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

The House of Peace (Luke 10:1-20)

The House of Peace

July 6, 2025

Luke 10:1-20

By: Pastor Mike Connor

 ***

As a person who has traveled widely, if not exotically, in preparation for professional ministry and as a musician, I identify with these 72 disciples. I have received an abundance of hospitality throughout my life from people who have welcomed me into their homes and into their stories. Sometimes I just needed one meal or one night in a clean bed on my way from here to there. Sometimes I needed a week, a month, a season. If I tried to count all the couches, pull-out beds, floors, and that one lavish master bedroom in a Chicago high-rise overlooking lake Michigan that I’ve been offered over the years, I doubt I could recall them all. But I will tell you about one experience of hospitality that made a deep impression on me.

The summer of 2013, when I was 22, I moved from north-central Indiana where I had gone to college to a place called Walkertown, North Carolina, not far from the city of Winston-Salem. I would begin my studies at Duke Divinity School in the fall, but I went down for the summer to participate in something called a Pre-Enrollment Field Education placement. In order to graduate from Duke with an MDiv, I would need to do at least two summer internships at local churches around North Carolina. As an incoming student, I applied to do a special early placement. It wouldn’t count toward the “official” two, but it was a way to gain some experience and make a little money before the start of school. I was accepted and assigned to Morris Chapel United Methodist Church in Walkertown.

A church member named Don Whicker opened his home to me. Don was 83 years old, and what we call “a pillar” of the church. He had been a stalwart Sunday School teacher for over 40 years and an avid member of the choir before giving both up. His wife of 56 years, Betty, had recently passed away, so Don and I bonded over our shared loneliness. You see, he had three adult daughters and several grandchildren in the area, all of whom I got to know that summer, but at home he was alone. For my part, I had come down to North Carolina, to this land of heavy humidity and rolling tobacco fields, not knowing a soul.

Don had a screened porch where he liked to sit in the evenings, and I’d often join him there, sometimes idly fiddling with my guitar or banjo, which he appreciated. He took me out to eat several times at a southern chicken sandwich chain called Bojangles. When we drove around Walkertown, he could point to various places and share stories about his roots. Everything was “my people” this and “my people” that. I found that surprisingly compelling.

Down in his basement there was an extra shower; it was really just a shower head sticking out of the wall that ran water directly onto the concrete floor. No tub or curtain or four-walled bathroom. Just a shower head and a drain. Don told me how much he had loved taking his showers down in the dark, cool, quiet basement during the years when he was working full-time and parenting three teenage daughters. He couldn’t manage the steep wooden stairs anymore, but with a glint in his eye he insisted that I should make use of that basement shower as a refuge after each day. He was a man of simple pleasures and reminded me very much of my own grandfathers.

Don served in the Korean War. He was stationed right along the 38th parallel, the arbitrary border diving North and South. Many times an incoming shell from the North nearly took him. More than once, he told me a story about a time when he was back from the War and had started his family. He was down using his shower when a lightning strike hit the house and he was electrocuted. Though somehow unharmed, he was terrified, and he sprang up the stairs and crashed into the kitchen where he wife and daughters were doing homework wearing only his birthday suit. He always ended the story by saying how strange it would have been to come home safely from war only to be struck down in the shower. Like many veterans, life for him was both a profound gift and haunted by the possibilities of chaos.

            I lived in North Carolina for eight years from 2013 to 2021, but my on-ramp, my introduction, were those three months in Don Whicker’s house. He died in 2015 when I was halfway through seminary. One of his daughters got in touch and asked if I’d come speak at his funeral because of the impression I’d made on all of them. And I did. I wanted to honor this man who had given me so much at a time of profound transition and change in my life. And I wanted to honor the fact that I, just by being there, had also given something intangible to him.

            I’m telling you about Don because I think we need to let some air into this passage from Luke chapter 10. Its first 16 verses tell us about Jesus sending the 72 disciples out in pairs for missionary work, and they record the instructions Jesus had for them. And then by verse 17, just one verse later, they’re already back! But there needs to have been a significant amount of time between verses 16 and 17, don’t you think?

         These 36 pairs of men had to walk to the villages they were sent to, some obviously further away than others. Then they had to do some ministry with the people – building relationships, healing diseases, preaching the kingdom, and exorcising demons. Then they had to walk back to Jesus. This wasn’t over in a day. At minimum it took several days, though I think one or two weeks is even more likely.

            In his instructions, Jesus describes a temporary joining of the disciples to the people in these towns and villages. ‘Be with people, enter their homes, eat the food they set before you,’ he says. It’s risky, it’s scary, being at the mercy of others in that way: I am sending you out as lambs among wolves. But it’s not a dependence the disciples are allowed to shirk: Don’t take any money with you, nor a traveler’s bag, nor an extra pair of sandals. They really are walking in and by faith, which is to say walking in and by trust. They trust that they will be taken care of – by other people, let’s not over-spiritualize this – if not in this place, then in the next.

Doris read from the New Living Translation which puts verses 5 and 6 this way: “Whenever you enter someone’s home, first say, ‘May God’s peace be on this house.’ If those who live there are peaceful, the blessing will stand; if they are not, the blessing will return to you.” But a slightly more literal translation of the Greek text brings out a provocative phrase in verse 6: “Whenever you enter someone’s home, first say, ‘May God’s peace be on this house.’ And if there should be there a son of peace, your peace will rest upon it.”

A son of peace, Jesus says. That’s who you’re looking for. Not just people living calmly in their house, but a child of peace. Go into a house and see if like recognizes like, if you, the giver of peace who’s come to pronounce and enact the nearness of God, recognize the giver of peace who’s ready to open their home and pantry and heart. Those are the places where blessing will abide.

This is radical stuff, because remember, these disciples are being sent places where Jesus hasn’t been yet. There are children of peace, Jesus promises, servants of peace outside our group waiting for you, even if they don’t know it yet. Jesus speaks of a world brimming with kindred spirits, with peacemakers from different walks of life coming together around tables in homes. When his happens, peace gushes out to touch the sick and hurting of the whole place.

Jesus is teaching the 72 – and us – something about his own journey, his own way. The opening chapter of John’s Gospel says that Jesus “came into the very world he created, but the world didn’t recognize him. He came to his own people, and even they rejected him. But to all who believed him and accepted him, he gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:10-12). Jesus, too, was sent the world. As a human baby he entered a world in which the people in power would ignore, hunt, slander, and crucify him; he came into this world dependent on the Yes of the teenage girl Mary who would mother him, the Yes of the adoptive father Joseph who would protect him, the Yes of his Heavenly Father who would love and provide for him. In his letter to the Philippian church, Paul says that Jesus “emptied himself” (2:7) when he came to us and that this self-emptying should constitute our own “attitude” (2:5) toward one another. Self-emptying means giving up the masquerade of self-sufficiency, the safety of distance.

It seems like Jesus sent out the 72 disciples with nothing but the clothes on their backs so that they could be like him in experiencing the great sting of rejection and the greater joy of welcome. They needed to learn that salvation, healing, and liberation do not come by force; they are not imposed on others from the outside. They originate in welcome, in strangers who recognize each other as siblings in peace.

The unspoken joy in the scene of the 72’s return is the joy of having been welcomed. Jesus told them to immediately leave any place that did not welcome them but to stay put wherever they were welcomed. The joy they have on account of their ministry implies that there were indeed children of peace to receive them in all these strange places. And we all know that hospitality is a gift that blesses in both directions: The ones who come as strangers receive material comfort and the joy of sharing their gits. The ones who do the welcoming are sanctified by their sharing and experience the thrill of having their hearts and minds broadened by the arrival of a guest.

Let’s now turn this a few different ways for some application:

Sometimes, being a person of faith means setting off into the unknown trusting in hospitality. No matter how much we think we have to offer, no matter how much our journey and vocation have sprung from the words of Jesus himself, we also depend on the goodness of others in the places to which we go. When we allow the temptation of self-sufficiency to shape our journey, we don’t rub shoulders with the people who we are sent to bless, people waiting to bless us. We might literally go from here to there, but without any radical change in the heart.

So, ask yourself this: Throughout my life, who are the people who have welcomed me, and how did that welcome affect my journey or vocation? What did receiving hospitality teach me about God?

Let’s turn it another way:

Sometimes, being a person of faith means being a giver of hospitality. Which means we should be ready and willing to open up our homes and our resources to people who need them. Not just our time and not just our money. But also our space, our stuff.  This story from Luke suggests that the healing power of God is sometimes going to come to us from outside our sphere. We must assume, as Christians, that our experience of God is incomplete apart from the visitation and gifts of the stranger, who becomes a guest, who becomes a friend. That is how Jesus came to us in his incarnation; that is how he comes to us still.

So, ask yourself this: Throughout my life, who are the people I’ve welcomed into my sphere, and how did sharing with them in that way affect my journey? And how do I decide who to welcome or the extent to which I will welcome them? What does it mean for me to be a child of peace who is able to recognize a sibling in peace on my doorstep?

Let’s turn this one final time:

If God comes to us in the stranger, if welcome precedes ministry, if God judges us by our decision to welcome or reject – if these things are true, then we have a great responsibility to partner with God in creating a world of welcome. We are called to expect God’s presence in the faces of those who we don’t know but are called to care for. We are called to discipline ourselves in generous, costly sharing.

And if that’s the world God wants us to make, we should protest every act and word and policy that diminishes welcome, that slanders hospitality as something soft or naïve, or that criminalizes sanctuary.

The border wall that will now receive billions of dollars in new funding from our paychecks is a statement about welcome. The mass detention centers for migrants that have received billions of dollars in new funding from our wallets are a statement about welcome. The travel bans brandished against whole nationalities are a statement about welcome. Incentivizing neighbors to report one another for harboring an undocumented person or sheltering a woman who has had to end a pregnancy are statements about welcome.

Our policies and practices, from the heights of government to the depths of the heart, are a litmus test: Are we sons and daughters of peace? Are we creatures of welcome? How would a stranger be met on our doorstep?

And the great irony here is this: being welcomed is what we all so deeply long for. We crave being welcomed in our home and in our churches, by our communities and by our God. What we most deeply want is to live in God’s house, where God has set a table with plenty. Why would we, collectively and in our individual hearts, deny others what we ourselves so desperately desire.

I’ve told you about Don Whicker, my host in North Carolina, and I wonder who is coming to mind for you as you consider hospitality. Now, may the God whose arms are always open to us in a gesture of eternal welcome teach each of us how to welcome and be welcomed. And may we settle for nothing less than a world of welcome, where strangers are treated as angels in disguise, as the Book of Hebrews tells us, and children of peace join together in works of healing and freedom.

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

On the Inside of the Discipleship Project (Luke 9:51-62)

On the Inside of the Discipleship Project

June 29, 2025

Church in the Park

Luke 9:51-62

By: Pastor Mike

* * *

Chapter 9 verse 51 marks a major narrative pivot in Luke’s Jesus story. He writes that Jesus “determined to journey to Jerusalem.” After establishing a popular ministry of healing and teaching in the northern region of Israel known as Galilee, a ministry that occupies chapters 4 through 9 of Luke’s Gospel, Jesus began a long journey south toward the city where he would “be betrayed into human hands” (9:44). Aware of the unjust treatment and the suffering awaiting him in Jerusalem, Jesus nevertheless committed to the path.

This development occurs about halfway through a string of stories in chapters 9 and 10 that explore the theme of discipleship. Luke 9 opens with Jesus sending out the twelve disciples in pairs to practice ministry. He “gave them power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases, and he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal” (9:1-2). Upon their return, Jesus guides them toward a deserted place so they can rest and tell him about their time in the field. But a crowd of needy people catches wind of where they are and crashes their retreat. Jesus receives them compassionately, teaching and healing them, and at the end of the day he multiplied a meager amount of food to feed more than 5,000 of them to the point of satisfaction.

            Next comes a story about Jesus, sometime later, asking the disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter answers, “The Messiah of God” (9:20). In response, Jesus, for the first time, teaches the Twelve that he will have to “undergo great suffering” (9:22) in order to fulfil his Messianic work. He tells them somberly that, in order to experience true life, they will need to lose their lives for his sake and “take up their cross daily and follow me” (9:23).

This is followed in rapid successes by the Transfiguration, a story about Peter, James, and John witnessing Jesus’ divine glory revealed on a mountaintop, a second teaching about the suffering to come, and an argument among the disciples about which of them is the greatest and most important. Jesus – no surprise here – tells them to knock it off, and he directs their attention to a small child and tells them that the goal of discipleship is to become childlike and to welcome children.

At last we arrive at these scenes which are our focus for today. Jesus makes that critical shift toward Jerusalem. His disciples are bound to go in whatever direction Jesus “sets his face,” while three unnamed individuals hesitate about whether or not they want to follow him.

            Luke closes this deep exploration of discipleship with the opening story of chapter 10, which mirrors the opening story of chapter 9. Now that he has reached Samaria, Jesus appoints seventy of his followers to go ahead of him in pairs to all the towns and villages that he intends to visit. As they go to find out where he will be welcomed, they are to herald his coming with their own ministries of – once again, notice the pattern – healing sicknesses and preaching about the nearness of God’s kingdom.

            So we have these two narrative bookends. In the first, Jesus sends the Twelve throughout Galilee to preach and heal; in the second, he sends 70 others out to do the same thing in unfamiliar territory. Both stories highlight the core things disciples do or don’t do. They don’t take along a lot of provisions or possessions, which means that they do depend on the hospitality of others. They meet people where they are and eat what is set before them. They preach about the kingdom, and they heal people from disease or demon possession. When they are not welcome in a place, they don’t react violently; they simply shake the dust off their sandals on their way out of town as a testimony against that place, and move on.

Between those two bookends are episodes that show what it means to be a disciple – one who follows behind the teacher without reservation – going where he goes, doing what he does, submitting to what he submits to. Discipleship is thrilling. It’s risky. It’s all-encompassing. It’s daily. But—if you’ve left everything to follow him, the promise is that it’s worth more than anything else in all the world.

            The closing scenes in chapter 9 which mark Jesus’ and – therefore his disciples’ – determination to go to Jerusalem, bring to the forefront the foundation of unreserved commitment, of complete readiness to follows, on which everything else that makes a life of discipleship is built.

When Jesus began travelling to Jerusalem, he had to pass through a region called Samaria. In the Old Testament, we are told that the kingdom of Israel, which was established under Saul, David, and Solomon, eventually fractured into two rival kingdoms, Israel in the North and Judah in the South. These kingdoms became like estranged branches on a family tree, with their own customs, centers of gathering, and claims to be the real, authentic thing. Yet the past relationship was undeniably felt, and for that reason the present relationship was all the more fraught and painful.

The Samaritans traced their lineage back to the old Northern Kingdom, but they were not, by the time of Jesus, considered “true” Jews. They were neither true Jews nor true Gentiles. Not really insiders; not really outsiders. In between. Monstrous. John’s Gospel tells us that “Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans” (4:9). But Jesus didn’t pay that either-or, black-and-white game. He had come for the sake of the whole world. He took his body, his love, and his proclamation of God’s kingdom to Samaria, much to the chagrin of his disciples.

Well, as you might imagine, not everyone in Samaria was glad he was there. Not every place was willing to host him. Jesus’ disciples, these “proper” Jews, weren’t willing to take that snubbing in stride. When Jesus learned that his first prospective site visit in Samaria was not going to happen, James and John sidled up and asked if Jesus would like them to call down fire from heaven and blow up the hostile town.

            It seems extreme, but is it? If you were traveling with someone you believed as all-powerful, and you had a legitimate reason to react violently against a community with whom you’ve experienced centuries of animosity, might you just test the waters, push on the boundaries to see if there is a quick and easy way to make that problem – those people – go away for good, to justify yourself once and for all? Fire raining down from the sky. Even today, isn’t that our way of dealing with enemies – with outsiders, foreigners, religious and ethnic “others” who violate our self-righteousness and pose a threat to us? The image is even more haunting in our era of modern warfare: napalm, bunker busters, drones.

So these two zealous brothers ask Jesus to do this, “but he turned and rebuked them” (9:55) What’s Jesus response to not being welcomed? Oh, it’s very dramatic: “Then they went on to another village” (9:56). ‘Guys, we’ll just go somewhere else; of course I have no intention of putting fire into your hands.’ (Contrast this with the tongues of fire that anoint the disciples on Pentecost; fire of love, anointing that leads to the gift of languages which unites the world’s peoples.) So James and John get rebuked. Then come these three short conversations with unnamed people, which my Bible titles “Would-Be Followers of Jesus.”

Conversation 1: A person catches Jesus’ attention on the road and says, I will follow you wherever you go. And Jesus said to him, Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.

Conversation 2: Jesus initiates this one. Follow me, he says to somebody. But that person said, Lord, first let me go and bury my father. But Jesus said to him, Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.

Conversation 3: Another says to Jesus, I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home. Jesus said to him, No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.

In each of these three interactions, the words “follow” is used. Important, because, again, that is the defining act of discipleship. And these conversations directly play on earlier stories of Jesus calling his first disciples to follow him. In those first call narratives, people follow Jesus immediately and without reservation. Take, for example, the calling of Levi in chapter 5: “After this [Jesus] went out and saw a tax collector named Levi, sitting at a tax booth; and he said to him Follow me. And he got up, left everything, and followed him” (Luke 5:27-28). Simple as that.

But these three unnamed people in Luke 9 are not so sure, not so ready. One’s enthusiasm and naivete is tempered by Jesus’ warning about not having a stable home; to really go with Jesus anywhere requires a full letting go of security, a willingness to live in dependency on God and others. The second responds to a direct invitation from Jesus with a request to go and do something else first. A third pipes up that he’ll follow but also needs to go do something first.

What they’re asking to do – bury or say goodbye to their relatives – seems very human and reasonable. It’s just this that highlights the radical nature of the call to discipleship. When you compile all the biblical stories of call from Old Testament to New, “doing something first” doesn’t really have a place there. It’s a red flag.

As harsh as Jesus’ words feel, the point is that discipleship doesn’t happen on our timing or on our terms. It’s following. Which is the opposite of self-determination. You go into enemy territory because Jesus goes there. You pick up the cross because Jesus picks it up. You do all of this nonviolently and without retribution because that’s the way Jesus has marked out. You can’t really do that if, from day one, you’ve asked for accommodation and reserved the right to order your own priorities.

We shake our heads and laugh at James and John’s brashness, but here’s the thing: long before this moment, they had left everything to follow Jesus. They’re on the inside of his project. They are genuine followers. They are therefore in a position to receive a real rebuke and to grow from that experience. They are deeply wrong about how to respond to the Samaritan’s lack of welcome, but they are in a safe position to be deeply wrong, because they bring their reactivity, their raw broken humanity to Jesus.

Notice: they address him as “Lord.” They ask him if he wants or desires this action. And they bear his rebuke. They’re allowed to be a mess, they can be honest about how they’d like to deal with their enemies, they are free to show their hand – because at the end of the day they’ve already thrown in their lot with their teacher, with their Lord. They will do what he tells them to do. They will follow him. Nothing else, not even their centuries-old grievance with Samaria, takes precedence.

On the other hand, these three unnamed conversation partners are not yet on the inside. They’re thinking about it. One is overly enthusiastic, two are reasonably cautious. But none of them is ready; none have committed. The Swiss theologian Karl Barth once wrote: “a limited readiness is no readiness at all in our dealings with Jesus.”[1]

What happens next is the sending of the 70. Luke is very careful to say, right on the heels of these three conversations, that “after this the Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him…” (10:1). Did you catch it? Seventy others. Which I take to mean, seventy people who were not these three. They had not yet called Jesus ‘Lord.’ They had not yet said Yes to him. And so they missed out on the risk, the exhilaration, the joy, the purpose to which he commissions the others; they missed out on their new family. They missed out on the opportunity to have their hearts recreated, to bear his healing rebuke, to grow in his love.

            Here are a few questions I will leave us with. Questions each of us can ask of our heart:

            First, am I truly following Jesus, or am I holding something back – something like a particular dimension of my life, an old wound or hatred, a need to be seen and known by the people around me in a particular way, my possessions or my family, my leisure or my work? If I am holding something back, will I ask God to give me the grace I need to surrender it?

            Second, am I being honest with Jesus about what I wish would happen to the people I don’t like, who mistreat me or trample on the things I value? Am I being honest about my inner fantasies where I play out my own version of calling down fire from heaven? Am I being honest about my lack of love, so that I can be unclogged, cleansed, made ready for radical love to flow? And if I feel afraid to tell Jesus what I’m really thinking or feeling about my enemies, will I ask God for the grace I need to hold nothing back from the one I follow?

            And finally, am I exercising the power he gives me to heal and proclaim the kingdom? Am I being bold to step into the ministry to which he has called me? And if I feel estranged from any meaningful ministry, will I ask God for the grace I need to say, “Here I am, send me.”

            As we ask and answer these questions about surrender, confession, and ministry, may the Holy Spirit meet us, help us, and draw us toward fullness of life. Amen.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV, 2, 535f.

Jesus was a Great Teacher and Storyteller (John 15:1-17)

Jesus was a Great Teacher and Storyteller

June 22, 2025

John 15:1-17

By: Kay Flowers

Jesus was a great teacher and storyteller. He went to great lengths to use familiar scenes, things, and events to relate the greatness of God to Jews of the first century. We see these things in his parables: a prodigal son, a traveler set upon by thieves. We see them in his similes: the Kingdom of God is like salt, leaven, a mustard seed. And we see them in his metaphors: sheep, shepherd, fishers of men. And vines. The vine is the central metaphor in today's scripture, but to understand it, we should take a brief look at vineyards (since few of us know how they work).

First, as we all know, there are many types of vines. Pumpkins and watermelons come to mind. Most vines have many of the same characteristics. However, in this context, we are most likely referring to grapes, the primary source of wine. The earliest evidence of winemaking, and by extension vineyards, dates back 6,000 years before Christ. Vineyards are carefully constructed with clean soil, and vines are often placed on terraces and attached to some kind of structure to keep the fruit off the ground. The vine sends out long tendrils or branches that produce grapes, relying on the stem of the vine to provide the necessary nutrients. Not all tendrils produce fruit, particularly in their first year. Therefore, the vinedresser must prune the vines back so that resources are not wasted on leaves only. This action also strengthens the branch for the years when it does bear fruit.

The word vine appears 185 times in the Old and New Testaments, but its meaning changes. The first mention is in Genesis, where it states that Noah was the first to plant a vineyard. Later in the Old Testament, the vine came to symbolize the nation of Israel.

In the psalm we heard earlier, the psalmist

Psalm 80:08: You brought a vine out of Q/Egypt. You drove out the nations and planted it. Oh God, Q/ hosts, look down from heaven and see, have regard for this vine.

In some cases, the reference was derogatory. The prophet Jeremiah says:

Jeremiah 2:21

Yet I planted you as a choice vine from the purest stock. How, then, did you turn degenerate and become a wild vine, Isaiah says. For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his cherished garden; he expected justice but saw bloodshed; righteousness but heard a cry!

Jesus uses the vine as a metaphor in his Farewell Discourses, his last instruction and comfort to his disciples before his death. In John 15, he says, "I am the true vine and my Father is the vinedresser." The vine is no longer Israel but is Jesus.

He reminds his disciples that branches that bear no fruit are removed and thrown into a fire. Those that bear fruit are pruned so that they will bear more fruit. The branch must remain in the vine because the vine provides nourishment and energy to the branch to bear fruit. We know now that the base of the vine provides DNA, the instructions for creating fruit. Without the vine, the branch can do nothing. In such a way, we must abide in Jesus, who supports us in our lives, so that we may produce fruit. Without him, we can do nothing.

But what does it mean to abide in Jesus? The word abide is used in John 15:1-17 I l times! This is an essential concept in Jesus' message. One commentator suggested that just starting the morning with prayer can renew us and prepare us for a day of abiding in Jesus. Another commentator said touching base with a friend, or a token, can keep us mindful of Jesus and his love. In some ways, the chips given to

Alcoholics Anonymous members act as tokens to remind the individual of their commitment to sobriety. In the same way, some Christians wear crosses or carry verses in their wallets to remind them of their commitment to Christ. I still have a small pocket cross that was popular in the 1970s. It came with a short poem, the last line of which was

"I carry a cross in my pocket to remind no one but me that

Jesus Christ is Lord of my life if only I'll let him be."

Seeking Jesus in what we do daily invites him to abide with us and reminds us to abide in Him.

Abide is an interesting word. Jesus urges his disciples to abide in him as the branches abide in the vine. If one looks up the definition of this word, its current usage is to accept or tolerate something, with synonyms such as bear, endure, suffer, and stand. However, the biblical sense is vastly different, stemming from an archaic meaning: to dwell or remain. One commentary I read suggested that the verse "In my father's house are many mansions" is better translated as "In my father's house are many abiding places," which I prefer.

When I first read this passage, I was struck by the word "abide" (it is hard to miss when it is repeated I l times). The image that came to my mind was my bed. I have an adjustable bed, and one of its settings is called "zero gravity." If you move to this setting, you are in a cradle, with the head slightly raised and the feet raised. It is

a position of complete relaxation. I could abide in that position for quite a while. Relaxing in a hot tub also comes to mind.

As I read more, however, I realized that branches that abide in the vine are part of the vine as the vine is part of the branches. Together, they work on creating fruit. So, the image of dwelling, or remaining, such as the branches dwelling in the vine, or us dwelling in Jesus, is not the relaxation I imagined. Instead, it can be a kind of work.

Another word that might be used for this arrangement is synergy: the combined effort of two entities produces a whole greater than the sum of the parts. The problem with that definition is that it is too impersonal. Jesus asks us to abide in him as he abides in us, an indwelling, not just a joint effort.

The goal of this synergy is the creation of fruit. Jesus mentions fruit many times throughout his ministry. In Matthew, Jesus reminds his disciples that "by their fruits, ye shall know them."

"For there is no good tree that bears bad fruit, nor on the other hand, a bad tree that bears good fruit. For each tree is known by its own fruit. For people do not gather figs from thorns, nor do they pick grapes from a briar bush. The good person out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth what is good, and the evil person out of the evil treasure brings forth what is evil; for his mouth speaks from that which fills his heart.

In other words, what a person produces reveals their true nature, just as the seeds in the fruit produce the plant they came from. Our fruit can be anything, such as our actions, attitudes, and behaviors. And, as the scripture mentions, what we say reflects the fruit we produce.

I've told the story before about a woman who was late and stopped at a light behind a car waiting for a pedestrian to cross the street. The light changed, but the car didn't move because the pedestrian was still in the crosswalk. Well, she was furious, honking her horn, yelling epithets out the window, and shooting the finger. When the car finally moved, she hurried down the road but was shortly pulled over by a policeman. She gave him her license and registration when asked, but then she asked him what was wrong. The policeman said, "Well, I was behind you at the light back there, and I couldn't help but notice all your bumper stickers. "Praise the Lord," "One way: Jesus," "In case of rapture, this car will be unmanned," "Follow me to Sunday School," etc. I thought I should check to be sure your car had not been stolen. Moral? You never know who is watching.

In Galatians, Paul describes the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

One who exhibits these qualities reflects the Spirit within him or her. Right in the middle of this list is kindness. Kindness encompasses most of Jesus' works, including healing, teaching, and feeding those who followed Him.

We have been talking about kindness recently as we seek to identify our Church values. The first of these is to be Actively Kind. If we show our kindness to those around us as well as to each other, we will be obeying Jesus' command to love one another. And if we obey his command, we will abide in his love. So, we should seek opportunities to show kindness to all.

As he ends this part of his discourse, Jesus assures us of three gifts and a promise. First, he says that if we abide in him and he in us, we will produce much fruit. This glorifies God the Father.

Second, if we keep his commandments, we will abide in his love, just as Jesus kept God's commands and abides in his love.

Another gift is joy. Jesus shared these things with the disciples the night before his death. Why? So that his joy might be in them and us, and our joy may be complete.

And the promise: if you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.

May God add his blessing to this review of his word.

Social Holiness

Social Holiness

June 15, 2025

By: Marlys McCurdy

In the mid-1700s, John Wesley set us on the path of social holiness. He understood and respected that God had created a magnificent world that we were given with the caveat that we take care of it and each other.

Genesis 2:15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.

And we haven’t done such a great job of that.

I came across an interesting fact recently. If you grew crops on a farm the size of China, the food produced would equal the amount of wasted food each year. That waste which often goes to landfill in this country becomes methane, which reduces the ozone and contributes to climate change.

The Oceans are warming, the currents are changing in the oceans, and the permafrost is thawing at an alarming rate. Species are endangered on every continent. We have state-sized floats of plastic waste in the oceans.

We suffer through massive droughts, famines and endless wars. But we haven’t done all this alone. It took all 8.2 billion of us to damage God’s creations. So now what?

Wesley knew that we were not particularly good stewards of the earth or each other. Even in the 1700’s it was apparent. He wanted us to strive for Social Holiness.

So, what is social holiness?

Social holiness is the practice of obeying Jesus' commandments to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind, loving your neighbor as yourself.

We must honor his creation mightily.

Wesley once claimed that there was no holiness but social holiness.

It is within the Christian community that holiness of life is to be realized. Today, social holiness needs to be extended beyond fellowship and community. It is within the socio-economic and political community that holiness of life is to be realized. We must care for all of creation as God intended. The Social Principles of our church provide a framework for being socially holy

Wesley thought that he had failed. What he did was launch us into a quest for social holiness – social justice. He wasn’t alive to see it but the first official Social Creed of the Methodist church was developed and adopted 1908. When the Methodists Joined with Evangelical United Brethren in 1968-69

the first set of social principles for the UMC was adopted.

Final draft of newest Social Principles was approved at General Conference in 2024 was published as part of the Book of Discipline in January of 2025.

There was a kerfuffle of some magnitude at the 2012 General Conference. The main point of disagreement was acceptance of the LGBQTi individuals as fully recognized members of the United Methodist Church, able to serve as clergy, and recognizing and honoring Gay marriage in the church.

The people at the conference realized that something needed to be done about these disparities

All UMC members and churches should fully understand the dynamic document that is the New Social Principles. It covers all of God’s creation.

Over 4000 members were involved with writing, reviewing and rewriting this document. It is rooted deeply in the Bible and Wesleyan theology. I would encourage all of you to read it online or in the new Book of Discipline. That’s where you will find the litany that Pastor Mike read with you.

Let’s focus on a couple of points from the principles.

1st we have failed in God’s covenant with us to “take care of the garden”. As humans we have strayed far from the perfection of the Garden of Eden. It really is shameful what we have done to his creation. And when you include people, it gets worse.

Wesley was adamant about serving all of creation. “To do justice, to love kindness, walk humbly with God Micah 6:8. This is the essence of social holiness.

We certainly did go out and thrive and multiply but somewhere along the line, with 8.2 billion on the planet today we missed the boat when it came to practicing Social Holiness with each other and with our awesome earth that we were given freely because God loves us.

John Wesley mandated that we do no harm, do good, and follow the ordinances of God. His rules and expectations for the church followed this mandate closely.

2nd God loves us always and fully. Christ died for our sins and we are redeemed.

In the SP it says “we are grateful for Gods forgiving and sanctifying love, given to us all and drawing us toward perfect love.”

By God’s grace we are called be more Christlike, and thus to be merciful just and compassionate.” God isn’t going to abandon us because we haven’t lived up to his covenant.

We are his Children and we are loved

3rd. What now? This is pretty heavy stuff. You have to pare it down to manageable for your life right now right here.

Heaven Help Us is a delightful new book written by John Kasich. A politician – who knew?

Albert Lexie worked two days a week shining shoes in the foyer of the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. He charges $3 a shine and had a healthy business in the foyer of this hospital. He collected his tips in a jar. He donated all of the tips to the “free care fund” at the hospital. Word got out and his tip total exploded. People heard about it and started tipping very generously. His total donation to the hospital topped $200,000 by the time of his death. All of those tips went to helping children at that hospital.

It was kind of a widow’s mite on steroids. And he didn’t do it alone. He created a community of people that donated to his cause.

Wesley said The Bible knows nothing of solitary religion.

Each chapter in this wonderful book details the lives of people who have made a difference.

Don’t assume you cannot do something that matters.

Wesley advised us to: "Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can." Read Stacey’s shirt

"I am no longer my own, but yours. Put me to what you will, place me with whom you will."

We have in this church a warrior who addresses social injustice in our world. God gave us mouths and brains and voices. We can influence our legislators. Donna Boe is a champion for the poor and oppressed in prisons and around the country and world. She has taught us how to influence our legislators. One person at a time. Don’t assume that your voice won’t be heard.

AND don’t just address the legislators from Idaho. Send or call anyone you disagree with or want to compliment. You may never know how much your words touch someone.

Wesley said "Love is the foundation of the Christian life."

We can be kinder to one another. Gary and I always try to “chat up” our servers at restaurants and at stores. Smile and listen to their stories. Everyone wants to tell their stories. Smile and nod, you don’t have to give advice just let them know you care enough to listen. If you are comfortable with it, ask someone if they mind if you pray for them? Maybe not right then or there, but at home. Most people will smile and say thanks. OH, BUT THAT SMILE! That’s soul food for you and them. When you reach out and touch someone this way, it is holy. Social Holiness shares canned food with the food banks. Work at this church’s breakfast for the needy.

Shorten your shower time, conserve water. Don’t throw out that ½ glass of water from yesterday; pour it on a plant or put it in the dog dish. Feed stale bread to wildlife. Be careful where you do it, because some people don’t want it to draw birds and other animals to their neighborhoods.

Give a “Bag of hope” to someone begging. Give them socks, wipes, Vienna sausages and information about local addresses like Aid for Friends and the Salvation Army or our church. You may change someone’s life. You will certainly make them smile (more SOUL FOOD).

Join our Care Team and give a piece of your heart to someone that needs a visit! Listen to their story and help them smile

I’m going to end with a local story about Millie Carey. Millie was a power to behold in this church. She was really, really into mission. Her daughter Annie told me that when Millie was living in Florida, the first hurricane that decimated Haiti weighed heavily on her soul. She went to there to help with money and hands. When she

came back Annie said all she had were the clothes on her back. She had given her purse and her shoes and suitcase and all other clothes away.

Millie’s nickels are dedicated to her. Gary often ushers and so did Millie. When she needed an usher, she knew she could tap my kind husband shoulder and say “we need you today”. He always said “I will for a nickel”. She always paid up. When she was dying of cancer she went back to Florida to be closer to family. One day Millie sent a card to Gary. In it was a quarter. She said she was paying it forward and he should keep ushering. When she was buried a nickel from Idaho went into her grave. It was little thing but,

It touches our hearts every time we tell the story. Millie understood Social Holiness and our need to work as a Christian Community to care for our creation.

We learned from a church in Oklahoma that asking people for their pocket change could fund things outside of budget line items. That church did an entire remodel of their kitchen with just the pocket change they have from each Sunday.

Our fund of Millie’s nickels helped fund the daycare downstairs at Christmas when things were so dire for them. Millie would have been so tickled. I can see her smiling at us each time we pass those red bags. They are out today.

John Wesley said, "I am no longer my own, but yours. Put me to what you will, place me with whom you will."

Amen

Let It Be With Me (Luke 1:34-35, 37-38)

Let It Be With Me

 June 8, 2025 - Pentecost Sunday

Luke 1:34-35, 37-38

By: Pastor Mike Conner 

***

Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word” (Lk 1:38). This is the prayer at the heart of Christian faith, the prayer that opens the way for Christ to join us where we are. When the Holy Spirit arrives to move us, this is the prayer we must be ready to pray. Our other practices of prayer – disciplines of scripture reading, silence, fasting, journaling – are really on in the service of this prayer; they prepare our hearts to say Yes to God’s arrival, to ready us for God’s readiness. Let it be with me according to your word.

Today we celebrate the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the gathered disciples. Jesus had told them to wait together in Jerusalem until they were clothed with power from on high, and then he ascended into heaven. They went back into the city and committed themselves to prayer and worship. Mary was there. In the first chapter of the Acts, Luke writes that the eleven apostles “returned to Jerusalem. …They all joined together constantly in prayer, along with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers” (Acts 1:12, 14).

Is it a stretch to imagine that Mary, who alone among them had once before been visited by the Holy Spirit and overshadowed by Highest Power, would in these moments of waiting and expectation be the teacher and champion of prayer, promoting patience, offering her words, helping each one prepare a heart ready to say Yes when the Spirit arrived? Just as she had carried and nourished and given birth to the Savior, these men and women would also carry Jesus’ presence into the world.

Let it be with me according to your Word.

     It’s a prayer of consent. A prayer of surrender – of openness and alignment. Mary prayed that prayer not knowing how she would conceive a child without ever having been intimate with a man. Most of the time God doesn’t give us the how, or the when, or the why. God does promise us that the Spirit will be in it and that “nothing will be impossible with God.” We are called to freely respond, Yes, yes, yes. Let it be so with me.

     The capacity to say Yes or No, to give or withhold our consent, is one of the things that makes us most deeply human. When our heart and mind and will are in alignment, no external pressure, no circumstantial suffering, can negate a Yes or a No. We might not be able to control much of what happens to us in our daily lives, in our families, in the political systems, but in large part we can control our responses to these things. We can say, No I will not go along with that, or Yes I will go along with that. The enduring power of African American spirituality has its origins in the suffocating horror of the slave ships, when certain men and women, who from a worldly perspective had had their humanity utterly stripped away, decided to believe against all evidence that God saw them and knew them, and the called or sang out to God and summoned God out of that darkness. The great African American teacher, writer, and spiritual director, Howard Thurman once wrote this meditation:

There is in every person an inward sea, and in that sea there is an island and on that island there is an altar and standing guard before that altar is the 'angel with the flaming sword.' Nothing can get by that angel to be placed upon that altar unless it has the mark of your inner authority. Nothing passes “the angel with the flaming sword” to be placed upon your altar unless it be a part of 'the fluid area of your consent.' This is your crucial link with the Eternal.

You get to say who, at bottom, you are. And who you are, from a Christian point of view, is a child of God, an image-bearer of God, a person in whose deepest center stands an altar jealously guarded for the love of God. Mary let the word of God pass that flaming sword, she opened her heart to God’s dwelling. All of us can do that, because the Spirit helps us. All of us are made to do that. Let it be with me according to your word is letting ourselves be caught up in the movement of God.

I want to dwell for a minute on one of the words in this prayer. According. Let it be with me according to your word, according is the word doing work bring the me and the you together. When we are of an accord, then we agree. We are in harmony. If two countries sign a peace accord, then they have made some sort of treaty or compact with one another, committing themselves to the same ideal. This words accord comes from an Old French word acorder meaning to reconcile, harmonize, agree, be of one mind. That word traces its roots back to Latin, to a verb accordare – to be in harmony, to be united, to give or grant with one’s heart. This word is created from the prefix ad, meaning “to, toward, or near” and the root cor – heart, or chorda –musical chords, or strings. Near the heart, to the heart, toward the heart.

When Mary says yes to God, she’s not going through some well-practiced gesture of submission. She’s not powerless here. She’s standing fully and freely in her power. She’s granting God her heart. She wants to be in harmony with what God wants. She wants to be of one mind with God. She wants her intent and God’s intent to be harmonized, like two notes played together on the piano. She invites the promise of God close to her heart. Discord – far from, away from the heart. (reveal this in next section?)

It is true in principle that nothing is impossible with God. But for that to be true on the ground, in our lived experiences, God needs a way in – an open mind, a willing heart. God needs the Yes to be spoken from our deepest place. And I want to emphasize again: Even if we’ve messed up in the past. Even if we feel inadequate or ill-equipped. Even if we haven’t had the experiences we think we need to have had, or read the books we think we need to have read. Even if we’re at our lowest point when the Spirit shows up. None of our mess is an obstacle to God if our heart desires to be of one accord with God’s heart.

Those men and women gathered in the upper room praying – they weren’t the stuff of the movement. They didn’t have assets – property, wealth, endowments, foundations. They didn’t have weapons. They hadn’t hired any experts or consultants. God doesn’t give the Spirit to the Roman aristocrats, the Jewish scholars, the platoons of soldiers. God gives the Spirit to those who seek him with all their heart. Who wait for him to come. Who say Yes to him. When this group of people emerged from that room speaking in the languages of the known world, the crowd that gathered was “utterly amazed, asking: Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans?” Not much later, this surprise is echoed by the religious and civil authorities that arrest Peter and John for preaching about Jesus being risen from the dead and healing people in the way that Jesus had healed people. They interrogated them, but “when they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus.  [And] since they could see the man who had been healed standing there with them, there was nothing they could say” (Acts 4:13-14).

In Jesus’ name, Amen.  

Clothed with Power (Luke 24:44-53)

Clothed with Power

06.01.25

Luke 24:44-53

By Pastor Mike Conner

Here at the end of Luke’s Gospel, Jesus promises power to the disciples, to the Church: “Stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high” (Lk 24:49). Those were the instructions given to the disciples right before Jesus ascended into heaven. They were told to wait together for a clear manifestation of power, some forceful experience that would catch them up and initiate their work as witnesses.

Clothed with power – that is the literal meaning of this Greek phrase. To wear power as one would wear a shirt. The disciples will not be the source of it – it’s something that will be put on them – but as their ‘uniform,’ power of a certain kind will distinguish them out in the wider world.

I like what the First Nations Version of the New Testament, translating the original languages into an indigenous worldview, does with these words: “I send to you the Holy Spirit, just as my Father promised. He will dress you in my regalia, with power coming down from the spirit-world above.”1

Regalia – the church dressed in the ceremonial clothes of Jesus, to be how he was and do what he did. In Ephesians ,6 Paul writes, “[B]e strengthened by the Lord and by his vast strength” (Eph 6:10). Cleary, part of Christian spirituality and ministry is this expectation that you and I will receive power from God and do something with it.

Ah, but power is one of the stickiest of subjects for Christians in our time and place, which is to say for American Christians in the 21st century – because many of us crave it. Or we misunderstand its true location and purpose. It’s easy to make a real mess of it – power – and with catastrophic consequences to both the public credibility of the Gospel and the well-being of those who lack social power.

There’s a song by the English pop rock band Tears for Fears called “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” That’s the idea. If only Christians could ascend to the highest levels of political, military, and economic power. If only followers of Jesus could be in control, tugging on the levers of policy and funding. If only we could consolidate power, manage it from the top down, shape the world to our liking.

Yet Paul says, “Do not be conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Rom 12:1). If the pattern of this world is one where everybody wants to rule it, what does it mean to resist that while still receiving our inheritance, our birthright, as people clothed with Gospel power?

What is power, what is it for, and if we find ourselves lacking it, how can we put ourselves in a position to receive it?

Martin Luther King Jr. defined power as “the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political and economic change.” When we have the resources to achieve a purpose, to shift the needle on how we and others experience our lives and the world around us, what is possible and available to us, then we have power. Of course, our purpose might be in line with God’s goodness or it might run counter to it. But insofar as we have the means to move forward in it, we are empowered.

In his New Testament letters, Paul reference power often. As he traveled around the Mediterranean world sharing the message of Christ with many different people for the first time, he face a lot of pressure to validate himself as trustworthy and legitimate, not only to these people born and raised outside Jewish culture but also to the other apostles who struggled sometimes to think beyond their home culture and allegiance. Rather than point to himself, Paul consistently points to the power that God manifested through Paul’s presence.

“For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified,” he writes in 1 Corinthians 2. “I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power” (vv. 2-5). He puts it as bluntly as possible later in the letter: “For the kingdom of God is not a matter of talk but of power” (4:20).

Paul had the power to achieve his purpose; that’s what legitimized his ministry. It wasn’t all talk. It wasn’t natural charisma or good marketing or funding from deep pockets or state-sponsorship operating in the shadows. It was power. But what exactly was Paul pointing to when he referenced this power? What kind of power does Jesus give us? What is it for? What’s the purpose that Jesus empowers us with his Spirit to achieve?

The risen Christ led his disciples a couple miles away from Jerusalem, away from the center of political and religious power in their culture. He took them to a humble town called Bethany, where he had some friendships with people like Simon the Leber and the siblings Mary, Marth, and Lazarus. Bethany had been his place of retreat and refuge in the days leading up to his crucifixion. It was a place he knew and loved, away from the clamor of commerce, the great temples and barracks and walls that signify political power.

In Hebrew, Bethany means “House of Affliction” or “House of Poverty.” And it was while standing among the people in the house of affliction that Jesus opened his arms in blessing, promised Holy Spirit power, and ascended into heaven. The placement of this story tells us as much as anything. Jesus’ power was always exercised for the sake of those on the margins, who live in the shadows of earthly domination and political prowess, who are weary and heavily burdened, oppressed, neglected, and afraid. The disciples would have to carry the promise and expectation of power back into the city knowing that the promise was given there with great thrones in view, but was promised in the presence of ordinary people living in the house of poverty.

But lets also look at Jesus’ ministry and what power meant for him. After his baptism and temptation, Luke tells us that Jesus returned to Galilee “in the power of the Spirit” (4:14). People were amazed at the power and authority of his word (4:36), specifically because with a word he was able to drive out evil spirits from people possessed by them. Luke says that “the power of the Lord was with him to heal” (5:17), and wherever Jesus went people tried to reach out and touch him, because power was going out from him, emanating from him (6:19).

The power to heal – that is what power in the kingdom of God is. And healing takes many forms. In Jesus’ context, people were most frequently healed of physical diseases that came with social and religious penalties: demon possession, seizures, leprosy, the inability to see or hear or walk.

And those acts of physical healing brought about social and religious healing as well. Jesus restored the people he healed not only to their own bodies but also to their neighborhoods and synagogues and communities. Their sins were forgiven; they were no longer ritually unclean. They could participate in life again.

More specifically, this power to heal is the power of forgiveness. Forgiveness, at its root, means release. Release from literal bondage or imprisonment, and also, in a legal sense, the wiping clean of a record. Forgiveness is letting go of our need to be in control, to be right, to hold something against someone else.

In Christ, God has forgiven our sins. God has released us from our worst selves, our worst moments on our worst days. God does not want us to be bound in egoic compulsions that stunt our joy and connection. God does not want us to be perpetually stymied by financial debt. God does not want us to be locked in our despair or our loneliness. God does not want our criminal record, our addiction, our status or ability or shame to determine our destiny. The power to bind was crucified with Christ; he defeated it. He forgives us, and calls us to be a people of forgiveness. We are given power to get free and to help bring others into freedom. This is not power over but power under. It is the power to lift others up.

Recently there was a prayer breakfast hosted at the White House by the Secretary of Defense. At that service, a preacher said this:

“Our Lord, Jesus said in Matthew 10, not a sparrow will fall to the ground apart from my heavenly Father. If our Lord is sovereign, even over the sparrows’ fallings, you can be assured that he is sovereign over everything else that falls in this world, including Tomahawk and Minuteman missiles, including strategy meetings and war room debriefings. Jesus has the final say over all of it. …Lord, may this become a place where Christians come together to do just this, and we see you move in power, not just through the Pentagon, but through our nation’s capital and down throughout this great nation.”2

This is a completely different vision of power than Jesus’ vision. One that is tied to absolute sovereignty, that relishes the idea that God keeps falling bombs front of mind. This is a vision of power working from the top down, from the center out – with people who have access to votes and weapons and money and policy determining whose worthy of safety and security, and who’s an enemy or at least collateral damage. Power over. Power that forces its way. Power that clings and consolidates. Power that can only express itself in the language of domination and death. This is what the church of Jesus Christ exposes as folly and madness when it exercises power in suffering love that sets others free. This is the fantasy that has to die in us as we receive Christ’s blessing and promise in the House of Affliction and Poverty.

Take a moment to consider a few things.

What kind of power do you want? Is it power over or power under?

Do you experience yourself as clothed in God’s power, as an agent of power, dressed in Christ’s regalia

Do we experience this congregation as a place where power is present and working? Are we getting free here – free of our self-loathing or self-righteousness, free of our partisan aspirations and our hatred, free of our debts and our past mistake?

Do we sense that power surrounds us, flows between us, overcoming what we think is impossible, unleashing joy?

Do you experience freedom to love boldly, gently, persistently in how you think and act and speak and suffer?

If we’d answer, yes – thanks be to God!

If we’d answer, no – then Jesus tells us what we need to do.

Luke tells us what the disciples did as they waited for the Spirit to come and clothe them with power. They received Jesus’ blessing, and they worshipped together with joy. Jesus’ last gesture in the Gospel of Luke is the gesture of blessing. He opens his pierced hands to them, and as he blesses them, he ascends into heaven. They – and we – abide in his unending blessing. We have to take this blessing to heart, to feel in our depths how much he loves us, how far he came for us, how much he endured to bring us into his glory.

“Beloved” – that’s the name he gives us. And as we relish that name together, bask in it together, experience the joy of it together, we will ready ourselves for his power of forgiveness. Jesus sent the Spirit upon a room full of people who were praying.

It’s easy, perhaps, for us to point out the abuses of power by Christians in our context while remaining stuck in a disempowered state of mind. But the truth is that God’s power envelopes us right here, right now. “Today is the day of salvation.”

Jesus gave us the Spirit so that we might continue his ministry among the poor and poor in spirit. Even in the smallest of acts – a smile, a meal delivered, a visit made, a gift given, a preference relinquished, a beauty named, an invitation offered, an insult or misunderstanding let alone – even in these small acts of freedom, we exercise the power of God release kindness into the world.

May God clothe us with power. Not like body armor… not like a suit and tie… not like a bumper-sticker emblazoned T-shirt. No, more like the simple, broken in clothes you’d put on to help your neighbor weed her yard or tidy up her garage or sit on her porch and listen to her story. May we be empowered to be free and set free, to lift up, to love.

In Jesus’ name, Amen.

1 First Nations Version: An Indigenous Translation of the New Testament (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2021), 163.

2 https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/21/politics/hegseth-pentagon-christian-prayer-service

Becoming the Body for One Another (Luke 24:36-39)

Becoming the Body for One Another

May 25, 2025

Easter Season

Luke 24:36-49

By: Pastor Mike

***

Without warning, the risen Jesus appeared in the midst of his disciples gathered in Jerusalem. They were together telling feverish stories in hushed tones about the impossible possibility that Jesus is alive. The women had a story, Peter had a story, the two from the Emmaus road had a story. When Jesus suddenly appears as a member of the group, the disciples experience a whole range of volatile sensations: terror, fear, disbelief, doubt, joy. Jesus rides out that moment of disturbance with them, offering more and more of himself until they are ready to have their minds opened to understand their new vocation as witnesses of Jesus’ forgiveness. 

One of the beautiful features of Luke’s Gospel is the way that the opening and closing chapters talk to’ and at times parallel each other. Luke chapter 1, concerned with the incarnation of Jesus – the Son of God conceived and born in human flesh – contains two stories that share many elements with this resurrection story from chapter 24.

When Zechariah the priest is praying in the Jerusalem temple, the angel Gabriel appears to him to tell him that he and his wife Elizabeth will have a son in their old age, a little boy who will grow up to be John the Baptist. Luke says that “when Zechariah saw him, he was startled and was gripped with fear” (Lk 1:12). Later, Gabriel visits a young woman named Mary, and announces to her that she will give birth to a holy child, the Son of God.  She, like Zechariah, was “was greatly troubled at his words” (Lk 1:29).

A Greek word links these two scenes to one another and to chapter 24. Tarasso, to be inwardly disturbed, like calm water that’s been struck and churned into a froth. It’s a word that can mean being startled, greatly troubled, baffled, confused, agitated, terrified. Like Zechariah and Mary in Luke 1. Like the disciples in Luke 24. An encounter with holiness and mystery sets them off balance, freaks them out. Doubts creep in, and their systems struggle to adjust to what they are experiencing.

Another parallel: in the same way that Jesus says “Peace” to the disciples, Gabriel says “Do not be afraid” (Lk 1:12, 30) to both Zechariah and Mary. And just as the disciples are being prepared at the end of the story to receive the Holy Spirit and become the Church – witnesses of Jesus death and life; proclaimers of forgiveness – so at the story’s beginning Gabriel is setting the stage for the Holy Spirit to saturate John and Jesus and the women who will conceive and give birth to them. 

These connections between beginning and end are not just artistic and interesting. They teach us something about the arc of faith, about how we come to trust that God is alive and moving in the world and wants something to do at a personal level with us.

An apparition of a dead person. A nebulous image. A faint trace of something. Such are the dictionary’s definitions of ghosts. And why wouldn’t most of us struggle from time to time with the sense that God has faded into the insubstantial realm of the ghostly, that God is not someone vividly alive and in touch with our hearts and our world? Rampant political corruption and the corrosion of once-reliable systems and safety nets in our - country. Genocide in Gaza, civil war in Sudan, the rapid warming of the global climate. Deregulation of artificial intelligence, widening wealth gaps, news algorithmically fed to us to keep us both enraged and scrolling. The stories and symbols and scriptures central to our faith, even God’s name, co-opted by Christian nationalists who worship power over others. The things we’ve suffered; the ones we’ve lost. The things we’ve done and left undone. Our shame and grudges and sins. 

It's not hard to understand why God might seem ghostly. God as faint memory, as vague concept, as caught somewhere between life and death. The idea that Jesus has defeated sin and death and lives among us and wants to clothe us with power can seem like a fantasy. Crashing against the hard, sharp realities of life, have you ever wrestled with the reality of God, not least with the reality of the good and kind Jeus of the Gospel? Have you ever doubted, ever been troubled or confused or afraid, ever had questions? If you’d be honest and answer Yes, then you can understand the initial reactions of Zechariah and Mary and the disciples gathered in Jerusalem. In a world that crucifies, what does it mean to be suddenly met by a Jesus who lives? 

Jesus’ encounter with the disciples in Luke 24 shows us the way Jesus guides us from our fears and doubts into trust and openness. For starters, Jesus is not annoyed by our questions and doubts. Our struggle to see clearly and to trust draws him more deeply toward us. He doesn’t shame or punish the disciples for needing time to come around. He doesn’t present them with a treatise on the theology and physics of resurrection. He doesn’t smack his forehead for the umpteenth time and grumble about how their initial terror proves once and for all that they’ll never be good enough to do what he needs them to do. 

He wants them – he wants us. And he is patient and kind in relentlessly offering himself. No matter how long it takes, eventually we come to see that Jesus – the Man of Sorrows, the Prince of Peace, the Friend of Sinners, the Forgiver of Enemies – is not a ghost who haunts us with see-through promises. He is not a phantom who appears every so often to frighten us into doing or not doing something. Jesus is not a melancholy memory haunting the halls of our minds or our churches. He is a person – a person who speaks and touches and eats. A person holding out his hands to each of us.

He moves us to this place of trust in three simple gestures. First, he speaks a word of peace: “Peace be with you” (v. 36). Second, he shows them his hands and his feet and invites the disciples to touch him (v. 39). Finally, he asks if they have anything edible lying around and then eats the piece of fish that they give him (vv. 41-43). From speaking to touching to eating. This is a way of deepening involvement, deepening physicality and intimacy. 

Jesus spoke to them. He told them that he loved them, that he had forgiven them, that they have nothing to fear if they would trust in him and commit to his way. He proclaimed God’s peace in their midst.

Then he presented his hands and feet to them. This is significant. The wrists and shins, hands and ankles bore the scars and mangling of the crucifixion he had endured. We know from John’s Gospel that the resurrected body of Jesus is a wounded body; though glorified, Jesus still bears the marks of what he went through. He presented the fullness of who he was – what he had suffered and what he had overcome and the love that suffused it all – he presented this to the disciples. He held nothing back from them. It was as if his body was testifying, ‘See God’s beauty and glory shining through my wounds.’ He gave them permission to feel the firm reality of his victory by touching his body, his lived story.

Finally, he asked them for something to eat. On a surface level, we might say that ghosts don’t eat. They don’t have bodies to metabolize the food; they don’t need calories. This was proof of Jesus’ physical presence. On a deeper level, we see here that Jesus asks the disciples to feed him. He calls them into action – the act of serving. They pull from their own resources to feed this hungry body who stands before them. And as they are drawn into that act of participation and service, they come to know the living God, not the ghostly apparition. 

Now, the risen Christ appeared to the disciples for forty days and then ascended into heaven. He showed us the way, and then poured out his Spirit so that we might practice the way for one another and for the world, everywhere and at all times.

This is how we love each other into the Body of the Christ. Whenever I feel like Jesus is slipping into the realm of the insubstantial, the vague, the hardly there; whenever God feels ghostly, this is how I need you, the Church, to minister to me.

I need you to come and be his Body for me. I need to hear you speak his word of peace. I need you to calmly be with me as I move through those stages of inner disturbance, through my doubt, fear, and bafflement. I need you to tell me that God is loving and forgiving and cares about what I’m going through.

I also need you to come and offer yourself. Be the tangible hands and feet of Jesus to me by sharing your story of beauty and brokenness. Let me see and handle the reality of his victorious life in your pockmarked story. How you’ve suffered and sorrowed but not lost your soul, because he’s guarded it with his love.

And then I need you to ask me for food. By which I mean, I need you to gently call me into action, to ask me to participate again in helping you address your own hunger. Invite me to share the meager thing I have on hand, so that I can stop wallowing in my distress, waiting to figure things out in my head, and instead be met by truth through loving contact with your needs.

That’s what I need from the Church when God feels like a ghost, when the promises of God feel like they’re fading or showing themselves to me in the slightest, most fleeting of moments. Proclaim peace, share your story, ask me to feed you – and you will make Jesus present to me, because you are, in fact, his Body.

And this is the same pattern for how we love the world in his name, how we do the work of witnessing that he has called us to do.

We are called to speak peace to the world: forgiveness and freedom in his name, boundless love and mercy.

We are called to put ourselves on display, be bold with our stories – with the beautiful love that has gathered up our suffering into a testimony. We need to be in touch with, accessible to, reachable by those in the world who need to see the proof of his triumph over hopelessness, addiction, shame, or anger. The proof is in our bodies, our stories, our resurrected wounds.

And then we go the furthest step, and eat in the presence of our neighbors. We sit around the table, fellowshipping and sharing life. Maybe we even ask them to feed us, to share something of their own resources with us. We hunger for what they have to give, and by honoring their story, their gifting, by receiving with gratitude what they have to offer, we call them into a healing participation in the body of Christ.

You might ask yourself: What do I need from the Body of Christ today to shore up my own trust and hope? A word of peace? A companion whose story can give me hope? A place to offer what I have and see what happens? Ask for what you need and it will be given to you.

And you might ask yourself: How is Jesus calling me to be his witness in the world? Where and to whom am I being called to speak his peace? Where and to whom am I being called to share my story and the fullness of my presence? Who does God want me to break bread with, or invite into the great work of feeding the hungers – spiritual and physical of the world? 

May God lead us out of the ghostly and into his goodness.

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

“Stay with Us!” (Luke 24:28-35)

“Stay With Us!”

May 18, 2025

Easter Season

Luke 24:28-35

By: Pastor Mike Conner

“Then they told what had happened on the road and how he had been made known to them in the breaking

of the bread” (Lk 24:35).

***

The road between Jerusalem and Emmaus was not a paved asphalt highway. People did not zoom down it in the safe enclosure of cars. This road was made of hardpacked dirt, or perhaps of Roman stone. The people moving along it moved either on foot at human speed or at the speed of their cart-pulling animals. This road was therefore a place of potential encounter.

A road is an in-between place. To walk the road is to be unsettled, exposed, and on the move. Throughout the Bible, roads, like desert wildernesses, place question marks beside the ideologies and identities of characters. But one crucial difference between the road and the desert is that people go into the wilderness in large part to be alone, seeking the voice of God and the voice of their heart in solitude. On the road, however, one expects to meet and be met, and God uses roads to reach into our world and wake us up through encounters with strangers. Like the man beaten by robbers, helped by the Good Samaritan (Lk 10:25-37); or Blind Bartimaeus yelling at full volume for Jesus to stop and heal him (Mk 10:46-52); or Philip running up to join the Ethiopian eunuch in his royal chariot (Acts 8:26-40).

In this resurrection story from Luke’s Gospel, three men walk together down an ancient road. Two disciples – at the story’s opening they might’ve said former disciples – and their teacher, Jesus. But they did not recognize him and they thought him a stranger. The three of them walked and talked, sharing stories of things hoped for and things lost, and turning over the meanings of the Hebrew scriptures. The road was doing its work.

On one level, we can read this story as a call to linger with strangers for as long as it takes us to recognize something familiar in them – that is, until we can see Jesus as we behold them.

On a deeper level, this encounter between strangers not only gave way to recognition. It also radically reoriented the lives of those involved. After Jesus disappeared, the two disciples went back to Jerusalem. They reunited with the eleven apostles and bore witness to the

Resurrected Christ. The road, and the one who met them on the road, changed them.

They recognized Jesus at last when they sat around the table and shared a meal with him. He took bread, announced God’s blessings in the midst of everyday, ordinary broken things, and fed them. Then they knew. Yes, their hearts had burned in their chests while they were talking with him about the scriptures on the road. They sensed that they were walking with someone special. But that shared reflection upon the scriptures, even with Jesus himself involved in the conversation, was not enough to awaken faith. For that, they needed the table, the meal, the physicality of shared life and food and spoken blessings.

From its earliest days, the Church has linked the proclamation of scripture with gathering at the table. The relationship is one of promise and fulfilment, call and response, announcement and experience. The Bible and the Church describe this relationship in many ways: word and sacrament, faith and works, hearers and doers, God and neighbor.

The table brings the Gospel home, because, as human creatures, we hunger. We hunger for bread, for community. We hunger for gifts and blessings that aren’t contingent on achievement or the external appearance of things. At the table of God “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for [we] are all one in Christ Jesus”

(Gal 3:28, NIV).

A new form of community is created at the table. The first Christians cared for social pariahs and outcasts, for women and children. They welcomed people from every nation and language and economic reality. This was scandalous and revolutionary in a world where power flowed down the channels of privileged bloodlines. Firstborn. Male. Roman Citizen. But the Christians lovingly violated these boundaries of identity. They even sold their possessions and brought the proceeds to the apostles, who distributed them to others according to need (see Acts 2:44-46). It was – it is – the logic of the table.

Lena has asked you to recognize the Christ in her, and the Christ in our neighbors – local and global – who are increasingly vulnerable because of their status as refugees or inhabitants of a warzone. And you can act on that recognition by participating in World Refugee Day, and by advocating for moral policies at every level of government. She’s asking you to inscribe the logic of the table on your mind and heart and body.

The United Methodist Church’s current social teachings say this: “As United Methodists, we acknowledge that love requires responsible political action and engagement aimed at the betterment of society and the promotion of the common good.  …We affirm the dignity, worth, and rights of migrants, immigrants, and refugees, including displaced and stateless people. …We recognize that displaced people are particularly vulnerable, as their in-between status often provides them with few protections and benefits, leaving them open to exploitation, violence, and abuse. We urge United Methodists to welcome migrants, refugees, and immigrants into their congregations and to commit themselves to providing concrete support…We oppose all laws and policies that attempt to criminalize, dehumanize, or punish displaced individuals and families based on their status as migrants, immigrants, or refugees.[1]

And, in the Bible, James chapter 2 says, “Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.”

The two disciples who walked with Jesus along the road managed to say all this with three simple words, as evening came and their companion seemed to be moving on:

 “Stay with us,” they pleaded (Lk 24:29). Stay with us, stranger. You’ve lit a flame in us, and we are on the cusp of knowing you. Stay with us. Let’s continue this conversation and share a meal together.

Stay with us.

We could build a whole moral politics upon that. At the very least, each of us must chart a Gospel-shaped life. “Stay with us.”

The beloved Twenty-third Psalm says that God “prepares a table before me in the presence of my enemies” (Ps 23:5). We might say that the work of the Church is to prepare a table before our neighbors in the presence of their enemies, to pass on freely what God has so generously done for us.

May Jesus use his table to teach us his way. Amen.

[1] “The Social Principles,” from The Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church, 2020/2024, 135, 144.

Discipleship at Human Speed (Luke 24:13-27)

Discipleship at Human Speed

May 11, 2025

By: Pastor Mike

Luke 24:13-27

***

While we were out East, Sus and I traveled down to Durham, North Carolina for a few days to visit friends. We stayed with a friend named Sarah, who we’ve known since our time in graduate school, and who now is the director of prison chaplaincy services for the State of North Carolina. Among other things, Sarah is an ordained Baptist preacher, a Hebrew Bible scholar, and a first-rate gardener. For years, she has planted walkable garden in the shape of prayer labyrinth, accessible to her whole neighborhood.

Her personal spirituality and her spiritual roots run deep. I’ve known this, but the truth of it was impressed upon me again on this visit when a certain basket sitting outside her home office caught my eye.

It was a small rectangular wicker basket full of manila folders. The edges of the folders were worn with age, and I was struck by the labels written on them in faded Sharpie. Folders labeled Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Psalms. Folders for Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Folders named Revival, Evangelism, Discipleship. Nearly all the biblical books were represented, including some touchstone Christian themes.

I’m one of those people who can sometimes be nosy in other people’s homes. I’ve been known to do some light snooping, especially when the snooping is of theological interest. I pulled out of one of the folders and opened it.

Inside were old sermon outlines – that was obvious right away. The outlines were meticulously typed onto hand-cut half-sheets of paper with a typewriter. Each had a title at the top in capital letters. Under that was an introductory sentence. Then there was a roman-numeral outline, with main points and sub-points, charting a movement of stories, cultural references, and scriptures all typed out in shorthand. At the bottom of each half-sheet was the conclusion, the invitation or call to the congregation.

Each slip of paper was also marked up with pen, pencil, and marker. Underlining for emphasis. Arrows dictating rearrangement. Words added here and there in a language I didn’t recognize. On the back of each half-sheet were handwritten dates – dates that the sermons had been preached. Macedonia, North Carolina, 3/3/1965. Russey Keo, Cambodia, 3/26/1995.

As I said, that wicker basket was full of folders. The first folder I pulled out had at least two dozen papers in it, maybe more. And they were all like that. It was stunning. I was thumbing through one person’s lifelong conversation with God and the scriptures. I fessed up and asked Sarah about them.

The sermons were her grandfather’s. He, too, was a Baptist preacher, and for many years served as a missionary in the Philippines. That other language scrawled upon the whitespace of the outlines was Tagalog, the national Filipino language. Sarah’s grandfather pastored mixed-race churches, preaching simultaneously to Filipino and white folks. Sarah has childhood memories of her grandfather moving comfortably around the front of churches as he preached, Bible always in hand, switching between English and Tagalog with ease.

Until she inherited his collection of sermon outlines after his death, she had thought that he preached completely from memory. Turns out he had typed the scaffolding of every sermon onto these papers, which were cut to slip discreetly into the open pages of his Bible.

I just wrapped up another lay preaching class here at our church. There were seven students in it, and any of them would tell you how much attention and effort went into the one sermon that they prepared for the class. The time attending to the scripture passage – prayer, observation, research. The time unearthing the nugget of good news. The time wrangling with words, words to give clear expression and fitting timbre to God’s promises and invitations.

Sermons are conceived and proclaimed at human speed. To honor the craft and the call, there isn’t any other way. And a wicker basket full of sermons arrives at a steady pace over the course of a full human life, collecting slowly in manila folders like layers of new soil. Each sermon the fruit of one man’s focused attention on the Word that God is speaking to the congregation for the sake of the world.

I said that there isn’t any other way but the way of human speed. But that’s not exactly accurate. Do you know that, today, I could open my computer, access a generative artificial intelligence platform (say something like ChatGPT), type in a prompt, and the bot would generate a complete sermon for me in a matter of seconds? I want a sermon of a certain length, on this theme, using this scripture; I want it to open with an engaging, down-to-earth story and end with a call to conversion; I want it to be sprinkled with several references to other relevant Bible verses and have an authoritative tone. And without even cracking open a Bible; without even asking God what this scripture passage might be requiring of you as the preacher, to say nothing of the congregation; without having to feel the joy or the sorrow or the urgency of it, you’d have a sermon. AI can do this because it’s been “taught” to do it. Sermons, among countless other cultural artifacts, have been fed into its program. Already there are many news, academic, and literary publishers who have sold their backlogs of licensed content to AI developers who will those vast archives to further train their bots.

In fact, someone could scan all of Sarah’s grandfather’s sermons, feed them into a program like ChatGPT as examples to imitate, and then ask the bot to write a sermon in his exact style and form. And, make no mistake, it would.

But think about what is lost when a preacher has a sermon produced for him or her by the machine. The long night of wrestling the text for blessing. The longing to see and understand. Grappling with meaning and application. Honing one’s perspective and voice. We abandon the personal experience and local realities in which the Word resonates. We give away our integrity, our authority, our voice.

Yes, I could ask the bot to produce another sermon outline utterly consistent with Sarah’s grandfather’s style, but it would never be his sermon, with paper hand cut to the perfect size, with notes jotted down in another language. It would not be a sermon at all, because there would have been no conversation between God’s divinity and our humanity, no word becoming flesh in and through the preacher’s heart and spirit and body. Sermons come at human speed because that is the speed at which God moves among us in the person of Jesus Christ.

Let me say that again: Sermons come at human speed because that is the speed at which God moves among us in the person of Jesus Christ. For the Gospel says that it was “while they were talking and discussing, [that] Jesus himself came near and went with them, [though] their eyes were kept from recognizing him” (Lk 24:15-16).

Two men were walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus on the day of Jesus’ resurrection. Their world was shattered. They had followed Jesus at human speed, listened to his words, come to believe in his power and hope in his salvation. Then they had lost him to the cruelty of crucifixion. “But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel,” they told the stranger who joined them on the road. Had hoped.

And then the women had come to them earlier that day to say that they had gone and found the tomb empty. They had seen angels who told them that Jesus was, against all conceivable possibilities, alive. Madness, surely. It was all so confusing. They couldn’t make heads or tails of it. So they went for a walk.

They could have ridden on animals for those seven miles, I suppose, but they chose to walk. One foot in front of the other. The body moving forward while the heart and mind spun in circles. They walked and they talked “with each other about all these things that had happened” (Lk 24:14). Moving at human speed, they were joined by the God of love moving at human speed. Jesus drew near to them and walked with them. Jesus entered into their conversation with a question: “What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?” (v. 17).

‘Doesn’t he know?’ we might ask ourselves as readers. ‘He’s God after all. Can’t he, like, mind-read?’ But Jesus doesn’t want that kind of relationship with us. Jesus prefers – and in his flesh binds himself to – the journey. To the slow, authentic unfolding of life. The God who spoke creation into being with imperatives humbles himself to the give and take of dialogue.

When Jesus asks them what they’re talking about, the two disciples stand still, “looking sad” (v. 17). Then the conversation begins. They tell him about their disappointment. They tell him about the things they don’t understand. And Jesus responds by pointing them to the scriptures: “Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures” (v. 27).

This was not a chatbot spitting out synthesized, fabricated answers. This was not Jesus rapidly downloading interpretive facts into the two men’s brains. This was a conversation about the words of God conducted over the course of a long walk.

It happened at human speed.

Thanks be to God that the content of that conversation was never written down, that Jesus’ own interpretation of the scriptures to Cleopas and his companion is not available for us to memorize and parrot. What is here for us to see is the living conversation, the reality that, when we walk and talk together about the challenges and confusions of life, Jesus joins us, and reveals his life and love to us.

Even as the walk came to an end, Cleopas and his companion still did not fully realize who it was that walked and talked with them. Only later, after sharing a meal with Jesus, did they realize it was him. Luke writes, “And they said to each other, ‘Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us’” (v. 32). The conversation with God at human speed touched their hearts; it lit something in them. Joy, hope, love. Curiosity, longing, epiphany. These whole-self, visceral experiences cannot occur when we hand over our long dialogues to the split-second calculations of the machine.

AI is rapidly and radically transforming the world we live in, particularly the economy and the internet, though it’s also beginning to intrude on spirituality. My point here is not to say that you’re bad if you use AI for some things; most of us are already engaging with it here and there even if we don’t realize it. Some of you might think AI has very little to do with you. I realize I’m straddling generational perceptions of an emerging issue.

But here is the heart of the matter: Many of our current political conflicts, personal anxieties, and social sins are a result of our refusal to move at human speed – which, I will say again, is God’s speed. We want to go faster. We want our relationships, our work, our leisure, and even our spirituality to produce results. We want answers to our prayers. Maximize. Optimize. Career hacks. Life hacks. Faith hacks. Get rid of the friction, please. Let the waiting, the suffering, the in-between times diminish.

And that temptation to move fast, to bypass the cultivation of patient endurance and simple presence, is aided and abetted by the technologies structuring how we encounter one another and perceive the world.

The good news of the walk to Emmaus is that, even before we know it, God is with us.

God joins our questioning and questing. God comes to us for conversation. God will redirect us, no matter how long it takes, toward fullness of life and deep and abiding hope – so long as we keep walking and talking with him.

But! – If we aren’t willing to stick with the journey while God is still unrecognizable, it is possible that the recognition of his presence will never come to us.

Christian life is a journey. It is a relationship. It is what the great pastor Eugene Peterson once called “a long obedience in the same direction.”1 These things proceed slowly; they make their way by trial and error. There is no technology that can produce the wisdom, generosity, steadfastness, and lavish love of Jesus in us. These virtues require time and attention, silence and suffering, daily prayer and communities of conversation.

Even before we know it, God is with us. If you are hungry for a living faith – keep going. Don’t accept digital substitutes or cheap answers. Keep walking and talking with others at human speed until your eyes are opened. If you are navigating the landscape of grief, journeying toward deep inner healing – keep going. The God of life and love is with you before you recognize it. Keep walking and talking with others until your eyes are opened. If you are asking God for a sense of belonging, of rootedness, of purpose or calling, and you’re finding that these clarities are slow to come – keep going. Jesus walks among you already, even if you haven’t seen him for who he is. Trust that your human pace is also his pace.

Hey, even if you’re drafting a mundane email, or writing what feels like a pointless paper for finals, or preparing for an interview, don’t turn to a voice that’s not your own. Don’t give over your powers of reason and association or the thrilling struggle of articulation to the machine. You have been made in the image of God. And each of us decides in every moment whether we will obscure or retrace the lines of that image.

Christian discipleship happens at human speed. It happens at the speed of the body. We take food to those who are grieving. We visit those who are sick or in prison. We sit with those who don’t want to be alone. We listen with the heart. We give to those who can give us nothing in return. We march for justice. We gather for worship, lifting our voices and breaking bread. We walk and talk together about all the things happening to us, in us, and around us – all the painful, confusing, shattering things – and we discover, slowly, with hearts burning, that where two or three are gathered, the Spirit of the Living Christ is among us.

For one man in North Carolina and the Philippines, the slow work of Christian discipleship meant waiting for the next sermon to come. It meant cutting the paper, typing the words, making notes. It meant considering the nuances of multiple languages, the needs of diverse hearers.

You hold those sermons in your hand and understand the logic of a life, a life listening, receiving, and sharing. It’s the logic of discipleship, life lived and shared at human speed.

May we, too, slow down enough to give Jesus time to join us. Perhaps then the way would not seem so lonely, or the horizon so dark.

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

Recognizing Resurrection (John 21:1-19)

Recognizing Resurrection

May 4, 2025

John 21:1-19

By John Gribas

About a week ago, my wife, Lana, and I attended a wonderful symphony concert at ISU. As we were finding our way to our seats before the performance, I noticed someone in the row just behind where we were about to sit. She seemed to be looking directly at me intently, smiling, leaning forward in her seat slightly—with that “I definitely know you and am making a connection with you” expression on her face. Was she, maybe, actually looking past me at Lana or someone behind us?

Then she said it. “Hello, John!” Yikes! I had absolutely no idea who this person was.

After a bit of awkwardness, I got up the courage to admit that. Turns out she was a new member of my own academic department just finishing her first year here. Double yikes!! Since I work almost exclusively in the Dean’s Office now, I have only met this person a time or two. Even so, I felt bad because I really should have recognized her.

Recognition. It isn’t always an easy thing. My guess is at least some of you can relate.

And maybe the disciples there at the Sea of Tiberias from the gospel reading today could also relate. As it says in verse 4, they “did not know that it was Jesus.” Not until after Jesus spoke to them and offered what must have seemed hauntingly familiar fishing advice (that is, to cast the net on the other side of the boat). Advice which led to an equally hauntingly familiar outcome (that is, a sizeable catch). Then, John recognized and shared his recognition with Peter and the others. “It is the Lord.”

Doesn’t this seem weird to you? I mean, I’ve read or heard this passage of scripture dozens if not hundreds of times. I’ve never really given it much thought before. Perhaps because of familiarity, I just accepted what happened at face value. Jesus was there. The disciples didn’t recognize him…at least not at first. No big deal.

But this time, as I read and reflected on this passage in preparation for sharing with you today, it struck me differently.

If you think about it, this just doesn’t make sense. I mean, many of these disciples, John and Peter for sure, had spent the last three years with Jesus—from what I see in scripture, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And Jesus wasn’t just one among a larger group of wayfarers—he was “the guy!” How could they not recognize him? Even if they were far enough away from shore to make it difficult to see, what about the sound of Jesus’ voice? It doesn’t seem plausible.

Some might rightfully point out that Jesus had died. Convincingly through the horrific process of crucifixion, no less. These disciples knew that. Some had likely witnessed it. With that as their very recent experience, it would make sense that the last thing they would be expecting is to bump into Jesus on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias—or anywhere else, for that matter.

But that really isn’t a good explanation for the recognition problem. It is probably true that people don’t expect to bump into those they know have passed away. However, recall the first verse in the section of scripture I just read.

“After these things Jesus showed himself again to the disciples.” Showed himself AGAIN! We know that this wasn’t the disciples’ first post-resurrection encounter. Something like this had happened before—a number of times. Recently.

After his death and resurrection, Jesus had appeared…

First, to Mary Magdalene at the tomb. Apparently, Jesus later appeared to other women who also were visiting the tomb. These women testified of their encounters to Peter and the other disciples.

Then, on the road to Emmaus where Jesus joined two disciples for a long walk, an enlightening conversation, and a meal.

Then to the apostles who were in Jerusalem, locked away out of fear.

Then to the apostles in Jerusalem again, this time including Thomas.

And now, to these disciples fishing on the Sea of Tiberias, also called the Sea of Galilee…where they did not recognize him. In fact, those encountering the resurrected Jesus failed to recognize him in most of these gospel episodes.

Doesn’t that seem strange?

I thought and thought about this. Ultimately, I didn’t come up with any good explanations for why these individuals failed to recognize Jesus. But even if the scripture I read from John 21, along with these other gospel accounts, don’t offer an answer to “Why?,” they do tell us something that I think is important to consider…

Even for the most devoted followers of Jesus, it can be very difficult to recognize resurrected things.

I’ll say that again. Even for the most devoted followers of Jesus, it can be very difficult to recognize resurrected things.

What kinds of resurrected things? Well…Jesus, for one. But, actually, I think we may be surrounded by a lot more resurrection stuff than we might imagine. I think that because of things Jesus told us.

He told us that whatever we do (or don’t do) for the least of these, we do (or don’t do) for him. So I guess in a way, in the lives of the least of these, the resurrected Jesus may be walking right past us pretty regularly. Or maybe it would be truer to say we are walking right past him.

He told us that he is the resurrection and the life and that those who believe in him, even though they die, will live, and that everyone who lives and believes in him will never die. Doesn’t this suggest that we—we who believe in him—are living, now, as resurrected people? Do you believe that? Do you recognize yourself as a resurrected thing?

He told us that the Kingdom of God is at hand. That it is here. It is now. And what is the Kingdom of God if not the resurrected world?

When you look around today, what do you see? Do you see a resurrected world? I gotta admit, most of the time I don’t. And I imagine that is true for many.

I don’t know why resurrection is so difficult to recognize. But I believe that, as people of God, part of our purpose is to help others see a resurrected world—see the Kingdom of God.

Maybe a good place to start is by letting others see some resurrection in our own lives. And maybe if we consider the gospel reading for today, as well as some of the other post-resurrection moments from scripture, and if we look to Jesus as a model, we might tease out some things that could help us do that.

Here are some things I see Jesus modeling…

First, embrace humility.

Consider the incident when Mary Magdalene stood crying at the tomb and Jesus showed up. She thought he was the gardener. Not the risen son of God, but a lowly gravesite gardener. Jesus didn’t say, “What? You think I’m a gardener?? Come on! I just conquered death for you and for all humanity for all time!!” Nope. He asked why she was crying and who she was looking for, and he said her name. “Mary.” Then she recognized him.

Humility. Empathy. Personal connection. These things can help others recognize resurrection in your life.

Second, be willing to invest real time and real conversation.

Jesus joined two men on the road to Emmaus, and he walked with them. He apparently walked with them for a good long while because when they stopped and invited him to stay for a meal it was getting dark. Along the way, Jesus joined in on the conversation they were already engaged in. He didn’t interrupt. He didn’t shift the conversation to suit his own concerns and purposes. He JOINED their conversation. In the end, he was invited to stay for more…and he accepted. And in the meal they shared, they recognized Jesus.

Investing time. Sharing the road. Joining the conversation. Accepting an invitation if it is offered. These things can help others recognize resurrection in your life.

Third, show up and keep showing up, and don’t hide your wounds.

Jesus came to visit a group of disciples in Jerusalem. They were cooped up together, essentially hiding. Worried about the authorities who might be trying to track them down. When Jesus showed up, they thought he was a ghost. Not a surprise. Someone just “appearing” or somehow walking through a locked door can lead to that conclusion.

But, ultimately, they recognized Jesus because he came with a greeting of peace…and with an appetite! He ate a piece of fish. He got close enough for them to feel his breath. He empowered them with the Holy Spirit and with a charge to forgive. Oh, and he showed them his crucifixion wounds.

In fact, Jesus appeared later to the same group in the same place again. This time, Thomas was there. Thomas who said he would not believe this resurrection story unless he touched those wounds himself. Jesus showed up and gave Thomas that opportunity.

Showing up, and showing up again. Being close and human—someone who breathes the same air and eats the same food. Someone who also has hurts and wounds. Don’t forget to look for an opportunity to remind them that they are children of the divine, imbued with the spirit of their creator, and therefore called and empowered to forgive. And bring a little peace along. These things can help others recognize resurrection in your life.

Fourth, meet them where they are.

In the gospel reading today from John 21, the resurrected Jesus shows up on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias. Seven disciples—seven fishermen—are doing what they do. Casting nets. Jesus goes to where they live and work and sweat. He had to get up really early to be there, because that is when fishermen fish. And he helped them in that work. And, surprise-surprise, he ate with them.

Not sure what the connection is between eating and resurrection recognition, but it sure seems like there is something there.

Scripture says that, after this, “none of the disciples dared to ask him, ‘Who are you?’ because they knew it was the Lord.”

Getting up early if you need to. Going to where they live and work and sweat. Helping and working up a sweat yourself. Sharing in a meal…maybe preparing it. These things can help others recognize resurrection in your life.

Finally, recognize the resurrection in them.

After they had eaten together there at the Sea of Tiberias, Jesus does something a little perplexing. Seemingly out of nowhere, he asks Peter, “Do you love me?” In fact, he asks Peter this three times. Why? Peter must have wondered why, himself. He was probably a bit confused. We are told he was hurt at that third “Do you love me?” But each time, Peter assured Jesus that, yes, he loved him.

Did Jesus ask three times because he wasn’t convinced that Peter really meant it? I mean, Jesus would have reason to question this disciple’s devotion given what had happened not long before—Peter denying Jesus in the courtyard of the high priest, Caiaphas.

But I think it was just the opposite. I don’t think Jesus doubted Peter’s devotion. I think Jesus knew that Peter doubted his own devotion—if you will, Peter doubted that there could be any “resurrection stuff” in his life after his earlier abject failure.

And so, just as Peter had denied his lord and teacher three times, Jesus gave Peter an opportunity, three times, to affirm his love. To remember the charge he was given as the rock upon which Jesus’ church would be built. Jesus gave Peter the opportunity to re-recognize the resurrection in his own life.

Seeing the inherent value in others’ lives, even when and especially when they cannot see it themselves. And engaging in ways that remind them that they have value and are valued as part of the Kingdom of God. These things can help others recognize resurrection in your life…and in their own.

Recognizing resurrection does not seem to come easily. But may we look to the life of the risen Jesus, following his lead and engaging with others in ways that reveal resurrection—reflected in our own lives, in the lives of others, and in all creation.

Amen.

Passing of the Peace OR I Love you, Pass It On (John 20:19-31)

Passing of the Peace OR I Love You, Pass It On

By April Mills

April 27, 2025

John 20:19-31

Friends, our scripture reading comes to us from the Book of John, Chapter 20:19-31, which reads:

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors were locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But Thomas said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

A week later, his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

This is the word of the Lord of the Harvest. Let us meditate on the wisdom of the Vine-grower, that we may all labor peaceably in our shared vineyard to bring forth the good bounty of their creation.

Many of you may know that the Easter Season continues with us for the next 6 weeks until the Season of Pentecost when Christ ascended and the Holy Spirit would become our constant Counselor. By design, this spiritual season is meant to be a time of renewal and calling, throwing wide the church doors and sending us all out to share the good news of Christ’s resurrection. In other words, my friends—welcome to the season of Evangelism.

Now, judging by the looks of some, I see this could be a bit of a hard ask. I am guessing maybe you doubt your ability to engage in evangelism. Perhaps like Thomas, you are vacillating back and forth, trying to decide if this is really your responsibility. Inwardly, you might think, “Maybe I could, but I am probably not the right person. I am not confident in any way to talk to my best friend, let alone a stranger on the street.” To you I say, “Peace, my friend, your wavering is natural. The Grace of God will precede you in all that you endeavour to do.”

You see, Thomas didn’t doubt because he was short on desire. What incredible honesty Thomas demonstrates to say that no account other than his personal witness of Jesus’ scarred hands and speared side could make him believe in life after crucifixion.

Have you ever heard that before when trying to share the word? “Show me the proof! Where is your evidence?” In the context of today, Thomas’s ambivalent reply was the result of good intentions and poor execution. In short, the Disciples fumbled the handoff. If we look to the verse just prior, we can unpack what frequently goes wrong when we try to share the message too hastily.

But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” And how did Thomas respond—warily, hesitantly, reservedly—much like so many of the hundreds of unchurched here in our community. They get told and told about the who, what & why of God, but less frequently shown how to sit in the presence of God in spite of their struggles.

Not that the Disciples did anything wrong per se. They were just beyond excited. Like Mary Magdalene, Simon Peter, and the other beloved Disciples did just days before, they jumped for joy and immediately started talking to one another about this incredible miracle.

And in that excitement, they missed the mark—totally forgetting the duties as assigned by Jesus only the day before. Recall Jesus had said, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you. Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them.”

Did you catch it? The 10 disciples were not commissioned to preach to Thomas. And they couldn’t preach to Judas, because he was no more. They were sent to the masses—the unchurched and unbaptized. Great intentions aside, their aim was off. Not off by one person. Not off by two people. But 10 whole people lost the original message to go beyond the church doors and offer forgiveness to those struggling many, not to witness to the one guy that wasn’t in the room and already knew Christ in person.

Stated another way: evangelism is not church swapping. I am going to be the one person who says that. Jesus’s missional call to the world is not about prying the active “others” away from their faith practice or community and convincing them we have a better, more truthful brand. I don’t care if they are Jews, Buddhists, Catholics, Muslims, Nondenominational Christians, LDS, or spiritualists, and even pagans. Let me be clear, Evangelism in our current context today applies to the unbaptized and the unchurched. Right now these disconnected folks, our neighbors in Pocatello Chubbuck area, amount to about a third of the people that we rub elbows with. They are friends, coworkers, family members and associates whom we already drink coffee with.

What you might not know is that some are secretly spending a little time each week attending the church of the self. Some are out fishing. Others are skiing or hiking in nature. Some sit on the couch with their phones grabbing occasional memes and sourcing spirituality from online content.

But they are seeking. If you get below the surface of their solitary sojourn outdoors, or the media grabs on the couch, you will find our friends are struggling to deepen their connection in God, looking for forgiveness, but ultimately foundering because they have no viable community with which to commune.

Missed mark or not, even the Disciples’ fumbled efforts had purpose. Jesus, omnipotent, intentional, deliberate Jesus, was priming the well and giving us a model to work from. In evangelical lingo that is to say that God’s prevenient grace was preparing Thomas ahead of time to accept the unbelievable. That kind of grace, the grace that primes the well, is the kind of grace your friends are currently cultivating outdoors and yes, even on the couch. Meanwhile, I imagine God must be enjoying the view equally well indoors and out.

In a wonderful art piece called “Go On, Saint Thomas,” by Jack Baumgartner, one artist goes to great lengths to reinterpret the cliché of Doubting Thomas for a modern Christian. Jack depicts Jesus embracing Thomas, folding around him like a shield, covering all but the crown of Thomas’ head and the outermost parts of his back. It is as if Jesus is wholly incorporating Thomas into the wildest possible body type there could be. The body of “we”. We the People. We God’s Beloved. We the Seeking. We the Disciples. Jesus seems in this image not to be separate from but in fact a part of Thomas and indeed all of us.

If you take even more time to consider the portrait, maybe blurring your eyes just a little, Jack’s magical art shows the intimacy of human embrace as a fully rounded circle. The rounded backs of the savior and the saved, the learning and the learned, the togetherness of two and not the impotent power of a self-doubting and separate one picking at healed over scars on the Ribs of God Made Human To walk Among us.

Think back on a time of grace that came when you awakened to your new identity as God’s beloved. Whole. When you came under the power of Jesus’ loving embrace, being still scarred but no less whole. Weeping wounds no longer gushed the grief. And you were forgiven the frailty of human error. I think Jesus kept his scars because he knew we would certainly keep ours.

And like the Prince of Peace, we can invite others into our embrace. Make fast a circle of wholeness and offer tangible, undoubtable proof as lived evidence that through God, we were forever changed from our shadow self. Gone are some of our frailties. No more do we experience wavering self-awareness. The wounded part of ourselves having long since scarred over and healed. The presence of such a healing is witness to our Thomas Twin-self currently struggling with our old issues.

In these moments I encourage you to listen closely for the Spirit and engage in the passing of the peace. In so much as Jesus spoke peace to Thomas, and the tradition continued for millennia down unto us, so we must speak peace to others and be Jesus to a new generation of seekers. We must be deliberate, we must be patient, and we must be intentional about this intimate moment with our neighbors as Jesus was deliberate, patient and intentional for us.

Etscko Schuitema, a practicing Sufi, had this to say about leveraging the power of intentional action: “Intention refers to the deliberate and conscious decision to act in a particular way or achieve a specific outcome. It is closely related to purpose, as purpose provides the overall direction and motivation for our actions.”

Friends, intention and purpose go hand in hand in God’s work here with our neighbors. We can live into our purpose by answering that call to evangelize the right way in this community. Evangelism, good evangelism, begins with deliberately aligning ourselves next to our unchurched or unbaptized friends and associates, and speaking peace to them behind closed doors when they are protected but still curious.

Consider this about yourself: Are you willing to let Jesus use you to prime the well? Perhaps in last week as you went about the work of being Jesus to someone, you heard the cries of an unchurched family member, friend or associate and it sounded like this:

My partner just left me. She was my everything. We shared the same meals. We shared the same wardrobe. We even liked the same movies. It was perfect. I don’t understand. What is wrong with me? I thought I was doing everything right. I just love her so much. And now I have to face my parents.

Christians speak peace and be willing to come alongside your neighbor. Let God’s love dispel heartache.

I’m just too tired to get out of bed. I’m numb. I’m done. There’s no air in the room. I don’t wanna be around people. I don’t wanna go to work. I don’t even wanna turn on the television.

Christians speak peace and be willing to come alongside your neighbor. Let God’s love dispel depression.

Oh my gosh, I am screwed. My rent is due, I barely have any food in the fridge, and I just got a notice that my electricity is getting shut off tomorrow. I don’t have the money. I can’t donate plasma and I’ve already pawned my car title. What am I going to do?

Christians speak peace, and be willing to come alongside your neighbor. Let God’s love dispel anxiety.

Passing the peace in this way is the best use of our intentional gifts. It is this deliberate process that you have been designed for, training for, and indeed doing for others within the congregation. Are you willing to extend the purposeful use of your gifts elsewhere and build momentum behind your neighbor’s closed doors?

If we are truly in tune with the example of Christ Jesus as our guide, I hope that you see what good evangelism looks like. It starts with stepping behind closed doors. It starts with speaking peace to your neighbors and loved ones in their hour of distress. It starts with forsaking the self for the community of we by letting someone in an showing them that your God loves and accepts all kinds to the table. Amen.

Then They Remembered His Words (Luke 24:1-12)

Then They Remembered His Words

April 20, 2025, Easter Sunday

By Pastor Mike 

Luke 24:1-12

The more she demanded of her memory, the more it gave.

— Barry Lopez, “The Open Lot”

***

  How, until that moment, could they have remembered his words?

His departure was so fresh, the shock of having lost him so total. Recalling the warm texture of his voice as he spoke those bright teaches and promises that expanded what it was possible for them to imagine about the world – to call all that to mind… it was agony.

It hurt to remember. Yet that’s precisely what the angels asked the women do: “Remember what he told you…”

“The old has gone, the new is here” (2 Cor 5:17)! The Apostle Paul writes those words in 2 Corinthians. He says that any person who places their full trust in Jesus’ sacrificial death and risen life participates in a new creation. Easter cleaved history into a before and after, an old age and a new age. On the one side, a cosmos alienated from God, and, on the other, a cosmos reconciled to God.

When the women came to the tomb, their remembering was still bound to the old age, its possibilities circumscribed by death.

We can look back two chapters to Luke 22 to see memory at work in the pre-Easter world. Jesus had predicted that none of his disciples would remain faithful to him when it was time for him to suffer. They would run away. Peter was the leader of Jesus’ disciples, and he argued with Jesus about this. Even if no one else could go the distance, Peter claimed that he would never falter. But Jesus predicted that Peter would deny knowing him three times.

After arresting him in the evening, soldiers brought Jesus to the high priest’s house for interrogation. Peter followed. He snuck into the courtyard and lingered by the fire. Some others who were there thought they recognized him, and they pressed him to admit his affiliation with Jesus. Peter denied it – once, twice, three times. The rooster crowed.

Luke writes, “The Lord turned and looked at Peter. Then Peter remembered the word of the Lord. …He went out and wept bitterly (Lk 22:61-62). This is memory haunted by failure. Memory that can only trace the lines of a botched and broken past. Memory that accentuates but cannot bridge the distance between ourselves and God.

     The women had come to the tomb that morning with their oils and spices so that they might lay Jesus to rest. It was the only thing to do that made any sense. They were seeking closure. Should memories of Jesus and his words pierce them, they would weep like Peter for what was bitterly and irretrievably beyond their grasp.

But what they found when they got there was an opening – an opening alive with angels. And those shining messengers of heaven said to them, ‘Remember! Remember what he told you (Lk 24:6). Remember his words. They are alive, because he is alive. He is not here among the dead. He is risen!’

Verse 8 is a short but all-important verse in Luke’s Easter story: “Then they remembered his words” (Lk 24:8).Hearing and believing that Jesus was alive, the women experienced all his words flooding back to them. At that moment, they entered the new creation – not as memories locked in the past, but as demands and promises invading the present. 

In Chapter 23 of his Gospel, Luke shows us this kind of redeemed, post-Easter memory, memory that surpasses the power of death. The Romans had crucified two other criminals along with Jesus, one to his right and one to his left.

One of these condemned men taunted Jesus, but the other asked for mercy: “Jesus,” he said, “remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Jesus answered him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise” (Lk 23:42-43).

This is memory that reconstitutes presence, memory that brings forward into every “today” not just the idea of a person or a thing, but their very reality. The criminal is asking that he not be forgotten. But Jesus offers him so much more. Jesus tells him that this very day, he –the man in all his fullness – will be (will live, will exist!) with Jesus.

This is how the words rushed back to the women there at the tomb. They returned in all their fullness, with all their power confirmed and secured by the Resurrected One.

Oh, we aren’t saved because we can quote the words of Jesus chapter and verse. We aren’t saved when we nod approvingly at them as the wise words of an ancient teacher. We aren’t saved by more or less trying to apply these words to our lives.

No, we aren’t saved by our efforts at all. Every effort of ours to keep these words through our own resolve will only place us in Peter’s position, remembering our failure to do so with bitterness and dejection.

We are saved by grace through faith (Eph 2:8-9). Our redemption is God’s gracious gift. Christ seeks us again beyond every closed door, every evil and unjust and bitter ending.

But what we are saved for… We are saved for these words.

We are redeemed for the purpose of enfleshing them right where we are. When we remember like the women remembered, Jesus’ words become more than words spoken once upon a time; they become words continually resounding through his Body, his Church.

These are not dead words recorded on a page. They are living words announced by our lives.

So, friends, which of his words does he want you to remember this Easter? Which of his words will fill your mind, flow from your lips, find a home in your very heart?

Perhaps it is a word that calls you to love far beyond your natural capacity and inclination. He says – not ‘he said,’ but ‘he says’ –“Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you…” (Lk 6:27). And when we are surrounded by the world’s hunger, he says “You give them something to eat” (Lk 9:13).

Remember his words.

Perhaps Jesus wants you to entrust your heart to the God who cares for you. For he says, “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you” (Lk 11:10).” He says, “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. …Instead, strive for the kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well.” (Lk 12:22-23, 31). Will you let these words subdue your anxieties and transform you into source of daily bread and peace for others?

Remember his words.

Maybe the word for you today is one that cuts through all your defenses, all your masks, your addiction and your shackles? For Jesus says, “Friend, your sins are forgiven you” (Lk 5:20), and “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace” (Lk 8:48), and “I do choose. Be made clean” (Lk 5:13). He announces our freedom over and over again. Will you let his words resound through your body and soul, that you might announce them to others in need of forgiveness and healing?

Remember his words.

Is he calling you, today to re-pattern your life according to the utter reversal of values in the kingdom of heaven? Jesus says, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind (Lk 4:18-19) And he says, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh” (Lk 6:20-21). And “all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted” (Lk 18:14). Will you participate in that prophetic anointing? Will you trust in your blessing as you struggle for justice with peace? Will you practice his costly, humble love?

Remember his words.

The disciples and the women who followed Jesus had heard these world-changing words many times. But death intervened and seemed to silence them, to consign them to the past. God’s love for the world and his desire to have love unleashed through us is what saturates these words. But that love story cannot be written in a world where the voices of chaos and retribution, hatred and fear get to have the last word.  

But – “Why are you looking for the living among the dead? He is not here! He is risen.”

With the announcement of his undying Life, all the words were suddenly available to the believing community again, beginning with the women. And we who are members of his Boby share in that inheritance.

We have been given the Holy Spirit, the very spirit of the Risen Christ. In John’s Gospel, Jesus says that the Spirit “will teach you all things and remind you of everything I have told you” (Jn 14:26).

Because of Easter, there will never be a voice out there in the world loud enough or cruel enough to obliterate the sound of Jesus’ words. Nothing and no one can negate the freedom we have been given to continue hearing and announcing them with the power that he gives us in the Spirit.

Jesus says, “I will show you what someone is like who comes to me, hears my words, and acts on them. That one is like a [person] building a house, who dug deeply and laid the foundation on rock; when a flood arose, the river burst against that house but could not shake it, because it had been well built” (Luke 6:47-48).

He says in another place, “But as for that in the good soil, these are the ones who, when they hear the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patient endurance” (Luke 8:15).

And finally, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it” (Luke 8:21).

Remember his words – build a foundation that cannot be shaken, bear the fruit that is love, become his family.

Announce his words – for they have been reclaimed from the silence of the tomb.

Be his words – today – because we can, because he lives.

Thanks be to God! Amen.  

The Magnitude of Mercy and the Gravity of Grace: A Creative Reflection on a Betrayer’s Backstory

The Magnitude of Mercy and the Gravity of Grace: A Creative Reflection on a Betrayer’s Backstory

April 6, 2025

The Fifth Sunday of Lent

Matthew 27:3-5

By John Gribas

Intro

I have so appreciated this sermon series focused on Jonah. Pastor Mike’s observations and insights have, for me, been incredibly powerful.

I am not surprised, though. I have always loved the Jonah story itself. It has such dramatic flair. Such strong and clear and recognizable narrative structure. It is in some ways extremely relatable—this poor guy who is asked to do something he really, really does not want to do and ends up causing himself a lot of grief trying to avoid his charge. In Jonah’s case, being handed a call to repentance and message of hope and forgiveness and being asked to share it with a people Jonah sees as unworthy.

Jonah was given a message of mercy and grace and was asked to share it. Instead, he held on to it for dear life, intent on making sure that message would never reach Ninevah.

You know, we tend to think of mercy and grace as unburdening things. Relieving. Releasing. Reviving. Uplifting. Things that lighten the load of pain and hurt and guilt.

And they are. But they can also be weighty and burdensome things…particularly when we hold on to them. Refuse to offer them.

When we do hold on, I think we come to know…the magnitude of mercy and the gravity of grace.

I think Jonah came to know these things in a very personal way. Think about his time on the boat to Tarshish and the storm. Jonah discovered that the mercy he was withholding had far too much magnitude to fit in that boat. It had the kind of magnitude that could conjure a great storm. A tempest. A real doozy!

And when he realized the storm would not subside so long as he held on, he allowed himself to be thrown overboard. And then he came to know the gravity of the grace he withheld. Gravity powerful enough to pull him to the very bottom of the sea.

And when you think about it, Jonah was not only withholding grace and mercy from the Ninevites. He was also withholding them from himself. Those sailors on the ship with Jonah—they wanted to find a way to spare him. Jonah said, “Throw me overboard. This is my fault.” His fellow seafarers did their best to offer Jonah a little mercy. A little grace. They grabbed some oars and gave it their all trying to get to land and safety. But in the end, Jonah, so intent on withholding God’s mercy and grace, could not receive the mercy and grace offered to him. Instead, he chose the dark waters of the sea and, ultimately, the belly of the great fish.

Why are mercy and grace such tricky things? Too offer to others, and also to receive for ourselves? The Jonah story gives some insight. For a little more, I ask you to allow me a bit of creative license, and I ask you to explore with me the backstory of another bible character who seemed to struggle with mercy and grace. This time, a character from the New Testament and someone whose struggles are clearly tied to this season of Easter.

A Creative Backstory

[Put on shawl. Pick up coin bag. Take one out, hold it up, and look at it.]

If you let go a coin...it must fall to the ground.

[Dropping coins to ground.] One...two…three…

[Hold bags with remaining coins up.]

Thirty.

[Drop bag to ground.]

Eye-een teh-khet eye-een, shane teh-khet shane. [Hebrew translation for "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth"]

I am Judas Iscariot. A Jew. Judean by birth. Follower of Jesus of Nazareth. One of the twelve chosen to be apostles. Treasurer and keeper of the common-purse.

Judas. The betrayer...the one who led the authorities to him. The one who sent him to his death with a kiss.

I am Judas Iscariot...the man! Judas the human being, for I am a human just like you. I am...just like you. I was...just like you. Perhaps no more, but once...ah, once I was a boy.

And I was a good boy, always tried to make my father proud of me. He was a good and respected man, and he had high expectations for his children. We worked hard to live up to those expectations, and I, more than any of my brothers, succeeded...most of the time.

I remember one particular failure quite well. I was young, about eight or nine years old. I had accompanied my father on a journey to a distant city. He was there on business and wanted to show me "the ways of the world."

While there, we occasionally used public transportation to get from place to place. I was a curious boy, and I became fascinated with the little mechanism attached to the public wagon or chariot that, with every so many turns of the wheel, would pop a pebble into an empty box. At the end of the ride, the driver would count the pebbles to determine the fare my father would pay.

We tried our best to accept rides only from Jewish drivers. But once, no Jewish drivers could be found. We were forced to accept a ride in a public Roman chariot.

I could tell by my father's hesitation that he didn't like the idea. I was sure there must be some Jewish law forbidding the activity, and I dreaded the thought of being "unclean" and wondered what type of sacrifice or purification process might be required.

Was it religious piety...anti-Roman zeal...or just plain naughtiness? I can't really say, but for some reason, I was overcome with a sense of disgust at the thought of paying a Roman with my father's hard-earned money, and I soon found my eyes fixed on that little box on the side of the chariot.

It was slowly accumulating more and more pebbles. The quiet, regular "chink...chink...chink" as they fell seemed to grow and grow and echo in my ears until it drowned out all else. Then, before I even realized it, I had a handful of smooth pebbles clenched in my fist. No one had seen.

The ride ended soon. My father paid the Roman driver in silence. And we went on our way down the road, my fist clenched tight, the pebbles burning into my palm. I felt satisfied.

All was well, until we came to a busy intersection where my father, often distant but always protective of his children, reached down and grasped my hand to cross. I had been found out.

My father, he...well, let's just say that he "disapproved." We marched back down the street, unfortunately the chariot driver was still there, and my father paid the man what we owed, plus twenty percent for proper restitution.

I was appropriately punished. And I spent many hours working for my father's friends to reimburse what I had stolen. "In this world," my father told me, “there are actions, and there are consequences we must pay."

Still, the most painful and lasting punishment was the memory of watching my father apologize to a Roman...because of me.

That boy grew into a man. And, with the help of my father's guidance, a model Judean. I worked hard, and I excelled in my studies. I learned a trade, and I earned an honest wage. I knew the law well, and I kept it. Yes, a model Judean.

Then I met him.

Jesus, a carpenter turned teacher. His words, drew me. Not only me, but the whole Jewish world has been waiting for the Messiah, the leader who will overthrow the Roman oppressor and restore the Jews to power and usher in the Kingdom of God.

Still, with the world so filled with wandering teachers, prophets, and self-professed messiahs, it is strange that I would be drawn to this one, particularly considering that this one was from Nazareth. As a Judean, I learned early in life that Nazarenes were rather crude, lacking in culture and education.

In many ways, Jesus was no different from the others who claim to be Messiah. There were the healings and other sorts of Egyptian magic we had come to expect from these holy men. But Jesus was unique. He had power, but he was gentle. Authority, but he was humble.

And the religious leaders, who so easily discredited religious frauds in the past, ended up looking like fools when challenging Jesus. If any could usher in the Kingdom of God, this man could.

But Jesus...he changed. Or maybe I changed. But how can you take seriously a Messiah who blatantly challenges religious authorities, who seems to believe he can step outside our laws, our traditions. What Messiah would eat with tax collectors and other sinners, keep company with harlots? What was this man's purpose?

It is fine to preach "mercy," but mercy will not topple Rome.

Jesus was wasting time and resources on unproductive things. I was disappointed. I was worried. I was confused.

Finally, we were to go to Jerusalem for the Passover. Jerusalem! Jesus knew that the Jewish authorities were seeking him. He was choosing a very dangerous path, and he was taking us with him.

How ironic that we were about to celebrate the Passover, the day God delivered the Jewish people from captivity in Egypt, and here we were, Jews, about to follow one who claimed to be God's son right into our own captivity.

[Pausing...unsure of what to say.]

I helped them find him...went to the Jewish authorities...told them I'd find an opportunity for them to arrest him without his crowd of followers around. The opportunity came during Passover.

We were sharing the Passover meal. Jesus, somehow he knew...he knew what I was planning to do. He told us all that one of us would betray him..."One," he said, "who eats with me from my bowl."

Then he dipped a piece of bread in the bowl and handed it to me.

I left immediately and went to the authorities. I took them to where I knew Jesus would go after the meal, to the Garden of Gethsemane.

Since it was dark, we had arranged a way for me to identify their man. I was to join the apostles in the garden, find Jesus, and greet him with a kiss on both cheeks. This I did.

The memory of the look in my father's eyes when he apologized to the Roman chariot driver for my error...that is painful. But it is nothing in comparison to the memory of the look in the eyes of Jesus as I betrayed him.

There was sadness, yes; yet I sensed that it was not for himself, but for me. There was calm, there was resolve, there was mercy...a terrible, terrible look of mercy.

Then, he was executed. Tried, beaten, and nailed to a cross. If you have ever seen one, then you know that there are not good and bad crucifixion deaths. There is only one kind of crucifixion...slow, painful, agonizing, and complete.

There are actions, and there are consequences...

Why did I do it? WHY? Was it because I knew he was not the Messiah but, instead, a deluded fanatic?

Was it because I believed that he was the Messiah and needed to be pushed into some sort of real action?

Was it for the silver given to me as a reward? Was I just afraid?

Maybe it was all of these...maybe it was none of these. Why did I take those pebbles from the box? I just don't know.

But what does it matter? He is dead. An innocent man is dead, and it is my doing.

So much for his life, his work. So much for mercy. Clearly, his death is evidence that mercy does not fit this world. If one such as he could not secure mercy from this world, then none can...and I am no exception.

In this world, there are actions and there are consequences we must pay...there are consequences I must pay.

[Pick up coin bag from the ground.]

If you let go a coin, it must fall to the ground.

But Jesus, if he were alive and here right now, I know what he would say. He would tell me..."But Judas. My dear friend Judas. If they fall, I can pick them up again."

But hands that have been crucified…can hold very little.

[Drop bag again.]

Eye-een teh-khet eye-een, shane teh-khet shane.

An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

A life…for a life.

[Remove shawl.]

Conclusion

Matthew 27:3-5

When Judas, his betrayer, saw that Jesus was condemned, he repented and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders. He said, "I have sinned by betraying innocent blood." But they said, "What is that to us? See to it yourself." Throwing down the pieces of silver in the temple, he departed; and he went and hanged himself.

Mercy. It is a thing of great magnitude.

Grace. It holds a powerful gravity.

For Judas, too much magnitude and too much gravity to offer to his enemies, the Romans. Same for Jonah. Too much to offer to the Ninevites. And for both, apparently also too much to receive. So strange.

Or maybe not strange at all. Am I…are we…all that different from Jonah? From Judas?

I share this imaginative backstory for Judas to suggest some reasons he may have had such a difficult time with mercy and grace. I also share it to encourage each of us to reflect on our own backstory.

As we approach Easter, if you find mercy and grace tricky things—to offer or to receive or both—look back and consider why.

Maybe something about your upbringing.

Maybe a specific hurt or wound or trauma.

Maybe the incessant messages from culture and media that promote vengeance and justice and paying your dues as ultimate values.

Maybe, God forbid, it somehow was baked into what you heard in your own religious upbringing—from your Sunday school class or from sermons or from the words and actions of others regarded as respected leaders in your faith community.

Maybe you will come to the conclusion that there is just something about being human that makes it really difficult to properly receive and digest mercy and grace.

As you reflect, let God touch and heal. Not imagining that you will suddenly find yourself able to carry these weighty things—mercy and grace—on your own. I think, perhaps, that we were never meant to carry mercy and grace…only to offer and to accept them.

So my hope, instead, is that your reflection on all of this allows you to let go…and to remember the one who did in fact carry the weight of mercy and grace in his life, and also in his death. And whose spirit, now living in us, can and will bear the magnitude of mercy and the gravity of grace, so that we may both give and receive.

Amen.

Benediction

The Lord bless you and keep you.

The Lord make His face to shine upon you, and be gracious unto you.

The Lord lift up His countenance upon you, and give you peace.

Charge

So let us go, recognizing the magnitude of mercy and gravity of grace. Not holding. Not withholding. But, instead, offering them as gifts—to ourselves, to each other, and to the whole world. Amen.

Our Knots, God’s Mercy: Yet Not What I want, But What you Want

March 30, 2025

The Fourth Sunday of Lent

Jonah 4:1-11

By Pastor Mike

***

     This story began with God telling the prophet Jonah to travel to Nineveh, a powerful city in the militant Assyrian Empire, and preach against it. As we’ve seen, Jonah ran away from this command; instead of going East, he went West, seeking passage on a ship bound for the faraway city of Tarshish. Sometimes we run from the right thing to do, the thing we sense that God has put in front of us. Sometimes, faced with a call, we grow afraid, and we try to quietly slip away.

     At first, fear seemed like a logical explanation for Jonah’s resistance to God’ call. Israelites and Ninevites were enemies, simple as that. Jonah might be threatened, accosted, or worse, should he leave the comfort of his own land and go rub shoulders with the enemy. 

     But the final moments of this great story reveal that Jonah had a more complicated motive than fear. He knew in his gut that doing the right thing, in this case, would not feel good to him, would not leave him feeling satisfied, happy, or secure. Should he go to Nineveh and speak God’s words, he would lose control of the narrative and the outcome; it would be between this people and the Lord. ‘Ninevites given the chance to receive mercy? You’ve got to be kidding me!’

     You see, the right thing in God’s eyes was the wrong thing in Jonah’s eyes. He was less afraid of the Ninevites’ violence toward himself, and more afraid of God’s kindness toward them.

    In light of their sorrow and repentance, God did relent from punishing the Ninevites. And, oh, this made Jonah’s blood boil. “Jonah was greatly displeased and became furious” – that’s how chapter 4 begins. And we finally understand the deeper, darker reason why Jonah had never wanted to come to Nineveh at all.

     “Please, Lord, isn’t this what I said while I was still in my own country? That’s why I fled toward Tarshish in the first place. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and one who relents from sending disaster” (4:2).

     Jonah is angry at God for being who God is. Jonah hurls God’s essential back at God as an insult. Ugh, of course even here you’d be this way – gracious and compassionate, loving and relenting. And here’s the thing about these words. They are a direct quotation of earlier scripture; they are some of the most precious words an ancient Hebrew would know.

      These words about God’s character were first spoken by God himself to Moses on Mount Sinai. After freeing the Israelite people from slavery in Egypt, God made a covenant with them at Mount Sinai, binding himself to them and promising to always protect and provide for them so long as they adhered to the Divine way of justice and love.

     According to Exodus 34, “the Lord came down in the cloud and stood there with [Moses] and proclaimed his name, the Lord. And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin” (vv. 6-7).

     God was telling Moses and the people very directly what the Divine character, the Divine heart, is like. And what a beautiful heart – patient, forgiving, loyal, longsuffering, and kind. And this Holy self-disclosure was cherished, written upon the heart of the people, and restated again and again in later stories and prayers. 

     Like Psalm 103: “The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. He will not always accuse, nor will he keep his anger forever. He does not deal with us according to our sins nor repay us according to our iniquities” (vv. 8-10).

    Or from the prophet Joel: “Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart. …Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from punishment” (2:12-13).

     That God is like this was no secret, no mystery.

     Jonah knew that he served a God with this heart. And when first called to Nineveh, Jonah put the pieces together theologically in an instant. Bringing the words of this kind of God to this kind of people would be a risk: God might be who he is and actually show them mercy. And that would unsettle the easy narrative in Jonah’s mind about who the people are that God likes and chooses, and who the people are that God dislikes and rejects. God’s compassion might extend to Nineveh. Which is to say: God’s compassion might leap the walls around Jonah’s own compassion, and lead him to a reckoning with his own smallness of heart.

    Jonah ran the theologically equation correctly, and his heart could not see it as good news. Jonah was disgusted that he has been called to demonstrate the limitless, borderless, unbounded goodness of God by coming to these people and witnessing their transformation.

     Poor Jonah. Poor Jonah – he wrings his hands and plods out of the city to pout about God’s graciousness under the shade of a rickety hut. 

    Jonah shows us the danger of evaluating God’s kindness according to our own standards and assumptions. When this happens, doing the right thing can leave us feeling angry and baffled. God’s goodness can feel offensive. God’s forgiveness can seem like a downright scandal.

   There is a reason that God says through the prophet Isaiah, “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).

    And it’s here that I want to remind us of some of the Gospel stories we’ve heard read in worship alongside Jonah these past four weeks. Truth is, the span of God’s mercy was not any easier for people who walked and talked with Jesus to swallow. 

    In one passage from Luke’s Gospel, a religious expert comes to Jesus asking him what he needs to do to gain eternal life. Jesus flips the question around and asks the man, “Well, based on your training, what do you think?” And the man answers dutifully, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus says, “That’s right, very good.” But the man, well, he wants to know exactly how much of that neighborly stuff he needs to do to be on the right side of the line. So he asks Jesus a clarifying question: “And who is my neighbor?”

   Jesus answers this by telling a story about a man who walks down the road and gets robbed and beaten and left for dead. And as he’s lying there in agony, two of the “right kind of people” – leaders in government and religion – walk down the road and pass him by. But then a third man – definitely the wrong kind of person, being a foreign, unclean Samaritan – stops and saves the man’s life. “Which of these three,” Jesus asks the scholar in front of him, “was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.” 

    Jesus radically redefined the bounds of neighborliness. You’re not a neighbor to someone else primarily because you share a point of view, a philosophy, an ethnicity, a hobby, or even a city block with them. You’re a neighbor when you enter into another person’s need, when you share their suffering and their joy as if they were your own.

     Being a neighbor is not something you are; it’s something you do.

    Later in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus tells a different story about a man who had two sons. The older son was loyal and responsible, but the younger son was a mess. He took his inheritance early and went and squandered half his father’s estate in hedonistic living in a far country. When he loses everything and is reduced to rags, he comes home, expecting to be given the cold shoulder and treated like a household slave. Instead, the father, seeing him from a distance, runs to him and embraces him. The father throws a party to celebrate his son’s homecoming.

    When the older brother comes in from the fields and hears about it, he gets bitterly angry – envious. He’s always been there, after all; he’s always done right without an expectation of reward. And now this – for him? 

     “Then the father said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.’” (Luke 15:31-32). The older brother had taken the love of his father so for granted that he had lost touch with the joy of it. And so he feels stingy about sharing it when the moment comes to share it. 

    And then we have our story from today, the parable Jesus tells in Matthew 20 about the day laborers. The guys who got hired at the end of the day and worked only an hour got paid the same amount as the guys who got hired at the beginning of the day and worked clear through it. 

    “And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us…’ But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; …I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?’” (Matthew 20:11-16).

     We can draw lines around our neighborliness. They’re in; they’re out.

     We can feel that appreciating someone else threatens our own position.

     We can balk at God’s generosity to the newcomer, to the latecomer.

     We can make ourselves the measure of God’s mercy, and that is when our heart hardens.

     And sometimes – well, sometimes these resistances begin at home, in the church itself.

    We, friends, can get stingy and fussy about who we are really obligated to as neighbors. We can miss the joy of someone coming home again into the love of God because, well, we’ve always been here, we’ve never left, and who do they think they are and why all this fuss about them? In the church, we’re not always above saying, ‘Hey I’ve been here the longest. I’ve put in more time than all y’all combined. Where’s my gold star, my bit of extra favor?’ Or: ‘Hey, I’ve been here a decade, why is that person who just walked through the door getting the attention and appreciation that I deserve.’

     Oh yes, we can do these things, too. We can become “greatly displeased” just like Jonah – and those toxins make it very difficult to witness to the all-encompassing love of God.

     But friends, we serve a God who sent Jonah to offer grace to his enemies.

     And we serve a God of Gethsemane.

     We serve Jesus Christ, the one who knelt down in the garden on the night before he died and prayed to God that the cup of suffering might pass from him. He didn’t want to do it. Not like that. He was in agony, knowing how difficult it would be to do the thing God had put in front of him to do. But he also prayed, “Yet not my will, but yours be done” (Luke 22:42). And having surrendered to the flow of God’s love, Jesus made of his death and risen life a redemptive sacrifice, a loss that gained everything, a self-gift that received the world in return.

     What it would be like, I wonder, if there was a group of people who decided that no matter how distasteful the call to love was at first, no matter how much it grated against their sensibilities, they would nevertheless pray to God, “Yet not my will, but yours be done.”

     Oh, what would it be like – if there was a people – who would do the right thing and magnify God’s love even though it might cost them their stories about the good and the bad, the worthy and the unworthy. 

     You go and take care of your ailing parents. You stick by them as they slowly decline. You sort through their stuff and tackle the mountain of paperwork. It’s hard and it costs and it will wear you out, but it’s the Jesus thing to do. You take time off from work that you worked hard to earn and all of sudden you are confronted with an urgent need or even a mundane call to service that God puts in front of you, and doing it would be hard and costly, and it may even make you impatient, but it’s the Jesus thing to do. Or you come into some money, and you already have far more than you need for yourself, and you choose to share it with someone who may not deserve it, who may not ever be able to pay you back for it, but who desperately needs the help. It costs but it’s the Jesus thing to do. 

     You feel God tugging on your heart to get to know your next-door neighbor, But God, you do know, don’t you, that they’ve got a Trump sign in their yard? You know they’ve got a Kamala sign? They’ve got that yellow flag with the snake. They’ve got that rainbow flag flying. But you push through the discomfort and check in anyhow because a neighbor is made by the messy sharing of life, not by the ease of ideology. It’s a hard thing and it costs some real comfort and cultural currency, but it’s the Jesus thing to do.

     And I could go on:

     You open your home to someone who needs a place to land and recover for a while. You let go of an old grudge. You agree to help the congregation with something behind the scenes. You watch someone’s kids when you’d rather be watching TV. You listen to your spouse’s concern and decide you will go with her or him to counseling and work to salvage, even strengthen, your marriage. Your neighborhood changes so you start learning another language. You stay up an extra hour to write the letter.

     We want these actions to align with our preferences. We want them to feel good and easy and to fill us with energy and confirm our standing in the world. And because we make ourselves the measure, so much Gospel work gets left on the table.

     Oh, but if we would but let the Spirit of the Lord – the compassionate one, the gracious and forgiving one, the one who is slow to anger and who relents from punishment – if we would but let that Spirit live in us, then we would stop asking, What’s in it for me? and we’d start moving towards the wounded on the streets, towards the runaways coming home, toward our co-laborers in the good work – even, and hardest, as Jonah learned – toward our enemies. 

     Brothers and sisters, God will ask us to love people we don’t think it’s right to love, serve people we don’t feel are worthy of our service. God will ask us to embrace and celebrate people beyond any worldly calculation. God will ask us to the right thing even when we are greatly displeased by it.  But a church that lets God crash through the borders of its concern? A church that can get angry with the demands of God’s compassion and still say at the end of the day, Yet not what I want, but what you want? Well, that’s a church that God can use to usher in the joy and the abundance of the Kingdom.

     May it be here. May it be us. In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.  

Our Knots, God’s Mercy: The Overturning (Jonah 3:1-10)

Our Knots, God’s Mercy: The Overturning

March 23, 2025

Jonah 3:1-10

***

The third chapter of Jonah begins in the same way that the first chapter began. God’s word comes to the prophet, calling him to get up and go to the great city of Nineveh in the heart of the ruthless Assyrian Empire. The first time Jonah received this command from God, he ran away. He boarded a boat bound for the faraway city of Tarshish. He ran away only to be caught in a storm, thrown overboard by his shipmates, and swallowed by a great fish. Jonah survived inside the fish for three days and three nights before he finally prayed for deliverance and was vomited out onto dry ground.

          So here we go, take two: “The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time” (3:1). And… this time Jonah listens. He travels east on a long journey inland until he reaches the city. He walks a day’s journey into it – surrounding by people he considers vile, brutish, unworthy of God’s concern – and he begins to preach: “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”

         It’s not exactly a message to win you friends among your enemies, not exactly something wise to say while traveling alone in a hostile place. A declaration of doom. But they were the words God gave him. ‘Forty days more and – katastrephō!’ says the ancient Greek translation of this Hebrew story. Catastrophe. Nineveh is bound for a sudden, radical overturning.

         When God spoke to Jonah the first time – before the voyage and the storm and the fish – God told him that the Ninevites “wickedness has come up before me” (1:2). That’s important to remember. Nineveh was not a good place. It was a place where economic injustices, social oppressions, and outright violence were the norm.

          The cries of the people suffering within these realities have reached God’s ears and gained God’s attention, just as, long before, the cries of the Israelites enslaved in Egypt had reached God’s ears and prompted God to act. And even though God had to deal with Jonah’s fickleness up until now, God has had the city’s wickedness and violence in view the whole time. God has not forgotten the cries of its poor.

            These strong terms for the city’s behavior are appropriate; we hear as much from the king of Nineveh’s own mouth. He orders everyone in the city to “turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands” (3:8). That first phrase – ‘evil ways’ – means something like a wicked disposition and the unethical direction. The second phrase – ‘the violence that is in their hands’ – suggests that each person is accountable for the destructive acts that they cling to, when they might otherwise curb and control them.[1]

           Wickedness and violence – ra’ and chamas in the Hebrew – are precisely the words that show up in the Noah story, found in the book of Genesis, when God decides to destroy the earth with a flood. Genesis 6:5 says, “The Lord saw that the wickedness” – the ra’ – “of humans was great in the earth and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually” (6:5). And Genesis 6:11 says, “Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence” – with chamas.

           And the overwhelming presence of peoples’ pain stirred up a strong emotional response in God: “And the Lord was sorry that he had made humans on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart” – Genesis 6:6. In the case of Noah, God followed through with judgement, saving only Noah and his family and breeding pairs of every animal. But in the Jonah story, God turns away from the planned punishment because the people of Nineveh respond to Jonah’s preaching. 

           All of which is to say: It is significant that God speaks to Jonah a second time. It’s easy for us to focus in on Jonah, to analyze what’s going on in his heart and mind and wonder about what he’s learning from all these experiences. But I think God’s persistence here is less for Jonah’s sake and more for the sake of those who are oppressed in the great city of Nineveh. God needs Jonah’s cooperation precisely because God wants to confront the root causes of that immense pain. Remember, Nineveh was a powerful city in a ruthless, militaristic empire. Neighbors were not treating each other well, and it is more than likely that slaves, foreigners, women, and children were bearing the brunt of systemic injustice and outbursts of aggression.

           And God wouldn’t let it go on. God is responsive to our mistreatment of others. God is responsive to our suffering. God feels fierce anger about it all. So God sent a truthteller – Jonah – to Nineveh to force a reckoning by stating the obvious: you cannot keep going this direction without catastrophic consequence.

             For a moment, let’s ask ourselves whose cries God is attuned to in our own community – be that our block, our city, our state, or our country. The cries of the hungry, the unhoused and displaced, the incarcerated. The cries of women who are trafficked, children who are neglected, the elderly who are forgotten. The cries of species whose homes have been reduced to a barely livable acreage. The cries of Idahoan women now living maternity care deserts, of Idahoan parents raising children in childcare deserts. The cries of children still separated from their parents at our country’s southern border – to be clear, a policy practiced by both parties in the past 10 years.

             God is attuned to the suffering, and God raises up truthtellers: people who will tell us – who are telling us, ‘You cannot keep going this direction as a person or as a community with catastrophic consequence.’ 

             We’ve seen that God is responsive to unjust suffering. God is also responsive to a change of heart, a change of direction. That’s what’s on display most in this third chapter of Jonah. The people who have practiced wickedness and violence decide to put an end to it! It’s not how it has to be – praise God! The Ninevites grieve and fast and put on scratchy clothes to show that they are sorry. And what begins organically in the streets with neighbor telling neighbor to put the violence down eventually reaches the attention of their king, and he – shockingly – gets on board. He tells the whole city to double-down on changing their ways. He’s so enthusiastic that he even orders the animals to join in the community’s turning. Donkeys and sheep and cattle wearing sackcloth and fasting and crying out to God.

                And we see God’s response to this in verse 10: “When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them, and he did not do it.”

                 God changed God’s mind. God did not do what God said God would do. Because God saw that they had made a concerted effort to turn from one way of life, founded on the domination and exploitation of each other, to a new way of life founded on forgiveness, repair, and justice.

               There was, at the end of the day, a great “overturning” in Nineveh. But it was not the violent overturning of brick and mortar. It was the overturning of a community’s heart and way of life. Jonah told the truth about violence, and the people who heard his words took them to heart.

                All you can do is tell the truth:

                If you live under the boot of Nineveh, you cry out honestly to God and trust that God hears you.  If you’re Jonah, you speak the words that God gives you to speak in an ungodly place and an ungodly time. If you’re the Ninevites at large, and you suddenly see how far off the mark you are, you change course and you urge your neighbors to do the same.

                All you can do is tell the truth. What comes after that belongs to God. Remember, this story was written after the Israelites returned from exile in Assyria and Babylon. The storytellers set it in the past in order to hold up a mirror to God’s people. ‘This could have been us,’ the storytellers are suggesting. ‘We could have listened to our prophets. We could have fed the hungry, housed the houseless, cared for the stranger. We could have called one another onto a better path and made a communal turn. But we didn’t, and the catastrophe came. Never again. Let’s do better this time.’

                “And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.”

               I’m compelled by this vision of a community realizing that is doing harm to its members and then doing something about it, spurring others to do the same. Justice starts at home, in the neighborhood, and the work of turning is for all of us, no matter our age or the skills and influence we think we have or lack.

                In Lent, we focus our attention on a God who attuned himself so completely with the sufferings of creation that the depth of his listening and the immediacy of his feelings pulled him from eternity into time, from invisible divinity into visible flesh – drew him into the very matrix of our agony. In Jesus of Nazareth, God joined us in our mess. On the cross, Jesus united himself with those who suffer unjustly. And all along the way, he spoke to us about a better way to live, calling us to love our enemies, to show mercy to those in need of mercy, and to make peace.

                 What might it look like for you and me to be so moved by our neighbors’ pain that we might follow Jonah and Jesus as they enter in, draw close to it, tell the truth about it, and share about a better way?

                   Sometimes, to experience the gospel as good news, we first have to experience it as bad news. We have to look in the mirror and take the logs out of our own eyes. We have to cut off the hand that causes us to sin. We have to go and sell all our possessions and give the proceeds to the poor. We have to see and feel and name our brokenness for what it really is, and then we have to do the hard work of relinquishing our way. We have to turn. It feels like bad news at first because it’s uncomfortable and costly and exposes our complicity in what is not right. But then we suddenly realize that this turning – itself a kind of death, a dying to the selfish ego – is the gateway to resurrection life, for us and for others. 

              God is near to you, the truthtellers say. Mercy is near to you. Love is near to you. A life-changing, world-overturning kindness is available to you. Deep peace, unbreakable hope, restored dreams – they are not far from you. You can have them if you are willing to turn from doing harm. You can experience them if you are willing to take judgment out of your own hands and place it in the hands of God, and then pick up the cross as a way of life. God is near to you as you listen to the point of joining, and love in both words and action.

                     Will we – members and friends of First United Methodist Church – will we believe God? Will we consent to the overturning of our hearts for the sake of love?

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

[1] See Susan Inditch, Jonah: A Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2023), 96.