Called to Remember (Matthew 2:13-23)

Called to Remember

December 28, 2025

Matthew 2:13-23

By: Pastor Mike Conner

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According to the liturgical calendar that is used to organize worship and discipleship in many Christian traditions, Christmas is not simply a day but a twelve-day season, running from December 25th, the Feast of the Nativity, to January 6th, the Feast of Epiphany. For twelve days the Church’s calendar invites us to meditate on the mystery of the Incarnation, and reflect on how this gift of God coming to be with us in the Christ Child ought to shape our lives. In Catholic, Lutheran, and Anglican tradition, the fourth day of the Christmas season, December 28th, is the Feast of the Holy Innocents. It is a day set apart for remembering the little boys of Bethlehem, two years old and younger, whom King Herod had killed in a sweeping effort to extinguish the Christ.

The Eastern Magi, astrologers sometimes called Wise Men or the Three Kings, had tricked Herod. In faraway lands, they had observed the rising of the Christmas star, had understood it to be a sign that in the land of Israel a King had been born for the Jewish people. The Magi came to Herod’s court in Jerusalem, asking him where the newborn king was to be found. Herod had no idea; he had missed the sign. Afraid of a challenge to his own power over the Jews, Herod asked the Magi to continue their search for the child, and to return to him after finding it, so that he also could go and worship him. This, of course, was a lie. He planned to kill the child. The Magi left Herod’s palace and continued to follow the star, which rested over a humble home in Bethlehem. Entering that home, they bowed before Jesus and blessed him with their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. That night, God warned them in a dream not to return to Herod, so they left the land of Israel by another road.

Herod, pacing around his palace and waiting for their return, slowly realized that they weren’t coming back, that he’d been lied to—and he was furious. There is hardly a breath between the eruption of his anger and its devastating consequences. “He became greatly enraged,” Matthew writes, “and he sent to kill all the little boys in Bethlehem in all its surrounding territory two years old and under” (Matt 2:16, my translation).

On Christmas Eve, I preached about Caesar Augustus’ census and the ways that the powers in our world are always trying to reduce our rich, singular lives to data, to names and numbers. The same impulse shows up here in Matthew’s Christmas story. Enraged by his lack of control over the situation, Herod gives an order: ‘Boys two and under in and around Bethlehem. Round them up, and get rid of them.’ But each of these was a singular child with a name, with a family. For Herod, an easy, impersonal order brings about the most painful, personal of griefs—and many times over. And it doesn’t even work. Little Jesus, carried through the darkness of that night by Joseph, slips through Herod’s fingers.

Joseph was warned by an angel in a dream to flee Israel, taking Mary and Jesus to Egypt before Herod’s soldiers arrived. The Holy Family became refugees, forced by the envious violence of their local ruler to leave behind their home and make do on the road, to live for a time as strangers in a strange land. They remained in Egypt until Herod’s death, at which time Joseph was again instructed in a dream by an angel; it was time to return to their homeland. But this was no triumphant return. They came back to live in silence and obscurity in the backwater town of Nazareth in Galilee. And yet, if one listened closely enough, there was still this: “A sound of weeping and wailing is heard in Ramah. Rachel is shedding tears for her children. No one can bring her peace, because her children have been taken from the land of the living” (2:17-18, First Nations Version). 

You know, as a pastor I feel a lot of pressure to bring some razzle-dazzle to the Christmas season every year, to use language and ritual to try and help us all connect with the joy and hope and mystery of it. And this story makes me deeply uncomfortable. The massacre of the Holy Innocents is a terrible moment in the Gospels, and it feels so at odds with the spirit of the season. I resisted committing to this text when I saw that December 28th fell on a Sunday this year. But Matthew found it important to include this story in his Gospel, to bring it inside the good news of Jesus. And down through the ages the Church has seen fit to honor these children with a feast day, so that they would not be forgotten. I felt convicted. Maybe I should take the time to really remember them, too.

If Jesus came to bring salvation to our world, if he came to redeem the cosmos, then we need to be honest about the condition of the world. Perhaps we are bummed – or more, wrecked – by this story, and want to keep it at arm’s length, not really even look at it directly, because of all the Christmas stories in the Gospels it is actually the most relatable one, the one that hits closest to home, and we think Christmas ought to bring us some reprieve from the sharp edges of reality. And yet, in 2025 Nigerian children are kidnapped. Gazan children are bombed and starved. American children are hungry and sick with Measles. And the list of avoidable atrocities goes on.

And in every one of these situations there are people playing the role of Herod behind the violence, trying to control the narrative, seeking to stifle our remembering. But the mothers and fathers remember. The community remembers. The soil remembers. God remembers. Should not the Church also remember? And, by its remembering, be liberated from the propaganda and feel-good illusions thrown at us? By its remembering be pressed toward the least of these?

The Incarnation is a profound act of divine remembering. In Christ, God has said to us, “I have not forgotten you. I will never forget you. I will come to be with you, as you are, and bind our destinies together.” And that act of solidarity becomes an example for us to live by in the power of the Spirit.

The Holy Innocents. They were killed by an angry, fearful King. They were killed as a consequence of the Magi listening to divine direction. They were killed to bring to fulfillment a Hebrew word spoken by Jeremiah, the weeping prophet. Matthew effectively gives us all three explanations, and not a single one of them would relieve the heart of a mother or father of Bethlehem. So we keep remembering—and we let that remembering do its work in us and in the world. Remembering is a political act, by which I mean it has to do with power and how we relate to one another. And remembering is a spiritual act, something Jesus tells us to do every time we gather in his name. Do this in remembrance of me. Remembering the hard things is important, too. Keeping the channel open, the energy of grief has somewhere to go, and it can make us more committed to love.

So we remember. We remember that those little boys in Bethlehem are members of the cosmos that Jesus has redeemed, and will be vindicated in the last days and raised to resurrected life. We remember that Jesus himself shared the fate of his playmates, sentenced to death on a cross by a sickening collusion of political and religious powers. We remember Mary was there at the cross, crying her tears. Jesus did not, in the end, escape the suffering of the Holy Innocents. To remember them is to remember him, and vice versa. To remember them is to remember all those whose worldly fate he came to share.

A 16th-century painter from the Netherlands named Pieter Bruegel the Elder once painted the Holy Innocents scene. He painted a scene of soldiers raiding a small town and putting its little children to death. Yet Bruegel translated the scene to a 16th-century Dutch village, where the villagers were attacked by Spanish soldiers and German mercenaries. The soldiers in Bruegel’s painting carry the imperial symbols of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, who ruled in Bruegel’s lifetime. Bruegel did what all good biblical interpretation does: it bridges the gap between the world of scripture and the world of the present moment. It says, Look, we are still living inside these stories today!

Emperor Rudolph disliked the painting so much that he purchased it in Prague around 1600. After purchasing it, he had the children in the graphic scene painted over with food items and animals, “so that it became a scene of plunder not a massacre of babies.” You can look at this online. In the center of the painting there is a group of ironclad soldiers all stabbing downward at…a group of chickens! We know that these were not Pieter Bruegel’s original details because his son, Pieter Breugel the Younger, made a copy of his father’s painting before it was whitewashed by the Emperor. The son’s copy, discovered in Vienna, “shows the original details of the massacre.” In our own moment, I’m sure we can think of times when those in high places have reshaped the narratives of war and poverty and human suffering to make them seem less devastating, more palatable or reasonable. The Gospel writer asks us to remember. The Church asks us to remember. The artists ask us to remember. The Herods and Holy Emperors and political pundits ask us to forget.

Christmas doesn’t mean that we escape the world. It means that we are met by a God who enters into complete fellowship with us in the world to bring about a reign of peace from the inside out. So, this Christmas I think God would have each of us remember a person, a family, an other-than human species, or a community that is at risk of being forgotten, that has suffered at the hands of power, but that Jesus came to hold in eternal love and remembrance.

This Christmas, remember someone who has not escaped the world’s sharp edges, who is grieving, who is hurt by the intolerance and violence of the world. Weep for them. Pray for them. Tell about them.

And may the hope of our faith be true for us all. As the Apostle Paul says, We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed (2 Cor 4:8-11 NIV).

And elsewhere: What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? …Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written:

“For your sake we face death all day long;
     we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom 8:31-39 NIV).

Amen.

Mary’s Love

    Mary’s Love

December 21, 2025

By: Elle Mann   

   Good morning, everyone. 

        For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Elle Mann and I am a member here at First United Methodist Church.  I’d just like to take a moment to thank Pastor Mike for the opportunity to give one of the messages during this Advent season.  April was up first, giving us a lesson about Elizabeth and Zechariah.  Then John gave a message on Joseph.  Last week Susannah gave a lesson on the meaning of angels through the story of Gabriel.  And I have been tasked with the story of Jesus’ mother, Mary. 

        I do have to say, I’ve been rather nervous to deliver this sermon. When I was first assigned such a person as Mary, I was very excited.  But as Susannah said last week, the enthusiasm quickly turned to anxiety in my brain.  What angle was I going to take?  What direction am I supposed to go in, in order to do Mary justice?  Telling her story is a tough task, so I ask you now, before I deliver this message to you, to offer me grace.  The stories that each of my fellow lay Advent speakers have given all revolve around words that we agreed on during our meeting a couple months ago; for Elizabeth and Zechariah it was hope, for Joseph it was peace, and for Gabriel it was joy,  just like the advent candles we’ve been lighting each week. When it came time to decide on the word for Mary’s tale, we all came to the consensus that the stories, just like the candles, should come full circle with love.  Love. God’s law.  To love one another as he has loved us.  Without exception.  Through darkness and doubt.  Through the clear, and through the fog. 

        To fully understand Mary’s story, we have to zoom out to look at the bigger picture.  What else was taking place when Mary received the life-changing news from Gabriel?  What extra trials did Mary face because of the task that God had given her?  And in order to grasp what an incredible advocate of love Mary is, we have to go back quite a ways before Jesus was born.  I’m really only going to skim through some of the history of Israel, and the events surrounding his birth and early years.  I will touch on just some of the pieces of information that I believe to be relevant to the story of Mary.

        Back in the tenth century BC, David and his son Solomon were responsible for establishing the Kingdom of Israel. However, it was not long into Israel’s existence that it split into the North and South kingdoms: where the north was still to be known as Israel, and the South was called Judah.  Both of these nations were conquered by different empires.  In the North, Israel was defeated by the Assyrian empire, and Judah was taken by the Babylonians (who ended up destroying the Temple,which was going to be a house of God, and a cultural and religious center of the south). 

By the time we reach the last two hundred or so years before Jesus’ birth, the land of Israel was ruled over by the Roman Empire.  And at the time that Mary was given the message by Gabriel, King Herod was ruling over the people, and the reconstruction of the Jewish Temple was underway.   However, the practice of Judaism was only allowed in cases where it wasn’t used to try and change the status quo.  It could only be practiced without ulterior political motives.

        So, it’s pretty easy to imagine that when King Herod learns from the wise men that the King of the Jews, and son of God, is soon to be born, it immediately sends him into a spiral.  He wines and dines with the wise men before asking them to return to him after they have learned the location of this Holy Infant.  He hides his true intentions behind the lie that he wants to go and visit the Son of God, to praise him.  When the wise men go to Bethlehem and find Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, they receive another message from God, warning them to steer clear of Herod as Jesus’ life will be in danger if they return to the Roman king.  Thankfully, the wise men listen, and they do not return to Herod, which leads the king to send out his military to round up and kill any son in his kingdom from the ages of 2 and younger.  When Mary and Joseph learn of this, through a message from Gabriel in one of Joseph’s dreams, they decide to flee to Egypt, to escape the wrath of the Roman King.

        Now why am I saying this?  Telling you all something that you most likely already know; as this story is one of the most well-known from the Bible.  Why do I need to give a history lesson on the events that lead up to Jesus’ birth if I’m supposed to be talking about Mary? 

I think it’s important to understand the historical context, because it helps us understand that Mary was someone who was already marginalized. She wasn’t someone who was part of the ruling majority. Now imagine what that must have been like.  Being a teenage girl, who was considered to be a second class citizen by those around her.  When she received the message that she would carry and give birth to God’s Son, Mary was engaged to Joseph, who was a descendant of King David.  A ways before their wedding, Mary is visited by the angel Gabriel, who says this to her in Luke 1, verse 31-32:  “You will become pregnant and give birth to a son.  You must call him Jesus.  He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High God.” 

        Then a few verses down, Mary accepts this endeavor with one simple sentence.  “I serve the Lord…May it happen to me just as you said it would.” 

        This part of the scripture has stuck with me while writing this message.  Mary’s trust in God.  How she was without a second thought, willing to have faith in him and see his plan through, and to love this child unconditionally.  He has asked a lot of Mary, who is engaged to Joseph, but is going to be pregnant long before their nuptials were to take place. God has asked Mary to carry his child, despite all of the scrutiny that she and her fiance (but mostly her) will face.  The only question she asks Gabriel is how she could possibly carry the child as she is unwed.  After that query is answered, she takes the task on with great bravery and grace. 

        It is believed that Mary was subjected to ridicule from the people around her, being an unwed, soon to be mother.  She was judged by her peers, who believed she was living a life of sin.  And what was she supposed to do or say in an attempt to defend herself?  Surely she knew that telling people she was carrying God’s son would make her seem delusional.  Who would believe hers and Joseph’s story, that Mary, just a simple girl with no title or money, was chosen by God himself to carry the Messiah?  People were probably more likely to believe that pigs had learned how to fly; rather than believing that someone with as little to her name as Mary could be hand picked for a task as great as this.  But through all of the mess, through all of the low points, with the verbal slander and ridicule that she faced, not once did Mary blink or turn her back on her child that was growing inside of her.  Not once.  She carried him with her head held high.  She was undeterred by the hate that was thrown her way.

        When the night came for Mary to give birth, and they made their way to the inn in Bethlehem, Mary was not shaken by the fact that she would not be given the comfort of a bed.  And when Jesus entered the world, she did not hesitate to wrap him up and keep him warm and safe. 

And when King Herod created a great threat to Jesus’ life, she did not think twice before making the difficult journey to Egypt.  Braving treacherous terrain in horrendous weather, while also being on the lookout for any of Herod’s forces trying to take her son away from her.  Not to mention the real possibility that they faced hunger and thirst on their journey.  Just to make sure that their son could have the opportunity to live a good life, and grow up without the fear of those who would wish to harm him. 

        Mary went through some of the most treacherous situations one can be expected to endure, all for this child.  This child; that changed the entire course of her life, and in a sense perhaps made it much more challenging than it would’ve been if God had not chosen her. 

Now some might say that it was Mary’s strength that helped her through this chain of events, and to some extent that is true.  Mary is, in my mind, one of the most amazing characters that we learn about not just in this story, but in the entire Bible.  And it has nothing to do with title, or power, or her lack of resources.  Her strength, her willingness to go down this strenuous path, is rooted in one thing.  Love.  She could have had everything else, but without the love there’s no saying whether or not things would’ve turned out the way that they did. 

        Here’s the thing about love.  It’s never what it is expected to be.  It’s never just smooth and free of obstacles, it’s full of twists and turns and trials that test us.  Every single day we are faced with situations where it almost feels impossible to believe that the concept of love even exists.  Let’s use smart phone technology as an example:  we have more access to the terrors of the world than we ever have before. We can hear about the awful realities of multiple genocides, of gun violence, poverty, and starvation, all just by unlocking our phones and opening the news app.  So, in short it’s a lot easier to forget that love is in fact there.

I myself am guilty of it.  But recently, when I’ve been caught focusing on the negative, I’ve often found myself thinking of Mary.  Thinking of refugees, the parents who have packed up their lives and are fleeing with their kids nowadays, risking everything to offer something better for their children. And I consistently asked myself, what drives that decision more than love? What makes us want to protect the ones closest to us more than love? 

We find examples of radical love throughout the world of pop culture.  Take Katniss Everdeen, the protagonist of the original Hunger Games trilogy.  For those who are unaware, this series is very popular among my generation, as the books and films started coming out while I was in elementary school.   At the beginning of the book (and I should warn you it is quite dark), we learn that each year, twenty-four children are offered up as tributes in an annual event called The Hunger Games.   Where the children are put into an arena, to fight to the death until only one is left standing. I know it’s a really morbid premise, but the entire series is a very important (and phenomenal) read.  In one of the first chapters of this book, when her little sister Prim’s name is drawn at the reaping of the Tributes, Katniss immediately runs to Prim and volunteers in her place.  She does this knowing fully what the consequences are.  She does this so that Prim will be safe, even if it means that she herself never comes home.

There are also examples of radical love in everyday life.  A parent or grandparent or sibling or aunt or uncle who tells a young person, “I see you. I love you as you are. I am here for you.” Even if some in their surroundings challenge who that young person is.  A person who “pays it forward” at the grocery store, when they recognize that someone might be struggling with hunger. A family that brings food to the food pantry to help their neighbors.  Holding the door for someone.  When your friend drives all the way out to Inkom after they’re done with work to help you replace a flat tire after a ski day.   When you offer to let someone borrow your umbrella when it’s raining.  Little acts of kindness such as this are just a few examples of radical love.

 Think of Elizabeth and Zechariah, who had hope even though they didn’t know what was going to happen; because they loved their son John, and they trusted that things would eventually be alright.  Think of Joseph, who was able to find peace, even when his world had turned upside down, and he was able to help the people he loved find peace, as well.  Think of Gabriel, who was able to deliver the message of joy, because he had love for God and his people.  

Mary, who had so little to her name, even knowing the risks, chose to love, even though she didn’t always know how everything would turn out. This story defies reason, just as love defies understanding.  Mary knew that the only way to bring Jesus into this world, the only way to keep him safe, was to love him radically.  Without exception, through darkness and doubt.  Through the clear, and through the fog.  So, as we go into the last few days before the birth of Jesus, finishing up this Advent season; remember Mary’s strength, remember her will, but most of all, remember everything that happened was a result of her infinite love.

And all God’s people said,

Amen.

For Nothing Will Be Impossible with God (Isaiah 6:1-7, Luke 1:26-37)

For Nothing Will Be Impossible with God

December 14, 2025

Isaiah 6:1-7, Luke 1:26-37

By: Susannah Conner

The Advent preaching team decided to split up the text by following the main characters of the Christmas story. April knew she wanted to preach Zechariah and Elizabeth, John gravitated toward Joseph, next week Elle will preach Mary. That left the angel Gabriel which I was excited about in John’s living room where we were hammering this all out, and by the time I’d gotten into my car to go home I was completely panicked. I don’t know what an angel is.

I mean, we can all conjure the sort of popular fairy tale entity of the same name. We’ve seen Touched by an Angel. It’s a Wonderful Life. Angels in the Outfield. Maybe you’ve read Dante and Milton. Maybe you enjoyed Dante and Milton. I did not. We’ve seen the defining works by Da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo. Y’all probably hung some angels on your Christmas trees. But the images in my mind, when I consider the general shape, size, and function of an angel are distinctly extrabiblical. This composite, gauzy superhero isn’t described as such in the Bible.

And I realized, before I could even get to Gabriel and the Christmas story; before I could properly consider the existence of angels; the thing I needed to know, was: What sort of creatures exist? The Bible throws us some real curve balls on this count. In Genesis 6 we find the B’nai Elohim, the sons of God, and the Nephilim, giant offspring of the sons of God and Ahuman women. We don’t hear a lot more about that. What happened to them? Beelzebul, Baal, Satan, Morningstar, demons, malachim, cherubs guarding the entrance to Eden. The seraphs of Isaiah. Winged, fiery serpents in Numbers and Deuteronomy. Jonah’s giant fish and the leviathan of Psalm 74 – the Behemoth and Leviathan in Job! Have you read Job 41 recently? It’s a dragon. It’s describing a dragon.

I’ve talked to some of you about this over the past several weeks and I know for a fact that we’ve got a whole spectrum of belief here, when it comes to the seen and the unseen, so I need us all to agree on a couple things before we can responsibly talk about Gabriel. The first is that the Bible mentions more creatures than you or I have ever encountered on this earth. We just don’t know: We don’t know what some of these passages are referring to; we don’t know what has changed over a few millennia. We don’t know when our word for something is aligning with an English translation of a Greek translation of an ancient Hebrew word. But right out of the gate, we have to be willing to leave the door cracked on what we believe does and does not exist in the vast and unknowable cosmos. That’s number one. We have to agree that there might be creatures out there that we don’t know about. 

The second thing we have to deal with is this whole problem with the cultural language around angels. And – as is often the case – translation has really muddied the waters. I mention cherubim and seraphim. It seems like these creatures are where we get the winged guardian image that is so often associated with angels. We heard the passage from Isaiah 6 this morning, the seraphs with six wings attending the Lord on his throne. Celestial beings, employees of God, not human beings, and I don’t see any evidence in the text that our ancient storytellers think these are the same things: cherubim, seraphim, malachim. In the Hebrew bible this is the word translated as “angels”, malak – singular, and it means messenger. This word is used all over the Bible to describe people and entities of all kinds delivering messages. An early, notable story about malachim, translated in your Bible and mine as “angels” is the story of the pronouncement to Abraham that Sarah will have a child in her old age (this should feel very familiar to us where we’re hanging out in the Christmas story). Genesis 18, three men visit Abraham, he provides them hospitality, they give him this message: Sarah will have a son. By the time we get to 19 verse 1, these same guys, two of three, are being called malachim. And when Lot shows them hospitality in the city of Sodom, they have inside information that the city is about to be destroyed. Malachim. Messengers you want to listen to. Who apparently look and walk and act like men who can drink Abraham’s water and eat cakes and calf under a tree.

Do I think these messengers are the same sort of creature as the angel (that’s angelos - messenger in Greek) in Luke’s account of Jesus’ birth? In Luke chapter two, an angel comes to the shepherds by night to tell them about the birth of Christ. “And suddenly there appeared with the angel a great multitude of heavenly host,” stratias, literally “an army.” Named, collectively, in verse 15 as angels. Here’s what I want us to agree to let go of: I don’t think angel is a specific term for a biologically specific creature. I think if you read up on angeloi and malachim, across the old and new testaments, you’ll find – in the places where it’s translated as “angel” – these are words used for a third party who’s delivering big news on behalf of God.

You know Moses and the burning bush? Angel. Malak. In the book of Acts Peter is freed from prison by an angel, an angelos. Burning bush, very different than a guy who can pick a lock. Both messengers from God.

And I think the liberties we take with the idea of angels, as if they were a species, can result in everything from bad theology that hurts other people to thoughtless angelology (real word I just learned) that puts us into a harmless little self-delusion.

The bad theology one, we’ve all heard. When, upon the death of a young person, someone tells the grieving parents that God needed another angel in heaven. That’s obviously not biblical and it’s obviously not helpful. We all try to make meaning when faced with inexplicable loss. But the idea of angels is such a cipher; such a vaguely religious nothing that can stand in for anything, that it can get deployed in harmful ways.

Harmless delusion, on the other hand – that’s me. I love asking God for angels. And I think this is how most people interact with the idea of angels within Christendom. Many of you know my kids, Mike and I have a 3-year-old and a 4-year-old. It was about the time that Adrienne turned three this October that both kids started sleeping through the night more reliably. Up until that point, we’d been sleep deprived for 4 and a half years. We moved here when Loren was three months old, it’s possible, until this fall, that I have never had an interaction with any of you when I didn’t feel like I had a concussion. And when they were both babies and we’d have a jag of really bad sleep or they both had colds, I would lay in bed, desperate for rest, and pray “God, can you please give them each angel? Just two of your smallest angels that you’re not using. To watch over them and help them sleep.” Honestly, if I hadn’t been preaching this story I don’t think I would ever have given this any thought at all. It was just something my addled mind grasped for. Like rubbing a lucky penny. I don’t think I believed it was real, so much as it felt like a way to ask God to put flesh on the bones of my intentions. This is what I want. It is something I cannot do. Give me an angel.

And that’s really just not what angels are. Biblically, cherubim guarded Eden. And the Ark of the Covenant. They didn’t guard people. Seraphim are only explicitly named in our Bible in the Isaiah passage from this morning and the job they’re doing is putting a hot coal in a guy’s mouth. And malachim, angeloi, angels, messengers; It’s a one-way thing. God has something to say, God wants to make sure the hearer hears it. Maybe there is a small, associated task. And, the thing is, this biblical reality is plenty fantastical without embellishment. People will continue to make speculative art about angels that will be beautiful and symbolic and feathered and absolutely mythical. I don’t have any problem with that. But in my personal faith, I don’t want to get the myth confused with the real phenomenon that is described so often, so vibrantly, with so much diversity, from Genesis to Revelation. Messengers. Operating on God’s orders. Circumventing human error. Catalyzing something big.

What we have here, in these scenes from the first chapter of Luke – when the angel Gabriel comes to Mary and when the angel we presume is Gabriel comes to Zechariah – what we have here is God putting flesh on the bones of God’s intentions. Because, human beings, we don’t always know when God is whispering to us in the night, it might take some rounds of misunderstanding, consultation with those wiser than us, time and prayer and discernment. It might take mistakes and doubt and conflict. God speaks to us that way, patiently, protractedly, but ours is a God that drops into time with us, on occasion, and works urgently to bring something specific about in a time and a place. “In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. Her name was Mary.” Angels get very specific instructions. They show up right on time and they will only give their message to the intended recipient. They’re like process servers. And, let me tell you, most people in the Bible who get a visit from an angel are pretty freaked out. Mary is greatly troubled. Luke 1:12 “When Zechariah saw him, he was terrified; and fear overwhelmed him.” Right time, right place, and really disorienting.

One of the things that’s misleading about the mythical cartoon angel is that it is recognizable. In the Bible, no one seems to immediately recognize a messenger from God when they see it. And when they do know what they’re dealing with, the descriptions range wildly. I mentioned Peter getting busted out of jail, this is in the book of Acts, chapter 12:6-9, “The night before Herod was to bring him to trial, Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with two chains, and sentries stood guard at the entrance. Suddenly an angel of the Lord appeared and a light shone in the cell. He struck Peter on the side and woke him up. ‘Quick, get up!’ he said, and the chains fell off Peter’s wrists. Then the angel said to him, ‘Put on your clothes and sandals.’ And Peter did so. ‘Wrap your cloak around you and follow me,’ the angel told him. Peter followed him out of the prison, but he had no idea that what the angel was doing was really happening; he thought he was seeing a vision.” Peter walked on water. There are few people in the Bible who are more down with the magical, metaphysical realities of the kingdom of God. Peter’s the guy who walked on water. And Simon Peter was Jewish. He would have received a deep religious education and been familiar with the cherubim and the seraphim and the malachim of it all. And he doesn’t recognize an angel from God even when he’s being broken out of prison under the noses of at least four guards. Must be a dream.

Again, I don’t think the word angel is referring to one thing that looks one way. What makes an angel an angel is what they’re doing. “I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people”, at this particular time. This is what’s happening. This is what it means. Gabriel and the angels are busy in this story. They have to tell everyone what’s going on. Zechariah gets met in the temple, Mary at home, Joseph is visited in a dream, our angel army comes to the shepherds after Jesus’ birth. If we remove the angels from this story, we’ve got a post-menopausal woman who gets pregnant, a terrified teenage girl ostracized by her community, and a world that’s received no clue that anything of consequence has happened at all. None of this will work unless God sends some very specific, very embodied messages to the people from whom God is asking unbelievable cooperation. This seems fair, if improbable.

But, for me, the great freedom of being a Christian is that my life is oriented around the God who deals in improbabilities. A God who chooses unlikely people for impossible tasks and brings them along with all sorts of rule breaking and mischief. Why not angels? We’re already celebrating the virgin birth of the God of the universe, who chose to come into time and space, not rich and ruling, but poor, hunted, and without a home. Why would we believe that and stop at angels? When you recognize how often, throughout the Bible, that God just out-plots God’s people and needs to send a clarifying word to keep everything on track, I start to think that messengers of God might be holding this whole mess together. I’ve told you a few angel stories this morning, but we haven’t made a dent in the number of times this happens in the Bible. Hagar, Elijah, Elisha, Daniel, Jacob, Gideon, the women who find Jesus’ tomb empty, Philip, Cornelius; they all lived remarkable lives of faith and they all had to receive a messenger, at one point or another, who kept it all moving. Kept the movements in time with the intentions of God.  

And it’s all the same motion. Angels, messengers, Christ; it’s the same thing; it’s the same reaching out. It’s the same God who can’t stand to be apart from you, collapsing the distance in every imaginable way. It’s the same God who captures our imaginations with the improbable and the impossible, because that is the way to our hearts. Miracles, meaning, good news. I don’t know what an angel is. But I know that nothing is impossible with God, so sayeth Gabriel. And that these stories remind us that there will be help for the faithful – inexplicable help, weird help. There will be company for those who step out in faith. Do not be afraid. When you find yourself called to speak truth, lead people, risk comfort, step into the fire, reach out toward God; God has some unbelievable ways of reaching back.

Amen.

Bringing Peace (Is. 11:1-10, Matt. 1:18-24, )

Bringing Peace

December 7, 2025

Isaiah 11:1-10, Matthew 1:18-24

By: John Gribas

My eldest son Adam can be a serious worrier. He was born in 1992 on Christmas day. For my wife, Lana, and for me, that was a very memorable gift. But despite sharing a birthday with “the prince of peace,” Adam has always been prone to see the glass half empty. To see perhaps a little too keenly and vividly the world’s dangers and threats and darkness and discord.

I remember one time when Adam was about five. He was caught up in some unsettling concern, fretting, wrapped up in worry and frustration and fear. He seemed to be spiraling a bit. So I did what I though a good parent should do in such a circumstance. I got down on my knees so I could look at him face-to-face. Pulling him close to reassure and console. And I said to him, softly, gently…

“Adam. Adam. Hey buddy… Peace.”

Adam stopped his ranting, looked directly at me for a moment, blinked a couple of times, and then said…

“Peace! (Hmph!!) Who thought of that?!”

Wow. Such cynicism from such a young boy. Or was it cynicism? Maybe it was just realism. I mean, this world…sometimes it can be a lot, right? Adam’s world back then in the late 1990s, it really wasn’t that different than our world today. There is a lot to fret about.

Consider the paper headlines or your phone’s news feed. Because of the privilege and good fortune many of us enjoy, we may occasionally allow ourselves to be lulled into imagining that the natural state of things is a broad tranquility, but the truth is every era has more than its fair share of unrest. Jesus reminded his disciples of this. As recorded in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus tempered his followers’ optimistic anticipation for the coming Kingdom of God by foretelling of wars and rumors of wars, nation rising against nation, famines and earthquakes, false prophets, likely persecution, love growing cold for many.

Despite all of this—maybe because of all of this—the overarching message Jesus brought and the message I bring to you today is a message of peace.

Peace. As a faith community, we yearn for it. We pray for it. We receive and experience it. There is obviously a link between peace and the life of faith…the life of the spirit. This link is strongly suggested in scripture. I did a search of the New Revised Standard Version of the bible, and the result listed 250 verses referencing “peace.”

Like my son Adam, I am someone for whom peace does not seem to come naturally. Because of this, I have specific music playlists and use my home’s Wi-Fi speakers to regularly pump peace into my ears and mind and soul. Solitude and quiet walks on one of the trails outside of town—these are also things I embrace and that help to bring a sense of peace. I do this because I love peace! I want peace!

And don’t we all? Really…don’t we all? Come on. Raise your hand if you like peace. Okay. But what, really, is “peace”? If you think about it, there are quite a few variations.

Sometimes, when we pray for peace, we mean “world peace.” We are hoping for the absence of or the end to war and other forms of large-scale conflict. We pray for peace in Ukraine. In the Middle East. Sudan. Afghanistan. Haiti.

Other times, when we pray for peace, it might be in response to a closer, more personal concern. Peace between me and my neighbor or coworker or someone I considered my friend. Peace between my parents. With or between or among my children. We long for “relational peace.”

Still other times, we pray for what we might call “inner peace.” Peace with myself—in my mind or heart or soul. I seek peace when I am internally conflicted. Because of uncertainty in facing an important decision. Because of an inability in light of distressing circumstances to believe that all will be well with me and those I love. Because of pain or failure or shame.

So when we say that we love and want peace, what do we really mean? World peace? Relational peace? Inner peace? I suppose it depends on our circumstances. Sometimes one of these in particular. Sometimes all of these.

Regardless, it seems especially right and good that we pray for peace now, in this time of Advent. This time of anticipation of the prince of peace coming into our world.

We are reminded of this in the earlier reading from Isaiah 11. If we read that passage as a foretelling of the coming of the Christ, then in Jesus’ birth we are encouraged to hope for and anticipate a peaceful existence indeed: “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.”

Jesus himself, so often throughout his life and ministry, reminds us that he is the prince of peace, the one who offers peace in response to our prayers. In John 14:27, Jesus says, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”

Yes, Advent seems like a very good time to hope for peace. It is right to ask for it. And we are blessed when we receive it.

But I’d like to take a moment to consider another experience we can have with peace. Something I see reflected in the reading from Matthew, and in the life of Joseph. In my recent reading and reflection on this portion of the Christmas story with Joseph and the angel, I began to see not so much an asking or a receiving…but a “bringing.” Bringing peace.

Consider Joseph. Engaged to Mary. Then discovering that Mary was with child. And he knew the child was not his. That had to be unsettling at the least, and I am sure Joseph was looking for a little peace. What kind of peace? Well…probably all of them!

To begin, Joseph had plenty of reason to hope for world peace. Yes, the Roman empire of that time did bring with it a kind of peace. Pax Romana. A period from about 27 BC to 180 AD. But, despite the name given to the period, the Romans did not think of this “peace” as an absence of conflict and war. Instead, they understood it as a unique time when all of their enemies had been beaten down so completely that they could no longer resist. It was during this sort of “peacetime” that Joseph lived, and he must have known and felt the heavy oppression of Roman occupation daily. Yes, Joseph would have good cause to pray for world peace.

What of relational peace? Well, the news of Mary’s pregnancy had to bring with it some serious tension between Joseph and his fiancé. If the news spread, it would no doubt bring even more serious relational tension between Joseph and Mary and their families and community members. Breaking off the engagement would likely have a similar result. Joseph had plenty of reason to seek some divine help for relational conflict.

For all of us, Joseph included, the simple awareness of world and relational conflict inevitably challenges our inner peace. His difficult situation had to weigh on Joseph’s mind, heart, and soul. This is suggested in verse 19 of our scripture reading from Matthew. “Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.” Joseph’s compassion for Mary, along with his personal sense of ethics and moral compass, put him in a real bind. What should he do? What was right and good? Joseph, I think, needed some inner peace.

Based on what is included here in the first chapter of Matthew, we don’t know whether Joseph actually reached out in prayer to ask for peace. It does appear that Joseph had a plan, though. It might not resolve any world conflicts, but it might just avoid some difficult relational conflicts and perhaps calm his conflicted heart and mind a bit. The plan was “to dismiss her quietly.”

Apparently, God had other plans. In a dream, an angel of the Lord came to Joseph and shared these plans. Take Mary as his wife. Accept that the child has been conceived through the work and power of the Holy Spirit. Name him “Jesus.” Know that he comes into the world to save people from their sins.

If Joseph had been praying for peace, my guess is that he was not imagining this as the kind of response that would provide it. I’m guessing that for Joseph, and I’m guessing for most of us, the expectation for an answer to a prayer for peace is that circumstances would change. Those nations would lay down arms and establish a binding treaty. Those two people would admit their part in the hurtful situation and would ask forgiveness and offer forgiveness and hug. That weird, uncomfortable feeling in my stomach would vanish and I would feel settled and sure and…at peace.

But the angel’s message to Joseph didn’t promise a change of circumstances. Instead, it offered a new understanding of Joseph’s circumstances. And it asked for a response.

And, as we learn in verse 24, “When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife.”

That is all fine and good. But John, you might be thinking, you said you were bringing a message of peace. This sounds like a message of obedience.

Yes, I agree. It does. But stick with me, because I think, at least in this case, they are one and the same.

As I said earlier, we really don’t know if Joseph prayed for peace—prayed for a divine change to circumstances impacting the world or his relationships or his inner turmoil. But we do know that Joseph’s acceptance and obedience in response to the angel’s message did things. Peace things.

I hope it brought peace to Joseph’s conflicted mind and heart. He was in a kind of “no win” situation, trying to figure out how to deal with Mary’s suspicious pregnancy without disgracing her and her family while maintaining his own integrity. The angel’s message, I think, settled things for Joseph.

I have to believe it brought peace to Mary who, despite her own angelic visitation, must have been aware of the likely consequences if Joseph exposed and rejected her. And though their community remained unaware, Joseph’s obedience avoided scandal and unrest and kept the peace for all of them.

What of the larger world? Though there was no obvious, tangible, immediate effect, I think we can all agree that Joseph’s actions were essential to the whole nativity narrative. The narrative that ushered in the prince of peace and, thinking back again to that passage from Isaiah, the hope and promise of this world as a peaceable kingdom.

I even think about the likelihood that Joseph “brought” peace to the little prince of peace himself. I mean, yes, Jesus came as the incarnation of the divine. “God from God, light from light, very God from very God,” as the Nicene creed suggests. But he came…as a baby.

And babies sometimes need some peace. They get hungry. They get cold. They need a diaper changed. They just want to be held and cuddled. And parents bring that.

Maybe it is just a fatherhood connection with the character of Joseph. Maybe it is because I can relate to becoming a father on Christmas. But I kind of like the thought that sometime during one evening in that chilly stable in Bethlehem, Joseph heard the cries of an infant in need, and he leaned over that manger, laid a warm hand on the little one, got very close to reassure and console, and said softly and gently…

“Jesus. Jesus. Hey buddy… Peace.”

Joseph listened and responded…and brought peace.

Archbishop Oscar Romero was an important advocate for human rights in El Salvador. You might recall that Mike referenced him in a sermon not long ago. Romero’s life—which ended in martyrdom—demonstrated peace as an active commitment to the wellbeing of the world, and he made a point of distinguishing this kind of peace from simply the absence of conflict. Romero defined peace as “the generous, tranquil contribution of all to the good of all."

I hope we all pray for peace. I hope that each one of us, at least in some small way, sees an answer to those prayers. And I hope most of all that we—like Oscar Romero, like Joseph, and like the prince of peace himself—are open to the voice of God and willing to respond to that voice. Willing to be the answer to the world’s cries for peace.

As we recognize the need for peace this Advent season…let’s bring it.

Amen.

Zechariah, Elizabeth & the Advent Season

Zechariah, Elizabeth & the Advent Season

By April Mills

11/30/2025

 First United Methodist Church

For some of us present today, we carry deep heartache burdened by the ever-persistent sadness that accompanies the absence of a beloved family member. It is a grief felt even more poignantly with the passing of the Thanksgiving Holiday. And though it seems dark, and the ceiling of the world is a wound, there will be stars up there tonight. Our necks arched and the cages of our hearts parted a little wider while peering heavenward, perhaps we harbor hope because sky hooked prayers are guarding us from spite with the same resolve that keeps the universe whole and the moon from slipping. And in the morning these magnificent stars never fail to herd the pale lamb like dawn into our sleeping houses.

The stars above us now were much like the stars above Elizabeth and Zechariah all those years ago. I suppose that this older couple would never consider wishing upon a star, whistling one down like a dog in faith of its shine. I wonder in their longing to be parents if they ever looked up and noticed an exceptionally bright star faithfully moving forward in space and time to shine above a certain manger. A star foretold in the Book of Numbers to come from the house of Jacob. A star poised and ready to answer the prayer of a nation, and later the entire world, that Hope was coming, lamb like, into every home as fluent and loving as milk. None the less, the stars have ushered in a day that forever changed the life of Elizabeth and Zechariah, and if we are lucky, our lives too.

Tradition teaches us that this encounter between Zechariah and Gabriel is part of the Advent season. And in each season, we are all invited to reexamine our traditions to find modern value in ancient sacred scripture. So I invite you now to peer deeper than you ever have before with new eyes and affirming hearts to contemplate the living Word of God as it applies to us today.

Luke, the author of today’s 2nd reading, established early in the text both the timeline of this narrative and the social and religious standing of both Zechariah & Elizabeth—our central figures. Very quickly though, Luke pivots his attentions solely on Zechariah when he writes of an encounter with the Arch Angel Gabriel.

In the encounter we find Zechariah experiencing a crisis of identity after Gabriel reveals he will be a father in his old age. Verse 18, “Zechariah said to the angel How will I know that this is so? For I am an old man and my wife is getting on in years.

Our modern ears might empathize deeply with Zechariah’s dismay. But the telling and retelling of this story may have left us tone deaf to the identity crisis he is surely experiencing. Yes, there were others in Zechariah’s own ancient past who were elderly parents. We all know the story of Abraham and Sarah. But the Story of Abraham and Sarah which Zechariah had traditionally studied many, many times, meant something altogether different for him when applied to his own life in that precise moment. And the result, doubt. Doubt because of his age. Maybe even doubt in his ability to father a child, let alone see the babe raised fully to adulthood.

Dear listeners, this pure moment of vulnerability for Zechariah in the presence of God’s Holy messenger, in the holiest of places a temple, on one of the holiest days in Zechariah’s season of serving as a high priest bear all of the markings of God’s gift of opportunity not at all the curse for doubting. And so God through an emissary blesses Zechariah with the opportunity to engage in silent contemplation—rendering him mute for a time.

From John McLaren, a member of the Center for Action and Contemplation. He writes, “Traditions are cultural communities that carry on, from generation to generation, ideas and practices in which they see great enduring value. Like everything in this universe, traditions are constantly changing. Sometimes they change for the better. Sometimes they change for the worse. Even if a tradition were to stay exactly the same, to be the same thing in a different environment is not the same thing…. 

We have no choice as to the tradition into which we were born. As we grow older, we must decide: Is this inherited tradition life-giving, death-dealing, or a mix of both? Is it time to migrate to a new spiritual tradition?”

Perhaps after much contemplation it was time for Zechariah to adopt a new spiritual tradition—self acceptance especially in his old age. For Zechariah, this also meant he had to commit to being a new father and make his wife a new mother. And it was so, for we read in verse 24, After those days his wife Elizabeth conceived, and for five months she remained in seclusion.

We know from our Bible readings that Zechariah had come around. He spent some time alone really thinking about that encounter with Gabriel, and once he surrendered to the message of the encounter, made up his mind to be a father. Zechariah trusted God to protect his wife while she was pregnant, what’s more knowing the times he lived in and the risks to both mother and child in the birthing process, let alone the survival rate of early childhood, Zechariah believed inherently that both would live—even Elizabeth in her old age.

Finally, the day had come. From Luke 1 verses 57-63 and 76-78, just after John’s birth.

On the eighth day they came to circumcise the child, and they were going to name him Zechariah after his father. But his mother said, “No; he is to be called John.” They said to her, “None of your relatives has this name.” Then they began motioning to his father to find out what name he wanted to give him. He asked for a writing tablet and wrote, “His name is John.”

Then Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied:

And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High,
    for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways,
to give his people knowledge of salvation
    by the forgiveness of their sins.

Because of the tender mercy of our God,

    the dawn from on high will break upon us,

to shine upon those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

For Zechariah and Elizabeth both, Hope was fulfilled.

Fast forward a couple of years, Zechariah sits after a family celebration. The guests, gone. The table cleared. The left-over food wrapped carefully for another meal, this proud father rests content, feeling the warmth of his wife as she leans gently against him. In this alternate ending, Zechariah is now 88 years old, and his wife Elizabeth, though gray haired, is still beautiful in his eyes. They both listen closely to their grown child, now in his 30s telling of his encounters and message for God. Zecheriah, always contemplative after that fate filled experience with the Angel, listens with one ear, and studies his adult child. To himself he thinks, in all my years, I would never have guessed John to become this kind of man.

Always thinking, Zechariah recalled the day Elizabeth and Mary stood under the portico and both women gasped when they noticed their unborn sons had recognized each other. Zechariah was a little caught off guard by the stray thought. He just realized that John, one of God’s chosen, knew his identity even from the womb. How had he never seen that before?

Then Zechariah thought about all the ways John’s life had been different than a father and high priest would have expected. He was wearing unusual clothing more and more lately. He had also started eating an unusual diet. It was something that appeared to frustrate Elizabeth, who had worked so hard to prepare the celebration dinner. “Of all of the traditional foods I made, foods he loved as a child, why does John only eat honey and locusts now? Elizabeth wondered out loud earlier that day. Clearly, she was a little hurt by John’s new attitude. “It’s only food,” Zechariah says, trying to comfort his wife. “What’s more important is that he is here with us today.”

However at the time, Zechariah was secretly a little worried. Because John was now living strangely in the wild—taking to roaming far away from the relative safety of his home. That more than anything was what scared Zechariah. Being alone in the wild—who knew what influences or events were happening out there, far from the security of the culture John grew up in. But Zechariah was consoled somewhat as he listened to his son talk about recent events.

“Father,” said John, “I have some news for you. I have decided to adopt a new name. I am no longer John, Son of Zechariah. That name is dead for me now. I am being called John the Baptist. The other day, I baptized 20 people in the river Jordan.”

Jolted immediately back into the present, Zechariah was shocked. “Baptized? What is Baptized?” And so John patiently begins to explain how he had contemplated the practice of the ritual bath and made it new. How he used this tradition as an outward sign for followers who’ve repented to declare their faith in God. For the Zechariah of my telling today, this would no doubt be a turning point between father and child. Who takes everything they ever learned at the knees of their religious parents and changes it? What child dares question what they were raised to believe?

“From Reddit: I was born and raised Christian. And…well--I'm pretty sure now that I'm transgender and lesbian. So I don't know. I'm just worried and kinda lost in this whole debate about sin and sexuality and don't really know what to think anymore. Can anyone help?”

Who, who my friends, takes everything they were ever raised to believe and questions it? John did. He questioned traditional clothing and found options that aligned with his identity. He questioned what he ate and drank, and aligned his diet to his beliefs. He questioned his association with community, and went instead to live where he felt affirmed and safe in a different corner of God’s Kingdom. Above all, John questioned some of the dogmatic beliefs and practices of the day and aligned them with God’s Holy purpose to restore the house of Isreal. Can you see the link my friends? Can you see the dot I just connected? There is so much from John’s life that is similar to our queer and trans Christian siblings. I want to be clear before I move on. There is no current scholarly debate over John’s gender, identity, or sexual orientation.

Even so, John holds something else in common with some of the Queer and Trans Christians of our time. John was murdered for his convictions. He was killed because he represented a direct threat to someone in power, King Herod. John upset the status quo because he chose to come out, live his truth, and talk about it openly rather than hide in the closet. A recent news headline from Washington DC illustrates the same story in our own age.  

“The National Black Justice Collective (NBJC) mourns the death of Da Queen ‘Dream’ Johnson, a 28-year-old Black transgender woman. She was shot and killed on Saturday, July 5. The D.C. police are asking for the public’s help in solving this case. Dream’s family and local advocates believe this is a hate crime.”

Did Dream Cry out to God? What about John? Did he cry out to God when he was facing his death? If either did, were there words anything like David’s Psalm from the Hebrew Bible?

I am the utter contempt of my neighbors

and an object of dread to my closest friends—

those who see me on the street flee from me.

I am forgotten as though I were dead;

I have become like broken pottery.

For I hear many whispering,

“Terror on every side!”

They conspire against me

and plot to take my life.

Did Dream, and possibly millions of other Trans people pray to God for protection like David did?  Is this their prayer now?

Save me in your unfailing love, God,

from my parents who have hated and disowned me.

Save me in your unfailing love, God,

from a community that won’t hire me.

Save me in your unfailing love, God,

from the nurse who refuses to provide care on principle.

Save me in your unfailing love, God,

from the people who want to kill me.

Save me. Save me. Save me.

Where was Dream’s Hope? Where is our Hope now? Are we like David and willing to place our Hope in God truly shouting, “Love the LORD, all you faithful people! The LORD preserves those who are true to him, but the proud he pays back in full. Be strong and take heart, all you who hope in the LORD.”

As a community we have taken heart. A couple of years ago, we made a commitment to be an open and affirming faith. We welcome all to the table every week. We have lifted up leadership, members of the LGBTQ community, who have the bandwidth in their busy lives to contribute to the Kindom of God now, here, present with us today. But have we demonstrated that strength in other areas of this church community? Look around friends, where do we have room to grow? Think about it. In this sanctuary, what spaces can we expand to allow our divine siblings to be seen and included? What are the spaces that subtly exclude them?

May I make a suggestion? Look now at the cover of our program today friends. Look long at the image of Jesus. The title of the art is called Christ Breaks the Riffle.

John calls to you from beyond the grave to consider the weapons that have been used against our trans siblings and children. In some cases yes, it is a gun. But sometimes the weapons wielded against the Queer community are far more subtle. This is the same weapon that was used to justify slavery. The same weapon that was used to justify misogyny. That weapon is in our pews even now. Bright red, and boldly lettered with the words The Holy Bible. It has become for some a sacred weapon that has perverted the Word of God for longer than any one of us would care to admit. It was forged out of more than a thousand years of injustice designed to preserve power in the hands of those who fear change.

Our task as a church is to consider how we can change that narrative now. We should consider things contemplatively, as John did. And usher in small things that change the narrative from fear to hope. Our time is now. As parents, siblings, and Allies, we have access to other options. And by choosing those options perhaps bend arc of the moral universe back towards justice. We have the opportunity to take was has been weaponized, and turn it once more into the tool is should be--hope.

My gift to all of you this Advent Season is a to offer each of you the opportunity to embrace a different way of seeing some of the texts that have been used to harm Queer and Trans people for thousands of years. Though there are so many passages to select from, I would like to read just one passages to you, as an example.

1 Corinthians 6:9

New Revised Standard Version: Do you not know that the wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, male prostitutes, sodomites,

That verse, and many more does more harm than good for our divinely created Christian queer friends, family, and coworkers—let alone this church community. But there is another translation we could adopt.

From the Queen Jame Version: Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor morally weak, nor promiscuous,

In an age where words matter, and what we read influences who we are—it’s time to look at subtle ways we can include everyone. We don’t have to decide today, but we must decide.

Circle back with me once more. I ask you to contemplate this question posed so elegantly by John McLaren: “Is this inherited tradition, a non-inclusive Bible, a life-giving, death-dealing tradition, or a mix of both? Is it time to migrate to a new spiritual tradition?”  

In closing, it is my prayer that John’s ministry can still do the job it was intended to do thousands of years ago. As the Arch Angel Gabriel said, “With the spirit and power of Elijah John will go before Jesus, to turn the hearts of parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.”

This is the Word of the Lord, Amen.

Generosity, Part 5: Giving Overflow (John 6:1-15)

Generosity, Part 5: Giving Overflow

November 23, 2025

 John 6:1-15

By: Pastor Mike Conner

***

  On this Christ the King Sunday, John’s Gospel confronts us with a Jesus who does not want to be king: “When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself” (6:15). I find it a bit perplexing. If you had come into the world to save it, and a great crowd of 5,000 menplus women and children had experienced your power and were ready to crown you as their king, wouldn’t you think that things were finally starting to cook, that you had the beginnings of movement? Instead, Jesus draws back from the very people who want to vault him into a position of worldly power. I want to explore why.

The ancient Israelites had a troubled experience of kingship. Their desire to be like other nations and have a king in the first place was flagged as a grave danger. Centuries before the days of Jesus, the prophet Samuel, who reluctantly anointed Saul to be the first king of Israel, raised this warning:

This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign…to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day. (1 Sam 8:11-18 NIV)

What words do we hear over and over again in that passage? He will take. He will take. He will take. The king will take sons and daughters, fields and vineyards—eventually the peoples’ own personal agency. That’s what a king does: a king takes; a king centralizes and consolidates power and resources around himself. And though Israel, and later the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah, had some good kings in their history—the best, of course, being David, and even his record is mixed—what we hear most often in the pages of the Old Testament is pain: endless war, oppressive taxation, the nationalistic coopting of religion, and apathy toward the plight of the poor. He will take.

Jesus did not come to be a king who takes. He came to be a king who gives. He did not come to be king who gathers all power to himself. He came to be a king who gives his power away. So he had to reshape the imagination of the people. He had to subvert their expectations, based on generations of trauma, of what a king does and what a king is like. To reach in and change what they desired, to resurrect their imagination, were as important to his saving work as his feeding and healing. So he had to avoid being taken by them. He would not be forced to play a role in a failed fantasy, this world of kings. So he withdrew.

Notice how many people participate in this great feeding. The disciple Andrew brings the unnamed boy forward. The boy shares his five loaves and two fish. The disciples organize the crowd into seated groups. Jesus blesses and distributes the food. The disciples then collect, to their shock and delight, twelve baskets of leftovers, each getting to hold the proof of what he did not think was possible.

John is careful not to label this moment a miracle. Instead, he calls it a sign (1:14). This isn’t an event that transcends the laws of nature but that points beyond itself to some fundamental truths about Jesus. And one of those truths is that Jesus empowers the people around him to transcend, to overcome, their fears—fears of vulnerability, fears of whether or not they will still have enough if they open themselves to others and share who they are and what they have.

It’s very significant that Jesus had the people sit down together. These were folks from many different villages and towns who may or may not have known each other. If they were drawn to Jesus because of his ministry of healing, they likely had some fundamental fears about being taken care of, about being seen and having enough. Jesus invited them into community with each other, gathered around tables spread in the wilderness.

Jesus wants us to feel in our bones that everything we need is already available to us when we gather in openness and generosity. If each of us opens our bag to bring out and pass around what we have brought with us, there will be more than enough. We will eat until we are satisfied. We will even have leftovers to share. Poor Philip, tested by Jesus, tries to solve the problem from the top down, like a king, running the economic calculation: it would cost an exorbitant amount just to get each of these people a few bites of bread. Jesus—led by the boy—inspires a bottom-up solution, rooted in sharing. If the crowd had seized Jesus to make him king, they would have been, in a strange way, disempowering themselves.

Even after it was over, even after they had eaten to the point of satisfaction, the people still struggled to really see the truth about Jesus, themselves, and their tablemates, to which this sign pointed: the truth of the gift economy. They just see Jesus, and I know this is going to sound strange, but in only seeing Jesus the people kind of miss Jesus’ point.

They think if they can crown him king all their problems will go away. But Jesus came that we “may have life and have it in abundance” (John 10:10 CSB) He came to draw us to himself, to sit us down with one another and bless us into our best, most trusting and most generous selves. The flip side is that when we, personally or as a Church, try to claim Jesus without also claiming the crowd—that is, one another, as well as the needs and gifts of our neighbors—he slips away from us.

The poem that begins John’s Gospel includes this verse: “From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace” (1:16). Jesus is a fullness that is always overflowing to us, gift after gift after gift. This is the life of perfect, eternal communion enjoyed by the Trinity, by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Each overflowing in self-gift to the others, each being filled by the self-gift of the others.

This is the that the Son of God brought near to us in the body of Jesus, and it’s the pattern of life Jesus sought to establish everywhere he went.

Think about the abundance that Jesus makes possible in John’s Gospel alone:

When he turns the water into wine at the wedding of Cana, it’s the servants of the chief steward who fill the great stone jars with water, who take a cupful to the chief steward (John 2:1-11). After he talks with the Samaritan woman at the well, “many Samaritans from that city [believe] in him because of the woman’s testimony” (4:39 NRSV, emphasis added). When Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, and Lazarus comes out of his tomb still bound with strips of cloth, Jesus tells the people around him to “unbind him, and let him go” (John 11:44 NRSV). When Jesus seeks out his scattered disciples after his resurrection, he tells an exhausted Peter to cast the net on the other side of the boat, and the net fills with so many fish that it threatens to break.

Do you see it? This is not a king who takes but a king who gives. 

You, he says, you fill the jars, you share your testimony, you unbind the man. There is something kingly about that, I suppose—the giving of an order, the delegation of a task. But these aren’t really orders or delegations, they are invitations to participate, they are a summons into our true power and humans made in God’s image: the power to overflow in love.

Who is he calling you to be?

What is he calling you to do?

Who are the people he is calling you to sit down and get to know, learning their names, learning to trust?

Sometimes Jesus just needs one person, like the boy, to bring their lunchbox forward and say, “I know this isn’t enough on its own, but I’m willing to share it,” to set the gift economy in motion. Maybe you are called, somewhere in your life, to be like that boy. Maybe you are called to be Andrew, who can identify and bring forward people whose gifts are so easily overlooked.

On this Stewardship Sunday, as we prepare to give our 2026 commitment cards, my prayer is that each of us will give what we can in response to a Jesus and a Church that gives, not to a Jesus and a Church that takes. For if it is the latter, the joy of the Lord has withdrawn, and we need to confront that sense of taking or being taken from in the Church or in our heart. I make my pledge today because I believe that there is always already enough, and I am grateful that you are the ones that Jesus has asked me to sit down and share life with. May it be so for you, too.

In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Generosity, Part 4: Giving Sets Us Free (Matt. 6:19-34)

Generosity, Part 4: Giving Sets Us Free

November 16, 2025

Matthew 6:19-34

By Pastor Mike Conner

***

There is a story in the Hebrew Bible that tells of God liberating the Israelites from slavery

in Egypt. It’s known as the exodus. Having heard the agony of the people, God sent a prophet,

Moses, and his brother Aaron to confront Pharaoh and demand the emancipation of the slaves.

But Pharaoh refused. God then afflicted Egypt with a series of plagues – frogs and flies, boils

and hailstones – culminating in the drowning of Pharoah’s army of chariots in the Red Sea. For

the Israelites, God split the sea; they passed through walls of water along dry, if squelchy,

ground.

It was a miracle, their freedom. It was beyond comprehension. It elicited great joy: “Then

the prophet Miriam, Aaron’s sister, took a tambourine in her hand; and all the women went out

after her with tambourines and with dancing. And Miriam sang to them, ‘Sing to the LORD, for he

has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea’” (Exod 15:20-21 NRSV).

Rapturous celebration. Victory song. The Israelites had cried out in pain, and God had

done something about it. They had seen no future for themselves or for their children, but God

gave them a future. They had witnessed divine intervention after divine intervention. Salvation

was tangible to them. Rattle of tambourines. Mud from an exposed sea bottom stuck on their

shoes. They were well on their way to the Promised Land.

We might expect this great event, this exodus, to produce a people of unshakeable faith,

of stalwart trust. But in the following verses we see this instead: “The whole congregation of the

Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. The Israelites said to them, ‘If

only we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and

ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly

with hunger’” (Exod 16:2-3 NRSV, emphases added).

They leave the sea edge and enter the desert and begin to complain. They complain

because they are hungry. ‘What good is our freedom from slavery if we’re now just going to die

of starvation?’ they ask Moses. Instead of trusting that the God who had who had toppled a

kingdom on their behalf would do something as fundamental as provide them with food and

water, the people grumbled. In an instant, their trust was gone.

And this reveals something fundamental about human nature. We struggle to trust. To

trust that there will be enough. To trust that God will come through for us and meet our needs.

That God will be faithful in the big things and the small things. That God will show up for us

today just as God did yesterday. We are vulnerable, because we are creatures with these

inescapable needs. And this very vulnerability can lead us to trust, or it can lead us to worry.

God sows the seed of his word among us, in our hearts. “As for what was sown among

thorns,” says Jesus, “this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world, and the lure

of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing” (Matt 13:22 NRSV). It doesn’t matter how

many miracles lie in our past; every day we have to choose to trust in a God who, as Jesus puts

it, “already knows all your needs” (Matt 6:33 NLT) and “will certainly care for you” (Matt 6:30

NLT).

Jesus of Nazareth is fully God and fully human. God the Son united himself with our

human nature, and therefore with our human needs, like hunger. God the Son came in order to

liberate us from the inside out, and his divine Life endured moments that encapsulated the most

harrowing experiences of human life. Moments of suffering, testing, and temptation; of betrayal,

deprivation, and injustice.

Jesus lived his human life without sin. Perfectly vulnerable, he was perfectly dependent

on God the Father. He redeemed each step of human journey, and now empowers us, through the

gift of his Spirit, to relate to God with greater and greater trust. This is what the first theologians

called “recapitulation,” the summing up of our human experiences in the life of Jesus, so that he

might give us a fresh start and a fresh foundation as we encounter each one.

When we hear Jesus say to us, “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what

you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear,” we have to

remember that he first taught them how to pray: “You kingdom come. Your will be done, on

earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread” (Matt 6:10-11 NRSV). And we also

have to remember that Jesus taught this prayer only after passing through his own 40-day period

of hunger and temptation in the wilderness of Judea. Satan had tempted Jesus to give up on God

and to make bread for himself. But Jesus, though weakened, refused to take matters into his own

hands. He endured this deprivation, taking our fundamental anxiety about our daily needs into

his redeemed life, and only then begins to teach us about prayer and worry.

He’s not asking us to be invulnerable superheroes. He’s asking us to experience our

vulnerability in him, and to rid ourselves of worry by crying out to God every day for daily

bread.

We can’t begin to take Jesus’ teaching on worry to heart if we aren’t praying to God every day

for what we need and leaning into Jesus’ own redemptive dependence.

Jesus relives Israel’s story, bears our universal human weaknesses. Jesus overcomes the

anxiety of the wilderness. He trust the God of daily bread. And he gives the gift of that victory to

us: “He will certainly care for you” (Matt 6:30 NLT), Jesus says of God. “[Y]our heavenly

Father already knows all your needs. Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live

righteously, and he will give you everything you need” (Matt 6:33 NLT).

One of the arenas of life where anxiety afflicts many of us greatly is our finances. Money

represents so many things to us: stability, safety, success, worthiness, independence, opportunity,

and more. These are values especially susceptible to worry.

This has certainly been true in my life, though not so much as a child. I was well

provided for and my parents were people of sufficient means. But in my adult life, as I’ve

accumulated debt for the sake of my education; as I bounced around for several years from bad,

expensive rental to bad, expensive rental; as I’ve started a family of my own and taken

responsibility for meeting the needs of others, worry over money has grown. To this day, as an

adult, I’ve never not lived paycheck to paycheck. And I’ve wanted to be free of it, because I have

experienced how, when worry over money infuses my daily life, it negatively colors my

relationships and my ministry.

So as we look ahead to Stewardship Sunday next week, I want to take a moment now and

share some of my story about the difference that giving to the Church has made for me – and for

me and Sus together.

For the four-and-a-half years that I was a pastor in North Carolina, I never once wrote a

check to the local church. I was working ¾-time at four small churches and freshly aware of the

debt I had gone into to pursue my call to ministry. I resisted – for many reasons that seem hollow

to me now – being mutually entangled in the material life of these communities.

Why would I give to a church that’s going to turn around and write me a paycheck? Why

would I give to a church that isn’t providing me with health insurance, housing, or help with

student loan payments? Why would I give to churches that are dying, not thriving? A wall went

up, as you can see, between me and my congregations. This was a way I could keep my distance.

It created an us versus them thing. As time went on, I liked that feeling less and less.

Sus and I got married in 2019. During the COVID years, we experienced changes in

housing, in jobs, in our family. We moved out here for me to double-down on my vocation; we

had kids; we shifted from being chronic renters to buying a house. We’ve always talked about

money openly and frequently, and for years we’ve used and stuck to a monthly budgeting app.

But even so, there was a baseline feeling of anxiety that permeated most of our conversations.

Mortgage, child care bills, student loans, oh my! Not unique to us of course, but something we

were facing for the first time. As time went on, we liked that baseline feeling of anxiety less and

less.

We also were experiencing a growing desire for integrity. As I said, we had moved out to

Idaho – a radical decision for us – to give ourselves over to a life of ministry. And our calling

had directly impacted where we were living, how we were spending our time, how we were

raising our family, what we were engaging with socially and politically. We started to realize

that the call had its claim on most every aspect of our lives in a direct way except our finances.

Why would we hold back our money from it?

I’m a person who likes to understand the meaning – the why – of things before I actually

do them. It’s a defense mechanism. I’ll read the book and then do the thing. But I’ve lived with

Jesus long enough to know that that’s just not how it works with him. He asks me to follow him,

which means both that he’s making a way for me and that I can’t get out in front of him. There’s

both security and surrender there; the security of his presence, the surrender of being able to

determine things for myself in advance.

I’ve known forever that Christians give to their local faith community. I used to watch

my parents do it when I was very, very young, sitting in the pews of Woodstown Presbyterian

Church in southern New Jersey. I knew that giving to the faith community is attested in the pages

of the New Testament and rooted in the giving practices of the ancient Hebrews. I knew the

language of tithing, and I expected other Christians to be doing it in the places where I served. I

knew that giving 10%, while not a direct biblical mandate, has been named by wise Christians

over the centuries as a liberating practice.

I knew these things from the outside, not from the inside. And I finally realized, in my

own heart and in my conversations with Sus, that I wanted to see for myself the difference that

giving to the Church would make for us. For me, that meant breaking down the wall of distance

between me and you, not holding this part of my life back from you. It meant trusting God to

subdue our anxiety.

So we decided to try it. In 2023, we started at around 2% with the intention to increase

our giving by a percentage point each year. In 2024 we increased to somewhere between 3% and

4%. For 2025, having developed the habit, we felt called to move to 10%. For us, that has meant

giving $700 each month this year. That amount feels like a sacrifice to us. But it also, as the

wisdom of the tradition and the teachings of Christ promised us, has led to some liberation.

I feel more deeply a part of the community – more deeply connected to you. I feel more

viscerally a part of our vision, our ministry priorities, our day-to-day needs.

At home, Sus and I feel less anxious. Paradoxically, by letting go of a portion of our

income, some air has been let into our financial conversations. There’s freedom to think about

our resources more communally. It’s not just mine and hers. It’s mine and hers and God’s. It’s

mine and hers and God’s and the people of God’s.

I’m not telling you this story to be prescriptive. And I’m not only confessing that, yes, I

your pastor have really struggled with something as foundational as giving.

More than that, I’m telling you this because I want you to know it’s okay to feel confused

or grumbly or outright resistance to giving, and that Jesus will meet you in your desire to

overcome that resistance. His prayers for daily bead, his victory over self-sufficiency in the

wilderness of hunger, will hold you and help you.

And I want you to know that blessing the community of God will bless you. I don’t know

how, but I know that it will. And I know because I’ve learned the hard way that none of us will

know how those blessings will transform our lives until we’ve tried the practice. Seek first the

kingdom, Jesus says. And everything else will follow. If you want to try pledging and tithing for

the first time, or if you want to see what it’s like to deepen those practices that you’ve already

established, I’m here to support you – not as an expert, but as a companion.

The Apostle Paul once wrote, “[W]ork out your own salvation with fear and trembling;

for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure”

(Phil 2:12-13 NRSV). God wants to set us free, and only God can set us truly free – which is

freedom for love, for an openness and mutuality and graciousness in every aspect of our lives.

Each step we take into this freedom is prepared and empowered by God. But we do need

to take each step. We are called into the awesome task of collaborating with God on our stories,

of working out the salvation, the salvos, the healing and wholeness that God intends for us.

Giving is one way that we do that. At least, it has been for me – though I’ve come to it

later than I like to admit. Perhaps it has been, or will be, for you, too.

In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Generosity, Part 3: Giving Constitutes the Community (Acts 2:43-47 & Acts 11:19-30_

Generosity, Part 3: Giving Constitutes the Community

November 9, 2025

Acts 2:43-47 & Acts 11:19-30

By Pastor Mike Conner

***

So far in this series on generosity, we have seen several examples of people who responded to Jesus’ presence in their lives by supporting him “out of their resources” (Lk 8:3). There was Zaccheaus the chief tax collector, who sold half his estate in an instant, promising to pay back anyone he had fleeced four times as much. There was Mary of Bethany, who during a dinner party with Jesus brought a jar of costly perfume and poured it out upon his feet, anointing him and filling the house with its fragrance. There were the women – Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Susanna, and the others – who traveled with Jesus from place to place supporting the needs of his ministry.

Each of these characters gave their gift because Jesus was with them, and they loved him. They could sense in him the very self-gift of God. All that was beautiful and true and pure and loving in the universe was present in this man who walked among them, made time for them, came into their homes, and changed their lives for the better.

The Book of Acts tells the story of the first Christians, those who received the outpouring the Holy Spirit after Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven. With the power of Jesus’ Spirit to help them, they began to establish a communal way of life based on everything Jesus had taught them and shown them. These stories that Larry has read for us, one from Acts 2 and one from Acts 11, showcase generosity as an essential ingredient in Christian community.

What do Christians do together? What are the basic steps in love’s choreography?

As we ask these questions we need to remember that, in the world of the New Testament, Christianity was a radically new and persecuted faith. When Acts tells us that “a deep sense of awe came over” the people, and that the Christians in Jerusalem were “enjoying the goodwill of all,” it speaks to the newness of this life in the Spirit, the refreshing care and respect that Jesus’ people were extending to orphans, widows, foreigners, the sick, and the poor. And when Acts tells us that “the believers who had been scattered during the persecution after Stephen’s death,” it speaks to the threatening conditions in which this generous life was practiced. 

Christian generosity was not charitable giving in our modern understanding of it. For modern charity often manifests as an us-them, or a top-down, relationship: the Church, from a position of material strength, dispensing resources to others. New Testament Christianity was, by necessity, much more spontaneous, and much more mutual. It was closer in practice to what people today might describe as Mutual Aid, a grassroots strategy for the meeting the needs of the most vulnerable in our community by allowing the most vulnerable to be leaders in crafting solutions. It’s like our new Blessing Pantry, which invites our neighbors to take what they need and also to give what they can.

The Christians had no cultural power. They were simply practicing generosity at the local level; everyone a giver, everyone a recipient. It was a captivating way of life bubbling up from the bottom of the social hierarchy. In the paradoxical mystery of the Gospel, all would become poor so that all might become rich. The early Christians’ economic practice was both an indictment of and an invitation to the world around them. How true might that be even for us, as we give to Christ in a society that is robbing its own people of food and healthcare even as it supplies bombs and ammunition for wars halfway around the world.

The economic solidarity of the early Christians was one of several core practices that Acts 2 distills for us: gathering for prayer and praise, gathering around tables for Holy Communion and other meals, gathering to learn about Jesus. And if we really think about it, it’s not as if the material giving is the only manifestation of generosity in this way of life. It’s just the most concrete one. But prayer and praise require a generosity of spirit. Table fellowship requires a generosity of presence. Holy Communion and sound teaching put us in touch with God’s fathomless, yet daily, self-gift to us.

I love the story that Luke tells in Acts chapter 11 because it shows how the generosity of the Christian community developed across time and space. Acts 2 shows us this really concentrated moment of life together in Jerusalem before the first Christians were scattered across the known world. Acts 11 shows us how those same impulses for generosity flourished even when things got more complicated and far-flung. 

Barnabas is key to this story. He’s introduced in Acts 4 as “a Levite, a native of Cyprus, Joseph, to whom the apostles gave the name Barnabas (which means “son of encouragement”). He sold a field that belonged to him, then brought the money, and laid it at the apostles’ feet” (Acts 4:36-37). Barnabas was an early participant in the generous community forming in Jerusalem.  

Barnabas appears next in the story in chapter 9, after Saul’s conversion. Saul, who we know as the Apostle Paul, was one of the great enemies of the first Christians. He got warrants to their places of worship; he authorized their imprisonment and beating; he even oversaw the killing of Christians. But in a dramatic way, God broke through to Saul and humbled him. Saul then became a Jesus follower, and the primary church planter in that first generation of Christians.

But in between his conversion and his calling there was a time of uncertainty. Would he be accepted by the community he had harmed? Would they recognize his change of heart as genuine? He went to Jerusalem to present himself to the apostles, but “they were all afraid of him” (Acts 9:26). But then Barnabas stepped in: “Barnabas took him, brought him to the apostles, and described for him them how on the road he had seen the Lord” (9:27). Barnaba was not only materially generous, selling his field to support the community, he was also spiritually generous, willing to offer forgiveness, encouragement, and belonging even to someone with Saul’s track record.

And then there’s this wonderful story in chapter 11. Even after Saul’s conversion, the persecution of the Christian community continued, and people were forced to flee Jerusalem and travel to other places in the Mediterranean world. Some of the early Christians show up in Antioch of Syria, and they begin preaching not only to the Jews living there but also to the Gentiles. Their ministry is blessed by God, and the Gentiles start believing in Jesus. 

The Jerusalem church catches wind of this news, and they want to understand it more deeply and support it. They send Barnabas, the son of encouragement, to Antioch, and when he gets there he’s amazed at the way God’s Spirit is moving in this diverse community – Jews and Gentiles, natives of Antioch and foreign preachers – and it fills his with joy. He encourages them, teaches them, and helps them grow.

Then Barnabas sets out to find Saul. This was the first century. You couldn’t just send a text and say, “Hey, where you at?” Barnabas had to go find Saul. He traveled a distance of over 70 miles on foot from Antioch to Tarsus, looking for his friend. When he found him, he brought Saul back to Antioch and they spent a year in ministry together building up that church. Later, the church in Antioch becomes the congregation that would affirm Saul’s calling as a missionary and send him out to plant churches. Saul cut his teeth for ministry in Antioch, thanks to Barnabas, who believed in his calling and included him in this joyful work.

Finally, to bring things full circle, one day prophets arrive in Antioch from Jerusalem. They tell the church in Antioch that a great famine is coming to afflict the known world. The church in Antioch responds by deciding to collect resources for the Christians living in Judea, “everyone giving as much as they could.” They started a weekly collection to bless their siblings in Christ who lived 300 miles away, and they entrusted the delivery of this gift to Barnabas and Saul.

Think of all the vectors of giving, the manifestations of generosity.

It starts with God’s generosity. Not fazed at all by persecution, God empowers these scattered preachers to reach a new and diverse set of hearers. God is generous in blessing fresh ministry in new places. There were the preachers themselves who pushed on the accepted boundaries and expanded their ministry to include Gentiles as well as Jews. There was the church in Jerusalem who shared Barnabas. There was Barnabas who shared his joy, his time, his teaching. There was Barnabas again who went to find Saul. There was the year they spent together building up the Antioch congregation, making it one of the strongest for years to come. And there were the Antiochian Christians responding to the needs of the church in Jerusalem by collecting funds for a time of famine. The role of giver and receiver reversed for a time. A kind of joyful mutuality that doesn’t keep score. 

Is it any wonder that “It was at Antioch that the believers were first called Christians”? The word Christian means little Christ, and something about this multi-layered, overflowing culture of sharing seemed so distinctly like Jesus himself that people gave the Christians their enduring name. 

I’ve seen a lot of sharing here at First UMC. Y’all are a generous people.

You share your lives with each other, telling your stories, opening your homes. You share your spiritual gifts with each other, praying and encouraging and teaching. You share your material resources with one another, giving food to the pantry, giving tithes to the church. You share in simple acts of service: vacuuming, cooking, trimming trees. And so much more.

This weekend, we had youth and adults here for an overnight retreat called Poky Rally. Participants came from Pocatello, Idaho Falls, Twin Falls, Boise, and other places. Each person here came to share themselves with others and to be shared with. Connections were made across artificial boundaries – denomination, congregation, city. We really are linked by love to one another.

What strikes me about Barnabas is that “when he arrived and saw the evidence of God’s blessing, he was filled with joy.” His first gift, besides going in the first place, was to simply say Yes. Yes, God is moving here, I see it and affirm it. Yes, these are my new siblings, because wherever the Spirit of the Lord is, there’s my family. Thanks be to God!

Keep going, church. Keep going in the way of generosity. Sharing your time, your stories, your resources, your Yeses. God wants to move among us in power in this time of great need and uncertainty for many in our community. May we continue to gather, to worship and pray, to share together at the Table, and to give.

In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen. 

Generosity, Part 2: Giving honors Jesus (Luke 8:1-3 & John 12:1-8)

Generosity, Part 2: Giving Honors Jesus

November 2, 2025

Luke 8:1-3 & John 12:1-8

By: Pastor Mike Conner

***

The word for ‘saints’ in both Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament, and Greek, the language of the New, comes from the adjective “holy.” Literally, saints are “holy ones.” And being holy means being set apart for a special purpose, being sacred.

Some saints are simply made by God. There come times when God needs a certain kind of person, and God breaks through directly to claim them. How else do you explain a person like Paul, who carried the Gospel to the Gentiles; or Francis of Assisi, who took a vow of poverty in an era when the Church was bloated with riches; or John Wesley, who sought solidarity with the masses of factory workers in newly industrialized England; or Martin Luther King Jr, who planted his dream for an end of poverty and racism in the memory of our own nation. Some saints are raised up, to borrow a phrase from the book of Esther, “for such a time as this” (Esther 4:14). But I believe that this is the exception rather than the rule.

Most saints are ordinary people working ordinary jobs in ordinary communities. You might be rubbing shoulders with some of them right now. What distinguishes these saints is that, in the midst of their so-called ordinary lives, they have fallen in love with Jesus and become captivated by his ministry. Jesus, to these saints, is so good, so sweet, so true and trustworthy, that he and his concerns become the preeminent priority of their own hearts. By ‘his concerns’ I mean Jesus’ special love for the socially vulnerable, the wounded and grieving, the written-off, the stranger. Such unequivocal commitment to Christ among “the least of these” is so rare that these ‘ordinary saints’ feel magnetic, dense, beautiful. They strike us as being apart – not by perfection or fame, but by love.

On this All Saints’ Sunday, we are going to spend a moment with a few early servants of Jesus – Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Susanna, and Mary of Bethany – who loved Jesus and his ministry profoundly. These are the women who accompanied Jesus from the start and stuck with him to the end – even beyond the end when they became the first witnesses of his resurrection. We must confess that they have been undervalued in mainstream Christian history and tradition. But, thankfully, Luke gives them, and other women, too, a robust place in his Gospel.

At the beginning of chapter 8, Luke offers this snapshot of Jesus’ ministry: “Soon afterward [Jesus] went on through one town and village after another, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. The twelve were with him…” (Lk 8:1). And this is how most of us are accustomed to imagining it: Jesus on the move, preaching, with his twelve male disciples. Yet Luke adds, perhaps to our surprise: “The twelve were with him, as well as some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities…who ministered to them out of their own resources” (Lk 8:1-3). Here we have a fuller picture: men and women, proclamation and healing, Jesus taking care of people and people taking care of Jesus.

Luke names some of these ministers: “Mary Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out. Joanna, wife of Herod’s steward Chuza. Susanna, and many others.” Jesus had cured them “of evil spirits and sicknesses” (Lk 8:1), and now they are among his companions.

That’s why they’re with him. First, they had gone to him for healing. Now they go with him to care for him, to make sure that others can experience what they experienced. They and others like them went with Jesus so that they might minister to him out of their own resources. One of the cultural assumptions about women in those days was that they didn’t have resources of their own. Everything ‘really’ belonged to their fathers, husbands, or sons. And the only viable role of a woman was to bear children, raise a family, and keep house.

But Jesus treated women as equals, counted their gifts as really coming from them. The word used here for “resources” is clearly material: possessions, funds. Joanna seems to be a woman with rather unique access to economic power; her husband, Chuza, manages Herod’s household and finances. But resources, the things one has accumulated, might also mean personal connections, stories, or spiritual gifts like wisdom, hospitality, and prayer.

These women, already considered second-class citizens, had also been afflicted by demons and sicknesses, driven even further to the fringes of their communities.

But not too far for Jesus.

Not even Mary Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out.

He met them, and he helped them; now they help him. It’s that simple.

Their service is a response of gratitude for his love. And they’re also confident in what his ministry can bring to others like them in their communities.

They have firsthand experience of it. It excites and animates them.

They want to support it.

Jesus empowered women and welcomed their children – and they loved him for it.

Jesus met the people where they actually were, not where he thought they ought to be – and they loved him for it.

He built fellowship with everyone, “sinners and tax collectors,” fishermen and soldiers – and they loved him for it.

He understood that people needed daily bread as much as they needed eternal life – and they loved him for it.

And Jesus was able to keep paying attention to others for free because there were people alongside him supporting the vision.

How marvelous! How wonderful!

And my song shall ever be:

How marvelous! How wonderful!

Is my Savior’s love for me!1

If the women named in Luke chapter 8 show us one aspect of the saints, that they, having been touched by Jesus’ love, commit to go with him and support his ongoing work day by day, then Mary of Bethany, whose story is told in John chapter 12, shows us another aspect.

She offers an example of spontaneous extravagance, giving to Jesus her very best gift without reservation, simply because the moment called for it, was elevated by it, and because it honored him.

Sensing the nearness of his betrayal, arrest, and death, Jesus sought out the company of his friends in the town of Bethany, not far from Jerusalem. He needed respite, and when he knocked on their door, it was flung wide for him. They prepared a meal; they gathered company. They lavished love on the Suffering Servant. Though it might sound surprising, this is love that Jesus needed – and even that need of his was part of his redeeming work.

He had to be like us in this way, including in our need for help, so that he could understand what we go through from the inside out. Before his ministry ever began, Jesus was tempted by Satan in the Judean wilderness, and he refused to turn stones into bread for himself. Jesus’ “weakness” made space for those around him to come into their purpose, to give of themselves, to participate.

At that dinner party in Bethany something unforgettable happened.

“I Stand Amazed in the Presence,” refrain.

Mary came before Jesus carrying a jar of pure, costly perfume, and in one great sweeping motion poured its contents onto his feet. Immediately, a woody, spicy fragrance erupted into the air, invading every nose and overpowering every other sensation. “The house was filled with the fragrance of her perfume.” The moment and every subsequent memory of it was suffused by the effects of her gift. A pound of perfume is a lot of perfume. Many years later, getting even the slightest whiff of it would transport those present back to that night in Bethany.

And, as with Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Susannah, Mary of Bethany offered this gift to Jesus because she loved him. She was with him because she had first come to him. She had come to him when her brother, Lazarus, had died, a story told in John chapter 11. She had asked for his help. She had shed sacred tears in his presence. And he, too, had wept in compassion and shared her grief. Then he had raised Lazarus back to life.

Now, Lazarus is reclining at the table with Jesus, and in response to this wholly unexpected communion of friends, something she had though was lost forever, Mary brings her very best gift, and pours all of it out.

Were the whole realm of nature mine,

that were an offering far too small.

Love so amazing, so divine,

demands my soul, my life, my all.

The great Swiss theologian Karl Barth once wrote, “It is clear that this deed of Mary’s describes the life of the apostles… [T]his is what is to take place in the world through their life—the whole house is to be filled with the odour [sic] of the ointment.”

“When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” verse 4.

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, II.2, 462.

In other words, the Church ought to be filling the atmosphere of its community with signs and sensations and memories of unforgettable love. And the way that we begin to do that is by ministering to Jesus out of our own resources.

So what does that mean, exactly?

It means supporting Jesus where he has promised to be: in his Body, the Church; and in “the least of these” – the hungry and houseless, the sick and incarcerated.

When we provide out of our own resources for the community of faith, we are providing for him. When we serve the most vulnerable in our world, we are serving him.

And these two avenues of support are not really separated from one another, because who are we, if not a people who have been met by his love?

What has Jesus done for you?

Has he forgiven you?

Has he embraced you? Has he stuck by you through the uncertainty of change or the agony of your grief?

Has he lifted you up and given you a purpose, written you in when everyone else had written you off?

Has he scattered your accusers, brought you into community where you can be your authentic self?

Has he freed you from debt, from addiction, from isolation, from hatred?

Has he gone with you through the valley of the shadow death, and kept you from fear and from harm?

Has he given you a place to exercise your desire for justice and peace, grounded in a sacred vision of the meaningfulness of every life?

What has Jesus done for you?

We are his Church when we can answer this. We are his saints when we respond to what he has done with what we can do.

We must keep holding space for others who have not yet met this unconditional love, and we must keep refining our ways of sharing it. May it be our delightful duty to support him out of our own resources, for his goodness has made its claim on our life and its energies. And may our service contain both the patience and the spontaneity of love.

I surrender all,

I surrender all,

All to Thee, my blessed Savior,

I surrender all.4

In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit: Amen.

“I Surrender All,” refrain.

Prayer for All Saints

By Gracie Morbitzer of Modern Saints

How blessed we are to have all you holy folks there for us

to learn about and to lean on.

How blessed we are to hear of your failures,

your triumph,

your humanness along the way.

How blessed we are to have your company

through any kind of trial,

for any type of intention.

How blessed we are to be inspired by your hope,

amazed by your love,

challenged by your diversity,

comforted by your company.

Be with us as we continue your work

and strive to create our own change

with our own talents and gifts,

just as you did –

and may we join you at the end of the day.

Amen.

Luke 8:1-3, New Living Translation

1 Soon afterward Jesus began a tour of the nearby towns and villages, preaching and announcing the Good News about the Kingdom of God. He took his twelve disciples with him, 2 along with some women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases. Among them were Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons; 3 Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod’s business manager; Susanna; and many others who were contributing from their own resources to support Jesus and his disciples.

John 12:1-8, New Living Translation

1 Six days before the Passover celebration began, Jesus arrived in Bethany, the home of Lazarus—the man he had raised from the dead. 2 A dinner was prepared in Jesus’ honor. Martha served, and Lazarus was among those who ate with him. 3 Then Mary took a twelve-ounce jar of expensive perfume made from essence of nard, and she anointed Jesus’ feet with it, wiping his feet with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance.

4 But Judas Iscariot, the disciple who would soon betray him, said, 5 “That perfume was worth a year’s wages. It should have been sold and the money given to the poor.” 6 Not that he cared for the poor—he was a thief, and since he was in charge of the disciples’ money, he often stole some for himself.

7 Jesus replied, “Leave her alone. She did this in preparation for my burial. 8 You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me.”

Giving Flows From Grace (Luke 18:9-14, Luke 19:1-10)

Giving Flows From Grace

October 26, 2025

Luke 18:9-14 & Luke 19:1-10

By: Pastor Mike Conner

***

Today is the beginning of our annual stewardship season and pledge drive. Every fall, our church leaders consider our needs and dreams for the upcoming year as they craft a budget. But to do that work responsibly, they need some indication of how we all plan to financially support our life together. So, we make commitments, or pledges, naming the amount of money we intend to give next year. You’ll be receiving a Commitment Card in the mail in the upcoming weeks for that very purpose, and we’re going to offer those as an act of worship on Sunday, November 23rd. Between now and then, to help each of us invite God’s Spirit into our decision making, I’ll be preaching a series of sermons on generosity and exploring some of the ways that giving is essential to Jesus’ way of loving God and loving neighbor.

Let’s start with the story Jesus told about a Pharisee and a tax collector: “He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt” (18:9). Okay, so we know right away that a nasty comparison game was playing our around Jesus. I’m holier than you, because… I’m closer to God than you, because… (We’ve never experienced anything like that in churches, have we?)

“Because,” the Pharisee says, “I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all my income. So thank you, God, that I’m not like other people; especially not like that guy over there.” That guy, of course, being one of those deplorable tax collectors. Meanwhile, that evil sinner was having a moment of real authentic connection with God. He’s recognizing that something isn’t right in his life, and he’s not thinking about anyone else at all. He’s pleading with God for mercy. He’s having a moment of humility and remorse.

The first and obvious lesson here is that a spirit of judgmental comparison does not belong in God’s house. That’s where they were: in God’s house, the Jerusalem Temple. As members of the Body of Christ, we are God’s house, and a spirit of judgmental comparison doesn’t belong here among us, either. We especially have to guard against that spirit when we engage in spiritual practices, disciplines, or habits -- things like fasting, tithing, reading the Bible, serving, or contemplation -- which help us grow in our faith but sometimes become performative and rigid and an insidious source of pride.

Obviously that judgmental spirit could creep into a time of communal discernment about giving. How does my giving compare to everyone else’s? Am I giving more than my fair share? Am I going to be judged because I can only give right now and a modest amount? That whole comparison game is a pitfall that we want to avoid.

But here’s the trap of Jesus’ parable! The deeper reinforcement of its message. The minute we say to ourselves, Wow, I’m not like that Pharisee at all! I would never judge anyone like that. Thank you, God, that I’m one of the nonjudgemental ones -- well, you see.

Jesus shows us that we can never really know what someone else’s inner disposition or motivation is when they come to worship, so we shouldn’t try to guess it or judge it. Instead, like the tax collector beating his chest, we should focus on having an authentic encounter with the living God and responding faithfully to that encounter.

A comparative spirit does not belong in God’s house. But what matters a lot is how each of us responds when Jesus comes to be a guest in our house. That’s what the story of Zaccheaus drives home for us:

Giving is a natural response to the presence of Jesus and his community in our lives.

Jesus was passing through the town of Jericho on his way to Jerusalem. A wealthy chief tax collector named Zacchaeus heard that Jesus was coming and wanted to see him. But he was a short man and didn’t want to jostle for space in the crowd, so he ran ahead of everyone else and clambered up a tree to get a sightline.

Zaccheaus was fundamentally separated from his community. His ‘short stature’ was both a literal description and a metaphorical acknowledgment of how people thought about him. He wasn’t ‘highly regarded,’ we might say, by his neighbors in Jericho. Tax collectors typically weren’t. They were often seen as betrayers of their Jewish communities, since they often worked with or for Rome’s occupying forces. It was also assumed that they were dishonest, keeping back some of what they collected for themselves. If that was true of an ordinary tax collector, how much more for a chief tax collector!

Zacchaeus wants to be near Jesus. That’s good! But he holds himself apart from his community, sets himself above them so that they can’t touch him, and that means he can only get so close to Jesus. For Zacchaeus, the issues at the heart of this separateness and distance are financial. His books are shut tight to these people. He can’t be one of them.

A lot of times, what we withhold from our community and what we withhold from God are related. And that means that when we are keeping a distance from our community on some axis of our lives, we are likely limiting what are we are able to experience of God’s joy, freedom, and power in that very same area. I’ll engage with my faith community over here, but not when it comes to my marriage, or my career, or my leisure, or my addictions. I really do want to be close to Jesus. It’s a sincere desire. But up a tree I go in order to see without being seen.

Ah, but Jesus is so kind.

Jesus always wants to overcome the distance between us and himself and put us in right relationship to our communities. He does not allow Zaccheus to remain stuck in his separation. The crowd has eyes on Jesus. Jesus has eyes on Zaccheus. He stops right at the base of that tree, looks up, and says, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today” (19:5). Your house. The doors of this house, a place of material abundance but spiritual secrecy and staleness, get thrown open to welcome Jesus!

Jesus taps into Zacchaeus’s true longing, not just to see him but to know him. And to act in that deep desire means climbing down the tree and getting back on the same level as everyone else. Jesus gives Zacchaeus the opportunity to do that, and Zacchaeus takes it.

This moment triggers two reactions. The crowd starts complaining: “Hey, Jesus has gone to stay with a sinful man!” We’ve already seen this prejudice against tax collectors, but maybe there’s some truth to it here. Zacchaeus was holding himself apart, after all. He knew something wasn’t right. But for that very reason Jesus singled him out. The people of Jericho have a legitimate grievance against their neighbor. Let’s deal with it!

Then came Zaccheus’s reaction. He hurried down, happily welcomed Jesus, and changed his posture toward his community: “Look, I’ll give half of my possessions to the poor, Lord. And if I have extorted anything from anyone, I’ll pay back four times as much.” He is immediately and profoundly transformed. He commits to repairing relationships broken by money. He even opens himself up for accusation. The guy who had climbed up a tree to get away from people who would never in a million years get a look at his tax logs now welcomes them to come knock on his door and say, Hey, I think you wronged me somewhere along the line.

Then Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.”

This is salvation for Zaccheus. Not welcoming Jesus into his heart but into his home. Not a confession of faith, not signing on to a doctrinal system, but returning to an authentic encounter with his community through a transformed relationship with his possessions and his money. Jesus found him tucked up there among the foliage of the tree, hiding away from his neighbors. I love this story because it demonstrates in the most concrete terms what salvation really means: coming down and coming near; opening up and welcoming in; being responsive to God and accountable to the people around us.

When Jesus comes into our homes, our lives, our stories, we are drawn toward community, and our hands loosen on our stuff. It just happens. I’ve experienced it, and I’ve seen it over and over again in many of you. When Jesus decides to stay with us, when he says today is the day I’m coming to your place, we become aware of the ways that our posture toward our resources can either divide us from him and others or unite us with him and others. This is part of the thrill and the pain of Christianity. It’s never only How are my resources related to my faith? Never only How are my resources related to my community? Both questions must be lived at the same time.

Friends today is the day of salvation. Jesus wants to stay with you and with me today. And he takes the initiative; he knows us by name; he stops right where we are and fixes us in his loving gaze. He takes us and our desires seriously: come down, I want to be with you! And all the rest unfolds from that.

Jesus never said to Zaccheus, Give away half your estate.

He doesn’t say to us, Tithe 10% of your take-home pay.

He never mailed out a commitment card.

These things are good and wise and helpful, but they are ways of responding to a more fundamental shift at the level of the heart. They are happy responses we make in and for God’s house, because God has first entered into ours. And with him comes the congregation, the crowd, the poor and poor in spirit.

At the heart of generosity is God’s being near to us in Jesus Christ, the free and unearned encounter with unconditional love that the Church calls grace. Grace releases, grace repairs, grace reconciles. And to experience its full power in our lives, we have to -- I hope we want to -- come down to where everyone else is and open our lives to each other.

So let’s agree right now. Let’s agree that we are not going to fill God’s house with a comparative spirit. It would’ve been great if, in Jesus’ parable, the Pharisee and the tax collector had talked to each other the way that Jesus and Zaccheus talked to each other, because the Pharisee could have probably helped the tax collector think through what to do with those feelings of remorse, and the tax collector could have challenged the Pharisee’s binary thinking about who’s worthy and good and unworthy and bad.

But as it happened one was locked in his pride, and one was stuck in his sorrow. And while Jesus does say that the tax collector “went home justified rather than the other” because his prayer was genuine and humble, it does seem like some potential for building community got left on the table.

Community. That’s what this is about. The kind of community Jesus can make among those who are grateful for his love. A place of abundance, of sharing, of sacrifice, of humble and living faith. As we enter into this season of financial discernment, may we each ask God to show us how to make space for him in our house, for the sake of all who enter his house.

In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit: Amen.

As a Little Child (Luke 18:15-17)

As a Little Child

October 12, 2025

Luke 18:15-17

By: Pastor Mike Conner

***

What do we know about the children in this story? It’s a crucial question, because Jesus explicitly says that in order to enter God’s new creation and beloved community, we have to receive grace “as a little child” (Lk 18:17).

I’ve looked again and again at these three verses, and the only thing that I think we can say for certain about these kids is that “people were bringing [them] to [Jesus]” (Lk 18:15). The infants and the young children are carried to Jesus with purpose. They aren’t just carted along because their parents want to go see Jesus. They aren’t just tolerated, there in the crowds to be seen and not heard. For some community members in that region between Galilee and Samaria where Jesus is traveling, the children are the why, the point of the journey. They are brought to Jesus to be touched, to be blessed and prayed for. What we know about the children is that they were carried or cajoled to the one who loves them unconditionally. 

I wonder if Jesus is saying that each of us needs to be brought lovingly to him if we are to enter God’s work in the world. Each of us enters the kingdom of God, perhaps, when we humble ourselves to living an interdependent life, when we allow ourselves to lean on others, to be helped by others. Each of us is who we are and where we are, in large art, because of others -- ancestors, parents, mentors, teachers, friends, coaches, therapists, support groups, spiritual directors, pastors, even strangers.

There is no such thing as a lone wolf Christianity; having a pick-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality and a vibrant faith are incompatible. After all, the word for faith in the New Testament, pistis, literally means trust. Trust means depending on something bigger and stronger than yourself to carry you along. Trust is the foundation posture of following Jesus. 

Luke’s placement of this story in his Gospel is revealing. It exposes our resistance to mutuality. Right after Jesus has instructed the disciples to imitate a child’s comfort with being carried, a rich ruler appears on the scene to quiz Jesus about the qualifications for salvation and what he has to do to earn it (Lk 18:18-29). For all we know, Jesus could still have a child in his arms or bouncing on his knees! 

Jesus tells the rich man that he must keep the ten commandments. The ruler affirms that he’s kept then since his youth. Now, this is interesting. The ruler uses the word νεότης (neotēs), which means youth or boyhood. That’s a different word from those Luke uses to describe the children and infants being brought to Jesus. The ruler is referring to a later stage of human development, a time when he internalized a kind of personal scorekeeping. From the days of his boyhood when we could start doing things for himself, measuring his religiosity and monitoring his decisions, he’s cultivated an impeccable religiosity, and garnered wealth and leadership, too.

So, Jesus’ next move is to disarm the man, to test his willingness to humbly trust in others. “Sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me” (Lk 18:22, NLT). Give up your achievements, your security, your autonomy. Follow me. Trust me. Then you’ll have eternal life. Jesus is asking this ruler to let himself be carried. He’s inviting him back beyond the malformation of his boyhood into true childhood, into spiritual infancy:  “But,” Luke writes, “when the man heard this he became very sad, for he was very rich” (Lk 18:23, NLT). It can be painful, when we’re used to a life organized by merit and rules and accumulation, to be invited to empty ourselves so that we can carry and be carried.

We aren’t told what the rich ruler ultimately did with his sadness, but Jesus’ point about the children is strengthened by this contrast. To experience freedom, we must not trust in ourselves but in the community that carries us, because it’s from that place of availability and simplicity that Jesus’ can touch us. 

Physical touch was very often how Jesus healed people. In Luke’s Gospel alone, he touches lepers to cleanse them of leprosy (5:13); he touches a widow’s dead son in the village of Nain and raises him back to life (7:14); on the night of his betrayal and arrest, Jesus even touches the slave of the high priest in the garden of Gethsemane, healing his ear, which had been slashed off by a defensive disciple with a sword (22:51). Throughout his ministry, crowds of people constantly tried to touch him and experience his power (6:19). Famously, a woman who for twelve years had failed to find a cure for her chronic bleeding pressed through a crowd to touch the hem of Jesus’ garment (8:44-47). And when she did, she was instantly healed. 

Jesus wants to help us. Jesus wants to bless us.

Jesus wants to give us a second chance, a third chance, a thousandth chance. He wants to free us from addiction. He wants to give us boldness in the face of fear, compassion in the face of cruelty, abundance in the face of scarcity. He wants to bind us to a community, take hold of our time and our talents for his glory, and wipe away our shame.

But for any of this to happen, we have to be touched by his grace. We have to be available, reachable, open to receiving something that we cannot earn or wrestle from life for ourselves.

We have come to a place or spiritual poverty where we can, with either sadness or joy, it doesn’t really matter: “Jesus, I can’t do this on my own. I need to be carried. I need to be helped. I need your healing touch.” 

And here’s what’s mysterious and wonderful: When we pray that prayer of surrender, or another prayer like it, when we enter into a way of live with others where we get to carry and be carried, we commune with Jesus himself. We aren’t just obeying him when we lean on others, we are spending time with him. Let me explain. 

The first verse in this story references infants. “People were bringing even infants to him” (8:15, NRSV), Luke writes. That word in Greek is βρέφος. It’s different from the words Luke uses in verses 16 and 17, variations of the Greek παιδίον, which means young child. Brephos indicates a brand-new baby, sometimes even a baby still in the womb. No other Gospel writer uses this word anywhere in the story of Jesus. It’s unique to Luke.  

And do you know where it shows up elsewhere in Luke, in stories also unique to his Gospel? In the Christmas stories! John the Baptist and Jesus are each called a brephos. John is called an “infant” in the story of pregnant teenage Mary visiting pregnant elder Elizaeth. John “leaps” in Elizabeth’s womb at the sound of Mary’s greeting (Lk 1:41, 44). Jesus is called a brephos, a baby, in the story of his birth, when he is wrapped in cloths and laid in a manger. The angels tell the shepherds to look for this holy infant. 

Jesus himself -- the Son of God, the Lord of the cosmos, the one who forgives our sins and erases our shame and empowers us for works of mercy and justice -- he was once a dependent baby. He needed to be carried, first in the womb of Mary and later in her arms. He cried to be fed, to be changed, to be held. At eight days old, he was lifted up by Simeon in the temple and blessed. As a toddler he was carried by his father Joseph into Egypt so be saved from the violence of Herod. And as a thirty-year-old man, still living from that foundational posture of dependence, he entered the waters of the Jordan, allowed his cousin John to hold him and baptize him, and he received the proclamation from heaven of the Father’s love, and the anointing of the Holy Spirit as his source of power. 

He knew unconditional trust. It was his way in the world. And it’s the way that he calls us to as well. 

This is not a coincidental linguistic connection between the infant Christ and the children who, many years later, were then being brought to him for a blessing. Jesus is saying that we all get a little help somewhere along the way, and that, whether we are helping or being helped, serving or being served, carrying or being carried, we are in contact with him. He has united it all to his divinity and dignified it.

What a rebuke of our society that scorns those who ask for help. We’ve made it a shameful thing, needing to be carried from time to time. So those in power are cutting SNAP, cutting Medicaid, and sending soldiers into cities to abduct the most vulnerable. We expand national budget for bombs while forcing more and more people into poverty.

But what a rebuke also, sometimes, of the Church, of Christians! Remember, it was the disciples who spoke sternly to the parents bringing those babies to Jesus. We sometimes internalize that bootstraps mentality, that love for autonomy and insulation from the plight of others. Our love has limits. We’ll welcome, we’ll donate, but when it comes to carrying someone else, that’s too much! Or when it comes to needing to be carried, well, we could never ask for that! We don’t want to be a burden! 

But, my friends, if it was good enough for Jesus to carry and be carried, it ought to be good enough for us. And though it’s easier for us to think of being Christlike when we are helping others, it is also Christlike when we ask those around us, especially those in the Body of Christ, for help. 

At the very beginning of the human story, when God first formed Adam from the clay and filled his lungs with the breath of life, God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone” (Gen 2:18, NLT).

Before anything was broken in creation, before deception and violence and shame ever entered the picture, there was still one moment when something wasn’t quite right. It was the moment when the first person was a solitary. So God put Adam to sleep -- a condition of utmost vulnerability. And God took a rib from him -- a sign of inherent incompleteness. And God took that rib and formed Eve from it -- the beginnings of an interdependent community of partners, helpers. Myth or not, it’s the Bible’s way of telling us that we are never meant to journey alone.

As we take some time to reflect on our own stories and who has carried us, may God break the hardness of our pride and give us the soft heart of humility.

May we become like the infants and those who brought them -- openhanded, either to be hefted up onto a hip, or available to reach for someone else.

Amen. 

MERCY AND PATIENCE (1 Timothy 1:13-17)

Mercy and Patience

September 14, 2025

1 Timothy 1:13-17

By: Pastor Mike Connor

***

This week, I attended a conference in Boise co-hosted by the Interfaith Alliance and the Western States Center. These two pro-democracy organizations, one national and one regional, brought together about 40 faith leaders from the Northwest to discuss the dangers that Christian Nationalism poses to our social fabric. The name of the conference was “Countering Hate,” and as I strategized with leaders from different faiths about how to resist the incursion of hatred in our contexts, I was proud to be representing a congregation committed to a practice of active kindness. I also felt affirmed about the inner work we’ve been engaged in all summer, the work of breaking the enemy-making cycle in our hearts through prayer, surrender, and love. It’s deeply important for the moment we are in. 

It was a weighty week to be gathered around the theme of “Countering Hate”: the 24th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attack; the breaking news about shootings in Colorado and Utah; the memorial service for Major General Joseph McNeil, one of the Greensboro Four, who, as a college student in 1960, led a sit-in at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina that catalyzed a mass movement of nonviolent sit-ins throughout the South and propelled the Civil Rights Movement to the height of its powers. The story of our collective brokenness is an old story, but so is the story of our collective struggle for peace, justice, and dignity for all. It was good to be doubling down on that work with Catholics, Evangelicals, Muslims, Jews, Latter-day Saints, and others. 

During the closing interfaith service at the conference, a participant offered a reading by Howard Thurman. Thurman was an African American Christian mystic, writer, and teacher who supported many of the twentieth century’s Civil Rights leaders from behind the scenes as a spiritual director. The words of his that were shared resonate with what I want to talk about today. He says, “There is a quiet courage that comes from an inward spring of confidence in the meaning and significance of life. Such courage is an underground river, flowing far beneath the shifting events of one’s experience, keeping alive a thousand little springs of action.”

To break the enemy-making cycle and be peacemakers in the world, we must have access to this ‘quiet courage.’ According to Thurman, such courage flows in us, springing from an unshakeable sense of life’s importance. The courage makes itself known, over the course of a life, in repeated acts of solidarity, hospitality, witness, and generosity. To connect this insight with words we’ve already meditated on this morning,

“Planting trees early in spring,

we make a place for birds to sing

in time to come. How do we know?

They are singing here now.

There is no other guarantee

that singing will ever be.”

We must be committed to love for the long-haul. The work of building relationships, building trust, building movements is slow, patient work.  The fruit of our committed loving grows only in God’s time. We’ll burn out if we only have immediate relief or immediate ‘results’ in view; there has to be a sense that we’re participating in a hopeful work that spans generations. 

But God’s timing is a funny thing. From the perspective of ministry, the road is long and we have to follow a God who is, as Paul describes, “the King of the ages” (1 Tim 1:17). Each spring, you plant more trees. Patience is the principal virtue. But the transformation of our hearts, being claimed and appointed to this work by God’s mercy, that is something that can happen in a moment. The scripture says, “Today is the day of salvation” (2 Cor 6:2). Another says, “Don’t let the sun go down on your anger” (Eph 4:26). And in this passage from 1 Timothy, Paul says “formerly [I was] a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence. But I received mercy…” (1:13). Such a disruption and shift in direction, what the Bible calls repentance and faith, or death and resurrection, can happen today -- for you, for me, for us -- if we want it to.

Paul speaks both of God’s mercy and God’s patience, and he sees them as connected. “I received mercy,” he says, “so that in me, as the foremost [sinner], Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience as an example to those who would come to believe in him for eternal life” (1 Tim 1:16). Mercy seems to understood by Paul as the immediate intervention of God’s grace in our lives, while patience is the aspect of God’s grace that such mercy reveals. When we receive mercy, we become aware of how patient God has been with us. God has been bearing with our faults, gently moving us through a process of re-creation, toward a moment of lasting commitment.

And being a recipient both of God’s long, loving patience and God’s immediate, radical mercy established Paul as an example for others. The Greek word Paul uses there for “example” means an outline, a sketch, a summary statement. Someone should be able to look at Paul and understand some things about God. His story became an object lessons: Look at me, and see how good God is. Take heart! Your life can change in a moment, AND your love can stretch out over the long road ahead. I’m living proof! 

In his New Testament letters like the one we’re considering today, written to his protégé Timothy, Paul occasionally tells us about his conversion in these stark contrasts: formerly I was this, now I am that. The actual event of what he experienced is passed down to us by Luke in the book of Acts 9. Paul, an educated and powerful Jewish leader, passionately persecuted the earliest communities of Christians in and around Jerusalem. He authorized their imprisonment, torture, and execution. One day, while he was going about this work, he was blinded by a flash of light from heaven and heard the voice of Jesus, who told Paul to stop persecuting him and his people and to start loving him and his people.

Paul was blinded for three days; he fasted and prayed until a Jesus follower named Ananias, came to where Paul was hiding out, laid hands on him, and prayed for him. When Ananias did this, Paul regained his sight; no longer “a man of violence,” he was a man who had “received mercy.” He was touched by the overflowing grace of God. He learned experientially -- which is the only way any of us can learn it -- “that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Tim 1:15).

Paul went on to organize many of the first Christian congregations. And the letters he wrote to teach, encourage, and correct these early believers now form about a quarter of the New Testament scriptures. This was work for the long-haul, requiring great patience. It cost Paul a great deal of comfort -- eventually it cost him his life. But it was work that began in a moment of mercy: he was ignorant but then he knew; he was blind but then he saw; he was lost but then he was found. 

I’d like you to take your worship bulletin and turn it to the front page. The graphic there is an artistic rendering of Paul. The painter, Gracie Morbitzer, who works out of her Modern Saints studio in Columbus, Ohio, wrote this artist statement to go with the image:

“Bearing some scars and an exhausted expression from his tireless work and travels, I still wanted St. Paul to have a gleam in his eye, representing the mission that was more important to him than his life and freedom.”

To be tireless in the work, yet still keep the gleam your eye. That’s the grace of patience, first experienced from God, now offered as a witness and a gift to others. 

Gracie Morbitzer also wrote a prayer to accompany personal reflection on her image of Paul. The prayer says this:

“It is so scary to have a shaking up of our entire worldview and all our beliefs. We feel we have no solid ground and wonder if we’ve done anything right, and what to do now. Help us to know that changing beliefs can be for the better, even when scary, and we will feel solid again. Amen.”

The cataclysmic changes that God’s love sets in motion in our hearts and minds and habits; that’s the grace of mercy. God the Creator is also our Re-Creator. God can claim us in a moment and then appoint us to service for a lifetime. 

I think that God wants us each to have a story that serves as an example to others. God’s love and grace are always meant to be for both our good and the good of the others. Paul came to realize, on the other side of mercy, just how immeasurably patient God had been with him. He had been so arrogant, so committed to his understanding of the world. His certainty and pride drove him to commit acts of violence, to exclude others from the community of faith. And all that time, God had been stretching out his purposes for Paul, stretching out his love, stretching out his grace, until finally there was a breakthrough.

With God, there can always be a breakthrough. We shouldn’t test God’s patience, but we can certainly trust it, and come to celebrate it. God will not forsake us no matter how far we wander. God will pursue us, call to us, show us mercy, and give us better work to do. 

Having experienced divine patience, Paul put it into practice in his ministry from that point forward. Elsewhere he names patience as one “fruit of the Spirit” (Gal 5:22-23). As a recipient of mercy, as a person appointed to serve a God of Patience, Paul took on the slow work of forming faithful communities. He championed forgiveness, reconciliation, peacemaking, sound teaching, and generosity. He passed on to others what he first received from Jesus. 

That’s what it really comes down to: Often, the very grace that God offers us is what we are best equipped to share with the world. We might all ask: ‘What’s my story? What does it reveal about who God is? When people consider me, what aspects of God’s character to they see? Am I a living example of God’s kindness? Or God’s generosity? Or God’s justice? What about God’s peace, compassion, or gentleness?’

And if you’re not sure, perhaps the invitation for you today is to pray for a breakthrough of mercy, for a transformation of heart. God’s great patience holds you even now: but what if today is the day of salvation? If that’s the case, in the moments that follow as we reflect on our stories, I invite you to simply ask God to meet you with that overflowing grace, to catch up your life in the great unfolding story of love, and to transform your heart and mind. Jesus says, “Ask, at it will be given to you. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened for you.”

Thanks be to God. Amen. 

Questions for group reflection:

• How has my life been changed by knowing, following, and being loved by Jesus

• What is God demonstrating to others about his mercy, patience, and love through my story?

• How might I reflect on my story and celebrate God’s love for me this week?

Prayer in a World of Enemies, #6: The Vastness of God’s Mercy (Ps. 36 & James 1:2-5)

Prayer in a World of Enemies, Part 6:

The Vastness of God’s Mercy

August 31, 2025

Psalm 36 & James 1:2-5

By: Pastor Mike Connor 

***

“The love of God is greater far
than tongue or pen can ever tell;
it goes beyond the highest star,
and reaches to the lowest hell;
the guilty pair, bowed down with care,
God gave His Son to win;
His erring child He reconciled,
and pardoned from his sin.”

Those words were written by German American Frederick Lehman early in the twentieth century for a hymn titled “The Love of God.” Higher than the highest star; lower than the lowest hell; reconciling, pardoning, and beyond description: the love of God. I used to sing that hymn during my college years in Indiana, a land of windblown open space. Lehman wrote it after crossing an ocean from Europe to America as a child and growing up in the vast Midwestern flatness of Iowa.

With its praise of a divine mercy reaching to the heavens and divine judgements deep as the seas, Psalm 36 pried the memory of Lehman’s hymn loose. Psalm and hymn together affirm the all-encompassing nature of God’s love. Like the bear-hunting family in the children’s book, who trapse through field and mud and water and snow in their quest, when it comes to God’s love, we can’t go over it and we can’t go under it. We have to go…? That’s right: through it.

Which is at one and the same time a wonderful, generous mystery and a terrifying prospect. God’s love is never something we have to earn, that’s the generosity of it. And it never leaves us unchanged: thus the holy terror!

Here at church this summer we’ve been holding our relationships with our enemies in the light of this great divine love. We’ve seen that God’s love calls us to honestly confess that we have enemies, be they political opponents, persons who’ve done harm to us or the people we love, addictions, or other personal and systemic sins. And when we’re honest with God about our enemies and what they stir up in us -- anger and sadness, grudges and fantasies of retribution -- all our clogged energy starts to flow and be transformed into a greater dependence on God.

Naming and then praying against our enemies brings us to a point of surrender, a condition of spiritual poverty. All we can do that does us any good is to ask the Holy Spirit to help us break the enemy-making cycle through a power and a vision greater than our own. That is when something tectonic shifts in our hearts, and we receive the grace of being able to pray for our enemies.

We live in a redeemed cosmos. Heaven and earth have been reconciled to God through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As Paul writes in the New Testament letter of Ephesians, “For Christ himself has brought peace to us. He united Jews and Gentiles into one people when, in his own body on the cross, he broke down the wall of hostility that separated us” (Eph 2:14, NLT). Seeing the reconciliation of enemies in his day-to-day ministry, Paul came to realize the scope of God’s salvation. He articulates his view in his letter to the Colossians: “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in [Jesus], and through him to reconcile everything to himself, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross” (Col 1:19-20, CSB).

Because of the peace between God and humankind that Jesus has secured for us, we can experience transformation of our relationships with our enemies. We could also say that our openness to that peace is a sign of our participation in God’s kingdom.

Even long before the days of Jesus and Paul, the Israelite king and poet David, in a moment of piercing perception, sensed that all creation is flooded with God’s love:

[You], Lord, shall save both man and beast.

How excellent is your mercy, O God!

The children of men shall take refuge

under the shadow of your wings.

They shall be satisfied with the plenteousness of your house,

and you shall give them drink from your pleasures

as out of a river.

For with you is the well of life,

and in your light shall we see light.

What a sublime vision. Heights, depths, distances. Salvation of man and beast. God bringing all people under protective cover, feeding them, giving them fresh water to drink. God the source of life and light. Every person and place and moment has access to love’s possibilities.

Like peace. Like transformation in our dealings with our enemies. That transformation can take different forms, depending on who our enemies are. It can look like the actual repair of relationships. Or it can look like offering forgiveness, no longer being ruled by bitterness over harm done in the past. Or it can look like freedom from personal sin, freedom for self-acceptance and newness of life.

God’s expansive love calls us to yield our control and to change.

But it’s not always going to appear or feel like peace is possible. Jesus, who taught us to love our enemies, was not naïve about this. In the great prayer for his disciples that he offers in John chapter 17, Jesus says to God the Father, “I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one” (John 17:15, NRSVUE). Eternally, Jesus prays the Church into the world; we aren’t given any license to forsake it or treat it badly or not cherish it. But we nevertheless need his protection and his sanctification. We are born into a world of ‘us and them,’ tempted by the evil one into the enemy-making cycle. We need to be born again, from above, into the vistas and horizons of empowered love.

At my house, we’ve been watching the 2016 Disney movie Moana. Like, many many times. Moana is set in an ancient Polynesian world and its main characters are the descendants of fearless seafarers. Moana is the daughter of the tribal chief, and she receives a spiritual call from the ocean to go and find the sacred stone heart of her people’s mother island, Te Fiti. When this stone heart was taken one thousand years prior to Moana’s life, the ocean became unsafe, and Moana’s people, gave up life on the open ocean to protect themselves from further tragedy.

Early in the movie, feeling constrained by her peoples’ fear of sailing beyond the reef of their island, Moana sings a song called “How Far I’ll Go”:

See the line where the sky meets the sea?
It calls me
And no one knows, how far it goes
If the wind in my sail on the sea stays behind me
One day I’ll know
If I go there’s just no telling how far I'll go[1]

Later, after Moana discovers the truth about the great navigators and explorers her were people once were and the roots of their present-day fears, her ancestors appear to her in a vision and sing a song called “We Know the Way.”

We set a course to find
A brand new island everywhere we roam
We keep our island in our mind
And when it’s time to find home
We know the way[2]

Those two songs show us two ways of being. Moana’s contemporaries have given themselves over to a self-protectiveness in response to fearing the world, the unknown. This fear is based on fundamental divisions: here and there, us and them. And it denies the heart’s deep craving for something more, something better and more thrilling. But with the help of her grandmother, her ancestors, and the ocean itself, Moana discovers how to live with and from a sacred center: “our island in our mind.” Home is a place to cast off from and return to. But more than that, it’s a knowledge and trust that travels with the people wherever they goes. Because they learn to trust and navigate again.

For Christians, that sacred center is Christ: the gift of God’s very self to us and in us. Christ allows us to be unafraid as we head off into unfamiliar territory, like transforming our relationships to our enemies, like praying for people we disagree with or find loathsome. In a redeemed cosmos, there are always brand-new islands of grace and mercy to discover. So long as we’re searching for them, trusting our center, they rise up to meet us.

“Consider it all joy, brothers and sisters, whenever you fall among trials of various kinds, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. Only let patience have a complete work, so that you may be whole and complete, lacking nothing. But if anyone among you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives to all generously and without reproach, and it will be given to him” (James 1:2-5, my translation and emphasis).

When we are grounded in the redeemed cosmos, James’s counsel to weather difficult things with hope sounds like good news rather than bad news. All experiences become chisels in the hand of God, who sculpts us into people of patience.

Patience trusts the ultimate purposes of grace. Patience endures through the hard work of forgiveness. Patience allows dynamic, even surprising outcomes to take shape. Like, what would it look like for me to pray for that person I don’t like, or to be grieved by their suffering? What would it look like for me to forge a coalition, a better neighborhood, even a chosen family, out of people who are initially at odds with one another?

When you read Psalm 36 one of the most striking things about it is its contrast between the wicked person and God. The wicked one, “flatters himself in his own sight …He imagines mischief upon his bed, / and has set himself in no good way; / neither does he abhor anything that is evil” (Ps 36:2, 4).

The one possessed by evil never moves beyond the fantasies and schemes and wayward desires that constitute his or her inner life. The picture is of a person alone in a room, on a bed, hatching an evil plot. So small and constrained, so disconnected and lifeless.

And we’ve been there, yes? Reduced to doom-scrolling, to passive seething, to profound disconnection?

But it doesn’t have to be that way. There is a whole adventure out there, with Jesus, the one who has redeemed the cosmos, as our center. It’s an adventure of living in God’s world where the light of God shines bright and the wings of God hover over and the house of God has a crowded table.

For my heart, watery metaphors are like medicine: ocean depths of love, the well of life, the river of delights. They remind me of the bigness of God. Pablo Neruda, the twentieth-century Chilean poet, wrote a poem called “the First Sea.” It’s tells of a child whose experience of water had been limited to river travel through dense forest, who comes into contact with the open ocean for the first time. Neruda writes,

…I broke free of my roots.

My country grew in size.

My world of wood split open.

The prison of the forests

opened a green door,

letting in the wave in all its thunder,

and, with the shock of the sea,

my life widened out into space.[3]

My country grew in size. My life widened out.

I wonder: What has a similar world-enlarging effect on you?

Maybe it’s music or novels, city streets or mountaintop views, coalition building or ecumenical worship. Certainly, for all of us, prayer is an ingredient in this wonder.

Whatever makes your heart bigger, your imagination broader, your sense of God’s ‘thereness’ more refined; whatever helps you give others the benefit of the doubt, or tethers you so unshakably to your center that you can be brokenhearted without bitterness, angry without hatred, principled without violence, you must feed your soul with those things.

And! -- when we are at a loss anywhere along the way, all we have to do is ask God for wisdom, and God will grant it, because God is endlessly, lavishly generous. Because God is Jesus, whose prayer we live and labor inside of, whose crucified body unites heaven and earth, and embraces all things.

“Could we with ink the ocean fill

And were the sky of parchment made

Were every tree on earth a quill

And every man a scribe by trade

To write the love of God above

Would drain the ocean dry

Nor could the scroll contain the whole

Though stretched from sky to sky.”

Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift. Amen.

[1] “How Far I’ll Go,” by Lin-Manuel Miranda, © Walt Disney Music Company.

[2] “We Know the Way,” by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Opetaia Tavita Foa'I, © Walt Disney Music Company.

[3] “The First Sea,” in Pablo Neruda, On the Blue Shore of Silence: Poems of the Sea, trans. Alastair Reid (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 12.

Prayer in a World of Enemies, Part 5: Be Strong in the Lord (Ps. 27 & Ephs. 6:10-20)

Prayer in a World of Enemies, Part 5: Be Strong in the Lord

August 24, 2025

Psalm 27 & Ephesians 6:10-20

By: Pastor Mike Connor 

***

Some of y’all probably remember, oh, about two years ago, when Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk were threatening to fight one another in a televised cage match? The two billionaires -- Zuckerberg the CEO of Facebook, now Meta; Musk the CEO of Twitter, now X -- had gotten into a heated virtual argument over Zuckerberg launching a new social media platform to compete directly with X. How did they think they should handle their disagreement? By locking themselves in a cage and beating one another into a pulp. To the Internet’s dismay, the fight never happened (I guess because Zuckerberg knows Brazilian jiu-jitsu, or something?). But their public threats were an example of how deeply engrained the reactive, retributive, ego-fueled cycle of enemy making is in our culture.

Two thousand years ago, when the Apostle Paul wrote that “our struggle is not against blood and flesh,” he was making use of a word, “struggle,” which literally meant “wrestle.” As in physical, man-to-man combat. It’s a word that goes all the way back to the Greek poet Homer, author of The Iliad and The Odyssey, eight hundred years before the life of Jesus.

For as long as we have been telling stories about ourselves in the West, we have been mired in binary thinking: Greeks and Trojans, Christians and heathens, Republicans and Democrats, Musk and Zuckerberg, us and them. Living in these black-and-white stories requires that we have enemies. We must deal with our enemies through a show of strength, dominating others through violence, deception, or social control.

It’s a dog-eat-dog world. Step into the ring. Winner takes all.

But Paul says our struggle -- meaning the wrestling that Christians do -- is not against flesh and blood. It’s not against other people. Remember Jesus’ words to Peter in the Garden of Gethsemane: “Put away your sword,” Jesus told him. “Those who use the sword will die by the sword” (Matt 26:52, NLT). Jesus breaks the cycle of enemy making. He doesn’t consent to that eye-for-an-eye and tooth-for-a-tooth stuff. We wrestle, according to Paul, against entities that are harder to put our finger on, that take a deeper level of awareness and spiritual maturity to detect:
“rulers,” “authorities,” “the cosmic powers of this present darkness,” and “the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”

Depending on their historical contexts, theologies, and prayer practices, Christians after Paul have given these hostile spiritual powers a variety of names. We wrestle against things like demons, the false spirit, ideologies, systemic injustices.

Demons. That’s how the early desert mystics and monks conceived their true enemies. In their writings, they offer counsel on how to guard oneself against a spiritual threat that comes at you from the outside. There was, for example, a spirit of jealousy, a spirit of lust, a spirit of anger, so being tempted in these areas a sign of attack. An evil, spiritual force, working for Satan, was attempting to get in and take hold of the monk’s heart and mind.

      The false spirit. That’s how St Ignatius described the enemy in the 16th century. Ignatius largely internalized and psychologized the ancient framework of spirits. He taught that we live each moment our lives under the influence of the “true spirit” -- God’s, ours -- or the “false spirit.” The true spirit can be known by what Ignatius called consolation: an inner sense of love, connection, and freedom. The “false spirit” can be detected by feelings of desolation, of diminished love, connection, and freedom.

      Ideologies, systemic injustices. These are modern terms, and they stress our sensitivity to the ingrained evils of history and society. Ideologies are basically bad stories. They are unbendable worldviews that demand allegiance and that hold no space for genuine interaction with people of other perspectives. They’re always trying to get their way, serving some at the expense of others. Ideologies can be as big as capitalism, racism, sexism, and Christian nationalism or as small as the story I tell myself about who I definitely am and who others definitely are.

Systemic injustices are structural evils. They bind people in social, economic, and political circumstances that are overly privileged or overly constricted. They also work in tandem with ideologies. Ideologies inspire the creation of structures that give power to some -- the good ones and worthy ones -- and take it from others -- the bad ones and unworthy ones. Importantly, when we’re born and raised in an unjust structure, as we all are at some level, we grow up thinking it’s the “way things are.” We are raised inside an ideology, and it takes work just to name the story that we’ve inherited. 

Demons, the false spirit, ideologies, systemic injustice. These are just some of the ways that Christians have named those spiritual forces of evil that Paul speaks of. They run the gamut from the demonic to the psychological to the political.

But notice, and this is critical: the enemy is not a person. It is a power that possesses the person. These cosmic powers that often go undetected in the ordinary, they grab hold of people and drain their vitality, assault their dignity, and conscript them into harmful causes. The only way for us to enter a wrestling match against these powers without adding to the damage is by putting on God’s armor: belt of truth, breastplate of righteousness, sandals for swiftly spreading peace; shield of faith, helmet of salvation, sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

And notice we do in our spiritual armor. Paul doesn’t tell us to be aggressive, to assert our own way. Rather, he calls us to “stand firm,” to endure until the end.

So, here’s the question for each of us: How can I get to a place where, little by little, I can disentangle my essence from each temptation and falsehood, from the smallness of the story or the constraints and expectations of the system?

To sketch an answer, let’s start with some words from the prophet Isaiah: “In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and confidence shall be your strength” (30:15, NKJV). Isaiah points toward what would later be called contemplative awareness, or contemplative vision. Our strength and salvation don’t come from reactivity or compulsive action, but from returning to our center, our quiet confidence in God.

So, our Psalm: “The Lord is my light and my salvation -- whom shall, I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life -- of whom shall I be afraid?”

So, Paul: “Be strong in the Lord.”

“In returning and rest you shall be saved.”

Contemplative awareness is cultivated through contemplative prayer. When we are inwardly still and observant, when we patiently learn to rest in God by releasing ourselves from our mind’s tyrannical activity, something liberating takes place: We learn that there is a deep center of our being that cannot be identified with any single thought or anxiety or story or emotional state or historical circumstance. There is something, there is someone -- me! -- who experiences all these things and yet is not reducible to any of them, or to all of them put together. I can start to observe my defensiveness, my assumptions, the spinning of stories to justify my anxiety or anger or withdrawal.

I wasn’t aware of them before, or if I was, I took them to be absolutely essential to my identity. But prayerful observation has now driven a wedge, no matter how small, and a moment, no matter how brief, between, say, the anger we feel and the self-justifying story we will start to spin about our anger; between, say, the person we loathe and our self-satisfied comfort in loathing them.

All God needs is a sliver of awareness. When something stirs us up and sets in motion that enemy-making cycle, we are able to pause and endure the assault with God’s help. God’s tools -- faith, righteousness, peace, and the rest -- help us choose who and how we want to be.

In this series on enemies, we’ve been on a journey. We began with the honest confession that our world and our inner fantasies are chock full of enemies. Us and them. Righteous and wicked. Liberal, conservative.

And as we’ve followed Jesus into this world, we’ve come to realize that our way of seeing is not God’s way of seeing. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Isaiah 55:8-9 (NIV). As Elle reminded us last week, “the Lord looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7, NIV). There is a reason Paul says in Romans that we must “be transformed by the renewing of [our] mind” (12:2, NIV).

If we can learn to observe ourselves slipping into the enemy-making-mode for any reason, we can stand firm against it and ground ourselves in God.

Always, we can give or withhold our consent to the story presented to us by the world or fabricated by our minds.

Always, God will help us if we ask him to.

Remember that point about the true enemy not being a person but a power of possession? We can say that because the contemplative awareness that shows us when and where we are at risk of being conscripted by sin is the same awareness that allows us to see other people as human beings, created good and in God’s image, who have become possessed by a vice, a false spirit, an ideology, a nexus of societal privileges and blind spots. Humans withering under the weight of falsehood. Humans who’ve given ground to a lie until they can’t tell themselves apart from it.

And so: Jesus calls us to pray for our enemies, to hold them before the mercy, the justice, the light of God. To beg that they be liberated from enslavement to powers that deceive and harm, that they would be freed into God’s story of joyful belonging, sacrificial struggle, forgiveness, and hope. And in order to pray prayers like that, we need to have those wedges of awareness, those footholds for the Spirit to move in our own souls. Because if we aren’t clear that our true enemy is our need to have flesh-and-blood enemies, we will always misunderstand the place of the struggle. We’ll reach for the cage match rather than prayer and telling the truth.

I’ll end with the closing words of our Psalm. And I’ll read them in three different translations to drive the point home.

“Wait patiently for the Lord. Be brave and courageous. Yes, wait patiently for the Lord” (27:14, NLT).

“Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord” (NRSV).

“Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the Lord” (KJV).

In the name of God, the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit: Amen. 

Don’t Judge a Book by its Cover

Don’t Judge a Book by its Cover

August 17, 2025

By: Elle Mann

***

When they arrived, Samuel took one look at Eliab and thought, “Surely this is the Lord’s anointed!”

But the Lord said to Samuel, “Don’t judge by his appearance or height, for I have rejected him. The Lord doesn’t see things the way you see them. People judge by outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”

People judge by outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”

But the lord looks at the heart.

I have to say, that is one of my favorite lines not just in this story, but in the entire bible. 

One of the most important lessons that we are told throughout our lives is to not judge a book by its cover.  Because in order to tell if it's a good book or not, we have to open it up, and read every page.  This is not to say that first impressions aren’t important, but they can be superficial.  How can we know for sure if this book is entertaining if we don’t even pick it up off the shelf?  The same goes for people, how can we say we know for sure who someone is based on one simple look or interaction.  

Eliab, Jesse’s eldest son is described as tall and strong with good looks, and Samuel immediately looks to him to be the leader without even considering the fact that he may just turn out to be the next Saul.  He is the first in the long line of Jesse’s sons to be presented to Samuel, and Samuel makes the snap judgement based solely on the fact that Eliab is (for lack of a better word) swoon worthy.  

Throughout the gathering, time and time again, God rejects each of Jesse’s sons. Then, once they reach the end of the line, Samuel asks if there is anyone left, any other son that Jesse could have.  David, the youngest of Jesse’s sons, isn’t even thought about for the position of King at first.  His father feels he is more fit for the farm life, so he leaves him at home to tend to their animals.  

Let that sink in for a moment.  The man God himself chose to be king, didn’t receive an invitation. Wasn’t even on the initial guest list.  He was the last thought to be picked for King, a humble boy whose life was farming day in and day out.  A son who had no hopes or aspirations about becoming a ruler. But in the end, he was the clear choice to rule Israel.

Why do we as a society place so much importance on the physical appearance of people?  Why do we always go for the one who looks like a good and fair leader, instead of the one who actually is both of those things.  Now this isn’t to harp on people who are deemed beautiful to society, who of course can have those qualifications; but too often we are drawn to what looks right, as opposed to what actually is.  And in a sense, that is very detrimental when we are looking to build a community.  If we just go along without opening the book and reading it, we often will come up short.  Just because the story doesn’t look appealing doesn’t mean it’s devoid of any value.  In fact, maybe it’s the best book to ever exist, but you’d never know because you went to one that looked easier to read.

Back in the late winter and early spring, I among several other members of this congregation took part in a class where we were taught by Pastor Mike on how to write a sermon.  Week by week, we were shown different ways to write and deliver messages, and in each session, we were expected to write a short speech on a certain topic and present it to members of the class.  Our final project was to write a ten-minute sermon on the scripture we were assigned at the beginning of the 6-week course.  When I initially wrote this sermon, I searched for examples in pop culture that I could use in comparison to this piece of scripture.  And for a while it was really difficult for me to find any sort of relation that could help me better understand the meaning of this chapter of Samuel.  That was until the night before the final draft of the homily was due, when the answer finally entered my brain:  Shrek.  

I know, it sounds a little ridiculous at first, but just roll me here.  At the beginning of the story, our protagonist, the title character Shrek, is a lonely creature who lives far away from the boundaries of society.  In the film, he and the iconic character Donkey are sent on a quest by Lord Farquaad, leader of Duloc.  They have to rescue the beautiful Princess Fiona from the highest room in the tallest tower of a dangerous dragon’s keep.  A bunch of hilarity and heartfelt moments ensue throughout the film, but the overall theme of it is clear.  Things are not what they seem, and in order for us to comprehend a person’s true nature, we have to give more than a simple glance. 

We can take it even further than that.  Actually, getting to know someone takes time and effort, and more often than not, people don’t show their real colors to just anyone on the street.  Even if you know some of this person’s beliefs, there are still so many more layers of complex traits that come with each person that you meet during your life.

Take the character Shrek.  Sure, he can be a little bitter and cranky from time to time, but in truth he has a kind heart and wants what’s best for the people he cares about.   Society has deemed him a big, stupid, ugly ogre. They’ve cast him out, made him feel like a monster, like he doesn’t belong in their world.  “They judge me, before they even know me.”  I can wager a guess that every single person in this room right now has been on both sides of that statement.  Every single one of us has made a skin-deep judgement of someone, and everyone has had that kind of comment made about them.  

Next, we have Lord Farquad, a man who presents himself as a worthy ruler to the people of Duloc.  But as the film goes on, you continue to see reasons why he is not the person he presents himself as to the public.  His hunger to sit on the throne and have unlimited power made him unworthy to lead in the end.  This hopefully leads the watcher to realize that we shouldn’t just blindly follow those who have a high rank.  Just because someone presents themselves in a proper manner does not always mean they can handle problems as well as themselves appropriately.  

Then there’s Princess Fiona, who appears to be a beautiful woman in the eyes of her peers, so people treat her well.  Just on that fact alone.  But for those of us who have not seen the movie, because of a curse that was put on her as a child, Fiona turns into an ogre at night.  Like Shrek, she is what everyone would call a hideous ugly beast.  

You could even make an argument that the dragon is an example as well, as she’s not as vicious as she is made out to be at first.  The only character that you could argue show’s his true colors from the very beginning is Donkey. 

So, where am I going with this?  How could I possibly tie the story of Shrek to the story of David being appointed the King of Israel?  I’ll ask you again, to let what I just talked about sink in.  Though the scripture at this point doesn’t go into much detail on who David is as a person, God believes he is worthy to take a seat on the throne.  In the beginning of Shrek, he is picked to go on this quest and in the end becomes an unlikely hero in the eyes of the world.  Granted, he doesn’t become King like David does, but he does help a lot of people along the way.  

Now, let’s talk about this line, “...but the Lord looks at the heart.” His choosing of David, and the magic behind this entire bit of scripture is that God chose David not because of his outward appearance.  Not because of the clothes he wears, or the strength of his arms, but because of the strength of his heart.  

In order to get a full grasp on this idea, we first have to take away that signal our brain initially sends when we see someone.  We have to reject the idea of the three second analysis.  Which I know from personal experience as a human being can be a very toilsome task to perform.  In order to do this, I encourage you to think of this lesson that Pastor Mike gave not so long ago.  In order to understand other humans, we have to accept that we won’t know all of the answers immediately, if ever.  We have to, like in all other cases, learn at human speed.  And we also have to keep this idea in mind. 

God creates all of us with a vision, he loves us not in spite of what we look like, but because of what we look like.  He made us all in his image, which means in turn, that not only are we all beautiful in our own way, but we are all capable of great things.  How does Shrek fit into all of this?  Well, the creator of this story used Shrek as a way to show that it is what is on the inside that counts the most.  In the end, Shrek, a humble ogre is shown to be a more reliable leader, despite the fact that his journey begins for selfish reasons.  Whereas someone such as Farquaad, who is so desperate for power, ends up sacrificing the kind heart that God places so much importance on.  

My hope for you is that we walk out of here today, that you use your eyes in the way that God does.  That you look deeper than the surface.   To look at the heart.  And not to judge, not to ridicule, but to be curious about the people around you and love them as he tells us to.  Amen.

Prayer in a World of Enemies, Part 4: A New Frame of Reference (Psalm 73 & 2 Cor. 4:7-12, 16-18)

Prayer in a World of Enemies, Part 4: A New Frame of Reference

August 10, 2025

Psalm 73 & 2 Corinthians 4:7-12, 16-18

By: Pastor Mike Conner

 ***

In the middle of the night, after sending all his earthly possessions across the river, Jacob wrestled with God until he received God’s blessing. After years of quiet wilderness wandering, estranged from his kindred and carrying a murderer’s guilt, Moses was given a purpose by the God who spoke out of a bush that was burning without being consumed. Hiding in the mountains from those who would kill him, the prophet Elijah heard God’s healing voice, not in the storm or in the earthquake or in the fire, but in that “soft whisper” (1 Kings 19:13, CSB). Hitting the bottom, coming to a kind of end, they all met God -- and were changed.

A woman suffering from bleeding for twelve years, who had “spent everything she had and was not helped at all” (Mk 5:26, CSB), pushed her way through a crowd just to touch the hem of Jesus’ robe. And when she touched it, her bleeding stopped. The beggar Bartimaeus cried out from the roadside just beyond Jericho: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” (Mark 10:47, CSB). Cried out until he was called forward and helped. Paul, the great persecutor of the church, sat in deep darkness with fasting and prayer, having been blinded by the light of the risen Jesus,. When he regained his sight, he was no longer a murderer but an apostle. Hitting the bottom, coming to a kind of end, they all met Jesus -- and were transformed.

The streams of Christian spirituality use different words for moments like these: repentance, conversion, new birth, surrender, consenting, yielding, awakening. There are times in our life when we finally see clearly what it is we need to let go of, or where it is that we need to be drawing on a deeper well of strength and understanding. And we know that clinging to that thing or keeping on as we are without any help limits our experience of God’s abundance, freedom, power, and love. And we know that the only way forward is through change, through meeting and being met by God in our spiritual poverty.

This is the fourth in a series of seven sermons on how Jesus wants to transform our relationship with our enemies. I imagine this series in a V-shape. To make progress, we first needed to go downward, down to the root. As Jesus says to Peter in John chapter 21, “When you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you, and take you where you do not wish to go” (John 21:18, NRSVUE). Maturing beyond the enemy-making cycle takes a kind of openhandedness, a surrender of self-will. We must face the need for change at the deep level of our hearts. If any of us has been able to take some steps along this journey up to this point -- or, I should say, down to this point -- it is because “the Lord himself goes before you” (Deut 31:8, NIV) and readies the way.

In order to let go, we have to know what we’re letting go of. We have to see it clearly and be willing to express how we really feel about it. Not what we think we’re supposed to feel about it, but how we really feel about it when no one else is looking. So the past two weeks we’ve explored those emotional dimensions of sadness and anger that surface and threaten to subsume us when we deal with our enemies.

Even though I’m going to be focusing on our relationships with our enemies, I’m holding open the very real possibility that you might be seeing something else clearly that needs to be given over to God: A friendship, partnership, or marriage that strained or broken. A line of study or work that isn’t right for you. An area addiction or an unhealthy habit. Wrestling with some aspect of your faith. When God gives us the grace to finally see and acknowledge these things, change can begin.

That’s the heart of what I have to say today. When we come to what feels like the end of our strength and understanding. When we’ve seen our predicament for what it is and brought our emotions, sensations, and fantasies about it all to God in prayer, we might feel like we are at our most helpless, formless point. But we are in fact at the hinge, at the moment of conversion. God the potter, who formed the first human creature out of clay and who continues to craft us into vessels able to bear his love and light, meets us in that lowly space. Letting go of our way and our coping mechanisms is the sweet spot, the ground zero of transformative change. If, with God’s help, we can linger there patiently and honestly, God will bless us.

We’re raised on an American ethos of self-sufficiency, self-creation, and impenetrability, so it feels totally wrong to be in that vulnerable, spent place. But Jesus says, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mk 2:17, NIV). Paul uses the image of the fragile clay jar to get at this truth. As we allow God to hew us out, empty us of all that we cling to -- including our need to have enemies, our right to our anger -- there is more room for God’s powerful light to live.

Some of us might wonder, Do I really need this? After all, I give a lot of my time and money and energy to advocacy, service, or political processes. Yes, even those of us who are committed to making a difference in our community need a transformation of heart. St Oscar Romero once said, “There can be no true liberation until people are freed from sin. All the liberationist groups that spring up in our land should bear this in mind. The first liberation to be proposed by a political group that truly wants the people’s liberation must be to free oneself from sin. While one is a slave of sin – of selfishness, violence, cruelty, and hatred – one is not fitted for the people’s liberation.”[1]

With Jesus and the Psalmist, we have faced the social world as it is: fractured into camps of us and them, haves and have-nots. With Jesus and the Psalmist, we have witnessed both systemic injustice and personal greed prey upon those in socially and economically vulnerable positions. We have let our questions and our anger flow so that they do not consume us. And it’s right here at what feels like the bottom, at what feels like a hollowing out of all those emotions and questions and fantasies that we’ve been either repressing or making an identity out of, that God is waiting to meet us and fill us with love.

“But as for me, my feet almost slipped;

my steps nearly went astray.

For I envied the arrogant;

I saw the prosperity of the wicked.

Did I purify my heart

and wash my hands in innocence for nothing?

…

I became embittered

and my innermost being was wounded;

I was stupid and didn’t understand.”

Here the Psalmist gives expression to the inner wound. Feet slip. Envy creeps in. Doubt. Bitterness. But then this:

“My flesh and my heart may fail,

but God is the strength of my heart,

my portion forever.

…

God’s presence is my good.

I have made the Lord God my refuge.”

What agony! To feel the wounds of living in an enemy-making world, and yet to know deep in our bones that what we hunger for more than anything is God, what we desire more than anything is God. As the Psalmist says in verse 25, “Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee” (Ps 73:25, KJV). That prayer is the expression of our failure to help ourselves and of the possibility of God’s renewing touch. It is that hinge, that point at the bottom of the V.

God, I don’t get it! I’m angry and I’m starting to tell you about it! I’m sad and I’m starting to tell you about it! I’m even envious sometimes and I’m starting to tell you about it! But more than anything God, I want you. Your presence, your mercy, your way. I trust that you are my good. I trust that you are the strength of my heart, even as my heart seems to falter. I trust that what feels very scary, letting you radically reorient my relationship to my enemies, is a kind of death that will bring inner renewal. It’s a trial and a testing I am willing to endure so that your power might find space in me.

Change sometimes feels like trouble! But Paul tells us that “our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever!” Today is a day for letting God’s love take root in our hearts. We are no longer our own frame of reference. Yes, we live in a world of enemies. But it’s God’s world, a world that God fully and irrevocably entered into, a world that God loved even to the point of death, a world that God carried through death into newness of life, into the hope of resurrection.

When we hit the bottom, when we come to the end, when we are hewn out, we are at our most receptive. Paul says that “we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen.

I’m going to invite us into a time of inner reflection. I encourage you for the moments that follow to assume a posture of prayer, perhaps placing your feet on the floor, uncrossing your arms and legs, closing your eyes or fixing them softly on a spot in front of you.

As you do that, let’s take a couple deep breaths here: in and out, in and out.

Let your breathing return to it’s regular rhythm, this gift of life that the body gives.

Now, make fists with your hands, ball them up tight. And say to God in your heart, “God, show me what I am grasping, what I am clinging to, when I consider my relationship to my enemies.”

Perhaps it will be a person’s name or face, someone who’s hurt you, or one of those generalized labels we like to use: Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, liberals, the Legislature, the… your will fill in the blank.

Perhaps God will show you a specific memory of harm.

Maybe God will show you your sadness or anger, your envy or confusion, or a specific fantasy of retribution. That you are clinging to these and that they are consuming you.

Maybe God will show you that you are holding tightly to your security, your possessions, and you’re afraid to make a change. Or that it’s your insecurity and inadequacy: “God, I can’t throw a million dollars at it, so I can’t make a difference… God, I’m too old, so I can’t… God, I’m too young, so I can’t… God, I’ve messed up too many times before, so I can’t.”

Or something else might come up that surprises you.

“God, show me what I am grasping, what I am clinging to, when I consider my relationship to my enemies.”

{wait here}

Now, open your hands and turn them over, visualize yourself letting it go, whatever you were holding on to. Let it fall to the ground. Don’t grasp it anymore.

Notice what emotions you experience as you do that. Is there fear and dread? Is there grief? Is there hope and freedom? Notice what you feel in your body as you let go. How do your hands feel? What’s happening in your chest, your gut, your throat, your eyes? As you rest in this moment of surrender, say to God with the voice of your heart, “There is none upon earth that I desire beside thee.”

{wait here}

Finally, turn your hands upward, keeping them open. This is a posture of receptivity. We’re in a position to receive something new, so ask God this: God, when I’m no longer holding onto that old thing, what will you give me to hold? Linger here for a moment and see what comes. Notice how it feels to wait for this gift. And if something specific comes, or even the hint or suggestion of an answer, how does it feel to receive this with open hands and willing hearts?

{wait here}

Take a couple deep breaths again and, when you’re ready, open your eyes and come back into this moment.

Today is the hinge. The scripture says that “it is for freedom that Christ has set us free” (Gal 5:1). Thanks be to God for this work that God is doing in us. Amen. 

[1] The Violence of Love, 198.

Prayer in a World of Enemies, Part 3: The Conversion of Our Inner Fantasies (Psalm 109 & Revelation 7:9-17)

Prayer in a World of Enemies, Part 3: The Conversion of Our Inner Fantasies

August 3, 2025

Psalm 109 & Revelation 7:9-17

By: Pastor Mike Conner 

***

Violent political revolutions and rampant human rights abuses plagued the countries of Central America throughout the late 20th century, especially in the decades following the Second World War. Foreign powers like the Untied States and the Soviet Union had much to do with this chaos, as each tried to curb the influence of the other in that region. In many of these countries, left-wing guerilla groups clashed with right-wing military dictatorships that had been installed and supported by US dollars and intelligence. As we might expect, ordinary people without political voice were caught in the middle and bore the brunt of the violence. In the country of El Salvador, these where the campesinos, the rural laborers who worked the plantations of the few rich landowning families who controlled the country.

The Salvadoran government’s death squads had developed methods of terrifying the rural poor, as well as anyone else who criticized the State. One notorious tactic of theirs was capturing people off the streets or from their homes at night. Members of death squads would arrive in dark, unmarked vehicles and whisk away people who would never be heard from again. These victims became known as “the disappeared.” Another method of terror was the wholesale slaughter of poor village communities. The thought here was that the Communists or Socialist revolutionaries could not recruit the rural poor to their cause if these potential sympathizers were not there to begin with .

A man named Oscar Romero was born in El Salvador on August 15, 1917. He became a Catholic priest. As he ascended through the ranks of Church leadership in El Salvador, the violence in his country was becoming impossible to ignore. El Salvador was careening toward full-blown civil war. The institutional Catholic Church was under increasing pressure to decry the use of violence against the rural masses.

Oscar Romero was considered a safe choice for Archbishop of San Salvador when he was appointed to that office in 1977 at the age of 60 years old. Romero was socially and theologically conservative, unwilling to rock the boat by criticizing the government. He preached and taught that the landowners who controlled El Salvador should be more generous with what they had, and that the poor should be more forgiving and hopeful -- but this came without a robust call to transform the social conditions that kept rich and poor locked in their places. He was a bureaucratic leader, adept at administration. He towed the party line. This all changed when the political violence roiling his country touched his heart at last.

Shortly after Romero became Archbishop, one of his dearest friends and colleagues, a priest named Father Rutilio Grande, was assassinated by the Salvadoran government for his public rebukes of state violence and his organizing efforts among rural laborers. Romero was crushed; his eyes were opened; his heart was set on fire with righteous anger and radical love. From that moment on, Romero became a bishop of the people, for the people. He, the most powerful Church leader in his country, became his beloved country’s most outspoken critic.

Romero began traveling around El Salvador to visit rural communities and hear firsthand accounts of their suffering. Each week, he gathered the names of everyone who had been disappeared, tortured, or murdered, and he would speak their names and tell the truth about what had happened over the radio. There was a radio tower installed on the Cathedral in San Salvador where Romero held his weekly mass. Seventy-three percent of the rural population of El Salvador and 47% of the urban population tuned into its broadcasts regularly.

For the majority of Salvadorans, Romero’s speeches and sermons were the main source of news. Romero told the raw, simple truth about those being harmed and those doing the harming. The military government had control of the press and would not report on their own role in the spreading violence. It’s no surprise that the radio tower at the Cathedral was repeatedly bombed. Over and over again, the Romero had it rebuilt.

Romero preached weekly sermons to his congregation and to listeners around El Salvador that reiterated several key ideas: He called those in positions of economic and political power to conversion. He called them to obey God’s higher law of love rather than the State’s orders to terrorize, hoard, and kill. He invited them to become a part of the Body of Christ by repenting of their sins and submitting themselves to the one true God. To the poor masses, Romero affirmed God’s divine solidarity with them through Jesus Christ, and he energized them by calling them to continue in their struggles for justice no matter the cost.

He called on church and country together to address the systemic roots of inequality and abject poverty and to transform society by practicing the values of God’s kingdom. Finally, he drew attention to the martyrs among the people, those who had been, as the Beatitudes say, “hunted down and killed for doing what was right.”  He honored them by naming them; he drew strength from the fullness of their witness and their selfless sacrifice.

Oscar Romero did this very poignantly by welcoming coffins bearing the bodies of the dead into worship services at the Cathedral. Very often the congregations would bring coffins containing their loved ones or neighbors into the Sanctuary and place them up front near the platform. Romero would pray, preach, and preside over Communion with the deceased fully in view.

He worked tirelessly with priests, nuns, students, hospital staff, journalists, foreign aid workers, community organizers, and journalists to build coalitions for justice. He made appeals to world leaders, to Pope John Paul II in 1979 and to President Jimmy Carter in 1980, asking them to condemn the violence of the Salvadoran government and US’s participation in it. Both declined.

Romero always refused to travel with a security detail. Wherever he was, he spoke the truth with a Christlike balance of boldness, humility, clarity, and compassion. A poet named Carolyn Forche once described Romero’s eyes as being illuminated as if from within -- a common observation of people enlightened by God’s love (think of Moses’ shining face!). Filled with God’s light, Romero gave hope to a great portion of his country. All he wanted was an end to senseless killing and an end to systemic poverty, the powerful brought down and the lowly lifted up. And for that vision, he, too, gave his life.

On March 24, 1980, Romero ended his full day of ministry by celebrating Mass at a chapel attached to a church-run hospital called Divine Providence. After concluding his sermon, he stepped behind the altar to bless Communion and was struck down by an assassin’s bullet. He died shortly thereafter.

Six days later, 250,000 people gathered at the Metropolitan Cathedral of San Salvador for Romero’s funeral. He had won the hearts of a people. Tragically, his service was interrupted by gunfire and bomb explosions, and in the ensuing chaos another 30 people lost their lives.

Romero couldn’t prevent the Salvadoran Civil War that broke out shortly before his death. From the end of 1979 to 1992, an estimated 75,000 people were killed and 8,000 persons disappeared. But he poured out his life to witness to a better way -- a way marked by sacrificial love, dignifying the poor, remembering the disappeared, repenting from violence and indifference, and forming beloved community. He used his position of privilege to tell and live God’s truth.

Under Pope Francis, Oscar Romero was beatified in 2015 as a martyr and canonized in 2018 as a saint. His feast day is March 24, the day he gave his life for God and for his people. Perhaps no Christian leader in the late 20th century had such a pure and clarifying impact on the worldwide Church as he.

***

I have told you Romero’s story because, you and I need some better stories, stories that shape our inner fantasies in a godly direction. Fantasies are the things we idly or actively imagine as we go about our days. In particular, when it comes to living in a world of enemies, we need our fantasies to be touched and transformed by God’s grace.

            Psalm 109 is perhaps the Bible’s most explicit fantasy of retribution. The Psalmist asks God to utterly ruin another person’s life:

            “Appoint someone evil to oppose my enemy;

            …when he is tried, let him be found guilty,

            may his prayers condemn him.

            May his days be few;

            may another take his place of leadership…

            May a creditor seize all he has…

            May no one extend a kindness to him.”

Yikes. But that’s not all! The Psalmist also asks God to ruin the life of the enemy’s spouse, children -- “may they be wandering beggars,” and to dig up dirt on his father and mother and ruin their legacy.

            This is intense, seething stuff. But when the Psalmist expresses why she feels this way, at least I think, ‘Well, okay. I see where you’re coming from.’

            “For he never thought of doing a kindness,

            but hounded to death the poor, the needy, and the brokenhearted.

            He loved to pronounce a curse…

            He found no pleasure in blessing.”

This is eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, stuff at its best. ‘God, do to my enemies what they’ve done to me!’ I can certainly think of some contemporary parallels:

It’s cathartic to say all this, to ask for these things, to give expression to the retribution, public humiliation, or outright harm that we sometimes wish upon our enemies. You don’t have to feel ashamed for experiencing those feelings or for having those kinds of thoughts flash through your minds. The Bible certainly gives us space to pray these prayers, to pray against our enemies. They have a place among God’s inspired words.

But we need to ask why a prayer like this is in the Bible and what we might learn from it. It’s not there to feed our ego or inflate our pride or tempt us toward our own violence. We know that Jesus calls us to love our enemies, so Psalm 109 can’t be a place to stay.

But this prayer has a place because it’s honest, and if the scriptures can’t meet us where we are, they can’t help us. The Psalmist is profoundly angry here, just as we sometimes get angry in our own lives. But -- and here’s the crucial thing -- the Psalmist is giving God her anger. This tirade is hurled not at the enemy it so thoroughly condemns, but at God. The Psalmist, wisely, never asks to be personally put in a position to bring judgement upon the enemy. No matter how graphic and volatile this prayer gets, no matter how honest its anger, the Psalmist never asks to do God’s job; the Psalmist ultimately leaves judgment in God’s hands:

            “Appoint someone evil to oppose my enemy…

            …May this be the Lord’s payment to my accuser.”

The Psalmist has found a way to pray against her enemies while placing the whole fantasy in God’s hands. This creates an opening for God to act -- not necessarily out there upon the enemy as we want, but in here on our heart and mind as we need.

Let me say that again:

When we are honest with God in prayer when it comes to our enemies, it creates an opening for God to act -- not necessarily out there upon the enemy as we want, but in here on our heart and mind as we need.

Enter our passage from the final book of the Bible: Revelation. John was an early Christian martyr exiled to the Roman penal colony on the island of Patmos. There, he received visions from God which he wrote down and sent to young Christian congregations in Asia Minor, encouraging them to remain faithful under persecution.

One day, John was given a vision of the heavenly throne room and the eternal worship happening there. He saw “a vast multitude from every nation, tribe, and people…clothed in white robes” and singing to God and Jesus. John learned that these worshippers were “the ones coming out of the great tribulation.” In other words, they were the martyrs, those who, like Oscar Romero, Father Rutilio Grande, and the legions of disappeared persons, remained faithful to Jesus’ way of love and service no matter the personal cost. Now, eternally in God’s presence,

“The one seated on the throne will shelter them:

            They will no longer hunger;

            they will no longer thirst.

            For the Lamb who is at the center of the throne will shepherd them;

            he will guide them to springs of the waters of life,

            and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

This is a more excellent vision, a better story for us to behold and fix our minds and imaginations upon. Rather than playing the downfall of our enemies on repeat in our mind’s eye, we are called to dwell on this eternal remembering and uplifting of the lowly. By giving our righteous anger over to God, we are able to hear our true call: to serve others, to seek solidarity with the oppressed, to remember and labor on behalf of the “least of these.” Once we pray against our enemies and give that fantasy over to God, our energies are unclogged; anger can be converted into love; we get unstuck; we start actively serving rather than passively fuming.

Sometimes Jesus got angry at the injustices he witnessed. He flipped over the tables in the temple after all. And I’m sure Oscar Romero experienced those flashes of rage in his own spirit -- noticed them, welcomed them, and then surrendered them in a seamless movement of prayer. I know I get angry, too. We are not supposed to pretend like anger isn’t there, to stuff it down and repress it. We’ll spend too much energy trying to look good to others rather than bear good fruit for God. We are not supposed to nurse our anger or cling to it like a coveted possession or make an identity out of it, which are the real spiritual temptations of our age. No, we are called to let it out before God in prayer, and then let God implant in us a vision that builds up rather than tears down, that heals rather than harms, that loves rather than condemns.

Oscar Romero never used his radio messages to pronounce curses on the enemies of his countrymen. Instead, he called everyone to conversion. He told the truth, yes. But he told the truth by filling the airwaves with the names, the stories, the struggles, and the hopes of those who he loved with the love of God, forgave with the forgiveness of God, and sorrowed for with the sorrow of God.

As the scriptures say, “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:17), and “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds” (Romans 12:2).

On this journey of learning to pray in a world of enemies, we have come close to our own renewal. Having committed ourselves to this work in the first place, and then allowing ourselves to express in prayer the sadness and anger of living among such pain and brokenness, we are not far from the kingdom of God.

May St Oscar Romero of El Salvador and St John of Patmos and others like them form in us a desire for that more excellent way.

And may God make us fit for walking it through the power and presence of his Holy Spirit. Amen.

Prayer in a World of Enemies, Part 2: Where Are You God? (Psalm 10 & Hebrews 2:5-18)

Prayer in a World of Enemies, Part 2: Where Are You, God?

July 27, 2025

Psalm 10 & Hebrews 2:5-18

By Pastor Mike Conner 

***

“At noon, darkness fell across the whole land until three o’clock. Then at three o’clock Jesus called out with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ which means ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ …Then Jesus uttered another loud cry and breathed his last” (Mark 15:33-34, 37).

This terrible moment appears in Mark the Gospel writer’s story of Good Friday, the day when Jesus, after being arrested, convicted, mocked, and beaten by those in positions of religious, legal, and political power, was crucified on a hill outside the city of Jerusalem. Nailed to the cross, Jesus experienced a moment of spiritual crisis, of felt abandonment. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

It was his “God, Where Are You?” moment, a moment that we all, for one reason or another, experience. It was a moment that he, the Son of God, came to experience with us, as one of us. Jesus knows what it’s like to lose sight of God and to feel that God has lost sight of him.

***

In time, we each enter one or more “God, Where Are You?” moments. We don’t plan for them or seek them out. But like rip currents hidden in the tides of life, they grab hold of us and drag us out far from shore. Great change, great loss usually bring that question to our lips: “God, where are you?” The death of a loved one. The loss of a job. Moving away from home. Debilitating illness. The betrayal of a friend. Divorce. Stock market crash. Flunking out of college. Relapsing. Realizing through trial and error that you’re not called to a path that you thought you were called to.

There are so many things that might bring us to these moments of darkness and abandonment.

I wonder what some of your “God, Where Are You?” moments have been? Perhaps you’re moving through one today.

***

The Book of Psalms in the Hebrew Bible comprises 150 prayers that Jews and Christians have prayed for millennia. Jesus himself prayed these prayers. The cry from the cross “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” -- is itself a line from Psalm 22. In his moment of God-forsakenness, when all Jesus could see was the darkness, he quote Psalm. He probably didn’t think of it that way. It was just the prayer language that had shaped and made a home in his heart.

The Psalms record many “God, Where Are You?” moments, and, most often, these moments are a result of exposure to avoidable forms of suffering. Specifically, they afflict the Psalmist when he or she resolves to see the world with eyes wide open, and feels overwhelmed by the brutality, the cruelty, and the pervasiveness of injustice in what he or she sees.

***

The theme of human beings partnering with God to shape a world in which all people receive adequate and equitable care is one of the primary themes of both the Old and New Testaments. The Book of Deuteronomy records Moses’s final teachings to the Israelites whose forty years of wilderness wandering had come to an end. They were about to enter the Promised Land, and God had some very specific instructions about how they were to conduct themselves in their new home in order to reflect his care and mercy.

In chapter 15 of Deuteronomy, God, through the prophet Moses, says this: “Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land’” (Deut 15:11).

That was a general, timeless command to care for the needy, but God and Moses also set forward some very specific expectations for how that openhandedness was to be practiced. Here are just three examples (and there are many, many more):

·         “If you lend money to my people, to the poor among you, you shall not deal with them as a creditor; you shall not exact interest from them” (Exod 22:25).

·         “You shall not strip your vineyard bare or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord your God” (Levit 19:10).

·         “You shall not withhold the wages of poor and needy laborers, whether other Israelites or aliens who reside in your land in one of your towns. You shall pay them their wages daily before sunset, because…their livelihood depends on them” (Deut 24:14-15).

Lending without interest, leaving fruit in your fields for others to glean, and paying a fair and timely wage. These acts of justice were meant to extend to both citizens and refugees. From this project of societal wholeness and health, God’s people repeatedly strayed.

The prophets whose words form a third of the Hebrew Bible rose up throughout the Israelites’ history in the Promised Land to condemn that failure, evidenced by the mistreatment of those who were socially or economically vulnerable by those who were socially or economically powerful. Yes, the prophets also rail against idolatry, the ways that the people abandoned God and placed their trust elsewhere: in the accumulation of wealth, in military prowess, or in strategic allegiances with neighboring powers. But these spiritual deviations always had social, material consequences. When the leaders of the people stopped trusting the God who had liberated them from oppression in the first place, and who had only ever asked them to mirror His eternal care in their own spheres of influences, they found themselves enslaved to ways of life predicated on greed, security at all costs, and exclusion.

When that happened -- and it happened all the time -- God sent prophets to rebuke the leaders of the people with words like these from the prophet Isaiah:

“The Lord enters into judgment
    with the elders and princes of his people:
It is you who have devoured the vineyard;
    the spoil of the poor is in your houses.
What do you mean by crushing my people,
    by grinding the face of the poor? says the Lord God of hosts.” (3:14-15)

And these:

“Woe to those who make iniquitous decrees,
    who write oppressive statutes,
to turn aside the needy from justice
    and to rob the poor of my people of their rights,
to make widows their spoil
    and to plunder orphans!” (10:1-2)

***

Our Psalm for today, Psalm 10, captures a few aspects of our natural emotional response to a society full of injustice, where “cursing, lies, and threats” (v. 7a), “trouble and evil” (v. 7b), “murder” (v. 8), and “capture” (v. 9) dominate social relations. The Psalmist is stunned that such acts are being perpetrated without any conscience or remorse.

The wicked are too proud to seek God.

They seem to think that God is dead.

***

The wicked think, “God isn’t watching us!

He has closed his eyes and won’t even see what we do!

…God will never call us to account.” (10:4, 11, 13b)

This situation created a crisis of faith for the Psalmist, who experienced profound confusion and sadness because, well, the wicked seemed right on this point. Where was God? Did God care? Did God see?

This prayer opens in agony: “O Lord, why do you stand so far away? / Why do you hide when I am in trouble?” (10:1).

This is a real “God, Where Are You?” moment. And many of us are familiar with it. Jesus certainly was.

***

Injustice against the poor was one of Jesus’ primary concerns. He made it his business to eat with sinners, feed the hungry, heal the sick, hang out with the ostracized, and forgive the unforgiveable. He died in large part because he named the practices of exclusion and greed that he saw in the religious elites of ancient Israel.

And that’s a real concern for us, too, especially with the amount of exposure we have to news from every corner of the globe. We feel the heaviness of avoidable suffering. It’s devastating when we could be collectively choosing a different way, but don’t. Children are starving in Gaza and dying of preventable diseases like measles in the United States. People are being torn from their families and communities by masked agents. Parents are having to choose between paying for rent, groceries, or childcare. At least eight million metric tons of plastic will enter the world’s oceans this year, and an estimated 12 million people will lose health insurance over the next 10 years. To name but a few things…

When you start to really face it -- and more, when you really start to care about it, and to access through prayer and through friendship with the most impacted how God feels about it all -- these injustices flood your vision and settle like a heavy weight over the chest. It’s all that there appears to be. And knowing that so much pain could be alleviated if we would but choose to share our resources and stop the cycle of enemy making -- it’s devastating. Confusion and sadness tempt us toward despair. We behold a broken world divided into camps of haves and have nots, of us and them, and we ask, “God, where are you? Don’t you see? Don’t you care? Have you left us here alone, or are you going to rise up and do something about all this?”

***

We wish our discipleship journey could bypass these “God, Where Are You? moments. But it can’t. We are followers of Jesus and Jesus himself passed through this darkness. But here’s what I want to emphasize:

Asking “God, where are you?” is not disqualifying. It’s deeply, profoundly human. And it’s a human experience that, in Christ, God has incorporated into His divine life. Which is to say: It’s not the end of the story. It feels like the end of the story. But really it’s a hinge swinging open to something new, something that only God can bring us.

When we are overwhelmed by the injustices that we witness or experiences -- whether through policy violence, warfare, or anything else -- Jesus is there with us in that moment of asking, “God, where are you?”

This is what the writer of Hebrews was getting at when he wrote, “As it is, we do not yet see everything subjected to him. But we do see Jesus -- made lower than the angels for a short time so that by God’s grace he might taste death for everyone… [He] had to be like his brothers and sisters” -- like us -- “in every way… For since he himself has suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted” (Heb 2:8-9, 17, 18).

We might not be able to make sense of everything that’s happening in the world. We might be disappointed as we look up to heaven or out toward the horizon for glimpses of God’s sovereign purposes. But in this time between the death and resurrection of Jesus and the coming of his New Creation, we are given him, his fellowship in our sufferings, his cry to join our cries to, and -- AND -- his resurrected life.

God didn’t answer Jesus’ question. God raised him to life! God continued his story!

God will not always answer our questions, but God will always raise us out of that darkness of seeming abandonment and continue our story, so long as we stay close to Jesus, even in our sadness.

***

As we move more deeply into the question of how God wants us to be people of peace and prayer in and for this world of enemies, there will come moments when we feel like it is impossible, like the task is too much, and those are moments when we need to just hold on. Hold onto Jesus. Hold onto his story. Hold onto the promise of his ongoing life with us.

            Crying out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” is not disqualifying.

            Asking, “God, why do you hide yourself when I am in trouble?” is not a failure.

A ministry that is full of radical love and purposeful action will come. But it will not come from us.

We first have to come to a kind of end: an end of our understanding, of our self-righteousness, of our own misplaced hopes in the next election cycle, or the next piece of policy, or the wealth that might vault us into a place of influence over others or insulate us from pain.

You see, in those moments of asking “God, where are you?” we’re as lost as those who we believe to be wicked.

They don’t see God, we say, and God doesn’t seem to see them.

But neither do we see God, and we confess that God doesn’t seem to see us.

But we do see Jesus -- lowly Jesus, who shares our condition, voices our questions, carries us toward a new future.

It may not be satisfying, but it’s where we are right now. Let us hold onto him, and feel that he is already holding onto us.

Amen.

Prayer in a World of Enemies, Part 1: Going Where We Do Not Wish to Go (Psalm 14 & John 21:15-19)

Prayer in a World of Enemies, Part 1: Going Where We Do Not Wish to Go

July 20, 2025

Psalm 14 & John 21:15-19

By Pastor Mike

***

With all the cruelty and deception at work in our country right now, I’ve been thinking about you. I’m concerned for those of you whose vocations are increasingly under threat, those of you whose safety and livelihoods feel less secure with each passing day. I grieve for those of you who are losing friends and family to politics, and for those of you struggling to hold onto a sense that life is a bright and beautiful gift. I’m also worried about those of you at risk of becoming grumblers and grousers at home with your screens rather than agents of justice walking alongside your neighbors.

And I don’t exempt myself from the temptations and agonies of our historical moment. It’s terribly difficult to be an American Christian right now who wants neither to “take the power back” for my own ideological victory nor to turn away and abandon the world. How can I, how can we be fully present to this life with all its conflict and pain while guarding our hearts from bitterness, resignation, or hatred? How can we step into the freedom of God, which is a freedom for forgiveness and for costly love?

Today I’m beginning a seven-week sermon series on our relationships with our enemies.  We live in a world marred by enmity and division, and Jesus calls us to be people of prayer in and for this world, not some other world. Having enemies is not something we can hold out here away from our discipleship; we must learn from Jesus, the Prince of Peace, so that we can become a people who break the enemy-making cycle, the cycle of grievance and retribution.

But as with so many things, the first step in breaking that cycle is naming and confessing that the problem is real and that we’re tangled up in it. So let’s do that:

First, we live in a world in which we are, in which we have enemies.

Second, we live in a world where it is profitable for a few to keep the enemy-making cycle up and running among the many.

Third, we live a world that wants us to believe that the label “enemy” is a fixed identity, a way of seeing another that cannot be transformed.

These are at least three strands in the knot of sin that we must allow Jesus to untangle. Let’s look at each strand a bit more closely.

We live in a world of enemies. That is the blunt, honest reality – and the Scriptures don’t shy away from that reality at all. But “enemy” is not word we typically use in our day-to-day life, so I invite you to translate it into your own experience. You might have an opponent, an oppressor, or an abuser. Maybe you have felt cheated, robbed, lied to, or lied about. Your enemy might have a very specific face, might meet you in a highly particular situation, or maybe you feel like the weight of the whole world is against you. The enemy might even be a person from your past whose hurtful words or actions continue to have power over you. Sometimes the phrase “those people” helps crystallize who the enemy is in our lives.

Take a moment to notice who is coming to mind as you consider your enemies.

At some point, we each cry out with the Psalmist: “They have all turned aside, / They have together become corrupt; / There is none who does good, / No, not one (Ps 14:2-3, NKJV).” That bleak feeling, that sense that humanity has completely lost its way, is as honest a place as any to enter into this prayerful relationship with God about our enemies. It’s not a place to stay. I wouldn’t even say it’s fully accurate. But prayer doesn’t have to be accurate – it has to be honest. So let us admit that we have enemies, and that having them hurts, confuses, consumes, and deflates our tender hearts.

Let us also name that we live in a world where those with the most resources profit from the enemy-making cycle. This is nothing new. On the American scene, it’s as old as politicians, tycoons, and preachers pitting poor white people against newly freed African Americans in order to oppose Reconstruction policies and racial integration in the South. But today this strategy is amped up to an extreme. You and I have constant access to a portal, designed to be addictive, that schools us in bitterness, nastiness, and rage. The powers that work upon our minds through these devices want to ensnare our attention and poison our imagination – for literal profit. The longer you and I scroll, the more we keep clicking on the inflammatory, the more someone somewhere is getting paid.

I know I often bring up our screens in a critical light. It’s not my intention to say that all media technology is evil or that we should just put our heads in the sand. But when we sit and scroll, we are passively selling our attention, siphoning our energy, and giving away our powers of discernment to something that is not human. The algorithms are designed to make us more and more sure of who our enemies are even as they immobilize us. This is not of God. God calls us to keep our actual neighbors in view, to respond what our bodies feel and what our spirits sense in response to the beauty and brokenness immediately around us. I’m not going to stop talking about the spiritual threats of our devices, and I hope you’re talking to one another about them, too. I hope you’ll talk to me, since I’m continually refining my own thinking about this.

And let’s be clear, it’s not just the apps, or the billionaires behind the apps, who profit from enemy making.  It’s the funders of wars, the corporations purchasing public policy, even the parent who sows discord among his or her children to escape responsibility for their own behavior. Whenever we find ourselves utterly convinced about who we are against, we would do well to pause and ask: Who is benefiting from the fact that I have this enemy?

So we’ve acknowledged that we have enemies, and we’ve named that our having enemies is as much something done to us as it is something that arises in us. Let us confess again that third strand, which is that we often believe that the label “enemy” is an absolute, fixed, essential identity – something that cannot change. Once an enemy, always an enemy.

From the perspective of the Gospel, “enemy” – however we have defined that for ourselves – is not an absolute definition. In Ephesians, Paul writes, “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph 6:12, NIV). And the Psalmist says, “Have all the workers of iniquity no knowledge, / Who eat up my people as they eat bread, / And do not call on the Lord?” (Ps 14:4, NKJV). Biblically speaking, true enemies are possessed by lies; they have given their lives over to deception. The name for the great enemy in the Biblical narrative, “Satan,” means accuser or deceiver. Those who eat up the poor as they eat bread believe in the lie of scarcity that causes them to hoard and control; they believe in the lie of self-sufficiency that causes them to insulate themselves from the sufferings of the disempowered; they believe in the lie of their invulnerability and forget that they, too, are mortal, finite, fragile.

Jesus came to exorcise – to cast out – these deceptions, and to save people from false identities. Jesus died on the cross and reconciled the cosmos to God; it’s a reconciliation that is available to everyone – to us and to our enemies. We are called to long for their healing and to want their conversion. Jesus’ work is to turn enemies into friends, whether that looks like two people making peace on their way to court, like Jews and Gentiles eating together, or like Zaccheus repaying fourfold all the people he had defrauded as a tax collector. Experiencing hostility in this life may be inescapable, but investing in the reality of enemies is a choice.

We are embarking on this series asking God to help us choose a better way, the way of Jesus.

Hear again the words of the Psalmist:

“The Lord looks down from heaven upon the children of men,

To see if there are any who understand, who seek God.

They have all turned aside,

They have together become corrupt;

There is none who does good,

No, not one.” (Ps 14:2-3, NKJV)

The issue here is with agency. The Psalmist is experiencing depression, as spirit of defeat, because she looks out upon the world and does not see anyone exercising their personal agency for the wellbeing and happiness of anyone else. What she does see are many people exercise their agency for their own gain, to the neglect of God’s will and at the expense of others. There is nothing inspiring, nothing beautiful. The bad are active; the good are paralyzed. Trying to see as God sees – “the Lord looks down from heaven” – the moral paralysis has even infected the psalmist.

Jesus came as an answer to this prayer, both in the sense that he became the Son of Man who sought God wholeheartedly, and in sense that he liberates our agency through the free and definitive exercise of his own. He is God, and who has more agency than God? And yet Jesus uses his free and powerful agency to come to us, to enter our world of enemies, and to liberate the world through the pouring out of his life and love on behalf of the poor and oppressed.

Here's how Paul puts it in Philippians chapter 2:

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, assuming human likeness. And being found in appearance as a human, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.”

Jesus exercises his divine agency in order to set us free from our sins – to make peace between God and a world that had grown hostile to God.

We see this peacemaking in poignant form in the story of Peter’s encounter with the risen Christ from John chapter 21. Peter had made himself an enemy of Jesus. He had denied him three times and abandoned him on the night of his arrest. But Jesus reclaims Peter, and heals his three denials by inviting him into three affirmations of love.  

Jesus then teaches Peter something about discipleship. As Peter matures in his faith, he will use his agency – his powers of choice and consent – to say Yes to the path of love. He will say Yes to the ways that Jesus wants to use him, Yes to the places Jesus wants to take him, Yes to the people Jesus wants to give him to love. His agency will be fully exercised in surrendering to God’s agency, and this will mean that Peter will both follow the one he loves and be led where he does not wish to go. This is the way of the cross; and for Peter, as the tradition holds, that cross became literal.

Like Peter, you and I are called to follow Jesus into a world of enemies. Jesus wants to restore our agency to us, to unlock the power of our Yes to God and our Yes to others. When you’re living in right relationship with God, living against the grain of the evil in the universe with purpose; when you’re doing what you can, what you are called to do, you can experience happiness and peace. This is the promise of the Church. The Church is a community of people standing where they stand, moving against the grain through their Yes to God, and, together, becoming a force. None of us has to know or do everything. But together, in Christ, we overcome all things.

This morning, the call is simply to follow him, even if it means following him into a world where it seems like “there is none who does good. No, not one.” That following is itself an act of profound freedom, and act of humanity, and it sets the stage for an exercise of powerful love, love that is generous, love that forgives, love that stretches out to touch even our enemies.

            We begin today by seeing the situation clearly, with our honest cries of confoundment.

            We begin today simply by saying Yes.

            “Yes. I have decided to follow Jesus.”

            Amen.

Astounded - Hearts Hardened

Astounded - Hearts Hardened

July 13, 2025

By: Lou Engelhardt

Language and culture affect our perception. If there is no word for something, it may or may not exist. Ken Carey says: [Words we use to describe] “Our view of ourselves and our world .....are but a thin sliver of the multidimensional reality we inhabit.” That reality,  as described by different cultures, is a place in which miracles happen all the time. And, What are miracles? They are defined as extraordinary events often attributed to divine intervention that appear to defy natural and scientific laws.

Other realities have been described throughout history, and that fascinates me. Especially descriptions that go way back…to a time when folks thought the world was flat, that there was a dome over it, and above that Gods and Goddesses held meetings and contests in another reality, fighting to gain the attention and loyalty of the people below. During that time in history what was known was mostly shared through spoken words, gathered and retold by storytellers. Each time a story was told it could and would have different meanings depending on whose words that told the story….For instance, the Yazidi people from what is today, Northern Iraq, in the area around Mt Sinjar, believed that Mt Sinjar is where Noah’s boat finally came to rest, that it crashed into the rocks of the mountain and was going to sink due to a huge hole in the hull, but a black snake coiled itself into a plug for the hole and to saved the animals and people on the ark. TFor this reason, they believe in a snake Goddess. The Yazidi also believe they only descended from Adam, and not from Eve. That is another story for another day. 

I love these stories and I find sometimes that folks seem to lose some appreciation or ability to hear such stories with any sense of belief as they grow out of childhood. Something about growing up changes us. Perception from childhood and also in earlier cultures contain complete belief in a multidimensional reality.  However, it seems that as we mature in our culture anyway, we are taught these things are simply someone’s imagination. We are taught that words only mean certain things, and without words for things, what we perceive does not exist. What happens to harden our hearts so we have trouble believing that even without words there is another reality and that miracles can and do happen. When do we become frightened and astonished by things we now call ghosts and “otherworldly”?

When I was about five years old the storyteller was my Berkley Grad, wild gypsy, opera-loving grandmother. She read Greek myths to me at the breakfast table while I ate grapefruit with a serrated spoon and Cream of Wheat, and drank Chamomile tea.  My favorite myth had words describing Perseus’ journey, in his winged shoes, to behead the Gorgon Medusa while looking in a mirror so he would not get turned to stone. This myth also described how immediately, when Perseus beheaded Medusa, the winged horse Pegasus, (on whom one could fly to heaven) was released from Medusa’s  head. My grandmother also taught me to say the 23rd Psalm outloud, from memory.  The 23rd Psalm had words that helped keep me from being frightened by the ghosts I knew were always hiding under my bed. 

As a child I believed in miracles. I believed that I could fly on Pegasus or with winged shoes, and I believed God would cook dinner and walk with me beside still waters. As a child I found it easy to believe in the words of myths and psalms as they described a multidimensional reality full of miracles. 

When I was in my 20s, living in Montana, I heard the words of a woman Shaman from the Crow Nation describing healings where she actually opened bodies with her hands and took out evil spirits. I believed her words describing these miracles. 

Long before Christ, history provides us with facts showing adult men and women from  all over the world have used words to describe multidimensional realities and miracles. The Minoan people of Crete were builders of amazing palaces, designers of ornate frescoes. They told the story of King Minos being cursed by Poseidon, and of the first supernatural creature - a minotaur - and of a complex labyrinth being built to confine the Minotaur. They relied on words from Goddesses to heal and guide them.  

The Mycenean Greeks were legendary warriors and traders, who believed their first king was Perseus, (yes, the same, the beheader of Medusa), and that he was the son of the God Zeus, and that the walls of Mycenae were built by Cyclopes. They developed and used the first known written words called Linear B. 

The Chinese believe that their deity Shangdi is the supreme ancestor of their royal lineage and they tell what are called “tales of the strange”  featuring supernatural beings and ghosts: like the story of Chang’s Flying to the Moon and the love story of the white snake and a scholar. 

During this same time, in North America, tribes living along the California Coast and around Lake Huron, as well as many other parts of the American continent, spoke of the presence of spirits and gods and miracles in their multidimensional reality. Also during this same time, the ancient Hebrews were telling stories of miracles and of finding one God who fought other Gods on their behalf - some of these Gods were Baal (numbers

25:3) and his wife Astarte, who is referenced as the Queen of the Heavens in Jeremiah

7:18), Chemosh (1 Kings 11:7), Dagon (Judges 16:23) and Milcom (1 Kings 11:13). The Hebrew God said “Yourshall have no other Gods before me, and He claimed the Hebrews as His people”. These early stories were shared orally and changed with whoever the storyteller was.  It was later that the stories of the Hebrew people were written down, and this took place about the same time as the early Greek languages started to be written. The Hebrew stories were written mostly in ancient Hebrew which is rooted in Afro-Asiatic language - which is quite different from early Greek. 

Jesus was born into the Hebrew reality, born a Jew, and raised with words about One God. Yet He was also  born during a time when words from many perspectives surrounded him. An example of this is the mention of Queen of Sheba, who was a pagan queen. This is found in Luke 11:31. The stories of these earlier times all captured the idea of something that is always present beyond what we can see, whether we choose to recognize it or not, and that miracles wake people up and draw them into the full experience of a great spiritual realm.  All the beliefs shared belief in a multidimensional reality in us and all around us – every day.  And yet, today it sometimes seems we struggle to accept there is a multidimensional reality. And in Jesus' time, the disciples and other witnesses appear to have struggled to accept miracles. 

All this background is meant to help bring us to the story at hand. Words describing a miracle written down by a young man who was not even a disciple. 

Records indicate Mark was perhaps 15-16 when Jesus was alive, and that he followed Paul and Barnabus during their ministries after Jesus’s death. It is believed that Mark started writing his words, capturing stories he heard from Peter about 30 years after Jesus died. I’m pretty sure he did not plan to have his words collected into what we now call the New Testament. 

It  seems to  me that Mark was especially interested in recording stories of miracles. His  choice of words perhaps showed his own astonishment at the idea of a  multidimensional reality and that he struggled to accept the miracles that Jesus performed. Mark’s words suggest he may have resonated with the struggles of the disciples as they tried to understand Jesus’  actions, and things the disciples could not see.  I think Mark found that the words of Jesus describing this Hebrew God was astonishing because this God was bigger and more powerful than all the other Gods that he heard of in his life. In Mark 6:45-52, Mark’s words describe one of many miracles performed by Jesus as the son of this God. Jesus had already cast out unclean spirits, healed Peter’s mother, healed a leper, made it possible for a paralytic to walk, healed a shriveled hand, stilled the sea, and just that day finished feeding 5000 people.

“Jesus immediately insisted that His disciples get into the boat and go ahead [of Him] to the other side to Bethsaida, while He was dismissing the crowd. After telling everyone good-bye, he went up into the hills by himself to pray.”

Why Immediately? Awww, after feeding 5000 people. 

Here is Jesus, perhaps 31 or 32 years old and here are the disciples, mostly between 15 and 18 years old. They were not a group of highly educated college grads, they were primarily tradesfolk or their children. It must have been difficult to understand this man telling of things beyond their experience and previous understanding.

I was a summer camp counselor and owned a summer camp business during my 20's and 30’s. I also raised three boys. I know what adolescent boys and young men are like. The disciples were a group of boys and young men following Jesus around, relying on him, asking questions, hungry, away from home, astonished and sometimes frightened at what they were seeing and hearing. It’s not like they were Jesus’ peers or had his back, or could counsel him in times of difficulty. I can only imagine his exhaustion, especially after he just spent the last hours speaking in front of a large crowd and then feeding all of them.

No wonder he immediately sent them away, and dispersed the crowd on his own. Needing some “down time,” some “me time,” some time to meditate, to pray, to find his balance, and to restore his connection to the grace and strength of the holy spirit. He needed time with God the Creator his Father. 

_______________

I loved spending time with my father. He was a good listener, and always saw me whole. He was kind and constructive, wise and nourishing. Up until the day he died, I relied on him for his leadership and guidance. I remember walking across the hills with him one day at his ranch in Northern California and asking: “how are you able to always be so strong and giving?”. And his response, “I have been graced with the way I think and live, and by how much life has given me. I do not know any other way to be. Why would I complain rather than being grateful and continuing to be who I am?”  I know he was connected to something much greater than himself. He lived his life as if it was a given. I very much needed his words and time to connect with him when my boys were young.

I’m sure Jesus needed that kind of connection to His Father in heaven, needed His words  as a source of grace and strength, needed time to restore his trust and to renew His acceptance of the responsibility to be who He was. So there He finally is, sitting on the mountain, visiting quietly with his Father. And the story continues…

“Now when evening had come, the boat was in the middle of the sea, and Jesus was alone on the land. Seeing the disciples straining at the oars, because the wind was against them, at about the fourth watch of the night (3:00-6:00 a.m.) He came to them, walking on the sea. And [acted as if] He intended to pass by them.”

Mark doesn’t give us much to go on here.  I want to know how Jesus saw them in the dark, and heard their words from way up on the mountain. 

I can imagine him shaking His head, and saying “gotta go Dad… those crazy boys are struggling again…wonder if I wander out on top of the water if they will ‘get it’, that they are connected to a multidimensional reality, and that miracles are real. When Moses asked to see God’s glory in Exodus 33, God “passed by” Moses to give him a glimpse. Did Jesus ask God “hey Dad, do you think if I did something like that they would get it?” So the next line says: “Jesus came toward them, walking on the water. He intended to go past them.” To pass them by.

(was he skipping, whistling, saying see this? Do you get it yet?)

“But when they saw Him walking on the sea, they thought it was a ghost, and cried out [in horror];for they all saw Him and were shaken and terrified. ” Frightened?  

And Jesus has to use words to calm the young frightened boys and men. “...He immediately spoke with them and said, “Take courage! It is I (I AM)! Stop being afraid.” Then He got into the boat with them, and the wind ceased [as if exhausted by its own activity];

But the next line says: “and they were completely overwhelmed,because they had not understood [the miracle of] the loaves [how it revealed the power and deity of Jesus]; but [in fact] their heart was hardened [being oblivious and indifferent to His amazing works].”

What? They still don’t get it? 

There are times I can relate to their astonishment and inability to see  miracles. On the one hand my whole life is filled with miracles – every day instances when I am so blessed and things happen synchronistically that surprise and delight me. I sense that I can reach out through what feels like a “veil” and touch that other multidimensional reality - and hold the hands of my father, my sister and my grandmothers.  I also believe there are angels - winged ones - among us here and now.

But there is a part of me deep inside that says I want words that create a REAL miracle. I want no more cough, no more arthritis, no more sciatica, no more depression, I want manna from heaven (literally I would like to see food fall from the sky). I want to pick up a glass of water and have it turn out to be fine wine. I want to be one of those “special” people who have come back from the dead, or regained their ability to walk, or had a demon tossed out of them. My mind twists things and says I have not had enough miracles, why should I believe these words about miracles and of some kind of multidimensional reality?

There is a tale from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, also known as the Iroquois Confederacy, the peoples from the area around Lake Huron….. a story of Bird Tribes - winged spirit beings who lived among the people. The words of this story tell of a  winged one who came to try to teach the tribes to stop fighting, and to recognize their blessings. The tribal leaders got angry, used words to try to frighten him, chased him up a tree at the edge of a cliff, and threatened to chop down the tree with him in it and send him to his death.

He stopped them with these words, “let me chop the tree down myself.” And he got down and started hacking at the tree with his knife. For hours he hacked away until it was almost chopped through. Then he climbed back in the tree so that his weight bent the tree enough to break the final connection and he toppled with the tree over the cliff. And they watched, astonished and frightened, and at the same time they agreed that he deserved to die. 

Unbeknownst to them, the tree landed in the branches of other trees and was gently brought to rest and the winged one got up, saw a large buck, was able to take its life and skin it and carry off the haunches. And he walked back through the canyon and up to where the tribes were gathered. They saw him coming and were again “astonished”, and frightened and thought they were seeing a ghost. He calmed them by offering words of peace, sharing the deer meat, eating with them, and simply being present.

They decided he must be from some multidimensional reality, that his return was a miracle, and they began to listen to his words. Out of that grew the League of the Five and then Six nations which became a model our founding fathers used in crafting the words of our democracy.

And so my questions:

●     What does it take for us to accept and honor the words and experiences of so many other cultures meant to teach us our place in this enormous multidimensional reality?

●     What does it take for us to believe words that tell us of miracles?

●     What does it take for us to hear words that help us really know that we are all one, that there is enough, that we do not have to be frightened? 

●     What does it take for us to stop looking out and seeing only differences, and start seeing miracles of belonging and perfection everywhere?

I love this quote from The Return of the Bird Tribes:

“In every moment the Great Spirit communicates to all creatures everything they need to know. Through ten thousand billion agents – angel, elemental animal, vegetable and mineral – through the vast and subtle network of living design beyond the weather, before the wind, the truth is ever transmitted into this world of form. … below the level of thought, when judgment subsides …. when your mind relaxes its cultural interpretations and trusts you to experience the natural clarity that is always present…when you are present.” Like Jesus was present. Like Jesus is present.

I believe God wants us to be present, and to recognize the multidimensional reality of our world. To know  that we do not have to each be the same, use the same words, believe exactly the same, be just like anyone else, or “get it right”… we are all perfected parts of creation and just need to stop and “Be Still and know that I am God”. Psalm 46:10

May we always hear words with open hearts and compassion, may we sink our feet deep into the earth while we sit still and breathe in the wind, may we hunker down into the boat and not be afraid. May we truly know the meaning of these words, “God is before me and behind me and all is well.” 

AND..

May we continue to grow out of our rigid adolescent limited understanding and bring back the wide eyed curiosity and understanding of words we heard when we were children. May we mature our sight to fully see and experience the multidimensional reality all around us with its abundance of miracles. May we live with the expectation that Jesus may come walking on the water every day.

Amen