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.

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 fifth chapter, verses 43-48.

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your siblings, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

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

Let me ask you a question that I don’t know how to answer: How do you love an ICE agent?

I mean that seriously. Not as a rhetorical provocation. Not as a thought experiment to be resolved in the next fifteen minutes and filed away. I mean it as the kind of question that should keep us up at night, that should make us put down our coffee and tea and stare at a wall in deep contemplation. Because we are sitting here this evening in a country where families are being separated. Where people who have built their lives here for decades are being dragged from their homes and their cars. Where children are watching their parents disappear. And Jesus, the God we follow, stands up on a hillside and says: love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you.

I want to honor the weight of that. Because I think we do the text a disservice when we rush too quickly to either comfortable compliance or righteous rejection. Both moves let us off the hook. Both let us stop thinking. And this text demands that we think: hard, honestly, and together.

We can’t read this text faithfully without being honest about the world we’re reading it in. The Sermon on the Mount is not a floating spiritual document delivered to nobody in particular. It was spoken to a specific people; people living under occupation, people living under the heel of an empire that had the power to take everything from them. That context is not incidental to the meaning. It is the meaning.

Liberation theologians have insisted for decades that you cannot read the Bible from nowhere. We each have a context. We each read the Bible from our identities, our social locations, our experiences, even our moods in any one moment. The poor read the Bible differently than the powerful. The persecuted read it differently than the comfortable. People being marginalized, people being persecuted are not abstractions They are our neighbors. Some of them are sitting in congregations like ours. Some of them are the parents of children in our communities. Some of them are those children.

We are in a moment of rising authoritarianism. The Trump administration has hung gigantic banners displaying the president’s campaign slogan and his image on key buildings in Washington, DC. In our communities and communities like ours across the United States, immigration enforcement has become a tool of state terror, designed not just to deport people, but to frighten everyone: to make whole communities go silent, go inside, stop gathering. When a parent is afraid to take their child to school or drive to work, when a church becomes afraid to hold its doors open, that is not just federal policy, that is the exercise of power over the vulnerable. And the church has something to say about that. We have to name it. We can’t look away.

Jesus says: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

Notice what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t say pretend there are no enemies. He doesn’t say call the people doing harm your friends. He doesn’t say there is no such thing as persecution. He names the reality: enemies exist, persecutors exist, and then he tells us how to relate to them. The command is not to deny the conflict. It is to refuse to let the conflict determine the entirety of who we become.

Walter Wink, one of the great liberation scholars of the New Testament, argued that Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount are not passive acceptance. They are a third way, neither violent retaliation nor doormat submission. Loving your enemy is a form of resistance, because it refuses to dehumanize. And refusing to dehumanize is one of the most radical things a person can do in a system that depends on dehumanization to function.

The system of mass immigration enforcement depends on the people carrying it out not seeing full human beings in front of them. It depends on categories: documented, undocumented, legal, illegal, righteous agents, and dissenters. Those categories reduce people to their administrative status. What Jesus asks of us is precisely the opposite of that reduction. He asks us to see the whole person. Even the person doing the harm.

How do you love an ICE agent? I want to be clear about what this question is not asking. It’s not asking you to approve of what they do. It’s not asking you to make peace with policies that terrorize communities. It’s not asking you to sit quietly while harm is done. The prophetic tradition that runs straight through Scripture, from Amos to Isaiah to the Sermon on the Mount is saturated with the insistence that God cares about justice, that systems of oppression are not neutral, and that God’s people are called to stand against them.

But here’s the uncomfortable dynamic: the person carrying out the terror is also a human being made in the image of God. Probably with a family, with debts, with fears, with reasons (good or bad) for why they do what they do. They may be acting out of conviction, cynicism, necessity, obedience to authority, or all of the above. They are caught in a system too, even if they are far closer to the handle of power than the people they are pursuing.

To love them does not mean to excuse them or their actions. It means to refuse to write them off as something less than human, which is precisely the mistake they’re making about others. Hatred has a way of turning us into the thing we hate. It narrows us. It makes us certain in ways that close off the possibility of change.

Jesus says: pray for those who persecute you. That is not a comfort. That is a demand. Prayer requires that we hold someone in our minds with care, that we bring them before God, which means we acknowledge their existence as more than the harm they cause. It doesn’t mean we stop working to end that harm. It doesn’t mean we quit showing up, speaking up, making good trouble, and praying with our bodies, our feet, and our wholes lives. What it means is that we do the work without losing our souls in the process.

I think Jesus is asking something even harder than we usually admit when we read this passage. He’s not just asking us to love individual bad actors. He’s asking us to practice a kind of love that refuses the logic of empire. That logic says that we divide people into groups as worthy and unworthy, human and subhuman or even nonhuman, the ones who matter and the ones who don’t matter.

That logic is in the rhetoric that calls human beings “animals” and “invaders” and talks about “swarms” and “herds.” It’s in the policies that treat people as administrative problems to be solved. It’s the logic that’s meant to divide us from our neighbors and pit us against the people with whom we usually have more in common. Capitalism and cooperations have been using this logic since before the Civil War to force wedges between poor Black people and poor white people. More recently, that logic has turned 180 degrees and has brought together the first two generations of ruling class Black people with the ancien régime of white power brokers. And if we’re being honest with ourselves, it’s the logic that makes us look at federal agents and feel only contempt. It may seem logical, even correct to use the same terms for ICE and Border Patrol Agents, precisely because the temptation to dehumanize does not only run in one direction.

What Jesus offers us is not naïveté. It’s a spiritual posture, a way of moving through the world that keeps our hearts from hardening. And in a moment when the systems around us are designed to harden us, to make us afraid, to make us tribal and reactive, that posture is itself a form of resistance.

Our passage tonight ends with: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The word translated as “perfect,” teleios in Greek, is derived from the Greek for a thing’s end or greatest purpose. In this passage teleios is better translated as “whole” or “complete.” Rather than being perfect as God is perfect, which is impossible for us, Jesus is calling us to be whole as God is whole. Be the kind of person who can hold the full complexity of another human being without collapsing them into what they do to you.

There’s nothing easy about that work, but we can’t be whole people if we dehumanize other people, no matter what they are doing. We know that hurt people hurt people, but so too can whole people make other people whole.

I want to close by saying something about what the church, the whole church, is called to be in this moment.

We are called to be a community that does not look away from the suffering happening in our cities, counties, states, nation, and world. That means we have to show up. It means knowing which organizations are doing sanctuary work and supporting them. It means being the kind of congregations that people know they can come to when they’re afraid.

We are also called to be a community that does not let that work turn us into people who can only see enemies everywhere. The same love that moves us to protect the vulnerable has to be vast enough, strange enough, scandalous enough, Spirit-sustained enough to hold even the people doing the harm. Not to excuse them. Not to stop working against what they do. Not to stop trying to make them better and whole. But to refuse to give up on their humanity, which is also, in some mysterious way, an act of protecting our own. If that sounds too hard, too strange, too conciliatory, just remember the Golden Rule that we all learned: Do onto others as you would have them do onto you. We all have learned that if someone does evil to you, this primary and fundamental rule requires that we not return evil for evil.

God makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good. Sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. The divine does not ration grace according to who deserves it. That is the most profound challenge to every system of hierarchy and domination that has ever existed. Because every such system is built on the premise that some lives matter more than others. We, however, follow Jesus who said that everyone is worthy, everyone is loved, and everyone is saved.

How do you love an ICE agent? I still don’t have a clear or clean answer. But I think it starts here: you refuse to stop seeing them as a person. You hold them in prayer, even when that prayer is angry and bewildered and barely coherent. You keep working hard to dismantle the systems they serve. You continue holding them accountable collectively and individually. You do all of that without letting hatred become the engine. Because hatred will hollow you out. The world does not need more hollowed-out people. It needs people who are whole. Teleios. Complete.

May God make us into those people.

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 Mark, the eighth chapter, verses 22-30.

They came to Bethsaida. Some people brought a blind man to [Jesus] and begged him to touch him. He took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village, and when he had put saliva on his eyes and laid his hands on him, he asked him, “Can you see anything?” And the man looked up and said, “I can see people, but they look like trees, walking.” ²⁵ Then Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again, and he looked intently, and his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. ²⁶ Then he sent him away to his home, saying, “Do not even go into the village.”

²⁷ Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi, and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” ²⁸ And they answered him, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” ²⁹ He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.” ³⁰ And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.

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

In the passage we just heard from the gospel according to Mark, Jesus heals a blind man. But it doesn’t happen all at once. Jesus touches him once, and the man says, “I can see people, but they look like trees, walking.” Partial sight. Blurred vision. So, Jesus touches him again, and then his sight is fully restored.

This is the only healing in all the gospels that happens in stages. Every other time Jesus heals someone, it’s immediate and complete. Why does Mark include this detail? Why does it matter that this man’s sight came gradually?

It matters because Mark is preparing us for what comes next. He’s preparing us to understand that seeing Jesus clearly, truly understanding who Jesus is, also happens gradually. It takes time. It requires Jesus touching us more than once. It requires moving from blurred vision to clarity.

Right after this healing, Jesus asks his disciples: “Who do people say that I am?” And they tell him: John the Baptist, Elijah, or one of the prophets. People see Jesus, but their vision is blurred. They’re seeing prophets walking around when they should be seeing the Messiah.

Then Jesus asks the real question: “But who do you say that I am?”

And Peter answers: “You are the Messiah.”

It’s the right answer. Peter sees clearly, or at least he sees more clearly than he did before. But here’s what’s crucial: Jesus immediately tells them not to tell anyone about him. Because even Peter’s confession, even his clarity, is incomplete. Peter doesn’t yet understand what kind of Messiah Jesus is. That will take more time. More teaching. In Peter’s case, as it is for most of us, it will be a lifelong process of seeing, failing to see, and seeing again.

We need to understand that claiming Jesus, confessing Jesus as Lord and Savior is not a transaction. It’s not a magic formula. It’s a process of coming to see clearly, and that process is initiated by Jesus. Jesus is the one who touches us. Jesus is the one who heals our sight. Jesus is the one who asks the question and makes it possible for us to answer.

On February 5^th at the National Prayer Breakfast, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made some statements about faith and military service that demonstrate the kind of blurred vision Mark is warning us about and, ironically, he did it by quoting this same passage.

Secretary Hegseth said: “And like Christ, in earthly ways our brave warriors are not called to appease the world, they must confront it. We know we fight a physical battle but ultimately grounded, as the president said, in a spiritual battlefield. Not only are we warriors armed with the arsenal of freedom, we ultimately are armed with the arsenal of faith and have been from the beginning.”

He went on to say: “The warrior who is willing to lay down his life for his unit, his country, and his Creator, that warrior finds eternal life.”

Now, I want to be clear about something from the start. The United States is blessed with many faith traditions and ethical frameworks, not just Christianity. We are a pluralistic society, and that is a strength, not a weakness. When our government officials speak at public events, when they use the machinery of state power, they speak for all Americans, Muslim and Jewish, Buddhist and Hindu, atheist and agnostic, and yes, Christian too.

So, we need to separate our faith language from our political and military language. The National Prayer Breakfast may be a religious event, but it is not or at least it shouldn’t be a Christian nationalist event and when the Secretary of Defense speaks, he speaks with the authority of his office. An office that serves all Americans, not just Christians.

But even setting aside that crucial concern about religious pluralism in a democracy, I need to address the theology itself. Because what Secretary Hegseth said isn’t just politically problematic, it’s dangerous and incorrect theologically.

Let’s start with the first statement. Physical war is not a “spiritual battlefield.” Our struggle against evil, what the Bible and theologians have called spiritual warfare, is not a physical battlefield. Spiritual battlefields and physical battlefields are not the same thing and confusing them leads to disaster.

When Paul writes in Ephesians about putting on the armor of God, about wrestling not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers, he’s describing something fundamentally different from military combat. He’s talking about the struggle against systems of oppression, against ideologies of domination, against the spiritual forces that dehumanize and destroy. The weapons of that warfare are truth, righteousness, peace, faith, salvation, and the word of God. Not bombs. Not bullets. Not the arsenal of one of the world’s most powerful militaries.

When we collapse these categories together, when we claim that physical warfare is spiritual warfare, we baptize violence. We make holy what is at best a tragic necessity and at worst an expression of imperial and colonial power. We put the cross on the sword, and friends, Jesus already told Peter to put the sword away.

The kin-dom of God does not advance through the machinery of earthly empires. It never has. It never will.

But it’s the second statement that I need us to really grapple with this evening. Because this is where the theology becomes not just dangerous, but heretical.

Recall, Secretary Hegseth said, “The warrior who is willing to lay down his life for his unit, his country, and his Creator, that warrior finds eternal life.”

No.

No, that is not the gospel. That is not how salvation works. That is not who Jesus is or what Jesus offers.

Let me be absolutely clear: dying in service to your country does not grant you eternal life. Dying for any cause, no matter how noble, does not save you. Your sacrifice, your heroism, your willingness to lay down your life, none of that, none of it, can accomplish what only Jesus can accomplish.

We are saved because Jesus sought us out first. We are saved because Jesus came to us while we were still lost, still stumbling in the dark. We are saved because Jesus touched us, Jesus healed us, Jesus asked us the question and then gave us the ability to answer it.

This is the heart of the gospel, and we cannot compromise it. We cannot allow it to be twisted into a theology that says, “Be willing to die for America, and you’ll find eternal life.” That’s not Christianity. That’s nationalism wearing Christian clothing. It’s the lie that has been told to soldiers since at least the Crusades and, no, it’s not unique to Christianity or to the 12^th century. It’s the lie told to followers of radical Islam. The Russian Orthodox patriarch has said it about Russian soldiers who die in the ongoing war in Ukraine.

Listen to what Mark shows us in this passage. The blind man doesn’t heal himself. He doesn’t earn his sight through his own effort or worthiness. He doesn’t perform the right actions or say the right words. Jesus comes to him. Jesus touches him. Jesus initiates the healing. And even then, it takes two touches, because Jesus is patient with our partial vision. Jesus keeps working with us until we see clearly.

Peter doesn’t figure out who Jesus is through his own wisdom. Jesus asks him the question. Jesus has been teaching him, showing him, revealing himself to Peter gradually. And when Peter finally confesses, “You are the Messiah,” that confession is a response to what Jesus has already been doing in Peter’s life. In Matthew 16:17, Jesus adds, “Blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven.” It’s not Peter’s achievement. It’s Peter’s recognition of what Jesus has already accomplished.

This is how salvation works. God acts first. Always. Jesus seeks us out when we’re lost. Jesus teaches us when we’re confused. Jesus loves us before we even know we need love. Jesus dies for us before we could ever die for Jesus.

And yes, our actions matter. Our response matters tremendously. What we do with our lives matters to God, matters to our neighbors, and matters in the world. Following Jesus requires everything from us: our whole hearts, our whole lives, our willingness to take up our cross and walk the path Jesus walked.

But our actions are responses to what God has already done. They’re not transactions that purchase salvation. They’re not achievements that earn eternal life. They’re the fruit of a life that has been touched by Jesus, healed by Jesus, transformed by Jesus.

When we confuse this, when we suggest that dying for your country grants you eternal life, we turn the gospel inside out. We make salvation about human action instead of divine grace. We make eternal life a reward for military service instead of a gift from God. We replace Jesus with America, and we call it Christianity. Remember the quote often attributed to Sinclair Lewis: “If fascism ever comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

And friends, I need you to understand how dangerous this is. Because if dying for America grants eternal life, then killing for America becomes holy act. If military service is the path to salvation, then militarism becomes our religion. If the warrior finds eternal life through sacrifice on the battlefield, then we have made an idol out of nationalist violence, and we are bowing down before it.

This is not a new temptation. Empire has always wanted to co-opt the gospel. Every empire has wanted to wrap itself in religious language, to claim divine sanction for its power, to promise salvation through loyalty to the state.

But Jesus stood before Pilate and said, “My kin-dom is not of this world.” Jesus refused the crown that empire offered. Jesus went to a Roman cross rather than take up a Roman sword. And Jesus rose from the dead to show us that the empire of death has no power over the kin-dom of God.

So, when we confess Jesus as Messiah, when we claim Jesus as Lord, we’re not just making a theological statement. We’re making a political one too. We’re saying that our ultimate allegiance is not to any nation, not to any flag, and not to any arsenal of freedom or faith. Our ultimate allegiance is to the one who came to us when we were lost, who touched us and healed us, who asked us, “Who do you say that I am?” The same one who gives us the ability to answer truthfully.

We’re saying that salvation comes from Jesus alone. Not from military service. Not from national identity. Not from our willingness to die for any earthly cause. Only from Jesus, who died for us, who rose for us, who seeks us out, and brings us home.

Mark shows us that man who was blind, seeing gradually. First blurred, then clear. And Mark shows us Peter, confessing Jesus as Messiah, but not yet understanding what that means. Both of them needed Jesus to keep touching them, keep teaching them, keep opening their eyes.

We need that too. We need Jesus to keep healing our vision, because it’s so easy to see trees walking when we should be seeing the kin-dom of God. It’s so easy to confuse empire with gospel, nationalism with faith, military power with spiritual warfare.

So let us be a people who see clearly. Let us be a people who know that salvation comes from Jesus alone, through grace alone, received through faith alone and that even that faith is a gift, a response to Jesus who sought us out first.

Let us be a people who refuse to baptize violence, who refuse to make idols out of nations, who refuse to trade the gospel for empire’s promises.

And let us be a people who confess, with Peter: “You are the Messiah.” Not America. Not military might. Not national greatness. You, Jesus. You are the one we follow. You are the one we trust. You are the one who saves.

Thanks be to 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 the Prophet Isaiah, the 56^th chapter, verses 1-7.

Thus says the Lord:
Maintain justice, and do what is right,
for soon my salvation will come
and my deliverance be revealed.

² Happy is the mortal who does this,
the one who holds it fast,
who keeps the Sabbath, not profaning it,
and refrains from doing any evil.

³ Do not let the foreigner joined to the Lord say,
“The Lord will surely separate me from his people,”
and do not let the eunuch say,
“I am just a dry tree.”
⁴ For thus says the Lord:
To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths,
who choose the things that please me
and hold fast my covenant,
⁵ I will give, in my house and within my walls,
a monument and a name
better than sons and daughters;
I will give them an everlasting name
that shall not be cut off.

⁶ And the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord,
to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord,
and to be his servants,
all who keep the Sabbath and do not profane it
and hold fast my covenant—
⁷ these I will bring to my holy mountain
and make them joyful in my house of prayer;
their burnt offerings and their sacrifices
will be accepted on my altar,
for my house shall be called a house of prayer
for all peoples.

Now listen for a word from God in the Gospel according to Mark, the 11^th chapter, verses 15-18.

Then they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves, ¹⁶ and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. ¹⁷ He was teaching and saying, “Is it not written,

‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’?
But you have made it a den of robbers.”

¹⁸ And when the chief priests and the scribes heard it, they kept looking for a way to kill him, for they were afraid of him because the whole crowd was spellbound by his teaching.

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

A Monument and a Name: A Sermon on Protest in the House of God

Friends, week ago today, a group of protesters walked into Cities Church in St. Paul, MN, during worship. They didn’t come with weapons. They didn’t come with violence. They came with their voices, their bodies, and their grief. They chanted “ICE out” and “Justice for Renee Good!”

The protesters came because they learned that one of the church’s pastors also serves as the acting director of the local ICE field office. They came because worship was happening in a building where a man who leads an organization that tears families apart, an agency whose actions have cost lives and spread terror through immigrant communities, was among those claiming to speak for God.

And for this act of protest, for this cry for justice inside a house of worship, civil rights attorney Nekima Levy Armstrong, school board member Chauntyll Allen, and activist William Kelly were arrested. The Attorney General of the United States announced their arrests with celebration. The Vice President of the United States promised they would go to prison. Fifty federal agents showed up at Nekima Levy Armstrong’s home to arrest her, not because she was physically dangerous, but because the administration wanted a spectacle. They wanted to send a message: Do not protest. Do not resist. Do not raise your voice, even in the house of God.

But here’s what I want you to hear tonight: Those protesters did exactly what Jesus did. They followed precisely in the footsteps of the savior and liberator Christians claim to worship, the Jesus who went into the temple and disrupted worship because that worship had become complicit with systems of oppression and exclusion.

When Jesus walked into the temple in Jerusalem, he didn’t find a quiet sanctuary of prayer. He found a marketplace. He found money changers and dove sellers. He found a system that exploited the poor and excluded the outsider. And the text tells us he began to drive them out. He overturned tables. He disrupted worship. He made it impossible for business as usual to continue.

And in no uncertain terms he proclaimed that “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations.”

For ALL nations.

Not for citizens only. Not for the documented. Not for those who look like us or speak like us or come from where we come from.

For ALL nations.

But you have made it “a den of robbers.”

A den of robbers. Now that language is important. Jesus isn’t just talking about economic theft, though that’s certainly part of it. He’s talking about a system that robs people of their dignity, their safety, and their belonging. He’s talking about religious leaders who collaborate with empire, who use their spiritual authority to legitimize violence and exclusion, who turn the house of God into a fortress that protects the powerful while casting out the vulnerable. Jesus is convicting systems which literally rob our communities of our neighbors.

Sound familiar?

When a pastor leads worship on Sunday and then spends Monday through Friday directing an agency that conducts indiscriminate raids on racially-profiled people, that uses five-year-olds as bait for their own families, that violently detains people because they look like they might be undocumented, that arrests children alone, that persecutes protestors and anyone they see as against their reign of terror—that’s exactly what Jesus was confronting. That’s exactly the kind of collaboration between religious authority and imperial violence that made Jesus overturn tables.

And when protesters walk into that space and say “This is not okay. This is not what the house of God is for. This ends now!” That’s not an attack on worship. That’s an act of worship. That’s what it looks like to actually believe that God’s house must be a house of prayer for ALL nations.

Listen! The Trump administration wants us to believe that the protesters were being disrespectful. They want us to clutch our pearls and cry about the sanctity of worship spaces. They want us to think that the real violation was disrupting a Sunday service, not the fact that an ICE agent is moonlighting as a pastor.

They fundamentally misunderstand what holy ground is. They don’t know what true worship, true service is. They’ve forgotten that sacred space isn’t made sacred by our rituals, our buildings, or the credentials of our leaders. Sacred space is made sacred by God’s presence, and God has been very clear about where God shows up.

God shows up with the foreigner. With the eunuch. With the excluded and the exiled. God shows up with the mother fleeing violence who gets shot by an immigration officer. God shows up with the protesters who risk arrest to say her name. God shows up with ICU nurses filming ICE agents and protecting fellow community members.

And God promises to give them “a monument and a name that shall not be cut off.”

Let’s sit with that language for a moment. A monument. A name. In the ancient world, your monument and your name came through your children, through your biological family, through your inclusion in the community. But God is speaking here to eunuchs and foreigners, people who were excluded from the temple, people who either couldn’t have biological children or weren’t considered part of the family of Abraham. People who the religious establishment said didn’t belong.

And God says: I will give YOU—the excluded ones, the ones they say don’t belong—I will give you a monument and a name better than sons and daughters. I will give you an everlasting name. I will bring you to my holy mountain and make you joyful in my house of prayer.

Do you hear what God is saying? The monument isn’t for those who maintain the status quo. The monument isn’t for those who keep the temple running smoothly while empire does violence outside the doors. The monument is for those who refuse. The monument is for those who resist. The monument is for those who say, “not in God’s name and not in our community!”

When Nekima Levy Armstrong walked into Cities Church and raised her voice, she became a monument. When Chauntyll Allen and William Kelly stood with her, they became monuments. Later in the week when over 100 faith leaders were arrested at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport protesting complicity of several airlines with ICE operations, they became monuments.

These acts of holy resistance, these moments when people put their bodies, their freedom, and their reputations on the line to stand with their neighbors, these ARE the monuments God’s talking about. These are the names that will not be cut off.

And here’s what we need to understand: This isn’t about being politically progressive. This isn’t about left or right, Republican or Democrat. This is about following Jesus, and following Jesus has always required this kind of resistance.

Jesus didn’t write letters to the temple authorities politely requesting reform. Jesus didn’t wait for the proper political moment. Jesus didn’t worry about being too disruptive or making people uncomfortable. Jesus walked in and overturned tables because the house of God had been turned into a den of robbers, and that couldn’t stand.

And Jesus paid the price for it. The religious leaders and the Roman authorities collaborated to crucify him. They killed him for this. They killed him because he insisted that the house of God must be for ALL people, because he stood with the excluded and the marginalized, because he refused to let religion become a cover for empire’s violence.

So when you see protesters arrested for doing exactly what Jesus did, when you see the full force of federal power brought down on people who dared to say “not in God’s name,” when you see religious leaders claiming that protest in church is inappropriate while saying nothing about a pastor leading an agency of deportation and death, remember whose side Jesus was on. Remember who Jesus said would receive the monument and the name.

Many people are publicly saying and even more are thinking: “But can’t we find a more respectful way to make our point? Can’t we work within the system? Can’t we have dialogue?”

And I want to be gentle with that question, because I understand it comes from a good place. In fact, in the past I’ve often been the person discouraging protests inside church buildings and particularly during active worship. But I also want to be clear: these questions and these hesitations often come from privilege. It comes from those of us who can afford to wait, who aren’t in immediate danger, who have the luxury of gradualism.

Renee Good and Alex Pretti didn’t have the luxury of waiting for dialogue. Undocumented immigrants and anyone thought to possibly be an immigrant right now doesn’t have the luxury of polite conversation. The children watching their parents be disappeared by ICE and often being detained themselves don’t have the luxury of respectful disagreement.

And here’s the other thing: they tried dialogue. Nekima Levy Armstrong called for the pastor to resign. She explained publicly why it was a “fundamental moral conflict” for someone to lead a congregation while directing an agency whose actions have cost lives and inflicted fear. She asked for accountability and investigation. And what was the response? Silence. Dismissal. Business as usual.

So, they did what prophets do. They showed up. They made the moral crisis visible. They made it impossible to pretend everything was fine. They refused to let worship continue as normal when worship was being led by someone participating in systematic violence against immigrants.

That’s what Jesus did. That’s what the prophets did. That’s what following Jesus looks like.

And following Jesus means we have to act. Not just believe the right things. Not just have the right theology. Not just talk about justice in our sermons. We have to put our privilege on the line. We have to put our bodies on the line. We have to put our reputations on the line. We have to stand with our neighbors, even when it costs us something.

Especially when it costs us something.

That’s where God is. God is with the protesters being arrested for crying out for justice. God is with people fleeing violence. God is with the families hiding from ICE raids. God is with those the religious establishment calls disruptive, inappropriate, and disrespectful.

God is always with those whom empire excludes, and God is always against those who use religion to legitimize that exclusion.

So, here’s my question for us, friends: Where do we stand?

Do we stand with the temple authorities who prioritize order over justice, who value respectability over faithfulness, who collaborate with empire while claiming to worship God?

Or do we stand with Jesus, who overturned tables, disrupted worship, and insisted that God’s house must be for ALL people, even when that cost him everything?

Do we stand with those who arrested the protesters, who brought fifty federal agents to make a spectacle, who promise to send them to prison for saying the names of people killed by ICE?

Or do we stand with Nekima, Chauntyll, and William? Do we stand with those who understand that sometimes the most faithful thing you can do is raise your voice in the house of God and refuse to be silent?

The administration is conducting mass deportation operations across this country. They’re terrorizing immigrant communities. They’re tearing families apart. They’re using the full force of federal—and often state and local—power to punish anyone who resists. And they’re doing it while wrapping themselves in the language of faith, while some church leaders stay silent or actively collaborate.

This is the moment we’re in. Many churches have become the dens of robbers Jesus was talking about.

And this is the moment when God is looking for people who will be monuments. People who will risk something. People who will act, not just believe. People who will follow Jesus, even when following Jesus means disrupting the comfortable religion that’s made its peace with empire.

So, I’m commissioning you today. I’m commissioning you to be monuments. To be witnesses. To refuse complicity. To put your privilege, your bodies, and your reputations on the line for your neighbors.

Maybe that means showing up at protests. Maybe that means opening your home as sanctuary. Maybe that means using your resources to support legal defense. Maybe that means risking arrest. Maybe that means having hard conversations with family and friends who want you to just stay quiet and be nice.

But it definitely means refusing to let worship continue as normal while our neighbors are being hunted. It definitely means refusing to accept a Christianity that collaborates with empire. It definitely means following the Jesus who overturned tables, not the domesticated Jesus who tells us to be polite while people are being deported and killed.

God is giving you a name and making you a monument.

God is calling you to be part of the house of prayer for ALL nations.

God is asking you to stand where Jesus stood, with the excluded, the exploited, and the ones empire wants to cast out.

Will you answer that call? Will you be the monument?

Will you follow Jesus, even when following Jesus requires holy resistance in the house of God?

That’s the question before us. That’s the commission we’re receiving. That’s what it means to worship the God who stands the oppressed, the marginalized, and the disinherited.

May we have the courage to answer. May we have the faith to act. May we become the monuments God is calling us to be.

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 third chapter.

In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, ² “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” ³ This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said,

“The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord;
make his paths straight.’ ”

⁴ Now John wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. ⁵ Then Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region around the Jordan were going out to him, ⁶ and they were baptized by him in the River Jordan, confessing their sins.

⁷ But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for his baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? ⁸ Therefore, bear fruit worthy of repentance, ⁹ and do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. ¹⁰ Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; therefore every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.

¹¹ “I baptize you with water for repentance, but the one who is coming after me is more powerful than I, and I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with^[d] the Holy Spirit and fire. ¹² His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

¹³ Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. ¹⁴ John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” ¹⁵ But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented. ¹⁶ And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw God’s Spirit descending like a dove and alighting on him. ¹⁷ And a voice from the heavens said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

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

Water and Fire: A Sermon on Baptism

There’s something about water that draws us in, isn’t there? We’re pulled toward oceans and rivers, we find peace beside lakes, we’re mesmerized by rain. Maybe it’s because we’re made of water, about 60% of us in fact. Or maybe it’s something deeper, something primal. Water is where life begins. In the womb, we float in water. In Genesis, the Spirit of God hovers over the waters of creation. Water cleanses, water sustains, water transforms.

Enter John the Baptist, standing waist-deep in the River Jordan, wild-eyed and wild-haired, calling people to come down into the water. Not just any people, he’s got Pharisees and Sadducees, tax collectors and soldiers, ordinary folks and religious elite all wading into the same muddy river. And John is shouting about repentance and preparing the way and someone coming who will baptize not just with water, but with the Holy Spirit and with fire.

Let’s start where Matthew starts. John appears in the wilderness of Judea, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Now, baptism wasn’t new. Jewish people had ritual washings, mikvahs, for purification. Gentile converts to Judaism went through baptism as part of their conversion. What was radical about John’s baptism was that he was calling everyone to be baptized, including Jewish people and those whose religious and ethnic membership was beyond question.

John is essentially saying: your pedigree doesn’t matter. Your religious and spiritual heritage doesn’t impress God. Before God, your degrees, credentials, and titles aren’t worth the paper your diplomas are printed on. Everyone needs to turn around, change direction, be washed clean, start again. “Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor,’” John warns the religious leaders. “For I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.”

This is John’s liberating message: the old hierarchies don’t hold in the water. The old categories that kept people in and pushed people out are dissolving in the Jordan. God is doing something new, and it starts with everyone—everyone—acknowledging their need for transformation and stepping into the water together.

And then Jesus shows up. Jesus, who doesn’t need to repent. Jesus, who John recognizes immediately as someone greater than himself. And Jesus says, “Let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.”

Now, theologians have puzzled over this for centuries. Why does Jesus need to be baptized? But I think we might be asking the wrong question. Maybe it’s not about what Jesus needs. Maybe it’s about what we need. Jesus enters the water not because he needs cleansing, but because we need to see God enter fully into human experience, including the vulnerability of standing in a river and submitting to a ritual of transformation. Jesus doesn’t baptize himself. He lets John baptize him. He demonstrates that the path to God’s kin-dom runs through humility, through community, through letting someone else’s hands push you under the water and pull you back up again.

And what happens? The heavens are torn open. The Spirit descends like a dove. And a voice from heaven says, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

Before Jesus preaches a single sermon. Before he heals anyone. Before he calls a single disciple. Before he does anything to prove himself, God declares over him: You are beloved. You are mine. I am pleased with you.

This is what baptism announces over every person who enters the water: You are beloved. You belong to God. Before you accomplish anything, before you prove yourself, while you’re still dripping wet and vulnerable, you are claimed by divine love.

The Journey of Baptism Through Time

So how did we get from John baptizing in the Jordan to the practices we have today? Let’s take a brief journey through baptismal history, because understanding where we’ve been helps us understand where we are.

In the earliest church, baptism was serious business. The Didache, a first-century Christian teaching document, instructs communities to baptize in running water when possible, echoing that Jordan River experience. Early Christians were baptized as adults after a period of instruction called the catechumenate, which could last up to three years. Baptism typically happened at Easter, in the middle of the night, and candidates went completely under the water, symbolizing death and resurrection with Christ.

These early baptisms were full-body immersion in cold water, often performed naked, followed by anointing with oil and putting on white robes. The symbolism was powerful: you went down into the water as your old self and came up as a new creation. You died with Christ and rose with Christ. The water was both tomb and womb.

By the third and fourth centuries, as Christianity grew and became more institutionalized, practices started to shift. Infant baptism became more common, partly because infant mortality was high and families wanted to ensure their children were baptized. The theology also developed that baptism washes away original sin, a concept that would become central in Western Christianity, particularly after Augustine.

The medieval church saw baptism as the gateway sacrament, absolutely necessary for salvation. This created anxiety about unbaptized infants and led to emergency baptisms. The mode shifted from immersion to sprinkling or pouring, making baptism more practical but perhaps losing some of that visceral symbolism of going under and coming up again. In one of the harsher moments of theological and liturgical practice, the soul of an infant who died unbaptized was said to go to Limbo, a state and place outside hell, but also outside heaven. These young souls could not enter heaven or purgatory because of the “stain” of original sin, but they were blameless on their own account and so damnation to hell was not appropriate. The Roman Catholic Church continued to hold this belief until the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.

The Reformation exploded with debates about baptism. The Anabaptists insisted on believer’s baptism only, that’s what their name, originally meant as a pejorative, means, “re-baptizers.” They argued that baptism requires conscious faith and commitment, not just being born into a Christian family. Meanwhile, Luther, Calvin, and the mainline reformers maintained infant baptism but emphasized that baptism is God’s action, God’s promise to us, not our work or our decision.

In the centuries since, Christian communities have continued to practice baptism in wonderfully diverse ways. Some traditions baptize infants and confirm them as teenagers or young adults. Others practice believer’s baptism with full immersion. Some sprinkle, some pour, some dunk. Some baptize in rivers and oceans, others in baptismal fonts or tanks built into church sanctuaries. You might not realize it, but this chapel has a small baptismal font next to the altar.

Some traditions have developed liturgical rites for “reaffirmation of baptismal vows,” formal, public ceremonies which people can choose to complete after a period of study and preparation to make their Christian commitment in a more mature and meaningful way. Other traditions regularly offer communal reaffirmations.

But across all these variations, certain themes persist: baptism as cleansing, baptism as initiation into community, baptism as participation in Jesus’ death and resurrection, baptism as receiving the Holy Spirit, and baptism as being marked as God’s beloved.

What Baptism Means

Having a better sense of the history of baptism, the next question we need to ask is what does baptism mean theologically? Let me offer several overlapping images that our broad Christian tradition has passed down to us.

First, baptism is incorporation—being brought into the body of Christ. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians that we were all baptized into one body, “Jews or Greeks, slaves or free.” Galatians 3 extends this: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Baptism creates a new family, a new identity that transcends and subverts the categories that divide us in the world.

This is why baptism has always been such a radical act. In the early Christian world, baptism meant you now owed your primary allegiance to Christ and the Christian community, not to Caesar, not to your biological family, not to your ethnic group, and not to your social class. Baptism was and is a political act of resistance against empire and every system that divides people into worthy and unworthy, insider and outsider, beloved and expendable.

Second, baptism is death and resurrection. Romans 6 is explicit about this: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore, we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of God, so we too might walk in newness of life.” The water is a tomb where our old self dies. It’s also a womb where our new self is born. We go under, held by the hands of the community, trusting that we’ll be brought back up to breathe again.

Third, baptism is anointing and empowerment. When the Spirit descends on Jesus at his baptism, it’s not just a nice spiritual moment, it’s his commissioning for ministry. Immediately after his baptism (and temptation in the wilderness), Jesus begins preaching, healing, and gathering disciples. Baptism isn’t just about being saved; it’s about being sent. It’s not just about personal piety; it’s about being equipped and empowered for God’s work in the world.

And fourth, baptism is belovedness declared. This might be the most part of baptism. Before Jesus does anything to earn it, God announces: “This is my beloved.” Our baptism announces the same over us. You are beloved, not because of what you achieve, not because of how you perform, not because you’ve gotten your theology exactly right or your life perfectly together. You are beloved because God says so. That belovedness is the foundation of everything else.

Living Out Our Baptism

Now that we understand the basic history and theology behind baptism, we are left with a single conclusion: if baptism is all of this—incorporation, death, resurrection, commissioning, and belovedness—then baptism can’t be just something that happened once. Baptism is something we live into every day.

Martin Luther, when he was struggling with doubt or despair, would remind himself: “I am baptized.” It was his anchor, his identity, his source of courage. When the world told him he was a heretic, when he feared he wasn’t good enough (which was most of his life), when he wondered if God really loved him (which, again, was most of his life), he came back to this simple truth: I am baptized. I belong to God. I am claimed by divine love.

What would it mean for us to truly live as baptized people? Let me suggest a few possibilities.

First, living as baptized people means remembering who we are. We are not primarily defined by our identities, our jobs, our titles and degrees, our political affiliations, or even our families. We are defined by whose we are: we belong to God. We are beloved members of the Body of Christ. This identity runs deeper than any other label the world tries to put on us.

For those of us in the LGBTQIA+ community, this is especially powerful. How many messages have we received that we’re wrong, disordered, unnatural, sinful, or an abomination? How many voices have told us we’re not welcome in God’s family, not included in God’s love? How many times have we’ve been told that we aren’t welcome in the church as our authentic selves? But baptism announces something different. Baptism says: you are God’s beloved child, claimed, cherished, and commissioned for sacred work in this world. The waters of baptism wash away every lie that you’re anything less than God’s treasured creation.

And baptism creates a community where all those old dividing lines dissolve. There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, gay or straight, transgender or cisgender, documented or undocumented. We are one body, baptized into Christ, bound to each other in radical welcome and shared belovedness.

Second, living as baptized people means dying and rising daily. Every day we’re called to let our old self die. That means setting aside our egos, our need to be right, our desire for comfort and security, and our participation in systems of oppression. Every day we’re called to rise into newness of life, to choose compassion over cruelty, justice over convenience, and solidarity over self-protection.

Many of my TFAM colleagues talk about thanking God for waking them up in the morning. I admit that practice is not part of my spirituality, but perhaps we should thank God each day for the ability to live out our baptism to the people around us and the people God puts in our paths.

But this is hard work. It’s the work of daily repentance, daily turning around, daily choosing to align ourselves with God’s kin-dom rather than the empire and the reign of darkness. Yet here’s the wonderful truth of baptism: we don’t do this work alone. We do it as a baptized community, supporting each other, holding each other accountable, and pulling each other back up when we slip under the water.

Third, living as baptized people means answering the call. Remember, Jesus’ baptism was his commissioning. The Spirit descended and then immediately drove him into the wilderness to be tested, and from there into ministry. Our baptism also commissions us. We are anointed and empowered for God’s work; work that includes speaking truth to power, standing with the marginalized, and resisting Christian nationalism and every theology and practice that weaponizes faith to harm people.

Friends, we’re living in a time when Christianity is being twisted to serve empire, to justify exclusion, to ordain oppressive policies and hateful rhetoric, and even to commit murder. But those of us who remember our baptism know better. We know that following Jesus means going down into the water with everyone else, not standing on the bank claiming our superiority. We know that the Spirit descends on communities which welcome everyone, which break down walls, which insist love is stronger than fear.

Fourth, living as baptized people means becoming the water and the fire. John prophesied that Jesus would baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire. Water cleanses and renews. Fire purifies and energizes. We’re called to be both: offering the cleansing grace of acceptance and welcome, and burning with holy passion for justice and transformation.

We’re called to be water for those who are parched, offering refreshment, quenching thirst, and bringing life. And we’re called to be fire for systems and governments, fire that burns away what’s false and harmful and reveals what’s true and good.

Final Thoughts

Here we are decades past our own baptisms. Perhaps, like me, you were baptized as an infant, wearing a little blue suit, in what, upon further reflection might have been a birdbath, all of which you don’t remember, but have seen pictures. Maybe you chose baptism as a teenager or adult when you chose Jesus as your Lord and Savior. Maybe you’ve never been baptized. Perhaps you’re questioning what your baptism meant in a church or tradition that ultimately rejected you or which you rejected, kicking the dust off your shoes and walking away.

Here’s what I want you to hear: baptism is not primarily about the water. It’s not about who pushed you into the water. It’s about the God who meets us in the water and the community which pulls us back out, even if we meet that community many years after our baptism. And, most importantly it’s about the God who claims us and names us as their beloved.

That belovedness is not conditional. It’s not something you can lose. It’s the deepest truth about who you are. From that belovedness flows everything else: your identity as part of Christ’s body, your daily dying and rising, and your commissioning and empowerment for God’s work in the world.

Whether you were baptized yesterday or seventy years ago, whether by immersion or sprinkling, as an infant or an adult, you are baptized. You are beloved. You are claimed by God. You are called to live as water and fire in this world, cleansing, renewing, purifying, and transforming. And know that if you’ve never been baptized, you are still claimed and loved by God.

When the voices of shame and exclusion rise up, remember, you are baptized.

When the world tries to tell you who you are and who you’re not, remember, you are baptized.

When you’re tired and discouraged and wondering if God and their love are real, remember, you are baptized.

The waters that covered you once still cover you now. The Spirit that descended on Jesus descends on you. The voice that announced over him announces over you: “This is my beloved child, with whom I am well pleased.”

Thanks be to 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 Gospel according to Matthew, the second chapter, verses 13-23.

Now after [the magi] had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” ¹⁴ Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt ¹⁵ and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, “Out of Egypt I have called my son.”

¹⁶ When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the magi, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the magi. ¹⁷ Then what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

¹⁸ “A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.”

¹⁹ When Herod died, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, ²⁰ “Get up, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who were seeking the child’s life are dead.” ²¹ Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel. ²² But when he heard that Archelaus was ruling Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. And after being warned in a dream, he went away to the district of Galilee. ²³ There he made his home in a town called Nazareth, so that what had been spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled, “He will be called a Nazarene.”

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

Friends, there’s something we often miss about the Christmas story. We’ve barely packed away the nativity scenes, the shepherds and the magi are heading home, and suddenly, in the middle of the night, an angel appears to Joseph in a dream with an urgent message: “Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.”

Flee. That’s the word. Not “travel.” Not “journey.” Flee.

The Holy Family becomes a refugee family in verse thirteen. Mary and Joseph gather what they can carry, wrap Jesus in whatever blankets they have, and disappear into the night. They cross borders without papers, without permission, without knowing if they’ll be welcomed or turned away. They become asylum seekers, running for their lives from a government that wants their child dead.

This isn’t a footnote in Jesus’ story. This is Jesus’ story. Before he preached a single sermon, before he healed a single person, before he called a single disciple, Jesus was a refugee. The incarnation doesn’t just mean God became human. It means God became an exile too.

Matthew tells us Joseph took the family and “went to Egypt and remained there until the death of Herod.” We don’t know exactly how long they were there—maybe a year, maybe three, maybe longer. Long enough for Jesus to take his first steps on foreign soil. Long enough for Mary and Joseph to learn a new language, to navigate a new culture, to lie awake at night wondering if they’d ever see home again.

Egypt. The place where their ancestors had been enslaved. The place where Pharaoh had ordered the murder of Hebrew baby boys. And now Egypt becomes the place of refuge, the place of safety, the place where the child lives.

God has a way of turning our expectations upside down. The empire that was once the enemy becomes the sanctuary. The foreign land becomes home. And Bethlehem, the city of David, the city of promise, becomes the city of slaughter.

Because Herod, when he realizes the magi aren’t coming back to report, does what tyrants always do. He sends soldiers. Matthew says Herod “killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under.” Mothers screaming. Fathers pleading. Blood in the streets where there should have been lullabies.

Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.

Let’s be clear about what this text is telling us: Jesus’ survival depended on Egypt’s welcome. If Egypt had closed its borders, if Egypt had turned them away, if Egypt had said, “We can’t take any more refugees, we have to take care of our own people first,” Jesus dies. The incarnation would have ended in verse thirteen. There would have been no gospel, no resurrection, no salvation, because the host country said no.

Jesus lived because somebody said yes. Because some Egyptian family took them in. Because some Egyptian community made space. Because Egypt became the place where God’s own child found refuge.

Now. Right now, as we sit here, there are families fleeing violence, fleeing persecution, fleeing death. They’re carrying children who can barely walk. They’re crossing borders without papers, without permission, without knowing if they’ll be welcomed or turned away. They are Mary and Joseph. Their children are Jesus.

And we have a choice about what kind of people we’re going to be.

The Trump administration has enacted what they call the largest deportation operation in American history. Mass deportations. Workplace raids. Military involvement in immigration enforcement. The employment of loosely trained, masked thugs who shoot first and then run away. Families ripped apart. Children separated from parents. People who have lived here for decades, who have built lives here, who have contributed to our communities, all marked for removal.

Some people say, “Well, they should have come legally.” Tell that to the asylum seekers at our southern border who are blocked from even requesting asylum. Tell that to the people fleeing gang violence in Central America, where our own government’s policies helped create the instability they’re running from. Tell that to Mary and Joseph, who didn’t stop to get travel documents approved by Rome before they fled in the middle of the night.

Some people say, “We have to follow the law.” Herod had a law too. He ordered the execution of children, and his soldiers followed those orders. Sometimes the law is wrong. Sometimes the law is evil. Sometimes following the law means participating in atrocity.

And sometimes, sometimes the gospel calls us to stand between the law and the vulnerable, to say “Not here. Not in our community. Not to these families who are fleeing for their lives.”

Jesus doesn’t just sympathize with refugees. Jesus was a refugee. God didn’t observe exile from a distance. God experienced exile in God’s own body. The incarnation means that when we turn away a family seeking asylum, we’re turning away the Holy Family. When we support policies that separate children from their parents, we’re supporting the policy that would have killed Jesus.

Matthew makes this connection explicit. After Herod dies, the angel appears to Joseph again: “Get up, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who were seeking the child’s life are dead.” But even then, even coming home, Joseph is afraid. He hears that Herod’s son is ruling in Judea, and he takes the family north to Nazareth instead.

Once you’ve been an exile, you can never fully stop being an exile. Even when you return home, you return changed. You know what it means to be foreign. You know what it means to be afraid. You know what it means to depend on the kindness or cruelty of strangers.

Jesus carries that knowledge his whole life. When he says, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me,” he’s not speaking hypothetically. When he says, “Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me,” he knows what it means to be the least. He’s been there. He’s lived it. He is them.

So, what does this mean for us? What does it mean to be the church of a refugee God?

It means we don’t get to be neutral. It means we don’t get to say, “Immigration is complicated” and wash our hands of responsibility. It means we stand with our immigrant siblings, our refugee neighbors, our asylum-seeking friends, not because it’s easy, not because it’s politically convenient, but because our God was an exile too.

It means we support sanctuary movements. It means we oppose mass deportations. It means we advocate for immigration reform that treats human beings like human beings, not like problems to be solved or threats to be eliminated.

It means when someone in our community is facing deportation, we show up. We fill the courtroom. We make phone calls. We raise money for legal defense. We offer our homes, our resources, and our presence.

It means we vote for politicians who will protect immigrant families, not tear them apart. It means we organize, we protest, we make noise, and we refuse to let this happen quietly.

Because we worship a God who fled to Egypt. We follow a Savior who knew what it meant to be hunted, to be foreign, to depend on strangers for survival. And we claim a gospel that says the Holy Family are still on the move, still crossing borders, still seeking safety, still asking for welcome.

The question isn’t whether Jesus was an exile. Matthew settles that in chapter two. The question is whether we’ll be the kind of people who welcome him. Whether we’ll be Egypt, opening our doors, or Herod, sending soldiers into the night.

Not among exiles. An exile too. That’s who Jesus was. That’s who Jesus is. That’s who Jesus calls us to stand with.

May God give us the courage to answer that call.

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.

Practical, Illustrative, and Prophetic: The Gifts They Brought

Friends, listen for a word from God in the Gospel according to Matthew, the second chapter, verses 1-12.

In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, magi from the east came to Jerusalem, ² asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star in the east and have come to pay him homage.” ³ When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him, ⁴ and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. ⁵ They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea, for so it has been written by the prophet:

⁶ “And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,
are by no means least among the rulers of Judah,
for from you shall come a ruler
who is to shepherd my people Israel.”

⁷ Then Herod secretly called for the magi and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. ⁸ Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child, and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.” ⁹ When they had heard the king, they set out, and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen in the east, until it stopped over the place where the child was. ¹⁰ When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. ¹¹ On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. ¹² And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.

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

Friends, tonight as we return from our winter holidays, we’ve entered the strange in-between time, a gray area from New Year’s Day until approximately Ash Wednesday. While the decorations are coming down and the magic of Christmas is fading, the Bible begins to accelerate. Baby Jesus will soon be a man, and we will journey with him to his death and resurrection.

Traditionally, the end of the Christmas season is Epiphany on January 6, the feast of the visit of three wise men or kings from the East who follow a star to the birth of a great king who will be called the King of the Jews. Today we celebrate that feast.

We need to be clear about who these people were and who they weren’t. They more than likely weren’t kings. The original text never calls them kings. That’s a later tradition influenced by Psalm 72 and Isaiah 60, where kings bring gifts to God’s chosen one. Matthew calls them “magi,” a Persian word that referred to a class of priests and scholars who studied the stars, interpreted dreams, and sought wisdom in the movements of the heavens. Their study placed somewhere between astronomers and astrologers (much in the same way that medieval alchemists were both early chemists and still magicians). The magi were likely Zoroastrians, one of the earliest monotheistic religions.

That said, the magi arrived from a different culture, speaking a different native language, and practicing rituals that would have seemed strange, even troubling, to faithful Jews in Jerusalem. They were different, strange, foreign.

Yet they’re the ones who show up. The text implies that none of the chief priests or the elders are getting ready to go to Bethlehem. No one is advising Herod to travel. Even though these leaders can quote from Micah 5 from memory when they reply to Herod’s inquiry, the people traveling to meet Jesus are Gentiles from a different country. These Persian Zoroastrians followed wisdom that came through their own tradition, their own study, and their own seeking. And it led them to Jesus.

The gifts the magi bring have long been under scrutiny. The internet has not been kind to them. Memes have highlighted the impractical nature of the gifts, particularly the frankincense and myrrh. But each of the gifts has a meaning for us.

First, gold. In the twenty-first century we rarely use gold as a currency and few of us ever interact with more than a few gold coins. But in the first century a chest of gold was practical. It was also a tribute gift that one would give to a king or other powerful person. Rather than think about a chest of glittery gold, we should think about it as cash. Regardless of the amount or its buying power, the first gift is about practicality. Jesus might be God incarnate, but he’s still a human child whose earthly parents are very human. In Matthew 8:20, Jesus reminds the crowds that “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” Even Jesus requires practical gifts. As we’ll explore next week, the family will soon be forced to flee into exile in Egypt. That journey will require money as will getting on their feet in a different country.

The second gift is frankincense. This is the illustrative gift, the one that shows us who Jesus is in his very nature. Frankincense was used in temple worship. It was the scent of prayer rising to God. It was what the priests burned when they entered the Holy of Holies. It was the smell of the sacred, the aroma of the divine presence.

When the magi brought frankincense, they were saying something profound: this child is not just a king, he is a priest. More than even that he is the presence of God with us. Emmanuel. The sacred made flesh. The holy dwelling among the ordinary.

These Zoroastrian priests from Persia somehow recognized the divine presence in a Jewish baby in a small town in Judea. They practiced different rituals. They spoke and prayed in a different language. They understood God through different texts and traditions. And yet they knew holiness when they encountered it.

They didn’t need to convert to Judaism first. They didn’t need to abandon their own wisdom tradition. They followed the knowledge they had: the movements of the stars, the stirrings of the spirit in their own hearts, and it led them to worship the true God in human form.

What might they teach us about recognizing the holy in unexpected places? About finding God’s truth in traditions different from our own?

We’ve been doing this through our recent Book and Bible Studies, both with Cosmas and now with Living Buddha, Living Christ. We’ve been finding common truths with people from different parts of our tradition and other traditions.

The third gift is myrrh. This is the forward-looking gift, the one that sees what’s coming. Myrrh was used in burial preparations. It was what you rubbed on a body to preserve it, to honor it, to prepare it for the tomb. It’s a strange gift for a baby. Dark. Ominous. Prophetic.

The magi brought myrrh because somehow, they understood that this child’s life would lead to death. That this king would not overthrow Rome with armies. That this priest would not offer the blood of bulls and goats but would pour out his own blood. They saw, even at the beginning, that the path of this life led to a cross.

What in the stars or in their studies or in their seeking told them that this baby would die young, would be executed as a criminal, would be wrapped in burial cloths and laid in a tomb? We don’t know. More than likely this part of the text is allegorical. Whether or not the magi brought myrrh with them is less important than the signal that Jesus came into the world as a liberator and savior.

These outsiders saw the whole arc of Jesus’ life. The glory and the suffering. The worship and the rejection. The crown and the cross. They brought gifts that honored all of it: the royalty, the divinity, and the liberation.

This passage demands a question of us: Whose wisdom are we willing to receive?

It’s easy to listen to people who sound like us, who share our background, who were raised in our tradition. It’s comfortable to stay with the familiar voices, the accepted interpretations, the teachers who confirm what we already believe. We know all about echo chambers and Christianity’s echo chambers are significant.

But what if God’s truth is bigger than our tradition? What if wisdom comes from unexpected places? What if the people we’ve dismissed as “other” or “outsider” or “not one of us” have something essential to teach us about who God is and what God is doing in the world?

The religious leaders in Jerusalem had all the right credentials. They knew the Scriptures. They held the positions of authority. And they missed it. They stayed home.

The magi had none of those credentials. They came from the wrong country, followed the wrong religion, and studied the wrong texts. And they were the ones who worshiped Jesus. They were the ones who brought gifts.

The author Haruki Murakami wrote that “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” What might we be missing because we’re only listening to voices that sound like ours? What wisdom might God be offering through people whose faith looks different, whose culture is unfamiliar, whose traditions we don’t understand?

The magi didn’t have to stop being Persian and Zoroastrian to worship Jesus. They didn’t have to abandon their own wisdom to recognize God’s truth. They brought who they were—their knowledge, their gifts, their perspective—and they laid it all before the Christ child.

That’s what God’s inviting us into. Not to abandon our own tradition, but to expand it. Not to pretend that all paths are the same, but to recognize that God’s truth is bigger than any single path can contain. To be humble enough to learn from those who are different from us. To be open enough to receive wisdom from unexpected sources. To recognize that all paths lead to God.

The question is: Are we paying attention? Are we watching for the ways God might be speaking through voices we haven’t traditionally listened to? Are we willing to be taught by people whose journeys look different from ours?

Or are we like religious leaders in every century, including our own, who are so blindly confident in what they already know or believe they know that they miss what God is doing right in front of us?

The magi came from the afar. They followed a star. They brought gifts that named the truth about Jesus: his humanity, his divinity, and the liberation he would bring. They saw what the insiders missed.

And then, after they worshiped, the text tells us something crucial: “They left for their own country by another road.”

They didn’t go back the way they came. The encounter with Jesus changed their path. They had to find a new way home. They had no allegiance to Herod, the genocidal king. They were forever changed and they followed other more powerful instructions.

Perhaps that’s the invitation for us too. To let our encounter with Christ open us up to new paths, new wisdom, new voices. To trust that God is bigger than our categories, wider than our traditions, more generous than our theologies sometimes allow.

The wise men from the East brought gold, frankincense, and myrrh. They brought wisdom from outside the walls. They brought gifts that revealed the truth.

What might we receive if we’re willing to learn from those we’ve kept at a distance?

What gifts might God be offering through the strangers we haven’t welcomed yet?

The magi came seeking. They came offering. They came worshiping.

And they went home by another road.

May we have the courage to do the same.

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.

All You Fascists Bound to Lose: A Sermon on Luke 1:39-55

Listen for a word from God in the Gospel according to Luke, the first chapter, verses 39-55:

In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”

And Mary said, “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my Savior; * for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant. From this day all generations will call me blessed: * the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name. He has mercy on those who fear him * in every generation. He has shown the strength of his arm, * he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, * and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, * and the rich he has sent away empty. He has come to the help of his servant Israel, * for he has remembered his promise of mercy, The promise he made to our fathers, * to Abraham and his children forever.”

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

Friends, think about what you know about Mary. Think about the ways you see her portrayed, particularly during Advent and Christmas. We’ve wrapped her in blue robes and placed her in nativity scenes with a placid smile. We’ve turned her into porcelain figurines and stained-glass windows where she gazes demurely at the ground. We’ve made her safe. Quiet. Compliant. We’ve stripped her of her power, her voice, and her audacity.

But the Mary of Scripture, the Mary who speaks these words we just heard, isn’t nice. She’s not a push over. She’s not afraid. She’s a resister, a dissenter, and a provocateur. Her words are dangerous. Her very existence and the circumstances of her pregnancy are scandalous in both first century Palestine and twenty-first century America.

She is, after all, a teenage girl. Probably thirteen, maybe fifteen years old. Unmarried and pregnant in a society that could stone her for it. Living under Roman military occupation in a backwater town in an oppressed nation. She has every reason to be silent, to make herself small, to survive by keeping her head down.

Instead, she proclaims the greatness of a God who doesn’t exalt the powerful, but lifts up the disinherited, the forgotten, and the marginalized.

And what a proclamation it is. It’s not a lullaby. This isn’t “Silent Night” or, God forbid, “Away in a Manger” or “Mary, Did You Know?” This is a battle cry. This is a declaration of war against every empire, every tyrant, every system built on the backs of the vulnerable. This is the Magnificat. If we really hear it, if we let it land, it should make the powerful very, very nervous.

Listen again to what this teenager proclaims:

“My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my Savior; * for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant. From this day all generations will call me blessed: * the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name. He has mercy on those who fear him * in every generation. He has shown the strength of his arm, * he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, * and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, * and the rich he has sent away empty. He has come to the help of his servant Israel, * for he has remembered his promise of mercy, The promise he made to our fathers, * to Abraham and his children forever.”

Mary is announcing that God is in the business of overthrowing empires. Of toppling the powerful. Of completely reversing the social order. The hungry will feast. The rich will go away with nothing. The proud will be scattered. The powerful will be yanked from their thrones.

And who is making this proclamation? Not a general. Not a scholar. Not a priest or a king. A teenage girl from Nazareth who is carrying God’s very self in her womb.

God looked at the Roman Empire with all its legions and its brutal enforcement of the Pax Romana and chose a teenage girl to announce its undoing. God looked at the temple authorities, at the wealth and power concentrated in Jerusalem, and gave the most radical manifesto in Scripture to a girl from the wrong side of the tracks.

This should tell us something. God delights in choosing the people the world overlooks. The people the powerful dismiss. The people who aren’t supposed to matter.

We need to hear this right now. We need to hear it because we are living in a time when the powerful are once again showing us exactly who they are. When immigrants—children of God, every one—are being terrorized in our own neighborhoods, ripped from their families, hunted in the very places that should be sanctuary. When ICE raids have violated churches, schools, and hospitals, sacred spaces where people should be safe. And now when ICE deployments have arrived here in Central Ohio.

We need to hear this because Transgender people, our siblings, our friends, children and adults alike, are being targeted with legislative and presidential cruelty designed to erase them from public life, to deny them healthcare, to proclaim that they do not deserve to exist as themselves. The message from those in power is clear: you are too dangerous to use a bathroom, too corrupt to receive care, and too wrong to be seen.

We need to hear this because people of faith who dare to proclaim a progressive, life-affirming gospel, who insist that God’s love is wider and wilder than the gatekeepers want to allow, are being painted as enemies, as groomers, as threats to children, as terrorists, and as a collective danger to society itself.

The regime is doing what regimes have always done. It’s targeting the vulnerable. It’s scapegoating the marginalized. It’s creating lists and categories of people who dare oppose its power. It’s using fear and cruelty as tools of control. It’s criminalizing the people who speak out against it.

And into this moment, we hear Mary.

We hear her announce that God sees what is happening. That God knows who the powerful are and what they’re doing. That God is not neutral. That God does not stand at a distance, wringing divine hands and hoping things work out.

God acts. God scatters the proud. God brings down the mighty. God lifts up the lowly.

The empires of this world want us to believe they’re permanent. They want us to believe they’re inevitable. They construct monuments to their own power and tell us this is just how things are. This is the natural order. The strong rule. The weak submit. The outsider is always a threat.

But Mary knows better. Mary knows the story of her people. She knows that Pharaoh’s army drowned in the sea. She knows that Babylon fell. She knows that every empire that has ever declared itself eternal has crumbled into dust. She knows that God keeps promises, even when it takes generations. Even when it looks impossible.

So, she sings of a God who remembers. A God who acts. A God who will not allow the powerful to have the final word.

Do you see why they made her nice? Do you see why they had to tame her, to domesticate her, to turn her into something sweet and safe? If we really listen to Mary, if we let her words shape us, we become dangerous too.

If we believe that God truly “brings down the powerful from their thrones,” then we can’t bow to them. We can’t pledge allegiance to their version of order. We can’t accept their cruelty as inevitable. We can’t consent to their rule.

If we believe that God “lifts up the lowly,” then we have to stand with the people empire crushes. Immigrants. Refugees. Asylum seekers. Transgender people. Queer people. Women. BIPOC communities.

If we believe that God “fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty,” then we can’t worship at the altar of wealth and power. We can’t pretend that the systems that enrich some while starving others are somehow ordained by God.

Mary won’t let us. This teenage girl from Nazareth won’t let us make faith into something polite and powerless. She insists, she proclaims, that the God we worship is a God of revolution. A God who takes sides. A God who doesn’t accept the world as it is but promises to remake it into what it should be.

Now, you might be thinking that this just another of my liberation-focused, social gospel forward sermons with hopefully equal parts truth-telling, fire, and hope. But the Magnificat, Mary’s song in Luke 1:46-55, has been considered so revolutionary that it’s been banned by more than one authoritarian regime. The British banned its public reading in India during colonial rule. During the 1980s, the government of Guatemala banned it from being read or printed because of its demonstrated ability to encourage the poor. And the military junta of Argentina, particularly during the late 1970s, banned all use of the Magnificat after it was used to great effect by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, an activist group of mothers who protested the disappearances of their children.

And here’s the thing: Mary’s not wrong. Every fascist regime that declared itself invincible has fallen. Every empire that built itself on the suffering of others has collapsed. Every tyrant who proclaimed their eternal reign has died or been driven from power and either has been forgotten or remembered only as a warning.

They are bound to lose. All of them. Because God’s in the business of liberation. Because God lifts up the lowly. Because God fills the hungry with good things.

The empires rise and rage and declare their power and then they fall. Always. Every time. We have no reason to doubt that pattern will ever change.

Yet, here is what we must understand: God does not do this alone. God works through people. Through ordinary, unlikely, overlooked people who dare to say yes to the revolutionary work of the kin-dom.

God chose Mary. A teenage girl. And Mary said yes. She let God work through her, even though it was dangerous. Even though it would cost her everything. Even though the empire would try several times to kill the child she carried.

She said “yes” because she believed the promise. She believed that God was making all things new. She believed that the powerful would fall and the lowly would rise. She believed that her people would be set free.

And she was right.

The baby she carried grew up to preach liberation and salvation. He challenged every religious and political authority that used God’s name to justify their power. He embodied everything Mary sang about.

Rome and the religious right of his day killed him for it. They crucified him because he was too dangerous, too revolutionary, too much of a threat to the established order.

But the empire didn’t win. Death didn’t win. Three days later, the tomb was empty. The One they killed came back. And everything Mary sang about began to unfold in ways even she couldn’t have imagined.

The revolution she announced didn’t end. It spread. Through a ragtag group of people who refused to be silent. Through communities that shared everything they had. Through people who loved their enemies.

So here is what I want you to hear today, in the weariness and the fear and the exhaustion: All the fascists are bound to lose.

The ones terrorizing immigrant communities; they will lose.

The ones trying to legislate Transgender people out of existence; they will lose.

The ones weaponizing faith to consolidate power and crush dissent; they will lose.

They always do. Because they are building on sand. They are building on fear and hatred and the illusion of control. And those foundations cannot hold.

But God is building something else. Something that cannot be shaken. A kin-dom where the last are first and the first are last. Where the powerful are scattered and the lowly are lifted up. Where the hungry are filled and the rich are sent away empty.

And God is building it through people like Mary. People like you.

You might not feel powerful. You might feel small and overwhelmed by everything happening around you. You might wonder what difference one person can possibly make against the machinery of empire.

But so was Mary. Just a girl. Just one person saying yes.

And look what God did. Look what God can do through anyone who believes the promise. Anyone who refuses to bow to the empire. Anyone who dares to sing the song of revolution even when the powerful are raging: “God has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. God has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.”

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.

Reflection

Sometimes you hear something which just catches your attention in a peculiar way. This morning, I was listening to the “Contemporary Christian Christmas” playlist on Spotify and a song came on told from the perspective of the Bethlehem innkeeper. If the refrain wasn’t bad enough: “Come see what’s happenin’ in the barn. I’ve seen nothin’ like this since I’ve been on this farm.” I’m not sure the singers and writers fully considered the implications of a song in which the narrator boasts about how he turned away a pregnant woman and made her “camp in the barn.”

Today, we’re going to peculiar and important messages. One to an older priest in the Temple and one two a young girl in a backwater community.

Now listen for a word from God.

Luke 1:5-38 NRSVUE

In the days of King Herod of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah, who belonged to the priestly order of Abijah. His wife was descended from the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. ⁶ Both of them were righteous before God, living blamelessly according to all the commandments and regulations of the Lord. ⁷ But they had no children because Elizabeth was barren, and both were getting on in years.

⁸ Once when he was serving as priest before God during his section’s turn of duty, ⁹ he was chosen by lot, according to the custom of the priesthood, to enter the sanctuary of the Lord to offer incense. ¹⁰ Now at the time of the incense offering, the whole assembly of the people was praying outside. ¹¹ Then there appeared to him an angel of the Lord, standing at the right side of the altar of incense. ¹² When Zechariah saw him, he was terrified, and fear overwhelmed him. ¹³ But the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will name him John. ¹⁴ You will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, ¹⁵ for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He must never drink wine or strong drink; even before his birth he will be filled with the Holy Spirit. ¹⁶ He will turn many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God. ¹⁷ With the spirit and power of Elijah he will go before him, to turn the hearts of parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” ¹⁸ Zechariah said to the angel, “How can I know that this will happen? For I am an old man, and my wife is getting on in years.” ¹⁹ The angel replied, “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news. ²⁰ But now, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time, you will become mute, unable to speak, until the day these things occur.”

²¹ Meanwhile the people were waiting for Zechariah and wondering at his delay in the sanctuary. ²² When he did come out, he was unable to speak to them, and they realized that he had seen a vision in the sanctuary. He kept motioning to them and remained unable to speak. ²³ When his time of service was ended, he returned to his home.

²⁴ After those days his wife Elizabeth conceived, and for five months she remained in seclusion. She said, ²⁵ “This is what the Lord has done for me in this time, when he looked favorably on me and took away the disgrace I have endured among my people.”

²⁶ In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, ²⁷ to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. ²⁸ And he came to her and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” ²⁹ But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. ³⁰ The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. ³¹ And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. ³² He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. ³³ He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” ³⁴ Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” ³⁵ The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. ³⁶ And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. ³⁷ For nothing will be impossible with God.” ³⁸ Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Then the angel departed from her.”

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

Message

Friends, there are two women in our text this evening who, by all accounts, should have been footnotes in history. One was too old. The other was too young. One had spent decades carrying the shame of barrenness. The other was an unmarried virgin from a village so insignificant that people joked, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” Yet here we are, two thousand years later, speaking their names: Elizabeth and Mary. Two normal women who were chosen and positioned to be remembered forever.

Luke, our careful historian and masterful storyteller, wants us to see something. He doesn’t simply tell us two separate stories that happen to involve angelic visits. No, he constructs these narratives as mirror images, as parallel prophecies that reflect and amplify one another. Notice the pattern: Gabriel appears. There’s fear. There’s an announcement of an impossible birth. There’s a question born of doubt or wonder. There’s a sign given. And there’s, ultimately, a response.

But let’s not rush past the setting, because Luke is deliberate about where these stories take place. The first scene unfolds in the most sacred space imaginable: the Holy of Holies, the center of the temple in Jerusalem, the very heart of the Hebrew’s worship. This space housed the Ark of the Covenant and was treated as the throne room of God on earth. So wonderful and so terrifying was this space that the priests who entered often had a rope tied around their waists so that they could be pulled out if needed. Here is Zechariah, a holy man, from a priestly lineage, performing what might have been a once-in-life-time duty, but was likely more of a once-every-few years responsibility. Everything about this scene screams significance, tradition, and centrality.

Then Gabriel travels to “a town in Galilee called Nazareth.” Not Jerusalem. Not even a town anyone had ever really heard of. A nothing place. And they appear not in a religious space, not during a sacred ceremony, but to a teenage girl in her home. The contrast couldn’t be starker. Luke is showing us something about how God works: the sacred and the ordinary, the center and the margins, the temple and the village. God speaks in all places.

Let’s look more closely at Elizabeth first. The text tells us that she and Zechariah “were righteous before God, living blamelessly according to all the commandments and regulations of the Lord.” Here were righteous people, faithful people, people who had done everything right. And yet “they had no children because Elizabeth was barren, and both were getting on in years.”

In that ancient world, barrenness—the inability to have a child—wasn’t seen as a medical condition. It was a social catastrophe, a mark of divine disfavor, a source of profound shame. It was grounds for a man to divorce his wife and take a new wife (our ancient ancestors didn’t understand that the man could be as much to blame as the woman). The text captures the shame Elizabeth felt when she says, “This is what the Lord has done for me when he looked favorably on me and took away the disgrace I have endured among my people.” For years, perhaps decades, Elizabeth had carried this burden. Every gathering of women, every celebration of another family’s child, every sidelong glance—they all reminded her of what she lacked, of what her culture said made her less than whole.

But notice what happens. Gabriel appears to Zechariah during that sacred moment and announces, “Your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will name him John.” The prayers they had prayed for years, perhaps prayers they had even stopped praying because hope had worn thin. Those prayers. God had heard them all along.

And here we encounter the first great question of our text: “How will I know that this is so? For I am an old man, and my wife is getting on in years.” Zechariah, the priest, the man standing in the temple, asks for proof. And honestly, can we blame him? He’s looking at the facts: he’s old, Elizabeth is old, biology is biology. He wants to believe, but the impossibility is overwhelming.

Gabriel’s response is swift and, frankly, severe: “But now, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time, you will become mute, unable to speak, until the day these things occur.” Zechariah’s silence becomes a sign, not just to him, but to everyone who expects to hear him speak. Something has happened. Something beyond words has broken into the ordinary world.

Then the scene shifts. Six months pass. Elizabeth is hidden away, marveling at what God has done. And Gabriel makes another appearance, this time to Mary in Nazareth.

Look at how Gabriel greets her: “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” This young woman, probably around thirteen or fourteen years old, is addressed with the same kind of honor that might be given to a queen or a princess. The text captures the shock of this: “But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.”

Mary’s question mirrors Zechariah’s, but with a crucial difference. Zechariah asked, “How will I know that this is so?” Mary asks, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” One question doubts the message; the other accepts it but seeks to understand the means. Zechariah questions the possibility, Mary questions the method.

Theologians have spilled significant ink and wasted vast swathes of time on a particular question: do angels have free will? The consensus holds that, no, angels do not have free will. If that’s true, then Gabriel may have been in awe of Mary. When they spoke to Zechariah, they were speaking about Elizabeth. Prayers were being answered and something miraculous happened. But Mary was given a choice. Mary had the ability to say no. And for that reason, she must have evoked great awe in the eyes of this very powerful, but still limited, archangel.

Gabriel’s answer to Mary’s question is magnificent: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.” The image here is one of protective covering, of divine presence, of the same Spirit that hovered over the waters at creation now hovering over this young woman. What is about to happen in Mary’s womb is nothing less than a new creation.

And then Gabriel does something beautiful. He points Mary to Elizabeth: “And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.” The angel connects these two women, these two impossible pregnancies, these two normal people carrying extraordinary promises. Elizabeth becomes a sign to Mary. The old woman who was barren becomes proof to the young virgin that nothing is impossible with God.

This is where Luke’s parallel structure reaches its full power. These aren’t just two random miracle stories. God chooses the overlooked, the barren and the virgin, the old and the young, the shamed and the unknown. God chooses people from the margins and from small villages. God chooses normal people and positions them at the center of the greatest story ever told.

But Mary alone is faced with a choice. This young girl must respond not just to an archangel, but to God. She must have been so frightened. An unwed woman conceiving a child would certainly bring scandal on her and it very well might get her killed. Yet, Mary looks bravely into the face of the angel and says, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

Let it be. Mary’s response becomes one of the most profound statements of faith in all of Scripture. She doesn’t fully understand. She knows the cost could be devastating. But she says yes. She consents to be used by God for purposes far beyond her comprehension.

These two women—one who had prayed for decades and one who had probably never imagined such a thing—both become bearers of impossible promises. Both become living testimonies that God doesn’t work according to our timelines, our expectations, or our cultural norms about who matters and who doesn’t. In fact, God rejects the notion that anyone might not matter.

The text tells us that when Gabriel spoke to Mary, there was a gravity to the moment, a weight to the announcement. This is the moment. This is when heaven and earth hold their breath. The entire cosmos waits for this young woman’s answer, because God has chosen to work through human consent, through human faith, through the “yes” of a normal woman from nowhere.

This story isn’t just ancient. It’s not just about two women over 2,000 years ago. God is still choosing normal people. God is still appearing in out-of-the-way places. God is still taking those whom the world overlooks—the too old, the too young, the too ordinary, the too broken, the too insignificant—and positioning them to carry out extraordinary purposes.

You may feel like Elizabeth. You’ve been faithful for years, but God seems silent about the deepest prayers of your heart. The promise hasn’t come. The waiting has gone on too long. You think you’re too old now for the dream to matter. But I tell you: your prayers have been heard. Every single one. God’s timing might not be our timing, but what seems impossible to you is the very kind of situation in which God loves to work.

Perhaps you feel like Mary, young, uncertain, overwhelmed by a call that seems too big for you. You’re from Nazareth, not Jerusalem. You’re ordinary, not special. You don’t have the training, the credentials, the background, the strength for what God seems to be asking. But God specializes in using the unqualified. The question is not whether you’re good enough. The question is, will you say yes?

Both of these women were normal. Both were overlooked by their culture for different reasons. Both faced impossible circumstances. And we’re still speaking their names two thousand years later. Not just because they were extraordinary in themselves, but because they allowed God to do extraordinary things through them.

The same God who overshadowed Mary, the same God who remembered Elizabeth, the same God who chooses the unlikely and the overlooked; that God is still at work. Still appearing in small villages and ordinary lives. Still announcing impossible promises. Still asking normal people to carry purposes that will echo through eternity.

The question is: when the messenger comes to you—and make no mistake, God is still sending messengers, still breaking into ordinary lives with extraordinary calls—how will you respond?

Will you ask like Zechariah, “How will I know that this is so?” Or will you ask like Mary, “How can this be?”

Will you have the courage to say with Mary, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

Two prophecies. Two women. Two impossible promises. One pattern that continues to this day: God chooses the normal, the overlooked, the unlikely, and through their yes, through their willingness to be positioned by God, they change everything.

May we have eyes to see when God is choosing us. And may we have the faith to say yes.

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.

Tonight, we’re going to continue our exploration of the Ten Commandments including how the ancient Hebrews would have heard and understood these commandments; how the commandments have been understood in the Biblical tradition; and how we can live out these commandments in our lives today.

The Third Commandment: “You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses their name.”

What It Meant to the Ancient Hebrews

My sister, Emma, is pregnant and with that comes the search for a name for the new son, brother, nephew, and grandson. Emma likes a compromise between traditional and non-traditional names. Patrick, my brother-in-law, is afraid that his son’s name will sound like, and I quote, “a Southern frat boy.” Both Emma and Patrick are convinced that the name cannot be one used by anyone in their lives including the names of their friends’ animals. Jack wants his brother to be “Max” and he’s sticking to that. Family names as first names are out of the question. They laughed when I suggested “Benjamin” as a first or middle name, but they seem set on “Paul” as a middle name which is my dad’s middle name. If I had children, I’d use family names and other traditional Euro-American names with nicknames at the ready.

Names are important. They identify not only who we are, but also who we came from, how those people thought and what biases they held. Our names also reflect who we are and how we want to identify ourselves. Growing up my mother was adamant that I was Benjamin, and no one would give me a nickname. In high school I got tired of correcting people and started using Ben, even though I still told people my name was Benjamin. In college it became important to me to be viewed as laid back and so I embraced Ben. Almost twenty years later everyone knows me as Ben and some people get confused when they hear someone call me Benjamin.

In the ancient world names held even more power as did how your name related to your family or your associated location. Remember, Jesus is referred to as Jesus of Nazareth, as the Jesus, son of David, and Jesus, son of Joseph. Names were thought to hold power. Our hymns and songs continue to discuss this dynamic. How often have you heard “there’s power in the name of Jesus” or “at the name of Jesus every knew shall bend?”

In the ancient Near East, particularly among the Hebrews, people believed that knowing someone’s name gave you power over them. If you knew the name of a god, you could invoke that god. You could call on that god’s power. You could use that god’s authority for your own purposes.

The Hebrews had just escaped Egypt, where Pharaoh used the names of gods to legitimize his power. Pharaoh would say, “The gods have spoken through me. Ra commands you. Horus demands this.” The gods’ names became tools of oppression, justifications for slavery, divine endorsement for human cruelty. If that sounds eerily familiar, it should, because some religious people, some Christians, have continued right where the Egyptian pharaohs left off.

Ready for some heresy? We need to unlearn that this commandment is about swearing and cursing. We need to stop taking a third grade approach and dumbing down what God is really saying to us.

Into the cultural milieu of the time enters God, the God who liberated the Hebrews, who says: “Don’t use my name the way Pharaoh used the names of his gods. Don’t use my name as a tool. Don’t weaponize my identity. Don’t invoke my authority to do what I would never do.”

The Hebrew phrase here is “lo tissa”—you shall not lift up, you shall not carry. Don’t carry God’s name into places God wouldn’t go. Don’t lift up God’s name to support what God would never support.

The word that’s often translated as “vain” is the Hebrew “shav” which means emptiness, falsehood, and worthlessness. Don’t empty God’s name of its meaning. Don’t turn God’s name into a lie. Don’t make God’s name worthless by attaching it to worthless things.

For the ancient Hebrews, this meant you didn’t swear false oaths in God’s name. You didn’t make promises you couldn’t keep and seal them with “I swear to God.” You didn’t use God’s authority to close a business deal that would cheat your neighbor. You didn’t invoke God’s name to win an argument God wouldn’t agree with.

But it was bigger than that. It meant you didn’t claim to speak for God when you were really just speaking for yourself. You didn’t use God’s name to make your prejudices sound holy. You didn’t baptize your agenda with God’s authority.

Because here’s what happens when you misuse God’s name: you don’t just insult God. You mislead people about who God is. You create a false image. You make people think God stands for something God never stood for. You make people think God condemns someone God actually loves.

What the Bible Says About It

This commandment echoes throughout Scripture, and remember it’s not about casual cursing.

In Leviticus 19:12, God says, “You shall not swear falsely by my name, profaning the name of your God: I am the Lord.” Notice that? When you misuse God’s name, you profane it. You make the holy common.

In Jeremiah 23:31-32, God says through Jeremiah: “I am against the prophets who wag their own tongues and yet shout, ‘The Lord declares.’ Indeed, I am against those who prophesy false dreams and tell them, spreading reckless lies in my name. Yet I did not send or appoint them. They do not benefit these people in the least.”

Repeat after me: “God is against false prophets.”

God is against people who claim divine authority for their own agendas.

And then there’s Jesus. In the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew 5:33-37, Jesus says: “Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not break your oath, but fulfill to the Lord the vows you have made.’ But I tell you, do not swear an oath at all... All you need to say is simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No;’ anything beyond this comes from the evil one.”

Jesus is saying: don’t use God’s name to make yourself sound trustworthy. Just be trustworthy. Don’t invoke God’s authority to make your words carry weight. Just tell the truth. Let your yes be yes and your no be no.

The Bible is consistent here: God’s name is not a tool. God’s name is not a weapon.

Living the Third Commandment Today

Church, we need to have an honest conversation. Because the third commandment is being broken every single day in our country, and it’s being broken by people who claim to be the most faithful.

We’ve already established that this commandment isn’t about whether you say “Oh my God” when you’re surprised or about those times that you use God’s name with more colorful language. God’s not up in heaven with a checklist, tallying up every time someone uses their name in casual conversation.

This commandment is about something far more serious. It’s about the systematic misuse of God’s name to oppress, exclude, and harm.

The Third Commandment is telling us that using God’s name to hurt people is taking God’s name in vain.

When politicians and other leaders say, “God told me to ban this book” or “God told me we need to criminalize abortion” or “God told me Trans people shouldn’t exist,” that’s taking God’s name in vain. Because the God of the Bible—the God who heard the cries of the oppressed in Egypt, the God who showed up in Jesus to welcome the outcast—that God didn’t tell you to do any of that.

When preachers stand in pulpits and say, “God hates Queer people,” that’s not just bad theology. That’s breaking the Third Commandment, because you’re putting words in God’s mouth. You’re making God say something God never said. You’re taking the name of the God who is love and attaching it to hate.

Right now, in 2025, people are using God’s name to:

· Justify cruelty toward immigrants

· Deny healthcare to Trans people

· Strip away the rights of women to make decisions about their own bodies

· Criminalize homelessness

· Defend systems of mass incarceration

· Legislate LGBTQIA+ people out of existence

Today the Third Commandment demands that we examine our own use of God’s name and that we act.

First, we must examine our own use of God’s name. Are we invoking God to justify our comfort? Are we using God’s authority to avoid doing the hard work of justice? Are we claiming God’s blessing on systems that God would dismantle?

Second, we must protect God’s name by protecting God’s people. When we harm people made in God’s image, we profane God’s name. When we exclude people God includes, we take God’s name in vain. When we deny someone’s humanity, we blaspheme against the God who created them.

The Third Commandment isn’t about policing language. It’s about protecting truth. It’s about making sure that when people hear God’s name, they hear the name of the Liberator, not the oppressor. They hear the name of Love, not hate. They hear the name of the One who welcomes, not the one who excludes.

The Fourth Commandment: Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your children, your slaves, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it.

What It Meant to the Ancient Hebrews

I imagine every one of us has been told recently what we need to rest, relax, take a break, or get some down time. I know I have. The Fourth Commandment is about rest which might sound strange to most of us. Americans are terrible at rest. The Puritan work ethic, the Black work ethic as a path to move beyond the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, the profound work ethic of immigrants trying to build the American dream, the suffering of people working full time jobs and still needing government assistance, and many other expressions of work as a type of salvation hasn’t left much space for rest. The Hebrews were no different.

For the better portion of four hundred years in Egypt they had been slaves. What little value their lives held, that value was proportionate to their ability to work and produce. There was no Sabbath for slaves. They worked until their bodies gave out.

In the imperial economies to this day, rest is rebellion. In imperial worldviews, rest is weakness. In the logic of oppression, rest is worthless.

Enter God with this radical commandment: Stop. Rest. One day a week, you don’t produce. You don’t labor. You don’t prove your worth through work. And this commandment covers everyone: You, your children, your servants, your animals, even the immigrant living in your community. Everyone rests. No exceptions. No loopholes.

The Fourth Commandment remains revolutionary. God’s saying: My economy doesn’t run on exploitation. My kin-dom doesn’t measure worth by productivity. In my world, rest isn’t a luxury for the privileged few, it’s a right for everyone.

The Sabbath is supposed to be a weekly reminder: You are not a slave anymore. You don’t have to produce to justify your existence. You are human, made in the image of God, and your humanity is not dependent on your labor and contribution to society.

The Sabbath was meant to be a form of resistance. Every week, the Hebrews said to any empire that would try to enslave them again: We will not work ourselves to death. We will not sacrifice our humanity on the altar of productivity. We remember that we are free.

What the Bible Says About It

The Sabbath shows up throughout Scripture, and it gets more radical with time.

In Deuteronomy 5, Moses repeats the Ten Commandments, but the reason for Sabbath changes. In Exodus, the reason is creation: God rested on the seventh day. But in Deuteronomy 5:15, the reason is liberation: “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore, the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.”

The Sabbath is both a principle of creation and a practice of liberation.

In Leviticus 25, God takes the Sabbath principle even further. Every seven years, the land itself gets a Sabbath. And every fifty years—after seven cycles of seven—there’s a Jubilee year. During the Jubilee, debts are forgiven, slaves are freed, and land is returned to its original owners. It’s a complete reset of economic inequity.

God’s saying: Rest isn’t just for people. Creation itself needs rest. People need periodic rest and liberation from systems of debt and inequality.

The prophets constantly called out Israel for breaking the Sabbath, not because of the rule itself, but because of what breaking it revealed. When Israel’s elite forced people to work seven days a week, they were recreating Egypt. They were becoming the oppressor. They were forgetting who they were and whose they were.

Then there was Jesus. We all know about the trouble Jesus got into on the Sabbath. The religious leaders kept trying to catch him breaking Sabbath, and he kept doing things like healing people and letting his disciples pick grain to eat.

In Mark 2:27, Jesus says something profound: “The Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath.” The Sabbath is a gift, not a burden.

And in Luke 13, when Jesus heals a woman on the Sabbath and gets criticized for it, he says: “Should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has kept bound for eighteen years, be set free on the Sabbath day from what bound her?”

Jesus is saying: The Sabbath is about liberation. It’s about freedom. It’s about healing. If keeping the Sabbath means letting someone stay in pain, you’ve missed the point of the Sabbath.

Living the Fourth Commandment Today

We live in a world that has largely forgotten the Sabbath. We live in a society that worships at the altar of productivity, that measures worth by output, that says your value is determined by your hustle.

Repeat after me: Rest is resistance.

In a world that says you must always be productive, rest is revolutionary.

In a world that says your worth is tied to your work, rest is rebellion.

In a world that exploits labor and extracts everything it can from bodies, rest is radical.

But here’s what we need to understand: The Sabbath isn’t just about individual self-care. The Sabbath is about collective liberation.

When God says everyone rests, they’re creating an economy of enough. God is saying: There is enough. Enough time. Enough resources. Enough life. You don’t have to exploit others to survive.

We need to challenge systems that deny people rest.

People are working two or three jobs just to survive. Despite their hard work, they often still need assistance, and they can never get ahead. They don’t get sick days. They don’t get vacation. They certainly don’t get a weekly Sabbath.

The Fourth Commandment demands we ask: Why? Why do we have an economy where some people work themselves to death while others accumulate obscene wealth? Why do we accept a system where rest is a privilege of the wealthy instead of a right for all?

When we fight for living wages, we’re honoring the Sabbath.

When we demand SNAP benefits and other social safety net programs, we’re honoring the Sabbath.

When we advocate for paid sick leave and family leave, we’re honoring the Sabbath.

When we push for protections for workers, we’re honoring the Sabbath.

Make no mistake, friends, rest is a justice issue.

Who in our society gets to rest? Who gets vacations? Who gets leisure time? Who gets to disconnect?

It’s not random. It’s stratified by race, by gender identity, by class, by citizenship status.

Undocumented immigrants can’t rest because they’re constantly afraid of ICE. They work in the shadows, often in the most dangerous and demanding jobs, with no protections, no benefits, no rest.

Black and brown communities work longer hours and multiple jobs, because systemic racism has created wealth gaps and denied economic opportunities.

Women, especially mothers, carry a double burden—work outside the home and the unpaid labor of caregiving inside the home. When do they get Sabbath?

Trans and Queer people can’t rest because they’re constantly defending their right to exist, constantly fighting for basic recognition and safety.

The Fourth Commandment is clear: Everyone deserves rest. The immigrant, the worker, the mother, the Queer person, the neighbor you don’t know. Everyone.

We must practice Sabbath ourselves, not just as self-care, but as spiritual resistance.

In a world that demands constant productivity, choosing to rest is an act of faith. It’s saying: I trust that God’s economy is bigger than capitalism’s demands. I trust that my worth isn’t tied to my output. I know that the world won’t fall apart if I stop.

But here’s where it gets challenging: We can’t just practice Sabbath for ourselves while ignoring the systems that deny others rest. That’s not Sabbath. That’s privilege.

True Sabbath practice means:

· Using our rested bodies to fight for those who can’t rest

· Using our Sabbath time to organize, to advocate, to resist

· Examining how our comfort might depend on someone else’s exploitation

· Working to dismantle systems that treat people as machines

Conclusion: Speaking Truth, Resting in Resistance

Friends, here’s what I want you to take away today.

God’s name is not a weapon, it’s a promise. The promise of liberation, of love, of welcome. When we protect God’s name, we protect God’s people.

And God’s rest is not a luxury, it’s a right. The right to be human, to stop producing, to exist without proving worth. When we practice Sabbath, we resist empire.

Stop letting people use God’s name to harm others. When someone says, “God hates” or “God condemns” or “God wants to exclude,” you speak up. You say: “That’s not the God I know. That’s not the God of the Bible. That’s not the God who liberated slaves and welcomed outcasts.”

Stop accepting systems that deny people rest. Fight for living wages. Fight for workers’ rights. Fight for immigrants who labor in the shadows. Fight for mothers who carry double burdens. Fight for the right of every human being to stop, to breathe, to rest.

Practice Sabbath as resistance. Rest your body as an act of faith. Rest your mind as an act of trust. And use your rest to build energy for the work of justice.

Here’s the truth: Empire—whatever form it takes—wants us exhausted. It wants us too tired to resist. It wants us working so hard we don’t have time to organize, to advocate, to imagine something different.

Yet God says: Rest. Stop. Remember who you are. Remember whose you are. Then, rested and renewed, go out and break chains. Speak truth. Practice justice. Love radically. That’s what it means to honor God’s name and keep the Sabbath. That’s what it means to be free.

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.

PART ONE: Understanding the Ten Commandments

Friends, seeing more and more calls to place the Ten Commandments in public schools, government buildings, and just about anywhere else conservative politicians can think of, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Ten Commandments and what they really mean. Do we really understand them? Do we really understand why people are so ready to read them as the end all, be all of God’s word and neglect the Beatitudes? Do any of us really know how we can live the Ten Commandments out in our lives today?

With those questions in mind, I want to spend the next few weeks looking at the Ten Commandments, a few at a time; what they continue to teach us; and how we can apply them in our daily lives.

Before we dive into any of the Commandments specifically, we need to talk about what we’re actually looking at when we read the Ten Commandments. Because here’s the thing—and I need you to hear this—these aren’t just rules. These aren’t just “thou shalt nots” handed down from an angry God in the sky trying to control us.

Repeat after me: These are words of liberation.

Let’s look at our text. Listen for a word from God in Exodus 20:1-17 NRSVUE:

Then God spoke all these words: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.

You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above or that is on the earth beneath or that is in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord, your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.

You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses their name.

Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work; you, your children, your slaves, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it.

Honor your parents, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.

You shall not murder.

You shall not commit adultery.

You shall not steal.

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s spouse, slave, ox, donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”

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

Before we get any further into this, let’s get our bearings.

Historically, these commandments come to a people who have just escaped slavery. They’ve been brick-makers for Pharaoh. They’ve known suffering, they’ve known hunger, they’ve known what it means to have their children torn from them. And now, three months into freedom, standing at the foot of Mount Sinai, they’re about to learn how to be free people.

See, Egypt had laws, but those laws served Pharaoh. Those laws said: you exist to produce, to serve power, to make the rich richer and the powerful more powerful.

But God’s law? God’s law is different. It starts not with “thou shalt not” but with “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out.” It starts with liberation. With rescue. With relationship.

From a literary perspective, the commandments are structured in a precise way. The first four deal with our relationship with God. The last six deal with our relationships with each other. In their very organization, God’s saying to us: “You can’t love God if you don’t love your neighbor, and you can’t truly love your neighbor if you don’t love God.”

And here’s something else: these aren’t suggestions. The Hebrew is direct, absolute. “You shall not.” Period. Full stop. There’s a clarity here, a firmness that says: This is what it means to be God’s people. This is the shape of freedom. This is how you stay free.

Theologically, the Ten Commandments reveal the character of God. They show us a God who cares about everything: our worship, yes, but also our rest, our relationships, our property, our sexuality, our speech, even our thoughts and desires. This is a God who wants all of us, who claims all of life as sacred ground. These commandments create the conditions for community. You can’t have a functioning, flourishing community if people are murdering each other, stealing from each other, lying about each other, and coveting what each other has. You can’t build the beloved community on a foundation of idolatry and unfaithfulness to God and to each other.

The Ten Commandments are God’s blueprint for how a liberated people stay liberated. We need to understand that the journey from Egypt to the Promised Land isn’t just geographical. It’s spiritual. It’s psychological. It’s communal. You can take the people out of Egypt, but getting Egypt out of the people? That’s the work of a lifetime. That’s the work of the commandments.

PART TWO: The First Two Commandments

I want to turn now to the commandments themselves. Over the next several weeks we’re going to focus in on each commandment by looking at three dynamics:

1. What the commandment meant to the Ancient Hebrews. How would they have interpreted the language and the calling from God?

2. What the Bible says about the commandment. The Ten Commandments are not static. They don’t just appear once or twice and are never mentioned again. The Bible speaks to and refers to them throughout the rest of the text. We need to understand that tradition.

3. How can we apply the commandment in our lives? The Ten Commandments are significant, and their influence is felt still today. How can we faithfully, progressively, and practically live them out in 2025?

The First Commandment: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.”

What It Meant to the Ancient Hebrews

Ancient Egypt was full of Gods. The Egyptians had gods for everything: gods of the Nile, gods of the sun, gods of the harvest, gods of the afterlife, gods of war, gods of fertility. At times even the living Pharaoh was considered a god. As is the case in many polytheistic religions, individual cities, powerful families, and areas often had their own gods or versions of gods. And these gods weren’t just spiritual ideas. They represented and legitimized real power. When Pharaoh spoke, he did so with the authority of the gods.

So, when God says, “You shall have no other gods before me,” it’s a direct challenge to the entire Egyptian worldview and every empire worldview that would come after it.

The vast majority of the nations and peoples the Hebrews will come into contact with—Canaan, Assyria, Babylon, etc.—had their own pantheon of gods too. A key element of many of these mythologies is that the gods were surprisingly human-like. You could argue with them. Buy them off with offerings and bribes. You could make deals with them. You could even play them off each other. You could make a deal with Baal for rain, a deal with Asherah for fertility, and a deal with Molech for military victory. You could hedge your bets. You could diversify your spiritual portfolio. And if they didn’t come through on the deal? If your god or gods didn’t do what you asked them to do? You could always go find a new god.

But our God says: “No, I’m not one god among many. I’m not a regional deity you consult for specific needs. I’m not a god you can manipulate. I’m the Lord God. I’m the One who liberated you. I’m the One who heard your cries in Egypt. I’m the One who split the sea. I will not share your loyalty with statues and idols. Sure, you can deny me and run away, but I’m all you’ve got and I’ll be here waiting when you come back.”

Yes, this is an exclusive claim. But it’s not exclusive because God’s insecure. This exclusivity is one of intimacy. It’s the exclusivity of a God who says: “I know what happens when you divide your heart. I know what happens when you try to serve multiple masters. You end up serving none. You end up enslaved again.”

What the Bible Says About It

This commandment comes up throughout Scripture. We hear it echoing in the words of the prophets, psalmists, and Jesus.

Isaiah 44:6-8 says: “This is what the Lord says: ‘I am the first and I am the last; apart from me there is no God. Who then is like me? Let them proclaim it. Let them declare and lay out before me what has happened since I established my ancient people, and what is yet to come…You are my witnesses. Is there any God besides me? No, there is no other Rock; I know not one.’”

In 1 Kings 18, the Prophet Elijah faced down 450 prophets of Baal. In verse 21 he asks the people, “How long will you waver between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him.” (Spoiler: It doesn’t turn out well for the 450 prophets of Baal.)

Jesus speaks to this commandment at least twice. First, in Matthew 6:24 Jesus says: “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”

Second and more importantly, in Matthew 22:37-40 he says, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Jesus demonstrated what the First Commandment is really about. It’s not just about avoiding carved images or foreign deities. It’s about the orientation of your whole life. It’s about who or what gets your allegiance. It’s about who has the final say.

Living It Today: Confronting the Idols of Our Time

I doubt any of us actively bow down to statues or worship pantheons of other gods. Maybe you do. But we still have our idols. The most dangerous idol for many of our Christian siblings right now is Christian nationalism.

Repeat after me: Christian nationalism is idolatry.

It takes the flag and wraps it around the cross until you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. It says that to be a “real” Christian you have to be white, heterosexual, at least middle class, and able-bodied. It doesn’t hurt to be male too. It also says that to be a “real” American you have to be Christian. It says that God blesses America above all nations—as if God plays favorites, as if God doesn’t love immigrants as much as a person born in the United States

Christian nationalism says: worship a small god in a small box who fits our ideal of what godliness is and while you’re at it also worship this nation, this flag, and the version of history where we’re the heroes and never the oppressors. It says: God brought you out of Egypt, but make sure you keep other people in their Egypt. Keep them out. Keep them down. Keep them separate.

Friends, this is not the God of Exodus. This is not the God who heard the cries of an enslaved people and said, “Let my people go.” This is a false god. This is Pharaoh in a flag pin and a cross necklace.

The First Commandment demands that we ask: Who is our God? Is it the God of liberation who brings people out of slavery? Or is it the god of nationalism that wants to build walls, ban people, and legislate who gets to be fully human?

And while we’re on the topic of Christian nationalism, let’s talk about one of their favorite phrases: “traditional family values.” It’s become an idol too.

The God we find in Exodus didn’t bring people out of slavery so they could create new categories of “clean” and “unclean,” “in” and “out,” “worthy” and “unworthy.” Jesus didn’t die on the cross so we could decide whose love is legitimate and whose isn’t.

When we say, “traditional family,” what are we really saying? When members of the Ohio General Assembly propose a bill calling for recognition of “Natural Families Month,” what are we calling “natural” and “unnatural?” Are we talking about the families in Scripture? Because Biblical families are messy. Abraham had a wife, who he occasionally called his sister, and had a child with his wife’s servant. Jacob had two wives and two concubines. David had a man stationed at the front lines of combat in the hopes that he’d be killed and David could have his wife. Solomon’s sexual conquests are well documented. Ruth and Naomi had a relationship so intimate that Ruth said, “Where you go, I will go; your people shall be my people and your God, my God.” David and Jonathan “knit their souls together.” Jesus’ family fled persecution and became refugees.

Whose “traditional values” are we defending? Is it the tradition of Scripture, with all its complicated, beautiful, and imperfect families? Or is it the tradition of 1950s America, a manufactured nostalgia for a time when only certain people got to be fully human and many people lived secret, repressed lives?

Some of the people who shout the loudest for “traditional family values” have some of the least traditional families and marriages.

Here’s the truth, church: God isn’t asking us to defend an idol of “traditional family values.” God’s asking us to defend families. All families. Transgender people who need their parents and families to see and love them. Queer families who are told their love doesn’t count. Single parents doing their best to raise children on their own. Grandparents raising their grandchildren. Extended family stepping up and stepping in. Immigrant families being torn apart. Families formed through adoption. Chosen families created when biological families don’t love people like they should.

The first commandment calls us to ask: Is our God big enough for all of this? Or have we made God in our own image, small enough to fit our prejudices? Because here’s what God is saying: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt.” Not just you. Not just people who look like you, who love like you, or who pray like you. All of us. Everyone crying out for liberation. Everyone yearning for freedom. Everyone trapped in systems that dehumanize and destroy.

God still hears the cries of the oppressed. God still breaks chains. God still leads people to freedom.

And if we’re going to worship this God, then we can’t worship the idols of nationalism and exclusion at the same time. We have to choose.

The first commandment is an invitation to freedom. Real freedom. The freedom that comes from worshiping the God who liberates, the God who welcomes, the God who says, “I see you, I know you, I love you, and I want all of you.”

The Second Commandment: “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above or that is on the earth beneath or that is in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.”

What It Meant to the Ancient Hebrews

For the Ancient Hebrews, this commandment was radical. Every other nation had images of their gods. You could go to the temple in Babylon and see Marduk. You could visit a Canaanite shrine and see Baal, carved in wood or stone, covered in gold. These statues were often more than just images or representations of gods, they were held to be the god itself.

Therefore, these images gave people a sense of control. You could see your god. You could carry your god with you. You could manipulate your god. You could put your god where you wanted, when you wanted.

But our God refuses to be contained. Refuses to be controlled. Refuses to be made manageable.

Why? Because the moment you make an image of God, you put a limit on God. You freeze God in one form, one expression, one way of being. And the God of the Bible is the God who IS. The God of becoming. The God of movement and mystery. The God who shows up in a burning bush and a pillar of cloud and a still small voice and ultimately, in the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ.

When the Hebrews would later build the Temple, the Holy of Holies—the inner sanctuary where God’s presence was said to dwell—contained no image. Just the Ark of the Covenant. Because God cannot be reduced to what our hands can make. Yet, we should be careful here, because images of God are not the only problem. Yes, the Holy of Holies was said to be unadorned, but it was a finite location. It put a limit on God who is limitless. It also enforced the idea that only certain people could access God who is as close as our next breath.

What the Bible Says About It

The second commandment isn’t just about physical statues. Throughout Scripture, it becomes clear that we make images of God in our minds too. We create mental idols: pictures of who God is and what God wants that serves us rather than transforms us. The people in Jesus’ time had made an image of God as the enforcer of purity codes, the keeper of boundaries, the rewarder of the righteous, and the punisher of sinners. And then Jesus showed up, eating with tax collectors and sinners, touching lepers, welcoming children, honoring women, and the people were confused because Jesus didn’t fit their image of God and the Messiah.

In Romans 1, Paul warns about people who “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images.” But the exchange isn’t just about statues. It’s about exchanging the truth of who God is for a version that serves our agendas, confirms our biases, and justifies our systems.

We see this throughout the Bible, across history, and today: people trying to make God into something controllable, something predictable, something that endorses what they already want to do. Every single time, God breaks the mold.

Living It Today: Breaking Our Mental Idols

Friends, we need to talk about the images of God we’ve created. Because some of these images are keeping us from seeing what God is doing right now in the world. I don’t just mean white “God” and white “Jesus” with their European features, pale complexions, and male gender. I mean the ideas, the conceptions, the many things we’ve substituted for God.

One of the most dangerous images we’ve created is the image of God as the defender of the status quo. God as the one who says, “Keep things the way they are. Don’t rock the boat. Don’t make trouble. Stay in your lane.”

But that’s not the God of the Bible. The God of the Bible is disruptive. The God of the Bible is always showing up where people don’t expect, calling the outcasts and the people who don’t think they qualify, and liberating people who others would prefer to keep oppressed.

We’ve made an image of God as someone who cares more about who people love than whether people are loved. We’ve made an image of God who cares more about protecting borders than protecting people. We’ve made an image of God who looks like us, thinks like us, and votes like us. And we’ve compounded that sin by saying that anyone who doesn’t fit that image must not know God or believe in God.

The second commandment is calling us to break the false images. Not just the ones in temples, but the ones in our hearts and minds.

What does this look like practically?

It means that when someone says, “God would never accept LGBTQIA+ people,” we break that image. We say: “Actually, the God I serve is bigger than your boxes. The God who created humanity in infinite diversity, who through Jesus welcomed everyone the religious establishment excluded; that God cannot be reduced to your narrow image.”

It means when someone says, “God blesses America above all nations, so we should close our borders and turn away refugees,” or simply implies that God wants to “make America great again,” we break that image. We say: “The God of the Bible was a refugee. Jesus was a refugee. The God who said, ‘I was a stranger, and you welcomed me’ cannot be squeezed into your nationalistic idol.”

It means when someone weaponizes “traditional family values” to exclude and harm, we break that image. We say: “The God who is love itself, who invented family and community, who expands our understanding of kinship beyond bloodlines; that God will not be used to tear families apart or deny the love that binds people together.”

See, the second commandment protects us from making God too small. It protects us from domesticating the Divine. It protects us from turning the God of liberation into the god of the empire, the God of love into the god of exclusion, the God of justice into the god of the status quo.

And yes, God is described here as “jealous.” But this isn’t petty jealousy. This is the jealousy of a lover who knows that when we give ourselves to false gods, we hurt ourselves. We diminish ourselves. We settle for less than the abundant life God wants for us.

God is jealous for our freedom. God is jealous for our flourishing. God is jealous because God knows that these images, these idols, will ultimately destroy us.

And notice what God says: punishment to the third and fourth generation for those who reject God, but steadfast love to the thousandth generation for those who love God. God’s love outweighs God’s judgment. This is a God whose default setting is love. Whose fundamental nature is grace. Whose deepest desire is relationship with us; real relationship, not a relationship mediated through images we control.

CONCLUSION: The Call to Freedom

Friends, these first two commandments call us into freedom. Real freedom. The freedom to worship the God who liberates, not the idols that enslave. The freedom to encounter the living God, not the manageable images we create.

This freedom has implications, too. It means we can’t stay silent when legislation tries to erase our Queer, Trans, and immigrant siblings. It means we can’t stand by when immigrants are demonized and dehumanized. It means we can’t tolerate a Christianity that baptizes racism and calls it faithfulness.

Here’s my charge to you today: Go and break some idols. Not with violence, but with love. Not with condemnation, but with truth. Not with exclusion, but with radical welcome.

Break the idol of nationalism by loving your immigrant neighbors.

Break the idol of “traditional family values” by affirming and celebrating all the beautiful ways people love each other and create families.

Break the idol of white supremacy by actively working for racial justice.

Break the idol of respectability by showing up, speaking out, making good trouble.

And as you break these idols, remember you’re not destroying faith. You’re making room for the real God. The God who is bigger than we can imagine. The God who liberates and loves and calls us into abundant life.

Amen.