus Christ, who had every spiritual gift imaginable, and did not hoard those gifts for himself, but emptied himself and gave up everything for his beloved children.4 Don’t look at each other’s gifts. Look for the ways you can give the gifts you already have—the gifts that you may have forgotten or never realized were gifts—and use them to glorify God and bless your neighbor. As your pastor, I bear witness that you have already done so. If you have forgotten, remember your gifts. When we forget again, let us remember the cross. And may we all go and do likewise. Amen.

Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely spiritual you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all peoples to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps fumble about for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said,

‘For we, too, are his offspring.’

“Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

Acts 17:22-31

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him because he abides with you, and he will be in you.

“I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me, and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”

John 14:15-21

“I will not leave you orphaned,” he said. It is Mother’s Day, and if your parents are no longer with us, maybe this hits differently today. If you never knew your parents, then his promise will really hit different.

It is Mother’s Day, and I can remember a time when I did not want parents. Embarrassingly, this lasted longer than high school. When I moved to Los Angeles in my early twenties, I was so happy to be my own person. I was so happy to be my full, authentic self. I had left the church, left my family for the other coast, left my ideas of God, left everything but that red Toyota Tercel that couldn’t make it past Texas without breaking down. After years and years of being a product of social systems I didn’t ask to be born in, I was so happy to do what Carl Jung called individuating, becoming my truer self, my own man. A struggling artist but a free bird.

My relationship to Christ was non-existent, and where it was existent, it was resentful. I remember actually thinking that I’m not gonna let myself be the prodigal son, not gonna be me. If I had ever gone to church, and if I had actually heard Jesus say, “I will not leave you orphaned,” it would not have been good news to me. In some ways, I didn’t want to be a son at all. If I didn’t have to worry about my parents feelings, then I could really live how I wanted, completely be me, no longer worrying about disappointing them. I used to think this was just a me thing or a twenties thing but some of us carry this a long time. Maybe you still do somewhere. If your parents are no longer with us, maybe this hits in a different way on days like today.

So I did the next best thing and lived like I was an orphan. We California transplants, we who move there, we either desperately remind ourselves we come from somewhere else, finding other transplants who carry deeper connections to us than the entertainment industry, or we desperately don’t want to come from anywhere at all, and sometimes it depends on the sunny afternoon. We all live on the internet now, and Los Angeles is almost like living on the internet in person—the most glamorous nowhere, the blank slate perfect weather with open-top possibilities for personal expression and fulfillment. It can feel quite alive, vibrant, in touch with truth. No real obligations to you, you don’t have real obligations to me, we’re just equal beings man, tolerating each other but not going out of the way for each other, climbing ladders, fully discipled in the bleeding edge of culture. Just spiritual orphans figuring it out. And it’s not just a California thing; because America has been fully Californized, we all live in the age of self-discovery, individual meaning-making, and if we don’t know that we come from somewhere, we live as if we were orphans with minimal responsibility to anyone.

This can seem to work well enough for many people, because at least it’s “free.” But underneath it all for me was loneliness. All the freedom, all the individuation, all the not wanting to be a product of a system or a church or a nation or God, it let me do what I want, but the price was loneliness. And I don’t know how lonely you have ever been. I don’t know if you feel lonely now in your life, including on this Mother’s Day. But there is a level of loneliness you can hit where you start to really believe it. You can be so lonely that it doesn’t even feel like belief, it just feels honest. It feels true. It feels real. That you are nobody to nobody.

But “I will not leave you orphaned,” he said.

I don’t know how many of us here have seen the movie Good Will Hunting, but there is a famous scene in it where Robin Williams is a therapist talking with a young Matt Damon, a janitor at MIT who grew up in the foster system, still wounded over the abandonment of his father long ago. In the most famous scene, Williams says over and over to the young man who has never lost the wounds of being a foster kid, “It’s not your fault.” “It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.” And it’s a beautiful scene because it’s sometimes the best the world can give us, simply telling us that when other people abandon us to pursue their own individualism, that it wasn’t our fault. We aren’t to blame for our pain. So many of us carry deep wounds around this. And no, we aren’t at fault for being abandoned. The even better miracle is that we aren’t abandoned at all. For he said, “I will not leave you orphaned.”

Last week we talked about commending our spirits to God in the same way Christ commended his spirit to his father on the cross, “Into your hands, O Father, I now commend my spirit.” (Luke 23:46) But before he commended his spirit to his Father, he was here, in a living room with his closest friends and followers, saying first, I commend my Holy Spirit to you. And as long as you are with me, you are also with God, and you are also with each other, and we are all together. And when all this is too long for Christians to say, we summarize it in a single word that we forget about its full meaning: communion.

Communion isn’t only when we partake in the Lord’s Supper. We are always in communion with the living God. He has never abandoned us, and he has never abandoned you.

First-century Athens was not 21st-century Los Angeles, the city of angels. But they were both cities of gods. Against all odds, Paul has found himself here in the marketplace of ideas, preaching the message he once tried to destroy. And here he is with all these free-thinking philosophers, after being a tent-maker throughout the empire for everyday citizens and their gods. As we heard in our reading today, he doesn’t say, “You have no idea what you’re talking about, you spiritually bankrupt degenerate narcissists” (maybe I sound like that). He says, “Athenians, what a spiritual people you are. I know your poetry. It has truth. And the God that you don’t know? Actually, I do know him. And you are his offspring. You are not orphans. You are part of his family.”

And Luke preserves these words for us and everyone in the ancient world because it’s for anyone who has been on a faith journey, anyone who “search[es] for God and perhaps fumble about for him and find him--though indeed he is not far from each one of us.” (Acts 17:27). For anyone who feels like they aren’t lost because they’ve never been found, Paul says, “You don’t even realize it, but you already are in communion with him. For as your poets know in their guts, in him we live, and move, and have our being. Just by being alive, you are already in communion with God, and you didn’t even know it. And he has made himself so much more clear.”

Why still study the classics? Why still study the Greek gods? Not because anybody thinks they “really exist,” but because even as dead idols, they are still a strange expression of some part of humanity, still some piece of creation. The gods embody the good and the bad, the vices and virtues, and by peering into how those old Athenians worshipped, we still learn about what we worship. All that our culture worships—let’s be honest, all we worship—all our dead gods include some of these virtues, all things that have truth that is of God but become deformed apart from God and destructive when we crave them. Power, beauty, wisdom, courage, justice, Greek gods had all these things, twisted by power games and capricious whims. You can still see it today. Like the ancient Romans, we still serve these gods unconsciously, forces of spiritual nature to appease and make trades. And we can carry this habit and posture into our faith, making our Christianity transactional, thinking God wants to make a trade with us, my behavior for his love.

But the true God didn’t make a trade with us. He made a trade for us. And in giving his life for you, he gave you the gift of full communion. When we live out of our sin and disobey, it is not about breaking a trade, it’s about living in the lie that we are our own, that we don’t fully belong to him and we don’t fully belong to each other through him. But we are not our own. We belong to God. He did not leave you orphaned.

Jesus taught us that while the Christian life has many “do’s” and “don’ts,” it’s less about “do” and “don’t” than it is living in the truth of relationship. It’s about living in the knowledge that he gave us here in John 14, that if you are in Christ, Christ is in you. He is in God, and the Holy Spirit is helping all of this. The living God is in you, and you are alive because of him; you live because he lives. That is communion. Whenever we sin, we forget the truth of our communion. We forget our father, which makes us forget our brothers and sisters. But none of us are orphans. We are each other’s keeper.

Looking back, I was pretty dumb to go to a place called the city of angels to escape God. And try as I could, I couldn’t escape him. And however many times you’ve tried, you couldn’t either. And neither does your neighbor. Neither does your enemy. Sometimes, it can be hard and weird to be a Christian in an increasingly secular, and especially in a state where we are a minority in our towns. But if you remember that whether people know it or not, they are in communion with you and God, let that change how you see them. Let that shift something in you. Let that move you to curiosity about the piece of God’s truth that they worship. And by showing them the love of Jesus, help them feel the communion that they don’t know they’re a part of. And pray for them, for every time we pray for someone, we remember the truth that is the fullness of our communion.

So hold onto that word: communion. Grow in holiness by growing in obedience to the communion you are already in, in obedience to the love of the one whom you have committed your spirit to, but who first committed his spirit to you. Remember that before we knew who he was, he knew all of who we were, and that whoever we meet who thinks they don’t know him and are just total spiritual individuals, they do already know him in part, for in him we all move and live and have our being.

And no matter how real loneliness feels, do not believe the lie. He has told you, O mortal: “I will not leave you orphaned. I am coming to you. And because I live, you live.” Amen.

For more discussion of this week’s texts:

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Our Parasocial Bible Study #12 - Sixth Sunday of Easter

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3 months ago · 1 like · Joe Welker

While they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Then he knelt down and cried out in a loud voice, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.”

Acts 7:59-60a

Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, but if you do not, then believe because of the works themselves. Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.

John 14:11-12

I don’t know how long my car has left, but I had a really hard time letting go of my last one, an over 200,000-mile 1997 red Toyota Tercel. It was not in great shape when I got it, and it was even worse shape when I left it. Once it was beyond any hope of selling, I went on one last joyride like it was a dying pet, then went to the salvage yard for $300 for parts. “Thank you, Terry. To the dump, I commend your spirit.”

On a serious note, I’m sad that I won’t be in town in two weeks for the final graduation of Sterling College. Not only because of the immense loss it will be for our community, but also because even in loss, there are still people to celebrate. For all graduations, there is always that bittersweet joy, a goodbye for us in the stands, a new life for the student. Do you remember your graduation(s)? Do you remember who was there? Do you remember seeing your favorite teacher on graduation day, and suddenly they no longer looked like a cross between a boss and a parent, and you realized they’re just a person? They were always just a person, but now you can see it because they no longer have control over you. Maybe your parents and grandparents were there too, not only to celebrate, but so that the graduate can remember they no longer have control over you either (thank heavens).

We call them “commencements,” as in a new beginning, but really we could also think of them as “commendations.” They are being sent off, no longer in the care of the people and place they once were, for their care is being handed over: they are commended.

When we decide to follow Christ, we not only have a new beginning with our souls, but we also have commended to him our spirits. Luke tells us that Jesus said on the cross, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46). John tells us that upon death, “He bowed his head and gave up his spirit” (John 19:30). Jesus was echoing the psalmist saying the same thing, “You are my refuge, into your hand I commend my spirit; you have redeemed me, O Lord, faithful God” (Psalm 31:4b-5). It is remarkable that in the midst of intense suffering on the cross, at the exact moment where he could have had reason to say, “God, how’d you let me get here? I can’t trust you anymore,” Jesus did the exact opposite. He said, “God, I fully trust you; I hand myself fully over to you.”

We also hear in today’s reading that what Jesus does is not just something only God can do. Stephen says in his final moments as the first Christian ever martyred, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” (Acts 7:59). Commending our spirits is something any of us can do, especially when it seems like it’s all about to be taken away from us.

If you find yourself in intense suffering, this might be one of the most powerful prayers you can pray. When the hells of the world are around you, your body and mind searing pain into you, your enemies mock and surround you, when it is all simply too much, there are so many worse prayers you can pray than, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” We can pray it even when it’s not the pain the world gives us, but the pain we give ourselves, for it is also one of the best rock bottom prayers. At the moment we realize where our selfishness has gotten us, and we now know for real that we cannot do it alone, and like many people on the first day of AA, we no longer even want to be in charge, so we give over control, and God begins with us again. Like with my old car, or with the prodigal son, it’s like here you go, God, have at this broken-down person, I’ll take money for parts at this point.

While this is the perfect prayer for those moments, we don’t have to wait for intense pain or rock bottom to hand our spirits over. Our whole life with Christ is an invitation for us to let go of more and more control over how things are supposed to be. After all, we do pray “Thy will be done.” God’s people are named after Israel, whose name means “he who struggled with God and endured.” Jacob didn’t live because he was more powerful than God, but because, once he finally believed God was blessing him, he could let go and become a transformed man, from manipulator to grace-receiver. Like Jacob, we also struggle with God for control: control over his creation, control over his children, control over the Holy Spirit. But when we give up control of our lives to Christ—not to Christianity, not to a pastor, but to Christ—we gain so much more back. It’s funny how when we give up control over our salvation, we live in far more grace than when we think it’s in our hands.

For example, think of all the debates you’ve ever been in. How does it feel to need to “win” a debate versus a conversation where you didn’t care if you “won”? Which felt freer? Which conversation explored the truth more honestly? When you feel like you have to win, you feel like you have to control the conversation, scoring points, changing the subject, framing it to your will. But when you have given up control of the conversation, and the idea of “winning” doesn’t even make sense, you’ll find that you’re actually far freer to speak what your spirit feels and more likely to arrive at the truth. As authoritarian powers and persons eventually learn, once we try to control truth, we lose it, because truth isn’t ours to control, it’s God’s.

Earlier this week at the 4C’s, we were talking about forgiveness at our bible study. As we were talking, it became clear that we all had some struggles with it. After that conversation, I would be shocked if there was a single one of us here in this church who, if you thought about it for a minute, had nobody that you still needed to forgive (you probably won’t have to think about it for a minute, or even ten seconds). Why? Because forgiveness is also about letting go of control (I can’t help but notice that Stephen, after letting go his spirit to God, his last words were one of forgiveness: “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” (Acts 7:60)). In the New Testament, the main word for “forgiveness” is aphiémi, or “to let go,” or “release.” I imagine most of us have trouble letting go of a pain, a hurt, a grudge, a suffering, or a real injustice because we are trying to hold onto control which the pain, the hurt, the injustice took from us. So often the injury and injustice was someone exerting their control over you in a way that was deeply wrong. If they exercised improper control over you to hurt you, a grudge doesn’t get rid of the hurt, but it does let us feel like we have more control again.

To be clear, forgiveness has nothing to do with minimizing how real the injustice is, or how real the pain is, or how wrong it was, or anything like that. It’s about, in a paradoxical way, taking a form of control by letting go control. We’re no longer trying to hold onto the injustice, we just release it back to God. It doesn’t mean that if we do forgive, it will happen quickly, easily, or completely. Imagine you have a boat tied to a dock, and that boat is the anger you have at someone or some group. And it’s a boat that also should probably go to the salvage yard because it just makes you upset every time you look at it or even think about it. To forgive is not to say the wrong wasn’t real, but to simply say, “I’m not gonna keep this boat tied to my dock anymore.” Then if you untie the boat, what happens? It floats away. It may take a long time because you aren’t even trying to push it away. It’s just out of your hands, floating. You have commended the whole thing to God, the hurt and your heart. And being able to do this is no small thing.

Let’s not kid ourselves: to trust and follow Jesus is not a small thing at all either. We are commending all of ourselves to his hands. Grace may be free, but it’s not always easy to accept if when it means I also have to let go. It’s one of the many meanings for us in baptism when we make vows or renew them as adults, the moment we say, “I now commend my spirit to you, God,” like a graduation for the soul. And so is repentance a commendation, where we say, “Lord, I know I have messed up again. Here I am again. To you, I commend my spirit. I’m giving up control.” When you’re exhausted of holding onto your sin and your shame about it, just untie the boat and let it float.

But here’s a predicament: I don’t believe we can fully do this without belief. Six times in our John 14 reading, Jesus says, “believe,” and it’s everywhere in John’s gospel that believing in Jesus is the key. But what if we don’t believe? Can we just make ourselves believe? I know we and many of our friends can get a lot of things from treating Christianity as a metaphor; I did too. But you don’t commend your spirit to a metaphor. You commend your spirit because you believe it. If someone tells us there’s free food at the church on Front Porch Forum, we go because we believe it’s true. If someone says there’s a unicorn farm where you fly to the stars in Danville, you’re probably not driving to Danville. We can’t commend our spirits to Christ without believing that Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. And we all know that we can tell if someone really believes something if it shows up not only in what they say, but what they do. If we say we believe in forgiveness but don’t actually do so, where is our belief? If we say we believe we should care for the needy and never do, do we really believe in what Jesus told us?

If you feel a pang of guilt at that, so do I. But to the extent that we are all sinners, we all struggle with belief. Maybe we struggle to believe that when we give ourselves to God, not only will he receive us, he will pour his Spirit back out on us; maybe we feel like we’ve tried that and it didn’t go as promised. But just as we don’t need to wait until we are struggling in our lives to commend our spirits to God, we don’t need to wait until we fully believe either. As Christ said to his friends, “Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, but if you do not, then believe because of the works themselves. Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.” (John 14:11-12) All throughout the gospels, we see sinners like you and me following before they fully believed in Jesus because they didn’t even know who he really was. Yet they act before they fully believe. Like on the road to Emmaus, they just wondered, “Were not our hearts burning?” (Luke 24:32). So while we can’t just force ourselves into more belief, there is good news. If believing is more than just what we intellectually know, but what our bodies actually do, then we don’t just commend our spirits as an effect of what we believe, but part of how we can come to believe is by commending our spirits. You can grow in belief by walking the walk of faith; it’s not a one-way street. What we do can help us grow in belief, because what we do is belief. We are not saved by works, but also, as James tells us, works are our living faith (James 2:14-26).

I pray you believe in your bones that Jesus is always pouring himself out for you and sending his Spirit for you. But if you don’t feel that, try giving him a little more of your spirit by doing the hard things he taught, so that you may believe that the Spirit is always moving. To commend our spirits to him is like hitting the ping-pong ball back to God that his Spirit already sent to you; no matter how many times you commend your spirit to him, he will send his back. This is a rhythm of Grace, giving ourselves over to the God who already gave himself to us.

And this is why Christian funerals need not be somber, for death is like a graduation. Maybe not by being martyred or by finishing agricultural college, but by living faithful lives until the end, when we become fully commended to God’s grace. But we don’t have to wait to graduate. We can live with commended spirits today by letting go more and more control into more and more of the new life in Christ. For Christ on the cross already commended his spirit to us, and he’s still commending his spirit to you in this very moment. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. You can believe in him. You can trust your spirit with him. And you will receive far more than you could ever control. Amen.

For more discussion of this week’s readings:

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Our Parasocial Bible Study #11 - Fifth Sunday of Easter

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3 months ago · 2 likes · Joe Welker

“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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3 months 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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3 months 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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4 months 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.

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