Engineering My Faith

Preached on the Third Sunday After Epiphany, January 25, 2026, to First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. We worshipped on Zoom due to inclement weather. Based on Isaiah 9:1-7.

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It has been a little while, so let me remind you that I’m planning to march through the Old Testament lessons this year. I was talking to a friend recently, and she was of the opinion that we should just set the Hebrew Bible aside. I believe that there is good news throughout the scriptures if they are read through the right lenses. In Better Ways to Read the Bible, Zach Lambert describes four helpful lenses: the Jesus lens (that the whole Bible points to Jesus), the flourishing lens (that the whole Bible is about fostering universal human flourishing), the fruitfulness lens (that the right interpretation will yield fruits of the Spirit), and the context lens (that we need to consider the whole story arc, not just a verse).

So let’s think about the context of today’s passage. Isaiah was a prophet who was active during the 8^th century BCE, a time when Assyria was on the warpath. Assyria conquered the Northern Kingdom, Israel, as well as parts of the Southern Kingdom, Judah. They laid siege to Jerusalem but fell short of conquest. Still, they exiled the ten northern tribes.

The darkness to which Isaiah refers is two-fold: the violent threat of the invading Assyrians, and the internal rot of Judah and Israel. That rot included oppressing the poor, failing to support the widows and orphans, and failing to welcome the stranger and immigrant. Truthfully, that rot is pervasive in every generation of every human society. Over time, the rich and powerful consolidate their positions by oppressing the poor and weak. Eventually, the society collapses, only to be replaced by a new regime with different rich and powerful rulers. That happened to Israel, to Judah, to Assyria, to Babylon, to the Seleucid Empire, to Rome, and on down the ages to the Germans and the Soviet Union. It is the story of the human condition.

It is important to remember that at the time of the Bible’s composition, its authors were generally writing from the margins of society. For the last 1500 years, the Church in its many forms has ruled over Christendom. That has skewed our ability to interpret the Bible’s message as it was originally intended. If you are in power, the logical aim of spreading God’s love is reconciliation between adversaries or with those you are oppressing.

But to the original recipients of Isaiah’s prophecies, reconciliation was the furthest thing from their minds. They wanted revolution. They were people with no power, no freedom, no agency. Their only hope was for God to rescue them. They needed a mighty warrior to free them, to break the yoke of their oppression.

And so, Isaiah promises that the people will be freed from tyranny by a Wonderful Counselor, the Prince of Peace. This prophecy was fulfilled in Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Yet it was not fulfilled in the way we would expect. Isaiah implied that the Messiah would be a mighty warrior, but he also says that war will be no more. One possibility is that ALL enemies will be vanquished. I suppose all things are possible to God, but 100% victory over our enemies seems like too much to ask.

No, I think that Jesus Christ delivers victory not by vanquishing our enemies, but by destroying the very category of “enemy.” That is, through Christ, all people, all things, all Creation will be reconciled to God. In that reconciliation, enmity will cease, not because our opponents have been defeated but because they will be turned into our friends, our fellow members of Christ’s family.

For what does war really accomplish? The victory achieved by the Allies in World War I sowed the seeds of the conflict that led to World War II. And the victory achieved in World War II set up the conditions of the Cold War. Now we can see that the victory over the Soviet Union set up the conditions that led to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Human attempts at forging a lasting peace through military might always result in another violent conflict.

But peace forged by the love of God poured out upon us all has the potential to truly last. That is the victory promised through Christ. Too many Christians think their job is to vanquish God’s enemies, as if God were too weak to do it. No, our job is to allow God’s love to overcome conflict and strife, and therefore turn enemies into friends.

“The people who walked in darkness
    have seen a great light;
those who lived in a land of deep darkness—
    on them light has shined.”

That’s how our NRSV Bible translates Isaiah’s words. But a better rendering is:

The people walking in darkness
see a bright light;^[g]
light shines
on those who live in a land of deep darkness.

Hear the difference? Verb tenses. The NRSV translation makes sense: people walked in darkness in the past, and then a light came and shined upon them, so they were no longer in darkness. But the Hebrew verb tenses say something else altogether. They say that people are still walking in darkness even though light is shining on them. The light is there, always and forever. Yet we do not have eyes to see it. We prefer the darkness to hide our evil deeds, or we mourn in the darkness of the world’s brokenness and refuse to see God’s goodness shine upon us.

Yet God’s light has been shining upon us all since the beginning.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was in the beginning with God. ³ All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being ⁴ in him was life,^[a] and the life was the light of all people. ⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it.

From the very beginning, Christ has been the light shining in the darkness. Christ has always been the way, the life, and the truth. All things have their being in Christ, the Word, the divine ordering principle of all Creation. We just fail to see it. We fail to see the light.

More than that, we fail to be the light. We are Christ’s body. We are all one in Christ, united through baptism and nourished through communion. We are all one in the Spirit, our Advocate who strengthens and unites us. Christ is the light of the world, and we are in Christ, and so we too are light to the world.

That is our fundamental calling: to build God’s kingdom by being light to the world. But how? What does it mean to “be light”?

Well, some people say it’s by following all the rules. Rules, rules, rules. Do this, don’t do that. But N.T. Wright wrote, “The New Testament’s vision of Christian behavior has to do, not with struggling to keep a bunch of ancient and apparently arbitrary rules, nor with ‘going with the flow’ or ‘doing what comes naturally’, but with the learning of the language, in the present, which will equip us to speak it fluently in God’s new world.”

We are called to learn the language of God’s love, of God’s reconciliation, of all that fosters human flourishing. We are called to speak the truth in love. We are called to lift up the lowly, to flip tables, to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to feed the hungry, to welcome the stranger, to clothe the naked, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. We are called to transform the world so that it progressively approaches God’s kingdom.

But you know that already. This is not the first time I’ve spoken about universal human flourishing, nor will it be the last, not until we reach that glorious state. And I’m not the only preacher proclaiming the year of the Lord’s favor and imploring their congregation to be light to the world. So why do we see so much darkness?

I subscribe to a newsletter called “Stoic Wisdoms” with an anonymous author. In a recent article, they wrote,

There’s a particular kind of suffering that comes from knowing exactly what needs to be done and not doing it.

Not the suffering of ignorance, where the path forward is unclear. Not the suffering of impossibility, where circumstances prevent action. But the suffering of standing at the threshold of change, seeing clearly what lies on the other side, understanding precisely what’s required to cross over, and choosing to remain where you are.

… The knowledge is available, but the cost of acting on it feels too high.

This is the real barrier.

Not lack of knowledge, but unwillingness to pay the price that acting on knowledge demands.

… [T]he immediate cost of [changing] … outweighs the projected benefit of having [changed] ….

This calculation might be wrong. Often is wrong. But it’s not irrational. It’s the product of human minds that weight immediate costs more heavily than delayed benefits, that fear loss more than they value gain, that prefer certainty even when certainty means staying in bad situations.

… But timing is never right. Circumstances rarely change on their own. The gap between knowing and acting doesn’t close through waiting. It closes through the decision to act despite the prohibitive feeling of the immediate cost.

… What changes the calculation is changing the framework within which costs and benefits are evaluated. Instead of comparing immediate cost to delayed benefit, comparing immediate cost to continued cost of inaction. Instead of weighing the discomfort of change against the comfort of stability, weighing the discomfort of change against the growing discomfort of maintaining the status quo.

When the weight of unlived knowledge becomes heavier than the cost of acting on it, action becomes not just possible but necessary. Not because willpower increased, but because the calculation shifted. The question changes from “Can I tolerate the cost of acting?” to “Can I continue tolerating the cost of not acting?”

So that’s the question I put to you today. You know what you should do, as an individual, as a part of this church, or as a part of an organization. You know how to be light to the world, yet you don’t. Can you continue tolerating the cost of not acting?

This isn’t about setting goals. I know that this is the time of year when people have mostly abandoned their New Year’s resolutions. Those almost always fail. James Clear wrote, “You don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” Resolutions fail because they propose a goal or a solution without providing a system that would get you from here to there. But Scott D. Clary wrote, “You don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your identity.” A good system imbues you with an identity that aligns with your goal.

I set a goal of running a half-marathon on February 21. The system that I set up to get there is a training plan with my Fitbit that will build the stamina and speed I need to complete it. But more importantly, the identity I have is that I’m a distance runner. That identity gets me out on the road to train when the temperature is in the teens or even single digits.

We each have a collection of identities. I’m a runner, a teacher, a mentor, an engineer, and more. You could probably make a list that would be mostly different from mine. But we all share one identity: WE ARE THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. We are Christ’s body. We are united by the power of the Holy Spirit so that we can be light to the world.

I implore you to embrace that identity and what it means to you. Then once you know what to do, think about the cost of the status quo, how much it is costing you to avoid the claim God has on your life. Ask yourself, What can I do to fulfill my calling, and how much is my inaction weighing on my soul? Then take a step into the unknown, confident that Christ will be walking with you and showing you the way. May God bless your journey. Amen.

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Homily for December 24, 2025, at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on Luke 2:1-20.

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This is the time of year when people travel great distances to visit the people that they love. In today’s world, do we really have to travel? Most of us carry around a little device that enables us to communicate with our family and friends any time. We can text them, we can email them, we can send them pictures, we can call them, we can even have a video chat. Any time at all. We can keep in touch with people both near and far through social media, people who share common interests and goals in life or people who are dear to us.

But there is something special about physical presence. The way we communicate is not really captured by phones or computers. In one study, only 7% of human communication was the words that were spoken, another 38% was tone of voice, and the other 55% was through body language. We’ve all experienced that text messages and emails are misinterpreted, phone calls are often unsatisfying, and even video calls aren’t good enough.

My general experience since the pandemic has been that texts are OK for specific communication or for casual contact, email is good for transferring information, and phone and video are good for maintaining relationships. But when things get hard or when you’re trying to build a new relationship—in the workplace, in your personal life, or whatever—there is no substitute for physical presence. There is no substitute for being together.

I am privileged to be able to live with the person who means the most to me in the world. Sometimes, Rhonda and I drive each other crazy, but that’s the price to pay for a deep emotional connection. The rest of my family is spread across the country—we are all where we belong, but it’s hard to be separated from everyone. Fortunately, I saw some of them at Thanksgiving and will see the rest of them over the coming week.

I can talk to my friends and family who live far away any time I want to. But I can’t hug them, I can’t share a meal with them, I can’t experience that close bond that only emerges when people are gathered together.

God had the same problem. In Genesis and Exodus, God shared a special closeness with humanity in the Garden of Eden, with Abraham, and with Moses. But for the most part, God could not really be with us. God yearned for the intimacy and emotional closeness that comes with physical presence.

And so, Jesus was born. Jesus was God in the flesh, Emmanuel, God with us. Jesus was born like every other human so that he could, so that God could experience the close bond between mother and child. Jesus grew up in a village so that God could experience the rhythms of life. Jesus lived among fishermen and tax collectors and Roman soldiers and Pharisees and all other walks of life so that God could experience the fullness of human relationships.

You can’t really learn about relationships by watching them. I mean, when we watch movies and TV shows, we learn something about the human condition and the way some people relate to one another. But there’s a flatness to those experiences because we aren’t really immersed in the situation. Live theater is better, but there is still a “fourth wall” that separates us from the action.

Jesus came to break that fourth wall, to immerse God in the messiness of human relationships. He came to satisfy God’s yearning for a close relationship with all of humanity.

God the Father was overjoyed at the birth of his son, so what did he do? He told everyone he could. He sent angels with a heavenly proclamation to the shepherds. They announced that today, the Messiah has been born. THE Messiah is the Anointed One, the singular person who ushered in a new age. The angels announced that the new age has begun, that THE Messiah has been born. God the Son has come to dwell among God’s people. God will no longer be satisfied with communicating through prophets. God has chosen to be with humanity to experience the joys and sorrows of this life.

Now, the shepherds could have thought, “Cool, the Messiah was born. But he’s just a baby. I’ll get excited when he starts doing something important, like fighting against the Romans or something.” But they didn’t. The shepherds knew intuitively that Jesus’s birth, the coming of the Messiah, God’s presence on earth, was important. They weren’t satisfied with head knowledge. They weren’t satisfied with information. They needed the transformation that comes with bodily knowledge and physical presence.

As I said, communication from a distance is fine for maintaining a relationship, but not for building one. The shepherds heard the announcement that God’s desire for closeness to humanity was so strong that God the Son came to dwell among us in the flesh. That provoked a desire among the shepherds to reciprocate, to seek that same closeness to God. They wanted to build a relationship with God that was closer than they could ever achieve through prayer.

So they rushed to Bethlehem to find Jesus lying in a manger. I can just picture it: Mary is exhausted from labor, Joseph is proud but overwhelmed with his new responsibilities, and here come some smelly, rough men who have been living with the sheep. But they were transformed first by their encounter with the angels, and then by their encounter with the baby Emmanuel, God With Us, the newborn king sent to change the world.

Jesus was born a king, but what kind of king? Tonight’s readings open with a decree from Caesar Augustus that all should be registered. That’s the kind of king that we are used to: when he says “go,” everyone goes. The Roman Empire, along with every empire before or since, was basically built on the threat of violence. What if Joseph had said that he couldn’t travel to Bethlehem because of Mary’s advanced pregnancy? He probably would have been arrested, flogged, beaten, imprisoned.

Is that what God’s kingdom is like? The same violent methods with different goals? No. God’s kingdom is rich relationships and deep love. God’s angel army came down to proclaim the dawning of the messianic age, armed only with love and joy. Jesus’s life was a testament to reconciliation, bringing people in from the margins to be a part of the community, healing the illnesses and moral wounds that kept them separated. Jesus came so that God could be in relationships that can only be built through physical presence, and to institute a kingdom that would be built on those deep connections.

But having taken on human form, Jesus’s life was finite. Even if he hadn’t been crucified, Jesus’s life would some day come to an end, and then God would no longer be able to have that same physical presence. Yet on the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came and energized the early Christians and transformed us into Christ’s body. God can still be present in the world through us. We embody God. We are Emmanuel.

And so, we gather this evening. We have heard the proclamation that a child has been born to establish a kingdom of love, a kingdom of reconciliation, a kingdom of rich relationships, a kingdom of abundant life, a kingdom of joy, a kingdom of universal flourishing. We heard God’s proclamation, and so we come to be present with our newborn king. But remember that Jesus was already born 2000 years ago, and so we can encounter God’s presence any time we want. We can communicate with God any time we want, through prayer. But often, that’s about as satisfying as a phone call—good enough to keep a relationship going, but not to build one.

Building a relationship requires coming together, sharing a physical presence. Eating together. Laughing together, crying together. Sharing your lives. Jesus of Nazareth died two millennia ago, but Jesus Christ was raised from the dead. He lives on in his people. Whenever we encounter someone whom God loves, we can encounter God’s real presence. Who does God love? Everyone. Everyone. Everyone you meet can be your connection to God’s divine presence. The people gathered in God’s name are God’s divine presence. The poor, the homeless, the prisoner, the outcast—they are God’s divine presence.

So tonight, welcome into God’s presence. May your eyes be opened to God’s presence in each person you meet, here tonight, as you go to your home or travel to far-off places, and each day as you encounter God’s beloved people in every walk of life. And may your lives be enriched with fulfilling relationships with God’s people, and through them, with the God who desires a deep and loving relationship with you. Amen.

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Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on December 21, 2025, Fourth Sunday of Advent. Based on Isaiah 7:10-16.

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Let me start by reviewing where we are and what we’re doing. I’m working through the Old Testament texts this year, and in Advent, that means Isaiah. Isaiah was one of the major prophets. He lived and prophesied in Judah, particularly Jerusalem, during the eighth century BCE. The major regional power at the time was Assyria, who ultimately conquered the northern kingdom of Israel but fell short of conquering Jerusalem.

Today’s passage takes place about 15 years before Assyria invaded Israel and Aram. Still, the threat of a major superpower drove Israel and Aram to invade Judah. The “two kings” that Isaiah mentioned near the end of the passage were King Rezin of Aram and King Pekah of Israel. Ahaz was the king of Judah.

So that was the original context of Isaiah’s prophecies. But the hallmark of true prophecy is that it speaks to both the present conditions and eternal truths.

George Orwell was an English writer who lived in the first half of the twentieth century. He is best known for Animal Farm and 1984, which most of you have probably read or at least know in broad outlines. Animal Farm is a fable best read as an allegory for the rise of the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union. 1984 addresses totalitarianism more broadly. Published in 1949, it speaks to the motivations and methods of totalitarian regimes like the Bolsheviks, Nazis, and other fascists that emerged in the 1920s and ‘30s. He was writing specifically about the conditions that led to World War II and that continued in other forms after the war. 1984 is a cautionary tale that may have helped the English-speaking world reject fascism in the early days of the Cold War. And yet, it still speaks to us today. Orwell’s dystopia included secret police, media control, words and concepts that were not allowed to be discussed, and widespread government surveillance—features that we can see in authoritarian governments around the world.

A decade later, the Civil Rights movement took form in the US. I see Martin Luther King, Jr., as a prophet of the highest order. His Letter from a Birmingham Jail is an excellent rebuttal to moderation in the face of tyranny, and his famous “I Have a Dream” speech continues to inspire millions of Americans. Yet both were fundamentally grounded in the conditions he was experiencing and witnessing all around him. He was speaking specifically to the reality of African-American oppression in the 1960s. This grounding, paired with the movement of the Holy Spirit, empowered his words to both inspire his followers and transcend their time and circumstances.

In the same way, Isaiah spoke to his current situation, yet his words live on to speak to our conditions today. Let’s look at his prophecy in its original context. Judah was under attack. The northern kingdom of Israel had partnered with the Syrian kingdom of Aram to invade Judah. Could Judah stand against those two armies? People had fears and doubts.

Isaiah went out to a place sometimes called Fuller’s Field, where laundry was being done or perhaps where new fabric was being washed as the final step in its creation. Ahaz didn’t want a sign, but God gave him one anyway through Isaiah’s words. He said, “This woman will bear a child.” He said that her child would be a sign that God is with us. That is, the armies arrayed against Judah would not be victorious, because God is on our side. How long? How long would Judah suffer under the enemies’ siege? Not long. The baby would be born, and soon after, before he was a toddler who could feed himself and knew right from wrong, the armies would be vanquished.

Yet it would be a false peace, a false prosperity. The baby, and by extension all Judah, would eat curds and honey. That sounds good, right? But perhaps that would be all they had. Perhaps the land would be devastated, and Judah would have to survive on what they could find in the wilderness, or on sour milk. Isaiah was a prophet who mixed hope with doom. He persistently reminded the king and the people of Judah that they would be punished for their iniquities, but that the punishment would be temporary. They would suffer from the devastation caused by the various invading armies, but would ultimately be restored.

Isaiah was largely correct. Oh, he had the timeline a little wrong, but he was correct that Israel and Aram would fail in their invasion, Assyria would fail in their invasion, and Judah would recover and be restored. Yet in other places, he prophesied that the covenant God made with David would be honored for all time and Judah would be an independent, holy nation ruled by David’s descendant. That turned out to be wrong. Judah persisted under David’s dynasty for another 150 years, but then was conquered by Babylon, never to return to its ancient glory.

After the exile ended, Jews were forced to reckon with the failed prophesies of Isaiah and others. They thought that their kingdom would be restored, but they remained a vassal state for hundreds of years. They achieved independence under the Maccabees, but that turned out to also be temporary. By the time of Jesus’s birth, the ancient prophecies could no longer be interpreted as foretelling a regular, worldly kingdom.

So, they re-interpreted Isaiah’s words to predict a different kind of kingdom and a different kind of king. Instead of a regular lower-case ‘m’ messiah, that is, someone anointed to be prophet, priest, or king, a normal thing that happened regularly throughout history, Isaiah and other prophets predicted a Messiah, with a capital M, the Anointed One who would restore the glory of God’s people. There were many different views on just who the Messiah would be and just what he would do. Some still held onto the idea of a worldly kingdom, and so many messianic movements arose to rebel against Roman occupation, all of which ended in bloodshed and destruction.

But others believed that the Messiah would institute a different kind of kingdom. They imagined that the Messiah would rule an eternal kingdom that transcends the evil and iniquity that they saw all around them. Jesus of Nazareth fulfilled this hope. During his life, many people thought he would lead a messianic movement like the others and rise up against Rome. Yet Jesus did none of that. He preached peace and reconciliation. He claimed that his kingdom is “not of this world.” He taught self-denial, forgiveness, and mutual support. He raised up the lowly and marginalized while chastising the rich and powerful.

Jesus was Emmanuel—a sign that God is with us, and God’s actual presence in the world. He was born in a time of turmoil to remind us all of God’s true nature. He was born in humble circumstances to remind us that Christ comes to us in the mundane, in the poor and oppressed, in those who live on the margins. He lived a simple life to remind us that we are promised abundant LOVE, not material abundance. He lived a life of service to demonstrate our call to mutual submission, serving and being served so that everyone can flourish. He died as he lived, a man of peace who refused to take up arms against those who rejected him. And he rose from the dead to demonstrate God’s transcendent power to conquer all of the sin and death of this world.

And yet, he did not come on clouds of glory to purge the world of evil and wickedness, as Daniel predicted. Instead, he ascended to heaven. Yet, he is still Emmanuel. Jesus Christ is still with us, by the power of the Holy Spirit, poured out upon his followers on the day of Pentecost and flowing through us all even now, two millennia later.

Jesus of Nazareth was a man who lived and died at the dawn of the common era, in an oppressed region of one of history’s greatest empires, a victim of the united forces of religious and government leaders who saw his message of hope, love, and equality before God as a threat to their power. Jesus Christ conquered sin and death and rules an eternal kingdom of peace, love, and reconciliation.

Yet we look around, and see that actually, the world order looks more like Rome’s empire of oppression than like Christ’s kingdom of love. What does that mean to us as Christians? Some say, in essence, that we need to fight fire with fire. The world is harsh and governed through power, so the church needs to be harsh and achieve power to impose our will on the world. But that is the exact opposite of what Jesus taught.

Instead, Jesus taught that the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed: something small that grows and flourishes into something great. The kingdom of God is established not by force, but by persistent love. Not by vanquishing our enemies, but by reconciling with them. Not by destroying the wicked, but by healing them.

Christ ascended into heaven, leaving his Church to be his body. WE are Emmanuel. We are God’s presence in the world, a sign that God will always be with humanity. In fact, we are the only sign most people see. If someone is in crisis and looking for a sign that God still cares about them, the work that we do as a church may be that sign. Whether they are homeless or hungry, or grieving or in emotional turmoil, or striving to make a better life in the face of oppressive systems arrayed against them, we can be God’s presence in their lives and demonstrate that indeed God does care about them, that indeed God will provide for them and support their flourishing. We can be God’s hands and feet in the world, seeking those in need and doing God’s work, if only we see with God’s eyes.

Yet too often, we are like King Ahaz. We don’t really want to see with God’s eyes. Today’s passage opens with Isaiah challenging Ahaz to ask for a sign. Ahaz says that he won’t put God to the test, a disingenuous claim that reveals his faithlessness and his desire to trust his own wisdom instead of putting his faith in God. Isaiah reminds him that God is present whether we acknowledge Them or not.

We are all like Ahaz sometimes. We know what we want to do, and we don’t want God interfering in our plans. We don’t want to hear that we should leave a job that provides financial security at the cost of our soul. We don’t want to hear the cries of the poor and oppressed, who God desires that we would care for. We don’t want to know anything that might mean that we have to change the way we live, or who is in our life, or how we worship, or anything else. Change is hard—it’s so much easier to just keep doing something unsatisfying or even emotionally or physically draining than to listen for what God is calling us to do.

Or sometimes, we’re like Jonah. Ahaz tried to avoid hearing God’s will altogether. Jonah heard God’s calling loud and clear, and said “NO!” So often, we know what God wants us to do, but like a toddler we say, “NO I DON’T WANNA!” Change is hard, so even when we clearly know what God wants, we avoid doing it.

In one of the commentaries, I read, “When the church veers off in a direction of its own choosing, when it puts even survival ahead of God’s will, the path becomes murky.” We see that in practically every church and every denomination, with just a few exceptions. PC(USA) is losing members at a pretty good clip. Since our denomination was created in 1984, our total membership has declined from 3.1 million to 1.1 million. From 1984 to 2000, we averaged a decline of about 2% per year. Since 2000, the decline has just accelerated. Now we’re averaging more than 4% annual decline. I read a recent article that showed pretty much every Protestant denomination following the same trend, with only Assemblies of God and PCA actually growing. Even the Southern Baptist Convention has been declining since about 2008. What’s going on? I think we have collectively chosen comfort over looking for God’s signs and looking for ways to follow where Christ is leading.

Christmas is our annual reminder that Christ came to Earth to show us what it means to seek God’s will, to follow God’s signs, to live as God’s people. Jesus set an impossible standard, one that we can never achieve, but one to which we should always aspire. We are called to watch for God’s actions in the world and watch for ways to participate in the emergence of God’s kingdom. Whether we want a sign or not, God sends them to show us how best to support human flourishing.

Since Christ ascended and sent the Holy Spirit to energize us, we have been made living signs of God’s presence in the world. I leave you now with the famous words authored by Teresa of Ávila, a famous Christian mystic who reformed the Carmelite monastic order in the 16^th century:

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

Teresa of Ávila

Amen.

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Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on December 7, 2025, the Second Sunday of Advent. Based on Isaiah 11:1-10.

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Before we get into today’s text, let’s review a few things I said last week. Isaiah was a prophet in the 8^th century BCE, the same time as Micah, Amos, and Hosea. The Assyrians were on the warpath, ultimately conquering Israel but falling short of conquering Judah. In this tumultuous period, Isaiah preached against the injustice that he saw in the Judean society, while looking forward to a time when they would beat their swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. He spoke of shalom, peace, wholeness—the way things ought to be.

So now on to today’s lesson. We all have an intuitive sense of right and wrong that is based on a deep-seated emotion: disgust. Disgust is basically a sensed violation of our boundaries. The most fundamental level of disgust relates to the things that should be outside our body versus the things that should be inside our body. That’s why sewers are disgusting, open wounds are disgusting, rotten food is disgusting, and so forth. Disgust is the solution to what has been called the omnivore’s dilemma. Humans can eat “everything,” by which I mean we eat both plants and animals. But which plants are good and which are bad? Which animals, or which parts of animals, are good and which are bad? Disgust helps us to choose, and was critical for early proto-humans 100,000 years ago. If you are too sensitive, you might miss out on the only food available and starve to death. If you are not sensitive enough, you might eat contaminated food, get sick, and die. Disgust is fundamentally related to keeping contaminants out.

But humans are adept at converting a literal, practical tool into an abstract idea. If you read the Torah with disgust in mind, you’ll see that it’s lurking behind much of the Law of Moses. Kosher laws are mostly about disgust—which foods are “clean,” and which are not. Many of the laws around sexuality are based on disgust. Then there are rules about who is acceptable in the holy community and who is not—abstract extensions of the disgust principle.

The way disgust works is most obvious in the rules around leprosy. If you came in contact with someone leprous, you “caught” the uncleanness. So too if you touch a dead body or various bodily fluids. A clean person becomes contaminated by contact with someone or something unclean. There is no safe dose of uncleanness—the smallest amount contaminates the whole. We are wired to keep out contaminants, including people who “contaminate” God’s holy people.

It wasn’t until I read about disgust that I really understood the difference between an honor-shame culture, like ancient Israel, and an innocence-guilt culture. Shame is related to disgust. If you experience a boundary violation, you are disgusted, and so you incur shame. That’s why rape victims incur shame in so many cultures—not guilt, because they didn’t do anything wrong, but shame because they were unwilling participants in something disgusting. Shame and disgust are deep-seated emotions. By contrast, guilt is a cerebral notion, which relates to fear rather than shame.

Today’s lesson starts with a discussion of a righteous judge, one who renews the Davidic covenant to rule God’s people with justice. I already read the opening from the NRSVue translation, which is very good and the main translation I use. But I often consult the New English Translation, or NET, which has a slightly different philosophy and copious translator notes. Here are the first few verses from NET:

11 A shoot will grow out of Jesse’s root stock,

a bud will sprout from his roots.

2 The Lord’s Spirit will rest on him—

a Spirit that gives extraordinary wisdom,

a Spirit that provides the ability to execute plans,

a Spirit that produces absolute loyalty to the Lord.

3 He will take delight in obeying the Lord.

These are some very different fruits of the Spirit. Paul wrote that the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. But Isaiah wrote that some fruits of the Spirit are EXTRAORDINARY wisdom, the ability to execute plans, and absolute loyalty to the LORD. Wow! That’s fantastic! I feel like Paul’s list is more internally focused, dealing with the heart, but Isaiah’s list emphasizes God’s action in the world. Like the ability to execute plans—which plans? Ones that come from extraordinary wisdom and loyalty to the LORD.

Jesus was this tender shoot that sprang from the stump of Jesse, on whom the Spirit of the LORD rested, a Spirit of extraordinary wisdom. Jesus was a doer, not just a talker. He spent his brief ministry traveling far and wide, healing people wherever he went.

But not just healing them—restoring them. Think about the times Jesus healed lepers. Under the Law of Moses, when Jesus touched a leper, Jesus became unclean. The uncleanness of the leper would spread to anyone who came in contact with them. But Jesus operated against disgust, against contamination. A book I’m reading right now calls this eucontamination, where “eu” means “good.” Rather than the disgusting uncleanness contaminating the clean, Jesus’s purity cleansed what was disgusting.

We see this again and again throughout the Gospels. Remember that certain people are considered unclean, too. But Jesus ate with them, with tax collectors and sinners. He let a sinful woman anoint his feet. Again and again, we read about scribes and Pharisees chastising Jesus for violating the boundary between clean and unclean, between pure and disgusting. But in His wisdom, Jesus demonstrated that His purity overcomes all uncleanness. Jesus purified and sanctified anyone who came in contact with him. His goodness and love are like a reverse contaminant, a eucontaminant that pushes out all uncleanness. Just as a small amount of something disgusting can ruin something good, it only takes a little bit of Jesus’s purity to purify those who are touched by Him.

There are plenty of metaphors for disgust, so I thought I should develop one for eucontamination. Consider a group of people all washing their hands. One option is to have a large bowl of water. Now, how many people need to wash their hands before you would question the wisdom of sticking your hands in the bowl? Just thinking about it makes me a little queasy. I guess it depends on the people, but regardless, once someone gets their hands clean in it, the water is dirty, right? Maybe a little bit dirty, maybe a lot, but I don’t really want someone else’s dirt on my hands. That’s the logic of disgust, the logic of contamination and uncleanness.

The other option is a sink with running water. As the clean water flows over your hands, all of the dirt and grime flow down the drain. Your uncleanness does not spread up through the tap to the source. The source remains clean and pure no matter how many people are washed by it. Everything disgusting is washed away.

So too, God’s abundant grace cleanses us all. Justice rolls down like water. Righteousness is an ever-flowing stream. The river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flows from the throne of God and of the Lamb.

Nothing we do can pollute the stream. Nothing we do is too disgusting for God’s grace to wash away. Nothing, nobody, is ultimately unclean in God’s holy kingdom. Not because anything or anyone is kept out, but because all who enter God’s kingdom are cleansed by God’s abundant grace.

This is the Peaceful Kingdom that Isaiah described. A righteous, equitable judge—our Lord and Savior—will rule over it. At His command, wickedness will be cast out. What’s left will be complete reconciliation. No longer will there be predator and prey—the wolf shall live with the lamb, and the calf and the lion will feed together. God’s abundant grace will wash away any fear, any violence, any covetousness that would disrupt relationships. True peace, shalom, will hold sway.

But the kingdom of God is at hand! Today is John the Baptist Sunday—happy Advent, you brood of vipers! Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near! John stood in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets, preaching that God would separate the good from the bad, the righteous from the evil, the clean from the unclean. He wasn’t wrong, exactly, just a little incomplete. Yes, God will separate the righteous from the evil, but not by casting some people into eternal conscious torment. Rather, the purifying eucontamination of Jesus Christ will purge the evil from everyone and everything, leaving only righteousness. As Solzhenitsyn famously said, the line between good and evil runs down the middle of every human heart. Jesus’s purifying, sanctifying grace is more powerful than any evil in our hearts, able to purge us of all wickedness so that we are made worthy of entering His peaceful kingdom.

But again, the kingdom of heaven has come near! We are already being purified and sanctified. We are already welcome in God’s eternal kingdom. And we are called to bring others into the kingdom by channeling God’s grace and letting it flow through us and over the world.

We, the Church, are Christ’s body. The logic of contamination and disgust say that we need to keep out the “wrong type” of people. The tax collectors and sinners of our age. We see this logic at work in almost every church, only with different boundaries. Some will say that you’re excluded if you believe the wrong thing. Some will exclude you if you are in the wrong kind of romantic relationship. Some will exclude you if you question authority. Some will exclude you if you vote the wrong way. Some will exclude you if you dress the wrong way, or have tattoos or piercings.

But we are Christ’s body. Who does Christ exclude? Nobody. By God’s grace, we are all purified and made worthy of full inclusion in Christ’s body. Nobody can corrupt our holiness. Nobody can make us “unclean” in Christ’s eyes. And so, our task is to seek those who have been excluded from other manifestations of Christ’s body—other churches in our community or around the world that have drawn boundaries where God does not.

We are channels of God’s grace. We are called to seek those who need to be welcomed in from the margins. We are called to seek those who disgust us, for whatever reason, because they are clean in God’s eyes. We are called to share God’s ever-flowing righteousness and let it wash away all of their shame.

The revolution will not be televised. Prophets are not interested in spectators. Jesus came to call us to action, to transformation of ourselves and the world. We are expected to participate in the flourishing of God’s kingdom, here and now, in each of our hearts, in this church, in our community, and throughout the world. We have been made clean and pure, holy parts of Christ’s body, so that we can do Christ’s work in the world, bringing everyone into God’s eternal, already-but-not-yet kingdom that is emerging among us. Let us seek this day, this Advent season, and all through our lives to share the abundant, ever-flowing grace that has washed over us and that promises total transformation and reconciliation of Creation. Amen.

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Preached on November 30, 2025, First Sunday of Advent, at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on Isaiah 2:1-5.

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Today, we start a new liturgical year with the first Sunday of Advent. My plan this year is to delve into the Hebrew Bible readings. We’ll see how it goes. Lots of preachers pull out the Old Testament to emphasize God’s vengeance against evildoers, but you know me—that’s not what I ever talk about. In Better Ways to Read the Bible, Zach Lambert listed four good lenses to use when we are reading any part of the Bible. The Context lens considers the broader context of any given passage. The Fruitfulness lens reads the text through the fruits of the Spirit and how it fosters them. The Flourishing lens is my main perspective: the kingdom of God is universal human flourishing, so how does the passage inform how we pursue that flourishing? And finally, the Jesus lens: all Scripture points to Jesus, who is the fullest expression of who God is and how God works in the world. So even though I’ll be talking about words written centuries before his birth, I do believe that our understanding of Jesus informs our understanding of the text, and vice versa.

But let’s start with the context. Isaiah is one of the major prophets, along with Ezekiel and Jeremiah. Some would include Daniel. Isaiah prophesied in Judah, the southern kingdom, in the latter half of the eighth century BCE, around the same time as Micah was active in Judah and when Amos and Hosea were active in the northern kingdom of Israel. The Assyrians were the main regional power at the time and were on the warpath. They besieged and ultimately conquered the northern kingdom. Then they marched south to Judah and besieged Jerusalem, but fell short, so Judah survived. Isaiah was active throughout the war.

All four prophets who were active during the Assyrian wars preached against the injustice throughout the two kingdoms. Isaiah laid the blame primarily on the leaders. Social injustice cannot be rectified with acts of worship. As Amos preached, “But let justice roll down like water, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

Isaiah and Micah both famously spoke of the day when the people would beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. This was a bold statement in the midst of war. When a brutal army is at your doorstep threatening annihilation, nobody wants to hear that they should lay down their arms, but everyone wants to believe that a day of peace would someday come. Remember I said that the kingdom of God is universal flourishing, right? Well, flourishing requires peace. So why is there war?

In the ancient world, agriculture was the foundation of a nation’s economy. If you possessed productive farmland, you could grow crops that would feed your people. If you controlled productive pastureland, you could raise sheep, goats, and cattle to feed your people. So ideally, a clan, tribe, or nation would maintain control over good land, work it to get the most productivity out of it, and flourish.

But the other way to obtain the produce of the land was to just take it. Take it by force. For millennia, the purpose of war was to obtain resources. When the Assyrians conquered Israel, they exiled the people so that they could control the land and extract its wealth. Later, the Babylonians did the same to Judah. That’s the reason the Greeks and the Romans conquered Judea as well. The same motivation drove European powers to conquer and colonize the Americas and parts of Africa, Oceania, and Asia. Eventually, competing ideologies became a reason for war, but usually with an economic basis as well.

Let’s think about the major conflicts in the world today. Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 to possess Crimea, which is an important gateway for them to access the Black Sea. More recently, they expanded their horizons and are seeking to control the major industrial portions of Ukraine. Sure, there is an ethnic argument they make, that these portions of Ukraine have many ethnic Russians in them, but the real reason is economic. Israel and Palestine have been locked in a struggle for almost 80 years. There are many reasons, but a big one is the economic deprivation of the Palestinians and their lack of freedom to flourish. A world in which swords have been beaten into plowshares is a world in which people focus more on producing wealth through their own efforts than stealing it by force or denying it to their enemies.

But I won’t deny that there are times when war is necessary and appropriate. Someday, when God’s kingdom comes in all its fullness, war will be no more. In the meantime, we need to muddle through and deal with the violence so prevalent in the world. What is the appropriate response of a Christian? Well, in the early days, all Christians were pacifists. St. Martin of Tours was a famous example. He was a Roman soldier who converted to Christianity and became the first recorded conscientious objector. After he left the Roman army, he became a monk, then a priest, then a bishop. His feast day is November 11, which became a traditional day on which to sign peace accords—most famously at the end of World War I.

But avoiding war sometimes amounts to allowing a bully to prey upon a weaker nation. So Christians developed just war theory. There are three parts of it: jus ad bellum, which are principles for going to war, jus in bellum, which are principles for conducting war, and jus post bellum, which are principles for the aftermath of war. Don’t worry, this isn’t a lecture on just war theory. I’ll just highlight a few things.

The most important condition for going to war is possessing just cause. Wars of aggression are never just. Self-defense is almost always just. Things get tricky when we’re talking about a third party. Consider the first Gulf War. Iraq invaded and conquered Kuwait. Clearly, Kuwait had the right to defend itself against the invasion, but they did not have the ability to do so. The US led a coalition to repel Iraq and re-establish Kuwait’s sovereignty. We had the ability, but did we have the right? I would say yes, but some would argue against me. So then fast forward to Ukraine. What really is the difference between Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and Russia’s invasion of Crimea? Not much, except that the US didn’t think it was a good idea to challenge Russia on the field of battle.

The main principles of just conduct of war are discrimination and proportionality. Discrimination means that you only attack enemy combatants, not civilians. Proportionality means that the force you use should not exceed the just goals.

The key to long-term peace, though, lies in jus post bellum, the just way to end and resolve a war. Again, there is discrimination and proportionality: the losing government should be punished, but not necessarily the non-combatant people of the losing nation, and the claims of victory should be proportional to the nature of the war. If the end of the war is not just, then the seeds of future conflict are sown.

In 1871, the Franco-Prussian War ended with Prussia controlling Alsace-Lorraine, a region of France that they had conquered. The Prussian Empire became the German Empire, one of the participants of World War I. In 1919, Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France, then in 1940 it was re-taken by Germany. Finally, in 1945, it was returned to France. Which nation should control it? I don’t know, but the fact is that both nations felt that they had a historical right to control its people, its land, and its resources. Leaving the issue poorly resolved presented a reason, or at least an excuse, for future conflict.

In many cases, wars end with a truce rather than a real peace. Consider what’s going on in Israel and Gaza right now. On October 7, 2023, Hamas invaded Israel, starting a hot war in Gaza. On October 10, 2025, just over two years later, both sides ratified a ceasefire deal that had many conditions. Yet 345 Palestinians have died in the conflict since the ceasefire was settled, including in an episode last Wednesday. I don’t think either side is really committed to the ceasefire because it does not really resolve the underlying problems. It is a temporary solution to a long-term problem that has existed for generations and has been prolonged by people who profit from a continuation of hostilities.

We live in a violent world. What are our obligations, as Americans? Well, we have helped to create many of the conditions that have led to war. For example, thirty years ago, the US partnered with other nations to convince Ukraine to divest of its nuclear weapons, in exchange for security guarantees. This was clearly the right thing to do at the time, and yet it left Ukraine defenseless in the face of Russian aggression. We have an ongoing obligation to Ukraine because of our involvement back then. As the leading superpower for decades, our actions have sown the seeds of future conflicts around the world. We cannot simply turn our backs on our allies or on defenseless nations that were destabilized by our actions.

This is not to say that the US did anything wrong, necessarily. The problem is that resources are finite, land is finite, and conflicts are inevitable. Even when we do our best to negotiate just resolutions to any conflicts, someone will end up feeling short-changed. I mean, who has the right to control Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank? Both Israelis and Palestinians have legitimate claims. Who has the right to Alsace-Lorraine? That seems to be settled now, but there was a time when both France and Germany had legitimate claims.

The kingdom of God is universal human flourishing. Yet in this finite world, it is often impossible to achieve flourishing for everyone. And so, we always feel like we don’t have enough. Or maybe you feel like you personally have enough, but others in your family or your community don’t. Or maybe a whole nation feels like they don’t have enough. And so, we want more. Always more.

Since I’m preaching on the Old Testament, let me reach back to the Mosaic covenant that established Israel as a nation, as God’s people. The Ten Commandments spelled out all the ways that people should act so that they would love God and love their neighbor. There are nine commandments that talk about things a person should or should not do, and then the Tenth Commandment is different. It speaks of the heart: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, male or female slave, ox, donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.” Coveting is an emotional response to seeing that your neighbor has something that you think would make your life better. Coveting is the root of the evil addressed in the rest of the commandments. When you let covetousness take root in your heart, you won’t let anything stand in the way of obtaining the object of your desire. Maybe you will steal it, maybe you will even kill for it.

But Isaiah spoke of a state of being where God’s justice leads to universal flourishing, so that no violence will be necessary. In God’s realm, everyone has what they need. In God’s realm, interpersonal violence is unnecessary. In God’s realm, war is unnecessary. There is no need to fight someone to take their land or resources, nor to defend yourself against aggression, because everyone will have the land or resources they need.

But what should we do in the meantime? In this finite world filled with violence, how can we live into God’s kingdom? Well, the first step is to see, truly see, one another’s needs. Rather than flattening people or nations into stereotypes, see them as fellow children of God who need food, shelter, safety, belonging, and self-actualization. See them through the eyes of their own culture and life experiences, without projecting your own beliefs and social conditions onto them. Then, having seen their true humanity, seek true shalom: peace, wholeness, and well-being. Cornelius Plantinga wrote:

The webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight is what the Hebrew prophets call shalom. We call it peace, but it means far more than mere peace of mind or a cease-fire between enemies. In the Bible, shalom means universal flourishing, wholeness and delight – a rich state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, a state of affairs that inspires joyful wonder as its Creator and Savior opens doors and welcomes the creatures in whom he delights. Shalom, in other words, is the way things ought to be.

Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., President Emeritus, Calvin University

The way things ought to be. God’s realm is the way things ought to be—not the violence and bloodshed and poverty and suffering we see all around us. Our world is so far from shalom it’s sometimes hard to imagine. We may never be able to achieve it. But with God’s help, through our beloved Savior who was born two thousand years ago, we can pursue it, one person, one decision, one relationship at a time. And in doing so, we will truly worship the Prince of Peace, not just with our words and our gatherings, but also with our reconciling actions in our families, community, nation, and world. Amen.

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Sermon on November 9, 2025, Twenty-Second Sunday After Pentecost. Based on Luke 20:27-38. With apologies to the United Church of Christ, who have used this title as their motto for many years.

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Before we seriously discuss today’s lesson, I’d like to take a quick tour through Israelite history. We often think of the ancient Israelites as always being monotheists, but that’s not quite true. In the time of Abraham, they might be described as henotheistic. That means they acknowledged one God, the God that we worship, as supreme over all other gods, but they also acknowledged that other gods exist and are worthy of worship by other people. Think about it: when Jacob and his 12 sons went down to Egypt, they didn’t proclaim their God to be superior to all of the Egyptian gods. They just kept to themselves. In fact, when Moses encountered the burning bush, a scene that Jesus evokes in today’s reading, he had to ask for God’s name.

Over the following centuries, the Israelites slowly progressed towards monotheism, but frequently slid into pagan practices. Over and over again, we hear about a prophet or a king denouncing Baal, Asherah, Molech, and other gods. There would be no need for denouncing unless the Israelite people were actively worshiping those other gods, right?

In 586 BCE, the single most catastrophic event of the Bible took place: Jerusalem was sacked, the Temple was destroyed, and the leaders of Judah were exiled to Babylon. A century later, the Temple was rebuilt and Judah was re-established, but the trauma of the Babylonian conquest lived on in their collective memory.

In the wake of this destruction and exile, the Jewish leaders had to figure out what had gone wrong. They knew that they worshiped the supreme God, the God who is above all others, El Shaddai, God Almighty, El Elyon, God Most High. They were God’s chosen people. How could they have been savaged by the Babylonians, who worshiped some other, lesser gods? Where had things gone horribly awry?

The best explanation anyone could come up with was that they had failed to follow the First Commandment: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.” When the leaders realized that they had broken this covenant with God, they began a series of reforms. They edited their ancient stories and writings into the Hebrew Bible as we know it, making sure to highlight the importance of monotheism and worshiping God alone. They made sure that the Temple stayed “clean,” that is, free of any other gods or idols or unclean practices. They ensured that the people all worshiped God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength, by participating in the Temple sacrifices and festivals and observances.

Thus began the Second Temple period, which ended shortly after Jesus’s resurrection. There was just one problem: No matter what the Jews did, they could not regain their previous stature. Under the Maccabees, they did achieve independence, but in 63 BCE, a couple of generations before Jesus, that independence came to an end. So again, religious leaders were left to wonder where things had gone wrong.

There were many factions in late Second Temple Judaism, but the two we hear the most about in the Gospels were the Pharisees and the Sadducees. In truth, Jesus had a lot in common with the Pharisees. Both were reformers who were trying to make Judaism relevant in a changing world. Jesus’s legacy was Christianity; the Pharisees’ legacy was rabbinic Judaism.

The Sadducees, though, were fundamentalists. They went back to the basics. In fact, they rejected most of the Hebrew Bible. They didn’t acknowledge the authority of the historical books, or the wisdom literature, or even the prophetic books. No, they said that the only true revelation of God’s divine will was in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Everything else, they rejected as too “modern.”

In government and military circles, there’s a truism, termed Miles’ Law: Where you stand depends on where you sit. What that means is, your opinion on some policy or budget or other decision depends on your position in the government. If you work for the National Nuclear Security Administration, you’d better believe in the efficacy of nuclear deterrence. If you work for the State Department, you’d better believe in the efficacy of diplomacy. If you work for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, you’d better advocate for solar, wind, and hydro. If you work for the National Energy Technology Laboratory, deep in the coal country of West Virginia, you’d better advocate for clean coal and other improvements to fossil fuel based energy.

Well, the Pharisees led the synagogues in the villages and small towns far from Jerusalem, so they sought ways to be true to God apart from the Temple. They acknowledged prophetic statements like from Amos:

I hate, I despise your festivals,

    and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. …

But let justice roll down like water

    and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

The Sadducees, though, were aligned with the Temple. They were linked to the Temple hierarchy, so their access to power and status depended on the stature of the Temple in the public consciousness. Therefore, they didn’t want anything to do with a prophet like Amos. Instead, they focused on the Torah with its pages of tedious description of the Tabernacle and the proper sacrificial practices. They rejected any reforms that may cut into their power base.

So when a young rabbi from a backwater village like Nazareth came along, the Sadducees had to squelch any of his attempts to modernize Jewish beliefs and practices. Earlier in this chapter of Luke, the chief priests and scribes challenge Jesus’s authority. Then they try to trick him with a question about taxes. Foiled at every turn, they concoct this ridiculous scenario to try to corner Jesus into admitting that there is no hope of resurrection.

But Jesus outwitted them. Like every great reformer, Jesus proclaimed a new Truth about God, but then tied it back to the texts that his adversaries would accept.

Let’s take a quick look at this ridiculous logic puzzle. The Torah established something called “levirate marriage.” The central problem was that if a man died without a son to inherit, then his line would come to an end. In a sense, inheritance functioned like eternal life. This was an era where the only wealth that really mattered was land. In the book of Ruth, we see a little glimpse into how this worked in practice. Ruth’s husband, brother-in-law, and father-in-law all died. In order that the husband’s and father-in-law’s line should survive, Ruth needed to bear a child, who would ultimately inherit her deceased husband’s property.

Which is to say, the whole point of marriage in ancient Israel was economic. Sure, we hear about loving couples in the Old Testament, but always as a little bonus on what is ultimately a financial transaction that aims to produce heirs. Over and over again, we hear admonitions about caring for widows, because the widow didn’t inherit—her children did.

The Sadducees clung tightly to the Torah, and so they embraced whatever it might say, relevant or not. Under Roman occupation, most of the Jews were dispossessed. There was little to no property to inherit. So even during that era, levirate marriage was mostly irrelevant. Jesus knew that, as did his followers.

And certainly, in the kingdom of God, inheritance is irrelevant. The kingdom of God is universal human flourishing. Eternal flourishing. So as Jesus said, there is no point in maintaining the ancient traditions around marriage. In the resurrection, death has been conquered, so there is no need for an heir. There is certainly need for LOVE, but not for the possessiveness of marriage. Levirate marriage, to ensure an heir for your brother, was essential in an ancient agrarian society. In the age to come, when death has been banished forever, transactional marriage is irrelevant.

Jesus then makes an argument that seems a little specious on its face. He says that God’s message to Moses demonstrated that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are alive to God. I have to say, that’s a pretty weak argument in favor of the resurrection. Truthfully, throughout the New Testament, the authors use Hebrew Bible texts similarly—re-interpreting, re-contextualizing, and re-framing the old words in new ways to speak to the new circumstances of Jesus’s coming as the Messiah they weren’t expecting.

This is both necessary and possible because the Bible is not the Word of God. Jesus Christ is the Word. The Bible is just a collection of words about an ancient people’s encounters with God. The Bible is God-breathed, meaning that its words speak to us only through the power of the Holy Spirit. Each new generation receives the Torah, the Prophets, the Wisdom literature, the Gospels, the Epistles, everything—we receive it along with the interpretations our forerunners made in their contexts. And then we have the freedom and the obligation to re-interpret it for our modern circumstances.

Consider this: during the Reformation, people like John Knox made biblical arguments against the Roman Catholic Church. Today, Presbyterians, who descend from Knox and include his writings in our Book of Confessions, have positive ecumenical relationships with the Roman Catholic Church. We have our differences, sure, but we no longer treat the Pope like the antichrist. In fact, a lot of us have pretty positive things to say about “our” Pope.

Or consider the unbelievable advances in technology. Consider that Jesus and his disciples mostly traveled on foot, while we travel in planes, trains, and automobiles. Consider that Paul’s epistles had to be hand-delivered by someone who could read them aloud to the illiterate receiving congregation, while we can all read them on our smartphones. Can we really say that the Bible’s teachings to a Bronze Age, agrarian society are relevant to a modern industrialized world without the guidance of the Holy Spirit?

I believe that God reveals Godself to humanity in the way that humanity can understand, given the level of understanding that a society has at the time. Remember ten minutes ago when I said that Abraham was henotheist rather than monotheist? That’s because Abraham was surrounded by other cultures with other gods, and so he was not yet ready to believe that our God is the only god. Then when the Israelites were wandering in the wilderness with Moses, they needed the Tabernacle to centralize their worship. But later when they were settled in Canaan, the Israelites needed guidance about maintaining their unique identity. Then when the Temple was destroyed and they were exiled to Babylon, they needed a way to continue worshiping God in a foreign land.

Throughout history, God has revealed God’s nature more and more to each generation, in ways that generation could understand. God’s most complete revelation was the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Even that was limited by Jesus’s context, though. Jesus could not teach his disciples, say, how to vote in a democratic society because such a thing did not exist. Instead, he held up general principles as absolutes, then gave some examples. Jesus taught that the kingdom of God is at hand! And the kingdom of God is universal human flourishing. It is up to us to determine how to pursue that flourishing in this generation, in this community and nation and culture.

But even that is insufficient. Look around: the people in this congregation are mostly of a different generation from, say, the students on campus or young working families. We are one expression of the Church (with a capital C), Christ’s body. But we are not the only valid expression of the Church. We are just one particular expression of it, with one way of being God’s people according to our understanding. As our understanding changes, and as our community and culture change, we must remain open to the guidance of the Holy Spirit and pursue new ways of being the Church.

At the little church up the street from me, across from Casey’s, there’s a sign board that usually has something that makes me angry. Well, not this past week. The message read, “Don’t put a period where God puts a comma.” I’m not sure what their pastor means, but here’s what I take away from it. Don’t exclude the possibility that God is still speaking. Don’t hold so tightly to your beliefs, or your way of expressing those beliefs in the choices you make and the actions you take, that God can’t change you. Don’t feel so bound by history that you are afraid to create a beautiful new future. And don’t prevent others from going where God is leading them.

God is still speaking! God speaks through the Bible, yes, but also through the gentle nudges of the Holy Spirit. God speaks through the people you encounter, whether they are strangers that you meet or the people that you love the most. God is still speaking. Let anyone with ears to hear listen! Amen!

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Sermon on October 5, 2025, 17^th Sunday After Pentecost. Based on Luke 17:5-10.

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During this part of the year, the lectionary marches through the Gospel of Luke. I like that. You get a different sense of the Gospels when you read them straight through, rather than picking out a verse or short passage.

Today’s lesson comes after a few hard teachings. A couple of weeks ago, Susan preached about the shrewd manager, which is pretty tricky to interpret. Last week, I preached about poor man Lazarus and the rich man. That’s a difficult teaching about wealth and privilege. The lectionary skips over the next little passage where Jesus tells the disciples that if anyone sins against them, they must forgive—up to seven times a day! Boy, Jesus just doesn’t let up, does he?

In desperation, the disciples cry out to Jesus, “Help us! We can’t do it! Increase our faith!” The Gospel message is hard. For chapter after chapter, Jesus tells his disciples how hard it is to live in this world as if the kingdom of God were already present, and then he demonstrates what happens when you take God’s commands seriously by picking up his cross. Our only hope is that God would give us the strength we need to carry on.

Jesus’s retort is a bit of a challenge to his disciples. A mustard seed is tiny, proverbially small. Maybe it wasn’t actually the smallest seed, but it was used symbolically to represent something unreasonably small. Jesus is almost saying that the disciples have no faith. He is saying that even a tiny bit of faith is enough, so if the disciples are struggling, their faith must be almost unmeasurable.

But wait—these were the people closest to Jesus, the ones who followed him all around Galilee and Judea and the surrounding regions. Surely they had some faith! They left their families, their homes, their jobs, everything for the sake of following the man they thought was the Messiah.

So how are we to understand Jesus’s implicit criticism of his disciples? If the disciples did not even have a mustard seed of faith, what hope do we have?

I’ve probably said this before, but the way we use the word “faith” is perhaps not exactly what is meant by the Greek word in the New Testament. We typically use it to mean an intellectual belief in something that we cannot prove empirically. Like, when we say we have faith in God, we usually mean that we believe that God exists even though we have no tangible evidence. That’s a good Enlightenment way of thinking rationally about the divine and transcendent mystery.

But a better way to think about “faith” in the New Testament is something like “fidelity” or “faithfulness.” It’s less about intellectual assent and more about action. If I say I’m faithful to my wife, I’m not saying that I believe intellectually that we love each other. I’m saying that my actions are consistent with my words of love. In the same way, Christian faithfulness is acting in a way that matches your professed beliefs about God’s Word, Jesus Christ.

Bo McGuffee is an ordained PC(USA) Minister of Word & Sacrament. He writes on Substack about a new way of following God. In a paywalled article titled “Alchemy of Belief,” he wrote:

Personal beliefs are what we actually believe, and they have a direct effect on our behavior. For example, if you believe that political protests make a difference, then you are more likely to attend or support them. If you believe that political protests don’t matter, then you are less likely to attend or support them. So, personal beliefs manifest themselves in our behavior.

Inherited beliefs come from our community, and they function primarily as virtue signals. By saying “I believe” in that which my community believes in, I assert that I belong to the tribe. Sharing inherited beliefs is to share an identity. The problem is that people often don’t realize the difference. They often think that they personally believe certain inherited beliefs when they don’t.

Bo McGuffee, The Alchemy of Belief

Simply put, McGuffee is pointing out the difference between beliefs that we profess and beliefs that impact our behavior. I can say that I believe that Jesus Christ was raised on the third day, but if I don’t live like death has lost its sting, do I really believe it? I can say that I believe in the Holy Spirit, but if I never listen for Her leading, what difference does that belief make in my life?

Too often, we fall back into “functional atheism.” That is, we say that we believe in God, we say that we believe God will make a way, we say that God will provide, but then we live like everything depends on our own will and our own work.

I think that’s what Jesus was getting at. The disciples professed that Jesus was the Messiah, but they didn’t really understand what they were saying. They didn’t truly believe that Jesus had come to conquer sin and death. Instead, they thought that Jesus had come to lead an army to vanquish the Romans, or perhaps that he had come to overturn the Temple hierarchy, and that the disciples were needed to support his revolution and help him rule a re-established nation of Israel.

But Jesus came for a different kind of revolution, one filled with LOVE. Jesus challenged his disciples to trust that His love, God’s love, the Holy Spirit’s love would empower them. They would not have to act on their own. They could trust that God would enable them to change the world.

Trusting in that way is really hard. I mean, really hard. For most of us, it goes against what our experience has taught us. In The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt says that our brain is like a rider on an elephant. The rider is our conscious awareness, the part of our brain that intellectually believes and decides and reasons through decisions. But most of our brain is the elephant. It takes in information and guides our actions. Now, how much influence does a rider really have on an elephant? Mostly, elephants go where they think they should, based on their experiences in the world. The rider can cajole them to go a certain way, or can train them to behave in certain ways, but at the end of the day, the elephant is really in charge.

Usually, when confronted with a problem, our subconscious mind makes a decision, and then our conscious mind figures out why we chose what we chose. Psychologists call this “confabulation,” because the reason we give may have little or nothing to do with the real reason. Maybe the real reason has to do with a habit we’ve developed, or an experience deep in our memory that was triggered by a new situation, or whatever.

My point is that our real beliefs live in the elephant, not the rider. That’s why we can say we believe certain things, but our actions have no relation to those beliefs. We may say that all people are equal in God’s eyes, but then we make snap decisions and exclude someone based on the way they look or talk or act. We may say we believe that God will provide, but then anxiously check how the stock market is performing.

So what can we do? We need to train the elephant. If you want your actions to match your beliefs, you need to embed those beliefs down in your subconscious. Let me tell you about what I’ve been doing for the last couple of months.

I read a book called Miracle Morning. In it, the author describes a set of practices that he does each morning so that his day goes well. The acronym he uses is SAVERS: silence, affirmations, visualization, exercise, reading, scribing. For silence, I pray. Scribing is a word for journaling that makes the acronym work.

I want to focus on affirmations and visualization. These are not things like saying, “I am rich,” or “I will be famous.” These are ways of setting an intention for how you will live your life. By repeating the same words that commit yourself to a certain path, and then visualizing where that path will lead, you slowly train your subconscious to make choices that lead where you want your life to go.

One of my current affirmations is this: “I am committed to becoming strong and fit and to losing weight, no matter what. There is no other option.” I say a few other things to flesh that out, and then I visualize myself hiking confidently up the mountain with my 70-pound pack on as I head to spike camp, or with a hindquarter of elk in my pack. In this way, I increase the probability that I will choose to be active and to eat right.

My other current affirmation is this: “I am committed to starting an LGBTQ ministry in Rolla, no matter what. There is no other option. This is how God has called me to serve Their kingdom. Now is the right time: all of the conditions are right.” After I say a few other things, I visualize the LGBTQ+ Rolla Community Center filled with faithful people talking about how God is moving in their lives.

Now, am I certain that this will be successful? No. But I am training myself to keep this goal in focus and to make the choices that are more likely to lead to its success. The reason I can commit to this path is that I believe God will amplify my efforts. I know that alone, I can do little more than plant seeds, but that God will give the growth.

This is faith like a mustard seed. A lifetime of experiences has demonstrated that nothing succeeds without my planning and execution, but I know that God has called me to this ministry, so I know that God will give me what I need to succeed. I can read the Bible and see examples of God giving the growth. Anxiety can kill my initiative, but through prayer, affirmation, and visualization, God will give me the courage to act.

There is only one way to ensure failure, and that is to not even try. With God’s help, anything is possible. What is God calling you to do? May God bless you with a vision of how you can contribute to the flourishing of Their kingdom, wisdom to see the path, and courage to put your faith into action. Amen.

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