The Challenge of Religion (John 4:1-26)
“An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy.” These are the words of American novelist John Gardner in his excellent essay “Excellence, Can We be Equal and Excellent Too?”
Indeed, we who take indoor plumbing for granted do not easily appreciate the miracle it is until our plumbing gives way, as I recently rediscovered. And because we take indoor plumbing for granted, scenes in the bible that involve wells come across as episodes from some fantastical land. However, I remember going to visit relatives in the South Indian state of Kerala during the peak of Summer. While there were many wells that were pretty much dry as a bone, one of my relatives’ wells always had fresh water. In a place where one’s access to drinking water was restricted to wells, you can well imagine how much of a blessing a well that never dried would have been.
The well that Jacob had dug many centuries earlier had been a constant source of fresh water for the people of Sychar. Of course, its location outside the town meant that people had to make quite a long journey to draw water and bring it back to their homes. This is a factor in the story we just heard.
This is one of my favourite passages in the whole bible. A couple of weeks back, when we were at the Wesley House, Lou asked us which episode from the bible we would like to be transported to so that we could witness or participate in it. Without hesitation, I said that I would like to be transported to the time when Jesus met the woman at the well. With every reading, every study, new light gets thrown on the passage. New meanings emerge, like waves at a beach, each carrying the previous meaning a little further.
But before we proceed let us understand the scene and the geography, for only then will we be in a position to understand the nature of this encounter. John tells us in v. 4 that it was necessary for Jesus to go through Samaria.
Actually, the practice of many Jews was to cross the Jordan eastward near Jericho, incidentally where Jesus probably was conducting the baptisms mentioned in this passage, then go north along the eastern bank of the Jordan in the province of Perea, and then cross over to the west near the confluence of the River Jabbok and the Jordan, thereby avoiding any contact with the Samaritans. So if John tells us it was necessary, it cannot mean that this encounter was necessary in a geographical sense. Rather, we must conclude that the encounter in this passage was a crucial one in God’s plan, not just a happy happenstance.
In today’s passage we find Jesus at the well near Sychar. The road from Jericho to Jerusalem and then north to Nazareth in Galilee did run through Sychar. But the well was about half a mile away from the road, toward the east of the city. So Jesus actually would have gone through Sychar, and then walked another half mile east to rest near the well. Why?
Was there no inn or tavern where he could have gotten a decent midday meal and rested his feet? And then he must have sent his disciples back to the city to get food. Does this not seem like simply an excuse to get rid of the disciples for a while? It was necessary for him to be at this well, but it was also necessary that the disciples were not there!
Now the well itself is an important symbol in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, scenes at wells have immense significance. Abraham’s servant, sent to find a bride for Isaac, finds Rebecca at a well. Jacob, fleeing from Esau, and looking for a place to settle, finds Rachel at a well. Moses, fleeing from Egypt, finds Zipporah at a well. The Samaritans, whose faith centred around the patriarchs and Moses, knew these ‘well scenes’ well. The well was where the towering figures of their faith found their brides.
Further, we also need to take a close look at some of John’s comments because they are quite revealing. Our passage is sandwiched between Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus and his encounter with the nobleman. At the end of the encounter with the nobleman, John tells us that healing the nobleman’s son was the second sign that Jesus did. The first sign was when he changed water to wine at Cana. What this specifically means is that the encounter with the woman involved no sign. This is important, so hold on to that thought.
Another comment John makes is in v. 9. After the woman asks Jesus how he asks her for water, John tells us, “For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.” Yet, when the disciples return, John tells us they were surprised to find him talking with a woman. Why does John bother with these two bits of information? Why should we know whom the Jews did not associate with? Why should we know what the disciples were thinking?
Now, John has had a good 60 years in which to ponder what he will write in his Gospel. If he has written something, it must be for a good reason. John is telling us not to be like the disciples. John is telling us, this is primarily an encounter between a Jew and a Samaritan, their respective genders are incidental to the encounter. John is telling us that the entire exchange between Jesus and the woman should be understood as being between a Jew and a Samaritan.
Now let us see what happens in this exchange. Jesus asks the woman for a drink. She asks him how he, being a Jew, asks a Samaritan for water. Jesus then introduces the concept of living water. The woman accurately observes that Jesus has no implements with which to draw water from this well. So she concludes that there must be more to this man than meets the eye.
“Surely you are not greater than our patriarch Jacob who first dug this well so that centuries later we still can draw from it.”
You see Jacob, the patriarch, did not simply draw water from this well. By digging the well, he had provided generations of Samaritans with water. Indeed the Empress Helena had built a church over the well, providing a small passage down to it. The well was found to be 35 feet deep and even in the seventeenth century there was 5 feet of water in it. Of course, human propensity to throw garbage just about anywhere has killed the well.
Jesus realizes that the woman is catching on. So he extends the metaphor. “Drink of the water I give you and you yourself will become a source of this water.”
Now the woman realizes that not only was this man claiming to be equal to Jacob. He was indeed claiming to be far greater! Now the Samaritans held to a Moses centred doctrine rather than a David centred one. This is only expected since the Northern kingdom of Israel, which later became Samaria, separated itself from the Southern kingdom of Judah, which was ruled by David’s descendents. The Samaritans were looking for the Prophet like Moses of Deuteronomy 18.15. When Jesus extends the metaphor, the woman realizes that he is claiming to be the prophet like Moses that the Samaritans awaited. Only that prophet could have a gift such as the one Jesus claimed to have.
She understands that he is claiming to have a gift that only a fool would refuse. And she is no fool. So she asks Jesus for the gift. “Give me this water.” And if this were indeed that prophet, then the Messianic age would have started and physical thirst would have been abolished. So she boldly declares her faith by saying, “Give me this water, so that I may not have to keep coming here.” She is not running away from her problems. She is challenging Jesus to live up to his words. She has not misunderstood Jesus. She has understood him better than we understand him. If he is the Messiah then his blessings must infuse our physical world as well, not just our spiritual world. Jesus’ blessings cannot only be pie in the sky bye and bye!
To her statement of faith Jesus says, “Go call your husband and come back.” If this were literal, it just does not make sense. Remember, we already said that this encounter does not involve any sign, even the sign of revealing to the woman her past. If Jesus had revealed her past, he would have been performing a sign.
Yet, John goes to great pains to indicate both the first and the second signs and no other! If we are to treat John’s narrative with respect, we must interpret the passage in John 4 without any indication that Jesus had performed a sign.
Also, if we take the reference to husband as literal, then we have to explain why from the notion of living water, Jesus jumps to the woman’s husbands, then she jumps to him being a prophet and to worshipping on a mountain. The whole passage would then be a hodgepodge of disjointed segments that are as immiscible as oil and water.
But if we take our cue from the Gospel itself, which tells us that Jesus was performing no sign in this encounter, then we cannot take this talk of husbands as literal. It must be symbolic. But symbolic of what?
In 2 Kings 17 we read that the king of Assyria settled what later became Samaria with people from five nations – Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath and Sepharvaim. These people built places of worship to their gods in the region of Samaria. The Samaritans became corrupted and began to worship these gods. Then the king of Assyria sent a Jewish priest to Samaria to teach the residents how to worship Israel’s God. But the result was a syncretized religion that adopted practices from those of the foreigners and the ancient Israelite faith.
In light of the marriage metaphor used by many prophets to describe the relationship between God and Israel, we can conclude from 2 Kings 17 that the Samaritans had had five husbands – namely the gods of Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath and Sepharvaim. Then they turned to a faith which mixed worship of God with these foreign gods. In other words, currently the Samaritans were not in a covenant relationship with any god because Yahweh cannot be worshipped along with other gods.
As soon as Jesus mentions the five husbands and the one who is not a husband, the woman, who is very astute, recognizes that this is the kind of language the Old Testament prophets used to describe the relationship of God with Israel. So she says, “I can see that you are a prophet.” If she was avoiding talk about her actual husbands, Jesus would have called her out on that as he did with a few people in the Gospels. The very fact that he did not call her out for stating that he was a prophet meant that she was not guilty of avoidance. In other words, the discussion of prophets must dovetail well with the issue of husbands.
Anyway, she tells Jesus, “I can see that you are a prophet.” Not because he had told her all her dark secrets. John has already told us not to see this encounter as containing a sign. She recognizes a prophet because he is denouncing incorrect worship. A prophet’s primary task was not to tell people their secrets or to reveal the future, but to call people back to worshipping God correctly.
And so she continues with the subject of worship. “Where should we worship?” is her question. Here on Mount Gerizim as believed by the Samaritans or in Jerusalem as believed by the Jews?
Jesus also continues with the subject of worship and makes it clear that in the future the place of worship will be rendered meaningless for what would matter is that people worshipped in Spirit and truth.
Later in the Gospel, in chapter 7, Jesus says, “If anyone is thirsty, let them come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within them.” You can search night and day for an Old Testament passage that mentions streams of living water flowing from a person and you will not find it. But we have just seen Jesus, God’s Word become flesh, make this promise to the woman! Jesus is citing his earlier words in John’s Gospel as Scripture! Vizzini from The Princess Bride would say, “Inconceivable!” Of course, in chapter 7, John explains what Jesus told the woman. The living water is the Spirit.
And so we see what the encounter with the Samaritan woman is all about. It is not about Jesus’ telling the woman her secrets. Rather, it is about Jesus as the Bridegroom of the New Israel wooing God’s lost people of Samaria to re-enter a covenant relationship with the Father in which each one of them will learn from the Spirit that flows within them how to worship the Father. And he does it in much the same way as the towering figures of Samaritan faith found their brides – at a well.
But you may be wondering. “Isn’t the title of this sermon ‘The Challenge of Religion’? What exactly is the challenge Deepak wants us to recognize?”
From the earliest days of the Christian Church, people have recognized that the Gospel according to John is quite different from the Synoptic Gospels. The Church fathers and mothers - and yes, there were many church mothers - recognized the differences and gave a wide variety of explanations. And almost without exception they realized that a Gospel like John’s must not be read woodenly or literally.
Hence, even though many of the early Church fathers had decidedly misogynistic views, they, almost without exception, did not view the passage we are dealing with in a literal manner. In particular, they understood the husbands of the woman in much the same way as I have presented today - as a reference to foreign gods - and not as literal husbands of the woman. After all, they knew - and many of us have forgotten - that it was almost impossible for a woman to initiate a divorce in first century Palestine, let alone five divorces, which would have been needed if she was able to convince other men to marry her.
However, after the Christian faith was deemed legal by Constantine and once it became the official religion of the Roman Empire, things began to change. The Christian faith changed from a way of life to a system of doctrines; from an exercise of trust to a religion. But you may ask, “Deepak, isn’t Christianity a religion?” Ah, you may be right. Indeed, you are! But Jesus did not come to institute a religion, a system of ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ that indicate how God is inclined toward you. That is precisely what a religion is.
A religion is nothing less than a promise that adhering to some system of permissions and prohibitions will appease a deity and make the deity favor a person. A religion is the idea that this world and what we do in it can be divided into the sacred and the profane. A religion is the assertion that there are sacred persons, sacred places, sacred periods, and sacred practices that can be distinguished from all that is profane. However, as poet and novelist Wendell Berry wrote, “There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.”
Extending this idea it means that any claim that there are persons or places or periods or practices that are unsacred is to accept that those persons and places and periods and practices have been desecrated. This is why Jesus tells the woman, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.” The idea behind the woman’s question concerning the authorized mountain on which to worship is that God is not accessible everywhere but only in certain parts of the world.
What Jesus does is re-sacralize formerly desecrated places. But once you have re-sacralized every place on earth, you do not need a special category of sacred persons who serve in sacred places or a special calendar of sacred periods during which the sacred persons serve in the sacred places or a special collection of sacred practices that only the sacred persons can officiate during the sacred periods in the sacred places. In other words, by re-sacralizing all places, Jesus does away with everything that religions need to ensure that they can propagate.
Unfortunately, once the Church became the stooge of the Empire, the challenge of religion proved to be too difficult to resist. There are many ways in which this happened. However, I wish to highlight just two. First, the acceptance of violence as a means toward ends. If there are particularly sacred places, persons, periods, and practices, then these will inevitably be a source of conflict between groups that hold different perspectives. Religions have been a reason underpinning violence for much of human history because religions divide the world into the sacred - us, of course - and the profane - them, of course.
Hence, the more closely a person is identified with a religion conceived as a legal framework, the more likely the person is to accept the use of violence to legislate that framework. We need only think of Church history when some people in power used that power to violently suppress and oppress those who did not agree with them.
Second, the relegation of women to second class level. At the outset, allow me to refute a common view. It is true that Greco-Roman culture had religious groups in which women were the priestesses. However, these were groups that were only for women. There was no known religious group open to women and men in which women held prominent leadership roles. To the contrary, many Greek and Roman authors faulted the early Church for the immodest, unchaste, and shameless practice of having women in positions of authority over men.
However, when we see Jesus here, he is the one who initiates conversation with the woman. He treats her as an equal, never with condescension. Her surprise was that he would speak with a Samaritan. However, Jesus’ disciples were surprised he was speaking with a woman. I think the difference here is how John tells us what to expect in Church history. Men will even reluctantly accept other men whom they disagree with in positions of authority as long as it means that women are kept away. However, Jesus does not treat the woman in that way. In fact, when she decided to play the evangelist by going off to the town to spread the news that Messiah had come, Jesus refused food brought by his disciples so that he could metaphorically eat the fruit of her labors.
These two effects are central to the challenge of religion. When you are convinced that women are inferior, you can prance around, like a buffoon is actually doing in the USA right now, arguing for more violence and testing people’s testosterone levels. When you are so afraid of different perspectives, you will insist on relegating half the population to the privacy of the home. Misogyny is the perspective of weak, cowardly men, who have lost the ability to recognize God’s good creation.
But Jesus will have nothing of this. By talking to the woman as an equal, by facing her questions without ridicule, by revealing his identity to her, by encouraging her to become an evangelist, by promising to quench her deepest thirst, Jesus reveals that she belongs in his presence. By rejecting the idea of sacred spaces, Jesus rejects the reasons behind the acceptance of violence. So will we follow him in this, realizing that his work involved the re-sacralizing of all our lives? If so, we will be placing ourselves in a position to stand up to the challenge of religion.
The Challenge of Politics (Matthew 22:15-22)
At the end of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Harry witnesses Professor Snape hurl the killing curse at Dumbledore, thereby killing him. Shortly after that, Harry attempts to curse Snape with a curse that Snape himself had devised. Harry is obviously quite angry at Snape for having killed his mentor. It is only in the next book that Harry realizes that Snape had actually been a triple agent, secretly working for Dumbledore while pretending to work for Voldemort. To most readers this came as a surprise because we had been led to view Snape through Harry’s eyes. And Harry suspected Snape all through the first six books. While we had been introduced to the idea that Harry’s perspective was not always aligned with reality, this revelation was quite startling since it called into question almost everything Harry had told us throughout the books.
A very similar thing happened here in the USA after 9-11. The desire for revenge made the citizens of this country believe their President when he said that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, leading to the Iraq war. It was later revealed that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, Iraq had no connection to the 9-11 attacks. Further, the revelation that the US Army had engaged in torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay seriously called into question the moral foundations of what the USA was attempting to do.
This sort of reversal of perspective happens when we are faced with an unreliable narrator - Harry in the first case and Bush and his cronies in the second. The case of the unreliable narrator comes to us when we read the bible not necessarily because the narrator himself is unreliable, though that happens at times. We encounter this most often when commentators take a superficial view of the biblical text, leading us to hold beliefs that are diametrically opposite to what the text would have us accept.
“Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” Simple, right? It appears Jesus is saying that there are two spheres in our lives, one over which Caesar or the state is sovereign and the other over which God or religion is sovereign, leading to the idea that Jesus was a buddy of Jefferson who wanted to build a wall of separation between Church and State. Jesus would then seem to be just another advocate of the First Amendment some seventeen centuries before the US Constitution and the First Amendment were drafted.
Unfortunately, Jesus had no clue that he was a First Amendment proponent born out of season! He was a first century Jew and he expressed his politics in a way that his first century Jewish audience would have understood. So let us try to understand Jesus, not as an eighteenth century Deist, but as a first century Jew.
Our episode begins with Matthew telling us that the Pharisees plotted to entrap him. And as part of this scheme they had their disciples go to Jesus along with some Herodians. To us living twenty centuries later, this might seem run of the mill. However, this would be like saying that some LGBTQ activists joined forces with members of the Westboro Baptist Church to question someone. You see, the Herodians supported Herod’s rule in the land even though he was not a Jew but an Idumean. Hence, to the Pharisees, Herod was nothing more than a pretender to the throne.
The slogan of most Pharisees was “no king but God.” On the other hand, since Herod’s rule was validated by Rome, the Herodians had no problem supporting Roman rule over the Israelites. In other words, the views of the two groups were diametrically opposite to each other on the issue of who could rightfully rule over the Israelites. Since the plan was to entrap Jesus, we can conclude that their question revolved around the issue over which they were divided so that, if Jesus supported one group, he would fall afoul of the other and vice versa.
They come to Jesus and ask him… Well, what do they ask him? Most translations say that they asked him if it was right to pay taxes to Caesar. We who live in an age when the primary taxes we are concerned about are our income tax or perhaps sales tax easily misunderstand what is being asked. Now, the New Testament uses four different words to indicate four different taxes. The word telónés referred to the tax-collectors, who collected a tax that was added at the end of a purchase; in other words, a sales tax. The word phoros, meaning ‘burden’, was a tax on property. The word didrachmon, which appears only in one verse, referred to the tax paid for the upkeep of the temple. The fourth word is what is used here and we will get to it shortly.
However, by translating all four words as ‘tax’, our translations make us believe that Jesus was responding to a question about taxes in general, the most general for us being income tax and sales tax, which is precisely not what is being addressed here. Some translations say it is a tribute to Caesar. But what would that mean? A handful of translations use the phrase ‘poll tax’ which is closer to the mark but quite archaic in phrasing.
You see, Jesus’ interlocutors ask him about the kénsos. That’s the fourth word from which we get the English word census. What is a census? It is simply a count of either citizens of a country or of residents of a country. The census process today may include the collection of all sorts of demographic data. But at the bottom a census is simply a count. The count could be used for all sorts of administrative purposes, like determining what level of taxation would produce sufficient revenue for the empire or how much grain and oil a certain region might need in the year ahead. It could reveal how strong an army the empire could build or how many teachers would be needed in five years. Whatever use the census is put to, the census itself is simply a count.
Now you may ask me, “Deepak, what’s the big deal with a census?” There are two problems from a first century Jewish perspective. First, God had promised Abraham, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them. So shall your descendants be.” If it was possible to count the Israelites, this would mean that God had failed to fulfill his promise to Abraham. Indeed, this is the reason for which God was angry at David when he conducted a census of the people. You can read about that in 2 Samuel 24 or 1 Chronicles 21. A successful census would mean that God’s promise to Abraham had failed. And because of this, except for the two censuses in Numbers, at the start of the forty years in the desert and at the end, no other census is taken. And the two in Numbers specifically indicate that, though the generation who experienced the Exodus passed away, their descendants were as numerous as they had been. Hence, the Roman requirement that the Judeans should pay the census tax would have gone against God’s promise to Abraham. As a result most Judeans, including the Pharisees, opposed the census tax. The Herodians, obviously, supported the census tax.
This is because, second, only a rightful ruler could conduct a census tax. What would the citizens of the USA say if, for example, Mark Carney came South and decided to conduct a census in the USA? I’m sure there would be more people clamoring to make Canada the 51st state of the USA!
A census can only be conducted by an authorized representative of a legitimate government. By supporting the census tax, the Herodians were agreeing that Caesar, who had validated Herod’s rule, was the legitimate ruler over Judea. But this would have gone against the Pharisee idea “no king but God.” So you see, the issue of the census tax was not some trivial issue. It was precisely one of the issues of tension between the Pharisees and the Herodians.
You can see how this would have put Jesus in a bind. If he said that the census tax was illegitimate, he would give the Herodians fuel against him, allowing them to tell Herod he ought to bring Caesar in to deal directly with Jesus. But if Jesus said that the census tax was legitimate, the Pharisees would be able to claim that all of Jesus’ talk about the kingdom of God was empty nonsense.
Jesus recognizes that this was just an elaborate ruse to trap him. So he asks them, “Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites?” The accusation of hypocrisy is twofold. First, and quite obviously, they had approached Jesus with flattering words even though they were trying to trap him. In other words, their words did not match their actions, which is the sign of hypocrisy.
Second, their positions did not match their claimed allegiances. The Pharisees, despite having the slogan “no king but God” paid the census tax. And the Herodians were committed to Herod, not Caesar per se. If another, more powerful empire was willing to authorize Herod’s rule, they would have switched sides in a heartbeat. Today, in India and the USA, we know of people so committed to a person that they will change their stance on just about anything. In other words, for both sides, their stated positions were simply instances of empty posturing.
Jesus then proceeds to answer their question by asking for the coin used to pay the census. Right away we should be asking, “Why is there a particular coin used to pay a tax?” Taxation is something no citizen likes. If tomorrow the state of Idaho declared that it was reducing or doing away with the sales tax, I can guarantee you that there would be no Idahoan of sound mental health who would be sad at this development. And if someone owed the state one dollar in state income tax, I know that no one would insist on paying two.
A denarius was a silver coin that was the equivalent of a day’s labor. Most day laborers were paid a denarius at the end of a day’s work. If you were asked to pay one day’s wage as a census tax, would you pay two? Hardly! Since it was a day’s wage, the denarius was the most common coin. Hence, it provided an easy way to number the people, which is precisely what a census was supposed to do. So Jesus asked for a coin used to pay the census tax.
Now, if the denarius was the most common coin in the Roman Empire, does it not strike you as strange that Jesus did not have one on him? I mean, if any of you are used to carrying currency with you, I’m quite certain you would have a one dollar bill with you. But Jesus did not have the most common coin that represented a day’s wage. Perhaps those who propose a health and wealth message should take note of this.
Anyway, Jesus asks for a denarius and they give him one. Jesus asks them, “Whose image is this and whose inscription?” The first word he uses is eikón and the second is epigraphé. In the 3rd century BC, the Old Testament was translated into Greek. This translation is known as the Septuagint. In this translation, the word eikón is used in Genesis 1, when God says, “Let us make humans as our image.” The New Testament uses this word twenty-three times and only in this passage and its parallels in Mark and Luke do some translations translate it with a word other than ‘image’. In all other occurrences, eikón is translated as ‘image’. By doing this our translations obscure what the text is telling us by severing the link we have with Genesis 1.
The word epigraphé appears only five times in the New Testament and is a compound word. It means ‘inscription’, but signifies writing on an object that indicates ownership depending on the context. If you saw two golden arches, what short phrase comes to your mind? “I’m loving it!” The logo and the tagline are modern day equivalents to the image and inscription on the coin Jesus held.
But what we need to understand is that the idea of inscribing something on someone is central in the bible. The Israelites were told to inscribe the words of the Torah onto their hands and heads. Jeremiah promised that God would inscribe his laws on the hearts of his people. And in the final book of the bible, one main way of determining whether a person belongs to the lamb or to the beast is by the name that is inscribed on their foreheads.
When Jesus asks, “Whose image is this and whose inscription?” he receives the response, “Caesar’s.” Now when he says, “Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” we could be forgiven if we concluded that Jesus is asserting that, since the coin belongs to Caesar, we should give him that coin. However, this conclusion is absurd. Let us think about what such a conclusion would imply.
We must begin by realizing that there is no way of distinguishing one denarius from another. If the denarius Jesus was given belonged to Caesar, then every denarius would belong to Caesar. And if the denarius given to Jesus was to be given as tax to Caesar, then every denarius should have been given as tax. Or how would you decide which coin should be given as tax and which not? What criteria could you use? If we understand Jesus in this way then there would be nothing like a genuine wage since every coin used to pay a person would actually belong to Caesar.
However, Jesus does not stop there. He continues with the words, “And to God the things that are God’s.” After receiving the coin, Jesus asked just one question. “Whose image is this and whose inscription?” We have seen that the language of image and inscription are ways of speaking about representation and ownership. The image of Caesar on the coin represented Caesar himself. And Caesar’s inscription on the coin indicated that the coin eventually belonged to him. So when Jesus says, “And to God the things that are God’s,” we are to search for whatever represents God and whatever belongs to God.
Of course, we have already referred to the opening chapter of Genesis, in which humans are declared to be God’s images. And we have seen that humans are the ones who are expected to bear the name of God on their foreheads, indicating that they belong to God. We humans - all of us - have been created to represent God. And we humans - all of us - belong to God.
But Caesar was a human. Contrary to the blasphemous claim of divinity on the coins, Caesar was just another human. He too was the image of God. And he too bore the inscription that indicated he belonged to God. In other words, Caesar, by virtue of being God’s image and bearing God’s inscription, had to be given to God. Note that Jesus does not answer the question he was asked. Did he agree with the Herodians that the census tax was legitimate? Or did he side with the Pharisees in asserting that it was not a tax that God’s people should pay?
Since Jesus has not given us a direct answer, there have understandably been a wide variety of responses. Most of these responses do not take into account two key ideas in the text. First, and we have covered this already, the tax being discussed is not a general income tax or sales tax or anything of that kind. Presumably, if we are able to function adequately in a society, we ought to fulfill certain responsibilities that would enable the society to continue to thrive. Roads, public transportation, healthcare, education , social security and other similar things are developed and maintained using the revenues the state gains from its residents.
Hence, everyone who benefits from them, has some sort of obligation of contributing to these revenues. However, this is not what this passage is about and we water down Jesus’ words if we fail to differentiate between the census tax and other taxes that help support society. He is not addressing whether paying income tax or sales tax is okay. He is not touching the issue of whether or not we should help with the upkeep of our church buildings. What he was asked about and what he is addressing is far more foundational, far more revolutionary.
Recall that he was asked about the census tax. And recall that only a legitimate authority in a region has the right to conduct a census. And recall that a census is, at its root, a simple count. What is being counted? I mean, we know that it is people who are being counted. But when the count is tallied, what does it reveal? When the USA reports that it has about three hundred million citizens, what does that tell us? What it says is that there are about three hundred million people who would have no objections to reciting, with conviction, the Pledge of Allegiance.
A census, in other words, is not simply a count of the number of people. Rather, it is a count of the number of people whom the sovereign could count on. It is a count of the number of people who are loyal to the nation. So when Jesus says, “Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” he is indicating that the census tax reveals how many people are loyal to Caesar. But when he says, “And to God the things that are God’s,” he indicates that since every human is created as God’s image, every human - ironically including Caesar - is expected to be loyal to God.
Therefore, when Caesar - or the state - does not allow people to be loyal to God, it is revealing itself to be a treasonous regime. Note what I am saying. If the state stifles the ability people have of being loyal to God, the state has committed treason against God. Of course, taken in a superficial manner, this statement of mine could be used to support the disengagement of escapism or the engagement of dominionism that we looked at two Sundays back. However, as we saw last Sunday, everything we do must be done with the ethos of love.
This means that the state cannot be tyrannical and still expect to be considered not treasonous because the tyranny itself will stifle the ability of people to be loyal to God. You see, loyalty, like love, is an exercise of freedom. You cannot compel a person to be loyal, just as you cannot compel a person to love. At best you will get disgruntled obedience that just waits for an opportunity to shrug off the yoke of the tyrant. This is the reason why every tyrant has been eventually deposed while we Christians believe that Jesus’ reign will never end.
In this episode from the Gospels, Jesus asks us to take a closer look at our politics. But not the views we have per se. Rather, he is more concerned about the ways in which we would want to spread our perspectives. That’s why he does not answer the question he was asked, but turns the focus to the issue of loyalty. Do we bear Caesar’s image and inscription, pushing our views down the throats of people regardless of what they believe and how they are affected? Or are we God’s images, bearing his inscription, and, therefore, attempting to persuade rather than coerce?
The challenge of politics is the challenge of how we wield power when we have it. Do we force people to do what we want because we have the power to force them? Or do we try to convince people to freely accept the positions we propose because loyalty cannot be forced? It is a tricky thing because power is seductive. Caesar’s image and inscription on his coin were a daily reminder of the overwhelming force with which the Empire subjugated the conquered people. Jesus, on the other hand, is content with having his image and inscription reside in people. Are we content? Or do we succumb to the challenge of politics?
Ethos of the Kingdom (Galatians 5:22-23, 1 Corinthians 13:1-13)
Title: Ethos of the Kingdom
Date: 09-27-2026
Text: Galatians 5:22-23, 1 Corinthians 13:1-13
Preacher: Pastor Deepak Babu
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” This is what Inigo Montoya says to Vizzini, in the 1987 movie, The Princess Bride, when the latter keeps saying, “Inconceivable” when he actually means “Unbelievable.” The misuse of words is quite common. The problem is that people who misuse words are completely clueless that they are misusing some words. Not only does this cause confusion, but also careless use of words can cause them to take on meanings that were just not there originally.
This happens especially when one word is expected to carry the weight of multiple, quite different, meanings. One example is the English word ‘love’. This word is expected to communicate everything from God’s love for us to the affection between friends, from the erotic attraction between two people to the commitment of a parent for their child. It would be like saying chilli peppers in India and expecting your Indian friend to understand which of the over a dozen common chilli pepper varieties we use that you meant.
Ever since I started here earlier this month, we have been going through this sermon series that I have titled ‘Identity and Vocation of the People of God’. In the first sermon we saw that our identity is to be in the ring with God, that the life of faith is not a bed of roses but one that is essentially a struggle to understand God and God’s purposes in the world in order to align ourselves with those purposes. In the second sermon we saw that the bible never depicts Jesus as a lion, but only as a lamb. Hence, all of God’s purposes, which are implemented by the lamb, are to be accomplished through means that are in alignment with the character of the lamb.
In the third sermon we saw that there are certain principles that are elevated inside God’s kingdom, which Jesus articulated in the Sermon on the Mount and especially the Beatitudes. These principles war against escapist and dominion ways of understanding Christian discipleship. We are to be engaged with the world, but not to overwhelm the world with our priorities. Now, the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes in particular are quite action oriented. Jesus explicitly tells us the kind of behavior his disciples ought to embody.
But as the Sermon itself indicates, it is possible to perform acts without having an inward transformation. We can do things that are expected of us without having the inner motivation to do those things but primarily because we wish to elevate ourselves in the eyes of others. This is most dangerous for us when we consider things like the Beatitudes. It is quite easy to think that we are somehow better than others because we act in accordance with the Beatitudes or the Sermon on the Mount. And because this self-delusion is an ever present danger, we need something else. What we need is a transformation of our character from the inside so that our actions are not superficial but driven by deep rooted traits that are increasingly how we can be defined.
We see a similar thing in The Matrix. When Morpheus is first teaching Neo about the Matrix, Neo is unable to operate efficiently in it because he remains tied down to what he would expect in the real world. He keeps trying to understand the virtual world in terms of the physical world and always comes up short with Morpheus besting him time after time.
It is only later in the movie, when he realizes that the virtual world has a different ethos, that he is able to function properly to defeat the Agents. As long as he was attempting to define the virtual world in contrast with its ethos, he was never able to defeat any of the characters in the virtual world. However, once he aligned himself with the ethos of the virtual world, he was able to first rescue Morpheus and later completely befuddle the confused Agents, who had never before faced an adversary so perfectly aligned with the ethos of the Matrix.
In much the same way, our beatific acts - that is those acts that are in alignment with the Beatitudes - will never prove to be of any value for God’s kingdom if we act without aligning ourselves with the ethos of God’s kingdom. We will then be like dogs chasing after our tails but never actually catching them or a person in a rocking chair who thinks that the motion of the chair is actually moving her somewhere. We will be acting for sure, but our misalignment with the ethos of the kingdom will make us fail in the task of being faithful emissaries of the kingdom.
But you may ask me, “Deepak, what about what you said concerning swimming downstream and upstream? If swimming upstream is moving in the direction of life, then should not the difficulties introduced with what you call misalignment actually be positive?” Well, consider that you are driving uphill. Due to the uphill path, there is the built-in opposition introduced by gravity. However, if you decide to attempt to drive uphill with the handbrakes on, well then, there will be opposition for sure. But one of the contributing factors is not in alignment with the journey you are attempting to undertake.
The forces of gravity were a part of the journey because you wanted to drive uphill toward some desirable destination. However, the handbrakes are not in alignment with the journey you were undertaking. In other words, just because something is difficult, it isn’t a sign that you are on the right track. Rather, we must discern what is actually in alignment with our discipleship and what is not. In the case of the car going uphill, you may not see that the handbrake is on. But when you get the smell of burning rubber, you will know something is dangerously wrong.
In much the same way, Paul lists the fruit of the Spirit. Recall Jesus’ teachings about good fruit and bad fruit. The fruit helps you decide about the health of the tree. If the fruit is good, the tree is healthy. If the fruit is bad, the tree is diseased. In the same way, the fruit we bear signifies what or whom we are connected to. If we bear the fruit of the Spirit, we are connected to Jesus through his Spirit. In his letter to the Galatians, Paul lists “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”
In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes, “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable; it keeps no record of wrongs; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” Neither list is intended to be comprehensive. While there is some overlap between the two, each list also has its unique aspects. The lists are much like an impressionist painting, where the overall effects rather than specific details are most important.
Let us first consider the nine words that Paul uses in Galatians and briefly comment on them. The first word he uses is love. We will hold off on discussing this to later in this message because it is too important to deal with briefly.
The second word is joy, translating the Greek word chara. English loses something crucial here because chara is derived from charis, which is the word for ‘grace’. Chara, therefore, is not just joy empty of context, but the delight that we experience and express when we recognize God’s grace in our lives and in the lives of others. When we see God’s grace in our lives, what the Spirit leads us to is a state of rapturous delight about the fact that God loves and favors his children. When you are blessed, I am led to drink deeply from the delight that only God’s Spirit can produce in us.
The third word is peace, which relates to the Hebraic concept of shalom. Peace, in the bible, is not simply the absence of conflict or war, but the presence of everything that makes for wholeness and flourishing. What the Spirit does is produce through us those things that make for wholeness in the lives of everyone around us. Indeed, the very idea of wholeness tells us that there can be no peace at the expense of the wholeness that another person experiences. We are in this together and it is only together that we can enjoy and explore the wholeness that God’s Spirit produces in us.
The fourth word is patience. The Hebrew phrase related to this is erekh appayim, which literally means ‘long of nose’. The idea is that, when we are angry, our nostrils flare up. However, it takes a long time for a person who is long of nose to reach the state of flared up nostrils. You can easily see how this idea relates to patience. However, it is crucial to understand the context too. A person can be deemed to be long of nose only if he/she is facing some aggravating situation that would cause others to have flared up noses. What is being described is a person who does not easily get angry and who does not easily lash out at others.
The fifth word is often translated as ‘kindness’. However, this has nothing to do with being friendly and helpful, as the English word would suggest. Rather, chréstotés involves having a disposition to do what is best for others. I think it is best to think of this as benevolence.
The sixth word is often translated as ‘goodness’. However, I think it is best to understand this word as beneficence. While benevolence addresses the inner disposition that we have toward others, beneficence addresses how we act in accordance with that disposition.
The seventh word is almost always translated as ‘faithfulness’. However, I think in this context it is better to use the idea of ‘trustworthiness’. Are people willing to take me at my word? Or do they suspect that I have some agenda all the time? Are people willing to trust that I have good intentions toward them? Or do they question my motives even when what I do may benefit them?
Now, I know that I have an accent different from what is common in Idaho. Hence, some of you may wonder what I am saying since it may sound confusing. Just this past Thursday, I met with Pastor Duane Anders from Boise. He is my District Superintendent and it was the first time we met. As we were talking, I told him about some events in my life and on a number of occasions I told him I did something after ‘walking Sherlock’. Not knowing that Sherlock is my dog, he had no clue what I was talking about.
He held off for the first few times I used the phrase until curiosity got the better of him. So he asked me what ‘walking Sherlock’ was, wondering if perhaps it was some sort of strange Eastern spiritual practice. We had a hearty laugh when I explained that it was just the mundane act of taking my dog out for a walk. But the thing is that, even though what I said was confusing, Duane did not conclude the worst about me, but asked me his question so that we could be on the same page. That determination to not jump to conclusions is what trustworthiness looks like.
The eighth word is translated as ‘gentleness’, though it would be better translated as ‘meekness’. The word Paul uses is derived from the word Jesus uses when he says, “Come to me… because I am meek” and when he says, “Blessed are the meek.” Meekness is strength under control. When someone corrects me, do I get defensive? Do I feel threatened? Or am I willing to take the correction - whether valid or not - in my stride and not let it affect the way I treat that person? Is my self-worth tied to my being praised by others all the time or can I accept negative comments?
The ninth word is self-control. Whereas meekness is strength under control, self-control is strength made visible in a measured manner. Meekness is more passive, while self-control is active.
Our brief discussion about the fruit of the Spirit reminds me of the interaction between Luke and Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back. Yoda tells Luke, “If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. Consume you it will.” Luke asks, “Is the dark side stronger?” to which Yoda quickly responds, “No, quicker, easier, more seductive.” The dark side is quicker, easier, more seductive. The way of the Jedi and the ethos of the kingdom takes time, is laborious, and, therefore, less appealing to those who aren’t willing to swim upstream.
Now, we had skipped discussing the word ‘love’. Let us move to that by looking at what Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 13. Paul’s chapter on love in 1 Corinthians is a remarkable one, filled with invaluable nuggets of wisdom. In 2024, when I wrote a series of devotions on the chapter, I needed more than a month to explain all the details in it. We do not have such time today. So allow me to focus on just three key insights. And I would like to view these in light of John’s remarkable declaration in his first letter that “God is love.” If what John says is true, then what Paul says about love must apply not just to us who are called to love each other, but also to God who surrounds us with his love.
First, Paul says that love “does not insist on its own way.” Understand this as saying, “God does not insist on God’s own way.” Since we are called to love each other, it must be true that we are not to insist on our own way. This is a difficult lesson for me. I am quite an opinionated person. And quite obviously, I hold my opinions because I think they are the right opinions. Why else would anyone believe what they do? But I am expected not to insist on my own way. Can you believe it? How much more difficult could Paul have made it?
Second, Paul says that love “keeps no record of wrongs.” Or “God keeps no record of wrongs.” As someone with an excellent memory, this is also particularly difficult. How do you forget when it takes hardly any effort to remember? Does Paul really mean that we should make every effort - and succeed no less - to not remember when people have wronged us? And why would he expect this from us? Well, if I keep no record of wrongs, I can never ask Peter’s question, “How many times should I forgive my brother or sister?” And I can never say to the person who wronged me, “You always do this!” because ‘always’ indicates memory.
Third, Paul says that love “does not rejoice at injustice but rejoices in the truth.” God rejoices in the truth, not at injustice. In the opening sermon of this series I had introduced to one of my pet peeves, namely the section headings in our bibles. Let me introduce you to another today, with the understanding that there are many more pet peeves to come. There are a handful of Greek words - nouns, verbs, and adjectives - that have the stem delta, iota, kappa - I know that sounds like a fraternity or sorority. Anyway, in English this would be the stem with the letters d, i, and k.
Some of these words are dikaios, adikia, dikaiosuné, and dikaioó. All of these derive from the Greek word diké, which means justice. Hence, these words should be understood as meaning ‘just’, ‘injustice’, ‘justice’, and ‘make just’. However, our translations consistently remove the idea of justice from these words. Hence, here the word adikia is commonly translated as ‘unrighteousness’ rather than as ‘injustice’. But these two words have quite different connotations in English. I think the bible is more concerned with justice than with righteousness, whatever that means!
Anyway, note the contrast Paul draws between ‘injustice’ and ‘truth’. Love does not rejoice at injustice but rejoices in the truth. In other words, injustice can only be promoted by falsehood and love wars against this by championing the truth. But who decides what is unjust? Who gets to determine when an injustice has taken place? Here, Jesus’ beatitudes help us. He says, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of justice.” If we can identify someone who is persecuted, we will likely be recognizing someone who is fighting injustice.
And persecution is always something those in positions of power do. Those who do not have power do not have mechanisms at their disposal that they can use to target others. In other words, wherever you see those in power attempting to silence - or perhaps something worse - people with differing perspectives you can be sure that you have identified the persecutor and the persecuted.
There is a contemporary case in point. Recently, rapper Macklemore was slated to open for Ed Sheeran. During two of the concerts Macklemore championed the words ‘Free Palestine’. Following this, facing pressure from Robert Kraft, Sheeran removed Macklemore from the lineup. Later, facing pushback from common people, Sheeran openly wept during one of the concerts. Macklemore has not publicly wept. Sheeran has. What do we do with Jesus’ Beatitude, “Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted?” How do we understand this?
It’s very simple. Who was silenced? Whose voice was deemed unacceptable? Whose livelihood was treated as dirt? You see, it is possible to fake the principles of the kingdom. It is possible to shed crocodile tears. It is possible to act like you are the one being persecuted. It is possible to act like you care about peace. However, the fruit of the Spirit is different. And love is different. Love makes the lover deny power for the sake of the beloved. Love makes one willing to be disadvantaged if by doing so the beloved will be benefited.
Love moves the focus from oneself to the beloved. Hence, while Sheeran focused on how he had lost friends and support of fans, Macklemore clearly declared that the real victims are the people of Palestine. Love is the ethos of the kingdom. Because we love, we admit that we are not the center, but that those who are suffering in the world, those who are facing injustice in the world, those whose voices are being silenced, are those who need to be at the center of all our concerns.
That is love. Have we not been using this word without knowing what it really means? May God who is love draw us so deep into God’s embrace that we will henceforth use the word correctly and act on it with the fruit that comes from God’s Spirit.
Principles of the Kingdom (Matthew 5:1-16)
“I like your Christ, but not your Christianity. I believe in the teachings of Christ, but you on the other side of the world do not. I read the Bible faithfully and see little in Christendom that those who profess faith pretend to see.” Almost a century ago, Dr. J. H. Holmes summarized Gandhi’s view of Christians and the Christian faith with these words. Speaking during a particularly harsh period of British imperialism in India, Gandhi was, unfortunately, blind to something. It wasn’t just the Christians on the other side of the world who saw what was not in the bible.
Unfortunately, Christians in India too at that time and even till today accepted things that would have baffled Jesus. The passage we heard is easily one of the most recognizable passages from the bible. Even if we cannot quote them directly, we will be able to say that these were the Beatitudes that we heard. Most of us will be able to state that this is also the start of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. But we need to ask ourselves some questions. Why does Jesus begin the Sermon on the Mount with the Beatitudes?
Also, given that the Sermon on the Mount appears right at the start of Jesus’ ministry in the Gospel according to Matthew, why is this the case? Last Sunday I mentioned a difference between visual and literary art. Literary art is sequential in nature. One word follows another. One sentence is followed by the next. In order to get the full effect that the author intends, we must read what is written in a sequential manner. This means that Matthew intended to tell his Jesus story with the Sermon on the Mount at the start and with the Beatitudes beginning the sermon.
Matthew begins his Gospel with a genealogy, something we today might consider to be the height of tedium. However, what he accomplishes with this is locate Jesus within a story that began with Abraham and that had major turning points in the reign of David and the trauma of the exile. Some of you may recall from last Sunday the importance I placed on the story within which we believe we are living. Matthew knew this. Hence, he opens by telling us that Jesus is best understood as someone who belongs in this story of Abraham, David, and the exile.
Two Sundays back, I introduced us to the principle of Chekhov’s gun. If you remember, according to this principle, if a gun is shown in the first act of a narrative, it should be fired later in the narrative. The reverse is also true. If something has been prominent early in a narrative, then its absence should make us pay attention. Most of the Old Testament took its final form either during or immediately after the exile. Many of the books are written either holding out a hope of return from the exile or looking back to the return from exile.
However, this crucial event in the history of the Israelites is absent in Matthew’s narrative. If you did not have access to the Old Testament and read just Matthew, you would not realize that the Israelites returned from exile. It would be like reading a history of the USA without any reference to the Civil War. However, since we have access to the Old Testament, the glaring absence of even a mention of this central and formative event should make us ask, “Why?” This would be a difficult question to answer if we did not have other Jewish groups who also did the same.
You have probably heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are ancient manuscripts produced by a group known as the Essenes. One of the central claims of the Essenes was that they were still in a state of spiritual exile even though their ancestors had physically returned to the land. On account of this, they too minimize the Old Testament texts that looked back on the return from exile. If we use this perspective for Matthew, we can understand that Matthew too was giving us a view that the exile was ongoing when Jesus began his ministry.
We can then understand Jesus’ life as portrayed by Matthew in light of the history of the people of Israel. In fact, Matthew makes this explicit. When Joseph, Mary, and Jesus return to the land of Judea, Matthew links it to the original exodus by quoting from Hosea, “Out of Egypt I called my son.” Then, when Jesus was ready to start his ministry, Matthew tells us that Jesus went to the Jordan to be baptized. From the other Gospels, we understand that John the Baptizer was on the Eastern side of the Jordan. Then, when Jesus came out of the water, he was tested in the desert for forty days much like the Israelites were tested in the desert for forty years. Once that was done, Jesus entered the land, crossing the Jordan from East to West much like the Israelites had done many centuries earlier. And from the other Gospels we learn that this happened in the vicinity of Jericho, where the Israelites had originally entered the land.
What was Matthew doing? He was portraying Jesus’ ministry as a recapitulation of the history of Israel. However, there are significant differences. First, the Israelites failed in the desert by complaining about bread, putting God to the test with regard to water, and worshipping the golden calf. Jesus, on the other hand, passed the very same tests. Second, Moses was disqualified from entering the land because he disobeyed God. Jesus, on the other hand, obeyed God completely and entered the land. Third, because of this, Moses’ teachings were given outside the land, while Jesus’ teachings were given inside the land. Fourth, Moses received the commandments on the mountain while Jesus delivered his teachings on the mountain. Fifth, Moses had to go down the mountain to teach the Israelites, while Jesus’ disciples went up the mountain to him. I cannot develop any of these here today. But each of these differences is significant. Today, I want to focus only on the parallel between Moses’ location and Jesus’ location before moving on to an overarching view of the Beatitudes.
Moses received the commandments on the mountain and then had to descend to give them to the Israelites. And he carried a set of mediated tablets inscribed with the commandments. Jesus, on the other hand, sat atop a mountain and his disciples ascended the mountain to receive unmediated, oral instruction from him. What did Moses give the Israelites? When we consider the first set of commandments, commonly called the Ten Commandments, what do we think the purpose of those commandments was?
The prologue to the Ten Commandments gives us some insight. God begins with the words, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” Scholars recognize this as similar to the Hittite suzerain-vassal treaties that were common in the Levant and Mesopotamia. Here, the suzerain opens with a declaration of what he had done for the vassal. And the rest of the treaty spelled out the obligations of both parties under the treaty.
In much the same way, God declares what he had done for the Israelites. This means that what follows, namely the Ten Commandments and other laws, were the obligations of the Israelites and God’s reciprocal obligations. God was forming them into a nation and these obligations delineated how this new community would function. They were the guiding principles, which, if followed, would result in a community that reflected the intentions of the God who made the treaty with them.
Given the large number of parallels between what Moses did and what Jesus did, it follows then that the Sermon on the Mount, given with Jesus seated at the top of a mountain, spelled out the guiding principles of the community that Jesus was forming. And what principles does Jesus spell out for us? Jesus begins with what we call the Beatitudes. Each Beatitude has two parts. It begins with a declaration of a trait that is blessed. And it concludes with a promise of what the blessing would look like. Hence, those who are poor in spirit are blessed. And the blessing they receive is that the kingdom of heaven is theirs. Of course, each of the Beatitudes can be explained in greater depth as I have done in my book Weathering the Storms. This is because we need to unpack what the trait is as well as what the blessing would mean. For example, what does it mean to be poor in spirit? And what does it mean to say that the kingdom of heaven is someone’s?
Once again you will realize that I will never advocate an easy way to read the scriptures. If, on any day someone who looks like me seems content with a surface reading of any passage, you can be rest assured that the body snatchers have come to Pocatello.
But back to the Beatitudes, what portrait does Jesus paint here for what his disciples would look like? People who are poor in spirit, who mourn, who are meek, who hunger for justice, who are merciful, who have a pure heart, who make peace, and who are persecuted for the causes of justice.
Let’s be honest here. None of these are conducive to marketing or advertising. I mean, can you imagine being attracted by the invitation to mourn or to be merciful or to be persecuted? We know in our bones that these are not easy things that Jesus is describing. As a result, Christians have, for the most part, taken three approaches to interpreting the Sermon on the Mount. Two of these are similar, with the third being different. Let us begin with the two that are similar.
For both these approaches, the Sermon on the Mount pertains to a future Millennial reign of Jesus. They diverge with respect to how they expect the Millennium to come about. The first approach is that of those who hold to what is commonly called Dispensationalism. This is a futurist perspective that expects things to get progressively worse on earth so that this descent can only be stopped by the return of Jesus to usher in his Millennial reign on earth. However, since the expectation is that things are going to get progressively worse, there is no incentive to work against injustice.
This is an escapist perspective of Christian discipleship, which cannot be squared with Jesus’ insistence that his disciples are going to be salt and light. Salt is inert until it comes into contact with water and other substances. Light shining without context is something that no one can describe because light depends on objects for its powers of illumination and shadow-casting. In other words, the metaphors of salt and light war against any ideas that Christians can have an escapist attitude toward this world and the creatures that, by God’s grace, live in it.
The second approach is that of those who hold a perspective known as Postmillennialism. This is also a sort of futurist perspective, but one that expects things to get progressively better due to the spread of the gospel. Eventually, when things become good enough, Jesus will return to a Church that has succeeded in Christianizing the world. Since the expectation is that things will become more and more Christian - whatever that means - there is an incentive to promote certain ideas that the proponents consider Christian.
This is a dominion perspective of Christian discipleship. This is the way of movements like the New Apostolic Reformation, the Seven Mountain Mandate, and Christian Nationalism, all of which plan to legislate what they consider to be Christian values, criminalizing those who do not fall in line with these values. Both these approaches explicitly exclude the Sermon on the Mount from being relevant to Christians today. The escapist perspective declares that the Sermon is only valid for the Millennium and, since we are disengaging from the world, there is nothing we can do.
The dominion perspective also proposes that the Sermon is only valid for the Millennium. But the adherents of this perspective excuse themselves by insisting that they can do everything that the Sermon rejects in the hope of ushering in the Millennium. In other words, to bring in a world in which people are meek, they allow themselves to be most aggressive. To bring in a world in which people are poor in spirit, they accumulate wealth without restraint. To bring in a world in which mercy is elevated, they become the most merciless of people.
Both these approaches - escapism and dominion - are problematic. And this is because they make Jesus out to be an idiot. After all, which teacher would give his/her students a lesson that would never be relevant to them? When his disciples came up to him, Jesus opened with the Beatitudes and continued with the rest of the Sermon. However, from the escapist and dominion perspectives, the relevance of the Sermon lies in the future. This means that Jesus knowingly opened his teaching with a lesson that none of his disciples would ever have found relevant. That is the sign of an idiot.
In his book The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard said that the statement “Jesus is Lord” is quite meaningless for anyone who has to hesitate before saying that Jesus is the smartest person who ever lived. In other words, no one can honestly follow someone who is not really smart. This is precisely why people who hold to escapist or dominion perspectives of discipleship do not bother about what Jesus called the weightier matters of the law - justice, mercy, and faithfulness. Such perspectives deny the transformative power of the Spirit in the context of discipleship in the here and now.
Since any perspective that makes the Sermon on the Mount irrelevant for discipleship in the Church age is one that paints Jesus as an idiot, such perspectives, like traditional Dispensationalism, the New Apostolic Reformation, the Seven Mountain Mandate, and Christian Nationalism, need to be rejected. You see, in the kingdom of God, there are no ends that can justify any means. The means always need to be in alignment with the ends. What we do must always be in accord with the kind of people we say God is transforming us into.
This brings us to the third approach to interpreting the Sermon. When we look at the Beatitudes, we can see that there is a common thread that runs through them. All of them go against the grain. To draw from the message two weeks back, all of them expect us to swim upstream because death is downstream, while life is upstream. It is easy to clamor after more, or to just chase after what gives us pleasure, or to allow ourselves to be aggressive, or to permit injustice when we benefit from it, or to insist on our rights and be merciless, or to accept twisted visions of God, or to allow conflict when we stand to gain.
It is much more difficult to align ourselves with the traits Jesus blesses in the Beatitudes. However, there is supposed to be no daylight between our character and the character of Jesus. After all, we are predestined to be conformed into the image of God’s unique Son. And if we think about it, we will find that the Beatitudes perfectly describe Jesus. Paul says Jesus became poor for our sake. Isaiah says that he is the man of sorrows. Jesus described himself as meek. He advocated for justice. People asked him for mercy and he granted it. He was single minded in obeying God. He is the Prince of Peace. And he was persecuted because he stood for justice.
When Jesus opened with the Beatitudes, he was signaling to his disciples what they should look for in him. He would not ask anything from his disciples that he was unwilling to embody in his own life. This is a sharp contrast to our modern Jar Jar Binks, who scampered off into another plane when he thought his life was endangered while allowing some of his staff members to stay in the plane that was threatened. Jesus does not ask from us anything he himself was unwilling to demonstrate in his own life. This is one main reason why I follow him.
But Jesus caps the Beatitudes with the twin metaphors of salt and light. Both are nonviolent metaphors. But also they are invincible metaphors. Salt will sterilize or preserve or enhance flavor depending on how it is being used. There is nothing that can be done to prevent the process once it has started. Light will illuminate and cast shadows depending on how it is being used. There is nothing that can be done to prevent it from accomplishing its purpose. As mentioned earlier, both metaphors envision interaction with the surroundings.
But also too much salt can destroy, as when armies in the past salted cities and their surroundings to ensure nothing would grow. And too much light can blind, as would happen if we dared to look directly at the sun. It’s a tricky balance that Jesus calls us to. We are to be engaged in the world and in contact with the people of the world. But we are not to attempt to overwhelm the world. And we are to do this by embodying the traits Jesus mentions in the Beatitudes. May the Spirit of God empower us with her wisdom to bring this embodiment to light in Pocatello and beyond.
In the Ring with God (Genesis 32:22-32)
“Don’t tempt me, Frodo! I dare not take it. Not even to keep it safe. Understand, Frodo, I would use this ring from a desire to do good. But through me it would wield a power too great and terrible to imagine.” These are the words of Gandalf to Frodo in Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of The Ring when Frodo attempts to give the one ring to Gandalf for safekeeping. Gandalf recognized that the ring promised something it could not deliver. If used, it would undermine the very reason for which the person chose to use it.
So… what if a tool you were given, a tool to presumably help you, turned out to be much like a crutch that kept you dependent and rendered you unable ever to walk? Most of us are probably quite accustomed to opening our bibles and reading it as though the section headings are a part of scripture. And we begin to think that the bible is divided into neatly separated portions that can be read in isolation from each other. Hence, when we read a passage like the one we heard today, we might think that it is about Jacob wrestling with God since that is what most headings tell us. Nothing could be further from the truth. Hold on to that thought.
This is my first Sunday as your pastor here at First UMC, Pocatello. I juggled with different ideas of how I should begin my pulpit time with you. I normally prefer going through books of the bible because that is how we receive our scriptures. I do not often like dealing with thematic series of sermons because very often they come across as contrived. However, you know very little about me and I know little about you. But we are beginning a relationship that will bloom and flourish only if we all know what we stand for and where our commitments lie.
And since the Conference and Bishop Cedric have blessed me with this commission and saddled you with me, it seemed best to me to give you an overarching idea of the perspectives that I take with respect to our faith and interpretation of the scriptures. Let this devil you don’t yet know become the devil you know, as it were! Of course, my journey from Bangalore to Pocatello started in India on July 29th and has ended on September 6th, a period of exactly forty days. You could say it has biblical resonances.
Anyway, to get to know this devil, I will be taking you through a series I am calling “Identity and Vocation of the People of God.” In this we will learn together who we are as disciples of Jesus and what he is calling us to do in this world he loves. It will be a somewhat long series, taking us almost to Advent, mostly because the scope of our vocation is broad beyond our imaginations. It is my hope that you will get a big picture idea of my thought processes and the way I approach the scriptures. But before we get to the aspect of vocation, we must understand who we are.
I began today with all guns blazing, arguing that the section headings in our bibles can often be misleading or even counter-productive. You will realize that this is one of my pet peeves. After all, the section headings are not in any of the manuscripts. How does this affect the way we read the bible? If we were to remove the passage we heard from the text of Genesis we would go directly from Genesis 32.21 to Genesis 33.1. In that case, we would read, “So the present passed on ahead of him, and he himself spent that night in the camp… And Jacob looked up and saw Esau coming, and four hundred men with him.” This would lead us to believe that, after a relatively uneventful night spent by himself, Jacob wakes up to discover that Esau was approaching him with a small army. In other words, without the passage we heard, the narrative would still make sense. So we have to ask ourselves, “Why did the author or editor of Genesis include this passage and why here?”
The Russian playwright, Anton Chekhov, has given us a principle commonly known as Chekhov’s gun. According to him “if you mention a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must be fired later.” In other words, every part of the narrative is important. This is especially true when it comes to the bible. After all, these books were written at a time when writing was a laborious process. Hence, nothing superfluous could be allowed to find its way onto the page - or rather scroll or parchment. Therefore, if the author or editor of Genesis found it necessary to include the passage we heard, it must be playing a role in the story being told, even though the narrative works well without it. So, to respect the author or editor, we must ask why this passage is included at all and why here.
You may wish to ask me here, “Deepak! Why are you making things difficult? Why can’t I just read my bible in the comfort of my home and simply take its meaning at face value?” That’s a valid question. What I am suggesting does make reading the bible more difficult. I cannot deny that. But why should I do this? In the words of Harrison Ford’s character in the 1986 movie The Mosquito Coast, “Dead things go downstream. Life is upstream.” To put it in other words, going with the flow does not yield the blessings that swimming against it does. Hold on to that thought.
Let’s see what our text says. We are told that, after Jacob sends his family ahead of him, he stays behind at the place where they had earlier camped. We are told that Jacob was left alone. But was he? Presumably not because no sooner have we read that he was alone than we are told about a man who wrestles with him. Unlike the start of chapter 33, where we are given information that Esau was approaching, we have no such thing here. Was the man already there, just waiting for Jacob’s family to go away? Did he suddenly materialize, as though the Jacob’s family hindered his appearance?
We are also told that the bout was started by this unknown man. It wasn’t Jacob who initiated the conflict. Presumably, the man had some kind of bone to pick with Jacob, though we are not told what it was. However, even though the man initiated the fight, we are told that he was unable to defeat Jacob. It’s like an ancient strait of Hormuz situation, if you know what I mean. Realizing that he was not winning, the man performs an illegal move and wrenches Jacob’s bone from the hip socket. But even this does not make Jacob give in. The man asks Jacob to let him go. The reason he gives is that dawn was approaching. Why? Was he afraid Jacob would see his face if the sun rose? Or was this man some kind of being that is unable to operate in the day time - a sort of biblical vampire? Of course, you may ask, “Deepak, wasn’t Jacab wrestling with God? Why would God be afraid? Why would God be unable to work during the day?”
But you see, in the narrative, the man is never identified as God. But you may ask, “Why
then does Jacob say, ‘I have seen God face to face, yet my life is preserved’? Surely this means that Jacob wrestled with God What else could it mean?”
It is here that we need to develop the discipline of telling the voice of a character in the narrative from that of the narrator. Jacob is not the narrator. The narrator always refers to Jacob’s sparring partner as ‘the man’. It is Jacob who mentions God. But note what Jacob says very carefully. He does not say, “My sparring partner was God.” Nor does he say, “I have wrestled with God.” Rather, he says, “I have seen God face to face, yet my life is preserved.” The narrator says that Jacob wrestled with a man. But Jacob says he saw God face to face? What gives?
Moreover, we are also told that the man tells Jacob, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans and have prevailed.” But does this mean that the man was referring to the then ongoing wrestling match? Or could it be something else; something perhaps in Jacob’s past?
Of course, we know about Jacob’s past. We are told that, when Rebekkah was pregnant, she was informed that she would give birth to twins. She was also told that the expected practice which gave pre-eminence to the firstborn would not hold for her children. She was told that the elder child would serve the younger. We know that later, when Esau was famished, Jacob used his hunger to purchase the rights of the firstborn from him. Later, when Isaac was ready to bless his eldest son, Jacob fell in line with Rebekkah’s plot and stole the blessing.
When he ran away and joined Laban he met his match because his future father-in-law was as accomplished a cheat as he. But this did not make him change his outlook on life. Rather, through an elaborate scheme, he arranged events so as to steal from Laban. You know, when someone insists on biblical family values, I love to point them to Jacob’s family. Dysfunctional in the extreme with barely any redeeming characteristics.
In all these ways Jacob demonstrated that he was simply going with the flow. In this world we are told to look out for number one. We are taught that the one with the most toys wins. We are seduced into collecting and accumulating more and more. That is exactly what Jacob did. He went with the flow. He went downstream. But life is upstream. And if following God leads to life, then going downstream is to strive with God and refuse to walk the path God would want us to walk. Of course, with all his schemes, Jacob had also antagonized his brother, his father, and his father-in-law.
Hence, well before the episode in Genesis 32, Jacob had lived a life of striving against God and humans. And no one had managed to make him understand that he was on the way downstream. No one had managed to make him see the errors of his ways. He had indeed prevailed against God and humans. But this is not a complement. This was an indictment of his scheming ways. But God…
Here I think we need a brief aside. The phrase ‘but God’ is one of the most powerful in the scriptures. It indicates a complete reversal in the narrative. If things are going well, the phrase ‘but God’ is devastating because it reveals that things are going to take a turn for the worse. However, if things are going poorly, the phrase ‘but God’ is full of hope because it indicates that things are going to improve.
Hence, the man indicts Jacob for his past by saying that he had striven with God and humans. But God uses precisely this weakness to turn it into a blessing. Jacob is told that he would now be characterized as someone who wrestles with God. He would become someone who recognizes that the path to life is the one on which he actively takes up the mantle of struggling with God. And his whole outlook changes. Hence, in chapter 33 we see him for the first time placing himself at the front in a situation of potential conflict.
And when he greets Esau he tells him, “No, please; if I find favor with you, then accept my present from my hand, for truly to see your face is like seeing the face of God.” Did you notice that? He told Esau that seeing his face was like seeing the face of God. But in chapter 32, while wrestling with the man, Jacob had already declared, “I have seen God face to face.” And prior to that he had thought, “I may appease him with the present that goes ahead of me, and afterwards I shall see his face; perhaps he will accept me.”
Jacob had hoped to cajole Esau with gifts so that, when he saw his face, Esau would be favorably disposed to him. It’s the same floating downstream way of doing things. Rather than own up to how he had stolen from his brother, he hoped to sweep that under the rug with gifts. But then he wrestles with a man. And he comes to the conviction that, while wrestling the man, he had seen the face of God. And when he sees his brother he realizes that Esau’s face was similar to the face of God he had been convinced about earlier.
What Jacob realizes is that you cannot expect God to simply wave God’s hands and absolve you of the responsibilities you have toward others. Rather, it is in wrestling with others to heal your relationships that you are able to see God. In other words, what Jacob realizes is that God wrestles with us when God makes us face the stark realities of how we have allowed our relationships to fall apart. More to the point, when we finally do encounter God, it is often in the context of attempting to mend our relationships with others.
Indeed, as long as we remain like Jacob, expecting to cajole or bribe or flatter our way out of the difficulties presented by our relationships, we will only deceive ourselves. But if we, like Jacob after he was renamed, are willing to face the people who have hurt us or whom we have hurt, then we might just discover in their faces the face of God. You see, after Genesis 32, Jacob’s descendants are almost always called the children of Israel. While Jacob’s name is sometimes used to refer to the nation as a whole, it is rarely used to refer to the people themselves.
Rather, the people are named according to Jacob’s new name. They are the children of Israel, the people brought into being in order that they would strive with God and wrest blessings from God. But just as Jacob discovered that it was while struggling with the man that he recognized the face of God, so also the people of Israel were expected to discover while they struggled with other humans that in their faces was the face of God.
We who follow Jesus have been adopted into the same family. Paul called the church the Israel of God. We are the ones who have been called to wrestle with God while struggling with our neighbors. And when we genuinely struggle with them we will discover that their faces are for us the face of God. When we put the two greatest commandments together we realize that it is in loving our neighbor that we get the opportunity and privilege of demonstrating our love for God.
However, each person has their own priorities and perspectives, which we will need to struggle to understand. And because of this the task given to us is not easy. We cannot simply read our bibles and expect guidance for every situation. Nor will today’s solutions work tomorrow, just as yesterday’s solutions do not work today. If we use either the bible or our doctrines rigidly, we may discover that it is similar to using the ring of power - full of promises, but ultimately destructive.
But God invites us to love our neighbors. And love is not something easy because it depends on the beloved. Because of this God’s invitation is nothing less than the invitation to wrestle in the ring with God. This is how I describe our life with God. Unlike in most religions, we are not promised a life that is smooth sailing. Rather, we are told up front that we will have trials and tribulations. We are told that we will be misunderstood. We are even told that we will be hated. In other words, we are not called to a life as spectators, but combatants- combatants in the ring with God.
A Subversive Vision (Revelation 5:1-14)
Did you see it? Did you see it? When the passage was read did you see a glaring gap? Did you wonder why you did not get to see what was promised? Or did you miss it? Way back in 1999, I was in the middle of my M.Div. degree at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, CA. I was doing an internship at the Glendale Presbyterian Church under Pastor Darrell Johnson with a focus on worship. Being the year before the much-anticipated, but highly underwhelming Y2K, Darrell had decided to take us through the book of Revelation.
And since I was doing an internship he offered me the opportunity of preaching on one Sunday. Since my internship focused on worship, I chose as my text the passage we heard, which forms the second part of the central and centering vision of the book. And as I prepared for that sermon, I came to a realization that I haven’t been able to shake and that still haunts me every time I read the text. And yes, I used the word ‘haunt’ intentionally for it is the word that best represents what I experience whenever I read this passage.
To understand this, consider what the titular character, who happens to be a gorilla, says in Daniel Quinn’s masterful book, Ishmael: “There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact… in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day… their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now.”
What the gorilla realized, and what we often do not, is that we are creatures who live in accordance with stories. This is why most of the bible is in narrative form. This is why most of Jesus’ teachings involve stories. This is because we do not live according to propositions, even though too much Christian ink has been spilled defending all sorts of propositions. Rather, as creatures of a God who reveals God’s heart through the billions of years of unfolding drama in this universe, we find meaning in our own lives by locating ourselves inside that very drama.
In the book of Revelation, John is being given one large vision that is divided into many smaller scenes. After receiving an opening vision and a series of letters for seven churches, John is introduced to a scene of worship in the heavens. Some Christians have concluded that, since John is carried to heaven, this symbolizes the Rapture of the Church. However, in Revelation, John moves between earth and heaven quite often. In that case, we would have to conclude that Jesus’ return would be characterized by an elevator experience in which the Church flies off and lands multiple times. I don’t know anyone who takes such an approach. But consistency would demand that we conclude Jesus’ return would be much like a pathetic series of elevator trips perhaps disguised as an amusement park ride.
Anyway, the second part of the scene begins with John telling us that God had a scroll in his hand and that he was looking for someone worthy enough to open the scroll. Unlike most scrolls, this one had writing on both sides. What was written in this scroll? And why was someone worthy needed to open it? Scrolls appear quite often in the Old Testament and almost always symbolize God’s plans and purposes. These often are worded in terms of judgments. Here a slight detour is in order.
The word ‘judgment’ is often misunderstood. Judgment does not mean punishment in the bible. Rather, judgment involves everything God does to set things right in a broken world. Hence, the healing of someone is judgment since it indicates that God has judged the sickness needed to be ended. Similarly, the overthrow of a tyrant is also a judgment. In situations of injustice, therefore, the setting right of things will involve the disempowerment of the perpetrators of injustice along with the restoration of the victims of injustice. Both need to be recognized in order for us to have a holistic view of judgment. Hence, as I said earlier, judgment is whatever God does to set things right in a broken world.
We can, therefore, assume the same to be true about this scroll too. It contained whatever God planned to do to set things right in a world that had increasingly fallen under the spell of the dragon.
But what was all this about worthiness? Those familiar with the MCU will be aware that Thor’s hammer, Mjölnir, can only be wielded by someone who is worthy. Similarly, the sword Excalibur would reveal its magical powers only if the one who wielded it was deemed worthy. Mythology is full of stories in which an important object only works for someone who is worthy. However, in most cases, we are not told what qualifies someone as worthy. This is where Revelation differs from other pieces of literature. It clarifies for the reader what the grounds for worthiness are.
But it is important that we take the narrative on its own terms. You see, there is a difference between visual art and literary art. When you see a painting, it comes at you all at once, without any recognizable sequence. You may later focus on this or that element of the painting. However, there is no way of knowing how each element affected you when you first saw the painting. This is not the case with narrative. In a narrative, the order in which the narrator chose to tell the story is crucial and serves to build tension and later to resolve the tension.
So… what do we hear when we read Revelation 5? After an entire chapter of focusing on the one who is seated on the throne, John’s eye is drawn toward God’s right hand in which he sees the aforementioned scroll. John hears an angel ask for someone who is worthy to step forward to take the scroll from God and to open it. Imagine you were in one of the first century churches as this book was read aloud to you. When the reader read the line, “Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?” what would you have thought?
Given that the book introduced itself as ‘the Revelation of Jesus the Anointed’ you would quite naturally think that Jesus would answer, “I am worthy.” However, this is not the case. Instead, when John writes, “And no one in heaven or on earth or under the earth was able to open the scroll or to look into it,” he is indicating that some time perhaps elapsed during which there was no response, thereby hammering home the conclusion that no one was worthy. If the scroll contained God’s plans to set things right, how would you respond to the realization that no one was found to implement those plans?
John tells us how we would respond by writing, “And I began to weep bitterly because no one was found worthy to open the scroll or to look into it.” Of course you would respond that way. Do we need a reminder to jog our memories that things are haywire in this world? Do we need convincing that there is rampant injustice in the world? So, if no one was worthy enough to implement God’s plans, then it would mean that there was no answer to the injustice in the world. And we can understand why John would weep bitterly upon reaching this realization.
Then one of the elders tells him not to weep. And the reason he gives is, “The Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals.” Clearly the title ‘Lion of the tribe of Judah’ is being applied to Jesus. It is presumably a messianic title. But how many times do you think this title appears in the bible? Would you be surprised if I said it appears over fifty times? What about if I said it’s about twenty times? What about a dozen times? What about never apart from here in Revelation 5?
Yes, that's true. The title ‘Lion of the tribe of Judah’ cannot be found anywhere else in the bible. However, the idea that Jesus is a lion pervades Christian thought. Why is this the case? In the intertestamental period, better known as the Second Temple period, Jewish hopes for a return to the glory days of David became mainstream. Based on Jacob’s blessing of Judah in Genesis 49, the tribe of Judah had adopted the lion as its symbol. From this, the Jewish hope for David’s descendant was expressed in the title ‘Lion of the tribe of Judah’. However, let’s give this some thought.
As Methodists, we do not accept the claim of Pentecostal Christians that there is a second baptism. As Methodists, we do not accept the Baptist claim that infant baptism is not valid. In other words, even though our siblings in the Messiah from other traditions interpret some scriptures differently, we do not simply accept what they claim. And this is for those who consider the same scriptures as inspired. Why then would we want to accept the Second Temple Jewish development of the idea of the ‘Lion of the tribe of Judah’? It would be as good as if we accepted that there was a hammer that only Thor could wield. And last time I checked, we are not devotees of Thor.
However, John was a Second Temple Jew who was steeped in the ethos of Second Temple Judaism, including the expectation of the ‘Lion of the tribe of Judah’. When the elder mentioned this figure, what do you think ran through John’s mind? During his years of ministry, Jesus had likened himself to a vine, a shepherd, light, life, a road, etc. None of these are fighting images. But ‘Lion of the tribe of Judah’ was different. This was a military commander. When John heard this title, he must have thought, “Finally! Jesus is going to roll up his sleeves for the battle with evil.” Most of us too would have such ideas floating in our heads when we heard the elder announce the ‘Lion of the tribe of Judah’. John would have turned, fully expecting to see a powerful lion, with a majestic, flowing mane, its claws pushed out and ready for a battle.
Let us go once again to 1999. Amid all the hype of that year, we also readied ourselves to watch the first prequel of the Star Wars series - Episode I: The Phantom Menace. In the two years that we were married till then, I had successfully indoctrinated Alice into liking all the science fiction that I enjoyed. I had a lot of help in this from many of my friends. So, we were eager to watch the movie. We purchased tickets for the first show on opening night. And we entered the theater expecting to be amazed. But what we got was boring discussions about trade disputes. And Jar Jar Binks. To say that we were let down would be an understatement. We had expected a majestic story revealing how Anakin’s journey to the Dark Side started. Instead we got a bumbling idiot and insipid dialogue.
John turns, expecting to see a grand lion. Instead, what he sees is a lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered. There could be no wider gap between what John expected to see and what he actually saw. On the one hand, an apex predator, often called the king of the jungle. On the other hand, a domesticated animal, specially bred to be non-aggressive and docile. On the one hand, a carnivore with teeth and claws designed to overpower prey. On the other hand, a tiny herbivore with barely any defence features.
And not only was there this glaring gap between what he is promised and what he is given, but also he had to make sense of the elder’s words that the ‘Lion of the tribe of Judah’ had conquered. John saw a lamb. Since lambs have no offensive or defensive features, should he reject the idea of the conquest the elder announced? That would mean that Jesus had not really been victorious. Or should he allow the glaring gap to redefine what is meant by the word ‘conquer’? And what would it mean to say that a lamb has conquered? Think about that.
We can easily think of what it would mean to say that a lion has conquered. With its teeth and claws it would have subdued its adversary. But what would conquest by a lamb look like? As the vision continues, the elders and the living creatures sing, “You are worthy to take the scroll and to break its seals, for you were slaughtered and by your blood you ransomed for God, saints from every tribe and language and people and nation.” Responding to this, the angels sing, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing.”
According to the angels, the living creatures, and the elders it is the Lamb’s death that entitled him to achieve everything he achieved. In other words, according to them, it is the Lamb’s death that constituted his victory. Or to put it more bluntly, the Lamb’s death is how he conquered. This is a crucial point to observe. It is Jesus’ death that was his victory. Many Christians think that his resurrection was the defeat of death. But that is not what Revelation says. The victory is ascribed to his death. This was recognized by the early church.
Hence, the Easter chant of the Orthodox churches asserts: “Christos anesti ek nekron, thanato thanaton patisas, kai tis en tis mnimasi zoin charisamenos.” Translated into English it says, “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and to those in the tombs, granting life.” The vision that John is given subverts our expectations in multiple ways.
First, contrary to the idea that his resurrection was his victory, Revelation tells us that Jesus’ death was his victory. What this does is detach the triumphalism often ascribed to Jesus’ resurrection and attach it to his crucifixion. The cross is not Jesus’ defeat but his victory. By allowing himself to be killed, Jesus revealed that death had no power over him. So what role did the resurrection have if it is not Jesus’ victory? The resurrection is the sign that the victory had been achieved. The resurrection is the announcement of the good news of a prior victory.
Second, Jesus does not change who he is from before his death to after. John sees a lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered. In other words, this is a post-crucifixion vision. And Jesus remains the lamb. He has not changed into something else. Even though John - and perhaps we - would want to see a more powerful symbol of victory, the symbol of victory John is given is Jesus as the lamb who was slaughtered. In other words, Jesus’ essential character does not change. In particular, there is no ‘lion-ness’ in the lamb.
Third, therefore, there has never been a lion. The conquering lion is a figment of our imagination, a projection of our desire for violent retribution onto God. But God has never been lion-like. Hence, his Anointed, the one who is worthy to implement his plans for his creation, is the lamb who was slaughtered, not the lion who slaughters.
Just two days after the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9-11, this is a lesson we would do well to learn. I was here in the USA on that day. And I saw fear overpower this nation as it chose to lash out like a wounded animal, without even caring who it was lashing out at. People began to distrust those who had skin like mine. The suspicion that developed led to calls for unrestrained vengeance. But that has never been the path to victory. Because of this, today the USA, under the leadership of a real life Jar Jar Binks, has lost much of the prestige and good will it once had, while its own citizens reel from staggering increases in the cost of living. That is what comes from parading like a lion and waging endless wars.
But what Revelation reveals is that there is only one path to complete and lasting victory. And that is the way of the lamb, the way of self-sacrifice, the way of unwavering trust in a God who will set things right. The question is, “Do we believe it?”
Hearing from God Who Shows Up in the Silence (1 King 19:9-18, Matthew 14:23-33)
August 9, 2026
1 Kings 19:9-18 NRSV
(and Matthew 14:23-33 NRSV)
By: John Gribas
[9] At that place he came to a cave, and spent the night there. Then the word of the LORD came to him, saying, "What are you doing here, Elijah?" [10] He answered, "I have been very zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away." [11] He said, "Go out and stand on the mountain before the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by." Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake; [12] and after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. [13] When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, "What are you doing here, Elijah?" [14] He answered, "I have been very zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away." [15] Then the LORD said to him, "Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus; when you arrive, you shall anoint Hazael as king over Aram. [16] Also you shall anoint Jehu son of Nimshi as king over Israel; and you shall anoint Elisha son of Shaphat of Abel-meholah as prophet in your place. [17] Whoever escapes from the sword of Hazael, Jehu shall kill; and whoever escapes from the sword of Jehu, Elisha shall kill. [18] Yet I will leave seven thousand in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal, and every mouth that has not kissed him."
Transition
Holy God. I ask that the words I share today, and the thoughts and ponderings they prompt in all our hearts and minds, may be guided by your Holy Spirit. And may they reveal You and the good news of the kingdom of heaven.
Amen.
Sermon: Hearing from God Who Shows Up in the Silence
As I prepare for offering a message like this, I almost always bounce thoughts and ideas off of my wife, Lana. I did that very thing in preparation for today. In light of this particular excerpt from the life of the prophet Elijah, I knew that, in one way or another, my message was going to focus somehow on listening to and hearing the voice of God.
Lana almost immediately reminded me of a story that has become part of our ongoing family lore. I want to share that story with you now, because I think it really fits the theme.
This took place at our dinner table a long time ago. Our two boys, Adam and Levi, were quite young. As I recall, it had been a particularly busy, hectic, stressful day—at least for me. When it came time to bless our meal with a prayer, I felt a bit at a loss for words. So instead of just throwing something out there that sounded fatherly and hopefully a bit spiritual, I suggested that we all take a few moments to be quiet, close our eyes, and listen to what God might have to say.
I was happy that everyone seemed good with that—including both boys. Personally, I am a real fan of silence, so I may have held on to the quiet longer than the others at the table were comfortable with. But no one complained.
Eventually, I opened my eyes and said, “Amen.” My family followed suit. Before we all started digging in, I decided to ask, “Did anyone hear God say anything?”
Levi, who was four or five at the time, chimed in. “Yeah, I heard something,” he said rather matter-of-factly.
I’m not sure if I was surprised at that…or delighted…or amused. Maybe a combination of all of those. “Oh, really? What did you hear God say?” I asked.
Just as matter-of-factly came Levi’s response: “God said, ‘I love you forever, Levi.’”
What a direct and deeply personal message. Levi heard his creator say “I love you” and refer to him by name. Man. That was special.
I share this because I think there are some real parallels to the story of Elijah and his time in the cave. Most important of all, in both cases, it seems that God’s voice is often loudest and clearest when we take a little time for quiet. When we listen to the silence.
Consider Elijah’s story. He was very much in need of hearing from God. He was tired, disillusioned, alone, and afraid. People—powerful people—were seeking to kill him. In particular, Queen Jezebel. She was an avid worshipper of the Canaanite storm god Baal. Despite the fact that she found herself wife to the King of Israel, she was just as avid in her commitment to wipe out the worship of the Hebrew god Yahweh. One of her main strategies was hunting down and executing Hebrew prophets like Elijah.
And Elijah had given Jezebel particularly good reason to pursue and destroy. In the chapter just before our reading for today, we learn about how Elijah singlehandedly challenged 450 prophets of Baal to a “Who worships the real God?” competition. It is quite a story and includes altars and wood and sacrificial bulls and futile entreaties to Baal and pagan prophets engaging in limping processions and a little self-mutilation.
And, in the end, their humiliation. No surprise to the mocking Elijah, Baal is a no-show. Yahweh, on the other hand, shows up big time. Even though the wood on the altar Elijah built has been thoroughly soaked and surrounded by a water-filled moat, Yahweh sends fire from heaven so intense that it vaporizes everything: bull meat, wood, water, the stone altar itself.
As an exclamation point to this impressive display, Elijah executes the 450 defeated and humiliated prophets of Baal. Jezebel’s prophets. Jezebel is not impressed or amused. Oops.
So…Elijah runs and hides in a cave. And he finds himself in need of hearing from God. I suppose this makes sense. Who wouldn’t seek a little divine presence and intervention in such a situation?
Then again, it really doesn’t make sense. I mean, consider what just took place in this Elijah story. Elijah had just openly challenged 450 rival prophets. He taunted them publicly while watching them fail. Then Yahweh, Elijah’s God, showed up convincingly in an all-consuming fire from heaven. Now one angry queen—powerful for sure, but still—one angry queen makes Elijah her target, and Elijah ends up hiding in a cave, seeking the voice of God and finding it not in the great wind or the earthquake or the fire, but in, of all things, silence.
Why?
I might ask myself the same question. All those years ago on that particularly busy, hectic, stressful day, why did I find myself at a loss for words at the dinner table—instead inviting some time of listening to the silence? Why choose this approach, this act of quiet desperation, to seek the voice of the divine?
You might say, as I just did about Elijah, it makes sense. People sometimes have challenging, stressful days. On such days, who wouldn’t look for a little divine comfort?
But, as I also just said about Elijah, it really doesn’t make all that much sense. Okay, I had a tough day. But I also have led an amazingly blessed life. I am and always have been constantly surrounded by evidence and reminders of God’s goodness and faithfulness and strength. I’ve never successfully challenged hundreds of pagan prophets to a fire-from-heaven duel. But I experience so much on a regular basis that screams “God is here! God is good! God is mighty! God is for you!”
First and foremost, the daily experience of life with my loving family screams this. What a blessing and what a powerful, constant message of God’s goodness.
Similarly, I have always been blessed with the support of a loving faith community, like I am blessed by all of you now. I recognize the creator in those who are and those who have been fellow sojourners of the way of Christ.
Additionally, consider where we live. This amazing place. The clean air and big, beautiful, majestic sky with its color and clouds and sometimes storms and lightning and thunder and rainbows. The mountains and the wildlife and the access to all of it through a wonderful trail system. Scripture reminds us of how God is made evident through creation…
Psalm 19:1-4. “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.”
Romans 1:20. “Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.”
My life is consistently screaming “God is here! God is good! God is mighty! God is for you!” Isn’t that enough? More than enough? What was I seeking in the silence at that dinner table?
And for Elijah, why was the successful battle with the prophets of Baal not enough, and why did he not hear the Lord in the great wind or the earthquake or the fire, but instead, in “the sound of sheer silence”?
As a possible answer, I want to suggest that there is a difference between hearing ABOUT…and hearing FROM.
Consider this. There are some strange things here in 1 Kings 19. The passage begins by stating that “the word of the Lord came to” Elijah, asking him what he was doing hiding in the cave. But after offering a rather feeble answer—everyone hates me, I’m the only faithful one left—Elijah is then instructed to “stand on the mountain before the Lord” because “the Lord is about to pass by.”
What is going on here? If the word of the Lord came to Elijah in that cave, wouldn’t that mean that the Lord was there? Why would the Lord direct Elijah to go out to stand on the mountain where the Lord was about to pass by?
I’ve done enough looking to know that there are plenty of people much smarter than me who have compelling responses to this question—responses that are far more historically, linguistically, and theologically grounded than anything I could come up with. Even so, I want to offer something for your consideration.
As it says, the “word of the Lord” came to Elijah in that cave, but hearing the word of the Lord is not the same as a direct encounter with the Lord. Some kind of divine prompting, whatever it was, led Elijah to reflect on why he was in that cave. Then he responded to that prompting and stepped out and experienced…a great wind, an earthquake, and fire.
Things not unlike our vast Idaho mountains and sky and storms and thunder and lightning. Things that, as Psalm 19 reminds us, tell the glory of God and proclaim his handiwork, pouring forth speech and declaring knowledge and going out through all the earth to the end of the world.
Amazing and powerful things that tell us about the Lord.
But, I am suggesting, there is a difference between hearing ABOUT…and hearing FROM.
I think at that moment Elijah needed something more than a message ABOUT God’s presence. He needed to hear FROM the Lord. He needed God’s presence itself.
And it came. God came. In the silence.
Just as, for my young son Levi at the dinner table, it came. God came. In the silence.
Levi grew up in a Christian home and attended a Christian church and school. He knew and regularly heard a lot ABOUT God, and all of that was good and a blessing in his life. He grew up in a beautiful place of mountains and blue skies that daily proclaim the glory of the Lord. But in that silence at that table, I believe he heard what he needed to hear at that moment…FROM God. And the God who is agape itself said, “I love you.” And the God who is infinite said, “I love you forever.” And the God who made us and knows us personally and intimately said, “I love you forever, Levi.”
But for Levi and for Elijah, why in the silence? I don’t know that I have a good answer. In some ways, it seems kind of obvious. No distractions. Huge Idaho skies and mountains and thunder and lightning and consuming fire from heaven and great winds and earthquakes. These are impressive and certainly can reveal important things ABOUT God. But they are, at the same time, distractions. Distractions, at least, to the intimate “person-ness” of God. That dimension of God that knows us, by name, and wants to connect and commune.
Maybe silence isn’t absolutely necessary, but it sure seems to help. Those involved with many religious orders over the centuries have known this. Some have taken vows of silence for this very reason. Consider the following quotes from Mother Theresa…
“We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence.”
“In the silence of the heart God speaks. If you face God in prayer and silence, God will speak to you.”
May we all give thanks for the many ways we hear the message about God’s goodness. In the creation. In our families and friendships. In this fellowship of faith. In the scriptures that include stories like this one of Elijah.
But today I challenge you, I challenge myself, I challenge us all. Consider how our use of time provides opportunities to hear not only ABOUT God, but FROM God. I think many people of faith don’t even consider hearing FROM God a thing to be hoped for. That’s just for the prophets of old and maybe particularly “saintly” folks like Mother Theresa.
I don’t think so. Mother Theresa didn’t think so. My young son, Levi, didn’t think so.
So, I challenge us all. May we trust that God wants us to not only hear about but to hear from. And let us look for and embrace opportunities of quiet, waiting expectantly to hear from the God who shows up in the silence.
Amen.
Benediction
The Lord bless you and keep you.
The Lord make His face to shine upon you, and be gracious unto you.
The Lord lift up His countenance upon you, and give you peace.
Charge
So let us go, listening expectantly to hear FROM the God who shows up in the silence.
Amen.
Love Boldly
Love Boldly
July 5, 2026
By: Marlys McCurdy
As I was pondering this sermon, I was thinking of using the parable of the good Samaritan as my main theme. Then I spent three rather long days at annual conference, listened to bishop Cedric preach on loving boldly and experienced the moving last Sunday of Mike preaching. This is what came out of this amalgamation of thoughts.
Prayer – lord may the meditations of my heart and words of my mouth be acceptable in thy sight.
The council of bishops met last fall and expanded the vision of the methodist church.
The Mission—The mission of the Church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. Book of Discipline
Renewed vision statement The United Methodist Church forms disciples of Jesus Christ who, empowered by the Holy Spirit, love boldly, serve joyfully, and lead courageously in local communities and worldwide connections.
Lovely words, but what do they mean to us here in Pocatello Idaho, inside of each one our lives and those around us
Today the world is fraught with pain and suffering. Every where you look you see contention and anger. We have wars ongoing everywhere. We have conflict in our life continually and it wears us down.
Jesus and the council of bishops are calling us to love boldly…..daily………here and now. There’s a tall order for us
God loves us so we can love each other. In John 13:34-35, Jesus says love one another as I have loved you. Another tall order
Christ didn’t hesitate to love boldly. His love wasn’t necessarily sweet and tender. He was bold, breaking rules and upsetting laws that had stood for centuries. He healed, even on Sundays, he forgave continuously, he called us to DO something!
He dined with tax collectors and the lowliest of the low.
Sing Zachias was a wee little man…
Zachias was a tax collector. One of the hated ones in society of the day. He made life hard for everyone, imposing the taxes of the government on every family and household in the land. Yet Jesus went to his house and dined with him. I’m sure Jesus touched and influenced Zachias. I am sure Zachias came away with a good hefty dose of the holy spirit that day. I also imagine that Jesus dining with a tax collector was not lost on the crowd that day. Neither was it lost on his disciples.
Jesus recognized the humanity of all men and women, and though we are flawed -declared it good.
He fed the poor, restored the sick and injured, welcomed children to come to him, taught us endless stories and parables to expand the understanding within our souls of what it means to love boldly.
Let’s explore one:
The Parable of the Good Samaritan
25 On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
26 “What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”
27 He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’[a]; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[b]”
28 “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”
29 But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
Who is my neighbor?? Somedays this question is easy. It’s the guy next door, the person you live with, the people of your church community. All of us.
30 In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. 31 A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. 32 So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33 But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. 34 He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. 35 The next day he took out two denarii[c] and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’
What was that experience really like?
Let’s go back to Judea sometime in the first century. Take a deep breath, Close your eyes, get comfortable and let your mind travel with me.
It is unbearably hot. You were just travelling this well-known road. You didn’t fear walking alone. You’ve walked this road many times.
The sun is scorching you. It is hot on your skin. It burns! They took your clothes.
You are thirsty. You can taste the dust in your throat in your mouth..
You are injured and bleeding. You just want to close your eyes and sleep. To give up.
The thieves left you beaten and discarded on the road. You HURT. (feel his pain)
You cannot seem to get up! Please someone HELP ME. Here comes someone…
They walk by
Here comes someone else… They walk by.
Someone is coming again. It is a Samaritan. He won’t stop for me. I am a Jew.
Wait he’s stopping! Praise God
We know from the parable that the Samaritan not only treated the man’s wounds. He anointed him with oil, gave his food and water and loaded him up on the Samaritan’s horse or donkey. Opinions vary. He takes him to an Inn and pays for his care, leaving money with the innkeeper. He returns later to pay the additional bill.
36 “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”
37 The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”
Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”
The Samaritan was loving boldly.
What would you have done? Would you have passed by, called 911, reached out and helped him as the Samaritan did?
Bishop Cedric Bridgeforth preached on Loving Boldly at Conference. I am going to share some his thoughts with you.
I always find Bishop Cedric so inspiring. He is a very dynamic and insightful speaker. He has had an interesting life and shared with us when he felt the call to ordained ministry. He was attending a church in South Los Angeles. The church did what they could for the street people – food, clothing, help with their houselessness. That church was loving boldly and investing in their neighbors.
And the street people returned the favor by protecting cars in the parking lot during church activities. Every day they met Bishop Cedric at the bus stop and walked him through their neighborhood to the church to protect him. They did this daily, month after month. One day the crowd of escorts was particularly excited almost frantic when he stepped off the bus.
He wondered what drugs they had taken that day. It was that type of neighborhood. But he went with it as they walked him to a flop house where he found a woman near death. They had brought him there to serve communion to her. They called him pastor and told the woman, Linda, that he was there to visit with her and serve her communion because she needed it. This was the moment that the Bishop realized he was called to ordained ministry. Loving Boldly in the South Los Angeles poverty-ridden neighborhood set him on a path that eventually led him to us!
So, Bishop Cedric loved boldly even before his call happened. He understood about loving boldly and loving his neighbors.
Back to the parable
The expert in the law knew that the merciful Samaritan was the one that Jesus saw as doing the right thing.
Jesus spoke of loving neighbors as He loved us. The Expert asked “who is my neighbor”.
That is a big question. Is it just your church congregation, just your friends and relatives, just your neighborhood neighbors?
In scripture Jesus says ‘truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’”
Bishop Cedric called the roll “Whether we know them or not, we must protect the orphans, the widows, the immigrants… the strangers, the misfits, the rebels, the renegades, the dreamers, the free thinkers, the early adapters, the innovators, the motivators, the resisters, the midwives. And all those who put themselves on the line to serve and to care for others.
Loving boldly will enlighten , even lighten you, when they say you’re too young, too old, too big, too small, too dark, too light, too smart, too woke, too gay too Christian, or just too much!!!”
He also warned us that it wouldn’t necessarily be easy. But this is what we are called to do.
Here is a suggested list I found online on one of the church’s sites.
· The mom checking our behind you in the grocery store.
· The man walking down the road as you drive by.
· The child giggling next to you in the movie theater.
· The woman sitting across from you in the hospital waiting room.
· The man on your TV sharing the news from states away.
· The father behind you in the school pick-up line.
· The child living in Poverty on the other side of the world.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we all paid more attention to the people and needs around us. We can all be Love ambassadors! The Council of Bishops of the UMC invites us to “reclaim a deeper identity.”
I’m quoting from an article published by Discipleship Ministries entitled: Love Boldly: The First Step Toward Discipleship That Transforms.
“Jesus’ love wasn’t necessarily sweet and gentle. It was Bold. His love disrupted systems, crossed boundaries, and healed wounds other wouldn’t touch. He restored people to themselves, to their communities and to wholeness. He ate with sinners and tax collectors, stood with the lost and forgotten, and refused to meet violence with more violence.”
They say that landing is sermon is the hardest part>
I’m going to share Bishop Cedric’s landing
“What if every disciple of Jesus Christ actually showed up loving boldly? Yes. What if every minister of the gospel preached loving boldly and then followed it up by living that out? What is every person here became a love ambassador. What would happen in the world?
We are the ones called to love boldly. We are the ones who need to show up and feed those who are hungry. We are the ones who are to give a drink to those who are thirsty. We are the ones who are to give a room to those who are on the street. We are the ones to give clothes to those who are shivering and naked. We are the ones to tend the sick. We are the ones to go the the prisons.”
So my message to you is LOVE BOLDLY
Amen
But there are also many other things . . . (John 21:20:25)
But there are also many other thinks . . .
June 28, 2026
John 21:20-25
By Pastor Mike Conner
‘Men work together,’ I told him from the heart,
‘Whether they work together or apart.’
The poet Robert Frost places these words on the lips of farmer who discovers the mystery of communion with another as he goes about his solitary work of turning cut grass to dry, and the spirit of these words pervades the final verses of John’s gospel. After living the days of Easter together—running to the tomb on Easter morning, going fishing, and encountering the risen Christ on the shore of the sea—Peter and the beloved disciple have come to a parting of the ways. Their future discipleship is destined to take on greater maturity, but for that to happen, they will have to work together in a different way, a way that requires them to be apart.
Peter struggles with this fork in the road. Yes, he has just been restored as a disciple (‘Simon, son of John, do you love me?’), and yes, he has just been given a new vocation as a shepherd of God’s flock (‘Feed me sheep.’), but that doesn’t stop him from wanting to also know the shape of his friend’s future. He turns from the one who has said, Follow me, turns to face the beloved disciple in the morning light shining on the Sea of Tiberias, turns one more time to ask, Lord, what about him? (John 21:21).
Where some readers of scripture sense an underlying tension or competition between Peter and the beloved disciple, I feel that there is a great bond of affection. As the beloved disciple follows along behind Peter and Jesus for a moment, and as Peter turns to regard him, I feel that they are trying to glimpse how a partnership like theirs might outlast the initial pang of loneliness that accompanies separation. I’m trying to glimpse that too, as I turn to face you one last time and ask the one who has called me to follow him, Lord, what about them?
Christians worship one God in three persons, an perfectly united fellowship of love that we call Trinity; we profess that salvation has come to this earth through a Messiah in whose one being the two natures of humanity and divinity are united “without confusion, without change, without division, [and] without separation.” Scripture says that we are all branches connected to the same vine, which is Christ; that we are all different parts of one body, which is Christ; that there is a great cloud of witnesses that surrounds us always, the saints and ancestors of the past accompanying us on our journeys. The wisdom that reminds of our mystical union runs through our scriptural and theological traditions.
And yet, Peter—and your pastor—is being tempted by the fiction of separation. Peter—and your pastor—isn’t quite ready to release the beloved into the mystery of a unique future and destiny. To do that means losing the beloved, doesn’t it? Peter—and your pastor—wants to hang on, wants to know. What about them?
Jesus’ response, while gentle and kind, is also firm and direct: If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me! (John 21:22).
Peter’s task, in that moment, was to follow Jesus into next chapter, which was a life of active ministry and spiritual authority that carried him from Jerusalem to Rome and eventually to his martyrdom. The beloved disciple’s task, in that moment, was to remain. This word doesn’t just mean ‘stay put.’ It comes from the Greek word meno: to stay, remain, abide—as in John chapter 15, where Jesus says to the disciples, “Abide in my love” (v. 9).
These are two of the most important words concerning discipleship in all of the New Testament: follow me, abide in me. We follow when we let Jesus guide us out of what’s familiar into the new, when we are led by him into new ways of understanding ourselves and the world, new relationships, new commitments. We abide or remain in Jesus when we rest in him through prayer and silence and faithful service, when we quiet our soul and sink down into his love right where we already are. Both are necessary in each of our spiritual journeys, yet there’s something special about having both words here in a single verse, distinguishing two unique callings, one for Peter and one for the beloved disciple.
In light of this, I want to do three things in this moment. I want to ask for your prayers as I live my call and follow Jesus to a new community and congregation. Then I want to encourage you in your own call to remain in Jesus’ love here in Pocatello. And finally, I want to share with you what the good news of it all is.
As I follow him, please pray for me:
Pray that I will follow Jesus without fear. Pray that I will proclaim Christ’s forgiveness of sin and shame and that I will nurture community in the Holy Spirit through my words and my actions. I don’t want to be afraid of stepping into the fullness of my gifts and of taking on this next chapter with all its unknown challenges. And when the time comes to get myself into some good trouble, advocating for the oppressed or challenging the assumptions at the heart of the congregation or society, may I do that work knowing that Christ has already overcome the world.
Pray, too, that I will serve with a pure heart, that will I offer myself where I’m needed and where I’m led. Pray that the contemplative vision of love will be renewed in me through grace, that I might withhold judgment, honor pain, elevate others, and spend time in secret with those on the margins of the community.
And would you pray that I have lots of fun? That I make friends, that I receive each day with wonder, that I find the birds and the waterways and the music that will sustain me when the days are long and the work is hard! Pray that Sus, Loren, Adrienne, and I are protected and provided for, and that our sense of family would continue to expand to hold one another and to hold others.
Will you pray these things for me, that I will have freedom from fear, that I will have purity of heart, and that I will experience the joy of the Lord? Thank you.
And now, friends, some reflections on your calling to abide. You are God’s beloved: remain in what you know to be true, abide in what you most cherish from our five years of partnership, stick with the things that have moved your heart, captured your imagination, stirred your desire, and drawn you into participation. I want to hold up three moments from my preaching that reflect my sense of who you’ve become and what you’ve accomplished in the Spirit.
Beloved, remember Mary of Bethany, who anointed Jesus with a pound of costly perfume. Remember how the sweet fragrance of her extravagant gift filled the whole house. Remember that the whole atmosphere of the house, the church, of the world does in fact change when pure and costly gifts are given in freedom and in love. May you abide in God’s love by continuing to love God and one another extravagantly, even sometimes impracticably, here in Pocatello. Pour yourselves out for one another. Give your very best, and then watch what happens.
Remember also those Israelite scouts who went to spy out the promised land after their liberation from Egyptian slavery, and who returned to Moses and the people afraid because they had seen the many inhabitants of the land and had felt like grasshoppers standing before giants. Remember how God said, “I take no objection to your saying: we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves but I take offense when you say so we must have looked to them. How do you know how I made you look to them? Perhaps you appeared to them as angels.” Our smallness, our weakness, our vulnerability is never an obstacle to God. Remember how the fullness of God came and dwelt in the body and soul of Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified one, who redeemed the world on the cross, and whose very smallness became a channel for the cosmic purposes of God.
Church, over and over again you have punched above your weight. Over and over again you have defied the odds and remained vibrant and loving with a heart for justice. Never look down on yourselves because the budget is slim or because you’re in East Idaho rather than Portland or for any other reason. Abide in God’s love by continuing to use your weakness as an occasion for the boldest of prayers, the biggest of dreams, and the bravest of actions.
Finally, remember that you have been called to love your enemies. That’s hard work in today’s world, today’s America, today’s Idaho. But it’s work you have said Yes to: remain in the ministry of reconciliation. You are called to break the enemy-making cycle through the patience, humility, and gentleness that the Holy Spirit will give you when you ask for her help. Never forget that you already live in a redeemed cosmos, that heaven and earth have been reconciled to God through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. So pray like it, speak like it, live like it. Abide in his love!
I must follow. You must abide.
And, do you hear the good news in all of this?
God isn’t done with either of us!
Listen to the scripture: “But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (21:25).
But there are also many other things.
But there are also many other things!
Say that with me, friends: But there are also many other things!
From the perspective of John and Peter, you and I are some of those “many other things” all these centuries later. How about that. And from our perspective, from our own fork in the road, we can still say that there are many other things to come. We are united in a story that outpaces us, overflows us, outlasts us.
John’s Gospel couldn’t contain the fullness of Jesus’ work.
The Bible doesn’t contain the fullness of God’s work.
The past five years in this congregation can’t hold it all.
Idaho can’t hold it all. Washington can’t hold it all
John supposes that even a world full of books couldn’t contain the fullness of the story.
The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the God who raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead, and is the God who continues to move among us. So, I may be sad, but I’m not discouraged, because “there are also many other things.” I may need Jesus to turn me back around and say Follow me one more time, but I’ll let him do it because “there are also many other things.”
And in the goodness of God, you will have moments, perhaps many days from now, when you will find some flowers that I have left growing beside the brook for the sheer joy of it, and you’ll find some fruit growing on a vine from a seed that was planted in secret, which only the Father saw. And you’ll know that we continue to work together, you and I, whether we’re together or apart.
And I have no doubt that I will go on to rediscover again and again the many truths and kindnesses with which you’ve seeded my soul, and I will know that we continue to work together, whether we’re together or apart.
“There are also many other things,” and I’ve got follow God into them, and you’ve got to remain with the God who wants to give them to you here.
Could we with ink the ocean fill
and were the skies of parchment made,
were ev’ry stalk on earth a quill
and ev’ry [one] a scribe by trade,
to write the love of God above
would drain the ocean dry;
nor could the scroll contain the whole,
tho’ stretched from sky to sky.
Amen, my friends. Amen.
Jesus’ Sermon in the Sand
Jesus’ Sermon in the Sand
June 21, 2026
By: April Mills
Oh my friends. What a pleasure it is to be here today with all of you. This space holds sacred energy for me. And when I read the Gospel of John from Chapter 1 to chapter 21 in preparation for this sermon, my heart jumped for joy.
Confession time: The Spirit of God drives my faith. It was the Spirit that moved me here. And I fully believe it was the Spirit that shaped this sermon series to meet the needs of this church long before Lou, Heath, me or Mike ever put words to paper.
I imagine that it must have been that same wise Spirit that showed up for all of our early gospel writers. According to one commentary, some biblical scholars believe that the Gospel of John was written by a small group of faithful Messianic Jews for the benefit other Jews that were struggling through a rough transition. The original purpose of the Gospel held two parts. 1) to establish Jesus’ authority and divine heritage. And 2) to give hope to those experiencing painful separation from their beloved synagogues and faith community.
This fundamental truth is writ large in John Chapter 1 establishing Jesus’ divine heritage early on in verses 13 & 14. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 14 The Word became flesh and dwelt[h] among us. We observed his glory, the glory as the one and only Son[i] from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
Chapters 2-19 do the heavy lifting of describing Jesus’s life as a rabbi, his encounters with the lay leaders and scribes of the day, and also the critical details of his death and resurrection in a way that ancient Jews could understand and use to preserve their faith.
At the end of John’s Gospel in chapter 20, our author eliminates all doubt about Jesus stating in the plainest possible language that: “31 these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God,[f] and that by believing you may have life in his name.” If you were a Jew living in this era worshiping the One God and following the teachings of Jesus, then this Gospel was written just for you. Boom. Mic drop. End of story.
Sorta. Somewhere later along the way this small group was inspired and thought there needed to be just one more chapter added to the Gospel of John. It’s as if there is an encore where Jesus comes back to have one last word.
In literary circles, this is called the epilogue. In big screen cinema, it is the stinger that rolls after the credits. As stingers go though, the last scene in John’s Gospel is simply beautiful.
The final chapter takes place late one evening after all of the disciples have seen the Risen Jesus mere days after his resurrection. No details reveal what night in particular the event occurred on. The text only says that a handful of the disciples were gathered together. Simon Peter, Thomas, Nathaneal, Zebedee’s 2 sons—James & John, as well as two others.
Almost as if it was an impulse, Simon Peter decides to go fishing. So he and his 6 companions row out together into the night. As the small crew set silently on the sea and the waves slapped gently at the side of the boat, each man takes turns casting the nets into the impenetrable fathoms hoping to pull up a catch. All night long, under a bright white moon, they cast and drew back their nets. The stillness of the cool air was broken by the whip sigh of wet netting spreading wide to break the waves with a slanted splash.
Simon Peter probably throws the net out the farthest. Maybe Thomas isn’t the most confident in where to throw, but he knows definitely how to release the cords with impeccable timing. Nathanael, a bit younger likely watches with a keen eye. And James and John? Well—they are pros at the cast and catch. The text doesn’t lay any of this out of course, but it does say that not a single fish was snared.
If you have ever been to sea on a cloudless night with the moon full overhead, the beach a mere 100 yards off shines like creamy white satin against the salt grasses rimming the edge of the water. It is the kind of sky that softens with the sunrise. One moment dark, the next golden.
Perhaps distracted by recent events, the disciples must have missed the passing form of our Savior walking along the beach leaving footprints in the sand. They likely did not notice the Lamb of God patiently gathering the drier bits of driftwood and building a low fire, good for cooking over. Did Jesus spit a few long branches with fish to roast, or were they left to cook over hot coals? And where did the bread come from? Was it a loaf he collected from a boy he passed along the way? One can only imagine.
Regardless, Jesus has prepared a beautiful beachside table for his final sermon on the sand. You might know it. It’s the sermon where Jesus asks Peter 3 times, “Do you love me?” Peter responds 3 times, “Yes.” After each response Jesus calls Simon Peter to “Feed my Sheep”.
That intimate moment clearly had profound effect on Peter, because in chapter 1 of Acts Peter has accepted his call and commissioning because he stepped up to shepherd the church into the next stage. What a call story! Breakfast and commissioning with Jesus!
This punchy, brief exchange sets the stage for my sermon this morning. But in order to fully appreciate the message God may have for some of us, we need to step back and see the whole picture, the backdrop to our scene as it were.
In the Gospel of John, Simon Peter’s story is illustrated in 6 vignettes. Here they are in a brief list: 1) Jesus and Peter meet, according to our authors, while John the Baptist was testifying of the Messiah (John 1:42). 2) Peter learned at the foot of his Rabbi. Eventually he believed in Jesus as the Son of God and knew that the Messiah was the way to eternal life (John 6: 68). 3) Peter continued learning and growing as a disciple and was no doubt present when the Savior commanded each of us to love one another (John 13:6 & 13:34). 4) When tensions rose within the local community and the Pharisees try to apprehend Jesus, Peter drew his sword and cut off a slave’s ear to stop the high priests from arresting Jesus (John18:10). 5) Jesus prophesied that Peter would deny being a disciple to Jesus 3 times. Peter, to his deep regret, did deny Christ (John 18:15; 18:17; 18:25). 6) After the Lamb of God was crucified, Simon Peter was among those present to witness he had overcome the grave in John 20.
There. There is our backdrop friends. Now let’s zoom in.
From the Gospel of John 21 beginning at Verse 15:
15 When they had eaten breakfast, Jesus asked Simon Peter, “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these [fish you have netted]?” Simon Peter looked up, from the dust at his feet, deeply moved in the asking because of his shame for denying Jesus just days ago. Perhaps Peter felt much like King David who composed Psalm 139. Inwardly he may have thought, “I cannot deny it Lord.11 If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me, and the light around me will be night”— 12 even the darkness is not dark to you. The night shines like the day; darkness and light are alike to you. But outwardly all Peter would say was, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.”
The utterance of Jesus’ next words were as inevitable as Simon Peter’s deeply held love for his Master. “Feed my lambs,” Jesus told him.
My friends, a calling is just that. It is undeniable. In your bones you know your purpose. Whatever kind of calling it might be, you are undeniably motivated to respond to the love of God in an outward way.
Perhaps in that moment, the sound of the waves lapping the beach on the incoming tide may have disappeared for everyone around that little cook fire that morning. Neither Thomas, nor Nathaneal, nor James and John, not even the two other disciples present dared break the tension between Jesus and Peter. For us as readers the disciples almost disappear. But the fact is they are witnesses to this intimate exchange. It is as if they represent those closed loved ones who’ve been witnesses to our personal growth a follower of Christ.
Jesus did not stop after the first asking though. A second time he asked him, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?”
Peter knew the reasons that Jesus asked a second time. Perhaps like King David, he may have thought, “1 Lord, you have searched me and known me. 2 You know when I sit down and when I stand up; you understand my thoughts from far away. 3 You observe my travels and my rest; you are aware of all my ways. 13 For it was you who created my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.” Those words were never spoken. The disciple’s only reply to the second question was the truth. “Yes, Lord,” he said to Jesus, “you know that I love you.”
Jesus did not wait to issue his calling a second time. “Peter, Shepherd my sheep,” he said.
Perhaps tears sprang suddenly in Peter’s eyes. The text is clear that he is deeply ashamed for having denied Jesus not once, not twice, but three times before.
Dearly beloved siblings in Christ, maybe like Peter your calling has been hard to accept. Whether you have resisted for reasons related to insecurity and doubt, or reasons associated with fear or frustration. Whatever the reason, a true calling does not go silent in the face of God’s persistent presence in your life.
Perhaps Jesus reached out, then. Maybe the Christ placed his nail scarred hand on his disciple’s strong right shoulder and asked him the third time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?”
Peter’s heart, contrite and broken must have been so humbled. We are told he held a deep grief. But we also know the love of Jesus knows no bounds. Perhaps too like King David, Peter knew in his bones the majesty of his Resurrected King and thought, 5 You have encircled me; you have placed your hand on me. 6 This wondrous knowledge is beyond me. It is lofty; I am unable to reach it. 14 I will praise you all of my days because your works are wondrous, and I know this very well.” But that Psalm was never to fall from Peter’s lips. Instead, Peter said all he needed to say. “Lord, since you know everything; you know that I love you.”
“Feed my sheep,” Jesus said. And after commanding his faithful disciple one final time, Jesus added the most important and least talked about phrase of all, “Follow me.”
“Follow me.”
Did Peter experience a real-life flash back just then? Did his mind reel through all the times and places where he followed his rabbi and guide? Perhaps he closed his eyes and wandered through those memories at the same time hearing the words of his guide and teacher Jesus.
“Follow me out on the water, Peter. Fear no sea or storm. Trust in me.”
“Follow me Peter. Lay down your sword for me and take up my cause instead.”
“Follow me Peter. Fish no more. Tend my sheep instead. Be the rock that my house will be built upon.”
When Peter opened his eyes, the tears were no more. His calloused hands were still slightly oily from the fish and bread he had for breakfast. But he was full. Not only full from the food, but filled with a purpose. Not his own, but the will of his Lord. And he was at peace, fulfilled in the knowledge that he was destined to be the rock that we all stand on today.
Callings come in all sizes my friends. Some are public. Some are private. But all of them require you surrender your will, accept yourself for all your shortcomings, study, pray and above all else follow the Guiding Spirit in order to manifest exactly what your friends and neighbors need most right now.
It is my testimony when you begin humbly, consistently seeking God’s guidance over your own intentions, that your joy will multiply. It as King David wrote in Psalm 139: 17 God, how precious your thoughts are to me; how vast their sum is! 18 If I counted them, they would outnumber the grains of sand; when I wake up, I am still with you.
Change Is Hope
Change is Hope
June 14, 2026
By: Heath Mann
Change is hope, and When we hope, don’t we most often hope for change.
I am not sure you are all aware, but we appear to be moving into a period of change, here at First United Methodist Church in Pocatello. A period of adjustment. This adjustment allows us the opportunity to choose our direction. To hope for…
I am not going to finish that statement because I believe that everyone in the room just thought of something different.
It is said that Change is the only sure thing in life.
If that is the case than why are we so afraid of change?
The band U2 released the song Yours Eternally, on their Days of Ash EP this spring and a particular lyric caught my attention, and once again challenged the privilege that I have benefited from for my entire life. That lyric is “if you have the chance to hope it’s your duty!” So if Change is hope than we must have a duty to hope for and to embrace change.
It made me sit back and realize that hope is not afforded to everyone in our world, or perhaps even in our communities, and our sphere of influence. There are times in life and situations when one cannot hope to change their situation. Can you hope when you are living in abject poverty? Can we have hope when we have just received a terminal cancer diagnosis? When we’ve lost a loved one? When we’ve gone through a divorce? When we face the politics of the current moment?
But that lyric remind us that we have an obligation to hope, if we are afforded that privilege? And doesn’t hope itself rely on change? A change in our circumstance, a change in our life, whether it be at work, our health, our current situation.
When planning this sermon series with Mike, Lou, and April, they gave me the task of creating a message based off of John 21 and specifically Verse 10. At first I found it difficult to find a message in change in this chapter, but then recognizing that during Jesus’ tenure on the planet, the men he was now talking to were his followers, his students, they were learning from him. But during this chapter, this was Jesus prepping them to become the teachers, to lead, to share faith to change your roles. “Cast your net on the other side of the boat” (change your tactics, adjust your thinking, believe!)
Methodist’s practice itinerant ministry traveling from place to place spending short periods of time sharing their gifts and teachings, then moving on to the next place, so in essence to change constantly. With Mike leaving, and Pastor DePak coming in to town, we are in the process of change. What change do you hope for? What changes during Pastor Mike’s tenure are you happy with, and what has changed that keeps you coming back to this Church or brought you into this church during the past 5 years?
To think this through, and admit these things, we must contemplate the things we want to see changed, the things we want to stay the same. The things we want to enhance and make better and the things that we feel are currently working well.
This requires a lot of us. It places on us the responsibility to maintain, and enhance the community we have currently and the community we desire as we move on and through our next itineration. What does that look like ? What is our wish, our hope for change!
Better, more interesting sermons…just kidding, I believe we will all be shocked if we receive a better orator than Pastor Mike! But what does that mean? What Change are we hoping for?
I would love to ask for a little bit of audience participation at this time, Please contemplate your answer to my following questions:
Do you love the community we have become through the leadership provided over these past 5 years?
Have our numbers grown over the past 5 years?
Do you feel like we have more energy as a congregation?
Are we in a period of ascendency as a congregation?
Now that these 5 years are complete, what is our responsibility to the legacy that Pastor Mike is leaving?
What is our responsibility to our fellow members, our church community, and our community at large?
What is our responsibility to our new leadership under Pastor Depok?
What is our responsibility to be stewards of the Methodist faith, our community, and our church family?
The beauty of our current position is that just like Jesus gave the disciples what they needed to move out of the role of student, and into the role of teachers, Mike, and the leadership of this church, through the investment of their time and knowledge of the scriptures and their experience have provided us what we need to move through this period of change.
So, what is our responsibility? Look around you, how do the faces you see form or fit your community? How do they impact your life? How important is this family to you? Why? Why is it important to you? What is your responsibility to this community?
To touch on this, I do think it is important to look at our history, and to where we are at today.
Over the past couple of months, since Mike ruined our summer with his announcement, I have watched this community show love, happiness and excitement for Mike and his family, but also express fears, doubts, and concern for this community and for what it has become for each one of us. We don’t want to lose this; we don’t want to lose what we have found. So what is our responsibility to ensure this doesn’t happen? To grow not to regress.
To look at our history, Maggie and I have been a part of this Church for over 31 years now. We remember when we had two full services, a very active youth ministries program that included programs for all ages. And a very welcoming and close culture. I in fact if you can believe it at first helped Maggie was hired as the director of young adult ministries for this church and after a 18 months, she moved on to a position at Southeast Idaho Public Health. Later a few years after that, I became the youth director, what can I say they were desperate. During this time we experienced a significant loss in support, and participation in our youth ministries programs, losing our paid positions in our Sunday school program, and our youth ministries program. I bring this up because this decline lasted almost 20 years, it is only recently that we are seeing a church wide support to bring these programs back.
The Church continued and struggled, then Mike came and created a community, a community of acceptance, a community of love, and a community that is invested in each other. I failed this congregation, by not being mature enough to fight for what was important to myself, to youth that was important to not just me but also the church. I relay to you only to try to convey that we, those of us who remain have a responsibility to ensure that we maintain the community, and the priorities we are proud of, and continue on this journey, just as the disciples had a responsibility to continue the teachings of Christ.
So how do we do this?
How do we ensure that the change is positive?
I do not have a concern that this congregation will be welcoming to Paster Depok and I know that we are excited to experience the teachings of Christ through a man whose life experiences are different from ours. To see how these amazing lessons of christ’s teachings can cross cultural, economic, and geographical boundaries. To learn more about his journey, and why this Christianity thing is important to him. To share our similarities, and our differences to learn…to change, to grow as a community, and a congregation.
So how do we ensure as a community that we grow during Pastor DePoks time, and that we enhance the things we are most proud of, and not let them diminish?
So why is community so important to us?
Communities were first created for protection, for food security, and for the ability to ensure the success of our species. This is pretty basic stuff, I wonder if the first homonids understood all of the other benefits that a communal life would provide?
Benefits of connection/comradery, collaborative decision making, sharing of joy, sharing of sorrow, and sharing of grief. Ingenuity found through differences in experience….
So how do we keep the community that we are currently enjoying? How do we enhance it? How do we maintain the Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors mantra of the United Methodist Church? How do we embrace this change? How do we maintain our momentum?
This morning while prepping this talk, I reflected on one of the things I love most about the methodist faith, and belief structure. The Methodist faith to me requires me to be an active participant in my relationships to the faith, to god, to study to learn, and to grow in my faith. I have to put in the time to be a good methodist. In essence this is what Itneracy requires of its congreations. It means we need to engage with eachother, this congregation, and our community at large.
I would ask you again to look at those faces in the community that are sitting here today.
How did they become your community? What barriers and discomfort did you overcome when you first darkened the door of First United Methodist Church, were first greeted by a member, first greeted a new face when you were a member of the community. (Not a member of the church necessarily), but a member of this community.
I am now going to ask you to look at this and consider how these periods of being brave, of moving outside your comfort zone, and of knocking down barriers have impacted your life. Why did this allow you to become a part of this community, and how did this strengthen your life.
In today’s world where our computers provide us with immediate answers, where we know longer have to go to a library to search for solutions, to meet a librarian, where online or at the table ordering at a restaurant removes our ability to engage with a person, and AI now is providing someone….something to talk to…replacing our need for friends for each other. This lack of connectivity creates a gap of connection, a gap of understanding and love.
Our political leaders further the gap between us by creating an us versus them scenario, that allows them to win a few thousand votes as opposed the majority, Using hot button topics to simplify our understanding of each other. I think those of us of a certain age, will agree that our species and our individuals are anything but simple. These tactics, these technological marvels can remove our connectivity to one another, in essence destroying our community. What is our responsibility for maintaining this community? To fight for the change, the hope the progress we wish to see.
I believe that Christ showed the way, and Mike has reminded us this over the past 5 years. During the scripture Christ brought his team back together, showing up in person, not just in spirit. He brought them back in order to remind that they are not alone, that they are a community that was created to go back out into the world and spread the good news and the joy of this new community called Christianity. Now it is up to us. Not just here with in these walls, but in the great community, our country, and our world.
Do this we must remember that we are not simple, that we have all walked a different, but we all have a lot more in common than we have differences. Like our community Pastor Mike, and Susannah have hope for the future in Washington, Pastor DePok has hopes for his future in Pocatello, all of us have hope for this congregation, and hope for our community, and by remembering that HOPE is most often hope for change. We do have some responsibility to not only be a part of the change we hope to see but be open to the change the lord sees for us.
As followers of Christ, students of the scripture and members of this community, this congregation, this world, we have been well prepared to deal with the change that is in front of us. As we move forward and work through this change, when we have a moment of concern, a moment of doubt, a moment of disappointment, and or anything that if left to fester could damage our community, this is the time to look to your community for the unity of purpose to carry us forward. I believe that if we remember these words and how they unite us all. “Faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love!” If we do, and understand how they unite us all, this congregation, this community, this country and this world, we will all make it through these changes, and we will all be better for it!
No Man Is and Island (John 21, Psalm 139)
No Man is an Island
June 7, 2026
John Chapter 21 and Psalm 139
By: Lou Engelhardt
Please pray with me…
Great Creator God Spirit, source of love, grace and community - please help me to put words to a message that lifts and inspires …in Jesus’ name.
Good Morning and thank you for being here this morning and for listening…
“No man is an island" is one of the most famous lines in English literature, written by the poet and cleric John Donne in 1623. It appears in his prose work Meditation XVII (from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions), which reflects on human mortality and our deep interconnectedness.
He wrote:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
As well as if a promontory were:
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
Based on John Donne’s writing, Joan Baez wrote this song:
No man is an island, No man stands alone, Each man's joy is joy to me, Each man's grief is my own. We need one another, So I will defend, Each man as my brother, Each man as my friend.
No man is an island, Way out in the blue, We all look to the one above, For our strength to renew. When I help my brother, Then I know that I, Plant the seed of friendship, That will never die.
Today is the first Sunday in June and Pentecost has happened. We have heard that Christ is risen. We have heard that people have all been invited to know Jesus and been touched by the Holy Spirit. This is amazing!
And yet… I have heard people speaking of fear, and feeling disappointed, and alone … fear over world conflicts, fear related to health, fear related to finances and safety, fear of political powers, fear of attitudes here in our Pocatello community, and fear of change right here in our congregation. A new pastor is coming, how will that be?
The following is a statement by Kabir, a famous Indian devotional mystic poet (1440-1518). He speaks of our needing to have lived through something in order to understand. What Kabir talks of is only what he has lived through.
“There is nothing but water in the holy pools.
I know: I have been swimming in them.
All the gods sculpted of wood or ivory can’t say a word.
I know, I have been crying out to them.
The Sacred Books of the East are nothing but words.
I looked through their covers one day sideways.
If you have not lived through something, it is not true.”
We are a community who have lived together through lots of change. As we heard last Sunday and as many of you know even if you were not here last Sunday, you and I have “walked on water” in our growth these last 5 years with Pastor Mike, overcoming fears, becoming more inclusive, and strengthening this community around some pretty hefty projects. I know it from living through it with you. And I believe we will continue this growth as change happens again. However, I also think we need to pay attention and keep our eyes on Jesus. We need to continue to lift each other onward, to face the storms of life with faith and not just “go fishing”.
I love Peter. He is so human and I can relate to his ups and downs as his faith is tested and as he matures. He walked on water and listened to Jesus' speaking directly to him, sending him forth to share the good news. And yet, what did Peter, and the other disciples do in the face of fear? When they thought Jesus was gone, in the face of change? Go fishing! And this was not “fishing for men, fishing for people”. They returned to what was familiar, they went out in their boat to life the “way it was”.
As John 20:19 says, it was Sunday evening after Jesus died, the disciples were meeting behind closed doors because they were afraid of the Jewish leaders. Jesus had died, left, was gone…and doubt, confusion and fear was filling their hearts and minds.
Then suddenly, Jesus was standing there among them! “Peace be with you.” he said. And as he spoke, he showed them the wounds in his hands and his side, and they were filled with joy!
They always loved Jesus showing up again and helping them to see the Way.
Just like when Jesus caught Peter as Peter was walking on the water and “saw the wind” and started to slip under, Jesus arrived, saved Peter, and brought peace to the disciples in the boat. And they were amazed.
And in today’s reading, John 21 begins by reminding us that Jesus has previously directed Peter and the disciples in the midst of their fear, knowing He would disappear again. He said: “I am sending you” - go proclaim to people that their sins are forgiven, that they are loved and valuable. The people of the world will not know they are forgiven if you do not do the work!
And the next thing they do is go fishing. Peter said, “I’m going fishing”. “We’ll come too,” they all said. So they went out in the boat… They went back to their old life that they were living before they met Jesus. And when Jesus appears on the shore as they are fishing, they do know him.
Here at Pocatello First UMC we have lived through some miracles of open hearted change and growth. My question is: will we “go fishing”? And not remember what we have learned together? Or will we take Jesus' words to heart and be sent forward to continue the journey of developing this lamp-lit community here in Pocatello?
I have lived through times in my life that seem similar to the story of Peter’s fear and his response to loss and change. The most striking story for me is that of my original introduction to Jesus.
It happened at Mount Hermon, which is a year round camp and Christian conference center in the Santa Cruz Mountains. A large group of us from high school who had been participating in YoungLife got to go on a bus to this beautiful place in the Redwoods. It was a weekend adventure. We played Capture the Flag in the mud, we wandered on quiet trails, and we gathered for laughter, meals and singing. Then, we were presented with a passionate evening service on Saturday night that told us the full story of who Jesus was, and what he wanted from us. And, it only takes a spark, to get a fire going…
I was overcome with my own personal desire to know this guy Jesus. To be closer to Him and follow His way of loving in the world. I felt I wanted to share this
amazing love story with my family and friends and tell everyone that we are all made in God’s image, and perfect in His sight. I became a Way follower with the dream of a more connected and loving world. I embraced the wonderful music of the 60’s, like Joan Baez’s song “No man is an Island”, like Simon and Garfunkel singing “like a bridge Over Troubled Waters”, like Carole King singing "You've Got a Friend, and like the Youngbloods singing "C'mon People Now, Smile on Your Brother, everybody get together and love one another right now.” After that weekend, I felt alive and excited. As John Fisher’s song says, “That’s how it is with God’s love, once you’ve experienced it, you want to sing, it's fresh like spring, you want to pass it on.”
My enthusiasm and actions lasted a couple years. Then, without the excitement of that weekend, my life as it was before pulled me back. I saw my Way-following friends get into arguments with the Jewish kids on campus, and my Younglife Leaders changed and moved on, and then, my parents divorced. I withdrew. I went “fishing”.
My father was my best friend from a very young age, and when the divorce happened, he was forced out of my life by my mother, due to his disclosure to her that he was gay. That information did not reach me till I was away in college. My experience of losing my dad while I was still in high school was devastating. During those last years of high school and into my first years of college, I did not know my dad was gay. It was never talked about. My mother just kept him away from us. She would call the police if he tried to come see us at our home.
During the year after he left, I continued to go to school - although I changed my class schedule to take easier courses. I continued to show up at the Peninsula Bible Church and sing with their choir - (where John Fisher, the guy who wrote It Only Takes a Spark, was playing his guitar and singing with us). I continued to participate in YoungLife and go to Bible Studies, and I tried to help my mother in her grief, a grief that I did not understand.
However, I was grieving as though my father had died. He had been my rock, my mentor, my hero. He had also challenged me about my new found faith and encouraged me to be watchful of people who used their Christianity to exclude and hurt people. My YoungLife leaders told me God never gives us more than we can handle…ha, that seemed pretty daunting. I cried out to God saying I no longer wished to go forward in my life if my dad was not there. I felt abandoned and terrified by the world I was seeing around me. My excitement and enthusiasm for living, and all the hope and love I had felt since Mt Hermon disappeared. My dad was gone and I eventually just went fishing, back to my life before hearing about Jesus.
But, as Crystal Gayle sings, “when I dream, I dream of you. Maybe some day, you will come true.” And I secretly continued to dream a dream of connection, acceptance, kindness and community. Over the years, I did a bit of “church hopping”, looking for Jesus to appear, and for the “love to come-a-tumbling down”.
I consider myself a Way Follower. I have never quite understood the need for a “church building”. I accept that buildings can hold gatherings and are helpful to create space for hosting some good works in the community. However, I question the funds required to maintain these structures.
In Matthew 16:18 Jesus says to Simon Peter: “...you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my “church”….” I recently discovered that this was not only the first reference to the word “church” in our English New Testament, but that the word “church” is actually not a translation of the original language, but rather it is a substitution. It is a derivative of the German word kirche, which was substituted for the original Greek term ekklesia throughout the New Testament. William Tyndall had the audacity to point this out in 1522. He was declared an outlaw, condemned by the Holy Catholic Church, bound to a beam, strangled with a rope, had his body burned and his ashes scattered. This was because by 1522 the “church officials” had abandoned Jesus’ model of leadership and replaced it with the top-down, imperial model. Officials did not want commoners to have access to the scripture to read for themselves.
However, in Matthew 18:20 Jesus said: “when two or more are gathered, I am with them.” The word ekklesia means congregation or gathering. It has nothing to do with a building. Jesus was not interested in “churches”. His life started a movement which eventually carried his message beyond the borders of Judea and Galilee. It captured the attention of the entire world. It was known as the Way. It did not exclude people, in fact it purposefully included many marginalized people. Jesus was a radical who believed things needed to change, and knew how that change could happen. That change included getting out of the temples and buildings and meeting with people where they were, on the road, at the well, at a wedding, on a hillside… and in peoples’ homes.
So it surprised me, after all the various “churches” and places of worship I had been to in an attempt to find that sense of love, safety, kindness, and community, when I actually found it here in this amazing community gathered in this building, underneath The Roof for All. The church that is home for the Pocatello First United Methodists.
These last few years have felt like a circle bringing me back to knowing the stories of Jesus that I first loved. I have learned things listening to Pastor Mike that have rounded 5
out my immature understanding of the Bible, and taught me more deeply about God’s great love for us. I have felt the initial wonder and excitement that happens when two or more of us are gathered, and Jesus really does arrive, and suddenly things seem different, clearer, kinder, more open and amazing.
Driving back through Eastern Oregon a couple weeks ago we drove through a sudden fierce storm. It was a bit frightening as there was hail hitting the windshields, the wind was blowing and the lightning was striking. All we could do is slow down and drive very carefully as there was nowhere to pull over and get out of the storm. Then, suddenly, the smell of sage permeated everything as the rain and hail pounded on the new growth and I was completely separated from any fear or concern and felt absolute wonder and joy. I wished I could just sit in that rainy scented air and go no further. It changed my perspective about that stretch of highway forever.
You, my community, are like that sudden change in the air around me. We have been through some storms together and seen new growth pushed by the rain and hail of the challenges we have faced together. You are the reason I am no longer afraid to call myself a Way follower out loud and to talk about God, and Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. You have restored my faith that I am loved and forgiven. You have reminded me of the importance of sharing Jesus’ stories and God’s love with others. You have calmed my storms and righted my boat. You have helped me overcome the fear of the outside world that made me want to hide my faith.
No one I met in other churches understood my love for my gay dad or the devastating impact caused by their hurtful words about gay people in general. Everyone said gay people were going to hell. I had decided I would rather go to hell with my dad and the people like my dad, than be a part of any heaven where he might not be welcome. It’s lonely wondering what Jesus might really have said. It’s lonely having people who claim to be followers of Jesus recite words from the Bible to support their hatred. It is terrifying wondering if Jesus is gone, or if God has stopped loving you, and if those who you have loved are going to hell. Why not just go fishing, and hope the storms don’t simply capsize your boat, smash your windshield, and remove the responsibility and challenge of living with what seem like insurmountable obstacles without God.
And how did the disciples act when they thought Jesus was gone? When they lived in a world of fear due to hatred? They went back to their earlier lives, they went fishing. Then suddenly, Jesus showed up, saying be at peace!
And when Peter grew fearful while trying to walk on water? As soon as Peter asked for help, suddenly Jesus was physically pulling him from the water.
But he also helped Peter grow by pinpointing the problem: “You of little faith, why did you doubt?”
Jon Ortberg in the book, If you want to walk on water, you have to get out of the boat, points to the fact that Jesus makes this comment to Peter when they are alone on the water-before getting into the boat—and that perhaps Jesus did not want to embarrass Peter in front of the other disciples. So in the privacy and safety of holding Peter up on the water, Jesus gently addresses the source of Peter’s problem.
The single command in Scripture that occurs more often than any other — God’s most frequently repeated instruction — is formulated in two words: Fear not. Do not be afraid. Be strong and courageous. You can trust me. Fear not. Fear is the number one reason why people refuse to get out of the boat. So we need this command all the time. Lloyd Ogilvie notes there are 366 “fear not” verses in the Bible—one for every day of the year, including one for leap year!
My experiences here have been like Peter’s. When I have been fearful, you as a community have shown up. You have pulled me up and reminded me to keep my focus on Jesus. And yes, some of this was my direct experience of being counseled and mentored by Pastor Mike. However, you as a community have been my experience of Jesus showing back up!
Jesus has shown up consistently in these last five years, during which time I have come to know many of you deeply and personally. I have felt welcome here in spite of some of my pain around my experiences with churches. I have been shown grace when dealing with conflict and differences. I have come to see how a truly loving and welcoming community works when modeled after Jesus’ most simple and profound teachings. Be at peace, love one another, go forth to serve others. I have felt the Holy Spirit in this place, shining from each of you.
Jon Ortberg goes on to say that whether Peter sank or water-walked depended on whether he focused on the storm or on Jesus. I am learning to live more focused on Jesus than the storms that rage around us and threaten our boats. I am excited for the changes we are heading into because they require us to remember that God is in charge, and Jesus is with us in every storm and when we gather in this place.
The quote I chose to go by my picture in my high school graduation yearbook was “behind me, even as before, God is, and all is well.” Looking back over my life this year, I can fully relate to Psalm 139 which says that God has searched me and known me, he has hemmed me in behind and before, and I have been unable to flee from His presence even when I have felt completely disconnected and thought the night could hide me. This community has renewed me and provided a safe and loving home to restore my faith in our great God, the ground of our being, the source of love. And as we go through change, I don't want to lose you.
We are headed into summer. This is historically a time when programs take a break, folks go on vacations, and the community seems to shrink for a bit. This can also be a time when our minds focus on what we think may be wrong in the world or in our community, we get caught up in fear and loss, and we drift away and perhaps do not return. Someone once asked a desert father named Abba Anthony, “What must one do to please God?” The first two pieces of advice were expected: Always be aware of God’s presence, and always obey God’s Word. But the third was surprising: “Wherever you find yourself—do not easily leave.”
The idea was that community is hard, authentic friendship is hard, patience in work is hard—so leaving will always look more attractive in the short run. But over the long haul, leaving easily has a tendency to produce people who live in a pattern of giving up. Do not easily leave.”
Ephesians 4:34 reminds us to “put away from you all bitterness, wrath, anger, wrangling and slander together with all malice and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ has forgiven you.”
I want to challenge us all to continue to show up, to put away any bitterness, wrangling or slander, and to be kind to each other as we navigate change. I wish for us to remember when two or more are gathered Jesus arrives. I believe we have been anointed by the Holy Spirit, and there is work to do. My hope as things change is for us to continue to be a refuge for people who have been harmed by “religion”, and a home for safe, open conversations. We can continue to be actively kind, bravely evolving, and prayerfully serving.
Proverbs 26:20 says: “For lack of wood the fire goes out, and where there is no whisperer quarreling ceases.” We are the wood needed to keep the fire burning and muffle disgruntled whispers. As part of that burning, I want to continue to hear your stories and know you more deeply.I want to continue to do projects together. I want to go fishing with you with Jesus in the boat. I want to have breakfast with you and Jesus on the beach every time we are together and also as we walk in our daily lives.
We have received the Holy Spirit and we should Be at Peace, not afraid of change. We must not go back to simply fishing. Even in the midst of change we must be willing to step out of our comfortable boats and trust Jesus to be present guiding our steps and lifting us onward.
Isaiah 43:1-3 says: “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; And through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you. . . . For I AM the Lord your God, your Savior . . ., and I love you.”
Jesus said:
As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.”
“Receive the Holy Spirit.”
“If you forgive anyone’s sins, they are forgiven.”
Jesus wants us to know we are sent, we are to forgive and assure people they are loved and valuable. We are to continue to do the work!
AMEN
May we all go from this place with the Peace He gives, knowing the Holy Spirit is in us, that God is with us, and that we are to forgive and live our lives as only those who truly feel forgiven and know Jesus can do. Go in Peace and serve as you go!
Lessons from the Journey (Acts 14:21-28)
Lessons from the Journey
May 17, 2026
Acts 14:21-28
By Pastor Mike Conner
***
In recent weeks, we have been learning from the ancient Christian congregation in Antioch of Syria. Luke tells their story in chapters 11 through 15 of Acts. Barnabas and Paul were leaders in that fledgling community. They had arrived in Antioch—Barnabas from Jerusalem and Paul from Tarsus—as the Holy Spirit was knitting people from vastly different cultural, ethnic, and religious backgrounds into spiritual community. Like master gardeners, Paul and Barnabas lovingly nurtured this new experiment in belonging that had sprung up out of the Antiochian ground.
And then one day as the church was worshipping, the Spirit spoke: “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.” What they were being called to do was not yet known. That they were being called was perfectly clear. So, the church sent them out, with prayer and fasting and the laying on of hands.
We are picking up the story today at the end of chapter 14. Paul and Barnabas are beginning to retrace their steps after a great adventure in sharing the gospel abroad with other people in far-off places. They are far from home, though not nearly as far as Paul will one day be. There will be other journeys like this, and Paul will carry the name of Jesus farther. But a first journey is always irreplaceable, a kind of initiation.
These eight verses are packed with insights, and I didn’t really want to leave anything out. So instead of trying to preach a 10-point sermon, I’m going to take this passage verse by verse. I trust that you will hear in this retelling something of spiritual benefit to you. May the Holy Spirit make it so.
After they had preached the gospel in that town and made many disciples, they returned to Lystra, to Iconium, and to Antioch… (v. 21)
Consult the map included in your bulletin. After they had been blessed by their congregation, Barnabas and Saul, along with a man named John Mark from Jerusalem, took a short walk to the port city of Seleucia, and from there sailed for the island of Cyprus. They landed in Salamis and traveled west across the island to Paphos. From Paphos they embarked on another ship and sailed northwest to the coastal city of Perga, then walked north to another Antioch in the region of Pisidia. East to Iconium, south to Lystra, east to Derbe. This is all relayed in detail in chapters 13 and 14 of Acts. You can see that Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe are all in the region of Galatia. The new churches in these places will eventually be the recipients of Paul’s letter to the Galatians.
From verse 21 we learn the essence of the work that the Spirit had called them to: preaching the gospel and making disciples. These are two different yet linked activities. Preaching the gospel summons people to trust in Christ; making disciples is the process of forming people to live as lovers of God and neighbor. Hearing and doing, faith and works, always held together.
Notice that the town of Tarsus lies southeast of Derbe, across the mountains of Cilicia. We know from other parts of the New Testament that Paul was deeply connected to Tarsus; he might’ve even grown up there, though we’re not sure. And then, moving clockwise around the Mediterranean Sea from Tarsus is Antioch of Syria, “home base” for Paul and Barnabas. In Derbe, they are not that far from home. They could’ve just kept going in a circle. Yet that’s not the route they take. On the cusp of a more familiar world, they turn around and begin retracing their steps, returning to Lystra, Iconium, and Antioch of Pisidia.
They did it out of love. They had brought so many new, wonderful people into a faith in Christ and spiritual fellowship with each other, and now they wanted to return to visit each of these new communities and reinforce the message of God’s love. This drive wasn’t born of an anxiety that everything would fall apart without them. No, it came from wisdom and compassion. Paul and Barnabas knew firsthand the value of nurturing churches. They had done it in their own Antioch to great effect. Having planted these seeds, it was time to water and weed the gardens. They took the longer and more difficult way home. But it’s the way that honored the heart of the work.
…strengthening the disciples by encouraging them to continue in the faith and by telling them, “It is necessary to go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God (v. 22).
On the return journey, Paul and Barnabas encouraged the new disciples to continue in the faith, and they taught them about the inevitability and value of hardship. The Greek word that’s translated here as “encouraging” is a form of the verb parakaleo. It means to embolden, comfort, advocate, plead. It’s one of the ways that Jesus, in John’s Gospel, describes the identity and work of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is the Paraclete, the Advocate, the one who gives us comfort and courage. Paul and Barnabas are channeling the work of the Spirit as they challenge these new congregations to stay the course, to walk in grace and mercy and justice.
They then offer a reframing of hardship. It is necessary, they say, for us to go through many difficult things to enter the Kingdom of God. Our challenges and sufferings can humble and teach us, if we let them. And the way of Christ is difficult: it’s a way of forgiveness and patience, of sharing and vulnerability. The way of Christ requires the congregation to continually change as new people start participating. The way of Christ is all about using the power one has to lift from the bottom, to give power away to others. The way of Christ demands justice for the poor and oppressed from those in positions of economic or political influence. Paul and Barnabas don’t want these brand-new Christians to fall away at the first moment of inner or outer resistance. Press through the pain, they say, and you’ll gain the prize.
And they can say this with authority. Their companion John Mark deserted them after they first arrived in Perga. They were forced to leave Antioch due to hostility. Paul was almost stoned by an angry mob in Iconium, and then successfully stoned in Lystra and left for dead. By turning around and revisiting each of these towns Paul and Barnabas were practicing what they preached: Do not be afraid; in Christ, God has overcome the world.
When they had appointed elders for them in every church and prayed with fasting, they committed them to the Lord in whom they had believed (v. 23).
During each visit on the return journey, Paul and Barnabas appoint elders, presbuteroi, within the local congregations. While power is meant to be shared and given away in Christian community, there is always a need for the gifts of leadership, for individuals who, with wisdom and maturity, can see the big picture, move deftly through conflicts, and keep the group grounded in the essential goals of their mission. Paul and Barnabas make leaders of the locals. They recognize and call forth gifts already present in the people.
Jesus Christ ascended into heaven so that he could pour out his Holy Spirit on others and be present in all times and places. His leaving paradoxically paved the way for the expansion of his presence. His leaving also empowered the original disciples, because they now had to step into their calling to speak and act as Christ’s Body on earth. Jesus gave them the authority to do this, to baptize, teach, and make disciples; they passed that authority along to people like Paul and Barnabas; and now they are entrusting it to new Christians in and beyond Galatia.
The handing off of authority, the proliferation of spiritual elders, has never stopped. We have many strong leaders here at First UMC, and I am grateful for the ways that leadership gifts have been recognized, offered, and honed in our community. Many of you lead in how you live your life; many of you lead various ministries or from behind the scenes; and many of you lead by being visible out in front, helping to tell the story of who we are and what God is up to among us. People of wisdom, integrity, vision, and steady strength are all around us; we must lean on one another as I prepare to leave and you prepare for a summer in between pastors. Paul and Barnabas show us the value of trusting the inherent giftedness of the local people.
They passed through Pisidia and came to Pamphylia (v. 24).
During every journey there are times when we are simply in transition and nothing else is really going on. We’re just getting from one place to another with no other agenda. It’s a fallow time, a rest note. Paul and Barnabas had to get from Antioch in Pisidia back down to the Sea. That was all. I imagine they discussed everything they’d experienced up to that point, and that they shared great stretches of silence. They ate their meals and prayed their prayers.
Not every moment has to be squeezed for productivity, for results. Sometimes its enough to just put one foot in front of the other. And we know that the risen Christ loves to meet us on the road as we walk along, to reveal himself to us in the simple things, as he did with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus.
After they had spoken the word in Perga, they went down to Attalia (v. 25).
Paul and Barnabas had passed through Perga on their way, but Luke doesn’t report that any ministry happened there. All he tells us is that Perga was where John Mark decided he couldn’t go any further and boarded a ship heading for Jerusalem. Perga had been a place of initial fragility, doubt, and division.
But, as the saying goes, you never step into the same river twice, and God’s mercies are new every morning. Paul and Barnabas weren’t ready to share the gospel in Perga during those first difficult days, but on the return journey something has shifted, and they are ready and able to ‘speak the word’ there. Then they go down to Attalia, which wasn’t even been on the inbound itinerary.
Paul and Barnabas were open to new possibilities on the return journey. They conducted themselves with great openness. They were able to be surprised, redirected, to have their assumptions overturned. Familiar or even written-off places can offer surprisingly fresh possibilities for those who are awake to the Spirit’s call.
Is there something in your life that you’ve overlooked, or where you might be called to try again?
From there they sailed back to Antioch where they had been commended to the grace of God for the work they had now completed (v. 26).
At last, the pair travels east across the sea and returns to the congregation at Antioch. Their work, which at first was undefined and had to be discovered in the going, is now known. It’s been lived. What a lovely word this is: the work is completed, fulfilled. The grace of God carried them through it, showed them what they needed to know and to do in each new setting.
Not every work that God calls us to lasts forever. Most journeys have a defined scope. It’s okay for our life with God to have cycles of calling and completion. And to be clear, fulfilment does not mean finality. Paul himself was utterly changed by his missionary activity. He will now always be an apostle to the Gentiles, planting and nurturing churches. This becomes his vocation. But it’s a vocation lived in seasons and stages.
It’s okay for one thing to come to an end so that another thing can begin, because the spaces in between call us to do something we so often rush right past: they offer us the opportunity to celebrate.
After they arrived and gathered the church together, the reported everything God had down with them and that he had opened the door of faith to the Gentiles (v. 27).
The community sent Paul and Barnabas out to bless the world, and now Barnabas and Paul return with stories from the world to bless the community. They call the people together, and they tell their story. And it’s a marvelous story—of Jews and Gentiles learning to love and belong to one another; of powerful preaching, miraculous healings, and difficult persecutions; of prayer, encouragement, and raising up leaders. The circle is being drawn wider. The family of faith is growing.
Paul and Barnabas report everything that God had down with them and how he—how God—had opened the door of faith to the Gentiles. How did the Gentiles come to believe in Jesus Christ? Make no mistake, God opened the door. Yet God did it through the ministry of Barnabas and Saul. Ministry is always both/and. We do it. God does it. We do it in God, God does it in us. The two are true at the same time.
We should never attempt to erase or minimize ourselves in our stories of God’s goodness. Otherwise they wouldn’t be true testimonies, true celebrations. All testimony takes its cue from Mary Magdalene’s Easter proclamation: “I have seen the Lord!” I! God is always working through the stuff of creation; God saved the world by joining us here in our world or atoms and bodies. Stories have characters, and it’s good for us to be characters, so long as we know through whom and in whom and for whom we do what we do.
And they spent a considerable time with the disciples (v. 28).
Once they were back in Antioch, Paul and Barnabas settled again into the familiar rhythms of their faith community. They re-engaged and filled back up. Paul and Barnabas won’t stay put forever, but they need to be refreshed and restored, to process and pray through their own experiences.
One thing I bet they realized is that the Antiochian church had done okay without them, that this community of deep prayer, sincere worship, generous sharing, and strong leadership had held together, and even been brought closer together, through their absence. Paul and Barnabas weren’t the only ones who had stories; the Antiochian Christians had their own victories to share, for the Holy Spirit had continued to work in and through them in their local context while Paul and Barnabas traveled.
So when the winds of the Spirit started blowing again, and it was time for Paul to board another ship and sail into the unknown, I imagine he felt the peace and freedom to do so. He knew that his siblings in Antioch would continue to flourish. He knew that, through God and with one another, they already had everything they needed.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
The Bond of Spiritual Community (Acts 13:1-4)
The Bond of Spiritual Community
May 10, 2026
Acts 13:1-4
By Pastor Mike Conner
***
There is a story in the Gospels about Jesus’ family coming to visit him early in his public ministry. That may seem rather ordinary, but Jesus had a way of turning simple moments into deep and memorable teachings. He used the visit of Mary, James, and his other brothers to begin remolding the meaning of family for those who followed him.
Here’s how Mark tells the story: “Then Jesus’ mother and brothers came to see him. They stood outside and sent word for him to come out and talk with them. There was a crowd sitting around Jesus, and someone said, Your mother and your brothers are outside asking for you. Jesus replied, Who is my mother? Who are my brothers? Then he looked at those around him and said, Look, these are my mother and brothers. Anyone who does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother” (3:32-35 NLT).
Reflecting on this passage, a Catholic writer named Rose Mary Doughery says, “[Here] Jesus is suggesting that the bond of spiritual community is a common wanting to do the will of God. Those who gather with him in this seeking are his family.”
The bond of spiritual community—the thing that ties us together more than external likenesses, cultural affinities, common ideas, or even language—is shared desire. When we come together and ask God, the living God, to meet us, speak to us, and use us, we become the family of Christ. Spiritual community transcends the artificial divisions we give it. It can happen anywhere and with anyone. And it cannot be taken for granted. It has to be enacted.
The church in Antioch, described by Luke in the book of Acts, was an example of true spiritual community. Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians from many different backgrounds worshipped together. There was Barnabas, whose name means “Son of Encouragement, who was a Jew from a priestly family with roots in the Gentile island of Cyprus. There was Simeon, nicknamed Niger, a Latin word meaning “black,” likely referring to the dark hue of his skin. There was Lucius from Cyrene, a Mediterranean port city on the coast of northern Africa, in present-day Libya. And there was a Manaen, a politically privileged childhood friend of Herod Antipas, the tetrarch of Galilee who executed John the Baptist and conferred with Pontius Pilate on the crucifixion of Jesus. Finally, there was Saul, a scholar of Jewish law with Roman citizenship with a connection to Tarsus, a city in present-day Turkey.
These were just five of the leaders of the Antiochian community, five of the prophets and teachers. Surely they represent an even more diverse community of faith. They were all together, worshipping, fasting, and praying. There is a contemporary Japanese German writer named Yoko Tawada who has written that “Nothing good can come from a predetermined sense of community,” and I think there might be something to her insight. After all, these Christians in Antioch, who, apart from the grace of God, could never have imagined being together in the vulnerability of worship, fasting, and prayer, receive a direct word from the Holy Spirit. The Spirit said, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.”
And they did it. The community heard and the community responded. Barnabas and Saul had already partnered together in ministry in Antioch, and they had been the two entrusted to carry those financial offerings for famine relief from Antioch to Jerusalem. Now they will partner together in missionary journeys that will transform Christianity into a global religious movement. They will do this together, just as Jesus sent out his original apostles two by two, and they will do it as an extension of their praying and sending community. Though it is the work appointed by the Spirit for them, it has a communal character any way you look at it.
How did they know the Spirit had spoken to them? Did they hear a direct, disembodied voice, like Saul on the Damascus road, Jesus in the waters of the Jordan River, Moses at the burning bush? Was it a word received and relayed by one of the aforementioned prophets—Lucius, or Simeon, or Manaen? Or did Barnabas and Saul feel their pulse quicken as some deep inner knowing came to wondrous expression—“I think God is calling me to go”—and was this followed by the affirmation of the community?
We don’t know. And it’s good we don’t know, because the infinite God speaks to us in many ways, and we wouldn’t want to fixate on just one of them. What we do know is the container in which the Holy Spirit’s voice reverberates: the shared worship, prayer, and fasting of people from different walks of life, who all long to serve God with sincere hearts, who are open to the new thing that God is going to ask of them.
The archetypal call story in the Bible is the call of Abraham in Genesis chapter 12. God calls this older man to leave his ‘country, kindred, and father’s house’ to journey to a land that would be revealed only as he started to walk down the road. Abraham would only come to perceive the destination after stepping forward in faith. This is how Jesus called his disciples, too. He simply said, “Follow me.” He did not tell them where his footsteps would lead them until much later, after they had been humbled and transformed by trusting him and listening to him along the way. That inscrutable element of call is present here, too, with Saul and Barnabas. The Holy Spirit doesn’t give a lot of detail, but simply says: “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.”
“The work.” I suppose they’ll discover what that means along the way, as the Spirit sees fit to reveal it to them! And yet everything hangs on those two little words: “Set apart for me.” Saul and Barnabas will belong to God. They will be kept in the Spirit’s care and guided toward the Spirit’s goals. So long as they want it. So long as they say Yes to it. So long as the community helps them to say Yes.
Like this ancient moment of genuine spiritual community in Antioch, the sacrament of baptism also condenses these enduring characteristics of life with God. Baptism is a form of initiation. Through these waters, we are released into the story of God, into the flow of the Holy Spirit.
Today we celebrate the baptisms of three little children. When we give our children in baptism, there is a very real sense in which they are no longer our own. They belong to God. This has always been true, but now that truth is made explicit, and we commit to bear it as a joyful responsibility. For many years yet our primary tasks might still be to protect and provide for our children, but we carry with us now a perennial question: “How is God going to use this person, and how am I going to help them hear and respond to the Spirit’s call? When it comes time for them to be set apart, to follow the waters of their baptism to its source in the living God whose thoughts are higher than my thoughts and whose ways are higher than my ways, will I bless them and send them?”
Baptism opens a window in the soul. The Spirit, the breath of God, blows gently in, tickles our curiosity, draws us to the window ledge to look out upon the infinite and the unknown. Our children will think thoughts, dream dreams, and enact community in ways that defy our expectations and that, hopefully, expand our own hearts and horizons. That’s the hope of baptism, not some weird byproduct.
Paradoxically, baptism is an initiation into something—the death and resurrection of Christ, the tradition of the Church, the family of God—which has centrifugal force, the need to open its embrace, to press outward. Just like the universe, which, the physicists tell us, is not only expanding in every moment but accelerating in its expansion.
“Train up a child in the way he should go,” says the voice of Wisdom in the book of Proverbs; and yet that training is not in how to be settled but in how to pay attention, how to love every facet of the reconciled cosmos, and how to live in joyful obedience to the free Spirit.
It is very hard to offer that training to our children if we have not honored the call of baptism for ourselves. So even though we are baptizing children this morning, we all are called to examine ourselves:
Am I awake to the movement of the Spirit in my own life and in the lives of others?
Am I participating in a community that helps me to hear what the Spirit wants to do with me, and am I helping others to hear and say Yes in their own way?
Is my life a prayerful life—joined to others, receptive to the voice of the living God?
What I’m trying to say is that life with God should have the flavor of an adventure. God will give us to one another in ways that surprise us. God will set apart us and our children in ways that surprise us. God’s voice will be heard in the context of community, where very different people share a common desires to magnify the love of God in the world. In this way, it is especially fitting to baptize a child, whose love is already indiscriminate and whose wonder knows no bounds. Jesus tells us that we must become like little children again to enter the kingdom of God.
Our world desperately needs communities who are not afraid of diversity and difference. It needs people whose hearts and minds and hands and homes are open to the many. May God use us all to share great love with the world, whether we, in any given moment, are the ones who send or are the ones being sent.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
We Are Members of One Another (Acts 11:27-12:25)
We Are Members of One Another
May 3, 2026
Acts 11:27—12:25
By Pastor Mike Conner
***
We are continuing to explore the relationship between two of the first Christian congregations: the church in Jerusalem, where the Holy Spirit was first poured out upon the disciples, and the church in Antioch, about 300 miles north of Jerusalem in Turkey. Luke tells us this story in chapters 11 through 15 of the Book of Acts, the sequel to his Gospel. Antioch was a cosmopolitan hub in the ancient Mediterranean world. People from all over the known world lived and worked there. Many of them responded to the Gospel when it was first preached by a few unnamed, ordinary believers who had escaped persecution in Jerusalem and come north.
The church in Antioch was a radical community not only because of its multiculturalism, which was and is always significant, but also because Gentiles were as prominently a part of it as Jews. Gentiles, those long considered outside the scope of God’s favor and covenant, were now drawing near to Christ as beloved ones. The church in Antioch was living a question perfectly articulated by theologian Willie James Jennings in his commentary on Acts: “What will you do if I join you at the body of Jesus and fall in love with your God and with you?” Their boldness in living this question is why Antioch was the place where, as Luke tell us, “the disciples were first called Christians” (Acts 11:26).
When the leaders in the Jerusalem church—people like the apostles Peter, James, and John—heard about what was happening in Antioch, they Barnabas, another trusted leader whose name means Son of Encouragement, to go and nurture what was happening there.
After going and seeing and joyfully encouraging the Christians in Antioch, Barnabas went to another city, Tarsus, to find Saul (who we know as Paul). Barnabas brought Saul to Antioch and involved him in the work of God there for a year.
The Holy Spirit kept drawing the circle wider. Ordinary, unnamed believers carried the Gospel spark to the Jews and Gentiles of Antioch. Barnabas blew encouragement on this fire and brought Saul, a murder-turned-disciple, to work it into a blaze. All the while, two communities of Christians, one in Jerusalem and one in Antioch, were being brought into deeper partnership and solidarity with each other.
The great American poet Mary Oliver has a very early poem called “Beyond the Snow Bank.” The poem describes a snowstorm that, in one county, is mild and lovely, but two counties north is fierce and devastating. People admire the picturesque snowfall in the one place, sending children out to play and skate. Meanwhile: “Two counties north the storm has taken lives.”
The poem is about the limits of human compassion, how we can only really grieve for someone or something that we have let touch us, that we in some way know and feel a sense of belonging toward. Mary Oliver ends the poem with these lines: “I only say, except as we have loved, / All news arrives as from a distant land.”
The question the poem leaves us with is this: How to expand the heart and bridge the distance between us our neighbors, so that their pain becomes our pain, their burden our burden?
Two counties north was, in the poet’s words, “A wild place never visited, so we / forget with each ease far mortality.”
What does it look like when Christian communities in different places get entangled with each other, not only in a mystical sense as members of Christ’s Body, but in practice?
This is on my heart this week, and not only because of Pastor Deepak coming from Bangalore, India to Pocatello, Idaho in a few months, bridging the world in his own story and body. It’s also on my heart because of Dr. Boe’s presentation to our youth group last Sunday about his many experiences of medical mission work, connecting Christians around the world in shared concern and service. And because of the ISU campus ministry board meeting we had this past Wednesday night, which for the first time in five years had members from Pocatello, Blackfoot, and Idaho Falls in attendance, as well as multiple students.
There is a real sense in which Christiain life is not only personal, between me and God, and not only social, between me and my neighbor, but also ecclesial, or as the Methodists like to say, connectional, between communities of faith. We are members of one another. And the Apostle Paul, who learned how to do ministry in Antioch, tells us as much in the book of Ephesians: “There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all” (4:4-6).
Prophets came from the Jerusalem church to the Antiochian church. They reported that a famine would hit Judea in the near future. The Christians in Antioch began a financial collection to help provide for the Jerusalem church. To them, 300 miles south might be a distant land in fact, but it was not a distant land to the heart. They belonged to the other Christians there; they felt that belonging strongly. They wanted to help. The way Luke tells this story, there’s a feeling of immediacy to their actions. There’s no long deliberation or argument about whether they have enough resources to care for themselves and send help to the Christians in Judea. They simply decide that everyone according to their own ability will put some money in the pot.
Let’s notice that it’s not the larger, established community in Jerusalem that is helping Antioch this time, but the smaller, newer community in Antioch that steps up to help Jerusalem. In the Body of Christ, what determines who helps who is nothing other than need. Antioch needed leaders and teachers, so Jerusalem sent Barnabas. Jerusalem is going to need food, so Antioch sends money. I’m reminded of when we were raising money to reroof our church two years ago, and about a dozen other churches, rural and urban, near and far, Methodist and non-Methodist, chipped in. At that time, we promised to do the same, should they ever need help. Naturally, Barnabas and Saul were the bearers of the Antioch church’s gift. Luke tells us, about a chapter later, that they were successful: “After they had completed their relief mission, Barnabas and Saul returned from Jerusalem, taking along John who was called Mark” (12:25).
Barnabas and Saul came to Jerusalem during a tender time, a time marked by both profound hardship and resilient joy. King Herod had recently “attacked some who belonged to the church,” killing John, one of the original twelve apostles. He had also imprisoned Peter, the chief apostle, intending to make public sport of him by executing him after the Passover Festival. But “the church was praying fervently to God for [Peter]” (12:5) in the home of a woman named Mary, the mother of John Mark. And God, through an angel, responded to their prayers, rescuing Peter from his prison cell and restoring him to the community.
James’ death and Peter’s freedom were signs that the church would be both a persecuted and a praying community, a community marked by both death and resurrection. Through it all, God’s providence was at work. God had not abandoned the believers; they could continue to trust in the Spirit.
Either during or shortly after the Jerusalem Christians were living through the ups and downs of that moment, Saul and Barnabas arrived with the gifts of Antioch. Peter and the others could rejoice that, even as they were enduring the violent whims of Herod, the Spirit was taking care of them for what would be a future challenge, the famine. They had partners in ministry, siblings in Christ, 300 miles away who had given generously to take care of them. Angels met them in their present, and angels me them for their future. They would have a future, Herod or no Herod, and they wouldn’t be alone in it.
And, of course, beloved Barnabas was back! The Son of Encouragement. The one who had a special gift for caring for the person right in front of him. I have to think that Barnabas would’ve heard about what had happened to James, and would have taken John aside for conversation, tears, and prayer.
What would Barnabas and Saul take back with them to Antioch after delivering the collection.? They would have fresh stories of God’s faithfulness, like Peter’s prison-break. They returned to Antioch with another new ministry colleague, John Mark, whose home was the site of the church’s intercessory prayer. They would bring to the church in Antioch a renewed realism and hope: yes, persecution would come from the powers and personalities that are opposed to the radical love of Christ, and yet God would take care of them.
Luke caps off this part of the story with short verse that is bursting with energy: “But the word of God spread and multiplied” (12:24). The Greek word for “word” – logos – can also be translated as message, report, news. So Luke, I think, wants us to see multiple meanings here. The actual Gospel is spreading, the proclamation about Jesus Messiah. More and more people are trusting in his name and in his love. And also, reports of God’s faithfulness in different communities are circulating. As more people in more places come to faith and have their lives woven together, there is a proliferation of stories. Stories of hardship and prayer, of faith, and freedom in the midst of pain. Stories of liberation from prison, provision for famine.
The early Christians shared material resources like money, food, and people, as well as spiritual resources like prayer and stories. It is good for us to reflect on our own understanding and practice of Christian fellowship. Do we feel ourselves connected to, responsible toward, and grateful for Christians in other parts of our town, our state, and our world? What does the movement of God among the Methodists of Pocatello have to do with the movement of God in other congregations and communities? What is God doing in other parts of our state or our world that we should learn from, incorporate, join in? What does it mean, in a political climate like ours where many Christians are behaving badly by aligning themselves with nationalistic fear and aggression, to still open outward, getting to know other of people faith and weaving a wider web of love?
And, on a more individual level, each of us ought to ask: God how are you calling me, like Barnabas and Saul, to be the bridge between your people here and your people in other places? What are you asking me to do to strengthen the whole family of faith?
These are some of the questions that Jerusalem and Antioch prompt us to ask. There’s no single right answer but may beautiful possibilities of partnership. In a season when much is changing for us here, perhaps we can see the cycling of people and stories and prayers and resources as a good and holy part of being the Church. The Spirit is always drawing the circle wider. Our anxieties cause us to narrow our vision; our hope causes us to expand it.
Friends, for five years, God has raised you from the ashes of the pandemic, and we have all learned how to be a church again.
Who knows what God will ask you to do next? Who will join us in this place? To whom will be sent?
Thanks be to God for the questions. Amen.
Living in a Both/And Time with Freedom (Acts 11:19-26)
Living in a Both/And Time with Freedom
April 26, 2026
Acts 11:19-26
By Pastor Mike Conner
***
After meditating on the dual nature of light, the poet Lia Purpura asks: “why wouldn’t / other things or states / present as / both/and?” Light, after all, is foundational to the cosmos—to life itself. Purpura’s insight, born of poetic wonder, is a key ingredient in wisdom. Wisdom calls us away from black-and-white, either-or thinking and toward an acceptance of life’s complexity, and into a reverent, curious posture toward all that we cannot fully understand or control.
We have entered a “both/and” season as a congregation. The upcoming weeks are going to be strongly marked by different energies coexisting in our bodies, and therefore in the spaces, moments, and words that we share together. There will be both grief and joy as you and I begin to say goodbye to each other and as you anticipate your partnership with Pastor Deepak. There will be deep gratitude for what has been, as well as a mixture of anxiety and hope about what is coming. These are days of departures and arrivals, of releasing and receiving with pure and open hearts. And who knows, whenever something in our lives changes in a significant way, there is the possibility that some other desire and regret that is highly personal and has nothing directly to do with the situation at hand will surface in the heart and ask us to listen. This is a tender time.
I’ll confess it is challenging for me to honor this “wobble” that the poet suggests we “take seriously / as a stance.” I don’t always get it right, welcoming the fullness of reality and not just the parts I’m naturally more comfortable with. And yet, I know it’s absolutely crucial that I try. It’s important not to repress some aspect of this experience or overindulge another—whether worry or sadness or even positivity—because that will only block the flow of love. And love is how we honor one another in the Spirit.
A “both/and” time invites us to be a “both/and” people. I am so grateful that I can ask for help from a “both/and” Savior. Jesus is both God and human, crucified and risen. When we lean on him, he doesn’t keep us from the wobble but gives us spiritual capacity to find peace in all things. As Paul puts it in Colossians, “in Him all things hold together” (1:17). I know that the Spirit of Christ will hold you and me and all of us together.
***
Over the next month, I will be preaching a series of sermons that explore a narrative arc from the book of Acts which has a lot to show us about how a “both/and” church can respond to the movements of the Holy Spirit with spiritual freedom, creativity, and joy. Acts chapters 11 through 15 primarily tell the story of the Apostle Paul’s first missionary journey around the Mediterranean world, planting churches in a variety of cultural contexts. (On the front page of your bulletin there’s a map of this journey which you can reference as we go along.) There is no doubt that Paul’s missionary activity and the pastoral letters he later wrote to those congregations changed the world. And yet what I want to focus on with you is not so much the journey of Paul itself but the circumstances surrounding it. You see, there would be no Paul without Barnabas, or the church in Antioch, or the church in Jerusalem, or the power and presence of the Holy Spirit. These stories remind us of some of the essential characteristics of being a church. After all, it was in Antioch that the believers were first called “Christians.” Why?
Today I need to offer a good bit of background to get us started, but here’s the overriding question of the series: What is the Holy Spirit wanting to do with our creative freedom and our will?
Acts is the fifth book in the New Testament. The first four books are all Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—which tell the story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Acts follows these up as a continuation of the story, telling about the birth of the Christian community and the earliest days of the Church.
After his resurrection, Jesus spent about forty days appearing to his disciples, and then he ascended into heaven and poured out the Holy Spirit upon the believers who were gathered together in Jerusalem. The Holy Spirit shares the risen life of Jesus, the strong love of God, with each one of us. Jesus’ life and ministry continue here on earth through the Church that is his Body. And they don’t just continue—they expand, reaching new people and places through the hearts and bodies and words of those who bear his radical love. That’s the story that Acts tells, the story of that expansion. With each turn of the page, more and more people are drawn to the goodness of God through the preaching, teaching, and generosity of the Church.
The two “giants” of the Book of Acts are Peter and Paul. Peter was one of Jesus’ original twelve disciples, and after Pentecost he became a leader in the Jerusalem church along with the apostle John and James, the brother of Jesus. Remember, Jesus himself and nearly all his first followers were Jews, so when we talk about the “birth of the Church” we’re talking about something that had roots in Judaism and was largely a Jewish Messianic movement. Peter’s ministry in Jerusalem was primarily, though not exclusively, focused on Jewish Christians.
Paul’s ministry was itinerant; he traveled all over the Mediterranean world preaching both to Jews and to Gentiles. Gentiles are also referred to as Greeks of pagans. Basically, they are people outside the covenant relationship between God and Israel. Yet, over time, it became clear to the apostles that the salvation procured by Christ in his death and resurrection was for the whole world, for all people. The Holy Spirit was on the move, ready to bring people of very different backgrounds and worldviews and languages into radical fellowship with one another.
In Christ, God had reconciled the whole world to himself. Now, that reconciling power was at work in the Christian community, dissolving hierarchies and borders and divisions at the congregational level. Paul and Barnabas and Peter and the other apostles were all caught up in this ever-expanding movement of love. Their hearts were continually being cracked open to make room for more people.
This didn’t happen without struggle and controversy and debate, but it did happen. The church was and is always trying to catch up with the Holy Spirit, who is always already at work out there drawing the circle wider. Grace always outpaces the system. God is Love itself, and God desires to share Love with all creation, with every single person. To profess faith in Christ means you will get swept up in that movement. It’s just a matter of when.
During those first days in Jerusalem, Barnabas came on the scene. He was a property-owning Levite with Cyprian roots, which means he was already living that mixture of Jew and Gentile. When the first Christians, under the direction of the apostles, were holding all their possession in common and selling what they didn’t need to support the poor, Barnabas came and participated in that. He sold a field and laid the proceeds at the apostles feet. His real name was Joseph, but they gave him the nickname Bar-Nabas, which means “Son of Encouragement.” That Greek word for Encouragement could also be translated as Son of Advocacy, or Son of Comfort. Barnabas quickly became a leader, lifting from the bottom, with gifts for seeing the importance of the one in reaching the many.
Saul and Paul are the same person. Saul is the Jewish version of his name, and Paul is the Greco-Roman version. So Luke will refer to him with whichever name best fits wherever he happens to be at the time. Saul was originally a persecutor of the early Christian community. He was a zealous and ambitious Jewish leader who wanted to eliminate the Jesus movement. He authorized the arrest and torture of several of the first Christians, and he presided over the stoning of Stephen. So when today’s passage talks about the persecution that began with Stephen, it’s referring to something that started because of Saul’s violence.
Yet shortly after the killing of Stephen, Saul was on his way to Damascus to arrest more Christians when God struck him down on the road, blinding him and commanding him to no longer do violence. This was a direct encounter with Jesus. Saul repented. He converted. He was filled with grace. A murderer-turned-disciple. After regaining his sight he traveled back to Jerusalem to present himself to Peter and the others and ask for forgiveness and inclusion in the ministry. When he got there, they were all afraid of him and refused to meet with him. But Barnabas, the Son of Encouragement, brought Saul in. He advocated for Saul with the Jerusalem leaders and ended up convincing them that Saul really had been transformed by grace. After testifying about his conversion in Jerusalem to the amazement of the believers there, Saul traveled north to the city of Tarsus and disappears from the scene.
Then something unexpected began to happen in Antioch. The persecution of Christians that Saul had initiated caused the community in Jerusalem to disperse. What was intended for evil God used for good. People carried the Gospel into new places and began to tell more people about Jesus. Some of these folks ended up in Antioch where they began preaching to both Jews and Gentiles. Antioch was one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the ancient Mediterranean world. There were people living there from many different cultures. And many different kinds of people responded to the message of Christ and began to share their lives and resources with one another. There had been suggestions of this kind of thing in Jerusalem, but in Antioch the cross-cultural, interreligious joining was the main event. It was new and beautiful. Word of what was happening there made its way down to the church in Jerusalem.
To understand what was happening there, and perhaps to help nurture it, the Jerusalem church sent none other than Barnabas, the Son of Encouragement. The scripture says, “When he arrived and saw the grace of God, he was glad and encouraged all of them to remain true to the Lord with devoted hearts, for he was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith” (11:23-24). Barnabas got to Antioch and had eyes to see that what was happening there was good and holy, in sync with the Spirit. Here was grace that he didn’t bring with him. It was already at work. It preceded him and would outlast him and he would contribute to it and serve it, but at the end of the day it was all grace. He was filled with joy, and he encouraged the Christians there to keep going. What’s more, he became a part of what was happening there, establishing himself as one of the primary teachers in the Antiochian congregation.
The Spirit had started working in a new way in a new place, and the established church had sent a worker to see and assess and help. That leader, Barnabas, then exercised his own creative freedom. He did something the Jerusalem church had not asked him to do. He left Antioch to go to Tarsus. He went to look or Saul. Something about what was happening in Antioch triggered Barnabas’s memory of and affection for Saul. He wanted Saul to be a part of this ministry. He brought Saul inside the new thing God was doing. And it was in Antioch that Saul cut his teeth for preaching and teaching. Eventually, this congregation, where Jews and Gentiles and people from all over the known world prayed and served together, would send Barnabas and Saul out on mission.
Who does the work of ministry and makes it fruitful? Is it us or is it the Holy Spirit? Yes. Who holds authority in the Christian community? Is it “the system,” represented by Jerusalem? Or is it the local churches, like Antioch? Or is it individuals like Barnabas and Saul? Yes. Is ministry about responding to what God is already up to before we get there or about helping to create conditions for a fresh movement of the Spirit? Yes.
These are some of the things we learn from Antioch. They were a “both/and” people living in a “both/and” time. And they were thriving, because, for them, everything came down to saying Yes to the Spirit, which surprises us, widens our embrace, and does it all in a way that is so kind, so joyful, and so wise.
With our partnership here in Pocatello, God did a new thing. And God is preparing the ground for another new thing during these months of transition. God did a new thing in Bangalore, India many years ago when Pastor Deepak came back from his studies in the US to pastor his people. God is preparing the ground in Woodinville, Washington for a new thing that will emerge through my partnership with a new congregation.
In all these places, and over and over again, it’s all grace. It’s all Holy Spirit. And we bring our unique stamp to it. We dance with the Lord, though we can never know what it’s going to look like ahead of time. For some of us, the task is to go and see and rejoice and serve with joy. For others of us, the task is to receive new partners and be changed.
What it comes down to for each of us is this: In each new season, is my zest for love growing? Is my heart becoming more spacious? Am I offering all that I have and all that I am up to the embrace of the Holy Spirit, recognizing that I am one small part of the whole? Am I experiencing the joy of being in a kind of community with others that only the Spirit could knit together? I believe that we have done this, that we are doing it, and that we will continue to do it, so long as our prayer continues to be: “Lord, may your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.”
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Children Are Listening
Children Are Listening
April 19, 2026
By: Elle Mann
***
I have to say this before I begin. Pastor Mike asked me to give the message for today over a month ago, and I honestly couldn’t figure out what I wanted to talk about up until Palm Sunday. As we’ve done so many times before, we had a number of members of our congregation come up and tell the story of the crucifixion and burial of Jesus, as found in scripture. It truly is one of the most powerful stories in the entire Bible. I was assigned to read the part of the story that started where Jesus is mocked and scorned by the people. My part of storytelling ended as the Son of God takes his final breath. As usual, that part struck me, right in the chest. I could feel this ache, tugging at my heart. However, this time it was for an entirely different reason than in past years.
As I read the scripture, I thought about the people, ridiculing Jesus, mocking him, taking away his clothes, spitting on him as they moved him through the streets on the way to be executed. All of that hate on display, for someone they didn’t actually know. For someone who was nothing but himself, the Son of God, manifested as a good man, just trying to help others. It’s a pretty awful thing to think about. But my mind wasn’t just on the people screaming in the streets. It was the ones who weren’t necessarily there, or perhaps they were there, but we never really hear of them or their reactions in this story.
When we’re young, we’re learning a lot of new things. We learn how to walk, how to ride a bike, we learn how to read and write, and for better or for worse, we learn the basics of math. But some of the most important lessons that we learn aren't always the most obvious. And a lot of the time, the people teaching those lessons may not even be aware of it.
How many people in this room have heard of the famous Stephan Sondheim? Alright, now how many people are familiar with his musical hit: Into The Woods? Great. The reason I bring that up is because there’s a line from this show, right at the end, that I believe sums up the exact point I want to get across. “Careful the things you say/children will listen/careful the things you do/Children will see and learn.”
So, as I said before: the pain I felt in my heart on Palm Sunday was more focused on the unseen participants. The children. The kids who were witness to their parents and/or parental figures degrading and demeaning a man that they hated. What were they thinking? What was their reaction to this? Were they in support of this? Or did they just go along with it because they didn’t understand exactly what was going on?
Growing up, I was very lucky that my parents taught me to love. Whatever form that it came in, that was their number one rule. And as I’ve gotten older, none of that has changed. And I’m grateful for it. Now, this isn’t to say that I don’t have moments when I let my anger or distaste get the best of me. I’m a rather emotional person, I feel things in big amounts, and sometimes what I say doesn’t exactly follow that rule. Especially with all of the unrest going on around the world.
But then I wonder: How did we even get here in the first place? What brought us to the point where it feels as though every part of the earth is on fire? Why can’t we go a day without terrible things taking place? I know I couldn’t possibly answer that loaded question in a short amount of time: as there are many reasons and it would take hours, if not days or years to answer it. And I know you all have things you need to do, so I just want to focus on one of the potential reasons.
One of my favorite movies is 42, the true story of the life of the first black man to play Major League Baseball: Jackie Robinson. Before him, every single player in the highest professional league was white. That was until the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Jackie in 1947. A bunch of stuff goes on in the movie, but this is what has always stood out to me as someone who watches it at least once a year.
A lot of Jackie’s teammates aren’t kind to him, and many of the fans and players all over the league, spout racist statements to him during games. Sometimes Robinson would receive life-threatening letters at his family home. In fact at one point, his own teammates started a petition to try and kick Jackie off of the Dodgers because they didn’t want to play with him. Now why is this? All because of the color of his skin. Why do we treat other human beings like this? Again, that is a loaded question, but when you get down to the root of it, it starts with what we’re taught as children. Many of Jackie’s teammates were most likely taught by their parents that anyone who wasn’t white was lesser than.
Imagine that.
Hatred towards other people doesn’t just pop into our head out of the blue, it's repeated to us until we start to believe in it. When we’re children, our brains are still in the early stages of development. So when we hear something, we tend to run with it because we don’t know any better. So when the players and fans say those terrible things, it is truly horrifying, but it all starts to make sense. There’s even a scene where a father and son go to a game, and the son watches and listens as his father yells racist slurs at Jackie. You can see the troubling dilemma going on in the young boy's mind as his father does this, but then he follows suit and yells similar words at Jackie. If the father hadn’t done any of that, would his son have?
Towards the end of the movie, a good amount of the players come around and start to support Jackie. This serves as a lesson about how hatred can be unlearned just as well as we can learn it. But when we see or hear things over and over again while we’re growing up, it can take awhile to move past it. It also takes the will to want to change.
So when those men and women were spitting at Jesus, yelling awful names at him and insulting him as he was dragged through the streets, it is a possibility that the children of these people were paying attention, and the animosity and violence could have become an image that was stuck in their brain about how to treat Jesus when they saw him.
Of course this thought of mine is completely and one hundred percent hypothetical, as we don’t really have any evidence to support it. But I just can’t get this thought out of my head.
I have experienced what it’s like for my friends to be hateful towards others. When I was in sixth grade, my friends and I were having lunch when I brought up that my family and I were fans of the television show “Glee.” A couple of friends agreed, saying they loved that show. But everyone else at the table started rambling about how the show was disgusting because it featured characters who were openly gay.
Before I could even begin to argue, one of my friends at the time said “Anyone who’s gay is going to hell.” An eleven year old said this. And one of my other friends reached across the table and gave them a high five. I remember going home to my parents in tears, telling them about what had happened. I told them I was worried for my Uncle Matt and Uncle Mike, who I had known and loved my whole life. And who were two of the most wonderful people I’ve ever known. How could anyone think such a horrendous thing was true? That’s when my parents told me that my friends had probably been taught that by the parental figures in their lives. The people who were teaching them “right and wrong” were telling them that someone was dangerous just because of who they were in love with.
Which makes me even more grateful to have the parents I have.
This is just another example of why what we teach children is important. What we place emphasis on when we are helping the kids of this world learn; is what they’re going to bring with them into adulthood as a core value. So maybe as a society, it’s better to teach love, instead of judgement and hatred.
After all, isn’t that what Jesus wanted us to do?
To love our enemies as we love our friends.
There are so many examples in the world today that show what happens when we marginalize and ridicule certain communities. The genocide in Palestine, Russia’s war on The Ukraine, the conflict in the Sudan. Here in the United States, where we have a president who villainizes anyone who doesn’t think, talk, or act like him. A president who is trying to turn the military against the people they’re supposed to protect. It makes it really difficult to look at the ones who continue to support him with grace. And there are often times where I want to tear my hair out or climb a mountain and scream in the open air because I cannot believe that there are people that even swear by these hateful ideologies.
But then I remember: this wasn’t something they were inherently born with. These people that are stuck on this train, they didn’t just appear there out of thin air. They were fed these ideas, just as their parents were. And they were by their parents, and so on and so forth.
Now, recognizing this doesn’t necessarily make me feel any better. And it doesn’t have to. But at least I can offer them some grace. Even if they refuse to walk a mile in my shoes. Even if they refuse to do anything but scorn me for my moral beliefs; at least I can offer them a bit of grace.
A lot of things we learn as kids don’t necessarily stick with us. But the important things, such as morals, such as the way we treat other people, the way we treat animals and the world around us, those things we learn early on. And the ones we watch while we’re growing up…that’s who we are most likely going to become in some way.
There’s a song by the all-women’s country group The Chicks, called “I Hope,” which is on their Grammy winning record “Taking The Long Way.” Some of you may remember that I sang this song a few years ago with the help of the choir. There’s a line in the pre-chorus where the lead singer Natalie Maines sings one of my all-time favorite lyrics. It goes like this: “Our children are watching us, they put their trust in us, they’re going to be like us.” Which, like the Sondheim lyric, tells us to pay attention to our children. And our grandchildren. Our nieces and nephews. It’s reminding us to teach them. So, if you’re going to teach them anything, let it be this. Teach them kindness and understanding. Teach them that it’s okay to make mistakes. That expressing themselves is important, no matter how they do it. Whether it’s through playing sports, doing theater, writing stories, singing songs. Teach them that just because someone has different beliefs or lifestyles, it doesn’t make them lesser than. Teach them to fight for what they believe in, and to stand up for those who can’t stand up for themselves. Teach them to listen. Teach them to ask for help when they need it. To share their feelings. Teach them about empathy. About sympathy. Teach them to apologize when they hurt someone.
All of these things are rooted in love. So if you teach them these things. You’re helping them to learn about and live by God’s number one rule. You’re helping them learn to love. And there are much worse things to learn.
“Careful the things you say, children will listen. Careful the things you do, children will see and learn.”
Amen.
Peace be With You (1 Peter 1:3-9, John 20:19-31)
Peace Be With You
1Peter 1:3-9
John 20: 19-31
By: Melody Briggs
****
Good morning… Thank you all for this opportunity to join together in worship and praise after such a bustling and busy final sprint through Holy Week, last week full of emotional twists and turns…as well as the all-encompassing journeying through the Lenten desert these past 40 plus days of reflection… sometimes the Lenten season is often full and intuitional pivots, pulls, and realizations as each one of us in our various ways has hopefully connected… grounded and reconnected and reground to various parts of ourselves along this awaited celebration into Easter… Last week we traversed through Maundy Thursday and the spiritual welcoming gatherings and witnessing that happened here around this very table of grace and communion, not only in witnessing and nurturing our spirits with bread and body, but also our hearts and the communion amongst our community in love… To the bearing witness of Good Friday… and its sometimes reverently comforting ritual of knowing that through darkness and encompassing tombs, there can also be light waiting on the other side.
To last Sunday when we so beautifully came together in celebration and witness last week as individuals, and a community celebrating life renewed … the ever blooming and renewal of our spirits and those around us… as well as the Easter lightness that often breathes within us as a continued acknowledged joyful spirit… and a continued promise of presently living in hope.
To today the 2nd Sunday of this Easter season. The scripture readings shared today are examples of the re accounts from John and Peter’s versions of what they witnessed, felt, and perceived. I felt called to reference both accounts within our readings this morning for their intertwining intricacies as well as the beauty and differences between their accounts of Jesus’s sending and individual perceptions. For each of them sheds light into their exchanges not only with Jesus but also each other.
John 20: 19 starts off describing Easter evening with the disciples hiding, gathered in the Upper room from fear of the Jewish leaders.
Can you imagine Easter evening hiding in a dark room in the mist of grieving… praying… weeping… reflecting on the events of witnessing the cruelty of man and the crucifixion of Jesus in fear for not only your own life, but also the lives of those alongside you?
And then in the mist of such life altering pivotal moments. Breathes of stillness. And what must have felt like endless minutes in the darkness in a place of sanctuary where you were asked to faithfully wait… Jesus just happens to appear plain as day. And in his appearance and states. In John's version of the sending. That we just heard. Jesus appeared and stood among them and said. “Peace Be With You!” “Peace be with you!” Showing him his hands... And his wounds ... Then again Jesus said, “Peace be with you!”
“As the Father has sent me - I am sending you.”
“As the father has sent me- I am sending you.” You ... I am sending you! You... being the extension of Christ life. Jesus witnessing to John and the disciples to continue on in the mist of overwhelming grief. in love… in spirit. In faith. And in action… and then as John reaccounts in his version here. Jesus breathed on them and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit.”
The word Spirit in Hebrew is often translated as a wind… a breath. Jesus breathed on them… receive..the Holy Spirit,. Re-creation with breath is a new creation. A soul consciousness so to speak.
A soul consciousness tends to be defined as the spiritual awareness that we have as individuals that is an eternal.. Non physical being of light. A soul. Jesus breathing into us the Holy Spirit and saying to his disciples and to us … Go Forth. Be present for as John reaccounts within his writings the word became flesh … make flesh the word. Make flesh the word… the living out of our faith.
Within Peter and his version here of the sending he acknowledges that Jesus through his mercy has given us a new birth.. A breath of renewal .. a new birth into a living hope. 1Peter 1 verse 8 states Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy. 9 For you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls.
A soul, rather than just a physical body or being. A soul can be known to be defined as an inner self, and is often characterized by qualities such as peace, purity, love, light, and bliss. These words are powerful. So are our words when we exchange the passing of the peace here… Within our community of each other.. Just as we did a little bit ago .
The passing of peace within ourselves and the passing of peace that we extend to strangers.. Loved ones.. And the prayers of peace that can extend beyond ourselves through our inner light.. Our love..
Sitting at the sound booth each Sunday here, I have the opportunity and beautiful viewpoint to witness each of you pass the peace with each other… as you reach out your hands as an extension of yourself and inner state “Peace be with you!” “ Peace be with you.” just as Jesus stated in John’s reaccounts to his disciples as the first words he satiated as he appeared through darkness.. and as Peter described as the genuineness of our faith.. A praise for a living hope.. For you are renewed and filled with inexpressible joy. A breath made flesh… our words made flesh. An extension of our souls, our spirits.. Our truths.. And inner light.
What do you all spiritually believe happens in the exchanging of peace here and in your day to day encounters? How does John or Peter’s perspective speak to you or sit with you? Do we as individuals tend to navigate our internal and external worlds boldly, bravely and openly and if so how does that affect us? How do we tend to express our peace in exchange with each other and ourselves outside of these walls? Do we tend to pull back at times…due to fears.. Shame.. Guilt.. And grief as we navigate conflicts within our head.. Our hearts .. our spirits? And what do we honestly believe is happening could or could not be happening in these spiritual moments of exchange with each other? Our peace… our out reach of hands in greeting one another .. our peace shared in eye contact and a smile with a stranger… Peace be with you…. And also with you… Is our peace within us tied to our forgiveness and the forgiveness of others? Is our internal peace tied to grace? Is our peace tied to the accounts of a resurrected place? Is our peace breathed into us? Into our spirits.. Our souls.. Our inner light..?
I would like for all of us to take a little time and explore some of these expressions and questions of peace within ourselves and our souls... Here .. in this space.. In this moment in the presence of each other.. If the form of a Breath Prayer. Breath prayers are prayers that tend to be aligned with the rhythm of our breaths.. Often the first half will be prayed during inhalation and the second half is prayed during exhalation. Often in repetition for the purpose of meditating on God’s words by actively processing the words and reflecting on them. So if you feel so called to just take a few deep breaths as we center our hearts.. Our minds.. And our souls…within our inhalations and exhalations in your own rhythm and timing.. Adjusting into your seat… and your body as you relax… and acknowledge your rhythm consciously becoming aware of your body… and your mind and your presence within this time.. This space.. and closing your eyes or relaxing your gaze if that feels comfortable… and safe to you and within you.
I would like to invite us all to breathe in peace ... and as you breathe in and fill your lungs, just notice how it feels to inhale peace… inhale peace and the resurrection of peace… inhaling peace in spite of all wounding… inhaling peace in the mist of physical pain… and as you continue to breathe in just notice the feelings.. Sensations.. The wondering of your mind.. Inhale the peace of forgiveness… the peace of the breath of the spirit within you..
And now we are going to shift our attention to our exhalations.. As the breathing out of the peace through us and within us.. As we have just breathed peace in … we will breath peace out… notice how it feels to exhale peace.. We exhale peace ..dispite all of our woundings… our fears… our shame and our grieving… exhale peace in the midst of any physical pain you may have or have noticed as your body and mind have quieted… to exhale peace in the renewal of our spirits… and exhale peace as we extend hope to ourselves and eachother…. And when you are ready.. I invite you to come back to our space here .. to your surroundings.. And to open your eyes as you need to..
Jesus breathed into them The Holy Spirit. And stood among and said Peace be with you! For as the father sent me. I am sending you. How is it with your soul today? How does the passing of peace on a Sunday morning ignite an inner light in you.. I have to say it is one of my favorite parts of worship to witness each week.. It always fills me to see each of you sharing this sacred space with eachother.. The smiles you all interchange and exchange with each other… the lightness in the air after you greet each other's spirits in warmth, renewal and comfort..
The smiles and the giggles of joy from our youth and children .. the lightness in your voices in prayer and thanksgiving as we usually join in song after…And knowing that as you may have entered this space feeling unseen and heard in a world that doesn't offer much comfort these days.. That just for a brief second… the inner light of your neighbor.. A friend.. A stranger touched you.. Just as you have touched them. Shared peace in passing. Peace Be with you and in you.
I don't know if passing the peace speaks to all of us here in these ways or not.. Or if you all hold a passion for it .. But I do find it beautiful and comforting that it usually comes in our worship services each Sunday after our prayer of confession. After we hold space for our confessions and our needs and welcome them, just as John and Peter and the disciples held space in the upper room amongst a plethora of emotions and fears as well as the need for sanctuary from the outer world.. Jesus appeared and his first words were soothing .. comforting.. And full of love just as yours have been here today within yourselves and with each other within your breaths and attentiveness to your physical and spiritual needs.
Does taking a moment to breathe in peace affirm your inner light .. nourish your soul?
That may have felt a bit heavy and weary traveling here to church today even in the midst of the celebration of Easter as well as this overcast Sunday. There happens to be a fairly early John Wesleyan practice, Methodists used when meeting in small groups as a deep self examine the growth of living our faith, rather than just accepting it. The question he often asked those he encountered was .. How is it with your soul?
So as we continue through this Easter season acknowledging the celebration of resurrection and life renewal, practicing living in hope renewed I would like for us to consider not only our peace within us .. but also the nourishing and watering of our souls on our journeys. Jesus appeared, and said For as the father has sent me I am sending you. My hope for you today is that you can all take refuge and sanctuary in rest in the knowing of Christ's peace. Go in Peace!
Community Vigil for Victor Perez
Community Vigil for Victor Perez
April 4, 2026
By: Pastor Mike Conner
Opening Prayer
A reading from the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 5:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Let us pray:
Loving Creator, we gather in your presence today trusting that you are always ready to receive us just as we are. As we hold vigil on this sacred ground—ground marked by love and loyalty, bullets and blood—we remember your cherished child, Victor Perez. We seek to honor Victor and those who love him through our presence, our stories, and our tears. We rest in your words of blessing, knowing that even in our grief and poverty of spirit, you are at work in us.
During this hour, may you comfort our hearts and keep the memory of Victor clear and alive in us, so that all that we think and feel may be purified and made useful by love. Help us to renew our commitment to the pursuit of justice and peace—for Victor and his family, throughout the City of Pocatello, and in all of life.
We continue to lament that Victor’s life was taken from us so quickly, so needlessly, and so brutally. For many it has been a long year of sorrow, frustration, and unsatisfying answers. Thank you for sharing our grief, outrage, and pain. Thank you, too, for embracing Victor’s spirit in the light and peace of your eternal presence.
Though you have created us through love and for love, we confess that we often fail to honor the inherent dignity of our neighbors. We are driven by the fear of what we don’t understand and the anger that clouds our judgments. We struggle to address our cultural addiction to violence and to fully acknowledge the harm perpetrated by our practices of policing.
Lead us into your truth, and bless those who are working for accountability and change on behalf of Victor and his family. Give all of us good work to do—the work of building real relationships with those in our neighborhoods, the work of advocating for policies and practices that minimize harm. Guide us onto your path of forgiveness, humility, and renewal.
We ask that your great mercy will have the final word in this story. And may our efforts in love be one way that we carry Victor forward into our shared future.
Lord, in you mercy, hear our prayer.
Amen.
The Good News of God is Meant to Be Sung (Zephaniah 3:14-20)
The Good News of God is Meant to Be Sung
Trinity Episcopal Church
Holy Saturday Easter Vigil
April 4, 2026
Zephaniah 3:14-20
By: Pastor Mike Conner
***
I have two kids, ages 5 and 3, at home, and they have this quirky bedtime habit of asking me or my wife for a story and then, after the story is finished, asking for what they call“the song of the story.” I’m not sure how this got started, but basically what they want is for us to take the story we just told them and retell it by setting the words to an improvised melody. Mostly I think they’re trying to delay bedtime, and yet, there’s a kernel of wisdom in their request. For as long as there have been humans telling stories, there have been humans singing songs, often singing the stories as the primary means of telling them. We learn our letters, numbers, colors, days of the week, and animals through song. In seminary, I memorized the Greek and Hebrew alphabets and the many different forms of verbs by setting them to simple tunes. Our hymns embed theology and biblical narrative in our hearts more effectively than even the best sermons.
God’s good news is meant to be sung. When God’s grace touches our lives, one of the most natural things we can do is to sing about it: “Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea” (Exodus 15:21). With tambourine in hand, this is how Miriam, the sister of Moses and Aaron, gave glory to the God who had freed her people from slavery.
“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,” sang the young unwed Mary when Elizabeth affirmed the presence of God in her womb. And after that holy child was born, the angelic army filled the skies above Bethlehem with song: “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom God’s favor rests.”
God’s good news is meant to be sung.
If we were to survey all the songs drawn from the human heart by the love and power of God, we would have to speak of Deborah’s praise of Ja’el, and the theological poetry of the Philippian hymn and the Johannine prologue, and the heavenly ecstasies of John the Revelator’s angels, martyrs, and strange creatures. We couldn’t leave out Zechariah’s Benedictus or Simeon’s Nunc Dimittis or the songs that shook the very foundations of Paul and Timothy’s Philippian prison cell.
The good news of God is meant to be sung.
Oh, there are the Psalms, chanted by Jews and Christians for thousands of years. There are the Eucharistic liturgies, the Gregorian chants, and the compositions of Bach, Beethoven, and Handel. There are the African American spirituals, those freedom songs by which the Nobodies of the world were uplifted as Somebodies to God. And yes, if I may, we couldn’t forget that great poet from our shared tradition, Charles Wesley, whose many hymns include “Come, thou long expected Jesus,” and “Hark! the herald angels sing,” and even tomorrow morning’s “Christ the Lord is risen today, Alleluia!” And just as there are rests in every piece of music, so even our sacred silences and contemplations have their place in our love song to God.
In every age and culture, in every language and artistic form, the good news of God is meant to be sung.
Zephaniah’s prophecy brought this home to me. Not much is known about him. The Bible says he prophesied during the reign of Josiah of Judah in the 7th century before Christ. Zephaniah’s three chapters of doom, which end with this sudden, stunning passage of joy, seem to fit the religious renewal and political reforms accomplished by Josiah when he came of age. Yet some scholars think these prophecies reflect, instead, Israel’s painful exile in Babylon, and the joy of their return. Others doubt Zephaniah ever existed at all.
What matters to me tonight is not historical exactitude but rather Zephaniah’s response to the movement of God—even if that movement was yet to come, experienced now only as a promise. “Sing aloud, O daughter Zion,” he urges. “Shout, O Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem!” (3:14). In a single verse we have four imperatives all basically saying the same thing: that God’s good news is meant to be sung. Singing is way to thank and tell the story of a God who removes our fear and our shame, who gathers in the outcasts and saves those who cannot save themselves.
But then, in verse 17, something unexpected happens. Zephaniah’s message shifts from what we do in response to God to what God does in response to us. The prophet says, “[God] will rejoice over you with gladness; [God] will renew you in [God’s] love; [God] will exult over you with loud singing!” And then the speech shifts into the first person, and we hear a stanza of God’s own love song for us.
Wait, God singing about us? To us? Over us?
What a mystery that we would bring such joy to our Creator!
And yet this is the good news of our faith, that through God’s faithfulness to the covenant, and through Christ’s death and resurrection, we have been made children of God, and who doesn’t love singing lullabies, happy birthdays, and loves songs to their children? Perhaps all our songs are reflections of, or small distillations of, God’s eternal song. Perhaps when we sing God’s good news we are participating in God’s song that is always already flowing through us. After all, to be inspired means to be filled with breath, and we have in our lungs the breath of the God whose word, whose melody, to us is love.
As John Wesley once wrote in an early Methodist hymnbook: “See that you join with the congregation [to sing] as frequently as you can. Let not a slight degree of weakness or weariness hinder you. If it is a cross to you, take it up and you will find a blessing… Sing lustily and with good courage. Beware of singing as if you were half dead, or half asleep; but lift up your voice with strength ...Above all sing spiritually. Have an eye to God in every word you sing.”
The good news of God is meant to be sung.
Thanks be to God. Amen.