Send Out Workers (Matthew 9:9-38)

Send Out Workers

March 1, 2026

Matthew 9:9-38

By: Pastor Mike Conner

***

“Jesus continued going around to all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and every sickness” (9:35 CSB). Matthew gave us a nearly verbatim summary of Jesus’ ministry back in chapter 4, but there is one subtle yet significant development here at the end of chapter 9. In chapter 4, Jesus began to go throughout Galilee; now, he continues going. This is important because everywhere that he has gone in Galilee, the crowds have been waiting for him, following him, pressing in upon him.

Day after day, the people have come to him carrying the heavy burdens of their need for truth, healing, and acceptance: men with leprosy, a Roman soldier pleading for his sick slave, two demon-possessed men in the graveyards of Gadarene, a dead little girl, a woman who has bled for 12 years, two blind men. They all began as faces in the crowd, yet they were people to Jesus, people worth the gift of attention and care. It would’ve been so easy for him to stop going from town to town once he had experienced the cost of being so open and receptive to the pain of the crowd, of choosing to treat each one as a unique child of God. Yet he was willing. His love was and is always ready to say Yes. He continues going, revealing to us the steadfast commitment and compassion of God. 

Now, here’s the thing: If every person in the crowd is indeed a person to Jesus, if being an instrument of healing requires a willingness to be redirected (the leader the sick daughter) or interrupted (the bleeding woman) or imposed upon (the two blind men), then Jesus, by himself, was never going to be enough.

Now, that might sound strange. How could Jesus, the Son of God, who reconciled the world to God through his death and resurrection, not be enough? 

Yes, Jesus is the firstborn, the font, the cornerstone of a new humanity, but for his gifts to be offered in history, in every moment and in every place, Jesus needs companions. He needs those around him through whom and in whom he could extend his own life and love. And so, with a tender and fierce love for the world, he said to his disciples, “The harvest is abundant, but the workers are few. Therefore, pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into his harvest” (9:38).

It brought Jesus immense pleasure to share his life and ministry with others. His joy really comes through in John’s Gospel, where he says to his disciples, “As the Father has loved me, I have also loved you. Remain in my love. …You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants anymore, because a servant doesn’t know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me, but I chose you. I appointed you to go and produce fruit.”

To be a worker in the fields of God is to be a friend of Jesus, and it’s to do what he did—what he never stops doing through those who share his Spirit. Giving away time and attention, receiving people and their mess without judgment, calling forth the truth of who they are as beloveds made in the image of God. 

One of the things I’ve learned about ministry while serving here in Pocatello is that the burdens and the joys are meant to be shared. I can’t do it on my own; none of you can do it on your own. We need one another, and we need God to raise up more workers!  This has been on my mind recently for a number of reasons.

Most of you know that our tenant daycare center, Tender Loving Care, has been struggling to make ends meet in recent years, and that things really came to a head in January. When I got the phone call that their board had voted to close the center, I was afraid and overwhelmed by the needs of everyone involved: the teachers who would be losing jobs, the families who would be losing care, the children who would be losing community, and our church, which would be losing a source of necessary income.

But luckily I’m a little wiser now than I was five years ago, and instead of sitting in that panic and anxiety by myself I started making calls, and within a few days, I had the most remarkable people coming alongside me share in the work, the work of the harvest, which, remember, is not about bringing souls in to conversion but about being sent into the crowd to be sources of divine attention and care. As of today, TLC is still open, and they’re even opening up an infant room. 

We had a parent town hall meeting on Thursday night, and I got to see someone from the United Way educate parents about the systemic challenges to childcare in Idaho, got to see several parents with grant writing experience meeting with one another for the first time. There are simply more workers in the room than there were even two months ago, and I credit that to God for raising them up. All I did was ask for them: God, if you want this to happen, if you want this center to be saved, send me the next right person, because I can’t do this on my own.

You’re going to hear later about some staffing changes at the church. About a year and a half ago, we welcomed Renzo as our new Office Manager; this month we hired a new Custodian and Caretaker; now we’re searching for a new Bookkeeper, and through each transition, I pray, “God send us the next right person to help us rise to the opportunity and privilege of working in your harvest, of sharing your grace with the world around us.”

And God has been faithful to raise up and send out the workers. Think about our 2023 process to become a Reconciling congregation, our 2024 campaign to put a new roof on our building, or the steady daily needs for leaders to offer care and education to others. Right now, we’re struggling to bring together enough adults and elders to sustainably serve our church’s young people and children, so I’m continuing to pray, “God, send workers into your harvest.” 

Because there is a harvest to be had. Kids are growing up in a scary world with failing institutions, a culture at war with itself, a planet careening toward climate disaster. Not to mention all the normal hard parts of childhood and adolescence: difficulties at school and at home, feeling powerless to protect yourself from the hardest changes, keeping alive the spark of your authentic self. We don’t have to address this need on our own; we can pray for more workers. If every face in the crowd is a unique person with a unique set of stories and needs who is worthy, in God’s eyes, of care and attention, then we must do what Jesus tells us to do and pray, “God, send out more workers!”

What would a church be like that prays that prayer over and over and over again? 

Well, first, it would be a church that leans into the world and not away from it. It would be a church rooted in the compassion of Jesus, that sees the crowd and doesn’t run away or complain or turn them away but wants to receive and help each person. It would be a church that sees the harvest not as a tally of souls to bring in and convert but as a field of potential relationships to go out and explore. You can only pray to God for more workers if you care in the first place. 

A church would also be humble. We can’t do everything alone. Praying every day for God to send out more workers would give us eyes to see the potential for partnerships with other members of our community. Because God will raise up whoever God chooses to raise up. They don’t have to look or sound or believe like us. And that humility would extend to how we see each other. We can be curious about the trajectories of service and call that each of us is on, wondering where and to whom each of us is being sent.  We don’t determine this for other people, because God is the one who sends people out, but we can anticipate with joy, and we can speak the truth of what we see in others, we can invite and we can affirm. 

So a church that prays for more workers to be sent out into God’s harvest would be a church that loves people fiercely, lives in joyful anticipation of the good works prepared for us beforehand, to borrow a phrase from Paul, and yet doesn’t grasp or control its members. I think we do a pretty good job at this. I see the joy you take in one another.

We would also be, I think, a grateful church, humbled by the power of prayer. If we pray for God to raise up workers for works of healing and love, couldn’t we flip that idea around and recognize ourselves as, at least in part, the fruit of others’ prayers? I think of this in terms of my upcoming ordination as an elder in the Methodist church. I am going to take literal vows this summer to be one who is sent out wherever God calls, but my journey is the fruit of so many other peoples’ prayers—beginning with my grandparents through pastors and youth leaders to friends and colleagues and even all of you. I’ve exercised my own freedom in my story, to both participate and resist God’s call, but maybe one way that grace flows is that someone out there looked out on a crowd of people full of sickness and fear and shame and prayed, “God, send workers into your harvest” – and here I am, and here you are.

Our lives are not our own. The prayers of the saints have sown their own seeds in us. And if God has raised us up to be workers in the harvest, then God will surely trust God to provide for us.

Disciples go out. They—we—disperse. We are sent among the people to be peacemakers, to be merciful. In John’s Gospel, Jesus actually says that we’ll do “greater works” than his (14:12 CSB), which is pretty wild if you think about it. That word “greater” might be understood a few ways, but there’s at least, I think, a sense of doing greater things by a property of multiplication. 

It is God’s harvest – the Spirit prepares, gives growth. God’s harvest needs workers, so we pray for them to be raised up and sent. And sometimes, perhaps, we recognize ourselves as the worker that someone else has prayed for, and we get to work. With that frame of mind, we can be a humble, joyful, expectant, and grateful church. And think of what can happen! 

Jesus saw Matthew sitting in his tax booth and said to him, “Follow me.” Running a tax booth on a public road would have set Matthew at odds with most members of his community. He was working the occupying empire, for Rome. Matthew was sitting in the isolation of his work, with questionable integrity. But he got up, left that situation, and walked with Jesus. And then in the very next verse we see Jessus sitting down in Matthew’s house, surrounded by tax-collectors and so-called “sinners,” having a dinner party. Matthew goes from being solitary to being communal. Matthew goes from being seated—stuck—in a booth that separates him from his neighbor to being seated—joined—at a table that creates fellowship. By the end of the day, a whole posse of tax collectors and other social pariahs had dropped in to spend time with him and with Jesus. Matthew went from being on the fringes to the very center of the gospel’s movement in the world. God raised him up and sent him out, and through him God would raise up others and send them out.

Greater by multiplication. And it can be so with us. 

Thanks be to God. Amen.

He Is Our Peace (Matthew 8:18-9:1)

He Is Our Peace

First Sunday of Lent

February 22, 2026

By: Pastor Mike Conner

***

In these three scenes, Matthew describes Jesus’ first journey back and forth across the Sea of Galilee. As a writer, Matthew gives us a clue that we should hold them together in our reflection, seeing them as a unified journey. “Now when Jesus saw great crowds around him, he gave orders to go over to the other side [of the sea],” says chapter 8 verse 18. A few paragraphs later comes chapter nine verse 1: “And after getting into a boat he crossed the sea [again] and came to his own town.” From the region of Galilee to the region of the Gadarenes and back again. And in between those narrative bookends, a lot of drama unfolds—storms at sea, demon-possessed men in graveyards, pigs racing off cliffs to fall to their death.

This is the first open-water journey described by Matthew. Throughout the whole Bible, water is both a symbol and a literal means of creation and re-creation. We might think of Genesis chapter 1, when God separates the waters below from the waters above in the creation of the earth. We might think of Noah’s great flood, or the Israelites’ freedom march through the Red Sea, or the many prophetic visions of fresh springs bubbling up in the dry desert as signs of salvation. In water, old realities are dissolved and new realities are born.

Jesus’ journey across the Sea reveals new things about who he is and what it means to walk the road with him. He leads members of the crowd outside their comfort zones, not only onto the great lake known for its unpredictable tempests, but also into a region where people of strange customs worship other gods. And it is precisely because this journey is unsettling that the growth the disciples experience is deep and profound. When we go where we’ve never gone before, we tend to be more receptive to new insights about God, the world, and ourselves.

Jesus’ order “to go to the other side” sparks conversations with two of his followers. The first, an overly enthusiastic scribe, pledges to follow Jesus anywhere. Jesus responds with a word of sobering caution: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (8:20). After this, a disciple comes and asks Jesus to delay the journey across the sea so that he can return home and attend to a need in his family. Jesus, perhaps not to our liking, responds, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.” Jesus slows the first man down. Jesus hurries the second man up. He knows exactly how to work with each one of us, no matter what the pitfalls in our personalities might be. And that is a mark of spiritual maturity, being able to receive and counsel others right where they are, not as we think they ought to be.

The story continues: “And when he got into the boat, his disciples followed him” (8:23). Those who board the boat after him are—or become—his disciples. Remember, at this point in Matthew we don’t yet have the twelve chosen apostles. We have the crowds who come to hear him speak and receive his healing, and we have people called “disciples” who’ve started to travel with him from place to place in a more committed sense, as students. The boundary between these two groups is rather fluid at this moment in Jesus’ ministry. At any time, someone from the crowd might become a disciple, and a disciple might fade back into the crowd. That is, until this moment, when shoving off from familiar shores forms a real threshold. Who will get in and go? Who will follow? It’s a moment of decision, and disciples are forged in moments of decision. 

Once they are out on the sea, a storm blows in and threatens to sink their boat. Jesus sleeps, so the others wake him up and cry out for help. He asks why they have so little faith, why they are so afraid. Then he gets up and rebukes the storm and it ceases. There is language play in the original Greek that is lost in the NRSV’s translation. Matthew describes the tempest as a seismos megas, “a great storm,” and the peace that follows Jesus’ rebuke of it he calls a galēnē megalē , “a great calm.” (We’ll come back to that “great storm / great calm” piece later.) The people in the boat are stunned: “What sort of man is this?” they ask each other.

The boat scrapes ashore in Gadarene. They have landed near a local graveyard. And out of that graveyard two demon-possessed men, fierce and violent, come running. They confront Jesus, asking him what he wants to do with them. With a word Jesus casts the demons out of the men, and the evils spirits enter a nearby herd of pigs, sending the animals into a frenzy that ends when they fall from cliffs into the water. The pig herders run into town to tell about the men, now free from their demons, and the pigs, now drowned in the sea. Everyone seems less impressed by that miracle of healing and more disturbed by the fact that their local economy was disrupted. They ask Jesus to leave at once, which he does. He sails back across the sea to Capernaum.

I believe that this journey “to the other side” and back again is here to shift our definition of security, to redefine peace—what it is and where we find it. God’s people have never been promised wealth, social influence, cultural popularity, or political power. God’s people have never been promised stasis, equilibrium, or an absence of suffering as a reward for their faith. But we are tempted to seek security and peace through these means, through resisting change or gathering material assets. 

“Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (8:20). Yes, but what does it mean that the one who said this about himself then lays his little head down in the boat and sleeps through the storm? The man who said there wouldn’t be a place for him to rest immediately finds rest in the most unlikely situation!

Starting all the way back with Abraham in the Book of Genesis, the biblical writers emphasize departure and change and the journey as deeply characteristic of faith. God came to Abraham and said, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you” (Gen 12:1). Abraham faith boils down to his willingness to respond to a promise and to be led by a faithful God, even though he does not know where he will end up or how he will get there. “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,” says the Book of Hebrews. “By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance, and he set out, not knowing where he was going” (Heb 11:1, 8).

Our security is found in the one who calls us. Our peace is found in the person of Christ. This is why Jesus calls the disciples “you of little faith.” Faith is trust, trust in the presence and provision of the God who accompanies us in all things, who is closer to us than we are to ourselves. They didn’t trust that, because he was with them in that boat, they would be okay. They might be tossed and shaken, soaked through and worried, but they would not be overcome. True peace is not found by staying behind on the safe beaches of Galilee. True peace is not to be identified with smooth waters. “The peace that surpasses all understanding” (Phil 4:7) comes from trusting God to go with us everywhere that God has called us to go. 

Following Jesus means embracing the departures and crossings—both internal and external—that God initiates, sometimes directly with a word and sometimes through the shifting tides of our circumstances. Following Christ means releasing our grip on ourselves or on the way things have supposedly always been. It means setting out to grow and change into the persons and the community that God intends for us to be.

This new definition of security is absolutely essential for what follows—in the story and in our ow lives—because Jesus has come so that he might take us to the graveyards of the world. Jesus has been sent to seek and save the lost, to encounter those in every time and place who have no place to lay their heads: refugees and houseless neighbors, the hungry and the sick, the incarcerated and undocumented, those troubled in mind and spirit who have no rest for their souls. He’s can’t wait for the disciple who wants to delay the journey in order to bury his father when there are two men over “on the other side” desperate to be brought back to life right now.

Jesus is all about reaching the unreachable, all about undoing the powers of death. And here I mean death as a force that reaches into life and grips us. Death as addiction, death as systemic injustice, death as the failure of the community to care for its most difficult or vulnerable members. Perhaps those who have no place to lay their heads have had some failures in life; without question, they have been failed—and many times over!

When we follow Jesus, the one who has no place to lay his head, we will be led to encounter others who have no place to lay their heads, those outcasts with whom he establishes divine solidarity. And when we work with him, through the power of his Holy Spirit, to announce the kingdom of light and life in those spaces of death, we will be asked to leave! We will become people who have, so to speak, no place to lay our heads. The powers that are invested in the status quo, that are held in the grip of the past and the present, they won’t like the fact that helping people escape the tombs sends the pigs off the cliff, shakes up the local economy, demonstrates their own failure, their own acquiescence to death. Institutional religions, Home Owners Associations, city councils, state and federal policy-makers—they usually won’t like it!

But the disciples endured the storm on the sea for the sake of those two men in the Gadarene graveyard.

And Jesus endured rejection in that place for the sake of those two men. 

If we are going to follow a God who endures the humiliation of having no place to lay his head, if we are going to become little-Christ’s who have no place to lay our heads, if we are going to love those who have no place to lay their heads—then we must learn to receive the gift of his peace, his “great calm” anywhere and everywhere, to experience that peace in him, with him, through him. 

This is the work. Jesus is in the business of turning the great storms of life—both within us (signified by demon possession) and without (signified by the storm)—into great calm. The great calm is not a possession, not a set of circumstances, not a masterful spiritual achievement, but a simple fact of trust. We trust the one who gives orders to cross into the unknown, we trust the one with us in the storm, we trust the one who reaches out to touch the wounds and wounded ones of the world.

I’ll conclude with a few more verses from Hebrews that celebrate the essence of faith:

“All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better homeland, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them.” (11:13-16)

May we claim the person of Christ as our peace, carrying the cross of his rejection, so that we might see the dead brought back to life, the written off written back in to the great story of God’s love.

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

One New Humanity (Ez. 36:22-28, Ephs. 2:8-22, Matt. 5:43-48)

One New Humanity

February 18, 2026

Ash Wednesday

By: Pastor Mike

***

Each of these scriptures testifies to the renewing of our human condition that God’s grace makes possible. During the days of Israel’s exile in Babylon, the prophet Ezekiel declared that the scattered ones would be gathered, and that those who were unclean would be cleansed. A new spirit would be given to the people in place of the old spirit, and a heart of cold stone would be replaced with a heart of warm, beating flesh.

In the days of the early Church, the Apostle Paul expressed what renewal in God would mean for our relationships with one another. Those who are far off are brought near, because God in Christ embraces all people. Hostility is replaced by peace. Strangers become fellow members of God’s household. The fundamental division in Paul’s mind was between Israel, God’s chosen covenant people, and the gentile nations, “strangers to the covenants of promise.” That these two groups could be brought together as one united people through the death and resurrection of Christ means that all brokenness in our social relations can be overcome.

Finally, Jesus calls us away from a practice of love based on merit (I love you because you love me) to a practice of love based on unconditional mercy and forgiveness: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

Each of these transformations, from the internal experience of a new heart to the external experience of a new community, are implied in Jesus’ command, Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. The word that is translated here as perfection means being mature, complete, whole; it means realizing the purpose for which we are made, just as God can ever only be what God is, which is love.  

I have brought these words from Ezekiel, Paul, and Jesus together because they produce a rich and colorful vision of what it means to live as an Easter people, a people filled with the Spirit of resurrection:

• From being scattered to being gathered. Instead of living a life of disordered desires, pulled this way and that by things that ultimately distract from what we most deeply want, we can be drawn into our deep personal center, where God’s spirit meets us and tells us who we are. 

• From a heart of stone to a heart of flesh. Where we have been hardened to the wonders of life or numb to the suffering of others, we can experience a new freedom for connection and joy. 

• From hostility to peace. Where we have been obsessed with patrolling the boundaries in church or country or neighborhood between insider and outsider, worthy and unworthy, or where these boundaries have been used to push us away, we can experience a radical new openness and sense of belonging to one another. 

• From love based on merit to the love that is God himself. Where we have reached an impasse with our own anger over the daily violence, deception, and injustice of our times, we can learn to give that anger expression in lament, and be filled with a divine compassionate love that even extends to our enemies. 

Who would I be, who would you be, who would we be if our humanity was remade in this way?

Lent is a season to ask that question. It is a season to hunger and thirst for the new humanity which Jesus inaugurated and opened to us.

Lent grew out of the early Church’s sense that the celebration of Easter Sunday required spiritual preparation. That preparation was framed around the movements of baptism. By reminding ourselves of all that God wants to do in us, through us, and for us, we become aware of the things standing in the way of that work, how we resist, domesticate, or sabotage our own remaking.

Which is why Lent is a season, not only of hunger—hunger for God’s will to be done in us—but of self-examination and repentance. Sometimes this takes the form of a decluttering, letting something go so that we can embrace something else, even if what we embrace is a felt lack, a sense of need, that sweetens over the forty days into solitude and silence.

Sometimes this repentance takes the form of commitment, engaging in a spiritual practice or stepping into a vein of service that challenges our resistance to grace.

Through it all, we notice—personally and collectively, Where am I, where are we, being ruled by fear, anger, or greed? By pride, envy, or apathy? We don’t notice those false spirits because God wants us to be ashamed. No, they are instead revealed by an infusion of light, a meditation on the perfection to which Jesus has summoned us. We see what we need to be freed from in the light of what we’ve been freed for. 

Scattered to gathered. Unclean to clean. Old spirit to new spirit. Stoney heart to living heart. Strangers to friends. Enemies to siblings. Calculating love to unbounded love.

For freedom to come, our posture during Lent must be one of openness to change and consent to the movements of grace within us. Both Ezekiel and Paul describe the work of conversion as fundamentally the work of God. God says, I will sanctify my great name. …I will take you from the nations and gather you…I will sprinkle clean water upon you. …A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God. Jesus has made both [Jews and Gentiles] into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility, between us.  He creates in himself one new humanity. 

God takes the initiative. God does the heavy lifting. God works the miracle.

It is all gift: the remaking of our humanity, the disarming of our resistance. It is all gift, all grace. It comes to those who seek it, ask for it, hunger for it, wait for it. It comes to those who give themselves into God’s hands and say with the old hymn, “Have thine own way, Lord / Have thine own way. / Thou art the potter, I am the clay.”

In a way, Lent intensifies for a season the daily rhythms and tensions of living in Christ and growing in love. We have to have some sense of where God wants to take us. We have to catch a vision for the new creation and begin to long for it, to hope for it, to hunger after it. And then we have to be honest with ourselves about our own inability or unwillingness to embrace it fully. And when we reach that place of hungering for what only God can give, we are ripe for prayer, ready for the outpouring of grace:

Help me, God. Help me to release what I need to release. Help me to take on what I need to take on. Help me to embrace necessary changes for the sake of my soul. Help me to relinquish my efforts to earn or achieve worthiness. Help me to rest in Christ and what he’s already achieved for me. Create in me a new heart. Renew a right spirit within me.

And then, when God arrives to give us the miracle—of a new heart, of a new humanity—we shall live in the land. We shall be God’s people. And God will be our God.

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

The Playdough Sermon (2nd Timothy)

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The Playdough Sermon

2nd Timothy

10.19.2025

By: Melody Briggs

Lord, please continue to open our hearts and minds to be used as an instrument of peace, vessels of grace and lights of unwavering love that continually breaks through darkness.

I would like to thank you all for this opportunity of growth today. Sharing in my understanding, and passions discerned from 2nd Timothy.

Believed to be a letter The Apostle Paul wrote to Timothy not only as his mentor and friend, but also from a nurturing father figure type role within Timothy’s spiritual development.

Paul's words of wisdom speak from a very nurturing and loving place. And speak volumes to the changing of seasons we all might experience within our own walks or journeys of faith.

This letter reads.. as it continues on speaks and leans into the valued connection Paul had with Timothy as he has watched and walked alongside him transition not only his understanding and teachings, but also to his depth of transition as he has grown from a welcomed child of God much like we all do into now young adulthood and the continued transition of becoming a man. Leading to the end of the passage where all the knowledge and understanding Paul hopes that Timothy will continue to nurture and fulfill within his own heart as he ages and grows into the testament of his faith.

2nd Timothy roughly states…

Continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you have learned it.

Continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you have learned it.

From childhood you have known the sacred …

you have been instructed through faith.

 And inspired by God. (hmmm)

As children we tend to learn from and experience life from the firmly believed values and teachings of those that love and nurture our upbringings/rearing, as well as our faith and the faith-based practices of those closest to us whether at home or within our communities. Thus, molding and shaping us as we meander… learn. And grow.

Is there a time that you can think back to some of those values… experiences, rearing’s…teachings…  and or faith-based practices ….

Something so deeply swelled within you that has tended to stay with you since childhood?

Taking you back in time to those child-like curiosities of the world around us…

Experiences and nuances that tend to still engulf our senses. 

My most memorable time of sense filled wonder and awe in the world that I can relate to or grasp from my past… starts roughly around five years of age. Is there an age or memory that has caught your attention?

I was often filled with a wide sense of wonder at that age… a real-life explorer so to speak. Every day was unknown … not knowing if it was banana pancake day or not… And I tended to be amazed and inspired by events like tea parties. Outings... Blanket forts… as well as environments that often felt magical or inspired by a spirit, God like vastness. Leaves swirling all around you in the fall… Rain puddles calling my name through the crisp air just to splash and leap upon… primary church songs about letting my light shine and hiding it under bushels... As well as other songs where we were dancing like crazed warriors.

You all have been provided with a small playdough. At this time, I would like for you if you feel so called to open it… and as you do… maybe you will take the time to open your senses within this moment…

And as you sit there you might start to

To smell it…

To roll some of it across your fingertips. And feel the reminisce of a child like wonder. As you experience its texture.  The memories that may be coming to mind…

Now if you will take some or all of the dough and roll it into a ball or a shape…. Possibly rubbing it between your palms into a tube or a worm…. And as you do take time to notice

To Feel.

To Explore.  And as you do… think back to maybe some of the values… teachings…  and faith-based practices you witnessed as a child.

 As you do, I would like to continue on with Paul's letter.

As Paul has described within this letter we as children often need

Reproof

Correction

Training

Reproof:

Reproof biblically is known to be value guided from acts of love. That can identify errors but ultimately promote wisdom and understanding. of consistent teachings, practices… and shared experiences helping to guide within us a sense of purpose.

Correction:

A purposeful and loving process to guide. Reform... Remold us … into a direction and or lean into behaviors of God's will. The meat and potatoes aligning us and our teachable moldable faith driven spirits.

Training:

Deliberate and disciplined practices that often lead to sustainable change and growth. Rooted in truths and the stretching of capacity to be a foundational force through all seasons.

Not only do we need these values as children, but we also need these throughout different seasons of life and within our experiences that challenge not only us but our capacity to seek the truth… to navigate corrections …  and define our purpose as well as the vastness and darkness of emotions such as Grief. Shame. Guilt...  And Debilitating Fear… The training of not only our minds but also our hearts as we learn to lean into the molding of ourselves, our environments, and the experiences of the world around us.

If you are still molding your playdough… How does it feel now?

Has the smell changed?

 Or deepened... maybe?

Is the texture more malleable?

warmer to the touch?

Or are you starting to have sensory overwhelm and possibly needing or wanting a wet wipe due to the chalky texture now coating your palms?

Much like the deepening of the second half of the letter ...Paul leans into the evolution of change that often occurs on not only our journeys of faith. But also, life as we age, evolve, change, remold, and ultimately grow.  Paul continues to extend his invitation to be insightfully aware of our need to be open and aware of our minds and hearts amidst our life's seasons.

They are the values and or lessons of:

Convince

Rebuke

Encourage

Convince:

Convince biblically involves relation to the personal experiences, discernments, or the invocation of the Holy Spirit within the openness of the listener and the external actions of the believer. Believers in this context reference those who are gentle in spirit, respectful, and often pray for change and or understanding. Convince the ability to relate with all senses.

Rebuke:

Rebuke is an expression to at times sharply course correct… often with purpose and a way to reflect and bring about repentance and restoration. Utilizing love as a motivator for change.

Encourage:

Support driven given with confidence and a genuine heart. A building up of our scaffolding so to speak either internally and or with the guidance of communal support living as a reminder of God’s truth and grace.

Now as you check into your senses.  Your surroundings… your heart and your mind … as it may have wondered…

into thought...

Possibly the openness of curiosity ...

or even more questions…

My hope is that just as Paul has written to Timothy from his heart that you also have had the opportunity within our setting today to tap into your internal wisdom. knowledge ... and change not only in the shaping and molding of your playdough but also to the growth in your own journeys and seasons of change.

When I took time earlier this week to connect to my growth, repurpose, corrections, and remolding if you will … I found myself wanting to lead into the convictions and truth of repair.

This letter from Paul to Timothy feels as if Paul was also speaking to my journey and molding not only from my child like faith of bravely singing songs of biblical warriors or the enveloping softness of worshiping within a community. But deeply to the depth of change I have encountered, and insightful truths I have uncovered and rediscovered as I have transitioned in growth within my current season but also into my changes in adulthood.  Oftentimes within our journeys of faith and life we tend to want to skip to the complexities of resolve and or repair. I know I do! It feels good. It's rewarding... It's proof of life's validity. So much so that standing firmly in our truths of knowledge, training, and correction can continue to guide us…

But maybe just maybe Paul’s insights were valid and can speak to us now as relatable insights and a reminder that Repair is possibly the universal truth of the biblical word Encourage: the scaffolding of the internal and the external as a welcoming guiding light for us to lean into the welcoming arms of God’s Love … and Grace in the midst of a convincing world in the middle of a remolding.

So, I hope today is for all of you to continue to connect in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you have learned it. From what you have lived through in the seasons of change… and Encouragement of God’s love and hope that fills all of you as you sit here to be instruments of peace ...lights of unwavering love… amidst the changing and remolding of seasons.

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My Spiritual Journey

My Spiritual Journey

February 15, 2026

By: Melody Briggs

Good morning, I would like to thank you all for this opportunity to share a little about myself, my spiritual  journey of sorts, and some of the lessons I have learned along the way. Some of you may have known me for the few years I have been attending, some of you may  even  or recall me as a youth attending many years ago, and others of you, have  possibly seen me when I have had the opportunity to greet you each Sunday from behind the sound board or busily setting up for church services. In the past few years under Pastor Mike’s direction we have had the opportunity to witness some pretty powerful  testimonies from many of us  gracing these pews this morning, and their words have bravely impacted my heart and soul.  I feel very honored to have the same opportunity today to share a little of me with you. When Pastor Mike approached me about this almost three years ago now… I couldn't even fathom having the bravery or the capacity to one let alone write down my spiritual journey and two even having the skills and tools to share my voice.. My thoughts.. And my experiences, but with some growth … spiritual discernment, and a loving community I am here today to connect with you all on more of a deeper and personal level as I lean into 

My spiritual journey started pretty young with strong Methodist roots when I was baptized at Hillcrest Methodist in Boise, Idaho 1981 as a baby. My dad was a band director now retired,  hence the name Melody. Growing up our family often moved for new job opportunities in and around Idaho, so did my coloring spots under the pews of the church choirs my dad directed.  I attended church on and off in my youth; I was led, and heavily encouraged by my parents as a teen to attend local churches, rallies, the ever growing christian rock band trend of the 90’s … if you know… then you know…Throughout my life experiences at home, and within the church I tend to navigate my world at  times as a bit of a tormented spirit. Not just from the torments, laments, and pains that often plague our souls such as self discovery, shame, guilt, and overwhelming fears… Don't get me wrong I have many depths and seasons of all of those too.   I tend to have vivid realizations of times and encounters when my actions, words, emotions have impacted others  in ways when I was a not so great daughter, sister, partner, mother, friend, neighbor… aquaintence…. And the like. Often those interactions of what are or are not… often ruminate many days.. Months.. And even year… they tend to haunt me in ways that are oftentimes hard to explain, to express, to feel, and to utterly eventually accept. As I am sure such experiences and living can and do at times haunt all of us. Such experiences, expressions,   and seasons of pain tend to tether and bind at our spirits weaving intricate  shackling webs that act like knotted ropes… or chains.. That can impact and tether our emotions… our behaviors… our ruminating thoughts… and ultimately our outward expressions. They tether us in ways that feel ultimately insurmountable. Utterly hopeless. 

For me personally, I started gathering information at a pretty young formidable age from narratives told to me by my mother, from her own moral code, biblical understandings, mental torment, and  her values of what christian practices should and should not look like. I was held accountable as a young child for the many  looks and expressions that I displayed as often being considered demonic, evil.  And the realization that my sheer presence at times invoked a fear in others that would have them leaving a  room in formidable pain and disgust. I have been held accountable for the multiple demonic behaviors I tended to exude during my childhood in various ways, while questioning morals, convictions, and conflicts of intrest… These experiences, narratives, behaviors lasted well into my late teens when I  randomly brought home a psychedelic poster of creation from a local outing. That  devious teen act fueled my mothers convictions of how demonic I truly had grown to be. With increased narratives and consequences. Sometimes increased narratives  from unhealed spirits, even those we are blessed to call our parents …can bind to us event tighter …than we could imagine… and can there come a time when those tethers … strangle us  and entrap us in ways that surmount far greater than what we think is possible here. It was at this time in my spiritual journey that I attempted to diminish my spirit and my life from pain… from the pain I was causing others ..

And pain I thought I was causing God by existing… by coming into this world as demonic…  not as a soul full of  unwavering grace .. of compassion… and ultimately love. At  this time in my journey  I couldn't understand how a loving  ominous God who created miracles …  worldly beauties…. Parted seas… fed thousands in need… who guided people to mountain tops … and ultimately died for our sins …. Could and would have his hand in the creation and existence of me. My mothers response to my almost successful attempt  at my own life… was not seen as an outcry of  insurmountable pain that had accrued over time, but rather a means for me finally be held accountable again to right my wrong doings of guilt  and shame by publicly  insisting that I give a testimony of my sins from a written expression in my personal journal in front of my peers at a youth rally she deemed fit …at the very pulpit in this church. 

It wasn't until my exploration of college that I attended a few classes in Austin,Texas at a church conference held in 2000. Where I felt the  pull to deep self exploration of connection and ministry might be even worth exploring…  It did however take a few many nudges from my local pastor and the Campus Wesley House Coordinator at the time, who thought I might enjoy further exploration in a calling in ministry.  I then helped eagerly to create a few foundational classes such as a children's puppet ministry and spruced up a children's area and nursery for youth at Chubuck United Methodist Church  at the time after attending.  Still trying to navigate and explore  if my actions in helping and serving others could outweigh the sins and narratives of my past.

Later. ..as college ended, so did my interest in the church community. As my life took a different route for a job opportunity and personal growth. Life has a way of leading us away in many directions and  worldly discoveries…. if we aren't intentional with nurturing  a spiritual component in. As I have now realized within my growth as a human.  Sometimes there is an underlying  pull to spiritual depths of discovery whether we recognize it in the moment or not…. Life kept leading me like a flooded river … flowing in new directions with ever changing currents and times…. New time lines…and fast paced living…                                                             Sometimes you just go where the river takes you…I suppose.  I got married in 2002 and started raising a family briefly and unexpectedly after in 2004…. Ultimately life led us, my now family of four in 2007 from Idaho to Corvallis, Oregon to help support my husband through graduate school  at Oregon State University, and continue with child rearing and the familial support and function of the household. It was a beautiful unexpected opportunity, when a local mom asked if I wanted to join the church choir. I was hesitant at first.  But ultimately decided that choirs and church pews do have a way of nourishing the soul, they surely did have a lasting impact from my younger years..  And my love of music. I gave it a go and got more involved  within the family ministries of the church there in the early 2000 years  from 2007-2009. Near  the end of 2010 I got divorced and moved back home to Idaho. I did enroll the kiddos into our local Lutheran Preschool in American Falls, Idaho and helped out some off and on at church there from 2011-2013.

Life threw a couple more curve balls my way and being forced to pivot in new directions  as beautiful as is … oftentimes makes it  a bit tough to sit and worship with others in a small town. Sometimes even attempting to try and leave the  burdens we carry outside of church doesn't always work… they have a way of binding to us as we attempt to heal. Needless to say  I didn't attend church much after unexpectedly losing my children in an unexpected custody battle six years after my divorce across state lines. The small town politics within the church and the community started to reiterate some of the deep harbored narratives my mom instilled  within me when I was younger of my demonic nature… and fear I instilled in others… as they didn't see me fit  to be near their children…  If mine were considered better off  in another state. It became increasingly harder to be seen as a part of their community… in and outside of church with harsh remarks and unexpected excuses as to my unwelcomeness. This deep longing.. Accumulation of greif.. Shame.. And ever growing fears… and relentless past narratives  abruptly embed my curiosity for my spiritual development or  even acknowledgement if you will. 

My spiritual exploration was at a bypass for seven years, I  filled my time with work… working multiple jobs… such as firefighting.. Ambulance runs as an EMT…m numerous college classes… lifeguarding..  Community service … on a journey to possibly attempt to prove to myself  if the narratives of my evil nature were in fact truths… was I even capable of love? Or would I just have this deep fear of myself inside of me always… even if I pushed myself physically into socially acceptable heroic acts… it wasn't until I randomly decided  one day to try and see how it would feel again to try and walk into a church in 2023 and see if it would or wouldn't fuel the narrative again of unwelcomeness. Here… 

I kept pushing myself and attending .. trying to allow myself to feel safe in a community of like minded people again… that the narratives I have tried to run from most of my life in the past might just be the past.  By Christmas of that year you all were in need of an added sound board volunteer to pull off the Christmas service for our Interfaith Fellowship here and  Pastor Mike  asked if I was available to help. I of course said yes and have been trying to pass the sound baton to another soul since, I don't know if you all know this, but us Methodists and christians  have a way of  seeing someone's spiritual gifts and possible talents even before they do.. Not sure if that is why we have so many committees and gatherings… as just to soak up and learn from each other?  I honestly  have enjoyed reviving old skills, and sharing in acts of service with you all since. After a little more gentle nudging I have had the opportunity to attend numerous classes  Pastor Mike  has provided as outreach for our congregation because of my attendance here. 

In May of 2024 I was approached by Pastor Mike and our District Superintendent to discern if deeper ministry was a calling for two local churches whom I have frequented over the years. I was grateful for the consideration, and due to various factors physically, emotionally, and spiritually I felt it wasn't where I felt called at that time. This past year due to gentle nudges and support I have had the opportunity to attend  Pastor Mike’s six plus week sermon writing course and various book studies, as well as had hard conversations, faith based inquires, and the capacity to hold space for others testimonies and stories  which in turn have helped to create and build a  cultural shift within my spirit, that it needed to say yes, to try adding a voice and a body to our worship design team.

I then gave my first sermon at the start of Advent last December in 2024 and have been trying to explore my depth… my behavior… my pain… my wandering spirit and soul a little more openly than before. Discerning if there is still a spark for any expanded spiritual enrichment  involvement or not? Am I still even a  worthy  specimen of sharing my voice… Am I as demonic as I was led to believe these past 40 years? Needless to say  I am very grateful for the opportunity to be here.  To be welcomed.. To be seen.. To be heard and to grow. And to try to ultimately lean in to nurturing my voice within my writing and my heart connecting to others.

It hasn't been until the last two years that I have even remotely had the capacity, the tools, the time, the space, and the unwavering community support to even attempt to face my inner demons so to speak… to the tethering and binding suffocating embrace that they have had on me, while holding me hostage in more ways than I care to spiritually and verbally admit. A deep seated spiritual narrative such as this… hard and deeply wired… isn't something I have been able to completely rewire or run from in the past… no matter how many good deeds I have attempted over the years … no matter how many times I have tried to repent… on this earth.. When you lose sight of your  internal worth… your purpose… your  navigational moral compass and values you tend to view the world and most interactions differently.. I was taught in life that you are valuable when you are a mother.. When you are a wife… when you are a capable provider…. When you are capable of nurturing love.. Compassion… and connection… And throughout my spiritual and life journey I have lost grips, opportunities, and experiences in some of those spaces…  But if I hold onto what I thought was the truth in the narrative that I am evil… at my spiritual core and being…That impacts the way I view myself… my interactions and behaviors  with others… Does that make me incapable of ever connecting? In a loving passing way on a Sunday morning to you?

Just as was shared with us in the scripture passage this morning, the journey up mountains and valleys and to the top where the clouds envelope us..  can lead and direct us to have different views …There are some spiritual foundational truths I have learned along my journey… In having the opportunity to worship and discern within my self discoveries with you all …  and some metaphors that have helped shape my spiritual understandings and experiences for example …  church pews …. Yes the very pews you are sitting in… tend to be essentially forgotten and and often overlooked structural pillars of the church… their craftsmanship  and purpose have helped generations of bodies…  with their support and function….and  have welcomed new views to the souls of their congregants and members through their supported invitation…  to such gatherings as choir practices.. Baptisms, worship services, funerals, and the revivals/ renewals of lost and unwatered wandering spirits, unanswered prayers and ….. And ultimately the  foundational support  they give our bodies and our tears that tend to hold us captive when our words may fail us… literal pieces of wood that support us when we aren't sure we should even be sitting in the presence of our neighbors… let alone a community that just might have the capacity or capability of loving us. Our church building that welcomes each week  can at times act like a welcoming home does to our family when they visit.  A safe place with a  beautiful new roof   to shelter us that can be used to  protect us and guide us.  These very walls openly  embrace us in prayer, spiritual growth and connection if we let and allow it. Just as a parent would when nurturing a child in need. …We can  and do create a space here each Sunday  that can shelter us from harsh storms externally and internally. We may not always be able to take away the pain or harm that has happened … whether at home or at church ..behind closed doors, or corridors and in hallways ... .as It is an inevitable to the human experience to witness harsh realities at times... But this space is sacred …for it is a place where we can have and hold hard conversations .. to lay down our troubles.. Torments.. Frears… and laments … To bravely allow safety .. repair.. And love .. to be welcomed… and to ultimately hold onto hope. 

You all have taught me that crowded tables matter. The tables that we have within our church  for hard conversations and potlucks matter…They matter because the spiritual narratives … we teach our children.. Ourselves.. Our neighbors… and those that cross our paths have lasting impacts on our spirits  and souls whether we like to admit it or not… I still don't honestly and truthfully know if I am evil.. Or if I have committed demonic  treacherous spiritual and physical acts that I will try to spend a lifetime trying to reconcile… but what I do know is that by facing those fears and the deep seated binding beliefs and stigmas that we can water and nourish our souls if that's something we chose to do… and that does matter… it impacts the way we believe…the growth of bravely evolving…  the way we live.. As  actively kind individuals.. The way we give and receive…. it gives us hope as individuals… it fuels our faith in prayerfully serving… and it also adds a beautiful  capacity to our lives in ways we otherwise may not have had the courage to face alone. 

And finally the biggest spiritual truth I know to be true that I hold deeply every Sunday  is that first  breath you tend to take as you open a church door to worship and commune in fellowship  with each other is truly a testament within itself.. For we do not  know what necessarily guides each of us here each sunday… or the depths, journeys, mountains and valleys that each one of us is facing in silence and discernment,  but I do know that once your hand touches the handle to walk into a church so does the threshold of your soul… in search of something to nourish it .. whether that is spiritual growth.. A sense of community… the smile of a neighbor to greet you… this very church pew to hold you for just a bit because your legs are too weary from the weight of the past that you carry… or just the comfort of the sound of an old hymn …to ease your cluttered mind.  

I do believe in being brave enough to profoundly explore one's spirit. Whether that is weekly in acts of service …  diving deeper into spiritual exploration… or  just the added  support of a sense of community and a warm meal … your spirit wherever it leads you just might have the capacity to grow… to travel up a high mountain top…  to hear God’s voice… or to just to hope that you too might be able to experience the warm  arms of a stranger in a hugging embrace and warm welcome.

I  can honestly  say I don't know the depths of my spirit… or my soul… nor do I know if I ever will… I don't even even know if these words of my spiritual journey and life … in thoughts..truths.. And experiences that have shaped and molded me for years ….  that I  have attempted to put onto paper … and clumsily utter to you.. In an act of  repentance of spiritual untether my spirit of sorts … even matters.  But I sure hope they do!  I hope these words.. This time can be a reminder to you when your spirit is tired… when your soul is longing for something more … that repair is a possibility… that healing has depths and seasons.... Twists.. Turns…  knots..and pivots… but that it can happen.. It is possible!… even in the midst of insurmountable pain.. And unwavering depths of grief… and especially  amidst  the ever hollow void of shame… 

That narratives whether our own… or others… have a tendency to be our compass or our beacon in darnkess… through harsh experiences.. They have a way of shaping and restructuring our now present narratives that oftentimes become our truths we live by… Those seasons of uncertainty and unknowns… can be just the realization that we needed that change.. That change and shifting in one's spirit  can be a possibility.  If we can we can have the capacity to  hold on to … and through… to allow ourselves the grace  to feel… to connect… to pray.. To discern… to sit in pews…  with neighbors and friends and to hold conversations.. Under sacred roofs whether at home or here…That the very walls that hold pain… can also hold peace.. That if we are brave enough to step off the door mat.. Turn the church door handle… and breathe through the confining thresholds of this world.. To our inner worlds.. And the dialogues and narratives that tend to hold us hostage… that we might know for a brief moment… as stated in the scripture.. Verse four.. It is good to be here!  if you wish!  And know with truth, conviction, and understanding that our spirits are capable of great things… of great transformation.. If we take the time to nurture them.. And allow them opportunities .. to be seen… to be felt… and heard no matter the circumstance. For who knows you  might just feel touched as the disciples did by Jesus as stated in Matthew.. For some people are indispensable companions on this journey of life and just as the narratives that shape us so do our companions and community…  and they just might surprise you … and  have the capacity to touch you..and guide you.. Do not be afraid..  Even if you don't recognize them just as the disciples did not recognize John the Baptist after descending the high mountain. Thank you  all for your companionship and guidance on my spiritual journey.

Please Bless us to continue to open our hearts and minds to be used as an instruments of peace, vessels of grace and lights of unwavering love, that continually break through darkness.

Stand With Minnesota (Southeast Idaho Citizens for Democracy Rally)

Stand With Minnesota

Southeast Idaho Citizens for Democracy rally

Caldwell Park, Pocatello, Idaho

January 31, 2026

By Pastor Mike Conner

 ***

I want to thank Elmer and Iris for the opportunity to speak to you about the moral moment that we find ourselves in. And, as always, it is humbling and inspiring whenever I get to share a platform with Reverend Haydie.

Friends, we’ve heard the call to stand with our neighbors in Minnesota by first standing among them, seeing what they see, and not being afraid to tell the truth about what we see. It is a call to be awakened, moved, even claimed by the suffering of some our most vulnerable neighbors.

If what we read and watch and hear directly about the situation on the ground in Minnesota twists our guts or causes tears to fall, we must listen to our bodies as they call us to respond. Grief is a good teacher.

I would suggest to you that another way for us stand with our neighbors in Minnesota is by standing behind them. We have an opportunity, I would even say a responsibility, to learn from their example and apply their spirit and tactics of moral resistance in our own community.

In my religious tradition, we talk a lot about something called discipleship. Being a disciple means following behind a teacher, learning to say what they say and do what they do. In my case, it is the Christ whose life forms the pattern. I am not permitted to determine my own way in the world like those in this country who, even from pulpits, claim that “might makes right.” Instead I walk behind a Teacher who says, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart.”

The spotlight has been on Minneapolis these past weeks, but the struggle of ordinary people against the brutalities of ICE has been playing out in places like Lancaster, Pennsylvania; in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina; in Portland and Seattle. Everywhere we see the resilience of neighbors who have set aside superficial differences to stand united against harm, who have sacrificed their time, resources, and comfort to stand in the gap for those living in fear of sudden arrest.

We are not short on teachers for this moment, and there is no reason for our community to be unprepared on that sad day when authoritarianism comes knocking on the doors of our most vulnerable neighbors. We can stand with Minnesota by having a teachable spirit as we engage in our own collective resistance.

Here are some things we might learn as we stand with by standing behind:

     Today is the day to forge mutual relationships of care with one another, and to enlarge our sense of belonging to one another. We each might ask ourselves, ‘In a typical week, where does my body literally go? What parts of town, what kinds of people do I just never see? When I imagine who my community is, does it include both the socially privileged and the socially vulnerable? Do I see people of many faiths and worldviews, from different generations? Do I know where the schools or daycares or bus stops, courts or factories or business are where I would need to take my body in a moment’s notice to stand in the gap for someone else? Do I feel a living thread of connection between the Temple and the trainyard, the University and the warming shelter, Amy’s Kitchen and the Boys and Girls club. And then, based on that honest self-reflection, we ought to challenge ourselves to bring new neighbors into our awareness and new concerns into our heart. To borrow words from one of Rev. Haydie’s bishops, we stand with Minnesota by weaving “a rich web of underground care.”

     Today is the day to resist every false narrative that says immigrants or refugees do not have a place in our common life. To reject every suggestion that those who protest peacefully are domestic terrorists, while those who force their way into homes without warrants are protectors of the peace. To decline stories that say we need to circle up and pursue the interests of our own group, and to champion stories that say we have more to gain when we all stand together. Our hearts are not so small nor our resources so scarce that we cannot make more room, and then more room, and then more room. We stand with Minnesota by telling the better story of our shared flourishing.

     Today is also the day for each of us to do the hard inner work of learning to feel the surge of our own anger, of our own impulses toward hatred and violence, without being overcome by them. To learn, through prayer or meditation or training in nonviolent resistance, how to harness that energy and turn it toward acts of compassion and care. We stand with Minnesota by breaking the cycle of harm, and sometimes that starts with our own hearts and imaginations.

     And, friends, if we are serious about resisting ideologies that divide us, serious about saying No to policy violence that’s been given the cheap stamp of divine approval, then today is the day to stand with our neighbors in Minnesota by resisting the forces of injustice here in Idaho. There is so much work for us to do right here, right now. The sacred worth and inherent dignity of our LGBTQ siblings and friends is again under threat. We have opportunities right now to restore reproductive freedoms, to resist cuts to education and healthcare funding. Every day we can choose to feed the hungry, house the houseless, and visit the lonely, the sick, the incarcerated. Let us raise our voice not only in solidarity with those who are far away but for the sake of those who are near. Today is the day.

     There is a chant being lifted up by crowds across the country that says, We’re not cold, we’re not afraid, Minnesota taught us to be brave.

Today is the day to embrace that stirring to be brave, to say Yes to getting engaged.

The teacher I follow once said, “I tell you the truth, if you had faith even as small as a mustard seed, you could say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it would move. Nothing would be impossible.”

Every one of you has a place in this struggle. With each of us taking up the work that we are called to do, no matter how small or it might feel when we consider ourselves alone, together nothing will be impossible for us.

Let us stand behind Minnesota—keep working, start walking.

God bless you.

Lead Us Not Into Temptation (Matthew 4:1-11)

Lead Us Not Into Temptation

January 18, 2026

Matthew 4:1-11

By: Pastor Mike Conner 

***

The very Spirit that came down from heaven in the form of a dove and anointed Jesus at his baptism now leads him into the wilderness to be tested, challenged. There, Jesus fasts for forty days and forty nights. His body wastes away in its extraordinary hunger. When he is at his weakest, the enemy of God comes and speaks deceitfully to him. This is the diabolos, the devil. This is the peiradzon, the tempter. This is satana, Satan. Three names for this cruel, cunning spirit in Matthew’s passage; three temptations. At the waters of baptism, God the Father had said, “This is my Son.” In the wilderness, the devil says, “If you are the Son of God.” What God speaks as a blessing to be enjoyed, the tempter twists into a reason for self-determination. Before he can step into public ministry, Jesus must answer a fundamental question: Will he, the Son of God, the Beloved, use his privilege and power to seek his own will and preservation, or will he, to borrow words from John’s Gospel, “do only what he sees his Father doing” (John 5:19 NIV)?

This is one of those passages of scripture that is endlessly fascinating. As I sat with it this week, it seemed as if every word opened up lines of inquiry. After all, there are parallel tellings of this story in Luke and Mark to compare it to; there are layers upon layers of Old Testament reference; there are word choices, images, and themes that connect it to other key moments in Matthew. Most sermons eventually require a severe process of selection. The preacher can’t say everything of interest or tell about all the false starts or rabbit trails or fugitive flashes of insight that were a part of study and prayer. I’m standing before you with a lot more that I might say about the Temptation, and with a lot of my own questions left unanswered. But my prayer has been that God would nevertheless use this one sermon as a means of daily bread.

And, you know, that feels like the resonance worth exploring this morning: the connection between the devil’s suggestion, “command these stones to become bread” (Matt 4:3) and Jesus’ teaching: “Pray, then, in this way: …Give us today our daily bread” (Matt 6:9, 11). Between Jesus’ necessary encounter with the tempter and the prayer we are to pray, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” That is, the connection between the temptation and the Lord’s Prayer.

     The Lord’s Prayer appears twice in the New Testament. In Matthew 6, it is a part of Jesus’ famous Sermon on the Mount. In Luke 11, Jesus offers it to his disciples after they come and ask him to teach them to pray. Many of us learned it when we were very young in this way:

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name.

Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.

For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.

Or like that, but maybe with some Thee’s and Thou’s.

If you’ve participated in our worship recently, you’ve perhaps noticed that we aren’t praying the same version or translation of this great prayer from week to week. This is a relatively new practice for us. Last winter, I preached a series on prayer and thought it would be beneficial for us to experience a fresh relationship with Jesus’ words. My hope was—and is—that variety would help us notice new things, ask fresh questions, and appreciate the substance and usefulness of the prayer. I don’t think Jesus gave us this prayer primarily to comfort us or even to unite us; certainly it is not meant to get stuck as a rote exercise or a source of nostalgia.

You know, it has never occurred to me to wonder before about where this prayer came from.  I mean, of course Jesus composed it and taught it—but why, and where? I guess I’ve assumed that he always knew it, or that it leapt spontaneously from his mouth when he sat down to give the Sermon on the Mount. But today I’m hearing all the connections between it and these days Jesus spent in the wilderness:

Our Father, who art in heaven. Well, Jesus encountered God as his Father during his baptism by John, when the heavens were opened the voice declared “Beloved.” Thy kingdom come, thy will be done. Here we have the language of kingdoms, which the Deceiver offered Jesus in exchange for his allegiance. Jesus rejected this offer by saying, “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only Him.” Give us this day our daily bread. In the wilderness Satan suggests that Jesus access his power to care for himself, to turn stones in to bread. Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from the evil one. A prayer of protection from what Jesus endured for us and in our place.  

I want to suggest this morning that it is worthwhile to consider the wilderness as the place that this wonderful prayer was composed. That it was forged not in contemplative stillness but through the fire of extreme deprivation and testing. What if the Lord’s prayer is a tool of resistance, a wilderness resource, a way of enduring our own weakness and limitations, our long days and nights of pain; a shield for holding off despair and desperation; a sword for cutting through the lies that tell us it is time to trust in something or someone other than God. I imagine that Jesus prayed this in the first-person singular “My Father… Give me today… Forgive me… Deliver me…” And by the time he was ready to pass it on to others, he had transposed it out of the singular and into the plural: we, us, our. Not only to unify you and me in our praying of it but to join us to his own voice, his own incorruptible integrity, his own unfailing trust.

What is at stake for Jesus in these three temptations—to provide for himself unnaturally, to entertain oblivion, to seek power and glory for himself? In his commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, a Catholic Bible scholar named George T Montague says this: “Unspoken, of course, is the assumption that Jesus should use whatever divine power he might have in his own interest, and should he do so in the matter of food, he would in effect withdraw himself from solidarity with his people of old and the people of his day who do not have it in their power to do such things…”[1]

His solidarity with us is what’s at stake. His commitment to be with us in our weakness, with us in our seasons of spiritual or physical hunger. To open for us, in the midst of them, a space where we can trust in God’s love, provision, and protection; a place where we won’t force our own way or sully our integrity out of desperation. And that place is his heart, expressed, I would argue, in this prayer.

If Jesus would have turned stones into bread—and he could have; he and Satan both know this—he would have stepped out of his communion with God the Father, making a move toward self-preservation before receiving a word from God. He would have abandoned his solidarity with our hunger; we can’t magically turn stones into bread, so he keeps himself from that human impossibility, though it means remaining in his hunger.

Jesus goes without food for 40 days and forty nights and then faces down the very heart of evil. Those were his temptations; they are not ours. The Spirit led him into that task; we are taught to pray for exactly the opposite, to not be led into temptation.

And yet, in our own way, don’t we often feel like this is this situation we are in?

Don’t we sometimes feel like we’ve been out here, in our own personal wildernesses, for almost too long? It may not be forty days and forty nights of total fasting, but maybe it’s been a long night of grief, a long year of being in and out of the hospital. Forty days of not being able to pay down your credit card. Endless days of chronic pain. A season of unemployment. Logging on for another day of watching what madness the Idaho Legislature will do next. Logging on to be pierced by the stories of pain: in Minneapolis, in Portland, in Gaza, in Sudan, in the polar regions. Our wilderness might be a dark night of soul, when God’s voice has gone silent. It might be a displacement from community, where we’ve been rejected, or where our own growth in faith and love drives us away from systems of harm.

And as if these wildernesses were not enough, in the midst of them we know who Jesus has called us to become: persons of no-strings-attached love, of costly generosity, of patient trust and continual forgiveness; humble people who seek no glory for ourselves; simple people who don’t participate in exploitation; people of hospitality who are more ready to give than to receive. If we consider all this and how often we “miss the mark,” how easy it is for us to abandon our trust in God because we feel that we’ve been out in the wilderness too long, we ought to rush to take up Jesus’ prayer again and cry out “ Our Father,” know that he is with us in that “Our,” and that he will help us remain steadfast through every testing, because he has already won the victory.

If we are going to persist in feeding people who are hungry, we have to be people whose own hunger for justice does not grow impatient and try to wrestle bread out of stones, but is instead sustained by that prayer, “Give us today our daily bread.”

If we are going to persist in advocating for affordable, quality childcare in a State where 25,000 parents left the workforce last year due to a loss or change in childcare, we have to be people who make our home in the prayer, “May your kingdom come, may your will be done.”

If we are going to persist in building the beloved community that Martin Luther King Jr. believed in; in eliminating the widespread poverty in America that broke his heart; in learning to see beyond what divides us to the promise of our solidarity with others, we have to be people who say, “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.”

With this prayer forged in the wilderness, we deal not with a comforting token or a rote religious exercise but with a channel of communion, a place where we, in our hunger, are met and sustained by the Christ who hungers but is not overcome by impatience, fear, or resentment. With this prayer forged in the wilderness, we will not force our own way. We will not sell our birthright as children of God. We will not sully our hands with the Master’s tools as we seek to deconstruct the Master’s house. We will not live in fear, or entertain oblivion, or numb our compassion by living as avatars in the simulacrum.

Instead, we will abide there, in the condition that so much of humanity lives so much of the time, hungry for bread and for justice in the wilderness, and make of our lives, right there, an offering, an opening, through which God’s power for love can flow.

If the Kingdom of God were to depend on our largesse or our wisdom, our creativity or our readiness to endure discomfort, we would be lost. But thanks be to God that the coming of the Love’s reign does not depend on our natural strengths but on our spiritual humility, our trust in Jesus’ victory over every demonic suggestion.

“For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Heb 4:15 NKJV), scripture proclaims.

So let us, through the solidarity and the prayer of Jesus, abide in him, and answer his call to never cease hungering and thirsting for righteousness. “Weeping may endure for a night,” maybe forty long nights, “but joy,” we know, “cometh in the morning” (Ps 30:5 KJV). And “all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure” (1 John 3:3 NIV).

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

[1] George T. Montague, S.M., Companion God: A Cross-Cultural Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1989), 42.

The Shape and Power of Repentance (Matthew 3:1-17)

The Shape and Power of Repentance 

January 11, 2026

Matthew 3:1-17

By: Pastor Mike Conner

***

One of my favorite American poets, James Longenbach, has a poem that starts with this question: “How do you imagine the shape of one lifetime? / A circle, a tangle of lines?” The poet is reminding us that life’s journey does not feel the same to each of us. Depending on our personalities and what we’ve been through, a lifetime might feel like a unified whole, a journey that has brought about a kind of return to or reconciliation with the major themes of our early years. Others of us might feel more fragmented, experiencing life like a “tangle of lines.” And the many forays we’ve made into becoming this or that, loving this and that, don’t harmonize neatly but nevertheless comprise who we are. Surprising symmetry or creative chaos? It depends! And on a morning when we hear in Matthew’s Gospel this good old word repentance repeated three times, I want to modify the poet’s questions to ask:

How do you imagine the shape of change?

Change. That’s what repentance fundamentally means: change at a deep and lasting level. The Greek word for it, metanoia, literally means a transformation of the mind, a shift in how we perceive, understand, and tell stories about God’s world and our place in it. In verse 1 of this chapter, John the Baptist preaches, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” In verse 8, as John criticizes the Pharisees and Sadducees for their religious posturing, he calls them to “bear fruit worthy of repentance.” And to clarify his role as the forerunner to a more powerful preacher who is soon to come, he says in verse 11, “I baptize you with water for repentance, but the one who is coming after me…will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” John’s baptism of repentance is connected to immersion in water, the confession of sins, and the call to bear fruit that aligns with God’s justice. These all speak to cleansing, fresh commitment, and new beginnings. And lest we over-associate this call to radical change with John’s ministry, Matthew places the very same sermon on Jesus’ lips when he emerges in Galilee for the beginning of his public ministry after his baptism and temptation in the wilderness: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Matt 4:17). 

So, again, the question: If we are all called to change in order to begin again with God, how do you imagine the shape that change?

Perhaps this change is like a sharp turning—we’re going one way and then God intervenes and we have to pivot to go another way. That’s the visual I was always given as a kid in youth group. Repentance as a kind of U-turn. What I like about that shape is the way it emphasizes a turning point, a moment when everything was different. It also reveals that we are always moving toward a goal, and if the goal is knowing God and loving God then I have to pursue that with intention even if it means letting those other destinations go. 

Or perhaps the shape of change is like open hands, open cup, something like a closed circle that’s been broken open. Maybe where we once experienced ourselves as isolated, self-sufficient, complete, safe in our bubbles or masters of our little universes, a kind of rupture is required. And with that cracking open comes a rush of freedom to release old things and be filled with new things. Maybe repentance feels like release, embrace, waking up to new love. Others can suddenly find a way in, and we can suddenly find a way out. 

Or perhaps we’d chart out change as a pair of glasses, as a kind of lens. This is change at our capacity to be present to our lives. Maybe we’re right where we need to be, but we’ve lost the joy of our commitments, lost sight of the beauty around us; we’re rushing past our neighbors, struggling to see our kids or spouses or friends or coworkers as the three-dimensional humans that they are. Perhaps repentance is like the sudden refining of vision, making vivid and beautiful and worthy of renewed devotion what was always already there. We cook dinner, or we take a minute to consider the stars, as if these acts might change the world. Change as a light that illuminates and wakes us up. 

A fourth possibility, if I may. Perhaps the shape of change is like a V, going down in order to come up again. This is the choreography of baptism: immersed in the water. Repentance might mean a humbling descent: returning to the earth, seeking solidarity with the poor who are trodden down, giving away our stuff or choosing not to operate out of our privileges, laying aside activity to seek God in silence, serving the visions of others. This is change as a kind of stripping away, a return to simplicity. The trees yielding to the cold air, letting the outer splendor of their leaves go, and trusting the strength of their roots.

And finally, perhaps the shape of change is like the poet’s “a tangle of lines,” a confused  and meandering squiggle, that suddenly straightens itself out. This is what the prophet Isaiah envisioned when he proclaimed, “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord; make his paths straight’” (Matt 3:3). This is change experienced at the level of desire and commitment. I’ve wanted so many things that I’ve gone nowhere. Not knowing who I am, I’ve been stuck in place, or I’ve been running to this and that with no real intention. This is repentance that “seeks first the kingdom of God.” It is “purity of heart.” The gift of a singleness of desire. It’s as if all our confused and congested energy suddenly has an open channel. It doesn’t resolve all the tensions but transcends them. The heart is fixed on God alone. 

How do you imagine the shape of change?

Going a different direction? Cracking open? Seeing clearly? Descending? Straightening?

It’s important that we each find our way into the meaning of repentance for ourselves, because it’s not meant to be one of those churchy words that is either overly familiar and safe or overly strange and off-putting. Repentance is a vital reality to be lived, an inescapable part of our life with God.

Notice that there are two voices crying out in this story from Mathew. There is the voice in the wilderness, and there is the voice “from the heavens” (Matt 3:17). Every one of us is created to hear that voice from the heavens as personally addressed to us. We are God’s Beloveds, with whom God is well pleased. We are destined to know ourselves in Christ as God’s most precious children. But to hear the “voice from the heavens” (3:17) in trust and security, we must first respond to “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness” (3:3). We must first prepare the way of the Lord. We must welcome change. 

There is so much that keeps us from resting securely in our identity as beloved creatures of the Great Creator. Our own mistakes and regrets, things we’ve done and left undone. The insecurities or harsh words and actions that filled our childhoods. The great losses we’ve endured that don’t make any rational sense. The daily onslaught of the world’s pain: countries at war, children hungry, cross-wearing politicians cutting away the social safety net, climate change. 

Given the harsh realities of life, no matter the shape of our repentance, the power of it has to be immense if it is to achieve a lasting rootedness in God, a lasting commitment to grow in love and justice. The power at work in repentance, like the power at work in faith, far exceeds what we can muster through our own will and conviction. This isn’t change that comes by reading a book or listening to a podcast or making a New Year’s resolution. This is change that comes by way of a miracle! 

And God has given us the miracle! God has given us Jesus!

Jesus, who has come to bring us inside his Belovedness, who has come to set his way of justice and generosity before us; Jesus, whose privilege it is as the eternally begotten Son of the Father to the hear the voice of heaven – he comes and stands among us and for us in response to the voice of the wilderness. He takes his place among the repentant. He goes where all broken humanity must go before it can put down roots in its belovedness. He comes to the water that cleans, strips, purifies, and claims.

And this is precisely what John the Baptist has such a hard time accepting at first. He cannot understand why Jesus would submit to a baptism of repentance. John sees things very clearly: he needs Jesus’ baptism. Yes—and: Jesus came to redeem us from the inside out, to infuse every crevice of our experience with the light and power of God, to leave no need in us unmet by his grace. So he says to John: “Let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness” (v 15). Oh, the kindness of God—that before any of us is ever fully ready for or capable of change, Jesus has already gone ahead of us into the water. 

Friends, if God has drawn near to you for the first or the thousandth time, and you stand at the shoreline of a necessary change that is far beyond your capacity or courage, Jesus is there, and he will help you to make that new beginning. Jesus is there, bringing about the miracle of a fresh start, a new commitment, of clear vision, of humbling descent.

As Paul writes in Philippians 2:13, “For God is working in you, giving you the desire and the power to do what pleases him” (NLT). We can yield to the shape of change, because Jesus’ grace has gone before us. 

Hear the voice of the wilderness! The voice of the wilderness says, “Come and be stripped of what isn’t working for you. Come and face why the good fruit is growing. Come and be broken open. Come and see things for what they really are. Come and stand on equal footing with everyone else, with equal need. Come and say I want God to be first in my heart.”

Hear it, and know that Christ is also hearing it; in his faithful response, you will discover your own faithful response.

Ask for his help, and he will help you.

Abide in him, and he will carry you. 

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Power to Become Children of God (John 1:1-18)

Power to Become Children of God

January 4, 2026

John 1:1-18

By Pastor Mike Conner

***

Here at the starting line of another year, I want to return to speak of something very fundamental, this great gift that John speaks of in the poetic prologue to his gospel: “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God” (1:12). 

He gave power to become children of God.

He.

That is, Jesus. The eternal Word, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, through whom all things have come into existence. He is Emanuel, God with us. Jesus has been born into our flesh and blood and bone. Jesus has entered into our vulnerability and weakness. Full of grace and truth, of life and light, he wants nothing more than to be here, to be close to you and me, no matter how sullen, distracted, anxious, or arrogant he finds us at first. As the book of Hebrews puts it, “The Son radiates God’s own glory and expresses the very character of God” (1:3 NLT). He does this in a baby’s body swaddled in cloth, in a man’s body suffering on the cross. He has come so that each of us might rise to be with him where he is, “close to the Father’s heart” (John 1:18). He.

He gave.

Yes, Jesus is the pre-eminent giver: “From his fullness,” John writes, “we have all received, grace upon grace” (1:16). This is what he does with who he is and what he has: he gives it all to us. His kindness and his compassion, his creativity and his patience. Jesus’ earthly ministry was a ministry of gifts: turning water into wine, feeding the crowds, healing the sick, forgiving sins, calling the disciples into their purpose, and even receiving the love others desired to show him. “Though he was in the form of God,” Paul writes in Philippians, “he did consider equality with God as something to be grasped for himself, but emptied himself…” Jesus pours himself out to bless us and enrich us with love. He is with us in every experience of doubt and abandonment, in every moment of healing and beauty. He is not one who grasps, possesses, or hoards. His openness to us, no matter where we’ve been or what we’ve done, is definitive. He gave his very life away in order to redeem us, and now he gives us to one another in a community of gifts. He gave. 

He gave power.

This is the gift for us to linger with today: Jesus gives power. This word in the New Testament, exousia, is about freedom and privilege. There are other words that indicate physical strength, personal ability, or social charisma. One of them is dunamis, which enters English as ‘dynamic.’ But this word, exousia, is about authority, capacity, choice. Later in John’s Gospel, Jesus will say, “I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again” (10:17-18). Herod thinks he has authority over Jesus. Pilate thinks he has authority over Jesus. The crowd thinks it has authority over Jesus. But any authority they have to determine Jesus’ fate comes because it has been first given to them by the One who has chosen to humble himself unto death on a cross. The Son of God throws the full weight of his divine privilege into the sacrifice of his life. What mystery is this, that the one through whom all things have come into existence would use power to give away power, and in that gift establish himself as the one worthy to receive “all authority in heaven and on earth,” as Matthew puts it in the closing words of his own Gospel. Jesus freely sacrificed himself for us, died our death, and now meets us in the moments and places of our God-forsakenness. He gave power. 

He gave power to become.

This is the power he gives us: the freedom to become—to grow, unfold, heal. None of us is ever “finished” in this life. God is boundless and infinite. With God there is grace upon grace. Which means that our desire for God is never fully quenched, and our spiritual ripening can never be considered a done deal. So he gives us power to become.

Power to become! One of the greatest gifts that any of us can give to another person is the time and space, the affirmation and patience, for them to discover their own identity and purpose in God’s love. The power to become has made all the difference for me. I have had people come alongside me in every season of my life who have seen potential gifts in me and wanted to help me grow. The power to become is what I want to give my kids: the trust, self-compassion, curiosity, and sensitivity they need to receive whoever God has created them to be. As a pastor in Pocatello, I see that the power to become is a gift denied to so many of our neighbors, who, in order to be worthy of acceptance in their faith communities, must foreclose on certain possibilities of self-expression and relationship, certain lines of doubt and exploration.

Jesus does not give us power for conformity. He does not give us power to control others, or to manipulate our circumstances, or to be important and talented, or to depose the leaders of foreign lands with a word. He does not give us power to get things right all the time, to have masterful recall of the scriptures or to spin eloquent theological arguments. No, he gives us power to live our questions, to receive each day as fresh and full of mercy, to embrace new people and ideas and callings, that we might say with the poet Rilke, “I want to unfold. / Let no place in me hold itself closed, / for where I am closed, I am false. / I want to stay clear in your sight.” He gave power to become.

He gave power to become children of God.

Children of God. Power to become…a child! A child of God. We are given the authority that we need to abide in Christ and experience ourselves in him as the Beloved of God—together. Children are dependent on others; children need help; children are impressionable, voracious learners, attuned to wonder. Children raise their arms to be lifted up; they throw themselves fully into whatever it is they are doing. They feel all their feelings intensely. By coming to us as the Word-made-flesh, the Son of God has given us the power to become spiritual children. As John writes elsewhere in the New Testament, “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are (1 John 3:1). As children, we are destined for joy in God. As children, we pray “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” As children, we are seen, provided for, never alone, no never alone. 

As the first theologians affirmed so very long ago, God became a human being so that human beings might become God. He descended to us that we might ascend with him. By uniting humanity and divinity in the body and history of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God has opened up the possibility for each of us to have a vibrant, intimate, faithful relationship with our Creator. He gave power to become children of God.

Friends, this is the essence of the Gospel. The power to become a child of God is available to each of us right here, right now. In the words of John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist revival in 18th century England, “[I]t is a present salvation. It is something attainable, yea, actually attained on earth, by those who are partakers of the faith.” To partake of this faith, the Gospel invites us to receive him, and to believe in his name. 

To receive him means opening the door of your heart to him when he comes knocking, when you sense that he wants something to do with you.

To receive him means being like Mary, and the Shepherds, and the Magi, and the Stable, saying Yes, come, Lord Jesus, I will give you room in my heart and in all my life.

To receive him means setting out to meet him in the places where he has promised to wait for us: in the Scriptures and at the Table, in the company of other believers, and in the face of every despised, rejected, vulnerable, or destitute person in our world. 

And to believe in his name?

This simply means to trust him. To trust that Christ is the one who the scriptures and the saints and your deepest longings say that he is: God with us in love and unconditional acceptance and perfect justice. He is the Messiah, the Christ, who died our death, raises us to new life, and gives us the power to be children of God, “close to the Father’s heart.”

Thanks be to God. Amen. 

Called to Remember (Matthew 2:13-23)

Called to Remember

December 28, 2025

Matthew 2:13-23

By: Pastor Mike Conner

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

Mary’s Love

    Mary’s Love

December 21, 2025

By: Elle Mann   

   Good morning, everyone. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And all God’s people said,

Amen.

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

For Nothing Will Be Impossible with God

December 14, 2025

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

By: Susannah Conner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

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

Bringing Peace

December 7, 2025

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

By: John Gribas

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

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

“Adam. Adam. Hey buddy… Peace.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Jesus. Jesus. Hey buddy… Peace.”

Joseph listened and responded…and brought peace.

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

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

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

Amen.

Zechariah, Elizabeth & the Advent Season

Zechariah, Elizabeth & the Advent Season

By April Mills

11/30/2025

 First United Methodist Church

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied:

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

Because of the tender mercy of our God,

    the dawn from on high will break upon us,

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

For Zechariah and Elizabeth both, Hope was fulfilled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am the utter contempt of my neighbors

and an object of dread to my closest friends—

those who see me on the street flee from me.

I am forgotten as though I were dead;

I have become like broken pottery.

For I hear many whispering,

“Terror on every side!”

They conspire against me

and plot to take my life.

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

Save me in your unfailing love, God,

from my parents who have hated and disowned me.

Save me in your unfailing love, God,

from a community that won’t hire me.

Save me in your unfailing love, God,

from the nurse who refuses to provide care on principle.

Save me in your unfailing love, God,

from the people who want to kill me.

Save me. Save me. Save me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

1 Corinthians 6:9

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the Word of the Lord, Amen.

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

Generosity, Part 5: Giving Overflow

November 23, 2025

 John 6:1-15

By: Pastor Mike Conner

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who is he calling you to be?

What is he calling you to do?

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

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

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

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

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

Generosity, Part 4: Giving Sets Us Free

November 16, 2025

Matthew 6:19-34

By Pastor Mike Conner

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

ground.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NLT).

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

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

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

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

deprivation, and injustice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

bread.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and more. These are values especially susceptible to worry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

relationships and my ministry.

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

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

me and Sus together.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

less.

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

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

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

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

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

Why would we hold back our money from it?

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

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

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

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

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

determine things for myself in advance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

over the centuries as a liberating practice.

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

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

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

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

subdue our anxiety.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

wilderness of hunger, will hold you and help you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Generosity, Part 3: Giving Constitutes the Community

November 9, 2025

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

By Pastor Mike Conner

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Generosity, Part 2: Giving Honors Jesus

November 2, 2025

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

By: Pastor Mike Conner

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But not too far for Jesus.

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

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

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

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

They want to support it.

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

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

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

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

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

How marvelous! How wonderful!

And my song shall ever be:

How marvelous! How wonderful!

Is my Savior’s love for me!1

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

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

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

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

At that dinner party in Bethany something unforgettable happened.

“I Stand Amazed in the Presence,” refrain.

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

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

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

Were the whole realm of nature mine,

that were an offering far too small.

Love so amazing, so divine,

demands my soul, my life, my all.

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

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

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

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

So what does that mean, exactly?

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

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

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

What has Jesus done for you?

Has he forgiven you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What has Jesus done for you?

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

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

I surrender all,

I surrender all,

All to Thee, my blessed Savior,

I surrender all.4

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

“I Surrender All,” refrain.

Prayer for All Saints

By Gracie Morbitzer of Modern Saints

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

to learn about and to lean on.

How blessed we are to hear of your failures,

your triumph,

your humanness along the way.

How blessed we are to have your company

through any kind of trial,

for any type of intention.

How blessed we are to be inspired by your hope,

amazed by your love,

challenged by your diversity,

comforted by your company.

Be with us as we continue your work

and strive to create our own change

with our own talents and gifts,

just as you did –

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

Amen.

Luke 8:1-3, New Living Translation

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

John 12:1-8, New Living Translation

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

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

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

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

Giving Flows From Grace

October 26, 2025

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

By: Pastor Mike Conner

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ah, but Jesus is so kind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He never mailed out a commitment card.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As a Little Child

October 12, 2025

Luke 18:15-17

By: Pastor Mike Conner

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.