Knox Church Sermons

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I just love thinking about the Magi, the wise men, the kings—these icons of curious faith. I admit, I’m going to wander around a bit in this morning’s sermon, because there’s just so much I could talk about; the magi themselves were wanderers too, so I hope that’s ok.

What do we know about the characters in this morning’s story? Centuries of tradition have built up around them. According to the songs and paintings and lore, they are three kings of the Orient, perhaps by the names of Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar; we imagine them riding across the desert on three lone camels under a starlit sky, bearing their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And yet close readings of the Bible story itself casts doubt on those traditions. Of these elements I’ve mentioned, the gifts appear in Matthew’s account, but that’s about it. Matthew doesn’t call them kings, but rather magi in Greek—astrologers who sought meaning and wisdom in the stars, hence our translation calls them “Wise Men.” Matthew says nothing of how many magi there were; there might have been three or thirty—he only tells us that there were three gifts. The traditional names and the identity of the magi come from opaque references in Psalm 72 and Isaiah 60, but we don’t really know who they were. In light of the pace and difficulty of travel, it is likely that the real image of their journey is not of three lone riders on camels, but rather a caravan, with servants and supplies, for they would have been on the way for a long time. And what happens when they got to the manger? Our nativitiy sets usually suggest that the magi are crowded around the manger along with the shepherds. Matthew seems to know nothing of the shepherds; the timing of this account suggest the magi might have arrived days, even weeks or months later. There is so much about these characters and this story that is shrouded in mystery and lost to time.

You may worry that these discrepancies kill the story, but for me its quite the opposite. For me all of the unknowns add to the mystery, the curiosity, the wonder of these magi. Whoever they were, they were motivated to travel a great distance following a Star in search of a child. Why? What made them go? At least one thing is sure: these were the original seekers of faith in Christ; they were deeply curious people, determined to be surprised by whatever God might have to show them.

What do the magi have to do with us? Well thanks to these original seekers, if you too seek greater faith and greater connection to God, there is almost certainly something in this story for you. If we ever feel like outsiders when it comes to matters of faith, well, so were they. They were not Jewish like Jesus and they certainly weren’t Christian, since that hadn’t come along yet. When they knelt down to pay him homage, who knows what traditions or background they brought. If you’ve ever been confused by the traditions or beliefs of church, if you’ve ever wondered how to pray or what you might say or do if you actually met Jesus; if you’ve ever wondered if you really belong here—these magi are probably your people.

At the same time, we can’t call them outsiders altogether, for these magi were clearly people of some wealth and influence who moved with confidence in the world. When the Star appears, they are able to drop everything and assemble a caravan for the journey; they bring gifts, they gain an audience with the local king to ask for directions; when they arrive they announce themselves and the purpose of their visit: “We have seen his star at it’s rising and have come to pay him homage.” They may bow and humble themselves at the manger, but these magi are not timid—they expect to be welcomed. So its also true that if you’ve been in church much of your life and show up on Sunday knowing what to expect, well, the magi might be your people too. But like the magi, we too might need to be ready to find in Jesus something different than what we expected.

For the next few weeks, I’ll be talking about the question, “Who is Jesus?” Who is this child that has been born in a manger? So far as the story of the magi tells us, we know a few things about him: First of all, we know some things that he is not. He is clearly not bound by religious convention, for no one in this story is a religious insider. Nor is Jesus the kind of king we are used to—he is not inaccessible in a palace with riches, but right before us in a manger—so we know that he welcomes everyone. Perhaps most of all, the story of the magi tells us that Jesus is One worthy of our wonder and our curiosity, and who he is cannot be summed up easily. Found at the end of a long journey under a mysterious Star, he will not be anything we can easily know or grasp or put into a box. He challenges us to be curious—knowing him begins only with a long journey.

There’s a traditional name that goes along with this Sunday shortly after Christmas—we call it Epiphany. Epiphany means “manifestation” or “appearance.” According to this story, the light of the Star guides the magi to an appearance of Jesus—an encounter with God. So for my own life and for yours, this story asks a question: how are you being drawn into an experience of God?

It can happen in so many ways.

For some of us, it’s about being part of the curiosity we see in the magi. What is the curious Star in your life? What are you tempted to follow, to go and check out, such that your spiritual life might be deepened? For all of time, people have followed mysteries and even stars in search of something deeper, something new, some knowledge and wisdom—sometimes quite literally. Galileo did so in days gone by, as did the makers of the James Webb telescope in our own time; Isaac Newton years ago and Carl Sagan in our own day linked their seeking in the stars to questions of truth, beauty, and meaning. These are the seekers, the questioners, the doubters who saw possibilities in the stars. Their lives, like this story of the magi are metaphorical for faith. Where might you be led if you look and listen for God and hope to be have an encounter? It might begin with a star, but maybe with some other mystery entirely. Just as it once was with Jesus in the manger, still today, God is looking for willing seekers. Be curious! Where might faith lead you?

For some of us, the questions that come from this story are not only curious, but they are difficult and challenging. They are found on the more threatening side of mystery, where things we find confound and trouble us. Sometimes the Bible takes us from the sweet, harmless nativity scenes of a suburban Christmas, into deeper questions as we encounter with God. What do I mean? Here are a couple of possibilities: As I said before, the wonderful story of the magi is for everyone. But what about those in our own world who seem to be left out?

What is Christmas for the children in our own city whose homes have no nativity scenes, no decorations at all, let alone adequate beds or food to eat, or a place to live without fear. How does the love of Christ appear to them? Are we willing to be troubled by that?

Another example: A part of this story is the frightening, death dealing participation of King Herod. The story tells us the magi were deeply frightened of him, and went home another way. Herod is driven by his fear and jealousy to massacre innocent children, and so the Holy Family flees to Egypt. Many in our own time have asked how that part of the story meets real people: those in Gaza and the West Bank of today—including the very city of Bethlehem. In the homeland of Jesus, a modern massacre has been underway for more than a year, with thousands of innocent children who would flee to Egypt if only they could.

What about even more forgotten parts of the world, in Central Africa, for instance, where on this year’s Epiphany there are more armed conflicts targeting civilians than at any other time we can remember.

We often prefer to ignore these tragedies. The magi would have preferred not to meet Herod. But the tragedies too are part of God’s world. Are any of today’s innocent, suffering people less deserving of meeting Jesus than you and me? Christmas is meant to challenge us, if we are willing. Can we take the leap from carols and gifts to Jesus’ demands for peace and justice? Will you go there with this child who has been born to us? Sometimes curiosity takes us to places we do not wish to go.

Every time I step into the pulpit, I’m aware of the wide variety of people who are listening, even in this little room. Some of you come to church wanting a challenge, or needing one—and others might be struggling mightily and in need not of challenge, but the comfort of Christ. I like to believe that in the richness of these stories, God gives each of us what we need, even if I as a preacher cannot. A great blessing of the Christmas story is the variety of characters we find within it—and every one of them belongs. Some of us are eager to talk about stars and dreams and mysteries and their meanings; others of us are more eager to talk about suffering and injustice. For others, faith is something else entirely. The magi, the shepherds—however numerous they might have been—all of them were invited to follow the Star in their own way, because all of us are children of God. In what way is this story a challenge for you?

We try a lot of things here at Knox to bring people closer to God. Some of them will work for you; some will not. As we live in the light of Christmas and begin a new year, I challenge you with today’s story, to be curious, to wonder where your spiritual life is leading you? What star are you following—or perhaps trying not to follow? Is faith for you an exercise or head or of heart, or of the work of your hands and feet? Is there one of those ways in which you need to be pushed? What are you being called to do, or maybe just slow down and think about for the first time? I pray that you will wonder about that not just on your own but with other members of this community. Who is God for you? A caring parent? An arbitrary and distant clockmaker? A welcoming friend? An angry judge? Have you ever really thought about it? Who is this Jesus in the manger? We are in the season of Epiphany—a time for encountering God. How will you be curious about faith? Amen.

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I wonder how many among you are, like me, feeling a bit hurried or overwhelmed on this Fourth Sunday of Advent, just days before Christmas. This week of the year is synonymous with stress. Perhaps you have presents left to buy, packing or cooking or cleaning to do, and with a few days left it just seems like too much. Maybe its not the busyness, but one thing on your calendar that has you feeling anxious, a family gathering, a difficult relationship you know you will meet face-to-face this week. Maybe its grief—this will be the first Christmas without him…or her…and its going to be really hard, and you know it. Maybe everything is going along fine, you’ve got it all planned, but then somebody gets sick—a child, a parent…you (all of the above)—and now your perfectly planned schedule is thrown off. You may feel like you are the only one in the room experiencing one of these things…I assure you, you are not. We are all vulnerable. It is true. Maybe life has been good to you, you’ve got the holidays planned and the stresses under control, and your schedule is set…you’ve just gotta swing into Whole Foods for a gallon of milk, or you’ve decided to take 5 minutes and pick up that peppermint latte you’ve been craving, and you finish your errand without incident, but then comes the worst challenge on this whole list…you’re in the parking lot of Rookwood Commons…and you can’t get out!

Take a deep breath…and let it out. And let’s be honest, for some of us, the stresses I’m describing does not exist only at Christmas, and it can’t be resolved with a deep breath. Please come and talk to one of us if you need help.

Where is Jesus anyway, in all this hustle and bustle? What happens to Jesus’ call to help others when we’re struggling to take care of ourselves? Why does the week before Christmas seem to be the most difficult of weeks to feel the calm and the closeness of God? What can we do about it, what does the Bible teach? Did any of them struggle as we do?

Let’s start this way: Most of us know someone who is immune to these stresses—or so it seems. Most of us can think of someone who walks through life with an unusual sense of calm. Not much of anything seems to upset them. They’ve been through a lot, and even in the midst of struggles, they remain grounded. They just seem to know that things will be alright.

Now, let’s be honest—some folks who appear to be that way…they are lying! They’re putting on a show, and if you look behind the curtain, their life is just a messy as everyone else’s; in fact it’s worse, because they’re also putting on a show.

But there are people out there who are more calm and grounded than the rest of us. They have figured something out that most of us are lacking. They have a sense of peace that carries them through highs and lows. And there are a couple of common threads, special things that make these folks tick. One is that they are not putting on a show, and you know it because a part of their M-O is that they talk about their struggles. Without embarrassment, they are transparent about their imperfections and just try to live with them; because they are not trying to be perfect, they are gracious to others and also gentler on themselves. Imperfection is one common thread to being grounded. And here’s the second: they know that they cannot do it alone.

This Advent in worship we’ve been talking about Elisha. Elisha was an Old Testament prophet, and his deep spiritual life helps us to see the story of Christmas through fresh eyes. Elisha is one of those grounded people I’ve been describing. In one story I told you, he keeps his cool when an enemy army is literally on his doorstep. In another story I told, he does something less showy but equally miraculous; he teaches a powerful General how to accept help. Do these stories sound like metaphors—because they are. Don’t you know someone who doesn’t know how to accept help? Haven’t you ever felt like an enemy is waiting right outside of your door and wondered how to keep your cool? Elisha knows how to do these things; and importantly, he does not learn them by instinct or accident, and he does not do them alone.

Elisha was not always the great prophet; before that, he was the apprentice. The great prophet Elijah was the one who showed Elisha how to live, and Elijah too, was one of those people who had to learn how to trust God.

Here are a couple of stories of Elijah, in a few words each: In one story, early in life, God sends a horrible drought and famine upon the land. God tells Elijah to go to a certain place to wait things out, and when he gets there, the stream dries up and he survives only because of the food and drink shared with him by a simple and generous widow. It’s a metaphor, of course. For one thing, God doesn’t send famine upon a whole nation of people just to teach one guy a lesson; but also it’s a story about how struggle can teach us to put our trust in God. Because of this early lesson, later, when an evil King and Queen become jealous of Elijah and threaten his life, he simply steals away to a desert cave where he awaits the still small voice of God—and God shows up. Elijah knows how to do this; he knows how to trust God when times get hard, because he’s been practicing it his whole life.

When Elijah’s days on earth are through, when his life is about at an end, we meet him in the story that was read today—he’s passing the torch to Elisha. A chariot comes to carry Elijah up to heaven. Elisha, the apprentice, who feels he does not yet have enough faith to take over, is begging his teacher, “leave me a double measure of your spirit!” Elisha the apprentice cries and screams as the chariot carries Elijah away up into heaven.

But once Elijah is gone, when the fiery chariot disappears, and the riverside is quiet once more, something else happens: the nervous young Elisha picks up from the ground his teacher’s abandoned mantle, his cloak, touches the waters of the river with it, and miraculously, like Moses did in ancient days, the water parts, and Elisha crosses dry land back to his homeland where he will lead his people. He is not so alone as he thought, and is more ready for leadership than he knew, but not because of who he is, but because he has learned from the help of his teacher, Elijah, and God is with him.

I wonder if you’ve ever thought about the Christmas stories through this same lens? The people we meet in the Christmas stories are not without struggles or fears—none of them are perfect; but neither are any of them alone. All of these people are very anxious and afraid. The shepherds who go to meet Jesus fear the angel, and the Kings likewise don’t know what to make of the star. The angels who meet them say almost nothing to them, other than encouraging them to “fear not”…because that’s what they need to hear! And where are they going? What are they seeking? Why do they undertake such a journey? Because both the shepherds in their poverty and the kings in their wealth, they know they need something—they need help from one whose wisdom is greater than their own.

Joseph and Mary’s stories are similar. Both are scared to death by the news of the child that is to be born; Joseph is a righteous man who risks being disgraced by the pregnancy; Mary is a vulnerable young woman who risks shame and abandonment. All this is in addition to how frightening parenthood is to every mother and father! But Joseph gets help from an angel in a dream; and Mary not only by that, but by a visit with her beloved cousin Elizabeth. She goes to stay with the cousin she looks up to, who listens and understands, and tells a story of the unexpected birth of her own son, named John.

The bravery we witness again and again in scripture is no accident and no coincidence. These people are not born with it, they are not immune to suffering, and they are not self-reliant. They have friends and mentors, they are open about their fears, and that is what helps them to thrive. They are helped and encouraged by friends. They move slowly enough and listen well enough to hear the urging of God through angels and signs. It is in all these ways that they are grounded.

Here is an experience I’ve had in this congregation: there is always some beautiful story going on about people in need who ask for help, and are surrounded by the love of this community. I’m sure many of you in this room can think of the current examples. It is also true that there are scores of people in this community who are so eager to help, if only they are asked; even the busiest among us always seem to have time to help when asked, because helping someone is so meaningful and important. Finally, I know that there are always people in this community who find themselves in need and who suffer through their struggles alone, because they cannot imagine asking for help. That’s the tragedy. Help isn’t always dramatic and often it begins with things that are far from life-threatening. Sometimes its just the courage to ask a friend to join you for coffee so that you can tell them about something you can’t figure out. And often the help is not based on expertise and takes little more than the gift of time; many times the greatest help just looks like…listening.

Love is not so much a feeling or emotion, but rather a way of being that we practice over time. It begins with small actions and experiments that soon become habits, and often we don’t know how we learned to do it. But love always begins with God.

I called this last Advent sermon “Love Begins at the Manger” because that’s what I see happening. I had not really thought of it this way before, but maybe for Mary and Joseph, this time away from home was just what they needed. Time away from the demands of regular life, from what was familiar to them, a break was the help they needed. They’ve brought with them to Bethlehem all of their fears and anxieties about where this unexpected pregnancy is going to lead, but they find themselves, at least for a night, set aside from what they knew, in the simplest of surroundings, suddenly quiet, and unable to ignore the clear voice of God, showing them the way into tomorrow.

Many of us may need God, and a good friend, to help us find a place of quiet listening. Maybe you need to make a good decision about simplifying your hurried life, or to work your way through the grief of a loss, or the pain of a difficult relationship. Some of us just need the permission to be less than perfect, or the time to dig out of a difficult week and regain our footing. And some of us just need to take a deep breath while we wait to get out of the Rookwood parking lot.

I want to invite each of us into just a few moments of silence, so that each one of us might pray to God, sharing what it is that we need help with… Be grateful and be honest. Let us pray…

May we receive the help that we need. May we experience God’s love at the manger this week. May we become the imperfect people God has created us to be, so that we can share God’s love with the world. Amen.

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Good Morning. Happy New Year to you! I know you think I’m a month early, but I simply wish to remind you that in the church year, today is Day 1. This is the first Sunday of Advent. It probably sounds irrelevant or out of touch for me to remind you about the church year, but consider this. Perhaps you are feeling a need for the kind of fresh start that comes with a new year; or perhaps you have found yourself dismayed at the commercialization of Christmas and want to know what can be done to restore its true meaning. If either of those ideas resonates with you, the wisdom of Advent is that we don’t have to wait for Christmas Day.

Starting today, we can receive the gift of a fresh start; starting today, we are invited to restore Christ to the center of our lives. Advent is our season of preparation. And some time of preparation makes sense if you wish to see lasting change in your spiritual life—the kind of resolutions that might actually stick. Instead of springing the birth of Jesus and the coming of the new year upon you a month from now, the church gives us a whole month of preparation to carefully and prayerfully consider what we will do. Let’s get started.

During Advent, we’re used to hearing a familiar series of readings: John the Baptist, the Prophet Isaiah, Mary and Joseph and Elizabeth; and I will draw upon those stories over the next four weeks. But in addition, and with a nudge from my friend and Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann, I’m going to introduce you to a new character whose story is filled with the spirit of Advent—the Prophet Elisha. Through telling his story, we’ll breathe some new life into the Advent themes of Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love that we speak of every year

So who is Elisha anyway? You might be familiar with the idea that a large part of the Old Testament, is devoted to the age of the prophets and kings. First there are the early days of Patriarchs and Matriarchs and Moses and the Law… Then come the prophets and kings; the people of Israel have established a somewhat stable monarchy, first in Judah and later in Samaria. During this time, as one would expect, there are good kings as well as bad ones; and the role of the Prophets is that through them, God speaks to the kings about how they are doing. You’ve likely heard of some of the major prophets who serve God in this way and have books named after them: Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. There are many others, and in the books we know as Samuel and Kings the prophets are, first Samuel and Nathan, and then later Elijah, followed by his student, Elisha. All of these prophets, and certainly not least of all Elisha, are about the business of helping kings to see the world the way God sees it. When we read about them, we try to do the same thing—we practice seeing the world the way God sees it. This is what Advent is—a season of reminding ourselves to see the world the way God sees it.

Here's today’s story about Elisha. The Arameans and the Israelites have been battling back and forth—they are neighbors in the Holy Land. The King of Aram has been sending out troops in hopes of surprising the Israelites, but someone keeps tipping them off, so that when they arrive for the ambush, there’s nobody there. Elisha is the culprit, he’s acting as a sort of spy for the Israelites, and when the King of Aram figures this out, he sends his troops after Elisha. Here’s where the story gets fun. There are some miraculous elements to how this story unfolds, and if you can suspend your disbelief and roll with the miracles, there’s a beautiful message hidden in this story.

Elisha isn’t scared of the Arameans; his faith in God is so strong that even in the face of threats to his life, he doesn’t lose his cool. When the army shows up at Elisha’s front door, Elisha’s servant—you can think of this as his student or mentee—his servant goes to look out the window and comes back scared to death—there’s an army out there! But Elisha’s got a plan. Elisha wants for his servant to have a spiritual awakening; he wants him to see the world through the fearless eyes of faith—the way Elisha can see it. So Elisha prays over him, and then sends him back to the window, and when he looks outside, the whole town is surrounded my mountainsides full of his own friendly army, illuminated with horses and chariots of fire and outnumbering the Arameans at the door. With his confidence fully restored, he steps outside and says to the general, completely convincingly, “Elisha is not here—but I can take you to him.” And he leads the army out of the town and right into his own territory, where the Arameans are outnumbered for real. They’ve been tricked.

Listen carefully—this is the important part. Now that Elisha and his allies have the upper hand, now is when the real dramatic twist of the story takes place. Elisha’s king wishes to take this opportunity to defeat the Arameans for good, but Elisha knows this is not God’s way, so he tells the king no. Instead, he feeds the army of his adversary, he gives them something to drink and a chance to rest, and then he sends them home. And this act of kindness brings the warring of these two peoples to an end.

I wonder if you can think of places where this kind of mercy and hope is needed today—where someone’s grace and generosity could change a bleak world for the better. There is the obvious example of the widening Middle East conflict, with innocent people on so many sides crying out to their leaders for mercy.

Are there leaders who wish to show mercy? It’s hard to say. I did notice this, that on Friday when Islamic rebels entered Syria, their general issued an edict: he instructed his Sunni army not to victimize Shittes, or other religious minorities, for as he said, Aleppo has always been—and remains—a meeting place of civilizations and cultures, with a long history of religious diversity.” (quoted by Malsin, in Wall Street Journal, December 1, 2024) I know nothing of this man and his army other than that it sounds like the kind of edict we need more of.

Your thoughts may be closer to other conflicts, in our own land, wondering when our political parties remember how to work together for the common good. Sometimes our longing for peace and mercy begins right in our own homes. This idea may be a week late, but what if a member of your family, someone usually combative and opinionated, what if they suddenly showed up curious about what other people at the table think. Has that person ever been you, and what if you could be the peacemaker?

Do these examples, large and small, do they seem impossible? I assure you they are not. As a pastor who talks to people a lot about their family problems, I can assure you that there are many examples where families are looking to make peace and restore their relationships. A familiar example to more of you may be the Civil Rights Movement, or the end to Apartheid, which was built around people who were trained to respond not with the violent reactions people expected, but with nonviolence; they showed onlookers that there was indeed another way.

Here's an Advent example. I imagine some of you are familiar with what became known as The Christmas Truce 1914, during World War I. Along the western front in Europe, it was a widespread, unofficial ceasefire that took place on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. In some places it was limited to a pause in the fighting to recover wounded soldiers and engage in prisoner swaps, but in other places it was quite a bit more remarkable, with many newspapers of the day reporting on soldiers who came out into the open battlefield to shake hands, trade souvenirs, and talk and laugh. In some places, as deceased soldiers were recovered, the two sides held joint burial ceremonies; in other places, soldiers from the opposing sides sang Christmas carols together. It was a remarkable occasion of peace and humanity, and it took place right in the midst of one of the most violent conflicts in human history.

The fact that the Christmas Truce was totally unofficial and yet so widespread, makes me wonder about regular people like you and me—how do we all show up in response to a story like Elisha’s. Some are truly bold, like Elisha, truly visionary and able to initiate peace. Others of us are like the Arameans—we have our orders, but if someone on the other side takes the lead, we’re willing to lay down our weapons and make peace. Many of us are like Elisha’s servant, feeling too timid to make the first move but just needing a nudge from someone else. I imagine the soldiers who were part of that Christmas Truce; there were probably very few courageous enough to be the first one to step out of the foxhole; but once a few had done it, many others followed, overwhelmed with their longing for peace and hope.

Elisha saves the people because he can see the world through hopeful eyes—as God sees it. He is not stuck in the way things are, but has the hopeful imagination to see them the way they ought to be.

I wonder how you will prepare yourself for the coming of Christ this year. How will you begin training yourself to see the world as God sees it? Perhaps it will be through a daily commitment to prayer, alone or with your family, carefully considering a change that needs to come into your life; maybe you’ll be more intentional worship, or joining our Advent scripture study, or reading the Bible on your own during Advent, to come to know this story better. Maybe you will engage in an act of giving or service, or will resist the trappings of commercialism to keep your focus on Jesus in this Advent season. Maybe you will be a peacemaker among those who are closest to you, bringing the light of Christ into the world. As the words of our tradition remind us,“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them has light shined… For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders, and he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” How will you prepare for his coming? Amen.

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Thanksgiving is this week. I wonder if you are feeling thankful; I wonder if some of you are feeling a bit stressed. Perhaps you’re hosting a family gathering, anxious about someone you’re going to see, or not see, or worried about getting everything done in time. Even the little things can be stressful. I’m in charge of the turkey this year. I’m not too worked up about it, but there’s a reason they have hotlines for this. All of these little holiday stresses are reminders that this season can be difficult; and this is a season we should enter into seeking to be compassionate toward others and toward ourselves.

So this morning we’re going to remember the point of Thanksgiving; we’re going to talk about gratitude. This is a week when we count our blessings, naming things for which we are thankful. As we gather together with family and friends in doing this, we are teaching our children the importance of gratitude. We are also reminding ourselves, for its easy for adults to forget to be grateful. And it can also be hard to be grateful, especially when we’re stressed or worried or struggling, or when the world seems full of trouble. But it is also true that in difficult times, it is as important as ever to practice gratitude. So I thought I’d tell you a remarkable story about gratitude even in the midst of real tragedy.

The story comes from Simran Jeet Singh, our guest preacher earlier this fall. He remembers clearly, as you might, that in 2012, a mass shooting took place at the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, killing seven, including the gunman. The massacre was a central experience in Simran’s life; he had experienced racism on an individual level throughout his life, but for him and for all American Sikh’s this public act of violence was new; it caused him to walk through his days with a renewed sense of vulnerability and fear for himself and for his loved ones.

The shooting was the start of an important journey for Simran. He struggled to understand his anger and grief; he struggled with the enduring reality of evil in the world, and with his need to heal. As a part of that journey, Simran got to know some of the members of that Sikh community in Oak Creek, listening to their own, more immediate stories of the experience. What amazed Simran the most were the expressions of gratitude. One young woman he quotes in his book said, “We have so much to be thankful for. I have my life. So many people I love are safe. It could have been so much worse. Someone was looking out for us that day.” Another profoundly grateful survivor was the police officer who had arrived first on the scene. He had kept the shooter at bay while being struck by 15 rounds of ammunition; several bullets were still lodged in his head, back and shoulder, a source of ongoing pain. “Despite this,” writes Simran, “Officer Murphy felt grateful to be alive and attributed his positive attitude to the [religious teachings] he learned from the Oak Creek Sikh community; he came to know them well in the aftermath of the shooting. If these people, Simran thought, whose lives had been so dramatically altered, could experience gratitude, so, he thought, can I. And those conversations led him on a journey of practicing daily gratitude.

Gratitude is an extraordinarily powerful spiritual resource, which is why it is not only foundational to Sikhism, but part of so many religious traditions, including our own. Being grateful is a means to profound and positive change in our lives. Gratitude has been proven to build resilience, helping us manage stress; it strengthens relationships when we share gratitude with others; it helps us keep the negativity in our lives at bay; gratitude can even make us gentler and more gracious toward ourselves.

The experience of gratitude, and its force for good is deeply grounded in Scripture and in memory. Our Psalm for today is about remembering gratitude in hard times. In verse 4, the Psalm reads: “Restore our fortunes, O Lord…,” and we know by that, that this is a plea from someone who is suffering and needs to be healed. The historical origins of the Psalm are not clear, so we have to guess at the situation. It could be many things. As is often the case in the Old Testament, the author might be concerned by the unfaithfulness or immorality of his neighbors or of an evil king on the throne. But it is equally possible that he is struggling with something more personal; the loss of a loved one, or a wayward son or daughter, the bad luck of a poor harvest, or a business decision that is threatening his family with ruin. So he begs of God, “restore our fortunes, O Lord”; return my life to the good and hopeful thing it once was.

Somehow, this struggling person has found his way to hope; we know that because he continues: “May those who sow in tears, reap with shouts of joy.” Whatever is going on for this person, she is not yet out of the woods, the suffering is still great—but she can see a way out. How? How can she see it? The answer is gratitude. Look at the beginning of the Psalm now. The first three verses are not a prayer, and not a plea, they are a memory: “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy…’ The hope this person needs in the midst of trouble comes from remembering with gratitude that God has helped before. That’s how they know that God will show up again!

Gratitude does not pretend that suffering doesn’t exist, but rather gratitude is what strengthens our hearts when hard times come, so that we have the strength to endure it. Rather than being overwhelmed by grief or sadness or hatred, we can feel those difficult things, yes, but then be moved to offer something good in response to the suffering.

Gratitude recognizes that sometimes things don’t turn out ok. And yet gratitude, sometimes quite miraculously, still finds its way to hope. Not long ago, I received an email from one of the professors at Princeton Seminary, when he was working his way through a struggle. Like the Psalm, his story was about a memory that was leading him toward hope. In it he said this: I woke up this morning with the words of our colleague Sonia Waters ringing in my head. [Dr. Waters, who also taught at Princeton, died last year at age 51, leaving behind her spouse and three stepchildren.] As she faced death with deep faithfulness, she sent [her colleagues] one last email that he remembered so clearly. As she faced her own untimely death, Sonia Waters left her friends with a message; it concluded with these simple and powerful words. “I pray you choose joy. Everything else is a waste of time.” What a statement of gratitude.

The professor who wrote the email went on to comment on that. He went on to say that To choose joy is not to [be naïve] or to deny the realities of our moment. To choose joy is to opt for the love of our neighbors, the certainty of God’s surprising grace among us, the promise of life amid the forces of death and despair that surround us. Joy, and gratitude, which is like it, are much deeper than simple happiness. Gratitude is a whole way of being; it requires some effort and discipline if you want it to change your life for the better. Gratitude is perhaps the first and most important step on any spiritual journey. And thankfully, there are such easy ways to get started.

One way to experience gratitude in your life is to pray about it, daily. Find a way, a time, to say prayers of thanks. This doesn’t have to be complicated or poetic. It can be a few quiet moments at the start or the end of the day, or some other time, when you remember the blessings in your life and name them before God. You might choose to jot them down in a journal so you can look back at them as the time passes. Give yourself some grace if you miss a day here and there—that doesn’t matter. But when you do give thanks, try not to be in a hurry. Take your time as you consider your blessings. Breathe deeply to slow yourself down; don’t just rush through them like a to-do list, but allow the good news of those blessings to wash over you, fill your heart and bring you joy. Another wonderful way to experience gratitude is to share it with someone else; you might be inspired to write a letter or send an email to let someone else know that why you are grateful for them. Expressing gratitude to others is one of the best ways to do something meaningful for someone else, while also giving a gift to yourself.

When Simran Jeet Singh met the victims of the Oak Creek massacre and witnessed their gratitude, he knew that adopting their way of being would not happen overnight and would involve some time and commitment. But he wanted what they had, so he tried it. He took time each evening, just a few minutes, to count his blessings and be thankful. Over time, gratitude became a part of him too. When he writes about it, he says, “My life hadn’t suddenly changed, nor did I have more to be thankful about. The change happened inside me…” And noting that it took practice, he adds that it took some time and that he did not stumble upon it by instinct. “[Gratitude] is not intuitive—” he says. “I had to [practice and] learn it.”

Holidays, on the surface, are occasions for joy; but beyond whether you clean the house or cook the turkey just right, these days and weeks ahead can be a source of stress and grief and anxiety. We think about who we will see and who we will not see; how it will go and how it will feel, and how we will respond. We often carry around fears and resentments and grievances that can have a corrosive effect on our lives and on the lives of others; they can threaten our own well-being and the moral compass we bring to encounters with neighbors and loved ones. Gratitude can change all of that, opening our hearts so that we remember and see others and ourselves as children of God. As the author of that email I told you about concluded: “My friends, let’s choose the kind of joy that runs through grief and sorrow and rests on God’s immense grace.” Choose gratitude. Everything else is a waste of time.” Amen.

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This week there was an election—perhaps you heard about it. And as of today, a large part of the electorate is really pleased, an equally large part is really disappointed, and a significant group in the middle are indifferent, and had it gone the other way, those characterizations would have been much the same. Throughout the fall, I have preached from this pulpit that we as Christian people are not to place our faith in politicians; just as in the days of the Old and New Testaments, the Bible cautions against putting our trust in earthly rulers; and the prophets keep on cajoling us—put your trust in God! I have prepared for today a sermon that is a call to action for us, and that I prepared prior to the election, knowing that I would say the same thing to you regardless of who won. I don’t know if this sermon will be helpful to you or not. I pray that it will be, and that it will help us to talk more about where God is leading us. Let us pray:

Gracious and Holy God, May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, for you, O Lord, are our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

I don’t say it often enough, but one of my favorite things about being a pastor here is the curiosity of this congregation. You might not realize it, but a lot of church people aren’t so curious. Many aren’t interested in struggling with the meaning of the Bible; in many places, unpopular or unpleasant scriptures do not get read, unconventional interpretations of the text are not welcomed, and people want answers from the pulpit, even though the Bible mostly gives us questions. But not here. Here at Knox, we dig around in the texts of the Bible to unearth surprises and truths, to expose interpretations that have been harmful in the past and to question if there’s another way a text can be understood. As far as I can tell, you not only tolerate that kind of preaching but welcome it. And your curiosity is a gift to me; and I thank you.

So in that spirit, this morning is Commitment Sunday (the day by which we hope all of you, members and non, newcomers and old stalwarts, have made your pledge). You can consider this the last of my Stewardship sermons for this fall, and in this one, we will not focus on budgets or highlight ministries—with thanks to the Stewardship Committee, we’ve done that. Instead I’m going to do something a bit different. We’re going to look at one of the most classic fundraising texts in the Bible, and I’m going to invite you to think about it differently than you might have before. I’m going to ask some curious questions; and theme will be: what kind of a world do you want to live in?

The story is traditionally known as the story of The Widow’s Mite—m-i-t-e—meaning a very small amount. In this story, Jesus and his disciples are near the synagogue, and observe people coming to make their gifts to the temple treasury. They observe rich people coming and giving large gifts, and then a poor widow who comes and gives two small copper coins, a modest gift. And Jesus says this: “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them; for all of them have contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in all she has to live on.” This text is typically preached to demonstrate sacrificial giving, and celebrate the generosity of the widow. We look at how she gives, talk of it as praiseworthy, and then we hope others will do likewise—right? Any of our long-time churchgoers have heard that sermon. Now, let’s get curious.

The story of the widow’s mite appears in three of the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke—that’s not true of a lot of Bible stories and suggests that something important is going on here. The Widow’s Mite appears in the story of Jesus right at the end of his ministry, right before Jesus begins the road to the Cross. So we can imagine that Jesus might be making use of this teaching as a last opportunity to make his point. This is one of Jesus’ last chances to teach his disciples and he knows it. You might wonder if Jesus is doing something much bigger than a lesson on fundraising; perhaps Jesus is using this story to leave them with a big question, something like: “What kind of a world do you want to live in?”

The version of the story we read comes from the Gospel of Luke. Luke is the author who spends the most time sharing Jesus’ teachings about money, and the thing I love about how Luke tells these stories is that he tells stories that are curious. Luke tells the thought-provoking story about rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. He challenges a Rich Fool who has more than anyone else, but is still worried and anxious. One of my favorites is the Parable of the Dishonest Manager, a story in which a middle manager makes moral compromises as he tries to do the right thing. Luke’s stories of Jesus are never one-dimensional—there is always some curiosity to be explore

So when it comes to the widow’s mite, the same must be true. Luke, like most of the Bible’s authors, contrasts the kingdom of heaven and the ways of the world; he always wants us to be questioning how things are and wondering about how they should be, and what kind of higher purposes God has in mind. Today, we started reading at the end of chapter 20 right before Jesus comment at the temple treasury, and here something else is going on. Right before Jesus invites the disciples to notice people making their gifts at the temple, he makes another observation. He’s denouncing the scribes, a group of wealthy and powerful people, he says of them: “they walk around in long robes, and love to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces…” And then he makes another comment about them which just happens to be about widows, he says, “They devour widows houses and for the sake of appearance, say long prayers.” He’s talking about these hypocrites, obviously making a commentary about things that are not the way they should be. Is it a coincidence that just as a widow walks up to make her gift, Jesus has noted that widows’ houses are being devoured? There must be something going on here; something that isn’t right. What’s the point Jesus is making?

I heard New Testament scholar Eric Barreto talk about this passage once; here’s what he thought. Jesus refers to the people bringing their gifts to the Temple treasury, and seeing the widow, Jesus comments that that she has put in everything she has. We are often taught that this is a good thing, the woman is a model of generosity, and we usually assume that Jesus is holding up the woman as an example.

But that’s not what Jesus says; Jesus just observes what is going on. And what if what is going on isn’t the right thing; what if this isn’t the way it should be. What if we are supposed to read this story, and see the folks who have more than enough giving some, and then widow who has almost nothing giving everything she has. What if we’re supposed to read it and say to ourselves, “That’s messed up. Who would want to live in a world that demands so little of people who have so much, and demands everything of people who have almost nothing to give?” Is that the kind of world you want to live in?

This is what Jesus is asking at the end of his ministry, before he begins the road to the Cross: what kind of world to you want to live in? What should be the relationship between the rich and the poor? Do we really want to live in a world that “devours widow’s houses?” Do we want to live in a world that celebrates the sacrificial faith of the poorest of the poor as others sit and watch? Or do we want something different? Maybe we want to ask harder, more curious questions: How does our community care for its most vulnerable people? What does my religious tradition have to say about inequality? What does Jesus’ ask of me? Reading this story at the end of our Stewardship season, I hope you see this story a little differently than its typical interpretation. We do not want to be like this story. We have another story in mind. We hope our people who have more than they need will give sacrificially; we hope that those who hardly have anything will never be required to give all they have. We want something different, because not only are we curious, but we are yearning, for a better world to live in, and we want to join God in bringing it about.

It's a curious interpretation, for a curious congregation; and I hope that in light of this whole contentious season, it encourages you to be curious about other things too. I have said to you throughout the fall, and will continue to say, that our salvation is not in a political candidate. Kamala Harris was not going to save us; neither will Donald Trump. Electing either of them president was bound to leave us with a still divided country, and with plenty of ongoing struggles that need to be solved.

Our country needs curious people, who don’t wish to rest on the laurels of political victory or be demoralized by defeat, but to keep being curious about the problems we face. And this congregation needs to keep being curious about our role in the culture, and dedicated to the values we have long held dear.

In the days ahead, these are the things we will do: We will love our neighbors, regardless of their religion, ethnic background, or national origin; we will be witnesses to the plight of the poor and the hungry and children who lack opportunities for a better life; we will honor the contributions of all people, regardless of their gender or sexual orientation, and we will lift up voices that have long been silenced. We will be curious and seek to act in response to global issues even when they confound us; we will be brave in our conversations, seeking to grow when we disagree, and refusing to be divided even when divisive voices surround us; and we will keep preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ, encouraging generosity, kindness, and justice in all that we do.

Brian McLaren, an author I like, says this: that “In times of crisis, people either clench fists, or open hands and arms and hearts.” That is not a partisan comment. We are living in a time of crisis; and the same would be true had the election gone the other way. Take a deep breath; this crisis has been going on for a while, and we have lived in times of crisis before. In the days that are before us, who will we be? Will we clench fists, or will we open hands and arms and hearts? What kind of a world do you want to live in? If we are truly curious about what Jesus is trying to tell us, we can join him in bringing that world about. Amen.

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It can be overwhelming to think about the numerous, immense problems that confront us in each day in the news. Foreign conflicts, global warming, electoral politics, poverty and gun violence, and the list goes on. You can’t possibly do something about all of these problems; you might be able to do only a little about any of them, but how in the world do you choose which one? And as overwhelming as it can be, it’s selfish and inhumane not to pay some attention.

Sometimes, I’ll admit, I get overwhelmed, wondering what I’m supposed to say about all these things—or any one of them. I find myself wondering if you show up on Sundays expecting me to reflect thoughtfully on issues where I have little expertise. I know it makes sense that I would wonder about this, because most of my colleagues do. Almost 100 years ago now, the great preacher Reinhold Niebuhr said that preachers should have the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. But I’ve been reflecting lately that his “newspaper” was nothing like mine. The breadth of information we have access to each day IS overwhelming, and we don’t even know how much of it we can believe.

When I’m feeling less overwhelmed, and a bit more centered, I remember that our job here at church is not to fix all the world’s problems—it is different. Here we are concerned with a different set of questions—not less important, and still related, but different. Here we ask questions like: What do I believe? What are the guiding values of my life? What kind of community do I wish to live in, and what am I willing to do to make it a reality? These are the kinds of questions we talk about in church. They are questions that can ground us, and then shape our thinking about all of those other matters, and that can help us make choices about where we will place our greatest concern. The questions we ask at church shape us into the kind of parents and neighbors we will be, they shape our professional lives, our volunteering, and how we spend our money, and collectively they extend to some of those big matters that make the news. This is a place where we are being formed by God for life in the world, and where we are given a manageable way to think about all that is out there, and not feel so helpless.

Here's a (non-churchy) example of what I mean: Seth Kaplan is a professor at Johns Hopkins University and a leading expert on fragile nation states—and before you get excited that this sermon is going to be third week in a row about the upcoming election, let me assure you it is not. The United States, argues expert Seth Kaplan, is not a fragile nation state. But we are fragile. The greatest fragility in our country, he argues, is found in our local neighborhoods. On the neighborhood level, he says, we have plenty enough crises to worry about. Seth Kaplan writes that, “from gun violence in Baltimore to teens committing suicide in Palo Alto to the opioid crisis in Appalachia…Our families and communities suffer from social problems that shock the rest of the world, and ought to shock us: family disintegration, homelessness, school shootings, racial animosity, skyrocketing rates of loneliness and depression, and deaths of despair—alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide.” Those are the problems. The hope, he argues in his new book, the hope…is that if we understand these problems as local in nature, it is within our grasp to change them. “When change is hyperlocal,” Kaplan writes, “that means we all have an opportunity to contribute.” And based on his worldwide expertise among local communities, both fragile and strong, he argues in his new book that we can think differently about the challenges that face us and do something about them. We can do so “starting with our own neighborhoods, and working sideways, one zip code at a time.” (Kaplan, Fragile Neighborhoods, x) Kaplan wants to help people who are overwhelmed by the big issues, to think about how we can change them through the daily choices we make as parents, neighbors, coworkers, and friends.

There are biblical examples of this same kind of thinking. People who lived in the world of the Bible had as many reasons as we do to be overwhelmed by issues of their day. The tyrannical occupation of the Roman Empire, profound income inequality, and brutal daily instances of violence and hunger were all a regular part of daily life. Jesus acknowledges them frequently. But even so, much of the time the Bible is helping its readers to think about problems that are within their grasp. Love your neighbor; live generously; practice forgiveness. These matters may seem boring or unimportant compared to toppling the Roman Empire, but in a way Seth Kaplan might have liked, the pages of the Bible offer guidance on these local ways a good Christian can change the world.

Today’s scripture comes from Timothy. It’s a tiny book—a letter really, only a few pages long, tucked into the last pages of the New Testament. Many of us know about the Apostle Paul, right? Paul is the one who wrote most of the New Testament, the greatest Apostle, the follower of Jesus who had a lightning bolt experience on the Damascus Road, gave his life over to following Jesus, and transformed the next 2000 years of history.

Timothy was a student of the Apostle Paul, and today’s reading is a letter from Paul to Timothy. Timothy was Paul’s right hand, his best friend, closest confidant; he was the one Paul entrusted with the future of the church. Paul would start a new local church, and then leave it in Timothy’s hands to continue the work when he left. So Timothy was one of those good and faithful people who worked quietly and behind the scenes, with much less notoriety than Paul. And it was the daily work of people like Timothy that would usher Christianity into the world. This letter Paul writes to Timothy, at the end of his life, is a personal greeting. In it he encourages Timothy: he demonstrates understanding and compassion for Timothy’s daily frustrations and the things that overwhelm him. And then Paul builds up Timothy for the challenging days ahead.

Some folks imagine the ancient church to be some kind of ideal community, but letters like this one remind us it was not. The church has always been a human institution. It’s always been run by some combination of paid people and volunteers, stuck in a daily grind of human messiness and distraction, hoping to catch some moments of grace along the way. So Paul writes to Timothy about regular things: how to deal with church members who think they are better than everyone else; how to correct some misunderstandings that have been floating around the new members’ class, how to avoid high flown speculation about theology, and keep your eyes on Jesus. And Paul frames the message with personal notes of friendship, understanding, and love: “You’ve been a great friend to me, Timothy; I know you get some difficult feedback and the work can be a grind, but you’re good at this work, a faithful follower of Jesus, and when I’m gone, the church will be in good hands.” (paraphrase) Paul knew that if he encouraged people like Timothy, they would encourage others too, and collectively, they all could change the world.

Today is All Saints Sundays. As a part of worship today, we pray the names of our Knox members who have died in the last year, and we hope that serves as a reminder of the many good and faithful people who have gone before us and taught us the faith.

I hope you have been following this fall’s Stewardship announcements, partly of course, because we need you to make your pledge for next year. But even more importantly, I hope you’ve been blessed by the stories we’ve been sharing. We started with reminders of how all of us, collectively, contribute to the good of the world. We sent out a series of six emails that remined you about how Knox invests in making the world better. We build strong friendships, enhance the safety of neighborhoods, provide mental health services and care for the aging, give second chances to the incarcerated, work for the welfare of youth and children, and create beauty and meaning through music.

Then we dialed in a bit more closely and sent you more messages that have focused on people who care deeply about this place, and why. We told you Karen Wirthlin’s family story, and about how Ginny Utz finds inspiration here for her work as a doctor and a parent. We told you about how Jim Crosset was sustained by this community following the tragic death of his wife Cindy.

Finally, there have been two beautiful videos shared this fall in worship. The first was narrated by Brittney Woolf, who told you her family’s story of finding a welcome at Knox, and her own conviction that this church cares about the right things. And the second you saw this morning, narrated by Laura Deck. Laura talked about the generational value of the ministries of this church, which she inherited from her parents and shared with her children, and how the investments we put into this place come back to us when we need it the most. It’s a story that is beautiful all on its own; and is even more beautiful because around here, it is not unusual. From one end to the other of this church, there are people who tell stories of friendship, commitment, and sacrifice that shape this community. Through all of these things, we have an exponential influence on the good of the wider world.

Today is a great day to remember and give thanks for the people in your life who have taught you the faith. How have they encouraged you in your journey, and how are you continuing to live out their legacy? Here at Knox we may not solve all the world’s problems, but we are about the vital work of making the world better: raising children with good values, helping adults to live faithfully and never stop growing, bringing a little more beauty and truth into the world we inhabit each day. Knox is a place to start growing, and a place to never stop, so that when we come to the end our earthly journey, we like Paul, can say with confidence, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” Here, we learn the way of Jesus from those who went before us, and we entrust God’s future to those who come after us. Amen.

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“The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” Those are the beginning words of today’s scripture lesson. They are words foundational to a faithful life. They were true long ago, they are true today, and they will be two weeks from now, after Election Day. At that time, no matter the outcome, roughly 40% of the country will be very disappointed, and our work as peacemakers will be before us just as it is today. And so the word for today is: “The Lord is my light and my salvation; The Lord is the stronghold of my life.”

I will admit that I often find it hard to trust God, and let go of my own anxieties. In the midst of global and national tragedies, and problems closer to home, and all of the things I need to help with but can’t fully control, I find it hard to trust God. I know I am not alone in this. We all live in a world now where the volume of news coming at us is overwhelming; it is impossible to take it all in, let alone decide what you really think about all of the issues, or what you might do in response. Many of you may find it additionally challenging, as I do, to wonder what Jesus is asking of us—even though all Jesus really wants to do is help! But it’s easy to forget that. With all of this in mind, each week, I must decide which of the world’s countless problems belong in this week’s sermon. I know that many things I say up here will please some of you only to displease others. And I know that saying nothing has its own set of costs. And I am not complaining but rather commiserating—for I know that most of you face some version of this same challenge everyday with coworkers, neighbors, and family.

Our guest Jim Wallis who joined us last week is a great case-in-point. There was some significant disagreement about what he had to say. Some of you loved it and told me so quickly; others of you did not like it, and voiced your displeasure. I’m going to talk about that for a minute because it has to do with what we’re praying about today.

Jim Wallis has been an important voice in American Christianity for 40 years, and I told you as much in introducing him. I did not take the time to tell you why. Jim grew up as part of a deeply religious evangelical community, but he fell away from the church when he came of age during the Civil Rights Movement. He saw his church completely ignoring the plight of the poor and the division between the races, and inviting him to do the same. So he left church, and started working in close proximity with people who were different from him. Over time his ongoing study of Scripture showed him that Jesus indeed cares deeply about the poor and the powerless. He then spent a career trying to change things for the better, in writing and preaching, coaching little league and working closely with friends and neighbors, and in political activism with politicians from both major parties. He has an incredible story. Regrettably, he didn’t tell you any of that personal history last week. I don’t know if there wasn’t enough time, or if he assumed you had read it in his book.

Instead, he skipped straight to the news that is most pressing for him today. Jim cares deeply about the plight of immigrants and refugees in our country. He also cares for struggling poor people who have lived here for a long time, so he spoke about both of them, reminding us that they are our neighbors. What he said is true. But his message did not deal with another challenge—that the person who may be voting differently than you are is also your neighbor.. I suspect Jim’s neglect of that idea meant that his message about the poor didn’t change any minds.

Even if Jim’s visit was a bit divisive, I’m still grateful for his visit, because it did do something really important: it got some of us talking. Not all of us, but at least some of you, talked to each other, or to me. All around us, people of different points of view have lost the ability to talk to one another, and those divisions are tearing us apart. Here in our church community, because Jim Wallis’ paid a visit, we are left with the challenge of being different and better. If you were disappointed with what you heard last week, good for you if you spoke up, and if you haven’t yet, I hope you will. If you loved what you heard last week, yours is a different challenge; we need you to ask around to find out how other people felt about it; and when someone voices an opinion different than yours, your job is to lean in and listen. If you know you want to be in conversation about this, please contact me directly; I want to hear from you regardless of what opinion you will be sharing; we have tools we can give you for these conversations.

Another way to work toward healing our world is what we are doing together today: praying together, and admitting that these burdens we carry often feel like too much. So we must place our trust in God, and hope that God will keep us on the right track.

The matter of living together in this culture and country is not yet an achievement, it is a journey. Many of the best things we can say about our nation are not about its accomplishments but about its aspirations—the things we hope for but haven’t accomplished just yet. That made me think of a song. At the end of today’s service, we’ll close by singing America the Beautiful. It has often been called America’s hymn—and it is deeply aspirational. Katherine Lee Bates was the author of the text, originally in 1893. She was the daughter of a minister, and grew up in church, though her father died when she was a child. Bates grew up in poverty, her widowed mother sustained the family through the kindness and cooperation that existed among her neighbors, and she came of age with a great appreciation for the value of helping one another to make ends meet. So she wrote of aspirations—hopes she had for her life and our country. She wrote of “purple mountain majesties,” knowing that many Americans never got to travel to see them. She wrote the truth that “alabaster cities gleamed,” but knew that happened alongside an urban grit “undimmed by human tears.” The song is full, not of accomplishments, but aspirations, and so over and over she wrote the plea, “God shed his grace on thee…” She hoped that as time went on, we would become more and more of the nation we were founded to be, with opportunity for all, enough to go around, and trust in God to bless us.

We are still a people who aspire for better days, and who must commit to working for them, and our church communities are a place to start. I read somewhere once, that church is supposed to be a training ground for the rest of life. We practice behaviors here among friends that we hope to be able to take out into God’s world. In the days before us, we will continue to be confronted by a world that confounds us with global turmoil, political strife, and personal stresses that can lay us quite low. These are things we can never entirely conquer, but we can practice here at being more honest about our struggles as we aspire for a better tomorrow.

As we continue in this service of prayer, we will turn as we always do toward the idea of offering—what we will give in response to God’s Word? What will you pray for in these days? And how might your prayers cause you to behave differently? The last verse of today’s Psalm states, “I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.” We will only get to goodness on this side of the grave if we are willing to do something to contribute to the good. That’s true even if it is something so little as to risk a difficult conversation with one who might disagree. We as a people can reach for better days. We begin with our prayers. Amen.

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I will admit to you that I found it difficult to write a sermon this week. So many complicated and tragic events are taking place in our world. I know you expect to be able to struggle and pray together about these things when we come to worship. Here at church we should ask our big questions and plead our case before God. And yet I am not an expert on many of the matters in the news these days, and often I feel inadequate to lead you in that questioning and praying.

This week passed the anniversary of the tragic events of October 7, and the widening conflict in the Mideast is as frightening as it is inhumane. On every side, innocent people have suffered incredible atrocities. Terrorist organizations hide behind families and children, the Israeli military targets them with weapons our government provides, and most of us feel helpless to influence the actions of the people in power. I am grateful to people in our congregation and to others I know who provide ways for us to increase our understanding and act for peace where we can. We have to pay attention to what is going on, even though we would rather think of something else, because God’s children are suffering.

The devastation of the hurricanes adds to the dismay; most of us know someone who has lost something, or everything, and so many are scrambling to survive. We cannot get to them, while emergency workers keep giving their all; and for the most part we continue in our patterns of consumption that warm the planet and increase the severity of these storms. And I am grateful to all of you who pray not only with hands folded but with hearts and wallets open, eager for our mission funds and our hands and feet to do what we can to help.

I said I found it difficult to write this week. I find myself in this whiplash between these horrible realities and not only the demands of daily life, but the good things that still deserve to be celebrated. Today the congregation is recognizing my 10 years of service in this congregation—I don’t know who planned it but I understand that is the focus of the Welcome Hour today. I have been blessed beyond measure in my ministry here. What would be more ungrateful than to brush aside your kindness and insist that we spend the whole day in mourning.

We have other things to celebrate as well. Earl Rivers turned 80 this week even as he continues in his 50th year making music among us. I’m grateful that our Mission Committee collected items for the needy at a tailgate yesterday, and hosted a second criminal records expungement at Third Church, and on Thursday invited us to learn about the Mideast peacemaking work of the Pilgrims of Ibillin. This week I spent time in my ministry talking on the phone about education needs in our city with Knox Elder Jim Crosset, who has come out of retirement to serve the School Board; and Friday I joined Knox Elder Evan Nolan at the announcement of his appointment to the City Council; these are just this week’s examples of the ways members of our church step up and give of themselves for the welfare of others in our community. And so many more of you have done so much, and will step up in the week ahead; you will perform similar acts of service that are just as selfless and loving, even though they will not make the paper—or even the Knox Enews. There is so much good to be thankful for.

How do we hold it all together, the bad with the good, in our hearts and minds and spirits? How do you go to an exercise class when someone else’s body is threatened by an airstrike? How do you weigh your choices in an aisle with dozens of breakfast cereals when millions cannot eat? I found myself this week humming the words of an old Dave Matthews’ song “Funny the Way It Is.” In the song, he tries to understand how “one kid walks ten miles to school while another is dropping out” and that “someone’s broken heart then becomes your favorite song.” Funny the way it is, he sings. I’ve always liked Dave Matthews, but I need more than the song. There has to be some greater wisdom; these things can’t just be, “funny the way it is.”

When I find myself feeling so lost in these questions, what am I to say as a preacher? It is wrong, and also arrogant, to imagine I will come up with some new way for us to understand, let alone to fix these things. That is far beyond my capability. Thank God there is wisdom much older than me to guide us. Do not get too excited for I am not about to share with you something you have not heard before. But the reason we come to worship over and over is because the troubles and struggles of life keep coming; so over and over again, our faith gives us reminders of how to live in the midst of the struggles.

Even Jesus looked to the past when it came to navigating life’s big questions, his foundation was in tradition. So here’s his unsurprising lesson for today:

One day Jesus is approached by a scholar, hoping to trip him up by asking a big question before a crowd of people, “Which commandment is the first of all?” he asks. Jesus answers not with his own judgment or innovation but by drawing upon wisdom handed down to him in the scriptures, he quotes Deuteronomy 6 and Leviticus 19 stating “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength,” and the second is this, he says, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

This ancient wisdom, still important today, comes not in merely quoting the scriptures, but in applying them. It is a daily and real challenge to live not just one of these commandments, but both of them at the same time, and to do so in tangible ways, every day of your life. Loving God is about spiritual health, personal growth, inner peace; and peace is only found if we are loving our neighbors, because you cannot ignore the suffering of others and expect to find peace with God. The opposite is also true. Loving others is the very essence of what it means to follow God; but the needs out there are far too great, endless and complicated for any of us to stay the course, unless we draw upon God to give us strength, and we have to do so daily.

This wisdom—to love God and neighbor—it is so ancient, transformative, and important that it resides in many traditions. Jesus is drawing upon Jewish law in his articulation of it; the five pillars of Islam say much the same thing: they require on the one hand prayer and declaration of faith, and on the other hand, charitable giving, and fasting as a reminder of the needs of others. When Simran Jeet Singh visited with us last month, his Sikh faith reminded us of the shared light of God, ik oankar, found in every human life; that light is discovered through seva—service to others. Love God and love your neighbor. The world only gets better when people love and serve one another, there is no peace without it; and to see the light of God in others, we also must be able to find it in ourselves, so we must love God (See Singh, The Light We Give).

Loving God and loving our neighbors is easier said than done—the words often become thoughtless platitudes. These are hard values to live, and they require practice, and thankfully people wiser than myself have offered guidance from their own experience.

We love God by deepening our own spiritual life and health; we do this by spending time with God. I don’t believe that God needs my love; but spending time trying to deepen my spiritual life is certainly good for me. So loving God is really a kind of self-care, but that’s a term we have to be careful with. Self-care is a term that caught on several decades ago, thanks to the work of Audre Lorde. Gratefully, it began with tireless humanitarian and justice workers who needed reminders to take care of themselves. Increasingly though, the term is over-used by comfortable people as a joking excuse for self-indulgence. Don’t get me wrong—rest, leisure, sabbath, these things are important for everyone. We all need to go on vacations, take in a show or a ballgame, eat ice cream out the container… Life is not all about work, and leisure makes us better people, not worse. Simran Jeet Singh reminds us that the test of good self-care, I think, is this: Do our acts of self-care help us to grow in gratitude, and do they give us the rest we need to get back to lives of service? Or do they just condition us to be more selfish? Self-care is real when it strengthens our connectedness to other people, and the rest of creation. This is love for God.

Just like love for God, loving our neighbors requires careful consideration. The problem with the command to love our neighbors is that it often remains an abstraction, and that’s not the way it was intended. Way back in the Book of Leviticus, the Bible warns against this. The Mosaic Law doesn’t just tell people to love their neighbors, it gives specific applications. Farmers are told to leave some crops around the edge of their fields for the benefit of the hungry, and grapes in the vineyard for the poor and the immigrant…Laborers should be paid promptly, and no one should take advantage of the handicapped. Maximizing profit and cutting corners are opposed to the love of neighbor—these specifics are covered in Leviticus.

In our own time and place, loving our neighbors takes so many forms and none of us can do them all. I applaud the efforts of so many of you, who make much greater efforts than my own to love your neighbors. Many of you are tireless advocates for the Palestinian people and for the dangers of antisemitism; many of you show up weekly to work one-on-one with children at Third Presbyterian or to pray with prisoners at the Hamilton County Justice Center. An equal and no-less important need is met by those who show up without fail to teach children in our Sunday School, or who may spend hours each week accompanying our aging members to doctors’ appointments, visiting or making phone calls or writing letters to Knox members who they know to be grieving. All of these things are important, and there are so many others. None of us can do them all, and the work will never be finished—which can be very frustrating.

The work will never be finished. We can never love God enough, nor can we love our neighbors enough; and yet we cannot give up. That is why loving God and loving our neighbors takes practice and happens in community. One of the best things you can do for your spiritual growth is to have an honest conversation with God and with someone else about this. Pray and talk with someone else about how you are loving God and loving your neighbor—and about where you struggle. Don’t allow it to be abstract. I really struggled this past week, reading a lengthy and heart wrenching account of hospital work in Gaza, and then realizing I was running late to work on my aching back at a Pilates class. As I hurried to class I wondered, how do I live with myself? I often struggle with how I should be spending my time. We need people to talk to so that we can wrestle with these questions. It can’t just be funny the way it is. This is what church community is for.

I’ve decided in recent weeks, maybe I’ve known from the beginning, that my title for this sermon series may be misleading. We’re not really looking for peace in troubled times; at least not if by “peace” you mean an absence of care or concern. You don’t find peace in troubled times by learning not to care—by holing yourself up for prayer and meditation while children starve. Even those who think they are succeeding are eventually haunted by their lack of humanity. Nor does anyone find peace by being overwhelmed by the suffering of others. If we cannot find joy in your daily life, if we cannot love our families, our closest neighbors, and ourselves, can we really be of help to people half a world away? We need God to show us how to keep our balance.

We have to somehow do both things together, nurture our love for God, and love our neighbors. The peace we seek in following these two commandments is not to arrive at resolution—but to be troubled enough by each kind of love to get up in the morning and joyfully try again. We have to commit each day to a few more minutes of prayer that’s really honest. We must commit daily to some kind of action that will leave the world better than we found it, according to what you can do.

The only surefire way to really have no peace is to abandon the struggle; that strategy may serve you for a time, but it will not last. People of God, we need not agree on the best way to love God and love neighbor; it would be impossible to achieve that, and even if we did, it would be awfully boring. But the daily quest to love God and love neighbor is a noble one, and is worth the struggle. And it is worth struggling through this together. I thank you, people of Knox, for allowing me 10 years of getting up each Sunday and struggling through the things I am not sure about. Let’s keep going and try to do a bit better today than we did yesterday as we seek to love God and to love our neighbors. Amen.

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Following that lengthy Stewardship video, I can imagine what some of you are thinking—you’ve already heard a sermon from me this morning! Your Stewardship Committee felt strongly that you should hear a different kind of Stewardship message this year, and that you should hear it as we gather on Sunday. Please share it as we post it online this week. There is so much good ministry happening here. We have been balancing our budget each year, but not in a way that is sustainable. We hope you will reflect carefully on your contribution this year, and join us as we invest in the future so we can keep doing so many good things. Here we are committed to something that is meaningful, I consider it a blessing to invite you to share in it.

But—I still feel called to preach this morning, because being invested in or committed to a community is so much bigger than money, and that’s what I want to talk to you about here in sermon number 2. Being part of a good community is so important; it is one of the chief antidotes to the loneliness, anxiety and depression that is rampant in our culture right now. Being committed to a community is key to finding peace in the midst of struggle and finding simple joy in each day. And there’s nothing new about it. This message begins in the Bible.

One of my favorite stories in Scripture supports this idea. We read from it this morning; it comes from the Book of Jeremiah. A little context is helpful. Jeremiah lived and wrote in a time called the Babylonian Exile. In ancient Israel there were times of great prosperity, but also times of terrible upheaval; unprincipled rulers weakened the kingdom; the community frayed, and warring tribes from outside took advantage. The worst of these times took place when the Babylonian Empire was on the rise. They laid siege to Jerusalem, sacking the city and destroying the palace and Temple. In order to cement their dominance, the Babylonians exiled the Israelites. This meant that anyone who had leadership potential: those who had been a part of government, religious leadership, scholars and teachers, leaders in business…all of these people were forcibly removed from their homes and taken to Babylon to live in exile.

It's hard to imagine a more dismaying and disorienting experience; the Scriptures tell of the hopelessness of the people and the ways their life together had fallen apart.

But even as dismaying as this circumstance of exile must have been, Jeremiah issues a call to the exiles in Babylon; a call from God that is challenging and also hopeful: “Build houses and live in them,” says the Lord. “Plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters…multiply there and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city to which I have sent you…,” says the Lord, “…for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” Commitment is the key to survival, Jeremiah says. I know at times in life you may not be at home, but invest yourself in the home and the neighbors you have. This is how you will find purpose in the midst of the exile.

One of the things I love about this story is that I think there is something in it for everyone, for exile is an experience just about all of us can connect to in some way. You just have to be a little careful how you talk about exile.

Tragically, there are millions of people in the world who find themselves living in true, physical exile from there homes. Refugees from climate crises and violence in Africa and Latin America, victims of war in Sudan, Palestine and now Lebanon, Ukraine. These tragedies are so immense that they make Jeremiah’s teaching sound tone deaf. Can you imagine suggesting to someone living in a refugee camp: “build houses and plant trees…” Of course not. And while I don’t understand the depth of that experience at all, I do have to imagine that the only ways human beings survive such a thing—if they do survive—is to find community—people with whom to partner and share what meager resources they have and to rely upon each other.

Other examples of those in exile are not quite so extreme.

Some of the best examples of exiles may be the hardworking people who migrate with their families to another country, seeking opportunity. Simran Jeet Singh, who was with us just last week, tells the compelling story of his father’s journey from the Punjab region of India to a new home in Texas. He married and started a new life, working, raising children, and yet doing so in incredible social isolation, maligned for wearing a turban, kids thrown out of soccer games and skating rinks. We were joined in worship last week by exiles such as these. A similar story is true for Haitian immigrants in our neighbor city of Springfield, who their mayor and our governor have called good, decent and hardworking people, just like those who have lived in Springfield for a long time and welcomed them. They have been publicly maligned and threatened in recent days. Thank God that the outpouring of support for them from churches of all kinds has been incredible; church people know that like the exiles of old, these people are making a commitment to life in a new land: build houses and life in them..plant trees and eat their fruit…marry… Put your children on the soccer team, join the PTA, take your kids to the birthday party…seek the welfare of the city to which I have sent you. This is the life of an immigrant. This good and faithful life so many find as they look for community in the midst of exile.

But to go a slightly different direction: what I find the most surprising about this Bible story and its metaphor of exile, is that you don’t have to be physically disconnected from your homeland in order to connect with this story. Exile is such a powerful idea because we have all some point felt isolated, removed from what we know, separated from what we once knew.

I wonder if you’ve ever had the experience of going through some difficult trial in life and feeling like you are not sure you know yourself anymore, almost like you have become a stranger in your own body. It happens all the time by people who suffer from addiction or other forms of mental illness, or when any of us experience periods of anxiety or depression. It even happens in the normal course of trying to manage stress, or adjust to some new challenge in life: becoming a parent, enduring a midlife crisis, transitioning to retirement, grieving the loss of a loved one. Often I visit with folks who say things like, “Some days I barely recognize myself.” This too is exile.

Now of course, we want to be a little bit careful, when we use the term exile to describe these more common and everyday examples, that we don’t minimize the suffering of the people I was talking about before—the immigrant or refugee, the person in serious, immediate danger. But the connection is actually an important one: the shared experience of exile, and the many forms in which it comes, can connect us with people who are different from ourselves, and awaken in us compassion for them. The crises endured by the refugee, the immigrant, the culture wide crises in addiction and loneliness that our country is facing—these challenges are met when people reach out in concern for others because we know what exile feels like. People who understand exile can see in everyone the need for community, and we invest ourselves in connecting with others.

Our congregation is a community that helps exiles find their way in life. We do this in all kinds of everyday but important ways. We help each other navigate parenthood and retirement and grief. We do it through the church’s 12-step programs for addicts; we house homeless families living on our third floor this very week. We’ve done it in the past year through our trips to the border in Texas to increase our understanding, and through a family we met there who we helped to settle in Cincinnati. All of these are stories of finding community in exile. It is often through helping others that we are blessed to find our own healing. We reach out in friendship because at some gut level we know what exile looks like; and when we live in community, we find that all God’s children are connected.

Let’s be frank about it: this is a stewardship sermon, and I hope that in hearing it, you will look for the pledge card coming in your mail this week, and will prayerfully consider how you will invest in this community in the year to come. I am not at all shy in sharing that message, because I believe that being a part of this community is a gift—I see it every day, and I want all of you to be invited to share in it, so that we can experience how very connected God hopes for us all to be.

I am so grateful for this community, and for its daily examples of people who give generously of their time, talent, and treasure. We do this so that people of all kinds, close by and far away, can find their way through times of exile, and become part of a community. And I am grateful that God gives us today’s story, one that we have all felt at one time or another: a story of exile invites us to a way out, a way out of loneliness into lives of connection: “Build houses and live in them. Plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters…multiply there and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city to which I have sent you…,” says the Lord, “…for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” Amen.

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Next week we’re going to be joined in both worship services and an after church lunch by Simran Jeet Singh and by interfaith neighbors in our Cincinnati community. I am really excited about this. Simran is a prolific speaker, author and professor of interreligious studies at Union Seminary in New York. I heard him speak at a church conference back in January and I immediately knew I wanted to share him with you. He will be wonderful addition to this current fall series on Finding Peace in Troubled Times.

Here's a story from Simran’s book. Simran is a follower of Sikhism, or Sikhi as they call it; He was born and raised in Texas, and he’s a brown guy who wears a turban. He’s a few years younger than me, so he lived through September 11 as a teenager and he can tell countless stories about racial profiling by people who assume he is a terrorist, about being told he could not wear his turban on the soccer field, and being told to “go back where he came from...” This is what his life has been like.

Air travel is a particular challenge for folks who look like Simran. One day his seatmate, an older white man, boarded the plane, took one look at him, harrumphed loudly and sat down. After ignoring Simran’s hello, he began to watch what Simran noticed was a right wing news channel on his phone; “[he sat there shaking] his head furiously every time [the program] showed images of refugees in camps and detention centers” as Simran wondered “What might he think of me? Was he going to confront me during the flight? Would I be safe?”

Facing up to his discomfort and resisting his own urge to make assumptions, Simran leaned in. He asked the man “Where are you headed…?” and after a couple more open-ended, friendly questions, the man opened up that he was headed back to Detroit following a chemo treatment, one he was convinced was not going to work. “We began to talk about family and friends who had deal with cancer,” he writes, “and then we began a deeper conversation that reflected on life and death: what we believed and how we wanted to live…” On that plane, two different people, who were probably both afraid of the other, made a connection.

Simran goes on to write: Perhaps our connection really changed something inside him. But then he wisely corrects himself: “It takes a lot more than a single conversation to move people, and changing people’s views isn’t my goal in moments like these. …tying our happiness to other people’s behaviors and outlooks will only leave us disappointed and dissastisfied. Instead, we must search for the common ground between us, the space where we are both one.” (129)

Simran is a wise teacher and practitioner when it comes to finding peace in troubled times. I find in his work aspects of Sikh tradition that are also common to our Christian tradition. There’s a thing Sikhism calls ik oankar—recognizing the divine light within one’s own life, and giving that same light to others; seeing the sacredness in others and in ourselves. Christians have a name for this too: we call it loving God and loving neighbor, or being created in the image of God. In both cases the lesson is the same. Peace does not come from changing someone else, or winning; but neither does peace come from ignoring the problems of the world as if they do not exist. Instead, we must live in ways that lead to peace in our own lives, while also remembering the needs of others and seeking what is best for the whole community. Peace is only found in a life of integrity that honors both our own spirituality and also the love of our neighbors.

Last week I preached a sermon that left me with no peace. I mean this in a good way, because I knew I would need to return to it this week. I wonder if any of you noticed it in the way I did. Last week we told the story of Joshua and the conquest of the Promised Land. We told Joshua’s story of gathering the elders of the 12 tribes at Shechem to renew their covenant with God. We talked about idolatry, the many ways in which wealth, power, or comfort pull us away from God. It was a good enough sermon, I hope God spoke through it, I stand by it as a solid interpretation. But there is only so much a sermon can accomplish in 15 minutes, and there was an aspect of last week’s message that haunted me, even as I was preaching it. Our tradition often selects readings that omit verses that might make us uncomfortable. As often as I can, I draw these verses back in and talk about them; not because I think I need to fix the Bible, but because I believe when there are parts of our history and tradition we are not proud of, we need to deal with them.

Last week what was skipped was the listing of peoples who were casualties of the conquest of the Promised Land. The story reads like this, God says: “I brought you to the land of the Amorites, who lived on the other side of the Jordan; they fought with you and I handed them over to you and you took possession of their land, and I destroyed them before you.” And it goes on to say the same about “…the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites…” and the obvious question seems to be, why? Why do these people have to suffer in order for God’s “chosen” people to thrive? Why must their land be taken and the people destroyed? Is that really what God wants? We cannot leave these questions unexplored. There is no peace in that.

There are explanations for these violent texts in the Bible. One is that these texts arise out of an ancient culture—tribal, violent, and full of daily threats to survival you and I can hardly imagine. So ancient literature is full of references that show how communities defended themselves by establishing unity in the face of outside threats. Building on that argument, the historical record outside of the Bible suggest that this whole “conquest” of Canaan by the Hebrews may never have happened—it was a mythology created to strengthen the bonds of the community that were necessary for survival. And finally, one might argue that these others groups were criticized not for their existence, but for their love of other gods, and that it is the extermination of those false gods and not the people, that is really the point of the story.

Even if all of that is true, I cannot just make peace with it. How can I worship a God, calling that God the God of love, the God of grace, the God of all creation, without wondering why that God choose to preference one dominant group of people and subject others to expulsion and extermination? I just can’t stand the thought of it.

Scriptures like this one have been a source of irreparable harm throughout history toward people who have lost their homelands and lives. They’ve lost their homes and lives to people who have felt “called by God” to colonize them. This is the thinking that convinced white settlers to expel Native Americans from their homes, and Europeans to force Jews out of their communities a century ago; it happened again when the State of Israel was established and Palestinians were expelled from their homes, and continues today in Gaza and the West Bank. And I could site countless other examples. These atrocities are often the result of government or military policies decided upon by the few while the many look on in horror; but in every one of these circumstances it is wrong, and yet it is a sin humanity seems to commit over and over again; and as long as we live in a world where we allow these tragedies to continue, there is no peace. There is no peace for a preacher who would prefer to talk about something else, or for regular people like all of us who do not wish to turn a blind eye while others suffer; and there is certainly no peace for people in so many conflict zones, all over the world, who keep losing their homes and lives.

And the great biblical tragedy is that this is all a corruption of God’s Word. This message of conquest is inconsistent with the teaching of the Bible. Thankfully, there are other Bible stories—ones that I believe take precedence over this story of conquest and tribalism in Joshua. I believe we honor God by telling Joshua’s story honestly, without taking any verses out; and we do better by remembering God’s more foundational stories, and telling them as often as we can.

One is the story in Genesis 12, familiar to many: God calls Abraham, saying, “Go to the land I will show you, and I will make of you a great nation…” You’ve probably heard that before. What often gets too little attention is the verse that follows that says “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” All the families of the earth shall be blessed. This is what God has in mind. Not a conquest of other peoples but an honoring of them all.

Christians may be more familiar with Jesus’ Parable of the Good Samaritan. In this story, a man is brutally beaten and left by the roadside to die, a priest and Levite pass by the man out of fear, but the Samaritan helps. I imagine many of you have heard good sermons about this story, and know: the priest and the Levite--these are a couple of examples of people we know, trust, and consider to be good. They leave the man to die. The Samaritan is the enemy—someone perceived as we might perceive the drug dealer, the person from the other political party, the one who gets on your nerves at work… The person we perceive to be the enemy, this is the person who helps.

The important part of this story isn’t the story itself, it’s the question that prompts Jesus to tell it, he is asked by a man in the crowd, “Jesus, who is my neighbor?” And the answer is obvious: your neighbor is not just the person who lives closest to you; it is the one who may be different. The neighbor, according to this story, is not the person you grill with at the block party or chat with on the sideline of the soccer game; the neighbor in this story is the person you fear and perceive to be a threat. The parable of the Good Samaritan isn’t told to get you to be nicer to the person who is part of your tribe, but to get us to behave humanely toward the person who is not. This is our tradition.

So much of this may seem at first to be tangential—how did I get down this road in a sermon that is supposed to be about finding peace in troubled times? Well, again, the starting point for me is that as I preached last week’s sermon, I had no peace. I was preaching a message of finding inner peace by placing our trust in God—and that’s a good message. But I could not stop wondering: what would be the reaction to such a sermon if it were listened to by a Palestinian from Gaza, or a Native American whose expansive native home was reduced to a reservation, or Simran Jeet Singh, our guest preacher for next week. He spent his childhood being barred from soccer games and skating rinks because he wears a turban, who is yelled at by strangers to go back to where he came from even though he was born and raised in Texas. What would any of them think to hear me preach Joshua 24 and conveniently skip over the verses that we don’t like. There is no peace in that.

Each Sunday when I walk up to the pulpit, I repeat to myself a simple mantra I was once taught by a mentor: he said, when you walk in the pulpit always remind yourself, “I have good news for these people…” The good news is that there are things we can do that encourage peace—peace for people who are suffering and also peace within our own souls. And thinking about both, peace within and peace without, love of God and love of neighbor, thinking about both kinds of peace is the only way you get either one.

Next week we’ll welcome Simran Jeet Singh and you’ll hear more of this message from one who will speak it much more eloquently than I have. He has a story to tell that I cannot, about being on the receiving end of fear and hate, and he tells it with a warmth and grace you must experience for yourself. I had to share him with you for many reasons, but among them is because of the ways we grow in understanding our own faith tradition by hearing the wisdom from another. Just about every week, I try to find a new way to remind you to love God and love neighbor, or that we are, all of us, created in the image of God, and so are you. How often, I fear, do I tell you those words and they lose their power because they have become too familiar? Our tradition is challenging and grace-filled in the very best of ways. Let’s hear it afresh, as next week we welcome and learn from our neighbors. I’ll see you then as we continue to explore how to find peace in troubled times. Amen.

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I have a favorite sermon illustration; I discovered it about 15 years ago. It may not be the best sermon illustration you’ll ever hear or the most important; it’s just that I remember the excitement I felt when I stumbled upon it. It opened for me a window into the wisdom of our tradition, and the challenge of being a person of faith, especially when we live through anxious times. I was visiting a friend at a house on a lake, when one morning I picked up a copy of National Geographic from the coffee table. It was in the early 2000s, when so many in my generation had come to see September 11, 2001 as a defining moment in history and in our lives, and on the day I opened the National Geographic I read an article that began like this:

“As the new century began, an epidemic of terrorism spread panic around the globe. In world capitals, leaders fortified their security and curtailed public appearances. Ordinary citizens felt unsafe walking the streets of major cities, while the terrorists themselves were like phantoms—everywhere and nowhere at the same time, seemingly able to strike at will. Terrorism became the preoccupation of police and politicians, bankers and business leaders. Headlines screamed out news of the latest outrage: “WASHINGTON STUNNED BY THE TRAGEDY” in one paper; “IN GREAT PERIL” in another. One horrific September terrorist attack, in the United States, sent the stock market reeling and sparked anti-immigrant sentiment. Another attack, in Madrid, plunged Spanish politics into turmoil over issues of war and peace. Politicians in the U.S. took to describing the war on terror as a struggle of good versus evil, while some religious leaders, quoting scripture, proclaimed the end of the world was at hand.

The year was 1901.” (National Geographic, November 2004, p.76)

The article went on to recount the political assassinations of Czar Alexander II and President William McKinley, the attempt on the life of French president Sadi Carnot, and the eventual terrorist assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the spark that ignited World War I. Terrorism—and the bitter fear it generates—the author argued, is nothing new.

Here’s what I heard when I read that article: People often want you to believe that the world is getting better or the world is getting worse, but the reality is that many things are staying the same. Whether its preaching, op-ed writing, political speeches, or just conversation, so much of persuasion is built on hope that everything is getting better or fear that everything is coming apart. But I believe that the arc of history and the story of faith suggests something else, something that may at first seem less motivational but I still believe this wisdom to be true for those who are willing to struggle with it: That the world has always been full of terrible evil as well as tremendous good, great blessings and horrible bad luck, war and peace, good presidents and bad ones, strong economies and recessions, joy and pain. But in the grand arc of history, human beings mostly stay the same. And the challenge of faith is to not be frightened by the fearmongers or duped by illusions that all our troubles are behind us, but to keep your cool, trust God, and still to get up each day ready to do the right thing.

There’s a Bible story I want to tell you today, a story for today and for all times; it is foundational to understanding the story of God. It appears at the end of the Book of Joshua. After receiving the Law and wandering in the wilderness for 40 years, the Hebrews have finally made their way to the Promised Land. On the surface of things, you would assume that things are going well. But trouble is at the door, for the people have become lazy in their faith. They are not observing their religious practices, which means they are also missing its reminders to take care of one another. They have forgotten who they are, and are worshipping other gods—idols. It is at this time that Joshua, God’s chosen leader for them, calls the elders of the tribes together and he puts a choice before them, a choice that becomes a famous turn of phrase in Scripture: “choose this day whom you will serve…” he says, “but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” The idea is simple, and even though our culture lacks the same idols, the message is as relevant today as ever: do not put your faith in the false gods of this world: in a president or party, the state of the stock market, the latest self-help trend or the escapism you can find in a drug or a drink. None of these fleeting and temporary fixes will help you to find peace in the midst a stormy world; the only way is to place your trust in God. God is the one who is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and will be there when all of the idols pass into oblivion and when the troubles of today are but a distant memory.

So Joshua asked them, “choose this day whom you will serve…” They nodded their heads, but soon many of them walked away. We know that because later in scripture, when things really fell apart, people look back and say, “See, see, we didn’t listen when Joshua tried to call us to account, we stopped listening to God and caring for one another.” We also know that people walked away because, let’s face it, faith isn’t a very attractive offer.

This story an argument about faith vs. idolatry, and idolatry is one of those biblical ideas that often feels judgmental or irrelevant or worse. Idols, whether ancient statues or the modern versions, represent power, wealth, or influence, escapism or comfort, easy tangible answers. So in the Bible, idols are represented by gold, armies, power and accolades, the seduction of physical beauty, and natural metaphors like plants that will grow without soil or water (otherwise known as weeds). Faith, on the other hand, is characterized by other metaphors: deeply-rooted seed that is planted in rich soil, the bread of life and the cup of salvation that fills our souls, and living water that never leaves us thirsty. Faith has no such quick fix or easy attraction. Faith is the stuff of wisdom gained with trial and error, practice and patience. Some days it tastes like a feast, but other days it tastes like the crumbs swept from the floor. We cannot control it; our friends and neighbors often believe it to be nonsense, it will almost never help you get ahead. Imagine how crazy they must have thought Joshua to be when he gathered them together at Shechem and claimed: “choose this day whom you will serve…but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

Another problem with faith is what it demands of us. I realize when I suggest that things are staying the same, it might sound as if I’m inviting you to ignore the world and its needs, as if what you do doesn’t matter, but that is NOT what I am suggesting. For the ancient Hebrews, trusting God and following God’s law meant loving God and loving one’s neighbor. It meant spiritual wholeness and justice and compassion for the world. And the very same is true for us. Loving God today means that you DO care what’s going on in Palestine and Israel; you DO care about public policies that care for the poor and create opportunities for all people; you DO give of yourself generously as a way of loving God, because, as Jesus said it, “when you did it to the least of these, you did it to me.” This way of living is inconvenient and time consuming and requires daily, lifelong commitment. Why would anyone do it?

Well, here’s one idea: Many of us look around in the world and see momentous problems and immense suffering and it threatens to paralyze us and make us want to give up. The only way to keep going is to ask God for the strength to keep on going, keep on caring, and keep on loving. When we remember that God is the one holding our anxieties with us, we can find the peace we need to keep going in the world—the peace that comes from no idol, no quick fix, no earthly possession you cannot take with you, nothing else and nothing less than God.

I’m going to make a confession: that there is plenty that I’m nervous about these days as I read the newspaper, think about the future of our country, or imagine the horrific events taking place in some of the world’s most desperate places. I am often unsure of how best to respond. But on my better days…I remember the promise of our tradition that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and I remember the challenge of Joshua to choose whom I will serve. Our culture is overwhelmed by voices of fear, and quick fixes that do not last. I want something more. Faith invites people to act sacrificially on behalf of justice, to give generously, to listen patiently to learn about those who are different, to commit to a way of life that has no easy answers and many big questions. On my better days I want that life.

Rev. David Annett: Today in an act of worship, you join our staff as one of our installed pastors; it won’t change your day-to-day life and responsibilities dramatically, but it is a designation that is appropriate and overdue for someone who has already done so much ministry here at Knox.

I once read that there is really only one significant difference between pastors and everyone else in the church. Pastors make a commitment to let other people watch us as we struggle. Whether it is in the pulpit or in a one-on-one meeting, or teaching at Knox Youth Group, we do our best work when we allow people to watch us struggle as we try to understand what God is up to in the world.

Dave, many days I do not know how best to do this work; I’m sure the same is true for you. But today, as we hear this story of Joshua who invites the tribes to renew their covenant with God, it gives me a chance to renew an invitation to you, and to all of us gathered here. Join me on my better days; and join me on the rest of the days when we are unsure, or frustrated or afraid, let us encourage one another: to work together as we place our trust in God, love one another, and discover what it means to truly serve the Lord.

What I do know is this… No matter what this season of life brings, Knox Presbyterian Church will need to do God’s work: to serve those in need, to give sacrificially, to provide care for those who are struggling in body and in spirit, to worship God and remind the world of beauty and truth, and to never abandon the big, troublesome questions of faith in favor of the easy idolatries that surround us. Only in holding to our faith, only in serving the Lord, will we find peace in the storm. We will go together. Amen.

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Resilience is a quality we want in life. Sure, it’s nice to have good luck and avoid struggle. But let’s face it, everyone is bound to have hard times. So it’s more important to be able to live through hard times, than to avoid struggle. This idea will sound familiar to parents in the room who have just sent their children back to school. You’ve probably heard a teacher or administrator say that a good education does not insulate our children from struggle, but allows them enough challenge to develop some inner strength, to learn to dust themselves off, to cultivate…resilience.

Like many good ideas, this wisdom can be traced back to the Bible. Richard Rohr is a popular spiritual guide; I know that some of you read his daily online devotional. This week he wrote about the idea of Order, Disorder, and Reorder. He explains: “It seems quite clear that we grow spiritually by passing beyond some perfect Order, through an often painful and seemingly necessary disorder to an enlightened Reorder or “resurrection.” (Rohr, Center for Action and Contemplation, Sunday, August 25). I’ve told you in the past Walter Brueggemann’s theory that the Book of Psalms is can be divided in to three types: Psalms of Orientation, Disorientation, and Reorientation, each suited to different stages on the journey of faith. Plenty of other theologians and interpreters have made similar observations. I’ve shared that the band The Grateful Dead used to plan concerts in this way—taking listeners on a journey from simple happiness through disorientation on the way to deeper joy at the end. All kinds of depth, and certainly deep faith is formed not by avoiding trouble, but is forged through the crucible of living through hard times.

Psalm 34 is the text for today, it’s a Psalm of reordering, of reorientation, and of thanksgiving. It’s based on a story from elsewhere in the Old Testament. Tradition has it that this psalm is about the young man who would become King David. It’s a story of resilience, a story about a young boy who is just coming of age. After the story in which the boy David slays Goliath, a convoluted series of events takes place, and David falls on hard times. Saul, who is king over Israel at the time, is at first overjoyed that this shepherd boy David slays the great warrior Goliath and sends the Philistines running in fear. After that, David becomes a great hero, and is welcomed into the palace. People forget about Saul the King, and Saul gets jealous and turns on David. Saul’s jealousy makes him crazy, and Saul chases David out of the palace running for his life; Saul’s son, the Prince Jonathan, tries to help David, but Saul’s army has been ordered to chase him down, and Goliath’s Philistines are just across the border hungry for revenge, so safety is hard to find. David somewhat miraculously finds his way through this mess, and as the story goes, when he is finally out of danger and has a chance to rest, he composes this Psalm, with its words of thankfulness for deliverance from harm.

It's a rather dramatic story with its kings and armies and running for your life, but the Psalm that results has all kinds of applications. Many of us have had the occasion to have narrowly escaped danger or ruin, perhaps we’ve even had a brush with death. This psalm is about the car accident that should have killed you but didn’t, the terrible mistake at work that somehow didn’t ruin your career—or that did, but taught you a life-changing lesson. This is a psalm for survivors of cancer, soldiers who made it home from war, addicts who got clean. These are words sung by any person who has seen enough trouble to know that the world isn’t always safe, but they’re okay. So there’s a real sense of gratitude here—a chance to take a deep breath, reconsider one’s old priorities, and try not to take for granted the second chance they’ve got. It’s a Psalm about resilience. Listen again:

I will bless the Lord at all times;his praise shall continually be in my mouth.2 My soul makes its boast in the Lord;let the humble hear and be glad.3 O magnify the Lord with me,and let us exalt his name together.

4 I sought the Lord, and he answered me,and delivered me from all my fears.5 Look to him, and be radiant;so your[a] faces shall never be ashamed.6 This poor soul cried, and was heard by the Lord,and was saved from every trouble.7 The angel of the Lord encampsaround those who fear him, and delivers them.8 O taste and see that the Lord is good;happy are those who take refuge in him. (Psalm 34:1-8)

It’s a Psalm of resilience. David sings that he was “delivered from fear” and “saved from trouble” and that he had “cried” and was answered. There is no sense, in the Psalm or in the story, that David’s life was without trouble or struggle; God did not insulate or protect David from harm. No, these things were real; David experienced them but lived through it. David saw on the other side that God is not there to keep harm from ever reaching us, but David comes to know the presence of God in the midst of it, to call upon God in times of trouble, and to see how God’s love can bring us through it. Children will not grow into functioning adults with no experiences of fear or danger. Likewise, a mature person of faith will have times of disbelief, doubt, and struggle—and the faith found on the other side of such things, is deeper.

I want to comment on a couple of specific verses: The first words of the Psalm are a bit surprising, they read, “I will bless the Lord at all times.” Most of us think of a blessing as something that God does, rather than us. David’s story does suggest that God blessed David; but then David’s Psalm expands our understanding: speaking of blessings as our work as well. What is a blessing, anyway? A blessing is the offering of an encouraging and uplifting word to someone else. A blessing is anything one might say to another that serves as a reminder: that you are gifted, and valuable, that your life is sacred. Clearly God is not the only one who can offer such words—we can do it too.

Offering God our blessing takes it a step further. To bless the Lord is to name God as the source of everything in life that is valuable and sacred. In David’s case, he discovers God’s presence in his struggle, and he is so grateful that he cannot keep silent. Many of us can hear echoes of that in people we’ve met; people who have felt God’s presence and feel compelled to talk about it: “I can’t take any credit for how I got through that; I didn’t know it at the time, but God was watching me.” “I sought the Lord and he answered me,” says the Psalm. “God delivered me from all my fears.”

I also love the words of verse 8: “O Taste and See that the Lord is good.” Because of what has happened in his life, David has a new appreciation for the beauty of the world and the importance of little things. He can taste God’s goodness in a way he never could before—it has become so vivid and immediate. Most of us know people who can see this as well. The world, though it is full of trouble and struggle, is also just dripping with beauty and goodness. The ripe end-of-summer tomato, the coolness of a jump in the lake, the simple perfection of reading to a child… Sometimes life just kind of sings it: “O taste and see that the Lord is good.”

Of course, there’s a theological risk to a text and a story like this one. There is the chance that survival or good fortune becomes a sign of God’s love. But what about when things don’t work out? Is that a sign that God blesses some and not others? Well, at least as far as this psalm goes, God’s love might be even deeper when things don’t work out. I’ve witnessed that, sometimes, God’s love is felt even more deeply by those who are still struggling, and that is the last place I want to go this morning, to an idea that has something to do with resilience, but is much deeper still.

I had an experience this week I’d like to tell you about; I’m sharing this story with permission. Plenty of you know Judy Rymer, a member of our congregation who is dying of pancreatic cancer. Judy is in her mid-80s, and has made an intentional decision to decline treatment.

The short number of weeks since have been full of surprises. She has been surrounded by friends from this community who love her. She has shared important letters and conversations with her dearest friends. And she has told me on several occasions that her sense of spirituality has come to life like never before; she is in fact a more spiritual person than she knew. And none of this changes the fact that her earthly journey is almost at its end.

This past week Judy and I had an experience that, I am grateful to say, I have had plenty of other times in the past. Which is to say it is a story about a miracle, but the kind of miracle that happens all the time. I took Communion to Judy in her home, where she is in hospice care. There is nothing fancy about home Communion. I have a little traveling Communion kit that looks a bit like a child’s chemistry set. I took out the little cups and the bread, sat on the bed at her side, her husband Glenn and her dear friend Deanna joined us. I began to recite the words of the liturgy, just as I do once a month here in worship; when I did, I noticed that Judy’s eyes brightened and sharpened, she was intensely focused and listening deeply, not just with her ears but with her heart; the Holy Spirit was alive in the room. And after we had shared the bread and cup, she remarked, “I’ve heard those words so many times; but they’ve never been so powerful as they were just now, speaking as if directly to me. Thank you.”

Of course it was not me she was thanking, but God. I was blessed just to be there. And I was glad when she told me it would be alright to share that story with all of you today. God is present all around us; sometimes we discover it on the other side of a path to resilience; other times we find God right in the middle of the struggle. None of us will cheat death. Judy does not have many days left, and she knows how this will end. And yet the presence of God is expansive in her life at this time. Too often we fail to speak of God’s power in our lives because we are waiting for all our troubles to be over; we often wait for a funeral to say the things that are most important, or we don’t say them at all because we are scared or embarrassed, or just unsure.

Do not delay. God does not promise a life without struggle, but God is with us, each and every day. God is present with us, even when the struggle is ongoing. We are surrounded with signs of it all the time, if we are wise enough to see them. We can speak words of blessing to other people, and about God; when we do, we remind them and remind ourselves of the blessings of this life, and embrace them while we can. O taste and see that the Lord is good. Amen.

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This morning we’re going to talk about a passage from the Book of Proverbs. Proverbs is known as Wisdom Literature in the Bible. You might have the impression that Proverbs is just a sort of collection of wise sayings, kind of like the fortune cookie of the Bible. But its much more than that. This collection of wisdom sayings from the Bible is excellent material for personal prayer and meditation. It’s authors reflect on ideas like trust in God, wisdom in parenting, fidelity, straightforwardness, discipline, friendship, temperance, diligence, and simplicity. Notably, in this sacred text, which comes from long ago and often errs on the side of patriarchy, wisdom is personified as a woman; the Old Testament likewise speaks of the Spirit of God in the same way. Proverbs is a recipe for the things that bring about the good life. And contrary to the common assumption that the good life is boring, Proverbs does not represent some kind of joyless moralistic drudgery; no, this is an encouraging invitation to a happy life one can live with a sense of real integrity. I highly recommend spending some time of your own in this book!

This is the third sermon in my four part Back to School series studying some less-familiar texts in the Bible. Let us pray: God, help us spend some time with wisdom this morning. Wisdom is a hard thing to come by, and we often get lost in our search for it. But it is a gift from You and a treasure worth seeking. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight; for you, O Lord, are our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

If I ask you to think about someone who is a truly great host, I bet there is someone who comes to mind for you. Someone whose door is always open and whose welcome is always generous. Their smile is broad and their arms are open. They are a great conversationalist and listener. They are not pretentious or stuffy, but warm and easygoing. Everyone is comfortable with them.

My friend Ed who comes to mind; I got to know him during the years I spent in Chicago. In those days I was in charge of worship at a church that had services throughout the day on Sundays, and I was usually at work from 7am-6pm. I lived alone at the time and Ed’s kids had grown up and moved out, so many Sunday evenings, we would grab dinner together and then find ourselves on his porch with a scotch and a cigar solving the world’s problems into the evening. We remain good friends and it’s not unheard of for us continue our Sunday night ritual via an occasional Zoom call.

Lots of people experience Ed as a great host. Ed and I led several medical mission trips to Guatemala—he was the logistical director, managing all the details and I was the chaplain, praying with patients and offering daily devotions. The doctors and nurses were serving in challenging and emotionally draining circumstances. But even though I was the minister, Ed was usually the one who knew about everyone’s problems and struggles. It was not at all uncommon for him to nudge me during the day: “Bob just had a difficult outcome with one of the patients—you might want to check in with him.” “I’m not sure if you know, but Susan is having a rough time in her marriage back at home.” “Did you know that Tim recently lost his father?” Ed was doing pastoral care triage for me all the time because people so easily opened up to him. Whether in his own home or a hospital in Guatemala, Ed is a great host.

The Book of Proverbs says that wisdom is like a great host.

“Wisdom has built her house,she has hewn her seven pillars.2 She has slaughtered her animals, she has mixed her wine,she has also set her table.3 She has sent out her servant-girls, she callsfrom the highest places in the town,4 ‘You that are simple, turn in here!’To those without sense she says,5 ‘Come, eat of my breadand drink of the wine I have mixed.6 Lay aside immaturity,[a] and live,and walk in the way of insight.’ (Proverbs 9:1-6)

One of the main ideas woven throughout Proverbs is about the nature of wisdom, and about the opposite of wisdom, which is folly. So the book weaves the contrast between wisdom and folly through a variety of different examples and metaphors, and the most prominent one culminates in today’s reading from chapter 9 where, as I said, wisdom is the host.

This morning’s text suggests that you might imagine yourself walking through the streets of the city and observing wisdom at her house; her door is open, her table set, wine and food prepared, and there she stands at the doorway, welcoming you in so that you may sit at table with her, learn her ways and maybe a bit of wisdom will rub off on you as well.

Renewing my study of Proverbs this past week, I discovered the author pointing out that, at first, folly looks a lot like wisdom—folly disguises itself as wisdom even though it is really quite the opposite. So in Proverbs 9, folly entices passersby with a similar setup as wisdom, but none of the substance. Listen to these verses later in chapter 9 about folly as the host:

“The foolish woman is loud;she is ignorant and knows nothing.14 She sits at the door of her house,on a seat at the high places of the town,15 calling to those who pass by,who are going straight on their way,16 ‘You who are simple, turn in here!’And to those without sense she says,17 ‘Stolen water is sweet,and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.’18 But they do not know that the dead[c] are there,that her guests are in the depths of Sheol. (Prov 9:13-18)

Folly looks a bit like wisdom, door open, welcoming us into her home. But folly stole her food and wine rather than preparing it herself; she is lazy in her preparations and has no guidance to share that is enduring.

It’s like wisdom is the knowledge gained from great traditions, from deep experience and reflection, from time tested knowledge for all generations. By contrast, folly is like the worst book on the self-help shelf; folly is the internet influencer who once stumbled on a good idea, and now curses people with daily posts full of ignorance.

There are so many ways in life that folly disguises itself as wisdom. Folly is the relationship that seemed fun at first but quickly turned out to be toxic. Folly is the guilty pleasure that might have been okay, but then it turned into an addiction. Folly is the positive value that became excessive and turned rotten: industry that evolves into greed, the weight loss plan that turned into an obsession with being thin, the close relationship between a parent and a child that became co-dependent. Folly shows up in so many ways—and looks so much like wisdom! Folly is attractive and enticing, but without wisdom’s depth.

It takes character, discipline, and usually some trial and error to distinguish between wisdom and folly; people have been trying to figure it out since time began. Long before the Book of Proverbs, the Bible is always developing this quest for wisdom. The Mosaic Law begins the Old Testament with the idea that God is present in the world, the righteous prosper and the wicked are punished and the world makes sense. This is wisdom. But later in Old Testament history, things change: the kingdoms fall apart, the Temple is destroyed, the people go into exile in Babylon and the voices begins to question wisdom: suddenly people are saying that the world and it’s wisdom is upside down—it is the righteous who are naïve, the wicked seem to be prospering, and you have to look out for #1. So the holy scriptures try to help people navigate these complex realities of life, and that’s how wisdom literature is born. When Proverbs suggests that folly looks a lot like wisdom, it is warning us against abandoning God’s ways when things get tough. It takes character and discipline to separate wisdom from folly, but in order for God to one day set right things that seem to be falling apart, we cannot abandon the principles of love, grace, and goodness that God set us in the world to live by.

God knows how difficult it is to tell wisdom from folly, so the Bible is full of stories in which people fall away from wisdom. Repeatedly, these people are forgiven, welcomed back into God’s fold, and given a chance to try again. Some of you may not know the stories of the Old Testament well, but may remember Jesus’ story of the Prodigal Son, the quintessential story of wisdom found only on the far side of a journey through folly.

God knows that all of us are a mix of wisdom and folly. And God gives us each other as friends and guides in the search for wisdom. Earlier, I might have led you to believe that my friend Ed is synonymous with wisdom, or that I am wise in his presence; the reality is less remarkable: we’ve gotten into plenty of trouble together, and much of our friendship is characterized by folly. But the gift of friendship is the presence of one who not only helps you find wisdom, but who welcomes you even in your folly. It’s no accident that my friendship with Ed started at church, because these are the kinds of friendships church should give us; these friendships are built on the stories we see in the Bible.

In light of the gift that Christian friendship has been for me, I’m inviting you to something that may lead you the same way. Tonight, at the first of three fall gatherings we’re calling Feast, we’re going to be talking about friendship—no reservations are required, and I hope you will come.

The author David Brooks has a book called How to Know a Person. Like most of his writing, it draws heavily upon ideas from the Bible. Later this afternoon, at Feast, I’ll be talking more about that book. The book has a lot to teach us about meaningful friendship. At one point, as he talks about listening, Brooks writes something that sounds like it came right out of Proverbs: “When you are listening,” he says, “you are like the host at a dinner party. You have set the scene. You’re exuding warmth toward your guests, showing how happy you are to be with them, [and] drawing them closer to where they want to go.” (Brooks, 75-6) There are specific things we can do to be this kind of a host—not gimmicks, but practices we can adopt that lead to richer deeper conversations, and tonight we’ll be introducing some of those ideas through Brooks’ work.

Friendship is where we want to start as we search for wisdom. Wisdom is a house with an open door, a host with open arms, a table with food that nourishes the soul, surrounded by friends who meet with compassion and laughter, as they talk about the follies that have led them to greater wisdom. It’s a metaphor from the Book of Proverbs, and it is there for us to think about as we try to be this thing called church. Amen.

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A few weeks ago, we heard on a Sunday from RJ Roberts, the Program Director over at our partner Third Presbyterian Church in East Westwood; among other things, he told us about the Peace and Hope Lifestyle, which is their program that seeks to lead young people into a way of life that is an alternative to gun violence and gang life. Just this past week I met another one of their new team members, a young man who spend 15 years in prison, and said it was long enough that when he came out and was given an opportunity to reconnect with people he had once known at Third Church, he was ready for a new and better life—and he wanted to share that message with other young people. How does that happen? How it is possible that a person who has so many reasons around him in life to believe that there is no way out; how does one imagine another way? That’s what we’re going to talk about this morning.

This is my Back to School sermon series, meaning that a few weeks ago I admitted to you that I’ve fallen off in my Bible study habits. I’m renewing those efforts by preaching on texts that are less familiar to me, that I’ve never preached on before—so I have to study. And I’m enjoying that—it’s good to learn new things. Today we’re in Psalm 78 and right at the start what I have to share is that I wish I had so much more time with this text. I wish there had been more time to study and prepare, and I wish I had much more time to preach this morning because there is just so much going on in this text that is worth talking about.

Psalm 78 is the second longest of the Psalms, 119 is by far the longest at 176 verses, but Psalm 78 has 72 verses—so we didn’t read the whole thing this morning. These longer psalms often share history in the form of poetry; you might compare that to epic poems of the ancient Greeks or even to modern songs like Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire. The point isn’t primarily to report history, but to remember and reflect on it. But why? What’s the point?

When I read the Bible in preparation for a sermon, I often start by wondering about what problem or issue is being addressed by this text? What question might a person be asking to which this text gives an answer, or at least, a response. The issue that spoke to me in this text is, “What kind of life do I want to live? What message do I want my life to speak?” More specifically, “Do I want the way I live, the things I say and do to show negativity, criticism, and despair, or do I want my life to speak of possibility, encouragement, and hope? How will my life speak?” Let’s take a look at Psalm 78 together and I’ll tell you how I got there.

The verse of this Psalm that really spoke to me is in verse 4 where the poet writes, “we will tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord.” This is a Psalm about what we teach our children, what we pass on to the next generation, and what we tell ourselves about life in the world. Is this a world of corruption and despair, or is it a world of hope and possibility? What do we wish to teach our children and tell ourselves about life in this world?

The answer comes in looking at the rest of the Psalm’s 72 verses, which remember the amazing things God has done in history; tragically, it also remembers the lack of gratitude human beings tend to show in response. So often God is showing up with grace, and hope; and we’re too busy to notice, too stuck in our own ways to care, or too pessimistic to believe.

According to biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann, this psalm is one of many Old Testament references back to a foundational story in the Bible, found in Genesis 18. The story is about Abraham and Sarah. This is the ancient couple to whom God first gave the promise: from you will come a great nation and descendants like the stars in the sky. But Abraham and Sarah waited for decades, and the promise was not fulfilled; they never had a single child. As this story begins, they are quite old, and one day three travelers appear at the door of their tent in the wilderness. Abraham and Sarah welcome the travelers, who turn out to be angels, but when the angels remind them of the promise and inform them that it is about to be fulfilled, Sarah overhears them and laughs out loud. As many of you will know, the promise turns out to be true, Sarah does conceive and bears a son, who continues the lineage that will become the twelve great tribes of Israel. Also from this family come the descendants of Hagar and her son Ishmael to which Islam traces its roots, and so all the great religions of the western world find their foundation in this story—which is a story of imaginative hope!

The point of this story about Sarah laughing and the reason this story is foundational in the Bible is this: you never, never, question God’s freedom! You never take away the idea that God can act and act in power and glory in the face of anything that might cause you to fear or despair. God’s ways may not be our ways, and what you want may not always be what you get, but God’s freedom will not be laughed at—for with God, all things are possible.

This story, from Genesis 18, is what Psalm 78 is talking about when it says “we will tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord.” Our children will not grow up as hopeless or helpless; no, they will grow up believing that they were placed in the world by God of loving, grace-filled imagination, whose freedom runs wild in the world.

Psalm 78 goes on to give other examples of the ways that story about Abraham and Sarah is relived again and again in the history of the Bible. One of them is the story of manna in the wilderness. In that story, the Israelites have left Egypt, they’ve been released from slavery, but they don’t know how to be free. Even though they have seen God bring the great plagues over their slavemasters in Egypt and the the Red Sea parted in two, somehow when the people find themselves free and liberated on the other side of the sea, they come to fear that they will die there of hunger. So the Lord sends bread from heaven to feed and reassure them. And if we had enough time, I’d unpack that story for you as well, because it’s much more complex than many of us realize, with little nudges and turns of phrase that reveal it to be a story about so many big ideas, about faith and doubt, scarcity and abundance, generosity and sharing, and learning to live as a people who are bold and not afraid. This—says Psalm 78—this is the kind of story we want to teach our children, this is what we want them to know about living a good life in God’s world, and the Psalm is 72 verses long because it references story after story in the history of the world where God shows up in imaginative hope again and again and again.

Developmental psychologists will affirm this biblical idea of what we want to teach our children. Erik Erikson’s classic theory of psychosocial development claims that at every stage of life, human beings who develop in a healthy way are making a series of choices—as we grow, we are learning our way into trust instead of mistrust, industry instead of inferiority, intimacy instead of isolation, generativity instead of stagnation, integrity instead of despair. This is the path healthy people are on. Each of these stages of development run the risk of going wrong when conditions are not healthy, and all of them are built on the same basic idea: we are trying, in the midst of life’s challenges, to become people who experience hope and faith in a world they know and trust, rather than despair in a world they see as impossible. Being on the right side of this kind of development depends on support from good parents, friends, teachers, and guides, who help us to grow into mature people. This is why we have to teach our children.

Similarly, God’s approach to teaching us to live with hope isn’t just a bunch of naivety and positive thinking. If you read Psalm 78 in its entirety, it’s full of not only wonderful stories about how God shows up in the world, but also hard memories—chastisements in fact—about the many ways that humankind keeps on turning away from God. Each time that God shows up to renew the relationship with humanity, it’s because we’ve gone astray, and a strong element of what Psalm 78 wants to teach us is to learn from the past and stop doing that. Trust in God, and stop leaning on your own understanding.

Erik Erikson argued that those developmental stages don’t end in childhood, they last our whole lives, and in the same way, this Psalm asks, “what will we teach our children?” but that question is equally about how we all are living as adults.

Grown-ups too need to live with a sense of imagination too: Walter Brueggemann, who I mentioned before, says stories like these are trying to teach us a “hopeful imagination.” We too often limit our ideas of imagination to the child who wants to be a Disney princess or a Transformer, but imagination is, in fact, how adults make the world go round. Imagination—the notion that things can be different than they are—is at the heart of every great invention and innovation—that’s probably obvious. But imagination is also what gets us unstuck from the greatest challenges and frustrations in life. The ability to imagine things as different and better than they are is the key to fixing a broken relationship with a spouse or a child, finding our way through a crisis with career or our finances, a struggle with addiction, or dullness in our spiritual lives. Collective, social problems also require hopeful imagination—that’s usually what it takes to end conflicts like the terrible ones we see today in Sudan, in Gaza and in Ukraine, or in our own country around intractable problems like opioid abuse or gun violence. Do you remember the story I began with this morning—about the Peace and Hope Lifestyle? I have no way of knowing or explaining how an individual who spent 15 years in prison could imagine a new and different life apart from crime and gangs—but if he can do it, so can any of us. The only explanation I can give you is the power of the story of God.

Perhaps you think that you’re too old or too reasonable for imagination, perhaps you hear these Bible lessons and think to yourself, well thanks Adam, but I don’t really need imagination—you see I’ve been around the block and I’ve seen a few things; I know how the real world works. Well, that’s imagination too. Based on our life experience, all of us can look at what is in front of us and imagine the worst. How many of you have sat worrying about things, imagining the worst of what might happen, stuck in a cycle of despair. Psalm 78 admits as much—this is the kind of imagining that humans usually do. The question is: Is that how you want to live?

I know that some of you will say that life doesn’t always turn out hopeful—that sometimes the bad news comes to pass. You would be right, and the world is full of that news, I hear it every day, same as you. It’s important to note that the Psalms talk about that too. Perhaps you’ve heard these quotations: “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept…; Out of the depths I cry to you God…, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me…?” These also are the words of the psalms—and they each have their purpose. But folks, these are not philosophical discourses, meant to unpack every angle of a problem and leave no idea unexplored. No! It’s poetry! And the poem we read today is about a reality we have all seen in people we have met. We all know folks who walk through the world with dismay you can read on their faces, convinced that the world is going to hell—and they want to take you with them! And we all know people who are full of hope and possibility, ready with a good word about what God has done—and they too want to bring you along. And the reality is that most of us find ourselves somewhere in the middle, trying to decide which way we will go and who we are going to be.

So the Bible gives us this Psalm, as a reminder of possibility. A hopeful imagination. In our turnings away from God, we have created a life of many challenges, many horrors in fact, many things to fear, it is true. But those who have looked deeply and seen much, many of them know that we have two ways to respond—we can despair, yes. But the teacher of today’s Psalm has something else to say: Give ear, O my people, to my teaching; incline your ears to the words of my mouth…WE will tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord…and the wonders that God has done.” Amen.

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If you were here last week, you know that I made a bit of a confession—my personal Bible study habits have fallen off lately in favor of other demands. What difference does that make? Well, like most preachers, for a time I can fake my way through sermons on material I already know, but if we’re all committed to growing in our faith, I too must take the time to be learning new things and seeking to grow. So I committed to you that in the next month I will preach on several passages of scripture I’ve never studied before, in order to renew my commitment, and enjoy learning something new. In light of the time of year, I’m calling this little series Back to School.

What follows today is my past week of looking more deeply into two stories: the feeding of the 5000 and Jesus walking on the water. Some of you will say, “Really Adam: you’ve been a pastor for almost 20 years and you’ve never studied these stories? Well, yes, I have, but John’s version of these two accounts is different, and rather less popular than the same stories as they are told in the other Gospels, and this week I decided to explore why. And what I discovered is this: two stories that challenge us to deepen our wonder about the world. Where has the world lost its wonder for you? A relationship that feels stuck. An addiction that will always defeat you. A political situation that is unsolvable. A social problem that is too broken to fix. Today’s story seeks to expand our wonder about God, so we can renew our wonder about the world.

The more popular accounts of these two stories appear in Matthew and Mark. Common to all accounts of the feeding of the 5000, the “problem” is that people are hungry. Preachers often focus on what Jesus says to the disciples; in Matthew and Mark, Jesus says to the disciples: “You give them something to eat”—as if the problem is theirs to solve. Out of that, preachers offer messages about generous sharing, suggesting that the disciples went around and discovered that many in the crowd, had brought along some kind of food for the journey—the sharing of the five loaves and two fish inspired others to do likewise and soon there was enough for everyone.

Likewise, when it comes to the story of Jesus walking on the water; sermons often have a similar focus on rational explanation: Perhaps there was something about the salt content of the water that made Jesus seem to float. Perhaps Jesus knew where the sandbars were, but Peter, who sinks, did not.

These messages are fine, but also disappointing. Why would we take two stories that mean to deal in genuine spiritual amazement, and try to reduce them to something we can understand? I’m not alone in this frustration. Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann says: “I cannot tell how many times I have heard these two stories of Jesus “explained” in “naturalistic” terms, as if they are not gospel wonders but are only commonsense performances. They are not commonsense,” Brueggemann corrects, “but rather are summonses and invitations to another world.” (Brueggemann, Delivered into Covenant, 18).

So John’s version, which I discovered this week, is different. Contrary to the more commonly preached stories in Matthew and Mark, which might tempt preachers to make these stories easy for you, John actively resists our efforts to explain the story away. Let’s track through the story together and I’ll show you some things I noticed.

The basic elements of the story are the same—there’s a large gathering of people following Jesus, the problem of feeding them all presents itself; and a solution comes through the discovery of two fish and five loaves that will end up feeding them all. This story is apparently important because its one of the few stories that appears in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—hardly any other stories of Jesus do.

Here’s a first difference: In all four accounts, the story opens with a setting near the Sea of Galilee, but John adds an additional comment: that it is also known as the Sea of Tiberias. Why is this included? Tiberias, you may know, was the Roman Emperor at the time—that renaming of a body of water was a way of reminding local people of their occupiers—it’s like the annoying renaming of sports and civic venues to remind us of what we’re supposed to be buying. John includes this note becuase he's going to make some kind of point about the Romans.

The next thing that happens in each version of the story is that Jesus has an exchange with the disciples about the problem of feeding all these people. In John’s version, Jesus asks the disciple Philip, “Where will we buy bread for all these people?” and Philip replies that they don’t have enough money. Then it is acknowledged that a boy has brought along five loaves and two fish and from these, the people will be fed. This exchange with Philip is different than in the other versions in that it tells us plainly that Jesus knows what he intends to do about feeding the people—he’s not leaving it up the disciples; also, John’s account is very clear in stating that the five loaves and two fish are indeed the source of feeding all the people, quote, “…Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to all who were seated.” These details prevent any rational explanation for what is taking place. There’s no sharing of food that everyone already had in their backpacks—Jesus does something amazing.

My hunch is that the other accounts, from Matthew and Mark, became more popular in the past few centuries, because they leave enough ambiguity for a rational explanation—and we like rationality. If you want to make the argument that the two fish and five loaves inspired other people to share, there’s room for that interpretation. But not in John. John is going to force us to talk about the power of God.

In the next part of the story, the reference to the Romans reappears and adds to John’s argument. The other accounts each say that in between the feeding story and the walking on the water, Jesus goes off to pray. John’s account is different. John says that after the amazement of the feeding story, “…Jesus realized that [the people] were about to come and take him by force to make him king, [so] he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.” John makes the unique point, that Jesus is not another Tiberias—he will not be confused with one of their earthly kings. He will not have God’s mission reduced to that kind of earthly glory—he is at work on something that is much, much bigger.

Finally, the walking on the water. John keeps it simple. John’s version is shorter than the others, with no distraction about the faith and doubt of Peter, or the idea that anyone else might walk on the water. The waters are rough, the disciples are scared, Jesus is the one who comes, the waters are calmed, and the boat is guided to shore. Jesus is the one who brings calm and joy.

The kneejerk reaction of most modern readers is to be uncomfortable with the miracle. Of course we are. But wouldn’t any genuine miracle have been just as shocking in the ancient world as it is today? If John wanted the story to be easy to accept, I imagine he would have told it another way. But he wants to tell a story different enough to shake us out of our usual assumptions about how the world works, and point us to the world as God sees it—a world of wonder.

John probably doesn’t care whether or not you can accept that Jesus worked a miracle, but he certainly wants us to take a break from our rationalizing and there’s a reason for that: we need wonder in life. I don’t care if you’re all in on believing that Jesus miraculously fed 5,000 people or walked on water, what does matter is that we have the ability to imagine a better world—a life that is more hopeful and joyful than our rationality often allows for—where things can be better than you suspected they might be if you’re willing to take a leap.

This is how we’re supposed to relate to God, and to one another. Not by trying to reduce God’s stories to something we can understand and explain, but by allowing God’s stories to be expansive in our lives, increasing our sense of what is plausible and possible, deepening us spiritually and convincing us that our lives are more sacred than we imagined they were. This is what it means to invite Jesus into the boat of our spiritual lives.

This kind of expansive relationship with God, allows us an expansive relationship with each other too. When people are hungry, will we get stuck in Philip’s immediate concern about grocery prices at the nearest store, or will we ask big questions about why there is so much hunger out there, and what needs to change. Mother Teresa’s worldwide movement of Missionaries for Charity began in 1946 with 13 members who decided to do something about masses of hungry people. Habitat for Humanity began when Millard and Linda Fuller had a vision to make some small impact in the problem of affordable housing. Acts of wonder such as those don’t come from people who look for the smallest and simplest explanations for God’s work in the world. We can either be immobilized by the world’s challenges, because rationality tells us they are too big to change, or we can be drawn into wonder, and become people who create change.

So John tells a story about Jesus. In this story he finds himself at the seaside with a huge crowd of people. They are hungry and Jesus feeds them. For hearers of the story it doesn’t really matter if their hunger was for bread or fish, or for something else in their lives, a story of healing and redemption, but he feeds them. He refuses for God to be reduced to another Tiberias, another greedy tyrant who feeds them for a moment in exchange for their loyalty; his vision is much greater than that—so he breaks away from them before they can explain his message away. He doesn’t want an official position in the government—he wants to go away and pray. And by the time his disciples see him later, calming the storm on the seas, they realize that he wants to calm the storms in their lives and in their hearts, and they receive him into their boat.

If we allow stories like this into our lives, the stories will threaten us with wonder. Have we been putting our faith in a Tiberias, rather than Jesus? Have we become too small in our thinking about hunger, or so immobilized by the rational problems that we do nothing at all? Have we become too small in our thinking about texts of the Bible and stories about Jesus? That’s been my most recent problem—reading this amazing text as a means to get a sermon done rather than as a fountain of wisdom that can surround my life with wonder. When we reduce God to a rational explanation, we put tragic limits on everything else in life too. What wonders in your own life have you been trying to explain away? Maybe you should just allow yourself to wonder some more. Thank you for giving me the chance to stumble around in the text this morning. I pray it will help all of us to stumble back into wonder. Amen.

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Though I can’t say exactly when it was, I know that this Bible story about the woman caught in adultery was one of the first Bible stories that really caught my attention. In this harsh world, full of imperfect people, a bunch of judgmental men drag before Jesus a person who has made a mistake. What she has done is not praiseworthy, but neither is the behavior of her accusers, and Jesus figures out how to make things right. He holds each person accountable to their actions and calls them to better living, and he does so without condemning any of them. He shows respect for the law without using it as a weapon. He exhibits grace. This was the kind of Savior I wanted to follow—and I knew I wanted to read more stories like this one.

I suppose that’s one way of explaining how I got into this work and what I continue to enjoy about it. I believe, most days at least, that the world is a good place, but so often that goodness is obscured by all kinds of things: divisiveness in our politics, our families, even our churches…and how hopeful it is to imagine that we have this book of wisdom, and that we might ease some of that strife by living our lives according to its words of healing and grace? That seems like something worth aspiring to.

So I started studying, and over time in the Bible I discovered wonderful surprises hidden in these pages, as well as the realization that much of it was more complicated than it seemed. I’ve had to rethink that story about the woman caught in adultery many times over, and each time I read it I discover something new.

Because I love exploring these mysteries in the Bible, during the first year of my ministry, I teamed up with a mentor who helped me write a curriculum for Bible study. We called it Wrestling with Scripture, and in it we introduced small groups to a method of reading the Bible. The study helps uncover the meaning and application of Bible stories by going progressively deeper with the stories like peeling back layers of an onion. In order to introduce people to this method, we utilized three passages of Scripture as examples:

The first was the passage from Matthew 5 in which Jesus famously instructs his followers to love their enemies. He offers this teaching with three illustrations—turning the other cheek, walking the extra mile, and, when being asked to give one’s coat, to offer one’s cloak as well. The plain sense of these teachings is that Christians should be accommodating towards those who hurt them, acting, some have suggested, like pushovers. But deeper readings of the text suggest that more is going on here. A theologian named Walter Wink wrote an article some decades ago exploring the historical context of each of Jesus’ examples.

Here were some of his discoveries: He found that a Roman soldier was allowed by law to force a common citizen to carry his pack for a mile, but an additional mile would have been a violation of that same law, and would put the soldier at risk of punishment, so insisting on going the second mile was actually a way for a common person to protest against this burden of Roman occupation.

Wink also found that in a court of law, convicted debtors were able to sue for as much as any extra clothing one might possess, but they could not go so far as taking the shirt off one’s back. Similar to the extra mile, the insistence on giving one’s cloak as well would be a way of publicly ridiculing anyone so greedy as to demand the cloak as well. (It’s hard to tell if anyone ever actually tried this, running through the streets naked to make someone else look bad, but Jesus make his point).

And finally, Wink points out that it was legal—regrettably—for a master to strike a slave, and that there was a socially acceptable way of doing this when one was in a position of power. Turning one’s other cheek forced the master to strike the other person in a different way: not the “respectable” way that treated a slave as less-than, but only in the way that the master would strike an equal. Jesus’ teaching was therefore an attack on the very idea that there would be a hierarchy of masters and slaves.

In all three of these examples, Jesus is not telling his followers to be doormats, but rather to creatively protest against systems that are unfair. Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and countless others have peacefully protested against their enemies in ways such as these.

The second scripture in the curriculum we wrote was from Exodus 32, the story of the Golden Calf. The background to this, in case you’ve forgotten or haven’t heard it before is as follows: In the story of the Golden Calf, Moses has gone up to Mount Sinai to receive the 10 Commandments and the rest of the Law, and the people wait at the bottom for his return. When Moses is gone a long time, the people fret that there must not be any God up there after all, so wanting a God they can see in the way neighboring peoples do, they pool together all their gold jewelry, melt it down and make a god for themselves. This makes God upset. Many of you probably remember that story. The element of this story that is often surprising upon a closer reading is verse 14, which says that when God gets upset and threatens to abandon and destroy the people, Moses pleads with God to reconsider, and verse 14 reads: “And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.” God mind can be changed??? And this study generates discussion about several big questions: what you think about a God whose mind can be changed, whether that matches with other assumptions you may have about an all-knowing and all-powerful Creator, what the story suggests about the power of prayer, etc.

Finally, the third passage in the study is one I know I’ve preached about here not too long ago, it’s from the Book of Revelation, chapter 17. Plenty of people find Revelation frightening, or at least intimidating, and this is one of the most graphic and mystifying passages in the book, about a whore and a beast making war on a lamb, in a setting surrounded by 7 mountains, and the beast is described with 7 heads and 10 horns, accompanied by a sign that reads, Babylon the Great. At first most folks are unable to make heads or tails of the story, but in the study we move through the passage methodically, establishing the plot and organizing the characters. We then return to the first chapter of the Book of Revelation, which fills in the important context that this is a letter written from a Roman prison, and that it’s symbolic language is targeted at the Roman occupiers whose persecution of Christians is described in the book as a war on Christ, the Lamb of God. Soon the passage, and the Book of Revelation itself, ceases to be so scary, once we see that it is not a prediction of the endtimes, as literalists started to argue in the 19th century; rather Revelation is a political and social commentary on the dangers of Empire and struggle for good, which is to say that its message is not so different from Star Wars.

Each of these studies shows how the Bible, when we peel back its layers of wisdom, becomes an incredible resource for the everyday struggle to have faith. The Matthew passage inspires Christians to stand up for oppressed people, and to peacefully stand up for themselves. The Exodus story shows that people of faith have always struggled with doubt, and that it’s alright to ask big questions about the nature of God. The Revelation passage reveals that even when it seems like the forces of evil are overwhelming the world, we believe in a God who is always working for good.

In ministry, I talk with all kinds of people who have regular problems in everyday life. It’s not uncommon for me to meet people who are struggling in some way, but then make some kind of miraculous connection between their struggle and the Bible they’ve been reading and hearing for their whole life. Some examples: Sometimes we struggle to understand why our actions don’t match our good intentions, and then somewhere in a distant memory, we find that we are not alone—we hear the confession of Paul: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (Romans 7:15) Someone else may struggle with tremendous grief and loss, and be upheld by the 23rd Psalm: “even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.” Sometimes a person needs to be genuinely angry with God for a while, and the only thing that allows them to tolerate the Bible is that it includes honest cries like “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me…” Imagine that a person struggles with addiction or depression, and in their struggle remembers the words of Jeremiah: “For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.” Sometimes our church committees struggle to do the right thing with the resources we have, but then someone speaks up: “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was naked and you clothed me…” and suddenly the right way is clear. Imagine that a parent and child have become estranged, but a breakthrough happens when one of them hears the story of the Prodigal and his Father, who runs with open arms to welcome him: he was lost, but is found. The ice breaks through a courageous phone call, and a relationship is reborn.

I would like to tell you that these theological connections between life and our sacred texts happen without any particular effort—that God delivers them to us the moment they are needed. Sometimes that happens; an infrequent church attender will tell me that in a moment of great need they randomly opened the pages of the Bible and the right words were there immediately. What is far more common though, is that the powerful connections I am describing come to us as a result of sustained effort. Years of study and a steady commitment to worship grounds our lives in faith. I thought about telling you some tear-jerker of a sermon illustration to make you feel the power of these biblical connections, but then I feared that might obscure the point. It’s not that Bible readers and churchgoers have it easier than anyone else, or that this book fixes all of our problems; but it is true that those who study and worship with a sense of commitment do receive the grounding of the Bible in their lives—I have not found a shortcut to it; but I assure it you it has power.

Throughout this series of sermons on practices of faith, I have argued that the wonderful thing about practicing faith is that often it need not add something that you are not already doing—we can experience sabbath, social justice work, saying yes and saying no, honoring the body—we can do these things with greater mindfulness and spirituality and yes, discover God in the everyday. It is also true that studying Scripture is an indispensable practice of faith; and that we must be committed if we really want it to become the storybook of our lives. When that happens, it is a beautiful thing.

I will admit to you that in the busyness of my own life, I am often guilty of forgetting these very things I am telling you. Sometimes my preaching defaults to things I studied a long time ago and do not rethink as often as I should. I can feel it when the sermons and the text have become uninspiring to me, and when that happens I always have myself to blame—I’m not studying enough. To that end, this week as our Practices of Faith series comes to an end, I’m making a commitment to myself and to you for the last month of this summer. I’m renewing my own practice of scripture study by having chosen for my next four sermons four scriptures I have never studied—so if I don’t spend time studying, you’ll know it! But I’m making this commitment not out of guilt or as a burden, but rather as a joy. The time that I spend immersed in the pages of our sacred texts always repays me many times over, and I look forward to learning something new. Pray for me—in joy—that God’s wisdom will be revealed in this commitment. And I pray that today’s reminder may encourage some of you in studies of your own. I’m always happy to talk with you about where to begin. Amen.

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Over time, preachers get a sense of when we are connecting with the congregation—and when we’re not. We can tell when we’re putting you to sleep, and we also know when everyone is listening. I have to tell you I laughed to myself during a sermon several weeks ago—at a moment when I knew you were with me! I made a comment about what it’s like to discover that part of your body isn’t working quite like it once did, and when I looked out at you it was like the whole room nodded in agreement all at once! Clearly I had made a connection.

This morning we’re going to talk about the spiritual practice of honoring the body. “The poet Jane Kenyon speaks of our “long struggle to be at home in the body,” she calls it, “this difficult friendship.” (see Paulsell, “Honoring the Body,” in Practicing Our Faith) It’s true, isn’t it? Our relationship with our bodies, at most any age, is filled with such divergent emotions: teenage years are marked with incredible growth and strength that at times makes us feel invincible; and at the very same time, raging hormones and rapid changes in our bodies make us feel so awkward and insecure. In adulthood the awkwardness starts to yield, but by the time it does we’re on the doorstep of aches, pains and malfunctions that did not used to bother us. Retirement is a gift to our bodies, as less is required of them each day, but the ailments only increased to fill the void. I have older friends who joke that when they gather with their peers, they put a time limit on how long they can complain about their bodies before they insist on moving on to other topics; and yet, it is the very sharing of those intimate details of aging and vulnerability that creates intimacy and friendship—talking honestly about struggles with our bodies helps us to feel less alone in life, and connected to other people. Especially when we confront serious and life-threatening failures in our bodies, it is important for us not to endure these things alone.

Our bodies are indeed ambiguous blessings, and when it comes to learning how to live in this amazing and problematic vessel, the church has often been unhelpful. The Bible says humans are made in God’s image and names the body a “temple of the Holy Spirit.” But in the early Christian world, these verses landed in a dualistic Greek philosophical culture; the result was a separation of the spirit from the body; the spirit became the dwelling place of God, while the body became suspect. Much early Christian theology centered around the glorification of monks who found greater holiness through bodily discomfort; some theologians came to believe that Jesus’ human body must have been an illusion, so impossible was it to imagine that divinity could dwell in something as fallible and susceptible to temptation as the mortal human body. Over time, suspicions about the body became a huge part of Christian belief. In modern times, the church has become unhelpful in other ways, overly concerned with telling church members what is acceptable to do in their bedrooms, and creating insiders and outsiders based on gender and sexual orientation. How far we have fallen away from the body created in the image of God or thinking of this vessel as a Temple of the Holy Spirit!

So in this sermon, as a part of this series on Christian practices, I want to talk about the body, at least long enough to reclaim some of its goodness. Also though, I will do so with some caution, to remind us that the ambiguity exists for a reason. Most Christian practices that help us enjoy our bodies can also be misused to harm ourselves and others. That makes it even more important that we make a spiritual practice of honoring the body. If we are wise, we might learn to know God more fully through the way we treat the bodies God has given us.

This whole series on practicing the faith is meant to make the point that Christian spirituality is not limited to what happens here at church. Nor is faith limited to practices like Bible study and prayer, but that there are all kinds of ways to find God’s presence in daily life. Often faithful practice simply means looking more closely to find God’s presence where it’s been all along. So to that end, today I want to give you a few specific ideas of how honoring the body in daily life can connect us with God, as well as some biblical and theological support for each one.

The first example is easy to forget but obvious once you take time to consider it, and that’s bathing. Christians mark the beginning of our life in Christ with baptism—a ritual bath, and we’re not alone in this ritual. Plenty of other religions consider bathing to be a foundational practice, Islam and Judaism in ways many of you might have seen. The baptism of Jesus is not the only story in his life about bathing. In the Gospel of Luke, an intimate story is told of an unnamed woman who bathes Jesus’ feet with her tears, wiping his feet with her hair; this humble person appears in contrast to the host of the house who provides no water for Jesus to wash his feet as was the custom and ritual, and the story becomes a powerful exchange about matters of justice and forgiveness. In the larger story of Jesus, this moment also stands as a ritual preparations for Jesus’ death as he nears the road to the Cross.

As Jesus’ suffering and death grows closer, another bathing story appears: Jesus himself will take a basin of water, kneel with a towel and wash the feet of his disciples, calling them not servants but friends—this is how he prepares them to follow him. All this biblical talk of bathing, and the regularity with which it was ritualized in the ancient world, is a reminder that most of us should take our daily bathing a bit more spiritually. Daily bathing is an intimate act during which we can give thanks to God for the health we enjoy and for the absolute miracle this machine God has created. At the same time, I like this idea of intentional bathing even more because most of us have parts of our body we aren’t crazy about, and in that way the body is a reminder that God didn’t create us for perfection, but that God is pleased that we are made just as we are. And finally, bathing doesn’t just need to be a time to pray about the body; you might even consider, just from a practical standpoint, that bathing is a point in the day when we usually aren’t distracted—unless you have a bunch of children!—so bathing is as good a time as any in the day to take some time for prayer.

In addition to bathing, plenty of other physical activities present the same kind of opportunity for spiritual reflection. Whether its yoga, soccer or just taking a walk, physical activity is a blessing; it’s a chance to appreciate the capability of our created bodies, a chance to directly thank God for what we’re able to enjoy. And when age, injury or illness limit what we can do, those are physical reminders that again, God didn’t make us to be perfect, but also, that we are mortal. When our bodies give us unpleasant physical reminders that we are not invincible, those are also invitations to take stock of the goodness of each day and not to take for granted the time that we have. This is honoring the body.

Touching and sexuality are the bodily acts that have perhaps the most potential for spiritual connection; at the same time they are fraught with the greatest potential for harm, and harm separates us from God. Handshakes, hugs, kisses on the cheek are simple but important touches—ways that we welcome one another and extend warmth and hospitality; but touch is also a way in which abuses of power take place, any time we touch another person in a way that is unwelcome. This reality is amplified in our sexual lives, in which God gives us the most intimate of gift as an expression of love, and yet that very gift when abused, and used in violence, separates us from one another and from God.

And of course sexual orientation has been a frequent matter where the church has caused tremendous harm. The traditional argument that our bodies are only meant for procreation, or that only straight men and women deserve to enjoy the blessing of sexuality has driven countless people away from the church altogether. Many sermons could be preached on that topic alone, but suffice it to say that I am grateful for the ongoing journey of this congregation in honoring all of the bodies that God has made. We welcome all in membership, leadership, and marriage; our youth group is a safe place for all of God’s children where we try with honesty and integrity to help teens grow into healthy, embodied adults; here we seek to recover the idea that the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, as the Bible calls them in the first place.

It’s taken me most of the sermon to get to today’s Scripture lesson, but that’s kind of by design. I’ve been working through several examples of how bodies give us potential for connection to God—and here’s a final idea that applies to all the others:

As with most spiritual practices, honoring our bodies is on one level about loving God, but is also about loving our neighbors. That’s where the Scripture from Matthew 25 comes in. We can spend every day honoring our bodies through greater attention to things like bathing, exercising, healthy touch and sexuality, not to mention all I haven’t said about what we eat and what we drink and what we wear; but the deepest spiritual awareness of the body comes when we consider honoring not only as a personal matter, but remembering the bodies of others. Do our daily decisions about clean water for bathing, healthy sexuality, and adequate food and drink apply only to ourselves, or are we living in ways honor all of the bodies God has created? In Matthew 25, Jesus says all these embodied things as he teaches his disciples: “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat; I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink; I was naked and you clothed me;” and he says, “whenever you did these things for the least of these, you did them to me…”

In these words come the challenge that we honor our own bodies most when we take actions that allow others to honor their bodies as well. Can we eat a good meal, especially the Lord’s Supper, and forget about people who are starving—whether its Palestinians in a war zone or families in our own community? Can we spend a small fortune adorning ourselves with the latest styles and not worry about children who are without shoes or coats? Can we enjoy a good sex life, and not be concerned about trafficking and abuse happening right in our communities? Honoring the body does not just mean our own bodies, and the joy that comes from caring for all of the world’s bodies, can help us enjoy our own bodies free of guilt or shame. Honoring the body is a means to both loving God and loving our neighbor.

I hope in this sermon, I may have helped you think a bit differently about some of the many, many ways in which our daily experience of living with a body is also a way to connect with God. God gave us these beautiful bodies for a purpose—to extend love and care into the world, and to experience love and care in our own lives. The opportunities are all around us. On Wednesday evening this week, I invite you to join me for the last of our summer Wednesday evening suppers, during which we’ll focus on a couple of means of prayer that can help us go deeper with the questions I’ve introduced this morning. I hope you will come; and I look forward to talking with you about other ways you might go deeper with these ideas as well. Amen.

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“I never thought I’d be living this way, she says.” “Somehow I imagined that life would be simpler. She has reached forty, and she thinks she should have her life together by now, but things are just not right. Too few evenings include nourishing suppers shared with loved ones; too many are given over to the demands of paid work or housework, or lost to worry and exhaustion. Her closest friends are spread across several time zones. The old neighbors she entrusted with the house keys are gone, and she barely knows the new ones. She finds community here and there, and she volunteers to help out as she can, but she is wary about getting too involved. Showing up at a PTA meeting, she has learned, probably means getting stuck with a fundraising assignment, so increasingly she stays away, in spite of her intense concern about her children and all the others. She does not feel right about this. “This is not how I intended to live my life, she sighs, turning from one task to the next. (Bass and Dykstra, Practicing Our Faith, 1).

This story is the opening of a book that has been important to me. It’s written by two authors named Dorothy Bass and Craig Dykstra and is called Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People.

As they say of the person in the story—and so many of us like her, “the sighs are born [not just from having to much to do, but from] our yearning to understand what [it all] adds up to.” The yearning is about questions of meaning and purpose and leading a life that matters.

The subject comes up in different contexts and for all different kinds of people. Sometimes its in the context of all we see these days about our culture’s epidemic of loneliness and worries about mental health or addiction. Sometimes its about the present and future of the church in our culture—why is a Christian way of life increasingly marginal; why don’t my adult children go to church, and what is there to do about that? Some of us may be feeling deeply blessed and not so burdened by these concerns, but what about the generation that comes after? Perhaps you notice, as I have, the anxiety out there about the future of our country and whether we will be able to pass on a good life to the generations that follow us. All of these are spiritual questions and require grounding in faith.

While the world keeps changing, these questions are not new. In today’s Scripture from the letter to the Romans, Paul writes about the yearning in his own life, and about his hope for the future. He says, “the sufferings of this present time are not to be compared to the glory about to be revealed to us…” “the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God…” “creation itself will be set free from its enslavement to decay…” He talks about a creation groaning in labor pains, longing for a renewed life, and that God knows the yearnings of our hearts, and longs to help us find that renewed purpose. Paul wrote those words from a prison cell, where he had been placed for sharing the good news of Jesus Christ to a Roman Empire that was not ready to hear it; so he knew something about yearning for a life that one can imagine, but that has not yet arrived. These yearnings are not new.

Here at Knox, one way we’ve heard these yearnings voiced is in listening to all of you as we worked in the last couple of years to create a new Strategic Plan for our congregation. Strategic plans can be dry and corporate sounding, yes, but listen to the resonance with what I’ve been talking about: The first and most important objective in our plan is to continue and enhance this congregation’s good work in helping people to grow in their spiritual lives. We’re doing some fresh thinking here to be sure we don’t just keep doing all the same old things—though many of them are working quite well!—but that we’re committed to trying new things to stretch ourselves as we seek to know God. We want to embrace the yearning in our lives for something deeper.

So in the first year of our new plan, we’re in what I’m calling a season of experimentation right now. Even while we continue to do many of the things we know you count on and love, we’re trying new ones also.

Some of them are simple; you might have noticed that we’ve been asking you questions of intention at the start of worship and when you attend church events “Why was it important for you to be here today?” It’s a little thing, but it’s a way we hope to remind you that what we’re doing here at Knox should be more than just a routine or responsibility—and if that’s what its become, we want to think together about how to change that. We’re doing another experiment with a new contemplative prayer group that will launch this month—if you were struck by the quiet prayer time we shared in worship a few weeks ago, this may new group may be for you; it’s the first of a potential series of spiritual pathway groups to connect you with other members of the congregation who may find God in the same ways you do. That may happen through prayer, or study, music, working for justice or time connected to nature.

As we introduce these experiments, I’ve been preaching this current series of sermons about the Practice of Faitha—and we’ve been holding Wednesday evening gatherings on the same topic. “The Practice of Faith”—What the heck does that mean? Well, practices of faith are all kinds of regular, everyday pursuits that, when done with intention, can help us find God’s presence in ordinary life. How we care for our bodies, what do we buy with our money, how do we think about rest and recreation…life is full of regular things, which we often do without much thought, but which we can also approach with intention, and then become surprised that God has been there all along. The sermon series and the Wednesday nights started several weeks ago with a focus on things like “sabbath,” “care for creation,” and “saying yes, and saying no”—we have been inducing these examples of practices one at a time.

It's important to acknowledge what the practices are not. Christian Practices are not a list of additional things you must add to your already busy life in order to become a good Christian. They are also not activities in which “practice makes perfect,” but are called “practices” on purpose, for like other practices like law or medicine, over time the intention doing of them can cultivate greater understanding. And while each of the practices are the kinds of things that lots of people do, you don’t need to be practicing all of them in order to find their value; a little bit at a time is often quite enough. We know that none of the practices will be for everyone, but we hope that we’ll catch your attention with a few of them. In all of this, we hope that you’ll find not some additional task or another thing to worry about, but instead a way of tapping into God’s presence, already there for you in things you do every day.

Above all, practices of faith are an invitation to a way of life. In this way of life, we are frequently surprised that life is full of what theologians call “thin places” places where the routine meets the heavenly, where God breaks in and makes herself known, if we are paying attention. The examples are not profound, but are indeed wonderful, and are happening all the time. One of the recent sermons got one of our college students interested in thinking about storytelling in great literature and movies, and we’re planning a class together to help the congregation see ways that the stories that grab you at your book club or on Netflix often have their foundation in the wisdom of the Bible. As another example: Some of you who have done premarital preparation with me might remember an exercise I invited you to do looking for how God shows up in your everyday life, and how to talk about that with your spouse. These are just a couple of examples about the kind of awareness and attention we’re hoping to heighten in this season of experimentation.

Of course, experimentation—as a church and in each of our lives—involves discovering both the things that are praiseworthy, and also things that are not. As we try these new things together, we’ll find some we want to give even more attention, and we’ll do other things that don’t go well so we won’t do them again.

Isn’t that how life together works? What an appropriate reflection for the weekend of our nation’s Independence Day. This weekend, we consider the courage, wisdom, and vision of so many who have sacrificed so much for the sake of this land we call home—the story of our country that lends meaning and purpose to our shared history. We also lament our tragic history of colonization, racism, and so many other sins that are also a part of who we have been and who we are. The same thing was going on in the time of our other scripture reading this morning, the one from Jeremiah. In a time when his own people were experiencing struggle and lostness due to their own sins, it was in their wandering that God stepped in and helped them see more clearly: “For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.”

These national holiday weekends are always a quandary for pastors. Pastors are here at church to point not to nationalism, which always tilts toward idolatry, but to point toward God—the God of all nations and peoples who is alone is the Lord. That doesn’t mean that pastors hate fireworks or that we disrespect the great deeds of courage wrought by so many who have served this country courageously. It just means that when I choose our national songs to sing on these mornings, I’m grateful to the composers who have understood our history so well, who remind us America is beautiful when we keep asking God to shed grace upon us, and to mend our every flaw—because we need it; and who remind us as our closing hymn will do, that loving one’s own homeland does not mean conquering or demeaning another—perhaps someday we will learn how.

It is this same kind of humility and hope we want to have in our spiritual lives. We are not here to feel guilty or defeated when we have failed to be good disciples, but to rejoice in the ways God keeps calling us to follow, imperfect as we may be. Christian practices are about the courage to look more critically into the difficult questions of faith that lead to a fuller, richer spiritual life.

As I mentioned, this is a season of experimentation. And we want you to be thinking about it and talking with each other, and with the church’s staff. What is working, and what’s not? While we decided on purpose to start some of these experiments before pausing as I am today to explain them, Elders and Deacons have been aware of this plan since the spring. They are paying attention and listening to you. In the fall we’ll be holding a leadership retreat to assess what we’re learning and consider what God is calling us to do next.

I’ll make just three reminders about the nature of Christian practices. One is that practices of faith are not more things to do, but rather a different kind of intention or focus to help us find God in daily living. The second is that you don’t have to do them all—find a practice that is intriguing to you and experiment with it; move onto another as you feel led. And the third is that practices need to be done in community; there are some elements of them that happen on your own, but to really grow in them and reflect about them, you need a community. All of these things, and a deeper dive with them, will be a part of what we do this Wednesday night at our weekly supper together. Come join us.

I pray that this will be a time of growth, learning, and grace in our community, and I’m glad to be on this journey with you. Amen.

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We’re in this summer series of talking about spiritual practices—everyday ways that God shows up in the world.

This morning we will talk about caring for creation or environmental stewardship. I will be honest with you that, to me, those churchy phrases feel dishonest: they seem like euphemisms to try to make us feel better about the crisis is facing our planet, and the increasing unlikelihood that we can turn it around. Who wants to talk about that on a nice Sunday morning? Trying to get church people to take the planet more seriously, pastor and author Brian McLaren has titled his new book about it Life After Doom. In it, he explores the complexity and challenge of living in a world human beings have failed to care for as we should. It’s a challenging book and an important one—I will draw upon it throughout this morning’s sermon.

I was reading the book in Ault Park a few weeks ago—the title draws some interesting stares when you carry it around. A woman walked by and saw the title, Life After Doom; she said, “that looks like happy reading!” and asked what it was about. I told her, and she looked at me, struggling a bit for what to say. She then expressed a version of what many of us feel, she said something like, “Yes, it is a terrible problem. I try to do the right thing. I wash and reuse my plastic bags. What is one person to do?” Many of us might say something similar; the problem seems so immense and our own ability to change things so small. What does a faithful response look like? How does one keep from losing hope? This morning I will try to offer some suggestions.

Let’s start with what the Bible says about our relationship with the rest of creation, which begins in chapter 1 of the book of Genesis. Here I’m going to call attention to some familiar elements of the creation story and maybe reframe for you some typical interpretations. The phrase that gets the most attention is this one in verse 26: “Let us make humans 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. The misuse of the word “dominion” has probably been most damaging to the environment. Again and again, we interpret it to mean that human beings have been given the rest of the planet to use to its exhaustion to serve human purposes, as if God gives us a mandate to exploit the rest of the creation.

But the rest of that same verse and the story itself does not match with that interpretation. Note that the first phrase of the passage says that humans are created in the image of God and according to God’s likeness, so apparently whatever dominion we have over the earth should reflect what God would do, that we should “exercise the same tender, loving responsible care the Creator has” for the world. A couple of other observations about the story reinforce the point and should humble us. Did you notice that on the 6th day of Creation God makes humankind, but on that very same day at the same time, God has created all of the other animals that populate the earth—humans don’t even get our own day. Did you also notice that at the dawn of creation, the vision of humanity that gives glory to God is not what we usually think of as human achievement. As McLaren states it, “the icon of humanity is not royalty in a palace, a conquistador on a horse or a white man in a pulpit,” no, what gives glory to God is “a couple of naked indigenous people living in a garden, in harmony with each other, with themselves, with all their fellow creatures, and with the earth itself.” That what we were created to be.

Tragically, we’ve lost sight of this original intention for the created order, and have replaced it with a vision of the world mostly based on domination: domination of one people over another, and the gutting of the earth’s resources for the convenience of humans. These things are not only normal, but have even been blessed by Christians throughout time, who we have usually been taught to think of as the masters over the rest of creation. And the great irony of our environmental crisis is that the constant drive to “advance” and “improve” the lives of affluent human beings is often the very thing leading to our destruction. The destabilizing of our climate has its own innate risks as ocean levels rise and natural disasters worsen, but the changes in climate also have dire side effects, as destabilized human populations fight over natural resources, and refugee crises increase as peoples flee from lands that are no longer livable.

This situation makes many of us feel helpless and hopeless. We read of the regular failures to change the course of environmental damage and we feel there’s nothing we can do. If the leaders of the G7 and the titans of industry can’t make any real commitments to stop climate change, what does it matter if I use another plastic bag? So we give up.

In the past few minutes I’ve been following McLaren’s work, which is extremely well researched, and I’ll admit I’ve been lecturing you bit about climate change, but my doing so is in service of something I think people of faith need to be discuss—this matter of giving up. Giving up, or losing hope, whether it is on earth care, or anything else that threatens us with hopelessness—these are spiritual matters. We have to figure out how not to give up. McLaren’s book acknowledges this, so as we continue thinking about earth care, I want to turn for a moment to some words about hope.

The Bible has a lot to say about hope, and one of the most significant passages is the one we just read to you from Romans, chapter 5. It says that when we are met with hard times, “…suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope—and hope does not disappoint us.” Paul’s most important insight was that God’s grace and love, and not own effort, is the foundation of hope. The powerful insight that inspired Paul is that you don’t just have to find hope inside of yourself; hope begins with God. We don’t have hope in life because we think we can earn salvation or be good enough to be earn God’s love. God loved us first, and we persevere in doing the right thing because we are grateful. Hopeful living is not about outcomes, but about gratitude. Likewise, I suspect hope for the planet planet not when we stew about whether we can fix the damage, but when we take care of God’s created world because we love it. Because we love the salmon and the heron, the ocean and the prairie, the magnificent sequoia, and maybe even the mosquito!

McLaren talks about a reimagining of hope in his book. He follows the work of a theologian named Miguel de la Torre, who I actually heard speak at a conference here in Cincinnati. De la Torre’s stance is that most of us misunderstand hope, and that hope has often been used in terribly destructive ways. Hope is often confused with optimism, a naïve belief that things will turn out ok in the end, even if all of the evidence seems to the contrary. This kind of hope may make us feel better for a short time, but it doesn’t change anything. Even more harmful is the way this kind of hope appears throughout human history when one group of people conquers another. Our own Christian tradition has been especially guilty of seeking to pacify people with hope. When Christians have colonized or conquered people and they are living in unfair circumstances, we have asked them to imagine a better life in heaven. We know life is horrible for you, says the conqueror, but hope in God and be happy. This is precisely the way that white American Christianity was introduced to slaves.

Miguel de la Torre says that in order for things to change, people don’t need pie-in-the-sky hope, they need to be desperate, for desperation is what inspires people to change. That message is hard to hear, but it tells us something important about hope. Real hope is not telling people to accept things for what they are, but rather about inspiring people to imagine that things can be different. That’s what changes the world. Again, in the context of slavery, it was that kind of hope that created the underground railroad and the abolitionist movement, rather than simply waiting for a better life in heaven. For anyone who was enslaved, freedom in a distant land hundreds of miles away on foot must have seemed impossible. For an abolitionist, putting one’s life and family on the line to stand for the freedom of others was a tremendous sacrifice. So it was not naïve optimism, but a desperate kind of hope that caused things to change. Today, whether we look at the oppressions being visited upon Palestinians, Ukrainians, or Sudanese, or intractable social issues in our own country like gun violence and opioid abuse, or the struggle for the environment that began this sermon; the desperate kind of hope that leads to action is what we need. (see de la Torre’s text, Embracing Hopelessness, 2002, or his keynote from the NEXTChurch Conference in Cincinnati, 2019; also as quoted in McLaren, 74-75).

Can we connect such a hope back to what I was saying about loving the earth? I think we can. I think we can because human history is full of not only terrible mistakes, but also wonderful goodness. Consider this quotation from historian Howard Zinn, quoted in McLaren’s chapter on hope:

“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an endless succession of presents, and to live now as we think humans should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory [italics mine]. (Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, in McLaren, 81)

Who knows if the earth can be saved, but perhaps Christians shouldn’t get stuck fretting about the results. Maybe instead we should simply be committed to “living as human beings should live, whatever the outcomes might be.” That sounds a lot like what Paul says about endurance, character, and hope. Christians do the right thing not because of what we can earn or achieve, but because we are grateful for what God has already done for us. If we are grateful for the earth, for the sunrise, the rainforest, the rushing river, magnificent eagle, and for one another, who knows if the world can be saved, but we live as if it can be, because we are grateful.

I invite you to take that thought with you as you go into your week, that the daily individual and collective steps we take to save the planet need not begin with proof of the outcome, but can be valuable first because loving the earth is the right thing to do. We can experience the presence of God, and glorify God, in the choices we make, choices that deny a world of domination and exploitation, and that lead us back to the garden where God created us for harmony. Or, consider these words of Cherokee author and theologian Randy Woodley: “To accept our place as simple human beings—beings who share a world with every seen and unseen creature in this vast community of creation—is to embrace our deepest spirituality.” (Woodley, Becoming Rooted, 2002) Amen.

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This summer we’ve been talking about ways God shows up in everyday life. We’re focused on the regular things we do, mostly outside these walls and often when we’re not trying to be Christian, where God is present. Today I’m going to talk about something all of us do, daily in fact—the important practice of saying yes and saying no. In his First Letter to the Corinthians—the early church people in the city of Corinth, Paul writes about his own faith as if it’s a race or a boxing match: “So now this is how I run—not without a clear goal in sight. I fight like a boxer in the ring, not like someone who is shadowboxing.” In our daily saying yes and saying no to a whole range of things, we are meant to keep our focus on the kind of life we hope to live—a life of hope and joy and peace; we want to say yes to these things. And we try to say no to the many things in this life that daily theaten to steal life from us a bit at a time. Some specific examples:

Tom has always been smart and hardworking. He made partner in his firm right on schedule, just as he was nearing his tenth wedding anniversary and the kids were turning 6 and 8. They moved into a bigger house 3 years ago, and have gotten used to some nice vacation spots and paying to get most of the work done around the house. In order to afford it, Tom keeps signing on for more and more responsibility, even though he gets stuck at the office through most of the kids music activities and sports. He’s rarely home for dinner and hasn’t been on a date with his spouse in 6 months. He feels stuck, but its mostly because of the need to sustain a lifestyle he is choosing for himself.

Jen is the consummate super mom with 3 kids, a house to take care of, aging parents and a full time job. She was mostly keeping it together—though stressed—but then when the pandemic came and there was nothing to do at night, her typical habit of a glass of wine each night turned into 5 times that, and she hasn’t been able to dial it back. Every day she feels like she’s just barely keeping the wheels from falling off, and she wants to quit, but she hates to appear like there’s anything she can’t handle, so she can’t seem to bring herself to ask for help.

After a long career of driving hard for success, Jim has been feeling spiritually empty and is trying to grow in his relationship with God. Prayer, meditation, and things like that have always been hard for him because he doesn’t feel like he’s “doing” anything, but lately he’s trying to turn over a new leaf because something about his life just doesn’t seem right, and he wants to figure it out. When he wakes up early in the morning, he’s got an app he uses for guided meditation, and a devotional journal he uses to try to pray. He tries for 20 minutes, and most of the time when he makes the commitment, the praying is hard, but the rest of his day is transformed for the better, calming his short temper, making him more attentive to his husband, and helping him to feel some peace. But this contemplative stuff is brand new for him, and most of the time, the hardest part is sitting down to get started—so he often skips it.

Each of these people are dealing with the challenge of saying yes and saying no—a thing we all have to do every day. It’s always been like that, and in case these challenges seem new to you, I direct you to Deuteronomy, chapter 30, recorded roughly 3000 years ago. For some context, Deuteronomy is the fifth book in the Old Testament, the last of the five books of the Law, so before it, you get the stories of the Creation and the Patriarchs in Genesis, then in Exodus the time of captivity in Egypt and release from slavery, and then the people wander in the Wilderness for 40 years seeking the Promised Land, and during this time God gives them the Law.

A common question—one worth asking—is why the Hebrews had to wander in the Wilderness for such a long time. If God loved them so much, why not just tell them how to get to the Promised Land? Well, the answer the theologians usually give is that the Hebrews needed an entire generation in order to forget about life in Egypt, so they could receive a better life as God’s people. Human beings are creatures of habit, and if you’ve spent much time watching the way we behave, it won’t surprise you that the Hebrews frequently ask Moses to take them back to slavery in Egypt. There are all kinds of instances when their new life of freedom seems hard or unpredictable, so they say to Moses, “take us back to the Pharoah. Yes, we may have been slaves, but at least we had bread to eat and water to drink, and a place to call home.” Metaphorically, these protests are supposed to call attention to how hard it can be to have faith that God will provide instead of having something you can predict and control. Humans want to be in charge of themselves, even if all we are really controlling is our own slavery. If that seems strange, consider the people from those opening examples I gave, who know they could be happier, but keep making choices that are stealing their lives away.

So the Law in the Old Testament is this new way of life that God takes 40 years to teach the people—a whole generation passes by so that a new generation, who can’t remember Egypt will be the one to take possession of the Promised Land—it’s that hard to forget and change. At the end of Deuteronomy, there are several long chapters of Scripture where God stresses again and again to the people an idea that culminates in the part we read from chapter 30: “See I have set before you life and prosperity, death and adversity; choose life so that you and your descendants may thrive and live long in the land.”

Choose life. Choose the life that God created you for. This is what we mean when we say that saying yes and saying no is a spiritual matter. Choose life. Saying yes and saying no is a spiritual matter we experience every day.

So we see that this daily practice of saying yes and saying no is one that is shared by all of us, and yet it may be new to think about it as a spiritual matter. The yeses and nos we say in life are a weekly, daily, even hourly matter in which God is with us, and if we choose, we can draw upon God’s wisdom and strength to guide us in our living and to ease our burdens. The question of “how do I do that?” or “How do I get started?” is often the most challenging, so this morning I’m going to offer you three of many possible examples, one of which we’ll do together. If any one of these intrigues you, remember that these sermons are recorded and I have a text version that is sharable as well, so don’t burden yourself with remembering each of the steps I’m about to describe—they will be there for you as you need them.

First I want to describe to you a prayer practice called the Examination of Conscience, or Daily Examen. It is attributable to St. Ignatius of Loyola and common to the Jesuits; it’s recommended for daily use, but it is something you can do just occasionally, or multiple times a day, and it is particularly helpful as we say yes and say no in life.

When I pray this prayer, I start by finding a place where I can be quiet and undisturbed, I take a few deep breaths, and before I start praying about anything else, I pray for the prayer itself, asking God to help me be grateful and honest as we talk. Next, I review the day that has passed, looking not to make a list of everything that happened, but remembering the things that were most important, especially if they drew an important or emotional response from me, either positive or negative. What were the things that made me feel grateful for blessed; what were the things that caused me stress or guilt or confusion. I dwell in each of these situations, thanking God or asking for help as needed. Importantly, in each of these situations, I ask what about them is helping me to feel closer to God, who loves me, and which ones might be carrying me further away from that same God. This prayer can tell me a lot about where in life I am saying yes and saying no, and where I may need to ask for help with that. Once I have looked back, I then look to the day ahead, asking God to be with me when these circumstances and others will arise again, and asking God to be present with me, guiding me through my day. Finally I close reciting words of grace that are familiar to me, the Lord’s Prayer, or the 23rd Psalm, or a word or phrase that I can carry through my day. There are many ways to describe the movements of this Daily Examen, and I can provide several for you if you’d like to reach out and ask.

The second means of saying yes and saying no is to place yourself in a group here at church that allows you to share your faith with others. Many of us have found this in prayer groups like “Soul Friends,” in various “journey groups” that we begin throughout the year in which we meet around a shared interest or study a book together, some find it in our men’s or women’s groups. And in a few weeks we’ll be launching a new thing called a contemplative pathway group, for Knox members interested in talking about contemplative practices in Christian faith, you’ll hear more about this soon. Especially when we approach these opportunities with intention and commitment, they can be quite powerful in your daily journey of saying yes and saying no.

The final strategy I offer we will do together, and it is perhaps the most obvious—the act of daily personal prayer, and because prayer doesn’t always come easily, and is sometimes a challenge for every single one of us, today we will practice together.

So I’m going to stop and invite you to take a deep breath, and I’m going to prepare us for a little quiet time to pray about a “no” or “yes” in your life where you may be struggling.

I invite you to settle into your space if you are not there just yet, take a deep breath, don’t worry about being absolutely still or not moving a muscle, stay awake and alert, for prayer is an engagement with God, but put yourself in a comfortable place, free of distractions. Sit with your feet on the floor, relaxing into your seat, you may want to close your eyes, you may wish to fold your hands or to lay them in your lap with your palms open upward, ready to receive. Take a few deep breaths, inviting God to join you, aware of God’s presence that has been there all along, asking God to help you be grateful and honest in this time.
Allow this to be a time of joy and gratitude for you, thanking God for the chance for this time of peace. You might take this time in daily prayer to acknowledge before God in silence, or to write in a journal concerns that are in need of God’s help; people who are suffering or afflicted, friends or family close to you who are struggling…
I now invite you to take this time to name a place where you are needing help with saying yes or saying no, and ask God to hold that with you and help you. I’m going to give you a few moments of quiet now, a reminder of this gift of God’s presence, always there for you anytime you need it. Remember that it is normal to feel distracted in prayer, so when other thoughts creep in, simply note that they are there, set them aside, and return to your conversation with God. Let’s hold some time for prayer together.

O Lord, hear our prayers. Help us to be guided by you. Help us to hear your promise to each us and repeat them often as a way of living: “The Lord is my shepherd.” Amen.

Perhaps the most important thing I can share with you about prayer, is that prayer does not always come easy, it is a discipline we have to practice, and we all experience periods of dryness or dullness at times when God seems hard to find. Give yourself some grace as you learn, ask for help if you would like it from us; we are practicing too. But the practice is worth it, for as I said at the start, this matter of saying yes and saying no, it is at the heart of what Paul calls this race we are running, let us not run with no goal in mind, but rather take the essential and important time to allow God to guide and direct us, to choose the life that has been set before us, for it is a gift. Amen.

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Good morning. My son’s football team had a campout last night, which I signed up to attend thinking it was on a Friday…we spent last night a tent on a football field—so today felt like a good time to talk about the need for rest!

I am going to talk about rest this morning—about sabbath. Whenever I speak on this subject, two thoughts come to mind. A part of me feels like you’ll find the idea to be archaic and out of touch—who takes a sabbath anymore? But the other part of me realizes that sabbath is more relevant than ever. “Why do we need a Sabbath?” you ask. And the answer that comes is so obvious. Because we are tired. We are exhausted. Exhaustion is one of the most common threads among people who sit in our pews each Sunday; exhausted by stress, exhausted by world events, exhausted by worry, exhausted by work… there always seems to be too much to do, and a deep desire to have more time to rest.

This sermon is not going to be an appeal to you to drop everything on Sunday and return to some bygone era when everyone else does that too. Even if we could, there are things about that model that were not so good. But I am going to argue that sabbath is something that is necessary and good and that there are quite a few ways to find it. And I’ll start that argument with what the Bible says about it.

You’ll recall that the Book of Genesis introduces the concept of sabbath right from the start. Chapter 1 tells the story of the seven days of creation, six days of God creating the world, followed by a seventh day upon which God rests. There is a typical understanding of sabbath from this story: that God rests on the seventh day following the all the work God has done, and we should do what God does. But theologian Karl Barth said that interpretation misses a vital detail: we are not God in the story, we are the humans. And if you look at what happens to the humans in the story, humans are created on the 6th day, so the first thing humans do is to have sabbath. Sabbath is not something we earn, it is something God gives us and tells us that we need. Some time to rest, to remember our relationship with God, and to care for our souls; sabbath is not a reward we get if we work hard enough the first 6 days of the week, It’s a necessary preparation for a healthy and joyful life.

But what else do we know about sabbath? Let’s continue with the biblical roots.

Sabbath appears in the 10 Commandments, and if you’ve forgotten or didn’t know, the 10 Commandments actually appear twice in the Bible, once in Exodus 20 and then also in Deuteronomy 5. Each version teaches a different lesson. The Exodus version is the one most of us are familiar with: “Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy” the text says, and then a verse later it gives the reason: “In six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the seventh day and consecrated it.” So we should do as God asks. Sabbath is an act of reverence and holiness toward God, and remembering it connects us to God—sabbath is an act of sustaining our faith.

The Deuteronomy version is different: “Observe the Sabbath day” it says, and then a different reason is offered: “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep it.” The reasoning here is different. The Hebrews were once slaves and now are free; as slaves they could not take a day of rest; but free people can. It’s a reminder of the injustice of the world and God’s desire that all people should live free and enjoy rest. The horrible plight of Palestinians or Uyghurs or Native Americans in our own land should remind people of faith that God never wishes for us to take our own freedom and sabbath at the expense of someone else’s.

There’s one more story that tells us about God’s intention for the sabbath, and it also occurs in Exodus. This is the story of manna. You may remember that as the Hebrews wander in the wilderness, God sends bread that falls from heaven. Five days a week, the manna falls from heaven, then on the sixth day, twice as much manna falls so that when the Israelites go out to gather it, there’s enough for them not to have to gather it on the sabbath. Another detail of this story is that God tells the Israelites not to gather more than they need for each day, and when the Israelites are disobedient and do try to store it up, the manna rots, and in this God is teaching them one more thing. Not only is a day of rest important, but that we ought to avoid excessive work in the name of gathering more than we need. Take only what you need for the day.

So I hope you are seeing that this 3000 year-old idea of Sabbath is one that has some merit to it; Sabbath reminds us of where we came from and observing it connects us with God; Sabbath reminds us of God’s commitment to justice; Sabbath even teaches what modern folk call work-life balance: if we don’t have enough time for sabbath, it may be because we’re working too much, we’re gathering more than we need; another name for that is greed.

So we’re getting an idea of where sabbath comes from, but what does it look like today? In the not too distant past, just about everything shut down on Sunday, but not only was that bad for people who were not Christian, it had a way of making Christians judgmental and self-righteous toward one another and that wasn’t good either. Instead, theologian Dorothy Bass writes that Sabbath done well suggests some kind of a regular break from three things: from work, from commerce, and from worry; sabbath keeping can take a variety of forms as long as it allows that break. A break from work is good for us and good for others too. The world can get by without your work for one day a week; in fact, when we take a break once a week, most of us are more productive and pleasant to work with the rest of the time. The break from commerce that Bass recommends is more related to the lessons about justice. Our constant need to produce and consume is often what forces other people to work, and whether you take sabbath on Sunday or at other times throughout the week, taking intentional breaks from the flow of buying, selling, and delivering has a cumulative effect of extending justice in the world. And worry is worth taking a break from as well. Excessive worry is so damaging to our spirits. It might seem hard to imagine how to just stop worrying, but you could take a pause from things that tend to cause worry: your bills, your list of things to do, your phone or news feed—what if you lay these things down for a day, or even just part of it, what if you ask God for help in doing so?

So within those parameters, I invite you to think this week about what Sabbath might look like for you. For plenty of us, Sunday might still be the most obvious time: to come to worship, to take a break from work and shopping, to pause the things in life that cause you to worry: For others, Sunday doesn’t work; I fall into that category for my agreement with you is that I show up and work on Sunday. But I do choose intentional times throughout the week to lay down my phone and set aside my email, and to take breaks from my to-do list, to read and pray and spend time with my family. And I do find a direct connection between the quality of my work and whether or not I took time in the week for my own spiritual health. And I believe that all of us, if we’re creative, if we make thoughtful choices, if we resist the desire to do and have everything, probably all of us can find ways to have sabbath.

I want to leave you with a couple of examples of ways to think about sabbath and an invitation to you to think about it some more.

That great sermon I once heard on the creation story I mentioned earlier came from a guy named Nate Stucky. He writes a lot about Sabbath, and I want to close by sharing a couple of his ideas. Stucky is the director of the Farminary at Princeton Theological Seminary. The Farminary is a farm, operated by seminarians—ministers in training, with the intention that they would learn how to lead by stepping away from the culture’s demands for constant productivity, and instead learn something by paying attention to the rhythms of nature. In nature, land lies fallow in order to be restored. In nature, winter seasons pass in order for roots to deepen so that greater growth can follow. Nature is often beautiful without doing or producing anything. Nature exposes the lie that we must be working in order to be valuable or loved.

Stucky also does a great job of connecting the spiritual side of sabbath to the justice side; he talks about an idea called “Rest as Resistance.” Stucky says that when we ourselves take time to rest, we actively resist the systems that require work and productivity from everyone. You can imagine how intentional breaks from shopping, or ordering takeout, or firing off emails have the effect of giving rest to other workers, the environment, and people we love. As an example that is right here close to home; when I take sabbath as your pastor, I’m not asking the other members of our staff or our church volunteers for more of their work. And when more and more of us commit to such a lifestyle, there is a cumulative effect that helps everyone rest.

Now I can imagine the counter-arguments; I know about how engaging in commerce is a means of job creation, etc. etc. I know plenty of excuses to keep on working—because I make them myself. But I am convinced that most of those arguments are far outweighed by the fact that so many of us are truly tired, and that great benefits come along when we commit to the rest we so desperately need. Additionally, I am convinced that there is enough creativity and wisdom in this church to come up with wonderful and realistic ways that we can add more sabbath to our lives. So I’m going to invite you as the sermon concludes today, to pray with me about how and when you might add some sabbath to your week—a break from work, from commerce, and from worry, and to think about what the benefits might be. And I’m going to remind you that each of these summer sermons is linked to a Wednesday night supper where we practice the faith together. This week we will be thinking together about sabbath so that we can offer you some ideas and you can share wisdom with each other. Together we can all add a little more rest to our lives. With that, would you pray with me?

God, help us take a moment to rest, breathe, reflect, give thanks. Help us to consider how to let go of work, of production and consumption, of worry. How do we hold less tightly to these things? Help us God. May we hear the words of Jesus, to consider the lilies of the field, they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet their heavenly parent feeds them. Amen.

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*Due to technical issues, the sermon is unavailable to stream*

Happy Memorial Day weekend. This, for many of us tends to be a weekend full of celebrations: family parties, graduation open houses, first trips to the pool, and hopefully some thanksgivings along the way, through parades and prayers and other means, that remind us of the courageous sacrifices that led to these liberties and pastimes we so enjoy.

This year feels different to me, maybe it always should. I would like nothing more than to spend the next 15 minutes telling jokes about parades and barbeques, but this year I am so aware of how tone deaf that would be. In other nations, there is not an historic remembrance of days heroic days gone by, but instead, today, there is a daily reality of burying the dead, waiting for the next strike to come, and wondering if peace and freedom will ever come. It is so in Palestine and Israel, and also in Ukraine, in Sudan and in Haiti, and about a dozen other places where local unrest and struggles for power destabilize governments and forever change the lives of regular people.

Today as I talk about healing and wholeness, I will try to say something faithful about this practice of faith with our world’s tragic and violent conflicts as the backdrop. I will inevitably say things some of you will perceive to be wrong. I am not a pundit nor am I well-schooled in any of these particular conflicts and I do not pretend to be. I have tried to look into some of our biblical texts and put them in conversation with the world around us. I hope that at least some of what I have to say will be helpful as you are confronted daily with the same news I see, as we seek together to be honest, to lament, to act, and to hope.

So again, the starting point for me, is to talk today about healing and wholeness, both words that require some definition. Healing, when it’s talked about in church, often conjures up some unhelpful images. Some of us imagine the crooked televangelist or the horror movie about an exorcism, and we’d prefer that the minister leave healing to the healthcare industry. I want to step back from that narrow definition and take a minute to remind you that most churches, this one included, engage in healing ministries every single day.

In early church history and throughout the Middle Ages, stories of faith as a miraculous healer were abundant, but even in the last few centuries, since the Age of Enlightenment caused a great rift between religion and science, the church has continued to be a major source of healing. Religious institutions have often been the primary driver of support for hospitals and healthcare: in peacetime, on the battlefield, and through medical missions. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the church did other public works of healing; it was largely the work of church people that reformed and modernized broken and often harmful institutions: schools, workplaces, prisons, orphanages and the like, to convert them from places of oppression to places of healing. And the activism of churches, historically and today, continues to provide healing through social welfare agencies, changes to harmful economic policies, and healing to the environment.

All of this is to say nothing about the more personal healing work that happens through neighborhood congregations, like this one, every day. Every week, we host groups for mental health or addiction recovery; we extend pastoral care to married couples or parents who are struggling, or grieving people who have lost a loved one; all of these are ministries of healing. Some elements of our culture continue to put strong separation between the physical and the spiritual, but there are many places where those lines are blurred. In the midst of a healthcare system that is often dehumanizing, the church cares not only for sick and the dying persons, but for the doctors and nurses who serve so tirelessly in systems that are broken. And there is increasing awareness that caring for our mental and spiritual health is directly related to our physical health—and not just when miracles happen. As the title of one current best seller tells it, The Body Keeps the Score of the traumas in our lives. When we seek to heal the spirits and souls of people who are hurting, we are often healing their bodies also.

In addition to what I’ve said about healing, I’ll say something more briefly about the word wholeness. Wholeness, I believe, is not something we are promised in this life. So many of the marketing messages we receive from health clubs, beauty products, or self-help book titles suggest that you can be whole, but that is not what we teach here. A core belief of Christian faith is that we live, and will continue to live in a broken world as regular human people. Wholeness is possible only when we return home to the God who created us. Many of the things that are marketed to us as a means to wholeness only cause us greater misery when we find that wholeness has not been achieved. But one of the gifts of faith is greater honesty about the limits of wholeness, so that we might come to a greater acceptance of our life as it really is. So you might say that healing is anything that takes us on a journey toward wholeness. It is a “journey toward” because, wholeness may not be a place where we can “arrive” in this life, but a journey toward it still matters. Ironically, we may be on the path to wholeness most of all when we make peace with the idea that we will not reach it.

So there’s healing—the many ways we help each other get better, and there is a path toward wholeness, which is a thing worth aspiring to, but not one we can fully achieve. These definitions are not mine; I find them in the ancient stories of the Scripture. The stories of the Bible speak of healing and wholeness in almost countless variety; today we read three: a man with a withered hand, a daughter at the point of death, a child overwhelmed by an evil spirit. We read these stories at face value and they seem like ancient or unreal or irrelevant tales of miracles, but the more time I spend in ministry, the more I see that life is full of stories like these. Each one shows the limits of wholeness, but also the journey of healing as part of a story of hope.

The first story is of a person who is otherwise healthy, but suddenly a part of his body begins to fail him. Could there be any more relevant story? This is the quintessential definition of middle age and the second half of life, when we discover, one body part at a time, that this machine is not so invincible as we thought it was? If we are lucky, we may discover that healing is possible, but even then we have to care for ourselves differently than we once did. So many of us can relate to that moment of first realizing we are a whole person with a part that is not serving us well: the man with the strained back, the woman with macular degeneration…the man with the withered hand.

The second story, of the daughter sick to the point of death is just as relevant and even more gripping. Every parent knows what it is to worry about a sick child; thankfully most of us have not experienced one at the point of death. But those of you who have been active in this congregation for a while can recount by name the children at the point of death who we as a church have prayed for; you have known their parents, who would have done anything to have made them well. A Bible story of this tragic circumstance and its hope for a good ending is not irrelevant; it is for some, too close to home.

And the third story is about a demon or an unclean spirit. Yes, these spiritual matters may seem strange for us. But in a more primitive culture, is it not reasonable that this may have been how they talked of mental illness? So often, even for us, mental illness seems like a way in which some outside force breaks in and takes hold of the whole life of an otherwise healthy person. Sometimes this happens with terrible consequences, but with help, with healing, often a person who has been imprisoned by such a force can be set free of it.

In all three of these stories, the idea of a journey toward wholeness holds firm. Each of these people, thankfully, has an experience of healing—something gets better, which is not always the case—and there are Bible stories of that as well. But each person healed in these stories, even afterwards, will live on in a broken world. During, and even after they are healed in these stories, people who surround them are angry, agitated, and judgmental. An act of healing takes place, yes, and even so, these people are still surrounded by a world where many other things remain broken: poverty and hunger and violence are rampant, and war and oppression persist. Healing is a miracle, but it is not to be equated with perfection, or wholeness; healing may in fact be a reminder to give thanks for the blessings we do enjoy, in a world that is still far short of perfect. Wholeness may not be possible yet, but the reality of healing helps us get up and keep going.

So what is the broader application of these stories? Does the healing and wholeness in these ancient texts have anything to say about the incredible brokenness of our world? Do they offer us any hope for healing in the midst of great suffering and tragedy? What about the world events that started this sermon?

What is going on in the war between Israel and Hamas is undeniably tragic. As a pastor, and not a pundit or politician, my primary aim throughout this conflict has been to lean more toward pastoring than toward preaching a position. I want to listen and learn from the trauma that is being experienced far beyond this congregation but also within it by those who are closest to friends and family directly affected by the conflict—and I will continue to do so.

The conflict is so tragic and traumatic because it is so incredibly complicated. Any attempt to suggest that there is a clear and obvious way forward or that a single group is at fault deserves suspicion. The most thoughtful voices seem to be the ones who can hold together two thoughts at the same time, even if they are in conflict. We can speak up for a free Palestinian land as well as standing for a free Israeli one. We can show compassion toward people whose loved ones have been hostages for a long time; we can also stand for the truth that any innocent Palestinian man, woman, or child killed in recovering those hostages is a moral catastrophe. We can treasure the humanity and dignity of Palestinian Arabs and the humanity and dignity of Israeli Jews—and we can be compassionate toward the loved ones of both, in our own communities here close to home. And even though holding all of these values I am describing amount to something less than wholeness; when they are taken together, all of them involve a commitment to healing.

I will admit to you, holding together these competing demands at times feels impossible to me, and can make us feel helpless. But we need not feel helpless or hopeless, for there are things we can do.

We can look to our past as Christians and Presbyterians, in which we usually place ourselves at the center of things, and instead we can seek to center the stories and struggles of the Palestinian and Jewish people whose histories are part of our own.

We can commit to learning more about these histories, both of them, from as many sources as we can. When that task seems too great with all the demands of our daily lives, we can at least make the commitment to get started; to go one step further today to increase our understanding.

We can take positions of activism for peace as each of us may feel called; we can do so knowing that there is no aspect of this conflict that is without complexity—but that there are many ways to seek healing.

We can speak up when we hear or witness bias against either Palestinians or Jews, who are so frequently painted with a broad brush. When we hear the insinuation that they all are in league with the tactics of Hamas or of the military strategy of Israel, we can expose these for the falsehoods they are.

We can hold prayer vigils alongside those who await the return of hostages; we can commit to fasting to heighten our awareness of those who are starving in Gaza. Ideally we will do both.

There must be a better way. Rarely have I felt so conflicted as I have in the days of this war, which is so far beyond my control, and has so many dimensions, and yet to say nothing for fear of saying something wrong is its own moral failure. So I invite you to continue to be in prayer with me, in these tender days, that we may find faithful ways to think, act, and live.

That we might never be helpless or hopeless, let us go to God in prayer:

God, we ask that you would show compassion toward the people of Palestine and the people of Israel, the people of other violent and war torn nations, and their loved ones and allies around the globe and here in our own city. Give courage to all who seek to hold together complicated commitments of compassion; help us accept the limits of wholeness, and yet seek healing, with no limit to our love. We pray for world leaders; we pray for soldiers called to war and their families; we pray for innocent people in the path of war, enduring daily suffering we can hardly imagine. And may we remember, on this our own celebration of Memorial Day, the tremendous sacrifices in our nation’s own history. Our own past conflicts arose out of something much less than wholeness. Those who have lived through them have suffered trauma many of us cannot imagine. In their lives too, O God, may you offer healing. Amen.

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For the past several weeks, without saying much about it, I’ve been preaching on the lectionary, the recommended scriptures that guide preachers and churches through the Bible every 3 years. At this time of year, most of the readings speak to the situation the disciples face in the days after Easter: How will they follow Jesus when he is no longer a daily, physical presence with them? It’s a relevant question for us today because, this is exactly the situation in which we find ourselves—we are trying to follow a Jesus who is not physically here.
In today’s scripture, understanding the challenge, and wanting to encourage the disciples, Jesus tells them: “I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide [who remain] in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.” Another translation: “Live in me. Make your home in me just as I do in you.” (MSG) “Remain in me and I will remain in you. A branch can’t produce fruit by itself. If you remain in me and I in you then you will produce much fruit (CEB).
It’s a metaphor about a grapevine. Vinegrowers know that the best fruit grows closest to the vine. The meaning is clear. We need to figure out, even in the midst of his physical absence, how we will stay close to Jesus. This is what we’ll be exploring today.
Before going on, let’s deal with the problematic, maybe offputting aspect of this passage. Jesus continues: “Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.” That sounds a bit threatening; some of us don’t like the idea that God might throw some people into the fire, or wonder if we might be that person. There’s an explanation for these words. To be fair, this passage originates from the Gospel of John, and in John, Jesus is known for saying divisive sounding things like this. The author of this account of Jesus’ life was heavily influenced by the dualistic Greek philosophy of his day, much of which had to do with drawing contrasts between insiders and outsiders, those who understand the wisdom being taught to them, and those who do not. So in John, there is plenty of reference to those who “get it” when it comes to Jesus, and those who do not, and this book is home to many metaphors about light and darkness, those who enter through the gate or hear the wisdom, and those who do not.
Accepting John’s style for what it is, I would invite you to consider that this passage need not be about insiders and outsiders, implying that some must be left behind. The passage talks about how vines are pruned as a means of keeping them healthy; a gardener trims the parts of the vine that are draining life from us in order to give more nourishment to the parts that are healthy; and so it should be in our own lives. We all have aspects of our lives that bear good fruit and add to our health and other aspects of our lives that steal life and vitality from us. The passage need not be about insiders and outsiders, but can be about nourishing the best parts of ourselves, and pruning away the things that are stealing life from us—or what the passage calls staying close to the vine.
But how do we do that? How do we stay close to Jesus? Well, most of us can probably come up with some obvious answers: we pray, we come to worship, we study the Bible, we engage in the church’s ministries of care and service. But having been at this ministry thing for a couple of decades, and also because I’m a regular guy myself, I can already here the pushback: “Adam, life is so busy, there are already so many demands on my time; how can I do more?”
The tough love reply is that doing more to attend to your spiritual life is always the right thing, and practically speaking will have good results in your life. Different spiritual traditions share some things in common; over on Hyde Park Square right now there’s a sign outside a meditation studio that reads, “Meditate 10 minutes a day. If you’re busy, meditate for 20 minutes.” Christians are wise to heed the same advice.
But another thing we don’t always talk about enough is finding God in your daily life, in the rhythms and practices and daily grind of the things you are already doing—God can be found there too, and this is something commonly known as observing practices of faith; it is about finding meaning and even the presence of God, in daily living. Here are some examples:
One I’ll just call noticing, or what some would call mindfulness. You can practice noticing God and expressing your gratitude in places where God is likely to be found. When you’re playing with your children or grandchildren, when you’re taking a walk outside, when you interact with a stranger who serves you a coffee or delivers the mail, when you hear music or pass by public art: instead of just considering these things to be the normal course of human events, you can remember that they are all gifts from God. Perhaps right in the midst of these things, you might say a short prayer, a simple word of thanks to God for what you have seen; maybe you commit to noticing God along with a friend and compare notes a few times a week about what you’ve seen. Most of the time, God is much more present than we realize, we just aren’t paying attention.
Here's another one: You can practice faith in what and how you eat and drink. Do you believe what Scripture says, that your body is a Temple of the Holy Spirit—and so do you treat it that way? When we put into these God-given machines the things that make them operate best, we can remind ourselves it is an act of faith and care. We can slow down the pace at which we shove food into our mouths, and instead savor how good it tastes, and remember the places it came from, praying for people in our human family who harvested, packaged, and delivered it. We can contribute to programs that fight hunger, not just once a year, but in increments when we are eating, so that other people can honor their bodies as well. And all this you can do through something you are already doing about three times a day.
A third example: You can practice faith in choices you make that affect the health of your spirit. Most of us say “yes” to too many things—can you say “no” to something if doing so would reduce stress in your life or create more time for God? What about a decision for forgiveness? Are you carrying around a resentment and could ask God to help you forgive in a way that could give new life to your spirit and add lightness to your soul? Saying yes and saying no with intention; offering forgiveness; these things have mental health benefits; they are also acts of faith.
These are just a few examples; I could go on. As the summer begins, I’m going to be spending more time talking about our daily tasks; we’ll be looking at how they can either be the meaningless daily grind of life, or ways in which we practice an active life of faith.
I’ll be honest with you about the challenge I have found with staying close to Jesus—this confession is true whether we are talking about daily practices, or the more traditional ideas of more prayer, worship, or study. I do find it hard to fit it all in to my busy life, and moreover, when I fail at what I set out to do, I often end up feeling guilty and defeated. When my goals are about spiritual growth, those feelings cause me to feel even further from God than I did in the first place, and then I wonder, what’s the use in trying?
Here's an example from my own life—along with something I’ve decided to do about it—something I believe is bearing fruit. On any morning when I can do it, I love being up early. In the midst of a busy life and a joyful, if often very noisy home, I love having time in the morning—and I’m a better person throughout the day when I have it. There are dozens of things I’m happy to do with quiet time in the morning. I have multiple prayer practices and meditations practices I enjoy; morning is a great time to read, whether for pleasure or study; I can exercise, whether that means a real workout or just a few minutes to tend to my aging back; in my amateurish way I do a Qi Gong martial arts practice that helps me wake up my mind and my body; sometimes I just try to get organized for my day or attend to a note or two I need to send. Sometimes I just drink my coffee and listen to music or enjoy the quiet. There are so many things I can do with this time, and that’s the problem. I struggle to choose how I will spend the time that I have, or I want to do several of these things; I find myself worrying about what time it is and how much time I’ve got left. A few months ago, I figured out that, as much as I like the morning, I was ending this time feeling frustrated and defeated because I had not accomplished all I had hoped to do—and I knew that wasn’t bringing me closer to God.
So I made a change. Now when I get up in the morning, however much time I have, I just choose one or two of the things I’d like to do, I might set a timer if I need a nudge about when to switch or stop, but most importantly, I stop what I’m doing just 5 minutes before I know I need to start the rest of my day, and I do two things. I spend that 5 minutes thanking God for the time that I did have, receiving the gift of what I was able to enjoy; and I remind myself that in the eyes of God, whatever I was able to do was enough for today. Unlike me, God is not trying to squeeze more productivity into our morning; God is just happy for us to be together, and remembering that is a means of grace. I’m not failing; I’m doing what the day allows—and I can receive and enjoy God’s grace as sufficient for today. And that 5 minute adjustment has made a significant difference in how my day begins.
In that spirit, I am finished for today: let us pray: God, as we hear the music that follows the sermon and have some time to reflect, let us be thankful for the time you have given us today to be in the presence of your wisdom and Word and to stay close to the vine. And may we remember that the time we share always makes you glad; may we know that what we have brought to it today is enough. Amen.

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Today we begin with words I admit may sound ominous, or at least confusing.

Isaiah 53 reads,“He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth;like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.8 By a perversion of justice he was taken away. Who could have imagined his future?For he was cut off from the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people.” (Isa 53:7-8)Every year during Holy Week those are the last words to our Tenebrae Service on Maundy Thursday. The passage is read after the last candle has been extinguished in a Sanctuary that is totally dark, and the congregation departs in silence to meditate on the Crucifixion until Easter morning. If you have never been to that service, it is a one of the more powerful worship experiences we have each year, and you should come. This morning, the same scripture is the focal point of our New Testament reading, so I get a chance to talk about it in a different context. For Christians the passage serves as a reference to Jesus. The Tenebrae service tells the story of the road to the Cross at length, with emphasis on the goodness of Jesus, his love for the disciples and all those he serves, the jealousy, insecurity, and lust for power that leads Romans and religious authorities to call for his death, and the complacency with which regular people like you and me allow it to take place. When this passage from Isaiah 53 is read, in metaphorical language about priest and sacrifice, we read about how Jesus was led to the slaughter, innocent like a lamb. In the Old Testament, or Hebrew Scriptures, the story serves a different purpose. It is part of a broader proclamation in the Book of Isaiah known as the Servant Songs, in which the Prophet Isaiah tells the story of an individual who will bring forth universal justice, and lifts up the oppressed by doing the will of God, and suffers in the process. In these songs, Isaiah expresses hope for his people, and restoration for anyone who may feel left out, who may fear that God has forgotten them. So these words that may sound ominous are actually words of hope.The Scripture we read today from the Book of Acts says that one day in ancient Israel, in the early years of Christianity, a man traveled along a wilderness road reading those very words from Isaiah. Philip, one of the apostles, or early Christian teachers, overhears him—for reading was generally done out loud in those days. Philip approaches the man and asks if he understands what he is reading, whereupon the man invites Philip to join him in his chariot, and the two begin to discuss the meaning of the passage.The setting, and the individuals involved, are important context: The man in the chariot is a eunuch—the passage says so four times, he was a male who would have been castrated at a young age in order to make him eligible for a life of service in the presence of royal women, and this particular man is a eunuch in the court of the Queen of Ethiopia. We are supposed to be surprised that such a man reading the Scriptures after visiting the Temple. As a eunuch he was ineligible for participation in certain elements of traditional Temple religion. And religion aside, his sexual difference places him very much on the margins of society—by no choice of his own, he’s an outsider—and the author wants us to notice this. But at the same time, this man is a court official, travelling independently with leisure time to read; he possesses a personal copy of the scroll of the Prophet Isaiah and he is riding along in a chariot. So while in some respects an outsider, he is simultaneously a very wealthy and powerful individual. An additional statement in the passage adds some mystery: when we’re told that he’s traveled to Jerusalem to worship and is now returning home, it is not clear if he is a Jew living in another land who has made a pilgrimage to the Temple, or if is he a curious Gentile attracted to Judaism? It is impossible to tell. We are supposed to recognize all of the complexity of this character. Is he an insider or an outsider?Now let’s return to what this man is reading—it isn’t an accident. There’s a lot of variety in the Old Testament. There are different styles of literature and different rabbinical schools of thought, and there are ways of understanding God that are in conversation with one another. So in some of the Scriptures, there are comments that differentiate clearly between insiders and outsiders, and that make it clear who belongs and who does not. So in Deuteronomy 23:1, we read that a eunuch could not be welcomed into the Temple. But other scriptures question these assumptions. The Prophet Isaiah, by contrast, is always preaching about the gathering in of all of God’s people, with no outsiders, that hoped for future of the Servant Songs. So, for instance, in Isaiah 11:11 that, he writes that the remnant from Ethiopia will be welcomed home, and in Isaiah 56:4, that the eunuch who has faithfully observed the sabbath will be welcomed into the Temple. This is the kind of stuff the Ethiopian eunuch would want to be reading. Again, who is this man? Insider, or outsider?So the eunuch, who Philip discovers riding along in his chariot, is reading Isaiah 53, this passage about a good, but suffering servant. The scroll he is reading describes a faithful and righteous child of God (an insider), who will be despised and rejected and led to the slaughter (treated as an outsider). And when Philip joins the eunuch in the chariot and asks, “Do you understand what you are reading?” The eunuch asks, “About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or someone else?” As one astute biblical commentator I read this week states it, what the eunuch is really asking Philip, is this: “Is this really about Isaiah and his situation, or could it be about me as well?” (see Feasting on the Word, Year B, Fourth Sunday After Easter) And isn’t that the basic question all of us bring to the Bible? Is this just some old dusty book about someone a long time ago? Or does it have something to say, to me? Which is a way of asking, when it comes to this faith and God thing, am I an insider, or an outsider? Do I belong? This is the question Philip and the eunuch are discussing.Now, in a beautiful twist of the story: we’ve been in this high flown speculation about matters of religion, and then there’s the moment when Philip and the eunuch land the plane. Philip has been unpacking the meaning of the scripture. They’re going along the road in the chariot and they come to water, and the eunuch asks, “Look, here is water. What is to prevent me from being baptized?” This is a bold and vulnerable question, because, Philip might easily have called the eunuch an outsider, but the Ethiopian eunuch took the risk, and into the water they went, and the eunuch received the answer to his question: in God’s world, there are no outsiders. You belong. This is the meaning of baptism.We have a baptism today, (in a couple of weeks we will have several more at Fresh Spirit) and let’s be honest, we still do this in an environment of insiders and outsiders. We welcome all, and I do believe that is true—but we have requirements. If it is an infant or young child, one parent must be a member of the church—we want a commitment to join an ongoing journey of faith. Whether it is the parents, or an older child or adult coming for baptism, we require them to meet with a pastor and to answer questions of belief—we want them to ride along with Philip in the chariot for a while and talk about what the scriptures mean, and decide if they really want to be baptized. The requirements, to my way of thinking, are rather minimal, but we do wind up with our share of disappointed folks who look at our requirements and then say, “well, Knox just wasn’t that welcoming.” There are other, conscientious reasons why some in our community may choose not to be baptized, and the church has an unfortunate history of creating insiders and outsiders based on race and sexual orientation, and surely today we are creating outsiders in new ways; baptism continues to be a practice that has some risk of creating insiders and outsiders.Even for people who are baptized, there is ambiguity that remains. Through this sacrament, we receive God’s promise that we belong to God. But as we meander through life, all of us hit snags in our faith when we have serious doubts, about the existence of God, or why there is such great suffering in the world, or why our church is so deeply flawed; other times we may fall away through some horrible mistake or deep crisis of our own, and may doubt that God can still love us. All of these things can cause us to wonder if we really do belong—or want to.For all those reasons, I love this morning’s story; I love it that there’s so much nuance and complexity to this character Philip meets along the road, because in his baptism we see that no matter how circuitous or complicated our journey of faith may get, in baptism we are reminded that none of our wanderings will ever separate us from the love of God.So a child who will is baptized is welcomed today; we baptize him into this very human, flawed community where we practice faith. Without question, his life will include moments of stumbling in faith, and the same will be true of his parents who will stumble in their journey to raise him, and to sustain faith of their own. But God’s blessing is with us and here to stay; there is nothing to keep us from being baptized, and there is nothing that can take it away from us. Amen.

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Preachers all have some aspects of the Bible that we’re drawn to more than others. I tend to preach on stories and poetry, and it’s less common for me to pick the New Testament letters. But I am committed to “eating my vegetables” so to speak, reading all of the Bible and not always choosing my favorites, and so today I picked the epistle—the letter, which is an excerpt from 1 John. Here, there’s something really important going on: we get a sort of elevator speech for Christianity. In this text you can imagine someone asking, “What does it mean to be a Christian?” and the answer that comes back is direct and concise: Christians are to follow Jesus and love one another—to believe in the truth of Jesus’ life and to be willing to act because of it. That idea will be the focus for today.

Let’s begin with a bit more background on the text: There’s good reason to believe that the Epistle (or letter) of 1 John was written by the same author as the Gospel of John—or by one of his students. About a generation later than John’s Gospel, this letter seems to be addressed to a community struggling with what it means to be a Christian. There are apparently some false prophets with impure motives in the community, perhaps vying for power, and the purpose of this letter is to help the community navigate these voices who want to lead the community. In case any of that seems irrelevant to life today, consider for a moment that something very similar is going on in evangelical Christianity today. There is immense debate over whether those churches have lost their spiritual identity and values in favor of a hard-right political agenda; letters and articles are written about it all the time. To be fair, some of the same debate goes on in more theologically progressive churches too, with many wondering if social issues or inclusion of all perspectives has the effect of watering down the teachings of Jesus. These are live debates. So, knowing what you believe about being a Christian and then being willing to hold to it is very much a matter for today. In this passage from 1 John 3, the author makes a claim about how one might sum up the Christian faith: “This is [God’s] commandment, that we should believe in the name of [God’s] Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us.” Stated another way a few verses earlier, “We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.” There is a part of these statements that is about belief in who Jesus was, and then a second part about what we should do. I’m going to address the two parts of those statements one at a time. First, the matter of believing in Jesus, knowing who he was and that he laid down his life for us. It’s still the Easter season, when we talk most about the death of Jesus on the Cross, and from time to time I think it’s appropriate to take a few minutes and remind one another what the church teaches about the meaning of the Cross. Why did Jesus die for us? The most common, though not necessarily the best, explanation is what theologians call “substitutionary atonement.” The basic idea here is that we are all sinners, but Jesus is without sin, and in order to “fix” what we cannot fix for ourselves, Jesus gives up his own life in order to redeem humanity and place us back in favor with God. It’s a traditional argument, based in familiar passages of scripture and ancient traditions of priest and sacrifice. If that seems archaic to you, consider also that this idea of substitutionary atonement fits with most of our typical cultural thinking about how justice and debt work, and that people get what they deserve, and to that extent it’s been popular in the past and still is today. However, this theory also raises some uncomfortable questions. Why does an act of such violence as the Cross provide a “fix” for the sin of the world, and what kind of God would be made happy by that? So, other explanations have been offered. Another explanation that has always made the most sense to me has to do with the idea of “solidarity”: that in Jesus’ death on the Cross, he acts in solidarity with humanity. This explanation begins with a similar initial premise—that we are caught in sin, and that is why we need saving. Let’s talk about that for a moment: Some folks are not comfortable with talking about sin and there are plenty of other sermons to preach about that, but for today, I’ll just offer this. Many assume that acknowledging the reality of sin means that YOU are a bad person and need to be saved from eternal life in hell, but there is another way of thinking about sin, with roots that are just as traditional. By this more communal way of thinking, it’s not just you, but the whole world that is caught in a cycle of sin, broken and separated from God’s good intentions for us, and we need help in order to restore the world to the goodness God created it for. It’s not just you but the whole world that needs salvation. Most of us don’t need to go any further than the daily news to see evidence of the brokenness of the world, which is what we traditionally call the reality of sin. But how does the Cross save us? Well, returning to this idea of solidarity: what is suggested here is that in the person of Jesus, God comes into the world in order to experience life in the same way that the rest of us do. Jesus is fully human, experiences hunger and joy, love and loneliness, and all aspects of humanity, and in order for him to be fully human, he must also face death. In all of that, he’s just like us. Under this explanation of solidarity and the brokenness of the world, its not God’s desire for Jesus to die, that doesn’t make God happy or satisfied—but it’s the brokenness of this world that kills him. Jesus lives a whole life of tremendous, selfless love—and that way of life was so threatening to the regular kings of the world that they put him to death—and the mob went along with it. God did not desire this, but God’s love for the world was so deep that God would do anything to be in solidarity with every aspect of human experience—including death. If I had unlimited time, I could tell you about plenty of other explanations and nuances to both of these theories of salvation, and I can offer you plenty more reading material, if you like, but for now the point might be this: there is no single definition as to how Jesus saves us, for not all the theologians agree. But the crux of the matter seems to be that the world needs saving, and as Christians, we mean to look to Jesus as our teacher to guide us out of the mess we are in and back to the goodness we were made for. 1 John 3 is claiming that Jesus paid the ultimate price to show us the way; the truth of Jesus is that he laid down his life for us. So what about the second part, that we ought to lay down our lives for one another—that Jesus commands us to love. At first this sounds so demanding as to be impossible, so while the first part of this sermon required explaining a lot of theory, this second part, I think, requires a dose of plain sense. The first thing to say is that, extreme as it seems, it is not impossible to imagine a person laying down one’s life in an act of love. Joan of Arc, Oscar Romero, Martin Luther King Jr. are the famous examples of Christians who have done this. Many others have done so. It is incredibly humbling to remember that there are soldiers, whether in the battles against slavery, or Nazism, or the terrors of today, who are willing to die for the freedoms the rest of us enjoy. The same can be said of first responders in every corner of the world, or the World Central Kitchen workers in Gaza who literally laid down their lives in love for others. This kind of sacrifice happens all the time. Another dose of reality, though, is that most of life is not made of that level of sacrifice, and that most days Christianity asks something much simpler of us. It asks that when we see a neighbor in need and have the ability to help, that we step up and do it. That’s what the passage suggests, not life and death, but rather compassion and generosity: “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?” With whatever situation that appears in our neighborhood or within our sphere of influence, we must give of ourselves in love. That is the expectation. And it can be met quite simply in opportunities we offer to you nearly every week here at Knox and that I’m sure you find in many other places as well.Jesus challenged powerful people in his world to act differently, and to help people in need. There are lots of ways we challenge ourselves to be more active in loving others, and I’ll simply share one way it has shown up in my life. Years ago, I was invited to attend a workshop for community organizers, and curious about that work, I went. Gathered in the room were lots of ministers like me and other do-gooder types, and the first thing that happened was that they asked us to pair up with someone in the room we didn’t know and talk about a question: “Describe a time when you have taken a risk and asked a person more powerful than yourself to do something to help someone else.” I found myself lacking many good answers to that question. It’s not the right question for everyone, but in my case, it woke me up to the fact that I knew plenty of people with power and influence but was very rarely challenging them to do more good—because it was easier not to. Ever since I have found it to be one way to measure if I am stretching myself to love others in a way that is sacrificial. I wonder if there is a different question or challenge that sometimes works on you?There are plenty of different ways of talking about being Christian. And I know it’s true that my sermons express many different ideas that might be described as the “essence” of Christianity; I have not yet landed on just one. But for today, the text reminds us that Jesus laid down his life for us and that we ought to lay down our lives for one another; that we are called to follow him and to obey his commandment to love one another.

So I leave you with questions: Do we appreciate (have we considered) the tremendous depth of God’s love for us such that there is nothing God will not do to be in solidarity with us—to live our life, to bear our struggles and griefs, and to suffer even death for the sake of goodness? AND do we love one another enough to be willing in our own lives to do something about it? These, says John, are the marks of a Christian. Amen.

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There are a lot of really important things about church ministry, but the story we’re reading this morning—commonly known as the Walk to Emmaus—this story has some personal history for me that always reminds me not to take myself too seriously. I remember this story well from seminary; I remember students and professors who treated it as if it was the most important story in the Bible, possibly more important than meeting Jesus Christ himself. This took me by surprise, because I’m pretty sure I got to through most of my first two decades of church without ever having heard it; especially if you are inclined to skip church in the weeks after Easter, you might miss it. But the seminary types love this story. And you can always count on Bible commentaries full of flowery rhetoric about the importance of this text. As I expected, I read one this week that began by calling it “one of the most enticing stories of the gospel literature,” and another who called it a story with “a surplus of meaning” a phrase he felt so strongly about that he wrote it in Latin: sensus plenior. I laughed out loud, and imagined that Jesus would probably do the same.

It is a great story though, and I’m going to tell it to you, beginning with examples of why seminarian-types geek out on it the way they do, and then I’ll end with some of the ideas in the story that are worth thinking more about. I’m not planning to be as “preachy” as I sometimes am about any of it, so you can decide for yourself how great the story really is. But at a minimum I want to put before you some of the compelling questions that come from this text, questions we all might want to think about some more. But first, a few things I learned about this story in seminary:In a literary sense, this story kind of book-ends the ministry of Jesus. Luke tells the story of Jesus with forty days at the beginning during which he prepares in the wilderness, and then here at the end there is forty days between the Resurrection and his Ascension into heaven. Here at the end Jesus prepares the disciples to continue his ministry once he is gone. This is one of those stories about preparation.It is Easter Day, but not morning anymore, and two disciples, Cleopas and another whose name is not given, have decided to leave Jerusalem and walk to a town called Emmaus about seven miles away. They have heard news about the empty tomb but they don’t seem to believe it. And as they walk, they are talking about all that happened in the last week leading up to the death of Jesus. While they are talking, another man joins them on the road, and it is Jesus, but like in other stories about those who witness the Risen Christ, at first they do not recognize him. He asks what they are talking about and they tell him, expressing dismay that Jesus has died, and then their mysterious companion corrects them, telling them that what has taken place happened just they way it was supposed to.Here’s the first thing seminary-types love about this story. It says that “beginning with Moses and all of the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures” and how the Messiah must suffer and die and rise again. He’s explaining the way that the entire narrative of the Bible is to be understood and how Jesus fits into the story—you might say he’s doing what seminary professors do, and ministers as well, so of course, we love it. You may remember a couple of summers ago I spent seven Sundays on a sermon series called Understanding the Bible and over and over, I told you about this cycle of creation, death, and rebirth that moves through the Bible. That’s what’s going on, except Jesus himself is doing the teaching.Moving on: the three travelers continue on and they come to a town and the mysterious companion acts as if he will keep walking, but the disciples invite him to stay. When they are at dinner, Jesus takes the bread, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to them, and “their eyes were opened and they recognized him.” This is the other point of the story that seminarians just love, for a whole list of reasons: (1) the story clearly articulates the liturgical formula that happens in the Sacrament of Holy Communion that we “take, bless, break, and then give” the bread. (2) that just like I tell you every Communion Sunday that it is God’s will that those who wish to meet Jesus find him at the table, it is in doing those four things that we are told the disciples meet Jesus, that “their eyes are opened and they recognize him. (3) This story is consistent not only with what happened at the Last Supper but earlier in the Book of Luke when he fed the multitudes with fishes and loaves, and later in meals that the disciples will share in the Book of Acts—that’s why it becomes a liturgical formula, and (4) that he does all of this using the ordinary bread that was waiting at that table in Emmaus, so just like we always tell you, it matters not if the wafers are blessed by the Vatican or Nabisco, with or without gluten, Wonder bread, matzoh, or tortillas, Jesus makes himself known to everyone the world round who wants to see, and Jesus does it with something as common as bread. In all these ways, this is basically the perfect story about Communion.So for these reasons connected to liturgy and sacraments and academic theology, as I’ve said, plenty of seminary types kind of geek out on this story. But it’s a powerful story for some other reasons too, and I’ll walk through with you, for just a few more minutes, some of the good questions it raises.Consider, first, what might be going on spiritually and emotionally for these two disciples who are walking along the road. Luke gives us just enough detail about these disciples to raise a bunch of other questions about them. He takes time to point out that they’re having a lengthy conversation about all that has happened to them, and the fact that all they had hoped for has now been taken away. So we get to see that these two have experienced something very hard that is common to many of us: they are grieving. They have had the experience of betting their lives on the wrong thing, and now everything they counted on has changed. Any of us who has been through a failed relationship, a great betrayal, a job loss, has had some sense of this. The same kind of feelings come when something terrible thing that happens causes us to question our whole value system. This story is a good jumping off point for any time at which we lose faith and hope in something we counted on.Another thing I find so curious about these disciples is this: even as they are grieving for Jesus, at first they cannot tell that the man who joins them is him. It’s a poignant comment on how grief works. How many of us have had something horrible happen, maybe the death of a loved one, and suddenly you can’t seem to pay attention to anything else? Our broken hearts blind us, one might say. The pain is so deep that it seems to occupy every corner of your mind and heart. Of course, it’s not easy to think about this when one is overwhelmed by grief, but there is another side to this as well. It is profound losses like this, the ones that shake us to the core, that lead us to greater understanding. Faith is often found in the midst of broken dreams. No one wishes a period of grief on anyone else, but we all confront grief sooner or later, and often by enduring a season of loss and coming out on the other side, we discover that our faith was stronger than we realized, and that God is most present in our times of greatest need—and we become much better companions to other people we meet who may be suffering themselves.Aside from the grief they are feeling, something else relatable is happening to these two disciples: they’ve been through a season of life with Jesus that was profoundly exciting and transformative in every conceivable way, but now it’s over, and walking down the road they are presumably headed back to whatever they were doing before: back to fishing, tax collecting, the grind of regular life. Plenty of us have been through something like that, a really fulfilling life experience that comes to an end, and over time the intensity of the experience will begin to fade. What do we do in life when life loses its excitement and everything seems ordinary? This too is a question raised by this story. When Jesus is no longer their daily companion, now that he has gone away and regular life must return, what are the disciples going to do?For so many of these reasons, I think the part of this story that may have the greatest power isn’t the conversation on the road when Jesus teaches the Bible or the moment when Jesus breaks the bread, but in between. When they reach Emmaus, they come to a crossroads. Jesus walks ahead as if he means to go on; the disciples are free to continue on without him, but thank God they ask him to stay. That burning feeling in their hearts was apparently strong enough that they didn’t want it to end, so they went to the trouble to invite him to stay. Jesus’ love is always like this. “We are always free to turn our backs on him…but inviting him to stay is when we are surprised by a life that is infused with meaning.” (Feasting on the Word, Year B, Third Sunday of Easter) It’s a subtle reminder that in all of the things we do as spiritual people, our worship and singing together, our prayers, our goods works and shared fellowship and all of the different things we do together as a church community—they are at their essence means of keeping the fire of faith burning with in us. Doing so takes perseverance, and it is a choice.So I leave it to you to decide just how powerful this story really is. It’s got great seminary fodder for teaching theology and sacraments—yes. And it also raises great questions about grief and loss and the grind of regular life. It appears at the end of the Gospel of Luke, but for followers of Jesus, then and now, who must figure out life without Jesus right by their side, is really just the beginning. And although this story does not provide all of the answers, I hope it’s questions will cause you to think about it even more. Amen.

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This morning’s scripture lesson includes a phrase that has been the source of Christian antisemitism in many places throughout history, and deserves comment when it is read: The story says that on Easter night, the disciples have locked the doors “for fear of the Jews.” One of the things we always must be careful about in reading the Bible is when its authors paint whole groups of people with a broad brush, and this verse is one of the most important examples. There certainly may have been a select group of religious authorities feared by the disciples; but Jews were not responsible as a whole people for the death of Jesus; specific Romans authorities sentenced him and he was put to death according to a Roman punishment. And far beyond those two groups, just about everyone who claimed to love Jesus during his ministry abandoned him in his time of need, and that should be a warning to all of us. But no single group of people are responsible for Jesus death. John, the author of the story of Thomas, tends to paint with a broad brush about the Jews (or at a minimum, takes it for granted that you know the context of his remarks), and throughout the last 2000 years, verses like this one have been used by countless Christians in support of antisemitism. Current events remind us of how important it is to be careful with our language. There are few things I feel qualified to state with authority about the tragic war unfolding in the Holy Land in these days, but something I hear increasingly these days is blanket rhetoric directed at Jews or Palestinians; of course, you and I hear the same directed at Russians, immigrants, opposing political parties here at home…you get the point: these sweeping generalizations are inaccurate and dangerous. As of this week the war in Gaza has gone on for 6 months; I pray for an end to the violence, and I know many of us struggle to know what to do, and I commend each of you who care so deeply. Often one thing we can do is to take responsibility for our own biases and for the uses—and misuses—of our own sacred texts. End of first sermon.

Let us pray: Gracious God, may we take seriously the need to read and interpret your scriptures with humility. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, for you, O Lord, are our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.I love this morning’s story about Thomas. It appears in our lectionary, the cycle of readings most years after Easter, but I’ve not spoken about it in a number of years. The story always takes me immediately back to the painting of it by the Baroque master Caravaggio, who painted so many of the physical and visceral scenes in the Bible, from the sacrifice of Isaac to the head of John the Baptist. In this one, Caravaggio chooses to say something the story itself does not—that when the Risen Christ invites Thomas to put his hands in the wound in his side, that Thomas then in fact does it; and we see Thomas’ moment of astonishment…the raised eyebrows and wide eyes and the caring hand and gaze of Christ…as Thomas changes his mind…but I’m getting ahead of myself. Today is the Second Sunday of Easter. According to our tradition, Easter is not just a day but a season, and the stories we read in church for the next several weeks are meant to draw us into the story of the Resurrection, and how people responded to it. Let’s get right to the heart of the matter: when we talk about Resurrection in the church, some folks are always wondering, “What do I have to believe about Resurrection?” “What if I’m not sure?” There are always a range of opinions, with some folks in the room quite comfortable with a literal, human, bodily Jesus who gets up and walks out of the tomb. And there are others who are quite relieved to read theologians like John Dominic Crossan and hear that some Christians have settled on no bodily resurrection at all—and that Jesus’ body might have been stolen by bandits or devoured by dogs. I am not going to prescribe for you today who is right and who is wrong, but I will address the question, and I want to do it through the lens of this story about Thomas. I’ll say one other thing before we look at the story itself: this story is known by tradition as the story of “Doubting Thomas” which is usually stated pejoratively as if Thomas was the one who did not believe and that was bad. If you were here last Sunday, you might guess that my perspective on that is different. I think most people, including all the disciples of Jesus and the women who went to the tomb—most people have trouble deciding what to believe about the Resurrection. And I think that is okay—my feeling is that doubt, taken seriously, is very much a part of this thing we call faith. On to the story: I’m going to teach my way through it a bit at a time leading toward this question of Resurrection at the end. As I said in my introduction, the disciples are locked in a room, and because we know that, we are supposed to be caught off guard when Jesus is suddenly there with them. He greets them, saying, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” He then breathes the gift of the Holy Spirit upon them and invites them if they feel so led, to go forgive others. Jesus’ words are worth talking about. Jesus might have said, “Why are you all locked up here?” or “Thanks for deserting me in my hour of greatest need,” or “I’ve just woken up from the dead, perhaps you would like for me to explain how.” But he does none of those things. In spite of all the suffering that has passed, Jesus shares a word of peace with them; he forgives them, and tells them they are still worthy to share the peace of God with others, and he encourages them in forgiving others. And the first thing all of that makes me want to say to you about Resurrection is that the point of the story seems not to be the “how” but rather the “why.” Regardless of how the Resurrection took place, the point seems to be that Jesus’ mission must continue. In spite of the fact that he was put to death, in spite of the hatred that continues in the world, followers of Jesus must continue to share his grace and love—even on the other side of his death, this is our calling. Then comes Thomas. He’s not in the room, and when the other disciples see him later and tell him about it, he can’t believe that Jesus was there. “Unless I see the mark of the nails…and put my hand in his side, I will not believe.” Seems reasonable enough. And as the story goes, Thomas gets his opportunity. A week later, the disciples are again in the same house, this time Thomas is with them, Jesus shows up once again, and Thomas believes, he looks at the Christ before him and makes what is clearly a confessional statement, he calls him “My Lord and my God.” At this point I want to loop back to what I said at the start about the Caravaggio painting: Caravaggio assumes that Thomas actually leans in and touches Jesus, but the story as it is written does not get into that level of detail. Again, as is so often the case with these mysterious stories in scripture, we are supposed to get the point, the “why” of the story—that Thomas chooses to believe—but we are left not knowing exactly how, and the person writing the story seems okay with that; Caravaggio was more curious, and that’s fine too. Either way, it is a story of navigating through a situation of doubt on the way to belief, and it seems like a given that everyone will do this a bit differently—and that is fine. This brings me to what I wish to say to you about believing in Resurrection, and there are two things: First, about how much you need to believe about it. On this often asked theological question, I usually follow the direction of my own mentor and greatest teacher, the late Bill Placher. Some argue convincingly for the risen Jesus as one who could have been photographed; others argue resurrection is but a metaphor for the ways Jesus’ legacy is lived by his disciples; Bill fell somewhere in the middle, but with a couple of qualifiers. One, that all of the biblical accounts agree that the “how” of resurrection is a mystery, and that’s okay—I’ve been arguing that all along. Bill’s second point, which I also recommend, is just to be cautious about dismissing the whole thing. If we completely abandon any idea of Resurrection—if we decide to just skip that part of the story—we lose much of the core of Christian faith. (for more on this point, see Placher, Jesus the Savior, 166-170). Jesus, in his whole life, taught us to believe that hope can win in the face of hopelessness and that life is possible even in the face of death. Jesus’ Resurrection is far from the only example of this; Jesus’ whole ministry was meant to help us work for a world where things can be better and different than what we are used to. Followers of Jesus are supposed to live for something more—and that often means being open to things that other people may find unreasonable. Put another way, I think when it comes to Resurrection, it’s important for all of us to simply be willing to have our minds changed. Some of you may object to the kind of certainty that says you have to believe in a literal, bodily resurrection in order to be a Christian. I understand. But refusing to believe that any kind of resurrection is possible; well, that may also be certainty, just dressed in different clothing. I don’t know what it was that caused Thomas to believe or even what he decided he believed in, but there’s something about the fact that he was willing to have his mind changed that seems important as a way of life. I’ll close with a simple example that might take these theological speculations and bring them down to earth a bit. I’m in the middle of jury duty right now; I had it last week and will next week again. I’m not allowed, of course, to talk specifics, but I will tell you something about the experience. Most folks don’t look forward to jury duty. Because of the inconvenience it causes, “jury duty” has an automatically negative connotation for most people that is right up there with “root canal.” I will admit that I went in with some of that negativity, wanting to do my civic duty but not really having the time. I am in the process of changing my mind. I will admit to having some skepticisms about the justice system in general and this responsibility in particular that I suspect are widely shared. But with regard to my colleagues on the jury: at the end of a week I think we are all in agreement that we’re happy to be there. It is a group of people who are diverse in our opinions, backgrounds, and experiences; we’ve been selected at random to spend two weeks together for long stretches of time, and we have talked openly about how refreshing that is. In this little group, we have found that we speak to one another with frankness, respect, and kindness, and that we value one another as human beings. And in a world where all of us spend most of our time in contexts where we carefully choose our friends and where we imagine that many others must be our enemies, this experience calls all of that into question. It is causing me to question once again many of my own assumptions about people who are different from me. If for no other reason, I think that makes it important for everyone to have to do jury duty. Be willing to have your mind changed—that is my good word for today. Christ is Risen, the tomb is empty, death does not have the last word. These are the things we say to one another on Easter. What do they mean for you? And are you willing to have you mind changed? Amen.

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Let us pray: Good and gracious God: on this miraculous morning, when we are reminded most clearly of your promise that life will always triumph over death, may we not forget those for whom death is such a present threat this day: people of Palestine and Israel, Ukraine and Haiti, immigrants and refugees seeking a home, victims of tornados and fallen bridges, victims of violence and hunger in the streets of our city and illness, grief, and loss in its homes. How can the story of Christ give hope to them, and to us? How we may we be instruments of your peace? How may we sow love, as Jesus calls us to do? This is the task of today, and it is a joyous one, for what higher calling is there than to be people of hope? May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

Let’s begin with something light, something silly, but something that caught my attention this week and through it, God showed me what to tell you about this morning. I don’t usually pay much attention to my fortune cookie, but here’s what happened early this week: I was finishing lunch at a Chinese restaurant, when the server handed to me a fortune cookie that I noticed was broken. I jokingly asked her if that was bad luck, and she said, “oh of course not, but I should give you another,” which she did. Then, the moment I stepped out the door a gust of wind blew the second one right out of my hand and it fell the ground, so there I was with not one, but two broken fortune cookies. I went to the car and opened the first one, because I’m not the kind of guy who is going to avoid a broken cookie, and this was another first: the fortune read: “Come back later; I am sleeping.” Impatiently, I opened the second wrapper, and finally read my intended message: “Courage is not the absence of fear but the will to confront it.” Well by now I was paying attention, and it hit me: this is the message of Easter. Like most fortune cookies, the message was not a new or brilliant idea, but it’s one of those worth being reminded of and thinking about. The kind of hope Jesus is trying to teach us comes not from a world without fear, but from the courage to face it. And with that in mind, I invite you to come with me into today’s familiar story.Of course, it was not courage, but fear that put Jesus to death on Good Friday—the fears that possessed everyone else in the story. Some religious authorities were afraid of how Jesus was revealing their hypocrisy. The Roman authorities feared the growing popularity of this rebel teacher who was gaining such a following. And when these powerful people conspired to put Jesus to death, common folks feared what would happen if they did not go along, so they became a mob. Even Jesus’ own disciples, who had witnessed his way of peace and love, caved under the pressure of fear, and abandoned him.The same is true in the world we inhabit today, that it is too often fear that is leading us. World leaders, fearing the loss of power, strike first against their political foes, and send their minions and armies in hope that others will fear them. In our own homes and lives, fear keeps us trapped in broken relationships, work that brings us misery, and neighborhoods where we fear people who are not like us.But…in our time, just as it was in Jesus’ time, there is another way. Jesus has shown it to us in his teaching and his living, and on Easter morning, we see that there were some people of courage who came after him, and who sought to follow him into a life of love. Early on Easter morning while it was still dark, women who had been followers of Jesus followed him still. They head for the tomb where Jesus had been buried to anoint his body according to their tradition. John’s version, which we read this morning, tells us it was Mary Magdalene. Mark’s version, which we believe to be the oldest, claims that she was joined by Mary the mother of James, and Salome. This morning we’ll spend a little time in both versions—why read just one account of a great story when you can read two? John’s telling of the story is the most popular and most often heard on Easter morning—and for many good reasons—it’s got plenty of great dramatic turns and twists to stop and to wonder about. In this version Mary Magdalene heads for the tomb on her own. It was risky enough in ancient Jerusalem for a single woman to be on the road by herself, but even more than that, Mary is already facing down fear knowing that there are likely soldiers guarding the tomb. As she approaches at a distance, she sees that the stone has been rolled away, so in a wise move (for courage need not be stupidity) she turns back and runs to tell the other disciples. Peter and another disciple race to the tomb, where they find the tomb empty and the linen burial wrappings left behind. Without much further comment, they return to their home, one must imagine quite confused by the whole thing. What else were they going to do? But the story continues that Mary remains there, weeping outside the tomb, surely afraid, but still there, and now the magic begins to happen. Finally peering cautiously into the tomb, it is Mary who discovers the angels, who announce to her that he has been raised. Emerging from the tomb, surely in total confusion, Mary stumbles into Jesus himself, at first mistaking him to be the gardener. But when Jesus calls her by name, she knows it is him. Racing home, it is Mary, the one who rose early in the morning with fear, but also with courage, it is Mary who is the first to go find the others and tell them: “I have seen the Lord!” And the rest, as they say, is history.Now I want to invite you to step with me into Mark’s version of the story which is less well-known, and much shorter, but which I’ve always liked the most—especially when it comes to talking about courage.In this story, Mary Magdalene is joined by two others, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, head for the tomb on Easter morning. The stone is rolled away, but they go right in, and a young man (Mark doesn’t say angel) is waiting there, who matter-of-factly tells them this: “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised, he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him.” He then tells them to go and share the news with the disciples that Jesus has been raised. And just as abruptly as the rest of Mark’s account, the story ends this way: “So [the women] went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” The End. Not just fear, but terror seized them. And they told no one; for they were afraid. That is how Mark’s Gospel ends. It is so troubling an ending that if you look in your Bible, you will find additional, optional endings to the story, endings that scholars know to have been found only in later manuscripts—because even the earliest Bible translators could not stand to end the story with fear. But here’s the thing: Mark is a great storyteller, and he knew exactly what he was doing. Mark’s Gospel, even though it’s the oldest, wasn’t written until 25 years after Jesus’ death. So if the women who went to the tomb really told no one, how’d we all find out? For sure, the women left the tomb afraid, and their fear was real, but in the end the news was so good that courage won out—they must have told someone! These women were not living in a world that had nothing to fear; but for sure, they were people who knew a thing or two about courage.Our situation is not so different from those first followers of Jesus. It’s easy, if a bit lazy, to tell ourselves that if we were one of the first followers of Jesus, if we were in those stories so long ago, that it would be easier to believe it all, and easy to be fearless and full of hope. But that’s not at all what the stories say. The stories admit openly that the women left the tomb afraid. We get it that way in both John’s telling of the story, and in Mark’s. Luke tells us that those who met Jesus were terrified and wondered if they had encountered a ghost (24:37) and Matthew says plainly that some who met the risen Christ “worshipped him, but some doubted…” (28:17). It seems clear enough that even for those who were there, what happened was not only mysterious, but frightening. Believing in the hope-filled story, believing that life can triumph over death has always been a thing that takes courage.Today, just as it was then, there is plenty in the world that can cause us to fear. Geopolitical circumstances, divisive culture wars, tough relationships with people you love…I don’t have to spell them all out for you, you know very well that there are things to be feared. But even though fear has always been with us, so too has courage, and like so many stories of Jesus, the story of Easter inspires us to live courageously, refusing to be overcome by fear.Cole Arthur Riley is a remarkable young author who has found her voice out of a journey full of challenge and courage. Now a prolific writer, she hardly spoke for the first decade of her life, family and friends wondering what exactly was the cause of her silence; with her father’s help, it was writing that began to save her. In young adulthood she was struck by a mysterious physical ailment that almost took her life and caused her tremendous despair. But from a place of suspicion and doubt, a bit at a time she began to find herself at home in the story of Christ, and started to write about it. Her latest book, Black Liturgies, is a collection of prayers and poems that challenge the church to embrace joy by being honest about things in life that are hard. These words are from her prayer for Easter, will you pray them with me?:“God who rose, Resurrect us. We’ve belonged to communities, workplaces, and spiritual spaces that have demanded our death far more than they ever advocated for our life… Let joy find us today… May joy find us. Not a joy absent of story or sorrow, but a joy whose allegiance is to memory. A joy that is not quick to forget the agony of Good Friday or dismiss the doubt of Silent Saturday. May we remember and rise to meet hope nonetheless, knowing your liberation is whispering up at us from its empty grave…” (Riley, Black Liturgies, 263)

The grave is empty. Courageous women have faced down fear and shared the story for us to hear it. May we now be led to tell others in our words and in our living that life will have the last word. Christ is Risen. Christ is Risen indeed. Amen.

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This morning we’re going to talk about what are traditionally known as The Beatitudes, this list of blessings Jesus speaks as the first words of his most well-known sermon; specifically, we’re going to talk about how these blessings contrast to most other messages we hear in life, other voices that speak loudly inside of us and that you might call curses.Since Christmas, we’ve been following a couple of themes in worship, and I want to begin with a little reminder of that broader context that sets up today’s message:After the birth of Jesus at Christmas, we spent several Sundays looking at his early life in a series called “Becoming Jesus.” We looked at stories from his childhood, spiritual training he intentionally sought out, and the way he surrounded himself with others for the start of his ministry.Then Lent came along, and we have been talking about a next phase in the story of Jesus. We’ve been asking a soul-seaching question: “What was I made for?” The question is appropriate for Lent because in this season, we are called to a time of spiritual self-examination, checking in about the health and growth of our relationship with God. So as we invite you to ask the question, “What was I made for?” we’ve been looking at what kind of answers Jesus gives to that question. This week’s passage—this collection of blessings—this is one of the ways Jesus tells us what we were made for.As we get into our sacred text for today, I want you to imagine yourself there in the moment, hearing these words for the first time. Imagine that you’re living in the time of Jesus, in the land where he taught and traveled, or maybe imagine that he’s living in our time, and one morning you find yourself with the opportunity to hear him speak to you, directly. On that day, word has spread that Jesus would be teaching on a hillside nearby—hundreds, maybe thousands, have left aside the other demands of the day to go and hear this great teacher, and you have decided to go as well, to see what all the fuss is about.Jesus arrives quietly and humbly, and walks to the hilltop, and there he sits down to teach, for that was the tradition of his ancestors. The crowd becomes quiet, and then he begins to speak, and the first thing he says is this:‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.‘Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.‘Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.‘Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you…Jesus’ voice is calming…and the words are mysteriously challenging, and you find yourself at peace; and suddenly you realize that what Jesus is saying is totally different than what you hear everyplace else in life. Brian McLaren, who I’ve cited here before, teaches that these blessings are what Christians should aspire to be. The problem is that we spend so much of our lives absorbing messages that are quite the opposite, messages that are curses, and not blessings.The voices we usually hear say sound more like this:“Do everything you can to be rich and powerful.” “Toughen up and harden yourself against feelings of loss.” “Be independent and aggressive, hungry and thirsty for higher status in the social pecking order.” “Strike back quickly when others strike you, and guard your image so you’ll always be popular.” (McLaren, We Make the Road by Walking, 127-8)These are the voices we most often here, but Jesus’ message is different, and Jesus’ purpose is clear. Not the curses you hear so often, but his blessings—the blessings are what you were made for.It is a real challenge to live by these blessing from Jesus instead of the curses we hear most of the time—but it is the purpose of the church to rise to that challenge, and speak the blessings. I recently read another pastor’s account of a Bible study he has led in his congregation for many years—many congregations have one like it, but I liked his simple way of putting it. He wrote, “Over the years, we have been part of each other’s diseases, divorces, jobs, weddings, marriages, and struggles with work and parenting. In spite of the seriousness of these issues, when the group started most of the men would comment only on how wonderfully they were doing with life. This is what they had learned to do in all the informal conversations they had in their workplace. If they dared to confess the truth, it could and probably would be used against them. But in time they discovered that this group could be the much-yearned-for sanctuary where they were free to confess weakness and limitation.” (Barnes, The Pastor as Minor Poet, 62)That is the definition of church. This idea of living honestly, according to truths that much of the culture does not value, but being drawn into this different and beautiful way of life. I can think of places where it happens here at Knox, in study groups and among informal friendships, in our Lenten Journey small groups going on now, and in one-on-one conversations in Jana’s office, or David’s, or mine; it happens anywhere where we talk about grief or mistakes, the challenges of parenting or caring for an aging parent, the frustrations in life we can’t make sense of, the stories of the ways we’ve tried to follow Christ, and the ways that we have failed. These are moments that are rarely glorified in the wider culture, but where we grow closer to a real relationship with God.New Elders and Deacons ordained today: what I am describing is the way of life to which you have been called, and it is the kind of community you have been asked to lead. Your task for this season of leadership is to help our community of faith live in this contrary and challenging and vulnerable way; to grow in Christ, to seek to be faithful, to fail at some things and to try again, to receive forgiveness in your own life, and offer grace to others. To help us find ways to do this work here at Knox, in our worship and music, education, mission, and even in the operations of the church, so that everyone we know gets to receive the blessings Jesus has spoken, and so that you can receive those blessings into your own life as well.It is a way of life that everyone wants, and yet it is surprisingly hard to embrace—I know I find that true in my own life. In the past several weeks as I was taking some time for renewal, I was reminded yet again that it is sabbath time with God that makes me a better pastor. I had to be reminded of it, because much of the time, I am deluded by a different voice; a voice that tells me my value comes from doing a lot of work. A part of my spiritual journey is trying to let the power of that voice die, so that I can hear the voice of blessing instead.It’s my hunch that inside many of you, there are unhelpful voices that speak too loudly. What does the unhelpful voice say to you? Our challenge is to keep those voices quiet enough so that we can hear Jesus when he speaks a message no one else is saying.Jesus lived a life that was radically counter to the voices of his time—and ours: he chose peace over violence, poverty over wealth, humility over personal glorification, God over country. People flocked to his way of life, so much so that he threatened the kings of his day, and so in order to kill his movement, they killed him. But his wisdom could not be put to death; his wisdom lives. Jesus is the model; Jesus lived a whole life of calling out all the harmful voices, and offering blessings in their place. We are called to follow him by putting to death in our own lives, the voices that are killing us by a thousand little paper cuts, and to hear the word of God that is calling us to a life of peace, joy, and love.The story of Lent is that the only way to salvation is through death. In the dying and rising of Jesus, we see a story that can be lived everyday in all of our lives. Life, real life, joyful life, is found by naming those things in life that are killing us: greed, lust, addiction, pride…what is it for you? We must find these curses and put them to death so that they cannot smother the presence of God—so that we can hear the blessings Jesus wants for us. Blessed are the humble, the grieving, the meek, the pure and heart, those who hunger and thirst for life with God—for they will be filled. May we lay aside the curses and hear the blessings of truth—this is what we were made for. Amen.

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This past week I was eating lunch at a restaurant, and I found myself in conversation with the owner, who expressed that she’d seen a lot of success over the years, but lately the job just seemed harder than ever. Staff, customers, economic realities; whatever it was, something about this season in life had just made the whole thing seem hard. Why? Well, I hear this kind of thing a lot as a pastor—and not just “these days”—but always. Professionals and parents and all kinds of people--will go through seasons during which things seem especially difficult; sometimes it feels like life has become harder, or less meaningful, or more complicated than it was in the past. And we feel a need for some kind of a reset or fresh start or at least a new perspective. The reality is that life IS hard sometimes; and we need to care for ourselves, and tend to our spirits in order to be ready for the challenges in each day, and especially for the hard seasons. If we look with courage and honesty at the mess life often appears to be, we can at the same time find beauty and poetry in that mess—and take some joy from it. I think training us for this might be the purpose of Lent.

I love this painting—I stumbled upon it not long ago at the Cincinnati Art Museum, and though it’s pretty traditional in nature, I found myself startled by it when I took a closer look. The painting was completed in 1888 by Henry Mosler; it’s about 5’ by 4’ in size, so large enough to really draw you in—and it’s the title that slowed me down enough to really look. It’s called Morning.So in this painting, there are two adults and five children starting the day and let’s take just moment to work left-to-right and see what the kids are up to. This first child is in pretty good shape; dressed, shoes on, ready to go, and now standing on the furniture. This one up at the top, on the other hand, is literally climbing the walls—and if you know anything about kids you know that that big hat just within reach is about to be removed. Child #3 is in the middle, perhaps the most idyllic of the bunch, a baby trying to learn to eat from a spoon, and one seat away, the next one one has given up on that stage of development, no spoon, slurping from the bowl. And this pair is my favorite. Apparently in “simpler times” it was just as challenging as it is today to get a four year-old to put on clothes. I always assumed that by breakfast time in 1888, a kid this age had not only dressed herself, but had already milked a cow, read something in Latin and shot dinner; but apparently not. Don’t miss the pile of coffee grounds on the table, or the cabbage on the floor, or the looks upon the faces of the adults in the painting—which are open to interpretation. To me, the meanings of this painting are clear. Morning has always been hard. And morning has always been beautiful.You don’t have to have children for morning to be an ambivalent experience. How many among us have planned the night before to have a great day tomorrow—or at least a productive one—only to wake up with an aching back, a scratchy through, a text message of distress that must be dealt with, a fender bender on the way to work, an unwelcome email in your inbox, a news story that breaks your heart, a coworker who is going to be difficult today…and suddenly, the great day you planned for becomes something else…a disappointment. Is there anything to be done about this? When the challenges come, is there a way to redeem them? A way to find God’s beauty and poetry at work?Enter the story from the Book of Genesis about Noah, the flood, and the rainbow. For starters I invite you to consider this: that life is often frustrating for any of us, and sometimes life is discouraging enough to make you want to give up. And in this story, God seems to share that frustration, because in this story, which begins a mere 6 chapters after Creation, a great flood destroys it all because its time to start over. But in today’s reading, at the end of the story, there’s this poetic statement by God, establishing a new covenant with Noah and his descendants, and promising to never again destroy the world by a flood. In this story, God acknowledges the tragedy of what has taken place in this flood, and perhaps even seems to be carrying some sense of regret; at the very least, God makes a promise that, going forward, things will never again get so bad to make it worth scrapping the whole thing. God wants us to learn to live—and even find joy—in the midst of the mess.Anyone who is not completely horrified by the violence of the flood story, and who is willing to keep on reading the Bible, finds that this story fits a theme that comes up again and again in Scripture, it is perhaps the most important storyline of all: that in the beginning, God creates the world and calls it very good; God places humankind in a beautiful garden to tend and enjoy; and when that experiment fails in Genesis, chapter 3, God’s purpose for the rest of eternity will be to try to help us get back to that Garden and receive the life of goodness and blessing for which we were made. That is God’s promise, the promise on which God will never give up. And every time we see a rainbow, we are supposed to remember it.Today is the first Sunday of Lent, a church season during which we will experience together a different kind of flood story, a different story about passing through death on the way to new life, this time centered around God’s own Son, Jesus. During Lent we follow Jesus on his path to Resurrection, which only comes through death on a Cross, and here we see a renewed telling of the flood story: that often in life, in order for rebirth to happen, first something has to die.We are called to go on this journey with Jesus, a journey of personal exploration about what in our own lives is not helping us get back to the Garden and therefore needs to die. An addiction, an attitude, an unhealthy relationship with greed or lust or some other sin. This is the story of Lent: that through the death and resurrection of Jesus we see a pattern we are meant to follow: to seek out the things in our lives that need to be let go or put to death, so we can experience more of the joyful life in the Garden for which God created us. Over the next several weeks, you’ll hear sermons around the question: “What was I made for?” and the common answer for all of us is that God made us to let go of the things in life that are death dealing for us, and to accept God’s invitation to return to that joyful garden. Lent is a season for thinking and praying about how we can do more of that.When I look at that painting, I see both of those messages I mentioned before: that morning—and really all of life—is beautiful, and is also hard. I think about what it’s like to chase my own children through the house in the morning, cajoling them into getting dressed eating breakfast, taking a shower, and I realize that everyday I make little choices to either experience these challenges either as an unwelcome annoyance that is ruining the start to my day, or as an amazing gift, through which I get to shape a young life and experience joy in my own life while doing it. And I realize that most of the other experiences in life that are hard also have that opportunity to be redeemed if I choose to see God working through them. Perhaps the same is true for you.A favorite author of mine, Craig Barnes, tells a story about this. One morning he was on a trail run—he was probably in his 50s at the time and was making his way along at what was a good pace for him. All of a sudden, a team of college cross country runners came from behind, running like gazelles and flew by him like he was standing still. By the time he got to the end of the trail, where their finish line was, the team was standing around talking and laughing, fully recovered, while Barnes, ready to collapse, bent over and sucked wind, wondering how anyone could think there’s such a thing as a good run.But just at that moment, the young runners all began to cheer, and Barnes looked up to see in the distance that a Special Olympics team was now approaching the finish line. And even though they weren’t moving with anything near the speed of the varsity team that went by before, all of them were smiling from ear to ear, loving not only the applause and encouragement but the joy of run itself, even in spite of the effort. It wasn’t an experience of perfection, but it was one of joy, of life lived “without veneer,” and full of grace. Barnes writes that he suddenly found himself cheering louder than anyone else for those joy filled runners, and that when he got back to his car, he couldn’t stop crying. Barnes had stumbled upon his own need to receive the joy of the day. He goes on to say that “the portal into joy is confessing the truth: [that] we are not whole. No has to pretend, and the truth feels so good that we just want to cheer whenever someone else exhibits it.” (Barnes, The Pastor as Minor Poet, 38)Our lives are so full of things that we wish were somewhat different than they are. Sometimes we feel that way for very good reasons. And many of the sources of our struggles are problems we are not going to be able to fix. When you’re 50, and can no longer run like you could when you were 20, it’s normal to feel some remorse over days gone by. And there are much greater problems in the world that are truly the cause of misery and suffering; but if we’re going to be able to contribute to the real struggles, we’ve also got to practice dealing with the little challenges of every day. Just like the Morning painting which can be interpreted either as a total mess, or a new dawn full of accidental joy… challenges can either ruin your day, or can be a chance to share joy and love in the world God has given you.Lent is a season for this kind of self-examination. To remember what you were made for: that God created you for good, and that through laying aside (putting to death) the things in our lives that are stealing joy from us, we can find more of the Garden God created us to enjoy. May this season of Lent take you on that journey, and lead you to life. Amen.

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I wonder if you’ve noticed that the people closest to you are often the least likely to want your advice? Your kids follow their coaches’ instructions much more quickly than yours; your young adult son or daughter doesn’t want your advice about who to date; aging parents would rather not have your guidance on where to live or what kind of help they should have, and your spouse probably doesn’t want your advice on much of anything! Age-old leadership advice says that the best way to get someone to do something is to make them think it was their own idea. We see evidence of this all over the place. The bad news about today’s sermon is that I am not going to tell you how to fix this, mostly because I don’t know how.But I do have a Bible story to tell you about a this idea; the story gives us things to think about in our own lives, and also as a church. The story is about what happens when Jesus teaches in the synagogue of his own hometown. We find in this story the comforting idea that you haven’t been doing anything wrong: it is a truism that the people closest to you don’t always want your advice—even if you’re Jesus Christ.Let’s start by setting up this story with a little context: In the centuries that lead up to the lifetime of Jesus, Judaism goes through a change. You may remember that the early books of the Bible include a bunch of laws that involve ritual sacrifices as a central part of religious life, and that most of those sacrifices were brought, first, the Ark of the Covenant as it moved about with a nomadic people, and then eventually to the permanent home of the Ark in the Temple built by King Solomon in Jerusalem. But in 587BC, Jerusalem is sacked and the Temple is destroyed, and the Jewish people are dispersed to live in a variety of other places. The Temple would soon be rebuilt, but this is the start of what you might call the age of the synagogue. Unlike the Ark or Temple in a central location, synagogues were like satellite locations for worship, and were found anywhere you had 10 at least people—10 men, I’m afraid—who met together to study a scroll containing the holy scriptures. At this point Judaism shifts somewhat away from the centrality of sacrifice and toward and emphasis on study. Any male who had come of age was permitted to read the scriptures in the synagogue and discuss their meaning. And this is what is going on when, in our story, Jesus visits Nazareth.So the people have gathered, the time for study is upon them, and they hand Jesus the scroll of the Prophet Isaiah, and he opens it to where he chooses and reads:“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”A beautiful, poetic message, encouraging healing, justice, and renewal. And Jesus closes the scroll, and says, “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Let’s discuss. At first, things are going fine. ‘What a great selection for a study,’ they say, ‘this carpenter’s son turned a rabbi sure is doing a fine job, its so nice to have him home for the weekend.’Then the trouble starts. Jesus, who is a keen observer of human nature, knows the next turn the conversation is going to take—and he beats them to it. He knows that the study group is about to quote a proverb: one of them is going to say, “Doctor, cure yourself,” and another is going to say to Jesus, “Do here what we’ve heard you were doing in Capernaum with all of that good teaching and healing…” It is as if to say, ‘Ok Jesus, you want justice and good news for the people of Nazareth—start with the man in the mirror and get to work!’ But then Jesus says, ‘Thank you very much, but I am just visiting. The suffering people of this town need you to get to work—and you know it.’The hometown guys don’t really like being challenged in this way and begin to shift in their seats, but Jesus, who doesn’t mind pushing people’s buttons in order to speak the truth, Jesus doubles down on the challenge. He references two other Scriptures, one about the prophet Elijah and the other about Elisha, and both stories are about the same idea: that God often sends help not to the people who already know the Law and are just ignoring it, but instead, God often helps people outside the faith who could use a good word of hope. God does this even when those people are supposed to be our enemies; and as for the insiders God seems to be ignoring, well, they’ve already got the truth right there in the Scriptures. They just need to hear it.Well, the people in the Nazareth synagogue don’t like this at all, and in fact they run Jesus out of town. How dare he provide comfort and healing and work miracles all over the region, but skip over them. And in a conclusion to the story I think is just great, the only miraculous thing Jesus does in this story is to “pass through the midst of them” as he went on his way. Just as they are about to throw him off the cliff, he disappears! And the angry people are left in disbelief; this young man they had just concluded was worthless enough to put to death was in fact God in their own presence…and now he is gone. But they’ve still got the synagogue and the scriptures telling them what to do—so now they’re really going to have to get to work.There are lots of applications of this story. It’s true in churches all over the place, that the criticisms are many and people don’t like hearing them. I can think of plenty of criticisms I could level at the congregation of my childhood, even though I love the place, and I can imagine the people who would want to run me out of town. On the other hand, to the extent that Knox is home for me after almost 10 years, I can think of critiques of this place that you all might not want to hear. And there’s nothing unique in that about my childhood church or about Knox. All pastors can think of these criticisms—the ones that would not be welcomed; in fact, it’s a well-known practice in ministry that, occasionally you invite a guest preacher to say something to your congregation that you know they can’t hear coming from you!On the other side of today’s Bible story though, the comparison isn’t as simple, for while a congregation is a congregation is a congregation, no pastor is Jesus Christ, I certainly am not, so if any of you responded to my critiques by quoting me a proverb, “Doctor heal yourself,” I would no doubt need to accept that advice from you. In every congregation, the verse Jesus quoted in Nazareth is true: we are too often lulled into comfort and complacency and self-preservation in our religious life together; we have forgotten Isaiah’s prophetic word that we are here to bring good news to the poor and to let the oppressed go free; and the pastor usually needs to hear it as much, or even more, than the congregation.These are truths about church life, and as much as they may sting, the truths that sting hardest are usually not the ones about our church, but about our individual lives. Most of us know the things we ought to change about our lives and we just don’t want to change them, so we hate it most when someone we love, someone who knows us well, points out something about us that we already know, and just don’t want to talk about. I wonder what that thing might be for you, today?There is beauty, though, to be found in seeing ourselves on both sides of this exchange between Jesus and the people in his hometown. For sometimes, yes, we are on the receiving end of advice or critiques we do not want to talk about. But other times, we are the ones who are giving the advice—and when we speak the truth to someone close to us, it is usually because we love them, and want good things for them; and remembering that when advice comes our way might make us more gracious in hearing a critique. But much more importantly, today’s story might allow a deeper truth to work upon us: that the truth Jesus speaks from the Prophet Isaiah is truth that all of us need to hear, so that we can ask how it’s beauty is alive in our own lives and could be more and more. Jesus speaks them because he wants greater love, justice, and joy for you, and for all of us together. Jesus wants us to have the personal joy that is found in justice and service to others. So listen once more to Christ’s teaching today, as I read it slowly:“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”And knowing that I can add nothing to the wisdom of Jesus himself, I leave you with the challenge he gave to the people in his own hometown. “Today, this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Amen.

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In these early weeks of 2024 we’ve been talking about the theme “Becoming Jesus”—a sermon series on stories from early in Jesus’ life and ministry. Today we’re shifting from the focus we’ve had on Jesus’ own preparations toward what it’s like to be on the receiving end of Jesus’ early ministry; we’ll be talking about the calling of his first disciples and how that took place and what it means for you and me. Before we get into that, I’m going to start with one example about why it might matter to talk about this today.

I wonder if any of you saw this story earlier in the week: Elmo (yes, Elmo from Sesame Street), posted a question on social media. The post read: “Elmo is just checking in! How is everybody doing?” Well, the newsworthy part of this story was that tens of thousands of people responded, mostly to let Elmo know what a hard time they’ve been having so far in 2024. There were lots of posts like, “Elmo, every Monday, I cannot wait for Friday to come…” and “I’m at my lowest, thanks for asking…” The responses spurred Elmo to make some additional posts about the importance of mental health and caring for one another. The fact that the post went viral landed Elmo a spot on The Today Show this week, where comedian Larry David, who was also on the show, attacked Elmo, I guess because he objected to sitting through mental health advice offered by a puppet… Larry David appears to be having a hard time himself….and that part of the story continues to develop.Well, I don’t have anything sermon-related to say about this crazy story except—and here I am quite serious: What a clear indication that people are crying out for help. A lot of folks are struggling out there; you’ve certainly read in other places or probably experienced yourself that there is a real crisis in mental health all around us; and whether the needs are related to grief, or exhaustion; worries about politics or of wars and hunger, refugee crises and gun violence, and many, many personal struggles with jobs or families or lonliness—or just the helplessness related to our lack of ability to fix all these things. People are hurting and stressed and feeling helpless and hopeless, and need something to get unstuck, a fresh start, a new beginning.When it comes to big, important struggles like these, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t lay any of them at the feet of Elmo. But if our faith is worth anything, we ought to be able to bring our questions to God, and in the story we read this morning, I see something of that going on with the way Jesus calls his disciples. So let’s spend a little time talking about that. We’re going to read this story with an eye toward what might cause the disciples—and modern day disciples like you and me—to decide to follow Jesus. My hunch is that they were struggling. Something about the world that surrounded them or their own personal struggles made them ready for something new. And then Jesus shows up.The thing that fascinates me in this story is that it shows both an amazing challenge Jesus puts before us, and at the same time, tremendous grace and acceptance. Let’s take a closer look so that I can tell you about what I mean.The story is a familiar one to some. Jesus is walking along the shores of the Sea of Galilee and recruits his first four disciples: Simon and Andrew; James and John. They are fishermen. He invites them to follow him and fish for people, or in the translation many of us learned as children, “Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men…” The story is memorable because of how bizarre it is. Jesus approaches, makes his invitation with no incentives or explanation of any kind, just “Follow me,”…and they go. The narrator, Mark, uses the term “immediately” all the time, and here he says, “Immediately, they left their nets and followed him.” A memorable commentary I read said, “you can fairly well see Zebedee, their father, standing in the boat holding the nets in disbelief.” (Placher, Mark—Belief Commentaries) There is no discussion of where they are going or how long they will be gone; no negotiating terms of inheritance with the father and boat they have just abandoned, or anything else of the kind. Mark intentionally tells the story to make the point that immediately they go without any hesitation. The intention is for the person hearing the story to see that Jesus’ says “Follow me” with such authority that the offer is irresistible. It’s so hard to understand what might have motivated these disciples to go, but in going back to where I started with that story about Elmo and all the hurt that is out there today, I have to assume that they followed…because they needed to. They were feeling stuck and hopeless, and he offered them a way forward in life. And that makes me want to look deeper and see if there’s more going on here.Thinking about how these disciples follow—without hesitation—theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer made an interesting point. Many of us assume that we would follow Jesus more closely “if only we had more faith.” Its as if we need more time to consider, believe, pray and prepare ourselves for the coming of Jesus, see the miracles and hear the teachings for ourselves and then we would do whatever he commands. But this story, he says, tells us quite the opposite. These disciples just go. They follow, entirely without question, and without any preparation. They follow—and that’s how they will learn faith. They follow—that is how their lives will change. So, Bonhoeffer says, that’s what you and I should do. If we’re wondering how to have more faith, how to find hope, how to get our lives unstuck…don’t spend time navel gazing and wondering about what it would be like. Follow Jesus. Do what he says and live the way he tells you to live—and your life will be transformed. Don’t think about it. Give it a try. (Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 61-2)Now that the challenge that is set before us, the next thing that is likely to come is the excuses. We say to ourselves, “I cannot I do as they have done, there’s no way I can leave behind all my other obligations, and abandon everything else I love, and even if I thought I could, I’m sure that I would fail. If following Jesus must be that complete, I cannot…”On this point, I’m with you. And if one has to drop everything and physically leave in order follow Jesus, honestly, I’m not even quite sure what that would look like. In light of this, I’m going to share another insight on this story that may surprise you. This is the grace in the story, and to understand this point, we have to back up a bit to the beginning of the story. If you look in your Bible, one of the ones here at the church or most of the ones you may have at home, the heading modern editors have put before this story always says something like, “Jesus calls the first disciples.” The modern heading calls them disciples. But in the story itself, Jesus doesn’t use that word, and neither does Mark as the narrator. The word disciple only comes up later in the book after they have started to follow him. Disciple is a word that doesn’t come up in many other contexts either, and so, points out theologian Bill Placher, you really only find out what a disciple is by seeing what these followers do once the go with him (Placher, Ibid, 35).The story of what the disciples do is where the surprise comes in: dropping everything to follow Jesus is quite an impressive at of faith, but just about everything else these disciples will do is…not. Not impressive, not faithful, not wise. Mark, the storyteller, goes to great lengths to make it clear that the disciples don’t get it when it comes to following Jesus, that they mess up and misunderstand and fail on all kinds of occasions. In fact, after laying the groundwork of that theme with most of the other disciples, Mark singles out the same two sons of Zebedee, we’ve been talking about, James and John. In a story in Mark 10, they are the ones who come to Jesus near the end of his ministry to ask if they can sit at his right and left when he triumphs gloriously…and knowing that is not at all the way human life is going to end for him, Jesus takes that opportunity to correct them, saying, “whoever wishes to be great must become a servant, and whoever wishes to be first must be slave of all.” James and John, and all of the disciples, they don’t get it, they don’t understand, they are not models of faithfulness and devotion…and yet we know from the story that these are Jesus’ closest and dearest friends. These are his disciples—these confused and struggling people. So what we have in this story is this odd mix of a great and high calling that requires no hesitation and no compromise and utter devotion, which is followed by…a life of repeated failure to deliver. Which is why, as I said earlier, I find this story to be one of both tremendous challenge and tremendous grace; because Jesus knows our doubts and failures and lack of faith very well, and yet he keeps on asking us to follow, he keeps on receiving us just as we are and inviting us to try again.

As for the way I started, with that reference to Elmo and the more serious acknowledgement that so many of us are looking for help… Well, the story of Jesus may be exactly what so many of us need. An offer for a new beginning, a new direction, a new way of life. An invitation to follow, with no need to prepare first; to do something powerful and important and transformative with our lives, something healing and wise and meaningful by being a disciple of Jesus Christ—and the permission to fail at it, as many times as we need to, and to know that we will be invited to get up and dust ourselves off and try again. For in that is a way to find, rest and healing, hope and a beginning. This is what the story of Jesus will teach us. Keep coming back. We’ll talk more about what this discipleship looks like. Thanks be to God. Amen.

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David Brooks’ book The Road to Character is full of real stories about people who spent significant time and effort in the forming of a significant life. Dorothy Day, Samuel Johnson, George Marshall, Bayard Rustin. Some of the names might mean more to you than others, but the stories have a common thread—the road to character is a long and challenging one, but it is worth it; we see it through these various individuals who learned something significant about life through self-examination, or struggle, or love, always through some form of challenge or testing. This morning’s Bible story might be very much at home in the same book. At first the story seems the stuff of fantasy, but on closer examination, it is all about the world we live in. This story is about the power of temptation and greed, it’s about the dangers of idolatry—which means centering your life around the wrong thing, and it’s about getting lost and trying to find your way in life. All those things are in this story, and I could go on. In this story, Jesus goes to the wilderness to prepare for his ministry. He takes the time and accepts the challenge to grow into the spiritual person God created him to be. Let’s look closer: We’re in the midst of a sermon series called Becoming Jesus. In this series we’re looking at stories from early in Jesus’ life and ministry, and how he prepares for his ministry. Last week we looked at the only account we have of Jesus’ childhood; in that story we saw that Jesus was not just some all-knowing God-child, but that he “grew and increased in wisdom” over the course of his life. This week we look at a similar idea. Jesus was not born a spiritual giant, but that he had to go through a process of preparation and struggle, which he would continue to renew throughout his life. As we look at the story, we’ll stop for some short detours to explore some of the specific things going on. First I want to invite you to notice the way the story begins and what has taken place just before: Matthew and Mark recount this story; in both versions, first, Jesus is baptized by John, the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus showing that God is pleased; and then, it’s that same Spirit that sends Jesus out into the wilderness. Matthew says Jesus was “led” by the Spirit; Mark, whose language tends to be more direct, says Jesus was “driven” by the Spirit into the wilderness. So in this story, God is making it clear that there is something Jesus must go and do. It will be essential for his development. He cannot do without it. And it’s a good thing for him to have this experience—it is God’s Holy Spirit that drives him there. But then there’s this thorny issue of what comes up next. Waiting for Jesus in the wilderness is “the devil” in Matthew’s version; Mark’s version draws on a Hebrew term calling him Satan. Plenty of us, myself included, are not sure how we feel about hell, or traditional depictions of the horns and the pitchfork and all—is that really consistent with the God of grace and love, right? So, let’s put this in some context. The Satan who is mentioned here is part of a tradition we see elsewhere in the Bible; the context that might be familiar to you is the Book of Job. In that story, Satan is depicted as a member of God’s heavenly court who becomes sort of a “fallen angel”; the character in this story is similar: he knows God and Scripture and quotes it to Jesus even as he offers temptations—the devil is familiar with God’s power, but wants to see it used for harm rather than for good; the devil in this context is a sort of literary device that brings to life the struggle between good and evil in the world. You don’t have to buy into the horns and the pitchfork, but this is supposed to be a means for us to talk about the fact that there is evil out there in the world, and we must contend with it. In Job’s tale, Job’s goodness and faithfulness is deeply tested, but God’s goodness ultimately prevails. In this story, the same Satan is present and preys upon Jesus in the wilderness. And this begs the question: why would God send Jesus into such an experience? The answer seems to be, again, that this is what life in the world is like—human beings face testing and temptation in the world; that’s just one of the facts of life—and if we’re going to claim that Jesus really understands what it is to be human, testing and temptation have got to be a part of that. The story continues—in Matthew’s version—with these three very tangible, descriptive accounts of what Satan says to Jesus. Satan dares Jesus: “turn these stones into bread if you are hungry; throw yourself off this tower and force the angels to save you; worship me and the whole world will be yours…” Theologians note in this story a distinction between temptation and testing. For the devil, this wilderness time is an opportunity to tempt Jesus—to try to get him to use power improperly or chase greed and power, or take shortcuts to glory—these are temptations to go the wrong way; but for God they are tests—opportunities to meet choices that are part of life in the world and to choose reliance on God and build a life of stronger faith. In the same way that we grant greater freedoms to children as they grow, God provides these tests, even to Jesus, to lead him toward a life not of empty shortcuts and material pleasures, but of faith in things that matter and last. This is the kind of character Jesus will need in his ministry just like all of us need them in order to lead principled, character-driven lives. And likewise, most any challenge that meets any of us in life can be considered a temptation to shortcuts and selfishness, or can be tests that lead us to greater inner strength. That’s what’s going on in this story. Mark’s version of the same story is much shorter, but all of the same elements are there: Jesus driven to the wilderness for a long period of time, temptation and testing, references that remind us Israel once walked this road as well; the reality of evil and the greater goodness of God, the comfort provided to Jesus by the angels. Even without the specifics, Mark gets his point across: Wilderness time is important. And the journey to spiritual maturity is important. And God is present in both. I’m not sure why, but I remember reading this story as a young person and imagining that everything associated with this story was bad—the devil, the temptations, the hunger—but the more I reflect on it now, the more I see the graces that are present in this story. It is about the reality of hardships and choices in life, and about a God who wants to guide us into a life of faithful living for things that matter. And wilderness is not at all a bad thing, though it usually feels that way at the time. All of us at times experience wilderness periods in life, where we wander a bit in search of what we are supposed to do next, unsure of what choice to make. And this story suggests that even though we may not always realize it, God is near, perhaps nearest to us, in those wilderness times, preparing us for what lies ahead. This story is all about Jesus’ spiritual development, and the last thing I’ll note about it is that it takes time—whenever the number 40 is used in the Bible, it’s a pretty good indication that something lasted a long time. So for those among us who may be currently facing a season in life in which we are feeling tempted or tested or wandering in search of what we are supposed to do next—and if it feels like its lasting a long time—note that you are in good company, including that God walks with us in these long seasons, often in ways we do not see. One of the primary purposes of the church is to be about the work of guiding people through times of spiritual wilderness. Already in our congregation, but more coming up in the season of Lent, and increasingly throughout the year, we plan to get more explicit about ways you can be aware of this part of your spiritual journey and be intentional about it, so that wilderness does not just happen to you, but so that you might be driven to it and led through it, as Jesus was, and so that you might sense God’s presence even in the struggle. That journey begins with prayer, which Jesus did throughout his ministry to renew his strength. I know many of you are experiencing some kind of wilderness even today, so I’m going to invite us to close today by praying together:

Let us pray. Gracious God, be present with us as we are here together, and be with each one of us, as we struggle with temptation and testing and wilderness in life. Perhaps today, people among us are being tempted by greed or addiction or some other shortcut to happiness that will more likely lead to misery. Help us God, guide us, keep us from harm and give us strength. Temptations come in life, O God, but help us to receive them and deal with them; we need not rely only on our own strength, but we can pray for strength from you to see us through, and then we might discover that there was more goodness and depth of character within us than we realized, and we might through you grow and increase in wisdom, as Jesus did. You are with us in the wilderness times of life, God. Help us to know it. If we are wandering in these days God, help us to find our way, to renew our sense of purpose and to be guided by you. Even as we struggle, help us to live generously, for our own happiness is usually found in helping someone else. Perhaps we have been in the wilderness for a long time. Help us to be gentle and patient with ourselves and to remember that you are with us. We know that the path to joy is not a quick one but that you are there, wanting good things for us. We thank you, God. Amen.

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Good Morning. It’s mid-January; snow is on the ground today, and it’s very cold. This week, The New York Times ran a little culture piece about January: it was about how, yes, there are many subjects that have become contentious to argue about; but it’s still pretty safe to have a spirited debate about whether you love or hate winter. On the minus side there is of course the cold, and with it the darkness, the salt and slush, the seasonal affective disorder and the challenges of being cooped up inside. But of course there are positives as well. The snow has its own beauty, even if you’re just looking at it through the window. Out there, kids are making snow angels and laughing their way down the sledriding hill—it always makes me smile that even the most sullen of teenagers seem to have an innate sense that helping a six year-old back up the hill is just kind of the right thing to do. Back at home a hot cup of cocoa and maybe a warm fire await. But why am I telling you this? Well, it’s a simple example of something our Christian tradition means to help with. Life is full of good news and bad, triumphs and struggles, despair and hope, and we are constantly pushed and pulled between these things. And in many ways more significant than what to think about January, it can be hard to find your way. Faith is supposed to help us navigate through it and hold things together. You’ve probably heard that Christian theology describes Jesus as “fully human and fully divine.” I imagine some among you find that to be fascinating scholarship, and just as many think it sounds like pointless academic drivel. This morning I’m going to argue that the idea of Jesus Christ as human and divine actually has a practical component. It is supposed to help us explain and navigate the tension in the world between human limitation and divine hope. It’s not that humanity is all bad either; it’s that in thinking more deeply about these things, we have a chance to become more fully human and fully divine. And this morning, during our current series on Becoming Jesus, we’re going to look at a story from Jesus’ childhood and what it teaches us about being both human and divine. The Bible story begins with a scenario familiar to many parents—it’s about a mom and dad who lose track of their kid. As the story goes, each year at the time of the Passover festival, Mary and Joseph travel to Jerusalem for the celebration. Jesus goes along. When he is 12 years-old, they make the trip per usual and on the way back they discover that Jesus is missing. Now, I know this sounds hard to believe or like really bad parenting. So consider for a moment how different childhood was just a generation or so ago. I remember age 12: I would leave the house after breakfast, basketball in hand, on foot or on a bike, unsure to whose backyard or woods I might be headed, no water bottle or snacks or money or cell phone in my pocket, with little likelihood that I would return before dinnertime. Many of you probably remember something similar. Imagine what the other Hyde Park parents would say in 2024. So here we have Jesus and his family, on a journey from their home of Nazareth up to Jerusalem for the biggest Jewish festival of the year. Jesus enjoyed some independence. They would have traveled in a large caravan from their community, for the roads were not safe for small groups, but a village could travel together; everyone knew each other; and on the way back Mary says to Joseph, “where’s Jesus?” and we can imagine that Joseph answers, “oh, I’m sure he’s out in front with the Schwartzs,” and someone overhears and says, “Nah, they said he was in back, with the Bernsteins,” and when they discover that he’s in neither place, like a modern family in the aisles of Target, they have to double back to Jerusalem to find their lost kid. After looking in all of the most obvious places to find a child, they finally stumble upon Jesus in the Temple, where he is amazing the rabbis with the depth of his questions. Now I don’t know about any of you, but when I heard that story in Sunday School, I could only imagine a miraculous, God-like prodigy, a kid who knew everything. When Mary and Joseph found him, he was not only unpacking the mysteries of eternal life, but was probably also teaching them advanced calculus and translating the works of Aristotle into Mandarin. This was the all-knowing God in the form of a little boy. There’s a sense in which the story does sound like that: we’re told that Mary and Joseph are amazed to find him there, and that when he says to them: “Did you not know I would be in my Father’s house?” that they don’t seem to understand. He was God. But here’s the thing: The story ends with another line, one I didn’t think much about until I read it again in seminary: the last verse reads that after these things, the family returned home, and Jesus “grew and increased in wisdom.” And that means that clearly there was no calculus or translating to Mandarin, and probably no secrets of eternal life either. Jesus was no doubt precocious and special, in childhood and adulthood too, but he was also human. His unusual wisdom was held in balance with the fact that he had to grow and mature just like the rest of us. So throughout his life, Jesus is showing us how to navigate this reality in which we all find ourselves: that in every one of us there are seeds of wisdom, goodness, and divinity. These seeds are ready to grow and increase and help us to live fuller lives. And at the very same time, we struggle with all of the natural limitations of human life. These limitations comes in the form of what we’d call pride or greed or impatience, biology or immaturity or just plain making a mistake, and there are a thousand ways in which these human limitations shape who we are. Until we come to terms with those limitations, we will never be fully human. And the great challenge of faith is trying to grow that seed of divinity even as we learn to live with our humanity. And that’s what the theologians are getting at when they say that Christ was both fully human and fully divine. Sometimes life seems impossible; but Jesus shows us that, with God’s help, we can make it. The human limitations and the calling toward holiness can both be a part of who we are. I began with the trivial matter of whether one likes or hates January, but this kind of wisdom applies to weightier matters as well; faith is meant to help us navigate the good and bad of life. What’s more, similar wisdom is found in many of the world’s great religions. Sometimes we hear wisdom from our own tradition most clearly when it is expressed through a fresh perspective, so this morning I’m going to share a story from the Sikh tradition. I was recently blessed to learn from a Sikh scholar and teacher by the name of Simran Jeet Singh. His is the religion that began in the Punjab region of Asia. Sikhi (or Sikhism as westerners often call it) is the world’s 9^th largest religion, and is one of a peaceful people who have often found themselves victims of violence and oppression. Forcibly relocated into that volatile part of the world between India and Pakistan, tens of thousands of moderns Sikhs have been the victims of extrajudicial government killings, ending in mass graves, mostly without much notice from the western media that focus on other places. Sikhs like Simran have had to figure out how to both advocate for the plight of their people while also trying to live joyous lives as best they can in a broken world. It is not unlike to the quest Christians might describe as the struggle of the human and the divine, and the wisdom of their tradition helps. Simran Jeet Singh, a joyful author and speaker, writes about the overwhelming challenges we know so well; he notes that sometimes “it feels like the world is falling apart all around us. We see suffering and injustice everywhere we look: climate change, lack of health-care access, gender inequities, racial injustice, widespread corruption, mass incarceration, voter suppression. The list is endless. [and might include for you Israel and Palestine, Ukraine, the US-Mexico border…Punjab]. Simran notes that our soulful compassion [which his tradition calls] (Hamdard) makes us want to act, but being inundated with endless concerns leaves us feeling paralyzed.” And he adds that we live in a culture of performative outrage that “makes us feel like imposters if we don’t try to fix everything, or at least pretend to.” On this point, Simran relates a Punjabi parable. According to the parable, on the day when the sun began to set for the first time, people feared that darkness would cover the land and remain forever. But one hopeful lantern in a small hut lifted its wick to challenge the darkness. Soon others joined it, and “watched in amazement as the many little lanterns illumined the earth, preventing the mask of darkness from taking over.” Commenting on the parable, Simran writes of a way that Sikhi wisdom engages with the world, in a different way that we might expect. It is about the oneness and interconnectedness of the world, and involves what they call “seva.” Seva “demands humility, disabusing us of our desire to bear the weight of the entire world on our shoulders.” We cannot fix all the problems or expect others to always do the right thing; but through the interconnectedness of Sikhi teaching, we can work for good in the ways that are within our power. If we do so with joy, in ways that bear light into the world, then like that little lantern, our light might be an inspiration to others as well. (See Singh, The Light We Give, xiv-xv) The Bible says: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” That’s how the wisdom of our own tradition describes the early days of Jesus’ life. He was fully human, and subject to the limitations and difficulties we all must face; and he was fully divine, called to be light to the world; and throughout life, he grew and increased in wisdom. This is how we see him “becoming Jesus.” And it is not just a story about his life, but a way of life into which we are all called as we navigate the troubles and joys of the world. Thanks be to God. Amen.

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Each year in the weeks between Christmas and the start of Lent, recommended Scriptures for worship focus on the early stories about Jesus. In these first chapters of the Gospels, we read about what Jesus did first: his process of “becoming” the one we ultimately know through the stories of the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, his teachings and his persecution and Crucifixion—how did this spiritual giant begin, and what were the stories that shaped his early life? In the next several weeks, Jana and I will preach about these stories of “Becoming Jesus…” And this week we’ll focus on beginnings.

It's a new year, and I imagine that, like me, you have seen plenty of news stories, articles, “best of” lists, invitations to make a resolution, and other references to the closing of the last year and the starting of a new one. One appeared on my phone this week from NPR; it was called: “50 Ways to help you move forward in 2024” and was divided into the categories: Career, family, finances, fitness, getting organized, health, hobbies, home, mental health, and relationships…each one with its own subheadings. By the time I finished scanning it, I had 50 new reasons to feel bad about myself!

The new year and its practices can be overwhelming and shame inducing, and yet there is a kernel of truth about the start of a new year—we often need a reminder to start over, think again about some aspect of our lives, and accept a new beginning. And that is inconsistent with the good news of Jesus Christ; it is about starting over. The story of Jesus is all about God making a fresh start with Creation, and every version of the story begins with that idea.

The beginning of Jesus’ ministry is understood differently depending on which Gospel you read. Luke and Matthew tell the “Christmas” stories most of us are used to, telling of Mary and Joseph, the shepherds and wise men, the manger; and John offers the philosophical reflection “In the beginning was the Word…” Mark’s Gospel, which we read this morning, does none of the above. Mark starts with a shorter introduction that seems to skip Christmas altogether. But Mark does indeed talk about a beginning. Today’s reading, his first verses, start: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ...”

It’s no accident that Mark starts with “the beginning of the good news.” My old friend and mentor Bill Placher once wrote in a commentary: Mark wants us to know that "the whole story that follows is a beginning” (Placher, “Mark” in Belief Commentaries, 13) Everything that we will hear in the story of Jesus, from start to finish, is about starting over, experiencing forgiveness and renewal, taking a fresh run at things. With his opening words, Mark recalls the beginning of the Old Testament—“In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth…” Mark wants to return us to that frame of mind, when God made the world and called it good, full of promise and possibility—this too is the starting point of the story of Jesus.

The phrase “good news” (euangelion in the Greek) is much more expansive than we usually think. As the same Bill Placher writes, If you look back at the usage of that word other places in scripture, you see that this is an entirely different form of victory and good news than anything else we experience in the world. Regular good news comes to us in all kinds of forms. Good news is—“proclaimed by imperial heralds [in the Bible]—or [in our own time] by presidents or hedge-fund managers or fan magazines telling about the stars— [but this good news is of an entirely different kind] and will thereby raise questions about the ultimate importance of those other forms of news” (Ibid., 15) That is how Mark starts the story of Jesus.

This is how Mark’s story of Jesus begins—with that one sentence. Then, immediately, there is John the Baptist, whose role is to announce the coming of Jesus. John is crazy—or at least that’s what folks probably thought of him. John it says, is clothed in camel hair—not the kind old Presbyterians wear as a sportcoat, but a rough animal skin—and he’s on a diet of locusts and wild honey which he eats for survival as he preaches out in the wilderness. John had not always looked that way. In the Gospel of Luke, we’re told that he is the son of the priest Zechariah. So John would have grown up not in the wilderness, but near the Jerusalem Temple. He was a child of the very small upper class in a society with little-to-no social mobility, and he would have been his father’s heir apparent in the Temple. He trades it all—the comfort and status and privilege and heads out to the wilderness. So yes, everyone would have thought he was crazy. But then again, maybe he’s onto something that the rest of us need to figure out. For it also says that multitudes went out to see and to hear John and to be baptized by him. And Jesus goes too; this is where his ministry begins. And why? What is John preaching? He tells people to “Repent,” which sounds like threatening stuff to us, but I like the way theologian Brian McLaren says it, he says repent means “rethink everything,” “question your assumptions.” (McLaren, We Make the Road by Walking, 88) And unlike a resolution to shed a few pounds or take up a new hobby, repentance is the best kind of thinking we might do about our own lives and the world in which we live. Shake yourself out of what you’ve told yourself is the limit of what is possible, and consider that there might be good news so powerful it could change your whole life. That’s what the story of Jesus is going to be all about.

Most of this sounds kind of individual, but there was a powerful social component to John’s message. The world into which Jesus was born was dominated by the Roman Empire. Regular people were mostly pawns in the efforts of local puppet kings to shore up what wealth and power they could before Rome took the rest away. This is the world into which Jesus was born. But John the Baptist refused to take part in all of that, and so would Jesus. They still lived in the midst of that reality of power and oppression, but they refused to be defined by it, and said the same to all who would listen to them.

We too live in a world where we often seem unable to escape the dominating influences of our own day: political strife, rampant materialism, the anxiety that arises from the constant consumer messaging that whatever you have isn’t enough—we too can refuse to be defined by that stuff. And just like in Jesus’ time, faithful living is often not about walking away from the world, but walking with the world in a different way. In the midst of the global crises we face: climate change, wealth inequality, the wars and refugee migrations, local crimes and mental illnesses that accompany all of the world’s stress—of course Christ is not inviting us to ignore these things. So when we read this is the beginning of the good news, we are invited to believe that God has something to say to us about engaging life in the world differently. Like John and Jesus, we can be in the world but not entirely of the world, not paralyzed or hopeless about the problems, but resilient enough in our faith that we can engage life in a new way.

All of that sounds radical; it sounds like a different and better life can only be had if you drop everything, quit your job, abandon your family, and head out to eat locusts and wild honey. It doesn’t have to be so dramatic as all that.

I read a social media post this week, forwarded from an old friend. It read this way: “I ended 2022 in an alcohol-soaked, frustrated rage at my job, my life, my relationships, and ultimately at myself. It was scary for me and those around me, and things got worse before they got better. I ended 2023 sober, happily cuddled in bed with a partner I love so dearly, and who has stood by me through so much that the gratitude and joy is overwhelming. I *lot* has happened in between that I won’t get into, but as an overall trajectory I’m pretty happy with it, and pretty sure I’m walking the right path. Wishing a peaceful 2024 to all!”

That old friend of mine who changed her drinking habits was apparently caught in a web of addiction that had come to define much of her life. Her post is remarkable; and yet escaping from such a thing is quite common. Everyday, in all kinds of places, including in churches like this one, groups of people gather together to walk away from a way of life they will no longer allow to define them so that they can be free to live a better life. Addiction is but one example. Every day, people decide to depart from all kinds of things: systems of materialism and comparison to one’s neighbors, calendars that are way too full and harmful expectations that others have set for us, the despair that comes from the news cycle, and they choose to say, “I’m just not going to be defined by that anymore—not in the way I once was.” I don’t have to do that. My life can be centered in something else.

The story of Jesus Christ has the power to reshape the whole way we look at life in the world, through the simple but profound words: love and grace. For while we live in a world where power and money, merit and revenge, guilt and shame often carry the day, the message of Christ is that God created us good and loves us. There is nothing you can ever do to remove that promise, that acceptance, that forgiveness, that grace and love from your life. As Mark says: “This is the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ.” This year, you are invited to hear it. Amen.

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I got the idea for this sermon from something I read called “Keeping Herod in Christmas,” (in McLaren, We Make the Road by Walking) which is a catchy title because it begs the question, “who would want to do that?” Who would want to keep Herod in Christmas? Herod is the bad guy in the story. Upon meeting him one time, the wise men are quickly convinced that they want nothing to do with him; they return to their homes by another road in order to avoid him; by the end of this morning’s reading, he has ordered the slaughter of innocent children in order to find and destroy the Christ Child. There is no exaggeration in saying that Herod’s presence in the Bible’s Christmas story is as-if all of your holiday celebrations were suddenly upset by a natural disaster or a mass shooting or the church being burned to the ground. Why would anyone want to keep Herod in Christmas?In order to understand, we need to spend some time paying attention to who Herod was, and what purpose he serves in the story that is being told. King Herod, or Herod the Great, ruled over Jerusalem in the years surrounding the birth of Jesus. If you’re wondering why anyone would call him great, it is because there is some ambiguity in evaluating his leadership. He is “great” insofar as he is associated with the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem—a sign of his Jewish identity and a big deal for his people. The same was true of several other major building projects for which he is remembered. However, Herod often used ruthless means to accomplish his ends. The Temple, and his other building projects, were accomplished by slave labor. He was a tyrant who held onto power by putting to death anyone who he thought threatened his power, including his wife and two of his sons. It also helps, as context, to know that while Herod was king in Jerusalem, he was actually a puppet of the Roman Empire; Herod held onto his own power only by appeasing the Romans. So here we have a tyrannical and deeply insecure leader who will do anything to stay in power. You can probably think of modern equivalents.Stepping back to the Christmas story most of you know better: the wise men (or magi, or kings, according to your tradition), have been watching the heavens for a sign of a Messiah, and have followed a star to Jerusalem, asking around to find out if anyone knows where the child is to be born. News of these foreign visitors reaches Herod, the local king, who calls together his advisors, and they decide together that the wise men should be sent to Bethlehem in search for the child. Herod instructs them to report back. The wise men proceed to follow the star and find the child—you know that story. And as the story goes, having been warned in a dream (and probably having learned a thing or two about Herod’s ways), the wise men return to their home by another road. When Herod discovers that he has been tricked, he needs a “plan b” to find and destroy this new rival king, so he sends out his henchmen to kill all children under the age of two, and because Joseph is warned in yet another dream, he, with Mary and the child, escape death by fleeing to Egypt.It's hard to tell if this massacre ever really took place—in a town the size of Bethlehem, it might have only effected 20-30 families (not that that’s any less tragic); or the massacre might have been craftily covered up by Herod; but in any case, it’s never mentioned in any historical source outside of this Bible story. However, the story does serve an obvious biblical and theological purpose: It is almost exactly the same story as another story from the Book of Exodus. In that story, Pharaoh kills innocent children in order to prevent the enslaved Hebrews from becoming too numerous and rising up against him—and one child, Moses, escapes. The Gospel of Matthew is telling us: Jesus is the new Moses. Pay attention. Follow him. He will be your deliverer. And Herod—Herod is the new Pharaoh.Pharaoh, like Herod, was a tyrant, and his tyranny was driven by the fact that he was insecure. Go back and read the Books of Genesis and Exodus. These are not just cute stories about burning bushes and parting waters, they are stories about what happens when a king leads out of a place of insecurity and anxiety. Pharaoh is a rich king who can never amass enough wealth to feel safe and secure. He dreams at night of corn that doesn’t grow as high as someone else’s and cattle that are thinner than the next guy’s; he stores up grain in barns for seven years, and when a famine comes, he trades that grain to starving people in exchange for their freedom; and yes, when the slaves become too numerous, he fears revolt and kills their children. It is a story of insecurity and anxiety that leads to tyranny. And again, you can imagine the modern day equivalents.So, back to Herod, and the original question: why keep Herod in Christmas? Herod symbolizes all of the worst impulses in human leadership. He is entirely self-interested and obsessed with his own power; he is abusive and violent, even toward those who are closest to him; and even though he is profoundly rich and powerful, he can only see what he does not have, and so is consumed by the anxiety that there will never be enough.In these things, Herod is the perfect foil, the perfect dramatic contrast, to Jesus, the true king: the whole purpose of Jesus’ coming into the world is to be for others, for the healing, teaching, and upbuilding not of himself, but of everyone else; he demonstrates this quality in the leadership that everyone sees, those who come to meet him from a great distance, like the wise men, and those like his disciples who will experience his grace and love most closely. And he is so secure and at peace in his leadership that, even when it means losing his life, he gives himself away.Herod, as we have said, is a puppet king, subject to the oppression of the Romans. So when the news comes that the Messiah, the liberator of the people, the new Moses who will once again lead them to freedom; when news comes that he has been born in Bethlehem, well, “a pious man would have greeted this news with hope and joy,” (McLaren, ibid) but Herod only sees it as a threat, and he responds with violence. But when the wise men follow the star and reach the manger, they find the opposite of violence; they find a harmless, vulnerable child, whose embrace of a different way of living, free from any anxiety or insecurity, will change history.Besides those broad strokes, there are more specific things to notice about this story, things that make it powerful in our own time. In this story, we learn that from the moment of his birth, Jesus was a refugee. Our own world is full of refugees, this has always been true and certainly is today. The Herods of the world have always committed the violence that leads people to flee from their homes and become strangers in a strange land, longing for peace and freedom. The modern evidence is there every time we turn on the tv or read the newsfeed or hear a report from our church’s mission committee. At Christmastime, we must not miss the theological connection, stated so plainly in Matthew 25 where Jesus says “I was a stranger and you welcomed me…” From the time of his birth, Jesus was a refugee; and we worship him by offering kindness and relief to the refugees of the world.Another thing this story tells us is a bit more personally challenging. As much as we hope to compare ourselves to the innocent, vulnerable love of the Christ Child, the fact is that there is a little Herod in all of us. Of course, we’re not sending out edicts to slaughter innocent children—but just about all of us have been guilty of worrying that there we don’t have enough, or feeling threatened by the power of someone else, or trying to control things that are really God’s business. We are selfish at the expense of those who suffer, we commit small acts of violence to insulate ourselves from harm, we feed our anxieties with addictions that help us temporarily feel in control. The stories of Pharaoh and Herod are meant to show us that these qualities that reside in all of us, and they are why we need a Savior. So the Christmas story gives us a wake up call: If Pharaohs and Kings—who have more power than anyone—if they worry about such things, how much more susceptible might be regular folks like you and me?But the story we read this morning also has a hopeful ending. For as pervasive as the violence and anxiety of the world may be, there is also a thread of wisdom that is woven through this morning’s story, wisdom that offers us a way out. The other kings in this story—the magi or “Wise men” if you will: they are asked to join in Herod’s life of selfishness and anxiety; but once they have met the Christ Child, they choose not to listen to Herod, but to go home by another road. There is no evidence that the wise men were any more holy, divine, or flawless than any other human being; but in this story, at least on that day, they had an experience of meeting Jesus, and it was powerful enough to shape their lives. They turned away from the anxiety and violence that are so damaging to human souls. They go home by another road, and because they are not Jesus, but merely have known him, they keep inviting us to go home by another road too.

We keep Herod in Christmas because he shows us that God understands the ways of this world and sends a Savior who can help us. Our Savior shows us solidarity with refugees and others who suffer; our Savior helps us look in a mirror at our own fears and anxieties; our Savior helps us to take another road that leads to a richer life. This is the one we must follow the star to find. The Wonderful Counselor; the Prince of Peace; the God of love, come down from heaven. Amen.

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When I was 11 years-old, I had in my bedroom a staple of 1980s technology. Perhaps you are familiar with it. It was called a clock-radio. It was amazing, told me the time, included a snooze button, and I could turn the dial on the radio so that 99 ½ FM WZPL would wake me in the morning, and I might be graced by the dulcet tones of Def Leppard.

It is easy to take for granted the speed with which technology moves along. We experience little conveniences every day without thinking much about them. But for whatever reason, I took notice one morning this week; I was momentarily blown away, when I passed by the bedroom of my 11 year-old son and heard him say to his own “clock radio”: “Alexa: what will the weather be like today?” And she promptly replied: “The weather in Cincinnati, Ohio will be partly sunny today, with a high of 56 degrees, 5 degrees warmer than yesterday.” Unbelievable! If my 11 year-old self could witness that, I would have thought it to be pure fantasy. My family today might as well be the Jetsons! Setting aside for today our many concerns about the rapid spread of technology (for the Alexa Dot is far from the most advanced thing we can do), it truly is incredible to think about some of the things humankind has accomplished. And the idea I wish to speak to today is that none of it is possible, except for the work of creative geniuses who are willing to believe that the impossible can happen. This morning I want to talk about imagining the impossible, which is not only necessary for technological innovation, but is essential to the life of faith. Today’s message is a bit of a rebound from last week, when we talked about hope, hope in the midst of a world we know will continue to be broken. That message is true. But it is also true that in the midst of a broken world, there are things that, quite miraculously, get better. And an important part of the message of Advent is the belief that God is coming into the world in an amazing and transformative way, for you and for me and for the entire world—and in order to be part of that happening, we have to imagine it. Imagination is something we mostly associate with young children. My 6 year-old loves the Cincinnati Bengals. And he loves, after watching them, to venture out into the back yard, and, all by himself, play a full game of football, complete with multiple players, offense and defense, penalties, field goals and two-point conversions. And there’s nothing incredible about that at all, because all kids do it. I remember playing basketball in my own driveway with Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and tennis --with Boris Becker—why not? They were regular guys, just like me, they probably even had a clock radio! Why not imagine it. In adulthood, though, imagination gets harder. We are more inclined to look at the world with the reality of brokenness always in front of us, and we’re often afraid to imagine that things can be different and better than they are. But imagination is desperately needed in order for human beings to flourish. Imagination helps an addict to conceive of life without using; imagination restores relationships when family members are estranged; imagination leads to transformational change in neighborhoods beset by crime and poverty. The fact is, huge positive steps like these happen in life all the time, but they only happen when first, some adult person can imagine it. Imagination has its roots in who God created us to be, and who we’ve been all along. Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann, cites Isaiah 43 which says, “Do not remember the former things, Behold, I am doing a new thing” and the name he gives to that kind of vision is “prophetic imagination.” (See Brueggemann, Hopeful Imagination) In order for new things to happen in the Bible, a prophet, a visionary, has to be able to imagine it. And Old Testament words that we think about it in Advent are full of this kind of imagination: The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light (9:2) He shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace (9:6) Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low (40:4) The zeal of the Lord of Hosts will do this. (9:7) The New Testament stories of Advent say much the same thing. In the Gospel of Luke, the passage we read from today, Mary is visited by an angel. Sometimes I suspect that because an angel appears in a Bible story, we assume that it was not so shocking for the person in the story. Kind of like Mary is sitting there, and the angel appears, and she must be thinking: “Well, this is unusual, but I’m in the Bible, so it must be okay.” The reality is that there’s no reason to think that being visited by an angel was any less shocking for Mary than it would be for you or me. The story clearly states that she’s perplexed and afraid. I wonder if—like some who have experienced such a thing—this was a bizarre but somehow wonderful moment in her life—something she was quite unsure about; and perhaps she wondered to herself: “maybe, just maybe, that was an angel?” The important thing about the story is less what happened and more how Mary chose to respond. She was able to go with it—to imagine a new and different life, for herself, for her family, and for the world around her, and because she could imagine it, she chose to live for it. It’s prophetic imagination. Joseph’s part of the story has a similar quality to it. Who, upon reading this story and giving it some serious thought, does not see all the reasons to doubt? Not only is there another appearance of an angel, but the story has all kinds of real world problems. When Mary becomes pregnant, the obvious conclusion is that she was unfaithful, or perhaps worse, the victim of violence. Either way, the story itself reminds us that the cultural standard was to dismiss her. But Joseph can imagine something different. We’ll never know whether he really believed the child was from God, or just had a deep capacity for kindness and forgiveness. But one way or another he decides that he can still imagine a life for them together. And somehow she believes him. It’s because of this imagination that they have a future. Things are sometimes not so different for you and for me. Life is full of instances where we assume that things can be no different from what they are. But sometimes it’s otherwise. Sometimes our imagination shines through the reasons to despair, and somehow, we go along with the dream! Today we’ll hold a baptism. Every time that takes place, I am surrounded by the wonder and awe of imagining the life that lies ahead for the family. The experience of that child will change the parents forever. Moms and Dads are never again quite the same person as they were before this gigantic gift and responsibility came along. Five or ten or twenty years down the road, who will they have become? What will they have learned about the depth of love that they never knew they had within them? And of course, there’s the child. Who will this little boy or girl grow up to be? What will be their gifts and skills and struggles and quirks? What will be their life’s work, whose lives will they touch, what loves will they have, and what stories will they tell? It’s all so amazing to imagine. Perhaps that’s why God comes into the world in the form of a child—because it brings up all of these wondrous things for us to imagine. When the shepherds and Magi arrive at the manger, they ask questions just like those we ask at a baptism: As the old Christmas carol goes, “What child is this who, laid to rest, on Mary’s lap is sleeping?” It’s the same question we must ask of ourselves. Who am I? Who will I be in this world? Will I allow my life to be shaped by hopelessness and despair, or will I, inspired by God, have the imagination to dream that things can be different and better than they are? That is the power of the story of Christmas, that Jesus invites us into a new life, to bring us a future, with hope. “This, this is Christ the King, who shepherds guard and angels sing. Haste, haste, to bring him laud, the babe, the son of Mary.” Amen.

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Welcome to Knox on this first Sunday of Advent. Advent is a magical time of the year. We arrive at church to see last week’s decorating completed, the greens are up and the ribbons hung, and we begin worship knowing that soon we’ll get to sing our favorite Christmas song. A family we may know well lights the first candle on the wreath; the reader opens the Bible to the Book of Isaiah, and we are surrounded by news of hope that the Savior of the World is on the way.And yet those of us who are being honest know that there is another thought lurking in the background—in the midst of that promise of hope and salvation. Next year on the first Sunday of Advent, we will come again, and many things will be very much the same. The world will still be broken, and salvation will remain incomplete. This year the world news is mostly of Israel and Palestine, last Advent it was all about Ukraine. Locally, every Christmas season brings with it the return of drives for food and coats and gifts because children and families are still hungry and cold and struggling with poverty. And year after year, we come and proclaim that salvation is near. Why do we do it?Wholeness is a popular idea, you can find it anywhere. It’s the foundational principle of so much advertising, every self-help strategy, and plenty of churches. The idea is that there is something wrong with you, and there is a way to fix it. Some product you can buy, some book you can read, some class you can attend, some life skill you can adopt that will make your life as perfect as it is supposed to be. You can be whole—that’s the idea. Advent is about something else, something much different than the illusion of wholeness; Advent is about hope.Hope, according to author Craig Barnes, “hope arises out of the hard truth of how things are. Committed Christians will always live carrying in one hand the promises of how it will be and in the other the hard reality of how it is. To deny either is to hold only half the truth of the gospel.” (Barnes, Yearning, 16). So here we are, the first Sunday of Advent, to build up and encourage one another as we seek to live in hope. Living in this tension that can make us a little crazy: we know it’s a broken, mixed up, cruel world, but it’s a beautiful one as well, and we, as followers of the long-expected Jesus, are committed to hope. We come back each year, because in this world that can threaten us with despair, someone must insist that salvation is on the way—and it might as well be us.This morning’s Scripture lessons share ancient wisdom about the struggle to hope. The first reading came from the Book of Isaiah. Isaiah is a book full of real world problems. The first 39 chapters of Isaiah comes from a time we believe the Israelites were under siege from invading Assyrians; by chapters 40-55, the Babylonians became the threatening outside force, conquer Jerusalem, and send the Israelites into exile. Life and survival itself was unsure and many would have thought the future grim. Throughout this time, the role of prophets, like Isaiah, was to encourage the people to hold fast to their faith in God, and hope for the future. So the people are feeling low, but Isaiah is the faithful voice that seeks to lift them up. No, do not despair. “Get you up to a high mountain and lift up your voice as a herald of good tidings. Isaiah offers a vision of the Savior’s way of ruling the earth: “He shall feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.”Prophets are still around in the modern world, and they still have the task of proclaiming hope in the face of hopelessness. Any preacher will tell you that on some Sundays its hard to talk about hope, but it’s the real pros who have shown us what hope really looks like. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stood before the Lincoln Memorial and preached about a dream—a dream that is still unrealized today. His words were beautiful, and are even more incredible when you consider the context out of which he preached them. King had experienced first hand some of the worst brutality that the world had to offer, from beatings at the hands of devout white supremacists and some law enforcement officials as well, to hypocrisy at the hands of not only politicians, but comfortable white pastors like me who said they were on his side, and betrayed him. King’s family was threatened and his home bombed, and in the end they would kill him for his words. And what did he say: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” (King, “I Have a Dream,” August 28, 1963) You know the speech. At one point he quotes the same chapter of Isaiah we read from this morning: “I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together…” (Isaiah 40:4-5) Words of hope; words of Advent; words spoken in the midst of a real world. Dr. King preached about the future of his children because he understood the need for hope, in the real world. The last sermon King ever preached was based on the story of Moses, and how on the day of his death, Moses stood on a mountaintop looked over and saw the Promised Land…but never got the chance to go in. That is not a story of wholeness; it is a story of hope.Another vision of hope is found in today’s New Testament story. Zechariah was an uncle to Jesus, a priest in the Temple, a man of God…who had lost hope. Before I tell you his story, I want to be quick to remind you that the Bible is not a good resource for everything, all the time. And when it comes to modern day struggles with fertility, this story is not where I would look. But in ancient times, the birth of a child to parents who have not been able to conceive is a frequent metaphor for new life and hope—and that is the guiding metaphor of this story.So in the story of Zechariah, he and his wife Elizabeth have been unable to conceive. God sends an angel to them in their old age, offering him a promise of a child and hope for the future, but Zechariah does not believe it, and as a result of his loss of hope, he also loses his ability to speak. Then God delivers. In the days while Zechariah is unable to speak, God keeps the promise, Elizabeth conceives, a child is born to Zechariah—the boy will grow up to be John the Baptist, whose ministry will be to announce the coming of Jesus Christ. And when Zechariah is finally humbled by the knowledge that God has done exactly what God promised to do, Zechariah’s voice returns, and he joyfully declares the good news of God in the same way Isaiah had done. Zechariah says beautiful, poetic, hopeful words of his son John: “You child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of their sins. By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”To guide our feet in to the way of peace. It is what Jesus came to do, and what John the Baptist was born to announce, and yet this is a real world story, for John would end his ministry beheaded by Herod and Jesus was Crucified by Rome—so it’s clear that neither of these stories is about wholeness—they are stories of hope. And hope is the stuff of life lived in the real world, where things are still broken.As we hope together for the birth of Jesus a month from now, today we come to this Table and take together the meal that Jesus shared with his disciples on the night before he died. I wonder if you’ve thought about it: when Jesus stands before them and declares ‘this is my body, broken for you,” he is making a statement, not of wholeness but of hope—hope for a broken world. He is giving all that he can—his whole self, in hope for the future of a world; it is a world in which much is not as it should be, and Jesus gives anyway. Not because he is naïve, but because he knows that this world is, and has always been, a world in need of hope.There is always a hunger for good news when times are tough. Ted Lasso, one of my favorite shows, premiered in the summer of 2020. The pandemic was months old with no vaccine in sight, and things were about as dark as most of us can remember. And while we were locked down, more than any other show, people began to watch this silly comedy drama about a soccer coach who knew nothing about soccer and a lot about hope. Through his own wonderful candor and vulnerability and brokenness, Ted Lasso gave people a little hope for themselves. David Brooks, who also loves the show, notes that at one point in the series, Ted “describes his goals as a soccer coach, and he could mention the championships he hopes to win or some other conventional metric of success, but [instead] he says, ‘For me, success is not about the wins and the losses. It’s about helping these young fells be the best versions of themselves, on and off the field.’” (Quoted in Brooks, The Atlantic, September 2023)Advent, and hope for that matter, is not about conventional measures of success. It’s not about whether or not the world will be saved between now and next year’s first Sunday of Advent; it’s not about whether we can solve all of the problems out there. It’s not about our church being successful, whether our giving or our worship attendance goes up this year, and its not about you being whole—and arriving on Christmas Eve with the perfect Christmas prepared and your personal problems all fixed and your prayer life at its best. Advent is about hope in a broken world, and the need for us to speak the good news to one another and to all we meet. To do the best we can each day, and speak hope into a world where hope is so needed. Advent means that in spite of all the reasons to doubt, we will keep on saying those same old, hopeful words: ‘Come, Lord Jesus.’ Bring salvation to the world, for we need it. Feed your flock like a shepherd. Gather us, your lambs, into the arms of your mercy. Give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, and guide our feet into the way of peace. Amen.

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Jeff is 26 years old. He gave his life to Christ as a teenager when he was on a youth retreat, and he was all in. Youth group, mission projects, Bible Study. He joined Campus Crusade in college and spent Friday nights evangelizing in his residence hall and spring breaks converting people on the beach. He was totally sure about Jesus. Then in his 20s his certainty started to break down, and so did his faith. He found himself disagreeing with his church friends; he was really hard on himself for some mistakes he made at work and in his social life; his college girlfriend decided he was no longer good enough and broke up with him. And he wonders lately: “Has Jesus has broken up with me too?” Jeff’s faith isn’t working because he’s got to figure out that following Christ isn’t about being perfect, it’s about receiving grace.

Monica is a 43. She’s a wife, mother, and professional; most days she knocks it out of the park in all categories. And she feels completely lost and overwhelmed. For most of her 30s she felt like the most important thing was achievement and getting things done, and so she did that, including with her faith. She attended all the right church mission activities, met with the moms group, dragged her kids to worship and Sunday School, and even got her husband to go some of the time. But lately she’s been wondering what its all for, because all the achievement isn’t bringing her much joy. “I’m not growing in faith,” she thinks. “Is church nothing more than another place to have to meet expectations?” Byron retired 6 months ago at 62. He made plenty of money, the kids are off to college, he’s got his health, and his wife still leaves for her job at the hospital every day at 7. Byron is lonely, and has no clue what he’s going to do with the next phase of his life. All his friends were work friends and they’re still working. He spent so much time at the office that he doesn’t have a lot of hobbies, and he’s already sick of playing golf three times a week. At night he looks at the ceiling trying to fall asleep and wonders, “Who am I?” He’s gone to church all his life, because it seemed like the right thing to do, but lately for the first time he’s started to wonder: maybe I need God’s help to figure this out. Theologian Brian McLaren starts a recent book with these words: “…[F]aith was never intended to be a destination, a status, a holding tank, or a warehouse. Instead, it was to be a road, a path, a way out of old and destructive patterns into new and creative ones. As a road or way, it is always being extended into the future…” These words are true for individuals, and also for communities of faith. McLaren continues: “If a spiritual community only points back to where it has been or if it only digs in its heels where it is now, it is a dead end or a parking lot, not a way. To be a living tradition, a living way, it must forever open itself forward and forever remain unfinished—even as it forever cherishes and learns from the growing treasury of its past.” (McLaren, We Make the Road by Walking, xii) In a recent sermon, I shared another quote from that same book: McLaren writes to all of us: “You are not finished yet. You are “in the making.” You have the capacity to learn mature, think, change, and grow. You also have the ability to stagnate, regress, constrict, and lose your way.” And then he asks, “which road will you take?” This Sunday we come to an end of this sermon series in which I’ve spoken to you about the four pillars of our emerging Strategic Plan, and the idea I’m focusing on this morning is the most important. The first pillar of our plan is called Dynamic Spiritual Pathways. It presents a challenge: For people like Jeff, Monica, and Byron, and for the community we share, what is the role of the church? Will we treat faith as a static destination, or will we take people on the journey of a lifetime? Which road will we take? This morning’s scripture may be instructive. It presents the same challenge: We can treat the story of Jesus like a history lesson about something that took place for one man, long ago. Or we can treat it like what it is: an invitation to a spiritual journey, for all of us. The Scripture is one I’m sure many of you have heard before. The first lines of the Gospel of John are commonly read as part of Christmas worship. I wonder if you’ve ever thought much about what it means. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” This is the way John describes the birth of Jesus. No shepherds, no wise men, no Mary and Joseph, no star or manger. Instead: eternal Word, life, and light out of darkness. This is who our Savior has been since the very beginning of time. Theologian Richard Rohr sums up this idea, joking that “Christ is not Jesus’s last name.” To claim that Jesus is the Christ—the eternal Word—is something much more, much deeper, and also profoundly important for you and for me. God has a divine purpose and intention for the goodness of the world, and it has existed since the beginning of time. Christ is a name for this good purpose. At one very important time in human history, a human being called Jesus walked among us as a particular manifestation of that goodness, purpose and presence. He was born of a woman, grew and increased in wisdom, gave us a vision of how to live together, offered healing and forgiveness, and endured all of the pain and sorrow that comes with human existence. He brought joy to all who followed him, for he himself was full of love and joy. That was Christ’s presence in one place and time. It exists still today, and will be here long after we are gone. Jesus’ life is part of a spiritual pathway that began at the dawn of time and will continue through the end of time—and we are invited to join. Jesus’ life is not a history lesson we are supposed to memorize, it is an invitation to a journey. We are invited, from whatever point we need to begin, to join on the sacred path, and grow. Knox Presbyterian Church is committed to growing. About 18 months ago, in an effort to figure out where to devote our energy next, we asked members of Knox to complete a lengthy survey. It told us a lot of wonderful things about our congregation and what you think about it: Knox is a great place for worship and music; it is a place that cares about children and youth, we care for people who are struggling with grief and loss or a tough transition in life; we are committed to mission; and we are a place that asks thoughtful questions about God and the world. The survey also told us about places where we can do better. We can go deeper in mission, we can improve some of our stewardship of this building and our other resources, and we can do better at assimilating new members and helping them find their place in the community. Each of those needs became a pillar of our Strategic Plan, which I’ve been telling you about in the last three sermons. The fourth area of growth is the hardest. This congregation scored rather low when it came to what the survey called “spiritual vitality.” That means you told us that many times you struggle with things like sensing the presence of God in everyday life, or making connections between the rest of your week and what happens here on Sunday—and that the church isn’t doing enough to help you with that. I’ll be honest with you: as the pastor of this place, my first reaction to that feedback was, “ouch.” I’ve been here for almost a decade, so I must bear some responsibility for that failure. Perhaps I’m not really cut out for this work after all. But then I had a chance to digest that feedback and to see how the congregation’s leadership began to respond to it, and I’ve started to feel differently about it. Every congregation has things that it does well and things it can do better. Most old established congregations like this one are good at worship services, programs and activities, weddings and funerals; and many traditional churches are criticized for kind of resting on our laurels and not being attentive enough to what one might call spiritual vitality—and that’s why many folks leave churches like this one. Here’s how Knox is different: we’ve decided to do something about it. While I’m choosing to talk about it last in this series, the first and most important pillar of our new Strategic Plan is this one: creating Dynamic Spiritual Pathways for growth in faith. We want to listen to stories like the ones of Jeff, and Monica, and Byron, and help people go deeper in their walk with God. We want to help that happen whether its through Bible Study or music, a prayer group, or a service opportunity, a way that we commune with God’s Creation or with one another in fellowship groups, or through any number of ways we haven’t even thought of yet, but that we will think of, with God’s help. You know what’s really wonderful about that? It means that Knox is committed to growth. We are not stagnant, we are not settling, we want to learn, mature, think, change and grow. We can hear the feedback our congregation gives us and respond to it. We are not finished yet. We are in the making. Today is what we call Commitment Sunday, and that means that it’s the day the church asks you to make a commitment, to turn in your pledge and offer your time, talent, and treasure. This might be the worst Stewardship sermon ever, because on the doorstep of asking you to turn in your pledge, I have actually stood up here before you today and told you, point blank, that this congregation scored poorly on spiritual vitality. But here’s the thing: we’re committed to doing better. We’re committed to growth. We’re committed to going someplace together with God where we haven’t been before. And in that sense, I’m telling you something we don’t usually say on Commitment Sunday. I’m telling you, on Commitment Sunday, that Knox is committed to you.

Of course, as we shared last week in worship, there’s really no “we” and “you” in all of this, there is only “us.” The current group responsible for the Session and the Board of Deacons and our Strategic Planning Team, “they” are “you” and will evolve again every time we elect a new class in February, and every time we welcome a class of new members. Likewise, it will take commitment from all of us if Knox is to be a church that continues to grow in faith. So I ask you this Commitment Sunday: Will you be a part of this journey with us? Which road will you take? Amen.

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Dorothy Day lived in the 20^th century during the time religious historians know as the second part of the social Gospel period; she founded the Catholic Worker Movement and the social justice focused journal by the same name. She was responsible for a dramatic increase in public understanding around the realities of poverty and homelessness, and was deeply involved in nonviolent direct action to advance the interests of people who live on the margins.

That’s about all I remembered from high school social studies, and it’s a description that I admit, in my younger days, led to some one-dimensional assumptions about Dorothy Day, including that she probably wasn’t a whole lot of fun. But later in life I did some more reading and my assumptions have changed; I think she must have been a fascinating and entertaining person to know.

Her early life is marked by a series of radical, sensual, curiosities, that she sought to satisfy by just about every form of experimentation; a published author, she would write about some of it in detail, and then later wish to find every published copy and burn it. She always served others, people living in the most desperate of circumstances, but early in life, she often did so unhappily. She found the work an overwhelming source of despair and hopelessness. Then, in midlife she connected it to the faith she had found in God. Her spiritual life opened the door to really loving others, and finding joy and meaning in doing so. Along the way, she made deep connections with others and with the world around her. One admirer wrote, “She had an enormous capacity for close friendships…each one unique, and she had many, many of them…” And her love of the created world was not limited to people who suffer. She was moved to the depths of her being by the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Her love of beauty was so rich that it was not uncommon for friends to find her lost in ecstasy while listening to opera on the radio.

All of that background suggests to me that Day’s life story is one of a person with deep yearnings who never settled. She was willing to take big chances and try new things. She left no stone unturned in life; she searched for meaning and purpose, and also for joy. I have to imagine that she amassed a lot of wisdom in the course of her life and that there was never a dull moment if one was her companion. And the heart of her story is that she cared deeply for other people, because of her intense love for God.

It's Stewardship season here at Knox. This time of year, we always throw around jokes suggesting that no one likes this time of year, who would want to be on a committee that has to ask people for money, and do I really like preaching these Stewardship sermons. But the reality is that much of that just isn’t true. During this time of year, we share amazing stories about Knox members who have been inspired by God to do wonderful things; our committee is a joyful group, new and old members of this place, who have had a great time thinking about how to inspire you this season. As for me, I love being a part of telling stewardship stories because of something Dorothy Day teaches us: we spend much of our lives achieving and accumulating and trying to advance ourselves in the world, and never feeling quite complete; but if we are wise, we eventually learn that life’s deepest joys come when we learn to be generous, and focus our attention on helping someone else. We find joy when that generosity and service is connected to our love for God.

There’s a Bible story about this, one that many of you may be familiar with, but perhaps having thought about in the way I’ll invite you to today. I remember it being one of the first stories I learned in Sunday School. It’s the calling of the disciples. Each of the Gospels include a version of this story where Jesus approaches these perfect strangers who are going about their business, and in very short order, he convinces them to leave their life behind and go where he is leading; in the words of my childhood Bible in the old Revised Standard Version, it was: “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” I remember not only the gender exclusive translation, but the classic interpretation. I always figured that when Jesus invited the disciples to fish for people, he was talking about conversion: Come with me, and together we’ll start a church; we’ll tell people about Jesus, and we won’t rest from our fishing until our nets are full to bursting. There is of course, nothing wrong with telling people about Jesus. But the idea that following Jesus is all about getting more followers has led to immense human suffering, whether we’re talking about the Crusades, or forced conversions of indigenous peoples. And I can assure you that the constant drive for more church members is also a miserable way to think about one’s ministry. There must be some deeper reason for us being together than to count butts in the seats—and I wonder if the story of the first disciples, if interpreted differently, might lead to a more satisfying goal.

So, I thought again about Jesus’ invitation to fish for people, and I wondered: What if I had been among those first disciples, making a living, minding my own business, and Jesus came and asked me to help him amass a huge crowd of followers and become really popular? I don’t think I would have gone along. Why did those first disciples go? But what if their motivation, and his invitation, was different than I thought? What if, like the Dorothy Days of the world, those first fishermen were searching, longing, hoping for some joy they had not yet found in life? And what if Jesus gave them what they needed by inviting them to serve others? What if the invitation to fish for people is not about how many followers I can attract, but about how I can turn my life outward, from survival and accumulation to the advancement of the good of others?

Jesus began his ministry by calling his disciples and inviting them to find themselves in service to others; and his ministry ends with another invitation to them. After his Resurrection, Jesus appears on a beach at the Sea of Galillee. There he makes a simple breakfast of fish and bread for his disciples. He approaches Simon Peter, who only days before had denied knowing him three times. Can you imagine the guilt and shame he must have been carrying? In a manner clearly meant to forgive and heal Peter, Jesus approaches him on the beach and asks him three times, “Peter, do you love me?” and when Peter says yes, Jesus invites him: “Feed my sheep.” This is how Jesus heals Peter. Do you want to heal the brokenness in your own life? Jesus answer is to serve others. In seeking their salvation, you will find your own.

Dorothy Day lived a life of dramatic generosity, and yet her acts of service always started small and personally, and she advised others around her to do the same. Meet the need that is before you; see God in every neighbor. God loves the drug addict or the homeless person as deeply as the high-achiever. Love wherever you can, and the life you save may be your own.

It might seem strange to step from Day’s example and the stories of Christ straight to our church’s Stewardship Campaign, but the reality is that for most of us, this is where deep generosity begins. We show up on a Saturday to pack food bags for hungry children; we mentor a child and meet someone whose life is quite different from ours; we teach our children by example that we give the first portion of our income back to God. Generous living is grounded in faith; the easiest place to find joy is in helping someone else; and loving others is the most concrete way we love God. These lessons begin at church.

So I am not at all shy about asking you to make the commitments that help the church to thrive. Everyone who is part of this community should make a commitment and give. Knox Presbyterian Church relies on the annual gifts of not a wealthy few, but hundreds of people who make three-, four-, and -five figure gifts to fund this place. In a way just as practical as your own household, we need your gifts to grow over time so that the church can keep up with inflation and try new things. This year we seek an average increase of 5% in our giving, and knowing that some are on a fixed income, we pray that others who can will do more; and we have a goal this year of adding 50 new pledges. Pledge cards are in your mail and available here at church and you can make your pledge online. Next week is Commitment Sunday; please turn in your pledge soon and help us plan for the year ahead.

Most of us are not Dorothy Day; we’re just looking for a way to add some meaning, purpose and joy to life. We hope to raise our children to be faithful people; we hope to find God’s presence in regular things; we hope to live with some virtues that belong in a good eulogy and not just on a good resume. The stories that inspire me here at Knox are not the ones that amount to a tear-jerking end to a sermon, but the ones of every day. Coming to Mission Possible yesterday and seeing every generation of faith working together. Witnessing volunteers who go to immense effort to help others and serve God’s church. Seeing people who are hurting and grieving cared for by friends who love them. Knowing that this is a place where my children are safe and happy, and trusting that they will realize that as they grow, and will discover their own commitments to God. It is not a perfect place, but thankfully, it is a good one. Let’s continue to nurture God’s legacy here. Amen.

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Two weeks ago, we presented the first phase of our Strategic Plan. Then last week, I joked with you in the sermon about how boring it is to preach a series about strategic planning; but at the same time I argued that the substance of the plan was important. Last week’s focus on our shared commitment to welcoming new people, and growing relationships, is at the heart of following Jesus. This week I’ll do something similar. Another pillar of our emerging strategic plan is about Stewardship, but not in some mundane, tactical, don’t forget to fill out your pledge card kind of a way. Stewardship, in the theological sense, is about attending to the gifts God has given us, honoring the legacy of faithful people who have gone before us, and securing a future for God’s church and our children. That too is at the heart of following Jesus, and is well worth thinking and praying about this All Saints Sunday. Let us pray.

Last week I was on a call with some other pastors. It’s a group I talk with often; we serve similar congregations around the country; our group meets to exchange ideas and help one another, and usually there’s some area of focus that we discuss. This week it was Israel and Gaza and the role of our churches in responding. That tragic situation is so complicated, and our responses were all over the map. One of the congregations has a long relationship with a Palestinian community in Gaza and was strongly sympathetic to their suffering; another serves a church right across the street from a synagogue, and felt more immediately connected to the security needs of Israel—and both sides of the conflict have their own internal complexity, and both of these pastors could see the other’s point of view. Another pastor was honest that his congregation had no immediate alliances in the conflict; he was troubled at how the news cycle keeps redirecting our sympathies, so that suddenly Ukraine, or refugees on our southern border, or hurricane victims, who were at the center of our attention only weeks before, are now eclipsed by a new concern. I know I felt a twinge of that pain just yesterday; I was working on this sermon when I saw the news of Friday night’s multiple shooting in the West End, which killed a boy the same age as my oldest. Is Knox doing enough about gun violence? Can any pastor or any local Presbyterian Church be expected to speak and act faithfully on all these matters?

The problems in our world are so many, and so are the potential ways to respond. Sometimes a global need appears right outside our door; last week when our mission trip volunteers returned from McAllen, Texas, they had befriended a refugee family headed…to Cincinnati. We’re now building a relationship with them to see how we can help and what we can learn. Other times the connections are quite distant; we find ourselves sending money and raising up prayers, and those things are important too. Sometimes we feel anxious and guilty over huge problems we can do nothing to change. Sometimes we make excuses to absolve ourselves of responsibility. Sometimes we need to take time to genuinely lament the brokenness of the world, and ask God to shape us into more sympathetic, grace-filled people.

It’s impossible to make sense of it all. Whether its on the op-ed page or at the latest dinner party, people are often trying to figure out whether the world is getting better or getting worse. I have said before, and continue to believe that things are mostly staying the same. Consider the eldest among us or our parents and grandparents who lived during the Holocaust or who saw the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the War finally came to an end; and how much more had we learned about our capability to destroy one another? Did our ancestors not live with as much disbelief and confusion as we do? So I wonder if the test of faith is not to figure out whether things are getting worse or better, but to figure out how to keep going in the midst of our own time, bringing as much hope and love into each new day as we can, and doing our best not to get discouraged. And it seems like the best way to learn how to do that is to pay attention to the faithful people who went before us.

There’s a Bible story about these things, it appears in the Second Book of Kings. The Prophet Elijah was one of the giants of faith in the Bible’s Old Testament. Elijah was a prophet, which is to say a truth-teller and a public witness. It was the worst of times in the history of Israel—Elijah was a prophet during the reign of King Ahab, and according to 1 Kings 16, “Ahab son of Omri did evil in the sight of the Lord more than all who were before him” (I Kings 16:30). So Ahab was a person who lived a life that brought immense suffering to his people, and it was Elijah’s thankless task to be the voice of God in such a time. And he did it. In the midst of terrible suffering that sometimes threatened to take away his hope, Elijah persevered in faith; Elijah was so faithful that when it is time for his life on earth to end, the Lord sends a chariot of fire to carry him to heaven, in a story that mirrors the Ascension of Jesus Christ. There is arguably no greater hero in the Old Testament in no harder a time. Now imagine that you were Elisha, Elijah’s student, his apprentice—you are next in line for the job. These are big shoes to fill, or, as the story tells it, a heavy mantle to wear.

There is this beautiful act of symbolism that shows how Elijah’s ministry is handed down to Elisha. Just before Elijah is carried up to heaven, the two prophets, the mentor and his student stand at the edge of a river. Elisha has been begging his teacher not to leave him behind. Elijah takes his mantle, probably a long robe that he would have worn and that would have been associated with his faithfulness and power, and as the story goes, he rolls it up, and he touches the water with it, and in a clear reference to Moses, God parts the water and the two prophets walk through to the other side. Elisha, knowing the immensity of what is taking place around him, feels completely helpless to be the one who will take over Elijah’s holy work, so when Elijah is swept up to heaven, Elisha falls to the ground and weeps; he is entirely overcome. Just before Elijah goes, Elisha begs his teacher: “grant me a double portion of your spirit.” And after Elijah is gone, he sees that left behind is Elijah’s mantle, and all of a sudden it hits him: it was never Elijah’s power that made him great in the first place; it was the power of God, given once to Moses and later to Elijah, and available to anyone willing to believe. So Elisha himself takes the mantle, touches it to the river and parts the water, and he returns to the other side to continue the work, which he will do, with God’s help.

The suffering in this world and the challenges we face can often be immense in a way that is too much for words, and too much for any of us. We can only get by with the help of God, and we learn that from the people who have gone before us, who have seen great tragedy of their own, and have fought the good fight, kept the faith, and finished the race.

This morning, Katie Fiorelli told you about Tom and Cece Mooney, who loved this church, and who left to us a generous gift. What she did not tell you about was their son, David Scott Mooney; his name marks our church’s David Scott Mooney Fund for Troubled Youth, a fund Cece and Tom established in their lifetime, after they lost their only child to mental illness and drug abuse. Every year, the Knox Mission Committee directs gifts from that fund to support individuals and institutions who are battling drug abuse, mental illness, and other threats to the lives of young people. In my experience, Tom and Cece never got over the death of their son, I suppose no parent ever does. And yet somehow, God inspired them to do something that was within their reach to try to prevent or minimize the suffering of others. It was the thing they could do, about the problem that was closest to them. Their more recent end-of-life gift placed additional funding into the David Scott Mooney Fund, but not only that. It’s also a gift meant to benefit the church’s music ministries, very broadly defined. Why? Because for Tom and Cece, two people who knew a thing or two about tragedy, the gift of music was something that kept them going and gave them hope and joy, a reason to get up in the morning when they probably didn’t always want to, and they wanted to pass on that gift to the rest of us.

We’ve got to pick up the mantle of that kind of faith. Relying on the power of God, and not ourselves, we have to think faithfully about the deep pain and deep joy in our own lives, and ask what God is leading us to do. It’s a question that has to be asked again and again, sometimes daily, as we grow in faith and increase in our understanding of suffering and love.

Some of you have may have heard me talk before about another mantle, another robe, that is part of the Christian story: According to the Rule of St. Benedict, the guide for life in the medieval monastery, there was a ritual that went along with joining the order. Upon entering the community and making one’s vows, here’s what they did: The novice would be offered a simple robe, the one he would wear as a sign of his commitment. But rather than taking his old clothes away, those clothes would stay with the monk, hung in his room, all the days of his life. And that was so that every day, upon rising in the morning, he would know that he was presented with a choice. I can put on my monk’s robe, the symbol of my commitment, the mantle given to me, and I can live one more day in this community, committed to the work of God. Or I can put on my old clothes, and go home.

Friends, we live in a threatening world, and in each new season of life we are met by world events and local problems and personal suffering that threaten to undo us. And God grants us the gift of those who have gone before us, so that we may know that they have fought the good fight, they have finished the race, they have kept the faith…and so must we. We must pick up the mantle. Amen.

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I want you to take a moment this morning to imagine a neighborhood Presbyterian church, perhaps a bit more typical in today’s world than this one. They have 50 or 75 members, their neighborhood is changing in difficult ways; poverty and unemployment have gone up in recent decades, stores and services have moved out, but people are still there and so is the church. Most churches of such a description do essential things for their neighborhood. Maybe it’s open after school for kids whose parents have no schedule flexibility at work; maybe they host a hot dinner on Wednesday nights for 20-30 folks who depend on it; they gather school supplies in the late summer and distribute groceries at Thanksgiving, they have a pantry that has diapers and socks and toiletries, they have an old parish house where sometimes they offer housing to a person who has just been released from prison.

Now I want you to imagine, for it is true, that there are about 60 Presbyterian churches like this in the Greater Cincinnati area. Also, there are an equal or greater number of churches like it that are Methodist or Baptist or Catholic or non-denominational, as well as Synagogues and Mosques and Hindu Temples that do many of the same things. And I want you to imagine the collective social crisis that would be at hand if one day they all disappeared. It is not just a crisis of mission, for that is not all that religious communities do. In a time when you can read daily about the mental health and substance abuse crises facing our communities, religious institutions provide a whole range of resource that create community and belonging and health: 12-step groups and soccer soccer programs, Scout troops and men’s groups, support for the grieving and rites of passage that help people grow and mature; opportunities for service to help people navigate life with meaning and purpose and rise above despair; and it all happens thanks to the Bible’s mandate to love one another because God loved us first. Larger churches, like this one, have different gifts too. We minister to young people who need grounding in their risky teenage years, we support smaller neighborhood churches with whom we are connected, we keep up the church’s vital role as a patron of sacred music; we’re a place for people to learn about civic and social issues. We often lament the diminished influence of the church in American society today, but make no mistake about it, there is a legacy that is still vital; we keep our communities healthy in all kinds of little ways that collectively, are enormous, and we must take seriously our place in that network.

The problem, of course, is that the culture is changing. There’s no one cause that we can point to, but in most cases its a combination of things: the cultural movement away from institutions, the hypocrisy (real or perceived) of the institutions’ themselves, and the church’s failure to change and be relevant to the world beyond its walls. As a result… In the decade that I’ve been with you, the Presbytery of Cincinnati has closed about three congregations a year; this year one of them was a congregation Knox helped to found. Culture wide, there are millions leaving church per year and the fastest growing religious demographic in the country is those who claim no affiliation at all. And here we are, Knox Presbyterian Church, somewhere in the middle of it all. By plenty of measures we are growing and doing fine. But is it merely true that we are drawing new members a little more successfully than our neighbors, and we are drawing from a well that is quickly drying up? Maybe.

Five hundred years ago, the Protestant Reformation reshaped the church in a very comparable set of circumstances. People had lost trust in their local congregations, the lack of transparency, the abuses of money and power… People started to leave, including some of the priests and civic leaders and regular families who had been core to the institution of the past. It took generations, about 200 years, for the Protestantism to figure out what the heck it was doing, and for the Roman Catholic church to respond and reform itself. Something new was born, but not without a long period of great upheaval. Much like today, in the Reformation, no one knew what the church would look like next.

There were some really good things about the Reformation. It recentered Christian leadership in the guidance of the Bible. It separated the church from the harmful influence of politics and power (at least initially). It put faith back in the hands of the people.

Of course, many of those hopeful signs would not last forever. In the culture of the last 100 years, the church’s growing alignment with power and influence has often threatened its integrity to a simple mission of following Jesus, and so we are in a time of upheaval yet again.

But there is another contribution of the Reformed church that is still worth listening to and that has the potential to outlast the changes that are threatening the church… The Reformers’ motto was that they wanted to be, in the Latin: Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda, or “Reformed and Always Being Reformed according to the Word of God.” They were smart and humble enough to realize that they probably didn’t have it all figured out, and that someday, the church would need to change again.

It’s a biblical idea, one that might be supported by any number of passages of Scripture, but that this week I’m speaking about with reference to these great words from Romans 12: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds…” What could be more inspiring than to think that throughout our lives, we get to be renewed. In each new chapter, on every day in fact, that we have a chance to be start over: to grow in our perspectives, to understand more than we did the day before, to increase in wisdom and in depth, and most of all, in love. Of course, love has been the foundation of Christ’s ministry all along. So in Romans 12, Paul immediately follows his invitation to be renewed and transformed with a list of 29 different ways one can increase in love. We can never run out of ways to love, never lack for occasions to love, never come up short of people to love. Love is the way we learn to mature, change and grow. Love is the thing that helps us avoid that life where we stagnate, regress and lose our way. Love is the way for our lives to be renewed and transformed, and there are so many ways for us to do it. Love is what Jesus did; and when the church is at its best, the love is what the church does.

We shared with you last week that Knox Presbyterian Church is at work on implementing a new Strategic Plan, and at first mention that sounds really boring—doesn’t it? Five hundred years ago, in the midst of a church in crisis, Martin Luther, at the risk of his very life, nailed 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg and started the Protestant Reformation. And here at Knox, we hired a management consultant and hoped to capture your imagination by showing you a powerpoint presentation.

There is great risk that that powerpoint presentation, like the three-ring binders of the last generation, will find its way onto a shelf in the pastor’s office and we’ll continue to watch the church die. But here’s the thing: I still feel called to this work of ministry, so I cannot and will not believe that. I can’t believe it because I sat in the rooms with the passionate members of our planning team. They are talented busy people who gave countless hours of their time, and we talked about their stories and what we heard from all of you, and I know that in this church, every week, people are met in their own lives by the depth of Jesus’ love. They have found that love at work here at Knox, and they want to share it with the next generation. And there is awareness that we are living in a time when the church is quickly changing and we are going to need to respond.

One of the “four pillars” of our new Strategic Plan is called “Proactive Invitation and Connection;” just in case you’re not swept up by that language, I want to be clear that you saw it in action this morning. The Woolf Family, Britt and Eric and their girls Elyse and Lincoln, have found a welcome and a home here. They’ve made friends, and want their family to be shaped by the Way of Jesus Christ that they find lived here; they are deeply committed to all three of those churchy words we speak to you every Stewardship season—they have committed their time, talent, and treasure. We have about 50 newer families who have found their way to this community in the last several years, and we have to be committed to making sure that all of them know how glad we are that they have come, and that we look forward to learning how they will share their gifts. And it is not all about the new people. They must be joined by every one of you who have been here for 10 or 20 or 60 years, who need to ask yourself if your relationship to the church has become as dusty as an old strategic plan. Does your relationship with God needs to be transformed by the renewing of your mind? If a new family comes and sits next to you in church on Sunday; if someone you meet at Target or a work event or a neighborhood party happens to know that you go to church at Knox, will they be inspired by the story you tell, the life you lead, or the ways you are seeking to renew it? If not, it’s time to ask why, and pray about it, and be renewed.

“You are not finished yet. You are in the making. You can learn, mature, think, change and grow. You also have the freedom to stagnate, regress, and lose your way. Which road will you take?” That’s author Brian McLaren in his book We Make the Road by Walking. It’s a book about the future of faith communities in this time of great change. He begins the book by describing these two roads, which are possible for all of us as individuals, then says they are also possible for spiritual communities, like this one that we share. And my answer to his question: Which road will we take? We will RISE. Of course that’s the answer. We will rise to the occasion, we will grow and mature, change and thrive, for who reads an invitation like that and wants to take the alternative path to stagnation and defeat? No one. And we cannot. The costs are too great, and so is the opportunity to Rise and be transformed by the renewing of our minds. The church has changed before and will change again, because what remains the same, as Paul stated it, is that there are countless ways to love. So do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds. Let us rise together to the call God has placed before us. Amen.

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This is the fourth sermon in a series I’ve called “Roots to Rise;” in it I’ve been talking about foundational narratives in the Bible. These stories are the roots of our faith and that tell us not only how to survive, but how to rise up in life and thrive—how to make choices that give life to ourselves and others and to turn away from the death dealing things of the world. In the first week we talked about the Creation stories and God’s invitation to be fed by the tree of life and place our trust in God rather than trying to play God ourselves—it’s not just a story about once upon a time, but a metaphor for a choice we have everyday of life in the world. In the second week, we looked at the story of Exodus and the journey of the Israelites to freedom—again a story that is not just ancient but is about the daily struggle not just to get human beings out of slavery, but to get the impulse toward slavery out of us. In the third week, Jana spoke about wisdom literature, the Bible’s words that help us understand how the world works and that inspire us to see life as a gift and our own lives as something created for good.

Today we turn to the role of prophesy in the Bible. This is where we make the most intentional turn outside of ourselves and our own personal faith and toward connection with life in the world. Prophesy, as I often tell you, is not about predicting the future through some kind of crystal ball; prophesy is rather about the present day. Prophets were ancient social commentators who looked at the world around them—the realities of poverty and justice, the role of leaders, and the role of religion—and they would speak and write about God’s vision of how life in the world should be. Prophesy in the ancient world meant saying pointed things to kings and priests and everyday people about their role in making the world a better place. So in the modern world, the words of the prophets are the place we go to see what God thinks about hunger and housing in our cities, violence in Israel and Gaza, and how to keep going in life when these problems and so many others seem impossible to fix. This morning we turn to one of these stories of prophesy in the Bible to see what it has to teach us.

The Book of Isaiah spans more than a century of especially desperate history in the land of Israel. After the journey into the Promised Land when the people left slavery in Egypt, that promise of home and freedom culminates in the glory days of kings David and Solomon; but following the life of Solomon, the kingdom is weakened; it divides into warring factions and is then threatened by outside invaders from other empires. Throughout the Book of Isaiah, the people are first under siege, then exiled from home in a story that sort of reinacts Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden. Finally in the end they are able to return home. God’s faithfulness in response to the people’s rebellion shapes the story from start to finish. The Prophet speaks to the people about the society that is collapsing around them; he tries in vain to get them turn their lives around, and to make that choice for life with God that has been the point ever since Genesis.

In the passage you heard, Isaiah describes the need for the people to restore the essence of their religion, which has become an empty hypocrisy, like people who go to church on Sunday, but whose lives have no sign of God’s love the other 6 days of the week. The role of the Prophet is to invite, cajole, and use all means necessary to get the people to choose life, and to see the world not through the cynical eyes of hopelessness but through as God sees it.

In the New Testament, John the Baptist takes up this old mantle of prophesy, and frames the life of Jesus in exactly the same way: “Prepare the Way of the Lord; make his paths straight. Change your hearts and lives. Make your religion vital, relevant, and life-changing, and not just a hypocritical show.

The specifics of the passage we read reinforce this message; it is about the intimate connection between religious practice and life in the world. The rituals of faith, whether we are talking about fasting and bringing sacrifices to the Temple, or Communion and Baptism in our own tradition—these things are empty unless we connect them to the pain and struggle of life in the world. Baptism is about the acknowledgement that our whole lives belong not to the fleeting material luxuries and temptations of the world; our lives belong to God. And Communion—is a meal. It’s not just some little square of bread, but is meant to fill us in the places where we are hungry in life, and is a literal reminder that people are hungry and when they are it is our calling to feed them. When we take these rituals seriously, we steer away from religion that is hypocritical or religion that is merely polite and toward a faith that is actually transformative for ourselves and others. This is the biblical foundation for what the church calls mission.

So the passage from Isaiah warns against fasting and ritual sacrifice that is merely a show, where people parade their false piety, and allow oppression, petty conflict and anger to overshadow their religious practice. In contrast, the fast I choose, says God, is to share bread with the hungry, to bring the homeless poor into your house, to cover the naked, and in all things to be ‘repairers of the breach, and restorers of streets to live in.”

Prophesy is connected to the other stories we’ve talked about in this series because it is intended to help us choose life in a world that wants to lead us toward death. Prophesy is meant to guide us in daily decisions to look outward beyond ourselves and seek to love and serve others. This daily practice of prophesy isn’t just an arrow pointing out into the world, it’s more like a loop that connects the inner life with the outer; so we look outward to connect our lives with the needs of the world, and we come back to the resources of faith to keep us from losing hope when the challenges seem too great.

You can probably think of someone you’ve known in life who has this figured out. Most people who lead lives of service, directed toward others, are also grounded in a spiritual foundation that feeds them for the work. These are the “restorers of the breach” mentioned in the Scripture—the ones who have the grounding in the faith and the love for the world to be changemakers in the world, and also to realize the limits of what we can fix and still not get discouraged.

I’ve been deeply troubled, as I know you are, by the terrible violence in Israel and Gaza and the explosive potential of that situation. I am far from an expert on the situations, and struggle to know what is the right thing to say, but still, God calls us to speak. I read this week about a circumstance in which a local clergy person said and did something that seemed to me like the right thing, connecting faith with action, and I wanted to share it with you.

A rabbi in the DC area and a local friend who is an Imam, share a long relationship. The Dulles Area Muslim Society has held their Friday prayers in the Synagogue building of the Northern Virginia Hebrew Congregation since 2008. Following the recent acts of terror perpetrated by Hamas, and the military response from Israel, Imam Mohammad Magid contacted his friend Rabbi Michael Holzman; he volunteered that his community would take no offense if it was simply too painful for their Jewish friends to continue to host them in the aftermath of the Hamas terror attacks on October 7.

I’d like to read some of the lines from Rabbi Holzman’s response:

October 11, 2023

“On behalf of the Northern Virginia Hebrew Congregation, we invite the members of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society to attend Jumma prayers at our synagogue building as you have done every Friday for over fifteen years.

We do not want to support the notion that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people is primarily a conflict between Judaism and Islam. Both of our religions clearly prohibit violence against innocents, the taking of revenge, or the holding of hostages. We reject the idea that the Holy Land is meant for believers of any one faith. We affirm the teaching of the holy Koran that God created us differently so that we can learn from one another. We understand from the Torah’s command to love the neighbor that we must first know the neighbor, and therefore we are meant to co-exist in proximity to one another.

We…believe that through our small, shared prayer space we demonstrate the greatness of human nobility. Our welcome is rooted in a desire to defeat extremism and the idolatry of vengeance.” (The Presbyterian Outlook, Oct 19, 2023, www.pres-outlook.org )

You can read the full text of the letter in our denominational publication called the Presbyterian Outlook. It was published this week with permission, as a testimony to the beauty of the relationship between these two communities who have reached out to one another so prophetically, and who refuse to give in to cynicism and despair.

In this story, we see a model of how to shape one’s life and relationships through an ongoing effort to connect faith with action, to have our deeds follow our words, and to be emboldened by our faith to take risks for the benefit of others. How amazing is the Rabbi’s testimony, that in an act of prayer in a local community, these two local communities are “demonstrating the greatness of human nobility.” And they are. Though an act that originates in the fundamental practices of their faith, they are doing something, in the midst of an impossible situation, where most of us feel lost, to advocate for goodness and peace. In the face of suffering and death, they are what Isaiah calls “repairers of the breach and restorers of streets to live in.”

This week, members of Knox are in McAllen, Texas along the southern US border working with refugees, meeting and feeding them, praying and extending a hand of friendship. You were invited in this morning’s Minute for Mission to join us in a couple of Saturdays and spend the day getting to know one of our church’s mission partners, who support and encourage families who have lost their homes and children who spend most of their days hungry. These are not problems that are easily solvable, but in all of them we make our humble efforts to understand more, to connect faith with real life in the world, and to perhaps be drawn into something larger than ourselves, because we turn outward and listen for God’s voice. This is prophesy: the invitation—the daily invitation—to have our faith inspire us to be repairers of the breach, and restorers of streets to live in. Amen.

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This morning we’re going to talk about freedom. It was my sermon topic long before the latest news cycle, in which we’ve learned of renewed violence in Israel and Palestine among people who seek freedom each by their own definition. This conflict has lasted so long, with so many tragic and complicated chapters. And we continue to pray for innocent people who find themselves in the path of war, and for people in power on both sides that they would be motivated to find a path to peace.

We’ve all heard the saying that “freedom isn’t free.” You may think of it as a cliché, or associate it with bumper stickers that you like or that you don’t, but there’s truth to it, and the idea is worth talking about. I wonder what images or contexts come to mind when I say freedom isn’t free. Perhaps you imagine Mel Gibson as William Wallace on the rack at the end of Braveheart; it’s a movie for us, but was a violent and tragic story in its own time, of people willing to pay the ultimate price for the love of freedom. In our own time, not only does the Holy Land come to mind, but Ukraine and Russia or China and Taiwan, internal struggles in Sudan, or Afghanistan, all places where people long for political freedom. Perhaps you think about our own country and our not-always functional government; it is so hard—and always has been—to keep our checks and balances in place against the impulses for greed, and the slow movement of democracy, the corrupting influences that come with power, and we remember the masses who go on feeling powerless. You may think about the heroes of the past who gave so much to secure freedom for slaves, be it fighting in the Civil War or operating the underground railroad. You may think of slaves who spent their lives working for freedom; you may think of people working still today to provide a real chance at freedom for all who live in this land.

This is indeed a complicated subject, and one I always weigh into cautiously—aware that I enjoy so many freedoms that others do not, and that there is much I do not understand, especially about the countless people for whom slavery is a modern, physical and economic reality. And yet, we must try to talk about freedom in church, because it is one of the fundamental ideas for which God created us. Slavery in all its forms is contrary to God’s will. And God’s freedom is so much more than anything I have mentioned so far, while also being connected to all of it. Freedom, as God understands it, transcends all of the circumstances of time and place; it is about the possibility that one day we might finally break the chains that bind us in this human life. Paradoxically, we only gain true freedom by placing our lives under the authority of God, and following God’s will. And as philosophical or theoretical as that may sound, it is real and immediate as well. For the quest for that true freedom is what animates those in Hong Kong or Mariupol, in Washington DC or Gettysburg, in camps near the US Border Wall or boats in the Mediterranean. It is also among all of us, across every national, political, or historical divide, as we struggle with slavery to greed, debt, alcohol, shame, rage, and the list goes on, for one of the unifying truths of human life, is that we are all longing for some kind of freedom.

Last week we began this sermon series called Roots to Rise in which we are looking at four fundamental narratives in the Bible; stories that talk of God’s will for us as we navigate life in the world. Last week we began with the Creation of human beings and talked of the choice between a tree of life and another tree whose ways lead to death; we talked of the daily struggle to choose a life that tilts us more toward life—toward purpose, meaning, generosity, joy. This week we take the next step, into the Bible’s most important story about freedom.

We are in the Book of Exodus, where we begin in chapter 1 with a verse biblical scholars understand to be pivotal. In Exodus 1:8, we read that “a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.” This verse ties the stories that just concluded the Book of Genesis with what is to come. Let’s look back for a moment: As a reminder, Joseph was the youngest son of Jacob, one of the patriarchs of ancient Israel. His own brothers sell him into slavery just before the beginning of a great famine that will span 7 years. But Joseph, by the will of God, works his way to the very highest place of power in the land of Egypt—how? By mastering the economic forces that will enslave his own people, and eventually his own family. During 7 fat years of strong production, Joseph works with Pharaoh, the king, to store up all of the grain he can for a famine that is coming. And when the days of famine arrive, Joseph and Pharaoh begin to sell that grain back to the starving peoples around them; they sell it in exchange first for their money and then their property and finally their freedom—the people become slaves in Egypt. And then one day a new king—a new Pharaoh—arises over Egypt, one who did not know Joseph, Joseph and his family too become slaves. The Israelites have lost their freedom.

The next story, the story of the book of Exodus, is the journey back to freedom. It is a story meant to make anyone who hear it reflect on our own lives, and the ways in which we too struggle for freedom.

The story begins with Moses, a child of the enslaved Hebrew people. His mother heartbreakingly gives him up for a sort of adoption; he will survive infancy by being raised in the palace of the Pharaoh as an Egyptian. As an adult, he discovers his real identity as a Hebrew, murders an abusive slavemaster, and flees Egypt fearing for his life. In the second half of this morning’s reading, in Exodus chapter 3, we find Moses in the wilderness where he discovers God in a bush that is burning, but not consumed by the flames, and God tells him: I am the God of your ancestors. “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey…” It is an invitation to freedom.

But the journey to freedom will not be easy—freedom will not be free. Most obviously there is the Pharaoh, the oppressor who prefers to keep this source of free labor in place.

But in addition to the opposition of the Pharaoh, there is the opposition of the Hebrews themselves, and this is the layer of the story that is perhaps more spiritually interesting. As Brian McLaren writes, “It turns out that it is easier to get people out of slavery than it is to get slavery out of people.” (McLaren, We Make the Road by Walking, 44) The Hebrews have their own misgivings about the promise of freedom, because they have been slaves for so long, and they know no other way of life. So when Moses first returns from the wilderness, they are suspicious of this stranger who claims to speak on behalf of their God, who promises a land of milk and honey and that the power of God will eclipse the power of Pharaoh. As the plagues begin to be delivered, the Hebrews take notice of Moses and his God, and they begin to believe that another way of life can be possible. And on the night remembered as Passover they flee from Egypt with Moses, cross the sea, and begin a new season of life with God.

But that is not the end of the story. The land of milk and honey is still far away, and the people will wander in the wilderness for 40 years; one generation will pass away and a new one will be born. God will deliver 10 Commandments to offer the people a new way of life together; God will provide water from a rock in the desert, and manna and quails from heaven to keep them from starving and to teach them patience and trust. And in return, the people will plead with Moses to take them back to Egypt, where life was hell, but at least it was the devil they knew. God will forgive them for their idolatry as they craft more predictable gods out of gold; God will forgive them for their lack of vision for the Promised Land. For 40 years, God will pull them kicking and screaming to freedom.

It is a story of so many things that speak to the human condition, and God’s desire for us to make choices that lead to life and not death. What are the freedoms to which you are drawn, and what are the earthly realities that keep you enslaved? Exodus is a story of slavery to greed and the lust for power, of addiction and the difficulty escaping destructive ways of life. It is a story of the choices we make for good and the choices that keep us in patterns that we know are destructive; and it’s a story that reminds us how hard it is to find freedom, and to keep it. It is a daily and lifelong journey to choose the life of freedom that God wants for us, and to escape the many things in life that threaten to enslave us. We are slaves to substances and retail therapy, choices we make for momentary comfort but that ultimately make us miserable. We are enslaved to the pull of greed and power to accumulate more; like Pharaoh, we fool ourselves into thinking that if we store up enough and have more than our neighbors, we can buy real freedom—even though freedom is not for sale. We find ourselves slaves to anger and resentment toward others, guilt and shame over realities of our past, and the pride through which we try to fix all our own problems. And God is with us, throughout all of life, just as God was in the wilderness with the Israelites for 40 years, pulling us kicking and screaming toward freedom, toward a promise of greater peace through a life of trust in God.

This is one of the great narratives, perhaps the greatest, that animates the history of the Jewish people, and therefore shapes the life of Jesus, who also was Jewish. The Jews celebrate the Passover feast to remember who they are and where they came from, and it is that meal that Jesus and his disciples are sharing when they gather around the Table which we know as the one that remembers the Last Supper. This is their story, and Jesus’ story, and our story. And as we continue together on the journey we are on this fall, I pray that you will ask how life may have you in bondage, that you will receive the grace of knowing that you are in the company of the greatest saints of the Bible, and will see ways God invites us all to choose freedom. Amen.

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This week we’re continuing a series we started last Sunday; for the next several weeks we are following the lead of our children as we worship; specifically, the Scriptures they are learning in their Sunday School curriculum are the same ones we’re studying in worship. The month of September is dedicated to Christ’s invitation to “Follow Me,” and this week’s focus is what it means to follow, not just as an individual, but as part of a community who follow together. Our culture, and the way it tends to talk about faith, often treats faith as an individual matter; but the roots of our faith indicate that it has always been meant to a journey we share together. As it has been said: “If you think you are privately saved or enlightened, you are probably neither saved nor enlightened.” So today we are talking about following Christ together.

The first reading comes from the Book of Deuteronomy, and I’m really glad for that because while Deuteronomy may not be the most familiar book of the Bible for many of us, this passage is absolutely fundamental to the Jewish tradition, the tradition Jesus claimed as his own; the tradition we inherited from another that came before us. Most Sunday School children learn that one day Jesus is asked, “What is the Greatest Commandment?” and he answers, “Love God and Love your neighbor.” But today, our Sunday School children are learning where that lesson came from: Jesus is quoting Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy means “second law,” It tells the story of Moses and the Hebrews after the Exodus from Egypt. After they cross the Red Sea, the Hebrews wander in the wilderness for 40 years in search of the Promised Land. The Hebrews have been slaves in Egypt for so long, and are so impossibly tethered to that enslaved way of life, that they need a sort of buffer between their former life in order to embrace the freedom God wants for them. It’s kind of like being in an abusive relationship that you know you need to escape but you just keep on going back. So they will wander in the wilderness for 40 years trying to forget slavery; the generation that left Egypt will pass away, and a new generation will be born and inherit the Promised Land. It is an expansive example of the often talked about idea that we want a better life for our children.

The core message of the story of Deuteronomy is how God’s way of life—God’s law, God’s way of freedom and not slavery—gets passed on from the first generation to the next. The summary of that message is this morning’s reading: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” These words that are foundational to Jewish life. The words are a mantra, meant to be carried with God’s people everyplace they go in life. So the next words of the scripture are just as important as the command itself: “Keep these words I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign upon your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”

This idea of carrying the mantra with you everywhere you go is embedded in Jewish life and reinforced in the Law in countless ways—none of which are that big a deal all on their own, but collectively, they can shape a life of faith. Many of you, I am sure, have visited the home of a Jewish friend who has kept this commandment by affixing a small Torah scroll to the doorpost of their home; perhaps you’ve seen them touch it with their hand as they enter or leave the home. It’s a reminder of God’s presence, and that it is foundational to life, and follows them everywhere they go. And all the practices of Jewish life, from teaching children the stories in Hebrew School to Shabbat dinners on Friday and Seder’s at Passover are ways of keeping the mantra present and teaching it to the next generation.

Christians do many of the same things, which is an important reminder, because we lose sight of the power of our own familiar traditions, but our routine traditions are important too. What are the ways God is present and obvious in life you live, and the words you say to the people around you? Do you read Bible stories to your children at night, or say a blessing when you sit down at the dinner table? Are those same traditions observed at family gatherings and grandparents’ houses? Are there comments made in your home, like rising in the morning and asking out loud, “I wonder what blessings God has in store for us today?” “Son, do you realize how blessed we are that God has given us this full refrigerator and a roof over our head?” Do you invite and remind your family to pray for victims of the earthquake in Morocco and the floods in Libya, and that car accident we just passed on the road.” Is the Bible visible in your home; do you open and read it; do your children or grandchildren know that you meet with other Christians for study or prayer or service, to mourn at funerals and celebrate at weddings and baptisms? None of these things are monumental tasks on their own, and each of us must engage in our own ways; but do not miss the power of the collective whole: taken together, these are the kind of practices that shape a Christian life; they are the ways that by repetition and ritual we teach our children and write on our doorposts what we believe.

The New Testament passage adds an important dimension to how we think about carrying God’s Word with us through the day. In the Letter to the Ephesians, Paul reminds his followers that we are not all alike! There are countless different ways to follow Jesus, and that we each do it differently depending on the gifts and skills with which we’ve been blessed. Paul uses the language that in a Christian community, some are apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers…and then goes on to say that the whole body, joined and knitted together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.” Its easy to dismiss this as archaic Bible talk that has little to do with many of us, but what Paul is saying here is that every one of us is gifted with a distinctive life and a set of gifts that can be expressive of God’s love in the world:

So some of us connect with God’s love most readily through sharing the gifts of music, while others find it in communing with and caring for nature. Some of you find that the academic study of the Bible helps you grow in faith, and others grow when they are out beyond the walls of this place serving the poor or working for systemic social change. Some of you grow in your own faith by sharing it with someone else and inviting them to church; others by participating in care and grief ministries, as you help one another navigate pain and loss in life. As Paul said: apostles—were sent out to serve; prophets—worked to change the systems and structures that harmed the vulnerable; evangelists—brought new people to the church; pastors cared for those who were struggling; teachers—passed on the traditions of worship and music. These are the things Paul was talking about. Every one of us has a gift, he says. You don’t have to have all the gifts; but you’d each better get busy using yours.

Additionally, I love Paul’s use of the word ligaments as he talks about how the body of Christ is tied together. The word “religion” may conjure up for many of us a series of strict laws or rituals, but the word itself is different than that. The Latin root ‘religio’ is like a re-ligament, or re-connection of us… with God, with one another, and with the world God has made. The church of the Ephesians was a diverse community; Ephesus was an active port with people from all over the region; and through that word “ligament,” Paul says they are to be about building up the whole body—we’re here altogether, trying to grow in faith in a way that none of us can do all on our own. None of us is likely to have all of the gifts this community needs; all of us brings something. And none of us can do it alone.

I hear other parents talk a lot at school and on the sidelines, about the importance of team sports in shaping young lives. When kids play soccer or basketball, even swimming or cross country, they learn about the importance of every teammate in working for a win, they learn to encourage one another, and are corrected when they blame someone else for a loss. Music and theatre and plenty of other disciplines teach our young people the same lessons. But sometimes, in our individualistic, spiritual-but-not-religious, “Jesus is my personal Lord and Savior” world, we forget that church is supposed to work the same way. Here we celebrate all kinds of gifts, and accept all kinds of imperfections, and learn to be gracious toward one another because Christ has been gracious and accepting toward us.

Last week, I spent a good amount of the sermon treating the children’s lesson as a simple one, and then layering it with the more challenging questions often asked by adults. This week’s adult challenge is different. I think the lessons we hope to teach our children are frequently forgotten among adults. Whether the model is sports, or orchestra, or church; whether we’re talking about encouragement, or varieties of gifts, or the importance of saying thank you—these things are often forgotten by adults—I am as guilty as anyone. And maybe the only way to get better is by practice—all the time and everyday—which is the point of the Deuteronomy lesson. You have to give yourself little reminders everywhere you go and all the time to love God and love your neighbor. You have to write those words on the doorposts of your house, or on your refrigerator or your bathroom mirror or as a reminder from your cell phone calendar. You have to teach them to your children at sunrise and at meals and at bedtime, invoking the name of God every chance you get. We have to do these things not just as a lesson for our children but as reminders for ourselves. You have to talk about them with each other at home and at church and as you learn and study and serve together. You have to find ways, all kinds of little ways, ways that fit your life and your particular gifts, and also ways that challenge you, to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your mind. This is the task for both children and adults. Love the Lord your God. Keep these words in your heart. Recite them and talk about them to your children. Write them on the doorposts of your life. Amen.

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How to understand this lesson from Romans? Some of you who pay attention this kind of stuff will note that I preach on stories more often than letters and wisdom texts in the Bible. I’m sometimes not sure what to do with these long lists that sound like a lot of instructions. So I’m a bit out of my comfort zone this morning. And that’s okay. Maybe today will be a relief for some of you who need a break from the stories.

And these letters are important to talk about too. Eugene Peterson is a writer a like a lot—he reminds us that Romans is a book for regular people. Endless volumes of scholarship have been written about Paul’s Letter to the Romans, but it was originally meant for regular people looking for spiritual help in their daily lives—people who had to go about “preparing meals, raising children, and going to work”—and wanted to follow Jesus as they did it. So here’s an opening thought to put this text in conversation with something pretty regular.

My children, like so many of yours, are involved in youth sports. As they get to be a little older, I’ve noticed that the game itself, as well as the coaching tactics are starting to change. Lots of haphazard running around a field is being replaced by hard work and building skills, and as for the coaching, the days of “that’s okay, try again” are giving way to a lot more “what do think you’re doing out there!?!?” This same dynamic shows up in a range of parenting activities; we all try to figure out how to balance positive reinforcement with the need for decisive corrective action, and while growing up sometimes means a little less encouragement and more correction, throughout life most of us continue to need some of both.

Religion is the same way. There’s a need for both the encouragement of unconditional love and also the corrective reminders that God has real expectations of us. Across the church landscape the emphasis differs. Here at Knox we talk a lot more about the unconditional love part; but a short drive up to Columbus on I-71 will remind you that “HELL IS REAL.” And although I wouldn’t ever make that slogan a sermon title of mine, I do believe that a mature faith requires both encouragement and correction. So I’ve given today’s sermon the title “Convicting or Aspirational?” and today I’m approaching this text as one that gives us some grace and encouragement as well as a kick in the pants—and both are important.

A major challenge of this text is that there is so much here. There are 29 injunctions in this passage telling Christians how to live. Harkening back to my opening example, it reminds me of my son’s baseball team, on which there are four coaches who spend most of the game hollering various instructions onto the field all at the same time. “Scoot back…scoot up; look ready…relax” good eye…but you can’t get any hits if you don’t swing…” You get the idea. Is this what it’s like to read Paul? Who could possibly be held responsible for all the things Paul is telling Christians to do, and this is just half a chapter of one in the seven New Testament letters attributed to Paul.

I read one interpreter this past week who advised the preacher to focus in on just one, or at most, two or three of Paul’s admonitions, and to go deeper, but I didn’t really agree. First of all, if I did that, I feel like most of you, having just heard the reading, might be wondering, “ok, Adam, but what about the rest of it?” And in addition, it seems pretty obvious that the selective is not what Paul had in mind. If only a few of these are important, why then write down all the rest. Obviously he thought we should hear them all.

Perhaps by now, we’re all feeling completely overwhelmed by the list; so here, I think, is the beauty of Paul’s impossible challenge to us. Even though nothing of what Paul says here should be ignored or left behind, I don’t think we have to think about them all at the same time. Every one of us is different, with different strengths and gifts and challenges, and we evolve through different seasons of life during which we’ll need to be challenged and encouraged in a variety of ways. So, I think it’s okay to read this passage asking, what speaks to me, right now, today, and ask what you hear God saying to you…

So, in a way that probably no preaching professor would recommend, I’m going to spend a few more minutes this morning just kind of briefly meandering through many of the ideas in this text, telling you a bit about what grabs me. Not all of those same things will grab you, but that maybe for many of you, one or two will resonate, and you’ll choose to think or pray or talk with someone else more about them.

“Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good;” Let love be genuine. All 29 injunctions about to come will flow from that. We can find the list of 29 injunctions to be overwhelming, or we can allow ourselves to be washed over by love. I think about this Patrick O’Brien novel I’ve read about sailing in the 18^th century; 80% of the nautical terms make little sense to me, but I don’t stop to look every one of them up; I let the prose flow over me like a symphony and I kind of think that’s the point. No one reads 1 Corinthians 13 overwhelmed by its 19 instructions about love; why do so here?

“[L]ove one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honour.” Mutual affection is hard, for even in really loving relationships, it is often the case that one party is feeling more love than the other…and then tomorrow the pendulum swings back the other way. How can we try to at least be gracious at times when we are not always the one feeling the love.

“Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord.” Zeal, ardent…easier words perhaps for people who come to these character traits naturally; harder for some of us who are more emotionally conservative. Everyone is different. But “serve the Lord”—I suppose every one of us, each in our own way, needs to figure out how we will do this. That’s for me is the convicting part; you can serve the Lord in a lot of ways, but pick something.

“Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.” The last ones are pretty straightforward, insofar as they are actions, but the first ones can be really hard. Rejoice in hope—even when everything in life tells you to be hopeless? Be patient in suffering? Almost never easy, and in some situations, not a very healthy thing to tell yourself or somebody else. Persevere in prayer? Well that’s easy—unless you’re currently feeling hopeless or enduring suffering. The challenges get worse:

“Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.” Ugh. The person in the family, or at the office, or in the neighborhood, or on your child’s soccer team…who you wish would just stop being so hard to deal with—bless them? These instructions are a tall order in suburban American, to say nothing of in a warzone or a refugee camp. Some of the commands of Christianity are extremely hard to put into action.

On the other hand: “Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all.” AND here the part I really like: “If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.” Now this I like: “if it is possible, so far as it depends on you…” Finally, after this long list of really difficult injunctions, Paul comes back down to earth and sums it up with a reminder that we are all human—none of us will get all of this right. Do the best you can each day. Maybe Paul’s version of Christianity is not so impossible as we thought.

And another one that may use harsh language but is actually really nice: “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.’” I like this one even more, for how many of our lives have at times been overwhelmed by our desire for vengeance. If you can’t quite own the word vengeance, most of us can at least relate to resentment, and the desire for payback—the way it eats at you when a wrong has been done and you find it so hard to forgive… Let it go, says Paul; some things in the world are going to remain unfair and not quite what you want for them to be; let it go. Give it up to God.

“No, ‘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.’” Getting toward the conclusion of the passage here, I’ll end on a lighter note: Most preachers are completely confused by this one. How will feeding my enemies heap burning coals on their heads? If anyone can explain this one, I’d welcome a message from you.

And the conclusion: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” This is in some ways, the sum of it all and the book-end to where we began. The intro was love…the conclusion is not to be overcome by evil…which can be so hard. Some days we wake up ready to overcome all the evil we meet…with good; other days we awaken already feeling overwhelmed by the evil we can see before our feet hit the floor. But if we become overwhelmed by evil, how can we live with genuine love? This is the challenge of following Christ.

Some of Paul’s message is really challenging—maybe impossible; some is inspiring—driving us toward a vision of what life might be. That’s why I chose that sermon title of “Convicting or Aspirational.” Sometimes on the playing field of life we need to aspire toward something great—even if fully achieving it in this human life may be beyond our reach. “Get back out there and try again, son. You can do it.” Other times we need to be convicted—we need a good old kick in the pants. “You call that defense? Get your head in the game!” Most of us need some of both. And I pray that, if not through my words, through the wisdom of the Apostle, you’ve been given some kind of a gift in this morning’s ramblings of faith, to encourage or challenge you as you have need. Amen.

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Barbie Goes to Church. Sounds like I’m all out of ideas, doesn’t it? Well, here we are near the end of summer and this week I felt like doing something a little bit fun so we’re going to talk about…Barbie. What??? Of course, this is church, so we’re really going to be talking about God—and Barbie is not to […]

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Every Sunday when we begin our service of worship, we make a few announcements and then, before calling you worship, we have a time of reflection. We invite you to close your eyes, take a deep breath, slow down enough to experience the presence of God surrounding you… And we know that some of you are greatly […]

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This summer we’re talking about being a Sacred Community—not a perfect or flawless community, but a community that is authentic and blessed and walks with God on its journey through the world. As we’ve talked through stories in the Book of Genesis, we’ve seen some of the marks of sacred community: the central place of […]

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We’re in the midst of a series of sermons on Sacred Community; we’ve been talking about the characteristics that help a community to feel, not perfect, but sacred—authentic and meaningful. Today’s marks are driven by a great story in Genesis 18 about an encounter Abraham and Sarah have with God—and the marks of sacred community […]

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Good morning. This summer we’re preaching through a series of sermons we’re calling “sacred community”—based on a series of stories from the Book of Genesis. Last week we began by defining sacred community not as a perfect community, but as one that commits to live life together—in all of its joy and all of its […]

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A lot of the time, a sermon will begin with a story or example, something to suggest up front that what you’re about to hear is relevant and will have meaning for your life. Today I’m going to take a different approach. I still believe that one of the reasons we come to church is to tap into ancient and important wisdom—I believe that if we dig deeply and curiously into this collection of ancient texts called the Bible, that there is something important to be found, something worth our attention. I think you believe it too.

So today, I’m just going to open the Bible and tell you a story from the Book of Numbers. It’s one of the appointed texts for this Sunday, which the church calls the Day of Pentecost. It comes from deep in the pages of the first five books of the Bible, known as the Penteteuch, or what our Jewish friends call the Torah or the books of the Law. This part of the Bible is challenging reading. Many well-meaning people who make a decision to read the Bible from cover to cover will make it through Genesis and Exodus but they give up somewhere in Leviticus before they get to Numbers—some of this reading is hard going. But this story is worth reading; and I think the relevancy will reveal itself along the way.

So first, some context: The Book of “Numbers”—where the heck does that title come from? Numbers, or Arithmoi is from the Greek Bibles of the early Christian era, calling attention to two censuses—two countings—that are taken in the book; there’s one at the beginning, and one in the middle. These two countings of the people frame the story, hence, Numbers. The more descriptive title of the book comes in original Hebrew translations, which call the book Bemidbar, or “in the wilderness,” a phrase from the opening line of the book.

And that’s what this book is—a story of what happens to the Israelites “in the wilderness.” Some of you know that the Bible begins with Genesis, a collection of epic stories that help explain where the Israelites came from and how they came to be a people who eventually became enslaved in Egypt. Exodus is then the story of their liberation from that slavery. After they are set free from slavery, God’s people cross the Red Sea of out Egypt and will wander in the wilderness for forty years on their way to their new home in the Promised Land. Numbers or Bemidbar, is the story of the 40 years in the wilderness.

The wilderness story is divided into two distinct parts. The first part is the story of the generation of people who are led out of Egypt and into freedom. These are the people who remember what things were like in Egypt, the oppression of their taskmasters and the bricks without straw; they remember the miraculous plagues God brought as an incentive to the Pharoah to set them free, and they remember crossing through the parted waters of the Red Sea and receiving manna, bread from heaven in the wilderness, to allow them to live. They saw these things with their own eyes.

A new generation is born in the wilderness. They have not witnessed any of these things, but learn about them in the stories they hear from their elders. As the story goes, the first generation will die in the wilderness; and it is the second generation will make it to the Promised Land. The two censuses, the “Numbers” that frame this story, define those generations and their stories.

Here is the great irony of this story in the wilderness: It is the second generation, and not the first one, who show great faith in God. You would think that the people who witnessed all of the wonderful things God had done for them, you would think that they would be endlessly devoted to God, who had done so much for them; but the story says otherwise. The first generation complains endlessly about how difficult life is in the wilderness, frequently falls away from God—they make golden calves to worship, and complain about the wilderness, and they keep asking Moses to take them back to Egypt. And that generation never makes it to the Promised Land. And you get the idea that they can’t make it not because the Promised Land isn’t there, but the idea is that they can’t find it because they don’t really believe in it. They don’t wander for 40 years because their compass is broken but because they just can’t seem to read it. It is only the second generation that has the faithfulness—the vision, if you will—to get to the Promised Land.

If that irony just doesn’t make sense to you, I invite you to consider for a moment the time in which we ourselves are living. Many of us are aware that we live—that we are perhaps a bit stuck—in a culture marked by a lot of things we don’t like: rampant materialism, media full of violence and overly sexualized, a country where people have a lot of stuff, but mental illness, loneliness, and poor health outcomes as a result of both are growing. There’s so much wealth and so much inequality and waste. Many of us also have a sense that if we could only simplify our lives and get back to basics, we would collectively be much happier than we are. But often we have no idea how to do that; we feel trapped in the life we’ve got. So we keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them. The Israelites knew that slavery in Egypt had been awful. But slavery in Egypt was, as the saying goes, “the devil they knew.” And what they feared even more was the uncertainty of a life of freedom because it was unknown to them. For all these reasons, it’s only the second generation, who have no memory of Egypt, who are finally able to break free from that old life and welcome a new way of being.

In the middle of this larger story I’ve been telling you, there’s a shorter one we read this morning. In chapter 11, the Israelites are once again complaining to Moses to take them back to Egypt. Remember that God has been providing food for them, this manna that falls from heaven with the dew every morning, and can be made into cakes that give them all the sustenance they need, and they don’t need to hunt or farm for it, and quite importantly—they are not enslaved any more; they are free. But they keep complaining to Moses, they say, “We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now our strength is dried up and there is nothing at all for us but this manna to look at.” (Numbers 11:6)

God’s people can’t find the Promised Land, they can’t see what God is trying to show them. They remind me of a modern family on some wonderful wilderness adventure—maybe a safari in Africa or a whale watching tour, and they are surrounded by all of the beauty and grandeur of God’s creation, and a guide prepares wonderful wholesome meals three times a day…but the kids keep asking for sour patch kids and mom and dad can’t stop wondering why there isn’t a Starbucks anyplace, and they all keep missing the amazing landscape around them because they’re constantly looking for a cell phone signal, so they can catch up on cable news and the latest celebrity gossip. You just feel sorry for them; but if we’re honest, we can see bits and pieces of our own lives in the ways they are acting.

Well, back in the ancient desert, the Israelites have the same problem, so Moses takes 70 elders from the people out to the tent where the ark of the covenant, and there God meets them—the God’s Spirit comes to rest upon them. They have an epiphany, an “ah-ha” moment, an experience of grace, and for a moment, they see things as they really are, they bow down and worship God, they recommit themselves to finding the Promised Land. But here’s the really sad part of the story. As soon as they leave the tent, the Spirit departs from them, and they return to camp unchanged. It’s as if that family I was telling you about on the African safari, something really amazing happens such that they finally put down their cell phones and are drawn into the wonder around them; they are swept up in something that feels profound and life changing…but then they get on the plane and go home, and everything goes back to the way it was before. Two weeks later they feel stuck and unhappy again, and they get little more than a passing yearning to get back to the happiness they think they can only get in Africa.

That’s essentially the story of the Israelites, but there’s this other thing that happens. There are these two others, their names are Eldad and Medad…and they don’t go to the tent for the meeting, they stay back at the camp. And one way or another, because you can’t really keep the Spirit of God locked up in a tent, there’s some of God’s Spirit that kind of leaks out and falls upon Eldad and Medad, and they, right there in the camp, start to see God’s amazing work going on around them. They can suddenly see how good the manna is, and they can remember how awful it was in Egypt, and they want to get to the Promised Land, and they start talking about it with their friends. But the elders who went to the tent, they are so stuck in their bad attitudes that Joshua, a leader among them, says to Moses, “did you know there are these two guys Eldad and Medad back talking to people about God…and they didn’t even go to the tent.” And Moses, who has failings and frustrations of his own, but who never totally falls away, Moses, thinks about it for a moment, and then he says to Joshua: “Wouldn’t it be great if everyone of us were like Eldad and Medad?”

Today is known as the Day of Pentecost in the church. Those of you who are lifelong churchgoers—the elders who always show up in the tent, so to speak—some of you will remember that on this day we remember the gift of the Holy Spirit coming to the disciples of Jesus. We usually read a story from the beginning of the Book of Acts and talk about the Holy Spirit coming down like fire from heaven, causing the disciples to speak miraculously in languages they do not know. It’s a great story. I’ve told it many times, enough that all of us, including me, often forget about its power. So today instead, I chose this more obscure story that reminds us that sometimes the Spirit of God does its work not by fire from heaven and speaking in tongues and not just in church, or on a distant safari, but sometimes God’s Spirit sneaks out of the tent, and changes our lives in little ways we didn’t see coming. Finding God’s presence in the everyday life we share—that’s going to be the focus of my sermons for the next couple of months as we talk about what I’ll call “sacred community.”

My prayer today is that God’s Spirit will be among us in the movements of our everyday lives, in our struggles to put down our cell phones and our lattes, to embrace in fullness the blessings of our families and friends and neighbors. My prayer is that in the day that God has given us, we will try to move a little closer to the Promised Land. Amen.

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Presbyterians spend a lot of time on statements of belief. We make them in baptisms, like we will this morning, as well as when we welcome new members and when our young people are confirmed. We have a whole book of confessional statements that are part of our church’s constitution—our guiding principles; and when we ordain ministers, elders, and Deacons, we ask them to affirm a long list of statements of belief.Every year when we train a new class of church officers, therefore, I spend some time talking to them about why we ask them to make these public declarations, and we talk about how to be comfortable doing so. After all, many of us have misgivings about the content of some of these statements, or about saying what we believe out loud. We are not sure about affirming the authority of the Bible—a book that says some pretty strange things—or about what exactly it means to affirm the essential tenets of the Reformed faith. These are concepts that are often unfamiliar. So I have an analogy I draw upon.I once read a book by a professor named Tom Long who claimed that statements of belief function much like telling someone, “I love you.” (see Long, Thomas, Testimony: Talking Ourselves into Being Christian, 2003). When we are new in a relationship, and want to be truly close to the other person, at some point, we take a chance and for the first time say, “I love you.” Not only are we nervous about what the other will say back, but we really don’t know ourselves the fullness of what the words mean. If the relationship stays and grows, we will find that saying “I love you” comes to mean something quite different after 5, 20, or 50 years of marriage, and when it carries with it shared experiences of raising children, blending families, or enduring loss together. Sometimes we learn that “I love you” means falling away or letting go. Over the course of a life together, “I love you” is a phrase that means so many, many things. But if we don’t have the courage to say it the first time, we’ll never discover any of the rest.That, wrote Tom Long, is how statements of belief work. That’s what its like to affirm out loud things like, “Jesus Christ is my Savior and Lord,” or that “I renounce sin and its power in the world,” or that “I place my trust in Jesus Christ and promise to be obedient to his way of life.” We don’t really know what these things mean when we first say them. Do any of us really place our undivided trust in Jesus enough to claim him as our only Savior and Lord? Do we trust him more than our savings accounts, or our own sense of self-reliance? Do any of us truly renounce sin? Have we entirely given up on violence and revenge, or on power as a means of control and substances as a means of comfort? Are any of us fully obedient to the extravagant demands Jesus makes of those who would be his disciples? Are we prepared to always walk the extra mile, and love our neighbor as we love ourselves? We don’t know what these words of faith mean. We chuckle when a15 year-old boy cries “but Mom, Jenny and I are in love!” But anyone who tells you they really understand what these confessions really mean is at least as foolish. Yet even though we don’t really know what these belief mean, Christians throughout time have been convinced that saying them out loud is important, because when we do, we’re forced to think about what they mean for us, and we start a journey. It’s like saying “I love you” for the first time.Mother’s Day is a good day to remember the importance of saying things out loud. The greeting cards, the flowers, the brunch after church, each of these gestures is important, but what parent doesn’t want to hear the words of thanks that so often go unsaid. Thank you, Mom, for all the early mornings, late nights, and sleepless worrying that you’ve endured for my sake. Thank you for the countless hours of chauffeuring me around, the laundry and cooking, taking care of me when I was sick, going without something nice for yourself so that I could get that thing I needed, loving me still when I as a teenager I treated you like so much garbage. Saying these things out loud makes a difference to parents, doesn’t it?Equally important is saying out loud that Mother’s Day isn’t a happy occasion for all—for many it’s a day of grief. On this day, many among us are aware of estranged and broken relationships; others among us are thinking of parents—or, God forbid, children, who have died. Infertility, and miscarriages, and all kinds of heartbreak are also a part of this day. And it’s always necessary to say so out loud here in church, because you’re certainly not going to find sensitivity to those things in a gift shop.Saying things out loud doesn’t fix everything. Saying thank you to Mom doesn’t change the fact that you were once an ungrateful teenager; acknowledging the pain of an estranged relationship doesn’t mean that it is no longer painful. But when we speak about these things out loud, we start to understand each other better, and grow in love. Speaking out loud doesn’t fix everything, but it’s a start.Saying things out loud is important to human relationships, and doing so is also foundational to faith in God. That’s why so many of our Scriptures talk about praise to God—we’re supposed to grow our faith by talking out loud about the things that God has done for us. So today’s psalm begins, “Make a joyful noise to God, all the earth.” “Let the sound of God’s praise be heard.” “I will come into your house with…offerings…I will pay you my vows…Come and hear, all of you who fear God, and I will tell you what God has done for me…”What must it be like for our heavenly Parent, our Mother God, to hear us utter these words? If God is like a mother, it must be amazing when we offer our praise, an incredible affirmation that, after all these years, all the love God showed us had its impact. We are growing into the grateful, humble, faithful people our Creator always hoped we might become.And yet, of course, God doesn’t need for us to say these things—God will be okay without words of praise and thanks. But saying them out loud is also good for us. When we praise and thank God, we remind ourselves of just how fortunate and blessed we have been, and revive in ourselves a greater sense of gratitude for the life we’ve been given. We remind ourselves of how foolish and ungrateful and flawed we have been on so many occasions, and restore in ourselves an appropriate sense of humility at how helpless we are, and how much we need God. And who doesn’t need a little more gratitude and humility in life?There are plenty of ways to speak our praise. We do it through music—the beautiful sounds we make through voice and instrument no doubt remind God of our gratitude. We speak with our actions, and the living of good and selfless lives no doubt gives joy to God.And yet saying the words is important too—even if its sometimes a bit uncomfortable or unfamiliar, its worth it.That’s because, yes, it is true, many of us say we prefer not to talk about our faith—we’d rather let our actions speak for us. But if we always rely on our actions so speak about God, we’d better be really well behaved. So, while actions may speak louder than words, words are important also.And yes, I know, many of us are not naturally included toward being evangelical. It doesn’t come easily for us to talk about faith among our coworkers or neighbors, and in fact, it makes us uncomfortable when others to it. On the other hand, keeping our faith a secret—especially if we find it faith really important in our own lives—is actually a rather selfish thing to do. If God has been good to us; if that goodness has made our lives more joyful, shouldn’t we try to find a way to share it? Perhaps we could be just a bit more brave about inviting someone we know to join us to meet some of our friends from church, or to come sing with us some Sunday. Perhaps when someone notices that we seem to have joy in life and confidence that things will work out when times are hard, perhaps we can be more willing to say that, for us, God has played a part in that.The irony of Mother’s Day is its reminder that while its good to tell our moms thank you today, the game changer would be to be more grateful the other 364 days of the year as well, and so it is with faith. Some of us aren’t sure how to pray, or why. In my own life, I have found it instantly helpful to begin each day with a few minutes of thanking God for the blessings she has given me. To leave my phone aside, to wait to check the news, to wake a few minutes early while it is still quiet, take a few breaths, and name my blessings at the start of each day. Precisely because I’m not perfect and I don’t get this done every morning, I know how much difference it makes when I do.So I commend to you, take a few minutes to consider for yourself, and to name out loud before God, the blessings of your life, and the things for which you are thankful. Make a joyful noise the Lord, let the sound of God’s praise be heard, tell those who will listen what God has done for you. Say I love you, for the first time; it may change your life. Amen.

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For the next two weeks I’ll be preaching sermons on the Book of Psalms. Psalms are incredibly important. The Bible is full of stories about who we are and why we are here that help teach us how to live, but Psalms have their own distinctive role. As the poetry of the Bible, in psalms we see the giants of faith working through their own struggles, and we keep reading their struggles to help us work through ours.Psalm 31, which we’re reading today, has its own voice of struggle; its author—who we’ll call the psalmist—the psalmist struggles between deep faith and an overwhelming fear. At times he says confidently, “You are indeed my rock and my fortress…you are my refuge…you have redeemed me.” But at other times the same voice is crying out in doubt and pain: “my life is spent with sorrow…I am the scorn of all my enemies…my strength fails because of my misery.”What’s really at the heart of this struggle is shame. It is referenced in the opening verse: “In you, O Lord, I take refuge; do not let me ever be put to shame.” Just about all of us struggle with shame at one time or another, though some much more than others; and that may be most sad because shame is not what God wants for us. Shame is a big deal; it can tear one’s life apart. Shame is like guilt that has taken on a life of its own. Psychologist and popular author Brene Brown writes that shame is “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are…unworthy of love and belonging (Brown, Daring Greatly, 69). The great Rabbi and author Harold Kushner—who died this week—he said guilt is feeling bad for what you have done or not done, while shame is feeling bad for who you are (Kushner, How Good Do We Have to Be?, 35); or in other words, guilt is knowing “I’ve made a mistake,” but shame is feeling like “I am a mistake.” The difference is that we can usually live through and get over many of our mistakes, but there are other ones that stick with us and haunt us—we are afraid they are going to get unearthed at some point we cannot anticipate and sneak up and destroy us. And the power they carry makes us afraid to live. Psalm 31 suggests that even Jesus struggled with shame. Jesus called upon the words of this Psalm in his dying hours. You may not have thought about it this way, so great is our esteem for Jesus, but hanging on the Cross, in the presence of all, Jesus is publicly shamed. Crucifixion was a Roman punishment, reserved for crimes where one had criminally challenged the authority of the Empire. Crucified persons were shamed for their attempts to disregard the power of Rome. Of course, Jesus committed no crime other than loving God more than the Emperor. His life was lived in the midst of a world that devalued human life, that treated most people like worthless cogs in an economic machine that powered the empire (maybe that rings true in our day as well). Jesus reminded people that in spite of what the world seemed to saying that God loved them still—that they had worth and belonging; that their Creator had a plan for them, greater than anything they could yet see. Rome hated that message—it threatened their whole strategy. So in his death, Rome hangs Jesus on the Cross as if to say, “All you have worked for and everything you have done is a failure. Ours is really the way of the world. You are a loser. Your struggle was worth nothing. You are a failure; you are a mistake.”Perhaps you can relate to some part of this. Perhaps in some noble moment you’ve been dressed down at a family gathering or insulted at a cocktail party for being overly compassionate or kind or hopeful. This was Jesus’ whole life; he was shamed for it, shamed to his death.Of course, for the rest of us, shame is often different than it was for Jesus. Some of us, it is true, are shamed because we stand up for what is right. But for most of us, shame is about ways we have failed. And remember, shame is not simple guilt over something we’ve done, it is that feeling that our whole life has been overshadowed by it.Shame is the young child who has already internalized the message that I am a “bad” kid. Shame is the teenager or young adult who has made some sexual exploration and wonders if it means he’s going to hell. It’s the parent who has made some mistake in childrearing or the professional who has made an unethical business decision and these things feel unforgivable. Shame is when we carry these things with us—for years and even decades; they take on a life of their own; we hide from them. Like the author of the Psalm, in shame we see our past deeds pursuing us like an enemy, tracking us down to expose us for what we have done and destroy our life. To cancel us, because what we have done is unforgivable.Shame is usually carried out as a secret; in thinking about it this week I was led to the website of an artist named Frank Warren. Years ago, he began an art project called post-secret. He invited people to send him anonymous personally decorated postcards and to write their secrets on them. He’s received hundreds of thousands of submissions, he’s published books of them and now you can read them posted on the web. Some of them are hysterical, if a bit sad: the quiet ways people have taken revenge on a nasty boss or the betrayal of a spouse; others cross the line into territory that is deeply troubling, we can see in them the cruelty and despair that comes from shame. Just about all of the secrets—and the incredible number of them—show us just how many secrets are out there. One person has written this of Frank Warren’s project: “Every single person has at least one secret that would break your heart. If we could just remember this, I think there would be more compassion and tolerance in the world.” (Warren, The Secret Lives of Men and Women, 49)So this is the Psalmist’s struggle. He is living with shame. He is deathly afraid that someone is going to com along who will “put him to shame.” His past is going to catch up to him; how can it be otherwise? How can he live? But as I said previously, this is not a one-sided Psalm, and in the midst of the shame he carries, he is also aware of what will save him. His hope is in God—because God does not deal in shame.This is what our shame has in common with the shame of Jesus—there’s a way out. And the way is the knowledge that God did not create us for shame, and does not want it for us. Hanging on the Cross, the last words of Jesus are a quotation from Psalm 31: Into your hands, O God, I commend my Spirit. When shame is overwhelming to us, it is God who is there to save us, to remind us of the value and goodness of our lives and that there is nowhere we can ever go where God does not love us still. For Jesus, all of the words of shame that are woven through Psalm 31 were true, but so was its declaration that God is a rock and fortress for us, that God removes us from the net in which we are trapped, that God wishes to set us again on a good and broad path, so that we may walk forward in life.If it seems naïve and silly to suggest that we are still loveable, that’s because it is. This is the part of the story of Christ that is most bizarre, and most contrary to just about everything else in the world. The life and death of Jesus are meant to teach us that in the midst of our brokenness, we are still worthy of love. This is the great irrationality of the Gospel; this is the miracle of grace. But as irrational as it may be, it is not wrong! It is a notion so powerful that when the Romans intended to shame Jesus into submission through death on a Cross, quite the opposite happened. His death transformed the history of the world.In God’s eyes, we are never put to shame. There is no sin that is irredeemable, no mistake that can cause God to regret our creation or to believe that we are no good. The power of this unreasonable, irrational message is what has drawn countless believers to Christ through out the ages. God loves us still.Often we imagine ourselves to be much more unforgivable than we really are. If the worst of our secrets came into view, perhaps there would be a time of reckoning, a need to come clean, but not in a way that would truly ruin one’s life. Often, continuing to live with our secrets is more damaging than what would happen if we allowed them to be known. Certainly that’s the case with so many among us who carry shame over addiction, depression, mental illness of so many kinds. In those very circumstances, the witness of our faith is so very important and powerful—that God is not ashamed and we need not be ashamed of ourselves.Jesus’ life does not end with shame on the Cross, and because his life was lived for us, we inherit the power of his message.Shame can be overwhelming; in situations where it is coupled with the power of mental illness it is deeply threatening, and sometimes takes our very lives. In those circumstances, we pray for the day when every child of God will stand before the One who created us and learn once and for all that we are good and lovable in ways we never imagined could be true. There are also people seated in this very room, watching online today, whose lives have already been transformed by the power of the love of God; they have found a way to let go of their shame—in a twelve step group, or to a pastor, with a friend, or in therapy. We give thanks, and pray that when we talk about shame out loud, others will learn from their stories. Often the escape from shame begins with an unreasonable and yet profound and powerful truth: that our God is not ashamed of us, and loves us still. This church is not a place of shame; it is a place of healing and grace. Into your hands, I commend my spirit, O God. Let me never be put to shame. Amen.

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More than a few preachers consider this to be one of the best stories in the Bible. Anna Carter Florence, who teaches preaching at Columbia Theological Seminary, writes, “If I were to choose one story that shows us the most about who Jesus is, it would be this one.” (Feasting on the Word, Year A) The story is 37 verses long, characteristic of John, who writes a lot of longer stories, but this one is still longer than most of his. Anna Carter Florence says it’s a story for “thirsty” preachers—and by that I think she means thirsty people—people who have some thirst, some yearning that needs to be met by faith, and they’re willing to do the work of letting the bucket down into the well and drawing it up, in the hope that its coolness will wash over their parched lives and leave them thirsty no more. The story itself is better than much of anything that I can do with it as a preacher, so this morning, I’m going to share it with you at its full length, just pausing to make some observations along the way.Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard, ‘Jesus is making and baptizing more disciples than John’— although it was not Jesus himself but his disciples who baptized— he left Judea and started back to Galilee. But he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.The story begins by telling us where we are and what’s going on; from what it says, we know that Jesus is in unfamiliar territory. The text says that Jesus left Judea for Galilee and had to go through Samaria. Samaria was not home for Jesus and his people. It’s not that it was hostile; the text just says they didn’t share things in common. You might imagine that it says, “Jesus left Hyde Park and went over to the west side of town.” Right away, the idea that Jesus is in Samaritan country tells us that he is out of his usual element, and from that I want to remind you that we live in a world that is broken in ways God did not intend for us, with places we might go that may not feel familiar or comfortable or like home for us. There is a signal right at the start of this story that we are starting from a where things are not quite as they should be, a place of brokenness…a place of thirst. In this story, that thirst leads Jesus to a well. The story says: A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, ‘Give me a drink’. (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.)This part is really interesting to me, for right away, we find out that Jesus is thirsty. In the Gospel of John, pretty much everything is a metaphor, so we know right away that Jesus doesn’t just need a drink. Jesus apparently has thirst in his life that goes beyond the long walk he’s just completed from Judea to Samaria—he has yearning in his life. Thirst, yearning, this feeling of not being quite whole, not quite at home…we sometimes think of that incompleteness as a bad thing, but this story says not so. Perhaps, out of your comfort zone on the west side of town, you could actually learn something, discover something you didn’t know before. The Son of God and Savior of the world is thirsty too, so maybe thirst is recommended for us too. But, the Samaritan Woman, like many in the Gospel of John, does not realize Jesus is speaking in metaphor:The Samaritan woman said to him, ‘How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’ (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, ‘If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, “Give me a drink”, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.’ This sounds like a metaphor to us, but the woman isn’t tracking with that just yet. For a person in her time, the expression, “living water,” was simply “flowing water”—not a spiritual matter, but just a stream or a river as opposed to a pond, so she continues to ask questions: The woman said to him, ‘Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?’ Jesus said to her, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.’ Now it clicks for her: Jesus is offering something much greater than plain old water. And she is intrigued. The woman said to him, ‘Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.’Now we will hear why the woman is thirsty:Jesus said to her, ‘Go, call your husband, and come back.’ The woman answered him, ‘I have no husband.’ Jesus said to her, ‘You are right in saying, “I have no husband”; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!’ Here, it needs to be said that having a husband is not necessarily the best way to achieve wholeness! I read this week that the great Spanish mystic Theresa of Avila, for instance, first chose the monastic life as a favorable alternative to marriage. But in this story the exaggerated character of this woman’s story—five, maybe six husbands—is supposed to tell us something. This woman is either searching hard for love and connection, or she is caught in some kind of deep economic vulnerability that causes her to keep looking to men who might save her, or something else. It is not a healthy situation, and it is certainly a metaphor for brokenness.Remembering that we are in a story full of metaphor, you might ask yourself this: What is my brokenness? What is the thing in my life that is not “living water?” People try to quench their thirst in all kinds of ways. What do we keep drinking, only to be left feeling thirsty again? Perhaps a few obvious things come quickly to mind: alcohol and drugs, retail therapy, unhealthy relationships, wealth, bigger house, better salary, better seats at the game, children who are more well behaved… There are plenty of things in life that we want, and when we get a taste of them, they only leave us wanting even more.Do you wonder if there’s really so much brokenness in comfortable community such as Knox Presbyterian Church. Listen to some of the titles of our Lenten small groups, led not only by members of the staff but some by members of the church community: “The Gifts of Imperfection,” “Lent of Liberation,” “Being Mortal,” “Breathing Underwater,” “Do I Stay Christian,” and “Walking to the Cross.” I stumbled upon this list accidentally in the midst of shuffling things around on my desk while writing my sermon, but for goodness sake, could you imagine a list of titles more uniformly focused on the reality of brokenness and yearning? Brokenness is not just out there in the media, in statistics about depression and anxiety, addiction, and lowered life expectancy. Thirst is not just someone else. This is us, folks. We are the woman at the well. What will Jesus tell us about our thirst? Here, I will admit, the story seems to go down a bit of a wormhole that is hard to follow in the literal translation from the Greek, so let me read from another translation, it’s called The Message: ^19-20“Oh, so you’re a prophet! Well, tell me this: Our ancestors worshiped God at this mountain, but you Jews insist that Jerusalem is the only place for worship, right?” ^21-23“Believe me, woman, the time is coming when you Samaritans will worship the Father neither here at this mountain nor there in Jerusalem. You worship guessing in the dark; we Jews worship in the clear light of day. God’s way of salvation is made available through the Jews. But the time is coming—it has, in fact, come—when what you’re called will not matter and where you go to worship will not matter. ^23-24“It’s who you are and the way you live that count before God. Your worship must engage your spirit in the pursuit of truth. That’s the kind of people the Father is out looking for: those who are simply and honestly themselves before him in their worship. God is sheer being itself—Spirit. Those who worship him must do it out of their very being, their spirits, their true selves, in adoration.” ²⁵The woman said, “I don’t know about that. I do know that the Messiah is coming. When he arrives, we’ll get the whole story.” ²⁶“I am he,” said Jesus. “You don’t have to wait any longer or look any further.” Did you see what Jesus did there? He took her question—her wondering about who this strange man was and about all of the things that divide them—and he made the connection between brokenness in the culture and the brokenness in this woman’s very own life. God loves us in the midst of both, and wants to lead us toward a greater wholeness. In our own time and lives, the cultural epidemics of loneliness and anxiety and addiction—they are also at work in our very own lives—we all need for a Savior. What does Jesus tell us about our thirst? That he is thirsty too, he knows how it feels to be us, and he loves us in the midst of it. He wants to give us living water. The story says: ²⁷Just then his disciples came back. They were shocked. They couldn’t believe he was talking with that kind of a woman. No one said what they were all thinking, but their faces showed it. But as for the woman, the text continues: Then the woman left her water-jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, ‘Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?’ Jesus and his disciples will now have their own lengthy exchange about food—in which we realize that the disciples too are hungry. They left the city and were on their way to him. Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, ‘Rabbi, eat something.’ But he said to them, ‘I have food to eat that you do not know about.’ So the disciples said to one another, ‘Surely no one has brought him something to eat?’ Jesus said to them, ‘My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. Do you not say, “Four months more, then comes the harvest”? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, “One sows and another reaps.” I sent you to reap that for which you did not labour. Others have laboured, and you have entered into their labour.’The disciples are hungry; but they too don’t quite get it that Jesus want to give them the kind of food that will never leave them hungry again. Meanwhile, as for the woman, she went and told others what she had experienced, and it says: Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, ‘He told me everything I have ever done.’ So when the Samaritans came to [Jesus], they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there for two days. And many more believed because of his word. They said to the woman, ‘It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.’ The story concludes in this way, coming back around to the Samaritans (the strangers) in the city seeing that this Jesus, this foreigner passing through their community, has come with a message of love, a message hope, a message that we’re not really as disconnected as we thought we were, a message that begins with something as simple as a request for a drink of cool water, but it’s actually an offer to quench the real thirst, the deepest yearnings in each of our own lives. The woman told her friends, Come and see a man who told me everything I ever did…and loved me anyway! Aren’t we all people who have brokenness in our lives and are just hoping that someone who knows that might love us anyway? Jesus says, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”Being thirsty and broken does not make us unlovable. This is the good news of Jesus Christ. Amen.

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Today’s Scripture lesson included a verse some of you may have heard before; I learned it first in a youth group song: “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.” Another translation says it this way: Psalm 119: 105: “By your words I can see where I’m going.” (Psalm […]

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Today in worship we celebrate the 20th Anniversary of David Annett’s ministry at Knox. Twenty years of Knox Youth Group, Fresh Spirit worship, technical support, Presbytery service, hospital visits, teaching, preaching; 20 years of being a good minister, friend, colleague, and companion. Dave is 44 years old, the same age as me; in fact, our […]

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The parable found in Luke 16:1-13, often entitled by interpreters as “The Parable of the Dishonest Manager,” has confounded and challenged interpreters, hearers, and readers for, perhaps, centuries. In the categories of parables, it’s what theologian and Jesus scholar John Dominic Crossan categorizes as a “challenge parable,” which are meant to lead us to “probe […]

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It’s September and school is back in session. From my office window here at Knox, I get to watch the kids arriving at preschool. New Velcro shoes, tiny backpack with a water bottle and a snack. Most of them are joyful and excited. Some have that trembling lower lip. And of course, there are the screamers—they mostly end up in […]

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I mentioned Elaine Pagels earlier in this sermon series. She’s one of the most important biblical scholars of the last century. She’s also written a recent memoir called Why Religion. In it, she seeks to reconcile her Knowledge of the Bible and religion with the grief and loss in her life, including the shocking deaths of a young child […]

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Last week in the latest sermon in our current series, “Understanding the Bible”, Adam introduced us to the Newer Testament as we considered the gospels – “gospel” meaning “good news”. The gospels tell the story of Jesus whom Christians confess to be the Savior. As theologian William Placher reminds us, Jesus’ name was likely something […]

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This is Understanding the Bible, Part 6. Parts 1-5 are available on our website and our podcast and you can catch up anytime. This week we turn to the New Testament. The story I’ve chosen as our focus for today is The Parable of the Prodigal Son. It’s one of the greatest stories ever told, and certainly one […]

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This is Part 5 of our Understanding the Bible series. You can catch up on Parts 1-4 by visiting our website or signing up for our podcast. In the first four lessons, we’ve followed a theme that is woven throughout the Bible: God creates a covenant with humankind, the covenant is broken when the people stray from God’s […]

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When I was in High School, my choir teacher was very fond of a specific joke that he loved to tell to all the new incoming students. With apologies to my paraphrasing of his comedic talents, it went something like this. “There once was a man who died and ascended to the pearly gates of […]

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This is the fourth sermon in the Understanding the Bible series. Throughout, I’ve tried to be honest about the limitations of this rapid journey through the Bible. Today, I will probably do the greatest injustice to Scripture as we cover about 1300 years of history and several hundred pages in the average Bible…in about 15 minutes. In most […]

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This is Part 3 of our Understanding the Bible series. In Part 1, I introduced an idea of understanding the Bible through a foundational story: the Creation of a Covenant between God and the world, the breaking of that Covenant, and the repair and restoration of that Covenant—a story we see spring up again and again. […]

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Today, admittedly quickly and simply, I will tell the story of the Exodus. Parts of it will be familiar to some of you: you’ll hear about crossing the Red Sea, wandering in the wilderness, manna from heaven and water from a rock, commandments given by God on Mount Sinai and a golden calf made down in the […]

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Today we begin a journey of Understanding the Bible. In seven lessons or about 100 minutes, I’ll be teaching through the Bible from start to finish. We’ll look for common ideas that can give you some orientation as you navigate this ancient, massive, sacred text. There are many ways to teach the Bible. The way I will offer is […]

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The prophet Elijah is known as one of the great prophets of the people of Israel, called by God to speak God’s words to the

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In the 8th century BCE, a young man named Isaiah was living in Jerusalem. He lived during the reign of four different kings: Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. These

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Today is Pentecost in the church; I just read you the story of Pentecost from the Book of Acts. This is one of a handful of

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“During the year 1957, I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive

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The Falling Spirit Our passage begins in the middle of a story. The apostle Peter is giving a sermon and he is suddenly interrupted by

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Before beginning the sermon this morning, I want to tell you about an important project underway at Knox, which actually goes along with the theme

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This is a transcription of the video message Adam Fronczek offered on Sunday, April 25, 2021. Today, as we continue the season of Easter

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Our passage begins with “While they were talking about this…”, so let’s go back a few verses to see what they were talking about. On

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Sarah Aldrich’s relationship with Knox was beautiful. She loved this place. She played bells and sang in the choir and served as the music librarian.

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As we hear the Easter story today, I want to take a moment to think about some other stories you know. Think for a moment

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On this Palm Sunday, due to the pandemic we miss the palm procession by our young people that usually leads us into worship this day.

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Scripture: John 4:1-41. The complete scripture may be found at the end of the sermon. This is a transcription of the video message Adam Fronczek

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During today’s sermon, I am going to invite you once again into a story from the Gospel of John about someone who has an encounter

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Meet Ted Lasso. Ted Lasso is the lead character in a new comedy on Apple TV that bears his name. It’s got a lot of

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In the story we read today, we are confronted by not one, but two of the most recognizable sound bites in Christianity. One is John

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Sermon It may not be obvious at first, but the story about Elijah and Elisha—especially the ending where Elijah ascends in the chariot of fire

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In the 12-Step Program of Recovery from the disease of addiction, a primary vehicle of the spiritual solution the program offers is meetings, when members

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In our Gospel story today, Jesus performs his first act of his public ministry in the Galilean seaside town of Capernaum. It is the sabbath

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The calling of Jesus’ disciples is a story I remember clearly from childhood Sunday School. I remember coloring and pasting and moving around the felt

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It’s tempting–especially when tensions are high in the culture around us and the news is all people seem to talk about–to expect sermons to be

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As I sometimes do, I wish to offer a word of caution before I begin today. The content of this sermon will be difficult. You

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This week we celebrate Epiphany in the life of the church, the celebration of the revealing of Jesus’ birth to the nations beyond Judea, beyond

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It was in the year 1223, almost 800 years ago, that the first nativity scene appeared at Christmastime. St. Bonaventure tells the story in his

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Introduction There is a passage from Paul’s Letter to the Philippians that is often read on this Fourth Sunday of Advent. Some have called it

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Well, here we are on the Third Sunday of Advent, a little less than two weeks before Christmas. It’s an unusual year to say the

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Six centuries before the birth of Jesus, God’s people dreamt of going home. In 598 BC, Jerusalem was sacked, and the Temple destroyed, and following

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To offer some background of our passage today, the Israelites have lived in Egypt for 430 years. Over those centuries the population of Israel swelled

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It seems to me like it’s been kind of a dizzying week. High hopes for a vaccine are updated daily, but for most of us,

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This great parable that Jesus tells in the 25th chapter of Matthew is better understood if we first say what it is not about. For

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Once again this week, I had an experience that seems unique to this strange time of pandemic. I had planned to work on my sermon

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Scripture: Matthew 12:1-12. The scripture readings may be found at the end of the sermon. This is a written transcription of the video message Jana

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The Question of Paying Taxes By Adam Fronczek October 18, 2020 Scripture: Matthew 22:15-22. The scripture readings may be found at the end

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Knox Church Sermons: Recent Episodes

Knox Presbyterian Church