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 Numbers, the 11^th chapter verses 16-17 and 24-30.

The Lord said to Moses, “Gather for me seventy of the elders of Israel, whom you know to be the elders of the people and officers over them; bring them to the tent of meeting and have them take their place there with you. I will come down and speak with you there, and I will take some of the spirit that is on you and put it on them, and they shall bear the burden of the people along with you so that you will not bear it all by yourself.

So, Moses went out and told the people the words of the Lord, and he gathered seventy of the elders of the people and placed them all around the tent. Then the Lord came down in the cloud and spoke to him and took some of the spirit that was on him and put it on the seventy elders, and when the spirit rested upon them, they prophesied. But they did not do so again.

Two men remained in the camp, one named Eldad and the other named Medad, and the spirit rested on them; they were among those registered, but they had not gone out to the tent, so they prophesied in the camp. And a young man ran and told Moses, “Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp.” And Joshua, son of Nun, the assistant of Moses, one of his chosen men, said, “My lord Moses, stop them!” But Moses said to him, “Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!” And Moses and the elders of Israel returned to the camp.

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

At the beginning of Numbers 11, several verses before we started reading tonight, the Hebrew people are complaining to Moses and Moses is complaining to God. In fact, Moses says to God, “If this is the way you are going to treat me, put me to death at once, if I have found favor in your sight, and do not let me see my misery.”

To be clear, I don’t think Moses is suicidal and I don’t think he really wants to die, but he’s frustrated and, like some of us, his frustration is manifesting as drama. This is one of his cries for attention and God, ever patient particularly with Moses, dismisses the drama, but gives Moses a command which will help his situation. That’s where our passage picks up tonight.

God tells Moses to gather seventy elders, bring them to the tent of meeting, and God will come down to meet with them. God says they’ll take some of their Spirit which is on Moses and place it on the heads of each of the elders. The elders will then carry the weight of the people with Moses.

Before we move on, I want to pause on this part of the story. First, seventy elders is a strange number for the Hebrews. They were traveling in groups delineated by their 12 tribes. Assembling a group of seventy elders poses a mathematical and political problem for Moses. If he chooses five men per tribe, he’ll be short ten, but if he chooses 6 per tribe, he’ll be two over. If he chooses six from ten tribes and five from the remaining two tribes, those tribes will be upset with him. The text doesn’t tell us how Moses arrived at the seventy, but the Talmud, a collection of rabbinic commentary on the Torah, proposes a solution to the problem and to why Eldad and Medad remain in the camp and don’t go to the tent of meeting. Sanhedrin 17, one section of the Talmud, says that Moses chose 72 elders, six from each tribe. He then had them draw slips of paper from a box. Seventy of the slips read “elder” and two were blank. According to the Talmud, Moses reasoned that the outcome would be divinely willed and who was he or the two excluded men to disagree with divine will? So Eldad and Medad end up with the blank slips, and the other 70 men follow Moses to the tent of meeting. We’ll come back to this point in a moment.

Second, we need to avoid thinking that the Spirit falls on people or indwells them in certain amounts. We’re reminded in 1 Corinthians 12 that there are many gifts of the Spirit, but that they’re activated by the same Spirit. There is but one Holy Spirit and the Spirit falls on people equally. What God’s promising Moses in Numbers 11 is that the responsibility for the people is going to be taken from Moses alone and distributed on the seventy elders. Moses remains in charge and his chosen assistants remain in their positions, but God is visibly authorizing these elders to serve with Moses and direct the people.

Moses does as God commands him and for a moment he can breathe, but as any leader knows situations involving people are hardly ever that tidy.

Even though Moses’s solution to choosing 70 elders excluded Eldad and Medad, it seems God chose them as elders anyway and the Spirit found them in the camp. Right where Moses had left them, in the middle of the cook fires and the complaining and the leftover manna, they started to prophesy.

Notice that the text never tells us what they said or what they did. We get no oracle, no vision, no sermon. We’re told who the Spirit landed on and where it landed, and that’s all. The story isn’t asking us to care about the content. It’s asking us to care about the location. The Spirit went where the people were.

That matters for us, because we love to wait for the Spirit where we’ve arranged for the Spirit to appear. We love to do church in the prescribed place, under the right order of worship. With the right person at the microphone. And nothing’s objectively wrong with any of that. Tents are good. Chapels and churches are good. But if we decide the Spirit only works inside our arrangements, we’ll keep sending runners to report what God’s doing in the camp. We’ll keep gatekeeping ourselves and others about where the Spirit can work and where God can appear.

For the people in this passage, the tent of meeting is the sanctioned place. It’s part of the structure that keeps the camp from chaos, and in the wilderness, structure keeps people alive. The story tells us that God honors that structure. It also tells us that God refuses to be held by it.

Everybody’s on the List

Let’s talk about prophecy because it can conjure up all kinds of images, some of them helpful and others not. If you’re thinking about a crystal ball or tarot cards, you can abandon those images for now. The kinds of prophets who appear in the Bible are those who the Spirit has handed a word from God, to be spoken into a particular time and place. Mostly it’s about the present. What’s broken here. What God sees. What God’s dreaming instead. A prophet tells the truth about the world as it is and points toward the kin-dom that’s coming.

Now look at who receives the Spirit in this story. Not one person; but seventy-two. God’s answer to Moses’s burnout is distribution. Prophecy isn’t a solo job for the exceptional. It’s a weight meant to be shared.

And Moses says aloud what God’s been doing all along. When Joshua demands he shut down Eldad and Medad, Moses says, “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets.” Every single one. Moses isn’t complaining or just observing. He’s praying.

Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets.

Centuries later, the prophet Joel hears it too. God says the Spirit will be poured out on all flesh. Children will prophesy. Old folks will dream, young folks will see visions, and the Spirit will fall on everyone evenly. Then Pentecost comes, and Peter stands up in a crowd, this is what Joel promised. Moses’s wish, granted. Not only for the ones at the tent. For everyone.

Which means you’re on the list too. Whether you’ve ever made it to the tent or not.

Given the choice, many of us would likely say, “Who? Me? I’m no prophet. Don’t give me that title!” We’ve been told that prophets are a special class of people. We’ve decided for ourselves that prophets are a special breed. Prophets are like the saints. We tell ourselves and we tell each other that they are the great ones, the famous ones, the ones with statues and special days.

But remember what we said about the saints last week. The saints aren’t just those people who are acknowledged by the church or the heroes of our religious stories. We are the saints too. The saints in glory aren’t judging us from a far. The saints are waiting for us to act with them.

The Spirit doesn’t wait for a résumé. The Spirit doesn’t just approach those of us with pretty titles and tons of letters after our names. Remember the Christian adage that God doesn’t call the qualified, God qualifies those they call. A prophetic life can look pretty ordinary from the outside.

Prophecy often looks like telling the truth about what’s in front of you. It looks like refusing to pretend that everything’s all right when it’s not. It looks like staying beside someone the world has dismissed, even when it’s politically or socially disadvantageous for us. It looks like setting a table for people who were told there’s no seat. It looks like living as if God’s kin-dom is already being built in our midst.

Stop Them

A young man runs to Moses. Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp. People have noticed that these men are active and they want it handled. They want to restore the proper order where Moses is the divinely appointed leader and messenger. In fact, upon hearing what’s going, Moses assistant and one of the chief leaders of the group, Joshua, says, “My lord Moses, stop them!”

The name “Joshua” is fairly common in the Bible in various forms because it means “God brings salvation.” Jesus’ name in Hebrew was “Yeshua” that is “Joshua.” So, whenever the name Joshua appears we should sit up and take notice. This Joshua will be the one to lead the Hebrews into the promised land.

He’s very close to Moses. He’s watched Moses nearly break several times. He’s loyal, and he loves the order and structure that’s kept the group alive. Everything in him says there’s a process and order. Eldad and Medad hadn’t been selected as elders. They weren’t at the tent. They didn’t receive the blessing and commissioning from God. How dare they prophesy in the camp.

His anger is understandable, but he’s also mistaken.

He’s wrong because the Spirit already fell on the people it was supposed to fall on. God has authorized something which no person, Moses included, could authorize.

And Moses answers. “Are you jealous for my sake?” Moses sees how Joshua’s opposition comes dressed as loyalty. It’s love for the leader, love for the structure, love for how things have always been. Real love. Pointed the wrong way at the wrong moment.

That’s the hardest opposition to face. It doesn’t come from villains. It doesn’t come from internet trolls with nothing better to do. It doesn’t arrive from the mouths of people who we’ll won’t remember in a day or two.

No, it comes from people who care about us and are scared. Jesus says it plainly in Luke 4:24: “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown.” Prophets are discouraged and get stopped by the people who know them best.

The words are the same for people who have new ideas. Innovators, artists, writers, and, yes, prophets. We know the sound of the discouragement. Slow down. Don’t act like that. Don’t rock the boat. You’ll hurt your reputation. You’ll hurt the community. You’ll hurt yourself. We need to be nice and compromise. Every word of it said with tenderness. Stop them.

Then there’s the other kind of objection. At Pentecost, when the Spirit fills the disciples with her power and they begin speaking every language, some in the crowd sneer, “They’re full of new wine” or in other words “They’re drunk.” These are strangers. They don’t know the disciples. They probably don’t care to know them. They’ve decided who these people are before one sentence lands. Same Spirit, same result. Somebody tries to stop it by mocking it, by shrinking it, by turning it into a joke.

When I was at the TFAM Midwest gathering in October, we had a moment of blessing and prayer over our bishop-elect. As the praying and blessing increased people began to shake and others began to speak in tongues. I’m still a baby Pentecostal and I admit my mind went back to the ordered liturgies of my Catholic, Episcopal, and Reformed background (by the way, some of the former Baptists around me were having similar thoughts). We would never deny the religious experience that was happening, but a part of us nevertheless clung to the order and decorum we used to know.

We do it to ourselves all the time, particularly in church. There’s a bit of religious calculus that goes on in my mind when I’m moved to put a hand in the air during a song. We say, if only to ourselves, “make them stop,” even when the “them” is us.

An Old Slogan About Living

They haven’t been in the news for a while, but most of us remember when Westboro Baptist Church was routinely in the news for protesting funerals. They’d carry horrible signs and shout even worse vitriol at people trying to mourn. A slogan and rallying cry came out of those protests: “Live your life in such a way that Westboro Baptist Church protests your funeral.” During the height of the Civil Rights Movement a similar reminder was that if someone’s shooting at you then you must be doing something right. And the LGBTQIA+ leader Harvey Milk famously said, “If a bullet should enter my brain let that bullet destroy every closet door.”

We shouldn’t so brazenly invite danger on ourselves, but this is the kind of audacity that a prophetic life should embody. The loudest cries of “stop them!” might come from our friends and families or it might come people who have never met us. But we should strive to be angelic troublemakers like Bayard Rustin called for in every town and city. We’ve got to ask ourselves honestly. When the Spirit shows up, are we the ones prophesying or are we the ones running to report it?

Back to the Camp

So where is God calling Blue Ocean Columbus and all of us in this season? That’s the question we’re asking right now.

We’re small. We’re in uncertain days, and every sensible voice wants to tell us what sensible looks like. Stay small. Stay quiet. Stay safe. Protect what we’ve got. The wilderness is real. Moneys tight. The mood around us shifts week to week. Some folks would be perfectly happy if people like us lowered our voices.

Hear this. God’s answer to a weary group was never a bigger group. God’s answer has always been a Spirit spread so wide it landed on two people who didn’t who weren’t even invited to the appointed place. The Spirit didn’t wait for a crowd. It never has. Small isn’t a verdict. Seventy doesn’t sound like a lot and two or three has been us some weeks, yet this whole story turns on those numbers.

Maybe God isn’t calling us to innovate a new program. Maybe God’s calling us to a new posture. We already carry the weight together, but perhaps we need to adjust the load. We need new people to run, walk, and crawl with us and stand up to take some of the load.

This is a working church. To keep a church like this going we need everyone invested and involved. That doesn’t mean get lost if you can’t coordinate an event or sit on the board. It means that we all have talents and gifts and Blue Ocean Columbus lives by the totality of those gifts. With those gifts engaged and people invested in the life of this congregation, this family, we can prophesy in this space, which is our tent. We can prophesy in our lives and our communities, which are our camps.

Forget what you learned before about prophesy and testimony in evangelical and Catholic churches. We have to prophesy. We have to testify. We can’t just say it here, we have to live it. God’s far from done with Blue Ocean Columbus. I can feel it. I hope you can too.

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 9th chapter, verses 1-6.

¹ The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
Upon those who lived in a land of gloom
a light has shone.
² You have brought them abundant joy
and great rejoicing;
They rejoice before you as people rejoice at harvest,
as they exult when dividing the spoils.
³ For the yoke that burdened them,
the pole on their shoulder,
The rod of their taskmaster,
you have smashed, as on the day of Midian.
⁴ For every boot that tramped in battle,
every cloak rolled in blood,
will be burned as fuel for fire.
⁵ For a child is born to us, a son is given to us;
upon his shoulder dominion rests.
They name him Wonder-Counselor, God-Hero,
Father-Forever, Prince of Peace.
⁶ His dominion is vast
and forever peaceful,
Upon David’s throne, and over his kingdom,
which he confirms and sustains
By judgment and justice,
both now and forever.
The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this!

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

Every year I celebrate the day I first came out on October 25. This year marks 19 years since I came out and this a part of that story.

I had just finished my first year of college and I took an internship in the admissions office at Sewanee. That summer, which felt like my first time being “on my own” (it wasn’t) I first admitted to myself that I’m gay. Yes, I had known for a while that I was gay, but I hadn’t admitted it to myself. Fast forward to the fall of that year and one of my professors and mentors could sense that I was struggling with something. She sat me down and presented three theories of what she thought was going on, the third of which was, “I think you think you’re gay.” She wouldn’t let me leave her office until I said the words: “I’m gay.”

After that conversation I slowly started coming out to my friends both at college and at home. Most people were supportive. Some had significant experience affirming members of the LGBTQIA+ community (shout out to the allies in the music and theatre communities). Some had never had a Queer friend and didn’t know how to react. A few wanted to be supportive, but they had been indoctrinated to believe that LGBTQIA+ people were possessed by demons or at least under the spell of Satan. My coming out started a few friends on their paths to deconstruction…sorry, not sorry.

The Sewanee chaplain cried and gave me a hug as did our choirmaster. Our associate chaplain was particularly supportive and was the first person to teach me that God made me gay and loved me no differently than anyone else that God made. I was inclined to believe her, but it took me more than a few years to really believe what she told me.

I came out to my aunt over a text message (she had known long before I had). I hoped I’d have the nerve to tell my parents while I was home for Thanksgiving that year, but alas I just couldn’t do it. Despite being registered Republicans and at least moderate Catholics, my parents had never expressed homophobic or negative views toward LGBTQIA+ people. In fact, we knew several Queer people growing up. But I had read too many stories about people who assumed that their families would be accepting only to end up being disowned or worse. I was convinced that my parents would never smile at me again once they found out.

Eventually, I wrote them a letter which my father found in the mail, didn’t open, and left on a table until my mother arrived home from work. She called me that night and said, “We got your letter. We love you. And you’re running up our cell phone bill, and we need to talk about that.” Though I now know that her statement was relatively poor in the annals of parental responses to children coming out, it worked for me at the time. For the record, my sister was the one running up the family cell phone bill.

The path from initial coming out to being who I am today was often rocky and was far less direct that one might imagine. It included silence and death threats from people I had considered my friends in high school, but it also included joy in discovering other people who were on coming out journeys of their own. I struggled for years to reconcile my faith and what I had been led to believe with who I was becoming as a Queer man in the world. In a moment which thankfully was neither recorded nor saved in text, I declared in my first ever sermon that I “didn’t support the gay agenda.” I was so desperate to hold a semblance of what I had been taught. I now understand that dynamic as part of the coming out process for many LGBTQIA+ people of faith.

At once coming out is a process shared by all Queer people and yet coming out is universally an individual experience that always is different for each person. What is shared by almost all LGBTQIA+ people is the reality that being out is substantially brighter than being in the closet. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.

The Dark Isaiah Knew

Tonight we’re reading from Isaiah again in one of the best known and most quoted passages from the prophet. Though often read closer to Christmas and paired with the story of Jesus’ birth as the light that bursts into darkness, this passage is being written to a people who, in the southern kingdom of Judah, are watching their religious siblings in the northern kingdom of Israel being conquered and taken into exile by the Assyrian army. Isaiah’s gloom isn’t a mood or even an emotion, it’s a reality.

Then three images stack up, one on top of another. A yoke, a pole across the shoulder, and a rod in a taskmaster’s hand. The yoke fits you for work you didn’t choose. The pole bends your back under a load that isn’t yours. The rod reminds you what happens if you slow down.

Too many of us know that yoke by heart. We were fitted for it in a youth groups and confessionals. The yoke was fastened in place by people who told us that they loved us, but our love was an abomination. The genius of this yoke and its accompanying rod was that no one needed to raise a hand against us. They just smiled, quoted a verse of scripture out-of-context or mistranslated, and moved on safe in the majority opinion.

If you grew up Catholic, it probably came with some sort of rhythm. Examine your soul, confess your sins, try to live better (code for celibate or as a heterosexual), and repeat. If you grew up Evangelical, it came with altar calls and reminders from the pulpit that sinners were in your midst, perhaps with a well-timed glare from the preacher, every Sunday, for as long as you could remember. Different contexts, but the same pole across your shoulder.

We learned to examine the space. We learned to notice small patterns and symbols to suss out how affirming a congregation might be to us and our family. We learned the importance of doing the math before walking into any room. We also learned to police our behavior, how we carried ourselves, how our voices sounded, and how we talked about our partners. We accepted being someone else not just to fit in, but to avoid conflict and, in some cases, to avoid danger.

And we were told it was God’s yoke. Jesus did say his yoke is easy and his burden light, but that wasn’t what the church handed us. What the church handed us was heavier, and it was never Jesus’.

But Isaiah’s clear about what God does with yokes. Despite what the church might have taught us and how often they tried to make the yoke into a cross, God doesn’t teach us to accept a yoke. God doesn’t ask us to patiently accept the will of the taskmaster. God smashes the yoke. Our liberation doesn’t start with our own strength. It starts with God, who never intended for us to be under that yoke.

The Yoke We Picked Up

We need to press this text a little further. Once God smashed the yoke, the pole on our shoulders, and the taskmaster’s rod, and we came out into the light, many of us didn’t stop. We turned around, we looked back, and we found the scared and broken people still on the path of coming out. And we figured somebody had to carry them, either because someone had carried us or because we wanted better for others than we had experienced ourselves. We became the guides and the teachers. The ones who show up to every meeting and the ones who answer the same question from the same relative for the eleventh year. We took the pole, laid it across our own shoulders, and named it a calling.

The Bible is full of examples of less than perfect people picking through the rumble and finding where God is calling them to be. Psalm 118:22 tells us that “The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.” Matthew 21 picks up that verse to describe Jesus, but God has a way to take what the world rejects and transform it into something powerful.

A few weeks ago, when I was in Cincinnati for TFAM Midwest’s gathering, our incoming regional bishop, Lesley Jones, showed us her pastoral staff. Special staffs for priests and bishops have a long history in religion and in Christianity go back to the staff carried by Moses during the exodus and the shepherd’s crook invoked in the parable of the Good Shepherd. Since at least the Middle Ages, these staffs have often been highly ornate and have been given unique liturgical names like the bishop’s crozier. Bishop-Elect Lesley’s staff is a substantial limb cut from a tree. It’s natural, organic, and decorated simply with blue and white thread and several small crosses. Yet when pounded on the floor of her church, particularly in time with the gospel music that congregation produces, it commands attention. The branch found in the forest becomes the staff of a bishop, pastor, and leader.

A Child, Born

Isaiah’s not finished until a child is born. A son is given. Dominion rests on his shoulder.

Even when so many of us are bent and bruised, there’s one who can hold the weight. It’s the same one who said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28-30). In Jesus liberation arrives, but it arrives in partnership with the God who saves.

Harvest Joy

Which brings me back to verse 2. Abundant joy. Rejoicing like harvest. Like people dividing the spoils. When the yoke breaks, Isaiah doesn’t describe a sigh of relief. He describes a feast.

The church taught us that coming out was a confession, something to be mourned, and about which we should feel shame. You were supposed to come out with your head down and your voice low. You were supposed to tell a pastor and then keep it to yourself. But Isaiah says it’s a harvest. It’s something you do with a full table and your friends and family around you.

Some of us never got that feast. We came out to silence, or to a cold shoulder at the same table where we used to sit. Isaiah’s joy encompasses everyone. It just refuses to let the loss have the last word. Joy and grief can share a harvest. Plenty of us have set a place for both. And yet that’s why we celebrate now. On Friday, I celebrated my 19^th year out of the closet with family, biological and chosen. I choose to celebrate each year not just because I’ve been able to live openly, but because I know that others can’t celebrate and because I know that others can’t live openly.

Coming out is the moment we embrace the light and walk towards even brighter days. Somebody made it out, turned around, and lit a lamp for us to follow. Now we do the same so that when the next person comes out the first light they see is the collective brightness of all our lamps radiating the light of God’s glory.

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 30^th chapter, verses 1-7.

Woe to the rebellious children, says the Lord,
who carry out a plan but not mine;
who make an alliance but against my will,
adding sin to sin;
who set out to go down to Egypt
without asking for my counsel,
to take refuge in the protection of Pharaoh
and to seek shelter in the shadow of Egypt.
Therefore the protection of Pharaoh shall become your shame,
and the shelter in the shadow of Egypt your humiliation.
For though his officials are at Zoan
and his envoys reach Hanes,
everyone comes to shame
through a people that cannot profit them,
that brings neither help nor profit,
only shame and disgrace.

An oracle concerning the animals of the Negeb.

Through a land of trouble and distress,
of lioness and roaring lion,
of viper and flying serpent,
they carry their riches on the backs of donkeys
and their treasures on the humps of camels
to a people that cannot profit them.
For Egypt’s help is worthless and empty;
therefore I have called her,
“Rahab who sits still.”

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

What Rulers Build

Show me what a ruler and the ruling class builds when nobody can stop them, and I’ll show you who they serve.

Pharaohs built pyramids. Caesars built arches. Kings built palaces and churches with their own names carved over the door. Our current president is in the process of building a ballroom and a triumphant arch. And nearly every one of them told the people the same thing. This is for you. This is for the nation. This is for God.

Sometimes it was almost true. Usually, though, it wasn’t.

Tonight we’re reading from Isaiah 30, and a government is building again. Not with stone. With alliances. With envoys, treasure, and a carefully drawn plan. And God’s opening word about it is the sharpest in the chapter.

“Woe to the rebellious children.”

Not “enemies.” Not some “foreign empire.” Children. God’s own children. People who should have known better and kept building regardless.

A Plan That Wasn’t God’s

We meet Isaiah and the Hebrews tonight approximately 700 years before Jesus. Assyria is the primary regional superpower, swallowing the region one city at a time. The northern kingdom of Israel is already gone. Judah, the southern kingdom, is next, and King Hezekiah’s court is panicking. And they do what royal courts and other forms of government do. They get practical, diplomatic, and even transactional. Hezekiah sends a delegation to Egypt to buy a military alliance. Isaiah names two Egyptian cities, Zoan and Hanes, where Hezekiah’s ambassadors are negotiating with the Egyptians. None of these steps are inherently wrong. In fact, they’re prudent. Judah’s military is no match for Assyria. Attempting to take the offensive or digging in for a long defensive is only going to lead to death.

The charge that Isaiah is directing to Judah’s leaders is in one sense more nuanced than that. Yet in another sense it’s also blunter. The leaders are carrying out their own plan, but not God’s plan. They’ve looked at the situation and they’ve chosen a course. But they’ve forgotten to seek God’s counsel and in doing so they’ve placed Egypt, its strength, and their own fortune ahead of God.

Even in the sense of First Temple Judaism, God wasn’t out of reach. The temple stood a short walk from Hezekiah’s palace. They didn’t ask because God might say “no.” Or worse. God might say “wait.”

And Egypt has history for the people. Egypt was the house of bondage; the land God brought their ancestors out of and through the desert. While Egypt might have looked like something of a savior in this particular moment, it was also a wolf always lying in wait, ready to pounce and conquer the Hebrews themselves. Going back down to Egypt for protection isn’t only bad strategy. It’s the Exodus played in reverse. It’s a freed people walking back toward slavery and calling it security. There was no guarantee that having defended Judah from the Assyrians, that the Egyptians would go home.

So, God gives the verdict. Pharaoh’s protection will become the shame of the rulers. The shelter you’re buying will turn into humiliation. The people you’re counting on can only give you disgrace.

Notice the word Isaiah uses for where they’re headed. Shadow. Taking shelter in the shadow of Egypt. Isaiah’s listeners would have caught his reference immediately and perhaps you did too: the Psalms are full of references to seeking shelter in the shadow of God’s wings. That’s where God’s people were supposed to shelter. Instead, they went shopping for what felt like better shade.

The Proud One, Again

Think back to chapter two of the Book of Habakkuk. This is the point when the prophet had resolved to stand on his watchtower, still arguing with God, but now more confident in waiting on an answer because he had finally heard from God in chapter one. “Look at the proud,” God says. Look at the one whose spirit isn’t right within them. Then compare them to the righteous who live by their faithfulness.

Not by certainty, but by faithfulness, and specifically faithfulness under delay. Even though the vision might be slow, you wait because you are waiting on God.

That’s the hinge between these two prophets. Habakkuk waits at his post. Judah’s leaders are the ones who can’t stand to wait and in their impatience they became proud. Habakkuk says that the proud never have enough. They open their mouths wide as the grave. They swallow whole nations and still they aren’t full.

Then comes a visceral image in Habakkuk 2: God pronounces woe on whoever builds a house on unjust gain, setting a nest up high, safe from every hand. God says the stones themselves will cry out from the wall. The woodwork will answer back. The building testifies against the builder. Many of us probably know this image from Psalm 127:1, “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.” Hold on to that image. We’ll come back to it shortly.

Ballrooms and Arches

Last October, crews began tearing down the East Wing of the White House. Within days, it was decimated. In its place the Trump Administration is constructing a ballroom complete with 90,000 square feet of space, seating for 650, and price tag reported to be at least $400 million, though some estimates put it as high as $600 million. Yes, it’s true that presidents, usually under the direction of their spouses, have the prerogative and even some public money to renovate the White House and introduce their own tastes, preferences, and décor. Jackie Kennedy undertook significant and publicized renovations to the executive mansion, and one need only look at photos of the Oval Office to see how presidents have chosen to decorate perhaps the most famous office in the world.

We’ve been told that the funds for the construction of the ballroom are coming from President Trump and private donors he recruited for the project. You can decide for yourself if you trust the president’s claims to say nothing of what the supposedly private donors are receiving in appreciation for their donations, but the East Wing of the White House was more than office space. Generations of people entered the White House for tours through the East Wing. First and Second Ladies and the only Second Gentleman in US history kept offices there since 1902 and used the space to champion their own causes and support the work of their spouses. Major pieces of domestic policy touching on everything from agriculture to education to public safety were crafted there when it housed the US Domestic Policy Council.

Then came plans for a 250-foot-tall arch, modeled on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, with a golden Lady Liberty on top flanked by eagles, planned for the traffic circle at the foot of Memorial Bridge, between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial. Renderings of the arch depict the words “One Nation Under God” across the top. President Trump has also stated that the arch might serve a police and/or defense purpose with the capability to house and deploy drones, snipers, and anti-aircraft artillery.

While it has been well documented that demolition began on the East Wing before all appropriate and legally necessary permissions had been received and there are still questions about the funding of both projects, Isaiah never asked whether the building was permitted. Isaiah asked whose counsel was consulted.

President Trump even said the quiet part out loud. When a reporter from CBS asked who the arch was for, the president pointed at himself and said, “Me.”

Triumphal arches have a history, and they are almost always rooted in the horrors of war. The Roman Arch of Titus, constructed in 81 CE, commemorates the sacking of Jerusalem in 70 CE by the legions under Titus’s command. Carved into its sides, one can still see soldiers marching out of the Second Temple with menorahs and other sacred relics on their shoulders. That’s the purpose of a triumphal arch. It says we won; you lost. We want people to remember our victory and your defeat. And the shape? It’s a grand arch so that the victorious army could march through it on parade. Ironically for an administration which stands so starkly with the modern State of Israel and has insisted on recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the Arch of Titus inspired the Arc de Triomphe which in turn is inspiring the Arch of Independence.

But the Arch of Independence, also known informally as the Arch of Trump, doesn’t celebrate a military victory. It is being planned because this administration needs to glorify the state and the values of the state to support their agenda. When actual policy and action fail, governments and their leaders often turn to building monuments.

Every modern US president lives in the White House because of their position and role. But the house is no more theirs than the office of president is theirs. They hold the White House like they hold the presidency in trust for the people of the United States to whom the house and the office ultimately belong. So too every king of Judah sat on a throne that supposedly belonged to God. Scripture’s whole political imagination rests on that idea. Rulers are tenants. The earth and everything in it belong to God. A tenant who starts knocking out walls to suit their own taste has forgotten who holds the deed.

We need to ask where this government’s urgency lives. If a presidential administration can summon donors, architects, and excavators within weeks for a monument. What could it summon for the hungry? For the stranger at the border? For our Trans siblings, who just want to live in peace? You can tell what a government believes and what it holds as sacred by what it finds the money, the speed, and the energy to build.

The singer and poet Passenger, the stage name of British artist Mike Rosenberg, has observed: “There’s no money for the homeless, no money for welfare/ No money for schooling or adequate healthcare /There is just no money here, said the rich to the poor /But it’s funny how there’s money when we’re going to war.”

And if the administration’s plans hold, God’s name will be stamped on top of the arch as if God approves and endorses the project. That should make every all of us nervous. We were warned about carrying God’s name to dress up our own ambitions. Remember Habakkuk and remember Psalm 127. The stone cries out from the wall. Every monument built to flatter a ruler eventually testifies against that ruler. The Arch of Titus still stands in Rome today. The Roman Empire, however, fell as all empires eventually do.

The Fool Isn’t Alone

We can’t place all of Judah’s problems on the shoulders of one man. Diplomats had been dispatched to two Egyptian cities and others were preparing to go even further into the territory of their old enemy, so sure they were that any other course would lead to their total destruction. A whole government on the proverbial and literal roads to Egypt. Foolishness at that scale requires support. It needs “yes” people who call it brilliant. It needs donors who write checks in the hope of currying favor. It needs preachers calling it “God’s work” from pulpits and anointing it as holy. It needs people who shrug and turn their heads because the project doesn’t yet affect them directly. It needs people who even in 2026 after the well documented horrors and tragedies of the 20^th century still fail to learn the truth of a poem that says, “When they came for someone else, I didn’t do anything because I wasn’t that person, but when they came for me, no one was left.”

Here’s where we have to turn the lamp around, my friends, because Isaiah always does.

If you were hoping that I was going to preach about swapping one set of leaders for another set of leaders, a set more to our political and social liking, I’m sorry, that’s not this message and it certainly isn’t this scripture. Egypt has hosted envoys from every party that’s ever held power. But Egypt isn’t a place on a map. Egypt’s whatever, wherever, or whoever we run to instead of first asking God.

For Judah, it was Pharaoh’s chariots and soldiers. For President Trump, it’s buildings and monuments to himself and how he hopes history will view his presidencies. For many churches, it’s a bigger building, a bigger budget, and a seat close to power. For many preachers, I’m, ashamed to say including me, it’s a bigger platform. For anyone who’s been bullied, shut down, shut out, and legislated against, it’s the pull to trust whoever promises protection this week. For all of us, it’s accepting the protection of any shadow other than God’s shadow.

Assyria was real. The threat Judah faced wasn’t imaginary, and ours aren’t either. Fear isn’t a character flaw. But fear can counsel us into decisions we would never otherwise make.

Like Judah and its leaders, we’re tired, scared people with real emergencies and real plans. That’s what makes these situations so dangerous. No one says, “Let’s defy God today.” We say, “Let’s be realistic.” We say, “We don’t have time to wait.” By the time anyone asks whose plan this is, the Pharoh’s armies are marching to Jerusalem.

Returning to the Text

Let’s go back to tonight’s text. Judah, its royal court, and it’s king are foolish, but not because they’re afraid or because they’ve looked at all their options and chosen the best of many bad choices. They’re foolish because they never consulted God; because in their fear, they’ve failed to wait for God and have instead trusted in themselves alone.

Here’s what I’m asking myself and all of you tonight. What are we building because we’re afraid to wait? What plan are we carrying out that God hasn’t seen? To which Egypt have we already sent envoys?

Ballrooms crumble. Arches become ruins. Psalm 127 told us how this goes. Unless God builds the house, the builders labor in vain.

But notice what God never says. God never says the door’s closed. God says, “You didn’t ask.” That’s an invitation inside the indictment. The conversation’s still open.

Before the next plan, the next alliance, the next monument. Ask God. Then wait for the answer, even when waiting feels like losing. Especially, when the waiting is hard.

The stones are listening.

So is 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 25^th chapter, verses 1-9.

O Lord, you are my God;
I will exalt you; I will praise your name,
for you have done wonderful things,
plans formed of old, faithful and sure.
For you have made the city a heap,
the fortified city a ruin;
the palace of foreigners is a city no more;
it will never be rebuilt.
Therefore strong peoples will glorify you;
cities of ruthless nations will fear you.
For you have been a refuge to the poor,
a refuge to the needy in their distress,
a shelter from the rainstorm and a shade from the heat.
When the blast of the ruthless was like a winter rainstorm,
the noise of foreigners like heat in a dry place,
you subdued the heat with the shade of clouds;
the song of the ruthless was stilled.

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples
a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines,
of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.
And God will destroy on this mountain
the shroud that is cast over all peoples,
the covering that is spread over all nations;
God will swallow up death forever.
Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces,
and the disgrace of God’s people God will take away from all the earth,
for the Lord has spoken.
It will be said on that day,
“See, this is our God; we have waited for God, so that God might save us.
This is the Lord for whom we have waited;
let us be glad and rejoice in God’s salvation.”

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

A Pivot Tonight

Friends, I had meant to take this message in a different direction. I wanted to spend tonight intentionally moving beyond Habakkuk using this passage from Isaiah, particularly verse nine, as a bridge: “…we have waited for God, so that God might save us.” But like many pastors something struck me this week about which I can’t be silent. About which the Spirit wouldn’t let me be silent even if I wanted to pass over it for the sake of an easier message tonight.

But before we go there, let’s get our bearings in tonight’s text, if only because it’s the first time since August 23, that we’ve read from a text outside of Habakkuk.

We’re all pretty familiar with the Prophet Isaiah. I’ve preached on passages from Isaiah many times and several of us locate our favorite or one of our favorite verses in this book. What’s important for us to remember tonight is that Isaiah is earlier in the Bible than Habakkuk, so we’re turning back some pages. We’re also likely stepping back about 100 years in time, though because Isaiah was likely written over a number of years by several authors, we can’t easily put a precise date on the text. There’s no evidence to suggest that writers of Habakkuk and Isaiah ever met, though it’s possible that the writers of Habakkuk may have read some or all of Isaiah.

Verse nine grounds tonight’s passage: “It will be said on that day, ‘See, this is our God; we have waited for God, so that God might save us. This is the Lord for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in God’s salvation.’” Not only was that going to be the bridge to Habakkuk tonight, but it’s the source of for the title of this message.

The grammar here is important: on that day. Future tense. Isaiah is picturing a people on the far side of the waiting, turning around to look at it. And what do they call it? Not wasted time. Not the dark years. They say, “We have waited,” the way you’d say, “We built this.” Gaelic, the primary native language of Ireland, has a phrase “Tiocfaidh ár lá” which means “our day will come.” This is the kind of waiting which both Habakkuk and Isaiah would have endorsed. Waiting is something they did. Together.

Habakkuk put it this way at the watchtower: if it seems to tarry, wait for it. Different Hebrew word, same posture. Isaiah’s word is often connected to a cord pulled tight. Waiting here isn’t slack. It’s strain. It’s keeping your grip while the rope burns.

Remember what Habakkuk was handed at the center of the book. The righteous live by their faith. Faith, for Habakkuk, meant faithfulness. Staying put. Staying honest. Staying in the conversation even when the answer seemed late.

Isaiah shows us the far end of that sentence. This is what a people look like who stayed. They look like people who can finally point and say, “This is our God. We waited. And it wasn’t for nothing.”

The City and the Feast

An important similarity between Habakkuk and tonight’s passage from Isaiah are their reflections on power and having clear eyes about the forces of the powerful. Habakkuk looked straight at a ruthless empire and refused to pretend it was anything else. Isaiah does the same. There’s a fortified city in verse two. Walls, palaces, the whole display. It looked permanent. And God made it a heap.

Notice the city never gets a name. Isaiah 24-27 all mention this city and each chapter leaves it unnamed. While scholars have guessed at the name or location for centuries, the text doesn’t give up the name. I think that’s deliberate. It means every generation gets to find its own fortress in the text, whether one of its own upon which God rained down judgement or one of its enemies.

Pay attention to verse three which says strong peoples will glorify God. Cities of ruthless nations will stand in awe. And yet in verse six, the feast is for all peoples. All of them. The vision isn’t the end of cities or nations. The vision is the end of ruthlessness. The table is set for everyone, and the only thing left outside is the cruelty.

This week it was announced that Nidal Hasan, who murdered 13 people and wounded at least 32 others in 2009 at Fort Hood in Texas, would be executed by firing squad. Now, I’m opposed to the death penalty for both moral and other reasons, but I wasn’t entirely surprised by the announcement given that the current administration supports capital punishment with a particular blood lust. What not only surprised, but made me recognize, yet again, the seemingly bottomless moral and ethical depravity of our country, was the announcement by Secretary of Defense Hegseth that the execution would be livestreamed for all to see.

Though Secretary Hegseth attempted to couch a public execution as some type of deterrent or example-setting moment, history unfortunately doesn’t support public executions as anything other than macabre spectator shows. From the executions of criminals in the Roman coliseum to beheadings of the nobility in revolutionary France to public lynchings in the American South which were turned into postcards, humanity has demonstrated that we will find new ways of killing each other and means of making it public entertainment.

Friends, I wish I had something encouraging to say here. Something that could put into context that in 2026 our national leaders are planning a public execution. Words fail me in this moment.

Instead, I want to address anyone who, like me, is tired. I recognize that’s likely all of us. Many of us are running on fumes, not just because of our own responsibilities, but because of the ongoing fire of the world around us. We can take some solace, though, in the place that Isaiah prepares at a table.

Verse 6. “On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.” Marrow. That’s not diet food. That’s the stuff hungry people see in their dreams. Anyone who’s lived through a siege or a lean year hears that word differently than we do.

And wine strained clear. Think about that one. All the cloudiness, all the sediment, settled out and filtered. Whatever has been murky gets made clear.

Then verse 7. There’s a shroud cast over all peoples. A sheet spread over all nations. The dread you’ve been carrying isn’t private, though you may experience it in your own ways. It’s a cloud lying over everyone, and God has decided to tear it down.

Verse 8. God will swallow up death forever. In the stories the Hebrew’s neighbors told, Death had a mouth and swallowed gods and mortals alike. Here, Death ends up swallowed.

Then comes the tenderest sentence in the chapter. God will wipe away the tears from all faces. Later on, Revelation borrows this line, because nobody’s improved on it.

Count the verbs. Make. Destroy. Swallow. Wipe. Now count who’s doing them. It’s God, every time. We get the waiting. God gets the rest.

And verse 9 ends with an invitation. Let us be glad and rejoice. Let us. If you needed it, here’s your permission. You’re allowed to exhale. You can be glad without betraying the people who are still hurting. You can rejoice while holding the national disgrace of a public execution. Gladness isn’t the opposite of honesty.

The Noise

That said, we also have to be honest about where we’re sitting. The feast is on the mountain. We’re down here, a few weeks out from an election.

And down here, it’s loud.

Look at verse 5. “The noise of foreigners like heat in a dry place.” The Hebrew here means strangers, outsiders in the sense of invading forces. We’re not talking about immigrant neighbors who’ve moved here. It’s about an invading army.

Noise. That’s Isaiah’s own word. The ads on the television. The social feed that refreshes with one more reason to be afraid. Some of it even comes with a jingle. The song of the ruthless, verse five calls it.

And underneath the noise, are the real fears. Will it be safe at the polls? Will the results be trusted? What if somebody decides to make trouble? Those aren’t small, silly, or paranoid questions. I can’t promise you how it all ends. Neither does Isaiah.

What Isaiah promises is relief and refuge.

Verse four. God has been a refuge to the poor, a refuge to the needy in their distress, a shelter from the rainstorm and a shade from the heat. Shade doesn’t turn off the sun. It makes the heat survivable.

And notice whom the shelter protects. The poor. The needy. The ones most exposed when the weather turns. That tells me something about what our waiting has to look like. If God is shade for the people most exposed, then waiting on God can’t be a private feeling. We have to be shade for each other. Check on the neighbor who’s scared to leave the house. Offer someone a ride. Sit with a friend’s anxiety without trying to fix it. Turn the television off for an hour. The ruthless song will survive without you.

And nothing in this chapter tells us to stay home. Waiting on God has never meant doing nothing. It means doing what’s ours and refusing to believe the outcome rests on our shoulders alone.

On That Day

On that day, somebody will say it. This is our God. We have waited. Tiocfaidh ár lá, our day will come.

We’re not there yet. But we’ve learned the sentence ahead of time. Until then we can rejoice at the tables we make larger and more affirming rather than building higher walls. We can rejoice in the midst of grief.

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 Habakkuk, the 3^rd chapter, verses 17-19.

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

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

Friends, after today we will have spent eight weeks with a prophet many of us had never read before this summer. Though I didn’t publicize it much, I’ve been calling this series “Call and Response: Considering the Book of the Prophet Habakkuk.” That’s exactly what it’s turned out to be: Habakkuk calling out to God, and God answering back in ways Habakkuk rarely wanted and almost never expected. We’ve watched him argue, go quiet, climb a rampart, tremble at a vision too large for his own body, and now, tonight, say something close to the opposite of where he started. I know you’re with me in experiencing some “Habakkuk fatigue,” so instead of walking back through the verses we’ve considered, I want to pull on three threads that have run through this whole book, see where they end up, and then let Habakkuk’s own final words close the series for us.

What We’ve Carried with Us

The first thread is waiting. Habakkuk opened this book demanding to know how long he’d have to cry out before God listened. His waiting was restless at best and at worst almost accusatory. God’s first answer didn’t satisfy him: an empire marching toward his own people, and his waiting turned into a second complaint, sharper than the first. By chapter two, that restlessness had matured into something steadier: “I will stand at my watch post, and station myself on the rampart,” a prophet choosing to keep watch rather than walk away, even with no answer in hand. By chapter three, waiting had changed shape again, into something quieter still, a kind of settled dread Habakkuk could hold even while his own body trembled, legs failing under him, bones gone rotten with the weight of what he’d finally been shown. Each time we met this prophet, waiting looked a little different, restless, then resolved, then quiet and trembling, but he never once stopped doing it. The posture kept changing. The commitment underneath it never did.

The second thread is the contrast between pride and faithfulness. We heard it most clearly in chapter two: the proud, whose spirit isn’t right in them, against the righteous, who live by their faithfulness. But that contrast showed up everywhere once we knew to look for it. The Chaldeans worshiped their own strength as a god that would eventually fall, the way every empire eventually falls. The idol makers trusted something they’d built with their own hands, gold and silver with no breath inside it, makers bowing down to what they made. Even the five woes we spent a Sunday unpacking all came back to the same root: plunder, violent gain, bloodshed, humiliation, and idolatry, each one someone trusting what they’d built over the God who’d made them. Pride, in this book, always looks like trusting something you made instead of the God who made you. Faithfulness always looks like staying planted anyway, even without that certainty. We even found a version of this contrast inside God’s own character, when we asked whether there’s anything God can’t do, and found an answer that had nothing to do with weakness: God’s faithfulness to God’s own nature runs so deep that acting against it was never a live option in the first place.

The third thread is mercy inside wrath. Habakkuk’s prayer in chapter three asked for exactly that: “God, in your wrath, remember mercy.” The whole book had already been building toward that plea. Habakkuk wanted judgment on the injustice he saw in his own community’s courts, and he got it. Then he wanted to know how a God too pure to look on evil could use a nation more wicked than Judah to deliver that judgment. We spent time sitting inside that question, naming the real theological gap between what God can’t do and what God, for reasons Habakkuk doesn’t understand, for reasons that we continue struggle with, hasn’t done. Neither Habakkuk nor us ever got a clean answer to that question, only an invitation to keep watching.

By the time we reached the theophany, judgment had grown even larger in scale: mountains shattering, seas fleeing, and nations trembling at a glance from God. But judgment was never the last word by itself. Even inside all of that terror, God’s whole purpose was named plainly: to save your people, to save your anointed. Wrath and mercy, running together the entire time.

Though…Yet

All three threads meet in the three verses we’re ending on tonight. Listen to what Habakkuk names first: “Though the fig tree does not blossom, and no fruit is on the vines; though the produce of the olive fails, and the fields yield no food; though the flock is cut off from the fold, and there is no herd in the stalls.” That’s not hypothetical language. That’s a total agricultural collapse for a culture deeply tied to the land and the literal failure of everything a household depended on to survive. Habakkuk isn’t picturing a hard season. He’s picturing the worst one imaginable. It’s the kind of situation where families go hungry and people consider leaving their homes for the resources of other nations and peoples.

And he says all of that before he says the next word, which is simply: “yet.” Yet I will rejoice in the Lord. I will exult in the God of my salvation. Notice what hasn’t happened here. The fig tree still hasn’t blossomed. The flock is still gone. Nothing in this verse has been resolved. Habakkuk doesn’t rejoice because the crisis lifted. He rejoices in the middle of it, with the empty fields still empty. After three chapters worth of argument, accusation, trembling, and vision, that small word, “yet,” is doing more work than almost anything else in the book. It’s the hinge the whole series has been swinging toward.

In the first thread, the prophet’s waiting has matured to praise in the midst of suffering. Not waiting for rescue before he’ll trust God, but trusting God while the waiting continues, with no promise of when it ends.

It’s also faithfulness over pride, the second thread. The proud, we were told back in chapter two, need the answer now, need certainty now. Habakkuk, standing in front of total loss, doesn’t have certainty about anything except God. That’s the faithfulness this book has been pointing toward the whole time: not staying because you’ve been proven right but staying planted when you haven’t been.

And it’s mercy inside wrath, the third thread, playing out in Habakkuk’s own body instead of in a vision. He asked God to remember mercy inside judgment. He doesn’t get to see, in these verses, whether the judgment on the horizon ever lifts, or whether the Chaldeans he feared ever actually arrive. What he gets instead is this: “God, the Lord, is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer and makes me tread upon the heights.” Not rescue from the hard ground. Strength to walk on it anyway, sure-footed, even in the hardest and highest places, the kind of ground a deer can manage and most of us would stumble across. That’s what mercy inside wrath ends up looking like by the book’s final line: not an exemption from difficulty but footing solid enough to keep moving through it.

Closing

Eight weeks ago, we started with a prophet few people preach and probably just as few routinely read, asking a consistent and age-old question: why God lets the worst things stand. We walked with him through a silence he couldn’t explain, an empire he couldn’t control, a catalog of woes against everyone too proud to wait, and a vision of God too large for his body or any human’s body to hold steady. We’re ending with the same prophet, still standing in loss, still questioning without ready answers, but proclaiming, “Yet, I will rejoice.”

Habakkuk never got the tidy resolution he wanted for himself, for his people, and for us. The fig tree in his story never blossoms. We never find out if the flock comes back. Instead, what he received was a way to rejoice without any of that being resolved. That’s what he leaves us with tonight, and it’s enough to carry out of this room, out of this series, and into whatever’s next: not every answer, but somewhere solid enough to stand.

Here’s what I’d ask us to take with us. Somewhere in your own life right now, there’s probably a version of Habakkuk’s fig tree, something that hasn’t blossomed yet, something that’s failed to blossom like it used to, and might not blossom on any schedule you’d choose. You don’t need that situation resolved before you’re allowed your own “yet.”

You’re allowed to name exactly what’s missing and still choose the next word. Whatever threads you’re carrying out of these weeks, the waiting, the question of what you’ve built your trust on, or the hope that mercy is somehow still inside whatever wrath you’re facing, Habakkuk’s left us a pattern for how to hold all of it honestly, without needing it resolved first. That’s the gift this strange, short, rarely preached book has turned out to give us.

Amen.

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

Special Note: We had trouble with recording and processing this week’s video. Apologies for the quality.

Friends, listen for a word from God in the Book of the Prophet Habakkuk, the 3^rd chapter, verses 2-16.

O Lord, I have heard of your renown,
and I stand in awe, O Lord, of your work.
In our own time revive it;
in our own time make it known;
in wrath may you remember mercy.
³ God came from Teman,
the Holy One from Mount Paran. Selah
Their glory covered the heavens,
and the earth was full of God’s praise.
⁴ The brightness was like the sun;
rays came forth from God’s hand,
where their power lay hidden.
⁵ Before God went pestilence,
and plague followed close behind.
⁶ They stopped and shook the earth;
God looked and made the nations tremble.
The eternal mountains were shattered;
along their ancient pathways
the everlasting hills sank low.
⁷ I saw the tents of Cushan under affliction;
the tent curtains of the land of Midian trembled.
⁸ Was your wrath against the rivers, O Lord,
or your anger against the rivers
or your rage against the sea,
when you drove your horses,
your chariots to victory?
⁹ You brandished your naked bow;
sated were the arrows at your command. Selah
You split the earth with rivers.
¹⁰ The mountains saw you and writhed;
a torrent of water swept by;
the deep gave forth its voice.
The sun raised high its hands;
¹¹ the moon stood still in its exalted place,
at the light of your arrows speeding by,
at the gleam of your flashing spear.
¹² In fury you marched on the earth;
in anger you trampled nations.
¹³ You came forth to save your people,
to save your anointed.
You crushed the head of the wicked house,
laying it bare from foundation to roof. Selah
¹⁴ You pierced with their own arrows the head of his warriors,
who came like a whirlwind to scatter us,
gloating as if ready to devour the poor who were in hiding.
¹⁵ You trampled the sea with your horses,
churning the mighty waters.

¹⁶ I hear, and I tremble within;
my lips quiver at the sound.
Rottenness enters into my bones,
and my steps tremble beneath me.
I wait quietly for the day of calamity
to come upon the people who attack us.

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

A Different Kind of Prayer

Something changes the moment Chapter Three begins. For two chapters, Habakkuk has been arguing. He complained, God answered, Habakkuk complained again, and God answered again, this time with a list of woes aimed at everyone too proud to wait. That whole exchange reads like a dispute, like a debate between two orators with arguments flying back and forth. Chapter Three, however, reads like something else entirely.

The heading tells us so directly: “A prayer of Habakkuk, the prophet, according to Shigionoth.” Scholars are divided on what this word means. We know that “shigionoth” is the plural of the word “shiggaion,” but the plural only appears here in Habakkuk, and the singular form only appears at the very beginning of the Seventh Psalm. It’s likely a musical or liturgical note referring to a type of ecstatic state. In both Habakkuk 3 and Psalm 7, the respective writers are expecting enemies to soon arrive, and they and their people have been whipped up into a frenzy through a mixture of preparations for battle and anxiety about the enemy’s arrival. By saying that Habakkuk’s prayer is “according to Shigionoth,” the writer is saying that this prayer was made during an ecstatic state. Habakkuk has stopped arguing with God and started praying to God, in a form meant to be sung during a moment of emotion and frenzy.

That shift in genre matters for how we hear what follows. Where the first two chapters read like a transcript, back-and-forth arguments meant to be followed the way we’d follow any dispute, Chapter Three reads like something meant to be performed. A congregation gathered for worship wouldn’t have listened to this the way they listened to Habakkuk’s complaints. They would have sung it, or heard it sung, with instruments underneath it, the same way they’d have heard any psalm. That changes what the chapter is asking of its hearers. The first two chapters ask us to follow an argument. This one asks us to be moved by a vision.

Three times in this chapter, after verses three, nine, and thirteen, we find the word “Selah.” The precise meaning of this word for the ancient Hebrews has been lost, but “Selah” has become a popular name for churches, organizations, and even people who have interpreted it to mean “peace” or “calm.” However, “Selah” was a musical term for a pause or a break. The author was indicating an intentional break in the lyrics which didn’t necessarily conform to the pattern of pauses observed by punctuation. For Habakkuk, he’s letting his thoughts and his words wash over him and his audience in stages. He’s catching his breath between waves of emotions.

The prayer itself opens with the plea that gives us our first pause before the pauses even start: “O Lord, I have heard of your renown, and I stand in awe, O Lord, of your work. In our own time revive it; in our own time make it known; in wrath may you remember mercy.” Notice what Habakkuk requests, and, just as tellingly, what he omits. He doesn’t ask God to explain the last two chapters. He doesn’t ask for the Chaldeans to be called off, or for the woes to land immediately. He doesn’t even ask for answers to the numerous questions he’s been asking.

Rather, Habakkuk asks God to renew God’s old work, to make that work known anew in his own time, and in that renewal, even in God’s wrath, that God would remember their mercy. That’s the crux of the next 14 verses: renewal, knowledge, and mercy. His prayer forms a vision of what might happen if God renewed, made known, and showed mercy through their work. Whether he knows it or not, Habakkuk is giving us a vision that will be fulfilled in Jesus.

His vision and the words he uses should seem familiar to us and they would have been immediately recognizable in his own time. Scholars call this kind of writing a “divine-warrior hymn,” or a “theophany,” meaning an appearance of God in visible, often terrifying power. This kind of writing echoes older poetry and songs including those of Moses and Miriam sing after crossing the sea. Think back to Exodus 15:1-3:

“I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously;
horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.
The Lord is my strength and my might,
and he has become my salvation;
this is my God, and I will praise him;
my father’s God, and I will exalt him.
The Lord is a warrior;
the Lord is his name.”

Or returning to Psalm 7:

“If one does not repent, God will whet his sword;
he has bent and strung his bow;
he has prepared his deadly weapons,
making his arrows fiery shafts.

I will give to the Lord the thanks due to his righteousness
and sing praise to the name of the Lord, the Most High” (12-13; 17).

Habakkuk draws on that same well of imagery, calling on the shapes and pictures his listeners had heard before, to describe something happening to them in their own time.

The God Who Comes

The vision opens with an arrival: “God came from Teman, the Holy One from Mount Paran.” Both of those places sit in the wilderness south of Israel, in the same general region as the Sinai, where God appeared to Israel in fire, cloud, and covenant during the Exodus. Habakkuk is placing this vision in a specific geography; one soaked in memory. This isn’t the arrival of some strange, new god. This is the same God who came down at Mount Sinai. The God who has already been attested as the one who was, who is, and who always will be. This is the God who, speaking from a burning bush, told Moses that “I Am Who I Am.”

God arrives in all the wonder and amazement that we’d expect. “Their glory covered the heavens,” Habakkuk proclaims, “and the earth was full of God’s praise. The brightness was like the sun; rays came forth from God’s hand, where their power lay hidden.” Brightness and hiddenness, named in the same breath. But God’s power isn’t dimmed by being hidden. If anything, Habakkuk seems to be saying the opposite, that something can be so bright it conceals its own source, the way staring straight at a sunrise shows you light without ever quite letting you see the sun itself.

“Before God went pestilence, and plague followed close behind.” Whatever this is, it isn’t gentle, and it definitely can’t be contained within the categories Habakkuk would normally reach for to describe a coming army or a coming storm. It’s both, and neither, and something else besides.

Then the earth itself starts to respond. God stops, and simply by stopping, shakes the ground. God looks, and nations tremble at the look alone. Mountains that Habakkuk calls “eternal,” hills he calls “everlasting,” the oldest and most permanent features anyone in his world could imagine, shatter and sink low in front of God’s presence. This isn’t the God who peacefully walked in the Garden of Eden. God appears in the fullness of their might and power.

Following a moment marked by selah, one of those intentional pauses we discussed earlier, the vision widens. Habakkuk sees the tents of Cushan under distress, the tent-curtains of Midian trembling, whole peoples shaking at what’s approaching, whether or not it’s even aimed at them directly. While it might seem obvious that if cities and mountains are trembling before God, then tents would stand little chance, the regions, Cushan and Midian, are important. These are ancient places invoked in the earliest moments of the Biblical narrative. Cushan was associated with the origins of Abraham and Midian was the site of an ancient battle remembered by its notable reference in one of Isaiah’s clearest messianic prophecies in 9:4.

Then the poetry turns toward water, toward rivers and the sea, in language that would have struck Habakkuk’s listeners as familiar from an equally ancient register: “Was your wrath against the rivers, O Lord, or your anger against the rivers or your rage against the sea, when you drove your horses, your chariots to victory?”

Ancient poetry across the whole region loved to describe gods doing battle with the chaos of the sea, the flood, and the deep. Habakkuk borrows that same battle, but he’s not describing some rival god of the waters losing to another god. He’s describing the sea as a representation of the untamed creation giving way before the God who made it in the first place. The Hebrew’s own collective and religious memory would have supplied the clearest picture available: a sea splitting open, chariots overtaken, a whole army swallowed by water that had, moments before, simply parted. Habakkuk doesn’t name that story here, but the shape of it is unmistakable, the same God, the same sea, the same reversal. The bow comes out. Arrows fly, more than enough for any target God chooses.

Then, just as the imagery and narrative hit a fever pitch. Selah. An intentional pause. If it feels unsettled, good; that’s Habakkuk’s point. It’s meant to be a chord that doesn’t resolve; a high-water mark that fades to black.

The next picks up with more frenzy, but in a different octave because we’ve paused. “You split the earth with rivers. The mountains saw you and writhed; a torrent of water swept by; the deep gave forth its voice. The sun raised high its hands; the moon stood still in its exalted place, at the light of your arrows speeding by, at the gleam of your flashing spear. In fury you marched on the earth; in anger you trampled nations.” This isn’t a light metaphor. Habakkuk’s describing the unmaking and remaking of the created order itself, mountains, seas, and sun and moon all responding to a presence too large for any of them to hold steady around.

And then, in the middle of all that overwhelming power, the purpose of God’s movement is revealed: “You came forth to save your people, to save your anointed.” All of this, the trembling mountains, the fleeing waters, the frozen sun and moon, exists for a reason. God crushes the head of a wicked house, laying it bare down to its foundation.

Selah. One more time, right in the middle of the action, at the pivot from terrifying power to salvation, we intentionally pause.

The vision closes its violent movement with a final image: God’s own arrows piercing the head of an enemy’s warriors, warriors who came like a whirlwind to scatter the Hebrews, gloating as if they could simply devour the poor and the hidden without consequence. God tramples the sea with horses, churning the mighty waters one last time. Every ounce of the power we’ve just watched unleashed across mountains, seas, and the sky turns out to have a target after all.

Trembling Within

Then Habakkuk tells us what all of that did to him. “I hear, and I tremble within; my lips quiver at the sound. Rottenness enters into my bones, and my steps tremble beneath me. I wait quietly for the day of calamity to come upon the people who attack us.” This isn’t artistic flourish. This is an embodied reaction to a vision that terrifies and blesses even the prophet who presents it to his people.

After two chapters of arguing with God, hearing answers far from the ones he wanted, and breaking in this frenzied prayer, Habakkuk is exhausted. He’s trembling before God, yes, but he’s also experiencing the torment of prophets and holy people before and after him, who, driven to earthly ecstasy, can barely keep themselves upright. The answer he has long sought has come now, in full, overwhelming force, and receiving it costs him something for which his resolve alone didn’t prepare him.

But he doesn’t run from trembling, and he doesn’t try to pretend it isn’t happening. He names it the same way he named his complaints in Chapter One. But the verse doesn’t end in terror alone. “I wait quietly for the day of calamity to come upon the people who attack us.” Even here, shaking, rotten-boned, Habakkuk returns to the posture he took at the start of Chapter Two. Climbing the rampart and the watch post once again, he waits.

That’s where we leave him tonight, still trembling, still waiting, having seen more of God’s glory than his body and his spirit are able to steadily hold. One more word is still coming, and next week, we’ll hear what Habakkuk does with all of this once the trembling finally settles.

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.

Special Note: Due to being ill, I was unable to be in person with the congregation. Instead, I recorded the service. The video above is taken from that recording.

Friends, listen for a word from God in the Book of the Prophet Habakkuk, the 2^nd chapter, verses 6-20.

⁶ Shall not everyone taunt such people and, with mocking riddles, say about them,

“Alas for you who heap up what is not your own!”
How long will you load yourselves with goods taken in pledge?
⁷ Will not your own creditors suddenly rise
and those who make you tremble wake up?
Then you will be plunder for them.
⁸ Because you have plundered many nations,
all who survive of the peoples shall plunder you—
because of human bloodshed and violence to the earth,
to cities and all who live in them.

⁹ “Alas for you who get evil gain for your house,
setting your nest on high
to be safe from the reach of harm!”
¹⁰ You have devised shame for your house
by cutting off many peoples;
you have forfeited your life.
¹¹ The very stones will cry out from the wall,
and the rafter will respond from the woodwork.

¹² “Alas for you who build a town by bloodshed
and found a city on iniquity!”
¹³ Is it not from the Lord of hosts
that peoples labor only to feed the flames
and nations weary themselves for nothing?
¹⁴ But the earth will be filled
with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord,
as the waters cover the sea.

¹⁵ “Alas for you who make your neighbors drink,
pouring out your wrath until they are drunk,
in order to gaze on their nakedness!”
¹⁶ You will be sated with contempt instead of glory.
Drink, you yourself, and stagger!^[c]
The cup in the Lord’s right hand
will come around to you,
and shame will come upon your glory!
¹⁷ For the violence done to Lebanon will overwhelm you;
the destruction of the animals will terrify you—^[d]
because of human bloodshed and violence to the earth,
to cities and all who live in them.

¹⁸ What use is an idol
once its maker has shaped it—
a cast image, a teacher of lies?
For its maker trusts in what has been made,
though the product is only an idol that cannot speak!
¹⁹ Alas for you who say to the wood, “Wake up!”
to silent stone, “Rouse yourself!”
Can it teach?
See, it is gold and silver plated,
and there is no breath in it at all.

²⁰ But the Lord is in his holy temple;
let all the earth keep silence before him!

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

Last week, Habakkuk climbed his watch post and God finally answered, closing with a promise that the vision would come, and a warning that pride and faithfulness can’t both hold the same ground. God also told him a list of accusations was coming, aimed at exactly the kind of pride that can’t wait. Tonight we get that list. Five woes, one after another, and then a single verse that answers all of them at once.

Five Woes

The first woe falls on whoever piles up what isn’t theirs, loading themselves with debts squeezed out of other people. Ancient Hebrew debt practices recognized two principles which we no longer utilize today and that these wealthy people also seem to have forgotten. First, every 50 years, during the year of jubilee, all debts were to be forgiven, slaves set free, and prisoners freed. Any debts should have been forgiven during that year. Woe to those who didn’t forgive debts in the proper way. Second, debts could be collected as needed, but provision was to be made to not ruin a person under their substantial debts for exactly the reason tonight’s text asks: won’t your own creditors eventually rise up against you? Won’t the very people you plundered end up plundering you back? Whatever you take from others has a way of finding its way home.

The second woe falls on whoever builds a house on evil gain, setting the nest up high, safe, above every danger anyone else has to face. Everyone should have a right to be safe and be safe, but the safety is an illusion when the house is built on corrupt business and cheating others. The very stones of that house, Habakkuk says, will cry out against its owner, and the plaster in the walls will answer them. The house itself becomes a witness against the one who built it.

The third woe falls on whoever founds a city on bloodshed, building something meant to last on a foundation of violence. Habakkuk asks whether all that labor amounts to anything and answers his own question: people wear themselves out for nothing when what they’re building rests on blood. And then, in the middle of this list of accusations, comes a strange, hopeful line: the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of God, the way water covers the sea. Whatever gets built on violence won’t be what finally covers the earth.

The fourth woe falls on whoever forces a neighbor to drink, plying them with shame and humiliation for sport. Short of some high school and college students, I’m not sure how many people set out to get their neighbors drunk. I think Habakkuk instead wants us to be aware of the times when we could lead others to sin or encourage them to sin, because he turns the proverbial cup around: the one pouring it will drink from it too, and the shame meant for someone else will land, in the end, on the one who poured.

And the fifth woe, the one that gives tonight’s sermon its title, falls on the idol maker. “What use is an idol once its maker has shaped it? A cast image, a teacher of lies. Its maker trusts in what he has made, even though he made it, and it cannot speak.” When most of us think of religious images and sculptures, we think of a piece of art which depicts a person or scene. The ancient understanding of idols was entirely different. When a person or group created an idol they ascribed to it certain abilities including speaking, moving, and granting what was asked of it. It didn’t depict a god, it was that god. The woe was on the one who not only created an idol, but woe to the one who tells a piece of wood to wake up, or silent stone to rouse itself. Habakkuk isn’t being subtle. He’s asking, plainly, how anyone could hand their trust to something they built with their own hands, something overlaid in gold and silver that still, underneath all that shine, has no breath in it at all.

Five different sins that should inspire woe, and one pattern running underneath all of them: whatever you build to serve yourself, whatever you construct to protect or exalt or comfort you, ends up testifying against you instead. The house cries out. The cup comes back around. The idol, dressed up in gold, stays lifeless the whole time. Notice, too, that three of these five woes end with almost the same refrain, a line about human bloodshed and violence done to the earth and its people. Habakkuk isn’t cataloging five unrelated sins. He’s describing one sin wearing five different disguises: the belief that whatever we build for our own advantage is worth whatever damage it costs someone else.

Ancient Idols

It’s worth pausing on that last woe, because we tend to picture ancient idol worship as something more naive than it actually was. Nobody in Habakkuk’s world genuinely believed a block of wood was, by itself, a god. Across the ancient Near East, elaborate rituals existed specifically to install a deity’s presence into a carved image, ceremonies known in Mesopotamia as the “opening of the mouth,” meant to give the image sight and speech and the capacity to receive offerings on the god’s behalf. This wasn’t superstition so much as careful theology, built with real craftsmanship and real conviction.

Habakkuk’s mockery lands precisely because he knows all of that and refuses to grant it any weight. Dress the thing in silver and gold. Perform every ritual meant to give it breath. It’s still wood. It’s still stone. We can contrast molding an idol out of a raw material and attempting to give it life with what God does in Genesis 2:7: “then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”

God formed humans from the earth, but made them living creatures by breathing their breath into humans. This quickening, enlivening breath is difference between things that are alive and things which cannot, without God, be brought to life.

The idols Habakkuk describes get gold and silver and elaborate ceremony, everything human craftsmanship can offer, and still end up with no breath in them at all. The craftsman still made it with tools in his own hands, and no ceremony changes the plain fact that the maker made the god, rather than the other way around. That reversal, trusting in something you built yourself as though it could rescue you, is the real target of the accusation, more than the material from which the idol happens to be carved.

The Idols We Hold Today

It’s rare for people today to carve idols and purport to give them life through ceremonies and rituals, but the underlying move Habakkuk names hasn’t gone anywhere. An idol, in his sense, isn’t defined by its material. It’s defined by the reversal: something we built with our own hands and minds, that we now trust as though it has a life and authority of its own, even though it can’t actually speak, it can’t actually see, and it can’t actually save us the way we’ve decided it can.

We build systems and then bow to them as though we hadn’t built them ourselves. We build wealth and then trust it to protect us the way only something greater than ourselves could. We build national identities and then treat them as sacred rather than constructed. We build institutions, ideologies, even technologies meant to answer every question for us, and then hand them an authority no human creation actually deserves, forgetting, the way Habakkuk’s idol makers forgot, that we’re the ones who shaped what we’re now bowing down to worship. Some of these idols are quiet and private, the ones we’d only admit to ourselves at the end of a long night. Others get built collectively, entire communities and nations shaping something together and then treating the result as though it descended from somewhere higher than their own hands.

Habakkuk doesn’t distinguish much between the two. Both end the same way: gold and silver on the outside, no breath on the inside. None of that requires a carved image. It only requires forgetting who made what and trusting the creation more than the God who made us.

That’s the real accusation underneath all five woes tonight, whether the crime is plunder, or violent gain, or bloodshed, or humiliation, or literal idolatry. In every case, someone built something to serve themselves and then discovered, too late, that what they built had turned around to answer them instead. The stones cried out. The cup came back around. The idol stayed silent exactly when it mattered most.

Habakkuk closes this whole catalog of woes with a single verse that answers every one of them: “But God is in God’s holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before them.” After five accusations built on noise, on plunder, on shouting neighbors into humiliation, on idols people had to talk into waking up, Habakkuk ends with the opposite posture entirely. Not a god who needs to be roused, but on God who is already and actually present, asking only for silence in response. That contrast is worth sitting with tonight: everything we build for ourselves eventually demands upkeep, defense, and noise. It needs protecting, polishing, propping up, a case made on its behalf. God, Habakkuk insists, asks for none of that. God doesn’t need us to wake anything up, doesn’t need gold or silver or a ceremony to grant presence. God only asks that we stop long enough to notice who’s actually there, already breathing, already alive, already asking nothing from us but our silence.

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 Habakkuk, the 2^nd chapter, verses 1-5.

I will stand at my watchpost
and station myself on the rampart;
I will keep watch to see what he will say to me
and what he will answer concerning my complaint.
² Then the Lord answered me and said:
Write the vision;
make it plain on tablets,
so that a runner may read it.
³ For there is still a vision for the appointed time;
it speaks of the end and does not lie.
If it seems to tarry, wait for it;
it will surely come; it will not delay.
⁴ Look at the proud!
Their spirit is not right in them,
but the righteous live by their faithfulness.
⁵ Moreover, wealth is treacherous;
the arrogant do not endure.
They open their throats wide as Sheol;
like Death they never have enough.
They gather all nations for themselves
and collect all peoples as their own.

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

About the sermon – not the sermon I wanted to preach, but I honestly got stuck on finding the right words to make sense of 9/11, even 25 years later. If you, like me, think this message ends abruptly, I apologize, but 9/11 was a defining moment for my generation which I always struggle with no matter how often I try to discuss it.

I Will Stand at My Watchpost

We left Habakkuk last week standing in a gap he couldn’t close. He’d confessed who God is — everlasting, holy, the Rock who doesn’t pass away — and he’d still pressed his hardest question: how can a God like that preside over the destruction Habakkuk sees coming? Chapter one ends without an answer. Chapter two opens with Habakkuk deciding what to do in absence of a clear answer from God.

Faithful still in this God he confesses, but doesn’t understand, Habakkuk doesn’t storm off, and he doesn’t stop asking. He tells us exactly what he’s going to do: “I will stand at my watchpost, and station myself on the rampart; I will keep watch to see what God will say to me, and what God will answer concerning my complaint.” Rather than resign, he’s resolved. Habakkuk doesn’t have an answer yet, so he chooses a posture he can hold until one comes, positioning himself as a watchman who scans the horizon, waiting for whatever comes next.

What happens next is as much a lesson as anything that will be said: when Habakkuk gets out of his own way; when he shuts up and just listens, then he hears God. This lesson bears out across the Bible which reveals that the saints of God need to take the step that so often comes hard to humans: being quiet, letting God be God, and trusting that an answer will indeed come.

When Habakkuk brought his first complaint, part of a larger and much longer complaint, God’s response came as an announcement about the Chaldeans. This time, God tells Habakkuk to do something practical: “Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so that a runner may read it.” Whatever God is about to say isn’t meant to stay private, locked up in one prophet’s head. It’s meant to be recorded, displayed, made legible enough that someone can quickly deliver it to busy people and move on to others. Habakkuk’s watch isn’t just for himself. He’s keeping it on behalf of everyone else who needs to see what he sees.

Then comes the substance of the answer: “For there is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay.” God doesn’t deny that the vision might feel delayed. God says it plainly: if it seems to tarry, wait for it. That’s an acknowledgment that waiting on God can feel like waiting on something overdue. But God pairs that honesty with a promise: it will surely come. From where Habakkuk is standing, on the rampart, scanning an empty horizon, those two things — it might feel late, and it will not actually be late — have to be held together rather than resolved into one or the other.

Then we come to the verse that grounds the whole passage, one of the lines writers in the New Testament will return to: “Look at the proud! Their spirit is not right in them, but the righteous live by their faith.” Paul and the Protestant reformers will use this verse along with others to build entire theological systems. But for Habakkuk in this moment, on this rampart, the meaning is narrower. He’s contrasting two ways of getting through a moment like this one. The proud, the arrogant, the ones whose spirit isn’t right within them, can’t hold the tension we just named. They need the answer now, need certainty now, need the horizon to resolve on their own schedule. The righteous live differently. They live by faithfulness, by staying steady, staying planted, continuing to trust and continuing to watch, even while the vision tarries. Faithfulness, here, isn’t a private feeling. It’s a way of enduring delay without abandoning the watch.

The chapter’s fifth verse turns toward what’s coming for his people. Habakkuk describes something like an insatiable appetite: wine that betrays the ones who drink it, an arrogance that doesn’t last, a hunger as wide as death itself, gathering up nations the way Death gathers up everyone eventually. It’s the beginning of a series of accusations Habakkuk is about to level, one after another, against exactly the kind of pride he’s just named as the opposite of faithfulness.

Twenty-Five Years of Waiting

At 8:46am on September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 crashes into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. I was in the eighth grade at St. Benedict School in Cambridge, OH. None of us had cell phones and news alert pop-ups were still rare so I’m not sure how we knew anything had happened, but I remember a murmur about a “small plane hitting the World Trade Center.”

At 9:03am United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower of the World Trade Center. A few minutes later Sr. Miriam, our principal, interrupted our English teacher who quickly wheeled out the classroom TV so that we could watch the news. At this point people were still cautious to use the words “deliberate” and “terrorism,” but it was hard to deny that this was some kind of attack. At 14, that was obvious to me.

At some point our teachers decided that we needed to go outside for PE. At 14 that seemed like the last thing we needed to do. At 39, I understand what they were thinking. When we came inside there was a rumor circulating that another plane had crashed, this time into the Pentagon. Several of my classmates started to cry and I tried to reassure them that this was just a rumor – remember there were many rumors that day most of which were revealed to be false. Unfortunately, our 8^th grade teacher quickly ordered us to our seats to inform us that at 9:37am American Airlines Flight 77 had indeed crashed into the Pentagon.

That night my home church was scheduled to hold a parish retreat. There was pressure to cancel it because people wanted to huddle together with their families in the relative safety of their homes. My mom, one of the organizers of the retreat, insisted that where else should we be if not at church? The retreat quickly turned into a space to bring fears, concerns, and the ultimate silence of people who didn’t know what else to do but knew that something had already changed.

On Friday we marked the 25^th anniversary of that tragic and fateful day. Perhaps more than remember the day itself and the 2,996 people who killed, we were compelled to remember the lives lost since and the fundamental ways in which our lives were changed. Anyone living in the United States and in grade school through college likely knew a handful of people who enlisted in the armed forces immediately after 9/11 or as soon as they could. The 20-year War in Afghanistan directly resulted from 9/11 and many people invoked 9/11 for the invasion of Iraq, though the two conflicts had little to do with each other. Even now as the Trump administration remains entrenched in a war with Iran that it started and continues to prolong, the specter of 9/11 looms large both in propaganda and in our collective memories.

I remind us about September 11, 2001, and tell a piece of my story from that day, because so many of us found ourselves 25 years ago this week watching and waiting on God. We gathered in churches, fellowship halls, in our homes, and surrounded by family. We mourned and we prayed. We asked, “how could this happen?” And we prepared for war. Twenty-five years ago most Americans couldn’t locate Afghanistan on a map or knew anything more about it than it leant its name to a type of blanket and a breed of dog.

September 11, 2001, gave us nothing useful to do with our hands. There was no watch post to so tall that we could climb and see the future. We had nothing to do except wait. But in that waiting we prayed. We filled sanctuaries that had been half-empty the Sunday before. We lit candles on sidewalks and stood in vigils that stretched past midnight. Our only posture was waiting.

That response, unfortunately, didn’t last long. Rarely does it or can it last. We turn back to our lives and unless we’re confronted with reminders of the tragedy, we sink back into our ruts and move on. Grief has its own timeline, and so does the kind of communal watching Habakkuk describes. But it does leave us with a question worth asking on an anniversary like this one, twenty-five years out: how do we wait upon God now?

Since 9/11, approximately 9,400 people have died from toxic exposure linked to the collapsed towers in New York. Another, approximately 240,000 people lost their lives in the War in Afghanistan and the total loss of life due to the War in Iraq has been estimated at as many as 1 million lives. In the midst of those wars and such incredible loss of life the unity so many people felt in the days right after the attacks, the flags on every porch, the sense of a country briefly speaking with one grieving voice, didn’t hold. It frayed, and then it fractured, along lines that have only widened since.

And long before the hate embedded in those fractures fell on immigrants and Trans people, our Muslim siblings bore the brunt of suspicion and violence. They were caricatured as the nation’s idea of an enemy. Their mosques vandalized, families surveilled, and neighbors treated as threats for no reason beyond their faith and their names.

Yet for all the challenges of the last twenty-five years and those times we felt like we have so little to offer, we’ve stood at our watch post and stationed ourselves on proverbial and literal ramparts. We’ve kept watch to see what God will say to us and how God will answer our prayers.

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 Habakkuk, the 1^st chapter, verses 12-17.

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

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

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

Friends, we listened to Habakkuk’s first complaint to God, a complaint not brought solely by this one prophet, but rooted in a communal cry over a justice system that had collapsed from the inside. Last week, we heard God answer, but not in a way the people and their complaining prophet wanted. The answer was a mighty and growing empire which had been content to largely ignore the Hebrew kingdoms until they attempted to conquer Egypt. Now the Chaldeans had their gaze fixed on the Hebrews as their next target for imperial expansion and conquest. Tonight we hear Habakkuk’s answer back to God. It’s a sharper statement than his first complaint, because now he’s not arguing with silence. God has spoken and Habakkuk finds himself in the difficult position of arguing directly with God and still feeling compelled to counter an answer he won’t accept.

Habakkuk’s Second Complaint

Habakkuk doesn’t accuse God. Rather he confesses who God is in the form of a rhetorical question: “Are you not from of old, O Lord my God, my Holy One?” And the prophet adds a confession of who he is in relation to this God, “You shall not die.” Habakkuk reaches first for what he knows to be true. God is everlasting, God is holy, and God doesn’t pass away the way humans and their strength do.

Not only does that statement acknowledge the difference between God and himself, but it also positions the god of the Chaldeans as ultimately perishable. Remember, last week we heard that for the Chaldeans their strength, their might has become their god. But their strength is mortal strength and therefore it has an expiration date. Empires come to power and empires fall from power. Anyone who bases their strength and its divine mandate on the strength of an empire will learn that strength will lessen and disintegrate. But strength found in God has no such lifespan.

But Habakkuk goes on to acknowledge that God did indeed appoint the Chaldeans. “You have marked them for judgment,” he says to God, “and you, O Rock, have established them for punishment.” Last week’s answer stands. Habakkuk understands where God stands, but he still disputes what comes next, because if this Rock, this Holy One, is who Habakkuk says God is, then something doesn’t fit. “Your eyes are too pure to behold evil, and you cannot look on wrongdoing.” So why, he asks, does God keep looking at the treacherous and stay silent while the wicked swallow up people more righteous than they are?

The chapter closes on provocative image. Habakkuk describes his own people as fish in the sea, crawling things with no one to rule or protect them. The enemy hauls them up with a hook, drags them out with a net, gathers them into a seine, and rejoices while doing it. Worse yet, the enemy sacrifices to that net, makes offerings to it, because it’s brought in such a rich catch. The Chaldeans have turned their own instrument of conquest into an object of worship. It’s the same move Habakkuk already named last week, when he said their own strength had become their god, except now we see what that idolatry looks like in practice: figuratively bowing down to the tool that did the killing.

We might wonder why nets are presented as so terrifying and so often associated with violence in the Bible. As people who rarely if ever catch our own food, we’ve lost the experience and mechanics of the net, particularly for something like fish. Once a fish is in the net, the struggle is over. Sure, the fish may flop instinctually, but its time is limited once it meets the net.

We may have lost familiarity with rope nets and the mechanics of catching our own food, but we know proverbial nets, some near as terrifying. Churches and worship dressed up so that we ignore the violence and deception their rhetoric enables and in which their leaders participate. Candidates for office who shout, promise all manner of illusions, and approve ads which flat out lie about the world in which we live and about the conduct of their opponents. We know those nets far too well. And, yet, this chapter ends exactly where it began, unresolved, with a question hanging in the air: is this conqueror going to keep emptying his net, destroying nations without mercy, forever?

Complaint, answer, second complaint, that’s the arc of chapter one, and we’ve now walked through all three movements. Habakkuk asked why injustice was allowed to stand inside his own community. God answered with an empire from outside. And now Habakkuk asks the harder question underneath both of those: if God is who Habakkuk says God is — pure, holy, unable even to look at wrongdoing — how can God preside over this destruction at the hands of an unrighteous nation? How can God seemingly sit still while justice is perverted and the law, the defining structure of Hebrew society, is twisted from within?

Is There Anything God Can’t Do?

Habakkuk’s statement that God’s eyes are too pure to behold evil and that God cannot look on wrongdoing, is profoundly theological, particularly if we hold a doctrine which says that nothing is beyond the power of God. To be clear, Habakkuk isn’t just describing God’s preference for actions. He’s naming something of which God is incapable. And that idea, that there are things God genuinely cannot do, is one the church has taken seriously for a very long time.

Classical Christian doctrine has always held that God cannot sin. Not merely that God chooses not to, the way a person might resist a temptation, but that sin is actually impossible for God. That impossibility is built into the definition of who God is. Later Scripture will say it plainly: God cannot lie, and God cannot deny God’s own self without ceasing to be God. Theologians have argued for centuries about exactly why that’s true and what it costs to say so, but the substance of the claim goes all the way back to time immemorial, long before Habakkuk wrote it here and even longer before any of the theological language was formalized. It is neither a matter of divine willpower straining against temptation nor a way that humans attempt to limit God. It’s a matter of divine nature, which makes certain things simply unavailable to God the way falling up is unavailable to a stone.

We often throw around the word “omnipotence” without thinking through what it means. Classical Christian theology has never claimed that God can do absolutely anything, including things that are contradictions in themselves. God can’t make a square circle. God can’t make two plus two equal five. Those aren’t failures of power; they’re just nonsense, not real possibilities at all. Sin works the same way, in this account. Sin isn’t a display of strength. It’s a falling short, a corruption, a failure to be fully what something was made to be. When we say God can’t sin, we’re not describing a God with a hole in God’s power. We’re describing the character of God which is so complete that acting against it isn’t an option. Put it this way: the strongest person you know isn’t the one who could betray every friend they have and simply chooses not to each morning. The strongest, most trustworthy people we know are the ones for whom betrayal genuinely isn’t on the table, whose integrity runs so deep it’s no longer a daily contest of willpower. God’s inability to sin isn’t a cage. It’s closer to what perfect freedom actually looks like: the freedom to be fully, consistently, unshakably who God already is.

But here’s where this gets genuinely hard, and I don’t want us to rush past it: knowing that God can’t sin doesn’t answer Habakkuk’s actual question. His question isn’t whether God personally sins. His question is why a God who can’t sin keeps watching other people sin without stopping them. Those are two different questions, and it would be a cheap, dishonest move to let the first answer quietly answer the second.

God’s own purity doesn’t automatically explain God’s patience with humanity’s impurity. There’s a real gap between what God can’t do and what God, for reasons Habakkuk doesn’t yet understand, hasn’t done. That gap is exactly where Habakkuk is standing at the end of this chapter. That’s exactly where we spend much of our lives standing too.

What Comes Next

Once again, we’re not going to close that gap tonight, because the text doesn’t close it either. Chapter one ends with Habakkuk’s question still open: is the net going to keep filling forever? But he doesn’t walk away from the question, and he doesn’t stop addressing it to God. Next week, we’ll watch him do something with that unresolved question, something worth the wait and it’ll take him to a place we haven’t seen him go yet in this book, a place where waiting itself becomes the practice.

For now, it’s enough to know he doesn’t let go of it, and he doesn’t let go of God either. We leave him there tonight: certain of who God is, uncertain of why God allows what God allows, and still, somehow, waiting for whatever comes next.

Amen.

Note - There was a video I wanted to share, but it didn’t work during the service. That video is available for you below.

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

Friends, listen for a word from God in the Book of the Prophet Habakkuk, the 1^st chapter, verses 5-11.

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

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

Before we get into tonight’s text, I want to show you something.

[Video]

In case you missed it, there’s apparently a resistance army forming to defend Canada in a trade war with the United States. Complete with an anthem, a music video, and a level of politely terrifying resolve, fully integrated with nature, which only Canadians could manage. I mention this because Habakkuk is about to do something similar. In the second third of chapter one, God responds to his first complaint and the prophet describes an invading army in the most over-the-top, spine-chilling terms he can find: horses faster than leopards, cavalry fiercer than wolves at dusk, an empire whose own strength has become its god. If the Canadian Resistance Army gave you a little taste of that mix of dread and absurdity, hold onto it. Habakkuk’s about to do the same thing, minus the maple syrup.

Last week we sat with Habakkuk’s first complaint: the cry that opens the book, the accusation aimed at God over a justice system that had stopped working. We left him there on purpose, with no answer, just the question hanging in the air: how long, O Lord? Tonight, God answers, and it isn’t that we would expect or that we would have chosen.

Who Were the Chaldeans?

God’s response begins with a command: look at the nations, and be astonished, because God is about to do something which the people will consider to be as strange as it is radical. God is raising up the Chaldeans.

The Chaldeans are the Neo-Babylonian Empire, a dynasty that had climbed to power only a few decades before Habakkuk wrote, built on the ruins of an Assyrian empire that had dominated the region for centuries. “Chaldean” originally named a smaller group from southern Mesopotamia, but by Habakkuk’s time it had become shorthand for the whole ruling dynasty of Babylon, founded by a general named Nabopolassar and, within a few years of this book, carried to its height by his son Nebuchadnezzar. By the time this book takes shape, the Chaldeans have already crushed Assyria and dealt Egypt a decisive defeat. They are, in every sense, the rising power of the moment, the empire everyone in Judah has been watching with dread, the one that will, within a generation, destroy Jerusalem and its temple and march its leadership into exile. Habakkuk’s original hearers wouldn’t have needed a history lesson to feel the weight of this name. But many people in Judah and Israel, two kingdoms at this point, did think the Chaldeans would come to dominate their areas. No matter what they thought about themselves, their territory and their influence was relatively small. The Chaldean leaders weren’t all that interested in them.

Think about to our study of Undoing Conquest and what Dr. Kate shared with us. This is the same time that the supposedly righteous kings are rewriting the law and sacred texts to write a female deity out of the practice of the Hebrews. Those same leaders, emboldened by the Chaldean defeat of Egypt will decide to establish itself as a greater power by trying to win their own victory in Egypt. It won’t work. Not only will the Hebrews fail to conqueror Egypt, but they will also draw the attention of the Chaldeans who will quickly decide that the Hebrew kingdoms warrant invasion.

That’s the reason that God’s description of the Chaldeans is meant to terrify. They’re called fierce and impetuous, a people who march across the whole breadth of the earth to seize homes that don’t belong to them. They inspire dread and fear whenever they’re mentioned. Their horses run faster than leopards and hunt more relentlessly than wolves at dusk. Their cavalry comes from far away and flies in like an eagle swooping to devour something already caught. They gather captives like sand, more than anyone could count. They scoff at kings and laugh at every fortress, piling up earth against a city’s walls and simply taking it. And then the line that closes this section, the one that gives the whole passage its edge: they sweep by like the wind and pass on, guilty people whose own strength has become their god.

Notice what God doesn’t say here. God doesn’t say the Chaldeans are righteous, or chosen, or good. God says they’re terrifying, violent, and guilty and God is still the one who raised them to power. That’s worth sitting with, not rushing past. This is God’s actual answer to Habakkuk’s complaint about a broken justice system: not correction from within, not a restored court, not a reformed law, but an empire marching in from outside, one whose only god is its own strength. If that unsettles you, it should. It unsettled Habakkuk enough that next week’s text is his second complaint, aimed squarely at this problem: how a God too pure to look on evil could use a nation more wicked than Judah to punish Judah at all. We’re not going to resolve that discomfort tonight. We’re going to let it sit exactly where the text leaves it, because pretending it isn’t there would be its own kind of dishonesty.

Threats from Outside, Threats from Within

Here’s what I want us to notice about the shape of this, because I think it’s the real hinge of the passage. Last week, Habakkuk’s complaint was entirely about what was broken inside his own community: corrupted courts, slack law, and wickedness surrounding the righteous. This week, God’s answer turns Habakkuk’s gaze outward, toward an empire on the march. And it would be easy to hear that as a kind of deflection: as if God is saying, stop worrying about your own courts, look at this much bigger threat coming for you instead.

But that’s not actually what’s happening here, and it matters that we see the difference. God isn’t distracting Habakkuk from the internal problem by pointing at an external one. God’s saying the external threat is the consequence of the internal one. The corruption Habakkuk named last week hasn’t just been a private failure with no cost attached. It has left the whole community exposed, unprotected, without the internal strength that might have let it withstand what’s coming. The threat from outside and the rot from inside aren’t two separate stories. They’re the same story, told from two different angles.

This pattern and problem are by no means unique to Habakkuk’s moment.

Communities, including our own, tend to find it easier to unite against a threat from outside than to do the harder, slower work of confronting what’s failing on the inside. Leaders seeking unity and national resolve often look to outside forces because an outside threat is clarifying. It gives people a common enemy, a shared fear, a reason to set differences aside. In the months after September 11, 2001, there was a PSA which showed a street in Anywhere, USA, with a banner that read “September 10, 2001.” Then the shot transitioned to the same street, every house with an American flag and a banner that read “September 12, 2001.” The clear message being that the tragedy had brought the country together in ways that nothing else could.

An inside failure is different, and it can take one of several variations. Sometimes internal problems are easy to explain and normalize. In other cases, they can be used to create discord and sow fear of our neighbors. We’re led to believe that we’re not the threat, so the threat has to be someone else, but whom? People in power create a bogeyman out of whoever doesn’t meet their narrative of acceptability. This is precisely the way immigrants and Trans people have been marginalized in 21^st century America. It was the way Jewish people were marginalized in the early 20^th century Third Reich. It’s almost always more comfortable to organize around fear of what’s coming than to do the work of repairing what’s already broken.

We do this at every scale. A household will pull together in a crisis and still avoid the harder conversation about what’s been quietly wrong between two people for years. A congregation will rally around a shared cause outside its walls while leaving its own unhealthy patterns untouched. A nation will unify, at least for a season, against an external adversary while the institutions meant to protect its own people keep eroding underneath everyone’s notice. None of that makes the outside threat imaginary. Habakkuk’s Chaldeans were entirely real, and devastating, and coming. It only means that outside threats can become a place to put our attention instead of the places that most needs it.

Habakkuk doesn’t get that comfortable option. God, through the text won’t let the external threat replace the internal reckoning. If anything, it makes the internal reckoning more urgent, because now the stakes of ignoring it are visible on the horizon, marching closer with every verse. Whatever we’re tempted to fear from outside, the deeper question this passage is asking is what’s been left unattended on the inside, the courts gone slack, the justice grown twisted, that leaves a people so exposed to it in the first place.

What Comes Next

We’re going to leave the Chaldeans right there tonight, still marching, still terrifying, still somehow raised up by the very God to whom Habakkuk brought his complaint. That’s not a comfortable place to stop. It isn’t meant to be. Habakkuk doesn’t stop there either. Next week, we’ll hear his second complaint, and it’s sharper than the first one, because now he’s not only asking why God allows injustice to stand inside his own community. He’s asking how a just God could answer that injustice with something that looks, by any measure, more brutal than the crime itself. That question deserves its own week.For now, we sit with an unwanted answer, a threat that’s genuinely terrifying, and a reminder that whatever’s coming from outside our walls, God’s word to Habakkuk suggests it’s never entirely separate from what’s already broken within them.

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 Habakkuk, the 1^st chapter, verses 2-4.

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

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

Good evening, friends. Two weeks ago, we met Habakkuk, a prophet we know almost nothing about, who was writing on the edge of his society’s collapse, doing something most prophets don’t do. He doesn’t so much speak for God as he delivers the cries and complaints of the people to God. Tonight we’re returning to the beginning of the first chapter and Habakkuk’s first complaint. But first let’s remember the structure of the chapter. English translations don’t do a good job at delineating that there are two voices in this chapter. The first, Habakkuk, declares his first complaint in verses 2-4 (that’s what we’re looking at tonight). Then God responds in verses 5-11 and Habakkuk offers a second complaint in verses 12-17.

Remember, Habakkuk doesn’t get a response to either of his complaints until Chapter Two and we aren’t going to get a response tonight either. That’s not only ok, it’s in fact one of the points of this chapter.

A Cry Without an Answer

Chapter One opens with Habakkuk’s cry to God which is as direct as it is timeless. “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not save?” Pay attention to the phrasing in “how long.” That’s not a first attempt at prayer or supplication. The Hebrew tense here suggests something ongoing. Habakkuk has been making this complaint for a while. He’s cried out before and he feels like he hasn’t gotten anything back. And now he’s naming that silence aloud to God again.

He says God has made him look at wrongdoing, made him stare straight at trouble. Destruction and violence sit right in front of him. Strife and contention keep rising around him. And in the face of that suffering something as gone wrong in the structure of his society. The law has gone slack, and justice never prevails. The wicked surround the righteous, hemming them in, and when judgment finally does come, it comes out twisted.

Habakkuk’s addressing a situation we can recognize in our own country. The threat isn’t just from some outside force. The real threat is deeply embedded in the fabric of the nation. Violence and conflict aren’t happening because of an enemy force, though for Habakkuk that will be the situation soon. No, the Hebrews are experiencing violence from within. The government creates situations where torment becomes lawful. Courts no longer render fair verdicts. Laws exist on paper but in reality carry no force or those laws are applied differently based on a person’s identity, wealth, or influence. Habakkuk isn’t standing outside his community pointing at some other nation’s violence. He’s naming what he sees inside his own nation and the very institutions that were supposed to protect people, worn down until they no longer do.

The Hebrew word translated as “law” here is torah, and torah means more than civil and criminal statutes. It means instruction, the whole shape of how a people are supposed to live together, handed down, taught, and trusted. When Habakkuk says the law, the torah, has gone slack, he’s not only complaining about a courtroom somewhere failing to convict the guilty or erroneously condemning the innocent. He’s saying the whole framework holding his community together has stopped functioning. He’s not the first prophet to say something like it. Amos accused the courts of his own day of turning justice into wormwood. Micah accused the leaders of building a city on bloodshed. Habakkuk stands in that same line, watching the gap widen between what his people were taught they owed each other and what they were actually delivering.

We know what this feels like. Our generations were raised on moral lessons about a Jesus who dined with sinners, preferred the company of the poor, and made clear that it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than a rich man to enter heaven. And, having had that vision driven into our heads by both church and media, we resolved to do something about it. Yet soon we were hit with claims that we were failing in our walk as Christians and, perhaps even worse, we were communists, socialists, and un-American. We were labeled like Archbishop Hélder Câmara who famously said, “When I feed the poor they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor are poor, they call me a communist.”

Habakkuk doesn’t file away these transgressions of his leaders. He doesn’t quietly endure it and call that faithfulness. He takes the issue straight to God and demands to know why God is letting it stand. That’s the whole of verses two through four. A cry, a description of what’s being destroyed and what’s already broken, and an accusation aimed at God who, at least Habakkuk believes, has the power and the obligation to act.

Learning to Complain

Most of us have prayed some version of Habakkuk’s opening line, even if we didn’t recognize it as or mean it as prayer. How long? Why, God, are you letting this happen?

When my mom got sick in 2024 and then went through months upon months of time in several hospitals; when it became natural to spend Saturdays in her hospital room watching Ohio State football and keeping her company. My recurring prayer was, “God how long is this going to last?” Yes, I thanked God for saving her when we needed a miracle, but why were we still there and why wasn’t she going home?

We’ve all prayed some version of these prayers in hospitals and doctor’s offices. After phone calls from home when we’ve been far away and in the days and weeks after job interviews and meetings about promotions. We’ve prayed them in times of grief when we’ve wondered when the shadows would lift. And we likely felt bad about some of those prayers. Haven’t we learned that God works in ways that are fundamentally different than ours? Who are we to question God’s plan?

Habakkuk gives us permission to say it out loud and models for us what that honest, visceral prayer can be. So does the book of Psalms, which is full of prayers just like his that cry out and name pain, name confusion, and even name frustration with God, without apologizing for any of it. Even Jesus on the cross called out to God with the first line of Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Perhaps a surprising portion of the psalms follow a similar pattern: an opening cry, a description of the trouble, and a demand that God do something about it. For the Hebrews, communal suffering deserved communal lament. They had entire liturgies designed for these moments of community grief, seasons of fasting, and mourning where the community brought its collective grief to God as one body. Complaint, in Scripture, shouldn’t be interpreted as the opposite of faith as American preachers have often held. Rather it’s a form of faith, one that is practiced and embodied throughout the Bible.

Think about it, you only argue with someone you believe is actually listening. Habakkuk wouldn’t bother demanding an answer from God if he didn’t think there was a God or if he didn’t think God was capable of acting. The complaint itself is a confession that God is real, present, and responsible.

That’s true for us too. But notice, Habakkuk doesn’t stop at the personal. We shouldn’t either. The complaint isn’t “why is my life hard?” The complaint is “why is our system of justice broken.” Habakkuk is speaking for the whole community watching its justice fail. That complaint is difficult because it asks us to grieve something we didn’t cause and something we can’t fix on our own. It precisely asks us to notice injustice that doesn’t touch or oppress us directly and, because of our identities and privilege, we might be able to ignore. Yet, we are called to bring that complaint and that grief to God anyway, often on someone elses behalf.

Not only do we have to name the complaint because it supports our communities, but left unspoken, that kind of grief tends to foment into cynicism, resignation, and the all too often hardened shrug that says nothing will ever change. Spoken to God, however, it stays alive as prayer.

Habakkuk’s Time and Ours

Friends, we don’t have to work very hard or look very far to feel the resonance across centuries with Habakkuk and the situations he’s describing. We know what it feels like to watch an institution stop doing what it exists to do. We know what it feels like to ask, quietly or aloud, whether anyone in charge is going to answer for it.

Habakkuk doesn’t offer us a solution to that feeling immediately. But he offers us the permission to name it and bring it before God. Like him, we still believe that God is listening, even if in silence. While that may be a smaller gift than we want, it’s still a gift given in hope.

Next week we’ll discuss God’s answers. That answer isn’t necessarily what either Habakkuk or we may want, but it forms a part of the narrative. Tonight, we sit with the complaint itself, unanswered, the way Habakkuk had to sit with it, and we let it be honest before we rush anywhere else. Blessed be that waiting.

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 Habakkuk, the 1^st chapter, verses 2-17.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who Is This Prophet, and When Is He Writing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Complaint, an Answer, and a Second Complaint

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why We Read the Books We’d Rather Skip

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

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

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

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

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

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

A Text We Might Want to Skip

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

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

Sons of God, Daughters of Humans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Spirit Will Not Abide

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

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

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

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

Where the Known Ground Ends

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trust Without Understanding

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

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

Noah Found Favor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Abram gave him one-tenth of everything.

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

Setting the Scene

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

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

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

The Valley of the King

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

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

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

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

Bread, Wine, and a Blessing

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

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

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

The Echo That Won’t Quit

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

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

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

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

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

The Gift of the Inexplicable

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

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

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

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

Where the Mystery Lives

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

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

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

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

Blessed Are You

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

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

In the mystery, we find God. Amen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Washington’s Verse

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

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

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

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

Reading the Prophet

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

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

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

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

The Vision

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

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

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

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

The Nation We’ve Built

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whose God Do We Walk After

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

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

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

Where This Leaves Us

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

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

Amen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I. The Road Out of Moab

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

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

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

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

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

II. Do Not Press Me to Leave You

Ruth on the other hand clings to Naomi.

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

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

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

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

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

Where you go, I will go.

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

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

III. What the Church Did with Love Like That

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

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

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

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

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

IV. But God Has Always Loved Us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V. The Healing Is Wide

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI. We Made It. We’re Still Here.

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

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

We made it.

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

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

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

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

VII. Your God, My God

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

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

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

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

Amen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love. Is. The. Greatest.

I. A Shift

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

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

It’s Pride Month.

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

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

II. What Love Looks Like Right Now

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

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

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

And yet. Here we are.

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

III. The World We’re In

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

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

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

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

IV. Celebration as Resistance

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

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

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

Love is patient. Love is kind. Love endures.

And so do we.

V. You Are Not Alone

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I. The Declaration

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

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

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

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

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

Say it after me: “If God is for us…”

“Who can be against us?”

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

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

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

II. The One Who Did Not Spare

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

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

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

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

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

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

III. Who Dares Bring a Charge?

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV. Nothing on the List

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V. Made This Way, Loved This Way

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

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

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

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

VI. The Declaration, Again

So, here’s where we land.

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing.

Amen.

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

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

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

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

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

Movement One: The Question Before the Question

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

Who sinned?

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

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

Who sinned?

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

Who sinned?

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

Movement Two: The Archaeology of a Slander

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

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

Who sinned?

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

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

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

Who sinned?

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

Who sinned?

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

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

Who sinned?

Movement Three: Jesus Refuses the Frame

“Neither this man nor his parents sinned.”

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

Neither.

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

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

Movement Four: Where Our [Ableist] Theology Fails Us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Movement Five: Tikkun Olam

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

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

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

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

I am the man.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Movement Six: What We’re Celebrating

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But we’re not celebrating with our eyes closed.

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

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

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

Amen.

Sermon begins at 45:00.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Movement One: The Letter Nobody Wanted to Write

Paul didn’t want to write this letter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Movement Two: The Test You Were Never Meant to Fail

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

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

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

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

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

Do you not realize?

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

Movement Three: A Story I Know

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

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

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

Movement Four: The Architecture of Doubt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the subtler experience is just as damaging.

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

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

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

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

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

Death by a thousand silences.

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

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

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

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

Who told you that Christ wasn’t in you?

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

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

Movement Five: What LOVEboldly Has Learned

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Movement Six: Greet One Another in Holy Love

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

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

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

Greet one another with a holy kiss.

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

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

All of you.

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

All of you.

The grace of Christ — for all of you.

The love of God — for all of you.

The communion of the Spirit — for all of you.

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

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

Movement Seven: Tomorrow Is Pride

Friends, tomorrow is June 1st.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Movement Eight: The Answer

So, here’s the answer.

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

They were wrong.

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

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

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

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

Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?

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

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

Closing: The God of Love and Peace

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

Not the God of condemnation and qualification.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that God is with us now.

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

God loves you. God has always loved you.

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

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

Amen.