Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.

Friends, listen for a word from God in the Book of the Prophet Habakkuk, the 1^st chapter, verses 2-17.

² O Lord, how long shall I cry for help,
and you will not listen?
Or cry to you “Violence!”
and you will not save?
³ Why do you make me see wrongdoing
and look at trouble?
Destruction and violence are before me;
strife and contention arise.
⁴ So the law becomes slack,
and justice never prevails.
The wicked surround the righteous;
therefore judgment comes forth perverted.

⁵ Look at the nations and see!
Be astonished! Be astounded!
For a work is being done in your days
that you would not believe if you were told.
⁶ For I am rousing the Chaldeans,
that fierce and impetuous nation,
who march through the breadth of the earth
to seize dwellings not their own.
⁷ Dread and fearsome are they;
their justice and dignity proceed from themselves.
⁸ Their horses are swifter than leopards,
more menacing than wolves at dusk;
their horses charge.
Their horsemen come from far away;
they fly like an eagle swift to devour.
⁹ They all come for violence,
with faces pressing forward;
they gather captives like sand.
¹⁰ At kings they scoff,
and of rulers they make sport.
They laugh at every fortress
and heap up earth to take it.
¹¹ Then they sweep by like the wind;
they transgress and become guilty;
their own might is their god!

¹² Are you not from of old,
O Lord my God, my Holy One?
You shall not die.
O Lord, you have marked them for judgment,
and you, O Rock, have established them for punishment.
¹³ Your eyes are too pure to behold evil,
and you cannot look on wrongdoing;
why do you look on the treacherous
and are silent when the wicked swallow
those more righteous than they?
¹⁴ You have made people like the fish of the sea,
like crawling things that have no ruler.

¹⁵ He brings all of them up with a hook;
he drags them out with his net;
he gathers them in his seine,
so he rejoices and exults.
¹⁶ Therefore he sacrifices to his net
and makes offerings to his seine,
for by them his portion is lavish,
and his food is rich.
¹⁷ Is he then to keep on emptying his net
and destroying nations without mercy?

This is the word of God for the people of God.

Friends, we’re starting something new this evening which will continue for the six weeks after I return from vacation. We’re going to live inside a book of the Bible that many of us may have never read and likely most of us have never heard preached: Habakkuk. It’s one of the Bible’s shorter books at just three chapters and 56 verses and tucked between Nahum and Zephaniah, in the part of the Bible often referred to as the Minor Prophets. Before we go any further, we need to get acquainted with Habakkuk himself. Who he is, when is he writing, and why on earth should we spend a month and a half here instead of somewhere more familiar?

Who Is This Prophet, and When Is He Writing?

I hate to tell you that we don’t know much about Habakkuk. Think about other Biblical writers: Isaiah has a narrative of his life and call. We even hear about his family. We learn about Jeremiah’s hometown and the name of his scribe Baruch who takes dictation. Ezekiel has visions so specific we can practically draw them. Habakkuk has none of that. No genealogy, no hometown, no account of how he came to speak for God. Scholars are even divided on his name which appears at most three times in the Bible: twice in the book that bears his name and one additional time in something called the “Additions to Daniel” which are not included in most Protestant Bibles and only in the Apocrypha of some Anglican and Lutheran Bibles. Some scholars think his name comes from an Akkadian word for a fragrant garden plant; others trace it to a Hebrew root meaning “to embrace.” Given how little we know about a historical figure named “Habakkuk,” it’s possible that, similar to other books of the Bible, Habakkuk may not have been a person, but rather a group of writers or a community which produced this book. What we do know is that Habakkuk is treated as God’s word and a prophecy from God by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Where we know so little about the author, we do know the time and place in which Habakkuk was active. Writing around 615 BCE, Habakkuk’s world is one in flux. The Neo-Babylonian Empire, which the text calls the Babylonians or the Chaldeans (people with their origins in modern day Iraq) has just crushed the ancient empire of Assyria and then dealt a devasting blow to another familiar empire, Egypt. The Chaldeans have emerged from these conflicts as the new regional superpower, and everyone in Judah can feel the ground shifting. Within twenty years, Jerusalem will fall. Within twenty-five, the temple will be reduced to ruins, and the leadership of Judah will be marched into exile. Habakkuk is writing on the edge of catastrophe and he knows it.

What makes Habakkuk unusual isn’t just so much his moment, it’s his method. Most prophets speak for God to the people. They stand in the town square and shout, “Thus says the Lord.” Instead, Habakkuk speaks to God on behalf of the people. He argues. He accuses. He waits for an answer, and when the answer comes, he argues some more. In that sense, Habakkuk belongs to a smaller though consequential lineage in Scripture. It’s the lineage of Abraham bargaining with God to save Sodom if there are but five righteous men in Sodom (remember God finds zero such men). It’s also the lineage of Moses breaking the first set of stone tablets and standing in the gap after the incident with the golden calf, and it’s the lineage of Job refusing to accept easy answers for his suffering. It’s the lineage of Jonah trying to run away from God’s call on his life and Mary instructing the stewards at Cana to do whatever Jesus told them. These are the ones who understood faith not as silence in the face of God, but as the nerve to bring forward a case.

The Book of the Prophet Habakkuk itself has a shape worth naming before we dig in. Chapters One and Two are structured as a dialogue, really more of a dispute, between the prophet and God: a complaint, a response, another complaint, another response, and finally a series of woes pronounced against the oppressor. Chapter Three shifts entirely. It becomes a psalm, a theophany, a vision of God appearing in power, and it ends with one of the most remarkable declarations of trust in the whole Bible, trust that holds even when Habakkuk names, explicitly, the worst-case scenario.

“Though the fig tree does not blossom
and no fruit is on the vines;
though the produce of the olive fails
and the fields yield no food;
though the flock is cut off from the fold
and there is no herd in the stalls,
¹⁸ yet I will rejoice in the Lord;
I will exult in the God of my salvation.
¹⁹ God, the Lord, is my strength;
he makes my feet like the feet of a deer
and makes me tread upon the heights.” (Habakkuk 3:17-19).

And running underneath all three chapters in this text written 2600 years ago are questions we’re still asking. Why does evil prosper while the righteous suffer? Is God actually sovereign over the nations, even the terrifying ones? What does it look like to keep watch for an answer that hasn’t come yet?

Chapter Two will give us the famous line: “the righteous live by their faith.” That line will be picked up by Paul and will echo through the work of Martin Luther, the Reformation, and a substantial volume of Protestant theology. Though for Habakkuk, that line isn’t about individual salvation so much as it’s about staying faithful, staying steady, when an empire is at the door and God’s timeline doesn’t match yours.

It also helps to remember where this book sits. Habakkuk is one of what our tradition calls the Minor Prophets, twelve short books, from Hosea through Malachi, that ancient Jewish scholars copied onto a single scroll and referred to as “The Twelve.” Minor, in this sense, doesn’t mean unimportant. It just means short. But shortness has a cost: these are the books we’re least likely to have heard preached from, least likely to have committed a verse to memory, most likely to skim past on the way somewhere more familiar. In Christian Bibles, the Minor Prophets are the last section of the Hebrew Bible before the beginning of the Gospels.

Habakkuk is short, a little strange, and largely unread by contemporary Christians, which is precisely why it deserves the kind of slow attention we’re about to give it.

A Complaint, an Answer, and a Second Complaint

Today, I want to dive into the first chapter as a whole. We will stay with this chapter for the first three weeks of our series as we look at the first complaint, God’s response, and Habakkuk’s second complaint. We don’t need to do much unpacking tonight, but I do want discuss the shape of it, because the shape is the argument.

The chapter opens with a sharp complaint: “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen?” Habakkuk names what he sees around him: violence, sinfulness, destruction, strife, and contention. He says the law has gone slack, that justice never quite arrives, that the wicked embed themselves among the righteous, and that judgment, when comes at all, is twisted. His complaint isn’t about a force from outside the community, Habakkuk is looking at his own society, its courts, its leaders, its unanswered violence, and he’s demanding to know why God is letting it happen.

Then God answers and God’s not particularly happy either. “Look at the nations, and see! Be astonished! Be astounded! For a work is being done in your days that you would not believe if you were told.” God doesn’t respond to Habakkuk’s accusations so much as God says, “Y’all have made this so bad for yourselves that I’m not inclined to save you from the Babylonians.” Here’s a nation that has already conquered two of your most feared ancient enemies and, bad news, they’re coming for you next. The imagery that follows is meant to terrify: horses swifter than leopards, more menacing than wolves at dusk, troops who come from far away and fly in like eagles swooping to devour prey. These people mock kings and laugh at fortified cities. And then comes the line that gives the whole passage its edge: their own strength has become their god.

Habakkuk’s complaint about injustice gets an answer, but the answer is far from what he expects and definitely not what he wants. He wants the God who rends the heavens, parts seas, turns rivers to blood, and kills the first born of every household which refuses to acknowledge God’s power. He doesn’t just want that kind of God, he expects that kind of God. And that’s where the second complaint begins. Habakkuk is stunned into a deeper question than his first one. How can God allow Judah’s destruction? Habakkuk describes his own people as fish, hauled up in a net with no one to stop it, while the enemy rejoices and makes offerings to the very net that caught them, worshiping their own instrument of conquest as though it were divine.

Chapter one ends without resolution, in fact it ends with a question left hanging in the air: is he to keep emptying his net, mercilessly destroying nations forever?

We don’t get an answer in this chapter and that’s deliberate. Complaint, unsettling response, deeper complaint. That’s the structure we’re going to sit with for several weeks rather than rushing past it toward comfort. Habakkuk doesn’t get an easy resolution in chapter one, and neither will we tonight. That’s not a flaw in Habakkuk’s writing or this sermon. That’s an intentional design, because we’re experiencing the same situation today. Worshiping the tools of conquest is a brother to peace through strength.

Notice, too, what Habakkuk does when his second complaint and it’s concluding question initially go unanswered. At the beginning of chapter two he says, “I will stand at my watch post, and station myself on the rampart; I will keep watch to see what [God] will say to me.”

Why We Read the Books We’d Rather Skip

So why are we turning to one of the least known Minor Prophets? Why spend multiple weeks in fifty-six verses that almost none of us could quote, when we could be somewhere more familiar like the Psalms, the Gospels, one of the Pauline letters?

Habakkuk almost never gets preached. It shows up in the lectionaries maybe once every few years, sometimes in fragments, usually the famous “though the fig tree does not blossom” verses from chapter three, stripped of everything that comes before it. And in congregations like ours where we don’t adhere to a lectionary, we might never hear from Habakkuk. Most of us could go a lifetime in church and never hear more than a whisper from this scripture. And that’s not unique to Habakkuk. Whole sections of Scripture function this way for us. There are the are the oft traveled Biblical paths worn smooth by constant use, and then there are vast stretches most of us have simply never walked.

That imbalance forms us, whether we notice it or not. A faith built only on the comfortable and comfortable-adjacent parts of the Bible is a thinner faith than the one Scripture actually offers us. It’s a faith that hasn’t had to sit with a prophet accusing God to God’s face. It’s a faith that’s been quietly taught, by omission, that doubt and protest are somehow less faithful than silence. If we really trust that the Bible forms the foundation of our faith, that it’s facts, fables, stories, and narratives are instructive to and about who we are, then we owe to ourselves and each other to walk the paths less taken.

This matters to me, and I think it should matter to us as a congregation, especially right now. As we move deeper into our life together with The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries (TFAM), we’re not just adopting a new set of relationships. We’re stepping further into a tradition that insists the whole of Scripture belongs to us, not just the parts that have already been smoothed down by centuries of comfortable use; every book, every hard question, every text that doesn’t resolve cleanly. TFAM’s founder and presiding prelate, Bishop Yvette Flunder, has spent decades teaching a gospel wide enough to hold the people the traditional church left standing outside. Part of what makes that gospel wide is a refusal to let anyone tell us which parts of the Bible are ours to wrestle with and which parts aren’t. A refusal to accept that there are parts of the Bible off limits to us or that parts of the Bible are too holy to be questioned, including the whole corpus itself. A whole faith reads the whole book. Not selectively. Not just the parts that flatter us or comfort us, but the parts that unsettle us too, because those are often exactly where God is doing something we wouldn’t otherwise believe if we were told.

So that’s the invitation for these six weeks. We’re going to let Habakkuk ask his questions without rushing to answer them for him. We’re going to sit with an empire we can’t control, a God whose timeline refuses to match ours, and a prophet who models bringing our whole selves, including our anger and our confusion, honestly before God, and then waiting, watching, for whatever comes next.

Amen.

Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.

Friends, listen for a word from God in the Book of Genesis, the 6^th chapter, verses 1-8.

When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, ² the sons of God saw that they were fair, and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose. ³ Then the Lord said, “My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years.” ⁴ The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.

⁵ The Lord saw that the wickedness of humans was great in the earth and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. ⁶ And the Lord was sorry that he had made humans on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. ⁷ So the Lord said, “I will blot out from the earth the humans I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air—for I am sorry that I have made them.” ⁸ But Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord.

This is the word of God for the people of God.

A Text We Might Want to Skip

There are passages in scripture most pastors and nearly all lectionaries tend to avoid like a pothole in a familiar road. Genesis 6:1-8 is one of those passages. We don’t avoid it simply because it references “glory” in battles done in God’s name or because it professes a god who commits genocide. It’s not even a long passage. In fact, it’s only eight verses and the eighth verse is straight forward. Yet, it is, by any honest measure, strange. Divine beings marrying human women. The product of these unions being giants called Nephilim. A God who looks at what God has made and regrets it. If you’ve never heard this text preached before, there’s more than a few reasons why.

We don’t talk about it because we don’t always know what to do with it. We should sit with that discomfort because the discomfort is the doorway into what this text is actually offering us.

Sons of God, Daughters of Humans

Let’s start with verse two. It’s the one that trips everyone up: “the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were fair, and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose.”

Who are the “sons of God” here? Biblical scholars have argued about this for more than two thousand years, and we’re not going to settle it tonight. But it’s worth considering the shape of the argument, because the ambiguity is not an accident of translation, it’s an integral part of the original Hebrew itself.

The phrase is “bene Elohim,” literally, “sons of God” or “sons of the gods.” In most other places this phrase appears in the Hebrew Bible (Job 1:6, Job 2:1, Job 38:7, and Psalm 29:1) it refers unambiguously to members of the divine council: heavenly beings who surround God’s throne, elsewhere called angels and archangels; beings created by God with great power and knowledge, but lacking free will. That’s the plain reading, and the oldest one. Ancient Jewish interpreters read this as a story about heavenly beings crossing a boundary they weren’t supposed to cross: mingling with mortal flesh. In a similar way to how these interpreters and rabbis would have read many of the so called “clobber” verses, the problem here is not one of sexual immorality, but that humans and angels or the “bene Elohim” are co-mixing that which is heavenly with that which is earthly.

By the time you get to the fourth century CE, church fathers like Augustine started proposing a different reading, largely because the idea of literal angels having children with human women had become theologically uncomfortable. In this newer reading, the “sons of God” become the righteous line of Seth (the third son of Adam and Eve), and the “daughters of humans” become the line of Cain, the first murderer who is condemned to walk to earth for eternity, marked such that no one would kill him. This reading considered the sin to be intermarriage between the faithful and the faithless, not a cosmic boundary violation. This is sometimes called the Sethite interpretation, and if we grew up with any formal interpretation of this passage, it was probably some form of this one.

But we need to exercise supreme caution with the Sethite interpretation. Later theologians, pastors, and, yes, politicians would use this interpretation to preach and legislate against racial intermarriage by mapping whiteness to the descendants of Seth and Blackness to the descendants of Cain.

But here’s what I want you to notice: the older reading, the stranger though less racist reading, is closer to what the original audience would have understood. Ancient literature is full of stories about divine beings who violate the created order, who cross the line between heaven and earth in ways that generate chaos. The people who first heard Genesis 6 weren’t reading a morality tale about who marries whom. They were hearing something closer to a rupture in the fabric of creation itself: a category collapse between what belongs to God’s realm and what belongs to ours.

And out of that rupture come the Nephilim, a word that likely comes from a Hebrew root meaning “to fall,” though its exact origin is debated. Genesis calls them “heroes of old, warriors of renown,” language that echoes, almost word for word, the way other ancient cultures described their demigods, beings that are part divine, part human, whose existence blurs a line that was never supposed to be blurred (think Hercules or, if YA literature is more your thing, Percy Jackson).

An aside, it is precisely because of these Nephilim and other constructions of demigods throughout ancient literature that it becomes so important for Christian theologians to make sure that Jesus is portrayed correctly as completely God and completely human. He is no demigod possessing a mix of essences, but truly God and truly man.

In any case, this ambiguity didn’t stay buried in obscure scholarship. By the time you reach the Second Temple period, the centuries just before and including Jesus’ time on earth, this eight-verse fragment had grown into an entire body of literature. 1 Enoch, a text many Jewish and early Christian communities treated with real seriousness, tells an elaborate story of heavenly “Watchers” who abandon their posts, take human wives, and teach humanity forbidden knowledge including metalworking, weaponry, cosmetics, and sorcery. The Nephilim, in that tradition, aren’t just superior warriors; they’re the offspring of a cosmic trespass, and their violence is what finally provokes the flood. Even the New Testament seems to know this angelic reading. Second Peter speaks of angels who sinned and were cast into gloom to await judgment, and Jude describes angels who didn’t stay within their proper realm. Neither writer explains the reference, because neither one needed to, their audience already knew the story we’re now working to recover.

I’m not asking you to resolve these tensions. I’m asking you to let it stay strange, because scripture doesn’t owe us tidiness, and a text that has puzzled readers for more than three thousand years isn’t going to get fully sorted out in one night.

My Spirit Will Not Abide

Into the middle of this strangeness, God speaks. And what God says is almost as odd as the Nephilim: “My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years.”

Read quickly, this can sound like a punishment: God capping human lifespan as a kind of judgment. But look at what the verse is actually doing. It’s not really about biology or lifespan; humans in Genesis go on living well past a hundred twenty years for chapters after this and, obviously, humans don’t live hundreds of actual years. What the verse names is a boundary, a limit on how fully the divine and the human can be fused together.

There’s something quietly gracious buried in that boundary. The chaos that produced the Nephilim was chaos precisely because the line between divine and human had collapsed. God’s response is not a further blurring but a re-drawing: mortals will stay mortal. Flesh will stay flesh. Within that limit, not despite it, life becomes livable again.

We don’t love limits. We tend to treat them as the opposite of blessing. But this text suggests something different: that some boundaries are what make a livable world possible at all, and that the God we’re dealing with is a God willing to hold a boundary even when holding it costs God something.

Where the Known Ground Ends

Here’s where the passage turns from strange to personal, because most of us know exactly what it feels like to stand at the edge of what we understand.

Picture the kind of sidewalk you find in an older neighborhood: poured decades ago, following the shape of the street, until at some point it simply stops. No warning. No barrier. The concrete just ends, and beyond it is grass, dirt, or whatever the ground happens to be doing on its own. You don’t get a map of what comes next. You just get the edge, and then you have to decide what to do with your next step.

Genesis 6 is, among other things, a story about a moment when the world’s own explanatory sidewalk simply ran out of pavement. The ancient writers were reaching for language to describe something that had genuinely gone wrong at a cosmic level, and the best they could do was borrow the shape of stories their neighbors already knew, stories of divine beings, giants, boundary violations, and bend those stories toward their own God, their own account of what creation is supposed to be.

That’s not a weakness in the text. That’s what faithful people do when they reach the edge of the known: they keep speaking, even without a map, because staying silent was never really an option.

It would have been easier, honestly, for the writers of Genesis to leave this moment out entirely, to skip from creation straight to the flood and never mention the Nephilim at all. Nobody would have missed a fragment nobody could fully explain. Instead, someone chose to leave the strange verses in, unresolved. That choice is itself a kind of witness: faith doesn’t require every gap to be filled before it’s allowed to keep going.

Isaiah 40:3-4 tells us that: “A voice cries out: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain.” And while that’s a comforting vision, most of us are not going to be handed neat theological answers for every hard thing we walk into. The sidewalk is going to end, the mountains continue to stand, and the rough places are going to stay rough. What our text tonight offers is not a paved road past the edge. It offers permission to keep walking anyway, trusting that we’re not walking alone.

Trust Without Understanding

Proverbs 3:5-6 puts words to that kind of trust better than I can: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight. In all your ways acknowledge God, and God will make straight your paths.”

Notice what that verse doesn’t say. It doesn’t say understand with all your heart. It doesn’t promise that insight will eventually arrive if we’re patient, clever, or faithful enough. It asks for trust precisely in the place where insight runs out, which is the only place trust is ever really needed. Nobody has to trust the parts of the map that are already drawn.

Noah Found Favor

Our passage tonight ends on a single, quiet sentence, easy to miss after everything that came before it: “But Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord.”

That’s it. No explanation for why Noah found favor and no argument for why grace lands where it lands. After giants, after divine grief, after a God who looks at creation and is sorry it was made, the text simply notes that someone found favor, in the middle of all of it.

Maybe that’s the truest thing Genesis 6 has to offer us: not an explanation for the strangeness of the world, but a reminder that grace has never needed an explanation.

Grace shows up in the weird chapters too. Especially in the weird chapters. Amen.

Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.

Friends, listen for a word from God in the Book of Genesis, the 14^th chapter, verses 17-20.

¹⁷ After [Abram’s] return from the defeat of Chedorlaomer and the kings who were with him, the king of Sodom went out to meet him at the Valley of Shaveh, that is, the King’s Valley. ¹⁸ And King Melchizedek of Salem brought out bread and wine; he was priest of God Most High. ¹⁹ He blessed him and said,

“Blessed be Abram by God Most High,
maker of heaven and earth,
²⁰ and blessed be God Most High,
who has delivered your enemies into your hand!”

And Abram gave him one-tenth of everything.

This is the word of God for the people of God.

Setting the Scene

This chapter is the continuation of a narrative arc begun in chapter 12 when God first calls Abram who is a nomadic herder rich in livestock and other wealth. We’d be forgiven if we’ve come to view Abram (later Abraham) as a sort of solitary character with only a few people around him, because that’s how the Bible tends to portray him. In fact, he’s a much more powerful person than that. He’s more like a chief or even a king in his own right. He leads a whole host of adults and children who are bound to him through both familiar and legal dynamics. But he doesn’t own or have direct claim on the land and so we often see him and his people moving about from one area to another. At the beginning of Genesis 13, both Abram’s group and Lot’s group are traveling together, but Genesis 13:5-7 notes that “Now Lot, who went with Abram, also had flocks and herds and tents, and the land could not support both of them living together because their possessions were so great that they could not live together. Thus, strife arose between the herders of Abram’s livestock and the herders of Lot’s livestock.” Not wanting there to be strife between their respective groups, Abram, and Lot part ways. They survey the respective areas, and Lot selects the Jordan plain which was “like the garden of the Lord” (Genesis 13:10). Per their agreement, Abram goes in the opposite direction and settles Canaan.

If you’re thinking that Lot shows up a lot in Genesis, and he always seems to be in trouble; you’re not wrong. Lot serves as a cautionary tale, but who is he? He’s the son of Haran, the younger brother of Abram, who died before their father Terah. It’s unclear how old Lot is when his father dies, but Abram seems to take him in. Though Lot is his nephew, given that Abram has no children, Lot becomes a kind of adoptive son and likely had Isaac not been born, Lot would have become Abram’s heir.

When Lot and Abram part ways, Lot impulsively chooses the more verdant land, but that land was also dotted with cities and kings who had staked claim to the land. Not only does Lot become involved with the drama and wars being waged by these kings, in time he loses his connection to the land entirely and moves his home into Sodom itself, which is where, in chapter 14, he’s captured and held for ransom.

The Valley of the King

That brings us to tonight’s scripture. Abram rode out to rescue his nephew Lot, who had gotten swept up in someone else’s regional conflict, a power struggle between a group of five kings against four. Armies from cities and under kings with names we can barely pronounce.

Abram took only a quarter of the men available to him and went out to do battle with the goal of saving Lot and retaking what belonged to Lot, to the King of Sodom, and the kings allied to him. As Abram returns, two kings come out to meet him in the Valley of Shaveh. One is the Bera, King of Sodom, whose people were just liberated from captivity, and the other is Melchizedek, the King of Salem.

We could write off Bera immediately, his city will be destroyed four chapters later anyway, but Melchizedek is someone we need to talk about. First, his name is doing a lot of theological work just by existing. “Melchi” means “king” and “Tzedek” means “righteousness.” He literally is the King of Righteousness. And he comes from a place called Salem, a word that shares its root with “shalom” or peace. The King of Righteousness, from the city of Peace.

Perhaps even more important, he comes out of nowhere, with no backstory, is presented as a priest, and he invokes God in the say way that Abram and others invoke God throughout the Bible. Melchizedek is a mysterious character, simultaneously a priest and a king, two positions which typically don’t go together, particularly in the ancient world. And here he is already in service of God. Even the many writers of the Bible will spend centuries trying to figure out what to do with him (he’s mentioned again in Psalm 110 and in Hebrews 5-7).

Bread, Wine, and a Blessing

But before we get to that, notice what Melchizedek does. He brings out bread and wine. Simple and earthy. Not sacrificial animals, incense, or some kind of elaborate ritual which would have been very appropriate for this kind of occasion. In this time and place, a meal of bread and wine was the standard meal one took on a journey. It was about sustenance not celebration. Yet, with these elements Melchizedek enacts a highly sacred moment.

He blesses Abram. He blesses God. He names what has happened in the language of divine providence: “Blessed be God Most High, who has delivered your enemies into your hand” (Genesis 14:19-20). For his part and in response to this blessing, Abram gives Melchizedek a tenth of everything. Though not yet required in any covenant or law, Abram instinctively offers this priest-king 10% of everything he has won in battle.

Something happened in that valley. Something real, important, and consequential. The text doesn’t fully explain it. It just shows it to us, trusts us to feel the weight of it, and moves on.

The Echo That Won’t Quit

Despite being named among a group of other kings who have almost nothing else to do with the rest of the text, the Bible can’t leave Melchizedek alone. You’d think a figure who appears in only three verses would fade from memory. But centuries after Genesis 14, a psalm attributed to David reaches back for him. Psalm 110:4 announces: “The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind, ‘You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.’”

The coming messianic king won’t be like the Levitical priests, descended from Aaron, embedded in the legal and genealogical structures of Israel. He’ll be something older. Something stranger. Something that precedes the whole system.

Paul runs with this reflection in Hebrews, chapters five, six, and seven, a sustained meditation on Melchizedek as one key to understanding Jesus. Paul says that because Melchizedek appears without recorded genealogy, without recorded birth or death, he resembles the Son of God and remains a priest forever. Jesus isn’t explained through the expected lineage. He’s explained through the mysterious one.

The parallels are striking. Both Jesus and Melchizedek appear with a level of mystery in their backgrounds. They are both designated as priests and kings. They are both called kings of righteousness whose kingdoms are peace. They both offer bread and wine as sacrifice.

And they both demonstrate that the eternal is revealed not through what’s documented and traceable, but through what exceeds our categories. That’s not an accident. That’s a theological statement about the nature of God.

The Gift of the Inexplicable

We like our faith to make sense. We like it to be traceable and coherent where we know how one belief led to another or who and where it was that we learned this or that. Tradition matters. The accumulated wisdom of those who came before us matters. How God has revealed themselves to us matters. Our own logic and reason matter.

But Melchizedek shows up to remind us that God doesn’t always work through the expected channels. Sometimes God shows up without genealogy or an introduction. Most of the time God shows up and doesn’t fit into the categories we’ve carefully constructed. But the mystery isn’t a problem to be solved. The mystery is where God lives.

In tonight’s scripture, a text that’s fundamentally about a military victory, about power and politics and who controls what territory, the moment the Spirit preserves for us across three millennia is a mysterious king-priest appearing from nowhere, bringing out bread and wine, offering a blessing, and leaving.

The battle will be forgotten. The kings will be forgotten. The valley and the skirmish and the geopolitics of the ancient Near East, all forgotten. But Melchizedek endures in our memory, because what happened in that ordinary place was extraordinary. When we least expect it, in the most unlikely of places, God shows up.

Where the Mystery Lives

Think about your own experiences with God. We’ve all had moments when an interaction, a conversation, a sight in nature, or a quiet moment alone invoked the presence of God in our lives.

The conversation that broke something open we’d been carrying for years. The stranger’s kindness that arrived at exactly the moment we needed it. The unexpected beauty that stopped us in our tracks and left us certain, somehow, that we were not alone in the universe.

These aren’t coincidences to explain away. These are Melchizedeks. They don’t come with genealogies. They don’t arrive pre-approved by the religious authorities, and they don’t fit perfectly in our categories of the sacred. They just show up and then they’re gone. And we’re left standing in the valley, changed. God is not confined to the places we’ve designated as sacred. God is not limited to the voices we’ve authorized to speak the holy word.

Whoever you thought God was going to be, whatever shape you thought the sacred was going to take, be open to the possibility that it’ll look like something else entirely.

Blessed Are You

Melchizedek blesses Abram. And Abram receives it. That might be the quietest, most profound thing in the text. He doesn’t demand credentials. He doesn’t question the authority. He just receives the blessing for what it is.

Open your hands. Receive the blessing. You don’t always need to understand its source. The mystery isn’t a threat to your faith. The mystery is an invitation to a deeper one. God is not only in the places you’ve already found God. God is not only in the voices you’ve already learned to recognize as holy. God is not only in the traditions you’ve inherited or the language you’ve been given. God is also in the valley. In the stranger. In the bread and wine offered by someone whose name you barely know.

In the mystery, we find God. Amen.

Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.

Friends, listen for a word from God in the Book of Micah, the 4^th Chapter, verses 1-5.

In days to come
the mountain of the Lord’s temple
shall be established as the highest of the mountains
and shall be raised up above the hills.
Peoples shall stream to it,
² and many nations shall come and say:
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob,
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.”
For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,
and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
³ He shall judge between many peoples
and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation;
neither shall they learn war anymore;
⁴ but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees,
and no one shall make them afraid,
for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken.

⁵ For all the peoples walk,
each in the name of its god,
but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God
forever and ever.

This is the word of God for the people of God.

I have a distinct memory of a series of books with orange covers and black-and-white images telling the stories of great and famous Americans. Called The Childhoods of Famous Americans, the books, which had a decidedly Christian bent and extolled values like hard work, resilience, and faith, were meant to present these Americans as children with relatable experiences and struggles. In most cases these stories were highly sanitized and included stories that were at best apocryphal if not completely fictious. If not the same series—it was first published in 1939 and remains in print today though with different bindings and images—I imagine you also grew up with these hagiographies of the United States’ (white, male, straight) founding fathers, and perhaps a few founding mothers and one or two righteous people of color who through hard work or the ability to pass as white managed to be the first BIPOC person in their field.

Washington’s Verse

While no one is on record having asked George Washington what his favorite Bible verse was and he thankfully didn’t claim that it was “too personal” to discuss, the verse Washington reached for again and again, in letters to friends, to fellow officers, to a Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, was Micah 4:4: “they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid.” Historians count nearly fifty times he wrote it out, across four decades, from the Revolution through his presidency and into retirement at Mount Vernon.

He loved the image of a man laying his sword down and going home to his own patch of ground, safe, unbothered, free of the noise of empire. It’s a beautiful picture. If you’ve visited Mount Vernon, you can image an older, tired Washington walking the grounds of his estate, sitting under shady trees, and being attended to by the over 300 people working the land and main house.

And there it is, the partial vision of Washington’s vision. While he quoted an image of universal, unafraid rest under vine and fig trees, the very people who built his estate, served in his home, and tilled its fields were slaves; people not only deprived of the freedom for which Washington fought, but human beings who could never sit under a vine of their own. Human beings literally bound to the land and to Washington, their master. The United States’ founding generation loved Micah’s verse, but only for themselves. They took the fruit of the vision and left the roots in the ground. They cut down the proverbial cherry tree and definitely lied about it.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Yesterday, we marked 250 years since those words and the document containing them were first signed. Having celebrated with picnics, fireworks, and voices raised in patriotic songs, tonight, we need to ask a harder question. Not whether America’s founders quoted good scripture. Whether Micah’s vision has ever actually described the United States and whether it does now.

Reading the Prophet

Micah wasn’t writing court poetry. He was an eighth-century BCE farmer-prophet from the small town of Moresheth, watching Assyria swallow nation after nation and watching his own leaders in Jerusalem get rich while they did it. The chapter right before tonight’s text is one of the harshest passages in the whole prophetic corpus. Micah tells the rulers of Israel they “hate the good and love the evil,” that they “tear the skin off my people” and “eat the flesh of my people.” He goes after the judges who take bribes, the priests who teach for a price, the prophets who preach peace to anyone who pays them and declare war on anyone who doesn’t. Chapter three ends with Jerusalem itself, the holy city, reduced to a plowed field and a heap of ruins because of what its leaders did to the poor.

And then, chapter four opens with this: “In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains.” Peoples will stream toward it. Many nations will come. God will judge between them and arbitrate their disputes, and the result won’t be one empire swallowing the rest. The result will be swords beaten into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks, nations will no longer even study war, and everybody, not just the powerful, will sit under their own vine and their own fig tree, with no one to make them afraid.

This same vision of the future appears almost word-for-word in Isaiah 2. Scholars place Micah and Isaiah in the same historical period, but don’t know who borrowed from who or even if they were both drawing from older, established visions of peace. We also need to remember that more than one author wrote we know of as the Book of Isaiah and the same may be true of Micah. Rather than one individual, many of the Bible’s prophetic texts are in fact the writings of prophetic schools or sects either founded by the original prophet for whom they were named or their immediate disciples. What’s important, though, is this was a shared hope of an occupied and exhausted people.

And notice where this vision sits in the book. It comes right after the worst of the indictment, not instead of it. Micah doesn’t soften chapter three to make room for chapter four. He lets the ruin stand, the plowed field, the heap of rubble, and only then does he say, “in days to come.” The hope doesn’t erase the accusation. It depends on it. You don’t get to the vine and fig tree by skipping the part where the prophet names exactly who tore the flesh off the poor to get comfortable.

The Vision

Notice what the vision does and doesn’t promise. It doesn’t promise one nation on top forever. It promises an end to the arms race itself, weapons melted down into tools that grow food instead of objects that end life. It doesn’t promise a gated peace for the strong. It promises “no one” afraid, a peace with no exceptions clause. And it locates security not in the size of an arsenal but in the size of somebody’s own vine, their own fig tree, ordinary and unspectacular and theirs.

For many of us, there is a certain discomfort, though, in measuring security based on the amount of land we own. Washington, a member of America’s ruling, landed gentry, could find peace in land ownership, but the over 300 slaves that he also owned at the height of his wealth, would find such a vision hollow. I believe that Micah’s vision has less to do with actual ownership and more to do with having a place where one can find peace. Peace and leisure to sit under one’s own vine and tree, requires cultivating situations where we can find that peace rather than stake an owning claim to it. Your vine or tree may be a tree in a public park or your favorite table at a local coffee shop.

Finding one’s own peace was something Micah’s audience knew well. They were living with the active fear of being overrun, exiled, even killed. That was the vision America’s founders, all of them, reached for when their war finally ended: a place to try to find peace.

But the 250^th birthday of the United States forces us to consider what we’ve built in two-and-a-half centuries and how close (or far) we’ve come to that vision.

The Nation We’ve Built

So, let’s talk about the United States at 250. We are the largest arms dealer on the planet. The United States sells more weapons to more nations than every other country combined, and we have built an economy in more than one town, more than one state, where the plowshare has been beaten back into a sword because that’s where the government contracts are. Our culture of weapons, known as the defense industrial complex, extends its reach into every part of public life, poisoning a country that has always had an uneasy relation with the gun.

We’ve built the largest prison and detention system on the planet and here too we’ve named it prison industrial complex because in the United States we figured out that not only can your company build prisons for the government, you can manage those prisons for the government too. But if these private prisons want to turn a profit, they need a steady stream of inmates. Enter the school to prison pipeline, the methods by which a disproportionately large number of Black and Brown people, particularly men and boys, are over criminalized, over policed, and over adjudicated into years and decades behind bars. Making up approximately 14% of the US population, Black people account for a staggering 42% of the incarcerated population in the United States. I hope we all understand that the cause is white supremacy and the legacy of slavery and racism. Overall, conservative estimates place the incarcerated population in the US at approximately two million people including local jails, state and federal prisons, immigration detention, youth detention, and other incarcerated situations. If that seems low—it is less than 1% of the people living in the United States—almost 5 million Americans are formerly incarcerated, 19 million Americans have been convicted of a felony, more than 79 million Americans have a criminal record, and 113 million adults have had at least one immediate family serve time in a jail or prison.

And while immigration detention remains a small percentage of the total US mass incarceration system, we have witnessed countless examples of people assumed to be immigrants because of their appearance pulled out of their vehicles, off the street, and out of their schools and places of employment to be detained simply because they might be an undocumented immigrant.

We could talk about a healthcare system that leaves people afraid of an ambulance bill before they’re afraid of a heart attack. We could talk about a housing market that has turned home ownership into a fantasy for whole generations. We could talk about how many of our school children have been trained, through drills most of us never had to sit through, to be afraid of the very buildings where they’re supposed to learn, because we have decided, again and again, that easy access to weapons of war matters more than their safety. We could talk about how quickly the word “freedom” gets deployed to protect the powerful and how rarely it gets extended to the people underneath them.

We could talk about how a nation 250 years into its own story still hasn’t figured out how to let every one of its citizens vote without a fight, or how quickly a book gets pulled off a school library shelf the moment it tells the truth about who this country has hurt and who it still hurts. How an honest recounting of American history is labelled as woke and inappropriate for white children, but at six years old Ruby Bridges could face down a crowd of protesters to desegregate a school in New Orleans.

Many of us know this fear from the inside, not as a headline but as a Tuesday or Wednesday. We know what it is to watch legislatures debate our right to exist, to wonder whether this year’s session ends with our families more protected or less. Micah didn’t write “no one shall make them afraid” as a suggestion for some people. He wrote it as the whole point.

None of that is a story about individual meanness. It’s a story about what a nation builds when it decides, over and over, across 250 years, that some people’s lives and their national inheritance matter more than others. Micah would call that what it is. Not a series of unfortunate policy choices. Idolatry.

Whose God Do We Walk After

Which brings us to the verse almost nobody quotes, the one right after the one Washington loved. Verse five: “For all the peoples walk, each in the name of its god, but we will walk in the name of the LORD our God forever and ever.” Micah doesn’t picture a world where every nation gets absorbed into one uniform empire, worshiping one uniform god. He pictures nations still walking their own paths, side by side, unafraid of each other, while Judah keeps walking in the name of its own God. Security doesn’t require sameness. Peace was never supposed to mean uniformity.

Here’s the real question this birthday puts in front of us. Every nation walks in the name of some god, whether it admits to one or not, and many of those gods are far more natural or human than they are divine. In whose name or in what’s name does the United States actually walk? Based on 250 years of evidence, we have often walked in the name of a god of market growth, a god of empire, a god of whiteness, a god of the national arsenal, and god of the border wall. That god has an American flag on its lapel and Micah’s own verse in its mouth, but none of Micah’s vision in its policy.

We do not have to walk in the name of that god. That was never the only American god available. There has always been another thread, quieter and harder to kill, running through abolitionists, suffragists, and labor organizers. Through the Black church, the Queer liberation movement, and every immigrant congregation that ever built a sanctuary out of nothing. It’s a thread that keeps walking in the name of a God who actually means it when God says no one shall be made afraid.

Where This Leaves Us

Two hundred fifty years in, the truth is this. America has never fully been the vine-and-fig-tree nation its own founder quoted into being, and pretending otherwise on a birthday doesn’t make it truer. In fact, America was never the vision of George Washington because Washington’s America ensured peace and security only for men like himself while literally building itself through the labor of people with no freedom and significant fear. But Micah was writing neither an apology nor a eulogy. He was writing a summons, addressed to people who could still choose which god to walk after and what kind of “days to come” they were building toward.

We don’t get to fix the nation on Sunday or by next Sunday. That was never the assignment. The assignment is smaller and harder: to keep telling the truth about the distance between the vision and the reality; to keep refusing the god of the arsenal even when it’s dressed in the right flag; and to keep walking, however imperfectly, in the name of the one whose peace was never for sale and was never reserved only for a certain and select few. Where that leads each of us this week is between you and the God who is still, even now, in the business of beating swords into something that can grow food.

Amen.

Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.

Friends, listen for a word from God in the Book of Ruth, the 1^st Chapter, verses 1-18.

In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land, and a certain man of Bethlehem in Judah went to live in the country of Moab, he and his wife and two sons. The name of the man was Elimelech and the name of his wife Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Chilion; they were Ephrathites from Bethlehem in Judah. They went into the country of Moab and remained there. But Elimelech, the husband of Naomi, died, and she was left with her two sons. These took Moabite wives; the name of the one was Orpah and the name of the other Ruth. When they had lived there about ten years, both Mahlon and Chilion also died, so that the woman was left without her two sons and her husband.

Then she started to return with her daughters-in-law from the country of Moab, for she had heard in the country of Moab that the Lord had considered his people and given them food. So she set out from the place where she had been living, she and her two daughters-in-law, and they went on their way to go back to the land of Judah. But Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, “Go back each of you to your mother’s house. May the Lord deal kindly with you, as you have dealt with the dead and with me. The Lord grant that you may find security, each of you in the house of your husband.” Then she kissed them, and they wept aloud. They said to her, “No, we will return with you to your people.” But Naomi said, “Turn back, my daughters. Why will you go with me? Do I still have sons in my womb that they may become your husbands? Turn back, my daughters, go your way, for I am too old to have a husband. Even if I thought there was hope for me, even if I should have a husband tonight and bear sons, would you then wait until they were grown? Would you then refrain from marrying? No, my daughters, it has been far more bitter for me than for you, because the hand of the Lord has turned against me.” Then they wept aloud again. Orpah kissed her mother-in-law goodbye, but Ruth clung to her.

So she said, “Look, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods; return after your sister-in-law.” But Ruth said,

“Do not press me to leave you,
to turn back from following you!
Where you go, I will go;
where you lodge, I will lodge;
your people shall be my people
and your God my God.
Where you die, I will die,
and there will I be buried.
May the Lord do thus to me,
and more as well,
if even death parts me from you!”

When Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more to her.

This is the word of God for the people of God.

I. The Road Out of Moab

Friends, the setting for our scripture tonight are a series of roads in and out of Moab.

A famine has emptied Bethlehem of its bread, Bethlehem, which literally means “house of bread.” A man named Elimelech packs up his family and heads to Moab, the foreign country across the Jordan. He’s looking for survival. What he finds is more loss. He dies. His two sons marry Moabite women, Orpah and Ruth, and then the sons die too. And now there are three widows standing at a crossroads: Naomi, who has lost her husband and both her sons in a foreign land, and Orpah and Ruth, who’ve lost their husbands and have no children to show for it.

In the ancient Near East, women were the property and under the protection of their closest living male relative. Daughters were subject to their fathers, wives to their husbands, and widows to their sons or the husbands of their daughters. A widow without a man to provide protection was in an extremely precarious position. She had no social safety net, no protection, no rights to inheritance, and on the margins of society in every conceivable way. A woman like Naomi had only two options available to her: she could try to live on her own which would likely mean begging or she could take her chances returning to her own family and to her father and brothers in the hopes that they would take pity on her and give her a place to live. They were under no religious, legal, or moral obligation to do so. Her position as a widow with dead sons was viewed as God’s judgement on her.

“Go back,” Naomi says, “each of you to your mother’s house.” She urges them to go back to their people, their gods, their chances of finding another husband. Go back to a life that might still hold something good, because Naomi has nothing left to give them.

Orpah weeps, kisses her mother-in-law, and turns back toward Moab. The text doesn’t condemn her. She makes the reasonable choice, the safe choice.

II. Do Not Press Me to Leave You

Ruth on the other hand clings to Naomi.

The Hebrew word for “cling” here is the same word used in Genesis 2:24 when a man leaves his parents and clings to his spouse. It’s the word for covenant binding. It’s the word for the kind of love that reorganizes your whole life.

Ruth speaks the declaration that she’s known for: “Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.”

We need to spend time with this statement. Ruth is a Moabite woman speaking to a Hebrew woman. While she was married to Ruth’s son, a Hebrew man, she’s still crossing significant boundaries for the ancient world. She’s leaving her homeland, her religion, her culture, her safety net, and pledging her life to a grieving old woman who has just told her to leave. She’s not doing this for economic advantage. She’s not doing it because the odds look good. She’s doing it because of love. Because of the covenant she feels with Naomi. Because of the kind of stubborn, irreversible loyalty that looks at every reason to turn back and says: no. I’m staying.

The Queer community has claimed this text for generations. Along with David and Jonthan, Joseph, Paul, and eunuchs throughout the Bible, Ruth and Naomi are often held up as Queer characters.

The story reads like a love story because it is a love story. It doesn’t fit neatly into the categories the ancient world or even our world uses to organize relationships. It’s two women, bound to each other across every line that should have divided them, making a covenant that the text treats with the same gravity as marriage vows. Your people, my people. Your God, my God.

Where you go, I will go.

That’s testimony. That’s what it sounds like when love refuses to be stopped by geography, grief, or the reasonable advice of everyone around you.

And here’s another reason this love is so important and reading the Queer nature of the Ruth and Naomi’s love is consequential: their love has to happen for the Biblical narrative and the history of salvation to continue. We would be forgiven for remembering Ruth’s declaration in chapter 1, verses 16-17, but forgetting where Ruth stands in the longer history of salvation. By following Naomi back to Judah, Ruth becomes the wife of Boaz and mother of Obed, who is treated as a grandson of Naomi. Obed becomes the father of Jesse, who in turn becomes the father of David. Matthew 1:17 confirms that 28 generations from the birth of David or 30 generations after the time of Ruth, Jesus is born. Out of the love of Ruth for her mother-in-law Naomi comes the Messiah.

III. What the Church Did with Love Like That

Today we celebrate the last Sunday of Pride Month and the last Sunday in our “I Will Testify to Love” message series. We continue to testify not only to what love is, but what love can be in a broad Christian tradition which took a story like Ruth’s, a story brimming in cross-boundary covenant love, and for generations used the institution of religion to tell Queer people that our love was wrong. They said that we were broken. That God didn’t want us. That we needed to be fixed.

Not in vague, abstract ways. In direct, devastating, institutional ways.

Conversion therapy was endorsed, funded, and run by churches. Young people were sent away by their families, in the name of God, to be unmade. Many of them didn’t survive. Queer people were denied communion. Denied baptism for themselves and for their children. Denied the right to bring our whole selves to the table that Jesus set for everyone. We were told that our love was incompatible with membership, with leadership, with grace. We were removed from congregations we’d grown up in, sometimes publicly, sometimes quietly, but always with the message: you don’t belong here.

Families were torn apart. Parents told their children that they couldn’t come home unless they changed. And they did it quoting scripture. They did it in the name of the God who is love. They did it not only because of what they heard at church, but because of the church’s pressure to produce “ideal” children.

Is it any wonder that so many of us learned to associate the name of God with rejection? That for some of us, the smell of a sanctuary still carries the memory of being told we weren’t enough? That the word “church” lands in our chests like a bruise?

IV. But God Has Always Loved Us

Here’s what we need to remember. Here’s what the text is testifying to, and what this whole series has been building toward: God didn’t do that to us. God has always loved us.

Institutions, churches, and families got it wrong. The people who wielded scripture like a weapon got it wrong. The denominations that wrote exclusion into their constitutions got it wrong. But God, the God Ruth was claiming when she said “your God my God,” the God who wove steadfast love into the fabric of creation, that God has never stopped loving us.

Ruth doesn’t invoke God as a weapon. She invokes God as a witness to her love. “Your God, my God” isn’t a theological treatise. It’s a declaration: the God I’m choosing to follow is a God who shows up in covenants like this one. A God who moves across borders. A God who takes the side of widows and foreigners and people with nothing left. A God who looks at the ones the world has written off and says: I see you. I’m with you. You belong to me.

That has always been the character of God. Not the god that was used to harm us. The God who is love, who made us, who sees us, who has been present in every moment of every story of Queer survival, Queer joy, and Queer love.

When we were being told we were broken, God knew we weren’t.

When we were being excluded from the table, God was making room.

When we were learning to be ashamed of who we are, God was grieving the lie we’d been handed.

And when we found our way to communities that said, not as a compromise or a footnote but as a first principle: you are fully loved, fully welcome, fully seen, that wasn’t an accident. That was the love of God working through human hands, refusing to let us go.

V. The Healing Is Wide

And here’s something else the text won’t let us miss.

Ruth and Naomi aren’t a conventional family. They’re not exactly a couple, not a household the ancient world would have known how to name. They’re a mother-in-law and a daughter-in-law, both widowed, one foreign, walking toward an uncertain future with nothing but each other and the stubborn insistence that this counts. That this is enough. That love between two people who refuse to abandon each other is worth something, even when the world doesn’t have a category for it.

The church has been getting families wrong for a long time. Not just Queer families though, yes, especially queer families. But also families that changed when the partners separated and divorced, where two people tried and it didn’t hold, and the church handed them shame instead of compassion. The single parent who showed up on Sunday and felt the sidelong glances, the unspoken assumption that something must have gone wrong, particularly single mothers in general or single fathers raising daughters. Blended families navigating stepchildren and half-siblings and the sometimes-complicated love of people who chose each other across hard circumstances. The person who never married and was made to feel incomplete, as though love only counts when it comes in a particular form. The couple who couldn’t have children and sat through sermon after sermon that made family synonymous with parenthood. The grandparent raising grandchildren. The chosen family, the friends who became siblings, the neighbors who became kin, told that what they had wasn’t real family because there was no blood or legal document to ratify it.

The church built an imaginary norm and then spent generations telling everyone who didn’t fit it that they were less. That their love was less. That God’s blessing was reserved for a particular configuration of people in a particular kind of household and if you didn’t have that, you were somehow outside the circle of grace.

But look at this text. Look at who God shows up for in this story. Two women with nothing. A foreign widow who crosses every boundary of ethnicity and religion to pledge her life to a grieving old woman. A family that doesn’t fit any category the ancient world had — and God is not absent from this story. God is all over it.

The healing we’re talking about today isn’t only for one community. It’s for everyone who has ever been told that the love they carry, the family they’ve built, the commitment they’ve made, the life they’ve chosen, doesn’t measure up. If that’s you then this text is for you too. Ruth’s testimony is for you too. God’s relentless and total love is for you too.

VI. We Made It. We’re Still Here.

This is the last Sunday of Pride Month. And I want to say something clearly: celebrating Pride isn’t something we do once a year in June and then put away. Pride is a posture. It’s the ongoing act of refusing to be ashamed of who God made you to be. It’s the continuous work of building communities where the most marginalized among us are centered, not tolerated. It’s what Ruth was doing on that road out of Moab, refusing the world’s verdict on what her life was worth.

We celebrate in June because June has history, because the Stonewall Riots happened, because people who had nothing left to lose stood up and said: no more. But what we’re celebrating isn’t confined to a month. What we’re celebrating is survival. Resilience. The stubborn insistence on joy in the face of everything designed to crush it. The fact that we’re still here.

We made it.

Not because it was easy. Not because nobody tried to stop us. Not because people aren’t still trying to stop us. Not because the church got it right, or the culture got it right, or the laws have always protected us, they haven’t, and in many places they still don’t, and we can’t afford to pretend otherwise. We made it because love is stubborn. Because community holds. Because the God who was present on the road to Bethlehem has been present on every road we’ve walked since then.

And the testimony, the testimony that this whole series has been building toward, is simply this: we will testify to love.

Not in spite of what we’ve been through. Because of it. Because we know what it costs. Because we’ve felt the absence of love and we know exactly how rare, how necessary, and how holy it is when it shows up.

Ruth knew. She had watched her husband die. She had watched her father-in-law die. She had watched her mother-in-law dissolve into grief. She was standing at a crossroads with nothing, and she chose love anyway. She chose covenant anyway. She chose the God who was present in this small, broken, beautiful act of loyalty — and she testified to it out loud, on a dirt road, with her whole life.

VII. Your God, My God

So let this be our testimony too: your God, my God. Your people, my people. Where you go, I will go.

We are not the church’s verdict on us. We are not the damage that was done in God’s name. We are not the wounds. We are the ones who are still here, still loving, still building, still testifying, because the love of God is older than the harm and stronger than the institution and more stubborn than any rejection we’ve ever faced.

That’s the testimony. That’s what we’ve been saying all month, in four different ways, from four different corners of scripture. Love is the point. Love is the power. Love is what made Ruth cling to Naomi on that road. Love is what made communities like this one possible. Love is what keeps us here.

And love, stubborn, border-crossing, table-setting, wound-tending, Queer, holy, and uncontainable love, is what God has always had for us.

Amen.

Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.

Note - Due to the extremely busy week with the Interfaith Pride Service and Columbus Pride, the Blue Ocean Columbus board allowed me to make this a “recorded service” so that I could travel and have some downtime.

Friends, listen for a word from God in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, the 13^th chapter.

If I speak in the tongues of humans and of angels but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. ² And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. ³ If I give away all my possessions and if I hand over my body so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing.

⁴ Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant ⁵ or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable; it keeps no record of wrongs; ⁶ it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. ⁷ It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

⁸ Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. ⁹ For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part, ¹⁰ but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. ¹¹ When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. ¹² For now we see only a reflection, as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. ¹³ And now faith, hope, and love remain, these three, and the greatest of these is love.

This is the word of God for the people of God.

Now, listen up close, pull your chair a bit near,
I’ve got something important I want you to hear.
It comes from a letter; old Paul, pen in hand,
who wrote to some folks in a far-away land.

He said: If you speak in the tongues of the sky,
if your words hit the ceiling and go way up high,
if you’ve got every language from angels and birds,
but haven’t got love, well, they’re just noise, not words.

If you’ve got prophecy, knowledge, and faith by the ton,
if you could move every mountain from under the sun,
if you give all you have to the cold and the poor,
but haven’t got love, you’ve got nothing. No more.

So, what is this love? Well, I’ll tell you what’s true:
It’s patient and kind and it sees the best in you.
It doesn’t get jealous or boast of its worth,
it doesn’t strut proud or get rude here on earth.

It doesn’t insist that it always must win,
it doesn’t keep score of your failures and sin.
It doesn’t rejoice when the wrong wins the day —
but when truth speaks up, love will cheer and will say:

“Yes! That’s it! That’s the thing! That’s the way!”

It bears every burden, believes every good,
it hopes for the best in each neighbor and hood.
It endures through the ache and the long, weary night,
love endures. Love stays. Love keeps holding on tight.

Now, gifts — they’ll all fade like the morning-time dew.
The tongues, they will cease. And the knowledge we knew?
It’s partial, it’s patchy, it’s here and then gone,
like a child who grows up and grows old and moves on.

For now, we see dimly through glass, through a haze,
like we’re squinting at God through a thick morning glaze.
But then — oh, but then! — we’ll see face and face clear,
We’ll be known as we’re known by the One who is near.

So, faith, hope, and love, these three wonders remain.
They weather the cold, they outlast every rain.
Faith holds in the dark when your candle goes out.
Hope leans toward the morning when you’re full of doubt.

But the greatest, oh friends, don’t you dare walk away,
the greatest of all of them is love, Paul would say.
Not love that is sappy or sweet like a song,
but love that stays patient when everything's wrong.

Not love that is earned by the things that you do,
but love that was first, love that started with you.
Love that said yes before you could say no.
Love that won’t leave. Love that won’t let you go.

Here is the secret that Paul wants you to know:
the love he describes is the love in which we grow.
It isn’t a task list. It isn’t a test.
It isn’t a ladder from the worst to the best.

It’s a name for the ground underneath every foot,
It’s the root of the tree before blossom or soot.
Before you were useful. Before you were great.
Before you were early or even too late.

You are loved. Full stop. That’s the whole thing. The end.

The love of the Holy One, close as a friend,
the love that made cosmos and quarks and the seas,
the love that makes room, yes, for each one of these,

for the doubters, the drifters, the Queer and the strange,
for the ones who’ve been told they are out of love’s range,
for the tired, the grieving, the lost and the found.

Love says: You belong here. This is your ground.

So, we go from this place, from this screen, from this space,
not to earn any love, but to live in its grace.
We love ‘cause we’ve been loved from the very first start,
and that love is the pump that keeps pumping the heart.

Be patient with someone who’s taking too long.
Be kind to the one who is trying to stay strong.
Bear someone’s burden. Believe the best things.
Hope hard. Endure. See what that kind of love brings.

For faith, hope, and love, these three beauties remain.
But the greatest of all of them?

Love. Is. The. Greatest.

I. A Shift

Friends, I want to set down the rhymes for a moment.

We’ve been playing and I mean that sincerely. Children learn though play and the more neurodivergent among us act out whole worlds of conversations and interactions so that we get them right when they happen. Sometimes play’s how we touch the truest things. But now I want to sit with you in the weight of the day. Not because the joy isn’t real, but because it’s June 21st, and I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t name where we actually are.

It’s Pride Month.

And just like at Stonewall in 1969, this year, Pride Month is not just a parade and celebration, though those still matter so much to the LGBTQIA+ community and all of our fierce allies. In 2026, Pride has, in the truest meaning of the word, returned to being a protest. It’s a defiant act. It’s a prophetic moment. It’s a community gathering itself in the middle of a sustained, organized, and political effort to make us smaller, to make us invisible, to make us afraid.

As a Queer man, I can’t name Pride as anything else. As a pastor, I can’t morally paint a picture for you which isn’t true.

II. What Love Looks Like Right Now

Paul wrote that love bears all things. Believes all things. Hopes all things. Endures all things.

I’ve been thinking about what it means to endure. Not in the passive sense, not gritting your teeth and waiting for it to be over. Endurance, a word we have largely divorced from its other form “endure,” in Paul’s usage, is active. It’s the runner who doesn’t stop when pain and fatigue tell them to sit down and rest. It’s the root system that holds when the wind ferociously grows.

Queer people, particularly Trans people, know something about that kind of endurance. We’ve been enduring for a long time. We’ve been told our love is less than, our lives are wrong, our bodies are mistakes, and our families don’t count. The church — and let’s be honest about this — the church said all those things. Many churches still do.

And yet. Here we are.

Still loving. Still building community. Still showing up for each other. Still insisting that we are exactly who God made us to be, and that who God made us to be is good.

III. The World We’re In

It’s June 21st, 2026. It’s the beginning of the last full week in Pride Month (how did that happen?). We’re in a moment when LGBTQIA+ people, particularly Trans people, and particularly Trans children, are facing legislative assault in state after state and at the federal level. When the language of protection is being weaponized as erasure. When some of our siblings are asking whether there’s room for them in this country, in the church, and in this world.

There is room. There has always been room. The Kin-dom of God is not a place of managed inclusion where we tolerate difference from a safe distance. The Kin-dom of God is a table that keeps getting longer and wider. It’s a love that keeps refusing to be diminished.

Paul says love doesn’t rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. Here’s the truth: we are loved. Here’s the truth: our love is real. Here’s the truth: no legislation, no court decision, no culture war talking point reaches all the way down to the ground of being where God has already said yes to us.

No one can’t get there. That ground is not up for a vote.

IV. Celebration as Resistance

So, we celebrate. Not in spite of the difficulty; because of it. Pride was born as a riot. It was born from people who had their backs against the wall and chose to fight back and say: no further. The Stonewall uprising wasn’t a party that became political. It was an act of survival that became a party because joy is itself a form of resistance.

When we gather, across screens, across distances, in this strange and scattered way that Blue Ocean is doing church today, and we say together that love is the greatest thing, we’re not just reciting a nice passage from Scripture. We’re making a claim about reality. We’re planting a flag.

Love is the greatest thing. Not fear. Not power. Not the voices that want to define us by what we’re against.

Love is patient. Love is kind. Love endures.

And so do we.

V. You Are Not Alone

I want to close by speaking directly to anyone in our community, anyone who joins us online, anyone watching this video as their first introduction to Blue Ocean Columbus, anyone at all who is tired. Who has been fighting for a long time and feels the weight of it today. Who opened their phone this week and saw news that made them feel smaller, less safe, less certain about the future.

You’re not alone. We feel it too. The whole community feels it.

But here’s what I know: you were loved before the fight started. You’ll be loved when it’s over. The love at the center of this universe, the love Paul is straining to describe in these magnificent, impossible sentences, that love has your name in it. It always has.

We see dimly now. We know in part. But what we know is enough to keep going. What we know is enough to celebrate. What we know is enough to show up for each other, and bear each other’s burdens, and believe the best, and hope without apology.

Friends, it’s Pride Month. We’re still here. We love and we are loved.

Amen.

Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.

Friends, listen for a word from God in Paul’s Letter to the Romans, the 8^th chapter, verses 31-39.

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? ³² He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things? ³³ Who shall bring a charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. ³⁴ Who is he who condemns? It is Christ who died, and furthermore is also risen, who is even at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us. ³⁵ Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? ³⁶ As it is written:

“For Your sake we are killed all day long;
We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.”

³⁷ Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. ³⁸ For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, ³⁹ nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

This is the word of God for the people of God.

I. The Declaration

“If God is for us, who can be against us?”

This is one of the primary and best-known questions in the Bible. It’s probably the single most important question Paul asks in all of his writings.

“If God is for us, who can be against us?”

Of course, it’s a rhetorical question. Paul’s not searching. He’s not looking for an answer.

“If God is for us, who can be against us?”

Say it after me: “If God is for us…”

“Who can be against us?”

This God isn’t watching us from a careful distance. They’re not tolerating us from behind a wall of requirements. She’s for us. He’s on our side. They’re in our corner. Present. Committed. Decided.

The single word “for” is load bearing. Everything else in this passage rests on it. And before we go any further this evening, I want you to hear it without the asterisks the world has tried to add. God is for you. Not a cleaned-up version of you. Not a future version of you who’s finally resolved whatever the church told you to resolve. You, exactly as God made you, on the day you were knit together, before you ever did anything to earn it.

That’s where we start. And by the time we’re done, I want us to end there too.

II. The One Who Did Not Spare

Paul’s next move is to ask what “for us” actually cost. “He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?”

If God gave the most precious thing — held nothing back, spared nothing, gave it all — then what exactly is God going to withhold from you now? After that? The One who gave everything is not going to turn around and say: yes, but not quite you. Yes, but only after you change. Yes, but only if you’re a version of yourself, I find more comfortable.

That’s not a God who gave everything. That’s a God who gave everything with fine print.

Love isn’t love if it comes with conditions, requirements, exceptions, and fine print. Those conditions and that fine print has told Queer Christians that we are loved, but that our love is disordered, our relationships are broken, and our belonging is conditional on remaining single and celibate or even becoming someone else. It’s handed LGBTQIA+ people a Bible and said: God loves you, but not like you are.

That’s a lie. And Paul’s logic won’t hold it up.

The God who did not spare the Son freely gives us all things. Freely. Not cautiously. Not partially. Not after review. Freely.

III. Who Dares Bring a Charge?

In verse 33, Paul asks a related question: “Who shall bring a charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies.”

Paul’s using courtroom language here, and deliberately. He knows what it’s like to stand accused. The communities he’s writing to know it too. They’re minorities, ethnically mixed, people like Paul who straddle two identities, two legal codes, two consequences if they’re found to be Christians. These are people meeting secretly in their homes, certainly being watched by forces of the empire. They know what it means to have your legitimacy and your place in the community challenged.

So do we. LGBTQIA+ people have sat in church pews and been told we were an abomination. We’ve been handed religious pamphlets designed to convince us that we’re broken. We’ve watched denominations vote on whether our lives are acceptable. We’ve heard pastors preach, with both great sincerity and great harm, that God’s love for us stops at the door of our sexual orientations and gender identities.

Paul’s question cuts through all of it. Who has the standing to bring that charge? Who has the authority to declare that the people God has already justified are actually outside the circle of grace?

Bishop Yvette Flunder, TFAM’s founder and presiding prelate, has named this clearly: the church has too often traded the Gospel of radical welcome for the gospel of comfortable exclusion. It’s not faithfulness that pushes LGBTQIA+ people out of congregations and families. It’s fear. It’s the ancient human instinct to draw a line and put someone else on the other side of it.

But God justifies. The verdict is already in. And no denomination, no doctrinal statement, no family member who quoted Leviticus at you over Thanksgiving, no pastor thundering from marble pulpits or a music stand; none of them have the standing to overturn it.

IV. Nothing on the List

Now Paul asks the question he’s been building toward all along. “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword?”

He’s not listing hypotheticals. These are the actual conditions of the people he’s writing to and they’re actual conditions for us today. Paul’s Roman audience was experiencing tribulation. They knew distress. Some of them had faced the sword. And Paul doesn’t skip past that. He quotes Psalm 44:22 right into the middle of it: “For Your sake we are killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.”

And we know what that feels like too. On Thursday, right here in Ohio, more than 100 FBI agents raided the Cleveland offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative and showed up at some of the organizers’ homes, took laptops and cell phones, and accosted staff and board members with and without subpoenas in a clear campaign of intimidation against people who have dedicated their careers to protecting voting access and voting rights. Meanwhile, ICE agents conducted a similar campaign against organizers and attorneys in other states working to assist undocumented children and other minors in the immigration and deportation processes. People harassed and accosted for doing nothing more dangerous than practical democracy. One leader said it was terrifying. It’s a different sword than Paul’s Roman audience was facing, but it’s still a sword. It’s still the forces of empire doing what empire always does. That’s what peril looks like in 2026.

Paul isn’t offering cheap comfort or a fast bypass around pain. He’s saying: I see the wound. I know what it costs. And I’m telling you anyway, none of it separates you from God.

Then he says it: “Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.”

More than conquerors. The Greek here is hupernikōmen, which is a bit difficult to translate properly into English, but overwhelmingly victorious or exceedingly triumphant come fairly close. Not just surviving. Not hanging on by a thread. Overcoming. Flourishing. And not because the pain wasn’t real, but because the love is more real.

Then comes the final list: “Neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Hear what’s not on that list. Your sexual orientation isn’t on that list. Your gender identity isn’t on that list. Your racial and ethnic identities aren’t on the list. The ways in which your ability differs from someone else isn’t on the list. None of these appears as an exception, because none of them are an exception.

V. Made This Way, Loved This Way

The good news of this passage isn’t only that God tolerates us. It’s that God made us. It’s that God looked at us and called us good. It’s that God loves us.

This is what the church at its worst has refused to say. The church has been willing to offer a partial welcome as long as you agree that the core of who you are is something God regrets. As long as you treat your own identity as a problem to be managed rather than a gift to be celebrated.

That’s not the gospel. The Gospel is that God looked at every human being, in every expression of gender, in every form of love, in every body, soul, and name and said: “beloved.” That’s not a mistake. That’s not a test. That’s the truth of the One who made you and has not stopped being for you.

If you’ve been told that God made you wrong, that the person you are is the thing that puts you outside the reach of grace, I want you to hear this evening: that those messages are not the word of God. God has said from the very beginning that you were made on purpose, for a purpose, and you are loved without reservation, beyond measure, exactly as you are.

VI. The Declaration, Again

So, here’s where we land.

“If God is for us, who can be against us?”

Not the pastor who told you that you were an abomination. Not the parent who said their faith required them to choose. Not the denomination that voted against your dignity. Not the theology that dressed fear up as faithfulness and called it love.

None of them can stand against the verdict of the One who made you, who did not spare the Son, who justifies freely, who loves without exception. None of them have that standing. None of them have that power.

You are not a casualty of God’s love. You are not an asterisk at the bottom of the welcome. You are a child of God, made as you are, named as you are, claimed as you are, and nothing — nothing in all of creation — can take that from you.

Not death. Not life. Not angels. Not powers. Not the church’s fear. Not the world’s contempt.

Nothing.

Amen.

Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.

Friends, listen for a word from God in the Gospel according to John, the 9^th chapter, verses 1 to 12 and 35 to 41.

As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. ² His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” ³ Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him. ⁴ We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work. ⁵ As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” ⁶ When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes, ⁷ saying to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see. ⁸ The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, “Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?” ⁹ Some were saying, “It is he.” Others were saying, “No, but it is someone like him.” He kept saying, “I am he.” ¹⁰ But they kept asking him, “Then how were your eyes opened?” ¹¹ He answered, “The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.’ Then I went and washed and received my sight.” ¹² They said to him, “Where is he?” He said, “I do not know.”

Jesus heard that they had driven him out, and when he found him he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” ³⁶ He answered, “And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him.” ³⁷ Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.” ³⁸ He said, “Lord, I believe.” And he worshiped him. ³⁹ Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgment, so that those who do not see may see and those who do see may become blind.” ⁴⁰ Some of the Pharisees who were with him heard this and said to him, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” ⁴¹ Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.

This is the word of God for the people of God.

Movement One: The Question Before the Question

Tonight we join Jesus and his disciples as they come upon a man who had been born blind. It’s important for the story that we know something about this man’s identity. We know his gender, we know that he’s disabled and has been so since birth, and we know that people in the community know these things about him. These identities set up the question on which we will be focused tonight: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

Who sinned?

We need to sit with that question, because it probably shocks our Midwest American sensibilities. It’s the kind of question we might expect from a child. “Mommy, why does that man look like that?” We know how our mothers would have reacted and as adults we would probably react the same way.

Yet in first century Palestine, it wasn’t a strange question to ask. Though the question is cruel by any standard, it wasn’t considered cruel, not in the social and theological framework that people were accustomed to living in. The theological world these disciples inhabited had a certain logic to it that attributed suffering to sin. Sin had consequences that ran through bodies and bloodlines. If something was wrong with you, something must have gone wrong somewhere. The question wasn’t meant to be malicious. It was part of the received wisdom of their tradition. It was the only story they had for what they were seeing.

Who sinned?

But notice what the question does. It doesn’t ask who this person is. It doesn’t ask what he needs. Worse than even othering him by assigning him some pejorative classification, it transforms this human being into a theological and social problem to be solved. He becomes the occasion for a debate. Throughout his whole life, every morning he’s woken up, every relationship he’s navigated, every way he’s learned to move through a world not built for him collapses into a single diagnostic question.

Who sinned?

That question has a very long life. It has traveled through the centuries, and it is still being asked. We know it. We’ve heard it. Some of us have asked it about others and even about ourselves.

Movement Two: The Archaeology of a Slander

Before we get too far into this message, I want to be clear that though this man and his encounter with Jesus are our entry points, I’m not necessarily preaching on him or on people living with disabilities, though we will come back to disabilities. Because it’s Pride Month, in fact Pride Sunday, and we are on the first Sunday of a four-part series on LGBTQIA+ people in the church, I’m going to be speaking about Queer issues, not disability. It’s not my intention to collapse Queer and disabled identities onto one another nor am I trying to say that Queer experiences of faith and Queer theology and disabled experiences of faith and Disability theology are the same.

Yet for centuries the church has asked this same question about Queer people.

Who sinned?

The question hasn’t always been crude. It hasn’t always been the fire-and-brimstone preacher with the bullhorn. Sometimes it’s come dressed in careful, measured theological language. It’s arrived in pastoral letters and denominational statements. It’s been spoken in the form of “we love you, but…” and you learn quickly that everything before the “but” is decorative.

This tradition has told Queer people that our desire is disordered. That our love is broken. That understanding ourselves in any sort of authentic way is the consequence of something having gone wrong in our upbringing, in our psychology, in our will. That our presence in the church and that our claims on marriage are the theological problems and occasions for debate.

Those forces, those discussions, that rhetoric, those tired hermeneutics, and that lazy theology doesn’t just wound Queer people. Those forces traveled. They moved down the hallways of our homes where they sat down at kitchen tables with our parents. They whispered to mothers who had just watched their child come out to them: what did you do wrong? They asked fathers: where did you fail? They handed families the same ancient question in modern clothes.

Who sinned?

Think about what it costs a family to carry that. A father who can’t stop turning it over and over. A mother who replays every decision. A sibling who learns that love comes with conditions and starts applying those conditions to themselves.

Who sinned?

The question doesn’t just wound individuals. It dismantles the very structures that are supposed to hold us. It teaches families to be afraid of each other. It gives love footnotes, fine print, and exceptions.

The worst part, though, is the question and the resulting substitute for love gets inside who we are as Queer people. Many of us believed it. Many of us spent years, decades, turning ourselves inside out trying to answer it correctly. Trying to pray ourselves into a different shape. Trying to want what we were told to want.

Who sinned?

Movement Three: Jesus Refuses the Frame

“Neither this man nor his parents sinned.”

Jesus doesn’t engage the question. He doesn’t engage in the theological or social question. He rejects the frame of the question entirely.

Neither.

What Jesus says next has been the subject of much theological debate: “He was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” Some readers hear in that statement the same kind of cruel theology that teaches that Judas was created solely to betray Jesus. That this man’s suffering was engineered by God for a specific purpose. That’s worth wrestling with as is the idea that disability is suffering in the first place.

But there’s another way to hear it. Jesus may not be explaining the blindness so much as redirecting the conversation. He’s saying: stop looking backwards for a cause. Look forward. Look at what’s possible. Look at what’s about to happen. The question isn’t who sinned, the question is what is God doing here, right now? What has God always been doing through and with this man? The man isn’t the problem. His identity as disabled isn’t the problem. The problem is how people have seen him and how they’ve questioned his identity.

Movement Four: Where Our [Ableist] Theology Fails Us

Now you might be ready for the next part. The miracle. The celebration. The part of the story to which we’ve been building. Jesus heals the man. Amen! Alleluia! Praise be the God who heals!

But does the man need healing? You might, rightly, say, “Yes, he’s blind. He needs to be healed.” Yet, something might be tugging at your heart, though. Tickling your logic. Is being blind an affliction or is it part of this man’s identity? Are the challenges he faces because he’s blind or because the world is built only for people who can see?

Disability theology presents a challenge to the narrative of healing. If because the built world, the world designed by humans, is built for people who can see and someone who is blind struggles in that world, then do they need to be cured? Do they need to be healed? Because if they need to be healed then who else needs to be healed?

The world is built for people who can hear. Do people who are deaf and hard of hearing need to be healed?

The world is largely built for people who are right-handed. Do left-handed people need to healed?

The world is not only built for rich people, it’s largely designed by rich people. Do poor people need to be healed?

The world is largely built for men. Do women need to be healed?

The world is largely built for cisgender people. Do Trans and nonbinary people need to be healed?

The world is largely built for straight people. Do gay, lesbian, bisexual, and pansexual people need to be healed?

The world, particularly the United States, is largely built for white people. Do people Black, Indigenous, and People of Color need to be healed?

Yes, these questions are outlandish—even the ones that have been asked and continue to be asked—but we need to sit with why we think people needing to be healed of their racial identity is problematic, but not why it’s equally problematic to think someone needs to be healed of a physical disability.

When progressive people discuss race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status, we acknowledge that people don’t need to be fixed, but rather the circumstances and dynamics in which they live and move. The same should be true for our siblings living with disabilities. As much as a person is blind or deaf so too is our society blind or deaf to their need.

We do not need to heal the person, we need to heal the world.

Movement Five: Tikkun Olam

Our Jewish siblings call it Tikkun Olam – “the healing of the world.” It’s a collective goal achieved through both systems-level interventions and healing each other. It’s a social philosophy and theology of care.

Notwithstanding the professional and personal calls that some of us hold as medical doctors and mental health therapists, we are collectively called to help people heal from the trauma, abuse, and hurt they have sustained in churches, families, and interpersonal relationships. As Christians we follow Christ who modeled healing in authentic actions both public and personal, both large scale and in smiles and moments of understanding.

As the story from scripture continues, the man who was blind returns and his community doesn’t recognize him. They don’t know what to do with him. They keep arguing about whether he’s even the same person. Isn’t this the man who used to sit and beg? Some say yes, some say no, he only looks like him. And the man keeps saying: I am the man.

He’s been named and renamed by other people his entire life. The disciples had named him a theological problem. The neighbors had named him the beggar. And now, having encountered Jesus, he’s forever changed.

I am the man.

So perplexed by this man and what’s happened to him, his neighbors and the whole community kick him out. They just can’t deal with him or with that has happened in their midst.

And Jesus hears what’s happens and immediately goes looking for the man.

Jesus speaks the sentence that closes the passage: “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.”

The Pharisees catch the edge of that and ask, “Are we also blind?”

“If you were blind, you would not have sin,” Jesus responds. “But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.”

Jesus inverts everything they assumed. The ones who were certain they could see, the ones who had the theological categories all sorted, who knew exactly what the problem was and where the blame belonged, they’re the ones in darkness. And the man they’d dismissed, expelled, reduced to a diagnostic case, he’s the one who ends the story seeing.

Movement Six: What We’re Celebrating

Friends, it’s Pride Sunday. And I want to say plainly what we’re celebrating.

We’re celebrating the people who survived questions about how they sinned, statements about how they should be loved even though they sinned.

We’re celebrating the Queer Christians who have stayed close to their faith even when their faith tried to expel them. We’re celebrating people who kept showing up to the God who kept showing up for them.

We’re celebrating the families who chose their children. Who sat across the kitchen table with everything they’d been taught and said: I choose you and I choose love. Whatever that costs me.

We’re celebrating the parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and godparents who had to grieve the theology they’d been given in order to keep the child they’d been given.

We’re celebrating the churches, congregations, and denominations who have done the hard work and have come through in full affirmation of the Queer community.

We’re celebrating the ones who are still in process, who are carrying the weight of questions, not yet sure what they believe about themselves, not yet sure they have permission to lay it down.

We’re celebrating the ones who never got to experience a church where you could be openly Queer and know that God loved you just as you are, just as they created you to be.

But we’re not celebrating with our eyes closed.

We know the wounds are real. We know that some of you carry the particular grief of having been rejected by the very communities that were supposed to hold you. We know that some families are still broken because of their decisions and the theologies they carry. We know that questions about sin still have power in too many churches and in too many homes.

We know that the church continues to prop up attacks on the Queer community in statehouses and the federal government.

So, we celebrate with our whole selves, including the parts that are still healing. Because that’s Tikkun Olam. Because that’s what it means to testify to love.

Amen.

Sermon begins at 45:00.

Note: On May 31, 2026, I guest preached at Cityview Church in the morning and also preached at my congregation, Blue Ocean Faith Columbus, that evening. Both sermons were similar, but my sermon at Cityview was the fuller version so I’m using that recording above and the text below.

Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.

Friends, listen for a word from God in Paul’s 2^nd Letter to the Corinthians, the 13^th chapter, verses 5-13.

Examine yourselves to see whether you are living in the faith. Test yourselves. Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless, indeed, you fail to meet the test! ⁶ I hope you will find out that we have not failed. ⁷ But we pray to God that you may not do anything wrong—not that we may appear to have met the test but that you may do what is right, though we may seem to have failed. ⁸ For we cannot do anything against the truth but only for the truth. ⁹ For we rejoice when we are weak but you are strong. This is what we pray for, that you may be restored. ¹⁰ So I write these things while I am away from you, so that when I come I may not have to be severe in using the authority that the Lord has given me for building up and not for tearing down.

¹¹ Finally, brothers and sisters, farewell.^[b] Be restored; listen to my appeal;^[c] agree with one another; live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you. ¹² Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you.

¹³ The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of^[d] the Holy Spirit be with all of you.

This is the word of God for the people of God.

Movement One: The Letter Nobody Wanted to Write

Paul didn’t want to write this letter.

Ok, that’s an odd place to start. I get it, but hang in with me, because it matters. In Second Corinthians, particularly these final chapters, Paul’s frustrated. He’s trying to balance charity with the anger he’s feeling. His apostolic authority has been challenged. There are people in Corinth – he passive-aggressively calls “super-apostles,” in chapter 11:5 and chapter 12:11 – who’ve been telling the community in Corinth that Paul doesn’t really represent Christ. That his ministry is illegitimate. That he’s not qualified to speak.

And Paul has spent most of this letter defending himself. Defending his credentials. Defending his record. Defending his right to claim the title of apostle. Frankly, it’s uncomfortable reading. There’s something almost wounded to it: Paul, the great evangelist, having to argue for his own legitimacy to people he helped bring to faith in the first place.

But then he gets to chapter 13, verse 5, and something shifts.

“Examine yourselves,” he says, “to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves.”

He turns it around. The Corinthians have been examining Paul, questioning his authenticity, testing his credentials and Paul essentially says: fine. But while you’re at it, look in the mirror. Examine yourselves.

And then he asks the question that’s going to stay with us this morning:

“Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?”

Movement Two: The Test You Were Never Meant to Fail

The word Paul uses for “examine” is a word for testing metals. You put gold in the fire to see if it’s pure. You assay it. You verify whether it’s what it claims to be.

But Paul’s not asking the Corinthians to examine themselves to figure out if they’re good enough. He’s not setting up a purity test, a bar they might fail to clear. He’s asking whether they recognize what’s already true.

“Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?”

The examination isn’t a test of worthiness. It’s not an academic test or an ordination paper. It’s a test of awareness. In order to ask if you realize that Christ is in you, Paul has to assume, he has to know, that Christ is indeed in the Corinthians. The question for the moment is whether they’ve talked themselves out of knowing it. Whether someone or something has coached them to miss it.

Paul’s astonishment is palpable. How can you not know this? How have you gotten so turned around that you’re over there measuring my apostolic credentials when the presence of Christ in you is the thing that matters?

Do you not realize?

And that’s when I have to stop and ask: Who taught you to doubt that Christ was in you?

Movement Three: A Story I Know

Like many of you, I wasn’t raised in the tradition that I profess as an adult. I was raised, educated, and socialized in Roman Catholicism, including 13 years of Catholic education. When it came to homosexuality – I can’t remember ever discussing gender and gender identity in Catholic schools – Catholic teaching held that being gay or lesbian was an “intrinsically disordered” orientation, but not sinful in and of itself. Homosexuals were to be treated with respect just like everyone else. It was only when a person chose to act on their on their sexual inclinations that one committed a sin. Until recently United Methodism referred to this as being “a self-avowed, practicing homosexual.”

In a certain light this theology was compassionate. It definitely looks better than condemning people simply for being gay or experiencing “same-sex attraction.” But dig only a bit deeper and one could quickly find its problems. It liked being Queer to having a mental illness. Granted, mainstream society and the DSM at one time did the same thing. The real harm was theological and how Queer people related to God. God made us LGBTQIA+ and in Genesis we learn that God looked at their creation and they called it good. God looked at all of us and called us good. Yet the church told us that to be in right relationship with God; to experience God’s love, we could never act on the sexual orientation and gender identity which God gave to us. No, we weren’t mistakes, just disordered and in that disorder expected to be celibate for life.

That’s how we learned that God might not be in us.

Movement Four: The Architecture of Doubt

That theology sounds almost kind, doesn’t it? It doesn’t condemn what you feel and might not even condemn who you are. It just condemns what you do. Who you love. The body you inhabit and how you actually live inside it.

But here’s what that theology actually builds, brick by careful brick: it constructs a version of us where our Queerness, our capacity for love, our embodied selves, our way of moving through the world — is the problem. Not an accident, not a wound waiting for healing, not even a struggle to be endured with sympathy. The problem itself. The thing that has to go before God can fully arrive.

And once we built that architecture; once we installed those supports inside our souls, it no longer mattered how warmly someone said, “But Christ loves you.” Because all we could hear was that Christ loved the version of us that didn’t exist yet. The version after the renovation of prayer and conversion “therapy.” The version that was sufficiently emptied of the parts that made us, us. The version made austere by celibacy and intentional rejection of our sexuality.

Friends, that’s not compassion. That’s not grace. That’s a hostage situation.

The institutional church has been remarkably creative in the ways it teaches LGBTQIA+ people to doubt that Christ is in us.

There’s the blunt version. The preachers who thunder from pulpits that Queer people are an abomination. That Trans people are mutilating God’s image. That same-gender love is a symptom of a civilization in spiritual and social freefall. We know those voices, the voices from family members who cling to clichés like “love the sinner, hate the sin,” but refuse to get to know who we are as people.

The world knows those voices, because they’re loud and flashy. They have legislative ambitions. In state after state, far too often led by elected leaders here in Ohio, those theological convictions are getting written into law: into laws governing bathrooms and whose history and life can be taught in school; into book bans and restrictions on funding for public education; into restrictions on what medical procedures are considered legitimate and where they can be performed; into laws about what a person needs to show to vote and who gets to vote; into laws that define which lives matter and, friends, if our laws are a reflection of our national values then all lives certainly do not matter.

The church’s doubt about LGBTQIA+ people doesn’t stay inside church walls. It never has.

But the subtler experience is just as damaging.

It’s the youth group where nobody ever says anything explicitly, but the silence about Queer identities is deafening.

It’s the family that loves you deeply but asks you please not to bring your partner to Christmas.

It’s the seminary curriculum that covers every strand of Christian theological anthropology except including LGBTQIA+ identities in the imago Dei.

It’s the worship service where the music, sermons, and illustrations all assume a particular kind of body, a particular kind of desire, a particular identity when addressing your spouse or partner.

It’s the fear and nervousness my fellow Queer clergy and I feel to preach about the Queer community using first-person language: our community, we, us.

Death by a thousand silences.

It’s not hyperbole to say that those silences kill. We know that LGBTQIA+ youth are more likely to die by suicide than their cisgender, heterosexual peers. We also know that Queer youth with just one affirming adult in their life are 40% less likely to experience suicidal ideation.

We know what it does to a teenager to sit in a pew week after week hearing that the fullness of who they are is, at best, a burden to be carried in secret and, at worst, evidence of their damnation.

We know what it does to adults who’ve spent decades in churches that offered them Jesus with one hand and withheld their full humanity with the other.

It produces spiritual homelessness. Whole generations of people who love God, who feel the presence of God, who’ve experienced real grace, but can’t find a community they can call home.

Who told you that Christ wasn’t in you?

Was it a pastor? A preacher? A parent? A schoolteacher who was well intentioned, but got it devastatingly wrong? Was it a church that welcomed you warmly until you introduced your partner or until you volunteered for ministry? Was it a community so focused on what it considered your sins that you had to leave the fullness of yourself at the door?

Because Paul’s astonishment still stands: how do you not realize? How has the church spent so much energy constructing doubt about something the text takes as absolutely given?

Movement Five: What LOVEboldly Has Learned

Friends, this is the work I get to do every day.

LOVEboldly exists to create spaces where LGBTQIA+ people can flourish in Christianity. We’ve been doing this work in one way or another for 15 years now and we’re only getting started. Our work includes equipping and training people and congregations to affirm and include LGBTQIA+ people. We also build and curate spaces where Queer people of faith can come together and be in community with each other. One of those spaces is the annual Interfaith Pride Service which is coming up on Tuesday, June 16, at 7pm at City Creek Events.

LOVEboldly’s third focus area is advocacy, primarily at the state level where we are currently tracking 35 pieces of legislation, some good, but mostly bad, and where we’re submitting testimony at the intersection of faith, justice, and the LGBTQIA+ community.

Part of the reason I’m here, part of the reason I was invited to preach today and be with you is because LOVEboldly has learned through our collective work and personal experiences that individual LGBTQIA+ people can’t undo decades of theological messaging about their own unworthiness while they’re still sitting in pews laced with decades of rhetoric about clobber verses and “Biblical marriage.” Communities have to change. The institutional church has to reckon with what it’s built.

When churches decide to genuinely and fully affirm LGBTQIA+ people, they’re not just making a policy change. They’re not just revising their statement of welcome. They’re doing something profoundly theological. They’re saying that they will no longer be a place that teaches people to doubt that Christ is in them.

They’re answering the question by refusing to be the ones who ask it in the wrong way.

Cityview, you’re doing that work. You have out LGBTQIA+ members and leaders. You’ve made the conscious and daily decision to affirm Queer people regardless of how they find you or how they engage with you. You invited me, the preacher ordained by an activist fellowship who has a bit of reputation for saying controversial and unpopular things. You are a congregation that decided to stop building up the architecture of doubt and start dismantling it.

And I want you to know what that means. Because somewhere in this room right now—maybe someone sitting in your row, in front of you, or behind you—or perhaps someone watching online came to worship today wondering if they’d finally hear something that makes them feel like they actually belong. Someone needed to be in a community like this where that question would be answered before they had to ask it.

That’s what you’re doing. Don’t underestimate it.

Movement Six: Greet One Another in Holy Love

Paul closes this letter, this letter he didn’t want to write, this letter forged in conflict and defense and a whole lot of apostolic exhaustion with something unexpected.

After all that. After chapters of tension, challenge, and mutual examination, he writes: “Finally, siblings, farewell. Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.”

Feel the weight of that shift. From conflict to blessing. From examination to embrace.

Greet one another with a holy kiss.

The holy kiss in the early church wasn’t a polite exchange at the passing of the peace. It was a sign of genuine belonging. An act of recognition that said: you are known. You are part of this body. There is no version of you that has to wait outside.

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.

All of you.

Not the edited version of you. Not the version of you that has passed the examination of the super-apostles or the gatekeepers or the denomination that told you to come back once you’ve got your sexuality sorted out.

All of you.

The grace of Christ — for all of you.

The love of God — for all of you.

The communion of the Spirit — for all of you.

This is the same letter. The same Paul who just said: examine yourselves, do you not realize that Christ is in you? And now he sends them out with this all-encompassing blessing.

The examination was never meant to produce exclusion. It was meant to produce recognition. Awareness. The ability to look at yourself, your full self, your actual self, and say: yes. I see it. Christ is here. Christ is in me.

Movement Seven: Tomorrow Is Pride

Friends, tomorrow is June 1st.

Tomorrow is the beginning of Pride Month, and I want to be clear about what Pride Month means, because it means different things to different people, at different times.

I came out almost 20 years ago during college. My first summer out and the first time I attended Pride events of any kind, I was interning for an Episcopal congregation in Washington, DC. A congregation whose associate pastor was openly gay. So, the first Pride event I attended that summer at one of the oldest and largest Prides in the country was an interfaith service, the service which we modeled Columbus’ first Interfaith Pride Service on. The service made Pride smaller, more intimate for this introverted, baby gay kid. A few years later during graduate school, Pride was a party because the majority of my friends and colleagues were Queer and we were living in the most progressive city in one of the most progressive states in the country during the robustly liberal years of the second Obama administration which had just overturned Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Now, Pride is…well…part of my job. And this year that means I’ll be working on my birthday which happens to be the Saturday of Columbus Pride.

But more so, Pride feels like a refusal, a resistance this year when the forces of empire conspire against our community and Transgender people have been labeled terrorists simply for existing.

Let’s be clear, Pride didn’t start as a party. Pride started as a riot. The Stonewall Riots were an uprising against police brutality and state-sponsored intimidation. Gay street kids kicked out of their homes and disowned by their families and Queer People of Color, among them Black and Brown Trans women, were the instigators of a movement that not only responded, but made it clear that Queer people refused to disappear. As the rallying cry of the 1980s and 1990s made popular: “We’re here. We’re Queer. Get used to it.”

Pride Month and Queer Pride in general is resistance. It’s a refusal to accept the teaching that there’s something in you or about you that disqualifies you from full humanity. It’s a refusal to doubt what you know to be true about who you are, and about who made you; about the one who created you with their image and called you good.

And the most theological thing the church can do in Pride Month is tell the truth: Christ is in you.

Movement Eight: The Answer

So, here’s the answer.

Whoever it was, the preacher, the parent, the youth group leader, the careful theological framework that sounded compassionate but still put you in a cage, the silence that spoke louder than any sermon ever could, whoever taught you to doubt that Christ was in you:

They were wrong.

Not mistaken, not well-intentioned, but incorrect. Wrong. Wrong in the way that costs people their lives. Wrong in way that has produced generations of spiritual trauma. Wrong in ways that drove people away from their God and their communities. Wrong in ways for which the church is rightly being held accountable.

For my fellow LGBTQIA+ people in this room, or joining us online, or who are watching this video later—I want to speak to you directly:

Christ is in us. Christ is in you. Not in spite of our Queerness. Not waiting until you fix something about yourself. Not reserved for a version of you to show up which is “less gay,” “less Trans,” less you.

In you. In us. The actual you. The you that walked through that door today, with everything you brought with you, your full history and your full identity and your full self.

Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?

That’s not my opinion. That’s Paul. That’s the text. That’s the living, breathing word of God.

And nobody gets to teach you otherwise. They never had that authority and they certainly don’t have it now.

Closing: The God of Love and Peace

Paul says the God of love and peace will be with you.

Not the God of condemnation and qualification.

Not the God who parcels out belonging based on which parts of yourself you’re trying to renounce.

The God of love. The God of peace. That God is with you.

That God was with us in youth groups that pretended we didn’t exist.

That God was with us in the pastor’s office when he told us being gay would never make us happy or fulfilled.

That God was with us in the sanctuary that demanded us to be less.

That God was with us when people hurled every insult they could conjure at us.

That God was with us in the silence when no one said what we needed to hear and even our friends had turned their backs on us.

That God was with us the day we finally said the truth out loud, to ourselves, looking in the mirror at 3am.

That God was with us when we told that first important person and it all became real.

And that God is with us now.

Christ is in you. Christ has always been in you.

God loves you. God has always loved you.

Whoever told you otherwise was wrong. Completely, categorically, without a doubt.

Beloved Queer siblings and fabulous cisgender and heterosexual allies, it has always been so and will always be so.

Amen.

Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.

Friends, listen for a word from God in the Acts of the Apostles, the 2^nd chapter, verses 1 to 13.

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. ² And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. ³ Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. ⁴ All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

⁵ Now there were devout Jews from every people under heaven living in Jerusalem. ⁶ And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. ⁷ Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? ⁸ And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? ⁹ Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, ¹⁰ Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, ¹¹ Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” ¹² All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” ¹³ But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”1

This is the word of God for the people of God.

Movement One: Happy Pentecost

Happy Pentecost, my friends!

Today we celebrate several important moments in the life of the communal church and the history of the Jesus movement or what we’ve come to call Christianity. First, Pentecost is the birthday of the church. Pentecost is the beginning of what we used to call the church militant, the church on earth. For us, it’s the beginning of the Jesus Movement. Whatever we call it, along with the Ascension or the moment when Jesus returned to Heaven, Pentecost is when the followers of Jesus began to put his teachings into practice without his physical presence among them.

Second, Pentecost is the redemption of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9) in a similar way to how the Cross is a redemption of the Garden of Eden. At Babel, God confused the common language of humans because of the power God saw in humanity. And while it’s a sermon and discussion for another day, Genesis 11 is unclear if the confusion of language is because the people at Babel had sinned or if God was scared of God’s creation or if it’s just a good story to explain why there are many languages on Earth.

Third, the story of Pentecost we heard in our scripture tonight is the first demonstration of speaking in tongues and it establishes both of the requirements for genuine and legitimate tongues: the speaker uses a language they’ve never spoken or studied and at least one other person is able to interpret what they’re saying. Indeed, Pentecost even goes further. Not only do the disciples speak in many languages and not only do people from many regions hear their own languages among the cacophony of voices, but when Peter stands up and addresses the crowd, every person in the crowd hears Peter in their own language.

Movement Two: The Cost of the Commission

Before we get too far into the celebration and the miracle of Pentecost, I think we have to sit for a moment with what this day actually cost the people in that room.

Tradition and the history of the Early Church reveal that the majority of the people present at Pentecost, who received the Holy Spirit that day would meet violent and tragic ends.

Peter will be crucified upside down, because he didn’t think himself worthy to die the same way as his Lord. James, the brother of John, will be beheaded on the orders of one of Herodian puppet kings, the first of the twelve disciples to be martyred. Though accounts vary somewhat, among the other ten disciples one will be stoned to death, five crucified, one beheaded, two will be stabbed, and only one, John, will die of natural causes and then while in exile and fleeing people who wanted him dead.

Two of the best-known early preachers, who weren’t even involved in Pentecost, Stephen and Paul, will meet similarly gruesome ends.

These people weren’t celebrating a comfortable religion and they knew it. They knew they weren’t receiving a Spirit that would make their lives easier, safer, or more respectable in the eyes of the people who held power.

No, they were celebrating the beginning of their own ends, and they still did it with joy. In the musical 1776, having approved the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin remarks with dark humor, “If we don’t hang together, we share surely hang separately.”

There’s something in that audacity that I think we need to recover. Pentecost isn’t a celebration of comfort. It’s a celebration of a Spirit that arrives with wind and fire and says: you’re going to go everywhere and say everything, and it’s going to cost you, but we’re empowering you to go anyway.

Movement Three: Drunk on the Spirit

Let’s talk about new wine. There are two important dynamics we need to remember which would have been obvious to first century listeners and readers. First, new wine is just that, it’s new. It doesn’t necessarily need to be of a higher quality than any other wine, it’s simply newer and likely comes from containers which have just been opened. Second, as we hear elsewhere in the Bible, one doesn’t put new wine in old wineskins. It’s a practical instruction because putting in new wine will cause the old wine skins to burst destroying both the skins and the wine. The instruction has also become a metaphor for people who are changed and can’t return to their former circumstances. The disciples have received the Holy Spirit and now they can’t do anything other than move forward.

When we look at this group gathered for Pentecost, we see our distant ancestors in faith; the earliest Christians and Christian leaders. But the crowd sees a bunch of Galilean fishers, tax collectors, and women who clearly had started partying too early in the morning. It’s easy to dismiss them as drunk, as improper, as embarrassing.

But here’s the important part neither the Spirit nor the disciples seem to care.

What the Spirit does at Pentecost is fundamentally subversive. Think about what actually happens in that crowd. The Roman Empire, the most powerful military and political machine the world had produced to that point. A culture whose titular city still exists and whose engineering and technology continue to command admiration today, ran on the logic of uniformity. It had one emperor. It had one legal code. It’s language, Latin, was the language of power. It co-opted and expanded Greek as the language of culture. Every other language was provincial, backward, beneath serious consideration. In enlightened and learned conversations of the 21^st century we still discuss “barbarians” even though they were sophisticated cultures and almost all of us here tonight are descended from those barbarians. The prejudices of the Roman Empire still dictate our semantics.

This is how empire works. Empire makes its language, its culture, its values not just superior, but the standard through which and by which everything else is judged. What the Roman Empire improved upon not only existed before their rise, it continues to this day. As we approach Pride Month a week from tomorrow, we should recall that still one of the most difficult spaces for LGBTQIA+ people are churches with majority people of color, including the Black Church. Yet, many cultures indigenous to Africa, Asia, and the Americas, have long and proud histories of not only affirming, but celebrating people we would today call Queer. But those traditions and even the memory of them were violently stamped out by White Europeans citing the supposed “word of God.” So sure were those colonialists and white supremacists that as recently as today, there are white Christian ministers expounding about how Jesus spoke Jacobite English as conveyed in the King James Version of the Bible.

And still into this mess of languages—indigenous, cultural, and those of empire—the Spirit shows up and immediately starts speaking every language. Parthian. Median. Aramaic. Egyptian. Arabic. Amharic. Hebrew. Latin. Greek. The languages of people the empire had conquered, colonized, and dismissed as well as the languages it promoted. The Spirit doesn’t establish a proper theological language that everyone has to learn before they can understand the Gospel. The Spirit meets every person in the sound of their own native tongue.

By using native languages and totally democratizing who as access to God, the Spirit devastates every theology and system that wants to claim God for itself.

The Holy Spirit makes it clear that God doesn’t belong to any one people.

God doesn’t belong to any one culture.

God doesn’t belong to any one empire, and God isn’t in the business of supporting empire—Roman, Greek, European, or American.

The Holy Spirit reveals and reminds the community, the people who will come to be called Christian that the gospel isn’t meant to be managed, translated down from on high, or made available only to those who’ve learned the right language and adopted the right customs. Though the institutional church has long struggled with its thirst for control through dictating who should preach and teach in the church, at Pentecost the Spirit poured out her gifts on all people.

That’s what “drunk on new wine” means theologically. It means losing your inhibitions about speaking truth in ways that make power uncomfortable. It means being so full of something that you stop performing respectability for people who were never going to respect you anyway. It means the Spirit makes you reckless enough to preach like Jesus preached, to live like Jesus lived, and to love like Jesus loved.

New wine doesn’t stay in old wineskins. It ferments. It expands. It breaks containers that were never designed to hold it. Pentecost is the moment when the Spirit says: your containers were too small, and you can’t go back to them again.

Movement Four: What We Did with the Fire

Pentecost deserves an honest reckoning. Because the disciples’ audacity at celebrating even though they already knew that their paths wouldn’t be comfortable or peaceful, is perhaps overshadowed by how quickly the movement Jesus started and these disciples put into practice joyfully even as they were hunted and killed; how quickly that movement fell victim to institutionalization and eventually to empire itself.

It didn’t take long. Within only a few years, Paul, Timothy, Peter, John, James, Jude, and others were creating theologies and deciding who could become a Christian. Less than 300 years later, the faith that began with a group of occupied Jewish people speaking in the languages of the colonized had become the official religion of the very empire that executed its founder. Christianity and its ministers became the chaplains of empire. The cross was planted in soil soaked with the blood of indigenous people who never asked for it. The same Spirit that spoke Parthian and Median was enrolled in the project of teaching everyone to speak Latin, then Spanish and English, and calling it evangelism. We shouldn’t forget that Spanish itself, once the language of conquest and empire is now in the United States regarded as a token of poverty, crime, and otherness with politicians calling for English as the official language of states and the nation.

This is not ancient history. In many parts of the world, including the United States, it’s not even history. It’s current events.

Christian missionaries traveled to Africa, Asia, and the Americas as the advance guard of colonial extraction. Children were taken from their families and placed in boarding schools designed, in the words of their sadistic architects, to “civilize” and “Christianize” them.

And the same church that received Pentecost’s fire has, in far too many of its expressions, used that fire to figuratively and literally burn people.

The church and people acting in its name used scripture to construct the theological scaffolding of chattel slavery and the white supremacy that propped up that system for centuries. When widespread, public slavery ended, that theology was repackaged as white supremacy, the war on drugs, and the prison industrial complex.

The church became the primary institution through which LGBTQIA+ people have been told that who we are is an abomination, that the God who made us is ashamed of us.

The church continues to weaponize the language of faith to bless and anoint political power. And it has become, in too many places, the institutional home of Christian nationalism. Parts of the church have become so corrupted that they have ordained the error and sin that God favors the United States above all other nations and that the US needs to be governed by people who look and believe a certain way.

The church has failed not just as an institution. Institutions fail. But the church failed with the wind and flame of the Holy Spirit. It didn’t just forget it had that fire, it put that fire to work for sinful and evil purposes.

We had wind and flame. We had a Spirit who showed up speaking the language of every marginalized people and we used that gift to build borders. We had a commission that ran toward the outsider, the overlooked, the other, and instead we spent centuries deciding who was too outside, too overlooked, too other to belong.

We took new wine and poured it back into the oldest, most brittle wineskins. Despite everything the Spirit told us, we retreated back inside those wineskins even though they were too small, too old, too beyond repair for us to flourish.

Movement Five: The Audacity of Celebrating Anyway

And yet.

And yet, here we are. On Pentecost Sunday. Gathered to celebrate.

This celebration, our celebration, is itself an act of defiance.

When the crowd called the disciples drunk, they were trying to make the whole thing go away. They were trying to use embarrassment as a tool of containment. If you can make people feel ridiculous for what they believe, if you can make the Spirit seem like foolishness, you don’t have to take it seriously. You don’t have to change. You don’t have to face the reality that your encounter with the Holy Spirit has fundamentally changed you.

We celebrate Pentecost because we believe the Spirit isn’t finished.

We believe that the same wind that filled that house is still moving.

The Spirit who acted at Pentecost and is still acting today is anti-nationalist by nature. The Spirit speaks every tongue. The Spirit honors every people. The Spirit’s arrival is the beginning of a movement that will cross every border empire drew, honor every culture empire dismissed, and refuse to be the property of any nation that tries to claim divine sanction for its power. You can’t wrap the Holy Spirit in a flag. You can’t draft the Spirit into your culture war. You can’t put the fire of Pentecost in a wineskin stitched with nationalism and expect it to hold.

The Spirit that was poured out on all flesh is still being poured out on all flesh.

The Spirit has been poured out on Queer people and immigrants and people fleeing violence and people who don’t believe the same thing and people who white Christian nationalism wants to exclude.

If it feels like the Pentecost fire went out, know that it’s always been here among the marginalized, among the disposed, and those with their backs against the wall. The fire’s been among people leaving their home states for legitimate medical purposes. The fire’s been among people shot in schools and mosques while their leaders offer “thoughts and prayers.” The fire didn’t go out it just went underground, into the margins, into the movements, into the bodies of people who were told they weren’t worth the Spirit’s time and kept prophesying anyway.

We celebrate Pentecost knowing it cost the first disciples everything. We celebrate knowing that the church has too often been faithless to its commission. We celebrate knowing there’s still so much work ahead.

We celebrate because despair isn’t the Spirit’s last word.

We celebrate because new wine can’t be put into old wineskins.

We celebrate because they called those disciples drunk and, yet, those disciples changed the world.

Go ahead. Be full of something that makes you reckless enough to speak the truth. Generous enough to throw open doors. Joyful enough to celebrate what God is doing even when you can’t yet see where it leads.

Pentecost isn’t a memory. It’s a commission. And the Spirit is still moving.

Amen.

Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.

Friends, listen for a word from God in the Acts of the Apostles, the 1^st chapter, verses 1 to 11.

¹ In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and teach ² until the day when he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. ³ After his suffering he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God. ⁴ While staying with them, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem but to wait there for the promise of the Father. “This,” he said, “is what you have heard from me; ⁵ for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.”

⁶ So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” ⁷ He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. ⁸ But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” ⁹ When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. ¹⁰ While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. ¹¹ They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”

This is the word of God for the people of God.

Movement One: After the Earthquake

We always live in resurrection time. Even on Good Friday when we mark Jesus’ death and his descent to the dead, we still live in resurrection time. But, friends, for the last several weeks we’ve been living in a time when the resurrection seemed the most palatable.

We’ve sat with the stories that begin on and follow Easter morning. The women at the tomb. The road to Emmaus, where two disciples walked with a stranger they didn’t recognize until the bread was broken. The upper room, locked tight, and Jesus appearing anyway saying, “Peace be with you.” Thomas with his hands in the wounds and a meal of broiled fish which Jesus ate in the midst of his disciples.

The gospel writers pile these stories up like they can’t quite believe them either. As if they’re saying: “No, really, something happened here. Something that broke the world open and put it back together differently.”

And then we get to the Acts of the Apostles, Luke’s second volume, a continuation of the same story, a new chapter. Remember, Luke directs this book to Theophilus whose name literally means “man of God” and reveals that this book is written not to one friend, but to all people. Inasmuch as Acts can be viewed as a kind of fifth Gospel, this gospel is about us, the people of God, acting in the world and what we will do with and too each other in the name of Jesus.

Jesus gathers the disciples one last time on a hillside outside Jerusalem. He gives them a promise and a commission. You’ll receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, he says. And you’ll be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

And then he’s gone. Lifted up, the text says, until a cloud takes him out of their sight.

The disciples do the most human thing imaginable.

They stand there. Staring at the sky.

Movement Two: Two Men in White

Luke tells us that while they were gazing up toward heaven, two men in white robes suddenly stood beside them. Angels, presumably. Messengers. And the messengers ask what is, honestly, one of the best questions in all of scripture:

“Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”

It’s not a cruel question. It’s not a scolding. There’s almost a gentleness to it, like someone laying a hand on your shoulder and saying, “Hey! Hey! Come back.”

Because here’s what the disciples are doing on that hillside: they’re waiting for something that’s already happened. They’re looking up for a Jesus who just told them to look out toward Jerusalem, out toward Samaria, out toward the ends of the earth. They’re oriented toward heaven when they’ve been commissioned toward the world.

But we need to be careful with this passage, because it’s sometimes used as a way to beat down any longing for transcendence, any hope that reaches beyond this world. That’s not what I’m after. The resurrection is real. The promise of new creation is real. The hope we carry isn’t just wishful thinking, it’s the ground on which we stand.

But there’s a version of Christian faith that gets so caught up in what’s coming that it forgets what it’s been called to do right now. A faith that’s so focused on heaven that it becomes, as the old saying goes, too heavenly minded to be any earthly good. A faith that watches the sky and waits, and in the waiting, opts out of the suffering, struggle, and gorgeous, difficult work of the world.

The angels won’t have it. And frankly, neither will the text.

Movement Three: They Waited Once

Now, there is waiting in this story. Jesus tells the disciples to go back to Jerusalem and wait for the promise of the Father. Wait for the Spirit. Don’t try to do this on your own. And they do. They go back. They pray together. They wait.

And the Spirit comes. Pentecost comes. Power comes. And then they go.

That waiting was real and necessary. It was the difference between burned-out human effort and Spirit-empowered witness. It mattered.

But here’s the thing: we’re not standing on that hillside anymore. We’re not waiting for the first Pentecost. That already happened. The Spirit has already been poured out on all flesh, as the prophet Joel promised, on all people, young and old, enslaved and free, the prepared and the unprepared. The Spirit isn’t something for which we’re still waiting. The Spirit is what we’ve already received.

Which means the commission is already in effect. The power is already available. The witness has already begun.

We’re not the disciples on the hillside. We’re their descendants, the ones who came after, who received what they waited for, who now carry forward what they started. We don’t need to wait for permission to go. We already have it.

Movement Four: To the Ends of the Earth

So, what does it mean to be a witness? What does it mean to be commissioned? What does it mean to be sent out?

I don’t think it means what a lot of people assume. It’s not primarily about knocking on doors or loading up a tract. The word witness in Greek is martys, which is the same root from which we get martyr. A witness is someone whose life testifies. Someone whose whole existence says: this is true. I know it’s true and because I have this conviction, I’ve staked my life on it.

To be a witness to the resurrection is to live as if death doesn’t get the final word. As if the powers that crush, exclude, and diminish don’t win in the end. As if love is stronger than every force arrayed against it.

That’s not a passive posture. That’s one of the most disruptive things a person can do.

The world runs on a different set of assumptions. The world says: protect yourself. Hoard what you have. The strong survive and while everyone else is crushed. Certain people matter more than others. Some doors are open to you and some aren’t, and that’s just the way it is.

Resurrection says: no. Resurrection says: if even death isn’t the final word, then nothing else can say what’s final apart from God. Resurrection says: we’ve seen what God does with sealed tombs and foregone conclusions. Resurrection says: we’ve seen what happens when the Spirit shows up in locked rooms. Resurrection says: we’ve seen what happens when small, committed groups of people try to change the world. Resurrection says: we will be sent to the ends of the earth.

The ends of the earth, in Luke’s day, meant the farthest imaginable reaches of the known world, the places you’d never go, the people you’d never encounter, the communities outside your circle of concern.

For us, the ends of the earth might be closer than we think. It might be across town. It might be the people our faith communities have historically excluded, the ones who’ve been told there’s no place for them here, only to find that resurrection has a way of opening doors that religion likes to keep shut.

It might mean showing up in places where hope is scarce and saying with your presence, your resources, your time, your voice: we believe something different. We believe you matter. We believe the kin-dom of God is wide enough for you.

Movement Five: Stop Looking at the Sky

Easter’s over. The resurrection appearances are winding down. Jesus is gone, not absent, not uninvolved, but no longer walking around in a body you can touch.

And the question the angels ask is still hanging in the air.

Why are you standing here looking at the sky?

It’s not a question about whether the resurrection happened. It’s not a question about whether heaven is real or whether hope is worth holding. Of course it happened. Of course, heaven’s real. Of course, hope is worth holding.

It’s a question about what you’re going to do with all of it.

The hope we’ve been given isn’t meant to be stored. It isn’t meant to lift us out of the world while the world burns. It’s meant to be poured out, given away, lived into the streets and neighborhoods and relationships and struggles that make up actual human life.

You’ve received the Spirit. You’ve been commissioned. You know what the tomb looks like when it’s empty.

The ends of the earth are waiting. Come back down from the hillside.

Amen.

Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.

Friends, listen for a word from God in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, the 15^th chapter, verses 12 to 28 and verse 55.

¹² Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? ¹³ If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised, ¹⁴ and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation is in vain and your faith is in vain. ¹⁵ We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ—whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. ¹⁶ For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. ¹⁷ If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins. ¹⁸ Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. ¹⁹ If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

²⁰ But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. ²¹ For since death came through a human, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human, ²² for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. ²³ But each in its own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. ²⁴ Then comes the end, when he hands over the kin-dom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. ²⁵ For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. ²⁶ The last enemy to be destroyed is death. ²⁷ For “God has put all things in subjection under his feet.” But when it says, “All things are put in subjection,” it is plain that this does not include the one who put all things in subjection under him. ²⁸ When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all.

⁵⁸ “Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?”

This is the word of God for the people of God.

Friends, you’ve heard me say it before, some passages from the Bible are made for preachers. 1 Corinthians 15:55 is one of those passages: “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?”

“O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”

Paul’s paraphrasing Hosea 13:9-10:

“I will destroy you, O Israel;
who can help you?
10 Where now is your king, that he may save you?
Where in all your cities are your rulers,
of whom you said,
“Give me a king and rulers?”

This is God’s judgement on Israel after they had requested a king, despite God’s words through the prophets that a king would not help them in the way they thought a monarchy would. And then, their king having failed them, they watched their kingdom collapse. They saw what it looked like when the powers of death had their way with a people.

But Paul takes that old lamentation and flips it. He takes what was once a threat and turns it into a taunt. A challenge. A dare.

Paul’s an interesting character to name grief for the community. He’s far from insulated from grief. He’s buried people including close friends. He’s preached to and written letters to communities where the dead were accumulating. He’s come close to death many times himself. But he’s also someone who once caused great grief and death to this very community. And still, as he holds the tension of causing grief and suffering it, he taunts death: “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”

Naming the problem: resurrection doubt

Friends, the passage we heard comes from a church that is not so different from us. The community in Corinth was made up of people who were trying to make sense of Jesus, trying to make sense of their own lives, trying to reconcile the faith they had received with the world in which they actually lived.

And there were people saying, “There is no resurrection of the dead.” Not just “I struggle to believe it,” but “that’s not a thing that happens.”

Paul doesn’t respond with a shrug and say, “Well, believe whatever you want.” He responds, “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain, and your faith has been in vain.”

That’s strong language. If Christ is not raised, the whole thing falls apart. Paul’s saying: resurrection is not an optional add‑on for people who like more mystical theology. It’s the center of the Christian imagination. Without resurrection, our faith collapses into wishful thinking.

Now, I know some of you hear that and think, “Okay, but resurrection is exactly what I struggle to believe.” Maybe you can get on board with Jesus as a teacher, as a liberator, as the one whose life shows us what love looks like in public. But a body raised from the dead? A whole future where the dead are raised and all things are made new? That can sound like a bit much.

If that’s you, you’re not alone, and you’re not outside the story. In fact, you’re sitting with the Corinthians, with people who have always struggled to imagine that death’s apparent finality is not the last word.

What is resurrection, really?

Part of the problem is that we’ve been handed some very strange images of resurrection: floating spirits, disembodied souls, zombies, a kind of spiritual escape hatch from the material world. But that’s not what Paul’s talking about. When Paul says “resurrection,” he’s talking about bodies. Real, actual, embodied life. Not ethereal souls finally leaving these “bad bodies” behind, but the healing, renewing, and raising up of bodies in God’s future. Resurrection is God saying, “I will not abandon creation. I will not abandon your body. I will not abandon the bodies that empire has crushed.”

The Corinth Paul was writing to was a city soaked in hierarchy: differences of class, wealth, gender, ethnicity, and status. Some bodies mattered more than others. Some lives were disposable. Some people were close to the centers of power; others were enslaved, exploited, or ignored. Sound familiar?

When Paul talks about resurrection, he’s not only comforting them with the idea that they will “go to heaven when they die.” He’s announcing that the God who raised Jesus from the dead intends to undo all the power structures that treat some bodies as sacred and others as expendable.

Resurrection says: the last word about your body isn’t what empire says, not what white supremacy says, not what Christian nationalism says, not what queerphobia says, not what ableism or fatphobia says. The last word about your body belongs to God, and God’s word is “life.”

Christ as first fruits: the beginning, not the whole harvest

Paul calls the risen Christ “the first fruits of those who have died.” “First fruits” is an agricultural image. It’s that first part of the harvest that comes in, the first ripe fruit on the vine. You don’t look at the first fruits and say, “Well, at least we got something.” You look at it and say, “This is the sign that the rest of the harvest is coming.”

When Paul calls Jesus “the first fruits,” he’s saying that what God did in the body of Jesus is the beginning of what God intends to do with all creation. Jesus is not the exception, but the pattern. It means that what God does with Jesus is what God will do with us, with our beloved dead, with creation itself.

And that’s a direct challenge to the way power works in our world. Because in our world, the way you keep people in line is by threatening them with some form of death: death of reputation; death of livelihood; social death, exile, exclusion; and sometimes, yes, physical death.

If you can convince people that the worst thing that can happen is to lose your life, or your place, or your status, and that after that there is only silence, you can control them. You can keep them quiet, compliant, manageable.

But resurrection says: the worst thing that can happen is not the last thing that can happen. The God who raised Jesus from the dead is not done yet.

The powers that be, and the power that is Paul says, “For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”

That language can sound violent if we’re not careful. Christians have absolutely abused this language to justify the domination of other religions, of colonized peoples, of women, of Queer and Trans people, of anyone who didn’t fit the imposed norm. “Look,” they said, “Christ will put enemies under his feet. And guess what? We get to act in his name.”

But look at who Paul names as the final enemy: death. Not “those people over there.” Not people who don’t believe like we do. Death.

And what are the allies of death? Everything that deals in death. Systems of white supremacy and racialized violence. Christian nationalism that worships power and control instead of Jesus. Economic systems that treat human beings as disposable for profit. Queerphobia and transphobia that tell people they’re better off dead than fully themselves. Ableism that treats some bodies as burdens rather than as bearers of God’s image.

Paul’s vision is not of Jesus trampling our human enemies. It’s of Jesus dismantling everything that allies itself with death. Ultimately that includes death itself.

When Paul says God will be “all in all,” he imagines a reality in which nothing stands opposed to the life of God, nothing is organized around death anymore. Every structure, every system, every “principality and power” that feeds on death is abolished.

Where death looks like it’s winning

Now, if we stopped here, this would just be a big beautiful theological picture, and you could leave thinking, “That’s nice. In some cosmic future, death won’t win.”

I don’t know about you, but I don’t live in that future. I live in a world where we are grieving, where we are all tired, where we are still reading the news and asking, “How is this happening?”

We see death’s shadow in so many places. So, when Paul says, “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” it can sound like a triumph that skips over our lived experience. It can sound like a boast that ignores the reality we inhabit every day. It can sound like a victory lap we haven’t earned.

But what if those questions are not the words of someone pretending death doesn’t hurt? What if they’re the words of someone who has stared death in the face, who has watched their friends be martyred, who has felt the power of empire, and still dares to say, “You do not get the last word?”

Resurrection as courage, not escape

So, what does any of this mean for us, here, now, as a small community with limited capacity, as people who are tired, who are trying our best, and who are sometimes just hanging on?

First, resurrection is the promise that God is committed to this world and these bodies, which means that what we do here matters. How we love, how we resist, how we show up for one another, it all matters. Nothing done in love is wasted.

Second, resurrection gives us courage. If death is not the final word, then we are free to live authentically, to tell the truth, to resist systems of death, and to be honest about our own wounds. Death loses some of its power to intimidate us into silence.

Third, and this is important, resurrection courage doesn’t mean we all sign up for more and more exhausting activism, more and more commitments, more and more “doing” until we collapse. Some of you are already at your limit. Your days are full. Your bodies are tired. Your nervous systems are frayed.

If I stood here and said, “Because of the resurrection, you all must now go out and do ten more things for justice this week,” that wouldn’t be good news. That would be cruelty dressed up as piety. Not to mention that most of you would probably say, “Ok, show us your ten, pastor.” I ain’t got the time for two, let alone ten, new commitments and I doubt you do.

So what do we do?

So, what do we do with “Where, O death, is your victory?”

For some folks, the faithful response is simply to trust that God is not done with you. When you feel like everything is closed off, you might whisper, “This is not the end of my story.” That is an act of resistance.

For other folks, the faithful response is grief. You’ve lost people, dreams, communities. You’re sorrow, processed, unprocessed, and still processing. To let yourself grieve in the presence of the God who raises the dead is an act of faith. You don’t have to rush to hope. You can cry out, and in your crying you are still held by the One who promises new life.

Other people, particularly those of us who can’t stop asking what more we can and need to do, the faithful response is a small act of solidarity with someone whose life is under threat. Maybe we check in on a Trans friend who’s scared. Maybe we make a phone call to someone we don’t get to speak to often or we decide to give a small donation to some good cause, or we use our social media to amplify voices our friends and family would never otherwise hear.

Maybe you need to rest more or maybe you just need to keep showing up, praying with your souls and with what strength you can muster. Every act of love and every moment of lives lived in love testify to the forces of death that they cannot and will not have power over your life.

“Where is your victory?” as a daily question

The title of this sermon is “Where is Your Victory?” Sometimes we aim that question outward toward death and its allies; toward systems of oppression, toward the stories that tell us we are worthless, toward the numbness that keeps us from feeling.

But I also want you to hear that question as something you can carry with you in a gentler way. When you encounter something that feels like death, a conflict, a loss, an injustice, you might quietly ask, “Where is your victory?”

Not because you see the victory yet. Not because you are sure how the story ends. But because you are aligning yourself with the One who has already begun the harvest. You’re saying, “I do not yet see the resurrection here. But I’m staking my life on the God who has promised that death will not win.”

Ending in hope, not certainty

I want to be clear: this isn’t about certainty. You don’t have to walk out of here today with all your questions about resurrection resolved. Faith is not a multiple‑choice test with one right answer. Faith, in this sense, is more like leaning. It’s the direction you lean when you don’t have all the evidence.

Paul leans toward resurrection. He leans toward a God who will not abandon bodies, a God who will not surrender the world to death, a God who created the world good and desperately, urgently wants to reconcile the world to God’s self.

My friends, my hope for us, is that we, too, will lean in that direction. That when we see death seeming to win, we will remember that it is already on borrowed time. That when we feel the sting of sin and the weight of systems that harm, we will remember that they, too, are not eternal.

And that together, in whatever capacity we have day-to-day and in our ordinary lives, we will practice resurrection. Because Christ is raised, and the first fruits have already appeared. The harvest is not yet complete. But death’s victory is slipping through its fingers.

Where, O death, is your victory?

Where, O death, is your sting?

May our lives, in all their beauty, begin to answer: “It’s not here. Not anymore. Not forever.”

Amen.

Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.

Friends, listen for a word from God in the Gospel according to John, the 20^th chapter, verses 19 to 29.

¹⁹ When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors were locked where the disciples were, for fear of the [religious authorities],1 Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” ²⁰ After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. ²¹ Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” ²² When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. ²³ If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

²⁴ But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. ²⁵ So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

²⁶ A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” ²⁷ Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” ²⁸ Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” ²⁹ Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

This is the word of God for the people of God.

Movement One: Where Was Thomas?

It’s evening on the first day of the week. The disciples are behind locked doors. John tells us they are afraid, afraid of the same authorities who had just crucified Jesus. And into that fear, into that sealed room, Jesus comes. He preaches to them. He commissions them. He reiterates the promise of sending the Spirit to be with them. It’s a deeply personal, intimate moment for the disciples.

But Thomas isn’t there.

For centuries that single absence has defined him. Doubting Thomas. The disciple who wasn’t where he was expected to be, who demanded proof before he would believe, who needed to see before he could trust. The church has repeated this story so often that his very name has become a synonym for skepticism, for hesitation, for the failure of faith.

But before we follow that road again, let’s sit with what the text doesn’t say. It doesn’t say Thomas ran away. It doesn’t say Thomas gave up. It doesn’t say Thomas was hiding in self-pity or wallowing in disbelief. In fact, if we take Scripture at its face value, at what it says and doesn’t say, it seems that Jesus is totally unconcerned that Thomas isn’t present.

Thomas had already shown us who he was. In John 11:16, when Jesus decides to return to Judea after the death of Lazarus, the same Judea where the religious authorities had just tried to stone him, it’s Thomas who speaks up. Not with a question. Not with a protest, but with a bold declaration: “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” That’s not the voice of a coward. That’s not someone whose faith runs shallow. Thomas is willing to walk toward death alongside his teacher.

So where was he when Jesus appeared? We don’t know. Perhaps Thomas grieved differently than the others, not in a group behind a locked door but out in the city, in motion, in the kind of restless sorrow that cannot sit still. Perhaps he was the one who didn’t have the luxury of hiding, because someone needed tending to: a grieving family member, a follower of Jesus who had no community to lock themselves inside with, someone on the margins who had come to depend on this movement and now had nowhere to turn.

We know that Jesus’ execution left more people shattered than just the twelve men who take up most of the space in the Gospels. There were women who had followed him from Galilee, funding his ministry, caring for the community. There were people he had healed whose lives had been transformed. There were the poor to whom he had announced good news. When the movement’s leader was killed, who was looking after them? Maybe that responsibility fell to Thomas. Maybe he was the one who stepped up.

The text gives us enough to know that Thomas was not a man who abandoned people in crisis. So, when we find him absent from that locked room, maybe the most honest thing we can say is not that he failed to show up, but that he showed up somewhere else.

Movement Two: The Wound-Keeper

When Thomas finally rejoins the group, the others tell him what happened. “We have seen the Lord.” And Thomas says the thing that has followed him ever since: “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

Notice for what Thomas asks. He doesn’t ask for a vision. He doesn’t ask for a feeling. He doesn’t ask Jesus to appear in a dream or whisper to his spirit. He asks to touch the wounds.

This is a profound and specific request, and I think we have been wrong to call it doubt. Thomas has just watched his teacher, the one he was willing to die with, be arrested, beaten, and executed. He’s sat with that trauma. He’s processed what it means that Rome can take a person you love and destroy them publicly and completely. And now his friends are telling him that the same person is alive again, that death did not hold him, that something happened on the other side of that violence.

Thomas isn’t asking for proof because he has a deficiency of faith. Thomas is asking for proof because he’s a human being who has been through something devastating. And he knows, the way anyone who has suffered knows, that you can’t simply skip over the wound to get to the healing. You have to go through it.

And we also need to remember, honestly, that while the other disciples may not have demanded evidence, they had already experienced the evidence. Jesus had appeared to them, and they had the opportunity to do exactly what Thomas is now asking.

There’s a theological tradition, rooted in the Hebrew prophets and carried through the psalms of lament, which insists our grief and our doubt are not obstacles to encountering God; they’re the very path toward it. The psalms are full of people who throw their anguish directly at God. The first line of the 22^nd Psalm reads, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” That isn’t faithlessness; in fact, both Mark and Matthew record Jesus saying those words moments before his death. This is honest faith, the kind that doesn’t perform certainty it doesn’t feel. Thomas is praying a psalm with his whole body. He’s saying: I can’t pretend the crucifixion didn’t happen. I can’t leap to resurrection without first standing in the grief.

Perhaps there is a kind of pastoral wisdom in Thomas’ demand, in the honesty and sincerity of his questions, that we have too often dismissed. If the resurrection is real, it should be able to bear the weight of our questions. A faith that cannot withstand honest inquiry is not a faith worth having. Thomas is not tearing down the house. He’s testing the foundation. He wants to know if this thing which we have come to call the church can hold.

Movement Three: Eight Days in the In-Between

In addition to Thomas’ story, there’s another dynamic most of us miss in this passage. John tells us that between Thomas learning of Jesus’ resurrection and Jesus’ appearing to Thomas and the rest of the disciples, eight days pass.

Eight days.

Jesus doesn’t appear to Thomas that night. He doesn’t show up the next morning to correct him or reassure him. There’s no immediate resolution. Thomas lives in the gray area, the liminal space between believing enough to serve the community, but still not believing that Jesus really has returned for eight full days while the rest of the disciples are apparently transformed by their encounter with the risen Christ.

Think about the emotional and psychological cost. You’re living in community with people who have had a miraculous experience you haven’t had. You hear them speaking with certainty about something you can’t yet fully affirm. Yet you keep showing up without having received what you need.

Those eight days are a portrait of faith. Thomas stays. He doesn’t leave in anger or shame. He doesn’t pretend to believe what he does not believe. He simply remains present in the community, carrying his questions, with honest suspicion and expectant hope.

The ancient church observed this passage as an image of the time between Easter and the second coming, the long in-between in which the church lives now, having heard the testimony of the resurrection but not yet seeing what we have been promised. We are, in other words, all living Thomas’ eight days. We have the witness of those who came before us. We have the testimony of scripture and tradition and the community of faith. We have our personal revelations, those moments when we have encountered the risen Lord ourselves. But we haven’t yet seen with our own eyes. We haven’t touched the wounds ourselves.

The Rabbinic tradition of Judaism speaks of teshuvah, the act of turning back to God, similar to what Christians call confession or repentance. But what Thomas demonstrates in these eight days is slightly different: not a return from wandering, but a faithful remaining in the wilderness. He doesn’t wander. He waits. And that waiting is holy.

Movement Four: The Touch and the Declaration

At the end of those eight days, Jesus visits the disciples again and Thomas is with them. Jesus goes directly to him.

He doesn’t scold Thomas. He doesn’t lecture him about the nature of faith or remind him that the others believed without needing direct proof. He offers Thomas the evidence. “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.”

We don’t know if Thomas actually touches the wounds. John doesn’t tell us. What we know is that Thomas’ response comes immediately and completely: “My Lord and my God.”

This is the highest Christological declaration in the Gospel according to John. Not Peter’s confession, not Martha’s, though those are significant too. Thomas, the one who has been labeled the doubter, becomes the first person in this Gospel to name Jesus as God without qualification. He doesn’t say “My teacher” or “My Lord” alone. He says, “My Lord and my God.” That declaration would have been recognized immediately by Jewish ears as an echo of Psalm 35 and Psalm 38, where David cries out to God in anguish and then is met by God. Thomas’ confession is born not in easy certainty but in the crucible of grief and honest waiting. That’s where the deepest knowledge of God so often lives.

Then Jesus speaks what has often been read as a gentle rebuke: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” I want to push back on the rebuke interpretation. Jesus doesn’t say Thomas was wrong to ask for evidence, to ask for proof. Jesus says there is a blessing for those who believe without seeing, a statement about the future community of faith, about us, about everyone who would follow and never have the option of touching the wounds themselves. Jesus isn’t scolding Thomas but rather telling him that Thomas has seen the risen Lord. Not physically until that moment, but in the people to whom Thomas has been visiting, consoling, and ministering to in the community.

And Jesus didn’t withhold himself from Thomas while Thomas was in those eight days. Jesus came. Jesus offered the touch. Jesus met Thomas in the specific and embodied place of Thomas’ need. The blessing on those who believe without seeing does not mean that those who need to see are less beloved. It means that the gift Thomas received is extended to everyone who comes after. The testimony of scripture and the Christian community and the movement of the Spirit continues to extend that gift to each of us.

Movement Five: Showing Up for the Thomas in the Room

Every congregation has people living in Thomas’ eight days right now.

People who have suffered losses that have not been resolved, that may never be resolved. People who were certain about their faith once and are no longer certain about anything. People who were hurt by the church, by another Christian, or by a theology that promised them one thing and delivered another. People who are watching the world, watching innocent people displaced, watching systems designed to crush the vulnerable grind on, watching the gap between what the church proclaims on Sunday and what it does the rest of the week and finding it very hard to feel the resurrection.

These people aren’t failing. They’re being faithful in the only way they can right now. They’re staying. They’re showing up. They’re carrying their questions into community rather than carrying them out the door.

The question for the rest of us, for those who, in this season, are more like the ten disciples in the locked room than like Thomas in his wilderness, is what kind of community we are going to be during those eight days. Are we going to treat those people with impatience, with judgment, with the subtle message that their inability to believe as quickly or as fully as we do is a spiritual deficiency? Or are we going to do what Thomas did: stay present, keep showing up, remain in the community with our questions held openly until the encounter comes?

Because here’s what the story of Thomas teaches us about accompanying one another through trauma, grief, and honest doubt: presence is the ministry. Thomas didn’t leave. He stayed with people who had something he didn’t have, and in staying, he was there when Jesus came back through the door.

The call to honor those on their own timeline and show up for them even when their process looks different from ours, isn’t a minor footnote to Christian community. Jesus modeled it. He came back. He came specifically for Thomas. He made space for the eight days. God doesn’t require us to arrive at faith on a schedule of someone else’s design. And because God doesn’t require that of us, we have no business requiring it of each other.

The resurrection is not an argument to be won. It’s a wound to be touched. And the church at its best is a community of people willing to hold still long enough for someone else to reach out their hand.

Amen.

Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.

Friends, listen for a word from God in the Gospel according to Luke, the 24^th chapter, verses 36 to 49.

³⁶ While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” ³⁷ They were startled and terrified and thought that they were seeing a ghost. ³⁸ He said to them, “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? ³⁹ Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see, for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” ⁴⁰ And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. ⁴¹ Yet for all their joy they were still disbelieving and wondering, and he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” ⁴² They gave him a piece of broiled fish, ⁴³ and he took it and ate in their presence.

⁴⁴ Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.” ⁴⁵ Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, ⁴⁶ and he said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day ⁴⁷ and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. ⁴⁸ You are witnesses of these things. ⁴⁹ And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised, so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.”

This is the word of God for the people of God.

Movement I: What Would You Give Him?

This week I crowd sourced answers to a question: If Jesus appeared to you right now and asked for something to eat, what would you give him? In addition to our congregational group chat, I also posted that question on my Facebook and in several clergy groups. Here are a sample of the responses I got:

• Many people said whatever they had handy or simply everything they had which, for one person, could include toddler food like chicken nuggets, mac and cheese, and edamame or her meal prep food of tofu, pasta, and veggies.

• Three people asked if Jesus keeps kosher given that he was Jewish.

• Some answers were clearly cultural or reflected people’s backgrounds including tacos, nachos, a juicy steak, enchiladas, soup, noodles, and a crumpet with melty butter.

• While other people suggested options from Jesus’ culture: artichokes, olives, falafel, dates, wine, cheese, bread, and fish.

• Speaking of bread and fish, one person suggested a tuna melt because the gospels make it clear that Jesus liked bread and fish.

• Desserts and snacks were also popular including popcorn, ice cream (has Jesus ever tasted ice cream?), French silk pie, angel food cupcakes, and brownies.

• Two people suggested the best items they could cook: blueberry buttermilk pancakes and chocolate chip cookies.

• And two people, a pastor and a religion professor, said they’d either offer Jesus a beer or take him to a local brewery because he’s got to be tired of wine by now.

I love every single one of these. And I want you to notice something: every one of those answers tells us something about the people who responded: what you have in the kitchen, what you love, what you’d reach for in a moment of startled hospitality. The question reveals us.

Let’s look at how the disciples responded when they were faced by that question. Luke tells us that when the risen Jesus appeared in that room, suddenly, inexplicably, while they were in the middle of a conversation, they didn’t immediately reach for food. They reached for a category: ghost. Spirit. Something non-corporeal and therefore manageable.

“Peace be with you,” Jesus says. And they were terrified.

Jesus, ever patient with our confusion, says: look at my hands. Look at my feet. A ghost doesn’t have flesh and bones. But even then, Luke tells us, they still didn’t believe: “while in their joy they were disbelieving.”

This is one of the more psychologically honest sentences in Scripture. They were disbelieving because of joy. Not because of doubt. Not because of grief. Because such great joy breaks the categories we have for it.

And then Jesus said, almost comically, “Have you anything here to eat?”

That’s it. That’s the line. The risen Lord of creation, standing before them in resurrected flesh, asks: got any snacks?

They gave him a piece of broiled fish. And he took it. And he ate it in their presence.

Luke makes sure we know this. He dwells on it. The fish. The eating. The presence. Because this is the whole point: the resurrection is not an escape from matter. Resurrection is the redemption of matter. The body matters. Food matters. Presence matters. The risen Jesus eats fish with his friends.

Movement II: What We Give in Our Own Lives

Now. What would you actually give him?

Not the funny answer. Not the cute answer. Not the type of food or even food itself. What I mean is in the actual moments of your life, when the sacred shows up hungry, what do you give and, more importantly, how do you respond?

Because Jesus does keep showing up. Not in resurrected bodily form in your living room, but hungry. Always hungry. Hungry in the Matthew 25 sense: “I was hungry and you fed me. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was sick and you came to me. Whatever you did to the least of these, you did to me.”

The question is always the same: have you anything here to eat?

I want us to think about what it takes to actually respond to that question in our individual lives. It’s not a question about having the right theology. It’s not a question about being in the right denomination or reading the right books. It’s a question about what’s in your hands and whether you’ll extend your hands to Jesus.

Those disciples handed over what they had. They didn’t cook a new meal. They didn’t apologize that it was only fish. It was what was there, and they gave it. In fact, for many of the disciples, their shared story with Jesus had come full circle. They were back home in Galilee and they were fishing. Here in the mundane, ordinary moments is where discipleship actually lives; not in the grand gesture you’re planning for later, but in what you have right now.

What’s in your hands right now? Time. Attention. Skill. Money. A willingness to sit with someone in their pain without fixing it. The courage to say “I love you and I see you” to someone who needs to hear it.

In that moment the disciples had a piece of broiled fish.

The disciples didn’t hand Jesus a fish because they had worked up sufficient faith. They handed it over still not fully believing, still wobbling between joy and disbelief. The presence of Jesus didn’t require their certainty as a prerequisite. In fact, Jesus’ presence didn’t require anything of the disciples, but even in their fear and their doubt, something moved them to respond.

This is grace. We don’t have to get our act together and then respond to the risen Christ. We respond, perhaps haltingly, imperfectly, and confused in our joy, and the responding itself is how we come to know what we believe.

Movement III: What We Give Together

But Luke doesn’t let us stop there. Because Jesus doesn’t just eat the fish, say thanks, and leave. He opens the Scriptures. He opens their understanding to how they fit into that scripture. And then he says:

“Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.”

You. Are. Witnesses. Not viewers, perceivers, or beholders. Witnesses. Witnessing requires both seeing and professing. It’s not a private spiritual activity. Witnessing is public. Witnessing has the power to change things.

Beginning from Jerusalem. Not from somewhere safe. From Jerusalem, the city that had just executed him. From the wound. From the place of grief and political violence. Beginning there, it goes to all nations.

This is where the stakes of the text become impossible to ignore. Because we’re not just individuals responding to the risen Christ in our quiet moments. We’re communities, families, churches, and cities and the risen Christ appears to us too and asks for something to eat.

“Have you anything here to eat?” At the scale of our region, we’re asking: what are we doing about the 1-in-5 people in Franklin County who experience food insecurity? When we ask it at the scale of our nation, we’re confronted with systems that have kept communities hungry for generations. Slavery, sharecropping, redlining, internment camps, paying workers in company credit, mass deportation, racial and ethnic quotas, gender pay gaps, and contemporary poverty wages have kept most Americans—even straight, cis, male, white Americans—closer to poverty than to wealth. Every one of these systems were and are intentional choices made by ruling classes to keep others down and in their places.

Liberation theology, which arose from the poor of Latin America reading the Gospel under similar forms of oppression, has always insisted on this: God has a preferential option for the poor. Not because poor people are holier than rich people, but because God notices who’s hungry and takes it personally. The Jesus who ate broiled fish with his confused, grieving, joyfully disbelieving friends is the same Jesus who says: when you ignore the hungry ones, you ignore me.

This is not just a political statement. This is the text. This has always been the text. The prophets were saying it before Jesus was born. Isaiah demanding that people loose the bonds of injustice, let the oppressed go free, and share bread with the hungry. Jeremiah weeping over a city that had forgotten its covenant obligations to the vulnerable. The gleaning laws in Leviticus, requiring that the edges of the field be left unharvested so the poor could eat. The Jubilee, which canceled debts, returned land, and freed slaves so that poverty would not become permanent.

God has been asking communities the same question for millennia: have you anything here to eat? And the answer is always the same: yes. The question is whether we’ll give it.

The church at its best has always understood that responding to the risen Christ means more than personal piety. It means being the kind of community that reorganizes itself around the question of who is hungry. It means being a church that gets inconvenient. That puts its money, its voice, and its presence in places that are uncomfortable.

Here’s what Luke’s showing us: the risen Jesus didn’t just appear to the disciples and leave them changed on the inside. He commissioned them. He sent them out. He said: what happened here, in this room, with this fish, with this opened Scripture, with these suddenly understanding minds; that’s not the destination. That’s the beginning.

You are witnesses of these things. Beginning from Jerusalem.

Coda: He’s Still Here and He’s Still Hungry

I want to close with the simplicity of this scene.

The risen Jesus is in a room. His people are there. They’re confused, joyful, and half-believing. He shows them his hands. He asks for food. They give it. He eats it. In their presence.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. The resurrection isn’t a doctrine to be defended. It’s a presence to be encountered. And the encounter always, always involves something concrete. Something you can hold in your hands. Something you can give.

The risen Christ is still in rooms. Still showing up in the middle of conversations. Still saying peace. Still extending hands that have seen trauma. Still asking: have you anything here to eat?

He’s hungry in your home. He’s hungry in this congregation. He’s hungry in this city. He’s hungry in this nation. He’s hungry in parts of the world where exploitation builds what we call “comfort.”

And the invitation is the same as it was in that sealed room filled with fearful disciples. Not to have everything figured out. Not to have your faith fully formed and your doubt fully resolved. Not to wait until you’ve cooked something worthy.

Just to give what you have. In his presence. Which is all the disciples did.

They gave him a piece of broiled fish, which he ate in their presence.

May we be so faithful. Amen.

Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.

Friends, listen for a word from God in the Gospel according to Matthew, the 28^th chapter, verses 1-10 and 16-20.

After the Sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. ² And suddenly there was a great earthquake, for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. ³ His appearance was like lightning and his clothing white as snow. ⁴ For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men. ⁵ But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. ⁶ He is not here, for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. ⁷ Then go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.’ This is my message for you.” ⁸ So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy and ran to tell his disciples. ⁹ Suddenly Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshiped him. ¹⁰ Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers and sisters to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”

¹⁶ Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. ¹⁷ When they saw him, they worshiped him, but they doubted. ¹⁸ And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. ¹⁹ Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit ²⁰ and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

This is the word of God for the people of God.

“Announcing the Resurrection is Women’s Work: A Sermon for Easter Sunday”

Before the Men Knew Anything

It was still dark. Matthew’s precise about this. The sun had not yet crested the hills outside Jerusalem. The stone was still sealed. The guards were still at their post. The men, for all we’re told in the Gospels, were still locked behind doors, tangled in paralyzing grief, racked with shame, and bound by fear. They had run. They had denied. They had watched from a distance or not at all.

And we shouldn’t fault them. The man they had been following for several years, who said that he was one with God, that he was the Son of Man—coded language for being the messiah—this man had been condemned to death and executed in the most brutal and public way that the world had yet invented. No, we shouldn’t fault Jesus’ followers who were in hiding. They didn’t know how the story would unfold. What might we have done under similar circumstances?

But we should remember who was there. Mary Magdalene was there. And so was another Mary who is only called “the other.” Tradition holds that this other Mary was the wife of Clopas and was present with Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of Jesus at his death and burial. Despite having the same name in the text, early Christian accounts suggest that she was Mary’s sister and therefore Jesus’ aunt.

So, on that morning, when it was still dark, before the sun had risen, before the announcement, before the earthquake, before the angel arrived dressed in white. These two women were already on their way to the tomb.

Let that sit for a moment. The first witnesses to the resurrection weren’t Peter, John, Andrew, James (who was the son Clopas and “the other” Mary), the other James, Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas, Matthew, Thaddaeus, or Simon the Zealot. They were women. Women whose testimony, under Roman law and under the social customs of first-century Judaism, was considered legally insufficient. Women whose voices were systematically discounted in the public and religious life of their world.

And yet. God chose them. Not despite their marginalization, but as if to announce, from the very first moment, that the logic of the resurrection is not the logic of empire. It’s not the logic of patriarchy. It’s not the logic of a world that decides who counts and who doesn’t. The resurrection begins at the margins. It always has.

What the Angel Said and What Jesus Said

The angel speaks first: “Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Go quickly and tell his disciples.”

Go and tell. That is the first commissioning of Easter morning. Not a quiet suggestion. Not a gentle invitation. A directive. Go. Tell. Announce the resurrection. And who receives it? Mary Magdalene and the other Mary.

But then, and don’t rush past this, on their way, Jesus himself meets them. They take hold of his feet. They worship. And Jesus echoes the angel almost word for word: “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers and sisters to go to Galilee.”

Notice what Jesus does here. He calls the male disciples his brothers and he sends women to tell them. Read that again. The risen Christ, in his first post-resurrection appearance to any human being, commissions women to be the bearers of the news to men. He reverses the entire assumed hierarchy of who speaks and who listens, who leads and who follows, who carries authority and who receives it.

In a world where women could not testify in court, Jesus makes women the primary witnesses to the most consequential event in human history. In a world where women were taught at the feet of men, Jesus sends women to teach men. The first sermon ever preached about the resurrection was preached by Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to a room full of frightened men who desperately needed to hear it. These Marys and Jesus’ mother, Mary, have rightly been called apostles to the apostles and disciples.

Go and tell. Twice in one morning, the first proclaimers of the resurrection are commissioned. The first preachers of Easter are women. This is not incidental to the story. This is the story. One detail on which all four gospels agree is that women went to the tomb first and women announced Jesus’ resurrection first.

And still, despite clear evidence to the contrary, the church has systematically barred women from ministry in almost every form.

The Long Silence the Church Imposed

Let’s say it plainly because particularly on Easter we need to be honest: the church has sinned against women. Not accidentally. Not mildly. Systematically, theologically, institutionally, the church took the very people whom God chose to first announce the resurrection and said that their voices didn’t count. Sit in the pew. Raise the children. Teach the children and other women. Make the casseroles. But don’t preach. Don’t lead. Don’t speak with authority.

The church twisted Paul’s letters, letters written to specific, struggling communities in specific historical moments into universal gag orders. They read 1 Timothy 2:12—“I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent.”—as the final word on women’s leadership for all time and all places. But they conveniently ignored the context of Paul’s language (Paul used words that are better translated as “husband” and “wife”) and they also ignored what Paul wrote everywhere else.

In the very same letter (1 Timothy 3:11), Paul discusses the qualifications for women to be deacons. In Romans 16:1, Paul commends Phoebe to the church at Rome, calling her a deacon and a benefactor, using the same Greek word for deacon that he uses when referring to himself and to Timothy. He then greets Priscilla before her husband Aquila, almost certainly because she was the senior leader of the pair. He names Junia as “prominent among the apostles” (the church would later try to give her a male name and erase a woman from such great standing among the apostles).

The selective reading of Paul that silenced women was never neutral scholarship. It was political maneuvering to maintain the power of men at the expense of women and anyone else who didn’t conform to what was considered “masculine,” “manly,” and in line with the preferred and favored gender identity of the time. Christianity wasn’t being particularly original in elevating men over women and anyone considered less than the male ideal. Remember, Mosaic law forbade a man “whose testicles [were] crushed or whose penis [was] cut off” to enter the assembly of God (Deuteronomy 23:1). Religions have a long and infamous history of excluding people without penises or whose penises didn’t pass muster from accessing and holding power.

We have to recognize that the same impulse that told women they couldn’t preach told them they couldn’t vote, couldn’t own property, couldn’t practice medicine or law, and couldn’t testify in their own defense. The church didn’t just reflect that culture; it provided the theological architecture. It gave patriarchy the blessing of God. And that is a sin. It deserves to be named as such.

Fannie Lou Hamer knew what it was to have her voice suppressed by systems that claimed God’s blessing. A sharecropper’s daughter from the Mississippi Delta, the youngest of twenty children, she educated herself by studying her Bible because the plantation system, a system that was nearly unchanged before and after emancipation, gave her no other schooling. She committed hundreds of verses to memory. She sang spirituals as a form of prayer and protest, singing “This Little Light of Mine” while she and her neighbors were held on a bus by police after trying to register to vote.

When she was arrested and jailed in Winona, Mississippi, in 1963 and beaten so severely that she suffered permanent kidney damage, she asked her cellmate, a teenage girl, to sing with her, because she needed God to be present in that cell. Her faith was not decorative. It was the substance of her survival.

And when she testified before the Credentials Committee of the 1964 Democratic National Convention, describing the violence she had endured simply for trying to exercise the rights the Constitution guaranteed, President Lyndon Johnson was so threatened by the power of her voice that he called an impromptu press conference just to bump her off live TV. The most powerful man in the world interrupted his own schedule to silence a Black woman from Mississippi. He didn’t succeed and the networks ran her testimony in full that evening. She educated a nation.

The church that told women like Fannie Lou Hamer to be quiet was not following Jesus and it wasn’t just following empire. It was constructing empire under the disguise of faith.

The Women Who Went Anyway

Here’s the thing about resurrection: you can’t suppress it. You can try. You might be able to make it quiet or push it far to the margins, but resurrection will eventually conquer any power that tries to stop it. Jesus overcame death and the grave. The powers of this world don’t stand a chance.

Women went anyway. They preached anyway. They led anyway. They built the church often while the institution was busy telling them they were out of order.

The Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis has served as senior minister of Middle Collegiate Church in New York City for two decades, building one of the most joyful, multiracial, and radically affirming congregations in the country. She preaches with the full weight of the Black church tradition and the full range of her own prophetic voice on racism, on democracy, and on the sacred worth of every human being. She didn’t ask the church’s permission. She followed God’s lead and did the work.

The Rev. Dr. Serene Jones serves as president of Union Theological Seminary, one of the most storied institutions of theological education in the world, a place that shaped Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Reinhold Niebuhr, and many others. She’s a systematic theologian whose work on trauma and grace has opened the gospel to people the church had given up on. She’s training the preachers and scholars who will carry the faith into the next generation.

The Rt. Rev. Dr. Katherine Jefferts Schori became the first woman elected Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in 2006, leading 2.4 million Anglicans through some of the most turbulent years in that denomination’s history. Conservative provinces of the Anglican Communion threatened to break away over her election. She served faithfully for nine years anyway.

The Rt. Rev. Yvette Flunder is the Presiding Prelate of The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries, a Black Queer Pentecostal woman who built a movement at the intersection of the Black Pentecostalism and radical Queer affirmation. A woman who has been told her whole life that she had to choose between her Blackness and her Queerness, between her faith and her full self. She refused to choose. She built a network of clergy and churches instead. She’s proof that the Spirit doesn’t wait for institutions to catch up before doing something new.

And just 11 days ago, the Most Rev. and Rt. Hon. Dame Sarah Mullally—who has the coolest ecclesiastical title other than maybe the Pope—was installed as the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury. The first woman to hold that office in its more than 1400-year history. A former nurse who spent years at the bedside of cancer patients before she was ever ordained, she processed into Canterbury Cathedral and took her seat in a chair that had never held a woman. She is now the spiritual leader of 85 million Anglicans worldwide.

But Archbishop Mullally, Bishop Flunder, Bishop Jefferts Schori, the Rev. Dr. Jones, the Rev. Dr. Lewis, and Mrs. Hamer are far from the only women who have broken significant ground in the church, and they are not the end of this story. Yes, it might have taken 1,400 years from the founding of the See of Canterbury for a bishop to be a woman, but in many parts of the church women continue to be excluded from ministry. Some parts of the church are still failing to do what God did on Easter morning before sunrise. God is patient. God is also very persistent.

Go and Tell. Your Commission Too

We’re now in the final movement of Matthew 28. The scene has shifted. We’re on a mountain in Galilee. The eleven disciples see the risen Jesus, who speaks to them: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” This is the Great Commission.

Even though Jesus speaks these words to eleven men, the Great Commission isn’t given to a credentialed elite. It’s not given only to those who never wavered. It’s given to a group of people on a hillside. A group of men who never missed an opportunity to screw up. People who had failed, fled, and doubted and it’s given to us too.

That commission has always been women’s work. From the first moment. From before the sun came up on the first Easter morning. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary didn’t wait for a church council to vote on whether they were qualified. They ran from the tomb with great prophetic joy.

Here’s the call this Easter day. Not just to celebrate the resurrection, but to proclaim the resurrection. To live like resurrection people.

Do we believe it enough to open every door of this church and every door of Christian leadership to women, without qualification, without asterisks, without the quiet assumption that men are the default and women are the exception?

Do we believe it enough to advocate for women’s leadership in the broader church? To refuse to give our fellowship, our dollars, our participation to institutions that still use the name of God to keep women out?

Do we believe it enough to actively seek out, encourage, fund, and follow women preachers, pastors, theologians, bishops, not as a progressive gesture, but as a theological conviction rooted in what happened before sunrise on the first Easter morning?

And if we believe those things, do we also believe that we must affirm gender expansive people and platform gender expansive leaders? Do we have enough faith not just to move mountains, but to break the titanic grasp of the gender binary?

This is not a secondary issue. This is about whether we believe the resurrection. Because if we believe it, if we really believe that Jesus conquered death and that the first thing he did was commission women to carry the Good News, then we can’t build churches and communities that tell women to sit down and shut up. We can’t. The two things are incompatible.

The church is still catching up to Easter morning. Let’s help it get there.

Alleluia.
Christ has been raised from the dead,
  the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.
For as in Adam all die, *
  so also, in Christ shall all be made alive. Alleluia. Amen.

Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.

Friends, listen for a word from God in the Gospel according to Matthew, the 21^st chapter, verses 12-17.

¹² Then Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves. ¹³ He said to them, “It is written,

‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’
but you are making it a den of robbers.”

¹⁴ The blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he cured them. ¹⁵ But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the amazing things that he did and heard the children crying out in the temple and saying, “Hosanna to the Son of David,” they became angry ¹⁶ and said to him, “Do you hear what these are saying?” Jesus said to them, “Yes; have you never read,

‘Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies
you have prepared praise for yourself’?”

¹⁷ He left them, went out of the city to Bethany, and spent the night there.

This is the word of God for the people of God.

Bishop William Barber, II, said, “Clergy cannot be neutral. We can either be chaplains of empire or prophets of God.”

Picture the scene, my friends: Tables overturned. Coins scattering across stone floors. Doves startled into flight. The sound of commerce, the hum of a religious economy, suddenly, violently interrupted.

How do we make sense of this? Well, people have been trying for two thousand years. And honestly, there is more than one way to read it. This evening, I want to walk us through three serious perspectives on what Jesus did, because faithful people have held and continue to hold all three. And then I want to tell you what I believe the text is actually asking of us.

Perspective One: Jesus Was Completely Justified

The first perspective says: Jesus was right. Full stop.

The temple had been corrupted. What was meant to be a house of prayer, a place where people could draw near to the living God, had become a marketplace. And not a neutral one.

Centuries before, the prophet Isaiah had written what he heard from God: “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples” (Isaiah 56:7).

For all peoples. That was always the vision. The temple was never meant to belong to the powerful and the people included in some sort of religious or civil elite. It was meant to be a gathering place for the marginalized, the poor, and the ones the religious establishment had repeatedly told were not welcome. But by the time Jesus walks through those gates, the Court of the Gentiles, the only space where non-Jews could come near to worship, had been filled with vendors and money changers. The very place set aside for the outsider had been colonized by the forces of commerce.

And that commerce was hardly innocent. The money changers were exchanging Roman currency for temple currency, but often at exploitative rates. The poor, who could barely afford a dove for sacrifice, were being squeezed by a system that wrapped religious obligation around economic extraction. The temple had become, as Jeremiah warned centuries earlier, a den of robbers — not a place of refuge, but a place where the vulnerable were preyed upon (Jeremiah 7:11).

From this perspective, Jesus isn’t being impulsive. He’s being prophetic. He’s doing what the prophets have always done, disrupting religious systems that had become comfortable with injustice. When the church, in any era, becomes more invested in its economic arrangements, its political alignments, its cultural power, than in its sacred calling, disruption is not just justified. It’s required.

When pastors live on palatial estates and fund their private jets from the tithes of the poor, disruption is required.

When the local pastor doubles as the local ICE commander, disruption is required.

When pastors and supposedly Christian leaders support political administrations which round up the most marginalized because they don’t look like “real Americans” and indiscriminately bomb schools, all while propping up a president who preys on children, disruption is most definitely required.

This reading has teeth. It should. The history of the church is full of moments when disruption was the most faithful act available. When the church blessed slavery, someone had to flip a table. When the church barred women and Queer people from the pulpit, someone had to disrupt the order of service. When the church turned its back on people dying of AIDS, someone had to stand up and say: this is not the house of prayer. This is a den of robbers.

First perspective: Jesus was right. The system was corrupt, and he confronted it. And we should do likewise.

Perspective Two: Jesus Had a Point, But It’s Complicated

The second perspective agrees with the first, but it asks us to slow down.

Think about who was in that temple courtyard. Pilgrims. People who had traveled hundreds of miles from Egypt, from Persia, from Asia Minor, all of them to worship at the holy city during Passover. And they needed animals for sacrifice. That was the law. That was the whole point of the journey. Most people couldn’t bring live animals from home. You couldn’t carry coins stamped with Caesar’s image into the temple precincts, the law required temple currency.

In other words: the system existed for a reason. The money changers and the dove sellers weren’t purely predatory in origin. They were a logistical solution to a genuine need. Religious practice, especially on a large communal scale, requires infrastructure. It requires some degree of institutional support. The question of how you fund and facilitate worship without compromising it is not a simple one. It was not simple then. It’s not simple now.

This perspective doesn’t excuse exploitation, and it doesn’t release the church from complicitly in that exploitation. But it asks us to hold some complexity. And it raises a genuine pastoral concern: when you disrupt the infrastructure of religious practice and even the religious practice itself, who bears the cost? Sometimes it’s the powerful: the money changers with their comfortable margins. Sometimes it is the pilgrim who traveled three weeks to offer their sacrifice and now has no dove to bring.

This is the same perspective which asks about the unintended consequences of disrupting a church service in order to protest the professional activities of one pastor. The morality of the protestors is not in question—Christian leaders should not and cannot be the leaders of a violent campaign to detain, assault, and murder people because of where they were born or how they came to be in the United States. What is in question is the morality of disrupting a church service to make that point.

This is the voice of the institutionalist in every congregation who worries that righteous disruption has unintended victims. And that voice is not always wrong. Reform movements that don’t always account for the people caught in the middle. Real hurt can occur to people who are innocent. Prophetic confrontation that ignores the complexity of systems can sometimes break things that cannot easily be rebuilt.

So, the second perspective says: Jesus had a point. But the full picture requires us to ask harder questions about who gets disrupted, who gets protected, and what replaces what we dismantle.

Perspective Three: You Should Never Disrupt a House of Worship

The third perspective is the easiest to dismiss and the one we should be most careful with. Because it comes from somewhere real.

There is a long tradition in Jewish and Christian thought that says: the sanctuary is inviolable. Sacred space is sacred. The act of worship, the community gathered, the prayers offered, and the ancient rhythms enacted, it all has a sanctity that must be protected. Full stop. Not because the institution is perfect. Not because the ministers are beyond moral questioning. Not because nothing ever needs to change. But because once you establish that worship can be legitimately disrupted for a good enough reason, you’ve opened a door that is very hard to close.

Think about what it means for an institutionalist to hear this story. They’re not being cynical. They’re being protective. They’ve seen what happens when sacred spaces become contested ground: when churches split, when communities fracture, when the people who most need a stable place of refuge find that even the sanctuary is no longer safe. They know that religious order, for all its imperfections, is also a form of pastoral care. It holds people together across disagreement. It preserves practices that carry meaning across generations.

And if we are being fully honest: there are situations in which disrupting worship causes real harm to real people. There are congregants who are the survivors of religious trauma, people in crisis, people for whom the liturgy is the only thing holding them together. For these people, our beloved siblings, even a righteous disruption in a religious space can feel like another violation. That has to matter to us. It has to matter even when we believe the disruption is necessary.

Let’s be very clear: this perspective is not simply an excuse for maintaining unjust systems. It doesn’t claim to support abuse or prop up leaders and institutions which need to be torn down. At its best, it’s a serious theological claim: that the house of God is not a political arena, and we should be profoundly cautious about treating it as one. At its worst it’s a response rooted in a primal fear of protecting the ones we love and the community to which we belong. It’s the response of people who know the history of Archbishop Oscar Romeo who was assassinated while celebrating mass and the slaughter of four young girls at 16^th Street Baptist Church. It’s a position held by sincere, thoughtful people of faith and we should understand the perspective before we move past it.

What the Text Is Actually Asking

So where does that leave us?

Here’s what I believe the text is doing. Matthew is not offering a story about property destruction. He’s not offering us a story about liturgical reform. He’s offering us a story about empire and about what happens when the house of God becomes a servant of empire rather than a challenge to it; when clergy become chaplains of empire, rather than prophets of God.

The temple in Jesus’ day was not simply a religious institution. It had long before become a mechanism of control when the priestly class began to require attendance in Jerusalem alone for ritual sacrifice. Then it was coopted into an instrument of Roman colonial control. The chief priests who administered it were collaborators with the occupation. The economic system embedded in temple worship extracted wealth from the poor and funneled it upward, first to the priestly class, and ultimately to Rome. When Jesus quotes Isaiah, calling the temple “a house of prayer for all peoples,” he’s invoking the original, radical vision of a God whose house belongs to everyone including the marginalized, the foreigner, and the outcast. It was the People’s House precisely because it was God’s House. And when Jesus quotes Jeremiah calling the temple “a den of robbers,” he’s indicting not petty theft, but the entire apparatus of religious power aligned with economic and political domination.

What Jesus disrupts is not worship. He disrupts the machinery that has colonized worship. He disrupts the temple economy that serves Caesar more than it serves God. And in doing so, he gives us a model, not permission to create chaos, but a model for what it looks like to confront empire when empire has taken up residence in religious spaces.

Empire does take up residence in religious spaces. It always has. It did long before first century Palestine and continues today. We see it when churches become platforms for Christian nationalism when the flag is placed on the altar and the nation is treated as a sacred object. We see it when prosperity gospel theology tells the poor that their poverty is a spiritual failure and the wealthy that their wealth is divine reward. We see it when congregations endorse political candidates from the pulpit, baptizing power in the name of God. We see it when religious institutions use their resources and influence to exclude, harm, and silence the people Jesus specifically sought out.

In all of these cases, the question Jesus puts before us is not: is disruption comfortable? The question is: whose house is this? And who is it for?

We shouldn’t see in this story and in Jesus’ example a carte blanc to be reckless or engage in liturgical disruption just for the sake of being disruptive. The second and third perspectives we explored should have taught us something. Disruption must be accountable. It must count the cost. It must ask who is protected and who is harmed by both the system and its undoing. Prophetic confrontation is different than righteous chaos.

But here is the permission the text offers and I believe it’s real permission, given by Jesus himself: you are allowed to be disruptive when the house of prayer for all people becomes a house of power for only the favored few. You are not only allowed. In some moments, you are called. You might even be required.

The fact that the institution is old does not make it holy. The fact that a practice is familiar does not make it faithful. The fact that confrontation is uncomfortable does not make it wrong. Jesus did not flip those tables because he had lost his temper. He flipped them because he knew what the house was for and he refused to pretend that it was still being used that way.

You are allowed to say: this is not the house of prayer. This is something else. And something else is not good enough.

What Happened After the Tables Fell?

I don’t want to end on the sound of coins hitting the floor.

Because Matthew doesn’t end there either. Watch what happens next, after the disruption. After the tables are overturned and the sellers are driven out and the religious economy is, at least for a moment, interrupted.

Disabled people came to Jesus in the temple, and he cured them.

When the machinery of empire is cleared out, even for a brief moment, the people it excluded can finally get through the door. The ones who had been kept at the margins by a system that served power instead of people: suddenly, they’re in the temple. Suddenly, they’re seen. Suddenly, they’re healed.

And the children, the ones no one was paying attention to, the children begin to cry out: Hosanna! Hosanna to the Son of David!

The religious authorities are furious. Do you hear what they’re saying? And Jesus says: yes. I do. Have you never read out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies, you have prepared praise?

Disruption is not the end of the story. It’s what makes room for the story that was always supposed to be told. The table-flipping clears the space so that the healing can happen. So that the praise can rise from the people who had been excluded and were never supposed to be there.

So yes, we are called to disrupt when the house of prayer has become something else. Not carelessly. Not cruelly. But faithfully. Prophetically. In the name of the God whose house was always meant to be a house of prayer for all peoples.

May we have the courage to flip tables—prophetically, figuratively, and literally—when the moment calls for it.

And may we always be listening for the praise rising from the margins — because that is where God is most at home.

Amen.

Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.

Friends, listen for a word from God in the Gospel according to Luke, the 18^th chapter, verses 9-14.

⁹ He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: ¹⁰ “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. ¹¹ The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. ¹² I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ ¹³ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ ¹⁴ I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other, for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

This is the word of God for the people of God.

Opening: The Weight of the Words

God, be merciful to me, a sinner. We begin with those seven words. Not a creed, not a doctrine, not a systematic theology. Just a human being at the back of a room, unable to look up, saying: God, be merciful to me, a sinner.

Luke tells us that Jesus told this story to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt. That’s the setup. That’s the condition Jesus is diagnosing and it’s worth pausing there, because before we learn anything about the Pharisee or the tax collector, we’re shown for whom this parable is told. It’s not for the people already on their knees. It’s for those of us who have, perhaps without meaning to, begun to mistake our proximity to righteousness for righteousness itself.

The Two Prayers

We need to recall what these identities were, Pharisee and tax collector, because that’s the only way Jesus talks about them. Pharisees were members of a distinct sect of pious Jews and while they were religiously conservative, they tended to be relatively younger men who were interested in new revelations of God’s work in the world. The fact that the Gospels so often portray them as questioning Jesus is not necessarily because they were trying to trip him up or get him in trouble, but because they were genuinely curious.

Tax collecting in Roman Palestine and other parts of the Roman Empire was a lucrative position, but one that was both dangerous and had far reaching social implications for the tax collectors. Tax collectors were recruited from the local population and granted their appointments because they knew the local community and lived in that community. If that wasn’t bad enough, tax collectors were paid based on the difference of their imperial quota and the actual tax they collected. So, if your household owed the empire 10 pieces of silver, tax collectors would charge you 12 pieces of silver of which they would ultimately keep two pieces. There was nothing in it for them to collect only the tax you owed. So, they became wealthy as they also became social pariahs.

Getting back to the temple, technically, what the Pharisee prays is not wrong. He thanks God and doesn’t lie about his own life. He fasts. He tithes. His righteousness in practice, such that he goes through the motions of religious devotion, is not in question. He’s a man who has done everything right and would be the envy of any religious group.

But Jesus says he went home empty. And the tax collector, a man who worked for an occupying imperial regime, who extorted his own neighbors to line his pockets and Rome’s coffers, this man went home justified. This man went home with something the Pharisee couldn’t buy with ten years of twice-weekly fasting.

The Pharisee’s prayer is a list of achievements addressed, more or less, to himself. He’s not really talking to God. He’s narrating his own virtue to an audience of one. The prayer curls inward. It measures. It compares. It ranks. God is invoked, but God is not actually present in the Pharisee’s prayer. There’s no need for God, because the Pharisee has handled things rather well without divine assistance.

The tax collector’s prayer, however, is a simple confession and declaration of need. It is entirely oriented outward toward God, toward mercy, and toward a reality the man cannot manufacture on his own. The prayer is an open hand. And God fills open hands.

The Practice of Confession: Gift and Wound

This parable has helped to shape Christian penitential practice for two millennia. Out of it and other texts, Christianity has built entire traditions of penance, of confession, of what the church calls the prayer of humble access. And we need to hold something in tension here. These practices have been, for many people, genuinely transformative. And for many others, they have been sites of profound trauma.

On one side of the tension: there is something deeply human about the practice of naming what we’ve done, what we’ve failed to do, and what has been done on our behalf whether we wanted it to happen or not. There is a certain release in saying the true thing out loud. There is freedom in not having to maintain the performance of righteousness. Confession, when it is functioning as it was meant to, is not about self-flagellation, it’s about honesty. It’s about dropping the pretense and being seen. It’s about discovering that you are still held by your friends, your family, and your community.

The best Christian practices of confession carry this spirit. They’re not about accumulating guilt; they are about releasing it. They don’t demand that you prove your worthiness before God will receive you. They insist that God receives you precisely because you cannot prove your worthiness. That is the tax collector’s testimony. That is the logic of grace.

But penitential practices have been made into something less about grace and more about shame. The church and people claiming to represent the church have weaponized these practices for their own gain. Many of us or those we love have sat in church settings where confession was used not to liberate but to control. Where the message, spoken or unspoken, was that we were fundamentally broken. We were told that we must keep saying so, keep performing our brokenness, keep returning to the altar, keep proving to the institution and to God that we know our place.

We weren’t offered forgiveness unless we first changed something about ourselves and even then, we were held up as special types of sinners, often while the very leaders condemning our “sins” did far worse behind closed doors and were still supported by other leaders. LGBTQIA+ people, women, people struggling with addiction, survivors of abuse, and other people whose bodies or identities were labeled sinful know this use of penance far too well, but so do people who made mistakes which put them at odds with communities who should have supported them.

There’s a version of the Pharisee’s prayer that says all the right penitent words, but it uses those words to reinforce a hierarchy and to keep certain people perpetually confessing, perpetually under the control of the leaders. It’s confession as domination. And Jesus has nothing to say in favor of it.

The tax collector’s prayer is not humiliation. It’s humility. Humiliation is something done to you, often by systems and institutions with power over you. Humility is something you arrive at, a true reckoning with your own limits, your own need, your own entanglement in the messiness of being human. The tax collector was not told he was a sinner. He knew it and he brought that knowledge to God without a mediator demanding his performance.

We hold this tension honestly: some penitential practices bear fruit, while other penitential practices cause trauma, and sometimes the same practice, in different hands, does both. The question is not whether we will have practices of reckoning—we will, we must, it’s part of what it means to be human and spiritual—but whether those practices are oriented toward liberation or toward control.

A Collective Reckoning: The Sin We Inherit and Extend

Now I want to take the tax collector’s posture, spiritually and physically, and apply it towards a reality beyond individual moral failure. Because one of the ways the church has historically misused the language of sin is to keep it entirely personal, between you and God, in a way that conveniently leaves structural evil untouched.

The tax collector’s sin was not only his. He was embedded in a system. He didn’t invent Roman imperial taxation. He was a local employee of an occupying regime that extracted wealth from the poor and the colonized and redistributed it upward. His individual sin was inseparable from a systemic sin. And when he beat his chest and said, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner,” he was not just naming his private choices. He was naming his complicity in something larger than himself.

I want to invite my fellow white Christians into the same posture.

Racism in America is not only a matter of individual prejudice. It’s a structure and a system with a history.

That history is not over.

The racial wealth gap in this country is a direct inheritance of chattel slavery, of Black Codes and Jim Crow, of convict leasing, of redlining, of the deliberate exclusion of Black Americans from the New Deal’s benefits, of GI Bill provisions that built the white middle class while excluding Black soldiers from many of the same benefits even when they fought with distinction in the same war. These are not ancient grievances. They are present realities, because wealth compounds and deprivation compounds, and we are living in the compounded interest of centuries.

When we benefit from systems built on that foundation, when we live in neighborhoods whose property values were inflated by exclusion, when we inherit wealth that was accumulated in part because others were excluded from accumulating it, when we move through institutions that were designed for our access, we are, whether we chose it or not, the tax collector. We are inside the system. We are participants in something we didn’t invent or have any desire to establish, but from which we continue to benefit and can never entirely escape.

This is what theologians mean when they speak of original sin as social and structural, not some stain on an individual soul, but the web of broken relations into which we are all born, which shapes us long before we are able to consent. We inherit it. And then, if we’re not deliberate, we extend it.

The Pharisee’s response to this, if we map it onto white American Christianity, is both familiar and catastrophic: “God, I thank you that I’m not like those people. I’m not a racist. I don’t say those words. I didn’t own slaves and neither did my ancestors. I have Black friends. I always vote the right way and for the right people.”

And perhaps all of that is true. But if while saying those things, we’re doing nothing to dismantle racist structures and if we’re more committed to our own comfort than to our neighbors’ justice, then that prayer curls inward, and we go home empty.

The tax collector’s response, which was never meant as a performance or some other expression of performative guilt, is to say: I am inside this. I have benefited from it. My family’s history is tangled up in it. And God, I need something bigger than my own virtue to get me through. I need transformation, not just good intentions. I need a community committed to repentance and to repair.

Repair is the word I want to land on. Not guilt as a destination. Not shame as a spiritual practice. But repair. The Hebrew concept of teshuvah, return and turning, implies not only a change of heart but a change of direction. You turn around and walk a different way. Teshuvah is connected to another Hebrew concept: tikkun olam [te-koon olam] or repairing the world.

When the harm has been material, when whole communities have been systematically stripped of wealth, health, housing, safety, and power, turning around means working to give back what was taken. It means supporting reparative policies. It means showing up in proximity and in solidarity. It means asking, “What does justice require of me?” rather than “What is the minimum I can do and still feel like a good person?” It means repairing the world.

No person or congregation is asked to carry the weight of American history alone. But we are asked to carry our part of it honestly. We’re asked to do it in community, with one another, and in deep partnership with the communities most harmed by these systems.

Justified, Not Perfected

In closing, we need to pay close attention to what Jesus says and does not say about the tax collector. Jesus doesn’t say the tax collector was righteous. Jesus says he was justified. There’s a difference. Righteous means you have arrived. Justified means you have been received, as you are, where you are, and something new has begun.

The tax collector walked home the same person he was. He still had accounts to settle, relationships to repair, a system to reckon with. But something had shifted. He had been seen, and he had been received, and that reception is the beginning of everything. You can’t change what you will not first acknowledge. You can’t be healed in a wound you insist on hiding.

The mercy of God is not a reward for getting your confession right. It’s not a prize given to those who perform humility convincingly. It’s the gravity of the universe, the deepest current of reality, always already rushing toward the one who turns and opens their hands.

And here is the truth I want you to leave carrying: the prayer that goes home justified is not the prayer that has it together. It’s the prayer that knows it does not. It’s the prayer that has stopped comparing. It is the prayer that has let go of the need to be right and has simply asked to be received with mercy, and sent out to practice it.

We are called to pray that prayer. Not once, not in a single moment of crisis, but as a way of being in the world. To keep our hands open. To keep our hearts honest. To keep confessing, not because we are broken and must remain so, but because we are in process, and honesty is the road, and mercy is what lines it on every side.

God, be merciful to me, a sinner. God, be merciful to us. God, be merciful to the systems we swim in. And God show us how to be mercy for one another.

Amen.

Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.

Friends, listen for a word from God in the Gospel according to Matthew, the twentieth chapter, verses 1-16.

“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. ² After agreeing with the laborers for a denarius for the day, he sent them into his vineyard. ³ When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace, ⁴ and he said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. ⁵ When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same. ⁶ And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around, and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing here idle all day?’ ⁷ They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard.’ ⁸ When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, ‘Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.’ ⁹ When those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received a denarius. ¹⁰ Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received a denarius. ¹¹ And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, ¹² saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ ¹³ But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for a denarius? ¹⁴ Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. ¹⁵ Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?’ ¹⁶ So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

This is the word of God for the people of God.

Introduction

There is a moment in this parable where the math stops working.

You can feel it coming. The landowner goes out at dawn, hires workers, agrees on a wage. Fine. He goes out again at nine, at noon, at three, and a five. Each time he hires workers and sends them into the vineyard. Then evening comes, and he tells his manager to pay everyone the same, starting with the last hired, and everything we thought we understood about fairness quietly tips over.

The workers who bore the heat of the day do the math in their heads. They do it fast. And the number they arrive at is more. They are about to receive more. They can feel it. Right? If the people hired last get the same wage they were promised, then it only makes sense that they would get more.

But they don’t get more. They get exactly what they were promised. They’re furious. And they have every reason to be furious, right? If you worked all day and got paid the same as someone who only worked a few hours you’d be furious too or you’d be lying.

The Parable on Its Own Terms

Before we go any further, let’s take the parable on its own terms. We need to be careful to remember that this is a parable. Parables are stories that convey deeper meanings and are used to great effect by Jesus throughout the Gospels. But we always need to careful to separate Jesus from his characters in the parables. Sometimes what people do in Jesus’ parables, and the truth Jesus is trying to communicate to us are different. This parable is one example.

A landowner goes out at dawn to hire workers for his vineyard. This type of work arrangement was typical for the time. Men, people we would call unskilled laborers, would wait in a public place until merchants and landowners arrived seeking workers. The earlier you arrived, the better the jobs and the better the workers you could find. Workers would look for employers they knew would pay them well and employers would look for the workers they knew and trusted. I doubt any of us have ever experienced this kind of day labor economy, but it was standard in Jesus’ time and until the beginning of the mass deportation campaign could still be found in places in the United States with large migrant worker populations.

So, the landowner in our parable tonight finds workers at dawn and he agrees with them on the usual daily wage, a denarius, a Roman coin worth about three grams of silver and equal to about two-thirds of what a basic Roman soldier made in a day. One denarius was the standard wage for a day laborer.

The landowner goes back out to the public space at nine in the morning and finds more people standing idle in the marketplace. He hires them too. Same at noon. Same at three in the afternoon. And then, at five, one hour before the end of the workday, he goes out again, finds people still standing there, and hires them.

Now, we should notice something here. The people standing in the marketplace at five o’clock weren’t necessarily lazy. They weren’t choosing leisure over work. The text tells us no one had hired them. They might have been there all day. They wanted to work. In the ancient world, day laborers had no guaranteed income, no safety net, no employer who owed them anything. They stood in the marketplace hoping someone would pick them. And some days, nobody did.

We don’t know who these people are that weren’t hired until five o’clock. They might have been there all day and were passed over by the system.

So, the landowner hires them and when evening comes and it’s time to pay, he does something extraordinary. He starts with the last hired. And he pays them a full denarius. A full day’s wage. For one hour of work.

And the ones who worked all day see this. And they think: well, if they got a full day’s wage, surely, we’re getting more. Surely the math works in our favor now.

It doesn’t.

They get a denarius too.

And they are furious. “These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.”

And the landowner says: “Friend, I am doing you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go. I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?”

And then Jesus lands it: “So, the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

The Fairness We’ve Been Taught

Here’s the thing: the all-day workers aren’t wrong. By every rule of earthly economics, they have a legitimate grievance. They worked more. They should earn more. That’s not greed, that’s the logic that organizes most of human civilization. Work hard, get ahead. Put in more hours, get more pay. Your labor has value proportional to the time you put in and your output.

We have built entire societies on this logic. And parts of it are good and true. But parts of it have also been used to justify enormous cruelty.

Because that same logic, that your compensation should match your output, has been used for generations to pay women less than men for the same work. It’s been used to classify workers as contractors, so employers don’t have to pay benefits and personnel taxes. It’s been used to argue that people who work minimum wage jobs somehow deserve minimum wage lives. It’s been used to create a reality known as the “working poor” and then to make that working poor class feel that their poverty is a personal moral failure rather than the predictable result of a system designed to keep labor cheap and ownership profitable.

There are entire economic theories and, disgustingly, theologies built on the idea that if you only work harder, longer, and better you can pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, even if you don’t have boots to begin with.

The earthly economy of fairness has a shadow side. It’s deeply embedded in racism, misogyny, and heterosexism. It’s the system that claims that the President Trump’s nominee for US Secretary of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, a plumber by trade with virtually no homeland security or military experience is a merit hire, but calls Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a lawyer and jurist with more than 30 years of experience, a “DEI hire.”

When the all-day workers grumble that the landowner has ‘made them equal’ to the latecomers, they’re not just complaining about wages. They’re complaining about dignity. They’ve internalized a hierarchy that tells them that they’re worth more, that they’ve earned more, that they deserve a distinction that marks their superiority. And when that distinction collapses, it feels like injustice.

When you’ve always known privilege, any assault on that privilege feels like injustice, even if it means justice for other people.

The hierarchy has always been the problem.

Bob Dylan captured this hierarchy in his song, “Only a Pawn in Their Game:”

“The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid
And the marshals and cops get the same
But the poor white man’s used in the hands of them all like a tool
He’s taught in his school
From the start by the rule
That the laws are with him
To protect his white skin
To keep up his hate
So he never thinks straight
’Bout the shape that he’s in
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game

From the poverty shacks, he looks from the cracks to the tracks
And the hoofbeats pound in his brain
And he’s taught how to walk in a pack
Shoot in the back
With his fist in a clinch
To hang and to lynch
To hide ’neath the hood
To kill with no pain
Like a dog on a chain
He ain’t got no name
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game.”

A Different Economy

What Jesus’s describing in this parable is not a lesson in labor law or ethics. He says so at the outset: “The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner.” He’s not telling us how to run a business. He’s telling us something about the character of God and the shape of the world God is making.

And in that world, the measure of what someone receives is not calibrated by what they produced, how hard they worked, or how long they worked. It’s calibrated by what they need.

Think about the workers hired at five o’clock. One hour of wages would not feed a family. It would be a major blow to paying for rent. The landowner doesn’t pay them what they earned by strict accounting. The landowner pays them what they need to live. What a family needs to make it through the night.

This is the logic that runs underneath the whole of Scripture. The manna in the wilderness, where everyone gathered exactly what they needed and no more. The gleaning laws of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, where farmers were commanded to leave the edges of their fields unharvested so the poor could eat. The Jubilee, where debts were cancelled, land returned, and slaves were freed, because greed and accumulation without limit was never God’s intention.

The feeding of the five thousand, where there is somehow enough, more than enough in fact, when the resources are shared rather than hoarded.

There is a divine logic that doesn’t work like our logic. It’s not that hard work doesn’t matter. It’s not that education, training, and experience aren’t important. It’s that human need is not a competition. That dignity is not a prize distributed to winners. Abundance, real abundance, the abundance of God, doesn’t run out when it is shared.

The all-day workers assumed the pie was fixed. If those latecomers got a full slice, then there were only two options: they must be getting more or there was less for them and that option was intolerable. But that’s scarcity logic. That’s empire logic. That’s the logic of a world where there is never enough, and so we must protect what we’ve earned and resent what others receive.

Jesus is offering us another way of seeing.

What This Does to Us

Here is the uncomfortable question this parable is asking us: Which group of workers do you identify with?

Most of us, if we’re being honest, identify with the all-day workers. We’re the ones who showed up early. We’re the ones who follow the rules, who do the work, who have the receipts to prove our effort. And when we see someone else receive what we feel we’ve earned, particularly if it’s through less effort, through what feels like luck or mercy or someone’s generous whim, something in us bristles.

We should pay attention to that bristling and ask ourselves why we’re feeling it, because it tells us something about what we actually believe about how the world should work. About whom deserves what. About whether we want a world of equity or a world of hierarchy dressed up as fairness.

Here’s the thing: the denarius was always sufficient. The all-day workers got exactly what they were promised (in fact, if you read the parable carefully, they were only group promised a set wage). They weren’t cheated. What they lost was their sense of superiority. And they couldn’t bear it.

There is something in us, something deeply human, that would rather have a little more than someone else than have enough alongside everyone. We would rather be ahead than be equal. And we call that fairness.

The Kin-dom of God calls it something else.

The Kin-dom of God asks, what if everyone had enough?

What if the question wasn’t who deserves more, but what does each person need to live with dignity?

What if we stopped organizing human worth around education, knowledge, productivity, and time?

What if we started judging human worth around the simple fact that each person is made in the image of God?

Good News for the Latecomers

There’s profound good news in this parable. And I don’t want to rush past it.

For everyone who has ever felt like they showed up too late, to faith, to healing, to a sense of their own worth, this parable is for you.

For everyone who has spent their life standing in the marketplace, passed over, not chosen, wondering if today is the day someone will finally see them, this parable is for you.

The landowner goes back. Again and again, he goes back. At nine. At noon. At three. At five. He doesn’t stop looking.

That is who God is in this story. Not a boss running the tightest operation. Not an efficiency expert maximizing output. A savior who keeps going back to the marketplace to find who’s still standing there. Who refuses to leave anyone out. Who looks at the ones the economy forgot and says: come, there is still work to do, and there is a place for you, and you will not go home empty-handed.

That is the Gospel. That is the scandalous, unreasonable, wildly impractical good news of Jesus Christ.

And it’s not even that the wage is the same. The wage doesn’t matter. What matters is God’s abundance, and everyone has enough.

Conclusion: What Do We Do With This?

This parable isn’t supposed to leave us comfortable.

It asks us to examine where we have confused our social arrangements with divine justice. Where we have called something “fair” because it benefits us, or because we have always accepted it as the way things work. Where we have participated in systems that pay some people less than what they need, not because those people are worth less than us, but because we have grown accustomed to an economy built on that fiction.

It asks us to look at the workers still standing in the marketplace. The ones who are working full days and still can’t pay rent. The ones doing the same job as their colleague and taking home less. The ones working full time at minimum wage and still in need of assistance to make ends meet. The ones the system passed over not because of their effort but because of their gender, their zip code, their immigration status, their gender identity, or the color of their skin.

And it demands we ask: is this the Kin-dom? Or is this empire? Is this divine abundance? Or is this scarcity logic with a religious veneer?

Jesus doesn’t give us an economic policy in this parable. But he does something more radical. He reorients us. He points us toward a world where what someone receives is tied not to what they produced but to what they need. He blows up the hierarchy of the deserving and undeserving. He says: the last will be first. And the first will be last.

Not as punishment. As grace.

Because in the Kin-dom of God, there is no last. There is no first. There is only the table, and the bread, and the God who keeps going back to the marketplace until everyone has a place.

May we have the courage to want that world. May we have the imagination to work toward it. And may the grace that has found us, find everyone still standing in the square.

Amen.

Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.

Opening Story

In certain, strange, corners of the internet largely contained to TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, it’s become a common practice for “Christians” to call Christian pastors they either don’t agree with or whom they find objectionable for some reasons, such as the pastor is Queer or a woman, a “false prophet.” While I once read the label as rude, meanspirited, and not a little bit hateful, I now realize that the “false prophets” of the digital age of evangelism have names like Brandan Robertson, Nadia Bolz Weber, William Barber, JJ Warren, Kate Common, Yvette Flunder, and, yes, even in death, Rachel Held Evans. Adding “Ben Huelskamp” to that great cloud of witness seems far more like an honor than any sort of pejorative.

I’m sure you all know why we get the label “false prophets” and from whom that appellation is received, but I struggle with the term “false prophets” when it’s applied to almost any person. A great and classical example is the Rev. Dr. Albert Mohler. If you don’t know his name, he’s the long reigning president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and one of the most acknowledged intellectuals of the Evangelical movement. Though he has and continues to preach in churches around the world, his first call has always been as an educator and writer. He’s waged intellectual wars with almost every name in secular and progressive spaces both politically and theologically. Progressive Christians often call Mohler a false prophet. I don’t think that’s fair. Yes, Mohler’s theology is often wrong, and he presents it with the generosity of Jonathan Edwards but being wrong and being a false prophet are two distinct positions.

Wholeheartedly believing something which turns out to be wrong based on your thorough study of the issue or topic is not a moral failing. The moral issue of a false prophet is knowing that something is wrong or untrue and still choosing to preach the falsehood.

The Warning in Context

In tonight’s scripture, we meet Jesus near the end of the Sermon on the Mount. He’s been teaching the crowds on a hillside in Galilee. His audience are ordinary people, many of them poor, many of them struggling under the weight of Roman occupation and religious structures that seemed more interested in maintaining order than delivering liberation. He’s told them that the poor in spirit are blessed. He’s told them to love their enemies, to pray for those who persecute them, to seek first the kin-dom of God. And now, almost as a closing charge, he issues a warning: watch out for the wolves.

Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.

The image is stark. False prophets don’t announce themselves. They don’t walk in wearing a sign that reads “dangerous.” They come dressed for the occasion. They speak the language. They use the right words. They perform impressive things. They have platforms and followings, and they often care more about the size of their following than they care about the people who make up their following. And yet Jesus says: watch carefully. Look at the fruit.

Now here’s a question worth sitting with for a moment: Who is Jesus warning? He isn’t warning Rome. He isn’t warning the Pharisees in this moment. He’s warning his own followers, the people who love him, the people gathering to hear him. The danger of the false prophet is a danger from within the community of faith. It’s an inside job.

That’s what makes this passage so urgent, and so uncomfortable. It would be easier if Jesus were warning us about people clearly outside the faith. But he isn’t. He’s warning us about people who will speak with complete sincerity; people who believe they’re doing the work of God. The test Jesus gives us is not theological correctness. It’s not impressive ministry. The test is fruit. What does the life and teaching of this person actually produce in the world?

The Fruit Test and the Rewriting of Jesus

So, what does good fruit look like? Good fruit looks like mercy. It looks like peacemaking. It looks like care for the poor, the mourning, the hungry. It looks like loving your enemies and praying for those who persecute you. The fruit of faithfulness, in Jesus’ own teaching, is unmistakably oriented toward the vulnerable and the marginalized.

This is why we have to reckon honestly with what is happening in our own moment, in our own country, in our own religious landscape. There is a movement that wraps itself in the language of Jesus while bearing a very different kind of fruit. We are, of course, talking about Christian nationalism. A theology, if we can call it that, that blends Christian identity with national identity, that fuses the cross with the flag, and that is far more interested in dominance than in service.

Christian nationalism doesn’t just get Jesus’ priorities out of order. It rewrites them. It takes the Jesus who said, “blessed are the meek” and replaces him with a triumphalist vision of Christian power over culture, over government, and over anyone deemed an outsider. In fact, it enjoys making people outsiders because those people haven’t lived up to its standards or have willfully transgressed its teachings. That is unless a person has wealth or power, then Christian nationalism is all too happy to embrace, even ordain, that person as a true servant of God.

Christian nationalism takes the Jesus who crossed every boundary to welcome the stranger and replaces him with a theology of exclusion. It takes the Jesus who said, “love your neighbor as yourself” and carves out exceptions—immigrants, LGBTQIA+ people, poor people, and its own political enemies—until love is so qualified it is barely recognizable as love. It becomes the kind of love of which people have rightly judged that “there is no greater hate than Christian love.”

And perhaps most destructive, Christian nationalism conflates the Kin-dom of God with the United States. It treats American power as sacred power. It suggests that God’s purpose in the world runs through American supremacy, that to be a faithful Christian is to be a certain kind of American, and to be a certain kind of American is to be on the side of God. But the Kin-dom of God doesn’t have borders. It doesn’t have a flag. The God of the Sermon on the Mount is not the patron deity of any empire. God’s reign is about the flourishing of all people, especially the ones that empires discard.

Jesus says: you will know them by their fruit. So, look at the fruit. When a theology produces contempt for immigrants, cruelty toward the poor, dehumanization of LGBTQIA+ people, and the celebration of power for its own sake, that theology is clearly not good fruit. You can wrap it in Scripture. You can perform great things in Jesus’ name. But the fruit doesn’t lie.

The fruit of the Spirit, Paul tells us in Galatians, is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. That’s the standard. Not political dominance. Not cultural victory. Not an impressive platform. Kindness. Gentleness. Love.

Lord, Lord — and the Grace That Precedes Our Works

But now we have to sit with the harder edge of this passage. Because there’s a second group Jesus warns about, and this point cuts differently.

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven…On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’”

These are not people who were indifferent to Jesus. These are people who did things, impressive things, significant things, things that looked like ministry. They prophesied. They performed works of power. They invoked his name. And he says: I never knew you.

The will of God in heaven, as Jesus defines it across the Sermon on the Mount, isn’t primarily about deeds. It’s about mercy. It’s about the orientation of the heart. It is about how you treat the person in front of you, the neighbor who needs food, the stranger who needs welcome, the person whose dignity is being stripped away by systems of power.

Here is the good news at the center of all of this: our standing before God is never something we earn. It’s never something we achieve. We don’t work our way into God’s favor. God’s grace runs ahead of every one of our efforts. Before we prophesied anything, before we did any mighty work, before we said a single word, we were known, and loved, and claimed by God. The work we do in the world is not a down payment on grace. It’s a response to the grace that has already found us.

The question is not: Have I done enough great things to earn God’s approval? The question is: Is Jesus forming me? Am I letting his vision of the world, where the poor are blessed and the meek inherit the earth and love is the final word, am I letting that vision reshape how I see and treat people? Is my life bearing the fruit of that formation?

Invitation and Hope

So where does this leave us? I want to close with the hope that is underneath all of this.

The reason Jesus warns us about false prophets is not to fill us with suspicion and anxiety. The reason he warns us is that he believes we can tell the difference. He trusts us with this discernment. He believes that people formed by his teaching will recognize the fruit of genuine love when they see it and will recognize its counterfeit as well. The warning is an act of confidence in us.

And the reason he warns against doing great works as a performance rather than as a response to love is not to make us feel like we can never do enough. It’s to set us free from the exhausting treadmill of spiritual achievement. You do not have to earn your place in the heart of God. You are already there. The invitation is not to perform your way into God’s favor. The invitation is to be known, really known, by the One who loved you before you ever opened your mouth or did any work.

Out of that knowing, out of being loved first, comes the fruit. Not the fruit of ambition or power or religious performance. The fruit of mercy. The fruit of welcome. The fruit of a life shaped by the Sermon on the Mount, oriented always toward the flourishing of the neighbor, the stranger, the last, the least, the lost.

In a world full of wolves in sheep’s clothing, in a moment when the language of Jesus is being used to justify things Jesus stood against, the most radical thing we can do is bear good fruit. Love people well. Welcome those the world is turning away. Work for the flourishing of our neighbors. Let the Kin-dom come, not through power, not through dominance, not through the sheer volume of our impressive deeds, but through the small, steady, faithful practice of love.

You will know them by their fruits. And the world will know us by ours.

May it be so. Amen.

Note - We folded our annual congregational meeting into this service which is why my message is shorter this week.

Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.

Do you know the difference between a homily and a sermon or in our context between a reflection and a message? Ten to fifteen minutes, that’s the difference.

Before I get to that reflection, I want to re-read our scripture tonight: “⁷ Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. ⁸ Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. ⁹ God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent God’s only Son into the world so that we might live through him. ¹⁰ In this is love, not that we loved God but that God loved us and sent God’s Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. ¹¹ Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. ¹² No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us, and God’s love is perfected in us.”

Friends, we’ve just done something remarkable together.

I know it might not feel like that. We’re a very small congregation and discussing business can feel routine, even trivial in our life together. Yes, we talked about budgets and bylaws, about logistics and decisions. Sometimes we disagree on certain points, sometimes we debate. But now we are turning back toward scripture, turning toward something quieter. That movement from the business of community to the heart of community is itself worth noticing.

Because what we just did is the work of love. Not the easy, glowing kind of love you find on greeting cards, but the real, rolled-up-sleeves, showing-up kind of love. It’s the kind of love that requires us to be present to one another, to care enough to engage, to trust that this group of people, this congregation matters.

And it does matter. John tells us why.

“Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.”

John opens with a word worth lingering on: beloved. Before the theology, before the command, before any of it: beloved. You are loved. That’s the starting place. Not a task to complete, not a standard to reach, but a status already given. You are already beloved.

From that foundation, John makes a striking claim: love itself is from God. Not inspired by God, not encouraged by God; love originates with God. When love moves through us toward one another, something divine is in motion. The source of that warmth you feel in a genuine embrace, the source of that quiet loyalty between old friends, the source of that inexplicable care you extend to a stranger; John says it all traces back to the same origin. Love is from God. In fact, love is God and God is love.

We don’t manufacture what holds us together. We don’t engineer it through good programming or clever strategy. Something has been given to us. Community, at its best, is a gift before it’s an achievement.

Then John says something which should stop us and cause us to reflect.

“No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us, and God’s love is perfected in us.”

No one has ever seen God. That’s an honest, almost startling admission sitting right in the middle of a letter about faith. We don’t get a clear view. We don’t get certainty carved in stone. The divine remains, in so many ways, beyond our full comprehension.

And yet.

If we love one another God abides. The word “abides” is important. It doesn’t mean God passes through or makes a brief appearance. It means God dwells. God settles in. God makes a home.

Community becomes, in this vision, the place where the invisible becomes visible. Not through spectacle or miracle, but through the ordinary and extraordinary act of people loving one another well. When someone sits with a grieving friend through the long silence, God is abiding. When someone extends grace where judgment would have been easier, God is abiding. When a group of people show up, year after year, through celebrations, budget meetings, discussions profound and mundane, and everything in between; God is abiding.

But the phrase I keep returning to is “God’s love is perfected in us.”

Not through us, as though we were merely a channel. Not despite us, as though God works around our limitations. In us. The Greek word here carries the sense of completion, of something arriving at its fullness. John is saying that divine love reaches its completion inside human community.

Think about what that means for a moment. God’s love, the love that called creation into being, the love that the whole of scripture strains to describe, finds its wholeness, its fulfillment, in the relationships we form with one another. We’re not spectators of divine love. We are the place where divine love becomes complete.

That’s no mere passing fact. That should astonish us. God’s love is perfected in our community, in our relationships with one another.

That means that the love which happens in communities, the many ways we show love to one another in this community is not peripheral to the divine story; it is the divine story, and it continues to unfold in our life together. Every act of genuine care, every moment of real belonging, every instance of people choosing one another across difference or difficulty; these are not just nice human moments. They are the completion of something God set in motion.

This is precisely why God called us out of churches and communities which failed to fulfill God’s love. This is why we make explicit that we affirm LGBTQIA+ people, immigrants, people of color, and people of many different marginalized identities. This is why we discuss politics and the state of the United States during book study and dinner out. This is why it’s really hard for me to go more than a week without preaching a social gospel. If God’s love is really perfected among us then we have to live that love not only in how we welcome people, but in how we do life together and in the witness that our lives demonstrate to the world outside our community.

Friends, we know that sometimes community is hard. It asks things of us: patience, honesty, the willingness to return after conflict, the humility to know others before we are known ourselves. It’s not always comfortable. More often it’s messy and far from perfect.

But God doesn’t ask us to build a perfect community. God asks us to love one another. And when we do, something remarkable happens. We become the dwelling place of God. We become the site of love’s completion and fulfillment.

You didn’t just sit through a meeting today. You participated in something sacred. You showed up. You engaged. You stayed.

That is love, doing what love does.

And in you, in us, in this community, love is being perfected.

Amen.