The Pharisees went and plotted to entrap Jesus in what he said. So they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality. Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me the coin used for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius. Then he said to them, “Whose head is this, and whose title?” They answered, “The emperor’s.” Then he said to them, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” When they heard this, they were amazed; and they left him and went away.

Matthew 22:15-22

One of the many joys we’ve had in Craftsbury is living in the manse, which I only call a “manse” 50% of the time because that word confuses people. Sometimes I say “parsonage” to be less confusing, but I’m not a parson, I’m a Presbyterian minister, so it’s “manse,” (but try arguing about it without sounding pretentious). It’s also confusing when people ask whether that white house next to the church is “your house.” Sometimes I say “yes” to keep it simple, but it’s not my house, it’s the church’s house, but then again, the church is God’s house, so whose house is it anyway? I don’t know, it’s just not mine. But even though it’s not mine, I’ll be taking my stuff out of it this week. George Carlin famously called a house “a place for my stuff,” and maybe that’s what we should have called it the whole time instead of the manse, “The place for the preacher’s stuff.”

But it has really been a nice thing for us, because if you live in a manse, you know you are living by grace. I know I didn’t pay for this place. I’ve been keeping my stuff here, but it’s not mine. I have lived by the grace of this church, not only you here and now who have supported us, but also the grace and work and generosity of the saints of Craftsbury who came long before us. And they were supported by saints before them, and we were all supported by God. This is, of course, how everything is, but it has been spiritually helpful to have a place for my stuff that I don’t own, because there’s no mistaking it: this home does not belong to me; it belongs to God.

I believe only a handful of people in this room have lived in a manse before, but we’ve all held currency before. Yes, that may soon be totally antiquated, but all of us have held American money in our hands before, and maybe it’s been money that helped you buy your stuff. But when you hold it, whose money are we holding?

This is the question today Jesus is not just asking the Pharisees, he is asking us. I don’t know if we would like the answer any more than the Pharisees when he asks, “Whose face is on it? Caesar? Then give it to Caesar.” We might be willing to let Lincoln have his pennies back, but I’m sorry Jesus, Mr. Franklin doesn’t need to buy any more stuff. However, there is an irony of history that many Christian kings continued minting their faces on money, as if to say, “See, Jesus said to give us what’s ours.” Even deeply Protestant and anti-monarchic America, after much chagrin, eventually printed dead presidents.

Of course, as Matthew tells us, this showdown is all a trap. It’s a kind of “gotcha” that I hope my daughter will one day try on me, because if she’s trapping me in these questions, at least I know she still cares what I think, whether she wants to or not. Likewise, the Pharisees care about Jesus whether they want to or not. They hope they can either get him in trouble with Rome so they can arrest him, or they can get him in trouble with the crowds and weaken what they thought was the source of his power. If Jesus bluntly said, “Yes, pay your taxes,” maybe the crowds would have turned on him. In the end, Jesus got out of the trap, but eventually, they got what they wanted. Religion, Rome, and raucous crowds rarely agreed, but here they did: put him on the cross.

But remarkably, Jesus flips a trap meant for him into a trap for the powerful. As if to say, “You call yourself Lord and put yourself on money? Perfect. You’ve just put your kingdom in a box, where it belongs.” I think it’s perfect that we are reading this story during election season, because we can remember that the domain of today’s politicians is really so small, even when we try to immortalize them or they try to immortalize themselves. I’m not saying politics and money don’t matter, but they are spare change in our Father’s world.

We can laugh at Caesar and the Pharisees because we can recognize something in them that’s in all of us; we’ve all probably had a taste of “Hall Monitor Syndrome,” or at least you’ve been the banker in a game of Monopoly. We get the tiniest taste of power and inflate it with impunity. I remember in fifth grade I was placed on the crossing guard for my elementary school, the “Safety Patrol,” along with my friend Dominique, and what tiny kings in tiny kingdoms we were. When we weren’t barking out orders, we passed the time talking about that week’s WWF wrestling show, where Stone Cold and the Rock taught us more than we knew about masculine illusions of power; since we didn’t know how fake it was, we also didn’t know how real it was. And I don’t know what my daughter will be like, if she’ll be more into pro wrestling or more into tea parties with stuffed animals. But if I have to sit next to a bunny, I’m sure I’ll be ordered to give to the queen the things that belong to the queen.

But you know what’s a wonderful sign of God’s grace? That all of us in God’s kingdom are playing as tiny kings and tiny queens in our tiny realms, from as small as a tea party to as small as the Roman Empire to as small as the United States of America, and God is utterly not threatened by it. If anything, he is amused by it. I mean, do you hear Jesus in this story? This man doesn’t even have a denarius to give to Caesar. What does he think of any of our kingdoms? “You want to play dress up? Sure, play dress up. You want to be emperor so bad, sure, be emperor. That’s dress up for adults.” And if you find yourself at an emperor’s tea party, and he demands you give him back his coin, sure, give him his coin. To be sure, Jesus doesn’t think it’s cute when leaders abuse people while playing their games. He is not indifferent to our suffering or abuses of power, and he will make it clear that another bill is due that they can’t pay off with their face coins. But until then, have your tea party.

In God’s mercy, God will let us persist in the illusions of our little fiefdoms. Meanwhile, he’s entrusted to you something far more real and wonderful: his image. You are a coin that bears the image of God. You are not God, but through the flesh and the Spirit we are teeming with a life that we may hardly know what to do with. Maybe we hardly know what to do with it because we forget that it’s not ours; we belong to God. As Paul said, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price.” (1 Cor 6:19-20) We are not gods, we’re God’s.

And this church, as much as I have so deeply loved and been honored and blessed to lead worship here for three years, this church is not mine any more than the manse, and it never was; it belongs to God. And when we go to North Carolina and buy a house, I might think it’s my house (and will be reminded every month that it’s the bank’s house). But even though I pay for it with money, Jesus is saying that spiritually, no house we could buy is really any different than the manse: deep down, it all belongs to God.

But our most prized possession, one that is really ours, that we shouldn’t want, yet we hold onto more fiercely than any other, is our pride. That’s the part of our stuff that doesn’t need a house; just shove it under the mattress of our minds. We remember the story of the widow who gives up her last coin, and pride is our last coin. Our money may have a Caesar or a president on it, but our pride is a coin that carries our self-image, the ruler of our lives. Our pride not only keeps us clinging to God’s stuff as if it’s ours, it makes us cling to our belief that we are self-justified people on our own who don’t need saving. Pride means that when we are put in a trap question, unlike Jesus, we respond based on who will serve us most. Really, the trap question they ask Jesus—“Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not”—is not really about the money or Caesar. It’s a loyalty test: who do you really belong to? Like when Joshua asks the angel, “Are you on our side or the enemy’s?” And the angel says, “Actually, I’m with God. Now take off your shoes, you’re standing on holy ground—God’s land.”

But the trap they are trying to put Jesus into is deeper and even older than testing loyalties. Maybe it’s a question they were trapping themselves into without realizing, a question that our pride loves to answer, “What kind of good person are you? What kind of righteous person are you? Are you righteous because you work for the kingdoms of this world, or righteous because you fight them?” Jesus knows that neither answer makes you righteous, and either answer puts you on the cross. You either are put on the cross by Caesar, or the crowds, or by the spiritual and moral authorities of the day, and if you’re Jesus, all at the same time.

I have mentioned it before, but I really am going to miss having the backdrop of Calvary in front of me as I preach every Sunday, where I can see Christ’s cross and two smaller ones:

In that story, one of the thieves seems to have held onto his most prized possession all the way to the end, that pride, the one thing he didn’t have to steal. He mocks Jesus, “Save yourself, Messiah!” But the other thief, having also proven himself unrighteous, makes another choice. “Jesus, remember me.” He gives up his pride, his last coin. And Jesus says, “Today, you will be with me in paradise.” So let us take our self-innocence, our self-justification, and our self-salvation, and not give it over to Caesar, but give that to God too. “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.” (Matt 16:25)

The good news, friends, is that we can afford to lose our life because it’s not even really ours. As Niebuhr said, our truest freedom is in discovering our lack of freedom; our deepest belonging is discovering we do not belong to ourselves. When we try to hold onto the life that isn’t ours anyway—when we try to gain it by taking Caesar’s coin from him—we lose it. We gain it when we echo the deep memory of the truth that Calvin echoed from Paul: “We are not our own: let us therefore forget ourselves and all that is ours. We are God’s: let us therefore live for him and die for him. We are God’s: let his wisdom and will therefore rule all our actions. We are God’s.”

The manse isn’t mine, or yours, or anybody’s—hallelujah. Your life is not your own; it’s just a place for God’s stuff. So give to Caesar his spare change and your two cents. But give to God the last coin with your face, and give to God everything that carries his face—all your heart, all your soul, all your mind—and love your neighbor as yourself. Then you will not only enjoy everything that he has given you as a gift, but you will keep being his gift. I know you have been to me. Thank you. Amen.

Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved.

I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord. Yes, and I ask you also, my loyal companion, help these women, for they have struggled beside me in the work of the gospel, together with Clement and the rest of my coworkers, whose names are in the book of life.

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. As for the things that you have learned and received and heard and noticed in me, do them, and the God of peace will be with you.

Phil 4:1-9

Like Paul with his friends, I knew I was in a season of goodbyes for the past couple of months, but this week I found out I have to say one more goodbye that I didn’t expect: my 2003 Acura RSX. On the one hand, it’s not that hard, nor unexpected; I knew I would be done with it soon. It hasn’t had working A/C in two years or heat for one Vermont winter; I never bothered painting the new bumper after I ran off the road into a snowbank my first winter here. I never bothered giving it a name, or a gender—“she” wasn’t my baby, it was just a good car for me for a long time, basically a nicer Honda Civic that used to have nicer leather until the upholstery started ripping through.

And yet I don’t like saying goodbye even to a beater. Because even though it’s an inanimate piece of metal, it’s been with me through so much of my life and so many relationships since I got it in the last week of my first job in Los Angeles. It’s been with me through so many different jobs, breakups, even religions, from coast to coast and up and down both. It’s seen twenty-nine states and three Vermont winters (barely). Yet it’s so silly because the car really is just a car. I’ve wanted to say goodbye to it for a while! I really mostly love it not because of what it is, but because of where it’s been with me and for how long. And yet even the easiest goodbyes aren’t easy.

So as I’ve been thinking about goodbyes, it struck me that we already are trying to put a positive spin on a hard thing by even calling them “goodbyes”; there’s no word “badbyes.” We’re already trying to be optimistic. Really, the only obvious “good” bye is to something that’s bad, something working even less well than an old car. Many of our byes are to something good, before we knew it, much less wanted it, but those aren’t good byes, just pain.

Even in our small congregation, I only know a glimpse of some of the hard goodbyes some of you have had to make. Even this weekend, we lost a beloved dog unexpectedly. In the past year, we have lost parents, spouses, and friends. We’ve lost more intangible things, too—around us in this community, people have lost jobs, abilities, dreams, and worse. These are not “good” byes.

Paul didn’t always have easy goodbyes either. In Acts 20, Paul says goodbye to one of his closest, most affectionate churches, his friends in Ephesus. He talks about all they’ve been through together, gives them some last exhortations, and charges them to remember what Jesus is calling them to do in their ministry. They prayed together, they cried together, they grieved together, and then they said goodbye.

The Church in Philippi, whose mail we’ve been reading this past month, was another beloved group of friends to Paul. The church gave birth starting with the women who gathered by the river, where he met Lydia. Then he and Silas were bound in jail in Philippi, and after a holy earthquake jailbroke them, they ended up baptizing the jailer and his entire household. These were his friends, and they also had to say goodbye, but they kept in touch.

And now at the end of this remarkable letter, we hear the Holy Spirit showing us what a really good bye looks like. All our other readings today explicitly mention a meal—a “table before me” in Psalm 23, a feast in Isaiah, Jesus’ wedding banquet—but in the letter to the Philippians, we symbolically get a taste of the meal of the kingdom of God, a place where humans are gathered together in joyful love. Here we, in 2026, are gathered in relationship to these saints across time and space, the magic of writing, with Paul passing around dishes of spiritual goodness like Thanksgiving gravy. Hear again some of what he says in his good bye:

“Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved.” Stand firm in the Lord in love; don’t be bent, don’t be swayed, stand firm in love together. He urges reconciliation with Euodia and Syntyche, two women who struggled with him in the work of the gospel—maybe two of the women who had first become Christians by the river together—people who were on the same team but couldn’t get on the same page. Then he says, “Rejoice in the Lord always, again, I say, rejoice!” Not because of hardship, but in the midst of it. “Let your gentleness be known to everyone”; don’t be any more famous than your kindness. “The Lord is near.” “Do not be anxious,” but give everything over to God in thankful prayer. Know that there is “a peace of God that passes all understanding” and it will “guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” And then this beautiful last litany— “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

Why does Paul say all this now? Why put this near the end? Maybe he knows that the antidote to a hard goodbye is not straining for the past, but living even more into what is good today. Now of course, even if we do that, goodbyes aren’t necessarily any easier. The loss is still real. Even knowing the unfathomable amount of life-giving love that would come on the cross through the resurrection did not make the pain of the cross easier for Jesus. His tears were real, and they are our tears. His anguish was real, for he shares in our anguish at the ultimate departure of life in death. The cross was not an easy goodbye to this life. Why would saying goodbye to the joys of this life be easy for us?

But we also know there is something so sacred in even the pain of a goodbye, because the same emotional investment that makes a goodbye hard is what made a goodbye worthy of the pain; the same passion that burns with grieving and the sorrow of letting go is how we know there was any love to delight in in the first place.

Time can be a miserable tyrant who death recruits to do its bidding. What’s remarkable, though, is how God can see all of time at once; every time we say hello to someone or something, God already sees us saying goodbye. And when we are in the pain of a goodbye, God already sees what we can’t as humans: the new graces we are about to say hello to. From where we stand in a goodbye—when we first met the love of our life who is no longer with us, or the first weekend I arrived here on those backroads, or the best family gathering we ever had that can’t happen again—remembering the “hellos” is just bittersweet. But from where God stands, a goodbye is passing the plate so the next dish of love can be served in his banquet.

That’s how Jesus can tell his disciples in the same breath, “I am going away, and I am coming to you.” (John 14:28); “I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you…because I live, you also will live.” (John 14:18-19) “In my Father’s house, there are many rooms,” (John 14:2), he says, and he is preparing a place for us there. As prophet Isaiah told us today, “The Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food and well-aged wines,” destroying shrouds, wiping tears, and “he will swallow up death forever.”

In our parable today, Jesus says many are invited to his feast: “the good and the bad.” The good, the bad, and you are invited to his feast. And so in Jesus Christ, every “badbye” is a truly good bye, because in the kingdom of God, there is hello again at the feast. That doesn’t mean we pretend grief isn’t there. We don’t take off grief, but “put on the clothes of Christ” (Romans 13:14). We do that in the beauty, joy, goodness, and love, standing firm in the Lord, reconciling, rejoicing, and making your gentleness famous. We are not running away from our grief. We are embracing it by also embracing the goodness of God along with it.

The place I’ve seen this most recently has been in the grief groups that Vicki and Sandy have led in the past couple of years for people who have lost a spouse or a child. It started as a program called GriefShare, and it’s now evolved into a group called “Living with Loss,” meeting monthly for potlucks and sharing. When I last attended as a supporting pastor, if you were to pop your head in during the first hour, you might not have known what we were meeting for, because we were simply eating, communing, and being in fellowship together. Then people began to share the aspects of living with loss they were still working through. As the stories go around, you see just how much we have in common in our grief that we thought nobody would understand or want to hear. But even though we feel left alone, God does not leave us orphaned. He brings us to the table together. And so “Living with Loss” is a great name for such a group, and even greater if you think about it for a second, because the loss isn’t denied, it’s lived with. And, I would say, it’s not just living “with loss.” It’s living through loss, which really is all living.

And when I go home from those meetings, I come back to hug and hold my wife a little tighter, filled with such joy and gratitude and even a little pre-grief at knowing this can’t be forever, because nothing is at the hands of that tyrant time. But by the grace of God I will soak up every moment that he gives us together, and know it will have been worth it.

That’s also how I’ve been feeling about leaving Craftsbury. That’s why today, even though there’s one more week, my sermon became about saying goodbye, partly because that’s just what our Philippians reading points to, but also because I don’t know if I will say goodbye properly next week or not. And I’ll have to give that up to God. But I know that no matter the goodbye, there will be another hello at the feast.

But until then and after then, brothers and sisters, “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things…do them, and the God of peace will be with you.” Amen.

The heavens declare the glory of God,
    and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours forth speech,
    and night to night declares knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words;
    their voice is not heard;
yet their voice goes out through all the earth
    and their words to the end of the world.

In the heavens he has set a tent for the sun,
which comes out like a bridegroom from his wedding canopy,
    and like a strong man runs its course with joy.
Its rising is from the end of the heavens
    and its circuit to the end of them,
    and nothing is hid from its heat.

The law of the Lord is perfect,
    reviving the soul;
the decrees of the Lord are sure,
    making wise the simple;
the precepts of the Lord are right,
    rejoicing the heart;
the commandment of the Lord is clear,
    enlightening the eyes;
the fear of the Lord is pure,
    enduring forever;
the ordinances of the Lord are true
    and righteous altogether.
More to be desired are they than gold,
    even much fine gold;
sweeter also than honey
    and drippings of the honeycomb.

Moreover, by them is your servant warned;
    in keeping them there is great reward.
But who can detect one’s own errors?
    Clear me from hidden faults.
Keep back your servant also from the insolent;
    do not let them have dominion over me.
Then I shall be blameless
    and innocent of great transgression.

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart
    be pleasing in your sight,
    O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.

Psalm 19

“May the words of my mouth and meditations of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.” These are the last words to Psalm 19, which is one of our readings today, so you’ve now heard these words three times today. Many of us preachers say this right before we preach, like a plea to God and to you, “Please forgive me if I say something dumb.” And I think you mostly have, so thank you.

As some of you know, almost every week, when I begin working on my sermon, I walk outside and think about this week’s readings. This week, the beauty on South Albany to Shatney to Shadow Lake and Ketchum Hill was stunning enough to walk twice; if you are a Vermonter who has been outside or simply looked outside this week, you have already been preached to this week. Every preacher who lives here has the gospel preached to them by the hills, the trees, the sideways sun when it emerges from the clouds and, this week, the leaves slowly letting go of their green to pour forth a sermon beyond speech, a silent voice whispering through all the earth of the power and presence of God. Around here, that’s just a walk around the block on a Wednesday.

Whether they know the opening words to Psalm 19 or not, every rural Vermonter knows “the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.” (v1) One reason I take pictures on these walks is to share some of these wordless sermons of God that are far more beautiful than the words of men (this week, I’m going overboard). Because it’s not just peak foliage season, but as the psalmist says, “day after day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world.” (v2-4)

But after the heavens and the stars, the Psalm takes an interesting turn. Now we’re not walking through the forest, but through the beauty of God’s Word. I won’t try to paraphrase it, just echo it: “The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul; the decrees of the Lord are sure, making wise the simple; the precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the Lord is clear, enlightening the eyes; the fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever; the ordinances of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb.” (v.7-10)

Why are these sections put side by side, the heavenly wonders of creation and God’s Teaching? It’s almost a very gentle challenge, but really an invitation: can you walk in the Law of the Lord with the same wonder and awe that you walk in the beauty of creation? Let’s be concrete: I won’t ask for a show of hands, but does reading the Ten Commandments fill you with the same awe as peak foliage season? If not, why not?

Sure, we may still hear the Ten Commandments with some reverence as the building blocks of our ethics. But of course, even in the much simpler times of humanity in ancient Israel, life was complex, brutal, unfair, and humans are unpredictable, so God did not stop at ten laws, but breathed out many, many more rules, which still do not cover every human situation, and breathed a yet more fundamental Spirit underneath the Law, guiding us to wholeness with him and goodness with each other. But we know rules can be cruel, and humans even crueler in applying them. As Paul would say, sin loved working through the Law. Sin takes what is sweeter than honey and turns it rotten.

So the decrees of the Lord may not comfort us at all in the most complex, morally fraught situations in the world, those times when we realize that not only are humans imperfect interpreters and arbiters of divine goodness, humans are not very reliable judges of ourselves or other people at all. One of the biggest problems that has defined our whole history is “Who among us can judge?” And how? King Solomon wrestled with this at the start of his kingship: God, you made me a king, but I don’t know anything, and there are so many people in your kingdom, so much complexity, and who can tell good from evil? God makes Solomon wise, and he is at first a marvelously wise judge (as seen in the story of the two women and the baby). But eventually, the king succumbs to his own pride and selfishness and violates God’s Law despite God directly blessing him with wisdom. So God’s justice may be perfect, but who can administer the thing that keeps us from sin if we’re all sinners? Sin has, once again, put us in an impossible situation.

But an even bigger problem than “who can judge” is “who can be judged and live”? We all want an easy conscience, but none of us has a truly clean conscience by our own standards of righteousness without whitewashing something somewhere in our lives. All our motives are tainted and so are our actions. Psalm 19 is attributed to David, but as it goes on, it ponders, “But who can detect one’s own errors?” (v12) Do we just need to walk even more in the woods of God’s Law to more fully understand it, to meditate on it day and night, to marinate in it?

Paul said, “Oh, I’ve tried this.” In our Philippians reading today, he lists off his credentials showing he is not just a true Jew, but “as to the law, a Pharisee…and as to righteousness under the law, blameless.” (Phil 3:6) And yet—and it’s a big yet—“whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” (v7) He goes on to say they are “rubbish,” garbage, the only time in the Bible we have this particular Greek word for “dung.”

Paul says he’s thrown all this stuff away, all his credentials, all the ways he would be blameless under the law, in order that he may be found in Christ instead: “not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith.” (Phil 3:9)

One of the problems with walking through the beautiful forest of God’s Word is that our sin wants to read it like we read everything: looking for ways to justify ourselves as righteous. How many times do we read Bible stories looking for confirmation that we’re good and “they” are bad? We might have done it with the parable this morning, “those evil Pharisees at it again—thank God I’m not like them!” (which is, of course, the Pharisee’s prayer in another parable). But reading the Bible to confirm our own goodness is like walking through the woods during peak leaf season and somehow thinking, “Man, aren’t I great?”

But we didn’t make the trees. We didn’t craft the leaves. We didn’t craft ourselves. And whatever true righteousness we have comes not of ourselves, but only from God, and if we believe that Jesus was who he says he is, then it is only by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone that we have righteousness. As Tim Keller said, what makes a Christian is not that we repent of our sins—which many people do—what makes us a Christian is that we repent of our righteousness. We finally admit that there is no way to make ourselves morally upright. We finally admit that all the ways we’ve tried were rubbish. We finally admit, “God, I can’t do it. I can’t see my hidden faults. I am captive to my pride. I need a redeemer.”

We are all made in the beautiful image of God, Spirit-breathed flesh, souls in bodies, yet by our own freedom and stubborn sin, unable to make ourselves good. Even relying on the beauty of creation, or the beauty of the Law, these are not rocks, these are not redeemers. God alone is. So it is not a walk in the woods, or a walk in the Law, that saves us. It is a walk with Jesus, who takes us through the woods, through the Law, sometimes into the valley of the shadow of death, heading to the cross, but never alone. We leave behind our checklists of what makes us a “good person” in our own eyes to see what makes us a loved person in his eyes.

But it’s still wonderful to soak in the beauty of nature, and it’s still wonderful, if we can trust it, to soak in the beauty of God’s Word and meditate on his Law day and night as Scripture invites us to. Not to become moral arbiters ourselves or to imagine we are judges who sit at God’s right hand, but to accept the gift of his grace. Just like we don’t look at the trees to say “Look how great I am,” we read the Bible to see how great God is, which we can through the light and revelation of Jesus Christ, who alone fulfills the Law as our only judge.

Why can we trust Jesus as our judge? Because he is a judge who would sacrifice himself for mercy. A judge who tells us the truth that, on the basis of our sins and our lives, we are all unrighteous and all fall short of the glory of God…but also tells us that because of his glory, because of his love and in giving his life, resurrecting in defiance of sin and death, all can enjoy the gifts of his righteousness by abiding in him. So can you walk in the Law of the Lord with the same wonder and awe that you walk in the beauty of creation? With Jesus Christ, we can walk anywhere.

Walk with him with a humble heart. God loved that King Solomon didn’t ask for long life or the death of his enemies, but simply help discerning right from wrong, because he couldn’t do it alone (1 Kings 3). Walk through the beautiful woods of God’s Word not seeking to justify our own goodness or our enemy’s badness, but for awe and wonder, to learn, to be immersed in conversation with God, always reading Scripture through the light of Jesus Christ and with the help of the Holy Spirit. While we will never be perfectly wise or good, you will be amazed at the ways God will read you in the leaves of the Book, spending time with the one who judges all human partial morality and false self-righteousness and doesn’t hate us for it, but loves us within it.

So when we stand before God who made the heavens, and when we draw near to the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ who walks with us everywhere, what can we possibly say? “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.” Amen.

If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

Who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,

But emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death--
even death on a cross.

Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,

So that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

And every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

Therefore, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence, but much more now in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

Philippians 2:1-13

As my wife and I get ready to move, I have been surprised to see old books and stuff that I thought I’d gotten rid of. Some of these are welcome surprises, some not so much. And this isn’t the first time that’s happened: each time I move, I think I’ve gotten rid of something, I keep carrying it with me from place to place, cross-country, up-country, upsize, downsize, ah, there it is again.

No doubt much of my psychological stuff is the same way over the course of a life. I used to be “Spiritual But Not Religious” (SBNR), and sometimes rather than being simply grateful that God graced me with a life in Christ again, I can feel a bit holier-than-thou against my old SBNR self, as if my hypocrisies didn’t travel with me throughout life. Like finding an old box, “Wait, I still have that?”

So many people identify as SBNR that it’s hard to define. For me, when I was living in Los Angeles, it would be something like, “My mind and my beliefs feel vaguely enchanted, and I see the world as magical, but my body doesn’t come along for that ride more than what is reasonable.” Or, “I meditate, I make art, I sometimes do the Venice Beach drum circle, I think about weird stuff, and then I do what I want.” A day in the life for me might be driving around LA for hours, listening to every spiritual podcast, a hippie on the inside, then spending my nights in bars with comics, waking up to work at a hedge fund, and feel like I was making spiritual progress.

One night at my bar comedy show, I met this traveling Spanish artist who was temporarily living in a walk-in closet in Silverlake. We got to talking about spiritual stuff and connected on that. As fellow SBNR people, we decided to check out the Malibu Hindu Temple, which we learned isn’t a place for white Westerners to find ourselves, but a real, fully active Hindu temple. We were shocked to find these people really believed it. You could tell because they did the practices, the prostrations, the sacrifices. They were nice, but their religiosity confronted us in its sincerity. Everyone else is in pants and button-ups and reverent attire, and meanwhile, here I am, a jerk in shorts and some shirt I bought online with Hindu art on it.

If you’ve ever encountered folks who actually live their faith in visible, binding ways, the Holy Spirit might also confront you with an uncomfortable question: what does it mean to have your spiritual life actually matter?

This is the heart of our Philippians reading today, one of the most important in Christianity. We have Paul reciting what seems to be an old hymn that teaches what spiritual formation in Christ looks like. At first, it might almost sound like something that is purely spiritual, mental: “Be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or empty conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.” (Phil 2:2-3) You might think, okay, if I just have the right mindset, I can do what I want, as long as I feel humble about it. As long as I say, “I love you,” and in my mind I believe it, then what I do doesn’t matter because I’m saved by faith. But pay close attention to what follows—what does it mean to have the same mind of Christ? It is to live it, with your body, your being, in self-giving love: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped or exploited, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave,” and as a human, “he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.” (Phil 2:5-8)

If this passage hits us hard, it’s because it gets at a tension in Christianity about as old as it gets: how do our bodies, our minds, and our spirit interact? How should they interact in Christ? The most influential Greek philosophies had a dualistic view of mind, or soul, and body being separate, while Judaism saw our bodies and our souls as enmeshed. And depending on what you held, you might think some ancient version of, “I’m spiritual, I love Jesus, but I don’t let that dictate my life, and because I’m a spiritual being, I’m free to do whatever I want.” Or you might think, “God is signing us up to be at war with our bodies.” Or a lot of other varieties, depending on what was inside the old boxes of your worldview.

And in comes Christ, who reveals God is actually in the flesh, fully God, fully human; you can’t split the two. Ever since Christianity brought the Jewish view of the world to the gentiles, as Reinhold Niebuhr observed, Western civilization has been tangling, untangling, and retangling how we think of the relationship between mind and body. Over and over, competing philosophies, historical trends, spiritual movements, they all tend to favor one over the other—are we just natural creatures who should live within nature, or rational and spiritual beings to rise above it? Are we primarily animals driven by animal instincts, or rational spiritual souls?

Our Philippians hymn tells us that the distilled answer, in Jesus Christ, is that we are both embodied and spiritual; they are inextricable, and they are given by God. Yes, we are in Christ by faith and saved by faith. But Christian discipleship says that Christ has made a claim on your life. Jesus also taught us that religion without the spiritual life at its heart is worse than nothing, it’s a force of sin that leads to death. So why are Christians “spiritual but also religious”? Because the man we have faith in said: “Follow me.”

If it’s the mind of Christ, it doesn’t stop at the mind. The mind of Christ follows with the body we have. To share in the mind of Christ is to ask, “Just as God took on the form of a servant in a real body, how can I take on the form of a servant in my real body? How can I be a servant in my actions, not to earn grace, but respond to the gift?” Asking these questions lets us do as Paul encourages: “To work out your own salvation in fear and trembling, for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” (Phil 2:12-13)

Paul tells us that if we take Christ seriously—if we take it seriously that God came down as a human, that he incarnated in real human flesh, and upon his death, resurrected that same flesh—then that has a real claim on our life. If God decided to live in the world not oppressing us in his might, who doesn’t take advantage of his power, who doesn’t impose himself, then we are to set aside the power and freedom that we have in order to serve those who have less, wherever they may be, just as he did. The mind of Christ says what we do matters.

You ever think about that word, “matters”? Maybe when we say something “matters,” we’re saying something that seems abstract and elusive, is real, tangible, physical. It matters. In Jesus, God literally matters—he’s physical. God is not just a great intelligence in the sky, God matters; he comes in the flesh. And on the flip side, Jesus isn’t just a wise human. He’s the son of God who sees humanity not only from without, but from within. Not just from within, but beneath; for the Lord said he came not to be served, but to serve. (Matt 20:28)

And so it’s not the mind of Christ unless the fruits of the Spirit are moving us towards serving. It doesn’t negate who we are in our bodies, instead, it fulfills them. It makes our bodies the fullest, most vibrant expression of our spirits while being reformed by the Holy Spirit. It’s what makes a true artist who doesn’t make art just to express herself, but the artist who says, “I’m going to make art that costs me something because I know it will enliven someone else.”

And as Scripture tells us, after humility and obedience to the cross, it didn’t end on the cross, but Christ was exalted. And that’s glorious. But sometimes, our Christian minds that grapple with sin will hear that and just see service as a means to an end, to be “one of the ‘good ones.’” But the thing about the cross is you can’t fool the cross. Nobody chooses to put themselves on the cross just for show. Nobody finds themselves on a cross just to feel enlightened. We’ll do all kinds of stuff that makes us look good and doesn’t actually cost us anything. But the mind of Christ follows all the way to a cross that can’t be fooled. Almost nobody follows Jesus all the way to it.

Jesus knows this. And he still loves us. And he still calls us to follow him to the cross anyway. And so each week we come to be confronted by the cross, which shows what a perfectly spiritual man actually looks like, and reminds us we aren’t. Each week we are confronted by the mind of Christ, who came in the same flesh as us, who shows us that we could never live up to what he did because we can never live up to the kind of love he has.

But then, each week, in our simple liturgies and humble country churches, we can also remember a miracle: the very person who confronts us saves us. Because this God really loves us, because His mind, His Spirit, really is of love, he continues loving us in Christ. To the mind of Christ, loving and accepting us in our failures was part of the walk to the cross. Part of the walk of our cross is loving and accepting each other in our failures too.

For while we can never live up to his love, we can move in his direction—empty ourselves, and follow him. When we come to a fork in the road between right and wrong, we can ask, “What’s the one that would serve? What’s the one that is setting aside our power, our privilege, our things, our advantages that could be for personal gain? What can we do to serve those who need it?” For Christ has empowered us to disempower ourselves for the sake of each other, to be spiritual and religious.

We might feel quite low after our falsely spiritual ways lead us to another dead end, after we realize no matter how many times we move, we haven’t gotten rid of the boxes of our hypocrisies. We might be annoyed that we are still carrying around some of our empty vanities. We might feel so low that we almost miss the mind of Christ reaching out in the hand of Christ, picking us up. And we might hear the mind of Christ in the voice of Christ saying what he said to those he healed, “Beloved, get up! Now pick up your mat, and follow me down. For there you were, and there again I must go.” Amen.

Jonah said, “And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” And the Lord said, “Is it right for you to be angry?” Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city, and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, waiting to see what would become of the city.

The Lord God appointed a bush, and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very happy about the bush. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered. When the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die. He said, “It is better for me to die than to live.”

But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?” And he said, “Yes, angry enough to die.” Then the Lord said, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”

Jonah 4:3-11

To me, living is Christ and dying is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me; and I do not know which I prefer. I am hard pressed between the two: my desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better; but to remain in the flesh is more necessary for you. Since I am convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with all of you for your progress and joy in faith, so that I may share abundantly in your boasting in Christ Jesus when I come to you again.

Only, live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that, whether I come and see you or am absent and hear about you, I will know that you are standing firm in one spirit, striving side by side with one mind for the faith of the gospel, and are in no way intimidated by your opponents. For them this is evidence of their destruction, but of your salvation. And this is God’s doing. For he has graciously granted you the privilege not only of believing in Christ, but of suffering for him as well-- since you are having the same struggle that you saw I had and now hear that I still have.

Philippians 1:21-30

Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?

Matthew 20:15

Today, Scripture gives us a tale of two prisoners.

First, meet Jonah. No, he’s not in jail. Jonah is just a free man who feels like his life is a prison. We are so used to stories with character development; Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey” mapped how most timeless stories have characters who leave home, go on a journey, encounter strife, and come back changed. But Jonah isn’t a hero—he’s one of us. He goes on a physical journey, but doesn’t go on a spiritual journey. He begins as a man who hates to suffer, and he ends still a man who hates to suffer.

Just to refresh: Jonah hears God’s call, knows answering it could be pretty painful, so he gets on a boat. The storm comes, he realizes he can’t actually avoid suffering, and he gets a brief moment of moral clarity—“Well, since it’s my fault, let me sacrifice myself for these men, and they’ll be saved. I’ll be dead, but hey, I won’t be suffering anymore.” He goes overboard, ends up in the whale, gives thanks to God for saving him, God gets him back on land and sends him out again. He obeys God this time—probably to avoid another whale detour—and preaches in Nineveh, and Nineveh repents beyond his wildest dreams. But has he repented? Is he transformed? Nope! Even the grace God gives his enemies is yet one more wound for Jonah, one more thing to suffer in this prison of life. As Jesus would say in his parable of the generous landowner, “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?” Jonah would say, “Yes, actually. I’d rather you not be generous to them. Be nice to me.”

See, Jonah is still one of us. “Take my life, God, I can’t stand it anymore!” “I wish I were dead!” Three times he wishes for death, a man who would rather be dead than alive.

But notice again when Jonah says, “Take my life, God.” And notice how God messes with him with giving him shade, and taking it away, almost like God is saying, “Take your life? I already have your life. You already belong to me. Sorry, not sorry. Oh, and by the way, the people you hate belong to me too, and so do all the animals in creation. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?”

Jonah’s now fully aware he’s not God. He can’t stop his own suffering. He hasn’t changed. This life, his body, all of it a prison of suffering. And because of that, look at how he acts even when given life and freedom. Look how he acts when someone else is given life and freedom! He can’t stand it. He’s a prisoner of his own mind.

But there’s another prisoner in our readings today. We don’t know where—Ephesus, Rome, somewhere—but Paul is in jail. But because he sees his life as free in Christ, he is totally free in prison, where living is still Christ.

What can a free man do when he can’t leave a room? Will he feel sorry for himself? Will he hate his jailers? Paul says, “Okay, well, I may be in jail, but I can still write letters. So I’m going to write some of the most beautiful letters that will teach my friends about God. I may be in jail, but I still have a mouth, so I can share the gospel to the jailers.” He says, “For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain. …my desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better, but to remain in the flesh is more necessary for you. …[so] I will remain and continue with all of you for your progress and joy in faith.” So even if he’s in prison, even if he’s beaten, even if he’s brought to death, who cares? God has a use for him here, so here he will be.

One man, Jonah, thinks he’s in prison despite being free. Another man is free despite being in prison. Paul cries, “I wish I was dead!” Paul says with a huge grin, “I wish I was dead! But living is still Christ.”

So which prisoner are we? I think if we look around the world, and look at ourselves, most people, most of the time, can relate more to Jonah. We feel defined by what we can’t do and can’t control because what we can’t do and can’t control makes us suffer. We can’t afford what we want, and we can’t afford to give everyone what they need. We can’t control society, and the times get weird. We can’t control aging, and our bodies suffer. Sometimes we may impose false limits on ourselves, limiting beliefs, when actually we do have more capacity for change than we realize, but most of our limits are not self-imposed. Most of our limits we have a hard time accepting.

So maybe life does feel like a prison to you. Maybe you feel severely limited by what you can offer God. Maybe your mind feels like a place you can’t escape, and maybe your body doesn’t allow you to do what you wish you could. Maybe you feel like Jonah more than half the time: “Jesus, just hit the eject button already.”

I don’t know about you, but the times I wished I was dead in a Jonah way were not the hardest circumstances of my life. I was a starving artist in LA, feeling like I could do anything, and the future was unlimited. In LA there were 1000 things you could do on any given night (only to sometimes do none of them). I lived for myself because I thought I belonged to myself, and whether I succeeded or failed, it would be because of some failure within me. And every day I suffered because every day was a reminder that I wasn’t fulfilling my dreams and doing unlimited things. The circumstances, though, were not really that bad—it was all almost entirely a prison of my own making, suffering at the hands of what I thought I was owed, just like one of those grumbling workers in the vineyard who thinks he deserves more.

But what was strange was how I didn’t feel like Jonah when there were much harder circumstances in my life, when I was in seminary, faced with ethical dilemmas that would alter my future. I often felt alone, overwhelmed, isolated, and for a couple years, I was stuck there. But there was a purpose. It was just as I had started actually taking my discipleship seriously, hearing words from those old confessions, like the start of the Heidelberg Catechism that says, “I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ,” and it meant something to me. It meant I belonged to one who had a higher, more perfect standard of embracing suffering for the sake of the world than I would ever achieve myself. It meant I was never alone. Every day, as a Christian, we have to face our limits—we’re not Jesus, and we never will be. We can’t forgive our enemies perfectly. We don’t help all our neighbors when we should. We’ll never be a perfectly finished jar of clay. And yet we still do the best we can in the direction we know God is calling us and trust that God’s glory is all the more glorious in our limited imperfections.

Because we follow a God who loves limits. A God who took on a human form, as Paul will go on to say in Philippians 2, a God who decided to become an utterly fragile and limited human. God made himself a human who could be arrested and thrown in jail and judged by other humans and crucified. And he would go through all of it. He didn’t avoid any of these limits. He embraced them all for the sake of love on the cross, where the glory of God was never more visible than in a body broken for you.

We want to belong fully to ourselves, to owe no one anything, to do whatever is right in our own eyes to avoid suffering. If we believe we belong to ourselves, then every limit on what we can do is another bar in that prison. Every responsibility is an imposition. But we do not belong to ourselves, because Jesus did not belong to himself—he is a God who says, “I belong to you. And you belong to me.” As Paul would say to his other friends, “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.” (Rom 14:8)

And if we belong to Christ, we belong to each other. And if we belong to each other, our main goal in life is not to avoid suffering. Instead, God calls us to do as Jesus did: embrace suffering for each other. Embrace our limits—the limits of our bodies, the limits of our minds, the limits of our gifts, the limits of where God has put us, the limits of our times…God has transformed it all on the cross. And now, by faith, living is Christ.

Living in Jesus Christ opens up a whole world of options within the world as it is, even if it’s not as it should be. Instead of asking to not be in prison, wishing we were dead already, living in Jesus Christ lets us ask, “What can a free man do in my prison? If I’m in the prison of my body, what can my body actually do?” Living in Christ lets us say, “If I can write, I’ll write to someone who needs it. If I can talk, I’ll talk to someone who needs it. If I can pray, I’ll pray for someone who needs it. If I can feel, I’ll hurt with someone who needs it. If I can encourage, I’ll encourage someone who needs it. And if anyone else feels like they’re in a cell all by themselves, I can let them know they are not alone, and I’ll be their cellmate too.” Thanks be to God, you already do that. Every day for three years, I have seen what this wonderful community is capable of. And it brings God glory.

If we have grown old, and tired, and hurting, and can’t do half of what we used to, there is something in this moment and in your limitations that God is yearning to use to show you and the world his glory. If you are in prison, do what only a prisoner can do. If you can only do a handful of things, do them to the fullest and devote them to God. Don’t ask God to take your life. He already has it. Just ask him, “How do you want to use me today?”

In Christ, we are no longer simply waiting for heaven. Because Jesus Christ is risen, alive and well in the Holy Spirit, so are we. Here, today. You wish you were dead? Brother, sister, you are in Christ now. Not just when we die, but in the life that is not your own. Dying will be gain. But today, living is Christ. Amen.

Peter came and said to Jesus, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.

“For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. When he began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him; and, as he could not pay, his lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions, and payment to be made. So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt. But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii; and seizing him by the throat, he said, ‘Pay what you owe.’ Then his fellow slave fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’ But he refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he would pay the debt. When his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. Then his lord summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’ And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

Matthew 18:21-35

I knew something was wrong on September 11th, 2001, when my middle school gym class was ending, and for the first and only time, Coach Dukes rolled in the cart with the TV. The bell rang, and five minutes later, we were in math class, glued to the TV up in the corner for the rest of the morning. After lunch, our history teacher said we needed to turn off the news, to which we said, “This is history!”

I remember during the period changes in the hallway, some boy said, “We’re gonna kick Saddam’s ___!”

I remember that afternoon playing tennis with my friend Nathan in an empty park while the sun went down.

This past Friday, as I was looking at all the coverage, my buddy sent me an old internet discussion from that morning. There was no social media back then, just message boards, and this one had 25 posts per page. By the second page, someone had guessed Osama bin Laden was involved. By page three, someone wondered if we were going to war.

Sometimes history is inevitable. That day felt “realer than real.”

But our gospel reading today involves some unreal parables and some unreal numbers. “Lord, if someone sins against me, how often should I forgive?” This question appears only in Matthew. Depending on the translation, Jesus says “Seventy-seven” or “seventy times seven,” but as most of us who are familiar with this passage probably have heard, this is not a literal math answer, but a theological figure of speech.

Seven, of course, is a holy number, intrinsically connected to creation, the Sabbath, a weekly rhythm of life in God. Jesus often used the Sabbath to demonstrate that the Law should be received as a gift, a grace. The Jubilee year, where all debt was forgiven, happened after even cycles of Sabbath years: seven times seven years.

But that is only part of the symbolic texture. We don’t know precisely what Jesus meant by this unreal number, “seventy-seven” or “seventy times seven,” but we know another time a similar number is used in Genesis, when one of Cain’s descendents says if Cain gets “sevenfold” vengeance, then I, Lamech, will get “seventy-sevenfold” vengeance. Like he’s saying, “Oh, vengeance will be so much mine, it will be beyond what you can imagine!”

So when Jesus flips that around to Peter, he is saying, “Your vengeance must not be seventy-sevenfold. Instead, your forgiveness must be beyond what you can imagine.”

But doesn’t that just turn you into a doormat? Why are we supposed to be so forgiving?

So Jesus uses another unreal scenario: here’s what the kingdom of heaven is like. It’s like a king who is owed money. One guy owes him ten thousand talents. Sound like a lot? Yeah, something between $6 and $100 billion dollars. Like seventy times seven, it’s not real. It’s like a bajillion. It’s a number the guy couldn’t pay back. But the king does. And so the servant is forgiven of an absurd debt, forgiven beyond what is real.

And here the story gets more gruesome and, unfortunately, realer. For the very same man, who had been given the impossible mercy, is owed a very realistic number—a hundred denarii, or for us, maybe about ten grand. That’s a real number. It’s real enough to ask for it when you need it, and real enough for most of us to notice it when it’s gone. But what about a guy who had just been gifted $100 bajillion whatever dollars?

Well, he does notice it. And like a member of the Soprano family, he chokes the man who owes him, then has him thrown in debtors’ prison. What is realer than violent hypocrisy?

Hey, maybe he forgot all he had been forgiven. That was last week. But the other servants didn’t forget, and they tell the king. And the king really didn’t forget. I mean, even a king doesn’t forget $100 bajillion dollars. And the king says, “Okay, if that’s how you treat my other servants, nevermind. You pay your debt.” And he’s handed over to the guards of the debtors’ prison known for their torture until he could pay a bajillion dollars. And so, Christ says, will be your fate if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.

This might sound intense, because it is. It may be hard to hear Jesus being harsh, even if it’s because we are harsh to our neighbor. It might also be hard if we see ourselves in the mirror Jesus holds up to us. Not just the amount that we owe God, having messed up more often than we can remember, but it is hard to know the standard he sets is forgiving your brother or your sister from your heart. “You mean I have to mean it?”

That just seems unrealistic. Bitter hatred doesn’t just go away. Like twenty-five years ago, the violence of human history can feel inevitable. Some think the Civil War was destined to happen from the original framing of the Constitution, that it made a clash over slavery just a matter of time. And if you think of the worst conflicts you have ever been in, you could probably trace, and you probably have traced, the reasons why it was inevitable. Your worst fights were two people on a collision course. It probably doesn’t make it a bit less painful, only more tragic.

Not only do conflict and war feel inevitable, but they feel eternal. Never-ending. Even Kansas and Missouri are still hashing out a football rivalry that goes back to the Civil War.

These inevitable, eternal conflicts are realer than real. Every bitter conflict comes about for real reasons and real issues that we can’t ignore. That’s why forgiveness can never be about pretending the issues didn’t matter, the pain wasn’t real, the hurt wasn’t profound, and in some cases, we say “what you did to me was unforgivable” and mean it because it is so beyond the pale of humanity that the only word for it is “evil.”

I mostly don’t like to remember anything from seminary. But one thing I recall is that forgiveness defies cheap answers. There may be no harder topic than forgiveness when it comes to honoring justice and dignity for everyone involved, because forgiveness can only happen in an unjust world. The world is not a clean, simple ledger. Unlike the parable Jesus gives us, it’s not always about $10,000 dollars, or even $100 bajillion, where at least we’re still talking about money, where forgiving is a matter of settling up the math. But how do you pay someone back for their childhood that was taken from them? When you rob someone’s dignity, what is the cost? When someone messed up your future, what do they owe you? When they took from you innocence, or your joy for life, or your compassionate heart that used to easily give people the benefit of the doubt but you can’t anymore, where does that show up on the balance sheet? What about a life?

When we’re talking about forgiveness, platitudes fail, because if we’re talking about it, our ideals have already broken down and something has gone wrong. Forgiveness is not affirming an unjust status quo or ignoring injustice or kicking the can down the road. Forgiveness is not about denying what is real.

In the Christian community—in this place where we hope to give each other a taste of the kingdom—forgiveness is something else. Forgiveness interrupts what is inevitable, eternal, and real. Forgiveness interrupts what is real by helping us remember that God created us from his very being in grace and continues to give us grace upon grace with his love that is actually realer than real. And because forgiveness can sometimes interrupt what’s real—even if we have to go back to reality—it can create moments and opportunities for something truly transcendent.

I don’t mean forgiveness is this false place of fake enlightenment. But I also don’t mean that we can ignore Jesus when he tells us to forgive our brother and sister for the harm they did to us from our heart. When I hear that, I already know I owe God again.

When that happens, sometimes I need to remember that I’m not Jesus. And the best thing I can do today is not be the savior I’m trying to be more like and never will be. If you’re like me, you might have to say to the person who hurt you, “Because I’m not Jesus, I’m going to ask Christ to forgive you when I can’t.”

Can we do that from our heart? From your heart, in your very being, “Christ, I can’t forgive them. Please forgive me that I can’t. And please forgive them for me.”

We have been talking about enemy love and forgiveness for a few weeks now. Still not solved. But in Sunday school last week, it came up that we have a helpful symbol for what Jesus is saying in this parable. Remember the mercy that you have received from God—vertical, top to bottom. And when you remember that, extend it out horizontally. “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”

And if you can’t do that, let Jesus forgive for you. Again. Don’t imagine that forgiveness is not the standard when it’s too hard to forgive. And don’t deny the pain that makes it too hard to forgive. Don’t forget what’s real. But Sabbath after Sabbath, grace upon grace, try letting the love of God interrupt what’s real. Amen.

You, mortal, I have made a sentinel for the house of Israel; whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me. If I say to the wicked, “O wicked ones, you shall surely die,” and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from their ways, the wicked shall die in their iniquity, but their blood I will require at your hand. But if you warn the wicked to turn from their ways, and they do not turn from their ways, the wicked shall die in their iniquity, but you will have saved your life.

Now you, mortal, say to the house of Israel, Thus you have said: “Our transgressions and our sins weigh upon us, and we waste away because of them; how then can we live?” Say to them, As I live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways; for why will you die, O house of Israel?

Ezekiel 33:7-11

Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.

Romans 13:12b-14

Jesus said, “If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”

Matthew 18:15-20

I’ve been watching lots of mafia movies and shows the past several months. I don’t entirely know why, but I’m not drawn to them because they portray the kingdom of God. They portray the kingdom of violence in, say, suburban New Jersey. I probably find them fascinating for the same reason other Americans do, whether it’s a taste of history, vicarious violence I would never do, or being entertained by stereotypes of Italian Americans.

One thing that I definitely find fascinating about mafia shows is not the gun violence, but the intense verbal fighting. Sometimes these fights end with a hitman in a dark alley, but what’s fascinating is how often these verbal conflicts actually result in reconciliation. Some of us grew up in households and families where there was almost no verbal conflict, or if there was, just between parent and child. Others of us grew up where verbal sparring is how you know someone actually cares. Being open with your passion may sometimes bring anger and deep pain in broken homes, but there can also be intimacy; you know where you stand. In other families, and often in our churches, we want to maintain peace so badly that we just never fight, even when we disagree, and the anger just simmers underneath. Which is better? Fight or flight?

Does Christ call us to one or the other? To either go to spiritual war with each other all the time, or to say “I’m just not going to say anything about how they hurt me because it’s not worth the drama.” And so in society, we cast each other off, either through vicious, violent condemnation or isolation.

Ah, but this is what might make it annoying to be a Christian. Because we don’t have a choice to be violent against each other or to be isolated from each other. We are in the Body of Christ. Through our faith, we are joined in Christ and we belong to each other. If you’ve ever found the teachings of Jesus personally inconvenient to you, you might here again too. So we can’t pick violent fight or permanent flight.

What instead? In many of our affirmations of faith from our Book of Confessions, you’ll notice we sometimes mention this word “reconciliation.” This is not just “making nice.” It is a word we in the Church use to describe what God has been trying to do with us since the day we realized we were naked in the garden. It hurt God’s heart immediately; as soon as Adam and Eve had separated themselves from God, he cried out, “Where are you?” And through the Law, and the prophets, and eventually his son, God has been so desperately wanting to reconcile us with himself, and in Jesus Christ, his cross became the ultimate form of reconciling the world with himself, not in destroying us, but in choosing to die himself so that we might live. We participate in this ultimate act of reconciliation on the cross anytime we confess and repent of our sin. The Church is thus a “reconciling community,” one that helps the world be reconciled with God and reconciles with each other.

Now sometimes, we can gloss over the prophetic edge of Jesus that calls us to repentance and notice our sins. Because we can be so anxious about conflict, we can imagine that Jesus is also anxious about conflict. He isn’t. In the gospels, he echoes the same tones of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and today, Ezekiel in saying exactly where and how we creatures are not embodying the heart and creative vision of our Creator. Does he do this just to make us feel bad about ourselves? Or is his heart still as broken as it was in the Garden? “Where are you?”

Today, God essentially tells Ezekiel: “Ezekiel, I have called you to carry my voice. If you don’t warn people of their errors, and they destroy themselves, they’ll die, but their blood is on your hands. But if you warn them, and they don’t listen, it’s on theirs. But Ezekiel, don’t forget— and this is really important—remember, I want them to live. I want everyone to live. Turn and live.”

The purpose of a prophet is not to tell people how wrong they are. That’s what Jonah thought, and he was upset when Nineveh repented. No, the whole purpose of the prophets is reconciliation. Jesus convicts us of where we’re wrong not that we may stew in our wickedness, but that we may live. It’s the difference between a legal threat and the hardest love letter you’ve ever written. The prophets are love letters from a broken-hearted God.

Often, we try to do the right thing by pointing out the world’s wrongs, witnessing to evil, saying, “God is not a fan of this.” But if we’re not really interested in their reconciliation with God, we are not actually being Christ-like. Let me pause here, which I wish didn’t need to be said, but unfortunately because I’ve lived it, I know it does: I am not pretending like you need to get along with someone who abused you, or even have them in your life. Sometimes, the best love we can give our enemy is love at a distance. Sometimes, you have done all you can and beat yourself up ten times over trying to reconcile with them and they are just not interested. Sometimes, you know it’s just not possible. And too often, people make our relational injuries all the worse by saying some version of, “You just need to get over it and move on from the pain.” That’s not the call today.

Today, amidst those truths of deep pain, we are also called to check our self-righteousness. If we preach with a desire for destruction in our heart, our heart is not with the Christ of reconciliation. But does that humility mean that if someone hurts us or is doing wrong in the world, we say nothing at all?

The love of God in Christ Jesus gives us another option. Sometimes Scripture is not very specific on the “how’s”, but here in Matthew 18, Jesus gives us plain steps for ordinary conflict resolution in the church. Each step doesn’t sacrifice the truth or deny a wrong, but also seeks reunion in the truth that we are all united in Christ. Every step of the way, we’re trying to give each other a chance to live. And when we have done wrong, we need to own it so that we might live. And then, at some point, we have to give it up to God. A priest once said the requirements are to show up, pay attention, tell the truth, and let go of the results. Do your best, and let God have the rest.

To me, if preachers are always first preaching to ourselves, the hard thing I hear Jesus saying to me today is we must not assume that the sin is only in our worst enemy’s hearts. We must not only ask for our enemies to change, but ask how we can change for our enemies to make it easier for them to turn and live. When Paul says, “Let us then throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light,” it is not only “reveling and drunkenness and illicit sex and licentiousness,” wrong actions, but also “quarreling and jealousy,” manifestations of the wrong spirit, that are the works of darkness. “Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” (Rom 13:12-14) Do not give our flesh the provision of licensing the destruction of others, but speak even hard things—especially the hard things—that they may build up in truth. And may this preacher do the same.

There once was a guy who was having car problems. He didn’t know what was wrong, he could just tell there was something off in the engine, but he didn’t have any idea how to fix it. He goes to the local mechanic and asks him to take a look. The mechanic is a kind man, it’s a small town, and when he takes a look at the car, he realizes oh boy, this is going to be such an expensive repair, and he’s not going to listen to me, and he’s just going to get mad. So the mechanic does an oil change, and when the guy returns, the mechanic says, “Oh, it’ll be fine,” and gives him the car. A few days later, the car breaks down. The guy takes it to a second mechanic who might know what he’s doing. This mechanic diagnoses the problem, and says yes, it’s quite expensive. In fact, you really need to replace the whole engine. He tells the car owner how much it’ll cost to repair it, more than what the car is worth. The guy gets outraged and doesn’t want to pay.

So he goes to a third mechanic and says, “I want another opinion.” He drops it off, and after a couple of days, the third mechanic calls the guy to come back because the car’s ready. The guy comes back, goes into the garage, and sees the entire engine has been removed and dismantled. Parts are all over the floor. Furious, the guy says, “What’s going on here?” The mechanic gives him the keys and says, “Yep, you have a broken engine.”

We live in a time when telling each other how we’re wrong is cheaper than ever, and reconciliation is as undesirable as ever. If we are to follow Jesus, who sought to reconcile the world to God, we have to want the reconciliation God wants. If our desire is to destroy our enemy, that’s a check engine light. If our desire is to never have a hard conversation in our life, that’s another check engine light. If we think we have nothing to repent of in ourselves, that’s one more.

A mechanic who doesn’t tell you what’s wrong is a lousy mechanic; a car owner who doesn’t listen is a lousy car owner; and someone who tells people how wrong they are all the time without any desire for them to live is like a mechanic who doesn’t put an engine back together.

Too often with our neighbor, we act like the mechanic who takes apart their engine and leaves it all on the ground. And when it’s us, too often we don’t want Jesus Christ to tell us what’s needed to repair our hearts. Maybe because the cost is very high, higher than we can afford, and no amount of our money can fix it ourselves. But thanks be to God, Jesus Christ has covered the cost, and he is the one who can transform our hearts. And he does transform our hearts with the rejoicing of angels.

And thanks be to God that we owe no one anything except to love one another. May we see all the ways he is reconciling us to himself. May we put on the Lord Jesus Christ and bring our reconciled hearts in hand to the world that so needs it too. Amen.

From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me, for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?”

“For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”

Matthew 16:21-28

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Romans 12:21

Last week, the kids around here went back to school, like many parts of the country, and some are going off to college with tons of pressure. Recent research said 56% of teens feel like they’re supposed to have their future figured out. I remember being 15 and my parents taking me to a career counseling center, where they had us do the Myers-Briggs test and a bunch of other questionnaires to help us answer: what is your calling? Yes, lad, you may have dreamed of astronaut or athlete or rock star, but have you considered corporate bankruptcy law?

As more and more things get replaced by technology and AI and all that, younger generations are struggling even more to find their calling. “What’s the point of doing what a machine can do better? Where can I go that won’t replace me? What actually moves me? What is the point of anything?” You may have a young person in your life thinking of that. You may be thinking of that. You may have already completed five or fifty different purposes and meanings, and now you don’t know what you’re supposed to do. “What has God apportioned me with the time I have here? Who is he calling me to be? Where is he calling me to go?”

Of course, we probably have multiple callings and purposes going on at once. I know and am grateful for the new, greatest calling I’ve ever had in my life of being a father. I could not be more excited for that call. But what if God is calling us to something that we don’t really want to do? Not just a different job, but something right at your pride. Imagine if you went to the career counselor and it was an angel from God himself, as if you were in the pages of the Bible, and the angel tells you: “I know you think you really want to do (checks notes) corporate bankruptcy law…but actually, God is calling you to own up and make repairs for all the mistakes you’ve made. Sorry!”

Sometimes, the biggest obstacle to the call God has for us is the call that we want to have for ourselves. If it feels like, ah, great coincidence, God is calling me to exactly what I felt like doing anyway—take a beat. But also, even if we pursue the wrong call, or the right call for the wrong reasons, God can eventually work with that if you let him (take it from someone who was convinced he had a calling at least five different times that never went how he wished). When the disciples began, they must have felt so good to be called by Jesus and named by him as his special twelve. What an honor. So what’s in store, Jesus? James and John thought glory, honor, power.

In our reading today, Jesus tells them what his own calling is: “[I] must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed and on the third day be raised.” (Matt 16:21) And as soon as he says this, Jesus is tempted again, not in the desert, but now by Peter, “God forbid, Jesus!” And we get that famous line, the harshest rebuke Jesus makes, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me, for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” I think he reacts like this because the temptation must have been so great in that moment to agree with Peter. Yes, God had called him to be the Messiah, but what God was calling him to was not to the world’s power and might. There was another call inside the call, and that’s one none of us want: you are going to have to suffer for the sake of others. There is no free lunch and there is no free Messiah. Grace is free—so, so free. But discipleship is not.

And so, Jesus tells them all, and tells us all: “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” (Matt 16:24-25) And as he would go on to teach and reveal, it is not just that you are being called to suffer, my disciples, but you are being called to suffer for the sake of others and in the right way. Are you going to suffer with love for God and love for your neighbor intact? Or are you going to suffer in a way that causes more pain for others? Are we going to avoid the suffering that is needed so that somebody else deals with it, so we can do what we feel like and say God approves? Or do we listen to the call inside the call?

Now if we struggle with what the still, small voice of the Spirit is calling us to do, not only is that nothing to feel ashamed about, but that may even be a sign that it is a real calling. The things that feel easy can just be a preference, our flesh talking, our personality enjoying life. But the things that we know we ought to do, but don’t want to, will have the Holy Spirit working and gnawing at you, wrestling with us until we let God bless us.

Jeremiah didn’t want to accept his calling. Not at the start of his prophecy, when he said, “I am just a boy, I can’t speak for you,” and God said, “That’s not a problem, I’ll put the words in your mouth.” (Jer 1) And Jeremiah does God’s will for a while. But he keeps coming back to God with some complaints. “Why am I suffering and the wicked prospering? I’m doing what you said.” He even gets so mad at God that today in our reading he says, “God, the pain that I have endured for your sake is so great, you’re like a river who doesn’t have water, but a river of lies!” (Jer 15:18) And God says, “Okay, that’s a bit much, Jeremiah…but I will still take you back. And I will send you back out to say the hard things that you really don’t want to say and they don’t want to hear, but I will make you stronger than you even know you can be, for I will be with you.” And Jeremiah returns to being a prophet, threatened, jailed, and hated for doing God’s calling. But God is with him.

Eventually, the disciples did answer the call too. Oh, they immediately answered the call they thought they had to be in the in-crowd, Jesus’ deputies. What honor! But now they know, “Oh…here’s the call that’s actually at the bottom of this.” As if Jesus had told them, “You’re excited to be a father? Great, here’s the diapers.”

We want to be a prophet and tell the world how messed up it is and how much God is on our side, but we don’t want the part where God says, “You need to apologize for the thing you said, because you don’t always speak for me.” We want to be a king like David, but like David, we don’t want to be accountable to the law. We want to be a holy, spiritual person for the vibes, but you don’t want to do the right but hard thing when it would ruin your reputation as an enlightened being. We don’t want the call inside the call. But that is, to use Bonhoeffer’s term, the cost of discipleship.

And maybe the disciples wouldn’t have followed if they had known the cost. Maybe that’s why he didn’t tell them right away. But he’s telling them now. Maybe you didn’t know the cost when you signed up for your call. But now Jesus is telling people who follow him, “Yes, you are loved, and you are redeemed, and you are mine. You’ve been saved for free; you can’t earn my love. I just love you. And you have a purpose. What you do matters and means something. I have use for you. But know that if you want to keep walking with me, there is going to be a cross. But you will not be alone. I am walking with you. And you will carry more than you possibly knew you could.”

There’s one more crucial thing, though. There is a version of a discipleship of “doing hard things” that looks like the logic of the world. Try harder, build more, get stronger, be a martyr, outsmart your enemies so you can defeat them. And maybe your enemies “deserve” to be defeated because they don’t care what’s true, what’s right, what’s good, what’s fair, and you feel God is calling you to oppose them. If so—and God truly may be calling you to that—take one more beat. In opposing the evils of the world, is there one more call inside the call?

“Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.” “Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord.” Instead, ‘if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink, for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.’ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” (Romans 12:17-21)

That may be the heaviest cross you ever bear. I’m preaching this and I already feel like I’m going to fail at it this week. I’m not proud of that, just being honest that God has more work on me to do. We let God work on us through sustained, patient, faithful discipleship that slowly forms us more into the Way of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, the one who bore a cross that was not a cross of pointless suffering with no meaning, but one that led to true life. Your cross is not an extra requirement on top of the gospel to be saved. But it is how Jesus says we can be in communion with him in this life, to bear each other’s burdens, to love when we do not feel like loving. And when we mess up, he loves us anyway and says, “Let’s begin again.”

A lot of people are preaching about Dolly Parton today—actually, it’s kind of weird, but I’m sure there are many people simultaneously talking about Dolly Parton in a pulpit somewhere right this very second. I was thinking about her this week, and everyone was remarking how unusual, in our current era, that this woman was so beloved by everyone—from Southerners to Northerners, from Trump to the Democratic Socialists, even a North Korean dictator appeared to post a eulogy for Dolly (sadly, I discovered this was satire—but the fact that it seemed possible is a testimony itself). So I thought, man, Dolly, how do you love your enemies if you don’t have any?

But believe it or not, Dolly did once have at least one enemy. She got her big break on the Porter Wagoner Show, and he was her mentor, close friend, collaborator in a love for country music. Eventually she wanted to go her own way, and this upset him, and there’s all kinds of articles about this, but the fracturing was already so painful that she wrote “I Will Always Love You” to try to make peace with him, and he loved it, but then he sued her anyway. She settled to avoid more drama. Thirty years go by, and whatever had happened by then, Porter Wagoner was dying of lung cancer. And the one public enemy of Dolly Parton had a visitor: Dolly Parton. They prayed, said goodbye, and she sang his favorite, “There’ll Always Be Music.” He died hours later.

The cross of Jesus Christ was a cross of forgiveness. Maybe the cross of that kind of forgiveness feels impossible to you. Maybe it would be impossible by yourself. But you’re not. You have a calling. But you also have a calling inside the calling. And you have a God who suffers with you, rejoices with you, calls you, and will lift you up when you call on him. Amen.

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, on the basis of God’s mercy, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable act of worship. Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.

For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the encourager, in encouragement; the giver, in sincerity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.

Romans 12:1-8

Many of us don’t quite know what we think about AI. What is an ethical use of it? How much is too much? I know we have environmental concerns, too, but it’s not just about that; a recent poll suggests more Americans would be comfortable with a coal plant being built nearby than an AI data center. Of course we may not want either, but nobody feels threatened by a coal plant in the way that AI can make us feel threatened as small and replaceable. And yet despite our ambivalent-at-best feelings, it seems Americans are using AI more and more.

Someone in our Estuary discussion group asked me if I was worried about AI replacing God—and no, God’s going to be just fine. I’m not really worried about Artificial Intelligence challenging God as much as I am about AI as Artificial Intimacy changing us. People say it’s “just a tool,” but we more and more turn to it as a quasi-therapist, imaginary friend, an empty encourager, a faulty teacher, and yes, some share so many thoughts with it that they kind of forget it’s not God (doesn’t help when some of the companies seem to literally believe they are building God). AI can be like our own personal god who just needs a little help getting to know you. But once they do, they are custom-fit for you based on how much you tell it. Movies like Her from 2013 with Joaquim Phoenix predicted this exactly, when a man falls in love with the AI voice in his ear that knows him more than any other person possibly could.

I do not have clean hands here. I use AI in research, to organize my notes and double-check my thinking, and now when I Google things whether I like it or not. But I never ask AI to generate sermon ideas or write any parts of my sermons for me, not because I’m special—or even because it benefits you, really (sorry)—but because the process is too intimate for me. About every week, at some point I go on a long walk past the farms near us, feeling closer to God in my body as I walk through the glory of creation…then like a madman, I ramble audio recordings into my phone of what the readings are calling to mind in my walk with God this week. What makes preaching special to me is not giving you the most optimized and efficient sermon on Romans 12 today. What makes it special is that I am the member of our community you have tasked with publicly sharing a piece of my relationship with God with you in a way that I hope illuminates the text and helps the Word come alive for you…and doing that is just an intimate thing. I don’t want interference in that. I want sincere connection.

When I come across AI writing, I just feel the offense as a reader, an intense disconnection, because it wasn’t the intimacy with a person that our whole lives we have come to expect from writing and speaking to each other, but there was something strange in between. The connection we had has been replaced for efficiency.

Artificial Intimacy can also give us the illusion that we can replace each other. And while we may “only” use AI as a tool, tools work in both directions; a new farming technology does not only transform the land, it transforms the farmer. Then, as we’ve seen, it replaces the farmer. Yes, farming is much safer and more efficient…for the farmers left.

But today, the apostle Paul tells us a different way. “We, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.” (Rom 12:5) We do not just belong to God; we belong to each other. We are to know each other like your hand knows to scratch your left shoulder before you even register an itch. A shoulder can’t scratch itself.

Of course, we can’t control how new technology and the complex incentives that come with it will transform our society. It will transform industries, eliminate some jobs, and leave people feeling even more replaceable. The human instinct is so often to treat each other as replaceable even without technology. But there is at least one place where we are called to resist that. We’ve always been called to it.

But the early church was a hot mess. They didn’t have the New Testament. They didn’t even have the Old Testament as we know it now, though they considered much of it their Scripture. They had the culture around them, “this age,” the times that they were a product of. They had each other—oh, whether they liked it or not, they had each other, and some even began working together and sharing all things in common. And they had the good news of Jesus Christ, that he had died, risen, and would come again. And so they tried to look at everything in life through those resurrection eyes together. With nothing more than faith in Jesus Christ, they studied the Scriptures together, worshiped together, ate together, and lived as one body that loves and respects and uplifts every single member, no matter how broken or thrown away by society or simply annoying they may be, everybody has a part in God’s story, and we are all called to help each other as if what happens to you is also happening to me.

Up to this point in Romans—a letter that some have posited cost Paul around $2000 in our money, an expensive little letter—Paul has laid out the gospel: we’re all sinners in need of grace, nothing saves apart from faith, God always loves us no matter what, and God is not leaving anybody behind without mercy. Christ is risen! But what do we do about that now?

When we read Romans 12:1-8 again tabove, it might feel like these are disjointed thoughts. But it all flows from the same gospel: what do we do now that Jesus is risen, and sin doesn’t have to be our boss? What does a life in the Spirit actually look like in resurrection eyes?

It looks like being a “living sacrifice,” as in, on fire for God but not burnt up, not martyred for his grace, because sin is defeated. We don’t need to defeat death with more dead flesh. So we offer ourselves to him continuously while staying fully alive. But we also offer ourselves to each other, and then we are sent out into the world to help however we can, not in the same way, but only as we as individuals can together. Loving people in the world but not conformed by the world, formed by the Spirit renewing our minds, discerning in “sober judgment” what things are of Christ and what are the wages that go back to death. In the gospel, we become humbled by the grace we’ve been given, because we are not so good that we need no mercy, and we are no better than anyone else, for “we are members one of another.”

And the more I chew on this passage, the more I hear that word again: intimacy. Not sexual intimacy with most people—and there’s a whole other sermon there about how human beings use sex also as artificial intimacy—but intimacy is the real deal sauce of relationship, truth in God expressed in truth with each other. The body of Christ is called to be spiritually intimate with one another, which we can only do because God is truly intimate with us. In Psalm 139, we hear how much God knows every single thing about you, what you’re going to say before you say it, he searches you and he knows you and loves you. For the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4, she was stunned that Jesus knew every single thing about her. That’s the intimacy between God and us.

Between each other, true intimacy gives each other whatever gift we have, whatever we have to offer, whether it’s the last coin of a widow or a spare donkey or a place where someone can eat, in our prayers for each other, the small-talk with someone you barely know, our best moments and our worst, our deepest fears and our pettiest judgments, our greatest joys and silliest preferences, it’s all intimacy. To live in the light of the gospel is to trust that you really have been reconciled to God for good, and anyone reconciled to God is reconciled with each other.

You may or may not know the story of Ruth, but here’s a refresher. Ruth and Naomi were not supposed to be kindred spirits. In the time of the Judges, an extremely selfish period of Israel’s history, Naomi, an Israelite, loses her husband. She just has her two boys, one of whom marries Ruth, the other marries Orpah, two non-Israelite women. And then their husbands die. Now they are just three women with no legal obligation and no ancestral loyalties to each other. Naomi tells them to move on with their life and she will go back home to Israel. Orpah says okay. But Ruth says, “Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there will I be buried. May the Lord do thus to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you!” (Ruth 1:16-17) Ruth said No, Naomi, you are not replaceable. We belong to each other, and we belong to God.

If you claim Christ, you are part of a body whether you like it or not. There is no such thing as being a Christian who is not part of the Church. You may not go to a church, but if you profess faith in Christ, you are part of the body, and you are needed. If AI replaces us for each other—not just in tasks, but in connection and meaning—then we are no longer a body with members who know each other. A healthy body honors the individual and the whole. If the group discards the lost sheep, it stops functioning as the body of Christ. If we as individuals believe that we can do it on our own, we are no longer living in Christ either.

It is true, though, that anybody who has ever been in church two Sundays knows that we have not always figured out how to be authentically intimate with each other; we’re in New England after all. It takes time. People mess up. Intimacy brings trust, and trust gets broken, and that brings greater pain than if we had stayed away. That makes it harder to begin again. Look left and look right and see that everyone, in some way, is broken and wounded. And if you look behind me as I preach, you’ll see the empty space left by the broken and wounded body of our Lord. We are his body. And when we feel our wounds most heavily, it may make us want to just not be with anybody anymore altogether because the tax of the pain of intimacy is too great. So we put on a smile, bunker down, and shield ourselves. And maybe we seek intimacy in false ways and simulate it through machines.

But the body of Christ cannot afford to be falsely intimate with each other. If it is Christ’s body, we are called to be intimate with each other and the suffering of the world through our Lord Jesus, from whom there is nothing to hide. He knows your inmost being better than even you do.

And in his church, nobody is replaceable. Your gift matters, no matter how small. You are wanted here, and you are needed here.

We say AI is “just a tool.” The cross was also a tool, a tool used to separate a person from their life. A tool of human eyes that sees other human life as disposable. And so God used the tool of disposal to tell you that there is nothing that can replace you in the eyes of God. He looks at you with resurrection eyes. Let us see each other through them too. Amen.

Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’^[a] table.” Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed from that moment.

Matthew 15:21-28

I saw an interesting map online last week drawn from New York Times data. It broke down by state how people self-identify their lineage in the United States, and which self-identity was largest in each state (not the majority, just the largest single identified ancestry). Some of it was predictable—people who self-identify as German dominate the Midwest, Italian in New York, African-American in the southeast, Mexican heritage in the southwest. Vermont was labeled Irish, to my surprise. In two states, Tennessee and Kentucky, the largest self-identified ancestry was simply “American.”

You might laugh at that, but sociologists say that is because people have been there so long, with their ancestry all blended together, they don’t know what ancient tribe they’re supposed to belong to. Scotch-Irish, German, English, who knows, so just go with “American.” And the whole reason we might laugh at that is that we know that “American” is not really an ethnicity, because being American isn’t about blood ancestry. So for most of our history, we have wrestled with a question: what makes you an American? And who belongs in America?

In ancient Israel, we might think this was an easier question, because people were more homogeneous in their tribal lineage. But over hundreds of years of exile and empire, people intermingle, intermarry, and move around. Now you and I might not see a problem with that, but let’s say you are an Israelite who knew your people came from twelve tribes, twelve sons of Jacob, who were now mostly gone. And the prophets had said God would resurrect all your people, all twelve tribes, who you can’t even identify on a map anymore. Some people thought the tribes were intact somewhere but exiled far off. But others worried that they were just totally gone with the wind, scattered, and even more challenging, blended in with the rest of the world. How are you supposed to resurrect all the tribes of Israel when the tribes are mixed in with the world? If you were trying to resurrect Israel and only focused on identifiable Israelites (Jews of the southern kingdom), it’d be like trying to save America by only focusing on the people from Tennessee and Kentucky.

But you can see the logic: if God will one day save Israel, worry about ethnic Israelites. The Pharisee movement thought if Israelites had stricter and stricter obedience to the Law, God would finally resurrect Israel—as one rabbinic tradition said, if Israel could just keep two Sabbaths in a row, the Messiah would come!

Focusing just on ethnic Israelites is what the disciples would have believed, too. After all, Jesus had sent them out just a few chapters earlier, telling them not to worry about the Gentiles, don’t check out the Samaritans, just focus on the lost sheep of Israel (Matt 10). But it brings us back to our American question: who belongs in the house of Israel?

In our gospel reading today, Jesus visits Tyre, 100 miles north of Jerusalem. He only goes for this story, and then he leaves; just for this moment. This is not the Jewish homeland, this is Gentile territory. So why is he there? Before Matthew can tell us, here comes an apparently quite loud woman. Mark says she’s Syrophoenician, what it would have been called in their time, but Matthew says she’s Canaanite, helping readers pay attention that there is something going on here that goes way, way back to the days of Joshua, who conquered the Canaanites. Now thousands of years later, here is Jesus, whose name is also Yeshua, and a Canaanite woman is in agony. Is he here to conquer her again like Joshua? Or just ignore her?

You might remember the other woman who just wants to silently touch his cloak in a crowd (Matt 9:20-22). That might be more your style of coming to Jesus, “Let me just touch his robe and not bother him.” This is not that woman. Matthew says she is shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David”—a non-Jew shouting his very Jewish messianic title—“my daughter is tormented by a demon.” Jesus doesn’t say anything. But something is cooking. Meanwhile, the disciples are already annoyed at her, as they often are at kids, women, and others who want Jesus’ help at their inconvenience, wanting to send her away. So Jesus sees this as a “teachable moment.”

You have to imagine him saying this like he knows where the script is going, when he says what would have been the conventional prophetic interpretation of his ministry: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” She cries again for help. And he responds with more conventional wisdom, like a proverb: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Again, if you don’t know what Jesus is doing, this might sound like Jesus is being racist and misogynistic. But he is reenacting and performing the same popular theologies that his own disciples hold. Yes, God is for the house of Israel. But Jesus knows where this play is going, like a point guard in basketball setting up an alley-oop, and so when he says “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs,” he knows this passionate woman is about to take that ball and dunk it: “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” It’s like saying, “But Lord, I’m not asking for anybody else’s meal, I’m just asking for the scraps of your grace.” “Woman, great is your faith!” And her daughter’s demon was gone.

So what is this really about? If the disciples had paid closer attention, they would have seen what the prophets had already said it was about. In Isaiah 56, the Lord says:

“The foreigners who join themselves to the Lord, to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord, and to be his servants, all who keep the Sabbath and do not profane it and hold fast my covenant—these I will bring to my holy mountain and give them joy in my house of prayer.….for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples. Thus says the Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel: I will gather others to them besides those already gathered.”

Isaiah 56:6-7a, 8

Even in the restoration of Israel, it is not about only those who are “from here,” it is anyone who accepts the grace of his Sabbath and holds fast to his covenant.

Again, the Pharisees look at this and say God will save Israel if we finally get our act together and keep the Law. Jesus says yes, we are called to fulfill the covenant, but the heart of it. And God is not waiting for us to get it perfect. What’s more, never forget that the covenant is not a burden, but a gift. To this day, when people hear the gospel that delivers us from our sins that also asks us to live a life no longer enslaved to sin, people hear two different things: is being a Christian a burden that self-righteous people embrace to puff ourselves up? Or is it accepting a gift that God keeps on giving to all sinners?

In Romans, Paul points out what Jesus also pointed out: Israel did not accept the gift of living in relationship with God. They did not repent and return to be gathered into God. And here comes this Canaanite woman, who is not merely asking for help from Jesus, but is embodying part of a great Jewish tradition. Not only Rahab, Jesus’ own ancestor, a Canaanite who helps Israelite spies in Jericho, but Jesus’ other ancestor Ruth, a Moabite, not an Israelite, was happy to glean from the fields whatever the Israelites didn’t want to eat. This woman is doing the same thing: Lord, I see the grace that your own children aren’t taking. Let me just have some of the spares. And yet even though Israel rejected the gift over and over, they and anyone who returns to God still receive his blessing. And yet there is some qualification, some marker, something that makes you part of God’s people. But if it is not where you came from, or how good you are, who belongs in the house of Israel?

Remember the night Jacob got a new name. He arrives at the river, sends his family ahead, and suddenly a mysterious divine being appears, and they wrestle all night. Jacob won’t let him go without a blessing. The sun comes up, and now he has a new name: Israel, “the one who wrestles with God and humans and survived.”

Look again at this woman. She’s wrestling with humans, alright, and she’s wrestling with God (and in the same person). Now someone asked the other day, how could Jacob wrestle with God and win? Why would God do that? Why does a father wrestle with his children? To have fun, to bond with them, and to teach them something important they can only feel by knowing in their bodies that you love them. And so when we wrestle with God as this woman wrestled with Jesus, feel it in your bones: God loves you. You belong. And it’s not just your bloodline; your vocation, your political convictions, your skills, your class, your pedigree, nothing else makes you part of God’s people except saying “yes” to his gift. Jesus is saying, “This woman, who you think is not part of Israel, had a faith so strong that she was willing to have it out with me. She is my people.”

So when Jesus said, “I came to save the lost sheep of Israel,” he wasn’t lying. He’s teaching, “Who belongs in Israel is more than you thought.” What makes you a Vermonter may be how many generations back you go, but what puts you in the house of Israel is your willingness to say yes to the gift and hold on to God in the wrestle. And that is a word we call faith.

Faith is not simply wrestling with how much you believe in God or not, but the daily wrestle that can only come from a life of deep faith. By faith, will you honor the gifts he has poured out on you by denouncing sin in your life even when you don’t feel like it? By faith, will you seek to fulfill his covenant through the spirit of the Law written on your heart even when it’s hard? By faith, will you love God and love your neighbor as yourself when our flesh tells us to love only ourselves? And when you fail at that, by faith, will you keep trying and know God still sees you and loves you no matter what?

Your faith may not be a woman boldly shouting at Jesus. Your wrestling may not be at a dramatic riverfront by the moonlight. Your wrestling faith may be the last whisper, barely holding onto Jesus that may not even feel like faith. But if there is something in you that is still trying, still curious, still can’t quite let Jesus go, then you have enough faith to move mountains. Because like this woman, you have to have great faith to wrestle at all with the almighty God. Jesus already knows she’s going to win; the disciples don’t, and it seems like she shouldn’t know she will receive his grace. She’s not supposed to belong in the house of Israel. But the wrestle itself is a gift, and she won’t let him go. Will you? Amen.

This sermon was informed by the scholarship of Jason Staples, author of Paul and the Resurrection of Israel, whose Substack is here. I also regularly listen to Fr. Aaron and Marissa Burt’s wonderful At Home with the Lectionary podcast for lectionary discussions in my sermon prep.

Immediately he made the disciples get into a boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them. And early in the morning he came walking toward them on the sea. But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, “It is a ghost!” And they cried out in fear. But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”

Peter answered him, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” He said, “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus. But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and, beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!” Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”

Matthew 14:22-33

In our twice-monthly Estuary conversations, sometimes we talk about things that are hopeful and uplifting. But more often, we talk about something that touches on the chaos of the world from the comfort of our home. This week, we sat around the living room of the manse, six of us gathered from across Wolcott and Craftsbury, coffee and ice water and couches and rocking chairs, looking out onto the piercing beauty of a hot Vermont afternoon in the shade, an oscillating fan on the lowest setting, and discussed the problems of AI, all the ways that it seeps into our digitized lives, what this means for God and religion and the whole thing. Sometimes we have discussed local political issues, broader societal collapse, and other problems facing civilization. Don’t worry, we solved all the problems. And then we stepped outside, and the problems melted away.

Maybe you’ve watched or endlessly scrolled the news, and then you put it down, go outside, and the world’s problems almost seem imaginary again. You could live as if they were not going on. Maybe we have to live as if some of the world’s problems weren’t going on in order for us to go on. That is, I believe, one of the main draws here of rural New England, America’s monastery. Yes, some of our neighbors live in poverty, and there is addiction, but it often stays out of sight if you don’t travel to Morrisville or Newport often. It’s not perfect, but the perfection of God’s creation has been about as well preserved as any state. In fact, so many of our economic problems stem from the fact that it’s so tranquil and beautiful that too many people retire and vacation here. I don’t know about people who grew up here, but people move here to live a bit farther away from the world.

I know when I got here three years ago, I needed to retreat from the world. Having served enough time in Los Angeles and Boston, I felt called to learn how to be a pastor here, and I’m grateful you felt called to teach me. After some intense years, I needed the space to breathe. This is a place where we can all breathe.

There is, of course, a seduction even in the best things in life. The place where we can live in peaceful solitude can be lonely. The place where we need to go to retreat can easily turn into an escape, where we can forever stay far, far away from all the problems of the world. You can retreat to a place to be at peace by yourself in the mountains, and then it’s not long until you want to live life on one long retreat.

The disciples probably couldn’t fully tell you why they started following this man Jesus. Maybe for some of these men who worked long hours day in and day out just to survive, maybe they thought they could learn how to breathe in a breathless world. They left their boats and their tax-collecting stations behind to sit at the feet of the one who they knew had more where this life came from.

But here they were on the boat again, because Jesus told them that’s what they needed to do. Thanks, Jesus. And by the way, where was he? He was on a retreat, at peace by himself in the mountains, in prayer. The crowds had been hounding him for healing, for teaching, for food, for all of himself. He had compassion for them all, but he also had a fuel tank. He needed to breathe too. And so he breathed. And he prayed. And he knew that the disciples were in a storm so bad that even a dozen veteran fishermen were terrified.

Eventually, he comes to them, and they are even more freaked out. If you were off the coast of Maine caught in a storm that scared even the lobster fishermen, and then suddenly a guy on water barreling your direction like maybe the angel of death himself coming to laugh in your face, yeah, we’d all be freaked out. This was not what they signed up in becoming Jesus followers! They signed up for the peace of Christ that they felt from this man, for the compassion he showed, for his authoritative teaching that made them finally see the Word of God clearly and with all the puzzle pieces fit, but now here on the boat, the puzzle pieces were scattered all across the deck. There was no time for Bible study or theological lessons, this was life and death.

“Take heart,” he said, “It is I. Do not be afraid.” Finally! There it is, Christ’s comfort. Or… just exactly what a ghost would say when he’s trying to trick you. See, Peter’s too smart to be duped, you’ve got to test the spirits out there in the real world. “Okay ‘Lord,’ if it’s you, tell me to walk on water, and I’ll do it.” “Okay, come on then.” And of course we know he does, and for a few moments, he has been conscripted into one of Jesus’ miracles again, just as he and the twelve helped feed the 5000, doing the impossible. But like getting distracted by your phone in the middle of a tranquil moment, just a couple of soggy footsteps later, he can’t help but notice the strength of the wind. And Peter remembers who he really is, just a guy, a fool, and what was he doing here anyway? “Save me, Jesus.” And Jesus immediately does, then he ribs him a bit about he of little faith. And the rest of them go wow, okay, that is not a ghost. That is the son of God.

But we aren’t capital-T The Son of God. So who are we? Who are you? Where are you? Are you in the crowd that Jesus just fed for a meal, who’s heard a little bit about this guy second-hand, tasted a bit of his bread, thought it was good, but you’ve got a life to get back to? Are you one of those who has been following Jesus around for a while, learning more, but not really having gone deeper? Are you quite dedicated, actually, in church all the time, maybe read your Bible regularly, and ready to fish? Are you on the shore away from the problems of the world, or are you diligently picking up the oars every week and facing storms? Are you trying to walk on water just like he did? Does your answer depend on the day?

I’m not like Jesus, but I do know how to go into the mountains to be by myself and with God. I know how to retreat. But I’m not nearly as good as Jesus at knowing when to come back down off the mountain. I have been in boats in storms, heck, that’s why I like the mountains. When people have been nasty and difficult, I’d rather just live and let live, because if you get involved in people problems, the problem is there’s people.

But we all know there are people who are still in storms right now. And we know, deep down, that the Christian life is not one of constant retreat. And we know this because the rhythm of Christ took a breath in, and then breathed himself back out to go be with us in our storms. And if you have gotten to the other side of a storm while clinging onto the Christ you thought had abandoned you, and you put your feet back on the ground, yes, you know too that he is the son of God, and you don’t need a preacher to tell you.

But once you’ve made it back to the shore…when do you go back?

Jesus will call you back out into the storms, out of your solitude and your tranquility, and have something for you to do. It turns out that our Estuary conversations have not fixed all the world’s problems. In fact, it may have just made some of us more aware of the storms that are out there. So when do you go back out?

Maybe you think your boat days are done. You may be at the care center or just in your own private home to retire, hoping to just wait until the resurrection and breathe. But I know you still have something God is calling you to do. In the ancient world, the sea represented the spiritual life itself, full of dangers that no man could traverse alone. You could stay at shore for your own peace or sail for your own glory, but us Christians have a different problem: we know the peace and love of Christ in the simple good life, but we know that our peace is not to be hoarded. There are waters between you and someone who could use your love today. Some of you have been trying to address the biggest political and poverty problems that face not just our region but our country. Some of you work hard for a million volunteer organizations. Some of you have been working hard for your family in self-giving love. Maybe your working days are done, but you still have the ability to share the love of Christ, a smile to let someone know you are happy to see them when they may not have many people left who are still always happy to see them. But maybe you have actually found ways to keep yourself endlessly busy and you need to breathe. Maybe the idea of doing anything more might as well be asking you to walk on water.

Yes, I believe we should trust Jesus enough to follow his example and walk to where people need us. You can trust and believe that he is recruiting you to participate in yet another of his miracles. But this might all seem like so much that you never want to get started. It’s a beautiful summer out there.

So let me tell you some better news: you are not Jesus. The weight of the world is not on you. It is he who died and was resurrected that we all might live. As our other reading said today, “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’ (that is, to bring Christ down), or ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’ (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead),” but, “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart.” (Rom 10:8-9) Always. Scripture shows us he’s not just walking on water, but he’s in the boat with us, so we need not walk on water.

It was Peter’s idea, after all, to want to walk on water to prove it’s Jesus. Jesus doesn’t ask him to do that. Jesus isn’t asking you to walk on water or raise him from the dead. Christ is the one who first comes down off the mountain to you. He doesn’t “meet you halfway.” He comes to you all the way, including in this very breath of this very moment. And then he sends us back out into the storm, not because we have proven our love for him, but because he loves us. Not because we trust him, but because he entrusts us, even sinners like us, to be his hands and feet to anyone in a storm. And we in the church are all in his boat together.

How will we know that we won’t just sink in the water again? You won’t know that. You can’t know that. You probably will sink again. It’s a stormy world out there. But before you even know where he is, it is Christ who is first walking to you. He isn’t a ghost. He has a hand; you can grab it. He’s got you. He’s in your breath and in your heart. Amen.

When Jesus heard about the death of John the Baptist, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” Jesus said to them, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” They replied, “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.” And he said, “Bring them here to me.” Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven and blessed and broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And all ate and were filled, and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.

Matthew 14:13-21

I saw The Odyssey last week, perhaps the most famous ancient story in Western civilization (if you want to feel how old it is, consider that Pontius Pilate would have learned this story when he was a schoolboy when it was over 700 years old). Even if we’ve never seen the movie or read the specifics, we know its fantastic imagery: the cyclops, the sirens, witches and spells. But for all its mythical elements, it resonates not because the plot points are that fascinating, but because there is more to it than these fantastic elements, which are symbolic stand-ins for the dynamics we face across a human life. But also, The Odyssey is so foundational because it’s even simpler than these: the guy just wants to go home. And that’s powerful not because we think Ithaca itself is so great, but because we know “going home” means more than simply returning to a physical place.

Our gospel reading today is far simpler. There’s no sea monsters here, just fish; no spells, just bread. And even more popular than the story of Odysseus fighting monsters is a story of leftovers.

Right before our story, Matthew tells us of a different feast more fit for The Odyssey, king Herod’s violent banquet, lavish in its excess with far more than what those who were there needed. The last dish of the night was gruesome, the head of the prophet John the Baptist who told him that he could not have his brother’s wife. And so in our story today, Jesus had just seen his friend John die to political persecution by a king who didn’t like hearing that he couldn’t just do whatever he wanted to.

So Jesus goes to be by himself, maybe sad, maybe anxious, we don’t know, but we know that as he saw people yearning for healing, he “had compassion for them” and cured all who were sick. But they were still hungry. And when his disciples turned to Jesus asking him to help them, he said, “You feed them.” And perhaps like we may look at the massive problems in the world in 2026, then swivel our heads back to Jesus, and say but Lord, look at our budget, look at our “human resources,” look at how limited and tired and busy we are. The disciples said, “We’ve tallied it all up and we have enough to make about ten tiny fish sandwiches.” So Jesus blesses and breaks the bread like he would on the night of his arrest, gives it back to his disciples, and says, “No, really, you feed them.” And all ate. And all were filled.

We don’t even know how exactly it worked out with the twelve baskets being passed around the crowd that day, just that when the disciples thought they needed to live in a scarcity mentality, with this simple man Jesus, there was somehow more where that came from. And they learned that we have all been conscripted into his miracles. We are not merely to be bystanders who are Jesus cheerleaders, but Jesus is handing us the basket back and saying, “Feed my sheep.”

I’ve seen us do it here in this church, I’ve seen us do it here in this community: somehow, by faith, there is more where that came from and more than the sum of our parts. But also, just like no great story is just a story, and the cyclops is not just a cyclops, and the bread and the fish are not just bread and fish, they point to something more. Likewise, when (for example) the Barton Hub has their Thursday meals to provide food for anyone who wants to show up that day, there is something more happening than just food to plate to mouth. But also, it’s not less than that. You don’t just tell people that they are symbolically a community. You feed them real food.

In his miracles, he isn’t only concerned with physical sight, but spiritual sight. He isn’t concerned only with the spiritually poor, but the people who are materially poor. Like everything in Jesus’ ministry, our story today points not just to the physical world or the spiritual world, but both at the same time. It points to the communion feast that he would first share with his brothers and sisters in which he invites us again to feast in today, the spiritual Eucharist that is also real bread and the real fruit of the vine.

God came as Jesus in the fullness of demonstrating what his people always knew, that signs and symbols and spirit only come to fulfillment when they are grounded in the tangible, physical, flesh and bones world. Jesus is the bread of life not only as a metaphor, but because his people eat. And when there was leftover bread in those baskets after being passed around to thousands, it was not a simple lesson in miraculous physics or the virtues of sharing, but a different abundance.

This left such a mark on his disciples that it is one of the only stories that all four gospels tell. John tells us in his gospel that he doesn’t have time to tell you all the miracles and things Jesus did, but that he’s giving us a representative sample to show the different sides of who Jesus was: the man who transforms us, like water to wine; the man who heals us and restores us, who gives sight to the blind, who never saw a storm he couldn’t master, who raises us from the dead, and even though it is not a physical miracle, who challenged the self-righteous to cast a stone, and a woman condemned to death instead lived forgiven.

And then we hear this story, because if there are things you need to know about Jesus that you can count on two hands, reserve one of your fingers to remember that our God is a God of abundance. There is always more where that came from. God will not just provide the maximum physically possible, but life in Christ sometimes means that things happen that defy what “possible” even means.

That’s why this story has resonated far more than a man who beats monsters by his own strength and cunning. Even if we or our friends or family members doubt whether or not these miracles happened, they would not have been told had the disciples not been shaken deep in their soul that something happened with this Jesus man that changes everything we thought was possible. This was so much bigger than bread and fish. They didn’t have burning hearts to tell people about one weird afternoon. Their hearts burned to spread the good news: there is so much more than where this life came from. God is more than just a disembodied figure, he is a God who is really here. And because he is really here, he wants us to play a real part of his love in the world. And if you are afraid that there is just not enough to go around, that there is not enough to give, be not afraid, this is a kingdom that grows from the smallest seeds to cover the world until all eat and are filled.

Our actions are more than just our actions; our physical actions have spiritual consequences, and our spiritual life has physical manifestations. We learn the fullness of the relationship between flesh and spirit by learning who God is in Jesus Christ. In Jesus, our God revealed that he is more than a presence that lives in heaven, but a man who lives here. He’s more than a man who lived here, but a presence who reigns in heaven and our hearts through the Holy Spirit. Jesus is more than just a prophet, more than a king, more than a priest, more than any of these human categories. He is more than a brother, more than a friend, more than a rabbi. He’s more than the word “he” or any name you could put words to, but if you had to name him, it would be Yeshua, “God saves.”

In all this world that needs the love of God more than ever, we who call ourselves members of Christ’s body have been given the opportunity to show those who don’t know it: there is always more where that came from.

You think you are out of options? Nope—there is more where that came from.

You think you found the bottom of the basket? Nope—there’s more where that came from.

You think you found the bottom of God’s grace? Nope—there’s more where that came from.

Even in our darkest nights, when there are no words of comfort to be heard, there is still a quiet whisper of something more. I once saw a mother in a hospital late at night hear the news that her teenage son had been shot in a drive-by shooting, and her wail is still in my ears. Every day there are thousands if not millions of horrible things that there is nothing any of us humans can really say. It is only in faith that we can stand in the darkness where light has just been extinguished and say there is somehow more light that will come.

And this will be true when you find yourself going home like Odysseus, worn and weary at the end of your adventures. In Jesus Christ, you can look at the stories of your life like a collection of baskets, with whatever bread and fish you’ve got, and look to God. “Is that all there is, Lord?” No, beloved, there is even more where that came from. Amen.

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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4 months 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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Our Parasocial Bible Study #20 - Sixth Sunday After Pentecost

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4 months 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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4 months 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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Our Parasocial Bible Study #17 - Third Sunday After Pentecost

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5 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.

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Our Parasocial Bible Study #16 - Second Sunday After Pentecost

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5 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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5 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.